University of Nottingham
Thursday 1 September 2005

My first task is to express the disappointment of Cardinal Paul Poupard who would dearly have loved to be here this evening. I am afraid I am a poor substitute, but that makes me all the more grateful for your kind invitation to be here in his place! Having collaborated with Cardinal Poupard as a member of the Pontifical Council for Culture for over twenty years, I can testify to the importance he attaches to the establishment and the flourishing of centres which engage in diverse ways in the dialogue between faith and culture.

In his work as President of the Pontifical Council he has sought for almost a quarter of a century to ensure that the Church is involved in and at the forefront of intellectual debates and cultural dialogues. He sees the establishment of Cultural Centres as a particularly fruitful way of advancing that goal. The 2005 edition of the Pontifical Council’s Directory of Catholic Cultural Centres lists about 1300 entries in many parts of the world.

At the end of last year, at a conference in Minsk, the Cardinal spoke about the importance of the activity which that figure represents:

For all their rich variety, these centres have one thing in common: the cultural activities they offer reflect their constant concern for the relationship between faith and cultures. This relationship is developed through dialogue, scientific research, personal formation and the promotion of a culture which faith inspires and makes fruitful, lively and dynamic. Catholic cultural centers, (and there is no reason why this should not apply to Orthodox or other Christian cultural centres) are public forums, places where people meet and reflect, study and learn, exchange ideas and develop the dialogue between faith and cultures. In the broad context of globalization, they offer Catholics, and anyone else interested in culture, opportunities for useful contact and conversation about the world and history, religion, culture and science, all of which helps to discern those values that can throw new light on existence and give meaning to life (POUPARD, Cardinal PAUL, Minsk, December 2004).

The dialogues and conferences that have taken place in the years since Pope John Paul established the Pontifical Council for Culture have been extraordinarily wide-ranging. They have involved Marxists from the Soviet bloc (already in the 1980s), people involved in media and communications, and information technology, higher education, scientists, artists, politicians, philosophers and theologians. They have addressed questions about the meaning of freedom in the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as issues about religious indifference, atheism, and the ideologies and mentalities that mark our cultures.

The establishment of this Centre of Theology and Philosophy is particularly welcome and I regard it as a great privilege to be asked to speak at its opening. Every aspect of the ‘rich variety’ to which the Cardinal referred is vital, because the Gospel is meant to take root in and illuminate every aspect of the life of individuals and of society. But the dialogue of philosophy and theology is of crucial, irreplaceable importance.

A great deal of what passes for dialogue between faith and culture or between science and religion, a great deal of the debate on bio-ethics, social questions and sexual morality in our societies is doomed to incoherence. This is so because the participants often do not adequately understand the philosophical, not to speak of the theological, dimensions of the issues about which they are arguing. Perhaps they are not even conscious that such dimensions exist!

When one hears or reads debates about matters ranging from embryonic stem cell research to euthanasia, gene therapy, the death penalty, what would constitute a just war, and the morality of nuclear weapons, one may often search in vain for any awareness that different and incompatible systems of moral philosophy are at work in the debate. A utilitarian, a fundamentalist, an intuitionist, a natural law philosopher – sometimes the same person at different stages of the argument – are blissfully unaware that they are speaking different languages, with different criteria, asking what are ultimately different questions. They may become increasingly irate at the failure to achieve a meeting of minds; but any such meeting will always be superficial and illusory unless we go back to the underlying questions!

The most profound reason for the incoherence is that none of them, except the natural law philosopher – if he or she has a good understanding of what natural law mean, which is not to be taken for granted! – has faced in sufficient depth the foundational philosophical injunction, “Know Thyself”. As Paul Ricoeur points out, the phrase ‘know thyself’ is, in the end the same as ‘be wise’ (RICOEUR, P., Finitude et Culpabilté, La Symbolique du Mal, Aubier 1963, p.331).The problem of moral incoherence and relativism, which Pope John Paul called “a real overthrowing and downfall of moral values”, is, as he put it, “not so much one of ignorance of Christian ethics, but ignorance rather of the meaning, foundations and criteria of the moral attitude” (JOHN PAUL II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia, 18).
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The real issue is that some of the moral approaches at work, because they are not founded on that first step, “Know thyself”, are, in the philosophical sense, the fruit of an “unexamined life” – a life whose ultimate meaning and purpose have not been thought through in depth. A reflection that asked fundamental questions of philosophical and theological anthropology would not find itself adequately accounted for in a moral approach that does not begin from a serious philosophical, indeed metaphysical, understanding of human freedom. It could not be satisfied, for example, with an approach that seeks to evaluate the exercise of human freedom simply in terms of the consequences that our choices produce, and to weigh these consequences in some kind of balance, however sophisticated, as if human freedom had no other meaning than to be a mechanism for bringing about changes in the physical world..

We need to go back to an approach that would understand that our choices are more than ways of producing results. They are a language in which we may acknowledge or deny the truth about other people and the truth about ourselves; our choices do not simply produce changes in external realities, “but, to the extent that they are deliberate choices, they give moral definition to the very person who performs them, determining his profound spiritual traits” (JOHN PAUL II, Veritatis Splendor, 71).
. In other words, in our exercise of freedom, we decide not just what we shall do but what we shall be – and what we ought to be can only be known in the light of a proper understanding of what it is to be human.

But the problem of incoherence and absence of deep philosophical roots is found more widely than the sphere of morality. In the homily that Pope Benedict preached as he entered the conclave that elected him, he said:

Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labelled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires (RATZINGER, J., Homily at the Mass for the Election of a Pope, 18 April 2005).
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The frame of mind that is criticised in those words was succinctly expressed on a banner carried in a Roman protest march a couple of years ago: “L’unica legge è il desiderio” (Desire is the only law; I have a right to whatever I want; my ultimate goal is my own ego and desires.).

The notion that everything is relative and that one person’s truth is as valid as another’s, is one of those ‘principles’ that is often stated or assumed but which, when it comes to the crunch, people find more uncomfortable than they like to admit. Thus, on many issues we proclaim aloud that the other person is entitled to his or her opinion, that there is no more to be said and we must agree to differ. That does not prevent us going away muttering to ourselves that he or she is utterly blind, or stupid, or stubborn, or hard-hearted, or narrow-minded!

Once again we are faced with the issue of who we are. It is perhaps the key question of our time to understand ourselves: the meaning of our lives, our freedom, our relationships, our death. Reflecting on the sudden implosion of the Soviet bloc, Pope John Paul pointed to the inherent weakness of any attempt to build a culture without a transcendent dimension. It is not possible to uproot the need for God from the human heart “without throwing the heart into turmoil”:

At the heart of every culture lies the attitude that the human being takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. (JOHN PAUL II, Centesimus Annus, 24).

The encyclical Fides et Ratio is in fact a call to the task that this centre has set itself; the dialogue between theology and philosophy. Pope John Paul states unambiguously that “One may define the human being… as the one who seeks the truth” (JOHN PAUL II, Fides et Ratio, 28); and that, “Every truth – if it really is truth – presents itself as universal, even if it is not the whole truth. If something is true, then it must be true for all people at all times”. (Fides et Ratio, 27).

He goes on to point towards another source of incomprehension – the tendency to take too narrow a view of the truth. The encyclical talks about levels or modes of truth:

Most (modes of truth) depend upon immediate evidence or are confirmed by experimentation. This is the mode of truth proper to everyday life and to scientific research. At another level we find philosophical truth, attained by means of the speculative powers of the human intellect. Finally, there are religious truths which are to some degree grounded in philosophy, and which we find in the answers which the different religious traditions offer to the ultimate questions (Fides et Ratio, 30).

And at the ultimate level, “In Jesus Christ, who is the Truth, faith recognises the ultimate appeal to humanity, an appeal made in order that what we experience as desire and nostalgia may come to its fulfilment” (Fides et Ratio, 33).

The idea that only what is scientifically proven can be true is a failure to understand the limitations of science itself. Science rests upon a number of foundation stones, each of which gives rise to the question, ‘why’. Science cannot answer that question because science cannot even begin unless these foundation stones are real. Cardinal Daly expressed it in this way:

One must take as given, for example, that the world exists, when it might well not have existed; and one must ask, ‘Why?’ One must take as given that this world is ordered and intelligible, when it might instead have been ‘unorderly’, chaotic, arbitrary and absurd; and we must ask, ‘Why?’ One must take as given that the human mind can attain to objective truth, when instead all truth claims might be subjective perception or illusion; and one must ask, ‘Why?’ (DALY, Cardinal C.B., The Minding of Planet Earth, Veritas 2004, p. 38).

Failure to recognise these modes of truth leads to those all too frequent and tedious discussions which appear to assume that natural processes, for instance natural selection, operate on the same level as, and in competition with, the creative power of God. The crucial concept of analogy has been lost to view and everything is therefore univocal and competing with everything else. And so, in this limited view, where scientific laws operate, there can be no room for the God who created the universe in which those laws operate! People whom God has created out of nothing believe that, because they understand something of how God’s world works (as distinct from what it means), God on whom the world and its physical laws continuously and totally depend, becomes an unnecessary hypothesis!

It is no wonder that Fides et Ratio calls for a philosophy with a ‘genuinely metaphysical range’ which recognises “that reality and truth do transcend the factual and the empirical”! The Pope went on to say in words that will no doubt figure, or perhaps already have figured, in your discussions that “We face a great challenge at the end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation… Even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the ground from which it rises”. (Fides et Ratio, 83).

I make these remarks as one less wise in this learned assembly. I make them simply to illustrate how, as one who has long given up the academic life for the pastoral, I believe that your Centre is concerned with issues of very actual and very practical import. The “downfall of values” the Pope John Paul spoke of, the “dictatorship of relativism” to which Pope Benedict points, have their root at the level that transcends the factual and the empirical. The incoherence, the lack of depth that mark much of contemporary life can find an important element of their cure in serious dialogue between theology and philosophy which will address the questions that are rarely expressed but never absent.

We have to find ways of making the depths of reality visible, of allowing, to borrow Paul Ricoeur’s insight, the symbols to give rise to thought (RICOEUR, P., Finitude et Culpabilté, La Symbolique du Mal, Aubier 1963, p. 324); we have to find ways of moving from phenomenon to foundation.

I hope and believe that this centre will play a really significant role in that task. It is a great privilege and pleasure to declare the Centre of Philosophy and Theology open and to wish it, on my own part, and on behalf of Cardinal Poupard and the Pontifical Council for Culture, all the fruitfulness and creativity that it richly deserves to have.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick