Statement of the Holy See to the United Nations

Remarks of Professor Marcello Pera

CONFERENCE

RELATIVISM AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURES

IN THE WRITINGS OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

Dag Hammarskjöld Library Auditorium, United Nations, New York, 20 November 2006

The God of the Logos.

Pope Benedict XVI and the crisis of modern culture

A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

Benedict XVI, Regensburg lecture

1. Questions about Western modern culture

When I was given the great privilege to write an introduction to this book (J. Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, Ignatius Press, San Francisco 2006), I had two burdens: to take a position on its content, and to explain why I was taking precisely that position. This time I have a third burden: to show why the Pope’s book contains, to the best of my knowledge, one of the most penetrating analyses of our modern Western culture and, to the best of my conscience, the most promising therapy against its malaise. This is like saying that I consider Pope Benedict XVI not only a deep intellectual analyst of our condition but a spiritual and moral guide to whom we all should pay the greatest attention. Even those who have problems with the Christian idea of Providence may agree that it is providential that Benedict XVI is today the Sovereign Pontiff of the Catholic Church.

Among the many other questions the book refers to―the chapter on the structure of faith is most impressive―the main ones are:

(1) What crisis is our condition passing through?

(2) What is the main source of this crisis?

(3) What consequences follow from it?

(4) Where does the crisis take place in particular?

(5) What remedies can be taken to overcome it?

(6) Who can take those remedies and how?

The Pope’s answers to these questions are straightforward, precise, and well argued. I will present them first, by using the Pope’s own words, and I will then make two reflections of my own, one more philosophical the other in reference to the religious tensions in today’s world. In the latter case I will refer to the Pope’s much disputed and even more misunderstood Regensburg lecture.

2. The Pope’s answers

The Pope’s answers to the questions above are quite clear and can be summarized briefly:

(1’) The crisis of the modern condition in Western societies is moral and spiritual. Modern man is, and wants to be, a Godless man. Today―the Pope writes―“man no longer accepts any moral authority apart from his own calculations.” (p.40) He considers himself as a man-“constructed” man, affected as he is by a sort of Icarian syndrome. “In this way, the splendor of the fact that he is the image of God―the source of his dignity and of his inviolability―no longer shines upon this man.” (p.26)

(2’) The profound origin of this situation is the modern idea of reason and the success of its technological applications. For today’s culture, “only that which can be demonstrated experimentally is rational.” (p.30) This means that “reason” is the same as “scientific reason”. But if reason is the same as scientific reason and any phenomenon is to be explained in scientific terms, then there is no room for religion, and morality, at its best, boils down to “the calculation of consequences.” As the Pope writes, “the category of good vanishes … Nothing is good or evil in itself.” (p.31) This is another way of saying that what is good and evil depends on our personal preferences and subjective interests, that there are no moral universal yardsticks, and that value judgments are the same as taste judgments. “I approve of gay marriage”, is like “I love vanilla ice cream”; “I stand for abortion”, is like “I prefer hamburgers”; and so on.

(3’) The outcome of this way of reasoning and living is not more freedom and more tolerance, as many intellectuals argue. Quite the contrary, the outcome is the “absolutization of a way of thinking and living that is radically opposed to all the other historical cultures of humanity.” (p.44) On this point the Pope is very precise. To those who are afraid of a clash of civilizations he recalls that “the real antagonism typical of today’s world is not that between diverse religious cultures; rather, it is the antagonism between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures, on the other.” (p.44) In other words, the risky game today is not merely between Christianity and Islam, but between secularism, on the one hand, and Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and any other historical religious faith, on the other. And if there will ever be a clash of civilizations, then the main responsibility will be of those secularized states and societies who do not allow religions to express themselves in public and to play a role in the definition of the identities of their peoples.

(4’) The moral crisis of modern man is widespread but it takes place in particular in the West and most of all in Europe. “Europe―the Pope writes―has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness.” (p.30) or: “a culture has developed in Europe that is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity.” (p.31). This is so because the very European culture that since the onstart had allied the Judeo-Christian faith with Greek reason, and on which much of Western civilization depends, is now trying an anti-historical experiment of “traction” of the former over the other, by attempting to replace God with science and religious life with a secularist view and practice. This is why, as George Weigel has stressed in his publications, Europe today is suffering from “a crisis of civilizational morale”. America, as the Pope had remarked in the book Without Roots (Basic Books, New York 2006) seems to be in a different position. However, the whole West faces a similar crisis, because it is affected by similar diseases.

(5’) The remedy to this situation lies in the reversing of a long standing view. “In the age of Enlightenment―the Pope writes―the attempt was made to understand and define the essential norms of morality by saying that these would be valid etsi Deus non daretur, even if God did not exist… Even the person who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist” (pp.50-51). In my view, this is possible because there is no need, apart from a historical tradition, to confine human reason within the borders of scientific reason. And this is also feasible, because reason can admit, and open itself to, other dimensions than the empirical ones. The God hypothesis―more specifically the Christian God hypothesis―requires us to broaden the usual concept of reason, not to shrink it. It demands that we live in accordance with certain moral values―such as respect for the dignity of the person, the commitment to human life, the affirmation of equality among men―not to abandon the best moral standards modernity has achieved or those truth claims scientific research has arrived at. The Pope has no doubts on this point. First he writes that “we must not lose sight of God if we do not want human dignity to disappear”, then he adds: “does this amount to a simple rejection of the Enlightenment and modernity? Certainly not! From the very beginning, Christianity has understood itself to be the religion of the Logos, to be a religion in keeping with reason.” (p.47)

(6’) Finally, the last answer. The remedies to overcome our moral crisis can be taken by any man of good will. The tool is dialogue. Not just a mere conversation or colloquy or exchange of ideas. Dialogue is more and more demanding: it is a confrontation between different interlocutors with different points of departure. At least for Christians, the common ground exists: as the Christian God is the God of the Logos, then, since reason can be shared by anybody, it becomes the means to standby one another and to understand each other even when differences and divergences still persist.

In summary. The Pope’s main points of the book, in my view, are:

(a) The moral and spiritual crisis affecting the West depends on a narrow conception of reason and on a blind confidence in technology that pervades our culture;

(b) Western science-dependent culture, while transforming science into a new religion or ideology, is missing the most important questions for man―our place and destiny in the world, the meaning of life, the foundations of morality, the sense of mystery and limit―, is shaking the moral foundations of our liberal states, and, by demonizing religion, is making our societies less cohesive;

(c) Broadening the Western concept of reason, opening it to the dimension of God, and living “as if” God, more specifically the God of the Logos, did exist, is the best way to avoid that clash of civilizations the West is bringing about and is most frightened of at the same time.

Here comes my first reflection on the Pope’s book. It deals with the Christian religion, its relation to science and its place in our lives and society.

3. Religion, science, metaphysics

In the era of Galileo Christianity was considered to be incompatible with modern astronomy. Then came Darwin and the same was held to be true. Today the story is repeating itself. With a crucial difference: whereas Galileo explicitly maintained that his theory did not interfere with religion and Darwin never considered his theory contrary to it, several modern cosmologists and biologists maintain the incompatibility view.

This is an enormous mistake. Thinkers like Richard Dawkins in his God’s Delusion or Daniel Dennet in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea or Breaking the Spell, who consider religion bypassed or confuted by science and take it as a cultural relict to be kept in some cultural zoos, are not advancing a scientific claim but a scientistic one. If one takes Darwin’s theory, transforms it into Darwinism, tries to explain any human behavior in naturalistic terms and reduces any human disposition to useful reactions to some pressure from the external environment, then one leaves the ground of experimental science, that is physics, and enters into a different one, that is meta-physics.

The games, of course, are free, one can play them both, but one cannot mix them up, let alone transfer the rules of the one into the domain of the other. If one does metaphysics without acknowledging it, then he or she is in the same position of the famous character of Molière who continued to speak but did not know what prose is. In the same vein, if one is hopeless at music, does not perform it and takes a high note as a disturbing noise, then one cannot pretend to listen to a concert and explain why people enjoy it by reducing it to a series of mathematical equations about the chords of the violins or the length of the brass. To my view, people like Dawkins are actors who play theater with no skill or musicians who scrape instruments with no talent.

Let us open the door of scientific laboratories. In the world there is love, compassion, devotion, commitment, piety, benevolence, among the many other aspects of human behavior. Following Darwin, one can say that these faculties, inclinations, feelings, emotions, or whatever they are called resulted from certain advantages of the brain as useful responses to the pressure from the environment. Or, following Hume, one can say they are dispositions selected or induced by culture and society. This may be the end of the scientific story but it is not the end of the whole story. Because to explain how these behaviors came out is not the same as to explain what their sense is. The material-efficient cause of the former explanation does not touch the formal-final cause of the latter. Nor does it replace it. To believe that it does amounts precisely to that way of shrinking the concept of reason and confining it within the limits of scientific reason alone that the Pope demands that we question.

It is true that modern science, contrary to, say, Aristotle’s is happy to get rid of formal-final causes. It is also true that modern science could not exist without this choice. But this is precisely a choice, a decision. It proves that modern science deliberately adopts one kind of reason and not others or one kind of evidence, empirical evidence, and not others, like evidence of faith or moral evidence. It does not prove that scientific reason covers the whole human reason or that empirical evidence covers any possible evidence. The reason I use to explain why I fell in love with that woman is not the same― in the sense that it does not use the same procedures and ways of arguing―as the reason that I use to explain what my love for that woman is. Nor does the former make the latter redundant.

Materialists, reductionists, monists conflate the two concepts of reason or absorb the one into the other. This is a fallacy. “Link”, “cause”, “evidence”, “truth”, “proof” are concepts with a precise meaning in one domain and a different one in another. To pretend that the former is the same as the latter is a category mistake dictated by a lapse of understanding or intellectual arrogance.

Religion, in my view, is a basic attitude that expresses man’s openness to the infinite and the transcendent and provides answers to ultimate questions―Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is the sense of our life? ― that cannot be settled otherwise. A lot of philosophers and scientists or would-be scientists from Lucretius to Bertrand Russell, from Critia to Freud have attempted the impossible to drop religion or the sense of faith out of our lives. No one has ever convinced more than their colleagues next door. Only large scale experiments like communism have succeeded for a while. I have no doubt that our philosophers and metaphysicians in disguise, tolerant, liberal and democratic as they profess to be, would not support, as many of their distinguished predecessors did, any new Lenin or Stalin or Mao who would come up with other religious cleansings.

Other attitudes towards religion are also wrong. One is relativism, according to which, any religion, like any form of life or culture or civilizations, is as good as any other. It is true that religions are self-contained systems, each of them with its own view of the Supreme Being, ways of relating to him, rites to pay homage to him, ceremonies to evoke or honor him, and so on. It is also true that self-contained systems are mutually exclusive. But although religious faiths are all-pervasive, religions are not cages with no ways out or conceptual highlands with no connections with the rest of human life. They have practical―that is cultural, social, moral, behavioral, political―consequences, for example in terms of human rights they do or do not support, the establishment of institutions they give or do not give rise to, the relations among men they favor or prevent. Therefore, although there cannot be a genuine inter-religious dialogue, religions can be compared at sub-religious levels and in indirect ways. It is up to rational discussion and critical scrutiny to let them evolve, to correct their previous interpretations, to establish their mutual merits.

Another wrong attitude towards religion is to privatize it, that is to confine it within the private, subjective sphere alone. As they are ways of orientating ourselves in the world, religions play, aim to play, and must play a role in public life. Religions shape societies. The distinction between state and church is an institutional regime (whose conceptual foundations date back to the Gospels), but it is not the same as the distinction between politics and religion. The former is a political arrangement useful to set limits and establish mutual relationships, the latter is an ideological prohibition harmful to individuals and societies.

The final wrong attitude against religion is the reverse of the previous one. We should not nationalize religions by replacing them all with a single “rational”, “positive”, or “secular” religion, as the French Enlightenment aimed to do and Jacobins of all sort have tried to do. Not only is law-enforced secularism not working in practice, not only is it intellectually arrogant and practically violent, its very idea is untenable in theory. It amounts either to a form of syncretism, which is inconsistent with the systemic, irreducible nature of religious faiths, or to a form of oppression, which is contrary to freedom and democracy’s very aim.

4. Christianity and Islam

My second reflection refers to the relationships between religions, in particular the relationship between Christianity and Islam, which today, for a lot of reasons mostly independent of them, is often a source of tension. I do believe that in this book and his Regensburg lecture the Pope has provided the right key to lessen, if not to resolve, it.

Let us first consider the problem from the Christian point of view. Christians believe in a God who is Logos. This is of fundamental importance, because if God is Logos, then “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.” This is precisely the core of what the now famous Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus said to the educated Persian. The Christian God is not violent, does not resort to coercion, does not make use of any strength but love and care (remember the very title of the Pope’s first encyclical: God is love).

The Pope knows and explicitly admits that things have not always gone like this. He writes that there have been times and places “where Christianity, contrary to its own nature, had unfortunately become mere tradition and the religion of the state.” (p.48) This reference makes it clear that what the Pope calls “the nature of Christianity” is not an immutable essence caught once and for all but an evolving concept that changes with interpretation. And this means that Christianity is accompanied by and subject to a rational, critical, self-improving and cumulative discourse that is a science: theology. As theology evolves and accommodates itself to different historical situations, sometimes by following them other times by anticipating them, the theological doctrine may change, and does change, with time. The God of the Logos is always the same―revelation, incarnation, resurrection―but our understanding of his message may be different. Deus est caritas, say, is not the same as Syllabus. This is no scandal, this is theological advancement, growth, progress.

Let us now consider the question from the point of view of Islam. Here some crucial questions crop up. Does Islam have a similar theology? Does it admit one? Does it have compelling hermeneutic authorities? And most of all: Is Islam, like Christianity, a religion of the Logos? Does Islam consider followers of other religions as different believers to be respected or as infidels to be condemned? Does Islamic jihad have only spiritual connotations? If this is so, if also Islam allows a rational, scientific, self-corrective theological discourse about God, then that discourse, which cannot be pursued but in terms of reason, becomes the common ground to entertain a dialogue, no matter how difficult it can be. If this is not the case, things become more serious.

Even in the modern age Christianity has faced the same questions. Sometimes it has answered them in the right way, sometimes in the wrong way, sometimes in the right way but with wrong applications. The Pope seems to want to answer them in a final, decisive way. He argues that the link between Christianity and reason is an essential, constitutive one. As he said in his Regensburg lecture, there is “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God”, “the encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance”, and “the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith”. In other words, “the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the uses of human reason are part of the faith itself”. This is mostly important, because if Christianity is coessentially linked to reason, then reason is the tool Christian believers can and should use to relate themselves to other believers.

Today the burden of answering the same questions is on Islam. It is Islam, first of all for the benefit of its own followers, that is asked to set the relation it intends to keep with human reason. It is Islam that is expected to interpret or present itself in such terms that it can allow intercultural dialogue. And it is to Islam to stop any wrong version of its core, especially if violent or aggressive. To ask Islam the very same questions Christianity has faced and continues to face is the most respectful way to start a dialogue with Islam, “without ambiguity”, to use the Pope’s own expression in his recent address at the Gregorian University in Rome. Christians and Muslims are different and may want to be different. But they should not be deaf and blind. What is at stake today is too important to be left to mass emotion or to oblique intentions of political leaders.

In his Regensburg lecture the Pope advanced a challenge to both Christians and Muslims. To the memory of the ones he brought the link between Christianity and reason, to the attention of the others he stressed that God acts according to reason. The Pope did not make any provocation, nor did he express any offence. His goal was a real interpretation of Christianity and a question to Islam. The Pope was misunderstood in the West, because sometimes bad calculations prevail over rational discussion, and in some Muslim countries, because sometimes hostile propaganda prevails over the exercise of understanding. This is a sad story and may be the source of a tragedy to which we all, if we are honest and responsible, must react. The situation is risky and the dim alarm has already sounded many times. The Pope has suggested a way to stop it. That is why we appreciate and thank him.