Epilogue: The Moral Challenge of the New Global Task

Abstract

As I come to the end of my reflections on Vatican II and phenomenology, what impresses me is not so much the Council’s sophisticated intellectual process, but the fact that its religious adaptation recapitulates and redirects human thought-patterns under development for well over a century. Vatican II and the “signs of the times” are telling us that the Age of the Enlightenment has come to an end: man can no longer live by reason alone.1 Reason needs to be anchored in a primordial faith (or myth) larger than itself, a faith which confers self-respect, clarity of direction, and a hierarchy of fundamental values. At the Council the Church returned to its own religious life-world to reformulate a creative and contemporary expression of such a larger faith. This was necessary because the battleground of the foreseeable future will be a clash of faiths, myths, and life-worlds rather than a clash of scientific ideas. Vatican II has, accordingly, brought into historical comparative focus the three great faiths now contending to shape the man of the future: faith in Reason, faith in the Collectivity, and faith in God. This context provides us with a better perspective on the three foremost leaders of these trends in modern times: Hegel, Marx, and John XXIII.2