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

[Stone]

INTRODUCTION

Pope Benedict XVI’s speech to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005 appeared to be the programmatic speech of a new pontiff, elected pope the preceding April 19. It closely resembles his inaugural encyclical.

I am going to try to extract its ideas from it by force, then to analyze them freely. I thus offer to my reader a route of exploration through the garden of conciliar theology. Three avenues emerge at once:

1. Forty years after the close of the Council, Benedict XVI recognized that ‘the reception of the Council has taken place in a rather difficult manner.’ Why? he asks himself. ‘Well, it all depends on the just interpretation of the Council or—as we would say it today—on its just hermeneutic.’ Side by side with a ‘hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture’ on the part of traditionalists and progressives, there is ‘the hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in continuity.’ This continuity is ‘the continuity of a Church which is a unique entity. [...] It is an entity which grows with time and which develops itself, remaining always the same—the unique entity which is the people of God on its pilgrimage.

2. Such was the Council’s intention: to guard the deposit of the Faith but to ‘present [it] in a manner which corresponds to the need of our time’ (John XXIII, opening speech to the Council). Benedict XVI explains:

This commitment with a view to expressing in a new fashion a determinate truth demands a new reflection upon it and a new vital connection with it [...]. The new way of speaking can only develop if it is born from a conscious understanding of the faith which is expressed and [...], on the other hand, if the reflection upon the faith demands equally that one live this faith.

3. Thus, to present a living faith, fruit of a vital new experience, was ‘the program proposed by Pope John XXIII, extremely necessary, as it is precisely the synthesis of fidelity and of dynamism.’

The Council’s hermeneutic, then, stands upon three principles which follow one upon the next:

– The subject of faith, with his reason, is an integral part of the object of faith.

– Thus, he must look for a new vital connection of reason with faith.

– Hence there is implemented a synthesis of fidelity and dynamism.

What sort of synthesis is this? The Council explains: to college ‘the requests of our times’ and ‘the values most prized by our contemporaries’ and, after having ‘purified’ them, ‘to bind them to their divine source’ (Gaudium et Spes, n. 11), that is to say, to introduce them to Christianity along with their philosophy. But to do this, the Church must for her part, as the Council determined it, ‘to revisit and equally to correct certain historical decisions’ (Benedict XVI, speech of December 22, 2005).

Such is the hermeneutical program which must be mutually imperative for reason and faith.

I will not attempt either an analysis or a synthesis of Benedict XVI’s thought, of his inspiration so eclectic and mobile. Professor Jacob Schmutz, in twelve sessions with the Sorbonne University, during 2007-2008, detailed its components: secularization, Christianity as vera philosophia[3], the human personality irreducible in nature, the Enlightenment (Aufklärung) who need God to limit their passion for independence, the historical contingencies which keep the conscience from seeing, etc.

In this extremely rich body of thought, I will content myself with outlining an extremely reduced philosophical and theological course, according to the custom of the initiate, guided by the idea of hermeneutic as by Ariadne’s thread [link to explanation of Ariadne's thread].

In my progress, I will let Benedict XVI speak, sometimes commenting in a polemical manner, for I have chosen such a style with care for brevity, suitable to this unpretentious journal.

When I cite his writings earlier than his sovereign pontificate, I attribute them with all respect and truth to ‘Joseph Ratzinger.’ His work, Introduction to Christianity, reproduces the course of the young professor from Tubingen and, prepared in French in 1969, was reedited in 2005 with a preface from the author, who fundamentally confirms his writing: ‘The fundamental orientation,’ he wrote, ‘was correct; that is why today I dare to place this book again in the reader’s hands.’

Several texts will whet my reader’s hermeneutical appetite. They are a little compendium of the developments which follow.

1. Concerning the corrective revisitation of Tradition

• My fundamental impulse, precisely from the Council, has always been to free the very heart of the faith from under any ossified strata, and to give this heart strength and dynamism.[4]
  
• Vatican Council II, with its new definition of the relation between faith and the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has equally revisited and corrected certain historical decisions; but in this apparent discontinuity, it has in return maintained and deepened its essential nature and its true identity.[5]
  

2. Concerning the purifying assimilation of modern philosophy

• To assimilate into Christianity [modern] ideas born into a new world, often hostile and even now charged with an alien spirit, supposes a labor in the depths, by which the permanent principles of Christianity would take up a new development in assimilating the valuable contributions of the modern world, after having decanted then, purifying according to need.[6]
  
• Certainly the philosophy of being, the natural metaphysics of the human spirit serves as instrument of faith for making explicit what it contains implicitly[7]: on the other hand, no philosophy can pose as partner of faith in ‘perfecting doctrine and faith like a philosophical invention for human minds.’[8]
  

Footnotes
[3] True philosophy
[4] J. Ratzinger, Le Sel de Terre, Flammarion-Cerf, 1997, p. 78-79.
[5] Benedict XVI, speech of December 22, 2005.
[6] Y. Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, Paris, Cerf, 1950, p. 345-346.
[7] See Pius XII, Humani Generis, Dz 2314.
[8] Vatican I, constitution Dei Filius, ch. 4, De fi de et ratione, DS 3020