Reason and Faith

At the beginning of the medieval period, religious unity under Christianity was the only factor of homogeneity that had survived the breakup of the classical world: all medieval philosophers in the West and in Byzantium are Christian, and a philosophic notion of evangelical revelation had already been developed, from the Logos of John’s Gospel to the philosophy of Augustine and the Greek Fathers. There is no tension between reason and faith in Boethius or in Pseudo-Dyonisius; instead, in the West, tension arises when rationality, understood as the capacity to define and distinguish (dialectics), becomes the mark of Carolingian power. In the debates of the Carolingian period, it is possible in fact to individuate how the use of dialectical reason came into conflict with the need to not contradict the concepts that justify the traditional ways of mediation with the sacred, namely the basis of ecclesiastical power. And neither in the dialecticians nor in the anti-dialecticians is there a conflict with reason as such, but rather there are limits to its applicability to the doctrines of the faith (the divines mysteries and the sacraments). It will be the solution of Anselm of Canterbury expressed in the formula of ‘faith seeking understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) to legitimize once and for all rational inquiry, opening up the possibility to create a theology, even though the ecclesiastical institution will make its presence felt on the dangers of rationalism through the condemnations of Abelard and the masters of Chartres in the 12th c. If we compare this situation with the contemporaneous changes occurring in Islamic philosophy, we note that the social context is different. In the 11th c. in the West, ecclesiastical power, philosophic research, and theology are interwoven in the same environment and at time practiced by the same people, whereas in the East, religious and social life are dictated by the literal interpretation of the Koran, and thus the followers of Kalam and the mystics of Sufism work outside the spheres of power, if not in direct opposition to them. In addition, the first Hellenizing philosophers (al-Kindi and al-Farabi), who pursue their studies in the shadow of political power, are very attentive to never question philosophically the absolute transcendence of God. In this context, then, we see an interesting analogy with the situation in Byzantium, the institutional separation between philosophic research and political and religious power. Even in Islam, however, the tension between philosophic research and faith later (11th-12th c.) appears with the reaction of al-Ghazali against Avicenna, and above all, when the thought of Averroes is banished from the schools: the position he had explicated in the Short Treatise on relationship between philosophy and religion was the last, albeit the most strong affirmation of the primacy of Aristotelian reason in the Islamic world. The appearance of works of Aristotle exacerbated again the problem of the relationship between religion and faith, never completely resolved even in the Latin world. The Aristotelian notions on the eternity of the world and on the soul as form of the body contradicted the concept of divine liberty and encouraged a naturalistic anthropology. From the prohibition of 1210, which linked Aristotle and heresy, to the condemnations at the end of the century (1270 and 1277), the tension between theologians and philosophers was ever present, while inside the mendicant orders the way of approaching philosophy and its relation to the doctrines of faith was quite different. At one extreme we have the Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull who was close to Franciscan positions, arguing it was possible to prove the truths of the faith with ‘necessary reasons’ articulated through an original method of demonstration, the ars combinatoria. Nor did the christianized Aristotelianism of St. Thomas win unanimous consent; several of the theses condemned in 1277 were Thomistic philosophical positions. Finally, the separation between the world of faith and that of rational inquiry (philosophy and science) characterize the modern via based on the philosophy of Ockham, from which positions rooted in skepticism and/or sheer faith arise during the last two centuries of the Middle Ages.