the giver ending essay

by Lois Lowry

The giver essay questions.

What does the ending of The Giver mean for our interpretation of the text?

Answer: Lowry has left the ending ambiguous. The more likely approach is to decide that Jonas did die and was merely hallucinating at the end of the novel, which could imply a pessimistic ending that completes our image of a dystopia that cannot provide its citizens with both safety and independence. Under this interpretation, we also see the difficulty of separating oneself from the collective; successful resistance requires more than just one or two people. One might decide instead that Jonas coincidentally finds the sled and Elsewhere at the conclusion of the novel. This development might suggest the ability of the human spirit to survive centuries of suppression and hint that Jonas's society will recover from the adverse effects of Sameness. It is important to note that in a later novel, Messenger , Lowry resolves the ambiguity by suggesting that Jonas survived, but this does not invalidate the possible interpretation that Jonas died.

What is the significance of snow in The Giver ?

Answer: Jonas's experiences with his memories are intimately connected with the idea of snow, from his first received transmission of sledding through snow on a hillside to his experience of a broken leg and finally to his real encounter with it at the novel's conclusion. As with many other things that have been eradicated through Sameness, snow involves the dangers that the community chose to end in its quest for safety. At the same time, however, it brings Jonas great joy, through his exhilaration in his first memory and in his apparent recognition of the existence of Elsewhere in the last chapter. Snow is neither good nor bad, but the novel implies that its absence takes some essential aspect away from the world. Removing a risk involves removing the benefits that could have resulted from taking the risk.

What meanings does the phrase "back and back and back" hold within the novel?

Answer: The phrase represents the traditional role of The Receiver within Jonas's community, and it gives a sense of history and continuity to the position of Receiver. Yet, as Jonas notes later in the novel, it also represents the burden and constraints that the society has given to The Receiver in the search for safety and Sameness. Whereas The Receiver is forced to remember "back and back and back" and understand all the pains of humanity, the rest of the community has no sense of history and thus loses both the positive and negative aspects of retaining a common history. For the community, the earlier times were times of hurt and danger, "backward" times that the people do not want to remember or relive.

How does The Giver's acquaintance with Jonas change The Giver's outlook on life?

Answer: Although most people read The Giver 's relationship to Jonas in terms of The Giver's teachings to Jonas--The Giver is in control, helping Jonas develop wisdom to augment his intelligence and courage--The Giver also gains some wisdom himself over the course of their relationship. Prior to meeting Jonas, The Giver had resigned himself to the stagnant nature of both the community and his role within the society, judging that the society was supreme and that he was powerless. However, by seeing the changes that his memories and teachings effect in Jonas, he learns that he also has the ability to teach others and perhaps reverse the oppression of individuals. By talking to Jonas about the problems of their society, he gains the resolve to make a difference and affect the society's future course.

Discuss how the idea of release is used in The Giver.

Answer: Because the nature of release is not revealed until very late in the novel--at a point that could be considered the climax of the plot--the continued references to the mysterious process of release unsettle us and lead us to suspect that it is intentionally hidden because of moral cracks in the society. The narrative introduces us to the idea of release in the first chapter as an apparently excessive punishment for a pilot's innocent mistake while indicating the presence of fear, which sets the tone for the rest of the novel. The novel then proceeds to both soothe and unnerve as it alternates examples of people who are happy to be released with those who are banished from the community for wrongdoing or for simply being weak. Considering that the Old are eventually released, it is not hard to figure out that being released means being euthanized. When the process of release is finally revealed, we are not surprised to see that it is lethal injection. The long period before the novel's revelation adds to its significance in revealing the problems in the community's structure. If the society has really done away with the troubles of this world, why do they still call euthanasia a release? Figuratively, people are being released from the bondage of the oppression in this tightly controlled society, but of course they do not see it in this way.

Discuss the role of family in The Giver .

Answer: Over the course of the novel, Jonas forms in a sense a second family. The first one consists of his family unit, and the second is a new family including Gabriel and perhaps also The Giver, who are joined to him by the transference of memories. The first unit serves as a foil for the second, as its apparent functionality is shown to be somewhat lacking in real love or permanent attachment. Most families are tightly controlled for the sake of the society (compare Plato's treatment of families in the Republic ). In contrast, Jonas's relations with The Giver and with Gabriel are more suggestive of the love that he feels in the memory of family and grandparents, and the novel suggests that their ability to feel true emotions such as love represents what is lacking in the rest of the community.

How do Asher and Fiona illuminate our understanding of Jonas's character?

Answer: Asher and Fiona serve as foils throughout the novel for Jonas. Initially, Asher's character description in particular highlights Jonas's characteristics of intelligence and thoughtfulness. Later in the novel, however, as Jonas's training begins to alienate him from the community, Asher's and Fiona's behavior during the war game shows the lack of understanding that results from their lack of historical awareness. The revelation that Fiona is training in release serves as a final indication of how Jonas has grown apart from the conventions and cruelties of his society.

Discuss the role of solitude or isolation in Jonas's experiences.

Answer: At one point in the novel, Lowry references the positive aspects of solitude as learned by Jonas through transmitted memories. However, for the most part, the effect of Jonas's role as Receiver-in-Training is to isolate him and make him experience the more negative aspects of his society. Because he has been trained to act always as a member of a group, he now learns that to honor The Receiver increases his burdens by adding the pain of loneliness to the weight of his memories. In his role as sage, he will always stand apart. He will develop his own sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, based on unique experiences that the regular society never has. His distanced vantage point allows him to critique the society more fully than he would have been able to do had he remained a normal member of the collective.

Write a second ending for The Giver that tells the fate of the community after Jonas's departure.

Answer: This question asks you to engage in a creative exercise. One might address the community's reaction to the loss of Jonas and what the people and The Giver are thinking as the people search for him. More importantly, one might consider the community's reaction to the return of their memories and about The Giver's attempt to help them. Such an ending could be written from the perspective of The Giver or the perspective of one of the members of the community, such as Jonas's sister Lily or his friend Asher. The narrative could then describe whether the community chose to reject or keep Sameness or what small risks the community began to take in order to appreciate individuality and the chance of developing a stronger, more free society.

How does Jonas's training as The Receiver of Memory serve as a coming-of-age story?

Answer: Jonas and his society proceed from the assumption that after the Ceremony of Twelve, all of the new Twelves are no longer mere children, although they stay with their family units and continue their schooling. However, Jonas's training reveals that after just twelve years of life, he has not acquired the wisdom necessary to approach his life as an adult. In his interactions with The Giver, he acquires this wisdom and mentally ages rapidly through his experiences of war, death, and starvation. This approach to development contrasts with that of Fiona and Asher, both of whom remain in a sense like children because their experiences do not grant them self-awareness and maturity.

The Giver Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for The Giver is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What do you think of the morning dream telling ritual?

This question calls for your opinion. There is no right or wrong answer. In my opinion, dream telling is rather ridiculous. We all know that dreams are inexplicable for the most part.... and most dreams disappear when we wake up.

Should Jonas have asked them to stop playing the game of bad guys and good guys? CHAPTER 17

No, I don't think Jonas should ask them to stop playing. These kids cannot handle the emotional trauma  of forgetting their lunch let alone understanding emotions behind war and death. They simply would not comprehend what Jonas is talking...

Chapter 13-16

Jonas advocates choices, as well as real family units rather than created family units.

Study Guide for The Giver

The Giver study guide contains a biography of Lois Lowry, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of The Giver.

• About The Giver
• The Giver Summary
• The Giver Video
• Character List

Essays for The Giver

The Giver essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of The Giver by Lois Lowry.

• The Cost of Security
• A Lonely Mind With a Heavy Burden: Hope in The Giver
• Is the Society of The Giver a Utopia?
• Reproductive Regulation and the Construction of Relationships for Populace Control in The Giver and “Pop Squad”

Lesson Plan for The Giver

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to The Giver
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• The Giver Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for The Giver

• Introduction
• Analysis of themes
• Literary significance and reception

Plot Summary

By lois lowry.

'The Giver' is a Newbery Prize-winning novel by Lois Lowry and tells the story of Jonas, a young, eleven-year-old boy raised in a futuristic walled community.

About the Book

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

The novel presents a dystopian community from the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy who is more perceptive, emotional, and thoughtful than any of the other community members. 

‘Spoiler Free’ Summary 

The Giver by Lois Lowry tells the story of Jonas, a young, eleven-year-old boy raised in a futuristic walled community. The community has eliminated pain, war, fear, and all negative and positive emotions. Everyone who lives there is content with the way things are and yet completely in the dark in regard to what life used to be like and the emotions, colors, and experiences they have all been stripped of.

When the novel begins, Jonas’s career is chosen for him. This sets him on a complicated path that leads to a series of horrifying revelations about his community, his family, and the parts of human history that have been removed from collective memory. Jonas’s relationship with his mentor, The Giver, helps him come to terms with the choices set out before him —either live with the knowledge he has or run and try to escape for a better life. 

The Giver Summary 

Spoiler alert – important details of the novel are revealed below. 

The Giver is told from the point of view of Jonas, a young boy who has lived his whole life in a walled, futuristic community, in which everything is controlled by “The Committee of Elders”. He lives with his father, who works with children as a nurturer, his mother, who works at the Department of Justice, and his younger sister, Lily, who is only seven years old.

A the beginning of the novel, he’s considering the upcoming Ceremony of the Twelve. There, his career path will be laid out for him. He’ll be given a job that perfectly suits him and that he’ll keep for the rest of his life. But unlike his friends Asher and Fiona, Jonas is unsure what he’s going to be given, considering that he has no great passion for any of the many jobs he’s tried. 

Citizens in the community apply to receive spouses, are assigned two children each, and upon adulthood, family units are dissolved. Citizens are eventually housed in the House of the Old when they reach a certain age. Then, they are “released” or killed in order not to place an additional burden on the community. The citizens believe that the process of being “released” means that one enters Elsewhere, the area surrounding the community, and into a new life. Death is not something that they have a firm grasp on. The old, ill, and nonconformists are all released. 

Jonas’s appearance is described in these pages as well. He has pale eyes, rather than the dark eyes many in the community have. He is also far more perceptive than others. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that he has a deeper insight into others’ lives and a connection to his emotions that others do not. Objects appear different when he looks at them as if they’re in the process of change. It soon becomes clear that this world is devoid of color, something he’s initially unaware of. 

The New Receiver of Memory

The Chief Elder reveals Jonas’s job at the Ceremony. He’s been chosen for his ability to see beyond to be the new Receiver of Memory, the highest position in the community. This means that he’s going to be the receptacle for the community’s collective memories before the Sameness, the painless and warless state they now live in. The memories might be partially gone, but they have to be kept somewhere. Someone has to keep track of them so that the community does not repeat the mistakes of the past, and that job is to be passed on to Jonas. 

Jonas meets with The Giver, an old man who demonstrates how the memories are passed on. Jonas’s first memory received is that of sledding down a hill in the snow at Christmas time. He also gives Jonas good memories of sunshine, warmth, excitement, and love, as well as painful memories such as loneliness, starvation, and fear. Jonas longs to share those experiences with others and realizes that no one in the community cares for one another as they should. 

During this period, his family elects to take care of a sickly Newchild, a baby named Gabriel. It’s revealed that Jonas’s father, whose career involves caring for new babies, is actually in charge of “releasing them”, or killing them by way of lethal injection if they prove to be sick or different in some way. Jonas’ father tells Jonas that Gabriel will have to be released the next day. Jonas is horrified by this revelation and is inspired to change things. 

The Giver helps Jonas plan to leave the community, saving Gabriel, who’s been chosen to be released, and starting a new life. But it’s not quite so simple. The Giver tells Jonas what happened to the last Receiver of Memory, his own daughter. This young girl was given the same memories of war, loss, love, color, and the past that Jonas was, but she couldn’t handle them. She was asked to be released, and her memories were set loose back to the public.

The community members, who had lived their whole lives without any strong emotions, were suddenly inundated with new ones. This caused a major issue that the Giver knows needs to be avoided. 

Leaving the Community

The two come up with a plan to get Jonas out of the community and to Elsewhere, the area outside their walls. There, his memories will disperse, and the Giver will help the remaining community members understand the truth of their existence and their new memories of the human past.

 Jonas eventually flees the community in somewhat of a panic, desperate to save Gabriel. He steals his father’s bicycle and heads toward Elsewhere pursued by search planes. At the end of the novel, he enters into a striking landscape of color, which readers will recognize as their own world. There, he feels hunger and fear.

The novel ends with Jonas and Gabriel climbing into a sled at the top of a hill, featured in Jonas’s very first received memory. They ride down it towards a village in which they can hear music. Without stating it outright, the end of the novel alludes to a happy conclusion of events for Jonas. He believes someone in the village is waiting for him and/or willing to help him. 

What is the main message of The Giver ?

The main message is the importance of memory to human experience–collective and individual. Without knowledge of the past, including mistakes and triumphs, humans cannot grow or learn.

Why is The Giver famous?

The Giver is famous for its unique characters, dystopian society, and the ways in which it makes adult themes understandable within a young adult novel. It also leaves readers with a cliffhanger ending.

What happened at the end of The Giver ?

At the end of the novel, Jonas rejects what his community has been asking of him (“the Sameness”) and runs from home. He takes Gabriel, his young brother, and they travel out into the winter landscape. It’s unclear how or if they survive.

What is the moral of The Giver ?

The moral is that memory and collective (as well as individual) human experience is necessary. Additionally, the suppression of identity in favor of collective morality and “sameness” is inherently damaging.

Who dies in The Giver ?

Depending on the reader, some believe that Jonas and Gabriel die at the end of the novel. (Seen through Jonas’ belief they are going to “Elsewhere.”) Others believe that Jonas and Gabriel live and find a life of peace and happiness in a new community outside the walls of their home.

Why was The Giver a banned book?

The Giver has been banned due to its adult themes. The book is intended for young readers, and some believe the discussions of suicide, murder, and euthanasia are too difficult for young adults to handle.

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Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Sometime in the future, an 11-year-old boy named Jonas lives in a seemingly perfect community in which there is little pain and little crime. People are polite. Everyone belongs to a supportive family. But this harmony comes at a price. There is also no choice, and real emotions are nonexistent. Life is dictated by strict rules. A committee of elders matches spouses and assigns them children born from women whose only job is to give birth. The committee names all babies and chooses every person's career. Sex and love are prohibited, being different is shameful, and families are dissolved when the children are grown. Everyone looks similar in skin color and dress. Everything serves a purely practical purpose—to serve the common good of the community and minimize conflict. The old and the sick are "released," which the community believes means sent to live "Elsewhere," outside the community.

During family time, Jonas shares his uneasiness about the upcoming ceremony, where he will be assigned his job. Jonas's father , a Nurturer who cares for newborns, shares his concern over a baby to be named Gabriel who is not growing fast enough. When Jonas's father brings the baby home, Jonas notices that Gabriel has pale eyes like him, an unusual trait.

The next day Jonas does required volunteer hours with his friends Asher and Fiona at the House of the Old. A woman named Larissa tells him an old man was recently released in a beautiful ceremony. Jonas asks what happens when someone is released, but no one knows. That night, Jonas has a dream about bathing naked with Fiona. When he tells his parents, his mother says they are natural feelings called Stirrings, and that Jonas must take a pill to stifle them.

A few weeks later, at the annual ceremony, Jonas's friends are assigned jobs that seem to fit them perfectly. But the Chief Elder skips Jonas's name. After everyone else has been assigned, the Elder announces that Jonas has been selected for the great honor of being the next Receiver. She says Jonas has the Capacity to See Beyond, which explains the strange changes happening to his vision.

The next day Jonas meets the current Receiver, who is now an old man. He tells Jonas his job is to transmit the memories he holds, which are all the memories in the world, to Jonas. He tells Jonas to call him The Giver . He then lays his hands on Jonas's back and gives him the memory of sledding in the snow. Jonas realizes there are hundreds of wonderful memories no one in the community has ever experienced.

Over the next year, from The Giver's memories, Jonas learns about color, nature, beauty, pleasure, love, and family. (For Jonas, the Capacity to See Beyond means that he can see in color, while everyone else sees in black and white). Jonas is also given painful memories of loss, loneliness, poverty, injury, war, and death. The Giver explains that the community is founded on the principle of Sameness, which requires the stability of a world without deep emotion or memory. But he adds that the memories give the Receiver the true wisdom needed to guide the committee on their decisions.

Meanwhile, in his efforts to help Gabriel avoid being released, Jonas also secretly learns that he has the power to transmit memories to Gabriel. While asking questions about release, Jonas learns from The Giver that ten years earlier, his previous trainee (later revealed to be his daughter) couldn't bear the pain of being The Receiver and asked for release. All her memories were traumatically released to the community. Later, at Jonas's request, The Giver shows Jonas a release ceremony Jonas's father is performing on an identical twin baby. Jonas realizes with horror that to be "released" means to be killed. He convinces The Giver to create a plan in which Jonas will escape from the community and release all his memories to the community members, to stop them from living such numb and ignorant lives. The Giver will stay behind to help the people cope with their new memories.

When Jonas learns that Gabriel is to be released the next day, he rushes forward with the plan: he takes Gabriel, crosses the river , and flees the community by bicycle. On the road he encounters beautiful things from his memories like rain and birds, but he also encounters hunger and cold. As he is growing weak, and despairs about being able to protect Gabriel, he sees a snow-covered hill from his first memory from The Giver. At the top of the hill, they find a sled and sled down, where they hear music at the bottom of the hill and see colored lights in the windows of houses in the distance.

• Literature Notes
• Major Themes in The Giver
• Book Summary
• About The Giver
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Chapters 1-2
• Chapters 3-5
• Chapters 6-8
• Chapters 9-10
• Chapters 11-12
• Chapters 13-15
• Chapters 16-17
• Chapters 18-20
• Chapters 21-23
• Lois Lowry Biography
• Critical Essays
• Style and Language in The Giver
• What Are Utopias and Dystopias?
• A Note about Infanticide and Euthanasia
• Full Glossary for The Giver
• Essay Questions
• Cite this Literature Note

Critical Essays Major Themes in The Giver

Many themes in The Giver demonstrate Lowry's concerns about society and humanity. For example, she concentrates on the tradeoffs involved when Jonas' community chooses Sameness rather than valuing individual expression. Certain themes in the book are familiar because they can be found in other novels by Lowry.

Throughout The Giver , Lowry attempts to awaken each and every reader to the dangers that exist when people opt for conformity over individuality and for unexamined security over freedom. At one time in the past, the people who inhabited Jonas' community intended to create a perfect society. They thought that by protecting the citizens from making wrong choices (by having no choices), the community would be safe. But the utopian ideals went awry, and people became controlled and manipulated through social conditioning and language. Now, even the expression "love" is an empty ideal. For example, when Jonas asks his parents if they love him, his mother scolds him for using imprecise language. She says that "love" is "a very generalized word, so meaningless that it's become almost obsolete." To Jonas, however, love is a very real feeling.

Lowry stresses the point that people must not be blindly obedient to the rules of society. They must be aware of and must question everything about their lives. In Jonas' community, the people passively accept all rules and customs. They never question the fact that they are killing certain babies simply because such babies are different, or that they are killing old people whom they determine are no longer productive to the community. The community members unquestioningly follow rules; over time, because killing has become a routine practice, horrible and senseless actions do not morally, emotionally, or ethically upset them. As The Giver says of Jonas' father's killing the lighter-weight twin male, "It's what he was told to do, and he knows nothing else."

Another important theme in The Giver is the value of the individual. Lowry points out that when people are unable to experience pain, their individuality is devalued. Memories are so vital because they oftentimes include pain, and pain is an individual reaction: What is painful to one person might not be painful to another person. Also, people learn from memories and gain wisdom from remembering past experiences.

Life in Jonas' community is very routine, predictable, and unchanging. So are most of the people who live in the community. These characters are uncomplicated and complacent. They are static, simple, one-dimensional characters. Because the majority of them do not change throughout the novel, we see only one part of their personalities — their surface appearances and actions. Nothing happens within static characters; things happen to them.

Most of the citizens in the community passively follow the rules of the community. They always do what they are told. Nothing has ever happened to them except when an earlier Receiver-in-training, Rosemary, asked for release because she no longer could tolerate living in the community. After her death, the people were in total chaos because they didn't know what to do with the memories that Rosemary had experienced. They were not accustomed to thinking for themselves. Experiencing Rosemary's memories was something that happened to the people. Afterward, they resumed their lives as before, so it is evident that nothing permanently changed within them.

Jonas, on the other hand, is a dynamic character. He changes during the course of the novel due to his experiences and actions. We know how Jonas changes because Lowry narrates The Giver in the third person, limited omniscient viewpoint in order to reveal Jonas' thoughts and feelings. When the novel begins, Jonas is as unconcerned as anyone else about how he is living. He has grown up with loudspeakers, rules, precise language, and a family that is not connected biologically, and he has accepted this way of life because he doesn't know any other type of existence. But as he receives The Giver's memories and wisdom, he learns the truth about his community, that it is a hypocrisy and that the people have voluntarily given up their individuality and freedom to live as robots. Jonas' character changes and becomes more complex. He experiences an inner conflict because he misses his old life, his childhood, and his innocence, but he can't return to his former way of life because he has learned too much about joy, color, and love. Lowry writes of Jonas toward the beginning of Chapter 17, "But he knew he couldn't go back to that world of no feelings that he had lived in so long."

Jonas also experiences an external conflict between himself and the community. He is frustrated and angry because he wants his fellow citizens to change and thereby give up Sameness. He knows that the community and each person's life will benefit if only they would — or could — reclaim their individuality. But the people can't change. Generations ago, they chose Sameness over freedom and individuality. Now, they know no other way of life.

Other themes in The Giver , such as family and home, friendships, acts of heroism, as well as the value of remembering the past, are familiar because they are themes in Lowry's previous novels also. Like Rabble in Rabble Starkey , Jonas has to leave the family that was created for him. Through the experience of leaving, both Jonas and Rabble learn to appreciate what it means to have a family and a home. And like Annemarie in Lowry's award-winning Number the Stars , Jonas lives in a repressed society in which he has no freedom. Both Jonas and Annemarie risk their lives in order to save people they love. Because the conclusion of The Giver is so ambiguous, we don't know how Jonas' experiences ultimately affect him or his community. We do know that he matures and that he feels excited and joyful as he and Gabe ride down the hill on the sled.

Lowry challenges her readers to reexamine their values and to be aware of the interdependence of all human beings with each other, their environment, and the world in which they live. When people are forced to live under an oppressive regime that controls every person's actions, meaningful relationships between people are threatened because they involve individual feelings and thoughts. Only by questioning the conditions under which we live, as Jonas does in The Giver , can we maintain and secure our freedom of expression.

Previous Lois Lowry Biography

Next Style and Language in The Giver

Church Life Journal

A Journal of the McGrath Institute for Church Life

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The Legacy of Benedict XVI

by Cyril O'Regan April 18, 2024

W hen it comes to Benedict XVI we find ourselves in the strange and awkward position that we neither know how to end nor how to start dealing with his legacy. We don’t know how to end insofar as we continue to receive his person and work. Like Vatican II, of whose reception he spoke so often, we live in the midst of discernment and argument concerning who and what he has bequeathed to us. Yet, we are also not quite sure how or where to begin dealing with a life that was constituted at once by unshakeable Christian conviction and deep investigation into truth, characterized by prayer, focused on the Eucharist that equally founded the Church and the Christian, moved by contemplation of the Word (made man) that is the purpose and meaning of all the words of Scripture as well as the stated purpose of his own life, and supported by the still small voice of the Holy Spirit that grounded his faith, his hope, and love, which gave him the courage to speak out from the Church to the world that needs redemption and to a sinful Church that requires unceasing vigilance.

With his work where to start? Where to determine the indelible pattern, given the manifold contributions he made to Catholicism in and through his deep historical studies (e.g. Augustine and Bonaventure); major theological inquiries in the areas of liturgy, eschatology, Church, ecumenism, and the theology of religions; his catechetical works (especially Introduction to Christianity ) in which he clarifies the faith that has been handed on to us both in terms of the beliefs that make up its content and the confession that binds us to these beliefs as ineluctable and inscribes them in our lives and in our deaths, in our intellects and in our flesh; and—working backward—his interventions as Pope, Cardinal, and Bishop in the public space to speak to the challenges faced by Christianity and the Catholic Church in a secular world that has essentially bled off transcendence, assumed that reason and faith are binaries, questioned all authority, laughed off Christianity’s claims to exclusive truth, denied all hierarchy, spoken satirically or juridically (or both) of Church malfeasance, lodged complaints not only about the Church’s collusion with power and power structures, but determined that the sponsoring of violence is intrinsic to its essence (e.g. the argument of the Egyptologist, Jan Assmann); and when not culpable, then useless: entirely incapable of adding anything to the human search for justice and human rights or indemnifying or even contributing meaningfully to the questioning that marks natural science and the historical and human sciences.

Obviously, one cannot speak definitively to a legacy that is as multivalent as it is excessive. Furthermore, it is likely that a real beginning is beyond us. Yet maybe we can begin to begin. With that more modest aim in mind—and suggesting more as a heuristic than a constitutive interpretive framework—perhaps we can simplify the task by looking at Benedict XVI in the mode of a Christian public intellectual who addresses himself to the secular age and who at once engages its critical stances towards Christianity determined to be authoritarian, fundamentally irrational, fanatical, and prone to violence and useless when it comes to contributing to unfettered inquiry, ethics, and modern culture. We could, and perhaps should, pursue this line of investigation in a straightforward way and critically assess what is living and dead in these episodic but recurring interventions on a range of matters in which Benedict either resists particular negative constructions of Christianity or criticizes fundamental aspects of the secular world either because of a stance it takes on fundamental issues that bear upon the understanding of society, culture, and value or its refusal to entertain Christian views that have a more particularist foundation. I propose to do something slightly different, specifically, not to talk at length to recognizable interventions by Benedict, but rather to the overall horizon and ethos of these interventions that identify him as a singularity as much—if not more—than these public interventions themselves.

I would like to suggest that we can begin to begin receiving Benedict XVI in his mode of critic of secular modernity, as well as defender of the faith and the Church under four aspects or auspices, those of voice , vision , witness , and gratitude . By voice I mean the ways in which across his various roles as theological expert, Bishop, Cardinal, and Pope anything that is idiosyncratic in terms of his person and particular and insistently partisan in terms of position is left behind in light of the commitment to the objectivity of truth that can speak for itself. By vision I mean both the telescoping of who God is as read from the immense love affair of God with his creation as this is focused in the drama of salvation and the figure of Christ. By witness I mean the engaged stance taken by Benedict in general and, more specifically, the stance taken on the basis of the fundamental conviction that if it is true that Christian life without beliefs is blind, it is equally true that Christian belief without commitment, risk, courage, and perseverance is empty. By gratitude I mean not only Benedict’s astonished sense of the gift of the Christian tradition and the mystery of Christ who is both its center and horizon, but his recommendation to the secular world that it pay heed to this Christian tradition as an inheritance that accounts for what is best and most substantive in secular thinking on justice, culture, and human dignity. I will speak to these four aspects in turn, and conclude by making some general remarks about their interpenetration.

His voice: not, as it has been so baselessly claimed, the bark of God’s bulldog; not the shout of the screamer with a bullhorn; not the voice of the carnival snake-oil man; but a calm, “kind” voice steadfastly speaking the truth, witnessed to by a two millennia-old tradition of reflection (conversation and argument) that renders the reality (Greek, ousia ) or authority (Greek, exousia ) of the Christ, who unforgettably told the whole truth in life, action, and in words, as he exposed himself to the scorn and violence of those who refused to listen and those who were provoked by his innocence and blamelessness. The voice of Benedict XVI is unmistakable in that it is emptied of its individual substance, desire, and insistence. That this voice or its modulation has to do with Benedict’s understanding of the office of Peter is undeniable: to be pope is to enter a role that takes on the Christological role of absolute service and being for others.

Yet, it has also got to do with his understanding of what it is to be Cardinal, to hold the office of Prefect in the CDF, to be Bishop with the responsibility of teacher, and to be Priest with the responsibility of sharing the Eucharist mystery. Ultimately, and constitutively, it has to do with Benedict’s understanding of what it means to be a Christian as a disciple of Christ, called to be a light to the world. To be a light is to be tasked not only to speak boldly ( parrhesia , 2 Cor 3:12) of the hope that has been given to the Christian, but also when necessary to critique with the same calm confidence as the ruling idols of the moment that press on Christianity not only by relativizing or denying its truths, but by questioning its rights to proclaim them. This prohibition arises from the tyranny of relativism that marks the secular world, the tyranny that would bar such claims on grounds of special pleading, groupthink, exclusion, and thus implicit violence simply awaiting a spark to make it explicit.

A fundamental element in speaking the truth is to expose the systemic inhospitality of the modern secular state towards Christianity that can at inopportune moments verge into open hostility. This is not to say that the secular world is always wrong in its criticisms of the behavior of the Church that has at times been both reprehensible and scandalous (e.g. the sex abuse crisis) and that the secular world has not been justified in pointing to the way in which the Church—similar to most worldly institutions—is too often guided by the instinct of self-preservation and self-reproduction. For Benedict, as for John Paul II, the world can provide moments for Christian self-inspection and ample opportunities for repentance. Still, overall, for Benedict, the “neutrality” of the modern secular world is as a matter of fundamental principle “armed”: it constructs the Catholic Church as irredeemably authoritarian both in its basic structure and in its public performance towards the world; as substituting an irrational faith for reason, which if objectionable in itself becomes more objectionable as it serves to sponsor violence. Further, it constructs the Church as recommending ways of thinking that straightjacket free inquiry (thereby making it incomprehensible how the university came into being under the tutelage of Catholicism) and engender unfree forms of living contrary to genuine human flourishing.

For Benedict, to respond critically to secular modernity is first to avoid being provoked by it; it is to exercise discernment and discriminate between what is hale and harmful in it; what can be sanctioned by reason understood against the backdrop of its full philosophical amplitude and what in it agrees with the Wisdom (reason as both substantive and holistic) that Christianity attempts both to honor and perpetuate. Demonization of secular modernity is reaction-formation, thus hostage to what it would deny as well as betraying a lack of confidence in the ultimate persuasiveness of truth it would proclaim. Benedict understands that the dominant narrative of secular modernity, to the effect that everything valuable concerning the ratification and protection of human rights depends upon reason’s critique of and separation from Christianity, is entirely self-serving, and deliberately ignores the insights bequeathed to it by the Christian tradition.

The omission perpetrated by secular modernity should be named. Nonetheless, dialogue should not—nor cannot—be broken off, for Christian faith is necessarily an encounter with a world yet to undergo transformation. As such, it needs to be listened to, even if not all of it can be taken on board—thus, Benedict’s capacity to speak to such secular eminences as Habermas and Rawls, as illustrated in an essay from his pontificate such as “Science, Technology, and Faith.” If, as he believes, both are tempted towards a procedural rationality in which the end is consensus, it is remarkable, he suggests, that in the end both qualify their positions: on the one hand, Rawls concedes that consensus has to yield to more substantive truths that may or may not be confirmed by the majority, and Habermas finally realizes that his discourse ethic needs to be leavened by a “sensibility to truth.”

The voice of the pope, the voice of the Christian is made ripe and full by listening: listening to the truth that has been spoken by the tradition, the good that has been lived; listening to the words of Scripture that speak the Word who is truth and life, but also consummately the way. Perhaps Benedict provides a synecdoche of listening when he recalls the pericope in 1 Kings: 3:5. There Yahweh asks Solomon who is about to ascend to the throne what he wants as a gift. Eschewing worldly goods and gratifications Solomon requests a “listening heart.” It is this gift that will enable him for “God speech” (Benedict’s notion of conscience) in and through the bustle of contingency and obligation and despite the noise of the world, and in doing so to unveil and show the way. It would be tempting to think in Benedict’s words and writing that the reproof of bluster and violence in speech as fundamentally unchristian represents the unilateral sanction of “civility.”

While given his philosophical temper, his commitment to reason, and the historical memory of fascism in his own country, Benedict has an elective affinity to tempered speech, he is not proposing civility as the answer or the antidote. He is reluctant to do so because he is aware that the “ask” of civility in the secular world often involves more than the request that certain protocols be obeyed in public speech, but effectively proscribes certain views as rationally baseless, as tribal, as atavistic. The calm that attends the speaking of truth for whose profession, but not whose outcome you are responsible, the recognition of the humanity of those whom you address who are vehement—even ferocious—in their disagreement with you, guarantees that something far more substantive than public “good form” is in play. The manner of speech is not an envelope for the content. As in the case of Socrates and the classical philosophical tradition (think: Aquinas), it is its indelible form. And with respect to voice—from which the I and its insistence has been removed—as with respect to any number of other facets of the dialogue between faith and reason in the West, the voice of Socrates is an analogy—perhaps a pale one—of the voice of the true shepherd brimful of love and forgiveness and hope for those who refuse the truth and ridicule those who speak it. The voice of Benedict is immediately recognizable because of its emptying, its exinanition, its absolute humility.

Even more than Introduction to Christianity , Benedict’s first encyclical Deus Caritas Est represents both node and summary of what he understands to be the essence of Christianity . This essence is in the first instance a vision rather than a theory inscribed in a set of doctrines or a set of religious practices and precepts. The vision is focused on who God is as God has expressed Godself in creation, but above all in the incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. This vision is not only prime with respect to all other facets of Christianity. This vision is in a quite literal sense an apocalypse ( apocalypsis ) that provides meaning and direction to our lives by focusing on God as the giver of all gifts, and, especially of himself. It is within the brackets of God’s promises and coming through on those promises across a series of incalculable gifts that history happens. Of course, the title of Benedict’s most famous encyclical is taken from 1 John 4:8.

Given the contemporary production of  Jesus of Nazareth (3 vols.), it does not seem an exaggeration to claim that this encyclical represents a crystallizing point to Benedict’s conviction that the Fourth Gospel represents the inflection (because reflection) point of the Gospels and the answer to the haunting question of Mark 8, “Who do you say that I am?” A primary purpose of the Church is to remind believers of this vision that has animated the Catholic tradition and that needs to be inculcated in a contemporary Catholic Church that even when its members are open to belief and precept they remain without conviction and direction. Without this vision as a source of meaning and truth, and perhaps above all of galvanizing energy, it is difficult to navigate the challenges of faith in a world jam-packed with questions and even more jam-packed with non-Christian answers. The first task of evangelization is to repair or inculcate vision, which if it is the fruit of Scripture and tradition, also makes sense of both.

Benedict’s vision is Johannine in a second, and more dramatic, sense in that it takes full account of the forces that oppose this vision and the thinking and the living that flow from it. The Gospel of John presents the fundamental diagnosis: it names the opposing force as “world” and implies thereby all that is in thrall to comfort, prestige, ethnic superiority, habit, anger, resentment, and revenge, as well as the thousand peccadillos that make the world go round and round and numb the prospects for transformation. Important also for Benedict is the Book of Revelation—a book that Benedict refuses to disown, despite its numerous misappropriations and misuses—and especially its concentrated focus on the forces of the world. Of course, this book is the revelation of the eternal meaning of Golgotha. The Lamb who is slain before the foundation of the world (Rev 13:8) is Christ in the hidden glory of the Cross. Precisely as such he is rejected and resisted. Whereas the modes of resistance picked out in John’s Gospel are passive and diffuse—darkness automatically rejects the light—the modes of resistance picked out in the book of Revelation are active and suppose the event of Christ as embodying a fundamental challenge to the world that is polarizing and escalates resistance. If the book of Revelation is the book of the martyrs or the book of the “saints,” it is also the book of the lie and the simulacrum. For Benedict, the Book of Revelation is a book that reads history, discerns its patterns, judges its meaning, and adjudicates its value.

To read history faithfully, however, is to see it as an agon in which the forces that resist God and the good are catalyzed in and by their opposition to the truth. If the result is persecution and oppression then and now, the result is also deceit, substituting a more palatable and appealing Christ for the one that hung on the cross to expiate our sins. The counterfeit or simulacrum on offer is that of Christ who will make us feel exalted and justified just as we are and who will waive our need to forgive as we are forgiven. In short, this Christ is one who shares enough attributes with the Christ confessed by Christians over millennia for us to feel that we are in contact with the real thing, though by the same token possessed of enough dissimilar features to convince ourselves that he has been brought up to date. In the Book of Revelation, this figure is the figure of the Anti-Christ. For Benedict, as for Newman in the nineteenth century, this figure can be an actual person, a violent political regime, and a presiding ethos that sucks the life from historical Christianity. The recently canonized saint and the recently deceased pope emeritus both sense that the modern secular ethos fits the bill.

History is a drama, both the drama of our suffering (Christians suffer over the world) and the drama of our choosing between the real Christ and a spurious Christ who is nothing more than an idol. If the drama of choosing is implicit for Benedict in the Book of Revelation, it is explicit in the great temptation scenes in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 in which Christ—and thereby the Church he founded—is asked quite literally to make the devil’s bargain: the price of universal rule is allegiance to a power in love with power. For Benedict, the three temptation scenes in Luke and Matthew are requests for acts of showmanship contributing to success that distort both human beings and God. With regard to the first temptation, to turn stones into bread is not to respond to the poor as Christ responds to them as bearers of inalienable human dignity, but to have decided in contempt that for them their only value is bodily satisfaction. With regard to the second, to consent to expanding the kingdom at the cost of yielding to the prerogatives of naked power is to betray the absoluteness of God and the gift of our indelible relationship with him. If the challenge in the second temptation is power as spectacle (Third Reich and Communism; the great scene in Lord of the Rings of Saruman addressing the orcs), the third temptation has to do with miracle as the suspension of the laws of nature or the apparent suspension of the laws of nature. “Apparent” is the key. As with spectacle, the power of miracle is that it holds hostage human imagination—thus, the rebuttal of this function of miracle and thus its refiguration throughout Luke and Matthew not as contraventions of the laws of nature, but rather signs of God’s compassion and mercy for creatures whom he has loved into existence.

For Benedict, the appropriate response to the apocalyptic figuration of modernity as crisis—indeed as a bundle of crises, for example, epistemic (truth issue), anthropological (whether or not selves have intrinsic dignity and are essentially relational), ethical (whether ethics is contextual or objective), politics (whether a purely immanentist politics is valid), and metaphysical (whether there is a ground or meaning or not)—is witness. Though they are textually and perhaps even intrinsically related, there are essentially two forms of witnessing in the biblical and Christian tradition, that is, suffering for one’s faith even unto death (martyr) and witness in terms of a perception and embrace of a mission to speak God’s judgment on society and on the Church in a condition of crisis (prophet). Obviously, even if there has been a significant measure of suffering, isolation, and ridicule in Benedict’s life, the mode of witness enacted in his life and writings is more prophetic than martyriological in the strict sense.

As with the biblical prophets, the judgment is directed both outward towards society and inward towards the Church in that there is a porous boundary between outward and inward insofar as that which enjoys political, social, and cultural prestige oftentimes is taken up uncritically by religious believers to the detriment of their faith and its hallowed traditions. Benedict’s theology as a whole is surcharged by the prophetic response “here I am.” He will stand for the prospects of truth and the validity of reason, for the intrinsic dignity of human beings, for the objectivity of ethics, and for God precisely as the ground of meaning and truth. He will make a stand equally against modernity’s elevation of instrumental and critical reason and its diminishing of philosophical reason, against the view that human beings are conditionally valuable depending upon whether they exist in or out of the womb, whether they are physically or cognitively impaired, whether they demand huge amounts of medical resources; against contextualist determinism; against relativistic and casuistical species of ethics; against an immanentist politics whether authoritarian or democratic; and against what he understands to be the pervasive and unacknowledged nihilism of modernity in which the divine is no longer the rivet.

All of these are important, but perhaps it is better to follow Goethe’s injunction of “dare to be finite” in the limited time (or space) that I have. So here I will speak to simply one of these crises with respect to which Benedict takes a stand, that is, the epistemological crisis that manifests itself as the “pathology of reason.” No less in talks he gave as Pope, for example the Regensburg Address and “Science, Technology, and Faith,” throughout his entire career Benedict argued against the reduction of reason in the modern world to instrumental reason (see: his essay on Fides et Ratio ). Instrumental reason is reason that has cut its cloth to the measure of problem-solving, having sidelined or dismissed with prejudice almost all the questions that animated classical philosophy, whether the nature of man, cosmos, God, value, happiness, etc. For him, reason realizes itself fully as a wisdom discourse, that is, a discourse comprehensive in its aim, deeper in what it discloses about reality than instrumental reason that shines a sharp light on a narrow slice of reality, and that does not admit of verification or falsification. For almost all of its history, the wisdom discourse of the West has been philosophy, and it is precisely because of its wisdom orientation and inflection that Christianity has been able in good conscience to fruitfully negotiate with it over the centuries.

Of course, Benedict is fully aware that what is at dispute in modernity is less the fact of this encounter than its validity. The validity of this encounter has in the modern world come to be questioned both from the side of philosophy (Benedict’s essay on Fides et Ratio ) and from the side of Christianity (Regensburg Address). It has been attacked from the side of philosophy on the grounds (a) that philosophy is an autonomous discipline that has only in modernity succeeded in throwing off its shackles from the Church that has consistently proven itself to be uninterested in free inquiry; and (b) that philosophy has no validity as a comprehensive discourse: it is either a problem-solving discourse of a particular type (analytical) or it represents a particular stance on the world (postmodern). It has been attacked from the side of Christianity on the grounds that the historical link between Christianity and philosophy has been ruinous to the integrity of Christianity that undergoes the contamination of “Hellenization” in and through the encounter. Hellenization denotes that Christian discourse, which is biblical discourse, is essentially hijacked by being made the servant of an alien discourse that is more propositional and impersonal.

With regard to the first objection (from the side of philosophy), Benedict is perfectly aware that a fact of history, that is the historically close ties between philosophy and Christianity, does not logically imply its justification. As is obvious from his essay “Science, Technology, and Faith,” Benedict sees philosophy as an independent discipline. Nonetheless, he wants to argue that there was something marvelously right—maybe even providential—about the close historical relations between philosophy and Christianity and philosophy and theology more specifically, given that each presents a comprehensive grasp of reality and its foundation. He is convinced that something like the law of double attraction applies. Even if philosophy and Christianity (also theology) are different in kind, nonetheless, philosophy can be seen to find in Christianity a kind of confirmation of its schematizations. Correlatively, in philosophy Christianity finds a wisdom discourse that would enable it at once to understand more clearly the revelation that it has been given and translate it ( apo-logia ) more effectively in a world that is plural in terms of culture, language, history, assumption, and levels of openness to listen to and appreciate what at first blush might be perceived to be alien to it. The site of the crossing, the chiasmus between philosophy and Christianity, is Christ who as Logos is word, but also intelligibility and truth.

With regard to the second objection (from the side of Christianity), which would separate Christian text and Christian faith from philosophy and keep them free from contamination, Benedict replies that the attempt to keep the biblical text free from the infection of philosophy itself exposes the biblical text to either a kind of hapless fundamentalism that, on the one hand, avoids rather than deals with the challenges of modernity (that is, if it is not a product of it) and, on the other, exposes the biblical text to the historical sciences in which its meaning is reduced either to historical facts or the historical-cultural situation of its production or transmission. With regard to Christian faith and its proposed purity, in the Regensburg Address, as well as any number of other places, Benedict argues that there is a pathology of faith correlative to the pathology of reason. Newman also argues that in addition to fideism’s indissoluble contract with fanaticism, its embrace of a God of sheer will (thus unaccountability) rather than Logos is ground zero for religious violence and its justification.

To embrace tradition—the handing on ( traditio ) of the Church to the individual and the community of what it has not earned—is to suggest that the fundamental disposition of reception is gratitude. For Benedict as Pope, Cardinal, Bishop, Priest, and Christian this extends to the entire Catholica —beliefs, precepts, practices, and forms of the Church’s life of a historical reality, as well as its wide array of theological voices, its saints and its prophets, as well, of course, as scripture and its symphony of voices unified by the Word and the glosses in writing, in prayer and song, and in life that it spurred with its fullness and provoked to sacrifice. Then there is the liturgy, which wears gratitude and memory in each of its gestures and words, and, in the Eucharist, memorializes the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ in whom God—who ever remembers us and counts us for more than we are worth—reconciles the world to himself.

It hardly needs saying that the gratitude enjoined on the Church and individual Christian is determinate in the sense that it is shaped by its object. Yet, when we consider the numerous interventions of Benedict into the public arena as pope, Benedict has noted a monumental shift, that is, theoretically and practically the new hegemony is that of self-rule ( auto-nomos ) that refuses to yield to any other, even the “totally Other.” In this brave new world of autochthony, humility is vice rather than virtue, what enslaves rather than what sets you free. For Benedict, the freedom that would be gained by autonomy is forever a chimera: we cannot completely fashion ourselves. Moreover, we have proven time and again that we cannot bear the load of our own self-creation. Just as importantly, for Benedict, this form of freedom is too low rather than too high, riddled by anxiety that cannot be masked by stipulation, beset by accident and self-loathing. Recognition of our limits and the gracious founder of these limits is what sets us free to love, cherish, mourn, and hope, thereby giving us a form of freedom that is rich and determinate. Above all, it sets us free not merely from but for . Freedom for is concretized in service to others and to the world.

These, of course, are Augustinian sentiments and judgments. Recognizing such would not embarrass Benedict who loves Augustine and regards him and his work as a gift to be received—though, of course, Augustine’s work is a cornucopia of gifts: the gift of understanding that life is confession, the gift of understanding our createdness and creaturehood, the gift of exegesis, the gift of understanding that prayer is a call to God who has already called us, the gift of both understanding the Trinity and being taken up by it, the gift of understanding the Church’s relation to an ambiguous social world, and the gift of comprehending at once the peccable as well as impeccable nature of the Church as corpus permixtum.

There are other theologians who are lauded and serve as theological models both in terms of substance and style, for example, Origen, Bonaventure, Guardini, de Lubac, and Balthasar. The general point here that Benedict strikes as Pope and as Christian is the virtue of humility that runs at the tangent to the modern world. Benedict sees this as clearly as T. S. Eliot. He privileges these other, these previous voices. What T. S. Eliot writes in “Burnt Norton”—the second of the Four Quartets —can be slotted in as if it were Benedict’s own avowal or confession:

And what there is to conquer By strength and submission has already been discovered Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope To emulate—but there is no competition— There is only the fight to recover what has been lost And found again and again.

For Benedict, it is gratitude that determines for a Christian the excess of joy over lamentation, the priority of celebration over the declamation of what we have lost in terms of place, prestige, and audience for what is true, good, beautiful, and wondrous. In gratitude is the inbuilt consolation of the memory of the Word who makes true the off-kilter world and makes bearable its ridicule and comic its machinations and deceptions.

The legacy of Benedict is the gift of his life and work with respect to which we are struggling to appropriate adequately, that is, to remember in a way that does justice to its eloquent and charitable firmness, the insights provided regarding the nature of faith, and especially of its understanding of the Church and its encounter with the modern world. With respect to the last of these, his words are as bracing as they are illuminating, and we continue to discern, discriminate, and sift. Yet, what he has bequeathed to us are insights and telegraphic hints rather than fully complete thoughts, diagnoses, and suggested intellectual and moral therapies. Thus, he has given us work to do, given our thinking a future while providing signposts. We would-be Christian thinkers are invited to pull hard on our oars. Thereby we come to honor Benedict our benefactor in the only way that he would approve, that is, by producing a supplement to the treasure of the Christian tradition, just as he was a supplement.

Acknowledging all of this, here I wanted to do something different, that is, present a horizon for his interventions in the public square as well as his retrieval of the Christian tradition that could serve as prologue or epilogue to the inventory of his manifest contributions and the tasks he set. My aim has been provide a set of categories that would do justice to him and his work as a singularity, as itself unforgettable—and not simply memorable—as the thinkers that prompt him to think and to pray. These categories were four: voice, vision, witness, and gratitude.

Looked at in pairs and then the pairs together, these categories suggest an unmistakable Gestalt . Voice and gratitude form a pair insofar as first, the “emptied” voice of Benedict presents an opening for the gracious receiving of an excessively rich tradition that accesses the excessively rich reality of a God who graciously loved us into being and who is with us to the end. Second, gratitude finds a privileged place not only in Benedict’s explicit affirmation of the entire Catholic tradition, but in his voice which is his own precisely as not his own, a voice emptied of its insistence such that we can hear the echoes of numerous other voices, speaking, praying, worshiping, suffering, healing, loving, and hoping. By the same token vision and witness are two sides of the same coin: the Christian vision of God as love opens up a dramatic narrative space in which one stands or yields, is bold or cowers, is faithful or unfaithful, is loving or unloving, is hopeful or has surrendered to despair and meaninglessness. Correlatively, witness supposes not only the profession of a truth that one will live for or die for, but echoes the Christological pattern of suffering, death, and resurrection inscribed in the world that has the power to refuse it.

Finally, the two pairs also relate positively and intersect. Voice and gratitude are what they are because they are caught in the gravitational pull of vision and witness. The voice would not be the voice full of listening unless it were measured by the self-emptying of the cross and the firmness of witness to the end. Nor would gratitude be so wide and deep and so plural, thus so “catholic.” And Christian vision and witness require a voice that has become a proper receptacle because it has drowned out its conceit, cut off the fat of rhetoric, and found a gratitude ample enough for us speak to, praise, and celebrate the bounty of the one so careless as to create us, make us so essential to his life, and pledge everything on the risky hope that we respond by pledging all that we are back.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This essay is adapted from the welcome address of the  de Nicola Center 's conference: “ Benedict XVI’s Legacy: Unfinished Debates on Faith, Culture, and Politics ” at the University of Notre Dame, April 7—9, 2024.

Featured Image: Taken by © Mazur/www.thepapalvisit.org.uk, distributed by Catholic Church England and Wales  The Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI in 2010; Source: Flickr,  CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Cyril O'Regan

Cyril O'Regan is the Catherine F. Huisking Chair in Theology at the University of Notre Dame. His latest book is the first installment of a multi-volume treatment of Hans Urs von Balthasar's response to philosophical modernity.  The Anatomy of Misremembering, Volume 1: Hegel .

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