In this last decade of the 20th century we stand at a decisive point in history: a juncture at which basic human decisions must be made which, for good or ill, promise to shape the history of human kind for centuries to come.

To the Western mind this appears if one begins from the commonplace that its history of thought divides between the classical, that is, ancient and medieval, on the one hand, and the modern and the contemporary (20th century) on the other. The former is seen to have been axised upon the transcendent, the absolute or the divine. This was the One of Parmenides and Plato, the Prime Mover or Knowing on Knowing (noesis noeseos) of Aristotle, the "Heavenly City of Augustine or the Creator and Redeemer of Thomas. The later period, from the time of the Renaissance, has been axised upon humankind: from its early exploration of the world to the recent concerns for the human environment and from Descartes’s Archimedean principle, "I am" (sum), to the existential and postmodern rejection of principles and foundation so that man might be free.

Present events force us to ask whether our people or any people so conceived can long perdure; and many signposts point to a negative answer. A short time ago the collapse of the totalitarian structures in Eastern Europe appeared to leave only that of the liberal, i.e., individualistic or even anarchistic, competition of the West. But the most recent signs suggest that we stand rather at the end of an era. First, the liberation of peoples in Eastern Europe, by enabling them to regain their sense of identity as peoples, suddenly has forced upon them all the unresolved issues of how they are to live together under the concrete overlapping of historical claims and counter-claims, triumphs and tragedies. Similarly, despite the narrow French vote, it is clear that any progress toward unity in Western Europe will have to give more attention to national and group identities. Second, the structures of the West seem now to have begun to crumble as well under the weight of individualistic self-centeredness. The weight of rebuilding East Germany may be the catalyst, but the disintegration seems to be rooted more deeply: wild over-consumption has generated astronomic debts within and between nations which in the last decade have mortgaged all foreseeable successive generations; moral corruption and self-seeking have undermined confidence in social structures from family to nation; the emerging sense of rights has degenerated into adversarial relations which paralyse economies, set people against their neighbors and turn ghettoes into zones of warfare and terror.

At this turn of the century there is reason to think that an entire era is passing; that we stand at a crossroads where we must choose either passively to slip further into the chaos which opens before us or creatively to open some new and deeper synthesis which assumes but transforms both the ancient thesis axised upon God and the modern antithesis axised upon man. If in the past one of these has supplanted the other, it is necessary now to think of ways to relate positively both horizons, enrich each with the strengths of the other, and open ways to make actual the sacredness of life and thereupon build the future.

There are some signs that this is now desired and sought. On the one hand, humanism no longer is taken in the closed and exclusive sense of the "scientific atheism" or reductive humanisms of the first half of this century. Disillusioned with the naive boasts that man can save himself (now revealed as a thin mask for the ancient boast in Milton’s Paradise Lost), people search for foundations for their freedom and dignity which transcend anything that mankind, whether as individual or as party, can create — and therefore take away.

On the other hand, the churches seem to be shifting also from opposition to transforming synthesis. The "Oath Against Modernism" has slipped into the past to be replaced by the Vatican II document: "The Church in the World"; the once feared Sacred Inquisition, having become simply the Holy Office, has now become the Congregation of the Faith; in turn, the Propaganda Fidei, once charged with simply passing on what had been handed down, has now become the Office for the Evangelization of Peoples charged with finding the meaning of the Good News for the emerging sense of the unique identity of each people. This bespeaks a new sense of the foundational importance of the meeting of God and mankind in the Annunciation, the Incarnation and the Pascal and Pentecostal events which began this era.

In this light the present theme, "evangelization and culture" reflects the recent sense of the need and possibility for a new, deeper and more fruitful synthesis of the ancient and modern horizons of God and man. In our precarious situation this is a challenge to which we dare not fail to respond. How can this be done?

To begin to discern the emergence of a new synthesis we might distinguish four planes: in terms of the focus of human awareness and interests: the objective (A) and the subjective or existential (B); in terms of levels of reality: mankind (C) and God (D).

Awareness Reality

A C

Objectivity Humankind

B D

Subjectivity God

This will enable our analysis to proceed in four steps. First, the present crumbling of the older Western view will be related to its limitation to the human understood in objective terms — A to C. Second, the resulting problems are seen as having pointed beyond objectivity to human subjectivity and thereby to a focus upon the nature of human creativity and upon culture as its realization — A to B (Part II). Thirdly, such phenomenological analysis in turn enables us to look more deeply into the origin of our own subjectivity and thereby to expand the focus of our awareness from humankind to the divine as the objectively transcending source in relation to which our conscious life stands as gift manifesting the intimate divine life of love — C to D (Part III). In this light, relations between religions becomes, not an alien imperial (or colonial) imposition, but the enlivening experience of being the expression of divine love, called in turn to respond creatively to present challenges — B to D (Part IV).

In the history of philosophy brilliant new creative openings often degenerate into reductivist efforts to absorb all other meaning. This perverse dynamism is found in no less central a personage than Plato who invented Parmenides’ relation of thought to being into a reduction of reality to what was clear to the human mind. Thus he invited the human mind to soar, but where it met his limits — as in taking account of concrete realities and the exercise of human freedom — he generated a classic blueprint for a suppressive communal state.

Such temptations of all-controlling reason are characteristic as well of modern times, beginning from Descartes’s requirements of clarity and distinctness for the work of reason. The effect in his own philosophy was to split the human person between the extended substance or body and the nonextended substance or spirit. Much as he tried for a unity of these in the human person, this could not be done in the clear and distinct terms he required. As a result philosophers and then whole cultures proceeded according to either body or spirit as modern thought polarized between the atomism of discrete sensations and the ever greater unities perceived by spirit.

What is particularly frightening is the way in which theoretical philosophical experiments in either of these isolates were carried out by a fairly mechanical pattern of reason and then translated into public policy. It is fine for a thinker to give free range to the con-structive possibilities of his or her mind by saying, as did Hobbes, e.g.: "Let’s suppose that all are isolated singles in search of survival" and then see what compromises and what rules will make survival possible. Over time we have become accustomed to that game and often forget Hobbes’s identification of the wolflike basic instincts by which it is played, but we should listen to others when they perceive the resulting system as predatory, brutish and mean.

Similarly, it could be helpful for a thinker to hypothesize that all is matter and then see how its laws can shed light on the process of human history. But when this was done by Marx and Lenin society began to repress the life of the spirit and term irrational everything except the scientific historicism; the freedom of individuals and of peoples was suppressed and creativity died.

Both are parallel cases of theoretical axioms becoming metaphysical totalities. It is not surprising that the result for this century was a bipolar world armed to the hilt and subsisting by a reign of mutual terror between the liberal democratic republics of the self-styled "free world" and the people’s democratic republics. What is surprising is that the internal collapse of one of the partners in this deadly game should give popularity to the notion that the parallel road taken by the other partner can be followed now without fear — that the wolf has been transformed into a lamb for lack of a mirror in which to observe the effects of its own root viciousness.

Our task, however, is not merely to identify the generic limitations of rationalism as background for the emergence of broad new sensibilities, it is also to relate this specifically to the new aware-ness of culture and its implications for the task of evangelization as that of the liberation of mankind in the deepest and fullest sense. Hence, we shall look specifically to the notions of freedom in order to see what the liberal rationalist perspectives do and do not make possible, and hence what precisely is the reason for the new attention to culture and the significance of this attention for evangelization.

1. Circumstantial 1. Self-realization

2. Acquired 2. Self-perfection

3. Natural 3. Self-determination

(A) Circumstantial freedom of self-realization: "To be free is to be able, under favorable circumstances, to act as one wishes for one’s own individual good as one sees it";

(B) Acquired freedom of self-perfection: "To be free is to be able, through acquired virtue or wisdom, to will or live as one ought in conformity to the moral law or an ideal befitting human nature"; and

(C) Natural freedom of self-determination: "To be free is to be able, by a power inherent in human nature, to change one’s own character creatively by deciding for oneself what one shall do or shall become".

When we look into the philosophical basis from which have arisen these various theories of freedom what appears striking is that each of the three types of freedom delineated by the Institute of Philosophical Research corresponds to an epistemology and metaphysics. Circumstantial freedom of self-realization is the only type of freedom recognized by many empirically oriented philosophers; acquired freedom of self-perfection is characteristic of more rational, formalist and essentialist philosophers; natural freedom of self-determination is developed by philosophers open as well to the existential dimension of being. This suggests that the metaphysical underpinnings of a philosophy control its epistemology and that especially in modern times this in turn controls its philosophical anthropology, ethics and politics. With this is mind the following review of the types of freedom will begin from their respective metaphysical and epistemological contexts and in that light proceed to its notion of freedom.

In these terms Descartes’s division of the human person into a spirit or thinking substance and a body or extended substance opened two divergent paths: That of Locke bases on the physical senses to which corresponds the circumstantial freedom of self-realization and that typified by Spinoza and Kant based on the human intellect to which corresponds the acquired freedom of self-perfection. While both are important their limitations posit the way to a new level of meaning (Part II) concerned with the natural freedom of self-determination.

If the three senses or dimensions of freedom correspond to epistemologies and metaphysics, then in order to be able to achieve liberation fully by freedom of self-determination a new level of awareness would be required. When the contemporary mind proceeds beyond objective natures to become fully conscious of human subjectivity or of existence precisely as emerging in and through human self-awareness then the most profound changes begin. The old order built on objective structures and norms would no longer be adequate, structures would crumble and a new era would dawn. This is indeed the juncture at which we stand; it can be tracked on two levels. It can be read by its external signs, namely in the social upheavals and realignments of the student revolutions of ‘68, the minority movements of the ‘70s or the crumbling of the ideologies in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But really to understand these in a way that makes it possible to respond creatively, it is important to use the tools of metaphysics and epistemology in order to understand their root dynamics and to be able not simply to react, but to respond creatively.

Today the greatest peril would appear to be our blindness to the forces at work in the world and therefore our inability to provide the creativity needed to keep these from degenerating into the most base and crude forms of barbarism. Neither the liberal balance of egoistic pursuit of private interests nor the formal ideal principles of a Kantian order have proven capable of warding off colonial oppression in recent centuries and even genocide in the present decade or of channelling human forces into humane relations.

It is of the greatest urgency that we begin to chart the forces which opened the new consciousness of human existence and thereby enabled radical development at the third and basic level of human freedom at which it becomes authentic liberation. This new emergence of the sense of identity and relation on the part of individuals and peoples will be studied below.

At the beginning of this century it had appeared that the rationalist project of stating all in clear and distinct terms, whether the empirical terms of the empiricist and positivist tradition of sense knowledge or the formal and essentialist Kantian tradition of intellectual knowledge, was close to completion. Whitehead writes that at the turn of the century, when with Bertrand Russell he went to the first World Congress of Philosophy in Paris, it seemed that the work of physics was essentially completed except for some details of application. In fact, however, the very attempt to wrap up scientific rational knowledge with its most evolved tools was to manifest the radical insufficiency of the objectivist approach.

For Heidegger the meaning of being and of life was to be sought in its unveiling in conscious human life (dasein) lived through time and therefore through history. If that be the case then human consciousness would become the new focus of attention. The pursuit of this unfolding, patterning and interrelation of consciousness would open a new era of human liberation. Epistemology and metaphysics would develop in the very process of tracking the nature and direction of this process. Thus, for Heidegger’s successor, Hans Georg Gadamer, the task would become that of uncovering how human persons, as emerging in the community of family, neighborhood and people, exercise their freedom in consciously creating culture, not merely as a compilation of whatever humankind does or makes, but as the fabric of human symbols and interrelations within which a human group chooses to live in the process of unveiling being in time.

To engage in the liberation of the person in our day requires examining the grounds upon which a people develops its identity as a nation and the process by which, in concert with others, it advances into the future.

This calls for attention to three specific issues:

1. the nature of values, culture and tradition;

2. the moral authority of this cultural tradition and its values for guiding our life; and

3. the active role of every generation in creatively shaping and developing tradition in response to the challenges of its times.

Values: Living things survive by seeking the good or that which perfects and promotes their life. Thus a basic exercise of human freedom is to set an order of preferences among the many things that are possible. These are values in the sense that they "weigh more heavily" in making our decisions than do other possiblities. Cumulatively, they set the pattern of our actions.

Culture: Together the values, artifacts and modes of human interaction constitute an integrated pattern of human life in which the creative freedom of a people is expressed and implemented. This is called a culture.

Each particular complex or culture is specific to one people; a person who shares in this is a civis or citizen and belongs to a civilization. For the more restricted Greek world in which this term was developed, others (aliens) were those who did not speak the Greek tongue; they were "barbaroi" for their speech sounded like mere babel. Though at first this meant simply non-Greek, its negative manner of expression easily lent itself to, perhaps reflected, and certainly favored, a negative axiological connotation, which indeed soon became the primary meaning of the word `barbarian’. By reverse implication it attached to the term `civilization’ an exclusivist connotation, such that the cultural identity of peoples began to imply cultural alienation between peoples. Today, as communication increases and more widely differentiated peoples enter into ever greater interaction and mutual dependence, we reap an ever more bitter harvest of this connotation. A less exclusivist sense of culture must be a priority task.

Tradition is the cumulative process of transmitting, adjusting and applying the values of a culture through time. It is at once both heritage or what is inherited or received and new creation as we pass this on in new ways. Attending to tradition taken in this active sense allows us to uncover not only the permanent and universal truths sought by Socrates, but: (a) to perceive the importance of values we receive from the tradition, and (b) to mobilize our own life project actively toward the future. We shall look more closely at each of these.

As received, tradition is not against freedom but is rather the cumulative freedom of a people. Persons emerge from birth into a family and neighborhood from which they learn and in harmony with which they thrive. Horizontally, one learns from experience what promotes and what destroys life; accordingly one makes pragmatic adjustments. Vertically, and more importantly, one learns values, i.e. what is truly worth striving for and the pattern of social interaction in which this can be richly lived. This, rather than all that happens (history), is what is passed on (tradita, tradition). The importance of tradition derives from the cooperative character of both the learning by which wisdom is drawn from experience — even of failure — and of the cumulative free acts of commitment and sacrifice which have defined, defended and passed on through time the corporate life of the community.

This cultural tradition attains its authority not by the arbitrary imposition of the will of our forbears or by abstract laws, but on the basis of what has been learned from horizontal and vertical experience about life and passed on. Through history there evolves a vision of actual life which transcends time and hence can provide guidance for our life, past, present and future. The content of that vision is a set of values which point the way to mature and perfect human formation and thereby orient the life of a person. Such a vision is historical because it arises in the life of a people in time and presents an appropriate way of preserving that life through time. It is also normative because it provides the harmony and fullness which is at once classical and historical, ideal and personal, uplifting and dynamizing, in a word, liberating. For this reason it provides a basis upon which past historical ages, present options and future possibilities are judged.

As an active process tradition transforms what is received, lives it in a creative manner and passes it on as a leaven for the future. Taken diachronically the process of tradition as receiving and passing on does not stop with Plato’s search for eternal and unchangeable ideals, with the work of techné in repeating exactly and exclusively a formal model or with rationalism’s search for clear and distinct knowledge of immutable natures by which all might be controlled. Rather, in the application of a tradition according to the radical distinctiveness of persons and their situations tradition is continually perfected and enriched. It manifests the sense of what is just and good which we have from our past by creating in original and distinctive ways more of what justice and goodness mean. Is the reading of the tradition a matter of appreciation and conservation or of original, creative and free expression? It is impossible to read an ancient text with the long closed eyes of their author, not least because to the very degree in which that might succeed it would destroy the text which in itself was written as a vital expression of the process of life. In contrast, a hermeneutic approach would seek not to reiterate ancient times in reading ancient texts, but to recognize that we come to them from new times, with new horizons and new questions; that this enables them to speak new meaning to us; and that in so doing the texts and philosophies are living rather than dead — and therefore more true. Texts sacred and profane, read in this sense are part of living tradition in which is situated our struggle to face the problems of life and build a future worthy of those who follow.

Application of the tradition requires prudence (phronesis) or thoughtful reflection which enables one to discover the appropriate means for the circumstances. It must include also the virtue of sagacity (sunesis), that is, of understanding or concern for the other, for one can assess the situation adequately only inasmuch as one, in a sense, undergoes the situation with the affected parties. Charity or concern for others is not then alien to the progress of a culture but integral thereto.

Further, if we take time and culture seriously then we must recognize that we are situated in a particular culture and at a parti-cular time; hence all that can be seen from this vantage point constitutes one’s horizon. This would be lifeless and dead, determined rather than free, if our vantage point were to be fixed by its circum-stances and closed. Hence, it is necessary to meet other minds and hearts not simply to add information incrementally, but to be challenged in our basic assumptions and enabled thereby to delve more deeply into our tradition and draw forth deeper and more pervasive truth.

A hermeneutic mode of openness does not consist in surveying texts or other peoples objectively, obeying them in a slavish and unquestioning manner or even simply juxtaposing their ideas and traditions to our own. Rather, it is directed primarily to ourselves, for our ability to listen to others is correlatively our ability to assimilate the implications of their answers for delving more deeply into the meaning of our own traditions and drawing out new and even more rich insights. In other words, it is an acknowledgement that our cultural heritage has something new to say to us and that we are the ones who can enable it to speak. This would suggest that the process of interchange between cultures is not merely one of communicating content regarding the nature of things, but of being a leaven to a culture in order that it be brought more fully to life. In this it is more existential than essential, more life than form.

Hence the attitude is not methodological sureness which imposes its views, nor is it a mere readiness for new compromises or new techniques of social organization. Instead, it is readiness to draw out in open dialogue new meaning from our traditions. Seen in these terms our heritage of culture and values is not closed or dead, but through interchange becomes more inclusive and more rich thereby enabling life to be ever renewed.

The above phenomenological analysis points us deeply into human subjectivity and life lived in its terms. But what is its ultimate meaning? Is this new focus upon human subjectivity but another chapter in Paradise Lost in which humankind attempts to seize his destiny by excluding all else. Is it a new reductionism leaving humans to interact not only more consciously but to attack others more devastatingly by killing not only bodies but spirits as well. If we are newly aware of cultures is this to open new periods of persecution and cultural genocide? Very concretely, in the words of Rodney King, "Can we get along?"

To do so it is necessary to break out of our self-centeredness. We must see if the new phenomenological awareness of existence as emerging through human consciousness can help resolve the problems by carrying its analysis to the origin of our subjectivity in relation to which our love and we our selves stand as gift to giver.

The given can be approached in a phenomenological manner by reflecting carefully the mode of operation of our conscious life. One place to begin is with the person as a polyvalent unity operative on both the physical and the non-physical levels. Though the various sciences analyze distinct dimensions, the person is not a construct of independent components but an identity: the physical and the psychic are dimensions of myself and of no other. Further, this identity is not the result of my personal development, but was had by me from my beginning; it is a given for each person. Hence, while I can grow indefinitely, act endlessly, and do and make innumerable things, the growth and acts will be always my own; it is the same given or person who perdures through all the stages of his or her growth.

Unfortunately, this givenness is often taken in the sense of closure associated with the terms ‘datum’ or ‘data’, as hypothetical or evidential. On the one hand, in the hypothetical sense a given is a stipulation agreed upon by the relevant parties as the basis for a process of argumentation: Granted X, then Y. The premises of an argument or the postulates in a mathematical demonstration are such. On the other hand, in the evidential sense, data are the direct and warranted observations of what actually is the case. In both these meanings the terms ‘given’ or ‘data’ direct the mind exclusively toward the future or consequent as one’s only concern. The use of the past participle of the verb stem (data) closes off any search toward the past so that when one given is broken down by an analysis new givens appear. One never gets behind some hypothetical or evidential given.

Second there is the too broadly experienced danger that in concrete affairs the concern to build the future in terms only of what has been conceived clearly and by all will be transformed, wittingly and unwittingly, into oppression of self-identity and destruction of integrative cultures both as civilizations and as centers of personal cultivation. Indeed, the charges of cultural oppression and the calls for liberation from so many parts of the world raise doubt that the humanist notion of the self-given and its accompanying ideals can transcend the dynamics of power and leave room for persons, especially for those of other cultures.

It is time then to look again to the second meaning of ‘given’ and to follow the opening this provides toward the source as implied in the notion of gift. Above, we had noted some indications that self-identity and interpersonal relatedness are gifts (dona). Let us now look further into this in order to see what it suggests regarding the dynamic openness required for cooperation between persons and cultures.

First, one notes that as gift the given has an essentially gratuitous character. It is true that at times the object or service given could be paid for in cash or in kind. As indicated by the root of the term ‘commercial,’ however, such a transaction would be based on some merit (mereo) on the part of the receiver. This would destroy its nature as gift precisely because the given would not be based primarily in the freedom of the giver.

The same appears from an analysis of an exchange of presents. Presents cease to be gifts to the degree that they are given only because of the requirements of the social situation or only because of a claim implicit in what the other might have given me. Indeed, the sole way in which such presents can be redeemed as gifts is to make clear that their presentation is not something to which I merely feel obliged, but which I personally and freely want to do. As such then, a gift is based precisely upon the freedom of the giver; it is gratuitous.

There is here striking symmetry with the ‘given’ in the above sense of hypothesis or evidence. There, in the line of hypothetical and evidential reasoning there was a first, namely, that which is not explained, but upon which explanation is founded. Here there is also a first upon which the reality of the gift is founded and which is not to be traced to another reality. This symmetry makes what is distinctive of the gift stand out, namely, here the originating action is not traced back further precisely because it is free or gratuitous. Once again, our reflections lead us in the direction of that which is self-sufficient, absolute and transcendent as the sole adequate giver of the gift of being.

The great traditions have insisted rightly both upon the oneness of the absolute reality and upon the lesser reality of the multiple: the multiple is not The Reality, though neither is it totally non-reality. Anselm’s elaboration of the notion of privation contains a complementary clarification of the gratuitous character of beings as given or gifted. The notion of privation was developed classically by Aristotle in his analysis of change, where privation appeared at the beginning of the process as the lack of the form to be realized. He saw this as more than non-being precisely in as much as it was a lack of a good which is due to that subject. Hence, in substantial change, because the basic potential principle is prime matter to which no specific form is due, privation plays no role.

Anselm extended this notion of privation to the situation of creation in which the whole being is gifted. In this case, there is no prior subject to which something is due; hence, there is no ground or even any acceptance. Anselm expressed this radically non-reciprocal nature of the gift — its lack of prior conditions — through the notion of absolute privation.

In the beginning, my dear, this world was just being (Sat), one only, without a second. . . . Being thought to itself: ‘May I be many; may I procreate.’ It produced fire. That fire thought to itself: ‘May I be many; may I procreate.’ It produced water. . . . That water thought to itself: ‘May I be many; may I procreate.’ It produced food. . . . That divinity (Being) thought to itself: ‘Well, having entered into three divinities [fire, water, and food] by means of this living Self, let me develop names and forms. Let me make each one of them tripartite. (Chandogya Up., 6.1-3, 12-14.)

 

To what does this correspond on the part of the source? In a certain parallel to the antinomies of Kant which show when reason has strayed beyond its bounds, many from Plotinus to Leibniz and beyond have sought knowledge, not only of the gift and its origin, but of why it had to be given. The more they succeeded the less room was left for freedom on the part of man as a given or gift. Others attempted to understand freedom as a fall, only to find that what was thus understood was bereft of value and meaning and hence was of no significance to human life and its cultures. Rather, the radical non-reciprocity of human freedom must be rooted in an equally radical generosity on the part of its origin. No reason, either on the part of the given or on the part of its origin, makes this gift necessary. The freedom of man is the reflection of his derivation from a giving that is pure generosity: man is the image of God.

The African spirit, especially in its great reverence of family, community and culture — whence one derives one’s life, one’s ability to interpret one’s world, and one’s capacity to respond — seems uniquely positioned to grasp this more fully. In contrast to Aristotle’s classical ‘wonder,’ these philosophers do not situate the person over against the object of his or her concern, reducing both to objects for detached study and manipulation. They look rather to the source whence reality is derived and are especially sensitive to its implications for the mode and manner of one’s life as being essentially open, communicative, generous and sharing.

In the light of this sense of gift, it may be possible to extend the sense of the notions of duty and harmony beyond concern for the well-being of those with whom I share and whose well-being is in a sense my own. The good is not only what contributes to my perfection: I am not the center of meaning. Rather, being is received and hence is essentially outgoing.

Seen in terms of gift, person and community manifest two principles for social dynamism in the development of a cultural tradition of harmony: complementarity which makes the formation of culture and interchange possible, and generosity which passes it along in an active process of tradition. First, as participants in the one, self-sufficient and purely spontaneous source, the many are not in principle antithetic or antipathetic one to another. Rather, as limited images they stand in a complementary relation to all other participants or images. This is reflected in the enjoyment experienced in simple companionship in which, by sharing the other’s experience of being, each lives more fully: the result is more than the sum of its parts. What is true here of individual persons is true as well both of groups of peoples and of the cultures they create through self-knowledge. It is this complementarity, derived from their common origin, which makes cooperation in work and decision making, whether in commerce or in culture, fundamentally possible and ultimately desirable.

This has two important implications for our topic. Where the Greeks’ focus upon their heritage had led to depreciating others as barbarians, the sense of oneself and of one’s culture as radically gifted provides a basic corrective. Knowing and valuing oneself and one’s culture as gifts implies more than merely reciprocating what the other does for me. It means, first, that others and their culture are to be respected simply because they too have been given or gifted by the one Transcendent source. This is an essential step which Gandhi, in calling outcasts by the name "harijans" or "children of God," urged us to take beyond the sense of pride or isolation in which we would see others in pejorative terms.

But mere respect may not be enough. The fact that I and another, my people and another, originate from, share in and proclaim the same Self, especially as Good or Bliss, implies that to the degree that our cultural traditions share the good, the relation between these integrating modes of human life is in principle one of complementarity. Hence, interchange as the effort to live this complementarity is far from being hopeless. In the pressing needs of our times only an intensification of cooperation between peoples can make available the essential and immense stores of human experience and creativity. A positive virtue of love is our real basis for hope.

A second principle for interchange is to be found in the participated — the radically given or gifted — character of one’s being. As one does not first exist and then receive, but one’s very existence is a received existence or gift, to attempt to give back this gift, as in an exchange of presents, would be at once hopelessly too much and too little. On the one hand, to attempt to return in strict equivalence would be too much for it is our very self that we have received as gift. On the other hand, to think merely in terms of reciprocity would be to fall essentially short of my nature as one that is given, for to make a merely equivalent return would be to remain centered upon myself where I would cleverly trap, and then entomb, the creative power of being.

Rather, looking back I can see the futility of giving back, and in this find the fundamental importance of passing on the gift in the spirit in which it has been given. One’s nature as given calls for a creative generosity which reflects that of one’s source. Truly appropriate generosity lies in continuing the giving through participating in one’s tradition, shaping it creatively in response to the needs of the day and the discoveries of the era, and handing on this good to others. This requires a vast expansion or breaking out of oneself as the only center of one’s concern. It means becoming effectively concerned with the good of others and of other groups, and for the promotion and vital growth of the next generation and those to follow.

The implications of such generosity are broad and at times surprisingly personal. First, true openness to others cannot be based upon a depreciation of oneself or of one’s own culture. Without appreciating one’s worth there would be nothing to share and no way to help, nor even the possibility of taking joy in the good of the other. Further, cultural interchange enables one to see that elements of one’s life, which in isolation may have seemed to be merely local customs and purely repetitive in character, are more fundamentally modes in which one lives basic and essential human values. In meeting others and other cultures, one discovers the deeper meaning in one’s own everyday life.

One does more than discover, however. One recognizes that in these transcendental values of life — of truth and freedom, of love and beauty — one participates in the dynamism of one’s origin and hence must share these values in turn. More exactly, one can come to realize that real reception of these transcendental gifts lies in sharing them in loving concern in order that others may realize them as well. This means passing on one’s own heritage and protecting and promoting what the next generation would freely become.

This sense of gift is of fundamental importance for the development of cultural awareness in our day. It provides the basis for understanding the basic dynamic instability of human life between limited realization and infinite openness. This engages us in the search for liberation and fulfillment from which values, virtues and ultimately cultures emerge. It situates this striving at the very center of human life. Further, it provides for an open and inclusive search for liberation in which we are concerned to share with others and grow in the very process. Finally, it provides a goal and direction for the process of liberation which elevates and transforms.

It is of fundamental importance to note the difference between a wisdom or overall outlook based upon humans and one that is based upon God, that is, in the above diagram between founding one’s outlook upon C or upon D.

The former, focused exclusively on humans, is charact-eristically modern and has some epistemological roots in the modern rationalist project of Descartes to gain control over life by reducing all knowledge to only that which can be developed with clarity and distinctness. It is not that knowledge with such characteristics is not desirable, but rather that the exclusion of all other knowledge decimates the dimensions of meaning and obliterates the dimensions of freedom, creativity and love.

As seen in Part I, this begins by analyzing all into their minimum clear component natures and then relating these externally. On the physical side these components are endowed by inertia; their mode of interrelation is then that of collision and displacement. When this is taken up by those who would achieve the goal of clarity and control in terms of sense knowledge alone, as in the Hobbesian and positivist tradition, the mode of interrelation is that of power relations of self-centered atomic individuals in search of survival. The modality of such life is violence tempered only by the compromise of one’s own vicious freedom. The key to directing one’s life and interpreting all others is Darwin’s survival of the fittest or Freud’s precarious management by the ego of an aggressive id through a tenuous super-ego. There is in this no goal or ideal toward which we strive, but only a series of steps to curb the degree of our crassness. One not only has evolved from a brutish state, he does so reluctantly, regrets that he can no longer be simply such and returns to it to the degree possible in order to be authentically oneself.

The religious view is radically different. Its sense of reality is primarily that of the All-perfect plenitude of being. In the Greek tradition this is the One, Unchanging, Eternal of Parmenides, the Goodness itself of Plato, the All-wise One of Aristotle; in the Hindu tradition it is Brahma as the One Existence, Consciousness and Bliss; for Islam it is the One All-powerful, All-wise, All-loving; for Buddhism it is the ideal of Compassion, Harmony and Mercy. This is what it means to be, and to the degree that men are not the absolute, they are limited realizations of that Perfection, Wisdom and Love.

In this context human life does have a goal and orientation. It is not an indifferent power asking only to be able to do whatever it happens to want and to gratify whatever instinct is the most clamorous at the moment. Rather its goal is to realize its being to the fullest and to share thereby to the maximum degree possible, and according to its own nature and context, in the unity and truth, love and bliss that being most truly is.

It is not then alien or compromising for a human person to want to be with others and to be concerned for their welfare — that is natural; rather, it is being self-centered and exploitive that is alien and self-destructive. Thus, the development of a cultural consensus in the good does not do violence to one’s nature and identity, but allows it to emerge and to celebrate its deepest striving. If this be the case then religious insight and outlook is truly needed and most deeply suited to human life, for it has the decisive power of the truth that responds to mankind’s most fundamental striving.

Indeed, we should go further and in a way particularly related to the generation of cultures. We saw above that the development of values and virtues of which a culture is above all composed arises from the elemental instability of the human situation. As human, humans like every being has all that pertains to them according to the level of their nature. The human person is a self-conscious participant in being, and in its primary realization being is One and All-perfect. Hence, one is ever open and searching in mind and heart. One can respond to all things because one can see the good in them; one needs to respond positively to things because one can appreciate one’s own imperfect level in comparison to the divine. Nevertheless, no limited reality can compel one’s assent because such a reality is always deficient in comparison to the All-perfect.

This free penchant for the good is the key to the dynamism of human life. From it there emerges both the creativity and the selectivity in the life of each human group by which it makes consistent choices and shapes its culture. For this reason, religion is not alien to cultures. To the contrary as pointing out the divine origin and goal of all it gives sense to their deepest strivings, opening new levels of awareness of the implications of their choices. It opens new pathways as well for healing the human weaknesses and redeeming the human falls which stand in the way of their effort to reflect more fully and in their own way the fullness of Life of which they come and toward which they are oriented. From this follow two corollaries.

This is intensified by, and may indeed reflect, a dualistic understanding of the Fall by which some Christians see nature as corrupted and hence as absent from the divine. In this perspective, human cultures as creations of a fallen humankind can only be corrupt and opposed to authentic human welfare conceived in such a context religion could not but do violence to cultures which are seen as needing to be swept away in order to be substituted by a new creation. Catholic theology has never accepted this notion of corrupted human nature as can be seen by its DeRiccis DeNobilis and de Foncaults who reached out to Chinese Indian and Islamic cultures. But there is much to do in working out the implications of the new sensitivity to cultures for living and sharing in faith. A review of alternate models for evangelization and culture may help to make this clearer.

Identification of the four dimensions in the initial schema makes it possible to identify a number of ways of looking at the relation of religion and culture.

1. If the attention to the relation of humankind (C) to God (D) is based most notably upon objectivity (A), which characterized modern thought and the earlier scholasticisms (in some distinction from Augustine) then religion is seen as a body of doctrine, unchanging in content and unaffected by human experience, which is to be passed to all cultures. Here the emphasis is on essence, nature or content. The existential condition is at best indifferent and at worst in danger of corrupting the content of religion.

Awareness Reality

A C

Objectivity Humankind

B D

Subjectivity God

2. If the attention to the relation of humankind (C) to God (D) is based more notably upon attention to human subjectivity (B), which characterizes recent thought, then the understanding shifts rather toward the existential character of human life in community. In that case the impact of religion is a matter of transforming the culture of a people. This is less a matter of addition to, or substitution of, an alien content than of serving as leaven to the culture, favoring its fundamental realization as a search for the good, enabling it to overcome failings and falls, reinforcing once again its basic orientation to the Divine source and goal of life, and enabling it to respond in kind to the gift which it has received.

A C

Objectivity Humankind

B D

Subjectivity God

A C

Objectivity Humankind

B D

Subjectivity God

Historicity and Religion. Models 2 and 3 make it possible to take positive account of the historical reality of religion. In view of the attention to subjectivity and people’s the response to religion the provenance of one’s faith is of great import. This is not merely to speak of the need for intermediaries who might well be interchangeable in order that the unchanging essence of the objective content of the faith be transmitted. Instead it bespeaks the importance of Providence in the development to religious sensibilities in the various peoples at particular junctures of their history and of humankind. It bespeaks as well the importance of the pattern of the interchange of religious vision to many regions of the world.

While this relates to the patter of commercial and political interests, it is not reducible thereto. Thus model 2 is required in order to overcome political and power readings of the relation of religion and culture according to model 1, which could reduce religion to a merely human and eventually non-religious enterprise. Instead it is important to search out the Providence of God in history in order to protect it from perversion for merely human ends and to cooperate instead in the realization of its plan for the transformation of mankind after the image of God, Creator and goal of human life. Here lies much of the problem of inculturation.

Religion and the Integration of Peoples. The historical interchange of religious insight has, in fact, two directions. There is and has been a process of communities sharing their faith with distant peoples. Conversely, there is a reception of religious insight along with immigration. What mode of relation of peoples is appropriate: is it one of communicating the content of the faith possessed (A); or is it one of drawing upon their distinctive cultural and possibly even their distinctive religious experience in order to develop the faith of the resident community (B) as well? The latter is a much richer sense of the importance of culture for religious awareness.

Religion nd the Progress of Peoples. If cultures are understood as concrete community modes of realizing human life, and if this desire for perfection is ultimately a reflection of the life of divine love in enjoyment of its own goodness, then religion should not be alien to the search of communities of peoples for fulfillment, or what can be called liberation. As reminding mankind of its source and hence of the extent of the dignity and rights of all religion is thus a transforming force in the progress of peoples.

1. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), 2 vols.

2. Adler, I, 586.

3. Ibid., p. 587.

4. Ibid., p. 606.

5. Tr. C.K. Ogden (London: Methuen, 1981).

6. (New York: Harper and Row).

7. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).

8. Brian Wicker, Culture and Theology (London: Sheed and Ward, 1966), pp. 68-88.

9. (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).

10. (New York: Crossroads, 1979).

11. Documents of Vatican II, ed. W. Abbott (New York: New Century, 1974).

12. V. Mathieu, "Cultura" in Enciclopedia Filosofica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1967), II, 207-210; and Raymond Williams, "Culture and Civilization", Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), II, 273-276, and Culture and Society (London, 1958).

13. Tonnelat, "Kultur" in Civilization, le mot et l’idée (Paris: Centre International de Synthese), II.

14. V. Mathieu, ibid.

15. V. Mathieu, "Civilta," ibid., I, 1437-1439.

16. G.F. Klemm, Allgemein Culturegeschicht de Menschheit (Leipzig, 1843-52), x.

17. E.G. Tylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1871), VII, p. 7.

18. Maurice Nedoncelle, "Person and/or World as the Source of Religious Insight" in G. McLean, ed., Traces of God in a Secular Culture (New York: Alba House, 1973), pp. 187-210.

19. Kenneth L. Schmitz, The Gift: Creation (Milwaukee: Marquette Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 34-42. I am particularly indebted to this very thoughtful work for its suggestions. I draw here also upon my "Chinese-Western Cultural Interchange in the Future" delivered at the International Symposium on Chinese- Western Cultural Interchange in Commemoration of the 400th Anniversary of the Arrival of Matteo Ricci, S.J., in China (Taiwan: Fu Jen Univ., l983), pp. 457-72.

20. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, nos. 6-8 in F. Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1934), pp. 82-84. Schmitz, ibid.

21. A. S. Cua, Dimensions of Moral Creativity: Paradigms, Principles and Ideals (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1978), chaps. III-V.

22. W. Cenkner, The Hindu Personality in Education: Tagore, Gandhi and Aurobindo (Delhi: South Asia Books, 1976).

23. Parmenides, Fragment 2.

24. Schmitz, 44-56.

25. Anselm, Monologium, cc. 8-9 in Anselm of Canterbury, eds. J. Hopkins and H. W. Richardson (Toronto: E. Mellen, 1975), I, pp. 15-18. See Schmitz, 30-34.

26. R. E. Allen, "Participation and Predication in Plato’s Middle Dialogues" in his Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics (London: Routledge, Keegan Paul, 1965), pp. 43-60.

27. Juan Carlos Scannone, "Ein neuer Ansatz in der Philosophie Lateinamerikas," Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 89 (1982), 99-116 and "La Racionalidad Cientifico-Technologica y la Racionalidad Sapiencial de la Cultura Latino Americana," Stromata (1982), 155-164.

28. William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1967), pp. 532-535.

29. Joseph Kockelmans, "Thanksgiving: The Completion of Thought," in Manfred S. Frings, ed., Heidegger and the Quest for Truth (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), pp. 175-179.

30. Schmitz, 84-86.

31. John Paul II, "Address at Puebla," Origins, VIII (n. 34, 1979), I, 4 and II, 41-46.

32. Metaphysics, I, 2.

33. Meditation, I.

34. Meditations III-VI.

35. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy

36. Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, "The Task of Christian Philosophy Today," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 53 (1979), 3-4.