The morality
that the Church teaches is not some special burden for Christians; it is the
defense of man against the attempt to abolish him. If morality—as we have
seen—is not the enslavement of man but his liberation, then the Christian faith
is the advance post of human freedom…
Man needs morality to be himself.
But morality requires faith in creation and immortality, that is, it needs the
objectivity of obligation and the definitiveness of responsibility and
fulfillment.
Joseph
Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?
Reflection
– This is another nifty little book by the future
Pope Benedict that I like to recommend to people. The title may sound rather
euro-centric and hence of little interest to those of us in other parts of the
world, but ‘Europe’ in Ratzinger’s thought really stands as the place of the
modern/post-modern existential choice of man—to press forward to increasingly
radical secularism and the attendant ideologies, or to turn back to the
coherence of faith and its integration into life. That is what this book is
really about, and as such it is relevant to all of us.
The abolition of man is a phrase that
Ratzinger seems to have borrowed from C.S. Lewis, whose work of that name he
cites with approval in this book. It is of the essence of modernity that there
is no such thing as ‘man’, that human nature is not a thing, or that at best
humanity is defined by its infinite malleability, its radical plasticity.
This means that we can shape and fashion
humanity any way we please, whether it is the capitalist project of reducing
people to units of production, the communist project of reducing people to the
service of the collective, the genderist project of severing biology,
sexuality, and personal identity in the service of an extreme form of libertinism
(ironically enforced by the coercive power of the state), or the positivist
project of reducing man to a unit of technical and scientific study to be
shaped and managed for optimal efficiency—the trans-humanist dream of
transcendence through scientific progress.
Post-modernity, meanwhile, rejects all
these big ideologies and in fact all the large sweeping narratives that claim
to give coherence to reality in favor of a radical individualism, perhaps a
nihilistic rejection of meaning, but at any rate essentially an embrace of
incoherent relativism in service of personal freedom. The problem of
post-modernism is that it provides no defense nor any possibility of defense
against the large ideological agendae that still operate in the world at the
hands of those who wield them.
Whew—that’s a mouthful. But this is more
or less the world that secularism delivers us to, isn’t it? Once God and any
objectively real transcendent order of reality is either denied or ignored,
considered illusory or unknowable or irrelevant, then ‘man’ is delivered over
to the ideologues who hold power at the moment.
And this is quite important. We can think
easily that it is a great liberation to get rid of God and the objective moral
law. Sartre and Nietzsche assure us it is so. But in fact, as Bob Dylan put it,
‘You gotta serve somebody’, and the
illusory freedom from God in fact delivers us to the unbearable slavery to the
spirit of the age. And, more to the point, it delivers the mass of humanity to
being objects of use and manipulation for the small elite who wield the levers
of power at this moment.
And that is a fairly precise description
of where we are right now. This little citation from Ratzinger, then, shows us
the way out of this degrading slavery. There simply must be a transcendent,
objective order to the cosmos, not to confine and hamper us, but to preserve us
from being annihilated by the powerful and the rapacious. There must be a moral
order, simply to provide us with a solid ground on which to stand against
tyranny and exploitation. There can be no ab-use of a human being if there is
no proper ‘use’ of one.
Without a real moral order to the
universe, there really is no grounds for objecting to virtually anything anyone
might do to anyone else. We may dislike people having their heads chopped off
or large men belting their wives in elevators or policemen being trigger-happy
(to name a few random examples plucked from my Facebook newsfeed), but we can’t really object to those things on moral grounds,
unless there are moral grounds.
And there are no moral grounds without an
order to creation and the personal responsibility and ultimate signification to
human life that is our immortal nature. And these do not exist without God. As
Nietzsche said, and Dostoevsky echoed, without God all things are permissible. It
is faith, and particularly the Christian faith which on strictly theological
grounds privileges the infinite worth of the individual person over any other
consideration, that is the best defense and solid ground of human freedom and
dignity in the world.
