Paying Attention To The Sky

Pope Benedict XVI greets the audience after arriving for a Young Catholics Youth Rally held at Saint Joseph's Seminary April 19, 2008 in Yonkers, New York.

 

Continuing the Reading Selections from Tracey Rowland’s Ratzinger’s Faith on his views concerning Modernity and the Politics of the West, particularly the collision of cultures with Islam. A good product description on Amazon: “The first serious assessment of the Pope’s theological vision, this thoughtful volume situates the thought of Benedict XVI within the intellectual history and academic circles of his time, exploring topics such as the interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, Benedict’s relations with other important scholars and theologians, and his attitudes on moral and political theology, western culture, the structure of the Catholic Church, liturgy, and love. It is a common observation that Pope Benedict has been influenced by the thought of St. Augustine in contrast to many of his predecessors in the papacy who were much more strongly influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas. This work therefore addresses the topic of in what way Benedict is an Augustinian. The volume also includes a bibliography arranged thematically for those who want to explore his thought more deeply in a particular area. A penetrating account of the thought of the reigning pontiff, this volume offers a wealth of insight for everyone interested in Pope Benedict.”

Correct Our Course (Three Essential Points)

1. First, the West needs to appreciate that law is not the opposite of freedom but is its necessary condition;
2. Second, against all utopian projects, there needs to be an understanding that within human history no absolutely ideal situation will ever exist and a perfected ordering of freedom will never be able to be achieved because it is impossible to eradicate original sin, and all its consequences; and
3. Thirdly, the leaders of the western world need to bid farewell to the dream of the absolute autonomy of reason [from theology] and of its self-sufficiency. As an aspect of this third course correction there needs to be a recognition that the first service that Christian Revelation delivered to the political order was to liberate it from the burden of being the highest good for humanity.

It destroyed the myth of the divine state, and in its place it put the objectivity of reason. However, Ratzinger warns that this does not mean that it has produced a value-free objectivity, such as is sometimes claimed for sociology “to genuine human reason belongs the morality that is fed by God’s commandments. This morality is not some private affair; it has public significance.” He reiterates the advice that Jeremiah gave to the Jews exiled in Babylon to seek the welfare of the city where God has placed them. He believes that the morality of the exile contains fundamental elements of a positive political ethos. As a general statement of principle, he concludes:

Although politics does not bring about the kingdom of God, it must be concerned for the right kingdom of human beings, that is, it must create the preconditions for peace at home and abroad and for a rule of law that will permit everyone to “lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way.” (1 Timothy 2: 2).

The State And Moral Truth: A Platform For Conversation
In Values in a Time of Upheaval Benedict stated that he did not wish to offer a new theory about the relationship between the state and moral truth, he merely wanted to summarize a number of insights that could form a kind of platform that permits a conversation:

1. The state is not itself the source of truth and morality;
2. The goal of the state cannot consist in a freedom without defined contents;
3. Accordingly, the state must receive from outside itself the essential measure of knowledge and truth with regard to that which is good; This outside cannot be ‘pure reason’ however desirable in theory, because, in practice, such a pure rational evidential quality independent of history does not exist. Metaphysical and moral reason come into action only in a historical context;
4. Christian faith has proved to be the most universal and rational religious culture;
5. The Church may not exalt itself to become the state, nor may it seek to work as an organ of power in the state or beyond the state boundaries;
6. The Church remains outside the state… [but] must exert herself with all her vigor so that in it there may shine forth the moral truth that it offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state.

The Church’s Teaching On Economic Ethics
In the more specific context of the Church’s teaching on economic ethics, Ratzinger, like his papal predecessors going all the way back to Leo XIII, has been strongly critical of both utopian socialist and laissez-faire, liberal capitalist theory. He observes that they share common philosophical presuppositions about the relationship of ethics to economics, and a common deterministic core. In his essay “The Church and Economics” he argued that the lives of many people are completely controlled by the laws of the market, while at the same time liberal theorists argue that the market is morally neutral and associated with the promotion of human freedom. He described as “astounding” the presupposition that the laws of the market are in essence good. With reference to the work by P. Scholl-Latour, Afrikanische Totenklage: Der Ausverkauf des Schwarzen Kontinents (Munich, 2001), he has written of the “tragic legacy” and “cruelty of the liberal capitalist system”:

“Behind the superficial solidarity of the developing-nations model has sometimes been hidden the desire to expand the reach of one’s own power, one’s own ideology, one’s own market share. In the process, old social structures have been destroyed, and spiritual and moral forces have been wasted, with consequences that should ring in our ears as an unprecedented indictment.”

Ratzinger thinks it is wrong to rely solely upon putatively ‘value-neutral’ marketplace mechanisms since ‘pre-existing values are always determinants in making market decisions’  He believes that contemporary world economic affairs are driven by a form of liberalism which ‘specifically excludes the heart’ and the ‘possibility of seeing God, of introducing the light of moral responsibility, love and justice into the worlds of work, of commerce and of politics’. He argues that ‘if globalization in technology and economy is not accompanied by a new openness to an awareness of the God to whom we will all render an account, then it will end in catastrophe.” Indeed, he asserts that “any kind of social or political unity that is created without God, or even in Opposition to him, ends like the experiment of Babylon: in total confusion and destruction, in the hatred and violence of universal conflict.”

Is There Common Ground Between Liberals And Christians On The Plain Of Natural Law
In some contemporary schools of Thomism the analogue for the idea of a theologically neutral secular social space is the project of discovering common ground between Liberals and Christians on the plain of natural law. The viability of this project is currently under question by a number of scholars, including those who identify their work with the Thomist tradition. This project received its greatest impetus in. the twentieth century with the scholarship and diplomatic work of the French Thomist Jacques Maritain (1882-1973).

In Faithful Reason John Haldane concluded that anyone reviewing the degree of ideological and moral diversity and conflict exhibited today, half a century after Jacques Maritain’s attempt in The Person and the Common Good, must wonder how feasible is the project of finding common ground between the Thomist and other traditions with reference to natural law.

James V. Schall has also noted that “reading Maritain on rights and values requires a constant internal connection to recognize that what he means by these terms is something very different from what is generally meant by them in the [contemporary] culture.” To the same end, Ernest Fortin has argued that “natural law becomes intelligible only within the framework of a providential order in which the words and deeds of individual human beings are known to God and duly rewarded and punished by him.” In societies where there is no longer a belief in any rational order within creation, or indeed any belief in creation itself, the project of using the language of the natural law tradition to negotiate with non-Christians becomes extremely difficult. This is Benedict’s conclusion also. In Values in a Time of Upheaval he wrote:

Natural law has remained — especially in the Catholic Church — one element in the arsenal of arguments in conversations with secular society and with other communities of faith, appealing to shared reason in the attempt to discern the basis of a consensus about ethical principles of law in a pluralistic, secular society. Unfortunately, this instrument has become blunt, and that is why I do not wish to employ it to support my arguments in this discussion [about the moral foundations of a free state]. The idea of the natural law presupposed a concept of ‘nature’ in which nature and reason interlock; nature itself is rational. The victory of the theory of evolution has meant the end of this view of nature.

Benedict is not saying that he does not believe in natural law. He believes in it because he believes in a divinely created order and he referred to it in Deus Caritas Est. He simply thinks it is a ‘blunt instrument’ for dealing with those who no longer accept a Genesis account of the creation. He recognizes that human rights have remained the last element of the natural law tradition operative within contemporary liberal political cultures, and he suggests that the doctrine of human rights ought today to be complemented by a doctrine of human obligations and human limits. He has not, however, made any pronouncements about the rhetorical effectiveness of the human rights discourse in the promotion of the Church’s teaching on the sanctity of human life and the foundation of human dignity.

A Purified Reason
In his essay “Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic” he wrote of a need for a polyphonic correlation in which the different religious traditions would open themselves up to the essential complementarity of reason and faith. He stated that there is a necessary correlativity of reason and religion which are appointed mutually to cleanse and heal one another, which mutually need one another, and mutually must recognize this need.  He is not, therefore, a fideist; he does want people to use their intellectual faculty to make judgments about the merits of different social practices. This theme was reiterated in Deus Caritas Est at article 28

From God’s standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly. This is where Catholic social doctrine has its place: it has no intention of giving the Church power over the State. Even less is it an attempt to impose on those who do not share the faith ways of thinking and modes of conduct proper to faith. Its aim is simply to purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just.

In the following article Benedict endorses the notion of an autonomous use of reason in the world of politics at the same time as noting that the Church has an indirect duty to contribute to the purification of reason and to the reawakening of those moral forces without which just structures are neither established nor prove effective in the long run. In this context, the expression “the autonomous use of reason” would appear to mean ‘reason’ in the sense of a prudential or practical judgment made without recourse to any ecclesial authority. In another sense, however, the Church remains involved in the whole process, albeit indirectly, through the judgments of lay Catholics and other Christians and persons of good will who operate with purified reason. A purified reason is the “Magna Carta of all ecclesial service.”

Kantian ‘Pure Reason’ And The Church’s Purified Reason
For Benedict such ‘purified reason’ is something vastly different from Kantian ‘pure reason’. One might say that for Benedict so-called “pure reason” is impure reason. In Deus Caritas Est he concludes that the figures of saints such as Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, John of God, Camillus of Lellis, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, Giuseppe B. Cottolengo, John Bosco, Luigi Orione, and Mother Teresa of Calcutta stand out as lasting models of social charity for all people of good will. They are the true bearers of light within history, for they are men and women of faith, hope, and love. In other words, the saints, rather than the rationality of the Enlightenment, are the true bearers of light in human history and the best models of how to engage the world.

The Problem Of Islam In The Western World
The notion of the importance of a reasoned or reasonable faith most often arises in contemporary discussions about Islam, Significantly, and contrary to popular attitudes, Ratzinger does not believe that the solution to the problem of Islam in the western world is for it to undergo its own eighteenth-century style Enlightenment. Generally, he believes that Muslims do not feel threatened by the Christian moral foundations of the West but by “the cynicism of a secularized culture that denies its own bases.” He suggests that it is not the mention of God that offends the adherents of other religions but the attempt to build the human community without any reference to God whatsoever. He believes that Islam comes alive as faith precisely when its adherents experience cultures, and, in particular, legal systems, that are God-less. None the less he is concerned that Islam has never really come to grips with the importance of the relationship between faith and reason. In 1988 he wrote:

Already in its emergence Islam is to a certain extent a reversion to a monotheism which does not accept the Christian transition to God made man and which likewise shuts itself off from Greek rationality and its civilization which became a component of Christian monotheism via the idea of God becoming man. It can of course be objected to this that in the course of history there were continually approaches in Islam to the intellectual world of Greece; but they never lasted. What this is saying above all is that the separation of faith and law, of religion and tribal law, was not completed in Islam and cannot be completed without affecting its very core. To put it another way, faith presents itself in the form of a more or less archaic system of forms of life governed by civil and penal law. It may not be defined nationally, but it is defined in a legal system which fixes it ethnically and culturally and at the same time sets limits to rationality at the point where the Christian synthesis sees the existence of the sphere of reason.

Regensburg
In his Regensburg address he was clearly trying to encourage the development of Islamic thought in the direction of a consideration of Greek ideas about reason. In his commentary on the address, James V. Schall made the point that, at their philosophic roots, the two cultures — modern secularism and Islam — are not that much different. He suggests that this is what Benedict implies in his citation from Ibu Hazn concerning voluntarism. Islam and modem secularism share the same voluntarist tendency. They both eschew the possibility that there is an obligatory order of reason. In the case of modernity and post-modernity reality is itself a product of human artifice, of mere human will. In the case of Islam, what is good is defined by reference to the will of Allah. In neither case is there a recognition of a logos inherent in the order of being itself. This is what Ratzinger was driving at, so to speak, in the Regensburg address. He was pleading at least as much with contemporary militant secularists as with contemporary militant Muslims to recognize that they share a common philosophical starting point.

This is not to say that Benedict believes that all Muslims are irrational voluntarists. He acknowledges that Islam is not a uniform thing. There is no single authority for all Muslims, and for this reason dialogue with Islam is always dialogue with certain groups. There is no commonly regulated orthodoxy; no one speaks for Islam as a whole. He does, however, believe that as a tradition Islam needs to engage with the intellectual heritage of Greece. He also believes that the attempt to graft on to Islamic societies what are termed western standards cut loose from their Christian foundations misunderstands the internal logic of Islam as well as the historical logic to which these western standards belong. All such attempts are doomed to failure. He has consistently opposed the American-led western intervention in Iraq. There is no ‘stem’ on which to graft western liberalism and the attempt to do so just fuels the resentment which is one explosive element of the original problem. It plays into the hands of the Islamic terrorists. Benedict believes that for democracy to work it needs a Greco-Christian cultural foundation.

The Rule Of Law
Underlying this position is an implicit belief that the rule of law so central to democracy is the key to the stability of the whole western system. More than anything else Ratzinger’s interventions in the area of political theory have taken the form of exhorting liberal elites to recognize that the rule of law must itself be based on solid foundations, not on the will of the people — whatever that happens to be, which is no more secure a foundation than the will of Allah — but on the logos inherent in creation. Discerning this inherent rationality, this natural order of being itself, requires a synthesis of the gifts of the Greek and Hebraic cultures. If any component of the double helix is severed and mutated then western culture finds itself in crisis, and when the whole framework is broken and mutated then there is an institutional civil war involving theists, moderns, and post-moderns.

Benedict does not believe that this conflict can be resolved by removing Christ and Christianity from western culture. Any attempt to do so will not only be a kind of cultural suicide (which is already far advanced) it will also require a change in social perceptions of the nature and dignity of the human person. Since Christianity and orthodox Judaism are the only theologies on the market, so to speak, which uphold the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death, regardless of its social utility, destroying the Judeo-Christian cultural roots of the West will lead to the emergence of a new ruling class with “Social Darwinist” social practices not all that different from those which prevailed in Nazi Germany.

The Suicide Of The West
From Benedict’s perspective the suicide of the West began when people stopped believing in the Christian account of creation and started to sever the intrinsic relationship of faith and reason. With the political arrival of Islam within western countries, including the heartland of what was once Christendom, a new four-cornered battle is emerging between Christians, Muslims, and different varieties of secularists and Nietzscheans. In this context Benedict’s approach is best summarized as: charity to all under the unambiguous standard of the cross, and, if need be, martyrdom and persecution before accommodation. The 265th successor to St Peter will not allow Christ to be placed in any contemporary pantheon. Not on his watch will Christianity be reduced to a mere “booth in the fairground of post-modernity.”