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The last years have seen a remarkable series of letters and encyclicals from Pope John Paul II. The most remarkable, in my opinion, is Salvifici Doloris ("The Christian Meaning of Human Suffering"), published in 1984—surely one of the finest documents (outside the Bible) ever written on this topic, and surely required reading for anyone interested in the so-called problem of evil, or the problems that suffering can pose for the Christian spiritual life or, more generally, the place of suffering in the life of the Christian. Last fall the pope issued another in the series: Fides et Ratio ("Faith and Reason"). This one doesn't strike me as having the sheer depth and power of Salvifici; and perhaps its message is also a little blurred, hard to get completely in focus. Nevertheless, from any seriously Christian point of view—Protestant as well as Catholic—it contains a great deal of solid good sense; and it also provides a wonderful occasion for rethinking its topic. I don't know how much of this document the pope himself wrote; given his philosophical proclivities and background, though, his own personal contribution could be extensive. For present purposes, I'll assume that he substantially wrote the document, an assumption that is encouraged by the use of the first person singular through out. While the letter is officially addressed "to the bishops of the Catholic Church," it seems, in fact, to be addressed much more broadly: to Catholic theologians and philosophers certainly, but also to Catholics and perhaps Christians generally and, in deed, to philosophers generally, whether Christian or not. The letter is divided into seven chapters (plus an in troduction and conclusion) and into 108 sections; I'll refer to specific passages by section.

The central topic is the age-old and never-finished discussion of the relation between faith and reason.1 In any event, it is an ancient topic that goes all the way back to the very beginnings of the Christian religion. But while it is an ancient topic, it is also a crucial current topic; there is no topic, it seems to me, more important for the present-day Christian community than this, and none that warrants more of our best thought and attention.

What the pope proposes here is very much in line with a traditional Catholic answer to the relevant questions, an answer that one attributes to Thomas Aquinas (subject to contradiction by scholars, such being the penalty for attributions to Aquinas, to adapt a phrase of Willard Van Orman Quine). The basic idea is that faith and reason are two separate sources of justified or warranted belief: "there exists a knowledge which is peculiar to faith, surpassing the knowledge proper to human reason, which nevertheless by its nature can discover the Creator" (8); "There exists a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only as regards their source, but also as regards their object" (9). Reason, as you might expect, is just the human faculty whereby we know what we know in science and everyday life; and faith is a supernatural gift that essentially involves trusting God and believing his Revelation to us through the Bible and the (Roman Catholic) Church. The basic idea is that faith and reason are in harmony. The pope mentions several times what he calls "the unity of truth," the idea that no truth of reason can contradict a truth of faith. That much is truistic: no truth of any kind can contradict any truth of any kind. What is not truistic is the pope's further claim: since God is the author both of faith and of our reason, God would not bring it about or permit it to be that faith and reason were in conflict. "It is the one and the same God who establishes and guarantees the intelligibility and reasonableness of the natural order of things upon which scientists confidently depend, and who reveals himself as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ" (34). "Both the light of reason and the light of faith come from God … ; hence there can be no contradiction between them" (43). The thought is that God would not permit any deliverance of faith to be inconsistent with any deliverance of reason.

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