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NOTE Fides et Ratio, Liberty, and its Welfare Relevance

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Teaching at the university level for most of my adult life and in my view the

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first duty of anyone who wants to transmit anything is to be clear. Now

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Now English is not my mother language. It's Spanish. And it is possible that in the course

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of my small short dissertation here, you might not understand some of my noises. So please

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Please feel free to raise your hands as I repeat that because it was on an

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intelligible. The subject matter of this talk was chosen by Dr. Kekeisen. He asked

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me to make some comments on the one of the late encyclicals, one of the last

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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.

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Well, I read it and here are some of my impressions or conclusions.

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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

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and the philosophical principles of a nation or a people under the rule of law, and I agree.

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But I have some good news. The opinion among the Catholic hierarchy is shifted in the direction of our way of thinking.

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I see with surprise that more and more clergymen in the Catholic Church read Ludwig von Mises

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and apparently understand Ludwig von Mises. So in that sense then I think a new generation of scholars,

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The introduction of this encyclical by the Pope, John Paul II, starts with a surprising statement.

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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.

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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.

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Who am I? Consciousness make us ask time and again, who am I in this universe? Also, according

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to him, know thyself means that I ask where I come from and where to am I going as a person.

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and another typical and recurrent question, why does evil exist? And the very last one,

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in order to ourselves, am I convinced that there is a possibility of life after death?

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These are the questions that John Paul II included in The Understanding of Ourselves.

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That was the introduction.

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In chapter 1, he presents what he calls the revelation of the wisdom of God, but with

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with a note that for me, as a philosophy professor, is very important.

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He stresses that the revelation of God is always present in time and history, it's not

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and speculation is not a theory, it's just a presentation, a factual presentation in a

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time, 2000 years ago, and in a place, in that case, Jewish-Palestinian, Roman-Palestinian.

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He says also, the man who responds to this revelation by faith in every act of faith

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is exercising his freedom.

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In other words, freedom is the consequence of an act of faith.

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And he will explain that a little later in a fashion that surprised me very much.

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But now I must say that the second chapter has the title in Latin credo ut intelligam

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which means I believe in order to understand in the assumption that faith and reason could

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never contradict themselves for each other.

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But most important, in the next chapter he says,

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Intelligo ut credan, which means the opposite.

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I understand in order to believe.

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Because according to him, we need to understand and to explain belonging of all mankind for

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for God, if there is any God.

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And he starts at this point underlining the nature of man as being a social nature, which

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is a famous statement by Aristotle.

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Man is a social animal, a social animal, and he says, what it means to be a social animal?

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And he responds to himself, by being social we mean that we trust each other.

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If we don't trust each other, we cannot believe, because belief is anchored in testimonies

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of other people whom I believe or not.

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I remember that a few years back, Francis Fukuyama published a book by the simple title

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Trust. And he tries to demonstrate in that book that the advanced societies are advanced

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precisely in the nature in which they trust each other. And the retarded or underdeveloped

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societies are underdeveloped because there is a high degree of suspicion among people,

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which is understandable because you cannot make a contract with anybody unless you trust

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the other person and the other person trusts you.

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Well, the Pope says, man is a social animal which can be translated into man being a trusting

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animal, and faith is based on trust.

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Maria also points out that the greatest drama in the relation between religious faith, Christian particularly,

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and reason has been the cleavage that has been dug out between reason and revelation, since the Enlightenment.

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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.

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But he says that there must be in any theological approach a philosophical approach before that.

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without philosophical approach we cannot receive trusting the revelation of God

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and in that sense he's making a passionate defense of philosophical

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thinking or philosophical activity of looking for the ultimate causes of

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of everything that man's experienced in this world.

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And he goes on through discussing details of the pre-Christian view of things, the Greeks particularly,

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the Christian and now what they call the post-Christian era, our era,

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where there has been a global apostasy of Christendom.

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Now, let me add some point of view that comes from me, not from the Pope.

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The relation between reason, philosophy particularly, and science, and faith has been for at least

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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,

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A book, blackboard, whatever, has an essence.

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That way of thinking was taken over by the Christians who were actually Greeks who have turned Christians.

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And let me say that this way of looking at things from an essentialist point of view

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has dominated the Western world up to the Enlightenment, up to 200, 250, 300 years ago.

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This is something that perhaps for you is not that relevant, but if you consider the situation of speculation,

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of thinking in religious terms and in accordance with the findings of science

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and technology, then is better understood that that essentialist thinking was a

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hindrance, an obstacle, a wall or a brick wall to a deeper understanding of modern

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Science and Mother Thought. There has been a change, and the change occurred mainly in the

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19th century and expanded and developed more in the 20th century up to this moment. The view that

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more and more theologians, at least Catholic theologians and Evangelical Protestant theologians too,

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have of divinity and of the metaphysical truth underlying the belief or the

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faith and the divinity in the divinity can be characterized as existentialist.

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That's a very important point. We are not anymore considering things or not so

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Not much, as before, from an essentialist point of view, but from an existentialist

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point of view. That is decisive. If any of you is familiar with the best philosopher of

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science in the 20th century, Carl Raymond Popper, will remember that Carl Raymond Popper

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Remember has insisted very much in that the essentialist way of looking at things hides

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from us the importance of what exists.

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Essences are not important.

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What are important are essences in existence.

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I know that this is abstract or confusing for you, but let me just point an author that

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might explain what I'm trying to say.

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The starter of the existentialist position in thinking was a Danish divine called Zøren

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Kierkegaard in 19th century, middle 19th century, and he was looking at an essentialist

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view of things by a German thinker, very influential one of the 19th century called Hegel, H-E-G-E-L,

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and he says Hegel has constructed, had built a beautiful intellectual building

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Where everything is accommodated into, the God, man, the earth, the sciences, everything.

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But he has left man, individual man, personal man, out of that building.

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So he explains the essences of everything except our essence, which exists.

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We can think of many essences that have existed and don't exist anymore, or many

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essences that may exist in the future. But what about us, individual beings,

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individual persons? Where is our position, our space in that huge philosophical

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Building that Hegel constructed, or that Hegel built. So he says, man is different

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from the rest of things that exist. In what sense men are different? Men are

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different because whenever anything is created or present to our worldview, we

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We can identify the essence of that thing as a table, or an animal, or a blackboard, or a wall, or a ceiling.

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But man is not born with an essence.

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Man exists, and during his period of existence, he builds up his own single essence.

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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.

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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

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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.

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A man who aggregates value, or a man who takes away value from the world in which he lives.

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So that is the kernel of the, in a nutshell, this is existentialism. Existentialism refers

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only to human nature, because only the essence of human nature consists in the results of

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his free choices during all his life.

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Well, going back to what the Pope says about Revelation and so on, he says that every man,

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Every single man has a calling, and that that calling becomes concrete, recognizable.

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His essence is so far as he freely decides to answer that calling.

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And that calling is faith.

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Calvin, a great theologian of the 16th century, a protestant one, said that every man and

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every woman has a calling in a different sense. Every man and every woman has a calling from

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from God to perfect or complete creation, the creation of God, through His work. Sweating.

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And so every time we build a Panama Canal, we are perfect in creation. Also with every

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time we make a tunnel, a tunnel under the English Channel between Greenland and France,

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We are perfect in creation and all of that is the product of work.

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I have five minutes and I'm going to resume what is left.

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Therefore, philosophy, Christian philosophy, sees faith, sees revelation from an existentialist

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point of view. The God I believe in is the God that makes me through my choices, my freedom,

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which brings closer to Ludwig von Mises the understanding of the Church about earthly

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Only realities like the market or social issues, progress or equality or whatever.

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In that sense existentialists, and I'm going to finish with this, existentialists do not

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attach too much importance to the categories of philosophers, be them Greeks or Germans

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today or French. They attach a lot of importance to history. There is biblical history, there

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There is a New Testament history, but it's always history, something that happened in

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a place and a time, something that determines our choices, and determining our choices determines

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who we are and where we are leading to.

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So the understanding of man, know thyself, as the Pope starts saying, is based ultimately

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in our choices, in our freedom.

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And by bringing freedom to such a high point, the Pope is concurring with us, is agreeing

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with us, that without freedom there can be no understanding, there can be no

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intelligence, there can be no human dignity, there can be no human progress.

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And for that reason, I think, I think I perceive a shift of opinion in the Roman

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Catholic Church, away from the world of essences of the Greeks towards the world

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of accomplishments, free choice, work hard, ethical lives of each one single

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man and single woman. And if that is the case, then at least for me, I am

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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.