A Year with Ratzinger

On pages 182-3 of his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger says:

With the insight that, seen as substance, God is One but that there exists in him the phenomenon of dialogue, of differentiation, and of relationship through speech, the category of relatio gained a completely new significance for Christian thought.  To Aristotle, it was among the “accidents”, the chance circumstances of being, which are separate from substance, the sole sustaining form of the real.  The experience of the God who conducts a dialogue…exploded the ancient division of reality into substance, the real thing, and accidents, the merely circumstantial.  It now became clear that the dialogue, the relatio, stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being.

I want to say two things about this quotation:  first, that Ratzinger is way off on Aristotle; and second, that he is completely right about what he ultimately wants to say.  But first, let’s talk about Aristotle.

Question:  “Why is an elephant big, gray, and lumpy?”

Answer:  “Because if it were small, white, and round it would be an aspirin.”

Accidents, even according to Aristotle, can be bound up with the essence of a thing.  Porphyry, the pagan interpreter of Aristotle, distinguished between “accidents” and “properties”, by which he mean accidents that flowed from the essence.  For example, that a duck is waterproof is no chance circumstance:  it flows from its nature as a water bird.  This is very basic stuff in Aristotelian philosophy, so it is striking that Ratzinger should thing all accidents are “chance circumstance”.

That the Christian experience should explode the distinction between substance and accident is impossible on three counts.  First, the distinction itself, as Aristotle puts it, is an absolute dichotomy:  that which exists in another is accident while that which does not exist in another is substance.  “Is” versus “is not” is hard to explode.  Second, although the Church Fathers were on the whole not familiar with Aristotle and followed Plato instead, the one part of Aristotle’s work they all followed was his logic.  They knew his Categories and used it.  So it’s unlikely that a distinction fundamental to the whole work of the Categories would be exploded by their faith.  Third, the Church actually uses this distinction in her dogmatic definitions concerning the Eucharist, so we do not by any means want to explode it.

But there is something strange about relation.  Already in Aristotle, one gets the sense that he finds it strange, but Aquinas (possibly depending on some Arab?) brings clarity to the issue:  relation is strange because it adds no being to a thing.  For example, if I am taller than John, then the reality is that I have a certain size, and when we consider that size towards John then we see that I am bigger, but this relation of “bigger” is not some other being in me besides my size.  Aquinas offers a beautiful and intellectually exhilarating account of how relation works out in the Trinity:  of all the categories besides substance, he says, relation is the only one that we could speak of in the Trinity precisely because it is the only one that does not add some extra being and so would not compromise the simplicity of God.  When Ratzinger says that Christians have found that relation “stands beside the substance as an equally primordial form of being”, he says the exact opposite of the truth.

And for all this, I think that Ratzinger is right.  To be sure, he has misunderstood Aristotle and the Aristotelians in a fundamental way:  when they say “substance”, he thinks they mean something inert that stands under accidents the way a pin cushion stands under the pins pushed into it.  He would rather that God, that Being, be something dynamic and active, something that strains forward to a goal, something that loves and burns.  And what he wants, I think, is in fact what good thomists mean by substance.

Substance is not something inert.  Natural substances bubble with activity, flow from origins, and yearn towards goals.  In fact, the very being of a man is the kind of being that must be from the first principle of being, and it is the kind of being that must strain forward to reach the end of all things.  By my being itself, and not by something added over and above my being, I relate to God as his creature and move toward God as my end.  A man who was not a creature and did not pursue his end would be a contradiction.

Ratzinger really brings out the fruit of his insight when he gets to Christology–amazing, amazing stuff.  In the meantime, I am convinced that he learned of Aristotle only through dry, stale manuals and that, despite his teachers, he saw his way through to the truth.

One of my colleagues here at WCC recently met Pope Benedict himself and shook his hand:

John Mortensen meets BXVI

Some people have all the ability!  The rest of us just blog on.

I thought about calling this a “postscript” but, here on the blog, all my scripts are posts and all my posts are scripts.  It would actually make some sense to say “postpost”, but it might seem forced.  So, without further ado, and still not knowing what to call, I here offer a follow-up clarification of my last post about Ratzinger and Aristotle.

My interest in noting Ratzinger’s lack of familiarity with Aristotle is not to say that his conclusions are false:  somehow, like an ecclesial cat, he always lands on his feet no matter what educational background he falls from.  (“Rat zinger” is a wonderfully appropriate name for such a feline.)  Instead, I am interested in testing the opinions of those who would put Ratzinger in a box.  One hears for example that Ratzinger is not a thomist but an Augustinian.  What truth is there to such generalizations?  In an earlier post I noted that Ratzinger rejects the scholasticism of his day with a visceral intensity unlike his handling of other interlocutors.  Whence this intensity?

If he learned of Aristotle, for example, only through textbooks, he may well have reason to dislike Aristotle–about whom he has only negative things to say so far in my reading–and already disliking the scholastics, who claimed Aristotle as their teacher, may have contributed to his feeling.  So he might really have considered himself opposed to thomism or Aristotelianism while in fact holding positions quite compatible with both.  I don’t know yet.

Concerning the issue of the individual and the person, let me make a key distinction.  It is true to say that Christianity brought with it a new concept of “person” that went beyond everything in previous Greek thought, and Ratzinger was right about this.  It is false that all Greek thought considered the universal primary and the individual secondary, and Ratzinger was wrong about this.  It is true that Aristotle was not very influential when the Church was born, so Ratzinger is right if we limit “Greek thought” simply to the most dominant form of Greek thought in a particular era.

But here’s the point I’m interested in:  someone who was closely familiar with Aristotle’s writings would not have characterized all of Greek thought this way.  While the cat lands on its feet with regard to the Christian faith, the phrasing of that paragraph reveals that Ratzinger does not think a lot about Aristotle.  So if we find him saying negative things about Aristotle, or considering himself allied with a different approach to philosophy, we can’t take it as strongly as we would if a man knew Aristotle through and through and rejected him with distaste.

As a minor footnote to the past few posts on the Introduction to Christianity, I should note that the Ratzinger of 1968 does not know Aristotle well.  For example, he says on page 160:

Greek thought always regarded the many individual creatures, including the many individual human beings, only as individuals, arising out of the splitting up of the idea in matter.  The reproductions are thus always secondary; the real thing is the one and universal.  The Christian sees in man, not an individual, but a person; and it seems to me that this passage from individual to person contains the whole span of the transition from antiquity to Christianity, from Platonism to faith.

That the universal is more real is in fact a platonic notion, but Aristotle–surely to be included in “Greek thought”–emphatically denied this.  He said that the individual is more real.  To be fair, Aristotle did not dominate antiquity as Plato did, but given the major role his philosophy played in Boethius and in all of medieval theology, one would expect that he would get an honorable mention as an important thinker of antiquity.

At another point, on page 174, Ratzinger argues that one must approach a mystery by putting together statements that seem irreconcilable to reason but in fact are complementary:

The intellectual approach of modern physics may offer us more help here than Aristotelian philosophy was able to give.  Physicists know today that one can only talk about the structure of matter by approaching the subject from various angles.  They know that the position of the observer at any one time affects the results of his investigation of nature.  Why should we not be able to understand afresh, on this basis, that in the question of God we must not look, in the Aristotelian fashion, for an ultimate concept emcompassing the whole but must be prepared to find a multitude of aspects that depend on the position of the observer and that we can no longer survey as a whole but only accept alongside each other, without being able to say the final word on the subject?  We meet here the hidden interplay of faith and modern thought.  That present-day physicists are stepping outside the structure of Aristotelian logic and thinking in this way is surely an effect already of the new dimension that Christian theology has opened up, of its need to think in “complementarities”.

Aristotle does in fact, in subtle ways, approach difficult realities from various angles, and in fact he gives an explicit account of why matter is difficult to know.  But Thomas Aquinas offers an even clearer example of a pre-modern, Aristotelian theologian who already grasped this insight Ratzinger finds in modern physics.  For example, in his discussion of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ in chapter 11 of his Compendium, Aquinas explicitly says that we cannot find an all-encompassing explanation because this mystery exceeds reason, and then he goes on to lay out two seemingly opposed but in fact complementary ways to understand it.  It’s the exact procedure Ratzinger lays out.

More on this point soon.

In a fresh rendering of an old idea, Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity describes the intelligibility of the world as a “being-thought” of things.  The fact that we can understand the world leads to the realization that these things came into being by being understood; our thinking of things is in fact a re-thinking of things, because the original Thought stands behind all.

He quotes Einstein and another scientist as saying this very thing, but then quotes the same scientists as repudiating the God of Christianity as “anthropomorphic”.  They can see that the root of all things is neither chance nor law but mind, but they cannot see this as Mind—as person.  As Ratzinger points out, this is the old division between the far off, cosmic power and the personal God close at hand to help.

This is an illuminating point:  even great scientific minds, capable of very abstract thought, may not be able to think clearly and consistently about something like “being” or “cause”.  Instead, because they think of God as limited like themselves, they conclude that Christians are guilty of anthropomorphism.

It’s what you might call irony.

I wonder about the dispositions that make for a great scientist and how they relate to the dispositions of a great philosopher.  Any thoughts?

The section on “I believe in God” in Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity offers a stimulating approach to the question of God’s existence.  In an effort to make clear the specifically Christian notion of God, Ratzinger points on the one hand to the ancient pantheon of gods who were available as helpers in time of need because they were close to man and took interest in his affairs.

He notes on the other hand that the ancients typically believed in one, all-embracing cosmic power that stood even above the gods as the ultimate ground of reality—“El” in Caananite culture, but named differently in other cultures.  This being was all-powerful, supreme, but at the same time aloof and unavailable.  Because he was not a useful god, so to speak, ready to help in time of need, he tended to fade further and further into the background.  (While Ratzinger does not cite him, Eliade offers a great account of this phenomenon in his Myth and Reality.)  This latter rendering of the deity was more like the god of the philosophers, who tended to be cosmic but aloof, in contrast to the gods of the state religion who were rationally untenable and deplorably anthropomorphic but close and receptive to prayer.

The God of Judaism combined the strengths of both:  Yahweh is not the god of a particular people or place but the cosmic God of all; at the same time, he is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, close to man and ready to help in time of need.  He is “the greatest in the smallest”, as Ratzinger says.  The God who structures the galaxies attends to the unfolding of each flower in the spring and the descent of each leaf in the fall.

In fact, he goes on to say, it is precisely because God is infinite, cosmic, all-powerful, he is able to rule the cosmos while being present to the smallest details of creation.  To think that the cosmic, all-powerful one could not possibly care about or notice the smallest movements of the smallest creatures in this immense universe is to think that he is not really all-powerful.  We divide the infinite and cosmic from the close and available because we unwittingly conceive of the infinite as finite and the cosmic as parochial.  Men make anthropomorphic deities and push El into the background for one and the same reason.

Among all of Ratzinger’s works, I am most looking forward to his Introduction to Christianity.  Any attempt to comment on the Apostle’s Creed is bound to expose the scope and themes of an author’s thought, so here more than anywhere I would expect to see the early Ratzinger’s prowess on display.

One hundred pages into it, I am not disappointed.  His proem on faith is profound and tantalizing at the same time, and the introductory comment on the history of the Apostle’s Creed rounds it out nicely.  While it takes the full hundred pages to see the many angles from which he wants to attack the question of faith, the picture does come into focus by the end.  He emphasizes the following points:

1. Faith in general, both Christian and otherwise:
   1. Faith is a way of getting into touch with reality.  It is neither a flight from reality nor a method for producing something.
   2. On the other hand, faith is inherently difficult for men of every age because(i) it is a turning towards what we cannot sense.(ii) Furthermore, faith is fundamentally a kind of trust or submission by which we base our lives on that which we cannot make.
2. Christian faith in particular:
   1. While all faith is a way of reaching towards the fundamental reality behind everything else, Christian faith takes Jesus Christ himself as this reality in person, the invisible ground of being become visible.
   2. Christian faith comes to us as words from the outside rather than as reflections we produce within ourselves.  This means that(i) we are not free to change the wording as we would be the wording of philosophical doctrine, and(ii) Christian faith is inherently ordered towards bringing men together, just as word—in contrast to mere thought—is ordered to communication between men.

His aim in the book is the put Christianity in new terms accessible to modern man, so it is difficult at times to measure what he has said against the traditional questions that exercise theologians.  For example, he includes every attempt to go beyond what is visible and tangible under the general description of “faith”; does this mean that he doubts reason’s ability actually to perceive invisible realities?  Does he think philosophy to be the field of the mushy, the touchy-feely, and the hopefully outthrust hand rather than the realm of the seeing eye of the mind?  It’s not clear.

On the other hand, his treatment of specifically Christian faith does not so much as mention the word authority, and nowhere does he come out and say that the keynote of faith is holding to a truth precisely because God has said it.  The notion that we entrust ourselves to an absolute reality (God) might imply that faith believes what this absolute reality has revealed precisely because it has revealed it, but one could take his description in other directions as well.

In other words, Trent masterfully steered a course between fideism and intellectualism, between faith as authority raping reason and faith as reason usurping authority, but it is difficult to know for sure where the Ratzinger of 1968 would put himself on this spectrum.  He’s trying to say it afresh.

My copy of the Introduction to Christianity includes a preface to the 2000 edition, but I will read that when I come to it in chronological order.

In his 1965 essay “The Question of the Concept of Tradition,” Ratzinger lays out his own view on the relationship between Scripture and Tradition.  To my everlasting delight, it is the same view I arrived at last spring while teaching Theology 102 at WCC, but Ratzinger’s different emphases and wording are helpful to me in fleshing out my thoughts.

He distinguishes between revelation taken materially and revelation taken formally.  Materially, revelation can be found in Scripture; formally, revelation has not taken place until the act of faith takes place in the soul of the one receiving revelation.  As a result, revelation resides first and foremost in the heart of the believing Church, while Scripture is given as an external aid.

But the revelation of God, according to the New Testament, is Christ, and what abides in the heart of the Church is Christ.  Scripture is given to the Church as an unchanging aid for the handing down of Christ from the heart of one generation to the heart of the next.

Here let me go beyond what Ratzinger says.  Scripture is supposed to be a mirror in which the Church sees Christ reflected so as to more faithfully receive Christ in herself; it is a guide rail, so to speak, to keep tradition on track through the ages as the whole Christ is handed down from one generation to the next.  Given this, one can see why Scripture must be the word of God:  a merely infallible text, like a papal pronouncement, would not be enough, because this text is an aid to impression God’s own Word–Jesus Christ–on believing soul.

As promised in my last post, I would like illustrate the shallow rejection of scholasticism evident in Ratzinger’s Theological Highlights of Vatican II.

To take a small example, “positive” is always a word of praise in Ratzinger’s reports while “negative” is always a demon word.  But the scholastics could have pointed out the importance of the via negativa in theology, which—far from being an arrogant stance taken against another—recognizes the limitations of human reasoning.  Often the most sensitive, precise statement we can make is a denial.  And to be fair, many of the “negative” condemnations of the past, such as those of Trent, were addendums to a positive exposition of doctrine.

To take a second example, “timeless” is always a demon word equated with “static” and opposed to “historical” and “vital”.  To equate “timeless” with “static” is to fall into a nominalistic understanding of “eternal”, as though the only way to fullness of being is through motion rather than through fullness of form.  But this verbal tick brings out the real problem with the scholasticism Ratzinger hated:  for many years, even those devoted to St. Thomas Aquinas approached him backwards through history and so came to him in the context of late medieval nominalism.  Seen from this direction, 13^th century scholasticism does indeed appear lifeless; seen from this direction, “system” is in fact an imposition on the living.  But read on its own terms and as emerging from the welter of 12^th century theology and spiritual movements, 13^th century “scholasticism” stands up as the aggiornamento of its day.

Another minor but revealing example of Ratzinger’s phraseology is found on page 93:  “In the text, which replaced an earlier draft, the old systematic Mariology was to a considerable extent (though not completely) replaced by a positive and scriptural Mariology.”  A moment’s thought exposes the division between “systematic” and “positive and scriptural” as contrived:  why on earth would a positive Mariology have to be unsystematic?  And is it so inconceivable that someone would try to study Scripture in an organized and systematic way?  The key here is that “systematic” is taken to mean “systematic theology”, that is, scholasticism as practiced by particular persons of Ratzinger’s day.  His words have carried him away:  being himself a careful and organized thinker, he does not mean to reject system as such but the concrete system of a certain group.

A far more important result of Ratzinger’s anti-scholasticism is that throughout Highlights he consistently rejects any answer to moral questions in terms of natural law.  He not only says that this is not the Church’s area—the Church should be preaching revealed truth—but repeatedly expresses the opinion that such approaches are doubtful in themselves.  This emptying of nature in favor of revelation is a deadly medicine for modern ills.  The later Ratzinger tends to emphasize the importance of reason’s ability to know truth about morality, so it will be interesting to see where the shift occurs and why.

In my last post I listed a few things I would like to track in Ratzinger’s thought over the following year.  My list was short by one, because I wanted to dedicate an entire post to the biggest item:  his shallow rejection of scholasticism.

This attitude runs throughout his report.  The usual rhetoric is engaged:  because scholasticism emerged in the middle ages, which was also the age when the eastern churches split away, anything biblical or patristic or eastern is good while anything medieval or western is bad.  (I rather suspect this hatred of all things western, rooted in a rejection of scholasticism, is what stands behind his harsh comments on the use of Latin in the liturgy and in Church documents.)

The rejection of the middle ages is not a subtle theme:  twice he repeats a line making the rounds at the council to the effect that Vatican II was “the end of the middle ages, and perhaps of the Constantian period”—and it is clear enough that if anything ever needed ending it was the middle ages.  So for example he says on page 127 that references to Lombard, Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas “will no longer be meaningful” for a theology of the episcopacy; whatever the merits of this claim, it is stated in a manner so sweeping as to signal the author’s desire to express not merely the truth but his personal disdain for the period.  Similarly, on pages 103-104 he refers to the

…frightful error of St. Thomas who thought it necessary to correct the gospel in suggesting that there is no need to await the day of judgment.  Teaching in a closed Christian society, he said that it was praiseworthy and salutary to weed out elements of evil and destroy sinners on our own authority (S. Th. 2-2, q. 64, a. 3 c ad 1).

If there is any “frightful error” here it is Ratzinger’s interpretation of Thomas.  I would invite anyone to read the text cited from St. Thomas and judge whether it asserts the need to weed out sinners on our own authority.  In fact, it does not seem to me possible that Ratzinger himself looked at the text before citing it; I think that he got that talking point together with its supporting reference from a conversation during the council and never had a chance to check it.  At this point, Ratzinger comes across as hurried, excited, caught up in the moment.

As I said above, it seems to me that this rejection of the middle ages is rooted not in a real hatred for what he has read of the medieval—Ratzinger wrote his dissertation on Bonaventure—but in a loathing for what he calls “scholasticism” or “neo-scholasticism” and which he associates with the middle ages.  Anyone who has seen the theology manuals in use in the first half of the 20^th century will have a sense of why one might hate it, but in Highlights Ratzinger joins many others of his generation in throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

In my next post, I’ll go into some of the details.