Human reason adds depth to faith
People are surprised that my generation of Catholic seminarians prepared for the priesthood 30 years ago by studying pagans. That is, we spent a good two years on philosophy, and that meant mostly Plato and Aristotle, Greeks who lived hundreds of years before Jesus.
We eventually got around to a Christian philosopher of some note, Thomas Aquinas, who lived more than a thousand years after Jesus. This man began his career by reading philosophy translated from Greek into Arabic and then into Latin. Because Aristotle was a pagan, and because the manuscripts came from Muslims, what Aquinas was doing involved secretly studying forbidden texts. Aquinas was himself condemned by some church authorities after his death but was rehabilitated, and his philosophy and theology became canonized in the Catholic Church.
There is the romantic notion that medieval monks saved Greek learning by copying classical manuscripts. It was actually mostly Muslims, living in a time when Westerners learned Arabic out of political and economical necessity. Hardly a scholar in the West could read Greek. It was Islamic philosophers who had preserved the writings of the Greek philosophers. It was the task of monks to translate Arabic into Latin.
I remind people of this because at one time in our history, Jews, Christians and Muslims, especially in Cordoba, Spain, were intellectual partners in science, theology, mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. The West is deeply indebted to Islam for the preservation and re-introduction of classic science and learning.
This interreligious work had to be carried on by thinkers convinced that human reason and faith came from the same source, were exhibited together in the observable world and could be the basis for positive discussions among people of different religions. They were bold to think so and were criticized more by their co-religionists than they were attacked by believers in other religions.
Since then, Christians, Muslims and Jews have separated even among themselves over the worth of science, the place of reason, the possibility of dialogue without ideology. What God seemed to have joined, at least in my education, has now been separated. I tell my companions that no amount of joining of church and state can make up for the separation of church and human reason.
For myself, the irony is that I had asked my superiors for permission to major not in philosophy, but in English literature. I saw an English major as not only more useful, but more fun. Permission was denied, of course, and I am glad now.
By studying philosophy, I can say that not only Jews and Muslims enriched my faith, but even nonbelievers like the ancient Greeks. Thinkers who were not Christian were central to my intellectual and religious sense.
If such study was once considered essential to Christian ministry in the past, the same attitude is desperately needed today for the sake of religious peace in the world. What was possible in the past could make a hopeful future.
The Rev. Halbert Weidner is an Oratorian priest and pastor of Holy Trinity Church.