Tea at Trianon: 'Fides et Ratio' at Twenty

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 5, 2022

'Fides et Ratio' at Twenty

From Archbishop Chaput at First Things:

In 1970, Michael Polanyi wrote an essay called “Why Did We Destroy Europe?” In it, he reflected on the cancerous spread of ideologies and war in the twentieth century. He argued that scientific rationalism had initially “been a major influence towards intellectual, moral and social progress.” But its chronic posture of skepticism and doubt had undermined human reason itself and bred a widespread nihilism. That nihilism had been weaponized by the pseudoscientific theories of Marxism and National Socialism with murderous results.

Despite its great achievements, scientific rationalism had, in effect, “become a danger to the spiritual conception of man.” And this had “brought about the destruction of liberal societies over wide ranges of Europe.”

Throughout his many books and essays, Polanyi—a fellow of the Royal Society and an acclaimed physical chemist before turning to philosophy—warned that the real threat to modern humanity was a bizarre form of “moral inversion” fed by a crisis of reason. A convert to Christianity in his thirties, he was deeply influenced by the work of the early Church Fathers, especially Augustine and his famous words Crede, ut intelligas—“Believe, so that you may understand.”

For Polanyi, humans are made to seek the truth. All knowledge requires a framework of preexisting belief to provide it with coherence. Rejecting the traditional philosophical foundations of Western culture gives rise to a spiritual turmoil that science, technology, and prosperity can’t quell. And when the soul is deprived of truth, it turns to toxic substitutes.

Polanyi wrote safely from England during and after World War II. But a Polish contemporary of the Hungarian-born Polanyi suffered those toxic substitutes firsthand. His name was Karol Wojtyła. A priest by vocation and philosopher by training, Wojtyła experienced both Nazism and Communism. And as Pope John Paul II, he engaged the modern crisis of reason in his encyclical from 1998, Fides et Ratio (“Faith and Reason”), which marks its twentieth anniversary this year.

John Paul wrote Fides et Ratio quite deliberately as a sequel to, and further development of, his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor (“The Splendor of Truth”). They’re closely linked. But in Fides et Ratio, the pope seeks especially to concentrate
on the theme of truth itself and on its foundation in relation to faith. For it is undeniable that this time of rapid and complex change can leave especially the younger generation, to whom the future belongs and on whom it depends, with a sense that they have no valid points of reference. The need for a foundation for personal and communal life becomes all the more pressing at a time when . . . the real meaning of life is cast into doubt. This is why many people stumble through life to the very edge of the abyss without knowing where they are going.
John Paul’s target is the challenge of postmodern cynicism. The key postmodern claim is that all truth is culturally constructed. “Absolute truths” are merely the products of a given time and place, subject to critique and change. In this view, appeals to truth are often tools of the powerful, masked by sacred language and used to subjugate minorities. In response, John Paul II argues that the search for truth is central to any genuinely human culture. The drive to understand the world and our place in it is one of the most basic human hungers. Truth is not the enemy of freedom but its foundation, since it gives us the capacity to love reality as it really is. Knowledge of the truth expands our freedom to love. (Read more.)