The Rise & Fall of Reason

REASON: to think or argue in a logical manner

Reason has long been central to Western thought. Rooted in the Latin ratio (“judgment”) and French raison (“to discuss or argue”), in English it has served both as logical justification and moral cause since the 13th century. For more than 2,500 years, reason has stood alongside authority—received knowledge; observation—knowledge gained by the senses; and intuition—knowledge that transcends logical reasoning as one of the four ways of knowing.

Thomas Aquinas elevated reason when he sought to reconcile it with faith. His Summa Theologica positioned reason as a divine gift—an instrument for discerning truth in a fallen world. The Scholastics (13th–15th-century Christian scholars and theologians) saw reason not as strict logic but as a moral compass, guiding humans toward clarity and virtue without succumbing to emotionalism. This legacy shaped Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant traditions alike.

From Divine to Human

Yet, in the 17th century, its meaning began to shift away from its divine moorings toward something referring to a purely human construct. We can trace its decline through four eras.

Rationalism. Enlightenment-era thinkers magnified the scope of reason. Descartes, Locke, and others declared it the foundation of all human knowledge. Indeed, Descartes’s famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (“I think; therefore, I am”) positioned reason as the bedrock not just of knowing but of existence. Philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries made reason synonymous with objectivity and the rejection of superstition, casting it as the path to liberating humanity from ignorance and tyranny.

Among America’s Founding Fathers, Jefferson and Adams in particular understood that for the new nation to become a just and stable society, its foundation must be built on objective reason. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson invoked “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” a phrase rooted in rationalist natural law theory. Adams believed that laws and institutions should be grounded in reason and virtue. He even warned against the dangers of unchecked emotion and factionalism.

Romanticism. By the 19th century, the Romantics rejected what they saw as the cold abstraction of reason for what they perceived as the liberating power of emotion and intuition. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley went so far as to declare, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” He, along with many other Romantic idealists, placed emotion and creativity above reason.

Existentialism. By the early 20th century, the existentialists argued that reason was incapable of resolving the absurdity of existence. Though they conceded that reason could describe the world and its physical operations, they insisted it could not justify living in that world. For them, each person must create his own meaning through choices he makes, rather than discovering through reason objective meaning that already exists.

Postmodernism. Following the existentialists, postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida regarded reason as contingent and complicit in systems of domination. The Frankfurt School critical theorists further critiqued Enlightenment reason as a tool for control rather than liberation. For the critical Marxist Herbert Marcuse, reason became a tool for overthrowing Western civilization. He radicalized reason in saying that, “Philosophy must break the spell of the prevailing rationality.”

The Perennial Invitation

Scripture affirms reason as part of God’s invitation to humanity. The Hebrew word yakach, translated “reason” in most English Bibles, means “to decide”—a call to moral discernment. This divine appeal frames reason not merely as logic, but as a relational bridge between God and man—a means of forgiveness, understanding, and truth. In Isaiah’s words, “Come, let us reason together.”