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WHAT may we hope for? In his encyclical Spi Salvi, Pope Benedict XVI
says that while science and technology may bring us more and more
things that help make life easier to live, they cannot be a tool and
guide for the moral well-being of the world.
This is because of developments in “the dark
side of modern culture.” George Noumeyer cites three
characteristics of these developments. These are distinguished by
hostility against the past, boredom with the present and fear of the
future. Modern culture appears hostile to the traditional values of
marriage, family and human sexuality. It denies or discards the
Christian roots of society.
Modern man appears bored with the present and is
filled with emptiness amid affluence as a result of the loss of the
deep meaning and purpose of life. All these lead to a fear of the
future. Yet when his projects go awry he is quickly disillusioned
and “slips into depression and nihilism (death wish).
Today man has a penchant for instant
gratification and modern culture is distinguished by practices
directed against new life—abortion, contraception, sterilization,
etc.
So what may we hope for? First, Pope Benedict
says that incremental progress is possible only in the material
sphere. “…In the growing knowledge of the structure of matter
and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we clearly see
continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature. Yet
in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there
is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that
man’s freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions
anew . . . Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every
person and every generation is a new beginning. Naturally, new
generations can build on the knowledge and experience of those who
went before them, and they can draw upon the moral treasury of
the whole of humanity. But they can also reject it because it can
never be self-evident in the same way as material inventions. The
moral treasury of humanity is not readily at hand like tools that we
use, it is present as an appeal to freedom and a possibility for it.
This . . . means:
“a) The right state of human affairs, the
moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed simply through
structures alone . . .
“b) Since man always remains free and since
his freedom is always fragile, the kingdom of good will never be
definitely established in the world…If there were structures which
could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the
world, man’s freedom would be denied, and hence, they would not be
good structures.
“What this means,” says Pope Benedict, “
is that every generation has the task of engaging anew in the
arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task
is never simply completed. Yet every generation must also make its
own contribution to establishing convincing structures of freedom
and of good, which can help the following generation as a guideline
for the proper use of human freedom; hence, always within human
limits, they provide a certain guarantee also for the future. In
other words: good structures help, but of themselves they are not
enough. Man can never be redeemed simply from outside. Francis Bacon
and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that
he inspired were wrong to believe that man can be redeemed by
science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of
hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the
world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and
the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it. On the
other hand, we must also acknowledge that modern Christianity, faced
with the successes of science in progressively structuring the
world, has to a large extent restricted its attention to the
individual and his salvation. In doing so it has limited the horizon
of its hope and has failed to recognize sufficiently the greatness
of its task—even if it has continued to achieve great things in
the formation of man and in care for the weak and the suffering.”
And for those who put their hopes in science,
man is redeemed by love. “This is what it means to say: Jesus
Christ has ‘redeemed’ us. Through him we have become certain of
God, a God who is not a remote ‘first cause’ of the world,
because his only begotten Son has become man and of him everyone can
say, ‘I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave
himself for me.” (Continued)
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