Professor Silvio Cajiao, S.I.

Bogotá, 28-01-2005

Once the Apostolic Letter Fides et ratio had established possibilities for accessing the truth both for the faith that accepts the revelation and for reasoning that critically affirms it, in the conclusive chapter John Paul II reminds us that, for believers, the Word of God has created a series of references and philosophical truths that are valid. For example, the world is not per se an absolute, since only God is absolute. Man is made in God’s image hence he is intelligent, autonomous and immortal. A refusal to acknowledge this dependence introduces into history the danger for human beings of self-destruction. In the same way, moral truths are established regards to which man may make mistakes not restricted by the restrictions imposed by his human nature but rather because of a mistaken use of freedom. In the Scriptures one finds the answer to the question concerning the meaning of man’s existence which can be found in Jesus Christ, and in particular in the mystery of His Incarnation, which challenges philosophy since it is in Him that the integration between the immanent and the transcendent is stated.

We are currently seeing a crisis of meaning, which assumes the form of fragmentary scientific visions of realty and with a number of philosophers abandoning their sapiential duty in providing an answer to the question, implicit in the sense of the religiosity of human beings who require a natural basis for this meaning.

The various philosophies are pressed to equally make use of there own capabilities with the objective of providing an ontological foundation for their statements, seeing that some of them have fallen into utilitarianism, becoming superficial and abandoning their own raison d’etre. The Church believes that it is possible for intelligence to achieve an adjustment to reality for cognitive objectives. In the New Testament in fact, there are statements with ontological characteristics about Jesus Christ, when it mentions that He is the Son of God.

The Pope has requested philosophy exercise its sapiential characteristics, in adapting knowledge to the metaphysical dimension. In the final part of that section, he indicates a number of philosophical schools of thought that have given up their real service. These are eclecticism, historicism, scientism, and pragmatism, the main difficulty of which, in addition to denying the possibility of accessing the truth, consists in the nihilism offered as an answer to the question regarding the meaning that invests human beings not only in life’s lack of meaning but in its very desperation.