Is God Beyond Reason?

The peace of God to be found in Paradise passes all our human understanding in this vale and veil of tears and in this cloud of unknowing that we call mortal life, but it doesn’t pass the perfected beatified human understanding of those who gain the beatific vision.

Over the Christmas period I had time to climb the mountainous backlog of correspondence that had accumulated during a period of intensive travel. This included a thought-provoking exchange with a graduate student in literature who sought my feedback on two theses he had written, one on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and the other on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

With respect to the former, the student had argued that Malvolio’s role in Shakespeare’s comedy should be seen as exhibiting all the hallmarks of tragedy in accordance with the principles established by Aristotle. Although I agreed that it is possible to see a tragic dimension to Malvolio’s fall, such a reading is undermined by the lack of truly noble traits in his character. I stressed that the contextual understanding of Malvolio as a Puritan is necessary to our understanding of what Shakespeare is doing with his character. Considering the malevolence that the Puritans exhibited toward both Catholic and Anglican faith, and towards the arts in general, and music and theatre in particular, Shakespeare’s audience would have seen Malvolio much as a Jew in the twentieth century would see a Nazi character in literature. The bottom line is that we are not meant to sympathize with the antithetical spirit of malevolence in the play, which Malvolio represents.

With respect to the thesis on the Divina Commedia, I had two quibbles, both of which centred on what I considered to be misunderstandings about the role of reason in Dante’s masterpiece. The student had claimed in his thesis that Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas were “controversial” for bringing “paganism” into Christian dialectic through their engagement with the philosophy of Aristotle. I questioned this on a number of grounds. First, it struck me as decidedly odd that Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas should have caused controversy for introducing Aristotle into the discussion considering that Augustine had already brought Plato into Christian dialectic almost 900 years earlier. Although it might be said, figuratively speaking, that Augustine had baptized Plato, and that Albert and Thomas had subsequently baptized Aristotle, it cannot be said that they had baptized paganism. The ideas of Plato and Aristotle, which Augustine and Aquinas had embraced, were rational, not “pagan”. They were at the service of truth, not of the pagan gods. Those classical philosophical ideas that the Doctors of the Church had introduced into Christian dialectic were introduced because of the truth they conveyed. These ideas were seen to be a reflection of the order and harmony of the cosmos which God had created. They conformed to reality, even as they enabled us to understand reality more deeply. To reiterate and to return to my interlocutor’s claim, the medieval scholastics had not brought “paganism” into Christian dialectic, they had brought Greek philosophy into Christian dialectic. They had brought the Greek love of wisdom into the conversation. And, which is crucial, they had only embraced those Greek philosophers whose ideas harmonized with a Christian philosophical understanding of the cosmos. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were invited to the table; Democritus and Heraclitus were not.

My other quibble was the apparent suggestion that Dante moves beyond ratio to fides as a necessary prerequisite for his ascent into Paradise. The very fact that he is examined in the theological virtues would seem to suggest that ratio is required in Paradise, as is the elevation of Thomas Aquinas, of whom Dante was a disciple, as one of the key saints whom Dante meets. What I believe my interlocutor was endeavouring to say is that the peace of Paradise is beyond the human capacity to reason, which is another way of saying that it is the peace that passeth all understanding (Philippians 4:7). It is, however, important to distinguish between “understanding” and “reason”. They are not the same thing. That which is beyond our understanding is not beyond reason itself, or, more correctly, it is not beyond Reason Himself: the Godhead being the Logos, i.e. Ratio. The analogy I sometimes employ to explain this is that our relationship to God is akin to a dog’s relationship to Man. The dog knows that the Man will not take it for a walk or feed it until the Man puts down the newspaper he is reading. This is the limit of the dog’s reasoning. The dog cannot read the paper. I believe that the beatific vision will enlarge our capacity to reason to such a degree that it will be akin to the dog learning to read!

The peace of God to be found in Paradise passes all our human understanding in this vale and veil of tears and in this cloud of unknowing that we call mortal life, but it doesn’t pass the perfected beatified human understanding of those who gain the beatific vision. If we get to heaven, we will be able to go further up and further in, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis. We will be able to reason beyond our fallen human capacity, enabling us to reason our way ever deeper into Reason Himself. And there’s no need to take my word for it, or C. S. Lewis’s. Here’s what St. Paul has to say on the triumph of reason in the Church Triumphant: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12).

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The featured image is courtesy of Pixabay.