Reflections Prompted by the Encyclical Fides et Ratio
What is the encyclical Fides et Ratio really about? Is it a document intended only for specialists, an attempt from a Christian perspective at restoring philosophy, a discipline that is in a state of crisis and thus of interest only to philosophers, or is it putting a question that matters to us all? We could also put it another way: Does faith really need philosophy, or is faith—which, according to a saying of Saint Ambrose, was given into the keeping of fishermen and not dialecticians—quite independent of the existence of a philosophy that is open to faith? If we regard philosophy as just one academic discipline among others, then faith is in fact independent of it. But the Pope understands philosophy in a far broader sense, and one far more in keeping with its origins. This philosophy puts the question of whether man can know truth, know the fundamental truths about himself, about his origin and his future, or whether he lives in a twilight that cannot be illuminated and must finally restrict himself to the question of what is useful. It is the peculiarity of Christianity, in the realm of religions, that it claims to tell us the truth about God, the world, and man and lays claim to being the religio vera, the religion of truth. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life”: this saying of Jesus from the Gospel of John (14:6) expresses the basic claim of the Christian faith. The missionary tendency of this faith is based on that claim: Only if the Christian faith is truth does it concern all men; if it is merely a cultural variant of the religious experience of mankind that is locked up in symbols and can never be deciphered, then it has to remain within its own culture and leave others in theirs.
That, however, means that the question about the truth is the essential question of the Christian faith as such, and in that sense it inevitably has to do with philosophy. If I had briefly to sketch the main intention of the encyclical, I would say that it is trying to rehabilitate the question of truth in a world characterized by relativism; it is trying to reinstate it as a rational and scientific task in the situation of modern science, which does indeed look for truths but which to a great extent disqualifies the search for the truth as being unscientific; it is attempting this, because otherwise faith loses the air it breathes. The encyclical is quite simply attempting to give us courage for the adventure of truth. It is thereby speaking far beyond the sphere of faith yet also into the heart of the world of faith.
1. Words, the Word, and the Truth
In his best-seller, The Screwtape Letters, which appeared in the forties, the English writer and philosopher C. S. Lewis depicted very wittily how unmodern it is to ask about truth today. This book consists of fictional letters from a senior devil who is giving advice on how best to proceed to one beginning in the work of leading men astray. The younger devil has expressed concern to his superior that especially intelligent people, in particular, might read the books of wisdom of the ancients and might thus come upon the track of the truth. Screwtape calms him by pointing out that the “Historical point of View”, with which the intellectuals of the Western world have fortunately been inculcated by the devils, means in fact that “when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected other writers”, and so on.[1] Josef Pieper, who quotes this passage from C. S. Lewis in his essay on interpretation, points out in this connection that the editions of Plato, for instance, or Dante produced in Communist countries always gave an introduction to the works being reprinted, which gave the reader a “historical” understanding of them and were meant thus to preclude the question of truth.[2]
Scholarly activity carried on in such a manner will have the effect of immunizing against the truth. The question of whether, and how far, something an author says is true is supposed to be an unscholarly question; it would indeed lead us beyond the realm of what can be demonstrated and supported by quotation, would be a relapse into the naïvete of a precritical world. In this way even the reading of the Bible is neutralized: we can say when, and in what conditions, some statement originated, and we have thus placed it in its historical setting, which does not ultimately concern us. Behind this kind of “historical interpretation” stands a philosophy, a basic attitude toward reality, which tells us that it is meaningless to ask about what is; we can only ask about what we are able to do with things. It is a matter, not of truth, but of action, of dominating things to our own advantage. As against such an apparently obvious restriction of human thought, the question of course arises: What is to our advantage? And in what way to our advantage? What are we here for? For anyone who looks below the surface, a false humility and a false pride at once become apparent in this fundamental attitude of modernity: false humility, which denies man the capacity to know and recognize truth, and false pride, with which he sets himself above things, above truth itself, by setting the expansion of his power, the domination of all things, as the goal of all his thinking.
We can today find presented in scientific form in the study of literature what appears in Lewis’ writing in ironical form. There, the question of truth is quite openly excluded as unscholarly. The German exegete Marius Reiser recently referred to the words of Umberto Eco in his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, where he says: “The only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from the insane passion for the truth.”[3] The essential basis for this unmistakable renunciation of truth consists of what people call nowadays the “linguistic turning point”: No one can get back behind language and its images; reason is conditioned by language and restricted to language.[4] As early as 1901, F. Mauthner had coined the phrase, “what people call thinking is only empty words.”[5] In this connection, M. Reiser talks of a “surrender of the belief” that one could relate “by linguistic means to nonlinguistic things”.[6] The eminent Protestant exegete U. Luz observes that—just as we heard Screwtape saying to start with—historical criticism has in modern times renounced any approach to the question of truth. He believes himself bound to accept this capitulation and to admit that truth is not to be found today beyond the texts themselves; rather, there are only competing truth constructs, offers of truth, which have to be presented and justified in public discourse in the marketplace of all the views of life.[7]
Anyone reflecting on these views will almost inevitably feel reminded of a very profound passage from Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates is telling Phaedrus a story he had from the ancients who knew about truth. Thoth, the “father of letters” and the “god of time” once came to the Egyptian king Thutmose of Thebes. He taught this ruler about various arts he had invented and especially about the art of writing that he had thought up. In praise of his invention, he said to the king: “This knowledge, O King, will make the Egyptians more wise and better able to remember things; for it has been invented as an aid to the memory as well as for wisdom.” But the king was not impressed. On the contrary, he foresaw as the result of the art of writing that:
This will bring forgetfulness into men’s souls. . . through the neglect of remembering, in that by trusting in writing they will draw remembrance from without. . . and not from within, from their own selves. You have not, therefore, invented a means of remembering but of recording, and you pass on to your pupils only the appearance of wisdom, not the thing itself. For they are people who hear much without learning anything and will therefore think themselves very knowledgeable, since in general they are ignorant, and they are people who are difficult to deal with, in that they are apparently wise but not truly so.[8]
Anyone who thinks of the way television programs from all over the world overwhelm people with information and thus make them apparently knowledgeable; anyone who thinks about the further possibilities of computers and the Internet, which make available, for instance, to anyone searching, all the texts of some Church Father containing some particular word, yet without the person’s having worked his way into his thinking, will not consider these warnings to be exaggerated. Plato is not rejecting writing as such, just as we do not reject the new information media but rather give thanks and make use of them; but he sets up a warning sign, the seriousness of which is demonstrated every day by the consequences of the “linguistic turning point” and by many developments of which we are all currently aware. H. Schade points out the essence of what Plato has to say to us today in this text: “What Plato was warning us about was the domination of a philological method and the accompanying loss of reality.” [9]
When writing, when what has been written, becomes a barrier to the content, then it has itself become an anti-art that does not make man more wise but sentences him to a sick appearance of wisdom. A. Kreiner is thus right when he remarks, about the linguistic turning point, that “the surrender of the belief that one can relate by linguistic means to nonlinguistic contents amounts to much the same thing as surrendering the possibility of any meaningful discourse at all.”[10] On the same point, the Pope in his encyclical makes the following remark: “The interpretation of this word [= the word of God] cannot merely keep referring us to one interpretation after another, without ever leading us to a statement that is simply true.”[11] Man is not caught in a hall of mirrors of interpretation; he can and must look for the way out to the reality that stands behind the words and manifests itself to him in and through the words.
This brings us to the heart of the Christian faith’s struggle with a certain type of modern culture, which would like to be seen as modern culture as such, but which—praise God—is only one variety of it. That is, for instance, glaringly obvious in the criticism leveled at the encyclical by the Italian philosopher Paolo Flores d’Arcais. Precisely because the encyclical insists on the need to put the question of truth, he declares that “the official Catholic culture has no more to say to ‘culture tout court [as such]’.”[12] Yet that also means that the question of truth stands outside “culture tout court”; And is not then this “culture tout court” rather an anticulture? And is not then its presuming to be culture itself, as such, an arrogant presumption showing how it despises people?
That this is the main point becomes clear when Flores d’Arcais accuses the Pope’s encyclicals of having “murderous consequences for democracy” and identifies his teaching with the “fundamentalist” version of Islam. He indicates as the basis for his charge the Pope’s having described laws that permit abortion and euthanasia as being beyond the pale of authentic legal validity.[13] Anyone setting himself against an elected Parliament in that way and trying to exercise worldly power on the basis of ecclesiastical claims shows, he says, that his thinking still bears the watermark of Catholic dogmatism. Such assertions assume that there can be no appeal from the decisions of a majority. The chance occurrence of a majority becomes an absolute. For there is still such a thing as something absolute, beyond which there is no appeal. We have been handed over to the rule of positivism and of the erection of what is accidental, what can indeed be manipulated, into an absolute value. When man is shut out from the truth, he can only be dominated by what is accidental and arbitrary. That is why it is, not “fundamentalism”, but a duty of humanity to protect man from the dictatorship of what is accidental and to restore to him his dignity, which consists precisely in the fact that no human institution can ultimately dominate him, because he is open to the truth. In its very insistence on our capacity to know and recognize the truth, the encyclical is a most necessary apology for the stature of man against everything that would like to be seen as “culture tout court”.
It is of course difficult, in view of the canon of methodology that has established itself today as bearing the “watermark of scholarly seriousness”, to get a further hearing in public debate on the question of truth. It is therefore necessary to clear the ground through an argument about the nature of science and scholarly work, about truth and method, about the task of philosophy and its possible paths. The Pope did not see it as his task to tackle in the encyclical the quite practical question of whether, and how, truth can once more become “scientific” or “scholarly”. But he does show why we have to set ourselves this task. He did not want to carry out the philosophers’ task himself, but he was aware of the task of raising an objection to a self-destructive tendency in “culture tout court”. Raising this objection is itself a genuinely philosophical step, conjures up the presence of the Socratic origins of philosophy, and thereby witnesses to the philosophical potentiality that lies in the biblical faith.
There is a kind of scientific attitude that is contrary to philosophy, that forbids it to deal with the question of the truth or makes the question impossible. Such a self-circumscription, such a contraction of reason cannot constitute the yardstick for philosophy, and science as a whole cannot end by rendering impossible man’s real questions, without which it would itself remain an empty, and ultimately dangerous, bustle of activity. It cannot be the task of philosophy to submit itself to a methodological canon that in particular sectors of thought may be correct. Its particular task must be to reflect on science and scholarship as a whole, to achieve a critical comprehension of its nature, and at the same time to transcend it in a manner that can be rationally justified in an approach to what gives meaning to science and scholarship. Philosophy has always to ask about man himself and must therefore always be seeking its way toward life and death, toward God and eternity. To this end it will today have to handle right at the start a problem with that type of scientific and academic attitude that cuts men off from such questions, and starting from those problems, which our society sets right in front of our eyes, will have to try to open up a way to what is necessary and what answers our needs. In the history of modern philosophy there has never been a lack of such attempts, and even today there are sufficient heartening approaches being made toward opening the door to the question of truth, the door that leads out of the circle of language turning around on itself.[14] There is no doubt that the call uttered by the encyclical is in this sense critical of our current conception of culture, yet it is at the same time in a profound unity with essential elements of the spiritual struggle of the modern age. The confidence to seek for the truth and to find it is never anachronistic: it is precisely this that maintains the dignity of man, that breaks down particularism, and that leads men toward one another beyond the bounds of their cultural settings on the basis of their common dignity.
2. Culture and Truth
a. On the Nature of Culture
What we have reflected on thus far might be described as the disputation between the Christian faith as it finds expression in the encyclical and a certain type of modern culture, from which we have left out of consideration the side of culture associated with natural science and technology. Our attention was directed to the side of culture to do with humane studies. It would not be difficult to show that their helplessness in the face of the question of truth, which has in the meantime developed into a quite angry reaction to it, rests in the final analysis on the fact that these disciplines would like to use the same methodology, and to attain the same measure of certainty, as is available in empirical spheres. The methodological restriction of natural science to what can be tested by experiment has become a real certificate of scholarly seriousness, indeed, of being rational at all. The methodological renunciation that makes sense, and is, indeed, necessary, within the framework of empirical science thus becomes a barrier before the question of truth: this is fundamentally a question of truth and method and concerns the universality of a strictly empirical canon of methodology. As against this, the Pope is defending the multiplicity of paths followed by the human mind and, likewise, the breadth of rationality, which has to use varying methods in accordance with the nature of its object. Immaterial things cannot be approached with methods appropriate to what is material; we might thus very roughly summarize the Pope’s objection to a one-sided form of rationality.
The dispute with modern culture, the dispute concerning truth and method, is the one basic thread running through the encyclical. Yet the question about truth and culture is also represented under yet another aspect, which essentially refers to the realm of religion as such. People nowadays often like to put forward the relativity of cultures to counter the universal claims of Christianity—which are grounded on the universal nature of truth. We can hear this as early as the eighteenth century in the writings of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who represented the three great religions in the parable of the three rings, of which one is the genuine and true ring, though there is no longer any way to establish this genuineness: the question of truth is insoluble and is replaced by the question of the healing and purifying effects of religion. At the beginning of our own century, Ernst Troeltsch then explicitly formulated the themes of the question concerning religion and culture, truth and culture. If at the outset he still posited Christianity as “the most concentrated revelation of personalist religious sensibility and practice, the only one that makes a complete break with the limitations and conditional forms of natural religion”, in the course of his reflections the perception of the cultural determination of religion increasingly overlaid his view of the truth and left all religions subject to a cultural relativity. The validity of Christianity ended by becoming for him an “affair of Europeans”: Christianity was for him the appropriate form of religion for Europe, whilst he recognized Buddhism and Brahmanism as having “absolute independence”. For practical purposes, the question of truth has been rendered redundant, and cultural boundaries can no longer be transcended.[15]
An encyclical that is entirely directed toward the adventure of truth had therefore necessarily to put the question concerning truth and culture. It had to ask whether there can ever be a communion of cultures in the one truth—whether truth can be expressed for all men, beyond its cultural forms, or whether it is ultimately to be only dimly perceived as a convergence behind varying or even contradictory cultural forms.
In his encyclical, the Pope has contrasted a dynamic and communicative understanding of culture as against a static concept of culture that assumes set forms that merely stand side by side together and remain constant, being unable to transpose and merge into one another. He emphasizes that, if they “are deeply rooted in experience, cultures show forth the human being’s characteristic openness to the universal and the transcendent”.[16] Hence cultures, as the form of expression of the one being, man, are marked by the dynamics of man, which transcend all boundaries. Cultures are not therefore fixed once and for all in one single form; they have the inherent capacity for progression and metamorphosis, though also of course the risk of decadence. They are concerned with encounter and with mutual fertilization. Because the inner openness of man to God is more influential in them, the greater and more pure they are, the inward readiness for the revelation of God is written into them. Revelation is not something alien to them; rather, it corresponds to an inner expectation in the cultures themselves.
Theodore Haecker spoke in this connection about the advent character of the pre-Christian cultures,[17] and many and various studies in the history of religions have meanwhile been able to show quite clearly this progression of cultures toward the Logos of God, who became flesh in Jesus Christ.[18] In this context the Pope turns to the list of peoples in the story of Pentecost, in the Acts of the Apostles (2:7-11), which tells us how the witness to Jesus Christ can be heard through the medium of all languages and in all languages, that is, in all the cultures that present themselves in language. In all of them, the words of men become bearers of God’s own utterance, of his own Logos. The encyclical says about this: “While it demands of all who hear it the adherence of faith, the proclamation of the Gospel in different cultures allows people to preserve their own cultural identity. This in no way creates division, because the community of the baptized is marked by a universality that can embrace every culture.”[19] On this basis, and taking as his example Indian culture, the Pope develops criteria which, in the general relationship of the Christian faith with pre-Christian cultures, should be observed whenever these cultures encounter the faith. He first briefly refers to the great spiritual striving for higher realms in Indian thought, which struggles to free mind and spirit from the limitations of time and space and thus effects that metaphysical opening up of man that has then also been given form in the thought of several important philosophical systems.[20] These few references show the universal tendency of great cultures, their transcending of time and space, and thus the forward impetus they impart to man’s being and to his highest capacities. Therein exists the capacity of cultures to enter into dialogue with one another—in this case, dialogue between Indian cultures and the cultures that have developed on the basis of Christian faith. Thus, out of the inner contact with Indian culture, the first criterion arises, as it were, of itself: this consists in “the universality of the human spirit, whose basic needs are the same in the most disparate cultures”.[21] From that a second criterion follows directly: “In engaging great cultures for the first time, the Church cannot abandon what she has gained from her inculturation in the world of Graeco-Latin thought. To reject this heritage would be to deny the providential plan of God.”[22] Finally, the encyclical specifies a third criterion, which follows from the previous reflections on the nature of culture: One should take care “lest, contrary to the very nature of the human spirit, the legitimate defense of the uniqueness and originality of Indian thought be confused with the idea that a particular cultural tradition should remain closed in its difference and affirm itself by opposing other traditions.”[23]
b. The Transcending of Cultures in the Bible and in the History of Faith
If the Pope insists that the particular cultural heritage that has once been won and has become a vehicle for the truth shared by God and man is then irreplaceable, the question then naturally arises of whether this is not then a Eurocentric character of the faith that is being canonized, a characteristic that does not seem to be eliminated even when in the continuing history of the faith new elements of heritage can enter, and indeed have entered, into the persisting identity, that which concerns us all, of the faith. There is no avoiding the question of how “Greek”, and how “Latin”, the faith actually is that originated, not in the Greek or the Latin world, but in the Semitic world of the Near East, within which Asia, Africa, and Europe have always rubbed shoulders and still do. The encyclical takes a definite view of this question, especially in its second chapter, on the development of philosophical thought within the Bible, and in the fourth chapter, on the fateful encounter of this wisdom of reason, which had developed within the faith, with the Greek philosophical wisdom. This is a question we meet in this book from various angles, again and again, and a few indications concerning it may be helpful at this stage.
Even within the Bible itself the intellectual material, both religious and philosophical, drawn from a variety of cultural worlds, is being worked into new form. The word of God reveals itself gradually in a process of encounters, in the course of man’s search for answers to his ultimate questions. It did not simply fall directly down from heaven, but it is a real synthesis of cultures. Yet looking more deeply into it, we are able to perceive a process in which God struggles with man and gradually opens him up for his most profound Word, for himself: for the Son, who is the Logos. The Bible is not simply the expression of the culture of the people of Israel; rather, it is ever at odds with the natural temptation these people have simply to be themselves, to make themselves at home in their own culture. Faith in God and an assent to God’s will are forever being wrung from this people against their own wishes and their own ideas. This faith is in continual opposition to Israel’s own religious inclinations and to its own religious culture, which is inclined to express itself in the cult of high places, in worship of the queen of heaven, and in the claims to power of its own kingdom. From the anger of God and of Moses against the worship of the golden calf on Sinai, right down to the late postexilic prophets, it is always a matter of tearing Israel out of its cultural identity, contrary to its own religious wishes, so that it has, so to speak, to leave off the worship of its own nationality, the cult of “blood and soil”, to bow down before the wholly other, the God who is not their own, who has created heaven and earth and who is the God of all peoples. The faith of Israel signifies a continual transcending of the limits of its own culture into the wide-open spaces of truth that is common to all.
The books of the Old Testament may in many respects seem less pious, less poetic, less inspired, than important passages in the holy books of other peoples. Yet the feature peculiar to them is this struggle of faith against what is Israel’s own, in this leaving behind of one’s own, which starts with the wandering of Abraham. Paul’s struggle to break out from the limits of the law, which he wages on the basis of his encounter with the risen Jesus Christ, takes this fundamental movement of the Old Testament to its logical goal. This signifies the complete universalizing of the faith, which is freed from being proper to the social order of a particular people. All peoples are now invited to participate in this process of transcending their own heritage that first began in Israel; they are invited to turn to the God who, for his part, transcended his own limits in Jesus Christ, who has broken down “the dividing wall of hostility” between us (Eph 2:14) and in the self-deprivation of the Cross has led us toward one another. Faith in Jesus Christ is, therefore, of its nature, a continual opening of oneself, God’s action of breaking into the human world and in response to this man’s breaking out toward God, which at the same time leads men toward one another. Everything anyone possesses now belongs to everyone, and everything else becomes at the same time our own, this whole comprehended in the Father’s words to the elder son: “All that is mine is yours” (Lk 15: 31), which returns again in the high-priestly prayer of Jesus, as the Son addresses the Father: “All mine are thine, and thine are mine” (Jn 17: 10).
This basic model likewise determines the encounter of the Christian message with Greek culture—which, of course, did not begin with the Christian mission but had already developed within the writings of the Old Testament, especially through its translation into Greek, and on the basis of that within early Judaism. This encounter was made possible because within the Greek world a similar process of self-transcendence had started to get underway. The Fathers did not just mix into the gospel a static and self-contained Greek culture. They could take up a dialogue with Greek philosophy and could make it an instrument of the gospel, wherever in the Hellenistic world the search for God had brought into being a self-criticism of that world’s own culture and its own thought. Faith links the various peoples—beginning with the Germans and the Slavs, who came into contact with the Christian message in the era of tribal migrations, and right up to the peoples of Asia, Africa, and America—not with Hellenistic culture as such, but with Hellenistic culture in the form in which it transcended itself, which was the true point of contact for the interpretation of the Christian message. From that starting point, faith drew these peoples into the process of self-transcendence. Quite recently, Richard Schäffler aptly remarked that from the beginning, the Christian preaching “had demanded” of the peoples of Europe (which, in any case, did not exist as such before Christian missionary activity) “that they take leave. . . of every native god of Europe long before they set their sights on any cultures beyond Europe”.[24] That helps us to understand why it was that the Christian proclamation sought points of contact with philosophy, not with religions. Where people did make this latter attempt, where for instance people tried to interpret Christ as the true Dionysius, the true Asclepius or Heracles, these attempts were soon rendered obsolete.[25] The fact that they sought points of contact, not with the religions, but with philosophy is connected with the fact that they were not canonizing a culture but did find it possible to enter into it at those points where it had itself begun to move out of its own framework, had started to take the path toward the wide spaces of truth that is common to all, and had left behind its comfortable place in what belonged to it. That is even today a fundamental indicator of the answer to the question concerning points of contact and transitions to other cultures and peoples. Faith cannot of course find points of contact with philosophies that exclude questions concerning the truth, but it can do so with movements that are trying to break out of the relativist prison. It can certainly not take over the old religions directly. Yet these religions can prepare such forms and usages, especially attitudes—reverence, humility, readiness to make sacrifices, kindness, love of one’s neighbor, the hope of everlasting life.[26] Let me add that this seems to me to be also of some importance for the question of the significance of the religions for salvation. They do not save people, so to speak, as closed systems and through faithfulness to the system; rather, they bring redemption only when they bring men to the point of “asking after God” (as the Old Testament puts it), “seeking his face”, “seeking the kingdom of God and his righteousness”.
3. Religion, Truth, and Salvation
Let me pause for a moment here, because this touches on a fundamental question of human existence that is quite rightly one of the main questions in the current theological debate. For it is a matter of the true underlying motive that is the starting point of philosophy and to which it must always return; if they remain true to their tasks, philosophy and theology necessarily touch upon this question. It is the question: How is man healed? How does he become righteous? In facing this question, the ancient world thought mainly of death and of what comes after death; the contemporary world, which sees as uncertain the existence of the world beyond and, therefore, to a great extent leaves it out of the questions it asks, has nonetheless to seek after righteousness within time and, in doing so, cannot leave the problem to one side of how to get the better of death. In the debate about Christianity and world religions, of course, the real point at issue has remained, quite remarkably, that of how religions relate to eternal salvation. The question of how men can be saved still tends to be put in the classical manner. And then the theory has been fairly generally accepted that the religions are paths of salvation. Perhaps not the proper, ordinary path of salvation, but—if at all, then “extraordinary paths of salvation”: one attains salvation through all the religions, that has become the current view.
This answer corresponds not only to the idea of tolerance and of respect for others, which so thrusts itself upon us these days. It also corresponds to the modern idea of God: God cannot reject people just because they know nothing of Christianity and happen to have grown up in other religions. He will accept their worship and religion just as he does ours. However obvious this theory seems to be at first sight—and it is meanwhile underpinned with many other arguments—it does still raise questions. For what each of these religions demands of people is, not just different from, but contrary to what is demanded by others. Meanwhile, in the face of the rising number of people who are not committed to any religion, this theory of universal salvation is even being extended to include nonreligious ways of life that are lived out seriously. Then it becomes quite true that things that contradict each other are seen as leading to the same goal—in other words, that we are once more facing the question of relativism. It is being silently assumed that all contents are basically of equal use. What is actually of any use, we do not know. Everyone just has to go his own way—to become happy in his own “façon”, as Frederick II of Prussia used to say. Thus, by way of the various theories of salvation, relativism slips in through the back door again: the question of truth is excised from the question concerning religions and the matter of salvation. Truth is replaced by good intentions; religion remains in the subjective realm, because we cannot know what is objectively good and true.
a. The Inequality of Religions and Their Dangers
Do we just have to put up with this? Is there an inevitable choice to be made between dogmatic rigorism and a humane, kindly relativism? I think that in the theories we have just been talking about, there are three things people have not thought through carefully enough. First of all, religions (and, nowadays, also agnosticism and atheism) are seen as being all of the same kind. But that is by no means the case. There are in fact sick and degenerate forms of religion, which do not edify people but alienate them: the Marxist criticism of religions was not entirely based on delusions. And even religions whose moral value we must recognize, and which are on their way toward the truth, may become diseased here and there. In Hinduism (which is actually a collective name for a whole multitude of religions) there are some marvelous elements—but there are also negative aspects: involvement with the caste system; suttee [self immolation] for widows, which developed from beginnings that were merely symbolic; offshoots of the cult of the goddess Sakti—all these might be mentioned, to give just a little idea. Yet even Islam, with all the greatness it represents, is always in danger of losing balance, letting violence have a place and letting religion slide away into mere outward observance and ritualism. And there are of course, as we all know but too well, diseased forms of Christianity—such as when the crusaders, on capturing the holy city of Jerusalem, where Christ died for all men, for their part indulged in a bloodbath of Moslems and Jews. What that means is that religion demands the making of distinctions, distinctions between different forms of religion and distinctions within a religion itself, so as to find the way to its higher points. By treating all content as comparably valid and with the idea that all religions are different and yet actually the same, you get nowhere. Relativism is dangerous in quite particular ways: for the shape of human existence at an individual level and in society. The renunciation of truth does not heal man. How much evil has been done in history in the name of good opinions and good intentions is something no one can overlook.
b. The Question of Salvation
That brings us already to the second point, which is generally neglected. When people talk about the significance of religions for salvation, it is quite astonishing that they for the most part think only that all of them make eternal life possible and when they think like that, the concept of eternal life is neutralized, since everyone gets there in any case. But that sells the question of salvation short, in most inappropriate fashion. Heaven begins on earth. Salvation in the world to come presumes a righteous life in this world. Thus one cannot simply ask who will get to heaven and suppose that this disposes of the matter of heaven. We have to ask what heaven is and how it comes upon earth. Future salvation must make its mark in a way of life that makes a person “human” here and thus capable of relating to God. That in turn means that when we are concerned with the question of salvation, we must look beyond religions themselves and that this involves standards of right living that one cannot just relativize at will. I would say, therefore, that salvation begins with man becoming righteous in this world—something that always includes the twin poles of the individual and society. There are kinds of behavior that can never serve man’s growth in righteousness and others that are always a part of man’s righteousness. That means that salvation does not lie in religions as such, but it is connected to them, inasmuch as, and to the extent that, they lead man toward the one good, toward the search for God, for truth, and for love. The question of salvation therefore always carries within it an element of the criticism of religion, just as, contrariwise, it can build a positive relationship to religions. It has in any case to do with the unity of the good, with the unity of what is true—with the unity of God and man.
c. Conscience and Man’s Capacity to Know the Truth
This statement leads to the third point I wish to address here. The unity and integrity of man has an organ: the conscience. It was Saint Paul who was daring enough to maintain that all men were capable of listening to their consciences and, thus, to separate the question of salvation from the matter of knowing and keeping the Torah and setting it on the common ground of the demands of conscience, in which the one God is speaking, and declaring to each one what is truly essential in the Torah: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness” (Rom 2:14-15). Paul does not say, If the pagans keep their own religion, that is good before the judgment-seat of God. On the contrary, he condemns the majority of the religious practices of his time. He points to another source—to what is written in everyone’s hearts, the one good, from the one God. There are in any case two opposing concepts of the conscience here, although they are most often simply lumped together. For Paul, the conscience is the organ within all men—who are one man—which makes transparent the one God. In current thinking, on the other hand, the conscience appears as an expression of the absolute value of the subjective self, above and beyond which there can be no further judgment in the moral realm. What is good as such cannot be known. The one God cannot be known. As far as morality and religion are concerned, the self is the final arbiter. That is logical, if we have no access to the truth as such. Thus, in the modern concept of the conscience, the conscience represents the canonizing of relativism, of the impossibility of establishing common moral and religious standards; just as for Paul and for the Christian tradition it had been, on the contrary, the guarantee of the unity of man and the possibility of knowing God, of the common and binding character of one and the same good.[27] The fact that in every age there have been, and still are, “pagan saints” is because everywhere and in every age—albeit often with difficulty and in fragmentary fashion—the speech of the “heart” can be heard, because God’s Torah may be heard within ourselves, in our creaturely being, as the call of duty, and it is thus possible for us to transcend what is merely subjective in order to turn toward each other and toward God; And that is salvation. Beyond that, what God makes of the poor broken pieces of our attempts at good, at approaching him, remains his secret, which we ought not to presume to try to work out.
Final Reflections
At the close of these reflections I should like to draw your attention to a methodological suggestion the Pope offers concerning the relationship between theology and philosophy, between faith and reason, because it addresses the practical question of how a renewal of theological and philosophical thinking, as the encyclical conceives it, might start to come about. The encyclical talks about a “circular movement” between theology and philosophy, understood in the sense that theology must always start from the word of God; but since this word is truth, theology will set it in relation with man’s search for truth, with the struggle of reason for the truth, and will thus bring it into dialogue with philosophy. The believer’s search for the truth will accordingly take place through a movement in which listening to the word that has gone forth will continually be meeting with the seekings of reason. Thereby, on the one hand, faith becomes purer and more profound, while, on the other hand, thought is also enriched, because new horizons are opened up for it.
It seems to me that this idea of circularity could be taken a little farther: Philosophy, too, ought not to shut itself in within its own material, within what it has itself thought up. Just as it has to pay heed to empirical perceptions that emerge within the various scientific disciplines, so also it ought to regard the holy traditions of religions and especially the message of the Bible as a source of perception and let itself be made more fertile by this. There is in fact no great philosophy that has not received illumination and guidance from religious tradition, whether we are thinking of the philosophy of Greece and that of India or of the philosophy that developed within Christianity or even of the modern philosophies that were persuaded of the autonomy of reason and held this autonomy of reason to be the ultimate criterion of thought—but that still remained indebted for the great themes of thought that biblical faith had given to philosophy on the way: Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling would be unthinkable without all that faith had already given, and even Marx, in the midst of his radical reinterpretation, drew his life from the horizon of hope, which he had taken from the Jewish tradition. When philosophy completely blanks out this dialogue with the thought of faith, it ends—as Jaspers once expressed it—in a “seriousness that is becoming empty”.[28] In the end, it finds itself forced to renounce the question of truth, that is, forced to give up itself. For a philosophy that no longer asks who we are, what we are here for, whether there is a God and an eternal life, has abdicated its role as a philosophy.
Finally, it may be helpful to refer to a commentary on the encyclical that appeared in the German newspaper Die Zeit, which has otherwise been somewhat distant from the Church. The commentator, Jan Ross, grasps the essence of this papal teaching document quite precisely when he says that the dethroning of theology and metaphysics has made thought “not just more free, but also more narrow”; indeed, he does not shy away from talking about people “rendered stupid by lack of faith”. “Reason, in turning away from the ultimate questions, has rendered itself indifferent and boring, has resigned its competence where the keys to life are concerned: good and evil, death and immortality.” The voice of the Pope, he says, “has given courage to many people and to entire nations and has sounded hard and piercingly in many people’s ears and has even aroused hatred; but when it falls silent, that will be a moment of frightful silence.” And indeed, if no one talks about God and man, about sin and grace, about death and eternal life, any more, then all the shouting and all the noise there is will only be a vain attempt to deceive ourselves about the voice of true humanity falling silent. With his candor, with the fearless frankness of faith, the Pope has stood up against the danger of such a silence, and in doing so he renders a service, not only to the Church, but to mankind. We should be grateful to him for that.
Notes:
[1] C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942; Glasgow: Collins, 1955), pp. 139f. Quoted by J. Pieper in “Was heißt Interpretation?” [What does interpretation mean], in his Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff [Writings on the concept of philosophy], vol. 3 of his Werke, ed. B. Wald (Hamburg: Meiner, 1995), pp. 226f.
[2] Ibid., p. 227.
[3] M. Reiser, “Bibel und Kirche: Eine Antwort an U. Luz” [Bible and Church: A reply to U. Luz], Trierer Theologischer Zeitschrift 108 (1999): 62-81, this point on p. 72; U. Eco, The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (1983; London: Picador, 1984), p. 491.
[4] Reiser, “Bibel und Kirche”, p. 63, with a reference to O. Tracy, Theologie als Gespräch: Eine postmoderne Hermeneutik [Theology as conversation: A postmodern hermeneutic] (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1993), pp. 73-97.
[5] F. Mauthner, Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache [Contributions to a criticism of language], 3 vols., 2nd ed. (1923; reprt., Frankfurt, 1982); the quotation is from 3:635. See Reiser, “Bibel und Kirche”, p. 73.
[6] Quoted by Reiser, “Bibel und Kirche”, pp. 73f.
[7] See ibid., pp. 63f. U. Luz, “Kann die Bibel heute noch Grundlage für die Kirche sein? Über die Aufgabe der Exegese in einer religiös pluralistischen Gesellschaft” [Can the Bible still be the basis of the Church? On the task of exegesis in a society of religious pluralism], New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 317-39.
[8] Phaedrus 274d—275b. Cf. on this H. Schade, Lamm Gottes und Zeichen des Widders [The Lamb of God and the sign of the ram] (Freiburg: Herder, 1998), pp. 27f.
[9] Schade, Lamm Gottes, p. 27.
[10] A. Kreiner, Ende der Wahrheit? [The end of truth?] (Freiburg: Herder, 1992), p. 116, quoted by Reiser, “Bibel und Kirche”, p. 74.
[11] No. 84.
[12] P. Flores d’Arcais, “Die Frage ist die Antwort: Zur Enzyklika Fides et Ratio” [The question is the answer: On the encyclical Fides et Ratio], Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 51 (March 2, 1999): 47.
[13] In nos. 68-74 of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae, the Pope deals in detail with the thesis that the lawgiving of any society should restrict itself to registering and giving established status to the convictions of the majority and that private conscience and public order should be strictly separate, and he argues against this (no. 69). As against this, the Pope asserts that democracy cannot become a surrogate for morality; the value of democracy, he says, stands and falls with the values it embodies (no. 70). This fundamental exposition of the principles of politics and the state cannot be set aside by brashly referring to them as “fundamentalism”; they do at least deserve a fresh examination and discussion. In this connection I might refer the reader to my book A Turning Point for Europe? trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994).
[14] In this respect, the list of names mentioned in no. 74 of the encyclical is certainly too modestly framed. One need only think, in our own century, of the importance of the phenomenological school, from Husserl to Scheler, and of the great movement of personalism, with names such as F. Ebner, E. Mounier, and G. Marcel, or to recall such great Jewish thinkers as Bergson, Buber, and Levinas, to see that philosophy in the sense in which the encyclical is speaking is possible even today and is indeed at work in many and various forms.
[15] See on this point H. Bürkle, Der Mensch auf der Suche nach Gott—Die Frage der Religionen [Man in search of God—The question concerning the religions], Amateca, no. 3 (Paderborn: Bonifatius, 1996), pp. 60-67.
[16] No. 70.
[17] T. Haecker, Vergil: Vater des Abendlandes [Virgil: Father of the West], 5th ed. (Munich: Kosel, 1947), e.g., pp. 117f.
[18] See, e.g., Burkle, Mensch auf der Suche nach Gott, pp. 14-40.
[19] No. 71.
[20] No. 72.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] R. Schäffler, “Ent-europäisierung des Christentums?” [De-Europeanizing Christianity?], Theologie und Glaube 86 (1996): 121-31; quoted from p. 131.
[25] Cf. ibid., p. 125.
[26] These connections, with acceptance and transformation, the making of distinctions and rejection, are very well portrayed by Burkle, Mensch auf der Suche nach Gott, pp. 18-40.
[27] For the question of the conscience, I may refer the reader to my little book Wahrheit, Werte, Macht [Truth, values, power], new ed. (Frankfurt: Knecht, 1999), pp. 25-62.
[28] Quoted by J. Pieper, in “Die mogliche Zukunft der Philosophie” [The possible future of philosophy], in his Schriften zum Philosophiebegriff, pp. 315-23; quoted on p. 323.
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