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

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EPILOGUE

Epilogue: Hermeneutic of the last ends

Forty years separate Joseph Ratzinger’s Christian Faith and Benedict XVI’s Spe Salvi (encyclical of November 30, 2007). Has the theologian pontiff retracted his past opinions? Has he changed his method?


1. Retractions

Yes, Benedict XVI seems to have changed his opinion concerning the redemption and passion of Christ:

Man has for God a value so great that he made himself man so as to be able to sympathize with man in a very real manner, in flesh and blood, as is shown to us in the account of the passion of Christ. [Spe Salvi, # 39]

This stain (of sin) has already been destroyed in the passion of Christ. [Spe Salvi, # 47]

If ‘the East ignores the purifying and expiative suffering of souls in the next life’ (# 48), as Benedict XVI says, this would signify that for him the West does not ignore it at all.

But, alas, the offering of daily pains, that he recommends in Spe salvi, is seen by him more as a compassion than as a properly so-called expiation, which would have an ‘unhealthy’ aspect:

The thought of being able to offer up little everyday pains [...], attributing to them a meaning, was a form of devotion, perhaps less in practice today, but not so long ago still very widespread. In this devotion, there were certainly things exaggerated and perhaps even unhealthy, but it is necessary to ask whether something essential, which could be a help, was not in some way contained in it. What does the word ‘offer’ wish to say? These persons were convinced that their little pains could be attached to Christ’s great compassion and thus would enter the treasury of compassion which mankind needs, (and) [...] contribute to the economy of good, of love between men. Perhaps we could ask ourselves truly is such a thing could not become again a judicious perspective for us. [Spe Salvi, #40]

The timidity of that ‘perhaps’ and the nostalgia denoted by those repeated uses of the past tense only goes to reinforce the evidence of change in religion: the offering of pains is no longer either reparative or expiative, for that was exaggerated and unhealthy; it is only a care for compassion, a spirit of solidarity, that is to say, of fraternal participation in the sufferings of men, which humanity needs in order to leave the solitude of the lack of love. It is under this title of solidarity alone that the new religion ‘could perhaps’ salvage this offering of pains, though duly review and corrected by a ‘hermeneutic right.’

To wish to flee or to suppress suffering, Benedict XVI adds, is ‘to sink into an empty existence,’ where is found ‘the obscure feeling of a lack of meaning and of solitude’:

It is not the act of dodging suffering, of fleeing before sorrow, which cures man, but the capacity of accepting tribulations and of maturing through them, of finding meaning in them by union with Christ, who suffered with an infinite love. [Spe Salvi, # 37]

But what is this ‘meaning?’ Why did Christ suffer? Benedict XVI is quiet about this.

– Jesus Christ suffered to expiate our sins: there is what the new religion rejects; it absolutely excludes the treasury of Christ’s superabundant merits and satisfactions.

At base, Benedict XVI notes down no repentance, he never reaches acceptance of the mystery of the redemption, the mystery of ransom by suffering. The demands of divine justice always cause him fear; he is victim of the emotionality of his time. And this emotionality continues by a progress which must lead the doctrine of the faith to ‘new syntheses,’ as the Council said:

Mankind passes from a rather static notion of the order of things to a more dynamic and evolutionary conception; from there is born a new problem, immense, which provokes us to new analyses and new syntheses. [Gaudium et Spes, # 5, § 3]

By this, the Church officially opened its doors to Marxism. It is in fidelity to this spirit from the Council that leading theologians embraced Teilhard de Chardin’s evolutionism and existentially reinterpreted the mystery of the redemption. Thus, the Bishop of Metz, Paul Schmitt, dared to declare at Saint-Avold in September of 1967:

The mutation of the civilization in which we live influences changes not only in our behavior, but even in the conception that we make for ourselves of creation as much as of the salvation brought by Jesus Christ.[214]

And it was as a reader and disciple of Joseph Ratzinger in his Introduction to Christianity that the bishop of Arras, Gérard Huyghe, in the collective catechism entitled The Bishops Speak the Faith of the Church, dared write, in 1978:

The door of entrance into the mystery of Jesus’ suffering must not be mistaken. In other times this mystery was presented as a simple (and fearful) juridical method. God (the Father!), having undergone an infinite offense (why?) by the sin of man, would only agree to pardon men after an infinite ‘satisfaction’ (what a horrible word). [A citation of Introduction to Christianity follows: Could God demand the death of his own Son?] God wishes no one’s death, either as chastisement, or as means of redemption. It was not the act of God that death entered into the world through sin.

There is only one door for opening it, only one door of love. Thus, we can dismiss all explanation of the passion in which Christ is not deeply integral to the human condition [...], with the condition of unhappy man. [...] This love joins man, the whole man whatever he is, even if he be executioner, and radically changes his destiny.

If the key of love be not taken, the right meaning, the correct and spontaneous feeling, is offended: how can anyone open himself to a God who is not a Father, who does not love, a Moloch who expects his ration of blood, of sufferings and of victims?[215]

Thus the hermeneutics practiced by Joseph Ratzinger have poisoned the catechesis of redemption. You see how a German bishop, Mgr. Zollitsch again in a television broadcast of May 2009 preached the redemption as a divine solidarity with unhappy, wounded humanity.[216] A week later, he outlined a retraction in his diocesan bulletin. But Benedict XVI, on his side, has never shown sign of repentance.


2. Limbo reinterpreted by hermeneutics

The Fathers’ interpretation or hérmènéia, we have seen, only lent the philosophy of being to the faith as an instrument, without posing any opinion, philosophic or otherwise, besides the faith. On the contrary, modern hermeneutics argue for feelings: it poses in antithesis to traditional faith the sentimental impression of the contemporary epoch and infers from this ‘new syntheses.’

Limbo is the victim of this. The common doctrine of the Church, not defined, certainly, but commonly admitted, teaches that the souls of infants who die unbaptized are, by reason of the original sin from which they have not been purified, deprived of the beatific vision of God, but are, by reason of their lack of all personal sin, exempt from the fires of hell, in a state or place called limbo.

Well, here is the point of departure for hermeneutic reasoning: Parents [of infants who die without baptism] suffer great grief [...] and it is found more and more difficult to accept the fact that God is just and merciful if he excludes from eternal happiness children who have no personal sins, whether they are Christians or non-Christians [sic].[217]

This sentimental premise is amplified in a theological assertion which looks for its justification in a scriptural text cited out of context:

Where sin has abounded, gra[c]e has superabounded (Rom. 5, 20). There is the absolute [sic] teaching of Scripture; but the doctrine of Limbo seems to restrain this superabundance [# 91].

But are there not other scriptural texts which affirm, ad rem, the universality of original sin and the necessity of Baptism for salvation?

Tradition and the documents of the magisterium which reaffirmed this necessity must be interpreted [# 7].

There must be a hermeneutic reflection concerning the manner in which the witnesses of biblical Tradition [sic], the Fathers of the Church, the magisterium, the theologians have read and employed biblical texts [# 10].

In other words, traditional hérmènéia is too simplistic; it deduced Limbo too abruptly from the assertion that only baptism effaces original sin. Hermeneutics must be preferred, in which the reaction of the subject, believing in the word of God in the 21st century, his ‘new reflection’ and his new ‘vital bond’ with it, result in a ‘synthesis of fidelity and dynamism’ which will be the ‘correct interpretation’ (see the speech on December 22, 2005).

Thus, hermeneutics purify hérmènéia from its primitive naivety and enrich it with the values of its emotive reactions—for which it makes an effort to find the echo in the Bible, by citing texts from it completely out of their context; a disgrace! – This is why the status of reason is not at all the same in the Thomist reading of Revelation and in the hermeneutic rereading. In the first, reason, purified of all subjectivity is a simple instrument for making the faith more explicit; in the second, reason, impregnated with subjectivity, sets itself up as a partner for faith and imposes on it its whims. Instead of magnifying glasses, hermeneutics recommends tinted and distorted glasses.

Well, the shape of these glasses, their tint, the whim of this reason are, fatally, the dominant shape, tint, whim of the epoch. This contemporary whim is neither science nor scientism; it is sentimentalism.

O theologians who twist texts, false spirits full of shrewdness, emotional enemies of truth, flowing with feelings and arid of faith! You reread and revisit the Tradition of the Church with your prejudices of today and you declare haughtily that this revision rediscovers ‘the deepest patrimony of the Church.’ On the contrary, you ought to find this patrimony in the Tradition of the Church, its constant practice and its invariable teaching, by bringing forth the high principles and by them condemning your prejudices of today.


3. Death, a remedy

Traditionally, death is the separation of the soul and the body, and the end of human life upon earth: it is the greatest temporal evil and the most feared. Death is not against nature, since all composite being is dissoluble and since God only preserved our first parents in the terrestrial paradise from it by a gratuitous preternatural gift. But it is, in fact, the penalty of sin: ‘Do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God commanded Adam, for the day on which you eat of it, you will die the death” (Gen. 2, 17).

This vision of death must be revised by existentialism. One of Saint Ambrose’s sermons, is only existentialist sermon, appears opportunely:

Death, the bishop of Milan says there, is not natural, but it is become so; for from the beginning, God did not create death; he gave it to us as a remedy [...] for transgression; the life of men becomes miserable in its daily work and by insupportable tears. A term must be set for his unhappiness, so that death may render to him what life had lost.[218]

In fact, Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) affirms, ‘Better is death than a bitter life: and everlasting rest than continual sickness’ (Eccl./Sir. 30, 17). – Still, eternal rest, whose enemy, like the enemy of life, is sin, must be merited.

And Benedict XVI underlines the existentialist paradox of death:

On the one hand, we should not wish to die [...], while on the other we also do not desire to continue this limited existence, and the world was not even created in this perspective [Spe Salvi, #11].

I would say that this paradox does not exist. Provided that it be without too terrible infirmities, what man does not want to continue living? The paradox is false because it fails to mention that death is the wages of sin: ‘stipendium enim peccati mors’ (Rom. 6, 23). Without doubt, it is more positive to see death as the remedy of our temporality than as a sanction for our malice. Religion is thereby rendered more acceptable for our fragile generation. But why hide from ourselves that Jesus, by the cross, has made of death a remedy, a truth: the expiation for sin?


4. Eternal life, immersion in love

Eternal life, Benedict XVI teaches, is not ‘an interminable life,’ an idea ‘which causes fear’; it is, as Saint Augustine said, ‘the happy life.’ In what does this consist?

It is a matter, Benedict XVI explains, of the moment of immersion in the ocean of infinite love, in which time—before and after—no longer exists [...], an immersion always renewed in the immensity of being, while we are simply filled with joy [Spe Salvi, #12].

Why this condition ‘it is a matter of?’ What is that ‘ocean of infinite love?’ What is that ‘immensity of being?’ One is not very reassured by these images nor by their dimensions. It is only on the following page that we learn that heaven is ‘to live with God forever.’ – It is true that eternal life, begun on earth by sanctifying grace, is a life with God; but what has changed in heaven? Is it only the ‘forever?’ Benedict XVI does not even feel capable, if not of giving a definition of heaven, at least of giving an exact description of it! Why does he conceal from us that the life of heaven is the vision of God himself, the vision facing God, God seen face to face, ‘facie ad faciem’ (1 Cor. 13, 12), that is to say, without created intermediary? It is Saint John, the Apostle of love, who teaches: ‘We know that when he shall appear we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is’ (I John 3, 2). Saint Paul explains that in faith, knowledge, as ‘through a glass, in a dark manner’ (I Cor. 13, 12), will be succeeded by the immediate vision of God. It is this view which will beatify the souls of the elect.

But is this view perhaps too precise for the spirit of Benedict XVI, recalcitrant in all definition? In any case, the pontiff clarifies one precondition for the happy life: it is not to live isolated from others, as Henri de Lubac showed, he said. From the Fathers, Lubac would have proved that ‘salvation has always been considered a communal reality’ (Spe Salvi, #14).

[The happy life] thus presupposes an exodus from the prison of my own self, because it is only in the opening of this universal subject [others] that also opens the sight of the source of joy, of love itself, of God [Spe Salvi, #14].


5. Collective salvation according to Henri de Lubac

The French theologian honored by Spe Salvi has in fact reinterpreted the dogma, ‘ no salvation outside of the Church,’ by invoking a collective salvation: no salvation for the individual without a community of salvation. This would remain quite traditional. But it is not only this. There will be no need for every infidel to enter in good time into the bosom of the Church; it suffices that each and every one of them make up a part of that humanity which is on the way to unity thanks to Christianity:

How then would there be salvation for the members, if by some impossibility the body was not itself saved? But the salvation for this body—for humanity—consists in receiving the form of Christ, and this is only done by means of the Catholic Church. [...] Is it not she, finally, who is charged with realizing, for as many as lend themselves to her, the spiritual unification of all men? Thus, this Church, which, as the invisible body of Christ, identifies itself with final salvation, as a visible, historical institution is the providential means of this salvation. ‘In her alone is mankind remade and recreated’ (St. Augustine, ep. 118, #33, PL 33, 448).[219]

Saint Augustine does not, however, speak of the unity of mankind, but of its recreation and this is more than a nuance. Does Father de Lubac judge it easier to impress the form of Christ upon the collectivity of humanity than to impress it by Baptism upon each of millions of souls to be saved? This would be a brilliant Platonic solution.

Another solution, more elegant, is proposed by the scurrilous[220] Jesuit: each of the millions of human beings has been and has still his role in the preparation of the Gospel throughout the centuries, despite the groping ‘of research, of laborious elaborations, of partial anticipations, of correct natural inventions, and of still imperfect solutions’ (p. 172). These living stones of the scaffolding for the building of the body of Christ will not be rejected ‘once the edifice is achieved’ (p. 172):

Providentially indispensible to the building of the Body of Christ, the ‘infidels’ must benefit in their manner from the vital exchanges of this Body. By an extension of the dogma of the communion of saints, it thus seems just to think that, since they are not themselves places in the normal conditions for salvation, they could nevertheless obtain this salvation in virtue of the mysterious ties which unify them to the faithful. In short, they could be saved because they make up an integrated part of the humanity which will be saved.[221]

This is no longer Platonism; this is theological fiction: to an imaginary preparation for the Gospel within paganism, a meritorious virtue of grace is attributed, in favor of the obscure artisans of this preparation. But can the recompense of an imaginary elaboration be anything other than an imaginary grace?

The sentimental care for enlarging the door of salvation, because the Church has become a little flock, makes reason a vagabond in the imagination. Benedict XVI makes a similar attempt to lessen the pains of Purgatory. Let’s see.


6. Purgatory diminished

Benedict XVI welcomes ‘the old Jewish idea of an intermediary condition between death and resurrection,’ that is, a state ‘in which the judgment is yet lacking’ and in which souls ‘already undergo punishment [...] or on the contrary already rejoice in the provisional forms of beatitude’ (Spe Salvi, #45).

This is, very simply, to repeat Pope John XXII’s error, condemned ex cathedra by his successor Benedict XII, defining that the souls of the just, ‘immediately after their death and purification [...], for those who should have need of it, [...] have been, are and will be in heaven, in the Kingdom of heaven, and in the heavenly paradise with Christ, united to the company of the holy angels.’[222]

In this [intermediary] state, Benedict XVI continues, are possibilities for purification and healing which make the soul ripe for communion with God. The primitive Church took up these conceptions, from which finally the Western Church [he wants to say Catholic] developed little by little the doctrine of Purgatory [Spe Salvi, #45].

To this heresy of the intermediary state (mixture of the old Jewish sheol and the Limbo of the Patriarchs) and to this theory of Purgatory with its old Jewish origin, Benedict XVI proposes a modern alternative which decidedly pleases him better:

Certain recent theologians are of the opinion that the fire which burns and at the same time saves may be Christ himself, the Judge and Savior. The encounter with him is the decisive act of judgment; before his eyes all falsehood vanishes. It is the encounter with him which, burning us, transforms us and frees us to become truly ourselves [Spe Salvi, # 47].

There is no question of a lingering debt to be acquitted, nor of a temporal penalty to be purged; he ignores that it is about this purification: might it be from sin? Whatever it may be, it is a liberation for the sake of becoming oneself anew; it is an existentialist transformation: Christ’s regard, the beating of his heart heals us thanks to transformation indeed sorrowful, ‘as by fire,’ as Saint Paul said (I Cor. 3, 12-15). Nevertheless, it is a happy suffering, in which the holy power of love penetrates us like a flame [Spe Salvi, #47].

I thought that the suffering of Purgatory was first a certain penalty of displeasure: the delay of access to the beatific vision, and besides that a penalty of fire, inflicted by God to purify the soul from its inordinate attachments to creatures. Is this explanation, which accords so well with the nature of sin—aversion from God and adherence to creatures—to clear for Benedict XVI? It is simply that the fire of love avails more to destroy ‘the filth’ of the soul, than a fire inflicted by the sovereign judge! Purgatory becomes quite sympathetic, since the same fire of love there destroys, as on earth, the stains on the soul.

– However the saints are not of this opinion; they have the faith, and they understand, like Saint Theresa of Lisieux, that ‘the fire of love is more sanctifying than the fire of purgatory’: that it is not thus the same fire.

Indeed, the advantage of the theory patronized by the pontiff is that this instantaneous purification through Christ’s regard enormously shortens Purgatory, with regard to our hurried generation. Here is a handy Christianity. Here is an ‘easier’ religion, such as was conceived by an English reformer. Here is the ‘reign of God,’ Kant would say, ‘in which the faith of the Church is overcome and replaced by religious faith, that is, by simple rational faith.’[223] For the rest, Kant adds, ‘if Christianity should cease to be likeable [...], one would necessarily see [...] the heart of the majority of men incited to aversion and revolt against it.’[224] (Texts cited by Spe Salvi # 19, without the pontiff’s remarking that Kant justifies this and, in so doing, without condemning him.)

Benedict XVI however clarifies something concerning this instantaneous Purgatory:

We cannot calculate with this world’s chronological measures the duration of this burning which transforms. The transforming moment of this encounter escapes all terrestrial chronometry. It is the time of the heart, the time of passage into communion with God in the body of Christ [Spe Salvi, #47].

Thus it is confirmed that Purgatory is a moment, a passage. There is no longer any question of remaining ‘in purgatory until the end of the world,’ as Our Lady dared to say to Lucia at Fatima, May 13, 1917, concerning a certain Amelia.[225] Decidedly, this new religion is more reassuring.


7. A humanistic particular judgment

God’s judgment is hope, Benedict XVI affirms: as much because he is justice as because he is grace. If he were only grace which make everything earthly insignificant, God would still owe to us an answer to the question concerning justice. If he were pure justice, in the end he could be for us no more than a motive of fear [Spe Salvi, #47].

I regret to contradict these reflections which seem to make good sense. No, if divine justice is desirable, it is not because it gives recompense to the ‘earthly,’ but to our merits, that is to say, our good works accomplished in the state of grace. But Benedict XVI precisely does not believe in merit:

God’s reign is a gift, and rightly because of this it is great and beautiful, and it constitutes the answer to hope. And we cannot—to employ classical terminology—‘merit’ heaven thanks to ‘our good works.’ It is always more than what we merit. [...] Nevertheless, with all our consciousness of the ‘super-value’ of ‘heaven,’ it remains not the less always true that our acts are not indifferent before God [Spe Salvi, # 35].

Let us remind ourselves of the anathema of the Council of Trent”

If anyone say that man, justified by his good works, does not truly merit [...] eternal life [...], let him be anathema.[226]

Likewise, if the divine justice of judgment ‘causes us fear,’ it is not because it could be ‘pure justice,’ but rather because it can inflict pains upon us, the eternal pain of those who die in the state of mortal sin and the pains of Purgatory for the rest.

But all these distinctions exceed Benedict XVI, as we will again note; his theology is diminished and hazy; the distinction between natural and supernatural is too large and too clear for his eye.


8. The fundamental option, economy of mortal sin

According to the tradition doctrine of the faith, by a single mortal sin, in fact the soul loses sanctifying grace (DS 1544) and merits eternal hell; while venial sin only merits a temporal penalty, perhaps expiated by any good work.

This distinction, however, is not conformed to the feelings of our contemporaries. (By whose fault? – The conciliar clergy’s!) They judge that, setting aside war criminals and the authors of genocide, with whom ‘everything is a lie’ and who have ‘lived for hate,’ and setting aside the saints ‘who let themselves be totally penetrated by God’ and have ‘totally opened themselves to their neighbor,’ there is ‘the norm,’ that of ‘the most part of men,’ in whom good and bad are present at the same time and sometimes evil more than good. But despite this:

In the greatest depth of their being remains a final, interior opening to truth, to love, to God. However, in the concrete choices of life, this is covered [...] by compromises with evil. Much filth covers purity, the thirst for which nonetheless endures and which, despite this, emerges always anew out of any baseness and remains present in the soul [Spe Salvi, # 46].

In this theory, there are no longer the just man and the unjust (theologically), no longer the state of grace and the state of mortal sin. All sin or state of sin gives way to salvation, provided that the fundamental option be guarded by God, by ‘the thirst for purity,’ ‘the interior opening to truth, love, God.’ In this case, ‘the Christian experience built upon Jesus Christ’ is a ‘foundation which can no longer be removed’ (#46). Such a soul could be saved by passing through the fi re which consumes evil deeds (Ibid., I Cor. 3, 12).

In the final account, Benedict XVI republishes the Protestant error of ‘man at once just and sinful.’ He also republishes the theory that was however condemned by his predecessor John Paul II in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (# 63-68), that of the fundamental good option, which keeps particular, sinful choices from interrupting the relation with God. Against this error, John Paul II reaffirmed the distinction between mortal and venial sin (VS 69-70). Benedict XVI’s religion is decidedly more convenient.


9. Hell, a state of soul

“Hell is other people,” said John-Paul Sartre. Benedict XVI takes the counter-stance against this diabolical egoism. Hell is irrevocable egoism, that of those who ‘have totally destroyed in themselves the desire for the truth and availability of love.’ He explains:

In such individuals, there would no longer be anything remediable and the destruction of good would be irrevocable: it is this which is indicated by the word hell [Spe Salvi, # 45].

Here is an equivocation. It is necessary to clarify that the one in a state of mortal sin already is in a state of damnation, but that this damnation is not irrevocable as after death. This then is hell, place and state of souls damned at once by their fault and by the sentence of the just Judge. If this distinction is lacking, the equivocation of mixing the state of the sinner’s revocable damnation and the state and place of hell’s irrevocable damnation remains.

And for want of knowing of what one is talking, one puts hells into the conditional: it ‘would be’ the state of a man irremediably closed to truth and bent back on himself. It is disquieting for the egoists that we all are, but who is entirely egoist? To sum up, who can be truly in hell? By such a manner, hell is a state of soul.*As a fruit of his hermeneutics, Benedict XVI’s religion is a religion which presents itself as very likeable, but it is a religion in the conditional.


Footnotes
[214] Offi cial Bulletin of the Diocese of Metz, October 1, 1967, cited by Itinéraires, # 118.
[215] The Bishops Speak the Faith of the Church, Paris, Cerf, 1978, p. 229-230.
[216] See Mitteilungsblatt of the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X, Stuttgart, May 2009.
[217] The Hope of Salvation for Children Who Die Unbaptized. Reflections of the International Theological Commission, published by Benedict XVI’s oral authorization in April 2007, # 2.
[218] Homily on the Death of his Brother Saturus, II, 47, CSEL 73, 274, cited by Benedict XVI, Spe salvi, # 10.
[219] H. de Lubac, Catholicism, the Social Aspects of Dogma, Cerf, 1938, p. 164-165.
[220] Translator’s note: the bishop’s word choice here was ‘sulfureux,’ meaning sulfurous or possibly lurid. Since ‘the sulfurous/lurid Jesuit’ made little sense, scurrilous or suspect seemed to be about the best interpretation.
[221] H. de Lubac, op. cit., p. 173.
[222] Mox post mortem et purgationem […] in illis qui purgatione hujusmodi indigebant […] sunt et erunt in caelo, coelorum regno et pardiso coelesti cum Christo, sanctorum angelorum consortio aggregatae (DS 1000).
[223] Immanuel Kant, The Victory of the Good Principle over the Evil and the Foundation of a Kingdom of God on Earth (1792), in Philosophical Works, Gallimard, La Pléiade, t. 3, 2003, p. 140.
[224] Kant, Das Ende aller Dinge – The End of All Things (1795), in Philosophical Works, Gallimard, La Pléiade, t. 3, 2003, p. 324-325.
[225] See Lucia Retells Fatima, DDB-Résiac, 1981, p. 159.
[226] Council of Trent, session VI, chapter 16, can. 32, DS 1582.