OUR LADY OF FATIMA  CATHOLIC CHURCH

La Sapienza 
Then and Now

January 17th, 2008

'The Pope is against the university'

Today the Pope was supposed to have made a trip to the Roman University La Sapienza ("Wisdom University" in English and boy, what a title for the place today !) A significant number of professors (67 of them) wrote a private letter to the Pope in November of last year objecting that a "man opposed to science" should not be made welcome at the University. The letter was later leaked sparking student demonstrations against the Pope. The Vatican let it be known earlier this week that the visit was "off" but that the Pope would still publish the text he had intended to give as an address at the university. What was the cause of the outcry ? On the face of it the hullabaloo centered around a lecture that the Pope gave as Cardinal Ratzinger almost 18 years ago on February 15, 1990. The "profs" and "students" allege that Cardinal Ratzinger endorsed the Catholic Church's condemnation of scientist and astronomer Galileo. A careful perusal of the entire text of the 1990 speech gives the lie to the accusation that the now Pope Benedict is an enemy of science and progress understood in the literal senses of those words. What, then, is the reason for the charge that the "Pope is against the university" ?

Here in its entirety is the address with highlights and a couple of remarks. Afterwards we will offer some speculation as to what is really going on in Rome.

PATHS OF FAITH IN THE REVOLUTIONARY
CHANGE OF THE PRESENT DAY*

The year 1989 led to dramatic revolutions in the political and intellectual landscape of Europe that no one could have predicted even a short time before. The new element in this revolution was the fact that it did not come about through political or military violence but through new departures and revolutionary changes in the intellectual order, which simply removed the basis from the old structures of power and led to their collapse almost overnight. Thus this process not only affects states that were previously dominated by the Marxist ideology but has a worldwide significance as well. It goes beyond the political field, particularly since it came from the metapolitical sphere itself and then of course brought to light the political force of originally nonpolitical factors. It would also, therefore, be inappropriate to harbor cheap feelings of satisfaction about the failure of others; rather, we are all called to reflect on the intellectual foundations on which paths into the future can be built, and on the foundations on which they cannot. Consequently, the reflections that follow, while linked to the political events of the year 1989, are directed to the metapolitical dimension that has appeared in all its urgency in these events.

1. THE CRISIS OF MARXISM
AS A QUESTION PUT TO THE WESTERN WORLD

a. The Metapolitical Foundations of the Political-Economic Crisis

We shall begin our examination with the facts, in order to discern their inner motivating forces and thus to find criteria for the future. The first question we must pose is: What was it really that collapsed in the course of the years 1989 and 1990? To begin with, one can and must say simply that Marxism failed as an all-embracing interpretation of reality and as a directive for action in history. Its promise of freedom, equality and welfare for all was not verified by the empirical facts; it was shown to be false on the basis of

political and economic facts. Although these assessments are correct, one would remain on a superficial level if one were to be content with them. Rather, we must take one step farther and ask: But what is specifically false in this interpretation of the world and in the praxis deduced from it? An exact observation of the events leads directly to the heart of the matter: the power of the spirit, the power of convictions, of suffering and of hopes, has thrown down the existing structures. This means that the materialism which wanted to reduce the spirit to a mere consequence of material structures, to the mere superstructure of the economic system, has been brought down. But here we are no longer speaking only of the problem of Marxism and its world of states-we are speaking about ourselves. For materialism is a problem that affects us all; its breakdown compels all of us to an examination of conscience.

This is why it is necessary to pause somewhat at this point and to ask what is the real core of a materialistic ideology. It does not consist in the total denial of spirit: materialism, too, admits that spirit has appeared on the scene at some place or other in history and that it must be distinguished from the merely material from then on. The essence of modern materialism is more subtle: it consists in the way in which the relationship between matter and spirit is conceived. Here, matter is the first and original element; it is matter, not the Logos, that stands at the beginning. Everything develops out of matter in a process of contingencies that becomes the process of necessities. Spirit is never more than the product of matter. If one knows the laws of matter and can manipulate these, then one can also direct the course of the spirit. One changes the spirit by rearranging its material conditions. Thus one can enlarge and remodel history in a mechanical way by enlarging and remodeling structures. (1)

This materialistic arrogance has been proved to be an error. It is true that the spirit does depend to a good extent on its material conditions, but it transcends these. One cannot free man from his freedom by lining with concrete the channels along which it must move. The presumption that claims one can construct the perfect man and the perfect society with structural formulas is the real core of modern materialism, and this core has been shown to be an error. To count on the mechanical instead of on the spiritual, the eternal, is to miscalculate in the long run.

If this is correct, then one particular type of belief in science is also thereby called immediately into question; this belief in turn is something that goes far beyond the domain of Marxist power. Science in the narrower sense of the term refers to the realm of the necessary, which can be reduced to strict rules and leads in this way to objectively verifiable certainty. But this means that science, so understood, cannot deal with the realm of what is free, that is, with the genuinely human dimension of man and his social bonds. However, the fascination exercised by an all-embracing concept of science, a concept able to deal with man no less precisely than with the things of physics, has led to the transgression of this boundary.

From as early as the time of Auguste Comte, all effort has gone into gaining a complete knowledge of man as a being governed by rules, to filling in all the blank spaces in the map of the scientific world. The result is the emergence, in all its variations, of the fundamental concept of social science, which appears in the East as Marxist sociology and in the West as positivist sociology. In both cases this sociology proposes the "project of modernity" (to use Jiirgen Habermas' term). (2)

There is no space here to explain more thoroughly the common methodological fundamental starting point of this kind of human science, which lies behind all the differences between Marxism and positivism; this human science regards itself as the new metaphysics, as the interpretation of the bases of human existence. Let it suffice to refer once again to Habermas, for whom personal existence is not to be seen as an independent variable but as "an essential dimension of the species, which realizes itself (first of all) in a historical process within one wholly specific time and society". The concept of person now denotes "an individual which has come into being in and through socialization and cannot at all be conceived of independently of society. This individual is produced or made, so to speak, in the mechanism of socialization." (3) The attempt to treat man "scientifically" in the narrowest sense of this word includes the determinism that comes from the antecedent materialism. An idea of science that is formed on the basis of what is not free is transposed to the realm of what is free, namely, the human realm, in order to make possible a "physics of man" in which there exist necessary laws and exact predictions.(4) If this theory is taken consistently, it demands by its very nature the exclusion of the factor of freedom. The Marxist system merely translated these fundamental presuppositions with all stringency into political action: the suppression of freedom by the system is not an abuse of thought but rather its logical application. This is why the outbreak of freedom in practice against the system on the streets of the Eastern European capitals has far-reaching theoretical consequences too. Not only does it call Marxist thinking into question: it is equally a question posed to our way of basing human science on methodological foundations that exclude the humanum. Thus what has happened here in the political sphere is a real contribution to the fundamental question of what freedom is, and of what man is.

A third aspect of these events seems clear to me. What has happened has also called into question one particular form of the idea of progress. The word "progress" has become a satellite of the post-Hegelian philosophy of history. It presupposes the mechanistic interpretation of history we have just criticized. "Progress" can be employed here as a party label that sells well. In the socialist camp, progress was regarded quite simply as whatever served the construction of socialism. But there is also a superficial liberalism that is no less partisan. Freedom is equated with the absence of ties, and everything that removes ties appears to be progress. And ultimately, there exists the "technologistic" variant of the belief in progress, which sees man's progress in the growth of technical ability as such. Romano Guardini spoke in this connection of the "idiocy of the belief in progress". (5) Wherever progress is seen as a necessary process of the legitimate development of history, it is located below the level of what is genuinely human and in its depths it is conceived against man. Personal freedom and ethical responsibility for oneself can then be seen only as factors that interfere with such legitimacy. The massive appearance of this "interference factor" in recent years is an event that gives hope-and is at the same time a fact that compels us to reflect and to change our way of thinking.

Here, of course, we cannot avoid the question of whether we are ready for and capable of such an about-face. To what extent are we at all able to develop new, basic visions of the totality and to abandon that secret or open materialism that has led to the embarrassing flirtation of Western intelligentsia with the Marxism of which many today no longer wish to hear anything?

At this point, we must turn to the practical question of which forces brought about the radical change in the states of Eastern Europe. Here, too, we shall not make political analyses in the narrower sense of the term. After having asked what it was that actually failed and proved to have no future, we now look for what is positive-for the energies that can effect the about-face. Naturally, this cannot be an exhaustive analysis but only a first tentative exploration.

What brought about the revolutionary change? First we must pause in considering the concrete course of the events, so that it becomes meaningful for us to go beyond this. An obvious fact that must be mentioned first as the strongest moving force of the new process is the material failure of the Marxist system in the economic and social realm. In this respect, it has failed in what was most its own-as a theory of economics-and it is no longer to be taken seriously as science today. The intellectual supporters of the system and its functionaries have known this for a long time: faced with the facts, those who embodied the system gradually lost faith in it, so that it had been kept going for a long time, no longer out of conviction, but only through the self-maintenance of power. The lifespan of sheer power, which only clings to itself without being supported by intellectual substance, is necessarily limited. As soon as the "loss of faith" on the part of the powerful coincided with the loss of confidence on the part of those they governed, and with their sheer distress, the brittle structure was bound to begin to shake.

In this context, the power of religion must be mentioned as a second factor. It had been predicted that religion would disappear of its own accord if those societal relationships that had channeled the projection of religion were to change. It had long been admitted that the speed of this process had been overestimated; and then finally more and more the possibility was left open that religion would probably never completely cease to exist altogether. Ultimately, something surprising happened: the question about God arose anew precisely within the intelligentsia of the natural sciences. A science that was becoming aware of its limitations recognized that the real answers lay outside what it in itself could offer. At the same time as the question about God flared up in the midst of the strictest rationality, the thirst for the eternal-which clearly is imprinted in the depths of our soul-made itself heard anew out of the depths of human existence. We know from many testimonies how God became an exciting topic precisely among the young academics who had grown up in a wholly atheistic climate. (6) This did not always lead to conversion, to concrete Christian faith. But such questions spontaneously generated, as it were, a new openness to the mysterious message of the icons and the closeness of the divine in the Orthodox liturgy, which is totally consecrated to the mysterium. The splendor of religious promises, which had previously paled under the magic of ideological promises, could be felt anew, pointing to other, higher fulfillments of human existence than those that a world deprived of God could offer, such as the substitute solutions of moral libertinism. Religion, which had been seen only a short time before as the embodiment of superstition and oppression, appeared as an agent of freedom; it emerged again as a public force that relativized the dominant power. Religion provided those powers of soul that ultimately became stronger than the external forces.

But we must also think of a third and quite different factor in this process: the influence of the mass media. Here we encounter a strange dichotomy, which we may not omit in the diagnosis of the present hour of history without being guilty of giving an insufficient account of the phenomena. There is no doubt that the mass media have proved to be a destabilizing factor with respect to dictatorships. They relativize everything with their skepticism, they show countertypes to everything and thus call everything into question. They present the eye with images of the life one would wish to have and thereby set up a criterion that impels opposition to the existing order. They form the consciousness and the subconscious and urge one to put into practice what has been seen and heard. Thus they have certainly made their contribution to the shaping of a consciousness that was less and less able to accept that the existing order was unchangeable. And they no doubt have their share of merit in what is perhaps the most astonishing and positive aspect of these revolutionary changes: namely, that they took place almost totally without violence. It is indeed true that one must not conceal here the heavy responsibility the mass media (with their banalization of violence, which appears as a quite normal and customary form of human behavior) must assume for the ease with which the threshold to violent action between individuals and groups is crossed over today. But there is another side of their activity, too: whatever happens at one point of the world is seen everywhere, at all places. All the world can see how terrible and cruel the use of military force is against people who demonstrate peacefully, as we saw in China and heard about from Romania. This violence can no longer conceal itself under the mask of action taken to bring about a better society; instead, the brutal face of a bloody dictatorship became visible, chilling the whole world. The world-wide multiplication of images becomes a factor of power in the local event and thereby provides the necessary protection to the defenseless will of those who rise up in protest. These are positive effects of a phenomenon of mass society to which we had not given any thought before. But, without a doubt, another side of this same phenomenon also exists: the power of the images to relativize goes beyond the sphere of dictatorships. They induce a general skepticism. One has the impression that one knows everything and can pass judgment on everything. But this could mean the loss of the ability to perceive the deeper dimensions of existence. We are threatened with a flattening-out of emotions, a grasping for what is external, a claim made on existence that no longer shakes only dictatorships but destabilizes the human soul itself to its very foundations. There is a danger that it may become incapable of the patience that is required to find the truth and incapable of that bond without which the truth does not bestow itself and without which the response of love cannot grow. It is not possible to give a simply negative or a simply positive evaluation of the mass media; precisely in their dichotomy, they are a fateful sign of our times, a sign whose power will develop increasingly in very diverse directions.

2. ANALOGIES AND VARIATIONS
IN THE WESTERN WORLD

Our reflections hitherto have taken their point of departure in the events of Eastern Europe, but we have attempted to reflect at the same time on our own problems too, the problems of the Western world and of its ideologies. In a second section, we

must go somewhat more deeply into this aspect of our question, before we can draw conclusions for the direction of faith today.

I should like to address three aspects above all: the crisis of the faith in science, the new question on the spiritual and the ethical, and the new search for religion.

The resistance of creation to its manipulation by men has become a new factor in the intellectual situation in the last decade. It is impossible to evade the question of the limits of science and of the criteria it must follow. The change in the way in which the case of Galileo is evaluated seems to me characteristic of the change of climate. This event, to which little attention was paid in the seventeenth century, was elevated in the following century to nothing less than the myth of the Enlightenment:

Galileo appears as the victim of the medieval obscurantism in which the Church persists. Good and evil stand in a distinct confrontation: on the one side, we find the Inquisition as the power of superstition, as the opponent of freedom and knowledge; on the other side stand the natural sciences, represented by Galileo, as the power of progress and of the liberation of man from the fetters of ignorance that kept him powerless vis-a-vis nature. The star of the modern period arises over the darkness of the Middle Ages. (7)

Strangely enough, Ernst Bloch with his romantic Marxism was one of the first to oppose this myth openly and to offer a new interpretation of the events. For him, the heliocentric world-system, just like the geocentric system, rests on unprovable pre-suppositions, including above all the supposition of motionless space, which has since been shattered by the theory of relativity. He states:

According to this view, the advantage of the heliocentric system over the geocentric does not consist in a greater degree of objective truth but merely in an easier calculability for us. Up to this point Bloch is doing no more than expressing the insight of the modern natural sciences; but the conclusion he derives from this now is astonishing:

The two methodological spheres are clearly distinguished from one another here, and the rights, as well as the limitations, of each are acknowledged. But the summary of the skeptical agnostic philosopher P. Feyerabend sounds much more aggressive when he writes:

C. F. von Weizsacker (to take one example) goes even one step farther in considering the practical effects when he sees a "perfectly straight path" leading from Galileo to the atomic bomb. To my surprise, when I was interviewed recently about the case of Galileo, I was not asked (for instance) why the Church had presumed to hinder the knowledge of

the natural sciences but, quite to the contrary, why the Church had not taken up a clearer position against the disasters that were bound to result when Galileo opened Pandora's box. It would be foolish to construct an impulsive apologetic on the basis of such views; faith does not grow out of resentment and skepticism with respect to rationality, but only out of a fundamental affirmation and a spacious reasonableness; we shall come back to this point. I mention all this only as a symptomatic case that permits us to see how deep the self-doubt of the modern age, of science and of technology goes today.

Let us now turn to a second area, that of the new search for an ethos and for "spirituality". Just as it is not possible to give an exclusively positive or exclusively negative evaluation of the doubts regarding science and the modern age that are spreading today, so it is not possible to portray the new openness to the spiritual dimension of the world and of human existence as a uniform phenomenon. Naturally, there is an unequivocally positive course of events today: if the moral was relegated entirely to the subjective realm at the height of the modern age, and technological progress was seen in itself as an unquestionable value, today the question about the ethical as the criterion of our activity has emerged anew in the same circles. To see ethical criteria as a boundary limiting what we research and what we do is no longer condemned a priori as obscurantism, since first the atomic bomb and then the life-destroying forms produced by technology have permitted the obverse side of progress to be perceived in practice. The effect of such a fundamental insight still continues for the most part, of course, to be limited in the practical sphere, as we see in the controversy about genetic manipulation and the procreation of man in vitro. The willingness to use human life-the life of persons, even if these are unborn-for the "higher ends" of research or for other goals considered to be good continues undiminished. The use of man as a thing, and playing with the divine mystery of his being, still goes on as before. But there is opposition, even-and precisely-within the ranks of the natural sciences. (11)

c. New Religiosity

Finally, the rediscovery of the religious dimension, too, is many-sided. Just as there is a decisive new turning to the ethical problem and a rejection of the self-satisfaction of positivism precisely among the outstanding minds of the modern natural sciences, so there is an awakening of young people today, who are asking passionately about God, ready to let their life be detennined totally and fundamentally by him. There is a greater generosity on the part of young people, who are not satisfied with vague feelings and half-hearted decisions but who seek unconditional obedience to the truth. Besides this, however, there is a widespread, rather vague tendency that one could call a yearning for spirituality and for religious experience. It would be wrong to dismiss this, but it would also be inappropriate to see in it the beginning of a new turning to the Christian faith. For this yearning often arises from a disappointment at the shortcomings of the technological world; it contains nostalgic elements and above all a deep skepticism with regard to man's vocation to truth. Truth seems to be discredited in history by the intolerance of those who fancied themselves in secure possession of it. Besides this, the experience of the limitations of science and the weakness of ideologies provokes skepticism rather than encourages the search for truth. Thus truth tends to be replaced by "values" about which one can seek at least a partial agreement. But such a selection remains questionable if

the criterion of truth is inaccessible. But above all, religion, if it is born of skepticism and disappointment at the boundaries of knowledge, necessarily becomes the domain of the irrational. It remains in the sphere of the nonbinding and easily turns into a narcotic. New mythologies are formed, as we see with particular clarity in the many-faceted phenomenon that is offered up for sale under the collective name "New Age". The parallels to the gnosis of the ancient world are striking: in both, abstruse themes of mythology are linked to the ambitious claim to possess the key of knowledge and to have found an all-embracing interpretation of reality, in which the mysteries of the universe are uncovered and knowledge becomes redemption. (12) The living God sinks down into the spiritual depths of existence in which man bathes and ultimately is dissolved in order to become one with the All out of which he has come. Karl Barth's observation that religion can become a kind of self-satisfying process that does not lead to God, but rather confirms man in himself and closes him against God, takes on a new contemporary relevance.

3. PATHS OF FAITH TODAY

At the conclusion, we now ask explicitly the question that has silently accompanied all our reflections up to this point: What ought we to do? What can provide a human future that is worth living? When we review the forces we have discussed hitherto, we can reduce them to two fundamental orientations: relativism and faith. Relativism unites easily with positivism; it is indeed positivism's own philosophical basis. We do not wish to dispute the fact that in many situations a dash of relativism, a bit of skepticism, can be useful; but it certainly does not suffice as a common ground on which we can live. For where relativism is consistently thought through and lived (without clinging secretly to an ultimate trust that comes from faith), either it becomes nihilism or else it expands positivism into the power that dominates everything, thus ending once again in totalitarian conditions. But what is left, if skepticism and relativism--despite all their partial usefulness-are not, on the whole, a path? Are we not directed anew to man's self-transcendence, to the path of faith in the living God?

A thousand objections are raised today to such an answer; all the pitiful forms of faith that have been produced in the past and in the present seem to justify these objections. The courage to believe cannot be communicated today, as formerly, in a purely intellectual manner. It requires first and foremost witnesses who verify faith as the correct path through their living and their suffering. The fact that faith became the force in Eastern Europe that proved to be stronger than "scientific socialism" is due in fact primarily to the humility and the patience of those who suffered, in whom the witness to a greater promise became visible. In this respect, our question goes far beyond a merely intellectual debate. But it is indispensable and has its own irreplaceable function.

This is why we must now go on to ask, vis-a-vis the caricatures and perversions of faith: What is the essential inner form of faith? Or, in other words: What must constitute a faith that responds to the signs of the times and thus shows man the path to redemption in this hour? I should like to propose three trains of thought.

Faith is not the resignation of reason in view of the limits of our knowledge; it is not a retreat into the irrational in view of the dangers of a merely instrumental reason. Faith is not the expression of weariness and flight but is courage to exist and an awakening to the greatness and breadth of what is real. Faith is an act of affirmation; it is based on the power of a new Yes, which becomes possible for man when he is touched by God. It seems to me important, precisely amid the rising resentment against technical rationality, to emphasize clearly the essential reasonableness of faith. In a criticism of the modern period, which has long been going on, one must not reproach its confidence in reason as such but only the narrowing of the concept of reason, which has opened the door to irrational ideologies. But the mysterium, as faith sees it, is not the irrational but rather the uttermost depths of the divine reason, which our weak eyes are no longer able to penetrate. It is and remains a fundamental word of faith when John - taking up and deepening the creation narrative of the Old Testament - begins his Gospel with the words: "In the beginning was the Logos", the creative reason, the power of the divine knowledge that imparts meaning. It is only from this beginning that one can correctly understand the mystery of Christ, in which reason can then be seen to be the same as love. The first word of faith, therefore, tells us: everything that exists is thought that has poured forth. The Creator Spirit is the origin and the supporting foundation of all things. Everything that is, is reasonable in terms of its origin, for it comes from creative reason.

Here, once again, we are confronted with the fundamental antithesis between materialism and faith. The creed of materialism is that the irrational stands at the beginning and that only the laws of chance have constructed the rational out of the irrational. Thus, reason is a by-product of the irrational; it is a mere assemblage in its laws, without any ethical or aesthetic content. This makes man in turn the assembler of the world, which he designs according to the criteria of his goals. But the real primal force always remains the irrational. For faith, it is exactly the opposite: the Spirit is the creative origin of all things, and therefore they all bear reason in themselves; this reason does not come from them but infinitely transcends them, yet it forms the law of their being. The creative reason that creates the objective reasonableness of things, their hidden mathematics and their inner order, is at the same time moral reason, and it is love. Man exists in order to recognize the traces of this reason and so to develop things in keeping with their essence. His rule is a service, and his freedom is a bond, namely, to the inner truth of things, and thus openness for the love that makes him like God.

The modern period is marked by a strange oscillation between rationalism and irrationality. Considering this dichotomy, it seems important to me to characterize the alternatives correctly. The fundamental alternative before which the course of the modern period sets us consists in the question: Does the irrational stand at the beginning of all things, is the irrational the real origin of the world, or does it come from creative reason? To believe means to take the second alternative, and only this is "reasonable", in the deepest sense of the word, and worthy of man. In the crisis of reason that confronts us today, this real essence of faith must once again become visible, this essence that saves reason, precisely because it grasps reason in its whole breadth and depth and protects it from the restrictions of a merely experiential verification. The mysterium is not opposed to reason but saves and defends the reasonableness of existence and of man.

Let us now turn from the realm of knowledge to that of willing and feeling. A fundamental preliminary decision has already been made here through our previous reflections. Schleiermacher attempted to save religion, in the fundamental danger to which the Enlightenment exposed it, by defining religion as feeling: "Its essence is neither thinking nor acting but intuition and feeling." (13) "Praxis is art, speculation is science, religion is sensitivity and taste for the infinite." (14) The nineteenth century largely followed him in this and found in this way its own kind of reconciliation between religion and science: reason could do as it liked; religion, which was wholly feeling, did not stand in its way and was for its own part free to express itself in the realm of feeling and to make its own position secure. The danger of such an intellectual truce still exists today; but this is not a peace but rather a division of man in which reason and feeling suffer equal damage.

It is in fact a resignation on the part of reason when it considers itself capable only of what is functional, no longer knows itself to be competent to recognize the truth of existence, the truth about us, about creation and about God. But this skepticism holds the field today to a large extent. We no longer dare for the most part to presume that we could recognize truth in the essence of our questioning. This false humility abases man, making our action blind and our feeling empty. Even in the Catholic Church, one rarely hears the claim any more that the truth about God becomes visible to us in faith. The impression is spreading that all religions grope in darkness and that all their statements are symbols of what is utterly unknowable. Thus religion is becoming once again a sphere of higher feelings. The religions, which have become interchangeable, are to serve the noblest goals of mankind with the thrust of the best feelings and to be instruments for the construction of a society of universal peace.

It is of course true that we all wish for universal peace. It is a justified imperative that to look toward God allows us to recognize men as our brothers and sisters and thus serves peace. But a religion that is nothing more than a means to attain particular goals is debased just as much as a religion that is allowed to govern only as feeling. (15) All errors contain truths. It is true that religion summons to peace; it is true that feeling, too, belongs to religion and that reforms that remove the humus of feelings will not succeed. But these truths retain their power only when they do not lose their own inherent interconnection. This interconnection consists in the fact that faith takes up feeling and redeems it from its indeterminacy by giving it its true ground: the feeling for the infinite is based on the truth that there exists an infinite God and that he addresses us, the finite ones. One will not restore power to faith today by reducing it as much as possible to the indeterminate but only by seeing it in its entire magnitude. Reduction does not save faith; it cheapens it. It becomes meaningful only when one leaves it its entire power. Then it is no longer we who save faith but faith that saves us.

The integration of knowledge, will and feeling takes place in the person. Christian faith has essentially a personal structure. It is the answer of a person to a personal call. It is the encounter of two freedoms. We have already said that Christian faith, on the basis of

its essence as described in the Bible, is not irrationalism but is the most decisive declaration that reason is the ground and goal of all things; we can now add that Christian faith in its essence includes a comprehensive philosophy of freedom. All we need do here, really, is repeat from another aspect what we have said above about the fundamental alternatives of thought. We noted that modern rationalism, on the basis of its methodological self-limitation, declares the irrational to be the origin of the rational. This means that it must declare the basis of freedom to be that which is not free, that is, that freedom, like reason, is a by-product of the self-construction of the world. Against this, faith, which knows the Logos as the beginning, has the primacy of freedom as its starting point. Only the link to the Logos guarantees freedom as the structural principle of what really exists.

This has disadvantages, in terms of the theory of systems: philosophies of what is necessary assert that they can explain everything. They offer user's instructions on how to bring about the better world by necessity. The philosophy of freedom that comes from faith cannot do this. It has no simple formula for the world. Or, to put it more exactly, its formula for the world is the freedom of God's love, which calls us in Jesus Christ and ever anew shows the path for man's freedom.

The effects of this reach into practical forms of piety. An apersonal piety corresponds to an apersonal philosophy. It cannot be denied that tendencies of this kind exist among Christians: there is a disintegration of the courage to believe in the personal God who hears us. Thus piety becomes a process of letting oneself sink down into the stream of being, redemption from the burden of freedom, from the burden of being a person, a return into the abyss of nothingness. Christian praying, however, is the response one freedom makes to another freedom, an encounter of love. Once again, the tendency to apersonal piety bears a portion of truth in itself: it seeks to overcome the difference that separates us from the Other and from others. But the withdrawal of existence, the resignation that this contains, does not save. The difference is overcome precisely when the encounter of two freedoms becomes love. It is not the denial of the person but rather the person's highest act, namely, love, that creates that unity for which we yearn from the depths of our existence, as creatures of the triune God. (16)

Thus we can say in closing: faith is no comfortable path. Anyone who offers faith as a comfortable path will not succeed. It makes the highest demands of man, because it thinks highly of him. But precisely because it does this, it is beautiful and in keeping with our own being. If we see it in its whole magnitude and breadth, then it bears in itself the answers for which our hour of history is calling.

Turning Point for Europe ?, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1994, pp. 81 - 111

This speech is an analysis of the reasons behind the phenomena of the apparent collapse of Marxism in former Communist controlled Europe. Whether the collapse is real or not remains to be seen. The Cardinal gives in brief outline the reasons for the rise of this political system: the Enlightenment, where man "comes of age" in the areas of philosophy, scientific "progress" and the loss of Faith, first through rationalism and then atheistic Communism because of the system proposed by Karl Marx. Along with the progression in philosophy, the Cardinal makes the case that there is a breakdown in ethics associated with technological advancement. 

As Pope, Joseph Ratzinger has continued to harp on the following themes: in the realm of ideas (philosophy), faith (theology), scientific advances (ethics), he repeatedly correlates these themes with relativism versus absolute Truth as personified in Jesus Christ the Logos or Word of St. John's Gospel. Truth can be known via Revelation, but also some things are immediately and innately perceived. Witness the religious awakening in Soviet Russia, that although the Marxist ideology sought to replace "religion" per se with materialism, materialism itself has neither satisfied the West nor the East. People are empty without the God who fills the void. This is beginning to arrive at a decidedly Augustinian weltanschauung (view of the world). Indeed the section on freedom is definitely laced with a view of the world that corresponds perfectly with St. Augustine's famous maxim: ama et fac quod vis (love and do what you will). Now St. Augustine was no libertine, far from it, however, he means that a love that is rightly ordered towards God will freely choose to do the good and avoid doing evil. It is a liberty that sets us free...

"Then Jesus said to those Jews, who believed him: If you continue in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

John 8:31 & 32

Faith, for Ratzinger is a personal encounter with God, a God who is love. Thus faith is a constant dialog of love with God, and with one's neighbor (since love is necessarily communicable - i.e. it shares itself with others). All of this is to be done in the freedom in which God has constituted man. This freedom, though, has consequences: 

"Thus we can say in closing: faith is no comfortable path. Anyone who offers faith as a comfortable path will not succeed. It makes the highest demands of man, because it thinks highly of him."

Turning Point for Europe ?, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1994, p 111

Far from embracing license for immorality, faith imposes upon us moral obligations, that is why the path is not "comfortable". Here we begin to arrive at a solution to the question as to why this speech is causing problems now. You will notice at the beginning of the text, that Cardinal Ratzinger delivered this address in three different venues with a few modifications to suit the particular occasion. The text he presents in his book, though, is the exact text that is causing such consternation. It didn't 18 years ago, so why now ? Well look at the protest photographs - a picture is worth a 1000 words ! 

Italy last year was in a heated debate over Prime Minister Prodi's same-sex legislation. The Catholic Church moved might and main to torpedo that deal. In Italian politics the ability of the Church to wield clout has been notoriously absent for decades. Ratzinger's pontificate has changed all that. Do you remember the referendum on pro-life issues that Cardinal Ruini and the Pope scuppered in 2005 ? Well 2007 was another triumph for Pope Benedict and the new head of the Italian Bishops' conference Angelo Cardinal Bagnasco of Genoa. The victory was so sweet, that the then Archbishop received bullets in the mail, had death threats scrawled on the walls of his cathedral and needed a security detail of Italian police to accompany him wherever he went. That is precisely what is now irritating the "intellectuals" and aging hippies of La Sapienza but then, not all the students are fooled by this nonsense. At yesterday's Wednesday audience, some of the students from La Sapienza showed up to support the Pope. Their home-made banners read: "If Benedict doesn't come to La Sapienza, La Sapienza goes to Benedict" and "Students with the Pope"

Pope Benedict made sure to speak with these youngsters after his address. The students were members of a group called Comunione e Liberazione (no translation needed I'm sure) a group dear to this Pope's heart. The words mean, union with the Church and liberation (again) with the Augustinian concept of the Truth setting us free. The joy on the faces of these young people is real.

Here is a Pope who connects with youth, he knows it and they know he knows it. It's a pity their "professors" don't ! The indefatigable Cardinal Ruini, still the Cardinal Vicar of Rome, has called for a mass show of strength in St. Peter's square in support of Pope Benedict. I'm sure the place will be packed to capacity ! I'll be there as well (at least via the internet), watching the Angelus address on my computer. Viva il Papa !

+TF

UPDATE

The following is an unofficial translation of what the Pope was going to say today:

'I DO NOT COME TO IMPOSE THE FAITH
BUT TO URGE COURAGE TO FACE TRUTH'

Rector Magnificus,
Political and civilian authorities,
Distinguished professors and staff,
Dear young students!

It is a cause of joy for me to encounter the community of La Sapienza, University of Rome, on the occasion of the inauguration of its academic year.

For centuries now, this University has marked the way and the life of the City of Rome, allowing the best intellectual energies in every field of knowledge to bear fruit. Whether it was in the time, after its founding by Pope Boniface VIII, when the institution was directly under ecclesiastical authority, or subsequently, when the Studium Urbis developed as an institution of the Italian State, your academic community has maintained a high scientific and cultural level which has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

The Church of Rome has always regarded this university center with sympathy and admiration, recognizing its mission - at times arduous and exhausting - of research and the educational formation of new generations.

The past several years have not lacked for significant moments of collaboration and dialog. I recall, in particular, the World Encounter of university Professors on the occasion of the university's 700th Jubilee year, in which your university took charge not only of hospitality and organization, but above all, of the prophetic and complex elaboration of a program on "a new humanism for the third millennium."

I would like to express, under these circumstances, my gratitude for the invitation which was extended to me to come to this university and give a lecture. With this in mind, I asked myself: What can a Pope say and what should he say on such an occasion?

In my lecture at Regensburg, I spoke as Pope, yes, but above all, I spoke as the professor that I once was in my university, seeking to link my memories to the present. At La Sapienza, Rome's oldest university, however, I have been invited as Bishop of Rome, and so, I must speak as such.

Of course, La Sapienza was once the Pope's university, but today it is a secular university with that autonomy which, based on its founding concept, has always been part of the nature of a university, which should be linked exclusively to the authority of truth. The university finds its particular function in its freedom from political or ecclesiastical authorities, especially in modern society, which needs institutions of this kind.

Going back to my question at the start: What can a Pope say and what should he say in meeting with the university of his city? Reflecting on this, it seemed to me that it holds two other questions, whose clarification itself should lead to the answer.

In fact, one must ask: What is the nature and mission of the papacy? And likewise: What is the nature and mission of a university?

I will not keep you and me in any long disquisition on the nature of the Papacy. A brief observation will suffice.

The Pope is, first of all, Bishop of Rome, and as such, through the apostolic succession from the Apostle Peter, he has an episcopal responsibility for the entire Catholic Church. The word 'bishop' - episkopos - in its primary sense means 'overseer' - was already, in the New Testament, fused with the Biblical concept of the Shepherd.

The bishop is he who, from an elevated viewpoint, sees the whole picture, and takes care of showing the right way to all his flock and keeps them together. In this sense, this description of his task is oriented within the community of believers.

The Bishop-Pastor is the man who takes care of this community - he who keeps the flock together and puts them on the way to God, indicated - according to Christian faith - by Jesus, who not only indicates it: For us, He is the way himself.

But this community that the Bishop takes charge of, whether it is big or small, lives in the world. Its conditions, its course of action, its example and its words inevitably influence all the rest of the human community in its entirety.

The larger this community is, the more its good conditions or its eventual degradation will have repercussions on all of mankind. We see today with great clarity how the conditions of religions and the situation of the Church - its crises and its renewals - are able to have an impact on all of mankind. And so, the Pope, because he is the Pastor of his community, has also become increasingly a voice of ethical reason for mankind.

Here however, the objection may be raised right away that the Pope, in fact, could never truly speak on behalf of ethical reason, but would draw his views from the faith and so cannot claim that they are valid for those who do not share that faith.

We must return to this subject, because now the absolutely fundamental question arises: What is reason? How can a statement - above all a moral norm - show itself to be 'reasonable'?

At this point, I wish to briefly point out that John Rawls, although denying that 'comprehensive religious doctrines' have the nature of 'public reason', nevertheless sees that their 'non-public' reason is, at least,still reason, which cannot be - in the name of a secularly hardened rationality - simply not known or not recognized by those who sustain such rationality.

He sees a criterion of this reasonableness, among others, in the fact that similar doctrines derive from a responsible and motivated tradition, in which, over a long period of time, sufficiently good argumentations have developed to support a particular doctrine.

I think this statement is important for its recognition that experience and demonstration over the course of generations - the historical background of human knowledge - are also a sign of reasonableness and lasting significance.

In the face of a-historical reason which seeks to construct itself only in an a-historical rationality, mankind's wisdom as such - the wisdom of the great traditional religions - must be appreciated and valued as facts that cannot simply be cast into the wastebin of the history of ideas.

Let us return to the initial question. The Pope speaks as the representative of a community of believers, in which during the centuries of its existence, a certain wisdom about life has matured. He speaks as the representative of a community which guards in itself a treasure of knowledge and of ethical experiences which have proven to be important for all mankind. In this sense, therefore, he speaks as a representative of ethical reason.

Next we ask: What is a university? What is its mission? It is a huge question to which, once again, I can try to answer only in almost telegraphic style with some observations.

I think it can be said that the true intimate origin of the university is is the longing for knowledge, which is inherent in man. He wants to know about everything that is around him. He wants truth.

In this sense, one can see the self-questioning of Socrates as the impulse from which the Western university was born. I think, for example - to cite just one text - of his dispute with Eutiphrone, who defended before Socrates mythical religion and his devotion to it.

To this, Socrates asked in his turn: "You think that the gods really had wars against each other and terrible enmities and combats... Should we, Eutiphrone, say effectively that all this is true?" (6 b-c).

In this question which seems to be far from devout - but which, in Socrates, arose from a religiosity that was purer and more profound than the search for the truly divine God - the Christians of the first centuries recognized themselves and their journey. They had received their faith not in a positivist mode, or as a way out of unappeased desires; they understood it as the dissolution of the fog of mythological religion to make way for the discovery of that God who is creative Reason and at the same time God-Love.

That is why, self-questioning about God, as also about the true nature and true sense of the human being,was, for them, not a problematic form of a lack of religiosity, but it was part of the essence of their way of being religious.

Thus they had no need to let go or to temporarily shelve Socratic self-questioning, but they could and they had to welcome it, recognizing as part of their own identity the exhausting attempts by reason to arrive at knowledge of the entire truth. And so, it became possible - rather it had to be - that the university was born in the context of Christian faith, in the Christian world.

It is necessary to take a further step. Man wants to know. He wants truth. Truth is above all something to see, to comprehend, theoria, as Greek tradition called it. But truth is never only theoretical.

Augustine, in making a correlation between the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount and the gifts of the Spirit mentioned in Isaiah 11, said there was a reciprocity between scientia and tristitia. Simple knowing, he said, makes us sad. In fact, whoever sees and learns just what is happening in the world, ends up being sad.

But truth means more than knowing: knowledge of truth has the purpose of getting to know what is good. This is also the sense of Socratic self-questioning: What is the good which makes us true? Truth makes us good, and goodness is true - this is the optimism that lives in Christian faith, because it has been granted the vision of Logos, of creative Reason which, in the Incarnation of God, also revealed itself as the Good, as Goodness itself.

In medieval theology, there was a deep dispute over the relationship between theory and praxis, on the correct relation between knowing and acting - a dispute that we will not develop here. In fact, the medieval university with its four faculties presents this correlation.

Let us start with the faculty which, according to the thinking of the time, was the fourth, that of medicine. Even if it was considered more of an 'art' rather than science, nevertheless, its inclusion in the cosmos of the universitas clearly meant that it was situated within the sphere of rationality, that the art of healing was under the guidance of reason and had been taken away from the sphere of magic.

Healing is a task that always calls for simple reason, but precisely because of this, it needs a connection between knowledge and power, it must belong to the sphere of ratio.

Inevitably, the question of the relationship between praxis and theory, between knowledge and action, comes up in the faculty of jurisprudence. It has to do with giving the right form to human freedom, which is always freedom of reciprocal communion: the law is the precondition for freedom, not its antagonist.

Now the question comes up right away: How does one define the criteria of justice which make possible a freedom that is lived together, which serve to make man good? At this point, we jump to the present: where it is the question of how to find juridical regulations that constitute an ordering of freedom, of human dignity and of human rights. This is the question that concerns us today in the democratic processes of the formation of opinion, which also torments us as a question for the future of mankind.

Juergen Habermas expresses, in my opinion, a vast consensus of present thinking, when he says that the legitimacy of a Constitution as a premise for legality, comes from two sources: from the egalitarian political participation of all citizens, and the reasonable form in which political conflicts are solved.

About this 'reasonable form', he comments that it cannot just be a battle for arithmetical majority, but should be characterize itself as a 'process of argumentation hat is sensitive to the truth" [wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren).

It is well said, but it's something very difficult to transform into political praxis. The representatives of that public 'process of argumentation' are - we know - predominantly the political parties as responsible agencies for the formation of political will.

In fact, they will unfailingly aim to win that majority and would thus inevitably pay attention to interests that they will promise to satisfy - such interests, however, are often very specific and do not really serve everyone. The sensitivity to truth is always overwhelmed by the sensitivity to these interests.

I find it significant that Habermas speaks of sensibility to the truth as a necessary element in the process of political argumentation, thus restoring the concept of truth to the philosophical and political debates.

Then Pilate's question becomes inevitable: What is truth? How does one recognize it? If this sends us back to 'public reason' as Rawls does, then the next question is: What is 'reasonable? How does reason show itself to be true reason?

In any case, it becomes evident that in the search for the laws of freedom, for the truth about just coexistence, different instances must be heard with respect to parties and interest groups without wanting to even minimally question their importance.

We thus return to the structure of the medieval university. Next to the faculty of jurisprudence were the faculties of philosophy and of theology, to whom was entrusted the research on man in his totality, and with this, the task of keeping sensitivity to truth alive.

One can say that the permanent and true sense of both faculties was to be custodians of that sensitivity to the truth, and not to allow that man be distracted from his search for truth. But how could they comply with this task?

This is a question that must always be worked on and which is never posed and resolved definitively. At this point, I too could not offer an answer, but rather an invitation to stay on the road with this question - in company with the great ones who throughout history have fought and sought, with their answers and their restlessness, to find the truth, which continually recedes beyond every single answer.

Theology and philosophy thus form a peculiar twin pair, in which neither can be totally detached from the other, but nonetheless, each must keep its own mission and its own identity.

It is a historical merit of St. Thomas Aquinas - in the face of the different answers of the Fathers of the Church because of their historical context - to have brought to light the autonomy of philosophy, and with that, the right and the responsibility of reason for self-questioning on the basis of its own powers. Differentiating itself from the neo-Platonic philosophies, in which religion and philosophy were inseparably intertwined.

The Fathers had presented the Christian faith as the true philosophy, underscoring even that this faith corresponded to the exigencies of reason in search of truth; that faith was the Yes to truth, with respect to the mythical religions which had become reduced to simple customs.

But at the moment the university was born, those religions no longer existed in the West, only Christianity, and therefore, it was necessary to underscore once again the responsibility of reason alone, not absorbed into the faith.

Thomas acted at a favorable time: For the first time, the philosophical writings of Aristotle were accessible in their entirety. There were Jewish and Arab philosophers, who represented specific appropriations and prosecutions of Greek philosophy.

Therefore Christianity, in a new dialog with the reason of others,
as it encountered them, had to fight for its own reasonableness.
The faculty of philosophy, which as the so-called 'faculty of artists', had been up to that time merely an introduction to theology, now became a true and proper faculty, an autonomous partner of theology and of the faith that it reflected. We cannot dwell here on the fascinating confrontation which came out of this.

I would say that the idea of St. Thomas on the relationship between philosophy and theology would be expressed in the formula found by the Council of Chalcedon for Christology: philosophy and theology should relate to each other "without confusion and without separation".

'Without confusion' means that each should keep its own identity. Philosophy should remain truly a search by reason into its own freedom and responsibility - it should see its limits, along with its greatness and vastness. Theology should continue to draw from a treasure of knowledge which it has not invented itself, which always surpasses it, and which, never being totally exhaustible through reflection, would always allow thought to start up anew.

The idea of 'without separation' should be in force just as much as 'without confusion'. Philosophy does not start from zero in the thinking subject, in isolated manner, but is situated within historical knowledge, which it always welcomes and develops critically but also obediently. Nor should it close itself up before what religions, and in particular, the Christian faith, have received and given to humanity to show it the path.

Various things said by theologians in the course of history - some of it even translated to practice by ecclesiastical authorities - have been shown to be false by history, and today we find them confusing.

But at the same time, it is also true that the stories of the saints, the story of humanism as it developed on the basis of Christian faith, demonstrates the truth of this faith in its essential nucleus, thus justifying its role in 'public' reason.

Of course, much of what theology and faith say could be done only within the faith and therefore cannot be demanded of those to whom this faith remains inaccessible.

At the same time, it is true that the Christian message is never just a 'comprehensive religious doctrine' in Rawls's sense, but a purifying force for reason itself, which helps it to be more itself.

The Christian message, based on its origins, should always be an encouragement towards the truth, and therefore, a force against the pressure of power and interests.

Up to now, I have been speaking of the medieval university, trying nonetheless to let the permanent nature of the university and its mission come through. In modern times, new dimensions of knowledge have opened up, and in the university, they are appreciated most of all in two spheres: above all, in the natural sciences, which have developed on the basis of the link between experimentation and the presumed rationality of matter; and in the second place, in the historical and humanistic sciences, in whuich man - scrutinizing the mirror of history, and clarifying the dimensions of his nature, seeks to understand himself better.

This development has opened to mankind not only an immense meassure of knowledge and power, but it has also developed the knowledge and acknowledgment of human rights and human dignity, for which we can only be grateful.

But man's journey can never be said to be complete, and the danger of falling into inhumanity can never be simply abjured - as we see in the panorama of current affaris.

The danger for the Western world - to speak of this alone - is that man today, especially considering the greatness of his knowledge and power, surrenders when faced with the question of truth. This would mean that reason ultimately folds up from the pressure of interests and the attractiveness of utility, being forced to recognize it as the ultimate criterion.

Stated from the point of view of the structure of the university, there is a danger that philosophy, no longer feeling capable of its true mission, degenerates into positivism; that theology, with its message addressed to reason, becomes confined to the private sphere of a group or groups.

If however, reason, solicitous of its presumed purity, becomes deaf to the great message that comes from the Christian faith and its wisdom, it would wither up like a tree whose roots no longer reach the waters that give it life. It would lose its courage for the truth and will stop being great - it would diminish.

Applied to our European culture, this means: if reason wishes to self-construct itself circumscribed by its own argumentation and that which convinces it for the moment, and - preoccupied with its secularity - cuts itself off from the roots through which it lives, then it does not become more reasonable and pure, but will decompose and break up.

With this, I return to our starting point. What does the Pope have to do or say in the university? Certainly, he should not seek to impose the faith in authoritarian fashion, because faith can only be given in freedom.

Beyond his ministry as Pastor of the Church and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral ministry, it is his task to keep alive the sensitivity for truth; to invite reason ever anew to set itself to a quest for the truth, for goodness, for God; and along this path, call on it to be aware of the useful lights that have emerged throughout the history of the Christian faith, and thereby to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light who illumines history and helps us find the way to the future.


From the Vatican
January 17, 2008 

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