Any intimations of authentic deprival are precious, because they are ways through which intimations of good, unthinkable in public terms, may appear to us.¹

George Parkin Grant

In his Truth and Tolerance, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger asks the following questions: “Are tolerance and belief in revealed truth opposites? Putting it another way: Are Christian faith and modernity compatible?” Ratzinger sets about in this work to understand what is at the heart of the meaning of culture, and the relationship of cultures to truth. The central question of religion, faith, and culture is the question of truth: what do religions, faiths, and cultures say about man, about God, about the nature and structure of reality as such? Central to the understanding of the great cultures of history is their interpretation, whether explicitly in creedal formulae or implicitly in institution and logic, of the world in light of their relationship to divinity. According to Ratzinger, this is to say that the question of the truth of God lies at the heart of what it means to be a culture in the first place.

In this light, what Christianity claims is that its interpretation of the world is the true one, and in this way the encounter between Christianity and “the world” is best understood as an encounter between more or less adequate expressions of the truth of God (here, he is joined by Christopher Dawson who defines culture in similar terms). For Ratzinger, “dialogue” is most authentically said to be a mutual pursuit of truth, to ask the question of who is speaking the truest word (logos). Coining a new term beyond “inculturation,” Ratzinger calls for “interculturality”: an approach that does not presuppose that faith can be transferred to a culture somehow already lacking a faith of its own, an approach that affirms as a matter of principle that no culture is neutral with respect to the questions asked and answer by religious faith. For him, there is no such thing as a faith free of culture, or a culture free of religion – apart, that is, from modern, technical civilization.

Since the question of truth is in fact at the heart of what it means to be a culture in the first place, the nuance of Ratzinger’s claim lies in recognizing that inter-cultural dialogue springs most essentially from the innermost identity of culture as culture: what it means to be a culture in the first place simply entails, as a matter of definition, an opening to the other in light of the pursuit of truth. This is of course said in view of the Church’s missionary task to preach the Gospel to the world: a task that is therefore never principally intrusive or alien to any culture qua culture. The story of Israel exemplifies this point paradigmatically for Ratzinger. Israel’s own identity was shaped by its struggles with and against other cultures: Hellenic, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, etc. These gentile cultures, like Israel, were at the same time religions, ways of life, each of which were somehow eventually incorporated into Israel (re: the promise made to Abraham, that his descendants would number greater than the stars – ad gentes). Ratzinger’s observation here includes the subtle point that these cultures would in fact be lost to history if they had not been taken up and transformed in Israel. To make the point more concisely, for Ratzinger culture as such is must fully itself in and as the one Body of Christ, the Church. The “culture” that is the Church gathers within itself the whole world. This is part and parcel of the “completion” of the Incarnation in the life of the Church in history.²

The first chapter of Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (“Belief in the World Today?”) casts the problematic sketched above in similar terms. Today, belief is seen to be old-fashioned and tradition is taken to be unreasonable compared to the preferred concept of “progress” (one might say that Ratzinger’s question with respect to progress is most basically: where to? It is a non-starter to laud progress qua progress). His sketch of the epistemological approach of modern man sees reality reduced to that which is measurable and graspable, wherein man is the essential measurer, grasper, and ultimate maker. The familiar reduction of verum est ens (“truth is being”) to verum quia factum (“truth is that which is made”) to verum quia faciendum (“truth is that which is makeable”) is presented as a “dethroning” of theology, which makes even the idea of something like faith a proposal that falls on deaf ears. This boils down to a perspective which, in seeing reality as that which can be made, is unable to identify what is innermost to the human being: response to a given logos, the revealed word of an other. What is essential to the Christian proposal about faith and belief is that faith is in someone, not something. The Creed, for example, says “I believe in One God, the Father the Almighty,” and not, say, “I believe in the Divinity.” Ratzinger takes up this point more fully later in the text (in the chapter “The God of Faith and the God of the Philosophers”): the Nicene Creed hangs on to both affirmations (of faith and philosophy) in naming God as “Almighty” and as “Father.” The biblical understanding of faith (drawing loosely from here his much later papal contribution to the encyclical Lumen Fidei) sees faith as a form of knowledge within its tie to love. That is, faith knows in receiving the love of God that reality is created and is fundamentally good, marking it through and through as both a gift and a task: hence both man’s dominion over creation, and the task of reason in seeking the truth, are first and foremost more matters of response to a primal generosity than they are of technical mastery of otherwise neutral, dumb objects. The great fault of modernity as an epistemological system, for Ratzinger, lies not simply in the exclusion of faith from public credibility, but in the narrowing and even crippling of reason itself by its reduction to technological dominion over the makeable.

John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio identifies similar impasses with respect to the relationship between faith and reason. Part of the responsibility lies with the “dramatic” separation of philosophy and theology begun in the Late Middle Ages, which in turn has allowed modern philosophy to grow into a cacophonous system which has utterly sundered the relationship between faith and reason. This is lamentable, according to John Paul II, for reasons intrinsic to philosophy and reason as such; the scope of reason, most essentially, is catholic: concerning the whole of reality qua true. What the Church has always affirmed is that both faith and reason are necessary for one to know – and to know qua loving – reality as created by God. A philosophy which denies the possibility and validity of faith as a form of knowledge undermines its own innermost desire to know reality. In view of the present cultural “crisis of meaning,” John Paul II calls for philosophy to recover precisely its “sapiential” dimension, which in its turn requires a re-affirmation of the authentic capacity for reason to grasp the truth – of the adaequatio rei et intellectus. Calling for the recovery of a philosophy of a “genuinely metaphysical range” is thus seen to be contained in the original task of the philosopher as a lover of wisdom.

The “modern” element at issue in the question of Christianity’s compatibility with modernity should therefore be seen in at least two ways. First, as it is a position of man relative to God and the world, the question of modernity remains a matter of what is innermost in man, namely, his ultimate desire for happiness and his capacity to know and love God. In this respect, Christianity is not only compatible with modernity, it offers what all men seek, no matter the era, and thus completes and even fulfills modernity. Secondly, as modernity represents a particular position of man relative to God and the world, and insofar as this position alienates man from his innate capacity to perceive the world as a gift to which he must respond in reason and in love, Christianity can perhaps be said to be incompatible with modernity according to Ratzinger and John Paul II. This second point bears spelling out. Insofar as modern, techno-scientific culture can be said to deny what is ultimately true about reality – that it is a free gift of God knowable by reason and faith – and insofar as it at the same time hampers the ability of man to thus know and love what is true about himself and the world, to the point of fostering a “culture of death” (cf. Evangelium Vitae), modernity therefore is not really a culture in the sense described by Ratzinger. The compatibility of Christianity is in fact a question of its claim to possess Christ, “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” coupled with its capacity and missionary task to spread precisely that Gospel in order to redeem the world. In this way, we can on the one hand affirm that Christianity poses no threat to modernity insofar as it is a human phenomenon – Christ came to save the world and all men, and so all the truths and positive achievements of modernity have their most proper place in the Church – while on the other hand deny without hesitation modernity’s capacity to propose the truth about the human being as an ideology grounded in the myth of endless technical progress. Or, as Hans Urs von Balthasar would have it, “Modern is something Christ never was, and God willing, never will be.”³

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