Faith and Reason

An Appreciation of Scheeben

In an earlier blog post I mentioned Matthias Joseph Scheeben in connection with his thoughts on the Mary-Church relationship. He was one of the inspiring theologians that my friend Father John Nepil discussed in his book A Bride Adorned. Reading Father John’s book pushed me finally to read the 800-page volume of Scheeben I’ve had on my shelf for years. The book is called The Mysteries of Christianity.

While I do not love everything in Scheeben’s book, I was particularly moved by his penetration into the mysteries of the faith in a way that led me many times to prayer. I found a tension in the book between the prayerful, mystical theology and the two-tiered, Scholastic formulations that was at times quite jarring. I tend to follow Henri de Lubac who questioned the strict split between nature and grace, or the natural and the supernatural, in books like The Mystery of the Supernatural.

(A quick aside: a few years ago I watched my one and only Taylor Marshall video. In that video he claimed that De Lubac’s theology of the relationship of the natural to the supernatural led straight to the Pachamama. For those of you who don’t know what that is, blessed are you. The Pachamama episode happened during the Amazon Synod in 2019, when somebody thought it was a good idea to bring this statue into the Vatican that was or could be understood as a pagan idol. The connection to De Lubac, claimed Marshall, was that in conflating nature and grace [which De Lubac does not do], the Church ended up in a situation where she claims that the world is already graced and that even pagan idols can be manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Or something like that. The irony was that the Taylor Marshall video led me to read De Lubac for myself. The further irony was that I ran into Taylor Marshall at a coffee shop in Grapevine, Texas where I happened to be reading The Mystery of the Supernatural—at his suggestion! I was too shy to introduce myself. Thus ends my Taylor Marshall story.)

In order to explain the question of nature and super-nature, I thought I would outline one of the final sections of Scheeben’s book, where he interrogates the phrase “Philosophy is the handmaid of theology.” This phrase allows him to lay out, in several steps, the deep ways we can understand the relationship between philosophy and theology, or reason and faith. Here goes:

(1) Reason is the lower cognitive principle and faith is the higher principle. Reason, or philosophy, is the handmaid of faith and theology, because reason works for faith. Scheeben outlines two ways that reason works for faith: as a preambula and as a pedisqua. As a preamble, “reason goes before faith, exploring the natural order of things upon which is erected the supernatural order to be known by faith” (Mysteries, 780). Reason can point toward an unknown which faith then comes to make known. There is such a thing as natural theology, but this is different from the theology proper, which is a science of revelation. After faith comes, reason works as pedisequa, or attendant, spelling out the deductions of the principles of faith and their relation among each other. Reason is thus a servant who is enabled by his service.

(2) The second step in Scheeben’s reflection is to look at the relationship between reason and faith as a marriage. (Trigger warning for the feminists.) In the marriage relationship, the two become one, and the wife is elevated by her relation to her husband. After the union, the wife can no longer stand on her own. She has been brought up higher because of her relationship with her bridegroom. So also reason no longer seeks autonomy from faith but is completely given over to serving the latter. This dynamic of higher/lower is very pronounced in Scheeben and will continue to be a blind spot for him, even in his later steps. I question what might change in his system if nature/reason/philosophy could be seen as an equal partner, different from yet complementary to grace/faith/theology. More on this anon.

(3) “The yoking of reason with faith in the theological sphere has its fairest and most sublime ideal in the espousals of the noblest of purely human beings, the Virgin of virgins, with the Holy Spirit, whereby she became the mother of Him who is personal Wisdom incarnate” (785). This is a brilliant move by Scheeben. He personalizes and concretizes the union of reason and faith in the relationship of Mary and the Holy Spirit. While Mary is lower than the Holy Spirit, she is necessary for the outcome of the Incarnation. She is elevated to be the mother of the Lord. Mary gives herself totally to the Lord’s plan and becomes “the pinnacle of human eminence and dignity” (787).

(4) The last image of union between faith and reason is the very Incarnation itself, the hypostatic union, that is, the divine and human natures united in the Second Person of the Trinity. Scheeben hints at the relationship between the two natures, but I want to make more explicit the resource of Chalcedonian Christology. The two natures are unmixed and unconfused and at the same time undivided.

(We should pause here. For our normal way of thinking about being, it is impossible for two things to be united, undivided and unmixed, unconfused at the same time. That is because two things cannot exist in such a way without there being some sort of competition or absorption. This is the beauty of Chalcedon, and of Christianity as such. What is impossible for human beings is possible for God. God is not in competition with human beings and so Jesus Christ can be 100% human and 100% divine. We are not dealing with an either/or but a both/and. Nature or grace becomes nature and grace. Because of his insistence that there is a realm of “pure” philosophy or reason, that there are things that are somehow unrelated to grace, Scheeben cannot help but work in the realm of either/or. And this handicaps him. I now realize that this blog post deserves a book! Might I suggest Heart of the World, Center of the Church by David L. Schindler or The Politics of the Real by his son D.C. Schindler?)

Scheeben reflects on the implications of the hypostatic union for the relationship of faith and reason: “As Christ’s human nature, owing to its union with the Logos, cannot and may not exercise its own activity as if it had separate existence, but must conform to the divine nature and will, so reason in a believing Christian cannot and may not philosophize independently of every other consideration, but must cherish harmony with faith in its philosophical speculations” (787-788). I like this…but the words “may” and “must” make it seem like the only thing keeping Christ’s human nature and, in the analogy, philosophy from going off on their own is a moral consideration. In reality, it is an ontological reality. Philosophy cannot any longer function as if theology, as if the fact of revelation, did not exist. There is no neutral ground. You have to take a position.

At this point, I leave Scheeben behind to make a modern application of this issue. The whole liberal (and by that I mean both its left and right varieties) is built on the illusion that there is a neutral ground. Because God has chosen to reveal himself in Christ, there is now no longer anything to do but be “for” or “against” Him. Even the choice to remain neutral is a choice. If I choose to be against Christ, everything I say and do will somehow be colored by that choice, even if I am a zoologist. If I choose to be for Christ, everything I say or do will somehow be colored by that choice, even if I am a physicist. (One time, a physicist friend told a class of high school seniors that doing physics for her was like discovering more about the One she loved.)

Caution: Just as the liberal position can build on the illusion of neutrality, so the integralist position can build on a false understanding of the hypostatic union. The divine and the human in Christ are not in competition with each other. At its worst, the integralist position behaves in such a way that the divine tends to absorb everything it touches, obliterating the human. That is not Christianity. If I choose for Christ, reason will be touched by faith in everything it does, but in a (divine) paradox, reason will never feel itself so free as it does when functioning in the “space” of faith. Of course, this deserves more than I give it here—I point you back to the Schindlers’ work. Even those whose journey has not yet brought them to the point of choosing for Christ, should feel more free to pursue the truth in the space of faith. (Cue the objectors shouting “What about the Inquisition?!”—very well, the Inquisition was not Christian.)

And finally, back to Scheeben: The problem with the strict separation of philosophy-theology, faith-reason, nature-grace, is that it pretends that there is realm that has not been touched by Christ. This is simply not the case. The Christo-centric theology of the 20th century (De Lubac, Balthasar, Ratzinger, Wojtyla and company) would question this separation and thus pave the way for the work of Vatican II. The greatness of Vatican II is precisely here: everything must be reinterpreted and read in the light of the event of Christ. Scheeben seems like a border figure, paving the way for the great 20th century renewal. This accounts for the tension between two different “modes” or “keys” in his work. It is a tension that I think has proved fruitful for the Church. One way that tension has been handled is the ressourcement theology of the 20th century. That is what I know. Others would resolve that tension differently. I leave it to them to tell us how.