faith and reason, the relationship between our intellectual understanding of God and divine revelation,

how what God reveals in Christ is in harmony with our human knowledge of the world.

Now, you may not be surprised to hear that since I'm a Dominican, the line I'm going to explore

tonight comes basically

out of the thinking of Thomas Aquinas. But it comes out of the thinking of Thomas Aquinas

as interpreted in the 19th century by the first Vatican Council. Now that council had two documents,

one was on papal infallibility, but the other document was on

faith and reason, and it's in Latin a document entitled De Filius, Son of God, which you can easily

find online, and which contains a kind of short but powerful synthesis of Catholic thinking

about faith and reason. And the exploration I want to make with you tonight

is on how to think about that document, you might say, as interpreted by 20th century, 21st century

disciples of St. Thomas Aquinas, or you might say Thomists. How have modern Thomists interpreted

the church's teaching at Vatican 1.

Now you have a handout in front of you, and it may look a little obscure.

Don't be too afraid. We will make it into intelligible sense over time.

The handout has arrows going upward and arrows coming down.

It's as if you have reason

ascending toward God and you have revelation coming down from God. And in the middle you have

different ways of understanding faith and reason. So I'm going to work through this handout

and I'm going to start at the bottom, which is about how our mind can naturally think about

God or ascend toward God. Then I'm going to go to the top and think about belief in divine

revelation, and then I'm going to look at different ways of thinking about faith and reason,

...