Cardinal's Jeff Suppan: Prestige Gives Authority to Truth

1) New York Times, October 26, 2006/Sports Thursday; D3.

St. Louis, Oct. 25 – “Jeff Suppan was scheduled to pitch Wednesday night for the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 4 of the World Series, but his time on the mound was not his only planned appearance on the game’s telecast.

“Suppan is one of several athletes who appear in a political advertisement to be broadcast regionally on the Fox network when Game 4 – which was rained out Wednesday – is played. The ad urges Missouri voters to oppose embryonic stem-cell research and vote against Amendment 2 to the State Constitution, which will be on the ballot in the election Nov. 7.

“In a video copy of the ad, produced and distributed by an anti-amendment group called Missourians Against Human Cloning and posted on the Internet, Suppan’s face appears in the first 10 seconds. He is not wearing a baseball cap.

“`Amendment 2 claims it bans human cloning, but in the 2,000 words you don’t read, it makes cloning a constitutional right,’ Suppan says in the ad. `Don’t be deceived.’

“Other athletes who appear in the ad are Kurt Warner of the Arizona Cardinals, who formerly played with the St. Louis Rams, and Mike Sweeney of the Kansas City Royals. James Caviezel, the actor who played Jesus in the film `The Passion of the Christ,’ also appears.

“The timing is no coincidence: Cathy Ruse [wife of Austin Ruse], a spokeswoman for Missourians Against Human Cloning, said the group specifically bought advertising time during Game 4, when Suppan was scheduled to pitch.”

2) The Missouri Catholic Conference said “the 100 word ballot summary" of Constitutional Amendment 2 that "voters will see upon entering the voting booth states that the proposal bans human cloning, but this is false. The ballot summary is relying upon a scientifically inaccurate definition of human cloning found in the full text of the proposal, which voters will not see when entering the voting booth. If voters could read the full text, they would know that human cloning is being authorized in the form of somatic cell nuclear transfer”[1] (underline mine).

3) In an international conference in Rome sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Life and the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, Benedict XVI said that embryonic stem-cell research is opposed for its destruction of human embryos to harvest stem cells.

4) Jeff Suppan and the other high profile personalities are living out the apostolic mandate of Christ to give testimony to the truth with the authority that professional, secular prestige gives them.

Prestige is today the professorial chair of recognized authority. To raise the culture to the level of Christ as the meaning of the human person, Christian professionals are needed who work a lot and very well in the nerve centers of society. This is the mission of lay people in the Church. Going, teach!

[1] Origins, October 19, 2006, Vol. 36, Number 19, 293-295.

October 24, The "Old" Feast of St. Raphael, Archangel

1. The young person today, as the Rich Young Man of Mark 10, 17-28 whom Jesus loved: “Jesus, looking upon him, loved him, and said to him, “One thing is lacking to thee; go, sell whatever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven’ and come, follow me.”

This is not an imposition on the freedom of a person. Rather, it is the necessary condition for freedom to be exercised. Recall from John Paul II: “The Crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of freedom; he lives it fully in the total gift of himself and calls his disciples to share in hiss freedom.”[1]

This challenge to give all must be proposed to the young people today. It is not an imposition from outside. It is longed for from within the young person. Benedict XVI said in 1990: “The anamnesis [the "not-forgetting," the ontological tendency of being created in the image of God] instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this `from without’ is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.”[2]

In the mind of Benedict XVI, the greatest evil of the day is the dictatorship of relativism, and the greates need is to challenge men with the absolute of the Person of Jesus Christ. As George Weigel said: "The most profoundly threatening dystopia for the future is not the brutal totalitarianism sketched in George Orwell's novel `1984,' but the mindless, soulless authoritarianism depicted in Aldous Huxley's `Brave New World,' a world of stunted humanity; a world of souls without longing, without passion, without striving, without suffering, without surprises or desires -- in a word, a world without love.'"

Recall the remarks of Benedict XVI to the communist Ernst Bloch concerning drugs and terrorism. "I ventured the hypothesis that obviously inthe Middle Ages the emptiness of the woul, which drugs are an attempt to fill, did not exist: the thirst of the soul, of te inner man, found an answer that made drugs unnecessary." He went on: "Drugs are the result of despair in a world experienced as a dungeon of facts, in which man cannot hold out for long... (T)he core is a protest against a reality perceived as a prison. The `great journey' that men attempt in drugs is the perversion of mysticism, the perversion of the human need for infinity, the rejection of the impossibility of transcending immanence, and the attempt to extend the limits of one's own existence into the infinite. The patient and humble adventure of asceticism, which, in small steps of ascent, comes closer to the descending God, is replaced by magical power, the magical key of drugs - the ethical and relgious path is replaced by technology. Drugs are the pseudo-mysticism of a world that does not believe yet cannot get rid of the soul's yearning for paradise. Thus, drugs are a warning sign that points to [something] very profound: not only do they disclose a vacuum in our society, which that society's own instruments cannot fill, but they also point to an inner claim of man's nature, a claim that asserts itself in a perverted form if it does not find the correct answer."

Concerning terrorism, Benedict said: "Terrorism's point of departure is closely related to that of drugs: here, too, we find at the outset a protest against the world as it is and the desire for a better world. On the basis of its roots, terrorism is a moralism, albeit a misdirected one that becomes the brutal parody of the true aims and paths of morality... Terrorism was at first a religious enthusiasm that had been redirected into the earthly realm, a messianic expectation transposed into political fanaticism. [Notice: There is "faith" but no reason; hence Regensgurg]. Faith in life after death had broken down, or at least had become irrelevant, but the criterion of heavenly expectation was not abandoned: rather, it was now applied to the present world... `God has no other arms but ours'... this now meant that the fulfillment of these promises can and must be carried out by ourselves. Disgust at the intellectual and spiritual emptiness of our society, yearning for what is completely different, the claim to unconditional salvation without restrictions and without limits - this is, so to speak, the religious component in the phenomenon of terrorism, which gives it the impetus of a passion focused on a totality, its uncompromising characer and the claim to be idealisitic. All this becomes so dangerous because of the decisively earthly character of the messianic hope: something unconditional is demanded of what is conditional, something infinite is demanded of what is finite. This inherent contradiciton indicates the real tragedy of this phenomenon in which man's great vocation becomes the instrument of the great lie" (Turning Point for Europe? Ignatius [1994] 18-22). Notice here the background for the Pope's remarks on the need for the recovery of reason by both West and East for dialogue.

2. The call and challenge must go out. Alvaro del Portillo, the first successor to St. Josemaria Escriva, said in 1988:

“While taking care of persons from all kinds of different backgrounds in the early decades of the history of Opus Dei, Escriva put special sacrifice and effort into the formation of so many young men and women. In doing so, he inaugurated an apostolic venture of first importance, which all of us in the Prelature should see as the apple of our eye:” St. Raphael Work.

Elsewhere, Escriva said: “All our apostolates can be reduced to only one: the apostolate of giving doctrine.” “Only ignorance can allow a man to commit crimes and not be aware of it. We must give doctrine.” In carrying out this formative task of St. Raphael’s work we count on a great variety of apostolic means and activities. Some of these means are already traditional and have been effective for the good of souls from the beginnings of our Work: the Courses of Formation, the Catechism classes and the visits to the poor of Our Lady, the meditations, the spiritual retreats and in general the liturgical acts of piety celebrated in our halls of residence…. These means are perennial and must be used always and everywhere when we are doing the work of St. Raphael. For they are characteristic of this apostolate and give life to all the other activities which take place around this work of St. Raphael.” Notice that they are reducible to the major categories of work and friendship. Elsewhere, “There are so many activities of all kinds, so many external undertakings that should be used. They are like nets for the fishing – a divine fishing – of the souls of those who are involved in the work of St. Raphael! Among these external undertakings, of course, two of them are obligatory: the catechism classes and the visits to the poor. Then there are sporting activities, and those to do with science, literature, the cinema or whatever you like! There are trips and a hundred thousand other things. All, however, have a deep apostolic inspiration, otherwise they are useless.”

3. Finally, daring and optimism! St. Josemaria quoted St. Paul: “Omnia possum in eo qui me confortat (Phil. 4, 13). `With him there is no possibility of failure. Hence the superiority complex; hence we can take on tasks with a spirit of victory, because God grants us his strength.
An inferiority complex? Why? I see no reason for it. How can you have an inferiority complex in Opus Dei? You have to have a superiority complex! But Father, wouldn’t that be a sign of pride? No, my children! It is a consequence of humility, of a humility that makes me say: Lord, you are he who is. I am nothing. You have all the perfections: power, strength, love, glory, wisdom, dominion, honour. If I get close to you like a child in the strong arms of his father or in his mother’s wonderful lap, I will feel the warmth of your divinity, I will feel the light of your wisdom, I will feel your strength running through my veins…. I have a superiority complex because I am in God’s hands, and he is my Father, et adorabunt eum omens reges terrae; omnes gentes servient ei (Ps. 71, 9). Even Satan serves him… I have a superiority complex because potestas eius, potestas aeterna, quae non auferetur: et regnum eius, quod no corrumpetur (Dan. 7, 14).'

“Also I realize, Lord, that you can do everything. I rectify my intention. As a ship at sea corrects its course by looking at a star, so I correct my intention by looking at Mary. And I will be certain of always reaching port. I will mark the reefs and with holy shamelessness I will let them be seen, those things that are at times little snares and at other times flagrant ignorance of hateful excuses; or sometimes, manifestations of the impotence of men who cannot stand the fruitfulness which you give to the others.”

[1] John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor #85.
[2] Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas, Texas, The Pope John Center (1991) 21.

The Ratzinger Constant: The Absolute

Plagued by Relativism

The present state of affairs is a dictatorship of relativism in which there is no absolute (save – contradictorily - that “everything is relative”) and its necessary corollary: the absence of God (on the understanding that God is Absolute). Benedict XVI, on the morning of his election as pope, remarked: “How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves – flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth. Every day new sects spring up, and what St. Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph. 4, 14) comes true.

“Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be `tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine,’ seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires”[1](emphasis mine).

Yearning for the Absolute

1) Human reason yearns for the absolute. It is constitutively oriented to be one Being (to know, to possess) with the Transcendent Creator because it has been made being in the image and likeness of the Creator-Being. It has no ontological right to this because it is creature-being, not Creator-Being, and cannot achieve it by its own power. Yet it necessarily tends toward it, and cannot become fully itself without it.

2) Ratzinger accounts for this experience in terms of conscience and platonically:

“(I)t is finally time to arrive at some conclusions, that is, to formulate a concept of conscience. The medieval tradition was right, I believe, in according two levels to the concept of conscience. These levels, though they can be well distinguished, must be continually referred to each other. It seems to me, many unacceptable theses regarding conscience are the result of neglecting either the difference or the connection between these two levels in the concepts synderesis and conscientia [remembering what is the good, and what is the good to be done here and now]…. I would like… without entering into philosophical disputes, to replace this problematic word [synderesis] with the much more clearly defined Platonic concept of anamnesis…. The word anamnesis should be taken to mean exactly that which Paul expressed in the second chapter of his Letter to the Romans: `When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do no have the law. They show that what the law requires is written n their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness… (2, 14 f).’ The same thought is strikingly amplified in the great monastic rule of Saint Basil. Here we read: `The love of God is not founded on a discipline imposed on us from outside, but is constitutively established in us as the capacity and necessity of our rational nature.’ Basil speaks in terms of `the spark of divine love which has been hidden in us,’ an expression which was to become important in medieval mysticism. In the spirit of Johannine theology Basil knows that love consists in keeping the commandments. For this reason, the spark of love, which has been pout into us by the Creator, means this: `We have received interiorly beforehand the capacity and disposition for observing all divine commandments… These are not something imposed from without.’ Referring everything back to its simple core, Augustine adds: `We could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us.’[2]

"This means that the first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the godlike constitution of our being is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is so to speak an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within,. HE sees: That’s it! That is what my naturae points to and seeks.”[3]

Therefore, there is the Right and Need to Evangelize: “… The gospel may, indeed, must be proclaimed to the pagans because they themselves are yearning for it in the hidden recesses of their souls (cf. Isaiah 42, 4).”[4]

Newman’s Toast first to Conscience, and then later, to the Pope.

“We can now appreciate Newman’s toast first to conscience and then to the pope. The pope cannot impose commandments on faithful Catholics because he wants to or finds it expedient…. The anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this `from without’ is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.”[5]

No Conscience, no Pope: “…the toast to conscience indeed must precede the toast to the Pope because without conscience there would not be a papacy. All power that the papacy has is power or conscience. It is service to the double memory upon which the faith is based and which again and again must be purified, expanded, and defended against the destruction of memory which is threatened by a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation as well as by the pressure of social and cultural conformity.”[6]

Gaining the “I” but Losing the Absolute

Disengagement from the Absolute: Descartes disengaged reason from reality/being. He never had a true and full tactile and emotional experience of being loved by the mother in that he “lost his mother when he was little more than a year old. She died in childbirth, and her newborn baby died with her. We can visualize the sickly schoolboy, with his chronic chest ailments, his need for prolonged sleep… From what we have seen in preceding chapters, it becomes quite clear that we encounter in Cartesian rationalism a pure masculinization of thought. [One controls reality, not listens to it] There is nothing childlike left in man’s gaze. The hand of Wisdom, Sophia, the maternal, is rejected, and a proud intellect lays claim to omnipotence. Goethe was to perceive the craze and destructiveness in all this: modern man, the un-historical, uprooted self-reliant victor, is a haunted fugitive. The march of conquest is actually a flight in perpetuity, and the only resting place, the haven of delivery, is the Eternal Feminine.”[7]

Once Descartes has made his error and centered on the self as source of mental certainty and not as experience of the real, the entire intellectual world marched in the procession behind the self disguised as thought, leaving reality dumbed down – “disengaged” in the terminology of Charles Taylor[8] - to sense experience, and relativist subjectivism to rule the day. The experience of the “I” as Being evaporated before it could be disclosed. Not until quantum physics (the Romanticism of Herder and Goethe could not mount any significant opposition to match the success of positivist technology) and the Second Vatican Council made public by John Paul II and now Benedict confronting Islam, is there a drum beat about the reality and absoluteness of the “I.”

The difficulty is that the “eye” of the “I” is consciousness disguising itself as the “I.” And confusing consciousness with concept, we – as Kant - tend to consign the qualitative experiences of the ontological “I” with categories or a prior’s of the intellect’s architecture or abstractive power. We are always seeking the real through consciousness and concepts and confuse the self with them.

Reality then is relegated to sensible perception and “facts” which are judgments of reason. It is not reason “seeing” but reason “deciding” from a quasi interior control panel.

Benedict, lamenting the epistemological confusion, says: "`Facts,’ that is, that which can be established as existing outside ourselves, are as yet only `facts,’ naked facticity. It belongs to the world of pure fable to attribute any qualities of a moral or aesthetic nature to the atom beyond its mathematical determinations. But the consequence of this reduction of nature to facts that can be completely grasped and therefore controlled is that no moral message outside ourselves can now come to us. Morality, just like religion, now belongs to the realm of the subjective; it has no place in the objective. If it is subjective, then it is something posited by man. It does not precede vis-à-vis us: we precede it and fashion it. This movement of `objectification,’ which permits us to `see through’ things and to control them, essentially knows no limits."[9]

The Recovery

This takes us back 2,600 years to the Ionian philosophers beginning roughly with Thales in 640 B.C. Benedict said: “Contemporary scholarship is coming to see more and more clearly that there are quite amazing parallels in chronology and content between the philosophers’ criticism of the myths in Greece and the prophet’s criticism of the gods in Israel. It is true that the two movements start from completely different assumptions and have completely different aims; but the movement of the logos against the myth, as it evolved in the Greek mind in the philosophical enlightenment, so that in the end it was bound to involve the fall of the gods, has an inner parallelism with the enlightenment which the prophetic and Wisdom literature cultivated in its demythologization of the divine powers in favor of the one and only God. For all the differences between them, both movements coincide in their striving towards the logos.”[10]

In Regensburg, Benedict explained how Judaic faith and Greek philosophy met at the time of the Exile in the 6th century B.C. in Babylon (Baghdad). There, they interchanged values. Judaic faith gave Monotheism to the Greeks, while the Greeks gave the Israelites the power to translate the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob into the universal creator of the universe. Benedict said:

“This inner rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an even of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: This convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.”[11]

The Resonance of Faith and Reason in the Babylonian Exile (586 B.C. – 538 B.C.)

From Local Deity to Creator of the Universe

Overview: Israel moves from the consciousness of the experience of Abrahamic and Mosaic faith – that God is Lord, but only of the Israelites – to the concept that this God of Israel is Creator of all that is, and therefore the One God. This is the enlightenment to monotheism, away from the polytheism of the myths. The enlightenment took place because of the experience of the removal – suffering – of Israel from its land, its temple, and therefore its cult. In a word, Israel had to go through the suffering of being and knowing that it was the people of God without its land or its temple and cult, and living that reality – that faith experience - in the exile of Babylon. That is, Israel continued to be God’s people even in exile, and therefore God’s people universally.

This universalization took conceptual formulation in the Wisdom literature of the prophets and in the Greek translation of the Septuagint [the presumed number of peoples of the world]. In a word, they did away with the gods in the process of growth of reason that Benedict calls “Hellenization.”

It is suggestive to consider whether we are in much the same situation today with regard to the hegemony of empirical science and positivist/analytic thought? Do we adore what we perceive and measure through our senses as an idol – considering it to be the real - leaving out the worship of the one true God who transcends perception? Are we in a state similar, or perhaps even worse (since we look for no transcendence even intra-cosmically) than 5th century Eastern pagans? It must be kept in mind that Kant had it right when he understood that God, the soul and morality were not to be found in the world of external perception, and thereby tucked them into the structure of our rational architecture. In fact, the actual development of science has taught us that perception is a myth; that what we sensibly perceive is not really there such as we perceive it; that the really real is perceptively and conceptually indeterminable (Heisenberg). Owen Barfield suggest that the whole cant of modern thought is an “idolatry” of the perceived, but that the “perceived” is really the way we take in what’s there. In its medieval formulation: “what is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” There really is no rainbow, just moisture and refracted light. Color is our way of receiving differing wave lengths of light. We see colors, but there are no colors without the receiving eye. This is not subjectivism. It is parsing out what was aboriginal perception and knowing before the split into subject and object. Berkeley suggests, and Wojtyla affirms, that the experience of the real is the experience of the self when it transcends itself. Being or “the real” is the experience of the self as gift. And it is in the experience of the self as going out of self to another that there is an experience of God, since to experience the reality of the self as relational is to experience the divine Person of the Son as pure relation to the Father.

The task today is to transcend – not eliminate – the fascination and idolatry of perception and the use of reason as art with the technology that has given it so much prestige. In a word, in the West science and technology is the equivalent of 6th century pagan myth that must be confronted and purified so as to enter into synthesis with the truth of the Creating God, and man as His image.

“Marduck” and the Creator

The thesis that Benedict proposes is that faith seeks reason in order to achieve its full stature as faith, just as reason seeks faith as radiance of Being to become fully reason. Then-Josef Ratzinger takes on the topic of Creation in the Old Testament.

“The first thing to be said is this: Israel always believed in the Creator God, and this faith it shared with all the great civilizations of the ancient world. For, even in the moments when monotheism was eclipsed, all the great civilizations always knew of the Creator of heaven and earth…In Israel itself the creation theme went through several different stages. It was never completely absent, but it was not always equally important…The moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile…. Israel had lost it land and its temple. According to the mentality of the time this was something incomprehensible, for it meant that the God of Israel was vanquished – a God whose people, whose land, and whose worshipers could be snatched away from him. A God who could not defend his worshipers and his worship was seen to be, at the time, a weak God. Indeed, he was no God at all; he had abandoned his divinity. And so, being driven out of their own land and being erased from the map was for Israel a terrible trial: Has our God been vanquished, and is our faith void?

“At this moment the prophets opened a new page and taught Israel that it was only then that the true face of God appeared and that he was not restricted to that particular piece of land. He had never been: He had promised this piece of land to Abraham before he settled there, and he had been able to bring his people out of Egypt. He could do both things because he was not the God of one place but had power over heaven and earth. Therefore he could drive his faithless people into another land in order to make himself known there. And so it came to be understood that this God of Israel was not a God like the other gods, but that he was the God who held sway over every land and people. He could do this, however, because he himself had created everything in heaven and on earth. It was in exile and in the seeming defeat of Israel that there occurred an opening to the awareness of the God who holds every people and all of history in his hands, who holds everything because he is the creator of everything and the source of all power.

“This faith now had to find its own contours, and it had to do so precisely vis-à-vis the seemingly victorious religion of Babylon, which was displayed in splendid liturgies, like that of the New Year, in which the re-creation of the world was celebrated and brought to its fulfillment. It had to find its contours vis-à-vis the great Babylonian creation account of Enuma Elish, which depicted the origin of the world in its own fashion. There it is said that the world was produced out of a struggle between opposing powers and that it assumed its form when Marduk, the god of light, appeared and split in two the body of the primordial dragon. From this sundered body heaven and earth came to be. Thus the firmament and the earth were produced from the sundered body of the dead dragon, but from its blood Marduk fashioned human beings. It is a foreboding picture of the world and of humankind that we encounter here: The world is a dragon’s body, and human beings have dragon’s blood in them. At the very origin of the world lurks something sinister, and in the deepest part of humankind there lies something rebellious, demonic, and evil. In this view of things only a dictator, the king of Babylon, who is the representative of Marduk, can repress the demonic and restore the world to order.

“Such views were not simply fairy tales. They expressed the discomfiting realities that human beings experienced in the world and among themselves. For often enough it looks as if the world is a dragon’s lair and human blood is dragon’s blood. But despite all oppressive experiences the scriptural account says that it was not so. The whole tale of these sinister powers melts away in a few words: `The earth was without form and void.’ Behind these Hebrew words lie the dragon and the demonic powers that are spoken of elsewhere. Now it is the void that alone remains and that stands as the sole power over against God. And in the fact of any fear of these demonic forces we are told that God alone, who is the eternal Reason that is eternal love, created the world and that it rests in his hands. Only with this in mind can we appreciate the dramatic confrontation implicit in this biblical text, in which all these confused myths were rejected and the world was given its origin in God’s Reason and in his Word. This could be shown almost word for word in the present text – as, for example, when the sun and the moon are referred to as lamps that God has hung in the sky for the measurement of time. To the people of that age it must have seemed a terrible sacrilege to designate the great gods sun and moon as lamps for measuring time. Here we see the audacity and the temperateness of the faith that, in confronting the pagan myths, made the light of truth appear by showing that the world was not a demonic contest but that it arose from God’s Reason and reposes on God’s Word. Hence this creation account may be seen as the decisive `enlightenment’ of history and as a breakthrough out of the fears that had oppressed humankind. It places the world in the context of reason and recognized the world’s reasonableness and freedom. But it may also be seen as the true enlightenment from the fact that it put human reason firmly on the primordial basis of God’s creating Reason, in order to establish it in truth and in love, without which an `enlightenment’ would be exorbitant and ultimately foolish”[12] (underline mine).

The Present “Myth” of Scientific Reason

(The “myth” is the arbitrary dogma that something is not real if you can’t make a model of it)

Ratzinger on the New Physics: “We know today that in a physical experiment the observer himself enters into the experiment and only by doing so can arrive at a physical experience. This means that there is no such thing as pure objectivity even in physics, that even here the result of the experiment, nature’s answer, depends on the question put to it. In the answer there is always a bit of the question and a bit of the questioner himself; it reflects not only nature-in-itself, in its pure objectivity, but also gives back something of man, of our individuality, a bit of the human subject. This too, mutatis mutandis, is true of the question of God. There is no such thing as a mere observer. There is no such thing as pure objectivity. One can even say that the higher an object stands in human terms, the more it penetrates the center of individuality, and the more it engages the beholder’s individuality, then the smaller the possibility of the mere distancing involved in our objectivity. Thus, wherever an answer is presented as unemotionally objective, as a statement that finally goes beyond the prejudices of the pious and provides purely factual, scientific information, then it has to be said that the speaker has here fallen a victim to self-deception. This kind of objectivity is quite simply denied to man. He cannot ask and exist as a mere observer. He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality `God’ can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God – the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering does one experience; only by co-operating in the experiment does one ask at all, and only he who asks receives an answer.”[13][14]

Earlier Ratzinger said: “The physicist is becoming increasingly aware today that we cannot embrace given realities – the structure of light, for example, or matter as a whole – in one form of experiment and so in one form of statement; that on the contrary from different sides we glimpse different aspects, which cannot be traced back to each other. We have to take the two together – say the structure of corpuscle and wave – without being able to find any all-embracing aspect – as a provisional assessment of the whole, which is not accessible to us as a unified whole because of the limitations implicit in our point of view. What is true here in the physical realm as a result of the deficiencies in our vision is true in an incomparably greater degree of the spiritual realities and of God. Here too we can always look from one side and so grasp only one particular aspect, which seems to contradict the other, yet only when combined with it is a pointer to the whole which we are incapable of stating or grasping. Only by circling round, by looking and describing from different, apparently contrary angles can we succeed in alluding to the truth, which is never visible to us in its totality.

“The intellectual approach of modern physics may offer us more help here than the Aristotelian philosophy was able to give. Physicists know today that one can only talk about the structure of matter in approximations starting from various different angles. They know that the position of the beholder at any one time affects the result of his questioning of nature. Why should we not be able to understand afresh, on this basis, that in the question of God we must not look in the Aristotelian fashion, for an ultimate concept encompassing the whole, but must be prepared to find a multitude of aspects which depend on the position of the observer and which we can no longer survey as a whole but only accept alongside each other, without being able to make any statement about the ultimate truth? We meet here the hidden interplay of faith and modern thought. That present-day physicists are stepping outside the structure of Aristotelian logic and thinking in this way is surely an effect already of the new dimension which Christian theology has opened up, of its need to think in `complementarities.”

“In this connection I should like to mention briefly two other aids to thought provided by physics. E. Schrödinger has defined the structure of matter as `parcels of waves’ and thereby fallen upon the idea of being that has no substance but is purely actual, whose apparent `substantiality’ really results only from the pattern of movement of superimposed waves. In the realm of matter such a suggestion may well be physically, and in any case philosophically, highly contestable. But it remains an exciting simile for the actualitas divina, for the absolute, `being-act’ of God, and for the idea that the densest being – God – can subsist only in a multitude of relations, which are not substances but simply `waves,’ and therein form a perfect unity and also the fullness of being.”[15]

No Absolute in Sensible Perception: Heisenberg

“Take Planck’s quantum theory. No doubt, you know that when Planck first tackled the subject he had no desire to change classical physics in any serious way. He simply wanted to solve a particular problem, namely the distribution of energy in the spectrum of a black body. He tried to do so in conformity with all the established physical laws, and it took him many years to realize that this was impossible. Only at that stage did he put forward a hypothesis that did not fit into the framework of classical physics, and even then he tried to fill the breach he had made in the old physics with additional assumptions. That proved impossible, and the consequences of Planck’s hypothesis finally led to a radical reconstruction of all physics.” [16]

This means that what we see is not what we get. What we see macroscopically in perception is not what is there subatomically. As we saw above in Owen Barfield, “physics has ended by having to conclude that all qualities are `secondary’ in this sense, so that the whole world of nature as we actually experience it depends for its configuration on the mind and sense of man. It is what it is because we are what we are. Thus our common assumption that the main effort of human thinking has been to make a mental replica of a pre-existent outer world is incompatible even with the scientific approach to things out of which it arose. This assumption is indeed determined by science; but by a science of the day before yesterday."

The new physics is telling us that the way we perceive reality is not the way it is. It is not that it is not there, but that the perception we have of it is the way we are, not the way it is. And so, it comes down to asking how we know that reality is really there since we don’t experience it as it really is.

The proposal that is in the thought of Wojtyla as philosopher and John Paul II as pope is: “In a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry.”[17] This means that the most real access to reality is the experience of the self in the free moral act of total self-gift. This means that I know the real when I know myself freely acting, and the experience of myself in the act of experiencing the world through the senses gives realism to the sensation. Hence, “what is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational… Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason.” John Paul entitled chapter III of Fides et Ratio: “Intellego Ut Credam:” I know in order to believe, because it is only by the acting of believing, of trusting in another, is my reason enlightened by the Being of the person of the believer.

Jesus Christ: The Only Concrete Absolute: God and Man

“To believe is to entrust this human I, in all it transcendence and all its transcendent greatness, but also with its limits, its fragility and its mortal condition, to Someone who announces himself as the beginning and the end, transcending all that is created and contingent, but who also reveals himself at the same time as a Person who invites us to companionship, participation and communion. An Absolute person – or better, a personal Absolute.”[18]

As we know, Nathanael posed a weighty prejudice to him: "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (John 1:46a). This expression is important for us. It allows us to see that, according to the Jewish expectations, the Messiah could not come from such an obscure village, as was the case of Nazareth (cf. also John 7:42). At the same time, however, it shows the freedom of God, who surprises our expectations, manifesting himself precisely there, where we least expect him. Moreover, we know that, in reality, Jesus was not exclusively "from Nazareth," but that he was born in Bethlehem (cf. Matthew 2:1; Luke 2:4). Nathanael's objection, therefore, had no value, as it was founded, as often happens, on incomplete information. Nathanael's case suggests to us another reflection: In our relationship with Jesus, we must not only be content with words. Philip, in his reply, presents a significant invitation to Nathanael: "Come and see" (John 1:46b). Our knowledge of Jesus is in need above all of a living experience: Another person's testimony is certainly important, as in general the whole of our Christian life begins with the proclamation that comes to us from one or several witnesses. But we ourselves must be personally involved in an intimate and profound relationship with Jesus. In a similar way, the Samaritans, after having heard the testimony of the compatriot whom Jesus had met at Jacob's well, wished to speak directly with him and, after that conversation, they said to the woman: "We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world" (John 4:42). Returning to the scene of the vocation, the evangelist tells us that, when Jesus sees Nathanael approaching, he exclaims: "Here is a true Israelite. There is no duplicity in him" (John 1:47). It was praise that recalls the text of a psalm: "Happy those to whom the Lord imputes no guilt, in whose spirit is no deceit" (Psalm 32:2), but which arouses Nathanael's curiosity, who, surprised, replies: "How do you know me?" (John 1:48a). Jesus' answer at first is not understood. He said to him: "Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree" (John 1:48b).…Anyway, what counts most in John's narration is the confession of faith that Nathanael professes at the end in a limpid way: "Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel!" (John 1:49). Although it does not reach the intensity of Thomas' confession with which John's Gospel ends: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), Nathanael's confession has the function to open the terrain to the fourth Gospel. In the latter a first and important step is taken on the path of adherence to Christ.

[The Point:]

"Nathanael's words present a double and complementary aspect of Jesus' identity: He is recognized both by his special relationship with God the Father, of whom he is the only-begotten Son, as well as by his relationship with the people of Israel, of whom he is called King, an attribution proper of the awaited Messiah. We must never lose sight of either of these two elements, since if we only proclaim the heavenly dimension of Jesus we run the risk of making him an ethereal and evanescent being, while if we only recognize his concrete role in history, we run the risk of neglecting his divine dimension, which is his proper description."

The Regensburg Solution

“We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons…(my emphasis).

“There was a young fellow from Trinity/

Who took the square root of infinity/

But the number of digits/

Gave him the figits/

He dropped Math and took up Divinity."
(George Gamow)

Benedict XVI ended his Regensburg talk on September 12, 2006:

“And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly….

“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application….
“We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons…

“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.

“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. At the same time… modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which it methodology has to be based.

“Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding….

“The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time”

The Goal @ Regensburg: Save Reason

Précis: Reason has been narrowed (and damaged) in both Islam and the West.

In Islam, there is no experience of the self as gift (faith) to a revealing Person (God in Christ). Hence, there is no experience of the self as good with freedom of autonomy and rights. Reason is prohibited from access to Being as Absolute within time and space. Hence, reason, searching for the Absolute, withers.[19]

In the West, reason has entered a self-imposed restriction to accept as real only what is sensible and mathematically measurable: the scientific method. Outside of that, there is only subjective un-reality. This means that God, the soul and morality are left to subjective whim and ungrounded. The real “I” that is the Being made in the image of God is camouflaged as subjective consciousness.

How? Go Out of Self and Experience of the Absolute

The core of the renewal of moral theology consists in an empirical experience of the value, “good” by the experience of the self going out of itself to the revealing Person of Jesus Christ. Being God, only Christ can demand all: the Absolute. Only one who has gone out self – even to the point of martyrdom - experiences peace and joy, that are signs of acting according to who one is. Morality – the good – is conformity with Being – who one is, and Who one images.

This is hugely important. The entire Enlightenment philosophy has not known how to encounter the “good” empirically as Absolute since the sensible, contingent, individual reality is precisely what we mean by not-absolute, not permanent, not universal, etc. However, this recovery of the experience of the “I” that Wojtyla saw in the living faith of St. John of the Cross, and his rational account of it by the description of the experience of self possession, self-governance, self-determination, he was able to disclose the above as experiences of the “I” that is made possible precisely by his consciousness of them. Hence, the “I” is not consciousness, but the instrument of seeing what is going on as experience, and hence the Being of the “I” as protagonist of its own interior dynamic and exterior action.

Notice the defining work of Benedict in the struggle with his thesis director Michael Schmaus over precisely this point: The act of faith is an anthropological act of the believing subject. “Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requries a someone who apprehends it.”[20]

But this supreme moral act that is self-transcendence to the risking of one’s life is Christian faith. Benedict XVI asks: “What, in the light of the Bible, is `faith’? And let us again affirm clearly: it is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision – it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death… Certainly a life lived by faith resembles more an expedition up a mountain than a quiet evening spent reading in front of the fire; but anyone who embarks upon this expedition knows and feels more and more, that the adventure to which it invites us is well worthwhile.”[21]


John Paul II says: “It is urgent to rediscover and to set forth once more the authentic reality of the Christian faith, which is not simply a set of propositions to be accepted with intellectual assent. Rather, faith is a lived knowledge of Christ, a living remembrance of his commandments, and a truth to be lived out. A word, in any event, is not truly received until it passes into action, until it is put into practice. Faith is a decision involving one’s whole existence. It is an encounter, a dialogue, a communion of love and of life between the believer and Jesus Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (cf. Jn 14:6).”[22]

Then, John Paul introduces the connection between faith and martyrdom (suffering for love): “Only conformity with the radical demands of the Gospel, can lead the believer to the supreme witness of martyrdom.”[23] He then insists: “Martyrdom, accepted as an affirmation of the inviolability of the moral order, bears splendid witness both to the holiness of God’s law and to the inviolability of the personal dignity of man, created in God’s image and likeness. This dignity may never be disparaged or called into question, even with good intentions, whatever the difficulties involved.”[24]

Addendum:

The Philosophy

Josef Seifert suggests that Wojtyla has been the first to approach the reality of Being, not from the angle of consciousness, but from the angle of action, and therefore, from living Abrahamic faith. His approach is to a description of feelings as experiences that disclose the ontological architecture of the self when exercising self-mastery. This was new, particularly when wedded to a metaphysic of being.[25]

Ratzinger also works in this mold borrowing from Josef Pieper and von Balthasar: “our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if e is to subsist.”[26]

Theological Background: Adam disengages himself as subject in the act of naming the animals. John Paul II says: “Up to this moment, man is the object of the creative action of God-Yahweh, who at the same time, as Legislator, sets the conditions of the first covenant with man. Already this divine act underlines man’s subjectivity. Subjectivity finds a further expression when the Lord God `formed every kind of animal of the field and all the birds of the air and brought them to the man’ (male) `to see what he would call them’ (Gen. 2, 19). Thus, the first meaning of man’s original solitude is defined based on a specific `test’ or on an examination that man undergoes before God (and in some way also before himself). Through this `test,’ man gains the consciousness of his own superiority, that is, that he cannot be put on a par with any other species of living beings on the earth.”[27]

Then, importantly, John Paul says: “Self-knowledge goes hand in hand with knowledge of the world, of all visible creatures, of all living beings to which man has given their names to affirm his own dissimilarity before them…. He is not only essentially and subjectively alone. In fact, solitude also signifies man’s subjectivity, which constitutes itself through self-knowledge. Man is alone because he is `different’ from the visible world, from the world of living beings.”[28]

Naming the animals and tilling the garden are twin modes of subduing the earth. John Paul says that the analysis of these verses of Genesis 2 “has brought us to surprising conclusions with regard to anthropology, that is, the fundamental science about man, contained in this book. In fact, in relatively few sentences, the ancient text sketches man as a person with the subjectivity characterizing the person.

“When God-Yahweh gives to the first man, formed in this way, the commandment concerning all the trees that grow in the `garden in Eden,’ above all the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, this adds the aspect of choice and self-determination (that is, of free will) to the outline of man described above. In this way, man’s image as a person endowed with his own subjectivity appears before us as finished in its first sketch.

“The concept of original solitude includes both self-consciousness and self-determination. The fact that man is `alone’ contains within itself this ontological structure, and at the same time, it indicates authentic understanding. Without this, we cannot correctly understand the next words, which constitute the prelude to the creation of the first woman, I want to make a help’…

“This man, about whom the account of the first chapter says that he has been created `in the image of God,’ is manifested in the second account as a subject of the covenant, that is, a subject constituted as a person, constituted according to the measure of `partner of the Absolute,’ inasmuch as he must consciously discern and choose between good and evil, between life and death.”[29]

Insofar as the human person has crossed the threshold of subjectivity by mastering self to name the animals and till the garden, he has actualized himself as Absolute as God is Absolute. He is “Partner of the Absolute.” Man has power over himself that he has now actualized and entered into subjectivity analogous to God’s triple Subjectivity. “Man is `alone:’ that is to say that through his own humanity, through what he is, he is at the same time set into a unique, exclusive, and unrepeatable relationship with God himself. The anthropological definition contained in the Yahwist text in its own way approaches the theological definition of man that we find in the first creation account (`Let us make man in our image and our likeness,’ Gen. 1, 26).”[30]

Aboriginal Historical Background: “Ernest Cassirer, dealing with language in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, showed how the history of human consciousness was not a progress from an initial condition of blank darkness toward wider and wider awareness of a pre-existent outer world, but the gradual extrication of a small, but a growing and an increasingly clear and self-determined focus of inner human experience from a dreamlike state of virtual identity with the life of the body and of its environment. Self-consciousness emerged from mere consciousness. It was only in the course of this process that the world of `objective’ nature, which we now observe around us, came into being. Man did not start on his career as a self-conscious being in the form of a mindless or thoughtless unity, confronting a separate, unintelligible objective world very like our own, about which he then proceeded to invent all manner of myths. He is not an onlooker, learning to make a less and less hopelessly inaccurate mental copy. He has had to wrestle his subjectivity out of the world of his experience by polarizing that world gradually into a duality. And this is the duality of objective-subjective or outer-inner, which now seems so fundamental because we have inherited it along with language. He did not start as an onlooker: the development of language enabled him to become one.

“Let us digress for a moment and examine the other, the received view, that the history of human thought is the history of an onlooker learning to make a better and better mental copy of an independent outer world. All positivist science is based on mathematics and physics; and modern physics originally set out to investigate nature as something existing independently of the human mind. But this was a postulate which it had more and more to abandon as time went on. At a quite early stage a distinction was made between `primary’ qualities, such as extension and mass, which were assumed to inhere in matter independently of the observer, and `secondary’ qualities like color, which depend on the observer. Roughly speaking, physics has ended by having to conclude that all qualities are `secondary’ in this sense, so that the whole world of nature as we actually experience it depends for its configuration on the mind and sense of man. It is what it is because we are what we are. Thus our common assumption that the main effort of human thinking has been to make a mental replica of a pre-existent outer world is incompatible even with the scientific approach to things out of which it arose. This assumption is indeed determined by science; but by a science of the day before yesterday.

“Early man did not observe nature in our detached way. He participated mentally and physically in her inner and outer process.”[31]

[1] Cappella Papale: Mass of the Conclave: Homily of His Eminence Card Joseph Ratzinger Dean of the Colleges of Cardinals, Vatican Basilica, Monday 18 April 2005.
[2] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Proceedings of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop, Dallas, Texas, The Pope John Center, (1991) 19-21.
[3] Ibid. 19-21.
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid. 21
[6] Ibid. 22.
[7] Karl Stern, “The Light From Woman,” Farrar Straus Giroux (1965) 91-105.
[8] “Descartes gives Augustinian inwardness a radical twist and takes it in a quite new direction, which has also been epoch-making. The change might be described by saying that Descartes situates the moral sources, within us…. The internalization wrought by the modern age, of which Descartes’s formulation was one of the most important and influential, is very different from Augustine’s. It does, in a very real sense, place the moral sources within us. Relative to Plato, and relative to Augustine, it brings about in each case a transposition by which we no longer see ourselves as related to moral sources outside of us, or at least not at all in the same way. An important power has been internalized…. The Cartesian soul frees itself not by turning away but by objectifying embodied experience. The body is an inescapable object of attention to it, as it were. It has to support itself on it to climb free of it…. But this different ontology, and hence different theory of knowledge, and thus revised conception of dualism cannot but result in a very different notion of the self-mastery wrought by reason. This cannot mean twhat it meant for Plato, that one’s soul is ordered by the Good which presides over the cosmic order which one attnds to and loves. For there is no such order. Being rational has not to mean something other than being attuned to this order. The Cartesian option is to see rationality, or the power of thought, as a capacity we have to construct orders which meet the standards demanded by knowledge, or understanding, or certainty;” Charles Taylor, “Sources of the Self,” Harvard University Press, (1989) 143-147.
[9] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point for Europe?” Ignatius (German 1991) 31-33.
[10] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 95-96.
[11] Benedict XVI, Regensburg, September 12, 2006.
[12] J. Ratzinger, “`In the Beginning…’” Eerdmans (1995) 10-14.
[13] J. Ratzinger, “Intro…” op. cit. 125 (1990 edition).
[14] Earlier (1988), Benedict said: “at the heart of the historico-critical method lies the effort to establish in the field of history a level of methodological precision which would yield conclusions of the same certainty as in the field of the natural sciences…. Now, if the natural science model is to be followed without hesitation, then the importance of the Heisenberg principle should be applied to the historical-critical method as well. Heisenberg has shown that the outcome of a given experiment is heavily influenced by the point of view of the observer. So much is this the case that both the observer’s questions and observations continue to change themselves in the natural course of events. When applied to the witness of history, this means that interpretation can never be just a simple reproduction of history’s being, `as it was.’ The word inter-pretation gives us a clue to the question itself: Every exegesis requires an `inter,’ an entering in and a being “inter’ or between things; this is the involvement of the interpreter himself. Pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction. It is not the uninvolved who comes to knowledge; rather, interest itself is a requirement for the possibility of coming to know…
“Here, then, is the question: How does one come to be interested, not so that the self drowns out the voice of the other, but in such a way that one develops a kind of inner understanding for things of the past, and ears to listen to the word they speak to us today?
“This principle which Heisenberg enunciated for experiments in the natural sciences has a very important application to the subject-object relationship. The subject is not to be neatly isolated in a world of its own apart from any interaction.” [14] J. Ratzinger, “Foundations and Approaches of Biblical Exegesis,” Origins February 11, 1988, Vol. 17: No. 35, b.

[15] J. Ratzinger, Ibid. 123-125.
[16] Werner Heisenberg, “Physics and Beyond, Encounters and Conversations,” Harper and Row, (1971) 147-148.
[17] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio #83.
[18] Andre Frossard, John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 66.
[19] “The modern idea of freedom is thus a legitimate product of the Christian environment; it could not have developed anywhere else. Indeed, one must add that it cannot be separated from this Christian environment and transplanted into any other system, as is shown very clearly today in the renaissance of Islam; 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, and hence this attempt was condemned to fail in this form. The construction of society in Islam is theocratic, and therefore monist and not dualist; dualism, which is the precondition for freedom, presupposes for its part the logic of the Christian thing.
In practice this means that it is only where the duality of Church and state, of the sacral and the political authority, remains maintained in some form or another that the fundamental pre-condition exists for freedom. Where the Church itself becomes the state freedom becomes lost. But also when the Church done away with as a pubic and publicly relevant authority, then too freedom is extinguished, because there the state once again claims completely for itself the justification of morality; in the profane post-Christian world it does not admittedly do this in the form of sacral authority but as an ideological authority – that means that the state becomes the party, and since there can no longer be any other authority of the same rank it once again becomes total itself. The ideological state is totalitarian; it must become ideological if it is not balanced by a free but publicly recognized authority of conscience. When this kind of duality does not exist the totalitarian system in unavoidable.
“With this the fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character”[19] J. Ratzinger, , “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy?” Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Crossroad (1988) 162-163.
[20] J. Ratzinger, “Milestones,” Ignatius (1997) 108.
[21] J. Ratzinger, “Faith and the Future,” Franciscan Herald Press, (1971) 50.
[22] John Paul II, “Veritatis Splendor,” #88.
[23] Ibid. 89.
[24] Ibid. 92.
[25] “I do not know any work in contemporary philosophy which addresses itself in an equally original way to this key topic of metaphysics and to an issue of such significance for ethics: the person. It is perhaps not since the time of Augustine that a philosopher as deeply committed to the truth and to the great philosophical tradition as Wojtyla has moved so far beyond a metaphysics of being and substance in general, and gone into the metaphysics of the personal being as actualized in consciousness and freedom And while Augustine’s profound insights into the nature of the person, deeply inspired by Plotinus, are inserted in theological contexts (notably in De Trinitate), The Acting Person is a `purely’ philosophical work which applies a rigorous phenomenological-philosophical method to its topic.”[25] Seifert then goes into the significant specifics: “The Book (`The Acting Person’) is full of discoveries which properly belong to its author. The philosophical originality of the work manifests itself especially in the deliberate attempt to overcome a one-sidedness in the philosophical approach to the person which has dominated philosophy since Descartes, but which actually goes back to Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. The one-sidedness in question lies in approaching the person primarily through knowledge and cognition. The book The Acting Person tries to correct this one-sidedness by viewing the person primarily as he manifests himself in action, and action as it reveals the person. This approach itself is highly original; so are those philosophical investigations in the book which elucidate the essence of freedom and of `man-acts.’” He goes on: “The book is free from a voluntaristic misinterpretation of the person which severs the link between will and reason, between action and truth. To be sure, the emphasis on the person as revealed through his free acts (actions) is intended to be more than merely complementary to the traditional modern emphasis on the person as a rational, knowing being. The thesis clearly seems to be that in acting as it involves free self-possession, self-determination, and self-governance, the person qua person realizes and shows himself most profoundly, especially in the morally good action.” (Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) As Philosopher And The Cracow/Lublin School of Philosophy,” Aletheia, Vol II (1981) 131-132).
Seifert then goes on to highlight Wojtyla’s unique work on the experience of the “I” (as being) by his particular use of phenomenology that transcends both Aristotelian and phenomenological traditions. Seifert suggests the thesis I am trying to deploy here, namely that “there is no real being in the world with which we stand in experiential contact and which is as rich as man; that, whatever else may be the object of human experience in some sense (Ideas and Ideals in the sense of the Platonic eide or Forms, religious objects of experience, etc.), these are not fully objects of experience and are not given to us in the wealth and diversification in which man is experienced by man. No being which is directly accessible to our `normal’ experience in the world, such as animals, plants, or works of art, etc., is of as rich a content as man.” (Ibid131-132). Seifert then goes on to show how Wojtyla’s work is the key to the purification of the subjectivistic deviation of the Enlightenment and its consequent dualism. He says: “For both in empiricism and in Kant we find an opposition between experience and cognition. Experience is reduced either to amorphous sense-impressions or to sense-perceptions (as formed by some basic laws of association or by the apriori forms of intuition: temporality and spatiality). Thinking seems then to `form’ experience, in fact to superimpose structures upon experience which deviate from it or at least originate in something else than experience (a transcendental structure of the ego).
[26] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 79-80.
[27] John Paul II, “Man and Woman He Created Them, A Theology of the Body” (henceforth TOB), DSP (2006) 5.4, 148.
[28] Ibid. 150.
[29] Ibid. 151.
[30] Ibid. 151.
[31] Owen Barfield, “The Rediscovery of Meaning and Other Essays,” Wesleyan University Press (1987) 16-17.

Lepanto Redux

The First Lepanto: 1571 A.D.

Two Culture Wars

1) the secularization of the “Res Publica Christiana,” a single society ruled jointly by mitre and sword (Pope and Emperor) that morphed into the nation-states in the 14-15th centuries; 2) Christendom and Islamic Fundamentalism.

History Leading up to the confrontation of the Islamic Ottoman Empire with the Holy Roman Empire, there was a breakdown in Christian life – a lived faith – certainly beginning in the split between East and West in 1054. Taking into account the lag time for consciousness to follow experience, the high medieval period of the great theologians, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure, reached its peak of the union of faith and reason in the 13th century. It then began to decline through Duns Scotus (as observed in Benedict’s Regensburg reference to his voluntarism being above intelligibility) into Occam’s[1] Nominalism (with its similar understanding of God’s a-metaphysical transcendence[2]) that was the severe decay of scholasticism. As evidenced below in footnotes 1 and 2, Nominalism of Occam evidenced the same irrationalism and fundamentalism as Islam. This then segued into modern Enlightenment rationalism as it had vitiated the positive aspects of the Protestant Reform. That rationalism that accompanied the loss of living faith in European culture in the 14the and 15th centuries and clashed with an aggressive Islam is symmetrical with our situation today

To our dismay, both the Reform and the Counter-Reform[3] beginning with the Council of Trent (1545) deployed this scholastic philosophy of William of Occam. It was not until the Second Vatican Council, John Paul II and Benedict XVI that the Church has deployed an epistemology (the metaphysics of the subject as a rational account of the Being as the acting (believing) “I”).

The Mission of Benedict XVI

As Benedict remarked on Polish Television in October 2005: “I forgot to mention the many documents that he left us -- 14 encyclicals, many pastoral letters, and others. All this is a rich patrimony that has not yet been assimilated by the Church. My personal mission is not to issue many new documents, but to ensure that his documents are assimilated, because they are a rich treasure, they are the authentic interpretation of Vatican II. We know that the Pope was a man of the Council, that he internalized the spirit and the word of the Council. Through these writings he helps us understand what the Council wanted and what it didn’t. This helps us to be the Church of our times and of the future.”[4]

Returning to the historical antecedents, with the victory over the Greco-Christian Constantinople in 1453 by the Turks, the breakdown or the Holy Roman Empire into the nation-states (Italy-Spain-France-etc. etc.), Moscow declaring itself to be the third Rome and thus presenting “itself as a new metamorphosis of the Holy Roman Empire, as a distinct form of Europe, which nevertheless remained tied to the West and was increasingly oriented toward it, even to the point that Peter the Great sought to turn Russia into a Western country”[5] - Islam attacked. The Catholic center had not held and the entire culture was splitting and disintegrating.

Enter the new Crusade galvanized by Pius V under the patronage of our Lady of the Rosary!

St. Pius V was the great reform pope after the Council of Trent. His greatest triumph though in international politics was the naval victory of the Catholic fleet against the Turks in the Battle of Lepanto. Victory was attributed to the aid of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Battle of LepantoThe greatest triumph of St. Pius V in international politics was the naval victory over the Turks at Lepanto (October 7, 1571) - a battle fought off the coast of Lepanto, Greece. This was the first major defeat of the Muslims. This victory was attributed to the help of the Blessed Virgin Mary, whose aid was invoked through praying the rosary. To commemorate this event, St. Pius V instituted on October 7 the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary and inserted the title”Help of Christians” in the Litany of the Virgin Mary.Historical details of the BattleThis Battle of Lepanto was a battle between the Catholic fleet over the fleet of the Ottoman Empire. The Catholic armada was said to consist of over 200 galleys, mostly Venetian and Spanish, and commanded by Don Juan of Austria. This Catholic armada engaged a Turkish fleet of 300 ships inside the entrance of the Gulf of Lepanto. The Turks suffered a crushing defeat in spite of their superior numbers. This the Catholics attributed to the aid of strength provided them through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary.


Georgios Rigas
N a f p a k t o s the Jewel of the Corinthian Gulf , where the famous Naval Battle of Lepanto took place on Oct 7 , 1571 .The Gulf of Lepanto is a long arm of the Ionian Sea running from east to west and separating the Pelloponnesian peninsula to the south from the Greek mainland to the north.
Jutting headlands divide the Gulf into two portions: the inner one, called the Gulf of Corinth today , ends with the isthmus of the same name , and the outer one is an irregular , funnel-shaped inlet now called the Gulf of Patras. For six weeks Ali Pasha's ships had been anchored inside the fortified harbor of Lepanto located in the gulf's inner portion, and on October 5 they began to move slowly westward past the dividing headlands into the outer Gulf of Patras. Still unsure of the enemy's position , Ali Pasha ordered his fleet to drop anchor for the night in a sheltered bay fifteen miles from the entrance to the inlet, where it remained all the next day anxiously awaiting the return of the scouting vessels. Around midnight Kara Kosh reached the anchorage with the news that the Christian fleet was then at Cephalonia , an Ionian island almost directly opposite and parallel to the mouth of the Gulf of Lepanto. With the first light of dawn the following morning , October 7 , 1571 , lookouts stationed high on a peak guarding the northern shore of the gulf's entrance signaled to Kara Kosh that the enemy was heading south along the coast and would soon round the headland into the gulf itself. The signal was relayed to Ali Pasha , who gave the order to weigh anchor. Everyone scrambled to battle stations and , as the fleet advanced , strained for the first sight of the enemy force.
The Christian fleet had started to move southward toward the Gulf of Lepanto. Now only fiteen miles of open water separated the forces of Islam and those of Christendom. The Turkish fleet , which numbered over two hundred and thirty galleys and one hundred auxiliary vessels , Ali Pasha commanded the center squadron , which faced the one commanded by Don Juan of Austria.
According to naval practice in those days , the moment two rival fleets finally assumed their respective battle formations , the leader of one would fire a piece of artillery as a challenge to fight , and the opponent would answer by firing two cannon to signify that he was ready to give battle. This day it was the Turks who made the challenge , and the sharp report from Ali Pasha's flagship was quickly followed by double round from Don Juan's artillery. At this time a large green silk banner , decorated with the Moslem crescent and holy inscriptions in Arabic , was hoisted on the Turkish flagship.
Now the setting was complete. The cross and the crescent fluttered aloft , symbolizing the two religions and the two hostile Civilizations of Christendom and Islam , whose forces were about to meet in the decisive battle of their long and bitter holy war. With the very first barrage many Turkish galleys were sunk and over a score badly damaged. After an hour of heavy fighting it was captured , the first Christian prize of the battle. The Christians were more than a match for them. In fact , they fought with such incredible ferocity that the battle soon became a slaughter. The defeat of the Turk's right wing was complete. Not one galley escaped. Those that were not sunk , burned , or grounded ashore were captured by their Christian opponents. The whole battle was over by four o'clock that afternoon , even though many of the Christian galleys were still giving chase to the Turkish ships and other solitary escaping Turkish vessels. The waters of the gulf for miles around were stained red from the great amount of blood shed that day and the sea was strewn with the bodies of both victors and vanquished. At sunset there were signs of approaching bad weather , Don Juan ordered the fleet to regroup quickly and head for a sheltered bay near the northwestern limits of the gulf. Around midnight they anchored in the bay and immediately all the fleet's leaders , with the exception of those badly wounded , came on board.
Don Juan's galley gatherd to congratulate him and celebrate the victory. The losses suffered by the Holy League fleet were between seven and eight thousand killed and about twice that number wounded , and only ten or fifteen ships had been sunk during the battle. These losses were comparatively light. Of the three hundred and thirty Turkish ships , fewer than fifty managed to escape and most of them were burned because they could not be made sufficiently seaworthy for further use; one hundred and seventeen Moslem galleys were captured intact and the rest were sunk or destroyed after they had been run ashore by the fleeing Turks. A large majority of the seventy-five thousand men who had entered the battle on the Moslem side were killed , five thousand were taken prisoner (with at least twice that number of Christian galley slaves liberated) , and only a few were able to escape either by ship or by swimming ashore. Turkey , for the first time in several centuries , was left without a navy.
Word of the fleet's splendid victory at Lepanto preceded Don Juan's return and quickly spread throughout Europe. The Republic of Venice was the first allied state to receive the happy news. The Doge quickly ordered a week of public celebrations and the seventh of October was declared a perpetual holiday in memory of the Battle of Lepanto. Hundreds of poems , songs , and paintings were produced all over Christendom in commemoration of the victory. All of Christendom took heart.
The famous Spanish writer , Miguel de Cervantes , who himself was wounded in the Battle of Lepanto , serving in the Spanish infantry , and who had also been a captive of the Barbary pirates until ransomed , recounted many of his experiences in the novel Don Quixote. The Battle of Lepanto marked the end of Turkish naval supremacy and the beginning of the Ottoman Empire's decline on both land and sea. Perhaps the most important result of the battle was its effect on men's minds: the victory had ended the myth that the Turks could not be beaten.
The Turkish fleet had 208 Galleys, 66 small ships; The Christian fleet about the same number. The crusaders lost 17 ships and 7,500 men; 15 Turkish ships were sunk and 177 taken, from 20,000 to 30,000 men disabled , and from 12,000 to 15,000 Christian rowers, slaves on the Turkish Gaileys, were delivered. Though this Victory did not accomplish all that was hoped for, since the Turks appeared the very next year with a fleet of 250 ships before Modon and Cape Matapan, and in vain offered battle to the Christians, it was of great importance as being the first great defeat of the infidels on the sea.

The Origin of Europe: Christian Culture

The Holy Roman Empire: Rome (313 A.D.: Constantine’s “conversion” [Pax Romana] A.D.) à Constantinople (shift from Rome in 800-880 A.D. with Charlemagne as emperor to Byantium with mission to the slavs [Cyril and Methodius]) à Moscow. In1453 A.D. Greek Constantinople conquered by the Islamic Turks finishing off Greco-Christian culture of Byzantium and passing it à to Renaissance humanists in Italy). A temporary galvanizing of Christendom after the victory at Lepanto attributed to Our Lady and the recitation of the Holy Rosary. However, Enlightenment rationalism begins in 1620 ending in à Breakdown of Christian Culture in the French Revolution (1789). As the United States developed a separation of Church and State as institutions, France separated religion and civic order (quite different from the United States) that now became secularized. The United States developed a “secularity” while Europe declined into “secularism” (no God or the Deist God of non-involvement with men). Reason loses it “evidential character” of experiencing God because of its rationalist character, i.e. only what is conceptual and sensibly measurable (positivism) is true and real. Marxism arises as the response to the injustice of the capitalistic injustice of the separation of capital and labor (failure to formulate Christian social doctrine in terms of the metaphysics of the subjectivity of the human person). The Church was tardy in formulating its doctrine of social justice (appearing for the first time explicitly in Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum”). Marxism economism collapses of its own weight because of its false and reductive anthropology. However, Benedict XVI, at this very moment, strongly warns that “The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that, although the fallacy of the Communist economy has been recognized, its moral and religious fallacy has not been addressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself, and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem, and left untreated, it can lead opt the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger – above and beyond the decline predicted by Spengler.”[6]

The Second Lepanto: 2006


George Weigel has published a piece entitled “Europe’s Two Culture Wars.”[7] These two culture wars in 2006 are similar to the situation in Europe preceding the Ottoman invasion in 1571. He calls them, “Culture War A,” and “Culture War B.” He writes: “The aggressors in Culture War A are radical secularists, motivated by what the legal scholar Joseph Weiler has dubbed `Christophobia.’ They aim to eliminate the vestiges of Europe’s Judeo-Christian culture from a post-Christian European Union by demanding same-sex marriage in the name of equality, by restricting free speech in the name of civility, and by abrogating core aspects of religious freedom in the name of tolerance.”[8]

“The Aggressors in Culture War B are radical and jihadist Muslims who detest the West, who are determined to impose Islamic taboos on Western societies by violent protest and other forms of coercion if necessary, and who see such operations as the first stage toward the Islamification of Europe – or, in the case of what they often refer to as al-Andalus, the restoration of the right order of things, temporarily reversed in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella.”[9]

He then proclaims: “The question Europe must face, but which much of Europe seems reluctant to face, is whether the aggressors in Culture War A have not made it exceptionally difficult for the forces of true tolerance and authentic civil society to prevail in Cultured War B.”[10]

This is the major thesis of Benedict. The entire force of his Regensburg talk is that Judeo-Christian faith had become reason as it became Hellenized. And becoming Hellenized was tantamount to becoming a subject and object of reason. This lifted the faith of Israel from a parochical and narrow cultic ethnic religion to universal religion where Yahweh was not just the God of the Jews, but the Creator of the cosmos and all that is in it. He was understood to be the God of the 72 peoples (Septuagint) that populated the earth. He was God like no other. Jesus Christ was not to fit in the pantheon of the mythical gods as Zeus or Jupiter, but was to be identified with the transcendent God of Greek Metaphysics, Platonic or Aristotelian. The Fathers of the Church opted to explain Christ as “homoousios” (one in being) with the Father, and Trinitarian theology and Christology became a work of transforming the being of the Greeks from substance into relation, and distinguishing person and nature.

The thesis of Benedict – that is epistemological - asserts that reason cannot be reason without faith.

Thesis: Reason lives in the Vision of Being: the “I” in the act of believing

"A critique of modern reason from within”

“There was a young fellow from Trinity/

Who took the square root of infinity/

But the number of digits/

Gave him the figits/

He dropped Math and took up Divinity."
(George Gamow)

Benedict XVI ended his Regensberg talk on September 12, 2006: “And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly….
“The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application….“We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons….
“Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions.

“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. At the same time… modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which it methodology has to be based.

“Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding….“The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time”

The Goal @ Regensburg: Save Reason

Précis: Reason has been narrowed (and damaged) in both Islam and the West. In Islam, by political theocracy. In the West, by a progressive rationalism that segued into the totalitarianism of scientific methodology and its concomitant relativism. Whatever is not reducible to theocratic ideology or measured external sensation is considered unreal. The Being of the “I” has simply not been an object of consideration, or has been camouflaged by consciousness (which, in reality, is the window of its disclosure). Since the “I” is the only Being that can be experienced in the moment of moral action without mediation of sensation nor concept, the moment has arrived for its recovery as absolute (and therefore universal) reality within the window of subjective experience where consciousness (not concept) is its noetic correlate. Such a move would introduce us into a hitherto lost realm of realism, and the recovery of reason without jettisoning the considerable progress that the Enlightenment from the 17th century has provided us. In the end, we could all talk – dialogue – with respect for legitimate pluralism bolstered and girded within a grounding of absolute being and its intrinsic rationality. In such an account, tolerance depends on the absolute truth, not on relativism.

The “Loss” of Reason (Wisdom) in the West

Dictatorship of Relativism:

Reason is built to experience and become conscious of Being. It has been dumbed down to a narrow experience of Being as sensible, measurable “facts” that are catalogued into infinite data bases. John Paul II said that “reason, rather than voicing the human orientation toward truth, has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of being. Abandoning the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned”[11] (my underline).

It is important to understand that there are two levels of experience: that of the external senses, and that of moral experience. John Paul II insisted that both levels of experience are, as experience, empirical. That is, they both are about reality and being, not about thought or emotion, etc. In his “The Acting Person,” he put it this way: “Man’s experience of anything outside or himself is always associated with the experience of himself, and he never experiences anything external without having at the same time the experience of himself.”[12] This means that the “I” of the person sensing experiences not only the thing perceived, but also the “I” in the act of perceiving. Therefore there is always a double access to the reality of being. In “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” John Paul II put it this way: The fact that human knowledge is primarily a sensory knowledge surprises no one. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any of the classical philosophers questioned this. Cognitive realism, both so-called naïve realism and critical realism, agrees that `nihil est in intellectu, quod prius non fuerit in sensu’ (`Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses’). Nevertheless, the limits of these `senses’ are not exclusively sensory. We know, in fct, that man not only knows colors, tones, and forms; he also knows objects globally – for example, not only all the parts that comprise the object `man’ but also man in himself (yes, man as a person). He knows, therefore, extrasensory truths, or, in other words, the transempirical. In addition, it is not possible to affirm that when something is transempirical it ceases to be empirical.

“It therefore possible to speak from a solid foundation about human experience, moral experience, or religious experience. And if it is possible to speak of such experiences, it is difficult to deny that, in the realm of human experience, one also finds good and evil, truth and beauty, and God.”[13]

This is an amazing statement on the level of philosophical discourse since it discloses what all of modern philosophy has been unable to disclose until reason is united to faith experience: that absolute values like the good and the true are experienced in the empirically existential singular. It is the fundamental thesis of the encyclical “Veritatis Splendor” that the human person experiences the absolute good in experiencing himself as imaging the God who alone is Absolute Good. “Veritatis Splendor” segues from #9 to #19 as follows: “There is only one who is good” (Mt. 19, 17); “If you wish to be perfect” (Mt. 19, 21); “Come, follow me” (Mt. 19, 21). "Let us rejoice and give thanks, for we have become not only Christians, but Christ (…). Marvel and rejoice." It then culminates in #21 identifying the human person with Christ Himself: “we have become Christ!’”

After the collapse of Communism, Josef Ratzinger published an interview[14] in 1993 in which he answered the question: “How do you analyze this divorce between faith and modernity? Ratzinger: “It is explained by the encroachment of relativism and subjectivism, an inevitable consequence of a world overwhelmed by the alleged certainties of natural or applied science. Only what can be tested and proved appears as rational. Experience has become the only criterion guaranteeing truth. Anything that cannot be subjected to mathematical or experimental verification is regarded as irrational.

“This restriction of reason has the result that we are left in almost total darkness regarding some essential dimensions of life. The meaning of man, the bases of ethics, the question of God cannot be subjected to rational experience, verified by mathematical formulae. And so they are left to subjective sensibility alone. This is serious because if, in a society, the bases of ethical behavior are abandoned to subjectivity alone, released from common motives for being and living, handed over to pragmatism, then it is man himself who is threatened.

“The great ideologies have been able to give a certain ethical foundation to society. But today, Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid, coherent view of man and his future. In the present situation of emptiness, there looms the terrible danger of nihilism, that is to say, the denial or absence of all fundamental moral reference for the conduct of social life. This danger becomes visible in the new forms of terrorism.”

In the West, this terrorism takes the form of the quiet elimination of the person as a subject and rendering him an object. The restriction of reason to the scientific method renders any and every other experience outside of the empirically measurable-sensible as “irrational” and obligatorily to be reduced. Every experience of the subject as Being must be reduced to the object. It must be rendered “legible to the computer.” In another place, Benedict had written: “The Book of the Apocalypse speaks of the enemy of God, the beast. The beast – the counterpower – does not bear a name but a number – 666 – the sees tells us. The beast is a number and translates into numbers. What that means is known to us who have experienced the world of the concentration camps: Its horror was due to the fact that the camps obliterated faces, annihilated history, and turned human beings into interchangeable parts of a huge machine. Human beings were identified by their functions, nothing more. Today we must fear that the concentration camps were only a prelude, and that the world, in accord with the universal law of the machine, may adapt itself completely to the organization of the concentration camps. For in a place where only functions exist, human beings can only be a kind of a function. The machines that human beings have constructed will stamp on people the sign of the machines. It is necessary to render human beings legible to the computer, and this is only possible if human beings are translated into figures. Everything else remaining in human beings becomes unimportant. Whatever is not a function is nothing. The beast is a number that transforms people into numbers. But God has names and calls us by name. He is a Person who seeks other persons. He has a countenance and he seeks our countenances. He has a heart, and he seeks our hearts. For him we are not functions of the great machine of the world; precisely those persons who have no automatic function are is people. To have a name means the possibility of being called, and it means communion. For this reason Christ is the true Moses, the fulfillment of the revelation of the name. He did not come to bring a new word as a name, but much more; he was himself the fact of God, he was the name of God; he was the possibility even for God to be called `you,’ to be called as a Person and as heart.”[15]

The Loss of the “Primal Evidential Character” (Experience of the “I”): The Loss of Reason (Nihilism) and The Abolition of Man:

In his “Turning Point for Europe,” Benedict said: “The problem of the modern period, that is, the moral problem of our age, consists in the fact that it has separated itself from this primal evidential character. In order genuinely to understand this process, we must describe it still more precisely. It is characteristic of thought marked by the natural sciences to posit a gulf between the world of feelings and the world of facts. Feelings are subjective, facts are objective. `Facts,’ that is, that which can be established as existing outside ourselves, are as yet only `facts,’ naked facticity. It belongs to the world of pure fable to attribute any qualities of a moral or aesthetic nature to the atom beyond its mathematical determinations. But the consequence of this reduction of nature to facts that can be completely grasped and therefore controlled is that no moral message outside ourselves can now come to us. Morality, just like religion, now belongs to the realm of the subjective; it has no place in the objective. If it is subjective, then it is something posited by man. It does not precede vis-à-vis us: we precede it and fashion it. This movement of `objectification,’ which permits us to `see through’ things and to control them, essentially knows no limits. Auguste Comte called for a physics of man: gradually, even the most difficult object of nature – man – must become scientifically comprehensible, that is, subordinate to the knowledge of the natural sciences. Thus one would see through man in precisely the same way as one sees through matter. Psychoanalysis and sociology are the fundamental ways to fulfill this demand. One can now (so it seems) explain the mechanisms whereby man came to believe that nature expresses a moral law. Naturally, the man who has been `seen through’ is no longer a man at all – it belongs to the essence of such knowledge that he, too, can be only pure facticity now: `If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world,’ writes Lewis. The theories of evolution, developed into a universal view of the world, confirm this optic and attempt at the same time to compensate for it. Naturally (so they say), everything has become what it is without any logic or, more correctly, through the sheer logic of facts.”[16]

Nihilism: Loss of Meaning
(Meaning comes from the experience of the self as real and good)

(The World is a Bad Place)


The Icon of Nihilism in the West: Drugs, the Revolt against “Facts”

Benedict XVI: “Drugs are a form of protest against facts. The one who takes them refuses to resign himself to the world of facts. He seeks a better world. Drugs are the result of despair in a world experienced as a dungeon of facts, in which man cannot hold out for long. Naturally, many other things are involved, too: the search for adventure; the conformity of joining in what others are doing; the cleverness of the dealers, and so on. But the core is a protest against a reality perceived as a prison. The `great journey’ that men attempt in drugs is the perversion of mysticism, the perversion of the human need for infinity, the rejection of the impossibility of transcending immanence, and the attempt to extend the limits of one’s own existence into the infinite. The patient and humble adventure of asceticism, which, in small steps of ascent, comes closer to the descending God, is replaced by magical power, the magical key of drugs – the ethical and religious path is replaced by technology. Drugs are the pseudo-mysticism of a world that does not believe yet cannot get rid of the soul’s yearning for paradise. Thus, drugs are a warning sign that points to [something] very profound: not only do they disclose a vacuum in our society, which that society’s own instruments cannot fill, but they also point to an inner claim of man’s nature, a claim that asserts itself in a perverted form if it does not find the correct answer.”[17]

The Icon of Nihilism (The Absence of Reason) in Islam: Terrorism, the Revolt Against a “Bad World”

Benedict XVI: “Terrorism’s point of departure is closely related to that of drugs: here, too, we find at the outset a protest against the world as it is and the desire for a better world. On the basis of its roots, terrorism is a moralism, albeit a misdirected one that becomes the brutal parody of the true aims and paths of morality. It is not by chance that terrorism had its beginning in the universities, and here once again in the milieu of modern theology, in young people who at the outset where strongly influenced by religion. Terrorism was at first a religious enthusiasm that had been redirected into the earthly realm, a messianic expectation transposed into political fanaticism. Faith in life after death had broken down, or at least had become irrelevant, but the criterion of heavenly expectation was not abandoned: rather, it was not applied to the present world. God was no longer seen as one who genuinely acts, but the fulfillment of his promises was demanded just as it had always been, and, indeed, with a new vigor. `God has no other arms but ours’ – this now meant that the fulfillment of these promises can and must be carried out by ourselves. Disgust at the intellectual and spiritual emptiness of our society, yearning for what is completely different, the claim to unconditional salvation without restrictions and without limit – this is, so to speak, the religious component in the phenomenon of terrorism, which gives it the impetus of a passion focused on a totality, its uncompromising character and the claim to be idealistic. All this becomes so dangerous because of the decisively earthly character of the messianic hope: something unconditional is demanded of what is conditional; something infinite is demanded of what if finite. This inherent contradiction indicates the real tragedy of this phenomenon in which man’s great vocation becomes the instrument of the great lie.”

“The false dimension in terrorism’s promise was, however, concealed, as far as the average participant was concerned, by connecting the religious expectation to modern intellectuality. This means, first, that all traditional moral criteria are dragged before the tribunal of positivistic reason, `called into question’ and `seen through’ as unproven. Morality does not lie in Being but in the future. Man must devise it himself. The sole moral value that exists is the future society in which everything that does not exist now will be fulfilled. Thus morality in the present consists in working for this future society. Accordingly, the new moral criterion states: `Moral’ is what serves to bring about the new society…

“It is only on closer inspection that one sees the cloven hoof in its entirety and hears Mephistopheles sneering. `“Moral” is whatever creates the future:’ on this criterion, even murder can be `moral;’ even the inhuman must serve on the path to humanity. Fundamentally, this is the same logic as that which says that even embryos may be sacrificed for `genuinely high-quality scientific results.’ And the concept of freedom here is the same as that which teaches us that it must be a part of a woman’s freedom to get rid of a child that stands in the way of her self-realization.”[18]

Islam

Benedict XVI ended his discourse in Regensburg with: “The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur -- this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.
“Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary tot e nature of God,’ said Manuel II… It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.”

First, it is critical to understand that “What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational…. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason.”[19] And the deep reason for this is reason’s need for being in its absoluteness of which it is deprived when it is able only to access being in sensible perception. The unique source of reason’s unmediated access to Being as absolute is the “I” of the believer in his act of self-transcendence, of going out of himself as gift to the Revealer. Such an act reveals not only who the Revealer is, but who also is the believer.

John Paul II said it like this: “The surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence. This is how we should understand this `commitment’ which you mentioned in your question and which presents itself as the solution to the very problem of existence or to the personal drama of human existence. It is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’
“When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person.”[20]

Islam is “Faith” as Conceptual Ideology, not Anthropology: Theocratic Fundamentalism

The reality is that Islam does not live faith as an anthropological act. It is a conceptual act that leads to prayer and fasting, but this worship more than faith. John Paul II suggested this when he said: “Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Koran, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.

“Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Koran, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. There is als0 mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.”[21]

This is the reason that the Koran is recited, not read. David Burrell remarks: “We have already seen how the Qur’an is not so much read as recited in the Muslim community, so that verses chanted and heard in a recurring fashion have the effect of shaping lives by offering spontaneous phrases with which to guide action. And quite consciously so, since the term Qur’an means `a reciting,’ and so it was delivered to Muhammad, who was then told often enough to recite what he heard. Western writers cannot resist the expression `sacramental’ when remarking on the role which recitation of the Qur’an plans in Muslim life, for `reciting of the sacred words is itself a participation in God’s speech.”[22] In this regard, Sandro Magister’s remark that “the Koran is not the equivalent of the Christian Scriptures: it is the equivalent of Christ” is apposite.

Since Christian faith is an obedience of self-gift, and therefore, free, it is significant that faith in Islam is not free. And the result of this is the failure to have any notion of true “secularity” based on the “consciousness” of the self-transcending believer and the consequent dualism of Church and State as consequence. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger had this comment:

“The modern idea of freedom is thus a legitimate product of the Christian environment; it could not have developed anywhere else. Indeed, one must add that it cannot be separated from this Christian environment and transplanted into any other system, as is shown very clearly today in the renaissance of Islam;

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, and hence this attempt was condemned to fail in this form. The construction of society in Islam is theocratic, and therefore monist and not dualist; dualism, which is the precondition for freedom, presupposes for its part the logic of the Christian thing.

In practice this means that it is only where the duality of Church and state, of the sacral and the political authority, remains maintained in some form or another that the fundamental pre-condition exists for freedom. Where the Church itself becomes the state freedom becomes lost. But also when the Church done away with as a pubic and publicly relevant authority, then too freedom is extinguished, because there the state once again claims completely for itself the justification of morality; in the profane post-Christian world it does not admittedly do this in the form of sacral authority but as an ideological authority – that means that the state becomes the party, and since there can no longer be any other authority of the same rank it once again becomes total itself. The ideological state is totalitarian; it must become ideological if it is not balanced by a free but publicly recognized authority of conscience. When this kind of duality does not exist the totalitarian system in unavoidable.

“With this the fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character.”[23]

Self-Hatred in the West: “Debonair Nihilism”[24]

Experiencing the “Good”

Being Loved: “Grace”

The experience of the value good is discovered in the experience of the “I” when there is self-transcendence as self-gift. This is the prime moral act that is Christian faith. The whole self must be given. The experience of that act is the consciousness that accrues to it of the good ness of the self as image of the only One Who is Goodness itself, God. Only God is good. Hence, the value good is not arrived at by reasoning and less by deduction, metaphysical or otherwise, but by direct unmediated experience of the self in the act of going out of self.

This experience must be anticipated by the experience of being loved by God and by parents. If this is not given, then the person lacks identity, and ultimately the impossibility of self-mastery to begin the process of becoming good by free self-governance. This has profound psychological presuppositions and ramifications.

In this regard, Benedict XVI says: “the root of man’s joy is the harmony he enjoys with himself. He lives in this affirmation. And only one who can accept himself can also accept the thou, can accept the world. The reason why an individual cannot accept the thou, cannot come to terms with him, is that he does not like his own I and, for that reason, cannot accept a thou.

“Something strange happens here. We have seen that the inability to accept one’s I leads to the inability to accept a thou. But how does one go about affirming, assenting to, one’s I? The answer may perhaps be unexpected: We cannot do so by our own efforts alone. Of ourselves, we cannot come to terms with ourselves. Our I becomes acceptable to us only if it has first become acceptable to another I. We can love ourselves only if we have first been loved by someone else. The life a mother gives to her child is not just physical life; she gives total life when she takes the child’s tears and turns them into smiles. It is only when life has been accepted and is perceived as accepted that it becomes also acceptable. Man is that strange creature that needs not just physical birth but also appreciation if he is to subsist. This is root of the phenomenon known as hospitalism. When the initial harmony of our existence has been rejected, when that psycho-physical oneness has been ruptured by which the `Yes,’ it is good that you are alive’ sinks, with life itself, deep into the core of the unconscious – then birth itself is interrupted; existence itself is not completely established….

The Cross: “The Cross is the approbation of our existence, not in words, but in an act so completely radical that it caused God to become flesh and pierced this flesh to the quick; that, to God, it was worth the death of his incarnate Son. One who is so loved that the other identifies his life with this love and no longer desires to live if he is deprived or it; one who is loved even unto death – such a one knows that he is truly loved. But if God so loves us, then we are loved in truth…. Life is worth living.”[25]

Loving: The Gift of Self

In his habilitation thesis: “Evaluation of the Possibility of Constructing the Christian Ethic on the Basis of the System of Max Scheler” John Paul II establishes in his first chapter (“The Ethical Ideal and the Principle of the `Sequela Christi’”) that one experiences the perfection of the good in oneself by the action of following Christ. He develops this idea in “Veritatis Splendor” when he proposes from Scripture the encounter of the Christ with the Rich Young Man. The youth calls Christ, “Good Master” to which Christ responds “There is only one who is good” (Mt. 19, 17). “Only God can answer the question about what is good, because he is the Good itself.”[26] Then, “If you wish to be perfect” (Mt. 19, 21), live the commandments. That done, what is still lacking consists in: “Come, follow me” (Mt. 19,21). The action, interior and exterior, of following Christ “is thus the essential and primordial foundation of Christian morality” (VS #19). John Paul says: “Following Christ is not an outward imitation, since it touches man at the very depths of his being. Being a follower of Christ means becoming conformed to him who became a servant even to giving himself on the Cross (Phil. 2, 5-8). Then, “having become one with Christ, the Christian becomes a member of his Body, which is the Church (cf. 1 Cor. 12, 13, 27). By the work of The Spirit, Baptism radically configures the faithful to Christ in the Paschal Mystery of death and resurrection; it `clothes him’ in Christ (cf. Ga. 3, 27): `Let us rejoice and give thanks,’ exclaims Saint Augustine speaking to the baptized, `for we have become not only Christians, but Christ (…) Marvel and rejoice: we have become Christ!’” (VS #21).
The point: Only the one who – as image of God Who alone is good - follows Christ – the perfect image of the Father (Col. 1, 15) - in action, interiorly and exteriorly, experiences being good.

If, in the West, we are working only on the level of sensible experience and reasoning abstraction, and not making the gift of self, then the population is mired in what the medieval theologians called acedia: “ kind of sadness… more specifically, a sadness in view of the divine good in man. This sadness because of the God-given ennobling of human nature causes inactivity, depression, discouragement… The opposite of acedia is not industry and diligence, but magnanimity and that joy which is a fruit of the supernatural love of God. Not only can acedia and ordinary diligence exist very well together,; it is even true that the senselessly exaggerated workaholism of our age is directly traceable to acedia, which is a basic characteristic of the spiritual countenance of precisely this age in which we live…. This sorrow is a lack of magnanimity; it lacks courage for the great things that are proper to the nature of the Christian. It is a kind of anxious vertigo that befalls the human individual when he becomes aware of the height to which God has raised him. One who is trapped in acedia has neither the courage nor the will to be as great as he really is. He would prefer to be less great n order thus to avoid the obligation of greatness. Acedia is a perverted humility; it will not accept supernatural goods because they are, by their very nature, linked to a claim on him who receives them.”[27]

Benedict XVI said, with regard to this pernicious self-hatred:

“Western self-hatred… is nothing short of pathological. It is commendable that the West is trying to be more open, to be more understanding of the values of outsiders, but it has lost all capacity for self-love. All that it sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure. What Europe needs is a new self-acceptance, a self-acceptance that is critical and humble, if it truly wishes to survive.

“Multiculturalism, which is so opassinately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial, a flight from one’s own thongs. Multiculturalism teaches us to approach the sacred things of others with respect, but we can do this only if we ourselves are not estranged from the sacred, from God….

“Unless we embrace our own heritage of the sacred we will not only deny the identity of Europe. We will also fail in providing a service to others to which they are entitled. To the other cultures of the world, there is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West. They are convinced that a world without God has no future. Multiculturalism itself thus demands that we return once again to ourselves.”[28]

Conclusion: There is truth, and it is absolute. That Truth is the Incarnate God Who is Jesus Christ. The Absolute Good is the divine Person Jesus Christ Who has taken the total humanity of Jesus of Nazareth as His very Self. Jesus Christ, as Totally God and totally man, must be understood on two levels. Benedict said on October 4, 2006: “We must never lose sight of either of these two elements, since if we only proclaim the heavenly dimension of Jesus , we run the risk of making him an ethereal and evanescent being, while if we only recognize his concrete role in history, we run the risk of neglecting his divine dimension, which is his proper description”[29] He went on: “Our knowledge of Jesus is in need above all of a living experience: Another person’s testimony is certainly important, as in general the whole of our “Christian life begins with the proclamation that comes to us from one or several witnesses. But we ourselves must be personally involved in an intimate and profound relationship with Jesus.” And finally: “Adherence to Jesus can be lived and witnessed even without doing sensational works.”[30]

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Only the experience of Christ in prayer, concretely praying the rosary through our Lady will give us this experience of Christ that will restore reason and make us capable of dialogue and the creation of a world culture based on the human person, the prototype of whom is Jesus Christ.

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[1] “What, in fact, is the essential characteristic of Occam[s thought, and of Nominalism in general, but a radical empiricism, reducing all being to what is perceived, which empties out, with the idea of substance, all possibility of real relations between beings, as well as the stable subsistence of any of them, and ends by denying to the real any intelligibility, conceiving God himself only as a Protean figure impossible to apprehend?” Bouyer concludes to the concrete consequences: “(I)t follows that grace, to remain such, that is, the pure gift of God, must always be absolutely extrinsic to us; also, faith, to remain ours, so as not to fall into that externalism that would deprive man of all that is real in religion, must remain shut up within us. For to suppose that dogmas defined by some external authority, that rites whose content surpasses in any way our personal experience, could be essential to our faith would be to alienate us from ourselves, to place our life in something that does not, cannot, concern us, condemned, as it is, to be not only external but totally foreign to us. In such a system, every being is doomed to remain a monad impenetrable by any other or else become a prey to confusion to the dissolution, pure and simile, of its individuality;” Louis Bouyer, “The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism,” Scepter (original 1956) 184-185.
[2] “Inside such a framework, the sovereignty of God is no more than a total independence of all that could be considered as laws of reality, whether the moral law or the logical principles indispensable to thought. To say that God is all-powerful would amount to saying that he could make good evil and vice versa, making a being other than it is; otherwise, it means nothing at all. For if being is no more than a word without content, infinite being cannot be other than the indefinite, pure and simple. Under such conditions, it seems quite natural that God may `declare just’ the sinner, leaving him as much a sinner as before; that he may predestine some to damnation, just as he predestines others to salvation. If he did not do so, nothing would distinguish him from us; his transcendent sovereignty would disappear. Doubtless he could remain greater than us, but within the same order. He would no longer be sovereign” (emphasis mine); Ibid 185-186.
[3] “The whole tragedy of Protestantism can be grasped only when it is borne in mind that the first Catholics to attempt its refutation, being themselves confined in the same framework of ideas as the Reformers, could not oppose them without rejecting the truth contained in what they affirmed. There was no escape from these dilemmas: either a grace that saves us by itself and so saves us without affecting us, or a grace that saves us with our independent collaboration, so that, properly speaking, it is we who have to save ourselves; either a faith that is faith in our faith, in our direct experience, and ultimately in it alone, or a faith that is but a pure and simple withdrawal from ourselves; either a God who is all, while man and the world are literally nothing, or man and a world having real powers and value, though limited, and a God who is no more than the first in a series, a creature magnified, but not the creator; … The debate between Luther and Erasmus is one of the first and more remarkable examples of this impasse. It shows up clearly the inability of Catholic thinkers contemporary with the Reformers, both prisoners of a vitiated philosophy, to admit what was positive in the Reformation and to lay bare the root of its errors…. (A) prisoner, like Luther, of the nominatlist categories, Erasmus was incapable of formulating clearly the true answer: that grace is grace, a pure gift of God, not in giving us nothing real but in giving us, insofar as we remain dependent on it, the reality we are incapable of acquiring by ourselves. Far from seeing this, he tried to salvage the free will of man without recourse to grace… It is exactly the same as Luther’s [view], except that it chooses the opposite horn of the dilemma;” Ibid. 187-188.
[4] October 16, 2005.
[5] Benedict XVI, “Europe and Its Discontents,” First Things, January 2006, 17.
[6] Ibid. 20.
[7] G. Weigel, Commentary May 2006.
[8] Ibid 30.
[9] Ibid
[10] Ibid
[11] John Paul II, “Fides et Ratio,” #5.
[12] Karol Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” D. Reidel Publishing Co. (1979) 3.
[13] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 33-34.
[14] J. Ratzinger and Henri Ting, “And Marxism Gave Birth to… NIHILISM,” Catholic World Report, January 1993, 52-55.
[15] J. Ratzinger, “The God of Jesus Christ,” Franciscan Herald Press (1979) 15-16.
[16] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point for Europe?” Ignatius (German 1991) 31-33.
[17] Ibid 20.
[18] Ibid. 21-22.
[19] J. Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy?” Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Crossroad (1988) 218.
[20] Andre Frossard and John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 67.
[21] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 92-93.
[22] David Burrell, “Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions,” UNDP (1993) 180.
[23] J. Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation….” Op. cit. 162-163.
[24] Weigel remarked: “Europe’s soul-withering skepticism goes hand in hand with what Alan Bloom once styled `debonair nihilism’ – a nihilism that , in its indifference to everything beyond the imperial self, has made its own contribution to the continent’s unwillingness to create the future by creating successor generations;” “Europe’s Two Culture Wars,” op. cit. 34.
[25] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 79-81.
[26] John Paul II, “Veritatis Splendor” #9.
[27] Josef Pieper, “On Hope,” Ignatius (1986) 54-56.
[28] Benedict XVI, “Europe and Its Discontents” op. cit. 21-22.
[29] Zenit. Vatican City, Oct. 4, 2006.
[30] Ibid