Msgr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais: Faith Imperiled by Reason - Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

[Stone]

Faith Imperiled by Reason: Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

by Msgr. Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, SSPX

[Slightly reformatted from here. It can also be downloaded from this website.]

[A reminder that the word 'hermeneutics,' by definition, is the 'science of interpretation.' So anywhere we see the word 'hermeneutics', we could substitute the word 'interpretation'. Therefore, the title of this work could easily read: 'Faith Imperiled by Reason: Benedict XVI's Interpretations' - The Catacombs]

PREFACE

by Dr. Peter Chojnowski

Those who remain attached to the Catholic Faith as articulated by all the great dogmatic Councils of the Church are greatly indebted to His Excellency Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais for this article, published just last summer in the French Dominican publication Le Sel de la Terre and just translated into English.

The fight we are in for Catholic Tradition is not a fight over ceremonies and rituals, which some happen to like and others happen not to like. The Sacred Rites of the Church are “sacred” precisely because they express and apply to the concrete lives of the Faithful, the truths and grace which even God the Son did not “make up,” but were, rather, revealed to Him by His Father in Heaven.

This article, which compares the theology of Josef Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) to that of the traditional theology of the Church as articulated by the Popes, the Fathers, and the Doctors, is truly a comprehensive study for all those interested in the doctrinal issues now being discussed behind closed doors.

Since the Conciliar Church has decided to accept the personal theology of each new pope as its current interpretation of the fundamentals of the Faith, it is absolutely essential for real Catholics to understand the Modernist Revolution in its current stage.

Please spread this article far and wide. The text is long, however, the reader should make it to the end in order to understand how the New Theology attempts to transform the most fundamental doctrines of the faith.

After reading this fascinating essay, anyone who thought that “reconciliation” between Catholic Tradition and Vatican II theology is right around the corner will have to think again!

January 2010

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Faith Imperiled by Reason: Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais

From La Sel de Terre, Issue 69, Summer 2009

Translated by C. Wilson

Translator’s Note: I have decided rather to preserve the Bishop’s slightly familiar writing style than to convert the tone of the article to something purely academic.

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FOREWARD
Introduction


Chapter I. The Hermeneutic of Continuity

1. The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today: the ‘why’ of hermeneutics
2. Faith at risk from philosophy
3. Hermeneutics in the Patristic School
4. The Homogenous progress of dogmas
5. Return to the objectivity of the Fathers and the councils
6. A new refl ection by a new vital connection?
7. The Method: Dilthey’s historicist hermeneutics
8. Benedict XVI reclaims the purification of the Church’s past
9. When hermeneutics begins to distort history
10. A new Thomas Aquinas


Chapter II. Joseph Ratzinger’s Philisophical Itinerary

1. From Kant to Heidegger: a seminarian’s intellectual itinerary
2. Kantian agnosticism, father of modernism
3. The autonomy of practical reason, mother of the Rights of Man-without-God
4. Reconciling the Enlightenment with Christianity
5. In search of a new realist philosophy
6. Relapse into idealism: Husserl
7. Heidegger’s existentialism
8. Max Scheler’s philosophy of values
9. Personalism and communion of persons
10. The dialogue of ‘I and Thou’ according to Martin Buber
11. ‘Going Out of Self’ according to Karl Jaspers


Chapter III. Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Itinerary

1. Living Tradition, continuous Revelation, according to the school of Tübingen
2. Revelation, living Tradition and evolution of dogma
3. Tradition, a living interpretation of the Bible
4. The doctrine of faith as experience of God
5. The power of assimilation, driving force of doctrinal progress, according to Newman
6. Far from pledging allegiance to our concepts, Revelation judges and uses them


Chapter IV. An Existentialist Exegesis of the Gospel

1. ‘He Descended into Hell’
2. ‘He rose again from the dead’
3. ‘He ascended into heaven
4. The reality of Evangelical facts put between parentheses
5. Existentialist exegesis, a divinatory art
6. A Historicist Hermeneutic


Chapter V. Hermeneutic of Three Great Christian Dogmas

1. The dogma of the Trinity reviewed by personalism
2. The equivocation of the perpetual search for truth
3. The dogma of the incarnation, revised by Heidegger’s existentialism
4. The dogma of the redemption reviewed by Christian existentialism
5. Satisfaction, the tact of divine mercy
6. A denial worse than Luther’s
7. Existentialist sin
8. The priesthood reduced to the power of teaching


Chapter VI. Personalism and Ecclesiology

1. The Church, communion in charity
2. The Church of Christ ‘subsists’ in the Catholic Church


Chapter VII. Political and Social Personalism

1. Personalism and political society
2. Personalism applied to marriage and chastity


Chapter VIII. Christ the King Re-envisioned by Personalism

1. Political implications of man’s ultimate end
2. Religious liberty purified by the help of Emmanuel Mounier
3. Jacques Maritain’s vitally Christian lay civilization
4. Sophistic refutations


Chapter IX. Benedict XVI’s Personalist Faith

1. Faith, encounter, presence and love
2. Philosophical experimentation and mystical experience
3. Divine authority replaced by human authority


Chapter X. Skeptical Supermodernism

1. An inaugural anti-program
2. A resigned and demoralized skepticism
3. Faced with skepticism, the remedy is found in Saint Thomas Aquinas


Epilogue: Hermeneutic of the last ends

1. Retractions
2. Limbo reinterpreted by hermeneutics
3. Death, a remedy
4. Eternal life, immersion in love
5. Collective salvation according to Henri de Lubac
6. Purgatory diminished
7. A humanistic particular judgment
8. The fundamental option, economy of mortal sin
9. Hell, a state of soul


Afterword: Christianity and Lumieres

1. A fragile equilibrium
2. Mutual regeneration and polyphonic correlation