George Weigel, som har skrevet en stor biografi om Johannes Paul II, og er ‘senior fellow’ ved ‘the Ethics and Public Policy Centre’ i Washington DC, skriver i britiske The CatholicHerald en lang og interessant artikkel om pave Benedikt som lærer. Her skriver han bl.a.: Here is a master-teacher, distilling decades of research and reflection into a body of truths that he manages to convey in language and imagery accessible to those untrained in theology and philosophy – which is to say, to the overwhelming majority of the human race. The enormous crowds at his general audience addresses testify to the hunger for truth which Pope Benedict has touched.
Weigel nevner her også boka ‘Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures’, der pave Benedikt distils a lifetime of reflection on the relationship between faith and reason, and on the cultural consequences of a collapse of both faith and reason, into a challenge of prime importance for the entire world – but especially for Europe, in its current crisis of civilisational morale.
I denne boka organiserer paven sine argumenter om kulturens krise i flere hovedpunkter, og Weigel nevner fire av disse som de viktigste:
Proposition 1: We live in a moment of dangerous imbalance in the relationship between the West’s technological capabilities and the West’s moral understanding.
Proposition 2: The moral and political lethargy we sense in much of Europe today is one by-product of Europe’s disdain for the Christian roots of its unique civilisation, a disdain which has contributed in various ways to the decline of what was once the centre of world culture and world-historical initiative.
Proposition 3: The abandonment of Europe’s Christian roots implies the abandonment of the idea of “Europe” as a civilisational enterprise constructed from the fruitful interaction of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome. This infidelity to the past has led, in turn, to a truncated idea of reason, and of the human capacity to know, however imperfectly, the truth of things, including the moral truth of things. There is a positivism shaping (and mis-shaping) much of Western thought today – a positivism that excludes all transcendent moral reference points from public life.
Proposition 4: The recovery of reason in the West would be facilitated by a reflection on the fact that the Christian concept of God as Logos helped shape the distinct civilisation of the West as a synthesis of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. If men and women have forgotten that they can, in fact, think their way through to the truth of things, that may have something to do with the European forgetfulness of God which Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn identified as the source of Europe’s 20th-century civilisational distress.
LES HELE ARTIKKELEN «Pave Benedikt XVI: en god lærer».
