Editor's Introduction

Abstract

This year marks the twentyfifth and twentieth anniversaries of two of Pope St. John Paul’s most important encyclicals. Promulgated in 1993, Veritatis Splendor sets out the principles of Catholic moral teaching and analyzes the dissent it has sometimes met; Fides et Ratio, written five years later, responds to certain errors with respect to the work of reason and its relation to faith, errors that underwrite a widespread lack of confidence in truth and a corruption of both philosophy itself and the attempts of plain persons to make sense of their own lives. John Paul himself draws the connection between these two encyclicals this way: “In . . . Veritatis Splendor . . . I draw attention to ‘certain fundamental truths of Catholic doctrine. . . .’ In the present letter, I wish to pursue that reflection by concentrating on the theme of truth itself and its foundation in relation to faith” (n. 6). These encyclicals, then, share a common emphasis on truth and faith. Both encyclicals present careful arguments against various theories that deny the availability or significance of truth as a norm for our reasoning and acting. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul finds the roots of such phenomena as cultural relativism, distorted views of conscience, and the totalitarian potential of democratic politics in various sorts of failure to acknowledge that the truth about God and the human person is an internal element of freedom and not a threat to it. Likewise, in Fides et Ratio, John Paul focuses on the viability of the human search for truth and its expression in metaphysical inquiry and ecclesiastical proclamation. He criticizes versions of historicism, scientism, pragmatism, and nihilism as the results of a flight from the truth. But John Paul’s aims in these encyclicals go beyond these theoretical interventions. Together, these encyclicals constitute a kind of protreptic invitation to a way of life both philosophical and theological, both naturally human and fully Christian. They both begin, in their first chapters, by proposing the question of the meaning of life.1 This question emerges, in each case, out of a narrative context. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul begins with the