POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON AND THE HIDDEN THEOLOGY OF CRITICAL THEORY
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Oxford German Studies, 43. 2, 172–189, June 2014
POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL
REASON AND THE HIDDEN THEOLOGY OF
CRITICAL THEORY
GAD YAIR
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
This paper analyses the affinity between the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and the
position of German critical theorists in their critiques of instrumental reason, thereby
exposing common theological motives that constitute German critical theory. Based
on a thorough analysis of his critical reflections about instrumental reason I advance
two propositions: on the one hand, that Pope Benedict XVI is a critical theorist; on
the other hand, that critical theorists embed theological assumptions in their
expositions of modernity and instrumental reason. Both parties rely on common
cultural tools that speak through the myth of Faust, and they share the same narrative
of doom and fall in their analyses of modernity and instrumental reason.
KEYWORDS: Critical theory, German social theory, theology, Faust
There is no Natural science without a precedent Religion. In this point there
is no distinction between the Catholic and the Materialistic views of the
world — both say the same thing in different words. Even atheistic science
has religion.1
In a recent article on possible interrelations between social theory and theology,
Harrington pointed out that political scientists acknowledge ‘the salience of the
theological dimensions and roots of […] basic concepts of modern political
thought’.2 This acknowledgment is gaining wider currency3 and is also found in
philosophy.4 However, says Harrington, ‘in the neighboring field of social or
sociological theory, rather less attention has been accorded to theological
genealogies’.5 This neglect, he argues, is surprising — especially given the centrality
1
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf, 1932), pp. 380–81;
emphasis in the original.
2
Austin Harrington, ‘Social Theory and Theology’, in Handbook of Contemporary
European Social Theory, ed. by Gerard Delanty (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 37–47 (p. 37).
3
See From Political Theory to Political Theology: Religious Challenges and the Prospects of
Democracy, ed. by Péter Losonczi and Aakash Singh (London: Continuum, 2010).
4
For example, John Caputo, Philosophy and Theology (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press,
2006).
5
Harrington, ‘Social Theory and Theology’, p. 37.
# W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014 DOI: 10.1179/0078719114Z.00000000056POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 173
of religion in early studies by sociologists (Weber, Durkheim, Mannheim) and
because ‘it would appear that theological and religious moments are in some sense
‘‘preserved’’ or implicated as residues of the past in the very categories with which
sociologists attempt to study them scientifically.’6
This paper sets out to address this neglect by analysing the affinity between the
writings of Pope Benedict XVI and the position of German critical theorists in their
critiques of instrumental reason, thereby exposing common theological motives
constitutive of German critical theory. On the one hand, it argues, Pope Benedict
XVI is a critical theorist; on the other hand, critical theorists seem to embed
theological assumptions in their expositions of modernity and instrumental reason.
Both parties rely on common pessimistic cultural tools that speak through the
myth of Faust. The cultural theology that underlies the German preoccupation
with the narrative of Faust provides the common ground that unifies critical theory
and the Pope’s theology.
The comparison between the Pope and critical theorists is surprising because the
Pope is critical of sociology generally, and of Marxist approaches to social and
historical analysis specifically. Nevertheless, like the German intellectuals of the
Frankfurt School, Benedict XVI attacks modernity and instrumental reason; and
like other German intellectuals, he attacks the after-effects of the Enlightenment:
science, technology and post-modern relativism. I use the conjunction between
the Frankfurt School’s sociological critiques of modernity and Benedict XVI’s
theological critiques of instrumental reason to expose latent cultural motives that
underlie both schools. In this conjunction I follow a trend that is currently
heralded by Habermas with his theses on ‘post-secular’ society.7 The analysis will
thus substantiate Milbank’s argument that ‘social theories are […] theologies or
anti-theologies in disguise’,8 or Postman’s secular argument, namely that the
‘social sciences are merely sub-divisions of moral theology’.9 Therefore, I argue,
contemporary critical debates about modernity, reason and technology should
always be tied to their deeper cultural/theological precedents, because ‘secularized
concepts retain a religious essence’.10
My thesis follows the insight of German political analyst and jurist Carl Schmitt,
who argued that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
6
Ibid., p. 41. Interestingly, some theologians made efforts to accommodate the teachings and
findings of sociology. See Richard A. Roberts, ‘Theology and the Social Sciences’, in The Modern
Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, ed. by David Ford and Rachel
Muers (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Benedict XVI, in contrast, thinks that this can only be a
Trojan horse.
7
See Jürgen Habermas, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’, New Perspectives Quarterly, 25.4
(2008), 17–29; Austin Harrington, ‘Habermas and the ‘‘Post-Secular Society’’’, European Journal
of Social Theory, 10 (2007), 543–60; Discoursing the Post-Secular: Essays on the Habermasian
Post-Secular Turn, ed. by Péter Losonczi and Aakash Singh (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2010).
8
John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993), p. 3.
9
Neil Postman, ‘Social Science as Theology’, Et cetera, 41 (1984), 22–32 (p. 32).
10
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 189; emphasis in the original.174 GAD YAIR
secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development
— in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state […] but
also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for
a sociological consideration of these concepts’.11 Karl Löwith bolstered this
position by arguing that ‘the moderns elaborate a philosophy of history by
secularizing theological principles’.12 Therefore, by exposing the affinity between
Benedict XVI’s theological critique of instrumental reason and the secular
approach that the Frankfurt School proposed for analysing the unintended effects
of modernity and the Enlightenment, I support the argument that sociology and
theology share some hidden cultural narratives and agendas. Both are, in some
sense and like the German culturally despondent intellectuals that Stern studied,
‘cultural middlemen, transmitting old ideas in new combinations to later
generations’.13 By exposing this surprising affinity, the present paper shows that,
like political science and philosophy, German critical theory has latent theological
presuppositions that constitute its narrative structure and predictions.
I begin with a short biography of Benedict XVI. The following section justifies
the use of Benedict XVI to extract the theology that is latent in German critical
theory. Most of the section explores the affinity between the ways in which the
Pope and major scholars from the Frankfurt School explain the evolution of
instrumental reason following the Enlightenment. To assess this affinity I analyse
Benedict XVI’s extensive corpus, i.e. publications, speeches, encyclicals, letters and
homilies. The juxtaposition of their respective positions helps appreciating the
common narratives of doom and fall that constitute their analyses of modernity
and instrumental reason and the shared roots of their lamentation over ‘the
disenchantment of the world’.14
BENEDICT XVI — A SKETCH
Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger, was born in a small German village
in 1927.15 His devout family moved several times during his childhood, staying near
the Austrian border. Following the Second World War he studied philosophy and
theology at Freising and the University of Munich (1946–51). He was ordained as a
priest in 1951 and obtained a doctoral degree in 1953 for a dissertation on ‘People
and House of God in St. Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church’. In 1957 he wrote a
Habilitation on ‘The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure’.
11
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985 [1934]), p. 36.
12
Karl Lowith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of
History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), p. 19.
13
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1961), p. 276.
14
See Max Weber’s ‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions’, in From Max Weber:
Essays in Sociology, ed. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press,
1946), pp. 267–301, and his The Sociology of Religion (London: Methuen, 1966).
15
See John L. Allen, Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger (New York:
Continuum, 2005); David Gibson, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and his Battle with
the Modern World (New York: HarperOne, 2006); Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The
Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Peter Seewald,
Benedict XVI: An Intimate Portrait (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008).POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 175
Ratzinger’s career in the Church was highly impressive. He was an assistant to
Cardinal Frings during the Second Vatican Council (1963). In 1972 he founded a
theological journal entitled Communio, and in later years he was assigned by Pope
John Paul II to various offices, in 1981 as the Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith. When John Paul II died Ratzinger presided at the Solemn
Funeral Mass. Ten days later, on 19 April 2005, he was nominated as the 265th
Pope and took the name Benedict XVI.16
Ratzinger’s academic career was impressive too. He began his teaching career at
the Freising High School of Philosophy and Theology, but moved quickly to the
University of Bonn (1959–63) and then to Münster (1963–66). He later taught at
Tübingen (1966–69) and then held the chair of dogmatics and history of dogma at
the University of Regensburg where he also took office as Vice President. His
curriculum vitae suggests that he is a prolific academic: he wrote many books and
articles throughout his busy dual career; he also admits to having thought that he
was chosen for a career in university teaching rather than in administering the
church.17
Benedict XVI is versed in twentieth-century German theology and philosophy,
straddling German discussions in both areas while providing incisive Catholic
interpretations of the Western tradition. As Cardinal Pell said recently, ‘No Pope in
history has published as much high quality theology on such a variety of topics as
Pope Benedict XVI. At the time of his election to the papacy few would have disputed
his position as the most distinguished living Catholic theologian.’18 Furthermore, his
period as pontiff did not end his prolific career as a commentator on the Western
tradition. Rather, as Samuel Gregg says, he used his Papal service as an opportunity to
pursue ‘a civilizational agenda […]. Quietly but firmly Benedict is making his own
distinct contribution to the battle of ideas upon which the fate of civilizations hang’.19
BENEDICT XVI AND SOCIOLOGY: A SURPRISING CONJUNCTION?
The juxtaposition of Benedict XVI with social theory is surprising yet justified. It is
surprising because he had strong reservations about sociology and the social
sciences more generally. It is justified because of Ratzinger’s professorial career
and prolific writings on the Western tradition — and mostly because he shares
with German critical theorists a common cultural basis.
Benedict XVI’s oeuvre and critical theory are highly critical of sociology and the
social sciences. Critical sociologists follow Marx in regarding religion as ‘the
opium of the masses’ and in exposing ‘the gulf between the moral criteria of
Christians and their actual conduct’.20 Indeed, ‘the sociological imagination as
classically deployed undercuts religious and theological pretensions’21 and it
16
See John L. Allen, The Rise of Benedict XVI (London: Penguin Books, 2005).
17
See Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the Millennium — An
Interview with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997).
18
Cited in the ‘Foreword’ to Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, p. x.
19
Acton Commentary, May 11 2011, ,http://spectator.org/articles/37641/benedict-xvi-no-
ones-shadow. [accessed 10 March 2014].
20
Max Horkheimer, Dawn and Decline (New York: The Seabury Press 1978), p. 91.
21
Roberts, ‘Theology and the Social Sciences’.176 GAD YAIR
actually explains away religious ‘pretensions’ by reducing them to social or
economic precedents. That sociology trumps theology — and also records the
decline of religion in modernity22 — are additional reasons to reject it. On various
occasions he has criticized sociology for attempting to model man and humanity
through deterministic and materialistic laws. He is also critical of sociology
because its ‘attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from
psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate’.23 The presumption of
sociology, he argued, negates the very essence of both man and humanity. In a
clear statement of this critique, Benedict XVI took aim at Auguste Comte, the
enlightened father of modern sociology, arguing that:
From as early as the time of Auguste Comte, all effort has gone into gaining
a complete knowledge of man as a being governed by rules, to filling in all
the blank spaces in the map of the scientific world. The result is the
emergence, in all its variations, of the fundamental concept of social science,
which appears in the East as Marxist sociology and in the West as positivist
sociology.24
Benedict XVI’s attack on Comte — the grandfather of French positivistic sociology
— was motivated by Comte’s deterministic and evolutionist model of society,
which presented religion as a mythical or even primitive stage in social evolution.
For Comte, modernity constituted the epitome of history, and science was its
befitting worldview. Emile Durkheim, who followed him, suggested that
modernity is a civil religion, and that the moderns need to abide by the scientific
state of mind with science replacing religion as a basis of solidarity. Benedict even
regards Marxist theory as theology in disguise, suggesting that Marx ‘simply
presumed that with the expropriation of the ruling class, with the fall of political
power and the socialization of means of production, the new Jerusalem would be
realized’.25 Those canonical beliefs of the discipline are reasons for the Pope’s
critical convictions against it. Simply stated, he seems to think that sociology
attempted to criticize belief and that it engages in profanity and blasphemy.
Yet Benedict XVI often refers to German philosophers and critical theorists. He
writes about Hegel and Marx, Kant and Heidegger; he mentions Fichte, Schelling
and Wittgenstein, and takes issue with Spengler, Horkheimer and Adorno. Marxist
and critical theorists appear often in his writings, even if critically, because they
seemed to propose a secular alternative for theology. For example, in The
Ratzinger Report he said that ‘the strictly scientific appearance of the philosophies
of Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas and Marcuse offered models of action by
which people believed they could respond to the moral challenge of misery in the
world as well as realize the proper meaning of the biblical message’.26 Like other
Marxist theories, he suggested, these are false prophets.
22
Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985).
23
The Regensburg Address on Faith, Reason and the University, 2006, ,http://www.
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_
20060912_university-regensburg_en.html. [accessed 10 March 2014].
24
Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe? (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), p. 93
25
Joseph Ratzinger, Saved in Hope: Spe Salvi (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), p. 21.
26
Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report, p. 178.POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 177
Nevertheless, his repeated references to German scholars testify to the intense
conversation that Benedict XVI conducts with the German intellectual tradition.
His writings routinely refer to and interpret the ‘decline of the west’, as Spengler
termed it. Furthermore, he writes about European history in an overarching
German cultural narrative of decline that secular scholars use to the same effect.27
Benedict XVI does so in clearer form and without the secular hesitations of other
German sociologists, who share the same ‘consciousness of gloom’28 yet ignore its
theological roots. In this sense, he provides a heuristic key to the cultural or
theological codes that constitute German critical theory.29
This conjunction between the assumed antipodes of social theory and theology is
actually made by the Pope himself. In a publication from 1991, A Turning Point for
Europe, the then Cardinal Ratzinger took the best known text of the Frankfurt School
fully seriously. ‘We ought to pay greater attention’, he wrote, ‘to what Horkheimer
and Adorno have called the dialectics of Enlightenment. By this is meant the ‘total self-
destruction of the Enlightenment’, which occurs where the Enlightenment absolutizes
itself and wishes to know only what is calculable and explicable but denies or relegates
to the merely private sphere everything that is not readily at its disposal’.30
This early reference is not the last one. In his 2007 Spe Salvi Encyclical he said
that ‘in the twentieth century, Theodor W. Adorno formulated the problem of
faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress
from the sling to the atom bomb’.31 In his 2010 Christmas address to the Roman
Curia he made reference to Horkheimer’s book, The Eclipse of Reason (1947),32
arguing that ‘to resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing
the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is
the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the
world is at stake.’ More significant for this conjunction is the meeting in 2004
between Cardinal Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas — ‘the one is the personifica-
tion of the Catholic faith […]; the other is seen as the personification of liberal,
individual, and secular thinking’33 — which was published with the allusive title
The Dialectic of Secularization: On Reason and Religion.34 This was another clear
setting where the Pope drew on Horkheimer and Adorno’s book, The Dialectic of
Enlightenment.35 These and other repeated references expose the tip of a culturally
constituted iceberg of congruence between the Pope’s theology and critical theory.
27
Gad Yair and Michaela Soyer, The Golem and German Social Theory (Lanham, MD:
Lexington, Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).
28
Kurt Lenk, ‘The Tragic Consciousness of German Sociology’, in Modern German
Sociology, ed. by Volker Meja, Dieter Misgeld and Nico Stehr (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1987), 57–75.
29
Yair and Soyer, The Golem and German Social Theory.
30
Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?, p. 174.
31
Ratzinger, Saved in Hope.
32
Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947).
33
Florian Schuller, ‘Foreword’, Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion, ed. by
Florian Schuller, trans. by Brian McNeil (San Franciso: Ignatius Press, 2006), pp. 7–19 (p. 15).
34
See Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and
Religion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006).
35
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: The
Seabury Press, 1972).178 GAD YAIR
Notwithstanding his criticism of sociology — whether Marxist or positivistic —
Benedict XVI’s portrayal of European history parallels or even follows his
sociological predecessors in the Frankfurt School. While German critical theorists
tend to downplay the theological motives that structure their orientation to
modern society, and while Benedict XVI rejects the legitimacy of sociology as a
valid intellectual position, these alleged antipodes actually share common cultural
moorings and intellectual narratives.
THE COMMON FAUSTIAN TRADITION
This exegesis extends my recent attempt to re-interpret German social theory by
exposing the deep cultural narratives which it unintentionally applies.36 I suggest
that like other German critical theorists, Benedict XVI applies the ready-made
narrative of Faust to criticize modernity, instrumental reason, science and
technology. In what follows I sketch the basic ingredients of this pervasive
cultural narrative.
The original legends about Faust were published around the 1580s and
presented his pact with the devil. Catholic monks used the secularized theology of
Faust to rebuke reformist movements that emphasized education and moral
autonomy. The moral of Faust is a theological one; it was conceived as — and
remained — a Christian epic.37 Faust’s quest for knowledge led him to bargain
with Mephistopheles, requesting superhuman powers in return for his soul, and
seeking knowledge of earthly and metaphysical matters. For twenty-four years,
Faust surveyed the cosmos and enjoyed life’s pleasures. As the pact concluded,
however, Mephisto brought Faust to his fated end — descent into hell. This
popular theology became a German cultural leitmotif, a pervasive cultural
narrative that pervaded all spheres of human expression, from poetry to literature,
from philosophy to social theory.
The story of Faust translated a theology of fall and anti-Enlightenment into
popular culture. It translated the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s original sin into
the reality of the renaissance.38 The historical turning point that the myth speaks
to was set by Martin Luther — ‘Faust’ from a Catholic standpoint. Luther’s revolt
against the Church and the papacy brought new spirits into the world. By
translating the bible into German, he allowed the masses to have direct access to
the text, thereby unintentionally ushering in the values of freedom from Church
doctrines and, ipso facto, moral autonomy. Shattering the enchanted days of the
pre-Reformation, the Lutheran insistence on subjective interpretation of the bible
posed an existential threat to the canons of the Roman Catholic Church.
Consequently, during the years of the counter-Reformation, the Church spread the
36
See Gad Yair, and Michaela Soyer, ‘The Golem Narrative in Max Weber’s Work’, Max
Weber Studies, 6.2 (2006), 231–55; ‘The Ghost is Back, Again: Karl Marx and the Golem
Narrative’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 8.3 (2008), 323–43; Yair and Soyer, The Golem and
German Social Theory.
37
Arnd Bohm, Goethe’s Faust and European Epic: Forgetting the Future (New York:
Camden House, 2007).
38
Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (New York: Avon Books, 1971); Joseph Ratzinger,
‘In the Beginning…’: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995).POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 179
story of Faust in order to strengthen piety. In that sense, Faust was a weapon of
counter-Enlightenment: a warning text against the deadly sin of pride and against
freedom and the vanity of moral autonomy. Indeed, Faust’s quest for knowledge
rested upon a Catholic interpretation according to which ‘curiosity had a bad
name, both as a form of lust and as the impulse which had resulted in the
expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise’.39
ENLIGHTENMENT AND INSTRUMENTAL REASON IN CRITICAL THEORY
The narrative of Faustian vanity pervades the German critical tradition. For the
members of the Frankfurt School, the Enlightenment constituted an attempt by
man to gain divine power to control nature, negate death, battle disease, and even
tinker with life. Their entire oeuvre was devoted to understanding the pitfalls of
the Enlightenment, and they interpreted it by employing the cultural narrative of
Faust. In their diverse studies they set out to show that the Enlightenment had led
humanity into a rational iron cage from which it had no means of escape.40 And
while they did acknowledge that this epoch had made for progress in some specific
realms, they argued that the instrumental, materialist reason which it bred took on
a distinctive life of its own. Consequently, at the height of man’s creativity and
aspiration, they argued, humanity had led itself toward the inevitable destruction
which the Enlightenment encapsulated within its spirit. Horkheimer and Adorno
stated this position clearly in the opening of their Dialectic of Enlightenment:
The Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and
establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates
disaster triumphant. The program of the Enlightenment was the disen-
chantment of the world; the dissolution of myths and the substitution of
knowledge for fancy […]. What men want to learn from nature is how to use
it in order wholly to dominate it and other men. That is the only aim,
ruthlessly, in spite of itself. The Enlightenment has extinguished any trace of
its own self-consciousness. The only kind of thinking that is sufficiently hard
to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive.41
Following Weber’s equation of Western modernity with formal rationality, the
members of the Frankfurt School termed this new Faustian orientation
‘instrumental reason’. It was a mechanical mode of thought, a calculative
consciousness that worked to disenchant society, laying it bare for rational
investigation, planning and control.42 They argued that this mode of thought —
objective, one-dimensional, rationalized — worked to defile the purity of culture,
music and art, and more generally corrupted all authentic motives of human
39
Dorinda Outram, The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
p. 51.
40
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason; Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958).
41
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 3–4.
42
See also Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper Torchbooks,
1966); and Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (London: Routledge, 1990).180 GAD YAIR
creativity. It wrought the ‘death of God’ and vulgarized the belief in spirits and
values. Consequently, the Faustian aspiration of modernity severed the essential
links that connected the stable world of prior eras, and it alienated the human
spirit, making room for a splintered consciousness that lost touch with the essence
of things, with Truth and Beauty. Indeed, German scholars have often criticized
the unintended consequences brought about by the Enlightenment’s hailing of
Faustian reason,43 defining modernity as a center for a ‘homeless mind’.44
The members of the Frankfurt School had many things to say about religion and
theology too,45 and they seemingly took an anti-theological stance — but they also
viewed science as the new religion of modernity. As Mendieta clearly says, for the
Frankfurt School ‘reason was to be liberated from the rigid grip of a reifying and
mystifying idolatry of technology and the market. […] Reason was to be liberated
from the church of positivism and the theology of the market.’46 Indeed, an anti-
Enlightenment and anti-capitalist thread runs through the work of the Frankfurt
School. As Hoenneth pointed out recently, ‘The various authors of the Frankfurt
School are united in the idea that the living conditions of modern capitalist
societies produce social practices, attitudes, or personality structures that result in
a pathological deformation of our capacities for reason’.47 Indeed, Hoenneth
chose a most fitting title for his book on the Frankfurt School — Pathologies of
Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory. This could well be a title of one of the
Pope’s books.
BENEDICT XVI AND THE PATHOLOGY OF INSTRUMENTAL REASON
Pope Benedict XVI’s writings on the Enlightenment, modernity and secularization
continue the critical tradition — largely identified with the Frankfurt School —
seeing Kant’s rationalistic philosophy and the Enlightenment as revolutionary
transformations that had unintended consequences for the pathology of reason.
Indeed, in his critique of the Enlightenment and contemporary society the Pope
explicitly sides with the Frankfurt School but takes his own path. This affinity is
expressed by Rowland, who suggested that ‘the marketing of vulgar art, music, and
literature and the generation of a very low, even barbaric, mass culture is seen by
Ratzinger to be one of the serious pathologies of contemporary western culture’.48
The Pope and the members of the Frankfurt School share the same critical arsenal.
Benedict XVI sees the Enlightenment as an attack on the Catholic Church and
authentic morality and humanity. However, like Horkheimer and Adorno, he
argues that in modernity ‘calculation rules, and power rules’,49 constituting a
43
Axel Hoenneth, Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009); Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
44
See Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind:
Modernization and Consciousness (New York: Random House, 1973).
45
See The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. by
Eduardo Mendieta (New York: Routledge, 2005).
46
Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Introduction: Religion as Critique: Theology as Social Critique and
Enlightened Reason’, in The Frankfurt School on Religion, pp. 1–21 (p. 2).
47
Hoenneth, Pathologies of Reason, p. vii.
48
Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, p. 9.
49
Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?, p. 39.POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 181
tyranny of technology and economy. The unbridled belief in science (i.e. facts and
positivism) and in democracy (i.e. majority opinion) has extinguished the light of
morality, leaving social architects and media barons to control the future. As a
consequence of the Enlightenment, argued Benedict XVI, ‘Europe has developed a
culture that, in a manner hitherto unknown to mankind, excludes God from public
awareness.’50 Kant’s radical negation of the ability to reason about God, and
Nietzsche’s bold pronouncement that ‘God is dead’ have completely transformed
Europe by tearing out its authentic theological roots. The Enlightenment thus
brought about a culture that created ‘the most radical contradiction not only of
Christianity, but of all the religious and moral traditions of humanity’.51 In ‘Truth
and Freedom’ he added that:
Common to the whole Enlightenment is the will to emancipation, first in the
sense of Kant’s sapere aude — dare to use your reason for yourself. Kant is
urging the individual reason to break free of the bonds of authority, which
must all be subjected to critical scrutiny. Only what is accessible to the eyes
of reason is allowed validity. This philosophical program is by its very
nature a political one as well: reason shall reign, and in the end no other
authority is admitted than that of reason. Only what is accessible to reason
has validity; what is not reasonable, that is, not accessible to reason, cannot
be binding either.52
Benedict XVI echoes the observations of German critical scholars,53 believing, like
them, that instrumental reason eventually leads to a ‘pathology of reason’. He too
argues that the calculative and scientific modes of thought that followed the
Enlightenment and the industrial and scientific revolutions have produced
alienated and homeless minds.54 This pathology of human reason destroys
Europe’s religious foundations and identity and the possibility of a unifying moral
basis for integrating a splintering global world.55 In a 2004 address titled ‘In
Search of Freedom; Against Reason Fallen Ill and Religion Abused’, delivered on
the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the invasion of France by the allied
forces, the Pope provided a direct reference to the pathology of instrumental
reason:
There are pathologies of reason totally disconnected from God. One would
probably denominate Hitler as irrational. But the great explicators and
executors of Marxism understood themselves very much as construction
50
Joseph Ratzinger, God is Love (Deus Caritas Est) (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006),
p. 30.
51
Ibid., p. 31.
52
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Truth and Freedom’, Communio: International Catholic Review, 23
(1996), 16–35. Available online: ,http://www.ewtn.com/library/theology/truefree.htm. [accessed
28 February 2014].
53
Hoenneth, Pathologies of Reason.
54
Berger, Berger and Kellner, The Homeless Mind; Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man
(New York: Ungar, 1961).
55
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.182 GAD YAIR
engineers, redesigning the world in accordance with reason. Perhaps the
most dramatic expression of this pathology of reason is Pol Pot, where the
barbarity of such a reconstruction of the world makes its most direct
appearance. But the evolution of intellect in the West, also, inclines ever
more toward the destructive pathologies of reason. Was not the atom bomb
already an overstepping of the frontier, where reason instead of being a
constructive power, sought its potency in its capacity to destroy?56
Benedict XVI voiced similar scathing critiques of the Enlightenment and
instrumental reason from his university chair and his minister’s pulpit, arguing
that the quest for knowledge and the control of nature are the root cause of the
existential and moral abyss of contemporary Europe. Reading Benedict XVI’s
analyses, one can conclude that he is a colleague in the German critical tradition,
because he too sees pathologies of reason in modernity57 and because he too uses
Faustian narratives to explicate the unfortunate unfolding of historical processes.58
Secular modernity, he argues, has become a new totalitarian religion, and it uses its
one-sided rationality to negate Christianity. As he said recently, ‘this development
increasingly leads to an intolerant claim of a new religion, which pretends to be
generally valid because it is reasonable, indeed, because it is reason itself, which
knows all and, therefore, defines the frame of reference that is now supposed to
apply to everyone’.59 This intolerant religious secularism must be criticized, says
the Pope, because it is one-sided and blind to its own faulty basis.
Notwithstanding his disdain for sociology, therefore, there is little doubt that
Pope Benedict XVI sees importance in the German critical tradition. He argues
that this critical tradition must accompany scientific innovations, because left to its
own logic science is doomed to lead humanity into destruction; and he
acknowledges, following Habermas, that theology must find new ways into the
hearts of secular people.60 Critique, therefore, is an important antidote for
countering the immanent negative tendencies of science, instrumental reason, and
the pathology of theology as well. As he said in his discussion with Habermas: ‘It is
the responsibility of philosophy to accompany critically the development of the
individual academic disciplines, shedding a critical light on premature conclusions
and apparent ‘‘certainties’’ about what man is, whence he comes, and what the
goal of his existence is.’61
Reason — the epitome of the Enlightenment and its aim — proved to bear sour
fruits. Benedict XVI suggests that reason is the power that brought the atomic
bomb about, and reason created the means of producing children in test tubes.
56
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘In Search of Freedom; Against Reason Fallen Ill and Religion Abused’,
Logos, 4.2 (2005), 1–5. Available online: ,http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.2/ratzinger.
htm. [accessed 18 March 2014].
57
Hoenneth, Pathologies of Reason.
58
Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New
York: Penguin Books, 1988).
59
Joseph Ratzinger, Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times: A
Conversation with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), p. 52.
60
Ibid., p. 64.
61
Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, p. 57.POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 183
Therefore, reason — which often turns into destructive instrumental reason —
needs to be checked by a critical consciousness that Heidegger defined as
‘meditative thinking’.62 As the Pope wrote recently, ‘rationality is an essential
hallmark of European culture. With it […] it has conquered the world […]. Yet this
rationality can become devastating if it becomes detached from its roots and exalts
technological feasibility as the sole criterion.’63
Pope Benedict XVI redeploys the German critique of the Enlightenment while
arguing that instrumental reason — the pathological mode of thought that the
Enlightenment promoted — is like a Golem rising over its master.64 In so doing he
echoes the gloomy observations of German scholars who decried the Enlightenment.
For example, his lecture on Europe’s Crisis of Culture (1 April 2005) reproduces
Weber’s earlier interpretation of the Enlightenment and modernity as an ‘iron cage’
that locked in the human spirit.65 ‘This Europe’, said the Pope, ‘since the time of the
Enlightenment, has developed precisely that scientific rationality […] which today
[…] thanks to the technical culture made possible by science, imprints itself on the
whole world, and even more than that, in a certain sense, gives it uniformity’.
Lacking cultural idiosyncrasy, he argues, this Europe becomes a void, a technical
forum of legal regulations that lack a moral Heimat and a spiritual source of
meaning.66 Like earlier German critiques of instrumental reason,67 he argued that
‘this purely functional rationality has implied a disorder of the moral conscience […]
as it deems rational only that which can be proved with experiments’.68
For Benedict XVI, the prominence of instrumental reason negates values, as
goodness is instrumentally weighed in terms of profit and political interests.
Modernity brought accesses of evil because values lost their intrinsic essence.
Echoing the lamentations of the members of the Frankfurt School against mass
society, Benedict XVI added that ‘mass society as well as the possibilities that have
arisen through the technical domination of the world have created new dimensions
of evil’.69 This was accompanied by other theses of critical theorists, e.g. in the
realm of science and its arbitrary control of human decision-making. ‘We should
always be threatened by the risk of an exploitative use of science, with the
62
Heidegger Discourse on Thinking.
63
Joseph Ratzinger, Europe Today and Tomorrow: Addressing the Fundamental Issues (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), p. 43.
64
Yair and Soyer, The Golem and German Social Theory.
65
Andrew M. Koch, ‘Rationality, Romanticism and the Individual: Max Weber’s
‘‘Modernism’’ and the Confrontation with ‘‘Modernity’’’, Canadian Journal of Political Science,
26 (1993), 123–44.
66
See Heimat: A German Dream — Regional Loyalties and National Identity in German
Culture 1890–1990, ed. by Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2000).
67
See Nicholas Gane, ‘Max Weber on the Ethical Irrationality of Political Leadership’,
Sociology, 31 (1997), 549–64; Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason;
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); Malcolm
Warner, ‘Kafka, Weber and Organization Theory’, Human Relations, 60.7 (2007), 1019–38; and
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978).
68
Ibid.
69
Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, p. 37.184 GAD YAIR
inevitable consequence of slipping into arbitrary decisions, discrimination and the
financial interest of the strongest’.70 He even suggested that the takeover by
instrumental reason leads to the decline of critique and hence the loss of freedom.
‘The dangers of standardization and control, of intellectual and moral relativism,
[are] already clearly recognizable in the erosion of the critical spirit, the
subordination of truth to the play of opinions, the multiple forms of degradation
and humiliation of the person’s intimacy’.71
This critique was expanded to embrace technology. In this, Benedict XVI clearly
sides with the critical position of Martin Heidegger against technology.72 The
latter, himself a Catholic student of theology who turned to philosophy, said
something very similar: ‘Nature becomes a gigantic gasoline station, an energy
source for modern technology and industry. This relation of man to the world as
such, in principle a technical one, developed in the seventeenth century first and
only in Europe’.73 Since Heidegger’s philosophical concerns date back to his
theological studies of Thomas Aquinas74 and as he repeatedly speaks of the
Gods,75 there is no wonder that we find the Pope echoing Heidegger in arguing
that
In reality modern civilization is not mere multiplication of knowledge and
know-how. It deeply encroaches upon the basic understanding of man, the
world and God. It changes standards and behavior. It alters the
interpretation of the world at its base. The religious cosmos is necessarily
moved by it. The arrival of these new possibilities of existence is like an
earthquake which shakes the intellectual landscape at its very foundations.76
The Pope’s stance against the invasion by instrumental reason and blind scientism
of the realm of spiritual questions is of long standing. In 1997 he argued that
Western ‘morality tends to be rather a product of chance and the calculation of
happiness’.77 He then added that ‘the great pathologies that we have today rest
upon the fact that there is some deficit in man’s life and that he perceives a lack’.78
Echoing prior secular critiques of the pathology of reason, he argued that a
rational mind which lacks moral or spiritual guidance ends up being — like Faust
70
Address, 13 February 2010, ,http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/
2010/february/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100213_acdlife_en.html. [accessed 10 March 2014].
71
Address, April 24, 2010, ,http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/
2010/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100424_testimoni-digitali_en.html. [accessed 10
March 2014].
72
Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, 1977).
73
Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 50.
74
See John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New
York: Fordham University Press, 1982).
75
Richard Rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (New York: State
University Press, 2006).
76
Cited in Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures, 1993, ,http://www.ewtn.com/
library/curia/ratzhong.htm. [accessed 10 March 2014].
77
Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth, p. 35.
78
Ibid.POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 185
— blind and dangerous: ‘The fundamental transformation of the understanding of
the world and of man that has come about thanks to the growth in scientific
knowledge has played a major role in the collapse of the old moral certainties.’79
Today, he says, ‘there is a poisoning of thought, which in advance leads us into
false perspectives’.80 Echoing Simmel’s Philosophy of Money and Heidegger’s
Discourse on Thinking — which argued that technical rationality controls values
rather than the other way around — he continued this seemingly secular German
line of critique by arguing that
In a world based on calculation, it is the calculation of consequences that
determines what must or must not be considered moral. And thus the
category of the good, as was clearly pointed out by Kant, disappears.
Nothing is good or bad in itself, everything depends on the consequences
that an action allows one to foresee.81
A systematic analysis of the Pope’s addresses suggests that three main concepts
drive his Christian theology: Love, Faith and Truth. These concepts appear in his
theological excurses and in his more earthly debates about charity and peace.82
However, the more involved he is with pragmatic issues, and the more he refers to
pragmatic decisions that governments make, the more central his critique of
instrumental reason becomes. Like Max Weber, he believes that spiritual forces
need to decide politics, not the instrumental bureaucracy that invades parliaments
and decides for politicians what to decree. The following quote provides a sample
of this often expressed critique:
Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it
ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today […]. Only if
there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law
function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is
at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by the
purely instrumental rationality of which I spoke earlier. In reality, this makes
reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to
preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for
seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite
all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.83
Following Weber, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, the Pope suggests that
scientific reason cannot serve as the ultimate criterion in deciding human affairs.
79
Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, pp. 56–57.
80
Ratzinger, Light of the World, p. 48.
81
Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Europe’s Crisis of Culture’, in The Essential Pope Benedict XVI: His
Central Writings and Speeches, ed. by John F. Thornton and Susan B. Varenne (New York:
HarperCollins, 2007 [2005]), pp. 325–37 (pp. 327–28).
82
Ratzinger, God is Love.
83
Address on the Occasion of Christmas Greetings to the Roman Curia, Monday 20
December 2010, ,http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2010/december/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20101220_curia-auguri_en.html. [accessed 10 March 2014].186 GAD YAIR
He repeatedly calls for ‘expanding’ the meaning of reason to include ‘faith’ or pre-
scientific elements. In the Regensburg Address (2006), for example, he said that in
criticizing reason, ‘the intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative
criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application’. He argues
that the attempt of Enlightenment philosophers to create values ex nihilo, e.g.
speaking about natural rights or human rights as if they have an a priori
substratum in either nature or the human mind — was vain. For Benedict XVI,
‘human dignity and nobility flows from the elevation of the person to a
participation in the life of and love of the Trinity, not from any eighteenth-
century German conception of the autonomy of the human will’.84
Consequently, the Enlightenment and instrumental reason were doomed to lead
down self-destructive paths. Only a new meaning of ‘reason’ — one accompanied
by faith — can salvage Europe from the disintegrating path that ‘reason’ has set it
on. Such a new meaning goes back to the essence of Logos, because ‘it is through
the way of reason that man encounters God, through the espousal of a reason that
is not blind to the moral dimension of Being’.85
By re-defining the concept of reason the Pope attempts to chart anew the course
of history, saving it from the fallen path of the Enlightenment. There is ‘a necessary
relatedness between reason and faith and between reason and religion’, he argued,
and this relatedness would provide the necessary corrective to the ‘pathology of
reason’ and ‘the pathology of religion’.86 This is all the more important in politics,
because the pathology of reason leads to terror and war. As he suggested in his
recent visit to Britain in an address at Westminster (2010): ‘This is why I would
suggest that the world of reason and the world of faith — the world of secular
rationality and the world of religious belief — need one another and should not be
afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our
civilization.’
DISCUSSION
The affinity between the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and the theses of the
Frankfurt School about the Enlightenment, rationalization and instrumental
reason is even more pervasive than depicted above. For example, the Pope’s
critiques of positivism, relativism and sociology — topics which would require
more space to cover in detail — re-animate the same positions that Horkheimer
expressed in his Eclipse of Reason87 or that other members of the School
expressed in theirs.88 Furthermore, it seems that major figures of the Frankfurt
School, though mostly Jewish, were highly conversant with Christian theology
themselves: Horkheimer, for example, believed that religions had some claim to
truth and that scholars need to acknowledge the limits of reason and accord faith a
84
Tracey Rowland, ‘Ratzinger the Romantic’, The Tablet, 10 July 2010, pp. 9–11 (p. 10).
85
Address in Normandy, 2004, ,http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4 .2/ratzinger_
printable.htm. [accessed 10 March 2014].
86
Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, pp. 77–78.
87
Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason.
88
Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (London:
Heinemann, 1977); Hoenneth, Pathologies of Reason.POPE BENEDICT XVI ON INSTRUMENTAL REASON 187
place in modern society; and Marcuse argued that one cannot understand modern
concepts without laying bare their theological precedents.89
The acknowledgment of theological motives in critical theory was recently
restated by Jürgen Habermas, who admitted that his own theory was ‘the
secularizing translation of the divine promise of salvation’.90 In their 2004
exchange, Habermas agreed with the Pope in calling for a post-secular political
formation, while Benedict XVI retorted by calling for universal values that would
create a process ‘so that that which holds the world together can once again
become an effective force in mankind’.91 Habermas did not shy away from
agreeing with the Pope that the only pre-political basis for modern society lies in
the Judeo-Christian tradition.92 Their surprising convergence on the pre-political
conditions of modern states was summarized by the Pope in a different context,
saying that ‘a secular state may — indeed, must — find its support in the formative
roots from which it grew, it may and must acknowledge the foundational values
without which it would not have come to be, and without which it cannot survive.
Upon an abstract, an a-historical reason, a state cannot endure’.93
While the discussion of post-secular modernity caught the public and academic
attention,94 the agreement between Habermas and Benedict XVI is wider yet. They
also agree on the interplay between theology and philosophy. As Mendieta
summarized, ‘In Habermas’ view, religion without philosophy is speechless,
philosophy without religion is contentless.’95 The Pope said something to the same
effect, namely that ‘Theology and philosophy […] form a strange pair of twins, in
which neither of the two can be totally separated from the other, and yet each must
preserve its own task and its own identity’.96 The agreement between Habermas
and Benedict XVI indeed runs deeper and covers topics of utmost relevance to
political debates, for example, their common critique of technology generally and
reproductive technologies more specifically.97
Clearly, then, secular critical theory and the Pope’s theology are not ‘antipodes’.
The Pope and many critical theorists share the Faustian narrative of a European
fall; and they similarly criticize a wide array of topics around conceptions of
rationalization and its discontents. Like other German critical theorists, indeed,
Benedict XVI is concerned with the transformation of human reason — with the
imprisonment of consciousness in the iron cage of instrumental reason. While the
89
Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1941); Herbert Marcuse, A Study on Authority (London: Verso,
2008).
90
Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 160.
91
Ratzinger and Habermas, Dialectics of Secularization, p. 80.
92
Habermas, ‘Notes on Post-Secular Society’; Austin Harrington, ‘Habermas and the ‘‘Post-
Secular Society’’’, European Journal of Social Theory, 10.4 (2007), 543–60. This meaningful
affinity should not hide other significant differences between Habermas and Benedict XVI.
93
Address in Normandy, 2004.
94
Losonczi and Singh, Discoursing the Post-Secular.
95
Mendieta, ‘Introduction’, p. 28.
96
Draft for a lecture at La Sapienza University of Rome, 17 January 2008.
97
Jürgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003);
Ratzinger, The Essential Pope Benedict.188 GAD YAIR
members of the Frankfurt School used critique and dialectics to try and salvage
humanity from its self-destructive path, the Pope attempts to do so by redefining
reason and attempting to re-insert faith into the public sphere. Notwithstanding
the distinct strategies that they adopt, the Pope shares with the Frankfurt School a
motivation to salvage humanity from the destructive path that the Enlightenment
(and the Reformation) inadvertently charted in seeking freedom and emancipa-
tion. From the perspective of Habermas, Benedict XVI is a ‘reflexive theologian’.98
From the Pope’s perspective, the members of the Frankfurt School might be
deemed repressed theologians.
As this exegesis suggests, indeed, one should comprehend this affinity in a
symmetrical opposition too — namely, evaluate the implication of this conjunction
for critical theory in its own right. From such a perspective, it seems that German
critical theory was impregnated with theological motifs. It is reasonable to say —
having seen that political science and philosophy are embedded in theological
patterns — that critical theory has secularized Faustian theological presupposi-
tions too.99 Read through this lens, in fact, the members of the Frankfurt School
seem to analyze the Enlightenment through the biblical story of the primal sin of
man — Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, in their
modern rendition it is the attempt of Faustian scientists and philosophers to learn
the hidden secrets of the universe and control it.100 In their concerted efforts as a
School they attempted to tie the sin — the Imitatio Dei, manifested by scientific
and industrial attempts to control nature and society — with the punishment,
namely the expulsion of man from the realms of native cultures into the brute and
mechanistic landscape of modern civilization. They have worked to understand
how the punishment was implanted within man, transforming his being from one
based on authentic consciousness into an alienated phenomenology which is led by
instrumental reason, namely man’s expulsion from his own internal heaven.
As some of the quotations here suggest, Pope Benedict XVI is well aware of the
theological motives inherent in German critical theory. He also accepts the critique
of theology that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted, recognising that with their
‘clear sight of the outsider, [they] have denounced the attempt by theologians to
sneak past the core of the faith, removing the provocatory character of the Trinity
and life beyond death as well as of the biblical narratives by reducing these to the
level of symbols’.101 Nevertheless, the Pope goes beyond mere correspondence
with the Frankfurt School by uncovering the alternative religious worldview that
Marxism proposed. His critique of Marxist ‘liberation theology’ also suggests that
he discerned in critical theories latent alternatives for Church canons and
authority. That Habermas admits the theological motive in critical theory meets
the Pope halfway in this recognition; and recent interpretive scholarship points in
this direction too.
I conclude that critical theorists need to take a new look at the theological
motives which may — with a hidden hand or through the discursive narrative
98
See Habermas Religion and Rationality, pp. 150–51.
99
See Harrington, ‘Social Theory and Theology’.
100
Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man; Erich Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My
Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Pocket Books, 1963).
101
Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?, p. 178.You can also read
