By Maureen McKew

In an age of technology, "taking it on faith" is a difficult proposition to sell. Perhaps Pope John Paul II knew that when he recently wrote an encyclical letter (Fides et Ratio) on faith and reason. He certainly knew that he would have to cite Augustine frequently. Augustine saw faith as the illuminator of reason.

At a recent Sunday morning Mass, the homilist recounted a television interview during which a retired talk show host was asked if he considered himself a Catholic. "Oh yes," said the interviewee, "but I have a lot of problems with Catholicism."

Evidently wishing to eliminate the middle man, he said that he didn't think he needed the Pope to tell him God's will. He also expressed an inability to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, along with a few other matters of faith. "But you still consider yourself Catholic?" the inter-viewer persisted. "Oh yeah," came the response. "Dyed in the wool." The homilist gently observed that this Catholic's wool appeared to have shrunk a bit.

Many are like the talk show host. Although frequently dismissed as "cafeteria Catholics," they just might lack the gift of faith or might have come to think that one has to choose between faith and reason because they may be trying to fathom their faith with the same experiential methods they use to study science. Yet, even science knows that more than logic is needed to guide one's experiments.

The problem of reconciling faith and reason is an old one. One of the earliest Christians to grapple with it was the apostle called the Doubting Thomas. He wasn't quite ready to take the word of the man before him that he was indeed Jesus, risen from the dead. He demanded some evidence and he got it--from Jesus himself. Thomas was an early proponent of using experiential methods to explain the inexplicable. He was fortunate. Not everyone gets such a personalized call to faith. Still, faith is a gift and can't be treated as if it were given, willy-nilly, to everyone.

St. Augustine dealt with the apparent struggle between faith and reason in his time, too. His response seems unhelpful--on the surface. In Sermon 126, he took as his theme Isaiah's admonition: Unless you believe, you shall not understand. In other words, without faith, there is no understanding. Besides, he found that reason

"worked better" with faith.

Well, a reader might say, that's easier said than done. Someone has to have faith before believing. For Augustine, it was never a matter of not having faith but of failing to believe.

Faith is a virtue, a grace given freely by God--but not to everyone. This is a point that has troubled believers and those who want to be believers. Jesus himself said, "Unless you are born again of water and the spirit, you will not enter the kingdom of God." Jesus seems to be saying that if a person does not believe in the central message of Christianity, which is that God sent Jesus Christ into this world to save us, and if that person is not baptized, that person cannot have eternal life.

Yet some people are denied the grace to believe. It is almost as if Jesus himself had taught a kind of predestination where God nullified our free will by deciding who would be given faith and who would not.

What then would be the point of living a good life and being virtuous if the decision were already made, one might well ask.

According to the Rev. Daniel Doyle, O.S.A., '75, assistant professor of theology and religious studies, no one has solved the mysteries of grace, free will and predestination. "What Augustine managed to do," said Father Doyle, "was to juggle the three issues and keep them all in the air, if you will. He never went to one extreme where he denied free will, nor did he so emphasize human initiative that he overlooks God's grace."

Echoing the letter to the Romans (Rom. 8, 29-30), Augustine said, in fact, that certain people are predestined (and that is the term he used) for grace; this underscores God's magnificence and generosity. The fact that other people are not predestined underscores God's justice. He constantly cited passages from the Old Testament to show how inscrutable are God's ways.

So where does this leave decent people, who lived right and did good deeds but who did not believe in the saving message of Jesus Christ? Does that mean the door to eternal life was shut for good to almost 80 percent of the world's population today who are not Christian? Does that mean the prophets and patriarchs of the Old Testament (and even Joseph, the foster-father and protector of the child Jesus) were not saved?

Augustine, along with other writers of his time, offered this theory about the salvation of the pre-Christians.

Since the Apostles' Creed stated that Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion and before his resurrection, it was believed that during his descent, Jesus liberated all the prophets and patriarchs, along with Joseph and many just souls.

As for the others, including unbaptized infants, Augustine believed they were not saved, although they would have been subjected to the lightest of punishment, a statement that perhaps foreshadowed the doctrine of purgatory. At the same time, as Bishop of Hippo, he was a fervent proponent of infant baptism. High mortality rates for babies at that time only increased the urgency.

For Augustine, reason began with faith. "Believe and you will understand" was the operating principle for everything. He understood that much of what is called "reasoning" actually is based on authority. Augustine believed all knowledge is based on authority and that there was no greater authority than God and revelation; that is, especially the authority of sacred Scripture, but also tradition and the practice of the Universal Church.

Following these were authoritative bodies that the Church recognized as having decision-making powers: plenary councils of the Universal Church, regional councils of bishops and synods of bishops. These can be summed up as witnesses.

This brings us back to the Catholic talk-show host who said he didn't need the Pope to tell him what God wanted of him.

Augustine would have disagreed vehemently. According to the Rev. Thomas F. Martin, O.S.A., assistant professor of theology and religious studies, Augustine and the Church of his time had a clear sense of the authority of the Bishop of Rome, although certainly this was a far simpler authority than that which developed by the Middle Ages and that which is contained in the modern Vatican.

Two kinds of knowledge

Augustine saw a collaborative relationship between faith and reason. He believed there are two kinds of knowledge. One is based on belief or faith. The other relies on things observed (reason) and is called understanding. Knowledge based on faith comes from God; it always has an authority that knowledge based on reason cannot possess.

However, faith does not set out to destroy reason; it actually enhances and protects it. Father Martin suggests an analogy to the child in a playpen. You can take reason wherever you want and not get hurt if you are protected by the parameters of your faith.

This is not to say that faith cannot be destroyed. As the Rev. Donald X. Burt, O.S.A., '52, a longtime professor of philosophy at Villanova, notes in his book, Augustine's World: An Introduction to His Speculative Philosophy (University Press of America, 1996), this gift is quite fragile. It can be destroyed or just ignored.

Reason without faith, however, quite simply goes nowhere. Father Martin explained: "For Augustine, any notion of a human being without God is damnation. The more a human strives to reason without faith, the more he or she is plunged toward nothingness."

With all the advantages of living in the age of technology, there is a temptation to apply the experiential method of learning to every discipline, including theology. Even scientific methods frequently demonstrate a theory or an event as happening pretty much as Scripture described it. But faith adds a dimension, as Augustine says: "Observe what you see, and see what you cannot see. Believe in the one whom you cannot see, on account of those things you can see" (Sermon 126, 3).

The Big Bang theory of the beginning of the universe is such an event, and it turns out that God didn't need seven days to do the job. The source material of everything in the universe could have come into existence in one burst of energy. As cited in the previous installment of "All Things Augustine," St. Augustine believed that "the universe was brought into being in a less than fully formed state but was gifted with the capacity to transform itself into a truly marvelous array of structures and life forms."

However, Augustine, like the other early Church fathers, took his Bible literally. He believed that Adam and Eve were created and set on Earth; they did not evolve from a lower life form. He also believed that the Gospels were written by four eyewitnesses to the life and death of Jesus.

There is no reason to think that Augustine, with his giant intellect and open mind, would have ignored the physical evidence that modern archaeologists and anthropologists have discovered to support the theory of evolution. Nor would he have refused to examine the work of modern experts in Scripture who have discovered that at least three of the four Gospels were written by Christians born well after the time of Christ.

For him, such knowledge, based on reason, would simply enhance his knowledge based on faith.

For Augustine and for the modern Church, which relies so strongly on him, reason and faith never are on a collision course. And faith itself is a journey. As he noted in Sermon 27, 6: "At the moment we are still on the road. What is the road? It's faith."

Father Burt stated it simply. "Belief [faith] is a necessary means to beatification [blessedness] but it is not the ultimate stage in our knowing. We believe now so that some day we will finally and forever understand ourselves and our God. We seek now by faith; then we shall find by understanding. Then we shall know the truth of Augustine's words: 'Understanding is the reward of faith.' Then we shall finally see what now we can only believe."

The next installment of "All Things Augustine" takes a look at Augustine's views on evil and on one of the most puzzling of all concepts: original sin. Why does God, who is all good, start every one of us out in life carrying the sin of our ancestors?

Author's note: Many thanks to the Rev. Allan D. Fitzgerald, O.S.A.,'64, for his invaluable assistance with this article.