Faith, Reason and the Eucharist
Denys TurnerYale University
Between doubts about “natural theology” and post-modern polemics against “modernity”, an older view that the existence of God can be known “by the natural light of reason” gets little hearing. Perhaps it is time to revisit these older views in light of Aquinas’ understanding of the rational powers as “bodily presence”, analogous to the power of signification found in music and, more profoundly, in the Eucharist; only within this broader conception of human reason can we speak of the existence of God as demonstrable by rational proof.
Denys Turner is the Horace Tracy Pitkin Professor of Historical Theology at Yale University. He is the author of Marxism and Christianity, Eros and Allegory, and The Darkness of God, as well as many articles and papers on political and social theory in relation to Christian theology, and on medieval thought, especially the traditions of mystical theology.
