Teaching at the university level for most of my adult life and in my view the
first duty of anyone who wants to transmit anything is to be clear. Now
Now English is not my mother language. It's Spanish. And it is possible that in the course
of my small short dissertation here, you might not understand some of my noises. So please
Please feel free to raise your hands as I repeat that because it was on an
intelligible. The subject matter of this talk was chosen by Dr. Kekeisen. He asked
me to make some comments on the one of the late encyclicals, one of the last
The last encyclical of late Pope John Paul II called Fides and Ratio, which is translated into faith and reason, and its welfare relevance for society.
Well, I read it and here are some of my impressions or conclusions.
It has been said, and I think those people who say it were right, that the Catholic Church has been reluctant to accept the philosophical principles of a free market
and the philosophical principles of a nation or a people under the rule of law, and I agree.
But I have some good news. The opinion among the Catholic hierarchy is shifted in the direction of our way of thinking.
I see with surprise that more and more clergymen in the Catholic Church read Ludwig von Mises
and apparently understand Ludwig von Mises. So in that sense then I think a new generation of scholars,
The introduction of this encyclical by the Pope, John Paul II, starts with a surprising statement.
Know thyself, which, as you know, was something inscripted at the door of the temple, pagan temple in Greece, to honor the gods in a place called Delphos.
What he means with know thyself. According to this document, by knowing thyself is meant that you, I try to find out which are the ways that must lead us into better responding the question, who I am.
Who am I? Consciousness make us ask time and again, who am I in this universe? Also, according
to him, know thyself means that I ask where I come from and where to am I going as a person.
and another typical and recurrent question, why does evil exist? And the very last one,
in order to ourselves, am I convinced that there is a possibility of life after death?
These are the questions that John Paul II included in The Understanding of Ourselves.
That was the introduction.
In chapter 1, he presents what he calls the revelation of the wisdom of God, but with
with a note that for me, as a philosophy professor, is very important.
He stresses that the revelation of God is always present in time and history, it's not
and speculation is not a theory, it's just a presentation, a factual presentation in a
time, 2000 years ago, and in a place, in that case, Jewish-Palestinian, Roman-Palestinian.
He says also, the man who responds to this revelation by faith in every act of faith
is exercising his freedom.
In other words, freedom is the consequence of an act of faith.
And he will explain that a little later in a fashion that surprised me very much.
But now I must say that the second chapter has the title in Latin credo ut intelligam
which means I believe in order to understand in the assumption that faith and reason could
never contradict themselves for each other.
But most important, in the next chapter he says,
Intelligo ut credan, which means the opposite.
I understand in order to believe.
Because according to him, we need to understand and to explain belonging of all mankind for
for God, if there is any God.
And he starts at this point underlining the nature of man as being a social nature, which
is a famous statement by Aristotle.
Man is a social animal, a social animal, and he says, what it means to be a social animal?
And he responds to himself, by being social we mean that we trust each other.
If we don't trust each other, we cannot believe, because belief is anchored in testimonies
of other people whom I believe or not.
I remember that a few years back, Francis Fukuyama published a book by the simple title
Trust. And he tries to demonstrate in that book that the advanced societies are advanced
precisely in the nature in which they trust each other. And the retarded or underdeveloped
societies are underdeveloped because there is a high degree of suspicion among people,
which is understandable because you cannot make a contract with anybody unless you trust
the other person and the other person trusts you.
Well, the Pope says, man is a social animal which can be translated into man being a trusting
animal, and faith is based on trust.
Maria also points out that the greatest drama in the relation between religious faith, Christian particularly,
and reason has been the cleavage that has been dug out between reason and revelation, since the Enlightenment.
He also says something about a piece of specialization in the theological studies of the Catholic Church that perhaps is not that interesting to you.
But he says that there must be in any theological approach a philosophical approach before that.
without philosophical approach we cannot receive trusting the revelation of God
and in that sense he's making a passionate defense of philosophical
thinking or philosophical activity of looking for the ultimate causes of
of everything that man's experienced in this world.
And he goes on through discussing details of the pre-Christian view of things, the Greeks particularly,
the Christian and now what they call the post-Christian era, our era,
where there has been a global apostasy of Christendom.
Now, let me add some point of view that comes from me, not from the Pope.
The relation between reason, philosophy particularly, and science, and faith has been for at least
1800 years, 1800 years, what I call essentialists. In other words, the Greeks developed through Plato and Aristotle and others, thinkers, an essentialist view of things, everything that we recognize or identify as a theme, a table,
A book, blackboard, whatever, has an essence.
That way of thinking was taken over by the Christians who were actually Greeks who have turned Christians.
And let me say that this way of looking at things from an essentialist point of view
has dominated the Western world up to the Enlightenment, up to 200, 250, 300 years ago.
This is something that perhaps for you is not that relevant, but if you consider the situation of speculation,
of thinking in religious terms and in accordance with the findings of science
and technology, then is better understood that that essentialist thinking was a
hindrance, an obstacle, a wall or a brick wall to a deeper understanding of modern
Science and Mother Thought. There has been a change, and the change occurred mainly in the
19th century and expanded and developed more in the 20th century up to this moment. The view that
more and more theologians, at least Catholic theologians and Evangelical Protestant theologians too,
have of divinity and of the metaphysical truth underlying the belief or the
faith and the divinity in the divinity can be characterized as existentialist.
That's a very important point. We are not anymore considering things or not so
Not much, as before, from an essentialist point of view, but from an existentialist
point of view. That is decisive. If any of you is familiar with the best philosopher of
science in the 20th century, Carl Raymond Popper, will remember that Carl Raymond Popper
Remember has insisted very much in that the essentialist way of looking at things hides
from us the importance of what exists.
Essences are not important.
What are important are essences in existence.
I know that this is abstract or confusing for you, but let me just point an author that
might explain what I'm trying to say.
The starter of the existentialist position in thinking was a Danish divine called Zøren
Kierkegaard in 19th century, middle 19th century, and he was looking at an essentialist
view of things by a German thinker, very influential one of the 19th century called Hegel, H-E-G-E-L,
and he says Hegel has constructed, had built a beautiful intellectual building
Where everything is accommodated into, the God, man, the earth, the sciences, everything.
But he has left man, individual man, personal man, out of that building.
So he explains the essences of everything except our essence, which exists.
We can think of many essences that have existed and don't exist anymore, or many
essences that may exist in the future. But what about us, individual beings,
individual persons? Where is our position, our space in that huge philosophical
Building that Hegel constructed, or that Hegel built. So he says, man is different
from the rest of things that exist. In what sense men are different? Men are
different because whenever anything is created or present to our worldview, we
We can identify the essence of that thing as a table, or an animal, or a blackboard, or a wall, or a ceiling.
But man is not born with an essence.
Man exists, and during his period of existence, he builds up his own single essence.
And how do we do that? Simply by exercising our freedom. Every choice that we make, every decision that we take, is building up, consciously or unconsciously, our essence.
And you cannot say who was Napoleon until he died, or who are you until you die, or who is me until I am, because as long as I can choose freely, I can convert into something good or something bad, something bright or something dark, something that makes history or something that passes
So, for the existentialist view, Man is not an essence, has no essence. Man makes himself, every man, through his freedom, through his acts of choice, his own essence, as being a good man or a bad man.
A man who aggregates value, or a man who takes away value from the world in which he lives.
So that is the kernel of the, in a nutshell, this is existentialism. Existentialism refers
only to human nature, because only the essence of human nature consists in the results of
his free choices during all his life.
Well, going back to what the Pope says about Revelation and so on, he says that every man,
Every single man has a calling, and that that calling becomes concrete, recognizable.
His essence is so far as he freely decides to answer that calling.
And that calling is faith.
Calvin, a great theologian of the 16th century, a protestant one, said that every man and
every woman has a calling in a different sense. Every man and every woman has a calling from
from God to perfect or complete creation, the creation of God, through His work. Sweating.
And so every time we build a Panama Canal, we are perfect in creation. Also with every
time we make a tunnel, a tunnel under the English Channel between Greenland and France,
We are perfect in creation and all of that is the product of work.
I have five minutes and I'm going to resume what is left.
Therefore, philosophy, Christian philosophy, sees faith, sees revelation from an existentialist
point of view. The God I believe in is the God that makes me through my choices, my freedom,
which brings closer to Ludwig von Mises the understanding of the Church about earthly
Only realities like the market or social issues, progress or equality or whatever.
In that sense existentialists, and I'm going to finish with this, existentialists do not
attach too much importance to the categories of philosophers, be them Greeks or Germans
today or French. They attach a lot of importance to history. There is biblical history, there
There is a New Testament history, but it's always history, something that happened in
a place and a time, something that determines our choices, and determining our choices determines
who we are and where we are leading to.
So the understanding of man, know thyself, as the Pope starts saying, is based ultimately
in our choices, in our freedom.
And by bringing freedom to such a high point, the Pope is concurring with us, is agreeing
with us, that without freedom there can be no understanding, there can be no
intelligence, there can be no human dignity, there can be no human progress.
And for that reason, I think, I think I perceive a shift of opinion in the Roman
Catholic Church, away from the world of essences of the Greeks towards the world
of accomplishments, free choice, work hard, ethical lives of each one single
man and single woman. And if that is the case, then at least for me, I am
I am Catholic, at least for me as a philosopher or philosophy professor, I am at peace that I can agree wholeheartedly percent, hundred percent, with Ludwig von Mises and with the Pope at the same time. Thank you.