Make Truth In Love: Deo Gratias for Pope Benedict XVI

by Daniel McInerny

"...the sanity of the world was restored and the soul of man offered salvation by something which did indeed satisfy the two warring tendencies of the past; which had never been satisfied in full and most certainly never satisfied together. It met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story."


This passage from G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man came to mind as I thought about the homily delivered by the former Cardinal Ratzinger at the Mass pro eligendo romano pontifice celebrated on Monday morning, April 18, just before the College of Cardinals entered the conclave that, the next afternoon, would elect Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope. One of the central exhortations of this beautiful homily is not to remain as minors in the Faith: "We must not remain children in faith, in the condition of minors. And what does it mean to be children in faith? St. Paul answers: it means being "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine (Eph 4:14)".

Cardinal Ratzinger went on to list various "winds of doctrine" that rock the "small boat of many Christians" today, that jeopardize the very sanity of the world: Marxism, liberalism, libertinism, collectivism, radical individualism, atheism, vague religious mysticism, agnosticism, syncretism, the proliferation of new sects, and finally, "a dictatorship of relativism."

How to withstand such winds and grow up in the faith? "An "adult" faith," the Cardinal explained, "is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ....On this theme, St. Paul offers us as a fundamental formula for Christian existence some beautiful words, in contrast to the continual vicissitudes of those who, like children, are tossed about by the waves: make truth in love. Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like "a clanging cymbal" (I Cor 13:1)."

Truth and love, the reconciliation of these two great desires of the human spirit, is the fundamental quest of every human person. The word quest is right, for the effort to live in the harmony of truth and love takes the form of a story. Chesterton was much alive to this theme:

"That normal narrative instinct which produced all the fairy tales is something that is neglected by all the philosophies--except one. The Faith is the justification of that popular instinct; the finding of a philosophy for it or the analysis of the philosophy in it. Exactly as a man in an adventure story has to pass various tests to save his life, so the man in this philosophy has to pass various tests and save his soul. In both there is an idea of free will operating under conditions of design; in other words, there is an aim and it is the business of a man to aim at it; we therefore watch to see whether he will hit it."

The Faith, Chesterton tells us, is an adventure story: a quest for love and a quest for truth, an adventure that reaches its crisis, climax and resolution in the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of He Who is Truth. The Faith meets "the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story." But the Faith is just not any story. If it were just a story it would be merely one expression of our "normal narrative instinct." It would fail to satisfy our desire for truth. That is why, Chesterton writes, the ideal figure in the story of Christianity "had to be a historical character, as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfill many of the functions given to...other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun."

The Christian story reconciles our desire for romance--the struggle that ends in the union of the lover and the Beloved--and our desire for a true account of how things really are. Life in Christ makes us protagonists in the drama of our salvation. Outside of Christ, as Chesterton observes, our desires for love and truth must forever be at war. An abyss separates them. "It was that abyss," Chesterton writes, "that nothing but an incarnation could cover; a divine embodiment of our dreams; and he stands above that chasm whose name is more than priest and older even than Christendom; Pontifex Maximus, the mightiest maker of a bridge."

Thanks be to God for our new pontifex maximus on earth, our new pontiff: Pope Benedict XVI. May he help us to live in the friendship of Christ, and thus to bridge the chasm in our wounded spirits between love and truth.

"Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like a "clanging cymbal.""

Benedict XVI: The Pope and His Agenda

by Sandro Magister

They called him a conservative. But Joseph Ratzinger revolutionized even the conclave which, on April 19, made him pope, Benedict XVI, “a humble laborer in the vineyard of the Lord.”

Never in the past century has the choice of a pontiff been spoken in a language so clear and sharp. And it came with a buildup which become more impressive as the hour of truth drew near. Until his last lecture on the state of the world, which Ratzinger gave on the last day of the deceased pope’s life. Until, even more importantly, the last homily he proclaimed in Saint Peter’s at the mass “pro eligendo romano pontifice,” a few hours before the closing of the doors of the Sistine Chapel.

As a cardinal, Ratzinger put nothing “on sale” in order to be elected pope. The votes and consensus landed on him one after the other, month after month, scrutiny after scrutiny, attracted only by his agenda, hard as a diamond. At the last mass in Saint Peter’s he reproposed this with the words of the apostle Paul: the goal is that of “being adults in the faith,” and not “children in a state of guardianship, tossed about by the waves and carried here and there by every wind of doctrine.”

Because modern times are leading precisely toward this, he warned: to “a dictatorship of relativism which recognizes nothing as definitive and leaves as the ultimate standard one’s own personality and desires.”

Against this “deceit of men,” Ratzinger opposed the principle that “we have, instead, a different standard: the Son of God, the true man,” who is also “the standard of true humanism” and “the criterion for discerning between the true and the false, between deception and truth.”

The plain conclusion: “We must foster the maturity of this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith.” And it doesn’t matter if “having a clear faith according to the Church’s creed is frequently labeled fundamentalism.”

Over the years, accusations of fundamentalism have been scattered against this German theologian who today is the new head of the Catholic Church.

During the 1960’s, the young Ratzinger followed the second Vatican Council as an expert consultant for the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings. He launched his first darts against the Holy Office, “out of step with the times and a cause of harm and scandal,” which he would direct many years later. But very soon after the end of the council, he began to denounce its effects, which were “crudely divergent” from what was to be expected.

The path he took was parallel to that of two other first-rate theologians of the time, his friends and instructors Henri De Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, both of whom also became cardinals, both of whom were also accused of having turned aside from progressivism to conservatism. Ratzinger never paid any attention to the label that was applied to him: “I have not changed; they are the ones who have changed.”

His was a strange conservatism, in any case. It was apt to disturb, rather than pacify, the Church. One of his favorite models is Saint Charles Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan who, after the Council of Trent, did nothing less than “reconstruct the Catholic Church, which was almost destroyed in the area around Milan as well, without returning to the Middle Ages to do so; on the contrary, he created a modern form of the Church.”

Today the transformations in civilization are no less epochal, in his eyes. The culture that has established itself in Europe “constitutes the most radical possible contradiction, not only of Christianity, but also of the religious traditions of humanity,” he argued on April 1 at Subiaco, at his last conference during the reign of John Paul II. And therefore the Church must react with all the courage it can muster, not conforming itself to the times, not falling to its knees before the world, but “bringing, with holy consternation, the gift of faith to all, the gift of friendship with Christ.”

Benedict XVI does not dream of the mass conversion of whole peoples for the Church of tomorrow. For many regions, he foresees a minority Christianity, but he wants this to be “creative.” He prefers the missionary impulse to timid dialogue with nonbelievers and men of other faiths.

Pessimism and angst have no place with him, and here also he breaks with the labels currently applied to him. He ended his homily-manifesto on April 18 at Saint Peter’s by invoking a world “changed from a vale of tears to the garden of God.”

He has been this way since he was a child: “The Catholicism of the Bavaria in which I grew up was joyful, colorful, human. I miss a sense of purism. This must be because, since my childhood, I have breathed the air of the Baroque.” He is distrustful of theologians who “do not love art, poetry, music, nature: they can be dangerous.” He loves taking walks in the mountains. He plays the piano, and favors Mozart. His brother Georg, a priest, is the choirmaster at Ratisbonne, one of the last pockets of resistance for the great tradition of sacred polyphony and Gregorian chant.

And this has been for years one of the points on which he has collided with novelties in the postconciliar Church. He has had harsh words for the transformation of the mass and liturgies “into spectacles that require directors of genius and talented actors.” He has said similar things about the dismantling of sacred music. “How often we celebrate only ourselves, without even taking Him into account,” he commented in his meditations for the Stations of the Cross last Good Friday. Here, “Him” refers to Jesus Christ, the one forgotten by liturgies changed into convivial gatherings.

Benedict XVI has never hidden his reservations even about the mass liturgies celebrated by his predecessor. No one in the curia of John Paul II was more free, or more critical, than he was. And Karol Wojtyla had the greatest respect for him for this reason, too. “My trusted friend”: this is how he defined Ratzinger in his autobiographical book “Arise, Let Us Be Going,” praise he never bestowed on any of his other close collaborators.

As prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Ratzinger criticized John Paul II on many points, even the ones that most distinguished his pontificate.

He didn’t even go to the first interreligious meeting in Assisi in 1986. He saw in this an obfuscation of the identity of Christianity, which cannot be reduced to other faiths. Years later, in 2000, a document came to dissolve any sort of equivocation, the declaration “Dominus Jesus,” published with his signature. It unleashed a storm of controversy. But the pope defended it completely. And in 2002, Ratzinger attended the meeting at Assisi in its modified form.

Another point on which the new pope did not agree with John Paul II was the “mea culpas.” Many other cardinals disagreed with these, but said nothing in public, with the sole exception of the archbishop of Bologna, Giacomo Biffi, who set down his objections in black and white, in a pastoral letter to the faithful of his diocese. Ratzinger voiced his criticism in a different way: in a theological document that responded, point by point, to the objections that had been raised, but in which the objections were all elaborately developed, while the replies appeared tenuous and shaky.

As a cardinal, Benedict XVI also criticized the endless succession of saints and blesseds that pope Wojtyla raised to the honors of the altar: in many cases, these were “persons who might perhaps say something to a certain group, but do not say much to the great multitude of believers.” As an alternative, he proposed “bringing to the attention of Christianity only those figures who, more than all others, make visible to us the holy Church, amid so many doubts about its holiness.”

He has always ignored politically correct language. In 1984, in a document against the Marxist roots of liberation theology, he delivered a deadly series of blows to the communist empire, labeling it “the shame of our time” and “a disgraceful enslavement of man.” During that same period, American president Ronald Reagan was speaking out against the “evil empire.” The news was spread that Cardinal Agostino Casaroli, the Vatican secretary of state and the architect of a policy of good relations with Moscow, had threatened to resign in order to distance himself from the prefect for doctrine. It wasn’t true. In any case, five years later the Berlin Wall came down.

Ratzinger has always distinguished himself as a man of great vision, not as a manager. He would love to see a Church that is simpler in terms of bureaucracy. He doesn’t want its central and peripheral institutions – the Vatican curia, the diocesan chanceries, the episcopal conferences – to become “like the armor of Saul, which prevented the young David from walking.”

Partly for this reason, he reacted strongly in 2000 when another talented archbishop and theologian, his friend and fellow German Walter Kasper, charged him with wanting to identify the universal Church with the pope and the curia, with wanting in effect to restore Roman centralism. Ratzinger replied, confuting Kasper’s thesis. The latter spoke again, provoking another public reply.

At the center of the dispute, which was fought on the terrain of advanced theology, was the relationship between the universal Church and the particular local Churches. This was the same question that the progressivist wing was discussing in more institutional and political terms during those same years, promoting a democratization of the Church, a balance of papal primacy with greater power for the college of bishops.

The controversy over the balance of power in the Church was also involved in the conclave that elected Benedict XVI, and a rejection of a greater role for collegiality was attributed to him, a rejection that would also create an obstacle to dialogue with the Orthodox and Protestant Churches.

But the reality is different. It was Kasper himself, whose motives are not suspect, who gave the name “the Ratzinger formula” to the thesis maintained by the present pope on relations with separated Christians, and called this “fundamental for ecumenical dialogue.” One written form of this thesis maintains that “in regard to papal primacy, Rome must demand from the Orthodox Churches nothing more than was established and practiced during the first millennium.”

During the first millennium, the college of bishops carried much greater weight. It will be, perhaps, a conservative pope like Benedict XVI who will clear the way for this reform.

The best man for the job

by Daniel Johnson

The Papacy the oldest and most successful institution in the world. Asking the Pope to abandon or water down Catholic doctrine would be like asking him to abolish his own office. Joseph Ratzinger has been the most powerful figure in the Church after John Paul II for the past two decades. It is entirely right that he should have the opportunity to serve the Church in the capacity for which he is so obviously head and shoulders above the rest. Among so many eminences, he was pre-eminent.

As usual, the BBC got the story all wrong. The task for the new Pope is not to take sides between liberals and conservatives. Nor was that the choice the cardinals faced in this extraordinarily rapid conclave. All cardinals are, by definition, conservative.

No, the great issue for Pope Benedict XVI is the one that he set out in his remarkable sermon at the preconclave Mass in St Peter’s. Does he wish to lead the Church down the primrose path of secularism, following the Christian heartlands of Europe in their descent into moral relativism, or does he intend to turn towards the new missionary Church of Latin America, Africa and Asia, to reaffirm the faith of Christ, the faith of St Peter, the faith of John Paul II? That is the real choice.

What the fight against communism was for John Paul II, the fight against rampant secularism will be for Benedict XVI. And all those anti-papist commentators who protested at the attention given to John Paul II’s illness, death and funeral will be gnashing their teeth once battle commences.

I believe, and firmly, that with God’s help Benedict XVI has it in him to be another great pope. He will build on the foundations laid by John Paul II, whose saintly genius he understood better than anybody else. And he knows exactly how to galvanise not only the devout, but also the vast dormant pool of lapsed Catholic laity.

Pope Ratzinger will be even more controversial than his predecessor. He began life under the Weimar Republic, which collapsed because it took moral relativism to extremes and succumbed to the secular ideologies of Left and Right.

He grew up under the Third Reich, witnessing at first hand the coercive and corrosive effects of a political religion. Though his father was no Nazi, Joseph was obliged to join the Hitler Youth and was fortunate to avoid military service. Far from this experience being an obstacle to his elevation, it was this dark night of the soul that qualifies him for it.

Joseph Ratzinger is virtually the first German since 1945 to hold any high-profile international office. Hostility to his nationality is widespread: he has been caricatured as “God’s rottweiler” and the “Panzerkardinal”. But his elevation is not only good for Christendom but also for Germans.

The revelation of the diabolical nature of the Nazi system, above all the murder of the Jews, confirmed in him the determination to devote his life to God. This was his form of atonement, and he has accompanied John Paul II on the spiritual journey that brought about the reconciliation of the Church and the Jewish people that was one of the greatest achievements of the past pontificate.

We cannot expect this Pope, of all popes, to abandon the “deposit of faith” which it is his sacred duty to preserve. There will be no change on issues such as contraception or the ordination of women, no legitimisation of gay marriage, no slackening in the determination to protect the unborn child or to stop the destruction of human embryos by scientists. The Nazi experience has taught Benedict XVI the dangers of eugenics and euthanasia, and we can expect an even more vigorous crusade against these evils.

Where I do expect movement during the Ratzinger pontificate is on ecumenical relations with the Orthodox and perhaps also Protestant churches. The last Pope opened up this Pandora’s box, bringing several of the smaller Eastern churches back into the Catholic fold. If the battle against the intolerance of secularism is to be won, Benedict XVI will have to find a way of reaching out to his fellow Christians to make common cause.

The last Pope was rarely given credit for his radical new ways of interpreting ancient doctrines, and the cardinals evidently realised that only Joseph Ratzinger had the learning and intellect to explain these exciting ideas not only to the laity but to the clergy too. In particular, the Theology of the Body, which sees sexuality as an emanation of divine love, has enormous unrealised potential to enthuse the young.

As Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctine of the Faith (the Holy Office) since 1981, Ratzinger has been treated as a kind of grand inquisitor by the media. This is based on the “persecution” of a handful of theologians, most famously Hans Küng. In reality, this persecution amounted to a change of job title: Küng could no longer call himself a professor of Catholic theology, but continued to teach exactly the same things at the same university.

I once discussed Ratzinger with Küng, his Swiss contemporary and arch-rival. While admitting that the new Pope was a clever man, Küng insisted that he had done great damage to the Church. But Küng believes that all the great world religions essentially teach the same, which is manifestly incompatible with Catholic doctrine. I came away with the impression that of these two brilliant theologians, it was Küng who had succumbed to the temptation to think he knew better, while Ratzinger had submitted to the authority of the Church. Ratzinger is no inquisitor, but Küng is a heretic.

And so when he described himself on the balcony yesterday as “a simple and humble worker in the Lord’s vineyard”, there was no false modesty.

That is how he sees himself. And given his precarious state of health, he would gladly have accepted another candidate. But there was nobody else up to the job.

Benedict XVI and Freedom

by Alejandro A. Chafuen

John Paul II’s pontificate left an unparalleled legacy of papal teachings. One key aspect of his tenure is the space he created for the work of other great theologians. The new pope, Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of them. Given Ratzinger’s sharp focus on doctrine, many have seen only one side of this man: the protector of the faith, the leader of a new “inquisition.” Few have focused on his rich analyses of freedom.

Just over two decades ago, Ratzinger’s office published a strong indictment of certain aspects of “Liberation” theology. This document dealt a huge blow to the most radical elements of the Church, a blow was compounded by the collapse of the Soviet atheistic utopia. John Paul II and Vatican theologians then focused on another enemy which affected East and West alike: the tyranny of relativism.

In his Encyclical Veritatis Splendor, the late Pope argued that the current culture “generates skepticism in relation to the very foundations of knowledge and ethics, and . . . makes it increasingly difficult to grasp clearly the meaning of what man is, the meaning of his rights and his duties.” His goal was to provide the compass for the practice of virtue as the first step needed for a moral recovery of civilization.

Classical liberal and “moderate” intellectuals were concerned that after the forceful defense of objective truth in Veritatis Splendor, the Church would to revert to imposing this truth by promoting coercive legislation. Yet this wasn’t the case. At the time of the encyclical, the Pope visited Sudan, a largely Muslim country, and argued forcefully that majorities do not have the right to impose their religious and moral views on minorities. The Wanderer, one of the most conservative Catholic newspapers, editorialized in favor of the “libertarian” slant of the Vatican Sudan statements.

Cardinal Ratzinger focused on teaching the importance of convictions, rather than force. On November 6, 1992, at the ceremony where Ratzinger was inducted into the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences of the Institute of France, he explained that a free society can only subsist where people share basic moral convictions and high moral standards. He further argued that these convictions need not be “imposed or even arbitrarily defined by external coercion.”

Ratzinger found part of the answer in the work of Tocqueville. “Democracy in America has always made a strong impression on me,” the cardinal said. He added that to make possible, “an order of liberties in freedom lived in community, the great political thinker [Tocqueville] saw as an essential condition the fact that a basic moral conviction was alive in America, one which, nourished by Protestant Christianity, supplied the foundations for institutions and democratic mechanisms.”

In his work as a theologian, Benedict XVI places freedom at the core of his teachings. He has a beautiful way of explaining creation, which according to him should be understood not with the model of a craftsman, “but the creative mind, creative thinking.” The beginning of creation is a “creative freedom which creates further freedoms. To this extent one could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom.” Christianity explains a reality that “at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the structural form of all being.” This freedom is embodied in the human person, the only “irreducible, infinity-related being. And here once again, it is the option for the primacy of freedom as against the primacy of some cosmic necessity or natural law.” Human freedom pushes Christianity away from idealism.

Benedict XVI argues that freedom, coupled with consciousness and love, comprise the essence of being. With freedom comes an incalculability -- and thus the world can never be reduced to mathematical logic. In his view, where the particular is more important than the universal, “the person, the unique and unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing. In such view of the world, the person is not just an individual; a reproduction arising from the diffusion of the idea into matter, but rather, precisely, a “person.”

According to Benedict XVI, the Greeks saw human beings as mere individuals, subject to the polis (city-state). Christianity, however, sees man as a person more than an individual. This passage from individual to the person is what led the change from antiquity to Christianity. Or, as the cardinal put it, “from Plato to faith.”

As a Roman Catholic, I and many others are already deeply grateful to Ratzinger and his teachings on creative freedom, that characteristic mark of the “infinity-related” human person. We can be sure that the newest pope will continue the legacy of John Paul II, placing freedom and dignity at the core of his teachings.

Habemus papam!

by John O'Callaghan

Nietzsche, as always, is relevant in times such as these. In yet another of those brilliant and fascinating reflections of his, he writes "our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for "unbelief"." He goes on to talk about that indistriousness that is consumed by finding out the truth from "the newspaper," the industriousness of those for whom "it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains unclear to them whether it involves another business or another pleasure."(From Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966. p.69) We live under "the yoke of tutelage" in Kant's celebrated phrase, tutelage from the media, living the very opposite of what it is to be enlightened.

I was reminded of this passage from Nietzsche as I listened to and read the American news media coverage of the election of Pope Benedict XVI. As a friend of mine astutely deadpanned, "the media seems surprised that a Catholic was elected pope." This morning, however, Cardinal Egan was quoted, yes in the "newspaper," as giving the journalists an assignment, namely, that they should stop reporting on what their "experts" and "consultants" said about Benedict, and actually read his work, as there is plenty of it that is readily available.

Well I confess, to my shame, I am in my own way guilty of some of what Nietzsche is aiming his pentrating gaze at, and Cardinal Egan is warning against. And I fear that for most of us we will in fact let the media shape our perception of this new Pope. We will read our favorite newspapers, opinion magazines, and listen to our Sunday morning gabfests. Commonweal, America, First Things, Crisis, the National Catholic Reporter, and the National Catholic Register will all provide us with just the convenient summarys and distillations we need to tell us what to think about this new pope on this or that issue, as we are too industrious to find out for ourselves what he thinks. Reading Benedict's writings both from the past and in the future: will that be a business or a pleasure? In the same passage Nietzsche asks whether anyone has ever noted that a genuine religious life requires leisure, that is, "leisure with a good conscience." In fact, after Nietzsche, the German philosopher Josef Pieper did just that in his books, Leisure the Basis of Culture and Happiness and Contemplation.

Sadly, I had never read a single page of anything theologian and cardinal Ratzinger had actually written. I always took my views of him from the newspapers, opinion magazines, and immaculately coifed and made-up talking heads. That is, until today when I read this magnificent reflection upon "Truth and Freedom," found simply by googling the names Ratzinger and Pieper. (More in a minute on why Pieper.) It argues in a very clear and pentrating way that while we are all very wary of truth, and question its value and our ability to acquire it, we do not bother to inquire into freedom and its true nature. Truth he argues is the "measure" of freedom. It is really quite an extraordinary reflection.

For example, consider this passage: After this attempt to understand the origin of our problems and to get a clear view of their inner tendency, it is now time to search for answers. It has become evident that the critical point in the history of freedom in which we now find ourselves rests upon an unclarified and one-sided idea of freedom. On the one hand, the concept of freedom has been isolated and thereby falsified: freedom is a good, but only within a network of other goods together with which it forms an indissoluble totality. On the other hand, the notion itself has been narrowly restricted to the rights of individual liberty, and has thus been robbed of its human truth. I would like to illustrate the problem posed by this understanding of freedom with the help of a concrete example. At the same time this example can open the way to a more adequate view of freedom. I mean the question of abortion. In the radicalization of the individualistic tendency of the Enlightenment, abortion appears as a right of freedom: the woman must be able to take charge of herself. She must have the freedom to decide whether she will bring a child into the world or rid herself of it. She must have the power to make decisions about her own life, and no one else can-so we are told-impose from the outside any ultimately binding norm. What is at stake is the right to self-determination. But is it really the case that the woman who aborts is making a decision about her own life? Is she not deciding precisely about someone else-deciding that no freedom shall be granted to another, and that the space of freedom, which is life, must be taken from him, because it competes with her own freedom? The question we must therefore ask is this: exactly what sort of freedom has even the right to annul another's freedom as soon as it begins?

Now, let it not be said that the issue of abortion concerns a special case and is not suited to clarify the general problem of freedom. No, it is this very example which brings out the basic figure of human freedom and makes clear what is typically human about it. For what is at stake here? The being of another person is so closely interwoven with the being of this person, the mother, that for the present it can survive only by physically being with the mother, in a physical unity with her. Such unity, however, does not eliminate the otherness of this being or authorize us to dispute its distinct selfhood. However, to be oneself in this way is to be radically from and through another. Conversely, this being-with compels the being of the other-that is, the mother-to become a being-for, which contradicts her own desire to be an independent self and is thus experienced as the antithesis of her own freedom. We must now add that even once the child is born and the outer form of its being-from and-with changes, it remains just as dependent on, and at the mercy of, a being-for. One can, of course, send the child off to an institution and assign it to the care of another "for," but the anthropological figure is the same, since there is still a "from" which demands a "for." I must still accept the limits of my freedom, or rather, I must live my freedom not out of competition but in a spirit of mutual support. If we open our eyes, we see that this, in turn, is true not only of the child, but that the child in the mother's womb is simply a very graphic depiction of the essence of human existence in general. Even the adult can exist only with and from another, and is thus continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like to shut out. Let us say it even more precisely: man quite spontaneously takes for granted the being-for of others in the form of today's network of service systems, yet if he had his way he would prefer not to be forced to participate in such a "from" and "for," but would like to become wholly independent, and to be able to do and not to do just what he pleases. The radical demand for freedom, which has proved itself more and more clearly to be the outcome of the historical course of the Enlightenment, especially of the line inaugurated by Rousseau, and which today largely shapes the public mentality, prefers to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from nor for, but to be wholly at liberty. In other words, it regards what is actually the fundamental figure of human existence itself as an attack on freedom which assails it before any individual has a chance to live and act. The radical cry for freedom demands man's liberation from his very essence as man, so that he may become the "new man." In the new society, the dependencies which restrict the I and the necessity of self-giving would no longer have the right to exist.

"Ye shall be as gods." This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom. Although Ernst Topitsch believed he could safely say that today no reasonable man still wants to be like or equal to God, if we look more closely we must assert the exact opposite: the implicit goal of all of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another. Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its influence even where such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are even rejected. To be totally free, without the competing freedom of others, without a "from" and a "for"-this desire presupposes not an image of God, but an idol. The primal error of such a radicalized will to freedom lies in the idea of a divinity conceived as a pure egoism. The god thought of in this way is not a God, but an idol. Indeed, it is the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil-the anti-God-because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God. The real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Man, for his part, is God's image precisely insofar as the "from," "with," and "for" constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern. Whenever there is an attempt to free ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity, but to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us call the radicalisms of modernity by this name) is a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man-as Sartre penetratingly saw-into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell.


This passage is extraordinary for a number of reasons. In the first place, near the end we see Benedict pointing in a very Nietzschean way to the modern process of self-deification through the proclamation of the "freedom of the will". Nietzsche had written: "The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than...[the] audacity to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness." To absolve God! Nietzsche of course had his own solution to this ersatz freedom, which was to diagnose in it little more than a useful fiction that disguised the will to power. "That which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey," and "in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills." Benedict recognizes that Nietzschean point when he mentions the idols, Sartre, and the spectre of Hell. Indeed, he has much to say in the essay about the way in which this Nietzschean battle of weak and strong wills works itself out in contemporary society, with its "interest groups."

But in the second place he suggests the alternative of the figure of mother and child as the image of genuine freedom. If we simply listen to many of the coifed heads, no doubt we will have this image psychologized for us in a way that very often borders on anti-catholic prejudice. Notice, instead, Benedict's desire to say that this relationship is no mere exception, but the exemplar of genuine freedom for human beings. I have often been perplexed when fellow Christians who oppose abortion nonetheless treat certain unexpected pregnancies as a problem to be solved, even as abortion is not granted as an option for solving the problem. On the contrary, against the background of the deposit of faith expressed in Scripture, the unexpected pregnancy is always a sign of God's covenant, and the birth of our salvation. As we treat these pregnancies as problems to be solved, often times testing our faith, God, on the contrary, says to us through them, "I have faith in you; these children are given to you for your salvation." In a sea of turmoil, they are the lifesavers that He casts to us, to be clung to with all of our might. And here Benedict is saying to us that in the relationship of mother to child, we have not simply an expression of God's faith in us, but the very imago dei. As mother and child are "for," and "through," and "with," so "the real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit)." What a profound insight into human interdependence. In such being-for, being-through, and being-with is found genuine freedom, a participation in the divine. Thus the question of abortion is not simply a question of "rights" and competing freedoms, but of the genuine nature of human dignity and destiny. Extraordinary.

Finally, the passage is significant for another reason. "We scholars" have a tendency to dismiss the importance and originality of a figure by reducing him or her to "the sources." Thus we do not have to ask ourselves whether what the author writes is actually true or not. "'The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement from 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 so on'." (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, as found here in Benedict's reflections upon the encyclical Fides et Ratio, delivered when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. Yet another piece I read just today.) If we rely upon the newspapers, magazines, and coifed heads, we will find out that Benedict is fundamentally "an Augustinian." With a wink, and a smile, a nod, and a knowing glance, as if we could make sense of what such a broad generalization means, we thus won't have to look at the arguments he adduces, and whether they support the truth claims he makes in works of philosophy and theology. And yet in this passage we see him departing in part, but in a significant way, from Augustine's discussion of the imago dei in his De trintitate. Augustine had ruled out reproduction as a source for a proper image of God, as such an image would be part of the"outer" life of man, not the inner life of the mind in which the image of God is to be found. In some ways, Benedict shares his insight more closely with Aquinas who had argued that in our reproductive capacity, in a certain way, human beings are greater images of God than even the angels are, for we can reproduce our own kind, "man from man, as God from God," the latter phrase in Aquinas bringing to mind the Nicene Creed. The point then is not to reduce Benedict to Aquinas rather than Augustine, but to recognize his own freedom of insight as he seeks to develop and express the faith he shares with these great figures, and all of us Christians.

Along those lines, I mentioned the German philosopher Josef Pieper. I saw a passage from Benedict's memoirs in which he mentions some of the most formative influences upon his thought being the theologian Romano Guardini, and the philosopher Josef Pieper. Sadly, I am not as knowledgeable of Guardini as I should be. But I do know a bit about Pieper. Reading this essay on Truth and Freedom, I am reminded of two specific books of Pieper's, Living the Truth, and The Silence of St. Thomas. To recognize these works as perhaps part of the horizon in which Benedict is writing is not to reduce his essay to them. But, for those not interested in living under the yoke of tutelage of the coifed, reading them may will provide some insight into what Benedict is arguing, in particular about the theme of truth as the "measure" of freedom.

I am no betting man, but I will not be surprised if Benedict's first encyclical is entitled, Veritas Vos Liberabit--the truth will set you free.

Habemus papam! Deo Gratias.