The Mind of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Pope Benedict XVI

The Dictatorship of Relativism

By Monsignor Michael J. Cantley

                        In his homily at the “Mass: for the Election of the Roma Pontiff,” Cardinal Ratzinger told his fellow electors of the many “winds of doctrine” buffeting the Church at this time in history.  He identified these winds, naming them as everything: “from Marxism to liberalism, even libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnostic- cism to syncretism and so forth.” Then he continued: “Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism.[1]  Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’ (see Eph. 4:14), seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.  We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely in one’s own ego and desires.”[2] 

            We have seen this principle of relativism in our previous lectures: the first on Christ, among the pluralists who would hold that Jesus is savior for Christians and other religious figures are the saviors of their votaries.  This carried over into our second lecture on the Church where the theme is advanced to ‘one religion is as good as another.’  Again, in our third lecture which focused on the discipline of morality where the attitude of relativism insisted that one should be free to do as one chooses since the truth and allowability of every action is what appears to be true or allowable for each person.   No one and no institution, it is alleged, has the right to determine the goodness or badness of any action, since there are no absolute rules for such judgment.  Hence, Cardinal Ratzinger had to remind his hearers: “We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man.  He is the measure of true humanism.  An ‘adult’ faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ.  It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.”[3]

            Having been elected Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Ratzinger evidences that he still has the same positions he did as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF).  In his address to the Ecclesial Congress of the Diocese of Rome, on the “Anthropological Foundations of the Family”, the Holy Father repeated his past concerns.  He said: “Today, a particularly insidious obstacle to the task of educating is the massive presence in our society and culture of the relativism which, recognizing nothing as definitive leaves as the ultimate criterion only the self with its desires.  And under the semblance of freedom it becomes a prison for each one, for it separates people from one another, locking each person into his or her own ‘ego.’  With such a relativistic horizon, therefore, real education is not possible without the light of truth; sooner or later, every person is in fact condemned to doubting in the goodness of his or her own life and the relationships of which it consists, the validity of his or her commitment to build with others something in common.”[4]     

            Relativism has a long history.  According to Plato in his dialogue Theatetus, relativism was the position of the Sophist Protagoras.  Plato describes him as holding: “Man…is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence of things that are not…things are to you such as they appear to you, and to me such as they appear to me.”  In such a system, nothing can be false since each of us establishes his or her own truth.  Such a system breaks down all meaningful communication as Protagoras himself saw and hence qualified his teaching by affirming that whatever one believes is true, some people may have better insights.  But, and this is the fundamental flaw in relativism, to say anything is ‘better’ is to measure what I hold and what you hold against some value that is objective and allows comparison.  Socrates puts is both humorously and clearly.  Speaking to Theatetus (who agrees with Protagoras) Socrates says:

         If truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another man’s feelings better than he, or has a superior right to determine whether his opinion is true of false, but each, as we have several times repeated, is to himself the sole judge, and everything that he judges is true and right, why, my friend should Protagoras be preferred to the place of wisdom and instruction, and deserve to be well paid, and we poor ignoramuses have to go to him, if each one is the measure of his own wisdom?...for the attempt to supervise or refute the notion or opinion of others would be tedious and an enormous piece of folly, if to each man his own are right.[5]

            Surely, Socrates is thinking of some external measure, some universal truth that can be taught, that is the measure of the truth of the particular, the criterion against which some notion or idea can be judged as right or wrong.  Relativism as conceived by Protagoras – and all later varieties have something of his position imbedded in them – is self-defeating.  Protagoras speaks of each one’s position as true.  In doing so he is asserting that his own statement is true.  Logically, therefore, it excludes all other assertions and makes itself absolute, the objective reality.  But how can Protagoras make such an assertion?  He wants a preferential position for his assertion, an assertion that denies any such preference exists in the first place.  Modern relativists think they escape the self-contradiction of Protagoras by escaping into the position of pragmatism – something is better or preferred not because it is true but because it works.  But, why does it work?  Because it accomplishes what we want.  But why do we want it?  Because it is better than the alternative.  But once the issue of better enters the picture, measurement against some objective norm asserts itself: a norm that is true, good or worthwhile.  Relativism simply keeps on putting off the inevitable confrontation with the truth.  It does not destroy truth or absolute value; it simply turns a blind eye to them.  Under the guise of ‘liberal’ it traps one into a prison of self interest and self contradiction.

            What is the appeal of relativism?  It may be the fact that it seems so tolerant, so open-minded; whereas the rejection of relativism labels one as arrogant, dogmatic, and even narrow-minded.  But to be open-minded suggests that one can be wrong and is willing to be corrected.  This is not what relativists hold.[6]  Relativists believe they have truth.  You may have a different truth, but one does not impact on the other.  And tolerance does not mean I have to agree with another’s position, only that I am willing to live peacefully and understandingly with the other even though we continue to disagree.  If tolerance enters the picture it is only because I have a position I am convinced is true, have no intention to change it, and know when, why and to what degree I will be indulgent with another’s error.  To be secure in the possession of truth need not make one arrogant or closed-minded.  If I become such, the problem is character not epistemology. 

            In May of 1966, Cardinal Ratzinger gave a major address to the presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops’ Conference of Latin America held in Guadalajara, Mexico.  It was entitled Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today.[7]  It ranged over a wide field of currently discussed theological issues both theoretical and practical, all of them seeking to find a way to make the faith acceptable to a world that had neither room nor time for God; a world drowning, at least in its own perception, in structures of evil that seemed to suggest that God had abandoned it.  He began his introduction relativism as an alternative response to this seeming absence of God with a brief treatment of Liberation Theology whose radicalism was a threat in the decade of the 1980s.  This movement needed a response because it promised practical, plausible and timely answers to the problem of redemption.  Oppressed by a world-situation that seemed to give the lie to the existence of an all good God, a world of poverty, enslavement and injustice that primarily victimized the innocent and helpless, a world whose very structures were evil, liberation theology concluded that such “could only be overcome through radical change in the structures…which are structures of sin and evil.”[8]  The resolution of the problem could not be achieved through individual conversion but only through corporate action against the “structures of injustice.”  Since the structures were politically engendered, the solution had to be political.  “Redemption thus became a political process for which Marxist philosophy provided the essential guidelines.”[9]  That theology attained its götterdammerung (twilight of the gods) with the fall of Eastern and European nations with systems based on Marxism.  Their demise made the radical lack of freedom within their borders clear to the entire world and demonstrated that liberation theology in Marxist guise was self-destructive.  The disillusionment that followed this experiment supposedly solidly based philosophically and scientifically, could only “justify the nihilism or, in any case, total relativism.”[10]  Nihilism had little to recommend it, so relativism took center stage.        

            In an interview held on November 19, 2004, at Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger was asked: “Where is God in modern society?”  His answer: “He has been put on the sidelines.  In political life, it seems almost indecent to speak of God, as if it were an attack on the freedom of those who do not believe.  The world of politics follows its norms and paths, excluding God as something that does not belong to this world.  The same in the world of business, the economy, and private life.  God remains marginalized…it seems necessary to rediscover…that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man’s heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God.  A society in which God is completely absent self-destructs.  We saw this in the great totalitarian regimes of the last century.”[11]  Yet, even this recent historical experience has not turned secular man back to God, but once again to his own judgment leading to the problem of relativism that Cardinal Ratzinger sees as “the central problem for faith at the present time.”[12] 

            Relativism did not fall from the skies.  Before Protagoras there was Heraclites with his doctrine of πάντα ρει (all things change), nothing remains the same, hence there are no absolutes.  In the Christian era, William of Ockham (14^th Century) laid the foundations for Nomenalism.[13]  This philosophical position denies universals and admits only the existence of the particular, the individual existing thing.  The similarities of things are not longer considered the common property of nature, hence general or universal abstract notions, laws or ideas are only ‘names’ (hence the name of this movement) or mental images.  With David Hume (18^th Century empiricist) this led to skepticism about the objective value of intellectual constructs.  Ockham’s reductionism (remember “Ockham’s razor?) disallowed pluralities without clear necessity.  The weight of judgment was thrown onto the particular.  He attributed absolute power to God (potential absoluta) making everything God created contingent, i.e., it could be its opposite should God so have desired.  One can easily imagine how, in so relative a world, metaphysics would be destroyed.  In our own day, a reflection of ‘nomenalism’ can be found in the ethical theory called Situation Ethics.[14]  It affirms that love is the determining principle for all moral decisions.  It attempts to describe a middle position between an ethic based on moral absolutes (which it designates as ‘legalism’) and action that has no laws, rules or principles to guide it.  But its problem, and no small problem at that, is that the ‘love principle’ is basically utilitarian – looking to accomplish the greater the greater good for the greater number.  It is an ethical principle that cannot avoid the position that the end justifies the means.  The basic problem with situation ethics is that it espouses love without moral content and is therefore reducible to personal preference in the accomplishing of any action.  Perhaps these two examples of the Protagorean dictum that “man is the measure of all things” fills in at least a small part of the history between the ancients and modern times as they attempt to trace the philosophical idea that is the heart of relativism.          

            Returning to Ratzinger’s address to the presidents of the doctrinal commissions of South American bishop’s conference in 1996, the Cardinal notices that there is an apparent symbiosis with democracy, an obvious favorite political motus vivendi in the West.  Democracy assumes the existence of different viewpoints and opinions and seeks some harmony in attempting to find common ground where people of different ideas and ideals can live together peacefully and productively.  Within limits it works, but not everything can be decided democratically.  Truth is not a matter of democratic decision – one cannot make killing the innocent right, nor truthfulness wrong.  The problem, however,  is setting limits, and a constitution attempts to do precisely that.  But beyond politics and in the doctrinal and moral spheres, “right is right if no one is right; and wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong.”[15]  There is objective truth and there are objective and absolute moral principles that are God-given and bind always, everywhere and upon everyone.  As we mentioned in the first lecture, pluralist theology is clearly wrong in reducing Jesus to just one of many savior figures.  This attenuates Christology intolerably even if it pleases the ear of the dialoging populace today.  The Cardinal puts is thus: “the notion of ‘dialogue’ – 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 antithesis of conversion and mission.  In the relativist meaning, ‘to dialogue’ means to put one’s own position, i.e., one’s faith, on the same level as the convictions of others without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of others.  Only if I suppose in principle that the other can be right, more right than I, can authentic dialogue take place.”[16]  Dialogue in the Cardinal’s sense is more than the mere swapping of opinions.  Plato would shutter, or be expelled by Socrates who sought the truth and hoped to wean Theatetus away from the limited vision of Protagoras.  Ratzinger’s judgment on this misuse of dialogue follows: “the relativist dissolution of Christology, and even more of ecclesiology, thus becomes a central commandment of religion… [it declares] faith in the divinity of one concrete person [Jesus Christ as something that] leads to fanaticism and particularism, to the dissociation between faith and love…”[17]  As it seeks to overcome the Christian’s faith, it self-destructs since it cannot wish to obliterate another’s position without admitting some standard of truth that relativism denies exists.  There can be no real dialogue on relativist grounds.

            Cardinal Ratzinger identifies John Hick (a Protestant scholar) and Paul Knitter (a Catholic) as in his discussion of the place of Christ in the school of pluralist theologians.  Hick, he reveals, takes as “His philosophical departure point…the Kantian distinction between phenomenon and noumenon.  We can never grasp ultimate truth itself, but only the appearances in our way of perceiving through different ‘lenses.’  What we grasp is not really and properly reality in itself, but a reflection on our scale.”[18]  He continues: “In Hick’s thinking, whom we are considering here as an eminent representative of religious relativism, 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 in an absolute transcendency.”[19]  While fundamentally different, the a-religious relativism of Europe and America “can get a kind of religious consecration from India which seems to give its renunciation of dogma the dignity of a greater respect between the mystery of God and man.”[20]  Reciprocally, European and American support encourages Indian Christian theologians to set aside the uniqueness of Christ and attempt dialogue with Indian religions by placing Christian teaching on the same level as that of the Asian religions.  “The historical Jesus – it is now thought – is no more the absolute Logos than any other saving figure in history.”[21]  Ratzinger concludes: “Under the sign of the encounter of cultures, relativism appears to be the real philosophy of humanity…this fact, both in the East and in the West, visibly gives it a strength before which it seems that there is no room for any resistance.”[22]  Those who resist are labeled illiberal, intolerant and undemocratic.  Yet the fact of the matter is that this thinking which usually involves capitulation of principle and teaching on the part of the Christian is dishonest and finally unfruitful.  In its attempt to dialogue with the East, the West fails to realize that Eastern religions exist on a very different plane from Christianity or the traditional philosophies of the West.  The religions of the East have no fixed and required doctrine.  They have required practice which defines the practitioner as an authentic believer (recall what we have already said in our last lecture about orthopraxy.)  In Indian religions, there is not creed or catechism required of adherents.  Rather there is “a system of ritual acts which [are considered necessary]…and distinguish a ‘believer’ from a ‘non-believer’.[23]  It is not knowledge but careful practice of a ritual that makes one a Hindu, Buddhist, etc.  With the Christian, practice stems from and articulates belief.  This is why capitulating on belief vitiates dialogue and involves one in mere sham.

            One has only to browse casually in almost any book store to discover stack after stack of books described as New Age philosophy, religion or simply literature.  Cardinal Ratzinger comments: “The relativism of Hick, Knitter and related thinkers, weather foreseen or not, laid a foundation for this New Age movement.  It is a resurgence of the old Gnosticism, seemingly clued into all of the scientific thinking of the age, but anointed with a mystical sense that experiences the Absolute.  The ‘Absolute’ is not to be believed, but to be experienced.  God is not a person to be distinguished from the world, but a spiritual energy present in the universe.  Religion means the harmony of myself with the cosmic whole, the overcoming of all separation.”[24]  In this system, redemption is not a gift given through Jesus Christ and mediated through his Church, but “is found in unbridling the self, immersion in the exuberance of that which is living and in a return to the Whole.  Ecstasy is sought, inebriety of the infinite which can be experienced in inebriating music, rhythm, dance, frenetic lights and dark shadows, and in the human mass.”[25]  Through these, man gets his gods back, but not the God of revelation.  It is a return to the alien and antiquated, while failing to look deeply into the wonder already possessed in the Christian faith with its own mystical tradition; a failure to appreciate the spiritual riches already possessed.

            How could all of this happen?  What are the causes outside the Church and within it?  The Cardinal answers by referring back to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a movement of untrammeled confidence in human progress, of absolute confidence in human reason leading to a questioning (read rejection) of all forms of authority and the giving of priority to the individual in all choices.  It is a world view that takes “a very dogmatic posture and excludes the intervention of God in the world [where]…religion…lies in the subjective sphere and can therefore have no objective dogmatic contents that are binding at all; in this view, dogma in general seems to contradict man’s reason.”[26]  Though the Enlightenment spent itself in that very century, even before the French Revolution, its attitude and mind-set remained to influence many fields of human activity, that of many in the Church too.  It is not likely that the future will see its lessening nor see the Church regain the position of teaching authority it enjoyed in the Middle Ages or even earlier in the last century at lest on the popular level.  It is more likely that the Church will continue its mission as a counter-movement to the ‘spirit of the world’: Christianity and ‘world spirit’ will remain in constant tension.

            Internal to Church life, this Enlightenment spirit and the pragmatic relativism we have been considering has also impacted the faith.  Unless we are consciously critical of the predominating weltanschauung (world opinion or ideology) or mind-set described here, we will unconsciously imbibe it with the cultural atmosphere all around us.  Cardinal Ratzinger, in his conference with the Latin American doctrinal commissioners concluded with a section entitled “Pragmatism in the Church’s Daily Life.”[27]  He points to two phenomena he considers to be of particular concern:

“First, there is the intention, with different degrees of intensity, to extend the principle of the majority to the faith and customs in order to ultimately ‘democratize’ the Church in a decisive way.  What does not seem obvious to the majority cannot be obligatory.”[28]  Then, he asks: “Which majority?” and who constitutes the “majority”? and will tomorrows “majority” be the same as todays? Ratzinger observes at this point: “A faith which we ourselves decide about is not a faith in absolute.  And no minority has any reason to let the faith be imposed on it by a majority.”[29]  Faith and practice either come from God through the Church and sacraments or they have no claim to bind anyone to anything.  One cannot pick and choose what is pleasing and convenient.  Jesus made that clear enough at the end of His Eucharistic discourse in John, chapter 6.  The hearers who could not accept that salvation would require eating his body and drinking his blood simply left his company.  He turned to Peter and the rest and asked “What about you, will you also go away?”  His teaching on the Eucharist was a non-negotiable, and there are other non-negotiable teachings where refusal to believe separates oneself from the Church.

Second: Cardinal Ratzinger turns to the liturgy and worries about the attitude that seems to believe that it can be changed arbitrarily.  Here there is a reflection of the desire for the unusual and ecstatic current in the New Age movement.  However, the liturgy is not ours.  It is the activity of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church.  The cries for change, and the locally induced changes, whether in the language of the liturgical celebrations or the addition or elimination of liturgical actions, are often done in what is called the ‘spirit of Vatican II’.  But, who determines this ‘spirit of Vatican II,’ when, where and in what circumstances are changes to be applied?  The Cardinal worries that those who claim to act in the ‘spirit of Vatican II’ are often people who misuse the Council’s teaching because they are not conversant with it.  He says: “We still have before us the task of communicating what the Council actually said to the Church at large and, beyond that, of developing its implications.”[30]  It is no exaggeration to charge that the documents of the Second Vatican Council have not yet been adequately studied and appropriated, a task that must come before any entry into its ‘spirit’ can be authentically attempted.

            Cardinal Ratzinger ends his address to the presidents of the doctrinal commission of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference with the hope that the Church will have a voice that will be heard in today’s world.  His concern is to alert believers to the filters of relativism that are so widely present in the conscious and sub-conscious attitudes of so many and even among the faithful.  Being alert to the mind-set of today believers will be in a better position to hear the voice of the Scriptures and Tradition.  While validly using the assets of modern biblical and historical criticism, but knowing their limitations, he hope that we will not lose sight of the fact that God’s “revelation is something alive, something greater and more; proper to it is the fact that it arrives and is perceived – otherwise it could not have become revelation…it is not separable from the living God, and it always requires a living person to whom it is communicated.  Its goal is always to gather and unite men, and this is why the Church is a necessary aspect of revelation.”[31]  The magisterium of the Church is not a burden but an asset.  When it speaks to those who believe that the teaching authority of the church is guided by the Holy Spirit, the benefit of security in truth attends the act of believing.