Excerpt from Michael Matheson Miller’s lecture for the 2023 Cátedra Joseph Keckeissen.

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My talk today is really an introduction to some of the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI. He was a prolific writer—I have one shelf in my library just of Ratzinger, and it’s full. I’m getting more and more, and I’m trying to collect all the books that he wrote. Sometimes it’s a little discouraging when you read someone who writes more than you read.

So I cannot, in any way, do justice to the thought of Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI. But what I’d like to do today is talk about one area—or a couple of areas—of his work. I think that he identified five crises in our modern life, our modern culture. And these five crises are also related to the loss of faith and to secularism, but also, I think, to a certain tendency I sometimes describe—The contemporary situation is that we have two things: we have technocratic utopianism on one side, and nihilism knocking on the door on the other side.

I think that Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI, was one of the great 20th-century analysts of political, social, moral, and human life, and he has a lot to add to our understanding.

I’m going to look at five ideas. I was asked to give a talk at a conference on Benedict XVI—the mind and the man—and my job was to focus on the political and social. But as I went through his work and looked at it, these things came to me. So, most of what I’m going to say is him. The framework is my framework. If he doesn’t like it, then I’ll ask him to pray for forgiveness for me. But this is all really his interpretation.

So, he identifies five crises. The first crisis is that of truth; the second is of reason; the third, of progress; the fourth, of freedom; and the fifth is beauty. And so, let me go through all of them.

What I think he does—and this is what struck me so much—is that he begins by looking at a crisis. He identifies a problem. So: the crisis of truth. And then he takes that problem on its own terms. He addresses it on its own terms, in a philosophical way, like wrestling with it. But he doesn’t stop there. He then proposes a response—and a response from the Gospels.

And I think that’s a wonderful model for us: that first, we address the problem on its own terms. We take it seriously. We look at it. We ask if it’s coherent or not, if it’s right… and then we propose: what’s the Gospel response to that?

I’ll start with the crisis of truth. This, I think, is really the crisis that’s at the root of secularism. It’s at the root of so many of our moral and political problems. It’s the denial of truth. Before he was elected pope at the conclave, he gave a very famous homily where he coined the phrase that most of you have probably heard. He said:

“We live under a dictatorship of relativism.”

He said:

“Having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled fundamentalism, whereas relativism—that is, letting oneself be ‘tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine’—seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times.”

And he said: 

“We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, there was exhilaration that these evil regimes had collapsed and that there would now be a revival of truth. But Ratzinger argued that relativism did not die. Instead, it combined with the desire for gratification to form a potent mix.

You can compare this work to the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and also to another Catholic philosopher named Augusto Del Noce, a wonderful thinker who said that communism failed in the East because it realized itself in the West. (This was in 1989.) So what happened is we had this desire for gratification mixing with relativism.

Now, how do we think about relativism? Well, in one sense, we can take the claims of relativism on their own terms. This is a pretty standard approach. I used to teach undergraduates, and today I had the pleasure of sitting and working with a class at Universidad Francisco Marroquín and having this very discussion with undergraduates here.

And so, how do we think about truth? Does truth exist? What does it mean? Many people, as you know, will say, “Truth does not exist,” and they think this is an opening up to their own subjective freedom and liberty, and that it’s not totalitarian.

But Ratzinger said relativism is a dictatorship. Why?

Relativism can only be a dictatorship because if you reject the possibility of truth, then you destroy philosophy. Because philosophy comes from the Greek words φίλος (philos) and σοφóς (sophos), meaning ‘love’ and ‘wisdom.’ And so the idea of truth is that you’re standing in front of reality with a love of wisdom, open to being shaped by reality.

Saint Thomas Aquinas describes truth as conforming the mind to reality. And you’re open to see that. Now, if you reject the possibility of truth—remember how he says it goes to your ego and desire—then there’s no response to reality. Rather, you become an ideologue.

So the opposite of philosophos (love of wisdom) is ideology: where the person has a view of the world and tries to fit the world into his own view.

Some of you may remember the Greek myth of Procrustes. He was a monster in ancient Greek mythology, and he had a hotel. In the hotel, he had a one-size bed. If you were too long for the bed, he would cut you to fit; and if you were too short, he would stretch you out to fit. And of course, no one ever checked out of that hotel. That’s what ideology is: it tries to fit reality into its own view—and that’s why it always becomes a dictatorship.

So let’s get back to this question of truth. First, let’s take the denial of truth on its own terms. If someone says, “There is no truth,” or “Truth does not exist”—and of course, whenever I hear that, I always ask, “Okay, is that true?”

I just had a talk with an undergraduate who answered, “Yeah, that’s true.”
I said, “Okay, so it’s true that truth does not exist?”
And they were like, “Yes.”
So I said, “Okay, is that the only truth?”
And people say, “Yes, it’s the only truth.”
And I’ll say, “Is that true?”

So now we have two truths: it’s true that truth doesn’t exist, and it’s also true that that’s the only truth. So I say, “Well, what’s next? Are you going to become a fascist?”

Now, my joke about fascism is actually on purpose, because oftentimes people will say, “If you hold absolute truth, you are a fascist.” But notice that the denial of truth is a self-refuting claim. It’s incoherent on its own terms. It’s self-refuting because to deny truth you must make a truth claim.

Then people say, “Fine, but you can’t know truth.”

And I taught undergraduates, so it happened over and over again. That was almost 20 years ago. Things haven’t changed—because it happened again this morning. (And they were wonderful, by the way. Wonderful graduates.)

And I said, “Okay, you can’t know the truth. Do you know that? Are you claiming you can’t know the truth?”

They’re like, “Yes!”

And again—it’s a self-refuting position. So to deny truth is an incoherent position on its own terms.

But as I said, when you deny truth, it’s like what we call a bait-and-switch. It’s a trick. It pulls you in, and it’s going to gratify your ego, because you are the arbiter of reality.

But then we ask ourselves: “If I’m the arbiter of reality, and you’re the arbiter of reality, and we’re not talking about anything outside ourselves…”

One of the examples I use to think about this is whether something is beautiful or not (and I’ll go to beauty later). But if you have a deep subjective experience of beauty—or of some truth—and you want to communicate it, if there’s no truth, and there’s nothing outside, what do I care what you feel?

And so it seems like it lifts you up, but in the end, the denial of truth makes your views, and your ideas, and your beliefs, and your experiences, and your emotions absolutely worthless—because you’re not talking about anything. And you only matter if there’s a transactional reason: you have a car, I need a ride—tell me what you think. But if I don’t need a ride and you don’t have a car, I don’t care what you think.

So the denial of truth actually dehumanizes the person. And it creates bad conditions for politics.

My talk is “The Crisis of Culture and the Defense of Politics.” Without truth, there can be no philosophy. Without philosophy, there can be no education and there can be no politics—which is an engagement in seeking after the best way to order a society.

There can only be a dictatorship.

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