All Inner Worldly Changes, Both for Good
and for Ill, Originate
in the Souls of the Dons, Both Academic and Clerical.

Ratzinger on Europe

By James V. Schall

Not many are wise. Those few that are we seldom hear, or understand if we do. The most difficult thing to see is the overall picture, the “where are we now in the order of things?” question. We sense that we are in a time of crisis. Whatever we think of Iraq or the United States, we suspect that the real crisis lies deeper. It lies in the soul and history of the strange behavior of Europe, the culture tinged by transcendence, the civilization from which we came. Few any longer can explain to us how we are still so related to a continent that, while being both, is more of an idea than a place. The universality found in philosophy, history, religion, and science all are rooted in distinct moments of this tradition.

Marcello Pera, the philosopher who is also head of the Italian Senate, recently (May 13, 2004) invited Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, to speak in the Sala Capitolare del Chiostro della Minerva, in the library of the Italian senate. In a profound and incisive discourse, entitled “Europe: Its Spiritual Foundations of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Ratzinger defined what he considered to be the causes of what more and more people see as the emptiness, the spiritual evaporation of the heart of Europe, most graphically seen in its rapid decline of population, its failure to understand its own uniqueness or its sources. The English text of the speech can be found here. Rarely do we see a lecture contain so much.

More and more, people are recognizing that Europe has a problem with its own soul. Recently, the Jesuit General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach was asked about the relation of a possible new European constitution and Christianity (September 25, 2003). He replied, “As the Holy Father has said, either Europe is Christian or there is no Europe. I feel that this statement is irrefutable. If the Christian meaning that has inspired European art, literature and philosophy were suppressed, we would be left with empty hands.” Clearly, Josef Ratzinger’s remarks at the Italian Senate confirm this estimate.

First, Ratzinger traces the history of the very idea of Europe, from its initial appearance in the distinction between the Greeks and the Persians. Europe has a south, an east, a west, and a north, all shifting in various ways. Also it is related to places like Siberia, to North and South America, to what it tried to do throughout the world in its colonial era from the fifteenth century on. What is Africa and Asia, large chunks of which were once European in character? Europe was mostly south and east and around the Mediterranean till the rise of Islam from the seventh century forward.

Though rarely admitted in public, Islam itself is today a good part of why Europe is worried about itself. Islam has not gone away, but remains utterly impervious to conversion. It finds itself more and more flourishing in bustling European cities, with more children than the Europeans are willing to produce. Europe appears old, rapidly declining. It does not think of the future. Till now, to its south and east, Europe only meant that which was not overrun by Islam. Where Islam conquered, Europe ceased.

“The rebirth of Islam,” Ratzinger observed, “is not only bound up with the new material riches of the Muslim lands, but also it is fed by the knowledge that Islam is in a position to offer a spiritual base that is valid for the life of a people. The traditional Christian basis that made Europe seems to be fleeing from the land of the old Europe, which, notwithstanding the perdurance of its political and spiritual power, has come to be seen ever more as condemned to decline and crumble.”

The East, the Byzantine tradition from the Roman empire and later Church, once stretched through Asia Minor through the Holy Land, and into Africa, then north through the Balkans into Russia. It has provided one model of the relation of religion and state in Europe, the sacred Empire. The west as far as Spain too went north, to Gaul, to Britain, eventually to Germany and Scandinavia. Ratzinger deftly sketches the history of the Carolingian Empire, the western view of the two swords, the rise of the national state, the colonial theories, the liberal mind and state.

Ratzinger’s basic thesis, as I understand it, is that the material success and accomplishments of Europe, now spread throughout the world through science and economics, and carefully imitated, have in fact left the Europeans themselves with little sense of their own meaning, something arising from within the European mind and not imposed on it from outside. They are vulnerable to and opposed by older Asian, even African religious traditions that have not disappeared but have managed to adapt the externals of technology and its way of life. In the light of the supposed failure of Christianity, these ways of life are becoming attractive to a spiritless people.

The sacred tradition that grounded the dignity of each individual in a divine creation is replaced by a state (Machiavelli’s ‘lo Stato’) that depends on only cold reason. “For the first time in absolute history there arose a purely secular state, which abandoned and placed to the side the divine guarantee and standard of the political element. The religious view is now considered as a mythological vision of the world. The modern mind declares that God himself is a private affair, who takes no part in the public life or the community function of forming values.”

Ratzinger is most adept at tracing this path of the state through the American and French revolutionary experiences, which he rightly distinguishes. He notes the totalitarian experience of the twentieth century and the unsettled nature of the secular democracies that have succeeded them. To Africa and Asia in particular, Europe now seems empty of any worthy values. This suddenly gives the other systems, once thought to be bypassed and scientifically untenable, an unexpected chance to reclaim lost ground. “Europe, in this very hour of its maximum success, seems to have become empty from within, paralyzed in a certain sense by a crisis of its circular system, a crisis that puts at risk its very life.”

Poignantly, Ratzinger adds, “There is a certain strange lack of will for the future in Europe. Its children, which are the future, come to be seen as a threat to the present . . . They do not come to be felt as a hope, but rather as a limit of the present.” These are blunt words. Europe blindly bought the population explosion, with the popularized means to control it, with the result that it is now in danger of itself disappearing.

Ratzinger invokes both Spengler’s Decline of the West and Toynbee’s view of the rise and fall of civilizations. He does not think that either of these theses were correct but they did make certain points. Ratzinger seeks a “more just” diagnosis of the situation, one philosophically better grounded

In the United States, Ratzinger finds not the separation of religion and public life as in the laicist European experience. There is here, however, a certain “cognizance of the mission, in confrontation with the rest of the world, of a religious type.” The Declaration of Independence is in a way, a secular version of “go forth and teach all nations.” There is something of this missionary drive in Islam also, I think, and from the same ultimate source though by radically different means.

Ratzinger concludes that there are three areas wherein Europe must rediscover, in intelligible form, its religious roots in order that it itself does not disappear, which he seems to think otherwise likely. The first point has to do with the “unconditional” status of human dignity and human rights before any civil jurisdiction. Ratzinger, like the pope, does not explicitly see any problem with using the words “value” and “rights,” which, however, often seem to lie at the origin of the problem they try to address. Both words in modern philosophy have precisely voluntarist roots. They mean ungrounded or variable content. Ratzinger does, however, implicitly reject the normal ungrounded modern meaning of these often confusing words.

These fundamental “rights” that must be recognized and acknowledged are not created by any legislature, nor are they conferred by the citizens—words that recall almost verbatim Cicero’s famous definition of natural law. They exist on their own proper grounds. They always require respect of the legislator. They are primarily given as “values” (standards) from a superior order.” Basically, they are rooted in God who alone can give these “rights” a firm basis. They cannot be manipulated by anyone. Only on such a basis can we see human greatness in the mystery of the Creator and the condition of the image of God which each (person) had conferred on him as man.”

Today, Ratzinger thinks, no one in general denies such general principles—life, liberty, and property—of human dignity. But in the concrete these positions are constantly violated and eroded by exceptions that negate the principle. Ratzinger mentions problems in medicine, cloning, using human fetus for parts, and genetic manipulation. These steps slowly consume human dignity. These destructive exceptions are always justified as a good end or purpose. They “justify what is not able to be justified.”

The charters of human rights need to be reformulated. This process may be the primary way to change the direction of society. Vague statements that allow exceptions that undermine the principle need to be rejected.

The second area is the juridical status of the family. “Europe would not be Europe any longer if this basic cell of its social edifice falls or comes to be essentially changed. “The Charter of the fundamental rights speaks of the right of marriage, but it does not mention any specific juridical and moral protection to be defined more precisely.” In dealing with homosexuality, Ratzinger rather amusingly notes that at the very time that legal gay marriages on the model of heterosexual marriages are said to be what the gay community wants, marriage itself is being rejected. The homosexuals seek something that men and women have given up.

Finally, Ratzinger comes to what he considers the West’s almost pathological hatred of itself. At a very time when everyone tries to be accommodating to any other values in other cultures, no matter how outlandish, Europe finds its own values “despicable.” “Europe, to survive, has need of new thought, certainly critical and humble, that can accept itself if it wishes to survive.” What does it mean to love and be open to everyone but oneself? This irony involves recognizing that we are worthy of something. This recognition requires a sense of the sacred. For this purpose, God cannot be a complete stranger to Europeans themselves. “Our duty is to nurture in ourselves the respect before that which is sacred and to show the face of God who appears there—the God who has compassion on the poor and the weak . . .”

Ratzinger is not overly optimistic. He has read his Augustine about what to expect among the nations. As a kind of ray of hope, he comes back to a thought of Toynbee. Europe can become a total stranger to itself, to what made it what is was. A reconsideration of the Charters of rights might be a first step. He looks to a “creative minority.” “Believing Christians should look upon themselves as a creative minority. They should help Europe to re-acquire the best of its heritage, if it is to be in service to the whole of humanity.”

All inner worldly cultural changes, both for good and for ill, originate in the souls of the dons, both academic and clerical. The alternatives to the three principles of absolute human dignity, the centrality of the family, and the worthiness of a culture built on reason and revelation are now in place. Ratzinger’s diagnosis goes to the heart of the matter. For Europe to be Europe its mind must recover the “what is” that founded it. The multi cultural alternatives are now on the blocks. The only souls to which they really appeal are to those who have emptied their own souls of any content. In brief, this is the message of Josef Ratzinger to the Italian senate.

Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books and hundreds of articles. A frequent contributor to HPR, Fr. Schall is also a regular columnist in Crisis magazine.