Rite and Reason: Patrick Pyefinds more comfort in Christ than in Marxism.
In January of 2004 a momentous meeting took place in Munich between the then Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) and German socialist philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The activities of Habermas would hardly be familiar to Irish people but in Germany he would be a household name, a socialist but also a polymath.
A victim of National Socialism, after the war he achieved his present position through two strategic moves. He borrowed copiously from communication theories as they developed during the 20th century. According to these theories - any communicative act had an implicit and inevitable telos: a mutual understanding among human beings. His second strategic move was that of imposing himself as a kind of authoritative referee on the politics of the West by measuring different contemporary events against his principles of political philosophy. Thus, he detached socialism from its past similarity with its national variety.
He branded popular conservatism and liberalism under the demon of neo-conservativism and sought a middle ground that few had the courage to challenge.
It was only in the third part of his talk in Munich (which took place prior to Cardinal Ratzinger's) that he came out with the surprising qualifications so symptomatic of the enrichment of his thinking. He noted the "renewed resonance" found in the suggestion that a contrite modernity can find help in getting itself out of its dead-end only through a religious orientation towards a transcendent point of reference.
Habermas only now articulates more clearly the concessions to religion that have perturbed certain intellectual circles over the last 150 years. "Sacred Scripture and (traditions) have persevered over millennia, in subtle formula and hermeneutics, institutions about error and redemption, about the salvational outcome of a life experienced as hopeless," he said.
Religious life helps keep intact, he continued, a number of sensitivities, nuances and modes of expression for situations that neither his own post-metaphysical approach nor an exclusively rationalist society of professional expertise can deal with in a fully satisfactory manner.
Unmistakably, Habermas condemns all those who keep trying to sentence the religious discourse in the public square to silence. "It is in the best interests of the constitutional state to act considerately towards all those cultural sources out of which civil solidarity and normal consciousness are nourished."
The human condition suggests to us a problematic of life only because we are contrary creatures who travel through different stages of a transition from birth to death. At each stage the beauty of the world appears to us utterly differently. No mechanism can mediate these perceptions because they are a part with the transitions of our soul and with each man, irremediable. Let us say, simply, life is a mysterious gift and we could not have invented it.
Cardinal Ratzinger, in his response to Jürgen Habermas, was sensitive to the latter's agnostic recommendations of transcendent insights and pressed his own insights further. He grazed lightly on Catholicism's insight into the mystery, but firmly on the present state of culture and its unhappy inability to cope with the simple business of living. The cardinal found more danger in the capacity for self-manipulation bequeathed to us in technology and science.
Such complex actions as cloning, arbitrary life production or destruction, and reification of the human body through its commercial uses (prostitution, euthanasia, organ trading, etc).
Habermas was a student of Marx, and Marx had nothing to say about sin or "self-manipulation". The will, according to Marx, acts on a level plane. He looked forward to a new man emerging as a product of the revolution, who would live in flatland. A world without the shadow of tragedy.
Pope Benedict seems to me more realistic. He continues to demonstrate that this new man is now a myth in the process of a very expensive disproof by history, and that man is the pilgrim of an eternal transfiguration towards the likeness of Christ. He seems to stand for a multidimensional stratification of life against the simplifying interpretations of the intellectuals. I find myself freer with Christ than the philosophers.
Patrick Pye RHA is a painter and member of Aosdána