HENT DE VRIESoutlay, one that cannot be legally commanded’’ (p. 253). While this need for political
virtues does not necessarily imply that only religion can generate this motivational force,
let alone that it provides ‘‘an argumentative ‘surplus’ ’’ (p. 251), its traditions may still—or
again—provide a reservoir whose potential ‘‘the secular forces of communicative reason’’
cannot fully exhaust or for which rational discourse cannot fully substitute.^128 ‘‘Political
virtues,’’ according to Habermas, ‘‘are a matter of socialization and of acclimating oneself
to the practices of modes of thinking within a liberal political culture. The status of citizen
is, in a certain sense, embedded in civil society, which derives sustenance from spontane-
ous and, if you like, ‘prepolitical’ sources’’ (p. 254). He concedes that this is not merely
an empirical matter. If critical reflection, especially philosophy, needs to take ‘‘the phe-
nomenon of the continued existence of religion in a continually secularizing environ-
ment’’ as more than a ‘‘mere social fact,’’ this is because this phenomenon also constitutes
a ‘‘cognitive challenge from within’’ (p. 256). This is not to deny the generic distinction
between ‘‘a secular mode of speaking, which requires itself to be generally accessible, and
a religious mode of speaking, which depends upon the truths of revelation’’ (p. 257), nor
does this insight exhaust itself in an attitude of respect toward the expressiveness with
which individuals and collectives often exemplify a religious way of life. Rather, if some-
thing remains intact in religious traditions, ‘‘so long as they avoid dogmatism and moral
constraint,’’ it is, Habermas claims, their ‘‘sufficiently differentiated possibilities of expres-
sion and sensibilities for misspent life, for societal pathologies, for the failure of individual
life plans and the deformation to be seen in distorted life contexts.’’ Part of the content
of religious traditions that Habermas considers worth saving is the ‘‘translation of the
notion of man’s likeness to God into the notion of human dignity, in which all men
partake equally and which is to be respected unconditionally’’ (pp. 257–58). More
broadly, against the backdrop of his famous diagnosis of the paradoxes of modernity, of
the ‘‘colonization’’ of the life-world by the systems and media of increasingly global eco-
nomic markets (i.e., money), on the one hand, and bureaucratic and juridified forms of
national and international administration (i.e., power), on the other, Habermas states
that it is ‘‘in the constitutional state’s own interest to treat with care all cultural sources
upon which the consciousness of norms and the solidarity of citizens draw’’ (p. 258). It
is in this context that he wishes to situate the discussion concerning ‘‘post-secular soci-
ety.’’ He concludes: ‘‘The ideological neutrality of the state authority, which guarantees
the same ethical freedoms for every citizen, is incompatible with the political generaliza-
tion of a secularistic worldview’’ (p. 260).
It would seem that Habermas’s latest views on the relationship between ‘‘faith and
knowledge’’ (the title of one of his most recent writings) and their mutual and comple-
mentary learning processes come within a hair’s breadth of Pope Benedict XVI’s more
decidedly theological view of the ‘‘necessary correlativity,’’ ‘‘polyphonic correlation,’’ and
‘‘essential complementarity of reason and faith’’ (p. 268). For him this implies fundamen-
tally a reflection on the modern phenomenon of ‘‘interculturality’’ (p. 266), whose impli-
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