The relation between philosophy and theology has always been very complex. Depending on the ideologies, the countries… it has been close, creating great thinkers and ideologies, or conflictual, creating violent situation but paradoxically stimulating as well. This relation has created great intellectual movements, from Aristotle to Ricoeur, and it has been very beneficial to other fields, from literature to politics or the economic system.
First philosophy and theology have been very related. For instance Plato aimed to put the soul to the intelligible world and not the sensitive world we live in. To this extend, as it was said in the Republic, the role of the philosopher in the city is to make it as compliant to the intelligible world. The link between philosophy, which is a path and a discipline, and a transcendent reality, which is the intelligible world to be reached, is showing a great link between two fields seen as interdependent. The neoplatonician Plotin, with his theory of the procession of the soul, is creating connexions between these fields as well. If Aristotle was more scientifical in his approach, as he was the founder of biology and of scientifical experimentation, he was very interested in the question of the soul, even if it didn’t respond, in his opinion, to the planonician ideal of the intelligible world. The first Christians like Saint Augustine, or even marginal ideologies like the Gnosis, were creating interconnexions between these two subjects. The other monotheist religions had also movements linking these two fields. In Judaism, the great Talmudist Hillel created the 7 methods of interpretation of the Torah which was an important step for philosophy and theology to distinguish the notions of truth and interpretation. In Islam Averroes created links in his books between these fields and promoted a more important role of philosophy to contribute to study the Koran.
Second these two subjects were also the place of rivalries and confrontations. A very famous one, in the Western world, was the opposition between Luther and Erasme in the Renaissance. While Luther was fighting the possibility to use Aristotle to interpret the Bible, he was paradoxically promoting a better knowledge of the sources of Antiquity, contributed to the teaching of ancient languages as Latin, Anciant Greek and Biblical Hebrew ; he was also antisemitic but greatly studied the Talmudist Rashi to interpret better the Bible. Another rivalry was between Descartes and Pascal. As the first promoted the emancipation of science towards theology, for instance with his theory of the doubt as founding the truth and progress, Pascal was promoting the primacy of theology towards other fields, qualifying Descartes of “useless and uncertain”. Philosophy and theology entered in a period of confrontation : for instance thinkers like Schleiermacher wanted to make theology in a general framework led by philosophy ; or philosophers like Voltaire theorized a primacy of philosophy, qualified himself as “theist”, believing in a transcendental world but didn’t want to “name” it precisely and relied more implicitely to philosophical reasoning to tell about it. If Kant tried to renew the declining notion the metaphysics and Hegel referred constantly to his Christian education to build his theory of dialectics, other modern philosophers like Marx, Nietzsche or Freud contested the fundamental importance of religion compared to other fields of knowledge.
The XXth century created attempts to create more compromise and dialog between these fields. The founding concept was the one of laicity, which want to put religion only in private space, which is not against the religions and is on the contrary a positive reaction to centuries of wars of religion, that had dreadful consequences in France in the XVIth and XVIIth century for instance. Philosophers like Ricoeur worked to create more dialog between these fields, respecting their specificities. He built his theories around the notion of hermeneutics, which is the interpretation of the texts, and was a way to create bridges between philosophy and theology. For instance, in Christianity, the historical-critical method was at the core of modern theology. If theologians like Boenhoffer were relying on this method, which is in itself giving the possibility of more dialogs with philosophy, other thinkers like Ratzinger criticized this method, which is in my opinion a regression and is detrimental to years of difficult compromises. These facts show that the relation between philosophy and theology is very sensitive, can be very controversial but also very mutually stimulating. It is the reason why the dialog between these two fields has to be constantly kept.
The observer 