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

[Stone]

CHAPTER X - Skeptical Supermodernism

To conclude, I would like to say that today we are dealing with a modernism renovated and perfected. The modernists considered dogmas to be products of religious experience, and as mere symbols serving to renovate this experience unceasingly. A century later, the immanent providence of all the divine mysteries is no longer affirmed. They are simply put between parentheses so as to seek for them only an existentialist or personalist vital significance.

No longer are denied either dogmas or the decisions of the past magesterium, but they are revisited so as to have for them a ‘conscious understanding’ which was lacking to past popes and doctors, an understanding (Verstehen) purificatrice from past, pretended circumstance and assimilatrice of present circumstance. No one becomes an atheist or heretic openly; no, simply, thanks to the tool of modern philosophy, the real Trinity is rethought, the real incarnation is disincarnated, the real redemption is sublimated, Christ the real King is relativized; will the real God be replaced next?


1. An inaugural anti-program

Immanuel Kant, imbued with his agnosticism, wrote in 1793 a work entitled Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, in which he already considered dogmas as mere symbols of moral ideas.

A hundred years after, following liberal Protestants Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Adolf Harnack (1851-1930), a priest, Catholic but soon excommunicated, Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) held the same theories, denounced by Pius X in 1907, in Pascendi.

And then, a hundred years after Pascendi, in 2007, there are Catholic theologians, one of whom has become pope, who, imbued with the philosophy of Kant and that of the 19th and 20th centuries, of Hegel, Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Jaspers, Buber, Marcel, Mounier and Maritain, have the ambition of purifying, correcting, enriching the doctrine of the faith and of engendering its progress by its actualized philosophical reinterpretation.

In the Middle Ages, Saint Thomas Aquinas happily resolved what seemed then an antinomy: to effect a synthesis of the Christian faith and the philosophy of Aristotle. In the 20th century, it seems it feel again to Vatican Council II and to its theologians, to make a synthesis between faith and the new philosophy. Should we be as happy with the ‘I” (or the ‘I-Thou’) philosophy as formerly with the philosophy of being? Are the philosophies of auto-coherence or of intersubjectivity as fruitful as that of the order of beings and ends?

These theologians, or rather these philosophers, have in part effected this process of synthesis in the Council, and as that has not been a success—they admit it—unrepentantly they wish to pursue its application. Benedict XVI has renewed the theory and has proclaimed again that program in his speech of December 22, 2005.

Well, if it is true, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote in his Principles of Theology, that Vatican II, through Gaudium et Spes, has announced a kind of ‘counter-Syllabus’ insofar as the conciliar text ‘represents an attempt at an official reconciliation of the Church with the world, such as it has become since 1789,’[207] then it is true that the speech of December 22, 2005, which proposed the theory of the reconciliation and mutual fecundation of revealed faith with agnostic reason, is the anti-program of Pope Benedict XVI’s inaugural quasi-encyclical.

In so doing, the advocates of such an anti-program disincarnate, uncrucify and uncrown Jesus Christ with more ferocity than Kant and Loisy. But their subjective faith is ‘in the hold of the flood of doubt’ of which Joseph Ratzinger spoke in his work, Introduction to Christianity.[208]


2. A resigned and demoralized skepticism

This faith believes by encountering God in place of believing simply in him. This faith believes by entering into interaction with God in place of adhering simply to his mystery. This faith frees itself by its experience of God, in place of relying upon the authority of God who reveals. This faith is made fragile by its human reason.

It is in the grip of doubt, for Joseph Ratzinger says that the believer, like the unbeliever, is always menaced by doubt concerning his position: ‘The believer will always be threatened by unbelief and the unbeliever will always be threatened by faith.’[209]

In a world without God, in peril of losing itself, can such a believer still propose eternal salvation and, as source of salvation, the ‘God of Our Lord Jesus Christ?’ Alas, no! He can only propose the guarantee of the values and norms drawn from the Enlightenment—which are the Rights of Man—a God considered nominally as the creative Reason of the universe and conventionally called the dispenser of the Rights of Man.

Is this hypothetic God different from the ideal God postulated, according to Immanuel Kant, by ethics? A God, as the same Kant avowed, ‘of whom no one knows how to affirm that he exists outside of man’s rational thought?’[210]

It is this provisional God of the Rights of Man that the Church must preach to the Muslims, according to the wish expressed by Benedict XVI on his return from Turkey, so as to make them effect an update of Islam thanks to the Enlightenment, in place of converting them to ‘the true Light which enlightens every man.’ (Concerning this wish, I refer my reader to my afterword.) At bottom, it is the religion of the Enlightenment which agrees the best with humanity today.

In the time of the Enlightenment, there was a search to establish universal laws valuable even if God did not exist; today, Joseph Ratzinger counsels, it is necessary to invert the order of this speech and say:

Even the one who does not succeed in finding the way of accepting God must seek to live and to direct his life as if God existed.[211]

There is the social solution for bringing order into the world: ‘Man must seek to life and to organize his life as if God existed,’ not because God does exist and because Jesus Christ is God, no. This is the last outcome of modernism. Modernism leads to skepticism, that is to say, to Christians who are no longer sure of what they believe; they content themselves with advising: act as if you believed!

It seems to me that this skepticism is no stranger to the pessimism which Joseph Ratzinger’s confidence made to Peter Seewald in 1996 reveals, and which was inspired by the conciliar idealism of the Church conceived as ‘the messianic people [...] who often keep the appearance of a little flock’ (Lumen Gentium, # 9b), a Church as ‘seed of unity’ and which must be ‘like the sacrament of unity for mankind’ (Lumen Gentium, # 1 and 9c):

Perhaps we must say goodbye to the idea of the Church reuniting all peoples. It is possible that we are on the sill of a new era, constituted very differently, of the Church’s history, in which Christianity will exist rather under the sign of the grain mustard, in little groups apparently without importance, but which live intensely in order to fight again evil and implant the good in the world; who open the door to God.[212]

At the Council, on the subject of the schema for the missions, presented in October 1965, Father Maurice Queguiner, superior general of the society of foreign missions in Paris, had reacted to such an opinion: ‘It is important,’ he said, ‘to drive back in an explicit manner the opinion of those who condemn the Church to be no more than a little entity, the least in the world’ (146th general congregation). This was a man of faith, a missionary.


3. Faced with skepticism, the remedy is found in Saint Thomas Aquinas

The lack of faith which, on the contrary, Benedict XVI suffers, is explained by his hermeneutic. His mutual reinterpretation of faith by idealist reason and of reason by modernist faith is only complicity.

His philosophy is no longer an instrument of faith in search of understanding, but the partner of faith, in order to impose on it his emotional whims. By his agnosticism, ignoring nature and its finalities, it replaces nature with the person and suppresses final and efficient causes, returning to full barbarism.

As far as his faith, it is only a symbolic rereading of dogmas according to the postulates of modern sensibility. Thus, Christ is more a man sublimated than a God incarnated. Sin does not offend God and the sinner does not redeem himself. Redemption, without defined end or agent, no longer effects justice towards God. God being no long the last end of the city, Christ the King is a historic error to be repaired by democracy and laicity. Such is the result of Benedict XVI’s hermeneutic.

A century before, in his inaugural encyclical E Supremi Apostolatus, his predecessor Saint Pius X described ‘the profound malady which torments mankind’: ‘it is,’ he said, ‘as regards God, abandonment and apostasy.’

But ‘the hermeneutics of the Council and of Benedict XVI,’ as I call them by convenience, lead to something more serious than simple loss of faith; they lead to the establishment of another religion, made of a shaky faith in God and of a faith reassured by man and by is inalienable and inviolable dignity. Man takes the place of God (2 Thess. 3, 3-17) both within and without the sanctuary. The mystery of iniquity develops in broad daylight.

God wishes that we should oppose ourselves to this diabolical disorientation. Let us arm ourselves. Against the revisions of hermeneutics and the doubts of agnosticism, let us equip ourselves with a great, preventative remedy.

To keep the faith stable and supernatural, ‘firm assent of the intellect to the divine truth received from without, by the very authority of this divine truth,’ the great protective remedy is Saint Thomas Aquinas, from whom comes this beautiful definition of faith.

In fact, it is because this objective, Catholic faith harmonizes perfectly which the philosophy of being set forth by Saint Thomas Aquinas, that Pope Saint Pius X prescribed to future priests ‘the study of the philosophy which the Angelic Doctor has bequeathed to us’ (Saint Pius X, Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici, June 29, 1914).

Faced with the impiety of those who pretend, by hermeneutics, ‘to detach from ossified layers of the past the deepest patrimony of the Church,’ let us take again into account the motto of the order of venerable Claude François Poullart de Places, of whom we are the heirs by the intermediation of venerable Father Henri Le Floch and of His Excellency Mgr. Marcel Lefebvre:

A pious clerk, without knowledge, has a blind zeal; a knowing clerk, without piety is at risk of becoming a heretic and a rebel against the Church.

Let us combine in ourselves piety (respect for the Church’s Tradition) with science (Thomist theology), so as to be neither blind men nor rebels. May the Virgin Mary, Immaculate in the faith, aid us in this:

She is the shield of faith, the pillar of the supernatural order. – She is neither liberal, nor modernist, nor ecumenist. She is allergic to all errors and with greater reason to heresies and to apostasy.[213]

This is also a question of taste: to skeptical furor, we prefer Thomist fervor.



Footnotes
[207] J. Ratzinger, The Principles of Catholic Theology, Téqui, 1982, p. 426.
[208] J. Ratzinger, The Christian Faith of Yesterday and Today, Cerf, 2005, p. 11-12.
[209] Ibid., p. 11.
[210] Immanuel Kant, Opus Postumum, Convolutum VII.
[211] J. Ratzinger, ‘Europe in the Crisis of Cultures,’ conference at Subiaco on April 1, 2005 (just before being elected Pope), Sienne, Cantagalli, 2005.
[212] J. Ratzinger, The Salt of the Earth, Flammarion-Cerf, 1997, p. 16.
[213] Mgr Marcel Lefebvre, Conference at Mortain, 1947; A Spiritual Itinerary, Écône, 1990.