Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David L. Schindler is Edouard Cardinal Gagnon Professor ofFundamental Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institutefor Studies on Marriage and Family at The CatholicUniversity of America, Washington DC.

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Ordering Love

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Preface...........................................................................................................................ixIntroduction: Ordering Love.......................................................................................................1"Keeping the World Awake to God": Benedict XVI in America.........................................................................19Cultural Implications of Religions in Public Life: Recuperating the Deeper Questions..............................................26The Dramatic Nature of Life: Liberal Societies and the Foundations of Human Dignity...............................................34Truth, Freedom, and Relativism in Western Democracies: Pope Benedict XVI's Contributions to Without Roots.........................53Civil Community Inside the Liberal State: Truth, Freedom, and Human Dignity.......................................................65Charity, Justice, and the Church's Activity in the World: A Reflection on Deus Caritas Est........................................133Does the Free Market Produce Free Persons?........................................................................................154Market Liberalism and an Economic Culture of Gift and Gratitude...................................................................166The Significance of World and Culture for Moral Theology: Veritatis Splendor and the Nature of the Body...........................219The Embodied Person as Gift and the Cultural Task in America......................................................................242Liturgy and the Integrity of Cosmic Order: The Theology of Alexander Schmemann....................................................288Living and Thinking Reality in Its Integrity: Originary Experience, God, and the Task of Education................................310Religion and Secularity in a Culture of Abstraction: On the Integrity of Space, Time, Matter, and Motion..........................328Modernity and the Nature of a Distinction: Balthasar's Ontology of Generosity.....................................................350The Given as Gift: Creation and Disciplinary Abstraction in Science...............................................................383The Anthropological Vision of Caritas in Veritate in Light of Economic and Cultural Life in the United States.....................430Index.............................................................................................................................450

Chapter One

For Pope Benedict XVI the main issue of our time, as it has been for all the saints and doctors of the Church down through the ages, is the memory of God and his centrality in our lives. Thus he asserts that the problems of the West can be traced finally to a forgetfulness of God. It is this question of God, of his presence or absence, that lies at the heart of the faith-reason problematic on which I have been asked especially to comment. My question is this: How does Benedict understand the task, as he puts it, of "keeping the world awake to God," and what does his understanding imply for America?

(1) Regarding God in America, the principal phenomena are two. On the one hand, as public opinion polls attest, God does not seem to be absent: the great majority of Americans continue to believe in God and indeed to give him an important place in their lives. And there is no need to doubt the sincerity of what people have recorded in these polls. In America the thesis that modernity brings with it secularism, or the death of God, therefore seems to be contradicted.

At the same time, equally pervasive in America is the view that the reality of God is not properly a matter of reason. However important it may be as a matter of inspiration, relation to God cannot be integrated into the logic of reason as exercised in the public life of the academy, politics, economics, or indeed morality. In short, the God who appears to be pervasively present in America remains absent to reason in what the culture considers reason's legitimate meaning. The God of believers appears to non-believers to be an arbitrary God who is a threat to the integrity of public argument.

(2) For Benedict, a God who is truly God must make a difference to everything all the time. Affirming the truth of Romans 1:20 that, since the creation of the world, God can be seen in the things he has made — and not only by believers — Benedict stresses that the question of God is inescapable. This indeed was one of the main (and often overlooked) points of his 2006 Regensburg lecture, whose burden was twofold: to insist, vis-à-vis the problems posed by some forms of Islam, that God is inherently reasonable; but to insist, at the same time, in relation to the West, that reason realizes its integrity only when it comes to terms with its constitutive or structural openness to God.

The whole of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI as it bears on culture and cosmos may be said to be centered on this basic fact that "I do not come from myself; rather, I come from another." What reason most basically is, therefore, is a dialogue with God: whatever the content of our conscious acts, we always speak at least implicitly about the reality of God and of our relation to him. No act of creaturely consciousness remains neutral or can remain silent with respect to the Creator.

It follows that the religious dimension of our existence can never be rightly understood as a merely voluntary, extra-rational, or private addition to the life of reason. What Benedict's work shows, in a word, is that the marriage of modernity and religion in America is a marriage between modernity and a religion already formed mostly in the reductive terms of a peculiarly modern — post-Puritan, post-Enlightenment — understanding of God, creation, and reason.

(3) Now it is important for Benedict, if he is not to fall into the kind of reductive religion of which he is critical, that he give reasons for this argument that are persuasive at least in principle to those who do not share his faith. To be sure, Benedict makes his proposal as a Catholic and hence as a theologian. Speaking from within his faith, he nevertheless offers a renewed interpretation of the conscience and the natural law that are common to all human beings, and in so doing makes also a philosophical claim that makes reasonable demands on all human beings. Regarding conscience: Benedict suggests that, to the traditional meaning of conscience as synderesis (moral awareness), we add, at an even more basic level, conscience as anamnesis (primitive recollection of God). Notably, Benedict makes this proposal also in terms of Socrates, who did not have the benefit of Christian revelation. Socrates witnessed by his life and argument that I become truly self-aware only by recalling in some primitive if unarticulated way the "more," stemming from the presence of a transcendent source, that is always implied in my self-awareness and is somehow more interior to me than I am to myself. This is so, Benedict says, because "the anamnesis of the Creator ... is identical to the ground of our existence."

Regarding natural law: Benedict has appealed often in his pontificate to natural law, but it is a version...