Question 6.98

6.98 Some thinkers maintain that the Church must now confront the conjunction of two challenges: the atheism of Enlightenment philosophy and the moral liberalism resulting from the social revolution in the 1960s. What is your judgment on what the philosopher Alberto Methol Ferré, a friend of Pope Francis, called libertine atheism?

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH

Today the West lives as if God did not exist. How could countries with ancient Christian and spiritual traditions cut themselves off from their roots to such an extent? The consequences appear to be so tragic that it is essential to understand the origin of this phenomenon.

The West decided to distance itself from the Christian faith under the influence of the Enlightenment philosophers and the resulting political currents. Although Christian communities exist that are still vital and missionary, most Western populations now regard Jesus as a sort of idea but not as an event, much less as a person whom the apostles and many witnesses of the Gospel met and loved and to whom they consecrated their whole life.

This estrangement from God is not caused by reasoning but by a wish to be detached from him. The atheistic orientation of a life is almost always a decision by the will. Man no longer wishes to reflect on his relationship to God because he himself intends to become God. His model is Prometheus, the mythological character of the race of Titans who stole sacred fire so as to give it to men; the individual has embarked on a strategy of appropriating God instead of adoring him. Before the so-called “Enlightenment” movement, if a man ever tried to take God’s place, to be his equal, or to eliminate him, these were isolated individual phenomena.

Atheism has its principal origin in the heightened individualism of European man. The individual-king, who aspires more and more to a sort of absolute autonomy or independence, tends to forget God. On the moral level, this search for absolute liberty implies the gradual, indiscriminate rejection of ethical rules and principles. The individualist universe comes to be centered solely on the person, who no longer tolerates any constraint. Hence God is considered someone who creates obstacles to confine our will by imposing laws; God becomes the enemy of autonomy and liberty. Wishing to be totally free, man refuses to accept what he considers to be constraints and even goes so far as to reject any form of dependence on God. He rejects the authority of God, who nevertheless created us free so that, by the reasonable exercise of our freedom, we might go beyond our wild impulses and tame all our instincts by taking full responsibility for our life and growth.

Atheism is thus a decision to ignore reason, which would bring us back to our Creator, the true light that should enlighten us, guide us, and show us the paths of life. In keeping with this logic, some philosophers speak about God no longer as a Father but as a great architect of the universe.

The rejection of God is situated in a movement of scientific and technological conquest that characterized Europe in the early eighteenth century. Man intends to dominate nature and to assert his independence. Technology gives him the impression that he is master of the world. He therefore becomes the sole ruler in a realm without God. Science, however, should not separate man from God. On the contrary, it should bring man closer to divine love.

Of course, the great mystery of evil can drive some persons to doubt and atheism. Indeed, if God is our Father, how can he allow so many innocent persons to suffer? There is no need to insist on the unfathomable quantity of evils with which mankind is afflicted. In Africa we have, unfortunately, paid a heavy tribute to wars, famines, and epidemics. At Cor unum, I witnessed many sufferings that we try to alleviate with means that are ridiculous in comparison with the extent of the needs.

I will never be able to forget the work that we accomplished in Haiti. How could God allow people who were already so poor, deprived of everything, to suffer one misfortune after another, like the gigantic earthquake in 2010, followed by floods and epidemics? How could I ever erase from my memory the refugee camps in Jordan and the faces of so many women who had lost their husbands, their houses, their belongings? They had to take care of their children, who because of the hardships were emotionally unstable and increasingly needy.

The question of evil, which goes down through the ages, remains the same: How can God allow such horrible trials and sufferings to be imposed on innocent victims? In this regard I like to cite Albert Camus. As a philosopher, he looked for reasonable certitudes by which to live. He saw faith as a “leap into the irrational” that turns the mind away from reality, in which man denies his faculty of reason, his “lucid awareness”. But what solidified the thinker’s atheistic position even more was the existence of evil, which he, like the Enlightenment philosophers, could not associate with the divine omnipotence and wisdom. He was unable to accept “the paradox of a God who was almighty and maleficent, or beneficent and sterile”, as he describes it in L’Homme révolté.¹ How can you believe in God when innocent children are suffering?

However, we do not know to what extent we cause most of the evils on this earth. How many wars and slaughters could have been avoided? Very often Western countries, who boast of being architects and promoters of peace, are the chief producers or the main traffickers of weapons of mass destruction. With cynical hypocrisy, they sell them to the poor nations and exchange them for their mineral or petroleum resources. The world today is rife with hatred, violence, and barbarism, and many innocent people pay dearly because of those who hold power.

Look at the chaos and disaster in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Palestine, Israel, Egypt, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali. . . Angola went through thirty long years of a similar situation. But in vast regions of the world, suffering has not made people lose their faith. On the contrary, God is a light that permits people who no longer have anything to continue to hope. I recall also the peaceful faces and the serene voices of the Filipinos who confided to me in 2013: “Typhoon Haiyan leveled everything, destroyed everything in its path, except our faith, which remains firmly planted like a rock in the middle of a turbulent sea!”

The brutal statements of Nietzsche in The Gay Science sum up the problem of atheism that I have just described. He sets a scene in which a madman goes through the city in broad daylight, with a lantern in his hand, shouting: “I seek God!. . . Where is God gone?. . . I mean to tell you! We have killed him,-you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move?. . . Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?-for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” And Friedrich Nietzsche finishes his account by writing: “It is further stated that the madman made his way into different churches on the same day, and there intoned his Requiem aeternam deo. When led out and called to account, he always gave the reply: ‘What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?’”²

Since we claim to have celebrated God’s funeral, how can we be surprised that a godless world has become a hell on earth? Morality, love, freedom, technology, and science are nothing without God’s presence. Man can devise the most magnificent works, but they will be mere sand castles and shifting illusions unless they are related to God. Nietzsche was twenty years old when he wrote his poem to the unknown God: “I want to know you, Unknown One, you who have reached deep within my soul. …”