Paying Attention To The Sky

Reading Selections (Part One) from a chapter of Tracey Rowland’s carefully researched tour or Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual development titled Ratzinger’s Faith . Associate Professor Tracey Rowland, Dean of the Melbourne John Paul II Institute, is described by Cardinal Pell in the foreword to this book as making progress towards “becoming Australia’s leading theologian.” 

What is the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond moralism?
In a series of sermons preached at the Cathedral of Munster to members of the student chaplaincy in 1964 Ratzinger posed the question: ‘What actually is the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond mere moralism?” The term moralism generally refers to the Kantian rationalist tendency to reduce Christianity to the dimensions of an ethical framework, or to equate faith with obeying a law. Lorenzo Albacete has described it as a modem form of Pelagianism, a belief in salvation through good works and obedience which he suggests can only be overcome by a ‘proper theology of grace in which grace is not presented as something added to and external to the natural law itself [as some Neo-Scholastics would have it], but rather as the possibility of a personal encounter with Jesus Christ.

In such a theology of grace ‘it is not life according to the natural law or to ethics that saves and fulfils us: more radically, it involves a relationship of Communion with the Person of Jesus Christ. This is essentially the response which the young Ratzinger gave to his own question in the third of his Munster sermons. Ratzinger proposed that the antidote to moralism is the theology of the First Letter of St. John: God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him. A theology focused on divine love was his solution.

And Forty-Two Years Later…
Forty-two years later, as a newly elected pope, he published the encyclical Deus Caritas Est, the first paragraph of which announces that being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea but the encounter with an event, a person, who gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction. The Dei Verbum understanding of Revelation is reiterated here and added to it is a critique of moralism which builds on themes in von Balthazar’s Love Alone is Credible.

Luigi Giussani Influence
It also resonates with the works of Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) who founded the Italian ecclesial movement Communione e liberazione in 1969 in the wake of the outbreak of enthusiasm for Marxism among Italian students and intellectuals. The movement has since produced many significant Italian politicians, journalists, and scholars, the most notable being Rocco Buttiglione (1948- ), an Italian Christian Democrat politician and professor of political science. In his funeral eulogy for Giussani, Ratzinger praised him for understanding that ‘Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event. This, in a nutshell, is the message of Deus Caritas Est.

von Balthasar’s ‘Perichoresis’
According to Ratzinger, von Balthasar, and others in the Communio school, the practice of the faith in the pre-conciliar era was hampered by moralism. They take the view that the problems which arose in the post-conciliar were not simply the result of a spreading infection of the 1960s secular liberal virus but were more fundamentally the logical outgrowth of a centuries-long process separating the true and the beautiful from the good. Von Balthasar used the Greek word ‘perichoresis’ for a type of circular dance to describe the Trinitarian relationships which ideally should exist among these three properties (truth, beauty, and goodness), described in philosophical parlance as transcendentals. It was one of his key arguments that at least since the time of the Reformation the relationships among the three have been systematically severed.

Differently defective accounts of human dignity, moral behavior, and spiritualities have followed according to which transcendental is left standing when the others drop out. We can end up with immoral aesthetes at one end of the spectrum, and unattractive and iconoclastic puritans at the other, as well as people who get ‘hooked’ on dogma but who are none the less not very charitable to their neighbors, and people who are kind hearted but ignorant of the truth, together with numerous other permutations and combinations depending on which transcendental or combination of transcendentals is lacking. In any event, when this disjuncture occurs the transcendental of unity is lacking. In the absence of a Christian culture in which the relationship of the transcendentals to one another is clearly visible and culturally embodied, the temptation to moralism is strong.

In von Balthazar’s account of the destruction of the perichoresis of the transcendentals particular emphasis is placed on the problems inherent within the Neo-Scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation, typified by the separation between theoretical and affective theology: While “the theoretical theology of the baroque era proceeded from a fixed “teaching of the Church” as object [the Suárezan insistence on doctrinal propositions] and therefore missed the spiritual, existential dimension which runs through everything biblical; the affective theology of the baroque missed the biblical center and proceeded mystically instead of eschatologically.”

According to this reading the problems faced by the Church in the 1960s and subsequent decades were caused as much by tendencies in post-Aquinas scholasticism as they were by the neo-Dionysian sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll pop culture which arose in the 1960s. Catholic culture was unable to withstand the onslaught of the neo-Dionysians because of an insufficient integration of spirituality and dogma. Consistent with this reading is Peter Henrici’s judgment that a specifically modern Catholic theology existed between Trent and Vatican II. It did not suddenly arise at Vatican II.

The Kantian and Jansenist Tendencies
In significant elements of post Tridentine Catholic culture, the practice of Christian life consisted largely of duties that were performed because one was obliged to do so: “moved by a kind of Christian Pharisaism, Christian existence had become viewed as a meritorious achievement that God commands and by virtue of which one is able to please him.” In short, the very Protestant Kant had become ‘a secret father of the Church.’

The Kantian emphasis upon duty and the notion of the moral as that which is done out of a sense of obligation rather than for the satisfaction of any affection, or even in accordance with any tradition, shares a logical affinity with Jansenism, a quasi-Calvinist heresy which infected the Church in France, Ireland, and countries of the New World where Irish missionaries (who had themselves been infected by the influx of Jansenist clergy from France in. the eighteenth century) were deployed. The two movements (Jansenism and Kantianism) arose in different centuries and in different intellectual cultures, and although Kantian ethics is based on an exaltation of the faculty of reason, and it appears to be the dialectical opposite of Jansenism with its intensely pessimistic outlook for the capacities of fallen human nature, the two movements share the property of making obedience to a legislator (even if in Kant’s case the legislator is reason itself) the driving force behind moral action. They also share the dialectical affinity for fostering a humanism without a religion (the project of Kant), and a religion without a humanism (the effect of Jansenius).

In his various essays Ratzinger has shown that he both understands and is disturbed by the spiritual pathologies which Kantian and Jansenist tendencies have generated among the faithful. After the Council, when a majority of avant-garde theologians seemed to believe that there are no moral absolutes, the hitherto sharp focus on right moral conduct tended to blur. The point which Ratzinger and von Balthasar made was that there could not have been such an implosion of Catholic moral practices within such a short frame of time unless there was something deeply flawed about the motivations behind the pre-conciliar practices.

They concluded that people in the pre-conciliar era had a tendency to live prescriptively, not because they believed that the moral injunctions were life-giving, not because they could see truth, goodness, and beauty in the practices themselves, but because of a fear of eternal damnation. Once the fear was eliminated the motivation holding up the practice dissipated. Referring to the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matthew. 20: 1-6), Ratzinger wrote: ‘What a strange attitude it is that we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it!” He added that “becoming a Christian is not taking out an insurance policy, it is not the private booking of an entry ticket to heaven.” Rather, “in its simplest and innermost form, faith is nothing but reaching that point in love at which we recognize that we, too, need to be given something.”

Jansenists And The ‘Maladie Catholique’
Ratzinger has also been acutely aware of the problems generated by Jansenism in the realm of sexuality. He has noted that towards the end of the nineteenth century French psychiatrists coined the phrase ‘maladie catholique’ to describe a “special neurosis that is the product of a warped pedagogy so exclusively concentrated on the Fourth and Sixth Commandments that the resultant complex with regard to authority and purity renders the individual incapable of free self-development.”  Such an experience of faith “leads, not to freedom, but to rigidity and an absence of freedom.”

The maladie was not only fostered by prurient boarding school masters who traumatized teenagers with threats of eternal punishment for moments of impurity, but it was also fostered by the pre-conciliar marriage manuals which reduced the whole complex territory of sexuality to a calculus of marital dues and contractual obligations. Here Ratzinger has been strong in his criticism of the pre-conciliar manualist tradition for its ‘decided rationalism’ which marginalized sacred Scripture and Christology. It ‘no longer allowed people to see the great message of liberation and freedom given to us in the encounter with Christ’ but rather stressed above all the negative aspect of so many prohibitions, so many ‘no’s.

While he acknowledges that these are present in Catholic ethics, he regrets that they were no longer presented for what they really are: the actualization of a great ‘yes.’ Moreover, while biblical citations ‘decorated’ the discourse here and there, the manuals placed an emphasis on natural-law-based casuistry whose appeal was limited to those with a positivist or legalistic mindset or those who were simply fearful of committing sin and looking for moral ‘certitude.’ The casuistry certainly provided guidelines and answers but not a deep understanding of the intrinsic beauty, truth, or goodness of the Christian moral life.

The Pre-Conciliar Manualist Tradition And Post-Conciliar Ethical Traditions
Notwithstanding the conciliar hope that ‘a renewed moral theology would go beyond the natural law system in order to recover a deeper biblical inspiration’, Ratzinger believes that it was precisely moral philosophy that ended by marginalizing sacred Scripture even more completely than the pre-conciliar manualist tradition. While Scripture was absent de facto (according to fact) in the manualist tradition, it was marginalized de iure (according to law) in post-conciliar ethical traditions. It was claimed that Scripture offers only a horizon of intentions and motivations, but it does not enter into the moral contents of action. These contents are left properly to human rationality. Such a conception was then translated into the claim that “ethics is purely rational, so that, in order to open itself to universal communicability and to enter into the common debate of humanity, ethics ought to be constructed solely on the basis of reason.”

God And Rationality
Against these Kantian tendencies, Ratzinger holds that even the Ten Commandments are not to be interpreted first of all as law, but rather as a divine gift. They are not about precepts circumscribed within themselves. They are a dynamic that is open to an ever greater and deeper understanding. Moreover, Ratzinger stresses that Christians cannot prescind from the explicit theism of the first tablet of the Ten Commandments which begins: “I am the Lord your God, you shall not have other gods before Me.” Christians “cannot yield on this point: without God, all the rest would no longer have any logical coherence.”

As Ian Markham put it: “You cannot assume a rationality and then argue that there is no foundation to that rationality. Either God and rationality go or God and rationality stay. Either Nietzsche or Aquinas, that is our choice.” Ratzinger would no doubt quibble with equating the Christian option solely with Thomism, but he certainly shares the belief, so succinctly put by Markham, that natural law does not run, so to speak, without theological presuppositions. This point has been argued strongly by the Augustinian scholar Ernest Fortin (1923-2002) and by classical Thomists like Russell Hittinger.

In effect this means that a Catholic account of morality cannot ultimately be successfully defended at the Bar of eighteenth-century-style rationality, jurisdictional questions aside, because that tribunal is fundamentally flawed, as post-modems agree. Positively, however, it does mean that in these post-modern times the battleground moves from the field of ‘pure reason’ and ‘pure nature’ to the theatre of the gods. It becomes your god against my God. Apollo and Dionysius face Christ. At least in many academies the rationalistic shadow-boxing is now passé, though it continues in courtrooms arid government bureaucracies where the dominance of liberal political assumptions precludes any appeal to first principles.

The strongest assertion to be made from the side of Apollo and Dionysius is that they affirm life. They give their blessing to human creativity. They offer a vision of humanism which treats originality and individuality as goods. They take a liberal attitude to sexuality. In sharp contrast they claim that Christ opposed eros  and fostered a religion in which the highest place goes to the celibate male priest who suppresses his sexuality and individuality and even sacrifices his own judgment and creativity to the orders of others in an ecclesial hierarchy with military standards of obedience and self-sacrifice.

Eros And Agape
It is to this charge that Benedict XVI addresses himself in the first part of Deus Caritas Est. Against Friedrich Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity killed eros  he declares that eros  and agape are not two distinct realities: there is a symbiotic relationship between the two; one cannot function properly separated from the other.

In support of this reading Angelo Scola concludes that ‘the fulfillment promised by amorous experience has nothing automatic or magic about it; it cannot be produced by ritual gestures or magic practices that avoid our having to commit our personal freedom’, rather “the erotic dimension of love, which does not ask my permission to happen, is fulfilled only in the agapic dimension of gratuitous self-giving.” Unless agape fructifies Eros  it simply dies. Experiments with Eros  which deprive the person of his or her dignity, which commodifies or otherwise dehumanize the person, which treat a person as a mere means to the achievement of some desire of another without any reciprocal self-giving, or which denigrate the body to the status of a mechanical object, cut short the ascent to the divine which is the work of agape. In these situations Eros  ultimately becomes sterile and boring.

Sexuality And Romantic Courtship
Applying this theology one concludes that for Benedict XVI the sexual revolution of the 1960s should be opposed, not on the basis of archaic casuistry, not because sexuality is merely a means to the end of procreation, but rather because the underlying vision of the dignity and meaning of human sexuality offered by 1960s Freudians, Nietzscheans, and New Age sex therapists is really not truly erotic. It is not only destructive of human dignity and integrity but it takes the pathos out of the whole experience. It trivializes sex and undermines romance and courtly love because both romance and courtship presuppose spiritual chivalry. Being prepared for heroic self-sacrifice for the good of another is the very essence of chivalry and the very antithesis of the morality of Nietzsche’s supermen or the feminist superwornan. Just as God and rationality either stay together or reason goes off on its own tangent and becomes violent, sexuality and romantic courtship either remain together or sexuality goes off on its own tangent and becomes banal and depressing. If, in the Nietzschean tradition, all experience is a good in itself, then Benedict XVI can respond that among other things the Nietzschean sola erotica stance operates so as to narrow the range of possible human experiences.

Benedict therefore tends to look on the post-sexual revolution generations with paternal pity, especially those who now belong to the second and even third generation for whom notions like romance, chivalry, courtship, and lifelong love and fidelity are often no longer a part of their memory and personal experience but are at best academic. Members of alphabetically described Generations X and Y often lack the sapiential experience of seeing eros  and agape working together. For many the only advice they were given is that of how to avoid an unwanted pregnancy. Benedict believes that this situation is not only robbing youth of the chance of forming successful lifelong partnerships, but it is actually sapping the joy from this axiological moment of their life:

Thus today we often see in the faces of the young people a remarkable bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm of youthful ventures into the unknown. The deepest root of this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound despair.

In drawing together the roles of Eros  and agape into a symphonic harmony, and gutting the Catholic tradition of every last remnant of Jansenism which no doubt made Nietzsche’s claim that Christianity killed Eros credible to a generation brought up on the idea that holy people become nuns and priests while the spiritually defective class get married.

Benedict XVI And The Theology Of The Body
Benedict XVI has built on the theology of the body of John Paul II. In his Love and Responsibility and the series of Wednesday papal audiences which came to be labelled the Theology Of The Body, John Paul II launched the first papal assault on the root causes of the maladie catholique. They were the first antidote to the Jansenist and Stoic treatment of sexuality and marital intimacy. They affirmed the intrinsic goodness of human sexuality and placed it within a whole Trinitarian framework encapsulated in the expression ‘the nuptial mystery’. Jansenism was a self-inflicted wound in the life of the Church. Once it has been seen off the stage, the way lies open to commence a battle to reclaim Eros  which the Church, too beset with internal problems at the time, did not undertake in 1968.

While Paul VI at least anticipated many of the problems which would arise if the unitive and procreative dimensions of sexual intimacy were severed, and while Ratzinger agrees with him on this issue, Ratzinger none the less concedes that the theology behind Humanae vitae was ‘relatively slim’. Karol Wojtyla was also of the view that in the midst of the media furor which followed the promulgation of Humanae vitae, authors of various articles and publications spoke out on behalf of a misguided concept of natural law as biological regularity and they in turn “imposed upon the Holy Father, and along with him upon the magisterium of the Catholic Church, an understanding of natural law that in no way corresponds to the Church’s understanding of it.”

Wojtyla’s 1969 essay ‘The Teaching of the Encyclical Humanae vitae on Love’ tried to undo some of the damage by placing the whole encyclical in a context of a theology of love which he later expanded during the early years of his pontificate. Instead of using Stoic categories to analyze marriage and sexuality Wojtyla spoke of love as a gift of the self; of spousal love being the paradigmatic gift of the self, and of the Trinity as the archetype of such a gift.

Michael Waldstein, who has undertaken the definitive translation of John Paul II’s Theology Of The Body lectures, interprets them as an explicitly Trinitarian response to what he terms “Kant’s anti-trinitarian personalism.” Whereas Kant’s personalism glorifies the autonomy of the individual person as ‘the only true value to which everything else must be subordinated’, and whereas for Kant “fatherhood is the worst despotism imaginable and sonship the worst slavery’, within Wojtyla’s personalism there is no glorification of autonomy and no opposition to the situation of dependency that exists in the normal father and son relationship.

Instead human dignity is rooted in a Trinitarian paradigm. Persons can only be understood in a relationship of mutual self-giving. According to John Paul II, the ability to understand these things is undermined by the effects of Cartesian rationality. As Waldstein puts it, “the claim is that the nature of sex has become invisible through our Cartesian glasses.” John Paul II tried to remedy this blindness with his critique of Kantian autonomy and his insistence that the highest meaning of the human body and sexual intimacy is to be found in nothing less than the nuptial mystery of the Trinity. Here we find foreshadowed Benedict’s argument that eros  and agape belong together and that God’s way of loving is the measure of human love.

In article 11 of Deus Caritas Est Benedict declares that ‘marriage based on an exclusive and definitive love is the icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa’ and that this close connection between eros  and marriage in the Bible “has practically no equivalent in extra-biblical literature.” It was not some hypothesis doing the rounds of all the tribes of the ancient Middle East but was something uniquely special about the revelation of the Old Testament, reaffirmed and elevated in the new dispensation.

Benedict’s strategy is therefore not so much to prove that Christian ethics are more rational than the alternatives, but to exhort married Christians to demonstrate in culturally embodied practices that they are more true, good, and beautiful; as it were, more erotic:

[In classical times] Christians were able to demonstrate persuasively how empty and base were the entertainments of paganism, and how sublime the gift of faith in the God who suffers with us and leads us to the road of true greatness. Today it is a matter of the greatest urgency to show a Christian model of life that offers a liveable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society forced to make increasing recourse to drugs because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures.

Benedict XVI And God Is Love
In short, Ratzinger thinks that Christians will be victorious here because “the actual advance registered by the Christian idea of God over that of the ancient world lies in its recognition that God is love.” No one else has a god who is so much for love. No other tradition begins with a baby in a stable whose birth is announced by a choir of angels and who receives gifts from kings and homage from shepherds while cattle keep Him warm with their breath.

The example Ratzinger chooses to illustrate the principle is taken from the Council of Trent. At that time the Catholic practice of holding Corpus Christi processions was opposed by Protestants who had rejected the belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, preferring to regard the sacred host as a mere symbol. The response of the fathers at Trent was that processions “must show forth the triumph of the truth in such a way that, in the face of such magnificence and such joy on the part of the whole Church, the enemies of the truth will either fade away or, stricken with shame, attain to insight.”

Ratzinger suggests that if we remove the polemical element about enemies of the Church being stricken with shame, what we have left is this: “the power in virtue of which truth carries the day can be none other than its own joy.” This is essentially his strategy for dealing with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. He wants it to be more obvious that there is actually nothing very romantic or liberating and ultimately really erotic about laissez-faire sex, while, conversely, those whose lives seek an integration of eros and agape paradoxically end up closer to achieving the Romantic ideal of a life narrative which is not only true and good but beautiful.