alone can convert and illuminate our hearts. On an immanent level, two
approaches are particularly convincing. Hans Joas proposes thefirst, Alexan-
der Solzhenitsyn the second one. Let us look at how they converge.
Hans Joas argues that traditionsas suchdo not‘produce’anything, but
that transformation depends on social agents in specific circumstances who
appropriate salient points of a tradition. In the course of this argument, he
identifies‘values, practices and institutions’ as the decisive cogwheels or
conveyor belts of cultural transformation.^52 It is important to grasp that not
only values or their proclamation suffice to transform a culture. Values are
introduced into history wrapped in practices. It is not even enough to put
them into practice individually. We need to build institutions. Referring to
freedom, for example, Nicholas Boyle has written inspiringly that the value of
freedom is not an individual matter:‘We create our freedoms in the institu-
tions we jointly construct.’^53 Catholic social thought has been slow to grasp the
importance of modern institutions in liberal states, for the reasons mentioned
above when dealing with the limits of neo-scholasticism. After John Paul II
and Benedict XVI, however, institutional ethics now has a place in Catholic
social teaching. Similarly, the Anglo-American experience was built on the
conviction that personal virtue was necessary but not enough, and accordingly
a system that built in checks and balances on an institutional level was set up.
In his famous speech after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Alexander
Solzhenitsyn called on the West to rediscover the three transcendentals of
truth, goodness, and beauty that—like three trees—cover the whole of culture
with their crowns.^54 Other authors have followed him, among them Robert
Royal and Jens Zimmermann.^55 Royal characterizes our age as a moment in
which the‘central doubters’like Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, and others
have themselves‘been subjected to doubt, and no definite replacements have
emerged’.^56 He is correct in his assessment that the best place from which to
begin looking for something new and useful, from which to start thinking, is
Christian humanism.^57
(^52) ‘Traditionen als solche bringen nichts hervor. Entscheidend ist die Art ihrer Aneignung
durch die zeitgenössischen Akteure unter ihren spezifischen Bedingungen und in dem Span-
nungsfeld von Praktiken, Werten und Institutionen, in dem sie sich befinden.’Hans Joas,Die
Sakralität der Person: Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte(Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012), 204.
(^53) Nicholas Boyle,Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel
to Heaney(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998), 9.
(^54) Cf. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn-lecture.
html.
(^55) Robert Royal,‘Christian Humanism in a Postmodern Age’, in Gregory Wolfe (ed.),The New
Religious Humanists: A Reader(New York: The Free Press, 1997), 87–103. Jens Zimmermann
structures his three revivals of self-knowledge around ethical transcendence, hermeneutics, and
aesthetics, which follows the transcendentals; cf. Jens Zimmermann,Humanism and Religion:
A Call for the Renewal of Western Culture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 346–51.
(^56) Royal,Christian Humanism, 89. (^57) Royal,Christian Humanism, 96.
214 Martin Schlag