The Nature and Mission of Theology (J. Ratzinger)

Some excerpts from the book (San Francisco, 1995):

p. 5 The most ancient Christian… iconographical canon comprises three figures: the shepherd, the orans and the philosopher.
––cf. F. Gerke and F. van der Meer

6 It is not the universe of the Bible and of sacred history which is the focal point of the most ancient Christian works of art but rather the philosopher, who is interpreted as the prototype of the homo christianus who has received the revelation of the true paradise through the Gospel."
––F. van der Meer, Die Ursprünge christlicher Kunst (Freiburg, 1982), S. 6

23 Death, the one question which it is impossible to ignore forever, is thus a metaphysical thorn in lodged in man's being. … questioning founders where there is no hope of finding an answer.

24 To the extent that the prophets see in the God if Israel the primordial creative ground of all reality, it is quite clear that what is taking place is a religious critique for the sake of a correct understanding of this reality itself.

26 The logos must be so intimately their own that it can be come apo-logia; through the mediation of Christians, the Word [Wort] becomes response [Antwort] to man's questions.

28 Otto Michel has pointed out that the Gnostics avoided the word "philosophy". With the term "gnosis" they expressed an even loftier claim. … Authentic philosophy, with its uncertainty, disgusts us. We want, not philosophy, but gnosis, that is, exact, verifiable knowledge. Moreover, philosophy is to a great extent weary of itself. It shares the impatience to become like the other academic disciplines both in nature and in worth. It wishes to be just as "exact" as they are. Yet it purchases exactitude at the price of its greatness, for in so doing it is no longer able to pose those questions which are proper to it alone. It becoming "exact", it joins the other disciplines in taking, no longer the whole, but the particular as its object.

37 The choice of our time has become that between the freedom of production and the freedom of the truth. But the freedom to produce, unchecked by truth, means the dictatorship of ends in a world devoid of truth and thus enslaves man while appearing to set him free.

38 "I maintain that in the long-run only a truth-oriented society, not a happiness-oriented society, can succeed."
–– H. Dietzfelbinger, "Dimension der Wahrheit", in Kath. Akademie in Bayern, Chronik, 1980/81, 150, citing Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker

39 Truth, in fact, is the medium in which men make contact, whereas it is the absence of truth which closes them off from one another. … Hermann Dietzfelbinger has pointed out that the depressing thing about Pilate's question ["An sit verum? What is truth?"] is that it is not really a question at all but an answer.

46 [The subjection of evangelical Christianity in Germany under the Nazis and Heinrich Schlier's resistance thereto] revealed plainly that there can be no office of teaching theology if there is no ecclesiastical magisterium, for in its absence theology would enjoy no greater certainty than any of the liberal arts, that is, the certainty of hypothesis, which may be the subject of debate but which no one can stake his life on.

48 …a church without theology impoverishes and blinds, while a churchless theology melts away into caprice.

52 Because Christian conversion throws open the frontier between the "I" and the "not-I", it can be bestowed upon one only by the "not-I" and can never be achieved solely in the interiority of one's personal decision. It has a sacramental structure. The "I no longer live" does not describe a private mystical experience but rather defines the essence of baptism. What takes place is a sacramental event, hence, an event involving the Church. The passive side of becoming a Christian calls for the acting Church, in which the unity of believers as a single subject manifests itself in its bodily and historical dimensions.

54 …according to Paul, the Church is in no wise a separate subject endowed with its own subsistence. The new subject is much rather "Christ" himself, and the Church is nothing but the space of this new unitary subject, which is, therefore, much more than mere social interaction.

56 For theology, in the strict sense of the word, is an exclusively Christian phenomenon, which has no exact equivalent in other religions. … Thus, faith concerns what we must do to attain the rectitude of our being. … Whereas myth, whether in Greece or India, does no more than multiply images of the truth, which for its part always remains incomprehensible, faith in Christ, as it is expressed int its basic assertions, is never interchangeable. … analogy is not the same as metaphor. … In this sense, rationality belongs to the essence of Christianity in a way which the other religions do not claim for themselves.

57 …theology is based upon a new beginning in thought which is not the product of our own reflection but has its origin in the encounter with a Word which always precedes us.

59 Conversion… is delivery into the pattern of doctrine…, or… entrance into the "we" of the Church. … "There is no 'easy access' to God. In contrast to the pretension of the autonomous search for God, … he is the unknown God, who 'dwells in unapproachable light' (I Tim 6:16)."
––R. Guardini, Berichte über mein Leben, 71ff.

60 The one who became flesh has remained flesh. He is concrete. … Obedience to the Church is the concreteness of our obedience. The Church is that new and greater subject in which past and present, subject and object come into contact. The Church is our contemporaneity with Christ: there is no other.

61 Faith is always a participation in a totality and, precisely in this way, conducts the believer to a new breadth of freedom.

62 [The claim that the pastoral office of the Church teaches to the faithful but not to theologians] merely rehashes that division between psychics and gnostics. … [The faith of "babes" in Mt 11:25] establish Christianity as a popular religion, as a religious creed without any two-caste system. … life itself is no hypothesis.
––cf. R. Spaemann, "Die christliche Religion und das Ende des modernen Bewußtseins", in IKZ Communio 8 (1979): 251–270.

65 …the [historical-critical] dismemberment of the Bible has led to a new variety of allegorism [vis-à-vis the Scriptures as mere allegories for the early Church's actual status/aims]

68 The highest ranking good, for which the Church bears responsibility, is the faith of the simple.

79 The reorientation of the idea of truth toward praxis, which occurred under the influence of the Frankfurt school and of the entire neo-Marxist movement, called the old [historicist] positivism thoroughly into question. … Truth is thus no longer excluded but produced by a method of praxis.

80 In the last analysis, the concept of a theology in which praxis has succeeded to the truth makes no provision for pluralism at all, just as little, in fact, as does the Marxist conception of itself. … there can be only one option, that is, only one praxis and, consequently, only one theory to serve it as well. In the long run, the renunciation of truth has no power to liberate. On the contrary, its final result is uniformity.

81 …the Church is not a state. … Pluralism in the interplay of Church, politics and society is a fundamental value for Christianity. It arose from the teachings of Christianity, which inculcates the relative value of all political and social achievements by shifting theocracy, the consummated form of God's rule and reign, into the eschaton.

83–85 the patristic concept of symphonia was four-fold [nach den Vätern]: 1) the unity of the OT and NT, "a structure enriched by manifold tensions"; 2) the unity of Christians with one another; 3) the unity of men with God; 4) man's oneness with himself in Christo.

86 … just as Christ is not half but wholly present, the Church is wholly present wherever he is. … The unity of the universal Church is in this sense an inner moment of the local church.

87 … the monarchical episcopate should rather be termed the principle of personal responsibility. The Church becomes tangible and answerable in real persons; these persons cannot make decisions arbitrarily but only insofar as they are bound in conscience to the faith of the universal Church. … The papal primacy has no real place if it finds no counterpart on the preceding levels––the personal responsibility of a bishop, which this latter cannot delegate to a conference, however important this institution may be to concretize his link to the whole body.

89 …the universal Church could be active in the local church only, and in this fashion contribute to a pluralistic, though ultimately unified, pastoral effort, only if there was a bond to a concrete, theologically grounded organ of the universal Church, the office of Peter.

90 Only the universal Church is capable of safeguarding the distinction of the particular churches from the state and society.

91 …Albert Görres… speaks of a "Hinduization" of the faith, "in which faith propositions no longer matter because the important thing is contact with a spiritual atmosphere which leads beyond everything that can be said."
––A. Görres, "Glaubensgewißheit in einer pluralistischen Welt", in IKZ 12 (1983): 129.

92 …faith… furnishes him [man] with a knowledge which alone makes sense of everything else which he knows.

93 Faith and theology differ in the same way as text and interpretation. Unity rests in faith, while theology is the domain of plurality.

94 The "I believe" of the Creed refers, not to some private "I", but rather to the corporate "I" of the Church. Faith is possible in the measure that I become one with this corporate "I", which does not abolish my own "I" but broadens it out and, in this way, brings it to itself for the first time.

95 The tendency to search for what is most ancient and original behind present developments is the logical conclusion of the loss of the binding element which holds history together and unifies it in the midst of its contradictions. Theology becomes archeaology….

96 …natural science… has achieved its greatest successes thanks, not to a free-floating creativity, but to the strictest adhesion to its object.

97 …pluralism happens, not when we make it the object of our desire, but when everyone wants the truth with all his power and in his own epoch. … The truth is never monotonous….

103 Faith reveals to us that eternal reason is the ground of all things or, put in other terms, that things are reasonable from the ground up.

104 …two roots of theology in the Church. The first is the dynamism toward truth and understanding inherent in the faith; the second is the dynamism of love, which desires to know the beloved more intimately.

112–113 More important than the concept of infallibility is therefore that of auctoritas, which, nevertheless, has well-nigh disappeared from our thought. Yet in reality it can never be wholly absent, because it represents a basic presupposition of community life. What would be the result if from now on the state were to enact as universally binding norm only what can be considered the infallibly correct solution to a given problem?

Wisdom from…

ATHANSIUS OF SINAI: The legacy of the saints

Even while the saints seemed to be with us they were not so in reality, for their minds were turned to God. They lived on earth as citizens of heaven. Having here no lasting city, they sought the heavenly one; having no earthly riches, they sought the riches of heaven. They were strangers and sojourners as their ancestors were. Strangers to the world, to the things of the world, and to the ways of the world, their whole hearts were absorbed in the things of heaven; these were the things they thought about and were concerned about. They longed for the beauty of heaven, its mansions and dwellings, its choirs and hymnody, its feasts and its eternal blessedness.

The saints contemplated, sought, and hastened toward these things, and so at last they attained them. Their striving was rewarded by admission to the heavenly bridal chamber. Because they labored they now exult. Because they were not negligent they now rejoice. Precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of his saints.
(Sermon: PG 89, 1192-1193.)

Do Purgatory now or do it later. God's call to glory is common for all Christians, but our response to the fire of glory is often delayed postmortem. Even then, however, God's burning love does not abandon us, but purifies us from our last worldly entanglements and weights, that we stay erect and free in eternity.

Athanasius of Sinai, known for his theological writings, was the patriarch of Antioch.

ST. AUGUSTINE: Vocations in a Monastery

Although good order reigns in my household, I am human and I live among humans. I would not dare to say that my home is better than the community of the Lord Christ, in which eleven faithful souls put up with the faithless thief Judas. Yet with great difficulty have I met persons better than those who have made progress in the monastery.
-- Letter 78, 8-9

Prayer. Thanks be to Him Who is desired before he is seen, whose presence is felt, and who is hoped for in the future.
-- Sermon 24, 1

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES:

Remember to keep in mind that all the past is nothing and that every day we should say with David, "Now I begin to love my God." To work, to exhaust oneself for God, is love. Therefore, apply everything to this love––eating, drinking, repose. Be very devoted to Saint Louis and admire his great constancy in loving.
(Letters 334; O. XII, pp. 367-368)

G. K. CHESTERTON:

THERE are only three things in the world that women do not understand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.
('What's Wrong with the World.')

ST. THOMAS D'AQUINO:

[I]n the name of the divine Mercy, I have the confidence to embark upon the work of a wise man, even though this may surpass my powers, and I have set myself the task of making known, as far as my limited powers will allow, the truth that the Catholic faith professes, and of setting aside the errors that are opposed to it. …

To proceed against individual errors, however, is a difficult business, and this for two reasons. In the first place, it is difficult because the sacrilegious remarks of individual men who have erred are not so well known to us so that we may use what they say as the basis of proceeding to a refutation of their errors. This is, indeed, the method that the ancient Doctors of the Church used in the refutation of the errors of the Gentiles. For they could know the positions taken by the Gentiles since they themselves had been Gentiles, or at least had lived among the Gentiles and had been instructed in their teaching.

In the second place, it is difficult because some of them, such as the Mohammedans and the pagans, do not agree with us in accepting the authority of any Scripture, by which they may be convinced of their error. Thus, against the Jews we are able to argue by means of the Old Testament, while against heretics we are able to argue by means of the New Testament. But the Muslims and the pagans accept neither the one nor the other. We must, therefore, have recourse to the natural reason, to which all men are forced to give their assent. However, it is true, in divine matters the natural reason has its failings.
(Summa Contra Gentiles I, 2)

8/25

Bush is… Obama is not…?

While I have been a distant observer of all things Bush for the last five years, having lived in Taiwan during that time, I have noticed one theme in particular. Bush is criticized by his many critics (fittingly) for being a talking suit of his party, an elite son of big money. He is also criticized for his lack of adequate prior political experience. He is just a glorified good ol' boy who was given the election by the Powers That Be.

Now, what has struck me in the past few months of presidential campaigning is how both candidates seem to embody, for their detractors, various aspects of "the Bush problem". McCain, for instance, is criticized as being too wealthy, and thus, implicitly, removed from the realities of the average American. It is ironic, nonetheless, how the rich always suffer this criticism––being detached from the concerns of the little people––and yet how they are also simultaneously held up as paragons of philanthropy and action-group support. It is a fact that the majority of charity has come from the rich, a fact that rests only very awkwardly with the idea that the rich just don't know or care about those in need. In any case, let the criticism stand: McCain embodies the old money provincialism that we have endured for eight years under W. Bush.

As for Obama, he embodies something much more scandalous in the W., namely, his lack of serious political experience. He has been expertly crafted by his party to strike all the right chords in the liberal American ear. And while he may not come from money, there is no denying he now embodies a classic example of an inadvertently aloof academic "thinker" and "orator." Obama is that quintessential punching bag, a lawyer, and one educated at Harvard no less! So, while he may not have sprung full-formed from the brow of the elite, he is now ensconced warmly in the embrace of the ivory tower and elite concerns. Just as Bush's credentials from Yale were meant to balance his populist Texan charm, so Obama's elite credentials are meant to balance his sporadic persona as a "normal American", as a prophetic leader who did not gain his allure from years of elite training, but, mystically, from an inner compass of ebony wholesomeness.

What bothers me is that, insofar as people complain America fell for Bush's polished image––all persona and little substance––, they are being blinded by their own complaints (or blinding others with them) to such an extent that we are being primed to fall for it all again in a new guise. Are we to imagine Obama's handlers are any less real or influential than Bush's? Are we to imagine one talking suit is better than another just because one is black and the other white? Or, at the very least, are we to imagine one inexperienced brain of the elite is better for being more eloquent? If one is making one's criticism of a politician the fact that he or she is too much image and too elite, then I see no way towards a meaningful criticism, given what modern politicking means. By contrast, if one makes one's criticisms of a politician specific legislative and moral points, as I do, then I frankly have very little concern with his elite attachments and moneyed detachments. The bottom line for me is one of principle, not one of comparing one political image against another. Insofar as Obama vigorously, indeed proudly advocates and underwrites the abortion movement in the USA, he is an absolutely unacceptable candidate for me or, I would say, any committed Catholic even basically cognizant of the Church's teachings on the ethic of life and the gravity of sin involved in formally supporting a candidate that violates that ethic.

I have heard it argued there is no grounds for "voting your religion". But this is as nonsensical as arguing we ought not "vote our values" or "vote our desires", insofar as religion conveys and animates the most basic values and desires in our lives. We have no choice but to live, or violate, our own values, including our religious (or irreligious) values. To paraphrase Shakespeare, to our own selves we must be true––and it may just follow the night like the day, that we shan't be taken in by any political image. In the world of modern American politics, we may only have smoke and mirrors to look into when we look into a candidate qua image––but at least if we make choices separate from the image, we can look ourselves in the mirror without shame.

Tell me…

Tell me what you think about tow trucks and I will tell you what you think about society.

Wisdom from…

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN (1801–1890): Bartholomew, the apostle

When people begin to feel they have a soul, and a work to do, and a reward to be gained, greater or less, according as they improve the talents committed to them, then they are naturally tempted to be anxious from their very wish to be saved, and they say: "What must I do to please God?" And sometimes they are led to think they ought to be useful on a large scale, and go out of their line of life that they may be doing something worth doing, as they consider it.

Here we have the history of Saint Bartholomew and the other apostles to recall us to ourselves, and to assure us that we need not give up our usual manner of life, in order to serve God; that the most humble and quietest station is acceptable to him, if improved duly––nay affords means for maturing the highest Christian character, even that of an apostle. Bartholomew read the scriptures and prayed to God; and thus was trained at length to give up his life for Christ, when he demanded it.
(Plain and Parochial Sermons II, 336-337.)

Newman was a famous preacher in the Church of England; after his reception into the Catholic Church he continued preaching and writing and later was made a cardinal.

ST. AUGUSTINE: Praying for Others

Let me be helped by your prayers, so that the Lord may see fit to help me bear his burden. When you pray in this way, it is really for yourselves that you are praying. For what is the burden of which I am speaking but you? Pray for me, then, as I myself pray that you may not be burdensome. Support me so that we may bear one another's burdens, thus fulfilling the law of Christ.
-- Sermon 340, 1

Pray for your bishop and priests and all religious!

Prayer. Lord, those who are bowed down with burdens you lift up, and they do not fall because you are their support.
-- Confessions 11, 31

ST. FRANCIS DE SALES:

It is strange to note that our nature wants nothing to do with anything that hurts. However, the repugnance that it feels concerning suffering is not, in my opinion, an indication of a lack of generosity. If we could persuade ourselves that if we were to be skinned alive like Saint Bartholomew, God would love us just a little bit more, I think that we would let ourselves be skinned, not without repugnance but despite our very repugnance. I think that sometimes, as a test, we should try to win a victory over ourselves with a bit of violence for the love of God, because if we never resist our dislikes, we might well become weaklings.
(Letters 1277; O. XVII, p. 341)

To their credit, I will say this idea of inner 'violence' is what many Muslims mean by jihad, or, holy struggle. I would say jihad, if taken in this sense, is Arabic for ascesis cum mortification. "From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and men of violence take it by force." (Mt 11:12)

G. K. CHESTERTON:

THE Secularist says that Christianity produced tumult and cruelty. He seems to suppose that this proves it to be bad. But it might prove it to be very good. For men commit crimes not only for bad things, far more often for good things. For no bad things can be desired quite so passionately and persistently as good things can be desired, and only very exceptional men desire very bad and unnatural things. Most crime is committed because, owing to some peculiar complication, very beautiful and necessary things are in some danger. For instance, if we wanted to abolish thieving and swindling at one blow, the best thing to do would be to abolish babies. Babies, the most beautiful things on earth, have been the excuse and origin of almost all the business brutality and financial infamy on earth. If we could abolish monogamic or romantic love, the country would be dotted with Maiden Assizes [i.e., a trial in which no one has been condemned to execution].
('Religious Doubts of Democracy.')

ST. THOMAE AQUINATIS:

For, since the end [or, goal] of each thing is its good, a thing is then best disposed when it is fittingly ordered to its end. And so we see among the arts that one functions as the governor and the ruler of another because it controls its end. Thus, the art of medicine rules and orders the art of the chemist because health, with which medicine is concerned, is the end of all the medications prepared by the art of the chemist. … That is why… artisans…, who are called master artisans, appropriate to themselves the name of wise men. But, since these artisans are concerned, in each case, with the ends of certain particular things, they do not reach to the universal end of all things. … The name of the absolutely wise man, however, is reserved for him whose consideration is directed to the end of the universe, which is also the origin of the universe. That is why, according to the Philosopher, it belongs to the wise man to consider the highest causes.
(Summa Contra Gentiles I, 1)

8/24

If religion is…

"If religion is faith in things unprovable, then not only is mathematics a religion, but (vis-à-vis Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem) it is also the only religion that can prove itself to be a religion."
–– HT to Albert in the thread for this post by Mark Shea.

It's also worth reproducing the quotation from the Prophet Gilbert:

Spiritual doctrines do not actually limit the mind as do materialistic denials. Even if I believe in immortality I need not think about it. But if I disbelieve in immortality I must not think about it. In the first case the road is open and I can go as far as I like; in the second the road is shut. But the case is even stronger, and the parallel with madness is yet more strange. For it was our case against the exhaustive and logical theory of the lunatic that, right or wrong, it gradually destroyed his humanity. Now it is the charge against the main deductions of the materialist that, right or wrong, they gradually destroy his humanity; I do not mean only kindness, I mean hope, courage, poetry, initiative, all that is human. For instance, when materialism leads men to complete fatalism (as it generally does), it is quite idle to pretend that it is in any sense a liberating force. It is absurd to say that you are especially advancing freedom when you only use free thought to destroy free will. The determinists come to bind, not to loose. They may well call their law the “chain” of causation. It is the worst chain that ever fettered a human being. You may use the language of liberty, if you like, about materialistic teaching, but it is obvious that this is just as inapplicable to it as a whole as the same language when applied to a man locked up in a mad-house. You may say, if you like, that the man is free to think himself a poached egg. But it is surely a more massive and important fact that if he is a poached egg he is not free to eat, drink, sleep, walk, or smoke a cigarette. Similarly you may say, if you like, that the bold determinist speculator is free to disbelieve in the reality of the will. But it is a much more massive and important fact that he is not free to raise, to curse, to thank, to justify, to urge, to punish, to resist temptations, to incite mobs, to make New Year resolutions, to pardon sinners, to rebuke tyrants, or even to say “thank you” for the mustard.

In passing from this subject I may note that there is a queer fallacy to the effect that materialistic fatalism is in some way favourable to mercy, to the abolition of cruel punishments or punishments of any kind. This is startlingly the reverse of the truth. It is quite tenable that the doctrine of necessity makes no difference at all; that it leaves the flogger flogging and the kind friend exhorting as before. But obviously if it stops either of them it stops the kind exhortation. That the sins are inevitable does not prevent punishment; if it prevents anything it prevents persuasion. Determinism is quite as likely to lead to cruelty as it is certain to lead to cowardice. Determinism is not inconsistent with the cruel treatment of criminals. What it is (perhaps) inconsistent with is the generous treatment of criminals; with any appeal to their better feelings or encouragement in their moral struggle. The determinist does not believe in appealing to the will, but he does believe in changing the environment. He must not say to the sinner, “Go and sin no more,” because the sinner cannot help it. But he can put him in boiling oil; for boiling oil is an environment.
–– Orthodoxy, ch. 2.