A book written by Pope Benedict XVI, before he became Pope, whose title translates from the Italian as Europe:its Spiritual Foundation of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, ought to be read by every European of whatever faith or no faith to better understand the roots of a crisis that lies in the very soul and cultural identity of Modern European Man.
“Mere praxis is not light” (Pope Benedict XVI)
In the last essay I touched briefly on the myth of secular salvation pervading European modern society. I’d like to continue the exploration of such an issue in the light of some reflections on this very subject by the present Pope Benedict XVI. These reflections have appeared recently in a book published shortly before his elevation to the Papacy. The book is in Italian and the translation of its title is: Europe: its Spiritual Foundations of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. It is basically the expansion of a lecture he gave on May 13, 2004 (as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger) in the library of the Italian Senate, i.e., the Sala Capitolare del Chiostro della Minerva. He was invited there by none other than Marcello Pera, who besides being the president of the Italian Senate is also a professional philosopher.
The general theme of the book seems to be this: modern Western Civilization finds itself in a crisis which many political and cultural pundits see as the crisis of the EU Constitution, or perhaps as the demise of the NATO alliance, or the war in Iraq, or global terrorism, or the entrance of Turkey in the EU. In reality the roots of the crisis lie much deeper, in the very soul and cultural identity of Europe, a continent that besides being a geographical place is also an idea which has developed over many centuries. The title alerts the attentive reader that we are dealing here not only with geography, history and spirituality but with cultural anthropology and philosophy of history. Those roots lie in the spiritual emptiness in the heart of Europe, in its low birth rates, in its failure to understand its own origins and uniqueness and to forge new paradigms for its future. It is as if this new polity called the European Union were being asked “Quo vadis Europa?” This European Pope has chosen the name of Saint Benedict who is the founder of Western monasticism and the patron saint of Europe. Few have commented on the historical significance of such a choice, and yet it seems to me crucial for understanding the mind-set of this Pope who, contrary to the conventional wisdom, will not be a mere clone of John-Paul II.
Were I to choose an appropriate metaphor to describe this spiritual emptiness of modern European man to which the Pope refers, I would have recourse to a horrific scene in a dark cave in the deepest part of Dante’s hell where Dante and Virgil encounter a man, the so called lantern man, holding his own head in his right hand and “doing light unto himself.” (Inferno XXVIII). Historically the man is the French poet Bertrand del Born, a man for whom action is everything and does not need truth as its underpinning; that believes that somehow one can act without asking first what is a just action, and what is justice not in a relativistic mode but in an absolute way. Appropriately Dante places him in the circle of the disseminators of discord. He epitomizes quite well, seven hundred years ahead of its time, modern man running full speed ahead in the grip of political ideologies of inevitable deterministic progress that promise to change the world without ever asking what is good and what is not good for the world or what is the ultimate Good. The result is not light but more dissensions and wars. By showing us a man who holds his own head to make light unto himself, Dante shows us the man who enlightened himself by a reason devoid of any sense of transcendence, thus turning upside down the biblical statement that “the truth shall make you free.” On the contrary, this man believes that it is frenetic action and praxis (one thinks of the futurism of Marinetti) that yields truth, or better partial relativistic particular truths. The sorry fruits of this positivistic-rationalistic mind-set which within modernity begins with Descartes and continues with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Hegelian and Kantian philosophy, all the way to modern times, are the lagers and the gulags of the 20th century underpinned by ideologies that promise a secular salvation.
The Pope points out that one such modern ideology is liberation theology which in Latin America ended up substituting the Christian idea of redemption. The relation of personal responsibility to sin and redemption gets shifted to the relation between social structures and redemption. The approach is now not that of conversion of the heart but that of social engineering: the redesigning of the social order in order to eliminate evil from the world. Redemption becomes a secular political process. This is the myth of secular redemption, of politics that misguidedly promises what it cannot deliver: spiritual renewal and redemption and elimination of evil and injustice from the world.
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“Mere praxis is not light” (Pope Benedict XVI)
The three post-war scenarios regarding EU-US relations
