PIERRE MANENT teaches political philosophy in the
Centre des recherches politiques Raymond Aron in
Paris. He is the author, most recently, of Democracy
Without Nations? (ISI Books, 2007). This reflection
was delivered at Notre-Dame Cathedral of Paris on
Sunday, February 25, 2007 and translated for Modern
Age by Ralph C. Hancock.
What is truth? This is a question that we
seldom formulate in these terms, but
that we often ask, when we ask ourselves if we
really see what we see. Do we really see what
we see? To verify, we try to touch. Truth
needs a touchstone; it is itself a touchstone.
We sense that we have hold of the truth when
we can touch what we see. We are in error
when we cannot touch what we seeāor,
rather, that is, what we think we see. A child
tries to catch his shadow; the adult has learned
to distinguish between what he thinks he sees
and what he can grasp. Reason, one might
say, is what allows us to link sight to touch.
This is often very difficult for us, unlike the
cat, which, perceiving the mouse, does not
hesitate over what he has to do. One glance
and whoosh! Our movements are much less
graceful than the cat’s; we are a wandering
and limping species because it is hard for us
to link sight and touch. It is hard, and so we
need reason, and reason is work. Why do we
make mistakes, why are we capable of error?
Because our eye is much bigger than the
cat’s, bigger even than the lion’s, because our
eye is huge; it is the eye of the mind. We can
see all that is, all that can be, because our
intelligence is open to being as such. We can
even see what does not exist, since we can
imagine itāthus the disproportion between
the unlimited scope of what we conceive and
the narrowness of what we can touch and
verify. And reason ceaselessly runs from one
to the other, from what we conceive to what
we can verify.
I shall not attempt to define faith, since I
am not a theologian and thus have no authority
in this area. I shall only observe that the
notion of faith in the strong sense that interests
us this evening appeared with Christianity
and has remained proper to Christianity.
With the Incarnation, truth offered itself to
be seen and even touched. The very principle
of being offered itself to Thomas’s observation.
Then it withdrew. “Have you believed
because you have seen me? Blessed are those
who have not seen and yet shall believe”
[John 20.29, RSV]āthose who have faith.
Faith attains its object without seeing or
touching it. Instead of going ceaselessly back
and forth, instead of working, it suspends
human effort and waits for everything, hopes
for everything, expects everything from God.
Reason is more essential to our being than
is faith. Reason makes us human. We are
human beings only by this faculty of erring
and recovering ourselves. To despise reason
is to despise one’s own being. The greatness
of Europe, what makes her unique among
the great civilizations, is that she has never
relented in the work of reason, she has never
tired and never ceased to make reason the
touchstone. Europeans have never ceased to
bring even Europe’s own faith, the Christian
faith, before the tribunal of reason, even
during the eras that we designate as “eras of
faith.”
Christian faith, for its part, accepts being
called to appear before the tribunal of reason.
It is distinctive of the Christian God to leave
man to his own counsel, and to put the
fulfillment of the plan of salvation as it were
at the mercy of human freedom. This is why
Christianity is not a law, but a faith. This is
why the Bible is not a teaching dictated by
heaven like the Koran. It is a chronicle, full
of detours, of an often-broken and everrenewed
covenant between divine goodness
and human freedom.
Reason’s questions do not leave faith
without reply. Faith says to reason that one
who ceaselessly verifies will never find the
truth that is the end of its seeking, in both
senses of the term. Would not reason’s activity
be in vain if there were not a point where
man’s truth was gathered, a point towards
which faith directs us, and hope and faith
carry us? However necessary, and even noble,
may be the work of reason, the moment
comes when one must consent to allow the
truth to come towards us.
During the last four centuries we have
built a rational order, devoted to experimentation
and verification. We have organized
ourselves to be free, as free as possible. No
tradition or proposition, no inherited experience
would be allowed to limit our power
to recompose the world to our liking, to give
new names to old things, or old names to new
thingsāand so, for example, to call “marriage”
whatever we wanted so to name. We
have built what Jean-Jacques Rousseau called
“enormous machines of happiness and pleasure”
where we are sure to meet only our
own will.
This liberal and democratic order abounds
in benefits of every kind, and for this it
deserves to be loved and defended. It has at
bottom only one defect: it tends to be indifferent
to truth. This is no accident, nor is it
the result of a human weakness inseparable
from all human order; it results, rather, from
the very law upon which this order is built.
This order abandons to science the concern
for meeting up with the truth in some indefinite
futureāincluding the prospect of finding
the true cause of faith in some locality of
the braināand, for the rest, it is satisfied to
call its least examined prejudices “values.”
This order is bothered by those who bother
with the truth, and finds intolerant those who
care about the truth.
But if the human race does not bother
with the truth, if it is not concerned with
truth, it loses its dignity, and then it is an
abuse of language to assign rights to such a
humanity. What rights can be accorded to an
erring species unconcerned with seeking its
destination?
Our political order for good reason separates
reason and faith. As a political or public
order, it intends to be based only on reason.
Thus faith is a matter of personal conviction
and of private life. This separation was once
necessary. It remains salutary. At the same
time, it weakens both reason and faith. Thus
protected from all radical questioning, reason
is satisfied to elaborate more and more
sophisticated techniques, including social
techniques. Faith takes refuge, and sometimes
shrivels, in the heart, and tends to
become confused with religious sentimentā
more and more sentimental, less and less
religious.
To be all they can be, or to approach this
goal, reason and faith need each other. The
point is not to confuse them, but to require
them to respond to each other, or rather to
question each other.
Reason demands of the believer his reasons
for believingānot that faith could ever
be simply rational, but because every human
being ought to be able to give an account of
what he thinks and does. Thus the believer is
required to elaborate and present his reasons
for believing, first in a God, and then in this
God who is supposed to have entered into
covenants with us as reported in Scripture.
Faith asks the agnostic or the atheist what
is the basis of human bonds if there is no
spiritual communion, and how he can understand
himself if he is destined for nothing.
This dialogue will be without end and
without conclusion, but not without effect.
Each side will understand itself better. And
now and then one will abandon what he had
thought for the other position because it will
seem truer to him. To change for the truth,
to change in pursuit of the truth, such is the
beautiful risk that man alone is capable of
taking, and before which today he withdraws
more and more.
This dialogue between faith and reason is
not necessarily calm, nor even always “respectful”
as this adjective is now understood.
We attach a lot of importance to respect, and
rightly so, but we often mistake what it is that
must be respected, what it is that deserves
respect. Respect is addressed to persons,
because, as Kant famously said, dignity belongs
to “humanity” as such, to the fact of
being human. But it makes no sense to
address this respect due to persons in the same
way to actions, thoughts, or words, which
are objects of legitimate judgment, whether
of approval or blame. Thus it is perfectly
legitimate that rationalists criticize, even
severely criticize, religion, whether it is a
question of religion in general or of a particular
religion.
For most serious rationalists, religion is a
weakness of the brain. I do not see why they
should not have the right to say so. Nor do I
see why those among them who are given to
mockery would not also mock religion. After
all, the believer who sees, or believes he sees,
who hears or believes he hears, things his
rationalist neighbor neither hears nor seesā
how could the latter not be brought at least to
smile? Rather than asking plaintively that
their faith be respected, believers might
make it more respectable by showing themselves
capable of defending it, even by taking
the debate to the rationalist camp, where the
best use is not always made of reason.
I am not asking that we apply ourselves
joyfully to exchanging insults and sarcasm,
but simply that we take the question of truth
seriously. Dostoyevsky says somewhere that
if he had to choose between Christ and truth,
he would choose Christ. This saying has
always seemed to me to be the peak of
foolishness. Only truth is worthy of choice.
Such things should not need to be said in a
country like France. More than any European
country, the axis of our history, moral
and political as well as spiritual, has been
dialogue, preferably vigorous dialogue, between
faith and reason, for example, between
Voltaire and PascalāVoltaire, who
was not always very respectful of believers,
and Pascal, who pursued the rationalist with
a lively insistence.
But if believers today are so concerned
with respect, this is perhaps less due to
pusillanimity than because they take upon
themselves the viewpoint of the rationalist,
and see faith as a survival from earlier times
that cannot confront the public light of
reason, and that must be protected as part of
their private lives. Religion that so encloses
itself in the fortress, thought to be invincible,
of the self’s feelings, abandons the public
space to its nakedness and leaves it stripped of
all trace of religion. In a society that has left
religion behind, the believer judges it to be
impossible, and moreover, illicit, to leave the
private realm of the heart.
And yet the believer, like his rationalist or
agnostic fellow-citizen, is always “outside
himself,” always already taken up in human
bonds that, like the non-believer, he is striving
to strengthen, to make more just or
sweeter. Each as much as the other must give
a reasonable account of these bonds. We are
trying to build a society within the limits of
reason. With reason we have built these
“enormous machines of happiness and pleasure”
that protect our rights. And reason
allows each to understand and calculate his
interests well, and to make them compatible
with those of others. But this extension of the
self, this enlargement of the self, this participation
of the self in something larger than
itself, which is implied in every human bond,
from the slightest to the grandestācan reason
ground this, can it first even understand
it? It can if it engages itself with all its strength
in the search for being, for the being such
that no greater being can be conceived. But
then, at this extreme limit of its strength, it
is necessary to accept, or not to accept,
suspending its effort, but not its movement,
and to let the greatest being come towards it;
and then rational man must consent, or not,
to let the truth come towards him.
One of the fathers of modern rationalism,
the philosopher Bacon, remarked that Pilate,
having asked “what is truth,” did not stay to
wait for an answer. Reason, which questions,
does not always listen to the answer; but the
believer who believes he has the answer often
has not listened to the question. The rationalist
and the believer do not limp on the same
foot. Thus they sustain each other, despite
everything, and our limping species makes
its way towards truth. Perhaps.