This is a reading selection from Fr. Thomas Rauch’s Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to His Theological Vision. The Holy Father is an “enormously competent” theologian and I for one needed to get an overview of his numerous (over one hundred) publications. I think Fr. Rauch’s book does a fairly good job of that although I had to scratch my head here and there at some of the criticisms he seems to favor (Luke Timothy Johnson’s off the reservation comments on sexuality and the Church seem to push the envelope somewhat.) Pay close attention to the footnotes when you read it.
As a theologian, Pope Benedict XVI is enormously competent. At home discussing biblical texts and their languages, the fathers of the church, or the writings of contemporary theologians and philosophers, he is a man of culture as well as of learning. He is a member of the Academic Française, the Rhineland-Westphalia Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. Best known for his work on episcopacy, Eucharist, ministry; tradition, and eschatology, he has published over one hundred books. One cannot read him without being amazed at the breadth of his scholarship. While clearly an intellectual, his pastoral concern has always been to safeguard from harmful speculation the faith of those whom he calls the “simple faithful.”
As a person, Pope Benedict is unfailingly gracious; he is reserved, diffident, even shy in his manner. But as Joseph Ratzinger he was also something of a polemicist. He often responded to critics directly and was not above using sarcasm in dismissing arguments he deemed frivolous. He has expressed his distaste for abstract theological texts, and though he can be as abstract as any philosopher, there is a passion in his writing, a concern to present the truth of the faith as he sees it against the wisdom of the world, which without the gospel is no wisdom at all. Even as Cardinal Prefect of the CDF [Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith], he was not afraid of controversy, responding at times to his critics by name. If he knows the church’s theological tradition intimately and can articulate it with grace, his own theological wisdom flows from certain distinctive fonts.
Ratzinger was never comfortable with the Neo-Scholasticism so dominant at the time he did his studies. He found it abstract, dry; and lifeless. This included Aquinas. In his memoirs, he said, “I had difficulties penetrating the thought of Thomas Aquinas, whose crystal-clear logic seems to me to be too closed in on itself; too impersonal and ready-made.” His own theology has always been rooted, first in scripture, then in the liturgy and the fathers of the church, the “return to the sources” or ressourcement that was to bear enormous fruit at the Second Vatican Council. If he was also concerned with aggiornamento, that bringing up-to-date and renewal of structures and life sought by the more progressive members of the council, his deepest instincts have been for ressourcement.
In a second polarity, the traditional tension between Catholicism’s two greatest doctors, Augustine and Aquinas, a tension evident at the council and in its aftermath, Pope Benedict has always been on the side of Augustine. Augustine was not dry; he wrote with passion. In commenting on the 1985 Extraordinary Synod of Bishops, Avery Dulles noted the presence of two major schools, the first of which, “led by figures such as the German cardinals Ratzinger and Hoeffner, had a markedly super-naturalistic point of view, tending to depict the church as an island of grace in a world given over to sin. This outlook I call neo-Augustinian.” Ratzinger is not reluctant to acknowledge his debt to Augustine. In an address to seminarians at Rome’s major seminary in February 2007, he reminisced about his own seminary studies: “I was fascinated from the beginning especially by the figure of St. Augustine and then also the school of St. Augustine in medieval times, St. Bonaventure, the great Franciscans, the figure of St. Francis.” But just as Augustine’s thought owes much to the Platonic tradition, particularly to the Neo-Platonism that was so strong in his own time, so Ratzinger owes a considerable debt to the heritage of Plato. Plato, Augustine, and Bonaventure have all left their marks on his thinking.
First, from Plato he learned to understand and privilege truth as the intelligible. Second, his anthropology or view of the human is deeply Augustinian. Finally, his epistemology and understanding of eschatology are profoundly stamped by his study of Bonaventure. In attempting to give an overview of Ratzinger’s theology we will consider the formative influence of these three thinkers and examine how they have affected his approach to modernity.
The Platonic Heritage
Ratzinger’s episcopal coat of arms bears the motto Cooperatores Veritatis, Co-workers of the Truth (“Therefore we ought to support such people, so that we may become co-workers with the truth.” 3 John 8). He has always seen his vocation, as a scholar and as a bishop and now as pope, to be in the service of truth. He sees truth as illumining the world of the sensible and the experiential from beyond, finding its ultimate embodiment in the logos, the person of Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Indeed, much of the criticism he has received over the years can be attributed to his professorial way of boldly speaking the truth as he sees it. His understanding of truth very much reflects the Platonic heritage that has so nourished his thought. First, like Plato, Ratzinger locates the true and the good beyond the world of experience, in the spiritual. Second, his notion of wisdom, though illumined by his faith, is very much formed by Plato.
Truth as the Intelligible
Plato and the Neoplatonism that so influenced Augustine located the true and the good in the spiritual realm, reflective of Plato’s world of the forms or ideas. Though this tradition saw an epistemic connection between these forms and human knowledge, the material world that we experience every day was only a poor reflection of the ultimately real. The true was the intelligible, not the merely sensible. Knowledge comes from recollection.
While Aquinas also emphasized the intelligible as the object of human understanding, he was formed in the tradition of Aristotle, who was considerably more empirical or experimental in his approach to human understanding. With his esteem for the physical sciences, Aristotle prized what humans could learn by careful observation and achieve through the application of critical reason. Ratzinger’s epistemology is much more Platonic than Aristotelian; in a remark that cleverly reverses the popular view of the seventeenth-century controversy with Galileo, he once argued that Galileo’s opponents were Aristotelian empiricists, while Galileo himself was a Platonist who placed more emphasis on understanding than on what appeared to the senses.
Ratzinger sees Plato as doing battle against the radical enlightenment of his day that denied that truth was in any way accessible to human beings. Of course he sees parallels here with contemporary, post-Enlightenment Western civilization with its skepticism, limiting knowledge and truth to what can be empirically demonstrated. For modern thought, ultimate reality remains unknowable, while the postmodernist ethos reduces all knowledge and “meta-narratives” to systems of meaning, “socially constructed” on the basis of one’s social location, meaning that all knowledge is relative to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity, which filter how we perceive the world. Ratzinger’s objection to the “dictatorship of relativism” is rooted here, in the modern reduction of knowledge to what is constructed on the basis of social location and thus is relative. Against this contemporary relativism, Ratzinger juxtaposes wisdom.
Wisdom
In his discussion of the gift of wisdom, Ratzinger goes back to Plato, who so shaped the development of wisdom in the Christian tradition. Plato taught that truth is an attribute of God. If humans cannot actually possess it, they can love it and search for it, drawn by Eros, which moves them to search for the Good and the Beautiful, in this way moving them beyond the limits of the merely intelligible toward the eternal. Ratzinger does not, however, rule out experience; even in the human sphere there is no knowledge without experience, and only the experience of God can yield knowledge of God. Wisdom can learn much from science, particularly to be sober, exact, and methodological. But knowledge cannot be limited to what is rational from a scientific point of view; in language familiar to us today he says that in a totally rationalized world, which limits rationality to the exact sciences, there evolves “a frightening dictatorship of uncontrolled irrationality.” Instead, he argues that when Eros is ordered, not just to the intellectual but to the eternal, then “the rational receives fecundity and warmth from the depths of the Spirit in whom truth and love are one.”
This theme of Eros drawing humans to God reappears in Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est. He finds in Plato an ally against the skepticism of our own day. But finally he privileges Augustine over Plato, for while Plato’s philosophy remained elite and in the last analysis hypothetical, Augustine was able to discover true wisdom in Jesus, the self-subsistent wisdom of God.7
The Primacy of the Idea
Nevertheless there remains a Platonic or Neo Platonic cast to Ratzinger’s thought, privileging the idea over the concrete and the empirical, which others have noted. Walter Kasper has several times called attention to the Platonic character of Ratzinger’s thought. In the late 1960s, shortly after Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity was published, Kasper wrote a critical review that led to several exchanges. Calling attention to the “latent idealism” in Ratzinger’s book, he noted that Ratzinger’s starting point was the Platonic dialectic between the visible and the invisible. What was real was the invisible, the ground for the real. Kasper suggested an alternative starting point for a systematic theology, the embodied situation of humans in nature, society; culture, and history. His point was that only in this way could theology take seriously the concrete problems of real people in a world where injustice, hunger, and violence rule. In his responses, Ratzinger denied the accuracy of Kasper’s charges.
More than thirty years later, Kasper, now a cardinal himself, raised the same issue in regard to Ratzinger’s ecclesiology. Ratzinger has long maintained the ontological and temporal priority of the universal church over local churches. In a disagreement on this point, Kasper observed that the debate was not about any point of Catholic doctrine but a “conflict between theological opinions and underlying philosophical assumptions.” Ratzinger’s argument, Kasper maintained, is essentially Platonic, starting from the primacy of the idea, while his own position is more Aristotelian, seeing the universal as existing in the concrete reality.
Another example of the primacy of the idea in Ratzinger’s thought is what we might call a “principle of reception,” with the emphasis always on what is received in its givenness, rather than on what develops or changes in the world of time and experience. Again this suggests a certain conceptual, even a priori character to his approach to theology and to the problems it must address. Jim Corkery calls this the priority of logos over ethos, of receiving over making, of being over doing, and sees it as lying at the heart and center of Ratzinger’s theological synthesis. It shows how Ratzinger thinks, but it also has concrete implications as to how theology addresses challenges in the church and its life.
Thus, from an anthropological perspective, Ratzinger typically argues that the human person is oriented not to some interior depth but to the God who comes from without. In the rite of baptism, for instance, the exorcism implies that the catechumenate is more than instruction and decision; only the Lord can effect our conversion, breaking our resistance to the powers that enslave us and enabling us to believe (37-38). Faith comes not from reaching deep into ourselves but from outside us; it is based on our meeting something (or someone) for which our experience is inadequate.
Ecclesiologically, the church lives from the faith it receives as a gift and from the sacraments that it cannot institute but only receive. It does not resemble a club, creating its own rules and statutes. ‘While there is a certain truth here, Ratzinger’s approach seems to leave little room for the church to respond to new challenges in the light of its faith, to renew and reform its structures or sacramental forms. A more historically oriented ecclesiology would show how the church’s structures developed in time, often borrowing from political and cultural models.
Liturgically, he argues that the community cannot bestow the Eucharist on itself, it can only receive it. “The Lord does not arise, as it were, from the midst of the communal assembly. He can come to it only from ‘without’ — as one who bestows himself’ in unity with all other communities (293). Similarly, for Ratzinger, a holy day, unlike a holiday, is God’s gift to humans; we do not make it, nor is it dependent on our decision; we receive it (82). Ecumenically, the unity of the church cannot come from the base, a sociological program inspired by neo-Marxism, or from the churches themselves; “it is no longer just a question of institutional ecumenism against ‘base’ ecumenism but of the ecumenism of a Church man can construct against that of a Church founded and given by the Holy Spirit” (303). Thus Ratzinger’s typical impulse is to see meaning as already given and fixed; he does not seem to leave room for development, higher viewpoints, new understandings, and change.
At one point Ratzinger raises the problem of the shortage of priests. But his approach is hardly empirical. He does not look at changing attitudes toward sexuality and the importance of marital intimacy; or at a culture unable to see celibacy as a value, or to families with fewer children reluctant to encourage a priestly vocation. Instead he questions the efficacy of the Eucharist in the church experiencing the shortage, arguing that “there is a correspondence between the capacity for sacramental marriage in accordance with the gospel and an openness to virginity” (298). While of course there may be some truth to what he says, there are certainly other, perhaps more persuasive reasons to be considered.
As far as reform in the church goes, he eliminates the usual arguments, for example, that the church restricts human freedom with its rules, that it has not integrated the rights and freedoms that are the patrimony of the Enlightenment, that we need to move from a paternalistic church to a community church for which we ourselves are responsible. He acknowledges that the church will always need human constructions. But just as Michelangelo sees the image hidden in the block of stone and works by an ablatio, the removal of what is not really part of the sculpture, true reform of the church takes place, he argues, by a similar ablatio, removing obsolete human constructions, “to allow the nobilis forma, the countenance of the bride, and with it the Bridegroom himself, the Living Lord, to appear.” Reform is not a matter of tinkering with the structure; it means letting the church’s true nature as the embodiment of Christ shine forth.
In regard to the debate over the ordination of women, in a comment on the 1976 CDF instruction concerning the exclusion of women from the priesthood, Inter insigniores, Ratzinger published a commentary that juxtaposed a functionalist conception of law with a sacramental conception of the church. According to Michael Fahey’s summary Ratzinger argued, “The sacramental view recognizes ‘pre-existing symbolic structures of creation, which contain an immutable testimony.’ The priesthood is not a career at the disposal of the institutional Church but is an independent, pre-existing datum.’”
Thus, Ratzinger’s tendency is to stress the idea over the real and the existential, not unlike Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which the objective world of ideas lies beyond the world of appearances experienced in the cave. This suggests an a priori dimension to his theology. Others would argue that theology today must always be concerned with the real and the experiential, not just the ideal; praxis is important.
Augustine
The most formative influence on Ratzinger’s thought was Augustine (354-430), the great doctor of the church whose ecclesiology was the subject of Ratzinger’s doctoral dissertation. In an article about one of his most successful books, his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger acknowledged his debt to Augustine:
“Augustine has kept me company for more that twenty years. I have developed my theology in a dialogue with Augustine, though naturally I have tried to conduct this dialogue as a man of today.”
Augustine was to shape to a remarkable degree Ratzinger’s understanding of the human person, and of the world which we inhabit.
Ratzinger’s dissertation was on the church as the people and house of God. In it he contrasted the ancient Roman “city of the gods” and its cult with the true City of God now revealed in the church where true worship took place. True worship means human life lived according to God’s will and God’s revelation. Specifically, as we shall see, it means the Eucharist. But in a pagan state or secular society, when human activity is no longer governed by a proper relationship with God, the demonic takes over. When God’s law is not honored, life is no longer held sacred, materialism and consumerism rule, and the autonomous self emerges with all its self-aggrandizing tendencies. Ratzinger experienced this firsthand in the Germany of his youth, when Nazi neo-paganism brought the whole world into conflict. His experience of growing up under the Third Reich only reinforced the Augustinian cast to his theological sensibilities.
Augustinianism and Thomism
The contrast between Augustine and Aquinas can be overemphasized. Aquinas had great respect for Augustine and cited him more than any other author. Augustine was largely responsible for joining the Greek philosophical tradition, particularly that of Plato and the Neoplatonists to the Christian tradition of the West. He insisted that reason is to govern the other faculties of the soul, thus stressing the superiority of the rational over the merely experiential. Understanding was based on an isomorphism between what is known and what is, that is, between the structure of being and what is known, assisted by God’s illumination of the human mind. In this there is little difference between Augustine and Aquinas.
But Augustine’s epistemology was far more Platonic than that of Thomas, who depended on Aristotle, as we have seen. For this reason, the Augüstinian tradition has sometimes been described as “voluntarist” because it emphasizes the role of the will in knowing, in contrast to Aquinas’s emphasis on the intellect)8 True knowledge is based on a prior choice of the good; we know what we love. Because Augustine regards intelligence as at least damaged by original sin, he esteems wisdom, the gift of God, far more than knowledge. The doctrine of original sin remains one of Augustine’s greatest theological achievements, but it colors his view of the goodness of humankind, as would become so clear in the teaching of the Protestant Reformers, particularly as developed in the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity.
This Augustinian emphasis reappears in Ratzinger’s thought; he calls attention to the fathers of the church, who saw Jesus’ words “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8), as the key to knowledge of God. “The possibility of ‘seeing’ God, that is, of knowing him at all, depends on one’s purity of heart, which means a comprehensive process in which man becomes transparent, in which he does not remain locked in upon himself.” Humility plays a key role in Ratzinger’s epistemology. He quotes with approval the words of his two mentors, Augustine, who said of his mother, Monica, a woman without the benefit of an education, that because of her simplicity of life she had reached the pinnacle of philosophy; and Bonaventure, who remarked of an elderly woman of deep faith that she “actually possessed more wisdom than the greatest scholars.” As Jim Corkery observes in reference to Ratzinger, “Augustine’s extolling of the humble believer over the proud philosopher surfaces repeatedly; and the point is frequently made that it is not proud philosophical insight, but humble, purifying faith that is needed for knowledge of the truth, for knowledge of God.” As Pope Benedict would write in his book Jesus of Nazareth, “The organ for seeing God is the heart. The intellect alone is not enough.”
In contrast, the Thomistic tradition is more intellectualist. While Aquinas, like Augustine, stressed that reason must work with faith, Aquinas tended to be more optimistic on what reason can know on its own. Our intelligence is “nothing more than a participated likeness of the uncreated light, in which are contained the eternal types.” In the words of Joseph Komonchak, intelligence “was a created power, resident in each individual and making the human knower the active co-agent in understanding and judging rather than the simply passive recipient that the knower appeared to be in the Augustinian view.” Thus, Aquinas had far more confidence in what intelligence could know; he taught that the intellect could grasp self-evident truths and had an important role to play in both philosophy and theology.
Ratzinger agrees with Aquinas that all knowledge begins with the senses, that there is a sensory structure to all human knowing, that even our way of thinking about God is dependent on and mediated by the senses, as we have seen. Even faith begins with experience, but it is never limited by experience. There is a self-transcending quality to faith that creates new experiences, allowing us to know something of the always greater God. But without faith, philosophy — that is to say, merely worldly wisdom — remains in darkness. Thus, from Augustine comes the distinction between wisdom (sapientia) and knowledge (scientia), so important for Ratzinger.
An Augustinian Pessimism
Ratzinger’s thought remains deeply influenced by the pessimism about the human evident in Augustine. The confidence one finds in Aquinas concerning the integrity of human knowing and willing is absent in Ratzinger. In many ways, Ratzinger’s instinctive attitudes toward human intelligence and thus its achievements in “modernity” show him to be much more like Jean Calvin and the Reformers than like Thomas Aquinas and his modern commentators. He frequently quotes Luther, and, like Luther, he emphasizes a theologia crucis, a theology of the cross that stresses the priority of grace over human achievement, philosophical reason, or ecciesial power.
Always he accentuates the sinful nature of the human person. In 1985 he told an interviewer that if he were to retire from his position at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he would return to the university and devote the remainder of his life to writing about original sin, for “the inability to understand ‘original sin’ and to make it understandable is really one of the most difficult problems of present day theology and pastoral ministry” His sober, if not pessimistic, Augustinian vision is evident in his lack of enthusiasm for what is for many Vatican II’s most optimistic document, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes.
As a peritus at Vatican II, Ratzinger was known as one of the progressives. He played an important role in the development of the conciliar texts on the church, divine revelation, and the missions. Yet he found problems with the text on the church in the modern world, precisely for conceding too much to the world. In his reflections on his experience at the council, published a year after it ended, he described a conflict between what he called Biblicism and modernity evident among the drafters of the constitution. Those advocating a modern theology, particularly certain French theologians, were legitimately concerned with using a language that contemporary men and women would understand. The text they produced was reasonable and polite, but Ratzinger found it problematic. He contrasted “the very plausible idea of man as a being called to subdue the world and free to decide his own fate” with “the Christological idea that man is saved by Christ alone.”
Suggesting that the text had opted for dialogue instead of engaging faith’s radical claim on human existence, it risked, in his opinion, reducing faith “to a kind of recondite philosophy.” In criticizing the schema for “an almost naïve progressivist optimism,” Ratzinger was touching on a theme that would come to dominate his thought when he moved from the university to Rome.
These same themes are present in his reflecting on Gaudium et spes more than fifteen years after the council’s close, indicating the consistency in Ratzinger’s thought. He acknowledged that the content of Gaudium et spes was entirely in keeping with the tradition. At the same time, he questioned its pre-theological concept of world, its emphasis on dialogue, and the “astonishing optimism” it displayed. Here his neo-Augustinianism emerges into focus. Some of the French and Belgian bishops and theologians who drafted the schema saw the “world,” with its scientific and technical mentality; as the counterpart to the church, and looked forward to a new cooperation with the world, in order to build it up. The council emphasized the concept of dialogue, seeing the relationship between the church and the world as a “colloquium” or conversation, as though both could enter into dialogue as equals.
Of course Ratzinger was suspicious of this emphasis. For him and some of the Germans, the world is the realm touched by sin, always in contrast to that of grace. And he found the assumption that nothing would be impossible if both church and humanity could work together simply too optimistic. What seemed to be missing was the “attitude of critical reserve towards the forces that have left their imprint on the modern world.” As Joseph Komonchak has observed, “The Augustinian distinction between science and wisdom would have offered a deeper epistemology than that of Aquinas, and greater emphasis on the Cross as the necessary point of contradiction between church and world would have enabled the council to avoid semi-Pelagian language and notions.” Ratzinger called Gaudium et spes a “counter syllabus” to the famous Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX (1864), acknowledging that it represented an attempt on the part of the council to reconcile the church to the new era that was inaugurated by the French Revolution; in other words, it was to be a reconciliation with modernity.
Another example of how his own thought is influenced by the heritage of Augustine is evident in his disagreement with his onetime colleague Karl Rahner. Specifically, he objects to Rahner’s insistence that what is truly human is truly Christian, as it seems to him to collapse God’s special revelation into a more general revelation readily accessible to human reflection. Thus, when Rahner says “He who.. .accepts his existence.. .says. .Yes to Christ,” Ratzinger argues that this means resolving the particular into the universal, denying the newness or uniqueness of Christianity or of Christian revelation. Furthermore, it seems to ignore the fallen nature of the human person. He writes that both Testaments teach “that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is… A Christianity that is no more than a reflected universality may be innocuous, but is it not also superfluous?” It means a self-affirmation of the human person rather than the biblical call to conversion.
Here again, Ratzinger’s basically Augustinian view of the relationship between the divine and the human emerges; he stresses humanity’s fallenness, and thus the “ultimately paschal” character of God’s dealing with us, converting and transforming us, purifying us through grace.
Ratzinger’s anthropological writings embody a distinctive position, a definite “take,” on the relationship between nature and grace. This position emphasizes discontinuity over continuity; it indicates that the way of grace is the way of the cross; it puts the stress on grace healing and transforming nature (gratia sanans) more than on grace elevating and perfecting nature (gratia elevans). In itself, this is unsurprising, given Ratzinger’s preference for Augustine and Bonaventure over Aquinas.
Jim Corkery, “Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Ideas” in Doctrine and Life 56 (2006)
Thus, Ratzinger’s discomfort with Rahner’s exaltation of the human is rooted in the Augustinian and Bonaventuran cast to his thought. It also illustrates how different his anthropology is from contemporary Western culture, with its optimistic attitude toward the human and its relativism regarding truth and value.
Bonaventure
Ratzinger did his Habilitation, the second dissertation required for a university chair in Germany, on the neo-Augustinian thought of St. Bonaventure. As he explains in his memoirs, since his dissertation on Augustine had dealt with ecclesiology, this new effort was to engage him with the theology of revelation. His work on Bonaventure was later to pay dividends at the council. But Ratzinger’s own attitude toward secular learning was to be deeply stamped by Bonaventure’s epistemology, and, even more significantly, his study of Bonaventure’s theology of history was to profoundly influence his understanding of eschatology.
At the time that Ratzinger took up the study of Bonaventure, European theology, particularly in Germany, had focused on the concept of salvation history, the idea that God’s saving plan for humanity is both worked out and revealed in a special history intermingled with world history. While Catholic scholars had also adopted this concept, Protestant thought tended to divorce a theology of salvation history from the metaphysics so important to Catholic theology. They rejected this joining of faith and metaphysics as a problematic “Hellenization” of the Christian tradition. To address this problem Ratzinger turned to Bonaventure.
Bonaventure’s Eschatology
Elected minister general of the Franciscan order in 1257, Bonaventure (1221-74) was caught up in an inner-Franciscan struggle with a group known as the “Spiritual Franciscans” or simply the “Spirituals,” disciples of a charismatic Cistercian abbot from Calabria, Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202). According to Joachim’s teachings, history is divided into three epochs or ages. The first was the Age of the Father (ordo conjugatorum). It embraced the period of the Old Testament, when God’s people lived under the Mosaic Law. The second was the Age of the Son (the ordo clericorum), the period beginning with the New Testament, in which God’s grace is mediated by the rites and sacraments of the church, administered by clerics or priests. The third was the Age of the Spirit (ordo monachorum), which Joachim proclaimed would dawn in the mid-thirteenth century introduced by St. Francis and his coinmunity. The Franciscans were the most spiritual of the traditional orders and would be the new and final order, representing the new people of God, the ecclesia contemplativa, arising out of the tribulation of the last days. Ratzinger translates this novus ordo as the “new People of God.” The Spiritual Franciscans saw themselves as representing the beginning of this new age of the Spirit.
While Bonaventure found much of Joachim’s thought problematic, not least for the tensions it had created within the Franciscan order, he also saw Francis as the sign of a new age, recognizing the possibility that this new age had actually begun. As Aidan Nichols says, “Bonaventure, just like Joachim, hopes for a new age of salvation within history. Between Jesus Christ and the final consummation of history he makes space for an ‘inner-historical transformation of the Church.” Bonaventure also taught that
[P]rior to history’s entry into God’s eternity there will be a “last age” in which the poverty of the church’s Jerusalem beginnings will blossom again in a reign of the poor on earth. Before the name “liberation theology” was ever heard of Ratzinger had to arrive at some judgment about this uncanny thirteenth century anticipation of liberationist eschatology.
Aidan Nichols, Thought of Pope Benedict XVI
One can see immediately where Ratzinger would have profound difficulties with Bonaventure’s vision. He objects that Bonaventure’s eschatology was raising “a new, inner-worldly messianic hope,” “a new salvation in history;” “an inner-historical transformation of the church” — all of which rejected the view “that with Christ the highest degree of inner-historical fulfillment is already realized so that there is nothing left but an eschatological hope for that which lies beyond all history.” It also amounted to making salvation something in history, rather than beyond it, relativizing if not replacing the unique role of the church by making it primarily contemplative rather than mediational, and anticipating a new mission of the poor against the covetous. What Ratzinger learned from his study of Bonaventure had a profound effect on his thinking, an insight or judgment that would return again in the face of new theologies of liberation with similar tendencies to place eschatology in history rather than beyond it, or to speak of a church of the poor, or to advocate modern congregationalist ecclesiologies that dispense with hierarchical mediation.
Bonaventure’s Epistemology
If Ratzinger was critical of Bonaventure’s theology of history, he also learned considerably from Bonaventure’s epistemology, which privileged the wisdom of faith over philosophy and the natural sciences. Writing in the mid-thirteenth century, a time in which the recent introduction of the thought of Aristotle was changing the traditional, largely Platonic understanding of theology Bonaventure saw theology as “nothing other than the understanding of Scripture.”~ Since Christ was the center of all things, philosophy for Bonaventure had to be radically Christian. But under the influence of the Aristotelians, philosophy was becoming increasingly self-sufficient, an autonomous discipline based on natural reason. While Bonaventure did not include Aquinas among the contemporary Aristotelians he was criticizing, he felt that Aquinas showed too much confidence in Aristotle. His own thought moved in another direction. According to Ratzinger, Bonaventure’s Collationes in Hexaemeron represented “a battle against a self sufficient philosophy standing over against faith.” It was not just anti-Aristotelian, but developed “into a general anti-philosophical attitude.”
There are of course parallels here between Bonaventure’s epistemology and Ratzinger’s. Ratzinger admires especially Bonventure’s absolute rejection of any philosophy not integrated into Christian wisdom. For both, Christ is the true wisdom. Komonchak refers to Ratzinger’s “Bonaventuran” theological vision:
“The gospel will save us, not philosophy, not science, and not scientific theology. The great model for this enterprise is the effort to preach the gospel in the alien world of antiquity and to construct the vision of Christian wisdom manifest in the great ages of faith before philosophy, science, and technology separated themselves into autonomous areas of reflection and activity.”
Komonchak, Church in Crisis, 13
Bonaventure, for whom Francis of Assisi was always a model, saw an essential relation between revelation and humility; the relation was such “that anyone who is entirely lacking in humilitas is also incapable of receiving any knowledge of revelation.” This emphasis, learned from both Augustine and Bonaventure, also becomes characteristic of Ratzinger’s thinking.
Attitude toward Modernity
Given the Platonic and Augustinian currents in Benedict’s thought as well as his own personal liistory his evaluation of modernity is ambiguous at best. His Augustinian tendency to contrast ±e wisdom of the world with that of the church was certainly reinforced by his experience of coming to maturity in Nazi Germany. He looks back on the church and its teaching as the one bulwark against the destructive ideology of the Nazis: “she had stood firm with a force coming to her from eternity. It had been demonstrated: The gates of hell will not overpower her.”
While many have argued that his thought moved in a more conservative direction after the student revolts of 1968, much of which he saw as Marxist-inspired, Michael Fahey insists that his thought “shows an amazing consistency.” According to Joseph Komonchak, Ratzinger very early aligned himself with a stream of renewal represented by theologians like Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou, who advocated a ressourcement, or return to the sources of Christian faith and life. “He showed little interest in another stream (represented by figures such as Marie-Dominique Chenu, Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, and Edward Schillebeeckx) which, inspired by Aquinas, proposed and attempted a positive engagement with modern intellectual and cultural movements.” Indeed, Ratzinger’s attitude becomes evident in his observation that the movement toward renewal in Catholic theology after World War I had been based on ressourcement, but since the council the emphasis has been on aggiornamento, so concerned with the present moment that “it regards any recourse to the past as a kind of romanticism.”
Benedict wants the church to be distinct from the world and its wisdom. He feels that a tendency to accommodate modem thinking has led to the loss of a sense of identity and mission for the church. Thus, his tendency is to return always to the sources of the faith in the scriptures, the liturgy, and the fathers of the church. But, important as this is, it makes him seem less open to advances in learning that could be identified as “secular” rather than “sacred.” In the words of one critic, he “sees all traditions and historical experiences outside his own as gray, while the castle of Catholic tradition that he inhabits is suffused with the deep reds and blues of stained glass and the flame of candles… .As the searchlight of orthodoxy and liturgy drown out the weaker voices of liberal critics.. .the Pope and the magisterium—the centralized authority of Roman Catholic wisdom—have no need to look outside for enlightenment.”
For example, like Pope John Paul II, who described contemporary culture as a “culture of death,” Pope Benedict in his installation homily used the metaphors of “desert” and “sea of darkness without light” to describe the contemporary world. While these metaphors may sometimes be meaningful, they also suggest that there are no values or advancements in understanding in contemporary culture from which the church might learn, for example, an emphasis on democratic structures, participation in decision making, transparency, the accountability of those in authority; and the principle of subsidiarity, which honors the right of smaller communities to make decisions appropriate to their life. This makes his approach seem overly negative.
Ethical Questions
His approach to ethical questions suggests a closed hermeneutical circle. He correctly argues that the scripture does not offer specific moral propositions but rather a structure; it points to reason as the source of moral norms. Here he sees three agencies at work: the Christian and human experience of the church at large, the work of scholars, and the listening and deciding undertaken by the church’s teaching authority. In Nichols’s words, the teaching charism of the pope and bishops “is not meant to substitute for the exercise of the experiential and learned elements in the Church, but to ‘place’ the results of the latter within a wider whole: the apostolic Church in its response to the apostolic revelation.” While this does not exclude doctrinal development in the area of morals, it does not presuppose it either.
Ratzinger, however, does seem to overload the church’s teaching authority with the presumption that it always knows the truth. He does not appeal to extra-ecclesial sources, for example, to advances in knowledge assisted by scientific research, sociological evidence, or psychology. The church today faces many questions that come from such advances, questions that are not answered simply from within the hermeneutical circle of scripture, the tradition, and the magisterium. What about what is learned through the sciences—can such historical data also become data for theology? For example, does the church need to rethink its discipline excluding those in second marriages without annulments from receiving holy communion, appealing to the principle of “economy,” as do the Orthodox? What about the relatively recent discovery of the concept of sexual orientation as given, not chosen, with increasing indications that it is determined very early in a child’s life or even before birth—does this have any implications for the church’s understanding of homosexuality? What about the many issues raised by advances in modern medicine, questions in the area of bioethics, such as the “end of life”? Has the church kept pace with a new appreciation of women in society; and the implications this might have for the church? Has the church sought to address these issues, drawing on the wisdom of its scholars and bishops and the experience of its faithful, or does it speak simply in the voice of the Roman congregations? Is there some wisdom, born of experience, from which the church might learn?
The apparently closed nature of Ratzinger’s hermeneutic circle has led some commentators to argue that he is not really open to what might be learned from other sources. As Komonchak observes, there are in his writings “very few positive references to intellectual developments outside the church; they almost always appear as antithetical to the specifically Christian.”
Theological Pluralism
The phenomenon of globalization has brought new challenges to the church and its theology; with the inevitable tensions between the local and the universal. How can a universal, multicultural church embrace theologies that reflect the unique insights, problems, and approaches that make up the diverse cultures of the Catholic Church? Can there be genuinely Asian or African theologies? Will Rome be open to the whole issue of theological inculturation? Or does the theological language that developed in the West become a standard for the newer theologies of Asia, Africa, or Latin America?
Many theologians today argue that effective evangelization depends on regional churches being able to develop their own theologies, reflective of their own contexts. Others are much more cautious, suggesting that local theologies pose a threat to the unity and universality of the church. In an early reflection on the highlights of Vatican II, Ratzinger seemed more open to local theologies. He observed that the implantation of Christianity in Asia had so far failed, in part because it had been unable to move beyond Occidental culture. “To this hour there has arisen no really indigenous Asiatic Christianity reflecting a genuine grasp of the spirit and culture of the Orient.”
Yet as prefect of the CDIF, Cardinal Ratzinger was reluctant to use the term inculturation. In 1993 he told the bishops of Asia that they should avoid the term, using instead inter-culturality. The idea of inculturation seemed for him to imply that “a faith stripped of culture could be transplanted into a religiously indifferent culture whereby two subjects, formally unknown to each other, meet and fuse.” Inter-culturality suggests a meeting of two cultures, such that one does not destroy, but can enrich the other. His point here is an important one. As Francis Schussler Fiorenza points out, Ratzinger does not think it possible to conceive of Christianity independent of culture. He fears that such a transcultural vision of Christianity would entail a loss of its distinctive Christian identity.
But he also seems to presume the normativity of Western culture for Christian theology In his interview with Vittorio Messori, he said that “there is no way back to the cultural situation which existed before the results of European thought spread to the whole world.” His 2006 academic lecture at Regensburg seemed to go even further. He pointed out that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures produced in Alexandria between 300 and 200 BCE, was more than a mere translation; it was “an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation” in which a profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place, evident in the later Wisdom literature. The New Testament also reflects this Greek spirit. Thus, for Ratzinger the Western rapprochement between faith and the use of human reason is part of biblical revelation; it is “part of the faith itself.
He sees Western thought as having moved beyond this synthesis between Christian faith and Greek reason, the result of the call for a “de-Hellenization of Christianity” that had already begun to emerge with the Reformation’s rejection of metaphysics, with its principle of sola scriptura. This same rupture of reason and faith was continued by liberal theology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and in the contemporary effort to argue that the early church’s synthesis of faith and reason under the influence of Hellenism is not binding on other cultures. Indeed, he argues that Christianity has more in common with ancient cultures, and, indeed, with other religions, both of which teach that humans must turn toward God and the eternal, than with the relativistic and rationalistic world of today that has cut itself loose from these fundamental insights.
While Benedict’s privileging of Western thought, at least in its historic synthesis of faith and reason, makes him less open to non-Western modes of thinking in principle, the point of his address at Regensburg was to insist that the modern, Western self-limitation of reason to the empirical and the demonstrable rules out a genuine dialogue with other cultures and religions, particularly with those that see the exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their deepest convictions. This of course was the main point of the address, which was largely lost because of the controversy over his remarks about Islam.
Nevertheless, Benedict’s point here was crucial. Without a concept of reason open to the questions of religion and the divine, a critical dialogue with religion that examines the rationality of faith remains for the West impossible. Nor will such a culture be able to enter into a genuine dialogue with a religion such as Islam, which looks upon Western culture as essentially atheistic.
Interreligious Dialogue
Ratzinger’s attitude toward dialogue differs considerably from that of his predecessor, John Paul II. In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio, John Paul affirmed that the “Spirit’s presence and activity affect not only the individuals but also society and history peoples, cultures and religions” (no. 28). In other words, for John Paul, the Spirit is mysteriously at work in some way in other religions. Though he holds firmly to Jesus as the one mediator between God and humankind, he also recognizes what he calls “participated forms of mediation,” which acquire meaning only from his mediation (no. 5).
However, Ratzinger seems much less willing to recognize the Spirit’s work in other religions. While the declaration Dominus Jesus, which came from Ratzinger’s CDF, quotes John Paul’s remarks in Redemptoris Missio (no. 55) that God “does not fail to make himself present in many ways, not only to individuals, but also to entire peoples through their spiritual riches, of which their religions are the main and essential expression even when they contain ‘gaps, insufficiencies and errors” (DI 8), it also distinguishes between faith as a supernatural virtue and gift of grace found only in Christianity and belief. James Fredericks asks:
Dominus Jesus concludes that “the sacred books of other religions, which in actual fact direct and nourish the existence of their followers, receive from the mystery of Christ the elements of goodness and grace which they contain.” If the grace contained in the Sutras and the Upanishads, the Qur’an, and the Dao-de king is from Christ and not merely the product of human wisdom untouched by grace, how then can Christians maintain a stark, un-nuanced distinction between “theological faith,” on the one hand, and “belief, in the other religions” which is merely “that sum of experience and thought that constitutes the human treasury of wisdom and religious aspiration”?
What emerges in Ratzinger’s language here is a characteristic distinction between the natural and the supernatural, reflective of his own Augustinian emphasis on the primacy of grace. Dominus Jesus, which came from the CDF under Ratzinger’s prefecture, spoke of those in other religions as capable of receiving divine grace, but added “objectively speaking they are in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the Church, have the fullness of the means of salvation” (no. 22). In many ways Pope John Paul’s approach to other religions was more like Rahner’s, more willing to recognize the ubiquity of the Spirit’s presence.
Ratzinger’s emphasis on evangelization in Dominus Jesus, while making an effort to incorporate what Vatican II says positively about other religious traditions, is so focused on the need to evangelize, to recognize the equal dignity of persons but not of doctrinal content, and to announce “the necessity of conversion to Jesus Christ” even in interreligious dialogue (DI 22) that it fails to communicate a sense that to enter into dialogue with another religious tradition can itself be a truly religious act. It is not simply a means of evangelizing but a way of approaching the mystery of God’s truth, for these religions “often reflect a ray of that truth which enlightens all men and women” (NA 2).
In a more positive essay, “The Dialogue of the Religions,” he outlines three principles. First, dialogue takes place not by renouncing truth but by entering more deeply into it. Second, while looking for what is positive in the belief of the other, we must be willing to accept criticism of ourselves and of our own religion. Third, dialogue is always a dialogical process. It does not replace missionary activity but is always aimed at finding the truth, at conviction, so that mission and dialogue become not opposites but rather mutually interpenetrate each other. The “dialogue of religions should become more and more a listening to the Logos, who is pointing out to us, in the midst of our separation and our contradictory affirmations, the unity we already share.”
Conclusion
Though Joseph Ratzinger was one of the youngest of the peritus at the Second Vatican Council, his instinctive tendency is much more toward ressourcement than aggiornamento. Few contemporary theologians are more rooted in tradition, particularly in the biblical and patristic tradition of the church. From his long years as a professor he is well read in contemporary theology and refers to it constantly in his work.
Yet his particular gift is to expound the tradition with a remarkable clarity rather than to reinterpret it creatively for new situations and problems. His optic on the human is colored by his love for Augustine. His own thought, often described as neo- Augustinian, has more in common with Augustine and the Reformers, especially with Luther and his theologia crucis, than with Aquinas or modern interpreters such as Kit! Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. While he contrasts Rahner’s theology as speculative and philosophical, conditioned by Suarezian scholasticism and its new reception in the light of German idealism and Heidegger, he characterizes his own intellectual formation as shaped by scripture, the fathers, and “profoundly historical thinking.”
Yet it is not clear how much historical consciousness has really shaped his thinking. There is a decidedly Neo-Platonic cast to his thought, deepened by his study of Bonaventure which has left him suspicious of any wisdom that is merely secular. At the same time, his preference for the idea over the real and the existential gives an a priori character to much of his theology and raises the question of how “new data,” whether from recent discoveries, from the social sciences, or from practical human experience, are integrated into his theological reflection. His tendency is to stress the supernatural over the merely natural.
His firm conviction of the complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ (DI 4) makes him somewhat ambivalent in regard to dialogue with non-Christian traditions. His concern is always to safeguard the absolute truth possessed by the church, not just from the “acids of modernity” but also from the modern tendency to see all religions as equally valid ways to the truth, which is detrimental to the church’s mission. This is not entirely wrong. As Francis Clooney emphasizes, “in the West we have forgotten that dialogue is a search for truth, not simply a modus vivendi.” Benedict argues that if all religions are equal in principle, “then mission can only be a kind of religious imperialism, which must be resisted.” The truth of God’s revelation in Christ must be offered as a gift, but freely and in love.
Thus, an obvious strength of Ratzinger’s theology is his adamant refusal to let secular modernity define the rules of the dialogue. In his view, the West since the Enlightenment has cut itself loose from its Christian roots with its historical synthesis of faith and reason, reducing knowledge to a narrow model based on scientific reason and the criterion of verifiability. Christianity cannot be reduced to an illumination in the depths of the person; its nature is historical because it is based on events.
Even biblical interpretation has been subjected to this same rationalism. Without a place for the transcendent, or for Christian revelation, Western intellectual culture has settled for technical knowledge rather than wisdom. Rather than constructing a society based on shared moral values rooted in God’s revelation, modern society relies on social engineering. Religion has been confined to personal interiority thus to the realm of subjectivity Each person is left free to construct his or her personal faith.
Of course Pope Benedict rejects all this. His theology begins from the principle that God has spoken in our history, that the divine self-disclosure takes place in the person of Jesus, the Word made flesh. He has challenged secular rationality not just as a religious leader but precisely as a theologian. He wants scripture to be the word of God, not just another historical text.
