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

[Stone]

CHAPTER IX - Benedict XVI’s Personalist Faith

How to explain this lack of faith? Here is a theologian, a cardinal, a pope, who is disinterested in the reality of the incarnation, who practices a ‘pocketing’ of the materiality of the redemption and who denies the royalty of Our Lord Jesus Christ. – It is that he has a personalist faith. I will attempt to demonstrate this.


1. Faith, encounter, presence and love

You never find, when Joseph Ratzinger speaks of faith, any mention either of the object of faith (revealed truths) or of the motive of faith (the authority of a supremely true God). This is not denied, but it is never evoked. In place of this, you find the initial impact, the encounter, the interpersonal relation with Jesus and the meaning that this encounter gives to life. Nothing of this is false, but this is not faith; it is a personalist view of faith. The theologian of Tübingen comments thus upon ‘I believe [...] in Jesus Christ’: The Christian faith is an encounter with the man Jesus, and it discovers in such an encounter that the meaning of the world is a person. Jesus is the witness of God, or better, he is the presence of the eternal himself in this world. In his life and by his total gift of himself for men, the meaning of life is revealed as a presence, under the form of love, which loves me also and which causes life to be worth the pain of living.[198]

Encounter, presence, love,...this is not faith, and it hides the object of faith. In our Credo, Joseph Ratzinger, writes, the central formula does not say, ‘I believe in something,’ but ‘I believe in You.’ – The affirmation is true; we do believe in Jesus Christ, a living person (his divinity must still be believed); but is not the denial (‘I do not believe in something’) heretical? For it denies the object of faith, the articles of faith, the twelve articles of the Apostle’s creed.

Having become Prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Joseph Ratzinger thus describes Catholicism:

It is a matter of entering into a structure of life, and this englobes the plan of our life in its totality. Here is why, I believe, one can never express it in words. Naturally, one can designate essential points.[199]

And faith is to believe in an event, but hardly in a conceptual content:

To become Christian, he says, the essential thing is to believe in this event: God entered into the world, and he acted; it is thus an action, a reality, not only a configuration of ideas.[200]

An elder and friend of Benedict XVI has furnished this very realistic testimony concerning Joseph Ratzinger’s anti-conceptualism:

Ratzinger has always been angry against this impulse which pushes one to consider truth as an object which one possesses and must defend. He does not feel at his ease with neoscholastic definitions, which appear to him as barriers: that what is contained in the definition should be truth and what is outside only error. [...] The truth is a Thou who loves first of all. According to him, God cannot be known because he is the summum bonum which a person seizes and demonstrates by exact formulae, but because he is a Thou who comes to the encounter and makes himself known.[201]

This faith without the truths of faith, without dogmas, or at least which depreciates them, is the personalist reduction of what had been Joseph Ratzinger’s childhood faith. His faith became, in the manner of Max Scheler and Martin Buber, encounter with the ‘Thou’ of Christ. His faith is also a ‘fundamental decision to perceive God and to welcome him,’ as with Gabriel Marcel, for whom faith is a strictly personal event, and in this sense incommunicable.

The Catholic faith is thus set aside. Faith, firm adherence of the intellect to revealed truths, is passed over in silence. The authority of God who reveals is fatally replaced by the religious experience of each.


2. Philosophical experimentation and mystical experience

For the rest, is the faith-encounter a mystical experience? ‘God exists, I have met him,’ André Frossard titled his narration of his conversion to the Christian faith, an undeniably authentic grace. But to rely essentially upon an encounter or on an impression of an interrogation—this can lead to illusion. The true mystic goes beyond emotions: the mystery of the incarnation was accomplished in the Virgin Mary without her feeling what it was; all was done in pure faith. The taste of Christ which communicates the gifts of wisdom and understanding is not perceptible to sense: thus, it is founded on true faith and corroborates truth faith. As to what are the riches that grace gives mystically to faith, it is necessary to reaffirm what Father Marin Sola teaches:

The sole objective source of all supernatural knowledge is the truth of faith: Accedentem ad Deum oportet credere (he who wishes to reach God must believe),’ Saint Paul says (Heb. 11, 6). From this is born the essential dependency and the subordination of speculative theology or mystical theology in regard to the revealed deposit and the authority of the Church. By the intuitive view from the gifts of the Holy Spirit, mystical theology can seize truth more or more quickly, but it cannot attain more of it than what the revealed deposit has always contained implicitly.[202]

This established, it must be said that faith which wants ‘to experiment with God’ in concepts of either existentialist or personalist philosophy has nothing to do with mystical theology! For the depth of the mystery is one thing, before which the mystic stops admiringly, but another is the intensity of emotion by which the idealist is stopped in his interpersonal relation with Christ.

Saint Pius X, in Pascendi, has, however, underlined how emotion and experience are more likely to trouble the faith which gives them basis.

Let us return, in fact, for a moment, he writes to the bishops, to this pernicious doctrine of agnosticism. The whole issue being concluded concerning God on the side of intelligence, the modernists try hard to open another on the side of sentiment and action. A vain attempt [...]. What commons sense says is that emotion and everything that captivates the soul, far from favoring the discovery of the truth, hobbles it [...]. As far as experience goes, what does it add to it? Absolutely nothing, besides a certain intensity which influences a conviction proportionate to the reality of the object. Well, these two things do not cause sentiment to be anything but sentiment; they do not take away its character, which is to trick it if intellect do not guide it; on the contrary, they confirm and aggravate this character, because the more intense a sentiment, the more it is a sentiment.[203]

The difference between the true believer, mystical at times, and the false believer, multiform idealist, consists in this: the mystic effaces self before the mystery and makes himself only an adorer; the idealist affirms himself as the ‘I’ correlative to the ‘Thou,’ as the subject who enters into an interaction with the object of his faith. Personalism affirms itself also as a subject who enters into interrelation with another subject, the Wholly-Other. – On the contrary, the contemplative theologian, and likewise the preacher or teacher, like Saint Thomas Aquinas, ‘does not have the goal of making a confidence to his hearers of the sentiments which rise in the soul of the doctor of contemplated truth, but to set free that very truth.’[204]3. Divine authority replaced by human authority.

If, with the philosophies issued from Kant, one admits that the subject is a part of the object, then the believer is part of faith. By the same blow, the formal motive of faith (divine revealing authority) makes way for human experience, deprived of authority and source of illusion. You see how Benedict XVI, in his encyclical Spe Salvi from November 30, 2007, in # 7, no longer understands the beautiful definition that Saint Paul gave for faith: ‘Fides est substantia sperendarum rerum, argumentum non apparentium (faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the proof of things which are invisible’ (Heb. 11, 1). What, then, is that ‘proof of things invisible’ if not the authority of God who reveals these things? And is it not on this divine authority alone that the certitude of the believer rests? We adhere, says Vatican Council I, to divine truth ‘propter auctoritatem Dei revelantis’ (because of the authority of God revealing – Dz 1789 and 1811). Well, it is very necessary to note that all this escapes Benedict XVI.

There is a temptation, in the actual encyclicals as in modern preaching, to present the evangelical message as the preacher’s personal witness, provided by his personal reactions. This is a confusion. Only the Apostles were ‘witnesses’; only they had witnessed what they had touched, seen and heard. Hear, for example, the witness of Saint John the Apostle:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled, of the word of life. For the life was manifested: and we have seen and do bear witness and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father and hath appeared to us. That which we have seen and have heard, we declare unto you: that you also may have fellowship with us and our fellowship may be with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And these things we write to you, that you may rejoice and your joy may be full. [1 John 1, 1-4]

But the Apostles’ successors, the bishops and priests who assisted them in the holy preaching, are not witnesses of the evangelical facts, like the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ; they are simply messengers, transmitters, of a sacred deposit which they have received and which they must deliver as it was. The force of conviction for the faith which they put into proclaiming the divine message is indeed necessary for moving the passions and will of their hearers, but it will not affect the content of this divine message, any more than their state of soul in its intersubjective relation with God.

Take care, Mgr Marcel Lefebvre said to his priests, to tendency, this shortcoming of considering faith as a science and seeking to penetrate the great mysteries of the faith by our human intelligence, trying to understand these mysteries in the same way as those which are attached to medicine or to the other human sciences. This would be a great obstacle, in place of a help for souls’ belief. For the faith consists in adhering to these truths because of the authority of God who reveals them to us, and not because of the knowledge that we can have of it.[205]

To adhere to the mysteries of God because of the light of my own search, or because of the heat of my interpersonal relation with Christ, the link between my ‘I’ and his ‘Thou’ is to acquire an opinion of the mystery, in place of adhering to it very firmly with divine faith:

Those who address the Church to demand the faith, says Mgr. Lefebvre to priests, already have that conviction that the faith which you must give them comes from God. If thus they already submit themselves to the authority of God, they will demand no more than one thing: that someone teach them what God has said. [...] Then it will be necessary to affirm the truths of faith. The faithful await this because, in this affirmation of the faith, it is God’s entire authority which passes through you. It is not your gratuitous opinion. It is not your authority that you set out, but God’s authority.[206]



Footnotes
[198] J. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, p. 36-37.
[199] J. Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth, 2nd ed., Flammarion, 2005, p. 19.
[200] Ibid., p. 21.
[201] Alred Läpple, ‘Testimony,’ in 30 Days, 24th year, 2006, #1-2, p. 60.
[202] Marin Sola, O.P., The Homogenous Evolution of Dogma, 2nd ed., Fribourg (Switzerland), Lib. Saint-Paul, t. 1, 1924, p. 375.
[203] Pascendi, # 54, Dz 2106.
[204] DTC, ‘Thomas Aquinas’: see the section on the ‘objectivity of his doctoral teaching.’
[205] Mgr. Lefebvre, homely at Jurançon, July 29, 1979.
[206] Ibid