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The two are in harmony, therefore, but each has its own sphere: "Philosophy and the sciences function within the order of natural reason; while faith, enlightened and guided by the Spirit, recognizes in the message of salvation the 'fullness of grace and truth'" (9). It is the province of reason and philosophy, says the pope, to ask the great questions associated with the meaning of life: what is our place in the universe? how shall we think about human suffering? in what does shalom or human flourishing consist? In older terminology, what is the chief end of man? It is also the province of philosophy to try to answer these questions, but to do so without adverting to the content of faith.
Philosophy is a purely rational subject. That is not merely to deny that it is irrational (a denial those acquainted mainly with contemporary French philosophy may be pardoned for viewing with a bit of skepticism); it is rather to say that in philosophy one properly relies on reason alone, not employing any of the deliverances of faith. In philosophy, you abstract from what you know or think you know by faith; if you employ what you know by faith (e.g., some of the specific teachings of Christianity) in addressing a problem, the result of the inquiry will not be philosophy but theology.
The pope doesn't say so here, but the Thomistic reason for observing this distinction is that (so the thought goes) to know or believe something by way of faith is to know or believe it on the basis of someone else's say-so, testimony; but what you learn for yourself, by way of reason, is something you "know better," something that has more epistemic clout, a higher kind of epistemic status, for you than what you believe on the authority of someone else (even God). For example, if I believe the Fundamental Theorem of the Calculus on the authority of my mathematician friend Paul, I don't know it as well as if I learn the appropriate bit of mathematics and come myself to see how the proof goes. (But isn't this doubtful? Given my mathematical limitations and my dubious grasp of the proof, perhaps I'd be better off believing on Paul's authority.)
Furthermore, according to John Paul, reason can go a considerable distance toward answering these questions: for example, it can prove the existence of God. Perhaps it can't prove the central claims of Christianity—for Sin, In carnation, Atonement, Redemption we need faith—but it can prove the existence of God, and that's no mean feat. And while we need faith for Incarnation and Atonement, this faith in no way contradicts reason. In fact, says John Paul, faith fulfills reason; I think he means that a person who didn't know about the gospel but thought very hard and responsibly about those topics (some of the ancient philosophers, say) and then came to hear the gospel, could or would see that what the gospel proposes is what he was really looking for all along. The Church Fathers, he says, "succeeded in disclosing completely all that remained implicit and preliminary in the thinking of the great philosophers of antiquity" (41). "Illumined by faith," furthermore, "reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God" (43). Faith and reason, then, though two quite different sources of warranted belief, are wholly harmonious. Faith fulfills reason, and reason is the organon by which faith comes to understand itself.
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