Pope: Faith-Reason Split is "Schizophrenia"

I love this word smithing -- the Holy Father's penchant for distilling things down to their most memorable drop of lucid brilliance. Just as his earlier expression, a "dictatorship of relativism," offered a dead-on nut-shell description of the regnant value-orientation of the contemporary imperial West, so here his reference to "schizophrenia" aptly describes the disjointed way in which the vast majority of western individuals relate values to facts, mind to body, the spiritual to the material, religion to science, the sacred to the secular, faith to reason in their comportment toward the world.

"The modern development of the sciences brings countless positive effects, which must always be acknowledged," the Pope acknowledges. But he he also goes on to point out: "At the same time, however, it must be admitted that the tendency to consider true only that which can be experienced constitutes a limitation for human reason and produces a terrible schizophrenia, evident to all, because of which rationalism and materialism, and hypertechnology and unbridled instincts, coexist."

The Holy Father made these comments on January 28, 2007, before reciting the Angelus with the thousands gathered in St. Peter's Square, on the calendar day that normally would be the liturgical memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), "a great doctor of the Church." Naturally, he referenced his predecessor, John Paul II's Encyclical, Fides et Ratio, on the relationship between 'faith' and 'reason'. Benedict has billed the healing of the cultural "schizophrenia" that separates faith from reason as one of today's most important challenges. See Pope: Faith-Reason Split Is "Schizophrenia" (ZENIT, 1/28/07)

Of related interest:

By the way, one the profoundest and best, if seemingly unlikely, sources from which you may find a solution to this schizophrenic vision is the integrating sacramental vision of the world offered by Thomas Howard in his book, which I cannot recommend highly enough, Chance or the Dance: A Critique of Modern Secularism. It is a book that deserves to be read on many different levels -- enjoyed, savored, contemplated, and carefully studied.