Our earthly life, Jacques Maritain wrote, is “a darkness sown with stars”. Young Catholics do not need a particularly gloomy temperament to sense dark forces at work in today’s world. Yet we should be thankful that, in the midst of this night, God has given us, among many other blessings, two ‘stars’ to guide us – two of the finest Popes ever to have occupied the Chair of Peter. Few thought that any successor to John Paul II could possibly measure up in comparison to the great adversary of the culture of death; but in Benedict XVI we have a man who, like his predecessor, will go down as one of the great pontiffs. For Benedict XVI is, quite simply, the most brilliant mind to be elevated to the Papacy since St. Gregory the Great; this is not flattery or exaggeration but a statement of fact. We can confidently predict that his teaching will be studied and admired one thousand years from now, should the world last that long. The publication of Dr. Tracey Rowland’s study Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI provides an excellent introduction to his thought; and we can be proud that such an important work has come out of our own country, not noted for great theological accomplishments.
What is particularly impressive about Joseph Ratzinger’s theology is not only the fact that it is the product of a truly formidable intellect; it comes from the whole man, mind, heart, and soul. Joseph Ratzinger’s theology could never be the subject of Pascal’s reproach contrasting “the God of philosophers and learned men” with the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob…Certitude, Certitude, Feeling, Peace, Joy.” Indeed, Ratzinger’s consistent aversion to the reduction of God to a rationalist construct explains what is often seen as the contradiction of his career; the man who started off as a “liberal” at the Second Vatican Council ended up as a “conservative” and champion of orthodoxy. Real liberals like Hans Küng do not fail to peddle a vulgarised version of this story, with Ratzinger as the comrade who betrayed the cause, a Faust who sold his soul to the Mephistophelian reactionaries in the Vatican in return for a red hat.
Such fairy-tales are not only false; they are uninteresting compared with the true story of the tensions and debates within Catholic theology in the twentieth century which provides the necessary backdrop to Ratzinger’s career. Although this is necessarily complex material, the average reader with a basic knowledge of philosophy and Church history should be able to follow Rowland’s lucid explanation. During Ratzinger’s youth, Catholic theology since the time of the Council of Trent had been dominated by an interpretation of Thomism developed by the Counter-Reformation theologians Suarez and Cajetan. This theology was characterised by a strict dualism between nature and grace, reason and faith, philosophy and theology. The Catholic faith could be defended against non-believers by purely rational argument. To its critics it seemed that neo-Thomism’s notion of reason was rather narrow, almost Kantian rather than classically Thomistic; that its rationalist mode of argument had little to say to the many outside the Church who were heirs to the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment rather than to the Enlightenment itself; that it seemed to think that atheism and Protestantism were explicable as mere defects of the intelligence. As Rowland observes, Ratzinger agreed with Henri de Lubac’s paradoxical observation that the four-square orthodoxy of neo-Thomism opened the door to secularisation by positing the existence of a sphere of ‘pure nature’ completely separate from the supernatural sphere of grace. No doubt these criticisms of neo-Thomism, still the gold standard of orthodoxy for many, will seem contentious; but Ratzinger, while respectful of St. Thomas himself, has been consistent throughout his career in his Augustinian opposition to neo-Thomism. His seminary professor recalls his viewpoint: “God is not recognized because He is a summum bonum that is able to be grasped and demonstrated with exact formulas, but because He is a You who comes forward and gets Himself recognized…”
Neo-Thomism lost its position of unquestioned dominance of Catholic theology at the time of the Second Vatican Council; Ratzinger as peritus to Cardinal Frings of Cologne played an important role in this process. However, Rowland skillfully develops the well-known story of how the reformist majority at the Council was itself divided. The ‘ressourcement’ school of de Lubac, of which Ratzinger was part, sought to enrich modern Catholicism with a deeper re-engagement with Scripture and the Fathers of the Church and an idea of human nature as in its very essence open to grace; the “Transcendental Thomists”, whose most prominent figure was Karl Rahner, sought the adaptation of Catholic theology to post-Kantian philosophy and paved the way to secularisation by reducing the supernatural aspects of Christianity to something implicit in nature itself (hence the famous, or notorious, idea that the man who was good on a natural level was an “anonymous Christian” and had no need of explicit Christian faith). Ratzinger’s consistent opposition to the “liberal theology” which springs from such thinking is, as Rowland makes clear, no contradiction to his earlier criticisms of neo-Thomism; both have their origin in an unshakeable Augustinian emphasis on the centrality of grace in and through Christ. In her second chapter, Rowland develops this theme by explaining Ratzinger’s reservations about some of the expressions in one of the main Council documents, Gaudium et Spes, particularly paragraph 26 which refers to “the autonomy of earthly affairs”, which might be interpreted as severing large areas of life from Christian faith and permitting their radical secularisation.
Rowland goes on to consider, chapter by chapter, different aspects of Ratzinger’s theology: his thoughts on Revelation, Scripture and Tradition, his theology of the Church and its structure, his moral theology, his analysis of modernity, his liturgical consciousness. Obviously a short review cannot even attempt a comprehensive overview of all these themes, and the full richness of the book can only be experienced by reading it. I shall limit myself to some brief comments on the last three topics mentioned.
Rowland shows that Ratzinger has been a consistent opponent of all attempts to reduce Christianity to “mere moralism”. He sees a flaw in the tendency in pre-Vatican II Catholic practice to reduce the Christian life, for the ordinary believer, to obedience to the Commandments and the avoidance of mortal sin. Without being integrated into a deep understanding and experience of the love of God and the beauty of His plans for us, there is a danger that the commandments will seem to be arbitrary prohibitions of an alien despot which we obey merely out of fear of hellfire, not because we truly believe that they are life-giving. Such a Catholicism will be rather brittle; in fact, for Ratzinger this is the explanation for why the Church, seemingly so healthy in the 1950s, collapsed so suddenly in the 1960s and 1970s. Moral truth as a transcendental must be integrated with love and beauty, the ‘no’ of the commandments with the deeper ‘yes’ of the love of Christ and “his great message of liberation and freedom”, otherwise people will reject Christian morality as cold and life-denying, as our contemporaries have done in the sphere of sexual morality. However, Ratzinger’s criticism of this type of narrow moralism is accompanied by an equally direct criticism of the post-Vatican II version of moralism that exults “social justice” at the expense of all the supernatural aspects of Christianity, a modern Pelagianism which reduces the Church’s mission to “good works” indistinguishable from those of humanitarian secular liberalism, although he himself is critical of many aspects of the contemporary capitalist economic order.
Rowland writes a fascinating chapter on Ratzinger’s view of modern philosophical and political thought. Enlightenment thinking, exulting human reason and attacking religion on the basis of its supposed irrationality, remains strong (think of the work of Professor Dawkins); but since Nietzsche the Enlightenment itself has been subject to the ‘post-modern’ attack, which argues that ‘reason’ itself is not objective. Ratzinger agrees with the latter camp to a certain extent: as he says, “reason has a wax nose”. In other words, its conclusions are never perfectly ‘neutral’ but are moulded by theological presuppositions. Thus the objectivity of the modern ideology of science and the much-vaunted ‘neutrality’ of the modern liberal state towards all worldviews are both illusory. Rowland provides an account of Ratzinger’s “genealogy of modernity”, the process by which, beginning at the Reformation, the unity of faith and reason characteristic of Catholic thought was sundered to produce the modern dichotomy of an unquestionable scientific rationalism combined with complete subjectivism in all non-scientific areas of knowledge and life.
Ratzinger’s theology of liturgy, and of beauty more generally, forms the subject matter of the final chapter. Ratzinger has thought more deeply about this subject than any other recent Pope. For Ratzinger, the banality of the modern liturgy as it is offered in many places is a scandal and a complete betrayal of the hopes of the Liturgical Movement with which he was associated as a young man. The sense of transcendence and silent awe, of the Mass as an extraordinary mystery in which heaven comes down to earth, has been lost, and replaced by the spectacle of a relaxed and informal community chattering away and worshiping itself, an idolatry which Ratzinger describes as analogous to the Hebrews’ worship of the golden calf. For Ratzinger, the elimination of beauty from Catholic liturgy and art as something elitist and pharisaical in order to assimilate them to the utilitarian ugliness of the modern world is a tragic mistake. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian religion, ignoring the fact that beauty is a transcendental quality of God of equal importance to His truth and His goodness. Nowhere is Ratzinger's true Augustinianism (so different from the debased Augustinianism of Jansenism and Calvinism) more apparent than in this love for 'Beauty, ever-ancient and ever-new', and Rowland clearly shares that love. Ratzinger goes so far as to write: “Next to the saints, the art which the Church has produced is the only real ‘apologia’ for her history…The Church is to transform, improve, ‘humanise’ the world – but how can she do that if at the same time she turns her back on beauty, which is so closely allied to love?” From these principles Ratzinger draws important conclusions for a true renewal of Catholic liturgy, music and art.
Rowland’s book is likely to remain the best short account of Pope Benedict’s thought available to the general reader for some time. Some knowledge of theology or philosophy would be helpful for prospective readers, although Rowland makes matters which are by their nature complex as clear as they can be made. For those of an intellectual bent, however, this book cannot be recommended highly enough. In the midst of the tedium of postmodern intellectual life, of rival systems united in a dreary denial of the deeper yearnings of the human spirit, Ratzinger’s thought shines out, warm, passionate, beautiful. In a world which, for all its wealth and material dynamism, seems to have grown cold and cynical, Ratzinger’s theology insistently presents the cure: communion with Jesus Christ. While Rowland concludes her book with a quotation from Joseph Roth’s fine novel The Radeztky March, the Pope’s intellectual life’s work reminds me of the truth of the words of another great novelist, Georges Bernanos: “The Church gives joy, all the joy allotted to this sad world. Whatever is done against Her, is done against joy.”
