QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

Faith is not fearful of reason; on the contrary, it seeks and trusts reason, since “the light of reason and the light of faith both come from God” and cannot contradict each other.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Reason

To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to contemning the command of God.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1a-2ae, xix. 5, ad 2

QUOTATION: Reason and Religion

Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

--G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

QUOTATION: Atheism and Reason

Being Atheist, it is characteristic of the advancing wave that it repudiates the human reason. Such an attitude would seem again to be a contradiction in terms; for if you deny the value of human reason, if you say that we cannot through our reason arrive at any truth, then not even the affirmation so made can be true. Nothing can be true, and nothing is worth saying. But that great Modern Attack (which is more than a heresy) is indifferent to self-contradiction. It merely affirms. It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone. Indeed, it may be remarked in passing that this may well be the cause of its final defeat; for hitherto reason has always overcome its opponents; and man is the master of the beast through reason.

--Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies

QUOTATION: The Irrationalism of Rationalism

Man, looking for complete emancipation, undertook to reduce everything to the level of reason. And in the end he comes to renounce the real; he no longer dares to use ideas to adhere to being; he forbids himself to know anything beyond the sensible fact and the phenomenon of consciousness; he dissolves every object of thought in a great flowing jelly called Becoming or Evolution; he considers himself a barbarian if he does not suspect every first principle and every rational demonstration, of naïveté; he replaces the effort of thought and logical discernment by a certain refined play of instinct, imagination, intuitive thrills, and visceral emotions; he no longer dares to judge.

--Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, 1958

QUOTATION: Errors in Reasoning

Errors in reasoning are lessons and warnings, not to give up reasoning, but to reason with greater caution. It is absurd to break up the whole structure of our knowledge, which is the glory of the human intellect, because the intellect is not infallible in its conclusions.

--Blessed John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

Faith is not the resignation of reason in view of the limits of our knowledge; it is not a retreat into the irrational in view of the dangers of merely instrumental reason. Faith is not the expression of weariness and flight but is courage to exist and an awakening to the greatness and breadth of what is real. Faith is an act of affirmation; it is based on the power of a new Yes, which becomes possible for man when he is touched by God.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), A Turning Point for Europe?

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

It is philosophically impossible for divine faith to profess what the reason must regard as false; not even divine omnipotence can make this otherwise.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, On the Unity of the Intellect

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

The medievals loved to say that God wrote two books: nature and Scripture. And since he is the author of both books, and since this Teacher never contradicts himself, these two books never contradict each other. And since this God who never contradicts himself also gave us the two truth detectors, faith and reason, it follows that faith and reason, properly used, never contradict each other. Therefore, all heresies are contrary to reason. Not all the truths of faith can be proved by reason, but all arguments against the truths of faith can be disproved by reason.

--Peter Kreeft, Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ

QUOTATION: The Gift of the Mind

God gave us a mind so that we might learn and receive help from him, not so that the mind should be self-sufficient.

--St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: Fighting the Current

When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.

--C. S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Reason

Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

--G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

QUOTATION: The Darkening of Reason

One of the greatest evils that the sin of Adam has produced in us, is that darkening of our reason by means of the passions which cloud our mind. Oh, how miserable is that soul that allows itself to be ruled by any passion! Passion, is as it were, a vapor, a veil which prevents us from seeing the truth. How can he fly from evil, who does not know what is evil? Besides, this obscurity increases in proportion as our sins increase.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: Reason Alone Can't Save Us

Reason can but ascertain the profound difficulties of our condition, it cannot remove them.

--Blessed John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Cultural Dialogue

A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: The Consequences of Original Sin

 

If for some wrongdoing a man is deprived of some benefit once given to him, that he should lack that benefit is the punishment of his sin. Now in man s first creation he was divinely endowed with this advantage that, so long as his mind remained subject to God, the lower powers of his soul were subjected to the reason and the body was subjected to the soul. But because by sin man's mind moved away from its subjection to God, it followed that the lower parts of his mind ceased to be wholly subjected to the reason. From this there followed such a rebellion of the bodily inclination against the reason, that the body was no longer wholly subject to the soul. Whence followed death and all the bodily defects. For life and wholeness of body are bound up with this, that the body is wholly subject to the soul, as a thing which can be made perfect is subject to that which makes it perfect. So it comes about that, conversely, there are such things as death, sickness and every other bodily defect, for such misfortunes are bound up with an in complete subjection of body to soul.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: The Heart

The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.

--C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

QUOTATION: Moderns

We talk, by a sort of habit, about Modern Thought, forgetting the familiar fact that moderns do not think. They only feel, and that is why they are so much stronger in fiction than in facts, why their novels are so much better than their newspapers. The current comment on all these things is … the queerest sort of patchwork of pagan and purely Christian ideas.

--G.K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1930

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

Now there is an additional reason why, of these two, he who is religious will believe more and reason less than the irreligious; that is, if a man's acting upon a message is the measure of his believing it, as the common sense of the world will determine. For in any matter so momentous and practical as the welfare of the soul, a wise man will not wait for the fullest evidence before he acts; and will show his caution, not in remaining uninfluenced by the existing report of a divine message, but by obeying it though it might be more clearly attested. If it is but fairly probable that rejection of the Gospel will involve his eternal ruin, it is safest and wisest to act as if it were certain. On the other hand, when a man does not make the truth of Christianity a practical concern, but a mere matter of philosophical or historical research, he will feel himself at leisure (and reasonably on his own grounds) to find fault with the evidence. When we inquire into a point of history, or investigate an opinion of science, we do demand decisive evidence; we consider it allowable to wait till we obtain it, to remain undecided; in a word, to be sceptical. If religion be not a practical matter, it is right and philosophical in us to be sceptics. Assuredly higher and fuller evidence of its truth might be given us; and, after all, there are a number of deep questions concerning the laws of nature, the constitution of the human mind, and the like, which must be solved before we can feel perfectly satisfied. And those whose hearts are not "tender," [2 Kings xxii. 19.] as Scripture expresses it,—that is, who have not a vivid perception of the Divine Voice within them, and of the necessity of His existence from whom it issues,—do not feel Christianity as a practical matter, and let it pass accordingly. They are accustomed to say that death will soon come upon them, and solve the great secret for them without their trouble,—that is, they wait for sight: not understanding, or being able to be made to comprehend, that their solving this great problem without sight is the very end and business of their mortal life: according to St. Paul's decision, that faith is "the substance," or the realizing, "of things hoped for," "the evidence," or the making trial of, the acting on, the belief of "things not seen." [Heb. xi. 1.] What the Apostle says of Abraham is a description of all true faith; it goes out not knowing whither it goes. It does not crave or bargain to see the end of the journey; it does not argue with St. Thomas, in the days of his ignorance, "we know not whither, and how can we know the way?" it is persuaded that it has quite enough light to walk by, far more than sinful man has a right to expect, if it sees one step in advance; and it leaves all knowledge of the country over which it is journeying, to Him who calls it on.

--Cardinal John Henry Newman, "Faith Without Sight", Parochial and Plain Sermons.

QUOTATION: You Cannot Argue with God

When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.

--C.S. Lewis