By Randall Smith, The Catholic Thing - Hence, we find Pope John Paul II, in his encyclical on “Faith and Reason” (Fides et Ratio) speaking eloquently of a twofold need, increasingly unmet. The first is “the need for a philosophy of genuinely metaphysical range, capable, that is, of transcending empirical data in order to attain something absolute, ultimate and foundational in its search for truth.” And the second, the need to “recover the sapiential dimension of study as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life.”