| | | OFFLINE | | Post: 31.814
Post: 13.900 | Registrato il: 28/08/2005
Registrato il: 20/01/2009 | Administratore | Utente Gold | |
|
I could not add more to the preceding post because there is a limit of 65,000 characters for a post. But it's just as well because I do not want anything like
the following to be in the same post as Joseph Ratzinger's essay... But now, read what Livi wrote, quoting from Radaelli and adding his own broadsides to
Radaelli's critique:
Heresy (is) in power
by Antonio Livi
Translated from
January 2, 2018
I believe it is indispensable, in the present theological-pastoral conjuncture, to consider what Enrico Maria Radaelli has so exhaustively demonstrated in his last work, Al cuore di Ratzinger. Al cuore del mondo" (In the heart of Ratzinger. In the heart of the world) (Edizioni Pro-manuscripto Aurea Domus, Milano 2017), namely, that the hegemony (first de facto, then de jure) of progressivist theology in the magisterial and governing structures of the Catholic Church owes itself even – and perhaps above all – to the teachings of Professor Joseph Ratzinger which were never denied, much less overcome, by Joseph Ratzinger as bishop, cardinal and pope.
[It is an unfounded exaggeration to speak of this ‘hegemony’ before Bergoglio became pope – since when, many of his writings and discourses have appeared to legitimize, at least for the media and the public they influence, most of progressive theology, i.e., made it de jure. But one must question that before March 13, 2013, there was even a de facto hegemony, although evidently, progressivist theology had sought to impose itself on the Church after Vatican-II, with varying degrees of success or failure and on different levels of the Church structure.
But to say it had de facto hegemony is to say – which Radaelli and Livi both dare affirm – that their theology had ‘overtaken’ even the popes themselves, whose individual and collective Magisterium will quickly dispel that lie! While Paul VI may have allowed himself to be influenced by his liturgical commission into protestantizing the Mass, that would seem to be the extent of the ‘hegemony’ that the progressivists had on him, because before the Novus Ordo, he had decreed Humanae Vitae – in the very year of the Cultural Revolution in the West – against the recommendations of his progressivist study commission. And shortly after his Mass came into effect, he made that famous line about ‘the smoke of Satan having seeped into the Church’.]
This hypothesis, which thus enunciated, could appear to many as unacceptable (I refer to all those who have so far seen Ratzinger as Cardinal Prefect of the CDF and then as Pope Benedict XVi as a providential bulwark against what he himself called ‘the dictatorship of relativism’), has adequate scientific justification in Radaelli’s book which analyzes page by page Ratzinger’s fundamental theological text, Einführung in das Christentum: Vorlesungen über das apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis (Introduction to Christianity: Lectures on the Apostolic Creed) which was published in 1968 as a re-elaboration of the lectures in theology given the preceding semester by the then 41-year-old professor at the University of Tuebingen, which has had 22 editions since then, the latest one in 2017.
Radaelli is known as the foremost disciple and interpreter of Romano Amerio who in 1985 published Iota Unum. Studio delle variazioni della Chiesa Cattolica nel secolo XX (Iota unum: A study of changes in the Catholic Church in the 20th century) – which I consider the first, courageous, serious and documented denunciation of the presence of theological modernism in the form (rhetoric) and substance (ideology) of Gaudium et spes, and of other Vatican-II texts. [Livi forgets that Ratzinger/Benedict XVI himself has been an outspoken critic of some main features in G&S – perhaps one of his major disagreements with John Paul II, who, having contributed to its drafting, stood by it 100%.]
Imitating the exegetic scrupulousness and intellectual honesty of his mentor [Livi thereby implies thereby that Joseph Ratzinger lacks both qualities!], Radaelli carefully studied the Ratzinger text, citing its fundamental passages from a recent Italian edition (2000), immediately noting – and this is one of the facts that support his hypothesis – that Joseph Ratzinger, even when he had become Prefect of the CDF, never felt the need to review or modify its contents. [And why would he??? He has been both consistent and honest about what he believes and what he teaches!]
Indeed, in 2000, he wrote that his book could well have been entitled Introduction to Christianity: Yesterday, today and tomorrow, adding: “Its basic orientation was, I believe, right. Wherefore my courage in placing this book once more in the hands of readers”. (“Introductory essay to the 2000 edition”, ed. cit., p 24).
In short, Radaelli concludes, the theology that Ratzinger has always professed and which can be found in all his writings, even in those signed as Benedict XVI (his three books on JESUS OF NAZARETH and 16 volumes of his INSEGNAMENTI (Teachings) [official texts of his Magisterium as compiled by the Vatican Archives and published twice a year during his Pontificate]) [I must interrupt here to question Livi’s false assertion that the JESUS books were signed as Benedict XVI – since the then-Pope was always very clear, from the beginning, that those books are his own personal writings as Joseph Ratzinger, not as Benedict XVI] are not substantially different from that of the “Introduction..’, which is an immanentist theology in which all the traditional terms of Catholic dogma remain linguistically unaltered but their meaning has changed: he has set aside, because he considers them incomprehensible today, all the conceptual schemes proper to Scripture itself, to the Fathers of the Church, and to the Magisterium (which presuppose what Bergson called ‘the spontaneous metaphysics of the human intellect’), “the dogmas of the faith are re-interpreted with conceptual schemes that are proper to modern subjectivism (from Kant’s transcendentalism to Hegel’s dialectic idealism).
All at the expense, Radaelli correctly observes, most especially of the basic notion of Christianity, namely, faith in the revelation of supernatural mysteries by God, ‘fides qua creditur’ (faith as belief). “This idea becomes irremediably deformed in the theology of Ratzinger by the adoption of the Kantian scheme that it is impossible to have a metaphysical knowledge of God, with the consequent recourse to ‘the postulates of practical reason’, which entails the denial of the rational premises of the faith and its replacement by ‘the reasons for believing’ which constituted the classic argument of apologetics after Vatican-I, merely on the ‘desire to believe’ which was theorized by the philosophy of pragmatist religion a la William James. [Imagine accusing the Pope of Faith-and-Reason himself of denying the rational premises of the faith!]
Ratzinger has always sustained, even in his most recent discourses, that the Christian act of faith has as its specific object, not the mysteries revealed by Christ, but the person of Christ himself, as we know him in the Scriptures and in the liturgy of the Church. [And why not? As Ratzinger reiterates in the 2000 essay, Christ's message is himself! Moreover, the mysteries of the faith mean less than nothing, unless one believes in Christ as the Son of God incarnated in order to redeem man from the ultimate consequence of Original Sin – which is eternal separation from God. And while we may call the mysteries of the faith ’mysteries’, they really adapt themselves to our limited human comprehension to the point that, as Christians and as Catholics, we accept and understand that yes, God can be Three Persons and still be One, which, I suppose, would be the basic ‘mystery’ that confronts a child first learning to be Christian and making the Sign of the Cross in the name of the three Persons of the Trinity.]
And because most contemporary theology today, according to Ratzinger, is unable to speak of faith other them in ambiguous and contradictory terms, “The problem of knowing exactly the content and the meaning of the Christian faith is today enveloped in a nebulous aura of uncertainty as perhaps never before in history” (op.cit., p 25). [So? Is that not a fact?]
In effect, theology today is constrained to admit that, in the believer’s soul, doubt is always associated with his act of faith (which he wills, even if it is 'unfounded'). [But is that not what faith is? I have faith because it was taught to me with my mother's milk, and even if as a child, I may not have been able to completely understand or explain what it was that I believed in, I knew exactly what I believed in by the time I had my first Communion, and I thank God that my belief, my faith, has always been complete and absolute, because faith, as such, does not have to be fully comprehensible nor explicable: it just is, and once you have accepted it and internalized it – as any Catholic who lives a sacramental life necessarily does – you don’t even question it. To doubt is to question your own faith, and it is a contradiction to the word ‘faith’ itself.]
This happens because the basis for the act of faith is no longer, as Vatican I taught, “the authority of God who cannot deceive himself nor deceive men”, but man himself who has wanted to construct an idea of God that satisfies his own spiritual exigencies. [Is that what Livi and Radaelli think Catholics do? Of course, each one of us is free to ‘imagine’ God as we please, but if you profess and practice Catholicism, then your basic unchanging idea of God cannot be other than the Triune God, even if Jorge Bergoglio says “There is no Catholic God”.]
But this idea of God, which the religious man of today has constructed in his own likeness and image [NO! How can any BEING other than GOD be the Three-in-One SUPREME BEING, CREATOR AND LORD OF ALL? – and if you imagine God as just like you, then you are not being Christian or Catholic at all], is inevitably uncertain and problematic, and theologian Ratzinger is aware of the radical incompatibility of God with contemporary culture.
Whoever tries to disseminate the faith among men who live and think today can really have the impression of being a clown, or even someone coming back to life from an old sarcophagus… He will realize the condition of insecurity towards which his own faith is heading, the almost unstemmable power of the unbelief that opposes his good will to believe… The threat of uncertainty weighs on the believer… (as though) he can live his faith only and always by giving in to the ocean of nothingness, of temptation and of doubt, because he has been assigned this sea of uncertainty as the only possible locus for his faith” (op. cit., pp 34-37)
[But he is describing the situation of the believer in today’s world - not saying that this is how it ought to be, but how it is - to better underscore why the message of Christ (Christ himself!) needs more than ever to be reinforced in the ‘faithful’ believer, and properly taught to catechumens and to the uninformed.]
Radaelli shows how the same expressions are found in the publicity for the Jesuit Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, who as Archbishop of Milan, liked to say: “Each of us has in ourself a believer and a non-believer who question each other in turn”. [That is not what Ratzinger says in the quoted passage. He says the believer today finds he has to live in a world of uncertainty that will always challenge his belief – or better yet, his faith – which does not necessarily mean that he has to succumb to this uncertainty. But do Radaelli and Livi subscribe to the Martini axiom – which is not what Ratzinger was saying? If they both pride themselves in being staunch Catholics, as firm and solid and steadfast in their faith as the Fathers of the Church – whom they accuse Ratzinger of setting aside, when he has probably been the most openly and widely Patristic of all the modern Popes! – then surely they cannot uphold Martini’s axiom!] I would add that these are the same expressions used by Gianni Vattimo in describing Christian belief as part of the Christian’s ‘weak thinking’.
But it is precisely this substantially skeptical notion of faith in Revelation which, according to Ratzinger, allows theology a profitable confrontation with today’s philosophy and science, explicitly conceding to them the epistemological premise that a rational knowledge of God and of natural law is impossible. [But that is the secular premise. And theologians do not need to be skeptical about Revelation in order to confront this secular view – it is simply a given for their task. Are they saying that Ratzinger himself is skeptical of Revelation? What an absurd notion about someone who wrote the JESUS OF NAZARETH trilogy – in which the very premise is that Jesus was the fulfillment of what the Old Testament had foretold in so many ways, and that the Gospels narrate the true and authentic story of the historical Jesus who is also the Jesus of the faith.]
In effect, if not even the believer is certain about the existence of God and of his visible presence in Christ [which Ratzinger does not say - only that believers today are constantly challenged by unbelief about the existence of God, and consequently, about Jesus himself being the Son of God!], then in the Church’s dialog with the modern world, one must speak of God as a hypothesis [Livi appears to disapprove of this, but to the secular world, yes, God is nothing but a hypothesis they have no use for, but that does not make him a hypothesis to the believer, and if the latter must argue against a secular about God, then he has to argue against the secular’s hypothesis, in favor of the God he believes in!] It is a hypothesis [the world’s – not Ratzinger’s] that Kant believed necessary as a foundation for religious piety, but not as evidence of natural reason on the basis of which it would be reasonable to believe in the word of Christ, who reveals the Father.
That explains to me why Ratzinger, in his praiseworthy efforts at pastoral dialog with secular culture, asked his interlocutors to think in terms of a public morality based on the hypothesis that God exists. (cfr Jürgen Habermas e Joseph Ratzinger, "Ragione e fede in dialogo", trad. it. a cura di G. Bosetti, Marsilio, Venezia 2005). [Yes, because he was talking to seculars who do not believe in God. The maxim, etsi Deus non daretur (“as if God does not exist”) is attributed to the 17th century Dutch jurist and pioneer of international law, Hugo Grotius, has been used by the Church to describe the post-Enlightenment emphasis on the autonomy of the human person, who thinks and acts “as if God does not exist”. Joseph Ratzinger has often cited it to say that it would be more rational for it to be configured as etsi Deus daretur (as if God exists), and that is what he was telling them, as Pascal used to tell his non-believing friends. To agnostics, he has said, what do you have to lose by living etsi Deus daretur?]
Thus did the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith argue on the eve of his election as Pope:
We must therefore overturn the Enlightenment axiom and say: even he who fails to find the way to accepting God, must nonetheless seek to live and direct his life ‘veluti si Deus daretur’, as if God did exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believer friends. This is the advice we would like to give even today to our friends who do not believe. This way, no one would be limited in his freedom, but all our work would find a support and a criterion which it urgently needs.” (“Europe in the crisis of cultures”, lecture given on the night of April 1, 2005, in Subiaco, at the St. Scholastica Monastery, when he received the Premio San Benedetto “for the promotion of life and the family in Europe”).
I read with particular attention the pages of Radaelli’s book in which the concept of ‘weak faith’ is adequately documented. It involves a philosophical-theological problem which, for its importance from the pastoral viewpoint, has always been at the center of my own studies (cfr Antonio Livi, "Razionalità della fede nella Rivelazione. Un’analisi filosofica alla luce della logica aletica", Leonardo da Vinci, Roma 2005; "Logica della testimonianza. Quando credere è ragionevole", Lateran University Press, Città del Vaticano 2007; "Filosofia del senso comune. Logica della scienza e della fede", Leonardo da Vinci, Roma 2010; "Quale pretesa di verità può essere riconosciuta alle dimostrazioni filosofiche dell’esistenza di Dio", in "L’esistenza di Dio. Un’innegabile verità del senso comune che dalla formalizzazione metafisica può ricevere piena giustificazione dialettica", a cura di F. Renzi, Leonardo da Vinci, Roma 2016, pp. 19-36). [A bit of self-puffery here!]
Radaelli’s analysis of Ratzinger’s text made me understand why this great theologian [Freudian slip by Livi? How can he call someone he virtually accuses of heresy and being responsible for the post-conciliar drift towards heresy 'a great theologian'?] has accepted as inevitable today a fideistic interpretation of Christianity [WHOA! Fideism is defined as an “exclusive or basic reliance upon faith alone, accompanied by a consequent disparagement of reason and utilized especially in the pursuit of philosophical or religious truth” - how, once again, can Livi make such statements about the heretofore unchallenged Pope of Faith-and-Reason?] and dismissed as useless ‘neo-scholastic apologetics’ a return to the ‘praeambula fidei’ of Thomas Aquinas that was also acknowledged in the dogmatic documents of the Council of Trent and of the First Vatican Council. [I'll have to find out in INTRODUCTION... where it is that Ratzinger writes that, if he wrote it at all! According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the praeambula fidei (which date back to the Fathers, far before Thomas Aquinas) are those truths preparatory to faith - the existence of God and the fact of revelation- which form the motives of credibility of the Christian religion and so make the profession of the Christian Faith a rationabile obsequium (reasonable service). Can anyone in his right mind imagine Joseph Ratzinger dismissing that?]
The reason is that from the beginning, namely, since ‘Introduction to Christianity', Ratzinger has taken part in that most efficient cultural operation that Cornelio Fabro defined as the ‘adventure of progressivist theology’ and which did just have Karl Rahner as its only protagonist.
Usually, too much importance is given to the doctrinal disagreement between Rahner and Ratzinger, following which the latter left the ‘Concilium’ group of theologians to join those of ‘Communio’. [One would think from Livi’s account that Ratzinger only left Concilium because of the dispute with Rahner and that he then went on to join Communio – when, in fact, he was among the founding members of Communio, the theological journal started by the post-Vatican II theologians who disagreed with the progressivist interpretation of Vatican II that prevailed in Concilium, the first post-conciliar theological journal.]
The truth is that the disagreement was only about dialectical methodology and not about the basic content of the ‘anthropological turning point’ that both wished to imprint on Catholic theology in view of a radical reform of the Church. [Livi’s conclusion, attributing an identity of purpose between Rahner and Ratzinger.]
Just read what Ratzinger himself wrote of his initial collaboration with Rahner during Vatican-II:
“Working with him, I realized that Rahner and I, although we agreed on many points and many aspirations, lived on two different planets. He, like me, was committed to liturgical reform, to a new use for exegesis in the Church and in theology, but his reasons were as diverse from mine. His theology – despite the Patristic readings in his initial years – was totally characterized by the tradition of Suarezian scholasticism [Francisco Suarez, 1548-1617, Spanish Jesuit priest, philosopher and theologian, generally regarded among the greatest scholastics after Thomas Aquinas] and his new version of it in the light of German idealism and Heidegger.
It was a speculative and philosophical theology, in which, ultimately, Scriptures and the Fathers no longer had a very important part, and in which, above all, the historical dimension was of little importance. I, on the other hand, because of my training, was entirely reared on the Scriptures and the Fathers, and on thinking that was essentially historical”. (Joseph Ratzinger, "La mia vita. Autobiografia", Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Città del Vaticano 2005, p. 123).
[Well, does that not prove the opposite of what Livi has been saying about the commonality between Rahner and Ratzinger, and what Radaelli claims that Ratzinger has ‘set aside the conceptual schemes proper to Scriptures themselves and the Fathers of the Church”?]
This digression allows me to reaffirm that the theme confronted by Radaelli’s new book and the acute critique with which he treats it renders a great service to understanding what has been happening in the Church from the 1960s to the present. They are events that I have often synthesized in the words “heresy (is) in power’. I express myself in terms that may seem simplistic or exaggerated but instead they are fully justified by the facts.
The reality is that neo-modernist theology, with its obvious ethical drift, has gradually assumed hegemony in the Church (in seminaries, in the pontifical universities, in the doctrinal commissions of episcopal conferences, and in the dicasteries of the Holy See), and from these positions of power, has influenced the themes and language of various expressions of ecclesial magisterium, and this influence has been fell (in various degrees) in all the documents of Vatican II and many of the teachings of the post-conciliar popes. (cfr Antonio Livi, "Come la teologia neomodernista è passata dal rifiuto del Magistero ancora dogmatico all’esaltazione di un Magistero volutamente ambiguo", in "Teologia e Magistero, oggi", Leonardo da Vinci, Roma 2017, pp. 59-86). [So, apparently Livi himself only recently set down these thoughts in his own book. He is, by the way, the editorial director of the Leonardo da Vinci publishing house.]
These popes have all been conditioned by this hegemony that Joseph Ratzinger himself designated just before he was elected pope, as the ‘dictatorship of relativism’. [In a controversy that attracted a number of contributions over several months in 2011, Sandro Magister highlighted the ‘disappointment’ of many traditionalists – including Radaelli and Robert de Mattei – that Benedict XVI had chosen to ‘ignore’ the errors of Vatican II itself, while concentrating only on what went wrong after the Council. In their opinion, the first error was “the renunciation of the Church's authority to exercise, when necessary, a magisterium of definition and condemnation; the renunciation, that is, of the anathema, in exchange for dialogue”. In a way, that is true, because the current idea of 'dialog' presupposes political correctness, i.e., not giving offense to others, and its particularly erroneous variant, 'ecclesial correctness', whereby, despite Canon 212, no Catholic can or should criticize the pope, however wrong the latter may be.
But since it takes another Council to ‘undo’ whatever outstanding errors were made by Vatican-II, Benedict XVI could only seek to rationalize, as he did, with the December 2005 ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ address, the most controversial decisions of Vatican II as contained in its documents by taking the tried-and-tested Church approach to interpret ambiguities in the Vatican II documents in the light of Church tradition. (This, of course, is the principal justification Cardinal Mueller makes for AL, but with the best will in the world, the justification cannot hold for AL because of the Pandora’s box of counter-traditional and counter-doctrinal practices it has let loose. One could say that, too, for the Vatican-II documents, of course, but progressivist interpretations have been countered and denounced by both John Paul II and Benedict XVI, whereas the liberal interpretations of AL are not just upheld but endorsed by the current pope.)]
Paul VI certainly presided over and directed the Council wisely after the death of John XXIII, and he must be credited with some providential interventions, such as the ‘Nota explicative previa’ which he added to the docmatic constitution Lumen gentium, as well as excluding from discussion at the Council the topics of priestly celibacy and artificial contraception (which he later addressed in the encyclicals Sacerdotis Coelibatus and Humanae Vitae), but at the same time, he upheld the interpretation of Vatican-II as an ‘anthropolgical turning point’ for ecclesiology, as the supreme event that recognized the humanistic values of modernity on the basis of a common ‘religion of man’.
John Paul II certainly had the courage to condemn theological deviations in morality (Veritatis splendor), and took up the teachings of Vatican II against fideism (Fides et ratio) but he allowed Karl Rahner to consolidate his hegemony on ecclesiological studies [Livi confuses 'influence' with 'hegemony', which means dominant leadership] and publicly honored him (with a letter of praise on his 80th birthday) and other important exponents of progressivist theology (naming Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar cardinals).
At the same time, he was deaf to the appeals of many authoritative representatives of the world’s bishops who asked him to effectively counteract the heretical drift of the ecumenical movement and of relations with the Jews. (cfr Mario Oliveri, "Un Vescovo scrive alla Santa Sede sui pericoli pastorali del relativismo dogmatico", Leonardo da Vinci, Roma 2017). [I am surprised Livi did not cite Benedict XVI's Anglicanorum coetibus as an example of the 'heretical drift in the ecumenical movement'! And what does he have against Catholic relations with the Jews?
No need to speak of the present pope. There is enough in the precise and relevant citations made of him by Radaelli in this most useful book.
Now, to give further context to how far out the Radaelli-Livi attack on Ratzinger's theology is, here is an article written shortly after Ratzinger was elected Pope in 2005, in which some Anglophone theologians speak out on his theology:
Theologians reflect on the new Pope's theology
By Jerry Filtreau
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE
May 2005
As a theologian the newly elected Pope Benedict XVI has been described as Augustinian rather than Thomist and more ressourcement than aggiornamento.
These are categories many Catholics may not recognize, but theologians who know his work said they help characterize important aspects of how the new pope, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, thinks.
The French term ressourcement, meaning a return to the sources, and the Italian term aggiornamento, updating or modernizing, were two ways of speaking about the task of church reform and renewal at the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. In the years following the council, they began to be seen as distinct terms identifying different views of the council.
"I think Cardinal Ratzinger had some concerns with what he perceived to be the drift of some of post-Vatican II Catholic theology and, to compensate for that, perhaps stressed the 'ressourcement,'" said Father Robert P. Imbelli, a theologian at Boston College.
"But I don't think he is unaware of the need for 'aggiornamento.' The question is the relative balance between them," he said. "I use those two terms which were used at the time of the council as an effort to speak about the dialectic and tension of Vatican II, which has perdured. I think the difficulty is to keep the tension, and too often one opts for an either/or rather than a both/and."
St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest theologians of the ancient church, is noted for his strong emphasis on the corruption of human nature by sin and the absolute necessity of grace for salvation.
St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest medieval theologians, did not deny sin or the need for grace, but he placed greater emphasis on the goodness of nature, including human nature.
For an Augustinian theologian like the new pope, "there's a certain pessimism about what a human being can do on his own without God's grace," said Dennis Doyle, a professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "I think that does color his approach, and it mixes in very well with his strong anti-Marxism, which is also at the same time an anti-utopianism, the idea that human beings should not try to create a perfect world on their own." [Because Original Sin makes that objectively intrinsically impossible!]
The idea that there is "something very negative about the human experience if we consider it apart from God's grace ... is a strong characteristic of his work," Doyle said.
In Cardinal Ratzinger's homily to the other cardinals just before entering the conclave where he was elected pope, that strong Augustinian bent came through clearly as he warned against "a dictatorship of relativism," "a trivialization of evil" and alien ideologies assailing the church, "from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism."
As a young priest teaching theology in Germany, Father Ratzinger studied St. Augustine extensively. His first book, in 1954, was "Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche" ("People and House of God in Augustine's Teaching on the Church").
In an article in a German theological review in 1969 he wrote, "Augustine has kept me company for more than 20 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."
No short article or couple of labels can capture the complexity and nuances of thought of someone who has been part of the Catholic theological world for more than half a century, the author of more than 60 books and hundreds of articles, one who, as head of the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has been deeply involved in the greatest questions of theology and teaching confronting the church in the past 24 years.
But Father Imbelli said such a discussion of a person's theological roots and leanings, despite its limitations, can be helpful in getting "away from the too-easy liberal-conservative dichotomy."
He called Pope Benedict "a person of substance who is firm in doctrine but also able to explain the faith, not just issue dictums. He will be a pope of reconciliation and peace."
He said he believed the pope's choice of Benedict as his papal name reflected first of all his admiration for St. Benedict, whose life and spirituality were "profoundly rooted in Christ." For the pope, as for his namesake, "Christ is the measure" of everything, he said.
Father John T. Ford, a professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, said that for many years he used Father Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity," which came out in English in 1969, as a basic text for courses on Christianity.
He, like others, recognized a shift in the theologian's approach to postconciliar reform just a few years after the council. By all accounts the young Father Ratzinger was part of the progressive wing of the church before and during the Second Vatican Council, in which he participated as theological expert to German Cardinal Joseph Frings. He was involved in the drafting of several of the council's documents.
Near the end of the council, which was held in four sessions from 1962 to 1965, the beginnings of his break with many fellow progressives could be seen in concerns he had about the council's Pastoral Constitution on the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes.
In The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, British Dominican Father Aidan Nichols wrote that in Father Ratzinger's notes on the development of that document during the council's third session, he recorded "the unresolved tension between two tendencies, one which gave enthusiastic affirmation to the world in a theology of the incarnation, the other presenting the much more critical posture of a theology of the cross."
"This contrast enables us to establish more closely the nature of Ratzinger's 'progressivism' at this point," the British theologian wrote. "It was controlled not so much by the imperative of modernization, or adaptation, 'aggiornamento,' but by that of a return to the biblical, patristic and high medieval sources, 'ressourcement.'"
Father Nichols said that in Father Ratzinger's published notes on the council's fourth session, his objections to the optimism about the world found in Gaudium et Spes increased.
In the epilogue to the fourth session notes, he added, Father Ratzinger struck "more than one somber note."
"Here and there, he thought, and perhaps more frequently than this phrase would imply, 'renewal' would be regarded as synonymous with the 'dilution and trivialization of the whole.' Here and there, the pleasure of liturgical experimentation would 'belittle and discredit' the reform in worship. Here and there, people would enquire after modernity, not after truth, and make what was contemporary the measure of all they did," Father Nichols wrote.
In a 1967 commentary on the council, Father Ratzinger repeatedly criticized Gaudium et Spes, calling it "unsatisfactory" and saying it "is not at all prepared to make sin the center of the theological edifice."
As Gaudium et Spes was being developed, Doyle said, "everybody agreed that the world is an ambiguous place and that the church has the light of Christ to offer to the world." He said the document, however, reflects more the kind of approach that another prominent German theologian at the council, Jesuit Father Karl Rahner, would take.
"Rahner's spin on that was that Christianity is making explicit what to some degree is already true about all of human experience," Doyle said. "Ratzinger, consistently throughout his theological life, always gave more of an emphasis to the need for an explicit encounter with Christ and he did not point to the presence of grace in the world that is somehow prior to or other than what is explicitly Christian not that he wouldn't acknowledge it, but he wouldn't use it as a starting point or as a point of emphasis in the way that Karl Rahner did."
Father Ford spoke of a shift in Father Ratzinger's direction around 1968, during the student uprisings in the United States and Western Europe. "There was a certain exuberance or euphoria after the Second Vatican Council," he said, but 1968 saw student protests against the war in Vietnam, the issuance of Pope Paul VI's condemnation of artificial birth control, followed by organized public dissent to that teaching from many theologians and the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.
In his 2000 biography, Cardinal Ratzinger, John L. Allen reports that as a theology professor at Tubingen in 1968, Father Ratzinger was shocked "that the theology faculties of Tubingen became the 'real ideological center' of the movement toward Marxism."
In one of his own books, Salt of the Earth, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote of the confrontations and challenges to the faith in 1968, "That experience made it clear to me that the abuse of the faith had to be resisted precisely if one wanted to uphold the will of the council."
Father Imbelli said that as a priest in the years following the Second Vatican Council, the new pope "had begun as one of the people who was promoting the new review, Concilium." I]Concilium is an international theological journal founded in 1965 and published in seven languages to, in its words, "promote theological discussion in the spirit of Vatican II." Father Ratzinger was on the founding board.
Father Imbelli added that within a few years, however, Father Ratzinger "became concerned about the direction" in which that journal was going. He assisted Swiss theologian Father Hans Urs von Balthasar in founding another journal that would restore the balance they thought was lacking in Concilium.
Communio, a quarterly begun in 1972 and now published in 15 semi-autonomous editions in Europe, Latin America and the United States, says it is committed to a "program of renewal through return to the sources of the authentic tradition."
Communio promotes reflective circles where its readers regularly get together to pray and discuss articles in the journal and issues in the church. One of its goals is to help overcome the polarization between church traditionalists and progressives. As a priest, bishop and cardinal the new pope has been a frequent contributor.
Father Imbelli said, "I tend to associate Communio with the 'ressourcement' of Vatican II and Concilium with the 'aggiornamento.'"
Father Ford said another key event that alarmed Father Ratzinger just a few years after the council was the publication of Infallible? An Inquiry by his former colleague at Tubingen, Father Hans Kung.
"I was just appalled by Kueng's book. It was more a trumpet blast than a serious work of theology," Father Ford said. However, he said, "it was picked up in popular circles" and for the next decade "it caused the wrong debate."
Father Ratzinger was made Archbishop of Munich and Freising and a cardinal in 1977, and in 1979 he was involved in the decision of the Vatican, in conjunction with the German bishops, that Father Kueng could no longer teach as a Catholic theologian.
While speaking of the time around 1968-70 as a kind of turning point, Doyle cautioned that "this always has to be qualified, in the sense that he also argues that he didn't fundamentally change his positions."
Rather, Doyle said, the radicalization among students, the dissent against the birth control teaching and other things, including a discussion in Concilium on whether there should be a Vatican III, "brought home to him that the Second Vatican Council could be interpreted and applied as though it were the starting point of some liberal trajectory."
It was in that time, he said, that "he seemed to become aware of how distinct his own positions were from the direction that the implementation of the council was going."
And here's the first of two replies to the Livi article posted by Magister on his blog. The writer is a Lawyer from Trieste who is a member of the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists.
Joseph Ratzinger as theologian:
Modern but not modernist
By Antonio Caragliu
Translated from
January 4, 2018
Antonio Livi, in his recent review of Enrico Maria Radaelli’s latest book, has the merit of being clear and to invite us to consider some basic problems regarding the always actual and relevant question of the relationship between faith and reason. [Yet he never once uses that binomial in his review!]
He criticizes Joseph Ratzinger for assuming “the epistemological presupposition that a rational knowledge of God and natural law is impossible”, thus disowning the classical doctrine of the ‘preambula fidei’ and making himself -complicit with ‘modernism’, its skepticism and its subjectivity. [How anyone could say that of the hidden co-author of Fides et ratio, and whose linchpin argument for the new evangelization was the utter compatibility (and inseparability) of Christian faith and reason! If he 'assumes' the epistemological presupposition Livi cites, it is an academic assumption, to lay the ground for contesting it, but he is not assuming the belief himself that it is impossible to rationally know God!]
Livi’s hypothesis does not convince me. But he leads us to ask an interesting question: What is the specifically modern attribute of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology?
The emeritus Pope himself explicitly reaffirms the modernity of his own theological reflections: “I have sought to bring the Church forward on the basis of a modern interpretation of the faith”, he says in Last Conversations to Peter Seewald.
As Livi warns, the modernity of Ratzinger’s theology influences a consideration of the classic doctrine of the praeambula fidei – those truths of a rational and natural order that prepare us for the faith. But this consideration, unlike what Livi claims, does not contradict the principle of the possibility that God can be rationally known, which Ratzinger reaches by another path.
This path takes into account the methodological atheism proper to the experimental sciences which, setting aside the logical aspect of the question of whether God exists, marked the passage from classical culture to the modern. Inn dealing with this methodological atheism, Livi and Ratzinger take two different paths.
Livi takes the path of the metaphysics of ‘common sense’, which he defines as the “organic ensemble of those certainties about the existence of beings in our immediate experience which are always and necessarily at the basis of every other certainty, or of every other claim to truth in judgment, whether existential or atrributive (A. Livi, "Filosofia del senso comune. Logica della scienza e della fede", Roma 2010, p. 7).
Livi’s explicitly metaphysical path is centered on the determination of ‘primary proofs’ that remain substantially extraneous to the investigation of fact that is proper to modern sciences.
Whereas Ratzinger chooses a path that I would define an 'ontological examination in depth’ of the epistemological considerations of modern science. An ontological analysis that derives the origin of human reason from the ‘creative Reason’ for all being. [I have to keep reminding myself: ontology has to do with the nature of being, existence, reality. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.]
At this point, one must specify how the knowledge that emerges with modern science is not so much a decription of facts and things (this is the error which persists in neo-positivism and analytical philosophy), but a knowledge of laws, that is, of the relationships between things, of functions. Such a methodological approach does not require determining the cause of why things exist.
That is why Ratzinger’s ontological analysis is not oriented to ‘entities’ and the cause of their existence – as classical metaphysics does, or Livi’s – but towards the legality and rationality that constitute the inevitable premise of scientific research. It is a modern path that is is also extraordinarily adherent to Biblical faith.
Ratzinger writes in his “Introductory essay to the 2000 edition’ of Introduction to Christianity which is the object of the criticism by both Radaelli and Livi:
“The prologue to the Gospel of John presents the idea of logos as central to the Christian faith in God. The word Logos means reason, meaning, but also word. Therefore, it has a sense of being a relationship, of being creative. God, who is Logos, assures man that the world has sense, it is rational, that existence has sense, that God corresponds to reason and reason corresponds to God, even if his reason constantly exceeds ours and often seems obscure to us. The world was born of reason, and this reason is a person, it is love: this is the message of the Biblical faith in God. Reason can speak of God, rather, it must speak of God, if it does not want to amputate itself. The idea of creation is linked to reason. The world is not just maya – appearance – that man must ultimately leave behind. The world cannot be reduced to an infinite wheel of suffering from which man seeks to be free. The world is positive”. ("Introduzione al cristianesimo", Brescia 2005, p. 21).
Between the ontological truth of creative Reason and the transcendental premises of science, there is no logically necessary relationship. As earlier said, scientific laws do without the question of the existence of God and the origin of reality. Because of this logical reason, Ratzinger maintains that the existence of God remains “the best hypothesis, even if it only remains a hypothesis" (J. Ratzinger, "L'Europa di Benedetto nella crisi delle culture", Siena 2005, p. 123).
I believe that the specifically modern character of Joseph Ratzinger’s theology lies in considering this logical reason.
It is a modern theology, but not skeptical, subjective or modernist.
The second 'reply' posted by Magister came from, strangely enough, one of the prominent 'pupils' of Livi, according to the article on Livi in Italian Wikipedia. Arzillo, who often contributes to Magister's posts, is described as an expert in the philosophy of law. He too has written books on philosophy and theology.Perhaps out of deference to his mentor, Arzillo does not even mention that he is replying to Livi's assault on Ratzinger:
Ratzinger's theology points
to St Paul at the Areopagus,
not to Kant and Hegel
by Francesco Arzillo
January 10, 2018
I think that the final part of the unforgettable address by Benedict XVI at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris on September 12, 2008, could offer a decisive key for understanding succinctly - but also retrospectively - the true core of the thought of the “pope theologian.”
These are his exact words:
«The fundamental structure of Christian proclamation 'outwards' – towards searching and questioning mankind – is seen in Saint Paul’s address at the Areopagus. We should remember that the Areopagus was not a form of academy at which the most illustrious minds would meet for discussion of lofty matters, but a court of justice, which was competent in matters of religion and ought to have opposed the import of foreign religions.
This is exactly what Paul is reproached for: he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” (Acts 17:18). To this, Paul responds: "I have found an altar of yours with this inscription: ‘to an unknown god’. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (17:23). Paul is not proclaiming unknown gods. He is proclaiming him whom men do not know and yet do know – the unknown-known; the one they are seeking, whom ultimately they know already, and who yet remains the unknown and unrecognizable
The deepest layer of human thinking and feeling somehow knows that he must exist, that at the beginning of all things, there must be not irrationality, but creative Reason – not blind chance, but freedom.
«Yet even though all men somehow know this, as Paul expressly says in the Letter to the Romans (1:21), this knowledge remains unreal: a God who is merely imagined and invented is not God at all. If he does not reveal himself, we cannot gain access to him. The novelty of Christian proclamation is that it can now say to all peoples: he has revealed himself. He personally. And now the way to him is open.
The novelty of Christian proclamation does not consist in a thought, but in a deed: God has revealed himself. Yet this is no blind deed, but one which is itself "Logos" – the presence of eternal reason in our flesh. "Verbum caro factum est" (Jn 1:14): just so, amid what is made (factum) there is now "Logos", "Logos" is among us. Creation (factum) is rational. Naturally, the humility of reason is always needed, in order to accept it: man’s humility, which responds to God’s humility.
«Our present situation differs in many respects from the one that Paul encountered in Athens, yet despite the difference, the two situations also have much in common. Our cities are no longer filled with altars and with images of multiple deities. God has truly become for many the great unknown.
But just as in the past, when behind the many images of God the question concerning the unknown God was hidden and present, so too the present absence of God is silently besieged by the question concerning him. "Quaerere Deum" – to seek God and to let oneself be found by him, that is today no less necessary than in former times.
A purely positivistic culture which tries to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation – the search for God and the readiness to listen to him – remains today the basis of any genuine culture.»
In these dense passages of the address of Benedict XVI, enthusiasts of philosophy and theology can find the thousand complex strands of the question of Revelation, as it is posed today in the mind of those who would like to be faithful to the wealth of revealed truth and of the understanding elaborated by the Church’s magisterium, above all in the two Vatican councils.
These councils must be interpreted, as Leo Scheffczyk taught, according to a criterion of strict continuity - I would say of reciprocity - from which it can be demonstrated that:
- On the one hand, Vatican I also incorporates the concept of the self-revelation of God (DH 3004), which is not an innovation of Vatican II, and which - taken in itself - is older than the re-use of it made by philosophical idealism in a different context of thought: a reference to this can be found, in fact, as far back as in Saint Bonaventure;
- On the other hand, Vatican II must be understood in the sense that “the words and actions presented by God themselves communicate the truth and can be accepted with reasonableness in their sense only as truth” (cf. L. Scheffczyck, "Fondamenti del dogma. Introduzione alla dogmatica,” Rome, Lateran University Press, 2010, pp. 82-83).
In the address of Benedict XVI in Paris, somewhat subtle but also very concrete, one can therefore find “in a nutshell” truly everything. There is a realistic understanding of the “preambula fidei.” There is the need for salvation. There is human reason in its various forms, and there is the Logos/Advent. There is human history intertwined with that of salvation.
But it does not contain any preliminary barrier of a Kantian nature, or in any case of irrational, pragmatic, or antimetaphysical origin.
In this latter regard it is opportune to point out that in the address “The faith and theology of our days” delivered in Guadalajara, Mexico in May of 1996, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger did not limit himself to criticizing certain forms of neo-Scholastic rationalism, citing as “more well-founded historically and objectively the position of J. Pieper” (who was in any case a thinker of Thomistic origin). But above all, in criticizing the relativistic theories of Hick, Knitter, and other theologians, he emphasized precisely the fact that they are ultimately founded “on a rationalism that, in Kant’s manner, maintains that reason cannot know that which is metaphysical”; while instead “man possesses a more extensive dimension than Kant and the various post-Kantian philosophies attributed to him.”
Moreover, in keeping with these premises, in the address to the international congress on the natural law organized by the Pontifical Lateran University on February 12, 2007, Pope Benedict XVI recalled
“another less visible danger, but no less disturbing: the method that permits us to know ever more deeply the rational structures of matter makes us ever less capable of perceiving the source of this rationality, creative Reason. The capacity to see the laws of material being makes us incapable of seeing the ethical message contained in being, a message that tradition calls lex naturalis, natural moral law. This word for many today is almost incomprehensible due to a concept of nature that is no longer metaphysical, but only empirical.”
It is no coincidence, for that matter, that Ratzinger’s thought has been the object instead - and I would say prevalently - of a criticism of a “progressivist” nature. Klaus Müller, in a calm and dense reading of the work of the pope theologian, in retracing the question of “Platonism” and of the “Hellenization of Christianity,” in fact emphasized how “Ratzinger never developed a positive and creative relationship with modern thought,” and in the first place with the grand season of German idealism (K. Müller, "Il teologo papa,” in a supplement to "Il Regno - Documenti" no. 3, February 1, 2013).
It seems to me that these few references could help bring the “Ratzinger question” back onto the right track.
[I was going to post a third reply, but once again, I am warned that I am overstepping 65,000 characters, so I shall carry er to the next post.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/01/2018 10:16] |