CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) - Benedict XVI has ushered in the Year of Faith.  In his apostolic letter Annus fidei, Pope Benedict XVI expressed his desire that during this Year of Faith every believer profess the faith "in fullness and with renewed conviction, with confidence and hope." 

Faith, however, does not deal only with God, it also relates to realities about us and about the world.  It may seem counter-intuitive, but one of those things that we are called to have faith in is reason. 

It is part of our Faith that reason can inform us reliably albeit limitedly about reality, about what is and what is good.  We believe that there is reason behind created reality, a Logos, and we also believe that our reason, which participates in the Logos, is adequate to discover the reason behind created reality.  Reason can even get right to the edge of created reality and grasp out toward, if not quite touch, the reality of God's uncreated existence, that He is, and that he is the Creator or the First and Uncaused Cause of what is. 

Faith believes also that not only is reason able to witness to us of God the First Cause, but it also informs us that God is our Final Cause, that our being and becoming participate in, that is, emerge from God and ultimately must return to God.  Reason allows us to know that there is what is called an exitus-reditus structure in the created order, that there was a beginning in God, the First Cause, and that there must be an end or purpose to the whole created order, in God, the Final Cause. 

Reason therefore takes us to the threshold of faith.

As John Paul II famously put it in the very beginning of his encyclical on faith and reason, Fides et ratio: "Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth," truth about ourselves and, ultimately, the source of all truth, Truth himself, God. 

Our Faith requires us to believe that we have two wings that propel us to truths about ourselves and about God, and not just one.

And this one wing we call reason has two aspects to it.  That aspect of reason that discovers what is true is called theoretical reason.  That reason that discovers what is good and the means to achieve it is called practical reason.

Reason, then, both theoretical and practical, can participate in the search of reality in tandem with, and not in opposition to, faith.  As Pope Benedict XVI mentions in his apostolic letter Annus fidei, reason's "search is an authentic 'preamble' to the faith, because it guides people onto the path that leads to the mystery of God."

"Human reason, in fact," the Pope continues, "bears within itself a demand for 'what is perennially valid and lasting.'  This demand constitutes a permanent summons, indelibly written into the human heart, to set out to find the One whom we would not be seeking had he not already set out to meet us."

This should come as no surprise.  After all, the neo-Platonic pagan philosopher Plotinus, for example, grasped the truth of the One through the use of reason without benefit of Revelation.  And Aristotle was able to grasp some great moral truths with the use of reason.  Similarly, some of the higher forms of Hinduism have grasped the concept of one God, for example in the Katha Upanishad and the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, and a law based upon fittingness or nature, dharma.

So part of the Year of Faith, in addition to Faith's increase, must be a restoration of reason.  For only with the restoration of reason can we have a reasoned faith and only with a restoration of faith can we have a faithful reason.

It is important, however, to understand that the reason that both John Paul II speaks of in his encyclical Fides et ratio and which Benedict XVI speaks of in his apostolic letter Annus fidei is not limited to what that narrow sliver of reason that we would call empirical or scientific reason.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church clarifies that the reason that is involved in the discovery of what is and what is good is not the kind of reason used in natural sciences such as physics.  Not that there is anything wrong with that reason; however, by its very nature that sort of reason is very limited, very one-dimensional, stunted and blunt when it comes to larger reality.

The reason the Church has in mind, the reason that leads us to the threshold of God, the source of all being, all truth, and all good, is a broader, thicker reason, one which relies upon "converging and convincing arguments" based upon what we perceive through our senses and common sense about reality.  [CCC ...