The Enlightenment ‘discovered’ reason and believed that, through it, the road to happiness could become accessible to all. I put ‘discovered’ within inverted commas because reason had been appreciated and used long before Bacon, Hobbes and their followers got enamoured by the idea and paved the way for the Enlightenment movement.

The Enlightenment was a-religious. However, because of the context in which it developed, it asserted that right behaviour is determined only by reasoning and not by the word of authority and, especially, not the authority of the Church.

This was also the time of the scientific revolution. Galileo, through observation, had come to the conclusion that the world moves around the sun rather than the other way round. In this he had shown that neither Aristotle’s nor the Church’s assumptions in this area were correct. Truth from authority received a fatal blow.

In time, the humanism of the Renaissance re-emerged in new and stronger forms. Humanists are typically intimately linked to secularism and they believe that human beings, using reason and science rather than revelation, can be in a better position to understand the world.

There are different types of humanism but most humanistic movements are often sceptical of and antagonistic to any theistic interpretation of the world. Corliss Lamont, a recent scholar in this area, describes Humanism as “a naturalistic philosophy that rejects all supernaturalism and relies primarily upon reason and science, democracy and human compassion”. Perhaps Humanism’s most famous exponent in our time is Richard Dawkins, who is an eminent evolutionary biologist.

Local humanists, lately, are becoming quite vociferous, insisting on the idea that new legislation should no longer be tied up to the teaching of the Church but based on reason and compassion. All this sounds good and attractive. However, the capacity of reason and of the scientific method by themselves to give us ethical principles is not unquestionable.

Science is about describing the world through observation, hypothesis and confirmation. It tells us a lot about how the world functions and how it has developed. Some scientists expect that eventually they will find out all about its origin and that God was not necessary for it to have come into existence; many others deny this possibility.

In the realm of ethics, science is even less helpful. Science is about measureable facts. But, as psy­cholo­gist Abraham Maslow rightly says, limiting life to measurable facts is leaving a lot out of life. Science can do a lot of things with facts but it cannot tell us whether what it can do is really conducive to genuine and integral human growth.

When it comes to ethics, reason remains indispensable but it needs to be used correctly. Reasoning has always played a very important role in the moral thinking of the Catholic Church. It is not true that the Church’s morality proceeds from authority or that it is totally found in the Bible.

Moreover, ever since Freud made us aware of the influence of the unconscious on our thinking and on our feeling, we have become aware that reason too has its vulnerability. Often it becomes victim of our unconscious desires. These make us reverse the process. Instead of reaching conclusions through a logical process, we begin with the desired conclusions and try to find ways to justify them. Psychologists call this rationalisation.

In order to function properly, reason needs to be as unconditioned as possible by the dictates of our unconscious. This isn’t always easy.

For these reasons, the Church is also open to Revelation and especially to the testimony of Jesus Christ, whom it believes was the only truly free person and the only one who could tell us how to be genuinely human.

The Church has nothing against humanism. On the contrary, the Church is all for it. However, when it comes to judge what is genuinely human and what is not, the Church is not always in agreement with the conclusions of those who deny the spiritual dimension of human beings. It believes that the purest humanism is found in the Gospel.

ajsmicallef@gmail.com

Fr Alfred Micallef is a member of the Society of Jesus.

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