"Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics ..."
Cardinal Ratzinger (now the Pope)
Ran across a Foreign Policy article optimistic about a rebirth of Christianity (posted on Politics for Pros) in Europe and following up on an intriguing quote from a leftist atheist philosopher, I came upon some interesting passages which I thought worth posting somewhere:
A Secular Atheist Changes His Mind
Jürgen Habermas, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the University of Frankfurt in Germany, is considered one of the most prominent and influential philosophers of Europe, and is an avowed liberal secular atheist. Described as “a sovereign judge of what is true and what is not, of what is right and what is wrong . . . [the] supreme judge in matters of democratic, progressive, cosmopolitan, and secular constitutionalism,”[1] he is a towering academic figure who designed the system which became the foundation of social democracy in Germany and Europe. Born in 1929, he is a close contemporary of Pope Benedict XVI, grew up in Nazi Germany and was a Hitler Youth, but had an awakening during the Nuremburg trials in which he began to ask questions about “civil rights, democracy, and open discourse.”[2]
Habermas has spent most of his career arguing against the use of “religiously informed moral argument” in the public sphere,[3] but recently has radically revised his thinking. He has become convinced that the ideals of the secular state – of the basic goodness, dignity, and equality of human beings – are derived from Christianity, without which the ideals are being lost. This loss is evidenced in Western culture in violent 20th century wars, increasing moral decadence, and the rising threat of bioengineering. It is also evidenced in the growing clash between the secular West and more traditional, religious cultures, especially Islam, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, and the growing Christianity of the Global South.[4]
Habermas first went public with his ideas on Oct. 14, 2001, in an acceptance speech for the Peace Prize awarded him by the German book industry. In it, he identified the legal concept of “secularization” as originating in the “forced transference of Church properties to the authority of the secular State.” [5] It later influenced attitudes of the modern age as a whole by setting up an adversarial relationship between religion and secularity, based on the assumption that religion would die away in the face of what was thought to be superior secular rationality.
However, this has not happened, and Habermas, in studying the growing clash in culture between religion and secularity, has concluded that not only has religion not gone away, but it is growing. Furthermore, and most importantly, religious reasoning has much to offer culture that secular reasoning cannot, and so must be taken into consideration in public discourse.
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Secularism and Christianity: a Beginning of a Rapprochement?
Faith and reason are not opposed. On the contrary, faith give us access to the great Reason of the universe, the Mind of Christ, Wisdom Incarnate, in and through whom the universe came to be, without whom our own thinking is incomplete and inadequate.
Ran into some interesting stuff related to secularism and Christianity this morning. First, a very interesting article a few days ago in the Christian Science Monitor on the rise of interest in religion in Germany. CMS reports a change in the thinking of German philosopher and secular atheist Jürgen Habermas:
…the recent shift of Jürgen Habermas, one of Germany's foremost philosophers, as evidence of the potential for a rethinking of the public role of religion. A professed secularist who has spent nearly half a century arguing against religiously informed moral argument, he made some arresting statements in his 2004 essay, "A Time of Transition."
"Christianity, and nothing else," he wrote, "is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter."
Searching for more on Habermas, came up with this from Sandro Magister, on his website Cheisa, who in 2004 linked the thought of Habermas with that of then Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict. He quotes then Cardinal Ratzinger:
Secularism is no longer that element of neutrality which opens up areas of freedom for everyone. It is beginning to turn into an ideology that imposes itself through politics and leaves no public space for the Catholic and Christian vision, which thus risks becoming something purely private and essentially mutilated. We must defend religious freedom against the imposition of an ideology that presents itself as the only voice of rationality.
I was especially arrested by Ratzinger’s use of the term “public space,” considering my own argument that the privatization of religion opened up “space” for secularism to grow.
Magister reports on Habermas’ interest in, of all people, St. Thomas Aquinas:
Habermas says he is "enchanted by the seriousness and consistency" of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, the opposite of the feeble thinking that pervades current theology:
"Thomas represents a spiritual figure who was able to prove his authenticity with his own resources. That contemporary religious leadership lacks an equally solid terrain seems to me an incontrovertible truth. In the general leveling of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalized Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community's practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete."
. . . He contests modern "unbridled subjectivity," which is destined to "clash against what is really absolute; that is, against the unconditional right of every creature to be respected in its bodiliness and recognized in its otherness, as 'an image of God'."
Interesting. And confirms what Pope Benedict today is saying about the need to bring reason and faith back together again in public discourse, which I wrote about yesterday.
Habermas is an atheist, but he is a thinking man who after a half century of arguing against religion, now sees the reasonableness and even necessity of Christian thought as the basis of a healthy culture, because (to rephrase the last paragraph above) Christianity’s view of the human person as created in the image of God is the ultimate source of an absolute and incontrovertible system of human rights.
It’s not just Christian thought, of course, that we need. It’s the grace of God, Who fills and permeates us when we give ourselves over to Him through faith in Christ, changes us, enlightens our minds with not only His grace, but also His wisdom, with the truth about the nature of existence and reality.
Faith and reason are not opposed. On the contrary, faith give us access to the great Reason of the universe, the Mind of Christ, Wisdom Incarnate, in and through whom the universe came to be, without whom our own thinking is incomplete and inadequate; and who, when He lives and moves in us, is the ultimate and best orderer of society and wellspring of a just and richly beautiful culture.
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