German bishop recalls Habermas-Ratzinger dialogue after philosopher’s death

Jürgen Habermas, the philosopher whose debate with the future Pope Benedict XVI on the foundations of democracy became a touchstone for the relationship between faith and reason, has died at 96.

Habermas emerged from the so-called Frankfurt School, which linked its philosophical and sociological ideas to Karl Marx and figures such as Sigmund Freud. The Frankfurt School was a pioneer and source of ideas for the 1968 revolution, and Habermas later broke with the movement.

The German philosopher’s willingness to take religious thought seriously — rare among secular philosophers of his stature — made him a valued interlocutor for Catholic thinkers.

In a statement Saturday, Bishop Heiner Wilmer, SCJ, chairman of the German Bishops’ Conference, commemorated the late thinker’s dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger.

“With Jürgen Habermas’ death, an exceptional philosopher leaves us,” Wilmer declared. “The breadth of his thinking and the visionary power to build bridges between philosophy and religion will remain.”

He added: “Unforgettable is his dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger, which showed that theology cannot exist without philosophy and philosophy cannot exist without theology. We will not forget the power of his intellectual achievement.”

The two thinkers discussed the “dialectical foundations of secularization” at the Catholic Academy of Bavaria in Munich in 2004. At that time, the later Pope Benedict XVI was still a cardinal serving as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Habermas, who maintained that the Enlightenment was an “unfinished project” that could be corrected through improved communication, found himself opposite a Bavarian prelate and theologian who maintained that the natural law tradition offers the surest path to overcoming the “pathologies of reason” and the twin dangers of political and religious fanaticism.

The Catholic weekly Die Tagespost noted in a March 14 obituary that their meeting demonstrated that the supposed opposition between enlightened reason and religious faith need not end in enmity. Both recognized the necessity of a mutual learning process, seeing the conversation itself as its own reward.

“Habermas, who described himself as ‘religiously unmusical,’ recognized in Christianity an important source of moral intuitions,” Henry C. Brinker wrote in the newspaper. “And the later pope drew out hidden resonances in Habermas that the philosopher himself probably did not suspect.”