Faith Imperiled by Reason: Benedict XVI’s Hermeneutics

'What is constitutive of faith today?’ Such is the question which Joseph Ratzinger posed in 1973, during a group ecumenical discussion, and which he posed as the first question of his book, The Principles of Catholic Theology.[9]
The collapse is scientific, political, moral, even religious. Must one allow for a philosophy of history which accepts ruptures in faith as relevant, each thesis possessing its meaning as one moment from a whole? Thus, to paraphrase Ratzinger,

Joseph Ratzinger seems to dismiss this dialectical method precisely because it results in a new truth. It is not necessary to synthesize irreconcilables, but to find what continuity exists between them. Let us then find what permanence of Christian faith there is in the fluctuations of philosophies which have wished to explain it. Such is the theme of the professor of Tübingen’s work, Introduction to Christianity.[10]

Since reason seems to evolve according to diverse philosophies and since the past of such an evolution adapts itself to the faith, the connection between faith and reason must be periodically revised so that it will always be possible to express the constant faith according to the concepts of contemporary man. This revision is the fruit of hermeneutic.

When Saint John, and the Holy Ghost who inspired him, chose the name ‘Word,’ in Greek Logos, to designate the person of the Son in the Holy Trinity, the word had been until then as ambiguous as possible. It commonly designated formulaic speech. Heraclitus, six centuries before John, spoke of a logos measuring everything, but that meant the fire which burns and consumed all. The stoics used this term to signify the intelligence of things, their seminal rational (logos spermatikos) which merged with the immanent principle of organization in the universe. Finally Philon (13 BC – 54 AD), a practicing Jew and Hellenist from Alexandria, saw in the logos the supreme intelligibility ordering the universe, but much inferior to the unknowable God—that of Abraham and of Moses.

John seizes a Greek word. He wrests it, in a manner of speaking, from those who have used it in ignorance or by mistake. From the first words of the prologue to his Gospel, he gives to it, he renders to it rather its absolute meaning. It is the eternal Son of God who is His word, His Logos, His Verbum. And this Word is incarnate [...]. Thus, the Revelation made to the Jews makes an effort, from its very beginnings, to express itself in the languages of Greek philosophy, without making any concession to it.[11]

Thus the faith expressed in human concepts is inspired Scripture; the faith explained in human concepts is theology, science of the faith; finally, the faith defined in human concepts is dogma. All these concepts have a plebian or philosophical origin, but they are only employed by faith once decanted and purified of all original, undesirable philosophical stench.

At the cost of what hesitations and what labors have the Fathers and the first councils resolved, when faced with heresies, to employ these philosophical terms and to forge new formulae of faith so as to clarify the gift of revelation! The use of the philosophical term, ousia (substance), hypostasis, prosôpon (person), to speak the mysteries of the Holy Trinity and of the Incarnation is accompanied by a necessary ‘process of purification and recasting’ of the concepts which these words signify.

It is only once extracted from their philosophical system and modified by a maturation in depth, then sometimes at first condemned because of their still inadequate content (monarchy, person, consubstantial), then understood correctly, admitted at last and qualified for application (but only analogically), that these concepts can become carriers of the new consistency of the Christian faith.[12]

These facts demonstrate that, far from expressing itself in the philosophy of the epoch, the faith must extricate itself from false philosophies and itself forge its own concepts. But is this to be extricated from all philosophy and to rest itself on a simple ‘common sense?’

With Father Garrigou-Lagrange, I will further respond to this question by showing that dogmas express themselves in the language of the philosophy of being, which is nothing besides a scientific instance of that common knowledge.

It was with repugnance, even, that the councils would consent to add precisions to the symbol of faith from the Council of Nicaea (325) which itself seemed sufficient to exclude every heresy. The council of Chalcedon (451), against the monophysite heresy, resolved to proceed to a definition (horos) of the faith, a novelty. A little after (458), the bishops would conclude that Chalcedon was no longer a extensive enough interpretation of Nicaea. The word, interpretation (hérmènéia), was also used by Saint Hilary (Syn. 91) when speaking of the Fathers who, after Nicaea, had reverently interpreted the propriety of consubstantial. It was a matter neither of a new reading nor of a revision to the symbol of Nicaea, but of a more detailed explanation. Such is, in consequence, the meaning of the hérmènéia achieved by Chalcedon. Later, one Vigilius of Thapsus would affirm that it was necessary, when faced with newly prepared heresies, to ‘bring forth new decrees of such a type that, even so, whatever the preceding councils have defined against the heretics remains intact.’[13] Then, Maximus the Confessor declared that the Fathers of Constantinople had only confirmed the faith of Nicaea against those who sought to change it for themselves to their own meaning: for Maximus, Christ subsisting ‘in two natures’ is not ‘another profession of faith’ (allon pistéôs symbolon), but only a piercing (tranoûntes) look at Nicaea, which, by interpretations and subsequent fashionings (épéxègoumenoi kai épéxergazoménoi), must still be defended against deformative interpretations.[14]

Thus, the hermeneutic (hérmènéia) that the Fathers practiced for the earlier magisterium was clarified as far as its end and as far as its form.

As far as the end, it is no matter of adapting a modern mentality, but of combating this modern mentality and of neutralizing the impression of modern philosophies upon the faith (it is in fact the characteristic of heretics to bring the faith to modern philosophical speculations which corrupt it). It is not any more a matter of justifying the old heretics in the name of a better comprehension of the Catholic formulae which have condemned them!

As far as the form, it is no matter of proposing modern principles in the name of the faith but of condemning them in the name of this same unchanged faith. In summary, the revisionist hermeneutic of Joseph Ratzinger is a stranger to the thought of the Fathers. There are, therefore, grounds for reviewing it radically.

It belongs to Saint Vincent of Lérins to have taught, in the year 434, the homogenous development of dogma, always by increase in explicitness but never by mutation:
In the same sense, in 1854 Pius IX, citing the same Vincent of Lérins in the bull defining the Immaculate Conception, and speaking of the ‘dogmas deposited with the Church,’ declared that she ‘devotes herself to polishing them in such a manner that these dogmas of heavenly doctrine receive proof, light, clarity, but retain fullness, integrity, propriety, and that they increase only in their genus, that is to say, in the same dogma, the same meaning and the same proposition’ [DS 2802].

According to this progress in clarity, dogmas do not progress in depth—a depth of which the Apostles have already received the plenitude—nor in truth, that is to say, in their aptness to that part of his mystery which God has revealed. The progress sought by theology and by the magisterium is that of a more precise expression of the divine mystery as it is, immutable as God is immutable. Concepts, always imperfect, could always be refined, but they would never fall out-of-date. A dogmatic formula, therefore, never has anything to do with, nor ever has to earn the vital reaction of the believing subject, but it would have everything to lose in doing so. It is rather that subject who must, on the contrary, efface himself and disappear before the objective content of dogma.

Far from being obliged to take on in turn the successive, temporary forms of human subjectivity, the dogmatic effort is a labor of perseverance for the sake of making revealed truth objective upon its base of the gifts of Scripture and Tradition. It is a work of purge from the subjective in favor of an objectivity as perfect as possible. This work of purification is not in the first place an extraction of the heterogeneous so as to regain the homogenous, even though it can be this when faced with heresies and doctrinal deviations. The essential operation of dogmatic development is the effort to reassemble what is dispersed, to condense the diffused, to eliminate metaphors as far as possible, to purify analogies so as to make them more suitable. Nicaea’s consubstantial and Trent’s transubstantiation come from such successful reductions.

Inevitably, dogmatic reduction deviates from scriptural depth: consubstantial will never have the depth of one word from Jesus, such as this: “Who sees me, sees the Father” (John 14, 9). In this word, what an introduction to an unfathomable abyss! What a source for interminable questions! What space for contemplation! And nonetheless, what progress in precision belongs to consubstantial! What a fountain of theological deductions! There is, it seems to me, Joseph Ratzinger’s whole gnoseological difficulty: torn between the dogmas which he must hold with an absolute stability and the inquisitive quest of his mobile spirit, Joseph Ratzinger never achieves the reconciliation of the two poles of his faith.

When will the affirmation of the ‘I’ efface itself before the ‘Him’?

It is this effacement of the believing subject which Benedict XVI energetically refuses. For him, the evolution of the formulation of the faith is not the search for better precision, but the necessity of proposing a new and adapted formulation. It is novelty for novelty’s sake. And the adaption is an adaption to the believer, not an adaption to the mystery. All this fits with John XXIII’s syllogism, from the presentation of the program of Vatican II in his opening discourse:
Such indeed was the Council’s task, Benedict XVI says: the modern reformulation of the faith; according to a modern method and following modern principles, then according to a new method and after new principles. For there is always method, on the one hand, and principles on the other. To apply this method and to adopt these principles should still be the Church’s task forty years later:
There is the whole revolution of the magisterium implemented by the Council. Preoccupation with the subject of faith supplants care for the object of faith. In place of simply seeking to make dogma precise and explicit, the new magisterium will seek to reformulate and adapt it. In place of adapting man to God, it wishes to adapt God to man. Do we not then have a subverted magisterium, an anti-magisterium?

Where to find the method for this adapted rereading of dogma? A German philosopher who has influenced German theology and whose mark is found upon Joseph Ratzinger must intervene: Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911), father of hermeneutics and of historicism.

Hermeneutics, as we have seen, is the art of interpreting facts or documents.

Historicism then, wishes to consider the role of history in truth. For Dilthey, as for Schelling and Hegel who were idealists, truth is only understood in its history. But whereas for Schelling and Hegel truth develops by itself, in a well-known dialectical process, on the other hand, for Dilthey a distinction must be made:

— **In physical sciences, development consists in explanation (Erklären), which is a purely rational function.

— But in human sciences, truth progresses by understanding (Verstehen) which includes the appetitive powers of the soul. Thus truth develops by the process of a vital reaction of the subject to the object, in accordance with the link of vital reaction between the historian, who looks into the facts of history, and the impact of history.

Thus, the emotive richness of the historian tends to enrich the object he studies. The subject enters into the object; it becomes a part of the object. History is charged with the energy of its readers’ emotions and thus the judgments of the past are unceasingly colored by the vital reaction of the historian or of the reader. Now, it is at the end of each epoch that there fully appears the meaning of that epoch, Dilthey emphasizes, and this is very true; from there, at each such term, it is necessary to proceed to a new revision.

Let’s apply this: the date 1962, that of the start of Vatican Council II, seemed the end of a modern epoch; thus one could then—and one was obliged to—revisit, revise all historical facts, the judgments of the past, especially concerning religion**—so as to disengage from them significant facts and permanent principles, not without coloring them anew with the preoccupations and emotions of the present.

In this sense, Hans Georg Gadamer (born in 1900) judges that the true historical consciousness does not, for the interpreter, consist in wishing to get rid of its prejudices—that would be the worst of prejudices—but in becoming aware of them and in finding better ones. This is not a vicious circle, the hermeneuticists say; it is a healthy realism which is called ‘the hermeneutical circle.’

Applied to the faith, this retrospective necessarily purifies the past from what was added in an adventitious manner to the nucleus of the faith, and this revision, this retrospective, necessarily aggregates to the faith the coloring of present preoccupations. There is, thus, a double process: on the one hand, a rereading of the past which is a purification of the past, a disengagement from its parasitic growths, a highlighting of its implicit presuppositions, a becoming conscious of its fleeting circumstances, a reckoning of the emotive reactions of the past or of the philosophies of the past; and on the other hand, it must be an enrichment of historical facts and ideas by the actual vital reaction, which depends on the new circumstances in the actual epoch, as well as upon the actual mentality and thus upon actual philosophy.

It is indeed to this hermeneutic that the expert on the Council, Joseph Ratzinger, invited the assembly in the editing of ‘schema XIII,’ which would become Gaudium et Spes, in an article written before the fourth session of the Council. What he said there about moral principles applies as well to dogmatic ones:

However uncertain and provisional it may be, this purification of the past is indeed what Benedict XVI reclaims for the Church, and this is a constant in his life. He says it himself:
In his speech on December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI enumerates the purifications of the past implemented by Vatican II and he justified them against the reproach of ‘discontinuity’ while invoking historicism:
It is clear – Benedict XVI concedes – that in all these sectors of which the collection forms a singular question, there could emerge a certain form of discontinuity in which, nevertheless, once the diverse distinctions between concrete historical circumstances and their demands were established, it would appear that the continuity of principles had not been abandoned.

In this process of novelty in continuity – Benedict XVI justifies himself – we should learn to understand more concretely first of all that the decisions of the Church concerning contingent facts – for example, certain concrete forms of liberalism – must necessarily be themselves contingent because they refer to a specific reality, in itself changeable:
Benedict XVI illustrates his proof by the example of religious liberty:

If only Benedict XVI would allow me to protest this distortion of history! The popes of the 19th century have condemned religious liberty, not only on account of the indifferentism of its promoters, but in itself:

— because it is not a natural right of man: Pius IX said that it is not a ‘proprium cujuscumque hominis jus,’[22] and Leo XIII said that it is not one of the ‘jura quae homini natura dederit.’[23]

— and because it proceeds from ‘an altogether distorted idea of the State,’[24] the idea of a State which would rather not have the duty of protecting the true religion against the expansion of religious error.

These two motives for condemnation are absolutely general; they follow from the truth of Christ and of his Church, from the duty of the State to recognize it, and from its indirect duty to promote the eternal salvation of the citizens, not, indeed, by constraining them to believe in spite of themselves, but by protecting them against the influence of socially professed error, all things taught by Pius IX and Leo XIII.

If today, circumstances having changed, religious plurality demands, in the name of political prudence, civil measures for tolerance even of legal equality between diverse cults, religious liberty as a natural right of the person, in the name of justice, should not be invoked. It remains a condemned error. The doctrine of the faith is immutable, even if its complete application is impeded by the malice of the times. And on the day when circumstances return to normal, to those of Christianity, the same practical application of repression of false cults must be made, as in the time of the Syllabus. Let’s remember that circumstance which change application (consequent circumstances) do not affect the content of doctrine.

We must say the same thing concerning circumstances which prompt the magisterium to intervene (antecedent circumstances). That religious liberty had in 1965 a personalist context, very different from the context of aggressiveness that it had a hundred years earlier in 1864, at the time of the Syllabus, does not change its intrinsic malice. The circumstances of 1864 certainly caused Pius IX to act, but they did not affect the content of the condemnation that he set down for religious liberty. Should a new Luther arise in 2017, even without his attaching as in 1517 his 95 theses to the door of the collegial church of Wittenberg, he would be condemned in the very terms of 500 years before.[25] Let us reject then the equivocation between ‘circumstantial’ decision and prudential, provisional, fallible, reformable, correctible decision in matters of doctrine.

By consequence the purification of the past of the Church, the revision of ‘certain of her historical decisions,’ such as those which Benedict XVI proposes, is false and artificial. It is to be feared that the same goes for the assimilation by the Church’s doctrine of the philosophies of the temps, which is promoted by the same Benedict XVI in his speech to the Curia in 2005.

Benedict XVI praises Saint Thomas Aquinas for having, in the 13th century, reconciled and allied faith and the new philosophy of his epoch. This new Thomas Aquinas says: Voilà, I am going to make for you the theory of alliance which the Council has attempted between faith and modern reason. I summarize.

Here are the pope’s exact words:
In short, Saint Thomas did not condemn Aristotelianism, despite its dangers, but he knew how to welcome, purify and establish it ‘in a positive relation with the faith.’ – This is very exact. – Very well, then, Vatican II did analogously; it did not condemn personalism, but it knew how to receive it, and, in return for some purifications, ‘how thus to place the faith in a positive relation with the dominant form of reason’ in the 20th century, how to integrate personalism into the vision of the Church.

– Stay to see whether this integration is possible.

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

Joseph Ratzinger’s philosophical itinerary is then an impasse, because it abandons the road of the philosophy of being. Will the theological itinerary of the same Ratzinger leave that impasse? Will it find a way which leads to the first Being, to his infinite perfections, to his supernatural mysteries?

To answer this question, it is first necessary to situate the professor of Tübingen in the context of German theology, dependent on the celebrated school of theology in the university of that very city.

According to the founder of the Catholic school of Tübingen, Johann Sebastian von Drey (1777-1853), historical development is explained by a vital spiritual principle:

What encloses the various historical epochs into a united whole or what sets them in opposition to each other is a certain spirit which, at determined times, concludes historical development with a unity filled with life: this is the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age.

[This spirit is constructive:] acting by going out of itself, it draws everything around itself like the center of a circle, which reduces opposition and reorganizes in accordance with itself whatever is conformed to it.[62]

The affinity of this thought to Dilthey’s is striking, but for Drey, the Zeitgeist is nothing besides the spirit of Christ. The theologian’s faith transfigures the philosopher’s naturalism.

In his Apologetik (1838), Drey explains how evolution is necessary to Chrstianity, insofar as it is a historical phenomenon and insofar as it is Revelation. Here is how Geiselmann summarizes Drey:

Christian Revelation is life, originally divine life—a life which, without interruption, increases from its original core towards its plenitude within the universal Church. As uninterrupted divine life, Revelation is not a completed gift, deposited, so to speak, in the cradle of the church and transmitted by human hands. It is this very Revelation, which, like all life, moves and continues of itself.[63]

Its movement is auto-movement, thanks to that portion of spiritual force which has dwelt in it since its origin, to know God’s essential force and also his action, which, without failing, continues to act and to lead his creation towards its perfection.[64]

This idea of Revelation, which ‘no longer appeared simply as the transmission of truths addressed to the intellect, but as the historical action of God, in which Truth unveils itself little by little,’[65] would have been the thesis concerning Saint Bonaventure presented by Joseph Ratzinger in 1956 for his State authorization as a university professor. The author pretended that the Seraphic Doctor had seen in Revelation, not an ensemble of truths, but an act (which is not exclusive), and that ‘the concept of “Revelation” always implies the subject who receives it’[66]: the Church thus forms a part of the concept of Revelation, that is to say, a part of Revelation itself. Similarly, the candidate for authorization maintained that ‘to Scripture belongs the subject who understands it [the Church]—Scripture with which we have already given the essential meaning of Tradition.’[67]. And Joseph Ratzinger tells just how his thesis-director, professor Michael Schmaus, ‘did not at all see in these theses a faithful reconstruction of Bonaventure’s thought [...] but a dangerous modernism, well on the way to turning the concept of Revelation into a subjective notion.’[68]

Well, this idea of Revelation as a divine intervention in history, which also was not closed by the death of the last of the Apostles, but which continues in the Church which is its receptive subject, had been rejected meanwhile, after Drey and before Loisy, by the Roman magisterium: Revelation is not any divine intervention, but only a pronunciation from God, ‘locutio Dei,’[69] not to the whole Church, but to ‘the holy men of God’ (1 P 1, 21), the prophets and Apostles’; the truth which it contains ‘was complete with the Apostles’[70]; it is not perfectible,[71] but is a ‘divine deposit’ confided to the magisterium of the Church ‘so that it might guard it as sacred and set it out faithfully.’[72]

The ‘Revelation transmitted by the Apostles, or the deposit of the faith’[73] does at all times experience progress, not indeed in its content, of which the Apostles possessed the plenitude as well as the plenitude of understanding[74], but in its explanation, by a ‘more ample interpretation’[75] or a clearer ‘distinction,’[76] that is to say, by a passage from implicit to explicit[77] of that same deposit of faith closed at the death of the last of the Apostles.

Certainly, God continues to intervene in human history: the conversion of the emperor Constantine, the evangelization of America, the pontificate of Pope Saint Pius X were as milestones among so many others in God’s providential action, but they do not have the value of divine Revelation. Here a very important distinction must be made: a progressive Revelation from God is undeniable in the Old Testament and even in the New until the death of Saint John. After that, public Revelation ended. Neither God nor anyone else could add anything whatsoever to it, as Saint John said in the Apocalypse:

For I testify to everyone that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book: If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book. And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book. [Apoc. 22, 18-19]

Without doubt, as Saint Thomas says, ‘in each epoch, the Church never lacks men filled with the spirit of prophecy, not indeed to draw out a new doctrine of faith, but for the direction of human acts.’[78] These are the subjects and instruments of private revelations. If, therefore, anyone supposes that public Revelation is continued in the Church by the prophetic charism of its members or of the hierarchy, he falls into error. Here as elsewhere, Saint Thomas is a sure guide. Speaking of the Old Testament, he teaches that there has effectively been an increase in the articles of faith, not as regards their substance, but as regards their explanation:

As regards the substance of articles of faith, there has been no increase in these articles according to the succession of time, because all the later ones are believed to have been already contained in the faith of the early Fathers albeit implicitly. But as regards their explanation, the number of articles as increased: because certain among them have been explicitly understand by the successors, which were not explicitly understood by the first. Thus, the Lord said to Moses in Exodus: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob and my name of Adonai I did not tell them.’ And the Apostle says: ‘the mystery of Christ...in other generations was not known...as it is now revealed to his holy apostles and prophets’ (Ep. 3, 4-5)[79]

There is no parallel but only analogy between the time of Revelation and the time of the Church, between progressive Revelation, on the one hand, and progressive development of Christian dogma, on the other. Thus Saint Bonaventure must be interpreted. Until Christ and the Apostles, Revelation itself was developed while passing from implicit to explicit; after the Apostles, Revelation being terminated, its understanding, its application and its proposal by the Church are developed while passing from implicit to explcit.We could summarize this in Latin: Ante Christum, creverunt articula fi dei quia magis ac magis explicite a Deo revelata sunt; post Christum vero et apostolos, creverunt quidem articula fi dei quia magis ac magis explicite tradita sunt ab Ecclesia.[80]

The historicism in Joseph Ratzinger’s concept of Tradition presupposes his subjectivism. The mystery of God is not an object; it is a person, an I who speaks to a Thou. The I who speaks is only perceived by a Thou who listens. This relation is inscribed in the notion of Tradition. Tradition, consequently, is nothing besides the living interpretation of Scripture:

There can be no pure sola scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’). To Scripture belongs the subject who understands it—Scripture by which is already given to us the essential meaning of Tradition.[81]

This requires explanation. For idealist thought, the crude thing is unknown; it is the object (that is to say, the thought thing) which is known. For Kant, the subject forms a part of the object, imposing on it his a priori categories, his own coloring. For Husserl, the thought object is simply the correlative for the thinking subject, independent of the thing. Joseph Ratzinger would find an application of this idealism in Scripture and Tradition: crude Scripture is unintelligible; it must be ‘understood’ by the Church as subject, which is its correlative, and which interprets it in its own manner; in this sense, ‘there can never be Scripture alone,’ in rebuttal of what Luther pretended with his ‘sola scriptura.’

In fact, Joseph Ratzinger is here inspired by Martin Buber,[82] for whom the essence of the Decalogue is a summons: the summons of the human Thou by the divine I: ‘Thou shalt not have strange gods before me...’ (Ex. 20, 3). Interpretation of the Bible relives the experience of this summons. In this sense, there is no sola scriptura since there is always the summons, today in the Church.

The truth is that it is the Church who gives an authentic interpretation for the Bible. But this is not because she is ‘the understanding subject,’ but because she is its judge: ‘It belongs to her to judge concerning the true meaning and interpretation of Holy Scripture.”[83] And to sustain this judgment, the Church has another source of faith: Tradition, that is to say, the truths of faith and morals received by the Apostles from the very mouth of Christ or from the holy Ghost, which have been transmitted from them to us without alteration, as though from hand to hand.[84] The witnesses for Tradition are the holy Fathers, the liturgy, the dispersed and unanimous magisterium of the bishops and the magisterium of councils and popes. All these voices succeed each other, but Tradition in essence is immutable.

It is because it is immutable that it can be a rule for the faith, because elastic rules are no rules at all. It is therefore insofar as it is immutable that Tradition is a rule of interpretation for the Bible; there is no actual reading of the Bible, different from yesterday’s, which can suffer Scripture to undergo a ‘process of reinterpretation and of amplification,’ as Benedict XVI pretends.[85]

Immutable in itself, Tradition progresses in becoming more explicit. Here is a truth which Vatican Council II, in its constitution Dei Verbum concerning Divine Revelation, has obscured by alleging an historical progress for Tradition in ‘its perception’ and in ‘its understanding’ of the things revealed by God, and an ‘incessant tendency of the Church towards the plenitude of divine truth’—things absolutely impossible, as I have shown. I cite:
I have already let you understand how doctrinal progress in becoming explicit is inversely proportional to progress in depth of understanding, which does not exist absolutely since, as Saint Thomas says:

Who in the Church could surpass the Apostles in understanding of the faith? It is inevitable that this in-depth understanding should decrease among their successors, despite being teachers of the faith provided with the charism of truth, excluding the several lights who are the doctors of the Church. This sane realism has given place, in the Council, to the illusion of necessary progress towards a pretended plenitude, which did not belong to the Apostles.

It is not only the idea of Tradition, but also that of Revelation, which Jospeh Ratzinger revises either in light of his idealism or in light of his personalism.

Thus, concerning Revelation, considered as somehow actual, Jsoeph Ratzinger is of the opinion that ‘the concept of “Revelation” always implies the subject who receives it.”[87] The author supposes wrongly that the receiving subject is the believer, or the Church, and not only the Apostles; he falls into a Prostestant error.

Concerning theology, Joseph Ratzinger judges that ‘pure objectivity does not exist,’ no more in theology than in physics. Just as in physics ‘the observer himself forms a part of the experience, and ‘in his response there is always some part of the question posed and of the questioner,’ so in theology ‘whoever engages in the experience receives an answer which not only reflects God but also our own question; it teaches us something concerning God by refraction through our own being.’[88]

Concerning the faith itself, Joseph Ratzinger assures us that pure objectivity is not even possible:

I object that, if to have faith an ‘experience of God’ is necessary, very few Christians have faith. Faith, adherence of the intellect to the divine mystery is a thing requisite for salvation; but the life of faith, ex fide, as Saint Paul said, is a normal, desirable thing, but not equally necessary; and in any case, the experience of God is not requisite for it.

But above all, if one defines faith as ‘experience of God,’ one repeats the modernist heresy, which consecrates every religion as true, since all pretend to have some authentic experience of the divine.[90]

Finally, concerning the magisterium of the Church, Joseph Ratzinger has as well a dialectic vision or, let us say, one conversational with its decisions, which must be, according to him, answers to the believers questions or the result of his experimentation with God:

Dogmatic formulae themselves—for example, one nature in three Persons—include this refraction through the human; they reflect in our example man at the end of antiquity who inquired and experimented with the philosophical categories from the end of antiquity, these categories determining the point of view from which he poses his questions.[91]

Let me first say just one word about the Kantian substratum for this problem.

Just as easily could all science of necessity be a reflection, not only of such things as appear to us (phenomena), but even of the spirit which imposes on them its modes by which they are represented to itself.[92]

One could in fact allow that the long and difficult adaptation of the concepts of dogma so as to proclaim them adequately is a kind of experimentation practiced by the Church. But by doing so, it is neither God nor his mystery that are thus challenged, but rather human concepts. It is not reason—ancient or medieval—which ‘experiments with God,’ but rather divine faith which ‘experiments with reason.’This being established, the fundamental problem remains: does our intellect reach the being of things, yes or no? Is truth objective? Is there a philosophy of the real? Are the concepts chosen and polished by the faith concepts of a particular, historical philosophy: Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomist, Kantian, personalist? Or rather are they more simply the concepts of the most elementary philosophy of being, that of common sense?

I mean by common sense the spontaneous exercise of the intellect, which reaches the being of the things of natural reality so as to find in them certain causes and certain principles. For example, reason spontaneously affirms that, besides the coming into being of a reality, there is in that reality something which abides (principle of substance). Or again: every agent acts for an end (principle of finality).

To the proposed question, I have already sketched above the answer, but it must be demonstrated.

Common sense, philosophy of being and dogmatic formulae

To limit ourselves to the dogma of the Divine Trinity, the principle mystery is the reconciliation of the divine unity with the real distinction of the Three Divine Persons. Let us examine the concepts which express better and better the mysterious antinomy.

The confession of faith in its primitive simplicity is this: ‘I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ his only Son, and in the Holy Ghost.’ This expresses the mystery clearly but still imperfectly. The heresies of the first three centuries dismissed the true meaning of this formula, either by denying the real distinction of the Three (Sabellius), or by denying the divinity of the Son (Arius), or that of the Holy Ghost (Macedonius), or by professing in opposition three gods (tritheism). This last error was condemned in 262 by a letter of Pope Dionysius. [93]

The Council of Nicea (325) clarified the dogma against the Arians, not only under a negative form by anathema, but in a positive manner, by expanding the apostolic symbol with the development of the idea of filiation and generation: ‘Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the only-begotten of the Father, that is, of the Father’s substance [...], begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father.’[94] Here appears the notion of ‘substance,’ which remains in the domain of common sense, but also the judgment of ‘consubstantial’ (homoousios), which already surpasses what expression the common sense can give to the shared divinity of the Father and Son.

Later, the first Council of Constantinople (381) clarified the divinity of the Holy Ghost. Finally, the second Council of Constantinople (553) clarified in its turn ‘that it is necessary to adore one deity in three subsistences or persons.’[95] This was an anathema, but it positively determined what must be believed. Besides the abstract terms of nature and substance (‘mian physin ètoi ousian: a single nature or substance’), the formula utilized the concrete terms of subsistence and person (‘en trisin hypostasesin ègoun prosôpois: in three subsistences or persons’), the first of which, ‘subsistence’ (or hypostasis), was already a developed philosophical notion, since it had been precisely distinguished from ‘substance’ (or ousia).

To continue, the eleventh private council of Toledo (675) distinguished the divine persons from each other by naming them in relation to each other: ‘In the relative names of the Persons, the Father is linked to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the Holy Ghost comes from the two others. And although, according to these relations, three Persons are affirmed, yet one still believes in only one nature or substance.’[96] From then on it has been believed that there are in God three real relations which characterize and number the persons.

At the council of Lyon (1274) was defined, by the Filioque, the procession of the Holy Spirit from both Father and Son (Dz 463). In 1441, the Council of Florence, in its decree for the Jacobites, gave the final expression of dogmatic progress concerning the Trinity: There is a distinction of persons by their relations of origin; their unity is total ‘wherever there is no opposition of relation’[97]; the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as from a single principle; and the persons are present in each other (circuminsession) (Dz 703-704). It is evident that the notions of ‘relative nomenclature,’ of ‘opposition of relation,’ of principle without principle,’ ‘principle from principle’ and ‘unique principle’ surpass the level of common sense and denote a philosophy, and a well-developed philosophy, but a philosophy which cannot be specifically named.

Even later, the Church, by the voice of Pius IX, condemned in 1857 the explanation of the Trinity made by Anton Günther (1783-1863). The person being ‘consciousness of myself,’ said the later, the two divine processions of the word and of love must be reinterpreted as being three intellectual processions: consciousness of the thinking self, consciousness of the thought self and the correlation between the two. This is Husserl before the fact. Pius IX declared this explanation to be ‘an aberrance from the Catholic faith and from the true explanation of unity in the divine substance’ (Dz 1655). Pius IX’s act contained an implicit approbation of the definition of person made by Boethius (470-525): ‘a person is an individual substance of a rational nature,’ a definition which surpasses common sense and which is coherent with the philosophy of being, though opposite to personalist philosophy, which confuses metaphysical personality and psychological personality.

I will conclude with Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange:

– The dogmatic formulae developed by the Church contain concepts which surpass common sense.

– These formulae and concepts belong to the philosophy of being, which maintains that the intellect knows, not primarily its own act, but first being.

– These concepts are all the same accessible to the common sense, insofar as it is the philosophy of being in its rudimentary state.

– This amounts to saying that the concepts of dogmatic formulae belong to the philosophy of being, which is the scientific instance of common sense.

– It follows from this, and is verified by facts, that idealist philosophies, which reject the philosophy of being, do away with the common sense and become inept for explaining dogma.

– Finally, the philosophy of being, suitable for proclaiming dogma, is not a ‘particular philosophy,’ nor a system, but rather the philosophy of all time, the philosophia perennis, to cite Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), the philosophy inherited from Plato and Aristotle.

Here is a beautiful witness offered to this philosophy of being by Henri Bergson (1859-*1941), who, without being a Thomist, was not for all that ignorant of the great Greeks or of Saint Thomas:

Of the immense edifice constructed by them, a solid framework still remains, and this framework draws the grand outlines of a metaphysics which is, we believe, the natural metaphysics of the human intellect.[98]

– The final reason for the suitability of the philosophy of being for developing dogma is their pre-established harmony, as was shown by Newman.

It was John Henry Newman (1801-1890) who first made a driving force for doctrinal development reside in the assimilation by Catholic doctrine of elements foreign to Revelation, that is to say, of philosophical principles. But, as an idealist, he saw in this assimilation a general sign of correct progress of ideas:

The facts and opinions which until now have been considered under other connections and were grouped around other centers are from now on gradually attracted by a new infl uence and submitted to a new sovereign. They are modifi ed, reconsidered, set aside according to each case. A new element of order and of composition has entered among them; and its life is proved by a capacity for expansion, without introducing any disorder or dissolution.

The process of deduction, of conservation, of assimilation, of purification, of molding, a unitive process, is the essence of a fruitful development and is its third distinctive mark.[99]

And Newman gives an example, a unique example of such a fruitful assimilation: the assimilation by Catholic theology of the philosophical principle of instrumental causality. This assimilation, he says, results from an antecedent affinity between the revealed truth and the natural reality.That an idea becomes more willingly coalescent with some rather than with others does not indicate that it has been unduly influenced, that is to say, corrupted by them, but that there was an antecedent affi nity between them. At the least, one must admit here that, when the Gospel speaks of a virtue going out of Our Lord (Luke, 6, 19) or of the cure that he effected with mud that his lips had moistened (John 9, 6), these facts offer examples, not of the perversion of Christianity, but of its affinity with notions exterior to it.[100]

This nice text allows us to evoke the fruitfulness of the assimilation by Christian doctrine of the principle of instrumental causality: one can think about the efficacy of grace in the sacred humanity of Jesus as instrument of his divinity, first in his passion, then in the Mass and in the sacraments, which Saint Thomas taught and which the Council of Trent utilized to define the action ex opere operato of the sacraments.[101]

One can also think, on the other hand, about the sterility to which Protestantism condemned itself by refusing this assimilation: the so-called Christ is the sole cause of grace without any instrument or mediation. Vatican Council II, likewise, was sterilized by refusing, in 1963, according to the counsel of the experts Rahner and Ratzinger, to proclaim the blessed Virgin ‘Mediatrix of all graces,’ because, they said, such a title ‘would result in unimaginable evils from the ecumenical point of view.’[102]

On the contrary, in Catholicism, the principle of instrumental causality has been the revealer of multiple faces of Christian dogma, which, without it, would have remained veiled in the depth of mystery and would have escaped the explicit knowledge of the faith.

Without doubt, assimilation, by dogma or by theology, of philosophical principles has no resemblance to the growth of living beings through nutrition, that is to say, by intussusception![103] Progress is made by a comparison of one proposition of faith (some one of Jesus’ miracles) with a judgment of reason (instrumental causality) which lends him its humble light, so as to draw from it a theological conclusion which will aid in clarifying dogma. In the progress of the science of the faith, the premise of reason is only an instrument for the premise of faith, an auxiliary of faith, for disengaging what exists in a virtual state, or even already in an actually implicit state—I will not go into the secret of this distinction. What must be understood is that the truth of reason cannot be included in the faith, but that it can be ‘assimilated’ by faith only as a tool for investigation and precision.

But what matters to us is the final rational for this pre-established harmony between dogma and philosophy. It is that, according to the philosophy of being, through our concepts the intellect reaches the being of things and, by analogy, can know something of the first Being, God. And we certify with admiration that what the philosophy of being says concerning the perfections of the first Being is in exact accordance with what Revelation unveils for us. On the other hand, what in God surpasses the capacity of every created intellect is supernaturally revealed to us, is expressed in human language and may be developed in the concepts of the philosophy of being.The suitability of this philosophy for proclaiming and causing dogma to progress is an indication of its truth. On the contrary, the unsuitability of idealist philosophies for doing this is the indication of their falsehood.

If the philosophy of being can express and develop dogma, it is also, and this must be emphasized, because that dogma, or Revelation, has judged and purifi ed its concepts, extracting them from particular philosophies or from what Benedict XVI calls ‘the dominant form of reason’ in an epoch. The whole endeavor of Saint Thomas was to purify Aristotle of his bad Arabic interpreters, to join to him elements of Platonism, and to correct him again by the light of Revelation, so as to make of him the instrument of choice for theology and dogma. Some excellent authors further clarify this conclusion.It is only once extracted from their philosophical system and modified by a maturation in depth, then sometimes at first condemned because of their as yet inadequate terminology (monarchy, person, consubstantial), then correctly understood, at last recognized and qualified as applicable—but only analogically—that these concepts could become bearers of the new substance of the Christian faith.[104]

It is by placing in the light of Revelation the notions developed by pagan philosophy that the Church has remained faithful to the Gospel and has made progress in the formulation of the faith.[105] [And she has resisted, I add, the attacks of that philosophy—still poorly developed.]

Far from pledging its allegiance to these concepts, the Church uses them in her service; she uses them as in every realm a superior uses an inferior, in the philosophic sense of the word, that is to say, by ordaining it to its end. Supernature uses nature. Before using these concepts and these terms in his service, Christ, through the Church, judges and approves them according to a wholly divine light, which does not have time for its measurement, but immutable eternity. These concepts, evidently inadequate, could always be made more precise; they will never become outdated.

Dogma thus defined cannot allow itself to be assimilated by human thought in a perpetual evolution; this evolution would only be a corruption. On the contrary it is [dogma] which wishes to assimilate to itself this human thought which only changes unceasingly because it dies everyday; it wishes to assimilate it to itself so as to communicate to it while here below something of the immutable life of God. The great believer is he whose intellect is basically more passive toward God, who vivifi es it.[106]

In light of our analysis of the role of the philosophy of being in the development of dogma, a role so well clarified by the three others whom I just cited, how defective and relativistic appears the idea that Benedict XVI has concerning the ‘encounter between faith and philosophy.’

When in the XIIIth century—he says—by the intermediation of Jewish and Arabic philosophers, Aristotelian thought entered into contact medieval Christianity, and faith and reason were at risk of entering an irreconcilable opposition, it was above all Saint Thomas Aquinas who played the role of mediator in the new encounter between faith and philosophy [with Aristotelian philosophy], thus setting the faith in a positive relation with the dominant form of reason in his age.[107]

According to Benedict XVI, the task determined by Vatican Council II, in accordance with the program sketched by John XXIII, was none other than today to set the faith in a positive relation with modern idealist philosophy, in order to suppress the deplorable antagonism between faith and modern reason, and to implement in sacred doctrine a new leap forward. Very well, let us see how Joseph Ratzinger himself, following this program which was also his own, has employed these ‘dominant’ philosophies of the 1950’s to reread several articles of the Creed and to expose the three great mysteries of the faith. Let us fi rst watch the exegete comment on three articles from the Creed, two of which are evangelical facts.

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

We will leave here the domain of exegesis so as to enter the vaster domain of theology and of theological explanation of dogma. According to Saint Anselm (1033-1109), theology is faith in search of understanding, fides quaerens intellectum. Could it give to us moderns a modern understanding of dogmas? Yes, Joseph Ratzinger answers, and ‘the answer will not only reflect God, but also our own [modern] question: it will teach us something about God by refraction from our own [modern] being.’[124] Here, first of all, is the modern attempt at refraction of the divine through the human, which the theologian of Tübingen undertook for the dogmas of the Trinity, the incarnation and the redemption.

‘For a positive understanding of the mystery,’ look at the title; there the thesis is set forth thus: ‘The paradox, “one nature, three persons,” is a result of the concept of the person.’

We are thus warned that we are going to have an explanation of the dogma dependent upon a particular philosophy and not the doctrine mastering and employing the philosophy of being. And the author continues: ‘[The paradox] must be understood as an implication internal to the concept of person.’[125]

And here is the reasoning:

– According to the Christian philosopher from the end of the antiquity, Boethius (470-525), the person is an individual substance of a rational nature. Based on this, to confess God to be a personal being and to be three persons is to confess one subsistent in three subsistances.

– Antithesis: but this substantialist affirmation, opposed to progress, of the person necessarily engenders by its absolute exactly its opposite. According to Max Scheler (1874-1928), the person is the concrete unity of being in its acts, and it attains its supreme value in the love of other persons, that is to say, in participation with the reality of the other: this intersubjectivity in fact helps the person to achieve objectivity in itself. Karol Wojtyla, Scheler’s disciple, saw the characteristic feature of the person in the tissue of the relations of communion (Teilhabe) which relates it to others, and the perfection of the person in acts of the communion of reality. Similarly, for Martin Buber, the ultimate truth of the human is found in the ‘I-Thou’ relation.

– Synthesis: the ontological view, opposed to progress, of the person is conformed neither to modern experience nor to its modes of investigation, which see the person not as a distinct being, but as a ‘being-among.’

To recognize God as person is thus necessarily to recognize as a nature demanding relations, as ‘communication,’ as fecundity [...]. A being absolutely one, who was without origin or term of relation, would not be a person. Person in absolute singularity does not exist. This emerges already from the words which have give birth to the concept of the person: the Greek word prosôpon literally means ‘to look towards’; the prefix pros (= directed towards) implies relation as a constitutive element. Likewise for the Latin word persona: to resonate through, again the prefix per (= through, towards) explains the relation, but this time as a relation in speech. In other words, if the Absolute be a person, he should not be an absolute singularity. In that way, in the concept of person is necessarily implied the surpassing of singularity.[126]

Of course, the author emphasizes that the term of person is only applied to God by an analogy which respects ‘the infinite difference between the personal being of God and the personal being of man’ (p. 115). But I note that by the reasoning of this theologian is demonstrated that the trinity of persons (or at least their plurality) comes from the personality of God. Well, that God must be personal is a truth of simple natural reason. Thus is demonstrated the plurality of divine persons by natural reason, which is impossible and heretical.

This disorder was avoided by Saint Thomas. With him, the divine persons as relations are the summit, not the starting-point, of his treatise on the Trinity. In his Summa Theologica, the holy doctor sets out from the divine unity and, upon the givens of faith, he establishes that there is in God a first immanent procession, an intellectual procession, that of the Word. Then, by analogy with the human soul created in the image of God, in which there is an immanent procession of love, the holy doctor deduces that all this supports the thought that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Word according to a procession of love. Finally, he deduces from this that there are in God real relations, subsistent[127] and distinct: paternity, filiation and spiration; and he concludes that these three relations constitute the three divine persons which Revelation teaches to us: in fact, he explains, the name of person signifies the distinction, while in God there is only distinction by the relations of origin, so that the three persons are these three subsistent relations.[128] This singular deduction occurs entirely within the faith; it sets out from a truth of faith, the processions, so as to end in clarifying this other truth of faith, the three persons.

The success of the philosophy of person as substance with Thomas and the failure with Benedict of the philosophy of person as relation confirms the truth of the first and the falsehood of the second. What a pity that the young Ratzinger was turned aside from Saint Thomas during his studies as a seminarian, as he relates:

This personalism was of itself linked in my eyes to the thought of Saint Augustine, which I discovered in the Confessions, with all his passion and his human depth. On the other hand, I hardly understood Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose crystalline logic appeared to me to be too much closed in on itself, too impersonal and too stereotypical.[129]The fact, however, is that Saint Thomas asked many more questions than his master Saint Augustine, but that, differently from the latter, he asked them in crystalline order and had a crystalline answer for all. Joseph Ratzinger would prefer to remain among questions and to search without ceasing for other answers less crystalline.

Joseph Ratzinger has explained his love for Saint Augustine, born from his readings as a seminarian:

I have been from the beginning—he said to Peter Seewald—very vividly interested by Saint Augustine, as counterweight, so to speak, to Saint Thomas Aquinas[...]. What moved me [...] was the freshness and vivacity of his thought. Scholasticism has its grandeur, but all there is very impersonal. There is need of a certain time in order to enter it and discover in it its interior tension. With Augustine, on the contrary, the impassioned, suffering, questioning man is directly there, and one can identify oneself with him.[130]

If Saint Thomas is the genius of synthesis, his beloved master Saint Augustine is the genius of analysis. A synthesis is always more arid than an analysis, and more attractive search for the lure of the unknown and for the discounted discovery. Henri-Irenee Marrou, another devotee of Saint Augustine, well describes the very lively movement of the great doctor’s thought:

[Still more than his memory of innumerable treasures], the power of his speculative genius must be celebrated, which knew how to detect that there was, here or there, a problem, how to pose it, then how to cling to it, to push it to the extreme, to face one by one the difficulties which arise, and not to declare itself too soon satisfied. It is a moving spectacle to see this great thought make itself clear and to express itself by groping about at the cost of immense efforts.[131]

But the Church, in declaring Saint Thomas her ‘Common Doctor,’ invites her sons not to remain groping, but to progress to the synthesis, an effort which ought to cost them much. There is the very effort which seems to have been renounced by Joseph Ratzinger, whose faith as whose theology is characterized, like that of the innovators, not by the stability of assent, but by the mobility of perpetual seeking. He seems to have suffered the malady of all those philosophers who, elevating becoming above being, unceasing doubt above certitude, the quest above possession, find their paradigm in Gotthold Lessing (1729-1781), German poet and skeptic philosopher, follower of the Enlightenment, from whom there is here a famous passage:

It is not truth, which is or is thought to be possessed, but the sincere effort that is made so as to attain it, which gives value to a man. For it is not by possession but by search for the truth that he develops those energies which alone constitute his ever-increasing perfection. Possession renders the spirit stagnant, indolent, prideful. If God, in his right hand, hold enclosed all truth, and in his left hand the impulse always in motion towards truth, it must be at the cost of my eternal wandering; if he say to me: “Choose!” I would incline myself humbly before his left hand and would say, “Father, give me this! Pure truth is for you alone.”’ (Lessing, Samtliche Schriften, X, 206, cited by Will and Ariel Durant, The Story of Civilization, X, Rousseau and Revolution, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1967, p. 512)

In place of humility, what refined pride! The subject prefers himself to the object. One is in total subjectivism, and this is irreconcilable with religion, which wills the submission of the creature to the Creator. Is there nothing of this pride in Joseph Ratzinger’s infatuation with personalism and its inquiry, and in the distaste that he has for Thomist philosophy and its simple supports?

The ‘refraction of the divine through the human’ is again sought by Joseph Ratzinger in the dogma of the incarnation, revised in light of existentialism. Existentialist philosophy will be used, the process of immanence will be borrowed and the method of historicism will be practiced. The principle of immanence says that the object of faith comes from within us and the method of historicism says that there is a necessary reinterpretation of dogma.

Here is how the dogma of the incarnation is presented after the theologian Joseph Ratzinger, in his book, The Christian Faith, of 1968, according to the schema of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

– Thesis: the philosopher Boethius, at the end of antiquity, has defined the person, the human person, as ‘an individual substance of a rational nature,’ allowing the development of the dogma of the two natures in the single person of Jesus Christ, defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451. There is the thesis; it is classical. Boethius, Christian philosopher, has illuminated the notion of person and has helped the dogma of Chalcedon to develop. Very good.

– Antithesis: today, Boethius is surpassed by Martin Heidegger, German existentialist, who sees in the person a ‘going beyond self,’ which is more conformed to experience than is subsistence in an intellectual nature. He prefers to go beyond self. We realize our person in surpassing ourselves; there is the definition of person according to Heidegger.

–Synthesis: the God-man, whose divinity we profess in the Credo, logically no longer has need of being considered as God made man. He is the man who ‘in tending infinitely beyond himself, totally surpassed himself and by this truly exists; he is one with the infinite, Jesus Christ.’[132] I repeat: it is necessary to believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, but—this is logically implied—there is no need to consider him as God made man. No, it must be supposed that, in tending infinitely beyond himself, Jesus totally surpasses himself and, thereby, truly exists. He is one with the infinite, Jesus Christ. Thus, it is man who surpasses himself, who auto-accomplishes himself and who becomes divine. There is the mystery of the incarnation reinterpreted in the light of existentialism and historicism simultaneously.

A logical consequence of this reinterpretation of the incarnation could be that the blessed Virgin is no longer the Mother of God, but that she is only the mother of a man who becomes divine. One risks falling into Nestorius’ heresy, condemned in 425 by the council of Ephesus in these terms:

If anyone should confess that the Emmanuel is not God in truth and that for this reason the Blessed Virgin is not Mother of God (because she has physically engendered the Word of God made flesh), let him be anathema. [DS 252]

Someone might say that Boethius has been surpassed and that Heidegger must be preferred because Boethius’ experience has been surpassed; Martin Heidegger’s experience is ‘a new vital link’ to the person; it corresponds to our actual problems, to our actual psychological problems: how to overcome egoism? One conquers it by going beyond self. Jesus Christ has conquered egoism, radically, by infinitely surpassing himself, by uniting himself to the infinite.

It seems to me all the same that the incarnation is above all the abasement of the Son of God, if I believe Saint Paul: “Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man.’ (Phil. 2, 6-7) Evidently, going beyond self is, in the regard of the moderns, more valuable than humbling self. However, the true improvement of man by the incarnation is clarified by the Fathers: “God made himself man so that man might be made God,’ that is to say, might be divinized by sanctifying grace.

Henri de Lubac, twenty years before Joseph Ratzinger, had already attempted a personalist and humanist reinterpretation of the incarnation, but with person as ‘consciousness of self’:

By Christ, the person become adult, the man emerges definitively before the universe, he takes full consciousness of himself. From now on, even before the triumphal cry: Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam [Know, o Christian, your worth] (St. Leo), it will be possible to celebrate the dignity of man: dignitatem conditionis humanae [the worth of the human condition]. The precept of the sage: ‘Know thyself,’ assumes a new meaning. Each man, in saying ‘I,’ pronounces something absolute, something definitive.[133]

Thus, the incarnation of the Son of God becomes the pedestal for human pride. The absolute person, independent of his acts, without consideration of his virtues or his vices, abstraction being made from his restoration or not in the supernatural order, saw his inalienable dignity magnified by God made man. We have here a fine example of the ‘humanist turn’ or ‘anthropology’ of theology, put into practice by Karl Rahner in Germany and by Henri de Lubac in France.

Joseph Ratzinger’s theological anthropologism is a very near neighbor to this: in place of person as consciousness of self, he opts for person as going beyond self.But the ‘conscious comprehension of expressed truth’ of dogma is pursued with this author by a new understanding of the dogma of redemption.4. The dogma of the redemption reviewed by Christian existentialism

It was Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) who was the instrument of this revision. According to this French philosopher, a Christian existentialist, disinterest and unconditional availability in regard to another, to the other, causes its entire ontological density to adhere to our ego. In this, Marcel is disciple of Scheler and neighbor to Buber.

According to Marcel, devotion, by its absolute, unveils the person of the absolute Being who is God, alone capable of explaining this experience by guaranteeing to it its value.[134] It follows that Christ, by his gift of his life for men, is the emblem of this revelatory gift of self from God.

The dialectical structure of the reasoning is Joseph Ratzinger’s in his work, Introduction to Christianity. I summarize the process of the theologian of Tubingen’s thought: again it has the schema of thesis,  antithesis, synthesis.

– Since Saint Anselm (1033-1109), Christian piety has seen in the cross an expiatory sacrifice. But this is a pessimistic piety. For the rest, the New Testament did not say that man reconciled himself to God, but that it was God who reconciled man (2 Cor. 5, 18; Col. 1, 22) by offering him his love. That God needed from his Son ‘a human sacrifice,’ is a cruelty which is not conformed to the ‘message of love’ in the New Testament.[135]

– But this negation, by its absolute, engenders its contrary (antithesis): a whole series of New Testament texts (1 Pet. 2, 24; Col. 1, 13-14; 1 John 1, 7; 1 John 2, 2) affirms a satisfaction and a penal substitution offered by Jesus in our place to God his Father, ‘such that we see reappear all that we just dismissed.’[136]

– Thus (synthesis), on the cross Jesus indeed was substituted for us, not to pay a debt, nor to suffer a penalty, but to ‘love in our place’ (p. 202). Thus, the thesis reconquers, enriched by the antithesis, in the synthesis.

We note well that here as in the dialectic of G.W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), the antithesis and the thesis, rather than contradictories, both make a part of the truth. The antithesis in not a simple objection which one may resolve by its elimination or by retaining its bit of truth; no, it is a contradictory truth which one resolves by its integration.[137] If this be so, truth, and the truth of faith equally, is subject of a continual and indefinite evolution: at each synthesis, the human spirit will always find new antitheses to oppose it, so as to effect ‘new syntheses’ (Gaudium et Spes, #5, §3). The result for redemption is that ‘the Christian sacrifice is nothing other than exodus of for the sake of, consisting of a departure from self, accomplished wholly in the man who is entirely in exodus, surpassing himself by love.’[138]

There is thus need of making a ‘rereading’ of the New Testament (Benedict XVI, first address, April 20, 2005), conforming to modern sensibility and to the existentialist ‘mode of investigation and of formulation,’ as is demanded by ‘a new reflection on truth and a new vital link with it’ (Benedict XVI, December 22, 2005). At the end of this ‘process of reinterpretation and amplification of words,’ the passion of Jesus Christ no longer causes our salvation by means of merit, not by means of satisfaction, nor by means of sacrifice, nor by means of efficient causality,[139] but by the example of the absolute gift of self (a Platonic idea?), and by the appeal of offered love, a mode of causality which J. G. Fichte wanted to call ‘spiritual,’ irreducible to efficiency and finality.

From this revolution in the idea of expiation, and thus in the very axis of religious relatiy, the Christian cult and all Christian existence also themselves received a new orientation.[140]

It is however true that charity is the soul of the redemptive passion of Jesus. But Joseph Ratzinger sins by angelism in placing between parentheses, by a pocketing worthy of Husserl, the reality of Christ’s sufferings and their role in the redemption. Did not Isaiah, however, describe Christ as ‘the man of sorrows [...], stricken by God, wounded for our iniquities, bruised for our sins,’ adding that ‘the chastisement of our peace was upon him and by his bruises we are healed’ (Is. 53, 3-5)?

In the sinner, Saint Thomas explains, there is a formal element, aversio a Deo (the fact of his turning away from God), and a material element, conversio ad creaturam (the fact of his turning towards a creature and adhering to it in a disordered fashion). The charity and obedience with which Jesus offered his sufferings compensate by a superabundant satisfaction for the aversio a Deo of all humanity; but as for the adherence to creatures, its disorder can only be repaired by a pain voluntarily undergone: this is Jesus’ penal satisfaction, offered to God his Father in our place, and by which all our satisfactions hold their value.[141]

Thus, far from having suppressed all offering of satisfaction to God by man, the Redeemer has been, says Saint Thomas, our ‘satisfier,’ whose sacrifice we offer in the Eucharist. Man is thus rendered capable of redeeming himself. In this work, Saint Leo the Great says,[142] God did justly and mercifully at the same time. God does not snatch man from his slavery to the devil by an act of main strength, but by a work of equality, that is to say of compensation. It is, says Saint Thomas, on God’s part a greater mercy to offer to man the possibility of redeeming himself, than to redeem him by simple ‘condonement’[143] of the penalty, without demanding any compensation. This contributes to man’s dignity the ability to redeem himself.[144] Not, indeed, that man redeems himself of himself, but he receives it from God to give it back to him. What we give to God is always ‘de tuis donis et datis’ (‘from those things which you have given us’—Roman Canon). And even if our gift procures nothing for God, who has no need of our goods (Psalm 15, 2) in order to be infinitely happy, it is nevertheless owed to God in strict justice—and not only in ‘metaphorical’ justice,[145] which is the interior good order of our faculties—as our contribution to the reparation of the order injured by sin. There are in these truths a sublime metaphysics refused by Joseph Ratzinger, who only sees love in the cross. We must reject in the name of the faith this dematerialization of the cross.

The error of the neo-modernists does not consist in affirming the primacy of charity in the redemption—Saint Thomas did it before them—but it is that heresy which consists in denying that the redemption is an act of justice. See the denials of Joseph Ratzinger:

For a great number of Christians, and above all for those who do only know the faith from afar, the cross situates itself within a mechanism of right wronged and reestablished. [...] This is the manner in which God’s justice, infinitely offended, is reconciled anew by an infinite satisfaction. [...]

Thus the cross appears to express an attitude of God demanding a rigorous equivalency between right and credit; and at the same time one retains the feeling that this equivalency and this compensation rests in spite of all upon a fiction. [...] He [God] gifts first secretly with the left hand what he takes back solemnly with the right. [...] The infinite satisfaction that God seems to demand thus takes on an aspect doubly unsettling. [...]

Certain devotional texts seem to suggest that the Christian faith in the cross represents to itself a God whose inexorable justice has claimed its human sacrifice, the sacrifice of his own son. And one turns in horror from a justice whose somber wrath steals all credibility from the message of love.[146]

But the series of denials is not closed; it relentlessly prosecutes the satisfaction of Jesus Christ and the offering that we renew in the mass:

It is not man who approaches God to bring him a compensatory offering.[147]

The cross [...] is not the work of reconciliation that humanity offers to an angered God.[148] [What becomes, on account of these denials, of the propitiatory nature of the sacrifice of the mass?]

Adoration in Christianity consists first in a welcome that is cognizant of the salvific action of God. [What becomes of the mass, sacramental renewal of the salvific action of Calvary?] [...] In this cult, it is not human actions which are offered to God; it consists rather in that with which a man lets himself be filled. [...] We do not glorify God in bringing to him what is so-called ours—as if all this did not already appertain to him—but in accepting his gifts. [...] The Christian sacrifice does not consist in giving to God something that he would not possess without us.[149]

He has offered himself. He has taken from men their offerings so as to substitute his own person offered in sacrifice, his own ego.[150]

If the text affirms in spite of everything that Jesus accomplished the reconciliation by his blood (Heb. 9, 12), this is not to be understood as a material gift, as a means of expiation quantitatively measured. [...] The essence of the Christian cult does not consist in the offering of things. [...] The Christian cult [...] consists in a new form of substitution, included in this love: to know that Christ has loved for us and that we let ourselves be seized by him. This cult signifies thus that we put aside our own attempts at justification.[151]There is in these repeated denials from Joseph Ratzinger a repetition of the Protestant heresy: Jesus has done all, man has nothing to do or to offer for his redemption. Hence, the sacrifice of the Mass is rendered superfluous, detrimental to the work of the cross; it is only an ‘adoration.’ [152] How would it be a propitiatory sacrifice?

Well, to this heresy another is added: the denial of the expiatory and satisfactory virtue of the sacrifi ceof the cross itself. This denial is a heresy worse than Luther’s. At least Luther believed in the expiation of Calvary. Here is his profession of faith:

I believe that Jesus Christ is not only true God, generated by the Father from all eternity, but also true man, born of the Virgin Mary; that he is my lord and that he has redeemed me and delivered me from all my sins, from death and from slavery to the devil, me who was lost and damned, and that he has truly acquitted me and earned, not with silver and gold, but with his precious blood and by his sufferings and his innocent death, that I might belong entirely to him and that, living under his empire, I might serve him in perpetual justice, innocence and liberty, and like him, who rose again from the dead, live and reign into the age of ages. This is what I firmly believe.[153]

Which of the two is Christian? The one who affirms with a powerful inspiration the efficacy of the sufferings and blood of Christ for redeeming us, or the one who denies it? Who is the Christian? The one who confesses, with Saint Thomas, the expiation, satisfaction and efficiency of Christ’s passion, or the one who, inspired by existentialism, denies these things?

It is true that Joseph Ratzinger recognizes in Jesus on the cross the gift of his own person and compensatory love; but why does he refuse to admit the complementary truths? Why does he profess diminished truths?

– Because divine justice does not please modern man. At the end, Gadamer is right: just like the historian who wants to rewrite history, the theologian who wants to rethink the faith is always the accomplice of his prejudices.

The ambition of hermeneutics to enrich religious truth and to engender its progress by a philosophical rereading is thus a staggering failure. It results rather in an impoverishment, which is a heresy.[154] This attempt had already been stigmatized by Pius IX in 1846 in these terms:

On those men who rave so miserably falls with much justice the reproach which Tertullian made in his time against the philosophers ‘who presented a stoic, Platonic, dialectic Christianity.’[155]

Nihil novi sub sole (Nothing new under the sun, Eccl. 1, 10).

But this new Christianity in the last analysis rests upon a misunderstanding of divine justice and upon an existentialist reduction of sin. It is this which we must examine in order to reach the bottom.7. Existentialist sinA stoic or Platonic neo-Christianity is a Christianity purged of sin. Joseph Ratzinger’s language is symptomatic: Christ has not reconciled the sinner, but he has reconciled man. For the rest, in his Introduction to Christianity, the author almost never mentions the word sin, sin in the article of the Credo, ‘I believe in the remission of sin,’ hardly mentioned and commented upon in half a paged (p. 240).

The only serious mention of sin: when Joseph Ratzinger sets forth Saint Anselm’s doctrine concerning Christ’s vicarious satisfaction:By the sin of man, who is directed against God, the order of justice has been injured in an infinite manner. There is behind this affirmation, Ratzinger comments, the idea that the offense is the measure of the one who is offended: the offense made against a beggar leads to other consequences that that made against a head of State. The weight of the offense depends on the one who undergoes it. God being infinite, the offense which is made against him on the part of humanity by sin has an infinite weight. The injured right must be reestablished, because God is the God of order and justice; he is justice itself.[156]

Hence the necessity, if God wishes culpable humanity itself to repair its sin, for a leader offering in the name of all humanity a satisfaction which, seeing the dignity of his life, would have an infi nite value and would thus be sufficient compensation: only the life of a God-man would have this virtue.[157]

Well, Joseph Ratzinger, while indeed recognizing that ‘this theory [sic] contains decisive intuitions, as much from a biblical point of view as from a generally human point of view’ and that ‘it is worthy of consideration’ (p. 157), accuses him of schematizing and deforming the perspectives, and of presenting God ‘under a disquieting light’ (p. 158).

– No, he says, Christ is not such a satisfier acquitting men of a debt of sin; it is the gratuitous gift of his Ego ‘for’ men:His vocation is simply to be for others. It is the call to this ‘for the sake of,’ in which man courageously renounces himself, ceases to cling to himself, so as to risk the leap into infi nity, which alone permits him to find himself.[158]It would be neither a question of a ‘work separated from himself’ which Christ must accomplish, not a ‘performance’ that God demands from his incarnate Son; no, Jesus of Nazareth is simply ‘the exemplary man,’ who by his example helps man to surpass himself and thereby to find himself (p. 158-159).

In this theory, what becomes of sin? It is ‘the incapacity to love,’[159] it is egoism, withdrawal into oneself. Culpability is the man bent back on himself (p. 198), in ‘the self-satisfied attitude, consisting in letting himself simply live’ (p. 240), the one who ‘simply abandons himself to his natural gravity’ (p. 241). Redemption consists in Jesus’ leading man to go out of self, to conquer egoism, to stand erect: ‘His justice is grace; it is active justice, which readjusts the bent man, which straightens him, which sets him straight’ (p. 198).

It is exactly right that Christ’s justice straightens the sinner, corrects the disorder of sin, frees charity within the love of God and neighbor: ‘God, [...] infuse in our hearts the sentiment of our love, so that loving you in all and above all [...].’[160] But is this what Joseph Ratzinger wishes to say?

Whatever it may be, it conceals this capital truth: sin is first formally an insubordination of man under the law of God, a break in the ordination of man to God. This first ordination, realized by sanctifying grace, was the source of the submission of powers lower in the soul than reason, and this double ordination, exterior and interior, constituted original justice, which was lost by original sin. This lost sanctifying grace for man and inflicted on his nature the quadruple wound of ignorance, malice, weakness and concupiscence,[161] wounds which remain even after baptism.Well, as all human nature, common to every man, was thus despoiled of the gratuitous gift of grace and wounded in its natural faculties, it is necessary that the Redeemer accomplish an act which, not limited to affecting each man in the sequence of ages, embraces all humanity in a single stroke. This was not possible by mere force of example or by attraction; this must be by the virtue of satisfaction and of redemption, which are works of a juridical nature.

As I have already said, according to Leo and Saint Thomas, God could have repaired humanity by the simple condonement of his debt, by a general amnesty; but man would quickly have fallen again into sin and this would have accomplished nothing! Thus God’s prudence and his free will chose a plan more onerous for God and more honorable and advantageous for man.

This plan of unfathomable wisdom was that the Son of God made man should suffer the passion and die upon the cross, offering thus a perfect and superabundant satisfaction for God’s justice and meriting for all men the grace of pardon, because of the dignity of his life, which was that of the God-man, and because of the immensity of charity with which he suffered, and the universality of the sufferings that he assumed (see III, q. 48, a. 2). And from the merits and satisfactions of Christ follow the good works—charitable acts and sacrifices—of Christians. Thus, in Jesus Christ, one of our own, it would be humanity which would rise up, and, joining its holy labors to those of its leader, it would cooperate actively in its own raising. “Thanks be to God for his ineffable gift!’ (2 Cor. 9, 15).

Far, therefore, from assuming a ‘disquieting aspect,’ the God’s care for our redemption by ourselves, in virtue of the merits and satisfactions of Jesus Christ, is the proof of God’s delicate respect for his creature, and the demonstration of a superior mercy.

There is the mystery which Joseph Ratzinger, alas, seems not to have assimilated. Why then? One is constrained to ask himself if he has not lost the sense of sin, lost the sense of God, of the God of infinite majesty. Does he forget the ‘dimitte nobis debita nostra’ from the Pater Noster (Matt. 6, 12)? Does he not admit the infinite debt contracted before God by a single mortal sin? Does he not then understand God’s care that an infi nite reparation be offered him on the part of sinners? Hell, moreover, is not for him a punishment inflicted by God, but only the outcome of love refused, ‘a solitude into which no longer penetrates the word of love.’[162] Joseph Ratzinger’s religion is shortened. Sin is no longer a debt, it is a shortage. This is existentialist sin.Well, Joseph Ratzinger declares, ‘from the revolution in the idea of expiation, the Christian cult receives a new orientation.’[163]

This new cult will be the new Mass.

The Mass becomes, according to the request of Dom Odo Casel, Benedictine monk of Maria Laach, the common celebration of faith. It is no longer a thing offered to God; it is no longer an action separate from that of the people; it is an action of interpersonal communion. It is a common experience of the faith, the celebration of the high deeds of Jesus. ‘It is only a matter of making remembrance,’ says the Missal for the flower of faithful French speakers in 1972.

On the other side, in parallel, according to Joseph Ratzinger, the priesthood ‘has surpassed the level of polemic’ which, at the council of Trent, had shrunk the vision of the priesthood by seeing in the priest a mere maker of sacrifices (Session XXIII, Decree on the Sacrament of Orders). The council of Trent shrunk the global vision of priesthood; Vatican II broadened the perspectives. Joseph Ratzinger tells us:

Vatican II has, by chance, surpassed the polemical level and has drawn a complete and positive picture of the position of the Church as regards the priesthood where were equally welcomed the requests of the Reform.[164]

You read aright: the requests of the Protestant ‘Reform,’ which saw the priest as the man of God’s word, of the preaching of the Gospel; this one point is all.

So then, Joseph Ratzinger continues:

In the last analysis, the totality of the problem of priesthood comes down to the question of the power of teaching the Church in a universal manner.[165]Thus he brings the whole priesthood back to the power of teaching the Church. He will not deny sacrifice, simply he says: “Everything comes down to the power of teaching the Church.’ Logically, even the offering of the Mass by the priest at the altar must be reread in the perspective of teaching the word of God. The priesthood must be revisited, as also sacrifice, as also consecration: this is nothing other than the celebration of the high deeds of Christ, his incarnation, his passion, his resurrection, his ascension, lived in common under the presidency of the priest, as Dom Casel pretended. The priesthood has been revised. The priest is become the organizer of the celebration and of the communal life of the faith.

But this new Christianity will necessarily assume a social form, on the one hand in the spiritual society of the Church, and on the other hand in the temporal city. What then will be its ecclesiology, and what will become of Christ the King?

If, from the Church, we pass to the city, we will see the disintegration which personalism causes, in political society first, and then in social life.

According to the theory which considers the person as a tissue of relations, as society itself is relation, it follows that the person would be its own end unto itself in society; it would be the end of society; the good of the person-communion would identify itself with the good of the political city.

According to the philosophy of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, the good of the person does not constitute the common good of the city: this common good is ‘an added good’ which will make the person attain to an added perfection. To this common good the person must ordain himself as to his temporal end, as potency is ordained to act. This classical conception allows it to be justified that the person must sometimes sacrifice his own goods—and even his life—for the common good of the city. In short, the person finds his temporal perfection in ordaining himself to the end of the political community.

The personalist conception deprives political society of a proper finality which transcends the good of its members who are persons. The whole postconciliar magisterium, or what holds its place, would make of common good a collection of the rights of the person, of rights’ of which there is as yet no complete catalogue, and which appears sometimes contradictory,’ as Joseph Ratzinger avows.[178]

The Thomist, later personalist, philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) came to the aid of this theory by distinguishing two things in man. On the one hand, he should be an individual, ordained to the political community as to his end, as the part is to the whole. On the other hand, his is a person who transcends the city and who is not a mere part of its whole.

In reality, this distinction is specious: it is only true that in the supernatural order, where the person is elevated by sanctifying grace above his nature; but it is false in the natural order where the person is only an individual of a rational nature, making one part of the whole of reasonable natures, and consequently ordained to this whole as a part to its whole. This is however very simple; it is simply a matter of applying the principle of totality: the part is for the whole. Certainly this principle may be modified, according to the fact that the city is not a substantial whole but a whole of order between substances, but this modification does not suppress the necessary and natural ordination of the person to the city, in the temporal order, as to its end.

Thus, the definition of the person as a tissue of relations, by abandoning Boethius’ definition, leads to the denial of final causality for political society. One finds in conciliar politics the same lacuna of the final cause that one finds, in individual ethics, with Kant and all Enlightenment philosophy.

Let us first consider sexuality and the virtue of chastity. The new ‘catechism of the Catholic church’ patronized by Cardinal Ratzinger makes chastity ‘the successful integration of sexuality into the person,’ that is to say,’ in the relation of person to person by an entire mutual gift [...] of the man and the woman,’[179] without reference to the first and proper end of sexuality, which is procreation, or reference to sin and to concupiscence.

The disappearance of the end implies ignorance of the nature of things. Thus, the nature of carnal desire (appetitus venereus) is passed over in silence, though Saint Thomas said of it that ‘it is especially connatural to us since it is ordained to the conservation of the nature [...] and thus, if it be nourished, it will increased to a higher degree [...] and thus at that higher degree it will have need of being checked’ (castigatus, chastised, from which comes chastity’s name).[180]

Here is the truth: God, author and redeemer of human nature, is the legislator of conjugal society. It is he who willed marriage to be fruitful, for the propagation of mankind: ‘Increase and multiply,’ as he commanded the first human couple (Gen. 1, 28). The morality of marriage is dominated by this end: procreation. The traditional code of Canon Law decrees that ‘the primary end of marriage is the procreation and education of children’ and that ‘the secondary end is mutual help and a remedy for concupiscence’ (canon 1013). Contraception and sterilization are immoral because they divert the conjugal act from its end, just as is periodic continence without grave reason, which diverts the conjugal state from its end. Well, personalism will corrupt these objective principles with subjectivism.

[According to the Council, procreation—or the refusal to procreate—] must be determined by objective criteria [very good] drawn from the nature of the person and of his acts, criteria which respect, in a context of true love, the total significance of a reciprocal gift and of a procreation worthy of man; an impossible thing if conjugal chastity is not practiced with a loyal heart.[181]

A first glance, this text withers subjectivism and calls for objectivity. In reality, it is the contrary. Is not the ‘nature of the person’ (barbarism) the intellectuality of human nature, capable of proportioning its acts by good reason? Where is the individuality of the person [which is common in him with the beasts], and what should give foundation to his moral autonomy (I. Kant; Marc Sangnier and le Sillon[182])? Or rather is this the intersubjective relation of the ‘I-Thou’ dialogue (Martin Buber), or the amorous, interpersonal relation, which is ‘the disinterested impulse towards a person as such’ (Max Scheler)? According to this philosophy of values, love ‘possesses in itself its own finality.’[183] The objective order of beings and of ends, according to Pius XII’s expression, is not taken into account.

If nature, said Pius XII, had had exclusively in view, or at least in the first place, a reciprocal gift and possession of the spouses in joy and in love, and if it had regulated this act solely so as to make as happy as possible their personal experience, and not for the end of spurring them on in service of life, the Creator would have adopted another plan in the formation and constitution of the natural act. But, this act is on the contrary entirely subordinated and ordained to the great law of the generation and education of the child, ‘generatio et education prolis,’ that is to say, to the accomplishment of the first end of marriage, origin and source of life.[184]

Well, denying Pius XII and the natural order, the new code of Canon Law places ‘the good of the spouses’ before ‘the procreation and education of children’ (canon 1055). This inversion of the ends of marriage is an open door to free unions and to pacs, to contraception and abortion. Imbued with underlying relational personalism, a professor René Frydman envisages the human embryo ‘as a being of becoming, who takes the status of person when he enters the couple’s plan.’[185] If thus the mother does not feel any relation to the infant which she carries within her, it is no person and may be eliminated.

The pretended civilization of love is a civilization of death. Christ the King, legislator of nature, being rejected, Christianity runs towards physical extinction. There is the ultimate outcome of personalism.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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 affi mation 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]

[Emphasis - The Catacombs]

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?

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]

– 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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

[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].

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.

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.

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].

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.

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.

“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.