From Hermes to Benedict XVI

The question of Faith and Reason is central to Catholic thought today. Aidan Nichols charts the development of the topic through key figures who set in every essential the terms of the debate between faith and reason whose issue, where official Catholicism is concerned, may be found as the twentieth century drew to its close in the encyclical letter Fides et ratio (1998) of John Paul II. The subject has always exercised Christian thinkers, but never more so than in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the European Enlightenment concentrated minds on the question, 'What can we know, and how?' Here Aidan Nichols traces the way a variety of thinkers reacted to the issues and to each other. Starting with Georg Hermes, he looks at the work of Anton Günther, Louis Bautain and fideism, the magisterial interventions of Gregory XVI and Pius IX, the return to scholasticism with Joseph Kleutgen and Leo XIII, followed by Etienne Gilson, Maurice Blondel and the philosophy of action, apologetics from Bondel to Baltahasar, before finding a final synthesis in John Paul II. Since the end of the twentieth century it is also necessary to take into account the distinctive thinking on this subject of Pope Benedict XVI. Aidan Nichols is an invaluable guide through the various accounts of the faith/reason relationship available within the parameters of Catholicism, and offers an approach which seems well-suited both to the demands of theology and to the philosophical needs of the present time Aidan Nichols, OP, an English Dominican, is sub-prior of Blackfriars, Cambridge. He has written widely in historical, fundamental and dogmatic theology, as well as on ecumenism, liturgy and the relation between the Church and the arts. His other books from Gracewing include Catholic Thought since the Enlightenment, Dominican Gallery and Wisdom from Above - a primer in the theology of Sergei Bulgakov.