Paying Attention To The Sky

A continuation of yesterday’s post…

Bourgeois Pelagianism And The Pelagianism Of The Pious
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. For this to happen, however, the Church has to get her own house in order and here Ratzinger observes that other strains of the Jansenist virus continue to weaken her constitution. In particular he speaks of the twin pathologies of bourgeois Pelagianism and the Pelagianism of the pious. He describes the mentalite of the bourgeois Pelagian as follows: “If God really does exist and if He does in fact bother about people He cannot be so fearfully demanding as He is described by the faith of the Church. Moreover, I am no worse than others: I do my duty, and the minor human weaknesses cannot really be as dangerous as all that.”  

This attitude is a modern version of ‘acedia’ — a kind of anxious vertigo that overcomes people when they consider the heights to which their divine pedigree has called them. In Nietzschean terms it is the mentality of the herd, the attitude of someone who just cannot be bothered to be great. It is bourgeois because it is calculating and pragmatic and comfortable with what is common and ordinary, rather than aristocratic and erotic. Here Ratzinger is using the adjective ‘bourgeois’ to describe an attitude to life which sociologists like Werner Sombart (1863-1941) and Max Weber (1864-1920) have associated with the upwardly mobile entrepreneurial classes.

It is a technical sociological term and should not be construed as meaning that to belong to any particular class is spiritually defective. Ratzinger himself was from a lower middle-class family. Similarly, the use of the word ‘aristocratic’ in this context means a personality type which prefers the excellent over the serviceable. Here it does not mean ‘born with a title’. Both Sombart and Weber regarded Protestant cultures as ‘bourgeois’ and Catholic cultures as ‘aristocratic’ and ‘erotic’. Weber thought that this helped to explain why Protestant cultures were wealthier. Catholics spent too much time either on their knees praying or around a table feasting. Protestants were more sensible and pragmatic. Their rituals were less elaborate and time consuming, leaving more time for work and making money.

Contrary to the bourgeois spirit Ratzinger argues that the Christian is the person who does not calculate. A Christian with an authentic spirituality does not ask “How much farther can I go and still remain within the realm of venial sin, stopping short of mortal sin?” Rather, the Christian is the one who simply seeks what is good, without any calculation. In this one can hear an echo of the French writer Georges Bernanos, well known as the author of The Diary of a Country Priest and The Dialogues of the Carmelites. Bernanos remarked that “the moment a person feels the need to consult the casuists in order to know the amount starting from which stealing money may be considered a mortal sin, we may say that his social value is nil, even if he abstains from stealing.” In contrast one can find an example of an erotic and aristocratic disposition in the prayer of St Ignatius of Loyola:

To give, and not to count the cost,
to fight, and not to heed the wounds, to toil,
and not to seek for rest, to labour,
and not to ask for any reward
save that of knowing that we do thy will.

The Pelagianism of the pious shares the property of not seeing any need for repentance and forgiveness and it is also quite pragmatic, but it falls into another Augustinian category of spiritual disorder, known as presumption:

They [pious Pelagians] want security, not hope. By means of a tough and rigorous system of religious practices, by means of prayers and actions, they want to create for themselves a right to blessedness. What they lack is the humility essential to any love — the humility to be able to receive what we are given over and above what we have deserved and achieved. The denial of hope in favor of security that we are faced with here rests on the inability to bear the tension of waiting for what is to come and to abandon oneself to God’s goodness.

The Pelagianism of the pious is also part of a broader cultural quest for self-sufficiency. Here Ratzinger speaks of a desire to get rid of all reliance on other people and their inner tension. Just as the Enlightenment sought to reduce religion to morality, he believes that a second reduction is taking place. Morality is being narrowed to the concept of human well-being. The self-help, self-healing, and self-motivating strategies of the New Age Movement are but one prominent example of this reduction. Ratzinger believes that this is farther evidence of a loss of belief in creation and without an understanding of human life as a divinely created gift the door is open for its commercialization. Here all Ratzinger can do is to reiterate the creedal Christian position: “We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed; each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.” His response to the whole raft of contemporary medical practices which treat the human person in some sense as a commodity is encapsulated in the following paragraph:

“To fabricate man and make him a product of our chemical arts or any other technology is a fundamental attack on the dignity of man, who is no longer considered, no longer realized as an immediate creature of God and his immortal vocation. It is essential to respect the unique dignity of man, who is wanted and created immediately by God, through a new miracle of creation. Through cloning the human person becomes our product, a product of our art: thus his dignity as a human person is violated from the start.”

The Treatment Of Homosexuality
The loss of belief in creation and the related idea of there being an intelligent pattern in creation is also linked to the treatment of homosexuality within the Catholic tradition, which Ratzinger as prefect of the CDF upheld in a number of documents. Ratzinger believes that God inscribed “instructions for use” objectively and indelibly in his creation and, consequently, “nature, and with it precisely also man himself, so far as he is part of that created nature, contain that morality within themselves.” For the Church “the language of nature is also the language of morality.” He regards homosexual practices as completely contrary to these “instructions for use” inscribed by God indelibly in his creation:

The call for homosexual partnerships to receive a legal form that is more or less the equivalent of marriage departs from the entire moral history of mankind… If this relationship [marriage] becomes increasingly detached from legal forms, while at the same time homosexual partnerships are increasingly viewed as equal in rank to marriage, we are on the verge of a dissolution of our concept of man, and the consequences can only be extremely grave.

None the less, in this context he has always been careful to distinguish between, the immorality of homosexual acts and the unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, between tolerance and affirmation, and between an unintended homosexual tendency and individual homosexual actions. The most significant document here is entitled ‘Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-discrimination of Homosexual Persons’. It includes the following propositions:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder…It is deplorable that homosexual persons have been and are the object ‘of violent malice in speech and in action.. The intrinsic dignity of each person must always be respected in word, in action and law…There are areas in which it is not unjust discrimination to take sexual orientation into account, for example, in the placement of children for adoption or foster care, in employment of teachers or athletic coaches, and in military recruitment.

The Relationship Between Masculinity And Femininity In The Order Of Creation
Apart from overseeing the promulgation of CDF documents Ratzinger has not devoted much attention to anthropological questions about the relationship between masculinity and femininity in the order of creation. This is more in the territory of the work of Angelo Scola, the leading Italian Communio-circle scholar who is now the patriarch of Venice. The following principles can be found in the works of Scola and have been brought together by David L. Schindler in an essay on Catholic theology and gender. Given the general closeness of the thought of Scola to that of Benedict they may serve as guideposts to Benedict’s likely general approach in this area:

1.  The gender difference should be seen as a perfection.

2.  While Aristotle anchored the meaning of feminine in ‘matter’ and in ‘potency’ rather than in ‘act’, and while Aquinas followed Aristotle on this point, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr anchored the meaning already in ‘act’.

3.  This means that, for those who follow von Balthasar and von Speyer, femininity is a perfection, not a defect.

4.  Men and women are both created in the image and likeness of the Trinitarian God, in and through Jesus Christ. What this means is that each images the whole of the Trinity but does so differently.

5.  Men and women are not two halves destined to merge so as to regenerate a lost unity. The dual unity of the sexes does not signify the symmetrical reciprocity as Aristophanes supposed in Plato’s Symposium.

6.  Every form of chauvinism contradicts the creative design.

The work of Scola seeks to link considerations of the nature of femininity and masculinity into the framework of Trinitarian theology. He has argued that a culture that does not accept the Revelation of the Trinitarian God ultimately renders itself incapable of understanding sexual difference in a positive sense. The Trinity is the model par excellence of a relationship of equality within difference. Scola believes that without a Trinitarian theism, or with a merely theistically colored theism, the feminine sex usually ends up being perceived as defective. All of this is consistent with the general approach of Deus Caritas Est.

Sexual Difference Within Contemporary Culture
Ratzinger has also spoken of a kind of extreme denial of the importance and value of sexual difference at work within contemporary culture. He speaks of a technological rationalism that pushes the emotional side of human nature to the irrational periphery and allots a merely instrumental role to the body. Against this he states that the body is not something external to the spirit, it is the latter’s self-expression: its ‘image’.

He notes that Plato would put men and women into barracks and place their children in a state-mn nursery. He thinks this represents a mental condition of despising the body, a kind of spiritualism that refuses to recognize that the body itself is the person. He believes that this kind of egalitarianism actually diminishes the status of women; they are ‘dragged down’ to being ‘undistinguished and ordinary’. It ‘horrifies’ him that people want women to be soldiers and to work as refuse collectors or miners.

Universal Salvation
In his series of essays published in 2005 under the title On the Way to Jesus Christ Ratzinger was critical of a prevalent image of Jesus as someone who “demands nothing, never scolds, who accepts everyone and everything, who no longer does anything but affirm us.” The fact that God is love and that Benedict wishes to highlight this dimension of the tradition should not therefore be construed as evidence that he is a universal Salvationist, that is, someone who believes that everyone will be saved. He is firm in his statements that hell and purgatory do exist and he expects that some people do occupy them:

There is no quibbling: the idea of eternal damnation which had taken ever clearer shape in the Judaism of the century or two before Christ has a firm place in the teaching of Jesus, as well as in the apostolic writings. Dogma takes stand on solid ground when it speaks of the existence of Hell and of the eternity of its punishments.

Hell Is A Challenge To Oneself  And Purgatory
Ratzinger links this stance to God’s unconditional respect for the freedom of his creatures. None the less he also notes that for many of the saints, including St. John of the Cross and St Thérèse of Lisieux, hell is not so much a threat to be hurled at other people as a challenge to oneself to suffer the dark night of the soul that conies with Christian faith. Ratzinger has also been influenced by Joachim Gnilka’s theology of purgatory for which he finds scriptural support in Corinthians 3: 10-15 and the support of the magisterium, most particularly at the Council of Trent.

According to Gnilka, “the purification involved does not happen through some thing, but through the transforming power of the Lord himself, whose burning flame cuts free our closed-off heart, melting it, and pouring it into a new mould to make it fit for the living organism of the body.” By this reading: “Purgatory is not, as Tertullian thought, some kind of supra-worldly concentration camp where man is forced to undergo punishment in a more or less arbitrary fashion. Rather it is the inwardly necessary process of transformation in which a person becomes capable of Christ, capable of God and thus capable of unity with the whole communion of saints.”

Ratzinger further notes that the doctrine on the existence of an inter-mediate state was never in dispute between the eastern and western branches of Christianity. It was only called into question by the Reformation in the face of what he calls “objectionable and deformed practice,” such as the sale of indulgences. Ratzinger firmly believes that it is effectual to pray for those in purgatory because “self-substituting love is a central Christian reality and the doctrine of purgatory holds that for such love the limit of death does not exist.” As pope he has affirmed the practice of offering indulgences (though not, of course, in return for money).

Ratzinger also believes that it is not wrong to speak of the immortality of the soul, even though sonic academics have argued for its scrapping and replacement with the concept ‘resurrection in death’. He describes this project as a manifestation of an “anti-Hellenic syndrome skeptical of ontology”, and the phrase ‘resurrection in death’ as something of no pastoral value:

In Lieu of The Concept Of Soul
Historically, it must be affirmed that the concept of soul found in Christian tradition is in no sense a simple borrowing from philosophical thought. In the form in which Christian tradition has understood it, it exists nowhere without that tradition. Christian tradition has seized upon pre-existing insights, elements of thought and language of diverse kinds, has purified and transformed these in the light of faith, and fused them into a new unity.

Although Ratzinger clearly believes in heaven, hell, and purgatory, his works do not specifically make a list of the kind of behavior that may land one in hell. Significantly, however, he does make it clear that he rejects the theory that those who with a clear conscience commit heinous crimes will probably be saved:

It is indisputable that one must always follow a clear verdict of conscience, or at least that one may not act against such a verdict. But it is quite a different matter to assume that the verdict of conscience (or what one takes to be such a verdict is always correct, i.e. infallible — for if that were so, it would mean there is no truth, at least in matters of morality and religion, which are the foundations of our very existence.

The authority commonly presented for a liberal interpretation of the primacy of conscience is Newman’s statement in his Letter Addressed to his Grace the Duke of Norfolk that he would toast conscience first, then the papacy. This is usually interpreted to mean that he put the authority of his own conscience above that of the pope’s. None the less, Ratzinger offers a completely different interpretation.

He says that Newman intended this to be a clear confession of his faith in the papacy, in response to the objections raised by British Liberal Party politician William Gladstone (1809-1898) to the dogma of infallibility. At the same time, against erroneous forms of ultramontanism (unhealthily bloated accounts of the ambit of papal infallibility), he meant it to be an interpretation of the papacy as an office which guarantees, rather than opposes, the primacy of conscience. In other words, Newman was making the point, which Ratzinger himself made prior to assuming the Office of Peter, that the pope cannot do whatever he likes, that the exercise of his prerogative powers are circumscribed by both Scripture and Tradition, that is, by the very data upon which a well—formed conscience relies. Ratzinger suggests that it is difficult today for people to grasp this point because they think on the basis of an antithesis between authority and subjectivity.

Ratzinger Own Account Of Conscience
In addition to offering a correction of the popular interpretation of Newman, Ratzinger has also sought to offer his own account of conscience which he thinks clarifies the medieval tradition. He agrees with the medieval tradition that there are two dimensions to conscience which must be clearly distinguished from each other but remain inseparable, and he believes that problems of interpretation have frequently arisen because scholars neglect either the distinction or the interrelatedness of the two dimensions.

The main stream of medieval scholasticism described the two dimensions of conscience by means of the concepts synderesis and conscientia. The word synderesis is of Stoic provenance and Ratzinger prefers to replace it with the Platonic concept anamnesis (memory). He suggests that this is linguistically clearer, deeper, and purer in philosophical terms.

The word “anamnesis” affirms St Paul’s idea that God’s laws have been written on the hearts of the gentiles (Romans. 2: 14-15) and St Basil’s idea of there being a spark of the divine love innate in each person. St Basil wrote that “the love of God is not based on some discipline imposed on us from outside, but as a capacity and indeed a necessity it is a constitutive element of our rational being.” Consequently, on what Ratzinger calls the ontological level, ‘conscience’ means the primal remembrance of the good and the true.

The second dimension or level is conscientia. Here Ratzinger argues that St Thomas saw conscience, not as a habitus, but as an actus, an action that is performed. It is on this level that an erring conscience obligates. None the less, Ratzinger argues that the fact that one’s conviction is naturally binding at the moment one acts does not mean that one is free of culpability, since “guilt may very well consist in arriving at perverse convictions by trampling down the protest made by the memory (anamnesis) of one’s true being.” The guilt would then lie on a deeper level, not in the act itself, not in the specific judgment pronounced by conscience, but in that neglect of my own being that has dulled me to the voice of truth and made me deaf to what it says within me.

Thus an immoral act is still an immoral act, even if one’s poorly formed conscience permits it. Ratzinger notes that if a person with an erring conscience could be saved then even the SS troops under Hider could be justified and now would be in heaven. He surely thinks that they are more likely not enjoying the beatific vision. Finally, in this context, as a matter of intellectual history, Ratzinger believes that problems have arisen over the meaning of conscience because of the publication of a work in 1942 by Antonin D. Sertillanges OP in which he attributed to St Thomas the teaching of Peter Abelard (1079-1142), although St Thomas’s goal was to refute Abelard. In Ratzinger’s judgment, the modern theories of the autonomy of conscience vis-à-vis the magisterium can appeal to Abelard but not to Thomas.

The Antidote To Moralism
Ratzinger believes that the antidote to moralism and the narrowing of moral theology to mere casuistry is the revival of an understanding that God is love and that the human person is a composite of body and soul, heart and mind, created in God’s own image. It is therefore consistent with his general orientation to the whole territory of ethics that Benedict has called on the Jesuits, the traditional foes of the Jansenists, to rekindle devotion to the Sacred Heart. He has described the 1956 encyclical Haurietis aquas of Pius XII as offering a theology of bodily existence. He believes that devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus explicitly invites entry into a spirituality involving the senses, corresponding to the bodily nature of the divine-human love of Jesus Christ. This, he says, is spirituality in the sense of Newman’s motto:

Cor ad cor loquitur “Over against the Stoic ideal of apatheia, over against the Aristotelian God, who is thought thinking itself, the heart is the epitome of the passions, without which there could have been no Passion on the part of the Son.”

Finally, in a reflection on his early patron, Cardinal Frings, Ratzinger has written that Frings and Newman shared a spiritual vision which is encapsulated in the following paragraph from the late fourth-century Cappadocian Father, Gregory of Nyssa:

This is true perfection: not to avoid a wicked life because like slaves we servilely fear punishment; nor to do good because we hope for rewards. . . On the contrary, disregarding all those things for which we hope and which have been reserved by promise, we regard falling from God’s friendship as the only thing dreadful and we consider becoming God’s friend the only thing worthy of honour and desire.

This spirituality would seem to be at the core of Ratzinger’s moral theology.