The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil According to the Holy Scriptures

§. 6.

Natural reason can serve the theologian in teaching.

But what finally should be held regarding natural reason in elucidating questions of faith? Should it be entirely rejected or shunned by the Theologian or interpreter of sacred Scripture? Not at all. We theologize among rational men, and we attempt to preach and interpret the mysteries of our faith to them, to whom it is connate above all to weigh what they have heard and been taught from others against the scales of their own reason, and if they find them to be less congruent with its principles or entirely contrary, they will be able to be led to believe or admit such things only with difficulty. Hence the Prince of the Apostles, St. Peter, directed a most wise warning to his own, saying 1 Peter, Chapter 3, verse 15: but sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being always ready to give satisfaction to every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you. Therefore, natural reason is by no means to be neglected by the Theologian in elucidating questions of Faith; for God, being infinitely wise, has not proposed such Mysteries of faith to us as are against reason, but such as can also be explained and interpreted according to reason and its arguments to the grasp of a rational man, provided that we always moderate the excessive itch to know and eventually subject reason to the obedience of faith, as St. Augustine warns in On Christian Doctrine, book 2, chapter 31: The discipline of disputation has great value for penetrating and dissolving all kinds of questions which are in the holy letters. You must only guard against both the lust for arguing and a certain childish ostentation of deceiving the adversary. And so, total clarity and evidence is not to be expected in this part, for the reason that the oracles of our faith, although they are not against reason, are nevertheless above reason, and escape all our grasp of clear and evident understanding, until we are led from vision through a mirror to the clear vision of God face to face, where faith will no longer have a place, nor its merit, which is granted to us only as travelers,