The range of senses should also include man's "moral sense", a sense closely connected with all that Evangelium vitae designates as "sense of God" and "sense of man" (n. 21). English moralists like Shaftesbury in his work Characteristics of Men (London, 1711), first used this expression of man's moral sense. In the beginning it was greeted with reservation because it had a certain positivist tone and equated morality with sentiment. Then its origin was forgotten and its usage in various languages was adopted, with the meaning of man's orientation as a cultural being, the sense of good and evil, in a certain relationship with conscience and practical reason. This expression was already used in the Encyclical Veritatis splendor: "Indeed, at the heart of the issue of culture, we find the moral sense which is in turn rooted and fulfilled in the religious sense" (n. 98). It is symptomatic that these last two Encyclicals, aimed at recovering the fundamental values of freedom based on truth and of life based on the dignity of the person, are also a pressing invitation to recover man's moral sense. The loss of the moral sense has serious consequences because it leads to "the culture of death" which seems to be increasing at the end of this century, while man's vocation is the "culture of life" (nn. 12, 78), the building of the "civilization of truth and love" (105). The Pope's thought invites us to reflect on the place of the moral sense in the culture of our time, on its role, on ways to recover it in view of the full promotion of man's humanity and the edification of the Christian.

1. The two facets of today's culture

Today's concept of culture goes beyond the Greek "paideia" or the Latin "humanitas", and surpasses that of the Encyclopedists. The culture of our time implies a horizon of totality in which human nature is circumscribed. We are convinced that man, as well as his nature, can only develop his gifts in the all embracing area of culture, arte et ratione vivit, as Thomas Aquinas put it, opportunely recalled by John Paul II in his famous speech to UNESCO in Paris in 1980, the Magna Carta of culture. In fact man is a cultural being, not only the subject of culture but also its object. He is its producer and also becomes its product, which from time to time conforms to the various models proposed. Culture is the atmosphere in which man breathes, and in which he finds the possibility for the full development of his human existence. The Constitution Gaudium et spes of the Second Vatican Council made a reference to culture and described it with today's sense of totality in these words: "The word culture in the general sense refers to all those things which go to the refining and developing of man's diverse mental and physical endowments" (n. 53). 

Each individual finds himself in two worlds at the same time, the natural, always inadequate for his state, and the cultural, in constant historical evolution. Man and world mutually call on one another. While the ancients and the medievals thought of man as a "lesser world", a microcosm, in which all the treasures dispersed in the macrocosm were concentrated, Heidegger coined the expression "being-in-the-world" to designate man. 

From the world of nature we are led to the world of culture. Today it is this cultural world, made by man and made to fit him, which is the problem. On the one hand, the 20th century boasts the greatest progress in history, the most brilliant discoveries and victories. This is true in the field of science and technology. Man's knowledge is the source of his domination of the world. Modern man's earthly city is a concentration of all the products of culture. Because of this culture, the world has become a "global village". Electronics has put everything in man's hands. Man's dreams, the "awakening" of our times, are the dreams of the homo faber, cultural dreams which the philosopher Bloch lists exactly. This can be said to be one of the aspects of today's culture, positive and encouraging.

However, it is not the only one, since another very different facet, its opposite, is hidden from no one. In fact, at the end of the century, a large part of humanity suffers hardship, rejects this cultural situation. Not only does the 20th century leave in its wake a long chain of crimes, wars and genocides which are the most serious in history, but on the threshold of the 21st century, the world is immersed in confusion and chaos. The evils of the present, further products of the new culture, are superimposed upon the customary evils of the past which have not yet disappeared. 

The world can be said to have improved in some ways, in some countries, but man has not become more human. In a better world man is less human, capable of producing serious threats against life, of reducing persons to the state of things, incapable of establishing justice and peace which he is always seeking. This situation is disconcerting, since man wants first and foremost to live as a man. Man is able to subdue the world, but he is unable to live in accordance with what his humanity demands. Man of the modern and post-modern age was able to develop science and technology, but has neglected to a large extent the human virtues, the moral sense that underlies culture. In our situation, the voice of the Gospel re-echoes in conscience: What profit would a man show if he were to gain the whole world and destroy himself in the process? (Mt 16:26). Today's culture is ambiguous, and as in Bergson's time, needs a "supplement of soul".

2. The ethical root of the cultural crisis

At the end of the century, it seems that the cries of protest against the negative dimension of the cultural situation are stronger, coming from all parts of the world, and rising higher, even to heaven, as in this document Evangelium vitae by John Paul II. But the cry is ancient and the voices well known. Husserl had already analyzed the crisis of European sciences in 1936. Huizinga recognized the crisis of civilization; Spengler after the first European war, thought of the decline of the West; Marcel condemned the work of men against what is human; Ortega y Gasset, on the ruins of Berlin in the post-war period, meditated on Europe's fate; Mondin compared our situation with the epochal crisis of the decline of the Roman Empire. Pope John Paul II from Compostela, or from the peaks of the Alps, raised his voice to Europe, inviting it to return to the Christian ways of the past. 

The crisis condemned by so many authoritative voices is certain and deep. One has only to glance around to be aware of it. In front of us are the ruins of a culture in agony. Cries are arising from every corner of the earth, protests from all the continents. The Encyclical Evangelium vitae gathers the condemnations of the Second Vatican Council against this culture of death, and completes the picture with man's new threats against humanity (chap. I). Everyone is aware of what is lacking in our cultural context. Man's dissatisfaction is a sign of his capacity to transcend concrete situations. He is above any situation and thus able to say no, as a sign of protest, conquest and transcendence. In a certain parallelism with the condemnations of the crisis, especially in the West, articles abound with proposals of a better culture for man's future on the threshold of the year 2000. The project of the open society is suggested, the quest to be rather than to have, the achievement of integral humanism. These voices also echo in the ears of the cultured, with the distinguished names of the authors: Popper, Fromm, Abbagnano, Maritain, and among the latter, also Jonas who sought a solution to the problem of man after Auschwitz. The philosopher Abbagnano found John Paul lI's project more satisfactory for the man of the future than those of science or Marxism, which were then in vogue. Culture is a highly complex totality. 

But not all the components are at the same level. If culture is the spiritual form society takes, its values are its basis. And this is the crux of the problem of culture's consistency and humanity. The religious value ranks first among these values, and associated with it is the moral value which by its nature embraces all human activity. "When the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned", Evangelium vitae declares (n. 22). "It is at the heart of the moral conscience that the eclipse of the sense of God and of man, with all its various and deadly consequences for life, is taking place" (n. 24). 

Man builds his own house on the rock of moral and religious values or he builds it, according to the Gospel parable, on the sands of power, possession or mere scientific knowledge. This is the difference between these human foundations. Knowledge and action are human activities. And they are also cultural activities. But they are ordered to the perfection of man's products, to the objective. They are the source for building Popper's World Three. But in themselves they are not able to develop the subject's capacity. Man perfects himself as man, thanks to the exercise of freedom in the order of good. Only the will, perfected by virtuous habits, is able to do good. Moral virtues not only do good works but also make the subject good. Man's journey towards the fullness of humanity passes through the virtues. Prudence, justice, the so-called "cardinal" virtues, are the virtues of man who follows right reason. The Christian knows that moral life is a condition of Christian life, that it is "on the path of the moral life that the way of salvation is open to all" (Veritatis splendor, n. 3). This is the cause of contemporary man's discomfort: the loss of humanity in a world which desires to be fit for man. 

3. At the roots of the loss of the moral sense

Culture as a totality transcends any individual subject, it is a collective fact in which the different generations take part. Man's moral sense develops in close relationship with the superior faculties, with intelligence and with the practice of freedom. Culture implies nature; its task is to bring it to the limit of its possibilities in the positive sense. Modern man has found himself a free subject and has made the so-called anthropological turn towards subjective immanence, without the vertical transcendence to which he is destined by his nature. With such a distortion he has made a turn against humanity itself. Modern man, man the fruit of the Enlightenment, rejects nature and seeks freedom alone. In reality he is deceiving himself because nature, flung out the door, comes back in through the window. 

In Psalm 8, when the question is asked about man it says that God inspires praise from the mouths of babes and sucklings, to silence the arrogance of the wise. Jesus praises the Father because he has revealed the things of the kingdom to the lowliest but has hidden them from the powerful (Mt 11:25). Thomas Aquinas, one of the wise men who considered himself the least among the learned, gives us an explanation of this fact. By their nature, all men are endowed with a certain upright and sure instinct that directs them to the good and the true, to God. The simple keep this instinct all their life. Instead, the so-called "wise" sometimes distort it and lose their natural sense of good and of God. Just as it happens in an accident when one of the senses is lost, i.e., sight or hearing, in cultural accidents it happens that the sense of man or of God is lost. Axiology speaks of the deafness and blindness of some to certain values. Modern culture has produced the eclipse and the blurring of the truths about freedom and man. Man knows many things, more than before, but he cannot respond about what is essential to his being as man. He has become ignorant of the essential, blind to the great questions of origin, essence and destiny. The steps along the way of modern and postmodern man and the places where he has been blind and deaf to ethical values can be outlined today. Each subject will have his own particular "accident".

However, contemporary culture, now darkened and in a situation of "eclipse"' as Evangelium vitae describes it (nn.22-24), has gone through these stages: forgetfulness of the ethical dimension, set aside as a reality inaccessible to science, with no bearing on humanity; the distortion of human freedom, and oppression of the individual in mass culture. In fact, the modern age has abandoned the role of ethical formation and the paideia of freedom, so important in man's formation. The distortion of freedom in the area of morality comes from the explanation of the genealogy of morality which it is believed was introduced from outside, imposed by society. The fourth power, as the mass media of our time is called, offers models of human life where good and evil have no boundaries and where the sound principles of reason are ignored. 

In this climate the conscience of a large number of our contemporaries is formed, without the ethical witness of parents or teachers. In these adverse circumstances, the shipwreck of moral values and the loss of the moral sense are normal. The man of our day must struggle against the tide, somewhat alone, if he wishes to preserve his moral sense. The collective blurring and loss of the moral sense have an effect on culture, which confuses good and evil, the value of life and that of death. Thus the paradox of the irrationality of reasonable man is reached: "It is not only that in generalized opinion these attacks tend no longer to be considered as 'crimes'; paradoxically they assume the nature of 'rights"' (Evangelium vitae, n. 11). 

The cultural situation of the eclipse and loss of the moral sense is truly serious, because it touches the depths of man. Man's ethical dimension is essential, mediating between the ontological basis of personal being, and the constitutive dimension of family, social and political being. Indeed, the moral sense has its roots in personal dignity; it develops in interpersonal relations of dialogue and love, justice and co-operation in social life, and is brought to completion when it finds its basis in God, revealed in Jesus Christ. Recovering the moral sense is the condition for a Christian life. The moral sense is converted into a sense of life. The Apostle John has left us a precious text on the senses of the Christian. Every disciple of Jesus must be able to develop these senses through which the life that proceeds from the Word is discovered and communicated. Evangelium vitae cites this: "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life ... we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us" (Jn 1:1-3). Overcoming our situation in which the moral sense in contemporary culture is blurred and lost is possible by meeting Jesus Christ, in whom man's fullness and the way that leads to God are found. The new Encyclical Evangelium vitae is not only an alarm bell as we face this situation, but primarily a valid help in recovering the moral sense so weakened, blurred or lost in the wide areas of culture today.