Ratzinger’s Reasonable Politics

“Politics belongs to the sphere of reason, the reason common to all, natural reason. Politics is therefore a work that involves the use of reason and should be governed by the natural virtues, so well described in Greek antiquity, the four cardinal virtues: prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude,” said then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, speaking in 2003 at a round-table sponsored by the Pontifical University of Santa Croce in Rome. The report appears in 30 Days. He is introducing The doctrinal Note about certain questions regarding the commitment and behavior of Catholics in political life (found here), and I found it while looking for something else.

The “correct secularism” and “laicization of politics” excludes theocracy, he continues. It excludes on the other side

a positivism and empiricism which is a mutilation of reason. According to this position reason is alleged to be capable of perceiving only material things, empirical, verifiable or falsifiable by empirical methods. Therefore reason would be blind to moral values and incapable of judging them, since they would enter the sphere of subjectivity, and not that of the objectivity of a reason limited to the verifiable, to the empirical, and so positivist.

This “mutilation of reason, restricting it to the ascertainable, to the empirical, to the verifiable or falsifiable according to material methods, destroys politics and . . . reduces it to a purely technical action, which should simply follow the strongest currents of the moment, submitting therefore to the transitory and also to an irrational dictate. . . . [R]eason has the capacity to know the great moral imperatives, the great values which must determine all concrete decisions.”

Faith doesn’t impose upon human political thinking something it can’t know on its own, but it “can enlighten reason, can heal, cure a sick reason. . . . [I]t restores reason to itself, helps reason to be itself, without alienating it.”