God's Dachshund, Part IV - Facing A New Dark Age

Dixeunt Pontificati

Although the mainstream press gives relatively little coverage to the pope in any substantive way, Benedict is something of a cult object in the Net Press and Blogosphere. Whereas his predecessor drew throngs of illiterates, Benedict seems to draw a multitude from those of us who think we have something to say.

Reading the disparate opinions of the pontificati it is hard to believe that they are talking about the same man. Benedict has been excoriated at once as a pro-gay, pantheist and as a “polarizing,” homophobic, “theo-con” leading a “papal caravan winding back to the Dark Ages”.

Criticism from the Left comes mostly from outside the Church and from those who have little knowledge of or interest in the Church’s historical and doctrinal development. In utilitarian fashion these external critics regard the Church as simply a political agency which they praise or criticise in accordance as it promotes their own social or political agendas. Invariably, the utilitarians are short on gratitude when the Church helps out and long on vitriol when it doesn’t.

Just as often, the vitriol becomes inflamed from other motives, as when Ratzinger is accused of being a “theological anti-semite” (London Times Apr. 18, 2005) and a Nazi. These calumnies are usually tied into rote accusations against the Church as an active collaborator with the Nazi regime.

Such virulence betrays a malign animus feeding off an historical ignorance that is oblivious to Bismarck's anti-Catholic kulturkampf, the notorious kanzelparagraf and the Nazi threat to “coordinate” the Church into the State apparatus. It ignores the Catholic Center opposition to Nazism, and the fact that the most visible resistance to the regime came from the White Rose, a Catholic inspired student resistance whose martyred members resisted precisely because they had been in the Hitler Youth, the Labor Corps and Wehrmacht and saw, through the “fog of empty phrases,” the “unspeakable crimes” being committed.

Young Ratzinger’s family was in the center-progressive Catholic tradition. His great uncle, George Ratzinger, (1844-1899) had been a priest, economist, social reformer, and politician who saw the gospel and Catholic social teaching as a means of empowering the poor. There can be little doubt, the Ratzingers took to heart Pius XI’s anathema against Nazi ideology as anti-Christian, racial idolatry. If the teenage Ratzinger “joined” the Hitler Youth, it was because it was by then obligatory and if he manned an anti-aircraft battalion it was because the Allies were committing the war crime of terror bombing civilians.

Benedict’s own writings are so far removed from “theological anti-semitism” as to make one wonder just exactly what sordid agenda the Times was pursuing.

“Christian faith has retained the core of Israel's faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth.” (Deus Caritas Est, § 1)

Just as heatedly but less viciously Benedict has been excoriated from conservatives within the Church as a crypto progressive who solidly supported the liberal errors of John Paul II concerning “religious liberty, counciliar ecumenism, collegiality, unity of the Church, and feminism” and who now appoints pro-gay cardinals to the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, invites rabbis to his installation, and makes overtures to Infidels while seeking to “establish a pan-religion where all men, believers or not, are brought together into a single universal church.”

Says one conservative voice,

“Finally, let me remind you, ... that it was Cardinal Ratzinger who worked tirelessly for suppression of the Fatima message.... [and] even went so far as to suggest that the vision of Hell Our Lady showed the children on July 13 might have been the active imagination of children...”

To which a Catholic liberal rejoins,

“One of the joys of reading Ratzinger is spotting how often he subtly tiptoes away from John Paul's obsessions: it would be surprising if we were to hear any more about Fatima during this pontificate, and there will be no more talk of Mary as "Co-Redemptrix" of humanity.”

Casting into the outer heap those calumnies which are the deformed progeny of ignorance and resentment, the principle difference between the liberals critics outside the Church and conservatives within is that the former focus on social issues while being ignorant of theological ones, whereas the latter obsess on liturgy, doctrine and personal morality while being indifferent to socio-economic inequities.

Nevertheless, through this fog of epithets and accusations, the more serious question remains: who is Benedict and what does he stand for?

Whether Benedict is a “liberal” or a “conservative” or perhaps something else, is not a question of labels but of understanding the tasks facing his papacy and the intended direction of his ministry. As I shall attempt to explain, Benedict is a radical reactionary who is girding the Church to confront a new dark age.

This characterization rejects the “conservative” and “liberal” labels as trivial and largely irrelevant to what Benedict is about. While he is not indifferent to the concerns of these factions and while he has engaged in some subtle and not so subtle re-positionings to accommodate them, his focus goes beyond their immediate objects of desire.

Benedict is not happy with condition of Church and is even less sanguine about the direction of humankind has taken. He sees the Church as being an agent for a fundamental re-civilizing of humanity and, to gird the Church for this missionary task, he has to effect a theological consensus between liberals and conservatives within the Church.

Similarly, Benedict’s outreach to the Muslim world was more than a diplomatic attempt to make peace with our supposed “enemies”. While it was that, it was also a call to non-Christian religions to collaborate with the Church in fashioning a common religious and spiritual response to the pathological secularism Benedict feels is threatening to consume mankind.

What specifically is the nature of this world-saving mission and what are the parameters of the consensus? In other words, what is the Church’s historical role today and what is that role’s theological basis?

To answer that question and to understand the nature of Benedict’s reactionary radicalism it is necessary, howsoever inadequately, to provide some gross sketch of the Church’s historical and theological development over the past two millennia.

--o0o--

The Three Ages of the Church

With respect to that ongoing “conversation” that constitutes the historical tradition of the Church we can begin by saying, as a matter of convenience, that there are three churches within the Catholic identity: the Medieval church, the Tridentine church and the Vatican II church. Each of these churches represented a more or less distinct and cohesive ecclesiastical response to a world-historical phenomenon.

Civitate Dei

In popular imagination the Medieval Church is conjured up as some witches’ brew of funereal sounding chant, joyless superstition, persecution and torture. This image flows from a misconception of the Middle Ages itself. Without doubt, the Middle Ages was a time of tremendous upheaval and rustification of life; but contrary to the orthodoxy of Voltairian Canards, they were not a time of darkness and stagnation. On the contrary, spanning roughly from the fourth century to the 15th, the Middle Ages were a time of great ideological ferment and cultural innovation. It was the Roman Empire that had stagnated becoming at once culturally moribund and politically oppressive. The Middle Ages although born in violence, disorganization and economic disruption also brought freedom and an attempt to approach life with new (and improved) values.

The early Church Fathers certainly saw it that way. In Augustine’s view, the Empire had served as a “vessel” for the spread of the Gospel. It had united East and West in prosperity and peace and Christianity had spread through its networks of roads and dioceses. Now the rotten husk was falling away as the flower of a new and higher consciousness emerged. Augustine’s vision of a new City of God was not the voice of darkness and despair but of hope and enlightenment.

This vision was not a day-dream but a call to mission. The Church well understood that, oppressive and sterile as the pagan world had become, it still stood for civilization -- for cities, for bureaucracies, for merchants. The collapse of this structure required a new structure in its place. The Church understood as well that whether the onslaughting germanic tribes were Christian or not, they needed to be civis-lized; i.e. brought into the structure of a larger, ordered social life. The Church could take over public administration, it could preserve and transmit elements of classical culture but amid the demographic maelstrom and economic collapse it had to recreate the image of society. It did so, in great measure, by living in the present its hope for the “city” to come. Spe salvi .

There were three salient characteristics of the Medieval church. The first was its great diversity of customs and liturgies under the aegis of a universal (“katolicos”) City of God. This cultural diversity was the necessary result of both immigration flows and the re-localization of social life. It represented an improvement; for the Empire, like all monolithic states, had imposed an “official” culture on the homogenized mediteranean world. Today we admire the ruins of arches and arenas in stretching from Toledo to Tunis to Turkey, but even as early as the waning days of the Republic, Cicero had sighed in despair, “Everywhere is Rome.” And everywhere the Roman Mall. The “international style” in stone was a reflection of the “international style” in everything else, at least for the Romanized “international middle class.” There were manuals on everything from what to say on such and such an occasion to what to “know” at cocktail parties. But, in fact, there had hardly been an innovation in anything in 300 years, which was itself 300 years removed from the cultural glories of Periclean Athens. The classical world had become the proverbial white-washed sepulchre. The relocalization of life brought forth an explosion of released creativity full of color and humor, from Byzantine mosaics, to Visigothic tableaux (above) to naked monkeys on capitals of columns to gargoyles, tapestries and stained glass. There was nothing dark about it.

The second salient characteristic of the Medieval Church was a profound and, in the end excessive, reverence for language (“the word”) which, to medieval eyes, had a near magical power to bring order to chaos, to still violence and to resolve conflict. Our ingratitude to the Middle Ages is astonishing. It is to them that we owe our constructs of classical logic, of the seven liberal arts, of legal due process, of propertied relations and perhaps most fundamentally, of the dualism between the “ideal” and the material. While all of these ideas had roots in Greek philosophy, the Middle Ages erected new edifices on old cornerstones, and these new structures are still the girders of our consciousness today. The Middle Ages fused Celto-Germanic notions and Judeo-Babylonian lore into Greek rationalism. Sometimes, a phallic monkey on a pole was the better result of the day, but through trial and error, the Middle Ages was our becoming.

This is not to say that the Middle Age was what it was not. It was a period of transmutation in which there were pockets of grotesque violence and abysmal ignorance. But it was also a time of practical invention and ideological synthesis. Although it never found how to make gold from lead, it gave us the wheelbarrow, the stirrup, the horse-collar and horseshoes, the rudder, compass, astrolabe, sundial, mechanical clock, spinning wheel, windmills and spectacles, to say nothing of stronger and improved plows -- practical things which were indispensable steps toward our modern technological empiricism.

The Imperial Foot

Last but not least, medieval man contemplated the Crucifix and this perhaps was the greatest contribution of the Middle Ages. Let no one laugh. The Romans thought nothing -- absolutely nothing -- of crucifying 30,000 Iberians or 70,000 Spartacists. For all his cruelties and barbarisms, medieval man never forgot that precisely because God had become the lowest of the low and had suffered the torture of the damned, every man, the least and the dirtiest of these, had a god redeemed dignity. A Caesar would never stoop to wash the feet of beggars. Voltaire could sneer all he wont, but the idea of inherent human dignity was not a gift of the Enlightenment.

If the Middle Ages is properly reassessed as a time of actual and real progress, this was due in great and substantial measure to the efforts of the Church -- of church men and women -- who guided, instructed and gave shape to this new civilization and whose last great thinkers, such as Vittoria and Suarez, brought us up to the line of the Renaissance and the modern world -- that Novus Organum which was breached in violence and gave rise to the Tridentine church.

Trent

The Tridentine Church, in which I include the imperial papal monarchy immediately preceding the Reformation and continuing on up to the World War (II) was almost the very the opposite of the Medieval Church. The social upheaval wrought by the Protestant insurrection was almost as cataclysmic as the Germanic invasions of the Fifth Century. The death and destruction that attended the Reformation wars certainly rivaled that of the Norman and Hunnish furies. Faced with this new historical crisis, the Church retreated behind the ramparts.

Protestantism based itself on a “return” to “the Bible” from and on the basis of which divines cobbled their theologies-- every man his own best Euclid. The misbegotten idea was that there was some blessed begin-state known as the Original Christian, the closer to which one got, the closer one got to Jesus. The Catholic Church could never espouse such a belief because it could never disavow her Sacred Tradition -- that is, that part of Revelation which is revealed through the ongoing life and learning of the whole faithful; that part of God’s Plan that had brought about the destruction of Rome and inspired the building of a new city. To claim otherwise would be to deny that God was present (and up to something) in the here and now.

But while not denying tradition, the Church sought rationalise it -- to delineate proper deductions, relationships between the parts, and lines of authority. The Council(s) of Trent promoted liturgical uniformity, rationalism, a certain staid gloominess passing for spirituality, and a gradual if never complete judaicising of hellenic traditions. This esprit de geometrie turned religious life into a collection of canons, indictions and prescriptions commonly, if somewhat inaccurately, referred to as the Syllabus.

In subtle ways the Church become protestantized even as she sought to immunize herself from the infection. Tridentine rationalism reflected an assumed opposition (non existent in the feudal world) between “reason” and “faith.” Trent managed the unique gymnastic of distrusting reason and doubting faith at the same time. Not surprisingly, the Council's teachings are as uplifting and inspiring as a penal code. The ultimate result was a kind of aesthetic sterility. It is equally unsurprising that intellectual vitality passed to the Great Secularists like Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Marx. And it is hardly surprising that after a brilliant dying flare in the Renaissance, Church art slowly decayed into embarrassing kitsch.

Politics was soon to follow. In the wake of the Enlightenment, the Napoleonic Wars and an emergent liberal nationalism, the Church which had once taken over governance from Rome was reduced to a mere social organization within the new secular state, although from place to place was supported in order to prop up the State.

It was in reaction to the formulaicness of the “Syllabus” that Vatican II took place. However, in order to put that great Council into proper context it is necessary to digress again and to briefly touch upon the crisis that confronted humanity upon the demise of burgertum at the close of the 19th century.

(Great Mobilizations)

In the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War the Prussian Court and General Staff fretted that the envisioned casualty rate would be so great as to trigger a revolution on the home front. All through the century casualty rates had been increasing, not simply in absolute numbers but, more frighteningly, in the rapidity of the carnage. In the event, the casualties of the war were severe amounting to about 50,000 soldiers in five weeks of war. But there was no revolution. The Mass Society had been born.

The rise of the mass state and the ensuing great slaughters made it evident that the Church could not continue on in simply in the safety of the Tridentine Canons. It needed to reach out, speak to and galvanize the masses, especially since those very same masses were being galvanized by the likes of Lenin, Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler.

It was Cardinal Pacelli, later Pius XII, who first recognized that, in this new world of mass mobilizations, the Church was not a player unless she too could gather up her sheep. Given that the Church was still a monarchy whose Vicar was bound by protocols, Cardinal Pacelli became the first peripatetic and charismatic “pre-Pope” travelling the globe in and drawing huge crowds at mass rallies from Argentina (below, 1934) to Germany. The Church had once again become a player.

But what hand to play? The difficulty was that the Church’s social doctrine, Rerum Novarum (1891), had essentially been co-opted or was itself a copy of social democratic, state-socialist and fascist programs. Aside from irredentist Communists in the east and diehard Liberal capitalists in the U.S., everyone accepted the propositions of regulated economy, class cooperation, and guarantees of social welfare. As a result, the “counter-mobilization” while it served to protect Church prerogatives did little to provide a particularly Christian vision for the masses themselves, apart from “moral renewal” and a subjective spiritual focus.

Following the disaster of the World War (II), it was clear that the Church had failed in the mobilization game. Pius XII died in despair, saying shortly before his death that mankind had fashioned a tombstone over itself that it did not have the strength to remove.

Vatican II

His successor, Pope John XXIII, did not share that pessimism. While he understood that the Church had arrived at a deadlock, “We feel we must disagree with those prophets of gloom, who are always forecasting disaster, as though the end of the world were at hand.” On what is said to have been a sudden inspiration, he called for a Second Vatican Council.

The essentially practical intent of John XXIII was to bring greater openness and aggiornamento (updating) to the Church. By this, he most definitely did not mean doctrinal reform. The issue in his mind was rather a pastoral objective to more effectively bring doctrinal vitality to the people and the people into more active participation in the Church.

“Mother Church earnestly desires that all the faithful should be led to that fully conscious and active participation in liturgical celebrations which is demanded by the very nature of the liturgy.”

But the very language of aggiornamento -- implied doctrinal widening. Indeed, in his opening address, John XXIII, cribbed from liberal theologians and asserted that,

“Divine Providence is leading us to a new order of human relations which, by men's own efforts and even beyond their very expectations, are directed toward the fulfillment of God's superior and inscrutable designs.”

And not just “us” Catholics. In Lumen Gentium, John wrote that “many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible confines." To which the next logical question was: How far out?

Pretty far, although with less than felicitous results. To regain the spontaneity and diversity of the medieval church, Vatican II substituted a formula of spontaneity which of course was a contradiction in terms. The result was typical of the cultural mindset of the Sixties: ignorance passing off as relevance, vulgarity passing off as spontaneity. While many Catholics might have welcomed an easing up on Tridentine formulas, they were equally appalled by the banality into which the liturgy was reduced.

At the same time, the many social activists came to look upon the Church as an agent for social change morphing organized charity, into political activism, and this again into “revolution”. The Church can certainly not be suffered to claim that is “removed” from active politics, and when such claims are made it is usually by the hierarchy in “support-the-State” mode. But the difficulty with the way the political question arose in the Sixties was that there was no coherence in what the Church’s position was or should be. The Church Political became a mobilization of individuals and groups wrapping themselves in the church’s mantel. While that ad hoc lay initiative has never been prohibited it has always been problematic.

In large measure, this activism was as harmless as it was trivial; particularly in the bourgeois West where the activism related to issues which, when they were not outrightly self-indulgent, were “ameliorative” rather than fundamental.

Latin American Liberation Theology was quite another matter. By interpreting the special option for the poor (“The poor shall inherit the Earth”) as implicating revolutionary action, the Liberationists appeared to be opening the door - if not explicitly calling for -- violence and class violence against fellow Catholics.

However, although Liberation Theology was propounded in the Sixties it had little to do with Vatican II. It was rather an outgrowth of the millenarian experience and traditions of the Church in Hispanic America, where elements within the Church (usually one or another monastic order) had always been active in founding parallel utopian societies and instigating revolutions. This movement and the theology on which it is based are a separate and peculiarly hemispheric phenomenon outside the broad outlines being drawn here.

As for the heady days Vatican II, it did not take long for there to be a morning after. From both left and right there was a recognition by 1978 that Vatican II had been a failure. The proof was the fruit (or lack of it). Participation far from increasing began to shrink. Likewise the orders and the priesthood fell off attracting novices. The “liturgical reforms” were such a disaster that the services in a Calvinist conventicle were more inspiring the average mass of twanging guitars or embarrassed parishioners croaking out simplistic hymns. Aggiornamento became equated with “relevance” which was simply a by-word for whatever any person subjectively felt was “important” to him or her -- all of which in the end, was simply another outbreak of Protestantism.

It is hardly surprising that faced with what can only be seen as a crisis, the conservative and liberal voices were at odds. Conservatives: We told you so. Bring back the Syllabus and the Tridentine Mass. Liberals:: You didn’t go far enough. No aggiornamento without gay marriage and women priests. If this seems utterly trite and superficial, one can only say that, alas, it is.

The crisis was masked for 25 years by the crowd-drawing hysterics of John Paul II. Impressive as these events were, the true strength of the Church does not derive from Roman spectacles. Pope Benedict put the best possible spin on Vatican II’s failure, saying that good seed is “slow in developing.” Forty years on and one might as well give up watering a stick.

It was in this sorry state that the Church entered into the Third Millennium and the keys to the kingdom were handed to Joseph Ratzinger.

Grotesquely inadequate as this thumbnail summary of two millennia of church history may be, it provides a necessary historical spectrum for measuring Benedict’s position and direction.

People who deride Ratzinger as a “conservative” fail to understand that he was a protegé and later the protector, of liberal theologians behind Vatican-II. Those who excoriate him as a pantheistic liberal fail to grasp how radically reactionary he is.

Benedict’s place and role within the context of Church history and issues is fraught with ambiguities and perhaps contradiction. On one point, the conservatives are correct: there is no reason to think that Benedict desires to revert to the Syllabus. Benedict’s rehabilitation of the “Latin” mass was less a ploy to bring back the Tridentine Church than it was a recognition that the liturgical reforms of Vatican II had proved to be a colossal flop. In the end, it simply made no sense to “outlaw” a form of liturgy which the Church had used for five hundred years and which still gratified many. Benedict certainly wants to reincorporate these “traditionalists” into the Church, but he has no intention of reinstating a tridentine conservatism.

On the other side, the liberals are wrong to assert that Benedict has “rejected” Vatican II. He has sought to restrain what he considers meanderings into wholesale relativism, but there is no reason to doubt his own protestations that he continues to accept the Council’s two cardinal aims of revitalization and aggiornamento. The real question is: what does oggi really demand? The answer to this question is the key to understanding what Benedict is about.

In my view, Benedict is driven by the conviction that today we stand at the abyss of a new Dark Age and aggiornamento requires the Church to respond to the crisis as it did 1700 years past. This should not be mistakenly thought of as call to “return” to the Medieval Church. Such an “originalist” intent, aside from being un-catholic, would be patently absurd. Instead, Benedict wants to rekindle the socio-moral missionary fervor that animated the Sixth Century Benedictine monks at the dawn of a Brave New World.

Ora et Laboro

That mission looked backward and forward at the same time. The Benedictine monks stood with their backs to an old world order that for all its degeneracy and corruption was still the repository of learning, commerce and civilized life They faced uncouth barbarians who so admired Rome that they wanted to posses all she had. For all that, their undisciplined energy had the potential to revitalize a civilization that was spent. The Benedictine motto Ora et Laboro -- Work and Pray -- summarized the task. One could pithily say that the old world needed to be taught the value of work and the new, the necessity for prayer. If the Barbarians needed to be taught that indulgence wasn’t everything, the Romans needed to be taught that work was not “what slaves did” but was a noble in itself -- a value which Benedict says which was “inherited from Judaism.”

Although the Benedictines did in fact venture forth into the bogs and forests of Germany “converting” the heathen to both “work” and “prayer” they are symbolic of what the Church as whole did at this time. Benedict’s encyclicals and remarks repeatedly allude to the role of the mendicant and monastic orders in shaping Christian civilization by living the Christian life.

Benedict emphatically rejects conceiving of faith as a retreat into the subjective monastery of one. Spe Salvi is clear that faith is social and cannot be experienced in isolation. For Benedict, the monastic orders are paradigms of faith both with respect to the communal life within their walls and their life with the communities outside them. With this paradigm in mind, one could say, the Benedict conceives of faith as a special kind of political action that Catholics must be prepared and willing to live out today the hope for tomorrow.

But before the Church can meet this task, it must regain its own coherence. For Catholics faith has always been a question of “what must we believe” not “what do I have a right to believe.” Thus for Benedict the question is not whether to let loose Christian activists, but rather to define what Christian activism is. As much as bridging past and future and connecting East and West, Benedict has to reunite liberals and conservatives within the Church itself. If that fault line is not sealed, the Church will schism at the first difficulty.

Characterizing Benedict as a conservative or liberal overlooks the synthesizing role he has undertaken and must play. In a sense, he has been preparing for this synthesis all of his life because what I have described as the Medieval and Vatican II churches represent the two poles of modern Catholic theology and Joseph Ratzinger intimately collaborated with both the “modernist” theologian Karl Rahner and the “medievalist” theologian Hans Uhr Von Balthasar. Benedict’s encyclicals and remarks have thus far operated at two levels. First as a kind of homily on how the life of Christian love and faith are lived, and second, interwoven with the homily, as a con-synthesis of these two theological perspectives.

Here and Now

Karl Rahner was perhaps the most impactive 20th century Catholic theologian as his writings, provided the original basis for much of Vatican II. Rahner was a Jesuit and, at the outset, a Thomist. His theological point of departure was St. Ignatius’ dictum that God was to be found in all things; and thus, in Rahner’s view, God was to be found even in an atheist’s denial of God.

This conclusion was somewhat the inverse of the Muslim view that God was so transcendent he could command idolatry. But whereas Ibn Hazn had held that such a command would prove how God was beyond everything, Rahner moved in the other direction. The task, he wrote, was not to stand dumb before His Beyondness but to understand how the infinite and transcendental could interface with the finite and actual; i.e. , what it meant to say that God became Man.

Rahner took the view that God’s offer of salvation was his self-communicating acceptance of salvation. According to him, God’s “self-communication” meant,

“that we must say of man here and now that he participates in God’s being; that he has been given the divine Spirit who fathoms the depths of God; that he is already God’s son here and now.”

Put in somewhat Hegelian terms, our existence is God’s contemplating (and actualizing) himself through us as a medium.

In the Rahnerian view, the joys and sorrows of Christ’s own dying and rising in the quotidian made up what Rahner called a “liturgy of the world.” The mysteries of the Incarnation and Grace unfolded into every dimension of human life leading to a “theology of everyday things” --a theology of work, of seeing, of laughing, of eating and sleeping, of walking and sitting. There was an echo of St. Benedict in this. Ora et Laboro, became Ora est Laboro (which is indeed a common gloss on Saint Benedict’s motto).

There were also dollops of optimism. As they say, “If God is with us, who can stand against us?” If God was in everything -- and in the 20th century “everything” was quite a disaster -- then in spite of all the horrors, despite all the affirmative denials of The Good, God was at our side, leading us forward. Pope John’s statement about a divinely operated new order of things clearly echoed this Rahnerian optimism.

But optimistic as Rahner’s anthropological theology might be, it had definite weak points, the first of which was that it implicated pantheism. (Syllabus Error No. 1) There is nothing wrong with pantheism, it is just not Christianity (as we've heard conservatives complaining). It can also be seen how “God is here and now” could be easily twisted into a post Vatican II, hippiesque theology of vulgarity.

Rahner’s God-in-All theology also led to the Christian acceptance of Non Christianity. Lumen Gentium's notion that “sanctification and of truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible confines” was a reflection of Rahner’s concept of the Anonymous Christian.-- a person who, while in every way not a Christian, had undergone a saving "baptism of desire".

“Even a person who does not know Christ conceptually can be saved through the power of the Holy Spirit, evidenced by a life lived, as Christ’s was, in faith, hope and love of the church.”

Of course it is indisputably true that God saves whom he will save and we have no say in it. But if we can be baptized by desire, why is Christianity necessary at all?

It is was hardly surprising that Rahner should have come under a bombardment of criticism. In the view of his critics, Rahner’s theology did not sufficiently account for the Crucifixion which is integral to the Christian world-view. Put a little less academically, if our desire is sufficient for salvation then Christ’s sacrifice was an unnecessary and useless act.

It is semantically clever to say that the atheist “implicitly” accepts the existence of what he denies, because one cannot deny nothing. But such Heideggerian jeux do little address the Christian objection that atheism is more than a mere consumer choice among philosophical objects. Rahner himself, was adamantly opposed to reducing God to a mere object of thought but his marginalization of sin lead to that result and, perhaps worse, failed to grapple with the challenge to Christianity raised by the God’s historical "self-contemplation" in the 20th century.

Rahner was ordered into silence by none other than Happy Pope John. At that point, the German theological establishment -- including the so-called Rotweiler -- rose up in protest and Pope John withdrew the order. Rahner and Ratzinger went on to collaborate as advisors to Vatican II.

It is dubious that Rahner ever intended a Cole Porter theology of All-is-Good / Anything Goes. Whether that was “implicit in” or an “erroneous inference from” his theology, a relativism which renders Christianity essentially accidental and irrelevant is not acceptable. To label that “conservative” misses the point.

But to say that Benedict rejects a touchy-feely latitudinarianism is not to say that he seeks lockdown in the Syllabus. Benedict’s conservatism goes beyond Trent to the earliest days of the Church and its Helleno-Judaic origins -- to a pre-Cartesian concept of Reason and Faith.

Yesterday Lost

The man who pointed in that direction was the second great Catholic theologian of the 20th century, Hans Uhr von Balthasar who, with Ratzinger, founded the theological journal Communio, and who two days before he died was honorifically made a cardinal by John Paul II.

Like Rahner, Balthasar objected to modern theology’s objectification of God. In his view academe had turned God into a mere occasion for speculative study -- a phantom and an idol -- when in fact He was the “light and fire” at the center of the cosmos. For Balthasar, as for Rahner, the living God, if he was anything, had to be supremely concrete; not something abstract or ghostly.

But from that cosmic point, Balthasar followed a divergent path. Whereas for Rahner, God was in all that is, for Balthasar the eternal God and the historical Man were parallel lines that only intersected at the junctures of Beauty, Truth and Goodness. These points of intersection gave rise to what Balthasar called a theology of aesthetics by which he most emphatically did not simply mean forms of beauty but more importantly beautiful actions, like Love and Humility. Put another way, God’s presence was only evident when the “concrete” and the “everyday” embodied certain qualities like truth, beauty and goodness.

Balthasar’s aesthetic action, gave rise to a further difference. Whereas for Rahner, God’s relationship to Man was His own self contemplation through Man, in Balthasar’s aesthetic theology Man and God stood in an I-Thou relationship bonded and made possible by love, analogous to a child becoming aware of his own self through feeling the otherness of his mother’s love for him.

For Balthasar, the God-Man relationship did not produce a “liturgy of the world” but rather a theologie dramatique the crucial act of which was the Crucifixion.

In his view “salvation” was not a natural in-built potential in the vein of a Platonic “all men desire the good” but rather was something that resulted from a free and undetermined response to a call from without. In this case, Christ’s call to man from the Cross.

Unlike Rahner, von Balthasar was not content to see the good in every day things. Rather it was his view that everyday life -- that, is “society” - had to provide man with reasons for being good. Not only was our liberal world failing to do this, it was actively working against it, dinning out the call from the Cross.

The Catholic Church has never been entirely at ease with Liberalism which it has criticised since before the French Revolution while at the same time condemning the equally critical Marx. Unfortunately, much of the Church’s criticism has been in the nature of declaiming against errors of degree; acknowledging and accepting the benefits of the bourgeois system while nattering against its excesses. Balthasar was utterly unforgiving and struck at the root.

He began by denying the validity of Cartesian rationalism. True knowing, he wrote, is not based on detachment and objectification but on love and surrender.

This view represented a return to medieval usage in which the word intelectus did not mean gear grinding brain activity but rather a “taking in” to the mind of the thing contemplated in all its functionality, essence, sense, beauty and purpose. To the medieval mind there was nothing curious in saying “I am intellecting a rose”. Nor was it considered “unscientific” to say that if the typical rose had seven or twelve petals, they stood for the seven virtues or the twelve apostles. Medieval man saw nothing absurd in seeking symmetries between the material and the spiritual and among all that was.

Balthasar’s axe swipe went to very roots of our present day civilization which insists on the validity of only a particular kind of knowledge -- of what might be said to be a mutilated form of knowledge. Having committed this great secular sin, Balthasar went on to denounce a culture of self-indulgence and violence that systematically denied man reasons for being good

“We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, .... whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past — whether he admits it or not — can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

"But whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated — a world in which art itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique.”

Balthasar’s pessimism stood in sharp contrast to Rahner’s optimism; and, of the two, Balthasar’s rejection of the modern world was far more radical than Rahner’s acceptance of it. Philosophies grounded in materialism (whether Marxist, capitalist or simply technocratic) will denigrate Balthasar as a looney reactionary. But the criticism is beside the point; Balthasar would counter-accuse the modern world with having lost its humanity.

Con-sysnthesis

Rahner and Von Balthasar represent the true liberal-conservative dialectic within the Church today. The Tridentine conservatives, while they may be more at ease with Balthasar’s language, do not seem to be up to his challenge. They are basically Catholic fundamentalists taking refuge in a sort of 16th century originalism. While Benedict is just as much pope to them as anyone else, his recent writings reflect a greater concern to harmonize two competing theological perspectives into a con-synthesis that speaks for the whole Church.

Spe Salvi was very much in the spirit of a theology of aesthetics when it stated “It is not science that redeems man: man is redeemed by love.” (§ 26) However, what could be more theologically here-and-now than following up with, “When someone has the experience of a great love in his life, this is a moment of “redemption” which gives a new meaning to his life.” (Ibid ) In virtually the same breath, Benedict blended von Balthasar with Rahner in a way that made lovely sense.

In the same vein, Rahner’s version of Loyola’s “mystical moment” as an historical (i.e. here and now) experience of eternity found echo in Benedict’s beautiful paragraph describing “eternal life” as the “moment” in which the individual is embraced by and in turn embraces the All and Everything. (Spe Salvi § 12 )

Turning from the “personal” to the “social”, Benedict’s assertion that beyond “structures” to relieve suffering, faith -- living the hope of things to come -- consists in personal compassion with the existing suffering of others is a restatement of Balthasar’s aesthetic theology. At the same time, Benedict’s definition of faith as the “embryo” of habits to come was lifted from Rahner’s notion of Grace as a “pre-apprehension” of the infinite.

Viewed as a prescription, Spe Salvi’s social doctrine of love and hope was essentially a restatement of Rahner’s Rule that Christian action involves: an absolute love towards neighbors coupled with a habit of hope for the future.

However, viewed as a social critique, Spe Salvi landed squarely in von Balthasar’s corner. Here, Benedict (as von Balthasar) did not stop at condemning the manifestations of modern society -- which is simply moralizing; but rather attacked the foundations of modern society -- which is radical and even revolutionary.

Benedict critiqued the “disturbing step” that was taken when Francis Bacon (Novus Organum) substituted “faith and practice” (Ora et Laboro) with “science and praxis.” (Spe Salvi § 16) “Faith in progress,” was misplaced because “man can never be redeemed simply from outside.... this kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it...” (Spe Salvi § 25) Benedict’s rejection of the modern world’s idolatrization of Cartesian rationalism is so Balthasarian as to bear re-quoting.

“[I]f science as a whole is [empiricism] and this alone, it is man himself who it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, ...then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’ ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ... ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.” (Regensburg Address)

In so striking at the Baconian roots of the modern world, Benedict was unmistakably in Balthasar’s corner and would appear to be at least extremely skeptical that God is present in our pathologies.

This short illustrative review is perhaps sufficient to show that Benedict is neither “liberal” nor “conservative” but rather pope, whose first task is to speak for the whole Church. Whether Benedict appears “conservative” or “liberal” is largely a function of which faction is fussing over his position on which obsession du jour. If he is said to be “conservative” by the New York Times it is only because its Religion editor is more interested in “women’s issues” than whether Maria should be qualified as Redemptorix. Benedict himself is far more interested in effecting a Summa of Parts that restates what the Church is, has been and will be about.

--o0o--

Pontification

The Pope’s mission to speak for the whole Church in unfortunately misconceived by many, including even some popes, to mean speaking at the whole Church. This cannot be. True pontification is not a matter of diktat but a question of distillation and in this regard a pope truly acts as servus servorum dei.

What I have denoted as the “three churches” is but a gross sketch of a millennial confluence of voices. It is in fact risible to speak of “a medieval church” or even of a singular tridentine church. If the 20th century Church encompasses such “opposing” voices like Rahner and von Balthasar, how much more so a church during the span of a thousand years. Even the first two popes were at odds.

If one were to hear the Church’s Chatter from within Augustine’s eternal, present moment, it would have the sound of a vast chorus whose singers were all improvising at once. What would that sound like? We cannot say; but at any given moment Christ’s meistersinger can whistle out what he thinks the melody is. ...correctly sung that is. :)

The two striking things about Benedict’s writings are their astonishing breath and their refined Mozartian playfulness. This is not a man who is pounding out Biblical quotes on an anvil, but rather someone with a thorough grasp and deep affection for the Western Tradition in the broadest sense. His writings defy reporting and are like “thought-symphonies” that can only be enjoyed and gestated.

From the outset, the reader gets the impression that Benedict is “pulling things together” in a delightful way that unfortunately has gone out of fashion. He reaches into an arcane corner of classical Greek thought, steals a quote from Islamic theology, then stretches back to the Old Testament for an idea before taking a swipe at Kant illustrated with a quote from some early rustic abbot. While he is certainly effecting a synthesis between present day “liberals” and “conservatives,” his style, encompassing the whole garden of human thought, goes beyond that.

To an extent this method is the message, for it embodies a return to a medieval way of talking. Benedict sees this “pulling” and “melding” to be the historical gift and proper function of the Church. In his view the rapprochement faith and inquiry “was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history.” (Regensburg Address)

In Benedict’s view that historical rapprochment has been destroyed and needs to be re-accomplished. He is clear that the anti-reason of either a transcendental fanaticism or a hippieseque know-nothingism, are subjective dementia which are products of an even deeper pathology; namely, the Baconian cleavage between reason and faith -- a cleavage which was the crevice on which the Reformation was founded. In both Benedict’s and von Balthasar’s view this was a catastrophic mistake. Benedict is calling on us to rethink our thinking so that truth and beauty, logic and aesthetics, science and faith, mysticism and politics are not viewed as opposites but as inclusives.

When writers on the Left scowl that Benedict is winding back to the Middle Ages they can be answered: Yes! Yes! That’s exactly it! Only you don’t get it. Swallowing the Voltairian Canard whole, they miss the real point. Benedict’s medievalism in fact rises to meet a Marxist challenge.

In a famous passage of Das Kapital, Marx criticised what he called the Fetish of the Commodity. Marx did not mean a fetishistic love of stuff -- what people call “being materialistic”. What he meant was that the capitalist economic system demanded a certain self-perpetuating way of looking at things which ultimately became a fetish in itself rather than any exercise of truly free thought.

For example, the purpose of health insurance is to provide payments for health care in the event of an illness. However, it is typical in the United States for an insurance company to deny health insurance to someone on account age or past habits, because he might get sick, even if he has no existing condition. “We have to keep our costs down, in order to protect our shareholder’s investment,” is the typical rationale. Thus the ideal applicant is a person who will pay the company money for no foreseeable benefit.

Another example of the fetish can be seen in the attempt to justify protecting the environment on the grounds that green policies “create jobs” and “are in fact cost effective.” Why not simply say that this Earth is too stonishingly beautiful to be destroyed for any reason?

What the “bottom line” fetish does is to supplant values such as beauty, caring, love of creation and compassion for fellow man with the demand to create surplus value.

Neither Marx nor Benedict be considered a “hater of science”. The difference between them is close. Whereas Benedict says that science, unguided by principles external to it, becomes destructive, Marx would say that it becomes destructive when guided by external principles that are selfish. Both would agree that “world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria” is a world that has opted to exterminate itself, and both would insist that Man has to break loose from an imprisoned way of thinking.

However, style and a revived way of looking at things is only half the story. Benedict is equally clear that faith is not a question of subjective attitudes but is something active and social. A pope’s second job is to lead and once the sheep have been gathered into consensus they presumable have to set off on some journey. Unfortunately, since Trent, the Church has tended to specialize in huddling. To the scorn of progressives and revolutionaries -- it has too often ended up instilling a political quietism under the guise of spirituality. Not Benedict.

Writing in 1991, then Cardinal Ratzinger warned European Churches that they “must not allow themselves to be downgraded to a mere means for making society moral, as the liberal state wishes; still less should they want to justify themselves through the usefulness of their social work".

“Mere means for making society moral” ?!?! - What kind of conservative would say such a thing? “Personal morality” has been the hallmark of the politically conservative Church and along comes Ratzinger announcing that the Gospel requires more than "Keep your nose clean and say the rosary twice a day".

However, Liberal “activists” fared no better. Substantially giving in to scientific rationalism they wanted the Church to carve out a sociological function for itself that would justify its role in society. To what were undoubtedly hearty chuckles from the Lutheran corner of the gallery, along came Ratzinger to admonish them against seeking justification through useful works.

What Ratzinger was really saying was that the Church was no one’s flying buttress; and perhaps that is the simplest metaphor for explaining what Benedict sees as the active role of the Church. A cathedral is a place of beauty, of song, of color, and of worship but also, in medieval times, a place of hospice, refuge, consolation, and yes of amorous trysts, conspiracy and community planning. In those days, the stone cathedral was the visible and focal manifestation of the communio around it -- not as “a place of prayer” but as a structure integrated into and reflecting the human life around it. “The Church” that is, all Christians together, have to be this place of work and prayer. Much of the homiletic aspect of Benedict’s writings is describing how this communio is animated and is. The substance of his encyclicals consists in painting a picture of the hope we should live out today.

The difference between the then and the now is the difference between Chartres in the plain and St. Patricks at 445 Fifth Avenue. Although as pope, Benedict will do his pastoral duty to animate all, he is not very sanguine about the mass church and would rather have a smaller cadre of Christians living communio than a larger church engaging in occasional feel good religiosity.

This is not to say that Benedict discounts the value of socio-economic structures. On the contrary, he has written that the Church should promote organized charity and he urges each generation to build just and compassionate political structures. He has expressed the view that “democratic socialism" is closer to the Gospel than free- market capitalism. But closer is not the same. In his view, the Christian way of life is some differential point between being personally good and socially useful.

Similarly, Benedict’s insistence on the over-riding importance of personal freedom as against utopian social structures is an echo of what might be called Balthasar’s “dramatic moment”. Once this echo is heard, it becomes clear that Benedict’s call for “personal freedom” is not an apology for Liberal platitudes about economic and personal “free choice”. Far from vindicating a right to chose wrong in the name of “freedom” Benedict is demanding that society remove the barriers that disallow man to be truly free.

Those who seek a structural change to the present system are no doubt dissatisfied with a revolution that to them appears hopelessly abstract and sentimental. When people are homeless, jobless, sick and starving, reduced to slave labor or dying in gutters, speaking of “a better way of intellecting” can be exasperating to say the least.

But exasperating or not the characterization of Benedict as a conservative, in the sense of supporting the status quo is entirely misplaced. His writings evince an awareness that the ecclesiastical Church is withering away and Global Liberalism has reached a self-destructive dead end. These are indeed dark assessments for the future and he is girding those who choose to be faithful to face an oncoming historical crisis he himself will not live to see.

Benedict is a small man, with an impish presence, a subtle sense of humor and a soft voice given to gentle exhortation and encouragement. This presence is at odds with a man who supposedly sees a gotterdamerung of both Church and Civilization. But once again Benedict pulls together Rahnerian optimism with Balthasarian pessimism. His vision is not Apocalyptic and his solution is anything but private subjective raptures. What he is saying to his despairing predecessor is that the Church can help lift the tombstone man has fashioned for himself, if in the time to come we live the hope of things to come.

Let us build a church so grand the world will think us mad!!

People of Seville - 1401

Ite Discursus Est

It is undeniably grotesque to attempt a summary of a philosophical history that spans 2,500 years in 24 pages. I have done so merely to give an imperfect sense of context and some explanation behind my conclusions concerning Benedict. It is appropriate to end with two personal vignettes that reflect upon the Joseph Ratzinger, neither as cardinal nor pope, but simply a human being.

A protestant seminarian studying in Germany tells of the time he was asked to translate an interview between two American Dominicans and then professor Ratzinger: “At length one of the Dominicans asked, ‘Did Jesus have a vision of God in Mary's womb?’ Ratzinger looked surprised. He turned to me, and asked in German,"Did I understand that question correctly?" I nodded yes. Answering directly in Latin, Ratzinger quoted William of Ockham: “Miracles should not be multiplied beyond necessity.”

Uta Ranke-Heinemann, the world's first female professor of Catholic theology and a leading liberal speaks admiringly and affectionately of Benedict. “And all my life, many people have been astonished that I've always sort of defended Ratzinger, even though I've said that many of his opinions are totally wrong.” ... The enormous difference between John Paul II and Ratzinger is intelligence. Ratzinger is more, much more, intelligent. Quite frankly, John Paul II was tedious without end. ... Ratzinger has much more of what the French call l’esprit de finesse.”

And also humility and kindness, Ranke-Heinemann remembers his shy student days, his humility and the fact that when John Paul II had excommunicated her, Ratzinger was the only one, of all those bishops and cardinals, to write to her “ in a friendly way, offering support.” Ranke-Heinemann was hardly a moderate... she questioned the Church’s meddling in private sexuality, the biological virgin birth, the Trinity and nothing less than the Incarnation. She considers Benedict’s belief in such irrational things to be an “enigma.” “But, she says, “with Ratzinger, I am already reconciled with him in life. Why? I don't know. Perhaps because, like Socrates, the more I know, the less I understand.”

Indeed. With the occasional exception there is the sense among those who call themselves Catholics, that the Church is greater than any of us and that the mystery of existence is greater than all of us.

©WCG, 2008

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