cLose-up
starting fresh

simply true
In the general disillusionment, there are signs of hope. The problem is our “inability to use the available facts to feed our reason.” In a culture that fractures reality without penetrating it, we miss “the most convincing evidence.” But it is possible to start again, from the beginning, from a restlessness “that exits also today,” as the Pope explains in an interview which passed unnoticed...

by John Waters

The main obstacle in our culture to continuing belief in the Christian proposal is not something inherent to Christianity. It is the positivistic forms of rationality that are used to distill the truth of reality but fall short of penetrating what is there. If there is a single thing that we need to repeat ad nauseam, this is it. The problem, then, is not an absence or scarcity of evidence, but the inability to use the available facts to feed our reason in a comprehensive way.
Thanks to Pope Benedict XVI and Fr. Giussani, we have access to these understandings, and therefore to hope and the possibility of restoring it to others.
At a recent session of the Synod of Bishops, a film entitled Bells of Europe was shown in a special screening for the Synod Fathers. The film, which deals with the relationship between Christianity, European culture, and the future of the continent, includes extracts from a series of interviews with important religious leaders from the main Christian confessions, including Pope Benedict XVI, as well as leading figures from the world of politics and culture.

An antidote to positivism. Pope Benedict’s contribution is as remarkable as it is brief. In a few sentences, he gets to the heart of the difficulty of modern man in seeking to establish, moment to moment, if reality continues to support his hopes. In a few broad strokes, the Pope provides reassurance and guidance, setting out both an antidote to the positivistic misappropriation of reason and a method for seeing truly.
“The first reason for my hope,” he says, “consists in the fact that the desire for God, the search for God, is profoundly inscribed into each human soul and cannot disappear. Certainly, we can forget God for a time, lay Him aside and concern ourselves with other things, but God never disappears. St. Augustine’s words are true: we men are restless until we have found God. This restlessness also exists today, and is an expression of the hope that man may, ever and anew, even today, start to journey towards this God.”
The most convincing–and yet the most ignored and taken-for-granted evidence–is within us: our desire. There was a time when I was not aware of this element of desire or, being minimally aware of it, thought it a phenomenon directed at fleeting things and therefore itself fleeting. I certainly would not have thought of it as evidence of anything substantial or constant, never mind a basis for infinite or absolute hope. To see desire as a thing in itself is to know hope as a thing in itself.
Having gently reminded us of the question that defines us, the Holy Father directs us again toward the human witness that is the Gospel. This must be entered into fully before we know what it is we are talking about. Unlike the ideologies which come and go as they distract us in different ways and directions, the Gospel is true, and therefore cannot wear out.
   “In each period of history it [the Gospel] reveals new dimensions, it emerges in all its novelty as it responds to the needs of the heart and mind of human beings, who can walk in this truth and so discover themselves.”
Bringing these two elements together–desire and truth–the Holy Father predicts a new “springtime for Christianity”–its early symptoms already observable in the “sense of restlessness” that exists among the young.
Often, speaking to people about such matters in Ireland, I encounter parents heartbroken because their children have strayed away from faith in Christ. Often, I find, they have attached too much importance to the words their children use to describe themselves, overlooking the force of desire which, when they come to think about it, they recognize as defining their children. I tell them to see past the self-descriptions of their children to the hunger that remains beyond words.
The Holy Father has given me new words to put before such parents:
“Young people have seen much–the proposals of the various ideologies and of consumerism–and they have become aware of the emptiness and insufficiency of those things. Man was created for the infinite, the finite is too little. Thus, among the new generations we are seeing the reawakening of this restlessness, and they too begin their journey making new discoveries of the beauty of Christianity; not a cut-price or watered-down version, but Christianity in all its radicalism and profundity. Thus I believe that anthropology, as such, is showing us that there will always be a new reawakening of Christianity. The facts confirm this in a single phrase: Deep foundations. That is Christianity; it is true and the truth always has a future.”

Two souls . Thus, the Pope enables us to see ways into and around the problem by redefining its terms.
For us in Europe, he elaborated, there is the need to find a new identity from which to carry out the responsibility of Europe to speak and transmit the truth in these fractured and confusing times.
But the problem, as he says, is not to be found in the host of diverse nations that make up modern Europe. Difference does not necessarily mean division. “In their cultural, human, and temperamental differences, nations are a rich asset which together give rise to a great symphony of cultures. Basically, they are a shared culture.”
This is the true problem: something like a virus infects the reason of man, confusing both young and old.
The Pope expanded: “The problem Europe has in finding its own identity consists, I believe, in the fact that in Europe today we see two souls: one is abstract anti-historical reason, which seeks to dominate all else because it considers itself above all cultures; it is like a reason which has finally discovered itself and intends to liberate itself from all traditions and cultural values in favor of an abstract rationality. Strasburg’s first verdict on the crucifix was an example of such abstract reason which seeks emancipation from all traditions, even from history itself.”
We cannot live like this, he says. Pure reason is defined by history, by truth, and cannot be removed from this context. Thus, Europe’s “other” soul remains–the Christian soul. It resides, still, within us all, at the core of our longing and hoping. We should not feel so discouraged.
“It is a soul open to all that is reasonable, a soul which itself created the audaciousness of reason and the freedom of critical reasoning, but which remains anchored to the roots from which this
Europe was born, the roots which created the continent’s fundamental values and great institutions, in the vision of the Christian faith.”

A new humanism. This soul must first find a new and more deeply shared expression in the ecumenical context–between the Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox churches–before seeking out anew this abstract reason. “It must then encounter this abstract reason; in other words, it must accept and maintain the freedom of reason to criticize everything it can do and has done, but to practice this and give it concrete form on the foundations and in the context of the great values that Christianity has given us. Only by blending these elements can Europe have weight in the intercultural dialogue of mankind today and tomorrow. Only when reason has a historical and moral identity can it speak to others, search for an ‘interculturality’ in which everyone can enter and find a fundamental unity in the values that open the way to the future, to a new humanism. This must be our aim. For us this humanism arises directly from the view of man created in the image and likeness of God.”
It is awesome to observe such clarity and such simplicity. It is beautiful to read it. But it is almost overpowering to know that, placed before the reason of man, such words are capable of rekindling a hope that many had thought dead because of some change in reality which they had not been able to understand.