HARMONIAM VITAE

Dharmaram Vision of Theological Formation

Abstract

Theology as such was not so speculative as perhaps it was made out to be a little prior to our own times. By the time we were introduced to theology it had become somewhat more of a positive science. But there were certainly elements of biblical exegesis, historical relation of theological development and so on. So it was not so abstract a kind of theology that we learned. It was somewhat intimately linked to the Bible and the history of dogma and the history of the Church. Even so I think we missed something. Theology was defined and handed down to us, according to definition given by St Anselm, the 11th century theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury. You must all be familiar with what he said about theology. Others have taken this dictum of his and applied it as definition to theology but it was never his intention to define theology. Fides querens intellectum – this was the sub-title of one of his books about the existence of God. There, in the first part he delved deep into the nature of any disquisition about God. And there he has this famous dictum: Fides querens intellectum – Faith searching through the understanding of its content. Faith tries to understand what is conceived in it, but not quite explicitly. There are many merits in this for use as a definition of theology. First of all, this dictum puts faith and theology in their proper relation. Theology is not something like a rediscovery of faith. Theology is something which presumes faith. Fides is faith which is already there; that intellectual assent of the theologian is there. He is only groping using the gift of God to understand it: “querens intellectum.” And St Anselm also emphasizes the faith aspect, that it is not merely by intellectual, rational pursuit that we can understand faith. He believed that faith could be understood only through prayer, and therefore he emphasized that; although in his dissertation he uses the term “ratio” very often, he has not lost sight of the fact that it is only in prayer that we can understand the meaning of faith. As Karl Barth has explained the whole thing, “ratio,” however, also gets a prominent place in two ways: “Ratio” as the faculty, of inquiry, and also as the level of understanding cannot be realized in real terms; it can be realized only in analogical terms; nevertheless, you understand the content of what you believe. This has been offered as the definition of faith, and many theologians have accepted it. And even in the Vatican Council we find a reflection of this conception. And there we read: When reason, enlightened by faith, seeks its object with reverence, diligence, and moderation, it attains, by God’s gift, to some understanding of the mysteries of faith. The definition of St Anselm is good and it has to be enlarged to include also what I am later on going to say. Even so, it does not bring into focus the point of view I am now going to present before you.