Faith, Truth, Tolerance

We offer here excerpts from the presentation by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the conference in Lugano

BY JOSEPH RATZINGER

Are tolerance and faith in revealed truth concepts in opposition to each other? Or, in other words, can Christian faith and modernity be reconciled? If tolerance is one of the foundations of the modern age, then isn’t the affirmation that one has discovered the truth a presumptuousness that is now a thing of the past and must be rejected, if we want to break the spiral of violence which runs through the history of religions? This question is raised today in an increasingly dramatic way in the encounter between Christianity and the world, and the conviction is spreading that renunciation on the part of the Christian faith of the claim to truth is the basic condition for obtaining a new world peace, the fundamental condition for the reconciliation between Christianity and modernity….

It may be useful… to mention another variant of the refusal of the truth of religion, which (this time) does not come from history, but from philosophical thought–Wittgenstein’s theses concerning our subject. G. Elisabeth M. Anscombe summarized her teacher’s opinion in two theses: “1. There is nothing comparable to a religion’s being true. We allude to this when we say, ‘This religious statement is not the equivalent of a statement of science.’ 2. Religious faith can be compared to a human being’s falling in love, rather than to his conviction that something is true or false.” Consistently with this logic, Wittgenstein noted in one of his numerous notebooks that for the Christian religion, it is unimportant if Christ actually performed in a certain way one of the works attributed to Him or even if He simply existed. This corresponds to Bultmann’s thesis: believing in one God, creator of heaven and earth, does not mean believing that God really created heaven and earth, but only means considering ourselves to be creatures and, thanks to this, living a more sensible life. In the meantime, similar ideas have spread also in Catholic theology and can be perceived more or less distinctly also in preaching. The faithful realize this and wonder if they have not been duped in some way. Living in a lovely fiction may be all right for a theoretician of religion; for the man who asks with what and for what he should live or die, this is not enough. A farewell to the claim to truth, which in and of itself would be a farewell to Christian faith as such, is here softened, granting to faith–understood as a sort of falling in love with its pleasant subjective consolations–to continue to exist. Faith is transferred onto the plane of play, while up to now it concerned the plane of life as such. Faith as a game is something radically different from faith believed and lived. It does not point out a path, it is merely an ornament. It does not help us to live or to die; at the most it furnishes a little entertainment, a little bit of pleasant appearance–but, precisely, only appearance, and this is not enough for living and dying…

The ancient tragedy is the interpretation of being by starting from the experience of a contradictory world, which inevitably generates guilt and failure. In his system–of the idea that develops through phases of dialectic–Hegel, after all, took up this way of seeing the world, and then tried to represent its reconciliation in an all-embracing synthesis as the hope for the future and thus as the dissolution of the tragic. The Christian eschatological orientation is here merged with the ancient vision of the unity of being and seems by now to “gather” the two into itself, thus explaining everything. But the dialectic remains cruel and the reconciliation only apparent. At the moment when Marx translated Hegelian speculation into a concrete project for the construction of history, this cruelty was made visible, and we are the witnesses of all its cruelty. For it is inevitable that the dialectic of progress, put into practice, claims victims; in order for the progress adduced by the French Revolution to be realized, it was necessary to accept its victims–or so they say. And in order for Marxism to produce the reconciled society, the massacres of human victims were necessary; there was no other way–here the mythological dialectic was translated into fact. Man becomes material for the game of progress. As an individual he does not count, since he is only material for the cruel God, Deus sive natura. The theory of evolution teaches us the same thing: that progress, precisely, comes at a price. And today’s experiments on man, who is transformed into an “organ bank,” demonstrate to us the very practical application of these ideas–in which man himself takes further evolution in hand….

The question of truth is inevitable. It is indispensable to man and concerns precisely the ultimate decisions of his existence: does God exist? Does truth exist? Does good exist? The “Mosaic distinction” is also the Socratic distinction, we could say. Here are made visible the inner motivation and inner necessity of the historic encounter between the Bible and Greek culture. What unites them is precisely the question of truth and good as such which religions raise or, as we could now call it, the Mosaic-Socratic distinction. This encounter began long before the beginning of the synthesis between Biblical faith and Greek thought which concerned the Fathers of the Church. It takes shape already within the Old Testament, especially in the Wisdom literature and in the memorable event of the translation into Greek of the Old Testament, which was a moment of intercultural encounter with enormous and long-ranging import. Certainly, in the ancient world, the outcome of the Socratic question remains open, and it is different in Plato and in Aristotle. In this sense, there remains in the world of the Greek spirit an expectation with regard to which the Christian announcement appeared as the longed-for answer. This open expectation, which in Greek thought was an attitude of searching, as it were, is one of the main reasons for the success of the Christian mission….

At this point, in the Mediterranean basin, and later in the Arab world and also in parts of Asia, monotheism presented itself as the reconciliation between reason and religion: the divinity achieved by reason is identical to God who shows Himself as Revelation. Revelation and reason correspond. The “true religion” exists; the question of truth and the question of the divine are reconciled. Antiquity shows us, however, also another possible outcome, which is current once again today. On one side, there is the Christian re-interpretation of Plato, the fusion of the Greek expectation and his question about truth, in which the Greek orientation is absorbed and at the same time redefined at its root.

On the other hand, however, there is the late Platonism of Porphyrius and Proclus, and others who became the instrument for the refusal of the Christian claim and for a new justification of polytheism–the other side of Platonic thought. Here precisely the position of the skeptics becomes the justification for polytheism: since we cannot recognize the divine, we can adore it only in multiform manifestations, in which are expressed the mystery of the cosmos and its multiplicity and, that cannot be reduced to any one name. In late antiquity this attempt at a restoration of polytheism, justified from the philosophical point of view and thus apparently rational, could not endure. It remained an academic construction, from which the necessary force of hope and truth could not spring forth….

For today’s attempts, too, at offering a way to go back to Egypt, a liberation from Christianity and its doctrine of sin, things cannot go differently. This is because also in this case we remain in the fiction that, to be sure, can be thought about academically, but it is not enough for living. Certainly, the flight from the one God and His claim will go on. The criterion established by modern science to reach certainty cannot correspond to the claim to truth of Christian faith, because the form of verification, here, is of a completely different nature from the sphere of what can be experimented. In effect, the type of experiment required–to guarantee with one’s life–is of a completely different nature. The saints, who passed the experiment, can function as guarantors of its truth, but the possibility remains of evading this eventuality. Thus, undoubtedly, other solutions will continue to be sought, they will be sought in the form of mystical unions, for which there are and will continue to be instructions and techniques….

The one God is a “jealous God,” as He is called in the Old Testament. He unmasks the gods because by His light we can see that the “gods” are not God, that the plural of God is in itself a lie. The lie is always non-freedom, and it is no coincidence, above all it is not false, that in Israel’s memory Egypt appears as a house of slaves, as a place of non-freedom. Only the truth makes people free. Where utility is placed before truth–as happens in the case of the dual truth that we talked about earlier–man becomes the slave of utilitarianism and of those who can decide what is profitable….

The themes of the true and the good cannot be separated. Plato was right when he identified the highest point of the divine with the idea of good. Inversely, if we cannot know the truth about God, then also truth about what is good and what is evil remains inaccessible. In this case, good and evil do not exist. All that is left is the calculation of the consequences: ethos is replaced by calculation. To put it even more clearly: the three questions about truth, the good, and God are the same question. And if there is no answer to it, then we stumble about in the dark concerning the essential things in our lives. Then human existence is truly “tragic”–then, certainly, we understand what redemption must mean. The Biblical concept of God recognizes God as the good, as the One who is good (cf Mk 10:18). This concept of God reaches its culmination in John’s affirmation: God is love (1 Jn 4:8). Truth and love are one and the same. This affirmation–if we grasp its full import–is the greatest guarantee of tolerance, of a relationship with the truth, whose only weapon is itself and thus is love.