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the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. In saying this, I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in our relation- ship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture. The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the lan- guage of nature and answer accordingly. Yet there is also an ecology of man. Man, too, has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled. Kelsen, at the age of 84 (in 1965), aban- doned the dualism of “is” and “ought”. (I find it comforting that rational thought is evidently still possible at the age of 84!) Previously he had said that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms, if a will had put them there. But this, he said, would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. “Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile,” he observed. Is it really?, I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus? At this point Europe’s cultural heritage
ought to come to our assistance. The convic- tion that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dig- nity in every person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. In the aware- ness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgement of the inviolable dig- nity of every human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in history. As he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace.
■This is an edited extrect from the Pope’s address, “The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundations of Law”, given before members of the Bundestag on Thursday of last week.
14 | THE TABLET | 1 October 2011
CHRISTOPHER HOWSE’S PRESSWATCH
‘Dr Williams likes quodlibets, and Frank Skinner’s is a good one’
“Fury” boiled over this week in the least likely battle since 2001, when a Sunderland greengrocer was prosecuted for selling bananas by the pound. The casus belli this time was the dropping by the BBC of BC and AD for BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era). “The BBC has been accused of
‘absurd political correctness’ after dropping the terms BC and AD in case they offend non-Christians,” wrote Chris Hastings in The Mail on Sunday. The clincher in the story seemed to be the reason given by the broadcaster’s religious and ethics department: “As the BBC is committed to impartiality, it is appropriate that we use terms that do not offend or alienate non-Christians.” The headline on a Mail on Sunday comment piece by James Delingpole read: “How the BBC fell for a Marxist plot to destroy civilisation from within.” The Marxist in question was identified as Herbert Marcuse, whose “teachings formed the intellectual bedrock for every revolutionary group from the Black Panthers to the Baader-Meinhof gang”. If this line of argument seemed preposterous, Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, in the next day’s Telegraph, took a lighter tone, if his objection was as strong. “There was no Mr Common Era preaching a ministry in Galilee in the first century AD,” he pointed out. “There was Christ, and if the BBC doesn’t want to date events from the birth of Christ then it should abandon the Western dating system.” When news turns so funny, it is
hard for comedians to keep up. Frank Skinner decided instead to hold a public conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. During it, he asked: “If you believe in God, why shouldn’t there be angels?” The writer Terence Blacker, in The Independent, thought that at this point, “Dr Williams, a saintly and thoughtful man, must have felt like burying his great bearded face in his hands”. I’m not so sure. Dr Williams likes quodlibets, and Frank
Skinner’s is a good one. A lot depends on the question. That is why another conversation last week, in The Guardian, between Richard Dawkins and Cristina Odone, was so unsatisfactory. “The Pope has said there are no ifs or buts, this is doctrine – we must never use birth control,” Cristina Odone said. “But how many Catholics do you think go to Confession and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve used birth control’?” Professor Dawkins met that question with another: “Why call yourself a Catholic when you don’t do what Catholics are supposed to?” The questions came as thick as quills upon the fretful porpentine, but clattered to the ground unanswered. The reason for this knockabout routine is that Richard Dawkins has got a new book out, The Magic of Reality. His lack of self-questioning was singled out in The Independent by biologist Colin Tudge, who wrote Dawkins “has no sense of irony. He rails … against fundamentalists yet he defends old-fashioned, Thomas Gradgrind-style materialism as zealously as the Mid-West Creationists defend the literal truth of Genesis”. It was like coming up for air to turn from the tight involutions of Dawkins’s world-view to a piece of work about which he can have nothing to say. The Poor Clares of Besançon have decided to move from their 800-year-old home to a new convent built by the renowned architect, Renzo Piano. Jonathan Glancey in The Guardian calls it “quietly masterful”. The challenge was great, for the
convent is a near neighbour of Le Corbusier’s masterpiece Notre Dame de Haut. “Just as Le Corbusier’s chapel was created for a Catholic Church he did not believe in,” Glancey writes, “so Piano has produced a building of quiet refinement and spirituality.” When theabbess, Sister Bridget de Singly asked the architect for a place of silence and prayer he said: “I can’t help you with prayer, but perhaps I can help with silence and a little joy.” The convent burrows into the hillside, helping its energy efficiency, but most striking is a use of natural light, in cells, refectory and chapel. Piano has “built around a minimal palette of concrete, timber and zinc; … he and his team have designed and crafted every last detail … within such a modest budget [£9 million] is a minor modern miracle”. Or, as Professor Dawkins would call it, magic.
■Christopher Howse is an assistant editor of The Daily Telegraph.
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