Editor’s note: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI died on Saturday morning, Dec. 31, the Vatican announced. Pope Francis announced the pope emeritus’s health had been worsening on Wednesday.
Because it primarily addresses his theological writings prior to his election as pope, this reflection refers to Joseph Ratzinger fairly than Pope Benedict XVI.
The late Cardinal Joachim Meisner, archbishop of Cologne, once described Joseph Ratzinger because the “Mozart of theology.” Others have suggested that Carl Maria von Weber or Anton Bruckner could be a greater comparison Each are emblematic of Austro-German romanticism.
Ratzinger was concerned with the connection between love and truth, affectivity in addition to objectivity, the importance of history for private formation, the historical character of revelation and the role of beauty in evangelization. History, beauty and love and the relation of all three to the formation of the human person are core Romantic movement interests and, within the type of Bruckner, Ratzinger wove together his analyses of those relationships in strongly polyphonic essays using wealthy, harmonic language. He managed to bring to the fore these neglected elements in Catholic thought without jettisoning what had come to be thought to be the classical elements. On this sense Ratzinger was the theological analogue of a musical synthesis of Mozart and von Weber or Bruckner, if such a thing were possible. For many who wanted the romantic element without the classical he was considered a dangerous reactionary, and for individuals who wanted the classical without the romantic he was seen as a dangerous liberal.
Ratzinger was concerned with the connection between love and truth, the historical character of revelation and the role of beauty in evangelization.
Augustinian at Heart
The generations ahead will form their very own judgments based on the volumes of his published works, which include over 60 books and magisterial documents spanning his quarter-century partnership with Pope John Paul II as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and his own almost eight-year papacy. They may little question regard him as one in every of the six most vital Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, together with Karl Rahner, S.J., Yves Congar, O.P., the Rev. Romano Guardini, Henri de Lubac, S.J., and the Rev. Hans Urs von Balthasar. The primary two were fellow theological experts on the Second Vatican Council, with whom he had positive collaborations (though he later distanced himself from those points of Rahner’s anthropology that derived from elements in German idealist philosophy, and in contrast to Congar, resigned from the editorial board of the theological journal Concilium because it veered away from official magisterial teaching within the Nineteen Seventies). The latter three were all, in numerous contexts, his mental heroes. De Lubac was also a fellow expert on the council. Ratzinger once wrote that it was unattainable for him to say how much he owed to de Lubac and von Balthasar.
They may little question regard him as one in every of the six most vital Catholic theologians of the twentieth century
In trying to find a brief statement which may encapsulate the vast range of Ratzinger’s polyphonic contributions, I got here across the next passage inMemory in Augustine’s Theological Anthropology (2012), by Paige E. Hochschild:
God moves the intellect and can through the knowledge that comes through the memory. The universal, for Augustine, might be perceived only through the actual. This must, subsequently, occur through history, through the visible, sensible works of Christ, through the practice of the virtues, the love of 1’s neighbor, the lifetime of the church, its sacraments, and above all its scripture. From these experiences, an individual has an intimation of what the happiness of the caelum caeli consists in.
One can easily substitute the name Ratzinger for Augustine on this passage and have a summary statement of Ratzinger’s theological vision. In his own words, Ratzinger was “a decided Augustinian,” and like Augustine, he believed that God might be perceived only in the actual. He wrote in Principles of Catholic Theology (1982):
Man finds his center of gravity, not inside, but outside himself. The place to which he’s anchored will not be, because it were, inside himself, but without. This explains that remnant that is still at all times to be explained, the fragmentary character of all his efforts to understand the unity of history and being. Ultimately, the stress between ontology and history has its foundation in the stress inside human nature itself, which must exit of itself with a purpose to find itself; it has its foundation within the mystery of God, which is freedom and which, subsequently, calls each individual by a reputation that is thought to no other. Thus, the entire is communicated to him in the actual.
God in History
In the identical work Ratzinger described the issue of “coming to an understanding of the mediation of history inside the realm of ontology” as nothing lower than the “fundamental crisis of our age.”
Post-Tridentine scholasticism had prided itself on its rejection of what was perceived to be a Protestant fixation on history. But in an mental landscape highly influenced by German Romanticism and the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the Catholic engagement with history couldn’t be left unattended without the church’s scholars losing all mental credibility. It was the Munich circle of students who were on the forefront of the engagement following the leads of the Nineteenth-century Tübingen theologians and dealing on trajectories just like those of John Henry Newman. It was inside this milieu that the young Joseph Ratzinger got here to the eye of Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne who invited him to attend the Vatican II as his theological expert.
The document of the council that carries the strongest evidence of Ratzinger’s involvement is the “Dogmatic Structure on Divine Revelation.” On this document the Suarezian account of revelation as something fundamentally propositional, “a clutch-purse of doctrines” because it is usually described, was put aside in favor of a historical account that presents Christ himself because the revelation of God the Father to humanity. Following Romano Guardini, Ratzinger argued, “Revelation doesn’t reveal something, nor does it reveal various sorts of things, but in the person Jesus, in the person who’s God, we’re in a position to understand the entire nature of man.” In Ratzinger’s best-selling work Introduction to Christianity (1968), which was translated into 17 languages, he explained the thought in these terms:
Christian belief will not be merely concerned, as one might at first suspect from all of the talk of belief or faith, with the everlasting, which because the “entirely Other” would remain completely outside the human world and time; quite the opposite, it’s way more concerned with God in history, with God as man. By thus seeming to bridge the gulf between everlasting and temporal, between visible and invisible, by making us meet God as a person, the everlasting because the temporal, as one in every of us, it understands itself as revelation.
Given Ratzinger’s interest in the way in which God pertains to the human person through individual moments in history, it is not any surprise that two of his favorite theological topics were the theological virtues (faith, hope and love) and eucharistic theology. The theological virtues are central to the human person’s development and friendship with God; and it is thru the reception of the sacraments, and particularly the Eucharist, that one grows on this friendship.
Two of Ratzinger’s favorite theological topics were the theological virtues (faith, hope and love) and eucharistic theology.
This friendship doesn’t involve the absorption of the person into God but fairly to the transformation of difference into the upper union of affection. The trail to this higher union involves conversion and purification and as such takes the form of the cross.
Included in his evaluation of the theological virtues (which owes much to the work of Josef Pieper, the Thomist philosopher who fatefully introduced him to Cardinal Wojtyła), is an account of the way in which through which the virtues have undergone mutations inside modern and postmodern culture. People still consider things, hope for things and love things, but in ways which might be highly problematic. There may be more faith in science than in Christ, more hope for material prosperity than for everlasting life, and widespread confusion about tips on how to relate eros with agape. There may be also confusion about tips on how to relate faith to reason. Here it is critical that when Ratzinger spoke of “reason” he didn’t mean the identical thing as Immanuel Kant. His understanding of this relationship was Augustinian, not post-Kantian, and explains his aversion to some schools of preconciliar Thomism. Philosophy shouldn’t be the pure reason of Kant or René Descartes but should accept the contribution of divine revelation and thus partner with theology in looking for to investigate the fruits of revelation. This makes a major difference to Christian epistemology.
It is usually said that the US didn’t have a Nineteenth century. The Romantic philosophy so pervasive in continental (especially German) thought in that century didn’t make the Atlantic crossing. Perhaps that’s the reason it continues to be possible to search out American Catholics who find it obscure why anyone would say that probably the most serious theological crisis of the twentieth century was coming to an understanding of the mediation of history within the realm of ontology. For many who do get the purpose that Catholic scholarship has little or no credibility without this and that the brand new evangelization depends upon the church’s scholars getting this right, the theological works of Joseph Ratzinger will proceed to supply insights into fragments of the issue.
Joseph Ratzinger’s life was one long heroic mental performance, engaging his whole heart—a theo-drama with all of the pathos of a Bayreuth festival. In Ratzinger’s case, nonetheless, Bavarian Catholic piety triumphed over whatever it’s within the German spirit that is still nostalgic for pagan heroics.
