The Truth of Christianity

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The Truth of Christianity1

Joseph Ratzinger

At the end of the second millennium, Christianity finds itself in profound crisis in the very place of itsoriginal dissemination, in Europe. It is a crisis caused by doubt of its claim to the truth. This crisis has a dualdimension: the first increasingly insistent question is whether it is right, in the final analysis, to apply the notion

of truth to religion; in other words, whether it is within mans power to know the truth in the strict sense aboutGod and things divine. Contemporary man feels much more at home with the Buddhist parable of the elephantand the blind man. A king of northern India once gathered all the blind people of the city together. Then, hehad an elephant led in front of them. He let some touch the head and said: This is an elephant. Others wereable to touch the ears or the tusks, the trunk, its back, its foot, its flanks, the hairs on its tail. Then the kingasked each one: What is an elephant like?. And, depending on which part they had touched, they replied: Itslike a woven basket, its like a vase, its like the wooden handle of a plough, its like a

warehouse, its like a pillar, its like a brush. At that point, the parable goes on, they start arguing andshouting: The elephants like that, No, its not. And they attacked one another and fists flew to the kingsgreat amusement. To todays men, this dispute among religions is like this dispute among men born blind. For,

we were born blind to the mystery of God, it seems. Modern thinking does not see Christianity as being in amore favorable position than the others. On the contrary, because of its claim to truth, it seems to be

particularly blind to the limitation of all the knowledge we have of the divine and is characterized by aparticularly insensate fanaticism which incorrigible assumes that its own specific experience is everything.

This generalized skepticism towards the claim to truth in the religious area is further supported by thequestions that modern science has raised about the origins and content of Christianity. The evolutionist theoryseems to have overtaken the doctrine of the creation, knowledge concerning the origin of man seems to haveovertaken the doctrine of original sin; exegetical criticism relativizes the figure of Jesus and questions his filialconscience; the origin of the Church in Jesus appears in doubt and so on. The end of metaphysics hasrendered the philosophy of Christianity problematical and modern historical methods have trained an ambiguouslight on its historical bases. It is therefore easy to reduce the Christian content to symbols, not to attribute anymore truth to them than to the myths of the history of religions, to see them as religious experience whichshould humbly take its place beside the others. In this sense one may still or so it seems be a Christian;

expressive forms of Christianity are always used but its claim is radically changed: that truth which had been anobliging force for man and a reliable promise is now a cultural expression of the general religious sensibility, anobvious expression for us because we are European in origin.

At the beginning of this century, Ernst Troeltsch offered a philosophical and theological description ofthis, Christianitys retreat from its originally universal claim that could only be founded on the claim to truth. Hehad arrived at the conviction that cultures are insuperable and that religion is bound to cultures. Christianity isonly therefore the side of Gods face turned to Europe. The particular characteristics bound to culture andraces and the characteristics of its great religious formations which embrace a wider context rise to theultimate level: Who would dare to make any categorical value judgment on the point? Thats something onlyGod himself may do, he who is at the origin of these differences. A man born blind knows that he was notborn to be blind and so he will never stop asking himself why he is blind and how to be cured. Only apparently

is a man resigned to the verdict of being born blind when faced with his lot, with the only reality which counts,

1Conference 2000 Years After What?, University of Sorbonne, Paris, November 27, 1999
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ultimately, in our lives. The titanic attempt to take possession of the whole world, to extract everything possiblefrom our lives and for our lives, like the explosion of a cult of ecstasy, transgression and self-destruction, showsthat man does not content himself with such a judgment. For, if he does not know whence he came and why heexists, is eh in all his being not an unfulfilled creature? The apparently indifferent farewell to the truth aboutGod and the essence of our I, the apparent satisfaction at not having to worry about any of this any more,deceives. Man cannot be resigned to being and remaining a man born blind as far as the essential things are

concerned. The farewell to the truth cannot ever be definitive.Things being what they are, the old-fashioned question of the truth of Christianity must be raised again,however, superfluous and unfathomable it may seem to some people. But why? Certainly and without the fearof leaving itself exposed, Christian theology will have to make a thorough examination of the various points thatthe fields of philosophy, modern sciences and natural history have raised to counter Christianitys claim to thetruth. But it must also develop an all-round vision of the problem of Christianitys authentic essence, its place inthe history of religions and its place in human life. I would like to move in this direction, highlighting how, at itsorigins in the kosmos of the religions, Christianity conceived of this claim it makes.

As far as I know, there is no Christian text of antiquity as enlightening of the question as Augustinesdiscussion with the religious philosophy of the most erudite of Romans, Marcus Terentius Varro (116-27BC).

Varro shared the stoic image of God and the world; he defined God as animam motu ac ratione mundumgubernantem (as the soul that holds up the world through movement and reason); in other words, as the soul ofthe world that the Greeks call kosmos: hunc ipsum mundum esse deum. This soul of the world, however, is not

worshipped. It is not the object of religio. In other words: truth and religion, does not belong to the order ofthe res, of reality as such, but to that of mores morals. It was not the gods who created the State but the State

which instituted the gods whose veneration is essential for the State order and for the proper behavior of itscitizens. Religion is, in essence a political phenomenon. Varro thus distinguishes three types of theology,

which he took to mean ratio, quae de diis explicatur and which we might translate as comprehension andexplanation of the divine. They are theologia mythica, theologia civilis and theologia naturalis. Offering fourdefinitions, he then explains the meaning to take from these theologies. The first definition refers to the threetheologians associated with these three theologies: the theologians of mythical theology are the poets becausethey have composed songs about the gods and are therefore singers of divinity. The theologians of the physical

theology (natural) are the philosophers, or the erudite, the thinkers who, going further than usual, wonder aboutreality, about truth; the theologians of civil theology are the peoples who have chosen not to join with thephilosophers (with the truth) but with the poets, with their poetic visions, with their imagery and theirrepresentations.

The second definition regards the places associated with each theology. The theater corresponds tomythical theology and it did have a religious and worshipful rank; according to public opinion, spectacles wereinstituted in Rome by order of the gods. The urbs corresponds to political theology while space of naturaltheology is the kosmos.

The third definition outlines the content of the three theologies: the mythical theology is made of fablesabout the gods, written by the poets; the theology of State, worship; natural theology is said to respond to the

question about who the gods are. It is worthwhile paying more attention here: If as in Eraclitus they (thegods) are made of fire or as in Pythagoras of numbers, or as in Epicurus of atoms and other things easieron the ear within the school walls than outside in the public square, then it could not be clearer that this naturaltheology removes the myth, or rather, it is rationality to an extent that looks critically at what is behind themythical faade dissolving it through scientific-natural knowledge. Worship and knowledge prove to be separateone from the other. Worship remains necessary while it is a question of political utility; knowledge has adestructive effect on religion and should therefore not be aired in the public square.

Then there is a fourth definition. Of what kind of reality is the content of the various theologies made?Varros answer is this: natural theologys concern is the nature of the gods (which do not really exist) while theother two theologies address the divina instituta hominum; the divine institutions of men. The consequence isthat the whole difference is reduced to the difference between physics as it was meant in ancient times and the

worshipful religion of the other contender. Civil theology has no god at all in the final analysis, just religion;natural theology has no religion, just a divinity. Of course, it cannot have any religion because the word inreligious terms cannot be addressed to its god (fire, number, atoms). Thus religio (a word essentially designating


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worship) and reality, the rational knowledge of reality, appear as two separate spheres, one beside the other.Religio does not draw its justification from the reality of the divine but from its political function. It is aninstitution of which the State has need in order to exist.

Undoubtedly, religion finds itself in a late phase, in which the ingenuousness of the religious attitude isshattered and its dissolution grafted on. But religions essential bond with the State order penetrates decisively

and much more deeply. Worship is, ultimately, a positive order which, as such, cannot be commensurate withthe problem of truth. While Varro in his time, when the political function of religion was still sufficiently strong,could still justify it as such by defending a rather crude conception of rationality and of the absence of truth inpolitically motivated worship, neo-Platonism would soon seek another way out of the crisis which would thenserve as the basis for the Emperor Julianus efforts to re-establish the Roman religion of State. What the poetssay is imagery not to be intended in the physical sense, are nevertheless images that express the inexpressible forall men whose main road to mystical union is barred. Although they are not true as such, the images are justifiedas a means to something which must always remain inexpressible.

The above anticipates something we will now go on to say. The neo-Platonic position, in its turn, isalready a reaction to the Christian position on the question of the Christian foundation of worship and the placeof the faith at its base in the typology of religions. Lets go back to Augustine. Where does he situate

Christianity in the Varronian triad of religions? The amazing thing is that without the minimum hesitation,Augustine sets Christianity in the sphere of physical theology, in the sphere of philosophical rationality, intherefore perfect continuity with Christianitys first theologians, the Apologists of the second century, and withthe position Paul gives Christianity in the first chapter of his Letter to the Romans which, for its part, is based onthe Old Testament theology of Wisdom and dates, going beyond it, to the Psalm which scorn the gods. In thisperspective, Christianity has its precursors of and its preparation in philosophical rationality, not in religions.

According to Augustine and biblical tradition which for him is law, Christianity is based not at all on images andmythical presentiment whose justification is ultimately found in their political utility; rather, it makes appeal tothe divine which may be perceived in any rational analysis of reality. In other words, Augustine identifies biblicalmonotheism with philosophical visions of the foundation of the world that took various shapes in ancientphilosophy. This is what is intended when Christianity, starting with the Pauline discourse of the Areopagus,presents itself with its claim of being the religio vera. It means that the Christian faith is not based on poetry and

politics, these two great sources of religion, but on knowledge. It venerates the Being at the foundation ofeverything that exists, the true God. In Christianity, rationality became religion and was no longer itsadversary. For that to happen, for Christianity to see itself as the victory of myth-removal, the victory ofknowledge and, with that, of truth, it had to consider itself as universal and be brought to all the peoples, not as aspecific religion repressing others by virtue of a type of religious imperialism but as the truth which renders theapparent superfluous. And it is that which, despite the wide-ranging tolerance of polytheisms, must have beenintolerable, but must have been seen as an enemy of religion, even as atheism. It was not founded on therelativity and on the convertibility of images. So, above all, it disturbed the political utility of religions and it thusundermined the foundations of the State in which it did not wish to be a religion among the others but the

victory of intelligence over that world of religions.

It is also true that Christianitys force of penetration derives from this, its position in the kosmos of

religion and philosophy. Already before the Christian mission began, some learned circles in antiquity hadsought in the figure of the God-fearing a bond with the Judaic faith which appeared to them to be a religiousrepresentation of philosophical monotheism corresponding to the demands of reason and, at the same time, tothe religious needs of man, a need which philosophy on its own could not satisfy: one does not pray to a godthat is only pondered. But wherever the God found in thought lets himself be known at the heart of religion as aGod who speaks and acts, thinking and faith are reconciled.

In that bond with the synagogue, there was still something that did not satisfy: for, the non-Jew wasalways an outsider, could never arrive at total membership. This node was unravelled in Christianity by thefigure of Christ, as Paul interprets it. Only then did Judaisms religious monotheism become universal and thusthe possibility to unify thinking and faith, the religio vera, became accessible to all.

Justin the philosopher, Justin the martyr (167) could serve as an emblem of this access in Christianity.He had studied all the philosophies and, in the end, he recognized the true philosophy in Christianity. He wasconvinced that, by becoming Christian, he had not denied philosophy, but that only then had he truly become a


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philosopher. The conviction that Christianity is a philosophy, the perfect philosophy, the one that was able topenetrate as far as the truth, would remain for a long time after the Patristic age. It was still totally current in the14th century in Nicolas Cabasilas Byzantine theology. Philosophy here does not certainly mean an academicdiscipline of a purely theoretical nature but also and above all something practical, like the art of living well anddying well which can only happen in the light of the truth.

The union of rationality and faith wrought through the development of the Christian mission and in theconstruction of Christian theology led, however, to some decisive corrections being made to the philosophicalimage of God, two of which we must mention. The first is that the God in whom Christians believe and whomthey venerate is really natura Deus unlike the mythical and political gods; this satisfies the need for philosophicalrationality. But at the same time the other aspect holds, too: non tamen omnis natura est Deus not everythingthat is nature is God. God is God by his nature but nature as such is not God. A separation is created betweenthe universal nature and the Being who establishes it, who gives it its origin. Only then do the physical andmetaphysical arrive at a clear distinction one from the other. Only the true God that we can recognize in naturethrough thinking is the object of prayer. But he is more than nature. He preceeds it. It is his creature. To thisseparation between nature and God is added a second discovery more decisive still: one could not pray to god,nature, soul of the world or whatever it was; we have noted that these were not religious gods. Now, and thisis what the faith of the Old Testament is already saying through the New Testament more so, this God who

preceeds nature addressed himself to men. He is not a silent God for the very reason that he is not just nature.He entered into history. He came forward to encounter man and so man may now encounter him. He may nowbind himself to God because God bound himself to man; the two dimensions of religion, which had always beenseparate one from the other eternally dominant nature and mans need of salvation, man who suffers andstruggles are now bound one with the other. Rationality can become religion because the God of rationalityhimself entered into religion. The element that the faith claims as its own, the historical Word of God is, in fact,the presupposition for religion now to address the philosophical god, no longer a purely philosophical God butone who, rather than shunning knowledge of philosophy, assumes it. Here an amazing thing emerges: the twofundamental and apparently contrasting principles of Christianity the bond with metaphysics and the bond

with history condition each other and relate to one another; together, they constitute Christianitys apologia asreligio vera.

If, then, it may be said that Christianitys victory over the pagan religions was made possible not least byits claim to reasonableness, we should add that there is a second no less important reason for this. Primarily andin totally general terms, it lies in Christianitys moral seriousness, this being a characteristic, after all, that Paul hadset in the same relation to the reasonableness of the Christian faith: everything to which the law basically aspires,the essential need highlighted by the Christian faith, for a sole God for the life of man, corresponds to all thatman, every man has written in his heart so that when it presents itself to him he recognizes it as Good. Itcorresponds to everything that is good by innate sense (Romans 2, 14ff). The allusion to stoic morals, to itsethical interpretation of nature is manifest here as it is manifest in other Pauline texts, in the Letter to thePhilippians, for example (Philippians 4, 8: Let your minds be filled with everything that is true, everything that ishonorable, everything that is upright and pure, everything that we love and admire with whatever is good andpraiseworthy).

Thus, the fundamental (albeit critical) unity with philosophical rationality present in the notion of God isconfirmed and takes concrete form now in the unity, also critical, with philosophical morals. Just as in thereligious field, Christianity surpassed the limitations of a school of philosophical wisdom for the very fact thatthe God of thought allowed himself to be encountered like a living God, so too here there was a surpassing ofthe ethical theory: it became a moral praxis, lived as a community and rendered concrete in which thephilosophical perspective was transcended to become real action, especially because of the concentration of allmorals in the twofold commandment to love God and others. Christianity, it might be said more simply, wasconvincing because of faiths bond with reason and because action was oriented to caritas, to caring for thesuffering, for the poor and weak independently of social or circumstantial differences. That this was the innateforce of Christianity is reflected in the way the Emperor Julian tried to re-establish paganism in a new form. He,pontifex maximus of the re-established religion of the ancient gods, set to instituting a pagan hierarchy of priestsand metropolitans that had never existed before. The priests had to be models of morality; they had to dedicate

themselves to the love of god (the supreme divinity among the gods). They were obliged to carry out acts ofcharity for the poor. They were no longer allowed to read licentious plays and erotic books and they had topreach on feast days on a philosophical argument such as to instruct and form the people. Teresio Bosco says


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rightly on this point that, in so doing, the emperor was not trying to re-establish paganism but to Christianize it his synthesis limited to worship of the gods, of rationality and religion.

Looking back, we might say that the force which transformed Christianity into a world religion lay in itsown synthesis of reason, faith, life. And it is none other than this synthesis that is summarized in the expressionreligio vera. All the more reason then, to pose the question: Why is this synthesis no longer convincing today?

Why, conversely, are rationality and Christianity considered contradictory and even mutually preclusive today?What has changed in the matter of rationality? What has changed in Christianity?

Once Neo-Platonism, in particular Porphyrius, countered the Christian synthesis with anotherinterpretation of the relationship between philosophy and religion, an interpretation intended to givephilosophical foundation once more to the polytheist religion. Today it is none other than this way ofharmonizing religion and rationality that is striving to prevail as the best form of religious sense for the modernconscience.

Porphyrius formulated his first basic notion thus: Latet omne verum the truth is hidden. Here, weshould remember the parable of the elephant in which, clearly, the Buddhist and Neo-Platonic conception meet,in that there can be no certainty about the truth, about God; they can only be matters of opinion. During the

crisis in Rome in the late fourth century, the senator Symmachus the mirror image of Varro and of his theoryof religion related the Neo-Platonic conception to a few simple, pragmatic formulas which we find in hisspeech in the year 384 before the Emperor Valentinianus II in defense of paganism and in favor of re-establishing the goddess Victory in the Roman Senate. I cite only the phrase which became famous: We all

venerate the exact same thing, we all think the same thing, we contemplate the same stars, there is only oneheaven above us and we are surrounded by the same world; of what matter are the different types of wisdom by

which each one of us seeks the truth? We cannot get to the heart of such a great mystery in only one way.

This is precisely what todays rationality sustains: we do not know the truth as such; by means of themost disparate images we are aiming at the same thing. Such a great mystery, the divine, cannot be reduced to asingle figure to the preclusion of all the others, one way only for everyone. There are many ways, there are manyimages and they all reflect something of the all but no single one of them reflects the all. The ethos of

tolerance belongs to those who recognize a part of the truth in each of these, of those who do not set their ownhigher than the others but who serenely join the polymorphous symphony of the eternally Innaccessible. Inreality, it hides behind symbols but these symbols seem nevertheless to be our only possibility of arriving at thedivinity in a sense.

So is Christianitys claim to be the religio vera superceded by rationalitys progress? Is it therefore forcedto lower the level of its claims and to enter into the Neo-Platonic or Buddhist or Hindu vision of truth andsymbol, to content itself, as Ernst Troeltsch proposed, with showing the part of Gods face turned to Europe?Must we go one step ahead of Troeltsch, who continued to consider Christianity the religion suited to Europe,given that Europe itself today doubts that religions suitability? That is the real question which the Church todayand theology must address. All the crises within Christianity that we see today have only their secondary root ininstitutional problems.

The problems of the institutions and of individuals in the Church ultimately derive from this questionand from the enormous weight it brings to bear. No one at the end of the second Christian millennium wouldeven remotely expect to find the definitive answer to this in a conference. There can be no purely theoreticalanswers, none at all, just as religion as mans ultimate attitude, is never just a theory. It demands a combinationof knowledge and action and it was on this that the persuasive force of the Fathers Christianity rested.

This does not mean that we can ignore in any way the urgency of the problem from the intellectual pointof view by relegating it to procedure. I will merely seek, in closing, to suggest an orientation hopefully in theright direction. We have seen that the original unity of the relationship while not fully acquired betweenrationality and faith, to which Thomas Aquinas ultimately gave systematic form, was lacerated less by thedevelopment of the faith than by rationalitys progress. As steps along the way of this mutual separation, one

could cite Descartes, Spinoza, Kant. The new englobing synthesis that Hegel attempts does not restore faith toits philosophical place but tends to convert it into reason and eliminate it as faith. This rendering absolute of the


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spirit is countered by Marx with the exclusiveness of matter: philosophy must then be taken back to the realmsof exact science. Only exact scientific knowledge is knowledge. And that dispenses with the idea of the divine.

Auguste Comtes prophecy left a remarkable echo in our century, in the human sciences, when he saidthat, just as everything that today is positive science, one day there would be a physics of man and the greatquestions left until then to metaphysics would be addressed positively in the future to that. The separation

between physics and metaphysics wrought by Christian thinking is increasingly abandoned. All must becomephysics once again.

The evolutionist theory became crystallized as the road to metaphysics definitive elimination, renderingthe hypothesis of God (Laplace) superfluous and formulating a strictly scientific explanation of the world.

An evolutionist theory that offers an englobing explanation of all reality has become a sort of primephilosophy that represents, so to speak, the authentic foundation of any rational understanding of the world.Every attempt to bring causes into play that differed from those elaborated by a positive theory, every attemptat metaphysics necessarily appears to be a relapse on reasons part, the decline of sciences universal claim.Even the Christian idea of God is necessarily seen as non-scientific. This idea finds no further correspondencein any theologia physica: the only theologia naturalis is in this vision the evolutionist doctrine and it knows noGod and no Creator in the Christian sense (or in the Jewish or Islamic sense). And it knows no soul of the

world or interior dynamism in the sense of Stoicism. One could eventually, in the Buddhist sense, consider thewhole world as a faade and nothing as authentic reality and thus justify the mystical forms of religion which arenot in direct competition at least with reason.

So has the last word been said? Are reason and Christianity thus definitively separated one from theother? However things stand, the portent of the evolutionist doctrine is not in doubt as prime philosophy andthe exclusive nature of the positive method as the only type of science and rationality. Both sides should embarkon this discussion with serenity and willingness to listen, something which has only happened in a minor way sofar. No one could seriously doubt the scientific evidence of the micro-evolutionary processes: Reinhard Junkerand Siegfried Scherer say on this point in their Kritisches Lehrbuch on evolution: These phenomena [micro-evolutionary processes] are well known principally as natural processes of variation and formation. Thatevolutionary biology examined them led to some significant knowledge being acquired on the living systems

amazing capacity for adaptation. They say that one can rightly characterize research into origins as biologyssupreme discipline. The question that a believer may ask when faced with modern reason is not about this, butabout the spread of a philosophia universalis which aims at becoming a general explanation for reality and whichtends not to allow any other level of thought. Within this same evolutionist doctrine the problem presents itselfon passing from micro- to macro-evolution, a transition on which Szamarthy and Maynard Smith, bothsupporters of a revised evolutionary theory, also concede: There are no theoretical reasons for thinking thatevolutionary lines increase in complexity through time; there is not even any empirical proof that this happens.

The question now goes deeper: it is a matter of knowing if the evolutionist doctrine has the power topresent itself as a universal theory of all reality, beyond which any ulterior questions about the origin and natureof things are no longer justified or necessary; or of establishing whether ultimate questions of that kind do notbeyond the field of pure scientific research. Let me put the question to you in a more concrete way. Does an

answer such as we find in the following formulation by Popper really tell us everything? Life as we know itconsists in physical bodies (better: in processes and structures) which resolve problems; the various species havelearned that through natural selection, that is, through the method of reproduction plus variations method

which in its turn was learned using the same method. It is regression but it is not infinite . . .. I think not. Inthe final analysis, it is an alternative that can no longer simply be resolved either at the level of the naturalsciences or even by philosophy. It is a question of knowing if reason, or rationality, is found or not at thebeginning of all things and at their creation. It is a question of knowing if reality is born by chance and necessity(or, as Popper would say, in agreement with Butler, of luck and cunning, and therefore of something withoutreason; if, in other words, reason is a chance marginal product of irrationality, ultimately a drop in the ocean ofirrationality, or does the fundamental conviction of the Christian faith and its philosophy still hold true: Inprincipio erat Verbum in the beginning of all things was the creating force of reason. The Christian faith todayas in the past is the option for the priority of reason and rationality. This ultimate question can no longer, as we

said, be resolved by arguments drawn from the natural sciences. Even philosophical thinking is blocked here. Inthis sense, there is no ultimate proof of the fundamental Christian option. But can reason ultimately and withoutdenying itself renounce the priority of the rational over the irrational, the Logos as the prime principle? The


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hermeneutical model offered by Popper, which appears in other different forms in other presentations of theprime philosophy, shows that reason can but ponder even the irrational by degree and it can do so rationally(solving problems and elaborating methods!), thus implicitly re-establishing the very primacy of reason that is socontested. With its option on the primacy of reason, Christianity is still rationality today and I think that arationality which dispenses with this option would, contrary to what it might seem, necessarily mean notevolution but the involution of rationality.

We have seen that, in the conception of early Christianity, the notions of nature, man, God, ethos andreligion were indissolubly linked one with the other and that it was this bond that helped Christianity to see its

way clearly through the crisis of the gods and the crisis of rationality in antiquity. Religions orientation towardsa rational vision of reality, the ethos as part of this vision and its concrete application under the primacy of love,are all associated one with the other. The primacy of the Logos and the primacy of love proved to be identical.

The Logos no longer appeared as mere mathematical reason at the basis of all things but as creating love to thepoint of compassion for the creature. The cosmic dimension of religion that venerates the Creator in the powerof Being and existential dimension, the question of redemption penetrated each other and became one. Inpractice, any explanation of reality that cannot in any sensible and comprehensive way establish an ethos mustalways be insufficient. Now, it is a fact that when the evolutionary theory risks expanding and becoming aphilosophia universalis, it is trying to establish a new ethos on the basis of evolution. But this evolutionary

ethos, which inexorably finds its key notion in the model of selection and, therefore in the struggle for survival,in the survival of the fittest, in successful adaptation, has little of comfort to offer. Even when effort is made tomake it more palatable in various ways, it is always, ultimately, a cruel ethos. Any effort to distill rationality froma basis of reality insensate in itself is a failure and spectacularly so. None of this is of much help to us in ourneed: for the ethics of universal peace, of effective love of others and the necessity we have to go beyond thedetail.

The attempt in this crisis of humanity to restore a comprehensible meaning to the notion of Christianityas religio vera must, so to speak, look equally to orthopraxis and orthodoxy. At the deeper level its content mustconsist in the fact today as always in the final analysis that love and reason coincide in that they arefundamental pillars proper of reality: true reason is love and love is true reason. In their unity they are theauthentic foundation and purpose of reality.

From: Joseph Ratzinger, "Christianity. The Victory of Intelligence over the World of Religions",English text in 30 Days, n. 1/2000, pp. 33-44.

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