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

[Stone]

CHAPTER II - Joseph Ratzinger’s Philosophical Itinerary

1. From Kant to Heidegger: a seminarian’s intellectual itinerary

What then is this ‘dominant form of reason’ which seduced the young Ratzinger and challenged his faith, so much so that he must exert himself heroically to reconcile them? Just like what he studied as a young cleric, it comes out of the agnosticism of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).

For the philosopher of Koenigsberg, our universal ideas do not take their necessity from the nature of things, which is unknowable, but from reason alone and from its innate ‘a priori categories’ of substance, causality, etc. Reason alone gives its structure and intelligibility to the real.

We only know a priori [that is to say, in a necessary manner] those things which we put there ourselves [Kant affirms].[27]

Modern physical science already followed this idealism with fruit by maintaining that the nature of the physical world remains opaque to reason and that we can only have mathematical and symbolic representations for it, in scientific hypotheses, works of reason, which force nature to appear before its tribunal so as to constrain it, by experimentation, to confirm the judge’s a priori. Once confirmed, the hypothesis is declared scientific theory, but it remains nonetheless a provisory and always perfectible hypothesis.

Kant wants to apply this rationalism to the knowledge of the operations of the intelligence itself upon the givens of sensible knowledge. It is our understanding, he says, which applies its a priori categories to things.

He does not see that the real beings most immediately perceived by the intelligence, such as being itself, or substance, or the essence of a thing, are on the contrary intelligible by the simple abstraction which the intellect operates on them from the givens of sensible experience. In particular, the first thing known by our intelligence is the being of sensible things:

What is first conceived by the intellect is being; for everything is capable of being known according as it is in act [...]. This is why being is the proper object of the intellect; it is thus the first intelligible, as sound is the first object of hearing.[28]

And upon this apprehension of being is founded the natural knowledge of the first principles: being is not non-being; everything which happens has a cause; every agent acts for an end; all nature is made for something, etc.

On the contrary, the consequences of the Kantian ‘unknowning’ or agnosticism are catastrophic: being as being is unknowable; the analogy of being is indecipherable and the principle of causality has no metaphysical value; thus one cannon prove the existence of God from the things of the world, and any such analogy between creature and Creator is unknowable, even blasphemous.


2. Kantian agnosticism, father of modernism

Consequently, reason cannot know either the existence or the perfections of God. This agnosticism even so incurs this reproach from Wisdom:

Deranged by nature are all men in whom there is not the knowledge of God and who, from visible goods, have not known how to understand He who is, nor, by the consideration of his works, how to recognize by analogy Who is their creator.[29]

Likewise, since the analogy with God is impossible, the revealed analogies which unveil for us his supernatural mysteries are just metaphors; consequently, every word of God can only be allegorical, and all human discourse concerning God, inversely, can only be mythological. This is the same principle of modernism condemned by Saint Pius X a century later: evangelical facts result from fabrications, and dogmas from a transfiguration of reality because of religious need. Dogmas have a practical and moral meaning which answers to our religious needs, while their intellectual meaning is derivative and subordinated. Their generative principle is within man; it is the principle of immanence.[30] For example, for Kant, already, the Trinity symbolize the union in a single being of three qualities of goodness, holiness and justice; the incarnate Son of God is no supernatural being; he is a moral ideal, that of a heroic man.[31] Therefore, dogmas are nothing more than symbols of states of soul.


3. The autonomy of practical reason, mother of the Rights of Man-without-God

On the other hand, in morality, according to common sense, human nature and its natural operations are defined by their ends, just as the nature and way of using a washing machine are what they are by their end. Well, Kant rejects the principle of finality itself, true and thereby the knowledge of our nature. He ignores that this nature is made for happiness and that true happiness consists in seeing God, who is the sovereign Good. Moreover, he denies the analogy between the sensible good, object of desire, and the genuine good, the will’s goal according to the perennial philosophy. The notion of the good is not acquired from sensible experience, and the existence of the sovereign Good is unknowable. Then what about morality? For Kant, a good act is not that which has an object and an end conformed to (unknowable) human nature and which of itself ordains man to the last end, but it is to act independently of every object and every end, out of pure duty, which is pure good will:

A good will is good not because of what it effects or accomplishes, nor because of its fitness to attain some proposed end; it is good only through its willing, i.e., it is good in itself.[32]

This is really the refusal of the final cause, the negation of the good as the end of our acts and the exclusion of God as sovereign Good and sovereign legislator. It is the proclamation of ‘the autonomy of practical reason.’ It is the German theory for the French Rights of Man in 1789. It is man taking the place of God.

Kantian virtue acts so as to ‘maintain in a person his humanity with its dignity.’[33] And as any such virtue, quasi stoical, does not coincide here below with happiness, it postulates the existence of a God who makes remuneration in the next life, a provisional and hypothetic Deus ex machina, concerning whom ‘one can only affirm that he exists apart from the rational thought of man.’[34]


4. Reconciling the Enlightenment with Christianity

Even if he seems to reprove such a ‘religion within the limits of reason alone,’ Joseph Ratzinger admires Kant, the philosopher par excellence from the Enlightenment. He salutes ‘the enormous effort’ of one who knew how ‘to bring out the category of the good’—that beats everything! —He proclaimed the current import of the Enlightenment, in his discourse at Subiaco, on April 1, 2005, one month before becoming pope. He analyzed the contemporary culture of the Enlightenment as being that of the rights of liberty, of which he enumerated the principles while adding**:

– “This canon of Enlightenment culture, though far from being complete, contains important values from which, as Christians, we cannot and we must not disassociate ourselves. [...] Undoubtedly, we have come to important acquisitions which can aspire to a universal value: the established point that religion cannot be imposed by the State but can only be welcomed into liberty; respect for the fundamental rights of man, which are the same for all; separation of powers and the control of power.”

– But, Joseph Ratzinger nonetheless objects, this Enlightenment culture is a secular culture, without God, anti-metaphysical because positivist, and based upon an auto-limitation of practical reason by which ‘man allows for no instance of morality independent from his self-interest.’ Consequently, ‘there exists contradictory Rights of Man, as for example the opposition between a woman’s wish for freedom and the embryo’s right to life. [...] An ideology confused with liberty leads to a dogmatism always very hostile to liberty.”[35] By its absolute, this ‘radical Enlightenment culture’ is opposed to Christian culture.[36]

– How to overcome this opposition? Here is the synthesis:

On the one hand, Christianity, religion of logos, according to reason, must rediscover its roots in the first philosophy from the Enlightenment, which was its cradle and which, abandoning myth, sought for truth, goodness and the one God. In return for this, this nascent Christianity ‘refused to the State the right to regard religion as a part of the political order, postulating thus the liberty of the faith.’[37]

On the other hand, Enlightenment culture must return to its Christian roots. But of course: proclaiming the dignity of man, a Christian truth, ‘Enlightenment philosophy has a Christian origin, and it is not haphazardly that it was rightly born in the domain of the Christian faith’ (sic).

This, moreover, the future Benedict XVI underlines, was the work of the Council, its fundamental intention, exposed in its declaration concerning ‘the Church in the modern-day world,’ Gaudium et Spes:

[The Council] has placed in evidence this profound correspondence between Christianity and the Enlightenment, trying to arrive at a true reconciliation between the Church and modernity, which is the great patrimony which each of the two parties must safeguard.[38]

To do this, Kant, in spite of his agnosticism, must be taken into account, the future pope judges: every man, even the unbelievers, can postulate the existence of God:

Kant denied that God can be known within the limits of pure reason, but at the same time he represented God, liberty and immortality, as so many postulates of practical reason, without which, he said in perfect agreement with himself, no moral act is possible. Does not the contemporary situation of the world make us think again that he might have been right?[39]


5. In search of a new realist philosophy

From his first love, never renounced, for Kant, the intellectual itinerary of a young seminarian from Freising led Joseph Ratzinger to modern German philosophy. He recounts it in his memoirs.

Counseled by my elder, Alfred Läpple, he said, ‘I read two volumes of the philosophical foundations for Steinbüchel’s moral theology, a new edition of which had just been prepared.’[In this book, he continues,] I found first of all an excellent introduction to the thought of Heidegger and Jaspers, as well as to the philosophies of Nietzsche, Klages and Bergson. For me, Steinbüchel’s work, The Revolution of Thought, was nearly the most important. Just as one believes in physical power so as to abandon a mechanistic conception and establish a new opening into the unknown and consequently into ‘the known Unknown,’ God, so one can note, in philosophy, a new return to the metaphysics made inaccessible after Kant.

We know that the physicist Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976) elaborated in 1927 a theory concerning the statistical position of atomic and molecular particles known by the name of the ‘uncertainty principle.’ In 1963, our professor of physical sciences in Paris, Monsieur Buisson, mocked the application, that certain ill-advised philosophers wanted to make of this principle, to substance and nature, which must henceforth be considered indeterminate and thus instable! It is unbelievable to see how the confusion between substance and quantity can have put the pseudo-philosophers, and even the pseudo-theologians, in a whirl for fifty years.

Steinbüchel, who began by studying Hegel and socialism, exemplified in the cited work the blossoming of personalism essentially due to Ferdinand Ebner, who also acted for him as a turning point in his intellectual development. The discovery of personalism, which we find realized with a new force of conviction in the great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber, was for me a marked intellectual experience; this personalism was by itself linked in my eyes to the thought of Saint Augustine, which I discovered in the Confessions, with all his human passion and depth.[40]


6. Relapse into idealism: Husserl

The turning point of modern thought is marked by phenomenology. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), a professor at various German universities, wanted to react against Kantian idealism and come ‘to things themselves.’ Very well. But to reach undeniable truth, he practiced a sort of methodical doubt, ‘épochè,’[41] which in Greek signifies the suspension of judgment, and he ‘struck into nothingness’ whatever was not ‘authentic.’ He did not deny the existence of external things, but he put it ‘between parentheses’: thus experience was ‘reduced’ to what is ‘give,’ to what appears, to what manifests itself ‘authentically.’ Well, the demand of this process lead Husserl to profess provisionally the contrary of what he had expected: it is no longer the thing external to the spirit which is absolutely real, but it is the ‘given,’ that is to say, the reality of my act of aiming at my mental object, in which I know myself to be thinking something.

For consciousness – Husserl says – the given is essentially the same thing, whether the represented object exist, or whether it be imagined or even perhaps absurd.[42]

It is clear in any case that everything which is in the world of things is, by principle, only a presumed reality for me. On the contrary, myself [...], or if you like the actuality of my existence, is an absolute reality. [...] Consciousness considered in its purity must be held by a system of being closed on itself, by an absolute system of being.[43]

Curiously, we find at the same time in modernism, the same disinterest in reality applied to religion: the reality of the mysteries of the faith matters little; what is important is that they express the religious problems and needs of the believer and help him to resolve them to fulfilll them. It was Alfred Loisy (1857-1940), Husserl’s exact contemporary, who undertook this ‘reduction’ on the part of dogma. These ideas were in the air.

With Husserl and his extreme crisis of idealism, the ‘turning point of thought’ evoked by Joseph Ratzinger was still problematic.


7. Heidegger’s existentialism

Let us understand the atmosphere of fresh air that existentialism, such as that of Heidegger, professor at Fribourg-en-Brigsau, can bring. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) wanted to avoid Husserl’s relapse into idealsm; he consecrated himself to beings, whose existence—the fact that they are cast into existence—calls out to us. At last, you say, here we leave the ideal and plunge again into the real! Alas! Being above all is the person and the general conditions for his affirmation. For existentialism in general, to exist is to have oneself abandon what one is not, by a free choice of destiny; in this sense, ‘existence precedes essence,’ becoming precedes being. To define the nature of things is determinism.– Kantian agnosticism is alive and well! The difference is that being defines itself by its action, as in Maurice Blondel (1861-1949).

For Heidegger, the subject is not constituted statically, by its nature, but by its dynamism, by its connections with others. Cast into existence and exposed to the abrupt impression ‘of finding myself there’ and to the feeling of ‘dereliction,’ I deliver myself from my anguishes by casting ahead, by accepting my destiny courageously and by making the decision to assume my place in the world, to ‘exceed myself,’ by giving my whole self to others who exist with me and by granting them authentic being.

Joseph Ratzinger will apply the idea of excelling oneself as accomplishment of self to Christology: Christ will be the man who completely excels, by the hypostatic union, and again, differently, by the cross.


8. Max Scheler’s philosophy of values

Another of Husserl’s disciples, Max Scheler (1874-1928), a professor at Frankfort, is the founder of the philosophy of values. According to this theory, human and community life is directed not by principles—which reason abstracts from the experience of things and which are founded on human nature, its finality and its Author—but by a state of spirit, a sense of life and of existence, which is nonetheless illuminated by immutable and transcendental values, which are imposed a priori (as Kant would say): liberty, person, dignity, truth, justice, concord, solidarity. These are the ideals, the many ideas which should live in action, in commitment to the serve of others and by which all should commune, differently however according to cultures and religions.

The Council, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are imbued with this philosophy of values.

The Council proposed before all to judge by its light (of the faith) the values most prized by our contemporaries and reconnect them to their divine source. For these values, in so far as they proceed from the human genius, are very good.[44]

The Church should not be the only promoter of values in civil society. [...] Ecclesiastical participation in the life of the country, by an open dialogue with all other forces, guarantees to Italian society an irreplaceable contribution of great moral and civil inspiration.[45]

It would be absurd to wish to turn backwards, to a Christian political system [...]. We do not hope to impose Catholicism on the West. But we do wish that the fundamental values of Christianity and the liberal values dominant in the world today could meet and become fertile mutually.[46]

This is to suppress the final cause along with the efficient cause of man and of society, and to construct politics on pure Kantian formalism.


9. Personalism and communion of persons

Scheler is the originator of a Christian existentialism or personalism. On the basis of the same confusion between being and act which is characteristic of Blondel and Heidegger, Scheler affirms that the ‘I’ results from the synthesis of all my vital phenomena of knowledge, instinct, emotion, passion, especially love—a synthesis which transcends each of these phenomena by an ‘unknowable something more.’

In this superior value the person discovers itself as ‘the concrete unity of being in its acts.’ The person exists in his acts. Love makes the person reach his ‘highest value,’ in an intersubjectivity where love shares in the life of the other and makes them interdependent. The Council was inspired by this to declare:

Man, the only creature upon the earth that God willed for its own sake, can only find himself fully in the disinterested gift of himself.[47]

There is the phenomenological view of charity, most characteristic of Scheler. But the danger is to reduce the redemption to an act of divine solidarity. Joseph Ratzinger will fall into this failing. Max Scheler goes only to the point of affirming that God has need of communicating himself to others, otherwise the disinterested solidarity which is the essence of love would not be authentic in Him. Joseph Ratzinger will apply this excess of intersubjectivity to the processions of the divine persons in the Trinity.

According to Scheler, the person is not only individual and ‘unrepeatable,’ but also plural and communal. It is of his essence to become part of a community which is a Miterleben, a ‘living with,’ a communion of experience.

Karol Wojtyla (1929-2005), the future Pope John Paul II, was an ardent disciple of Scheler, for whom he wished to supply his nonexistent[48] ethics, without correcting his metaphysic of the person. For Wojtyla, ‘the person determines himself by his communion (or participation, communication, Teilhabe) with other persons.”[49] The person is relation, or tissue of relations.

Isn’t this nonsense? The person, philosophically speaking, is a substance par excellence and not an accident or a collection of accidents. “The person is most perfect in its nature,” Saint Thomas explains.[50] It is evident that this ‘perfection’ is to subsist in itself and not in any other. Invaluable then is Boethius’ definition of person, maintained by Saint Thomas:
“Hoc nomen persona signifi cat subsistentem in aliqua natura intellectuali: the name ‘person’ signifies a being subsisting in an intellectual nature.”[51]

Well, abandoning such healthy realism, all personalism adopts the relational defi nition of the person. And the application of this definition to social life seems to flow from the source: communion, Wojtyla said, is not anything which reaches the person from the exterior, but the very act of the person, which energizes it and reveals to it, through unity with the other, its interiority as a person.[52] The Council picks up this idea:

The social character of man becomes apparent by the fact that there is an interdependence between the growth of the person and the development of society itself. In fact the human person [...a Thomistic interpolation] is and must be the principle, the subject and the end of all institutions. Social life is not therefore for man something superfluous: as it is by exchange with others, by the reciprocity of services, by dialogue with his brothers that man grows according to all his capacities and can answer to his vocation. [Gaudium et Spes, #25, § 1]

We will see further this application of this principle to the Church and to political society: if the person itself constitutes society, it follows that one could even have economics as the final cause for society, unless the person be first made the end of society.


10. The dialogue of ‘I and Thou’ according to Martin Buber

Joseph Ratzinger has recounted how, by means of reading Steinbüchel, he made the acquaintance of ‘the great Jewish thinker, Martin Buber.’[53] ‘The discovery of personalism [...] realized with a new force of conviction’ in Buber was for Ratzinger ‘a marked spiritual experience.’[54]

The central work of Martin Buber (1878-1965), I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923), places relation at the beginning of human existence.

This relation is either ‘I-it,’ as in the technical sphere, or ‘I-thou.’ The ‘I-it,’ in human relations, reduces a fellow man to a thing, considered as a mere object or a simple means. On the contrary, the ‘I-thou’ establishes with another a reciprocity, a dialogue, which supposes that I, at the same time as the other, am a subject. Buber is the thinker of intersubjectivity. If the ‘I*-it’ is necessary or useful for the functioning of the world, only the ‘I-thou’ sets free the ultimate truth of man and thus opens a true relation between man and God, the eternal Thou.[55]

The relation to others, who hold the common nature of man, is important, with its power, authority, influence, appeal, invitation, answer, obedience, but the danger is to make this relation the constituent of the person, when it is only one of its perfections. Besides, in this matter Buber discovered nothing, since already Aristotle (384-322 BC) set friendship as the virtue which crowns intellectual life and happiness. He defined it as ‘a mutual love founded on the communication of some good,”[56] as Saint Thomas (1225-1274) said, which, going even beyond Buber, makes charity (love of God) a true friendship:

As there is a certain communication of man with God, according as he communicates to us his beatitude, this communication must be founded upon a certain affection. Concerning this communication it is said in the first epistle to the Corinthians (1, 9): “God is faithful, by whom you are called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.” In fact, the love founded upon this communication is charity. It is thus manifest that charity is a certain friendship of man for God.[57]

Moreover, the danger, in the religious domain, is to confuse this charity with faith and to make faith in God a dialogue of the believer with a God who ‘cries out to him,’ making an abstraction from the conceptual content of the faith, that is to say, from the truths that God has revealed—not to me, but to the prophets and Apostles—and that the Church teaches. See how Buber himself confuses Revelation, experience, encounter, faith and reciprocal relation.

Revelation is the experience which swoops down on man in an unexpected manner [...]. This experience is an encounter with an eternal Thou, with an Altogether-Other who addresses himself to me, who calls me by my name [...]. The image of encounter precisely translates the essence of religious experience. The Thou as an active and not objectifiable presence, comes to meet me and expects for me my establishment in the faith of reciprocal relation.[58]

It is to be feared that Joseph Ratzinger made this confusion between faith, Revelation and reciprocal relation, and that he also abstracted from the content of the faith, that is to say, from revealed truths. It is this that the continuation of my exposé will try to elucidate, first by examining Joseph Ratzinger’s theological itinerary, then by a more precise study of the notion of faith which the future Benedict XVI developed in the course of his career. But before that, let’s look at one last philosopher who interested the student in Munich.


11. ‘Going Out of Self’ according to Karl Jaspers

By Joseph Ratzinger’s own avowal, there was in fact another existentialist and personalist, Jaspers, who marked the young philosopher of Freising.

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), a professor at Heidelberg, resembles a Christian existentialist and personalist, although he did not know how to reflect on the personality of God. He proposed an natural analogy for charity toward fellow men: communion. He is in fact less original in comparison with Scheler and Heidegger. He notes the experience of loving communication, made out of respect for the mysterious personality of the ‘other’ whom one even so wishes to touch and to whom one wishes to give oneself. This going out of self (Ek-Stase) towards others would furnish to Joseph Ratzinger a philosophical substratum for the considerations of Dionysius’ mystical theology concerning the ecstatic love of the soul for God and for a new interpretation of the redemptive love of Christ, as ‘going out of myself,’ in reaction to the pessimism of Heidegger for whom ‘going out of self’ is the solution for the anguish of an existence doomed to death.

Christ—Joseph Ratzinger will teach at Tübingen—is fully anthropocentric, fully ordained to man, because he was radically theocentric, in yielding the ego, and by this fact the being of man, to God. Then, in the measure by which this exodus of love is the ‘Ek-Stase’ of man outside of himself, an ecstasy by which he is extended forwards infinitely outside of himself and thus opened, is drawn beyond his apparent possibilities for development—in this very measure adoration [sacrifice] is simultaneously cross, suffering and heartbreak, the death of the grain of wheat which can bring forth no fruit until it passes through death.[59]

Is this not to effect a personalist or existentialist reinterpretation of the redemption? The cross should not be the torture of Jesus on the wood of the cross; without doubt it is not, as with Heidegger, an extension into the future so as to escape the present; but it is the extension outside of self for the sake of love which ‘shatters, opens, crucifies and sunders.’[60] In this fatally naturalistic perspective, where is sin? Where is atonement?

The danger of wishing, with Heidegger or Jaspers, to find natural and existential bases for supernatural realities is that of succumbing to a temptation all too natural for a spirit which seeks to reconcile ‘modern reason’ with the Christian faith: to cause, in place of an aspiring analogy, a debasing reduction of supernatural mysteries. Was this not the process of Gnostic heresies?

Jaspers exceeds the rest in the fault of confusing natural with supernatural. His method of ‘paradoxes’ consists in finding for the apparent contradictions of the natural order supernatural solutions. John Paul II seems to have given in to this fault in his encyclical on August 6, 1993, concerning the norm of morality: his letter presents itself as the modern solution for a modern antinomy [Antimony definition: contradiction or opposition, especially between two laws or rules. - The Catacombs]:

How can obedience to universal and immutable moral norms respect the unique and unrepeatable character of a person and not violate its liberty and dignity?[61]

Dignity is considered in a personalist manner, as inviolability, and not in a Thomist manner, as virtue. Thus, to a false problem, a false solution:

The crucified Christ reveals the authentic meaning of liberty: the total gift of self. [VS 85]

The gift of self in the service of God and of one’s brothers [accomplishes] the full revelation of the inseparable link between liberty and truth. [VS 87]

This is true on the supernatural level. But isn’t it disproportionate to give a philosophical question a supernatural, theological solution: the cross?

The true solution of the antinomy is the Thomistic: liberty is the faculty which pursues the good; and it is the role of moral law to indicate what is this good, and that’s all.

This false antinomy reveals a subjectivist philosophy’s incapacity to pose true questions. How to grasp the mystery of God, if the intellect has that for its first object how, not being, but the thinking subject or the questioned subject? If the notion of being does not allow one to climb again by analogy from created beings to the first Being? One is forced into the immanent genesis of dogmas, according to the modernist theory condemned by Pascendi. How to grasp the notion of good, the ratio boni, if thought cannot climb by analogy from sensible good to moral good? If the intellect does not know human nature and its ends, and the last end? One is condemned to the ethics of the person, the ethics of the inviolable subject or rather that of the subsistent relation. On all sides, there is an impasse.



Footnotes
[27] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, preface to the 2nd edition, III, 13.
[28] “Primo in conceptione intellectus cadit ens; quia secundum hoc unumquodque cognoscibile est in quantum est actu; unde ens est proprium objectum intellectus, et sic est primum intelligibile, sicut sonus est primum audibile.” (I, q. 5, a. 2).
[29] Wisdom 13, 1-5: “But all men are vain, in whom there is not the knowledge of God: and who by these good things that are seen could not understand him that is. Neither by attending to the works have acknowledged who was the workman.” (Douay-Rheims version)
[30] St. Pius X, encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, # 9 and 13, Dz 2076 and 2079.
[31] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 1793.
[32] Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. (trans. by James W. Ellington), 1981, p. 7.
[33] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Paris, PUF, 1965, p. 92-93.
[34] Immanuel Kant, Opus postumum, Convolutum VII.
[35] Joseph Ratzinger, speech at Subiaco, Documentation catholique, 2005, special edition, p.121-122.
[36] J. Ratzinger, ibid.
[37] J. Ratzinger, ibid.
[38] J. Ratzinger, ibid.
[39] J. Ratzinger, ibid., p. 124-125.
[40] J. Ratzinger, My Life, Memories, 1927-1977, Paris, Fayard, 1998, p. 52. [41] reduction
[42] Husserl, Logical Investigations, II, 2nd part, translated by H. Hélie, PUF, 1970, p. 151.
[43] Husserl, Directive Ideas, translated by Ricoeur, Gallimard, 1950, p. 164.
[44] Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, #11, § 2.
[45] John Paul II to President Bettino Craxi, at the time of the ratification of a  - 136 - new Italian concordat, June 3, 1985 (The Cross, June 5, 1985).
[46] Joseph Ratzinger, interview with the daily newspaper, Le Monde, November 17, 1992.
[47] Gaudium et Spes, #24, § 3.
[48] “Si in luce ambulamus,” St. John said, “societatem habemus ad invicem” (If we walk in the light, we are in communion with each other – 1 John 1, 7): Society is a matter of virtue.
[49] Karol Wojtyla, Person und Tat (Person and Act), Freiburg, Herder, 1981, ch. 7, n.9, p. 311 and 341.
[50] “Persona est perfectissimus in natura.” Summa Theologica, I, q. 29, a. 3.
[51] Summa Theologica, I, q. 39, a. 3, obj., 4.
[52] Rocco Buttiglione, The Thought of Karol Wojtyla, Communio-Fayard, 1984, p. 291.
[53] Joseph Ratzinger, My Life, Memories, 1927-1977, p. 52.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Summarized from our perusal of G. Bensussan, art. ‘Buber,’ in JeanFrançois Mattéi, Universal Philosophical Encyclopedia, Paris, PUF, 1972, t. 2, p. 2301-2302.
[56] ‘Mutua amatio [quae] fundatur super aliqua communicatione’ II-II, q. 23, a. 1.
[57] II-II, q. 23, a. 1.
[58] Martin Buber, The Eclipse of God, Paris, Nouvelle Cité, 1987, p. 35; cited by Daniel Tangay, Leo Strauss, an Intellectual Biography, Paris, Livre de poche, p. 296.
[59] Joseph Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, p. 203-204.
[60] Ibid., p. 204
[61] John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor, # 85