PETER JONKERS
In a much-quoted passage, John Rawls formulates the guiding question of Political Liberalism as follows: “How is it possible for those affirming a religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example, the Church or the Bible, also to hold a reasonable political conception that supports a just democratic regime?”1 In this chapter I want to evaluate Rawls’s answer to this question by comparing it with that offered by the former head of the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI.2 This comparison is illuminating in three ways. First, Pope Benedict was not only an outstanding intellectual with strong opinions about, among many other things, the role of religion in the public sphere, but as the highest authority in the Catholic Church, he also defined the Church’s official position in this debate. Second, he defined the reasonable apologia of Christian faith in the secular world as one of the most important priorities of his pontificate. He therefore did not limit himself to preaching to the converted, but wished to discuss the Church’s position on these issues with the world at large in a critical and yet constructive way. In particular, when he addressed a secular audience he consistently defended the Catholic position as far as possible on the basis of reasonable, rather than strictly theological, arguments.3 This approach makes it methodically feasible to compare his position with Rawls’s political liberalism. Finally, Pope Benedict’s position presents a fascinating case for examining Rawls’s claim that reasonable comprehensive doctrines should endorse his idea of political liberalism. Roman Catholicism is clearly a “comprehensive doctrine” in Rawls’s sense. But can Pope Benedict be expected to answer Rawls’s guiding question positively, and if not, does he have good reasons for his refusal?
Pope Benedict’s basic answer is that, although modern principles of political freedom, democracy, equality, and reasonable argument are to be affirmed, a free state rests on “pre-political moral foundations,” which serve as normative points of reference for every regime and must be held in common by all religions and secular worldviews.4 This answer reflects the fact that Pope Benedict disagrees with Rawls on at least two fundamental issues, which constitute the core of the debate between them and to which I shall refer regularly in the course of my analysis. In the first place, Pope Benedict does not share Rawls’s trust in fundamental human reasonableness as a guarantee for political fairness. For Rawls, persons are reasonable when “they are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so. Those norms they view as reasonable for everyone to accept and therefore as justifiable to them; and they are ready to discuss the fair terms that others propose.”5 This idea of reasonableness informs the whole project of Rawls’s political liberalism, because “the form and content of this reason … are part of the idea of democracy itself.”6 In contrast, Pope Benedict, although consistently stressing the importance of reason in all human affairs, is much more pessimistic about Rawls’s claim that human beings, who are always children of their own time and cultural situation, are reasonable enough to provide the general principles or standards that are necessary for specifying fair cooperation. The kernel of his first disagreement with Rawls therefore concerns whether reason has this capacity—as Rawls tries to show with, for instance, his distinction between the reasonable and the rational7—or rather risks being merely a social or inherently ethnocentric construction, such that it cannot provide such general standards and reasonable consensus is unfeasible, as Pope Benedict argues.8 Pope Benedict’s pessimism about the plausibility of reason’s universality and impartiality leads him to refer to notions like “intrinsic truth” and “goodness” as necessary referents for reason, and as offering fundamental norms underlying reasonable political consensus.
This brings me to the second point of disagreement between Pope Benedict and Rawls. Rawls wishes to exclude views on intrinsic truth and goodness from political philosophy because they introduce transcendent, or metaphysical, notions that cannot be reasonably examined. Religious comprehensive doctrines rest on religious authority, while metaphysics presents itself as a pseudo-rational kind of knowledge about supersensible things. But, like many other contemporary philosophers, Rawls puts metaphysics (represented paradigmatically by Plato and Aristotle) on a par with the Christian tradition (represented by Augustine and Aquinas) by interpreting them both as claiming “that there is but one reasonable and rational conception of the good.”9 Because of the transcendent and hence dogmatic character of Christian and metaphysical ideas about the true and the good, Rawls insists on distinguishing political liberalism as clearly as possible from religious and metaphysical conceptions of justice. For Pope Benedict, by contrast, it is essential to hold to the ideas of intrinsic truth and goodness as a prepolitical normativity, not because they are God’s commandments, but because they are exemplifications of the rationality that inheres in the world, such that they are the only true general standards for fair cooperation and justice. From this perspective he poses some crucial questions to Rawls and others who place reasonable consensus at the basis of a democratic polity. For example, he asks, “the consensus of whom?” and “what is reasonable? how is reason shown to be true?” as well as asking “whether there is something … that is antecedent to every majority decision and must be respected by all such decisions.”10
Despite these two major divergences, Pope Benedict and Rawls implicitly agree on a crucial point, namely, the reasonableness of reason. In particular, in this regard both refer to Kant’s idea of a reasonable faith, according to which faith is never solely reason’s belief in its own capacities, but is also the belief that reasonableness is inherent in reality itself. This congruence between Pope Benedict’s and Rawls’s views is rarely noted by commentators, but I will attempt to show that it constitutes the essence of debates over what makes a polity just and, hence, humane.11
The structure of my chapter is the following. I shall begin by discussing the issues of (non)public reason and justification that are the major points of disagreement between Pope Benedict and Rawls. Then, in the second section, I will turn to Pope Benedict’s idea of wisdom as an alternative common ground for political life. In the third section I will discuss the enigmatic issue of a philosophical faith in reason. In the following section, I will comment on Pope Benedict’s and Rawls’s divergent ideas about reasonable pluralism. I will conclude by briefly pointing out the resulting aporia, one that underlies a great deal of contemporary political thinking and for which neither Rawls nor Pope Benedict has a convincing solution.
REASONABLE JUSTIFICATION IN POLITICS
As my point of departure, I take the speech that Pope Benedict prepared to give at the “La Sapienza” University of Rome in January 2008, and in which he gives a short, interesting response to Rawls’s philosophical project.12 From the beginning of the lecture, he addresses the tricky question of whether he, as pope, has anything meaningful to say to a secular audience. His basic answer is that the Church, whose history, example, and message inevitably influence the entire human community, is “increasingly becoming a voice for the ethical reasoning of humanity.”13 Of course, Pope Benedict realizes that to this it will be objected that he “draws his judgments from faith and hence cannot claim to speak on behalf of those who do not share this faith.” But he defends himself by referring approvingly to Rawls, who, he writes, while “denying that comprehensive religious doctrines have the character of ‘public’ reason, nonetheless at least sees their ‘non-public’ reason as one which cannot simply be dismissed by those who maintain a rigidly secularized rationality, because these doctrines derive from a responsible and well-thought-out tradition in which, over lengthy periods, satisfactory arguments have been developed in support of the doctrines concerned.”14 Thus, surprisingly perhaps, Pope Benedict borrows an argument from the liberal thinker Rawls to criticize rigidly secularized rationality for its parochiality and, paradoxically, to reverse the standard Enlightenment objection to religion.
Although this passage shows that Pope Benedict appreciates Rawls’s definition of religious traditions as reasonable comprehensive doctrines, it should not obscure the differences between Pope Benedict’s and Rawls’s conceptions of (non)public reason and justification. Regarding the idea of reasonableness, Pope Benedict interprets Rawls as acknowledging “that down through the centuries, experience and demonstration—the historical source of human wisdom—are also a sign of its reasonableness and enduring significance. … Humanity’s wisdom—the wisdom of the great religious traditions—should be valued as a heritage that cannot be cast with impunity into the dustbin of the history of ideas.”15 Certainly, Pope Benedict would agree with Rawls’s claim that “the roots of democratic citizens’ allegiance to their political conceptions lie in their respective comprehensive doctrines.”16 But by defining the great religious traditions as expressions of “humanity’s wisdom,” and by interpreting their long-standing experience and demonstrative capacities in existential issues as a sign of their reasonableness as such, Pope Benedict makes clear that he does not accept Rawls’s distinction between public and nonpublic reason. At the end of his speech, he even states that “the history of the saints, the history of the humanism that has grown out of the Christian faith, demonstrates the truth of this faith in its essential nucleus, thereby giving it a claim upon public reason.” This leads him to conclude that “the message of the Christian faith is never solely a ‘comprehensive religious doctrine’ in Rawls’s sense, but is a purifying force for reason, helping it to be more fully itself. On the basis of its origin, the Christian message should always be an encouragement towards truth, and thus a force against the pressure exerted by power and interests.”17 Pope Benedict’s basic reason for this statement is that for Christianity, as a religion of the Logos, the world comes from reason, such that reason is the world’s criterion and goal.18 On the grounds that the particular tradition he represents participates in the universal reasonableness of God’s creation, therefore, Pope Benedict claims the right to participate in the ethical reasoning of our time, and this not only at the level of nonpublic reason, but also, and more importantly, at that of public reason proper.
This also reveals that Pope Benedict understands public justification in a very different way from Rawls. For Rawls, “public justification is not simply valid reasoning, but argument addressed to others: it proceeds correctly from premises we accept and think others could reasonably accept to conclusions we think they could also reasonably accept.”19 Regarding this process of reasonable justification of comprehensive doctrines, he insists that “there are no restrictions or requirements on how religious or secular doctrines are themselves to be expressed; these doctrines need not, for example, be by some standards logically correct, or open to rational appraisal, or evidentially supportable.”20 However, for the “proviso” to be fulfilled—that is, for the nonpublic justifications of comprehensive doctrines to become truly political justifications, based on public reason—the reasonableness of these doctrines must depend on the reason that those who present the justification of their doctrines share with those to whom these justifications are addressed, and this reasonableness is primarily to be decided not by the former group, but by the latter.
Rawls’s idea of public justification denies that religious traditions may participate in this process as long as they have not fulfilled the proviso. In opposition to this, as I have shown, Pope Benedict first argues that comprehensive doctrines (both religious and secular) are actually part of public reason, such that they must always already have satisfied Rawls’s proviso. Second, Pope Benedict takes the normativity of these doctrines to have priority over the idea of overlapping consensus. His basic reason for this is that he understands these doctrines as traditions of wisdom with long histories as purifying forces for reason, particularly with respect to the partial rationality of interest groups. Hence, these traditions not only can but also should participate in the process of ethical reasoning. The upshot of these two arguments is that Pope Benedict proposes the notion of wisdom as a normative point of reference for consensus and hence as an alternative common ground for public justification.
It is important to note that Pope Benedict’s reasons for adopting this position are philosophical rather than religious, although his philosophical frame of reference is clearly at odds with Rawls’s. Nonetheless, it is also worth examining some of the theological reasons for this aspect of Pope Benedict’s disagreement with Rawls, and how they compare with Rawls’s own views on theology. In his autobiographical essay “On My Religion,” Rawls explains why he abandoned his orthodox Christian beliefs in spite of the deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings.21 In particular, he recounts how his personal experiences during the Second World War, and especially his awareness of the Holocaust, led him to question whether prayer was possible. “To interpret history as expressing God’s will, God’s will must accord with the most basic ideas of justice as we know them. For what else can the most basic justice be? Thus, I soon came to reject the idea of the supremacy of the divine will as [like the Holocaust] also hideous and evil.”22 Furthermore, by studying the history of the Inquisition Rawls came to “think of the denial of religious freedom and liberty of conscience as a very great evil,” such that “it makes the claims of the Popes to infallibility impossible to accept.”23 Finally, his reading of Jean Bodin’s thoughts about toleration led him to claim that religions should be “each reasonable, and accept the idea of public reason and its idea of the domain of the political.”24 Against this background, it is no wonder that Rawls considers the very concept of religious truth as authoritarian and intolerant, and the ensuing persecution of dissenters as the curse of Christianity. Instead, he argues, one has to accept “that politics in a democratic society can never be guided by what we see as the whole truth.” Ultimately, there is no other option for a democratic society than “to live politically with others in the light of reasons all might reasonably be expected to endorse.”25
These remarks, albeit autobiographical, suggest that Rawls’s main reason for rejecting the notion of (religious) truth as the basis of public justification is that it is exclusivist with regard to other comprehensive doctrines and claims an a priori superiority over the reasonable political values of a constitutional democracy. If a religion upholds such a notion of truth, it no longer qualifies as a reasonable comprehensive doctrine. Rawls links this exclusivist conception of truth with the idea of a voluntarist God, whose absolute free will is the only source of all being and all moral and political values, such that only people who believe in the true God will be saved. Rawls admits that if the Christian religion were to accept the idea of a reasonable, nonvoluntarist God, according to which “the ground and content of those values is God’s reason, … then God’s will serves only a subordinate role of sanctioning the divine intentions now seen as grounded on reason.”26 Such an idea of God would avoid exclusivism and would allow for the possibility that God’s salvation extends to people who do not believe in Him, but who nevertheless accept essential moral and political values on the basis of a reason that they share with the faithful. But, while admitting this possibility, Rawls nonetheless equates the idea of religious truth with exclusivism, a voluntarist God, and an authoritarian Church.
By interpreting religious and secular traditions as expressions of wisdom, Pope Benedict wants to show that Rawls’s sharp distinction between nonpublic and public reason not only is inadequate on philosophical grounds, in the ways that I have mentioned above, but also results from theological reasons that are at odds with Catholicism.27 A first reason for the (post–Vatican II) Catholic Church to reject the exclusivist position is that it would deny salvation to all non-Christians. Furthermore, Pope Benedict repudiates the idea of a voluntarist God, because this would eventually lead to “a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness.” Instead, as I have mentioned, he argues that Christianity is fundamentally a religion of the Logos, such that it is “a religion in keeping with reason.”28 Therefore, he cannot accept a separation of faith and reason, or, phrased positively, he holds that God’s will is subordinate to and grounded in His reason. Indeed, the idea of the unity of faith and reason provides Pope Benedict with a theological argument for his claim that Christianity cannot be expected to justify itself before the tribunal of secular reason, whose authority it cannot accept precisely because it rests on a separation of faith and reason.
Rawls’s view of the Christian religion thus relies too heavily on his negative ideas of an authoritarian Church, an exclusivist religious truth, and a voluntarist God. This is not only indicated by his autobiographical remarks; it is also reflected in the guiding question of Political Liberalism, which refers to a “religious doctrine that is based on religious authority, for example, the Church or the Bible,” and in his claim later in the book that Churches are inherently exclusivist, since they hold “that there is but one reasonable and rational conception of the good.”29 This exclusivist and authoritarian interpretation of Christianity is theologically problematic and surely at odds with the Catholic view on the matter, which puts God’s reason prior to His will.
THE IDEA OF WISDOM AS AN ALTERNATIVE COMMON GROUND
In order to fully understand Pope Benedict’s view of Christianity as a tradition of wisdom, it is important to further examine the idea of the unity of faith and reason. Generally speaking, wisdom can be defined as a life-orientating kind of knowledge that is based on human experience, but that also has a divine origin.30 In other words, wisdom departs from our concrete historical and cultural situation as humans, while nonetheless orientating it toward attaining “our destiny and thereby realizing our humanity.”31 Through its divine origin, wisdom refers to transcendent truths and values, which are normative points of reference with regard to all our reasonable deliberations and consensus-building. Whereas reason primarily refers to a human capacity, offering a common ground for consensus between the ideas of people who are in principle equally reasonable, wisdom refers to a much broader kind of reasonableness, because it results from those ways of life that, through the ages, have proved themselves to be fruitful, that is, to orientate the lives of individuals and communities toward truth and goodness. Phrased philosophically, a wise person is able to see things, and particularly existential issues, in a larger perspective—sub specie aeternitatis, as it were. This implies that true wisdom transcends the reasonable deliberations of individuals, which are always embedded in the contingencies of place and time, and is thus able to serve as a purifying force for reason. Hence, it is no wonder that wisdom is something that all humans, regardless of their cultural and religious affiliations, strive for, and that all religious and secular traditions claim to be the source of true wisdom. In sum, wisdom can be considered as knowledge that has a transcultural, universally human character.32 Yet, precisely because humans are not divine, nobody can claim to “possess” wisdom absolutely—a finitude that is expressed by Socrates’s contrast between the Gods, who are wise, and humans, who can only strive after wisdom,33 as well as by Paul’s saying that God has made foolish the wisdom of the world.34 Obviously, this insight applies equally to religious and secular traditions: although all of them claim to be treasure-houses of wisdom, the very transcendent character of wisdom prevents them from being able to rightly claim that they possess it completely.
It is on these grounds that Pope Benedict criticizes Rawls’s proposal to replace the idea of truth with that of reason: in his view, it makes the question of how reason is shown to be true impossible to answer.35 In particular, without a broader perspective reason is unable to adequately assess the different claims of parties and interest groups when issues of justice are at stake. In other words, since reason is essentially a human capacity, Pope Benedict insists that the idea of reason risks being reduced to that of the rationality of a coincidental majority. Whereas this danger might be avoided in a small, well-organized, and socially cohesive community, it has become ever more difficult to reach reasonable consensus in a globalized world. Nowadays, every proposal for consensus is more often than not faced with the unsettling question, “the consensus of whom?”36 Philosophically speaking, the deconstruction of reason, which results in its being characterized as inherently ethnocentric or as a social construction, has become a real threat to the possibility of reasonable consensus. With these problems in mind, Pope Benedict proposes the idea of wisdom as an alternative common ground, one that treats traditions of wisdom as concretizations of this idea, and therefore as suitable contributions to public reasoning over the normative basis for a just society, since they broaden reasonableness by connecting it with truth and by including long-standing insights. Pope Benedict does not say that Christianity is the only tradition of wisdom, or that Christians possess wisdom completely, and hence that their specific ideas about right and wrong could be enforced on a pluralist society. But he does claim that only the idea of wisdom is able to free consensus from spatiotemporal and cultural limitations, and reason from its inevitable finitude and subjectivity. Thus, in fundamental opposition to Rawls, he states that reason and reasonable consensus should be subordinate to truth: “the pursuit of truth makes consensus possible, keeps public debate logical, honest and accountable, and ensures the unity which vague notions of integration simply cannot achieve.”37
A PHILOSOPHICAL FAITH IN REASON
Does Rawls show any sensitivity to Pope Benedict’s argument about the fundamental connection between reason and truth? In an important section of Political Liberalism, Rawls dwells upon what he admits to be a fundamental paradox of public reason: “Why should citizens in discussing and voting on the most fundamental political questions honor the limits of public reason? … Surely, the most fundamental questions should be settled by appealing to the most important truths, yet these may far transcend public reason!”38 Ultimately, Rawls’s claim that citizens should nonetheless not trespass the limits of public reason rests on the idea that, as democratic citizens, they pursue the ideal of democratic citizenship—that is, their duty is to explain to one another their principles and policies in terms each could reasonably be expected to endorse as consistent with the principles of freedom and equality. The pursuit of this ideal is in turn supported by the comprehensive doctrines that reasonable people affirm, so that the paradox of public reason disappears: “Citizens affirm the ideal of public reason, not as a result of political compromise, as in a modus vivendi, but from within their own reasonable doctrines.”39 In particular, the duty of civility requires people not to vote purely on the basis of their subjective preferences and interests, since democracy cannot be identified with simple majority rule, implying that a majority can do as it wishes. Nor should they vote on the basis of what they see as right and true according to their comprehensive doctrines. In sum, the duty of civility goes hand in hand with the ideal of a well-ordered, democratic society, which “fashions a climate within which its citizens acquire a sense of justice inclining them to meet their duty of civility.”40 By referring to this ideal and its corresponding duty of civility, Rawls tries to describe the idea of public reason in such a way that it is less liable to being ideologically perverted and remaining spatiotemporally and culturally short sighted, and thus counters the objection made by Pope Benedict. Indeed, he considers this duty, which intrinsically is a moral (not a legal) one, to be one of the main innovations in his account of public reason.
Although the issue of the adequacy of public reason as a common ground for a democratic society is a major point of disagreement between Pope Benedict and Rawls, I think that the distance separating them is less than it seems at first sight. Whereas Pope Benedict cannot reasonably substantiate his claim that Rawls’s position inevitably results in reducing overlapping consensus to that of a contingent majority, Rawls cannot accuse Pope Benedict of dogmatically imposing a (Catholic) view of the whole truth upon contemporary pluralist society. Although obviously stemming from quite different backgrounds, Rawls’s ideal of democratic citizenship, which qualifies consensus as a reasonable one and as consistent with the principles of freedom and equality, and Pope Benedict’s idea of wisdom, which extends to various religious and secular traditions and therefore does not attribute “the whole truth” to the Catholic Church, both try to solve the paradox of reason and truth in a democratic society. Of course, there remains a major difference between their solutions: Rawls’s ideal of citizenship relies on citizens’ understanding and acceptance of it, which gives it a more “deliberative,” democratic character, whereas Pope Benedict’s idea of wisdom relies less on the citizens actually understanding and accepting it but offers a much more robust defense against ideological perversion by admitting insights about “the good life” from religious and secular traditions that have proved their truth over time. In short, one might say that the difference between Rawls and Pope Benedict comes down to that between a more “horizontal” ideal of moral and political normativity, which eventually rests on a faith in reason, and a more “vertical” one, which rests on a faith in God’s Logos that is present in the world as a purifying force for reason.
It is worth further exploring Rawls’s and Pope Benedict’s ideas about the need of a moral and political normativity, because they take us to the heart of the metaphysical questions that I mentioned above. It must be emphasized that the “metaphysics” involved—implicitly in Rawls’s case, explicitly in Pope Benedict’s—is not of a precritical or dogmatic kind that would claim to have a positive, quasi-scientific knowledge of the supersensible. Rather, it is a metaphysics in Kant’s sense, a metaphysics of finite reason:41 that is, as metaphysics, it examines the reality of the highest ideas of reason, God, freedom, and immortality,42 but, as a metaphysics of finite reason it also recognizes that the use of reason in this respect can only be hypothetical, and not apodictic. It can never prove the truth of these ideas, because they are only adopted as hypotheses, and therefore we can think about them only problematically, by accepting them as a never-ending task of reason.43
In order to show that this metaphysics of finite reason indeed plays an important role in both Rawls’s and Pope Benedict’s thinking, I shall comment on their use of the notion of philosophical or reasonable faith. Rawls refers to this notion in order to give a philosophically substantiated, positive answer to the question of the possibility of a reasonably just political society: “In trying to do these things political philosophy assumes the role Kant gave to philosophy generally: the defense of reasonable faith. … [I]n our case this becomes the defense of reasonable faith in the possibility of a just constitutional regime.”44 Although for Rawls this faith concerns only the coherence and unity of reason,45 it must be noted that, for Kant, this unity is never solely a faith of reason in its own capacities, but is also a purposive one, that is, a belief that, on a fundamental level, reasonableness is not merely a human invention, but is also inherent in reality itself. At the level of theoretical reason, this can be only a problematic idea, which by directing “the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge … serves to give to these concepts of the understanding the greatest possible unity combined with the greatest possible extension.”46 But at the level of practical reason, one must accept the effective reality of the highest good as a postulate of practical reason, since it is essential for orientating oneself in moral and political matters. Kant calls this attitude a “reasonable faith,” that is, a belief “which is based on no other data than those which are inherent in pure reason”:47 it consists in the subjective conviction of the truth of the highest good on purely reasonable grounds, while at the same time being aware that its truth cannot be demonstrated objectively. Phrased more technically, a reasonable faith is a conviction of truth that is subjectively adequate but consciously regarded as objectively inadequate. It thus holds an intermediary position between an opinion—considering something to be true on objective grounds that are nevertheless consciously regarded as inadequate—and knowledge—considering something to be true on objective grounds that are also consciously regarded as adequate. Hence, Kant concludes, “a pure reasonable faith is the signpost or compass by means of which the speculative thinker can orientate himself on his reasonable wanderings in the field of supersensible objects.”48 Rawls agrees with Kant’s views on “the role of philosophy as apologia: the defense of reasonable faith,” defining this faith as “that of showing the coherence and unity of reason, both theoretical and practical, with itself; and of how we are to view reason as the final court of appeal, as alone competent to settle all questions about the scope and limit of its own authority.”49 Moreover, he identifies this role with “the defense of the possibility of a just constitutional democratic regime.”50 This shows that for Rawls, just as for Kant, reasonable faith refers not only to the unity of reason, but also to the possibility of its ultimate purpose, a just constitutional democratic regime. Obviously, like Kant, Rawls must insist that the finitude of reason means that the reality of this purpose cannot be demonstrated. But by referring to this ultimate purpose, he nevertheless introduces a metaphysical element that points beyond the sphere of reason. For a reasonable faith not only concerns a belief in reason and its unity; it also involves a faith in the possibility of a just constitutional democratic regime as the normative, orientating purpose of reason.
Interestingly, in one publication Pope Benedict also refers to Kant’s idea of a reasonable faith in order to propose a solution to the problem of moral and political normativity. He defines this problem as the tendency to shape human affairs purely on the basis of subjective preferences, whether they are part of a consensus or not, a tendency that manifests a lack of orientation or of a perspective transcending the here and now. His solution is an intriguing, and controversial, proposal to secular society. He first refers to Kant’s postulates of practical reason as the object of reasonable faith and an orientating principle in moral issues, thereby applying to the moral and political domain the idea of wisdom considered above. This leads Pope Benedict to the bold suggestion that a secular person “who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist.”51 This means reversing one of the most basic axioms of the Enlightenment. According to Hugo Grotius, in order to keep essential moral values free of contradiction and to base them on grounds independent of the divisions and uncertainties of the various religions and philosophies of life, and thus to secure peaceful coexistence, these values must be defined in such a way as to be valid etsi Deus non daretur.52 Why does Pope Benedict boldly propose that secular people reverse this principle? It is not to convert them to Christianity, but to solve the problem of moral normativity, which religious and secular people have in common. For he proposes not a religious but a reasonable faith, consisting in the idea that in all human beings’ ways of life there is a perspective that transcends the here and now and puts their lives in a broader perspective: “This does not impose limitations on anyone’s freedom; it gives support to all our human affairs and supplies a criterion of which human life stands sorely in need.”53 Hence, living as if God exists must be interpreted here as employing God as a symbolic representation of universal moral and political normativity, which is prior to consensus building. Living as if God exists means that all people, religious and secular, should be prepared to let their lives be orientated by this normativity. But by phrasing God’s existence in a conditional way, as an “as if,” Pope Benedict also enables secular people to interpret this normativity in a different way from Christianity. In short, living as if God exists serves to concretize wisdom as an existential, orientating kind of knowledge that is a common ground for all people, but that also allows for plurality. Only if we are prepared to live in this way, Pope Benedict claims, can “we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.”54
The fact that both Rawls and Pope Benedict refer to a reasonable faith offers an interesting perspective on their views on moral and political normativity. In Rawls’s case, introducing this notion helps him to provide his search for a reasonable foundation for democratic society with an ultimate purpose, albeit one that cannot be demonstrated objectively. In Pope Benedict’s case, proposing that people live as if God exists is a way of introducing a common ground among religious and secular people, which also allows for plurality among them. Hence, the Christian doctrine is not presented as “the whole truth,” but as “an encouragement towards truth,” a call to the idea of truth or wisdom.55
PLURALITY VERSUS REASONABLE PLURALISM
If we accept the conclusion that, at a fundamental level, an ultimate, orientating purpose is necessary for reason, one can justly ask if this does not jeopardize the very idea of reasonable pluralism as a basic fact of democratic society. This is the critical question that Rawls’s perspective poses to Pope Benedict’s defense of truth.
As shown above, the main reason for Rawls to oppose the notion of (religious) truth as the basis of public justification is that it excludes other comprehensive doctrines and claims an a priori superiority over the reasonable political values of a constitutional democracy. Pope Benedict, for his part, agrees with Rawls’s critique of such religious exclusivism, but claims that Christianity adopts an “inclusivism” toward other faiths.56 However, he also admits that this term is inadequate, since it suggests that all religions and secular worldviews can be absorbed by a single one. What is needed instead, he claims, is “an encounter of various religions, in a unity that transforms pluralism in plurality.”57 This “encounter,” or dialogue, model of religious plurality is based on the conviction that cultures and religions are not completely inaccessible to each other, because they are united by the faith that the Logos is present in all of them.
How does Pope Benedict’s view of religious plurality relate to Rawls’s idea of reasonable pluralism? Rawls defines reasonable pluralism as “the fact that a plurality of conflicting reasonable comprehensive doctrines, religious, philosophical, and moral, is the normal result of a culture of free institutions,” because “a public and shared basis of justification that applies to comprehensive doctrines is lacking in the public culture of a democratic society.”58 This means that reasonable pluralism must be distinguished from pluralism as such, that is, a simple variety of doctrines and views, often the result of peoples’ understandable tendency to view the political world from a limited standpoint. If this were the only kind of pluralism, then the deliberative character of democracy and an overlapping consensus between free and equal citizens would be impossible. The constitutive parts of reasonable pluralism—namely, comprehensive doctrines, covering the major religious, philosophical, and moral aspects of human life—must rather be reasonable themselves. Rawls also claims that a reasonable comprehensive doctrine “normally belongs to, or draws upon, a tradition of thought and doctrine. … It tends to evolve slowly in the light of what, from its point of view, it sees as good and sufficient reasons.”59 Rawls concludes that in a society whose permanent condition is reasonable pluralism, such that the differences between citizens arising from their comprehensive doctrines may be irreconcilable, “the idea of the reasonable is more suitable as part of the basis of public justification for a constitutional regime than the idea of moral truth.”60
From this perspective, Pope Benedict’s view on religious plurality poses a fundamental problem. He sees the idea of wisdom as a common ground for all religious and secular traditions, just as the ideal of reason serves as a common ground for all reasonable consensus in Rawls’s philosophical project. But the idea of wisdom does not only provide a formal common ground, as Rawls’s idea of public reason does. It also contains all kinds of specific ideas about man’s nature and destiny, which serve as principles for his orientation in life and which run counter to Rawls’s reasonable pluralism. In other words, besides offering a formal common ground for interreligious dialogue, the idea of wisdom also serves as a substantive point of convergence for the plurality of religions and secular worldviews. In this crucial respect, the model of convergence proposed by Pope Benedict differs essentially from Rawls’s reasonable pluralism, which is based on accepting religious and moral divergence as a fundamental reality.
Pope Benedict deals more explicitly with the issue of pluralism in his debate with Jürgen Habermas. He begins by observing that cultural pluralism is the most important feature of our times, and that considering the intercultural dimension is therefore absolutely essential for reflecting on the basic questions of contemporary human existence.61 Pope Benedict therefore does not long nostalgically for the return of any premodern cultural or religious uniformity. But in order to be productive at all, he is convinced that pluralism needs to be based on a more fundamental relatedness, in a way similar, but not identical, to Rawls’s sense that simple pluralism needs to be based on reasonable pluralism. For Pope Benedict, relatedness means that “the cultures of mankind, each of which together with its religion forms a whole, are not just unrelated blocks standing side by side or in opposition to each other.”62 The question for him, then, is whether and how one can overcome pluralism and have it replaced by relatedness. As I have shown above, he defines secular and religious comprehensive doctrines as traditions of wisdom, and on the basis of this common frame of reference, he claims that reason and faith are able to purify and heal each other of their respective pathologies. As a first step in this mutual learning process, he states that it is
important to include the other cultures in the attempt at a polyphonic relatedness, in which they themselves are receptive to the essential complementarity of reason and faith, so that a universal process of purifications (in the plural!) can proceed. Ultimately, the essential values and norms that are in some way known or sensed by all men will take on a new brightness in such a process, so that which holds the world together can once again become an effective force in mankind.63
This means that Pope Benedict accepts that “the rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons … is unattainable at the present moment. This is why the so-called ‘world-ethos’ remains an abstraction.”64 At the same time, however, he is confident that an interaction between the Christian faith and Western rationality as well as with and among other, non-Western cultural traditions will lead to a purification of all of them, so that ultimately a true common ground, based on essential values and norms, will be an effective force for the whole of humanity. From a Rawlsian perspective, this hope for a growing interaction between cultural traditions, like the idea of convergence that underlies it, is not sufficient. For it fails to fully acknowledge the existence of conflicting yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines as a basic fact of any democratic society.
CONCLUSION
The preceding analysis leaves us with an aporia. Is an interaction between secular rationality and the great religious traditions possible in terms of the idea of wisdom as their common ground? The current situation of (reasonable) pluralism does not bode well in this respect. The predicament of modern societies seems to be one of needing ideas of human dignity and political justice as substantive points of reference, but being utterly unable to reach an overlapping, reasonable consensus even as to their minimal content. This is especially so on a global level. The current controversies about the universality of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and, on a more fundamental level, about whether there indeed are universal human values are telling examples. The reasonableness of reasonable pluralism is therefore profoundly in question. Referring again to Kant, one can phrase this aporia as follows: we require an orientating principle and an ultimate purpose to purify religion and reason of their respective pathologies, but the reasonableness of this principle must itself be determined, since “one should never deny reason the prerogative … to be the ultimate criterion of truth.”65
Notes
