Faith, reason, and the university

By C.S. Morrissey
Special to The B.C. Catholic

Faith Forward: Exploring Religion, Culture, and Conflict, an annual public symposium at Trinity Western University, this year took Politics and the Religious Imagination as its theme.

The symposium, this year held March 12-15, has been awarded a five-year grant from CHNU TV to explore "interfaith dialogue about the world's most pressing issues."

Father Raymond de Souza, a university chaplain and National Post columnist, lectured on Religion and Canadian Politics. Other lectures were by Richard Kearney, a professor of philosophy at Boston College; Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at the New School of Social Research, New York; and Paul Gottfried, a professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania (with a response by Grant Havers, a professor of philosophy at Trinity Western University).

Critchley argued, as an avowed unbeliever and neo-anarchist, against otherworldly dogmas, but for "an ethics of infinite responsibility that challenges and overrides the vapid mantras of contemporary political moralism."

Kearney promoted a Christian ethic of dialogue with those who are different, something exemplified in all hospitality to strangers; but he blamed the West for any contemporary conflicts with Islam.

However, unlike anywhere else, "The West blames itself for everything," observed Gottfried in his lecture.

Gottfried lectured on the "always expanding" tendency to "self-incrimination" he sees as characteristically "thriving in secularized Protestant societies." "You should not make faces at history," he argued, quoting one of his old teachers.

He is a self-identified "paleoconservative" who is critical of the Iraq war, which he alleges was instigated by "neocons," and a "Hobbesian" (the English political philosopher "Thomas Hobbes has influenced me the most," he said).

"Christianity should stop surrendering to its critics, who want nothing but the extinction of Christianity," said Havers, speaking in agreement. Moreover, he argued, "Both Catholics and Protestants should avoid playing with the politics of social engineering."

Havers has argued with Gottfried on previous occasions about the details of which "conservatives" have departed from conservatism to embrace social engineering instead. At the symposium both saw such sorry trends happening in Canada.

All the keynote lecturers also shared the stage on Friday morning for an interfaith panel discussion that included a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim imam, and Abbot John Braganza, OSB, of Westminster Abbey in Mission.

It was Father de Souza who posed the most challenging remarks to the symposium. These came, not in his Thursday lecture, but in a half-hour talk on Faith, Reason, and the University given to a small crowd of select faculty and students March 12.

This brief talk then generated an hour and half of discussion that was an auspicious beginning to the whole symposium. Father de Souza argued that Pope Benedict XVI's Regensburg lecture of Sept. 12, 2006, was highly significant, because its outcome has produced "the only meaningful encounter" between Islam and Christianity in the modern world.

"Is God so majestic that He can command the irrational?" The answer to this question in the Christian tradition, said Father de Souza, as emphasized by

Gospel takes reason to new heights

Pope Benedict in his Regensburg lecture, is emphatically "no."

At Regensburg, Pope Benedict simply posed the same question to Islam, said Father de Souza, but he did not answer it on Islam's behalf. Islam must now answer it, either implicitly or explicitly, because "how it answers will shape the outcome of history," he noted.

Reading from a Haida myth as he sat next to the fireplace in the ACTS Seminaries Graduate Student Collegium, Father de Souza used the Bill Reid story, The Raven Steals the Light, to illustrate that "the world of faith can be an arbitrary and tyrannical world." In contrast, Pope Benedict has spent "the whole of his intellectual and theological career" showing how Christianity liberated the world from the tyranny of ancient religion and its many irrational fictions.

"Man's natural religious imagination," said Father de Souza wryly about the Haida myth, "does not produce the Sermon on the Mount."

The Gospel thus helps human reason to new heights, and "the university was born from the heart of the Church," he said.

Reason purifies faith "of things that are contrary to reality," he said, and faith, in turn, "takes us where reason cannot go." Hence metaphysics and theology are, correlatively, the crowning pursuits of the university.

Father de Souza asked if metaphysics was taught anywhere on the campus, and someone from the crowd with a Redeemer Pacific College sweat-jacket said, "Redeemer Pacific College!"

Giving Notre Dame University as an example, Father de Souza noted that the most interesting work on campus is often not being done in theology departments, but instead in philosophy departments. "Reason can't purify faith if universities aren't interested in studying the faith," he tartly observed of the proliferation of religious studies departments in universities and their condescending approach to Christianity.

C.S. Morrissey is an assistant professor of Medieval Latin Philosophy at Redeemer Pacific College.