The Roman poet leads Dante down into Hell and up the Mountain of Purgatory - to the highest point that unaided natural reason can reach. As a symbol of reason and classical wisdom, the Roman poet Virgil guides Dante in the Inferno and Purgatorio. Dante on Reason and Faithĭante presents a Thomistic view of the relatedness between reason and faith through Virgil and Beatrice, his two guides in the Divine Comedy. To help in this regard, I will describe what the Catholic intellectual tradition teaches and draw from the imaginative illustration provided by Dante, the Catholic Church’s greatest poet. Many of our own people believe that their faith is incompatible with reason, but this does not need to be the case. Before this issue can be addressed on a practical level, it is essential that Church leaders have a firm grasp of what the Catholic intellectual tradition says. This is certainly a pastoral concern for priests, teachers, and catechists. The Catholic faith, in other words, is viewed as irrational and anti-science. As people leave the faith in high numbers, one of the reasons given is that faith and reason - more specifically, scientific reason - are viewed as incompatible. The topic of the relatedness between reason and faith is important.
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