A Year with Ratzinger

When teaching through Dei Verbum, and laying out a position very much like Ratzinger’s, I told my students that the magisterium has authority over biblical interpretation and Church doctrine (more or less the same thing) because it’s mission is to guard the common good of the Church.  Any community needs an authority to protect it’s common good, so when your common good is a set of truths and a life of grace then you end up with a magisterium.

So I was pleased to find that in The Ratzinger Report, the man himself speaks of the Church’s faith as a “common good”:

One should not forget that for the Church faith is a “common good”, a wealth that belongs to everybody, beginning with the poor who are least protected from distortions.  Consequently the Church sees in the defense of right belief also a social work for the benefit of all believers.  From this viewpoint, in regard to error, it must not be forgotten that the right of the individual theologian must be protected but that the rights of the community must likewise be protected. (p. 25)

Although he has not made much of that term in what I have read so far, I think nothing is more fundamental to understanding the relationship between magisterium and Scripture/Tradition.  The notion of a community with its common good is the natural reality upon which grace has built in this case.

At long last, I have reached the end of Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology.  It is not only long, but dense and difficult, and the essays vary widely in penetration.

For the record, I should say that the last third or so of the book was the most enjoyable part for me.  The whole book is a forest of “stuff” which I will have to revisit over the coming year as I teach related material, but the last third is that vintage Ratzinger that got me into this project in the first place.

Particularly touching are the last two essays, in which he talks about Vatican II and its reception (or lack thereof).  He makes the point that reconciling modernity and tradition, which was the task of Vatican II, will not come about via theological discussions of Vatican II, via bureaucracies, or paperwork:  it will come about when modernity and tradition coexist in the souls of saints.  The soul is the true laboratory, and the saints are the true theologians.

Somehow Ratzinger always touches me deeply when he writes about love.  One gets the impression that he himself has loved….

Anyhow, the following struck me from his Principles of Catholic Theology:

Radical irreconcilability with oneself that rages against the self and is no longer satisfied with creation either in oneself or in others is no longer penance; it is arrogance.  Wherever the fundamental Yes to being, to life, to oneself, ceases to exist, penance disappears and turns into arrogance.  For penance presumes that man is permitted to affirm himself.  By its very nature, it is a penetration to the Yes in the hidden places of whatever obscures the Yes.  That is why true penance leads to the gospel, that is, to joy–even to joy in oneself.

The Christian tradition has long held that pride can masquerade as humility, and no doubt that happens in several ways.  Ratzinger here traces the lines of causation in a way new to me:  failure to affirm oneself as good leads to failure to affirm creation as good; failure to affirm creation as good leads to railing against all creation; but the one railing has, ipso facto, taken a stance over against the one railed at, and so in a queer way one ends up in an arrogant stance over against all of creation–including oneself.

One’s person is divided.  One begins by hating the content of one’s nature and personal history, and so one ends by identifying oneself as a kind of denatured coordinate–the “I”–hellishly chained to concrete nature.  What appears as hatred of self is in reality a placing of the “I”–secretly the self again–over all else.  Self hatred is the extreme of self love.

And that, I suppose, is what it is like to be damned.

My job has recently caused me to think and write about Wyoming Catholic College’s “Outdoor Leadership Program”.  (I would provide a link, but my job includes re-writing all the [currently inadequate] web content, and the new stuff is not up yet.)  The basic assertion is that, these days at least, it is important for a liberally educated Catholic to spend a lot of time outdoors.

So I was tickled to find this in Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology:

Faith has the added task–in a time when creation has been forgotten, in which we live, to a large extent, in a secondary world of the self-made–of putting man once again in the way of creation in order to let him see it again and thus learn to know himself. (Page 345)

We should give him a WCC T-Shirt or something.  That’s spectacular.

In his Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger offers an interesting reflection on the perennial question of whether the intellect or the will is the higher power.  He ends up defending Thomas Aquinas’s view, on the whole.  The essay was written in 1980, which makes the following line interesting.

I admit that it has become clear to me only through the developments of recent years how fundamental this question is.  Thomas Aquinas had, in fact, only reflected anew on an answer already formulated by Irenaeus of Lyons, the real founder of Catholic theology, in his controversies with Gnosticism…. (page 319)

He goes on to say that Christ’s achievement was to bring us into contact with the very being and truth of God, which is to say that Christian doctrine has very much to do with metaphysics and other such things that have become unpopular.  And he finds a slot for Bonaventure’s approach to the question, along with Augustine.

But what interests me is this:  he says here that only in the years leading up to 1980 did he realize how crucial it is to defend metaphysics and the intellect along the lines laid out by Thomas Aquinas.  That’s something to ponder.

On page 114 of his Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger makes a really neat point about the Nicene Creed.  After making his usual case that Christianity met the deepest needs of philosophy at the time, he points out that Arius wanted to go further and co-op Christianity for philosophy by making a philosophically palatable Christ.

This was a terrific temptation for Christianity.  Even though in reality it subjugated Christianity to philosophy, it seemed to harness the perennial power of philosophy to the Christian wagon.

But the Council of Nicaea rejected this philosophication of Christian doctrine and opted instead for a literal interpretation of the Bible.  So even though the famous “homoousios” language introducing a philosophical term into Christian doctrine, the net effect is to defend Christian doctrine from servitude to philosophy.

And that’s just neat.

It was great to see that our current Pope penned these words:

Today, many Christians, myself included, experience a quiet uneasiness about attending divine services in a strange church; they are appalled at the thought of the half-understood theories, the amazing and tasteless personal opinions of this or that priest that they will have to endure during the homily–to say nothing of the personal liturgical inventions to which they will be subjected.  No one goes to church to hear someone else’s personal opinions.  I am simply not interested in what fantasies this or that individual priest may have spun for himself regarding questions of Christian faith.  They may be appropriate for an evening’s conversation but not for that obligation that brings me to church Sunday after Sunday.  Anyone who preaches himself in this way overrates himself and attributes to himself an importance he does not have. – Principles of Catholic Theology, pg 283.

In other words:  he feels my pain.  I hate finding a church on the road, and I hate taking my kids to church on the road.  But the Pope knows exactly why I hate it.

That’s something, at least!

The last third or so of Ratzinger’s Principles of Catholic Theology is turning out to be very rich.  So often when he makes a brilliant point it seems obvious the moment he says it even though I had never thought about it before.

On pages 282-283, he repeats the old doctrine, championed by Augustine and accepted by the Church, that the efficacy of a sacrament does not depend on the sanctity of the priest.  But then he connects that to another old doctrine, namely that the true priest is Jesus Christ and other priests are priests only by being his ministers.

Priests of the Old Testament were priests in their own right, not as representatives of someone else, and if a priest was unholy then he was to be expelled from serving at the altar.  But priests of the New Testament, although they should be holy, do not vitiate the sacraments by unholiness because the sacraments depend on the holiness of the one priest Jesus Christ.

It appears that Augustine made this point in the Donatist controversy, but I have Ratzinger to thank for bringing it to my attention.

Way down in the comments box of my recent post “As Far as the East is from the West”, some good things happened.  In case you didn’t catch the conversation, check it out.

As expected, I failed to blog every night about the F&R Seminar.  There were evening sessions, and the rule of thumb is that my wife and I need an hour and a half of conversation after we are alone at night, so when I came home at 9:00 p.m. there was no time to blog before 10:30 p.m.–at which point, to be honest, my brain is not worth blogging about.

The seminar itself was reasonably profitable simply because we read a bunch of fairly good books.  Can’t go wrong that way.

The seminar discussions were way up and down, depending on how well participants managed to escape the moderator.  More moderated was generally less good, in this case.

I learned about myself that Binx, the main character in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, is dangerously close to my soul.  The reason I wanted to escape Percy was that I sliding into Binx’s moods.  But the book itself is masterful.  Reading Lewis’s The Great Divorce led me to see that The Moviegoer is about life in hell.