Standing For Reason

The Huffington Post ran a forum last week advertised with the line “What Is The Future Of Faith? These 10 Millennials May Hold The Answer.” Those ten may be right, but it’s depressing if they are. With the exception of the Catholic contribution, each celebrated a subjective, individualistic, personally-modified, mutable, and always-affirming religion without dogma and earthly authority. Do and believe what you want, ascribe it in some sense to a force beyond you, and off you go.

The same day the Religion News Service ran a story on the rising popularity of folk religions like Santa Muerte. It was essentially the same story, though those religions seemed more likely to develop informal clergy and hierarchy and to depend more on charismatic authority. I can see their attraction and use, when I can’t for the life of me see why anyone would get out of bed in the morning for any of the “faiths,” but that’s probably a matter of personality. Still, they aren’t essentially different from the “faiths” celebrated by the Huffington Post’s writers.

These are spiritualities and religions of freedom, and against them and their peers stands the Catholic Church. The Church makes the increasingly eccentric and bold declaration that the world has a structure and one we can understand through our reason. The moral law in particular is a matter of public reason.

It gets, from the general American point of view, worse. The Church also insists that we can know something about God, from which other things logically follow (see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, numbers 31, 35, 50). And even worse than that, the Church claims that the arguments are very strong that God has spoken to us and given us a visible institution to guide us. Her theologians and pastors write as if the arguments were very good ones that ought to move the unbiased person at least close to agreement. Revealed truths must be held by faith, but reason can lead us to see that we have very good grounds for that faith.

Catholics used to speak like that as a matter of course. In the lectures Ronald Knox gave to Oxford students in the early fifties, collected in The Hidden Stream, he laid out the rational claims for the Catholic faith as if he were demonstrating a geometric proof. When I first read the book, formed as I had been in the secularist mind, I thought he was being presumptuous. Catholics couldn’t possibly talk like that normally. And then I kept reading and found they did.

Few Catholics speak this way anymore, and for good reasons. (Some of the few who do are those offering substantial philosophical arguments for marriage as it has been understood.) It’s not a way of speaking for which you can get a hearing in public. Few people have the time to work through the arguments for the existence of God and the implications thereof, and even fewer have any tolerance for the kind of mind that believes it’s merely stating what everyone would see if they bothered to think it through. That kind of mind is positively medieval. Remember the Inquisition, Galileo, the Scopes monkey trial, and those horrible people who protest soldiers’ funerals. And the last two popes, the totalitarian Pole and the oppressive German. Compare with Pope Francis.

If you’re speaking to people who think like that, claiming that reason’s on your side probably won’t get you anywhere. You may simply confirm their idea of Christians as bigots with no tolerance for others and ideologues who won’t see that other people think differently. We prefer sociological arguments: Look, we say, our principles work and will make your life better.

The Catholic Church upholds the power of human reason and in doing so seems to reduce the range of human freedom. The “faiths” the Huffington Post’s writers describe let us do and think what we want. Catholicism says not only “Thus says the Lord” but “Thus says reality.” When we want (so we think) to live in the great outdoors, Christianity puts us in a house.

It feels restrictive. Yet in using reason to point to reality, Catholicism makes real freedom possible. A man is free to think anything he wants, because God has given him that power, but he’s not free to be wrong if he wants to be right. The Church treats the world as a physicist treats the matter he studies. He may not understand it well but he knows there is something there to understand. The professor of physics is not free in any useful sense to ascribe gravity to fairies and sprites. He can stand on a table in the middle of the lab one day and declare, “I’m a free man. You can’t tell me what to think. Fairies do hold everything down!” and his colleagues will say yes, we can’t tell you what to think, but pardon us while we go talk to the dean.

The Church stands for reason and therefore for freedom. Whatever you want to do in your life, you will do it better—you will be freer to do it well—if you recognize the realities the Church has come to see through reason.