Christian doctrine regards human beings as made in the divine image; and that has regularly been interpreted as meaning that human beings share something of the rational nature of God. But to use those words today instantly gives a false impression. We understand ‘reason’ as a way of arguing and testing propositions ”“ usually so as to become better at manipulating the world round us. Because religious faith is not a matter of argument in this way, it is then easy to conclude that faith and reason are enemies, or at least operating in different territory. Already in the Europe of the early Middle Ages, in the dispute between St Bernard and Peter Abelard, there was a foreshadowing of this sterile opposition. Bernard complains that Abelard thought faith was a judgement that you came to when the arguments were over, an informed opinion, almost an informed guess, and that reason was no more than marshalling the evidence and learning how to tell a good argument from a bad one. But St Bernard himself held to an older and richer understanding of reason as the way in which we shared in God’s vision of an ordered and connected world. You could not say that God was rational because he was good at arguing and came to well-supported conclusions: when theologians said that God was rational, they meant that he was consistent with himself and that out of his own understanding of the richness of his being he created a world of astonishing and beautiful diversity which still had a deep consistency about it.
And perhaps that is where we need to start today in thinking about the place of reason in a Christian institution. A ‘reasonable’ or ‘rational’ human being, on this understanding, is one who seeks not first and foremost to master and control a passive universe around, but one who looks for the ways in which he or she can discover the rhythms and patterns of reality and so understand themselves more fully. Certainly it implies that this kind of knowledge will be useful: it is better to work with the grain of reality in what we do than to work against it. But if the very first question is always ‘What is the use or the profit of this?’ we are training ourselves to ignore everything that lies outside our own immediate practical questions. That is not the spirit in which great discoveries are made; and it is certainly not the spirit in which great human beings are made. The student or researcher who is able to allow their mind and heart to be shaped by the flow and complexity of what is around, not prejudging what the important questions are but letting themselves be carried along by a certain degree of wonder and uncertainty, is the student who will be likely to arrive at innovative and creative insight.
Thus one of the central tasks of a Christian institution of learning is to allow some of the space and freedom for students to become creative in this way.