LOGOS II BENEDICTINE RECONSTRUCTION

THE RELATIVELY ABSOLUTE GOD

Pope Benedict’s Regensberg speech came down hard on the side of Reason, whatever that might mean, and on the side of the mysterious Christened Grecian Logos at that; but in his 1996 Guadalajara address as Cardinal Ratzinger to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, he posited Faith as the only salvation of “man” from the relativism he identified with “the philosophical foundation of democracy” a “system of freedom” involving “dialogue,” a systematic “offshoot of the Western world… connected with the philosophical and religious intuitions of Asia especially.” Since Marxism, the only modern scientific approach to salvation, has miserably failed in its effort to stand the ideal upside down and bring heaven to earth instead of talk about it, was doomed from the beginning because Marxists tried to do God’s work hence became diabolical instead of divine, only nihilism or total relativism could be justified. And now, “Under the sign of the encounter of cultures, relativism appears to be the real philosophy of humanity…. Anyone who resists not only opposes democracy and tolerance – i.e., the basic imperatives of the human community – but also persists obstinately in giving priority to Western culture.”

In retrospect it appears that the cardinal did not think as highly of Western culture in Mexico as he did more recently as pope in Bavaria, at least not until it is specifically associated with Catholic culture and becomes, if only Christianity wins out, a world culture. But Western scholars insist that Western culture, whether secular or spiritual, is in fact unavoidably Christian because of Christianity’s profound historical effect on its development ever since Emperor Constantine saw a peculiar cross on the battlefield and made the Asian religion an imperial religion for good political effect, remaining himself a pagan. The cardinal confessed to the fact that “relativism is a typical offshoot of the Western world,” and as pope he admitted to the beneficial influence of Near Eastern Judaism, but he had not been so sanguine in Mexico about Christianity’s “surprising” connection with the religious institutions of the Indian subcontinent, a connection he believed gave relativism its “particular impulse at the present moment.” Hinduism is an umbrella for an incredible variety of religious cults with their respective forms of worship and multiple deities personal and impersonal, accidental and absolute, a pluralism that has no doubt contributed to its stability as the oldest world religion. Notwithstanding the intolerance made most blatant in the Crusades and Inquisitions, the Roman Church went out of its way to incorporate aspects of the various pagan cults it encountered besides the ancient cults it inherited from the Orient and the Occident, but its abstract monotheism ultimately tolerates only an absolute three-in-one god whose being seems to depend on the existence of his enemy, Satan, the only truly monotheistic creature, the fallen angel who loved God so much that he refused to love God’s image; namely, Man. Satan is indubitably responsible for the vain illusions of relativity that distract Man from the worship of the one and only god.

The total relativists, said Cardinal Ratzinger, believe dialogue would ensure that all the participants in the great relational conversation are equal: How could the truth be known if impeded by irrational prejudices? “The notion of dialogue,” he said, “which has maintained a position of significant importance in the Platonic and Christian tradition, changes meaning and becomes both the quintessence of the relativist creed and the conversion and the mission. In the relativist meaning, to (engage in) dialogue means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s own faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it that that which is attributed to the opinion of others.”

That is to say that Mr. Ratzinger’s cardinal complaint is that relativists consider their faiths on a par with his own self-righteous orthodox (‘right opinion’) faith. At least he recognizes the relative superiority of his own relative absolute, whereas the liberal relativists seem to be relatively unconscious of their own striving for superiority; hence they are unwittingly inconsistent in their arrogant self-ignorance. If only they recognized the relativity, which they equate with equality, of their own stance, then and only then would they be totalitarian relativists; but then nothing would be worth saying; that is, dictating as authors - authorities. However, one thing that religious relativists or pluralists insist upon, following the lead of American Presbyterian John Hick, whom the cardinal identified as “an eminent representative of the religious relativism” rooted in the “Asia’s negative theology,” is that the Absolute cannot miraculously interject itself into cause-and-effect determined history.

So much for Jesus Christ in the skeptical West, but such a divine incarnation is in fact common under the Hindu umbrella. The relatively determined world of cause and effect is an illusion, a mayic projection, according to the Hindu sages who recognize avatars. But Cardinal Ratzinger, for whom Jesus the Christ is the only real incarnation of God, implied that the divine incarnations of Hindus are phantasmagoric reflections of abstract absolutes. But never mind the complexity and the contradictions; his point is this: Religious relativists of the American sort believe Jesus of Nazareth is no more than a myth, and think that people who do believe there is some sort of valid binding truth in history’s span are not only ignorant but are regressive fundamentalists who threaten the Summum Bonum of neoteric man; namely, Liberty, and all she implies – freedom, tolerance, private property, et cetera..

Good point. In the United States of America, said to be the most religious nation under God in the First World, with liberty and justice for all, a “new paradigm” has come forth to save beleaguered Christianity from the fundamentalism that is driving enlightened people away from church-attended religion. For example, on October 28, 2006 The Miami Herald reported that Marcus Borg, professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University, claimed that mainstream churches have lost 40 percent of their members, in part because mainline religions are not doing enough to draw a line between fact and fiction in the Bible; therefore he is in town to deliver a three-day lecture at the Coral Gables Congregation Church, in hopes of moving the dwindling congregation beyond Bible literalism, which “has become a major intellectual stumbling block for millions of people.”  Asked to describe the so-called new paradigm of Christian faith, Professor Borg said: “The earlier way of seeing Christianity is literalistic, and the emerging version emphasizes a historical and metaphorical interpretation of the Bible. It affirms religious pluralism, and it involves a recovery of Christian spiritual practices such as contemplative prayer and meditation.” Biblical literalism demands that people believe, for example, in the factuality of the Creation myth with its talking snake and magic trees. He said 48 percent of Americans say they believe the world was created less than 10,000 years ago, not because they really believe it but because they are supposed to give it ritual lip service. But such dishonesty shames them, and they eventually leave the churches disgraced.

Professor Borg does not believe the seas actually parted for Moses or that Jesus was actually born of a virgin or rose from the dead. His religion is not factual; it is metaphorical: “The point of the story of the story of the empty tomb is that you won’t find Jesus in the land of the dead. He’s of the present, not of the past…. What I’m emphasizing is taking the Bible seriously, not literally.” As for political Christianity, the professor said Jesus’ criticism of the Christian right would be extreme. He agreed with the sentiment behind evangelist Jim Wallis’s question: “How did the religion of Jesus become pro-war, pro-rich and only pro-American? Jesus was crucified or executed by empire, and early Christianity was an anti-imperial movement.”

Professor Borg’s views obviously clash with Professor Ratzinger’s, and even the more so since the latter became Pope Benedict. The Pope of course would be glad to sit down and have a reasonable dialogue with the likes of Professor Borg instead of heading up a holy war against the infidels of America. We might want him to ask Professor Borg, “What good is Christianity if no person, not even Jesus the Christ, can be in fact actually saved from the determination of facts? Metaphorical salvation might do as a sop to absorb the guilt of sinners that they might use religion to justify whatever they wanted to do in the first place and even feel good doing it, but feel-good religion is not good enough for us, for we want the real McCoy, or rather, Jesus the Christ.” But the genuinely faithful are few and far between in this age of gilded individualism. As a matter of fact, most Americans do not know what to believe anymore when it comes to religion, unless there is money to be had or a war to be fought or a prisoner to be executed or an abortion to be prohibited in God’s name.

“Two years after The Passion of the Christ broke all box office records, religion remains conspicuously absent from most Hollywood films. Why? Even though more than 90 percent of Americans claim to believe in God, they disagree about the particulars, so no studio dares commit faith to film,” wrote film critic Peter Debruge in his October 27, 2006 review (Miami Herald) of Conversations With God, wherein a man is rendered homeless by a car accident, pathetically struggles to recover, is directly spoken to by God, writes a revelatory book and strikes it rich. But a substantial conversation is not revealed in the movie: the conversations remain a one-sided affair. The film seems to be nothing more than an infomercial for the books written by the real author, Neale Walsch, therefore the critic flunks the film adaptation.  Unfortunately, he did not briefly speculate on the causes of the popularity of Mel Gibson’s purportedly anti-Semitic, graphic rendition of the Crucifixion. He might have remarked that public executions have always been crowd pleasers, the more grisly the better. And what could be more fascinating than the torture and capital punishment of the most innocent lamb in the world? Or was he a traitor to his people and to empire? In any event, crime is the price of freedom, and punishment the price of crime, and people want plenty of it. Still, we wish that Artemis had substituted a scapegoat at the last moment and had whisked Jesus, the Margin between Heaven and Earth, off to some undisclosed planet where he would secure the sacred rites until it was time to return to restore sanity to Earth pursuant to a shocking and awesome apocalypse instituted by the Terrorist Almighty. No doubt the horrific drama would be a really big box office hit – doomsayers would be enraptured. Until then one might ask why the torture of alien prisoners and capital punishment is not televised where torture and capital punishment is most favored in the free world, in gun-toting United States of America, where murder, rape and mayhem are the usual entertainment fare – perhaps Americans prefer metaphors to experiencing the real thing in their own homes.  But let the answer to why we are what we are be secreted by the term of dogma called sin lest ambiguous freedom be lost to the Total.

To return to Cardinal Ratzinger, whose Guadalajara speech is no secret: Although he gives lip-service to the archetypical dialogue of Plato, who twisted Socratic skepticism into faith in absolutes; although he gives lip-service to the scholastic Christian dialogue that allowed for the argument of thesis and antithesis as long as the incarnated theme of its traditional episteme remained intact; - Cardinal Ratzinger, where his own religion is at stake, prefers his blessed monologue to doubting dia-logue, which requires two to tangle.  After all, there is only one god, not two or more, and rational argument must therefore be employed to the highest use of logic: to persuade oneself and others that the one-god is altogether good despite the appearance of evil in the world. But the relativists insist that the declared divinity of a particular person is an attempt to mitigate fear, and can only lead to fanaticism when crucified by doubt – the self-righteous anger may be cloaked in humility and the pilgrims may profess love and even learn to love the enemy of their wanted omnipotence, the external force who holds sway over their mundane existence.

Relativism, then, is a rationalization of tolerance, which is a good thing for politics, said Cardinal Ratzinger; but it does not otherwise apply, for there are in fact certain injustices, such as “killing an innocent person” and “denying an individual and groups the right to their dignity.” Of course the pontiff, whose very career depends on the reality of his absolutes, which are by definition independent of relative particulars, and in particular the reality of his own absolute, which he would have as the universal scheme or logos of existence, resorts to the customary refutation of so-called total relativism, that all symbolic actions and actual deeds are not equal. Some ideas and some works are absolutely good, and some are absolutely evil, as is similarly recognized by all civilized peoples; and if not, should be so recognized. It is reasonable to expect that the Ten Words – the Decalogue or Ten Commandments – would be accepted by good people everywhere, or that they would at least accept five or six of them, which would go to show us that, although there are relative differences between cultures, they all have something in common, which disproves the principle of absolute relativism.

Finding a total relativist is of course impossible, for each and every individual naturally would persist forever if it could, and to do so it would have to forcefully impose its own virtue on others that it not be in itself retrained. The relativists we hear so much about are in fact paper tigers created in selfish defense of one’s own absolute idols or ideals as expressed in words, which themselves are deemed sacred shields, to the end that nominalists are disposed to charge the philosophical logophiliacs with logolatry or the worship of words in themselves, which results in endless talk about talk and ceaseless logicism because there is nothing outside of the sacred text, nothing outside of the Logos. That is to say, absolute relativists are a fearful figment of the human imagination, In addition to the ground beneath our feet that it relies on, the imaginative power naturally wants some metaphysical ground or image to stand on to do its work; thus does faith precede works.

The presumably absolute relativism of Plato’s Protagoras, for example, cannot be reasonably attributed to the historical Protagoras’ extant sayings: Plato’s Protagoras is a fictitious character, the contrary mouthpiece for Plato’s dialectic, wherein he argued against his own relativism and for the hypostasis or realization of mental constructs in order to treat his ideals as real thingies - the archetypes of things real – hence the confusion of realism and idealism, of what is with what we want. Given the underlying crisis or hypocrisy of humankind, the crisis between the past and present reality and the ideal future desired, we are all relativists and absolutists at once, and in our logomachy or war of words, we forget that the mote we see in another’s eye is the reflection of the log in our own. For instance, when the absolutists charge the relativists with inconsistency because they would preserve for themselves the principle they would deny to others, the absolutists are blind to the fact that they are doing the same thing, attempting to raise the symbol of their relative position over the rest, that all might not only tolerate one another, but even love everyone unconditionally, or else a holocaustic sacrifice of infidels to Moloch.   

All of the vices including homicide, cannibalism, rape and theft have been deemed goods at one time or another by various cultures and all sorts of vicious conduct has been provoked and sanctioned by religious sentiment. From our elevated perspective we may thank Judeo-Christian sentiment for considerable moral progress in the mores of human cultures, for helping to tame the beast; but still, since religious institutions usually supported the political regimes for their own good, and so often sanctioned whatever the beast within wanted to do, anyway, in accordance with its instinctive logos or anarchic faith, we must give much of the credit for humane civilization to the gradual development of liberal political institutions. That is not to say that any political regimen or body politic or structure can save humankind from itself, nor that politicians are better than anyone else; quite to the contrary, thus do those fanatic fundamentalists who do not understand that political ideologies are theologies, believe a theocratic would be best, so that the best one-god can be equally imposed on all.

Now the killing of innocent persons and depriving individuals and groups of the right to dignity, which Cardinal Ratzinger mentioned before he was inducted as pope, is a vicious routine deemed a necessary evil to keep the peace; and mass murder and mayhem and destruction of the means of secular life is a common practice in times of war, where the deliberate murder of innocents is committed to end wars even today, despite all the rhetoric about collateral damage. Moreover, these crimes against humanity have been done in the name of gods and often the same god to wash away the blood-guilt – a fundamental raison d’ être of a number of ancient religions. The Holy Father, thank God, has objected to the pre-emptive war waged by President Bush in the name of the “Father higher than my father,” to make the world safe for his version of democracy, as well as to the aggression of Israel, its Middle East proxy. President Bush, incidentally, claimed that Jesus Christ is his “political hero.” 

We might infer from Cardinal Ratzinger’s relativistic pronouncement that killing guilty people is just, which would certainly deprive them of their social dignity. An absolute injunction would absolutely prohibit homicide, and it would have to be politically enforced: religion, before all, is the worship of absolute Power, while politics appertains to the relative distribution of that Power. Like the relativists of whom he complains, the cardinal did not see the political plank in his eye, which further substantiates the creed of cognitive relativism, that thinking in itself, being a human activity, is always ambiguous, and if we are what we think we are, the Absolute may never appear in our language, or for that matter, the history that we have told. Yet that is anathema for a man of the true Christian faith, for whom the Absolute appeared in concrete human form as Jesus the Christ, and in effect made history possible, as least according to the calculations of the Common Era calendar. Christians have faith because of this mysterious Punctuation that saved them from irrational fear, anxiety, superstition, and the degrading and violent practices that relieved their boredom. Our faith is not to be placed in the works, but in the Creator who gave us his only begotten son to murder, the perfect proof that it is better to suffer an evil than to do one, better to die on the cross at the hands of injustice than to unsheathe a sword, for it is not true that a life not worth killing for is not worth living; quite to the contrary: A life one must kill for is not worth living, especially when the humble and meek who imitate this example are bound to sit beside God when their lives on Earth are wrongfully terminated. But it appears that Pope Benedict does not cotton to that absolute perspective, hence he is himself a relativist, so to speak.

HISTORICAL CRITICISM

Throughout history dissident historians not to mention politicians have criticized dogmatic historical interpretations of past events. The victors tend to expunge the records of dissent and to sit on their historical laurels, thinking by the while that their own interpretation of history will endure as long as the stone on which it is chiseled. But the stone is bound to be overturned in time along with its history, leaving people who have stones in their heads to bang their heads against fallen walls and fight each other over the rubble. Somehow, perhaps by Providence, the Rock of Peter upon which the Roman Church was built has endured along with its sacred canon carefully culled from a variety of texts and somewhat edited over the centuries. Peter’s rock is a modified replica of David’s keystone; without it, the grand edifice would fall into the abyss – those who would pry up dogma to take a peek at chaos should beware, for they might make a fatal slip and work their own destruction.

A copied-out and illustrated book used to cost more than a large house, and for the most part poor folk, not to mention numerous nobles, were illiterates. The Bible’s contents, deemed to communicate the ultimate history of histories, were therefore related and interpreted by messengers for the Lord’s Messenger – the Logos, meaning of course the Son of God. The sacred text was deemed sacrosanct and heretical criticism was not appreciated and was severely punished lest there be no metaphysical Rock to stand upon in the City of God. Of course authoritative interpretations were permissible provided they were apologies for the faith deemed righteous by the administration; hence certain methods of interpretation became standardized. Thanks to the Muslims who had preserved ancient Greek texts and had put an alchemical and scientific spin on Aristotle, the Church was confronted with a Greek philosophy apparently hostile to the Catholic faith, but its intellectuals managed to incorporate its bare bones, the ancient trivium of grammar, logic and rhetoric  to Catholic ends – for instance, the writing of pious letters..

Once the Holy Bible was printed in the vulgar tongue, the authoritative ecclesiastical corporation was challenged not only in Latin by the likes of Erasmus but was roundly criticized in the vulgar tongue for its seeming misinterpretations of sacred history; yet the text itself, which had been deemed the Word by high spiritual authority, remained sacrosanct to most people. The scientific ray of the Enlightenment was focused more on the determination of factual events than on elusive abstruse meaning, but of course doubt was cast on miracles and other deviations from natural law as well as the substantiation of events with evidence – even the historical existence of Jesus was questioned.

Enlightenment thought and Roman Catholic thought were akin inasmuch as both rationalized a universal viewpoint or embraced a rational worldview, as if there were a certain logic or Logos, be it natural or divine law, governing space-time existence. Moreover, both envisioned a more or less linear progress to an ideal state. On the other hand, historicism raises history above theology and philosophy, disregards universalistic rationalizations, and seeks to understand past facts and events as they essentially were in their respective times and circumstances. Historicism is not to be confused with scientism; although its style was influenced by modern science, its historians averred that history differs from natural science inasmuch as human history is the creation of the human will, which is notoriously difficult to control short of murder; imprisoned people have the freedom of their private thoughts; given writing instruments, there is no better place to write a revolutionary tract on liberty than in prison.

History is purportedly then a human enterprise to which all the sciences are subservient: it cannot be quantified in such a way that the future may be predicted or controlled. The theory of probability is helpful in the short run where big numbers are involved; even so, every insurance company or organization for human security is bound to eventually fail, and it will do so in short order, now that the pace has picked up, unless it welcomes and responds fortunately to change. Historicism emphasized change, hence was antipathetic to the theories, structures, systems raised by the religious, philosophical, and natural sciences. Some of the leading lights of classical historicism were profoundly religious men who did in fact have a religious perspective on the world; but that spiritual viewpoint was, for the most part, particularistic in comparison to the Catholic; to wit: German Lutheran. For them, only faith is of avail, and then only a few shall be saved no matter what they might do or say. The concrete works of human hands and the symbolic works of human minds cannot save humankind from God’s doom.

Pope Benedict speaks well of the Enlightenment provided it is wed to the Christian religion, but a most rational star of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, not to mention Satan, is nonetheless the arch-enemy of Catholic conservatives. Professor Kant waxed enthusiastic on transcendentalism, but then said that nothing certain could be divined with transcendental logic. He even scoffed at the notion of transcendent beings – in America, the New England Transcendentalists mistakenly thought that Kant had testified for immediate or intuitive access to the Supreme Being. His famous “thing-in-itself”, the primordial unknown god we conceive as being behind or underneath or above it all, cannot exist, cannot be known – if history be definitely thought, the unthinkable cannot be. That is to say that the Absolute can never appear to humankind on this plane, hence the notion of its incarnation in a man is absurd, at least according to Professor Kant’s logic. Furthermore, any dogmatic teaching to the contrary, implied Professor Kant, would be “a crime against humanity because it is the original vocation of humanity to progress the enlightenment in self-impelled knowledge that has cast off the tutelage of external authority.”

On the other hand, Johann Georg Hamann, Kant’s good friend and philosophical antagonist, believed that Kant’s airy castles of reason were crimes against humanity, artificial schemes that serve to shield people from the reality of their God-given passions and convert them into sleepwalkers if not zombies. Hamann, so-called Magus of the North, was a founder of the romantic ‘Storm and Stress’ literary movement that stressed revolt and personal freedom. A strong defender of Lutheranism, he wanted to kindly wash away the sins of intellectual pride by giving members of the party of reason “curative baths” in his voluminous “tubs” or books – as far as he was concerned, all books are sacred and there is nothing beyond God’s great text simply because that textile comprises everything that can be said and done. One such bath was an essay entitled ‘Metacritique of Pure Reason,’ in effect a critique of Kant’s critique, in which he undermined Kant’s logicism by grounding knowledge in experience, the hypostasis or underlying unity of which is God, or so he believed. Analytical reason in effect is disintegrative. All the finite differences or dissimilarities between things as perceived and conceived are resolved in the One or Absolute; in another word, if you please: God. This notion was by no means novel in German culture: in fact, it came to Nicolas of Cusa, roughly three centuries prior to Hamann, as a “gift from above” in response to his mathematical and philosophical musings. Not only his contradictions, but all contradictions including the logical contradictions of the three-in-one-god conception, were conveniently resolved in infinity by virtue of a coincidence of so-called opposites. Nicolas, by the way, dropped his support for the radicals who advocated the superiority of a general council over the pope, and instead supported the supremacy of the pope over the religion to guarantee the unity of the Church.

We know finite objects by their similarities and dissimilarities; an apple and an orange are both fruit but differ from one another in kind of fruit; and we know both kinds of fruit as fruit because fruit, in turn, differs in respect to other kinds of things we know, such as vegetables. But when we ascend the ladder of universals to the Being of all beings, there is nothing to compare Being with except not-Being, which is not a feature of anything conceivable; quite to the contrary. That is to say that Being, because it has no known comparable, is inconceivable. God is inaccessible to human reason. Kant would agree with that much early on in his career, but not with his friend Hamann’s notion that God, the something behind the veil we call reality, is accessible through natural experience.

Thinking is another passion among several, at least as Hamann passionately thought of it, wherefore thought is as fallible as any human passion, including its thoughts about its perfection in systematic reasoning. Nature is God’s speech, and its true nature is divined not by systematic reasoning but by the genius of creative people who are either ignorant of the rules or who know the rules and just refuse, like Socrates, to play the self-contradictory game of hypocrisy, and admit instead to their own ignorance.

In Socratic Memorabilia, Hamann reiterated what everyone who knows anything about Socrates must know, that having proved his own ignorance, the great skeptic’s conversations were intended to defeat the arrogance of the reasoning power, and not to augment the false pride taken in its virtues or to borrow it for religious dogma. Hamann’s illustrious friend Kant and company, the so-called New Athenians, had deified Socrates in order to mock Jesus, using dialectical games to deflate his transcendence and make merely a practical man out of him. We note well that Pope Benedict hijacked Socrates, not to confess his own pontifical ignorance but to pontificate on the false notions of those who call Christian theosophy false:

“Socrates says,” Pope Benedict declared at Regensburg, “it would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being – but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and suffer a great loss.” But the fact that truth needs falsity on the one to be true on the other does not make falsity right. If someone thinks wrongly long enough, wrong might feel right, but that does not make it so.

At any rate, we may praise reason to high heaven but to what end? Are we that much wiser than the high priest we would replace? Kant dared his contemporaries to think, but for what reason? Are we to believe that we are enlightened and to strut about like peacocks for that very reason? Socrates was the wisest man on earth, and above all a man should know himself, but when Socrates inquired at length into the matter he found his wisdom in knowing his ignorance, whereas the rest thought they were wise by virtue of their faulty reasoning.

Since Kant is an arch-enemy of the Roman Church, Pope Benedict must appreciate Hamann’s attempt to baptize Kant’s overarching reason hence subject it to faith, but a Lutheran a Catholic cannot be, so battle-lines must be drawn and quibbled over – we find the pope’s logic rather fuzzy lately, and that might be a good thing if it were more inclusive or catholic. Hamann was moved to quote the famous battle-cry of the Enlightenment penned by Pierre Bayle, author of the most intriguing dictionary ever written: “Reason is the supreme tribunal, and one which judges in the last resort, and without appeal, everything that is placed before it.” To which Hamann responded: “What is this reason, with its universality, infallibility, exuberant certainty and obviousness? An ens rationis, a stuffed dummy which the howling superstition of our unreason endows with divine attributes.” Hallelujah! Now to be fair to Pierre Bayle, a faithful skeptic in his own right, we should point out that he said somewhere that reason is an acid that eats through everything including its base, but that he was nevertheless not afraid of the bottom falling out on him

At least Immanuel Kant did not throw out the howling baby with the bathwater: He reduced the merit of religion to moral practice, hopefully in accord with his version of the Golden Rule, the ethical imperative that each and every one of us should ask whether or not our reasons for acting should be universal laws. Doing unto others as you would have done to yourself will not do for all if you happen to be, for example, a masochist benevolently inclined to sadism. Good reasons are better based on good intentions, but the goodness of those intentions is socially defined in terms of their fruits. As for natural law and the science of nature: The law special to Man’s nature is his ability to reason; in order to effectively reason, he must freely criticize, as Kant presumed before critiquing reason and finding fault with transcendental logic – the virtue of logic is that it finds fault with ambiguous reasoning, and its fault is that it proves no affirmation to be true. An abstract argument might be air tight and as empty as a vacuum. There must be some universally perceptible evidence of the truth of a statement if it is to be scientific in the modern sense of science. A more or less scientific methodology of Bible criticism or exegesis was developed, and it was naturally applied to secular histories as well, an application that would pose a serious problem to anyone whose faith depended on the truth or immutability of the concrete facts related by Holy Scripture. Such Bible criticism fell under the rubric ‘historical criticism” or the “historical-critical method” of interpretation, a modus operandi for historiography that might confirm as well as deny the principles of faiths if not the naked facts. Popes and others who need faiths to stand on are not about to have their legs kicked out from under them if they can help it.

There are many ways to skin a cat. Rudolf Bultmann, a Neo-Kantian who believed the unavoidable external world is produced by the human mind and is a flow of sin, wanted to correct the vices of Protestant exegesis because he believed its historical critical method had disposed of the saving love of Jesus. There is no use trying to repudiate the critical method, he thought, for we are stuck in this sinful world, from which there is no absolute escape but in the existential impact of Scripture preached as the Logos – the Word of God. Revelation or the awakening comes in the form of divine lightning while we are rooted to the sinful world.

Mr. Bultmann’s most gifted student, Henrich Schlier, practiced a Gnostic sort of historical criticism, yet he eventually fell in love with the Roman Church, much to the dismay of his colleagues. His “impartial historical criticism’ of the New Testament led him to believe that “Christ’s free giving of himself through the Holy Spirit in the Church is in ‘principle’ captured and ‘documented’; that is to say, we find its origin and beginning there.” That is to say, the Church embodies the Jesus tradition. And what is that? “One can only understand it as the ‘self-exegesis of the Logos, Jesus Christ himself through the Holy Spirit through the faith of the Church. This is particularly obvious in the Fourth Gospel.” One should be careful of the subject he would criticize because he would have to learn it to do so, and might fall for it. An atheist might even become a man of the cloth, and that is why committed atheists refuse to argue about the subject they believe does not exist.    

 But it is the possibility of denial of faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ if not his actual existence by historical criticism that is the rub: Pope Benedict among other conservative or fundamentalist religious believe historical criticism should be confined to the secular or satanic realm, and bona fide religious history left to God and his messengers. An historian true to historical-critical methodology should set aside her religion and consider the source documents scientifically without subtext, as if it were a secular text in the contexts of the times of its writing, instead of approaching it with prejudicial absolutes; in other words, to be more objective, s/he had better approach the sacred text scientifically or atheistically; i.e., relativistically.

Cardinal Ratzinger, destined to be Pope Benedict anon, had divined something absolute and eternal from sacred scripture and had in fact apotheosized his own favorite particular. He turned on relativism in his Guadalajara address; but he paradoxically charged critical historians, who are supposedly relativists, with doing the same thing; that is, with being absolutists – at least their absolutism could be dismissed as trivial because it was merely secular. He admitted that the historical-critical method “is an excellent instrument for reading historical sources and interpreting texts. But it contains its own philosophy in general… (which) is hardly important….” He summarily dismissed the narrated facts of the past, because all it can tell us is what has passed and nothing more; and even those tales are tainted by the prejudices of the critical historian. After all, the absolute and eternal transcends time, and in any case we might presume that true Christians always look ahead unto Doomsday for the coming of their messiah.

The cardinal named an American Presbyterian, John Hick, as the “eminent representative of religious relativism,” adding that “there is a strange closeness between Europe’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Asia’s negative theology. For the latter, the divine can never enter unveiled into the world of appearances in which we live; it always manifests itself in relative reflections and remains beyond all worlds and notions in an absolute transcendency.” Although Kant thought that the notion of transcendent beings was laughable, Mr. Hick is careful to make the Kantian distinction, that our truths are conditioned by our capacities, hence we do not see the world as it is, so to speak, but as we see it through our lenses. The Absolute cannot enter into our history; Jesus of Nazareth’s posture as Son of God is a myth, and faith in his divinity alone will lead to fanaticism.

Other critical historians, such as the ex-priest Paul Knitter, try to effect a new synthesis of Asian and European religions, joining pluralist religion with liberation theology, and emphasizing practice over theory. But the cardinal will have none of that, for “Putting praxis above knowledge in this way is also a clearly a Marxist inheritance…,” declared Cardinal Ratzinger. Where do I find a just action if I cannot know what is just in an absolute way?” Marxist theology is no theology at all because it renounces metaphysics – that apparently led to its miserable demise, just as any godless political system is bound to fail. In any event, as conservative Christians have pointed out time and time again, God’s revelatory cataclysms or dooms (judgments) have taught us that systems do not save men and women; only God can do that, and then the men and women might save the system.

ALL SYSTEMS ARE DOOMED BY GOD

The point that all systems are doomed is especially well made just after a catastrophe. Herbert Butterfield made it after the world wars, in Christianity and History (1949). Humankind’s relative prosperity and rationalism did not save it from disaster, and war got way out of hand, as if to teach a lesson to all who waged it, that they were confronting the iron rod of the Lord’s wrath.

“It is a dangerous illusion to imagine that if Germany can be proved to have sinned, those who fighting against her may be assumed to have been righteous,” penned Mr. Butterfield. When the historian sees old orders crumbing, he “can hardly avoid the conclusion that moral defects have something to do with the catastrophes that take place. The processes of time have a curious way of bringing out the faultiness concealed in a system which at first view seems to be satisfactory.” Moreover, “Sometimes… it is only by a cataclysm that man can make his escape from the net which he has taken so much trouble to weave around himself; and that is why the judgments of God so often appear to be remedial to the future historian….” Every systematic order relied upon for salvation is doomed: “If we were to establish an ideal state of unconditioned freedom in society, we all know that within a shorter or longer period the result would be an alarming scene of license.” When Amos warned that the day of the Lord awaited upon by all was not a triumphant day but was rather doomsday, a terribly dark day of reckoning. “Where the greater prophets of the Old Testament extend their survey beyond their own country and pronounce a doom upon many nations for rearing themselves up like gods, the analogies with the modern deification of the state seem to me to be very remarkable indeed.”

As Jeremiah once said so well, “Thine own wickedness shall correct thee.” Mr. Butterfield the historian posits propounds a judgment embedded in the complex fabric of history, a doom that shall fall heaviest on people who think they are gods and who “put their trust in man-made systems and worship the work of their own hands, and who say that the strength of their own right arm gave them the victory.” Moreover, “One of the most dangerous things in life is to subordinate human personality to production, to the state, even to civilization itself, to anything but the glory of God.” If all that be true and forthcoming, prophetic critical historians might suppose that not shall be the United States of America and its allies doomed in short order. But the history of Israel teaches us that the Remnant shall survive to enjoy the Kingdom of God: “Even if the Remnant were only a handful it would inherit the fullness of the Promise.”

Jews expect the Messiah to come someday, and this notion secularized renders us confident of our progress towards an ever-receding, glorious political future. As we know, the Jewish messiah is a temporal king, and Jewish salvation, unlike that of the frustrated Jews who call themselves Christians, does not call for the perdition of everyone who does not convert to the tribal religion, for all tribes shall be ruled by Israel, and the redeemed shall inhabit this Earth, not some other world. Herbert Butterfield cannot help but to marvel at the great historical contribution of such a small nation. He does not mention the contributions of the Greek city-states, England, Portugal, Holland, or the Italian city-states, for their contributions to world history apparently pale in comparison to the boon provided by the ancient Hebrews who “by virtue of inner resources and unparalleled leadership, turned their tragedy, turned their very helplessness, into one of the half-dozen creative moments in world history.” Therefore, “one of clearest and most concrete facts of history is the fact that men of spiritual resources may not only redeem history, but turn it into a grand creative moment.” We might add history is redeemed to be redoomed, or judged to be judged, time and time again, despite the notion of linear progress, which advances infinitely until its end meets its origin in an infinitely vicious or virtuous cycle – its virtue or vice depends on pessimistic or optimistic sentiment. And sometimes when man is judged by the highest power, wrote Mr. Butterfield, supra-personal edifices associated with progress, such as state, culture, capitalism, and liberalism, are forthwith shattered. However, we note that Christian history apparently does not call for the shattering of the Christian historian’s Christian church, which handed over its sword to the dominant political authorities long ago, that the factions might fight in the same name of the multifaceted being whose determinations often appear to be at the fanciful leisure of fickle Lady Luck than at the will of seriously disposed Divine Providence..

“When men used to talk of making the world safe for democracy,” he continued, “one suspected that one heard half an echo of a satirical laugh…. After that, statesmen became still more presumptuous and promised by victory in war they would secure the world ‘freedom from fear.’” And may the multiform Judeo-Christian tribal deity forgive our sinful cynicism in respect to the Judeo-Christian edifice relied on today by the leader of the super-powerful leader of Western civilization, who in the name of his god embarked the nation on a crusade to make the world safe for his version of democracy, whether the world wants it or not, over the dead bodies of countless noncombatants whose hellish circumstances under their new democracy make the tortured life of imprisoned combatants a cakewalk. The neo-barbarian Christian leaders have effected the death of more than a million Iraqis, more than the despot they overthrew, but they are to be forgiven because they had good intentions and the casualties were collateral damage or a necessary evil. At least Pope Benedict, who is naturally well-versed in the Christian conception of just war, has condemned the pre-emptive or unjust war, although he has of late cast a jaundiced and wary eye on Islam, which Islamic terrorism defames in his eyes by begging Allah to fatally differ with the Great Satan, the West the pontiff lauds for its Christian inspiration.

GERMANIC HISTORICISM

The accursed relativists, pluralists, deconstructionists, multiculturalists and postmodernists object: It is not God who in his capacity as Terrorist Almighty dooms the differences and destroys the world to achieve a consensus of terror or unity in death, but rather the absolutists who have created Him to condone their relative injustice and authorize further brutality. But to do the relativists justice, are not they and their kith and kin absolutists in their own right? Cardinal Ratzinger implied, while impugning its relativism, that the strain of historicism called the “critical historical” method by Biblicists is really another form of frustrated absolutism: “It supposes that history is, in principle, uniform, therefore, man with all his differences and the world with all its distinctions are determined by the same laws and limitations so that I can eliminate whatever is impossible. What cannot happen to day in any way could not happen yesterday nor will it happen tomorrow.”

Now classical historicism holds that truth is relative to given moments in history; hence truth is in effect constantly changing; therefore, no one truth is absolute or more important than the truths corresponding to any other moments of history. History does not repeat itself: What’s done is done and won’t happen again. Relativistic reasoning on history gave priority to the notion of change and rejected the transcendent religious norms handed down by medieval Christianity as well as the rational structures devised and other idols embraced during the Enlightenment – during the Revolution, images of Reason and natural scenes replaced sacred images in churches; and if a priest mentioned God, guffaws could be heard all around.

Of course the notion that singular historical truth is absolute belies or makes a myth of the birth and death and resurrection of god incarnate, a miraculous punctuation that historicism would fain deny until scientifically proven – miracles assume divine intervention by an unknown being in contradiction to natural law; thus far none have been proven to the satisfaction of objective observers.

But that is not to say there is no principle of unity nor design, meaning, or purpose underlying history. An historian and other authors might believe in the existence of some form of providence, but be unable to explain it adequately from their perspective in the historical complex. The school of so-called New Historicism would examine the historical text or testimony in the light of the social circumstances of its time, which presumably determine the author’s opinions. Therefore the author’s personal authority is diminished while the context of his work is emphasized, instead of idolizing the authors whose subservient perspectives have been sanctioned as authoritative by the power elite – what then, of the Supreme Authority, the Author of the Universe?  

So-called classical historicism, we should note well, was an ethnocentric phenomenon that arose out of the struggle for the unification of a particularistic Germany. The Germanic peoples, particularly the ones in the north, had good cause to reject the principles of the French Enlightenment and Revolution and to get France off their backs. Historicism used careful historical research as a tool to that end, for much can be found in the archives that can be used to deconstruct  the abstractions of theological, political, and economic authority, and, if writing one’s own history, to assert one’s own unique cause and genius instead.

“I see the time coming,” predicted Professor Leopold von Ranke in his history of Germany in the Reformation (1839), “when we will base modern history no longer on secondhand reports, or even on contemporary historians, save where they have direct knowledge, and still less on works more distant from the period; but rather on eyewitness accounts and on the most genuine, the most immediate, sources.” Notwithstanding an apocalypse that destroys the world, a school of historicism three centuries hence would no doubt be bewildered when they look back on today’s records in hopes of ascertaining the way our period essentially was so that the particular genius or spirit of our age could be described. Future historians will no doubt approach our complexity with preconceived notions or concepts already worked out by certain varying schools of thought under development today and handed down by historians closer to the period under study. No doubt such traditions will be defied. But let us return to classical German historicism, which arose out of the need to reassess the political and cultural traditions of Germany and somehow restore the integrity of its adolescent unity after its humiliating defeat in the Great War.

Whereas prominent critical historians of England and France still believed in a common rational standard for institutions anywhere, the German historicists were more narrow-minded, insisting that universal standards did not apply to their unique national culture let alone any foreign culture; unless, of course, the culture is violently imposed wherever might can make right. They emphasized the cultivation of the individual in is place and time while playing down the notion of universal political liberty; as we know, this attitude led to a militantly organized, authoritarian state, and the conception of the folk-nation as a paranoid individual defending its parochial interests against the encroachments of Western European models of parliamentary republicanism and constitutional democracy. Germany, perhaps rightly convinced that the world was out to get it, assuming that it was in fact the particularly superior culture of the world, reacted to its “delusions” of persecution and grandeur with pre-emptive attacks, taking the war to the enemy instead of waiting for the enemy to arrive.

Therefore we have in recent history a most egregious example, if Pope Benedict and other staunch anti-relativists or absolutists are correct, of the hypocrisy or self-inconsistency of relativism, inasmuch as one set of relativists may believe their own relatives are better than the others, and roll over the world in an effort to make their particularity absolute. Still, we should keep in mind that historicism is a vague term, that it had its own historical development, wherefore not all historians who embraced German historicism have been alike, and that the ideal of cultural relativism today is tolerance if not acceptance – perhaps all cultures might happily consume the world providing that it is rationalized into a gigantic shopping center protected by the New World Order. The most intelligent cultural relativists do not ask us to take their word for anything or to impose the culture they comply with on anyone – we need cultures to survive - but to suspend value judgments and conduct rational inquiries into the nature of things. That suspension is in itself a value judgment that posits the very human freedom from worldly systems postulated by churches as they capitulate to those systems in order to endure, and put their own flock under the thumb of church politics. If we did not have the freedom to rise above all cultures to examine them, we would be prisoners of our respective cultures, and even less than that, we would zombies, unconscious of the nature of our own thoughts. In the final analysis, the only absolute the cultural relativist might uphold is humanity, and its supreme value its universal self-love. But this is anathema to those who put the love of God at the head of the commandments and place murder sixth on the list, so that hate-others-based love, such as that inspired by the Crusades and jihads, may persist. Wherefore unruly youth, confirmed ruffians, and noble knights are united in hate; eager to conduct legalized crimes against humanity in the name of God, for Man’s moral improvement, of course.   

Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), a friend of Johann Goerg Hamann and Immanuel Kant, is a most prominent founding father of classical historicism. He tried, like other German philosophers of his day, to reconcile the Enlightenment with Christianity. That effort is well represented today by our German pope, whom we believe would get along famously with Herder due to their common interests; not only in God and scholarship but in their opposition to the glorification of nations, military conflict, imperialistic exploitation and the like. But Herder was not a Holy Roman Empire type of authoritarian: he was a liberal thinker who had studied with Immanuel Kant, taught school, wrote provocative essays and profound tomes in a casual manner that they might be more accessible to readers, and among other things, served as General Superintendent of the Lutheran Clergy in Weimar. He was a cosmopolitan committed to republicanism and egalitarian democracy. He had an antiauthoritarian temperament and he was skeptical of traditional metaphysics, including metaphysical religious or theological systems. Herder approached historical criticism systematically, but he abhorred system-building because buildings inhibit inquiry outside their framework. Pope Benedict embraces a final solution to existential doubt, a solution systematically expressed under its god’s dome or doom in Catholic creed and dogma. Herder would undoubtedly object to the pontiff’s approach, not simply because Herder was to some extent an irrational Lutheran, but because of the absolute rigidity of conservative papal pronouncements. He believed that the search for truth entailed testing of opposing positions until the best one won out. Fundamentalists of course know in advance which historical article of faith must win, and can barely tolerate any opposition to it although other historical criticism will be entertained.

Thought depends on language for its expression. We have enough difficulty saying what we think as it is without using our language to stifle our thinking. Herder firmly opposed using language to imprison thought and torture its creative inclination. As for theology or thinking about deities, it appears to this author that too much fuss is made over words, and at the vulgar level, we have too much killing over quibbling about terms that refer, if there really is one deity, as so many people suppose, to the same ineffable One. However that might be, Herder believed that God has being, as a divine unifying force, and not in physical form – an existential extension that would result in the dualism of deity set apart from the world. And he claimed that God thinks and has purposes. Yet Herder championed a strictly secular approach to interpretation of scripture. As far as he was concerned, biblical texts, no matter how holy they are deemed to be, are human works, wherefore religious assumptions must not interfere with their interpretation; excepting the allegories set down in the New Testament, the historian should not interpret scripture allegorically. In the final analysis, human sentiments and not cold reasoning determines morality – good morals depend on good examples, and history has the task of bringing those examples forward. Concepts are based on perceptions; conversely, beliefs are influenced by and character partly determined by concepts. Despite his historical relativism, he did not insist that secular history is purposeless or meaningless; he insisted that history is governed by efficient causation and does have an overall purpose in the advance of “humanity” and “reason,” but the subject is so complex that he doubted whether it can be explained adequately enough to control and predict the future.

In any case, it appears to us that historicism’s truth, if there is any absolute truth to historicism, conditioned by historical circumstances as it is, is simply another relative truth, of little importance, really, in comparison to the absolute unmitigated truth embraced by the likes of the Holy Father in the Vatican, provided that such an Absolute, who is intimate with every hair on our heads, is really real, in which case its appearance in history would in cause and effect be the beginning and end and all of human history.

As Professor Ranke put it, “I would maintain that every epoch is immediate to God, and that its value in now way depends on what may have eventuated from it, but rather in its existence alone, its own unique particularity.” Professor Ranke was a pious Lutheran. He looked for the “Holy Hieroglyph” that is God’s Hand everywhere in history. His careful research into its unique particulars discovered in original source documents, led him to reformulate the absolute conception in his words: “Truth can be but One.” But our faithful pioneer of historicism, who was loyal to Prussia and rejected the French revolutionary ideals, did not say that historical moments or periods were of equal value simply because they were are equidistant to God; quite to the contrary, the Prussian state with its perfect Christian religion was morally superior to all others. God gives each state a special moral idea to attend to. The power of a state is derived from its spiritual nature, a power that naturally would be extended by military means so that culture and state might rest on the strongest possible foundations. The son of God might have humiliated his body for our sake, and then cried out in agony, “My Power, my Power, why hast thou forsaken me?” But an eternal god does not forfeit his godhood nor forsake his power for he is god the power. At the end of the history of development is a totalitarian state of voluntary obedience, for our freedom, as Saint Augustine recognized at one point, is the freedom to sin. If only we knew the Logos, how could we disobey? But Professor Ranke, although his relativism is tainted by absolutism, does not speak in that manner.

As a matter of fact, states, as Professor Ranke conceived them, were integrated personalities, absolute persons presiding over the particular conflicts within their organisms. In other words, the ontic state is a concrete universal, a generalized individual and an anthropomorphic creature – a person is a human – a transcendental person who does not appear on Earth as a man, as did Jesus the Christ, but who nevertheless is a being – thus did the this historicist embrace the metaphysical notions that other historicists would repudiate in favor of their own ontologies; for example, “social wholes” became the beings in question instead of individuals. Furthermore, Professor Ranke believed that if the historian suspended judgment when he peered at history the way it really was, certain “spiritual substances” and “moral energies” besides the states that are “thoughts of god”, would manifest themselves. It appears that this founding father of the classical historicism that branched off into the sort of postmodern historical-critical method that Pope Benedict dislikes not only believed in Logos but also had his logii or lesser holy ghosts to boot. It is virtually impossible to take the god out of man no matter how fond he is of the daily news. Yet the Roman Catholic Church would not give him access to the Vatican archives to research his History of the Popes During the 16^th and 17^th Centuries. Why not? He was a Protestant. The Church denounced the book. Today Pope Benedict, as we can see from his Regensburg speech, at least shares his historical view that the Catholic Crusades united Christians and produced modern European civilization.

Adherents to historicism cannot help but to believe in a nature common to humanity; otherwise their research into past events would be futile because nothing within its span could be understood by the human historian. If God were not real, humankind or its Man would have to be the absolute god of his kind, whom he has and is and needs to fashion his perception of the similarities and differences he perceives in the world, that he might grasp and control his circumstances and therefore succeed with his survival project. David Hume, notoriously skeptical of the absolute spinning of his time, once said, “Mankind are so much the same in all times and places that history informs us of nothing new or strange.” Herder claimed Hume’s statement was false because his own historical studies of original sources had convinced him that the perceptions and conceptions of peoples within different historical periods and cultures differ radically, and radical differences even exist among individuals of different societies. Those differences make interpretation of historical sources extremely difficult, for the historian himself is bound to differ from the subjects of his study and hence to share the same inexplicable gulf that may never be adequately justified by an abstract reconciliation. No mere word can possibly suffice to absolve the radical differences. The particular conceptions of different people at differing times should not be confused with circular talk about talk or the usage of common nouns claiming to denote universals in common that do not exist in fact. In any case the circumstances and human events of a certain period of time may differ from other periods; indeed, they must differ to be perceived, for if everything in the historical world were of the same cloth and color, nothing at all would be distinguished.

ABSOLUTELY SPEAKING

Abstractly speaking, what historical periods have most in common, no matter how those periods are determined by the historian, are the differences apparently due to the human determinative process that dooms or judges them differently. Those abstract determinations, although they may be convenient to the purposes of a time, may not be the best ones nor may they apply to other circumstances; wherefore to set them in stone as concrete absolutes to be instantiated as the bedrock of every circumstance may be counterproductive and destructive. Fear of the unknown naturally causes us to cling to what we know; many hold back to secure the ground already claimed, a few take the fatal leap forward into unfamiliar territory with their eyes wide open, willing to amend or replace any hypotheses contrived beforehand to suit the purpose. Those few are more interested in becoming than in being. Their urgent endeavors have always fascinated those whom they leave behind to experience their adventures vicariously. The path cleared by the pioneers had broadened considerably over time; given the progress of Lady Liberty, who has increased the opportunities available to each and every liberal-minded person, sometimes even the majority of our contemporaries are heroically inclined, so to speak. They suspect they are nobodies, and they want to become somebody.

The late Paul Tillich could not think without absolutes – come to think of it, neither can anyone else. In his essay, my search for absolutes, he observed that “there is a fascination in this view of being as becoming for many of our contemporaries…. It is this fascination which contributes most to the victory of relativism of our times.” But if we look at what is going on, wrote Professor Tillich, we discover that our knowledge of becoming stands steady above the flow, and that “the power of knowing is an absolute.” Absolutes are indispensable, he thinks, because without a background to relativity, the mind could not maintain its “centeredness.” As for theories, such as the theory of relativity, an underlying structure makes them possible: We presuppose that there exists a logical mental process which enables a theory to do what we expect it to do. It is our very power of abstraction that “liberates us from bondage to the particular by giving us the power to create universals.” “Abstraction gives us the power of language, language gives us freedom of choice, and freedom of choice gives us the possibility of infinite technical production.”

Applying a single name to diverse things might be a violent act as far as some postmodernist thinkers are concerned, especially if those names are imposed by the West, but how could we otherwise be human beings and get things done? “It is interesting that in the symbolic story of the Paradise, as told in Genesis, language (the naming of animals and plants) is combined with technical activity (the cultivation of the garden). All this would be impossible without the absolutes we call essences…. Certainly there is a universal essence ‘man,’ usually referred to as ‘human nature,’ which makes it possible for us to have this word ‘man; and to recognize men as men.”

Of course Professor Tillich makes his claim without mentioning that the abstracting process makes us so giddy that we develop a dogmatic tendency to pin things down by converting a particular perspective into a universal entity and thus unjustly doom all those who differ. We would name presumably essential qualities of things or the existential quality of everything as if the respective qualities had some independent existence as beings or as Supreme Being, and thus delude ourselves into believing our actions are justified by the names. We might turn figments of our imagination into facts and run amok. If we are rash, we might become so intoxicated by the thinning air of abstraction as we approach the point where nothing is left of the world we have abstracted from that we do not realize that we have in the process doomed our world, and that the faith we fall back on is a reversion to primitive motivation – we can only hope that our instincts or drives or spirits or gods or whatever we might call them have their own beneficial logos.       

In any event, for the sake of dramatic effect it would seem that the “postmodern relativists,” who either wittingly or unwittingly celebrate the death of the last god who died, or who favor plural gods or no god or gods, and who in theory transcend good and evil although they vehemently protest against the commission of evils they are prejudiced against, are regressing the world to its beginning in chaos, laying the highest civilization, the Christian-inspired West, to ruin along with its cult of gilded individualism guided by the Invisible Hand. Everyone wants to work for herself or himself nowadays, not for the Man, and public works are roundly denounced because the tax detracts from the personal yield. For most people, those who work for others, work is a demoralizing grind, but they have to work and are convinced work shall save them, although they hate it. Faith in the absolute does not have a chance in the workaday world where everyone must make a living. The faith that all will be well in the end if everybody overcharges everybody now does not hold up for long. But give faith a chance, declared Cardinal Ratzinger at Guadalajara:

 “Why, in brief, does faith still have a chance? I would say the following: because it is in harmony with what man is…. In man, there is an inextinguishable yearning for the infinite. None of the answers attempted are sufficient. Only the God himself who became finite in order to open our finitely and lead us to the breadth of his infiniteness responds to the question for our being. For this reason, the Christian faith finds man today too.”

Continued in LOGOS III BENEDICTINE DECONSTRUCTION