Papal visit to Germany –2 POPE BENEDICT XVI


n the First Book of Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success, wealth, long life, the destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kings 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politi- cian. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to the cri- terion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of jus- tice. “Without justice – what else is the state but a great band of robbers?”, as St Augustine said. Germans know from their own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the state became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organised band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the domin- ion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously incon- ceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. Even today, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics. For most of the matters that need to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evi- dent that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsi-


10 | THE TABLET | 1 October 2011


The Listening Heart I


bility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. This conviction was what motivated resist- ance movements to act against the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to justice and humanity. For these people, it was indisputably evident that the law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when it comes to the decisions of a democratic politician, the question of what now corre- sponds to the law of truth – what is actually right and may be enacted as law – is less obvi- ous. The question of how to recognise what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder. In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion. But unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the state and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from reve- lation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned them- selves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century BC. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with


A lasting theme of Benedict XVI’s pontificate is that a society founded on what can be scientifically proven – positivism – diminishes humanity. In his address to the members of the Bundestag he called for a debate into how reason, informed by ethics, natural law and faith, enlightens the world


German Economy Minister Philipp Roesler and Chancellor Angela Merkel look on as Pope Benedict XVI gives a speech to the German parliament in Berlin on Thursday 22 September. Photo: CNS/Reuters, Thomas Peter


leading teachers of Roman law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key sig- nificance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and phil- osophy opened up the path that led, via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment, all the


way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world”. For the development of law and humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law. We see the two fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart – reason that is open to the language of being. There has been a dramatic shift in the sit- uation in the last half-century. The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to men- tion the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation


arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated on com- pletely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist under- standing of nature has come to be almost


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