Benedict in Germany on the origin of European civilization

George Weigel quotes Pope Benedict on the origin of modern Europe and human rights.


Pope Benedict:

The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person, and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks, and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: It is these criteria that we are called upon to defend at this moment in our history.

Weigel:

Why don’t we get this today, the pope then asked? He might have said, rightly, that we don’t get this because Christophobia is a major defect of 21st-century European high culture — an irrational refusal to concede to Christianity any nurturing role in building a Europe of civility, tolerance, respect for human rights, and the rule of law. Rather, Professor Ratzinger took a more academic tack and noted that the 21st-century West is still paralyzed by what we assume to be “the unbridgeable gulf . . . between ‘is’ and ‘ought’” as defined by Immanuel Kant and, above all, David Hume. This bifurcation leads to a thoroughly positivistic notion of reason and to a thoroughly positivistic notion of law: The only reason that counts is scientific reason, and the only law that matters is black-letter law. But this amounts to an enormous impoverishment of human understanding, and a very brittle, indeed dangerous, notion of law, Benedict suggested. Against this self-demeaning positivism, “the windows must be flung open again,” so that “reason . . . can rediscover its true greatness” and human beings can learn once again that “man is not self-creating freedom.”

Reason, morality and human rights can only be grounded in God, not in man. Our modern abandonment of our civilization's Christian roots is a foolish and ultimately deadly mistake. Positivism-- the assertion that only what can be demonstrated empirically is worth our assent-- is a bizarre self-refuting philosophical error. Positivism itself is not demonstrable nor  empirically verifiable. It is a metaphysical presupposition. A coherent positivist would deny the coherence of positivism.

The Pope's conclusion is that our responsibility before God and the inviolable dignity of every person is what we are called upon to defend at this moment in our history. He understands, as few do, the stakes in  this battle.