This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

Ten Years Later

Lessons from the Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger
Debate
Eduardo Echeverria
Sacred Heart Major Seminary

The only strength with which Christianity can make its influence felt publicly is ultimately the
strength of its intrinsic truth. This strength, though, is as indispensable today as it ever was,
because man cannot survive without truth. That is the sure hope of Christianity; that is its
enormous challenge to each and every one of us.1

The focus of this lecture is the Habermas and Ratzinger debate in Munich, at the invitation of
the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, on January 19, 2004.2 The then Joseph Ratzinger, Cardinal-
theologian, Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and now Emeritus Pope
Benedict XVI, and Jürgen Habermas, who for decades has been a leading figure in German and
Continental philosophy as a whole addressed the question regarding the pre-political normative
presuppositions of the democratic constitutional state and whether or not it can justify those
presuppositions without appealing to religious or metaphysical foundations. Before zooming in
on that exchange of views itself in the second part of this lecture, I want to frame it in the larger
picture of their understanding of the relationship of faith and reason because that
understanding shapes their reflections on secularization and the role of religion and reason in a
post-secular society, meaning thereby a pluralist society. I contend that there is much to learn
from this exchange, and hence I shall conclude by drawing some lessons from it for a Christian
orientation in a pluralist democracy ten years after the debate.

Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age

My starting point for considering their understanding of the relationship of faith and reason is,
surprisingly, the First Vatican Council’s teaching regarding a “duplex ordo cognitionis.” The
latter refers to a “twofold order of knowledge [that is] distinct both in principle and also in
object,” according to the dogmatic constitution of that 1870 Council on the Catholic faith, Dei

1
Joseph Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy [1984],” in Church, Ecumenism, & Politics,
Translated by Michael J. Miller, et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008 [1987]), 193-208, and at 208.
2
Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization, On Reason and Religion, Translated by
Brian McNeil, C.R.V., Edited with a Foreword by Florian Schuller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). In my
opinion, a better translation of these addresses is found in Political Theologies, Public Religions in a Post-Secular
World, Edited by Hent De Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), Jürgen
Habermas, “On the relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” and Joseph Ratzinger, “Prepolitical
Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 251-260, and 261-268, respectively. Both translated by Anh Nguyen. I will
be citing from the Nguyen translation.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

filius.3 “In its principle, because in the one we know by natural reason, in the other by divine
faith; in its object, because apart from what natural reason can attain, there are proposed to
our belief mysteries that are hidden in God that can never be known unless they are revealed
by God.”4 Corresponding to the epistemological distinction between faith and reason are the
lines of demarcation between the disciplines of theology and philosophy. Theology, which
presupposes the truth of the Christian faith, is the disciplined exploration of the content of
revelation; it is faith seeking understanding of that truth-content received from revelation, with
the aim of understanding the truths of revelation in their inner coherence, intelligibility, and
justification. Philosophical knowledge, in contrast, remains within the bounds of unaided
reason, that is, independent of the truths of revelation, aiming at the kind of knowledge that
reason as such can gain by itself. In principle, both Habermas and Ratzinger share this “duplex
ordo cognitionis” as a starting-point in their reflections. Still, their interpretation of the “duplex
ordo” sharply differs, and that is clear from the answer they give to the following question
raised by Ratzinger: “Can philosophy and theology [and hence faith and reason] still enter into
any kind of mutual relationship at the level of methodology.”5
Ratzinger responds to this question by arguing that the “duplex ordo” “could be
expressed using the formula that the Council of Chalcedon adopted for Christology: philosophy
and theology must be interrelated ‘without confusion and without ‘separation’. ‘Without
confusion’ means that each of the two must preserve its own identity. Philosophy must truly
remain a quest conducted by reason with freedom and responsibility; it must recognize its
limits and likewise its greatness and immensity.” Still, the interrelationship is such that there
must be a balance of “without confusion” and “without separation.” “For philosophy and, albeit
in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious
traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge,
and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.”6
Furthermore, adds Ratzinger, “The truth of revelation does not superimpose the truth achieved
by reason; rather, it purifies and exalts reason [in its own order], thereby enabling it to broaden
its horizons to enter into a field of research as unfathomably expansive as mystery itself.”7 In
short, for Ratzinger—and I would say for Aquinas, down to Leo XIII and then to Vatican I and
3
Heinrich Niebecker calls this twofold order of knowledge ‘das erste grosze Wesensgesetz des katholischen
Offenbrarungsbegriffs’ [the first great essential law of the Catholic notion of revelation] (Wesen und Wirklichkeit
der übernatürlichen Offenbarung—Eine Besinnung auf die Grundlagen der Katholischen Theologie [Herder:
Freiburg, 1940], 198).
4
Heinrich Denzinger, Compendium of Creeds, Definitions, and Declarations on Matter of Faith and Morals, edited
rd
by Peter Hünermann, 43 Edition, Translated and edited by Robert Fastiggi and Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2012), §3015.
5
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” in The Nature and Mission of Theology, Translated
by Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 13-29, and at 17.
6
Pope Benedict XVI, Regensburg Address, “Faith, Reason, and the University,” A Reason Open to God, On
Universities, Education & Culture, With a Foreword by John Garvey, Edited by J. Steven Brown (Washington, D.C.,
Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 7-19, and at 18. Pope Benedict XVI, “Christian Faith Forms Reason to
be Itself,” A Reason Open to God, 27: “Philosophy does not start again from zero with every thinking subject in
total isolation, but takes its place within the great dialogue of historical wisdom, which it continually accepts and
develops in a manner both critical and docile. It must not exclude what religions, and the Christian faith in
particular, have received and have given to humanity as signposts for the [philosophical] journey.”
7
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Achievement of Reason,” A Reason Open to God, 32-36, and at 35.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio—the Christian faith “is a purifying force for reason, helping it to be
more fully itself.”8 In his address at the Catholic Academy, Habermas a couple of times refers
explicitly to the Catholic tradition, as he understands it, in precisely the terms of the “duplex
ordo.”9 Unlike Ratzinger, however, Habermas’s view of this “duplex ordo” reminds me of the
neo-Scholastic interpretation10—found in Heidegger, Jaspers, and Copleston, et al.—which is
indebted more to Descartes than to Thomas Aquinas, and his neo-Thomist interpreters, Gilson11
and Maritain,12 regarding the answer to the above question. For instance, regarding the matter
of “grounding” of morality and law, the natural law is always defined by Thomas in reference to
the eternal law. “It should be said that the natural law is a participation of the eternal law, and
therefore endures without change owing to the unchangeableness and perfection of divine
reason.”13 Habermas isn’t clear that the Catholic tradition does not hold that natural law is
grounded in, rather than known by, human reason; otherwise, human reason would subvert
the metaphysical order laid out in the Summa. In other words, while many things are known
from the bottom up, as it were, they are not “grounded’ in this way. In short, a metaphysics of
theism is not something that may or may not be stuck onto an ethics or law presumed to be all
it should be in itself. This Cartesian inspired interpretation of the “duplex ordo” claims not only
a valid disciplinary autonomy for philosophy but also a self-sufficiency of rational thought.
Philosophy is based solely upon a “nonreligiously informed” reason “just in case it is based
solely on premises and inferences that all cognitively competent adult human beings would
accept if those premises and reasons were present to them, if they understood them, if they
possessed the relevant background information, and if they freely reflected on them at
sufficient length.”14 Where it critically differs from any Neo-Scholastic interpretation of the

8
Pope Benedict XVI, “Christian Faith Forms Reason to be Itself,” A Reason Open to God, 28.
9
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 252, 257.
10
Neo-scholasticism maintains that philosophy is self-sufficient in the natural realm of reason, that it must not be
influenced by faith in that realm, and that there is no such thing as Christian philosophy. Of course they affirm that
the philosophical reflection of Christians should be true and compatible with the Christian faith, but such reflection
should stand on its own, being the exclusive work of autonomous reason in the natural realm, unaided by faith,
and indebted to faith no more than their secular counterparts in philosophy. Indeed, the concept of “Christian
philosophy” makes no more sense to a neo-scholastic than it does to Martin Heidegger. He wrote famously, “A
'Christian philosophy' is a round square and a misunderstanding. There is, to be sure, a thinking and questioning
elaboration of the world of Christian experience, i.e. of faith. That is theology” (An Introduction to Metaphysics,
translated by Ralph Manheim [Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1961], 6. In line with Heidegger, well-known
historian of philosophy Frederick Copleston, S.J., succinctly writes, “The most that the phrase ‘Christian philosophy’
can legitimately mean is a philosophy compatible with Christianity; if it means more than that, one is speaking of a
philosophy which is not simply philosophy, but which is, partly at least, theology” (A History of Philosophy, Vol. 2,
Mediaeval Philosophy, Part II, Albert the Great to Duns Scotus [Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1962], 280-281).
11
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, Gifford Lectures 1931-1932, translated by A.H.C. Downes
[New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1940],1-41. See also, “The Idea of Philosophy in St. Augustine and in St.
Thomas,” and “What is Christian Philosophy?,” in A Gilson Reader, Selections from the writings of Etienne Gilson,
Edited, with an Introduction by Anton C. Pegis (Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1957), 68-81, 177-191, respectively.
Etienne Gilson, Christianity and Philosophy, translated by Ralph MacDonald, C.S.B., (London: Sheed & Ward, 1939).
12
Jacques Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy, Translated by Edward H. Flannery (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1955).
13
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologia I-II, q. 93, a. 2, resp.
14
Nicholas Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmetaphysical Philosophy, Religion, and
Political Dialogue,” in Habermas and Religion, Edited by Craig Calhoun, et al. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2013),
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

“duplex ordo” is that the Neo-Scholastic held that not only may philosophical conclusions not
conflict with the givens of revelation but also metaphysics is a foundational philosophical
discipline. By contrast, according to Habermas, there is a necessity for a post-metaphilosophical
philosophy, meaning thereby that it “refrains” from making “ontological pronouncements on
the constitution of being as such.”15 He explains the reason for the necessity of post-
metaphysical philosophy: “The secular awareness that we live in a post-secular world is
reflected philosophically in the form of post-metaphysical thought.”16 Habermas makes clear
the difference between secularistic17 and the secular character of post-metaphysical
philosophy. This philosophical position is, he claims, agnostic, and hence not anti-metaphysical
philosophy, non-reductionist, suspends judgment on religious truths, and rejects scientism, its
naturalistic worldview,18 and the corresponding epistemology that excludes theological
judgments from the genealogy of reason. Elsewhere he says that this is “a philosophical reason
which had become self-critical to break with metaphysical constructions of the totality of
nature and history.”19 Again, in his address to the Academy, he says that a “nonreligious and
postmetaphysical justification of normative foundations of the democratic constitutional state .
. . is part of the tradition of rational law, which does without the ‘strong’ cosmological or
salvation-historical [heilsgeschichtlich] assumptions found in classical and religious teachings of
natural law.”20 I shall return below to the significance of Habermas’s claim that those rights
which human beings enjoy by the very fact of their humanity have no need of any metaphysical
or religious grounding.
Still, Habermas insists on drawing a strict line between faith and knowledge, “In my
view, a philosophy that oversteps the bounds of methodological atheism loses it philosophical

92-111, and at 97-98. Charles Taylor makes a point similar to Wolterstorff’s about how Habermas seems to
“reserve a special status for nonreligiously informed Reason (let’s call this ‘reason alone’) in his essay, “Why we
need a Radical Redefinition of Secularism,” The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, Edited and Introduced by
Eduardo Mendieta, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 34-59, and at 53.
15
Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Translated by Ciaran Cronin
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 140.
16
Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Square,” European Journal of Philosophy 14:1, 1-25, and at 16.
17
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, Philosophy must overcome “a narrow secularist mindset” (140).
Habermas explains: “As long as secular citizens are convinced that religious traditions and religious communities
are, as it were, archaic relics of premodern societies persisting into the present, they can understand freedom of
religion only as the cultural equivalent of the conservation of species threatened with extinction. Religion no
longer has any intrinsic justification in their eyes. . . . Clearly, citizens who adopt such an epistemic stance toward
religion can no longer be expected to take religious contributions to contentious political issues seriously or to
participate in a cooperative search for truth to determine whether they may contain elements that can be
expressed in a secular language and be justified by rational arguments” (139).
18
Jürgen Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” in Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age, Jürgen
Habermas et al., Translated by Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2010), 15-23, and at 22: “Given the
spread of a naturalism based on a naïve faith in science, this presupposition [treating religious expressions as
simply irrational] cannot be taken for granted. The rejection of secularism is anything but a trivial matter. It
touches in turn on our initial question of how modern reason, which has turned its back on metaphysics should
understand its relation to religion.”
19
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 16.
20
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 252.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

seriousness.”21 In other words, he writes: “[post-metaphysical philosophy] treats revelation and

religion as something alien and extraneous. . . . The cleavage between secular knowledge and
revealed knowledge cannot be bridged.”22 Summarily stated, post-metaphysical philosophy,
says Habermas,

can draw rational sustenance from the religious heritage only as long as the source of
revelation that orthodoxy counterpoises to philosophy remains a cognitively
unacceptable imposition for the latter. The perspectives which are centered either in
God or in human beings cannot be converted into one another. Once the boundary
between faith and knowledge becomes porous, and once religious motives force their
way into philosophy under false pretenses, reason loses its foothold and succumbs to
irrational effusion.23

Habermas emphasizes the anthropocentric character of post-metaphysical philosophy.

Whereas the assertion, more precisely, a metaphysical claim about God’s existence that is
inherent to faith’s knowledge of God makes it clear that “theocentric thinking, by definition, is
not post-metaphysical philosophy.”24 In short, epistemologically and hence methodologically
speaking, philosophy qua philosophy has nothing to do with theology, and reason with
revelation. On this view, as Ratzinger clearly puts it, “It must be granted, in fact, that if a reason
entirely neutral vis-à-vis the Christian faith is part and parcel of the philosophical act, and if
philosophical knowledge necessarily excludes any prior given which streams into thinking from
faith, then the philosophical activity of a believing Christian must indeed appear to be
something of a fiction.”25
But we don’t have the full picture yet of Habermas’s view. He advances what he calls a
dialogical approach to the relation between theology and philosophy, revelation and reason.
He distinguishes this approach from not only the Hegelian or Marxist approach that intends to
subsume the substantial truth of faith into philosophy but also the rationalistic one denying
“religion any rational content.”26 Post-metaphysical philosophy does not presume “to decide
what is true or false in religion,” but rather it “leaves the internal questions of the validity of
religion to disputes within rational apologetics.”27 Says Habermas, “Faith remains opaque for

21
Jürgen Habermas, “A Conversation about God and the World,” Interview with Eduardo Mendieta in Religion and
Rationality, Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, various translators (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 147-
167, and at 160.
22
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 17. See also, idem, “Religion in the Public Square,” 17:
“Philosophy circles the opaque core of religious experience when reflecting on the intrinsic meaning of faith. This
core must remain . . . abysmally alien to discursive thought.”
23
Jürgen Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, Translated by Ciaran Cronin
(Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2005), 242-243.
24
Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas,” 98. See Habermas “An Awareness of What is Missing,”
16, “We should not try to dodge the alternative between an anthropocentric orientation and the view from afar of
theocentric or cosmocentric thinking.”
25
Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 17.
26
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 18.
27
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 245. Habermas “An Awareness of What is Missing,”42: “It differs
from Kant and Hegel in that this act of drawing the grammatical borders [between faith and reason] does not make
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

[philosophical] knowledge in a way which may neither be denied nor simply accepted. This
reflects the inconclusive nature of the confrontation between self-critical reason which is
willing to learn and contemporary religious convictions. This confrontation can sharpen post-
secular society’s awareness of the unexhausted force [das Unabgegoltene] of religious
traditions. Secularization functions less as a filter separating out the contents of traditions than
as a transformer which redirects the flow of tradition.”28 So, Habermas holds that a dialogical
approach in philosophy to religious traditions is “open to learning from them.” This approach
aims “to salvage cognitive contents from religious traditions. All semantic contents count as
‘cognitive’,” he adds, if they “can be translated into a form of discourse decoupled from the
ratcheting effect of truth of revelation. In this discourse, only ‘public’ reasons count, . . . reasons
that have the power to convince also beyond the boundaries of a particular community.” 29 In
this connection, Ratzinger asks the right question: “In what way is philosophy open to faith and
oriented from within toward dialogue with its message?”30 Well, the brief answer to this
question here is that a philosopher’s philosophical views is, according to Habermas, not altered
from within by the ontological content of the biblical revelation and hence is philosophically
open to the Christian faith. Rather, according to Habermas, the philosopher’s interest in religion
is only “as a potential source of insights that can be appropriated for his own purposes.” 31
To get at the precise nature of appropriation, we shall need to distinguish it from what
Habermas sometimes calls “translation.” The difference is made clear by Wolterstorff:

We have all had the experience, upon listening to someone of a quite different
persuasion from our own, of seeing the reality that he was trying to get at even though
we ourselves would never put it that way. Though we dissent from the propositions he
affirms, we see what he was trying to get at. We then put that in our own words; we
appropriate it. We don’t translate what he said into a different language; we
appropriate what he was trying to get at. Habermas’s thought is that appropriation, so
understood, is what the postmetaphysical philosopher mainly aims at in his dialogue
with religion.32

To translate what is said into a different language such that the translator also affirms the idem
sensus of cognitive contents—eodem sensu eademque sententia—presupposes the distinction
between propositional truth and its historically conditioned formulations, between form and
content, truth-content and context, This distinction was also invoked by John XXIII in his
opening address at Vatican II, Gaudet Mater Ecclesia, and this has been viewed by many as a
clear indication that he wished the considerations begun by the nouvels théologiens to be given
continued study. The pope made this distinction between truth and its formulations in a
famous statement at the beginning of Vatican II, which I quoted above: “The deposit or the

a philosophical claim to determine what (apart from that knowledge of the world which in institutionalized in
human society) may be true or false in the contents of religious traditions.”
28
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 18.
29
Habermas, Between Naturalism and Religion, 245.
30
Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 23; italics added.
31
Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas,” 102.
32
Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas,” 100.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

truths of faith, contained in our sacred teaching, are one thing, while the mode in which they
are enunciated, keeping the same meaning and the same judgment [eodem sensu eademque
sententia], is another.” The subordinate clause in this passage is part of a larger passage from
Vatican I, Dei Filius (Denzinger 3020), and this passage is itself from the Commonitorium
primum 23 of the fifth century monk, Vincent of Lérins (died c. 445): “Therefore, let there be
growth and abundant progress in understanding, knowledge, and wisdom, in each and all, in
individuals and in the whole Church, at all times and in the progress of ages, but only with the
proper limits, i.e., within the same dogma, the same meaning, the same judgment.” So, we can
say with justification that John XXIII framed the question regarding the nature of doctrinal
continuity in light of the Lérinian thesis, received by Vatican I, that doctrine must progress
according to the same meaning and the same judgment (eodem sensu eademque sententia).
Clearly, Habermas doesn’t have the main claim of hermeneutical projects, such as the
Lérinian one, in mind when he talks about “translation of their [religious traditions] rational
content.”33 Pace Habermas, given his post-metaphysical philosophical perspective it seems that
he cannot be engaging in the “potentially translatable truth content of religious utterances.”34
Still, he recognizes that philosophy “has long since appropriated biblical motifs.” Some
examples of appropriation by philosophy of genuinely Christian ideas are as follows:

This work of appropriation found its expression in heavily laden, normative conceptual
networks, such as: responsibility; autonomy and justification; history and memory;
beginning anew, innovation, and return; emancipation and fulfillment; or
externalization, internalization, and embodiment; individuality and community. It is true
that the work of appropriation transformed the originally religious meaning, but without
deflating or weakening it in a way that would empty it out. The translation of the notion
of man’s likeness to God into the notion of human dignity, in which all men partake
equally and which is to be respected unconditionally, is such a saving translation. The
translation renders the content of biblical concepts accessible to the general public of
people of other faith, as well as to nonbelievers, beyond the boundaries of a particular
religious community.35

Appropriation, then, removes the insight—say, the identical dignity of all men that deserves
unconditional respect—from the revelational narrative of creation, fall and redemption and
from the ontological content of the theocentric language in which it was asserted, formulating
this insight in its own anthropocentric secular language—“suppressed or untapped moral
intuitions”36—and justified by secular arguments whose premises express the basic principles of
egalitarianism in law and morality as well as the authority of natural reason as manifested in

33
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 22.
34
Jürgen Habermas, “‘The Political’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” 14-
33, and at 32n22.
35
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 258. See also, idem, Essays on
Faith and Knowledge, 1.41, cited in Wolterstorff, “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas,” 99-100; and Habermas,
“A Conversation about God and the World,” 157.
36
Habermas, “‘The Political’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” 27.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

the institutionalized sciences.37 Furthermore, given the universalization of religious freedom

and the concomitant recognition of irreducible religious diversity, in assent and practice, says
Habermas, “religion has had to give up the claim to interpretive monopoly and to a
comprehensive organization of life.”38 In all of these instances, religious traditions experience
“cognitive dissonance,” according to Habermas, and hence self-reflective accommodation is
required, for example, by the Christian faith, given irreducible religious diversity, the
secularization of knowledge and its institutionalized monopoly by modern scientific experts,
and the priority of or “the precedence of secular reasons and the institutional translation
requirement”39 in anthropocentric secular language. Habermas assures us that religious
traditions, such as Christianity, hold on to their exclusive truth claims, with the autonomous
progress in secular knowledge and egalitarianism in law and morality being consistent with
their faith.40 Still, given this demand of accommodation, religious traditions seem to be
asymmetrically burdened since those whom Habermas calls “enlightened secular citizens . . .
are not exposed to similar cognitive dissonances.” Habermas denies this asymmetry arguing
that secular citizens living in a post-secular society must also “epistemically adjust” by grasping
that “their conflict with religious opinions [is] a reasonably expected disagreement.” “An
epistemic mindset is presupposed here that would originate from a self-critical assessment of
the limits of secular reason. However, this cognitive precondition indicates that the version of
an ethics of citizenship I have proposed may only be expected from all citizens equally if both,
religious as well as secular citizens, already have undergone complementary learning
processes.”41
I am not persuaded by Habermas’s assurances that their cognitive burdens are
symmetrical and that the corresponding learning processes are complementary. And I don’t
think Ratzinger would be either. Yes, Ratzinger agrees broadly with Habermas in rejecting
secularism, scientism, naturalism, urging the importance of expanding the concept of
rationality, and the like. Regarding the broadening of our understanding of rationality,
Ratzinger/Benedict XVI writes, “A correct understanding of the challenges posed by
contemporary cultures and the formulation of meaningful response to those challenges must
take a critical approach toward narrow and ultimately irrational attempts to limit the scope of
reason. The concept of reason needs instead to be broadened in order to be able to explore
and embrace those aspects of reality that go beyond the purely empirical.” 42 However,
Ratzinger makes a point that highlights a crucial difference between himself and Habermas: “To
cease asking questions about the origin and goal of the whole of reality [of being as such] is to
leave out the characteristic element of philosophical questioning itself.”43 In particular, consider
Habermas’s demand that “methodical atheism” defines the boundaries of serious philosophy.
This surely means that a Christian way of philosophizing, a philosophical reasoning conceived
and practiced in dynamic union with, or vitally conjoined to, faith, is ruled out of bounds as a

37
Habermas, “An Awareness of What is Missing,” 21.
38
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 259.
39
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Square,” 15.
40
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Square,” 14.
41
Habermas, “Religion in the Public Square,” 15-16.
42
Pope Benedict XVI, A Reason Open to God, 238, and also 29-32, and 61.
43
Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 21.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

sham.44 Also, consider his disavowing, or at least forgoing, metaphysics from philosophical
inquiry, which leads to a notion of rationality that is not inherently “open to God.” On
Habermas’s view, philosophy cannot be open to faith and hence oriented from within toward
dialogue with the Christian faith because he thinks—given his methodical atheism—that to take
seriously “the answers of the Christian faith . . . is to cut off the path of thought.” Ratzinger
disagrees. “Might it not be that it is only such answers that give questions their true depth and
drama? Could it not be that they radicalize not only questioning but thinking itself, setting it on
its path instead of obstructing it?”45
This is particularly the case if the prior claim of the biblical revelation itself advances an
ontological judgment, as Ratzinger puts it, “when it professes the existence of God, indeed, of a
God who has power over reality as a whole.” This is, Ratzinger adds, “a statement about reality
as it is in itself.” Christianity has hitched its philosophical wagon, as it were, with the movement
of the logos against the myth, with the God of philosophers against the gods of religion, or as
he also puts it, “against the myth of mere custom for the truth of being.”46 He says:

This breakthrough [from mythos to logos] in thinking about God to a fundamental claim
on human reason as such is wholly evident in the religious critique of the prophets and
the biblical wisdom literature. If the prophets ridicule man-made idols with mordant
acerbity and set the only real God in contrast to them, in the wisdom books the same
spiritual movement is at work as among the pre-Socratics at the time of the early Greek
enlightenment. To the extent that the prophets see in the God Israel the primordial
creative ground of all reality, it is quite clear that what is taking place is a religious
critique for the sake of a correct understanding of this reality itself. Here the faith of
Israel unquestionably steps beyond the limits of a single people’s peculiar worship: it
puts forth a universal claim, whose universality has to do with being rational. Without
the prophetic religious critique, the universalism of Christianity would have been
unthinkable. It was this critique which, in the very heart of Israel itself, prepared that
synthesis of Hellas and the Bible which the Fathers labored to achieve. For this reason, it
is incorrect to reduce the concepts logos and aletheia, upon which John’s Gospel
centers the Christian message, to a strictly Hebraic interpretation, as if logos meant
“word” merely in the sense of God’s speech in history, and aletheia signified nothing
more than “trustworthiness” or “fidelity.” For the very same reason, there is no basis for
the opposite accusation that John distorted biblical thought in the direction of
Hellenism. On the contrary, he stands in the classical sapiential tradition. It is precisely in
John’s writings that one can study, both in its origins and in its outcome, the inner

44
John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, 1998, Fides et Ratio, no. 76.
45
Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 17-18.
46
Pope Benedict XVI, A Reason Open to God, 31. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, Translated
by J.R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004 [1968]), Chapter 3. See also, Jaroslav Pelikan, Christianity and
Classical Culture, The Metamorphosis of Natural Theology in the Christian Encounter with Hellenism, Gifford
Lectures, 1992-1993 (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1993), for extensive support to Ratzinger’s thesis
about the swing from mythos to logos.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

movement of biblical faith in God and biblical Christology toward philosophy

philosophical inquiry. 47

The upshot of this long passage is in the concluding sentence where Ratzinger suggests that the
fundamental affirmation of “Christ the Logos” radicalizes philosophical reflection by setting it
on a path where philosophy inquires about truth, being and reason. Implicit, then, in this
fundamental affirmation is a two-part statement: “1. In the Christian faith, reason comes to
light; precisely as faith it demands reason. 2. Reason comes to light through the Christian faith;
reason presupposes the faith as its living space.”48 This is not just a claim about theological
method as the project of faith seeking understanding (fides quarens intellectum). Rather, it
“expresses the conviction that what is reasonable, indeed, fundamental reason itself, comes to
light in the Christian faith.” What exactly does the biblical revelation that Christ is Logos bring to
light about fundamental reason itself? That is, says Ratzinger, “it means to say that the very
foundation of being is reason, and that reason is not a random byproduct of the ocean of
irrationality from which everything actually sprang.”49
Thus, on the one hand, the reasonableness of reality must be understood as an essential
conviction of the Christian faith. On the other hand, as philosophical reason sets out on her
search for truth, Ratzinger adds, “faith commissions her to recognize in the faith the
prerequisite that makes her [reason’s] own operation possible and not to pursue her claim to
comprehensiveness to the point of abolishing her own foundation, for that would mean that
she was mistaking herself for divine reason and thereby abandoning communication with the
divine reason on which her life depends.”50 That is, in response to the question as to how the
mind and language are fit to grasp the reality of things as they are, Ratzinger answers that the
intellectual structure of the human subject and the objective structure of reality coincide
because “it is ‘one’ reason that links them both.” In short, “our reason could not discover this
other reason were there not an identical antecedent reason for both.”51 This means that
theocentric thinking, for whom God is prima veritas, in God, and only in God, are knowledge
and reality, not only in correspondence, but directly known to correspond. Only in him do truth
and knowledge of truth, alethiology and epistemology, coincide.52 Consequently, continues
Ratzinger, “if it [reason] no longer recognizes this prerequisite for its own existence and
exaggerates its own absolute character beyond this previously assumed absoluteness of the
truth, it reverts by an inner logic to a justification of the irrational and makes reason itself out
to be an irrational accident.”53 In conclusion of this section and in preparation for the next, let
me say that if Habermas aims at learning from the Christian tradition, as he insists, then it is
47
Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 24-25.
48
Ratzinger, “Theology and Church Politics,” 148.
49
Joseph Ratzinger, “Theology and Church Politics [1980],” in Church, Ecumenism, & Politics, 148-159, and at 148.
50
Ratzinger, “Theology and Church Politics,” 149.
51
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Harmony of Faith and Knowledge,” 92.
52
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Objective Structure of the Universe and the Intellectual Structure of the Human Being
Coincide,” in A Reason Open to God, 268-271, and at 270: “The objective structure of the universe and the
intellectual structure of the human being coincide: the subjective reason and the objectified reason in nature are
identical. In the end it is ‘one’ reason that links both and invites us to look to a unique creative Intelligence.” This is
the view of Thomas Aquinas and Herman Bavinck.
53
Ratzinger, “Theology and Church Politics,” 149.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

unacceptable to insist on a “post-metaphysical standpoint.” “The secular awareness that we

live in a post-secular world is reflected philosophically in the form of post-metaphysical
thought.” Christian orthodoxy demurs. Given the priority Habermas ascribes to the
“secularization of knowledge” and the corresponding post-metaphysical standpoint, he “takes
it for granted that human knowledge is self-sufficient, and in no need of any metaphysical, or
religious grounding.”54 But philosophical inquiry must address the question regarding the
implication of whether or not God exists. There are only two options in response to this
question.

Either one recognizes the priority of reason, of creative Reason that is at the beginning
of all things and is the principle of all things—the priority of reason is also the priority of
freedom—or one holds the priority of the irrational, inasmuch as everything that
functions on our earth and in our lives would be only accidental, marginal, an irrational
result—reason would be a product of irrationality.55

Ratzinger invites human reason, philosophical inquiry, to set out ever anew in its search of what
is true and good, indeed, in search of God. Says Ratzinger, “The Question of God is the Crucial
Question.” He explains: “The theological horizon can and should value all the resources of
reason. The question of the Truth and the Absolute—the question of God—is not abstract
investigation divorced from daily life, but is the crucial question on which the discovery of the
meaning of the world and life defends.”56 According to Ratzinger, God himself is Logos, the
rational primal ground of all that is real, the creative reason that is the origin of the world and
that is reflected in the world. It is here that the idea of universal human rights, rooted in the
nature of the person, and drawing their legitimacy in the objective and inviolable demands of a
universal moral law, finds its deepest metaphysical foundations.

The “end of metaphysics,” which in broad sectors of modern philosophy is imposed as

an irreversible fact, has led to juridical positivism, which today especially has taken on
the form of a theory of consensus: if reason is no longer able to find the way to
metaphysics as the source of law, the state can only refer to the common convictions of
its citizens’ values, convictions that are reflected in the democratic consensus. Truth
does not create consensus, and consensus does not create truth as much as it does a
common ordering. The majority determines what must be regarded as true and just. In

54
Roger Trigg, Religion in Public Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 43.
55
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Harmony of Faith and Knowledge,” in The Garden of God, Toward a Human Ecology,
With a Foreword by Archbishop jean-Louis Bruguès (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2014),
91-94, and at 93. See also, in this book, the Easter Vigil Homily, April 23, 2011, “The World is a Product of Creative
Reason,” 65-71, and at 68. Elsewhere Ratzinger writes, “Is the world to be understood as originating from a
creative intellect or as arising out of a combination of probabilities in the realm of the absurd” (“Faith, Philosophy
and Theology,” 25).
56
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Question of God is the Crucial Question,” in A Reason Open to God, 244-248, and at 245.
Josef Schmidt, S.J., “A Dialogue in Which there Can Only Be Winners,” in Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular Age,
59-71, and at 70. “The question concerning the metaphysical constitution of this . . . reality cannot be rejected,
however, and faith can recognize in this the point of departure for the enduring discussion-worthiness of the idea
of God.”
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

other words, law is exposed to the whim of the majority and depends on awareness of
the values of the society at any given moment, which, in turn, is determined by a
multiplicity of factors. This is manifested concretely by the progressive disappearance of
the fundamentals of law inspired by the Christian tradition.57

I zoom in now on the exchange between Habermas and Ratzinger in order to show the
philosophical relevance, indeed, necessity of metaphysical and religious grounding.

The Pre-political Foundations of the State

There are two major questions addressed in the Habermas and Ratzinger exchange.
First, can the normative bases of the validity of a free, secular democratic constitutional state,
governed in its innermost core by the rule of law and human rights, be justified independently
of religious and metaphysical grounding? Second, what binds us together with an orientation
to the common good in a democratic constitutional state in which the freedom of the individual
to order his own life is declared to be the real goal of societal life? Both these questions pertain
to pre-political foundations.
I shall limit myself to the first question in this lecture. In reply to the first question,
Habermas says “yes.” He attempts to justify “a rational law that does without the ‘strong’
cosmological or salvation historical assumptions found in classical and religious teachings of
natural law.”58 The difference between a “strong” and a “weak” justification of the validity of
law and human rights is that the former thinks there is a “deficit of validity” without a
metaphysical or religious grounding—this is Ratzinger’s view—whereas the latter thinks that,
according to Habermas, “the liberal state is self-sufficient with regard to its need for
legitimation, that is, that it can draw upon the resources of a set of arguments that are
independent of religious and metaphysical traditions.”59 What, then, are the “normative
contents” of a secular democratic constitutional state that needs justification?
Habermas argues that secular justification of the democratic process is possible in virtue
of two components that make up the practice of democratic self-determination, or the
deliberative mode of democratic will formation: first, the equal participation of all citizens in
the democratic process, guaranteeing the basis of mutual respect among them as free and
equal members of the political community—this is the core of civic solidarity that interconnects
democracy and human rights from the very outset; and second, the epistemic dimension of a
deliberation that can be justified in light of generally accessible reasons—the so-called
nonreligiously informed use of reason—and that grounds the presumption of rationally
acceptable outcomes. “This grounding strategy refers to the constitution that the consociated
citizens give to themselves and not to the domestication of an existing state authority, as the

57
Pope Benedict XVI, “Crises of Law,” in The Essential Pope Benedict XVI, His Central Writings & Speeches, Edited
by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne, Introduction by D. Vincent Twomey, SVD (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2007), 376-380, and at 376-377.
58
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 252.
59
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 253.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

latter should be created only through the democratic drafting of the constitution. A
‘constituted’ (rather than a merely constitutionally tamed) state authority is governed to its
very core, so that the law completely penetrates political authority.”60 In addition, says
Habermas, “the legal institutionalization of the procedure of democratic legislation requires
that both liberal and political basic rights [Grundrechte] be guaranteed simultaneously” because
“democracy and human rights co-originally interpenetrate each other in the process of drawing
up constitutions.”61 In reply to the criticism that the free, secularized democratic constitutional
state cannot itself guarantee the foundations of its validity—of law and of human rights—and
hence is in need of pre-political metaphysical, or religious, grounding, Habermas says that this
conclusion overlooks “the point that systems of law can be legitimated only in a self-referential
manner, that is, on the basis of legal procedures born of democratic procedures.”62
In response to Habermas, Ratzinger is unpersuaded by his ultimate appeal to democratic
procedures, that is, to the idea, as Habermas puts it, “whereby legitimacy is generated by
legality.”63 Some four years after his exchange with Habermas, Ratzinger, now Benedict XVI,
addressed the members of the General Assembly of the United Nations, making a point aimed
at positions like those of Habermas:

Experience shows that legality often prevails over justice when the insistence upon
rights makes them appear as the exclusive result of legislative enactments or normative
decisions taken by the various agencies of those in power. When presented purely in
terms of legality, rights risk becoming weak propositions divorced from the ethical and
rational dimension which is their foundation and their goal. The Universal Declaration,
rather, has reinforced the conviction that respect for human rights is principally rooted
in unchanging justice, on which the binding force of international proclamations is also
based. . . . Since rights and the resulting duties follow naturally from human interaction,
it is easy to forget that they are the fruit of a commonly held sense of justice built
primarily upon solidarity among the members of society, and hence valid at all times
and for all peoples. . . . Human rights, then, must be respected as an expression of
justice, and not merely because they are enforceable through the will of legislators.64

In his Address to Representatives of British Society, Benedict XVI raises the same point about
where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found. “Each generation, as it seeks to
advance the common good, must ask anew: what are the requirements that governments may
reasonably impose upon citizens, and how far do they extend? By appeal to what authority can
moral dilemmas be resolved? These questions take us directly to the ethical foundations of civil
discourse. If the moral principles underpinning the democratic process are themselves

60
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 252-253.
61
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 25-26.
62
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 27.
63
Habermas, “On the Relations between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,” 28.
64
Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Members of the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization,
New York, Friday, April 18, 2008.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

determined by nothing more solid than social consensus, then the fragility of the process
becomes all too evident—herein lies the real challenge for democracy.”65
Furthermore, adds Ratzinger, “Since unanimity among people is rarely achieved,
democratic will-formation must reply on one of two essential tools, either delegation or
majority decision, in which, according to the importance of a question, different ratios for a
majority might be required. But majorities too can be blind or unjust. History makes this quite
clear. When a majority, however large it may be, represses a minority—for example, a religious
or a racial one—by means of oppressive laws, can one still speak of justice, of law?” Ratzinger
explains: “It is in this way that the principle of majority rule still leaves the question of the
ethical bases of the law unanswered, still leaves open the question whether there is anything
that can never become law, that is anything that always remains unlawful in essence or,
conversely, anything that by its very nature is unalterably a right and precedes every majority
decision and must be respected by it”66 What things are these?
Briefly, these are the normative elements in, for instance, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948) that define some inalienable rights of the human person. Such rights
transcend the positive law of states, serving both as a reference and norm for a lawmaker. They
are pre-political rights, possessing objective existence, existing prior to any decision of the
lawmaker. Yes, democracy is necessary precisely in order to secure and protect these rights.
But as Ratzinger says, “Law and freedom can never mean robbing another person of his rights.
And this means that a basic element of truth, namely, ethical truth, is indispensable to
democracy.”67 Continues Ratzinger: “Modernity has formulated a reserve of such normative
elements in the different declarations of human rights, thereby withdrawing them from the
discretion of majorities. Now, one may well, in the present state of affairs, be content with the
inner evidence of these values. But even such a deliberate restriction of the question has a
philosophical nature. There are, then, values that follow, in and of themselves, from the
essence of human existence and that are, for that reason, inviolable for everyone who is
human.”68 Ratzinger gives the following examples of unconditional values: it is never right to kill
innocent persons, equality of men regardless of race, the equal dignity of the sexes, freedom of
thought and belief, and the right to life for every person, that is, the inviolability of human life
in all its phases from conception to natural death, and others.
What, then, are the presuppositions of law, the deeper grounds for law and human
rights other than legality? The brief answer to this question here is that these rights would be
incomprehensible without the presupposition that man as such, in virtue of his human nature,
is the subject of rights.69 Human rights are “rights inherent in every person and prior to any
Constitution and state legislature.” Such rights acknowledge, protect and secure, the worth and
dignity of every individual as a human being irrespective of race, ethnicity, creed, political
views, or social class. Indeed, human rights are universal because “there is a human nature

65
Pope Benedict XVI, “Religion: Vital Contributor to the National Conversation,” in A Reason Open to God, 211-216,
and at 212-213.
66
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 262-263.
67
Ratzinger, “What is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralistic Dignity,” in Values in a
Time of Upheaval, Translated by Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 53-72, and at 55.
68
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 263.
69
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 266.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

shared by everyone.” Such rights manifest the genuine dignity and objective value that every
individual person actually possesses—an intrinsic value of the objective order of creation not
only linked to our human nature but also to a universal moral order, which is evidence that “we
do not live in an irrational or meaningless world.”70 Here we return to the fundamental
question whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature presupposes a creative a
Creator Spiritus.
As I argued earlier, Christians would see this universal moral order, or a moral logic, as
John Paul II called it,71 which is built into human life reflecting the objective and inviolable
demands of a universal moral law, “as connected with Creation and the Creator.”72
Furthermore, adds Ratzinger, “man’s existence bears in itself values and norms that are to be
found but not invented,”73 which is the reflection of a law that derives from nature and nature’s
God. These human rights are correlative to duties. There is a limitation of the language of
rights, however. Rights are not separate entities; rights are intelligible only in terms of duties,
and duties must be reduced to principles. Moreover, natural human rights are not cultural
constructions for they are grounded in an objective ontological criterion, a higher order of
moral reality that depends on truth, corresponding to true requirements of human existence.
At its core here is “the absoluteness that must be affirmed with regard to human dignity and
human rights. This is antecedent to every law promulgated by the state. . . . This validity of
human dignity, which counts before all political action and decision making, points ultimately to
the Creator. It is only he who can posit laws that are rooted in the essence of man and that no
one may alter. This means that an essential Christian inheritance is codified here in its own
special form of validity. The fact that there exist values that no one may manipulate is the real
guarantee of our freedom and of our human greatness. Faith sees therein the mystery of the
Creator and of the divine likeness that he has bestowed on man. Hence, this proposition
protects an essential element of the Christian identity of Europe in a formulation that even the
nonbeliever can understand.”74 Essential elements of Europe’s cultural heritage, such as, “the
conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of
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.”75
In this connection, Ratzinger notes that this complex of ideas—the legal enactment of
the unconditional value and dignity of man, of freedom, equality, together with the principles
of a democratic constitutional state, and of the rule of law in society—that entails an image of
man, a moral option, and a concept of law that is a pre-political foundation is not at all self-
explanatory, possessing a genuinely evidential character that a “nonreligiously informed
reason,” that is, unaided reason could perceive. Rather, adds Ratzinger, “The developments of

70
John Paul II’s “Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” October 5, 1995, in Make Room for the
Mystery of God: Visit of John Paul II to the USA 1995 (Boston: St. Paul Books & Media, 1995), 20-21.
71
John Paul II’s “Address to the United Nations General Assembly,” 21.
72
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 266.
73
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 266.
74
Ratzinger, “Europe’s Identity,” in Values in a Time of Upheaval, 129-150, and at 146-147.
75
Pope Benedict XVI, “The Listening Heart: reflections on the Foundations of Law,” in A Reason Open to God, 216-
224, and at 223.
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the twentieth century have taught us that this evidential character—as the subsistence and
reliable basis of all freedom—no longer exists. It is perfectly possible for reason to lose sight of
essential values.”76 This is precisely where the Christian tradition remains a vital force in civil
society in restoring the moral dimension and rational dimension knowledge of its evidential
quality that was lost when the historical basis of a culture and the ethical-religious insights that
it preserves were no longer taken seriously will it contribute to the legitimation process of a
democratic constitutional state. In order to grasp the evidential quality of these unconditional
values a corresponding moral consciousness must be developed anew. In short, the “truth
about the good supplied by the Christian tradition becomes an insight of human reason and
hence a rational principle.”77
In other words, Christianity is considered here as the source of moral knowledge,
antecedent to the political action on which it sheds light. Christianity, not as a revealed religion,
but Christianity as a leaven and a form of life which has proved its worth in the course of
history. “The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are
accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.” In other words, Christianity
“has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law—and to the harmony of objective
and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative
reason of God.” According to this understanding, Ratzinger adds, “the role of religion in political
debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by nonbelievers—
still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the
competence of religion—but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason
to the discovery of objective moral principles. This ‘corrective’ role of religion vis-à-vis is not
always welcomed, though, partly because distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and
fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. And in their turn,
these distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and
structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process. Without the corrective
supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated
by ideology or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human
person.”78 Christian faith, argues Ratzinger, has proved to be the most universal and rational
religious culture. Even today, it offers reason the basic structure of moral insight which, if it
does not actually lead to some kind of evidential quality, at least furnishes the basis of a
rational moral faith without which no society can endure. In sum, the state may and must
acknowledge the basic values without which it would not have come into being and without
which it cannot survive. “A state based on abstract, ahistorical reason has no future.” Here in
this pithy formulation we find Ratzinger’s rejection of Habermas’s “nonreligiously informed
reason” because the Christian faith forms reason to be fully itself.

If reason, out of concern for its alleged purity, becomes deaf to the great message that
comes to it from Christian faith and wisdom, then it withers like to a tree whose roots

76
Ratzinger, “Freedom, Law, and the Good, Moral Principles in Democratic Societies,” in Values in a Time of
Upheaval, 45-52, and at 50.
77
Ratzinger, “What is Truth? The Significance of Religious and Ethical Values in a Pluralistic Dignity,” 64.
78
Pope Benedict XVI, “Religion: Vital Contributor to the National Conversation,” 213-214, and 219.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

can no longer reach the waters that give it life. It loses the courage for truth and thus
becomes not greater, but smaller. Applied to our European culture, this means: if our
culture seeks only to build itself on the basis of the circle of its own argumentation, on
what convinces it at the time, and if—anxious to preserve its secularism—it detaches
itself from its life-giving roots, then it will not become more reasonable or purer, but will
far apart and disintegrate.79

This means in practical terms that we Christians must join all our fellow citizens in elaborating a
moral justification of law and of justice that is nourished by fundamental Christian insights, no
matter how the individual would justify these and no matter how he connects them to the
totality of his life. However, such shared rational convictions will be possible, and “right reason”
will not forget how to see, only if we live our own inheritance vigorously and purely. This will
make it inherent power of persuasion visible and effective in society as a whole.

Lessons from Habermas and Ratzinger for a Christian

Orientation in a Pluralist Democracy

I turn now to state four lessons from this debate for a Christian orientation in a pluralist
democracy.
First, the upshot of this debate is that there is a basic difference between a secularistic
society and its attending thinly-disguised totalitarianism (to borrow a phrase from John Paul
II80) that squeezes religion out of the public realm by privatizing it to a religious realm in which
it makes no difference, purporting to leave us with a “naked public square,” on the one hand,
and a post-secular or pluralist society, on the other, in which reasoned public debate between
the religious and irreligious, engaged in a mutual learning process, about the foundations of
society is necessary. Habermas is right that “The secularization of the state is not the same as
the secularization of society.” Religious communities play a vital role in civil society and the
public square. Deliberative politics and its corresponding ethics of citizenship entail the duty of
reciprocal accountability of all citizens, religious and secular citizens. The latter, in particular,
says Habermas, “are obliged not to publicly dismiss religious contributions to political opinion
and will formation as mere noise, or even nonsense, from the start. Secular and religious
citizens must meet in their public use of reason at eye level. For a democratic process the
contributions of one-side are no less important than those of other side.”81 Ratzinger registers
his broad agreement with Habermas’s remarks about a post-secular society, that is, the
willingness to learn and mutual self-limitation between religious and secular citizens.82
Second, Ratzinger holds, rightly in my claim, that the Christian faith’s claim to truth is
per se a public claim. Of course he insists that this claim “must not be detrimental to the

79
Pope Benedict XVI, “Christian Faith Forms Reason to be Itself,” A Reason Open to God, 29.
80
John Paul II, Encyclical Letter, Centesimus Annus, May 1, 1991, no. 46.
81
Habermas, “‘The Political’ The Rational Meaning of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology,” 26.
82
Ratzinger, “The Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,” 267.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

pluralism and religious tolerance of the state.” Significantly, however, Ratzinger urges that
“from this one cannot conclude that the state is completely neutral with respect to values. The
state must recognize that a fundamental system of values based on Christianity is the
precondition for its existence. In this sense it simply has to know its historical place, so to speak:
the ground from which it cannot completely detach itself without falling apart. It has to learn
that there is a fund of truth that is not subject to consensus but rather precedes it and makes it
possible.”83 We find a well-articulated version of what Ratzinger is getting at in Jacque
Maritain’s vision of a democratic society.84 This involves respecting the diverse philosophical
and religious creeds and traditions of contemporary society. In his public philosophy, Maritain
develops with sophistication the prospects for a common foundation in religiously and
philosophically pluralistic societies. He advances a chartered pluralism85 that is able to explain
(a) the pluralist principle in democracy, (b) the charter and basic tenets that are at the core of
its existence, and (c) the philosophical and religious justification of the democratic charter.
Briefly, this charter includes:

[R]ights and liberties of the human person [and] corresponding responsibilities; . . .

functions of authority in a political and social democracy, moral obligation, binding in
conscience, regarding just laws as well as the Constitution that guarantees the people’s
liberties; . . . human equality, justice between persons and the body politic, civic
friendship and an ideal of fraternity, religious freedom, mutual tolerance and mutual
respect between various spiritual communities and schools of thought; . . . obligations
of each person toward the common good of the body politic and obligations of each
nation toward the common good of civilized society, and the necessity of becoming
aware of the unity of the world and of the existence of a community of peoples.86

Third, Natural law is appealed to by the Church in three principal contexts. One such
context has been discussed in this lecture. The Church faces an aggressive secularism that
wants to exclude believers from public debate, by referring to the interventions of Christians in
public life on subjects to which the natural law pertains: the defense of the rights of the
oppressed, justice in international relations, the defense of human life, from conception to
natural death, and of the family and marriage, religious freedom and freedom of education,
and others. These natural law arguments “are not in themselves of a confessional nature, but
derive from the care which every citizen must have for the common good of society.” There are
three other contexts where natural law may be invoked. For instance, there is the context of a

83
Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy,” 207.
84
On Jacque Maritain’s public philosophy, see my article, “Nature and Grace: The Theological Foundations of
Jacques Maritain’s Public Philosophy,” in the Journal of Markets & Morality 4, No. 2 (Fall 2001): 240-268. On line:
http://www.marketsandmorality.com/index.php/mandm/article/viewFile/577/568.
85
This is how Os Guinness describes Maritain’s public philosophy whose influence, along with that of John
Courtney Murray, S.J., he acknowledges on his own views. On this, see The American Hour: A Time of Reckoning
and the Once and Future Role of Faith (New York: Free Press, 1993), 239–57, at 251 and 254. See also Murray’s
important and influential study, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Kansas
City: Sheed and Ward, 1960). 49. Maritain, Man and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 110.
86
Maritain, Man and the State, 109.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

culture that limits rationality to the natural sciences and abandons the moral life to relativism.
In this connection, the natural law insists on “the natural capacity of human beings to obtain by
reason ‘the ethical message inscribed in the actual human being’”87—as Benedict XVI put it in
an Address to the International Congress on Natural Moral Law.88 Also, to know in their main
lines the fundamental norms of just action in conformity with man’s nature and dignity so that
a basis in reason and nature for the rights of man is provided.
There is a second context to which appeal is made to the natural law, that is, the
presence of relativistic individualism. The latter “judges that every individual is the source of his
own values, and that society results from a mere contract agreed upon by individuals who
choose to establish all the norms themselves.” To this view, the natural law urges us to consider
the natural and objective character of the fundamental norms that regulate social and political
life. As I argued in the second lesson, “the democratic form of government is intrinsically bound
to stable ethical values, which have their source in the requirements of natural law and thus do
not depend on the fluctuations of the consent of a numerical majority.”89

Of course I understand that the term “natural law” is a source of numerous

misunderstandings in our present cultural context. The International Theological Commission
described these misunderstandings and possible corrections:

At times, [1] it evokes only a resigned and completely passive submission to the physical
laws of nature, while human beings seek instead – and rightly so – to master and to
direct these elements for their own good. At times, [2] when presented as an objective
datum that would impose itself from the outside on personal conscience, independently
of the work of reason and subjectivity, it is suspected of introducing a form of
heteronomy intolerable for the dignity of the free human person. Sometimes also, [3] in
the course of history, Christian theology has too easily justified some anthropological
positions on the basis of the natural law, which subsequently appeared as conditioned
by the historical and cultural context.

And hence a better understanding is needed that responds to these objections:

But a more profound understanding [ 4] of the relationships between the moral subject,
nature and God, as well as a better consideration of the historicity that affects the
concrete applications of the natural law, help to overcome these misunderstandings. It
is likewise important today [5] to set out the traditional doctrine of the natural law in
terms that better manifest the personal and existential dimension of the moral life. It is
also necessary [6] to insist more on the fact that the expression of the requirements of
the natural law is inseparable from the effort of the total human community to
transcend egotistical and partisan tendencies and develop a global approach of the

87
International Theological Commission, “In Search of a Universal Ethics: A New Look at the Natural Law,” no. 35.
88
Pope Benedict XVI, “Lex Naturalis,” in A Reason Open to God, 207-211, and at 209.
89
International Theological Commission, “In Search of a Universal Ethics,” no. 35.
This article may not be quoted, copied, or linked without explicit permission of the author.

“ecology of values” without which human life risks losing its integrity and its sense of
responsibility for the good of all.90

Four, Ratzinger holds that the Church cannot close her eyes to the pathologies of
religion and secularism who, in the name of an ideology which purports to be scientific or
religious, claim the right to impose on others their own concept of what is true and good. As
John Paul II said, however, “Christian truth is not of this kind. Since it is not an ideology, the
Christian faith does not presume to imprison changing socio-political realities in a rigid schema,
and it recognizes that human life is realized in conditions that are diverse and imperfect.
Furthermore, in constantly reaffirming the transcendent dignity of the person, the Church’s
method is always that of respect for freedom.”91 Yet, significantly, the Catholic tradition holds
that freedom attains its full development only by accepting the truth. For in a world without
truth, freedom loses its foundation and man is exposed—as I said earlier in lesson three—to the
violence of passion and to manipulation, both open and hidden. In accordance, however, with
its respect for freedom, “The only strength with which Christianity can make its influence felt
publicly is ultimately the strength of its intrinsic truth.”92 Alternatively put, the Declaration on
Religious Freedom of Vatican II states, “The truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its
own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”93 Yes, the
Church respects the legitimate autonomy of the democratic order. But her deepest
contribution to the civil order and hence by implication to the political order is precisely her
vision of the dignity of the person revealed in all its fullness in the mystery of the Incarnate
Word. “It is only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word that the mystery of man takes on light.” 94

90
International Theological Commission, “In Search of a Universal Ethics,” no. 10.
91
John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, no. 89.
92
Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy,” 208.
93
Dignitatis Humanae, no. 1.
94
Gaudium et spes, no. 22.