The German Genius

languages). In 1977 he was made archbishop (and cardinal) of Munich and Freising and four years later Pope John Paul II made him Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Holy Office, the historical Inquisition.
    Ratzinger has published many books and, although a conservative and traditionalist on many matters, has not been afraid to engage in full debate with contemporary philosophers, social critics, and academics, both religious and secular. His works abound with references to classical Greek thought, to Nietzsche and Heidegger and, for example, to the more recent works of Jean Lyotard, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre (research professor of philosophy at Notre Dame University, Indiana), Nicholas Boyle (professor of German Literary and Intellectual History at Cambridge, whose distinguished two-volume biography of Goethe and his age was discussed in Chapter 4), and Jürgen Habermas, with whom Ratzinger coauthored Die Dialektik der Säkularisierung ( The Dialectics of Secularisation ) in 2007.
    Ratzinger’s theological and philosophical priorities are recognizably in the German tradition, showing a concern with the theological implications of what Kant, Dilthey, Max Weber, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer have offered—that is, a grappling with what we can know, the dangers of making partial points of view absolute guides, and above all the dangers of what Weber called “instrumental reason,” scientific reasoning used to control the world rather than to enjoy it. 104 A close student of Augustine as well as of Thomas Aquinas, Ratzinger was also much exercised by the events of 1968, which for him, as for others, marked the real arrival of postmodern society and relativism, with its ideas of culture as a “carnival,” where all worldviews have equal validity. 105
    For Ratzinger, the central event in modern history was the Enlightenment and this, he says, occurred—and could only have occurred—in a Christian environment like Europe. The development of reason, which the Enlightenment philosophes made so much of, is itself an aspect of revelation and so the world can never be enjoyed to the full so long as we maintain a division between faith and reason—this division being our central predicament. Ratzinger believes that the mystery of the Trinity is there to help us grasp the reality of the modern—but also ancient—trinity: the links between beauty, goodness, and truth. These links, he says, show us that there are eternal and timeless values, and the way God lets us know that this is true is through the phenomenon of hope, a gift. Nietzsche said that hope was the last joke that God played on mankind, but Ratzinger insists that hope is one of those “memories of God” that is etched within all of us.
    Only Christianity—Catholicism—can offer the right mix of faith and reason, says Ratzinger, for it alone is responsible for recognition of the perceived dichotomy, it alone has established the traditions—the intellectual traditions (Augustine, Aquinas) as well as the liturgical traditions—that will help us “encounter Jesus,” a central element in his thought. 106
    Christianity, for Ratzinger, is the master story; for him the postmodern world is quite at sea in asserting that master narratives are wrong in principle and often dangerous in practice, and he insists that the “evolutionary ethos” of the contemporary world means that our only choice is between Christianity and nihilism. His answer to the nihilists is that they must first realize that they “need to be given something.” 107 And he uses here, both as evidence and analogy, marriage. We all feel we need love, but we have no control over erotic love—we have no control over who we fall in love with, we experience it as a bolt from the blue, and for Ratzinger it is a gift of God. Erotic love inevitably fades, however, and, with help from the church, the community of the church, the tradition of the church, erotic love is turned into something else. “The erotic dimension of love, which does not ask my permission to happen, is fulfilled only in the agapic dimension of gratuitous self-giving.” 108 The phenomenon of agape, self-giving, for Ratzinger helps our ascent to the divine, invests us with a “spiritual chivalry.” “Thus today we often see in the faces of the young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation…The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability