By Fr. Roy Cimagala
GIVEN the fact that we are not meant to remain only in the natural level, relying simply on our human powers, but rather are meant to enter and share the supernatural life of God since we are his image and likeness, we have to be clear that we have to be guided by faith rather than simply our own reasoning and our other human ways of knowing.
Faith is God sharing his knowledge with us. It is how we begin to share the life of God. And he gives it to us very willingly. It just depends on us on whether we receive it or not, and to respond to it or not.
Faith contains truths that go beyond the natural realities of our life. Thus, it has supernatural truths or mysteries which we have to learn to feel at home with. This means we have to learn not to stick to our natural reasoning alone, but to go beyond it.
To be sure, faith does not supplant our reasoning or intelligence. Rather, it makes full use of it, although its scope is far wider and deeper than what our intelligence can fully know and understand.
As the Catechism puts it, faith is first of all a gratuitous gift of God, it is grace. But it also requires the correspondence of our intelligence. It is also a human act. It asks us to do our best to understand it as much as we can. It seeks understanding.
Besides, though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith in us and who also bestows the light of reason on the human mind. He cannot contradict himself. (cfr. CCC 156-159) Thus, faith and human science cannot contradict with each other, though the latter cannot cope with what the former teaches and shows.
We have to remember that since the reality that governs us transcends the natural order, our human faculty of intelligence and reasoning just cannot depend on the data provided by our senses and our own understanding of things.
Otherwise, we will be trapped in our own world that does not jibe anymore with the reality meant for us. This is especially observable in the world of politics where partisan and ideological interests get so strong as to go to the extent of pushing all kinds of fallacies and blatant falsehoods, supported by so much rhetoric and theatrics, that even clear immoralities like divorce, abortion, atheism, etc. can be espoused and legalized.
Our reason needs to be guided by faith. In that regard, we need to be humble enough to acknowledge the need of our reason for the guidance of faith. That’s because no matter how perceptive and intelligent we are, we can always detect that there is another world that is beyond the sensible and the intelligible. This is the world where our senses and intelligence cannot anymore cope.
This is where we need to humble ourselves, a predicament that many of us find hard to resolve. We tend to hold on only to our own ideas and the facts and data that we can manage to gather, guided mainly by our senses and intellect. In short, we make our own selves, and to be more specific, our own senses and intellect, to be our own sole guide, our own god.
We have to do something drastic about this. And the first thing we should do is to feel the need for God from whom all of us and the entire creation come and to whom we all belong.
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
