“A dictatorship of relativism is being established, which recognizes nothing as final and leaves only one’s own ego and desires as the last measure.” The famous statement made by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the beginning of the conclave of 2005, remains the strongest and clearest judgment of the times we live in. Photograph the hegemonic ideology in many international institutions professed by the ‘global party’ of the ‘politically correct’. The years that have passed since 2005 have confirmed the cardinal’s words that he would emerge from this conclave as Pope Benedict XVI. Unfortunately, the Ratzinger Thought I have reported is assumed to simply express a Catholic view, as if it were a denominational critique of increasingly secularized times, hence irrelevant to non-Catholics. But that’s actually not the case. “Relativism” is not so much (or only) a problem for the Church, but above all for the anthropological foundations of Western civilization, which have emerged from Greek philosophical thought, i.e. a problem of reason and the polis based on these built on cultural foundations. This becomes clear in the book “Humanism and Theology” by Werner Jaeger, which reproduces one of his memorable lessons from 1943. It has now been appropriately relaunched by Vita e Pensiero with a valuable presentation by Carlo Ossola.
HUMANISM
Hunter, Professor of Classical Studies at the Universities of Berlin, Kiel and Basel, left Germany for the USA in 1936 and became Director of the Institute for Classical Studies at Harvard. Among his most important works we must mention “Paideia”, but also the book on Aristotle translated by Guido Calogero in 1935. He died in Cambridge in 1961. Central to the volume we are talking about is the word “humanism”. Jaeger notes that “a group of modern thinkers have adopted the word ‘humanism’ in this new sense of agnostic philosophy” and this “is but a return to the ancient Greek sophists”. The Sophists’ “relativistic doctrine” was based on a “radical lack of certainty” about the “aeterna veritas” and “many scholars today believe that humanism is identified with this anthropocentric vision”. Jaeger explains that «against the paideia of rhetorical sophistry», from which «the relativistic forms of modern humanism are derived, … the paideia of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle prevailed». The scholar points out that “the humanism of the Sophists seems not to be the pinnacle but the symbol of the downfall of Greek civilization. In fact, they ushered in a period of social and intellectual disintegration. And you have to keep that in mind in order to understand the contrast with the Sophists of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. For these Big Three, “God” means the certainty of the objectivity of good, truth, and beauty transcending turbulent sensual reality and time. Without “God” there is no order, no rationality, no science, no polis. “In restoring the certainty of God as the supreme principle of the natural and social world, Plato and Aristotle, following in Socrates’ footsteps, did not wish to return to the mythological age,” writes Jaeger, “but rather to reveal that indestructible essence of reality which religion in symbolized in mythical form in its archaic phase”. Thus reason (logos) approaches “the reality which religion called theos”, that is, God, and “the result of this effort of the intellect has been defined as theologia”. Indeed, “the one who invented this word and made this new concept the center of all philosophical thought” was Plato. Aristotle inherited it from him and “named his first philosophy ‘theology’ because it is that part of philosophy which transcends the physical world”. Only later was it called “metaphysics”. Jaeger emphasizes: “It was the Greeks, the founders of philosophy and science, who brought this new form of rational relationship to the superhuman world into the spiritual life of mankind”.
OF THE HUMAN AND THE DIVINE
The Sophists were not concerned with “exploring the essence of divine things”, they only wanted to be “teachers of bourgeois virtues”, i.e. “a social science without a metaphysical background”. Socrates, explains Jaeger, “showed them that in the practical field of education there is no place for distrust of reason, because true education (…) requires an end towards which human action is directed and a certainty around the good attained. Protagoras’ claim that man himself is the measure of all things is nothing other than the declaration of bankruptcy of human culture.” With his method, Socrates “proceeded from the existence of human desires to distinguish what the individual desires from what is absolutely desirable which he calls “the good in itself”». Plato continues on his way and declares that it “leads to the divine principle of the intelligible world”. Thus «we read in his latest work «The Laws», in which the philosopher appears as the legislator of a new human society founded on the rock of truth, a word that casts retrospectively both at the beginnings of Socrates’ quest and at all Works of Plato: God is the measure of all things. Protagoras’ words that man is the measure are reversed and reversed. True paideia, be it education or legislation, must be based on God as the supreme norm. Aristotle – although taking a different route – “agrees with his teacher Plato in understanding philosophy before it transcends the limits of the sensible world, essentially as theology”. Indeed, with Plato, he affirmed “a conception of man in which the divine is contained, and showed the way by which mortal man may partake of eternal life.” According to the philosopher von Stagira, science would also not be possible if the soul did not have the ability to understand the rational order of the sensible world. Neither does the polis. Theirs is the rational search for eternal truth, not religion. For this reason, Ratzinger emphasizes that when the Christians arrived, they did not enter into a dialogue with pagan religion, but embraced Greek philosophy (he defines this meeting as “the event that revolutionizes world history”). Because “Christianity”, writes Ratzinger, “was not conceived as a religion, but primarily as a continuation of philosophical thinking, i.e. man’s search for truth”. Thus he presented the event of the incarnation of truth “as la religio vera”.
RENAISSANCE
Already “Saint Augustine”, Jaeger confirms, “opposes the mythical and political theology of tradition to the natural theology of the philosophers”. Christianity thus stands as the true Paideia, culminating in “the systems of the two greatest Christian thinkers, St. Augustine and St. Thomas,” who “represented the fusion of the two chief expressions of theocentric humanism of classical antiquity, Platonism and Aristotelianism, effected with the Christian faith “. From Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas come Dante and Humanism, which will then reach the artistic peaks of the Renaissance (Raphael’s “School of Athens” is in the heart of the Vatican rooms). The modern legacy of the Thomistic Humanism is Jacques Maritain’s “integral humanism”, which Jaeger quotes and which was very important in the twentieth century. It is this thousand-year-old civilization that has enlightened the world. Today it is attacked by what Ratzinger called “the dictatorship of relativism”. www.antoniocci.com