Ratzinger's Faith and Reason | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Ignatius Insight
Ratzinger's Faith and Reason | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | In
Appreciation of Tracey Rowland's Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope
Benedict XVI
http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2008/schall_trowlandbk_may08.asp
"Benedict believes that the
Mass is a Holy Sacrifice, offered ritually as worship, not a fellowship meal, that
those who attend do so for the purpose of Divine Worship, that music which is
based on most contemporary popular musical forms is completely unworthy, and
that everything that is related to the Mass and other liturgies of the Church
should be marked by beauty. Beauty is not an optional extra or something
contrary to a preferential option for the poor. It is not a scandal to clothe
sacred words in silken garments. Catholics are not tone deaf philistines who
will be intellectually challenged by the use of a liturgical language or put
off by changeless ritual forms." — Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger's Faith
"From the beginning,
Christianity has understood itself as the religion of the 'Logos', as the
religion according to reason. In the first place, it has not identified its
precursors in the other religions, but in the philosophical enlightenment which
has cleared the path of tradition to turn to the search of the truth and
towards the good, toward the one God who is above all gods." — Joseph
Cardinal Ratzinger, "The Subiaco Address"
I.
The reading of what is
billed as a "theology" book on a pope, of all things, will not seem to be what
this book surely is to read, namely, a distinct pleasure. Aristotle warned us
that if we do not take proper delight in all things, especially in the things
of the mind, we will not know the highest pleasures that are in store for us
when we seek to use that given faculty we call intellect. Well, that is not an
exact citation from Aristotle, but pretty close. Clearly the highest pleasures
follow from our knowing the highest truths and the reality in which they are
founded. The central point of this book is this: "What is the Christian
understanding of God?" And what is the relation of the God of Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob to the God of the Philosophers? No doubt our best current guide to
the answer to these fundamental questions lies in the work and pontificate of
Benedict XVI.
This slim volume by Tracey
Rowland is introduced by George Cardinal Pell. He remarks, "It is a sign of the
times and a portent of the future that this excellent volume was written by a
young, married woman" well on her way to "becoming Australia's leading
theologian" (x). Tracey Rowland is from the Brisbane area, currently the head
of the John Paul Institute in Melbourne, where her husband Stuart is a lawyer.
She earned a Master's Degree in political philosophy at the University of
Melbourne and her doctorate at Cambridge University in England.
Rowland's first book, Culture and the
Thomist Tradition After Vatican II, is a critical
analysis of the understanding of "culture" in the Vatican II Document, Gaudium
et Spes (The Church in the Modern
World). The second chapter of this book treats Joseph Ratzinger's understanding
of this same issue of whether "culture" is "philosophically neutral." If it is
not, as it is not, then any effort to reconcile oneself with this same culture
will involve accepting doctrines inherent in the cultural patterns that are in
fact inimical to the faith. Thus,
For
Ratzinger, the whole point of Gaudium et Spes, correctly interpreted, is that a 'daring new'
Christocentric theological anthropology is the medicine that the world needs,
and that it is the responsibility of the Church to administer of it. He is
critical of interpretations which would transform Christianity into what he
provocatively calls a 'poorly managed haberdashery that is always trying to
lure more customers'" (46).
This means that the
understanding of man begins with the understanding of God, creation, the Fall,
the Incarnation, and redemption. If we begin here, we will understand our minds
better, while leaving them at the same time precisely minds.
II.
As I have known Tracey
Rowland for many years as a good friend and have also known her work, I would
not restrict the scope of her theological excellence and influence to
Australia. Her association with the Cambridge "Radical Theology" school already
has put her in contact with some of the most insightful figures in today's
theological world, with John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, Fergus Kerr O. P.,
and Aidan Nichols O. P. Thus, the following remarks are by no means a "review"
or "critique" of Rowland's work. Let's just call them, as was the case of my
comments on Msgr. Robert Sokolowski's Christian Faith & Human
Understanding (Ignatius Insight,
March 2006), Schall's "appreciation" of a friend's remarkably insightful book.
Yes, I find here a distinct
delight that comes from reading something that is both well done, true, and
indeed written, as all theology should be, with considerable wit. Let me cite
just one example of the latter: "When it comes to the question of whether or
not the practice of kneeling should be abolished (as advanced liturgists oddly
seem to insist is the will the Almighty), he (Benedict) has no time at all for
the ideas of the anti-kneeling contingent" (138). In fact, the Pope's analysis
of the history of kneeling (Benedict seems to know the history of about
everything) shows that it is a distinctly Christian invention, not at all
common to other religions. Its practice was based on a specifically Christian
theological idea of the relation of man to God not at all inimical to either of
the two parties.
The only "quibble" that I
have with this book is over the title. This issue is succinctly expressed in
the title I have given to these reflections, not Ratzinger's Faith, as is in fact the book's title, but "Ratzinger's
Faith and Reason." This is why I
cited the passage about the Logos
from Ratzinger's Subiaco Lecture, a passage that can be duplicated in the
Regensburg Lecture (also an Appendix of this book) and many other sources in
the immense corpus of this present pope's writings. If we just call something
"Schall's Faith" or "Rowland's Faith," or even "Ratzinger's Faith," we will be
tempted to say: "Well, fine, so that is what that fool Schall holds. So what? I
hold something entirely different! On this approach, everyone's 'faith' is
equal no matter what it is." The whole spirit of Ratzinger's work, of course,
is that such relativism cannot be defended in reason and certainly not in
revelation.
Now I do not at all imply
that Tracey Rowland would not agree with my point here if she knew it. Knowing
the ways of book editors and publishers, I am not even sure this was her
original title. Why this pope is particularly important is precisely his
insistence that the faith is addressed to and indeed advances and heals reason.
That connection is what this book is about in its most important reaches. No
one is clearer on this point than Tracey Rowland herself. "The emphasis given
by Benedict to 'an intellectual affirmation' by which one understands the
beauty and the organic structure of faith means that the primary task of the
Church in this era is one of catechesis and healing rather than accommodation
and assimilation" (147). Notice that the "beauty" and "organic structure" of
the faith are what calls for an "intellectual affirmation."
I have often been amused in
Ratzinger's writings, say in his Jesus of Nazareth, in which he would cite some scholarly explication
of a way to interpret a passage in scripture about the nature of Jesus that was
untenable. After explaining the scholar's point and the evidence for it, the
pope would simply say of the position, "But there is no evidence in the text
for this view." Discussing the question of how to situate the work of
Ratzinger—is he a Thomist? an Augustinian? a reactionary? a
liberal?—Tracey Rowland writes in this same spirit:
For
many the only logical alternative to not being for modernity or post-modernity
is to be for some kind of medieval or baroque restoration. However, there is
no evidence of support for these alternatives in Ratzinger's works either. He explicitly rejects the baroque
alternative in theology and he is not so facile a character as simply to want
to replay Augustine and Bonaventure over and over until the Second Coming. (45)
This passage is not only
quite amusing—imagine a "facile" Ratzinger "replaying" Augustine over
till the Second Coming—but brings up the question of where Ratzinzer
stands with regard to medieval, baroque, modern, and post-modern thought.
Actually, I can imagine the
pianist, Josef Ratzinger, playing Mozart over and over on the piano till the
Second Coming and beyond. What he says on beauty, as the introductory citation
implies, comes pretty close to suggesting, as does Plato, that the singing and
sacrificing and dancing may very well what we do in eternity.
There is nothing neo-Manichean (matter is evil) about Ratzinger.... One of the
strongest Augustinian things about him is his concern for the transcendental of
beauty... His sympathy for Augustine and Bonaventure lies not in any Manichean
propensities but primarily in the place they give to love, the way that they
envisage the relationship between love and truth, and their common concern for
the transcendental of beauty. (149)
We should not underestimate
such a passage. It portends that, in this pope, we have a man who is wise in
all fields. Christianity in its Catholic grounding is a coherent whole that
first needs to know what its own internal order is fundamentally about. Then,
in knowing this order, it can examine what the other claims to truth are and
the evidence for them. This book of Tracey Rowland, I think, in the briefest
way possible, gives the dimensions of this coherence and the initiatives to
make it known and practiced that we find in Josef Ratzinger.
III.
"From Benedict's perspective
the suicide of the West began when people stopped believing in the Christian
account of creation and started to sever the intrinsic relationship of faith
and reason." (122) This is a passage worthy of Nietzsche, whose famous death of
God was not so much the result of a metaphysical analysis of being as a
horrible personal realization that Christians themselves evidently did not much
believe in the faith they professed. Nietzsche was a prophet of post-modern irrationalism
and the decline of a Europe that had lost its original faith. Ratzinger often
cites Nietzsche. "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 superman or the feminist superwoman." (72) The superman
projects his will to power in a world of void that has lost its coherence. The
very opposite of this view is that of a world made in gift that arises out of
the abundance of the love within the Trinitarian Godhead itself.
In his Audience on St.
Benedict, the pope clearly explained his concern for modern Europe:
In
order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical
instruments are important, but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and
spiritual renewal which draws on the Christian roots of the Continent,
otherwise a new Europe cannot be built. Without this vital sap, man is exposed
to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem
himself by himself—a utopia which in different ways, in the 20th
century Europe, as Pope John Paul II pointed out, has caused 'a regression
without precedent in the tormented history of humanity'." (L'Osservatore
Romano, April 16, 2008)
It is a commonplace that
behind political institutions is always a worldview, an ideology. Here the
notion of "self-redemption" is seen precisely as an alternative to that faith
that originated Europe. It is ironically called a "utopia" that has led to a
"regression without precedent."
Rowland points out that the
Christian understanding of reason is not simply a return to pagan reason. "'In
the Greek conception, the world appears as a divine fullness at peace within
itself. While for the Christian account of creation, the world is dependent on
something other than itself,' Ratzinger concludes that this is the aesthetic
prelude to an increasingly prominent idea in the modern mind: the idea that the
human dependency implied by faith in creation is unacceptable." (108) What
Benedict has set out to show, especially in his first two encyclicals
Deus
Caritas Est and Spe Salvi, is that what is unacceptable is precisely a denial of
this dependence, the logical consequence of which is not "slavery" but the
freedom to receive the gift of divine life which is the only real destiny worth
having.
This book consists of seven
chapters and an Introduction. The first chapter is on the place of Ratzinger
in theological scholarship. The second deals with culture and Gaudium et
Spes. Chapter Three is on Scripture,
Chapter Four on Moralism and Love, Chapter Five is on the Church, Chapter Six
is on Modernity and Politics, and Chapter Seven is on the Liturgy. Rowland
succinctly explains the position Benedict has taken on all of these issues. One
astonishing thing about Ratzinger is that he does take positions. And he seems
to have thought about most everything. Recently, I had given a number of talks
on Spe Salvi. A couple of weeks
ago, someone gave me a copy of the Catholic University Press translation of Ratzinger's
Eschatology, a book originally
written in German in 1977. Of course, we discover that the pope has been
thinking of death, hell, eternal life, and purgatory for decades. One senses
the finger of God here in bringing forth this material that would otherwise
have been known only to a few had not Ratzinger become Benedict.
The most serious concern of
this book is to place Ratzinger as a thinker and doer who has managed to
confront almost every major theological issue and to keep in clear focus how the
central teachings of the Church are to be understood and presented as the most
brilliant explanations of man in the cosmos. No doubt the chapter that will
cause the most immediate stir is that concerning the liturgy. The pope's book
The
Spirit of the Liturgy, a title he
used in honor of a similar title of Romano Guardini a half century previously,
has been a refreshing representation of the centrality of the Mass, its
meaning, the way to celebrate, attend, and worship at it. That there have been
many aberrations in this area since Vatican II, no one will deny. What to do
about them is a work in progress.
Christianity is, above all,
about the proper way to worship God. This way, when we think about it, could
ultimately only come to us from God Himself. The relation of Christ, the Word,
to the Eucharist, the redemptive sacrifice, and thereby to the Father is
something that Benedict is at pains to clarify. Benedict's "general assessment
is that the reforms of the liturgy in parts of the Church have been 'culturally
impoverishing' and that the 'great cosmic dynamism of the liturgy has grown
short of breath....' Some contemporary liturgies he believes are even forms of
apostasy..." (129) If anything, Benedict seeks to restore dignity and mystery
and, especially, beauty, of music and architecture. "With reference to the
experience of Peter, James, and John of the Transfiguration, he argues that
beauty is 'not mere decoration' but an essential element of liturgical action."
(131) Beauty is, indeed, one of the effects of revelation itself.
To those Catholics who have
longed for a dignified and inspiring liturgy, Roland writes: "Rather than being
ecclesial lepers, in the pontificate of Benedict XVI Catholics who have for
several decades suffered behind an iron curtain of parish tea party liturgies
and banal 'cuddle me Jesus' pop songs, liturgy as psychotherapy and a group
bonding exercise, are more likely to be welcomed in from the cold and treated
like ecclesial treasures." (141) Many will also applaud the following passage
Rowland cites from Ratzinger: "Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy
because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of the
liturgy as totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious
entertainment." (138) The choir itself is "supposed to have been praising god,
not putting on a concert." How much air such a passage clears is difficult to
estimate, but one would guess an awful lot.
IV.
This book, in any case,
possesses a concise thoroughness that finds what Ratzinger said in some obscure
German journal forty years ago. It puts back together things that have been
scattered in Christian thought itself. That we have suffered from liturgical,
theological, scriptural, and cultural confusion there can be no doubt. What we
have in Benedict, as Rowland shows us, is a kind of quiet intellectual energy
that has long penetrated to the core of the most important of theological and
philosophical controversies.
Benedict's is a mind that
does understand what Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Bonaventure and Aquinas
said, what Suarez wrote, what Luther was about. He knows French thought along
with Kant and the Enlightenment. He is familiar with Hegel, Marx, and
Nietzsche, as well as Habermas and the modern German scholars and philosophers.
His "proof" that the resurrection is at least intellectually feasible in Spe
Salvi does not come from Paul or
Aquinas but from the Marxist thinker Theodore Adorn and the meaning of justice
as foreshadowed in Plato.
Ratzinger is aware that the
grounds on which modernity has based itself no longer hold much credibility.
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 passe, though it continues in courtrooms and
government bureaucracies where the dominance of liberal political assumptions
precludes any appeal to first principles. (71)
One finishes this book with
a sense of comfort. The "Logos" has left the secular realm. Its primary
defenders sit on the throne of Peter and deal with the sensible people who
still read Plato and Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and Bonaventure.
Or perhaps we should say
that what Rowland has shown us is how this pope sees a complete reordering of
the priorities of reason and revelation. Ratzinger is in no sense an enemy of
reason, though he knows when it is used erroneously. Revelation does make sense,
but it needs to be seen first as grounded in the scripture and tradition from
whence our understanding of the Godhead first was formulated with the aid of
the Macedonia to which Paul was sent. This pope does seek to meet any religious
or philosophical or scientific position on the grounds of reason. It is no
longer enough politely to "disagree." Though we are to be properly tolerant, no
one can any longer hide under the pretence of "private opinion" left
unexamined. The "unexamined life" that Socrates thought was not worth living
now includes the proper examination of a revelation addressed to Logos, to
reason.
As Benedict remarked in his
Regensburg Address and is repeated here (161), the de facto but illogical
"self-limitation" of reason to only its rationalistic or technical side
deprives our minds of their full scope. It leaves the Western mind devoid of
those spiritual resources that are most looked for in the cultures of Islam and
the East. "Western culture is fractured since each of its institutions, from
the family up to parliaments, universities, and courts, are operating on
concepts and values which are unstable and at varying states in the process of
'multifaceted mutation. There is not even one single telos to which the mutations are heading." (143) These
are sober, ominous words.
This book is literally what
its sub-title says it is, "the theology of Pope Benedict XVI." We will not
find, I suspect, a clearer or briefer or more accurate presentation of this
theology. "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." (70) The papacy of Benedict, as Tracey Rowland recounts it so well,
is nothing less than a careful reminder and explanation to us of just that in
which this "logical coherence" consists.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger's
Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: University Press, 2008), 140-41.
[2]
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "The Subiaco Address" (April 1, 2005), Appendix I of Ratzinger's
Faith, ibid., 163.
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Fr. James V. Schall, S.J., is Professor of Political Philosophy
at Georgetown University.
He is the author of numerous books on social issues, spirituality, culture,
and literature including Another
Sort of Learning, Idylls
and Rambles, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning,
The Life of the Mind (ISI, 2006),
The Sum Total of Human
Happiness (St. Augustine's Press, 2007), and The
Regensburg Lecture. His most recent book is
The Order of Things (Ignatius Press, 2007). Read more of his essays on his
website.
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