Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers

Description

Faith and reason, especially in Roman Catholic thought, are less contradictory today than ever. But does the supposed opposition even make sense to begin with? One can lose faith, but surely not because one gains in reason. Some, in fact, lose faith when reason is not able to make sense of the experiences of our lives. We very quickly realize that reason does not understand everything. Immense areas remain incomprehensible and irrational, which we abandon to belief and opinion. Soon we definitively renounce thinking what that has been excluded from the realm of the thinkable. Ideological nightmares arise from this slumber of reason. Thus, the separation between faith and reason, too quickly taken as self-evident and even natural, is born from a lack of rationality, an easy capitulatin of reason before what is supposedly unthinkable. Rather than lose faith through excessive rationality, we often lose rationality because faith is too quickly excluded from the realm that it claims to open, that of revelation. We lose reason by losing faith. Examining such topics as the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly, this book spans the range of Marion’s thought on Christianity. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, structured according to the logic of the gift that calls forth a response of love and devotion through kenotic abandon. Cover Page Cover Half Title Series Announcement Page Title Page Copyright Dedication Contents Preface Translator’s Note Half Title Part I: Reason and Faith Together 1. Faith and Reason 2. In Defense of Argument 3. The Formal Reason of the Infinite Part II: Who Speaks About It? 4. On the Eminent Dignity of the Poor Baptized 5. The Service of Rationality in the Church 6. The Future of Catholicism Part III: What Is Possible and What Shows Itself 7. Nothing Is Impossible for God 8. The Phenomenality of the Sacrament 9. Transcendence par Excellence Part IV: Recognition 10. The Recognition of the Gift 11. “They Recognized Him and He Became Invisible to Them” 12. The Invisible Saint Notes Index Series Page