the humanity that belongs equally to man and to woman.’^45 The world is
entrusted to our humanity as gift and task. The mission is to live out the truth
about ourselves in order to structure the visible world according to truth. From
hisfirst encyclical,Redemptor hominis, until hisfinal book, from which I have
quoted above, John Paul II was convinced that Christian humanism must be
Christocentric and transform culture. The amazement about the Good News
of Christianity for humanity, about redemption, in‘a hidden and mysterious
way...vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism....TheChurch’sfundamental
function in every age and particularly in ours is to direct man’s gaze, to point the
awareness and experience of the whole of humanity, towards the mystery of God;
to help all men to be familiar with the profundity of the Redemption taking place
in Christ Jesus.’^46 It is through Christ that God cultivates man: from its creation
in the image of God, man’s humanity contains something of the divine.‘His
humanity,then, can be“cultivated”in this extraordinary way.Moreover, inGod’s
plan of salvation, it is only by agreeing to be grafted onto Christ’sdivineVine
that man can become fully himself. Were he to refuse this grafting, he would
effectively condemn himself to an incomplete humanity.’^47
Based on such Christocentric and faith-based notions of Christian human-
ism, Francis George has tried to describe the dynamism or the means in which
such a cultural transformation could take place:‘The faith creates such a
culture by being simply, boldly, and unapologetically itself.... By the power
of the Eucharist and through a kind of osmosis, we transform the culture,
gently but subversively, from within.’Eucharistic people must refashion the
political, economic, and social realms. The goal of this process is the‘total
transformation of the world in all its dimensions’.^48
While one can only agree to the spiritual side of this quotation, I think that
his formulation of the programme underestimates the importance of philoso-
phy, especially social ethics and political philosophy. Profanity must be truly
profane, in order to be open to the transcendent. We must take second causes
and the relative autonomy of worldly affairs seriously. George’s formulation,
left out of the context of his other writings, could be taken as too generalized,
thus requiring a further differentiation according to the different types of
secularity. However, I do agree with him that evangelizing culture means
cleansing it of demonic elements. This presupposes that our culture is sal-
vageable. We are used to saying that grace builds upon nature, which we can
translate, with H. Richard Niebuhr, as‘faith builds on culture’. According to
George,‘culture is more important than institutions in preserving and spread-
ing the faith’.^49 Consequently, it is important to determine what kind of
(^45) John Paul II,Memory and Identity: Personal Reflections(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
2005), 91.
(^46) John Paul II, EncyclicalRedemptor hominis§10. (^47) John Paul II,Memory, 111f.
(^48) George,Difference, 23. (^49) George,Difference,26–8.
212 Martin Schlag