Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 10
The Folly that is True Wisdom
Date: May 08, 2007
Time: 5:05am est

Today we conclude a series of ten reflections on Benedict XVI's Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. As we saw in the previous segment, in Part III, Benedict has raised a poignant question. In the face of present-day mysteries-from black holes, to the mind-body relation, to the problem of evil-would not the best answer be a kind of "devout" agnosticism that refrains from making any claims about God one way or the other, and simply resigns itself to allow human knowledge to progress to the point of discovering alternative answers anchored in empirical reality? Or as Benedict puts it, "to leave aside whatever lies beyond our grasp and be content with what we are permitted to know?"

The challenge posed to Christian faith today does not arise from atheism, but from an agnosticism anchored in Western pessimism about the possibilities and frontiers of human reason.

Benedict's response to this putative best answer is to point out a simple fact: the prospect of putting agnosticism into practice in day-to-day living is essentially unworkable. Writes Benedict:

As a pure theory, it may seem exceedingly illuminating. But in its essence, agnosticism is much more than a theory: what is at stake here is the praxis of one's life. When one attempts to "put it into practice" in one's real field of action, agnosticism slips out of one's hands like a soap bubble; it dissolves into thin air, because it is not possible to escape the very option it seeks to avoid. When faced with the question of God, man cannot permit himself to remain neutral. All he can say is Yes or No-without ever avoiding all the consequences that derive from this choice even in the smallest details of life. Accordingly, we see that the question of God is ineluctable; one is not permitted to abstain from casting one's vote (pp. 88-89).

That the question about God is unavoidable can only be true if there is something in our very human make-up that forces us to answer that question-yes or no. "The thirst for the infinite," affirms Benedict, is a fundamental aspect of human nature, indeed, "the very essence of human nature." And that's what makes agnosticism impossible in practice: we are creatures who ask about the infinite, about our origin, about our ultimate destiny, and the Cause of it all.

To live in agnosticism would mean to live suppressing the deepest expressions of our very human nature. Of course, this is precisely the threat leveled by secular western culture. It is in the face of this threat that Benedict has raised his alarm. The culture of secularization would erase western man's memory of his roots in the Creator; it would distract him from asking the big questions, and cut off any access to the reasons for believing.

The crisis of western culture today is that existential estrangement from our very human nature. More specifically, it is the secularization that would pull up, and do away with, our cultural moorings in religious and moral practice where once upon a time we found reasons:

• for seeing ourselves and others as subjects, not as objects, as persons, not as things;
• for mastering passion with virtue;
• for placing reasonable ethical limits on scientific investigation;
• for approaching human life at all its stages with veneration, never treating it as a means to an end, but always as an end in itself.

To the extent that the west has forgotten these roots, cutting itself off from moral and religious tradition, the result has been, and can only be, moral decadence:

Where nothing can be taken for granted, everything becomes possible, and nothing is impossible any longer. Now there is no value capable of sustaining man, and there are no inviolable norms. All that counts is man's ego and the present moment (pp. 93-94).

Benedict maintains hope, however, that western culture can awaken from its agnostic and cynical slumber. This can only happen when we freely embark again upon that road of understanding ourselves as made, not in our own image, but in God's image. Along that road, western man must be willing to take up Pascal's wager, to listen to those who claim to have "seen" and experienced the Living God, and to begin to live "as if God existed."

Aided by the grace of God who calls to this man from the very core of his being, advancing "gradually toward Him, and the buried memory of God, which is written on the heart of every man," western man can move from the folly of faith to that living encounter in which faith is transformed into knowledge and the greatest wisdom.

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures -9
THE FAITH THAT MAKES US HUMAN
Date: April 23, 2007
Time: 9:01am est

In Part III of Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, Pope Benedict turns to the question of Christian faith: " th e fundamental act of Christian existence."

Why, we might ask, does he choose to draw his reflections to a close by turning to the topic of faith? He actually gave us the answer toward the end of Part I.

Our greatest need in the present historical moment is people who make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live.. We need men who keep their eyes fixed on God, learning from him what true humanity means (p. 52, emphasis my own).

Faith, according to the Holy Father, is the way Christians strive to be fully human, the answer Christians give to the question: how can we fully realize our humanity?

Faced with western culture which, by and large, submerges humanity in a struggle for meaning in a world seemingly bereft of transcendence, Benedict says we must turn to faith in God. Faced with a Europe that suffers a tragic loss of memory of its Christian roots, thus threatening its own continued existence, the Pope urges a return to Christian faith. In the face of cultures which habitually regard human persons as objects, our best hope for recovering an enduring meaning for our lives, affirms Benedict, is a return to transcendence, to belief in God.

He begins by noting that we all share a commonsense notion of "faith" without which our lives would be rather difficult. When someone informs us that our expected time of arrival at Chicago O'Hare is 6:15pm, or tells us to take two tablets before going to bed, or that the fertility rate in France is on the rise-if the person who informs us has a reasonable degree of expertise (e.g., this person possess knowledge that we lack), we generally believe him or her. This kind of everyday "faith" is ubiquitous, and human life as we know it would be impossible without it.

This kind of everyday human "faith" is really more on the order of trust, and it relies on human knowledge: I may not know why or how X is the case, but someone does, so I therefore believe that X is the case.

It is precisely this kind of "faith" that raises a contemporary hurdle for the act of Christian faith:

This means that we are confronted once again, and in an even more urgent fashion, with the problem: Is this type of faith compatible with modern critical knowledge? Would it not be more appropriate for an adult of our times to refrain from expressing judgments on such matters and to wait for the day when science will have definitive answers even to this kind of question? (p. 84).

In other words, the Holy Father says the Christian is faced with a very peculiar contemporary challenge to his faith: is not a kind of devout agnosticism more reasonable? Rather than laying down claims about God and Revelation as answers to life's big questions, would it not be more reasonable respectfully to withhold any claims about such questions, allowing time and human knowledge to progress to the point of discovering alternative answers anchored in empirical reality? As Benedict puts it:

This, however, makes it all the more urgent to know whether the question of God does surpass the limits of human capabilities as such, so that agnosticism would in fact be the only correct attitude for man: the acknowledgment, appropriate and honest, "devout" in the profound meaning of that word, of that which eludes our grasp and our field of vision, a reverence vis-à-vis something that is inaccessible to us. Might not this be the new form of intellectual devotion: to leave aside whatever lies beyond our grasp and be content with what we are permitted to know? (p. 86).

The major contemporary challenge to Christian faith, then, is not atheism which lays down equally dogmatic and absolute claims about the non-existence of God-claims which cannot possibly be made with such quasi-scientific assurance. The challenge today, rather, is agnosticism anchored in Western pessimism about the possibilities and frontiers of human reason.

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 8
"God saw...And behold it was very good."
Date: March 04, 2007
Time: 4:57am est

Part II of Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is composed of three short chapters in which Benedict reflects on that dignity of the human person-from conception to death-the respect for which can be the only lasting foundation of an ordered civil society. "When man's conscience loses respect for life as something sacred," he writes, "he inevitably ends by losing his own identity." Indeed, the loss of respect for the sacredness of human life at any stage, and the willingness to attack that fundamental good for the sake of other goods undermines the very possibility of civil life together.

It follows that a state that claims the prerogative of defining who is and who is not the subject of rights, and that consequently accepts that some persons have the right to violate the fundamental right to life of other persons, contradicts the democratic ideal, although it continues to appeal to this claim. Such a state imperils the very basis on which it governs (p. 64).

This is why "the abortion issue" is not simply one issue among many. Respect for human life and the egregious violations of that respect which are commonplace in westerns societies constitute a grave threat to our own continued existence: we risk losing our own identity; we risk estrangement from our own humanity.

Benedict points out that such estrangement occurs when the value of human life is consistently run through the sieve of that primordial and sacrosanct of all values "the right of the individual to express himself freely." He further points out that this dynamic presupposes the misconception-theoretically or at least implicitly-that rights, including the right to life, are to be conferred on others, rather than being recognized as already inhering in them from the very first moment of their existence.

Such a misconception, furthermore, goes hand in hand with the historically tragic tendency to view other human beings-at least potentially or at some stages of their existence-as objects . Human beings, however, are distinct from all other animals in the world for the precise reason that we engage in-or posses the active potential to engage in-conscious, self-directive, free action. Only human animals are rational, free subjects by nature , which is to say, of all the species of animals on the earth, only human beings are persons .

In order to recognize other human beings as subjects and not objects-even at their very earliest stages of development-the Holy Father says we must "open our eyes":

This makes it clear that the look I freely direct to the other is decisive for my own dignity, too. I can acquiesce in reducing the other to a thing that I use and destroy; but by the same token, I must accept the consequences of the way I use my eyes here. These consequences fall back on my own head: "You will yourselves be measured by the measure with which you measure." The way I look at the other is decisive for my own humanity. I can treat him quite simply like a thing, forgetting my dignity and his, forgetting that both he and I are made in the image and likeness of God. The other is the custodian of my own dignity. This is why morality, which begins with this look directed to the other, is the custodian of the truth and the dignity of man: man needs morality in order to be himself and not lose his dignity in the world of things (pp. 69-70).

Recognizing the dignity of others is that much easier, the Holy Father points out, when I have been able to rejoice in the experience of how "Good looks at us in love."

"And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen 1:26, 3 I).

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CHRISTIANITY AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURES - 7
To live 'as if God existed'
Date: February 21, 2007
Time: 5:05am est

Benedict concludes Part I of Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures with a chapter entitled "The Permanent Significance of the Christian Faith."

He begins by reminding us that the foregoing historical and philosophical critique of Enlightenment thought is not tantamount to a rejection of the Enlightenment and Modernity. On the contrary, Benedict reiterates a theme deeply entwined in the message of the Second Vatican Council, namely, that Christianity, as "the religion of the Logos " and "a religion in keeping with reason," shares much common ground with the best that Enlightenment thought had to offer. Christianity and Enlightenment have shared the aspiration to be "open to all that is truly rational." But again, Benedict cogently insists that their apparent irreconcilability is reducible to a disagreement about the nature and scope of human reason:

[T]he problem is whether the world comes from an irrational source, so that reason would be nothing but a "by-product" (perhaps even a harmful by-product) of the development of the world, or whether the world comes from reason, so that its criterion and its goal is reason. The Christian faith opts for this second thesis and has good arguments to back it up, even from a purely philosophical point of view, despite the fact that so many people today consider the first thesis the only "rational" and modern view. A reason that has its origin in the irrational and is itself ultimately irrational does not offer a solution to our problems. Only that creative reason which has manifested itself as love in the crucified God can truly show us what life is (p. 49).

Benedict holds that Christians must continue to engage a secularized culture with a vision of reality in which rational activity, human consciousness, and the experience of freedom, far from being understood as the bi-product of mindless biochemical evolution, are in fact the product of "creative reason", gifts of the Logos to humanity.

And on the basis of such a positive vision, and in the light of his foregoing commentary, Benedict ends Part I , with a challenge. He recalls that some Enlightenment thinkers responded to the religious and intellectual upheavals of their day by trying to shield the fundamental tenets of the moral life from similar scrutiny and upheaval by suggesting that "even if God did not exist" ( etsi Deus non daretur ) those moral tenets would still be true -for all peoples, in all times and places. In the wake of the tragedies spawned by modern and contemporary God-less secularism, the Holy Father ends by suggesting that today secularists would be wise to do just the opposite, "to live as if God existed" (veluti si Deus daretur).

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. This does not impose limitations on anyone's freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need (pp. 51-52).

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CHRISTIANITY AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURES - 6 RELATIVIST DOGMATISM
Date: February 04, 2007
Time: 10:17pm est

Benedict ends chapter 1 with two questions: whether the philosophies of the Enlightenment and the culture they have spawned really constitute the best that human has to offer, and whether this Enlightenment culture is truly complete in itself with no need for roots or touchstones of meaning beyond itself.

In chapter 2, he answers both of these questions with an emphatic, 'no'. First we should note that by philosophies of the Enlightenment, the Pope would appear to have in mind 18 th century thinkers: David Hume, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and certainly Immanuel Kant among others. Benedict is quick to note that from the collective thought of these and like-minded thinkers, the world has much to be grateful for: the insistence on universal human rights, and the conviction that religion is to be embraced and practice in freedom, to name only two.

But there are two other striking and paradoxical characteristics of the thought of this period, and it is on these that Benedict will focus: on the one hand, the exultation at the prospects of human reason with regard to our human situation, and simultaneously, a curtailing, limiting, and impoverishing of that very understanding of reason's possibilities.

Furthermore, Benedict observes that "these philosophies are characterized by their positivist-and therefore anti-metaphysical-character, so that ultimately there is no place for God in them." And he keenly observes that the Enlightenment's curtailing of reason's possibilities corresponds perfectly to the culture which is both cause and consequence of such thought, a culture of the 'new science', a procedural, mechanical, newly technological culture. Such a conception of reason is a kind of made-to-order notion, a snug fit for an era dominated by a largely pragmatic, legal, mathematized, and-in the modern sense-scientific approach to human problems.

Benedict calls this phenomenon the "self-limitation of reason," and he cogently notes that, left to itself, the further our understanding of reason becomes impoverished, and the more we conceptually distance ourselves from the Creator, the greater the danger that we will end by destroying ourselves. This dark truth was not lost on the authors of the 2 nd Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes : "Without a creator, there can be no creature.once God is forgotten, the creature is lost sight of as well" (GS, 36). Hence, as Benedict notes, it should not be surprising that the very Enlightenment thought that once hailed the quasi-discovery of human liberty, has ended in our day by announcing its non-existence, by informing us-in so many strains of deterministic philosophy-that freedom is an illusion.

And this brings us to the answer to the second question: Enlightenment philosophy suffers a severe degree of self-limitation, cut off by choice, and at its very roots from what Benedict calls "the basic memory of mankind" - the shared patrimony of the profound experience of ourselves as human beings.

This "mutilation" of reason, affirms Benedict, should not only present itself as entirely unacceptable, but, indeed, "irrational." And it is in this light that he critiques the European Union's refusal to acknowledge the Christian roots of Europe. He unmasks that refusal and reveals the deep, underlying motivations of such politicking. Far from meaning to respect the sensitivities of non-Christian peoples in Europe, the move was actually a bold imposition of this impoverished worldview on the member countries. Far from avoiding antagonism with non-Christian religions, the exclusion of the reference to Christianity is a throwing down of the gauntlet that threatens a much more real and perilous antagonism:

The real antagonism typical of today's world is not that between diverse religious cultures; rather, it is the antagonism between the radical emancipation of man from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures, on the other (p. 44).

It is also a most remarkable and brazen instance of a genuinely dogmatic imposition of the relativism that has been the sorry fruit of this culture:

In this way, relativism, which is the starting point of this whole process, becomes a dogmatism that believes itself in possession of the definitive knowledge of human reason, with the right to consider everything else merely as a stage in human history that is basically obsolete and deserves to be relativized (p. 45).

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CHRISTIANITY AND THE CRISIS OF CULTURES -5 ENLIGHTENMENT CULTURE
Date: January 25, 2007
Time: 10:17pm est

In Benedict's view, contemporary Europe is the product of a cultural ethos that has predominated since the Enlightenment and has, by and large, permeated all facets and dimensions of European life, both private and public. This he refers to as "Enlightenment Culture."

According to the thesis of the laicist Enlightenment culture of Europe, it is only the norms and substance of this same Enlightenment culture that can determine the identity of Europe, and it follows that every state that accepts these criteria can belong to Europe. Ultimately, it is unimportant to know on which framework of roots this culture of liberty and democracy is planted. And we are told that this is precisely why the roots cannot be included in the definition of the bases of Europe-for these are dead roots that do not form part of today's identity. Accordingly, this new identity, which is defined exclusively by the Enlightenment culture, entails that God has nothing whatever to do with public life and with the foundations of the state (p. 37).

The Pope makes this observation in reference to two phenomena: the exclusion of any reference to the Christian roots of Europe or God from the European constitution, and the consideration of new member states in the European Union (he specifically refers to the case of Turkey). The Enlightenment culture can be found, of course, right here at home in the U.S., or in Central America, or in almost any place in the world. It is simply the worldview which holds that certain achievements of the Enlightenment period (the solidification of the notion of human rights, the freedoms of citizens, democratic rule) have superseded the need to anchor our understanding of ourselves in any transcendent reality.

This makes everything logical and even, in a certain sense, plausible. For what higher good could we wish than that democracy and human rights be respected everywhere? But at this point, we must ask whether this Enlightenment laicist culture is truly the culture-finally revealed in all its universality-of a reason that is common to all men, a culture that must be accepted everywhere, even if it is rooted in a soil that is historically and culturally diverse. And one must ask whether this culture is truly complete in itself, so that it does not need any roots outside itself (pp. 37-38).

Enlightenment culture prides itself on being based on the best that human reason can offer. But as we have seen, we have every reason to suspect that this is not the case, that indeed Enlightenment culture is the product of philosophies which have, paradoxically, restricted reason and curtailed all that reason has to offer.

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 4
Europe and the exclusion of God
Date: January 16, 2007
Time: 9:31pm est

Pseudo-moralism, affirms the Pope, is actually an obstacle to genuine moral renewal. He then observes that in the same way, a reduction of Christianity to a vague and watered down conception of "Gospel values" is equally deleterious to the full thriving of Christianity. And from this observation about Christianity he then transitions into a consideration of Europe and "the foundations on which Europe rests."

We can say that while Europe once was the Christian continent, it was also the birthplace of that new scientific rationality which has given us both enormous possibilities and enormous menaces. In the wake of this form of rationality, Europe has developed a culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public awareness (pp. 29-30).

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 3
The pseudo-moralism of our age
Date: January 10, 2007
Time: 4:30am est

Benedict goes on to note that, notwithstanding the great contemporary disconnect between science and morality, our contemporary culture is not lacking a kind of pseudo-moralism.

It is indeed true that a new moralism exists today. Its key words are justice, peace, and the conservation of creation.But this moralism remains vague and almost inevitably remains confined to the sphere of party politics, where it is primarily a claim addressed to others, rather than a personal duty in our own daily life. For what does "justice" mean? Who defines it? What promotes peace? In the last decades, we have seen plenty of evidence on the streets and squares of our cities of how pacifism can be perverted into a destructive anarchism or, indeed, into terrorism. The political moralism of the 1970's, the roots of which are far from dead, was a moralism that succeeded in fascinating even young people who were full of ideals. But it was a moralism that took the wrong direction, since it lacked the serenity born of rationality. In the last analysis, it attached a higher value to the political utopia than to the dignity of the individual, and it showed itself capable of despising man in the name of great objectives (pp. 27-28).

Benedict is pointing at the commonplace appeal to 'common values', sometimes called 'core values', around which-it is supposed-all of us can rally. But as Benedict suggests, a supposed moral consensus on such values (protecting the environment, the quest for peace, human rights, and so on), as good as it may sound , conceals an underlying complete disparity of morals and worldviews.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has dedicated many years of thought to this phenomenon of ersatz moral consensus. He writes:

Where once the common language of morality, even in everyday speech, had embodied a set of precise distinctions which presupposed a complex moral scheme, there comes into being a kind of linguistic mélange which enables very little to be said. . . What these linguistic twists and turns testify to is the way in which the moral vocabulary had become detached from any precise central context of understanding and made available to different competing moral groups for their special and differing purposes. ¹

MacIntyre has keenly observed that attempts at arriving at this supposed 'moral consensus' are very often the best indicators of the very real, underlying, paralysis of contemporary moral discourse which, as Benedict points out, renders moral discourse "vague" at best, relegating it "almost inevitably.to the sphere of party politics."

If truth be told, in our current cultural and moral milieu, the illusion of a broad-based consensus on the validity of a set 'core values' evaporates as soon as we delve a bit below the surface to discover both a) the irreconcilable conceptions of the good being invoked by parties to the supposed consensus, and b) the rival versions of morality to which these conceptions of the good are associated.

After Virtue , 233.

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 2
Date: December 11, 2006
Time: 4:24pm est

What happens to our culture when the vast majority of people become accustomed to thinking about the human as a product, as one more potential artifact to be produced by human ingenuity? In Benedict's opinion, what happens is that we descend from understanding ourselves as being created in the image of God, to understanding ourselves as being made in our own image . The Holy Father continues:

All this demonstrates that the growth of our possibilities is not matched by an equal development of our moral energy. Moral strength has not grown in tandem with the development of science; on the contrary, it has diminished, because the technological mentality confines morality to the subjective sphere. Our need, however, is for a public morality, a morality capable of responding to the threats that impose such a burden on the existence of us all. The true gravest danger of the present moment is precisely this imbalance between technological possibilities and moral energy (p. 27, emphasis my own).

It is no secret that persons who espouse what Benedict calls a "technological mentality" will almost by default relegate moral discourse and the whole broad enterprise of ethical consideration to the realm of the utterly subjective. Recourse to that realm-so the idea goes-may have its usefulness (things like religious sentiment and moral consideration can give us a helpful psychological boost from time to time), but it is otherwise utterly unempirical, essentially irrational, and entirely skewed by one's tastes and preferences. It is certainly not the stuff of science, and morality-like religion-is best kept out of the public square. Such an attitude, the Pope says, is perilous. Why? Because scientific advancement and the progress of human knowledge untethered from sustained and rigorous moral reflection will eventually implode on itself and society. A culture's "moral energy" - the stamina to ask hard, probing questions, to insist on the reasonable limits of scientific endeavor, to uphold the inviolable dignity of human life from conception to natural end-must keep apace with the advancement of scientific endeavor. And it must do so, not to squash that progress, not to impede science or "stand in the way of cures", but precisely to assure that science successfully achieves its genuine goals-without destroying humanity in the process.

Such an attitude is not "medieval"; it is, rather, based on a cursory glance at history, and a probing understanding of the human person and human weakness-precisely the kind of considerations from which the contemporary scientific mindset must never abstract itself. Researchers are human beings capable of moral failure or moral greatness. Whenever we touch the human in the laboratory, there are necessarily far-reaching questions that must be answered on the moral plain. Scientists, researchers, those engaged in healthcare-all would do well to strive to be sound moralists as well. But as Benedict notes, the disconnect today between the two realms of science and morality is considerable-dangerously so.

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Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures - 1
Date: December 8, 2006
Time: 11:57am est

Herewith I hope to start of series of reflections on Pope Benedict XVI - Joseph Ratzinger's most recent book, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. The Pope's speech at the University of Regensburg last September was in many ways a continuation of the reflection he had engaged in shortly before being elected Pope and which was subsequently synthesized in this book. Crisis is, in many ways, a key for interpreting what the Pope has been saying about the West and Islam over the past three months, and it well merits some sustained consideration. So I hope to go at it little by little in subsequent postings.

Chapter 1 is entitled, "Reflections on Cultures that Are in Conflict Today." He opens with this reflection:

We are living in a period of great dangers and of great opportunities both for man and for the world, a period that also imposes a great responsibility on us all. During the past century, the possibilities available to man for dominion over matter have grown in a manner we may truly call unimaginable. But the fact that he has power over the world has also meant that man's destructive power has reached dimensions that can sometimes make us shudder.He has investigated the farthest recesses of his being, he has deciphered the components of the human being, and now he is able, so to speak, to "construct" man on his own. This means that man enters the world, no longer as a gift of the Creator, but as the product of our activity -and a product that can be selected according to requirements that we ourselves stipulate (pp. 25-26; emphasis my own)

We are all children of a mindset which has long taken for granted that man's domination of nature-everything from learning to rotate crops to putting a man on the moon-is a good thing.

And the vast majority of it has been good. This drive toward domination has been a dominant passion of the western mind in particular, especially from the 16 th century onward, with roots in the thought of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes. But as the Holy Father points out, the drive toward domination has brought singular perils for humanity. Consider, for example, the drive to harness the forces of atomic nuclei (making nuclear weapons possible), and in our day, the drive to harness the processes of cell regeneration (which is currently ushering in the age of embryo-destructive research). While it is certainly possible to employ this same knowledge and technical ability for the good of humanity, the Pope is reminding us that the expansiveness of the drive for dominion over nature also holds out the potential for catastrophe. More precisely, his point is that, in many sectors, the drive to dominate nature has now collapsed upon those who would be the dominators, upon human nature itself: "[Man] is now able, so to speak, to 'construct' man on his own." Indeed he is; the age of "designer babies" more than confirms and illustrates this point.

The Pope's concern, then, seems to be this: what happens to our culture when the vast majority of people get accustomed to thinking broadly about human life, human nature, and human existence as objects , as things ' make-able, ' in place of considering them as God- given realities, as personal subjects , as gifts ' receivable '?

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