Paying Attention To The Sky

A Dictatorship Of Relativism
In his homily at the Mass prior to his election Ratzinger rhetorically asked: ‘how many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking?’ He suggested that the western world was currently in the throws of a dictatorship of relativism that did not recognize anything as definitive and whose goal consists solely of the satisfaction of the desires of one’s own ego. However, while post-modem relativism is replacing the Ten Commandments in the area of private morality, in the area of public morality eighteenth-century ‘Enlightenment’ conceptions of freedom and truth continue to provide the foundation of the dominant political cultures of the West. Paradoxically, these theories are now being used to promote nineteenth-century romantic-movement visions of human dignity, which, at least implicitly, and sometimes quite explicitly, reject the eighteenth-century accounts of reason and morality.

For this reason contemporary public life in the western world has been described as a three-cornered ‘civil war’ of hostile traditions. The pattern of alliances in this war is constantly changing from issue to issue, country to country, and political forum to political forum. This is the political environment in which the Catholic Church finds herself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Benedict has to navigate between the Charybdis of eighteenth-century-style attacks on the rationality of Christianity and the Scylla of nineteenth-century ‘post-modern’ attacks on Christian conceptions of human dignity and the meaning and purpose of sexuality.

Depending on the context, Benedict’s statements can sound more or less hostile, more or less favorable to the Enlightenment(s). When dealing with conceptions of the meaning and value of human life which have a nineteenth-century neo-pagan Romantic pedigree he tends to implore recourse to reason. When dealing with political philosophies which flow from eighteenth-century thought he reminds his interlocutors that philosophy has always been nourished by religious traditions. He is almost on a weekly basis contending with the theological presuppositions of hostile traditions. He believes that the Church cannot simply retreat into her own ghetto: the Church “cannot enclose men and cultures in a kind of spiritual nature reserve.”

Three Views of Modernity
So what is the framework from within which Benedict operates when judging aspects of contemporary culture? The point is often made that where a person stands on the issue of the culture of modernity depends upon how she or he views the evolution or, in academic parlance, genealogy of this culture. In other words, what is its pedigree, where did it come from? How did we get to this state of civil war among hostile traditions? There are several schools of interpretation, but most can be slotted into one of three academic stables:

(i)       modernity represents the severance of the classical-theistic synthesis: what we have now are free-floating concepts which have lost their meaning once separated / from the whole;

(ii)     modernity represents a mutation of the classical-theistic synthesis since the key concepts once severed from their Christian roots are given new meanings; and

(iii)    modernity is an entirely new culture based on concepts and values which were specifically developed to take the place of the defunct Greek and Christian concepts.

The above categories are not necessarily closed or always exclusive. For example, one can accept Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘first stable’ account of the severance of faith from reason, and the severance of politics and economics from ethics, at the same time as accepting von Balthazar’s ‘first stable’ account of the severance of the true, the beautiful, and the good from one another, as well as agreeing with William T. Cavanaugh, Catherine Pickstock, and John Milbank’s ‘second stable’ account of the emergence of the liberal state as an entity which conies with its own heretical soteriology. They each hold pieces of a puzzle which can be fitted together. Those who study the cultures of modernity and post-modernity are rather like art curators who each work on understanding one or two pieces of a great mosaic in order to discern where they once fitted into the picture. The insights of many scholars can be brought together to get a clearer and larger picture. Some focus on the processes of severance and disintegration, others on the form of the mutation. So the question arises: where does Ratzinger fit into these categories? Is there a stable in which he might feel at home?

Ratzinger’s View
Ratzinger has not written one all-encompassing comprehensive exposition of his own genealogy but he has offered pieces of the puzzle in various books and articles. The first general point to be made is that he has no sympathy at all for the third category which views modernity as something completely new, nor does he have any patience for the doctrine of social evolution and the Hegelian belief in constant progress to which it is closely allied. Ratzinger rejects all materialistic and deterministic theories of history.

The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970) once made the observation that the Christian view of history is not a secondary element derived by philosophical reflection from the study of history. It lies at the very heart of Christianity and forms an integral part of the Christian faith. As a consequence there is no Christian ‘philosophy of history’ in the strict sense of the word. There is, instead, a Christian history and Christian theology of history. This is essentially the position that Ratzinger has taken since at least the time of his Habilitationsshrift  post-doctoral thesis required for qualification as a professor on the theology of history in the thought of St Bonaventure.

It echoes the position of the German philosopher Josef Pieper who has been one of the seminal influences on the thought of Ratzinger and it resonates with the whole Christocentric trajectory of von Balthasar. Pieper argued that ‘there is no philosophical question, which, if it really wants to strike the ground intended by itself and in itself, does not come upon the primeval rock of theological pronouncements’ and as a consequence “the beginning and end of human history are conceivable only on acceptance of a pre-philosophically traditional interpretation of reality; they are either “revealed” or they are inconceivable.”  

A New History
While this is cold comfort for those who want a philosophy of history, its positive side is that it means that “the Incarnation is not the nth performance of a tragedy already lying in the archives of eternity.” It is an event of total originality. In accord with Dawson, Pieper, and von Balthasar, Ratzinger holds that Christian Revelation is the foundation of a new history which, paradoxically, is experienced as the end of all history:

The beginning and end of this new history is the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is recognized as the last man (the second Adam), that is as the long-awaited manifestation of what is truly human and the definitive revelation to man of his hidden nature; for this very reason, it is oriented toward the whole human race and presumes the abrogation of all partial histories, whose partial salvation is looked upon as essentially an absence of salvation.

Ratzinger thus rejects all philosophies of history which would find in the historical process some dynamic outside the theo-drama of God’s offer of grace and the human response to this offer. He describes secular theories of historical progress, especially the Marxist and liberal accounts, as examples of ideological optimism and a secularization of Christian hope. His genealogy of modernity does not follow the school of thinking which reads modernity as an entirely new culture, completely severed from all Christian roots. He believes that it is entangled with the Christian heritage however much secular liberal political elites may want to deny this.

Ratzinger’s Critique Of The Culture Of Modernity
What Ratzinger offers by way of his own contribution to the critique of the culture of modernity is a kind of ‘double helix’ genealogy with reference to two sets of three intellectual moments in which the Hellenic component of the culture was severed from the Christian and in which the Christian component was fundamentally undermined by the mutation of the doctrine of creation. Indeed in both cases the severances are accompanied by mutations. When faith in creation is lost, Christian faith is transformed into gnosis, and when faith in reason is lost, wisdom is reduced to the empirically verifiable which cannot sustain a moral framework.

With reference to the Christian side of the ‘double helix’, Ratzinger identifies the first moment of severance with the philosophy of Giordano Bruno (1545-1600). He acknowledges that, at first sight, ‘it may seem strange to accuse him of suppressing faith in creation, since he was responsible for an emphatic rediscovery of the cosmos in its divinity’, but he argues that it is precisely this reversion to a divine cosmos that brings about the recession of faith in creation: “Here ‘renaissance’ means relinquishing the Christian so that the Greek can be restored in its pagan purity. In the Greek conception, the world appears as a divine fullness at peace within itself. While for the Christian account of creation, the world is dependent on something other than itself.” Ratzinger concludes that this is the aesthetic prelude to an increasingly prominent idea in the modem mind: the idea that the human dependency implied by faith in creation is unacceptable.

The second significant moment arrives with the thought of Galileo (1564-1642) in which there is also a return to the Greeks, not to their aesthetic insights, but to the mathematical side of Platonic thought. Here Ratzinger writes:

“God does geometry’ is the way [Galileo] expresses his concepts of God and nature as well as his scientific ideal. God wrote the book of nature with mathematical letters. Studying geometry enables us to touch the traces of God. But this means that the knowledge of God is turned into the knowledge of the mathematical structures of nature; the concept of nature in the sense of the object of science, takes the place of the concept of creation. . . Determined by this axiom [‘God does geometry’], God has to become Platonic. He dwindles away to be little more than the formal mathematical structures perceived by science in nature.”

Ratzinger concludes:

“A mere ‘first cause’ which is effective only in nature and never reveals itself to humans, which abandons humans to a realm completely beyond its own sphere of influence, such a first cause is no longer God but a scientific hypothesis. On the other hand, a God who has nothing to do with the rationality of creation, but is effective only in the inner world of piety, is also no longer God; he becomes devoid of reality and is ultimately meaningless. Only when creation and covenant come together can either creation or covenant be realistically discussed — the one presupposes the other.”

The third form of deviation from the classical-theistic idea of creation came with Martin Luther (1483-1546). While Bruno and Galileo represent a return to a pre-Christian, Greek, and pagan world, Luther went in the extreme opposite direction. He wanted to purge Christian thought of its Greek heritage, and the Greek element he found most objectionable was the concept of the cosmos in the question of being, and therefore in the area of the doctrine of creation. For Luther, redemption sets humans free from the curse of the existing creation and thus grace exists in radical opposition to creation. Developing an argument taken from Angelo Scola and Rocco Buttiglione, Ratzinger concluded that “without the mystery of redemptive love, which is also creative love, the world inevitably becomes dualistic: by nature, it becomes geometry: as history, it becomes the drama of evil.”

Hegel and Marx
After these three moments in which the doctrine of creation was mutated, the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) tried to resolve the dualism by positing God not as the eternal self-existent Almighty, who stands facing the evil of the world, but rather God who exists in the process of reasoning. He reinterprets the whole of human history as the unfolding of reason. With Karl Marx, the greatest of the left-wing Hegelians, redemption was then construed as something which humanity must achieve through its own efforts by an intellectual and political process.

In the Marxist schema, the place of creation is reoccupied by the category of self-creation, which is accomplished through work. Against the Marxist idea that the human person is someone defined by the capacity to work and produce things, Ratzinger believes that the human person is first of all a being created for worship. Against Marx’s idea that redemption should take a political form, Ratzinger argues that “the only goal of the Exodus [the liberation of the Jews from slavery to Pharaoh] was worship, which can only occur according to God’s measure.” He suggests that this orientation of creation to the rest of the Sabbath is not a peculiarly Christian idea, but that all the great pre-Christian civilizations point to the fact that the universe exists for worship and for the glorification of God.

From this premise he concludes that “the danger that confronts us today in our technological civilization is that we have cut ourselves off from this primordial knowledge which serves as a guidepost and which links the great cultures, and that an increasing scientific know-how is preventing us from being aware of the fact of creation.” As a consequence, “those who reject God’s rest, its leisure, its worship, its peace and its freedom, fall into the slavery of activity.”

On this reading the Christian component of the classical-theistic synthesis was mutated in the above three moments represented by the figures of Bruno, Galileo, and Luther, whose dualist consequences Hegel sought to overcome by a completely new idea of God and history.

The Subversion Of The Greek Strand Of The Helix (Three Moments)
Ratzinger then further identifies three moments in the subversion of the Greek strand of the helix. This subversion was actually the central theme of his famous Regensburg address. This time Luther remains in the trilogy but as the representative of the first rather than third moment. As stated above, the Reformation he fostered sought to sever all the Greek components of the synthesis from the Christian. For Luther, reason was the bastard child of Aristotle brought up by the pimp Thomas Aquinas. Two centuries later the Lutheran Immanuel Kant carried through the programme of severance. Although Ratzinger seems to include Kant as an heir to the Lutheran ‘first moment’ he does say that in his anchoring of faith ‘exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole’ he carried through Luther’s programme with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen.

The second moment in the programme of de-Hellenization arrived in the nineteenth century with Adolf von Harnack (1851-1930) as its leading representative. Von Harnack sought to distinguish between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The God of the philosophers was said to have put an end to worship in favor of morality. He was presented as the father of a humanitarian message. Harnack’s goal was to liberate Christianity from philosophy altogether as well as to purge it of doctrinal elements such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the belief in the Trinity. Ratzinger concludes that the end result of this second moment is that the radius of both science and reason has been severely narrowed and the question of God is made to appear either unscientific or pre-scientific. In this situation any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be ‘scientific’ would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self.

The third moment is contemporary and is associated with the anti-European attitude which surfaced in the aftermath of two world wars started in Europe and the rise of Asian and African nationalism in the 1960s. It holds that the synthesis of Greek and Christian thought in the first centuries after Christ was an important project for those times but has no relevance to contemporary non-European cultures. To put the position somewhat crudely, the Greek component may be of some interest to Europeans but it is irrelevant in outback Australia, the highlands of New Guinea, or the safari parks of Kenya. Ratzinger says that there is some element of truth in this position.

Ratzinger’s Genealogy Of Modernity
It is true that a knowledge of classical letters is not necessary for salvation. None the less, Ratzinger believes that the relationship of faith to human reason arose providentially from the junction of the Greek and Hebraic cultures. For him an understanding of this relationship is indispensable. This is the universal cultural patrimony of Catholics across the globe and its importance was also recognized in paragraph 72 of John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio: “In engaging great cultures for the first time the Church cannot abandon what she has gained from her inculturation in the world of Greco-Latin thought. To reject this heritage would be to deny the providential plan of God who guides His Church down the paths of time and history.”

It is something of a paradox that Luther was hostile to the Greek interest in rationality and yet it was a philosopher deeply influenced by Lutheran pietism who did more than anyone else to drive a wedge between faith and reason and in effect exalt the faculty of reason. The cumulative effect of Luther and Kant was to force a choice between scripture alone and so-called ‘pure’ reason alone. Those who took the path of reason alone tended to instrumentalize Christianity by turning it into a moralism. Thus reduced, the task of evangelizing the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific came to be seen, at least in the 1960s and 70s, as a project of transmitting a Christian moral vision along with helping these peoples to improve their material standards of living, particularly their access to medical treatment. While Ratzinger is not opposed to either the transmission of a moral vision or improving material standards of living, he does believe that to reduce Christianity to these goods is severely to truncate it, and to drain it of its most dynamic, most life-giving elements.

Ratzinger’s genealogy of modernity thus takes the form of both severance and mutation (first and second stable accounts) wherein the classical-theistic synthesis is unraveled through three successive attacks on the doctrine of creation on the one side, and at least three successive attacks on the relationship of faith to reason on the other. Linked to the mutation of the Christian doctrine of creation is the emergence of a notion of human freedom as the ability to pursue any vision of the good which might appeal. Once the relationship between nature and creation has been severed, then the way lies open for the severance of nature and morality and the arrival of the Nietzschean project of the transvaluation of the Judeo-Christian heritage.

The Role Of The Church
Politically the end result is that the Church has to contend with the argument that only Enlightenment culture can be constitutive for the identity of Europe, and the countries of the western world generally. Within the culture of modernity different religious cultures can coexist with their respective rights only on the condition and to the degree in which they respect the criteria of this culture, and are subordinated to it. Ratzinger, however, believes that the Church cannot accept this kind of marginalization. In the collection of essays published in 1988 under the tide The Church, Ecumenism and Politics he noted with approval that the early Christians would not allow Christ to be included in the pantheon alongside the pagan gods. They would not pay their dues to the pagan gods and nor would they accept that the life of the polis was the highest good there is.

In this context Ratzinger has been influenced by the work of the German philosopher Robert Spaemann who has warned against a ‘fatal tendency’ to understand Christianity as just one of an ensemble of social forces. According to Spaemann, the Church must understand herself as “the place of an absolute public validity surpassing the state under the legitimizing claim of God.” Ratzinger agrees with this but says that this claim to public validity should not be construed as an opposition to a genuine religious tolerance. He agrees with the basic principle of the conciliar document Diqnitatis humanae that religious observance can never be coerced. None the less, he argues that the state must recognize that a basic framework of values within a Christian foundation is the precondition for its own existence and it must learn that there is a truth which is not subject to consensus but which precedes it and makes it possible.

Included in this judgment is Ratzinger’s assessment that there is no such thing as a theologically neutral state which is the good which the liberal tradition claims to offer. It is logical nonsense. He quotes Rudolf Bultmann’s line that “an unchristian state is possible on principle, but not an atheistic state.” It is at this point that Ratzinger’s thought resonates with much contemporary scholarship from the Radical Orthodoxy and evangelical Protestant stables and also with the Thomist political philosophy of James V. Schall SJ and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Secularism
The evangelical scholar Oliver O’Donovan has written that “the appearance of a social secularity could only be created by understanding society as a quasi-mechanical system, incapable of moral and spiritual acts,” and, thus, “the false consciousness of the would-be contemporary secular society [or theologically neutral liberal state] lies in its determination to conceal the religious judgments that it has made.” The Anglican John Milbank, and the Catholic William T. Cavanagh, have both traced the mutation in the meaning of the concept of the secular realm. Prior to modem times it referred to this temporal world before Christ’s second coming; it has only recently come to mean a separate social space which is impermeable to grace and the intrusion of theological principles. They argue that within the traditional meaning of the term saeculum society as a whole could never be secular.

The fact that the concept is one of those which has undergone a process of mutation was also recognized by Ratzinger in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in 2003. Here he stated:

“Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated.” Similarly, in 2000 he wrote: “the problem with the liberal privatization of religion is that, in the name of tolerance, it favors what is in fact an intolerant suppression of the (ultimately religious) question of this fidelity.”

In The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope and Love, he concluded: “A society that turns what is specifically human into something purely private and defines itself in terms of a complete secularity (which moreover inevitably becomes a pseudo-religion and a new all-embracing system that enslaves people) — this kind of society will of its nature be sorrowful, a place of despair: it rests on a diminution of human dignity.”

In part this diminution of human dignity stems from the fact that the criterion of rationality by which this Enlightenment culture runs is increasingly taken from an experience of technological production based on science. At its most extreme this leads to a scientific domination and manipulation of nature that is problematic in view of the dramatic environmental problems the world now faces and in view of its effects on the very conception of what it means to be human.

Conception no longer needs to be the result of an act of love but can be the result of a laboratory technique; parents are encouraged to abort genetically imperfect babies; the sick and elderly in some countries can now choose to end their lives rather than being a burden on their families. In each of these cases human life is no longer accepted as sacred and inviolable. It has its market value. Ratzinger writes that according to the values of this culture imperfect individuals must be weeded out and the path of planning and production must aim at the perfect man. Suffering must disappear, and life is to consist of pleasure alone. This leads to new forms of coercion and the emergence of a new ruling class.

A New Political Moralism
Ratzinger believes that members of this new ruling class are fostering a “new political moralism” whose key words are justice, peace, and the conservation of creation. He includes Hans Kung’s Weltethos (world ethos) project in this category and he strongly endorses the criticisms of this project by Robert Spaemann. Kung’s project is to try and boil down the values of all the great religious traditions to a short list of moral principles upon which they might all agree. In some ways it is a variation on the Kantian political philosophical project of John Rawls with its concept of “reflective equilibrium.” Neither Spaemann nor Benedict has any opposition to justice, peace, and the conservation of creation per se, but they make the point that the content which is commonly given to these terms by members of the new ruling class is different from what a creedal Christian would give them, and they also believe that the project simply will not work.

Spaemann argues that Kung’s Weltethos reduces religion to being merely ‘a booth in the fairground of post-modernism, adding an ambiguous offer of “sense and meaning beyond death” to the somewhat plausible “be nice to each other.”  This is the very claim of religion’s ‘educated’, ‘benign’, and ‘enlightened’ detractors. For Spaemann any political philosophy which tries to ignore the reality of original sin becomes just another utopian ideology. He asks, why would a chap who is otherwise going to commit adultery refrain from doing so because it might offend the world ethos? If it is not enough for a Christian that Jesus Christ tells him the same thing, why should this person suddenly change his judgment because Muhammad or some other religious figure has joined the chorus? Spaemann concludes that Hans Kung is firmly rooted in the tradition of modernity’s instrumentalization of religion in the service of morals and morals in the service of national preservation.

In other words, Kung’s Weltethos is a kind of warmed-up version of Adolf von Harnack’s nineteenth-century project. Benedict adds to this his judgment that there is no rational or ethical or religious universal formula about which everyone could agree and which could then support everyone, and it is for this reason that the so-called world ethos remains an abstraction. He also cites the judgment of the German historian and anti-Nazi hero Joachim Fest (1926-2006) that “the farther the agreements — which cannot be reached without concessions — are pushed, the more elastic and consequently the more impotent the ethical norms become, to the point that the project finally amounts to a mere corroboration of that unbinding morality which is not the goal, but the problem.” Ratzinger concludes:

“The political moralism that we have lived through, and are living through still, not only does not open the way to regeneration, it actually blocks it. The same also holds therefore for a Christianity and a theology that reduce the core of Jesus message, the ‘kingdom of God’ to the ‘values of the kingdom’ while identifying these values with the main watchwords of political moralism, and proclaiming them, at the same time, to be the synthesis of all religions — all the while forgetting about God, despite the fact that it is precisely He who is the subject and the cause of the kingdom of God.”