Many famous sentences and phrases came to mind as I read this fine collection of Joseph Ratzinger’s (Benedict XVI) writings on his beloved cultural homeland, Europe. Some come from Scripture. A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country; a good shepherd goes in search of lost sheep. I think also of Shakespeare: “His life was gentle; and the elements So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” Finally, a Nietzschean phrase (taken in a non-Nietzschean sense) regularly recurred: “a good European.”

Ratzinger was a good European. The reasons are illuminated in a new collection of his selected writings, The True Europe: Its Identity and Mission.

A Lifetime: Its Lessons and Questions

As a true son of Europe, this eminent Catholic thinker and churchman constantly worried about his cultural homeland and her modern children. A good deal of his adult life was spent considering both, measuring the Europe of his day against what the title of the collection highlights: Europe’s defining “identity and mission.” That aboriginal “mission,” that defining “identity” as a “cultural continent,” was to combine Christian faith and philosophical reason in a mutually enriching dialogue, and constantly to humanize politics and social life in the light of the dignity bestowed on man. During his long lifetime (1927–2022), he had constant cause for worry, as modern Europeans repeatedly turned their backs on this grand inheritance. Growing up a teenager in Bavaria in the early 1940s, he saw the rise of the monstrous racialist ideology that captured his nation. Then, after a devastating world war, he saw his beloved Europe divided by an Iron Curtain, with his own country exemplifying the division, this time affected by a monstrous ideological totalitarianism of the left.

Two decades later, the still youngish professor observed the antinomianism, utopianism, and revolutionary violence of ’68. And from 1989 until his death, he tracked a series of fateful decisions by elites that took Europe in an ominous direction, toward a thoroughgoing secularism that expelled God and biblical faith from public life and enthroned a radically autonomous humanity sans Dieu et sans racines (without God and without roots). 

Thus, during the course of an eventful lifetime, he observed his compatriots going mad in a number of ideological ways, right, left, and humanitarian. They had in common the rejection of the Christian faith and corresponding apotheoses of reason and will which, in truth, were a terrible blinkering and narrowing. What he witnessed was a series of experiments in distinctively modern forms of atheism, what the French Jesuit theologian, Henri de Lubac (1996–91), collectively dubbed “atheistic humanism.” All of these represented fundamental breeches with Europe’s nature and vocation. 

Or did they? For here was a paradox: these aberrations of reason and will, these extreme denials of faith, had been conceived, gestated, and first saw the light of day in Europe. They were quintessential European products. How was this possible? 

When the question was posed in this way, the full task of the cultural diagnostician came into sight. Why and how did Europe gestate its antitheses? How could one discriminate valid from invalid European developments? And, most urgently, how could one effectively recall Europeans to themselves, to their original identity and defining mission? How could one make God credible and attractive to those who had abandoned Him? The lectures, essays, and addresses of this volume help readers see how the eminent scholar, thinker, and churchman went about this humongous task. All three competencies—scholar, thinker, and churchman—were required.

Scholar, Thinker, Churchman

As a scholar, he gathered and synthesized the relevant data, reaching back in history to the first occurrence of the term “Europa” in Herodotus, then tracking the concept and reality of a distinctive cultural continent as it took shape. As a thinker, he analyzed its various components (Greek; Roman; Christian; modern) in their positive elements and contributions to humane culture, and considered the contemporary scene in their light. As a churchman known for his learning and candor, he was regularly invited to speak on things European. Hence a general characteristic of the pieces collected here: they are reflections offered to different audiences—some ecclesial, some secular—on different occasions between 1979 and 2021. Each is a gem (some more than others), and collectively they contribute to a mosaic: Ratzinger on Europe then and now, and on its possible futures.

Throughout, one hears the full register of Ratzinger/Benedict’s “voice.” By turns, the voice is analytic and narrative; critical and constructive; gentle, firm, and blunt; and ominous and inviting. Its dominant note is an unforced combination of “the serenity born of rationality” and firm faith. In speaking this way, he embodies and “expresses” his conviction about Europe’s vocation to combine faith and reason in mutually illuminating dialogue, and thus to serve the whole human person. He believes that the world and the Church would be immeasurably diminished by the loss of this identity, as reality and ideal. Yet many present-day signs make this a real possibility. 

Europe’s “Pathological Self-Hatred”

Ratzinger is struck by how much contemporary Europe hates itself. This shows up in the most elemental and the most elevated ways. Elemental, because its native populations refuse the elemental act of hope which is to bring new life into the world; elevated, because of its constant rejection of its rich cultural patrimony outside of modern categories such as science, liberty, and secularism taken to extremes. It is simultaneously weary of life and vaunts itself as the new model for humanity. Small wonder other regions of the world look at today’s Europe and say, no thanks, we wish to live, and we wish to continue to live in continuity with our roots and history. 

Benedict regularly takes the opportunity to tell his European compatriots what a cultural outlier they are on today’s scene, in light of their repudiation of their cultural roots and foundations. Priding themselves on being open to all other cultures, they miss the chief lesson the others could teach them, that a culture that severs itself from its roots and history is not long for this world. 

Nor is it just itself that Europe hates. It hates human life itself, and the means that God has given humanity to share in its transmission: monogamous heterosexual marriage. Some of the most pointed passages address Europeans’ embrace of an absolute right to abortion and the legalized practice of euthanasia as among the (chief) defining marks of human liberty. This is barbarism masquerading as civilizational progress. While acknowledging difficulties in any number of personal circumstances, Ratzinger points out the willful blindness to known truths about nascent human life enshrined in the right to abort it—together with the corruption of human conscience it presupposes and justifies. Conversely, gratitude and respect for the gift of life are enshrined in the biblical commandment not to murder. Indeed, the foundation of civilized life is the prohibition not to take innocent life. On that score, contemporary Europe has deeply compromised its claim to civilized existence. 

Likewise, the replacement of the norm of heterosexual marriage and family by ersatz ideological constructions attacks human life and society at their most fundamental level. No society can embrace or tolerate these aberrations for long. Technological and other efforts to replace the natural order of life’s generation and transmission necessarily lead to further evils: frozen embryos, surrogacy, the loss of human identity in those brought into the world in these artificial ways, and the furthering of a destructive utilitarian attitude toward human life.

There are some brighter spots, but Benedict’s diagnosis of contemporary Europe can be summed up as follows: the new Europe is motivated by the hubris of total emancipation and self-creation, which leads inexorably to cutting oneself off from the sources of life. No wonder Europe is dying. Man is not God, and to pretend otherwise necessarily leads to the diminishment of His image. 

This diagnosis of today has the double virtue of pointing back to the path one must retrace to discover the causes and twisted course that led to it, and to the path forward by which Europe can revive (in several senses) itself. A deracinated Europe must rediscover its vital roots.

Modernity Rescued from Itself

Genesis 2–3 limns the original and sempiternal human temptation: to usurp God’s place, to determine autonomously good and evil. This runs counter both to the created order and to divine command. In a number of places in these writings (and more so in others), Ratzinger retraces the modern mistakes that led to today. When one knows the terminus ad quem, one can view history and its developments with a focused eye. The departures can be placed under a number of categories: reworked anthropologies; reworked theologies; reworked understandings of science and nature; reworked understandings of the state and politics; reworked understandings of history (from theological and providential to secular and immanent); and so on. There are many pieces to the puzzle of historical causality. 

Here, alas, it is not possible to retrace Ratzinger’s multifaceted genealogy of contemporary Europe and what he calls its “secular culture.” Two general points, however, need to be made. First, Ratzinger is far from being simply “anti-modern.” The second is that modern instances are today in need of support, support that their erstwhile enemy, Christianity, can provide. Modern science, for example, was and is an advance in man’s understanding of the world. What Ratzinger is concerned about is its prevenient “mapping of the world,” the worldview it presupposes and promotes. Here questions arise about its adequacy that science itself cannot address or answer. “Scientism,” the view that modern science is the peak of reason, is false, demonstrably so, and science needs to be (re)enlisted in a dialogue with other uses of reason, starting with philosophy but also including faith. 

In this vein, he asks scientists and partisans of science: what is the great presupposition of science? Is it not that reality is intelligible and that the human intellect is capable of engaging its intelligibility? What justifies that presupposition, however? Is it more plausible to maintain that intelligibility and intelligence come from 1) fundamental non-intelligence, from brute matter, or 2) from creative Reason? As presuppositions, neither can be scientifically proven, but one enables inquiry and accounts for scientific discovery, while the other makes science an act of pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, Sisyphean if not absurd. The more plausible (and hopeful) choice makes a fundamental tenet of faith, creative Divine Logos, science’s surprising ally. 

Something similar occurs with modern ethical values such as human equality, dignity, and the rights of conscience, which are fundamental for modern democracy. As values shared by his contemporaries, he asks them two questions: 1) where did these values come from? And 2) what can support them today? An open-minded look at human history and world cultures reveals that they first came to light in Christian soil, and were rooted in Christian revelation. Modern thinkers then tried a variety of ways of grounding them in other instances: in nature, reason, and even History or will. Today, these efforts have revealed their inadequacies, and contemporaries are left with commitments without ground or support. Their original source, Christianity, however, stands ready to provide that support.

Here Ratzinger makes a move similar to what he did with modern science. If his contemporaries are committed to human dignity, indeed to absolute or unconditional human dignity—which their reactions to the genocides of the twentieth century and the human rights declarations that followed indicate they are—where, he asks, does “absoluteness” and its corollaries such as “unconditional” and “inviolable” come from? In the final analysis, only a real absolute—the Absolute, God—can anchor this sort of unconditional respect for man. Evolution doesn’t. Christianity does. Today, the choice for man leads to the choice for God.

These sorts of reductio ad alterum (which remind me of Pascal) are but one arrow in Ratzinger’s rhetorical quiver. He has many others on display in this collection, dispelling misconceptions about Christianity (which are legion) and, more positively, showing the true face of the Christian God as revealed in Jesus Christ. Here another phrase comes to mind: sursum corda, lift up your hearts. For above history is the Lord of history, above culture, the divine Subject of culture. Ratzinger’s Christian faith tells him that the parable of the Prodigal Son is the eternal truth of God’s relationship to humanity, even in our most errant ways. Out of faith and love, he reiterates that Word of hope to each and all of his compatriots, to all who read him.