BENEDICT XVI:

A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED

T&T Clark Guides for the Perplexed

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 BENEDICT XVI:
A GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED
TRACEY ROWLAND
 Published by T&T Clark International
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Copyright © Tracey Rowland, 2010

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and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work.

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In Memory of Peter Knowles OP
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1
Chapter 1: The Romantic Antecedents 9
Chapter 2: The Humanist Culture of the Incarnation 25
Chapter 3: Revelation, Tradition and Hermeneutics 48
Chapter 4: The Theological Virtues 71
Chapter 5: History and Ontology after Heidegger 93
Chapter 6: Christianity in the Marketplace of
Faith Traditions 114
Chapter 7: The Vision of Unity 129
Conclusion 152

Notes 161
Select Bibliography 182
Index 195

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks are due to Alcuin Reid for recommending my name to

Tom Kraft at Continuum and to Tom himself for the opportunity
to write the Benedict XVI volume of the Guide for the Perplexed
series. Unlike my earlier book, Ratzinger’s Faith: the Theology of
Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford University Press, 2008) which was
written for a general audience, this work offers a guide into the
thought of Ratzinger for those who are already studying theology
or embarking upon it. As my husband has explained to our friends,
‘the first Ratzinger book was Ratzinger for mice, this one is
Ratzinger for rats’.
Chapter 2 is a development of a paper delivered at the 2009
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Conference in Providence, Rhode
Island and Chapter 4 represents a development of material covered
in ‘Variations on the Theme of Christian Hope in the Work of Joseph
Ratzinger-Benedict XVI’ which was published in Communio: Inter-
national Catholic Review (Summer, 2008). I wish to thank the
Communio editors and Kenneth D. Whitehead, the editor of the
FCS Conference Proceedings, and Professor William E. May of FCS,
for permission to use some of the earlier material in this work.
For information on the influence of John Henry Newman on
the generation of Catholic Germans who came of age during the
Nazi era, I am indebted to Jakob Knab, a leading authority on the
German anti-Nazi movements. I am also grateful to Cyrus Olsen
and Philip Endean for their help with material on the relationship
between Rahner and Ratzinger, and to Stuart Rowland, Daniel Hill,
Aaron Russell, Stratford Caldecott, Thaddeus Kozinski, Adam
Cooper, David Schütz, Rev. Fraser Pearce, Fr Gregory Jordan SJ,
Anna Krohn, Mary Taylor and Michael Lynch for reading various

ix
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

drafts, to Angela Kolar of Campion College, Sydney, for her transla-

tion of an early Ratzinger article on the concept of Bildung and to
Patrick Sibly and Anthony Coyte for their administrative assistance.
The work is dedicated to the memory of Peter Knowles OP, an
Australian Dominican, who shared Ratzinger’s preference for the
Patristics over the Baroque Scholastics and his appreciation of the
central importance of liturgical reform for the re-evangelization of
the formerly Christian countries of the Western world. Fr Knowles
was particularly kind to exiled Central Europeans throughout the
cold war era and risked his own freedom smuggling medicines and
religious books into the Communist bloc and samizdat publications
out of it. In various eulogies he was described as the most handsome
man of his generation, the most cultured, and the most aristocratic.
He heroically maintained his joie de vivre amidst an ecclesial culture
which was decidedly low-brow and philistine. I once heard him
conclude a paper with the words: ‘though the days of our lives are
numbered, the days of Israel shall live forever’. This capacity to
live life from the perspective of eternity was his key to coping with
the odd assortment of ecclesial types who crossed his path in the
decades following the cultural revolution of the 1960s. He knew that
the fashion of a decade is rarely, if ever, the truth of a century, and
thus that there must be better times ahead. For these reasons and
many others this work is in his memory.

Tracey Rowland
Beechworth, Eastertide, 2009.

x
 INTRODUCTION

In an interview given in 1997, Joseph Ratzinger stated that he had

never tried to create a theological system of his own – ‘the aim is not
an isolated theology that I draw out of myself but one that opens
as widely as possible into the common intellectual pathways of the
faith’.1 For this reason one does not find in his publications the
presentation of a totally original theological synthesis, but rather a
series of seminal interventions in theological debates thrown up by
pastoral crises. Vincent Twomey, one of his former doctoral students,
has written that his methodology is to take as his starting point
contemporary developments in society and culture, and then he
listens to the solutions offered by his fellow theologians before
turning to a critical examination of Scripture and Tradition for
pointers to a solution. He finally attempts a systematic answer by
presenting the topic in the context of theology as a whole. As a
consequence of this approach his academic output is fragmentary –
it is ‘filled with brilliant insights into almost every subject of theology
and yet it is not a fixed system’.2
Since there is no fixed system, the approach of this Guide is to
focus on subject areas which Ratzinger has himself identified as
critical fronts in contemporary Catholic theology. Among these, the
one he described in Principles of Catholic Theology (1982) as having
created the severest crisis, and which is in a sense the most fundamen-
tal and far-reaching, is that of presenting a Catholic understanding
of the mediation of history in the realm of ontology.3 In short, the
Catholic theological establishment is yet to give an adequate response
to the issues raised by Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and
other twentieth-century works on the relationship between theology
and metaphysics, anthropology and history, whose genealogies can

1
 BENEDICT XVI

be traced to conceptions of truth and freedom in German Idealism

and to the biblical scholarship of the nineteenth century. Linked
to this is the need to get beyond the ahistorical temper of scholasti-
cism without ending up in the ditch of moral and epistemological
relativism.
These issues of the theological significance of history and culture
were brewing from at least the late eighteenth century with the ascen-
dancy of Romantic movements among intellectual elites across
Western Europe and the United Kingdom. With them came a whole
raft of hermeneutical questions. These in turn impinged upon the
territory of theological anthropology, especially the question of how
revelation is received and mediated from one generation to another.
The decidedly ahistorical temper of the pre-Conciliar theological
establishment rendered it incapable of entering into these debates. In
many instances those who dared to ask questions framed from within
the concerns of the Romantic movement were tarred with the brush
of ‘modernism’ and found themselves on the margins of ecclesial life.
Even those who turned to Patristics for insights worked under a cloud
of suspicion. The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) removed the
lid from this cauldron of theological conundrums though the issues
were far from resolved in the Conciliar debates and documents.
Almost half a century later the intellectual battles continue in
Catholic academies.
When only in his 30s, Ratzinger attended the Council as a peritus
or expert theological advisor to Josef Cardinal Frings of Cologne. In
those years he was a typical member of his generation frustrated by
the neo-scholasticism which had been fostered by the encyclical
Aeterni Patris (1879) of Pope Leo XIII. The encyclical called for a
renaissance of the study of the medieval Dominican St Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) as an antidote to various forms of rationalism
and relativism. While it did produce works of genuine scholarship
in places like Louvain, there was nonetheless a tendency of many
seminary professors to rely upon secondary sources and summaries
which were collated into manuals for the rote learning of seminari-
ans. There was also a tendency to read Aquinas abstractly without
regard to his historical context, or to read him as an interlocutor
for post-medieval philosophers such as Descartes and Kant, and to
sever the philosophical components of Aquinas’s synthesis from the
theological and present them in separate intellectual packages. In
many seminaries this Leonine Thomism became the only framework

2
 INTRODUCTION

which was ever presented to students and the mode of its presenta-
tion in manuals was of questionable pedagogical value. Moreover,
this pre-Conciliar Thomism prided itself on being ‘above history’
and marketed itself as the ‘perennial philosophy’. One of the most
helpful and even-handed accounts of it has been provided by
Fergus Kerr in his Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians: From
Neoscholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism.4 Kerr observes that almost
every significant Catholic theologian after the Second World War
(including Ratzinger) was in some sense in rebellion against this,
and that the most extreme rebel, Hans Küng, was the one who had
been given the longest (seven-year) exposure to it at the Pontifical
Gregorian University in Rome. This is not to say that Kerr thinks it
was all bad, merely that he makes the historical observation that
while twentieth-century Catholic theology began in a neo-scholastic
key, it ended with two successive papacies and their leading theolo-
gians singing the not so baroque tune of the nuptial mystery. Thomas
F O’Meara has presented the following snapshot of the pre-Conciliar
period which goes some of the way to explaining the rebellion:

Late nineteenth-century repetitions of medieval thought and

baroque scholasticism determined Catholic religious education
from catechism to seminary textbook. This restoration was more
particularly of philosophy than theology, of Aristotle than Thomas
Aquinas, of logic than of Christology. A non-voluntaristic and free
theology of grace found in Aquinas was re-formed into a theology
of propositional faith, ontology, and church authority. A lack of
sophistication in method, a questionable arrangement of disciplines,
an absence of history, a moralistic interdiction of other theologies
even when based upon Scripture and tradition characterised this
theology.5

To this summary of O’Meara’s can be added the observation of

Jean Daniélou that Scholastic theology locates reality in essences
rather than in subjects, and by so doing ignores the dramatic world
of persons, of universal concretes transcending all essence and
only distinguished by their existence.6 It was precisely this world of
persons, of subjects struggling with their self-identity, which was
the common turf of nineteenth-century Romantics and twentieth-
century existentialists and at the level of the average parish, it was
the common turf of ordinary people trying to come to terms with

3
 BENEDICT XVI

the impact of two world wars and an economic depression on their

personal relationships.
It is not surprising therefore that in 1946 the young Bavarian
seminarian Joseph Ratzinger found scholasticism to be too imper-
sonal.7 According to Alfred Läpple, his seminary prefect, scholasticism
‘wasn’t his beer’.8 After a long and boring lecture from one of his
professors on how God is the summum bonum, Ratzinger quipped to
Läpple that ‘a summum bonum doesn’t need a mother’.9 Having found
scholasticism to be uninspiring he turned his attention to the study
of St Augustine, John Henry Newman and the mid-twentieth-century
personalist scholars, including the Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber.
He has described the encounter with Buber’s personalism as a spiri-
tual experience that left an essential mark, especially as it resonated
with his studies of St Augustine.10 When he did venture into schola-
stic territory, it was St Bonaventure who captured his attention, and
here it would seem to be precisely because Bonaventure had a strong
interest in the theology of history. Similarly, when he did take an
interest in a Thomist author, it was Josef Pieper, whose interests
untypically extended to the philosophy of history.
His own memories of his intellectual interests in this period of
his life are encapsulated in the following paragraph:

Our interests were varied. We wanted not only to do theology

in the narrower sense but to listen to the voices of man today. We
devoured the novels of Gertrude von Le Fort, Elisabeth Lang-
gässer, and Ernst Wiechert. Dostoyevsky was one of the authors
everyone read, and likewise the great Frenchmen: Claudel, Bernanos,
Mauriac. We also followed closely the recent developments in the
natural sciences. We thought that, with the breakthroughs made
by Planck, Heisenberg, and Einstein, the sciences were once again
on their way to God . . . . In the domain of theology and philoso-
phy, the voices that moved us most directly were those of Romano
Guardini, Josef Pieper, Theodor Häcker, and Peter Wust.11

During the Conciliar years Ratzinger was associated with other

young periti who were critical of the theological establishment.
These included Hans Küng, Karl Rahner (1904–1984), and Edward
Schillebeeckx (1914–2009). However this association did not survive
the 1960s. By the early 1970s a breach had developed between two

4
 INTRODUCTION

groups of leading theologians which came to be associated with the

names of the journals in which they published. The journal Concil-
ium, founded in 1965, became the flagship for those offering the more
liberal interpretations of the Second Vatican Council. Ratzinger was
later to refer to their approach as the application of a ‘hermeneutic
of rupture’. They had a tendency to interpret the documents as
though they represented a complete break with the pre-Conciliar
framework. The leading names associated with Concilium included:
Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, Yves Congar
(1904–1995), Edward Schillebeeckx, Franz Böckle (1921–1991) and
Gustavo Gutiérrez. Ratzinger was also for a time (from 1965–1972) a
member of the Concilium board. The second journal, Communio,
founded in 1972, was centred on the works of Hans Urs von
Balthasar (1905–1988), Henri de Lubac (1896–1991) and Ratzinger
himself.12 This involvement with the establishment of Communio
followed upon the success of Ratzinger’s first book Introduction to
Christianity which was published in 1968 and became an international
best seller translated into 17 languages. Whereas Concilium approached
the Conciliar documents with a hermeneutic of rupture, the Communio
authors offered a hermeneutic of continuity, though the latter
accepted that the documents were intended to have a remedial effect
on elements of the pre-Conciliar theological outlook. According
to the Communio scholars, the problems in contemporary and late-
twentieth-century Catholicism had their origins at least as far back
as the sixteenth century and certainly did not begin in 1962, as
defenders of the pre-Conciliar establishment claim.
The publication of a Polish edition of Communio was facilitated
by Karol Wojtyła when he was the Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow.
In 1981 as John Paul II he called Ratzinger to Rome to be the Prefect
for the Sacred Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, the President
of the International Theological Commission and the President of
the Pontifical Biblical Commission. The history of their partnership
goes back to 1974. At that time Josef Pieper wrote to Ratzinger and
told him that he should get in touch with the Archbishop of Cracow,
Cardinal Wojtyła. Pieper had heard Wojtyła speak at a philosophy
conference and thought that he and Ratzinger should get to know
one another. Ratzinger responded to the suggestion by sending Wojtyła
a copy of his book Introduction to Christianity. Two years later in
1976, when Wojtyła was invited to preach the Lenten retreat to Pope

5
 BENEDICT XVI

Paul VI, he based the retreat on ideas from that book by Ratzinger.13
From these beginnings the two developed a quarter-century partner-
ship which lasted until the death of John Paul II in 2005.
In his preface to the 2004 edition of the Introduction to Christianity,
Ratzinger reflected on the two watershed years of the second half of
the twentieth century: 1968 and 1989. He began with the observation
that 1968 marked the rebellion of a new generation, which not only
considered postwar reconstruction in Europe as inadequate, but
‘viewed the entire course of history since the triumph of Christianity
as a mistake and a failure’.14 After noting the attraction of Marxism
to the elite of this generation, he further observed that the collapse
of Communist regimes in Europe in 1989 left behind them ‘a sorry
legacy of ruined land and ruined souls’.15 Marxism ultimately failed
the generation of ’68, but even so, at the moment of its collapse
within Europe, Christianity ‘failed to make itself heard as an
epoch-making alternative’.16
The Church in 1989, a decade into the pontificate of John Paul II,
was still wallowing in post-Conciliar introspection and suffering
the political side-effects of sharp internal theological divisions. The
cultural and political weakness of the faith was also in part due to
sociological factors. The emergence of a wealthy Catholic middle
class in the US and the countries of the British Commonwealth,
desperate for acceptance by Protestant elites and wanting to accom-
modate its faith to the culture of modernity, including the adoption
of a decidedly modern attitude to sexuality, created numerous
intellectual and pastoral challenges which were simply beyond the
capacities of many of the clergy to address.17
At the same time in Latin America social and economic problems
were being addressed by a new generation of ecclesial leaders sym-
pathetic to Marxism. Paradoxically, while Catholics in places like
Poland, China, Korea and Vietnam were being persecuted by Com-
munists, true believing Marxists could still be found in Catholic
theology academies outside the Soviet bloc and its Asian derivatives.
As Ratzinger noted, ‘in 1968 there was a fusion of the Christian
impulse with secular and political action and an attempt to baptize
Marxism’.18 This project labelled as liberation theology was particu-
larly strong in countries which were formerly Spanish or Portuguese
colonies such as the Philippines, Honduras, Nicaragua, Argentina
and Brazil. However it was also popular among Catholic intellectual
elites throughout Europe and the Anglophone countries. Ratzinger

6
 INTRODUCTION

spent a number of his early years as Prefect for the Congregation of

the Faith contending with theologies of liberation. In doing so, he
was not trying to defend the economic order of the Latin American
countries. He was never what today might be called a neo-conservative,
the sort of person who attempts to tie together Christian beliefs
with an enthusiasm for liberal market economics. He acknowledged
the existence of terrible poverty and economic injustice in many
of the above-mentioned countries and even described as ‘astounding’
the notion that the laws of the market are in essence good.19 None-
theless, he believed that ‘whoever makes Marx the philosopher
of theology adopts the primacy of politics and economics’ and as
a result the redemption of mankind ends up occurring through the
vehicles of politics and economics.20 He therefore concluded that ‘the
real and most profound problem with the liberation theologies i[s]
their effective omission of the idea of God, which, of course, also
changed the figure of Christ fundamentally’.21 While the liberation
theologians did not declare themselves atheists, their god ‘had nothing
to do’ and their Christ was transformed into a political agitator.
Ratzinger argued that the ‘god who has nothing to do’ had been
around for at least a century and so it was not surprising that there
arose these theologies of political and economic liberation. In the
past century ‘Christian consciousness acquiesced to a great extent –
without being aware of it – in the attitude that faith in God is
something subjective, which belongs in the private realm and not in
the common activities of public life where, in order to be able to get
along, people all have to behave now etsi Deus non daretur (as if there
were no God).’22 He concluded:

It did not take any particular negligence, and certainly not a

deliberate denial, to leave God as a God with nothing to do, espe-
cially since his name had been misused so often. But the faith
would really have come out of the ghetto only if it brought its
most distinctive features with it into the public arena: the God
who judges and suffers; the God who sets limits and standards
for us; the God from whom we come and to whom we are going.
But as it was, it really remained in the ghetto, having by now
absolutely nothing to do.23

It was not only liberation theologians who contributed to this

marginalization of God from public significance, but Catholics inspired

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 BENEDICT XVI

by Liberal philosophy were also complicit in fostering the same social

trend. It suited their upward social mobility prospects to privatize
their faith or to promote what Maurice Gauchet calls a ‘superstruc-
tural faith’ that does not penetrate to the core of a person or culture
itself.24 Each in their own way, the Marxist inspired Catholics, and
the Liberal inspired Catholics, allowed their political and social
interests to transform their theology, rather than allowing their
theology to transform their political and social interests. With so
many internal problems it is not surprising that Christianity was
unable to present itself as a viable alternative to the various Marxist
and Freudian inspired ideologies in 1968 or to the nihilist currents
in post-modernism in 1989.
At the close of the first decade of the twenty-first century the issue
is not so much liberation theologies (although they continue to be
significant in some countries, including the US in the form of black
liberation theology) as the emergence of post-modern theologies
which challenge the very notion of Christianity as a master narrative,
valid for all ages and cultures.25 For some of these Christ is no longer
God incarnate, the one mediator, the eternal Word and so on, but
merely someone who experienced God in a special way – a kind of
Western analogue for Buddha.26 As the Church’s theologians grapple
with the emergence of post-modern philosophy and its theological
significance, what Ratzinger described as ‘the fundamental crisis
of our age’ – developing a Catholic understanding of the mediation
of history in the realm of ontology – becomes the central problem-
atic around which and upon which so much of the structure of the
narrative depends. It is not surprising therefore to find that many
of Ratzinger’s theological interventions relate to this problematic.

8
 CHAPTER 1

THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

In the popular imagination the phrase ‘Romantic movement’

conjures the sound of bells peeling from snow-topped steeples,
images of cattle grazing on village greens and hillsides, the smell of
smoke rising from the heaths of Scottish crofters and the lyricism
of the English poets who set up camp in the Lake District. In short,
the phrase is synonymous with rural beauty and pastoral content-
ment and sometimes aching sexual passions, mostly unrequited.
The collective common factor is an aversion to the ugliness of the
industrialized world and its highly rationalistic and materialistic
culture, and a reverence for the natural order and its beauty. The
movement had strong appeal for artists and intellectuals, that is, for
those who wanted their lives to be something more than a contri-
bution to the cold god of industry and capital. It emphasized such
concepts as individuality or the personal uniqueness of each and
every human being, the importance of memory and the motions of
the human heart, the significance of cultures and traditions and the
transcendental of beauty, especially as the latter is revealed in nature.
H. G. Schenk described it as ‘a half way house between nihilism and
Catholicism’.1 It had the potential to be developed in both directions.
Thus, Nietzsche and (according to some readings) Heidegger can be
found at one end of the spectrum and Joseph Ratzinger and Hans
Urs von Balthasar at the other. While the publication of Aeterni
Patris in 1879 fostered a hyper-rationalist neo-scholasticism to
out-reason the rationalists, in Baden-Württemberg and Lucerne
and among English convert intellectuals and Anglo-Catholics, other
currents of thought had been engaged with the concerns of the
Romantics. While they did not eschew the importance of truth or
the work of the intellect, their starting point was the whole human

9
 BENEDICT XVI

person and the quest for self-transcendence. They chose to enter the
controversy about the relationship between faith and reason only
after deepening their understanding of the relationship between
faith and history.2 History in turn opens onto the terrain of memory
and tradition and ultimately hermeneutics.
In Germany the centre of this Catholic engagement with Romantic
thought was to be found at the University of Tübingen.3 Its leading
theologians were Johann Sebastian Drey (1777–1853); Johann Adam
Möhler (1796–1838) and Johannes Evangelist von Kuhn (1806–
1887). As Grant Kaplan has noted, they followed the lead of Schelling
in rejecting Kant’s project of stripping the positive and historical
from Christianity, of proclaiming Christianity as a pure religion of
reason.4 They also eschewed the post-Kantian tendency to reduce
Christianity to the level of an ethical framework. Drey emphasized
that the Catholic faith is a religion of ‘sentiment’ (Gemüth) as well as
of reason (Verstand) and that revelation is itself an historical event.
This in turn highlighted the importance of the individual in the
reception of revelation. Following the logic of Lessing’s Education
of the Human Race, Drey concluded that what education is for the
individual, revelation is for all of humanity.5 Similarly, von Kuhn
described the philosophy of Christian revelation as ‘the presence of
Christ revealed historically, not dialectically’.6 Meanwhile Möhler
added to this accent on history by positing an organic unity between
the Christian community and Christ. As Kaplan explained, for
Möhler ‘the chain of history from nineteenth-century Swabia to
first-century Palestine is unbroken. In order to be salvific, the saving
truth of Christianity must have been present, even in a truncated
form, for every generation of believers’.7 This is because access to
the truth occurs by living the truth. In a work published in 1988,
Joseph Ratzinger was to describe Möhler as ‘the great reviver of
Catholic theology after the ravages of the Enlightenment’.8
In addition to the cluster of scholars at Tübingen there were other
theologians focused on the issues of the Romantic movement. These
included Johann Michael von Sailer (1751–1832), the Bishop of
Ratisbon, described by some as ‘the Church father of Bavaria’, his
disciple Heinrich Alois Gügler (1782–1827) who became the leader
of the romantic school in Lucerne and one of those who influenced
Möhler, Franz Xaver von Baader (1765–1841) the Professor of
Speculative Theology at Landshut who argued against the Kantian
severance of philosophy from religious traditions, and Matthias

10
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

Joseph Scheeben (1835–1888) a professor at the archdiocesan

seminary of Cologne, author of works on nature and grace and the
inter-relationship of the Christian mysteries, to name only a selection
of the most prominent.9
Virgil Nemoianu has also drawn attention to the fact that in
German-speaking lands there were circles of intellectuals who acted
as a link between theologians and other members of the literati, such
that theologians were not cut off from the currents of thought in
the world of the arts, politics and literature, as sometimes happens
when theological studies are left to clerics in seminaries. In this con-
text he mentions the contribution of Countess Amalie von Gallitzin
(1748–1806), along with Franz von Fürstenberg (1729–1810), whose
salon in Münster acted as a kind of clearing-house connecting
different circles of Catholic intellectuals.10 Their greatest achieve-
ment was the conversion of Count Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg
(1750–1819) who wrote a 15-volume theology of history from an
anti-Enlightenment perspective.11
Such theological engagements with Romantic movement themes
never took off in the Roman academies or in Belgium and Holland
as they did in nineteenth-century Tübingen, Bavaria and Lucerne,
though in Oxford the sermons and tracts of John Henry Newman
were covering some of the same territory.12 The Munich-based
Jesuit, Erich Przywara (1889–1972), editor of Stimmen der Zeit,
had developed an interest in Newman as early as the 1920s and had
encouraged Edith Stein to translate Newman’s pre-conversion letters
and his Idea of a University into German.13 The cultural critic
Theodor Haecker, who had converted to Catholicism in 1921, had
also translated works of Newman into German and is one of those
specifically cited by Ratzinger as a popular author for seminarians
of his time. Haecker is also credited with introducing Sophie Scholl,
martyr of the White Rose movement, and others in her circle, to the
works of Newman.14 In particular, in the Advent of 1943 Haecker
quoted from his translation of Newman’s Advent sermon on the
Antichrist (Tract #83) to members of the anti-Nazi student group.
Haecker believed Newman was especially valuable for demonstrating
the legitimate role of reason in the act of faith and for explaining
conscience in relation to other acts of the mind, making conscience
an organ and mediator of knowledge.15 He praised Newman for his
clear perception of the intellectual difficulties which exist for the
faith in the modern world and in particular for his understanding

11
 BENEDICT XVI

that these difficulties could not be overcome with ‘a naked syllogism’.16

In 1935 Haecker published Der Christ und die Geschichte which
covered themes in the theology of history and in which he paid
particular attention to the action of Divine Providence in history.
In all, Haecker published some seven books on Newman, mainly
translations into German.
When Ratzinger joined the seminary in Freising in 1946 his Prefect
of Studies, Alfred Läpple, was working on a dissertation on con-
science in the work of Newman.17 Ratzinger has since reflected that
for seminarians of his generation ‘Newman’s teaching on conscience
became an important foundation for theological personalism, which
was drawing us all in its sway. Our image of the human being as
well as our image of the Church was permeated by this point of
departure’.18 Ratzinger was to take from Newman his understanding
of papal authority as a power that comes from revelation to com-
plete natural conscience and Newman’s rejection of the popularist
interpretations of papal authority as something akin to absolute
monarchy.
Not only Läpple was immersed in the works of Newman, but
so too was Gottlieb Söhngen (1892–1971), Ratzinger’s teacher in
fundamental theology and the director of both of Ratzinger’s theses
(the doctorate and habilitationschrift).19 It was under Söhngen that
Ratzinger studied Newman’s Grammar of Assent. Söhngen had also
worked on the topics of the convertibility of truth and being, on
sacramentality, and on the border issues between theology and
philosophy, all of which reappear as perennial themes in Ratzinger’s
publications.
In an address delivered to mark the centenary of Newman’s death,
Ratzinger remarked that even deeper for him than the contribution
of Söhngen for his appreciation of Newman was the contribution
which Heinrich Fries published in connection with the Jubilee of
Chalcedon.20 Here he found access to Newman’s teaching on the
development of doctrine, which he regards, along with Newman’s
doctrine on conscience, as Newman’s decisive contribution to the
renewal of theology. It ‘placed the key in our hand to build historical
thought into theology, or much more, [Newman] taught us to think
historically in theology and so to recognize the identity of faith in
all developments’.21
While the teaching on the development of doctrine opened a
pathway for history in theological thought, the doctrine of conscience

12
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

gave weight to the emerging body of mid-twentieth-century scholar-

ship presented as Christian personalism. Both John Paul II and
Ratzinger were heavily influenced by personalist currents in their
early academic years. Whereas the young Wojtyła was in contact with
the French sources of the movement, and with the work of the
Munich-born philosopher Max Scheler, the young Ratzinger came
to personalism primarily through the Saarland philosopher Peter
Wust (1884–1940) and the Austrian born Jewish philosopher, Martin
Buber (1878–1965).
Wust was influenced by St Augustine and St Bonaventure, espe-
cially Bonaventure’s doctrine of the concursus Dei, (according to
which all created substances have causal powers which cannot
be exercised without the concurrence of God), as well as by the
philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler (1874–1928) and Karl
Jaspers (1883–1969). His most famous works were Die Auferstehung
der Metaphysik (1920), Naivität und Pietät (1925) and Ungewissheit
und Wagnis (1937). In Naivität und Pietät Wust offered an anthro-
pology in which the unity of the soul is pre-eminently displayed
in the work of memory and conscience and which emphasized the
importance of Vernunft (intuition) as a necessary supplement to
Verstand (analytic reason) in the apprehension of a hierarchy of
values and by which Vernunft is itself conditioned by an attitude
of faith. This attitude of faith or piety is in turn understood as the
reception of a natural revelation of God to the soul. E. I. Watkin,
Wust’s English translator, compared him to Wordsworth: ‘Words-
worth’s reverence for things, for human ties, for the soul, as vehicles
of a divine power is precisely what Wust describes and demands
especially in his use of the word Pietät’.22 Watkin noted that unlike
some of the English Romantics, particularly Blake, who represented
the deliberate rejection of discursive reason in favour of intuition, or
imagination, Wust regarded both Vernunft and Verstand as necessary
elements of judgment.
Just as Wust regarded piety or what might otherwise be called
a disposition of receptivity to the will of the divine as a necessary
element for the proper function of Vernunft, Martin Buber believed
that every great culture rests on an original relational incident, on a
response to a Thou made at its source. (As John Francis Kobler
observed in his Vatican II and Phenomenology: Reflections on the
Life-World and the Church the categories of being and existence
in scholastic philosophy are expressed by Martin Buber and other

13
 BENEDICT XVI

philosophers of dialogue such as Levinas, through the ‘I’ and the

‘Thou’).23 This original relational incident creates a special concep-
tion of the cosmos which is then handed down to succeeding
generations. If however a culture ceases to be centred in the living
and continually renewed relational event, in Wust’s terms, if it suffers
a loss of piety, then it hardens into a world of disenchanted
commodities.24
Buber also drew the young Ratzinger’s attention to the significance
of St Augustine for understanding what the Romantics called
Bildung or the development of the individual soul. In Between Man
and Man (1947) Buber noted that the first philosopher to pose
anthropological questions, more than seven centuries after Aristotle,
was Augustine. Whereas Aristotle reflected on those things that
can be discerned about human beings in general, Augustine was
interested in his own self-experience.25 Buber also noted that with
Aquinas some nine centuries after Augustine there is a return to a
more panoramic vision:

In Aquinas’s world system man is indeed a separate species of a

quite special kind, because in him the human soul, the lowest
of the spirits, is substantially united with the human body, the
highest of physical things, so that man appears as it were as ‘the
horizon and the dividing line of spiritual and physical nature’.
But Aquinas knows no special problem and no special problem-
atic of human life, such as Augustine experienced and expressed
with trembling heart. [With Aquinas] the anthropological ques-
tion has here come to rest again; in man, housed and unproblematic,
no impulse stirs to questioning self-confrontation, or it is soon
appeased.26

It was in part this ahistorical character of the work of St Thomas

which left Ratzinger with the impression that Thomism is too dry
and impersonal, in contrast to the works of Augustine, for whom,
‘the passionate, suffering, questioning man is always right there,
and one can identify with him’.27 The impersonal and ahistorical
character of Thomism meant that it was not well equipped to deal
with mid-twentieth-century existential angst. It needed to be supple-
mented with a personalist dimension as Karol Wojtyła and his
colleagues at the Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) had also
concluded.28

14
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

Not only had Buber identified a key focal difference between

Augustine and Aquinas which resonated with the pastoral concerns
of the young Ratzinger, but Buber was also hostile to a conception
of religion as ritualism and dogmatism, and this was another of
Ratzinger’s pastoral preoccupations. Instead of writing about Juda-
ism from the perspective of dogma and ritual, Buber tried to present
the essential qualities of Judaism in terms of a philosophical anthro-
pology with an emphasis on how the human person can bridge the
gulf between the sacred and profane. Indeed, von Balthasar sug-
gested that Buber was driven by a quest to understand what Catholics
would call sacramentality – the way that God relates to his people in
signs and actions – and that this led him to accept and defend the
body of thought that is common to the romantic movement and
modern psychology that stresses the significance of the myth-making
faculty of the creative imagination.29 In his 1968 bestseller, Introduc-
tion to Christianity, Ratzinger was also to approach the topic of
Christianity from the perspective of philosophical anthropology. Like
Buber he was keen to emphasize the importance of relationality –
that dimension of the person which makes him or her unique and
unrepeatable.30 He has written that the era of defining the person
solely in terms of substantiality (those elements human persons share
in common– the human ‘hard drive’ as it were) is over.31
Buber’s affirmation of the need for ‘original relational incidents’
as the source of the human understanding of the cosmos and as the
foundations for human cultures also resonated with the thought of
Josef Pieper (1904–1997) a professor of philosophical anthropology
at the University of Münster who eventually became a friend of
Ratzinger. Although a scholar of Aquinas and commonly described
as a Thomist, Pieper never accepted the sharp dichotomy between
theology and philosophy which was so typical of pre-Conciliar
Thomism. In his introduction to the 2008 English translation of
Pieper’s Überlieferung: Begriff und Anspruch (On the Concept of
Tradition) which was first published in 1970, E. Christian Kopff
claimed that Pieper never felt comfortable with the label ‘Thomist’
and could never satisfactorily answer requests from American colle-
agues to identify the school of neo-Thomism to which he belonged.32
Nonetheless Pieper was certain that his work was running on a differ-
ent trajectory from what he called the ‘Cartesian-hued rationality’
of twentieth-century French neo-Thomism.33 A key to this differ-
ence was Pieper’s acceptance of Werner Jaeger’s interpretation of

15
 BENEDICT XVI

Aristotle in his Aristotle: Fundamentals of the History of his Develop-

ment (Oxford University Press, 1934). Pieper believed that the
most exciting conclusion of Jaeger’s Aristotle book was that behind
Aristotle’s metaphysics there lies the credo ut intelligam.34 Against
the ‘Cartesian-hued Neo-Thomists’ Pieper wrote:

The very moment someone engaged in philosophizing ceases to

take his bearing from sacred tradition, two things happen to him.
First, he loses sight of his true subject, the real world and its
structure of meaning, and instead talks about something entirely
different, namely, philosophy and philosophers. Second, having
forfeited his legitimate hold on the only authoritative tradition,
he must illegitimately and (by the way) vainly seek support in
the mere facts handed down, in randomly chosen historical
‘material’.35

Echoes of Pieper can be found throughout Ratzinger’s publica-

tions, particularly in his treatments of the theological virtues, of hope
and history and of faith and reason. Ratzinger has also acknowl-
edged that he sought to extend Pieper’s philosophical reflections
on faith, hope and love into the theological and spiritual spheres
and his Spiritual Exercises were dedicated to Pieper on his 85th
birthday.36 Like both Pieper and Söhngen, Ratzinger is interested in
the border zones between philosophy and theology and he encour-
ages philosophers to take their bearings from sacred tradition. Unlike
the Cartesian-hued Thomists or those influenced by Kant, Ratzinger
has argued that there is no such thing as pure reason or rationality
unencumbered by theological presuppositions. As he expresses the
idea, ‘reason has a wax nose’.37
More specifically Pieper argued that it makes an enormous
difference to human conduct whether or not one accepts the tradi-
tion of the created character of the world and humanity. Only
someone who accepts it, who ‘understands mankind essentially as
something designed, can stand up against Jean-Paul Sartre’s thesis,
which is equally derived from a dogma, has very serious conse-
quences, and is by no means purely abstract’.38 For Sartre, and now
one might add most contemporary postmoderns, there is ‘no human
nature and human beings have no pre-established purpose or
meaning’.39 This is a theme to which Ratzinger returns again and

16
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

again in his treatment of contemporary western culture and the

problems generated by contemporary biotechnology. For example,
the issue of the morality of creating human embryos for research
purposes is ultimately resolved by recourse to theology – either by
concluding in the negative, that human life is sacred or concluding
in the positive that it is a commodity. In his Foreword to Introduction
to Christianity Ratzinger wrote:

If the world and man do not come from a creative intelligence,

which stores within itself their measures and plots the path of
human existence, then all that is left are traffic rules for human
behaviour, which can be discarded or maintained according to
their usefulness.40

Josef Pieper’s first book was inspired by a lecture on Goethe

and Thomas Aquinas, which was delivered by Romano Guardini
(1885–1968) at the Castle Rothenfels on the Main in 1924. The
lecture was titled ‘About the Classical Spirit’. Guardini held posts at
the University of Berlin (1923–1939), Tübingen (1945–1948) and
Munich (1948–1962) and was one of the great scholars of twentieth-
century Catholic Germany. He was forced to resign his post in 1939
and for a time was silenced by the Nazis. Karl Rahner described
him as a ‘Christian humanist who led Germany’s Catholics out of an
intellectual and cultural ghetto and into the contemporary world’.41
Similarly, Ratzinger remarked:

His flair for seizing upon philosophical questions of life and

existence of the time between and after the world wars, and
illustrating them with literary themes or with great figures of the
faith, enabled theology in its Catholic form to remain a dialogue
partner in the academic world . . . . He penetrated areas shunned
by scholastic theology.42

Guardini wrote both his doctoral and habilitation theses on

St Bonaventure. The doctorate was on salvation in St Bonaventure
and the habilitation thesis was on the illumination of the mind in
St Bonaventure. Both of these topics and the general theological
place of St Bonaventure made an impact on the young Ratzinger
whose own habilitationschrift became a study of the theology of

17
 BENEDICT XVI

history in St Bonaventure. This however is not the only contribution

of Guardini to Ratzinger’s intellectual formation. Guardinian themes
appear like a watermark on the pages of Ratzinger’s essays.
One of the first books Ratzinger read when he began his theologi-
cal studies was Romano Guardini’s The Spirit of the Liturgy. In the
year 2000 he published his own work with the same title with ‘the
intention of translating what Guardini did at the end of the First
World War, in a totally different historical situation’.43 In the preface
he described Guardini’s work as having helped him and others of his
generation to ‘rediscover the liturgy in all its beauty, hidden wealth
and time-transcending grandeur’.44 Guardini’s book The Lord (1937)
also offered Ratzinger’s generation a new approach to the spiritual
interpretation of Scripture. Of this Ratzinger has written:

Guardini recognized that the liturgy is the true, living environ-

ment for the Bible and that the Bible can be properly understood
only in this living context from which it first emerged. The texts
of the Bible, this great book of Christ, are not to be seen as
the literary products of some scribes at their desks, but rather
as the words of Christ himself delivered in the celebration of
holy Mass.45

Further, Guardini’s The Essence of Christianity (1938) can be read

as a precursor to Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity (1968). As
Ratzinger was later to write, ‘we were taught by Guardini, [that] the
essence of Christianity is not an idea, not a system of thought, not a
plan of action. The essence of Christianity is a Person: Jesus Christ
himself’.46 This principle became enshrined in the Conciliar docu-
ment Dei Verbum (1965) which Ratzinger helped to draft and formed
the central theme of his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (2007).
In his criticisms of liberation theology Ratzinger also made use
of Guardini’s reflections on the relationship between thought and
being, especially Guardini’s emphasis on the priority of logos over
ethos and in various places he has used the Guardinian concepts
‘concrete-living’ and ‘polarities’ (a concept also used by Erich
Przywara). In Perché siamo ancora nella Chiesa, Ratzinger wrote:

Man is open to the truth, but the truth is not in some place but
rather in the concrete-living, in the figure of Jesus Christ. This
concrete-living demonstrates truth precisely through the fact that

18
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

it is the unity of what are apparent opposites, since the logos and
the a-logon are united in it.47

Not only did Guardini inspire Pieper and the young Ratzinger but
he also taught Hans Urs von Balthasar at the University of Berlin.
Balthasar was later to publish a work of tribute to him under the title
Romano Guardini. Reform aus dem Ursprung.48 As a Jesuit student in
the years 1931–1937 von Balthasar had his own taste of the dryness
of scholastic theology and through the inspiration of his confrères
Erich Przywara and Henri de Lubac, he set his studies on a radically
different course. Przywara, one of those responsible for introducing
Newman to a German audience, empathized with von Balthasar’s
intellectual frustration and counselled him to learn the scholastic
philosophy with ‘an attitude of serene detachment’. Accordingly,
von Balthasar claims to have sat through classes on scholasticism,
with his nose defiantly glued to the works of the non-scholastic
Augustine, and with his ears plugged.49 While Przywara got him
through his studies of pre-Conciliar scholasticism, de Lubac, he
wrote, ‘showed us the way beyond the scholastic stuff to the Fathers
of the Church’, and ‘while all the others went off to play football’,
he, Jean Daniélou and Henri Bouillard read Origen, Gregory of
Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor.50
De Lubac was influenced by Maurice Blondel’s account of tradi-
tion as presented in his History and Dogma (1903) and Blondel in
turn had been influenced by Newman whose work had been intro-
duced to a French audience by Henri Bremond. Blondel also came
to know of the Tübingen school through Georges Goyau, who was
an author of an important study on Johann Adam Möhler. In his
introduction to the English translation of Blondel’s The Letter on
Apologetics and History and Dogma, Alexander Dru (a close friend
of Theodor Haecker thanks to their mutual dedication to Kierkeg-
aard) noted that the very first edition of Annales de Philosophie
Chrétienne (a journal owned by Blondel and to which he was a
frequent contributor) ‘pointed to the need to break away from the
narrow Latin, Roman and Mediterranean conception of Catholicism
by pointing to the relevance of the German Catholic writers of the
Romantic period’.51 He also noted that Blondel, Bremond and
Goyau – among others – were ‘carrying on (unbeknown, at first,
to themselves) the tradition of Tübingen (and in some respects
therefore of Newman)’.52

19
 BENEDICT XVI

Thus the Catholic engagement with Romantic movement themes

was to reach France in the first half of the twentieth century, and it
found expression not only in journals like Annales de Philosophie
Chrétienne but also in the publications of the great literary laymen
such as Charles Péguy, Georges Bernanos, François Mauriac and
Paul Claudel. While studying under de Lubac in Lyon-Fourvierve
(1933–1937), von Balthasar was introduced to the literature of Péguy,
Bernanos, Mauriac and Claudel and he set about translating their
works, as well as de Lubac’s Catholicisme, into German. The last
three of these authors have been cited by Ratzinger as popular with
German seminarians of his generation. Mark Bosco has argued that
these lay Catholic literati became fashionable in the intellectual
salons of Paris between the two world wars precisely because their
Catholicism was ‘never served up with triumphant, epistemological
certainty or as morally uplifting drama’ but rather as ‘a place where
the mysterious irruptions of grace might shine forth or manifest in
profound ways’.53 These artists created ‘a specific vision of French
Catholicism, one which was prophetic in denouncing both the
rationalism of the state as well as the bourgeois Christianity that
made a too-easy concourse with industrial society’ and one might
add, Vichy.54 With an emphasis on aesthetic considerations over
rational modes of discourse this vision ‘offered both a critique of the
modern state and a powerful philosophical and artistic alternative’.55
It addressed itself to the whole range of human experience, including,
but not exclusively, the intellectual.
The common theme running from Newman and the Tübingen
scholars through to the names of Guardini, Blondel, de Lubac,
Przywara, von Balthasar, Péguy, Bernanos, Mauriac, Claudel and
ultimately Ratzinger is an interest in how the human being situated in
time and in a specific cultural milieu connects to the divine. They
were all interested in the Romantic theme of Bildung or the develop-
ment of the soul in all of its multi-dimensional complexity. The
Boethian definition of a person as an ‘individual substance of a
rational nature’, though accurate as definitions go, was a dry husk
with which to confront the existential trauma of the twentieth
century. In the late 1960s, with the arrival of the sexual revolution
and wide-scale revolt from magisterial teaching, the questioning
of the very structures and traditions of the Church, and clerical
enthusiasm for pastoral projects aimed at accommodating the litur-
gical practices of the Church to those of contemporary pop culture,

20
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

a new intellectual coalition was formed around de Lubac, von

Balthasar and Ratzinger. It took a concrete form in the creation
of the journal Communio in 1972. In addition to re-publishing the
literary works of the great twentieth-century laymen (Claudel et al.)
in some dozen languages, the Communio circle of scholars offered
a hermeneutic of continuity for the interpretation of the documents
of the Second Vatican Council.
One of the earliest examples of the application of this ‘hermeneutic
of continuity’ can be found in Ratzinger’s 1969 critique of the treat-
ment of freedom and anthropology in the Conciliar document
Gaudium et spes (1965).56 He argued that while the document offered
a daring new theological anthropology which was to be celebrated,
the presentation of the anthropology was poor, and indeed he went
so far as to observe that some of the language in the section on free-
dom was ‘downright Pelagian’.57 The sections of the document he
strongly affirmed were those owing their inspiration to the work
of Henri de Lubac, particularly de Lubac’s Catholicisme (1938),
which he described as ‘a key reading event’ that gave him ‘a new
way of looking at theology and faith as such’.58 By emphasizing
the Christocentric paragraphs in Gaudium et spes influenced by
de Lubac’s Catholicisme, he effectively closed off the secularizing
loopholes in the document.59
While de Lubac’s ecclesiological works form much of the founda-
tion of the Communio ecclesiology, they are buttressed by von
Balthasar’s work on the Petrine Office and his notion of a symphony
of different missions in the life of the Church. Since the symphony
needs many sections (different intellectual or spiritual charisms),
von Balthasar’s ecclesiology exhibits a quality of being both anti-
clericalist in orientation while at the same time defending the
sacred hierarchy by finding a place for it within the whole. As
Ratzinger himself has written, ‘von Balthasar had a great reverence
for the Petrine, for the hierarchical structure of the Church. But he
knew, too, that this is not her entire nor her deepest aspect’.60
The influence of the ecclesiology of de Lubac and von Balthasar
is palpable in Ratzinger’s treatment of issues in this territory but
one finds that de Lubac and von Balthasar have also influenced
Ratzinger’s understanding of revelation and in the case of de Lubac,
of scripture. Above all Ratzinger shares with von Balthasar an
interest in beauty as a transcendental property of being, and in love
as a theological virtue, and indeed the form of all virtue. In 1985

21
 BENEDICT XVI

it was Ratzinger who hosted von Balthasar’s 80th birthday party in

Rome and in 1988 it was Ratzinger who delivered von Balthasar’s
funeral homily in Lucerne.61 In Milestones – Memoirs 1927–1977,
Ratzinger remarked that meeting Balthasar was for him the begin-
ning of a lifelong friendship and that never again has he found anyone
with such a comprehensive and humanistic education as Balthasar
and de Lubac. He concluded, ‘I cannot even begin to say how much
I owe to my encounter with them’.62
One final figure who deserves to be mentioned in any account of
the intellectual antecedents and mentors of the young Ratzinger is
the German philosopher and theologian, Dietrich von Hildebrand
(1889–1977). Von Hildebrand was brought up in a Protestant family
but converted to Catholicism in 1914 and became a prominent
Catholic intellectual opposed to Hitler’s plans for the future of
Europe. He was one of those German scholars who spent the late
1930s and early 40s on the run from Nazi assassination squads
and ultimately reached safety in the United States. By the 1950s
he was back in Munich as a member of the parish of St Georg
where the young Fr Ratzinger was an assistant priest. He and his
wife Alice ran a salon that sounds rather like that of the Countess
Amalie von Gallitzin. They brought together intellectuals from
across the world and Ratzinger would attend their meetings from
time to time. In 2000 he wrote the preface to Alice von Hildebrand’s
A Soul of a Lion, her biography of her husband, and in it he referred
to his attendance of the occasional lectures given at the Hildebrand
home in Munich. He specifically remembered one of Dietrich von
Hildebrand’s lectures on beauty’s philosophical and spiritual signifi-
cance and he concluded that ‘the joy and freshness of his under-
standing of Catholic doctrine was contagious and stood in marked
contrast to the dryness of a type of scholasticism that seemed to have
become stale and brittle’.63
Von Hildebrand’s popularity as a heroic anti-Nazi intellectual
fell into decline in the 1970s following his defence of the traditional
Latin Mass which was in most places suppressed between 1969 and
1987. Von Hildebrand never questioned the legitimacy of the rite of
1969 but he did regard aspects of its use as problematic. He rhetori-
cally asked whether people better meet Christ by soaring up to Him,
or by dragging Him down into their workaday world? Ratzinger
was later to be critical of the tendency in contemporary liturgy to

22
 THE ROMANTIC ANTECEDENTS

‘bring God down to the level of the people’ and was to describe such
actions as a form of ‘apostasy’. In The Meaning of Christian Brother-
hood and in Principles of Catholic Theology Ratzinger also gave
significant space to what he described as the authentically ‘biblical’
inspiration of von Hildebrand’s depiction of the Christian attitude
of readiness to change and convert to the radical newness of Christ.
This topic pervades von Hildebrand’s publications but its most
extensive treatment can be found in his Transformation in Christ.64
Ratzinger’s criticisms of Karl Rahner’s account of human freedom
in Hearers of the Word are focused on this theme of conversion and
transformation in Christ.
The expression ‘the Rhine flowed into the Tiber’ is a well-worn
cliché used to explain what happened within the Catholic Church in
the first half of the 1960s. Many ideas which had been percolating
in the theology academies of Munich, Lucerne and Tübingen rose
to the surface as the bishops of the world, or at least a significant
majority of them, came to accept that neo-scholasticism had its
limitations.65 It was the ideas of those who were humanists by disposi-
tion, interested in anthropological questions, often multidisciplinary
and above all concerned to understand the theological significance
of history and tradition, which became ascendant.
None of the above is intended to suggest that Ratzinger/Benedict
XVI is neatly pigeon-holed as the Tübingen School’s most illustrious
heir, or a German apogee of John Henry Newman, or the Bavarian
soul mate of the Swiss von Balthasar. Like all great scholars, he is
not so easily labeled and packaged. However, one might at least
conclude that there is some degree of truth in these tags, and that it
is not possible to understand Ratzinger without a certain familiarity
with the Romantic reaction against the rationalism of the Enlighten-
ment and with the Catholic wing of the Romantic tradition. Indeed,
it helps to have knowledge of the Romantic movement generally,
including the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, with whom Ratzinger is
a frequent interlocutor.
Cardinal Joachim Meisner has suggested that Ratzinger is the
‘Mozart of theology’, and while it is true that Ratzinger does not
jettison the classical repertoire, given the influence of the Romantic
movement on German theology, coupled with Ratzinger’s recogni-
tion that the failure to provide an adequate account of the mediation
of history in the realm of ontology represented the single greatest

23
 BENEDICT XVI

crisis for Catholic theology in the twentieth century, a more appro-

priate analogy might be that of a more romantically-inclined
composer, such as Carl Maria von Weber or Bruckner. Nonetheless,
Ratzinger’s work does have the luminosity and directness of Mozart,
and, of course, a Mozart composition like the 40th symphony in
G minor has its romantic moments.66 Ratzinger permits the intro-
duction of Romantic themes into the classical repertoire without
abandoning its essential elements.

24
 CHAPTER 2

THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF

THE INCARNATION

A significant attribute of theologians influenced by the Romantic

movement is an interest in culture, understood in all three German
senses of the term, as Kultur or civilization, Geist, or the spirit or
ethos of institutions, and Bildung, as self-cultivation or education.
Whereas the neo-scholastics tended to ignore the concept altogether,
and to respond to the rationalism of the eighteenth century with a
scholastic counter-rationalism, the Romantics were more interested
in understanding the social and liturgical embodiment of Christian
ideas or what might be called the ‘lifestyle’ implications of the choice
for or against Christianity. While the scholastics tried to prove that
Christianity was more rational than any alternative on the market,
the Catholic romantics tried to prove that the opportunities for self-
development (Bildung), were greater with the Christian, in particular,
Catholic, option. However the Catholic tradition is itself complex. It
is the home of more than one spiritual family. Balthasar compared
it to a symphony. There are, for example, Carmelite, Benedictine,
Dominican, Franciscan, Ignatian and Salesian spiritualities for those
in religious Orders and many derivatives of these in the lay ecclesial
movements. The approach to the realm of culture, especially culture
as Bildung, varies both across and within the spiritual families.
In his essay Zwischen Religion und Kultur written in the twilight
moment of scholasticism in 1962, Erich Przywara observed that
there is a tension or polarity between religion and culture which has
run through the whole history of Christianity.1 Beginning with Justin
and Tertullian, he noted that their opposition might be categorized
as the either/or between religion as the ultimate strength of culture

25
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and culture as religion’s opponent. Similarly, in the early Middle

Ages, he noted the acute contrast between the monasteries of Cluny
and Clairvaux and the still more acute contrast between Peter
Abelard and St Bernard. Cluny is renowned for the visual splendour
of its architecture, Clairvaux is famous for its austerity. Abelard is
remembered for his sensuality (not only because of his affair with
the beautiful and brilliant Héloïse but also for the sensual beauty of
his musical and poetic compositions), while it is known that it took
a decision of a General Chapter of St Bernard’s Order to make him
mitigate the austerities of his regime at Clairvaux. Przywara observed
that these polarities fed into the chaos of the Reformation, when the
contrast is between the culturally resplendent church of the Renais-
sance and later the Baroque and the iconoclastic ‘imperceptible
and invisible God’ of the Protestants. Finally, Przywara concluded
that nineteenth-century intellectual history was characterized by a
division between the idea of the pursuit of scientific and cultural
knowledge as a kind of religion in itself, and the gradually ascendant
ideals of the Catholic romantics of science and culture which have
their immanent ideals in religion, especially in Christendom.
Przywara’s summary may be brought up to date by adding to it
the fact that in the post-Conciliar Church there has been a division
between those who want to baptize contemporary mass culture and
those who regard this strategy as a major cause of the dramatic
decline in the numbers of those participating in the sacramental life
of the Church after the Council. Indeed, in the post-Conciliar era
these two positions have grown so far apart that it is no longer accu-
rate to describe them as poles held in tension. While whole diocesan
liturgical commissions spend their time trying to make the liturgical
practices of the Church more closely embody elements of contempo-
rary popular culture, there are those like Cardinal James Stafford
who claim that ‘every world religion is trembling before the advances
of American pop culture’, and thus that pop culture is actually
toxic to the flourishing of the faith.2 Today the contrast is no longer
between austerity and sensual splendour but between those who
regard beauty as something objectively discernible and those who
regard it as a mere matter of taste or personal preference.
Ratzinger is firmly on the side of those who think like Stafford and
indeed his opposition to the project of accommodating the cultural
life of the Church to that of contemporary mass culture is possibly

26
 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

that element of his intellectual work for which he is most famous.

Certainly no other Cardinal of his generation has written so exten-
sively on this topic. He has cautioned that where the imprint of the
Catholic faith remains in a culture one should not try to destroy it
in the zeal for renewal – it should not be pushed aside as ‘outmoded
junk’.3 In taking this stance, he has been one of the very few theolo-
gians of his generation not to follow the so-called ‘correlationist’
pastoral strategies associated with the theology of Karl Rahner,
Marie-Dominique Chenu, Edward Schillebeeckx and David Tracy
which sought to attach the faith to some pierres d’attente (toothing
stones) jutting out from modern and post-modern cultural formations.
Often the argument is made that some element of these modern
and post-modern formations actually had a Christian foundation and
thus that there is some point within them to which the Christian faith
can graft itself. However Balthasar and many of the Catholic literary
leaders of the first half of the twentieth century have been sceptical
of this kind of strategy. In the following passage which starkly illus-
trates the difference between the Communio theologians and the cor-
relationists, Balthasar dismissed the idea of attaching the faith to
anything which is a mere mutation of a Christian idea or practice:

The Gospel and the Church are plundered like a fruit tree, but
the fruits, once separated from the tree, go rotten and are no
longer fruitful. The ‘ideas’ of Christ cannot be separated from
Him, and so they are of no use to the world unless they are fought
for by Christians who believe in Christ, or at least by men who
are inwardly, though unconsciously, open to Him and governed
by Him. Radiance is only possible when the radiant centre is
permanently active and alive. There can be no shining from stars
long dead.4

Although Ratzinger has not explicitly endorsed this judgment of

Balthasar, his comments on the theme of culture strongly resonate
with it. In his own analysis Ratzinger begins with the observation
that the slate of the human mind is never blank. It bears the stamp
of a community that provides patterns of thinking, feeling and
acting. In a statement that sounds evocative of Michael Polanyi’s
tacit theory of knowledge, Ratzinger defines culture as the ‘system
of notions and thought patterns that preconditions the individual

27
 BENEDICT XVI

human being to judge in certain ways’.5 With Henri de Lubac he rejects

the proposition that the realm of culture can ever be theologically
neutral. Culture at its core means an opening to the divine.6 If the
divine is not the Holy Trinity it will be some substitute for it. The
Catholic faith is not some intellectual system which can be tied on to
and expressed in any cultural form. For Ratzinger, ‘the Church is its
own cultural subject for the faithful’.7 He expressly rejects the idea
that national or historical cultures might allocate their own body to
the faith. According to such a vision the faith would always have
to live from borrowed cultures, which remain in the end somehow
external and capable of being cast off. The culture of such a faith, its
practices, would be debased, becoming ‘a mere exchangeable shell’
and the faith itself would be reduced to the standing of ‘a disincar-
nated spirit ultimately void of reality’.8 Such modes of thinking are
typical of the eighteenth century, reducing culture to mere form and
religion to either pure emotion or pure thought.9 Ratzinger prefers
the expression ‘interculturality’ (the meeting of two different cultures
and a constructive search for the truth embodied in both) to ‘incul-
turation’ (which may imply the notion of hooking up the faith to a
new exchangeable shell).
Ratzinger believes that the uniqueness of Christian culture is
rooted in the Incarnation and that all of its specific characteristics
disintegrate when this belief is eclipsed.10 The Incarnation means
that the invisible God enters into the visible world so that those who
are bound to matter can know him. In paragraph 22 of the document
Gaudium et spes of the Second Vatican Council, the significance of
the Incarnation is expressed in the following manner:

The Truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does
the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a
figure of Him who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ,
the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father,
and His Love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his
supreme calling clear.

Ratzinger further observes that the Incarnation is rightly under-

stood only when it is seen within the broader context of creation,
history, and the new world. Only then does it become clear that the
senses belong to faith, that the new seeing does not abolish them, but
leads them to their original purpose.11 The International Theological

28
 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

Commission under Ratzinger’s leadership expressed the position in

the following paragraph:

In the last times inaugurated at Pentecost, the risen Christ, Alpha

and Omega, enters into the history of peoples: from that moment,
the sense of history and thus of culture is unsealed and the Holy
Spirit reveals it by actualizing and communicating it to all. The
Church is the sacrament of this revelation and its communication.
It recenters every culture into which Christ is received, placing it
in the axis of the world which is coming, and restores the union
broken by the Prince of this world. Culture is thus eschatologically
situated; it tends towards its completion in Christ, but it cannot be
saved except by associating itself with the repudiation of evil.12

Aidan Nichols has summarized the metaphysical foundations

of what Ratzinger calls the ‘humanism of the Incarnation’ in the
following manner:

This polarity structure of all existence, while manifesting the

ontological difference between the being of the creature and that
of the Creator, also suggests a positive moment where the creature
displays a certain likeness and so comparability with its God.
For between these poles there plays a fullness of inner life – a
continuous epiphany of the divine likeness.13

Nonetheless, not every variety of Catholic culture has breathed

this humanism. There periodically arise spiritual movements which
are suspicious of these positive moments and exaggerate humanity’s
fallen condition. The concern is that people will grow to love the
world too much or claim too much for human nature. Jansenism was
one such movement in the modern era which had a particularly
destructive effect on Catholic culture in eighteenth-century France
and nineteenth-century Ireland and countries of the New World that
came under the influence of Irish Orders of religious. The two areas
it affected most deeply were liturgy and sexuality. The Jansenists
favoured austerity in both of these areas of social life and were to
cause what French psychologists called La Maladie Catholique – an
inability to successfully integrate one’s sexuality into one’s overall
personal development. The late twentieth-century liberation theo-
logy movement also had a tendency to suppress the role of the sensual

29
 BENEDICT XVI

in Catholic culture and to treat an interest in the transcendental of

beauty as a peculiarly bourgeois vice, inconsistent with a preferential
option for the poor.
In a reflection on the earliest disputes within the Church about art
and beauty, Ratzinger observed that ‘iconoclasm rests on a one-sided
apophatic theology, which recognizes only the Wholly Other-ness of
the God beyond all images and words, a theology that in the final
analysis regards revelation as the inadequate human reflection of
what is eternally imperceptible’.14 He concluded that ‘what seems
like the highest humility toward God turns into pride, allowing God
no word and permitting him no real entry into history . . . matter is
absolutized and thought of as completely impervious to God, as
mere matter, and thus deprived of its dignity’.15 One might say, using
Przywara’s metaphors, that Ratzinger is personally closer to the spirit
of Cluny than Clairvaux. He suggests that a ‘theologian who does
not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous’ because
‘blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they
necessarily are reflected in his theology’.16 He believes that ‘the only
really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two argu-
ments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which
has grown in her womb’.17 Thus, ‘[n]othing can bring us into close
contact with the beauty of Christ Himself other than the world of
beauty created by faith, and light that shines out from the faces
of the saints, through whom His own light becomes visible’.18 Even
more specifically he has written that the ‘greatness of Western music
from Gregorian chant to polyphony to the Baroque age, to Bruckner
and beyond’ is, ‘the most immediate and the most evident verifica-
tion that history has to offer of the Christian image of mankind and
of the Christian dogma of redemption’.19
This is not a novel position in the Catholic tradition but follows a
long line of authorities, including St Augustine, St Bonaventure, Hugh
of St Victor, John Henry Newman and Hans Urs von Balthasar who
have regarded the aesthetic moment as essentially theophanic. Behind
these stand the influence of Plato for whom the beautiful and the
good coincide. In this context Ratzinger has been influenced by what
he terms ‘the magnificent interpretation of Platonic eros in Josef
Pieper’s Begeisterung und göttlicher Wahnsinn: Über den platonischen
Dialog Phaidros’.20 As Ratzinger summarizes Plato: ‘through the
appearance of the beautiful we are wounded in our innermost being,
and that wound grips us and takes us beyond ourselves; it stirs

30
 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

longing into flight and moves us toward the truly Beautiful, to the
Good in itself’.21 Ratzinger also quotes the fourteenth-century
Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas:

When men have a longing so great that it surpasses human nature

and eagerly desire and are able to accomplish things beyond
human thought, it is the Bridegroom himself who has wounded
them. Into their eyes he himself has sent a ray of his beauty. The
rise of the wound is evidence of the arrow, and the longing points
to the one who has shot the arrow.22

Ratzinger further notes that Cabasilas distinguished between two

different kinds of knowledge: one is knowing through instruction,
which remains second-hand and does not put the knower in contact
with reality itself. The second kind of knowledge, in contrast, is
through personal experience, through contact with the things them-
selves.23 Ratzinger acknowledges the importance of the first form of
knowledge which he associated with the discipline of theology, but
adds that we must not despise the impact produced by the heart’s
encounter with beauty, or to reject it as a true form of knowledge. To
do so, he suggests, would be to ‘dry up both faith and theology’.24
This was essentially von Balthasar’s criticism of post-Tridentine
theology. It became too rationalistic. The head was severed from the
heart. Piety was regarded as something emotional and not subject to
rational scrutiny and theology was something rational and not really
associated with matters of the heart.
In The Spirit of the Liturgy Ratzinger applies this Platonic theory
to a broad-brush history of Western art. He argues that in the art of
icons, as well as in the great Western paintings of the Romanesque
and Gothic periods, the experience described by Cabasilas has gone
from being an interior event to being an external form and thus has
become communicable.25 However, he observes that ‘this kind of
Platonism, transformed as it is by the Incarnation, largely disappears
from the West after the thirteenth century, so that now the art of
painting strives first and foremost to depict events that have taken
place, rather than being essentially epiphanic’.26 With the Renaissance
‘we see the development of the aesthetic in the modern sense, the
vision of a beauty that no longer points beyond itself but is content
in the end with itself, the beauty of the appearing thing’.27 At the
same time ‘a nostalgia for the pre-Christian gods emerges, for a world

31
 BENEDICT XVI

without the pain of the cross and the fear of sin’, which Ratzinger
suggests may have become ‘too overpowering in the images of the
late Middle Ages’.28 Today, he concludes, Christian art stands between
two fires:

It must oppose the cult of the ugly, which says that everything else,
anything beautiful, is a deception and that only the depiction of
what is cruel, base, and vulgar is the truth and true enlightenment.
And it must withstand the deceptive beauty that diminishes
man instead of making him great and that, for that very reason,
is false.29

For there to exist both an emotional and theological equilibrium

in specifically religious art, Ratzinger argues that every image of
Christ must contain a reference to his crucifixion, resurrection and
return in glory. While different emphases may be possible one of the
three aspects should never be eclipsed by another, and in the different
emphases the Paschal Mystery as a whole must be plainly evident.30
Spiritual pathologies arise when there is a lop-sided emphasis on one
or other of the Paschal mysteries. Jansenism, for example, could be
described as a spiritual disposition fixated on Good Friday.
The fact that both the crucifixion and the return in glory can be
represented highlights the paradoxical nature of beauty. In Holy
Week, the Church uses an antiphon taken from Isaiah 3:2: ‘He had
no beauty, no majesty to draw our eyes, no grace to make us delight
in Him’, and yet Psalm 44 speaks of ‘the fairest of the children of
men upon whose lips graciousness is poured’. In a reflection on these
dramatically contrasting scriptural passages, Ratzinger concludes
that ‘the beauty of truth appears in him [Christ], the beauty of God
himself, who powerfully draws us and inflicts on us the wound of
Love, as it were, a holy Eros that enables us to go forth, with and in
the Church, his Bride, to meet the Love who calls us’.31
While the art of painting in the post-Renaissance era has to some
degree lost this erotic quality, music has suffered an even greater
diminution of its epiphanic potential and in the particular case of
rock music Ratzinger believes that it represents a regression to the
paganism of the Dionysian cults. He rejects the idea, popular with
contemporary evangelical Protestants and even Catholic liturgists,
especially those formed in the 1970s, that form and substance can be
easily separated, and thus that the only problem with rock music

32
 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

from a Christian point of view is the explicitly sexual and sometimes

crude lyrics. He finds the music itself objectionable and claims that it
has no place in the liturgy. In various publications he recommends
Calvin M. Johansson’s, Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint.32
In this work Johansson identifies a tendency of liturgists to oscillate
between the poles of aestheticism and pragmatism. He defines aes-
theticism as a preoccupation with beauty for its own sake which
runs into the danger of idolatry, while pragmatism creates a false
dichotomy between medium and message, music and gospel, in which
each may go its own way without regard for the other.33 The pragma-
tist ‘uses music uncritically as a message lubricator, sweetener or
psychological conditioner’ and ‘emasculates the gospel by using
commercialized music to sell it’.34 Such a medium, he argues, ‘kills
the message’.
Similarly, Ratzinger uses the expression ‘utility music’ to describe
popular music which is used in Church services as a carrot to entice
worshippers and the intellectual defence of this practice as ‘pastoral
pragmatism’. He also uses the expression ‘sacro-pop’ which he takes
from H. J. Burbach’s articles in the Internationale katholische
Zeitschrift.35 In his books The Feast of Faith and a New Song for
the Lord one can find passionate criticisms of ‘sacro-pop’, ‘parish
tea-party liturgies’, ‘pastoral pragmatism’, ‘primitive emotionalism’
and ‘utility music’. In a lecture on ‘Theological Problems in Church
Music’ delivered to the Church Music Department of the State
Conservatory of Music at Stuttgart, he further spoke of puritanical
functionalism as a first millstone around the neck of Church music
and the functionalism of accommodation (presumably to the norms
of contemporary mass culture) as the second millstone.36 In making
these judgments he acknowledged his debt to the arguments of Hugo
Staudinger and Wolfgang Behler, the authors of Chance and Risk of
the Present, to the effect that the machine has become the universal
stereotype for human beings and thus all of reality, including art, is
reduced to quantitative dimensions and has fallen under the laws of
the marketplace.37 He acknowledges that Karl Rahner and many
other Catholic intellectuals of the Conciliar generation were of the
view that there is nothing wrong with the use of utility music, but he
disagrees. He quotes Adorno’s judgement that ‘the fundamental
characteristic of popular music is standardization’ and describes this
as ‘incompatible with the culture of the Gospels, which seek to take
us out of the dictatorship of money, of making, of mediocrity, and

33
 BENEDICT XVI

brings us to the discipline of truth, which is precisely what pop music

eschews’.38 He rhetorically asks whether it is a pastoral success when
Catholics are capable of following the trend of mass culture and thus
share the blame for its making people immature or irresponsible.39
Even more dramatically, Ratzinger has declared that the trivializa-
tion of the faith by following the trends of mass culture ‘is not a new
inculturation, but the denial of its culture and prostitution with the
non culture’.40 He observes that disputes about music are at least
as old as the conflict between Dionysian and Apollonian music in
classical Greece, and that while Apollo is not Christ, Plato’s concern
about the music of the Dionysian cults remains relevant today since
contemporary musical forms have become a ‘decisive vehicle of a
counter religion’.41 Rock concerts are ‘anti-liturgies where people are
yanked out of themselves and where they can forget the dullness and
commonness of everyday life’.42 They are enterprises to make money
out of the human need for an experience of self-transcendence:

People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience

of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm,
noise and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of
having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it
were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of
the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance
when the self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and
breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption
that can be tasted at least for a few moments.43

In a dissertation on dogmatic theology and the ecclesial practice of

music, J. Andrew Edwards concluded that Ratzinger’s concern with
the philosophical anthropology reflected in Dionysian music leads
into his concern that music’s portrayal of subjectivity may point
toward a soteriology that is alien to the Christian position.44 In other
words, rock music is seeking freedom in ways that are contrary to
Christian notions of freedom and responsibility. Edwards notes
that Ratzinger’s antagonism toward rock music is ‘not therefore an
aesthetic decision based on his own subjective taste, but is rooted
in his detection of theological doctrines lying beneath the surface
of these musical practices which are diametrically opposed to the
Christian faith’.45 In particular Edwards concluded that Ratzinger’s
use of the Apollonian-Dionysian paradigm flows from his concern

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

that rock music’s engagement with the body may contradict the incarna-
tional emphasis on the rational Word redeeming the sensual.46
It is difficult to find other such sustained critiques of the rock
music industry in Catholic theological circles, though the non-
Catholic English philosopher Roger Scruton has reached similar
conclusions to Ratzinger in his cultural studies and the Anglican
theologian Catherine Pickstock has written theological analyses
of recent music history which resonate with some of Ratzinger’s
concerns.47 In a lecture delivered in Cambridge on the morality of
pop, Scruton argued that much contemporary pop music arrests
its listeners in a state of adolescent psychological development.
In the essay ‘Youth Culture’s Lament’ he described the pop star
as someone who excites his fans to every kind of artificial ecstasy,
knowing that nothing will change for the fan, that the void will
always remain unfulfilled. In words that could have been written
by Ratzinger he concluded:

This music is not designed for listening. It is the accompanying

soundtrack to a drama, in which the singer, strange as it may seem,
becomes something like the sacred presence of a cult, the incarna-
tion of a force beyond music, which visits the world in human
form, recruiting followers the way religious leaders recruit their
sects. The pop star’s appearance on stage is not like that of an
orchestra or an actor: it is a ‘real presence’, an incarnation of an
otherworldly being, greeted by a release of collective emotion
comparable to the Dionysiac orgies depicted by Euripides.48

Scruton also argues that to possess a culture is not only to possess

a body of knowledge or expertise; it is not simply to have accumu-
lated facts, references and theories. It is to possess a sensibility, a
response, a way of seeing things, which is in some way redemptive.49
Thus culture is not merely a matter of academic knowledge but of
a mode of participation which changes not only thoughts and
beliefs but perceptions and emotions. This is especially so of one’s
musical culture.
While Scruton and Ratzinger reached the same sociological
conclusions about the rock music industry, the Swiss philosopher
Alain de Botton has made some very similar observations to
Ratzinger about the banality of mass culture, and its tendency to
foster the psychological conditions of alienation and homelessness.

35
 BENEDICT XVI

In the following paragraph de Botton compared McDonald’s to

Westminster Cathedral:

The restaurant’s true talent lay in the generation of anxiety. The

harsh lighting, the intermittent sounds of frozen fries being
sunk into vats of oil and the frenzied behaviour of the counter
staff invited thoughts of the loneliness and meaninglessness
of existence in a random and violent universe. Conversely, after
10 minutes in [Westminster] cathedral, a range of ideas that
would have been inconceivable outside began to assume an air
of reasonableness. Under the influence of the marble, the dark-
ness and the incense, it seemed entirely probable that Jesus was
the son of God and had walked across the Sea of Galilee. In the
presence of alabaster statues of the Virgin Mary set against
rhythms of red, green and blue marble, it was no longer surprising
to think that an angel might at any moment choose to descend
through the layers of dense London cumulus, enter through
a window in the nave, blow a golden trumpet and make an
announcement in Latin about a forthcoming celestial event.50

Similarly, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ratzinger wrote:

The windows of the Gothic cathedrals keep out the garishness

of the light outside, while concentrating that light and using it so
that the whole history of God in relation to man, from creation
to the Second Coming, shines through. The walls of the church, in
interplay with the sun, become an image in their own right, the
iconostasis of the West, lending the place a sense of the sacred
that can touch the hearts even of agnostics.51

Paradoxically, this reflection of Ratzinger on Gothic architecture

resonates more with the ideas of prominent non-Catholic philoso-
phers like de Botton and Scruton, than with the ideas of many of
Ratzinger’s fellow theologians. For example, on the so-called ‘right’
of the theological spectrum, Thomists ‘of the strict observance’ tend
to be rather unmoved by concerns about mass culture. Many are
of the view that since St Thomas did not spend any time on the topic
of culture, it really cannot be all that important. They also have a
tendency to draw distinctions between form and substance and to
regard only matters of substance as important. Ratzinger’s aesthetic

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

judgments are then treated merely as matters of taste. Implicitly,

in this context, a Cartesian metaphysics is joined together with a
Kantian aesthetics. At the same time, on the ‘left’ of the theological
spectrum, the liberation theologians have been completely hostile to
this aspect of Ratzinger’s theology. They regard it as Euro-centric
and elitist. Minlib Dahll’s claim that the majority of Catholics do
not listen to Mozart or Beethoven, nor do they have any interest
in classical Greek and Roman culture and that the Credo of the B
Minor Mass by Bach is not holier or more beautiful than a Zulu
dance is an expression of this perspective.52
Whenever Ratzinger addresses the topic of culture it is often
helpful to ask whether he is speaking primarily of European cultures
which are modern and/or post-modern, or the pre-modern and
modernizing cultures of the post-colonial countries of Asia, Africa
and the Pacific. In relation to the second, the macro level theological
issue is that of the criteria to be applied to the baptism of elements
of pre-Christian cultures. One of the most famous examples of the
Church contending with this issue comes from the period of the
first Jesuit missions in China. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) argued that
Christian missionaries would be well advised to dress in the robes
of Chinese scholars, and instead of presenting Christianity as some-
thing intrinsically linked to European culture, they should try to
graft Christianity onto compatible stems in the Confucian tradition.
Ratzinger has only addressed the question in passing and has flagged
with approval the more extensive treatment of the subject by Christian
Gnilka in Chrêsis: Die Methode der Kirchenväter im Umgang mit der
antiken Kultur.53 He has specifically referred to the idea of St Basil
the Great that when Christianity meets a pre-Christian culture it
must make a slit (or wound) in that culture, as one makes a slit in the
bark of a tree to graft another onto it, and such grafting processes
are extremely delicate.54 The slit must be made at the right time and
in the right place, and at the right angle. This ‘slit’ is also a kind of
purification.
Ratzinger acknowledges that both the Constitution on the Liturgy
and the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity of the Second
Vatican Council explicitly allow for the possibility of far-reaching
adaptations to the customs and cultic traditions of peoples. None-
theless, he has written that it seems to him ‘very dangerous that
missionary liturgies could be created overnight, so to speak, by deci-
sions of bishop’s conferences, which would themselves be dependent

37
 BENEDICT XVI

on memoranda drawn up by academics’.55 He suggests that it is ‘not

until a strong Christian identity has grown up in the mission coun-
tries can one begin to move, with great caution and on the basis
of this identity, toward christening the indigenous forms by adopting
them into the liturgy and allowing Christian realities to merge with
the forms of everyday life’.56
At the same time, within the regions of the world that have been
Christian for centuries, Ratzinger observes that ‘traditional culture
is pushed aside into a more or less museum-like state of preservation
in the concert hall’ and ‘the contemporary world is conceived so
completely in terms of the functional that the link with history is
broken, and history itself can only retain any value at all as a func-
tion, namely as an object in a museum’.57 A mutual concern over
this state of affairs represents a point of convergence between
Ratzinger and the more intellectually inclined of the Catholic tradi-
tionalists. Ratzinger’s statement that ‘culture without ritual loses its
soul; [while] ritual without culture fails to recognize its own dignity’
resonates well with those of a traditionalist disposition.58 So too
does his judgement that since liturgy is the encounter with the
beautiful itself, with eternal love, there must be no surrender to phi-
listinism within the Catholic faith, and particularly not in seminaries
where men are prepared for the priesthood.59 Any dialogue between
the Church and contemporary Western culture ‘cannot consist in
the Church finally subjecting herself to modern culture, which has
been caught up to a large extent in a process of self-doubt since it
lost its religious base’.60
Such a negative judgment on the culture of modernity or what
Paul de Man calls ‘the culture of forced forgetting’ was strong in
the publications of Guardini and Bernanos, two of the intellectual
heroes of Ratzinger’s youth. In his collection of essays on The End
of Modern World, Romano Guardini drew a connection between
the character of ‘mass man’ and the problems of evangelization in
the contemporary world. He described ‘mass man’ as having no
desire for independence or originality in either the management or
the conduct of his life – neither liberty of external action nor free-
dom of internal judgment seem for him to have unique value; and
this is understandably so, for he has never experienced them’.61 He
identified the problem as a causal relationship between the lack of a
‘fruitful and lofty culture’ that provides the sub-soil for a healthy
nature, and a spiritual life that is ‘numb and narrow’ and develops

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

along ‘mawkish, perverted and unlawful lines’.62 Similarly, in the

context of his appraisal of the work of Georges Bernanos (1888–
1948), von Balthasar observed that for Bernanos nothing could be
more devastating than a confusion, or even an approximation, of the
phenomena of strong ecclesial obedience (typical of an ultramon-
tanist Jansenism) and the narrowing of human horizons by machines
and social conditions (typical of the institutional practices within the
culture of modernity). Bernanos wrote of a ‘flight to conformism’ –
‘the blissful servitude that dispenses one from both willing and
acting, that doles out a little task to each one and that, and in the
near future, will have transformed man into the biggest and most
ingenious of insects – a colossal ant’.63 He believed that modern
man adores systems because it dispenses him from the daily risk of
judging. His choices are made by the system for him.
Common to Ratzinger, Guardini, von Balthasar and Bernanos
is the idea that ‘in the crisis of culture we are experiencing, it is
only from islands of spiritual concentration that a new cultural
purification and unification can break out’.64 This is one of the two
reasons given for Ratzinger’s choice of the papal name Benedict. In
part he wanted to honour Benedict XV who tried so hard to bring
an end to the First World War before it claimed the lives of millions
of Christians on both sides of the trenches, but his second reason
was his belief that Western culture needs a new Benedictine moment.
Just as it was the formation of Benedictine monasteries across the
map of Europe which created the first high Christian culture, today,
he believes, the banality of mass culture and the anti-memory orien-
tation of modernity will only be transcended by islands of spiritual
excellence. Today such islands need not be restricted to monastic
enclosures but may be found within the many new ecclesial move-
ments which arose in the second half of the twentieth century.
Balthasar somewhat poignantly expressed the idea when he wrote
that those who withdrew to the heights to fast and pray in silence are
‘the pillars bearing the spiritual weight of what happens in history.
They share in the uniqueness of Christ . . . in an untamed freedom
which cannot be caged or put to use. Theirs is the first of all aristo-
cracies, source and justification for all the others, and the last yet
remaining to us in a most unaristocratic world’.65
The belief in the need for such spiritual elites to create communities
in which the culture of modernity can be transcended and supplanted
with a high Christian culture is another point of convergence between

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Ratzinger and the more intellectually inclined members of the tradi-

tionalist movement. The movement has its administrative centre in
Ecône, Switzerland, where opposition to aspects of post-Conciliar
theology and practice was led by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. The
Lefebvrists were particularly opposed to the liturgical changes of
Paul VI which had the effect of fostering ‘folk liturgies’ that made
use of utility music and sacro-pop. In France there was also strong
opposition to Dignitatis Humanae, the Conciliar decree on religious
freedom, which was marketed and received by many as the Church’s
endorsement of the political philosophical principles underpinning
the French and American Revolutions. For many of the French
Catholic families, the revolution was freshly remembered as murder-
ous, anti-Catholic and a general movement of debasement and thus
anything which appeared to be affirming it was approached with
grave reservations. Moreover, the traditionalists were hostile to the
new theological projects endorsed by the theological experts of the
Second Vatican Council, including Ratzinger himself, as dangerous
flirtatious with the gods of nineteenth-century Germany – history
and hermeneutics, in particular – and thus the contamination of
the Tiber by the Rhine. For many traditionalists, the demise of pre-
Conciliar scholasticism (the theological framework regarded by
Ratzinger, Balthasar and many others of their generation, as too
dry and rigid) is a major cause of the post-Conciliar crisis. In 1988
Archbishop Lefebrve performed schismatic acts by ordaining four
priests as bishops without the authority of the Pope. John Paul II
deployed Ratzinger to negotiate with Archbishop Lefebvre but all
of his diplomacy and intellectual skill failed to deter Lefebvre from
going ahead with the ordinations.
Since the beginning of his papacy Ratzinger has gone to great
lengths to restore the Lefebvrists to full Communion with the Church.
In line with his many statements on the problems of post-Conciliar
liturgical practices, on the 7th of July 2007 he issued the Motu
Proprio, Summorum Pontificum, which lifted the canonical hurdles
to the celebration of the older liturgical rites preferred by the tradi-
tionalists.66 In 1969 Paul VI had attempted to supersede the usage
of the so-called Tridentine or traditional rite and publicly acknowl-
edged that in doing so he was ‘parting with the speech of Christian
centuries’. He also acknowledged that some Catholics would be
‘bewildered’ by this.67 Nonetheless, he claimed that ‘modern man’ is
‘fond of plain language’. This pastoral judgment was the only reason

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

given in his famous General Audience Address of November 26,

1969, for his decision to introduce what became known as the Novus
Ordo or new rite. Some three years earlier in an article published in
the 22 October 1966 issue of America magazine, Gareth Edwards
had argued that if ‘the Church wants to sweep the world like the
Beatles, it must use language as contemporary as theirs’.68 There was
thus something of a ‘plain language’ attitude about in the mid-1960s
as the linguistic equivalent of the abandonment of hats and gloves
and the use of formal titles in social discourse. Indeed, another of
Edwards’ ideas was that people should think of God as their friend,
and that the Church should drop all references to his Kingship,
which was now completely out of step with a common preference
for democratic republics.69
Why Paul VI decided to ‘go with the Beatles’ as it were, rather than
with those he acknowledged would be ‘bewildered by this’ remains
an interesting historical question. It may be that he thought it was
a way of appearing ‘liberal’ and ‘open to modernity’ at a time when
he was enduring a wide scale rebellion over his ‘conservative’ stance
against contraception in the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae. What-
ever his reasons for supporting those calling for a more ‘no frills’
liturgy, in the United Kingdom where many of the Elizabethan
martyrs were sent to the scaffold for attending the Mass that Paul VI
now regarded as not pastorally suitable for ‘modern man’, a signifi-
cant pro-traditional rite movement was led by prominent members
of the laity, including Harold Acton, David Jones, Graham Greene,
Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh. Waugh was particularly distressed
by the thought of a new vernacular rite which would make no dis-
tinction between American and British English.70 A petition presented
to Paul VI, signed by members of the British literary and theatrical
establishment, including non-Catholics like Nancy Mitford and Agatha
Christie, led to the “Heenan Indult” – a special privilege granted by
Paul VI to Cardinal Heenan of Westminster to allow a limited usage
of the older rite in the United Kingdom.71 In practice however, the
usage of this rite was always tainted by the opposition of many tra-
ditionalists to the Second Vatican Council. Those who preferred this
traditional rite were tarred with the brush of Lefebrvism which was
a much larger and more complex theological package than a mere
preference for a more solemn and transcendent rite by those who
found sacro-pop repulsive. Also problematic was the fact that in
many places the traditional rite became more of a heritage piece than

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a living rite, since its organic development was brought to an abrupt

end in 1969. This ‘heritage piece’ quality of the traditional rite
also had the effect of deterring Catholics who were fully supportive
of the theological renewal brought about by the Second Vatican
Council from its attendance. Many found themselves faced with a
choice between museum-piece liturgy or banal sacro-pop.
Although Ratzinger was influenced by the new liturgical move-
ment of the first half of the twentieth century and enthusiastic about
the potential for liturgical renewal in the early 1960s, he came to
regard the liturgical experiments of the post-Conciliar period in a
largely negative light. In The Spirit of the Liturgy he argued that litur-
gists who sought to bring God down to the level of the people were
engaging in behaviour analogous to the Hebrew’s worship of the
golden calf, which was nothing less than an act of apostasy.72 Aidan
Nichols, the leading English authority on the thought of Ratzinger,
has explained the theological problem with ‘bringing God down to
the level of the people’ in the following terms:

The Liturgy as saving action is ‘catabatic’ coming down from

God to human beings. What by contrast is anabatic – going up to
God – about the liturgy is the glorification of God by men. But
notice that, while the catabatic aspect of the Liturgy must come
first, it is to such anabatic glorification that the sanctifying divine
action is ultimately directed. The example of our great High Priest
tells us so. Christ’s entire life and passion was directed chiefly
to the glorification of the Father: even the salvation of the human
race was subordinated to this goal. So also in the Liturgy the sote-
riological intent of the rite, aiming as it does, at our sanctification,
is itself subordinated to its doxological purpose. This may seem
an unnecessary exaltation of God at the expense of man, shades
indeed, of a Feuerbachian nightmare. But we see that things
cannot be otherwise, once we realize that our sanctification is
nothing other than our incorporation into the glorification of
God through Jesus Christ Our Lord.73

Therefore, what are regarded by many as ‘mere matters of form’

are regarded by Ratzinger as front line issues in the battle for the
re-evangelization of the formerly Christian countries of the Western
world. In Sacramentum Caritatis, his first Apostolic Exhortation,

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

he wrote that everything associated with the Eucharist must be

marked by beauty:

The beauty of the liturgy is part of this mystery; it is a sublime

expression of God’s glory and, in a certain sense, a glimpse of
heaven on earth. The memorial of Jesus’ redemptive sacrifice
contains something of that beauty which Peter, James and John
beheld when the Master, making his way to Jerusalem, was trans-
figured before their eyes (cf. Mk 9:2). Beauty, then, is not mere
decoration, but rather an essential element of the liturgical action,
since it is an attribute of God himself and his revelation. These
considerations should make us realize the care which is needed,
if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour.

Moreover, in his preface to Alcuin Reid’s The Organic Develop-

ment of the Liturgy Ratzinger noted that no one, not even the pope,
has the authority to create new liturgies out of the fabric of their own
imaginations. The pope, he said, is rather like a gardener, who can
do some pruning and oversee the liturgy’s organic development.74
For Ratzinger the most important principle for any rite to enjoy
validity is that it be an organic development of a rite of apostolic
provenance. Providing this criterion is met, he is not disturbed by
the use of more than one official rite. He is not a bureaucrat with a
passion for uniformity. The existence of a plurality of rites associated
with different linguistic groups such as the Maronite and Ukrainian,
and different spiritual groups, such as the Carmelite and Dominican,
has been a long standing element of Catholic liturgical life. Since all
of these are organic developments of rites of apostolic provenance,
they are acceptable. By virtue of the same principle, Summorum Pon-
tificum stated that the traditional Mass must be given due honour
for its venerable and ancient usage. Since the Motu Proprio of 7 July
2007, it has thus become a perfectly legitimate, but ‘Extraordinary
Form’ of the Roman rite. Ratzinger has stated that he hopes that
the simultaneous existence of the two Roman rites will be ‘mutually
enriching’.75 What seems to be implied in this statement is the idea
that the sense of mystery and transcendence which is pervasive in the
Extraordinary Form might offer a corrective to the more mundane
orientation of many celebrations of the Novus Ordo, while aspects of
the Novus Ordo (perhaps the presentation of the scripture readings

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 BENEDICT XVI

in the vernacular) might foster the organic development of the

Extraordinary Form. Ratzinger prefers the scripture readings to be
in the vernacular, but believes that a knowledge of the Greek Kyrie,
and the Latin Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnes Dei, should be a
standard share in the cultural capital of any Catholic, regardless of
national identity.
In order to further ‘heal a wound in the ecclesial fabric’ in January
2009 Ratzinger released from the penalty of ex-communication the
four men who had been illicitly ordained bishops by Archbishop
Lefebvre. This gesture does not mean a return to full Communion
with the Church of the traditionalist groups since this would require
such groups to accept that the documents of the Second Vatican
Council are capable of a theologically sound interpretation and many
individuals within this movement continue to resist this judgment.
As Ratzinger wrote in paragraph 4 of the Motu Proprio Ecclesiae
Unitatem, issued in July 2009, ‘doctrinal questions remain and until
they are clarified the Society has no canonical status in the Church
and its ministers cannot legitimately exercise any ministry’.76 Accord-
ing to the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, in lifting the
decrees of ex-communication the pope was intending to remove all
possible pretexts for infinite arguing in his negotiations with mem-
bers of Archbishop Lefebvre’s Society of St Pius X.77 In the process
he suffered the humiliation of discovering after the event, that one
of the four bishops, Richard Williamson, is a holocaust denier.
Archbishop Lefebvre’s own father, René Lefebvre, fought for the
French Resistance and died in the Nazi concentration camp of
Sonnenburg. Why he thought Williamson worthy of Episcopal con-
secration remains an enigma, but suffice to say that Ratzinger was
extremely embarrassed by this discovery. In an apologetic letter to
the bishops of the world he wrote:

A gesture of reconciliation with an ecclesial group engaged in

a process of separation thus turned into its very antithesis: an
apparent step backwards with regard to all the steps of reconcili-
ation between Christians and Jews taken since the Council – steps
which my own work as a theologian had sought from the begin-
ning to take part in and support. That this overlapping of two
opposed processes took place and momentarily upset peace
between Christians and Jews, as well as peace within the Church,
is something which I can only deeply deplore.78

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

In summary, Ratzinger’s understanding of the importance of

history, memory and a Catholic culture which is at once both high
and popular, and his aversion to the accommodation to the mass
culture of modernity pastoral strategies of many of his generation,
do represent points of convergence between he and the traditional-
ists and also many members of the new ecclesial movements which
have mushroomed since the Second Vatican Council. His critiques
of the problems of mass culture also converge with those of non-
Catholic social philosophers such as Scruton and de Botton and
from a more popular literary level one finds some strong resonances
between the academic Ratzinger and the more popularist Alexander
Boot, author of How the West was Lost.79 Boot traces the emergence
of “modern man” whom he calls “Modman” to the Reformation
and contrasts him with the Catholic ‘Westman’. According to Boot,
‘Modman’, an evolutionary development from Reformation man,
today comes in two species: ‘Modman Philistine’ and ‘Modman
Nihilist’. The central message is that the only resistance to philis-
tinism and nihilism within contemporary Western culture is coming
from the Catholic Church and those of her intellectuals who under-
stand that the main weapon of Modman is a ‘slow imposition of
philistine values on society’, accompanied by a gradual imposition
of political and economic power that can force ‘Westman’ into com-
pliance.80 Included within the strategy is the replacement of the
historic role of the father by the state bureaucracy, and the eventual
abolition of the family itself. Ratzinger’s concerns about philistines
being in charge of seminary formation are consistent with Boot’s
sociological diagnosis. Seminarians who receive an impoverished
education will graduate to ordination without the necessary cultural
capital with which to contend with mass culture. A priest who is
himself unable to rise above this culture will not be able to liberate
others and he will be rejected by those of a nihilist disposition
as a typical member of the herd from which the nihilist is trying
to escape.
French Catholics who refer to EuroDisney as a ‘cultural Chernobyl’
and deliberately give tourists the wrong directions to McDonald’s
and prefer that their families attend solemn liturgy, preferably in
Latin, have at least an intuitive grasp of the problems generated by
‘Modman Philistine’. The problem for Ratzinger is that precisely
because the Second Vatican Council is popularly seen as having given
its approval to the culture of modernity, those who have a sense that

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Catholicism and Philistinism are enemies, have a tendency to turn

their hostility onto the Council. Against such tendencies Ratzinger
does insist that the documents of the Second Vatican Council are
perfectly capable of orthodox and hostile-to-philistinism interpreta-
tions, providing one uses what he calls ‘a hermeneutic of continuity’
rather than a ‘hermeneutic of disruption’. While it is true that
Ratzinger has been interested in the Rhineland or Romantic move-
ment theological themes and critical of pre-Conciliar scholasticism,
these themes can be developed, as Schenk recognized, in either a
Catholic or nihilist direction, and Ratzinger obviously occupies the
Catholic end of the spectrum. He does not accept (as many of the
traditionalists do), that the mere interest in the question of the rela-
tionship between history and ontology evinces dangerous modernist
and ultimately nihilist dispositions. He further believes that it is
not possible to defend tradition while eschewing the importance
of history, as the pre-Conciliar Thomists tended to do. His answer
to the nihilist Romantics of the nineteenth century and the marke-
teers of nihilism and philistinism in the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, is the humanism of the Incarnation, poetically expressed in
his following statement:

The Magi of the Gospel are but the first in a vast pilgrimage in
which the beauty of this earth is laid at the feet of Christ: the gold
of the ancient Christian mosaics, the multi-coloured light from
the windows of our great cathedrals, the praise of their stone, the
Christmas songs of the trees of the forest are all inspired by him,
and human voices like musical instruments have found their most
beautiful melodies when they cast themselves at his feet. The
suffering of the world too – its misery – comes to him in order,
for a moment, to find security and understanding in the presence
of the God who is poor.81

This humanism is something dynamic. Since its dynamism is

generated by the work of grace in the lives of Christians its potential
social and cultural achievements are almost infinite. It is far from
fostering a museum-piece Catholic culture or ghetto. Ratzinger him-
self has remarked that Catholics cannot live in some kind of spiritual
nature reserve.82 However what is static is the theological foundation
for this: the once and for all events of the creation of the world,
the Incarnation, and the Paschal Mysteries, which make possible

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 THE HUMANIST CULTURE OF THE INCARNATION

the intimacy between the Divine and the human, the sacramental
presence of God in the world. As David S Yeago has explained
the theory:

Because the encounter of nature and grace is a meeting of con-

tingencies in freedom, the encounter of theological reflection
with human culture cannot be governed by any general method or
forced a priori into an invariant theoretical framework. In a dra-
matic narrative configuration, both the developing plot, with its
situations, characters and themes, and the resolution that bestows
on the drama its final sense and significance, are contingent,
unpredictable, characterized by freedom and surprise. It is impos-
sible to tell in advance of its occurrence just how the resolution of
the story will relate to the various elements of the plot in their
concrete diversity; one has to watch the story unfold and see.83

The only qualification one might add to Yeago’s summary is that

what humanity has learned about God through the Incarnation and
the Paschal Mysteries is not something which is subject to change
over time. Precisely how in Ratzinger’s theology this eternal element
is handed down from one generation to another is the subject of
the following chapter.

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 CHAPTER 3

REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

The conflict over the liturgical changes in the pontificate of Paul VI

and the correlationist pastoral strategies of leading theologians
of the Conciliar generation are but individual elements of the wider
issue of the theological significance of tradition. Tradition can mean
something like the word ‘customs’ or ‘practices’ such as decorating
trees and building nativity sets in Christmastide, or it can mean
something like a body of beliefs. The two usages of the term are
often distinguished by the concepts of capital T tradition, referring
to the body of beliefs, and lower case t traditions, referring to cus-
toms and practices. The two meanings of the word intersect in the
liturgy where the practices embody the beliefs. In his commentary
on Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation
promulgated at the Second Vatican Council, Ratzinger rather acutely
observed that whereas the Council of Trent was more concerned
with lower case t traditions, (the customs and practices) the Second
Vatican Council only addressed capital T tradition.1 This is notwith-
standing the fact that at the level of the parish community and in
seminaries, the Council was widely interpreted as a call to overhaul
and update all lower case traditions in the name of aggiornamento
(renewal). Ratzinger noted that Cardinal Meyer of Chicago in one
of his speeches to the Council raised the issue of the importance of
having some guidelines for the purification of traditions that have
ceased to be living traditions, but he also observed that Cardinal
Meyer’s concerns were not taken up by other Conciliar fathers
or their periti. Accordingly the chance to address this issue was
lost. What did occur however, in the drafting of the document Dei
Verbum, was the presentation of an account of revelation and its
relationship to Tradition which represented a return to a more

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

Patristic and authentically Scholastic understanding of the topic

than that which came to dominance in the post-Tridentine era and
which is strongly associated with the theology of the Spanish Jesuit
Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). In Dei Verbum, the standard pre-
Conciliar Suárezian account of revelation was overhauled, along
with a popular account of Tradition associated with the thought of
a fourth-century monk called Vincent of the monastery of Lérins,
located near Cannes on the French Riviera. Indeed, a shorthand way
of reading Dei Verbum is to say that the account of revelation found
in Suárez and the account of tradition found in Vincent de Lérins
were ditched, in favour of a new synthesis combining insights of
Newman, Guardini, de Lubac, Blondel and Yves Congar. The two
themes come together in paragraph 10 of Dei Verbum, where the ‘two
sources’ theory of revelation (Scripture and Tradition) are united
into one:

Sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture, then, are bound closely

together, and communicate one with the other. For both of them,
flowing out from the same divine well-spring, come together in
some fashion to form one thing, and move as towards one goal.2

An in depth account of how the Suárezian approach to revelation

is a modern (Baroque) invention can be found in the essay by John
Montag entitled ‘The False Legacy of Suárez’.3 Montag argues
that although Suárez was working within the intellectual tradition
of Thomism as taught at the University of Salamanca, his account
of revelation is actually different from that of classical Thomism.
For Suárez, revelation does not disclose God himself, rather it con-
cerns pieces of information which God has decided to disclose and
whereas for St Thomas, things revealed led to faith, for Suárez faith
confirms what is revealed. St Thomas also understood the mediation
of revelation differently from Suárez:

Thomas never had cause to reify the mediation into words or

propositions through which God hands over ‘things to be believed’.
Nor does Thomas separate the moment of belief or assent from
some prior moment of apprehension. We have seen, too, that for
Thomas, revelation takes place in the judgment and understand-
ing, as part of the assent of faith. Revelation does not occur
‘on its own’, as if it were a thing apart, before becoming part of

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human thought and experience. But, for Thomas, what God reveals
has precisely that quality which Luther sought to recover in his
translation – that is, the intimate self-manifestation, the word
which pours from the heart, and which animates faith.4

According to Montag, these reversals between Aquinas and

Suárez assume the loss in the late Middle Ages of the metaphysical
framework of participation, and the concomitant loss of an intrinsic
link between the sign and the thing signified:

As a result, the content and the authorization of revelation are

prised apart, and both aspects are thought of as isolated occur-
rences grounded in the will rather than a necessity intrinsic to the
real. Revelation is now something positive in addition to reason,
precisely because a rational metaphysics, claiming to comprehend
being without primary reference to God, frames all discourse,
including the theological. Ironically, revealed truth becomes some-
thing ineffably arbitrary, precisely because this is the only way it
can be construed by an already intrinsically godless reason.5

Ratzinger’s attempt to deal with the Suárezian treatment of revela-

tion as an object to which faith assents, rather than in terms of
the power of judgment and perception, provides a case study of
a theological intervention to overcome a pastoral crisis. As a young
priest he was often shocked to find Catholics who obeyed all the
ecclesial rules and regulations and assented to all the doctrines but
did not experience any joy in the faith because the whole affective
side of their souls was not integrated with the intellectual side. Their
faith as such was an intellectual assent they gave to a series of dog-
matic propositions. This is not to suggest that Ratzinger sees no
place for dogma, he clearly does believe that it has its own place and
importance, but he believes that primarily what was revealed was the
person of Christ, and that the dogma follows after this primary event.
His concern with this issue was such that one whole section of his
habilitationschrift was initially devoted to a critique of the Suárezian
account of revelation. It had to be jettisoned however when one of
the examiners, Michael Schmaus, indicated that he would fail the
dissertation because of this criticism of Suárez. The point that the
young Ratzinger was making was that the Suárezian account was
a Baroque initiative which differed from the understanding of the

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

scholastics, particularly from St Bonaventure. Following Guardini,

Ratzinger argued that ‘Revelation does not reveal something, nor
does it reveal various kinds of things, but in the man Jesus, in the man
who is God, we are able to understand the whole nature of man’.6
With specific reference to Dei Verbum, which he, Rahner and de
Lubac, helped to draft, Ratzinger has stated that the Conciliar fathers
were ‘concerned with overcoming neo-scholastic intellectualism, for
which revelation chiefly meant a store of mysterious supernatural
teachings, which automatically reduces faith very much to an accep-
tance of these supernatural insights’.7 In the words of Cardinal
Albert Vanhoye: ‘revelation in Dei Verbum is presented in a perspec-
tive that is not simply intellectual, but one of interpersonal existential
relationships, a perspective of communion between the human per-
son and the divine persons’.8 In his biography Milestones Ratzinger
wrote:

The word [‘Revelation’] refers to the act in which God shows

Himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this
is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept
of ‘Revelation’. Where there is no one to perceive ‘Revelation’,
no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed.
By definition, Revelation requires a someone who apprehends
it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure,
were later on very important for me at the time of the Conciliar
discussion on Revelation. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then
Revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture
but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that Revela-
tion is always something greater than what is merely written down.
And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola
scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of
Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this
the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.9

In another commentary on Dei Verbum, Ratzinger noted that

there were three motifs that came together in the struggle for this
Constitution on Revelation. The first was the view of tradition as
an organically developing process by which tradition had to be
understood in terms of the categories of growth, progress and the
knowledge of faith that Romantic movement theologians had deve-
loped. The second was the problem of the application of critical

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historical methods to the interpretation of Scripture and the third

was the growing interest in biblical scholarship in Catholic circles.10
With respect to the first of these, and in particular, in relation to
article 8 of Dei Verbum which addresses the handing on of apostolic
preaching from one generation to another, Ratzinger observed that it
is not difficult ‘to recognize the pen of Yves Congar in the text and to
see behind it the influence of the Catholic Tübingen School of the
nineteenth century with, in particular, its dynamic and organic idea
of tradition, which in turn was strongly impregnated by the spirit of
German Romanticism’.11
Yves Congar was a French Dominican and author of the two
volume La Tradition et les traditions (1960–1963) which remains a
classic text in the field. The subject of tradition was of special signifi-
cance for the French given that it was among the eighteenth-century
French philosophes that hostility to the concept first erupted in the
period of the Revolution. In his preface to Maurice Blondel’s History
and Dogma, Alexander Dru offered the following observations of the
treatment of tradition in French intellectual life after the Revolution:

Tradition was viewed in a political light and, regardless of what it

was applied to, came to mean the conservation of a heritage, of an
object, and in Christianity of a clearly defined object, ‘the deposit
of the faith’. The handing down of the ‘deposit’ was looked upon
as an impersonal process; the whole emphasis fell on what was
handed down, and no thought was given to how it was handed
down. The common view of Tradition was mechanical, and it
would hardly be a caricature to say that it was so objective as not
to imply any believers to hand down the deposit. This impersonal
way of conceiving Tradition led inevitably to what Blondel calls
fixisme, the notion that nothing whatsoever should change and
therefore in practice to un rétrogradisme meurtrier, a fatally retro-
grade attitude towards intellectual questions . . . . Blondel’s notion
of Tradition [in contrast] was conceived not in a political light or
context, but in a cultural or aesthetic one. He was not trying to
defend continuity; he was not concerned in the first place with
what was handed down, but with how it was handed down.12

Blondel thus stands as a bridge between the nineteenth-century

Romantics and late twentieth-century Catholic scholars of tradition
such as Alasdair MacIntyre. As with MacIntyre, Blondel was keen to

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

understand the dynamics of the transmission of a tradition and the

role of practices in the transferal of meaning. He also emphasized
the personal element in the handing on of a tradition, against the
eighteenth century’s tendency to regard as rational only that which is
universal and impersonal. In History and Dogma, Blondel wrote:

[W]hen it is a question of finding the supernatural in Sacred

History and in dogma, the Gospel is nothing without the Church,
the teaching of Scripture is nothing without the Christian life,
exegesis is nothing without Tradition – the Catholic Tradition
which is now seen to be not a limitative and retrograde force, but
a power of development and expansion. Careful not to hide its
talent safely away, and faithful to the injunction to make it bear
fruit, Tradition is less concerned to conserve than to discover: it
will only attain the α at the ω.13

Such typically Blondelian and Tübingen-style motifs and treat-

ments of tradition regularly surface in the works of Ratzinger. In his
Wednesday audience address of 26 April 2006, he stated that ‘this
communion we call “Church,” does not only extend to all believers in
a specific historical period, but also embraces all the epochs and all
the generations’.14 Due to the work of the Holy Spirit ‘it will always
be possible for subsequent generations to have the same experience
of the Risen One that was lived by the apostolic community at the
origin of the Church, since it is passed on and actualized in the faith,
worship, and communion of the People of God, on pilgrimage
through time’.15 Moreover, ‘Tradition’ is ‘not merely the material
transmission of what was given at the beginning to the Apostles, but
the effective presence of the Crucified and Risen Lord Jesus, who
accompanies and guides in the Spirit the community he has gathered
together’.16 It is not ‘the transmission of things, or words, a collection
of dead things [but] the living river that links us to the origins . . . the
great river that leads us to the gates of eternity’.17
Cyril O’Regan has also described von Balthasar’s oeuvre as a cri-
tical recapitulation of the view of tradition offered by the Tübingen
School: ‘the commitment to plurality, variety and heterogeneity,
illustrated in the Glory of the Lord and Theo-Drama makes it appar-
ent that Balthasar is involved in an essential revision of the model
of tradition as that which is one and the same everywhere and at
all times’.18 The reference here is to the model of tradition offered in

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 BENEDICT XVI

the famous Commonitory of Vincent de Lérins written in 434. The

three basic principles offered by Lérins to distinguish the true tradi-
tion from heresy were that something had to have been held by
everyone, everywhere in the Church from the earliest times. The prin-
ciple is often summarized by the Latin phrase Quod ubique, quod
semper, quod ab omnibus. Both Ratzinger and von Balthasar have
been critical of de Lérins’ principle. In his essay on the Transmission
of Divine Revelation, Ratzinger wrote:

He [Lérins] no longer appears an authentic representative of the

Catholic idea of tradition, but outlines a canon of tradition based
on a semi-Pelagian idea. He attacks Augustine’s teaching on grace
as going beyond ‘what had always been believed’, but against this
background this proves to be an inappropriate attempt to express
the relationship between constancy and growth in the testimony
of faith. The rejection of the suggestion to include again Vincent
de Lérin’s well known text, more or less canonized by two coun-
cils, is again a step beyond Trent and Vatican I . . . It is not that
Vatican II is taking back what was intended in those quotations:
the rejection of a modernistic evolutionism, an affirmation of the
definitive character of the revelation of Christ and the apostolic
tradition, to which the Church has nothing to add, but which is its
yardstick, but it has another conception of the nature of historical
identity and continuity. Vincent de Lérin’s static semper no longer
seems the right way of expressing the problem.19

At the end of this text Ratzinger noted that it is not an easy

matter to distinguish between the simple ideas of a given fact and its
explanation, because the explanation, as the process of understand-
ing, cannot be clearly separated from what is being understood.20
While Ratzinger’s criticisms focused more on fundamental principles
of hermeneutics, O’Regan described the opposition of von Balthasar
in the following terms:

From a Balthasarian point of view, the position advocated by

Vincent of Lérins, which throughout the history of Catholicism
has had considerable support, is flawed . . . Excluded is the variety
of theological perspectives that is constituitive of the depth of
the Catholic tradition. Excluded also is the praxis of the saints as
forms of language that emerge unanticipated, yet answer specific

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

communal and historical needs . . . Balthasar is persuaded that

Lérin’s univocal and static view of tradition does not correspond
to the palpable fact of the development of doctrine. Just as impor-
tantly, however, Lérin’s definition is in danger of denying the
symbolic nature of all language with respect to the divine and
promoting the view that doctrine is adequate to the mystery to
which it refers. 21

O’Regan summarized von Balthasar’s account of tradition with

the statement: ‘truth is objective, yet refracted over time through
Christian communities, and exemplary members of these communi-
ties’.22 In his own account, Balthasar endorses the notion of the
development of Tradition but states that it is wrong to think of this
process as something like filling in pieces of a three-dimensional
jigsaw puzzle:

The truths that come into new prominence can never contradict
the old, but nevertheless the Spirit can in every age blow where he
will, and in every age can bring to the fore entirely new aspects
of Divine Revelation. What is entirely intolerable is the notion
that the ‘progress of dogma’ gradually narrows down the unex-
plored area of divine truth, continually allowing less and less
space to the free play of thought within the faith, as though ‘pro-
gress’ consisted in first of all establishing the main outlines of the
faith, and then proceeding to the more and more detailed work
required to complete the edifice until finally – shortly before the
Last Judgment, perhaps? – the structure would stand there
complete, consisting in all its aspects of fully ‘used up’ defined
dogma.23

In an essay on Bonaventurian resonances in Ratzinger’s theology

of revelation, Aaron Canty summarized much of the above in the
following paragraph:

The fact that revelation and the response to revelation that is

faith both occur in time and space implies that both revelation
and faith grow over time. This process is true both for the indi-
vidual believer and for the Church as a whole. As the individual
advances in contemplation, the soul perceives more profoundly
the truths that Scripture contains; likewise in the Church, the

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contemplative part of the Church learns more and more about the
revelation contained in Scripture. Scripture contains an infinite
number of ‘seeds’ or interpretations that require time to unfold
them.24

This leads to the second and third motifs mentioned by Ratzinger

as matters driving the deliberations of those who worked on the
drafting of Dei Verbum. Catholic scholars required more sophisti-
cated intellectual tools with which to respond to the rise of the study
of hermeneutics and the conclusions drawn by the application of the
historical-critical method to Scripture. The names most strongly
associated with the method are those of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–
1976) and Martin Dibelius (1883–1947). Bultmann denied that
readers of the scriptures had any hope of an objective understanding
of the events depicted there, and suggested that the important factor
was the existential impact of Scripture which could not be spelt
out in a dogmatic form. His approach represented the adoption of
themes in the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger to biblical
hermeneutics.
Linked to the historical-critical method was a body of research
described as the search for the historical Jesus. The initiator of this
quest was the German Deist philosopher H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768)
who offered rationalistic explanations for miracles. He was followed
by the German theologian D. F. Strauss (1808–1874), author of The
Life of Jesus: Critically Examined, for whom Christianity is a myth
which encodes a philosophical concept of the unity of the divine
and human consciousness. Strauss was followed by Bruno Bauer
(1809–1882) who denied the historical existence of Christ and argued
that Christianity represents a synthesis of the Stoicism of Seneca the
Younger and the Jewish theology of Philo. K. F. Bahrdt (1741–1792)
developed the argument that Jesus was a member of the Essene sect
and tried to develop a rationalist religion to suit their purposes,
while Ernest Renan (1823–1892), a Breton philosopher, wrote an
enormously popular Life of Jesus which traced his development as
a revolutionary.25
With reference to these different versions of the historical Jesus,
Ratzinger rhetorically asked:

How is it possible to come to an understanding which on the one

hand is not based on some arbitrary choice of particular aspects,

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

but on the other hand allows me to hear the message of the text
and not something coming from my own self ? Once the methodo-
logy has picked history to death by its dissection, who can reawaken
it so that it can live and speak to me? Let me put it another way: if
‘hermeneutics’ is ever to become convincing, the inner harmony
between historical analysis and hermeneutical synthesis must be
first found.26

As a general principle Ratzinger concluded that what is needed

is a self-criticism of the historical method which can expand to an
analysis of historical reason itself.27 He recommended Reiner Blank’s
Analyse und Kritik der formgeschichtlichen Arbeiten von M. Dibelius
und R. Bultmann (Basel: 1981) as a model of this kind of research.
He suggests that the self-critique of historical method would have
to begin by reading its conclusions in a diachronic manner so that
the appearance of a quasi-clinical-scientific certainty is avoided and
exegesis is recognized as an historical discipline:28

Certainly texts must first of all be traced back to their historical

origins and interpreted in their proper historical context. But then,
in a second exegetical operation, one must look at them also in
light of the total movement of history and in light of history’s
central event, Jesus Christ. Only the combination of both these
methods will yield understanding of the Bible.29

Ratzinger further argues that it is necessary to re-examine the

relationship between event and word. For Dibelius and Bultmann
and the mainstream of modern exegesis, the event is the irrational
element.30 Against this principle Ratzinger holds that both word and
event have to be considered equally original since ‘a dualism which
separates them leads to a docetic Christology in which the fleshly
existence of Christ is removed from the realm of reality’.31 In the
following passage Ratzinger offers a summary indictment of the
problems associated with the methodology of Bultmann and Dibelius:

Despite all the differences between Dibelius and Bultmann in

matters of detail, one can detect here a whole series of fundamen-
tal assumptions they hold in common and that both unquestion-
ably regard as trustworthy. Both of them assume the primacy of
preaching over event: in the beginning was the word. Everything

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 BENEDICT XVI

else unfolds out of preaching. Bultmann pushes this thesis to

the point that only the word can be original for him; the
word generates the scene. Everything that is an event is accord-
ingly by definition secondary, a clothing of the word in mythical
form.32

Ratzinger then suggests that the thesis that the word has priority
over the event gives rise to two further pairs of antitheses: ‘the
playing off of word against cult and of eschatology against apo-
calypse’.33 Closely connected to this is the tendency to oppose the
Jewish to the Hellenistic and among those things that Bultmann
considered Hellenistic were the idea of the cosmos, mystical religio-
sity and cultic piety.34 What remains of Christ after he has been
de-Hellenized is a ‘strictly eschatological prophet who at bottom
proclaims no substantive message’.35 Christianity is thereby reduced
to a syncretic mixture of Jewish eschatology, stoic philosophy and
Greek mystery religion:

If we may characterise somewhat crudely Bultmann’s method of

appropriating Jesus’ message for the present, we could say that he
sets up a correspondence between non-apocalyptic prophetism
and certain fundamental ideas of the early Heidegger. To be a
Christian according to the mind of Jesus was therefore substan-
tially the same as the way of existing in openness and vigilance
that we find depicted in Heidegger.36

Notwithstanding the Heideggarian contribution Ratzinger believes

that behind the whole enterprise of Bultmann and Dibelius lies the
Kantian turn, which he defines as the reduction of history to and
by philosophy.37 He further argues that the debate about modern
exegesis is not at its core a debate among historians, but among
philosophers, and that the exegete must refrain from approaching
the interpretation of the text with a ready-made philosophy. None-
theless he believes that Christians cannot simply return to the
Scholastics and Patristics as a shield against modernity. While aspects
of their approach to scripture need to be retrieved, the hermeneutical
questions of the past couple of centuries cannot be set aside.
As Chairman of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Ratzinger
presided over the drafting of two significant documents: The Inter-
pretation of the Bible in the Church (1993) and The Jewish People and

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible (2002). These built on

principles set out in Dei Verbum, as well as the encyclical Providentis-
simus Deus of Leo XIII and Divino afflante Spiritu of Pius XII. The
latter was the document in which the Church definitively accepted
the use of the philological and historical method in the study of the
Bible. In the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church the historical-
critical method is praised for its contribution to a deeper understand-
ing of the ‘intention of the authors and editors of the Bible as well
as the message which they addressed to their first readers’ and it is
described as ‘implying no a priori if used in an objective manner’.
Words of caution are however sounded over the practice of some
exegetes of hooking the method up to ‘certain hermeneutical choices’
which can be ‘tendentious’. Reading scripture through the lens of
Marxism or Feminism are two specific examples of this practice
given in the document. With respect to the particular issue of
Wirkungsgeschichte (the study of the history of the influence of a
particular text) the following observation is made:

The mutual presence to each other of text and readers creates its
own dynamic, for the text exercises an influence and provokes
reactions. It makes a resonant claim that is heard by readers
whether as individuals or as members of a group. The reader is
in any case never an isolated subject. He or she belongs to a
social context and lives within a tradition. Readers come to the
text with their own questions, exercise a certain selectivity, pro-
pose an interpretation and, in the end, are able either to create a
further work or else take initiatives inspired directly from their
reading of Scripture.

Essentially the same hermeneutical principles underpin the docu-

ment Memory and Reconciliation: the Church and the Faults of the
Past, a statement of the International Theological Commission, also
under Ratzinger’s chairmanship:

Bringing to light the communality between interpreter and the

object of interpretation requires taking into account the questions
that motivate the research and their effect on the answers that
are found, the living context in which the work is undertaken, and
the interpreting community whose language is spoken and to
whom one intends to speak.38

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 BENEDICT XVI

Most significant here is the reference to an interpreting commu-

nity. Contemporary hermeneutical scholarship has emphasized the
principle that thinking always involves thinking in the context of
some particular and specific public, which will normally have its
own institutional structure.39 Alasdair MacIntyre, for example, has
referred to the institutional structure of Plato’s Academy and Aqui-
nas’s Dominican Order and to the differences between English
culture and Highland Gaelic culture and the ‘public’ of each of these.
Similarly Hans Georg Gadamer argued in Truth and Method that
human beings always operate from within the horizons of particular
languages and traditions and thus ‘meaning is not an objective pro-
perty of the text that the interpreter discovers so much as an event
in the present, a “fusion of horizons”’.40 When applied to the scrip-
tures, this means that the scriptures must be interpreted from within
the horizon of faith itself and, from Ratzinger’s point of view, the
institution of the Church and her interpretations of the passages,
forms part of that horizon. Ratzinger has written that ‘the exegete
must realise that he does not occupy a neutral position above or
outside Church history and he must acknowledge that the faith is
the hermeneutic, the locus of understanding, which does not dog-
matically force itself upon the Bible, but is the only way of letting
it be itself’.41 This principle is something which he has taken from
Guardini’s Das Christusbild der paulinischen und johanneischen
Schriften (Würzburg, 1961). He has stated that ‘the reflections on
method that Guardini develops on pages 7–15 are among the
most important things that have ever been said on the problem of
methodology in scriptural interpretation’.42 Ratzinger was also influ-
enced by Guardini’s article ‘The Science of Faith’ published as
‘Heilige Schrift und Glaubenswissenchaft’.43 Guardini referred to the
Pauline text (1 Cor. 2:14–15): The things of the Spirit of God can
only be judged spiritually; and Hebrews 11: 27 – faith is the means
to see the invisible. Ratzinger has summarized Guardini’s horizon in
the following terms:

For Guardini the first step is always attentive listening to the

message of the scriptural text. In this way the real contribution
of exegesis to an understanding of Jesus is fully acknowledged.
But in this attentiveness to the text, the listener, according to
Guardini’s understanding, does not make himself to be the Mas-
ter of the Word. Rather, the listener makes himself the believing

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

disciple who allows himself to be led and enlightened by the Word.

It is precisely by repudiating a closed merely human logic that the
greatness and uniqueness of his Person becomes apparent to us. It
is precisely in this way that the prison of our prejudice is broken
open; it is in this way that our eyes are slowly opened, and that
we come to recognize what is truly human, since we have been
touched by the very humanity of God himself.44

The same recognition of faith as a necessary preambula to exegesis

has been defended by von Balthasar in the following terms:

Christ’s divinity cannot be wholly comprehended through his

humanity, and no more can the divine sense of Scripture ever
be fully plumbed through the letter. It can only be grasped in the
setting of faith, that is to say, in a mode of hearing that never
issues in final vision, but in a profession without end, a progres-
sion ultimately dependent, in its scope, on the Holy Spirit. Faith,
the foundation of all our understanding of revelation, expands
our created minds by making them participate in the mind of
God, disclosing the inward divine meaning of the words through
a kind of co-working of God. (I Cor. 2.9–16)45

In this analysis scriptural interpretation becomes part of the work

of the Holy Spirit. As Kevin Vanhoozer expresses the principle:
‘Scripture is not merely “writing” but rather a key instrument in the
communicative economy of the triune God in which the Father is
revealed, the Son reveals, and the Spirit is the agent of revelation’s
perfection’.46 In the following paragraph Ratzinger draws this link
between scriptural hermeneutics and theological anthropology:

Man cannot get out of himself, but God can get into him. In the
dynamism of his being, man can also transcend himself; he
becomes more like God, and likeness is knowing – we know what
we are, no more and no less. This first idea is paired with a second
one in Gregory: God’s entrance into man has taken historical
form in the Incarnation. The individual human monads are
broken open into the new subject that is the new Adam. God
wounds the soul – the Son is this wound, and by this wound we
are opened up. The new subject, the Adam who finds his unity
in the Church, opens from within to be in contact with the Son,

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 BENEDICT XVI

and so with the triune God himself. Thomas gave these two
ideas a metaphysical turn in the principles of analogy and parti-
cipation. By doing so, he made possible an open philosophy
that is capable of accepting the biblical phenomenon in all of its
radicalism.47

Among theologians the major criticisms of an approach to scrip-

ture and tradition derived from the works of de Lubac, Guardini,
von Balthasar, Blondel and Ratzinger come from those who want to
approach the scriptures with a foundation in a particular philosophy
that is somehow inconsistent with the ideas presented above. Typi-
cally they are scholars with an attachment to Marxism, Feminism or
postmodernism. Each of these three traditions has its own internal
sub-divisions and there are points of convergence, as well as con-
tradiction, with elements of the classical Christian framework or
narrative. Since 1989 the Marxist tradition has been on the wane,
though it continues to provide something of a hermeneutical horizon
for the study of scripture by liberation theologians. Feminist and
postmodern theologians are now the most common critics of
Ratzinger and there are, of course, postmodern Feminists. The
standard criticisms from both Feminist and postmodern quarters are
that Ratzinger believes that Christianity is a ‘master-narrative’ (a
comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge)
valid for all times and all peoples and that his anthropology is
‘essentialist’, that is, that he sees an intrinsic relationship between
biology and sexual identity.
Lieven Boeve of Leuven is a prominent theologian engaged with
postmodern philosophy and also with the theology of Ratzinger.
His account of Tradition brings into relief the specific difference of
Ratzinger’s position. Boeve begins from the principle that those who
inherit a Tradition are not only its heirs but also its testators, and that
Tradition develops when there has been a change in context by those
who receive it.48 Boeve notes that the ‘change of context brought
about by modernity does not so much confront the Christian tradi-
tion with new questions (similar to former context shifts), rather it
presents a fundamental challenge to the very right to existence of a
“tradition-based” Christian narrative’.49 Modernity, in other words,
represents an attack on the very notion of the relevance of Tradition.
Boeve then argues that both the correlation-to-modernity theorists

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 REVELATION, TRADITION AND HERMENEUTICS

and Catholic traditionalists generate problems because they only

adhere to a single pole of the relationship with Tradition – either to
the pole of being an heir, or to the pole of being a testator:

Traditionalists over emphasize the idea of being heirs: the inheri-

tance is preserved and passed on as a whole, undifferentiated; a
creative and life-giving reception of the tradition is rarely men-
tioned. The modernizing tendency emphasized the idea of being
contextual benefactors: the inheritance was streamlined, adapted,
and where necessary, corrected in the light of the modern critique
of tradition. In the first instance, the tradition as a dynamic
process of recontextualisation was abandoned. In the second
instance, the tradition as bestower of meaning was neglected; the
Christian narrative ran the risk of becoming a (legitimating)
reduplication of the modern master narratives.50

Boeve juxtaposes the notions of correlation (in short hand terms,

the pastoral projects of correlating the faith to the culture of moder-
nity, popular in the immediate post-Conciliar era and associated with
Rahner, Schillebeeckx, Küng and Tracy), rupture or discontinuity (the
highly critical of secularism stance of Ratzinger, Barthians, Radical
Orthodoxy scholars, traditionalists and many young Catholic schol-
ars who came of age during the pontificate of John Paul II) and
interruption (his own project) which requires an intellectual engage-
ment between Christianity and postmodern philosophy which is
in some sense different from that in which the Radical Orthodoxy
scholars and Catholic scholars supportive of magisterial teaching
are involved. Whereas the correlationists were seeking to correlate
the Catholic faith and modernity, Boeve’s project is one of recontex-
tualizing the Catholic faith with reference to postmodernity. Boeve
concludes that for Ratzinger:

It is not dialogue with the world that one should expect to find
on the theological agenda, but rather conversion of a world
characterized by the absence of faith and declining values. The
current context, certainly the European context, has alienated
itself to such a degree from the Christian faith that an emphasis
on the Christian alternative as a rupture with the world is the
only approach that can claim legitimacy.51

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 BENEDICT XVI

Ratzinger would probably argue in response that while he is not

opposed to dialogue, the purpose of dialogue is conversion. More-
over, the Church herself, according to the ecclesiology of Vatican II,
is the Universal Sacrament of Salvation. Her whole reason for being
is to mediate Christ to the world, to be the light for the nations. This is
what she does in her dialogue with the world. Ratzinger would also
probably emphasize that he does believe in the organic development
of tradition. However it might be argued that he and Boeve have a
different idea about development itself. For Ratzinger Christianity
is the master-narrative in the sense that other narratives are usually
either pre-figurements or post-Christian mutations of the Christian
narrative. He also approaches dialogue with the proponents of other
traditions from within the horizon of Christian revelation. As he
expressed the point in the context of Jewish-Christian dialogue:

To be sure, the point of this dialogue was not simply to repeat

nineteenth and early twentieth century scholarship in comparative
religion, which, from the lofty height of a liberal-rationalistic
standpoint, had judged the religions with the self-assurance of
enlightened reason. Today there is a broad consensus that such
a standpoint is an impossibility, and that, in order to understand
religion, it is necessary to experience it from within, indeed, that
only such experience, which is inevitably particular and tied to
a definite historical starting-point, can lead the way to mutual
understanding and thus to a deepening and purification of
religion.52

To extend Boeve’s testator metaphor, one might say that Ratzinger

is highly sensitive to the intentions of the deceased as expressed in the
testamentary document. Neither Christ’s divinity, nor his humanity,
can be denied, nor can doctrines like the Trinity or creation in time.
However, the individual’s participation within the life of the Trinity
can lead to a deepening of a knowledge of the narrative, both for the
individual, and for the community of believers who share the same
horizon of faith. New historical contexts may exercise an influence
over the appropriation of the Tradition. Some elements of the Tradi-
tion may be more or less easily appropriated in different cultural
contexts. However this is not to say that history or culture itself con-
stitutes the Tradition. As Kaplan explained Adam Möhler’s account
of the development of tradition, the faith of those in first-century

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Palestine is not a different faith from those in nineteenth-century

Swabia. De Lubac in his essay Le Révélation Divine was quite
emphatic about this principle. He argued that history is not the
medium of revelation or salvation: ‘whether we are talking about
profane or ecclesiastical history, by themselves, historical events
bring us no increase in supernatural revelation’.53 They must be
enlightened by the light that comes from the Gospel. In taking such
a stance Ratzinger is actually much closer to the postmoderns than
the moderns since he rejects the idea that there can be a neutral view
from somewhere external to the tradition.
Boeve however argues ‘that Christian faith and tradition are not
only contained in a specific historico-cultural context, but are also
co-constituted by this context’.54 He adds that this is not to reduce
faith solely to its context or to suggest that the development of tradi-
tion is a mere adaptation to the context. Ratzinger would no doubt
acknowledge that changes in the cultural context, such as occurred
to Jewish Christians finding themselves in far-flung posts of the
Roman empire, or Catholics finding themselves in the midst of a
Protestant province during the Reformation, do foster developments
within the tradition as social conditions encourage a deeper reflec-
tion on some particular aspect of revelation. However, for Ratzinger
revelation occurred at a particular once-and-for-all moment in
history. While the Christian’s understanding of it may deepen and
be encouraged by a particular historical condition to deepen in a
particular way, nothing new can be added to revelation itself.
These themes were addressed by Ratzinger during a meeting with
organizations involved in Interreligious Dialogue at the Auditorium
of the Notre Dame Center in Jerusalem. At this meeting he acknowl-
edged that ‘faith is always lived within a culture’ and that believers
‘draw from and shape the culture’ they meet. However he added
that ‘the individual is never fully expressed through his or her own
culture, but transcends it in the constant search for something
beyond’. Moreover, ‘lives of religious fidelity echo God’s irruptive
presence and so form a culture not defined by boundaries of time or
place but fundamentally shaped by the principles and actions that
stem from belief’.55 This stance was also taken by another German
Cardinal, Paul J. Cordes, in a 2009 address in Sydney to Catholic
academics and representatives of Church agencies. Cordes stated
that ‘the theologian misinterprets the concept of Revelation when
he suggests that human life situations might acquire the quality of

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Revelation. The Church holds that Revelation is complete with the

death of the last Apostle’.56
The baseline question thus seems to be: how do theologians
distinguish between elements of revelation that are of eternal signifi-
cance, and those which were mere historical stage props? The fault
lines between the various groups labelled by Boeve as correlationists,
discontinuity theorists and proponents of a theology of interruption
are often defined by a different judgment about what is a mere stage
prop and what must remain essential to the script. There exist huge
divisions between those who judge elements of the cultures of moder-
nity and postmodernity as hostile to the basic principles enshrined in
the testamentary documents and those who want to read-down sections
within the documents as mere historical baggage which can be safely
jettisoned in the new cultural context. For example, Hans Küng’s
ecclesiology as presented in his Structures of the Church, fosters the
notion that the governance structures of the Church should change
throughout history to keep pace with other forms of social organiza-
tion. This effectively classifies the Episcopal hierarchy as an historical
stage prop. Against this classification, Ratzinger has written:

Authority in the Church stands on faith. The Church cannot

conceive for herself how she wants to be ordered. She can only
try ever more clearly to understand the inner call of faith and to
live from faith. She does not need the majority principle, which
always has something atrocious about it . . . the sacramental order
guarantees more freedom than could be given by those who
would subject the Church to the majority principle.57

Thus we return to Ratzinger’s observation that the most serious

crisis for twentieth-century Catholic theology is coming to an under-
standing of the mediation of history in the realm of ontology, and
one might add, the role of history in the interpretation and transmis-
sion of Tradition. For Ratzinger history and context are important
but revelation is not just another ‘master-narrative’. The Incarnation
and Pascal Mysteries are either Divine Revelation or they are mere
myths associated with a particular Semitic tribe which because of
its incorporation within the Roman empire, spread throughout the
Roman colonies and eventually became the dominant myth of Europe.
If however they are Divine Revelation, then all the other myths are in
a sense redundant. As he wrote, when he was still a young professor,

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‘the faith in the one God, who has created the whole world through
the Word, does not tolerate the religious appearance of myths, it
rather enlightens the world’.58 It is precisely for this reason that
Balthasar argued that the real battle between religions begins after
the Incarnation. More recently as Benedict XVI, Ratzinger wrote
in paragraph 5 of Spe Salvi:

[Saint Gregory Nazianzus] says that at the very moment when the
Magi, guided by the star, adored Christ the new king, astrology
came to an end, because the stars were now moving in the orbit
determined by Christ. This scene, in fact, overturns the world-view
of that time, which in a different way has become fashionable once
again today. It is not the elemental spirits of the universe, the laws
of matter, which ultimately govern the world and mankind, but a
personal God governs the stars, that is, the universe; it is not the
laws of matter and of evolution that have the final say, but reason,
will, love – a Person. And if we know this Person and he knows us,
then truly the inexorable power of material elements no longer has
the last word; we are not slaves of the universe and of its laws, we
are free. In ancient times, honest enquiring minds were aware of
this. Heaven is not empty. Life is not a simple product of laws and
the randomness of matter, but within everything and at the same
time above everything, there is a personal will, there is a Spirit
who in Jesus has revealed himself as Love.

The reference here to the Holy Spirit is significant. If one asks the
question of Möhler and Newman about how they can be certain the
faith of a nineteenth-century Bavarian is the same as a first-century
Roman the role of the Holy Spirit becomes a central factor. As
Balthasar noted the ‘task of making the historical existence of Christ
the norm of every individual existence is the work of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit does not issue a further revelation, he exposes the
full depth of what has been completed, giving it a total relevance
for every moment in history’.59
Such an account of the work of the Holy Spirit is contained in
paragraph 7 of the Conciliar document Lumen Gentium: ‘In order
that we might be unceasingly renewed in Him [cf. Eph. 4:23], He has
shared with us His Spirit who, existing as one and the same being in
the Head and in the members, gives life to, unifies and moves through
the whole body’. The theme is also strong in the Pauline scriptures.

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 BENEDICT XVI

As Ormond Rush explains in his essay ‘The Holy Spirit and Revela-
tion’, for St Paul, the understanding of the Gospel and the event of
preaching, including the hearing that leads to faith, are all the work
of the Holy Spirit:

[In First Corinthians], Paul affirms the revelatory role of the Spirit
who knows the depths of God, and, because believers are taught
by the Spirit, they now have the mind of Christ, enabling them to
understand the gifts of God . . . Paul also witnesses to the graced
quality of his re-reading of the Jewish Scriptures; it is the Holy
Spirit who enables him to properly interpret them. He believes
that his proclamation of the Gospel is a divinely-assisted inter-
pretation of the tradition. For example, in 2 Cor. 3:12–18, he
writes of understanding the reading of Scripture in the light of
Christ, and of the Spirit’s role in removing the veil that would
prevent proper interpretation. Paul is here naming the Christian
experience of the Holy Spirit as the source of the capacity to
interpret the new in terms of the old, and the old in terms of
the new.60

Ratzinger would no doubt endorse these Pauline themes as a key

to any viable account of the transmission of revelation from one
generation to another and he would underscore the fact that in this
context the interpretative community is the Church and in a special
way the sacred hierarchy. In many places, but especially in Principles
of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger is critical of the idea that one can
learn to be a Christian on one’s own as one might pursue a degree in
Christian Studies. In a Wednesday audience catechesis he illustrated
his argument with reference to St Paul’s treatment of baptism in his
6th Letter to the Romans. He noted that St Paul uses the passive tense
in the statement ‘we have been baptized’. This means that no one
can baptize himself and that an ‘autonomous, self-produced Christi-
anity, is a contradiction in itself’61. Moreover, Ratzinger observes
that the Christian community does not act on its own either, accord-
ing to its own ideas and desires. The community also lives in the same
passive process: Christ alone can constitute the Church and be the
true giver of the sacraments.62 Thus, faith is not a product of human
thought and reflection, it cannot be invented, it can only be received
as a gift from God.63

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On the Feast of St Paul 2008 Ratzinger, as Benedict XVI, pro-

claimed a special ‘Pauline Year’ dedicated to the study of the Pauline
scriptures. He also praised St Paul for not putting his own spin on
what he had learned from those who had known Christ. He argued
that St Paul’s Christology is never original at the expense of faithful-
ness to the tradition: ‘the kerygma of the apostles always presides
over the personal re-elaboration of Paul; each of his arguments
moves from common tradition, and in them he expresses the faith
shared by all the Churches’.64 In this way he suggested that St Paul
offers a model for all time of how to approach theology and how
to preach – ‘the theologian, the preacher, does not create new
visions of the world and of life, but he is at the service of truth
handed down’.65
One might say that Ratzinger shares the attitude of many of the
postmoderns that there is something sophistic about writing, that
is, about texts de-coupled from their author, and that he also shares
the classical mentality that pedagogy requires as a starting point,
the submission to the guidance of a teacher. In 1986, in a reflection
on the effects of the Second Vatican Council, he wrote:

A body remains identical precisely by being continually renewed

in the process of living. For Cardinal Newman the idea of deve-
lopment was in fact the bridge that made his conversion to
Catholicism possible. My own belief is that it belongs in fact to
the decisive fundamental concepts of Catholicism . . . Anyone
who wants to cling merely to the words of scripture or the patterns
of the early Church banishes Christ to the past. The result is either
a faith that is completely sterile and has nothing to say to today
or an arbitrariness that jumps over two thousand years of history
and throws it into the dustbin of failure while dreaming up for
itself how Christianity was really meant to appear according to
scripture or according to Jesus . . . Genuine identity with the
origin is only to be found where there is also the living continuity
that develops it and thus preserves it.66

Moreover, in Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger wrote

that the central mystery of salvation, namely, the death and resur-
rection of the Lord, is not some mere ‘timeless truth’ hovering
independently over a realm of changing facts, but this mystery

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introduces Christians into ‘the dynamic circle of Trinitarian love that

not only unites subject and object but even brings individual subjects
together without depriving them of their individuality’.67 This par-
ticipation in the life and love of the Trinity safeguards the tradition
against becoming radically historicist in the sense of being mere
written words to be construed in dependence on changing social
conditions. In his address to the participants in the conference
to mark the 40th anniversary of the promulgation of Dei Verbum,
Benedict XVI reiterated the theme of II Pet. 1: 20, that prophecy
has never been put forward by man’s willing it. It is rather that those
impelled by the Holy Spirit have spoken under God’s influence.
Prophecy contained in Scripture cannot therefore be the subject of a
purely personal interpretation.68
A summary of these various themes in Ratzinger’s attempt to find
a legitimate place for history within tradition can be found in the
following paragraph of Aaron Canty:

First, Benedict gives priority to God’s initiative in revealing him-

self to humanity. Second, this revelation transcends the text of
Scripture in such a way that faith must precede its reading for it
to be transformative. Third, faith, that is, humanity’s response to
God necessarily possesses a corporate dimension. Revelation is
given to individuals who, because of their faith, form a commu-
nity that continually communicates God’s revelation. An ongoing
dialectic of reception and communication continues throughout
history so that ‘the individual [authors] of the Bible are inspired,
and thus the Church is active in speaking through them, and
God is speaking through the Church’. Fourth, Benedict’s theology
of revelation maintains a strong historical and even eschatological
orientation which involves not only an emphasis on God’s plan of
salvation and history, but also on the very theological significance
of history and its relationship to the future.69

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 CHAPTER 4

THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES

In theological parlance faith, hope and love are known as the

theological virtues. Faith is especially related to the intellect and its
pursuit of truth, hope to the memory and its experience of beauty
and love to the will and its appetite for goodness. Since all of creation
is in a sense marked by the form of the Trinity, these virtues, like the
Trinity itself, are said to be related in the manner of a circular dance
or perichoresis. The theological virtues are also related to the Gifts
of the Holy Spirit with wisdom, understanding and knowledge
having a particular association with faith, fortitude with hope, and
fear of the Lord and piety with love. These relationships are drawn
out in the works of the early Church Fathers and Scholastics. Their
precise treatment varies from theologian to theologian but there is
a general agreement that any account of theological anthropology
will include some analysis of the relationships between faculties
of the soul, theological virtues, transcendental properties of being
(truth, beauty and goodness) and the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
(Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Knowledge, Fortitude, Piety and
Fear of the Lord). In such a scheme the absence of one or more
theological virtue will give rise to a spiritual disorder. Conversely,
understanding these various components of the human soul and
their relationships with one another and their potential to develop
the theological virtues and receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit, gives
one a framework for a Catholic approach to what the German
Romantics called Bildung.
The significance of the theological virtues has been a perennial
theme in Ratzinger’s thought from his earliest years as a professor
through to the earliest years of his papacy. His first papal encyclical,
Deus Caritas Est, dealt with the relationship between faith and love,

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and his second encyclical Spe Salvi dealt with the relationship
between faith and hope. The first half of Deus Caritas Est built upon
Guardini’s theme that Christianity is primarily about a personal
relationship with the Trinity and Balthasar’s theme, expressed most
strongly in Love Alone is Credible, that it is the reality of love rather
than clever dialectics that will ultimately convince ‘modern man’ of
the truth of Revelation. Motifs which appear in Spe Salvi were also
foreshadowed in Ratzinger’s earlier academic works including: Faith
and the Future (1971), The Theology of History in St Bonaventure
(written as an Habilitationsschrift in the 1950s and published in an
English translation in 1971), Principles of Catholic Theology (1982);
Politik und Erlösung (1986); Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope and
Love: The Yes of Jesus Christ (1991); and The End of Time? (2004) –
a paper delivered at a meeting with Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen
Moltmann and Eveline Goodman-Thau.1 In the shadows behind
many of these publications there stands the influence of Josef
Pieper’s works on Glaube, Hoffnung and Liebe published together
with a translation in English in 1997 and his Über das Ende der Zeit
published in an English translation in 1999.2 Behind Pieper there
stands the works of Paschasius Radbertus (c.790–865) – a Frankish
theologian of the Carolingian era, as well as critiques of despair
and presumption and the spiritual malady of acedia in the moral
theology of Augustine and Aquinas. To these Ratzinger adds reflec-
tions on hope from St Bonaventure’s Advent Sermons and insights
from more contemporary, predominately Marxist authors, such
as Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and
Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) of the Institut für Sozialforschung,
known colloquially as the Frankfurt School. The significance of
these non-Christian authors is that they provide insights into post-
Christian analogues for the theological virtue of hope. The third
encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, also builds on the critique of liberal
notions of progress in Spe Salvi, but shifts its application from
eschatology to the intersection of theology with social theory. The
core theological ideas of Caritas in Veritate were all present in
Ratzinger’s essay (published in 1969) on the notion of human dignity
in the Conciliar document Gaudium et Spes and these in turn
reiterate themes in de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheistic Humanism
(1944), specifically the notion that all secular visions of a perfected
humanity are ultimately tragic.

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In many of these papal reflections on the theological virtues

Ratzinger’s accent is on how the particular theological virtue under
examination has undergone a secularist mutation. The general idea is
that faith, hope and love have not disappeared in post-Enlightenment
cultures but they have been mutated, losing their Christian meaning.
Faith still exists but in Science rather than Christ, love is either
something completely Platonic (in the mind) or completely sensual
(without a rational component), and hope becomes hope in material
and technical progress, which is linked to faith in science, just as
faith in Christ was formerly linked to hope in Christ. Whereas other
scholars have tended to examine the cultures of modernity and post-
modernity from the perspective of what they have done to the unity
of the transcendentals (von Balthasar), or to an understanding of
the faculties of the soul and the formation of the ‘self’ (Alasdair
MacIntyre and Charles Taylor), or to configurations of the nature,
grace and culture relationship (Louis Dupré), or to conceptions of
good government (Eric Voegelin, Leo Strauss, James V. Schall and
Robert P. Kraynak), Ratzinger has tended to focus his analysis on
its treatment of the theological virtues. In paragraph 22 of Spe Salvi
(an encyclical which can be taken as an antidote to the uncritical
affirmation of modernity readings of Gaudium et spes) he stated that
‘a self-critique of modernity is needed in dialogue with Christianity
and its concept of hope’.
Central to his reading of this topic is the notion that since the
time of the French Revolution the Christian understanding of hope
has been mutated first into Liberal, secondly into Marxist and thirdly
into broader Social Darwinist notions of progress. He partly came
to this judgment through reading the three-volume work of Ernst
Bloch on The Principle of Hope which he believes exemplifies the
mutation. A critique of the notion of progress as a Liberal and
Marxist neo-Gnostic heresy has also been a recurring theme in the
works of such decided non-Marxists as James V. Schall and Eric
Voegelin. Schall speaks of a ‘re-location of the supernatural virtue of
hope’ in the political philosophy of modernity and recalls that Eric
Voegelin characterized the logos of modernity as the ‘immanentiza-
tion of the eschaton’. Schall argues that as a result of the tremendous
effort of modernity to make philosophy ‘practical’, the classical
notions of the last things – death, purgatory, heaven and hell – have
not disappeared altogether but have been relocated within this world

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and reappear in new forms.3 Liberalism and Marxism thereby parody

creedal Christianity rather than transcending it. With Voegelin and
Schall, Ratzinger concludes that both the Liberal and the Marxist
image of the world share a ‘strange eschatological consciousness’
ultimately shaped by the idea of progress.4 He describes the Liberal
faith in continuous progress as ‘the bourgeois substitute for the lost
hope of faith’ and the replacement of the concept of truth by the
concept of progress as the ‘neuralgic point of the modern age’.5 He
suggests that ‘Liberalism and the Enlightenment want to talk us into
accepting a world without fear: they promise the complete elimina-
tion of every kind of fear’, through the application of so-called
scientific rationality.6 Similarly, for Marxists, optimism is the theo-
logical virtue of a new god ‘history’ and a new religion. Heaven
becomes the Communist Utopia which is achieved by means of the
‘revolution’, which for its part represents a kind of mythical god-
head, as it were a ‘God the Son’ in relation to the ‘God the Father’ of
history.7 Hope thereby becomes ‘the virtue of an aggressive ontology,
the dynamic force of the march towards Utopia’.8
The academic merit of the Frankfurt School theorists is that
they offer an immanent critique of the failure of the various post-
Enlightenment attempts to ground hope in something other than
Christian faith. The major work of value here is Dialectic of Enlight-
enment, co-authored by Adorno and Horkheimer. It is one of the
classics of twentieth-century social theory. The following is an
excerpt from an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on its central theses:

Long before ‘postmodernism’ became fashionable, Adorno and

Horkheimer wrote one of the most searching critiques of moder-
nity to have emerged among progressive European intellectuals.
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a product of their wartime exile . . .
Their book opens with a grim assessment of the modern West:
‘Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of
thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear
and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth
radiates under the sign of “disaster triumphant”’ . . . How can
this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of modern science
and medicine and industry promise to liberate people from igno-
rance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help create a

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world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology, knowingly

practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop lethal
weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become
irrational.

In referring to Adorno and Horkheimer, Ratzinger was not

endorsing all the principles and conclusions of their Institute for
Social Research but he does demonstrate a knowledge of the secular
critiques of modernity which converge with the Catholic criticisms
at various junctions. He is sympathetic to their argument that the
rationality of the so-called Age of Enlightenment has evinced a pro-
pensity for violent applications. These conceptual changes are charted
by Ratzinger through the works of Immanuel Kant, particularly his
notion of a transition from an ecclesiastical faith to a rational faith
presented in 1792, and his later 1794 warning about the consequences
if even this so-called rational faith were to be found wanting. In this
context Ratzinger cites Henri de Lubac’s ecclesiological masterpiece,
Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, as a place to
gain an understanding of this point. He also provided a preface to
the 1988 English translation of the work in which he described it as
‘an essential milestone on my theological journey’ in which de Lubac
demonstrated ‘how the idea of community and universality, rooted
in the trinitarian concept of God, permeates and shapes all the
individual elements of Faith’s content’. Part of Ratzinger’s concern
here is the power of what in other places he has called ‘pious
Pelagianism’ and a ‘narrow-minded individualistic Christianity’. He
has complained that pious Pelagians think of the Christian life
as something like taking out an insurance policy against spending
eternity in hell. They want security, not hope:

By means of a tough and rigorous system of religious practices,

by means of prayers and actions, they want to create for them-
selves a right to blessedness. What they lack is the humility essential
to any love – the humility to be able to receive what we are given
over and above what we have deserved and achieved. The denial
of hope in favour of security that we are faced with here rests
on the inability to bear the tension of waiting for what is to come
and to abandon oneself to God’s goodness. This kind of Pelagian-
ism is thus an apostasy from love and from hope but also at the

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profoundest level from faith too . . . . The core of Pelagianism is a

religion without love that in this way degenerates into a sad and
miserable caricature of religion.9

While the pious Pelagians err by focusing on their own salvation

and turning it into a project to be realized by a strategic plan which,
once enacted, should evoke a predictable reward from God, others
can err in the opposite direction. They want to believe that there
are no eternal consequences of our life choices here and now, that
everyone is automatically guaranteed an entry ticket to an egalitarian
heaven where it does not matter what one has made of the gift of life
on earth. Against this mentality Ratzinger offers the following words
of caution:

Grace does not cancel out justice. It does not make wrong
into right. It is not a sponge which wipes everything away, so
that whatever someone has done on earth ends up being of equal
value. Dostoevsky, for example, was right to protest against this
kind of Heaven and this kind of grace in his novel The Brothers
Karamazov. Evildoers, in the end, do not sit at table at the eternal
banquet beside their victims without distinction, as though nothing
had happened.10

Ratzinger also uses Spe Salvi as an opportunity to reaffirm the

Church’s teaching on the existence of an intermediate state between
heaven and hell, usually called purgatory. Here he affirms the idea
of some recent theologians, including Joachim Gnilka, who are of
the opinion that the fire which burns and saves is Christ himself, the
Judge and Saviour:

This encounter with Him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us,
allowing us to become truly ourselves . . . His gaze, the touch of
his heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation
‘as through fire’.11

In Jesus of Nazareth, Ratzinger further stated that Christ’s descent

into hell on Holy Saturday was not ‘merely in the role of a spectator,
as in Dante’s Inferno’. Rather he goes down ‘in the role of one whose
suffering-with-others is a transforming suffering that turns the
underworld around, knocking down and flinging open the gates of

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the abyss’.12 Without going so far as to endorse universal salvation-

ism, Ratzinger nonetheless offers a very hope-filled reading of the
events of Holy Saturday.
A variation on the presumption of a universal sponging is what
Ratzinger calls ‘bourgeois Pelagianism’. He describes it as sympto-
matic of the following attitude: ‘if God really does exist and if he
does in fact bother about people he cannot be so fearfully demanding
as is described by the faith of the Church. Moreover I’m no worse
than the others: I do my duty, and the minor human weaknesses
cannot really be as dangerous as all that’. 13 Here his use of the adjec-
tive ‘bourgeois’ should not be construed to mean literally ‘middle
class’ but rather having a preference for that which will get one by,
rather than striving for excellence. A number of European sociolo-
gists have used the expression in this way, including Werner Sombart,
who argued that Protestant cultures tend to be bourgeois, while
Catholic cultures tend to be ‘erotic’ and aristocratic. Here ‘erotic’
does not mean ‘explicitly sexual’ but rather passionately driven by
transcendent ideals. The bourgeois personality type makes do with
what is serviceable and is content to just get across the line while the
aristocratic personality type always wants the best. The corrosive
effect of the bourgeois mentality on Catholic spirituality and the
theological virtue of hope was a recurring theme in the novels
of Georges Bernanos and thus reading Bernanos helps to place
Ratzinger’s use of this expression into a richer spiritual context.
One example of Bernanos’ treatment of this theme which includes
elements of both pious and bourgeois Pelagianism can be found in
the following paragraph taken from We, the French:

There exists a Christian order. This order is the order of Christ,

and the Catholic tradition has preserved its essential principles.
But the temporal realization of this order does not belong to the
theologians, the casuists, the theologians or the doctors, but to
us Christians. And it seems that the majority of Christians are
forgetting this elementary truth. They believe that the Kingdom
of God will happen all by itself, providing they obey the moral
rules (which, in any event, are common to all decent people),
abstain from working on Sunday (if, that is, their business doesn’t
suffer too much for it), attend a Low Mass on this same day,
and above all have great respect for clerics . . . . This would be
tantamount to saying that, in times of war, an army could quite

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fulfill the nation’s expectations if its men were squeaky clean, if

they marched in step behind the band, and saluted their officers
correctly.14

Implicit within the mentality of the bourgeois Pelagian is a failure

to critically analyse contemporary culture from a theological stand-
point, and a concomitant tendency to blend in with the norms of the
surrounding culture rather than being a sign of contradiction to a
secular world view. Ratzinger however has consistently rejected all
the versions of belief in cumulative progress which might validate
such dispositions of an uncritical openness to prevailing social trends.
With reference to the Revelation of St John in the New Testament,
he remarks that ‘the vision of history that is displayed there repre-
sents the greatest possible antithesis one can imagine to faith in
perpetual progress’:15

The Apocalypse is far removed from the promise of continual

progress: still less does it recognise the possibility of establishing a
once and for all fortunate and definite form of society through
our own human activity. Despite or rather precisely because of
this rejection of irrational expectations it is a book of hope.16

Contrary to much of the post-Conciliar Whiggish thinking which

saw in contemporary Western liberalism a qualitative ethical advance-
ment over previous forms of social organization, in both Spe Salvi
and Caritas in Veritate Ratzinger reiterated the principle that faith
in perpetual progress is hubristic. Whereas in the late 1940s Jacques
Maritain spoke of a ‘kind of plant-life formation and growth of
moral knowledge and feeling, in itself independent of philosophic
systems and the rational justifications they propound’, in paragraph
24 of Spe Salvi Ratzinger offered the following reflections:

Let us ask once again: what may we hope? And what may we not
hope? First of all, we must acknowledge that incremental progress
is possible only in the material sphere. Here, amid our growing
knowledge of the structure of matter and in the light of ever more
advanced inventions, we clearly see continuous progress towards
an ever greater mastery of nature. Yet in the field of ethical aware-
ness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility
of accumulation for the simple reason that man’s freedom is

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always new and he must always make his decisions anew . . . .

Naturally, new generations can build on the knowledge and expe-
rience of those who went before, and they can draw upon the
moral treasury of the whole of humanity. But they can also reject
it, because it can never be self-evident in the same way as material
inventions. The moral treasury of humanity is not readily at hand
like tools that we use; it is present as an appeal to freedom and
a possibility for it.

Much of the above can be succinctly summarized in Pieper’s state-

ment that ‘the classical theology of the Church is equally removed
from both the over simplification of liberalism and the desperate
rigidity of stoicism’.17
These two Pelagian spiritual pathologies can also be read as
particular manifestations of what Augustine and Aquinas identified
as the sins of despair and presumption. Ratzinger has noted that
both attitudes are very close to one another and inwardly coincide.
The error they share is the idea that one does not need God for the
realization and fulfilment of one’s own being.18 Thus, ‘those who
despair do not pray any more because they no longer hope: those
who are sure of themselves and their own power do not pray because
they rely only on themselves’.19 Despair and depression, common
conditions in the contemporary Western world, are directly linked
by Ratzinger to secularism. This is not to say that Ratzinger denies
that there can be bio-chemical causes of depression, merely that he
believes that those who have no relationship with Christ are bound
to experience a certain emptiness and hopelessness which may be
linked to the unusually high incidence of depression in contempo-
rary society. A secularist culture impoverishes spiritual horizons
and diminishes opportunities for self-transcendence. Such a void is
never successfully filled by the pseudo-liturgies of rock concerts and
the pseudo-models of exemplary humanity presented to youth by
those who make their fortune marketing celebrities. The evangeliza-
tion of youth thus requires their liberation from the horizons of mass
culture and an encounter with Christ which is authentically sacra-
mental. Ratzinger paternally diagnoses the condition of contemporary
youth culture with specific reference to the theological virtues:

Thus today we often see in the faces of young people a remarkable

bitterness, a resignation that is far removed from the enthusiasm

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of youthful adventures into the unknown. The deepest root of

this sorrow is the lack of any great hope and the unattainability
of any great love: everything one can hope for is known, and all
love becomes the disappointment of finiteness in a world whose
monstrous surrogates are only a pitiful disguise for profound
despair.20

Although Ratzinger often defers to the wisdom of Augustine

rather than Aquinas, in this context he closely follows Pieper’s judg-
ment that acedia (a kind of spiritual slothfulness) is a symptom of
secularization and the underlying Thomist analysis that it stems
from a lack of greatness of soul (magnanimitas), from a blindness
to the divine pedigree of human nature. In his Spiritual Exercises,
Ratzinger quoted extensively from St Thomas’s treatment of hope,
and listed each of the ‘daughters of acedia’ whose pedigree was
tracked by Aquinas:

Along with despair there is the ‘footloose restlessness of the mind’,

for, as Thomas says, ‘no man can dwell in sorrow’. If the founda-
tion of the soul is sorrow we are faced with a continual flight of
the soul from itself, with a profound restlessness man is afraid to
be alone with himself. He loses his center and becomes a mental
and spiritual vagabond who is always out. The symptoms of
this footloose restlessness are garrulousness and inquisitiveness.
Further there is inward restlessness (importunitas – inquietudo)
and changeability of will and purpose (instabilitas loci vel
propositi).21

Other ‘daughters’ include: apathy (torpor) with regard to the things

necessary for salvation, faintheartedness (pusillanimitas), nursing
grudges (rancour) and spitefulness (militia).22
In many of his works, but particularly in his Christmas reflection
on art in the Basilica of Saint Mary Major, Ratzinger linked the
theological virtue of hope to the transcendental of beauty, and its
absence to a rationality severed from all affectivity. He noted that
‘depression and despair result when the balance of our feelings
becomes disordered or even suspended, when we no longer perceive
with our hearts, but merely with a knowledge that has lost its roots’.23
This is Ratzinger in a very Augustinian moment. In other places he
has commended Augustine for his recognition that ‘the necessary

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purification of sight takes place through faith (Acts 15:9) and through
love, at all events not as a result of reflection alone and not at all by
man’s own power’.24 In this Christmas reflection he added a criticism
of Cartesian rationality or what Bernanos has called ‘the logos of
the machine’:

Some things are discerned, not through domination, but only

through service, and these are the higher ways of perception. For
what we are able to dominate is beneath us. A thinking that
persists in dissecting and putting together is in its essence materi-
alistic and reaches only to a certain threshold. So beyond dissecting
and analysing, the physician needs dedication to the person in
whom the characteristics of the sickness appear.25

Speaking of the arch of triumph in the Basilica which stands

above a crypt that was originally built as a replica of the cave of
Bethlehem, Ratzinger reflected:

The interaction of arch of triumph and cave teaches us to pass

from aesthetics to faith . . . The transition to this image can lead
us a step further still. It helps us to loosen faith from the strain
of will and intellect and allow it to enter into the whole of our
existence. It gives aesthetics back to us in a new and greater way:
if we have followed the call of the Saviour, we can also receive
anew the language of the earth, which he himself assumed.26

This epistemology is of course deeply Trinitarian. The theological

virtues and the transcendentals work together in symphonic har-
mony. Pieper, quoting from St Thomas’ questions on hope, says that
the theological virtues flow back upon themselves in a sacred circle:
one who is led to love by hope has thereafter a more perfect hope,
just as he also believes now more strongly than before. Moreover,

The existential relationship of these three – faith, hope, and

love – can be expressed in three sentences. First: faith, hope and
love have all three been implanted in human nature as natural
inclinations (habitus) conjointly with the reality of grace, the one
source of supernatural life. Second: in the orderly sequence of the
active development of these supernatural inclinations, faith takes
precedence over both hope and love; hope takes precedence over

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love; conversely, in the culpable disorder of their dissolution, love

is lost first, then hope, and last of all, faith. Third: in the order
of perfection, love holds first place, with faith last, and hope
between them.27

Similarly, Balthasar observed that St Paul binds faith, hope and

love together in a sort of perichoresis.28 Just as he traced the sever-
ance of the beautiful from the true and the good in the transition
from Christendom to the culture of modernity, so too one could
trace the severance of each of the theological virtues from their
perichoretic relationship, and their subsequent secularist mutations.
In Deus Caritas Est Ratzinger broke the ground on this genealogy
with his reflections on the severance of eros from agape and in doing
so, sought to refute the claim of Nietzsche that Christianity had
killed eros. As Serge-Thomas Bonino summarized the argument:

[For those who separate eros and agape] the person’s subjectivity
imposes a meaning on the body which each person technically
manipulates in a way that treats it as a purely physical and exterior
reality. This vision of things is ultimately destructive for authentic
love: It disconnects the spiritual dimension of love, often reduced
to a chaste amorous feeling, from sexuality, which is reduced to
a purely biological function, ceasing to be a sacrament of love.29

In the third of his encyclicals Caritas in Veritate Ratzinger fol-

lowed through the emphasis of Spe Salvi on the secularist mutation
of the virtue of hope, with a general criticism of secularist concep-
tions of social development. The intellectual centre of Caritas in
Veritate is that ‘Life in Christ is the first and principal factor of deve-
lopment’ and thus that ‘a humanism which excludes God is an
inhuman humanism’. It rests a notion of authentic human develop-
ment upon the principle enshrined in Gaudium et Spes 22, that the
human person only has self-knowledge to the extent that he or she
knows Christ and participates in the Trinitarian communion of love.
The whole document is a plea to understand the limitations of a
secularist notion of development. Behind secularism lies the error
of Pelagius which in contemporary times takes the form of trust in
education and institutions without reference to God or the interior
dynamics of the human soul. A purely secularist notion of develop-
ment reduces the human person to an economic machine somehow

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designed for the accumulation of wealth. Such a truncated concept

of development has fostered government policies hostile to the more
spiritual elements of human life, including relationships of recipro-
cal self-giving in love. Abortion is encouraged, couples in some
countries are punished for having more than one child, and interna-
tional aid is linked to the acceptance of contraceptives. The questions
covered in Humanae Vitae (the 1968 encyclical of Paul VI which
reiterated the magisterial teaching against the use of contraception)
are much broader than matters of personal morality. For Ratzinger
there is a strong link between life ethics and social ethics. This point
has been made in all three of his encyclicals. The concept he uses
to combine the two is that of a ‘human ecology’.
The deficiencies of thinking about social development within the
horizons of secularism was a much discussed topic at the time of
the collapse of European Communism, when dissident intellectuals,
many of them Catholic, reflected on the most desirable cultural
foundations for their post-Communist future. It is in their publi-
cations that one finds the kind of critique of secular models of social
development which Ratzinger presents in Caritas in Veritate.30 In an
essay entitled ‘Waiting for Supermarkets’ Zdzisław Krasnodebski
observed that given the contemporary liberal presumption that it is
wrong to assume that the distinction between good and evil may be
clearly discerned, or that we could have any claim to know the whole
and be the advocate for the universal subject, all that Poland could
expect from a Western culture penetrated by such ideas was some-
thing as mundane as a supermarket.31 He lamented that the lost
paradise of Europe could not be rejoined because the Western
Europeans had sold their souls to utilitarian currents of philosophy,
no less than the Communists. Krasnodebski concluded that there
was no archaic Ithaca to which Poland might return, because
Penelope did not wait faithfully. She had submitted to some very
materialistic suitors. Using Alexander Boot’s terms one might say
that she had allowed herself to be taken by both sub-species of
Modman, but particularly by Modman Philistine. Similarly, in a 2008
interview with Poland’s Adam Michnik, the former Czech leader
Vaclav Havel had this to say about contemporary Western culture:

On the one hand everything is getting better all the time – a new
generation of mobile phones is being released every week. But
in order to make use of it you need to follow new instructions.

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So you end up reading instruction manuals instead of books

and in your free time you watch TV where handsome tanned guys
scream from advertisements about how happy they are to have
new swimming trunks by fashion house X.32

Ratzinger’s argument in Caritas in Veritate is expressed somewhat

more theologically but he is making the same kind of criticism
of Western notions of development. He believes that the general
tendency for Western government institutions to equate human
development with the success of capitalism and democracy or
material progress is utterly inadequate when measured against the
Gospel’s standard. In particular, as he says in paragraph 34, Western
consumers need to recover an understanding that truth is some-
thing which is given as a gift: ‘In every cognitive process, truth is not
something that we produce, it is always found, or better, received.
Truth, like love, is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes
itself upon human beings’.
Many of these criticisms of liberal models of development were
foreshadowed in Ratzinger’s 1969 essay on the idea of human dignity
in the Conciliar document Gaudium et spes.33 In this paper, written at
the height of the post-Conciliar chaos era, Ratzinger explicitly
rejected the idea that it is possible to construct ‘a rational philosophi-
cal picture of man intelligible to all and on which all men of goodwill
can agree, to which can be added the Christian doctrines as a sort
of crowning conclusion’.34 He described the theory as a ‘fiction’. It
rested upon a construction of the relationship between nature and
grace which was dominant in the pre-Conciliar era, and which was
heavily criticized by Przywara, Guardini, de Lubac, Rahner and von
Balthasar as a Baroque distortion of Patristic and Scholastic thought.
De Lubac, with the support of the French intellectual historian,
Etienne Gilson, led the charge against what was called the extrinsicist
account of the relationship, such that nature and grace occupied two
completely separate ontological spaces.35 The main targets of de
Lubac’s critique were Cajetan and Suárez and their contemporary
exponents in the Dominican and Jesuit Orders, such as Reginald
Garrigou-Lagrange and Louis Billot. Fergus Kerr has described
these theological battles over the relationship between nature and
grace as the most bitter of the twentieth century.36 Rahner actually
described the extrinsicist account as the ‘original and mortal sin
of Jesuit theology’.37 Romano Guardini was also critical of this

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Suárezian movement in anthropology. In a work on the conversion

of St Augustine he wrote that natural man ‘cut off from the world of
revelation and reduced to an object of critically departmentalized
questionings’, did not interest St Augustine:

What does, is man as God intended him to be, hence as he should

be: whole. Such a man is made, irrevocably, to exist by God for
God. To Augustine’s way of thinking, ‘merely natural’ man simply
does not exist. Even man outside faith and obedience to God exists
not ‘naturally’ (in a closed world, autonomous-hence-significant-
in-itself). But contrarily: against God’s will and away from Him,
his existence too is ‘supernatural’ – only negatively.38

Jean Borella diagnosed the problem with the extrinsicist account

as an overemphasis on the Aristotelian idea of the natural order as
a rigid system of natures complete-in-themselves, which exclude
the supernatural just as the circle excludes the square.39 Robert
Spaemann has also observed that ‘all of the Thomists of the six-
teenth century cite Aristotle in this context’.40 They ‘superimposed a
hypothetical purely natural destiny of man, a “finis naturalis” onto
the actual destiny given in salvation history; and the fateful construc-
tion of a “natura pura” came into being’.41 Thus associated with the
extrinsicist account of nature and grace there developed a two ends
theory of human nature – the idea that there exists a natural end
and a separate and distinct supernatural end. In dramatic contrast,
Nicholas J. Healy has observed that in Eschatology and Eternal
Life Ratzinger shows how Thomas’s ‘theology of creation’ entails a
‘complete transformation of Aristotelianism’.42
The theory of there being two ends to human nature was embraced
by Thomists in the twentieth century who sought to find some com-
mon ground with non-Catholics in liberal societies on the territory
of ‘pure nature’. The hope was that Catholics and non-Catholics
could work together on the basis of shared understandings about
what constitutes human nature and thus its natural end, while more
contentious theological propositions about the supernatural end
could be relegated to the territory of private belief. De Lubac argued
that this strategy had opened the formerly Christian societies of the
Western world to the ascendance of a secularist ideology. As Serge-
Thomas Bonino has noted, secularism reduces revelation ‘to a mere
anticipation of the conquests of reason, and the charitable works of

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the Church [are reduced] to a rough sketch of the pure rationality of

the providence of the State’.43
There is thus a consistently anti-secularist line running through
Ratzinger’s publications from the commentary on the treatment of
human dignity in Gaudium et spes, to the first three encyclicals of his
pontificate. Its theological foundation is found in the acceptance
of de Lubac’s anthropology as expressed in his Catholicisme and as
it was taken up in paragraph 22 of Gaudium et spes at the Second
Vatican Council. Without Christ there can be no integral human
development. In a speech on the clarification of the Church’s self-
understanding of social doctrine with particular reference to Benedict
XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate, Cardinal Cordes argued that the
Church in her presentation of social doctrine cannot do without the
truth of Revelation, despite its emphasis on the empirical reality:

It will not forget the Logos made flesh as its ‘ratio’ and look for it
within its discourse. It will not hide this light for its certainty, its
reasonableness. Sometimes Church discussion gives the impres-
sion that we could construct a just world through the consensus
of men and women of good will and through common sense.
Doing so would make faith appear as a beautiful ornament, like
an extension on a building – decorative, superfluous. And when
we look deeper, we discover that the assent of reason and good
will is always dubious and obstructed by original sin – not only
does faith tell us this, but experience, too. So we come to the
realization that Revelation is needed also for the Church’s social
directives: the source of our understanding for ‘justice’ thus
becomes the Logos made flesh.44

Such critiques are destined to cause tension with currents in

American Catholic thought where an enormous amount of effort
has been devoted to defending the compatibility of Catholic theo-
logy with the liberal political and economic theory underpinning
the US constitutional and economic order. This has been pursued on
the basis of an alleged theologically neutral neo-Aristotelian notion
of nature. As David L. Schindler has argued there is a sharp differ-
ence between the political implications of de Lubac’s account of
nature and grace and those of scholars who base their jurisprudence
and political theory upon the extrinsicist accounts of nature and

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grace and the two ends theory of human nature. Among the latter,
prominent twentieth-century Americans included the Conciliar
peritus, John Courtney Murray, and the ethicist, Germain Grisez.
Schindler has summarized the difference between the political impli-
cations of the accounts of nature and grace represented by de Lubac
and Murray in the following statements:

According to Murray: faith and grace do not determine the

structures and processes of civil society: these are determined by
reason, in the light of the lessons of experience . . . [The Church]
does not aim to alter the finality of the state, but to enable the
state to achieve its own finality as determined by its own nature.
Conversely, for de Lubac, the state occupies no special ‘secular’
space beyond the operation of the law of the relations between
nature and grace. It is from within that grace seizes nature . . . It
is from within that faith transforms reason, that the Church
influences the state.
For Murray, grace’s influence on nature takes the form of
assisting nature to realize its own finality; the ends proper to grace
and nature otherwise remain each in its own sphere. For de Lubac,
on the contrary, grace’s influence takes the form of directing
nature from within to serve the end given in grace; the ends proper
to grace and nature remain distinct, even as the natural end is
placed within, internally subordinated to, the supernatural end.
For Murray then, the result is an insistence on a dualism between
citizen and believer, and on the sharpness of the distinction
between eternal (ultimate) end and temporal (penultimate) ends.
For de Lubac, on the contrary, the call to sanctity ‘comprehends’
the call to citizenship and all the worldly tasks implied by citizen-
ship. The eternal end ‘comprehends’ the temporal ends.45

The most prominent intellectual heirs to the tradition of Murray

have been Michael Novak, the late Richard John Neuhaus, and
George Weigel. Novak has coined the term ‘Whig Thomism’ to
refer to their common project of promoting the compatibility of
US-style liberalism with Catholic social thought. They are also
collectively described as ‘neo-conservatives’. Their flagship is the
journal First Things which Neuhaus edited until a short time before
his death. Novak and Weigel were both critical of elements of

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Caritas in Veritate. Weigel argued that some statements within it

could actually be read down as having been inserted by officials
from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace against the better
judgment of Ratzinger himself.46 This is a novel approach to the
interpretation of papal encyclicals. The normal attitude is to acknowl-
edge that while such documents are often put together by a team of
consultants under the direction of the pope, and while it is often
possible to detect the ‘paw prints’ so to speak, of particular theolo-
gians on papal documents, the final product is taken as a faithful
representation of the mind of the pontiff, and those who were
consulted are usually constrained by principles of ecclesial etiquette
from identifying their own contributions. Weigel particularly opposed
those sections of the encyclical endorsing ideas from Paul VI’s
social encyclical Populorum Progressio (1967), which he described as
the ‘odd duck’ in the roll-call of papal social encyclicals of the last
century. In a somewhat more opaque metaphor he further described
Caritas in Veritate, taken as a whole, as having the form of a ‘duck-
billed platypus’ (an Australian monotreme that lives along river
banks and looks somewhat like a small otter with the bill of a duck.
Still more curiously it lays eggs but feeds its hatchlings on breast
milk). Weigel was also critical of the encyclical’s introduction of
themes taken from contemporary theological anthropology, espe-
cially the notions of ‘communion’ and ‘gratuitousness’. He claimed
that the expression a ‘necessary openness, in the world context, to
forms of activity marked by quotas of gratuitousness and commu-
nion’ was difficult to comprehend.
These concepts are not however taken from liberation theologians
‘burrowed into the woodwork at the Pontifical Council for Justice
and Peace’ but from many completely mainstream theologians who
have nothing very positive to say about really existing Marxism or
its derivatives. Traces of these themes can, for example, be found
in the works of Karol Wojtyła – both in pre-papal essays like ‘The
Constitution of Culture through Human Praxis’, and papal docu-
ments such as Sollicitudo rei Socialis (1987) in which he developed
the concept of solidarity and Laborem Exercens (1981) wherein he
discussed the transitive and intransitive effects of human actions,
which in other places he related to the transcendentals of truth,
beauty and goodness. One of the most dramatic of Wojtyła’s inter-
ventions on social topics was precisely the idea that the subjective

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(intransitive) dimension of human labour is more important than the

objective (transitive):

[T]hat which is transitive in our culturally creative activity and is

expressed externally as an effect, objectification, product, or work
can be said to be a result of the particular intensity of that which
is intransitive and remains within our disinterested communion
with truth, goodness and beauty. This communion, its intensity,
degree, and depth, is something completely internal; it is an imma-
nent activity of the human soul, and it leaves its mark and brings
forth fruit in this same dimension. It is from this communion that
we mature and grow inwardly.47

This attempt to treat labour practices as an element within a larger

theological vision of the development of the human person was a key
theme in Wojtyła’s approach to social issues and Ratzinger in Caritas
in Veritate clearly sought to situate himself within the traditions of
Montini and Wojtyła. Concepts like gratuitousness and communion
are not foreign words in his theological vocabulary. They are com-
monly used by Communio circle scholars. For example, in an essay
on the ‘poverty of liberal economics’, Adrian Walker argued that
‘the best, most central paradigm for understanding free economic
exchange is not a contract among self-interested strangers, but gift-
giving among neighbours’.48 Moreover, Ratzinger has never been
sympathetic to the US neo-conservative stance on economics. One
would not need to place him under political pressure to get him
to endorse themes in Populorum Progressio. In pre-papal essays
he described as astounding the idea that the laws of the market are
either neutral or in essence good and in the context of the problem
of Third World poverty he referred to the ‘tragic legacy’ and ‘cruelty
of the liberal capitalist system’.49 In an interview with the Italian
Catholic agency SIR given in 2004 he said that he believed that
economic affairs are often driven by a form of liberalism which
‘specifically excludes the heart’ and the ‘possibility of seeing God,
of introducing the light of moral responsibility, love and justice into
the worlds of work, of commerce and of politics’.50
There is a strong link between the second part of Deus Caritas
Est and themes in Caritas in Veritate, particularly the idea that the
Christian service of material needs is different from any other form

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of humanitarianism. In paragraph 31 of Deus Caritas Est Ratzinger

wrote that while professional competence is a primary, fundamental
requirement of those entrusted with the provision of the material
needs of others, it is not of itself sufficient:

We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always

need something more than technically proper care. They need
humanity. They need heartfelt concern. Those who work for
the Church’s charitable organizations must be distinguished by
the fact that they do not merely meet the needs of the moment,
but they dedicate themselves to others with heartfelt concern,
enabling them to experience the richness of their humanity. Con-
sequently, in addition to their necessary professional training,
these charity workers need a ‘formation of the heart’: they need
to be led to that encounter with God in Christ which awakens
their love and opens their spirits to others.

Ratzinger concludes paragraph 33 by saying that ‘with regard

to the personnel who carry out the Church’s charitable activity on
the practical level, the essential has already been said: they must not
be inspired by ideologies aimed at improving the world, but should
rather be guided by the faith which works through love’. In other
words, there is a qualitative difference between Christian charity and
every other form of humanitarianism:

My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others

becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not
to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only
something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally
present in my gift.

The essential difference of Christian charity is therefore the

personal spiritual dimension. It is a two-way participation in the
love of the Holy Trinity. Precisely because of this personal element
Ratzinger warns against a ‘growing secularism of many Christians
engaged in charitable work’ and he concluded Deus Caritas Est with
an honorary roll call of saints who in their lives gave witness to this
essential difference of Christian charity. They included Francis of
Assisi, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, John Bosco and Teresa
of Calcutta.

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 THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES

The inverse side of this accent on the spiritual is that Ratzinger

has often commented that the Church should not seek to imitate
the corporate world wherein this element is not primary. Some of
these comments include the following:

1. Saints, in fact reformed the Church in depth, not by working up

plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the
Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every
age is holiness, not management.51
2. The saints were all people of imagination, not functionaries of
apparatuses.52
3. I have said very often that I think we have too much bureaucracy.
Therefore, it will be necessary in any case to simplify things.
Everything should not take place by way of committees; there
must even also be the personal encounter.53
4. Paul was effective, not because of brilliant rhetoric and sophisti-
cated strategies, but rather because he exerted himself and left
himself vulnerable in the service of the Gospel.54

In summary, Ratzinger does not think that Christianity is just

about alms giving – if it were then the Vatican should be running
its own Live Aid concerts and similar secular events. Rather he sees
Christian charity as intimately connected with personal love and
personal encounters with the grace of Christ. This is what gives
Christian social service its distinctive character and makes it different
from secular forms of humanitarian aid. He is also concerned
about the ways in which modern corporate practices preclude the
flourishing of this personal dimension. Following the treatments
of the theological virtues in Pieper and Aquinas, which themselves
have strong scriptural foundations, Ratzinger regards a specifically
Christian account of faith, hope and love not merely as radically
different from all the contemporary secularist alternatives, but,
precisely because of this, capable of giving rise to a completely differ-
ent kind of political and economic culture from anything imagined
in secular social theory. In his Spiritual Exercises in Faith, Hope
and Love, he concluded:

A society that turns what is specifically human into something

purely private and defines itself in terms of a complete secularity
(which moreover inevitably becomes a pseudo-religion and a new

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all-embracing system that enslaves people) – this kind of society

will of its nature be sorrowful, a place of despair: it rests on
a diminution of human dignity. A society whose public order is
consistently determined by agnosticism is not a society that has
become free but a society that has despaired, marked by the
sorrow of man who is fleeing from God and in contradiction
with himself. A Church that did not have the courage to under-
mine the public status of its image of man would no longer be
the salt of the earth, the light of the world, the city set on a hill.55

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 CHAPTER 5

HISTORY AND ONTOLOGY AFTER HEIDEGGER

The issue of the severance of the trinitarian relationships between

faith, hope and love and their secularist mutations, is only one aspect
of the much larger problem, identified by Ratzinger in his Principles
of Catholic Theology as no less than the ‘fundamental crisis of our
age’. As has been stated earlier he summarizes this crisis as ‘coming
to an understanding of the mediation of history within the realm of
ontology’.1 He believes that history always becomes problematical
when a particular historical configuration is in a state of crisis as
Western culture appears currently to be. At such times people become
more highly conscious of the difference between their historical and
ontological nature.2 The dramatic change in historical context fosters
an awareness of a multitude of different lifestyle options. The Roman-
tic dream of cultivating a beautiful soul (Die schöne Seele) is no
longer an isolated preoccupation of a small intellectual elite but on a
more popularist, far less philosophical level, so-called ‘plain persons’
are engaged in an enterprise of artistic self-creation. Today the
horizons or options on the lifestyle menu are almost infinite and
the Christian churches are thus placed in a position where they need
to offer some criteria to their faithful for making their selections.
This requires the development of a theological anthropology that is
sufficiently multidimensional to include within it both substantiality
(the notion of a universal human nature), and relationality (an
appreciation of the uniqueness of each and every human life, its
individuality, determined by its relations with similarly unique
others). It requires, in other words, an account of the human being as
a being in time, but in such a way that the two dimensions are held
together rather than eclipsing either the historical or the ontological
end of the pole.

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The impetus for examining the historical end of the pole can be
found at least as far back as Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–
1803), however it became a driving force in theological speculation in
the twentieth century following the publication of Heidegger’s Being
and Time in 1927. Heidegger had abandoned his Catholic faith in
1919 and in the 1920s he turned to Protestantism, particularly to
Martin Luther’s criticisms of scholastic metaphysics. This was at a
time when neo-scholasticism was the dominant theological tradition
in Catholic academies, in particular in the pontifical academies in
Rome and Belgium. Heidegger was in full rebellion from the anti-
historical spirit of the scholasticism of his youth. While later scholars
would defend Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure from the charge
of having ignored history, it is generally acknowledged that post-
Tridentine scholasticism prided itself on its rejection of what was
perceived to be a Protestant fixation on history. Rudolf Voderholzer
noted, for example, that Cajetan skipped whole passages in his
commentary on the Summa of St Thomas precisely because they
concerned mere history and so, in Cajetan’s understanding, resisted
systematization and as such were of no interest to him.3 However
what interested the young Heidegger was precisely what he called the
‘hermeneutics of facticity in concrete life’ or being as it is in time,
which became known as an ‘existential analytic’ in Being and Time.
The key categories of this analytic were care and existence, concern
and instrumentality, temporality and historicity.
In the 1920s these categories were appropriated by Rudolf
Bultmann, one of Heidegger’s colleagues in Marburg, and applied
to his deconstruction and demythologization of the Gospels. Later,
in the 1930s, Heidegger’s attention was drawn away from Luther to
the works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the poet Friedrich
Hölderlin (1770–1843). Notwithstanding the fact that as Rector
of the University of Freiburg between April 1933 and April 1934
Heidegger had allowed himself to be publicly associated with the
Nazi ideology, during the decade of the 1930s a whole generation of
Catholic scholars were attracted to the study of his philosophy. These
included Max Müller, Gustav Siewerth, Johannes B. Lotz and Karl
Rahner. His impact was such that in 1969 Rahner was to write that
‘Catholic theology can no longer be thought of without Martin
Heidegger, because even those who hope to go beyond him and ask
questions different from his, nonetheless owe their origin to him’.4
He also remarked that although he had had many professors in the

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classroom, ‘there is only one whom I can revere as my teacher, and

that is Martin Heidegger’.5 Nonetheless, three of the most prominent
scholars on the thought of Rahner and Heidegger (Karen Kilby,
Cyril O’Regan and Laurence Paul Hemming) are in agreement that
Rahner’s appropriation of the philosophical apparatus of Heidegger
was merely strategic or opportunistic. He was making use of the
conceptual apparatus of Heidegger’s philosophy without necessarily
buying into Heidegger’s theological positions. Precisely what these
theological positions were remains a matter of academic discussion.
In general, it seems he went from being a devout Catholic to a generic
Christian with a strong interest in Luther, to a scholar interested in
pre-Christian paganism, then to someone with an interest in some-
thing akin to Buddhism or what John D Caputo describes as ‘a
meditative, silent world reverencing’ and finally he asked to be buried
with the full rites of the Catholic Church.6 Thus Rahner’s appropria-
tion of elements of Heidegger’s philosophy was a contemporary case
of ‘plundering the spoils of the Egyptians’, of placing ideas from
rival, or at least external traditions, at the service of Christianity. As
Hans Küng has argued, Rahner was the last in the line of the great
neo-scholastics.
In stark contrast to Rahner, Ratzinger, who was born some
23 years later in 1927, the year that Being and Time was first pub-
lished, was not formed in a strong scholastic mould. Ratzinger’s
list of those who were intellectuals popular with seminarians of his
generation did not include members of the immediately previous
generation who were working to develop scholasticism (apart from
Pieper who was atypical of this academic breed) and there was no
one on his list who was particularly inspired by Heidegger. Those he
regarded as mentors or intellectual heroes were all non-scholastics.
Moreover, many, like Theodor Haecker whom Heidegger had pub-
licly ridiculed, had paid a high price for their opposition to Hitler.
Martin Buber was however on his list of seminarian ‘top ten’ favou-
rites and Buber was famously critical of Heidegger. Buber traced the
contemporary cosmological and anthropological crises through
Spinoza, Kant, Marx, Hegel, Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer,
Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Scheler. He concluded that after
Nietzsche ‘nothing more remains to the solitary man but to seek an
intimate communication with himself’ and that this is the basic situ-
ation from which Heidegger’s philosophy arises.7 In Buber’s reading,
Heidegger’s existence is monological, notwithstanding his interest in

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being in the world.8 In Heidegger’s world there is no true Thou spoken

from being to being.9
Ratzinger is clearly post-Heideggerian in the sense that he acknowl-
edges the importance of the macro level issues about the relationship
between history and ontology which Heidegger made so central to
twentieth-century thought. In his own analysis Ratzinger traces
the contemporary crisis in the understanding of the relationship
between the two to the collapse of the prevailing Christian historical
consciousness at the time of the Reformation. The effect of the
Reformation was ‘to make the individual person’s orientation deter-
minative, and responsibility for the Christian order was deliberately
referred to the world, to the princes, in order, precisely in this way, to
expose the lack of historical actuality in the Church that was herself
unable to form her own history or communicate salvation by her
continuity’.10 In place of the concept of succession there appeared
the emphasis on the charismatic authority of the Holy Spirit, and in
place of typology, which pointed to the continuity of history in
promise and fulfilment, there appeared the appeal to what was in the
beginning.11 Since ontology is the basic philosophical expression of
the concept of continuity, Ratzinger observes that it was rejected by
Protestants, particularly Lutherans, first as a Scholastic and later as
a Hellenistic perversion of Christianity and contrasted with the idea
of history.12
In the early part of the twentieth-century Catholic theology thereby
faced the question of the relationship between salvation history as
presented in the Scriptures and the metaphysical heritage in Catholic
theology, with a subsidiary question of the extent to which scriptural
mediation could exist together with ecclesial mediation, as well as the
anthropological question about the value to be given to human
achievements in the whole economy of salvation.13 Karl Barth and
Oscar Cullmann led the Protestant ‘salvation history’ side of the
debate, while Gottlieb Söhngen in Germany and Jean Daniélou
in France, led the Catholic side of the discussion.14 According to
Ratzinger, Söhngen ‘attempted to approach the first question by con-
structing two philosophical models – the abstract-metaphysical and
the concrete-historical – whose mutual complementarity became for
him the key to the Catholic-Protestant debate as well as a kind of
hermeneutic for disclosing the relationship between history and
dogma’.15 The second question had in various ways occupied the
attention of de Lubac, Rahner and Ratzinger and their ideas on this

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theme fed into the drafting of Dei Verbum, as discussed in Chapter 3.

The third, more anthropological question, was directly addressed by
Daniélou. He argued that history is primarily ‘the great works of
God, accomplished by preaching and the sacraments’.16 This is ‘what
constitutes history in its most real and most hidden substance’.17 The
successive Christian cultures constitute only ‘the outer garment’ of
this history, they are, as it were, epiphenomena. The mission of the
Church is not primarily to ‘humanise civilization, to make pleasures
more moral, salaries more just’.18 These things are important, but
secondary and not the essential. What is primary is ‘liberating souls
from spiritual captivity’ and if she succeeds in this mission, the
improvements to the social order will follow.19 For this reason
Daniélou spoke of a dramatic tension between two successive epochs
of total history – the already of the Kingship of Christ which had
been won on the Cross, and the not yet of the New Jerusalem.20
These terms, ‘the already’ and the ‘not yet’ were also employed
by Cullmann. Of those on the Protestant side of the discussion,
Cullmann was closest to the positions represented by Daniélou and
Söhngen, at least in his understanding of salvation history (though
not in his hostility to the Greek side of the Catholic intellectual
heritage). In Revelation Theology: a History, Avery Dulles summa-
rized the Cullmann project in the following terms: ‘In focusing on
redemptive history as the chief content of revelation, Cullmann
opposes the Rationalists, who conceive of revelation as timeless
truth, the Barthians, who take refuge in primal history or meta-
history (Urgeschichte and Übergeschichte); and the Bultmannians, who
tend to separate faith from belief in past historical occurrences’.21
In Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, Ratzinger concluded that
Cullmann’s mature position as represented in his Salvation as History
is both more concrete and closer to the actual content of Scripture
than to the other Protestant models offered by Barth and Bultmann.22
Ratzinger also praised Cullmann for drawing out the ‘existential’
content of salvation history:

Faith means entering into solidarity with salvation history, taking

up its ‘already’ and, on that basis, working towards the ‘not yet’.
The ‘existential’ categories of faith, hope and love are brought
into relation with salvation history’s own constituitive dimensions.
Faith is the appropriation of past history, which finds itself trans-
posed through love into the present and so becomes once more

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hope for the future. Salvation history is, therefore, not merely the
past, it is also the present and the future, as we continue on our
pilgrimage till the Lord’s return.23

Nonetheless, while Ratzinger approved of Cullmann’s attention

to the existential content of salvation history and his notion of the
tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’ of Christian life in
history, he also concluded that Cullmann’s account of the relation-
ship between time and eternity was ‘somewhat problematic’ and that
the question of how the biblical message is mediated was ‘treated
much too cavalierly’.24
Commentaries on these discussions published in the 1950s often
divided scholars into ‘eschatological’ and ‘incarnational’ camps, with
Barth representing the most extreme end of the eschatological pole,
associated with a disposition of indifference to culture and human
progress, while the disposition of those who tended toward the
‘incarnational’ end was summarized in the following paragraph by
Martin D’Arcy:

We ought not, therefore, to leave history in the ditch while we

travel with our hidden treasure to our last end. To think in this
way [like Barth] is to undervalue the Incarnation. The new Adam,
like the old, gives a name to creatures, a new name, and His
re-creative act has become part of the texture of history. It does
not abolish but transfigures historical values.25

Ratzinger later summarized the positions with the rhetorical

question: do the phenomena which typically accompany the reality
of man, such as beauty and art, exist in the Christian scheme, and is
their existence in it justified, or is the nakedness of the Cross the
sheer negation of all these things?26
A second wave of these debates followed upon Rudolf Bultmann’s
1954–1955 Gifford Lectures, published as History and Eschatology
(1957). These debates centred upon Bultmann’s emphasis on the
pre-eminence of word over event. In Ratzinger’s analysis the effect of
the primacy of the word in Bultmann’s theology was to ‘cancel the
notion of a continuous series of salvation-historical events; salvation
is to a large extent detemporalized just as the notion of the eschato-
logical is expressly divested of all temporal determinatives’.27 While
initially it was a lapse from salvation history into metaphysics that

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was branded as the Catholic error, after Bultmann it became ‘the

preoccupation with a continuous line that progresses by way of a
determinable sequence of events that is regarded as the Catholic
misinterpretation of the original intention of the New Testament’.28
In the 1960s a new element entered into the discussion with the
ascendance of Marxism in university departments, predominantly
in Western European countries and countries of the British Com-
monwealth. Intellectual Marxism arrived with its own version of
‘salvation history’ and its own ontology, including dialectical materi-
alism with its promise of the abolition of class conflict and the
division of labour. The ideologues of the Soviet establishment even
spoke of a ‘New Soviet Man’ who came to be ridiculed in literature
as Homo Sovieticus. Marxist feminists also promised the abolition
of patriarchy and for some, the family itself. As Paul Henry described
it: ‘Marxism represented the materialistic messianism of a laicized
Christian hope, for whom Christ is only a stopover from which to
pass beyond, a dialectical moment of the historical becoming’.29
Ratzinger noted that ‘the view that the Bible speaks exclusively in
terms of salvation history (and thus, anti-metaphysically) facilitated
the fusing of the biblical horizon with the Marxist idea of history’.30
Accordingly, history is a progressive liberation and it thereby becomes
the real revelation and the real interpreter of the Bible. In effect ‘it
swallows up the concepts of God and Revelation and takes over the
role of God’.31 This not only affected political theory but Ratzinger
also associates its influence with the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
In an essay on the concept of Bildung published in 1975, he described
the idea of eliminating the problem of sexuality and eros through a
process of enlightenment as an example of the pursuit of redemption
through knowledge. He also suggested that for a Marxist or libera-
tion theologian, guilt is the experience of having retarded human
progress.32
The final years of the pontificate of Paul VI thus saw the rise in
popularity of theologies of liberation built upon these earlier debates
about salvation history, particularly the contributions of Bultmann
and his followers, spliced with Marxism. However in 1978, Karol
Wojtyła, a Polish phenomenologist with 30 years experience of really
existing Marxism was elected to the papacy. In 1979 he issued the
first encyclical of his pontificate – Redemptor Hominis – which began
with the words, ‘Jesus Christ, the redeemer of man, is the center and
purpose of human history’. This was popularly received as a direct

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refutation of the opening words of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto,

that the history of the world, is the history of class conflict. In his
Apostolic Letter, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, Wojtyła set out the
Catholic conception of time and history in the following manner:

In Christianity time has a fundamental importance. Within the

dimension of time the world was created; within it the history of
salvation unfolds, finding its culmination in the fullness of time
of the Incarnation, and its goal in the glorious return of the Son
of God at the end of time. In Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh,
time becomes a dimension of God, who is himself eternal . . .
Christ, true God and true man, the Lord of the cosmos, is also
the Lord of history of which he is ‘the Alpha and the Omega’
(Rev. 1:8; 21:6), the ‘beginning and the end’ (Rev. 21: 6). In Him
the Father has spoken the definitive word about mankind and
its history.

This Christocentric theology of history was promoted throughout

Wojtyła’s pontificate, alongside a Christocentric anthropology rooted
in the theme of Gaudium et spes 22 – the idea that Christ is the
model of a perfected humanity. Ratzinger consistently endorsed this
approach and described Christ as the ‘directional arrow, as it were,
that indicates what being human tends toward, although as long as
history is still on the way, this goal is never fully realised’.33
Early in Wojtyła’s pontificate Ratzinger published Principles of
Catholic Theology in which he surveyed the various approaches to
the relationship between history and ontology. In particular, he traced
the treatment of issues such as Hellenization and de-Hellenization,
ontology and history, institution and event, incarnational theology
and the theology of the cross, and the emergence of a theology of
liberation in which history is salvation on the basis of hope in human
progress and past history is rejected as an inferior form of existence.34
The first series of debates tended to highlight distinctions between a
Catholic and Protestant understanding of the relationship between
nature and grace and the place of the world in the economy of salva-
tion, while the issues that arose with Bultmann, liberation theologians,
and now one could add post-moderns, are essentially engagements
with post-Christian constructions of the relationship between being
and history.

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In his response to the Protestants, Ratzinger acknowledges that

at first glance, except in a few passages, the Bible contains no onto-
logical reflection, that it appears in fact to be antithetical to the Greek
mode of ontological thought. However upon a closer inspection he
concludes this is a superficial reading and he suggests that Scripture
actually has significant things to say about being as such.35 In con-
trast to the Greek concept of being however, Ratzinger suggests that
the Biblical idea of creatureliness means having one’s origin, not in
a passive idea, but in a creative freedom:

Decisive for the Greek concept of God was the belief in God as a
pure and changeless being of whom, consequently, no action
could be predicated; his utter changelessness meant that he was
completely self-contained and referred wholly to himself without
any relationship to what was changeable. For the biblical God,
on the other hand, it is precisely relationship and action that
are the essential marks; creation and revelation are the two basic
statements about him, and when revelation is fulfilled in the
Resurrection, it is thus confirmed once again that he is not just
one who is timeless but also one who is above time, whose exis-
tence is known to us only through action.36

In Principles of Catholic Theology Ratzinger did not attend to

the task of providing his own definitive account of the mediation
of history in the realm of ontology, though he did argue that Karl
Rahner’s attempt to deal with the issue in Hearers of the Word (first
published in 1941) made the mistake of making man’s being itself
historical in character. In this critique of Rahner he follows Pieper’s
criticisms of the influence of Heidegger. In his essay on hope, Pieper
wrote:

Present day existential philosophy, which regards human existence

exclusively in its temporality as a ‘being in time’ is right to the extent
that it opposes an idealistic doctrine of man in which the status
viatoris seems transformed, against its nature, into a permanent
likeness to God. But to the extent that this existential philosophy
conceives of man’s existence as essentially and ‘in the foundation
of its being temporal’ (Heidegger), it too fails to comprehend the
true nature of its subject.37

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More fundamentally, Pieper observed that ‘existentialism fails to

recognise the true nature of human existence because it denies the
“pilgrimage” character of the status viatoris, its orientation toward
fulfilment beyond time, and hence, in principle, the status viatoris
itself’.38 While Rahner did not himself deny the status viatoris he
tended to conflate salvation history with world history. As Ratzinger
expressed the problem:

Rahner appropriated universal reason for Christianity and tried

to prove that universal reason leads ultimately to the teachings of
Christianity and that the teachings of Christianity are the univer-
sally human, the rational par excellence. In the generation that
followed Rahner the direction of his thought was reversed. If the
teachings of Christianity are the universally human, the generally
held views of man’s reason, then it follows that these generally
held views are what is Christian. If that is the case, then one must
interpret what is Christian in terms of the universal findings of
man’s reason.39

In the 1970s and most of the 1980s until the collapse of European
Communism in 1989, this approach nurtured the liberation theology
movement since in those decades Marxism was seen by many mem-
bers of the international intellectual elite as the embodiment of
human reason. In his response Ratzinger asked whether it is true
that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes
it known:

Is the Christian really just man as he is? Does not the whole
dynamism of history stem from the pressure to rise above man as
he is? Is not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that
man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he
ceases to be what he is? Does not such a concept which turns
being into history but also history into being, result in a vast
stagnation despite the talk of self-transcendence as the content
of man’s being?40

James V. Schall recently put such propositions in the form of a

statement rather than a question: ‘If we treat man as only natural, he
will no doubt end up being less than natural . . . the principle is not,
get man’s natural end right and you will be happy, but get man’s

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supernatural end right or you will not be able to get his natural or
this worldly end right’.41
Against Rahner’s treatment of the relationship between history
and ontology, Ratzinger suggested that ‘we must comprehend why
God’s universalism (God wants everyone to be saved) makes use of
the particularism of the history of salvation (from Abraham to the
Church)’, and further, that ‘concern for the salvation of others should
not lead to this particularism being as good as completely deleted:
the history of salvation and the history of the world should not be
declared to be simply identical because God’s concern must be
directed at everyone’.42 Moreover, Ratzinger argued that Christianity
does represent a very particular intervention in the history of being
and the being of history since how otherwise could it be such a sign
to be rejected (Lk. 2: 34)?43
Referring to passages in Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith:
An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, Ratzinger concluded that
the real problem with Rahner’s synthesis is that he ‘sought for a phi-
losophical and theological world formula on the basis on which the
whole of reality can be deduced cohesively from necessary causes’.44
Ratzinger believes that at the root of this approach is a concept of
freedom taken from idealistic philosophy, and while he believes that
such a concept is appropriate for an understanding of divine free-
dom, he thinks it does not work for human freedom. He notes that
Rahner defines freedom as the ‘ability to be oneself’ and that it is
nothing less than the ‘the ultimate self-responsibility of the person’.45
He described such a concept of freedom as ‘an almost godlike ability
for self-action’ and suggested that ‘wanting to be like God is the inner
motive of all mankind’s programs of liberation’.46 He also recom-
mended the work of M. Kriele, Befreiung und politische Aufklärung,
for an exposition of the alternative accounts of human freedom on
the intellectual market.47
The specific difference of a Christian conception of freedom was
addressed by Jean Daniélou in his essay, ‘The Conception of History
in the Christian Tradition’. Daniélou wrote:

In order that there should be history, it is not enough that events

have importance; there must be as well a continuity in them. It is
precisely this which makes the difference between the concept of
‘historicity’, such as is represented by the Existentialist philosophy
and which is merely the present act of individual liberty, and that

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of sacred history, where the individual inserts himself into the web
of an economy which goes beyond him and which constitutes
an objective plan.48

Accordingly, in Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger rejected

accounts of freedom which derived their content from German
Idealism:

Man finds his centre of gravity, not inside, but outside himself.
The place to which he is anchored is not, as it were, within himself,
but without. This explains that remnant that remains always to
be explained, the fragmentary character of all his efforts to com-
prehend the unity of history and being. Ultimately, the tension
between ontology and history has its foundation in the tension
within human nature itself, which must go out of itself in order
to find itself; it has its foundation in the mystery of God, which is
freedom and which, therefore, calls each individual by a name that
is known to no other. Thus, the whole is communicated to him in
the particular.49

This notion of the communication of the whole in the particular

was a dominant theme in von Balthasar’s 1963 work Das Ganze im
Fragment which was published in English as A Theological Anthro-
pology. In that work von Balthasar addressed the theme of the frag-
mentary nature of the human perception of the world with reference
to the theological virtues:

Faith, hope and charity move through a fragmentary existence

towards an unforeseeable perfection. Therefore, they can become
suspicious if wholeness is offered recognizably and tangibly to
them in advance. In the fragmentary nature of man and the world
they have a guarantee of the genuine. As a blind man feels with
knowing hands the sharp edges of broken pottery, so they learn
from the fragments of existence in what direction toward whole-
ness God points them. Such a fragment is, for groping human
hands, the cross of Christ: innumerable lines of significance inter-
sect at it, disentangle, then entangle themselves again. A synthesis
that can be grasped at a glance is all the less possible in that the
synthesis that God brought about manifested itself in the ulti-
mate shattering of all human plans, demands and longings. Faith,

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love and hope grope their way through the darkness: they believe
the incredible; they love that which withdraws itself, abandoning
them; they hope against hope. The darkness with its withdrawal
of all available unity makes them one.50

Von Balthasar thereby offers an account of Bildung or self-

development in which God and the human person are the two
primary actors or agents. The two exist in a dialogical relationship
where prayer and sacraments are the primary mode of communica-
tion within the relationship. In his work on the nineteenth-century
French Carmelite, Thérèse of Lisieux, von Balthasar argued that ‘for
each Christian, God has an idea which fixes his or her place within
the membership of the Church, and that this idea is unique and
personal, embodying for each his or her appropriate sanctity’. Thus
the vocation of each individual is to ‘transform his life into this Idea
of himself secreted in God, this “individual law” freely promulgated
for him by the pure grace of God’.51 This means that there is no
‘one size fits all’ blueprint for Christian spirituality. There are rather
many missions and charisms in the life of the Church. It is through
the work of prayer and grace that the individual comes to an under-
standing of the divine will for him or her and for each person there
will be both ‘constants’ and unique gifts and special graces. Among
the ‘constants’ will be the work of the theological virtues, that is, of
faith, hope and love, and a life of prayer and participation in the
sacramental life of the Church, but beyond this each person enjoys
what the Romantics called individualität (individuality) which is
forged in the theo-dramatic relationship. In his one publication which
directly addresses the topic of Bildung, Ratzinger argued that while
the Christian doctrine of creation can be used to defend a notion of
human equality in the sense that all have been created in the same
image of God, it should not be used to imply a general sameness
between persons. The Christian faith, he said, would rather bring
to the fore the equality of the different pathways (vocations) and
recognize the dignity of all human beings in the symphony of the
various callings.52 He also noted that the contemporary quest for
sameness or uniformity (one might say ‘a one size should fit all
attitude’) in educational policy, has been driven by the sin of envy.
Thus the difference between the account of Bildung to be found
at the nihilist end of the Romantic spectrum and the account to be
found at the Catholic end is not related to any Catholic indifference

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to individuality or desire for social uniformity. It is rather the case

that at the Catholic end the image of the beautiful soul is an image
known to God and discerned by the human person through prayer,
whereas at the nihilist end, the image is self-created by the person
without any reference to God. As R. E. Norton concluded in his work
The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century,
for most of the nineteenth-century advocates of Bildung, the whole
process came to be seen as a sovereign and independent good.53 For
the contemporary postmoderns who occupy the nihilist end of the
Romantic tradition, there are no criteria by which one should go
about the process of artistic self-creation. There is no ideal or exem-
plary model of humanity. What matters is not any quality of the self
which is ultimately created, but the freedom of the process by which
the self (whatever its ultimate character) was created.
Ratzinger’s criticism of elements of Rahner’s treatment of the
relationship between history and ontology not only relies on Pieper’s
criticisms of Heidegger and basic principles of Balthasarian theo-
dramatics as outlined above, but it also echoes Pieper’s earlier
criticisms of the French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. In the 1960s
one of the sources of authority for the more Concilium style inter-
pretation of the Second Vatican Council as a positive embrace of the
culture of modernity was to be found in the theology of history of
Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard tried to solve the tension between the
incarnational and eschatological perspectives with an evolutionary
account of salvation history. Ratzinger’s reflections on Teilhard appear
in the publication of the proceedings of a symposium to mark the
70th birthday of Johann Baptist Metz who was arguably Rahner’s
most illustrious student. Ratzinger’s contribution was published
under the title ‘The End of Time’. The following is his summary of
Teilhard’s thesis:

He [de Chardin] described the cosmos as a process of upward

development, as a journey of unification. From the very simple,
this journey leads to ever greater and more complex units in which
multiplicity is not cancelled out but integrated into a growing
synthesis, culminating in the Noosphere, where spirit and its under-
standing comprehend the whole, and everything is integrated
into a kind of living organism. Based on Ephesians and Colos-
sians, Teilhard envisages Christ as the energy that drives towards
the Noosphere, an energy that finally incorporates everything

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into its fullness . . . For Teilhard all of evolution’s terrible aspects

and so too, finally, all of history’s atrocities, are inevitable mishaps
in the process of upward movement toward the definitive synthe-
sis. . . .Thus, in the end human beings in their suffering appear
as the material for evolution’s experiment, the world’s injustices
as mishaps that you have to reckon for such a journey.54

On this view reality becomes a sort of inevitable Wagnerian fate

which does not end in Götterdämmerung but in the Noosphere. Against
the logic of this orientation, Ratzinger argues that ‘the cosmos is not
neutral when it comes to human beings. Human beings are not beg-
garly parasites of being; rather, the cosmos is created with freedom
in mind, a freedom that takes up its inner trajectories and alone can
bring them to their goal’.55 Similarly, Pieper was critical of Teilhard’s
theology on the grounds that it could not account for the meaning of
martyrdom. In Pieper’s words, ‘evolution knows no martyrs’.56 If one
is living in a low stage of historical or ‘cosmic’, development, why
die for something which might turn out not to be an eternal value
or principle after all? Why die for the papacy when it may be just a
pre-modern institution at a low stage of evolutionary development?
Ratzinger refuses to accept a theology of history which reduces
centuries of Christian sacrifice to the status of a mere preparatory
phase in the evolution of the cosmos with a Christian impetus. For
Ratzinger, as for John Paul II, the centre of human history is the
Incarnation. There is nothing in Scripture to suggest an evolutionary
perfection of human nature or the social order. All that can be known
for certain is Christ’s warning recorded in the Gospel of St John –
if they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you – and his
promise in the Gospel of St Matthew that the gates of hell will not
ultimately prevail against the Church.
Nonetheless, while Ratzinger clearly regards human nature as a
constant in creation which does not cumulatively develop to some
higher ontological stage, either in its capacity for love or for knowl-
edge (at least not before the Last Judgment and the renewal of the
cosmos), he also recognizes that the possibilities for participation in
the life of the Trinity, for deepening love and knowledge, can be either
thwarted or enhanced by cultures which are more or less impervious
or receptive to grace and the cultivation of virtue. It is the element
of creative freedom within human nature that is so vulnerable to
damage from a secularist culture. The severance of the links between

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notions of God, human nature, ethos and religion and the emergence
of counterfeit notions of faith, hope and love, set limits on the intel-
lectual horizons of people at the same time as encouraging social
and institutional practices which require a capacity for vice rather
than virtue and thereby diminish a person’s ability to love. As Bonsor
has expressed the idea in Heideggerian terms, ‘the play of historical
contexts continually opens what can be seen, what can be thought’
and conversely, whatever ‘is said and thought is intrinsically bound
to the opening, to the context which makes it possible’. 57 However,
for Ratzinger, unlike Heidegger, the whole purpose of the Church
as the universal sacrament of salvation is to act as the agent by which
the eternal is mediated to the present. Self-transcendence, including
the transcendence of one’s culture, is made possible by grace given by
a personal God. Some cultures however are more or less hospitable
to the humanism of the Incarnation than others. As de Lubac argued,
no culture is ever theologically neutral.
It is sometimes remarked by those writing from a liberation theo-
logy perspective, that Ratzinger appears closer to the eschatological
end of the spectrum than to the incarnational. This is because of his
scepticism about the possibility of a moral ‘leap forward’ in human
behaviour and organization. He is wary of neo-Pelagian presump-
tions about the perfectibility of human nature through education
and he regarded the terminology in the discussion of freedom in
Gaudium et spes as ‘downright Pelagian’. Education however valuable
it might be in eliminating ignorance, cannot eradicate sin. Nonethe-
less his disposition is never to occupy one extreme end of a theological
spectrum but rather to try and balance the poles in a creative tension.
One might say that his tendency is to think of Good Friday from the
perspective of Easter Sunday and Easter Sunday from the perspec-
tive of Good Friday. In his Introduction to Christianity, he wrote:

Christian belief is not merely concerned, as one might at first

suspect from all the talk of belief or faith, with the eternal, which
as the ‘entirely Other’ would remain completely outside the human
world and time; on the contrary, it is much more concerned with
God in history, with God as man. By thus seeming to bridge the
gap between eternal and temporal, between visible and invisible,
by making us meet God as man, the eternal as the temporal, as
one of us, it understands itself as revelation.58

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In A Theology of History, von Balthasar drew out the consequences

of this approach in the following paragraph:

The value of the historical pole of human existence is thus

heightened by the historical character of Christ’s revelation and
to some extent liberated from its unjust imprisonment within an
unhistorical philosophy of essences, raised, to some extent, from
the sphere of pure philosophy to a participation in the factuality
of theology. Contemporary religious existential philosophy has,
indeed, gone a step beyond the Platonic scheme of thought, by
as it were turning it around to leave the sphere of essences, of the
Logos, open in its depths to that in which it is grounded: the sphere
of existence as ek-sistence, the surging out of essence into time and
history; this insofar as the coming-to-be of being (esse accidens
in Arab scholasticism), its time dimension, which at the religious
level is its openness to the encounter of God’s will and command,
is the ultimate ground of man’s being human.59

By the 1950s, the need for Catholic theologians and philosophers

to attend to the significance of time and history was well appreciated,
at least by the more intellectual of the Europeans, which explains the
surge of interest in personalism, existentialism and phenomenology
among those who were to become the Conciliar generation. Albert
Dondeyne, a Conciliar peritus from Belgium, saw the task of his
generation as one of combating the materialism of the Marxists, on
the one side, and the intellectualism of the neo-scholastics, on the
other. He noted that by emptying man of his interior life and by
stripping the interior life of its bodily exteriority, materialism and
intellectualism make inter-subjectivity something incomprehensible.
As a result the true historical character of human existence evapo-
rates.60 He added that the neglect of the human person’s embodiment
within the world exercised a disastrous influence on the ontological
interpretation of human existence:

Thinkers like Newman, Marcel and Jaspers have shown that by

eliminating from man’s inheritance corporeity as well as the
inter-subjectivity and the being-in-history that follow from it,
rationalism must end up by emptying human reality of its onto-
logical content and of its intrinsic reference to the Transcendent.

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To reduce the human person to a bloodless and anonymous

spectator is to destroy the very idea of a ‘person’ and make man
a being without soul or destiny, for whom life has neither rhyme
nor reason, since there is really nothing he can do. Hence, the
importance in metaphysics of Blondel’s theme of action . . .
Embodiment contributes to our insertion in being, towards
making us participate in . . . the mystery of being.61

Ratzinger addressed these themes in an essay first published as a

chapter in Dogma und Verkudigung in 1973 and then re-published in
the Communio journal in 1990 with the title ‘Concerning the Notion
of Person in Theology’. The whole article is based on a rejection of
the classical definition of the person, coined by Boethius, as the indi-
vidual substance of a rational nature. This is an understanding of the
person defined entirely in terms of substance. Ratzinger believes that
it ‘cannot clarify anything about Christology or the Trinity’ and is
‘an affirmation that remains on the level of the Greek mind which
thinks in substantialist terms’. Instead, he argues that the notion of
‘relation’ or ‘relationality’ needs to be recognized as a third specific
fundamental category between the Greek categories of substance
and accident and he believes that it is impossible to approach the
Trinity without this category. Within Trinitarian theology, the notion
of person only makes sense when understood as relation. According
to Augustine and late Patristic theology, the three persons that exist
in God are in their nature relations. They are, not therefore, ‘sub-
stances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing
relations, and nothing besides’.62 Ratzinger concludes that ‘relation,
being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is
the person itself’.63 Moreover, echoing Dondeyne and countering
Descartes, Ratzinger observes that the body is not something exter-
nal to the spirit; it is the latter’s self-expression, its ‘image’. The
constituents of biological life are also constituitive of the human
person: ‘Since the body is the visible form of the person, and the
person is the image of God, it follows that the body, in its whole
context of relationships, is the place where the divine is portrayed,
uttered and rendered accessible to our gaze’.64 For Ratzinger, the
era of defining the person solely with reference to the dimension of
substantiality is over.
Nonetheless Ratzinger is aware that an explicit appreciation of
the dimension of relationality was a long time coming in Christian

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anthropology. He acknowledges that at the beginning of the Middle

Ages, Richard of St Victor found a concept of the person derived
from within Christianity when he defined the person as ‘the proper
existence of spiritual nature’ and he praises the Victorine for this
insight which ‘correctly sees that in its theological meaning “person”
does not lie on the level of essence, but of existence’.65 Scholastic
theology was thereby able to develop categories of existence out of
this contribution. Its defect was that it limited these categories to
Christology and to the doctrine of the Trinity and did not extend
them to the human person. This was somewhat short-sighted and
corresponded to an eclipse of the notion of deification in the theo-
logy of the West which was brought back into focus by the ressource-
ment scholarship of the mid-twentieth century. The whole point
of Gaudium et spes 22 is that Christ is the Second Adam, the true
fulfilment of the idea of the human person:

In Christ, in the man who is completely with God, human existence

is not canceled, but comes to its highest possibility, which consists
in transcending itself into the absolute and in the integration of its
own relativity into the absoluteness of divine love.66

Prescriptively Balthasar observes that the task of making the

historical existence of Christ the norm of every individual existence
is the work of the Holy Spirit:

This carving out of a section of history in order to make it

relevant to the whole of history is a process involving several
factors, all interconnected in their dependence upon the Holy
Spirit, but nonetheless distinguishable. The first concerns the
working of the Spirit upon the Incarnate Son himself . . . A
second factor is the working of the Spirit as he relates to Christ,
thus transformed, to the historical Church of every age, which
is expressed typically in the sacraments, and most fully in the
Eucharist. A third completes this relation by creating the missions
of Church and individual as applications of the life of Christ to
every Christian life and the whole life of the Church . . . If the first
and the third is primarily personal and the second is primarily
sacramental, it is important to see from the start how the two
aspects are interwoven . . . everything in the sacramental order has
to be embedded in the personal level, as mediation and encounter,

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as a gesture expressing personal intention, and hence it always

communicates personal, historical graces, and creates personal,
historical situations.67

This is another dimension of the paradox that the human person

perceives the whole only through fragments. Ratzinger’s concerns
about Rahner’s attempt to address the relationship between history
and ontology in Hearers of the Word being neglectful of this element
is perhaps further evidence that Ratzinger’s theology is in the tradi-
tion of Augustine, Newman and Guardini with their emphasis on the
very personal response of the human heart to a divine conversation.
Rahner’s theology could lead to the positing of the existence of an
anonymous Christian, but it would be difficult to reach such a posi-
tion from reading Augustine, Newman or Guardini. Throughout his
publications Ratzinger frequently refers to the fact that the event of
love is always linked to an encounter with a person. This is one of
those Guardinian watermarks. As Livio Melina, a former colleague
of Ratzinger’s in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
has observed:

This singular correlation between love and person was perceived

and expounded systematically by the personalism of the last cen-
tury, which defended, on the one side, the irreducible subjective
singularity of the person that emerges in love and, on the other
side, the originality of the knowledge that love permits and that is
qualitatively distinguished from other forms of knowledge.68

In keeping with the Patristic tradition, Maximilian Heinrich Heim

argues that Ratzinger’s theology ‘is defined, not by an opposition
between salvation history and its ontological unfolding, but rather
by a mutual ordering of the two that constantly adheres to the prae
[logical and temporal priority] of God’s action’, and one might add
that this action, although directed to the whole of creation, is always
individually and personally mediated.69 These are insights he owes
to Guardini, Söhngen and Buber and principles he shares with von
Balthasar.
In a preface to the second volume of his collected publications,
published in 2009, Ratzinger reflected that ‘if neo-Scholastic theo-
logy essentially understood Revelation as the divine transmission
of mysteries, which remain inaccessible to the human mind, today

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Revelation is considered as God’s manifestation of himself in an

historical action, and salvation history is seen as a central element
of Revelation’.70 The fact that this is so within the field of Catholic
theology is largely due to the efforts of Söhngen, von Balthasar,
Daniélou, Rahner and Ratzinger himself. His habilitationsschrift
topic, recommended by Söhngen, brought him into the territory
of the scholarly debates about St Bonaventure’s criticisms of the
influence of Aristotle in theology.71 From these he concluded that
the anti-Aristotelian elements in St Bonaventure’s thought are related
to his theology of history and that his theology of history was thor-
oughly Christocentric. Such Christocentrism becomes emblematic
for all of the mature Ratzinger’s work, beginning with his criticisms
of the 1960s enthusiasm for an allegedly benign secularism. It is
consistent with his youthful enthusiasm for the works of de Lubac
and his intellectual affinities with von Balthasar and ultimately
Wojtyła. It might also be argued that it inoculated him against
the positions of Teilhard de Chardin and the liberation theologians
for whom history is a progressive movement, either toward the
noosphere or the immanentization of the eschaton.
In the final analysis Ratzinger’s theology cannot accommodate
either the Liberal (Whig) or Marxist accounts of history or ontology.
The Liberal he rejected in various works from his 1960’s criticism of
the account of human freedom in Gaudium et spes through to the
papal encyclicals Spe Salvi and Caritas in Veritate. Education and
technology, though capable of being put to a good use, cannot in
themselves bring about an improvement of the human condition,
and freedom is only freedom if it is linked to truth and love. The
Marxist he rejected as a professor at Tübingen in 1968, later as
Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, and finally
as pope in his first two encyclicals. Within his theology there can
be no other ‘ends’ to history than Christ, who is simultaneously the
alpha and omega, and no other end to human nature than eternal
beatitude in the presence of the triune God.72 Among fellow Chris-
tians this leaves him in a position that is closer to Barth than
Bultmann, closer to Cullmann than to Barth, but ultimately with
Daniélou, Söhngen and von Balthasar. Within his humanism of the
Incarnation there is a place for beauty and art and other human
works which is not negated by the nakedness of the Cross.

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 CHAPTER 6

CHRISTIANITY IN THE MARKETPLACE

OF FAITH TRADITIONS

In November of 1999 to mark the arrival of the millennium the

Sorbonne held a colloquium entitled Deux mille sans après quoi?
Eighteen speakers were invited, including Ratzinger. His address was
framed by the question of how Christianity originally saw itself in
the marketplace of faith traditions. He began by observing that in
the year 2000 Christianity is in deep crisis, especially in Europe. He
further identified the foundation of the crisis as the loss of belief in
the idea that reason and religion have anything to do with one
another. He also noted the popularity of the Buddhist fable which
compares the different faith traditions to different perceptions of an
elephant as given by blind men, some having caught hold of its trunk,
others its tail, others its ears and so on. The fable is often quoted by
people who believe that there is no possibility of one true religion.
There is simply a kind of basic human quest for contact with some-
thing divine, some force that is supra-human. Different faith traditions
merely represent different human experiments fostered by this basic
psychological need. Human beings have no capacity to understand
the supra-human, no faculty for contact with the divine. They are
like blind men grasping parts of an elephant.
In his response to the fable, Ratzinger suggested that the best
place to find an answer to the question of how Christianity originally
saw itself in the marketplace of faith traditions, is in Augustine’s
work on the philosophy of religion according to Marcus Terrentius
Varro (116–27BC). Varro identified 3 different approaches to theology:
what might be termed mystical theology, political theology and
natural theology or physics. Within Varro’s framework, the classical
poets were the mystical theologians; they composed hymns to the

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gods. Their natural habitat was the theatre which in classical times
was thoroughly religious and cultic in character. According to popular
conviction theatre shows were established in Rome on the orders of
the gods. The content of mystical theology was thus the myths of the
gods. The natural theologians were the philosophers, those who went
beyond the mundane and searched to understand reality as such.
Their natural habitat was in the academies and the content of their
theology focused on the subject of what the gods are made. The
political theologians were those whose natural habitat was found in
the organs of government and the content of their theology covered
cult worship.
From these sets of distinctions Varro concluded that natural theo-
logy deals with the nature of the gods and the remaining theologies
deal with the godly institutions of men. Civil theology does not
ultimately have any god, only religion; while natural theology has
no religion, but only some deity. Moreover, within this triad the order
of worship, the concrete world of religion, does not belong to the
order of reality as such, but to the order of mores, or customs. The
gods did not create the state, rather the state instituted its own gods,
and their worship is important to the state in order to maintain the
good conduct of its citizens. According to this view, religion is essen-
tially a political phenomenon or what today would be called an
ideology. Ratzinger noted that within this triad of theological types,
Augustine placed Christianity in the realm of physical or natural
theology. Christianity therefore has its antecedents in philosophical
rationality, not in mythical cults which have their ultimate justifi-
cation in their political usefulness.
From this foundation Ratzinger concluded that precisely because
Christianity understood itself as the triumph of knowledge over
myth, it had to consider itself universal – ‘it had to be taken forth to
all peoples not as a specific religion elbowing its way among others,
not through any sort of religious imperialism, but as truth which
makes illusion superfluous’.1 Since it did not concur with the relati-
vity and changeability of the civic gods it frustrated the political
usefulness of religion and as a result its adherents were subjected to
successive waves of persecutions by Roman emperors.
Nonetheless, while Ratzinger, following Augustine, classified Chris-
tianity under the banner of a natural religion, he observed that with
Christianity there is a profound modification of the philosophical
image of God: the God in whom the Christians believe is truly a

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natural God, in contrast to the mythic and political gods; but not
everything which is nature, is God. God is God by his nature, but
nature as such is not God. There is a certain separation between
all embracing nature and the Being which affords it its origin and
beginning. Further, this God is not a silent God. This God entered
human history.
According to Ratzinger’s reading of history, Christianity was
convincing precisely because it joined faith and reason and because
it directed action to caritas, to charity – the moral practices which
were a part of the Christian package placed an accent on the loving
care of the suffering, the poor and the weak:

We have seen that in the conception of Early Christianity the

notions of human nature, God, ethos and religion were inextri-
cably linked to one another and that precisely this bond helped
Christianity to see and navigate clearly amid the crisis of the gods
and the crisis of ancient rationality.2

In a more recent work Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and

World Religions, Ratzinger observed that there are essentially three
ways of moving beyond the realm of primitive human religious expe-
rience and myth. He identified these as mysticism, monotheistic
revolution and enlightenment. He further argued that the real ques-
tions concerning relations between religions arise between mysticism
and monotheistic revolution and that no choice can be made in
favour of one or the other on rational grounds since to do so would
be to presuppose the absolute validity of the rational way. Accord-
ingly, the choice is, in the final analysis, one of faith, albeit, in the
case of a choice for monotheistic revolution, a faith that makes use
of rational standards.3
Ratzinger identifies the difference between the mystical and mono-
theistic ways as a different understanding of God. For the mystical
traditions, such as Buddhism, God is entirely passive and the decisive
element is human experience, whereas for the monotheistic traditions,
such as Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God is active and in some
sense invites the person into a relationship.4 What results from this
difference is that the beliefs of the monotheistic traditions are his-
torical in character, whereas the mystical traditions are unhistorical
in character.5 With reference to the work of Jean Daniélou, Ratzinger
emphasizes that Christianity is essentially faith in an event, whereas

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the mystical traditions believe in the existence of an eternal world

that stands in opposition to the world of time.6 He concludes:

We could say that biblical ‘mysticism’ is not a mysticism of images

but of words and that its relation is not contemplation by man but
the word and the act of God. It is not primarily the discovery
of some truth; rather, it is the activity of God himself making
history. Its meaning is, not that divine reality becomes visible to
man, but that it makes the person who receives the revelation
into an actor in divine history.7

In Principles of Catholic Theology, Ratzinger further argues that

the revelation of Christ presumes a loss of credibility on the part of
the late Judaic concept of history:

Its interpretation by Paul gives radical expression to the historico-

critical fact; it completes the break with the former concept of
history and, at the same time, understands Jesus’ message as the
foundation of a new history, which paradoxically, is experienced
as the end of all history and, for that reason, affects all mankind.
It would not be difficult to identify, on this basis, two criteria of
the rising Christian historical consciousness, which, in their para-
doxical tension, bring into focus the paradox of this consciousness
itself: it is characterized simultaneously by both personalization
(individuation) and universalisation. The beginning and end of
this new history is the Person of Jesus of Nazareth, who is recog-
nized as the last man (the second Adam), that is, as the long-awaited
manifestation of what is truly human and the definitive revelation
to man of his hidden nature; for this very reason, it is oriented
toward the whole human race and presumes the abrogation of
all partial histories, whose partial salvation is looked upon as
essentially an absence of salvation.8

Having agreed with Augustine that Christianity emerged in classi-

cal times as a type of natural theology, that is, a claim about what
God is, Ratzinger suggests that Christianity today must meet the
challenge of a new ‘first philosophy of sorts’, which is found in the
theory of evolution. Today Christian thought is itself being construed
to be unscientific since the popularist theory of evolution holds that
there is no creator in the Christian, Jewish or Islamic sense of the

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term, nor is there any ‘soul of the world’ or interior dynamic in the
classical Stoic sense.
While accepting that there are micro-evolutionary processes at
work, Ratzinger believes that the world was created in time by God
and that Christians cannot surrender this principle if Christianity
is not to mutate into some kind of Gnosticism. He believes that all
the monotheistic traditions share this basic belief that the world was
created by God according to his own principles, giving the natural
order an internal coherence and beauty. In a series of essays pub-
lished in 1995 under the title of A Catholic Understanding of the Fall
and Creation he wrote:

I see the common core of Gnosticism, in all its different forms and
versions, as the repudiation of creation. This common core has a
common effect on the doctrine of humankind to be found in the
various models of Gnosticism: the mystery of suffering, of love,
of substitutionary redemption, is rejected in favour of a control
of the world and of life through knowledge. Love appears too
insecure a foundation for life . . . It means one has to depend on
something unpredictable and unenforceable, something we cannot
certainly make ourselves, but can only wait and receive . . . instead
of being a beautiful promise, love becomes an unbearable feeling
of dependence, of subjection . . . In the Gnostic view of the world,
whether ancient or modern, creation appears as dependence, and
God as the reason for dependence . . . [this is] the reason why
Gnosticism can never be neutral in matters concerning God, but
rather aggressively anti-theistic . . . .Gnosticism will not entrust
itself to a world already created, but only to a world still to be
created.9

Thus the place occupied by love in the Christian framework finds

its analogue within the evolutionary ethos with the concepts of power
and adaptability. As a consequence,

Amidst this contemporary crisis of humanity, the effort to restore

an understanding of Christianity as the true religion or religion
of truth in the classical sense, must be based equally upon ortho-
praxis as well as orthodoxy. Today as in the past, its deepest aspect
must consist in love and reason converging with one another as
the essential foundation pillars of reality: real reason is love and

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 CHRISTIANITY IN THE MARKETPLACE OF FAITH TRADITIONS

love is real reason. In their unity, they are the real basis and goal
of all reality.10

This notion of the convertibility of being and love was emphasized

in Ratzinger’s first papal encyclical Deus Caritas Est. Many of the
themes to be found in this encyclical can be traced back to von
Balthasar’s 1963 work Love Alone is Credible. In its preface von
Balthasar wrote that never in the history of the Church have Chris-
tian thinkers thought it adequate to answer the question of what
specifically is Christian about Christianity with reference to a series
of mysteries one is required to believe. Instead they have always
aimed at a point of unity that would serve to provide a justification
for the demand for faith. He further argued that it was only an account
of revelation based on the notion that God is love which can provide
such a point of unity.
In the first two sections of Love Alone is Credible Balthasar
offered an intellectual history of two approaches to a defence of
the reasonableness of Christian revelation: one he called the cos-
mological reduction, the other the anthropological reduction. He
believed that both are inadequate in the intellectual climate of today.
A nutshell summary of his account of the cosmological reduction
is as follows:

In order to bring home the credibility of the Christian message to

the ancient world, the early Church fathers presented this message
against the backdrop of the then powerful world religions . . .
Christianity stood out against this background as the fulfillment
of the fragmented meaning of the world . . . [Against the pagan
backdrop], Christianity could be made credible, both because it
unified what was fragmented and also because it ransomed what
was held captive by converting what was perverted.11

This is a sophisticated way of presenting the standard account of

Christianity as the union of Athens and Jerusalem (faith and reason)
and the resolution of the aporia of the Greek achievement. Balthasar
believed that this approach was possible in classical times because
Christian thinkers took over the identity between philosophy and
theology that had prevailed in the ancient cultures as a self-evident
fact, however he believed that this self-evidentiary quality of the
nexus between faith and reason began to break down during the

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Renaissance when it was gradually replaced with so called natural

ethics, natural religion and philosophy.
A central villain in Balthasar’s genealogy is Lord Edward Herbert
of Cherbury (1582–1648), a graduate of University College, Oxford,
and one time ambassador to Paris (1619–1624). Of Cherbury’s work,
Balthasar noted that while his concept of God remains saturated
with content from the Christian tradition he presents this content as
something that can be established and justified by pure reason.12 In
the following generations, others were to pursue the pure religion
of reason shifting the criterion from the cosmological to the anthro-
pological. This anthropological reduction culminates in Kant and
indeed Balthasar argued that all the pathways of modernity intersect
in the thought of Kant:

Luther deposes Aristotelian reason in order to make room for

faith, but this rejected reason acquires a Cartesian structure and
Kant tries to tame it by bringing it under human control. Being
thus limited, reason no longer has anything to do with religion
and it becomes what Karl Barth called an ‘idol factory’.13

In the book Balthasar and Ratzinger jointly published as Princi-

ples of Christian Morality, Ratzinger was critical of the idea that
morality is a function of pure reason. He wrote:

The originality of Christianity does not consist in the number

of propositions for which no parallel can be found elsewhere . . .
It is impossible to distill out what is specifically Christian by
excluding everything that has come about through contact with
other milieu. Christianity’s originality consists rather in the new
total form into which human searching and striving have been
forged under the guidance of faith in the God of Abraham, the
God of Jesus Christ. The fact that the bible’s moral pronounce-
ments can be traced to other cultures or to philosophical thought
in no way implies that morality is a function of mere reason – this
is a premature conclusion we should not allow to pass unchal-
lenged any longer.14

Von Balthasar’s third way, or preferred alternative to the cosmo-

logical and anthropological reductions, is to make the notion that

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God is love the key to understanding the originality of Christian

revelation. He began this section of his work with an analysis of the
relationship between eros and agape and beauty. He observed that
‘already in the realm of nature, eros is the chosen place of beauty:
whatever we love always appears radiant with glory; and whatever is
objectively perceived as glorious does not penetrate into the onlooker
except through the specificity of an eros’.15 He concluded that the
poles of eros and agape are transcended in the realm of revelation,
wherein God’s kenotically condescending Logos expresses himself as
love, Agape, and thus as Glory.16 He also concluded that the designa-
tion of Christ in the Gospel of John as the Logos points to the fact
that the evangelist envisions him as fulfilling the role of cosmic
reason, in the Greek sense, as that which grants all things their
intelligibility. Significantly, however, he argued that the subsequent
events of the Gospel reveal that John does not seek to demonstrate
this by projecting the life of Jesus onto the level of Greek wisdom,
but rather by allowing the incarnate Logos to interpret himself.17
Ratzinger began his first encyclical with the passage from scrip-
ture so emphasized by Balthasar (1 Jn 4:16) – ‘God is love and he
who abides in love abides in God and God abides in Him’ – and he
noted that it is very difficult to find texts of this kind in other reli-
gions, that this notion is an element that is peculiar to Christianity.18
In the first paragraphs of Deus Caritas Est he also reiterated the
principle which he had learned from Guardini, that for Christians,
truth is a person. According to Guardini:

This Logos, which is perfectly simple and yet immeasurably

rich, is no order of forms and laws, no world of prototypes and
arrangements, but Someone, He is the living son of the eternal
Father. We can stand before Him, face to face. We can speak to
Him and He answers, indeed, He Himself gives us the power
to stand before Him and He can grant our request. We can love
Him and He is able to give us a communion which reflects the
intimacy in which He lies upon the bosom of the Father, and
which St John experienced when His Master permitted him to
lay his head upon His heart. This fact established a contrast to
everything which natural philosophy and piety can experience
or invent. This Logos, this one and all, steps into history and
becomes man.19

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Guardini went on to say that if one tries to mute this personal and
historical side, ‘then all depth of thought, all intellectual keenness,
all ecstasy that you may have is nothing’ since one will have
‘dissolved Christ’.20
In his own genealogy of the destruction of the classical-theistic
synthesis of faith and reason Ratzinger agrees with the view that
all roads to modernity run through the Kantian intersection, but
he is also interested in the side-road of the Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Against the Scholastic equation
verum est ens (being is truth), Vico advanced a new formula,
verum quia factum (the true is what we make).21 Vico thereby
introduced the problematic of the relationship between being
and history. Ratzinger notes that through Hegel and Comte being
itself came to be understood as an historical process. Marx then
gave economics an historical slant and Darwin gave biology an
historical slant. With F. C. Baur theology turned into history.22
By the end of the twentieth century Ratzinger suggests that Vico’s
verum quia factum had been replaced with verum quia faciendum
with the result that the truth with which we are now concerned
is feasibility. The dominance of history is being replaced by the
dominance of techne.23
This theme is treated in the series of essays Ratzinger published
as Values in a Time of Upheaval. In these he traced the transition
from mutations in the concept of God in the eighteenth century
(from God the Creator to god the mechanic) to a ‘second Enlighten-
ment’ which renders all conceptions of God and even of Marxist
eschatology and epistemology obsolete. It takes as its criterion of
rationality the experience of technological production based on
science. This more contemporary conceptual mutation markets
itself under the label of a ‘new world order’. Ratzinger observes
that proponents of this concept share with Marxism ‘the evolu-
tionistic idea that the world we encounter is the product of irrational
chance’ and ‘cannot bear any ethical directives in itself as the old
idea of nature envisaged’.24 The principles of this new order are
therefore not derived from considerations of what is according to
nature but from the dreams of scientific and entrepreneurial elites
who represent a new ruling class and bring with them new forms
of coercion. The greatest scope for their operation lies in the fields
of biotechnology. Human life becomes a product and hope is

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reduced to something like trust in the future promises of genetic

manipulation.
Contrary to all conceptions of rationality which seek to isolate
themselves from faith and theology, in paragraph 23 of his second
encyclical, Spe Salvi, Ratzinger reiterates his often repeated state-
ment that ‘reason needs faith if it is to be completely itself: reason
and faith need one another in order to fulfil their true nature and
mission’; while in paragraph 26, against the Social Darwinist values
of the new managerial and scientific elites, he makes the point that
it is not science but love that redeems the human person.
The cultures of modernity and post-modernity are thus held
together by numerous concepts, values and institutional practices
many of which are either severed fragments of an older Christian
culture or mutated variations on creedal Christian themes, as with
the example of the Christian theological virtue of hope and its liberal
mutation in the concept of progress addressed in Chapter 4. In his
millennium address to the scholars of the Sorbonne Ratzinger noted
how the links or ‘intellectual glue’ uniting faith and reason have in
successive centuries been detached or, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues,
‘severed’. He believes that a restoration of these links is a necessary
component of the work of evangelization and that one of the most
important Patristic insights which requires restoration is the notion
that ‘within the ordering of religion to a rational view of reality, the
primacy of the Logos and the primacy of love were revealed to be
one and the same’:

The Logos was revealed to be not only the mathematical reasoning

at the basis of all things, but as creative love to the point of becom-
ing com-passion, co-suffering with creation. The cosmic aspect
of religion which worships the Creator in his power of existence
and its existential dimension, the question of Redemption, have
co-penetrated one another and become one . . . [The] evolutionary
ethos [of the second Enlightenment], however, which by necessity
identifies its key concept in the selection model, hence in the
struggle to survive, in survival of the fittest, survival grounded
in successful adaptation – has little comfort to offer.25

The linking of love and knowledge is a common Augustinian and

Balthasarian motif. In A Theological Anthropology, a work praised

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by Ratzinger, Balthasar linked the logos of love and knowledge

with the theological virtues in the following manner:

Such unity of the Christian attitude of faith, hope and love is the
ultimate basis of Christian understanding or knowledge whose
nearest analogy is the knowledge of a beloved human being . . .
The mediator of such understanding in love is the Holy Spirit
which, as the ‘Spirit of Childhood’ encourages two attitudes. The
first is the immediate, open approach to all the treasures and
secrets of God; the second is the childlike spirit which does not
presume to take what does not belong to it.26

This notion of the need for childlike receptivity to the work of

the Holy Spirit steers the Catholic faith away from the danger of
presenting itself as an intellectual system requiring mostly sound
philosophical foundations for its comprehension. While not dismiss-
ing the need for sound philosophy, in his encyclicals Ratzinger has
emphasized the more personalist or affective dimensions of the act
of comprehension. In Spe Salvi he adds to this accent on the response
of the human heart to God, the theme that love transcends time: ‘the
saints way of acting and living is de facto a “proof ” that the things to
come, the promise of Christ, are not only a reality that we await, but
a real presence’.27 Christians believe not only because something is
logically coherent but because they have seen the beliefs embodied in
the practices of the lives of the saints whose love for others is what
makes belief plausible and persuasive and even compelling. The
epistemic rôle of the saints as the most authentic witnesses to the
truth about existence to which reference was made by John Paul II
in Fides et ratio is here reaffirmed.
As was made evident in Ratzinger’s various anti-Suárezian inter-
ventions, he believes that the movement of Revelation proceeds
from God (the Father), to humanity through Christ, and admits the
faithful into the fellowship of God in the Holy Spirit; and that the
purpose of this dialogue between God and the human person is
not so much the transmission of information but rather the transfor-
mation of the person in the life of the Trinity. For Ratzinger, this is
not a matter of removing the intellectual component of faith but
understanding it as a component in a wider whole.28 He believes that
‘the act of faith is an event that expands the limits of individual
reason’ and ‘brings the isolated and fragmented individual intellect

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into the realm of Him who is the logos, the reason, and the reason-
able ground of all being, all things, and all mankind’.29 Thus
‘Man can rethink the logos, the meaning of being, because his
own logos, his own reason, is logos of the one logos, thought of the
original thought, of the creative spirit that permeates and governs
his being’.30
The model of reason members of Western cultures have received
from the eighteenth century, especially from Kant, cannot, however,
accommodate the structure of the faith by such an expansion of the
range of reason. Like MacIntyre, Ratzinger believes that there are
different rationalities associated with different theological traditions
and thus that some theological frameworks may be more or less
open to fostering the expansion of reason’s range. He has also stated
that he prefers the epistemology of St Augustine because Augustine
‘is well aware that the organ by which God can be seen cannot be a
non-historical “ratio naturalis” [natural reason] but only the ratio
pura, that is, purificata [purified reason] or, as Augustine expresses it
echoing the Gospel, the cor purum [pure heart]’.31 Belief in the sense
intended by the Creed is not an incomplete kind of knowledge, an
opinion that subsequently can or should be converted into practical
knowledge. It is rather an essentially different kind of intellectual
attitude, which stands alongside practical knowledge as something
independent and particular and cannot be traced back to it or
deduced from it.32 Ratzinger is also of the opinion that ‘neo-Scholastic
rationalism failed in its attempts to reconstruct the “preambula fidei”
with wholly independent reasoning, with pure rational certainty’.33
Karl Barth, he says, was ‘right to reject philosophy as the foundation
of faith independent of faith’, since if that were so, ‘our faith would
be based from the beginning to the end, on the changing philosophi-
cal theories’.34 Nonetheless, he believes that Barth was wrong to
propose faith as a pure paradox that can only exist against reason
and totally independent of it. For Ratzinger faith and reason need
one another and their relationship is an intrinsic one: ‘Reason will
not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will
not be human’.35
In his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger wrote that ‘the
Christian corrects philosophy and lets it know that love is higher
than mere thought’.36 With the arrival of Christianity, purely philo-
sophical thinking was transcended on two fundamental points:
whereas the philosophical God is essentially self-centred, thought

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simply contemplating itself; the God of faith is basically defined by

relationship; and whereas for the philosophical god, thought is divine,
for Christianity, love is divine.37 He further argued that the fact that
the Christian God is personal is at the same time an option for the
primacy of the particular over the universal, and of freedom as
against the primacy of some cosmic necessity.38 Christian belief is
also the option for the view that the receiving precedes the making
and that what cannot be seen is more real that what can be seen – it
is an avowal of the primacy of the invisible as the truly real.39 The
Christian sees in man, not an individual, but a person. According to
Ratzinger, ‘this passage from individual to person contains the whole
span of the transition from antiquity to Christianity, from Platonism
to faith’.40 It completely transcends the logos of the Stoics since
a ‘world created and willed on the risk of freedom and love is no
longer mathematics’.41
In Spe Salvi Ratzinger as Benedict XVI drew attention to the
similarities between the state of society when the First Letter to
the Corinthians was written and the state of contemporary western
culture. At the time of St Paul, myth had lost its credibility, the
Roman state religion had become fossilized into simple ceremony
which was scrupulously carried out, but by then it was merely a
‘political religion’, and philosophical rationalism had confined the
gods within the realm of unreality. Today Christians find themselves
in a position where they are struggling to defend the reasonableness
of their beliefs since many people no longer accept there is any order
in the cosmos, any design, end or purpose. Accordingly, it is difficult
for Christianity to present itself as it did in classical times as the
natural theology, to use Varro’s terminology. At the same time there
is a return to treating the state as a highest good and secularism is
emerging as a political theology to underpin this. Moral neutrality is
the new civic virtue required to give effect to this political theology.
Meanwhile many people do conclude that God is like an elephant
with different faith traditions representing a glimpse of only one side
of his divinity.
While this is the situation in the West, in his 1996 lecture to the
bishops of Mexico, Ratzinger spoke of a ‘strange closeness between
Europe’s post-metaphysical philosophy and Asia’s negative theo-
logy’. While noting that the two philosophies are fundamentally
different both for their departure point and for the orientation they
imprint on human existence, Ratzinger suggested that they seem to

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mutually confirm one another in their metaphysical and religious

relativism:

The a-religious and pragmatic relativism of Europe and America

can get a kind of religious consecration from India which seems
to give its renunciation of dogma the dignity of a greater respect
before the mystery of God and man. In turn, the support of
European and American thought to the philosophical and theo-
logical vision of India, reinforces the relativism of all the religious
forms proper to the Indian heritage . . . In this way, it also seems
necessary for Christian theology in India to set aside the image of
Christ from its exclusive position – which is considered typically
Western – in order to place it on the same level as the Indian
salvation myths. The historical Jesus – it is now thought – is no
more the absolute Logos than any other saving figure of history.42

While this represents a kind of decline to what Varro would call

mystical religion, in the same article Ratzinger also noted another
kind of permutation and combination which he illustrated by refer-
ence to the work of Paul Knitter. Knitter joins the theologies of
pluralist religion (God is like an elephant) with the theologies of
liberation and their primacy of praxis over belief. This emphasis on
praxis and in particular political practices is evocative of the political
theologies of the classical world. Finally, in this Mexican address,
Ratzinger also situated the New Age movement into the category of
a mystical religion. For the New Age movement’s adherents:

[T]he solution to the problem of relativity must not be found in

a new encounter of the self with another, or others, but by over-
coming the subject, in an ecstatic return to the cosmic dance.
The Absolute is not to be believed but to be experienced. God is
not a person to be distinguished from the world, but a spiritual
energy present in the universe. The primitive rites must be renewed
in which the self is initiated into the mystery of the Whole and
is liberated from itself.43

Ratzinger therefore wishes to present Christianity as a natural

religion, as something which is philosophically defensible, and he
wishes to distinguish it from a mere political ideology, as he believes
secularism is, and from a mystical religion as he believes various

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Asian and New Age religious movements are. However to do so,

he has to demolish eighteenth-century conceptions of rationality.
As Adriaan Peperzak and others have argued, philosophy in the
Hellenistic epoch is not identical with the modern project of scien-
tific and autonomous rationality. It is much more religious and
ethical. It is intimately connected with the existential search for
meaning and ultimate wisdom.44 It is this more classical under-
standing of philosophy which Ratzinger seeks to restore as a kind
of preambula fidei.

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 CHAPTER 7

THE VISION OF UNITY

In an essay on inter-religious dialogue Ratzinger posed the question:

What sort of unity, if any, can there be? What standard can we use to
seek this unity?1 As in his Sorbonne Address, Ratzinger then observed
that there are two basic types of universal religions – the mystical and
the theistic. As a logical consequence he believes that inter-religious
dialogue can adopt one of two strategies: ‘it can attempt to assimilate
the theistic into the mystical type, which implies regarding the
mystical as a mere comprehensive category ample enough to accom-
modate the theistic model, or it can pursue the opposite course’.2
Alternatively, both religious types could decide that their real goal is
orthopraxy, that is, they could retain all their formulas, forms and
rites, but be ordered to a particular common praxis.
Ratzinger rejects both the project to reduce religion to orthopraxy
and the project of assimilating the theistic religions into the mystical
type and conversely of assimilating the mystical into the theistic.
Those who foster some version of the orthopraxy alternative gloss
over the fact that concepts like justice and peace and the integrity of
creation do not come with a ready-made definition and praxis but
rely for their very meaning on presuppositions, often of a theological
nature. Ratzinger describes such projects as an attempt to reduce
religion to a political moralism or ideology and he has referred his
readers to Robert Spaemann’s criticisms of Hans Küng’s Weltethos
project which carries some of these hallmarks.3 He believes that
‘religions can encounter one another only by delving more deeply
into the truth, not by giving it up’.4 In one speech, he noted that Jesus
never resorted to sugar-coating his message and even preferred the
defection of his own disciples to any dilution of his teaching.5 With
respect to the project of assimilating the theistic religions to the

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mystical, Ratzinger concludes that ‘such a reduction means that the

world of the senses drops out of our relation to the divine’ and the
cosmos and history no longer have anything to do with God.6 Such
a form of religion loses its power to form a communion of mind and
will, becoming a matter of individual therapy.7 Central to the theistic
religions is the idea that ethics is in some sense linked to the will
of God and with this comes the notion that faith in God cannot
do without truth which must have a specifiable content.8 For these
reasons he rejects the ideas of those who wish to call an end to
the Catholic Church’s centuries-long commitment to converting
those of other religious traditions. He emphatically rejects the idea
that missionary work is wrong-headed, but argues that preaching
must be a dialogical event.9 Also rejected is the notion that somehow
a pure enlightened reason might be able to stand outside of all reli-
gious traditions and judge them from a neutral standpoint. Consistent
with his belief that the Scriptures need to be read from within the
horizon of faith itself, he states that there is a ‘broad consensus
that such a standpoint is an impossibility’ and thus, ‘in order to
understand religion, it is necessary to experience it from within,
indeed, that only such experience, which is inevitably particular and
tied to a definite historical starting-point, can lead the way to mutual
understanding and thus to a deepening and purification of religion’.10
With respect to the particular issue of doctrine, Ratzinger has further
warned that one needs to guard against any temptation to view
doctrine as divisive and hence an impediment to the seemingly more
pressing and immediate task of improving the world. He argues
that the history of the Church demonstrates that praxis is not only
inseparable from, but actually flows out of didache or teaching.11 In
Principles of Christian Morality he wrote:

Christian praxis is nourished by the core of Christian faith, that is,

the grace that appeared in Christ and that is appropriated in the
sacrament of the Church. Faith’s praxis depends on faith’s truth,
in which man’s truth is made visible and lifted up to a new level by
God’s truth. Hence, it is fundamentally opposed to a praxis that
first wants to produce facts and so establish truth.12

Ratzinger’s emphasis on the importance of doctrine and the

continued relevance of the Church’s missionary works is consistent
with the stance of his papal predecessor in Redemptoris Missio.

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Gavin D’Costa, an advisor to the Pontifical Council for Inter-

religious Dialogue, has noted that within Redemptoris Missio, the
1990 encyclical of John Paul II which was written as an affirmation
of the Church’s missionary activity, one can find a critique of the
types of theology and approaches to dialogue that have come to be
advanced by Paul Knitter, Raymond Panikkar and Jacques Dupuis.
Respectively, these are notions whereby ‘the Spirit is shorn of its
relationship to Christ or the Church, or when Jesus is seen as one
of many instantiations of the eternal Logos, or when the trinity is
potentially envisaged within the economy of history as apart from,
or out of relation to, the historical church and the kingdom’.13 In
particular D’Costa describes Paul Knitter’s position as one of a
‘liberation-cum-theological form of pluralism’ in which ‘the divine
is to be found in socio-political-ecological emancipatory movements
and “mother-earth” affirms and guides this process’.14 He suggests
that this amounts to a proposal wedded to the Enlightenment project
begun by Kant, such that a universal ethical imperative is prioritized
over metaphysics and religion’, and he notes the affinity of this
project with that of John Hick.15
As D’Costa describes the early Hick’s position: ‘basically, [his]
argument has been that Jesus should not be seen as God incarnate,
but rather the divinity of Christ should be viewed mythologically’.16
By mythologically he means ‘a story which is told but which is not
literally true, or an idea or image which is applied to something
or someone but which does not literally apply, but which invites a
particular attitude in its hearers’.17 D’Costa notes that in the later
Hick, the notion of myth ‘is applied not only to the incarnation, but
to the very idea of God and is further extended to the ultimate reali-
ties designated by the various religions, such as the Hindu Brahman,
or Allah in Islam, Yahweh in Judaism, and so on’.18
Ratzinger’s frequent affirmations of the personal nature of the
Christian God such as one finds in the opening paragraphs of Deus
Caritas Est are related to his opposition to the eighteenth-century
Kantian project of reducing Christianity to the dimensions of a
moral framework. For Ratzinger what is primary is the individual
person’s participation in the life of the Trinity, and while the ethical
practices assist this, they are not an end in themselves. He uses the
term ‘moralism’ to describe projects which focus on ethics as ends
in themselves. His criticisms of the shared praxis projects of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries are of a similar mind-set to those

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found in John Milbank’s ‘The End of Dialogue’ essay.19 Milbank

argues that the emphasis on justice and liberation one finds in the
‘praxis solution’ glosses over the fact that religions have differed as
much over political and social practices as they have over notions of
divinity. He also draws attention to the paradox that those who are
most vocal about the need for religious pluralism and building a new
world order based upon shared ethical practices tend to be basing
their stance on Enlightenment values and attitudes, that is, Western
liberal values and attitudes, which run counter to their very project
of affirming the non-Western ‘others’. Milbank concludes that the
‘praxis project’ has tended to disguise two important facts: ‘first, that
the characteristic “liberal” values of the modern West are in specific
yet complex ways related to its Hellenic-Roman-Christian-Jewish
inheritance; second, that they are also related to certain pragmatic
necessities and reconfigurations of power, which ensured upon the
disintegration of Christendom’.20
Ratzinger acknowledges that the approach to dialogue one finds in
documents such as Redemptoris Missio are not universally accepted.
There is an alternative reading, what he calls the ‘relativist reading’
which requires placing one’s own faith on the same level as the
convictions of others. Such dialogue becomes an exchange between
positions which are mutually relative and in his judgment requires
a relativist dissolution of Christology and even more so of eccle-
siology.21 However, one consequence of Ratzinger’s understanding
of preaching and missionary work as dialogical events is that he is
genuinely open to acquiring a deeper understanding of his inter-faith
interlocutors’ traditions and he is certainly open to finding aspects
of other traditions which are perfectly consistent with the Catholic
faith. This is a matter of intellectual and spiritual development and
is most evident in Ratzinger’s engagements with Jewish scholarship.
In a meeting with representatives of the Jewish community in the
Elysée Palace, Paris, in 2008, Ratzinger stated that ‘the Catholic
Church feels obliged to respect the Covenant made by the God
of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’ and indeed ‘the Church herself is
situated within the eternal Covenant of the Almighty, whose plans
are immutable, and she respects the children of the Promise, the
children of the Covenant, as her beloved brothers and sisters in the
faith’.22 In this address Ratzinger also reiterated the 1938 statement
of Pius XI to Belgian Pilgrims, that spiritually, Christians are also
Semites, and the 1939 statement of Henri de Lubac, that to be

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anti-Semitic also signifies being anti-Christian. The issue of the

relationship between the covenant made by the God of Abraham,
Isaac and Jacob and the new revelation of Christ is obviously the
most theoretically complex and controversial in the territory of
Jewish-Christian dialogue and thus Ratzinger’s description of it,
as stated above, represents a very precise and highly nuanced exposi-
tion. It implicitly rejects the ‘two covenants’ approach for Jews and
Christians and prefers to use the terminology of a single covenant
stemming from Abraham and fulfilled in Jesus.
At an even deeper theological level Ratzinger defines the faith of
Israel as consisting in the commitment to God’s will as expressed in
the Torah, and the expectation of the Messiah in such a way that
the three dimensions of time are connected: ‘obedience to God’s will
bears an already spoken word that now exists in history and at each
new moment has to be made present again in obedience’ and this
obedience is ‘oriented toward a future when God will gather up the
fragments of time and usher them as a whole into his justice’.23 He
then observes that Christianity follows this basic configuration:

The trinity of faith, hope and love corresponds in a certain respect

to the three dimensions of time: the obedience of faith takes the
word that comes from eternity and is spoken in history and trans-
forms it into love, into presence, and in this way opens the door
to hope. It is characteristic of the Christian faith that all three
dimensions are contained and sustained in the figure of Christ,
who also introduces them into eternity. In him, time and eternity
exist together, and the infinite gulf between God and man is
bridged. For Christ is the one who came to us without therefore
ceasing to be with the Father; he is present in the believing com-
munity, and yet at the same time is still the one who is coming.
The Church too awaits the Messiah . . . For Christians, Christ is
the present Sinai, the living Torah . . . 24

In an earlier address given in Jerusalem in 1994 at the invitation of

Rabbi Rosen, Ratzinger described Christ’s death on the cross as an
act endured in ‘innermost solidarity with the Law and with Israel’
and noted that the Catechism of the Catholic Church understands
Christ’s death as the perfect realization of what the signs of the Day
of Atonement signify.25 Similarly, in an address to the Academy of
Moral and Political Sciences in Paris he noted that ‘both the Letter

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to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John (in Jesus’ high-priestly prayer)
go beyond the traditional link between the Last Supper and the Pasch
and see the Eucharist in connection with the Day of Atonement’.26
One might say that just as Ratzinger likes to employ a hermeneutic
of continuity in his presentation of the Church’s teaching before and
after the Second Vatican Council, he likes to emphasize an analogous
hermeneutic of continuity between the Old and New Testaments, in
which the New Testament is the fulfilment, not the abrogation, of
the Old Testament. This theme is strong in paragraph 1968 of The
Catechism of the Catholic Church which Ratzinger helped to draft:

The Law of the Gospel fulfils the commandments of the Law

[= the Torah]. The Lord’s Sermon on the Mount, far from abolish-
ing or devaluing the moral prescriptions of the Old Law, releases
their hidden potential and has new demands arise from them: it
reveals their entire divine and human truth. It does not add new
external precepts, but proceeds to renew the heart, the root of
human acts, where man chooses between the pure and the impure,
where faith, hope and charity are found . . . The gospel thus brings
the Law to its fullness through imitation of the perfection of the
heavenly Father.27

Accordingly Ratzinger is keen to emphasize that Jesus did not

act as a liberal reformer recommending a more enlightened inter-
pretation of the Torah. The view, popular with some liberation
theologians, that Jesus was a liberal confronting an ‘ossified tradi-
tionalist hierarchy’, ‘fundamentally misunderstands the conflict of
the New Testament and does justice to neither Jesus nor to Israel’.28
In Ratzinger’s judgment the fundamental nature of the conflict
between Jesus and the Jewish authorities of his day was his claim to
be acting on the authority of God himself. This left the authorities
with only two logical choices: either he was the Son of God as
he claimed, in which case they were witnessing the birth of a new
revelation, or he was a blasphemer. In Ratzinger’s words, this was the
‘tragic depth of the conflict’.29 Obedience clashed with obedience
leading to a conflict that had to end on the Cross:

In the Catechism’s theology of the New Testament, the Cross

cannot simply be viewed as an accident that actually could have

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been avoided or as the sin of Israel with which Israel becomes

eternally stained in contrast to the pagans, for whom the Cross
signifies redemption. In the New Testament there are not two
effects of the Cross: a damning one and a saving one, but only a
single effect, which is saving and reconciling.30

According to Ratzinger, in this event of the Cross, all the sacri-

ficial symbols of the Old Testament are brought to their deepest
meaning – the symbols themselves can ultimately be laid aside as
Jesus himself becomes the sacrificial lamb – but in such a way that
not one iota of their meaning is lost:

The universalizing of the Torah by Jesus, as the New Testament

understands it, is not the extraction of some universal moral pre-
scriptions from the living whole of God’s revelation. It preserves
the unity of cult and ethos. The ethos remains grounded and
anchored in the cult, in the worship of God, in such a way that the
entire cult is bound together in the Cross, indeed, for the first time
has become fully real. According to Christian faith, on the Cross
Jesus opens up and fulfils the wholeness of the Law and gives it
thus to the pagans, who can now accept it as their own in this
its wholeness, thereby becoming children of Abraham.31

Jews are thus the ‘older brothers’ of Christians and this expression
of solidarity is one which has been well received in Jewish quarters.
In 2008 when Ratzinger invited Shear-Yashuv Cohen, Head Rabbi of
Haifa, to address the Synod on the Word, the Rabbi gave a positive
response to the invitation and in this he stated that the policy and
doctrine of describing the Jewish people as G-d’s Chosen People and
the Older Brothers of Christians is something deeply appreciated.
Ratzinger frequently uses this older sibling language and emphasizes
that together Christians and Jews can offer a shared witness to the
One God and his commandments, the sanctity of life and the promo-
tion of human dignity and the rights of the family.32 Thus, in his 2009
Address to the two chief Rabbis of Jerusalem, Ratzinger reiterated
his commitment to the path chosen at the Second Vatican Council
for a ‘genuine and lasting reconciliation between Christians and
Jews’ which ‘continues to value the spiritual patrimony common to
Christians and Jews and desires an ever deeper mutual understanding

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and respect through biblical and theological studies as well as fraternal

dialogues’.33
While the Jews precede Christians in the order of salvation history,
Muslims belong to a tradition which arose after the time of both
the Old and New Testaments. It is thus not possible (at least not from
a Christian perspective) to situate Christianity within the Islamic
tradition the way that it is possible to situate it within the Jewish
tradition. Islam regards itself as a correction of the distorted inter-
pretations of the Jewish prophets, and of Christ, who in turn is
regarded as merely another prophet. As a consequence, Ratzinger’s
addresses to representatives of the Islamic world tend to focus on
the themes of a common interest in peace and tolerance and on a
reiteration of paragraph 3 of Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II Declara-
tion on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions:

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore
the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and
all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken
to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His
inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of
Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though
they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a
prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they
even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the Day
of Judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who
have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral
life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and
fasting.

By far the most dramatic of Ratzinger’s engagement’s with the

Islamic world occurred with the delivery of an address at Regensburg
University on 12 September 2006. His analysis took the form of a
discussion about the relationship between faith and reason in the
Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. It included drawing atten-
tion to the common element in militant Islam and contemporary
Western liberalism – the fact that both ideologies have a philosophi-
cal foundation in voluntarism. Ratzinger cited the Muslim theologian
Ibn Hazm as saying that God is not bound even by his own word,
and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to mere
humans, and further, that were it God’s will, humans would even

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have to practice idolatry. In his reflection on this section of the

Regensburg Lecture, James V. Schall wrote:

The logic of this position is that obedience to Allah is absolute

even when unreasonable. Revelation is not itself ‘obliged by God’s
own truth’. This position affirms that God is not Himself bound
by His own truth. It would limit His glory to impose any restric-
tions, even that of contradiction. The effect of this view is to
eliminate any secondary causality which would attribute to non-
divine things an inherent order. Thus, in principle anything could
be otherwise. What it is has no foundation, no guarantee of its
own truthfulness in being. Reality becomes both enormously
mysterious and intrinsically arbitrary. The Pope sees this exact
same problem in later Western thought, which is no doubt one
of the reasons he brought the issue up in the first place.34

The term Ratzinger uses to describe the West’s version of volunta-

rism is that of ‘de-Hellenisation’ – the tendency from the Reformation
through to the eighteenth century and beyond of severing the sym-
biotic relationship between faith and reason through the rejection
of the Greek conception of philosophy and the medieval classical-
theistic syntheses. In the Regensburg Lecture he noted that the
voluntarism of the West did not however begin in the eighteenth
century when philosophers self-consciously started to reconstruct
the relations between faith and reason but its origins may be traced
back earlier to the ideas of Duns Scotus (c.1266–1308). Scotus
is regarded by many scholars of political theory as the father of
Western liberalism with its emphasis on the freedom of the human
will. In drawing this comparison between militant Islam and militant
liberal-secularism, Ratzinger was making the point that both neglect
the search for truth itself. For the militant Islamicist, the truth is
whatever Allah decides it will be, for the militant liberal-secularist,
either there is no truth as such, merely ‘my will’ and ‘my own per-
sonal values’ or there is ‘truth’ but it is whatever I decide it will be.
Such a truth is personally constructed; it is not a ‘given’ in a divinely
created order of reality.
Notwithstanding the militant Islamic protests and random acts
of violence against Christians following the Regensburg Address,
Ratzinger’s apostolic journey to Turkey in November 2006 was not,
as some portray it, an ‘exercise in damage control’. It was already

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planned long before the Regensburg Address and the main intention
was for the pope to participate in the annual St Andrew’s Day delega-
tion of the Holy See to the Fanar. The basic message of this visit
was papal support for those Muslims and Christians who live in a
political culture deeply ingrained with secularist ideologies and
opposed to any religious expression in the public square. In a meeting
with members of the Diplomatic Corps to the Republic of Turkey
Benedict XVI remarked that ‘Christians and Muslims, following
their respective religions, point to the truth of the sacred character
and dignity of the person’.35 Like many world leaders Ratzinger makes
a distinction between violent religious fanatics and pious people of
good will, and implores members of the Islamic world not to follow
those who fit into the first category.
In summary one might argue that when addressing members of
the Islamic tradition he makes appeals to reason and to a common
belief that human beings have been created by God, when addressing
members of the Jewish tradition he appeals to common theological
elements in the Jewish and Christian traditions such as atonement,
sacrifice, priesthood and covenant and when confronted with the
various versions of the ‘praxis project’ he makes MacIntyresque noises
about how notions like justice are themselves tradition-dependent
and Milbank-sympathetic observations about how eighteenth-century
Western liberal philosophical presuppositions lie dormant at their
foundations.
When one moves from inter-faith dialogue to ecumenical dialogue
Ratzinger tends to emphasize the primacy of prayer for unity and
the path of ‘spiritual ecumenism’ – a theme which was prominent in
John Paul II’s encyclical Ut Unum Sint (1995). For example in his
Letter to the Participants in the Third European Ecumenical Assembly
he wrote that ‘two elements must guide us in our commitment: the
dialogue of truth and the encounter in the sign of brotherhood.
Both need spiritual ecumenism as their foundation’.36 Similarly, in his
Catechesis on the Work of Prayer for Christian Unity, he wrote that
common prayer is what ‘distinguishes the ecumenical movement
from any other initiative of dialogue and relations with other reli-
gions and ideologies’.37 On the occasion of the Feast of Saint Henrik
he even described the joint prayer of Lutheran and Catholic Finns as
‘the royal door of ecumenism’, which ‘reinforces our bonds of com-
munion; and enables us to face courageously the painful memories,

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social burdens and human weaknesses that are so much a part of our
divisions’.38 Since grace is the most effective healer of the wounds
of the eleventh and sixteenth centuries, prayer is the primary element
of ecumenical efforts.
Ratzinger’s most significant ecumenical achievement as a Cardinal
was to be instrumental in saving the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine
of Justification with the Lutheran World Federation (which the
Methodist World Council has now also signed as its own confession
of faith on this matter). Bishop George Anderson, head of the Evan-
gelical Lutheran Church of America, publicly acknowledged that it
was ‘Ratzinger who untied the knots’ when it looked as though the
document would be shipwrecked by officials from the Pontifical
Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. Ratzinger got the
agreement back on track by organizing a meeting with the Lutheran
leaders at his brother Georg’s house in Regensburg. It is said that at
that meeting Ratzinger made three concessions that salvaged the
agreement. First, he agreed that the goal of the ecumenical process is
unity in diversity, not structural reintegration. Secondly, he acknowl-
edged the authority of the Lutheran World Federation to reach
agreement with the Vatican (this was something which the Pontifical
Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity had questioned).
Thirdly, Ratzinger agreed that while Christians are obliged to do
good works, justification and final judgment remain God’s gracious
acts. The actual wording of the key sentence of the declaration is:
‘By grace alone, in faith in Christ’s saving work and not because
of any merit on our part, we are accepted by God and receive the
Holy Spirit, who renews our hearts while equipping us and calling
us to do good works’.39
Consistent with his first concession above, that the ecumenical
process is one of acquiring unity in diversity, not structural reintegra-
tion, in his Ecumenical Meeting Address during World Youth Day
at Cologne Ratzinger remarked that ‘Ecumenism does not mean
what could be called ecumenism of the return: that is, to deny and to
reject one’s own faith history – it does not mean uniformity in all
expressions of theology and spirituality, in liturgical forms and in
discipline’.40 In this address he also spoke of dialogue as an exchange
of gifts in which the Churches and Ecclesial Communities can make
available their own riches. This theme was reiterated in a parallel
address in the Crypt of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, at the Second

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World Youth Day of his pontificate. He noted that whereas an idea

aims at truth, a gift expresses love. Both, he concluded, were essential
elements of dialogue.
A dramatic example of these principles in operation has been the
announcement of the establishment of a Personal Ordinariate for
Anglicans who wish to place themselves under the jurisdiction of the
Petrine Office, but otherwise retain their own liturgical forms and
perhaps even, to some degree, their practice of ordaining married
clergy. According to Cardinal Levada:

It is the hope of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, that the
Anglican clergy and faithful who desire union with the Catholic
Church will find in this ecumenical structure the opportunity to
preserve those Anglican traditions precious to them and consis-
tent with the Catholic faith. Insofar as these traditions express in
a distinctive way the faith that is held in common, they are a gift
to be shared in the wider Church. The unity of the Church does
not require a uniformity that ignores cultural diversity, as the
history of Christianity shows.41

In his published commentary Levada noted that this proposal of a

Personal Ordinariate was consistent with earlier twentieth-century
ecumenical efforts of Cardinal Mercier of Belgium who explored the
possibility of an Anglican union with the Catholic Church under the
principle of an Anglicanism ‘reunited but not absorbed’. Levada also
noted that paragraph 13 of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on
Ecumenism recognised the special place of the Anglican Communion
as a body in which Catholic traditions and institutions were to some
degree retained after the Reformation. For Anglo-Catholics the
barriers to full communion with the See of Peter have tended to
be primarily juridical and cultural rather than doctrinal. Although
the Pope has not made any public statements about what he thinks
might be the ‘gifts’ such Anglicans could bring home to the Church,
many commentators have observed an affinity between the Anglo-
Catholic approaches to liturgy and Ratzinger’s concern about banal
and pathetic home-made ‘parish tea party’ liturgy. Many such Angli-
cans have long held that for them the major barrier to their return to
full Communion with the Catholic Church is precisely the banality
of many post-Conciliar parish liturgies and what Digby Anderson
has dared to call the ‘oikish translation of the Mass’.42 In response to

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the question, ‘what is it that Anglican Catholics could bring with

them as a small gift on their trip to Rome?’ Anderson suggests better
translations and the moral sensibility associated with the idea of the
gentleman, including the cult of understatement and self-deprecation
and traditional manners.43 Ratzinger is likely to recognize such attri-
butes in the character of John Henry Newman, one of the intellectual
heroes of his youth.
Even higher on the list of Ratzinger’s concerns than the Anglicans
is his hope of healing the 1,000-year rift with the Orthodox Church.
In his first pastoral visit outside of Rome in the Italian city of Bari
in which the remains of St Nicholas of Myra are venerated by
Orthodox pilgrims, Ratzinger described ecumenical outreach to the
Orthodox Church as a fundamental commitment of his papacy.44
To this end he has cultivated a very strong relationship with the
Ecumenical Patriarch, Bartholomew I. He made a visit to the Fanar
in November 2006 and invited the Ecumenical Patriarch to address
the Synod on the Word held in 2008. This was the first time in history
that a Patriarch of Constantinople has been present to address a
Synod in Rome. Patriarch Bartholomew described the gesture as
‘an important step towards restoration to full communion’.45 This
was in part due to the fact that the Orthodox Church attaches a
fundamental ecclesial importance to the synodical system.
In his pre-papal theological works Ratzinger noted that one source
of the conflict between the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the
papacy has been the difficulty in distinguishing between patriarchal
and apostolic primacy. In the Episcopate and Primacy, he observed
‘that confusion between the primitive claim of the apostolic see
and the administrative claim of the patriarchal city characterizes the
tragic beginning of conflict between Constantinople and Rome’.46
Ratzinger believes that the patriarchal principle is post-Constantinian,
its instinct administrative and its application closely tied up with
political and geographic data, while the apostolic principle relates
to matters of faith. Since the patriarchal principle is essentially
administrative he believes that ‘extensive patriarchal ‘autonomy’
is compatible with the true essence of primacy, and perhaps the
Eastern Churches would hardly need to change anything in terms
of concrete juridical structure’.47
Ratzinger has also been seeking to improve relations with the
Russian Orthodox Church and in September 2009 he met with Arch-
bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the head of the Department of External

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Church Relations of the Russian Orthodox Church, who is often

described as the Russian Church’s ‘Foreign Minister’. Archbishop
Alfeyev described the goal of his work as ‘bridging the gap between
Catholics and Orthodox by means of cultural collaboration, in the
hope of hastening the time of closer doctrinal and ecclesial relations
between Catholics and the Orthodox worldwide’. He has also been
quite open in conversations with journalists about his admiration for
Ratzinger’s stance against secularism and he has recommended the
establishment of a European Catholic-Orthodox Alliance to form a
common front to protect Europe from being ‘irrevocably devoured
by secularism, liberalism and relativism’.48 To this end, Archbishop
Alfeyev has most recently presided over the establishment of the
St Gregory Nazianzus Foundation to work together with Catholics
and others in the West to support traditional Christian values. Like
members of the Traditional Anglican Communion, the Russian
Orthodox find the official Catholic magisterial teaching against the
ordination of women and homosexual marriage a reason for respect-
ing the Petrine Office and establishing closer relations with it.
Underpinning Ratzinger’s approaches to inter-faith dialogue
and ecumenism is his ecclesiology which represents a mixture of
ingredients taken from St Augustine, de Lubac and von Balthasar,
with dashes of Louis Bouyer, Jean Daniélou and Yves Congar.
Behind Congar there stands the influence of Russian Orthodox
ecclesiology, including elements from A. S. Khomiakor, Sergei
Bulgakov, George Florovsky, Nicholas Afanasiev and Vladimir
Lossky. Of all these elements arguably the most seminal was Henri
de Lubac’s presentation of the relationship between the Eucharist
and the understanding of the Church as the mystical body of Christ.
Ratzinger has described de Lubac’s Corpus Mysticum as a work
of ‘imposing and comprehensive scholarship’ in which he found
‘a new understanding of the unity of the Church and the Eucharist’
which further helped him to enter into ‘the required dialogue with
Augustine’.49 An interest in these relationships between ecclesiology
and Eucharistic theology was also strong among the Russian émigré
theologians of the Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge in
Paris who exerted an influence over the work of Congar. Francesca
Murphy has also noted that Communion ecclesiology (the label
generally used to cover this cocktail of influences) has its origins
in the appropriation of the insights of German Romanticism by
nineteenth-century theologians. While the dominant post-Tridentine

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ecclesial model was juridical, Johann Adam Möhler in his Die Einheit
in der Kirche oder das Princip des Katholicismus (1825) described the
Church as a community whose growth is conditioned by the presence
of the Holy Spirit.50 Murphy writes:

What was important to Möhler’s immediate heirs, such as Newman

in his Essay on Development (1848) and Matthias Scheeben in Die
Mysterien des Christentums (1865) was that the church is the
organic outgrowth of the Incarnation. But the element of Möhler’s
ecclesiology which outlived Romanticism was the conception of
the church as the mystical Body of Christ. The nouvelle théologie
which emerged in the late 1930s promoted the notion of church
fellowship as common life within the mystical Body of Christ.
Yves Congar built on his own historical scholarship to show that
Thomas Aquinas understood the Church in terms of the grace
flowing from the Head (Christ) to members, and labored to make
the more recent sources of this ecclesiology available: the pilot
volume in the Unam Sanctum series which Congar edited was a
French translation of Möhler’s Die Einheit der Kirche.51

Ratzinger argues that Communio or communion is anchored first

and foremost in the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, which is
why, in the language of the Church, the reception of the sacrament
is still described as ‘going to Communion’. Through this sacrament
Christians enter into a blood relationship with Jesus Christ. In his
Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis he reiterated the
words of John Paul II in his Encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia that
the memorial of Christ is ‘the supreme sacramental manifestation
of communion in the Church’.
In Lumen Gentium, the ecclesiological document of the Second
Vatican Council, the Church is defined as an ‘instrument for the
redemption of all, sent forth into the whole world as the light of the
world and the salt of the earth; and also as the sacrament (that is,
efficacious sign and embodied form) by which Christ’s mission is
extended to include the whole of man, body and soul, and through
that totality the whole of nature created by God’. As the mystical
body of Christ, the Church is thus the instrument for God’s plan to
gather ‘all things’ (Eph. 1:10) in Christ, as well as the eschatological
form of redeemed creation. Ratzinger’s argument in Sacramentum
Caritatis is that the Church embodies this end above all in her

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celebration of the Eucharist. In the gift of the Eucharist Christ

endows the Church with the ‘real presence’ of his body and blood
together with an inner participation in his mission to the world.
Ratzinger describes the miracle of the conversion of bread and wine
into Christ’s body and blood as a ‘sort of “nuclear fission” which
penetrates to the heart of all being’.52
The two most important documents authored by Ratzinger on
the Communio ecclesiology theme are a 1992 Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith publication entitled ‘Letter to the Bishops of
the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church understood
as Communion’, and an article published in L’Osservatore Romano
in 2000 as ‘The Ecclesiology on the Constitution on the Church,
Vatican II, Lumen Gentium’.53 In the CDF document he summarized
the Communio ecclesiology in the following terms:

Ecclesial communion is at the same time both visible and invisible.

As an invisible reality, it is the communion of each human being
with the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit, and with the
others who are fellow sharers in the divine nature, in the passion
of Christ, in the same faith and in the same spirit. In the Church
there is a relationship between the invisible communion and the
visible communion in the teaching of the Apostles, in the sacra-
ments and in the hierarchical order. By means of these divine
gifts, which are very visible realities, Christ carries out in different
ways his prophetical, priestly and kingly function for the salva-
tion of mankind. This link between the invisible and the visible
elements of ecclesial communion constitutes the Church as the
Universal Sacrament of Salvation.54

Often these ideas are expressed in the Pauline language of the

nuptial mystery (the spousal relationship between Christ and
the Church), particularly in the works of Cardinal Angelo Scola, the
Patriarch of Venice and Cardinal Marc Ouellet, the Archbishop
of Quebec City, both of whom were strongly influenced by von
Balthasar. Ratzinger also frequently uses the nuptial imagery in his
references to the Church. In Sacramentum Caritatis he wrote that
the Eucharist, as the sacrament of charity, has a particular relation-
ship with the love of man and woman united in marriage and that
the entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ
and the Church. He also described baptism as the nuptial bath

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which precedes the wedding feast, which is the Eucharist. At the

final Mass of World Youth Day in Sydney he explained to the half
a million youth assembled before him that the annunciation of the
angel Gabriel to Mary was ‘God’s marriage proposal to humanity,
accepted on our behalf by the Virgin Mary’.
Other Pauline motifs can also be found in Ratzinger’s ecclesiolo-
gical essays. Sometimes he refers to Paul alone, at other times it is
Paul refracted through Augustine. Two of his most common ecclesio-
logical themes are the ontological priority of the universal Church
over that of the local Church and the inadequacy of all merely socio-
logical accounts of the Church. Ratzinger notes that the term ekklesia
comes for the first time from the pen of St Paul and makes its first
appearance in the First Letter to the Thessalonians. In other Letters
St Paul speaks of the Church of God which is at Corinth and of the
Churches of Galatia, particular churches therefore, but he also says
he persecuted the Church of God: not a specific local community.
From these observations Ratzinger concludes that we see that for
St Paul the word, ‘Church’ had a multi-dimensional meaning: it indi-
cated a part of God’s assembly in a specific place (a city, a country,
a house) but it also referred to the Church as a whole. Thus, the
Church of God is not only a collection of various local Churches
but these various local Churches in turn make up one Church of
God. All together they are ‘the Church of God’ which precedes the
individual local Churches and is expressed or brought into being in
them.55 This was the central point in the pre-papal debates between
Ratzinger and Cardinal Walter Kasper. Kasper wanted to give prior-
ity to the local church.
The article by Kasper originally appeared in the Jesuit journal
Stimmen der Zeit in 2000. It was then translated and published in the
journal America of the American and Canadian Jesuits and in the
London Tablet. Kasper noted that ‘many Catholics and their clergy
can no longer understand certain rules imposed by the universal Church
and hence disregard them. This applies both to moral questions and
to questions of sacramental and ecumenical practice, such as the
admission of remarried divorcees to Communion or the extension of
Eucharistic hospitality’. Kasper further argued that Ratzinger ‘has
not tackled pastoral concerns’ and ‘comes from the theoretical point
of view of systematic theology’. Ratzinger’s doctrinal point was that
‘in its essential mystery’ the universal Church is a reality ‘ontologi-
cally and temporally prior to every individual Church’.56 To defend

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this principle Ratzinger quoted paragraph 9 of the Congregation

for the Doctrine of the Faith document entitled Some Aspects of the
Church understood as Communion. In paragraph 9 there is a reference
to the Church being manifested in time, on the day of Pentecost,
in the community of the 120 gathered around Mary and the 12
apostles. Kasper regarded this line of argument as ‘questionable’. He
claimed that many exegetes are convinced that this report in Acts is
a construction of Luke. Professor Michael Theobald claims that at
Pentecost the focus is not on the universal Church but on the Jewish
diaspora gathered there. Kasper asked why the one Church should
not pre-exist as a Church ‘in and from’ the local Churches?57 He sug-
gested a psychological explanation for Ratzinger’s stance. He believes
that Ratzinger has a pre-disposition to think Platonically, that is, in
terms of ideas, rather than in a more Aristotelian mode, or empiri-
cally. Cardinal Dulles then weighed into the debate on the side of
Ratzinger and said that while he suspected that Ratzinger ‘had a cer-
tain affinity for Christian Platonism’ in the present debate he believed
that Ratzinger’s arguments came from Scripture and Tradition rather
than from Platonic philosophy.58 Dulles added:

The ontological priority of the Church universal appears to me

to be almost self-evident, since the very concept of the particular
church presupposes a universal Church to which it belongs,
whereas the concept of the universal Church does not imply that
it is made up of distinct churches . . . Historically, too, the priority
of the universal Church is evident because Christ unquestionably
formed the community of the disciples and prepared the apostles
for their mission while they were still fathered together. Particular
churches emerged only after the Church became dispersed, so that
it became necessary to establish local congregations with their
own hierarchical leaders.59

In a pre-papal chapter on ‘Pluralism as a Problem for Church and

Theology’, Ratzinger addressed the topic of pluralism within the
Church with reference to the notion of symphonia which he described
as offering an understanding of the synthesis of unity and multipli-
city within the ecclesial community.60 He suggested that the concept
functions on four levels: (i) it serves to express the unity of the
Old and New Testaments – which is the unity of law and gospel,
of prophets and apostles, but also the unity of the diverse writings of

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the New Testament authors among themselves; (ii) it describes the

unity of Christians with one another through the work of the Holy
Spirit; (iii) it describes the unity between the Creator and the crea-
ture; and (iv) it describes the internal unity of the person within the
life of grace. The faith itself he describes as a ‘polyphonic melody
composed of many apparently quite discordant strains in the contra-
puntal interplay of law, prophets, Gospels and apostles’.61 Following
de Lubac he emphasized that the Church is built up by the sacrament
of the Eucharist and that the Church is wholly present wherever
the Eucharist is present. He then expounded on this theology with
reference to the tension between the local and universal Church:

On that account [the notion that the Eucharist makes the Church],
the local churches have the whole reality of the Church, not merely
a parcel of the whole. On the other hand, the fresh discovery that
Christ can exist only as a whole must not lead us to forget the
complementary truth that he can only be one and that we accord-
ingly possess him in his entirety only when we possess him together
with others, when we possess him in unity. The unity of the uni-
versal Church is in this sense an inner moment of the local church,
just as the multiplicity and inherent dignity of the local churches
is an essential component of ecclesiastical unity.62

In this same essay and in the context of the idea of pluralism

among theologians, Ratzinger argued that genuine pluralism hap-
pens not when one makes it an object of desire, but when the truth
itself is sought. He noted that the achievements of ‘the great French
theology’ (presumably here a reference to de Lubac, Congar, Bouyer
and Daniélou) was born, not because these theologians wished to
do something French, ‘but because they expected nothing less from
themselves than to find the truth and to express it as adequately as
possible’.63 The truth, he concluded, ‘is never monotonous, nor is
it ever exhausted in a single form, because our mind beholds it only
in fragments, yet at the same time it is the power which unifies us.
And only pluralism in relation to unity is great’.64
In his account of a legitimate pluralism within the Catholic theo-
logical tradition, Aidan Nichols has described theological projects
as representing a ‘refraction of revelation, which presents a part at
least of revelation’s own content in a new medium of thought’ and he
suggests that ‘the richness and complexity of the internal structure

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of Christian revelation is able to suggest an infinite number of

theological approaches to revelation’s content’.65 Thus, ‘the themes,
motifs, models, metaphors, found in the New Testament can and do
suggest entire perspectives on the Christian mystery as a whole’.66
He gives as examples the idea of theology as mystical exploration
(Denys), as the construction of a Christian wisdom (Augustine), as
a science (Aquinas), and a divine aesthetics forming the foundation
for a ‘dramatics’ and finally a ‘logic’, an account of the divine-human
mode in which we understand the beauty communicated in that
action (von Balthasar). This account of a plurality or symphony of
different refractions of revelation would seem to be a more concrete
exposition of the position put forth by Ratzinger. This means that
for Ratzinger there is not one officially approved Catholic theology,
but a variety of different theologies, each refracting different lights
of revelation but all capable of a harmonious interaction and
application to particular pastoral needs.
Ratzinger’s interest in restoring the Christian unity which was lost
through centuries of human error, political and theological conflicts
and poorly managed cultural sensitivities was evident in his early
academic life. In the 1960s at the University of Bonn he had directed
a thesis by Vinzenz Pfnür on the doctrine of justification in Luther
and in the circle of those taking doctorates under him there were
two Orthodox students, Damaskinos Papandréou and Stylianos
Harkianakis, who today are both metropolitans of the Ecumenical
Patriarchy of Constantinople.67 The young Ratzinger also had a
number of Lutheran convert academic friends, including Heinrich
Schlier who had been a student of Rudolf Bultmann, and Paul Hacker,
who was a scholar of Hinduism and who influenced Ratzinger’s
understanding of the history of religions (though Hacker was later
to be highly critical of the Second Vatican Council, the Jesuit Order
in general, and the theology of Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von
Balthasar in particular).68 Thus, there was always an openness to a
genuine intellectual dialogue with those who came from other tradi-
tions, but never from a position of indifference or prejudice to matters
of doctrine. Ratzinger was always deeply convinced that the Chris-
tian ‘myths’ so to speak, the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection
of Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, are true, and there
has obviously never been any experience intellectual or emotional
which has shattered his belief in this. Nor has he ever lost faith in the
Catholic Church as the universal sacrament of this salvation.

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 THE VISION OF UNITY

In 2000 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith published

the Declaration on the Unity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ
and the Church, otherwise known by its Latin title Dominus Iesus.
This Declaration issued under Ratzinger’s leadership of the CDF,
reiterated the teaching of the Second Vatican Council that the single
Church of Christ ‘subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the
successor of Peter and by the bishops in Communion with him’. The
expression ‘subsists in’ was taken directly from Lumen Gentium.
According to Dominus Iesus, this expression sought to harmonize
two doctrinal ideas: that the Church of Christ exists fully only in the
Catholic Church, but that nonetheless outside of her Communion
there exists many elements of sanctification and truth in other eccle-
sial communities. In other words, rejected is the notion that each
ecclesial community might have its own little piece of the truth, which
through dialogue, might form a much larger theological jigsaw as
each party comes to the table with its own pieces of the puzzle. To
extend this metaphor, Ratzinger’s position is that only in the Catholic
Church is the full picture with all of its hues and shades of light vis-
ible, but nonetheless that those outside the Church, when they left,
took with them parts of the picture which continue to provide them
with ‘elements of sanctification and truth’. Further, there is nothing
in his writing to suggest that he would not concur with the assess-
ment that these external ecclesial communities may have done an
excellent job at conserving particular pieces of the jigsaw. For exam-
ple, one might argue that the returning Anglicans are coming home,
so to speak, with the gift of a great tradition of choral music, and
the returning Lutherans are returning with volumes of valuable
scriptural studies.
In an article published in 1986 just a few years into the pontificate
of John Paul II, Aidan Nichols quoted from an unpublished paper
delivered by Ratzinger at the Centre d’Etudes saint-Louis de France
in Rome. It conveys something of the spirit that animates so much
of Ratzinger’s work in the ecumenical field and his approach to the
different spiritual and theological traditions internal to the Catholic
Church:

In the Church, the debate (about freedom) concerns liberty in

its deepest sense, as openness to the divine Being in order to
become a sharer in its life . . . The fundamental right of Christians
is the right to the whole faith . . . All other liberties in the Church

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 BENEDICT XVI

are ordered to this foundational right. Under this common deno-

minator of faith we must leave a wide space for differing projects
and forms of spiritual life, and, analogously, to differing forms
of thought, so that each with its own richness may contribute to
the faith of the Church . . . What is in question is, on the one hand,
the basic right of the faithful to a faith which is pure, and, on the
other, the right to express that faith in the thought and language
of their own time.69

Paradoxically, Ratzinger’s ecumenical achievements, such as the

creation of the Anglican Ordinariate, have not been well received by
those who have spent much of their academic careers writing about
dialogue. Those who have been advocates for the ‘praxis projects’
which bracket out doctrine and considerations of what is true, and
simply try to boil down the great religious traditions to a few ethical
principles, find that the kind of healing that is taking place through
declarations like the one on justification which Ratzinger brokered
with representatives of the Lutheran tradition, undermines their
own projects. It demonstrates that an approach which takes doctrine
seriously does not necessarily lead to more conflict but can lead to
a deeper understanding on both sides. Thus Hans Küng responded
to the announcement of the Anglican Ordinariate with a polemical
attack on Ratzinger published in Italian in La Repubblica and in
English in The Guardian in which he accused Ratzinger of fishing
for converts in the muddy waters of right-wing extremists.70 Here the
reference to ‘right-wing extremists’ is a reference to the 400,000 strong
membership of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a body which
is composed of what might be called common garden variety God,
Queen and Country Anglicans who oppose the ordination of women
and the appointment of practicing homosexual clergy and bishops.
While Küng lamented the gift of a personal ordinariate to the tradi-
tional Anglicans, Robert Moynihan in an editorial for Inside the
Vatican, drew the following conclusion:

Benedict is rallying his troops. He is trying to reunite all those

factions and denominations and groups in the West that share
common beliefs in the eternal destiny of human beings, in the
sacredness of human life (since human beings are ‘in the image
and likeness of God’), in the existence of a moral standard which
is true for all times and in all places (against the relativism of the

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 THE VISION OF UNITY

modern secular culture), in the need for justice in human affairs,

for the rule of right, not might. And so he is doing his best, in
what seems perhaps to be the ‘twilight of the West’, to build an
ark, centered in Rome, to which all those who share these beliefs
about human dignity may repair.71

Significantly, he is trying to be hospitable by finding a place on the

ark for those with attachments to different liturgical and ecclesial
cultures. He has made it clear that Anglicans, for example, do not
necessarily have to drop their liturgical baggage into the Tiber before
applying for admission, and there is no reason to believe that the
same principle would not apply to other Christian communities
who wanted to join as a group. So long as there is no doctrinal incon-
sistency if people want to come with prayers written in King James
English and hymns in seventeenth-century German, Ratzinger has
demonstrated that he will use the power of his office to cut through
the bureaucratic barriers to make their reception as painless as
possible.
One might conclude therefore that from Ratzinger’s perspective,
his duty is to teach and defend the Catholic faith, to intellectually
engage with those outside that faith who are open to dialogue, and
to find ways of healing the wounds and divisions among Christians
and drawing all those who bailed out in the eleventh and sixteenth
centuries into Communion with the See of Peter. As he showed
by his action in regard to the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of
Justification in 1999, Ratzinger believes this can be done in a way
that is sensitive to the historical memories of the wound, sensitive to
cultural and linguistic differences and aware that the formulae in
which doctrines are expressed can sometimes be so problematic that
new language, new formulae, need to be considered without doing
violence to the doctrinal concerns on either side.

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 CONCLUSION

Speaking of Martin Buber, von Balthasar wrote that ‘those of us

who know him at all realize that he is not simply another writer
of Jewish race who has been admitted into the German pantheon,
but the man, and, what is more, the only one, who remained in the
forefront of German literature throughout the last half-century,
representing the Jewish race in the face of a blind hatred of every-
thing Jewish’.1 Unlike so many others he did not pursue a strategy of
assimilation but he endeavoured to ‘recapture the essential spirit
of Judaism’. A parallel judgment can also be made of Ratzinger.
For the second half of the twentieth century (especially since 1968)
and the beginning of the twenty-first he has represented Catholic
theology in the face of a militant secularism and various crises inter-
nally created within the Catholic Church. With respect to the latter,
Philip Blosser offered the following indictment of post-Conciliar
Catholic culture:

For more than two generations now, we [Catholics] have been

robbed of the fullness of Catholicism, which is our birthright.
With a few thankful exceptions, our collective acquaintance with
Scripture is piecemeal, our knowledge of tradition is pathetic, our
hymns are embarrassing, our religious art is ugly, our churches
look like U.N. meditation chapels, our ethics are slipshod, and our
aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities are so far from being sublime
that they almost look ridiculous . . . For over two generations
our faith formation has been shaped by a media culture that has
portrayed our Church as a dinosaur that is either an impediment
to social progress or simply irrelevant.2

Amidst this general condition of cultural poverty, Ratzinger never

pursued a strategy of accommodation to the culture of modernity,
as was the preferred option of so many of his generation, but he

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 CONCLUSION

did set about in works such as An Introduction to Christianity,

Principles of Catholic Theology and The Spirit of the Liturgy to
recapture the essential spirit of Christianity. Drawing inspiration
from the theological works of Sts Augustine and Bonaventure and
John Henry Newman, Guardini, de Lubac and von Balthasar, as
well as the personalism of philosophers like Buber and Wust, and
the treatment of virtue in Pieper, with a direct engagement with
Scripture, he wove together a synthesis of insights into successive
theological crises. In every instance he highlighted the sui generis
character of Christian Revelation, particularly its insistence on the
convertibility of being and love. The development of a Christian per-
sonalism, in Ratzinger’s case, one heavily indebted to St Augustine
and Guardini, has been one of the positive post-Conciliar develop-
ments helping to counter balance Blosser’s long list of humiliating
failures.
Significantly, Ratzinger belongs to a tradition of thinking which
traces the failures, not to the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s,
but to a whole series of intellectual derailments stretching all the way
back to the rise of nominalism in the fourteenth century and to the
many scholastic distinctions which were hardened into dualisms in
the post-Tridentine era. The separation of spirituality from dogma,
liturgy from scripture, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the theological
virtues from an ethics that became deeply casuistic are also part
of the story behind the impoverished condition of contemporary
Catholic culture. In the first half of the twentieth century those who
understood these things were often members of the laity, including
a large number of converts, whose intellectual formation took place
outside of seminaries. Some like Wust, Blondel and Gilson were
philosophers employed in secular institutions, others were literary
types like Paul Claudel and Georges Bernanos. The Germans were
particularly creative and tried to take seriously the arguments of
their Lutheran colleagues and engage with the leading intellectuals
of their time. The French were determined to overcome both secular-
ism and Jansenism. Claudel wrote that perhaps it is because Jansenism
‘held one part of God’s work in contempt, the noble faculties of
imagination and sensibility, to which certain lunatics would have
added reason itself, that religion has been through a long crisis,
from which it is barely beginning to emerge’.3 For Claudel, the crisis
was not primarily an intellectual crisis, but ‘the tragedy of a starved
imagination’.4

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 BENEDICT XVI

The rise of Catholic Inc. – the model of the Church as a modern

corporation – has in recent times fostered this ‘tragedy of a starved
imagination’. The pneumatological dimension of the Church is con-
stantly suppressed by people with narrow imaginations focused on
figures, annual reports and mission statements. Against this contem-
porary sociological development Ratzinger constantly reiterates the
importance of the prophetic Pauline charism and the personalist
nature of Catholic welfare and community service. Ratzinger’s use of
the phrase ‘our bureaucratized faith’ and his many warnings against
this tendency of the Church to ape the managerial processes of the
corporate world represent an acute sociological observation about
the source of pastoral problems in the contemporary Church. His
treatment of the Lefebrvist problem (in part but not entirely a cre-
ation of the hermeneutic of discontinuity and its self-secularizing
pastoral strategies) and the situation of Anglo-Catholics who retain
an attachment to their high English cultural heritage but nonetheless
concur with all elements of Catholic doctrine, provide case studies of
his interventions against what could otherwise be bureaucratically
insurmountable pastoral disaster zones.
In his Crisis of the West, Peter Wust concluded that since the forces
of anti-Christian destruction broke forth in their fullest fury from
the region of Teutonic culture, ‘we may say that the brunt of respon-
sibility rests on the shoulders of German Catholicism, on that section
of the Catholic people which lives in the heart of Europe, and which,
ever since Luther and the Council of Trent, has had to put up one
single unbroken struggle to preserve its Christianity and Catholicism’.5
Those words were written in 1931 before the numerous martyrdoms
in the concentration camps and the flamboyant opposition of those
like Clemens-August Graf von Galen, the ‘lion of Münster’, whose
moral authority was such that the Nazis dare not arrest him, (though
dozens of his priests were sent to Dachau). If he were still alive Wust
would no doubt appreciate the prophetic nature of his words com-
posed during the prelude to the Nazi era. It is as if the papacies
of John Paul II and Benedict XVI represent a double act of Divine
Providence, with a Pole being chosen to see off European Commu-
nism and a German succeeding him to begin healing the fractures
of the sixteenth century and offer a sustained intellectual response to
the nihilist wing of nineteenth-century Romanticism which reached
its extreme in the Nazi death camps. It may also be providential
that this particular German pontiff is not deeply wedded to Baroque

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 CONCLUSION

scholasticism and actually regards extrinsicist accounts of nature

and grace as highly problematic.
Ratzinger’s love of the early Church fathers and of Newman, and
his interest in the nineteenth-century Romantic movement themes
like history, hermeneutics and tradition, give him an affinity with
the more intellectually inclined Lutherans and Anglicans for whom
Baroque scholasticism is alien territory, and provide him with the
intellectual capital with which to engage the concerns of the post-
moderns. Since postmodern thought is very much rooted in the
Romantic reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century
and focused on topics like the uniqueness of each and every human
being, it is impossible to deal with it unless one moves beyond the
boundaries of Aristotelian categories. Both John Paul II and Benedict
XVI understood this from their earliest pastoral years and while one
worked on developing the Thomist tradition in a more personalist
direction, the other worked on mining the Augustinian tradition with
reference to the same pastoral ends. Wojtyła was working on the
Aquinas-John of the Cross-Mounier-Scheler line, while Ratzinger
was working on the Augustine-Newman-Guardini-Buber-Wust line.
Wojtyła’s spirituality was more Carmelite, Ratzinger’s more Benedic-
tine. Both however were concerned to re-establish relations between
intellectual judgment and the movements of the human heart.
Wojtyła spoke of the ‘theatre of the inner self’, Ratzinger more often,
simply of the heart. Both sought to shift Catholic theology from a
preoccupation with a notion of life as duty parade and obedience to
moral precepts (what Ratzinger calls ‘moralism’), to an understand-
ing of life as a theo-drama in which obedience is always linked to love
and truth and beauty – ultimately to participation in the life of the
Trinity. Wojtyła’s flagship moral encyclical was titled Veritatis Splen-
dor (the Splendour of the Truth) and Ratzinger’s first encyclical was
titled Deus Caritas Est (God is Love). Both encyclicals in their own way
offered a critique of utilitarian and pragmatic approaches to rela-
tionships, including the human-divine relationship. While Lutherans
are wary of those who think that they can earn their passage to
heaven through good works, Ratzinger similarly cautions against a
pious Pelagianism in which one tries to notch up spiritual credit with
which to ‘buy’ grace. The deepest lesson Ratzinger learned from
Guardini is that spirituality is intimately personal, not contractual.
At the intellectual centre of the Romantic movement is the
intersection between being and history. The difficulty of navigating

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 BENEDICT XVI

Catholic theology through this intersection can be seen to be behind

almost all the theological controversies of the twentieth century,
resting as it does, on conceptions of the relationship between nature
and grace and culture. It was central to the modernist controversy at
the turn of the century, and to the conflicts over nature and grace
which arose in the 1940s and still remain controversial. It is also an
essential component of conflicts in the territories of ecclesiology
and moral theology. Included within this general problematic is the
theological significance of experience. In his L’experience chretienne
(1952), Jean Mouroux argued that the most serious crises faced by
the Church in the modern era all deal with this issue, including the
crisis of Protestantism and the experience of Justification, Jansenism
and the experience of delectation; the crisis of Quietism and the
experience of purity of spirit; the crisis of Traditionalism and the
reaction of ‘experience against reason’; the crisis of Modernism
and the experience of ‘the heart against the head’.6
Ratzinger has not himself offered the ultimate theoretical resolu-
tion for those trying to find an orthodox path through the intersection,
but he has helped to steer the barque of Peter around various
icebergs and he has signalled strong reservations about Rahner’s
approach to the problem in Hearers of the Word. He has also
signalled his preference for the theological anthropology of von
Balthasar over that of Rahner and for the philosophy of Buber
and Blondel over that of Heidegger. Nonetheless, in union with
Rahner, de Lubac and Congar, he managed to inject some of the
insights of Guardini, Newman and Blondel into Dei Verbum, thereby
overcoming some of the problems in the fields of revelation and tra-
dition, generated by a narrow reliance upon Lérins and an uncritical
acceptance of Suárez. Dei Verbum can be read as a vindication of
the anti-Suárezian arguments made in Ratzinger’s controversial
habilitation thesis on the theology of history in St Bonaventure
and a vindication of the notion of an organic development of tra-
dition which is strong in the works of Newman, the Tübingen
theologians and Blondel and which represents a much more theo-
logically sophisticated treatment of tradition than the framework
offered by Lérins.
In recognizing the importance of history and the organic develop-
ment of the tradition Ratzinger has not however embraced the
attitude that all meta-narratives, all claims to know the whole and to
be an advocate for the universal subject, are flawed and oppressive.

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 CONCLUSION

The burdens of his various offices – Theology Professor, Archbishop,

Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith and now
Supreme Pontiff – place him in a position where he either accepts
the thesis that the human capacity for knowledge of the divine is so
limited it is like asking a group of blind men to describe an elephant,
or continue to hold that the Catholic faith is the master narrative,
under the trusteeship of the hierarchy and the guidance of the Holy
Spirit. His contemporary, Hans Küng, reached the first conclusion,
that in effect the hierarchy is no guarantor of the truth. Accordingly
his global ethic projects are focused on an analysis of the practices
which the different world religions commonly uphold and can be
distilled to a corporate moralism. In Varro’s terminology, Küng’s
projects fall into the category of ‘political theology’. They are about
the pursuit of social consensus rather than about the pursuit of truth
or what Varro would identify as a natural theology. Ratzinger repre-
sents the choice for the alternative path. He insists that Christianity
is the natural theology. Following the lead of Newman, Ratzinger
has opened Catholic theology to a consideration of the problem of
history, but he does not allow the Tradition to be constructed from
historical elements external to revelation itself. Consistent with de
Lubac and Möhler he believes that the faith of a twenty-first century
Catholic in any diocese of the world is not essentially different from
that of a first-century Christian. He does however acknowledge
that some dimensions of the Tradition may now be more deeply
appreciated through the interventions of scholar-saints and the
work of the magisterium under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. As
Newman noted, such developments usually take place in moments
of cultural crisis. In this sense it can be said that history is a major
factor in the development of the Tradition. One can, for example,
read John Paul II’s collections of scholarly interventions in the field
of sexuality, published under the banner of a ‘theology of the body’,
as a development of the Tradition in the wake of the pastoral crises
thrown up by the Jansenist heresy and its maladie catholique as well
as by the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In this way history can be a
catalyst for the development of the Tradition but it is always (from
Ratzinger’s perspective) a matter of judging the new historical reali-
ties with reference to the Tradition itself, not bringing the Tradition
before the tribunal of the Zeitgeist.
One context in which the contemporary Catholic Church has
been very open to the spirit of the times has been that of music and

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 BENEDICT XVI

the arts in general. One of the most popular pastoral initiatives of

the 1970s was that of accommodating liturgical practices to the
standards of mass culture. This strategy has not however succeeded
in increasing the numbers attending Church services. Although he
was in favour of liturgical reform, Ratzinger was never in favour of
any movement to dumb down the liturgical language to the lowest
common denominator expressions or to introduce rock and sacro-
pop music into the liturgical context. Here it would seem that this
is partly because of the importance that the transcendental of beauty
plays in his spirituality and theological judgments. It is arguably
in this context that he is at his most Augustinian. He believes that
good liturgy requires more than the use of the correct words. For
Ratzinger everything associated with the Eucharist must be marked
by beauty. It is in this context that he finds himself least understood
by both Thomists in the pre-Conciliar mould, and liberation theo-
logians influenced by Marxism. While a new generation of Thomist
scholars is emerging which is more sensitive to the importance of
beauty (one thinks, for example, of the works of Thomas Hibbs
and Graham McAleer), it nonetheless remains the case that for
Ratzinger’s generation of Catholic theologians, Aquinas was rather
hard to place in the line of authorities for whom beauty was a
significant transcendental.
Given the traumatic history of twentieth-century experiments with
allegedly ‘rational’ ideologies, a wide variety of scholars has reached
the conclusion that the culture of modernity with its foundations
in the notion of reason severed from all theological presuppositions
is hostile to human flourishing and as such far from liberating. Many
agree with Jean-François Lyotard that the summer of 1968 repre-
sented a moment in history when the elite of a whole generation
rebelled against the idea of ‘pure reason’ and its social embodiments
and inaugurated the era of postmodernity. However precisely the
same generation of Catholic scholars had a tendency to hop on board
the modern project as everyone else was leaving it. The tragic and
humiliating nature of this was a common theme in the reflections of
the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge. Catholic intellectuals
gave themselves up to modernity just as the real avant-garde was
beginning to critique it. They came out of their bunkers with their
hands in the air as the enemy was departing for a new battlefield.
The Catholic elite of this generation was left to look effete and
irrelevant. Speaking of Rahner, Metz, Küng, Tracy and Schillebeeckx,

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 CONCLUSION

Boeve noted that they all presupposed that it was possible to

identify continuity between modernity and Christian faith as a point
of departure.7 However, ‘the modern context, has passed into
history’.8 With reference to the transition to postmodernity, Boeve
concludes that the most relevant theological question no longer
appears to be: ‘how can the Christian tradition be productively
involved in a dialogue with modern secularity, resulting in a relevant
and plausible modern Christian mode of existence’, but rather ‘how
does the Christian narrative relate to the plurality of religious and
non-religious fundamental life options?’9
Ratzinger has also asked this question in the various articles about
how Christianity sees itself in the market place of faith traditions.
The most significant of these was the Sorbonne address delivered in
the context of the millennium celebrations. Themes in this address
have subsequently been taken up in his papal encyclicals with par-
ticular emphasis given to the centrality of the Christian doctrine that
God is love. For Ratzinger Christianity is the natural theology in the
classical Roman sense. It rests on what he calls the ‘twin pillars’ of
love and reason and because of this belief Christians cannot place
Christ in some post-modern pantheon of the gods. They can cer-
tainly dialogue with those who worship other gods, and through this
dialogue they can deepen their understanding of alternative tradi-
tions, but what Ratzinger does not accept is that one might through
this process of dialogue discover some element of truth in an alter-
native tradition which was not already present and available to
Christians through their own Tradition. He believes that everything
necessary for salvation has already been revealed.
With reference to the multiple dialogues going on with Lefebvrists,
Anglicans, and the Orthodox, Robert Moynihan, (the editor of Inside
the Vatican), has quipped that this pontificate has become one of
‘all dialogue, all the time’. However Ratzinger’s conclusions to this
question do not appeal to those who remain in some sense wedded
to the view that secularism is a benign and theologically neutral or
even welcome social development or who are committed to one or
other of the praxis projects. His belief that doctrine matters, that
the dream of unity based on practices without any reference to theo-
logical foundations is futile and that secularism is just the latest in
a long list of atheistic ideologies which end up destroying human
freedom places him on a collision course with those who would pri-
vatize faith and eliminate it from the public sphere. One might say

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that he is at war with the mentality that wants to remove crucifixes

and nativity sets from public spaces and regulate the teaching of
Christmas carols in kindergartens. He is also at war with the official
European Union ideology which suppresses any acknowledgment
that Christianity is the cultural glue which holds the concept of
Europe together. He would no doubt warmly endorse Roger Scruton’s
judgment that ‘the high culture of Europe acquired the universality
of the Church which had engendered it’ and that the ‘core experience
of membership survived to be constantly represented in the Mass –
the “communion” which is also an enactment of community’. 10 This
theme was rather poignantly presented in the Belgian movie Joyeaux
Noël which recalled the Christmas truces in the battlefields of the
Somme and the celebration of midnight Mass by soldiers from
opposing armies. Scruton’s conclusion that the art of European
culture bears witness to this communion of the European peoples
‘either by honoring or by defiling the thought of God’s incarnation’,
is precisely the idea at the centre of Ratzinger’s humanism of the
Incarnation. For Ratzinger and Scruton it is the Eucharist rather
than economics that holds Europe, and indeed any Christian civiliza-
tion, together. Catherine Pickstock and William T. Cavanaugh have
also argued this point. According to Cavanaugh’s reading of the
intellectual and social history, the modern state arose not by secular-
izing politics but by supplanting the imagination of the body of Christ
with an heretical theology of salvation through the state.11 While
modernity represents salvation through the state, post-modernity is
coming to represent salvation through the globalization of capital
and universal access to commodities. Though Ratzinger is not opposed
to advances in the material order, he believes that salvation will never
come through the market or through the state but only through
Christ, and thus, as he wrote in Caritas in Veritate, ‘a humanism which
excludes God is an inhuman humanism’.
Secularism, far from being theologically indifferent, is rather the
political theology which provides the intellectual infrastructure for
what his papal predecessor called the ‘culture of death’. The myth
of a purely secular rationality not only ‘lied’ but it failed to liberate
and incite to love. Death in Darwin’s jungle is not the reason of being
and creation.12 In Benedict XVI, the nihilist wing of the Romantic
movement is being confronted with the alternatives of the Catholic
wing, based on what he described in the late 1960s as a ‘daring new’
presentation of Trinitarian anthropology.

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 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1 Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the
Millennium an Interview with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1997), p. 66.
2 C. E. Olsen, Interview with Fr D. Vincent Twomey, Ignatius Insight,
7 June; ignatiusinsight.com/features2007/vtwomey_interview_jun07.sp
3 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a
Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), p. 158.
4 Fergus Kerr, Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell,
2007).
5 T. F. O’Meara, Church and Culture: German Catholic Theology, 1860–
1914 (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 50.
6 Jean
. Daniélou, ‘Les orientations présentes de la Pensée religieuse’,
Etudes 249 (1946), p. 14. For a short essay on the debates and personali-
ties of this period, see: Aidan Nichols, Beyond the Blue Glass: Catholic
Essays on Faith and Culture (London: Saint Austin Press, 2002): 33–53.
7 Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth; p. 61.
8 G. Valente, and P. Azzardo, ‘Interview with Alfred Läpple’, 30 Days,
1 (2006), p. 60.
9 Ibid. p. 60.
10 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1998), p. 44.
11 Ibid. pp. 42 & 43. Note in this publication Haecker was written with
an umlaut over the “a”, but Haecker himself used the “ae” rather than
“ä”. Both styles of spelling are found in the literature.
12 For an account of the formation of Communio which includes direct
quotations from Ratzinger see: M. Bardazzi, In the Vineyard of the Lord:
the Life, Faith, and Teachings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI
(New York: Rizzoli, 2005), pp. 50–55.
13 George Weigel, God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the
Catholic Church (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), p. 178.
14 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2004), p. 11.
15 Ibid. p. 11.
16 Ibid. p. 11.
17 E. Michael Jones, Living Machines (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995).

161
 NOTES

18 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 14.

19 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Church and Economics’, Communio: Interna-
tional Catholic Review, 13 (1986): pp. 199–201.
20 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 15.
21 Ibid. p. 16.
22 Ibid. p. 16.
23 Ibid. p. 17.
24 Maurice Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History
of Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
25 Black Liberation Theology was pioneered in the United States by James
H Cone, Professor of Systematic Theology, Union Theological Seminary
at New York College.
26 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 21.

CHAPTER 1
1 H. G. Schenk, The Mind of the European Romantics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1979), p. xviii.
2 In this context it is interesting to note that arguably the country in which
Aeterni Patris has had the greatest long-term popularity is the US, and
which, as John Milbank has noted, ‘in a sense never had a 19th century –
never had historicism and the cult of society and culture and socialist
popularism’. See; John Milbank, ‘The Gift of Ruling: Secularization and
Political Authority’, The Dominican Council, 2004: 212–38 at 235.
3 For histories of the Catholic Faculty of Theology at Tübingen see:
J. R. Geiselmann, Die Katholische Tübinger Schule. Ihre theologische
Eigenart (Freiburg, 1964) and Reinhardt, R, (ed.); Tübinger Theologen und
ihre Theologie. Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Katholisch-
theologischen Fakultät Tübingen; Contubernium, Beiträge zur Geschichte
der Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen 16. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr,
1977; and D. D. Dietrich and M. J. Haines (eds), The Legacy of the
Tübingen School: The Relevance of Nineteenth-Century Theology for the
Twenty-First Century (New York: Crossroad, 1997).
4 Grant Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment: The Catholic Recovery of
Historical Revelation (New York: Herder and Herder, 2006), p. 80.
5 J. S. Drey, ‘Aphorismen über den Ursprung unserer Erkenntnisse
vonGott – ein Beitrag zur Entscheidung der neuesten Streitigkeiten über
den Begriff der Offenbarung’, Die theologische Quartalschrift 8 (1826):
237–84. Quoted by Grant Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment, p. 107.
6 J. E. Kuhn, ‘Über den Begriff und das Wesen der speculativen Theologie
oder christlichen Philosophie’, Die theologische Quartalschrift 14 (1832)
411 f. Quoted in T. F. O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman Catho-
licism: Schelling and the Theologians (Indiana: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1982), p. 154.
7 Grant Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment, p. 104.
8 Joseph Ratzinger, The Church, Ecumenism and Politics (New York:
Crossroad, 1988), p. 4.

162
 NOTES

9 For an overview of the intellectual milieu of these times, see: Virgil

Nemoianu, ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth Century’
in M. Ferber (ed.) A Companion to European Romanticism, (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2005): 393–412; T. F. O’Meara, Romantic Idealism
and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Indiana: Univer-
sity of Notre Dame Press, 1982).
10 Virgil Nemoianu, ‘Sacrality and the Aesthetic in the Early Nineteenth
Century’, in M. Ferber A Companion to European Romanticism, (ed.);
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 406.
11 Ibid. p. 406.
12 The affinity between Newman and von Balthasar has been examined
by Aidan Nichols, see: Aidan Nichols, Beyond the Blue Glass (London:
Saint Austin Press, 2002): 67–86.
13 Edith Stein, (trans.); John Henry Newman: Briefe und Tagebucher bis zum
Übertritt zur Kirche 1801–1845. Band I. (München: Theatiner Verlag,
1928).
14 Simon Caldwell, ‘Woman who defied Hitler was inspired by Newman’,
The Catholic Herald, 3 April 2009.
15 G. Biemer, ‘Theodor Haecker: In the Footsteps of John Henry Newman’,
New Blackfriars, Vol. 81. Number 957, July 2007, pp. 414 and 416; Jakob
Knab, ‘Wir schweigen nicht, wir sind Euer böses Gewissen: Die
Newman-Rezeption der Weissen Rose – und ihre Wirkungsgechichte’,
in Bernd Trocholepczy (ed); Wirklichkeit, Verwirklichung und Wirkungs-
geschichte. John Henry Newmans ‘Realizing’ als Basis einer praktisch-
theologischen Theorie (Newman Studien vol. XX) (Frankfurt am Main:
28-01-2010).
16 Theodor Haecker, Vorwort zu Satire und Polemik (Innsbruck: 1922).
17 This was published in 1952 with the title Der Einzelne in der Kirche.
18 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Newman belongs to the Great Teachers of the
Church’, 1990 Centenary Symposium paper, as published in Benedict
XVI and Cardinal Newman, Jennings, P. (ed.); (Oxford: Family Publica-
tions, 2005).
19 Gottlieb Söhngen, Kardinal Newman, sein Gottesgedanke und seine
Denkergestalt (Daun: Aurel Verlag, 1946).
20 Heinrich Fries, Die Religionsphilosophie Newmans (Stuttgart:
Schwabenverlag 1948).
21 Joseph Ratzinger, Presentation on the Occasion of the First Centenary
of the Death of Cardinal John Henry Newman, 28 April, 1990, Rome.
22 E. I. Watkin, Introduction to Crisis in the West by Peter Wust: (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1931), p. xxxiv.
23 J. F. Kobler, Schillebeeckx, Phenomenology and Vatican II: A Review of
Eric Borgman’s Edward Schillebeeckx: A Theologian in His History: Vol. 1,
A Catholic Theology of Culture (1914–1965) Trans. By John Bowden;
Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, (Spring, 2005), p. 26.
24 Martin Buber, I and Thou (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1937), p. 75.
25 Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (London: Fontana, 1971),
pp.159–60.
26 Ibid. p. 101.

163
 NOTES

27 Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the
Millennium. An Interview with Peter Seewald (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1997), p. 61.
28 For example, see Karol Wojtyła, Person and Community: Selected
Essays, Theresa Sandok (trans.) (New York: Peter Lang, 1993) and
M. A. Krapiec, I-Man: An Outline of Philosophical Anthropology (New
Britain, CT: Mariel Publications, 1983).
29 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Martin Buber and Christianity: A Dialogue
between Israel and the Church (London: Harvill Press, 1960), pp. 34–5.
30 For an entire work which compares the theme of relationality in the
works of Buber and Ratzinger see: M. Rutsche, Die Relationalität Gottes
bei Martin Buber und Joseph Ratzinger (Munich: Grin Verlag, 2008).
31 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Concerning the Notion of the Person in Theology’,
Communio: International Catholic Review 17 (3) (1990): 439–54.
32 E. C. Kopff, Introduction to Josef Pieper, Überlieferung: Begriff und
Anspruch (Munich: Kösel, 1970) and the English version Tradition:
Concept and Claim (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2008), p. xxiv.
33 Josef Pieper, No One Could Have Known: An Autobiography: the Early
Years 1904–1945 (San Francisco, 1987), p. 46, as quoted in E. C. Koppf’s
introduction to Tradition: Concept and Claim, p. xxiv.
34 E. C. Koppf, Introduction to Josef Pieper, p. xxv.
35 Josef Pieper, Scholasticism (New York: 1960), p. 126.
36 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith,
Hope and Love (New York: Crossroad: 1991).
37 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2005), p. 37.
38 Josef Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, p. 44.
39 Ibid. p. 44.
40 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1990), p. 27.
41 R. A. Krieg, Romano Guardini: the Precursor of Vatican II (Indiana:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1997)
42 V. Consemius, ‘The Condemnation of Modernism and the Survival
of Catholic Theology’, in Gregory Baum (ed.); The Twentieth Century:
A Theological Overview (London: Continuum, 1999), p. 21.
43 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco, Ignatius,
2000), p. 8.
44 Ibid. p. 7.
45 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Guardini on Christ in our Century’, Crisis Magazine,
(June, 1996): 14–15 at p. 14.
46 Ibid. p. 15.
47 Joseph Ratzinger, Perché siamo ancora nella Chiesa,(Rome: Rizzoli,
2008), p. 261.
48 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Romano Guardini: Reform aus dem Ursprung
(München: Kösel-Verlag, 1970).
49 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prüfet alles – das Gute behaltet (Ostfildern:
Schwabenverlag, 1986), p. 9.
50 Ibid. p. 9.

164
 NOTES

51 Alexander Dru, Introduction to Maurice Blondel: A Letter on Apologetics

and History and Dogma (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 60.
52 Ibid. p. 48.
It should be noted that Przywara did not entirely agree with Bremond’s
appropriation of Newman, regarding aspects of it as too modernist.
See: Erich Przywara, ‘Zur Geschichte des ‘modernistischen’ Newman in
Ringen der Gegenwart: Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927 (Augsburg:
Benno Filser Verlag, 1929).
53 Mark Bosco, ‘Georges Bernanos and Francis Poulenc: Catholic Con-
vergences in Dialogues of the Carmelites’, Logos, 12:2, Spring, 2009:
17–40 at 21.
54 Ibid. p. 21.
55 Ibid. p. 22.
56 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Dignity of the Human Person’ in H. Vorgrimler
(ed.); Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1969).
57 Ibid. p. 138.
58 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs (1927–1977), (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1998), p. 98.
59 An extensive analysis of Ratzinger’s critique of Gaudium et spes can be
found in Chapter 2 of Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: the Theology
of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
60 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Homily at the Funeral Liturgy of Hans Urs von
Balthasar’, in Hans Urs von Balthasar: His Life and Work, D. L. Schindler,
(ed.); (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), p. 293.
61 David Schindler on Cardinal Ratzinger’s Ecclesiology: Interview with
Editor of Communio: International Catholic Review, Zenit, 1 May 2005.
62 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones – Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco:
Ignatius , 1998), p. 143.
63 Joseph Ratzinger, Preface to Alice von Hildebrand, A Soul of a Lion (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), pp. 11–12.
64 Joseph Ratzinger, The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1966), p. 53 and Principles of Catholic Theology (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), pp. 60–2.
65 Aidan Nichols makes the observation that it was not so much the Rhine
flowing into the Tiber, as the Neckar flowing into the Tiber – Tübingen
is situated on the Neckar.
66 The author is indebted to David van Gend for his knowledge of the
relationship between Mozart and the Romantic composers.

CHAPTER 2
1 Erich Przywara, Weg zu Gott (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), p. 502.
2 James Cardinal Stafford, ‘Knights of Columbus-States Dinner Keynote
Address”, Washington DC, 3 Aug. 2004.
3 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2005), p. 45.

165
 NOTES

4 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Das Ganze in Fragment. Aspekte der Geschich-
testheologie (Einsiedeln, 199), p. 198f as quoted in John Saward,
‘Chesterton and Balthasar: the Likeness is Greater’, Chesterton Review,
Vol. XXII, No. 3, Aug. 1996, p. 314. The author is indebted to Karl
Schmude for this reference.
5 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, p. 44.
6 Ratzinger, ‘Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures’, Address to
the Presidents of the Asian Bishops’ Conference, 2–5 March 1993.
www.ewtn.com/library/CURIA/RATZHONG.HTM.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Joseph Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every Day
of the Year (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), pp. 18–19.
11 Aidan Nichols, Say It is Pentecost (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2001), p. 3.
12 International Theological Commission, ‘Faith and Inculturation’,
Origins 18 (1989): 800–7.
13 Aidan Nichols, Say It is Pentecost, p. 3.
14 Joseph Ratzinger, J The Spirit of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2000), p. 124.
15 Ibid. p. 124.
16 Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report: An Interview with Vittorio
Messori (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985), p. 130.
17 Ibid. p. 129.
18 Joseph Ratzinger, Message to Comunione e Liberazione, August 2002,
Rimini, Italy – published in Adoremus, Oct. 2006 Vol. XII, No. 7, p. 1.
19 L’Osservatore Romano, 16, No. 6, (1986), pp. 10ff.
20 Josef Pieper, Darstellung und Interpretationem: Platon, Vol. I, ed. B. Wald
(Hamburg, 2002).
21 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 126–7.
22 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, p. 35.
23 Ibid. p. 36.
24 Ibid. p. 36.
25 Ibid. p. 37.
26 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Art, Image and Artists’, Adoremus Bulletin; Vol. Viii
(1) Mar. 2002, p. 1.
27 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 129.
28 Ibid. p. 129.
29 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, p. 40.
30 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 132–3.
31 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, pp. 32–3.
32 C. M. Johansson, Music and Ministry: A Biblical Counterpoint (Peabody,
MA: Hendrickson, 1998).
33 Ibid. p. 55.
34 Ibid. p. 5.
35 H. J. Burbach, ‘Sacro-pop’, Internationale katholische Zeitschrift,
3:148–57 (1974).

166
 NOTES

36 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Theological Problems of Church Music’ Crux et

Cithara (1983): 214–22 at p. 214.
37 Hugo Staudinger and Wolfgang Behler, Chance und Risiko der
Gegenwart: Eine kritische Analyse der wissenschaftlichtechnischen Welt
(Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1976).
38 Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 108
39 Ibid. p. 109.
40 Ibid. p. 109.
41 Ibid. pp. 123–4.
42 Ibid. p. 32.
43 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Liturgy and Sacred Music’, Communio: International
Catholic Review 13 (1986): 377–91 at p. 387.
44 J. A. Edwards, ‘Fides ex Auditu: Dogmatic Theology and the Ecclesial
Practice of Music’, MPhil dissertation, University of St Andrews
(2008), p. 95.
45 Ibid. p. 97.
46 Ibid. p. 97.
47 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999); Catherine Pickstock, ‘God and Meaning in Music: Messi-
aen, Deleuze and the Musico-Theological Critique of Modernism
and Postmodernism’, Sacred Music, Vol. 134 (4), (Winter 2007) 40–62.
48 Roger Scruton, ‘Youth Culture’s Lament’, City Journal, (Autumn, 1998)
12–25.
49 Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Manchester: Carcanet,
1990) 113–27.
50 Alain de Botton, ‘Feeling Beauty’ The Age Good Weekend, 29 April
2006, pp. 27–8.
51 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 128–9.
52 Minlib Dahll, Review of Ratzinger’s Faith: the Theology of Benedict
XVI in Conversations in Religion and Theology 7 (2) (2009) 172–84.
53 Christian Gnilka, Chrêsis: Die Methode der Kirchenväter im Umgang mit der
Antiken Kultur: Vol II Kultur und Conversion (Basel: Schwabb & Co, 1993).
54 Joseph Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, p. 46.
55 Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith, p. 81.
56 Ibid. p. 82.
57 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Theological Problems of Church Music’, p. 214.
58 Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 175.
59 Ibid. p. 175.
60 Ibid. p. 96
61 Romano Guradini, The End of the Modern World, (London: Sheed &
Ward, 1957), p. 78.
62 Ibid. p. 88–9.
63 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence, (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), p. 588.
64 Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, p. 126.
65 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1994), p. 125.

167
 NOTES

66 This Rite was slightly amended by Blessed John XXIII.

67 Paul VI, Wednesday Audience Address, 26 Nov. 1969, L’Osservatore
Romano, 4 Dec. 1969, p. 12.
68 Gareth Edwards, ‘Modern English in the Mass’, America, 22 Oct. 1966;
see also a reference to Edwards in ‘Distant Early Warning: Translation
Hazards’, Adoremus Bulletin, Vol. XIV (5), July–Aug., 2008, p. 2.
69 Gareth Edwards, ‘Modern English in the Mass’, America, 22 Oct. 1966;
see also a reference to Edwards in ‘Distant Early Warning: Translation
Hazards’, Adoremus Bulletin, Vol. XIV (5), July–Aug., 2008, p. 2.
70 S. M. P. Reid, A Bitter Trial (Curdridge: Saint Austin Press, 1996), p. 34.
71 A widely held belief, which is impossible to substantiate with reference
to any document, is that Paul VI was impressed by the name Agatha
Christie on the petition begging for a reprieve of the suppression and
promptly granted the indult.
72 Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 22.
73 Aidan Nichols, ‘St Thomas and the Sacramental Liturgy’, The Thomist
72 (2008): 569–95 at p. 590.
74 Joseph Ratzinger, Preface to The Organic Development of the Liturgy 2nd
edition, (Farnborough: St Michael’s Abbey Press, 2004).
75 Ibid.
76 Benedict XVI, Ecclesiae Unitatem (4). Acta Apostolica Sedes forthcoming.
77 Editorial, ‘Benedict XVI’s Bold Move for Church Unity’ L’Osservatore
Romano, 26 January 2009.
78 Letter of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI to the Bishops of the Catholic
Church Concerning the Remission of the Excommunication of the Four
Bishops Consecrated by Archbishop Lefebvre, 10 March 2009.
79 Alexander Boot, How the West was Lost (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).
80 Ibid. p. 119.
81 Joseph Ratzinger, Co-Workers of the Truth, p. 16.
82 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Christ, Faith and the Challenge of Cultures’.
83 David S. Yeago, ‘Literature in the Drama of Nature and Grace: Hans
Urs von Balthasar’s Paradigm for a Theology of Culture’ in Ed. Block
Jnr (ed.) Glory, Grace and Culture: the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press: 2005).

CHAPTER 3
1 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Commentary on the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine
Revelation: Origin and Background’, in Herbert Vorgrimler (ed.), Com-
mentary on the Documents of Vatican II, Vol. III (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1969) pp. 155–272.
2 Casarella, P, Introduction to the 2000 edition of Scripture in the Tradition
(New York: Herder and Herder, 2000), p. xvi.
3 John Montag, ‘The False Legacy of Suárez’, in John Milbank , Catherine
Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds) Radical Orthodoxy (London: Rout-
ledge, 1999) pp. 38–64.
4 Ibid. p. 57.

168
 NOTES

5 John Milbank, Introduction to Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge,

1999), p. 5.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation: Origin
and Background’ in Herbert Vorgrimler (ed.), p. 176.
7 Ibid. p. 172.
8 Albert Vanhoye, ‘The Reception in the Church of the Dogmatic
Constitution “Dei Verbum”’ in J. Granados, Carlos Granados and Luis
Sanchez (eds), Opening Up the Scriptures: Joseph Ratzinger and the
Foundations of Biblical Interpretation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2008), p. 113.
9 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977, (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1998), pp. 108–9.
10 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Sacred Scripture in the Life of the Church’ in Herbert
Vorgrimler (ed.), pp. 155–6.
11 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Transmission of Divine Revelation’ in Herbert
Vorgrimler (ed), p. 184.
12 Alexander Dru, Prefatory Note to Maurice Blondel: History and Dogma
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 214.
13 Maurice Blondel, History and Dogma (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
1994), p. 276.
14 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus, the Apostles and the Early Church (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 2007), p. 24.
15 Ibid. pp. 24–5.
16 Ibid. p. 27.
17 Ibid. p. 28.
18 Cyril O’Regan, ‘Balthasar: Between Tübingen and Postmodernity’,
Modern Theology 14:3 (July 1998) 325–53 at pp. 329–30.
19 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Transmission of Divine Revelation’ in Herbert
Vorgrimler (ed.), p. 187.
20 Ibid. p. 188.
21 Cyril O’Regan, ‘Balthasar: Between Tübingen and Postmodernity’,
p. 330.
22 Ibid. p. 337.
23 Hans Urs von Balthasar, On Theology of Revelation: A Theology of
History (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1963), pp. 102–3.
24 Canty, A, ‘Bonaventurian Resonances in Benedict XVI’s Theology of
Revelation’, Nova et Vetera, Vol. 5 (2), (Spring 2007) 249–67 at p. 254.
25 Joachim Gnilka, Jesus of Nazareth: Message and History (Peabody, MA:
Hendrickson Publishers, 1997) pp. 1–12.
26 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of
the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today’, in Richard John
Neuhaus (ed.), Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference
on Bible and Church, (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 4.
27 Ibid. p. 6.
28 Ibid. p. 22.
29 Ibid. p. 20.
30 Ibid. p. 19.

169
 NOTES

31 Ibid. p. 20.
32 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of
the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today’ in Jose Granados,
Carlos Granados and Luis Sanchez (eds), Opening Up the Scriptures:
Joseph Ratzinger and the Foundations of Biblical Interpretation, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 11.
Note this particular essay of Ratzinger’s has been published in English
twice, first in the work edited by Neuhaus, and secondly in the work
edited by Granados. The translations are different, so that while they
remain the same in substance, the precise words used vary.
33 Ibid. p. 14.
34 Ibid. p. 14.
35 Ibid. p. 15.
36 Ibid. p. 16.
37 Ibid. p. 19.
38 International Theological Commission: ‘Memory and Reconciliation:
the Church and the Faults of the Past’, The Pope Speaks 45, 4, (2000)
208–49 at p. 224.
39 See for example: Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Some Enlightenment Projects
Reconsidered’, in R. Kearney and M. Dooley (eds), Questioning Ethics:
Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, (London: Routledge, 1998)
pp. 245–58 at p. 250.
40 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Scripture and Tradition’ in The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge University Press: 2003),
pp. 152–3.
41 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’ in Jose Grenados,
Carlos Granados and Luis Sanchez (eds), p. 29.
42 Joseph Ratzinger, footnote 25 of ‘Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’
in Richard John Neuhaus (ed.), Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The
Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church, p. 18.
43 Romano, Guardini, ‘Heilige Schrift und Glaubenswissenschaft’, Die
Schildgenossen 8 (1928) 24–57.
44 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Guardini on Christ in our Century’, Crisis Magazine,
(June 1996) 14–16 at p. 15.
45 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Explorations in Theology Vol. I: The Word
Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1989), p. 21.
46 Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ‘Scripture and Tradition’ , p. 165.
47 Joseph Ratzinger, Biblical Interpretation in Crisis’, in J. Granados, Carlos
Granados and Luis Sanchez (eds), p. 23.
48 Lieven Boeve, Interrupting Tradition: An Essay on Christian Faith in a
Postmodern Context (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2003), p. 24.
49 Ibid. p. 35.
50 Ibid. p. 49.
51 Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval
(London: Continuum, 2007), p. 6.
52 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Interreligious Dialogue and Jewish-Christian
Relations’, Communio: International Catholic Review, 25, (1998) 29–41
at p. 31.

170
 NOTES

53 Henri de Lubac, Le Révélation Divine (Paris: Cerf, 1968), p. 101.

54 Gregory Hoskins, ‘An Interview with Lieven Boeve: “Recontextualizing
the Christian Narrative in a Postmodern Context”’, Journal of Philoso-
phy and Scripture Vol. 3 (2) (Spring 2006) 31–7.
55 Benedict XVI, ‘Address during Meeting with Organizations involved
in Interreligious Dialogue at the Auditorium of Notre Dame Center in
Jerusalem’, (Sydney: Columban Mission Institute), p. 22 and p. 23.
56 Paul J. Cordes, ‘Not without the Light of Faith: Catholic Social Doctrine
Clarifies Its Self-Understanding’, Address at the Australian Catholic
University, North Sydney, 27 November 2009, p. 4.
57 Joseph Ratzinger, Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), p. 34.
58 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Bildung und Glaube in unserer Zeit: drei Thesen
zur christlichen Bildung’ in Informationsdienst des deutschen Instituts für
Bildung und Wissen, Heft 8/9 (15 September 1975), pp. 113–16.
59 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, p. 82.
60 Ormond Rush, ‘The Eyes of Faith: The Sense of the Faithful and
the Church’s reception of Revelation’, (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 2009), pp. 18–19.
61 Joseph Ratzinger, Saint Paul: the Apostle (Huntington: Our Sunday
Visitor, 2009), p. 91.
62 Ibid. p. 91.
63 Ibid. p. 90.
64 Ibid. p. 63.
65 Ibid. p. 63.
66 Joseph Ratzinger, The Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays
in Ecclesiology Trans. Robert Lowell and Dame Frideswide Sandemann,
O. S. B. (New York: Crossroad, 1988), pp. 6–7.
67 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1987), p. 26.
68 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Address to the International Congress for the 40th
anniversary of Dei Verbum’, L’Osservatore Romano, 21 September 2005, 7.
69 Aaron Canty, ‘Bonaventurian Resonances in Benedict XVI’s Theology
of Revelation’, Nova et Vetera, Vol. 5 (2), (Spring, 2007) 249–67 at 266.

CHAPTER 4
1 See also: Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Eschatology and Utopia’, Communio: Inter-
national Catholic Review, 5 (1978) 211–27; ‘Vorfragen zu einer Theologie
der Erlösung’ in L. Scheffczyk, (ed.), Erlösung und Emanzipation (Munich,
1982) pp. 167–79; ‘Gottes Kraft – unsere Hoffnung’ in Klerusblatt 67
(1987) 342–47; ‘On Hope’ Communio: International Catholic Review, 12
(Spring, 1985) 71–84.
2 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997) and
Josef Pieper, The End of Time: A Meditation on the Philosophy of History
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999).
3 James V. Schall, ‘The Encyclical on Hope: On the De-immanentizing’
of the Christian Eschaton’, Ignatius Insight, 3 December 2007; James

171
 NOTES

V. Schall, The Politics of Heaven and Hell: Christian Themes from

Classical, Medieval and Modern Political Philosophy (Lanham, MD:
University Press of America, 1984).
4 Joseph Ratzinger, The End of Time? The Provocation of Talking about
God (Co-authored with J. B. Metz, Jürgen Moltmann and Eveline
Goodman-Thau) (New York: Paulist Press, 2004), p. 14.
5 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ: Spiritual Exercises in Faith,
Hope and Love (New York: Crossroad, 1991), p. 41; Joseph Ratzinger,
Values in a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), p. 88.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, p. 84.
7 Ibid. p. 42.
8 Ibid. p. 42.
9 Ibid. p. 82.
10 Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, paragraph 44.
11 Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, paragraph 47.
12 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to
the Transfiguration (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 20.
13 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, p. 81.
14 As quoted by von Balthasar in Bernanos: An Ecclesial Existence (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), p. 555.
15 Ibid. p. 53.
16 Ibid. p. 55.
17 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius: 1997),
p. 130.
18 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, p. 81.
19 Ibid. p. 67.
20 Ibid. p. 73.
21 Ibid. p. 78.
22 Ibid. p. 78.
23 Joseph Ratzinger, Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), p. 22.
24 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Dignity of the Human Person’ Commentary on
Gaudium et spes, H. Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents
of Vatican II, Vol. III (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 155.
25 Joseph Ratzinger, Images of Hope: Meditations on Major Feasts,
pp. 39–40.
26 Ibid. pp. 21–2.
27 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love, p. 103.
28 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1994), p. 44.
29 Serge-Thomas Bonino, ‘Nature and Grace in Deus Caritas Est’, Nova
et Vetera, Vol. 5 (2) (Spring 2007) 231–48 at p. 237.
30 For an English language survey of these ideas see: T. A. and
S. A. Rowland, ‘Contemporary Central European Reflections on
Civic Virtue’, History of European Ideas Vol. 21 (4): 505–13.
31 Zdizsław Krasnodebski, ‘W oczekiwaniu na supermarkety, czyli upadek
komonizmu w swietle postmodernistycznej filozofii widziany’, Res Publica,
No. 4. 1991.

172
 NOTES

32 Ibid.
33 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Dignity of the Human Person’ in Herbert
Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II Vol. V,
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 115–64.
34 Ibid. p. 120.
35 Henri de Lubac, ‘Duplex Hominis Beatitudo’, Communio: International
Catholic Review 35 (Winter 2008) 599–612.
36 Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell,
2002), p. 134.
37 Karl Rahner, Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons, Faith in a Wintry
Season: Conversations and Interviews with Karl Rahner in the Last Years
of His Life, (New York: Crossroad, 1991), p. 49.
38 Romano Guardini, The Conversion of Augustine (London: Sands & Co.,
1960), pp. 68–69.
39 Jean Borella, The Sense of the Supernatural (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1998), p. ix.
40 Robert Spaemann, Philosophische Essays (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983),
pp. 26–7.
41 Ibid. pp. 26–7.
42 Nicholas Healy, ‘Henri de Lubac on Nature and Grace’, Communio:
International Catholic Review (Winter 2008), 535–65 at p. 546.
43 Serge-Thomas Bonino, ‘Nature and Grace in Deus Caritas Est’, Nova
et Vetera, Vol. 5 (2), (Spring 2007) 231–48.
44 Paul J. Cordes, ‘Not Without the Light of Faith: Catholic Social
Doctrine Clarifies Its Self-Understanding’, Address at the Australian
Catholic University, Sydney, 27 November 2009, p. 6.
45 David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church: Communio
Ecclesiology, Liberalism and Liberation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1996),
p. 79.
46 George Weigel, ‘Caritas in Veritate in Gold and Red’, National Review
On-Line, 7 July 2009.
47 Karol Wojtyla, Person and Community: Selected Essays, translated by
Theresa Sandok (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), pp. 270–1.
48 Adrian Walker, ‘The Poverty of Liberal Economics’, in Doug Bandow
and David L. Schindler (eds), Wealth, Poverty and Human Destiny
(Wilmington: ISI Books, 2003), p. 23.
49 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Church and Economics’, Communio: Interna-
tional Catholic Review 13 (1986): 199–204 and On the Way to Jesus Christ
(San Francisco: Ignatius: 2005), p. 121.
50 Joseph Ratzinger, Interview with the Italian Catholic Agency SIR,
Rome, 7 May 2004.
51 Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report: An Interview with Vittorio
Messori (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985), p. 53.
52 Ibid. p. 67.
53 Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The Church at the End of the
Millennium (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), p. 266.
54 Joseph Ratzinger, Images of Hope, p. 26.
55 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, p. 77.

173
 NOTES

CHAPTER 5
1 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1987), p. 160.
2 Ibid. p. 153.
3 Rudolf Voderholzer, ‘Dogma and History: Henri de Lubac and the
Retrieval of Historicity as a key to Theological Renewal’, Communio:
International Catholic Review, 28 (Winter 2001) 648–68 at p. 651.
4 Karl Rahner, cited in Thomas Sheehan, Karl Rahner the Philosophical
Foundations (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987), p. xi.
5 Ibid. p. xi.
6 John D. Caputo, ‘Heidegger and Theology’ in Charles Guignon (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 284.
7 Buber, M. Between Man and Man (London: Fontana, 1971), p. 203.
8 Ibid. p. 208.
9 Ibid. p. 210.
10 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 157.
11 Ibid. p. 157.
12 Ibid. p. 158.
13 Ibid. p. 174.
14 See, for example: Oscar Cullman, Salvation in History (London: SCM
Press, 1967); Christ and Time (London: SCM Press, 1962); Gottlieb
Söhngen, Die Einheit in der Theologie (Munich: Karl Zink, 1952), Aus
der Theologie der Zeit (Regensburg, 1948).
15 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 174.
16 Jean Daniélou, ‘The Conception of History in the Christian Tradition’,
Journal of Religion Vol. 30 (3) (1950) 171–9 at p. 177.
17 Ibid. p. 177.
18 Ibid. p. 177.
19 Ibid. p. 177.
20 Ibid. p. 177.
21 Avery Dulles, Revelation Theology: A History (New York: Herder and
Herder, 1969), p. 124.
22 Joseph Ratzinger, Dogmatic Theology: Eschatology: Death and Eternal
Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988). p. 54.
23 Ibid. p. 54.
24 Ibid. p. 55.
25 Martin C. D’Arcy, The Sense of History: Secular and Sacred (London:
Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 182–3.
26 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Christian Universalism: On Two Collections of
Papers by Hans Urs von Balthasar’, Communio: International Catholic
Review (Fall 1995) 545–57 at p. 546.
27 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 176.
28 Ibid. pp. 177–8.
29 Paul Henry, ‘Christian Philosophy of History’, Theological Studies,
Vol. XIII, No. 1 (March, 1952) 419–32 at p. 430.

174
 NOTES

30 Joseph Ratzinger, The Ratzinger Report: An Interview with Vittorio

Messori (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985), p. 182.
31 Ibid. p. 182.
32 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Bildung und Glaube in unserer Zeit. Drie Thesen zur
christlichen Bildung’, IBW (Institute für Bildung und Wissen) Journal,
13, (1975), 113–16 at p. 114.
33 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology’,
Communio: International Catholic Review (Fall 1990): 439–55 at p. 452.
34 Ibid. p. 158.
35 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 160.
36 Ibid. p. 185.
37 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love, p. 95.
38 Ibid. p. 95.
39 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 168.
40 Ibid. p. 166.
41 James V. Schall, ‘Certain Fundamental Truths’, Ignatius Insight, 6 Oct.
2009.
42 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, p. 92.
43 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 166.
44 Ibid. p. 162.
45 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 169.
46 Ibid. p. 169.
47 Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1986), p. 33.
48 Jean Daniélou, ‘The Conception of History in the Christian Tradition’,
p. 172.
49 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, p. 171.
50 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology, pp. 95–6.
51 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Thérèse of Lisieux: A Story of a Mission, trans.
by D. Nicholl (London: Sheed and Ward, 1953), p. xii–xiii. See also for
an extensive treatment of this subject Victoria S. Harrison, ‘Homo
Orans’: Von Balthasar’s Christocentric Philosophical Anthropology’,
The Heythrop Journal, Vol. XL (1999): 280–300.
52 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Bildung und Glaube in unserer Zeit. Drie Thesen zur
christlichen Bildung’, IBW (Institute für Bildung und Wissen)Journal13
(1975), 116.
53 R. E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth
Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 250.
54 Joseph Ratzinger, The End of Time?: The Provocation of Talking about
God, (Co-authored with J. B. Metz, Jürgen Moltmann and Eveline
Goodman-Thau), (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2004). p. 15.
55 Ibid. p. 22.
56 Ibid. p. 16.
57 Jack A. Bonsor, ‘Truth and History: The Question’, Philosophy and
History, p. 53.
58 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1990), p. 54.

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 NOTES

59 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius,

1994), pp. 34–5.
60 Albert Dondeyne, Contemporary European Thought and Christian Faith
(Pittsburg, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1962), p. 83.
61 Ibid. p. 83.
62 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology’,
Communio: International Catholic Review (Fall 1990) 439–55 at p. 444.
63 Ibid. p. 444.
64 Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One (San Francisco: Ignatius,
1986), p. 52.
65 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology’,
Communio: International Catholic Review (Fall 1990) 439–55 at p. 449.
66 Ibid. p. 452.
67 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History, p. 82.
68 Livio Melina, ‘Love: the Encounter with an Event’ in Livio Melina and
Carl Anderson (eds), The Way of Love: Reflections on Pope Benedict
XVI’s Encyclical Deus Caritas Est, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006), p. 22.
69 Maximilian Heinrich Heim, Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and
Living Theology: Fundamentals of Ecclesiology (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2007), p. 10.
70 Joseph Ratzinger, Preface to the 2nd volume of his Opera Omnia,
Offenbarungsverständnis und Geschichtstheologie Bonaventuras Herder,
Freiberg 2009.
71 For an extensive treatment of this theme in Ratzinger see Aidan
Nichols, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger (Edinburgh: T & T Clark,
1988), Chapter 3.
72 The author is indebted to Aidan Nichols for this insight.

CHAPTER 6
1 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Sorbonne Millennium Address’, translation by
Maria Klepacka. Nov. 1999.
2 Ibid.
3 Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World
Religions (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), p. 32.
4 Ibid. p. 39.
5 Ibid. p. 39.
6 Ibid. p. 40.
7 Ibid. p. 42.
8 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, pp. 155–6.
9 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘“In the Beginning”. . . A Catholic Understanding of
Creation and the Fall’ (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995), p. 97.
10 Ibid.
11 Balthasar, H. U. von, Love Alone is Credible (San Francisco: Ignatius,
2004), p. 16.
12 Ibid. p. 26.
13 Balthasar, H. U. von, Love Alone is Credible, p. 35.

176
 NOTES

14 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Christian Morality. (Co-authored with

Heinz Schürmann and Hans Urs von Balthasar) (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1986), p. 53.
15 Ibid. pp. 53–4.
16 Ibid. p. 54.
17 Ibid. pp. 54–5.
18 Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus, the Apostles and the Early Church (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 2007), p. 72.
19 Romano Guardini, The Word of God: On Faith, Hope and Charity
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), p. 28.
20 Ibid. 29.
21 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 59.
22 Ibid. p. 62.
23 Ibid. p. 65.
24 Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval, p. 156.
25 Joseph Ratzinger, Sorbonne Address, ‘2000 Years after What?’, the
Sorbonne, Paris, 27 November 1999; quotation in the text taken from
translation of Maria Klepecka based on the Polish translation published
in Christianitas, Numer 3/4, (2000) 11–23.
26 Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theological Anthropology (New York: Sheed
and Ward, 1967), p. 97.
27 Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi (8).
28 Ibid. p. 177.
29 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Church and Scientific theology’ Communio:
International Catholic Review (Winter, 1980) p. 339. In this context
Ratzinger cites his reliance on the insights of Henri de Lubac in Credo.
Gestalt und Lebendigkeit unseres Glaubensbekenntnisses (Einsiedeln,
1975), pp. 29–56.
30 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 59.
31 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Dignity of the Human Person’ Commentary on
Gaudium et spes in H. Vorgrimler, (ed.) Commentary on the Documents
of Vatican II, Vol. III (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 155.
32 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 71.
33 ‘The Current Situation of Faith and Theology’, L’Osservatore Romano,
6 November 1996: 4–6 at p. 6.
34 Ibid. p. 6.
35 Ibid. p. 6.
36 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, p. 147.
37 Ibid. p. 147–8.
38 Ibid. p. 158.
39 Ibid. p. 73.
40 Ibid. p. 160.
41 Ibid. p. 160.
42 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Current Situation of Faith and Theology’, p. 5.
43 Ibid. p. 5.
44 Adriaan Peperzak, ‘Plotinian Motifs in Bonaventure’s Itinerary of
the Mind to God’, in P. J. Casarella, and G. P. Schner (eds), Christian

177
 NOTES

Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: the Thought of Louis Duprè,

(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), pp. 50–63.

CHAPTER 7
1 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Interreligious Dialogue and Jewish-Christian Relations’,
Communio: International Catholic Review, 25 (Spring 1998) 29–40 at 32.
2 Ibid. p. 32.
3 Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions, One Covenant: Israel, the Church
and the World (San Francisco: Ignatius: 1999), p. 94. fn 6.
4 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Interreligious Dialogue and Jewish-Christian
Relations’, p. 38.
5 Benedict XVI, Homily in Bari, June 2005, as reported in The Tablet,
4 June 2005, p. 30.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Interreligious Dialogue and Jewish-Christian
Relations’, p. 34.
7 Ibid. p. 34.
8 Ibid. p. 34.
9 Ibid. p. 39.
10 Ibid. p. 31.
11 Joseph Ratzinger, Address of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI, Crypt
of St Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney, 18 July 2008.
12 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1982), p. 70.
13 Gavin D’Costa, The Meeting of Religions and the Trinity (New York:
Orbis, 2000), p. 113.
14 Ibid. p. 30.
15 Ibid. p. 30.
16 Gavin D’Costa, ‘Taking Other Religions Seriously: Some Ironies in the
Current Debate on a Christian Theology of Religions’, The Thomist, 54
(3) (July 1990) 519–31 at p. 521.
17 Ibid. p. 521.
18 Ibid. p. 523.
19 John Milbank, ‘The End of Dialogue’ in G. D’Costa (ed.), Christian
Uniqueness Reconsidered: Myth of Pluralistic Theology of Religions
(London: Orbis Books, 1990), pp. 174–192.
20 Ibid.
21 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Lecture on the Current Situation of Faith and
Theology’, L’Osservatore Romano, 6 Nov. 1996.
22 Joseph Ratzinger, Address to the Representatives of the Jewish
Community, Elysèe Palace, Paris, 12 Sept. 2008.
23 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Interreligious Dialogue and Jewish-Christian
Relations’, p. 36.
24 Ibid. p. 36.
25 Joseph Ratzinger, Many Religions – One Covenant: Israel, the Church and
the World, p. 32.
26 Ibid. p. 63.
27 Ibid. p. 33.

178
 NOTES

28 Ibid. p. 39.
29 Ibid. p. 40.
30 Ibid. p. 40.
31 Ibid. p. 41.
32 See for example: ‘Letter of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the President
of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews on the
Occasion of the 40th anniversary of the Declaration “Nostra Aetate”’.
33 Benedict XVI, Address during Courtesy Visit to the two chief Rabbis of
Jerusalem at Hechal Shlomo Center in Jerusalem in Pope Benedict XVI
on Christian-Muslim-Jewish Relations: Excerpts from the Addresses and
Homilies of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVU during his Pilgrimage to
the Holy Land (8–15 May 2009), (Sydney: Columban Mission Institute,
2009).
34 James V. Schall, ‘The Regensburg Lecture’ (South Bend, IN: St Augustine’s
Press, 2007), pp. 44–5.
35 Address of Benedict XVI to the Meeting with the Diplomatic Corps
to the Republic of Turkey, 28 Nov. 2006.
36 Benedict XVI, ‘Letter to the Participants in the Third Ecumenical
Assembly organized by the Council of European Episcopal Conferences
and by the Conference of European Churches’, Castel Gandolfo, 20
Aug. 2007.
37 Benedict XVI, Catechesis on the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity,
18 Jan. 2006.
38 Benedict XVI, ‘Address to an Ecumenical Delegation from Finland
on the Occasion of the Feast of Saint Henrik’, 18 Jan. 2008.
39 John Allen Jnr, ‘Ratzinger credited with saving Lutheran Pact’, National
Catholic Reporter, 10 Sept. 1999.
40 Joseph Ratzinger, Address of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI,
Archbishop’s House, Cologne, 19 Aug. 2005.
41 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Note of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith about Personal Ordinariates for Anglicans
Entering the Catholic Church’, Oct. 2009.
42 Digby Anderson, ‘English Gentlemen’, New Directions, Oct. 2008, p. 29.
43 Ibid. p. 29.
44 Robert Mickens, ‘Pope committed to unity with Orthodox’, The Tablet,
4 June 2005, p. 30.
45 Patriarch Bartholomew I, ‘Speech delivered in the Sistine Chapel’,
18 Oct. 2008.
46 Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy (New York: Herder
and Herder, 1962), pp. 58–9.
47 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Primat’ in Josef Höfer and Karl Rahner (eds), Lexikon
für Theologie und Kirche, (Freiburg: Verlag Herder, 1963), p. 763.
48 Robert Moynihan, ‘A Walk by Night’, Inside the Vatican, 12 Nov. 2009.
49 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs 1927–1977 (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1998), p. 98 and Co-Workers of the Truth: Meditations for Every
Day of the Year (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), p. 124.
50 F. A. Murphy, ‘De Lubac, Ratzinger and von Balthasar: A Communal
Adventure in Ecclesiology’ in F. A. Murphy and C. Asprey (eds),

179
 NOTES

Ecumenism Today: the Universal Church in the 21st Century, (Aldershot:

Ashgate, 2008), p. 45.
51 Ibid. p. 46.
52 Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis (11) (2007).
53 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Letter to the Bishops of
the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church understood
as Communion’, 28 May 1992; ‘The Ecclesiology of the Constitution
on the Church, Vatican II, Lumen Gentium’, L’Osservatore Romano,
19 Sept. 2001.
54 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Letter to the Bishops of
the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church understood as
Communion’, 28 May 1992, Article, 4.
55 Benedict XVI, St. Paul the Apostle (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor,
2009), pp. 46–7.
56 Walter Kasper, ‘On the Church: A Friendly Reply to Cardinal Ratzinger’,
The Tablet, 23 June 2001, 927–30.
57 Ibid. p. 930.
58 Avery Dulles, as quoted by Zenit International News Agency, Vatican
City, 28 May 2001.
59 Ibid.
60 Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology : Approaches
to Understanding Its Role in the Light of Present Controversy (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1995), p. 83.
61 Ibid. p. 84.
62 Ibid. p. 86.
63 Ibid. p. 97.
64 Ibid. pp. 97 and 98.
65 Aidan Nichols, The Shape of Catholic Theology: An Introduction to Its
Sources, Principles and History (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press,
1991), p. 352.
66 Ibid. p. 352.
67 Gianni Valente, ‘Tradition and Freedom: the lectures of the young
Joseph’, 30 Days, March 2006.
68 Peter Gaeffke, ‘Philology and Confrontation: Paul Hacker on Tradi-
tional and Modern Vedanta’, Journal of the American Oriental Society,
April–June, 1977.
69 Joseph Ratzinger as cited by Aidan Nichols, in ‘Walter Kasper and his
theological programme’, New Blackfriars Vol. 67 (787) (Jan. 1986) 16–24
at 22. Nichols was citing Joseph Ratzinger ‘Loi de l’Englise et liberté du
chrétien, Service culturel de l’Ambassade de France près la Saint-Siège,
24.11.1983. According to Nichols, Ratzinger in making these statements
was indebted to D. Nestle, Eleutheria, Studien zum Wesen der Freiheit bei
den Griechen und im Neuen Testament (Tübingen 1967) and E. Coreth,
‘Zur Problemgeschichte menschlicher Freiheit’, Zeitschrift für katholis-
che Theologie 94 (1972) 258–89.
70 Hans Küng, ‘The Vatican thirst for power divides Christianity and
damages Catholicism’, The Guardian, 27 Oct. 2009.

180
 NOTES

71 Robert Moynihan, ‘Movement of all Fronts’ Inside the Vatican, 26 Oct.

2009.

CONCLUSION
1 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Martin Buber and Christianity: A Dialogue
between Israel and the Church (London: Harvill Press, 1960), p. 9.
2 Philip Blosser, ‘The Kasper-Ratzinger Debate and the State of the
Church’, New Oxford Review (April, 2002) 18–25 at p. 25.
3 Paul Claudel, Positions et Propositions (Paris: Gallimard, 1926), p. 175.
4 Ibid. p. 175.
5 Peter Wust, Crisis in the West (London: Sheed and Ward, 1931), p. 53.
6 J. Mouroux, L’experience chretienne (Paris: Aubier, 1952), p. 5 as quoted
by A. Maggiolini, ‘Magisterial Teaching on Experience in the Twentieth
Century: From the Modernist Crisis to the Second Vatican Council’,
Communio: International Catholic Review, (Summer 1996) 225–43.
7 Lieven Boeve, God Interrupts History: Theology in a Time of Upheaval
(New York: Continuum, 2007), p. 4.
8 Ibid. p. 4.
9 Ibid. p. 100.
10 Roger Scruton, The Philosopher on Dover Beach (Manchester: Carcanet,
1990), p. 123.
11 William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 2003), p. 5.
12 For a poetic expression of this idea see Gottfiried Benn, ‘Verlorenes Ich’,
the Penguin Book of German Verse (New York: Penguin, 1957), 425–7.

181
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PRIMARY SOURCES – BOOKS AND

ARTICLES BY JOSEPH RATZINGER
Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche (Munich: Karl
Zink Verlag, 1954).
The Episcopate and the Primacy (New York: Herder and Herder, 1962).
(Co-authored with Karl Rahner).
‘The Changeable and the Unchangeable in Theology’, Theology Digest, 10
(1962), 71–6.
‘Die Heilige Schrift und die Tradition’, Theologische-praktische Quartal-
shrift, 3 (1963), 224–7.
The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood (London: Sheed & Ward, 1966).
Das Problem der Dogmengeschichte in der Sicht der katholischen Theologie
(Cologne and Opladen, 1966).
Theological Highlights of Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 1966).
Revelation and Tradition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966).
(Co-authored by Karl Rahner).
‘Das Menschenbild des Konzils in seiner Bedeutung für die Bildung in
Christliche Erziehung nach dem Konzil’, Berichte und Dokumentationen,
4, ed. Kulturbeirat beim Zentralkomitee der deutschen Katholiken
(Cologne, 1967), 33–65.
‘Das Problem der Transsubstantiation und die Frage nach dem Sinn der
Eucharistie’, Theologische Quartalschrift 147 (1967), 129–58.
‘Kommentar zu Art. 11-22 der Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der
Welt von heute’, Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, suppl. vol. iii (Freiburg,
1968), 313–54.
‘Commentary on the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation’, in
H. Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II
(New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).
‘The Dignity of the Human Person’: Commentary on Chapter I, Part I of
Gaudium et spes, in H. Vorgrimler (ed.), Commentary on the Documents
of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969).
Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie (Düsseldorf: Patmos
Verlag, 1969).
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 INDEX

Abelard, Peter 26 Barth, Karl 63, 96, 97, 98, 113, 125
acedia 80 Bartholomew I 141
Acton, Harold 41 Basil the Great, Saint 37
Adorno, Theodor 33, 72, 74, 75 Bauer, Bruno 56
Aestheticism 33 Baur, F. C. 122
Aeterni Patris 2, 9 Beatles, The 41
Afanasiev, Nicholas 142 beauty 21, 22, 26, 29, 32, 33, 43, 46,
agape 82, 121 71, 80, 98, 113, 118, 121, 158
Aggiornamento 48 Beethoven, Ludwig 37
Alfeyev, Archbishop Hilarion 141–2 Behler, Wolfgang 33
Alighieri, Dante 76 being and love 119
alienation 35 Bernanos, Georges 4, 20, 38, 39,
Anderson, Digby 140, 141 77, 81, 153
Anderson, Bishop George 139 Bernard, Saint 26
Anglicans 140, 149, 150, 151, 159 Bildung 25, 71, 99, 105, 106
Anglican Ordinariate 140, 150 Billot, Louis 84
Annales de Philosophie Bio-technology 17, 122
Chrétienne 19 Blake, William 13
Apollonian music 34 Blank, Reiner 57
Aristotle 3, 14, 16, 146 Bloch, Ernst 72, 73
Astrology 67 Blondel, Maurice 19, 49, 52, 53, 62,
Augustine, Saint 4, 13, 14, 15, 19, 110, 153, 156
30, 79, 80, 85, 110, 112, 115, Blosser, Philip 152, 153
117, 142, 145, 148, 153, 155 Böckle, Franz 5
Boethius 20, 110
Baader, Franz Xaver von 10 Boeve, Lieven 62, 65, 66, 158–9
Bach, Johann Sebastian 37 Bonaventure, Saint 4, 13, 17–18,
Bahrdt, K. F. 56 30, 50–1, 55, 72, 94, 113,
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 5, 9, 15, 19, 153, 156
20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 27, 30, 39, 53, Bonino, Serge-Thomas 82, 85–6
54, 55, 61, 62, 67, 73, 82, 84, 104, Bonsor, Jack Arthur 108
105, 112, 113, 119, 120, 123–4, Boot, Alexander 45, 83
142, 144, 148, 152, 153, 156 Borella, Jean 85

195
 INDEX

Bosco, Mark 20 D’Arcy, Martin 98

Botton, Alain de 35, 36, 45 Dahll, Minlib 37
Bouillard, Henri 19 Daniélou, Jean 3, 19, 96–7, 103,
‘bourgeois Pelagianism’ 77, 78 113, 116, 142, 146
Bouyer, Louis 142, 146 Darwin, Charles 122, 160
Bremond, Henri 19 D’Costa, Gavin 131
Bruckner, Anton 24, 30 Dei Verbum 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, 59,
Buber, Martin 4, 13, 14, 15, 95, 70, 96–7, 156
112, 152, 153, 155, 156 democracy 84
Buddhism 95, 114, 116, Denys, or Pseudo-Dionysius 148
Bulgakov, Sergei 142 Descartes, René 2, 110
Bultmann, Rudolf 56, 57, 58, 94, Deus Caritas Est 71–2, 82, 89–90,
97, 98, 113, 148 119, 121, 155
Burbach, H. J. 33 Dibelius, Martin 56, 57
Bureaucracy 91 Dignitatis Humanae 40
Dionysiac orgies 35
Cabasilas, Nicholas 31 Dionysian music 34
Cajetan, Cardinal Thomas 84, 94 Dionysian cults 32, 34
Canty, Aaron 55, 70 Divino afflante Spiritu 59
capitalism 84 Dominus Iesus 149
Caputo, John D 95 Dondeyne, Albert 109, 110
caritas 116 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 4, 76
Caritas in Veritate 72, 78, 82, 83, Drey, Johann Sebastian 10
84, 87–8, 89–90, 113 Dru, Alexander 19, 52
Cartesian metaphysics 37 Dulles, Cardinal Avery 97, 146
Cavanaugh, William T. 160 Dupré, Louis 73
Chardin, Teilhard de 106, 113 Dupuis, Jacques 131
Chenu, Marie-Dominique 27
Christie, Agatha 41 Ecclesia de Eucharistia 143
Christology 3, 69, 110, 111, 132 Ecclesiae Unitatem 44
Classical Thomism 49 Ecumenism 139
Claudel, Paul 4, 20, 21, 153 Edward Herbert of Cherbury,
Cohen, Shear-Yashuv 135 Lord 120
Communio 5, 21, 27, 143, 144 Edwards, Gareth 41
Comte, Auguste 122 Edwards, J. Andrew 34
Concilium 5, 106 Einstein, Albert 4
Congar, Yves 5, 49, 52, 142, 143, Elizabethan martyrs 41
146, 156 eros 32, 82, 99, 121
Connolly, Cyril 41 ethos 18, 25, 107–8, 116, 118, 135
Cordes, Cardinal Paul J. 65, 86 Eucharist, the 43, 144, 158
Council of Trent 48, 154 European Union 160
Cullmann, Oscar 96, 98, 113 existentialism 109
culture 2, 25, 29, 37, 64, 65 experience 156

196
 INDEX

Faith and history 10 Gregory of Nyssa, Saint 19

Faith and reason 16, 116, 119, 122, Grisez, Germain 87
123, 125, 136, 137 Guardini, Romano 4, 17, 18, 38,
Faith, hope and love 16, 71, 73, 81, 39, 49, 51, 60, 62, 72, 84, 112,
82, 91, 93, 97, 104, 105, 107–8, 121, 153, 155, 156
124, 133 Gügler, Heinrich Alois 10
family, the 45, 99, 135 Gutiérrez, Gustavo 5
Feminism 59, 62
Feuerbach 95 Hacker, Paul 148
Fides et ratio 124 Haecker, Theodor 4, 11, 12, 19, 95
Florovsky, Georges 142 Harkianakis, Stylianos 148
‘folk liturgies’ 40 Havel, Vaclav 83
Freedom 2, 34, 47, 113, 149 Hazm, Ibn 136–7
French neo-Thomism 15 Healy, Nicholas J. 85
Freud, Sigmund 8 “Heenan Indult” 41
Fries, Heinrich 12 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Frings, Cardinal Josef 2 95, 122
Fürstenberg, Franz von 11 Heidegger, Martin 1, 9, 56, 58, 94,
95, 101, 106, 108, 156
Gadamer, Hans Georg 60 Heim, Maximilian Heinrich 112
Galen, Clemens-August Graf Heisenberg, Werner 4
von 154 Hellenism 96
Gallitzin, Countess Amalie von 11, 22 de-hellenization 137
Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald 84 Hemming, Laurence Paul 95
Gauchet, Maurice 8 Henry, Paul 99
Gaudium et spes 21, 28, 72, 82, 84, Herder, Johann Gottfried von 94
86, 100, 111, 113 ‘hermeneutic of continuity’ 46
Geist 25 ‘hermeneutic of rupture’ 5, 46, 154
German Idealism 104 hermeneutics 10, 40, 54, 56, 59, 60,
Gifts of the Holy Spirit 71 61, 155
Gilson, Etienne 84, 153 Hibbs, Thomas 158
Gnilka, Christian 37 Hick, John 131
Gnilka, Joachim 76 Hildebrand, Alice von 22
Gnosticism 118 Hildebrand, Dietrich von 22, 23
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 17 Hinduism 148
Goodman-Thau, Eveline 72 historical-critical method 56
goodness 71 history 1, 2, 3, 23, 38, 40, 45, 46, 53,
Goyau, Georges 19 58, 59, 64, 66, 74, 93, 94, 96,
Greene, Graham 41 97, 99–100, 102, 103, 106, 107,
Gregorian chant 30 109, 112, 113, 116, 117, 121,
Gregory Nazianzus, Saint 67 122, 127, 129–30, 133, 155, 157
Gregory Nazianzus and ontology 96, 103, 106, 112,
Foundation 142 121, 155

197
 INDEX

Hitler, Adolf 95 Kaplan, Grant 10, 64–5

Hölderlin, Friedrich 94 Kasper, Walter 145
hope 16, 71, 73, 80, 81, 82, 91, 93, Kerr, Fergus 3
97, 101, 104, 105, 107–8, Kierkegaard, Søren 19, 95
122–3, 124, 133 Kilby, Karen 95
Horkheimer, Max 72, 74, 75 Knitter, Paul 127, 131
Hugh of St Victor 30 Kobler, John Francis 13
Humanae Vitae 41, 83 Kopff, E. Christian 15
Krasnodebski, Zdzisław 83
Iconoclasm 30 Kraynak, Robert P. 73
Incarnation 28, 46, 61, 66, 67, Kriele, M. 103
148, 160 Kuhn, Johannes Evangelist
individuality 105–6 von 10
International Theological Kultur 25
Commission 28–9, 59 Küng, Hans 3, 4, 5, 63, 66, 129,
Interpretation of the Bible in the 150, 157, 158–9
Church, The 58–9
inter-religious dialogue 129, 142 La Maladie Catholique 29
Islam 116, 117–18, 131, 136, 138 Laborem Exercens 88
Langgässer, Elisabeth 4
Jaeger, Werner 15 Läpple, Alfred 4, 12
Jansenism 29, 32, 39, 153, 156, 157 Le Fort, Gertrude von 4
Jaspers, Karl 13, 109 Lefebvre, Archbishop Marcel 40,
Jewish eschatology 58 44, 159
Jewish People and their Sacred Lefebvre, René 44, 154
Scriptures in the Christian Leo XIII, Pope 2
Bible, The 58–9 Leonine Thomism 2
Johansson, Calvin M 33 Lérins, Vincent de 49, 54,
John, Saint 78, 107 55, 156
John of the Cross 155 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 10
John Paul II, Pope 6, 13, 63, 107, Levada, Cardinal William 140
124, 143, 149, 154, 155, 157 Levinas, Emmanuel 14
Jones, David 41 Liberalism 74, 113, 142
Judaism 15, 116, 117–18, 131, 132, liberation theology 6, 7, 8, 29–30,
136, 152 37, 62, 88, 99, 102, 108, 113,
Justification 148 127, 134, 158
Joint Declaration on the Doctrine liturgy 22, 29, 38, 42, 48, 158
of Justification 139, 151 logos 18, 73, 81, 86, 109, 121, 123,
Justin, Saint 25 123–4, 124–5, 126, 127
Lossky, Vladimir 142
Kant, Immanuel 2, 10, 16, 58, 75, Lotz, Johannes B. 94
95, 120, 122, 125, 131 love 21, 32, 38, 70, 71, 73, 80, 81,
Kantian aesthetics 37 82, 89, 91, 93, 97, 104, 105,

198
 INDEX

107–8, 112, 113, 118, 119, 123, Mitford, Nancy 41

124, 125, 126, 133, 159 modernism 2
and knowledge 123–4 modernity 6, 39, 41, 45, 62, 66, 73,
and reason 118–19, 159 74, 82, 120, 122, 152–3, 158, 160
Lubac, Cardinal Henri de 5, 19, 20, ‘Modman’ 45
21, 28, 49, 51, 62, 65, 72, 75, ‘Modman Nihilist’ 45
84, 85, 86, 87, 96–7, 108, ‘Modman Philistine’ 45, 83
132–3, 142, 146, 153, 156, 157 Möhler, Johann Adam 10, 19,
Lumen Gentium 67, 143 64–5, 67, 142–3, 157
Luther, Martin 50, 94, 95, 120, Moltmann, Jürgen 72
148, 154 monotheistic revolution 116
Lutherans 149 Montag, John 49, 50
Lyotard, Jean-François 158 Montini (Pope Paul VI) 89
‘moralism’ 131, 155
MacIntyre, Alasdair 52, 73, 123, Mounier, Emmanuel 155
125, 138 Mouroux, Jean 156
magnanimitas 80 Moynihan, Robert 150, 159
Man, Paul de 38 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 23, 37
Marcel, Gabriel 109 Müller, Max 94
Maritain, Jacques 78 Murphy, Francesca 142
Marx, Karl 95, 99–100, 122 Murray, John Courtney 87
Marxism 6, 8, 59, 62, 72, 73, 74, 88, Mystical religion 127
99, 102, 109, 113, 122, 158 Mystical theology 114, 115
mass culture 35, 36, 39, 45, 79 Mysticism 116
‘mass man’ 38
material progress 84 Natural theology 114, 115, 117, 126
Matthew, Saint 107 Nature and grace 47, 84, 87, 100,
Mauriac, François 4 154–5, 156
Maximus the Confessor, Saint 19 Nemoianu, Virgil 11
McAleer, Graham 158 Neo-scholasticism 2, 25, 94, 109,
Meisner, Cardinal Joachim 23 112–13
Melina, Livio 112 Neo-Thomism 15
memory 45 Neuhaus, Richard John 87
Memory and Reconciliation: the New Age movement 127
Church and the Faults of the New liturgical movement 42
Past 59 Newman, John Henry 4, 11, 12,
Mercier, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph 140 19, 20, 23, 30, 49, 67, 69, 109,
metaphysics 98–9, 131 112, 141, 143, 153, 154, 155,
Metz, Johann Baptist 5, 72, 106, 156, 157
158–9 Nicholas of Myra, Saint 141
Meyer, Cardinal Albert 48 Nichols, Aidan 29, 42, 146–7, 149
Michnik, Adam 83 Nietzsche, Friedrich 23, 82, 94, 95
Milbank, John 131–2, 138 Nihilism 45, 46

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 INDEX

‘noosphere’ 106–7, 113 Platonism 31, 126, 146

Norton, R. E. 106–10 Polanyi, Michael 27
Nostra Aetate 136 Political moralism 129
Novak, Michael 87 Political theology 114
Nuptial mystery 144 polyphony 30
Pontifical Biblical Commission 58–9
O’Meara, Thomas F 3 Pontifical Council for Interreligious
Ontology 1, 23, 46, 74, 93, 96, 99, Dialogue 131
100, 103, 106, 112, 113 Pontifical Council for Justice and
O’Regan, Cyril 53, 54, 95 Peace 88
Origen 19 Pontifical Council for the
Orthodox, the 159 Promotion of Christian
Orthodoxy 118 Unity 139
Orthopraxis 118, 129 pop music 34, 35
Ouellet, Cardinal Marc 144 Populorum Progressio 88, 89
postmodernism 62
Panikkar, Raymond 131 postmodernity 66, 73, 158, 160
Papandréou, Damaskinos 148 pragmatism 33
‘parish tea-party liturgies’ 33 presumption 79
Paschal mystery 32, 46, 66 ‘primitive emotionalism’ 33
‘pastoral pragmatism’ 33 Progress 74
pastoral strategies, correlationist 27, Protestantism 26, 77, 94, 156
48, 62–3 Providentissimus Deus 59
Paul, Saint 68, 69, 82, 91, 126, 145 Przywara, Erich 11, 18, 19, 25, 26,
Paul VI, Pope 5–6, 40, 41, 48, 88, 99 30, 84
Péguy, Charles 20 ‘pure reason’ 16, 120, 158
Peperzak, Adriaan 128 puritanical functionalism 33
perichoresis 71, 82
personalism 109 Radbertus, Paschasius 72
Petrine office 21, 140, 142 Radical orthodoxy 63
Pfnür, Vinzenz 148 Rahner, Karl 4, 5, 17, 23, 27, 33,
phenomenology 109 51, 63, 84, 94, 95, 96–7, 101,
Philistinism 38, 45–6 102, 103, 106, 113, 148, 156,
Philosophical anthropology 15, 34 158–9
Pickstock, Catherine 35, 160 rationalism 2, 23, 25, 109, 125, 126
Pieper, Josef 4, 5, 15, 16, 19, 30, 72, redemption 30, 99, 123
79, 80, 81, 91, 95, 101, 102, Redemptor Hominis 99
106, 107, 153 Redemptoris Missio 130, 132
‘pious pelagianism’ 75, 76, 155 Reformation 26, 45, 65, 96
Pius XI, Pope 132–3 Reid, Alcuin 43
Planck, Max 4 Reimarus, H. S. 56
Plato 30, 34 relationality 15, 93, 110
Platonic 73, 109 relativism 2, 142

200
 INDEX

Renaissance 26, 31, 119–20 Schopenhauer 95

Renan, Ernest 56 Scola, Cardinal Angelo 144
revelation 21, 43, 48, 50, 51, 55, Scotus, Duns 137
65–6, 68, 70, 72, 85–6, 112–13, Scripture 1, 3, 21, 49, 51, 53, 55, 56,
117, 119, 121, 137, 148, 153, 156 61, 69, 70, 96, 153
Ricci, Matteo 37 and tradition 62, 146
Richard of St Victor 111 Scruton, Roger 35, 36, 45, 160
rock concerts 34, 79 Second Vatican Council 2, 41,
rock music 32, 34, 35, 158 45, 69, 86, 106, 134, 135–6,
Romanesque 31 148, 153
Romantic movement 2, 9, 10, 11, 23, secularism 79, 82, 83, 85–6, 90,
25, 46, 51, 155 113, 126, 127–8, 142, 152,
Rosen, Rabbi 133 153, 159, 160
Rush, Ormond 68 secularization 80
Russian Orthodox Church 141–2 sexuality 6, 29, 99, 157
Siewerth, Gustav 94
Sacramental Social Darwinism 73
life 105 Society of Pius X 44
order 66, 111–12 Sollicitudo rei Socialis 88
presence 46–7 Söhngen, Gottlieb 12, 16, 96,
Sacramentality 15 112, 113
Sacraments 97, 105 Sombart, Werner 77
Sacramentum Caritatis 42, 143, 144 Spaemann, Robert 85, 129
‘sacro-pop’ 33, 40, 41, 42, 158 Spe Salvi 72, 73, 76, 78, 113, 123, 126
Sailer, Johann Michael von 10 Spinoza, Baruch 95
Salvation history 96, 97–8, 98–9, Stafford, Cardinal James 26
112–13, 136 Staudinger, Hugo 33
Sartre, Jean-Paul 16 Stein, Edith 11
Schall, James V. 73, 74, 102, 137 Stoic philosophy 58, 117–18, 126
Scheeben, Matthias Joseph 10–11, Stolberg, Count Friedrich Leopold
143 zu 11
Scheler, Max 13, 95, 155 Strauss, D. F. 56
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Strauss, Leo 73
Joseph 10 Suárez, Francisco 49, 50, 84,
Schenk, H. G. 9, 46 124, 156
Schillebeeckx, Edward 4, 5, 27, 63, Summorum Pontificum 40, 43
158–9
Schindler, David L. 86 Taylor, Charles 73
Schlier, Heinrich 148 Tertio Millennio Adveniente 100
Schmaus, Michael 50 Tertullian 25
scholasticism 2, 4, 19, 22, 40, 46 Theobald, Michael 146
Baroque 154–5 Theological anthropology 2, 61, 71,
Scholl, Sophie 11 88, 93, 104, 156

201
 INDEX

Theological virtues 16, 71, 73, 82, Varro, Marcus Terrentius 114,
104, 105, 123–4 115, 157
Thérèse of Lisieux, Saint 105 Veritatis Splendor 155
Thomas Aquinas, Saint 2, 3, 14, 15, Vico, Giambattista 122
17, 36, 49, 50, 62, 79, 80, 85, Voderholzer, Rudolf 94
91, 94, 143, 148, 155 Voegelin, Eric 73, 74
Tracy, David 27, 63, 158–9 Voluntarism 136, 137
tradition 1, 3, 46, 48, 49, 51, 53,
62–3, 64, 66, 155, 156, 157 Walker, Adrian 89
Traditional Anglican Communion Watkin, E. I. 13
150 Waugh, Evelyn 41
traditionalists 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, Weber, Carl Maria von 24
62–3 ‘Westman’ 45
Trent, Council of 54 ‘Whig Thomism’ 87, 113
Trinity 71, 90, 110, 111 Wiechert, Ernst 4
Truth 2, 71 Wiegel, George 87, 88
and love 113 Williamson, Richard 44
Twomey, D. Vincent 1 Wojtyła, Karol 5, 13, 14, 88, 89,
99, 113
Ut Unum Sint 138 Wordsworth, William 13
‘utlity music’ 33, 40 Wust, Peter 4, 13, 14, 153,
154, 155
Vanhoozer, Kevin 61
Vanhoye, Cardinal Albert 51 Yeago, David S. 47

202