War & Peace Quote by Reinhold Niebuhr

Niebuhr refuses the comforting fantasy that faith and reason live in separate rooms. He stages them as mutual predators: each one "feeds upon" the other, taking what it needs, then "destroying" what made it possible. The line has the bracing, anti-sentimental edge that runs through his whole project: he’s not interested in harmony, he’s interested in tension as the price of being honest about human limits.

The intent is diagnostic. Faith, for Niebuhr, is not a soft-focus alternative to thinking; it’s what you reach for when reason hits its boundary conditions: suffering, guilt, finitude, the stubborn irrationality of history. But reason isn’t merely faith’s enemy, either. Reason disciplines faith, strips away superstition, exposes self-serving piety. In that sense, reason "feeds" on faith’s moral energy and existential urgency, translating it into arguments and institutions. Then it "destroys" it by insisting that what cannot be proven doesn’t deserve allegiance.

The subtext is his trademark suspicion of purity. Pure reason becomes arrogance: the belief that politics, ethics, even the self can be engineered without remainder. Pure faith becomes denial: a spirituality that baptizes wishful thinking. Their battle is also their co-dependence, because each contains the seed of its own corruption that the other can temporarily check.

Context matters: Niebuhr wrote in the shadow of world wars, totalitarian propaganda, and liberal optimism that looked naive after Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The sentence is a miniature version of his Christian realism: history doesn’t reward tidy syntheses; it forces us to live inside contradictions and still act.