O'Callaghan on Pope Benedict, Pieper, and Nietzsche

Notre Dame philosopher John O'Callaghan has posted some thoughts about Nietzsche and the coverage of Pope Benedict's election, and also about truth, freedom, abortion, and Josef Pieper.  John's post is detailed and eloquent; I cannot do it justice here.  I thought this passage of Cardinal Ratzinger's, which John quotes, was particularly challenging:

  “Ye shall be as gods." This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom. . . . [T]he implicit goal of all of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another.  Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its influence even where such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are even rejected.  To be totally free, without the competing freedom of others, without a "from" and a "for"-this desire presupposes not an image of God, but an idol. The primal error of such a radicalized will to freedom lies in the idea of a divinity conceived as a pure egoism. The god thought of in this way is not a God, but an idol. Indeed, it is the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil-the anti-God-because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God. The real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Man, for his part, is God's image precisely insofar as the "from," "with," and "for" constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern.  Whenever there is an attempt to free ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity, but to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth.  The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us call the radicalisms of modernity by this name) is a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man-as Sartre penetratingly saw-into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell.

Rick