Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Notwendigkeit der Offenbarung; Wiedergewinnung des Grundes der Vernunft durch Vernunft

Kurzinhalt: ....the instrument that is most transparent for its constitutive relationship to Being; to be rational means to live within the differentiated horizon of the ultimate revelation; Christianity defines the limits of rationality

Textausschnitt: 119a We can do no more than take up their suggestions. Despite all appearances, our world may not be as self-sufficient, as secular, or as rational as it asserts. The schizophrenia that insists it can dispense with the very foundations that sustain it need not be viewed in a wholly negative perspective. Contradiction provides the opening into which our meditation may enter, as we begin to explore the extent to which a rational secular order might become capable of acknowledging its constitution through the definitive self-revelation of God in history. What is needed is the confidence that the rationality of the modern world will lead us back to the differentiation of Being from whence it is derived. A faithful unfolding of reason itself eventually makes plain its dependence on an order of Being from which it takes its bearings. Far from a conflict with revelation, the deepest reality of reason is that it exists in continuity with the self-disclosure of transcendent divinity. A secular world as such can hardly even be identified, except through the dedivinization of the cosmos in the full transcendence of revelation. Our problem is to retain or rediscover the enchantment of its tension toward the ground that can no longer be identified with it. A beginning is to be found in the operation of reason itself. The reenchantment of our world can most effectively begin with the instrument that is most transparent for its constitutive relationship to Being. Indeed, nowhere is the movement from the Beyond so available to us as it is through the opening of the soul. Having rediscovered the subjective pathway, we can then appreciate more fully the source of the great symbolic forms that marked the earlier eras of enchantment. (Fs) (notabene)

120a Reason has always been the illuminative center of human existence. Only its discovery is a novelty, and that particular moment is tied, as we saw in chapter 1, to the revelation of transcendent Being that can be apprehended by no other means. The memory of that derivation may have receded, but it is never closed up. It awaits, as Heidegger understood, as a destiny ready to seize us when we least expect it and therefore remains available for the meditative recovery we seek to obtain. Reason is embedded in the revelatory opening, and it can never finally cut itself off from that source without turning its back on reason. Our confidence is therefore well founded that reason, faithfully pursued, will lead us back to the full amplitude of differentiation. To stop at anything less than the definitive attainment of differentiation would be to settle for a lesser hold on rationality. This is impossible for reason, without turning away from itself. To settle for a reduced standard of rationality is to choose what is irrational. Reason cannot be itself if it fails to live up to its own exigences. Left free from preconceived restrictions and released from the ideological incubus, reason enlarges itself freely until it reaches the limiting horizon of differentiation. To be rational means to live within the differentiated horizon of the ultimate revelation. (Fs)

120b The modern world is not only historically Christian; in a deeper sense, with implications for the relation to other world religions we will explore in the next chapter, it is essentially Christian. Its rationality is not only derived historically from a Christian orbit; it is structurally related to the maximal differentiation of being achieved there as well. Christianity defines the limits of rationality. To the extent that we submit to the norms of rationality, we are drawn inexorably toward their fullest expression within Christianity. Resistance at any point along the way involves a diminution of rationality. Of course, it is not necessary to begin at the end point of fulfillment. Anyone who undertakes the rational opening toward truth is implicitly within its orbit. All that is needed is faithfulness to the imperatives of reason itself for the amplification within the full Christian differentiation of Being to disclose itself. (Fs)

121a It matters little where we begin. Ineluctably, we are drawn toward the discovery of the presumptions of our worldview and toward the recognition of their beginning. The differentiations on which we ground our rationality do not arise ready-made. They depend on an illumination of Being that demarcates the main lines of their reality. It has long been understood that the conception of divinity, the organizing framework of religion, provides the ultimate horizon of meaning for any society. We are accustomed to applying this perspective when studying other societies and civilizations. It is the theological that furnishes the most comprehensive principles of reality and, therefore, the constitutive self-understanding of a social whole. But we rarely apply the same insight to ourselves. Curiously, only the postmodernists have begun to compel a reexamination of the perspective from which our own scientific study of the world and society derives its validity.1 The problem is that such critics themselves share too much of the modernity they critique. They take the objectivity of modern science at its face value as rooted in the claim to have detached itself from all premises and presuppositions. As a viewpoint utterly detached from any interest in the organizing framework of reality, modern science and liberal rights can assert their superiority. But it does not take much to deconstruct the myth of neutrality. Even modern science cannot escape the acknowledgment of its assumptions about the nature of reality, man's place within it, the purpose of human life, and the expectations of good and bad. The problem of the deconstructionists is that they themselves share the bankruptcy of foundations. They cannot conceive of any grounding of rationality. It must therefore be, they conclude, irreducibly relative, culture bound, and interest driven. (Fs)