Since yesterday, I have been reading two books borrowed from the Arlington Public Library.
One, a small volume authored jointly by the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the present Pope Benedict-XVI, and the Italian academic and statesman Marcello Pera is titled, rather ungraciously, Without Roots. The basic theme of the book is what the authors consider present day Europe's lack of convictions or Christian Europe's reluctance to stand for and affirm its faith. A recurring target of the authors' criticism is 'relativism', the position that everybody's truth is good for himself, reflected in the statement that "every theory has its own experience". According to the authors, while relativism is motivated partly by a desire to buy peace with other cultures, especially the Islamic, it can be counterproductive in that. To quote Ratzinger: "To the other cultures of the world, there is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West. They are convinced that a world without God has no future. Multiculturalism itself thus demands that we return once again to ourselves."
Only last week, I have completed "The Rule of Benedict", David Gibson's book on Pope Benedict-XVI. Gibson is an American convert to Catholicism. It is well-informed and interesting. But the problem with the positions taken by progressives like Gibson is this: They seem to believe that any reform is progress. The only conviction that they hold is about the uselessness of all convictions. Taken together, Rule of Benedict and the present book gave me a good idea of the mind of Pope-XVI. In fact, Gibson's work is sub-titled, Pope Benedict-XVI and His Battle With the Modern World. That tells it all! One thing that struck me about "Without roots" is the authors' Euro-centric view of Christianity. This is indefensible considering that present day Catholic Church has an overwhelmingly non-European following. Besides, a Euro-centric view of the religion has no support in the history of origin or early development of Christianity.
The second book I am reading is an ambitious "Catholic Lifetime Reading Plan" by the Jesuit priest John A. Hardon. It is a collection of brief introductions to about a hundred 'catholic' authors. The criteria for inclusion are the authors' adherence to true tenets of catholicism and their acceptance of supremacy of Pope. Thus, that early patristic genius, Origen is excluded while Tertullian and the incomparable church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea are included with a warning to the readers. Origen's exclusion is because of his view that eternal damnation may not after all be eternal! Tertullian's flaw is a certain sympathy with Origenism. (Of course, in his later life, the orthodox Tertullian had moved to the Montanist heresy.) And Eusabius is blamed for his leanings towards Arianism, the fourth century heresy blamed for watering down the divinity of Jesus. The inclusion of some like Boethius and Goeffrey Chaucer really surprised me. Boethius, the author of Consolations of Philosophy, was in all likelihood a non-Christian. Chaucer of course was one of the greatest writers in western history. But his Canterbury Tales are not the most edifying of Christian writings. He himself considered them un-Christian as proved by his retraction at the end of the collection.
One of the writers in this Reading Plan is St. Anselm of Canterbury who lived in the 11th Century. The entry on Anselm interested me as it contained the following summary of his famous ontological argument for the existence of God: The existence of the idea of God necessarily involves the objective existence of God. Since by the very notion of God we mean "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," if we were to suppose that God did not exist, we would be involved in a contradiction, because we could conceive of a Being greater than a non-existing God--namely, a God who existed. To quote Karen Armstrong from her book, A history of God, "the very idea of 'God' contains a validation of God's existence because a perfect being which did not exist would be a contradiction in terms." [I have not read Armstrong's book though I very much want to. This quotation is from a review of the book that I read in the net.)
I think, Bertrand Russel in his History of Western Philosophy has given the story of this most interesting argument which was accepted and rejected by many great philosophers. Those who accepted its logic include Descartes and Spinoza. It was rejected by Thomas Aquinas, and Immanuel Kant.
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