The “True Enlightenment”

In a time of crisis for mankind, the reasonableness of Christianity disperses the fog of superstition and the claim to divinity on the part of power and violence. It was like this in the beginning, too, when the “Christian claim” first dawned upon the pagan world

By STEFANO ALBERTO

Antonio Socci, presenting in a recent article the meeting in Assisi on January 24th as an “Enlightenment” event aimed at “removing all theological legitimization from any form of terrorism and violence” (Il Foglio, January 22, 2002, p. 2), referred to an important address by Cardinal Ratzinger at the Sorbonne in Paris on November 27, 1999 (cf. “Cristianesimo. La vittoria dell’intelligenza sul mondo delle religioni” [“Christianity. The Victory of Intelligence over the World of Religions”], 30 Giorni, January 2000, pp. 49-60), observing that he “more than once has developed the idea that Christianity entered the world as the true ‘Enlightenment,’ which disperses the fog of superstition and the claim to divinity on the part of power and violence.”

The Cardinal, if truth be told, does not use the term “Enlightenment” to describe the innovation of the irruption of Christianity onto the human scene. Doesn’t, then, this juxtaposition seem a bit too audacious, since it was precisely the Enlightenment that historically set in motion the process, still ongoing, of the radical relativization of the truth, of reduction of the Christian faith to a moral doctrine (within the limits of “practical reason alone”), and it was precisely the Enlightenment that set about translating what was believed to be the essence of Christian faith into ideas that had no need to find their justification in faith? Socci’s reference is paradoxical but not at all out of place, if we consider that the current climate is marked by a widespread crisis in the use of reason, by the political and instrumental use of religion to justify power struggles and terrorist violence, by the return to irrational and instinctive positions as escape routes from reality, by the prevalence of “good feelings,” by the growing success of superstitious credences and esoteric and magic practices, by a yielding to a fatalistic and, after all, nihilistic resentment in the positions of many intellectuals.

The courage of reason
Thus, albeit in a very different context from the year, 1784, when it was made and in a profoundly different sense, Kant’s appeal to man to “come out of the condition of minority for which he can only blame himself” through “the courage to use his own intelligence” (“Sape audere! This is the motto of the Enlightenment!”) is still current. But where can man find this courage to use his reason, without first yielding to the pride of glorifying it as the measure of all of reality and then to the bitter disappointment of considering it incapable of recognizing the true meaning of things?

People run away from the increasing toil of living simply by trying to give up on reality and the search for a meaning that makes it worthwhile to face it all. A well-known Italian intellectual wrote recently, “If we stop for an instant and watch life passing by in front of us while we stand still, everything looks different, senseless, mad. To live life, you have to forget it. In our moments of pause, we feel like we are on the edge of an abyss.”

Festugière made this comment on the crisis of ancient civilization, which appears surprisingly up-to-date in its description of the climate of neo-paganism in which we are living: “Since… man is by now abandoned to his uncertainty, since the egotism of the masters and the ambition of those who want to become one increase the cruelty of wars, multiply massacres, accustom people to despising the blood of the weak, man feels even more oppressively the weight of heimarmene [fate].… And so credences arise, not new but recently spread, to increase the burden of destiny” (cf. L’idéal religieux des grecs, p. 104). The great distance of two thousand years between the world in which Christianity began to take its first steps and the world of today in which, especially in the West, it seems to be on its last legs, is traversed by the possibility of a new beginning, in an historical condition never experienced before, as Péguy lucidly points out, in Véronique: “For the first time after Jesus, we have seen, beneath our eyes… a new world arise… a society taking shape… after Jesus, without Jesus. And what is most terrible, my friend, it cannot be denied, is that they have succeeded… You are the first of the moderns.”

The event of an encounter
In a similar context, the question of the truth of Christianity might seem by now to be outmoded, superfluous, and insoluble, if it were resigned to surviving alongside other religions, whether traditional or recently created (New and Next Age), as an ancient Western doctrine and a collection of strange rites, the endowment of increasingly scarce minorities. John Paul II, however, in his recent message to Fr Giussani for the twentieth anniversary of the Pontifical Recognition of the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation, forcefully recalls its original nature: Christianity, “even before being a sum of doctrines or a rule for salvation, is… the ‘event’ of an encounter,” and faith is an “authentic adventure of cognition.”

In his lecture at the Sorbonne in 1999, Cardinal Ratzinger centered precisely on this last aspect, highlighted by St Augustine’s confrontation with the religious philosophy of the “most erudite among the Romans,” Marcus Terentius Varro, who, under the influence of Stoicism, considered religion, in its essence, a political phenomenon: “Truth and religion, rational knowledge and the order of worship are situated on two completely different planes. The order of worship, the concrete world of religion, does not belong to the order of the res, reality as such, but to that of mores, or customs. The gods did not create the state, the state instituted the gods, veneration of whom is essential to maintain order in the state and the good behavior of its citizens” (ibid, p. 50). For the other great current of thought of the crisis of the ancient world, neo-Platonism, religiosity is expressed above all in the images of the poets, who evoke what cannot be known: “Even though they are not true as such, the images are justified as approaches to something that must always remain inexpressible” (p. 52).

The newness of Christianity
According to St Augustine, Christianity “from Paul’s address on the Areopagus onwards, presents itself with the claim to be the religio vera. This means that the Christian faith is not based on poetry or politics, these two great sources of religion; it is based on knowledge. It venerates the Being who is the foundation of everything that exists, the ‘true God.’ In Christianity, rationality became religion, no longer its adversary” (p. 52). Christianity, as the “victory of demythologization,” the victory of knowledge and, by this, of the truth which makes appearance superfluous, is universal, for all peoples and all cultures and at the same time for the freedom and dignity of each individual. This is why its newness was perceived by the dominant culture of the time as disturbing the political usefulness of religions, to the point of endangering the foundations of the state, “in which it did not want to be a religion among others, but the victory of intelligence over the world of religions” (ibid).

G. Bardy (cf. La conversion au christianisme durant les prémiers siècles–Conversion to Christianity in the Early Centuries) has highlighted the novelty of Christianity, which in the face of the religious formalism of late antiquity presented itself as the announcement of a presence, that of Jesus Christ, which reawakens in man the desire for the truth and, overcoming all fear, asserts itself as the experience of liberation from fate and sin, as the daily possibility of walking toward a kind Destiny that is already present and is a companion to man in the dramatic circumstances of life. The Christian God–Ratzinger observed–“entered history, He came to meet man, and so man can now meet Him. He can bind himself to God because God bound Himself to man. The two dimensions of religion, which had always been separate from each other, eternally dominant nature and the suffering and struggling of man’s need for salvation are bound to each other.… Here an amazing thing comes to light: the two apparently opposite basic principles of Christianity, the tie to metaphysics and the tie to history, are conditioned by and carry each other; together they constitute the apologia of Christianity as religio vera” (p. 54). Starting not from a philosophical reflection, but from the impressiveness of an historical Fact, spread by word of mouth throughout every known land, in the flow of the generations, the surprise emerged of something new that was destined to exercise a radical influence on the way of conceiving and living reason and freedom. “The primacy of the Logos and the primacy of love were revealed to be identical. The Logos no longer appeared as the mathematical reason at the base of all things, but as a love that was creator to the point of becoming com-passion [‘suffering with’] toward the creature” (Ratzinger, p. 60). Thus, the content of the Christian experience reveals that “love and reason coincide in that they are the true fundamental pillars of reality: true reason is love and love is true reason. In their unity they are the true foundation and the purpose of all of reality” (ibid).

The truth will set you free
The formal tolerance that hides the need not to change the arrangement of consolidated power schemes and an ultimate indifference, if not hostility, toward man’s free attempts to risk a full meaning for his life, an indifference to the claim that it was impossible to know the truth (Latet omne verum, “the truth is hidden,” was one of the basic tenets of neo-Platonism), was answered, and is answered, by Christianity–not with proclamations or efforts to persuade by means of more sophisticated doctrines and definitions (the eagerness common to the “gnoses” of every era), but with the clear announcement of a liberating Presence, that of Christ, which can be encountered in reality: “You will come to know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (Jn 8:32). What, theoretically, at the beginning of the Christian adventure appeared and still today appears unachievable (“There is a destination, but no path,” cries Kafka), historically, through the possibility of a real encounter, becomes obviously real. This is why the love of rationality intrinsic in Christianity and the need for reasonableness as verification of the truth of its proposal lie at the root of that sincerity which–Giussani observes–is “an intense participation in the truth of living to the full” (Corriere della Sera, February 3, 2002).

Great events like the meeting in Assisi, or more hidden ones like the daily presence in the places where the events of life are played out, testify to the possibility that Christian reasonableness is a proposal that aids a path of peace, justice, and forgiveness. The passion for truth becomes a tension of charity that, as Fr Giussani has written, does not want to “negate others’ attitudes, but to affirm sincerely what distinguishes us.”