Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: The Folly of Faith [Part One of Six]
There are some fundamental human attitudes which are indispensable as presuppositions for the knowledge of God. Among them I would like to mention:
1) listening to the message which comes from our existence and from the world in general,
2) vigilant attention regarding the religious discoveries and experience of humanity,
3) a decisive and persevering commitment of our time and of our interior energies to this question, which concerns each one of us in first person.
Truth Denied
We should ask ourselves now, at this point, if there is an answer for man to such a question. In case of an affirmative answer, to what kind of certainty is it acknowledged to have arrived? In his Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul found himself facing exactly this problem, and he responded to it with a philosophical response based upon the facts presented by the history of religions. In the Roman megalopolis, the "Babylon" of the time, he stumbles upon such a moral decadence which comes from the total loss of tradition, deprived of that interior evidence which in other times was offered to man, from the beginning, through usages and customs. Nothing is taken for granted anymore! Everything becomes possible. Nothing is impossible, now. There is no longer any value able to sustain man. There are no longer any inviolable norms. What counts is only the "I" and the present instant. The traditional religions are nothing more than convenient facades without interiority. All that remains is cynicism, naked and raw.
To this metaphysical cynicism of a society in decline, dominated only by power, the Apostle offers a surprising response. He states that, in reality, it knows God very well. He writes "...[W]hat may be known about God is manifest to them." (Romans 1:19) And he grounds this claim saying that "Ever since the creation of the world, His invisible perfections can be contemplated with the intellect in the works accomplished by Him, like His power and divinity." And from here the Apostle draws the conclusion "...They are therefore inexcusable." (Romans 1:20-21) According to the Apostle, the truth is accessible to them but they do not want it because they reject the demands that it would place on them. The Apostle employs for that the formula "to hold the truth prisoner of injustice." Man resists the truth which would demand of him a submission which expresses itself in the act of giving God glory and thanksgiving. For Paul, the moral decadence of the society is nothing more than the logical consequence and the faithful reflection of this radical perversion. When man puts his egoism, his pride, and his comfort above the vindication of the truth, in the end everything cannot but find itself upside-down. That which comes to be adored is no longer God, to Whom alone adoration is owed. Image, appearance, current opinion take the upper hand on man. This general alteration then spreads to all of the areas of life. That which is contrary to nature becomes the norm. The man who lives against the truth lives also against nature. His creativity is no longer at the service of the good but becomes a genius and a refinement of evil. The bonds between man and woman, between parents and children, dissolve, and thus the sources of life themselves are blocked. That which reigns is no longer life but death. A civilization of death is asserted.
Saint Paul has thus sketched a description of a decadence which, by its actuality, truly shocks us modern readers. However, he is not content with simply describing these things as was commonly done at the time, a rather perverse type of moralism which, while expressing its judgment, ends by taking pleasure in the negative. On the contrary, the analysis of the Apostle leads to a diagnosis and is thus transformed into an appeal. Found at the origin of all that, according to Paul, is the denial of the truth in favor of the comfortable and of profit. As the point of departure, there is a resistance to the evidence of the Creator which is present on his heart like that of a being which looks at him and calls him. For Paul, atheism, or even agnosticism lived as atheism, is not at all an innocent posture. It always comes, according to him, from the rejection of a knowledge which is offered in itself to man but the conditions of which man refuses to accept. Man is not condemned to remain in uncertainty regarding God. He can see Him if he gives ear to the voice of His Being, to the voice of His creation, and if he lets himself be led by it. Paul does not admit the existence of a purely ideal atheist.