By Benwen Lopez

Pune, Aug 4, 2020: As India struggles to redefine secularism, a core value that guides its Constitution, a Jesuit priest tries to give an alternative understanding of the principle of separation of the state from religious institutions.

Jesuit George Karuvelil recently published a book “Faith, Reason and Culture – An Essay in Fundamental Theology,” which he says stems from his philosophical school of thought that is based on faith and reason.

The member of the Patna Jesuit province has taught philosophy at the Jnana Deepa Vidyapeeth in Pune for 23 years until his retirement in 2019. The second of the nine children of Varkey and Rosamma Karuvelil, a farmer couple, says the book is the fruit of his intellectual service to the faculty of philosophy. Three of his brothers and the lone sister are religious.

Father Karuvelil holds a doctorate from the University of Delhi. He was dean of the JDV Philosophy department from 2006 to 2009. He was also a visiting professor at many institutes, seminaries and universities in India and abroad. After retirement, he continues to serve the faculty of philosophy in different capacities.

Father Karuvelil, 65, shared with Benwen Lopez, his former student and a seminarian of Sindhudurg diocese in Maharashtra state, about his book, life and experiences. The book was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

What was the main idea of writing this book? Who are the people who have inspired you?

Let us begin with the most basic fact: the turbulence in the Church after Vatican II. Faithful were leaving the Church in hordes, especially in the West; priests and religious were no exception. In the past, whenever the Church faced crises, leaders arose whose saintly lives and intellectual rigour imparted new vigor to life in the Church. But this was not happening at this time. I realized this from my study of philosophy and theology. Critical questions were being asked about religious faith in general and Christian faith in particular, but no convincing answers were forthcoming.

Small wonder then that secular thinking and living were replacing religion. The only available alternative was some form of fundamentalism, which is equally harmful to genuine religion. It is this experience of almost complete disarray in a philosophical and theological formation that made me realize the need for rethinking the intellectual foundations of faith, which resulted in this book.

If I can speak of a single person who has inspired me to undertake this task, it is St Thomas Aquinas. He lived at a time when the Church was faced with a similar challenge to the intellectual foundations of faith. But undaunted by the challenges, he set about working and provided the foundations that have served the Church well for centuries. A second inspiration was Pope John Paul II who saw through the intellectual meanderings after the Council and called upon Christian intellectuals to address the issue.

What is the format you have used in the book and who will benefit from this book?

As befitting a book on faith and reason, the major format of the book is expository and argumentative. But I have also used some amount of historical narratives, stories and parables to make it intelligible to non-specialists.

Currently, the nature of Indian secularism has been defined in a self-defeating way as equality of religions. It is more of a reaction to which has emerged the present state of affairs that is totally out of sync with our civilizational ethos. My book makes room for alternative understanding secularism that needs to be spelt out at the earliest.

Put differently, my book has a double orientation. One is internal to Christian faith, including the formation of seminarians. The other is to the outside world, to anyone willing to use reason regarding religion. It is in the latter capacity that spelling out the religious nature of Indian secularism becomes a part of its task.

What are some of the philosophical schools of thought you have used to tell your story in this book? Are any of these schools your own?

The rigorous analysis I learned from analytic philosophy has been a great help. Particularly helpful has been the thought of the Later by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others who have developed his thought further. I have not spoken on any of my schools of philosophy because schools get formed when a good number of people begin to follow it. I certainly have had many students who have benefitted immensely by what I taught and were eagerly waiting for the publication of this book.

What are some of the key lessons that you desire for the reader to take away from your book? Do you see this book being used as a textbook to foster dialogue with atheists and people of other faith?

(You wrote about the parable of the invisible gardener that changed the mind of Antony Flew on the existence of God, triggering his conversion. Earlier, he could not see how the first self-reproducing life could kick off the entire process of evolution.)

The most important lesson, of course, is that it is entirely reasonable to believe in God. But that statement would make no sense unless one has the correct understanding of God. Many think of God as a hypothesis for explaining the world. When [former] atheist Antony Flew got converted, his conversion was to such a God; others consider God a failed hypothesis lacking in evidence. Some think of God as the totality of the world such that to know the world in its entirety (as scientific ‘Theory of Everything’ hopes to accomplish) will be to know God. Still, others think of God as an absentee landlord who, having created the world lets it run on its own. There is no doubt that some Christian thinkers and some styles of Christian talk about God have encouraged these and many other confusions about God. An important part of my task is to correct these misconceptions.

[An] equally important [lesson] is the need to use reason in religion. This is the only way to expose charlatans who exploit and misuse the religiosity of ordinary people for self-aggrandizement. Fundamentalism is another evil rooted in the refusal to use reason in religion. Critiquing religion in the name of true religion is a sacred duty of every theologian and religious intellectual. This was done by the prophets of the Old Testament as well as the radical bhakti poets like Kabirdas, Tukaram, and others in India. My book provides a framework for doing so in the contemporary world.

A third lesson is that God is not a monopoly of Christians or even of theists. The reality of God is encountered by deeply religious people all over the world, without being a part or the whole of the physical universe. This is why the subtitle of my book is fundamental theology. It deals with and provides reasons for the most fundamental convictions of religious faith, irrespective of whether they use the word ‘God’ or not.

A special feature of the rationality of religion discussed in this book is its reliance on natural mystical experiences; this makes dialogue with people of other faiths, and open-minded atheists possible. This basic or natural religiosity also makes a religious critique of religions possible. But basic religiosity does not make religious differences unimportant. Some specific features of Christian faith and their significance are set forth towards the end of the book.

A fourth lesson is a conceptual clarity it brings to the identity of disciplines of empirical sciences, philosophy, and theology on the one hand, and systematic/dogmatic theology and fundamental theology on the other.

I would see this more like a sourcebook than a textbook. As a book about the rationality of religious faith, it provides the basics for dialoguing with atheists. But fostering dialogue with people of other faiths call for more detailed work concerning each religion, exploring the commonality and differences with the concerned faith. I would like my readers to realize that inter-religious dialogue is dialogue; it cannot be done by creating some kind of religious Esperanto that levels out differences. A fundamental theology that encourages dialogue with Islam, for example, must spell out the monotheism and other matters which are shared, as well as try to understand their disagreements.

Today, Christianity, in particular, faces a threat from ‘New Atheism’ and relativism. How would your book help theologians, priests and Church-people to respond to these threats?

I have suggested in my book that ‘New Atheism’ is a reaction to religious fundamentalism and the violence engendered by it. Therefore, even if you expose the flaws in their logic, the phenomenon of new atheism will continue to have fertile ground for growth. Threat from ‘New Atheism’ will disappear only when the evils of fundamentalism and the violence it inspires are tackled. My book provides the intellectual resources for tackling these evils.

Relativism is an ever-existing danger in a pluralistic world, unless one knows how to seek truth amid diverse perspectives/interpretations. Pope John Paul II and his successor warned about relativism; they saw the need to go beyond interpretations but provided no means for doing so.

Finding a way of getting at the truth in the midst diverse claims is not easy. This is also the reason why it has taken me a lifetime to complete this book. I think I have, at last, found a satisfactory way of going beyond relativism. It is for others to judge how satisfactory it is. The fact that competent persons who read the manuscript found it an eye-opener is encouraging. I am particularly encouraged by the comment of a non-Catholic reviewer who not only predicted a long shelf-life for this book but also observed that ‘even… non-Catholics [like him/her]… will use this book for the next decade or so…’. (Since it was a blind reviewer engaged by the publisher I am ignorant of the person’s identity). Theologians and Church-people can benefit by appropriating the lessons of the book.

Your book mentions about seminaries reducing the teaching of Faith and Reason to just a course on Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason). Why do you think this is happening, considering the subject’s importance? Are seminary students really interested in the subject?

That is right. Many seminaries teach the encyclical Fides et Ratio as a course on faith and reason. That is primarily because there were no alternatives. The encyclical itself is emphatic about the need to relate faith and reason, but does not say how to do it; rather relating the two is described as a ‘daunting’ task that needs to be taken up by Christian intellectuals in the next millennium (written in 1998).

What I have done is to carry out that task. Related to the first reason (not having alternatives) is the gradual dismantling of philosophy studies, as the encyclical clearly mentions. If Thomism was grilled into the seminarians as the official philosophy of the Church before the Council, dismantling of that system would leave a vacuum. This vacuum is sought to be filled with a hotchpotch of empirical sciences and history of philosophy without any unifying vision. And Fides et Ratio does provide a rather detailed history of faith-reason relations, but history cannot substitute seeking rationality of faith in the present.

As for the interest of seminary students, I should say that those who take the challenges posed to religious faith with some degree of seriousness have always shown great interest in it. This is true not only in the later years when the course took a definite shape but even earlier at its experimental stage. Having said that I must also acknowledge that the material covered in this book is too vast to be assimilated by the average and below average students. It covers studies in perception, science, atheism, secularism, mysticism, and God. It is for this reason that I talked about it as a sourcebook than a textbook. To be most effective, the variety of materials in the book needs to be dissected into various courses, as was done when Thomism was the official philosophy of the Church.

Most important are the courses on knowledge (including scientific knowing) that systematically teaches the art of critical thinking, hermeneutics that teaches the art of understanding another who is different from oneself, and philosophy of God. While these are standard subjects my book deals with them in an almost entirely new way that is contemporaneous and coherent.

God willing, I hope to bring out some textbooks, especially on the theory of knowing and philosophy of God, in due course. When such individual courses are available, the course on faith and reason will come towards the end, as a way of holding these diverse materials together. This would also help the students in their comprehensive examinations at the end of their philosophy program. Thus they would be ready to start their theological studies without crippling doubts about faith or putting their reason on hold to make room for faith during their theology. Given that my students and I did not have the benefit of such preparation and everything had to be done within a single course, I would judge the interest of my students as excellent.