God's Dachshund, Part I - Gotterdammerung of the Whistleblowers

Not So Crazy After All.

Idling through the blogsphere over the holidays, I was taken aback by a picture of Pope Benedict XVI captioned “total evil”. Such an excoriation seemed excessive even given the invective that often substitutes for criticism of Church policy.

Even before his election as pope, Cardinal Ratzinger had been the butt of superficial and hostile reporting, particularly in the United States and England. He has routinely been described as “God’s Rottweiler,” head of the “Inquisition” and lastly as the “Nazi Pope”. These epithets did not appear only in some issue-focused rag but in the mainline media as well, although the latter often hid their glee behind the excuse (worn out by the fifth grade) that they were only reporting what the class was saying. In all events, the people who wrote this stuff were either ignorant of or intentionally ignored the underlying historical or theological dynamics at work. They wanted results and if the results weren’t what they wanted they resorted to insult.

I confess to having been one of the crowd albeit not quite as adamant. When “Ratzo” (as i called him) was first elected, I was of the opinion that he was certifiably insane. But I arrived at this opinion with very little knowledge of his career and basically relying on the sources I have mentioned.

I have since concluded that Benedict is a very intelligent and educated man -- a much more interesting figure than the peripatetic bimbo that preceded him. He has written two encyclicals (one on Love and the other on Hope) which reflect a spirit that is both intellectual and compassionate.

Both these encyclicals are rich with erudition and cannot be digested at a single sitting. Moreover, Benedict does not seek to narrow his focus but rather to stretch his topic so as to cover as wide a compass as possible without loosing coherence. I have the sense that this style of panoramic analysis is intentional and that the Pope is, with the time left him, seeking to reposition the Church for the future. It behooves his would be critics to listen to what he has to say. To that end I would like to attempt a brief and partial synopsis of some small portion of his thought.

A Cloud of Understanding

The greatest impediment to understanding what Benedict (or any pope for that matter) has to say is to approaching the subject matter with a protestant mind-set. Protestantism is founded, most fundamentally, on subjective individual interpretation and hence personal choice. Catholicism is not. Simply put, for Catholics the question is not: What do I believe that I want done? but rather, What do we believe that I must do? No less a rationalist and skeptic than Montaigne acceded to the magisterium of the Church not on the grounds that he had concluded it was true but rather for the reason that he could not trust his own sense that it was not. This approach has something to do, I think, with humility.

The second impediment to understanding what Benedict might be saying is a general lack of familiarity, particularly in predominantly protestant cultures, with the catholic conversational context. It is a truism that all meaning is contextual. Just as the color perceived depends on the lighting, so the sense of words depends on their frame of reference. Any assessment of what Benedict has to say requires some understanding of the ambiance and language in which he is required to speak.

No pope can simply say what he wants. A pope, like a Supreme Court justice, works within a given framework of precedents -- in the Church’s case a “structure” that has been contributed to and built up by thousands of people over thousands of years -- mystics, artists, theologians, philosophers, musicians, architects, poets. The Church itself is constrained today by what has been said before.

This does not mean change is not possible. Just as the legal rule of stare decisis does not equate with decisional stasis, so the Church has never equated “tradition” with “changelessness” but rather with a process of slow adaptation and evolution. However, this openness to change can also not be equated with a practical purpose of simply keeping up with the circumstances or, even less, with some variant of majority rule. Rather, the Church’s concept of an evolving tradition is rooted in its concept of God’s Revelation.

Whereas Protestants regard the Bible as the single inerrant source of God’s Word, the Catholic Church has always insisted that God’s Revelation is not limited to Sacred Scripture but unfolds just as truly through the actual and ongoing understanding and practice of the Whole Faithful. To hold otherwise would be to deny that we are in an actual, living, communion with the Divinity who works with us and through us presently, and not simply through an instruction manual written millennia past.

In the catholic view, there is no hard and fast Sacred Geometry but rather the Bible itself is a reflection of an ongoing, unfolding and not ostensibly consistent understanding of His people. As Ratzinger noted in 1986, “It is quite true that the Biblical literature owes to the different epochs in which it was written a good deal of its varied patterns of thought and expression.”

At the same time that varied “collective understanding” of the Faithful is not simply a matter of majoritarian opinion on any given day. If it were, there would be nothing to distinguish Revelation from mere impulse and passion. In the catholic view, “faith” is essentially a trans-temporal collective experience. One could say, that in formulating that Consensus of the Faithful which is deemed to reflect God’s Revelation, everyone, including those who have spoken and since died, still have a say in what the truth is. Where existential issues of faith and morals are concerned, the question is not why doesn’t the Church say this or do that but rather: how do we move our Cloud of Understanding from one place to another?

Nudging the Cloud

Benedict’s writings thus far reflect an acute awareness of the tradition in which he operates. However, he does not content himself with citing one or two biblical or theological precedents that support and make a particular point. To be sure, he quotes chapter and verse and invokes “ol’ reliables” like Augustine and Thomas. But he also quotes and talks to pagan philosophers, atheists, emperors, Protestants, economists and just about anyone who has ever peeped up in the multi-part dialogue we call the Western Tradition.

This, eclectic and encompassing method is noteworthy in and of itself because it operates ecumenically at an inceptional level. Benedict is a Catholic and is, in the first instance, addressing his co-religionists. But he invites into the discussion, and would have his readers consider, what pre-Christians, non-Catholics and even ideological opponents have to say. He does not write anyone off or out on mere factional grounds; and his first encyclical revealed a professorial style which tacitly admitted that we all have had something to say.

Published shortly after becoming Pope, Benedict's first encyclical was on Love (Deus est Caritas.) “This should be a belly of yawns,” I thought. But as I started to read, I was impressed by his erudition and by the gentleness with which wrote. Even more astonishing was the fact that he began by talking about erotic love.

There has been a strong tendency in Christianity generally to distinguish between eros (sticky, icky, bad love) and agape or philion (clean, pure, good, spiritual love). It is a psychological dichotomy which although rejected by some mystics gets reinforced by the morality brigades and has been responsible for much grief, as Wagner recounted with wrenching poignancy in Tannhauser.

Confronting the issue squarely, Benedict acknowledged Nietzsche’s accusation that Christianity had “poisoned” eros. Is that perhaps not true? he asked. “Doesn't the Church blow the whistle just when the joy which is the Creator's gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?”

Whoa! What kind of pope questions whether we should be calling the ol’ time out on a hot and steamy foretaste of Heaven? I read on.

Benedict then launched into a broad review of pagan, old testament and modern attitudes about love during the course of which he saw fit to bring up (of all things) Plato’s Symposium -- that famous homo-erotic wine fest in which Alcibiades professed his eros for Socrates and Socrates his philion for Alcibiades -- or maybe it was the other way around. Although Benedict laid off those particulars, he felt it important to allude to “the myth” (recounted at the feast by the comic playwright, Aristophanes) that humans had originally been two-headed, four-legged spheres, until Zeus grew wroth and split us in two, causing us ever after to seek out our missing half. "And so," Aristophanes concluded, “when we at last find our other half, we are so happy that we clasp one another, never let go and become inseparable parts of our original selves.” But, as any classicist knows, in Aristophanes’ myth there were originally three spherical genders: man-man, woman-woman and male-female. I was left at once smiling and dumbfounded. “No! He can’t possibly be....”

No; he can’t. I think it would be gross mistake to conclude that Benedict was endorsing Greek Love sub silentio. But it would be an equal mistake to ignore what I think is a conscious attempt to unembarrass the conversation and to make a more fundamental point about human affection.

At the Symposium, Aristophanes’ myth was either the first or second “offering” on the nature of love. The ensuing offerings were of an “ascending” nature and concluded with a monologue by Socrates on divine love and friendship. Thus, the division between eros and agape finds its roots (or at least its pretext) not so much in Christianity as in Plato. But where one would have expected a pope to launch into a true but tired reminder of the virtues of philion, love of Christ and Fellow Man etc. etc., Benedict saw fit to dredge up the tale of human balls in erotic unity. He did so in order to “clarify” that it was off the mark to try to separate eros from agape

“The more the two, in their different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more the true nature of love in general is realized. Even if it [eros] is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and wants to “be there for” the other. The element of eros thus enters into this [“higher”] love...” and vice versa.

In so writing, Benedict did us a liberating service by reminding the whistle blowers that we should not view our erotic impulses as dirty and alien but rather as natural and integral to our personal maturation precisely because physical enjoyment is part of the “process” of spiritual perfection.

No doubt there are many who have come to this conclusion without the aid of Benedictine intervention. But in terms of the Church’s teaching, Benedict has clearly sought to push it out from the shadows of Puritanism into a view of life that accepts our incarnation as natural, salutary and organic with our spiritual development.

Just as intriguingly, his endorsement of eros shifted the Church’s sexual doctrine out from under the mechanics of teleological conditionality. The Church has never disapproved of physical sex, per se but it has approved of it as God’s physical tease and trick to get us to procreate. There have always been problems with this approach not least of which is the absurdity of expecting people to cultivate the correct intentionality by thinking about babies while having sex. Even worse, if sex is “redeemed” by its procreative function, what are we to say about sex after menopause? And if sex after menopause is permitted for straights why not sex before baldness for gays? Certainly, there are no limits to God’s ability to instigate procreative miracles. To be sure, Benedict does not reprove or discount the functional role of sex in procreation. That too would be absurd. But the whole discussion is broadened and shifted when sex is seen as the tease and trick to get us to care for one another.

Clouding the Issue

After reading his letter on Love, I began asking around among people who do theology for a living. “Wasn’t Ratzo responsible for declaring homosexuality to be an “intrinsic disorder”? Actually not; that phrase came from a pre-existing declaration. What Ratzinger did (in 1986) was issue a letter, as head of the Congregation for Doctrine and Faith, that “clarified” that prior declaration. What people in the gay and general media have ignored was that this “clarification” came loaded with equivocations and weasel words. Ratzinger began by stating what appeared to be an outright self-contradiction:

“ Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.”

Well is it a sin or not? Not. In a convoluted sentence he switched terms. The inclination is not a sin but should be considered a disorder. Such a statement, howsoever convoluted in its wording, unmistakably shifted the issue from morals to psychology. Indeed, Ratzinger followed up with an acknowledgement that the sciences “have their own legitimate ... methodology” and that the Church was “in a position to learn from scientific discovery.”

It would seem, then, that in “condemning” homosexuality as a disorder, Ratzinger at the same time lobbed the whole issue into the psychologists’ court. But in the ensuing sentence he backed off and played the ol “morals trumps science” card. On the other hand, he wrote, the Church’s “moral authority” allowed it “to transcend [i.e., “ignore”] the horizons of science....”

So do we transcend or not? Who knows. “Naturally, an exhaustive treatment of this complex issue cannot be attempted here, but we will focus our reflection within the distinctive context of the Catholic moral perspective....”

In other words, homosexuality is a psychological disorder... a very complex issue which we haven’t got time to go into...so we’ll content ourselves by summarizing our purely moral perspective as it has been up to the present. The lawyer in me had to laugh. This was hardly the Blast of the Whistleblowers.

Now, either ol’ Ratzo was the village idiot who didn’t realize what a leaky row-boat he had launched or he is very smart and was doing something like walking on water. As evidenced by his letter on Love, he is certainly not stupid.

I was told, by my “sources” that the letter was designed to appease conservatives, principally among them John Paul II who was champing to issue a clear and unmistakable papal condemnation of unnatural sin in no uncertain terms eins fur alle mal! Apparently, the “Rottweiler” persuaded him that it would be sufficient to simply sign off on a Letter he would write as head of the Congregation. The letter ends with an almost off-handed imprimatur, and while not meaningless, is of much lower authority-value than had it been issued as a papal declaration. The letter’s bark was far stronger than its bite.

Undoubtedly the 1986 letter contained language which is disappointing and hurtful to gays. But much of the reactive criticism among “liberal” and “gay” interests groups has not been attuned to the subtleties of the jargon. For example, in theological lingo, “chaste” does not mean “celibate”. Thus, when the letter called for homosexuals to be “chaste” it was actually holding back from ordering them to be celibate. Not only was this distinction lost on most critics, they also seem to have overlooked that the instance could be argued as conceding the legitimacy in principle of homosexual “couples” in the first place.

It would beg too much to read some sort of tacit approval of homosexual sex into the letter. The point is rather that, despite hurtful language, Ratzinger made an unmistakable effort to refrain from doing what it would have been very simple to do. To dance The Falwell, all he had to say was: We condemn the sin; we love the sinner. But he clearly did not clearly say that.

All this may seem maddeningly slow to those who demand, and need, validation in their lifetime. But one cannot expect an elephant to hop like a fly. No pope could waltz in and reverse the Church’s position on any topic overnight. Such a “shocker” reversal would not last long and would be discarded as an aberration within a few years. Instead, by adjusting points of departure and reworking foundations, Benedict apparently seeks to achieve a subtler but more solid legacy.

©WCG, 2008