Nor suffering any.
A fascinating article by R.R. Reno at First Things.
Christians should seek to enlist as many as possible in the cause of humanity. It is one of the central principles of Catholic theology that grace perfects rather than destroys nature. Faith fulfills rather than subverts reason. For this reason, the Catholic tradition (like most other Christian traditions) has never formulated sharp antagonisms between Christ and culture, between church and world, between revealed truths and the truths accessible by natural reason, or between men and women of goodwill and believers in Christ. As the Second Vatican Council made clear, we don’t all need to be believers in order to share and support a humane social order.And yet what is possible in theory often remains painfully remote in life. As Byron recognized, modern humanism can easily become cruelly jealous of the modest claims it stakes upon the noble but fragile human condition. To believe in something more—it can so easily seem a betrayal. And because the reality of faith cannot help but ignite a desire for God in others, it is not hard to see why our present-day crusaders against belief take up their rhetorical bludgeons. They fear the contagion of piety. To defend the finite goods of this world against the perceived assaults of holiness, they turn the earthly city into a fortress and drive out anyone they perceive as disloyal to its this-worldly principles.
As part of one of my theology classes, I am reading the Catechism, and I have been thinking deeply on the connection between faith and reason. The church sees no conflict between the two; but it is clear about one thing: faith is superior to reason.
35 Man's faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God's existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
36 "Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason."11 Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God's revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created "in the image of God".
37 In the historical conditions in which he finds himself, however, man experiences many difficulties in coming to know God by the light of reason alone:
Though human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, who watches over and controls the world by his providence, and of the natural law written in our hearts by the Creator; yet there are many obstacles which prevent reason from the effective and fruitful use of this inborn faculty. For the truths that concern the relations between God and man wholly transcend the visible order of things, and, if they are translated into human action and influence it, they call for self-surrender and abnegation. The human mind, in its turn, is hampered in the attaining of such truths, not only by the impact of the senses and the imagination, but also by disordered appetites which are the consequences of original sin. So it happens that men in such matters easily persuade themselves that what they would not like to be true is false or at least doubtful.38 This is why man stands in need of being enlightened by God's revelation, not only about those things that exceed his understanding, but also "about those religious and moral truths which of themselves are not beyond the grasp of human reason, so that even in the present condition of the human race, they can be known by all men with ease, with firm certainty and with no admixture of error".
The long quote in the middle is from Pius XII's encyclical, Humani Generis, which I will have to read at some point.
The gist of the Catechism is this -- man can, indeed, reason himself to God, but rather than, at that point, simply worship God, man prefers to convince himself that God either does not exist, or pretends his existence is sufficiently doubtful to justify doing whatever he pleases.
That this is a true statement about the condition of man I have absolutely no doubt.
The illusion that modern man suffers under is that Reason is king. Those that doubt the interior truth of the story of Genesis are, in a terrible irony, the worst sufferers of the condition Genesis describes. We like to stand in judgment of Scripture, but truly, Scripture stands in judgment of us.
This fact can only be understood through faith, and for those who possess faith, it is itself sufficient evidence of God's existence that one need no longer reason to it. Why take the stairs when you can take the elevator, why build a scaffolding around the church steeple when one can walk up the stairs inside it? When we do not subject ourselves to the exterior truth which has been revealed to us, we are nothing but prisoners of our own tautologies and illusions.
This makes, for believers, Christ's identity certain. He is the Truth, breaking in from the outside, to liberate the gift of faith from the prison of man's reason. As St. Michael chains the Devil to prevent him from doing us harm, Christ chains our reason to put it to better use.
We deny him at our peril. The peril is a prison built of our illusions.