Amongst the many tributes paid to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in recent days, it was the report of the observation of the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, that I thought most fully captured what he was about. Media outlets shortened it to refer to him as "a giant of faith and reason", but the full text can be found on the website of the Italian Government.
Benedict XVI was a giant of faith and of reason. A man who loved the Lord and devoted his life to the service of the universal Church. He spoke, and will continue to speak, to the hearts and minds of people with the spiritual, cultural and intellectual depth of his Magisterium. A Christian, a shepherd, a theologian: one of history’s greats, whom history will not forget.
I have conveyed the Government’s and my personal sympathy to the Holy Father Pope Francis for his and the entire Church community’s grief.
This was also reinforced by Tim Stanley's contribution to the "Thought for the Day" on BBC Radio 4's Today programme this morning. He pointed towards Pope Benedict's address in Westminster Hall during his visit to Britain in 2010 as a key to understanding him. I would additionally point towards the lecture that Pope Benedict would have delivered at the La Sapienza university, had that visit gone ahead in January 2008.
The first of these highlights what should be the just relationship between government or state and the ethical proposals that might be the proper province of religions.
The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation. According to this understanding, the role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn, these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person. Such misuse of reason, after all, was what gave rise to the slave trade in the first place and to many other social evils, not least the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. This is why I would suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.....
...there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square. I would invite all of you, therefore, within your respective spheres of influence, to seek ways of promoting and encouraging dialogue between faith and reason at every level of national life.Pope Benedict's lecture prepared for La Sapienza explores the relationship between the mission of the Pope and the mission of a university, addressing the community of a university that in its origins was a Papal foundation but is now an institution of the Italian state. In discussing first the role of the Pope as Bishop of Rome, who first exercises a care for the community of the Church, Pope Benedict wrote:
Yet this community which the Bishop looks after – be it large or small – lives in the world; its circumstances, its history, its example and its message inevitably influence the entire human community. The larger it is, the greater the effect, for better or worse, on the rest of humanity. Today we see very clearly how the state of religions and the situation of the Church – her crises and her renewal – affect humanity in its entirety. Thus the Pope, in his capacity as Shepherd of his community, is also increasingly becoming a voice for the ethical reasoning of humanity.
Pope Benedict then goes on to suggest that there is a human wisdom passed down that gives a credibility to the religious thought of earlier generations:
Here, however, the objection immediately arises: surely the Pope does not really base his pronouncements on ethical reasoning, but draws his judgements from faith and hence cannot claim to speak on behalf of those who do not share this faith. We will have to return to this point later, because here the absolutely fundamental question must be asked: What is reason? How can one demonstrate that an assertion – especially a moral norm – is “reasonable”? At this point I would like to describe briefly how John Rawls, while denying that comprehensive religious doctrines have the character of “public” reason, nonetheless at least sees their “non-public” reason as one which cannot simply be dismissed by those who maintain a rigidly secularized rationality. Rawls perceives a criterion of this reasonableness among other things in the fact that such doctrines derive from a responsible and well thought-out tradition in which, over lengthy periods, satisfactory arguments have been developed in support of the doctrines concerned. The important thing in this assertion, it seems to me, is the acknowledgment that down through the centuries, experience and demonstration – the historical source of human wisdom – are also a sign of its reasonableness and enduring significance. Faced with an a-historical form of reason that seeks to establish itself exclusively in terms of a-historical rationality, humanity’s wisdom – the wisdom of the great religious traditions – should be valued as a heritage that cannot be cast with impunity into the dustbin of the history of ideas.
After observing that man, in exercising his reason, seeks what is good as well as what is true, Pope Benedict goes on to address the question that he would later address in Westminster Hall:
At this point, however, the question immediately arises: How is it possible to identify criteria of justice that make shared freedom possible and help man to be good? Here a leap into the present is necessary. The point in question is: how can a juridical body of norms be established that serves as an ordering of freedom, of human dignity and human rights? This is the issue with which we are grappling today in the democratic processes that form opinion, the issue which also causes us to be anxious about the future of humanity. In my opinion, Jürgen Habermas articulates a vast consensus of contemporary thought when he says that the legitimacy of a constitutional charter, as a basis for what is legal, derives from two sources: from the equal participation of all citizens in the political process and from the reasonable manner in which political disputes are resolved. With regard to this “reasonable manner”, he notes that it cannot simply be a fight for arithmetical majorities, but must have the character of a “process of argumentation sensitive to the truth” (wahrheitssensibles Argumentationsverfahren). The point is well made, but it is far from easy to put it into practice politically. The representatives of that public “process of argumentation” are – as we know – principally political parties, inasmuch as these are responsible for the formation of political will. De facto, they will always aim to achieve majorities and hence will almost inevitably attend to interests that they promise to satisfy, even though these interests are often particular and do not truly serve the whole. Sensibility to the truth is repeatedly subordinated to sensibility to interests. I find it significant that Habermas speaks of sensibility to the truth as a necessary element in the process of political argument, thereby reintroducing the concept of truth into philosophical and political debate.
Whilst many in public life seem to appreciate Pope Emeritus Benedict for his gentleness and warmth of character, it will be interesting to see how many really appreciate the dimensions of his intellectual thought on how the public sphere should have a just regard for religious belief. It would be quite unfair, for example, to dismiss his thought in this field on the grounds that it is being cited by two people who wider society would recognise as being politically right of centre
No comments:
Post a Comment