Faith, Metaphysics, and the Sciences

In his 1999 encyclical Fides et Ratio , Pope John Paul II affirms that "the human being can come to a unified and organic vision of knowledge" (FR, 85). The present issue of Communio explores two themes that, while at first sight seemingly unrelated, in fact converge in providing an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the unity that John Paul II insists human knowing can, indeed, must, attain in order to overcome the "fragmentation" that threatens the "interior unity" of the person (ibid).

"Holiness is intended to comprehend the order of being in its entirety."

“If the Christian belief that God created the world could no longer be related to the world of our experience . . . the one God of the Biblical faith himself would become an unreal entity.”

"The most basic and indispensable mediator between the realm of revealed knowledge, grasped by faith, and that of all other natural knowledge, in particular the natural sciences, is metaphysics ."

“Modernity entails, ultimately, an injustice that transcends the occasional or accidental exploitation of man by man—a more fundamental injustice against not only the image of God in man but God himself.”

"Fundamentalism . . . fails to see that . . . each man, and only he, decides about his humanity, because the foundation itself chooses the act of human freedom as the locus of its donation."

“We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. . . . Technology is the ontology of the age.”