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

[Stone]

CHAPTER IV -An Existentialist Exegesis of the Gospel

Nominated, in the summer of 1966, as professor of dogmatic theology in the illustrious faculty of Catholic theology at the university of Tübingen, Joseph Ratzinger was confronted with an introduction to Heidegger’s theology of existentialism by the protestant Rudolph Bultmann. In his courses for winter 1966-1967, he ‘tried to fight against the existentialist reduction’ of doctrines concerning God and concerning Christ.[108] My reader well judge whether this combat was victorious; its content figures in the work prepared in 1968 under the title Einführung in das Christentum (Introduction to Christianity [109]). Among other things, the author there comments upon three articles from the Apostle’s Creed, two of which are among the facts narrated by the Gospel.

1. ‘He Descended into Hell’

‘No other article of faith [...] is as strange to our modern consciousness.’[110]

– But no! Let us not eliminate this article: ‘It represents the experience of our age,’ that of dereliction [Heidegger’s theme], dereliction through God’s absence (Ratzinger clarifies), of which Jesus had experience on the cross: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (Matt 27, 46)[111]

– Thus, this article of faith explains ‘that Jesus has crossed through the door of our ultimate solitude, that he has entered, by means of his Passion, into the abyss of our dereliction.’ The limbo of the Saints of the Old Testament visited by Jesus (this limbo is passed over in silence) is the sign that where no other word can reach us, there He is. Thus, hell is overcome, or more exactly, death which previously was hell is no longer so [...] since within death dwells love.’[112]


2. ‘He rose again from the dead’

– Man is doomed to death (p. 214) (another theme of Heidegger’s). Can Christ be made an exception?

– In fact, this article corresponds to the desire for love, ‘which aspires to eternity’ (p. 214); because ‘love is stronger than death.’ (Canticle 8, 9) Thus, man ‘can only survive by continuing to subsist in another’ (p. 214), in that Other ‘who is’ (p. 215), He, ‘the God of the living [...]; I am in fact more myself in Him than when I try to be simply myself’ (p. 215). (Notice the Platonism: I would be more real in God than in myself).

– Thus, in presenting himself really ‘from the outside’ to the disciples [very well], Jesus ‘shows himself powerful enough to prove to them [...] that in him, the power of love is manifestly stronger than the power of death’ (p. 220)

The conclusion that one must logically draw: the reanimation of Christ’s body on Easter morning was not necessary; Christ’s ‘survival’ by the force of his love suffices; and this survival is guaranteed to be ours by love...

– This does not reassure me concerning the reality of my future resurrection.


3. ‘He ascended into heaven’

– ‘To speak of the ascension into heaven or the descent into hell reflects, in the eyes of our generation awakened by Bultmann’s critique, the image of a world of three levels which we call mythical and that we consider as definitively outdated’ (p. 221). The earth is round; there is neither top nor bottom.

– ‘This [outdated] conception certainly furnished images by which the faith represented its mysteries, but it is also certain that it [this conception] does not constitute the essence of asserted reality’ (p. 221). The reality is that there are ‘two poles.’

– Thus, the reader concludes logically, Christ’s ascension was not in the dimensions of the cosmos, but in the dimensions of human existence. In the same way that the descent into hell represents the plunge into ‘the zone of solitude of love refused’ (p. 222), the ascension of Christ ‘evokes [sic] the other pole of human existence: contact with all other men through contact with divine love, so that human existence can find in some way its geometic place in the intimacy of God’ (p. 222).


4. The reality of Evangelical facts put between parentheses

The physical reality of the mysteries is neither described nor commented upon, it is neither affirmed nor denied—save that of the ascension, which seems quite denied; very simply it does not have any interest, it is put in parentheses, as Husserl would do, because it is not the ‘reality.’ ‘For consciousness,’ said the phenomenologist of Frieburg, the given is a thing essentially the same, whether the represented object exist or whether it be imagined or even perhaps absurd.”[113]

By this account, little matters the historical reality of the Gospel; what matters is that the scriptural symbols of descent, resurrection and ascension and the dogmas which correspond to them should be able to explain the interior experience of the man of the 20th or 21st century. Joseph Ratzinger simply gives to this experience a Christian substance drawn from several parts of the Gospel: the dereliction of the cross. Thus Christianized, the existentialist rereading of the dogma is confirmed: the truth of the facts of the Gospel, the truth of dogma—it is their power of evoking the existential problems of the present epoch. Such is the movement toward introversion affected by the ‘new type’ of modernism.


5. Existentialist exegesis, a divinatory art

There must be a free movement for the vital creation of a new understanding of Scripture. Exegesis becomes a divinatory art: it divines what God never meant to signify: the historical sense being denied or ostracized, the divined sense rests on nothing. Well, the whole secondary meaning of Scripture, as St. Thomas explains, ‘is founded on the first meaning and presupposes it.’[114]

Thus, to take again the Gospel as commented upon by Joseph Ratzinger, man’s escape outside the zone of dereliction into a geometrical place within the presence of God presupposes, to be an understanding of Scripture, Jesus’ physical ascension

– ‘He was lifted up as they watched, and a cloud hid him from their eyes’[115]

– as its foundation.

Consequently, denying or passing over the literal sense in silence is the ruin of all exegesis.

Such was the fault of Origen: persuaded that the moral or spiritual sense of Scripture was the principal, he neglected to explain the literal sense and sank into an arbitrary allegorical interpretation.[116]

Saint Jerome rose in force against this deviation and begged a correspondent: ‘Distance yourself from the heresy of Origen!’[117]

And Cardinal Billot, who cites this test, shows how Alfred Loisy, commenting on Saint John, wishes that the multiplication of loaves were only a symbol of the Eucharist, the historical fact being no more than a fiction.[118]

Joseph Ratzinger—this is patent after what we have read—falls into Origen’s fault, a ‘heresy’ according to Saint Jerome, and he risks falling into the heresy characterized by Loisy.

Exegesis can become, in turn, a pure art of deconstruction: in the mystery which possesses us, the ascension is no more than a purely verbal poetic allegory; under the appearance of the deeds and gestures of Christ, it directly explains the moral fact of the soul’s return to God. Exegesis becomes, when all is said and done, an art of free creation according to the road of immanence denounced by Saint Pius X: the ‘transfiguration,’ by holy writ, of its religious sentiments into fabulous facts, and in turn, the demythologization of evangelical facts by the exegete.[119]


6. A Historicist Hermeneutic

But exegesis becomes above all, thanks to history, a historicist hermeneutic.

Every word of weight—writes the exegete Pontiff—contains much more than is in the author’s consciousness; it surpasses the instant when it was pronounced and it will mature in the process of history and of faith.[120]

Is this possible? Saint Paul’s high principles of wisdom were known by him in all their elevation and also in all their potency (in potentia) for application. They had no need of ‘maturation’ but simply of being preached and meditated, so as to be applied to the varied circumstances which the Apostle did not have in mind (in actu).

An author, following the exegete, does not speak only from himself, but he speaks ‘in potency,’ ‘in a common history which bears him and in which are secretly present possibilities for his future. The process of interpretation and amplification of words would not be possible if there were not already present in the words themselves such intrinsic starting-points.’[121]

If it was a matter of progress in distinction and precision, as Saint Vincent of Lerins allows, this would be just. But the words, ‘interpretation and amplification of words’ are revelatory: for Joseph Ratzinger it is a matter of progress effected by the play of vital reactions from believers in successive epochs, according to the idealist and historicist principle. This is the dream of a living, evolving Tradition, contrary to the essential immutability of Tradition.

Pius XII, in his encyclical Humani Generis of August 12, 1950, had condemned the penetration of the ‘system of evolution’ and of the philosophies of existentialism and of historicism into dogma. One must believe that, seventeen years having elapsed and Vatican II having passed over all this, Joseph Ratzinger did not feel himself bound by this new Syllabus, which stated among other things:

The fiction of this evolution, causing the rejection of everything absolute, constant and immutable, has opened the way for a new, aberrant philosophy, which, going beyond idealism, immanentism and pragmatism, is named existentialism, because, neglecting the immutable essences of things, it only concerns itself with the existence of each. To this is added a false historicism which, only attaching itself to the events of human life, overthrows the foundations of all truth and of all absolute law in the domain of philosophy and even more in that of Christian dogma.[122]

Thus was condemned not only living, evolving Tradition, but also the existentialist rereading of dogma and the very method of historicist revisionism of doctrine and faith. The whole future Joseph Ratzinger was analyzed and condemned in advance.

One understands that the exegetical audacities of professor Joseph Ratzinger, even before his Introduction to Christianity (1968), had very soon frightened the Roman theologians, if one believes Cardinal Cottier concerning the rest of them. This man confided in his biography, embellished with a brief commentary, the recent propositions of a witness whom he does not name but who has not invented the fact:

Recently was reported to me the word of a eminent professor of Rome, who had written certain preparatory texts [for the Council] and had said later to his students, while speaking of Ratzinger, ‘this young theologian will do much evil to the Church!’ —This is marvelous, no?[123]

Marvelous or tragic? Has the young theologian of yesterday made his act of contrition?

Footnotes
[108] J. Ratzinger, My Life, Memories, 1927-1977, ch. 11, p. 121.
[109] J. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, Cerf, 2005 (a new edition without any change to the 1st edition from 1969).
[110] J. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, p. 207
[111] Ibid.
[112] Ibid., p. 213.
[113] Fifth logical research, in Husserl, Logical Researches, t. II-2, Paris, PUF, 1961.
[114] I, q. 1, a. 10.
[115] Videntibus illis, elevatus est, et nubes suscepit eum ab oculis eorum (Acts 1, 9).
[116] See Tixeront, Handbook of Patrology, Paris, Victor Lecoffre, 1918, p. 120-121.
[117] Saint Jerome, Letter contra Joannem Hierosolymitanum.
[118] Louis Billot, De Ecclesia, t. II, Rome, Gregorian University, 1929, p. 96.
[119] See Pascendi, # 9, Dz 2076,
[120] Benedict XVI, foreword to Jesus of Nazareth, Flammarion, 2007, p. 15.
[121] Ibid.
[122] Pius XII, Humani Generis, August 12, 1950, Dz 2306, DS 3878.
[123] Patrice Favre, Georges Cottier, Itinerary of a Believer, Tours, CLD, 2007, p. 73.