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

[Stone]

CHAPTER I: The Hermeneutic of Continuity

1. The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today: the ‘why’ of hermeneutics

'What is constitutive of faith today?’ Such is the question which Joseph Ratzinger posed in 1973, during a group ecumenical discussion, and which he posed as the first question of his book, The Principles of Catholic Theology.[9]

‘The question is ill framed,’ he amends; ‘it would be more correct to ask himself what, out of the collapse of the past, still remains today a constitutive element.’

The collapse is scientific, political, moral, even religious. Must one allow for a philosophy of history which accepts ruptures in faith as relevant, each thesis possessing its meaning as one moment from a whole? Thus, to paraphrase Ratzinger,

‘Thomistic as well as Kantian interpretation of Christian fact each has its truth in its own historical epoch but only remains true if one abandons it when its hour is finished, so as to include it in a whole which one constructs as a novelty.’

Joseph Ratzinger seems to dismiss this dialectical method precisely because it results in a new truth. It is not necessary to synthesize irreconcilables, but to find what continuity exists between them. Let us then find what permanence of Christian faith there is in the fluctuations of philosophies which have wished to explain it. Such is the theme of the professor of Tübingen’s work, Introduction to Christianity.[10]

Since reason seems to evolve according to diverse philosophies and since the past of such an evolution adapts itself to the faith, the connection between faith and reason must be periodically revised so that it will always be possible to express the constant faith according to the concepts of contemporary man. This revision is the fruit of hermeneutic.


2. Faith at risk from philosophy

When Saint John, and the Holy Ghost who inspired him, chose the name ‘Word,’ in Greek Logos, to designate the person of the Son in the Holy Trinity, the word had been until then as ambiguous as possible. It commonly designated formulaic speech. Heraclitus, six centuries before John, spoke of a logos measuring everything, but that meant the fire which burns and consumed all. The stoics used this term to signify the intelligence of things, their seminal rational (logos spermatikos) which merged with the immanent principle of organization in the universe. Finally Philon (13 BC – 54 AD), a practicing Jew and Hellenist from Alexandria, saw in the logos the supreme intelligibility ordering the universe, but much inferior to the unknowable God—that of Abraham and of Moses.

John seizes a Greek word. He wrests it, in a manner of speaking, from those who have used it in ignorance or by mistake. From the first words of the prologue to his Gospel, he gives to it, he renders to it rather its absolute meaning. It is the eternal Son of God who is His Word, His Logos, His Verbum. And this Word is incarnate [...]. Thus, the Revelation made to the Jews makes an effort, from its very beginnings, to express itself in the languages of Greek philosophy, without making any concession to it.[11]

Thus the faith expressed in human concepts is inspired Scripture; the faith explained in human concepts is theology, science of the faith; finally, the faith defined in human concepts is dogma. All these concepts have a plebian or philosophical origin, but they are only employed by faith once decanted and purified of all original, undesirable philosophical stench.

At the cost of what hesitations and what labors have the Fathers and the first councils resolved, when faced with heresies, to employ these philosophical terms and to forge new formulae of faith so as to clarify the gift of revelation! The use of the philosophical term, ousia (substance), hypostasis, prosôpon (person), to speak the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation is accompanied by a necessary ‘process of purification and recasting’ of the concepts which these words signify.

It is only once extracted from their philosophical system and modified by a maturation in depth, then sometimes at first condemned because of their still inadequate content (monarchy, person, consubstantial), then understood correctly, admitted at last and qualified for application (but only analogically), that these concepts can become carriers of the new consistency of the Christian faith.[12]

These facts demonstrate that, far from expressing itself in the philosophy of the epoch, the faith must extricate itself from false philosophies and itself forge its own concepts. But is this to be extricated from all philosophy and to rest itself on a simple ‘common sense?’

With Father Garrigou-Lagrange, I will further respond to this question by showing that dogmas express themselves in the language of the philosophy of being, which is nothing besides a scientific instance of that common knowledge.


3. Hermeneutics in the Patristic School

It was with repugnance, even, that the Councils would consent to add precisions to the symbol of faith from the Council of Nicaea (325) which itself seemed sufficient to exclude every heresy. The council of Chalcedon (451), against the Monophysite heresy, resolved to proceed to a definition (horos) of the faith, a novelty. A little after (458), the bishops would conclude that Chalcedon was no longer a extensive enough interpretation of Nicaea. The word, interpretation (hérmènéia), was also used by Saint Hilary (Syn. 91) when speaking of the Fathers who, after Nicaea, had reverently interpreted the propriety of consubstantial. It was a matter neither of a new reading nor of a revision to the symbol of Nicaea, but of a more detailed explanation. Such is, in consequence, the meaning of the hérmènéia achieved by Chalcedon. Later, one Vigilius of Thapsus would affirm that it was necessary, when faced with newly prepared heresies, to ‘bring forth new decrees of such a type that, even so, whatever the preceding councils have defined against the heretics remains intact.’[13] Then, Maximus the Confessor declared that the Fathers of Constantinople had only confirmed the faith of Nicaea against those who sought to change it for themselves to their own meaning: for Maximus, Christ subsisting ‘in two natures’ is not ‘another profession of faith’ (allon pistéôs symbolon), but only a piercing (tranoûntes) look at Nicaea, which, by interpretations and subsequent fashionings (épéxègoumenoi kai épéxergazoménoi), must still be defended against deformative interpretations.[14]

Thus, the hermeneutic (hérmènéia) that the Fathers practiced for the earlier magisterium was clarified as far as its end and as far as its form.

As far as the end, it is no matter of adapting a modern mentality, but of combating this modern mentality and of neutralizing the impression of modern philosophies upon the faith (it is in fact the characteristic of heretics to bring the faith to modern philosophical speculations which corrupt it). It is not any more a matter of justifying the old heretics in the name of a better comprehension of the Catholic formulae which have condemned them!

As far as the form, it is no matter of proposing modern principles in the name of the faith but of condemning them in the name of this same unchanged faith. In summary, the revisionist hermeneutic of Joseph Ratzinger is a stranger to the thought of the Fathers. There are, therefore, grounds for reviewing it radically.


4. The Homogenous progress of dogmas

It belongs to Saint Vincent of Lérins to have taught, in the year 434, the homogenous development of dogma, always by increase in explicitness but never by mutation:

It is characteristic of progress that each thing be amplified in itself; it is characteristic of change, on the other hand, that something be transformed into something else. [...] Whenever some part of the essential seed grows in the course of time, then one rejoices in it and cultivates it with care, but one never changes the nature of the germ: then is added to it, certainly, its appearance, its form, its clarity, but the nature in each genus remains identical.[15]

In the same sense, in 1854 Pius IX, citing the same Vincent of Lérins in the bull defining the Immaculate Conception, and speaking of the ‘dogmas deposited with the Church,’ declared that She

‘devotes Herself to polishing them in such a manner that these dogmas of heavenly doctrine receive proof, light, clarity, but retain fullness, integrity, propriety, and that they increase only in their genus, that is to say, in the same dogma, the same meaning and the same proposition’ [DS 2802].

According to this progress in clarity, dogmas do not progress in depth—a depth of which the Apostles have already received the plenitude—nor in truth, that is to say, in their aptness to that part of his mystery which God has revealed. The progress sought by theology and by the magisterium is that of a more precise expression of the divine mystery as it is, immutable as God is immutable. Concepts, always imperfect, could always be refined, but they would never fall out-of-date. A dogmatic formula, therefore, never has anything to do with, nor ever has to earn the vital reaction of the believing subject, but it would have everything to lose in doing so. It is rather that subject who must, on the contrary, efface himself and disappear before the objective content of dogma.


5. Return to the objectivity of the Fathers and the councils

Far from being obliged to take on in turn the successive, temporary forms of human subjectivity, the dogmatic effort is a labor of perseverance for the sake of making revealed truth objective upon its base of the gifts of Scripture and Tradition. It is a work of purge from the subjective in favor of an objectivity as perfect as possible. This work of purification is not in the first place an extraction of the heterogeneous so as to regain the homogenous, even though it can be this when faced with heresies and doctrinal deviations. The essential operation of dogmatic development is the effort to reassemble what is dispersed, to condense the diffused, to eliminate metaphors as far as possible, to purify analogies so as to make them more suitable. Nicaea’s consubstantial and Trent’s transubstantiation come from such successful reductions.

Inevitably, dogmatic reduction deviates from scriptural depth: consubstantial will never have the depth of one word from Jesus, such as this: “Who sees me, sees the Father” (John 14, 9). In this word, what an introduction to an unfathomable abyss! What a source for interminable questions! What space for contemplation! And nonetheless, what progress in precision belongs to consubstantial! What a fountain of theological deductions! There is, it seems to me, Joseph Ratzinger’s whole gnoseological difficulty: torn between the dogmas which he must hold with an absolute stability and the inquisitive quest of his mobile spirit, Joseph Ratzinger never achieves the reconciliation of the two poles of his faith.

When will the affirmation of the ‘I’ efface itself before the ‘Him’?


6. A new reflection by a new vital connection?

It is this effacement of the believing subject which Benedict XVI energetically refuses. For him, the evolution of the formulation of the faith is not the search for better precision, but the necessity of proposing a new and adapted formulation. It is novelty for novelty’s sake. And the adaption is an adaption to the believer, not an adaption to the mystery. All this fits with John XXIII’s syllogism, from the presentation of the program of Vatican II in his opening discourse:

From its renewed, serene and tranquil adherence to all the teaching of the Church in its integrity and its precision [...], the Christian, Catholic and apostolic spirit of the whole world waits a leap forward toward a doctrinal penetration and formation of consciences, in the most perfect correspondence of fidelity to the authentic doctrine, but also: this doctrine studied and explained through the forms of investigation and the literary formulation of modern thought. One, in fact, is the substance of the ancient faith from the depositum fidei, the other the formulation of its surface: and it is of the later that one must, if there be need, take great care, by weighing everything according to the forms and the proportions of a magisterium whose character is above all pastoral.[17]

Such indeed was the Council’s task, Benedict XVI says: the modern reformulation of the faith; according to a modern method and following modern principles, then according to a new method and after new principles. For there is always method, on the one hand, and principles on the other. To apply this method and to adopt these principles should still be the Church’s task forty years later:

It is clear that this commitment in view of expressing in a new manner a determinate truth needs a new reflection upon that very truth and a new vital connection with it. It is equally clear that the new way of speaking can only mature if it is born from a conscious comprehension (Verstehen) of the expressed truth, and that on the other hand the reflection upon the faith demands just as much that one live that faith.[18]

There is the whole revolution of the magisterium implemented by the Council. Preoccupation with the subject of faith supplants care for the object of faith. In place of simply seeking to make dogma precise and explicit, the new magisterium will seek to reformulate and adapt it. In place of adapting man to God, it wishes to adapt God to man. Do we not then have a subverted magisterium, an anti-magisterium?


7. The Method: Dilthey’s historicist hermeneutics

Where to find the method for this adapted rereading of dogma? A German philosopher who has influenced German theology and whose mark is found upon Joseph Ratzinger must intervene: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), father of hermeneutics and of historicism.

Hermeneutics, as we have seen, is the art of interpreting facts or documents.

Historicism then, wishes to consider the role of history in truth. For Dilthey, as for Schelling and Hegel who were idealists, truth is only understood in its history. But whereas for Schelling and Hegel truth develops by itself, in a well-known dialectical process, on the other hand, for Dilthey a distinction must be made:

— **In physical sciences, development consists in explanation (Erklären), which is a purely rational function.

— But in human sciences, truth progresses by understanding (Verstehen) which includes the appetitive powers of the soul. Thus truth develops by the process of a vital reaction of the subject to the object, in accordance with the link of vital reaction between the historian, who looks into the facts of history, and the impact of history.

Thus, the emotive richness of the historian tends to enrich the object he studies. The subject enters into the object; it becomes a part of the object. History is charged with the energy of its readers’ emotions and thus the judgments of the past are unceasingly colored by the vital reaction of the historian or of the reader. Now, it is at the end of each epoch that there fully appears the meaning of that epoch, Dilthey emphasizes, and this is very true; from there, at each such term, it is necessary to proceed to a new revision.

Let’s apply this: the date 1962, that of the start of Vatican Council II, seemed the end of a modern epoch; thus one could then—and one was obliged to—revisit, revise all historical facts, the judgments of the past, especially concerning religion**—so as to disengage from them significant facts and permanent principles, not without coloring them anew with the preoccupations and emotions of the present.

In this sense, Hans Georg Gadamer (born in 1900) judges that the true historical consciousness does not, for the interpreter, consist in wishing to get rid of its prejudices—that would be the worst of prejudices—but in becoming aware of them and in finding better ones. This is not a vicious circle, the hermeneuticists say; it is a healthy realism which is called ‘the hermeneutical circle.’

Applied to the faith, this retrospective necessarily purifies the past from what was added in an adventitious manner to the nucleus of the faith, and this revision, this retrospective, necessarily aggregates to the faith the coloring of present preoccupations. There is, thus, a double process: on the one hand, a rereading of the past which is a purification of the past, a disengagement from its parasitic growths, a highlighting of its implicit presuppositions, a becoming conscious of its fleeting circumstances, a reckoning of the emotive reactions of the past or of the philosophies of the past; and on the other hand, it must be an enrichment of historical facts and ideas by the actual vital reaction, which depends on the new circumstances in the actual epoch, as well as upon the actual mentality and thus upon actual philosophy.

It is indeed to this hermeneutic that the expert on the Council, Joseph Ratzinger, invited the assembly in the editing of ‘schema XIII,’ which would become Gaudium et Spes, in an article written before the fourth session of the Council. What he said there about moral principles applies as well to dogmatic ones:

The formulations of Christian ethics, which must be able to reach the real man, the one who lives in his time, necessarily takes on the coloration of that time. The general problem, the knowledge that truth is only historically formulated, arise in ethics with a particular acuity. Where does temporal conditioning stop and permanent begin, so that it can, as it must, cut out and detach the first so as to arrange its vital space in the second? There is a question which no one can ever settle in advance without equivocation: no epoch can in fact distinguish what abides from its own fleeting point of view. To recognize and practice it, it is thus still necessary always to engage in a new fight. Faced with all these difficulties, we must not expect too much from the conciliar text in this matter.[19]

8. Benedict XVI reclaims the purification of the Church’s past

However uncertain and provisional it may be, this purification of the past is indeed what Benedict XVI reclaims for the Church, and this is a constant in his life. He says it himself:

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. This impulse is the constant in my life.[20]

In his speech on December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI enumerates the purifications of the past implemented by Vatican II and he justified them against the reproach of ‘discontinuity’ while invoking historicism:

In the first place, it was necessary to define in a new way the relation between faith and modern sciences [...]. In the second place, it was necessary to define in a new way the link between the Church and the modern State, which accorded a place to citizens of diverse religions and ideologies [...]. This was bound in the third place to the problem of religious tolerance, a question which needed a new definition of the link between the Christian faith and the religions of the world.

It is clear – Benedict XVI concedes – that in all these sectors of which the collection forms a singular question, there could emerge a certain form of discontinuity in which, nevertheless, once the diverse distinctions between concrete historical circumstances and their demands were established, it would appear that the continuity of principles had not been abandoned.

In this process of novelty in continuity – Benedict XVI justifies himself – we should learn to understand more concretely first of all that the decisions of the Church concerning contingent facts – for example, certain concrete forms of liberalism – must necessarily be themselves contingent because they refer to a specific reality, in itself changeable:

It was necessary to learn to recognize that, in such decisions, only the principles express the enduring aspect, while remaining in the background and motivating decisions from within. On the other hand, the concrete forms are not as permanent; they depend on the historical situation and can thus be submitted to changes.

Benedict XVI illustrates his proof by the example of religious liberty:

Vatican Council II – he says – with the new definition of the relation between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has revisited and likewise corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity, it has in turn maintained and deepened its essential nature and its true identity. Vatican Council II, recognizing and making its own through the decree on religious liberty an essential principle of the modern State, has captured anew the deepest patrimony of the Church.[21]

9. When hermeneutics begins to distort history

If only Benedict XVI would allow me to protest this distortion of history! The popes of the 19th century have condemned religious liberty, not only on account of the indifferentism of its promoters, but in itself:

— because it is not a natural right of man: Pius IX said that it is not a ‘proprium cujuscumque hominis jus,’[22] and Leo XIII said that it is not one of the ‘jura quae homini natura dederit.’[23]

— and because it proceeds from ‘an altogether distorted idea of the State,’[24] the idea of a State which would rather not have the duty of protecting the true religion against the expansion of religious error.

These two motives for condemnation are absolutely general; they follow from the truth of Christ and of his Church, from the duty of the State to recognize it, and from its indirect duty to promote the eternal salvation of the citizens, not, indeed, by constraining them to believe in spite of themselves, but by protecting them against the influence of socially professed error, all things taught by Pius IX and Leo XIII.

If today, circumstances having changed, religious plurality demands, in the name of political prudence, civil measures for tolerance even of legal equality between diverse cults, religious liberty as a natural right of the person, in the name of justice, should not be invoked. It remains a condemned error. The doctrine of the faith is immutable, even if its complete application is impeded by the malice of the times. And on the day when circumstances return to normal, to those of Christianity, the same practical application of repression of false cults must be made, as in the time of the Syllabus. Let’s remember that circumstance which change application (consequent circumstances) do not affect the content of doctrine.

We must say the same thing concerning circumstances which prompt the magisterium to intervene (antecedent circumstances). That religious liberty had in 1965 a personalist context, very different from the context of aggressiveness that it had a hundred years earlier in 1864, at the time of the Syllabus, does not change its intrinsic malice. The circumstances of 1864 certainly caused Pius IX to act, but they did not affect the content of the condemnation that he set down for religious liberty. Should a new Luther arise in 2017, even without his attaching as in 1517 his 95 theses to the door of the collegial church of Wittenberg, he would be condemned in the very terms of 500 years before.[25] Let us reject then the equivocation between ‘circumstantial’ decision and prudential, provisional, fallible, reformable, correctible decision in matters of doctrine.


10. A new Thomas Aquinas

By consequence the purification of the past of the Church, the revision of ‘certain of her historical decisions,’ such as those which Benedict XVI proposes, is false and artificial. It is to be feared that the same goes for the assimilation by the Church’s doctrine of the philosophies of the temps, which is promoted by the same Benedict XVI in his speech to the Curia in 2005.

Benedict XVI praises Saint Thomas Aquinas for having, in the 13th century, reconciled and allied faith and the new philosophy of his epoch. This new Thomas Aquinas says: Voilà, I am going to make for you the theory of alliance which the Council has attempted between faith and modern reason. I summarize.

Here are the pope’s exact words:

When, in the 13th century, Aristotelian thought entered into contact with Medieval Christianity, formed by the Platonic tradition, and when faith and reason were at risk of entering into an irreconcilable opposition, it was Saint Thomas Aquinas who played the role of mediator in the new encounter between faith and philosophy, thus placing faith in a positive relation with the form of reason dominant in his epoch. [...] With Vatican Council II the moment when a new reflection of this type was necessary arrived. [...] Let us read it and welcome it, guided by a just hermeneutic.[26]

In short, Saint Thomas did not condemn Aristotelianism, despite its dangers, but he knew how to welcome, purify and establish it ‘in a positive relation with the faith.’ – This is very exact.

– Very well, then, Vatican II did analogously; it did not condemn personalism, but it knew how to receive it, and, in return for some purifications, ‘how thus to place the faith in a positive relation with the dominant form of reason’ in the 20th century, how to integrate personalism into the vision of the Church.

– Stay to see whether this integration is possible.



Footnotes
[9] J. Ratzinger, The Principles of Catholic Theology, Téqui, 1982, p. 13
[10] J. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, Cerf, 2005 (reissue without any change from the 1st edition of 1969).
[11] André Clement, The Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas, NEL, 1983, p.33-34.
[12] Michael Fiedrowicz, Theologie der Kirchenväter, Grundlagen frühchristlicher Glaubensrefl exion, Herder, 2007, p. 340.
[13] Vigilius of Thapsus, Against Eutyches, 5, 2.
[14] Maximus the Confessor, opusc. 4, PG 91, 260: Fiedrowicz, Theologie der Kirchenvater, p. 356-357.
[15] Saint Vincent of Lerins, Commonitorium, RJ 2173-2174.
[16] See J. Ratzinger, My Life, Memories, 1927-1977, Paris, Fayard, 1998, p.43-44.
[17] John XXIII, Gaudet Mater Ecclesiae, opening speech of the Council from October 11, 1962, translation according to the Italian text prepared in l’Osservatore Romano, October 12, 1962, p. 3. See on this subject Paolo Pasqualluci, ‘Vatican II and modern thought: Considerations from a celebrated talk of John XXIII,’ The Religion of Vatican II – First Paris Symposium,
October 4-6, 2002, p. 313-314. (NDLR.)
[18] Benedict XVI, speech from December 22, 2005.
[19] J. Ratzinger, Der Christ und die Welt von heute, in J. B. Metz, Weltverständnis im Glauben, Matthias Grünewald Verlag, Mainz, 1965, p. 145.
[20] J. Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth, p. 78-79.
[21] Benedict XVI, speech from December 22, 2005.
[22] “A right proper to each man’: Pius IX, encyclical Quanta cura, Dz 1690.
[23] ‘Rights which nature has given to man’: Leo XIII, encyclical Libertas, Dz 1932.
[24] Pius IX, encyclical Quanta Cura, Dz 1690.
[25] See: Fr. François Knittel, “Benedict XVI: debate concerning Vatican II,’ in Courrier de Rome, Si si no no, # 290, June 2006, p. 6.
[26] Benedict XVI, speech of December 22, 2005.