Cardinal Ratzinger On Europe's Crisis of Culture

A niece of mine recently brought this Ratzinger lecture to my attention.

On July 26, 2005, the day before John Paul II died after a prolonged death watch, Joseph Ratzinger—soon to be Benedict XVI—gave an address at Subiaco on Europe's cultural crisis. This address was in the nature of a campaign speech for the papacy, setting out Ratzinger's views on the position of the Church in the modern world. He was presenting himself as a man of vision with a clear idea of the problems facing the Church—the implication being that he was therefore the right man to lead the Church after the long pontificate of John Paul II. This address is thus a handy summary of Ratzinger/Benedict's views.

Ratzinger begins his address by providing something of a laundry list of important problems facing modern man—symptoms of the cultural crisis. These are, in his view, problems that have developed over the last century and are representative byproducts of a cultural change in the West. Among those problems are the threat of terrorism, including the possibility that terrorists may soon obtain biological and/or nuclear weapons; the reaction to terrorism on the part of “lawful states,” which have adopted internal security measures that rival those previously associated only with dictatorships; the development of bio-technology which casts doubt on the dignity of man as God's image; and the growing inequality in the “distribution of the goods of the earth.” Ratzinger concludes by characterizing this crisis as a crisis of moral strength:

All this shows that the growth of our possibilities has not been matched by a comparable development of our moral energy. Moral strength has not grown together with the development of science; rather, it has diminished, because the technical mentality relegates morality to the subjective realm, while we have need, precisely, of a public morality, a morality that is able to respond to the threats that weigh down on the existence of us all. The real and gravest danger in these times lies, precisely, in this imbalance between technical possibilities and moral energy.

Having stated his view of the problem in general terms, Ratzinger presents his analysis of the crisis under seven headings.

John Duns Scotus and the Crisis of the West, Part 2

MacIntyre's Critique of Scotus

As we have seen, numerous thinkers, included Benedict XVI, have seen in John Duns Scotus' thought a turning point for Western Christianity. While we lament the failure of most modern thinkers (Josef Pieper is a remarkable exception) to connect all the dots that lead from archaic ontology through Plato to the present, the recognition of Scotus' significance for Western thought is a welcome development. We, of course, believe it is essential to see Scotus and other similar figures as parts of a continuum—in line with Whitehead's insight that Western thought is largely a series of footnotes to Plato. In this second look at Scotus' thought and its influence on subsequent Western thought we will begin by considering Alasdair MacIntyre's fine critique of Scotus in his important work, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition. MacIntyre's discussion of Scotus can be found on pages 152-156. Importantly for our purposes, MacIntyre (like Pieper before him) discusses the importance of Scotus' influence with regard to the relationship of “philosophy” and “theology” or “religion.”

Popes Say The Darndest Things

While researching regarding Duns Scotus we came across two documents of Benedict XVI that contain some remarkable opinions--opinions that cut to the heart of his papacy.

The first document is the text of a General Audience given on July 7, 2010. The General Audience was devoted to John Duns Scotus.

The "Theologism" of Bonaventure

Recapitulation

This project began with an examination of the "archaic ontology" described in the works of Mircea Eliade--the ontology of the man of "archaic" or traditional cultures.  It is our thesis that the basic outlook of the archaic ontology served as the basis for most later developments in the intellectual history of mankind, and therefore only by coming to an understanding of archaic ontology are we able to understand the intellectual history of mankind, including the ideologies of the modern world.  It may be well to recapitulate some of these ideas before we proceed further, in order to recall the connection between archaic ontology and such seemingly unrelated phenomena as the theology of a 13th century Christian theologian, such as Bonanventure.

Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The 1988 Erasmus Lecture

In 1988 Cardinal Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came to New York to deliver the Erasmus Lecture. The title of his lecture was Biblical Interpretation in Crisis, which reflected his long running concern with the state of modern Biblical exegesis. In the lecture he set forth his critique of the current troubled state of affairs--which he attributed to the influence of the “historical-critical method”--and offered his “hopes” for the future. This appears to be as good a starting point as any for a consideration of the issues confronting the Church in developing a coherent theory of revelation, and especially because Ratzinger's views, as expressed in 1988, remain unchanged in their essentials to this day.  We will proceed with a running commentary on Ratzinger's somewhat rambling lecture.

Ratzinger quickly sets the tone for his lecture, opening his remarks with an anecdote from Soloviev that portrays modern exegetes as the Antichrist! He then suggests that “[t]o speak of 'the crisis of the historical-critical method' today is practically a truism.” He professes to find this state of affairs, which is to say, the state of affairs as he has painted it, somehow ironic, since the historical-critical method had “gotten off to so optimistic a start” 100 years ago. True, he adds, the historical-critical method as originally conceived during the Enlightenment contained an “impertinent presupposition” which regarded “dogma or church doctrine ... as one of the real impediments to a correct understanding of the Bible itself,” yet Catholic proponents of the historical-critical method assured the Church that the method, once freed of such anti-Christian presuppositions, would provide “strict objectivity” and would bring us closer to “the clear and unmistakable voice of the original message of Jesus.” And, in fact, says Ratzinger, that did initially appear to be the case.

This manner of framing the subject is certainly noteworthy, implying as it does that the historical-critical method is part of an illusory quest for “strict objectivity.” From a philosophical standpoint this formulation clearly implies that Ratzinger falls well within the common Platonic tradition when it comes to the the problem of knowledge. For Platonists (of whatever stripe) knowledge is an all or nothing proposition. Either we attain to a complete grasp of the Ideas (the heavenly archetypes of Mircea Eliade's “archaic ontology”) or ... we have no real knowledge at all! Godlike omniscience or total skepticism, the Scylla and Charybdis that has bedeviled man for millennia. Ratzinger is situating the entire project of historical-critical exegesis within the context of this wrongheaded epistemology.

So, then, what followed from the historical-critical method's optimistic beginnings? Ratzinger first complains that the historical-critical method led to a “confused” picture--use of the method gave rise to a number of apparently conflicting theories. The existence of contradictory theories, says Ratzinger, meant that “access to the Bible” was blocked for all those who were not “initiated” into the complexities of the method (note once again the use of a loaded, pejorative term: “initiated,” with its hint of a gnostic fraternity of illuminati). Furthermore, says Ratzinger, those who were “initiated,” the scholars and exegetes, “were no longer reading the Bible anyway, but were dissecting it into the various parts from which it had to have been composed.” (My emphasis.) In other words, Ratzinger suggests that these exegetes were impious men who ignored what “the Bible” was actually saying, in favor of arcane academic game playing that blocked the simple faithful from access to the clear meaning of the text.

It's clear that Ratzinger disapproves of this situation, but he is less than totally forthcoming about his exact reasoning. For example, he appears to be saying that the “uninitiated,” the simple faithful, should have full “access” to “the Bible.” How reasonable is this contention? There are at least two presuppositions behind this complaint, and probably more.

Benedict at Regensburg

"Jihad injures reason, for it honors a god who suffers no constraints on his caprice, unlike the Judeo-Christian god, who is limited by love. That is the nub of Pope Benedict XVI's September 12 [2006] address in Regensburg, Germany." So wrote internet gadfly Spengler, only a week after Benedict's address, in Jihad, the Lord's Supper, and Eternal Life. Robert Reilly, writing at about the same time in Crisis magazine (The Pope and the Prophet), had a similar reaction: "Finally, a leader has spoken about the real, essential differences in the struggle between the West and Islam ..."

Benedict's now famous address at Regensburg bore the title "Three Stages in the Program of De-Hellenization." While Spengler, Reilly and most other commentators focused on what they saw as Benedict's critique of Islam's vision of God--which Benedict presented through a quotation from "the dialog carried on ... by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both"--there was, in fact, far more in Benedict's address than met most eyes at the time.

Benedict, as is now well known, has made the theme of the recovery of reason a key project for his papacy, for he sees the recovery of reason as essential for the spiritual recovery of the West. Benedict shares the quite conventional interpretation of the West as "a rapprochement between biblical faith and Greek inquiry." The very identity of the West resides in this "rapprochement," and the spiritual crisis of the West lies precisely in this, that these two indispensable elements of the Western spirit have been sundered by what Benedict calls the "Program of De-Hellenization."

No doubt Benedict may have been happy to clarify those "essential differences" between Christianity and Islam that Reilly refers to, but his address was far more than facile Muslim bashing. But if contrasting Christianity and Islam was not Benedict's primary purpose, then why did he plunge into the question of Islam at the very outset of his address?

Misfortune and History - Continued

In “Misfortune and History” (from The Myth of the Eternal Return) Mircea Eliade deals at considerable length with “Hebrew” thought. This is, to my mind, perhaps the least satisfactory section of The Myth of the Eternal Return, due in part to its reliance on scholarship that has now been pretty definitively superseded but also due to faulty analysis.

Eliade characterizes as "Hebrew" thought what is now known to modern scholars as the Deuteronomic ideology, accepting the now discredited view that Israelite thought essentially underwent no development from the origins of Israel to the fall of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Modern scholarship has conclusively demonstrated both that the Biblical accounts of Israelite origins (the Exodus and Conquest) are not historical and that Israelite conceptions of divinity as well as religious practice underwent significant development and change. What I have characterized as the Deuteronomic "ideology" attained social effectiveness during the years between the fall of the northern Israelite kingdom (722 BC) and the final fall of the southern kingdom of Judah (586 BC). The so-called Deuteronomic "reform" was politically dominant especially during the reign of Josiah (649-609BC). The Deuteronomic ideology combined a rather advanced development of Israelite religion in the direction of monotheism, away from a more traditional West Semitic pantheon of gods, with a basically conservative "archaic" worldview. Where the "archaic" worldview saw misfortune in history as either a defeat of one set of gods by an opposing set of gods, or as the result of a failure to conform to divine will, the Deuteronomic ideology interpreted misfortune in Israelite history--and the misfortune that threatened in the form of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires--as the result of Israel's failure to conform to the Deuteronomic theology of Yahweh as the sole god of Israel and obedience to Torah. The history of Israel was rewritten to conform with this view. Thus, according to this ideology, the history of Israel could be understood according to a very simply logic: when Israel followed the commandments as set forth in the Deuteronomic books of the OT, all went well. When Israel failed in some respect--as when the Israelites followed their more traditional West Semitic religious traditions--things fell apart.