Ratzinger, Joseph, Western Culture Today and Tomorrow - Addressing Fundamental Issues, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2019.
Part III - 'Responsibility for Peace', Chapter 1: 'In Search of Peace', Sections 3 ('The question of the right relation between reason and religion') and 4 ('The task of Christians').
To tackle the problem of terrorism some force is required―pacifism will not solve it.
However pure force will not do either. It needs to be proportionate and founded in principles that everyone (or most) would accept, what Francisco de Vitoria in the XVI called ‘ius gentium’ or the precursor of today’s international law.
It also has to be combined with attention to the roots of problems such as social injustice and break with the cycle of violence (‘an eye for an eye’) through forgiveness―even if that is not easy.
The problem of course with international law is who determines its content and who enforces it. There have been serious discussions among intellectuals (including Habermas)1 on the feasibility and desirability of a ‘global domestic politics without a world government’.
At any rate, Ratzinger points to the need for legitimacy of international law, which cannot be the responsibility or prerogative of a few, or worse, one country (in reference to the ‘policeman’ role the United States undertook after 1990).
What set Europe at peace after the II World War was, in addition to sheer exhaustion, also the conviction that, unlike in the aftermath of the I World War, this time the victors were not trying to advance their own interests only, but those of the defeated too.
The problem of terrorism has sometimes been superficially presented within the frame of a ‘clash of civilisations’2. Often a simplistic approach might reduce ‘Islam’ to a stereotype of religious fanaticism that ‘the West’ has overcome with its enlightened rationality. However, as Ratzinger notes, the truth is more nuanced, starting with the basic question on how ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’ are defined.
However religion is more than fanaticism and, without it in interaction with rationality ‘the sources of law and morality dry up’. As we saw in earlier chapters, the very foundations of society and the polity rest on the sources of morality that come from historic, religious traditions.
Plus in addition to the ‘pathologies or religion (fanaticism) there are also those of rationality (eg scientism). God can be turned into an idol used to advance the claims of a group in absolute terms as in terrorism. But ‘progress’ in the Marxists sense or scientific research can also become instruments to control, destroy or even engineer human beings. In both cases morality and law become partisan, at the service of a specific group to dominate others.
Ratzinger remembers two kinds of reason present in ancient thought and identified as ratio, or the practical knowledge necessary to master the material world, as in experimental sciences and technology, on the one hand, and intellectus as the knowledge of ‘the deepest levels of being’. We could perhaps understand them as the contrast between what today we call ‘science’ and ‘wisdom’ or knowledge of the whole of reality, its causes, ends and meaning.
When only the first kind of knowledge prevails―even worse, when rationality is reduced to this kind of knowledge―religion and morality are relegated to the sphere of the subjective (not verifiable through scientific experimentation that by definition is valid only for the material world) and law and indeed society and the state lose their moral foundation: there is no good or evil anymore, but only ‘better’ or ‘worse’ in utilitarian terms.
Nothing, not even human dignity or the right to live is absolute anymore. Any claim to absolute values such as truth or good is deemed ‘fanaticism’. Ratzinger alludes to famous French philosopher Jacques Derrida, famous for his theory and method of ‘Deconstructionism’, shocked by the 9/11 attacks in New York.3 Abstracted from the great historic traditions that religions offer, autonomous reason becomes self-referential and in the end self-destructive as it lacks moral foundations. This is an idea that Ratzinger brings up again and again along his different contributions to this book.
That is why, to the suggestion of Enlightened thinkers at a time where faith was largely still present in societies, to regard reality ‘as if God didn’t exist’, now Ratzinger highlights Kolawkosky’s invitation to think of it today ‘as if God existed’.4
And this takes us to the task of Christians today, not to fight against rationality but for a complete, holistic view of it. This is the spirit of John Paul II’s encyclical letter Faith and Reason.
The task of Christians, then, is to advocate for reason not only as the capacity for technological progress, but also as the capacity to discover truth, and therefore what is truly good. This second kind of reasoning is metaphysical and opens the space to the transcendent5 and to God.
Ratzinger leaves us with three ideas about the Christian God we are called to promote. First one, He is Logos, the rational, creative origin of reality. Man complies with this Logos by defending a type of reason open to the metaphysical dimensions of reality, the foundations for truth and morality so it is objectively possible to know what is true and false, good and evil, right and wrong.
Second, God as Logos, eternal reason is also relation in Himself and towards the creation, especially man. He is Love. And at the same time he is the guarantor of justice, which is not abolished by love but derives from it. A clear idea of justice guarantees the law too.
Third idea, God the Logos, incarnated and revealed in Christ, did not advocate for a theocracy, but for what we would call today a secular state which is not the Kingdom of God. A secular state requires a balance between rationality and religion. It should be open and inclusive of both believers and agnostics or non-believers. And as it is not a theocracy, neither should it be a secularist regime. ‘A State cut off from all historical roots and recognising no extra-political moral foundation eventually has nothing left but the positivistic criterion of the majority principle leading to the decadence of law governed by statistics.’
A secular State has the right and even the obligation to rely on the moral traditions in which it is rooted and which shaped it. To promote a moral foundation for law and justice Christians must bring Christian principles and ideas to the public sphere and endorse and support them with the testimony of our lives, as exemplified by the saints.
Do you think our society is open or closed in ‘the immanent frame’?
How can we distinguish between ‘useful’ and ‘meaningful’ reason, between scientific and metaphysical thought? What kind of reason does the Bible use?
Where are Christians, secularists, Muslims and other traditions placed in the public sphere of societies in the West? How can dialogue be established with other traditions?
Habermas, Jürgen. Time of Transitions. Edited by Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
Habermas, Jürgen, and Jacques Derrida. ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’. Constellations (Oxford, England) 10, no. 3 (September 2003): 291–97.
Huntington, S. P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York, NY: Penguin, 1997.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Religion: If There Is No God—: On God, the Devil, Sin, and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion. St. Augustine’s Press, 2001.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
1 See: Jürgen Habermas, Time of Transitions, ed. Ciaran Cronin and Max Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006)., especially Chapter 6 ‘Euroscepticism, Market Europe, or a Europe of (World) Citizens?’.
2 See for instance: S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York, NY: Penguin, 1997).
3 Though on the opposing side but still inside the secular rationality spectrum with respect to that of Habermas, Derrida signed a letter with him around 2003 after the US invasion of Iraq claiming the birth of a European public sphere and advocating for a common European foreign policy. See: Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, ‘February 15, or What Binds Europeans Together: A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, Constellations (Oxford, England) 10, no. 3 (September 2003): 291–97.
4 Leszek Kolakowski, Religion: If There Is No God—: On God, the Devil, Sin, and Other Worries of the So-Called Philosophy of Religion (St. Augustine’s Press, 2001).
5 See a thorough description of today’s immanent Western public sphere, mostly closed to any transcendence in: Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)., especially Chapter 15, ‘The Immanent Frame’.