The attempt,
carried to extremes, to shape human affairs to the total exclusion of God leads
us more and more to the brink of the abyss, toward the utter annihilation of
man.
We must
therefore reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment [to live by only those truths
that would be true even if God did not exist] and say: even the one who does
not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought
nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as
if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing
friends, and it is the advice that I should like to give to our friends today
who do not believe.
Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the
Crisis of Cultures
Reflection
– I am back from holidays, nicely rested up thank
you, and ready to roll for another year of blogging (among other things). I
thought I would start off this round with a return to some vintage ‘Ratzinger
blogging’. Those who have discovered my blog more recently may not know that it
used to be called ‘Life with a German Shepherd’ and was dedicated exclusively to
the writings of Pope Benedict. I did my licentiate thesis on his thought, and
have a wealth of references from him in my files.
I always recommend the book quoted here as
a good starting point for those who want to read something by Ratzinger. It is
short, topical, lively, provocative. Today’s quote is a good example.
Fashioning a social world without reference to God seems to many to be the path
of freedom and tolerance. Let everyone think what they wish, privately, about
religious matters, but let our public life together be officially agnostic, if
not atheistic. This has been advanced, and continues to be advanced, as the
most peaceful way to live together.
It is illusory, though. We cannot,
individually or communally, avoid ultimate questions. If there in fact is no
God, or if we at least live our lives as if there is no God, the ultimate
questions about truth and meaning and what is good do not simply wither away on
the vine. Human beings are made for meaning—we cannot stop looking for
meaningfulness in life. And if that meaning is not given, it must be fashioned.
If it is not something to discover, it is something to make. It cannot be, and
never is, something we just forget about. We’re not really built that way.
And so we have, in this seemingly tolerant
agnostic/atheist approach to social life, the transference of questions of
ultimate meaning, truth, and goodness to the sphere of political and
sociological transformation of the world. When there is no God in heaven to
which we can refer the matter of ultimate happiness and the consummation of
human striving for perfection, then we must labor to create a heavenly life (or
some poor facsimile of same) on earth.
And if this does not take place in the
sphere of political ideologies or moral crusades (some people, after all, are
genuinely apolitical by temperament), then it will take place in the naked
pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power, or some potent combination of these. But
all of this—ideological agendae and self-seeking gratification—are in fact
matters that occur in public that affect all of us. The religious impulse, the
sense of God and of ultimate reality that is outside of us, is forced into a
private expression that is more and more hemmed in, while all of the other
efforts to force meaning upon a meaningless reality rampage publicly and
increasingly intrude upon us all.
And so we have the seemingly mild and
irenic advice given by Cardinal Ratzinger. Act as if God exists, even if you
can’t see your way to really believe that. Act as if the questions of ultimate
meaning and happiness are in fact given and not made, as if there is a hope for
human fulfillment that lies outside our own striving and violent effort. Act as
if we do not have to press so hard to make this life on earth a heaven for
ourselves, as if there might just be a heaven awaiting us.
It seems like a very mild and simple
prescription for what is truly a complex and very serious problem, but I believe
he is pointing the way to a real remedy for our post-modern ills. If God does
not exist, we are plunged into an abyss of meaninglessness which forces us into
a terrible strife and clash with one another and with a cold and lifeless
cosmos.
If we but grant the existence of God, leaving aside for the moment the
specific questions of His nature and revelation to us, we find ourselves on
solid ground, able to simply work with a measure of peace to make this world a
more kindly and lovely place, since at the bottom of the abyss lies not black
nothingness but a Living Presence that sustains and supports us and gives us
hope that all is not lost, that all, in fact, shall be well in the end, well
not by our own efforts and virtues but by a mercy that comes to us from the One
who made all that is. And that is what we have, if we decide to live ‘as if God
exists’.
