Faith and Reason in Byzantine Catholicism
Faith and Reason in Byzantine Catholicism
A Synthetic Analysis of the Thought of John Paul II and Georges Florovsky
This is a paper that I wrote for the “Introduction to Dogmatics” class I took this past spring semester through the Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Saints Cyril and Methodius. You can download the pdf version of it here:
Revelation is the voice of God speaking to man. And man hears this voice, listens to it, accepts the Word of God and understands it.1 — Georges Florovsky
Introduction
Byzantine Catholic theology occupies a special place in the landscape of Christian thought, being a synthesis of the ascetical-mystical spirituality of the Greek East and the rational intellectualism of the Latin West. At the heart of this tradition lies a complex relationship between faith and reason, two concepts which are perceived as being at odds with one another in the modern world. Contrary to this dualistic view, the Byzantine Catholic tradition posits that faith and reason work in synergy to catalyze the Christian’s path toward theosis. This paper explores this relationship by synthesizing insights from two seminal figures in theology: Pope St. John Paul II, whose encyclical Fides et Ratio epitomizes the Roman Catholic Church's 20th century stance on the connection between faith and reason, and Archpriest Georges Florovsky, the most influential Orthodox theologian of the 20th century and torchbearer of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis,2 whose work “Revelation, Philosophy, and Theology” offers a window into the Orthodox Church’s engagement with this same question. By integrating these two approaches, this study expresses a vision of Byzantine Catholicism that breathes with both lungs — Eastern and Western — in its approach to applying faith and reason, or theology and philosophy, in the modern world. It proposes that the employment of these concepts by Byzantine Catholic scholars can offer the world a holistic path to understanding the divinization of man, one that acknowledges the limits of human reason while embracing the heights it can attain by supernatural faith.
Faith and Reason, East and West
The modern world places faith and reason in opposition to one another. In this paradigm, reason as applied by philosophy and science is the only way that true knowledge of the world can be attained. The revealed truths of faith are merely unprovable hypotheses lacking in substance. The Enlightenment and its consequences have been a disaster for the Christian faith, as Jesus Christ has been relegated to the dustbin of history alongside the other fantastical superstitions that humanity held before discovering the scientific method. Revelation is an illusion. Science is God. But are faith and reason actually opposed to one another?
In the Latin West, faith and reason work in harmony to give the Christian a better understanding of God. As St. Anselm famously stated in his Proslogion, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”3 He and St. Thomas Aquinas dared to propose proofs for God’s existence because divine revelation showed them that His existence should be rationally demonstrable, by virtue of His creation of the natural world.4 What we are able to reason about from observations of the created world has deep implications for what we know of uncreated reality. The fact that these two great saints of the Roman Catholic Church and their respective theological schools, the Franciscans and Thomists, agree on this crucial point indicates that medieval Scholasticism as a whole found human reason to be a valuable tool to use in understanding who and what God is. God created man and endowed him with reason so that man could use this great gift in order to better know and love God. This harmonious approach to faith and reason is normative in the modern day Roman Catholic Church due to the primacy Thomism holds in the mind of that particular church.5
The relationship between faith and reason in the Greek East is far more strained than it is in the Latin West. For most modern Orthodox believers, the truths of faith are inaccessible to reason. The mystery of God is so far beyond what our limited human minds can grasp as to be utterly incomprehensible to us. Matthew Baker concisely summarizes the Eastern Christian view in his analysis of Georges Florovsky’s true vision for the Neo-Patristic Synthesis, the movement in 20th century Eastern Orthodoxy that advocates for a return to the minds of the early Church Fathers in order to stimulate theological renewal in the modern world:
Much of what passes as Orthodox and neo-patristic theology since Florovsky, in dealing with the question of reason in theology, repeats the 19th century Romantic appeal to a non-rational ‘experience’ against Enlightenment Vernunft. In doing so, it allows precisely the same Enlightenment reduction of reason (conceived in opposition to tradition, transcendence, revelation, history, mystery, and liturgy) to define the terms of what constitutes rationality for theology and culture alike.6
This tendency to put faith and reason at odds with one another is often raised in Eastern polemical reactions against the supposedly overly intellectual Scholastic theology of the Latin West. The West is seen as being far too reliant on positive theological methods in its attempt to better know God, while the East is said to understand that only negative, mystical experience of God is the path to true knowledge of Him. In this perspective, there is a hard break between the truths accessible to faith and those accessible to reason. The truths of faith are far above anything that reason can hope to discover on its own, and the very application of philosophical tools to strive for a better understanding of God is wrongheaded. Reason is irrelevant to Christian life, if not actively harmful.
Between the Thomistic Ressourcement and the Neo-Patristic Synthesis
Byzantine Catholicism is at the fertile crossroads of the Greek East and the Latin West. Our church’s liturgy, spirituality, and theology is rooted in the Slavic Christian tradition that grew out of Byzantium. We are in communion with the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, the Bishop of Rome, which means that our theology aligns with the pastoral authority of the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Interesting ambiguities arise here on the relationship between faith and reason due to the theological and philosophical predilections of the East and West. In what follows, I will analyze the key points of contact between the approaches to faith and reason proposed in John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, the essential papal encyclical for understanding the relationship between theology and philosophy in the modern world, and Georges Florovsky’s “Revelation, Philosophy, and Theology,” his most clear and concise examination of this same nexus of ideas.
Return to the Fathers
Both authors emphasize the vital importance of putting on the minds of the Fathers when probing the relationship between faith and reason in modernity. When the Apostles, and the Fathers who followed in their footsteps, evangelized the Greco-Roman world, they were confronted with an ancient tradition of pagan philosophy that asked questions about the nature of reality without reference to the Creator God of Israel. Nonetheless, the rational techniques that these philosophers developed in order to try to understand the mystery of the universe could be applied to the proclamation of the Gospel. Our forebears used Hellenistic philosophical inquiry so that they might “become all things to all people, that [they] might by all means save some.”7 John Paul II summarizes the Fathers’ approach to using Greek philosophy in service of the Trinity:
Precisely because they were intense in living faith's content they were able to reach the deepest forms of speculation. It is therefore minimalizing and mistaken to restrict their work simply to the transposition of the truths of faith into philosophical categories. They did much more. In fact they succeeded in disclosing completely all that remained implicit and preliminary in the thinking of the great philosophers of antiquity.8
The Fathers did not simply translate Hebraic Revelation into the language and categories of Hellenistic philosophy. They revealed to the philosophers the one true God whom they worshiped unknowingly.9 Hellenism was forced to grapple with this new, divine truth: that the Father created the world out of nothing, through the Son and by the power of the Holy Spirit, in a completely free and personal way. There was no room for the old idea of a heavenly craftsman anymore.10 Florovsky goes so far as to declare that:
The “calling of the Gentiles” meant that Hellenism became blessed by God. In this there was no ‘historical accident’ — no such accident could lie therein. […] There was precisely as little “chance” or “accident” in this “selection” of the Greek language — as the unchanging proto-language of the Christian Gospel — as there was in God's “selection” of the Jewish people out of all the people of antiquity. […] The presentation of Revelation in the language of historical Hellenism in no way restricts Revelation. It rather proves precisely the opposite — that this language possessed certain powers and resources which aided in expounding and expressing the truth of Revelation.11
Instead of rejecting philosophy, as many modern commentators claim he did,12 it turns out that Florovsky believed that the Fathers' use of Greek philosophy to evangelize the world was not a meaningless, contingent fact of history that could have been otherwise. It was part of God’s saving plan that the Christian message be shouted from the rooftops using the language and concepts of the venerable Greek philosophers.
Truth is Historical
In the modern world, history has no meaning. The twists, turns, and reversals of cosmic unfoldings are utterly contingent, simply the result of the randomness of a mechanistic, deterministic universe. There is no meaning in the one path of natural history that we happen to be traveling down. There is no end that we are progressing toward. It is all just atoms bouncing around, arbitrarily causing one event to lead to the next. Everything is due to chance. In the modern scientific paradigm, truth must be in the image and likeness of Newtonian physics where there is literally no concept of history. The arrow of time has not been explained by physics.13 Its equations work as well going backwards as they do going forwards. The historical sciences of geology and biology are held in less esteem than the experimental sciences of physics and chemistry, because the knowledge they unearth is bound by time while experimental findings in the present are assumed to express physical laws that are true throughout all time.
This approach to history is emphatically rejected by the Church, East and West. John Paul II explains the Western approach to finding meaning in the history of creation and salvation:
The world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process. Faith intervenes not to abolish reason's autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts. Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them. Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence.14
The Old Testament chronicles God's saving acts in history on behalf of His chosen people, Israel. The New Testament recounts God’s physical entrance into history itself to save all of mankind. Salvation happened in time for a reason. Revelation occurs in and through history because we are finite creatures, and God wants to commune with us where we are, subject to the outrages of death and dissolution. Truth is not something to be grasped solely by the intellect like one of Plato’s forms, abstracted from the material world. The very createdness of our being, the fact that man is made as a body-soul composite, tells us something important about the mystery of God. To reject the body, and the spatial and temporal limits that comes with it, is to miss the fact that truth is embodied:
Certainly the Word of God is eternal truth and God speaks in Revelation for all times. But if one admits the possibility of various meanings of Scripture and one recognizes in Scripture a kind of inner meaning which is abstracted and independent from time and history, one is in danger of destroying the realism of Revelation. It is as though God had so spoken that those to whom he first and directly spoke had not understood him or, at least, had not understood as God had intended. Such an understanding reduces history to mythology.15
To attempt to interpret Sacred Scripture without regard for the Tradition that brought it into existence is to circumscribe God as a series of ideas that can be explained using the written word. God is not an abstraction. He cannot be written down. He is the union of three divine persons in one divine essence who conveys the mystery of His being through marvelous, embodied acts in space and time.
Creation was Made for the Incarnation
The Incarnation is the central event in the history of creation and salvation. Man and the world were created so that God could enter into space and time to bring them into union with Himself. Jesus Christ is the firstborn of all creation — in, through, and for whom all things were made.16 This act of Incarnation defies all human logic. How could the Creator take on a created nature? How could the infinite God become a finite man? The idea boggles our fallen minds. Yet, its majestic truth is the reason for all that is:
The mystery of the Incarnation will always remain the central point of reference for an understanding of the enigma of human existence, the created world and God himself. The challenge of this mystery pushes philosophy to its limits, as reason is summoned to make its own a logic which brings down the walls within which it risks being confined.17
The Trinitarian and Christological dogmas that the Incarnation make manifest show the wisdom of this world to be foolish, as it was in the time of St. Paul and is now.18 In the minds of modern, “rational” men it is at best a myth and at worst an absurdity that violates the principle of noncontradiction. Yet, it is true. And since it is true, philosophy must attempt to understand it to whatever degree is possible using reason.
The Incarnation not only shows us the truth about who and what God is, it shows us the truth about ourselves as human persons and members of the whole Creation:
Revelation is not only Revelation about God but also about the world. For the fullness of Revelation is in the image of the God-Man; that is, in the fact of the ineffable union of God and Man, of the Divine and the human, of the Creator and the creature — in the indivisible and unmerged union forever. It is precisely the Chalcedonian dogma of the unity of the God-Man which is the true, decisive point of Revelation, and of the experience of faith and of Christian vision.19
Any understanding of the natural world that is not rooted in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is incomplete. How could philosophers and scientists come to know the universe as it truly is without knowing Who it was made by and why it was brought into existence? To attempt an explanation without revealed truth must necessarily lead to false conclusions. Natural reasoning cannot attain the ultimate truth without being shown the divine meaning behind the empirical realities that it observes. Otherwise, it is simply chasing after the wind.20 This truth that is necessary for a proper appreciation of reality is that of Jesus Christ — the Way, the Truth, and the Life of the cosmos.21
Knowledge is Relational
Since divine truth itself is a communion of persons, any human attempt to receive it must be grounded in a personal relationship with the Trinity. This relational nature of divine truth applies to natural realities as well. No one can test every conclusion arrived at by science to prove their truth.22 Practically, we trust that the person sharing information with us is knowledgeable and we ascribe them some degree of authority such that we believe what they say. In other words, we take what they say on faith. The Latin word fides and the Greek word pistis both mean trust.23 John Paul II explains the importance of this act in the life of human persons:
Truth — vital and necessary as it is for life — is attained not only by way of reason but also through trusting acquiescence to other persons who can guarantee the authenticity and certainty of the truth itself. There is no doubt that the capacity to entrust oneself and one's life to another person and the decision to do so are among the most significant and expressive human acts.24
Since we entrust ourselves to fallen, mortal creatures every day, how much more readily then should we throw ourselves into the arms of Jesus Christ, the divine person who not only knows the truth but indeed is the Truth Himself? We should ground ourselves on the Rock of Christ in our theological, philosophical, and scientific endeavors because he is the only person that we can trust without any shadow of a doubt.
We don’t simply receive enlightenment from God statically. Esoteric knowledge is not just beamed into our heads. Our whole person must enter into dynamic conversation with the Lord in order to receive all that He wants to give us. Without our being able to accept, understand, and apply the truths that are communicated to us, there would be no substance to our notionally accepting them as fact. Georges Florovsky explains that:
The “God of the Living,” the God of Revelation speaks to living persons, to empirical subjects. The face of God reveals itself only to living personalities. And the better, the fuller and the clearer that man sees the face of God, so much the more distinct and living is his own face, so much the fuller and clearer has the "image of God" exhibited and realized itself in him.25
God only reveals himself to living, breathing, human persons. In order to be what a human person should truly be, to transcend our current wretched state, we need to reason with the truths revealed to us, understand the implications that they hold for our individual lives, and live them out in communion with our fellow creatures.
Theology Should Guide Philosophy
Both John Paul II and Georges Florovsky believe that the truth which faith enables us to see should direct our application of reason. Since Revelation is true, it reveals facts about reality to us that must be considered when using philosophy and science to increase our understanding of the natural world. John Paul II proposes that Christian philosophy refers to those developments in philosophy that would not have happened without the entrance of Christianity onto the scene. He proposes that this philosophy has two main effects:
The first is subjective, in the sense that faith purifies reason. As a theological virtue, faith liberates reason from presumption, the typical temptation of the philosopher. […] The philosopher who learns humility will also find courage to tackle questions which are difficult to resolve if the data of Revelation are ignored. […] The second aspect of Christian philosophy is objective, in the sense that it concerns content. Revelation clearly proposes certain truths which might never have been discovered by reason unaided, although they are not of themselves inaccessible to reason.26
These subjective and objective insights are intimately bound up with one another. When the philosopher encounters such a seemingly paradoxical mystery as that of the nature of the Holy Trinity, they must humble and submit themselves to this truth and apply reason to discover logical explanations for what might be seen as absurd. The subjective impacts of Christian philosophy proposed by John Paul II are predicated on its objective revelations. Theology therefore must guide philosophy, in whatever form it takes, since it lays out truths that philosophy could not encounter on its own.
Georges Florovsky goes even further than John Paul II. In his view, not only should theology guide philosophy, it is actually the true philosophy. Natural philosophy must begin in heaven and come down to earth, a complete inversion of what came before.27 Any philosophical system that does not take into account the truths disclosed by revelation is inherently flawed. Philosophy must stretch itself in order to attempt to understand the Christian mysteries:
Christian dogmatics itself is the only true philosophical “system.” One recalls that dogmas are expressed in philosophical language— indeed, in a specific philosophical language— but not at all in the language of a specific philosophical school. Rather, one can speak of a philosophical “eclecticism” of Christian dogmatics. And this “eclecticism” has a much deeper meaning than one usually assumes. Its entire meaning consists of the fact that particular themes of Hellenic philosophy are received and, through this reception, they change essentially; they change and are no longer recognizable. Because now, in the terminology of Greek philosophy, a totally new experience is expressed.28
The most dramatic example of the way that Hellenic philosophy had to be radically altered to accommodate Revelation is the evolution of the term hypostasis.29 It originally was a synonym of ousia, the underlying reality of something, which we now use the words essence, substance, nature, and being to describe. Following the Council of Nicæa, hypostasis began to refer to what we now mean by the word person, the underlying reality of someone rather than something, in order to better express the Trinitarian mystery using human language. The Council declared as dogma that God is three distinct hypostases — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — in one divine ousia. The Council of Chalcedon declares that Jesus Christ is of two ousias, one divine and one human, united in His one, divine hypostasis. Philosophy had to die and be reborn in the baptismal water flowing from the side of Christ to understand these truths.30 In a similar way, modern philosophy and science must die to their empirical assumptions and come to appreciate the invisible, spiritual essence of the visible, material universe.
Implications for Byzantine Catholic Theology and Philosophy
The key takeaway from this analysis is that the Eastern and Western views on the relationship between faith and reason, as expressed in writings of John Paul II and Georges Florovsky, accord with one another. While the stereotypical Eastern and Western views would lead one to assume that faith and reason are incompatible, it turns out that in their shared 20th century emphasis on returning to the Fathers they find that reason properly applied to the revealed truths of faith bears good fruit. This is as true in the present as it was in the past. There is no conflict between faith and reason for the Universal Church. The hard break between Revelation and reality proposed by post-Enlightenment thinking is a myth. This myth actively harms the Church by keeping divine evidence from being used in making rational conclusions about the nature of reality. It does so by excluding the truths revealed by faith from being included in the definition of empirical evidence.
The program for the proper application of faith and reason in Byzantine Catholic theology and philosophy that emerges from this study has five key tenets. The first is that we must put on the minds of the Fathers. Their approach to using the rational tools supplied by Hellenistic philosophy to better articulate and preach the Christian message to a pagan world is the model for our modern struggle with the same problem. The second is that we must fully appreciate that truth can be discerned from history. History is not meaningless. It is full of meaning because it is where God chooses to reveal Himself to us. The third flows from the second, that the central fact of the creation and salvation is the Incarnation: the mystery whereby God was born of a woman, taught us how to live the good life, was crucified for our sins, rose on the third day, sent forth the Holy Spirit upon the Church, then ascended into heaven — by which He opened the possibility of divinization for human persons. The fourth is that we must understand that knowledge is relational and therefore that our approach to gaining true knowledge, whether spiritual or natural, must be grounded in the person of Jesus Christ, truth Himself. The fifth is that Church theology must direct our philosophical and scientific pursuits so that we do not lose sight of the hidden, spiritual nature of reality when making rational conclusions. This program lays out a clear methodological approach to comprehending reality as it truly is for Byzantine Catholic scholars. No matter where our research may lie on the spectrum between the humanities and the sciences, we must strive to anchor our intellectual pursuits to the rock of Jesus Christ, the Truth from whom all knowledge flows.
Conclusion
This exploration of the relationship between faith and reason in Byzantine Catholicism, as illuminated by Pope St. John Paul II and Archpriest Georges Florovsky, gives us a generative synthesis that transcends the dichotomies of modern thought. It is one rooted in the ancient traditions of the Greek East and the Latin West that proposes we approach reality with the eyes of faith and the tools of reason. Byzantine Catholicism does not merely straddle the mystical East and the rational West, it offers a holistic approach to knowledge — one that honors the complexity of Revelation without sacrificing the rigor of philosophical inquiry. The true challenge of our time is not choosing between faith and reason, but rather living within the dynamic tension they create and allowing each to enrich the other in our journey for union with God. This study suggests that a renewed emphasis on the Patristic tradition can guide us as we confront the challenges to the Universal Church presented by modernity. The Church Fathers, with their deep grasp of both Sacred Scripture and Hellenistic philosophy, exemplify the fruitful synergy between faith and reason that we need to cultivate within ourselves. By following their example, we can address the theological, philosophical, and scientific questions of our own age with spiritual depth and intellectual rigor. We Byzantine Catholics are uniquely positioned to contribute to a renewed understanding of faith and reason due to our dual patrimonies. Let this struggle to bear witness to the truth not only deepen our own faith but also serve as a source of renewal for the Church at large, demonstrating that in Christ, all things hold together31 — both the mysteries of faith and the inquiries of reason.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 22.
Anselm, Proslogion.
Mascall, “Faith and Reason: Anselm and Aquinas,” 79.
Pope Leo XIII, Aeterni Patris.
The Didache Bible, v. 1 Corinthians 9:22.
Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 24.
The Didache Bible, v. Acts 17:23.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, art. Demiurge.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 32–33.
Baker, “Theology Reasons in History: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and the Renewal of Theological Rationality,” 102.
Callender, “Thermodynamic Asymmetry in Time.”
Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 11.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 24.
The Didache Bible, v. Colossians 1:15-16.
Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 45.
The Didache Bible, v. 1 Corinthians 3:19.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 34–35.
The Didache Bible, v. Ecclesiastes 2:11.
The Didache Bible, v. John 14:16.
Wells, “Homily on Thomas Sunday.”
The Catholic Encyclopedia, art. Faith.
Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 19.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 25–26.
Pope St. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 42–43.
Florovsky, “Revelation, Philosophy and Theology,” 33.
Berardino, Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, art. Hypostasis.
Baker, “Theology Reasons in History: Neo-Patristic Synthesis and the Renewal of Theological Rationality,” 86–87.
The Didache Bible, v. Colossians 1:17.