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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