Though I’m still warmed with joy over the upcoming beatification of John Paul II, I can’t help but think there is far more to Joseph Ratzinger, whom we now know as Pope Benedict XVI, than we can truly imagine or epitomize in journalism. Since he was proposed as a candidate for the papacy I’ve been slowly chewing on his pre-papal writing, in little bits and chunks here and there. He’s not the type of thinker I can plow into and devour, he is too formidable as an intellect. While I greatly enjoy easily digestible and clear thinking, there is something about the scope of Ratzinger’s knowledge that resists quick absorption in the intellectual gut. Reading Ratzinger is sort of like eating while pregnant–the digestion process is slower and sometimes a bit more uncomfortable, simply because the food slows down in transit so that the body may absorb more of its nutrients to feed the growing child within. Ratzinger travels through the intellectual gut very slowly, and I think it is for precisely the same reason that it is slow. There is more nutrients to be derived from so that you may grow your own intellectual child. It doesn’t take you over, it fertilizes your own thoughts and brings them to fuller fruition.

He is the type of thinker who continually surprises me and the more I read about him the more I realize I haven’t understood him at all, because my prejudices about him–derived from my fellow Catholics and the media–all turn out to be terribly reductive. The doctrinal pit bull or the radical traditionalist both fall short of the mark. It would be easy, at the head of a system like Catholic theology, to put blinders on to the rest of the secular world. He is somehow able to absorb and synthesize seemingly all of it, and find what is truthful and discard what is not. The reflex to reject, out of hand, all that is not strictly orthodox, simply doesn’t exist in his worldview. For there is nothing that orthodoxy does not subsume and make a part of itself, it is, as it and we claim to be, universal.

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been thinking about the difference between the secular (the rightful domain of all souls on earth) and secularism (the suffocating mistake that freedom FROM religion should replace freedom OF religion). It is primarily because I fear, particularly on the internet, that the Catholic intellectual inheritance is being subsumed within a bunker mentality, a mentality which has us lobbing hand-grenades and mustard gas at an allegedly ferocious army that turns out to merely be a pack of boys from Golding’s Lord of the Flies with sticks and stones. Hunkered down, embittered, and fearful, the bunkered down Catholic already reeks of a defeat that hasn’t even remotely come to pass. It’s oddly millenarian and pessimistic for a people of joy.

In my travels, which are admittedly a little more scattershot and haphazard than they once were, as a mother of two, soon to be three, children three and under, I discovered this book , a dialogue between Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, on the dialectics of secular reason and religion. I must admit the answers given by both men revolutionized my perception of each of them–and they perform the theory that each of them are advancing in what maybe the oddest philosophical co-operation in history: the radical notion that secular reason and religion are not at war with each other but need to remain in dialogue with each other. They each fortify and delimit each other. One might easily expect that Habermas would note all the limitations of religion and Ratzinger all the limitations of reason, and while they both acknowledge the limitations of each, each man, admirably goes to great lengths to describe the limits of the viewpoint one might expect him to favor.

Habermas admits the undeniable Judeo-Christian inheritance implicit to contemporary secular reason, and insists it must remain a part of the dialogue, separating him from previous iterations of Marxism which reject all religion of the opiate of the people. (Habermas has been particularly insightful in noting that the obvious result of such a view is that your socio-economic inheritance becomes a more absolutist totalitarian religion than the opiate they reject. Sort of like moving from methadone to heroin instead of the other way around.)

He also, unexpectedly for a neo-Marxist, acknowledges the “salvific” value of religious discourse, which reason alone cannot provide, particularly in a world where any form of salvation seems absent. Ratzinger for his part confesses to the tendency for religion to separate and even oppose itself to reason, even to the point of a sort of theological positivism which results in extremity in rhetoric as well as physical violence, he refers particularly to the Catholic faith in general as a political and global player, exhibiting “pathologies in religion,” as he calls them. We also have seen, “pathologies of reason” in which reason over-reaches it’s own limitations, envisioning itself as opposed to the natural law of which it is a part. This is not the same argument of old that Catholicism is reasonable because Catholicism is reason; that’s an aphoristic equivocation, Ratzinger is distinctly imagining secular reason as separate parts within a whole that work to delimit each other, even as each is self-limiting. It is an expansion of John Paul II encyclical Fides et Ratio to a new and even more startling figuration.

Most notable (and least surprising, perhaps) is Ratzinger’s persistent call that “human rights” be coupled with a larger conversation of “human obligations.”

I am struck by the radical nature of this dialgoue and the tectonic shift it represents. Both men call for a “post-secular” age in which secular reason and divine revelation work in a dialogue with each other, each acting to delimit and purify each other. Reason, notes Ratzinger, via Habermas, must be “the controlling organ” of religion. I’m particular moved by the humility each man exhibits and the fact that the eschew the easy position of the unthinking on both sides: which must posit a straw man enemy of the other, using the pathologies of each side to stand for the entirety of it’s world view.

It should provide a model for reasoned dialogue on both sides of the debate. It’s not something, I imagine, that would drive the internet market which is subsumed with hollow polemic and an artificial form of spleen venting disguising itself as thoughtfulness. It’s an easy tactic, feigning outrage. It makes one appear instantly superior. The only problem is that it usually involves a reductive and usually uninformed characterization of the opposing viewpoint.

It left me with an optimistic feeling–that there is still a possibility for the faithful to exist within secular culture as a leaven rather than consistently at war with it. There is a supreme carefulness in Ratzinger a willingness to open his mind to opposition and ideas without fear, almost as if his intellectual gifts blossomed under the opening words of the papacy of his worthy predecessor: Be Not Afraid. Ratzinger–now Pope Benedict XVI–has an intellectual fearlessness that will bear great fruit. I believe this conversation with Habermas has yet to hit its full stride in the world of ideas. It may come some time from now, but its time is coming. The postsecular age is upon us and it feels a whole lot like dawn.