7

POSTMODERN ANTI-ENLIGHTENMENT POSITIONS

From the Cassirer-Heidegger Debate to Benedict XVI’s katholische Aufklärung

RICHARD RORTY OCCUPIES a position of special prestige and authority within the group of postmodern thinkers. His position is close to that of Michel Foucault, for he has argued for a need finally to separate the social and political project of the Enlightenment, which, however, in his view still constitutes a valid proposition, from its epistemological and philosophical project, which he declares a failure.1 This position, which is particularly insidious and ambiguous, since its declared aim is to demolish the very basis of the Enlightenment’s philosophical framework, was first articulated with great clarity at a meeting held in Davos, Switzerland, in the spring of 1929, where two important thinkers, Ernst Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, discussed the crucial theme What is man?—and thus, indirectly, the authentic meaning of Kant’s philosophy.²

Above and beyond their academic skirmishes and the unbridgeable conceptual distance that divided them and would also affect their respective personal histories (Cassirer escaped from Germany to the United States, while Heidegger was a supporter of Nazism), what was really at stake was, even then, the very existence of the Enlightenment, and the legitimacy of its epistemological foundation. Cassirer attended that rendezvous as a prestigious exponent of early twentieth-century German Neo-Kantianism, a follower of the Marburg School, and of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, who believed that current theories of knowledge were in urgent need of revision. In his research, Cassirer had endeavored to go beyond the old and controversial positivistic model of objective knowledge of the thing in itself, that was founded on the natural sciences, and to open up a united horizon of critique for the first time to the whole of human culture, embracing disciplines from psychology to linguistics, from ethnology to the history of ideas. Cassirer thus accepted the need to redefine the relationship between the a priori and experience, in view of an idealistic conception of Kantian transcendentalism that was both more complex and problematic. His position remained firmly within the universalistic tradition of Enlightenment humanism. At this very time, first in his pioneering studies on mythical thought, and then in his multivolume Philosophie der symbolischen Formen,3 Cassirer was developing his original philosophy of culture, which focused once again specifically on man, who was seen as the privileged agent of an infinite production of cultural forms through symbolic language, forms that enabled him to understand himself within his world, and his world within himself. In the first paper he gave at the Davos meeting, on the subject of finitude and death, Cassirer immediately stressed the double nature, both material and spiritual, of man, and the crucial importance of the transcendental and extra-worldly dimension of human existence, without which no form of knowledge, and consequently no form of Enlightenment, would be possible: “L’homme est certes fini, mais il est en même temps cet être fini que connaît sa finitude et qui, dans ce savoir qui lui-même n’est plus fini, s’élève au-dessus de la finitude.”⁴

Heidegger, on the other hand, came across as the great eliminator of the Enlightenment, which he saw as the final phase of that vilified trajectory of Western metaphysics that had finally brought about the enthronement of man—to use Foucault’s famous metaphor in Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things)—and had thus accelerated the rise of nihilism and the oppressive domination exercised by modern technological society. A pupil of Husserl, and believed by his contemporaries to harbor neo-Scholastic sympathies, Heidegger appeared to be the charismatic spokesman for a new concept of metaphysics, a concept that could only assert itself, as he wrote with an intentionally violent undertone, through the complete “destruction de ce qui a été jusqu’ici les fondements de la métaphysique occidentale (l’Esprit, le Logos, la Raison).”⁵ It is likely that, in Heidegger’s view, the key question of Enlightenment thought, What is man? which formed the basis of the Davos debate, was not in fact the decisive question to be posed if one is to achieve an understanding of the vicissitudes and destiny of mankind. For him, the fundamental question would have been instead that of ontology, that is to say of the meaning and essence of being: What is being? Why is there being instead of nothing? The lack of an answer to these questions and the consequent neglect of the issue of being, from Plato all the way to Nietzsche, were thus to blame for the wrong turning taken by Western metaphysics, which was leading it straight to nihilism. All the long series of “humanisms” in history, constantly characterized as they were by the assumption of man’s universal and rational essence, merely confirmed the magnitude of this initial mistake.6

It was imperative to clarify this once and for all at the Davos meeting, before a philosophers’ tribunal. Cassirer, who was an adherent of humanist thought, saw man as a transcendental being who was capable of attaining infinite knowledge and truth, and considered him to be both the main instrument and the ultimate end of a reflection Cassirer carried out in the tradition of the Enlightenment. Heidegger, on the other hand, assigned secondary importance to man compared to the vital question of the knowledge of being. For him, man was no more than a “shepherd of Being” and “the neighbor of Being”;⁷ he was the way and ontological instrument through which to interpret the meaning of being. To that end it was important to take into account the fact that the fundamental characteristic, the essence of the humanitas of homo humanus lay in the finitude of existence and in his inhabiting the truth of being—“the Being of man consists in ‘being-in-the-world,’ ”⁸ while truth was transformed from rational adaequatio intellectus et rei into the unveiling and manifestation of being: “deconcealing.”⁹ Man is thus defined as open to being (Dasein, “being there”), and therefore as part of a bigger picture. As such, he had inevitably fallen from the throne on which the Enlightenment had placed him. Contrary to what was claimed by the science and technology of the modern world, man was not in charge of being: in fact, it was man’s “being-there” that was determined by being.

Both Cassirer and Heidegger had written important books on Kant, in 1918 and in 1929, respectively. The Davos seminar underlined further the irreconcilable differences between the two speakers, in particular their different interpretations of a text as fundamental as the Critique of Pure Reason. According to Heidegger, and contrary to common opinion, what was worth investigating within those pages was not Kant’s critique of reason, i.e., his logic and methodology of the knowledge of positive sciences. Instead, Heidegger was interested in Kant as one of the first thinkers who had realized that one must go beyond pure logic to finally found an ontological metaphysics of man’s being-there (Dasein). This would then entail investigating man’s essence and the modality and meaning of his being-there in relation to being, rather than questioning how one could formulate a judgment on objects, or analyzing the limits and autonomy of reason in epistemological mechanisms. Kant had replied to the question What is man? by placing the problem of the finitude of human knowledge at the center of his critique of reason. That way of framing things was born out of the assumption that the finitude of man was a primary trait of his connection with being. From this came the provisional and derivative quality of human knowledge as well as its finitude, for it was subject to the temporality and mortality of being-there in relation to being. Intuition was therefore seen as a passive faculty, and intellect as merely re-productive rather than productive. Reason was finite and incapable of transcending experience in the pursuit of the realm of ends. Truth, far from being eternal, was finally revealed as the daughter of historical time. Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant effectively tore the Enlightenment project to pieces. The dream of the emancipation of man through man, which saw man as being able to interact with his own destiny, had lost its sole and fundamental weapon, i.e., knowledge as developed by Western metaphysics. How could one go on believing in culture, or in man as the subject of a variety of formative activities and an ideal regulating force in their development? According to Heidegger, Kant had already realized all this, and he had retreated in fear and anguish from his own discovery. In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant had indicated that the transcendental capacity of imagination was the fundamental faculty that unified sensibility and intellect within the mechanisms of ontological knowledge. However, in the second edition, he was frightened by this hypothesis, which questioned the very bases of a Western metaphysics that was founded on Logos and ratio, and he therefore abandoned this course, turning instead for his main theme to the centrality of the intellect and of logic rather than of imagination.10

Faced with this interpretation, which situated Kant within what we now call “the postmodern,” Cassirer, who understood what was at stake, replied in strong terms. In a long review written in 1931, which in a way was the conclusion of the Davos disputation, Cassirer stressed again the overall import of Kant’s philosophy, and the fundamental importance of the question of ethics and of moral law within that system of thought. It was within the world of morality that the categorical imperative was realized, which produced the miracle of man’s creative knowledge and his exercise of the transcendental capacity of imagination towards the realm of ends: “the ‘I’ is at bottom only what it makes of itself.”¹¹ Kant had always stressed how any analysis that was based solely on the “nature of man” would never be able to attain the transcendental idea of liberty and the creation of a universal ethics. Heidegger’s crude and tragic monism aimed at bundling together phenomena and noumena, the sensible world and the intelligible world, since it considered it impossible to think of the human being outside time and finitude. Kant, on the other hand, was a dualist, and was trying to understand the relationship between mundus intelligibilis and mundus sensibilis. As Cassirer passionately pointed out, Kant’s problem “is not the problem of ‘Being’ and ‘Time,’ but rather the problem of ‘Being’ and ‘Ought,’ of ‘Experience’ and ‘Idea’.” Kant was not interested in the problem of the temporality of the subject, or in the theme of existential anguish in the face of nothingness, or in the interpretation of man’s being-there in relation to the temporality of “being-to-death.” What he was interested in was the “intelligible substrate of humanity” (18). For Cassirer, “Kant is and remains—in the most sublime and beautiful sense of this word—a thinker of the Enlightenment,” as he “strives after light and clarity even when he contemplates the deepest and most hidden ‘grounds’ of Being” (24). Mankind owed to Kant a philosophy that pointed man on the one hand towards “experience,” and on the other towards his participation in the “idea,” and therefore in transcendence and infinity: that was his “metaphysics,” his way of exorcising the “anxiety of nothingness.”

What remains today of that famous debate? How will the confrontation between the modern and the postmodern end? And how will the philosophical question of the Enlightenment be transformed in the face of the obstinate attacks launched by those who want to do away with the subject and critical reason and proclaim the death of man—and this despite the fact that they are unable to point to any serious, feasible alternatives beyond those of nihilism or the return to more or less disguised forms of religious spiritualism?

These are difficult questions to answer. They are made all the more difficult by the reappearance of an unwanted third party, alongside postmodern and neo-Enlightenment thinkers. And this is a very powerful and fearsome party, about which very little is normally said: i.e., the Catholic Church. One of the most extraordinary effects of the war between the modern and the postmodern is without a doubt the philosophical and cultural resurrection of God. This has taken the form of an unexpected comeback of religions in the public arena of Western societies, which, having lost their way, now suddenly find themselves on the road to post-secularization.12 One of the most obvious consequences of this comeback is the crisis that threatens the lay principle and Enlightenment concept of the separation between religion and politics, accompanied by the transformation, in many ways disconcerting and unexpected, of the philosophical issue of the Enlightenment into a new and complex theological issue. This is a problem that for too long has been underestimated by the heirs to the Enlightenment tradition, and which deserves instead our focused attention.

It is obvious that this radical change of scenery is not due solely to arguments adduced by postmodern philosophers, however insistent and persuasive those arguments may have been. Rather, behind the collapse of the great progressive ideologies and utopian philosophies of emancipation, which has been an incontrovertible aspect of the international scene since 1989, there are far-reaching economic, social, and political factors, compounded by errors and tragic delusions that history has laid to rest. And yet, it is certainly no coincidence that the radical theses, unsettling questions, and apocalyptic language of thinkers like Heidegger, Adorno, and Foucault have become an integral and crucial part of the arguments that Christian philosophers and theologians advance against the specter of the Enlightenment—which, incidentally, means that that specter, albeit now more diaphanous than ever, is still fearsome enough in their eyes.

The Catholic Church has updated its old anti-Enlightenment arsenal through intelligent and systematic reference to the dialectic of the Enlightenment itself, including the alleged responsibilities consequent to critical reason and the Kantian claim of man’s moral autonomy. These positions have in fact been blamed for contributing to the genesis of totalitarianism, the commodification of goods, and the creation of our stressful technological society. Accusations have come from all quarters, ranging from John Paul II’s encyclicals to the standard challenges posed by theologians, parish priests, and intellectuals alike, which have by now reached the status of cliché. It is worth noting that it is the paradigm of the Centaur, in its more recent and striking incarnations, that increasingly dominates major debates in the international public arena, while the historians’ Enlightenment is consistently ignored. Within this framework, one may also cite how the philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the theologian Joseph Ratzinger recently concurred on the need for a dialogue between Faith and Reason, or between “lay rationality” and Christianity, in the light of a new postsecular society, in which religion occupies center stage in public life. The course of that dialogue has followed precisely the traditional Hegelian lines of censure aimed at the estrangement of modernity, a modernity that, moreover, is seeking its foundation and dialectical reconciliation with itself through religious Faith, just as the young Hegel had hoped.13 In fact, this road remains the easiest in that it leaves open the possibility of future moments of convergence between reason and faith, and does so without dwelling too much on past history and dramatic events.

And yet the past is never completely gone and continues to affect our choices. For centuries the Catholic Church vilified, demonized, and used every means in its arsenal to impede an affirmation of the rights of man, of religious freedom, of toleration, and democracy. How can it now credibly present itself as a legitimate bastion, defending the Western world’s precious political heritage without first taking serious stock of itself? It is not enough to invoke the “purification of memory” and to apologize for the misdeeds of the past, as John Paul II did, if one then continues to point the finger at the Enlightenment as the historical cause of the culture of death and all the other evils of the twentieth century.¹⁴ It is not enough to proclaim to the four winds the universality of the rights of the human being, if the Church then negates those rights within itself, and refuses to confront the necessity to redefine the fundamental concepts of liberty and truth, also and especially on a theological level.¹⁵

As is well known—or rather, as should be well known but is not—it was only with the Second Vatican Council that the Church really began to respond to the modern political advances brought about by the Enlightenment. It took several varieties of totalitarianism, the tragic events of the twentieth century, and above all the Holocaust, which cast so heavy a shadow on the Catholics’ attitude towards Jews, to shake the consciences of a hierarchy entrenched behind the certainties of the Council of Trent, to finally open up a dialogue between Catholicism and modernity.16

Already in 1930s France, a group of important thinkers linked to the Catholic avant-garde journal Esprit, including names such as Mounier, Daniélou, and Maritain, had in fact taken the first steps towards engagement with the modern post-Enlightenment world of the rights of man. However, their efforts went largely unheeded. These thinkers acknowledged at last the important positive contribution made by the Enlightenment, but they also advocated going beyond the “radical vice of anthropocentric humanism” pervading that movement.¹⁷ They theorized the need to open the way to social rights, and to a “new Christendom” capable of taking in the positive aspects of modernity and Christianizing its very roots—or at least foregoing demonization of the modern based on preconceived notions. As Maritain wrote in his famous Humanisme intégral (1936), in which he outlined the foundations for a philosophy of the history of Christianity in the wake of historicist theories of “overcoming”: “In the scheme of Christian humanism there is a place not for the errors of Luther and Voltaire, but for Voltaire and Luther, according as in spite of the errors they have contributed in the history of men to certain advances.”¹⁸

After World War II, thanks to the efforts of progressive elements among the Church’s European hierarchy and of the powerful Catholic Church of North-America under the direction of Cardinal Spellman, those ideas were reflected in the decree Dignitatis humanae personae of the Second Vatican Council, which strongly reflected the wishes of Pope Paul VI. In this groundbreaking document, the Catholic world defined for the first time the ius ad libertatem religiosam as an inalienable right of the human being, a right immune from both the “reason of State” and the “reason of the Church.” On that occasion a “star witness,” Karol Wojtyła, exclaimed: “It was a revolution!” He had immediately grasped that, beyond the significant theological and ecclesiastical departure that this constituted, the shift of emphasis from the rights of God to the rights of the human being could have important political implications in the fight against communism.¹⁹ And indeed the Second Vatican Council seemed at one point to be headed towards an “anthropological turn,”²⁰ based on the works of some of the main exponents of the so-called nouvelle théologie, in which crucial attention was paid to a reconsideration of the historicity of Christianity and to the reevaluation of history and of human existence in time as a theological issue.²¹ However, that position was soon abandoned in later interpretations of the outcome of Vatican II. A shortcut was adopted instead, which consisted in a form of hermeneutics that was entirely philosophical and theological, and which was, in the end, all that came out of that dialogue between Christian and Enlightenment humanisms that was heralded by the courageous questions asked in the encyclical Gaudium et spes: “What is man? What is this sense of sorrow, of evil, of death, which continues to exist despite so much progress?”22 They thus abandoned the main road, which, though undoubtedly fraught with hardships and perils, would have led towards respect for historical truth, tolerance, and the reciprocal and respectful acknowledgement of each other by the two humanisms that have profoundly affected the history and identity of the Western world.

An important element that led to that approach being discarded was without doubt the dominant role played, in the last few decades, by the philosophical and theological culture of the German Catholic world within the intellectual horizons of the Vatican hierarchy. This was a strong and evocative culture, which found a crucial point of reference, especially for Pope Benedict XVI, in the work of Romano Guardini, who was born in Verona in 1885, but held the chair of Catholic theology at the University of Munich from 1923 until his death in 1968.

In his famous Das Ende der Neuzeit (1951), Guardini adduced solid philosophical arguments for proclaiming the end of “the modern world,” that is to say of a modernity founded on values that went against the revealed religion of Christianity. Moreover, he detected in the postmodern era that was just underway unexpected and important grounds for God’s reentry into the future history of mankind. In Guardini’s evaluation, the experiment of modernity had been a terminal and resounding failure. With all its illusions and hopes, with all the bourgeoisie’s “superstitious faith” in progress, in the autonomy of the individual, and in his capacity to enfranchise himself by his own means and without the need for God, what that experiment had finally led to were the horrors of totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the terrifying prospect of science and technology out of control and able to produce only a “non-natural nature” and a “non-human man.”²³

Inebriated with power, an unconscious victim of his own uncontrolled and unlimited freedom, bowing under the weight of his own strength, modern man had led humanity to the brink of the abyss. “Without exaggeration one can say that a new era of history has been born. Now and forever man will live on the brink of an ever-growing danger which shall leave its mark upon his entire existence”—thus prophesied Guardini (110). Faced with the existential anguish wrought by the savage, primitive, and unbounded power of the modern world, in which “all the horrors of darkness are once more upon man [and he] stands again before chaos” (111), humanity’s only hope of saving itself lay in returning to a religious sentiment that needed to be built anew. In the new era that was dawning full of uncertainty, the Church was called upon to assume the supreme role of savior of humanity, to protect human beings and safeguard their link with God through Revelation, which was seen as the foundation of truth and of the historical meaning of being. The Church must bravely reenter society, renew the sacred value of “the crucial events of life such as birth or marriage or death” (117), and prevent the total secularization of the two forces whose hybridization the Church fears and denounces more than anything, i.e., of biology and politics. Guardini was well aware of the difficulties and above all of the ultimate eschatological meaning for God’s people of the dawn of a new historical era:

Loneliness in faith will be terrible. […] If we speak here of the nearness of the End, we do not mean nearness in the sense of time, but nearness as it pertains to the essence of the End, for in essence man’s existence is now nearing an absolute decision. Each and every consequence of that decision bears within it the greatest potentiality and the most extreme danger (132–133).

In the aftermath of the Council, such thoughts pressed on the minds of Catholic intellectuals, bishops, cardinals and popes, as they faced the task of interpreting the “updates” put forward by Vatican II. John Paul II’s general aversion to today’s Enlightenment-influenced modernity, for instance, bears deep traces of this.24 At a three-day seminar held at the behest of the pope at Castel Gandolfo, near Rome, in August 1996, eminent scholars such as Paul Ricoeur, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Maier, Stanley Rosen, and others deliberately launched an entirely new era in the relationship between the Enlightenment and Christianity. The “today” of the seminar’s title—“Enlightenment Today”—refers to the post-1989 period, i.e., the new era characterized by the defeat of Communism and the start of the third millennium.²⁵ In the proceedings we find the image of the Enlightenment definitively ordained as the last stumbling block that remains before the pernicious and tragic experience of secularization can be toppled once and for all.

However, within those pages there are still many unresolved positions. One senses a form of subdued and painful hesitation: on the one hand, there is acknowledgement of the by now historically undeniable merits of the Enlightenment, identifiable in the eighteenth-century rise of the ideas of liberty and of the rights of man in the fields of philosophy, law, ethics, and politics; on the other hand, there is the terrible accusation leveled by postmodern thinkers, that, by denying God’s role in history, the Enlightenment brought about the rise of totalitarianism, the dominion of a dehumanized technology and science, and a form of limitless individual freedom that was bound to degenerate into unfettered positivism. For instance, in Hans Maier’s insightful paper, acknowledgement of the historical merits of the Enlightenment is accompanied by the claim that ever since the eighteenth century there had in fact been a “Catholic Enlightenment” and a “Christian ‘Sapere aude!’,” whereby the Catholic Church had worked alongside exponents of the Enlightenment at a common project aimed at educating mankind along the lines hoped for by Lessing (93). This being the case, a call went out to appropriate the most authentic legacy of Enlightenment-inspired humanism and to mobilize third-millennium religion in defense of its best values. In the words of one of the participants, Robert Spaemann, “in the aftermath of Nietzsche, we have now reached a point where only religion can save the Enlightenment […] because religion understands the Enlightenment better than the latter understands itself” (232). Particularly noteworthy in this respect are John Paul II’s concluding remarks, wherein he explores the religious origins of the metaphor of light and enlightenment. This validates in a definitive and authoritative way the strategy of appropriating the Enlightenment legacy, which itself follows the traditional pattern set by Augustine in his project of assimilating and surpassing the legacy of the classical world of Greek and Latin antiquity in the City of God.

In fact, many of these ideas were not new. They had been circulating for quite some time, ever since Vatican II. Among the thinkers who were most concerned with the complex relationship between Christianity and Enlightenment culture, both during and after the Council, was Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. In his reflections, this became an important issue in terms both of theology and of the Church’s political stance, so much so that the theme of the Christianization of the Enlightenment as a possible solution to the philosophical problem of the dialectic recurs obsessively in many of his writings. Ratzinger repeatedly points to the way in which the Church “in the dialectic of enlightenment does away with the conditions for enlightenment,”26 prevents its degeneration into totalitarianism, and safeguards its original message of an emancipation generated by the Logos: “Christian theology, if it is functioning correctly, is to be seen as a force for enlightenment.”²⁷ Ratzinger’s hope that humanity can be rescued by a new holy alliance between faith and reason therefore rests on the common rationalistic foundation of the Enlightenment and of Christianity, as embodied in St. John’s Logos. This can be seen clearly in texts such as the one drafted for a meeting with the academic staff of the University of Rome “La Sapienza” that was due to take place in January 2008 (but was subsequently called off). In this document, the constitution of a third-millennium humanism was to rest upon a number of agreed-upon principles, such as the fundamental vocation to the pursuit of truth and the rejection of myth in the name of reason that guided both Christian theologians and the thinkers based at European universities ever since their foundation, or such as certain pronouncements, at times somewhat questionable, on Islam’s historical and genetic incapacity to embrace rational argumentation as the decisive horizon in theological discussion (as opposed to Christianity’s greater openness in this respect).

And yet, one persistent obstacle to dialogue between the heirs of the Enlightenment and those of the Catholic tradition was Benedict XVI’s constant oscillation between acknowledging the historical merits of the Enlightenment and condemning it as a dangerous “dead dog” in Western culture. In Ratzinger’s stance we find, on the one hand, the admission that the Enlightenment has originated a modern lay culture founded on the beneficial institutional separation of Church and State: “In the broadest sense of the word, the term laico denotes spiritual membership in the Enlightenment.”28 On the other hand, there are constant references to the direct responsibility of the Enlightenment for the rise of totalitarianism. In the 2007 encyclical Spe Salvi, clearly following a pattern borrowed from Guardini’s reflections, Ratzinger effectively proclaimed the end of the modern era and of the illusions of those who believed in the idea of “progress.” He thus liquidated once and for all the Enlightenment’s hope of emancipating man through man, and announced the definitive failure of Marx’s communist prophecies. Even Kant was misappropriated as the first to raise serious concerns over the potentially catastrophic and apocalyptic consequences of human action in the latest periods of the history of mankind.²⁹

The Catholic Church seems to have made a conscious decision to mix together history, theology, and philosophy along the lines of what we have called “the paradigm of the Centaur.” One cannot help feeling that this will inevitably lead to a muddying of the waters and will make discussion of the issue in the public arena increasingly difficult. If the theological manipulation of the paradigm of the Centaur is carried beyond certain levels, it will elude or even mystify the rights of history, rendering discussion banal and straining belief. It is certainly not conducive to a helpful and clear discussion when Ratzinger asserts that there were three successive “ages of enlightenment” in history. In his account, the first of those ages occurred in ancient times, was adopted wholesale by Christianity and was instrumental in its victory over paganism. The second took place in the eighteenth century, had undoubted merits in its assertion of the rights of man and of human liberty, but was also responsible for chasing God away from the world. Finally comes Ratzinger’s “second Enlightenment,” which is currently in operation and which he characterizes as a dehumanized and Godless age, a product of that dialectic so well described by postmodern thinkers, and from which only the Church can save us.³⁰ This ambitious theological-philosophical vision can be considered a contemporary Catholic version of the Centaur. By these means, Ratzinger manages to take apart the whole universe of values developed by eighteenth-century Enlightenment culture. He bypasses the principle of the separation of religion and politics by applying Bellarmino’s theory of potestas indirecta in the moral field.31 He brings God back into the very center of public debate, and elevates the hierarchy and the sovereign pontiff to the role of guarantors of liberty and democracy in the Western world. He does all this in order to revitalize a Christianity that in practice continues to experience a profound vocational crisis, despite the huge crowds that gather in Rome.

Leaving aside the specific case of Benedict XVI’s work, which stands out for its intellectual complexity and sophistication, the dangers of this conceptual device, and of that employed by postmodern philosophers, lie in the deliberate conflation of history, theology, and philosophy, at the expense of the rights of historical truth. And indeed the dominant element in contemporary variations on the theme of the Centaur is the theological principle. The Holocaust is used to explain, retrospectively, Rousseau’s political ideas. Questionable products of mass culture are blamed on the rise of public opinion in the eighteenth century, and vice versa. Poor Voltaire would appear to have unwittingly opened the gates to Hitler and Stalin with his insistence on man’s liberty and responsibility in the face of a distant and indifferent God. Rather than selectively studying the Enlightenment and the numerous metamorphoses that its legacy has undergone in the two intervening centuries, thinkers have resorted to an abstract and instrumental amalgamation of languages and disciplines. In opposition to this trend, the present volume focuses on the necessary distinctions between different contexts and eras, and above all between the philosophical and the historical aspects of the Enlightenment. It is hoped that this distinction will help us analyze these questions in a more productive way, as we reflect both on our historical knowledge and on whether or not the values developed by eighteenth-century culture have endured in time, above and beyond the shattered illusions and undeniably tragic aberrations and degenerations of the modern world. Only in this way will it perhaps be possible to escape the stranglehold of those who consider the legacy of the Enlightenment and its values as nothing more than an anachronistic relict, and therefore invite us (with a malicious smile) to choose between skepticism and moral authoritarianism, between God and nothingness.