Benedict XVI understands that the wars of the world
are still fought in the minds and hearts of men.
January 01, 2013
“The Church represents the memory of what it means to be human in the face of a civilization of forgetfulness, which knows only itself and its own criteria. Yet just as an individual without memory has lost his identity, so too a human race without memory would lose its identity.”
— Pope Benedict XVI
Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012.
“I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity. To be sure, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us; Christ, who is the truth, has taken us by the hand, and we know that his hand is holding us securely on the path of our quest for knowledge.”
— Pope Benedict XVI
Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, December 21, 2012.
I.
Each year the Holy Father gives a significant lecture to the Roman Curia about the events of the previous year. In this year’s account, Benedict spent time recalling his trips to Mexico, Cuba, and Lebanon.
In the course of a year, the modern Popes probably see more important (and “unimportant”) people in the world than any other public figure. Their trips to various countries are usually major events in those countries. It is said that John Paul II was seen in person by more human beings than any man in history.
In introducing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Sodano recalled the liturgical antiphon: “
Propre est jam Dominus, venite adoremus" – The Lord is near, come let us adore Him.
The Child in the stable in Bethlehem, Benedict continues, “is God himself and has come so close as to become a man like us.” Benedict never hesitates to identify Christ as true God and true man. These very words — "the Child is God Himself” — defy and challenge the whole world by affirming its truth.
Benedict made a most interesting remark about Cuba: “That country’s search for a proper balancing of the relationship between obligations and freedom cannot succeed without reference to the basic criteria that mankind has discovered through encounter with the God of Jesus Christ.”
One presumes that, if that statement is true for Cuba, it will be true for other lands, including our own. Evidently, mankind has learned something about obligation and freedom from its dealing with the reality of Christ. Essentially it is that no freedom exists without corresponding obligation. Likewise, an obligation that is not freely accepted is more like determinism or coercion than free responsibility.
II.
To the Curia, Benedict devotes considerable discussion to two topics: the family and the meaning of dialogue. The meeting on families in Milan gave the Holy Father an opportunity to reflect on the nature of the family and the modern effort to eliminate it as the central institution of human life.
Many questions come up about the family with which we must be familiar: “First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment. Can one bind oneself to a lifetime? Does this correspond to man’s nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to human freedom?”
These are the common questions that we hear when we try to justify divorce or infidelity of various sorts. They are rooted in an individualism that does not see human perfection as a relationship of commitment to others, including to God Himself.
But Benedict brings up something of great profundity about the nature of the modern attack on marriage. Evidently, the Pope has been reading a reflection on marriage by the Chief Rabbi in France, Gilles Bernheim. Rabbi Bernheim points out that the current attack on the family, child, and marriage is not just rooted in a false notion of freedom. This latter view has been characteristic of much modern opposition to permanent marriage. Now the issue goes to the very nature of what a human being is, not just his freedom.
What is questioned is the being of man as we have known it. It is only if we deny the being of man that we can embrace views of human relations that undermine the structure of man.
Traditionally, Rabbi Bernheim notes, to be a human being meant to be born “of woman.” Chesterton noted somewhere what a terrible thing it would be if we were “born of man.” But today, the notion of gender is not something of given fact but of choice. What one is born as makes no difference.
“Sex is no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of; it is a social role that we choose for ourselves.”
If man is born of woman, the role chosen for him is essential to his own good. But if we conceive “being given ourselves” to be a denial of our “freedom,” we must develop a theory that denies our given nature. We thus have to choose our “gender”, whatever it be.
Of this view, Benedict states: “The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious.” This obvious falsity, however, does not prevent individuals and governments from choosing it.
People deny they have a “nature” that derives from the fact of the body (and soul) given to them at conception and birth. They want to “make” themselves with no relation to God or nature. They will seek to prove that nothing in them has an origin from anything but themselves.
“According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of human nature.” The male and female division of human beings is essential to human nature as such. This duality is now questioned.
What are the consequences of this new view? It is the belief that it was “not God who created us male and female.” What did this was “society,” whose authority we now also deny We decide for ourselves.
“Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will.” This is a new form of what Maritain once called “angelism.” The body has nothing to do with our soul and spirit. Will is everything, shades of Nietzsche. We need not account for our body, let alone see in it as part of our own real good.
The Pope points out that now we are manipulating human nature, a manipulation often pursued by the same people who are up in arms about manipulating the environment. They oppose manipulating the latter but demand that we manipulate human nature.
One can only stand in awe at the force of the Pope’s mind as he examines the logic of these views of gender. “From now on there is only the abstract human being who chooses for himself what his nature will be. Man and woman in their created state as complimentary versions of what it means to be human are disputed.”
Yet, we are not just spirit and will but we are persons with body and soul in one whole. We are a unified being, all aspects of which belong together in a harmonious whole
Benedict proceeds to draw out the logic of this denial of the normalcy of male and female in one nature. “But if there is no preordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him.”
The dignity of the child is that it is a gift, not the product of human engineering or ownership. He is a good in his own being.
“Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately too man is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God…. The defense of the family is about man himself…. When God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.”
(See Schall, “On the ‘Right to Be Born,’” in Political Philosophy and Revelation, The Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming 2013).
If we maintain that someone, male or female, has an independent “right” to a child apart from the stable male-female marital relation, it follows that any arrangement in which a child can be obtained — in vitro, cloning — is merely the exercise of one’s rights.
The child, who ought to be the center of the issue, is deprived of his own need of father and mother, of his own dignity. What comes first is not the child but oneself, the complete opposite of the natural order.
But that is the logic of the I-me-myself narcissistic culture that now dominates the West!]
III.
Benedict next takes up the issue of dialogue. It is a confused area. The noble Platonic notion has become — if not useless in a world of relativism in which no truth can be found — at least a justification for endless discussions that decide very little.
Benedict sees three areas of dialogue: with the state, with society, and with religion. When civilizations forget what man is, the Church becomes the memory of mankind, of what man is. What the Church knows from its experience is relevant to non-believers.
Benedict draws a delicate line here. Knowing the almost impossible task of discussing theological issues publicly, particularly with Muslims, he grants that dialogue still must find some basis of agreement about common problems. Still, any dialogue will lead in some way to fundamental issues.
“A dialogue about peace and justice is bound to move beyond the purely pragmatic, to become an ethical struggle for the truth and for the human being.…” What began as a pragmatic issue does bring up the question of what is the right way to live and why.
Two reasons are given for dialogue among those whom we are not seeking to change.
“1) Dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at understanding. In this respect it differs from evangelization, from mission. 2) Accordingly, both parties to the dialogue remain consciously within their identity, which the dialogue does not place in question either for themselves or for others.”
These principles, of course, strike us as being a long way from Plato’s understanding of dialogue. The Pope himself finds problems with them. “I find them too superficial. True dialogue does not aim at conversion, but at better mutual understanding — that is correct. But all the same the search for knowledge and understanding always has to involve drawing close to the truth.”
A Christian cannot say that his discussion blocks out any approach to the truth. “I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.”
He can do this because reason open to revelation and revelation addressed to reason constitute a grounding in what it is that unifies our knowledge and sees the truths in other views together with their limitations.
The Church exists in part so that we do not forget who and what we are. It sees that the most fundamental institution of society, the family, is now an object of complete elimination, and the relations that are associated with the family, the most fundamental ones, are left without grounding in nature or being.
The dialogue with any of the disparate religions and philosophies of our time cannot ultimately forget that truth is the direction in which all reason tends. When Socrates said that dialogue taught him what he did not know, he only reached this conclusion after eliminating many positions that were in fact not true.
Dialogue may not be conversion but the establishment of any truth or the rejection of any error remains a central task. The wars of the world are still fought in the minds and hearts of men. Benedict quite clearly understands this fact.
Perhaps it is just a coincidence that there is another major article by Fr. Schall out today, January 1, 2013, online, this time in a secular conservative journal. But it could also mean that his recent retirement from his teaching job at Georgetown University gives him more time now to exercise his mind in the service of God and his readers! The mind of Schall is obviously exceptional, the more so because, unlike many of his fellow Jesuits, he applies it to the illumination of orthodox Catholic thinking (always in the light of classic philosophy, as well), not to assert some Jesuitic and typically egoistic sophistry in the guise of scholarship or plain dissent!
The universe we know in
by Rev. James V. Schall, S.J.
January 1, 2013
Socrates was fond of repeating the advice of the Oracle: “Know thyself.” He probably said, “Know thyself,” rather than, “Know the world,” because it is more difficult to know oneself than to know the world.
Self-introspection yields not ourselves, but something approaching infinity beyond ourselves. The first thing we know about ourselves is that we have a faculty whereby we know. Yet, we did not give this strange knowing power to ourselves. We wonder perhaps why we have it.
Plato, in fact, thought that the universe was not complete unless within it something existed that could understand it. To him, it was almost as if the universe, being spoken, needed to be spoken back, rearticulated for what it was.
Such a view presupposes that within the universe itself is found an intelligibility that makes this specific universe to be what it is rather than some other one that may be possible. This intelligibility is not put there by the human mind but is found there already and is coherent, however long and laborious the process of discovery may be.
In our intellectual comprehension of things, we stand outside the ongoing complexity of what the universe is. Yet, as existing beings within it, we clearly also belong to the universe. Human beings may be an anomaly, but we are here with as much title as any other being in the universe including the universe itself.
We do not much worry that this cosmos might in fact not be as it appears or that it might be configured differently. We find intelligibility in the universe; we do not put it there. The fact that we can speak of a “drama” of the universe implies that it reveals a plot of some kind. We wonder what sort of evidence there might be for its meaning.
As Christians, we have an explanation of the universe and our place within it. It comes to us, as it were, on good authority. We can look on and understand this explanation as it is revealed to us. When we have spelled this overall plan out, we can ask also, using our minds, whether it fits in with what we can know and figure out by ourselves through our science and intuition.
The first thing to recognize is that the universe, the cosmos, what is called in Genesis “the heavens and the earth,” need not exist. God is not part of creation. He stands outside of it. He does not need it unless He so wills. The universe depends on Him; He does not depend on it.
Aristotle once hinted that the world existed because God was lonely, that He lacked what is best in us, namely, the relation to and friendship with others. Thus, in this view, the world exists because God lacked something. If this position were true, God would be less than God.
But creation does not teach this dependency of God. It teaches the opposite. God is not lonely. Still, Aristotle had reason for thinking as he did. What he lacked was an understanding of the inner life of God, something not known except to the Godhead itself.
Many things in Aristotle are right about God. His God even seems to have some care for the world. He does move also by love and desire as a final cause. But it was only the doctrine of the Trinity that fully explained the sense of Aristotle’s concern. If there is love and inner friendship within God, then He would have no need to create to make up a deficiency. It does not follow from this position, however, that God lacked a reason to create, or that He did not create out of love. It only means that He did not create out of inner necessity of His own.
When it comes to the making of things, the first philosophical principle is that the first thing in intention is the last thing in execution. Moreover, the last thing in execution is what is the reason for creation in the first place.
What I am concerned about here is the overall structure of the universe, but this “structure,” as it were, is itself dependent on why it exists in the first place. When Cicero said our distinguishing characteristic is reason, whatever its source, he meant that it was the activity of this faculty of our soul that was meant to be fully activated for the universe to be completed.
Christianity would not disagree with this view. It would add that reason is open also to what is revealed to it from the source of reason itself if that origin should choose to act. Evidently, all beings with reason in their nature can communicate with each other at some level.
Revelation is mind speaking to mind. Revelation is not primarily intended to confuse man, but to enlighten him about what is. It does this in a peculiar way, for revelation comes to us more fully through redemption than creation. Yet, creation already sets forth the grounds whereby redemption might be necessary that the initial purpose of God in creation is to be attained.
Creatio ex nihilo
The cosmos itself, it appears, came into being, with time and space, between 13 and 14 billion years ago. In one sense, this seems like a long time ago, but in another sense it is a finite period, not an infinite one.
Some earlier theories of cosmic origin wanted to maintain that the origin was in an infinite time past, which theoretically would allow for many kinds of experiments to take place for configuring the world as it is.
The evidence seems now clear that the cosmos began with what is called a “big bang” in which everything in its physical structure is present in principle. This fact requires the existence of a super-intelligence outside the universe.
What is remarkable about this beginning is that it could not have originated from “nothing.” This fact indicates that its origin must have been with an all knowing being that understood the structure of the world and placed its order within it to be worked out in space and time.
The world contains beings that can act in various ways, including rational ways. While God may be necessary to explain why being remains present at all times, this does not prevent there also existing within the cosmos beings who exercise their own relative autonomy and power.
There are secondary causes in the world as it exists. Time and place are real, not just figments of our imagination. God is powerful enough that He creates beings that can also be free and act in their own right. Indeed, this fact gets us to the very purpose of creation in the first place and hence the reason why the cosmos exists in both its simplicity and complexity, in its size and grandeur.
Aquinas tells us that the eternal law is the order of things outside of God as they exist initially or eternally in the mind of God. God can create “images” of Himself outside of Himself. These images, these persons, are created for their own sakes, but likewise as beings that are offered something beyond the powers of their own nature.
This is why C.S. Lewis once said that we have never met a mere mortal. And indeed, we have never met a mere immortal. What we have met are individual human persons, each unique, each created freely in order that each might freely accept the participation offered to him to live, after his fashion, the inner life of the Godhead, eternal life.
The cosmos exists that an arena to carry out this purpose might be spread out in space and in time. Looked at from this angle, the cosmos, while majestic in itself, bears nowhere near the fascination as is carried out in the four score years and ten that is figuratively given to each person.
And yet, what we now call the salvation of each person takes place within a world that we seek to understand and order, that we seek to know. In studying the cosmos, what seems now clear is that it did not cause itself, nor did it come about by accident from nothing.
In addition, the cosmos seems to bear clear signs that its very structure was so ordered that rational life would be possible at some place or some places in the universe. The various constants that go to make up the anthropic principles that make life possible and keep it in being seem much too finely honed to be mere accidents. Rather, they reveal purpose already within the structure of the cosmos from its beginning.
The cosmos exists so that free and rational beings might live to carry out their own purpose.
From this background, it follows that what is important about the cosmos is not so much its existence as its grounding of human life for sufficient time that it might decide what it is about. It is not designed to go on forever in its present form.
Moreover, if we look at the central doctrine of Christianity, that of the resurrection of the body, we are led to suspect from what we can ascertain from Christ’s resurrection and from what Paul says about the earth itself awaiting its redemption that the cosmos is kept in existence even when its purpose is achieved in the redemption of our souls.
So I have called these remarks, “the universe we know in.” It is in this universe that we are given the powers to know what we are and why we exist. It is also the arena of our working out how we will stand to the universe, its purpose and its origin.
We are given from within the universe even the Incarnation of the Son of God not merely for the redemption of our sins but for the completion of the work of the Father in the beginning.
It is sometimes astonishing to realize how little evidence for atheism there really is. But it is equally astonishing to realize how much evidence for pride exists among us, for the effort to create our own world apart from the world that really exists is ever present.
We can be sure that if, as the Psalm says, “the Lord does whatever He wills,” He never wills to complete His initial purpose in offering us eternal life apart from our willingness to receive it. Perhaps this purpose has something to do with the length of time and the largeness of space what we now look out on and back on.
The Lord not only “summons the clouds from the ends of the earth,” He calls upon us to wonder about the fiery ends of this earth and of our place within it.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 02/01/2013 05:48]