To elaborate on the Magisterium of the Catholic Church is our mission on Plinthos (Gk. "brick"); and to do so anonymously, so that, like any brick in the wall, we might do our little part in the strength of the structure of humanity almost unnoticed.
Writer, George Weigel in his "The Catholic Difference" column of the Archdiocese of Newark's The Catholic Advocate, expresses concern over Catholic educators' misappropriation of Pope Benedict's message to them. Here is Mr. Weigel's 5 June 2008 article.
Mulling pope's call to universities, without spin
Pope Benedict XVI, during his recent historic visit to the United States, had barely left the Catholic University of America on April 17 when the Catholic higher education establishment's spin machine shifted into high gear.
One university president said that what most impressed him about the papal address to Catholic educators was what it was not: a dressing-down. Still another president cooed that she felt "affirmed." An administrator at yet another institution said that, as the pope hadn't cited Ex Corde Ecclesia--John Paul II's concerns about Catholic identity were clearly old hat.
One got the distinct impression from the spin that a lot of people thought they'd dodged a bullet and were grateful they weren't going home to face irate alums and dubious donors. The "Benedict loves what we're doing" blah-blah has continued ever since.
The facts, to put it gently, suggest something rather more complicated. Consider these excerpts from the Holy Father's address:
"A university's or school's Catholic identity...is a question of conviction. Do we really believe that only in the mystery of the Word Made Flesh does the mystery of man truly become clear? Are we ready to commit our entire self--intellect and will, mind and heart--to God? Do we accept the truth Christ reveals?"
What percentage of this year's Catholic college and university graduates could honestly answer those questions with a convinced "yes?" What percentage would even understand the first question?
"While we have sought diligently to engage the intellect of our young, perhaps we have neglected the will. Subsequently we observe, with distress, the notion of freedom being distorted. Freedom is not an opting out. Freedom is an opting in; a participation in being itself. Hence, authentic freedom can never be obtained by turning away from God."
Might these sentences be printed, framed, and posted in co-ed dormitories on Catholic campuses?
"We observe today a timitdity in the face of the category of the good...an assumption that every experience is of equal worth and a reluctance to admit imperfection and mistakes. And particularly disturbing is the reduction of the precious and delicate area of education in sexuality to management of 'risk,' bereft of any reference to the beauty of conjugal love."
How many freshman orientation programs and student life offices on Catholic campuses would have to examine consciences here?
"I wish to affirm the great value of academic freedom. yet any appeal to the principle of academic freedom in order to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university's identity and mission; a mission at the heart of the Church's (teaching mission) and not somehow...independent of it."
Will the theologians at prestigious Catholic universities who affirm Humanae Vitae's teaching on the morally appropriate means of regulating fertility, the Catechism's teaching on the disordered character of homosexual acts, and the teaching of Ordinatio Sacerdotalis on the inadmissability of women to Holy Orders please raise their hands?
The spin machine notwithstanding, Benedict XVI put serious challenges before the nation's leading Catholic educators.
To resolve any doubts that the pope has a different idea of what befits a Catholic college or university than a lot of the Catholic higher education establishment, however, I propose a simple test. Whether or not to produce Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues"--a "play" that mocks the settled teaching of the Catholic Church--has become a tedious annual ritual on many Catholic campuses. Prominent among them is Notre Dame University--to the public mind, a flagship among U.S. Catholic institutions of higher education. There, the university's president, Father John Jenkins, C.S.C., has allowed Ensler's play on campus, acquiescing to the demands of some Notre Dame faculty while rejecting the counsel of other distinguished faculty members and the arguments of the local bishop.
In the patristic period, disputes within and among local churches were submitted to the Bishop of Rome for adjudication. Se here's my proposal and my test case: let Father Jenkins send Pope Benedict XVI a copy of Ensler's play, asking the pope whether he considers this material appropriate for production or useful for discussion on a Catholic campus.
The answer, I predict, will not please the spin machine.
(George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.)
This is the final version (complete with footnotes) of the Holy Father's celebrated university lecture in Germany 2006, for which he received the highest German national prize awarded by the University of Tubingen. I provide it here because my future posts will be dealing with the foundations for the Enlightenment and the ensuing French Revolution, and their modern bequest, as necessarily related to Christ, and to the Vicar of Christ, a foremost advocate of the classics. Specifically, there is an inseparable alliance of human Reason and human Liberty with Christ (Logos), as indicated in Spe salvi.
LECTURE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE BENEDICT XVI DURING THE APOSTOLIC JOURNEY TO MÜNCHEN, ALTÖTTING AND REGENSBURG (SEPTEMBER 9-14, 2006) MEETING WITH THE REPRESENTATIVES OF SCIENCE
Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg
Tuesday, 12 September 2006
Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections
Your Eminences, Your Magnificences, Your Excellencies, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a moving experience for me to be back again in the university and to be able once again to give a lecture at this podium. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - something that you too, Magnificent Rector, just mentioned - the experience, in other words, of the fact that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the "whole" of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.
I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.[1] It was presumably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than those of his Persian interlocutor.[2] The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship between - as they were called - three "Laws" or "rules of life": the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. It is not my intention to discuss this question in the present lecture; here I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue as a whole - which, in the context of the issue of "faith and reason", I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.
In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the holy war. The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: "There is no compulsion in religion". According to some of the experts, this is probably one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threat. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur'an, concerning holy war. Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the "Book" and the "infidels", he addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness, a brusqueness that we find unacceptable, on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[3] The emperor, after having expressed himself so forcefully, goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. "God", he says, "is not pleased by blood - and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death...".[4]
The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature.[5] The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.[6] Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.[7]
At this point, as far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we are faced with an unavoidable dilemma. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the λόγος". This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: "Come over to Macedonia and help us!" (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a "distillation" of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.
In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply asserts being, "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy.[8] Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula 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. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought 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 (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) 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.[9] 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.
In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which, in its later developments, led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazm and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 stated - unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language. God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love, as Saint Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is, again to quote Paul - "λογικη λατρεία", worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).[10]
This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.
The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity - a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.[11]
Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.
The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal's distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue,[12] and I do not intend to repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack's central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. Fundamentally, Harnack's goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ's divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament, as he saw it, restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature's capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield decisive certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.
This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.
I will return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology's claim to be "scientific" would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science", so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective "conscience" becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.
Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was an initial inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not simply false, but it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.
And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.
Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought - to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: "It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss".[13] The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur - this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God", said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
[1] Of the total number of 26 conversations (διάλεξις – Khoury translates this as “controversy”) in the dialogue (“Entretien”), T. Khoury published the 7th “controversy” with footnotes and an extensive introduction on the origin of the text, on the manuscript tradition and on the structure of the dialogue, together with brief summaries of the “controversies” not included in the edition; the Greek text is accompanied by a French translation: “Manuel II Paléologue, Entretiens avec un Musulman. 7e Controverse”, Sources Chrétiennes n. 115, Paris 1966. In the meantime, Karl Förstel published in Corpus Islamico-Christianum (Series Graeca ed. A. T. Khoury and R. Glei) an edition of the text in Greek and German with commentary: “Manuel II. Palaiologus, Dialoge mit einem Muslim”, 3 vols., Würzburg-Altenberge 1993-1996. As early as 1966, E. Trapp had published the Greek text with an introduction as vol. II of Wiener byzantinische Studien. I shall be quoting from Khoury’s edition.
[2] On the origin and redaction of the dialogue, cf. Khoury, pp. 22-29; extensive comments in this regard can also be found in the editions of Förstel and Trapp.
[3] Controversy VII, 2 c: Khoury, pp. 142-143; Förstel, vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.5, pp. 240-241. In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.
[4] Controversy VII, 3 b–c: Khoury, pp. 144-145; Förstel vol. I, VII. Dialog 1.6, pp. 240-243.
[5] It was purely for the sake of this statement that I quoted the dialogue between Manuel and his Persian interlocutor. In this statement the theme of my subsequent reflections emerges.
[7] R. Arnaldez, Grammaire et théologie chez Ibn Hazm de Cordoue, Paris 1956, p. 13; cf. Khoury, p. 144. The fact that comparable positions exist in the theology of the late Middle Ages will appear later in my discourse.
[8] Regarding the widely discussed interpretation of the episode of the burning bush, I refer to my book Introduction to Christianity, London 1969, pp. 77-93 (originally published in German as Einführung in das Christentum, Munich 1968; N.B. the pages quoted refer to the entire chapter entitled “The Biblical Belief in God”). I think that my statements in that book, despite later developments in the discussion, remain valid today.
[9] Cf. A. Schenker, “L’Écriture sainte subsiste en plusieurs formes canoniques simultanées”, in L’Interpretazione della Bibbia nella Chiesa. Atti del Simposio promosso dalla Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, Vatican City 2001, pp. 178-186.
[10] On this matter I expressed myself in greater detail in my book The Spirit of the Liturgy, San Francisco 2000, pp. 44-50.
[11] Of the vast literature on the theme of dehellenization, I would like to mention above all: A. Grillmeier, “Hellenisierung-Judaisierung des Christentums als Deuteprinzipien der Geschichte des kirchlichen Dogmas”, in idem, Mit ihm und in ihm. Christologische Forschungen und Perspektiven, Freiburg 1975, pp. 423-488.
[12] Newly published with commentary by Heino Sonnemans (ed.): Joseph Ratzinger-Benedikt XVI, Der Gott des Glaubens und der Gott der Philosophen. Ein Beitrag zum Problem der theologia naturalis, Johannes-Verlag Leutesdorf, 2nd revised edition, 2005.
[13] Cf. 90 c-d. For this text, cf. also R. Guardini, Der Tod des Sokrates, 5th edition, Mainz-Paderborn 1987, pp. 218-221.
The Holy Father's recent encyclical, Spe salvi, highlights the disillusion of man today. The confusion of philosophy, the moral anarchy and the prevailing Machiavellian political atmosphere all have their root in the rejection of God, the source of perfection; human utopias can only be as good as the men that comprise them. For a perfect world we need Christ, perfect man and perfect God; perfect in suffering. Christ is the perfection of Passion: Hope in suffering: Joy in certain knowledge of God the Father and complete confidence in Him within the world. This is true hope, hope in truth, which courageously faces the evil and defects of the world with goodness and honesty, with love and mercy. Outside of this attitude of Christ man has no hope! Let us propose a reflection on the limits of our world so as to highlight the need for God, as a transposition of the Holy Father's theme.
In his reflections on the 2006 Valencia visit under the theme of marriage and the family, the Holy Father indicates the demographic crisis in Europe as a crisis of moral orientation in parents. "...[T]he problem of Europe, which it seems no longer wants to have children, penetrated my soul. To foreigners this Europe seems to be tired, indeed, it seems to be wishing to take its leave of history. Why are things like this? This is the great question. The answers are undoubtedly very complex. Before seeking these answers, it is only right to thank the many married couples in our Europe who still say 'yes' to children today and accept the trials that this entails: social and financial problems, as well as worries and struggles, day after day; the dedication required to give children access to the path towards the future. In mentioning these difficulties, perhaps the reasons also become clearer why for many the risk of having children appears too great.
"A child need loving attention. This means that we must give children some of our time, the time of our life. But precisely this 'raw material' of life--time--seems to be ever scarcer. The time we have available barely suffices for our own lives; how could we surrender it, give it to someone else? To have time and to give time--this is for us a very concrete way to learn to give oneself, to lose oneself in order to find oneself.
"In addition to this problem comes the difficult calculation: what rules should we apply to ensure that the child follows the right path and in so doing, how should we respect his or her freedom? The problem has also become very difficult because we are no longer sure of the norms to transmit; because we no longer know what the correct use of freedom is, what is the correct way to live, what is morally correct and what instead is inadmissible.
"The modern spirit has lost its bearings, and this lack of bearings prevents us from being indicators of the right way to others. Indeed, the problem goes even deeper. Contemporary man is insecure about the future [without hope!]. Is it permissible to send someone into this uncertain future? In short, is it a good thing to be a person? This deep lack of self assurance--plus the wish to have one's whole life for oneself--is perhaps the deepest reason why the risk of having children appears to many to be almost unsustainable. In fact, we can transmit life in a responsible way only if we are able to pass on something more than mere biological life, and that is, a meaning that prevails even in the crises of history to come and a certainty in the hope that is stronger than the clouds that obscure the future.
"Unless we learn anew the foundations of life--unless we discover in a new way the certainty of faith--it will be less and less possible for us to entrust to others the gift of life and the task of an unknown future.
"Connected with that, finally, is also the problem of definitive decisions: can man bind himself for ever? Can he say a 'yes' for his whole life? Yes, he can. He was created for this. In this very way human freedom is brought about and thus the sacred context of marriage [which is by nature monogamous and heterosexual] is also created and enlarged, becoming a family and building the future."[1]
The truth is that the present world is very unstable and unreliable and is will fail us. It is not reasonable to put one's faith in the passing world, because everything on earth is passing and only God and His love lasts. An Italian Renaissance poem offers many poetic images for the limits and earthly life, which deceptively promises perfection.
"Our mortal life seems like... ...a show, a display of vanity; a beautiful garment which covers the deformities of a sick body, a grassy meadow which hides among its green weeds a poisonous serpent.
"...a narrow field but full of hard stones, a thick wood, but full of sharp thorns, a shady mountain, but full of towering rocks and altogether a great forest, but full of savage beasts.
"...[A] dark valley of tears, a fountain barren of thoughts, a river turbid with tears, a stormy sea of troubles.
"...[L]ike a bubble in water which soon bursts, like vapor in the air which soon vanishes, and like the flower that suddenly withers on the hedge.
"...I compare it to an old house that threatens to collapse in ruins, to a high tower built on the sand, to a tree full of branches but without roots.
"...[It's] like a boat without a helm, old age without a cane, a horse without reigns and a blind man without a guide.
"...[It can be likened to] confused order, to tormented calm, to ineffectual toil, to good ailing health and to poor wealth.
"...[D]eformed beauty, infamous honor, eager ambition, precipitous height and an obscure nobility.
"...[A] sack [riddled] with holes, a cracked jar, a dirty mirror, a broken glass,
"...a golden fish hook with bait, a sharp piercing dart, a sour apple that disgusts and a cup of intoxicating wine.
"...[A] journey full of traps, a city full of strife, a divided kingdom, a tyrannical principality, an irksome pilgrimage.
"...[A] castle in the air, a ship in the sea, a mist before the sun, and a passing wind that does not return.
"...[A] deep whirlpool where many drown, a narrow sea where many are in peril, an ocean without a port where one passes at great risk.
"...[A] cave of serpents, a den of thieves, a lair of assassins, a haven for evil doers.
"...[A] city square full of noise, a winding street full of pitfalls, and an old wall full of crevices.
"...[A] yoke that is not soft, a heavy burden, and a strong chain.
"...[I]t is pitch that defiles, mud that sticks, dust that blinds.
"...[A] sandy desert, a horrid wilderness, an uninhabitable country.
"...[I]t changes like the moon, it passes like a mailman, ...it turns like a wheel.
"...[I]t is a city of blood, a lusting after the flesh, satisfaction for the eyes and arrogant pride in the heart.
"...[The] love of madmen, the desire of the wicked, the pleasure of the sensualists.
"...[A] a poorly stocked table, a leaking cistern, a hard bed and an empty coffer.
"...[A] singing mermaid, an enticing whore, a spell casting sorcerer.
"...[A] lying life, a dead life, a breathing death, a hell of the living.
"...[A] funeral of living bodies, a headlong race to death, a noble show of pomp that is given to the worms.
"...[I]n fact all the vilest names and titles can be applied to this worldly life and they will all suit it excellently well.
"Now, so many people hold this worldly life in high esteem and enjoy it to such a point that they would rather never die because their sins have dimmed their sight and placed a veil before their eyes so that they cannot understand the truth of things. And therefore, mistaking the false for the true and evil for good, they stray into error. And meanwhile, Death overtakes them and carries them off to where they find nothing in hand but wind, with torment and grief.
"Men who live thus are most unhappy, since they sleep securely in so dangerous an error. How much better for them if once they could awake from such a deadly stupor.
"How much benefit it would be to people if they looked beyond the surface, beyond the misfortunes and imperfections of this life of deceit! Because by becoming too attached to its false beauties they fall into and do not see the tortures of Hell and the cruel arms of Death." [2]
Spe salvi is the Holy Father's post-enlightenment presentation of the same failed world to men showing them the inherent imperfection and limits and corruption with the world and especially within man, from which only Christ can free us.
Would that man should seek the deep meaning of life. Would that men should seek God. Would that men should find Jesus Christ, recognize and repent of their sins and receive His mercy: the Love of God in the Blood of Jesus. Would that men should begin to live in God , and thus really LIVE!
[1] Benedict XVI Address to the Roman Curia, 22 December 2006
[2] Emilio de'Cavalieri (1550-1602), from the introductory dialogue to the oratorio "Rappresentatione di Anima et di Corpo", February 1660 production, Rome.
For a sketch outline of Benedict's recent papal publications: Deus caritas est, Jesus of Nazareth, and now Spe Salvi, I propose the Jubilee year address to Catechists below. More on this later.
The New Evangelization, building the civilization of love
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Address to Catechists and Religion Teachers
Jubilee of Catechists
December 12, 2000 (Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe)
Human life cannot be realized by itself. Our life is an open question, an incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realized. Each man's fundamental question is: How will this be realized—becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path toward happiness?To evangelize means: to show this path—to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness—rather: I am that path.The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice—all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.This is why we are in need of a new evangelization—if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works. But this art is not the object of a science—this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life—he who is the Gospel personified.
I. Structure and method in new evangelization
1. The structure
Before speaking about the fundamental contents of new evangelization, I would like to say a few words about its structure and on the correct method.The Church always evangelizes and has never interrupted the path of evangelization. She celebrates the eucharistic mystery every day, administers the sacraments, proclaims the word of life—the Word of God, and commits herself to the causes of justice and charity. And this evangelization bears fruit: It gives light and joy, it gives the path of life to many people; many others live, often unknowingly, of the light and the warmth that radiate from this permanent evangelization.However, we can see a progressive process of de-Christianization and a loss of the essential human values, which is worrisome. A large part of today's humanity does not find the Gospel in the permanent evangelization of the Church: That is to say, the convincing response to the question: How to live?This is why we are searching for, along with permanent and uninterrupted and never to be interrupted evangelization, a new evangelization, capable of being heard by that world that does not find access to "classic" evangelization. Everyone needs the Gospel; the Gospel is destined to all and not only to a specific circle and this is why we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.Yet another temptation lies hidden beneath this—the temptation of impatience, the temptation of immediately finding the great success, in finding large numbers. But this is not God's way. For the Kingdom of God as well as for evangelization, the instrument and vehicle of the Kingdom of God, the parable of the grain of mustard seed is always valid (see Mark 4:31-32).The Kingdom of God always starts anew under this sign. New evangelization cannot mean: immediately attracting the large masses that have distanced themselves from the Church by using new and more refined methods. No—this is not what new evangelization promises. New evangelization means: never being satisfied with the fact that from the grain of mustard seed, the great tree of the Universal Church grew; never thinking that the fact that different birds may find place among its branches can suffice—rather, it means to dare, once again and with the humility of the small grain, to leave up to God the when and how it will grow (Mark 4:26-29).Large things always begin from the small seed, and the mass movements are always ephemeral. In his vision of the evolutionary process, Teilhard de Chardin mentions the "white of the origins" (le blanc des origines): The beginning of a new species is invisible and cannot be found by scientific research. The sources are hidden—they are too small. In other words: The large realities begin in humility.Let us put to one side whether Teilhard is right in his evolutionary theories; the law on invisible origins does say a truth—a truth present in the very actions of God in history: "The Lord did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the Lord loved you." God says [this] to the People of Israel in the Old Testament and thus expresses the fundamental paradox of the history of salvation: certainly, God does not count in large numbers; exterior power is not the sign of his presence.Most of Jesus' parables indicate this structure of divine intervention and thus answer the disciples' worries, who were expecting other kinds of success and signs from the Messiah—successes of the kind offered by Satan to the Lord: All these—the kingdoms of the world—I will give to you ... (Matthew 4:9).Of course, at the end of his life Paul believed that he had proclaimed the Gospel to the very ends of the earth, but the Christians were small communities dispersed throughout the world, insignificant according to the secular criteria. In reality, they were the leaven that penetrates the meal from within and they carried within themselves the future of the world (see Matthew 13:33).An old proverb says: "Success is not one of the names of God." New evangelization must surrender to the mystery of the grain of mustard seed and not be so pretentious as to believe to immediately produce a large tree. We either live too much in the security of the already existing large tree or in the impatience of having a greater, more vital tree—instead we must accept the mystery that the Church is at the same time a large tree and a very small grain. In the history of salvation it is always Good Friday and Easter Sunday at the same time ....
2. The method
The correct method derives from this structure of new evangelization. Of course we must use the modern methods of making ourselves be heard in a reasonable way—or better yet: of making the voice of the Lord accessible and comprehensible. ... We are not looking for listening for ourselves—we do not want to increase the power and the spreading of our institutions, but we wish to serve for the good of the people and humanity giving room to he who is Life.This expropriation of one's person, offering it to Christ for the salvation of men, is the fundamental condition of the true commitment for the Gospel. "I have come in my Father's name, and you do not receive me; if another comes in his own name, him you will receive," says the Lord (John 5:43). The mark of the Antichrist is the fact that he speaks in his own name.The sign of the Son is his communion with the Father. The Son introduces us into the Trinitarian communion, into the circle of eternal love, whose persons are "pure relations," the pure act of giving oneself and of welcome. The Trinitarian plan—visible in the Son, who does not speak in his name—shows the form of life of the true evangelizer—rather, evangelizing is not merely a way of speaking, but a form of living: living in the listening and giving voice to the Father. "He will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak," says the Lord about the Holy Spirit (John 16:13).This Christological and pneumatological form of evangelization is also, at the same time, an ecclesiological form: The Lord and the Spirit build the Church, communicate through the Church. The proclamation of Christ, the proclamation of the Kingdom of God presupposes listening to his voice in the voice of the Church. "Not speak on his own authority" means: to speak in the mission of the Church ....Many practical consequences come from this law of expropriation. All reasonable and morally acceptable methods should be studied—to use these possibilities of communication is a duty. But words and the whole art of communication cannot reach the human person to such depths as the Gospel must reach.A few years ago, I was reading the biography of a very good priest of our century, Don Didimo, the parish priest of Bassano del Grappa. In his notes, golden words can be found, the fruit of a life of prayer and of meditation. About us, Don Didimo says, for example: "Jesus preached by day, by night he prayed."With these few words, he wished to say: Jesus had to acquire the disciples from God. The same is always true. We ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.We must add another step. Jesus preached by day, by night he prayed—this is not all. His entire life was—as demonstrated in a beautiful way by the Gospel according to St. Luke—a path toward the cross, ascension toward Jerusalem. Jesus did not redeem the world with beautiful words but with his suffering and his death. His Passion is the inexhaustible source of life for the world; the Passion gives power to his words.The Lord himself—extending and amplifying the parable of the grain of mustard seed—formulated this law of fruitfulness in the word of the grain of seed that dies, fallen to earth (John 12:24). This law too is valid until the end of the world and is—along with the mystery of the grain of seed—fundamental for new evangelization. All of history demonstrates this.It is very easy to demonstrate this in the history of Christianity. Here, I would like to recall only the beginning of evangelization in the life of St. Paul. The success of his mission was not the fruit of great rhetorical art or pastoral prudence; the fruitfulness was tied to the suffering, to the communion in the passion with Christ (see 1 Corinthians 2:1-5; ... 2 Corinthians 11:30; Galatians 4:12-14)."But none will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah," said the Lord. The sign of Jonah is the crucified Christ—they are the witnesses that complete "what is lacking in Christ's afflictions" (Colossians 1:24). Throughout all the periods of history, the words of Tertullian have always been verified: The blood of martyrs is a seed.St. Augustine says the same thing in a much more beautiful way, interpreting John 21, where the prophesy of Peter's martyrdom and the mandate to tend, that is to say, the institution of his primacy, are intimately connected.St. Augustine comments [on] the text John 21:16 in the following way: "Tend my sheep," this means suffer for my sheep.... A mother cannot give life to a child without suffering. Each birth requires suffering, is suffering, and becoming a Christian is a birth. Let us say this once again in the words of the Lord: The Kingdom of heaven has suffered violence (Matthew 11:12; Luke 16:16), but the violence of God is suffering, it is the cross. We cannot give life to others without giving up our own lives.The process of expropriation indicated above is the concrete form (expressed in many different ways) of giving one's life. And let us think about the words of the Savior: "Whoever loses his life for my sake and the Gospel's will save it" (Mark 8:35).
II. The contents essential for new evangelization
1. Conversion
As for the contents of new evangelization, first of all we must keep in mind the inseparability of the Old and the New Testaments. The fundamental content of the Old Testament is summarized in the message by John the Baptist: metanoeìte—Convert! There is no access to Jesus without the Baptist; there is no possibility of reaching Jesus without answering the call of the precursor, rather: Jesus took up the message of John in the synthesis of his own preaching: metanoeìte kaì pisteúete èn tù eùaggelíu (Mark 1:15).The Greek word for converting means: to rethink—to question one's own and common way of living; to allow God to enter into the criteria of one's life; to not merely judge according to the current opinions. Thereby, to convert means: not to live as all the others live, not do what all do, not feel justified in dubious, ambiguous, evil actions just because others do the same; begin to see one's life through the eyes of God; thereby looking for the good, even if uncomfortable; not aiming at the judgment of the majority, of men, but on the justice of God—in other words: to look for a new style of life, a new life.All of this does not imply moralism; reducing Christianity to morality loses sight of the essence of Christ's message: the gift of a new friendship, the gift of communion with Jesus and thereby with God. Whoever converts to Christ does not mean to create his own moral autarchy for himself, does not intend to build his own goodness through his own strengths."Conversion" (metanoia) means exactly the opposite: to come out of self-sufficiency to discover and accept our indigence—the indigence of others and of the Other, his forgiveness, his friendship. Unconverted life is self-justification (I am not worse than the others); conversion is humility in entrusting oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and the criteria of my own life.Here we must also bear in mind the social aspect of conversion. Certainly, conversion is above all a very personal act, it is personalization. I separate myself from the formula "to live as all others" (I do not feel justified anymore by the fact that everyone does what I do) and I find my own person in front of God, my own personal responsibility.But true personalization is always also a new and more profound socialization. The "I" opens itself once again to the "you," in all its depths, and thus a new "We" is born. If the lifestyle spread throughout the world implies the danger of de-personalization, of not living one's own life but the life of all the others, in conversion a new "We," of the common path of God, must be achieved.In proclaiming conversion we must also offer a community of life, a common space for the new style of life. We cannot evangelize with words alone; the Gospel creates life, creates communities of progress; a merely individual conversion has no consistency....
2. The Kingdom of God
In the appeal to conversion the proclamation of the Living God is implicit—as its fundamental condition. Theocentrism is fundamental in the message of Jesus and must also be at the heart of new evangelization.The keyword of the proclamation of Jesus is: the Kingdom of God. But the Kingdom of God is not a thing, a social or political structure, a utopia. The Kingdom of God is God. Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our—in my life.God is not a faraway "ultimate cause," God is not the "great architect" of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it—on the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of historyIn his conference when leaving the University of Münster, the theologian J.B. Metz said some unexpected things for him. In the past, Metz taught us anthropocentrism—the true occurrence of Christianity was the anthropological turning point, the secularization, the discovery of the secularity of the world. Then he taught us political theology—the political characteristic of faith; then the "dangerous memory"; and finally narrative theology.After this long and difficult path, today he tells us: The true problem of our times is the "Crisis of God," the absence of God, disguised by an empty religiosity. Theology must go back to being truly theo-logy, speaking about and with God.Metz is right: the unum necessarium to man is God. Everything changes, whether God exists or not. Unfortunately—we Christians also often live as if God did not exist (si Deus non daretur). We live according to the slogan: God does not exist, and if he exists, he does not belong.Therefore, evangelization must, first of all, speak about God, proclaim the only true God: the Creator—the Sanctifier—the Judge (see Catechism of the Catholic Church).Here too we must keep the practical aspect in mind. God cannot be made known with words alone. One does not really know a person if one knows about this person secondhandedly. To proclaim God is to introduce to the relation with God: to teach how to pray. Prayer is faith in action. And only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of his existence appear.This is why schools of prayer, communities of prayer, are so important. There is a complementarity between personal prayer ("in one's room," alone in front of God's eyes), "para-liturgical" prayer in common ("popular religiosity") and liturgical prayer.Yes, the liturgy is, first of all, prayer; its specificity consists in the fact that its primary project is not ourselves (as in private prayer and in popular religiosity), but God himself—the liturgy is actio divina, God acts and we respond to this divine action.Speaking about God and speaking with God must always go together. The proclamation of God is the guide to communion with God in fraternal communion, founded and vivified by Christ. This is why the liturgy (the sacraments) are not a secondary theme next to the preaching of the living God, but the realization of our relationship with God.While on this subject, may I be allowed to make a general observation on the liturgical question. Our way of celebrating the liturgy is very often too rationalistic. The liturgy becomes teaching, whose criteria is: making ourselves understood—often the consequence of this is making the mystery a banality, the prevalence of our words, the repetition of phrases that might seem more accessible and more pleasant for the people.But this is not only a theological error but also a psychological and pastoral one. The wave of esoterism, the spreading of Asian techniques of relaxation and self-emptying demonstrate that something is lacking in our liturgies. It is in our world of today that we are in need of silence, of the super-individual mystery, of beauty.The liturgy is not an invention of the celebrating priest or of a group of specialists; the liturgy (the "rite") came about via an organic process throughout the centuries, it bears with it the fruit of the experience of faith of all the generations.Even if the participants do not perhaps understand each single word, they perceive the profound meaning, the presence of the mystery, which transcends all words. The celebrant is not the center of liturgical action; the celebrant is not in front of the people in his own name—he does not speak by himself or for himself, but in persona Christi. The personal abilities of the celebrant do not count, only his faith counts, by which Christ becomes transparent. "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30).
3. Jesus Christ
With this reflection, the theme of God has already expanded and been achieved in the theme of Jesus Christ: Only in Christ and through Christ does the theme God become truly concrete: Christ is Emmanuel, the God-with-us—the concretization of the "I am," the response to Deism.Today, the temptation is great to diminish Jesus Christ, the Son of God, into a merely historical Jesus, into a pure man. One does not necessarily deny the divinity of Jesus, but by using certain methods one distills from the Bible a Jesus to our size, a Jesus possible and comprehensible within the parameters of our historiography.But this "historical Jesus" is an artifact, the image of his authors rather than the image of the living God (see 2 Corinthians 4:4ff; Colossians 1:15). The Christ of faith is not a myth; the so-called historical Jesus is a mythological figure, self-invented by various interpreters. The 200 years of history of the "historical Jesus" faithfully reflect the history of philosophies and ideologies of this period.Within the limits of this conference, I cannot go into the contents of the proclamation of the Savior. I would only like to briefly mention two important aspects.The first one is the Sequela of Christ—Christ offers himself as the path of my life. Sequela of Christ does not mean: imitating the man Jesus. This type of attempt would necessarily fail—it would be an anachronism. The Sequela of Christ has a much higher goal: to be assimilated into Christ, that is to attain union with God. Such a word might sound strange to the ears of modern man. But, in truth, we all thirst for the infinite: for an infinite freedom, for happiness without limits.The entire history of revolutions during the last two centuries can only be explained this way. Drugs can only be explained this way. Man is not satisfied with solutions beneath the level of divinization. But all the roads offered by the "serpent" (Genesis 3:5), that is to say, by mundane knowledge, fail. The only path is communion with Christ, achieved in sacramental life. The Sequela of Christ is not a question of morality, but a "mysteric" theme—an ensemble of divine action and our response.Thus, in the theme on the sequela we find the presence of the other center of Christology, which I wished to mention: the Paschal Mystery—the cross and the Resurrection. In the reconstruction of the "historical Jesus," usually the theme of the cross is without meaning. In a bourgeois interpretation it becomes an incident per se evitable, without theological value; in a revolutionary interpretation it becomes the heroic death of a rebel.The truth is quite different. The cross belongs to the divine mystery—it is the expression of his love to the end (John 13:1). The Sequela of Christ is participation in the cross, uniting oneself to his love, to the transformation of our life, which becomes the birth of the new man, created according to God (see Ephesians 4:24). Whoever omits the cross, omits the essence of Christianity (see 1 Corinthians 2:2).
4. Eternal life
A last central element of every true evangelization is eternal life. Today we must proclaim our faith with new vigor in daily life. Here, I would only like to mention one aspect of the preaching Jesus, which is often omitted today: The proclamation of the Kingdom of God is the proclamation of the God present, the God that knows us, listen to us; the God that enters into history to do justice. Therefore, this preaching is also the proclamation of justice, the proclamation of our responsibility.Man cannot do or avoid doing what he wants to. He will be judged. He must account for things. This certitude is of value both for the powerful as well as the simple ones. Where this is honored, the limitations of every power in this world are traced. God renders justice, and only he may ultimately do this.We will be able to do this better the more we are able to live under the eyes of God and to communicate the truth of justice to the world. Thus the article of faith in justice, its force in the formation of consciences, is a central theme of the Gospel and is truly good news. It is for all those suffering the injustices of the world and who are looking for justice.This is also how we can understand the connection between the Kingdom of God and the "poor," the suffering and all those spoken about in the Beatitudes in the Speech on the Mountain. They are protected by the certainty of judgment, by the certitude, that there is a justice.This is the true content of the article on justice, about God as judge: Justice exists. The injustices of the world are not the final word of history. Justice exists. Only whoever does not want there to be justice can oppose this truth.If we seriously consider the judgment and the seriousness of the responsibility for us that emerges from this, we will be able to understand full well the other aspect of this proclamation, that is redemption, the fact that Jesus, in the cross, takes on our sins; God himself, in the passion of the Son, becomes the advocate for us sinners, and thus making penance possible, the hope for the repentant sinner, hope expressed in a marvelous way by the words of St. John: Before God, we will reassure our heart, whatever he reproves us for."For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything" (1 John 3:19ff). God's goodness is infinite, but we should not diminish this to goodness to mawkish affectation without truth. Only by believing in the just judgment of God, only by hungering and thirsting for justice (see Matthew 5:6) will we open up our hearts, our life to divine mercy.This can be seen: It isn't true that faith in eternal life makes earthly life insignificant. To the contrary: only if the measure of our life is eternity, then also this life of ours on earth is great and its value immense. God is not the competitor in our life, but the guarantor of our greatness. This way we return to the starting point: GodIf we take the Christian message into well-thought-out consideration, we are not speaking about a whole lot of things. In reality, the Christian message is very simple: We speak about God and man, and this way we say everything.
No man who loves can be a materialist. The materialist can only lust and use others because every beautiful young virgin with time and wear will become disproportionate and old. Love is the deep dedication to the person, who, though bodily real is not just or even primarily flesh but much more, infinitely more, which only the true lover can see, in selfless unlimited commitment. The Little Prince makes this point which the Holy Father emphasized in both of his encyclicals, that the deepest and most important aspect of reality cannot be measured, controlled or possessed[1]. One must use the heart in addition to the mind to measure the greatest realities: love, goodness, truth, eternity.
"Men cultivate five thousand flowers in one garden and they do not find what they seek...Meanwhile what they seek might be found with just one rose...But the eyes are blind. It is necessary to search with the heart."
(Les hommes de chez toi, dit le petit prince, cultivent cinq mille roses dans un meme jardin...et ils n'y trouvent pas ce qu'ils cherchent...Et cependant ce qu'ils cherchent pourrait etere trouve dans une seule rose ou un peu d'eau...Mais les yeux sont aveugles. Il faut chercher avec le coeur.) Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, chapt. 25
The most important things are not accessible to the eyes--not material but metaphysical. This was the same point made by the Greeks as in the gradual relief of a dual material deception in Plato's "Analogy of the Cave", book VII of the Republic.
"...[I]n the region of the known the last thing to be seen and hardly seen is the idea of good, and that when seen it must needs point us to the conclusion that this is indeed the cause for all things of all that is right and beautiful, giving birth in the visible world to light, and the author of light and itself in the intelligible world being the authentic source of truth and reason, and that anyone who is to act wisely in private or public must have caught sight of this." (par. 517c)
First was the relief of the deception of the images projected on the wall, finally revealed as mere shadows cast by the fire behind the activity behind the fetter bound deceived; then the far greater relief going out of the cave to the brilliant sun and the world under its brilliance. In Pope Benedict's terms the first level is the discovery of "little hopes", the second that of real hope, a hope in the possibility of fulfilling all of man's worthy desires endlessly.
The material world involves a dual deception: 1) It poses as the whole of reality and as larger than its true worth and is therefore not as fulfilling as it appears because in itself it offers much less than it pretends. 2) It is the image (sign) of--it indicates--a reality many times (infinitely) greater than itself, than what it pretends to offer. Thus, it is both less and more that it seems.
For example, a beautiful adolescent girl gives us a glimmer of immortal beauty to indicate the profound, unfathomable worth of the girl herself prescinding from all physical beauty (all glimmers). Nor is she as perfect as she seems even on the material level for she, like every mortal man, has corruption (at least physical waste) within her viscera. That is why it (the superficial) is so ephemeral, because it is only a reflection. The deception is to think that this is all there is. It might lead to an overestimation of the sign. It is also analogous to a general deception of the beauty of the entire visible world and everything it has to offer (which also always includes corruption [man's capacity for evil and the consequent negative effects] in its viscera) vis-a-vis the eternal Beauty. That is the deeper level of this first deception which brings in the second deception which tends to an underestimation of the goods of this world.
Taking the calculable benefits as the whole of reality (this world as the only world) can produce contempt, not valuing it as a part of a greater whole. In that case one would never find the rose one seeks even with a garden full of roses. In fact the girl and the world is not unimportant precisely because she and it are not the whole of reality.
The passing nature of things is not worthless but is essentially united to the whole of reality (time is part of eternity in the Person of Christ), like the body is essential to the girl; the sign and the reality are inseparable, so this life and the after-life are inseparable--we will live forever as we have lived on earth; each man dies as he lives! Thus life on earth, personal dedication, far deeper than the pursuits of the flesh, even through the greatest suffering, for true love and for the constant purification of love, has eternal significance. "...[T]he way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continued to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love. Indeed, it has already been burned away through Christ's Passion" Spe salvi, 47
This theme of the greater love of heaven as being the impetus and the meaning and the hope of the loves of the earth was the theme of Deus caritas est (the very nature of eros being agape directed) and is found in the heart of the encyclical on hope. The Holy Father makes this statement after showing the limits of human reason and human freedom and therefore the limits to hope in human progress.
"It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love. This applies even in terms of this present world. When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of 'redemption' which gives a new meaning to his life. But soon he will also realize that the love bestowed upon him cannot by itself resolve the question of his life. It is a love that remains fragile. It can be destroyed by death. The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: 'neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Rom 8:38-39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then--only then--is man 'redeemed', whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances. This is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has 'redeemed' us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote 'first cause' of the world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of him everyone can say: 'I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me' (Gal 2:20).
"In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life (cf Eph 2:12). Man's great , true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God--God who has loved us and who ontinues to love us 'to the end.' until all 'is accomplished' (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30). Whoever is moved by love begins to perceive what 'life' really is...Life in its true sense is not something we have exclusively in or from ourselves: it is a relationship. And life in its totality is a relationship with him who is the source of life. If we are in relation with him who does not die, who is Life itself and Love itself, then we are in life. Then we 'live'." SS, 26-27
Only the man who has the love of Christ has a reason to live beyond adolescent enthusiasm. And only the man who can live beyond lust (be it lust of the flesh, lust after things or vain pride of life) has a reason to live at all, because otherwise he will never be satisfied even with all of the roses in the world. Christ is our satisfying sweet Rose: "eat my Flesh and drink my Blood and live!" says the Lord. Only His Flesh will satisfy and He gives the proper value to all of our human relationships which are neither to be worshipped nor despised but nobly pursued in His love.
--------------------
Notes
[1] In Truth and Tolerance Cardinal Ratzinger emphasized that reason (e.g. science) is always in need of love, the love of God, which in its true form is one with the Truth, He is the Truth and therefore the guide also for man's understanding and for the meaning of his life and activity in the world.
"The attempt, in this crisis for mankind, to give back an obvious meaning and significance to the concept of Christianity as the religio vera, must, so to speak, be based in equal measure upon orthopraxy and orthodoxy. At the most profound level its content will necessarily consist--in the final analysis, just as it did [in early Christianity's indissolubly linking the concepts of nature, man, God, ethics, and religion]--in love and reason coming together as the two pillars of reality: the true reason is love, and love is the true reason. They are in their unity the true basis and the goal of reality." p. 183
December 3, 2007 Op-Ed Contributor A Vote for Latin By HARRY MOUNT http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/03/opinion/03mount.html
London - At first glance, it doesn't seem tragic that our leaders don't study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about. As they themselves might have said, "Roma urbs aeterna; Latina lingua aeterna."*
None of the leading presidential candidates majored in Latin. Hillary Clinton studied political science at Wellesley, as did Barack Obama at Columbia. Rudy Giuliani had a minor brush with the language during four years of theology at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn when he toyed with becoming a priest. But then he went on to major in guess what? Political science.
How things have changed since the founding fathers.
Of the 7,000 books originally in Thomas Jefferson's library, only a couple of dozen are still at Monticello. The rest were sold off by his descendants, and eventually bought back by the Library of Congress. The best-thumbed of those remaining — on a glassed-in shelf in Jefferson's study — is a copy of Virgil's "Aeneid."
Jefferson started learning Latin and Greek at age 9 at a school in Virginia run by a Scottish clergyman. When he was at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, a Greek grammar book was always by his side. Tacitus and Homer were his favorites.
High school, Jefferson thought, should center on Latin, Greek and French, with grammar and reading exercises, translations into English and the memorizing of famous passages. In 1819, when Jefferson opened the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (built according to classical rules of architecture), he employed only classically trained professors to teach Greek and Roman history.
This pattern of Latin learning continued for more than 150 years. Of the 40 presidents since Jefferson, 31 have studied Latin, many at a high level. James Polk graduated from the University of North Carolina, in 1818, with top honors in math and classics. James Garfield taught Greek and Latin from 1856 to 1857 at what is now Hiram College in Ohio. Teddy Roosevelt studied classics at Harvard.
John F. Kennedy had Latin instruction at not one, but three prep schools. Richard Nixon showed a great aptitude for the language, coming second in the subject at Whittier High School in California in 1930.
And George H. W. Bush, a Latin student at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., was a member of the fraternity Auctoritas, Unitas, Veritas (Authority, Unity, Truth).
A particular favorite for Bill Clinton during his four years of Latin at Hot Springs High School in Arkansas was Caesar's "Gallic War."
Following in his father's footsteps, George W. Bush studied Latin at Phillips Academy (the school's mottoes: "Non Sibi" or not for self, and "Finis Origine Pendet," the end depends on the beginning).
But then President Bush was lucky enough to catch the tail end of the American classical tradition. Soon after he left Andover in 1964, the study of Latin in America collapsed. In 1905, 56 percent of American high school students studied Latin. By 1977, a mere 6,000 students took the National Latin Exam.
Recently there have been signs of a revival. The number taking the National Latin Exam in 2005, for instance, shot up to 134,873.
Why is this a good thing? Not all Romans were models of virtue — Caligula's Latin was pretty good. And not all 134,873 of those Latin students are going to turn into Jeffersons.
But what they gain is a glimpse into the past that provides a fuller, richer view of the present. Know Latin and you discern the Roman layer that lies beneath the skin of the Western world. And you open up 500 years of Western literature (plus an additional thousand years of Latin prose and poetry).
Why not just study all this in English? What do you get from reading the "Aeneid" in the original that you wouldn't get from Robert Fagles's fine translation, which came out just last year?
Well, no translation, however fine, can ever sound the way Latin was written to sound. To hear Latin poetry spoken smoothly and quickly is to hear a mellifluous, rat-a-tat-tat language, the rich, distilled, romantic, pure, heady blueprint of its close descendant, Italian.
But also, learning to translate Latin into English and vice versa is a tremendous way to train the mind. I think of translating concise, precise Latin into more expansive, discursive English as like opening up a concertina; you are allowed to inject all sorts of original thought and interpretation.
As much as opening the concertina enlarges your imagination, squeezing it shut — translating English into Latin — sharpens your prose. Because Latin is a dead language, not in a constant state of flux as living languages are, there's no wriggle room in translating. If you haven't understood exactly what a particular word means or how a grammatical rule works, you are likely to be, not off, but just plain wrong. There's nothing like this challenge to teach you how to navigate the reefs and whirlpools of English prose.
With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government. The novelist Alan Hollinghurst describes people who know history's turning points as being able to look at the world as a sequence of roots: Greece gives way to Rome, Rome to the Byzantine Empire, to the Renaissance, to the British Empire, to America.
You can gain this advantage at any age. Alfred the Great, the ninth-century king of England, who knew how crucial it was to learn Latin to become a civilized leader, took it up in his 30s. Here's hoping that a new generation of students — and presidents — will likewise recognize that "if Rome is the eternal city, Latin is the eternal language."
Harry Mount is the author of "Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life." New York Times
Thursday, December 13, 2007
'Spe Salvi' at a glance
By John Thavis
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Here at a glance are the main points of Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical, "Spe Salvi" (on Christian hope), released Nov. 30:
-- Jesus Christ brought humanity the gift of a "trustworthy hope" in salvation and eternal life, a hope that is directly connected with faith.
-- In the contemporary world, however, religious faith has been replaced with faith in progress and technology, provoking a "crisis of Christian hope."
-- Ideologies like Marxism tried to do without religion and create a perfect society through political structures. Instead, this led to the "greatest forms of cruelty," proving that "a world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope."
-- Some have placed their hope in the mistaken belief that man could be redeemed through science -- but science can destroy the world unless it is guided by religious values.
-- Experience shows that anyone who does not know God "is ultimately without hope," the great hope that sustains life.
-- Christianity cannot limit its attention to the individual and his salvation; Christianity's transforming role includes the wider society.
-- Prayer is an effective "school of hope," as demonstrated by the saints through the centuries. Prayer should not isolate Christians, but make them more responsive to others.
-- Suffering cannot be eliminated in this world but can be transformed by Christian hope. The measure of humanity, for individuals and society, lies in compassion for the suffering.
-- The prospect of divine judgment also offers hope, because it promises God's grace and justice.
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 01, 2007
Spe Salvi
Benedict XVI put out his newest encyclical on November 30, and it's well worth reading.
Brief summary of the encyclical:
Paul says, "In hope we are saved" (Rm. 8:24). What can justify that?
The Christian faith is not merely informative but performative; it doesn't merely make things known, it makes things happen, because Christian faith involves hope, and the one with hope lives differently, with a new life.
The hope that is redemption is life with God; a good example is St. Josephine Bakhita of Darfur, and this experience is discovered as well in the early Church.
Human beings live lives in a sort of paradox; we want life to continue, for us and for our loved ones, but we don't want merely to live indefinitely. We know and yet do not know what we want, and reach out for something out of our reach. We use the term 'eternal life' to describe this 'unknown' that we want, something that would not merely be interminable but life in its fullest and most proper sense.
Christian hope is not individualistic but social; the known unknown that we seek is to be numbered among a people. But there is an idea that hope is selfish rather than social. We find the reason for this in the foundations of the modern age, in which the disturbing step is taken of trying to find salvation in a union of science and technological practice. Faith became faith in progress, and hope, which is intimately tied to faith, became perverse.
Technological progress must be matched by ethical progress; calculating reason must look beyond itself and direct the will along the right path; fully human freedom requires the convergence, based on something else, of various kinds of freedom. The point put simply: man needs hope, so man needs God.
Institutions, however important, cannot guarantee the moral well-being of the world; even the best ones can only function when people are motivated as a community to assent freely to the social order. Thus we cannot definitively establish the world of good will; free assent must be constantly won over to the cause of good, so every generation in a sense begins anew. Yet it is also the case that ever generation must make its own contribution to those institutions for good and for freedom that can serve as a guideline to the next generation.
We are redeemed by love; in Jesus Christ we can say, "I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). This love is life, and it is communal life, for it is union with the one who gave Himself for all. Loving God, we participate in His justice and love for others. We see an example of this in the life of St. Augustine.
How, then, may we learn and practice hope? First, through prayer, prayer that is both personal and guided and illuminated by the great prayers of the Church and the saints in the liturgy. Second, in contexts of action and suffering, we can open ourselves to truth, to love, to good, and courageously place ourselves on the side of good even when it is difficult to do so. St. Paul Le-Bao-Tinh provides a useful example of this; and perhaps it would be judicious to revive, moderately and reasonably, the practice of 'offering up' the hardships we experience. Third, by faith in the Last Judgment, which is a faith in the ultimate justice of the order of the world; God's judgment is hope because it is both justice and grace. And fourth, by taking Mary as our sea-star (stella maris) of hope in our journey of faith.
In the previous post we outlined the false hopes presented in the encyclical. Now we shall give the Pope's answer to each of those false hopes. Before we begin though please note that all of the major ideas of this encyclical are found in a small book by Josef Pieper, Hope and History, Munich[1]: 1967, which I have had on the shelf for some time and yesterday read in light of this encyclical. The two works are organized differently, and the philosophical climate has changed in our post-Soviet era with the crises of the Islam/ Judeao-Christian civilization clash, and the demographic suicide of the "enlightened" nations. The major difference in these two works is that the previous optimism of the materialists is gone, the blind faith in progress has been shattered by the failures and disasters and impending disasters caused by the atheistic empires. Today the world has lost all real hope. There are negative indications on all sides: from the destruction of the family, licentiousness, abortion, to war, terror, increased crime, immigration crises, environmental concerns, etc. The Holy Father, being a good father to all humanity, representing Christ, who represents and is one with the heavenly Father, seizes this moment of general despondent disorientation to show the Way. Christ is the Way. God is the purpose of our life and the sure source of Hope. We (believers and non-believers) shall not be discouraged by our failures. We need to renew our hope in the mercy of God, in goodness, in justice, in lasting peace, by looking to the Prince of Peace. This message is particularly apropos during Advent, as we await the coming of Christ at Christmas 2007.
The topics on the "false hopes" are 1) false religions, 2) subjectivist Christianity, 3) misunderstanding of "eternal life" and 4) artificial "redemption". We shall present the Holy Father's answer to each in turn.
1) False religions are saved from meaninglessness and ultimate despair by the personal knowledge of and relationship with the living and true God who fulfills all of their noble traditions and aspirations. "Spe salvi facti sumus--in hope we were saved, says Saint Paul to the Romans, and likewise to us (Rom. 8:24)." 1 In this all of us are the same, believer and non-believer (i.e. non-Christian). The Holy Father here shows that all men are in need of hope. No one is born a believer. Coming to faith is the actual beginning of hope: "To come to know God--the true God--means to receive hope...that there is a 'paron' above all masters, the Lord of all lords, and that this Lord is good, goodness in person...[The African slave convert Saint Josephine Bakhita] came to know that this Lord even knew her, that he had created her--that he acutally loved her. She too was loved, and by none other thatn the supreme 'Paron', before whom all other masters are themselves no more than lowly servants. She was known and loved and she was awaited. What is more, this master had himself accepted the destiny of being flogged and now he was waiting for her 'at the Father's right hand'. Now she had 'hope'--no longer simply the modest hope of finding masters who would be less cruel, but the great hope: 'I am definitively loved and whatever happens to me--I am awaited by this Love. And so my life is good.' Through the knowledge of this hope she was 'redeemed', no longer a slave, but a free child of God." The Holy Father uses this example of how faith in the one true God is also the blessed assurance that changes one's life. That the true God is the one Who is Love and above all worldly power and dominion and above all the cosmic powers too. 3
"The Roman state religion had become fossilized into simply ceremony,...merely a 'political religion'. Philosophical rationalism had confined the gods within the realm of unreality. The divine was seen in various ways in cosmic forces, but a God to whom one could pray did not exist. (cf. Col 2:8)...Gregory of Nazianzen...says that at the very moment when the Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit determined by Christ. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the univers, the laws of matter, which ultimately govern the world and manking, but a personal God governs the strars, that is the universe; it is not the laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason, will, love--a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us, then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we are free. Inancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of this. heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit who in Jesus has revealied himself as Love". 5 (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1817-1821)
2) Subjectivist Christianity needs to re-evaluate itself and realize that true Christianity is no human invention but "hypostasis" (substance), real. Christian hope is based on the fact that God, who is love, has loved us and does love us, thus life is worthwhile and possible.
In this section of the encyclical (nos. 24-31) entitled "The true shape of Christian hope", the Holy Father addresses the secularized Christians who tend to displace their hope in God and Jesus Christ, His Way and His Life onto smaller temporal hopes. Christians have an obligation to work for progress in the material sphere, but with the keen awareness that mastery of nature does not necessary lead to mastery over man, because of the problem of human freedom. "...In the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man's freedom is always new ans he must always make his decisions anew. These decisions can never simply be made for us in advance by others--if that were the case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning...The moral treasury of humanity is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it (...not readily at hand like tools that we use)...Even the best structures function only when the community is animated by convictions capable of motivating people to assent freely to the social order. Freedom requires conviction; conviction does not exist on its own, but must always be gained anew by the community...24 What this means is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed...[G]ood structures help, but of themselves they are not enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from the outside. 25 Here there is an allusion to religious freedom inherent in each human person.
"It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love. This applies even in terms of this present world." And not just any love, only God's love will do! "When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of 'redemption' which gives a new meaning to his life. But soon he will also realize that the love bestowed upon him cannot by itself resolve the question of his life. It is a love that remains fragile. It can be destroyed by death. The human being needs unconditional love. He needs the certainty which makes him say: 'neither death, nor life, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separated us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord' (Rom 8:38-39). If this absolute love exists, with its absolute certainty, then--only then--is man 'redeemed', whatever should happen to him in his particular circumstances."26 Thus the Christian task in the world is largely social in transmitting the much needed love of God to others. In this regard Saint Augustine described his daily life, "'The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel's opponents need to be refuted, its insidious enemies guarded against; the unlearned need to be taught, the indolent stirred up, the argumentative checked; the proud must be put in their place, the desperate set on their feet, those engaged in quarrels reconciled; the needy have to be helped, the oppressed to be loberated, the good to be encouraged, the bad to be tolerated; all must be loved.' 'The Gospel terrifies me'--producing that healthy fear which prevents us from living for ourselves alone and compels us to pass on the hope we hold in common."29 Here the Holy Father shows the indispensible task of the Christian in the world in His responsibility to bring God to it, to others! It is not enough to be good or to do good, the Christian has to bring them God in Jesus, he is the true love of God.[2]
"[Unconditional love]...is what it means to say: Jesus Christ has 'redeemed' us. Through him we have become certain of God, a God who is not a remote 'first cause' of the world, because his only-begotten Son has become man and of him everyone can say: 'I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me' (Gal 2:20). In this sense it is true that anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope,without the great hope that sustains the whole of live (cf. Eph 2:12). Man's great, true hope which holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God--God who has loved us and who continues to love us 'to the end,' until all 'is accomplished'" (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30). 26-27 Prayer is a major source of that God given hope, as explained in following passage from the Holy Father's first encyclical.
"When we consider the immensity of other's needs, we can, on the one hand, be driven towards an ideology that would aim at doing what god's governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem. Or we can be tempted to give in to inertia, since it would seem that in any event nothing can be accomplished. At such times, a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path, without falling into an arrogant contempt for man...It is time to reaffirm the importance of prayer in the face of the activism and the growing secularism of many Christians engaged in charitable work. Clearly, the Christian who prays does not claim to be able to change God's plans or correct what he has foreseen. Rather, he seeks an encounter with the Father of Jesus Christ, asking God to be present with the consolation of the Spirit to him and his work. A personal relationship with God and an abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeanded and save him from falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism. An authentically religious attitiude prevents man from presuming to judge God, accusing him of allowing poverty anf failing to have compassion for his creatures. When people claim to build a case against God in defence of man, on whom can they depend when human activity proves powerless?" (Deus caritas est, 36-37) Prayer is one of the necessary contexts of true hope. cf. 32-34 Thus our hope is not simply "informative" but "performative"--changing our lives and our world. cf. 4
3. Misunderstanding of "eternal life"
"...[W]e need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loves us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety. His Kingdom is not an imaginary hereafter, situated in a future that will never arrive; his Kingdom is present wherever he is loved and wherever his love reaches us. His love alone gives us the possibility of soberly persevering day by day, without ceasing to be spurred on by hope, in a world which by its very nature is imperfect. His love is at the same time our guarantee of the existence of what we only vaguely sense and which nevertheless, in our deepest self, we await: a life that is 'truly' life."31
To have knowledge of and hope in the eternal life promised by God in Christ we need the three "settings" mentioned in the last section of the encyclical, a life of faith. Prayer in communion with the prayer of the Church, Christian action and patient enduring of the suffering which may come, and meditation on the Last Judgement are all essential to Christian hope. Regarding the Last Judgement (the last section of the document, before the concluding prayer to Our Lady) the Holy Father says "I am convinced that the question of justice constitutes the essential argument, or in any case the strongest argument, in favor of faith in eternal life." 43 This point needs to be considered in light of this entire document and the particular doubts and anxieties of our age and in light of the constant teaching of the Church. In the encyclical on hope the only allusion to heaven is through the prism of suffering and judgment, in other words, the arduousness of the task, that heaven must be striven for and it is a demanding achievement only possible with God's purifying help: Purgatory (here and hereafter). Suffering is necessary to get to heaven. The deepest suffering of man is relieved only through the merits of Christ's blood, His grace. Therefore, man needs Christ and the assistance of heaven to live. Living for Christ and for heaven gives true meaning to this life and to the suffering of this life.
There is no justice without God, without the Last Judgment. If there were not Judgment (no ultimate Judge) then there would be no rights nor corresponding duties because there would be no permanent guarantee, no truth, and ultimately, no right and wrong. The Judgment is necessary for the defence of reason and freedom which are based in the pursuit of what is good (for man). The very hope that all will be set aright comes from the Ultimate Divine reality. Every idea of goodness is founded in God, in Christ. Thus, "To protest against God in the name of justice is not helpful. A world without God is a world without hope. Only God can create justice. And faith gives us the certainty that he does so. The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror, but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope. Is it not also a frightening image? I would say: it is an image that evokes responsibility...God is justice and creates justice. This is our consolation and our hope. And in his justice there is also grace. This we know by turning our gaze to the crucified and risen Christ. Both these things--justice and grace--must be seen in their correct inner relationship. Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong into right 44...Christ...is the fire which both burns and saves...It is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of his love sears throug us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God. In this way the inter-relation between justice and grace also becomes clear: the way we live our lives is not immaterial, but our defilement does not stain us for ever if we have at least continuted to reach out towards Christ, towards truth and towards love...grace allows us all to hope, and to go trustfully to meet the Judge whom we know as our 'advocate', or parakletos"(cf. 1Jn 2:1). 47
4) Pope Benedict answers the attempts at artificial "redemption" that modern man too needs God in Jesus Christ to enable him to properly use his freedom and to humbly use reason under His wisdom. Structures in every time and place, according to the particular needs, are necessary to assist in educating man, every man in the proper use of his freedom: for goodness and truth, but with the assistance of the wisdom and law of God. "...[T]echnical progress [must be] matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth..." (cf. Eph 3:16; 2 Cor 4:16) [in order to be real progress]. 22 Yes indeed, reason is God's great gift to man, and the victory of reason over unreason is also a goal of Christian life. But when does reason truly triumph? When it is detached from God? When it has become blind to God? Is the reason behind action and capacity for action the whole of reason? If progress, in order to be progress, needs moral growth on the part of humanity, then the reason behind action and capacity for action is likewise urgently in need of integration through reason's openness to the saving forces of faith, to the differentiation between good and evil. Only thus does reason become truly human. It becomes human only if it is capable of directing the will along the right path, and it is capable of this only if it looks beyond itself. Otherwise, man's situation, in view of the imbalance between his material capacity and the lack of judgment in his heart, becomes a threat for him and for creation. Thus where freeedom is concerned, we must remeber that juman freedom always requires a convergence of various freedoms. Yet this convergence cannot succeed unless it is determined by a common intrinsic criterion of measurement, which is the foundation and goal of our freedom. Let us put it very simply: man needs God, otherwise he remains without hope. Given the developments of the modern age, the quotation from Saint Paul with which I began (Eph 2:12) proves to be thoroughly realistic and plainly true. There is no doubt, therefore, that a 'Kingdom of God' accomplished without God--a kingdom therefore of man alone--inevitably ends up as the 'perverse end' of all things as described by Kant (19): we have seen it, and we see it over and over again. Yet neither is there any doubt that God truly enters into human affairs only when, rather than being present merely in our thinking, he himself comes towards us and speaks to us. Reason therefore needs faith if it is to be completely itself: reason and faith need one another in order to fulfill their true nature and mission." 23
Notes
[1] It should be interestion to investigate the connection between Ratzinger, Pieper and Munich, especially during the 50's-70's.
[2] Man's constant need for unconditional love never goes away. Man Always needs Jesus. "Love--caritas--will always prove necessary, even in the most just society. There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminated love is preparing to eliminate man as such. There will always be suffering which cries out for consolation and help. There will always be loneliness. There will always be situations of material need where help in the form of concrete love of neighbor is indispensable." (Deus caritas est, 29)
