Extirpating Relativism
The Mutual Enrichment of Faith and Reason
To Broaden Reason by Expanding Being
Relativism is the loss of the absolute in values. It comes from the loss of the unmediated experience of the real that is “being.” That “being” is the self that is experienced in moral actions, the first of which is Christian faith.
Benedict’s Challenge: “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.”
His Solution: “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 into itself the true human limits, 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.”
“And it seems to me, 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 Father’s 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.
“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.
“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.
“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.
“This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.
“But only by means of the difficult process of purification, of transformation, of conversion.
“I would say the word ‘conversion’ is the key word, one of the key words, of St. Augustine, and our culture also has a need for conversions. Without conversion one does not arrive at the Lord. This is true of the individual, and this is true of the culture as well…”[1]
Relativism can only be defeated by the experience of the Absolute. Ontologically, only God is absolute: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone” (Mk. 10, 18; cf. Lk. 18, 19). The analogy between God and creation is “Being.” Reason feeds on being. All knowledge begins in the senses, but the being so perceived sensibly is finite, changing and contingent. It is not absolute.
To know only contingent being through the medium of sense perception is to be in a state of intellectual relativism. The mind seeks the absoluteness of truth but finds itself in a universe parsed out in contingent and historical “facts.” Reason, in this state of starvation for the absolute truth “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.” [2]
“The real untruth of the world view of which drugs and terrorism are symptoms consists in the reduction of the world to facts and in the narrowing-down of reason to perception of what is quantitative. That which is most specific to man is shoved aside into the subjective realm and thus lacks reality. The "abolition of man", which results from the attribution of absoluteness to one single mode of knowledge, at the same time clearly falsifies this world view. Man exists, and anyone who, on the strength of his own theory, has to pull man down into the sphere of a machine that is "seen through" and can be assembled lives in a construction of perception that misses precisely what is essential."[3]
"What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims at being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able to be effective as reason”[4] because only the total involvement of the self in the act of Christian faith activates the being of the believer, which becomes transfigured before reason. The absolute being for reason is the being of the self of the believer in the self-transcending act of self-gift to the revelation that is the Person of Jesus Christ Himself.
On the morning of his election as pope, Josef Ratzinger said: “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.”[5]
The Epistemological Problem: In 1993, he remarked that “Now we are close to the end of a millennium and in an entirely new historical period, indicated by schemas of thought, science, technology, culture and civilization, breaking completely with al that we knew previously.”[6] When asked about the remark that nihilism is rapidly taking the place of Marxism in his then-last work “A Turning Point for Europe,” [7] he answered: “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[1993], Marxism is crumbling and liberal ideology is so split into fragments that it no longer has a common, solid coherent view of man and this 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.
“Even though perverted, the political, social terrorism of the 1960s had a certain kind of moral ideal. But today, the terrorism of drug abuse, of the Mafia, of attacks on foreigners, in Germany and elsewhere, no longer has any moral basis. In this era of sovereign subjectivity, people act for the sole pleasure of acting, without any reference other than the satisfaction of ‘myself.’”[8]
The Goal: Recover Realism (“Being”) = Broaden Reason
“To reconcile the 'being of the ancients' with the 'subjectivity of the moderns.’”[9]
The Answer: The entire task will depend on what we take to be “experience” as the criterion of what we call “real.” What we will see below are two levels of experience: the classical and the modern.
The classical works with one level of experience that is sensible and explains the sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge as derived therefrom by abstraction, and returning to verify the abstraction as true or false.
The modern has been the turn to the subject as in Descartes, but confusing the abstraction (or consciousness) and the “I” as one and the same thing. The result has been the problem of relativism with the confusion as to the meaning of the human person and subsequent threat to the human person.
The solution will consist in recognizing that there are two levels of experience corresponding to two order of being or reality: the one the experience of the external senses; the other the experience of the “I” in the free act of self determination, i.e. in the moral act. To limit the real to only what can be sensed empirically, shuts reason in on itself.
To Broaden Reason = To Experience “I” as Being
John Paul II gave notice of these two tiers of experience in his “Crossing the Threshold of Hope:”
And as Karol Wojtyla affirmed in his “Introduction” to “The Acting Person:” “Man’s experience 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.” [10] In the “Preface” to the same work, he says: “Since Descartes, knowledge about man and his world has been identified with the cognitive function – as if only in cognition, and especially through knowledge of himself, could man manifest his nature and his prerogative. And yet, in reality, does man reveal himself in thinking or, rather, in the actual enacting of his existence? – in observing, interpreting, speculating, or reasoning (which are changeable, even flexible insofar as they are acts, and often futile when confronted with the facts of reality) or in the confrontation itself when he has to take an active stand upon issues requiring vital decisions and having vital consequences and repercussions? In fact, it is in reversing the post-Cartesian attitude toward man that we undertake our study: by approaching him through action.”
In another preface to the English/American edition of “The Acting Person,” Wojtyla said:
“This presentation of the problem, completely new in relation to traditional philosophy (and by traditional philosophy we understand here the pre-Cartesian philosophy and above all the heritage of Aristotle, and, among the Catholic schools of thought, of St. Thomas Aquinas) has provoked me to undertake an attempt at reinterpreting certain formulations proper to this whole philosophy. The first question which was born in the mind of the present student of St. Thomas (certainly a very poor student) was the question: What is the relationship between action as interpreted by the traditional ethic as actus humanus, and the action as an experience. This and other similar questions let me gradually to a more synthetic formulation in the form of the present study The Acting Person.
“The author of the present study owes everything to the systems of metaphysics, of anthropology, and of Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics on the one hand, and to phenomenology, above all in Scheler’s interpretation and through Scheler’s critique also to Kant, on the other hand. At the same time, an individual attempt has been undertaken at reaching this reality which is the man-person as seen through his actions… Perhaps, the reader… will accept something from my broadened discovery of the person through his actions. In this the author sees a turn toward the most interesting ‘thing itself’ (zuruck zum Gegenstand) which is precisely the human being as a subject.” [Rome, March 1977].[11]
The priority of being over thought. The ultimate criterion of truth as absolute
a) The response of classical Hellenic thought: experience of the real, means:
“All obligation is based upon being. Reality is the foundation of ethics. The good is that which is in accord with reality.
“He who wishes to know and to do the good must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being. Not upon his own ‘ideas,’ not upon his ‘conscience,’ not upon ‘values,’ not upon arbitrarily established ‘ideas’ and ‘models.’ He must turn away from his own act and fix his eyes upon reality.
“‘Reality’ means two things. This twofold meaning is expressed by the two Latin words realis and actualis; the one is derived from res – thing, the other from actus – action.
“Res is everything that is ‘presented to our sense perception or our intellectual cognition, all that has being independently of our thinking. ‘Real’ in this sense is whatever is ‘opposed’ to us. Here the original meaning of the word ‘object’ is revealed and confirmed. Not-real is that which is merely thought… Reality (in the sense of realis) is the whole of being which is independent of thought.”[12]
The Proposal
The solution to overcoming relativism as the dissolution of reason as reason is the exposure of it to the transfigured “Being” of the subject as believer. Notice that in Scripture the “Being” of the believing subject is transformed from Simon into Peter, Saul into Paul, Miriam into “full of grace,” Abram into Abraham, Jacob into Israel, etc. The constricted being of the individual Simon, Saul, Miriam, Abram, Jacob becomes the “constitutively-relational” being of the believer, the actual image of God, Who is a triple Relationality of Father, Son and Spirit. In a word, to become “person” as God is three Persons, one has to transcend self into being “gift.” That done, we move into another horizon of being that is absolute in a way that is analogous to the way God is Absolute.
The change is metaphysical from individual to person. To become a person is an achievement of passing from potency to act of giftedness, of love unto death for the other. This is the spousal love of God for His Body, the Church. Karol Wojtyla wrote that “Spousal love differs from all the aspects or forms of love analysed hitherto. Its decisive character is the giving of one’s own person (to another). The essence of spousal love is self-giving, the surrender of one’s ‘I.’ This is something different from and more than attraction, desire or even goodwill. These are all ways by which one person goes out towards another, but none of them can take him as far in his quest for the good of the other as does spousal love.”[13] Further on he comments: “The fullest, the most uncompromising form of love consists precisely in self-giving, in making one’s inalienable and non-transferable ‘I’ someone else’s property. This is doubly paradoxical: firstly in that it is possible to step outside one’s own ‘I’ in this way, and secondly in that the ‘I’ far from being destroyed or impaired as a result is enlarged and enriched – or course in a super-physical, a moral sense.”[14]
Wojtyla is proposing that the “Being” of the “person” works on a different level and with a different "dynamic" than the “being” of things. He is proposing, as does the all Christian revelation, that the act of self-giving – if it is total [taking place as totality only in the act of faith] – “grows” the Being of the person. This is explicit in Lk 17, 33: “Whoever tries to save his life will lose it; and whoever loses it will preserve it,” which became explicitly translated as Christian anthropology in “Gaudium et Spes “#24: “man, the only being God has loved for itself, finds his true self only in a sincere giving of himself.”
In reality, the change is metaphysical from individual to person. To become a person is an achievement of passing from potency to act of giftedness, of love for the other unto death. In a word, “spousal love.” The metaphysical workings of this have never been examined as the inner workings of the whole man. They were examined as the interplay of “faculties” – “accidents of substance” - of intellect and will by St. Thomas, not without the danger of reifying them.[15] But, borrowing from Aristotle, he considered man to be in the ontological category of “substance” as everything else but with the permanent “accident” of rationality.
The great achievement of Karol Wojtyla is the deployment of phenomenology to peer into these workings as workings of the entire self in the act of self-determination for the execution of the free act. What he found was that “(t)he lived experience of the fact `I act’ differs from all facts that merely `happen’ in a personal subject. This clear difference between something that `happens’ in the subject and `activity’ or action of the subject allows us, in turn, to identify an element in the comprehensive experience of the human being that decisively distinguishes the activity or action of a person from all that merely happens in the person. I define this element as self-determination.”
The deployment of phenomenology a la Wojtyla is the perception of the reasoning “I” into the internal workings of itself in the quickening of the self into the free moral act. There he found “self-determination, self-possession and self-gift in accord with the values ontologically grounded in the “tending” of the being of the person as image of the divine Persons. This ontological tendency is, of course, what ahs been called “natural law” which is not really the law of human “nature” in an Aristotelian or even Thomistic sense, but “the law of the person” as imaging God. All this “knowing” in empirical in that it derives from an experience of ontological reality, the being that is the self.
The certainty that we are dealing with “being” and not with thought as consciousness is the experience of passing from potency to act in the free act of self-determination. St. Thomas accounted for this passage from absolute value to decision and free execution of action by the extension of the theoretical grasp of being to the will where reason would “see” that being was “good” as desirable and therefore “ought” to be done. For our purposes here the first meaning of being for St. Thomas is substance and the interplay of knowing and willing is explained in terms of faculties of intellect and will that are accidents of substance.
What Wojtyla and Ratzinger are suggesting is that being is not primarily to be understood as substance but as person and accessed in the moral act of faith. Hence, “in a special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being [actu essendi], and hence with metaphysical inquiry” (“Fides et ratio” #83).
The act of faith is an anthropological act that is a moral act of self-determination. The act of faith is a self-transcending act which provides – for reason - empirical access to reality as being. It is in this sense – not merely as an addition of “supernatural” concepts to “natural” concepts – that faith enlightens reason. It is, again, rather because faith is the very act of the being of the self as person, and since being is the act of every content of reason, that without faith, reason cannot really be reason. Benedict said: “What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not remain reasonable or rational… Reason needs revelation in order to able to be effective as reason.”[16]
But “revelation” is the very Person of Christ,[17] and faith is the act of “becoming” that Person as “another Christ.” Consider Ratzinger’s description of his habilitation thesis: “Here [in the theology of the high Middle Ages], ‘revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also apart of the concept of ‘revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive ‘revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it…. If Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as prude sola scriptura…, because an essential element of Scriptura is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[18]
In a word, the believer must become that “act” that is Christ, and therefore take on the self-giving dimension of His “To Be” that is self-gift to death in obedience, that is faith in us. The “light” that is given off from that transformation of our “to be” is the light shared from the divine Person.
St. Gregory of Nyssa says it this way: “From the Lord’s saying: ‘Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God,’ we are to learn that blessedness does not lie in knowing something about God, but rather in possessing God within oneself.
“I do not think these words mean that God will be seen face to face by the man who purifies the eye of his soul. Their sublime import is brought out more clearly perhaps in that other saying of the Lord’s: The kingdom of God is within you. This teaches us that the man who cleanses his heart of every created thing and every evil desire will see the image of the divine nature in the beauty of his own soul…. If by a diligent life of virtue you wash away the film of dirt that covers your heart, then the divine beauty will shine forth in you.
“Take a piece of iron as an illustration. Although it might have been black before, once the rust has been scraped off with a whetstone, it will begin to shine brilliantly and to reflect the rays of the sun. So it is with the interior man, which is what the Lord means by the heart. Once a man removes from his soul the coating of filth that has formed on it through his sinful neglect he will regain his likeness to his Archetype, and be good. For what resembles the supreme Good is itself good. If he then looks into himself, he will see the vision he has longed for. This is the blessedness of the pure of heart: in seeing their own purity they see the divine Archetype mirrored in themselves.
“Those who look at the sun in a mirror, even if they do not look directly at the sky, sees its radiance in the reflection and just as truly as do those who look directly at the sun’s orb. It is the same, says the Lord, with you. Even though you are unable to contemplate and see the inaccessible light, you will find what you seek within yourself, provided you return to the beauty and grace of that image, which was originally placed in you. For God is purity; he is free from sin and a stranger to all evil. If this can be said oof you, then God will surely be within you. If your mind is untainted by any evil, free from sin, and purified from all stain, then indeed are you blessed, because you r sight is keen and clear. Once purified, you see things that others cannot see. When the mists of sin no longer cloud the eye of your soul, you see the blessed vision clearly in the peace and pourity of your own heart. That vision is nothing else than the holiness, the purity, the simplicity and all the other glorious reflections of God’s nature, through which God himself is seen.”[19]
Note further and deeper that human reason has been assumed into the divine Person of the Logos not to be in parallel to the divine intelligence but to be exercised as the human reason of the divine “I” of the Son. Jesus Christ, Who is God, reasons as man in the light of Divine Being. Hence, the Son of the Father, “sees” experientially the infinite Being of God with human reason. The question is not the content of the reasoning, but the light of His divine Self that Christ’s human reason perceives as the Logos lives out His human Life. The suggestion is that as we advance in the exercise of self-giving whereby we become “other Christ” and our being “expands” more and more, then we simply see reality more and more as real in the light of the Absolute.
Consider Benedict's remarks on "Realism" (Brazil, 2007):
“What is real? Are only material goods, social, economic and political problems "reality"? “This was precisely the great error of the dominant tendencies of the last century, a most destructive error, as we can see from the results of both Marxist and capitalist systems. They falsify the notion of reality by detaching it from the foundational and decisive reality which is God. Anyone who excludes God from his horizons falsifies the notion of "reality" and, in consequence, can only end up in blind alleys or with recipes for destruction….
“(W)ho knows God? How can we know him? (…) For a Christian, the nucleus of the reply is simple: only God knows God, only his Son who is God from God, true God, knows him. And he "who is nearest to the Father’s heart has made him known" (John 1:18). Hence the unique and irreplaceable importance of Christ for us, for humanity. If we do not know God in and with Christ, all of reality is transformed into an indecipherable enigma; there is no way, and without a way, there is neither life nor truth."
To see in terms of the absolute, restores meaning to factual and contingent knowing. Consider the enlightenment of Helen Keller as presented and commented on by Walker Percy. She experienced herself as “I” in the act of naming the water (similar to the exegesis of Adam naming the animals done by John Paul II in TOB):
"“We walked down the path to the well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honeysuckle with which it was covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand, she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motion of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that `w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away.
I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. [She had earlier destroyed the doll in a fit of temper.] I felt my way to the dearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow.”[20]
What had happened? Helen had exercised her subjectivity as cause by “throwing” (βαλÎιν) the “likeness” (sym): w-a-t-e-r at the wet flowing object. She had experienced herself as cause, and therefore came to a consciousness of herself as “self.” Walker Percy comments: “before, Helen had behaved like a good responding organism. Afterward, she acted like a rejoicing symbol-mongering human. Before, she was little more than an animal. Afterward, she became wholly human. Within the few minutes of the breakthrough and the several hours of exploiting it Helen had concentrated the months of the naming phase that most children go through somewhere around their second birthday.”[21]
Enter Wojtyla’s Phenomenological Metaphysics
The Phenomenology of the Act of Faith Yields “I” as Being
Wojtyla’s phenomenology permits the recognition of the experience of self-determination
The Will Does not Will; the "I" Wills
“The basis for understanding the human being must be sought in experience – in experience that is complete and comprehensive and free of all systematic a priori’s. The point of departure for an analysis of the personal structure of self-determination is the kind of experience of human action that includes the lived experience of moral good and evil as an essential and especially important element; this experience can be separately defined as the experience of morality. These two experiences – the experience of the human being and the experience of morality – can really never be completely separated[22], although we can, in the context of the overall process of reflection, focus more on one or the other. In the case of the former, philosophical reflection will lead us in the direction of anthropology; in the case of the latter, in the direction of ethics.
“The experience of human action refers to the lived experience of the fact `I act.’ This fact is in each instance completely original, unique, and unrepeatable… The lived experience of the fact `I act’ differs from all facts that merely `happen’ in a personal subject. This clear difference between something that `happens’ in the subject and `activity’ or action of the subject allows us, in turn, to identify an element in the comprehensive experience of the human being that decisively distinguishes the activity or action of a person from all that merely happens in the person. I define this element as self-determination.
(…) “`I act’ means `I am the efficient cause’ of my action and of my self-actualization as a subject, which is not the case when something merely `happens’ in me, for then I do not experience the efficacy of my personal self. My sense of efficacy as an acting subject in relation to my activity is intimately connected with a sense of responsibility for that activity…”
“Self determination as a property of human action that comes to light in experience directs the attention of one who analyzes such action to the will. The will is the person’s power of the self-determination….
“When I say that the will is the power of self-determination, I do not have in mind the will all alone, in some sort of methodical isolation intended to disclose the will’s own dynamism. Rather, I necessarily have in mind here the whole person. Self-determination takes place through acts of will, through this central power of the human soul. And yet self-determination is not identical with these acts in any of their forms, since it is a property of the person as such… My analysis, however brief, shows that self-determination is a property of the person, who, as the familiar definition says, is a naturae rationalis individual substantia. This property is realized through the will, which is an accident. Self-determination – or, in other words, freedom – is not limited to the accidental dimension, but belongs to the substantial dimension of the person: it is the person’s freedom, and not just the will’s freedom…”[23]
“I” as Potency and Act: Cause of Action
Since things happen to man, and that he also is the cause of his own action, there is a different dynamic at work. In the one case, he is in potency to be acted on; in the other he is the cause and agent. “Potency… may be defined as something that is in preparation , is available, and even ready at hand but is not actually fulfilled. The act… is the actualization of potentiality, its fulfillment.
“As is to be seen, the meanings of both concepts are strictly correlated and inhere in the conjugate they form rather than in each of them separately. Their conjugation reveals not only the differentiated, though mutually coincident states of existence, but also the transitions from one to the other. It is these transitions that objectivize the structure of all dynamism inherent in being, in being as such, which constitutes the proper subject of metaphysics, and at the same time in every and any being… We may with justice say that at this point metaphysics appears as the intellectual soil wherein all the domain of knowledge have their roots. Indeed, we do not seem to have as yet any other conceptions and any other language which would adequately render the dynamic essence of change – of all change whatever occurring in any being – apart from those that we have been endowed with by the philosophy of potency and act. By means of this conception we can grasp and describe precisely any dynamism that occurs in any being. It is to them we also have to revert when discussing the dynamism proper to man.”[24]
“Man is thus in a wholly experiential way the cause of his acting. There is between person and action a sensibly experiential, causal relation, which brings the person, that is to say, every concrete human ego, to recognize his action to be the result of his efficacy; in this sense he must accept his actions as his own property and also, primarily because of their moral nature, as the domain of his responsibility. Both the responsibility and the sense of property invest with a special quality the causation itself and the efficacy itself of the acting person.”[25]
John Henry Newman:
We should not here that Newman makes the same affirmation: “The assent which we give to the proposition, as a first principle, that nothing happens without a cause, is derived, in the first instance, from what we know of ourselves; and we argue analogically from what is within us to what is external to us. One of the first experiences of an infant is that of his willing and doing; and as time goes on, one of the first temptations of the boy is to bring home to himself the fact of his sovereign arbitrary power, though it be at the price of waywardness, mischievousness, and disobedience. And when he parents, as antagonists of this willfulness, begin to restrain him, and to bring his mind and conduct into shape, then he has a second series of experiences of cause and effect, and that upon a principle or rule. Thus the notion of causation is one of the first lessons which he learns from experience that experience limiting it to agents possessed of intelligence and will. 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 phenomenal as causes.”[26]
In a word, causality as an experience does not come to us through the senses, but in the experience of ourselves as agents of our own free actions. The consciousness of that experience is then extrapolated to the phenomena which we take in through the external senses. David Hume was correct in stating that causality is not senses but experienced in self and then extended outside. In agreement with this, Wojtyla writes: “The students of the problems of causality, on the one hand, and psychologists, on the other, often note that human acting is in fact the only complete experience of what has been called by Aristotle ‘efficient causation.’… Efficacy itself as the relation of cause and effect leads us to the objective order of being and existence and is thus of an existential nature. In this case efficacy is simultaneously an experience. There lies the source of the specific empirical significance of human efficacy related with acting.”[27]
Benedict’s Call to Arms
What we have seen above is the project that Benedict is calling for. He said as much in an early interview on Polish television when asked about the proposal of his pontificate. He responded: “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.”[28] The state of affairs of not experiencing the self, and therefore, not experiencing God, consists in the acedia of a “sloth of the heart.”
Recent Document (one of four: see “Appendix”):
European Professors I
1) “Widening the Horizons of Rationality” (June 7, 2008):
At the Sixth European Symposium of University Professors
Pope Benedict XVI
Widening the horizons of rationality
On Saturday, 7 June [2008], the Holy Father met with participants at the Sixth European Symposium for University Professors in the Vatican's Clementine Hall. The Symposium was taking place in Rome from 5-8 June with an estimated 400 university professors participating from 26 European countries.
In continuity with last year's European meeting of university Lecturers, your Symposium takes up a very important academic and cultural theme. I would like to express my gratitude to the organizing committee for this choice which permits us, among other things, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of the Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio of my beloved Predecessor Pope John Paul II.
Already on that occasion 50 civil and ecclesial philosophy professors of the public and pontifical universities of Rome manifested their gratitude to the Pope with a declaration which confirmed the urgency of relaunching the study of philosophy in universities and schools.
Sharing this concern and encouraging fruitful collaboration among the professors of various Roman and European athenaeums, I wish to address a particular invitation to philosophy professors to continue with confidence in philosophical research, investing intellectual energy and involving new generations in this task.
The events which took place in the last 10 years since the Encyclical's publication have further delineated the historical and cultural scene in which philosophical research called to enter. Indeed, the crisis of modernity is not synonymous with the decline in philosophy; instead philosophy must commit itself to a new path of research to comprehend the true nature of this crisis (cf. Address to European Meeting of University Lecturers, 23 June 2007, L'Osservatore Romano English Edition, 11 July 2007, p. 6) and to identify new prospectives toward which to be oriented.
An 'anthropological question'
Modernity, if well understood, reveals an "anthropological question" that presents itself in a much more complex and articulated way than what has taken place in the philosophical reflections of the last centuries, above all in Europe.
Without diminishing the attempts made, much still remains to be probed and understood. Modernity is not simply a cultural phenomenon, historically dated; in reality it implies a new planning, a more exact understanding of human nature.
It is not difficult to gather from the writings of authoritative thinkers an honest reflection on the difficulties that arise in the resolution to this prolonged crisis. Giving credit to some authors' proposals in regard to religions and in particular to Christianity is an evident sign of the sincere desire to exist from the self-sufficiency philosophical reflection.
From the beginning of my Pontificate I have listened attentively to the requests that reach me from the men and women of our time and, in view of their expectations, I have wished to offer a pointer for research that seems to me capable of raising interest to relaunch philosophy and its irreplaceable role in the academic and cultural world.
You have made it the object of reflection of your Symposium: it is the proposal to "widen the horizons of rationality". This allows me to reflect on it with you as among friends who desire to pursue a common journey.
I would like to begin with a deep conviction which I have expressed many times: "Christian faith has made its clear choice: against the gods of religion for the God of philosophers, in other words against the myth of mere custom for the truth of being" (cf. J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ch. 3).
[29]Meet the reality of person
This affirmation, that reflects the Christian journey from its dawning, shows itself completely actual in the cultural historical context that we are living. In fact, only beginning from this premise, which is historic and theological at the same time, is it possible to meet the new expectations of philosophical reflection.
The risk that religion, even Christianity, be instrumentalized as a surreptitious phenomenon is very concrete even today. But Christianity, as I recalled in the Encyclical Spe Salvi is not only "informative", but "performative" (cf. n. 2). This means that from the beginning Christian faith cannot be enclosed within an abstract world of theories, but it must descend into the concrete historic experience that reaches humanity in the most profound truth of his existence.
This experience, conditioned by new cultural and ideological situations, is the place in which theological research must evaluate and upon which it is urgent to initiate a fruitful dialogue with philosophy.
The understanding of Christianity as a real transformation of human existence, if on the one hand it impels theological reflection to a new approach in regard to religion, on the other, it encourages it not to lose confidence in being able to know reality.
The proposal to "widen the horizons of rationality", therefore, must not simply be counted
among the new lines of theological and philosophical thought, but it must be understood as the requisite for a new opening onto the reality that the human person in his uni-totality is, rising above ancient prejudices and reductionisms, to open itself also to the way toward a true understanding of modernity.
Humanity's desire for fullness cannot be disregarded. The Christian faith is called to take on this historical emergency by involving the men and women of good will in a simple task. The new dialogue between faith and reason, required today, cannot happen in the terms and in the ways in which it happened in the past. If it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise, it must begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysical truth.
Dear friends, you have before you a very exacting journey. First of all, it is necessary to promote high-level academic centers in which philosophy can dialogue with other disciplines, in particular with theology, favoring new, suitable cultural syntheses to orient society's journey.
Taken from:L'Osservatore RomanoWeekly Edition in English11 June 2008, page 6
Content: The operative word is "Performative" (as in “Spe Salvi”) for the broadening of reason is concomitant with the broadening of the being of the person by means of the act of faith as a going out of self in order to take in and become the Person of Christ who is, in Himself, the very meaning of “Revelation.” What is involved here is the realism of being as criterion of knowing. It is profoundly evangelical as in Simon coming to know that Jesus of Nazareth is Jesus the Christ, or the Samaritan woman lowering herself in humility before Christ and his revealing his identity to her. Reason's exposure to being widens as the believing person expands in the experiential encounter with Christ. This would connect with Fides et ratio #83: "In a special way, the person [exercising the act of faith] constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry."
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
b) The goal of Benedict is to dare to enlarge the meaning of the experience of being, and therefore broaden the range of reason to embrace reality-being not only as “true,” but also as “good.” My first exposure to that daring project was Benedict’s “Introduction to Christianity” where he speaks about the divine Person of the Father in the classical terms: “the First Person does not beget the Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving, ‘wave’ not ‘corpuscle’… In this idea of relativity in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the ‘accidents,’ Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the ‘individual.’ Let us listen once again to St. Augustine: ‘In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation.’ Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended: relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for which it would be inconceivable.”
[30]All of this means that Being and reality up to this point is experienced through the external senses. Thought is abstraction from it. Thought is not real. The synonyms subject, “I” and self are identified with thought, and therefore have the non-stabile unreality of thought. Hence, outside of the empirical, sensible experience of the material world, there is no reality. In order to be scientific, the subjective must be removed as much as possible. It is interference with objective reality. It is not real.
Of, course, the supreme difficulty, as Benedict says above, is that “(t)his 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.” Here, there is total relativism.
The Act of Faith is the Act of Being: Self Gift
Faith as Anthropological Act
Christian Faith: The Experience of Acting Humanly in One’s Whole Self.
This is the center-piece of the entire study: Faith as ontological-anthropological act.
Vatican II: Dei Verbum:
“Thus, as the centuries go by, the Church is always advancing towards the plenitude of divine truth, until eventually the words of God are fulfilled in her” (Dei Verbum 8). There is, therefore, a development of experience and consciousness in the assimilation of Revelation. Hence, the faith is not reducible to a series of concepts as intellectual snapshots that can be placed in a book. “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 pout 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). It entails an act of trusting abandonment to Christ, which enables us to live as he lived (cf. Gal. 2, 20)…”
[31]Faith is act of the whole person: “The obedience of faith (Rom. 16, 26; cf. Rom. 1, 5; 2 Cor. 10, 5-6) must be given to God as he reveals himself. By faith man freely commits his entire self to God, making ‘the full submission of his intellect and will to God who reveals’” (Dei Verbum 5).
[32]John Paul II Comments: “Faith, as these words show, is not merely the response of the mind to an abstract truth. Even the statement, true though it is, that this response is dependent on the will does not tell us everything about the nature of faith. ‘The obedience of faith’ is not bound to any particular human faculty but relates to man’s whole `personal structure and spiritual dynamism
“Man’s proper response to God’s revel-revelation consists in self-abandonment to God. This is the true dimension of faith, in which man does not simplyt accept a particular set of propositions, but accepts his own vocation and the sense of his existence. This implies, at least in principle and as an existential premises, that man has the free disposal of himself, since by means of faith he ‘abandons himself wholly to God.’ This dimension of faith is supernatural in the strict sense of the word.”
[33]To complete the above anthropological notion of faith with the Christological notion of “revelation” as developed by Benedict XVI in his habilitation thesis:
Ratzinger’s Retrieval of the Pristine Meaning of Revelation and Faith:
Benedict understands revelation to the very Person of Christ Himself. Therefore, to
“understand” Scripture one must “know” the Person of Christ. And one can “know” the Person of Christ only by experiencing Him in the ontological subjectivity of the self. This is achieved by faith as self-gift.
Josef Ratzinger said: “I had ascertained that in Bonaventure… there was nothing corresponding to our conception of `revelation,’ by which we are normally in the habit of referring to all the revealed contents of the faith: … Here, `revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of `revelation.’ Where there is no one to perceive `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained thorough my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important fort me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This is turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura…, because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”
[34]
The “Being” of the Self is Recovered in the Act of Faith
Let us pay attention to another level of experience.
1) John Paul II’s announcement of two levels of experience:
“The fact that human knowledge is primarily a sensory knowledge surprises no one. Neither Plato nor Aristotle nor any of the classical philosophers question 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 fact, 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 is 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. God Himself certainly is not an object of human empiricism; the Sacred Scripture, in its own way, emphasizes this: "No one has ever seen God" (cf. Jn 1:18). If God is a knowable object--as both the Book of Wisdom and the Letter to the Romans teach -- He is such on the basis of man's experience both of the visible world and of his interior world. This is the point of departure for Immanuel Kant's study of ethical experience in which he abandons the old approach found in the writings of the Bible and of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Man recognizes himself as an ethical being, capable of acting according to criteria of good and evil, and not only those of profit and pleasure. He also recognizes himself as a religious being, capable of putting himself in contact with God. Prayer--of which we talked earlier--is in a certain sense the first verification of such a reality…
[35]“And we find ourselves by now very close to Saint Thomas, but the path passes not so much through being and existence as through people and their meeting each other, through the "I" and the "Thou." This is a fundamental dimension of man's existence, which is always a co-existence…
[36] Such co-existence is essential to our Judeo-Christian tradition and comes from God’s initiative. This initiative is connected with and leads to creation, and is at the same time – Saint Paul teaches - `the eternal election of man in the Word who is the Son (cf. Eph. 1, 4).”
[37]2) Benedict XVI: a) On the two levels: a) the meeting of Christ and Nathanael: words alone do not suffice to know Jesus as the Christ; one must “come and see.”
[38]b) Theological epistemology: The two major theses concerning accessing the “I” of Jesus Christ beyond the sensible phenomenon of Jesus of Nazareth:
· “According to the testimony of Holy Scripture, the center of the life and person of Jesus is his constant communication with the Father:” “We see who Jesus is if we see him at prayer. The Christian confession of faith comes from participating in the prayer of Jesus, from being drawn into his prayer and being privileged to behold it; it interprets the experience of Jesus’ prayer, and its interpretation of Jesus is correct because it springs from a sharing in whets is most personal and intimate to him.”
[39]· “Since the center of the person of Jesus is prayer, it is essential to participate in his prayer if we are to know and understand him.”
- Like is known by like.
- Since Christ is prayer, one must pray and approach the habitus of prayer in order to be “like” Him (become one being with Him).
- Since we are ontologically made in the image of God, and Jesus is the perfect image of the Father (Col. 1, 15), if we experience ourselves to be “like” Him, we “know” (intellegere: to read from within) Him.
c)
Samaritan Woman: The following reveals the mind of Benedict XVI concerning the supreme crisis of the present day, the absence of God; and b) it is vintage Ratzinger in its depth, clarity and simplicity as portrayal of the transition from the objectified “horizon” of “thing” (water) to the “horizon” of “I” as disclosed by the act of sincerity (self-gift). This revealing of God’s presence among us, “I who speak with thee am he,” is compelling. Of incalculable importance is Benedict’s assertion below: “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.”
“It [John 4] opens with the meeting of Jesus and the Samaritan woman in the context of a normal, human, everyday experience – the experience of thirst, which is surely one of man’s most primordial experiences. In the course of the conversation, the subject shifts to that thirst that is a thirst for life, and the point is made that one must drink again and again, must come again and again to the source. In this way, the woman is made aware of what in actuality she, like every human being, has always known but to which she has not always adverted: that she thirsts for life itself and that all the assuaging that she seeks and finds cannot slake this living, elemental thirst. The superficial `empirical’ experience has been transcended.
“But what has been revealed is still of this world. It is succeeded, therefore, by one of those conversations on two levels that are so characteristic of John’s technique of recording dialogue, the Johannine `misunderstanding,’ as it is called by the exegetes. From the fact that Jesus and the Samaritan woman, though they use the same words, have in mind two very different levels of meaning and, separated thus by the ambiguity of human speech, are speaking at cross-purposes, there is manifested the lasting incommensurability of faith and human experience however extensive that experience may be. For the woman understands by `water’ that of which the fairy tales speak: the elixir of life by virtue of which man will not die and his thirst for life will be entirely satisfied. She remains in the sphere of bios
[7], of the empirical life that is familiar to her, whereas Jesus wants to reveal to her the true life, the Zoë.
“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.
But we anticipate. As we have said, 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: a confession in which, at last, she reveals herself unsparingly [emphasis mine]. 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 not 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 (underline mine) 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. (underline mine). For the `gift of God’ is God himself, God precisely as gift – that is, the Holy Spirit (cf. verses 10 and 24). At the beginning of the conversation, there seemed no likelihood that this woman, with her obviously superficial way of life, would have any interest in the Holy Spirit. But once she was led to the depths of her own being [underline mine], the question arose that must always arise if one is to ask the question that barns in one’s soul. Now the woman is aware of the real thirst by which she is driven. Hence she can at last learn what 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 conversio, 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 knows 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.”
[40]Conscience: the Experience of Being Human as Image of God:
In Texas in 1988 Ratzinger said: “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 an echo from within. He sees: That‘s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.
“This anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical with the ground of our existence, is the reason that mission is both possible and justified. The Gospel may and indeed must be proclaimed to the pagans, because this is what they are waiting for, even if they do not know this themselves (see Isa. 42, 4).”
[41]To preach the truth of Jesus Christ is not only to be permitted, but it is essential for the human person to become himself, since it proclaims what the person is longing to hear: the answer to who he is, and what he must do to fulfill himself. Freedom cannot be fully exercised without this knowledge. Therefore, woe to us if we do not preach Christ, and Christ crucified.
The Self Is Not Consciousness, But “Being”
The problem is that the self is not understood ontologically. And if it is, it is not “I” but a substantial “it” with a rational nature (“rational animal”), the result of a reason that works only on the level of sense experience and abstractive thought.
In this light, Benedict is calling on philosophers to “widen the horizons of rationality” to take in the fullness of “Being.” As we have seen, on June 7, he said: “I would like to begin with a deep conviction which I have expressed many times: ‘Christian faith has made its clear choice: against the gods of religion for the God of philosophers, in other words against the myth of mere custom for the truth of being’ (cf. J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ch. 3).”
[42] And “the truth of being,” he goes on, is the “performative” experience that the human person has of himself in the act of faith as self-gift. The experience of the self, going out of self, discloses a new dimension of reason that is the consciousness of the self that is not reduced to the limitation of sense experience and abstract concepts, but to an experience of the existential “I” that is the “empirical” source of absolute value, such as authenticity and the good. Notice Benedict’s remarks: “Christianity… is not only ‘informative,’ but ‘performative’… This means that from the beginning Christian faith cannot be enclosed within an abstract world of theories, but it must descend into the concrete historic experience that reaches humanity in the most profound truth of his existence.
“This experience, conditioned by new cultural and ideological situations, is the place in which theological research must evaluate and upon which it is urgent to initiate a fruitful dialogue with philosophy.
“The understanding of Christianity as a real transformation of human existence, if on the one hand it impels theological reflection to a new approach in regard to religion, on the other , it encourages it not to lose confidence in being able to know reality.
“The proposal to ‘widen the horizons of rationality,’ therefore, must not simply be counted among the new lines or theological and philosophical thought, but it must be understood as the requisite for a new opening onto the reality that the human person in his uni-totality is, rising above ancient prejudices and reductionism, to open itself also to the way toward a true understanding of modernity.
“Humanity’s desire for fullness cannot be disregarded. The Christian faith is called to take on this historical emergency by involving the men and women of good will in a simple task. The new dialogue between faith and reason, required today, cannot happen in the terms and in the ways in which it happened in the past. If it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise , it must begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysica truth.”
As an aside, it is telling that Josef Ratzinger has exorcised the idea of substance not only as the prius ontological category, the prime meaning of being, but as an adequate way of dealing with reality. I cite three Ratzinger examples: 1) “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in term of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today `objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being complete – so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for which it would be inconceivable;”
[43] 2) “In this light, Boethius’s concept of person, which prevailed in Western philosophy, must be criticized as entirely insufficient. Remaining on the level of the Greek mind, Boethius defined `person’ as Naturae rationalis individual substantia, as the individual substance of a rational nature. One sees that the concept of person stands entirely on the level of substance. This cannot clarify anything about the Trinity or about Christology; it is an affirmation that remains on the level of the Greek mind which thinks in substantialist terms;”
[44] 3) “a new philosophical category – the concept of ‘person’ – was fashioned, a concept that has become for us the fundamental concept of the analogy between God and man, the very center of philosophical thought. The meaningof an already existing category that of ‘relation,’ was fundamentally changed. In the Aristotelian table of categories, relation belongs to the group of accidents that point to substance and are dependent on it; in God, therefore, there are no accidents. Through the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, relation moves out of the substance-accident framework. Now God himself is described as a Trinitarian set of relations, as relatio subsistens. When we say that man is the image of God, it means that he is a being designed for relationship; it means that, in and through all his relationships, he seeks that relation which is the ground of his existence.”
[45]The History of Philosophic Reason Is the History of the Reciprocal Experience of Reason and Faith
Benedict points to four (4) areas of experiential interplay between faith experience and philosophical thought (reason):
1) At Regensburg, he said: “Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush [God’s Name: Yahweh, “I AM”] came to new maturity at the time of the Exile [5th century b.c.] when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth [i.e. rationally universal] and described in a simple formula [“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” Gen1, 1
[46]) which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: “I am.”
“This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Psalm 115). Thus despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sough to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature.
“Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint – is more than a simple… translation of the Hebrew text: It is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of Revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act ‘with logos’ is contrary to God’s nature.”
[47]2) Lecture by Benedict XVI at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”
Here Benedict shows the impact of this mutual enrichment between Judaic faith and Hellenic reason in the development of reason in rejecting myth and in search of truth of reality (for our purposes, “Being”)
[48]. At the time of the Platonic dialogues (400-350 b.c.) involving the character Socrates, Benedict offers a dramatization of the rejection of the myths in favor of truth. He writes: “The human being… wants truth. In this perspective, one can see Socratic question as the impulse that gave birth to the western university.” In debate with Euthyphro who defended mythical religion, Socrates countered: “Do you believe that the gods are really waging war against each other with terrible feuds and battles? (...) Must we effectively say, Euthyphro, that all this is true?” (6 b-c). The Christians of the first centuries identified themselves and their journey with this question which seems not particularly devout – but which in Socrates’ case derived from a deeper and purer religious sensibility, from the search for the true God. They received their faith not in a positivistic manner, nor as a way of escape from unfulfilled wishes; rather, they understood it as dispelling the mist of mythological religion in order to make way for the discovery of the God who is creative Reason, God who is Reason-Love. This is why reasoned enquiry concerning the truly great God, and concerning the true nature and meaning of the human being, did not strike them as problematic, as a lack of due religious sentiment: rather, it was an essential part of their way of being religious.”
[49]3) The first Christians such as St. Justin Martyr took Christ as the true philosopher, and Christianity as the true philosophy: “The Father had presented the Christian faith as the true philosophy and had emphasized that this faith fulfills the demands of reason in search of truth; that faith is the ‘yes’ to the truth, in comparison with the mythical religions that had become mere custom. By the time the university came to birth, though, those religions no longer exited in the West – there was only Christianity, and thus it was necessary to give new emphasis to the specific responsibility of reason, which is not absorbed by faith;” (Benedict XVI, Lecture at “La Sapienza”)
4) The Fathers of the Church: Consider the first four Trinitarian and Christological Councils: Nicea (325); Ephesus (431); Chalcedon (451) and Constantinople III 680-681). They apply the Aristotelian “Being” of substance and explode it. The ousia of Aristotle becomes homoousios of Father and Son who are equal but different. This understanding of equal but different introduces into the notion of “Being” the transformation from “being-in-self” to “being-in-relation.”
They then are forced to take the notion of “nature” and distinguish it from “person” in the attempt to give a rational account of Jesus Christ as God and Man.
This step was taken in the light of the impact of Hellenic reason on Judaic faith at the time of the Exile: “It is true that the early Christian decision could base itself on the whole preceding struggle, especially on the last phase of it, on the words of the Deutero-Isaiah and the Wisdom literature, on the step that had been taken in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, and finally on the writings of the New Testament, especially St. John’s gospel. It was in the wake of this whole series of event’s that early Christiantiy boldly and resolutely made its choice and carried out it purification by deciding for the God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions. Wherever the question arose to which god the Christian God corresponded, Zeus perhaps or Hermes of Dionysus or some other god, the answer ran: to none of them. To none of the gods to whom you pray but solely and alone to him to whom you do not pray, to that highest being of whom your philosophers speak…. When we say God, we do not mean or worship any of this; we mean only Being itself, what the philosophers have exposed as the ground of all being, as the God above all powers – that alone is our God. This proceeding involved a choice, a decision…”
[50]Benedict XVI wants us to make this same choice today in the light of the wilting or reason under the ponderous rationalism of a dictatorship of facts that is equivalent to a new pagan myth of the mind. He quotes himself precisely on this point in his June 2008 talk to the Sixth European Symposium of University Professors. There he said: “I have wished to raise a bid for research that seems to me capable or raising interest to relaunch philosophy and its irreplaceable role in the academic and cultural world.” And that bid to “relaunch” philosophy is concretely to “widen the horizons of rationality.” In the light of the above, this means to find an unmediated access to the Being of the person as the absolute and center of all meaning. As center, the subject or person as absolute has to be accessed objectively, and thus vanquish relativism.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
The Refrain: “To reconcile the 'being of the ancients' with the 'subjectivity of the moderns.’”
[51]Repeating the Challenge: “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.”
His Solution: “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 into itself the true human limits, 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.”
“And it seems to me, 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 Father’s 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.
“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.
“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.
“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.
“This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.
“But only by means of the difficult process of purification, of transformation, of conversion.
“I would say the word ‘conversion’ is the key word, one of the key words, of St. Augustine, and our culture also has a need for conversions. Without conversion one does not arrive at the Lord. This is true of the individual, and this is true of the culture as well…”
[52]* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Conclusion
Dr. Kenneth L. Schmitz:
“Just as believers are called to bring everything that is ‘beautiful, good and true’ toe the feet of Christ, so too philosophers who are metaphysicians of esse are urged to enter into respectful dialogue with philosophies that differ from or even contradict the metaphysics of esse.
“Indeed, the turn to phenomenology, so characteristic of Wojtyla’s earlier philosophical work, has undoubtedly drawn his attention to an ontological interiority in the concrete and historical order of being itself. For there is operative in being as existential act an interiority that is neither religious in form nor introspective in the modern sense, but that is the very ‘radicality’ of being itself. This, above all, it seems to me, is the most significant ‘newness’ that Fides et ratio brings to our attention. It is nothing short of the ‘dearest freshness deep down things.’
“For, in the metaphysics of esse, it is the insight into the nature of being that sustains the search for truth. The bond between knowledge and love, between the true and the good, is certified by the actual richness of being itself. Moreover, it is in the transcendentals that we see that intrinsically differential unity of being in all its richness. Being is really one wit the good, t he true, and the beautiful; it is only the finitude of our approach that is the source of their distinction (ratione). And it is this intimate ‘convergence,’ which is already an identification that gives attractive power to truth….
“The primary new ontological insight, then, is into the ontological interiority disclosed byt eh metaphysics of esse. It seems to me that , in his earlier philosophical work, especially in The Acting Person, metaphysics had been construed as indispensable but somewhat ‘objective,’ betraying an unintended infection from the modern primacy given to the distinction of subject and object. The difference between metaphysics and phenomenology remains. Metaphysics gives it account within the horizon of the community of beings, whereas phenomenology has as it horizon human experience as such.
“In turning to phenomenology to interpret human interiority, Karol Wojtyla brought subjectivity to prominence, a prominence that has continued to characterize his writings on work, society, and interpersonal relations. But, it seems to me that in Fides et ratio there is evidence that the ‘soft exteriority of metaphysics has given way to a more permeable and intimate metaphysical discourse under the influence of a phenomenology that, without altering the character and vocabulary of a metaphysics of existential act, has nonetheless had an impact upon it. It is as though the turn to phenomenology has acted as a catalyst to release the metaphysics of esse from any residual exteriority attendant upon the modern sense of objectivity. And, indeed, this is to restore that metaphysics to its pristine character prior to the modern primacy give to the distinction of subject and object. Is this a simple return? By no means, since the impact of a phenomenology of experience has released from within the traditional metaphysics of esse a new and more radical appreciation of the ontological interiority of being itself: adnovitatem et radicalitatem ipsius ‘esse.”
[53][1] Robert Moynihan, “Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” Doubleday (2005) 34-36.
[2] John Paul II, “Fides et ratio” #5.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point For Europe,” Ignatius (1994) 35.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralist Society, in Church, Ecumenism and Politics.” Crossroad, 1988, pp. 217-218).
[5] April 18, 2005.
[6] J. Ratzinger, “And Marxism Gave Birth to … NIHILISM,” The Catholic World Report, January 1993, 52.
[7] J. Ratzinger, “Turning Point for Europe,” Ignatius (1994).
[8] J. Ratzinger, “And Marxism Gave Birth to … NIHILISM,” op. cit. 54.
[9] Paul O'Herron, Introduction to "The Texture of Being, Essays in First Philosophy" by Kenneth L. Schmitz, CUA (2007) ix.
[10] Karol Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” D. Reidel Publishing Company (1979) 3.
[11] Ibid xiii-xiv.
[12] J. Pieper, “Reality and the Good,” in Living the Truth, Ignatius (1989) 111.
[13] K Wojtyla, “Love and Responsibility,” Ignatius (1990) 96.
[14] Ibid. 97.
[15] See J. Pieper’s “Reality and the Good” in Living the Truth Ignatius (1989) 179. The entire presentation, as all neo-scholasticism, presumes the prius of Being to be “substance,” that is a “thing-in-itself” that operates and acts in the contingent world through its “powers” that are accidents that are really distinct from it. All the interactions of so-called “Intellect” and “will” also tend to “reified” as things.
[16] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and Politics” Crossroad (1998) 218.
[17] “‘In these last days he [God] has spoken to us by a Son” (Heb. 1, 1-2). For he sent his Son, the eternal Word who enlightens all men, to dwell among men and to tell them about the inner life of God. Hence, Jesus Christ… speaks the words of God… As a result, he himself – to see whom is to see the Father (cf. Jn. 14, 9) – completed and perfected Revelation and confirmed it with divine guarantees. He did this by the total fact of his presence and self-manifestation… He revealed that God is with us…” Dei Verbum #4. Gaudium et Spes #22: “Christ the Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and of his love, fully reveals man to himself…”
[18] J. Ratzinger, “Milestones…” (1997) 108-109.
[19] Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio 6, De Beatitudinibus: PG 44, 1270-1271. Liturgy of the Hours III, 411-412.
[20] Ibid 34-35.
[21] Ibid 38.
[22] The deep reason for this is that the “I” images God Who alone is good. To experience one’s being as image is to experience that one is good. This is the supreme triumph of realist ethics over relativism. It has been the centuries long challenge from Hume to now concerning how factual, empirical “is” can be the ground of moral “ought.” The challenge was to explain how one can deduce (since obligation must come from the prius of Cartesian consciousness) “ought” from “is.” The failure to answer that provoked Kant’s so-called “transcendental” philosophy both theoretical and practical to save the absolute. Absent the phenomenology of the experience of the “I” as real Being, there was no escape. Either is was empiricist relativism of self as mere consciousness, or it was the ungrounded apriori categories of Kant. But since they were mere consciousness also, there was no escape from subjectivism and relativism. Wojtyla’s “discovery” of the experience of the “I” changes the entire thoughtscape if we understand it. See John Paul II’s VS ##9-11.
[23] Karol Wojtyla, “The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” Person and Community (1993) 189-190
[24] K. Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” Reidel (1979) 66.
[25] Ibid 67.
[26] J. H. Newman, “A Grammar of Assent” UNDP (1992) 70.
[27] K. Wojtyla, “The Acting Person,” ibid. 68.
[28] Benedict XVI's Interview on Polish Television “John Paul II Is Always Close to Me" Vatican City, Oct. 16, 2005
[29] Consider the remark made by Paul O’Herron who introduces the philosophical achievement of Dr. Kenneth L Schmitz in the light of the life intention of Hegel: “to reconcile the ‘being of the ancients’ with ‘subjectivity of the moderns’” (Kenneth L. Schmitz, “The Texture of Being” CUA (2007) ix.
[30] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 131-132.
[31] John Paul II, “Veritatis Splendor,” #88.
[32] John Paul II, “Sources of Renewal”
[33] Karol Wojtyla, “Sources of Renewal” Harper and Row, 1979) 20.
[34] Ibid. 108-109.
[35] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of Hope,” Knopf (1994) 34
[36] Ibid 36.
[37] Ibid
[38] “Philip told this Nathanael that he had found "him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph" (Jn 1: 45).… "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" (Jn 1: 46). In its own way, this form of protestation is important for us…. Nathanael's reaction suggests another thought to us: in our relationship with Jesus we must not be satisfied with words alone. In his answer, Philip offers Nathanael a meaningful invitation: "Come and see!" (Jn 1: 46). Our knowledge of Jesus needs above all a first-hand experience.” Benedict XVI Sept. 6, 2006.
[39] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 15-27.
[40] J. Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Ignatius (1987)353-355.
[41] J. Ratzinger, “Conscience and Truth,” Values in a Time of Upheaval Ignatius (2006) 92.
[42] Benedict XVI, “At the Sixth European Symposium of University Professors,” June 7, 2008.
[43] J. Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Ignatius (2004) 184; (1990) 132.
[44] J. Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology” Communio 17 (Fall, 1990) 448.
[45] J. Ratzinger, “Many Religions – One Covenant” Ignatius (1999) 76-77.
[46] It must be remembered that “Israel always believed I the Creator God, and this faith it shared with all the great civilizations of the ancient world… The moment when creation became a dominant theme occurred during the Babylonian Exile. It was then that the account that we have just heard – based, to be sure on very ancient traditions – assumed it present form. Israel had lost its 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….
“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 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;” J. Ratzinger, “In the Beginning…” Eerdmans (1995) 10-11.
[47] Benedict XVI, Papal Address at University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006.
[48] “What is ancient philosophy? Pierre Hadot makes very clear what he thinks it is not: it is not the deposit of philosophical concepts, theories and systems to be found in the surviving texts of Graeco-Roman antiquity, the subject matter of courses of study in the curricula of modern universities. This subject matter indeed does constitute the “philosophical discourse” of the ancient philosophers. But that discourse is itself merely the expression of what Hadot takes to be the essence of ancient philosophy which, in his view, is a way of life. In the author’s own words, “Philosophical discourse . . . originates in a choice of life and an existential option—not vice-versa . . . . This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally to justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world” (p. 3). Moreover, philosophy both as a way of life and as its justifying discourse is not the attainment and deployment of wisdom, but “merely a preparatory exercise for wisdom” which “tend[s] toward wisdom without ever achieving it” (p. 4). It is the primary purpose of this book to establish these claims for ancient philosophy as a whole by demonstrating it to be true of each of its major parts;” A review of Pierre Hadot’s What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by Michael Chase, Harvard University Press, 2002.
[49] Benedict XVI, “La Sapienza.”
[50] J. Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 94-95.
[51] Paul O'Herron, Introduction to "The Texture of Being, Essays in First Philosophy" by Kenneth L. Schmitz, CUA (2007) ix.
[52] Robert Moynihan, “Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” Doubleday (2005) 34-36.
[53] Kenneth L Schmitz, “God, Being and Love,” in The Texture of Being - Essays in First Philosophy CUA Press (2007) 280-282.
