Ratzinger on the Modern Mind
One of the standard questions hovering about the intellectual world since the crisis of Marxism has been, "Where does the intellectual left go next, especially if it refuses to consider orthodoxy?" The obvious, most likely answer, I think, is that it goes in the direction of ecology and environmentalism insofar as these all-embracing systems provide an apparently plausible, natural justification to reduce the relative importance of man's individual dignity in the name of a planetary or worldly, if not cosmic, "good." This postulated inner-worldly transcendent good is proposed in the name of the on-going cycles of nature and of the good of the living "species" within it. This higher "good" becomes the criterion by which we judge how many people we can have in each country or on the earth, how long they can live and under what conditions, what they can or cannot consume, what their relation is to the state. Indeed, it is not the state but the world state which—since it is said to have the exclusive responsibility to look out for the distant future—can control the present in its name. "Progress" is replaced as an ideal by "stability." This simultaneous relativizing of the dignity of the human person and of the consequent justification for the vast expansion of the state has provided a handy way to replace or rather incorporate the Marxist ideology that formerly justified these inner-worldly goals with a new more comprehensive ideology that explains what is happening in a different manner.
One of the immense advantages of Catholicism today, known everywhere outside the universities, is not so much the importance of an authority that is not dependent directly on academic, scientific, or political fashions of the time but on an authority that is rooted in the intelligence of faith. And what is even more useful in this connection is that, in the persons of both the Holy Father and Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, we have with us a coherent body of teaching whereby we can keep contact with the living intelligence of Christianity as it reacts to the dominant intellectual positions that persist in modern culture. In the case of Ratzinger, whose perceptive mind is often overlooked, we can find a bemused and powerful intellectual force that, from time to time, directs itself to evaluating the movements that are seen daily intersecting, from around the world, that central crossroads in Rome where not only European and American trends are observed, but also those in Africa, Latin America, and Asia.
In May of 1996, before the Doctrinal Commission of the Latin American Bishops, in Guadalajara, in Mexico, Josef Cardinal Ratzinger presented a remarkable discourse on the various interconnecting intellectual trends found throughout the world with their relation to basic Catholic teaching (" Current Situation of Faith and Theology," L'Osservatore Romano, English, November 6, 1996). I did not receive my surface copy of this particular L'Osservatore Romano until January 27, 1997, but I sat down and read it immediately. Ratzinger has a remarkable facility for synthesizing and explaining things of a complicated or subtle nature. He is wide-ranging and, what can I call it?—calmly bemused by the curious extremes to which modern intellectuals go in explaining their ideological substitutes for precisely his area of jurisdiction, namely, doctrine and faith.
The Guadalajara address does not directly touch on the vast confusions that ecology and environmentalism have increasingly presented to the basics of Christianity, which has tried, largely unsuccessfully, to respond by developing a sophisticated doctrine of "stewardship." The latter presentations that I have seen so far vastly underestimate the degree to which environmentalism has become a rival religion to Christianity. But Josef Ratzinger does take up a second and not unrelated way in which many of the enthusiasms found in the ecological schools manifest themselves through an attempt to combine liberation theology with Western academic relativism and Eastern mysticism. Value-free democracy has become the political expression of academic relativism. Into it are mixed also certain strands of particularly Indian religious philosophy. Much of this Eastern spirituality, with not a negligible amount of New Age thought, itself related to Eastern philosophies, also has influence in the ecological schools and vice versa.
Ratzinger begins with a very careful analysis of how and why liberation theology came to be considered a substitute for the Christian idea of redemption.1 What happened, in Ratzinger's analysis, was that relation of personal sin and redemption was shifted to the relation between social structures and redemption. The Christian approach was thus not to be a conversion of heart through repentance and Sacrament but a redesigning of the social order in some specific way (change of property, family, state) to eliminate evil from the world. Political struggle was what the faith was said to be about. "Redemption thus became a political process, for which the Marxist philosophy provided the essential guidelines." Liberation theology provided, apparently, a practical method to reform the world to rid itself of spiritual problems. To this theory, Ratzinger says simply, "The fact is that when politics want to bring redemption, they promise too much." Politics cannot accomplish these spiritual things. It seems ironic, though it is true, that the world's worst tyrannies arise from promising too many political things.
Ratzinger next comments on what everyone has observed, namely, that liberation theology suddenly fell into disrepute because the world realized that the Marxist systems in fact produced neither redemption nor liberation but tyranny. But Ratzinger adds, in a passage that seems to me very perceptive,
[that] the non-fulfillment of this [Marxist-liberationist] hope brought a great disillusionment with it which is still far from being assimilated. Therefore, it seems probable to me that new forms of the Marxist conception of the world will appear in the future. For the moment, we cannot be but perplexed: the failure of the only scientifically based system for solving human problems could only justify nihilism or, in any case, total relativism.
That is, the results in the West and too often in Marxist countries was not natural law or Christianity but relativism.
What about this relativism as a substitute for the supposedly scientific certainties of Marxism? Ratzinger proceeds to trace the relativist systems that prevail in dominant Western culture. Relativism is considered to be a "positive" system. It provides what is thought to be the philosophic grounding for democracy.2 Democratic dialogue and compromise, it is said, depend on the absence of any theoretic grounding for either what is true, right or good. "Democracy in fact is supposedly built on the basis that no one can presume to know the true way, and it is enriched by the fact that all roads are mutually recognized as fragments of the effort toward that which is better." All positions depend on historic situation, not on philosophical grounding. No political opinion can be "correct." Thus a place for contradictory and morally incoherent systems exists by right in any democracy. The relativist sees any claim to be correct or to truth to be the error of Marxism and all dogmatic religion.
On examining the position that this relativist freedom solves all problems by tolerating them to exist, Ratzinger points out the logical consequences: "However, with total relativism, everything in the political arena cannot be achieved either. There are injustices that will never turn into just things (such as, for example, killing an innocent person, denying an individual or groups the right to their dignity or to life corresponding to that dignity), while, on the other hand, there are just things that can never be unjust." Some ways of doing good things or dealing with wrong things can vary widely, no doubt, but what are the "limits"? Obviously, the limits arise when we claim the right to contradictory things—to life and to killing, to speech and to lying.
This philosophical relativism is now invading religion. Christians are increasingly influenced by this movement in religious relativism that goes back to the 1950s. The enthusiasm that attached to liberation theology is now to be found in the enthusiasm of the theologians advocating the plurality of religion schools. In this approach, Christianity is reduced to just another religion with no particular claim to uniqueness. And it is here that liberation theology meets Eastern religion, especially those of India. Behind these newer considerations, Ratzinger mentions, among thinkers, especially the American Presbyterian John Hick and the former German Catholic priest, P. F. Knitter. Behind all of these movements lies the influence of Kant and the notion that we can "prove" that we can have no contact with objective reality. We must rather turn inwards for any contact with ourselves. Jesus in this system cannot be considered the one avenue to God. He becomes something of a "myth," one among other prophets or spiritual leaders. Since the Absolute cannot, in this view, come into history in any manner, there can be no Church or sacraments or dogmas.
Fundamentalism is, consequently, taken to mean, from a relativist philosophy, the affirmation that there is a revelation of God in history through Christ, that is, taken to mean orthodoxy. This "fundamentalism" (that is, standard Catholic orthodoxy) is seen to be an attack on modernity and its essential philosophical roots in absolute tolerance and freedom, both taken to be without limits. The notion of dialogue also has a new meaning, not the honest and open accounting for what one believes or holds ("We hold these truths"), rather it means "to put one's own position, i.e., one's faith, on the same level as the convictions of others, without recognizing in principle more truth in it than that which is attributed to the opinion of others." To take this view of dialogue, of course, means that one must already, in principle, doubt one's faith before entering into dialogue. "According to this concept, dialogue must be an exchange between positions which have fundamentally the same rank, and, therefore, are mutually relative." Religion in this sense comes to mean implicitly the denial of both Christ and the Church to enter a dialogue with other "religions."
How does this thinking relate to Indian philosophies? First of all, again, Christ must be made to exist on the same level as Indian salvation myths. The historical Jesus—it is now thought—"is no more the absolute Logos than any other saving figure of history." Since in human history, there are these many faiths in space and time, there is not a reason why one is more important than another. "Under the sign of the encounter of cultures, relativism appears to be the real philosophy of humanity." If anyone might disagree with this view, he denies both liberty and tolerance. He is also trying to impose a "Western" view—that is, there is in fact a revelation—on others. And this encounter of cultures and their religions is where the intellectual critical point is in the upcoming New Millennium, just as the critical point was with Marxism in the middle part of the Twentieth Century.
Knitter realized that the pluralism of religion theory left the world in a kind of stagnation. That is, if every religion and culture were the same, why bother to change any? Thus, he wanted to unite the theology of liberation (political change) with that of the plurality of religion. This effort to find an outside prod to the ancient Indian religions is why Ratzinger does not think Marxism is totally dead. We are, however, still looking for the new man and the new age. If there is a relativism at the basis both of current Western philosophy and of classic Indian religion, then thought alone, trying to decide which is right, cannot solve our problems because all thought is equal in the cultural relativist view. The only place to go, it seems, is to "praxis," to practice, to this famous Marxist concept. "Putting praxis above knowledge in this way is also a clearly Marxist inheritance. However, whereas Marxism makes only what comes logically from renouncing metaphysics concrete—when knowledge is impossible, only action is left—Knitter affirms: the absolute cannot be known but it can be made." That is, we presumably know what we "make," so that all society becomes not something natural, but something "made" or "constructed" by human means.
At this point, Ratzinger himself simply wants to know "Why?" Why is it so obvious that action does not need truth? He explains, "Where do I find a just action if I cannot know what is just in an absolute way?" Communist regimes failed, he added, because "they tried to change the world without knowing what is good and what is not good for the world, without knowing in what direction the world must be changed in order to make it better." That is a remarkable observation. So to the idea that we ought to change or make the world no matter how we change or make it or even if we do not know the truth, Ratzinger adds, in the pithiest of statements, "Mere praxis is not light."
Indian religions traditionally did not have any doctrine. No compulsory doctrine belonged to them. What they had was ritual. One was saved, presumably, not by knowing the truth, but by performing the right ritual. The Greek and Christian idea was different. There was a difference between opinion and glory (the same Greek word, doxa). To be orthodox did not mean just having the right opinion or following the standard ritual, but "to know and practice the right way in which God wants to be glorified." This "right way" implied that some ways were the wrong ways, even if we were to show respect to the persons who hold them. Now most people no longer think that the Indian ritual saves, but they do think, because of their relativism, that some practice will do the trick. Where does this practice come from? Why, it comes from politics, so that there can now be proposed a certain union between East and West, each providing what the other lacked. The problem is, however, that neither of these freedoms, either of praxis to make what it wants or of Indian mysticism from all matter and being, has any content, even when presented in Christian terminology. "When mystery no longer counts, politics must be converted into religion."
The "New Age" provides a further component to these movements. "For the supporters of the New Age, the solution to the problem of relativity must not be sought in a new encounter of the self with another, or others, but by overcoming the subject, in an ecstatic return to the cosmic dance." This New Age system is said to be scientific. But what is proposed is a kind of anti-rationalist mysticism: "The Absolute is not to be believed, but to be experienced. God is not a person to be distinguished from the world, but a spiritual energy present in the universe." The New Age spirituality is not an encounter with God as a transcendent Trinity of persons. Rather, not unlike the Stoics, it advocates that we become in harmony with the cosmic whole. The old atheism wanted to identify everything with the self. The new atheism wants the self to be absorbed into the whole and be identical with it, which is itself the only "god" there is. We must overcome the idea of a personal being or self against which a world of things, persons, and God exist and for whom we are to relate ourselves in love and knowledge. "Redemption is found in unbridaling the self, immersion in the exuberance of that which is living, and in a return to the whole. Ecstasy is sought, the inebriety of the infinite which can be experienced in inebriating music, rhythm, and, frenetic lights and dark shadows, and in the human mass." Ratzinger remarks that this position logically has renounced both modernity and man himself. The gods have taken the place of God. Thus we are in the process of reviving pre-Christian religions and cults.
What about Christianity in relation to these events? "If there is no common truth in force precisely because it is true, then Christianity is only something imported from outside, a spiritual imperialism which must be thrown off with no less force than political imperialism." The living God is indeed met in the sacraments, but if we do not believe or accept the truth of this meeting, then it too is empty ritual. Thus, there is nothing to prevent us from joining the pagan cults now revitalized. And Ratzinger makes a remarkable connection here between the rise of New Age and the demise of classic Marxism, "The more manifest the uselessness of political absolutism (as a scientific explanation), the stronger the attraction will be to what is irrational and to the renunciation of the reality of every day life." Notice what he says is that these movements do not lead to the denial of God, but to a "renunciation of the reality of every day life," the very place that Aquinas says that we must begin our search for God and one another. Without orthodoxy, in other words, we no longer even see the ordinary things around us because they are no longer themselves but something we made or a mystical part of ourselves.
Ratzinger proceeds to remark on a phenomenon that I am sure many have noticed.
Externally, in the Church, everything still looks more or less the same. But underneath, there is a widespread loss of faith and explicit doctrine, especially among the intellectuals and many clerics. If we cannot maintain the sources of authority in the Church as set forth in its own doctrines, we find another source. The first of these signs of loss of faith is the effort to "democratize" the Church after the model of that form of democracy itself based on relativism. Faith, however, cannot be decided by majority vote. Either faith comes from the Lord in the sacraments or it does not exist. "A faith which we ourselves can decide about is not a faith in the Absolute." The alternative of those who think that faith is decided by the majority is either to identify faith with power (the majority, whatever it is) or, more logically, not to be believe in anything.
The next concern has to do with the doctrinal effect in the Church of widespread changes in liturgy, both those permitted and those practiced whether permitted or not. "The different phases of liturgical reform have let the opinion be introduced that the Liturgy can be changed arbitrarily." This rapid change of liturgy leads to the suspicion that the doctrines that explain the liturgy are also subject to change. Likewise, New Age tendencies are discovered at work in the liturgical practices that have appeared— "what is inebriating and ecstatic is sought and not the 'logike latreia.'" Ratzinger says that he perhaps "exaggerates" these tendencies in order to see them, but they are there. We do not dance because of what God is, but we dance because we think ourselves to be gods participating in the cosmos and identified with it.
In the light of the appeal to Christians and non-Christians alike of Marxism, relativism, and New Age movements, Ratzinger asks, now addressing himself to the intellectuals in the Church, "Why has classical theology appeared to be so defenseless in the face of these happenings? Where is its weak point, and why has it lost credibility?" It is remarkable that this question is asked at such a high level in the Church. These are, no doubt, fair and perceptive questions. Ratzinger thinks that one primary reason has to do with the status of exegesis. The writers who promote Marxist, relativist, Eastern religions, or New Age positions usually begin from what they believe has been proved in Scripture studies: "They state that exegesis has proven that Jesus did not consider himself absolutely the son of God, the incarnate God, but that he was made to be such afterwards, in a gradual way, by the disciples." Besides this so-called evidence from contemporary exegesis that the Church could not teach what it said it did, theology is also based on a Kantian position about the impossibility of the mind to reach any kind of reality or to have any awareness of the absolute. Ratzinger thinks that these two sorts of consideration indicate the nature of the problem with theology.
In response, Ratzinger first points out that exegesis itself does not uniformly teach that Christ, say, did not consider himself to be God. Moreover, historical criticism cannot have the kind of certainty on this point that modern thinkers claim for it. But let us suppose that most exegetes do hold that the basic Christian positions cannot be proved. The reason for this claim is that these exegetes have a common philosophy which does not allow them to conclude to anything else. Their method reduces the reality they study to its (the method's) proportions. Ratzinger puts this position into words: "If I know a priori (to speak like Kant) that Jesus cannot be God, and that miracles, mysteries and sacraments are three forms of superstition, then I (the exegete with this philosophy) cannot discover what cannot in fact be in the sacred books." My philosophical theory has prevented me from seeing what might be there. What I see is my theory, not the reality. Ratzinger does not deny that there is value in the "historical-critical" method. Generally, if it is used to study the history of the Roman emperors, say, it works fine. When the method is used on the Bible, two problems arise. The method wants to find out about the "past as something past." History further is said to be "uniform." This means that all instances of a given type will be judged to be the same on the basis not of fact but of theory. The method brings us to the past, not to the present.
Secondly, the world in theory must be held to be always the same. The method requires this. The crisis of exegesis is a crisis of the philosophical presuppositions that guide its method by which it reaches conclusions such as that Jesus did not affirm his own divinity. "The problem of exegesis is connected . . . with the problem of philosophy. The indigence of philosophy . . . has turned into the indigence of our faith. The faith cannot be liberated if reason itself does not open up again." Reason, in other words, knowing itself, must see that it is grounded in what is, over which it has no control. What is controls what we know and not vice versa. The exclusion of any reality, however, is contrary to the object of reason itself. "Human reason is not an autonomous absolute." Ratzinger thinks that scholastic philosophy in the twentieth century in a sense failed because it tried to do the impossible, that is, provide a totally rational ground of the faith that a priori excluded the possibility of faith's openness to reason.
Yet, it was reality, not reason, that decided that to which reason was open. And reality included the reality of God and his activity in time. Faith cares for and about reason. "It is not the lesser function of the faith to care for reason as such. It does not do violence to it; it is not external to it; rather, it makes it return to itself." Thus, faith can liberate reason from itself by asking it questions that it could not itself have anticipated, yet about which it can consider. "Reason will not be saved without the faith, but the faith without reason will not be human."
Finally, Ratzinger asks, "Why, in brief, does faith still have a chance?" His answer is remarkable: "because it is in harmony with what man is." Kant lies at the heart of the problems that much modern philosophy has with the faith. Because he arbitrarily cut off any path to reality, he has to "postulate" substitutes for what reason animated by faith could reach, which remains, in spite of this philosophy's presuppositions, reality, what is. "In man there is an inextinguishable yearning for the infinite," Ratzinger concludes. "None of the answers attempted are sufficient. Only the God himself who became finite in order to open our finiteness and lead us to the breadth of his infiniteness responds to the question of our being. For this reason, the Christian faith finds man today, too." That is to say, it "finds" man in the today because the active God is not limited to the rigid past moment examined by the philosophical suppositions contained in much exegesis.
In conclusion, let me remark that Josef Ratzinger is acutely aware that what is behind the philosophical and religious movements that propose themselves as alternatives to orthodox Christianity, many of which already disguise themselves in Christian terminology, is the effort to solve all human problems and disorders by human means. Ratzinger's awareness that Marxism is not altogether dead and how it might reappear reminds me of what Paul Johnson wrote back in 1989:
Perhaps the most important single thing which the Judaeo-Christian tradition established was the principle of monotheism and the concomitant rejection of natural phenomena—sun, moon, trees, rivers, woods, and symbolic animals—as objects of worship. There is among the more active environmentalists an element of pantheism, one might almost say of paganism. . . . The ideological scene . . . may become more complicated by the next century (2000). . . . But whatever form this conflict of ideas takes, we can be confident that the radicals will continue to insist that human behavior can be transformed by political process and that the state must play the leading role in this transformation. Hence those who remain skeptical of this contention . . . must continue to focus on two fundamental points— the natural imperfection of human beings and the limits which must be imposed on state power.3
Josef Ratzinger's discourse in Guadalajara on contemporary intellectual movements is a remarkable reminder of the nature of the democratic state when it is based on relativism, of the confluence of liberation theology with its emphasis on politics joined with Eastern mysticism with its lack of definiteness about the divinity and things themselves. What Josef Ratzinger has shown is that orthodoxy remains the intelligible alternative to the ideologies of our time at the precise point wherein each deviates from reality, from what is.
NOTES
1 See James V. Schall, Liberation Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982); "Counter-Liberation," Orbis, 30 (Fall 1986), 426-32; "Liberation Theology: Afterthoughts," Social Justice Review, 86 (September-October 1995), 143-48.
2 Cardinal Ratzinger elaborated the problem of relativism and democracy more in detail in his Address on his Induction to the French Academy, found in L'Osservatore Romano, English, February 10, 1993. On this address, see James V. Schall, "The Threat Posed by Modern Democracy," Homiletic and Pastoral Review, XCIV (June 1994), 31-32, 46-47.
3 Paul Johnson, "Is Totalitarianism Dead?" Crisis, 7 (February 1989), 16.
Reverend James V. Schall, S.J., is now teaching at Georgetown University after having taught at the University of San Francisco and the Gregorian University in Rome for twelve years. A prolific writer, he is the author of many books and hundreds of articles. A frequent contributor to HPR, Fr. Schall is also a regular columnist in Crisis magazine. His last article in HPR appeared in January 1997
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