“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."
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 talk:
“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….
“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."
Let us go by parts:
“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."
Let us go by parts:
A) “The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly.”[1] The critique of modern reason is not rejection of the “insights of the modern age.”
What are those insights according to Benedict XVI? They are: 1) the relation of faith and modern science; 2) a new perspective on the relation of Church and State; and 3) “a new definition of the relation between faith and world religions.”
The common denominator of the three insights is the shift from the epistemological horizon of the object to the subject.
On December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI opened his Christmas Address to the Roman Curia with the words of St. Augustine: Expergiscere, homo: quia pro te Deus factus est homo - Wake up, O man! For your sake God became man."[2]
With some imagination, we can see this as the call to connect the reality of the Second Vatican Council with the positive elements of the Enlightenment. Deep into the talk, he mentioned that “three circles of questions had formed which then, at the time of the Second Vatican Council, were expecting an answer. First of all, the relationship between faith and modern science had to be redefined. Furthermore, this did not only concern the natural sciences but also historical science for, in a certain school, the historical-critical method claimed to have the last word on the interpretation of the Bible and, demanding total exclusivity for its interpretation of Sacred Scripture, was opposed to important points in the interpretation elaborated by the faith of the Church.
Secondly, it was necessary to give a new definition to the relationship between the Church and the modern State that would make room impartially for citizens of various religions and ideologies, merely assuming responsibility for an orderly and tolerant coexistence among them and for the freedom to practice their own religion.
Thirdly, linked more generally to this was the problem of religious tolerance - a question that required a new definition of the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions. In particular, before the recent crimes of the Nazi regime and, in general, with a retrospective look at a long and difficult history, it was necessary to evaluate and define in a new way the relationship between the Church and the faith of Israel.”[3]
B) “Broadening our concept of reason and its application:”
The acting person experiences self directly, without intermediary of sensible perception or concept (intentional knowing). The persistent difficulty has been the confusion of the self as Being with the self as consciousness. There is a parallel confusion between experiencing the self as Being and yet calling it consciousness, and experiencing reality as the self-Being that senses, and calling it the “thing-perceived.”
The thesis is to accept the insight of modernity that the locus of reality is the “I” and that its perception of the world is really subjective. The task of theology and philosophy is to purify this insight with the corrective that the “I” is not consciousness but real being disclosed by consciousness (the key to forming the experience of the “I” in act and potency in the moment of self-determination), and that sensible perception is subjective with regard to sensible qualities without forfeiting realism. By that is meant, the experience of the “I” as real being grounds the conviction of reality that we give to the object of sensation. The sense organs do not conduct real existence to reason but the perception in the organ of the “I” that is an experience that the “I” has of itself. The subject, in reality, experiences itself sensing through the organ. The reality of the sensed object comes from the reality of the “I” experiencing itself in the act of sensing (to be developed in a subsequent blog).
If this be true, then there are two kinds of error in describing this: 1) that there is a one to one correlation between the sensible thing in material reality and perception. That is, what you see is what you get. This is consistently overthrown by the obviousness that it is not true. We most obviously do not experience sensible things as they are. What we sense to be sound and sight are reverberations of quantified waves and particles, not sound and sight. The colors of the rainbow that we see are not in the moisture as colors, nor the blue in the gaseous atmosphere of the sky as blue. The macro-world of Newtonian physics had to be (reluctantly) revamped for the micro-indeterminate world of atomic theory and quantum physics. In modern physics, “the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically [sensibly] verifiable” had to be overcome. Reality was not being given in measuring the sensible as sensed.
B) “Broadening our concept of reason and its application:”
The acting person experiences self directly, without intermediary of sensible perception or concept (intentional knowing). The persistent difficulty has been the confusion of the self as Being with the self as consciousness. There is a parallel confusion between experiencing the self as Being and yet calling it consciousness, and experiencing reality as the self-Being that senses, and calling it the “thing-perceived.”
The thesis is to accept the insight of modernity that the locus of reality is the “I” and that its perception of the world is really subjective. The task of theology and philosophy is to purify this insight with the corrective that the “I” is not consciousness but real being disclosed by consciousness (the key to forming the experience of the “I” in act and potency in the moment of self-determination), and that sensible perception is subjective with regard to sensible qualities without forfeiting realism. By that is meant, the experience of the “I” as real being grounds the conviction of reality that we give to the object of sensation. The sense organs do not conduct real existence to reason but the perception in the organ of the “I” that is an experience that the “I” has of itself. The subject, in reality, experiences itself sensing through the organ. The reality of the sensed object comes from the reality of the “I” experiencing itself in the act of sensing (to be developed in a subsequent blog).
If this be true, then there are two kinds of error in describing this: 1) that there is a one to one correlation between the sensible thing in material reality and perception. That is, what you see is what you get. This is consistently overthrown by the obviousness that it is not true. We most obviously do not experience sensible things as they are. What we sense to be sound and sight are reverberations of quantified waves and particles, not sound and sight. The colors of the rainbow that we see are not in the moisture as colors, nor the blue in the gaseous atmosphere of the sky as blue. The macro-world of Newtonian physics had to be (reluctantly) revamped for the micro-indeterminate world of atomic theory and quantum physics. In modern physics, “the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically [sensibly] verifiable” had to be overcome. Reality was not being given in measuring the sensible as sensed.
Benedict has remarked,
“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 multitudes of aspects which depend on the position of the observer [the “I”] 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
“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 multitudes of aspects which depend on the position of the observer [the “I”] 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.’"
Benedict offers three stages of experience that must be taken into account to achieve realism:
1) Empirical experience: Nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu (“Nothing in the mind except through the senses”): “the immediate and uncritical perception by the senses that is common to all of us. We see the sun rise; we see it set. We see a train pass. We see colors… this manner of experience is, certainly, the beginning of all knowledge, but it is always superficial and inexact. And therein lies its danger.”[4] The naiveté of this kind of experience – exclusively – does not yield reality. To be truly real, reason must prevail over immediate experience. “Modern natural science is built on the rejection of pure empiricism, on the superiority of thinking over seeing.”[5] Therefore, “while `empirical experience’ is the necessary starting point of all human knowledge, it becomes false if it does not let itself be criticized in terms of knowledge already acquired and so open the door to new experiences.”[6]
Benedict offers three stages of experience that must be taken into account to achieve realism:
1) Empirical experience: Nihil in intellectu nisi in sensu (“Nothing in the mind except through the senses”): “the immediate and uncritical perception by the senses that is common to all of us. We see the sun rise; we see it set. We see a train pass. We see colors… this manner of experience is, certainly, the beginning of all knowledge, but it is always superficial and inexact. And therein lies its danger.”[4] The naiveté of this kind of experience – exclusively – does not yield reality. To be truly real, reason must prevail over immediate experience. “Modern natural science is built on the rejection of pure empiricism, on the superiority of thinking over seeing.”[5] Therefore, “while `empirical experience’ is the necessary starting point of all human knowledge, it becomes false if it does not let itself be criticized in terms of knowledge already acquired and so open the door to new experiences.”[6]
In the Regensburg talk, he refers to this correction of “empirical experience:” “This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence, the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity.”
Of course, what he is beginning to introduce here is the need for a higher experience and consciousness in order that reason be recovered and lifted from the under the weight of the positivistic data bases under which it wilts.
2) Experimental experience: Nihil in sensu nisi per intellectum ("Nothing in the senses except through the mind"): “The senses experience nothing if no question has been raised, if there is no preceding command from the intellect without which sensory experience cannot take place. Experimentation is possible only if natural science has elaborated an intellectual presupposition in terms of which it control nature and on the basis of which it can bring about new experiences. In other words, it is only when the intellect sheds light on sensory experience that this sensory experience has any value as knowledge and that experiences thus become possible.”[7]
2) Experimental experience: Nihil in sensu nisi per intellectum ("Nothing in the senses except through the mind"): “The senses experience nothing if no question has been raised, if there is no preceding command from the intellect without which sensory experience cannot take place. Experimentation is possible only if natural science has elaborated an intellectual presupposition in terms of which it control nature and on the basis of which it can bring about new experiences. In other words, it is only when the intellect sheds light on sensory experience that this sensory experience has any value as knowledge and that experiences thus become possible.”[7]
Benedict tellingly here sheds light on the epistemological shift to the entrance of the subject in the physical experiments of modern physics. He remarked:
“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 not 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 pure 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 quire 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.”[8]
C) “Reason and Faith Come Together in a New Way”
3) Existential experience: The experience of the “I” as gift: When one enters into the experiment in order to control material reality, it kills in order to know. Benedict said: “L. Kolakowski has made the interesting observation that the way in which the natural sciences deal with nature is actually a form of necrophilia. They dissect it as though it were a dead object and, in this form, are able to control it. If we apply this thought also to the human sciences, we might conclude that their way of dealing with human beings is likewise a kind of necrophilia”[9] – a putting to death of the object. Benedict quotes Von Balthasar: “In `existential experience,’… the decisive factor is not control but letting oneself be controlled and the new way of `going where one would rather not go’ that is thus made possible. An integral part of this latter process is acceptance of the experience of nonexperience, which is the only way on e can reach a higher level.”[10]
Quoting “Happy are the pure in heart: they shall see God” (Mt. 5, 8), Benedict says:
“The possibility of `seeing’ God, that is, of knowing him at all, depends on one’s purity of heart, which means a comprehensive process in which man becomes transparent, in which he does not remain locked in upon himself, in which he learns to give himself and, in doing so, becomes able to see. From the perspective of Christian faith, we might say that religious experience in its most exalted Christian form bears the mark of the Cross. It embraces the basic model of human existence, the transcendence of self. The Cross redeems, it enables us to see. And now we discover that the structure of which we are speaking is not just structure; it reveals content as well.” [11]
“The possibility of `seeing’ God, that is, of knowing him at all, depends on one’s purity of heart, which means a comprehensive process in which man becomes transparent, in which he does not remain locked in upon himself, in which he learns to give himself and, in doing so, becomes able to see. From the perspective of Christian faith, we might say that religious experience in its most exalted Christian form bears the mark of the Cross. It embraces the basic model of human existence, the transcendence of self. The Cross redeems, it enables us to see. And now we discover that the structure of which we are speaking is not just structure; it reveals content as well.” [11]
Let me try to clarify the above. Perception is about really existing things. But the perception itself is subjective. The colors that we see "in" the rainbow are not "in" the rainbow. They are the product of the structure and physiology of the eye that are acted on by refracted light. We do not grasp the real existence of color "out there" where the rainbow appears. Through our perception, we grasp color, not the real existent as real existent. We have no "experience" of real existent by our perception of color.
Bishop George 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753, also known as Bishop Berkeley, was an influential Irish philosopher whose primary philosophical achievement is the advancement of what has come to be called subjective idealism, summed up in his dictum, "Esse est percipi" ("To be is to be perceived"). He is classical example of Enlightenment subjectivism following on the heels of the Cartesian stampede into the "cogito ergo sum." However, in line with Benedict's
"the positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly," let me offer the insight of Berkeley that can be of value to us. In his later philosophical development, Berkeley clarified the meaning of "exist." A.A. Luce comments: "In the case of the subject, he says, existence is activity: I see the car; I exist. Exist means am perceiving. In the case of the object existence is passivity: I see the car; the car exists. Exists means is perceived. In both cases exist is said from within the perceptual situation, and has no meaning outside that situation;" ("Berkeley's New Priniciple Completed," New Studies in Berkeley's Philosophy, Holt, Rinehard and Winston [1966] 4).
Luce makes the case that Berkeley's completed principle made the case that "exist may mean to perceive or to be perceived, to be able to perceive or to be able to be perceived." What is suggested in the "completion" is that there is a real experience of the "I" as perceiver, and therefore as being. Wojtyla remarked at the very beginning of "The Acting Person:" "Man's expereience of anything outside of 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" (3). This suggests that the realism of the external sensible world is not given to me directly through the external senses. It is given to me in the experience of myself as perceiving the external sensible world. The realism of the extra-mental existent comes from the experience of the "I" in the self-determining act of perception.
John Henry Newman suggests this in his reference to causality. He remarks that we do not perceive causality through sensible perception. We perceive it only internally when the "I" masters itself, wills to act, and finds itself thwarted in the execution of said act. "(T)he notion of causation is one of the first lessons which he [the wayward boy] learns from expereince, that experiences limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will [discipling parents]. It is the notion of power combined with a purpose and an end. Physical phenomena, as such, are without sense; and experience teaches us nothing about physical phenomena as causes" ("A Grammar of Assent" UNDP [1992] 70). In a word, it is the experience of the acting self in the moment of self-transcendence [faith] that the reality of Being is experienced in its supreme realism, unmediated by either sensation or abstract concept. This is the expansion of reason to the fullness of reality and its salvation from the dungeon of "facts."
Benedict then offers the superb pericope of the encounter between Christ and the Samaritan woman of John 4. Quoting in part, it runs:
“In the next stage, the woman’s full attention has been attracted to the subject of a thirst for life. She no longer asks for something, for water or for any other single thing, but for life, for herself. This explains the apparently totally unmotivated interpolation by Jesus: `Go and call your husband!’ (Jn. 4, 16), It is both intentional and necessary, for her life as a whole, with all its thirst, is the true subject here. As a result, there comes to light the real dilemma, the deep-seated waywardness, of her existence: she is brought face to face with herself. In general, we can reduce what is happening to the formula: one must know oneself as one really is if one is to know God. The real medium, the primordial experience of all experiences, is that man himself is the place in which and through which he experiences God. Admittedly, the circle could also be closed in the opposite direction: it could be said that it is only by first knowing God that one can properly know oneself.
“The woman must come first to the knowledge of herself, to the acknowledgement of herself. For what she makes now is a kind of confession: [“I have no husband”] a confession in which, at last, she reveals herself unsparingly. Thus a new transition has occurred –to preserve our earlier terminology, a transition from empirical and experimental to `experiential’ experience, to `existential experience.’ The woman stands face to face with herself. It is no longer a question now of something but of the depths of the I itself and, consequently, of the radical poverty that is man’s I-myself, the place where this I is ultimately revealed behind the superficiality of the something. From this perspective, we might regard the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman as the prototype of catechesis. It must lead from the something to the I. Beyond every something it must ensure the involvement of man himself, of this particular man. It must produce self-knowledge and self-acknowledgment so that the indigence and need of man’s being will be evident.
“But let us return to the biblical text! The Samaritan woman has achieved this radical confrontation with her own self. In the moment in which this occurs, the question of all questions arises always and of necessity; the question about oneself becomes a question about God. It is only apparently without motivation but in reality inevitable that the woman should ask now: How do things stand with regard to adoration, that is, with regard to God and my relationship to him? (cf. Jn 4, 20). The question about foundation and goal makes itself heard. Only at this point does the offering of Jesus’ true gift become possible. For the `gift of God’ is God himself, God precisely as gift – that is, the Holy Spirit (cf. v10-24). At the beginning of the conversation, there seemed no likelihood that his woman, with her obviously superficial way of life, would have any interest in the Holy Spirit. But one she was led to the depths of her own being the question arose that must always arise if one is to ask the question that burns in one’s soul. Now the woman is aware of the real thirst by which she is driven. Hence, she can at last learn that it is for which this thirst thirsts.
“It is the purpose and meaning of all catechesis to lead to this thirst. For one who knows neither that there is a Holy Spirit nor that one can thirst for him, it cannot begin otherwise than with sensory perception. Catechesis must lead to self-knowledge, to the exposing of the I, so that it lets the masks fall and moves out of the realm of something into that of being. Its goal is conversion, that conversion of man that results in his standing face to face with himself. Conversio (`conversion,’ metanoia) is identical with self-knowledge, and self-knowledge is the nucleus of all knowledge. Conversio is the way in which man finds himself and thus now the question of all questions: How can I worship God? It is the question that means his salvation; it is the raison d’etre of catechesis.”[12]
The reason of the Samaritan woman has been raised to the level of Being itself in what Benedict calls “existential experience.” By experiencing herself telling the truth about herself (which involves a kenotic humility) with savage sincerity, she experiences herself as the being that uniquely images the Transcendent God. She goes out of herself, and experiences going out of herself. This produces a kind of “Transfiguration” as that of Christ on the Mount when He begins to pray. The being of the image of God gives off a radiation of light, an intelligibility of relational being that dazzles reason and restores the pristine light that Adam experienced at the moment of the “original solitude” and found himself alone as “I” amidst an creation of objects (“its”). It is this radiation of intelligibility that Helen Keller experienced when she first obeyed the indication of her nurse, Ann Sullivan, and “named” the water. That exercise of obedience and therefore sovereign subjectivity in self-mastery is the act of passing the threshold into the restoration of reason to vision in a world that has been dumbed down to mere measurement and calculation.
[1] This affirmation squares with the following dialogue of then-Cardinal Ratzinger with Robert Moynihan: “Here is the problem: Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith”
“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.
“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let us call it epochal struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.” You use the phrase `epochal struggle’… I said…“Yes.” `Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…’ `Yes, certainly…’ “And it seems to me,” he continued, `that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith.
“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.
“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith” (The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, `Let God’s Light Shine Forth,’ ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday [2005] 34-35).
[2] St Augustine, Sermo, 185.
[3] He went on to say: “These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.
It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.
On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change.
Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.
It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.
The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church. By so doing she can be conscious of being in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself (cf. Mt 22: 21), as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time. The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State.
The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one's own faith - a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God's grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all.
At the same time, she assures peoples and their Governments that she does not wish to destroy their identity and culture by doing so, but to give them, on the contrary, a response which, in their innermost depths, they are waiting for - a response with which the multiplicity of cultures is not lost but instead unity between men and women increases and thus also peace between peoples. The Second Vatican Council, with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity. The Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time; she continues "her pilgrimage amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God", proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, n. 8). Those who expected that with this fundamental "yes" to the modern era all tensions would be dispelled and that the "openness towards the world" accordingly achieved would transform everything into pure harmony, had underestimated the inner tensions as well as the contradictions inherent in the modern epoch. They had underestimated the perilous frailty of human nature which has been a threat to human progress in all the periods of history and in every historical constellation. These dangers, with the new possibilities and new power of man over matter and over himself, did not disappear but instead acquired new dimensions: a look at the history of the present day shows this clearly. In our time too, the Church remains a "sign that will be opposed" (Lk 2: 34) - not without reason did Pope John Paul II, then still a Cardinal, give this title to the theme for the Spiritual Exercises he preached in 1976 to Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia. The Council could not have intended to abolish the Gospel's opposition to human dangers and errors. On the contrary, it was certainly the Council's intention to overcome erroneous or superfluous contradictions in order to present to our world the requirement of the Gospel in its full greatness and purity. The steps the Council took towards the modern era which had rather vaguely been presented as "openness to the world", belong in short to the perennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason that is re-emerging in ever new forms. The situation that the Council had to face can certainly be compared to events of previous epochs. In his First Letter, St Peter urged Christians always to be ready to give an answer (apo-logia) to anyone who asked them for the logos, the reason for their faith (cf. 3: 15). This meant that biblical faith had to be discussed and come into contact with Greek culture and learn to recognize through interpretation the separating line but also the convergence and the affinity between them in the one reason, given by God. When, in the 13th century through the Jewish and Arab philosophers, Aristotelian thought came into contact with Medieval Christianity formed in the Platonic tradition and faith and reason risked entering an irreconcilable contradiction, it was above all St Thomas Aquinas who mediated the new encounter between faith and Aristotelian philosophy, thereby setting faith in a positive relationship with the form of reason prevalent in his time. There is no doubt that the wearing dispute between modern reason and the Christian faith, which had begun negatively with the Galileo case, went through many phases, but with the Second Vatican Council the time came when broad new thinking was required. Its content was certainly only roughly traced in the conciliar texts, but this determined its essential direction, so that the dialogue between reason and faith, particularly important today, found its bearings on the basis of the Second Vatican Council. This dialogue must now be developed with great open-mindedness but also with that clear discernment that the world rightly expects of us in this very moment. Thus, today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.”
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 347.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid 347-348.
[7] Ibid. 348.
[8] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 125.
[9] Ibid 349.
[10] Ibid 349.
[11] Ibid 350.
[12] Ibid., 353-355.
The reason of the Samaritan woman has been raised to the level of Being itself in what Benedict calls “existential experience.” By experiencing herself telling the truth about herself (which involves a kenotic humility) with savage sincerity, she experiences herself as the being that uniquely images the Transcendent God. She goes out of herself, and experiences going out of herself. This produces a kind of “Transfiguration” as that of Christ on the Mount when He begins to pray. The being of the image of God gives off a radiation of light, an intelligibility of relational being that dazzles reason and restores the pristine light that Adam experienced at the moment of the “original solitude” and found himself alone as “I” amidst an creation of objects (“its”). It is this radiation of intelligibility that Helen Keller experienced when she first obeyed the indication of her nurse, Ann Sullivan, and “named” the water. That exercise of obedience and therefore sovereign subjectivity in self-mastery is the act of passing the threshold into the restoration of reason to vision in a world that has been dumbed down to mere measurement and calculation.
[1] This affirmation squares with the following dialogue of then-Cardinal Ratzinger with Robert Moynihan: “Here is the problem: Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith”
“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.
“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let us call it epochal struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.” You use the phrase `epochal struggle’… I said…“Yes.” `Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…’ `Yes, certainly…’ “And it seems to me,” he continued, `that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith.
“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.
“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith” (The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI, `Let God’s Light Shine Forth,’ ed. Robert Moynihan, Doubleday [2005] 34-35).
[2] St Augustine, Sermo, 185.
[3] He went on to say: “These are all subjects of great importance - they were the great themes of the second part of the Council - on which it is impossible to reflect more broadly in this context. It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance.
It is precisely in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. In this process of innovation in continuity we must learn to understand more practically than before that the Church's decisions on contingent matters - for example, certain practical forms of liberalism or a free interpretation of the Bible - should necessarily be contingent themselves, precisely because they refer to a specific reality that is changeable in itself. It was necessary to learn to recognize that in these decisions it is only the principles that express the permanent aspect, since they remain as an undercurrent, motivating decisions from within.
On the other hand, not so permanent are the practical forms that depend on the historical situation and are therefore subject to change.
Basic decisions, therefore, continue to be well-grounded, whereas the way they are applied to new contexts can change. Thus, for example, if religious freedom were to be considered an expression of the human inability to discover the truth and thus become a canonization of relativism, then this social and historical necessity is raised inappropriately to the metaphysical level and thus stripped of its true meaning. Consequently, it cannot be accepted by those who believe that the human person is capable of knowing the truth about God and, on the basis of the inner dignity of the truth, is bound to this knowledge.
It is quite different, on the other hand, to perceive religious freedom as a need that derives from human coexistence, or indeed, as an intrinsic consequence of the truth that cannot be externally imposed but that the person must adopt only through the process of conviction.
The Second Vatican Council, recognizing and making its own an essential principle of the modern State with the Decree on Religious Freedom, has recovered the deepest patrimony of the Church. By so doing she can be conscious of being in full harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself (cf. Mt 22: 21), as well as with the Church of the martyrs of all time. The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State.
The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one's own faith - a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God's grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all.
At the same time, she assures peoples and their Governments that she does not wish to destroy their identity and culture by doing so, but to give them, on the contrary, a response which, in their innermost depths, they are waiting for - a response with which the multiplicity of cultures is not lost but instead unity between men and women increases and thus also peace between peoples. The Second Vatican Council, with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity. The Church, both before and after the Council, was and is the same Church, one, holy, catholic and apostolic, journeying on through time; she continues "her pilgrimage amid the persecutions of the world and the consolations of God", proclaiming the death of the Lord until he comes (cf. Lumen Gentium, n. 8). Those who expected that with this fundamental "yes" to the modern era all tensions would be dispelled and that the "openness towards the world" accordingly achieved would transform everything into pure harmony, had underestimated the inner tensions as well as the contradictions inherent in the modern epoch. They had underestimated the perilous frailty of human nature which has been a threat to human progress in all the periods of history and in every historical constellation. These dangers, with the new possibilities and new power of man over matter and over himself, did not disappear but instead acquired new dimensions: a look at the history of the present day shows this clearly. In our time too, the Church remains a "sign that will be opposed" (Lk 2: 34) - not without reason did Pope John Paul II, then still a Cardinal, give this title to the theme for the Spiritual Exercises he preached in 1976 to Pope Paul VI and the Roman Curia. The Council could not have intended to abolish the Gospel's opposition to human dangers and errors. On the contrary, it was certainly the Council's intention to overcome erroneous or superfluous contradictions in order to present to our world the requirement of the Gospel in its full greatness and purity. The steps the Council took towards the modern era which had rather vaguely been presented as "openness to the world", belong in short to the perennial problem of the relationship between faith and reason that is re-emerging in ever new forms. The situation that the Council had to face can certainly be compared to events of previous epochs. In his First Letter, St Peter urged Christians always to be ready to give an answer (apo-logia) to anyone who asked them for the logos, the reason for their faith (cf. 3: 15). This meant that biblical faith had to be discussed and come into contact with Greek culture and learn to recognize through interpretation the separating line but also the convergence and the affinity between them in the one reason, given by God. When, in the 13th century through the Jewish and Arab philosophers, Aristotelian thought came into contact with Medieval Christianity formed in the Platonic tradition and faith and reason risked entering an irreconcilable contradiction, it was above all St Thomas Aquinas who mediated the new encounter between faith and Aristotelian philosophy, thereby setting faith in a positive relationship with the form of reason prevalent in his time. There is no doubt that the wearing dispute between modern reason and the Christian faith, which had begun negatively with the Galileo case, went through many phases, but with the Second Vatican Council the time came when broad new thinking was required. Its content was certainly only roughly traced in the conciliar texts, but this determined its essential direction, so that the dialogue between reason and faith, particularly important today, found its bearings on the basis of the Second Vatican Council. This dialogue must now be developed with great open-mindedness but also with that clear discernment that the world rightly expects of us in this very moment. Thus, today we can look with gratitude at the Second Vatican Council: if we interpret and implement it guided by a right hermeneutic, it can be and can become increasingly powerful for the ever necessary renewal of the Church.”
[4] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987) 347.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid 347-348.
[7] Ibid. 348.
[8] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 125.
[9] Ibid 349.
[10] Ibid 349.
[11] Ibid 350.
[12] Ibid., 353-355.
2 comments:
MESSAGE
MESSAGE
Post a Comment