Christ, Society and the State

On January 19, 2004 in Munich, at the invitation of the Catholic Academy of Bavaria, Jurgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger engaged in a public discussion on the topic 'The pre-political moral foundations of a free state'. In this remarkable dialogue between these high profile representatives of the credenti (believers) and the laid (secular persons), between philosophy and religion, Habermas called for secular society to acquire a new understanding of religious convictions and to acknowledge that these convictions pose a 'cognitive challenge' to philosophy. It was as if a wall of separation had become, in an instant, a doorway to dialogue. In this timely book, Trainor makes a decisive intellectual response to the 'challenge to dialogue' posed by the 'Munich moment'. He holds that the 'secular' and the 'sacred' do not depict separate realms but that they are integral aspects of a single dynamic totality. The 'sacred', he maintains, is the origin and end of the 'secular', and the 'secular'. he holds, is only truly and fully itself when suffused with the 'sacred', that is, when the ruling authorities, organisations and social groups within the secular realm exercise their 'related autonomy' in such a way that the 'sacred' (God, the Holy Spirit-in-us) is perfectly at home there, and when the Father, descending upon this realm through the authority of the Son, encounters in love the Spirit ascending within us. This means that the state is the 'sacred in the midst of the secular' or the 'own self' of society as a collective person (the Holy Spirit co-present with us in our community), and that each human society, because it is vertically related to the Divine, is not only cultural 'all the way down', hut also universal 'all the way down' or ever open to the intimations of the `universal Spirit' (as the Gospel insists). All of this casts the problems currently posed by 'rights-versus-the (common] good' ," 'plurality-versus-unity disputes in the new light of 'differences being held together by a single divine embrace'.

Dr. Brian T. Trainor is Senior Lecturer and Head of Postgraduate Studies in Humanities at Tabor Adelaide.