On the first day of his state visit to his native Germany, Pope Benedict addressed
the Lower House of the nation's parliament, the Bundestag. Here is the English translation
of the full text of his speech:
"Mr President of the Federal Republic, Mr
President of the Bundestag, Madam Chancellor, Mr President of the Bundesrat, Ladies
and Gentlemen Members of the House,
It is an honour and a joy for me to speak
before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that
meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work
for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President
of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind
words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me. At this moment
I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman
who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed
the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest. But the invitation to give
this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest
responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging
the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and
states. Setting out from this international responsibility that I hold, I should
like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law. Allow
me to begin my reflections on the foundations of law [Recht] with a brief story from
sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited
the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will
the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life –
destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for
a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and
evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately
matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work
as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must
be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions
for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, as this is what opens up for
him the possibility of effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to
the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding
of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards
the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without
justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”, as Saint Augustine
once said . We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty
spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right
and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly
organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to
the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong
is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when
man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency.
Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make
human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right?
How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may
appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians
and politics today. For most of the matters that need to be regulated by law, the
support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that
for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is
at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility
must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In the third
century, the great theologian Origen provided the following explanation for the resistance
of Christians to certain legal systems: “Suppose that a man were living among the
Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among
them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians,
would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the
Scythians.” This conviction was what motivated resistance movements to act against
the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to justice
and to humanity as a whole. For these people, it was indisputably evident that the
law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when it comes to the decisions of a democratic
politician, the question of what now corresponds to the law of truth, what is actually
right and may be enacted as law, is less obvious. In terms of the underlying anthropological
issues, what is right and may be given the force of law is in no way simply self-evident
today. The question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice
when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our
knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder. How do we recognize what
is right? In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion: decisions
regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken with reference to the divinity.
Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed body of law
to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation.
Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the
harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both
spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned
themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in
the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law
developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman
Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was
and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian
marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian
Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way
to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which
our nation committed itself to “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation
of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world”. For the development
of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian
theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism
and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their
interrelation as the universally valid source of law. This step had already been
taken by Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans, when he said: “When Gentiles who
have not the Law [the Torah of Israel] do by nature what the law requires, they are
a law to themselves ... they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts,
while their conscience also bears witness ...” (Rom 2:14f.). Here we see the two
fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than
Solomon’s listening heart, reason that is open to the language of being. If this
seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of legislation up to the time
of the Enlightenment, up to the time of the Declaration on Human Rights after the
Second World War and the framing of our Basic Law, there has been a dramatic shift
in the situation in the last half-century. The idea of natural law is today viewed
as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic
environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline
briefly how this situation arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an
unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from
an “is”, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason
for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature and reason
has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen
– is viewed as “an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and
effect”, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it. A
positivist conception of nature as purely functional, in the way that the natural
sciences explain it, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once
again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according
to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific
one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding,
does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion
must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm
of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the
field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset
– then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is
a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary.
Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch
one. The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in
general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may
in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding
to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself
the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status
of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with
Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism
as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights
and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result
that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and
at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum. In its
self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond
mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves
provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either
from God’s wide world. And yet we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in
this artificial world, we are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which
we refashion into our own products. The windows must be flung open again, we must
see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of
all this. But how are we to do this? How do we find our way out into the wide
world, into the big picture? How can reason rediscover its true greatness, without
being sidetracked into irrationality? How can nature reassert itself in its true
depth, with all its demands, with all its directives? I would like to recall one
of the developments in recent political history, hoping that I will neither be misunderstood,
nor provoke too many one-sided polemics. I would say that the emergence of the ecological
movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the
windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be
ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young
people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature,
that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has
a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. In saying this, I am
clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from
my mind. If something is wrong in our relationship with reality, then we must all
reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very
foundations of our culture. Allow me to dwell a little longer on this point. The
importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature
and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a further point that
is still largely disregarded, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man.
Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will.
Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect
and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to
his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create
himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled. Let us
come back to the fundamental concepts of nature and reason, from which we set out.
The great proponent of legal positivism, Kelsen, at the age of 84 – in 1965 – abandoned
the dualism of “is” and “ought”. He had said that norms can only come from the will.
Nature therefore could only contain norms if a will had put them there. But this
would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. “Any attempt
to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile”, he observed. Is it really?
– I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason
that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus? At
this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction
that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea
of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability
of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility
for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To
ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally
and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter
between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism,
the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has
shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before
God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person,
it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend
at this moment in our history. As he assumed the mantle of office, the young King
Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today,
were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think that, even today,
there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity
to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice
and peace. Thank you for your attention!"