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

[Stone]

AFTERWORD

Christianity and Enlightenment

1. A fragile equilibrium

I have mentioned the wish expressed by Benedict XVI, after his return from Turkey, on December 22, 2006, before the members of the Roman curia, of seeing Islam update itself with the help of the Enlightenment, a process effected in the Church by Vatican II, ‘at the end of a long and difficult search,’ the pontiff avowed, explaining:

It is a matter of the attitude that the community of faithful must adopt when faced with the convictions and demands which are affirmed in the philosophy of the Enlightenment.

On the one hand, we must oppose ourselves to the dictatorship of positivist reason, which excludes God and the life of community and of public organization, thus depriving man of his specific criteria for measurement. On the other hand, it is necessary to welcome the true conquests of Enlightenment philosophy, the Rights of Man and in particular the liberty of the faith and of its exercise, by recognizing in them equally essential elements for the authenticity of religion.[227]

Leaving to the reader the care of appreciating the justice of the free exercise of ‘faiths,’ the advantage of ‘the authenticity’ of Islam, and the degree of realism in the opening of Islam to the Enlightenment rather than the conversion of Muslims to the true Light ‘which enlightens all men’ (John 1, 9), I will consider the nature of the welcome, by the Church of Vatican II, for the quintessence of the Enlightenment: the Rights of Man. Joseph Ratzinger describes this recent welcome as an ‘acquisition’ and a ‘balance’:

The problem of the 1960s was of acquiring the better values expressed by two centuries of ‘liberal’ culture. These are in fact the values which, even if they are born outside the Church, can find their place, purified and corrected, in its vision of the world. It is what has been done. But it is necessary to admit that some hopes doubtless too naïve have been deceived. It is a matter of finding a new equilibrium.[228]

This text is an implicit citation of Yves Congar’s texts which I have quoted in my introduction, to which I send my reader. Father Congar proposed as early as 1938 (and in his work from 1950 for a ‘true reform of the Church’[229]), Christianity’s assimilation of ‘valuable contributions’ from the modern world, after the Church has ‘decanted and at need purified’ them. This is what the Council attempted, but in fact has this synthesis not been assisted to an unstable and not yet attained equilibrium? In fact, does not the one who says the word equilibrium suppose an engagement of forces between two antagonists?

This is what seems to me to emerge from one of Joseph Ratzinger’s conferences treating exactly of a mutual purification and a correlation of Christianity and the Enlightenment.[230] – I summarize this text:

1. On the one hand, religion should make positivistic rationality hear reason by causing it to admit, in science as in politics, ‘the challenge and the chance of faith in God, who is in person the creative Reason of the universe.’[231] Positivist reason should not even be asked to accept natural right
—whose legislator is God, author of human nature:

This instrument [J. Ratzinger judges] is unhappily blunted, and it is why I prefer not to lean upon it in this debate.

The idea of natural right presupposes a concept of nature where nature and reason interpenetrate each other, in which nature herself is rational. This vision of nature collapsed when the theory of evolution triumphed. Nature as such may not be rational, even if there are in it rational behaviors. There is the diagnostic which is addressed to us from this very moment, and which seems impossible today to contradict [p. 25].

But is human nature not rational for God who conceived it and affixed to it its ends? Is it not ration for man, who, by his natural reason, apprehends his natural inclinations as good and thus as ends to be attained by his action?[232]

It is necessary to suppose that Joseph Ratzinger is incapable of grasping such an argument, no so much because he adopts the evolutionary antithesis which he sets forth, but because he refuses the idea of finality and the notion of final cause.

However, he does consent to admit as a base for natural right what would be the Rights of Man:

As the ultimate element of natural right, which would wish to be in its depth a reasonable right—in any case, in modern times—the Rights of Man are put in place. They are incomprehensible without the presupposition that man as man, by virtue of his simple membership of the species ‘man,’ is a subject of rights, which his being itself bears in itself for values and norms—which are a matter of discovery and not of invention [p. 25].

My readers will be indignant, I hope, at this ‘human species’ without knowable nature, which serves as a foundation, not for rights (to what really is right, because this is suited to human nature and its ends), but as a foundation for a ‘subject of rights,’ who says only ‘I have the right,’ without knowing first to what he has a right nor from what he holds this ‘I have the right.’ He will be indignant too at this ‘values’ which, without being the order owed to the end suited to the nature, are all the same ‘values maintained by themselves, issued from the essence of the human and thus inviolable by all those who possess this essence’ (p. 21). He will be indignant then at those ‘norms’ which apparently have no author, not even that God who is however ‘the creative Reason of the universe.’ He will be indignant at last that those ‘values and norms’ must be, according to Joseph Ratzinger, completed, limited by a list of the ‘duties of man.’ Is this the Decalogue? Instead of the norms of natural right following naturally from the commandments of God, one has duties as a man, antagonistic and regulatory to one’s rights:

Perhaps today the doctrine of the Rights of Man must be completed by a doctrine of the duties of man and the limits of man, and that is what could, in spite of everything, help to renew the question of knowing whether there can be a reason to nature and thus a reasonable right. [...] For Christians, they would deal with creation and with Creator. In the Indian world, it would correspond to the notion of dharma, to the internal causality of being; in Chinese tradition, it is the idea of the celestial orders. [p. 25].

Is the Creator no longer the supreme and unique legislator of nature? He is only the police for the Rights of Man? Between the Christian faith (or other religious traditions) and the Enlightenment (and its Rights of Man), the assimilation dreamed up by Yves Congar, the acquisition wished by Joseph Ratzinger, the equilibrium called for by Benedict XVI prove itself to be a trial of strength.


2. On the other hand, Christianity (like all religions)—cured of its ‘pathologies’ (p. 27) by a purification of its tendency to be, in place of a force for salvation, ‘an archaic and dangerous force which builds false universalisms [the reign of Christ, or Jihad] and foments thus intolerance and terrorism’ (p. 22)—would ratify the Rights of Man, duly purified and limited, as ‘the translation of the codified convictions of the Christian faith into the language of the secularized world,’ according to the expression of Jürgen Habermas in the same dialogue.[233]


2. Mutual regeneration and polyphonic correlation

In summary, Joseph Ratzinger declares: “I feel myself in general agreement with Jürgen Habermas’ account concerning a post-secular society, concerning the will for mutual learning and concerning self-limitation on the part of each’; he explains himself:

– There are extremely dangerous pathologies in religions; they make it a necessity to consider the divine light of reason [sic] as a sort of organ of control which religion must accept as a permanent organ for purification and regulation [...]

– But there also exist pathologies in reason [...], a hubris (passion) of reason, which is not less dangerous [...]: the atomic bomb, man as product. This is why in an inverse sense, reason also must be recalled to its limits and learn a capacity for hearing in regard to the great religious traditions of humanity. [...]

– Kurt Hubner recently formulated a similar need and declared that with such a thesis there was not question of a ‘return to faith,’ but of a ‘liberation in relation to a historical blindness, which supposes that [faith] no longer has anything to say to modern man from the fact that it is opposed to its humanistic idea of reason, of Aufklärung and of liberty’; I would thus willingly speak of a necessary form of correlation between reason and faith, reason and religion, called to a purification and to a mutual regeneration. [...]

[As for other cultural or religious components], it is important to integrate them in an attempt for polyphonic correlation, in which they will open themselves to the essential complementarity between reason and faith. Thus could be born a universal process of purification in which, in the fi nal account, values and norms, known or intuited in one manner or another by all men [sic], will gain a new force of radiance. What maintains the world in unity will in this way rediscover new vigor [p. 27-28].

*Thus, Benedict XVI’s hermeneutics goes much further even than I discerned at the beginning: more than a reinterpretation, it is a regeneration; and it goes beyond the only links of the Catholic religion with Western rationality. It consists first in a mutual purification of faith and reason, which corrects the intolerant drift of the first and the blind autonomy of the second. It finally consists in a mutual regeneration of faith and reason, which would enrich faith with the liberal values, duly limited, of the Enlightenment, and which would win reason over to a hearing of the faith duly decoded and transcribe in secularized language. And this process would stretch out universally to all religious faiths and to all rationalities.

Without realizing a one world ethos (p. 27), thus vigor would be given to the values which must support the world.

*Does it not seem to my reader that what maintains the world is neither Max Scheler’s ‘values,’ nor the Enlightenment’s man as ‘subject of rights,’ but Jesus Christ, author, reformer and elevator of human nature? ‘For other foundation no man can lay, but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus’ (I Cor. 3, 11). Before this conviction which the Christian faith grants, the whole equilibrist construction of a theologian in his room – salva reverentia – collapses like a castle of cards, as the New World Order will collapse which it wishes to serve. For secularized reason, the faith has only one true word: ‘Omnia instaurare in Christo (to restore all things in Christ)’ (Eph. 1, 10).



Footnotes
227] DC #2373, February 4, 2007, p. 108.

[228] J. Ratzinger, Why the Faith is in Crisis, debate with Vittorio Messori, Jesus, November 1984, p. 72.
[229] Y. Congar, True and False reform in the Church, Paris, Cerf, 1950, p. 345-346.
[230] J. Ratzinger, ‘Democracy, Right and Religion’ in The Prepolitical Foundations for the Democratic State, Dialogue with Jürgen Habermas, Munich, January 19, 2004, translation by Jean-Louis Schlegel, in the review Esprit, July 2004, p. 5-28.
[231] Speech of December 22, 2006, to the Curia, DC # 2373, February 4, 2007, p. 107.
[232] See I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
[233] See J. Ratzinger, speech of December 22, 2006, DC 2373, p. 107