These, of course, are points that Joseph Ratzinger has been making for years, indeed decades. In Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, he synthesizes his arguments into a series of finely-tuned propositions on which all men and women of good will would do well to reflect. Among the most important of these propositions I would list the following, illustrating each with a brief citation from the book:
Proposition 1: We live in a moment of dangerous imbalance in the relationship between the West’s technological capabilities and the West’s moral understanding.
Thus Ratzinger writes, “Moral strength has not grown in tandem with the development of science; on the contrary, it has diminished, because the technological mentality confines morality to the subjective sphere. Our need, however, is for a public morality, a morality capable of responding to the threats that impose such a burden on the existence of us all. The true and gravest danger of the present moment is precisely this imbalance between technological possibilities and moral energy” [p. 27].
Proposition 2: The moral and political lethargy we sense in much of Europe today is one by-product of Europe’s disdain for the Christian roots of its unique civilization, a disdain which has contributed in various ways to the decline of what was once the center of world culture and world-historical initiative.
Thus Ratzinger writes, “…Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness…God is irrelevant to public life…[This contemporary European culture] is the most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity…” [pp.30-31].
Proposition 3: The abandonment of Europe’s Christian roots implies the abandonment of the idea of “Europe” as a civilizational enterprise constructed from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. This infidelity to the past has led, in turn, to a truncated idea of reason, and of the human capacity to know, however imperfectly, the truth of things, including the moral truth of things. There is a positivism shaping (and misshaping) much of Western thought today — a positivism that excludes all transcendent moral reference points from public life. Ratzinger asks whether such a positivism in an exercise of what the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor describes as “exclusive humanism,” and then asks whether such an exclusivist humanism, is, itself, rational. His answer is a resounding “No.” As he writes, “This philosophy expresses, not the complete reason of man, but only one part of it. And this mutilation of reason means that we cannot consider it to be rational at all. Hence it is incomplete and can recover its health only through reestablishing contact with its roots. A tree without roots dries up…” [p.43].
And so, evidently, do civilizations.
Proposition 4: The recovery of reason in the West would be facilitated by a reflection on the fact that the Christian concept of God as Logos helped shape the distinct civilization of the West as a synthesis of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. If men and women have forgotten that they can, in fact, think their way through to the truth of things, that may have something to do with the European forgetfulness of God which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn identified as the source of Europe’s 20th century civilizational distress.
Thus Ratzinger writes, “From the very beginning, Christianity has understood itself to be the religion of the Logos, to be a religion in keeping with reason…[But] a reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problems. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is” [ pp. 47, 49]…
If Europe begins to recover its faith in reason, then at least some in Europe may, in time, rediscover the reasonableness of faith; and in any event, a renewed faith in reason would provide an antidote to the spiritual boredom from which Europe is dying — and thus open the prospect of a new birth of freedom in Europe, and throughout the West.
George Weigel On Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures
Pope Benedict’s ‘Europe’s Crisis of Culture’ in shorter form
