6. The Enlightenment and the First Vatican Council

The emergence of the new science in the seventeenth century stirred up a real crisis for the Christian theology of revelation. Isaac Newton's success in describing nature as a world-machine governed by fundamental physical laws gave rise to an wareness of the power of reason. The new view of nature was deterministic and reductionistic. The ideal of rationality manifest in science became the norm for interpreting reality and experience. Deistic views of God were common, and some thinkers rejected all truths about God and defended atheistic and materialistic philosophies, while some denied any connection between revealed truths about God and empirical reality. The awareness of the historical character of human reason, knowledge and understanding further threatened the universality and uniqueness of revealed religion. Gabriel Daly gives a nice summary of the real crisis in terms of the views of the philosophers:

"Descartes had prepared the way with his methodical doubt and his emphasis on clear and distinct ideas. Hume's radical empiricism awoke Immanuel Kant from his dogmatic slumbers. The result was Kant's "Copernican revolution", with its turn to the subject and its conception of religion as limited by the bounds of human reason."20

To meet the challenges of atheism, deism and rationalism, the Dogmatic Constitution Dei Filius asserts the First Vatican Council's teaching on revelation. God's existence and some of His attributes "could be known with certainty from the consideration of the created things, by the natural power of human reason"21 Nevertheless, revelation is necessary because "God directed human beings to a supernatural end, that is a sharing in the good things of God that utterly surpasses the understanding of the human mind."22 The goal of revelation is to raise human beings to a supernatural level so that they can"conceive what things God has prepared for those who love him."23 This supernatural revelation is contained objectively in the written scripture as well as in the unwritten traditions "which were received by the apostles from the lips of Christ himself, or came to the apostles by the dictation of the holy Spirit, and were passed on as it were from hand to hand until they reached us." 24 The Church thus has the authority to judge the true meaning and the interpretation of scripture. In the fourth chapter of Dei Filius, it is claimed that there are mysteries hidden in God that can only be known by revelation and accepted by faith. Reason, when used properly, can achieve some understanding of God's mysteries "whether by analogy from what it knows naturally, or from the connection of these mysteries with one another and with the final end of humanity." 25 Although faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between them because they come from the same God. In addition, they mutually support each other because right reason establishes the foundations of faith whereas faith in turns delivers reason from errors.

The First Vatican Council made a clear distinction between the natural knowledge identified by human reason and the supernatural knowledge attained by revelation. Revelation is then regarded as a closed issue, becoming a doctrine that must be kept intact and interpreted in loyalty. This static and propositional notion places emphasis on the objective dimension of revelation, explicitly as something given to humankind in an impersonal way.