Here's a rare appreciation by a secular Amerian journalist of the Pope's mind and how he has confronted modern thinkers and measured them by Christian thought.
Benedict XVI, modern man
by Mike Potemra
June 25, 2009
Pope Benedict XVI is acknowledged by virtually everyone to be a man of prodigious intellect, whose mind has been shaped by Scripture, as well as by such theologians as Augustine, Bonaventure, and Aquinas.
But a new book from Ignatius Press makes clear the extent to which the current Pope has grappled with the thought of such shapers of the modern mind as Comte, Wittgenstein, Barth, Beauvoir, and Camus.
Faith and the Future is a small book — just 118 pages, of moderately large type — but it deals with the largest issues, and does so in a way that has the ring of lived truth. It contains five essays that originated as radio talks given by then-professor Joseph Ratzinger in 1969 and 1970.
Faith, Ratzinger writes, is “not a system of knowledge,” but an act of “trust”: “A man remains a Christian as long he makes the effort to give the central assent, as long as he tries to utter the fundamental Yes of trust, even if he is unable to fit in or resolve many of the details.”
Ratzinger seems here to be calling for an epistemologically modest attitude, but he actually does so in the service of recognizing man’s greatest possibilities.
Confronting Wittgenstein’s famous dictum, “What we cannot speak about we must consign to silence,” he writes: “[This statement] is only apparently logical. The logos, the intellect of man, reaches farther than formal logic. Man simply has to speak about the inexpressible if he would speak about himself. He must reflect precisely on the incalculable if his thinking is to touch the sphere of the truly human.”
This book is not a condemnation of Wittgenstein and other modern thinkers. It is a sincere engagement with them, in a spirit of what the author calls man’s “responsibility to reality.”
The current Pope has a reputation as a rather shy, bookish fellow — but this slight yet impressive volume shows a man very much concerned with the real world, and Man’s situation in it.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 26/06/2009 19:02]