Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007): 231–48

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“Nature and Grace” in the Encyclical
Deus Caritas Est
S ERGE -T HOMAS B ONINO, OP
Dominican House of Studies
Toulouse, France

N ATURE AND GRACE : Might this be the cryptic theme of Pope
Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, which was made public on January 25,
2006?1 Of course not.The precise subject of Deus Caritas Est is one that
could not be more clearly specified right from the beginning: “I wish in
my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and
which we in turn must share with others” (no. 1). Consequently, the
pontifical document is subdivided in two parts, which are distinct in
many aspects but unified by the common reference to divine love, envisaged first in and of itself, and then considered as participated in the
community of believers and the source of the community’s charitable
energy. The goal of the first part is to “clarify some essential facts
concerning the love that God mysteriously and gratuitously offers to
man, together with the intrinsic link between that Love and the reality
of human love” (no. 1). The second part “treats the ecclesial exercise of
the commandment of love of neighbor” (no. 1), which is to say, the diakonia or service of charity (no. 19, original emphasis).The practical goal of this
teaching is to “call forth in the world renewed energy and commitment
in the human response to God’s love” (no. 1).
This being said, it quickly becomes apparent to the theologian that, in
the treatment of the encyclical’s questions, Benedict XVI uses a well
thought-out and precise conception of that which is classically called “the
question of the relationship between nature and grace.” In truth, even
1 This article first appeared as “ ‘Nature et grâce’ dans l’encyclique Deus Caritas

Est,” trans. Shannon Gaffney, Revue Thomiste 105 (2005): 531–49.

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though the concept of nature is well-attested to in the encyclical,2 it
would be distorting the thoughts of the pope to force them, at any cost,
to fit into the problematic, and the “Thomistic” categories, of the relationships between nature and grace. Benedict XVI does not focus as much
on abstract essences as on concrete, historical situations, in such a way that
the problematic of the relationships between nature and grace takes on,
for him, the analogical form of a reflection on the encounter between, on
the one hand, the event that is the grace of Christian revelation3—in its
twofold dimension of light for the intelligence and dynamism for the will,
and on the other, the historically determined human realities, personal and
communal.4 For Benedict XVI, the archetype—which is constantly a
subject of meditation—of this encounter is that which took place at the
beginning of Christianity between Christian faith and the Greco-Latin
culture of Antiquity.5 There is nothing surprising about the fact that the
meditation on love that opens the encyclical is constructed on the
encounter between eros, as understood in Greco-Latin culture, and agape,
which defines Christian love according to the New Testament. It is also
not surprising that the encyclical is full of references to the wisdom of
antiquity:This comes not from a mania of an erudite German, but rather
2 Benedict XVI, encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est, January 25, 2006. The term

“nature” appears at least a dozen times in the encyclical. Once it is used simply
to translate the Latin, indoles (no. 28). Most of the time, it refers to the essence of
a reality, that is to say to the elements and the dynamisms that define it.Thus, it
concerns the nature of love (nos. 7 and 18), that of eros (no. 7), of the Church
(nos. 25 and 29), and of faith (no. 28). Concerning human nature, Benedict XVI
explains that God revealed to Israel “man’s true nature” (no. 9).This nature is the
source and the normative justification of certain fundamental givens of human
existence. It founds the natural law that manifests “what is in accord with the
nature of every human being” (no. 28). In the same way,“eros is somehow rooted
in man’s very nature” (no. 11) and “the command of love of neighbor is inscribed
by the Creator in man’s very nature” (no. 31).
3 Cf. Benedict XVI, encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est, January 25, 2006, no. 1:
“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the
encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
4 These “human realities” are the expression of human nature defined by a
constant ensemble of active and passive powers; but, as realities concretely situated in the history of Salvation, they also carry the double mark of the initial
vocation of man to the supernatural, which coincides in fact with creation as the
first act of the history of Salvation, and of sin that refuses this vocation and warps
human nature in the sinner.
5 Cf. for example Joseph Ratzinger’s recent explorations of this theme in Values in
a Time of Upheaval (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006); and idem, On the Way to
Jesus Christ (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), ch. 3.

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from the desire to think within a horizon of the intimate relationship
between the classical, pre-Christian culture and the Christian faith.
The manner in which Benedict XVI envisages the encounter between
Christian faith and human realities—its modalities and the causes of its
success or failure—constitutes a theological structure that underlies the
entire encyclical and that does not fail to contribute greatly to its unity.
It effectively governs the principal problematics at play in the encyclical.
In the first part, the meditation on the relationship between eros and agape
clearly shows this vision of the encounter between Revelation and the
order of human realities. In the second part, this same vision is at the
heart of the reflection on the relationship between justice and charity, as
well as on the relationship between the State and the Church as subjects
of social activity with the purpose of doing good.
This article aims to be a theological homage to Benedict XVI at the
dawn of his pontificate. It proposes to explain, in a small way, this theological structure.To do so, two paths are possible. An inductive route, according to the ordo inventionis, would begin from different analogical realizations
of this structure of the encounter in order to show, little by little, the ratio or
the analogically common notion. In this article, I will follow a more deductive route, according to the ordo expositionis, which consists in first expressing the general laws of this encounter of faith and human realities, in order
then to illumine the various applications that the encyclical sets forth.
The General Laws of the Encounter Between
Faith and Human Realities
The order of natural human realities and the order of grace are two distinct
orders. For example, concerning the State and the Church, the pope affirms
that “the two spheres are distinct, yet always interrelated” (no. 28). Human
realities are the deployment of the capacities of human reason, in the theoretical order (philosophy, science) or the practical order (justice, political
life), as well as in the dynamisms of human love.The order of grace comes
from a more profound gift of God: It consists on the one hand in the
objective revelation of the Mystery, received in faith, and on the other hand
in the dynamism of charity as participation in the love with which God
loves himself and loves his spiritual creatures. In relation to nature, grace is
irruption and newness: It opens “new horizons”6 to human existence.
As distinct as they may be, these two orders are not called to be purely
juxtaposed or to be contented with a peaceful coexistence. On the
6 Cf. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, no. 1 and no. 28:“Faith by its specific nature

is an encounter with the living God—an encounter opening up new horizons
extending beyond the sphere of reason.”

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contrary, they must imperatively enter into and stay in an intimate relationship with one another. A successful articulation between these two
orders is characterized by three traits.
First, it assumes at the very least a unity according to the analogy
between the two orders. If there were no relationship between the natural human realities (for example, human love) and the supernatural realities (charity), there would be two parallel universes that never meet.7 This
gets to the heart of the very pertinence of Christianity, which is to say its
inscription in the real life of men. If the order of grace were “another
world,” without a relationship to the historic realities of human cultures,
Christianity would be reduced to a gnosis, an evasion. On the contrary,
human realities offer themselves to grace as a surface of incarnation.
Second, grace ripens, heals, and purifies natural human realities. This is
something upon which the encyclical greatly insists.There exists in natural
human realities, a sort of initial indetermination that must be lifted up in the
course of their development by an encounter with faith.This makes emerge,
not without suffering at times, that which is the best and most authentically
human within them.8 By contrast, when they are left to themselves, that is
to say, when man refuses to enter into the paschal steps that are implied in
the encounter with Christian faith, these human realities can only degenerate. But, when man opens himself to grace, man becomes aware of his own
mystery, which is to say the integral reality of his nature; and he can fully
and truly exercise the dynamisms that constitute this nature.
Third, the irruption of grace at the heart of human realities brings
newness and rupture: Grace cannot be reduced to a homogenous deployment of nature.9 Nonetheless, beyond the rupture, grace also fulfills, in an
7 Cf. ibid., no. 7: “Were this antithesis [between the Greek eros and the Christian

agape ] to be taken to extremes, the essence of Christianity would be detached
from the vital relations fundamental to human existence, and would become a
world apart, admirable perhaps, but decisively cut off from the complex fabric of
human life”; and no. 8: “biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one
opposed to that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts
the whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and to
reveal new dimensions of it.”
8 Cf., for example, ibid., no. 8: “Fundamentally, ‘love’ is a single reality, but with
different dimensions; at different times, one or other dimension may emerge
more clearly.”
9 The encyclical insists, for example, on the newness of the image of God brought
by Revelation in comparison to that which circulated in ancient religions or even
in Greek philosophy. This newness was not without rupture. Between Greek
philosophy and Christian faith, there is not a simple homogenous development.
Cf. ibid., no. 9: “The divine power that Aristotle at the height of Greek philosophy sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire

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unexpected fashion, the profound wishes of human nature and carries its
dynamisms to their full completion. In fact, Revelation brings certain still
confused hopes which, by nature or already by grace—this question will
not be discussed here—inhabit and agitate the human heart, a response
that is both disconcerting and fulfilling.10
In opposition to this logic of complementarity and accomplishment
are the mortifying logics of substitution and separation. In the first case,
the autonomy of temporal realities is denied by religious overdetermination. Religion refuses the constituent dialogue with reason, which leads
to its own degradation, to a deformation of the image of God, and in the
sociopolitical arena, to a fanaticism that does not hesitate to have recourse
to violence.
In the second case, the logic of separation leads to the secularization
and the social marginalization of Christian faith, which is denied any
influence over the real life of men. A certain “gnostic” tendency in the
interior itself of Christianity can, by advocating a spirituality of evasion
or disengagement, favor this movement of secularization to the highest
degree. Religious values, confined to a strictly private sphere, appear, in
this way, to be more and more ethereal and without real interest. As for
the human values which were brought by Christianity, they are, one may
think, reintegrated or reabsorbed into the structures of natural order.
Thus Revelation is reduced to a mere anticipation of the conquests of
reason, and the charitable works of the Church to a rough sketch of the
pure rationality of the providence of the State.
The consequences of this separation are no less noxious to human realities than they are to Christian faith.To describe the situation that is created
in nature when it is cut off from grace, the encyclical many times uses
words such as degradation, debasement, and demeaning: Nature degrades
itself when it closes itself off from the beneficial influences of grace.11 In
and of love—and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself
it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love.The one God in
whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love.”
10 The encyclical uses the concept of “dream” two times to indicate this type of
confused hope. Cf. ibid., no. 10: “man can indeed enter into union with God—
his primordial aspiration [somnium]. But this union is no mere fusion, a sinking
in the nameless ocean of the Divine; it is a unity which creates love, a unity in
which both God and man remain themselves and yet become fully one”; and no.
13:“The ancient world had dimly perceived [antiqui somniaverunt] that man’s real
food—what truly nourishes him as man—is ultimately the Logos, eternal
wisdom: this same Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love.”
11 Cf. ibid., no. 4: “An intoxicated and undisciplined eros, then, is not an ascent in
‘ecstasy’ towards the Divine, but a fall, a degradation [imminutio] of man”; no. 5:

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fact, the opening to grace is not an optional possibility, but an intrinsic
requirement of nature, whose refusal is equivalent to mutilation.This is to
say, for example, that eros that thwarts the movement, which brings it to go
beyond itself toward agape and which divinizes itself, becomes its own caricature.12 Similarly,“neutral” reason—reason that desires to be nothing but
reason—easily allows itself to be subverted by particular instincts or interests that are, however, inferior in dignity.13
In particular, reason cut off from faith ends up easily losing the
dynamism that should open it to the totality of reality in all of its
complexity. The price that is paid for this withdrawal into ourselves is
reductionism, which consists in taking the part for the whole, and reducing the real to that which reason—a reason voluntarily lacking in fullness—thinks it grasps. From this comes a truncated vision of God that has
produced at least three venomous fruits in contemporary culture.
“Here we are actually dealing with a debasement [depravatio] of the human body:
no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom”; no. 7: “The
element of agape thus enters into this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished
[decidit] and even loses its own nature”; no. 37:“A personal relationship with God
and an abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeaned [prolabatur homo].”
12 Cf. ibid., no. 8: “Yet when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one
another, the result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love.”
13 Joseph Ratzinger has a great interest in the thought of St. Bonaventure. In an era
during which philosophy tended to claim its independence, Bonaventure firmly
denounced this pretension of philosophical reason as a degradation of reason. Cf.
St. Bonaventure, Collationes de septem donis Spiritus sancti, Collatio IV, no. 12:
“Philosophical science is a path toward other sciences, but those who claim that
we can stop there [ibi stare, such was the ideal of certain members of the faculty
of arts] fall into darkness [Philosophica scientia via est ad alias scientias; sed qui
vult ibi stare cadit in tenebras]”; and ibid.: “The first light, that of philosophical
science, is great in the opinion of the men of the world, but it is easily eclipsed
if one is not on guard against the head and the tail of the dragon. If between it
and the sun of justice something is interposed, it suffers the eclipse of foolishness. . . . The one who trusts in philosophical science and is appreciated, and
because of this he believes he is better, he becomes stupid. That is to say, when
he believes he grasps the Creator through this science, without an ulterior light,
it is like a man trying to look at the sky or the sun with candles [Prima claritas,
scilicet scientiae philosophicae, magna est secundum opinionem hominum
mundialum; sed de facili eclipsatur, nisi homo caveat sibi a capite et cauda draconis. Si aliquid interponatur inter ipsum et solem iustitiae, patitur eclipsim stultitiae. . . . Qui confidit in scientia philosophica et appretiatur, se propter hoc et
credit se esse meliorem, stultus factus est, scilicet quando per istam scientiam sine
ulteriori lumine credit se apprehendere Creatorem, sicut si homo per candelas
vellet videre caelum vel corpus solare].”

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The first fruit of rationalist reductionism is materialism. The encyclical denounces, above all, the social effects of materialism, such as the
reduction of the person to his economic needs, which goes hand-inhand with forgetting the necessary interpersonal and spiritual dimension
of aid to the destitute.14
The second fruit is dualism, which, incapable of conceiving of the unity
of reality in reference to the Creator and the unifying presence of original
reason (the Logos), divides the world into two universes that are strangers to
each other: that of the body, abandoned to the materialist interpretation, and
that of pure spirits. Benedict XVI indicates two major consequences of this
dualism. First, applied to the human person, it pulverizes unity;15 it decomposes the human person into one part to which is reserved the exclusivity
of rationality and to another part, consequently purely material, which no
longer has rational and human meaning on its own. From this point on, it
is up to each person’s subjectivity to impose a meaning on the foreign and
insignificant mass of the body that each person technically manipulates in a
way that treats it as a purely physical and exterior reality.16 This vision of
things is evidently destructive for authentic love: It disconnects the spiritual
dimension of love, often reduced to a chaste amorous feeling, from sexuality, which is reduced to a purely biological function, ceasing to be the sacrament of love.17 Second, the same dualism is at the root of the ideology of
progress and betterment, which is many times denounced in the encyclical.18 It is certainly not the case that the pope is against progress or
14 Cf. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, no. 28:“In the end, the claim that just social

structures would make works of charity superfluous masks a materialist conception of man: the mistaken notion that man can live ‘by bread alone’ (Mt 4:4; cf.
Dt 8:3)—a conviction that demeans man and ultimately disregards all that is
specifically human.”
15 Cf. ibid., no. 5: “Should he aspire to be pure spirit and to reject the flesh as
pertaining to his animal nature alone, then spirit and body would both lose their
dignity. On the other hand, should he deny the spirit and consider matter, the
body, as the only reality, he would likewise lose his greatness.”
16 Cf. ibid.: “On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the
purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see
it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he
attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless.”
17 Cf. ibid.: “Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body:
no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a
vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely
biological sphere.”
18 Cf. ibid., no. 31:“The modern age, particularly from the nineteenth century on,
has been dominated by various versions of a philosophy of progress whose most
radical form is Marxism”; no. 33: “they [Christians] must not be inspired by

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amelioration of the conditions of the life of humanity, but he diagnoses in
this common belief—which holds that men radically modify their condition by their action—an illusion that flows from the forgetting of God and
his providential action. If, in fact, as dualism claims, the world is not the work
of the Logos, if it is not governed by him with strength and wisdom, then
man, instead of fitting into the world as a humble instrument in the work
of this mysterious governance, is tempted to impose, even by revolutionary
violence, the pseudo-clarity of his “scientific materialism.”19 However, this
ideology, because it takes its support from a truncated vision of man, can
only lead to inhumane practices.20 The failure of the bloody experiment of
Marxism sounded the knell of this dualist and promethean approach toward
the amelioration of the world by “pure reason.”21
The third venomous fruit of rationalist reductionism is, on the
sociopolitical level, totalitarianism. Having no vis-à-vis to remind it of its
relativity, political reason, incarnated in the State, can easily take itself to
be everything, as we will discuss later. But, here again, the pretense that
neutral reason can suffice in and of itself leads, in fact, to its pledging allegiance to infrarational interests, which is to say to ideologies.
Eros and Agape
In this perspective of a necessary and fecund interaction between natural
human realities and Christian faith, the first part of the encyclical teaches
ideologies aimed at improving the world, but should rather be guided by the
faith which works through love (cf. Gal 5:6)”; no. 35: “we are helped by the
knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord’s hands; and this
knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world. In all humility we will do what we
can, and in all humility we will entrust the rest to the Lord.”
19 State bureaucracy (cf. ibid., no. 28) is another expression of this will toward excessive rationalization. In fact, the desire to master everything in the social body is
born from the lack of knowledge—which is characteristic of this rationalist dualism—of the immanent rationality of the natural communities anterior to the State.
20 An example of this would be sacrificing, in the name of a “generic, abstract, and
undemanding expression of love” (ibid., no. 15), the concrete and truly present
person, for the utopia of a perfectly organized society. Cf. no. 31:“What we have
here, though, is really an inhuman philosophy. People of the present are sacrificed
to the moloch of the future—a future whose effective realization is at best doubtful. One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here
and now.”
21 Cf. ibid., no. 27:“Marxism had seen world revolution and its preliminaries as the
panacea for the social problem: revolution and the subsequent collectivization of
the means of production, so it was claimed, would immediately change things for
the better.This illusion has vanished.”

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that a just appreciation of nature and the value of human love becomes
possible only in the climate of an openness to supernatural Revelation,
filled with the love that is in God. Only in the coming together of eros
and agape can the full truth of human love be shown.
Love considered as a gift of self to the person loved is not a perfection
that belongs exclusively to the love of God or to his participation in man,
which is supernatural charity:This is already a constituent dimension of
human love. At the same time, this dimension, virtually present from the
beginning in eros—which is the “worldly” form of love (cf. Deus Caritas
Est, no. 7)—seems to be concealed by the initial predominance of the
possessive dimension of this love. It only fully emerges in the light of the
revelation of the divine form of love, agape. This is an eloquent illustration of the thesis that only grace can fully reveal nature to itself.
There exists, therefore, in eros, as the human form of love, whose archetype is the love of man and woman, an internal dynamism that pushes it
not to deny itself in charity but to come to its fulfillment in charity. It
contains two types of elements. Some come from its initial imperfection,
for example, its selfish, possessive, primarily sensual character, or the fact
that sexual instincts or feelings of love develop in a savage fashion without being integrated into a properly spiritual and unifying plan. If eros
were defined by such properties, it is clear that it could never be assumed
into the Christian form of love. Eros and agape would, in this case, be two
contradictory and irreconcilable realities.The victory of one would be the
death of the other. However, eros also contains, and more essentially, an
oblative, spiritual dimension. The passage from an eros that is predominantly possessive to an eros that is predominantly oblative, assumed by
agape, is, therefore, not so much a rupture, but rather a maturation, a healing, and a purification.22 Little by little, these accidental elements of eros,
which could be parasites to the essential reality of human love and limit
its dynamism, are abandoned, and the secondary elements are integrated
into the global plan.This passage, which is in the very logic of authentic
human love, nevertheless does not happen without death to itself. But,
this is in order to attain, in a paschal logic, to a fulfillment where love
becomes capable of integrating the diverse components of the person and
unifying them. In this fulfillment the promises of the absolute and of
22 Cf. ibid., no. 5:“Purification and growth in maturity are called for; and these also

pass through the path of renunciation. Far from rejecting or ‘poisoning’ eros, they
heal it and restore its true grandeur.” The concept of “purification” is
omnipresent in the encyclical: It expresses an essential aspect of the action exercised by grace in natural human realities.

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happiness, which are confusedly present like a foretaste in the experience
of human love, are finally realized.23
A completely opposite logic of separation between the human experience of love and the revelation of divine love in Christ would lead here to
a two-fold impasse. On the one hand, human love that rejects the illuminations and purifications that come from grace would lower itself to an
infra-human form of love—sentimentalism or eroticism. Eros, being intrinsically ordered to its assumption by agape, degrades and denies itself when
it opposes this.The perversions of eros in the cultures of antiquity and the
reduction of eros to “sex” in contemporary culture show evidence of this
problem.24 On the other hand, a divine love of charity that would come
to juxtapose itself in a purely extrinsic fashion to the experience of human
love would not only lose its pertinence for man, but would be purely and
simply incomprehensible:The very term “love” would be equivoval.
Without using the term, Benedict XVI has recourse here to the classic thematic of analogy. On the one hand, a “categorical” analogy unifies
the different meanings of love on the human level by using the first and
unifying analogate, the love of man and woman, which finds its fulfillment in marriage.25 On the other hand, a “transcendental” analogy
23 Concerning the “promises” that human love contains, without being able to real-

ize them by itself, cf. ibid., no. 2: “love between man and woman, where body
and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness”; no. 5:“love promises infinity, eternity—a reality far
greater and totally other than our everyday existence”; no. 6: “How might love
be experienced so that it can fully realize its human and divine promise?”; no. 7:
“Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for the great
promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less and less concerned
with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other.” Along the same line,
human love gives a foretaste of full happiness; cf. DCE, no. 3: “the joy which is
the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the
Divine”; no. 4: “Evidently, eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to
provide not just fleeting pleasure, but a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of our
existence, of that beatitude for which our whole being yearns.”
24 Cf. ibid., no. 4: The Old Testament “in no way rejected eros as such; rather, it
declared war on a warped and destructive form of it, because this counterfeit
divinization of eros actually strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes it”; and no. 5,
“Eros, reduced to pure ‘sex,’ has become a commodity, a mere ‘thing’ to be
bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity.”
25 Cf. ibid., no. 2:“Let us first of all bring to mind the vast semantic range of the word
‘love’: we speak of love of country, love of one’s profession, love between friends,
love of work, love between parents and children, love between family members,
love of neighbor, and love of God. Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however,
one in particular stands out: love between man and woman. . . .This would seem

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permits us to think of the “intrinsic link” (cf. Deus Caritas Est, no. 1)
between, on one side, these different forms of human love and, on the
other, divine love. These two loves clarify each other: Revelation of the
love of God for men is expressed through human love, and human love
receives from this revelation an unsuspected depth and discovers the fullness of its meaning.The link, which biblical scholars know well, between
the deepening of monotheism and the emergence of monogamous
marriage illustrates this reciprocity perfectly.26
This understanding of the fullness of the truth of human love, made
possible by the light of Revelation, reflects back on the idea that one can
have of love in God. The authentic perfection of human love must
eminently be found in God, but free of its created modalities. Can eros then
be attributed to God? Is eros a divine Name?27 If eros is taken in the
restricted sense, in which it defines a sensual and passionate love, or even
a love of the possessive sort, it is clear that it cannot in any manner be
attributed to God. St. Thomas comes to our aid in this question. In the
Summa theologiae, he explains how the will and love of God that extends
first to the infinite Good, God himself, extends also to his creatures. In
doing this, St. Thomas leads us deeply into the contemplation of the
mystery of love. Using physical beings as his starting point, because for us
they are the most familiar, the Angelic Doctor draws out a first transcendental metaphysical law: Each being, he says, has a natural inclination
toward his own good, his own perfection, whether it be to acquire it (if he
does not have it), or to rejoice in it (if he has it). But this is only one aspect,
the most apparent one for us, of the dynamism of the appetite. St.Thomas
also discerns in each being another natural inclination: the tendency to
communicate his own good, to have others participate in his own perfection, to “shine” with a kind of gratuitous superabundance. Such is the law
of the generosity of being, which defines in its source the mystery of
causality: “Hence we see that every agent, in so far as it is perfect and in
to be the very epitome of love; all other kinds of love immediately seem to fade in
comparison. So we need to ask: are all these forms of love basically one, so that
love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately a single reality, or are we
merely using the same word to designate totally different realities?”
26 Cf. ibid., no. 11:“Corresponding to the image of a monotheistic God is monogamous marriage. Marriage based on exclusive and definitive love becomes the
icon of the relationship between God and his people and vice versa.”
27 Benedict XVI, who, concerning the love of God for his people, declares that “his
love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape” (ibid., no. 9), indicates
in number 9, note 7 that this was the position of Dionysius:“Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who in his treatise The Divine Names, IV, 12–14 (PG 3,
709–713) calls God both eros and agape.”

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act, produces its like.”28 The Dionysian influence can be seen here (bonum
diffusivum sui).This law of the generosity of being applies analogically to
God:“Hence, if natural things, in so far as they are perfect, communicate
their good to others, much more does it appertain to the divine will to
communicate by likeness [that is to say: by communicating its likeness] its
own good to others as much as possible,” that is to say, as much as the
other things are susceptible to receive it.29
The perfection of love consists, therefore, in giving, in giving oneself.
Thus, on the human level, deeper than the love that desires (a sign of the
imperfection of our “needy” nature) there is the love that gives (a sign of
a certain already possessed perfection). However, for us, the two aspects
are indissociable:The love that gives does not exist without the love that
desires and acquires the good that it communicates. Consequently, eros
cannot be defined without this reference to desire. It remains intrinsically
linked to need and to lack, and thus to the potentiality that characterizes
the condition of the creature. In this case, it appears difficult to see in eros
a pure perfection that one could attribute analogically to God.The love
of God is supremely “liberal”: God does not want creatures in order to
fill a lack or a need that he has, but rather to communicate to them his
goodness in a manner of superabundance.30 The attribution of eros to
God can, therefore, only be along the lines of a metaphor, which clearly
does not mean that it has nothing to teach us about God’s way of being
toward his creatures.
Justice and Charity
The same logic of the fulfillment of natural human realities through their
encounter with grace, which is fully at play in the meditation on the rela28 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 19, a. 2.
29 Cf. ibid.:“Deus non solum se vult, sed etiam alia a se. Quod apparet a simili prius

introducto. Res enim naturalis non solum habet naturalem inclinationem respectu
proprii boni, ut acquirat ipsum cum non habet, vel ut quiescat in illo cum habet;
sed etiam ut proprium bonum in alia diffundat, secundum quod possibile est.
Unde videmus quod omne agens, in quantum est actu et perfectum, facit sibi
simile. Unde et hoc pertinet ad rationem voluntatis, ut bonum quod quis habet,
aliis communicet, secundum quod possibile est. Et hoc praecipue pertinet ad
voluntatem divinam, a qua, per quandam similitudinem, derivatur omnis perfectio. Unde, si res naturales, inquantum perfectae sunt, suum bonum aliis communicant, multo magis pertinet ad voluntatem divinam, ut bonum suum aliis per
similitudinem communicet, secundum quod possibile est. Sic igitur vult et se esse,
et alia. Sed se ut finem, alia vero ut ad finem, inquantum condecet divinam bonitatem etiam alia ipsam participare.”
30 Cf. ST I, q. 44, a. 4, ad 1: “Et ideo ipse solus est maxime liberalis, quia non agit
propter suam utilitatem, sed solum propter suam bonitatem.”

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tionship between eros and agape, is still at work in the second part of the
encyclical about the relationship between social justice, as a rational
requirement in the relations between people, and charity.31
Benedict XVI affirms both the necessary distinction between justice and
charity, and their no less necessary complementarity. It follows that charity
has not to substitute for human justice and that human justice has not to
do without Christian charity.32 On this last point, the pope vigorously
responds to the Marxist objection, according to which, in a society that is
finally rational like the post-revolutionary society, social justice should
substitute for charity.33 This Marxist absorption of charity into justice,
which is the fruit of a logic of separation, betrays a double error. First,
narrow rationalism, which inescapably flows from the separation of reason
and faith, disfigures and humiliates human nature by reducing it to its material, economic dimension. Narrow rationalism does not understand that the
human person aspires to things beyond the abstract love due to this abstraction, which is the ens oeconomicum.The human person wants concrete love,
which is manifested in quality, interpersonal relations and especially in the
gift of self.34 Second, Marxism does not understand that, without Christian
charity, human justice can only degrade itself. In fact, if it is not animated
by charity, the pursuit of social justice loses its most efficacious moral spirit,
and, in the face of difficulties becomes a prey to the discouragement that
lies in wait for those who adhere to the ideology of promethean progress.35
31 Cf. Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, no. 26.
32 Cf. ibid., no. 28: “There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate

the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to
eliminate man as such.”
33 Cf. ibid., nos. 26 and 31.
34 Cf. ibid., no. 18: “Going beyond exterior appearances, I perceive in others an
interior desire for a sign of love, of concern. This I can offer them not only
through the organizations intended for such purposes, accepting it perhaps as a
political necessity. Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more
than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they
crave.” The same principal according to which a merely “technical” (objective
and abstract) relationship is insufficient to truly come to the aid of a concrete
human person is applied to the work of caregivers (no. 31):“Individuals who care
for those in need must first be professionally competent: they should be properly
trained in what to do and how to do it, and committed to continuing care.Yet,
while professional competence is a primary, fundamental requirement, it is not
of itself sufficient.We are dealing with human beings, and human beings always
need something more than technically proper care. They need humanity. They
need heartfelt concern.”
35 Cf. ibid., no. 35: “There are times when the burden of need and our own limitations might tempt us to become discouraged. But precisely then we are helped

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The State and the Church
The question of the relationship between Church and State is, along with
the analogous question of the relationship between faith and reason, one
of the classic forms of the issue of the relationship between grace and
nature. In Deus Caritas Est, this question is raised by the pontifical teaching on the necessary harmonization between, on the one hand, charitable works that are proper to the Church as an autonomous social subject,
and, on the other hand, the workings of the requirements of justice and
solidarity in which the State is invested. Benedict XVI intends here to
warn against the temptation of a gentle secularization of the Church’s
works of social charity, which would lead to their absorption into the
tentacular structures of the providence of the State.
As must be done, Benedict XVI reminds us of the importance of the
distinction between the two social communities that are the Church and
the earthly city:
Fundamental to Christianity is the distinction between what belongs to
Caesar and what belongs to God (cf. Mt 22:21), in other words, the
distinction between Church and State, or, as the Second Vatican Council puts it, the autonomy of the temporal sphere. . . . The two spheres
are distinct. (Deus Caritas Est, no. 28)

According to its essential goals, the State, which is to say the political
authority, aims to promote a social justice that guarantees to each
member of the civil society his share of the common good.36 In order to
determine this just order, the political leaders use the support of the
fundamental givens of natural law and, making use of reason, create laws
that are adapted to the desired end.
As for the Church, she is not an invisible communion of pure spirits,
but rather the “social expression of Christian faith.” She is an autonomous
social subject endowed with institutions that are necessary for the realization of her own ends. Consequently, she “has a proper independence
and is structured on the basis of her faith as a community which the State
by the knowledge that, in the end, we are only instruments in the Lord’s hands;
and this knowledge frees us from the presumption of thinking that we alone are
personally responsible for building a better world.”
36 Cf. ibid., no. 26:“It is true that the pursuit of justice must be a fundamental norm
of the State and that the aim of a just social order is to guarantee to each person,
according to the principle of subsidiarity, his share of the community’s goods.
This has always been emphasized by Christian teaching on the State and by the
Church’s social doctrine”; and no. 28: “Justice is both the aim and the intrinsic
criterion of all politics.”

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245

must recognize” (Deus Caritas Est, no. 28).The Church works directly to
procure the eternal salvation of men:This consists for them in communion with God, who realizes at the same time their full humanization.
Thus, in accord with the main concerns of the encyclical, Benedict XVI
affirms that “the entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love
that seeks the integral good of man” (ibid., no. 19).
It follows from this distinction between “two spheres” that the Church
must respect the “legitimate autonomy” (ibid., no. 29) of the political
order: She must not seek to exercise political power nor even to intervene
directly in concrete determinations of the political order.37 Similarly, the
State must abstain from intervening in religious subjects as such and must
respect the structures that are proper to religious communities.38
However, there is nothing more arduous for the State, considered not
as a philosophical abstraction but as a real institution composed of men
who are marked by egoism and sin, than to resist the temptation to totalitarianism. The State has a tendency almost spontaneously to free itself
from any relationship with the religious institution, which, in reminding
the State of its relative status, would hinder it from erecting itself as the
absolute. Little by little the State absorbs and governs every aspect of
social life. The “laity,” when it is conceived as a reduction of religion to
an individual option of the strictly private order, without inscription in
the social or political order, becomes, in this way, a decisive step in this
process of absolutization of the State. Against this, Benedict XVI claims
for the Church the status of a proper social subject, as much in the order
of charitable action as in the order of social and cultural life.To be faithful to the integrality of her mission, the Church possesses and must
possess her own charitable works, which insert themselves into the social
network of the civil community.39 Thus, the wave of secularization (or
37 Cf. ibid., no 28: “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the polit-

ical battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not
replace the State”; ibid.: “The Church’s social teaching . . . recognizes that it is
not the Church’s responsibility to make this teaching prevail in political life”; no.
29: “We have seen that the formation of just structures is not directly the duty
of the Church, but belongs to the world of politics, the sphere of the
autonomous use of reason.” Lay Christians have a specific mission to fulfill on
this concrete level of political life; cf. ibid., no. 29: “The direct duty to work for
a just ordering of society, on the other hand, is proper to the lay faithful.”
38 Cf. ibid., no. 28: “The State may not impose religion, yet it must guarantee religious freedom and harmony between the followers of different religions.”
39 Cf. ibid., no. 29:“The Church’s charitable organizations, on the other hand, constitute an opus proprium, a task agreeable to her, in which she does not cooperate
collaterally, but acts as a subject with direct responsibility, doing what corresponds

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self-secularization) that desires to put certain ecclesial institutions (hospitals, schools, universities, youth movements, and so forth) under the more
or less direct tutelage of the State, far from closing an abnormal bracket
during which the Church would be provisionally substituted for the
State, which is weak in these domains, represents a vital loss for the
Church and for society. In addition to this, it constitutes a danger for civil
society that finds itself with its hands tied and given up to the deadly
embraces of the State hydra.40
Historically, this process of secularization could have been favored by a
false theological conception that unilaterally insisted on the autonomy of
the temporal realities, while making the beneficial influence of grace,
which allows for the full blossoming of nature, go unnoticed. A certain
neo-Thomism—that which categorically refused the notion of Christian
philosophy, and, always in the name of strict separation of orders, came to
justify the “purely political” adhesion of Catholics to Maurrassisme and then
to communism—carries its weight of responsibility here. Deus Caritas Est
teaches, on the contrary, how vital it is for natural human realities to be
exposed to the purifying influences of grace. Concerning this “Christian
philosophy,” Jacques Maritain judiciously distinguished, inspired perhaps by
the Thomist theology of angelic illumination, a dual influence of faith on
the opus rationis that is and must remain philosophy. In concrete human
history, faith, on the one hand, brings certain objective givens to philosophy, which stimulate it, and, on the other hand, subjectively comforts the
philosopher in permitting him to practice philosophy in a propitious moral
and spiritual climate.41 This is also, mutatis mutandis, the role that Benedict
XVI attributes to faith vis-à-vis politics. In fact,
to her nature. The Church can never be exempted from practicing charity as an
organized activity of believers”; and no. 32: “the true subject of the various
Catholic organizations that carry out a ministry of charity is the Church herself.”
40 On the merely political level, secularization of ecclesiastical institutions manifests a
serious misunderstanding of the principle of subsidiarity, which nevertheless
protects personal and communal freedoms against the absolutist temptation that
always exists for the State. Cf. ibid., no. 28:“The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—
every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State
which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with
the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives
arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness
to those in need.The Church is one of those living forces.”
41 Cf. Jacques Maritain, De la philosophie chrétienne (conference given in 1931), in
Oeuvres complètes, vol. V (1933; Fribourg: Éditions universitaires, 1982), ch. 3,
“L’état chrétien de la philosophie,” 245–58.

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247

politics is more than a mere mechanism for defining the rules of public
life: its origin and its goal are found in justice, which by its very nature
has to do with ethics. The State must inevitably face the question of
how justice can be achieved here and now. But this presupposes an even
more radical question: what is justice? (Deus caritas Est, no. 28)

In this ethical determination of what is just, a work of practical reason,
Christian faith intervenes on the level of “objective contributions” thanks
to the social doctrine of the Church, which, arguing “on the basis of
reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the
nature of every human being” (ibid.), reminds us of and confirms the
fundamental principles of ethics.The Church contributes in this way to
the “formation of consciences in political life” (ibid.). Faith also intervenes on the level of “subjective considerations.” Indeed, if practical
reason can, by right, discover what is “just,” it is actually fragile, precarious, and menaced: “The problem is one of practical reason; but if reason
is to be exercised properly, it must undergo constant purification, since it
can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness
caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests” (ibid.). Grace,
by purifying the heart, places practical reason in the best conditions to
accomplish its proper ethical work. Thus, faith is “a purifying force for
reason itself ”: “From God’s standpoint, faith liberates reason from its
blind spots and therefore helps it to be ever more fully itself. Faith enables
reason to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more
clearly” (ibid.). What is more, still on the level of subjective considerations, the purification accomplished by grace not only ameliorates the
capacity for discernment, but also gives the moral strength to put into
practice, whatever the costs may be, the demands of justice that one
perceives. Grace thus nourishes and keeps alive the spiritual and ethical
motivation of the members of civil society:The Church “has to reawaken
the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper” (ibid.). In sum, grace gives a “soul” to action
for social justice and brings it to its perfection.
Deus Caritas Est is addressed “to the bishops, priests, and deacons, men
and women religious, and all the lay faithful.” It nevertheless contains a
powerful and well-defined message for all men of good will. Benedict
XVI is convinced that the recognition of the primacy of God and of spiritual values is not an option but a vital necessity for the life of people and
communities. Integral humanization passes through the opening to grace
that does not destroy anything, but rather purifies and fulfills everything
that is good in human realities. Likewise—and this is the obscure side of

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the same principle—our societies self-destruct by marginalizing Christian faith and hiding their spiritual roots. Thus, Benedict XVI, in his
homily for the inaugural Mass of his pontificate, April 24, 2005, restated
with fervor the famous words of his beloved predecessor: “Do not be
afraid! Open wide the doors for Christ!”42 Benedict XVI explained that
John Paul II
was addressing the mighty, the powerful of this world, who feared that
Christ might take away something of their power if they were to let
him in, if they were to allow the faith to be free.Yes, he would certainly
have taken something away from them: the dominion of corruption,
the manipulation of law and the freedom to do as they pleased. But he
would not have taken away anything that pertains to human freedom
or dignity, or to the building of a just society.43

Then Benedict XVI enlarged his meditation and, going beyond the
political order alone, applied to the whole of human reality the necessity
of being open to grace:
If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful, and great. No! . . . Only in this
friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. . . .
[Christ] takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.When we give
ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return.Yes, open, open
N&V
wide the doors to Christ—and you will find true life. Amen.44

42 Pope John Paul II, homily at the Mass for the inauguration of his pontificate

(October 22, 1978), www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1978/
documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19781022_inizio-pontificato_it.html.
43 Pope Benedict XVI, homily at the Mass for the inauguration of his pontificate
(April 24, 2005), www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2005/
documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050424_inizio-pontificato_en.html.
44 Ibid.

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249

Bonaventurian Resonances in Benedict XVI’s
Theology of Revelation
A ARON C ANTY
Saint Xavier University
Chicago, Illinois

O F THE RECENT evaluations of Pope Benedict XVI’s theology,
few have examined at any length the influence of St. Bonaventure on his
thought. There are a number of surveys or brief descriptions of his
encounter with Bonaventure as Benedict wrote his habilitation, but what
analysis of Bonaventure’s influence that does exist tends to focus on
Benedict’s ecclesiology or his interest in history and eschatology.1 These
emphases are no doubt justified, since these themes arise throughout
Benedict’s career, but they fail to capture one of his primary interests
during his early career, namely revelation. History, eschatology, and the
Church are, of course, bound up with the concept of revelation, but
1 See, for example, John L. Allen, Jr., Pope Benedict XVI: A Biography of Joseph

Ratzinger (New York-London: Continuum, 2000), 36–38, 99–100; Andrea
Bellandi, Fede cristiana come “Stare e comprendere.” La giustificazaione dei fondamenti
della fede in Joseph Ratzinger (Rome: Editrice Pontifica Università Gregoriana,
1996), 90–92; Maximilian Heinrich Heim, Joseph Ratzinger–Kirchliche Existenz
und existentielle Theologie unter dem Anspruch von “Lumen Gentium.” Ekklesiologische
Grundlinien (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004), 149–52; Dorothee Kaes,
Theologie im Anspruch von Geschichte und Wahrheit. Zur Hermeneutik Jospeh
Ratzingers (St. Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1997), 62–63; Paolo Martuccelli, Origine e
natura della chiesa. La prospettiva storico-dommatica di Joseph Ratzinger (Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 305–20, 330–33; Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Benedict
XVI:An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger:An Introductory Study (New
York/London: Burns and Oates, 2005), 51–65; Andrea Tornielli, Ratzinger.
Custode della fede (Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 2002), 36–39; and Thomas Weiler,
Die Ekklesiologie Joseph Ratzingers und ihr Einfluss auf das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil
(Mainz: Grünewald, 1997), 125. There are some exceptions to this trend in the
studies by A. Bellandi and D. Kaes.

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Benedict’s theology of revelation is the larger conceptual sphere in which
his ecclesiology, theology of history, and eschatology develop. Revelation
was also among his first theological interests, and the theology of revelation that he articulated was also among the first elements of his overall
theological project that took a definite shape. In the formation of this
theology, Bonaventure played a significant role. It was Bonaventure’s
theology of revelation that initially interested the young Joseph Ratzinger
as he began research for his habilitation.Although Benedict was forced to
omit his study of Bonaventure’s theology of revelation from the final draft
of his habilitation, as he recounts in his memoirs, he claimed that what
he learned from Bonaventure regarding revelation was “very important
for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and
tradition.”2 This interest in Bonaventure’s theology of revelation is the
background for Ratzinger’s published studies on Bonaventure’s ecclesiology and theology of history.
It is also important to note that however much Bonaventure’s theology of revelation and his salvation-historical mode of theology appealed
to Benedict, the latter’s appraisal of Bonaventure’s ecclesiology was not
entirely positive, nor was his evaluation of Bonaventure’s theology of
history and eschatology entirely free from criticism. Nevertheless, there
are significant connections between the two men on these topics. This
essay will describe several aspects of Bonaventure’s theology of revelation
and attempt to show parallels between Bonaventure’s and Benedict XVI’s
understanding of revelation and history and its significance for the Church.
Aspects of Bonaventure’s Theology of Revelation
Although Joseph Ratzinger was clearly influenced by Thomas Aquinas’s
understanding of revelation,3 Bonaventure’s articulation of this teaching,
especially in the Collationes in Hexaëmeron, was particularly important for
2 Joseph Ratzinger, Milestones: Memoirs, 1927–1977, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 109.
3 For Ratzinger’s interpretation of Thomas on revelation and salvation history, see

his Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans.
Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 178–79; and idem,
Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith:The Church as Communion, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and
Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 21–28.
See also Leo Scheffczyk, “Der neuscholastische Traktat De revelatione divina, die
dogmatische Konstitution Dei Verbum und die Lehre des hl. Thomas,” in La
doctrine de la révélation divine de saint Thomas d’Aquin, ed. Léon Elders (Vatican
City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1990), 13–26; and Leo Elders,“Aquinas on Holy
Scripture as the Medium of Divine Revlation,” in Elders, La doctrine de la révélation divine, 132–52.

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251

Benedict.4 In the works of Bonaventure, Benedict found that the Franciscan master never treated the concept of revelation in a systematic way,
in the manner of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century neo-scholasticism. Bonaventure’s interest, rather, lay primarily in “the many individual
revelations which have taken place in the course of history.”5 Bonaventure’s writings address “the individual acts of revelation which can be
repeated, and which in fact are often repeated by God. In these acts, God
turns toward the individual recipient of the revelation.”6 This emphasis
on a dynamic model of revelation necessarily touches on how revelation
is perceived in faith and in Scripture and how humans respond to God
in salvation history.
In the Collationes in Hexaëmeron, Benedict discovered that Bonaventure’s
understanding of revelation had three primary significations.The first signification consists of an unveiling of the future.7 When Bonaventure uses
“revelation” in this sense, it usually refers to Old Testament figures and
events representing Christ in some way.The second signification consists of
4 Joseph Komonchak has rightly noted Benedict’s initial interest in Bonaventure,

although his characterization of Bonaventure as “anti-philosophical” and “antiintellectual” requires significant qualification at the least, if not outright rejection.
See his “The Church in Crisis, Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision,” Commonweal
132 ( June 3, 2005). For more nuanced appraisals of Bonaventure’s philosophy and
his estimation of human reason, see Efrem Bettoni, Saint Bonaventure, trans.Angelus
Gambatese (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1964), 119–27;Vincenzo Cherubino
Bigi, Studi sul pensiero di S. Bonaventura (Assisi: Edizioni Porziuncola, 1988), 325–29;
Elisa Cuttini, Ritorno a Dio. Filosofia, teologia, etica della mens nel pensiero di Bonaventura da Bagnoregio (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002), 121–81; and Alfonso
Pompei, “Cosmologia: scienza e fede in Bonaventura da Bagnoregio,” Doctor
Seraphicus 47 (2000): 5–42. Perhaps the best study of the relationship between
Bonaventure and Aristotle is Jacques Guy Bougerol’s “Dossier pour l’étude des
rapports entre saint Bonaventure et Aristote,” Archives d’Histoire doctrinale et littéraire
du Moyen Age 40 (1973): 135–222. Benedict himself acknowledges Bonaventure’s
suspicion of Aristotle not only in The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans.
Zachary Hayes (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971, 1989), 134–62; but also in
a lecture given at the College of St.Thomas and St. John Vianney Seminary,“Faith,
Philosophy, and Theology,” in Pope John Paul II Lecture Series (St. Paul, Minnesota:
College of St.Thomas, St. John Vianney Seminary, 1985), 11, 13.
5 Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, 57.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 58.This dimension of revelation is brought out most clearly in Bonaventure’s
Collationes in Hexaëmeron, ed. Pp. Colegii S. Bonaventurae, in Opera omnia, vol. 5
(Quaracchi: ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1891), 14, 25, where
Bonaventure uses the term “prophetical revelation” to show how Old Testament
figures and events represent Christ.The other references Benedict cites (13, 17; 14,
7; 14, 10) do not stand by themselves as easily, but must be placed side by side one
another in order to corroborate the understanding of revelation given in 14, 25.

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a “spiritual” understanding of Scripture. For Bonaventure, this authentic
understanding of Scripture, which is a type of revelation, occurs only in the
sixth age of human history after the life and mission of Jesus Christ.8
Bonaventure is clear that revelation does not pertain to the letters of Scripture, or the literal sense, but revelation instead consists of God’s communication of the spiritual understanding of Scripture. Using the Gospel story of
Jesus turning water into wine, Bonaventure claims that the “Holy Spirit
does not give spiritual understanding unless man provide the jar, that is, his
capacity, and the water, that is, the understanding of the literal sense.”9 When
the literal sense is turned into “wine” or the spiritual understanding, the
“jar” or human capacity remains, but the literal understanding is turned into
the spiritual understanding.10 The third spiritual signification of “revelation” can refer to “that imageless unveiling of the divine reality which takes
place in the mystical ascent.”11 This dimension of revelation emphasizes the
importance of love in uniting the individual with God in such a way that
the concepts and the activity of the intellect cease to operate and only “the
affective power keeps vigil and imposes silence upon all other powers.”12
Bonaventure’s threefold understanding of revelation allows him to
outline three forms of wisdom that are made possible only by means of
revelation: sapientia multiformis, sapientia omniformis, and sapientia nulliformis. Sapientia multiformis is the wisdom that Scripture communicates
under various figures and signs.13 Sapientia omniformis is the wisdom that
can be found in all things.14 Wisdom, in its most penetrating reach into
the human soul, has no form, hence the designation sapientia nulliformis.
8 See Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 16, 29.
9 Ibid., 19, 8.
10 Benedict will use similar language when discussing the creation narrative of

Genesis. He claims that the Old Testament can be read only in light of Christ,
who provides the unity of Scripture. Any interpretation of the creation account,
or the legal precepts for that matter, without reference to Christ would be
concerned only with the literal sense of Scripture; it is Christ who “frees us from
the slavery of the letter.” Benedict, In the Beginning:A Catholic Understanding of the
Story of the Creation and the Fall, trans. Boniface Ramsey, O.P. (Huntington, IN:
Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., 1990), 26. On faith as a hermeneutic lens that “opens”
the Scriptures, see his essay “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question
of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today,” in Biblical Interpretation in
Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church, ed. Richard John Neuhaus
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989), 1–23.
11 Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, 59.
12 Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 2, 30.
13 See ibid., 2, 12.
14 On the idea of “natural” revelation, see Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God,
trans. Alexander Dru (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996), 7–13.

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The soul attains this height of wisdom by grace, turning away from sense
perceptions and images and gazing only at God.15
The fact that revelation is operative in all of these manifestations of
wisdom implies that revelation is not consigned to the past, nor identified only with the writing of Scripture, but is an ongoing process that
occurs throughout salvation history, eliciting a response of faith both in
individuals and in the Church as a whole. The subjective dimension of
revelation, that is, what pertains to an individual’s penetrating vision of
the intelligible world, is bound up with prophecy and contemplation.
The objective dimension of revelation, that is, what pertains to the
content of revelation, is found in Scripture and the understanding of
Scripture as articulated by the Fathers of the Church.
In both the subjective and objective dimensions of revelation, what
allows the individual and the Church to respond to divine revelation is the
gift of faith. Faith is an attitude or disposition of the will that allows the
individual and the Church to understand the content of Scripture, the
“spirit” veiled by the “letter.” As the individual and the Church witness
God’s revelation of himself, they articulate in human language what they
“see” or perceive. Scripture is one result of this effort to describe the ineffable, but so too is any work in which the understanding of Scripture is
communicated. Scripture is the privileged source because it contains the
“mysteries” that both reveal and conceal the mystery of Christ,16 but the
non-scriptural reception and communication of the mysteries of the faith
is also “revelation,” as well.
For Bonaventure what matters is not so much the written text of Scripture, the “letter,” but the understanding of it that is received and passed on
in the Church. One may read Scripture but still not believe or understand
what it says. Likewise, someone may never be able to read Scripture and
still understand what it says through the preaching and oral exposition of
others.The inseparability of the text of Scripture and the understanding of
Scripture explains not only the equation of sacra scriptura and theologia in the
thirteenth century and the designation of scholastic theologians as doctores
sacrae scripturae,17 but it also suggests the need for a corporate reception and
15 This description of wisdom is slightly different from that found in Bonaventure’s

Sentences commentary, where he distinguishes four kinds of wisdom. See his
Commentaria in IV Libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi, vol. 3 , ed. Pp. Collegii
S. Bonaventurae (Florence: Collegium S. Bonaventurae, 1934–49), d. 35, a. 1, q. 1.
16 See Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 2, 11–12.
17 See Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, 67; and Jean-Pierre
Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1, The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 54–58.

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understanding of Scripture and the development of the understanding of
Scripture over time.
Because God’s revelations to the individual and to the Church
throughout history have the same source there is a harmony among
them. Since God is the source of the spiritual understanding of Scripture,
there should also be a harmony of interpretations between the individual exegete and the Church, as well.This fact does not mean that theologians do not disagree in their understanding of certain passages in
Scripture or in their understanding of certain teachings (the record of
scholastic disputations and ecclesial condemnations from the thirteenth
century confirms that), but it signifies that both the individual and the
Christian community receive revelations from the same source and
respond to it with the same faith, regardless of its articulation.
The fact that revelation and the response to revelation that is faith both
occur in time and space implies that both revelation and faith grow over
time.This process is true both for the individual believer and for the Church
as a whole. As the individual advances in contemplation, the soul perceives
more profoundly the truths that Scripture contains; likewise in the Church,
the contemplative part of the Church learns more and more about the revelation contained in Scripture. Scripture contains an infinite number of
“seeds” or interpretations that require time to unfold them.18 Only constant
contemplation on the truths of the faith can make these seeds bear fruit.
But how does this growth of revelation take place throughout history?
As indicated above, God reveals himself to the prophets and apostles who
write most of the books of Scripture.19 The spiritual meaning is revealed
progressively by the Fathers of the Church, who interpret Scripture
through the lens of faith, and whose writings, because of their close relationship to the truths of the faith, are not completely separate from Scripture. Characterizing Bonaventure’s view of the relationship between
Scripture and patristic exegesis, Benedict claims that the Fathers are
“bearers of a new spiritual ‘revelation,’ without which the Scriptures
simply would not be effective as revelation.”20
Revelation does not end with the age of the Fathers, however. In fact,
for Bonaventure, it increases and intensifies over time, so that his own age
shares in this process, as well. Bonaventure notes that the sixth age of the
Old Testament, from Hezekiah to Zerubbabel, was one of prophecy, and
it parallels the sixth age of the New Testament, which began with the
18 See Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 13, 2.
19 On the canonical status of biblical books not written by the prophets and apos-

tles, see Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, 78–79.
20 Ibid., 80.

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pontificate of Adrian I and continued up to Bonaventure’s own day.21
The fact that Bonaventure was living in the time of prophecy before the
seventh and final age is significant for his understanding of the process of
revelation.The gift of prophecy allows for the “contemplative Church”22
to have a greater understanding of Scripture than existed in earlier stages
of salvation history.
According to Bonaventure, however, the Church has not only a
contemplative dimension, but an “active” dimension and a “mixed”
dimension (comprising activity and contemplation), as well.Although the
distinction between action and contemplation had long been used by
Christian writers to describe the various modes of Christian life, Bonaventure recasts this distinction in light of historical developments in the thirteenth century (and also with a desire to have any earthly ordo align with
the ninefold angelic hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius and the threefold
“hierarchy” of the Trinity).The active part of the Church is made of three
groups of laypeople (people, masters, and leaders), and the “mixed” part
of the Church consists of clerics, whose way of life involves contemplation but service in the world, as well.23 The contemplative part of the
Church has three groups. The first consists of those who pray, namely
monks. The second group consists of those who “speculate” or study
Scripture: the Dominicans and the Franciscans.24 The final group consists
of those whose contemplation has led to rapture or ecstasy, and here
Bonaventure lists only Francis.
The fact that the two most recognized mendicant orders comprise the
penultimate stage of the contemplative dimension of the Church precisely
because of their study of Scripture is significant. Francis, the one who
occupies the highest plane of contemplation, is the one whom God chose
to rebuild the Church of that time. Francis’s prophetic role was revealed
to him, and it involved a life of following the Gospel quite literally. In his
Legenda maior, Bonaventure ensures that his master is both apostolic, in the
21 See Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 16, 29.
22 “Ecclesia contemplative”: Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 13, 7. See also

ibid., 16, 29.
23 The clerics also are divided into three groups: ministers, priests, and pontiffs.The

“ministers” consist of porters, readers, exorcists, acolytes, subdeacons, and
deacons; the “priests” consist of both priests and bishops; the “pontiffs” category
includes Christ, Peter, the pope, and the patriarchs of the four other patriarchates.
Further discussion of Bonaventure’s understanding of the structure of the
Church would take us too far astray from Bonaventure’s theology of revelation.
24 Even here Bonaventure cannot resist placing the Franciscans above the Dominicans, because while the Dominicans emphasize study, the Franciscans emphasize
love. See Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 22, 21.

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sense of living an apostolic life and being devoted to the apostles (especially St. Peter), and prophetic.25 Both dimensions involve following the
truths of the Gospel, and preaching those truths. In order to preach the
Gospel, his followers would have to do more than live a life of poverty;
they would have to study Scripture and imitate what they studied. Only
then would Franciscan preaching be effective. Francis’s literal imitation of
the Gospel, which was the fruit of his mystical experiences, was both the
historical and the theological foundation for the Franciscans’ study of
Scripture. Following Francis meant looking back to Christ, the apostles,
and the Church Fathers, and toward the eschatological elements of the
Gospel, which were in the process of unfolding.
Although Bonaventure situates his own time just before the seventh
age of the New Testament, and so gives his own time an apocalyptic
coloring, he was convinced that the infinite seeds of Scripture were not
close to sprouting and blooming.The full revelation was in the process of
unfolding and would be consummated in the seventh age, but the mendicants (and the Franciscans in particular) played an important role in
preparing for the full revelation that God would bring about. For
Bonaventure, the mendicant orders not only followed the Gospel more
literally than the monks did, but their following of the Gospel coincided
with a renewed interest in Scripture. Indeed the scientific examination of
Scripture, emphasizing the literal sense, was rooted in St. Francis’s decision to follow the Beatitudes literally. For Bonaventure, Francis was an
eschatological figure, whose self-giving response to God’s Revelation in
the form of poverty pointed the way to a new manner, not only of living
the Gospel, but also of interpreting Scripture, as well.The scriptural studies of the Franciscans and Dominicans during the first half of the thirteenth century led to renewed interest in the transmission of scriptural
texts, the creation of study tools, such as concordances and lists of variant readings of the Vulgate text, changes in the method of dividing the
text, and drawing from contemporary theologians and spiritual writers,
and not only the Fathers or “doctors” of the Church.
Bonaventure’s theory of revelation, then, gives a priority to God
revealing himself to human beings throughout history. Knowledge of
God is communicated to people as individuals, such as Abraham, but also
to people as whole. “Scripture” is one means of communicating God’s
revelation, but the actual act of revelation is in some sense prior to writing the text of Scripture or to people’s reading Scripture or hearing its
exposition.This priority is manifested when faith accompanies the read25 See Bonaventure, Legenda Sancti Francisci, ed. Pp. Colegii S. Bonaventurae, in Opera

omnia, vol. 8 (Quaracchi: ex Typographia Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1898), ch. 3.

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ing of Scripture, since without it no knowledge of God may be received.
The collective reading of Scripture in the Church, that is, the place where
Scripture is read and heard, builds up the spiritual understanding of
Scripture over time in such a way that the Church as a whole gains
deeper insights into God and his plan of salvation. Bonaventure’s appreciation for the transmission of revelation throughout history and the
increasing deepening or penetration of revelation over time anticipated
in some ways modern approaches to fundamental theology.
Benedict’s Discovery of Bonaventurian
Resonances in Vatican II
As theologians in the middle of the twentieth century gained a greater
appreciation for the historical context of revelation and the response to
that revelation, they increasingly focused on God’s plan of salvation in
history and the human potential to receive and understand revelation.
The Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei
Verbum, was written with some of these interests in mind; and Benedict,
then a professor of fundamental theology at the University of Bonn,
contributed to the theological discussion that shaped the schemata of
what eventually would become Dei Verbum. Benedict’s previous study of
Bonaventure, completed in 1957, had allowed him to reflect on the
nature of revelation; and it proved valuable in the ongoing discussions of
the schemata, which proved to be highly controversial.26
In the final text of the Constitution on Divine Revelation, Benedict
found profound similarities between high scholastic models of revelation
and what the council fathers taught in Dei Verbum. One similarity was the
understanding of revelation as a process, and another was its eliciting faith
in individuals and in the receiving community.27 It is precisely this
dynamic understanding of revelation and faith that attracted Benedict to
Bonaventure’s model of revelation. Benedict was intrigued by it, because,
in contrast to certain neo-scholastic models, the scholasticism of the thirteenth century understood revelation to be an act of God. The neoscholastic models that dissatisfied Benedict understood revelation to be
26 See Benedict’s reflections on these discussions in Ratzinger, Milestones, 124–30.
27 Shortly after the council, René Latourelle, who saw Dei Verbum as a possible “char-

ter of fundamental theology,” described the task of fundamental theology to be
understanding the Word of God “in its mysterious being, in its historical unraveling, in the signs of this unraveling, in the objective forms by which it expresses itself
and perdures through the centuries (tradition and Scripture), and in its authentic
interpreter (the magisterium).” “Dismemberment or Renewal of Fundamental
Theology?” trans.Anthony M. Buono, in The Development of Fundamental Theology,
ed. Johannes B. Metz (New York-Paramus, NJ: Paulist Press, 1969), 31.

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what resulted from that action, namely Scripture and Tradition. According to Bonaventure, Scripture could not exhaust God’s revelatory selfcommunication; God’s revelation always transcends what gives witness to
it. This theological approach to the question of revelation found favor
with those modern theologians, like Benedict, who thought it important
to consider how the receiving subject or subjects of revelation shared in
the act of revelation. Benedict summarizes the findings of his research in
his Milestones:
The word [“revelation”] refers to the act in which God shows himself,
not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the
receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of “revelation.”
Where there is no one to perceive “revelation,” no re-vel-ation has
occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation
requires a someone who apprehends it.These insights, gained through
my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the
time of the conciliar discussion on revelation. Because, if Bonaventure
is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in
Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that
revelation is always something greater than what is merely written
down.And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola
scriptura (“by Scripture alone”), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.28

This understanding of revelation that Benedict found in Bonaventure
implies that revelation is not only historical, it is also intrinsically dialogical. It begins with God who reveals himself, but he reveals himself to a
“receiving subject,” whose being is conditioned by time and space.
Benedict describes this process further in his commentary Dei Verbum,
where he describes the council’s articulation of revelation in terms very
similar to what he discovered in the Seraphic Doctor (although he never
mentions him). Benedict, for example, emphasizes the differences in the
articulation of revelation between Vatican I and Vatican II, and several
emerge:
Whereas Vatican I starts from the natural knowledge of God and
considers “supernatural” revelation only in close connection with this
idea, in order to proceed immediately to the question of its transmission in scripture and tradition, here the question of natural knowledge
of God is put at the end and God’s revealing activity described within
a comprehensive survey of salvation history. . . . Here, instead of the
28 Ratzinger, Milestones, 108–9.

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abstract values “sapientia et bonitas” we first have reference to God
himself “in his wisdom and goodness,” thus giving a far greater emphasis to the personal and theocentric starting point when compared with
Vatican I: it is God himself, the person of God, from whom revelation
proceeds and to whom it returns, and thus revelation necessarily
reaches—also with the person who receives it—into the personal
center of man, it touches him in the depth of his being, not only in his
individual faculties, in his will and understanding.29

What Benedict here calls the “personal and theocentric starting point” is
precisely what he discovered in Bonaventure.30 God communicates
himself in a unique way at certain moments in salvation history.
Criticizing again what he calls “neo-scholastic intellectualism” that
understood revelation to be “a store of mysterious supernatural teachings,”
Benedict believed that Dei Verbum tried to show how revelation was a
“totality, in which word and event make up one whole, a true dialogue
which touches man in his totality, not only challenging his reason, but, as
dialogue, addressing him as a partner, indeed, giving him his true nature for
the first time.”31 Benedict noted that this dialogical dimension of revelation, the fact that God’s act of revealing necessarily involves individual
recipients, including the Church in some sense, has profound implications.
Most obviously, it entails that this action of revelation initiated by God
invites or elicits a fully human response, a response that not only originates
within time and space, but also is directed toward the eternal and thus what
is in humanity’s future. This human response occurs only because of the
human openness toward the divine and the receptivity latent in that openness, and the response of faith is possible only because one has heard God.
Indeed Benedict believed that the emphasis on listening in Dei Verbum
was one of its strengths over earlier drafts of the document that were in
danger of “ecclesiological positivism.”32 If the earlier schema had prevailed
(in particular text C),
29 Ratzinger, “Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation: Origin and Background,” in

Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, trans.
William Glen-Doepel, et al. (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 170.
30 See also Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles I, c. 6; and Summa theologiae I, q.
1, a. 6.
31 Ratzinger, “Dogmatic Constitution on Revelation,” 172. Although Benedict
here describes the receptive subject of revelation primarily in anthropological
terms, in his commentary on ch. 2 of Dei Verbum the Church plays a more significant role as the partner in God’s revelatory act. See ibid., 181–98. Benedict also
notes in passing the influence of neo-scholastic theological emphases on earlier
versions of the text: see 157–66.
32 See ibid., 162.

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The Council would otherwise have risked falling victim to a kind of
ecclesio-monism in its texts, whereas the Constitution on Revelation
now stressed the importance of listening, thus moving beyond everything that was said at the Council in order to take up an attitude of
listening, an attitude in which the Church transcends itself, for it is not
there for its own sake, but only to lead him to whom all honor is due,
God the Lord.33

Revelation thus conceived includes both God’s self-communication
and the human response simultaneously. This understanding is exactly
what Benedict found in Bonaventure’s theology of revelation. Just as
revelation is not “a store of mysterious supernatural teachings,”34 so too
“faith is not a system of knowledge, but trust.”35 This trust is an existential orientation, a direction of life that one manifests concretely within
history, but that always is open toward the future, which is “where” the
Church and each believer await the fulfillment of God’s promise.36
Bonaventurian Themes in Benedict’s
Writings After the Council
After the council, Benedict developed the understanding of revelation
and faith that he found in Dei Verbum and that he described in his
commentary on it. He continued the idea that revelation is an ongoing
process initiated by God, but he recast that teaching into more existential terms. Although Benedict returns to this theme in numerous places,
making an exhaustive study here impossible, it will suffice to point out a
few places where Benedict develops his theology of revelation.
In Benedict’s recent work, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World
Religions, he echoes Bonaventure’s understanding of revelation as individual acts of God’s self-communication, initiated throughout history, and
translates it into existential terms. In contrasting what he calls “mysticism”
with monotheistic religion, Benedict argues that mysticism is a religious
system in which the ultimate reality is a spiritual experience that the individual achieves through a purifying ascent into a passive and impersonal
God. Monotheism, as Benedict understands it, stands in near opposition to
this view of religion and necessarily requires God’s initiative. Monotheism
views God as the primary agent in the historical relationship and sees
33 Ibid., 162.
34 Ibid., 172.
35 Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971), 24.
36 For a summary of the early conciliar debate on revelation, see Joseph Ratzinger,

Theological Highlights of Vatican II, trans. Henry Traub and Gerard C. Thormann
(New York: Paulist Press, 1966), 20–26.

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union as occurring between a personal God and individuals. Revelation
occurs when “something not ours, not to be found in what we have, comes
to me and takes me out of myself, above myself, creates something new.”37
It is a “call from God,” which is the ultimate reality in human existence.38
This call, initiated by God, goes out to all people, people embedded in
historical and cultural contexts; and it requires a response. The positive
response, the response that allows each human to be an “actor in divine
history,”39 is faith. Even in his understanding of faith, however, Benedict
begins with an existential approach. In his early Introduction to Christianity, he describes the most basic characteristic of faith as an openness
toward what is not visible, that is, an acknowledgment that what we
experience through sense perceptions may not be all there is to reality.
He explains that “belief signifies the decision that at the very core of
human existence there is a point that cannot be nourished and supported
on the visible and tangible, that encounters and comes into contact with
what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence.”40 This attitude is a “conversion” in some sense because humanity
possesses a natural inclination toward what is sensible. The acknowledgment of what is not sensible, the acknowledgment of something that
undergirds and supports sensible reality, is an authentic step toward the
truth of reality in its fullness.
From this basic attitude of openness toward Another to the God of
Jesus Christ seems to be quite a leap. How is the chasm bridged? Benedict finds in the enigmatic figure of Abraham a clue to expanding the
understanding of what faith means.What is important for Benedict is not
so much that Abraham was unaware of Jesus Christ or that he may have
had a polytheistic religion.The first important element of Abraham’s faith
is that the God of all, the Creator, was a family God, even a personal God.
This fact implies that the Creator was not only outside the created order,
but somehow inside it, as well. The transcendent Creator was a God of
history and in history, a God who entered into relationships, covenants
with humanity.The second important fact about Abraham’s faith was that
this God called to Abraham, and Abraham responded to that call by leaving his homeland and going into unknown lands and an uncertain future.
This step from the known into the unknown, this leap of faith in response
37 Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans.

Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 89.
38 Ibid., 36.
39 Ibid., 42.
40 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, 2004), 51.

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to God’s call (however that call was perceived), represents a remarkable
commitment:
[Abraham] gave up the present for the sake of what was to come. He
let go of what was safe, comprehensible, calculable, for the sake of what
was unknown. And he did this in response to a single word from God.
He had met God and placed all his future in God’s hands; he dared to
accept a new future that began in darkness. The word he heard was
more real to him than all the calculable things he could hold in his
hand. He trusted that which he could not yet see, and thus became
capable of new life, of breaking out of rigidity.The center of gravity of
reality, indeed the concept of reality itself, changed. The future took
precedence over the present, the word heard over comprehensible
things. God had become more important to him than himself and than
the things he could understand.

This response to God’s call marks Abraham’s freedom:
Attachment to the accustomed world came to an end, and man’s true
destination appeared—not his immediate environment, but the whole
world, the whole of creation that knows no frontiers, but allows itself
to be explored until the ultimate foundation of everything has been
discovered. . . . Abraham is on the way. He no longer belongs to any
fixed place, and is therefore a stranger and a guest wherever he goes.41

Abraham’s faith is not merely openness but an attitude of trust in a
personal God.The trust is elicited because of God’s promise to Abraham,
a promise whose fulfillment lay in the distant future.The trust also implies
a renunciation, a conversion from what is known to what is unknown.
Although this faith is clearly different from a mere openness to
Another, insofar as trust in the promise of a personal God becomes operative, how does it relate to the faith of Christianity? Abraham’s belief in
God’s promise of future posterity and a future homeland and the Christian faith in the God of the resurrected Jesus seem very different. Christianity seems to care very little about blood ties and a hope for a future
homeland on earth. Nevertheless, for Benedict, the person of Jesus Christ
is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham. In Christ, “the promise
of a future, of the country of the future, has acquired a full and clearly
defined form. Faith in the risen Christ is nothing other than the faith of
Abraham—the promise of a future and of a country.”42
41 Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, 30–31.
42 Ibid., 39–40.

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The difference between belief in God before and after the event of
Christ is the person of Christ himself. Before Christ, those who had faith
(Abel, Melchizedek, Abraham, the people of Israel) trusted God with
their future. Abraham’s faith is so strong that he could be prepared to
sacrifice Isaac, his son, the embodiment of Abraham’s future, because of
his trust in the Lord.43 Those who had faith in God believed that they
would have a place of rest and a time of peace in the future. With the
advent of Christ, the “place” and “time” of the future are made present.
Christ himself is the future of humanity because “Faith in the God of
Jesus Christ means faith in the God who still opens up, really and truly,
a future behind the wall of death.”44 The resurrection of the crucified
Christ shows the similarity between Abraham and Christ, namely that
both entrusted their entire being to God; the difference between Abraham and Christ is that the promise to Abraham has been fulfilled in the
Word-made-flesh, in whom the future has been made eternally present.
The exodus or “cultural break,”45 that is, the journey in which Abraham
and the people of Israel left behind what was familiar for something new,
is, in Christianity, “now interiorized as the readiness to allow oneself to
be changed.”46 The promise of a glorious future, which Abraham
believed, is revealed fully in the resurrected Christ. The life represented
by the Resurrection is eternal and one of communion with God. It
redeems humanity from what is so familiar—namely sin, suffering, and
death—and allows the believer to share in that eternal life. It implies the
eradication of sin and death in general and the forgiveness of personal
sins and their consequences as well.
Benedict’s more existential description of faith allows him to address
contemporary concerns better than if he had retained more traditional
language. He believes that it is important that Christian faith be a trust
directed toward “that which has not been made by oneself and never
could be made and which precisely in this way supports and makes possible all our making.”47 It means that this trust lies outside the realm of
practical or scientific knowledge. Drawing from Heidegger’s distinction
between “calculating” and “reflective” thought, Benedict argues that trust
belongs to the realm of reflective thought, the dimension of humanity that
pertains to the “realm of basic decisions that man cannot avoid making.”48
43 See Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 94.
44 Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, 42.
45 Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 87.
46 Ratzinger, Faith and the Future, 46.
47 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 70.
48 Ibid., 71.

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In responding to the fundamental questions that pertain to the very meaning and existence of each human person, humanity can find the meaning
of existence in what it makes or in what it receives from beyond itself. If
humanity looks for the meaning of existence in what it makes, it must put
its trust in the future that it is preparing and will accomplish. For Benedict,
the archetypal model of this form of belief is Marxism.49 Since it does not
acknowledge the reception of human existence and the meaning bestowed
on it apart from itself, it is a monological belief system, or perhaps better, a
solipsistic belief system.True dialogue can exist for humanity only when it
responds to what it hears from outside itself.
Although Benedict cites Marxism as a particularly acute danger because
of the “impression it evokes of harmony with practical knowledge,”50 he
also asserts that the danger of calculating thought eclipsing reflective
thought is present in every age. Benedict cites as an example Bonaventure’s response to the increasing interest in the natural world that developed in the thirteenth century. The problem according to Bonaventure
was not so much the growing autonomy of philosophy or natural science.
What Bonaventure encountered was a certain type of amnesia.According
to Benedict, “Bonaventure felt obliged to reproach his colleagues of the
philosophical faculty at Paris with having learned how to measure the
world but having forgotten how to measure themselves.”51
How should humanity “measure” itself? A clue to discovering how to
measure oneself is the restlessness within each person. Augustine, in the
famous opening passage of The Confessions, prayed, “You have made us
and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”52
The restlessness that one feels existentially invites the kind of reflective
thought to which Bonaventure exhorted his colleagues at the University
of Paris. Ultimately that restlessness is a deeper invitation, not only to
reflective thought, but to a radical orientation and trust in the Creator.
This reflective thought can liberate humanity and allow it to realize its
yearning for authentic freedom, which is conceived not as the ability to
act in autonomous fashion, but rather as the acceptance of love.53
Ultimately it is faith or trust in God that will allow humanity to find
the true measure of itself. Benedict notes the significance of faith in his
49 See Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 72. See also his comments regarding

Marxism in Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, nos. 26, 31.
50 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 72.
51 Ibid., 71.
52 Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding (New York: New City Press,

1997), I, 1, 1.
53 See Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One, 33–34; and idem, Salt of the Earth, 282–83.

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commentary on part of Gaudium et Spes:“Faith does not diminish man but
leads him in the direction which alone the endless restlessness which
impels him can find satisfaction. Man’s measure is infinity, everything else
is too little for him. Consequently only God can be man’s measure.”54 This
capacity for God is a gift, something received and not something manufactured by humanity. Faith is the human response to that gift and “to the
meaning” that supports humanity and the world.55 In “more traditional
language,” Benedict describes faith as “a response to the word, the logos, that
upholds and maintains all things.”56 It is clear, however, that there is nothing impersonal about this response to “the word.”This faith is a trust in the
Word-made-flesh, a person, who makes existence intelligible to humanity:
Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing
as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me,
that I can entrust myself to it like the child who knows that everything
he may be wondering about is safe in the “you” of his mother.Thus in
the last analysis believing, trusting, and loving are one, and all the theses
around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the allembracing about-turn, of the assertion “I believe in you”—of the
discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth.57

Faith, then, as an attitude of trust, begins with openness to what is not
perceived by the senses, and it moves toward a realization that this imperceivable reality beyond itself communicates meaning to each individual.
What gives meaning to human beings, precisely, is love, a love that is
manifested in action. Here is where the revelation of God in Jesus Christ
becomes the starting point of the people’s realization of just how much
this “imperceivable reality,” namely God, loves them.
Although Benedict’s less traditional language, especially in his later
writings, may make his theology of revelation seem rather distant from
that of Bonaventure, Benedict has retained most of the essential themes
of Bonaventure’s thought. First, Benedict gives priority to God’s initiative
in revealing himself to humanity. Second, this revelation transcends the
text of Scripture in such a way that faith must precede its reading for it
54 See his commentary on Gaudium et Spes “The Dignity of the Human Person,”

in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, trans.
W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 159.The sentiment articulated
there is expressed in the context of human freedom in idem, Behold the Pierced
One, 34.
55 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 73.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., 80.

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266

to be transformative.58 Third, faith, that is, humanity’s response to God,
necessarily possesses a corporate dimension. Revelation is given to individuals, who, because of their faith, form a community that continually
communicates God’s revelation. An ongoing dialectic of reception and
communication continues throughout history so that “the individual
authors [of the Bible] are inspired, and thus the Church is active in speaking through them, and God is speaking through the Church.”59
Throughout history then, revelation continues and even grows, both in
the individual and in the Church.60 Fourth, Benedict’s theology of revelation maintains a strong historical and even eschatological orientation,
which involves not only an emphasis on God’s plan of salvation within
history, but also on the very theological significance of history and its
relationship with the future.These elements of fundamental theology, all
central to Benedict’s thought, have close parallels with the theology of
the Seraphic Doctor. Although in Benedict’s later writings Bonaventure
is cited less frequently than he was in the earlier part of his career, and
although Benedict clearly developed what he had learned from Bonaventure, Bonaventure’s theology of revelation remains a foundational source
of Benedict’s own theology and his view of God’s revelation to humanN&V
ity within history.

58 See Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco:

Ignatius Press, 2002), 152–59.
59 Ibid., 155. Heinrich Schlier, who wrote about revelation at the time of the

Second Vatican Council, expresses it this way: “the communication of God by
Jesus Christ to the world merges into communication of Him by the tradition
of those who experienced it. God’s self-disclosure to the world is disclosed
precisely as such in history, in the explanatory speech of those who have opened
themselves to it.” The Relevance of the New Testament, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New
York: Herder & Herder, 1968), 49. (The original edition, Besinnung auf das Neue
Testament, was published in 1964.)
60 See Ratzinger, God and the World, 154.

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267

The Theological Heritage of Pope Benedict XVI
ROMANUS C ESSARIO, OP
St. John’s Seminary
Brighton, Massachusetts

The Pope Theologian
N O POPE in modern times has come to the Chair of Peter with as
copious a body of published theological writings as did Joseph Ratzinger.
He has written more than eighty-five books as well as over five hundred
articles and occasional essays. Although Pope Benedict XVI is knowledgeable in many fields, the majority of his writings exhibit his professional competence as a theologian.
Upon being received into the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, thenCardinal Ratzinger remarked in 2002:“I did my philosophical and theological studies immediately after the war, from 1946 to 1951. In this
period, theological formation in the faculty of Munich was essentially
determined by the biblical, liturgical, and ecumenical movement of the
time between the two World Wars.”1 Joseph Ratzinger engaged the theological disciplines that prepared him to meet the challenges that the
Church would face in the twenty-first century. It is easy to discern in this
This short essay, which draws on published reflections by the Irish priest-student
of Joseph Ratzinger Vincent Toomey, originally appeared as an introduction to
Benedictus, ed. Peter John Cameron (San Francisco: Ignatius Press/Magnificat,
2006).This volume of day-by-day meditations taken from the writings of Pope
Benedict XVI offers to those who do not have the time to read everything that
the pope has written a way to benefit from his richly textured insights into
divine truth. Father Peter John Cameron, O.P., who is a long-time student of the
pope’s writings, has assembled excerpts from the pope’s writings that may serve,
among other purposes, as a source for daily reflection.
1 For the complete text of Pope Benedict’s remarks, see Pontifical Academy of
Sciences, Scripta Varia 105, The Cultural Values of Science (Vatican City: Pontificia
Academia Scientiarum, 2003), 50–52.

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program of studies the hand of divine providence at work early in the life
of a man who would become pope.
Professional theologians will come to recognize what the pope himself
has described recently as the “unfinished character” of his complete
works. The unfinishedness that Benedict XVI ascribes to his lifelong
theological accomplishment does not signal a failure, however. He contemplates what might have been the case if he were not asked to assume
responsibilities other than those of a university professor.
Joseph Ratzinger was called to assure pastoral service in the Church,
first as cardinal archbishop of Munich and shortly thereafter as prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was not afforded the
opportunity to complete the kind of overall systematic account of
Catholic theology that, for example, finds an original model in the
Summa theologiae of St.Thomas Aquinas.The pope considers nonetheless
that his writings do “amount to something like a single whole.”
Pope Benedict XVI makes these remarks on his own writings in his 2005
book Values in a Time of Upheaval: How to Survive the Challenge of the Future.2
The Pope’s Theology
Pope Benedict XVI has been occupied with theological studies and
discussion for more than half a century. No wonder that he has found the
occasion to write on nearly every topic that one expects from the pen of
an authentic Catholic theologian.This massive accomplishment provides
the pope’s blueprint for doing theology.
One way to identify some general themes that emerge in the theological reflections of Joseph Ratzinger is to recall what he reports as the
influences that surrounded his own early theological studies: the Holy
Bible, the Sacred Liturgy, and Catholic ecumenism.
The Sacred Scriptures introduce Christ. Joseph Ratzinger takes seriously the Church Fathers’ insistence on the unity of the Old and New
Testaments.This unity illuminates the central place that Jesus Christ holds
in the salvation of the world. No one is saved without at least implicit faith
in the One Mediator between God and men, which in some way associates them with the worldwide communion that we call the Church.
The Liturgy of the Church finds its source in the Eucharist. It is said
that Pope Benedict had to be persuaded to hold his inaugural Mass as
pope in St. Peter’s Square. He would have preferred to offer the Mass
within the Vatican basilica to make it visually clear that Christ stands at
2 Pope Benedict XVI, Values in a Time of Upheaval: How to Survive the Challenge of

the Future (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005).

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269

the center of every efficacious liturgical action that the Church celebrates.
Each human being is called to participate in the worship that Christ
offers to the Father of glory and that is preeminently commemorated in
the Catholic Mass.
Ecumenism is ordered to reveal that the one Church of Christ exists
in order to communicate the gift of salvation to the whole human race.
There is only one saving communion. People of God and God’s House in
Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church is the title of the pope’s doctoral dissertation.3 From his earliest student days, a principal concern of Pope Benedict XVI has been to point out the legitimate place that the Church
holds among the nations; he wants to capture for his contemporaries the
important reflections that St. Augustine first aired in his chapters on the
City of God and the City of Man.
The Pope’s Mission
In accord with one’s personal vocation, each Catholic is obliged to make
the mission of the pope his or her own. Like the great pontiffs who are
his predecessors, Benedict XVI considers it incumbent on a Catholic
bishop to address the well-being of both the Church and the political
community. He recognizes that the original rebellion of the human race
still makes its adverse influence felt among even the most enlightened of
our contemporaries. “The outcry in favor of anarchy,” writes the pope,
“is the reaction to a threatening feeling of dependency that creates a new
form of non-liberty in the middle of our social liberties.”4
The pope offers more than a social critique. He has an exit strategy.
Benedict XVI proclaims that God has provided a remedy for mankind’s
ancient curse: Christ, the Eucharist, the Church. The Incarnation of the
Son of God ennobles every human being. In Christ, each believer
receives his mandate to make things new.
It is no wonder that Benedict XVI returns again and again to the Fiat
spoken by the Blessed Virgin Mary. He sees that her submission to God
effectively brings tranquil order, happy surrender, and true freedom to the
world. Those who want to share in these liberating qualities are invited
3 Joseph Ratzinger, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustinus Lehre von der Kirche (Ph.D.

diss., University of Munich, 1954).
4 In Pope Benedict XVI, Theologische Prinzipienlehre. Bausteine zur Fundamentalthe-

ologie, 2nd ed. (Donauwörth:Verlag Erich Wewel, 2005): “Der wachsende Schrei
nach Anarchie ist die Reaktion auf das bedrängende Gefühl totaler
Anhängigkeit, die eine neue Form totaler Unfreiheit mitten in den bürgerlichen
Freihalten erschaffen könnte.” English trans: Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D.
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987).

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to enter into her Magnificat. Those who implement, according to their
capacities, what Pope Benedict XVI says about Christ, the Eucharist, and
the Church will contribute to completing in their own lives and vocations what for reasons known only to God Joseph Ratzinger has left
N&V
“unfinished.”

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271

A Note on Joseph Ratzinger and Contemporary
Theology of the Priesthood
M ATTHEW L EVERING
Ave Maria University
Naples, FL

I N HIS ESSAY “On the Essence of the Priesthood,” originally delivered at the opening of the Synod of Bishops on the priesthood in October 1990, Joseph Ratzinger begins by depicting the current mainstream
viewpoint regarding leadership in the earliest Christian communities.
According to this mainstream scholarship,“Above all there is no sign that
these offices were empowered for cultic worship: nowhere are they
explicitly connected with the celebration of the Eucharist. Indeed, their
content appears to be principally the proclamation of the Gospel and, in
second place, the ministry of love among Christians, along with functions
of a more practical sort within the community.”1 Lacking the aspect of
cultic worship, no hierarchical priesthood would be needed, since teaching and service require no unique priestly participation in Christ beyond
that which all Christians receive. As Ratzinger observes, this mainstream
position leads to a functional rather than ontological/sacramental account
of Christian priesthood: “All of these data arouse the impression that
these offices were seen, not sacrally but in purely functional terms, that
is, that they were administered entirely according to considerations of
practical utility.”2 Corresponding to this functional account of the priesthood, he goes on to say, is a non-cultic understanding of Jesus’ Cross,
which becomes an exemplar of love that radically overturns every “cultic”
1 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “On the Essence of the Priesthood,” in Called to

Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1996 [German 1991]), 105–31, at 107.
2 Ibid.

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system and thereby frees human beings from sacrificial worship.3 In this
light it is not surprising that many Catholic theologians now seek to go
beyond both Trent and Vatican II’s teaching on the priesthood, so as “to
abandon the ancient conceptions of cult and priesthood and to seek a
Church at once biblical and modern that would resolutely take up the
challenge of the profane world and would be organized solely according
to functional considerations.”4
Is Ratzinger’s description of the contemporary situation correct, and if
so how might theologians reclaim an understanding of the cultic priesthood? The two sections of my brief essay seek an initial answer to these
questions. First, in order to flesh out Ratzinger’s depiction of the contemporary situation, I summarize the views of the sacramental theologian
David Power. Second, I suggest that Ratzinger’s essay offers an exemplary
path for moving beyond the current mainstream view that Jesus abolishes
the cultic/hierarchical priesthood.
3 Ratzinger challenges the notion that such exegetical conclusions are “objective,”

arguing instead that they are “the fruit of the fundamental hermeneutical options
developed in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The central point of
these options was a reading of the Bible based on the dialectical opposition of
law and promise, of priest and prophet, of cult and promise.The mutually coordinated categories of law, priest and cult were classified as the negative aspect of
the history of salvation: the law, it was maintained, leads man to self-righteousness; cultic worship presupposes the error that man stands on a sort of equal footing with God and can establish a relationship of justice between himself and God
by offering certain gifts; priesthood, on this reading, is, so to say, the institutional
expression and the permanent instrument of this perverted relationship with
God.The essence of the gospel, which is said to appear at its clearest particularly
in the major Pauline epistles, would then be the overcoming of this structure
raised by man’s destructive self-righteousness.The new relationship to God rests
entirely on promise and grace, and it finds expression in the figure of the
prophet, who is accordingly construed as strictly opposed to the cult and the
priesthood. Catholicism appeared to Luther as the sacrilegious reinstatement of
the cult, of sacrifice, priesthood and law. He therefore saw it as the negation of
grace, as apostasy from the gospel, as a return behind Christ to Moses” (108).
Ratzinger adds, however, that “there were countertendencies even at the time of
the Reformation, even within Lutheranism and Luther’s own works. In spite of
everything, ordination was soon understood as much more than a purely functional decree that could be revoked at any moment but was conceived as having
at least a certain analogy to a sacrament. Its connection with the celebration of
the Eucharist quickly reemerged, and it was even seen once more that the
Eucharist and preaching are not to be disjoined. . . . Accordingly, it was precisely
the branch of Protestantism tracing itself back to Luther that also developed a
strong cultic tradition, whose deepening in the liturgical spring of the twentieth
century made possible fruitful ecumenical encounters” (109–10).
4 Ibid., 109.

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David Power on the Priesthood
David Power’s The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition bemoans the
loss of a proper understanding of “sacrifice” in the early Church, a loss that
in his view led to the development of a strict distinction between the
ordained priesthood and the common priesthood, as well as to the deformation of the Church’s understanding of the Eucharist. In the early Church
of Justin Martyr,“sacrifice” in Christian worship meant not a bloody sacrifice, or a cultic (unbloody) reenactment of Jesus’ bloody sacrifice, but rather
a spiritual sacrifice, a “sacrifice” of praise and thanksgiving. In this way, the
pagan and Jewish emphasis on the need for the shedding of blood in the
worship of God was transcended. Early Christianity, Power notes, provided
a “way to God that eliminated cultic sacrifice from the picture and placed
the grateful memory of the cross in its stead and replaced the rites of sacrifice with the table of Christ’s body and blood.”5 By sharing a meal with the
risen Lord and giving thanks for what the Lord did on the Cross, the early
Christians indicated that pagan and Jewish bloody sacrifice, the need for
violence in the relationship with God, no longer had a place after Jesus.
Jesus’ death and resurrection made possible an entirely new way of relating
to God, namely, relating to the risen Lord in table fellowship and praise.
The contrast between friends sharing a transformative meal in a spirit
of rejoicing and priests slitting the throats of animals and sprinkling their
blood upon the altar is clear. Power remarks that by continuing to use the
term “sacrifice,” however, the early Christians risked that their metaphorical understanding of “sacrifice” (as a spiritual sacrifice of praise and
thanksgiving) would be misunderstood by later Christians. More importantly for the development of the priesthood, the early Christians risked
that the pagan and Jewish forms of cultic priesthood—built around ritual
slaying of animals so as, among other things, to purify the people before
God—would return in the Christian community. Where Eucharistic
worship is a meal between friends who are rejoicing and giving thanks
together, there need be no strict distinction between the friends; although
one may preside, nonetheless such presiding need require no cultic consecration (cf. Exodus 29) that sets apart priests for the service of God, and
that leads to a two-tiered relationship of the community with God. If all
the friends are equally equipped to offer thanksgiving at the meal, then all
the friends relate to God together, on the same level. By contrast, if some
of the friends are consecrated priests, then the other friends have to relate
to God in worship through the mediation of the priests.
5 David N. Power, O.M.I., The Eucharistic Mystery: Revitalizing the Tradition (New

York: Crossroad, 1992), 320.

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The latter situation, Power holds, came about due to negligence in the
early Christian community as regards the words “priest” and “sacrifice.”
He explains the original situation:“As is well known, in earliest times no
cultic vocabulary was attached to presiding at the Eucharist. The one
pronouncing the prayer and blessing the table was given only a functional
designation.Words like presider, supervisor, or bishop were enough to designate the officiant, just as they designated the ministerial role of leadership
in the church.”6 Such words referred to a function, but not to an ontological status that elevated some Christians above others in the relationship to God accomplished in worship. Unlike pagans and Jews, these early
Christians did not depend upon priestly, cultic intercession; Jesus had
removed this barrier. He did not remove the barrier, Power emphasizes,
by offering on the Cross the perfect sacrifice.This would be to place the
Cross in a continuum of sacrifice, so that it would differ only in degree
from other bloody sacrifices. Rather, in Jesus, an entirely new way of
relating to God becomes possible. Christ’s supreme love in sharing his life
with us, a life that overcomes death by his resurrection, makes us friends
of God, no longer burdened with the weight of offering bloody sacrifice
to God so as to propitiate and be acceptable to an alien God. Power states,
“All ritual offerings ceased because of the way in which the Word Incarnate had wrestled with humankind’s alienation from God in death and
sin.”7 Lives filled with love are henceforth the path of relationship with
God, rather than requiring the mediation of priestly and cultic sacrifice.
Thus, as Power observes, “The religious awe and power associated with
cultic sacrifice was transferred to the memorial Eucharist, to the death
remembered, to lives lived in obedience to this gospel, and to the witness
of the martyrs.”8
The pagan and Jewish habits, however, remained close to the surface,
and the early Christian effort to redefine the old words ultimately failed.
This failure occurred gradually, making the Eucharist a particularly
“poignant” instance of the tendency of human beings to reify what is
originally a metaphor.9 Power remarks, “When the presider was in time
called a priest, at first this meant nothing more than what was meant by
designating the prayer or the blessed gifts a sacrifice.”10 A “priest” was not
a cultic priest, no more than the “sacrifice” was a cultic sacrifice. On the
contrary, the words simply evoked metaphorically the “religious awe and
6 Ibid., 321.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid., 320.
10 Ibid., 321.

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power” that pagans and Jews had associated with the cultic worship; the
metaphors served to show that Christian worship had taken up and
fulfilled the goals of pagan and Jewish worship, but no longer with the
need for consecrated priests devoted to offering bloody intercessory
sacrifice to God. As Power puts it, “When Justin Martyr said that Christians did indeed have a sacrifice but that it was no other than the thanks
rendered for redemption in the death of Christ, his words recast religious
reality in a new mould.”11 Even when the priest’s sacramental action
began to be seen as action “ex persona Christi,” this meant solely that
Christ’s power, not the priest’s, infused the sacrament.12
What happened, in Power’s view, to finally overpower this fragile “new
mould” for religious thinking, this transformation of worship into a meal
of friendship and thanksgiving? By the fourth century the “new mould”
was showing severe strains:“Already in John Chrysostom’s relation of the
action of the bishop to Christ’s heavenly liturgy there is a tendency to
employ the words sacrifice and priest in a more mythical than metaphorical sense.”13 What had happened, Power says, was that the understanding
of the Eucharist as a memorial meal—“Do this in remembrance of me”
(Lk 22:19)—had changed.The act of remembering Jesus’ gift of his body
and blood now was understood to insert participants into Jesus’ very act
of sacrificial self-offering. Instead of a memorial, the Eucharist thus
became a representation or reenactment in the sense of enabling participants to share in Jesus’ very act. Instead of the linear horizon of time
within which participants remembered Jesus’ past actions with hope for
the future consummation of the kingdom, the Eucharist now inserted
time into eternity in such a way as to enable the present to participate,
ontologically, in the past and in the future. Power describes with dismay
the resulting collapse of the early Christian attempt to move beyond the
traditional religious framework of priestly sacrifice: “In this context, the
language of sacrifice assumed anew something of its cultic and mythic
character.The sacrificial act of Eucharist was again given propitiatory and
cultic power. It appealed anew to the cultic shedding of blood and the
offering of victims as a way of escaping evil and making retribution for
sin.”14 Once the Eucharist came to be understood as a cultic sacrifice,
Christian priesthood underwent a similar retrogression to the pagan and
Jewish model of consecrated intercessors standing between the people
and their (wrathful) God.
11 Ibid., 320.
12 Ibid., 321.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 321–22.

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Matthew Levering

According to Power, although this radical distortion of Christian
ecclesiology and worship has largely held sway for over 1600 years (in the
Catholic Church at least), the present moment offers a propitious time
for carrying forward once again the early Christians’ rejection of cultic
worship and cultic priesthood. He observes, “As things stand at present,
the language of priesthood and sacrifice needs to be once more
demythologized.”15 In order to accomplish this, he suggests, one needs
first to understand why the mythical understanding of the humankind’s
relationship to God, in which God is seen as requiring bloody sacrifice
from consecrated intercessors, has proven to be so resilient.The answer is
evident as regards rural people who depend upon the seasonal cycles of
life:“If the spirits were propitious, the cycles themselves were benevolent.
Angering spirits or showing them neglect was hazardous to the lifeworld.”16 Among rural Christians, this worldview was transposed so that
it seemed that Christ’s “suffering appeased God and so rendered the
surrounding world benevolent.”17 Cultic participation in Christ’s sacrificial Cross enabled such Christians to think that they had appeased God
and would therefore be blessed. Although it is less clear why the sacrificial worldview holds attraction even for modern, urban people, Power
speculates that the reason is that cultic sacrifice appears “to offer a means
of overcoming the disorder caused by injustice and division and offense
against rule.”18 Cultic sacrifice, on this view, reestablishes “order.”
How then can this notion be “demythologized,” in accord with early
Christian faith and practice? Power argues that once more the early
Christian “reversal” of the pagan and Jewish bloodletting must be heard.
(Holding that Judaism became less and less a cultic religion during the
time of the prophets, Power adds the caveat that he wishes to make his
point not “by way of comparison with Old Testament worship, which in
its own way is a story of reversal, but by way of contrast with what
appears to be a rather universal human instinct to want to ‘make sacrifice.’ ”)19 God is not a wrathful God who desires victims. Rather, God
loves us and desires us as friends with whom he shares fellowship. Since
everything is God’s gift, God is not so needy as to require that sacrificial
offerings from us. In faith, we can recognize God’s infinitely gifting love,
and we can thereby emerge from the cycle of cultic sacrifice. God need
not be propitiated at special times or through special acts of worship; all
15 Ibid., 322.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.

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God asks, instead, is that we share his love. Above all, God completely
renounces violence. Love is the opposite of violence, although love may
at times be called to non-violent martyrdom. As Power says, Christ
“reverses the attempt to set aside special times and acts of worship by
revealing that the people freed in Christ are themselves ‘sacrifice,’ that
true worship is a life lived in faith and according to the gospel and in the
Eucharist celebrated as such. In the cross of Christ believers have been
freed once and for all from evil powers, sin, and death.”20
For Power, then, sacrifice in its “demythologized” sense is a “language
of reversal.”21 What is sacrificed in Christ’s death is the old worldview of
pagans and Jews (the latter to varying degrees). Gone is the notion of the
God who seeks our offerings and the blood of victims. In its place, Christ
makes fully manifest the God of love, already active in the Old Testament.
This God wants us to join him in love and friendship.Whereas the God
of sacrifice emerges from our fears about our fragility in a world of
suffering and death, the God of love proclaims good gifts and resurrection from the dead. Communion in loving fellowship, rather than sacrifice to a needy God, constitutes the real import of Christ’s death. In this
“reversal of values,” the false god and the false religion are “sacrificed.”
Power states that Christ’s “love proclaimed reverses the order of religion
in which the judgment of God demands satisfaction to one in which a
communion with a forgiving and loving God is possible.To celebrate this
reversal, recourse can be had to some of the images other than sacrifice
that tradition supplies.”22 Among these images are God’s vindication of
the just and the release of those in bondage.
The resurrection, not the crucifixion, thus comes to stand at the heart
of Eucharistic theology. The Eucharist invites people to the liberation
from evil, sin, and death that God reveals and accomplishes through
Christ’s resurrection, and that forms the basis of our eschatological hope.
Against the view that the Eucharist represents and reenacts Christ’s
Passion, Power remarks that the Eucharist promotes the kingdom of God
“not by a mythic reenactment of a primordial sacred event, but by a
retrieval of the eschaton into the story. In the story, the image of Christ’s
return figures as judgment upon malevolence and as a reversal of
values.”23 Similarly the Eucharist, properly understood, should not for
Power inspire self-sacrifice or mortification, but rather should inspire
intensified communion in self-giving love and mercy. The Eucharist
20 Ibid., 322–23.
21 Ibid., 322 and 323.
22 Ibid., 323.
23 Ibid.

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stands for the justice of communion (the God of love) rather than the
justice of sacrifice (the God of fear). Power affirms, “It is the demythologization of sacrifice, the predication that relates it to Christ’s love, to
thanksgiving, to a life of obedience to the gospel, that offers a new paradigm for justice.”24 Christians thus should seek communion with each
other in love, confident that “[i]n the bread and wine of the people there
is the presence of a God who is revealed by being veiled under these
symbols, just as the divine love continues to be revealed under the veil of
Christ’s suffering.”25
Clearly, this vision has an impact on how one should understand the
Christian “priesthood.” Rather than a two-tiered system in which consecrated priests offer up Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of the people, the
community that gathers for the common meal of thanksgiving in
memory of Jesus enjoys an unqualified unity “in the communion of a
common table that knows of no discrimination.”26 The task of the leaders of the community is to make manifest this unity in the gospel as
received by the community and in the “common table.” God’s gifts of life
and healing are for everyone, and do not require sacrificial or cultic
priestly mediation. When Power discusses the priesthood, therefore, he
emphasizes its transparency to the community rather than anything that
sets it apart within the community. In his view,“The role of the priest has
too often been spoken of as a power received. It is properly understood
in what it says of the reality of church communion.”27 The priesthood
should be understood, in other words, not as a power to consecrate the
Eucharistic sacrifice in the divine worship, but as a service of communion:“Ordination to ministry in fact expresses the ecclesial reality of inner
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 324. Power later summarizes his understanding of God’s presence in the

Paschal mystery: “It is proclaimed in the story of the death and resurrection of
Jesus Christ that even in suffering the power of God prevails in the history of the
world. In his death, Jesus is presented as eschatological judge in whom the
triumph of God’s power will prevail. . . . In the paschal narrative, the hearers of
the word hear of their own future hope and expectation.The force of God’s love
prevails amid all the discontinuities of history and keeps hope alive.The memory
of all who suffered is taken into the memory of Christ.This dangerous memory
stands as judgment on human injustice and as promise of freedom. It liberates
from prejudice and fear. It offers a critique of human ideologies and institutions,
political and religious. In faith and anticipative memory, Christian peoples can
always give testimony to an alternative world, in which love and justice prevail”
(347).
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., 346.

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unity, Catholic communion, and apostolic foundation. The role of the
presider is to let speak and work those realities that presidency serves.”28
In particular, Power identifies three such realities: the power of the
word, the community’s apostolic witness, and the communion table.The
priest/presider serves “the power of the word” through the homily, which
is best understood as “a community action” rather than as the work of
the priest.29 The community’s apostolic witness possesses a preeminence
recognized, Power says, in the Didascalia’s “image of the bishop yielding
his chair to the beggar,” an image that should inspire like actions.30 Third,
the priest/presider’s role at the communion table finds true expression
“[w]hen the ritual performance of the communion rite is such as to
express the bonding in Christ of members with each other in the sharing of Christ’s own gift.”31 In these three realities, the existing communion of believers in Christ’s love, not priestly cultic achievement of such
communion through sharing in Christ’s sacrifice, is affirmed and celebrated by the priest/presider, whose role is strictly functional rather than
ontologically differentiated from other members of the community.
Joseph Ratzinger on the Priesthood:
Three Principles
How might one respond to Power’s position? As a beginning step, I think
that one can find in Joseph Ratzinger’s “On the Essence of the Priesthood” principles for challenging Power’s viewpoint. I will identify three
of them here.
1. Jesus Christ is the bearer of power to heal the world.
A fully developed Christology and soteriology, Ratzinger suggests,
finds in Jesus Christ both the newness of the gospel and the unity of
the Old and New Covenants.Thus it will not suffice to conceive of
Jesus “as the great ethical teacher who frees man from the constraints
of cultic ritual and places him directly before God with his personal
conscience.”32 Nor is Jesus the great liberator from institutional
oppression, notably that of priestly institutions. Rather, “In all the
Gospels, he appears as the bearer of a power received from God (Mt
7:29, 21:23; Mk 1:27, 11:28; Lk 20:2, 24:19, et passim).”33
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ratzinger, “On the Essence of the Priesthood,” 111–12.
33 Ibid., 112.

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2. The Gospels show that Jesus shares his power with the disciples/apostles.
By configuring the twelve as the new Israel, after his Resurrection
“Jesus confers his power upon the apostles and thereby makes their
office strictly parallel to his own mission. ‘He who receives you
receives me’, he says to the Twelve (Mt 10:40; cf. Lk 10:16; Jn
13:20).”34 Could this power simply be the power to teach and serve,
and thus a power that would not seem to require a hierarchical
priesthood among Christians? Against this view, Ratzinger argues
that the “power” is the power of divine gifting:“How could they [the
disciples/apostles] possibly say ‘I forgive you your sins’? How could
they conceivably say ‘This is my body’ or impose their hands and
pronounce the words ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’? Nothing that makes
up the activity of the apostles is the product of their own capabilities.”35 Since their power is one of divine gifting, it must be uniquely
received from God. It is received from God as a participation in Jesus’
own relation of total receptivity to the Father. As witness to this
point, Ratzinger cites two texts from the Gospel of John: “The Son
can do nothing of himself ” ( Jn 5:19, 30) and “Without me you can
do nothing” ( Jn 15:5). The disciples/apostles receive all from the
incarnate Son, just as the Son receives all from the Father. By receiving a share in Christ’s power of divine gifting—manifested in the
forgiveness of sins, the Eucharist, baptism, and so forth—the disciples/apostles enjoy a power that goes beyond, while including, teaching and service. This power to communicate the divine gifting is
rooted, as Christ’s power is, in radical receptivity, and so the power
itself is a “sacrament” received from Christ.
3. Paul makes clear the structure of gifting/receptivity that belongs to kenotic power.
In 2 Corinthians 5, Ratzinger notes, Paul emphasizes the connection
between his work and Christ’s:
All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself
and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, God was in
34 Ibid., 113. In this regard Ratzinger also cites other texts from the Gospels:“Perti-

nent here is the whole string of texts in which Jesus transmits his own ‘power’
(authority) to the disciples: Matthew 9:8; 10:1; 21:23; Mark 6:7; 13:34; Luke 4:6;
9:1; 10:19. For its part, the Fourth Gospel goes on to complete in especially clear
terms the parallelism between the form of Jesus’ mission and the form of the
mission of the apostles: ‘As the Father has sent me, so I send you’ (13:20; 17:18;
20:21)” (113–14).
35 Ibid., 114.

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Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal
through us.We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to
God. (2 Cor 5:18–20)

Paul’s “ministry of reconciliation” communicates to others the
reconciliation accomplished by Christ. Put another way, it communicates the power of Christ’s Cross. As Ratzinger says, “Since as a
historical happening it [the Cross] belongs to the past, it can be
appropriated only ‘sacramentally’, though Paul does not explain in
detail here how this takes place.”36 Most importantly, Paul’s power
itself is “sacramental”—that is, a participation in Christ’s power—
because it is a distinct ministry belonging to Paul as an ambassador,
or steward (1 Cor 4:1), of Christ. For Ratzinger, such apostolic power
serves to carry “forward that dialogical structure that pertains to the
essence of revelation,”37 by inscribing a structure of receptivity
within which the divine gifting operates.
Arguing that this dialogical structure of gifting/receptivity belongs
intrinsically to the Church, Ratzinger cites Paul’s farewell exhortation
to the “elders” (presbyteroi) of the Ephesian Church as recorded in Acts
20:28:“Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy
Spirit has made you guardians [episkopoi], to feed the church of the
Lord which he obtained with his own blood.”These “presbyter-bishops,” Ratzinger observes, “are successors but are not themselves apostles.”38 Their task, like Paul’s, is to communicate the divine gifting so
that the universal priesthood of Christ may be nourished.39
36 Ibid., 118.
37 Ibid., 120.
38 Ibid., 123.
39 Ratzinger presents this point by quoting Jean Colson’s words about the Old

Testament priesthood: “ ‘It is the chief function of the kohanim (i‘eqei~y) to keep
the people aware of its priestly character and to work so that it might live in
accordance with it, so that it might glorify God with its entire existence’ ” (127,
quoted from J. Colson, Ministre de Jésus-Christ ou le Sacerdoce de l’Évangile [Paris:
1966], 185). Ratzinger comments on this quotation: “This statement is unmistakably close to the already-cited formula in which Paul speaks of his mission as
leitourgos of Jesus Christ; the only difference is that the dynamic, missionary character of this expression now comes much more clearly to light as a consequence
of the bursting open of the boundaries of Israel by the Cross of Christ.The ultimate end of all New Testament liturgy and of all priestly ministry is to make the
world as a whole a temple and a sacrificial offering for God” (127).

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Concluding Reflections
What then are the main differences between Ratzinger’s and Power’s
positions? First, as regards Jesus Christ, Power understands him as the one
who liberates human beings from the perceived need to placate an alienated god through sacrificial worship. Jesus reveals instead that God desires
to unite us to himself in a shared celebratory meal. By contrast, Ratzinger
denies that Jesus is primarily a teacher who frees human beings from the
irrationalities of cultic worship. For Ratzinger, Jesus bears life-changing
power from the Father. Jesus’ power changes the world through his total
self-giving on the Cross. His power, when applied to us, changes us from
self-centered to self-giving. Second, as regards Jesus’ sharing of his power
with the disciples/apostles, Power argues that all human beings are equal
in the celebratory meal, a meal that exposes God’s triumphant and everpresent love. Since God does not need cultic propitiation, there is no
need for anything but a functional distinction between the presider at the
meal and the other partakers. For his part, Ratzinger holds that Jesus’
sharing of his power with his disciples/apostles ontologically changes
them and gives them a distinct role in the community. They receive a
power that is beyond merely human capacities, a power to give the divine
gift.Third, as regards the witness of Paul, Power emphasizes that the apostolic generation preached the triumph of love over fear and the recognition that everything is God’s gift.There is thus no need for setting apart
special acts of worship.We worship rightly when, freed from the myth of
an alienated God, we recognize that God’s gifting takes place all around
us. Ratzinger’s position again is quite different. He holds that Paul, with
the other apostles, receives a “ministry of reconciliation” in which Paul
serves as a “steward” of the power of divine gifting.The ecclesial hierarchy instantiates a structure of gifting and receptivity (a participation in
the Son’s relation to the Father) that is the opposite of the sinful human
tendency to claim autonomous self-construction and self-sufficiency.
In short, Ratzinger’s three principles suggest a path toward reclaiming
the theology of the cultic priesthood.The first step is to affirm that Jesus’
Pasch, as the supreme manifestation of his “power” from the Father in the
Holy Spirit, brings about a real change in the relationship of human
beings to God, rather than simply revealing God’s unchanging love.The
second step is to identify the apostles as receiving an ontological share in
Jesus’ Paschal “power” that enables them to bestow Jesus’ sanctifying gifts
upon the whole community. The third step affirms that Jesus thereby
constitutes a community built upon a structure of gifting/receptivity,
which reverses the human sinful desire for autonomous self-sufficiency.

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By contrast to Power’s depiction of Jesus as the revealer of the
omnipresence of God’s beneficent gifting, Ratzinger presents Jesus as
answering, by the power of his embodied self-giving love, the need of
fallen human beings to be liberated from their sinful pride and rejection
of God. Jesus establishes hierarchical sacramental mediation in his Church
because human beings need more than a celebratory meal that assures
them of the omnipresence of God’s love. Given the sinful tendency to
cleave to self, human beings require ongoing formation in receptivity to
Jesus’ healing and elevating power. For Ratzinger, hierarchical sacramental mediation exists to form human beings in this cruciform image of
radical receptivity. Ratzinger’s approach thus provides a model for a
N&V
renewed theology of Catholic priesthood.

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285

Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict XVI,
on Biblical Interpretation:
Two Leading Principles
F RANCIS M ARTIN
John Paul II Cultural Center
Washington, DC

T HE BASIC principles governing Joseph Ratzinger’s understanding of
biblical hermeneutics can be reduced to two under which many other
aspects of his approach can be subsumed. In this short study of his teaching on the understanding of the Bible, I will concentrate on these two
principles, which can be expressed as: (1) The subject of biblical interpretation is the Church, the Whole Christ; (2) Scripture is a privileged
instrument of Divine Revelation, which means that it mediates supernatural knowledge to those who approach it with faith. In this essay I will
try to develop briefly the thinking of Benedict XVI on these two principles. In each case I will describe his position and then reflect on it theologically and philosophically. I offer this as a contribution that can help
elucidate his thought as well as honor a theologian who has striven his
whole life long to serve Jesus, the Word of God.
The First Principle: The Subject of Interpretation
A Brief Presentation of Joseph Ratzinger’s Thought
In concluding his address of May 10, 2003, commemorating the onehundredth anniversary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Cardinal
Ratzinger, its president, made the following statement that expresses both
principles I have isolated for consideration in this essay:

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Faith itself is a way of knowing.Wanting to set it aside does not produce
pure objectivity, but comprises a point of view which excludes a particular perspective while not wanting to take into account the accompanying conditions of the chosen point of view. If one takes into account,
however, that the Sacred Scriptures come from God through a subject
which lives continually—the pilgrim people of God—then it becomes
clear rationally as well that this subject has something to say about the
understanding of the book.1

In another essay dedicated to “The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity
of Theology,” Ratzinger further discusses the Church as the subject of
theology thus opening up its interior mystery:
The Church, moreover, is not an abstract principle but a living subject
possessing a concrete content.This subject is by nature greater than any
individual person, indeed than any single generation. Faith is always
participation in a totality and, precisely in this way, conducts the
believer to a new breadth of freedom. On the other hand, the Church
is not an intangible spiritual realm in which everyone can pick what
suits him. She is endowed with a concreteness rooted in the binding
Word of faith. And she is a living voice which pronounces itself in the
organs of faith. . . .
But how exciting exegesis becomes when it dares to read the Bible
as a whole. If the Bible originates from the one subject formed by the
people of God and, through it, from the divine subject Himself, then it
speaks of the present. . . . Without the living subject, either one must
absolutize the letter, or else it vanishes into indefiniteness.2

“Subject” as the term is being used here may be defined as “the locus of
agential receptivity and active engagement.” Employed this way the
primary reference must be to a person, predicated analogously of divine
and human persons.3 There is also the use of the term to apply to collective entities as “subjects,” the state, a family, a race, and so forth, which can
be loci of receptivity and engagement but whose unity is found in a bond
that is external to the persons who make it up.There is, however, a third
way of being a subject, and this is the way of the Church, the Body of
1 “Relationship Between Magisterium and Exegetes,” address to the Pontifical

Biblical Commission, L’Osservatore Romano (English), July 23, 2003.
2 Joseph Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission of Theology: Essays to Orient Theology in

Today’s Debates, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 61,
64–65.
3 For a brief but clear treatment of “person” in theological predication, see Josef
Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17
(1990): 439–54.

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Christ that is neither a person, defined as “the incommunicably proper
existence of spiritual nature,”4 nor a collectivity. In Thomas Aquinas’s
opinion, the Church, which is the Mystical Body of Christ, may be
considered as a “quasi person” united to Christ, its Head.5 It is this
“mystical person” that is the subject of Revelation and its interpreter.
In a 1997 essay Joseph Ratzinger addressed the issues of Revelation,
Christology, the role of office in the Church, and the notion of the
Church as subject:6
For the believer, however, the Church is not a sociological subject
created by human agreement, but a truly new subject called into being
by the Word and in the Holy Spirit; and precisely for that reason, the
Church herself overcomes the seemingly insurmountable confines of
human subjectivity by putting man in contact with the ground of reality which is prior to him.7
The Second Vatican Council teaches the historical continuity
between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church in the
now-famous paragraph 8 of Lumen gentium: “This Church constituted
and organized as a society in the present world subsists [subsistit] in the
Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him, although outside of her structure, many
elements can be found of sanctification and truth which, as gifts properly belonging to the Church of Christ, impel toward catholic unity.”8
If belief “in the body” of the Church is taken away, the Church’s
concrete claims regarding the content of the faith disappear along with
her bodiliness. . . . Subsistere is a special case of esse. It refers to existence
in the form of an individual subject.That is exactly what it means here.
The council wanted to say that the Church of Jesus Christ, as a
concrete subject in the world, is found in the Catholic Church.9
4 “Spiritualis naturae incommunicabilis existentia.” Richard of St.Victor, cited in

ibid., 449.
5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae III, q. 49, c.: “Sicut enim naturale corpus est

unum, ex membrorum diversitate consistens, ita tota Ecclesia, quae est mysticum
corpus Christi, computatur quasi una persona cum suo capite, quod est Christus.” (ST III, q. 19, a. 4, c.: “Grace was in Christ, . . . not simply as in an individual man, but as in the Head of the whole Church, to whom all are united as
members to the head, forming a single mystical person.” Also, ST III, q. 48, a. 2,
ad 1: “The head and members form as it were a single mystical person.”
6 Joseph Ratzinger,“Deus Locutus Est Nobis in Filio: Some Reflections on Subjectivity, Christology, and the Church,” in Proclaiming the Truth of Jesus Christ: Papers
from the Vallombrosa Meeting (Washington, DC: United States Conference of
Catholic Bishops, 2000).
7 Ibid., 23.
8 Ibid., 24.
9 Ibid., 27.

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In the same essay Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to state that in the Catholic
Church the subsistence of the one subject of the Church is the work of
God alone, and it continues to be true “despite the discrediting failures
of the members of the Church.”10 The sin and disunity of the Church
hinders and obscures Christ’s action in his body, namely unity of faith,
which speaks both to the faith by which one believes and faith as that
which is believed. As people mature in their progressive and personal
faith assimilation to Christ, the shadows of their personality give way to
the light of truth and the energy by which they yield and cling to
revealed reality becomes more personal and less idiosyncratic. This is a
process that is never complete but it does bring about a deep spiritual
unity in those who are being moved by the same Spirit.The result is that
there is unity as well at the meeting point of faith, that is, God himself
and a knowledge of his plan of salvation.11
The Church is a mystical Person, a mystery as well as an agent. The
Scriptures have been entrusted to the Church as a source of life, the life
that consists of a transforming knowledge of Jesus Christ,“the leader and
perfecter of faith” (Heb 12:2). Such a faith vision is expressed by Thomas
Aquinas, who, while he does not use the word “subject,” expressed the
same truth:“The formal objective of faith is the First Truth as this is made
known [manifestatur] in Sacred Scripture and in the teaching of the
Church which proceeds from the First Truth” (ST II–II, q. 5, a. 3, c). Or
again in the same question, “Faith adheres to all the articles of faith
because of one reason [medium], namely because of the First Truth
proposed to us in the Scriptures understood rightly according to the
teaching of the Church [secundum doctrinam Ecclesiae]” (ST II–II, q. 5, a.
3, ad 2). And to cite but one more text:“The formal role [ratio] of object
in faith is the First Truth made known through the teaching of the
Church” (De caritate, q. 13, ad 6).
In the three texts from St.Thomas we have just seen, we may note that
the Church is described as the active, that is, the mediating subject of Revelation. Before continuing to consider this aspect in the thinking of Joseph
Ratzinger, we should consider his understanding of a prior truth, namely,
that of the Church as receptive subject of Revelation. Joseph Ratzinger
approaches this question primarily in terms of the relation between Reve10 Ibid., 28.
11 See Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum, no. 2: “It pleased God in his goodness and

wisdom to reveal Himself and to make known the mystery of his will (see Eph
1:9) by which men have access in the Holy Spirit to the Father, through Christ,
the Word of God made flesh, and become sharers in the divine nature (see Eph
2:18; 2 Pet 1:14).”

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lation, Scripture, and Tradition.12 In his 1964 study, published along with a
study by Karl Rahner, Ratzinger considers the question in just these terms,
proceeding in part by a series of five “theses.”13
The first thesis, “Revelation and Scripture,” begins by stating that the
fact that “tradition” exists derives from the non-identity of “Revelation”
and “Scripture.”14 The non-identity lies in the fact that Revelation is
more than Scripture to the extent that the reality exceeds its verbal
expression, and also because there can be Scripture without Revelation
as when a non-believer reads Scripture.“For Revelation always and only
becomes a reality when there is faith. . . . It is a living reality which calls
for the living man as the location of its presence.”15 Ratzinger expresses
the same principle elsewhere by saying that for St. Bonaventure,“Revelatio refers not to the letter of Scripture, but to the understanding of the
letter; and this understanding can be increased.”16
In the second thesis Ratzinger discusses the Old and New Covenants
and the writings of each stage, maintaining that for the New Testament
“Scripture” refers to the Old Testament.This position probably needs to
be nuanced in the light of some recent studies that point to indications
that the Gospel writers were aware of continuing the Scriptures.17
Nevertheless, it is still true that the Old Testament “can only subsist
within the spiritual reality of Jesus Christ.”18 The third thesis examines“Christ, the Revelation of God,” which means that “The actual reality which occurs in Christian Revelation is nothing and no other that
Christ himself.”19 Thus, “faith is equivalent to the indwelling Christ”20
(this is expressed in Eph 3:17), which implies that by faith “the individual encounters Christ and in him enters the sphere of influence of his
12 This is, in fact, the title of an article he wrote in 1958: Joseph Ratzinger,“Offen-

barung–Schrift–Überlieferung,” Trierer theologische Zeitschrift 67 (1958): 13–27.
13 Joseph Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” in idem, Revelation and Tradition

(Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1966).
14 Ibid., 35.
15 Ibid., 36.
16 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes

(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971, 1989), 68.
17 D. Moody Smith,“When Did the Gospels Become Scripture?” Journal of Biblical

Literature 119 (2000): 3–20; Francis Moloney,“The Gospel of John as Scripture,”
Catholic Biblical Quarterly 67 (2005): 454–68.
18 Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 39.
19 Ibid., 40.
20 This statement can find a remarkable echo in the work of some Lutheran theologians who maintain that this is Luther’s position as well. See Karl Braaten and
Robert Jenson, eds., Union with Christ: The New Finnish Interpretation of Luther
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998).

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saving power.”21 On a broader scale it also means that the Pauline expression “Body of Christ”
implies that the community of the faithful, the Church, represents
Christ’s continued abiding in this world in order to gather men into, and
make them share, his mighty presence. . . . It also follows that the presence of Revelation is essentially connected with the two realities “faith”
and “Church,” which themselves, as is now clear, are closely connected.22

The fourth and most fully developed thesis has to do with “the nature
of tradition.” The basic principle stems from the fact that the reality of
Revelation is in excess (Überhang) of Scripture.23 Revelation itself, the
explicitation of the Christ reality, has its double yet single enduring presence in faith and in the Church; and it occurs in the preaching that is an
unfolding of what is presented, first in the Old Testament and then in the
New Testament: It is also an interpretation of the Christ-event itself on the
basis of the Pneuma.“But it is precisely in this Church that Christ is living
and present; in the Church which is his Body in which his Spirit is
active.”24 The move to include the Gentiles, thus moving from “Kingdom” to “Church,”“opened out that new interpretation of the message of
Christ which is the essential message of the Church.”25 After discussing
the “Old Testament theology of the Old Testament” (a series of new readings of older texts),26 the “New Testament theology of the Old Testament”
(basically its “spiritual sense”),27 and the “New Testament theology of the
New Testament” (established by looking at successive expressions of the
Mystery), Ratzinger arrives at what he calls the “Church theology of the
New Testament.” By this latter he means the continuation of that successive process already begun in the New Testament itself but now no longer
21 Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 41.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 45.
24 Ibid., 42.
25 Ibid. For an appreciation of this initiative of the Holy Spirit, see F. Bovon, De Voca-

tione Gentium: Histoire de l’interprétation d’Act. 10:1–11:18 dans les six premiers siècles,
vol. 8 of Beiträge zur Geschichte der biblischen Exegese (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck],
1967); and Brant Pitre, Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile: Restoration Eschatology and the Origin of the Atonement (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck/Grand Rapids, MI:
Baker Academic, 2005).
26 For an excellent account of this procedure, see Michael Fishbane, Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
27 See Francis Martin,“The Spiritual Sense (Sensus Spiritualis) of Sacred Scripture,”
in Sacred Scripture:The Disclosure of the Word, Francis Martin (Naples, FL: Sapientia
Press, 2006).

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canonical. Ratzinger calls this “dogmatic theology” and then goes on to
specify that “in a precise sense we could designate only dogma as such as
the Church’s theology of the New Testament.”28
Finally, the essay develops here the three “sources” (Wurzeln) of tradition.The first we have already seen:The excess of the reality of Revelation over Scripture. The second is: “The specific character of New
Testament Revelation as pneuma as opposed to gramma and, consequently,
what one might call in Bultmann’s terminology the impossibility of
objectifying it.”29 From this comes the fact that the Rule of Faith has a
guiding priority in interpretation.The return to this position, notably on
the part of several evangelical scholars, challenges the opinion that the
Scriptures can be understood from within any context provided that the
correct methods are rigorously applied. This challenge is multiform. It
comes from those who appeal to the Rule of Faith as the ultimate, interpretive norm,30 or more generally, to the role of the Holy Spirit in the
Church,31 or finally to the multiform presence of the Word in the
Church.32 The third source is given as:
The character of the Christ-event as present and the authoritative enduring presence of Christ’s Spirit in his Body the Church and, connected
with this, the authority to interpret Christ yesterday in relation to Christ
today, the origin of which we have observed in the Church’s reinterpretation by the apostles of the message of the kingdom.33

Ratzinger goes on to enumerate the “levels” of tradition:
1. the original paradosis made by the Father of his Son who continues
this action as judgment and gift of salvation and remains in the whole
of his mystery in the Church. This superabundant tradition remains
“the decisive fundamental reality which is antecedent to all particular
28 Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 45.
29 Ibid.
30 For example, see Robert W. Wall, “Reading the Bible from Within Our Tradi-

tions:The ‘Rule of Faith’ in Theological Hermeneutics,” in Between Two Horizons:
Spanning New Testament Studies and Systematic Theology, eds. Joel B. Green and
Max Turner (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 88–107.
31 David S.Yeago, “The Bible,The Church, and the Scriptures: Biblical Inspiration
and Interpretation Revisited,” in Knowing the Triune God:The Work of the Spirit in
the Practices of the Church, ed. James J. Buckley and David S.Yeago (Grand Rapids:
Eerdmans, 2001), 49–93.
32 Leo Scheffczyk,“Sacred Scripture: God’s Word and the Church’s Word,” Communio 28 (2001): 26–41.
33 Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 45.

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expressions of it, even those of Scripture, and which represents what
in fact what has been handed down.”34
2. The presence in faith of the indwelling Christ.
3. The organ of tradition is the authority of the Church, that is, those
who have authority within it:These are the “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers” spoken of in Ephesians 4:11 whose
authority is diverse but real.
4. The expression of tradition as the Rule of Faith.
Finally, we must consider exegesis, or interpretation, whose basic principle is that “Revelation becomes present through preaching” and therefore that “tradition by its very nature is always interpretation, does not
exist independently, but only as exposition, interpretation ‘according to
the scriptures.’ ”35 In another place, commenting on Dei Verbum, Joseph
Ratzinger has this to say about tradition:
We can see here how little intellectualism and doctrinalism are able to
comprehend the nature of Revelation which is not concerned with
talking about something that is quite external to the person, but with
the realization of the existence of man, with the relation of the human
“I” to the divine “thou,” so that the purpose of this dialogue is ultimately not information but unity and transformation.36

This must, of course, be balanced by the insistence that the Church’s
witness is linked to an exegesis that “investigates the literal sense, and so
guards the link with the sarx of the Logos in opposition to all gnosis . . .
defending the sarx of history against the caprice of gnosis which perpetually seeks to establish its own autonomy.”37 The Church performs this
function in virtue of the right of prescriptio: The Church is the rightful
owner of Scripture (Tertullian).This raises the issue of the delicate balance
between the Rule of Faith, and the historically ascertainable literal sense
of Scripture in confrontation with those types of gnosis that seek either to
claim a “higher” knowledge on the basis of modern historical study or to
bypass such historical work in the name of a “spiritual” understanding.
The key is a restored understanding of human cognition and of faith as a
34 Ibid.
35 Ibid., 47.
36 Joseph Ratzinger, “Revelation Itself,” commentary on chapter 1 of the Dogmatic

Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, in Commentary on the Documents of
Vatican II, vol. 3, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 175.
37 Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 48, 49.

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way of knowing. Some approaches to this were made by Dei Verbum, but
the crucial question of how the Church uses Scripture to correct the
exuberances of “tradition” has yet to be thoroughly considered.38
The Church as “I”
There is, moreover, one other aspect of the Church as subject that must
be considered here, and that is the relation between the individual “I” and
the “I” of the Whole Christ. Perhaps the best place to appreciate this
aspect of Ratzinger’s thought is the essay we have considered already:
“The Spiritual Basis and Ecclesial Identity of Theology.”39 In that essay,
the starting point is Galatians 2:20,“It is no longer I who live, but Christ
who lives in me,” whose meaning is expanded as follows:
It is a death-event. In other words, it is an exchange of the old subject
for another. The “I” ceases to be an autonomous subject standing in
itself. It is snatched away from itself and fitted into a new subject.The
“I” is not simply submerged, but it must really release its grip on itself
in order then to receive itself anew in and together with a new “I.”40

The new “I” spoken of here is the una persona mystica. It is the Christ
who, through baptism, is “put on” with the result that now “[t]here is
neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is not male
and female, for you are all one [singular masculine] in Christ” (Gal 3:8).
This “one man” can be called “the Christ”: “For just as the body is one
and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many,
are one body, so it is with the Christ” (1 Cor 12:2, see also 1:13). This
one man both possesses and receives the form (typos) of teaching to
which we are entrusted and to which we give obedience from the heart
(Rom 6:17). Jesus Christ is the one who as God incarnate is the Source
of the Body’s life, he is the one who animates our prayer and understanding, and who prays for us. As Augustine declares:
38 Though it is not our matter here, it is worthwhile pointing out that Ratzinger

appreciates the fact that Vatican II did not advance the discussion as to how tradition can be criticized: “On this point Vatican II has unfortunately not made any
progress, but more or less has ignored the whole question of the criticism of
tradition.” (Ratzinger, “Revelation Itself,” 185). In another study, I have tried to
point out that, in fact,Vatican II did redirect tradition but without offering any
theoretical basis. See “Dei Verbum: Revelation and Its Transmission” to appear in
Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering
(Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
39 In Ratzinger, The Nature and Mission, 45–72.
40 Ibid., 51.

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When we speak to God, praying, we do not separate the Son from Him;
and when the Body of the Son prays, it does not separate its head from
itself.Thus it is he, the one Savior of his Body, our Lord Jesus Christ, the
Son of God, who prays for us and prays in us and is prayed to by us. He
prays for us as our priest, he prays in us as our Head, he is prayed to by us
as our God. Let us then, recognize our voice in his and his voice in ours.41

In bringing this section to a close, I wish to give here a striking paragraph, found as the concluding statement to the remarkable study by
Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ. It is, as far as I can judge, a perfectly
adequate way of expressing Joseph Ratzinger’s understanding of the
Church, and the Church as the subject of biblical understanding:
The message is this: in the Church, which is the continuation of Christ,
there exists between the Incarnate Word and each Christian more than
any bond of love, however ardent, more than relation of resemblance,
however close, more than the bond of total dependence that binds to
their one Savior all men who have received the grace of pardon and
sanctification. There is something more than the union of subjects to
any king, more than the insecure incorporation of members in an
organism, more than the closest moral union. There is a “physical”
union, we should say, if the very term itself did not appear to place this
bond in the category of mere natural unions. At all events it is a real,
ontological union, or, since the traditional names are still the best, it is
a mystical, transcendent, supernatural union whose unity and reality
exceed our powers of expression; it is a union that God alone can make
us understand, as He alone was able to bring it into being.42

The Church as Subject in the Letter to the Ephesians
It will be useful at this point to turn briefly to a New Testament writing
that speaks of the Church, the Body of Christ, in terms that can reinforce
the teaching of Joseph Ratzinger and help us to understand the Church
as a knowing subject. I will concentrate on the first sixteen verses of chapter 4 of the Letter to the Ephesians since it is there particularly that we
can be instructed on the intimate relation between Revelation and unity.
Ephesians 4:7–16
This passage is the second paragraph in a major section (Eph 4:1–6:20)
titled by Rudolf Schnackenburg,“Realising Christian Existence in Church
41 In Psalm 85, 1 (Corpus Christianorum Latinorum 39, 1176 [Turnholt: Brepols,

1956]).
42 Emile Mersch, The Whole Christ: The Historical Development of the Doctrine of the

Mystical Body in Scripture and Tradition, trans. John R. Kelly (Milwaukee: Bruce,
1938), 584.

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and World.”43 The passage we are going to consider (4:1–16) is titled “The
Church as the Sphere of Christian Existence.” Its first part (4:1–6) addresses
the urgent question of Church unity, which it ultimately grounds in the
Trinity itself.The second part, which we will reflect upon (4:7–16), speaks
of the variety of gifts bestowed on the Body by the ascended Christ, then
of the danger of division as well as its remedy: arriving “at the unity of faith
and knowledge of the Son of God, unto the Perfect Man, unto the measure of the stature of the Fullness of Christ” (v. 13).
Ephesians 4:7–16 applies the Trinitarian foundation of Church unity,
set forth in Ephesians 4:1–6, to the multiplicity of gifts in a way similar
to the development in 1 Corinthians 12:7–30. However the accent here
is on the resurrected Christ being the source of the gifts and his action
in bringing about unity through joining all believers more closely to
himself. The text begins with a principle: “To each of us is given grace
according to the measure of the gift of Christ” (v. 7). It goes on to unveil
for us the source of that donation of life-giving activity:
Therefore it says:“Going up to the height, he captured captives, he gave
gifts to men.” This, “he went up,” what is it except that he also
descended to the lower part of the earth? The one who descended is
also the one who went up, above all the heavens, that he might fill all
things. (vv. 8–10)

The “grace” mentioned in the enunciation of the principle, it is generally agreed, refers to those special graced endowments given to each
believer for the building of the Body. They are distributed by Christ
himself according to the measure he wills. In order to explicate how
Christ distributes these and other blessings, Paul appeals to the authority
and fruitfulness of the transformed Christ, now “divinized” in his humanity by the resurrecting power of the Father: “the surpassing greatness of
his power, for us the believers, in keeping with the operation of the might
of his strength which he carried out in Christ, raising him from the dead
and seating him at his right hand in heaven” (Eph 1:19–20).We celebrate
this ineffable mystery on the feast of the Ascension.44
43 Rudolf Schnackenburg, The Epistle to the Ephesians: A Commentary, trans. Helen

Heron (Edinburgh:T&T Clark, 1991), 5.
44 For a study of the mystery of the humanity of Christ now present to God in a

new way, see Pierre Benoit, “The Ascension,” in idem, Jesus and the Gospel, vol.
1 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1973). For another understanding of this text,
see W. Hall Harris, The Descent of Christ: Ephesians 4:7–11 and Traditional Hebrew
Imagery (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1996).

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Paul presents the risen Jesus as the source of “grace” in the Church by
adapting a Jewish interpretation of Psalm 68:19.The notion of ascending
on high and thus being able to confer gifts on men is contained explicitly
in the targum on this psalm verse:“You ascended the firmament, prophet
Moses, you took captivity captive, you learned the words of the law; you
gave them as gifts to the sons of man.”
The actual text of the targum of the Psalms is late, probably fourth or
fifth century, but some form of this targum must have been known to Paul
who cites it nearly verbatim. Moreover, a text that so perfectly corresponds to the Christian use made of it by Paul and other parts of the New
Testament can hardly have been forged or even retained by Judaism unless
it were already firmly fixed in the tradition.45 The tradition concerning
Moses going up to heaven to receive the law is a development of the biblical notice (Ex 19, 32, 32–34) that relates Moses’ special meetings with God
that resulted in his coming down from the mountain with the gift of the
law.46 It is this tradition that forms the basis for the targumic text just
cited, and that is utilized in Romans 10:6–8.The same image lies behind
Acts 2:33 whose theme is close to that here in Ephesians:“Exalted to the
right hand of God, receiving the promise, the Holy Spirit, from the Father,
he poured him out: that is what you see and hear.”
The explanation of the use of this Jewish tradition is given now by
Paul, using the two key words “ascend” and “descend.” Jesus’ ascension
according to Paul is not from the foot of a mountain, but from the abode
of the dead:“[W]hat is it except that he also descended to the lower part
of the earth?” (Eph 4:9).Thus is it that the ascension is not to the top of
a mountain but “above all the heavens” (v. 10).The consequence is not a
carrying back of the gift of the Torah but “that he might fill all things”
μ
(v. 10). This allusion to the theme of pleroma,
refers to the fact that in
Ephesians, the Church, the Body of Christ, is the recipient of the divinizing activity of the Risen Christ: It is the place of union and action. In
45 For instance, TgNe of Dt 30, 12–14, reads: “The law is not in the heavens, that

one should say: Would that we had one like Moses the prophet who go up to
heaven and fetch it for us, and make us hear the commandments that we might
do them. Nor is the law beyond the great sea that one should say:Would that we
had one like Jonah the prophet who descend into the great sea and bring up the
law for us, and make us hear the commandments that we might do them. For
the word is very near to you, in the word of your mouths and in your hearts,
that you may do it” (compare Rom 10:5–10).
46 There are some developments of this tradition, in which it is said that God
“inclined the heavens and came down” to speak to Moses (See Pseudo-Philo,
Biblical Antiquities, 15, 6; 4 Esd 3:18).

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brief it is the subject, the receiver of and active participant in, Christ’s
action as both God and man.
And it is he who gave some [to be] apostles, some [to be] prophets,
some [to be] evangelists, some [to be] pastors and teachers, with a view
to equipping the holy ones for the work of service, for the building of
the Body of Christ until we all arrive at the unity of faith and knowledge of the Son of God, unto the Perfect Man, unto the measure of the
stature of the Fullness of Christ.
So that we might be children no longer, wave-tossed and carried
along by every wind of teaching through men’s trickery, in [their]
cunning ability for the scheming of error. Rather, being truthful in
love, let us in every way grow unto him who is the Head, Christ; from
whom the whole Body being fitted together and connected through
every joint which gives it support, in keeping with the effective action,
done in the measure of each individual part, is bringing about the
growth of the Body, for its own upbuilding in love. (Eph 4:11–16)

The Graces Conferred by Christ
It is extremely important to note that the five “graces” mentioned in
Ephesians 4:11 all have to do with what Joseph Ratzinger calls “the organs
of faith”: apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers.The object of
these ministries is “to equip the holy ones for the work of service,” each
person having their own endowment “for the building of the Body of
Christ.”47 Thus, from the outset there is order in the Body of Christ and
ministerial gifts that have a directive role in regard to the activity of the
whole Body.This “building” activity of the risen Christ continues until we
all arrive at the unity of faith; the knowledge of the Son of God; the
Perfect Man, unto the measure of the stature of the Fullness of Christ.This
corresponds to the description in Dei Verbum, article 8, which, as we have
seen describes the “progress” of the Apostolic Tradition taking place by
contemplation, study, and experience on the part of the whole Church,
and the particular role of the successors of the apostles.
The atmosphere created by the unity of faith produces the second
effect: “knowledge of the Son of God.” The process of coming to this
knowledge on both a personal and ecclesiastical level is traced out in the
47 Several commentators wish to see in the notion of “equipping” and “building” an

extension of the original ministry of the five expressly named leaders rather than
a description of the effect of their activity in regard to the rest of the community.
This is not necessary, makes it difficult to understand why the author says that this
activity continues “until we all arrive . . . ,” and renders the expression in verse 16,
that the Body is “building itself up in love,” difficult to understand.

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concluding lines of the first part of the letter, Ephesians 3:14–21, especially
the first six verses in which Paul speak of his prayer to:
The Father from whom every family, in heaven and on earth, is named,
that he give to you, in keeping with the riches of his glory, to be
strengthened with power through his Spirit unto the inner man; that
Christ dwell, through faith, in your hearts, rooted and grounded in
love; so that you may be strong enough to comprehend, with all the
holy ones, what [is] the width and length and height and depth; thus to
know the love of Christ surpassing knowledge, that you may be filled
unto all the Fullness of God. (Eph 3:14–19)

The prayer is to the Father from whom every family is named, accenting his all powerful will to confer life.The object of the prayer is twofold:
that we be strengthened interiorly48 by the power of the Holy Spirit, and
that Christ dwell in our hearts by faith; thus enabling us to be rooted and
grounded in love.The passage speaks of “power” because this is the means
by which our wounded and weak nature is actually transformed as we
yield to the interior action of the Holy Spirit.As Cardinal Ratzinger says:
“It is here that the poles of human subjectivity and the uniqueness of the
person of Christ are resolved in the concrete subject of the Church.”49
A further goal of the action of the holy ones mentioned in Ephesians
4:13 is that we, as Church, arrive at being “the Perfect Man, unto the
measure of the stature of the Fullness of Christ.” In terms of the prayer
in Ephesians 3:19, it means that we come to know the love of Christ
surpassing knowledge and to be filled unto all the Fullness of God. The
phrase in Ephesians 4:13, “the stature of the Fullness of Christ,” refers to
becoming fully Church, an eschatological reality when the Church will
receive all the divine life and gifts that flow into it from its Head, Christ.
The phrase in Ephesians 3:19, “be filled unto all the Fullness of God”
looks at the same reality from the viewpoint of Christ himself who is “the
Fullness of God,” the divine and infinite recipient of the gift the Father
makes of himself within the life of the Trinity. Now, by the mystery of
the incarnation, Jesus Christ himself is in some mysterious way the Fullμ
ness (Pleroma)
of the Father, as the one in whom the Ple μroma of the Deity
dwells bodily (Col 2:9), and the Church, his Body, is the created recipient of that divine life.
The final two verses of this section portray, on the other hand, the role
of truth in bringing the whole Church to maturity.
48 A determination of the exact meaning of eso μ anthro μpos exceeds our needs in this

present context.
49 Ratzinger, “Deus Locutus Est,” 23.

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Rather, being truthful in love, let us in every way grow unto him who
is the Head, Christ; from whom the whole Body being fitted together
and brought into connection, through every sustaining juncture
according to the action, [done] in the measure of each individual part,
is bringing about the growth of this [same] Body, unto the building of
itself up in love. (Eph 4:15–16)

μ
The participle aletheuontes,
translated as “being truthful,” refers on one level
to truthful speech and action that flows from union with Christ. It is here
contrasted with the falsehood that is keeping Christians immature and
μ
divided.The full meaning of the phrase aletheuontes
en agape μ refers to a deep
50
yielding to “the truth in Jesus” (Eph 4:21), and letting him actually
become the living source of our energy and life.The nature of that activity
is now described by a partial comparison between the activity of the head
in a human body, as this was then understood, and the action of Christ as
head of his Body. Going beyond the physiology of the day Paul speaks of a
causality that flows from the risen Christ (see already Phil 3:21) that confers
growth on the Body, that provides life and movement though in such a way
that it is working “within each individual part.” Maturity, therefore, is the
work of the Spirit conferred by Christ upon each believer bringing each
one into a deeper union with the risen Son of God in such a way that the
Body builds itself up in love. Mystical awareness of this process is what Paul
means by “knowledge of the Son of God.” Such a knowledge belies in its
own way the non-transcendent bias of much modern reflection on cognition, and it is to that aspect of Joseph Ratzinger’s thought that we now turn.
The Second Principle: Faith Is a Way of Knowing
“The act of faith essentially consists in an act of knowing; that is its formal
or specific perfection; this is clear from what its object is.”51 This splendidly dense statement of Aquinas may be made clear by the remark of
50 J. Armitage Robinson, St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, 2nd ed. (London: MacMil-

lan and Co., 1922), 107: “Paul uses the name ‘Jesus’ by itself when he wishes
emphatically to point to the historic personality of the Christ.And this is plainly
his intention in the present passage.The message which he proclaimed was this:
The Christ has come: in the person of Jesus—the crucified, risen, and ascended
Jesus—He has come, not only as the Messiah of the Jews, but as the hope of all
mankind. In this Jesus is embodied the truth: and so the truth has come to you.
You have learned the Christ; him you have heard, in him you have been taught,
even as the truth is in Jesus.”
51 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 14, a. 2, ad 10: “Ad decimum dicendum, quod
actus fidei essentialiter consistit in cognitione, et ibi est eius perfectio quantum
ad formam vel speciem; quod patet ex obiecto, ut dictum est; sed quantum ad
finem perficitur in affectione, quia ex caritate habet quod sit meritoria finis.”

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Joseph Ratzinger that, “To know the person of Christ is the foundation
of theology.”52 Applied to the topic at hand, we see that the understanding of Scripture is the work of faith seeking understanding; and that is
something that far exceeds that kind of biblical criticism that is, to use
George Steiner’s expression,“words about words.”53
Dei Verbum, article 8, presupposes that “faith is a way of knowing” and
at the same time places this principle in the context of the growth of
Tradition the growth of which, as has been already observed, it understands to be a combination of the increased knowledge of all the
members of the Body of Christ and the preaching of those with the episcopal charism.54 It is important to note in this text how Vatican Council
II places this reality within the life of the Whole Christ that is presented
as the subject of interpretation:
The Tradition which is from the Apostles makes progress in the Church
under the assistance of the Holy Spirit.55 There is a growth in understanding, both of the realities as well as of the words that have been
handed on.This takes place as a result of the contemplation and study of
the believers who ponder these things in their heart (see Lk 2:19, 51), as
well as by the intimate knowledge of the spiritual realities which they
experience, and by the preaching of those who have received with episcopal succession, the sure charism of truth.Thus, as the centuries advance,
the Church continually moves toward the plenitude of divine truth until
the words of God reach their fulfillment in her. (Dei Verbum, no. 8)

The ministries enumerated in Ephesians 4:11 as “apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers,” ultimately derive from, are sustained by,
serve, and direct that whole body of the faithful whose growth in understanding, achieved through “contemplation and study” and an “intimate
knowledge of the spiritual realities which they experience” is the source
of the growth of Tradition.
52 Ratzinger, “Deus Locutus Est,” 21.
53 George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989,

1991). Elsewhere in the same study he says, “It is the break of the covenant
between word and world which constitutes one of the very few genuine revolutions of spirit in Western history and which defines modernity itself ” (93).
54 It will be helpful here to return to Ratzinger’s statement to the effect that,
“Tradition then exists concretely as presence in faith, which again, as in the indwelling of Christ, is antecedent to all its particular explicit formulations and is
fertile and living, thus developing and unfolding throughout the ages.” Revelation
and Tradition, 46.
55 See Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, ch. 4
(Denz. 1800 [3020]).

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I wish now to reflect briefly on what is meant by the words “understanding” (perceptio),“intimate knowledge” (intima intelligentia), and “experience” (experiuntur). All of these expressions are a forthright rejection of
that theological attitude once described by Romano Guardini as “a liberalism kept in check by obedience to dogma,”56 and which are indebted
to a Kantian understanding of cognition. The council has reiterated the
fact that faith is a way of knowing, and this obliges us to look more
deeply into the questions of knowledge and language. I will first present
a few lines in order to elucidate Joseph Ratzinger’s frequently reiterated
position that “faith is a way of knowing,” and then proceed to look at
knowledge as both imitation and word, that is, as the reality itself transposed through the act of knowledge and communication. In order to
accomplish this, I will reconsider the ancient understanding of knowledge as this has been recovered and advanced in the modern appreciation
of language and knowledge.
Ratzinger on Modern Cognition Theories
and Biblical Interpretation
One of Joseph Ratzinger’s most trenchant criticisms of the cognition
theories that lie at the root of much biblical interpretation is to be found
in his 1989 essay, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” published the same
year in German and in English.The occasion for the English text was the
Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church.57 Early in his presentation,
Ratzinger observes that historical criticism of the Bible labors under
many of the erroneous presuppositions of modern historical investigation, especially the notion that history is a “science” in the same way as
the empirical sciences.58 A diachronic analysis of the results of the
method can show unmistakably that, after two centuries, contrary to the
positive sciences, there are few if any assured results that have become a
common basis for progress.59 In addition, modern fascination with an
understanding of history as temporal linear succession has eliminated the
biblical vision of history as the working out of God’s plan of salvation:
56 Romano Guardini, Berichte über mein Leben:Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen (Düssel-

dorf: Patmos Verlag, 1984, 4th edition), 33, cited by Ratzinger, The Nature and
Mission, 47, n. 5.
57 Joseph Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the
Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today,” in Biblical Interpretation in Crisi:.
The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and the Church, ed. Richard John Neuhaus
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1989).
58 Ibid., 6.
59 Ibid., 8.

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If we are to understand modern exegesis and critique it correctly, we
simply must return and reflect anew on Luther’s view of the relationship between the Old and New Testaments. In place of the analogy
model which was then current, he substituted a dialectical structure.60

We must also note that, while there has been a continuity in the
historical analysis of the biblical text, it lies not so much in a settled body
of agreed upon results as in the perdurance of philosophical presuppositions at work in what is called historical reason.61
The real philosophic presupposition of the whole system seems to me
to lie in the philosophic turning point proposed by Immanuel Kant.
According to him, the voice of being-in-itself cannot be heard by
human beings. Man can only hear it indirectly in the postulates of practical reason, which have remained, as it were, the small opening through
which he can make contact with the real, that is, his eternal destiny.62
In theological terms, this means that Revelation must recede into the
pure formality of the eschatological stance, which corresponds to the
Kantian split. As far as everything else is concerned, it all needs to be
“explained.”What might otherwise seem like a direct proclamation of the
divine can only be myth, whose laws of development can be discovered.
It is with this basic conviction that Bultmann, along with the majority of
modern exegetes, read the Bible. He is certain that it cannot be the way
it is depicted in the Bible, and he looks for methods to prove the way it
really had to be.To that extent there lies in modern exegesis a reduction
of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means of philosophy.63

I recognize, of course, that many exegetes would object that they do
not practice their scholarship under the aegis of a Kantian epistemology.
Some, through loyalty to the Church tradition, have intuitively gone
beyond the limits and presuppositions of their method, but they have not
directly confronted the challenge offered here in Joseph Ratzinger’s assessment. One reason, perhaps, is that the whole field of cognition theory has
itself been dominated by Kantian thinking as well as reactions to it that
do not manage to shake themselves free from the image of the knower as
60 Ibid., 12. On the importance of the ancient understanding of the “spiritual

sense” of Scripture and the view of history it implies, one might consult Martin,
“The Spiritual Sense.”
61 Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” 14.
62 Ibid., 15. For an account of Marburg neo-Kantianism and its influence on Bultmann, see Roger A. Johnson, The Origins of Demythologizing: Philosophy and Historiography in the Theology of Rudolph Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 1974).
63 Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” 16.

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an isolated unit responsible for the forging of personal meaning.64
Another reason is the vastness of the enterprise:
The scholarly search to find a better synthesis between the historical
and critical methods, between higher criticism and Church doctrine is
hardly a recent phenomenon.This can be seen from the fact that hardly
anyone today would assert that a truly pervasive understanding this
whole problem has yet been found. . . . At least the work of a whole
generation is necessary to achieve such a thing.65

In the few lines that follow I wish to contribute to this work of a
generation by reflecting on two realities that have suffered a false separation, namely knowledge and language and by proposing that knowledge
is not effected by a determining subject knowing a passive object, and
that consequently language is not the naming of a private acquisition.
Knowledge as Imitation
Because God’s “motive” in creating is agape,μ there is present in creation
what Jacques Maritain calls “the basic generosity of existence.”66 Aquinas
reflects this intuition when he states that,“From the very fact that something exists in act, it is active.”67 In a remarkable passage, obviously
indebted to Denys’s treatise on The Divine Names, Aquinas moves from
the observation of the “generosity” of all beings to an understanding of
the generosity of their Source. Note how this vision of reality follows
upon the biblical teaching that God’s act of creation is totally free and
adds nothing to God:68
For natural things have a natural inclination not only toward their own
proper good, to acquire it, if not possessed, and if possessed, to rest therein;
but also to diffuse their own goodness among others as far as possible. . . .
Hence if natural things, insofar as they are perfect, communicate their
goodness to others, much more does it pertain to the divine will to
communicate by likeness its own goodness to others as far as possible.69
64 See, for instance, Kenneth Schmitz, “Postmodern or Modern-Plus?” Communio

17 (1990): 152–66.
65 Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” 5–6.
66 Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 90.
67 Summa contra Gentiles, 2, 7.
68 In this section I am using material that can be found in chapter 6 of my study, The

Feminist Question: Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1994).
69 ST I, q. 19, a. 2, quoted in W. Norris Clarke, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,”
Communio 19 (1992): 604. All quotations of St.Thomas in this section are translations of W. Norris Clarke from his article.

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If we apply this notion to the act of knowledge, we may say that the
very act of existing is a communicable perfection that is bestowed on the
knower by what is known. This understanding of the manner in which
all entities can imitate God not only eliminates the isolation of foundationalism, which leaves to the knowing subject the sole task of conferring intelligibility, it also shows the universe to be a place characterized
by relation: “Communication follows upon the very intelligibility [ratio]
of actuality. Hence every form is of itself communicable.”70
There is a certain generosity in effective activity; it is sharing, not coercion.This is especially noticeable in the act of knowing.The mind is not a
dominating principle imposing intelligibility from its own resources, nor is
the object known through an act by which it coerces the mind to produce
its “representation.”There is a “nuptial relation.”Truth is not primarily in the
proposition, but rather in the “original concord between thing and intellect,” in the “resonant symmetry of knower and known.”71 Rather, knowing takes place in the receptive and creative imitation of reality effected by
the mind. Being shares in the generosity of God, it is diffusive of itself. Mind,
while it fashions the entity according to its own energy, can only do so as
fecundated by the entity itself, which, far from passively receiving intelligibility, actively imparts its reality to the mind.There is no “foundation” either
in the subjectivity of the knower, deriving all certitude from a seemingly
unassailable experience, or in the thing known that requires to be known in
order to be actually intelligible. Both are principles communicating actuality, and both are receivers needing union in order for truth to exist.
The original truth, spoken of previously, the union between the mind
and what is known, is only possible because what is known is “imitated”
by the mind.To imitate is to transpose a reality to another plane of existence. If, in response to a request that I imitate the chair in my room, I
make another chair, I have not imitated—I have reproduced. To imitate
the chair I must transpose it to the level of word or line and color or
some other and different mode of being.Thus, in the act of knowledge,
the energy by which being is imitated derives both from the dynamism
70 SCG 3, 64. As W. Norris Clarke expresses it: “It turns out, then, that relational-

ity and substantiality go together as two distinct but inseparable modes of reality. Substance is the primary mode, in that all else, including relations, depend on
it as their ground. But since ‘every substance exists for the sake of its operations,’
as St. Thomas has just told us, being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally
flows over into being as relational, turned toward others by its self-communicating
action. To be is to be substance in relation.” Clarke, “Person, Being,” 607, original
emphasis.
71 Kenneth Schmitz, “Neither With Nor Without Foundations,” Review of Metaphysics 42 (1988): 15.

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of the substance in relation and that particular way in which I, as a
knower, share in the dynamic light of God, a light that, even apart from
faith, St.Thomas does not hesitate to call “a certain imprint of the divine
light.”72 It should also be noted that, while this action takes place in the
mind, it is the whole body person who knows, who imitates.
Thus, from the two points established, the dynamic and relational
character of being, on the one hand, and the mutually active and receptive nature of the act of knowing, we are able to appreciate that knowledge is neither with nor without foundations. The bias to replace
commonality by a systemic totality swallows the irreducible nature of the
individual in context by making it correspond to a prefabricated structure. Furthermore, the bias to replace being by thought sacrifices a confidence in creation to the anxiety of isolation. When these biases are
surrendered, logic’s need for a starting point is recognized as both valid
and limited, but it is clearly recognized as pertaining to second-order
discourse. Clarity in this regard has been achieved not in spite of, but
precisely because of the turn to the subject. It is a metaphysical achievement nurtured by a biblical sense of the manner in which all that is
created shares in the dynamism and generosity of the Creator.The act of
knowledge is thus, under this aspect, an imitative sharing in the creating
act of God. But there is more, it is, in a profound sense an imitation of
the procession of the Word: “The Word of God comes to man everyday,
present in the human voice.”73
Knowledge as Word
“When the verbum cordis is constituted the intellect actively thinks what
it knows; the internal word is knowledge come to life in the mind.A still
further dimension is reached in external speech, the audible use of
language, whose function is to express publicly the verbum cordis.”74 This
statement of Robert Sokolowski contains most of the key notions necessary for the reestablishing of what, as we have seen, George Steiner
referred to as “the covenant between word and world.”75 In the preceding section, I analyzed knowledge as an imitative act performed by the
person in and through the mind. I now wish to look more closely at the
72 ST I, q. 12, a. 11, ad 3; I–II, q. 91, a. 2.
73 Hugh of St.Victor, The Word of God, I, 2–3 (Paris: Sources Chrétiennes, 155, 60).
74 Robert

Sokolowski, “The Agent of Truth: Phenomenology of the Human
Person” (2006).This section of my own study is deeply indebted to Sokolowski’s,
and I thank him for allowing me to use and cite his work, still in copyrighted
manuscript, as I attempt to apply his insights to the task of biblical exegesis.
75 George Steiner, Real Presences, 93.

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act of imitation itself and observe how this act is intrinsically linked to
language, to word.76
General Considerations
Building upon his own understanding of the Platonic principle that “good
is diffusive of itself,” St. Thomas reasons that since the act of existence is
the foundation of all other perfections, indeed “the actuality of all acts and
the perfection of all perfections,”77 the diffusiveness of the good is rooted
in the existence of a being; and it is thus that whatever exists manifests
itself in the act of its existing.78 Disclosure, therefore, involves both the
created reality manifesting itself in and through the act of its existence and
the creative receptivity of the mind that receives the act of the reality and
gives it intelligibility, transposing it to the level of the knower.This energy,
the capacity to receive and transpose, is what the ancient thinkers meant
by the light of the mind. As we have already noted, Aquinas says of this
interior light of reason that it is itself a “certain participation in divine
light” (ST I, q. 12, a. 11, ad 3); it is, in fact, “nothing else but the imprint
of the divine light in us” (ST I–II, q. 91, a. 2). He also says that the intensification and elevation of this light, which is the heart of sacra doctrina, the
reception and transmission of prophetic knowledge, is also “a certain
imprint of the divine knowledge” (ST I, q. 1, a. 3, ad 2).
From the side of the mind itself, according to Aquinas, there are three
dimensions of our knowing that can be manifestations of God.The first
of these is the knowledge implicit in every act of knowing: “All knowing beings implicitly know God in whatever they know. For just as nothing is desirable except as it bears a likeness to the First Goodness, so
nothing is knowable except as it bears a likeness to the First Truth.”79
76 In the paragraphs that follow I am utilizing material that can be found in my

article, “Revelation as Disclosure: Creation,” in Wisdom and Holiness, Science and
Scholarship, ed. Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, forthcoming).
77 De potentia, q. 7, a. 2, ad 9. Translation is from W. Norris Clarke, “Action as the
Self-Revelation of Being:A Central Theme in the Thought of St.Thomas,” in his
Explorations in Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN/London: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1994), 45–63.
78 Later in the same essay (“Action as the Self-Revelation,” 63, n. 11), Clarke cites
Karl Rahner: “Our first statement which we put forward as the basic principle
of an ontology of symbolism, is as follows: all beings are by their very nature
symbolic, because they necessarily ‘express’ themselves in order to attain their
own nature.” Quoting Karl Rahner, “Theology of the Symbol,” in Theological
Investigations, vol. 4 (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1966), 221–52.
79 Aquinas, De veritate, q. 22, a. 2, ad 1.

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The second dimension of knowledge is intuition or intellectus. It
consists in the presence of the thing known to the knower. In the very
first article of De veritate, Aquinas, who is asking the question, “Quid sit
veritas?” discusses the relation of being to the intellect. He makes the
following statement:
True [verum] expresses the correspondence [convenientia] of being to the
knowing power [intellectus], for all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to
be the cause of knowledge [assimilatio dicta est causa cognitionis]. Similarly,
the sense of sight knows a color by being informed with a species of
the color. 80
The first reference [comparatio] of being to the intellect, therefore,
consists in its agreement with the intellect [ut ens intellectui correspondeat]. This agreement is called “the conformity of thing and intellect”
[adaequatio rei et intellectus], and in this conformity is found the formal
constituent of the true [et in hoc formaliter ratio veri perficitur], and this is
what the true adds to being, namely, the conformity or equation of
thing and intellect [conformitatem seu adaequationem rei et intellectus]. As
we said, the knowledge of a thing is a consequence of this conformity
[ad quam conformitatem, ut dictum est, sequiter cognitio rei]; therefore it is an
effect of truth, even though the fact that it is a being is prior to its truth
[Sic ergo entitas rei praecedit rationem veritatis; sed cognitio est quaedam veritatis effectus]. (De veritate, q. 1, a. 1. c.)

“Assimilation is the cause of knowledge.” And again, “knowledge of a
thing is a consequence of the conformity of thing and intellect.” And
since truth is precisely the “assimilation of the knower to the thing
known,” it follows that “knowledge is a certain effect of truth.” It is at the
ontological level that the act of knowing imitates, in a created manner,
the procession of the Word in the Trinity, with this difference: In the Trinity, the Father produces the Word totally from within himself, he is the
principium Deitatis,81 whereas the human being must first receive before

80 It is important to advert to another principle of Aquinas:“veritas fundatur in esse

rei magis quam in ipsa quidditate” (In I Sent d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, sol.).As David Bentley Hart remarks: “the adequation that truth is consists in an assimilation of the
esse of any given thing, whereby it accepts each thing as it is.” David Bentley
Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite:The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2003), 247.
81 For a discussion of this and similar expressions, see Yves Congar,“The Father, the
Absolute Source of Divinity,” in I Believe in the Holy Spirit, vol. 3 (New York:
Seabury, 1983).

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producing a word, for, as we have just seen, beings give themselves to us
and modify us, thus establishing us in truth whose effect is knowledge.82
The third dimension of knowledge is, then, reasoning (ratiocinatio),
which is a movement of the mind made in the power of the original
intuition by which new truth is acquired and consciously assimilated in
judgment. It is a movement from what is less determinate to what is more
determinate; from a determination of actuality to a determination of
form. But this must not be understood as a unidirectional movement.
What is acquired by reasoning can itself become another intellectus, for, as
Aquinas says elsewhere, intellectus is not only the principle of reason, but
also its term or goal.83
Word
Robert Sokolowski has correctly observed that the act of knowing transpires as a linguistic act. Thus, by the fact that knowing takes place in and
through a commonly held medium, namely, language, it is of its nature a
public performance. The establishing of this fact and its relevance to the
modern problem of cognition is one of the bases of Sokolowski’s whole
study. I will use some of his fundamental notions in order to untie the Kantian knot, which, as we have seen in Ratzinger’s analysis, is the principal
obstacle to a “synthesis between the historical and critical methods, between
higher criticism and Church doctrine,”84 that is, between an integration of
the manner in which the Church as interpreting subject understands and
lives Scripture and the proposals of modern historical reason.The key, as I
understand it, is to show that words are not labels we give to an interior
possession most often called “concepts.” This understanding of “concept”
leaves us with the insoluble problem of explaining the relation between
these interior entities and the world in which we live. In terms of exegesis
this split between word and world licenses one to interpret the word of the
text as bearing all the meaning, while the “event” remains in the unknowable territory of the past, or is reinterpreted according to the reconstruction
of the commentator. In this view, the account of the death and resurrection
of Jesus, for instance, can be interpreted by the evangelists who express their
interpretation based on their preoccupations and prejudices, and we have
the right to do the same: Matthew or Crossan, take your pick.
82 Thus, it would seem that that knowledge which is the effect of truth must first

be considered as intellectus, as Aquinas says in the Summa contra Gentiles (1, 57):
“That which is supreme in our knowledge is not reason, but intellectus which is
the source of reason.”
83 In III Sent. d. 35, q. 1, a. 3, sol. 2:“Intellectus est rationis principium et terminus.”
84 Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis,” 5.

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It is essential, then, as one of the first steps in integrating the ancient
expressions of biblical reality with our historical reason to resolve the
Kantian understanding of the act of knowledge, and its influence on much
of the neo-scholastic interpretation of Aquinas. We have already ascertained that knowledge is a “nuptial event”: It involves the imparting to the
knower something of the being of the other and the reception of that gift
by the knower in an initial act.“For all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be
the cause of knowledge. Similarly, the sense of sight knows a color by
being informed with a species of the color” (Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a.
1. c.).This “assimilation” is what Aquinas calls elsewhere species intelligibilis.
Besides being potential as receptive, the intellect is potential in the
sense of being capable of acting, that is, it can generate an internal
word. It needs, however, to be enabled to do so by being informed by
an intelligible species. . . . Once it has been so formed the intellect can
form its own conception or word: formatus format. The intellect therefore, is potential in being both receptive and active.85

The key in understanding Aquinas’s teaching on knowledge is to grasp
his attribution to the intellect of an energy by which what has been
received and to which the intellect is assimilated achieves its reality of
knowledge by being worded. This word, however, is not protolanguage; it
is language: It is a statement formed by syntax that expresses a form of
being.At the level of assimilation, there is presence, but not, strictly speaking, knowledge. For this to exist, there must be what Aquinas, following
Augustine, calls a verbum interius or verbum cordis (also called a conceptus or
conceptio). It is at this point that there is language and communicability,
though all the activity is as yet immanent:“The internal word of the heart
is what is signified by the exterior word. But the exterior word does not
signify the intelligible species.”86 The reason for Aquinas’s distinction
regarding what the exterior word signifies lies in the difference in the
mode of being of the internal word and the intelligible species: Knowledge takes place in and through an expression that has syntax, that is, one
in which there is expressed explicitly or implicitly the notion of “to be.”87
85 Sokolowski, “The Agent of Truth,” 209.
86 Quodlibet V, q. 5 a. 2, sc.This whole paragraph is indebted to Sokolowski, “The

Agent of Truth,” 205–7.
87 It should be noted that the “word” need not be merely a simple statement, it may

be an abundant reality either actually expressed by several statements or virtually
containing them as occurs in a significant insight.

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Having forged a union once again between word and world—thanks
to the teaching of Aquinas and others regarding the manner in which
being gives itself to the knower who receives it and who gives it a properly human existence as word—we should turn our attention now to the
modern contribution made by an understanding of syntax as such, since
the “word” of which we speak is precisely the reality given a human level
of existence because of syntax. With this step we will be enabled once
again to receive the word of Scripture as communicating to us in a
human way the divine realities that give life.
Syntax
In elaborating his understanding of syntax, Robert Sokolowski acknowledges the important influence of the work of Derek Bickerton.88 After
observing the four levels of language—protolinguistic, normal word use,
declarative, and philosophical—Sokolowski notes, “Protolanguage is
speech deprived of syntax, or speech that has not attained syntax. It is
what we call ‘baby talk.’ In it the speaker indicates things, but only episodically.”89 One of the characteristics of protolanguage is the paucity of
verbs and thus of the linguistic markers that indicate and effect a specific
intelligibility. Syntax, on the other hand, is the means by which reality in
all its multiple and layered complexity presents itself to be known: It is
not represented by concepts that are in turn represented by verbal expression, it is rather revealed in and through words. I wish to present now a
long passage in Sokolowski’s study, with its passages from Bickerton,
because this text can convey an intuitive understanding of how reality is
mediated through language and serve as a response to the aporia created
by subject-dominated cognition theory.
Language is an entirely different thing from protolanguage. It is not the
case that protolanguage is only a more primitive stage of language; it is
something else, an alternative to language, and not a simpler version of it:
“The faculties of protolanguage and language are disjoint,”90 Bickerton
says, and “there can be no plausible intermediate stage between the
two.”91 The difference between protolanguage and language is discrete
88 Derek Bickerton, Language and Species (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1990); Derek Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior (Seattle: University of Seattle Press, 1995);William H. Calvin and Derek Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with the Human Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2000).
89 Sokolowski, “The Agent of Truth,” 22.
90 Bickerton, Language and Species, 118.
91 Ibid. 165.

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and decisive: “Between protolanguage and language we find nothing.”92
The major difference between them lies in the fact that language incorporates syntax and protolanguage does not:“Syntax is the magic key that
unlocks the floodgates of language. . . .”93 It is “the Rubicon.”94 Moreover, syntax is not just linear concatenation; what is special about it is its
hierarchic and nesting structure: “The really crucial relationships in
language are not horizontal but vertical. . . .”95 Through syntax, phrases
can be embedded inside other phrases, not just strung along one after the
other.This embedding, this Russian-doll structure, permits the exquisite
articulation that is radically different from the “one by one” sequencing of
protolanguage. . . . In language, “phrases are not as they might appear to
be, strung together serially, like beads on a string. Phrases are like Chinese
boxes, stacked inside one another.”96 And Bickerton rightly concludes this
remark by saying, “The importance of this point cannot be overestimated.” In protolanguage we have sequences of ideas; but in language we
have thoughts, and thoughts occur as embedded in larger thoughts.97

If faith is a way of knowing, then faith is a way of wording. By returning to a more solid understanding of cognition and deepening this
through an appreciation of the role of syntax in human-language expression, we have articulated, in regard to the Scriptures, what every believer
knows by experience: that in all genuine, verbal communication what is
mediated is the reality itself, not a notion of the reality.The stage is now
set for a beginning in the work of synthesis called for by Joseph Ratzinger.
To conclude, I would like to reflect on what lies ahead in this effort.
Concluding Reflections
The act of knowing is an instance of the “generosity of existence,” by
which creation participates in the nature of God and is, in its own way,
diffusivum sui. Created reality thus calls out, as it were, to be known, not
only by its Creator, but also by its fellow creatures. Man, through the
whole activity of his spiritual/physical being, receives this call and, by a
mysterious alchemy, accepts the gift of other creatures, transforms it by a
process of imitation into something of himself, and then gives another
92 Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior, 71.
93 Calvin and Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina, 52.
94 Bickerton, Language and Human Behavior, 65. Calvin and Bickerton, Lingua ex

Machina, 24: “In fact, as was apparent nearly two decades ago, the real Rubicon,
unpalatable as it may be to the philosophically minded, is syntax not symbols.”
95 Calvin and Bickerton, Lingua ex Machina: Reconciling Darwin and Chomsky with
the Human Brain, 140.
96 Bickerton, Language and Species, 60.
97 Sokolowski, “The Agent of Truth,” 23.

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level of being to what he knows through an act of wording, in an act by
which, like Adam, the creature’s being and identity are named and placed
in the interlocking net of all being.
If this were not enough, God, who willingly allows himself to be
known in this way and thus to enter the world of his creatures, has raised
man to faith, to the ability to share, though darkly for now, in the knowledge God has of himself, and which he shares ineffably with the
blessed.98 The challenge that faces us now is to apply what has been
gained in the area of knowing and wording, to the revelation God makes
of himself in Christ, and in his Body, the Church, instructing us
constantly through our share in the divine light that we call faith.
Since biblical interpretation is a matter of understanding the realities
mediated to us by a text, we must attend to the public nature not only of
discourse, but of the very act of wording itself which takes place by
language. Understanding the thoroughly public nature of the process by
which the worded reality reaches us in an act of communication remains
a primary task of biblical interpretation, and provides insight into the fact
that the Whole Christ is the subject of interpretation.99 We must, moreover, remember that God teaches us uniquely through the Scriptures.
Commenting on 2 Timothy 3:16, Aquinas asks why only the Scriptures
should be considered divinely inspired since, according to Ambrose,
“anything true, by no matter whom said, is from the Holy Spirit.” His
response is that God works in two ways, one that is immediate and this
pertains to him alone (such as is the case with miracles), and one that is
mediate, that is through the mediation of lesser causes (as is the case with
natural operations). He then says: “And thus, in man, God instructs the
intellect both immediately through the sacred letters and mediately
through other writings.”100
There is further the very model of all “wording” in which by the grace
of the “mission” of the Word, he proceeds in a participated way within
us. It will be important in the future to imitate Augustine and Aquinas
and look to what we can become in our knowing in order to understand
knowledge itself, especially our knowledge of revelation. Think, for
instance, of how our understanding of cognition is stretched when the
word that proceeds in us is the Word himself.
It is necessary that the soul be conformed or assimilated to that Person
(who is sent) through some gift of grace. . . .The Son, for his part, is the
98 See ST I, q. 1, a. 2.
99 I have hardly touched upon this important aspect of Sokolowski's contribution.
100 In 1 Tim 3, lect. 3 (Marietti ed. §812).

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Word—and not just any word but a Word breathing forth love. Thus
Augustine (bk. 9 of De Trinitate) says that “the Word we intend to make
known is a knowledge filled with love.” For it is not by just any perfection of the intellect that the Son is sent, but only of that instruction by
which it bursts forth in an affection of love as it says in John 6:45,
“Whoever has heard from the Father and accepted his teaching comes
to me.” . . .Augustine plainly says that the Son is sent when he is known
and perceived. The word “perceived” signifies a kind of experiential
knowledge.101

And finally, let us consider this text of Henri de Lubac when reflecting on what is available to us in the gift of the Sacred Scriptures:
Since Christian mysticism develops through the action of the mystery
received in faith, and the mystery is the Incarnation of the Word of God
revealed in Scripture, Christian mysticism is essentially an understanding of the holy books. The mystery is their meaning; mysticism is
getting to know that meaning.Thus, one understands the profound and
original identity of the two meanings of the word mystique that, in
current French usage, seem so different because we have to separate so
much in order to analyze them: the mystical or spiritual understanding
of Scripture and the mystical or spiritual life are, in the end, one and
the same.102
N&V

101 ST I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2. I suspect that this teaching of Augustine is one of the places

from which Aquinas drew, and because of which, in contradistinction to Aristotle, he posited the notion of wording in every act of knowledge, in much the
same way as, in his teaching on our knowledge of God, (ST I, q. 12) he concentrates on beatific knowledge.
102 Henri de Lubac, “Mysticism and Mystery,” in idem, Theological Fragments (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 58.

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315

Pleasure: A Reflection on Deus Caritas Est
G. J. M C A LEER
Loyola College in Maryland
Baltimore, Maryland

T HERE IS a strange peculiarity in the history of Catholic ideas.
Thomas is the only truly great Thomist, but there are a number of great
Augustinians.At least this is true of philosophy. Most philosophers would
accept three Catholics after Thomas amongst the absolute giants of the
discipline: Malebranche, Pascal, and Scheler. All three were Augustinians.
It seems that when Catholic philosophy replenishes itself it does so either
with a renewal of Thomism or with original thinkers who draw upon
Augustine.To the philosopher, it is interesting that there are no references
to Thomas in Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est, but quite
a few to Augustine. Of course,Thomas spoke about love—indeed he has
a fascinating theory of love—but for Augustine love is basic to the analysis of man and human action. It is quite fitting then that Augustine is a
substantial presence in Pope Benedict’s encyclical on the distinctiveness
of Christian love. Media pundits found something very reassuring about
Benedict’s choice of love as the topic of his first encyclical. It is such a
“nice” subject and one that everyone can agree on.The Church and our
media elite agree: Love is good! Benedict’s choice, however, is subtle. He
is well aware that humanitarian love is not at all the same as Christian
love (see the remarkable nos. 36–37) and that these two loves are the
difference between the culture of death and the culture of life. Perhaps
he even means to signal this difference with his preference for the phrase
“social charity” rather than “social justice” (nowhere used) for the latter,
as anyone familiar with American Catholic colleges knows, is readily coopted by a “diversity” agenda antithetical to Christian morals.
But love has also been a “wedge issue” inside Catholic Christianity
itself.There are at least four distinctively Augustinian theses that medieval

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philosopher-theologians of various stripes used when disputing with
Thomists. St. Augustine said of his stealing pears one night that “if any
part of one of those pears passed my lips, it was the sin that gave it flavor.”
About that night, he reflects, “the evil in me was foul, but I loved it.”1
Thomas argued that the will requires no virtue to order it internally
because the will is structurally responsive to the good.2 Augustine’s
example raises the possibility of will unmoored from the good, having as
its object not a good, nor even an apparent good, but evil. Scotus finished
Augustine’s thought for him arguing that it is possible to love and take
pleasure in hate.3
Augustine chillingly described the City of God and the city of man as
two loves: the one marked by a love of God, the other by a self-love
contemning God and others.The first is a love of generosity, the other a
love of domination where government, though intent on building security for the enjoyment of the “lowest goods,” does not stop at crime being
inspired by “diabolical envy.”4 This powerful vision of the city of man
makes Thomas’s conviction that secular government is part not of a fallen
but natural order seem naïve. For Augustine’s analysis of government
suggests that even if there is a “pull” in the will toward the good, it is fatally
compromised by man’s destructive ambition and joy in domination.
Quite apart from diabolical grip, the good are beset by their own
lower nature. While wayfarers, the good will have to fight against the
wicked but they will even fight amongst themselves “as a result of that
part” that makes a man fight against himself.5 Importantly, it is not
Augustine’s position that this struggle is a simple consequence of the Fall.
The Fall exacerbates a structural tension within human nature.6 Whereas
Aquinas argues that sensuality in relation to reason is like the “freemen
1 St. Augustine, The Confessions (London: Penguin, 1961), 49 and 47.
2 J. Capreolus, On the Virtues, ed. K. White and R. Cessario (Washington, DC:

Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 265. Capreolus’s text is a remarkable compilation of passages from Thomas and his detractors arranged as a series
of arguments. Readers who want to find the exact references for the texts of
Thomas, Durandus, and Scotus will find them cited in Capreolus.
3 Ibid., 331. Respecting the damned, Scotus claims, “they, simply speaking, hate
God with pleasure and without remorse of conscience. It is clear, therefore, from
these points that the right dictate can be, simply speaking, present in the intellect without the right choice of that dictate being present in the will.”
4 St. Augustine, The City of God (London: Penguin, 1984), 593, 599 and 601.
5 Ibid., 601.
6 For the late thirteenth-century Augustinian Giles of Rome on this point, please
see my “Sensuality: An Avenue into the Political and Metaphysical Thought of
Giles of Rome,” Gregorianum 82 (2001): 129–47.

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in cities who have the right and the means” of opposing their royal
ruler,7 Augustine says reason rules sensuality,“the irrational desire which
submits to rule,” despotically.8 Thus Aquinas argues that there is a continuity of freedom between the three principles of human action—intellect, will, and sensuality.9 If the actus voluntarius is to reflect the man, this
continuity of freedom is necessary. Augustine’s restriction of freedom to
man’s “higher part” echoes in Scotus’s idea of the will as the only free
power and the principal site of the virtues.10 The question raised here
is—and it is of enormous significance for philosophical anthropology,
and so for apologetics, ecumenism, and pastoral theology—to what
degree can sensuality be a constituent of an act of love?
These three theses are related and relevant to the principal topic of this
reflection, the fourth of Augustine’s theses: his stunning, and surely true,
phenomenology of sexual pleasure.11 There are a number of aspects to this
description, some a Thomist has little difficulty accepting. But Augustine’s
description of the orgasm’s assault on the integrity of the person proves
deeply troubling for Thomism. Famously, Augustine describes sexual
pleasure as a “mental emotion” mingling with a “physical craving” that
ends in “an almost total extinction of mental alertness.”The excitement of
sexual pleasure culminating in orgasm, “disturbs the whole man,” says
Augustine.12 Troubling to the Thomist is the implication that an aspect of
the natural order is (now) depersonalizing.Augustinians are less perplexed
than Thomists by the sense that nature and grace relate with a certain
degree of antagonism; they are less surprised by the role dialectal antagonism plays generally. Benedict writes, for example, of God’s forgiving love
being so great that “it turns God against Himself, his love against his
justice” (Deus Caritas Est, no. 10, see also no. 12). I do not know if this
formulation is inspired by Augustine, but it certainly runs counter to
Aquinas’s conceptual “serenity” (Gauthier). Aquinas can only marvel at
Augustine’s image of the married man, a “friend of wisdom,” overwhelmed by the (now) “perverted emotions.”13 To the Thomist, sacramental conjugal love is a supernatural perfecting of sexual love and
expressive of a certain continuity between nature and grace:After all, Thomas

7 Capreolus, On the Virtues, 249.
8 Augustine, The City of God, 584 and 586.
9 Capreolus, On the Virtues, 248–49.
10 Ibid., 256–57.
11 Augustine, The City of God, 577–81.
12 Ibid., 577.
13 Ibid., 577 and 580.

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argues that natural love can have God as its primary object; were it otherwise the general principle that grace perfects nature fails.14
Augustine’s phenomenology makes one wonder whether there might be
a problem not merely with sexual pleasure but pleasure as such. It is something of a commonplace in contemporary theological circles that many of
today’s woes can be traced to the nominalism that swept the Christian
universities in the fourteenth century. Is it well-appreciated that Augustine
stood warranty for some of nominalism’s essential ideas? An early fourteenth-century Dominican (d. 1332?), Durandus of St. Pourçain argued that
pleasure is indeed morally problematic and so much so that it raises a problem with Thomas’s naturalistic ethics in toto. Scotus certainly disagrees with
Thomas that God because “by essence goodness, cannot be displeasing to
any will.”15 Durandus is skeptical for another reason: He argues, and the
argument will come to have a principled role in modern thinking, that
pleasure is always self-referential and that a naturalist or eudaimonistic ethics
is only ever a metaphysical egoism.16 According to Durandus, Thomism
holds that the good satisfies human appetite, and this is just to say that the
good is what satisfies our love of concupiscence, a love that has man as its
object. Durandus is not just some medieval contrarian—he agrees with
Benedict, “whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man
as such” (Deus Caritas Est, no. 28)—but he thinks ethical naturalism is
precisely the elimination of love. Benedict and Durandus agree with
Scheler when he writes that “the important thing is not the amount of
welfare, it is that there should be a maximum of love among men.”17
Benedict thinks Durandus completely wrong, however.The encyclical
has as one of its aims to clarify the unity between eros and charity.There
is no fundamental break between these two loves: eros, a human love
capable of giving a “foretaste . . . of that beatitude for which our whole
being yearns” (Deus Caritas Est, no. 4) and the love that God is, has him
as its object, and him as its source, charity. Benedict says eros is a love
between a man and a woman, “where body and soul are inseparably
joined” (no. 2), and, of course, what he means is, as Aurel Kolnai puts it,
“mature people are absolutely never in love without also being sexually
attracted.”18 So when he says that “human beings glimpse an apparently
14 Capreolus, On the Virtues, 165.
15 Ibid., 355.
16 Kant objects to an ethics expressing desire for this is, as Spiegelberg puts it, to

“subordinate all our actions to the rule of self-love and happiness, hence our
lower nature.” H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 289.
17 M. Scheler, Ressentiment (Milwaukee,WI: Marquette University Press, 2003), 62.

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irresistible promise of happiness” in eros (no. 2), that love is refracted
through sexual pleasure and we quickly return to the problem posed by
Augustine’s analysis. Benedict wants to argue that there is a unity in love,
but we must wonder both whether there really is a continuity between
sexual love and charity and what this can mean for Thomism where
sensuality is significantly valorized. Some of Augustine’s theses on love
cut against the hope of the encyclical respecting the unity of love. The
stakes are high for Benedict reaffirms the basic direction of Catholic
theoretical engagement with the world: “The Church’s social teaching
argues on the basis of reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what
is in accord with the nature of every human being” (no. 28).
But how is Durandus’s criticism blocked? What matters here is to get
clear about the intentionality of pleasure. In Capreolus’s treatment of hope
he reviews a dispute between Thomas and Durandus. Durandus denies
that hope, at least as explained by Thomas, is a theological virtue. In
Thomas’s account, hope is a perfection of the irascible appetite19 because
it seeks an “arduous good” difficult to secure: eternal life.20 The theological virtue of hope helps establish an inclination in the will for an “eternal good,”21 and Thomas argues blessedness or happiness “enters into the
definition of hope” because it is “the aggregation of all goods.”22 If a
virtue is a theological virtue, God must be the object; but if human happiness is the object of hope, then it appears to collapse into a love of concupiscence, and such a love always has the human agent as its principal
object. Durandus argues that the Thomistic analysis makes hope have the
pleasure of eternal life as its immediate object, though he concedes God
may appear as a remote object within this pleasure. That is, “created
blessedness,” a state of human happiness, is the immediate object of hope23
and not the uncreated living God. In a love of concupiscence, says Durandus, we always will “a good for ourselves.”24
18 A. Kolnai, Sexual Ethics: The Meaning and Foundations of Sexual Morality (Alder-

shot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 129.
19 Spiegelberg’s classic essay on medieval and modern conceptions of intentional-

ity confines medieval interest in intentionality to acts of the intellect and denies
the idea was connected with acts of love, joy, and other emotions and appetitive
states.This is not right: See H. Spiegelberg “ ‘Intention’ and ‘Intentionality’ in the
Scholastics, Brentano, and Husserl,” in his collection of essays The Context of the
Phenomenological Movement (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 4 and 12.
20 Capreolus, On the Virtues, 124–25.
21 Ibid., 126.
22 Ibid., 127.
23 Idem.
24 Ibid., 128.

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About this argument, Capreolus says a Thomist can accept that a love
of concupiscence is a love of self, but must reject Durandus’s claim that
because hope is a hope for blessedness God is not an immediate object
of a love of concupiscence.25 Capreolus argues that Thomas shows that a
love of concupiscence is not exclusively a love of self: that God and the self
can both be immediate objects of such a kind of love.Thomas argues that
eternal blessedness is an intentional pleasure double in object having the
use-experience of blessedness and the contemplative-experience of the
essence of God.26 Even if we love God only with a love of concupiscence, God is still an immediate object of that love.Thomas denies, therefore, that pleasure is uniform. Pleasure may be self-seeking but this does
not warrant the assumption that my use of an object is the full content of
the pleasure; rather, besides my use, there stands the object, immediately
experienced, and so not merely an object refracted through my useexperience.There is, if you like, an estoppel on the use-experience by a
contemplative, disinterested aspect of the pleasure. Hope as a virtue that
perfects human desire generates a pleasure double in object then. The
formal object of the pleasure generated by hope is God; the material
object, created blessedness.27 Put otherwise, hope ordering appetite in
relation to God has a complex intentionality with one object being God
as “Himself in Himself ”28 and another object being God as benefactor.
Since it is Thomas’s position that objects give the species of acts,Thomas
argues that hope is a genuine theological virtue because it has God as an
immediate (formal) object. As Capreolus puts it, a Thomist can concede
to Durandus that God is not the total immediate object of hope but one
of two partial objects of hope. This subtlety is enough to save Thomas’s
position—and therewith eudaimonistic ethics!—because Durandus is
right to point out that every pleasure has, as at least a partial object, an
operation and this must needs belong to the one having the pleasure.29
The example used by Thomas to clarify this point is that of drinking
wine. Because of the position he wants to hold, Durandus is forced to
argue that taking pleasure in a glass of wine has but one object, the pleasure I have from the use of the wine. Aquinas had argued that besides this
pleasure object there is also the object of the wine itself: One can take
pleasure in the wine and not merely from it.30 Pleasure can rest in the
25 Ibid., 127–28.
26 Ibid., 140.
27 Ibid., 139.
28 Ibid., 128.
29 Ibid., 137.
30 Ibid., 140.

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321

wine as its intentional object and not only upon the effects of the wine.
Of course, Aquinas has also to argue that these two partial objects of
pleasure in wine stand in a hierarchy, the contemplative-experience
standing as the formal object of the pleasure and the use-experience of
the wine as the material object.
The example is interesting because it seems that Thomas’s analogy
between pleasure in wine and pleasure in God is weak. Even if Aquinas is
right about the wine example and that our appetites expressed in love of
concupiscence can genuinely rest in objects, Durandus is nevertheless right
about the crucial example. Our pleasure in wine is not a compelling analogy to our pleasure in God, for Benedict is certainly correct that the
personal love of marriage is a better analogy for the personal love of God.
Pope Benedict argues with plenty of scriptural warrant that the pleasure of
conjugal love offers a “glimpse” of a “promise of happiness” (Deus Caritas
Est, no. 2): Conjugal love is a “joy which is the Creator’s gift [and] offers us
a happiness which is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine” (no. 3). Conjugal love certainly has the double intentionality of partial objects that Aquinas
seeks. Marriage is a relationship in which a man and a woman have a useexperience of one another, but also experience a genuine beloved, not
merely someone loved but someone privileged in the field of my experience.These two partial objects also stand in a hierarchy, but sexual pleasure
appears to rupture the relationship between the formal and material objects
and to invert the intentional order within conjugal love.The wine analogy
is weak because taking pleasure in wine is not an analogous pleasure to the
peculiar nature of sexual pleasure. Durandus did not believe that marriage
was a sacrament and perhaps on account of this inversion: If marriage is an
affirmation of sexual love then marriage cannot be a sacrament, for sexual
love expresses a pleasure that is, inevitably, one of egoism; namely, where the
use-experience takes precedence over and occludes the contemplative, affirmational aspect of pleasure. As Augustine puts it, excitement and orgasm
overwhelm the “intellectual sentries.”31 Aquinas rejected the Augustinian
(and later Scotist) position that perversity is a love of an evil object.Aquinas
had a number of explanations for the phenomenon of perversity,32 but one
regards the inversion of values. Scheler and Karol Wojtyla held that an inversion of value was the mark of an evil will,33 and Aquinas agrees: Perversity
31 Augustine, The City of God, 577.
32 His use of the idea of velleity is especially interesting. See On Evil (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 2003), q. 16, a. 3.
33 M. Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values (Evanston, IL:

Northwestern University Press, 1973), 25; and K.Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1981), 159.

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is the turning away from a high good towards a preferred low good.34 Built
into sexual love is perversity.This is not meant to be shocking, but an explanation for the phenomenological evidence of what Kolnai calls the “ethical
precariousness” of sex.35 The phenomenology of sexual pleasure favors
Durandus’s position that pleasure is always a love of concupiscence and thus
a matter of use. Even if sexual pleasure is a perverse pleasure, the role it has
in conjugal love will be enough to derail Pope Benedict’s hopes for the
unity of love.
Kolnai accepts Augustine’s analysis of sexual pleasure, but argues
nonetheless that sexual love is rather Thomistic than not.The depersonalizing quality of sexual pleasure is not only because of the domination of the
partner implicit in Augustine’s analysis,36 but also a “drowning” of the
person in a homogeneous, anarchistic “stream of life.”37 Drowning in
sexual pleasure is phenomenologically the eclipse of the person, for distinction between person and object all but disappears:There is, says Kolnai, a
“quasi-absolute pervasion of the object.”38 Sexual pleasure is morally a
problem, “something which extremely easily and quickly becomes sinful,”39
because the pervasion of excitement and orgasm is an experience happening within one, an abandonment.Wojtyla identified the experience of efficacy as opposed to something happening in one as a basic fault line in the
experience of our personhood.40 Sexual pleasure is not only not experienced as efficacy, but precisely as pervasion. Benedict writes: “[I]t is man,
the person, a unified creature composed of body and soul, who loves. Only
when both dimensions are truly united, does man attain his full stature.
Only thus is love—eros—able to mature and attain its authentic grandeur”
(Deus Caritas Est, no. 5).The unity of love—wherein eros and charity both
affirm the person—is lost if eros is not an act of the person or, to use
Wojtyla’s terms, efficacy is replaced by activation.
Sexual pleasure is a threat to the person but one framed by, and in continuity with, sexual love, and so not a decisive threat. Sexual pleasure structurally is found with sexual love—which is not to deny the two can be
separated—and whilst sexual pleasure is a felt narrowing of intentional life,
sexual love is a felt expansion. Even within sexual pleasure there is a definite intentional structure wherein essentially a union with the other sex is
34 Capreolus, On the Virtues, 352–53.
35 Kolnai, Sexual Ethics, 45.
36 Ibid., 44.
37 Ibid., 45 and 49.
38 Ibid., 42.
39 Ibid., 43.
40 K.Wojtyla, The Acting Person (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979), 87.

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sought.Two poles exist in sexual pleasure: Pulled toward irresponsibility by
the binding power of excitement and orgasm,41 sexual pleasure is also a
response to the concrete value of someone of the opposite sex.42 This value
response is (normally) initiated by sexual love and magnified by marriage,
an institution that, amongst other things, serves for the personalizing of sex.
To use Thomas’s double-object analysis of the intentionality of pleasure:
Sexual love has for one of its two partial objects the use of the other as an
instrument of diversion,43 the occluding of the “beloved” amidst the
pervasion of voluptuousness; but the other partial object of sexual love is
human devotion, a reaching out for personal closeness,44 what Kolnai calls
the “proximity-intention.”45 This second object is the “intrinsic ennoblement” of sex, while the first is its innate moral precariousness.The “proximity-intention” of sexual love is an expression of an appetite for “the more
real presence of the person possessed”46 and “an intention which embraces the
two lives [of the man and the woman] in their entirety.”47 As Scheler has it,
all love, including sexual love, is a response to the value-saturated essence
of a particular person48 abstracted from the utility value of the person.49
Indeed, conjugal love is anticipated in sexual love as the latter already “radically exalts” the beloved.50 There is then “an emphatic and thoroughgoing
moralization of sexuality” from within sexual love as it places sexual pleasure, despite all its precariousness, within “the sphere of feeling,”51 the site
of the cognition of value. Kolnai’s analysis of the intentionality of sexual
love shows that Augustine is right about sexual pleasure. The use-experience of sexual pleasure is, however, only one of the two partial objects of
pleasure initiated by sexual love. It is by returning to Aquinas’s treatment
of the intentionality of beatitude that helps make this point. Sexual love has
a double intentionality with an object fixing use and another fixing the
affirmation of the beloved, a devotional encounter with her value-saturated essence.
41 Ibid., 237–38.
42 For why homosexuality does not refute this essential structure of sexual pleas-

ure, see Kolnai, Sexual Ethics, 46, 186–94.
43 Ibid., 44.
44 Ibid., 122.
45 Ibid., 131.
46 Ibid., 124, original emphasis.
47 Ibid., 125, original emphasis.
48 Ibid., 128, n. 1.
49 Ibid., 130.
50 Ibid., 131.
51 Ibid., 132.

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This reflection wanted to show that Benedict’s interest in the unity of
love can only claim in Augustine an ambiguous filiation. I reviewed the
Thomas-Durandus debate to show that in the history of Catholic ideas an
Augustinian heritage had been used to counter what I take to be a signature Thomist theme:That there is a deep continuity in human and divine
love because there is a continuity between nature and grace. Returning to
this old debate helps better explore the essential thesis of the encyclical in
its full richness. To appreciate the double intentionality of eros with its
problematic object of use and its ennobling object of devotion is to identify a connective tissue between eros and charity. Benedict’s unity of love
thesis is thoroughly defensible on Catholic grounds, but these grounds are
not naïve. They show, as Kolnai puts it, that the sacrament of marriage
“fulfils a double goal, to affirm and seal the goodness laid down in nature
itself, and also to complete it supernaturally and to fence it off from the
evil and anarchic powers of natural reality with the help of a special grace.”52
In marriage the devotion of sexual love is elevated into promises of
commitment to the good of the other, and to the good of others who will
issue from sexual love; these promises craft donations that then serve as a
substructure of sexual love and orders that love to the generosity of the
hour known by a Mother and her Son (Deus Caritas Est, no. 41) and
N&V
definitively away from egoism.

52 Ibid., 147, emphasis added.

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325

Joseph Ratzinger and Protestant Theology:
The Four Last Things
F RANCESCA A RAN M URPHY
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen, Scotland

I N 1960, Joseph Ratzinger remarked that, with respect to Protestantism, one could “invert a saying of Saint Augustine’s: that an old schism
becomes a heresy.The very passage of time alters the character of a division, so that an old division is something essentially different from a new
one.”1 Ratzinger had a hand in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Ut unum sint
(1995) and pushed through the Lutheran-Catholic Joint Declaration on the
Doctrine of Justification in the summer of 1998.2 This essay will describe just
his responses to Protestant thought, not his ecumenical work or the ecclesiology from which it springs.3 His engagement with Protestantism is
characteristically ad hoc. Where there is disagreement, Ratzinger, as the
original South Park Catholic, simply says,“You’re wrong.” He is coruscating about Luther’s reduction of justification by faith to hope for myself, for
this entails the “exclusion of love” from justification: “[I]n Luther’s view
faith is no longer, as it is for Catholics, . . . a sharing in faith with the entire
Church; for him . . . the Church can neither assume the guarantee of
certainty for one’s personal salvation nor decide in a . . . binding manner
1 Joseph Ratzinger, The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, 2nd English trans. (San

Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1960, 1993), 88.
2 John L.Allen, Pope Benedict XVI:A Biography of Joseph Ratzinger (London: Contin-

uum, 2005), 232–34; and, for a scholarly account, Daphne Hampson, Christian
Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and Catholic Thought (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 215–21.
3 We discuss both in “De Lubac, Ratzinger, von Balthasar:A Communal Adventure
in Ecclesiology,” in Ecumenism in the 21st Century: Reflections on Ut Unum Sint, ed.
Chris Asprey and Eric Puosi (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, forthcoming).

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about the content of faith.”4 There is also an ironic side, exposed in the
adverse comparison of Catholic behavior with that of Protestant. As
against some 1970s Catholic catechisms, Ratzinger remarks that Luther’s
catechisms were based on clear doctrinal loci, not on complex theological
programs;5 having flattened another cardinal’s fleet of local churches, he
capped the devastation with a citation from Rudolf Bultmann.6 There are
a few straight lifts, such as his use of Barth’s notion of the election of all
humanity in Christ to address the question of the relation of Christians to
non-believers:“Just as Christ the chosen one,” Ratzinger says, became “the
one rejected for us in order to confer on us his election,” so “this exchange
relationship occurs constantly in salvation history following him.”The few
are elected in service to the many.7 His theology also contains some give
and take with recent Protestant theology.
Since Protestants have always looked to Augustine, one might imagine
the interchange begins from Ratzinger’s doctoral thesis on Augustine. His
habilitation on Bonaventure’s theology of history led him nearer the
mark.There are two reasons why taking the measure of Bonaventure put
Ratzinger foursquare with Protestant thought. In the first place, Bonaventure’s “unique individuality” consists in his being the sole scholastic writer
to consider Scripture, not in a “conceptual-abstract” way, but in terms of
its historical symbolism.8 Bonaventure built “a new theory of scriptural
exegesis which emphasizes the historical character of the scriptural statements in contrast to the exegesis of the Fathers and the Scholastics which
had been more clearly directed to the unchangeable and the enduring.”9
A Bonaventurian approach to Scripture has sufficient parallels with
Protestant methods to create openings for dialogue. One way of resolving
the problem of how Scripture relates to history has been to conceive
Revelation as a salvation-history: For Ratzinger, Bonaventure got there
4 Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology, trans.

Robert Nowell and Fridesiwide Sandeman, O.S.B. (Slough: St Paul Publications/New York: Crossroad, 1988), 111–13.
5 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental
Theology, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (Ignatius: San Francisco, 1982,
1987), 130–31.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Local Church and the Universal Church,” America 185
(November 19, 2001): 11.
7 Ratzinger, The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood, 79. Here, as so often in his references to Barth in the 1960s, Ratzinger refers us both to Barth’s Church Dogmatics and to Hans Urs von Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth.
8 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure, trans. Zachary Hayes
(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1959, 1971, 1989), 4.
9 Ibid., 7.

Joseph Ratzinger and Protestant Theology

327

before Barth and Oscar Cullmann.With the Protestant writers, salvationhistory replaces metaphysics as a category of theological understanding.
Bonaventure’s notion of salvation-history and his belief that “wisdom is
unthinkable . . . without reference to the historical situation in which it
has its place” enter into Ratzinger’s conversation with modern Protestantism.10 He allows that history has a place in metaphysics, and complements the concession with the profession that metaphysical insight is a
creative force in history.
In the second place, for better and for worse, the accentuation of the
historical character of knowledge in both Bonaventure’s thought and that
of Protestant theologians is linked to a focus on eschatology, and even to
apocalyptic leanings. Luther’s appropriation of a “linear” sense of history,
the “greater value” that the Reformer placed on the “individual historical event” led Lutherans to perceive their era “as moving very quickly
toward the edge” of historical time.11 Ratzinger had discerned the same
slant in his favored medieval theologian. Luther expressed his eschatological sensibility in a doctrine of once-for-all justification. By separating
justification from temporal sanctification, he divested Lutheran Christianity of the need for an historical Church. Ratzinger traces the “anecclesiality” of Lutheranism to Augustine’s having
distinguish[ed] with a sharpness until then unknown between the theological greatness of the Church as a salvific reality and her empirical
existence; many who seem to be in the Church are outside her; many
who seem to be outside her are in her.The true Church is the number
of the predestined who . . . transcend the visible Church while . . . the
reprobate are present at her very center.

With Luther, the
concept of the Church was limited, on the one hand, to the local
community; on the other hand, it embraced the community of the
faithful throughout the ages who are known only to God. But the
community of the whole Church as such is no longer the bearer of a
positively meaningful theological content.12

It is not easy for a Catholic theologian to find a solid point of contact in
writings from which a theological notion of the Church is absent.Taking
10 Ibid., 6.
11 Robin Bruce Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis:Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran

Reformation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 100, 102, and 114.
12 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 196–97.

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a different tack from the Anabaptists and Lutherans, Calvin sublimated
eschatology into dual predestination.When Barth wrote in his Commentary
on Romans that a “Christianity which is not wholly eschatology and nothing but eschatology has nothing to do with Christ,” he was taking Protestantism back to the Reformation.13 In his Church Dogmatics, Barth
transformed Calvin’s idea of predestination into the eternal predestination
of Christ to damnation and salvation on behalf of all.The first volume of
his Church Dogmatics declares that “theology is a function of the church.”14
Here a point of conversational contact is established.Where Ratzinger uses
Luther and modern Lutherans like Bultmann to support ideas he already
holds, he assimilates the Swiss Calvinist’s Christocentricity into the positive
content of his theology.At the same time—agreeing with Barth that plausibility to secular reason is not a criterion of theology—he retains the right
to say,“You’re wrong.” Barth had not so much eliminated eschatology from
his theology as he created an eschatological doctrine of the Church.
He fills out his notion of the Church by affirming that “the being of
the Church is identical with Jesus Christ.” For Barth, the subject of theology takes three forms: Revelation (flowing from the Father), Word
(corresponding to the Son), and Proclamation (deriving from the Holy
Spirit). The Word is said to be the history-making act of God. When he
states that the Word is the criterion of Christian dogma, Barth means that
Christ is.15 The Church exists from the Word of God. Ratzinger
acknowledges the value of this when he states his relief that, following
the intervention of Paul VI,Vatican Council II’s Dogmatic Constitution
on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, was not absorbed into that on the
Church: “The council would otherwise,” he considers,
have risked falling victim to a kind of ecclesio-monism in its texts,
whereas the Constitution on Revelation now stressed the importance
of listening, thus . . . tak[ing] up . . . an attitude in which the Church
transcends itself, for it was not there for its own sake, but only to lead
to him to whom all honor is due, God the Lord.16
13 Karl Barth, Commentary on Romans, 4th ed., 314, cited in Nicholas J. Healy, The

Eschatology of Hans Urs Von Balthasar: Being as Communion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 8. Anyone who can get to page 314 of Barth’s Commentary on
Romans has a higher eschatology threshold than I.
14 Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, The Doctrine of the Word of God, trans. G. W.
Bromley, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh:T&T Clark, 1932, 1936, 1975), 3.
15 Ibid., 41, 43, 137, and 144.
16 Joseph Ratzinger,“Origin and Background,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, trans. William Glen-Doepel (London/New
York: Burns & Oates/Herder & Herder, 1967, 1969), 162.

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The first phrase in article 1, “Dei verbum religiose audiens et fidenter proclamans” is “one of the happiest formulations in the text: the dominance of
the word of God, its sovereign supremacy above all human eloquence and
activity . . . is given due prominence.The Church itself is depicted in the
double role of listening and proclaiming.”17 This elucidates the link
between the Constitutions on the Church and on Revelation: The “life
of the Church is . . . opened upwards and its whole being gathered
together in the attitude of listening, which can be the only source of
what it has to say.”18
Ratzinger seems to proceed in the same deferential direction when he
notes that the third article of Dei Verbum affirms
the historical character of Revelation, which comes to man not as a
timeless idea but as the historical operation of God in our own time.
So far we can see here a certain approximation to the position of Cullmann and his school without necessarily speaking, in a technical sense,
of a theology of salvation history.19

But he is actually moving toward a sting in the tail. For, as Walter
Brueggemann observes, the “notion of salvation history and what
Enlightenment scholarship understood by history are quite distinct
matters.This distinction . . . has haunted . . . the enterprise of Old Testament theology through the twentieth century.”20 All the better that Dei
Verbum was not tied to it. Two of the obstacles to the coupling of the
understanding of “history” in Protestant biblical scholarship and in secular scholarship are the hermeneutical gap a modern person must cross to
grasp the meaning of an ancient text, and the question of how a history
in which God acts overlaps with data acceptable to a secular scholar.
Brueggemann notes that, although
nineteenth-century developmentalism is very different from eighteenth-century rationalism and empiricism, it is in continuity with
them in practicing an epistemology of the human knower as an unencumbered
objective interpreter who was understood to be a nonpartisan, uninvolved reader
of the data.21
17 Ratzinger,“Preface,” in Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol.

3, 167.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., 172–73.
20 Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 11.
21 Ibid., 13, original emphasis.

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Barth’s declaration that faith is the only objective lens through which the
Bible can be understood was intended to abridge this hermeneutical
difficulty. His followers in the field of Old Testament studies sought to
shore this up by demonstrating that a gulf exists between the attitudes
evinced in sacred Scripture and those exhibited in the texts of other Near
Eastern Religions. Albrecht Alt argued that “very early, even from its inception, Mosaic Israel operated with distinct theological assumptions.” 22 Claiming
that Israelite law codes differ from other Near Eastern codes in issuing
“absolute commands and prohibitions,” Alt argued that
this apodictic command . . . is based on the absolute sovereignty of
YAHWEH , the God of Israel. Thus the form of the law is taken as
evidence of the . . . monotheism that was already present in Israel and
decisive at the Mosaic beginning of Israel. Martin Noth followed Alt’s
insight with the claim that it is YAHWEH ’s “exclusive sovereignty” that
is the bedrock of Israel’s self-understanding as a community under the
command of YAHWEH .23

The “Biblical Theology” school from Alt to Noth to von Rad, in
Germany, and G. Ernst Wright in America intended to echo Barth’s
hermeneutical “fideism” by finding marks of Israel’s unique character in
its texts. But, after Vatican II, the second problem in the Protestant agenda
for linking sola Scriptura to Scripture’s demonstrable uniqueness came
home to roost: “The principal criticism of von Rad and his ‘recital of
God’s mighty deeds’ is that neither von Rad nor anyone else has found a
way to relate salvation history . . . to secular history as it could be recovered by secular scholarship.”24
The point at issue in both the hermeneutical question and that of
whether both Christian and secular historians understand history in the
same way is whether the Bible makes most sense within the Church.
Where Brueggemann finds with the Council of Trent,25 Ratzinger notes
that Vatican II improved on Trent’s notion of two sources of Revelation,
Scripture and tradition. For this
distributes Revelation in a mechanical way between two vessels of
Revelation that are independent of each other and thus again fails to
recognize its true nature, which is not a collection of propositions that

22 Ibid., 21, original emphasis.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., 43.
25 Ibid., 4.

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can be . . . sheered out between two different compilations, but a living,
organic unity.26

But the council’s effort to create a single-source, Catholic notion of sola
Scriptura irritated Protestant observers. Ratzinger saw that the route of
appeasement in dialogue with Protestantism often boomerangs; as one
seems to approach convergence, more deep-seated Protestant convictions
emerge to reject the apparent kinship. Moreover, the common ground
may turn out to be quicksand, out of which a biblical theology like Cullmann’s has no escape. The dual dilemma of mid-century biblical theology came down to proving in all scientific credibility that one’s historical
findings come up to one’s faith. At the time, writers like Cullmann and J.
Jeremias were convinced that biblical exegesis would approach ever closer
to the truth of history. Others, like Bultmann and Ernst Käsemann were
not: “[I]t seems to me safer to walk through a minefield blindfold[ed],”
Käsemann wrote, than to rely on historical exegesis.27 Although
Ratzinger appreciated that, materially, sound scholars like Jeremias sometimes made good findings, nonetheless he recognized that Bultmann and
Käsemann had seen the basic formal problem:
Historical research has done away with the Reformation idea that
Scripture itself has one clear meaning. . . . This means that an opposition between Scripture and the Church is ultimately not possible. . . .
When Cullmann tells us to put our trust in the exegetes, that is, in their
being led by the Holy Spirit, then we must say that fear of the terrifying possibilities of the teaching office can equally be dispelled only
through confidence in the Spirit that guides his Church.28

With Barth clearly in view, Ratzinger notes that in Dei Verbum:
“[O]nly Scripture is defined in terms of what it is: it is stated that Scripture is the word of God consigned to writing.Tradition . . . is described
only functionally, in terms of what it does: it hands on the word of God,
but is not the word of God.”29 As his perception of the meaning of the
contingency of Revelation deepened, Ratzinger will argue that Luther’s
excision of “man-made traditions” from the interpretation of Scripture
left him with just “the pure power of reason, the immediate access to the

26 Ratzinger, “Chapter II: The Transmission of Divine Revelation,” in Vorgrimler,

Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 3, 191.
27 Ibid., 193.
28 Ibid., 194.
29 Ibid., original emphasis.

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word of God.”Tradition, he will later say, “is not the adversary of reason
but its handiwork . . . and the contingency on which it is founded.”30
At the turn of the twentieth century, two Protestant biblical scholars,
Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, dismantled the nineteenth-century
belief that biblical scholarship had recovered the historical Jesus. They
argued that Jesus was not a pious liberal but a pious Jew who preached the
imminent end of the world. A generation later, von Balthasar could accurately comment that eschatology was now the “storm-zone” of modern
theology.31 Pre-Reformation Christians had set eschatology in stone, in
the architecture of their cathedrals. But, since the seventeenth century,
both magisterial Protestantism and Catholicism had put the lid on the
apocalyptic fervor that preceded the Reformation;32 only sectarian
Protestants like the Plymouth Brethren took eschatology or apocalyptic as
central to their life and worship.The rediscovery of eschatological themes
in Jesus’ own preaching reopened a question educated people imagined
had been closed: If eschatology belonged to Jesus’ self-understanding, it
should have some role in Christian theology—but what? Bonaventure had
already raised this problem. The Franciscan general broke with the
lapidary formation of medieval orthodoxy and went some way in hand
with Joachim of Fiore’s use of Scripture to predict an eschaton that is both
imminent and overlaps with the “Sixth Day” in which history has
remained since the advent of Christ. As Ratzinger put it in his habilitation,“Bonaventure believes in a new salvation in history, within the limits
of this time. This . . . must be seen as the central historico-theological
problem of the Hexaemeron.”33 Following Augustine, a standard medieval
opinion was that nothing very new will happen before the end of time;
history replays variations on the plan mapped out in the Book of Revelation. As in the liturgy, so in history—but with less calendrical regularity—the map depicted in Revelation simply circulates.34 By laying the
sevenfold movement of history (corresponding to the seven days of
Creation) from Adam to Christ alongside a chart of historical events,
Bonaventure was able, in Joachim’s footsteps, to note equivalences between
30 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 91.
31 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Eschatologie,” cited in Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology:

Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein (Washington, DC: Catholic
University of America Press, 1977, 1988), 1.
32 Walter Klaassen, Living at the End of the Ages: Apocalyptic Expectation in the Radical
Reformation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1992), 19–24.
33 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 14.
34 I discuss this in more detail in “The Book of Revelation:The Apocalypse of St.
John the Divine,” in The Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, ed.
Kevin Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic/SPCK, 2005), 680–87.

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the scriptural “septacet” and the era after Christ.Where the equivalences
between the two lines have yet to be balanced out, he was able to discern
which events will arrive before the “Seventh Day,” or the Second Coming
of Christ: As yet missing are a second Charlemagne and, parallel to the
Babylonian exile, a second tribulation for the Church.Abandoning a reading of Scripture and history that went back to Augustine, Bonaventure
decided that there will be an intersection in the as-yet-uncharted territory
of the Sixth Day, the last days of mankind, and the Seventh Day, the Last
Judgment: The eschaton and the “new salvation” it harbors will occur
within history. Bonaventure’s belief in the imminence of the end is tied to
a conviction that Francis was the “seventh seal,” the “Angel who ascends
from the rising of the sun” (Rev 7:2).35 This is not, according to
Ratzinger, the most ground-breaking feature of the Seraphic Doctor’s
theology of history; but it is there and helped to prepare the German
theologian’s response to the means by which modern Protestant theologians attempted to navigate the “storm-zone.”
In Barth’s 1919 Romans Commentary, eschatology had been the category that depicts God’s “vertical” difference from human, horizontal
history, the way in which God miraculously erupts into history. Considering the “antiseptic task” of the Commentary completed, the Church
Dogmatics modifies its category-break by asserting that the
reality of the Revelation of Jesus Christ is also what we call the lifetime
of a man. It is also a section of what we call “historical time” or world
history. . . . Revelation in the sense of Holy Scripture . . . is an eternal,
but not therefore a timeless reality. . . . Revelation will never be discovered by anyone who undertakes to arrive at a kind of timeless core by
abstracting from all times or from specific times, or who attempts to rise
from the human to the divine.36

Within Barth’s hermeneutics, “what we call ‘historical time’ ” is known
theologically, and hence some Anglican critics have questioned whether
“history” is for Barth a reality independent of God.37 The autonomy of
historical time is not the matter that Ratzinger sees as problematic in
Barth’s eschatology. His concern is that the post-Romans Calvinist keeps
35 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 33; see also 20–32.
36 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 50.
37 See Richard Roberts, “Karl Barth’s Doctrine of Time: Its Nature and Implica-

tions,” in Karl Barth: Studies of His Theological Method, ed. Stephen W. Sykes
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 88–146; and Richard Roberts, “The Ideal and
the Real in the Theology of Karl Barth,” in New Studies in Theology I, ed. Stephen
Sykes and Derek Holmes (London: Duckworth, 1980).

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the “Last Things” at arm’s length, outside of time. As a theological and
thus Christological category, for Ratzinger, eschatology involves indwelling
as well as inbreaking. He complains that, with Barth, the “word ‘eschatological’ no longer qualifies time.”38 Barth’s negotiation of the eschatological question can be seen synoptically with that performed by
Bultmann, and Ratzinger does this, taking the one as the converse side to
the other. Where Barth reinstated eschatology as the ever-possible act of
God, Bultmann took eschatology as the Christian’s act of “breaking through
to authenticity in an encounter-event.”39 Ratzinger is no more satisfied
by the Lutheran than the Calvinist: Bultmann’s “solution is,” he feels,
“purchased at too dear a price. For it depends on displacing Christianity
from its home in the midst of reality and resettling it on the pinhead of
the present moment.”40
Chiliasm repeatedly resurfaces in Western history because it is religiously attractive. Ratzinger considers that Barth’s apparent withdrawal of
eschatology from “real time” leaves an all too theological Christianity
defenseless against the appeal of religion. Ratzinger is familiar with Eric
Voegelin’s accounts of National Socialism and Marxism as secularized
versions of chiliastic and Joachimite religiousity.41 As Ratzinger sees it,
the “attack on God” launched by Marxist thought
fosters a religious pathos which attracts the often deracinated religious
energies of numerous contemporary men and women to itself, as a
magnet draws ore.This pathos also affects theology, which detects in it
the opportunity to fill the eschatological message with a tangible, realistic content. It is curious, and yet, in the light of Barth’s violent separation of faith and religion, also understandable that when theology is
thus placed before the alternatives of faith in God and a religious pathos
directed to futurity, it is willing to choose religion over against God.42

One of Ratzinger’s objections to liberation theology is that transmuting
eschatology into futurity creates an inner-historical “new salvation”: As a
38 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 48.
39 Ibid., 49, original emphasis.
40 Ibid., 50.
41 In conversation with Voegelin’s literary executor, Paul Caringella, Ratzinger

assured him that he owned shelf-loads of Voegelin’s writings.The briefest exposition is to be found in Eric Voegelin. Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1968). Ratzinger may have had a sufficiently high eschatology
threshold to attempt Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Apokalypse der deutschen Seele:
Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen (1937–39). It has some relevance to
German history between 1932–1945.
42 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 3–4.

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terminus for humanity, this is what Barth would call an idol. Ratzinger
encountered this maneuver in the Lutheran Jurgen Moltmann’s Theology
of Hope. Where Barth and Bultmann seemed to derealize eschatology,
Moltmann made it a function of a human future to be earned by political means. Moltmann had regained the future connotation that eschatology had for Joachim, for Bonaventure in part, and for the Anabaptists, and
installed at its heart a “political utopianism.” Ratzinger argues that a political interpretation of the category of eschatology both rationalizes faith—
by making eschatological hope intelligible in political terms—and
fideizes reason—by requiring politicians to take Jesus’ preaching of the
Kingdom as a direct criterion of practical action.43 Ratzinger’s work on
Bonaventure prefigures his later doubts about liberation theology: He
criticizes Bonaventure’s belief in the imminence of the end in the same
way that he will censure Moltmann’s “futurity,” finding that, here,“a new,
second end is set up next to Christ.”44
Hence, when he states that “[t]he setting asunder of eschatology and
politics is one of the fundamental tasks of Christian theology,”45 one may
think that this is his last word. But when Ratzinger writes that “every
interpretation of Franciscanism which abstracts from its original determination with regard to . . . eschatology . . . misses” its “essence,”46 he does
not mean that Franciscanism was a dead end.The vicissitudes of modern
Protestantism make evident the omission in which Catholic and Protestant thought had colluded:We cannot maintain the polite, post-Anabaptist silence about eschatology, for forgetting that we are “ever before” the
eschaton had sent theology into a tailspin when Jesus’ eschatological
preaching was rediscovered. Ratzinger makes good the omission in three
ways, which, as it happens, are mirrored in Pope John Paul II’s encyclical
Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003). Most obviously, he seeks to reawaken the
medieval art of making worship a living exegesis of Revelation: “The
cosmic imagery of the New Testament cannot be used as a source for the
description of a future chain of cosmic events.” For “these texts form part
of a description of the mystery of the Parousia in the language of liturgical tradition. . . . The Parousia is the highest intensification and fulfillment of the Liturgy. And the Liturgy is Parousia, a Parousia-like event
taking place in our midst.”47 Second, just as Ecclesia de Eucharistia affirms
that “the Christian vision . . . increases rather then lessens our sense of
43 Ibid., 58–60.
44 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 114.
45 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 60.
46 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 40.
47 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 202–3; cf. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, nos. 18 and 19.

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responsibility for the world today,” so Ratzinger insists that eschatology is
more effective in “moral theology” than in practical politics.48 The significance of the sacramental and moral signposts is that, third, they disturb
our this-worldly complacency:
Martin Heidegger remarked that, in the face of the situation into which
mankind has blundered, only a god could save us. Our one possibility,
he considered, was “to prepare the way for the readiness to receive the
appearing of the god.” In this dictum of a post-Christian pagan, there
is a genuine insight into the depths of our subject. The “readiness to
expect” is itself transforming. The world is different, depending on
whether it awakens to this readiness or refuses it.49

Bonaventure acknowledged this “ever-beforeness.” He realized that the
Franciscan order is “not yet the true order of Francis,” but, rather, poised
on the edge of eschatological perfection. Bonaventure’s gesture of waiting, to “preserve whatever could be preserved” of the “radically eschatological character” of Francis’s life and testament,50 is an immanent sign of
the eschaton and one which Ratzinger appreciates. He finds this sense of
immanence wanting in Barth’s theology. He intended to create a theology
that does just silence the Protestant dilemmas.
Moltmann’s 1970s “futurism” was built on German biblical scholarship going back to the immediate postwar years. It was at this time that
biblical scholars sought the uniqueness ascribed to Scripture by Barth in
the attention that it pays to history.Thus, Cullmann found that Hebrews
defined faith in temporal terms:The “assurance of things hoped for” refers
to “things which are future.” This accentuation of temporality made it
impossible to avoid “futurism” by entwining eschatology with the liturgy.
For what is unique about the biblical conception of time, according to
Cullmann, is that it does not rotate but follows a straight line:
In the primitive Christian preaching . . . salvation, in keeping with the
Bible’s linear understanding of time, is conceived . . . in terms of a time
process. . . . Because time is thought of as a progressing line, it is possible here for something to be “fulfilled”; a divine plan can move forward
to a complete execution; the goal which beckons on the end of the line
can give to the entire process which is taking place all along the line
the impulse to strive thither.51
48 John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 20; Ratzinger, Eschatology, 59.
49 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 201; John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 20.
50 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 51; see also 50.
51 Oscar Cullmann, Christ and Time: The Primitive Christian Conception of Time and

History, trans. Floyd V. Filson (London: SCM Press, 1948, 1951), 37, 53–54.

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This linearity is evidence for the thesis that, unlike other near-Eastern
texts, Scripture refers to a saving history. Cullmann seeks to show that
Barth’s notion of the uniqueness and hence God-givenness of faith is
exegetically accurate: For Barth, “revealed reality” is a “temporally
limited, unrepeated, and quite unrepeatable event.” Both Barth and, he
thinks, the “Bible” place “extraordinary stress on the historicity of the
Revelation recorded by it because by Revelation it does not mean a
creation of man.”52 For these thinkers, the liturgy cannot reflect the
immanence of the eschaton because liturgy is eminently repeatable.
Cullmann’s most famous exegetical claim is that Scripture makes Christ
define the “mid-point” of temporal space: Once time is perceived in its
full linearity, “the decisive mid-point, the Christ-deed, can be the firm
hold which serves as a guide point for all the process that lies behind and
for all that lies ahead.”53 Barth had exposited the same idea theologically:
[T]he real temporal pre-existence of Jesus Christ in prophecy and his
reality post-existence in witness are identical with this once-for-all
existence of his as the mid-point of time. The mid-point of time—
which, after all, belongs to time—is the fulfillment of time.That is what
distinguishes it from all other times.That is what it has common with
the end (and . . . with the beginning) of time.54

The topical feature of Ratzinger’s habilitation was the claim that
Bonaventure situates Christ at the “mid-point” of time. Bonaventure
achieved this innovation partly through his “charting” of the seven days
of creation against the history from Adam to Christ and post-apostolic
history. For this leads him to break with the normative, Augustinian
picture of Christ as inaugurating the Sixth, and historically final, Day of
creation—which situates Christ at the eschatological closure of biblical
time rather than in the midst of salvific time. As Ratzinger puts it,
For the Augustinian scheme, Christ is the end of the ages; for the
Bonaventurian schema, Christ is the center of the ages.55
The coming of the Son of God marks the fullness of time: not
because time ends with his coming, but because the hidden prophecies
of all ages have been fulfilled. . . . It belonged to Him . . . as the true
Mediator, to come mid-way, some of his elect preceding and others
following Him.56
52 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 12, and 329.
53 Cullmann, Christ and Time, 54.
54 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 12.
55 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 17.
56 Ibid., 109–10.

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Bonaventure reinterprets plenitudo temporum, the “fullness of time,” to
mean “the center of time”: Thus, “the figure of Jesus Christ, the middle
person in the Trinity as well as the mediator and middle between God and
man . . . becomes the synthesis of everything that is expressed for
Bonaventure in the concept of center. Christ becomes the center.”57
Joachim lies behind this new conception, for Bonaventure achieved it by
assimilating something of Joachim’s “futurism,” and “baptizing” it. It was
because Joachim saw the Old and New Testaments as “parallel”“halves” of
history that he set Christ literally in medias res:“For the first thousand years
of Christian theology,” or, after Augustine and before Joachim, “Christ is
not the turning point of history at which a transformed and redeemed
world begins. . . . Rather, Christ is the beginning of the end. He is ‘salvation’ in as far as in him the ‘end’ has already broken into history.”58 By
setting Christ at the mid-point of time,“Joachim became the path-finder
within the Church for a new understanding of history which to us today
appears to be so self-evident that it seems to be the Christian understanding.”59 This is Joachim’s “true significance.” Joachim’s influence on the
Franciscan movement is “important above all because it brought about the
acceptance of this new historical consciousness. . . . The Church and
redemption are rendered historical in an entirely new way which cannot
be a matter of indifference for the history of dogma nor for systematic
theology.”60 Where Augustinian tradition stressed Christ’s finality, Joachim
and Bonaventure stressed his centrality.Thomas Aquinas’s objection to the
apocalypticist side of Joachim was that Old Testament signs and miracles
do not forewarn of similar crises in New Testament and post-apostolic
time but, rather, prefigure Christ himself.61 Bonaventure retains Joachim’s
idea that the Old and New Testaments run parallel to each other in their
entirety but keeps apocalypticism at bay by repudiating the notion of a
“third age” of the Spirit that supersedes the era of Christ. Here as elsewhere, Ratzinger says,“Thomas is more an Augustinian than is Bonaventure.” Bonaventure is able to baptize Joachim’s ideas because his goal is
Christocentism.Where Joachim was
concerned with bringing out the movement of the second age to the
third, Bonaventure’s purpose is to show, on the basis of the parallel
between the two ages, that Christ is the true center and the turning
57 Ibid., 110.
58 Ibid., 106.
59 Ibid., 107, original emphasis.
60 Ibid.
61 Thomas Aquinas, IV Sent., d. 43, q. 1, a. 3, qc. 2, ad 3. Near identical remarks

occur in the Summa theologiae III, q. 77, a. 2, ad 3.

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point of history. This is the basic concept of Bonaventure’s historical
schema, and it involves a decisive rejection of Joachim. In the final
analysis, he is closer to Thomas than to Joachim.62

This aspect of Ratzinger’s comeback to biblical theology indicates that
it is possible for a scholastic and Catholic thinker to place Christ at the
“ ‘axis of world history,’ the center of time.”63 But this does not resolve
the opposition implicit in the Protestant theologians’ emphasis on biblical linearity.The “symbol of time for primitive Christianity as well as for
biblical Judaism,” Cullmann wrote, “is the line, while in Hellenism it is
the circle.”64 He defined “biblical thought” as against “Greek thought,”
and thus against metaphysics. It remains common in Protestant milieux
to contrast the abstract and atemporal thinking of the Greeks with the
historicity of Scripture. In order to tackle this objection, Ratzinger draws
on Bonaventure’s deep sense of the historicity of Revelation. Once he
has laid the specter of Catholic abasement before “Greek” metaphysics to
rest, Ratzinger will be able to show that, in the liturgy as in “the prayer
of the early Church,” eschatology is “personalized. Its focus is not space
and time, . . . ‘Where?’ and ‘When?’ but relationship with Christ’s person
and longing for him to come close.”65 The question arising from the
crossover of time and eschatology in Jesus’ self-understanding seemed to
be, where do they overlap in Christian history? But a better question may
be, who is the juncture? “The Christian,” Ratzinger writes, “lives in the
presence of the saints as in his own proper ambiance,” amongst the persons
who indwell the frontier between time and eternity,“and so lives ‘eschatologically.’ ” The saints “count for something not as the past but as the
present of the Lord’s power to save.”66
Ratzinger has claimed that because, for Luther, “ontology is the basic
philosophical expression of the concept of continuity” between Christ
and the Church,“it is opposed first as a Scholastic and later as a Hellenistic perversion of Christianity and is contrasted with the idea of history. In
modern histories of theology, the concept of salvation history is treated as
a Protestant antithesis to the ontological assessment in Catholic theology.”67 Before we consider Ratzinger’s treatment of this “antithesis,” we
should note a difference between what Cullmann and Barth mean by
62 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 117–18.
63 Ibid., 118.
64 Cullmann, Christ and Time, 51.
65 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 8.
66 Ibid., 9.
67 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 158, original emphasis.

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“salvation history.” When they stressed the linear temporality of Scripture,
the salvation historians wanted to uncover in Scripture something that, in
Barth’s own doctrine of Revelation, is more elusive than chronological
time. For Barth, the contact of Revelation with the passage of time is a
metaphor for its quality as event. Even the idea of the “mid-point of time”
exposed in the first volume of the Church Dogmatics is too static to capture
what Barth means by the Christ-event. Where the biblical theologians
pointed to historicity as against Greek, metaphysical circularity, Barth
argued that God’s acting is not a thing, but an event. The efforts of the
biblical theologians to supply textual evidence for a Barthian Weltanschauung
goes against the grain in that the purpose of Barth’s theological method is
to deliver Christians from reliance on any kind of evidence, including not
only the metaphysical but also the historical. Moreover, for Barth, Revelation never materializes in a text as such. The text of Scripture is not
Revelation in its verbal content: It becomes Revelation if and when God
chooses to make it a revelatory event. Scripture becomes concurrent with
Revelation when it becomes the focus of God’s action. Barth writes that,
The concept of truths of Revelation in the sense of Latin propositions
given and sealed once for all with divine authority in both wording and
meaning is theologically impossible if it is a fact that Revelation is true
in the free decision of God which was taken once for all in Jesus Christ,
that it is thus strictly future for us, and that it must always become true
in the Church in the intractable reality of faith.The freely acting God
Himself and alone is the truth of Revelation.

Hence, the
direct identification between Revelation and the Bible which is in fact
at issue is not one that we can presuppose or anticipate. It takes place
as an event when and where the biblical word becomes God’s Word,
that is, when and where the biblical word comes into play as a word of
witness. . . .Thus in the event of God’s Word, Revelation and the Bible
are indeed one, and literally so.68

There is a tension between this and Cullmann’s proposition that the
“Christian absolute norm is itself also history and is not, as is the philosophical norm, a transcendent datum that lies beyond all history. The
primitive Christian norm . . . consists . . . in a temporally connected historical series of a special kind, namely, the biblical history.”69 Ratzinger’s
68 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 15 and 113.
69 Cullmann, Christ and Time, 21–22.

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rejoinder will, in a sense, play the two positions off against each other: If
Christian Revelation really is eschatological, then it must be historical, and
this “is” is then an ontological or metaphysical datum.
Cullmann and Barth share the belief that the priority of history or
event over ontology is rooted in the fact that God is “for us.” Christians
must describe God in terms of “act” and “deed” because God’s primary
reality in relation to us is salvific. God does before we know anything
about him. Barth also asserts that God is a doer or actor in relation to us
because his very being is act or deed. Ratzinger rejects one feature of
these proposals but also goes some way toward greeting Barth’s insight.
To say that truth is yielded only by time is to make deeds or occurrences
the sole source of truth. If one takes the notion that “truth is a function
of time” as a principle—and we have seen that the biblical theologians
inadvertently reinstated a first principle to underlie revealed theology—
then one will have to take it as a matter of principle that Christ’s temporal doing exhausts his being. For Cullmann, only the “salvation historical”
creeds of the early Church, the formulae that describe what he has done
for us, appropriately name him. But Christ does not remain within
history: He acts creatively in relation to it and changes its course. In order
to affirm the leap from historical being into Resurrection, one must
affirm that there is something beyond time—eternal life.There is no need
to consider the latter as a lifeless and inactive concept. As Ratzinger
notes, the primitive Christian creeds were both nominal and verbal:The
first, such as “Jesus is Lord,” denote what Christ is; the second, such as
“God has raised him” refer to what he has done—risen from death.70
But, precisely as a deed, the resurrection reveals Jesus’ ontological identity
with the life of God:
The Resurrection is but the most extreme concretization of this statement: God is. It shows that God is in-deed (wirklich), for being is doing
and God’s being is the life that overcomes death. That God is in-deed
means that there is a truth of man in which the goals of his intellectual
inquiry find their limits and their measure.71

The resurrection is a quintessential event, so that, in it, being and doing
are at one. Likewise, the “is” of Chalcedon, which affirms that, in the
incarnate Logos, God is man, is no abstract, a-temporal concept, but
embraces the event of God’s becoming man, the Incarnation.72
70 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 16, 19–21.
71 Ibid., 99.
72 Ibid., 182.

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In the Incarnate Christ, the deed of service to us, the role as savior, is
identical to Christ’s being; he puts his entire being at our service.
Ratzinger has written that “the Trinity becomes . . . recognizable for us
through the fact that in his Son as man God Himself has become witness
to Himself and thus his personality has taken actual concrete shape in the
radical anthropomorphism of ‘the form of a servant’ in ‘the likeness of
men’ (Phil 2:7 . . . ).”73 Aidan Nichols interprets such statements by reference to Ratzinger’s affirmation that, in Christ, the “person is the office,
the office is the person”:There is in Christ “no private area reserved for
an ‘I’ which remains in the background behind the deeds and actions, and
thus at some time or other can be ‘off duty.’ Here there is no ‘I’ separate
from the work: the ‘I’ is the work, and the work the ‘I.’ ”74 For Barth, the
person of Christ is his work because the immanent Trinity itself is act or
deed before our need for salvation: Unlike Cullmann’s equation of Christ
with his temporal function, Barth’s formula proceeds from a theological
principle. Ratzinger’s treatment recalls Barth’s proposition that “ ‘Christ’s
being as man is his work’: the importance of the whole section had been
brought home to Ratzinger by von Balthasar.”75 Ratzinger’s development of a Christology of “being and service” is intended
to overcome, to the degree possible, the polarity between a Christology of the Incarnation, on the Johannine and patristic model, and a
Christology of the Cross, of the sort found in Paul and the sixteenthcentury Reformers.The being of Christ—the predominant concern of
a Christology of the Incarnation—is a continuous exodus. It is not a
resting in self, but the permanent act of being Son, of being servant.
Conversely, this act, for which we need verbs, “doing” words, and
whose supreme manifestation is the Cross, is not simply doing, but is
also being. A Christology of the Incarnation and a Christology of the
Cross require each other.76

Ratzinger lays aside both a Christology that functionalizes Christ at
the requirement of human justification, and a Christology so metaphysical that it is blind to the fact that, within the Trinity, action or being is
73 Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 34–35.
74 Aidan Nichols O.P., The Thought of Benedict XVI:An Introduction to the Theology of

Joseph Ratzinger (London: Continuum, 1988, 2005), 123, original emphasis, quoting Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (London: 1969), 149.
75 Nichols, The Thought of Benedict XVI, 123, citing Karl Barth, Kirchliche Dogmatik
(1948), III.2, 66–69; and Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Zwei Glaubensweisen,” in
Spiritus Creator (1967), 76–91.
76 Nichols, The Thought of Benedict XVI, 125–26.

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acting toward, or relating. The primary historical “action toward” is the
resurrection. Hence, “all Christian theology,” as Ratzinger considers
must be first and foremost a theology of Resurrection. It must be a
theology of Resurrection before it is a theology of the justification of
the sinner; it must be a theology of Resurrection before it is a theology of the metaphysical sonship of God. It can be a theology of the
Cross but only as and within the theology of Resurrection. . . .The core
of the Gospel consists . . . in the good tidings of God’s action, which
precedes all human doing. . . . For if it is true that the prae of God’s
action is significant for theology, that faith in an actio Dei is antecedent
to all other declarations of faith, then the primacy of history over metaphysics, over all theologies of being and existence

is “obvious.”77 The “concept of God is” thereby
removed from the realm of a mere . I believe that it was here that
the definitive boundary between the biblical and the Greek concept of
God became obfuscated, that this obfuscation was the crux of the
repeated patristic attempts to combine Greek thought with biblical faith
and that from this arose for Christian theology a task that is still far from
being accomplished. Decisive for the Greek concept of God was the
belief in God as a pure and changeless being of whom . . . no action
could be predicated; his . . . changelessness meant that he was . . . selfcontained and referred wholly to Himself without any relationship to
what was changeable. For the biblical God, on the other hand, it is . . .
relationship and action that are the essential marks; creation and Revelation are the two basic statements about him, and when Revelation is
fulfilled in the Resurrection, it is . . . confirmed . . . that He is not just
one who is timeless but also one who is above time, whose existence is
known to us only through his action.78

The Reformation disjunction between metaphysics and saving history is
based on the belief that God is only known in his saving act. If one accentuates the word “known,” God’s “saving act” is subordinated to our
knowledge and reception of it:The error of Lutherans like Cullmann lies
here; but those Catholic critics who reduce Protestant belief to this are
also missing something. For if, with Barth, one stresses the “saving act,”
then one is simply a realist. To say that God is his doing is to affirm that
God is before we theoretically formulate his being. Ratzinger concludes
that,“the prae of God’s action means . . . that actio is antecedent to verbum,
77 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 184–85.
78 Ibid., 185.

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reality to the tidings of it.”79 Theological realism is a good way to avoid
Pelagianism: “It is not works that are vivifying, but faith” because “Only
by handing oneself over to truth and rightness does one find that
communication which is life.”80
Ratzinger extensively embraces Barth’s notion of God’s being as event.
But he also sees a value in the more prosaic conception underlying the
evidentialism of the biblical scholars: This event really does materialize in
history. An eschatologically oriented theology must include ontology
because, in the Resurrection, eschatology is history—the “is” of metaphysics is inescapable. As Ratzinger puts it,
the definitive transformation that eschatology underwent by virtue of
Christian belief in the Resurrection is its transposition into history. For
late Judaic expectation, eschatology lay at the end of history.To believe
in the Resurrection of Jesus means, on the contrary, to believe in the
eschaton in history, in the historicity of God’s eschatological action.81

The ancient world imagined the philosopher as one to whom “death
is always present.” This pre-Christian “philosophy gave the [Christian]
faith its first concrete,” imaginative “expression”:“This means that Christian art finds one of its roots in coming to grips with death.”82 The early
Church imagined the “Christian philosopher” in an analogous yet “different” way.The difference is a new contact with reality:“[H]e carries in his
hand the Gospel, out of which come facts, not words. He is the true
philosopher because he is understands the mystery of death.”83 The art of
the Catacombs often presents Christ as the philosopher, and a favorite
scene is the raising of Lazarus: “Christ appears as the true philosopher
because he has the answer: he changes death, and he changes life.”84
Within the history of philosophy, as Ratzinger sees it, the upshot of
Luther’s opinion that metaphysics is an intellectual “justification of works”
is the “rejection of ontology” by the post-Kantian philosophers.85 If one
is to converse with Protestants about the usage of philosophy within
theology, a Bonaventurian idea of the creative Logos is an apt opener.
Historically, Barth’s objections to the Catholic use of metaphysics in
theology refer to the practice of most Thomists of his era of making
79 Ibid., 186.
80 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 99.
81 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 187.
82 Joseph Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” Communio 11 (1984): 350.
83 Ibid., 351.
84 Ibid.
85 Ibid., 356–57.

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philosophy the antecedent foundation of theology.Whence his assertion
that there is no anthropological or metaphysical “prius” for theology.
What Barth found fault with in the Thomist theology he knew was its
methodological insistence on foregrounding philosophy. Ever “since
Descartes,” he complains, this has entailed deploying “a comprehensively
explicated self-understanding of human existence which may also at a
specific point become the pre-understanding of an existence in the
Church or in faith, and therefore the pre-understanding and criterion of
theological knowledge.” As Barth sees it, God’s action is the only
antecedent condition of theology: “The Word of God always tells us
something fresh that we had never heard before from anyone. The rock
of a Thou . . . is thrown in our path here. This otherness which is yet
related to us and made known to us . . . stamps it . . . as the Word of God.”
The criterion that goes before theology is not the anonymous objective
truth of metaphysics but the divine subject:
The personalizing of the concept of the Word of God, which we
cannot avoid when we remember that Jesus Christ is the Word of God,
does not mean its deverbalizing. But it . . . means awareness of the fact
that it is person rather than thing or object even if . . . it is word, word
of Scripture and word of preaching.To be person means to be subject,
not merely in the logical sense, but also in the ethical sense: to be free
subject, a subject . . . able to control its own existence and nature . . .
and also able to select new possibilities of existence and nature.86

Ratzinger thinks that Barth’s idea of Revelation as a personal action influenced Vatican II’s move away from the notion of revealed truth as
congealed in two separate “sources,” conceived as material objects: “One
of the most important events in the struggle over the Constitution on
Revelation” was, he says,
the liberation from this narrow view and the return to what actually
happens in the positive sources, before it was crystallized into doctrine,
when God “reveals” Himself. . . . Only by going back to the comprehensive reality of the deeds and words of God is it possible to do away
with the positivisitic idea of the duplex fons; only by going back to the
common foundation of all Christian discourse, could the question of
the individual elements of the passing on of Revelation be removed
from the field of controversy and placed within the appropriate framework. If one compares the text of article 2 with what was said at Vatican I (DS 3004 f.), it becomes clear how much Catholic theology has
benefited in the last fifty years from the theology of Karl Barth, which
86 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 36, 138, 141.

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itself was influenced by the personalistic thinking of Ebner, Buber, and
others. . . .Whereas Vatican I starts from the natural knowledge of God
and considers “supernatural” Revelation only in close connection with
this idea, in order to proceed . . . to the question of its transmission in
Scripture and tradition, here the question of the natural knowledge of
God is put at the end and God’s revealing activity described within a
comprehensive survey of salvation history.87

If starting from God’s “revealing activity” could help to defrost the
notion of Revelation as a solidified “deposit,” so the notion of philosophy as an antecedent foundation of theology can attain more flexibility
if one considers philosophical questions historically. Barth rejected
philosophy as a static, Cartesian basis for theology because this foundation lacks the ultimacy of a person-to-person “dialogue”:
[T]he Word of God . . . aims at us and smites us in our existence. No
human word has the competence to aim at us in our existence. . . .The
only word that may aim at us in our existence and can smite us in our
existence is one which questions and answers us in . . . the same way as
death might question and answer us at the end of our existence. But
death is dumb. It neither questions nor answers. It is only the end.88

For Ratzinger, metaphysical conceptions of immortality, like that of Plato,
are not the antecedent foundation of Christian faith in resurrection:
The philosopher, we might say, is Peter on the lake, wishing to step
beyond mortality and glimpse life but not succeeding, indeed sinking
beneath the waves. For all his capacity to speculate about immortality,
in the end he cannot stand. . . . Only the Lord’s outstretched hand can
save sinking Peter, that is, humankind.That hand reaches out for us in
the saying, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” [Mt
5:8]. Philosophical understanding remains a walking on the waters: it
yields no solid ground. Only God incarnate can draw us out of the
waters by his power and hold us firm.89

Once given a “Christological transformation, the Platonist notion of the
life which flows from truth is . . . made the vehicle of a ‘dialogical’
concept of humanity: Man is defined by his intercourse with God.”90
Although it accords with the Platonic conception, the
87 Ratzinger,“Chapter I: Revelation Itself,” in Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Docu-

ments of Vatican II, vol. 3, 170.
88 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 141.
89 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 152.
90 Ibid.

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starting point of the Christian understanding of immortality is the
concept of God, and from this it draws its dialogical character. Since
God is the God of the living, and calls his creature, man, by name, this
creature cannot be annihilated. In Jesus Christ, God’s action in accepting humanity into his own eternal life has . . . taken flesh: Christ is the
tree of life whence we receive the food of immortality. Immortality
cannot be accounted for in terms of the isolated individual existent and
its native capacities, but only by reference to that relatedness which is
constitutive of human nature.91

The “constitutive” “relatedness” of human beings is brought about by
their creatureliness:Their Creator sets them in relation to himself as creatures.Whereas, for the creature, relatedness is conferred by another, to be
God is to be relationship, for God is love. So it is wrong to think of God
as an inactive metaphysical condition of theology: “knowing and believing in God,” Ratzinger states,
is an active-passive process, not a philosophical structure . . . ; it is an act
in which one is first touched by God and then responds. . . . It is only
from this perspective that we can understand what it means to call God
a “Person” or to speak of “Revelation”: in our knowledge of God there
occurs also—and, indeed, first—something from God’s side.92

Presented in terms of a doctrine of creation, a theocentric personalism
can interpret immortality as a property of human nature. Using Teilhard de
Chardin’s idea that evolution produces “ever better eyesight” as a metaphor
for spiritual vision, Ratzinger remarks that the human person is the
creature . . . for whom the vision of God is part and parcel of his very
being. Because this is so, it also belongs intrinsically to his being to participate in life. . . . it is not a relationless being oneself that makes a human
being immortal, but precisely his . . . capacity for relatedness, to God. . . .
such an opening in one’s existence is not a trimming, an addition to a
being which really might subsist in an independent fashion. . . . It constitutes what is deepest in man’s being. It is . . . what we call “soul.” . . . A
being is the more itself the more it is open, the more it is in relationship.93

Hence,
it is the man who makes himself open to all being, in its wholeness and
in its Ground, and becomes thereby a “self,” who is truly a person. Such
91 Ibid., 157–58.
92 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 69.
93 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 154–55.

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openness is not a product of human achievement. It is given to man;
man depends for it on Another. But it is given to man to be his very
own possession. That is what is meant by creation, and what Thomas
means when he says immortality belongs to man by nature.94

As in “Thomas’s theology of creation: nature is only possible by virtue of
a communication of the Creator’s, yet such communication both establishes the creature in its own right and makes it a genuine participator in
the being of the One communicated.”95
But if relatedness is simply a spelling out of createdness, how was it
that this insight gave over to a notion of metaphysical “natures” as rationally self-founding entities? Why did Catholic theology need Karl Barth
to remind it of the implications of the doctrine of creation? And was it
because of any overlaid feature of Catholic theology that Protestant salvation historians complained that the “ ‘Hellenization’ of Christianity” had
“created a static style of thought that cannot do justice to the dynamism
of the biblical style?”96 Such “questions had a strong influence” on
Ratzinger, and he wrote his habilitation on Bonaventure in order to
“make a contribution toward answering them.”97 As he notes, the idea of
history that the Scholastics took from Augustine denies that, as a series of
accidental occurrences, history can be a “science”: “for science treats
precisely of the universal.” Hence, despite the importance of biblical
typology to the medieval, “the predominant impression remained that
history lay outside the limits of that which is properly intelligible and
thus below the proper area of concern for theology.”98 Since any
sequence of moments is “mere[ly] accidental,” the idea that an infinite
series of moments could lie behind us is not illogical. Once it is assumed
that “history is the realm of chance,” one can entertain the hypothesis of
the eternity of world.99 “With keen perception,” Ratzinger says,
“Bonaventure sees that this concept of history is incompatible with the
Christian view.”100 Bonaventure rejected the thesis of the eternity of the
world not because it was Aristotelian but because it ran counter to his
own “theology of history”101 within which history is not a chronicle of
94 Ibid., 155.
95 Ibid.
96 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, xi
97 Ibid., xii.
98 Ibid., 76, 119.
99 Ibid., 140.
100 Ibid., 141.
101 Ibid., 119.

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chance occurrences, but “illumined by the same divine order which is the
unifying law of all reality.”102
Ratzinger seems to consider that a Bonaventurian sense of history as
the arena of God’s action is a natural complement to the Thomist appetite
for metaphysics. For, without the sense of dynamism and concrete
contingency that history lends to metaphysics, philosophy neglects its
other-bound reference, becoming a self-referential science of pure
rationality, not the rationality of things, and thus loses the sense of relationality in creation, which theology perfects. Something similar can
happen to faith. Just as a theoretical commitment to philosophical rationality can end up “reasoning about rationality,” so a programmatic determination to make faith propel theological discourse can turn into
believing in one’s belief. Commenting on the odd fact that it was
“Thomas the metaphysicist” who both “brought about the rejection of
the salvation-historical concept” and “took the first critical step toward
the age of history,” Ratzinger remarks that “[f]ortunately, theology has
always been richer in its achievements than in its programs.” The theological “revolution” attendant on a literal rather than allegorical
“hermeneutic method” can be assessed “positively and negatively (yes,
negatively!).”103 Ratzinger is an unprogrammatic thinker, a Church man
who is more interested in responding to the lay of the land than in driving a theory to its logical conclusion. For the man of the Church, neither
Plato, Aristotle, nor Thomas “is philosophy or the philosopher. It is in the
multivalent message of the entire history . . . that truth is disclosed and
with it the possibility of fresh knowledge.”104 The question of philosophy and theology is not a matter of either giving priority to faith or
making reason the foundation but of “put[ting]” both “into dialogue with
one another.”105
Barth said that theology is “rational wrestling with the mystery” of
God’s action. “But all rational wrestling with this mystery . . . can lead
only to its fresh . . . interpretation and manifestation as a mystery. For this
reason it is worth our while to engage in this rational wrestling with
it.”106 Ratzinger was disconcerted that a recognition of God’s mysterious
“invisibility” is absent from Lumen Gentium’s two articles on atheism:
“[P]ass[ing] over the essentials of the via negativa,” the council ignored the
attention that Catholic theologians had paid to this “since Karl Barth’s
102 Ibid., 19.
103 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 181.
104 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 24.
105 Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 358.
106 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 368.

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criticism of the analogia entis.”107 Rather than regarding the necessity of
acknowledging God’s “invisibility” as an admission of the ultimate blindness of conceptual reason, Ratzinger treats it as the space that creates the
possibility for dialogue between philosophical questions and theological
answers: “Must not the answers . . . by their very nature leave room for
the unexpressed and inexpressible? Might it not be that such answers give
the ultimate questions of life and death their real depth and dramatic
character?”108 Theology creates the possibility for concrete, realistic, and
dramatic philosophical speech because “if faith speaks about the resurrection from the dead, then we are not dealing with some abstruse utterance about some unknown place in some unknown future.”109
Earlier twentieth-century students of Bonaventure had been divided
between those who followed Etienne Gilson in viewing him as an antiAristotelian Augustinian, and those like van Steenberghen who saw
Bonaventure as an eclectic, Augustinian Aristotelian. Gilson and van
Steenberghen differed for half a century, not only about whether
Bonaventure was a pure Augustinian or an Aristotelianizing one, but
about the possibility of “Christian philosophy.” Whilst finding that van
Steenberghen’s view of Bonaventure as an eclectic Aristotelian is more
on the mark, Ratzinger observes a certain irony in the fact that this
requires van Steenberghen to regard the Seraphic Doctor as a “Christian
philosopher.”110 Ratzinger does not point out a second irony: Both
medievalists exchanged places in the two controversies, for Gilson’s
107 Joseph Ratzinger, “Introductory Article and Chapter I: The Dignity of the

Human Person,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5, ed. Herbert
Vorgrimler, trans. W. J O’Hara (London/New York: Burns & Oates/Herder &
Herder, 1969), 154–55.
108 Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 354.
109 Ibid., 358.
110 Ratzinger declares that “Van Steenberghen is . . . inconsistent with the results of
his own studies when he defines Gilson’s concept of ‘Christian philosophy’ and
when he expressly affirms the fundamental possibility of separating philosophy
and theology in Bonaventure; for his own presentation of the history of philosophy indicates that the so-called Augustinianism arises from the problem of the
relation of philosophy and theology and that it is the result of a process of development in which this philosophy is actually being formed. . . . His own presentation of the history of this period . . . indicates that the real question in the great
disputes of the thirteenth century was not simply a philosophical fight within an
already existing philosophy. Rather it was a question of Christian philosophy and
Christian wisdom as such. . . .The problem of Augustinianism and Aristotelianism is not a purely philosophical problem. It cannot be treated at all if we abstract
from theology, and every presentation that attempts to do so overlooks the decisive point at issue.” Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 131.

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notion of Christian philosophy is at least as Bonaventurian as it is
Thomist. Ratzinger mentions, in his book on Bonaventure, Gilson’s
famously annoying lecture on the future of Scholasticism, in which he
argued that Scholastic philosophy can only survive if, like the philosophy
of the medieval doctors and saints, it needs theology like some fish need
“warm water.”111 Two decades on, when Ratzinger tackled the ThomistFranciscan debate over whether theology is primarily a speculative or
practical science, he finds with the Thomists, simply because God is and
does before human theologians can act and do. But, he says, this does not
mean Bonaventure’s insight can be disposed of. This is because the
assumption that God, and thus the scriptural word of God, is the subject
of theology that lies behind it:
The writers of Holy Scripture speak . . . as men, and yet . . . in doing
so, they are “theologoi,” those through whom God as subject, as the
word that speaks itself, enters into history. What distinguishes Holy
Scripture from all later theology is thus . . . safeguarded, but, at the same
time, the Bible becomes the model of all theology. . . . In this way,
Bonaventure achieved in his later works the synthesis he had sought in
his earlier ones, where he had affirmed the ontological character of
theology and thus the proper rank of the theoretical and yet had spoken
. . . of the necessary self-transcendence of contemplation into the practice of the faith.112

A good theologian is not a career intellectualist, for “just as we cannot
learn to swim without water, so we cannot learn theology without the
spiritual praxis in which it lives.”113 Ratzinger’s response to the protest
against the presence of metaphysics in theology is to take up a Bonaventurian, that is, Gilsonian, notion of philosophy as Christian wisdom.
A Christian wisdom will relate philosophy to history. For instance, it
will not think of Platonism as an ahistorical “essence,” but as a precise
response to a historical and political crisis in the development of human
thought about human nature.114 For Ratzinger “the whole question of
the relation of faith and reason” is related to the issue of history. For it
can hardly be disputed that as a consequence of the division between
philosophy and theology established by the Thomists, a juxtaposition
has gradually been established which no longer appears adequate.There
111 Etienne Gilson, “Historical Research and the Future of Scholasticism,” Modern

Schoolman 29 (1951): 10.
112 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 321.
113 Ibid., 322.
114 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 77–78.

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Francesca Aran Murphy
is, and must be, a human reason in faith; yet conversely, every human
reason is conditioned by the historical standpoint so that reason pure
and simple does not exist.115

As Ratzinger notes, “the terminology established by St. Thomas” entailed
that “philosophy and theology were distinguished as the study of the natural and the supernatural. . . .These distinctions received a particular sharpness in the modern era.” Even if the “distinction” was later presented “in a
more radical manner than the texts themselves would justify,” one cannot go
back to the thirteenth century or make the tradition just end there:“Once
this distinction is drawn, the question inevitably arises: can philosophy and
theology be brought into a methodological relationship?”116 The means of
reconnection between nature and the supernatural that Ratzinger takes
links up with a historical fact: Historically, philosophy has always responded
to religion.This link can be surprising, not only because one may think of
philosophy as timeless reasoning, but because Ratzinger himself can be as
critical of religiosity as any Lutheran or Barthian. He constantly deems the
innovations of Socrates and Plato as an “enlightenment” with respect to
earlier religious and mythical thinking.117 Nonetheless, unless it wants to be
ontologically empty, philosophy needs “a priori concepts”:“philosophy has
always thrived on critical dialogue with . . . religious traditions.”“[R]eligious
traditions” form “the starting points in its struggle to find the truth.”118
What calls for enlightened criticism in religion is the localism of myth, its
inability to proclaim one universal God. This is where the philosophical
impulse joins forces with the Revelation of the unique God of Israel:
The assertion of a God who creates and redeems the entire world goes
far beyond any individual religious community. . . . It is an assertion
about reality. . . .The impact of this “God-thought” . . . is quite clear in
the critique of other religions made by the prophets of Israel and the
Wisdom literature.When the self-made gods are ridiculed and the one
true God is placed in opposition to them, we see the same movement
at work as we do in the pre-Socratic thinkers of the early Greek
enlightenment. . . . The faith of Israel gives rise to a . . . claim whose
universality is linked to its reasonability.119
115 Ratzinger, “Introductory Article and Chapter I,” 120.
116 Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 353.
117 See, for instance, Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 327 and 339; and idem,

Eschatology, 77–79.The deepest discussion is in Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief
and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003,
2004), 82–83 and passim.
118 Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 355.
119 Ibid., 355.

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When John calls Christ the Logos “he stands in the clear Wisdom tradition.”120
Although biblical theologians like Gerhard von Rad grasped the
significance of biblical typology, it took him a while to admit that Scripture does not only proclaim history, but also creation.Von Rad arrived at
this conclusion late in life, through the study of Old Testament parables
and proverbs.121 Ratzinger uses the example of the parable to explain
what Christian wisdom is. Jesus taught in parables not just because “faith
reveals itself only in parables” but also because “the parable makes clear
the core of reality itself.This is possible because reality itself is a parable.
Hence, it is only by way of parable that the nature of the world and of
man himself is made known to us.”122 Parables are not extrinsic to our
natural or historical “experience of the world” for
the parable . . . gives this experience its proper depth and reveals what
is hidden in things themselves. Reality is self-transcendence, and when
man is led to transcend it, he not only comprehends God but, for the
first time, also understands reality and enables himself and creation to
be what they were meant to be. Only because creation is parable can it
become the word of parable.That is why the material of daily living can
always lead beyond itself; that is why a history can take place in it that
both transcends it and is profoundly conformable to it.123

Christian wisdom is historically instantiated because to be human is to
be historical:
Man is temporal as a traveler along the way of knowing and loving. . . .
His specific temporality also derives from his relationality—from the fact
that he becomes himself only in being with others and being toward
others. Entering upon love, or . . . refusing love, binds one to another
person and so to the temporality of that person, his “before” and “after.”
The fabric of shared humanity is a fabric of shared temporality.124
120 Ibid., 359.
121 Gerhard von Rad began his defense of the reading of Christological typology in

the Old Testament by remarking that typological thinking is present in all human
thought, especially in proverbs and in poetry: “Typological Interpretation of the
Old Testament,” in Essays on Old Testament Hermeneutics, ed. Claus Westerman,
trans. James Luther Mays (Richmond,VA: John Knox Press, 1964).Von Rad elaborated on this at length in Wisdom in Israel, trans. James D. Martin (London:
SCM, 1970, 1972).
122 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 344.
123 Ibid., 345, original emphasis.
124 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 183–84.

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354

This insight, spurred in part by Barth’s perception that we gain our
humanity by how we are addressed and respond, leads into the question
of whether “tradition takes place . . . as the growing insight, mediated by
the Holy Spirit, into Revelation that has been given once and for all”:
The question of the historicity of inspiration is “the crux of the difference between Catholic and Protestant theology in the question of tradition.”125 During the Second Vatican Council, both literal-minded
Thomists and Protestants like Cullmann found it difficult to articulate
the value of tradition because they ignored
our deeper knowledge of the problem of historical understanding, which
is no longer adequately expressed by the simple ideas of a given fact and
its explanation, because the explanation, as the process of understanding,
cannot be clearly separated from what is being understood.126

Bonaventure had made no such clean-cut distinction between Revelation and inspiration, text and interpreting mind: For him, Revelation is
the ongoing deepening of our understanding of Scripture.127 Ratzinger
carries this line of thought through by declaring that “subsequent history
belongs intrinsically to the inner momentum of the text itself. . . . It does
not . . . provide retrospective commentary on the text. Rather, through
the appearing of the reality which was still to come, the full dimensions
of the word carried by the text come to light.”128 Because Scripture
becomes spiritually intelligible in history,
the Gospel does not confront the Church as a self-enclosed Ding-an-Sich.
Herein lies the . . . methodological error of trying to reconstruct the ipsissima vox Jesu as a yardstick for Church and New Testament alike. . . . Jesus’
message becomes intelligible for us through the echo effect it has
created in history. In this echo, the intrinsic potential of that message,
with its various strata and configurations, still resounds. Through its
resonance, we learn more about the real than we shall ever do from
free-floating critical reconstructions.129

The sense of “either/or”-ness upon which Protestant spirituality turns
can be appropriated by Catholics as the real historicity of the human
creature. But where, in Protestantism, the “either/or” is conceived as a
decision and thus related to the future, for the Catholic, human history
125 Ratzinger, “Revelation Itself,” 179.
126 Ratzinger, “The Transmission of Divine Revelation,” 187–88.
127 Ratzinger, Bonaventure, 64–69.
128 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 42.
129 Ibid., 41.

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includes not only the present and future, but also the past. Barth both uses
the philosophers and thinks philosophically for himself: He does not so
much denigrate philosophy or reason as he underplays the consideration
that reality “remembers” what God has done in it. Ratzinger claims that
human time is “memoria-time,” time as recapitulated and made meaningful in memory.130 Barth believed that
To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ.To
act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call.This obedience to
the call of Christ is faith. . . . Faith grasps the promise that we shall be
led into all truth ( Jn 16:13). Faith knows God. Faith is the determination of human action by the being of the Church and therefore by Jesus
Christ, by the gracious address of God to man.131

For Ratzinger, the ecclesiality of Christian faith entails that, as a “transhistorical subject,” a subject that is in but not of time, the “communio Ecclesiae . . . is the mediator between being and time.”132 This memory
generates tradition, the creative ability to take history forward.Within the
communal litany of the saints, the “eschatological question becomes the
question of my own dying,” rather than “temporal expectation of the
world’s end.” But “this is possible . . . because the individual has found
shelter in a history filled with salvific energy.”133
The prerequisites for Ratzinger’s reply to Barth’s understanding of the
Incarnation as the revelatory act of the Trinity were, first, his discovery of
a similar pattern in Bonaventure, for whom “Christ is the medium distantiae, the defining center, in his Crucifixion,”134 and second, that he “in due
course” became “sympathetic to the principal prophet of a renewed
Christocentricity in Catholic theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar.”135 Von
Balthasar’s work on Barth’s theology was one means through which
Ratzinger learned that “for pursuing the dialogue with Protestant theology, Catholic theology requires that there be, despite all divisions and
antitheses, a common theological motive”136 and that “Catholic theology
must not . . . be afraid to learn from its partner.”137 The pre-Barthian
Catholic understanding of the work of Christ was not really centered on
130 Ibid., 184.
131 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 17.
132 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 23.
133 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 11–12.
134 Nichols, The Thought of Benedict XVI, 63.
135 Ibid., 63–64.
136 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 180.
137 Ibid., 180–81.

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death. In Being and Time, Heidegger had summed up human historicity as
a being toward death. Barth appropriated this historicizing of human
“nature” into his Christocentric anthropology. For him, the human being
is a being toward the eschatological act of God—Christ. Barth created an
opening for others to enable philosophy to recapture its bonds with the
deep religious desires of humanity, and thus with faith.
Ratzinger affirms that for “human life, death is the only real question”
and yet that, “we have also to reckon with the openness” of divine “Love
for history.”138 Barth concurs. The critical difference between the two is
the place of human philosophy in this “reckoning.” For the Thomists of
Barth’s time the only dialogue possible with Barth was a “dialogue of the
deaf ” (we need not pretend that the recent maneuver of pretending that
Thomas was a Barthian is a better solution). Ratzinger draws on Bonaventure instead, because unlike Thomas the “saint . . . admits that there is a
certain violence in reason which will not be harmonized with faith.”This
is the violence of irreligious, technological rationality. But Bonaventure
says that there is a question that emerges from another source: perhaps
faith should be understood in terms of the love to which it gives its
assent. . . .To love means wishing to know, and so the search for insight
can be an inner drive towards love. . . .There is a link between love and
truth, which is significant for both philosophy and theology.139

For the Swiss Calvinist,
Revelation . . . does not differ from the person of Jesus Christ nor from
the reconciliation accomplished in him. . . .When in the word Revelation we say “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” then we
are saying something which can have only an inter-Trinitarian basis in
the will of the Father and the sending of the Son and the Holy Spirit,
in the eternal decree of the triune God, so that it can be established
only as knowledge of God from God.140

Ratzinger modulates Barth’s programmatic forte :The “means of salvation
history—the death and Resurrection of the Lord” is “truly present” in
the ecclesial act of faith.
This means, which is inseparably bound to the act of “faith in” . . . introduces us into the dynamic circle of Trinitarian love. . . . Because this
creative love is . . . love as meaning and meaning as love, because it is
138 Ibid., 39; and idem, Eschatology, 190.
139 Ratzinger, “Faith, Philosophy and Theology,” 361.
140 Barth, Church Dogmatics, I.1, 119.

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the creative reason of all reality, it cannot be reciprocated without logic,
without thought and word. But because true reason makes itself
known, not in the abstraction of thought but in the purification of the
heart, it is linked to a way, the way followed by him of whom it may
be said: He is the Logos. This way is death and resurrection; to the
Trinitarian communio there corresponds the sacramentally real communio
of a life lived in faith for which we are purified in the death and resurrection of conversion.141

Ratzinger complements Barth’s theological Christocentricity with a
firm recognition that “in the man Jesus God has bound himself permanently to human history.”142 As he reads it, the “act of faith . . . is essentially an act of union”143 because “the real interdependence of all men
and of all creation” entails that
the end of history is not for any man . . . something which has ceased to
concern him. . . .“The Body of Christ” means that all human beings are
one organism, the destiny of the whole the proper destiny of each. . . .
The decisive outcome of each person’s life is settled in death. . . . But
his final place in the whole can be determined only when the total
organism is complete, when the passio and actio of history have come to
their end. And so the gathering together of the whole will be an act
that leaves no person unaffected. Only at that juncture can the definitive general judgment take place, judging each man in terms of the
whole and giving him that just place which he can receive only in
conjunction with all the rest.144

Human history is the gestalt form of the Lord.“History is still real” after
Christ, “it really continues and its reality is suffering.”145
The way in which Ratzinger applies a “renewed Christocentricity” to
eschatology fills certain lacunae in Protestant and earlier Catholic
thought. He understands the Last Things historically, by reference to the
person of Christ. “Justification by works means that man wants to
construct a little immortality of his own,”146 and hence, “Purgatory is
understood in a properly Christian way when it is grasped Christologically, in terms of the Lord himself as the judging fire which transforms us
to his own glorified body.”147
141 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 26–27.
142 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 187.
143 Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 328–29.
144 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 190.
145 Ibid.
146 Ibid., 99.
147 Ibid., 229.

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It does not replace grace by works, but allows the former to achieve its
full victory . . . as grace.What . . . saves is the full assent of faith. But in
most of us, that basic option is buried under a good deal of wood, hay,
and straw. . . . Man is the recipient of the divine mercy, yet this does not
exonerate him from the need to be transformed. Encounter with the
Lord is this transformation.148

Just as purgatory is not a “supra-worldly concentration camp,” so heaven
is not a place, but Christ:
One is in heaven when, and to the degree, that one is in Christ. . . .
Heaven is thus primarily a personal reality. . . . Heaven, as our becoming
one with Christ, takes on the nature of adoration. All cult prefigures it,
and in it comes to completion. Christ is the temple of the final age; he
is heaven, the new Jerusalem; he is the cultic space for God. . . .This is
what the theological tradition calls the vision of God.149
N&V

148 Ibid. 231, original emphasis.
149 Ibid., 234.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007): 359–74

359

Benedict XVI on the Holy Images
A IDAN N ICHOLS, OP
Oxford University
Oxford, England

Introduction
A POPE who is at once a theologian by métier and a man of wide
personal culture is likely to address at some point or other the topic of
holy images. For this topic exists at the intersection of two vital lines: the
presentation of the economy of creation and redemption through
divinely elected signs and the human practice that is visual art or—if the
word “art” has acquired excessively virtuoso associations—then, at any
rate, painterly craft.
As Cardinal Ratzinger, Benedict XVI has addressed these issues from
two perspectives that broadly correspond to my proposal of two (intersecting) “lines.” In his Christology, he considers holy images as a continuation
of the divine presentation of salvation through the incarnate Word, Jesus
Christ, who is the living Icon of God and his human Face—a Face the
traits of which can still be captured iconographically, by a meta-empirical
seeing, through visionary painting. In his study of the liturgy he takes holy
images to belong with the way the Church, in her worshipping spaces,
allows the divine signs issuing from Revelation to be themselves signaled
and thus transmitted through human art. In the first case, the emphasis lies
on the holiness of the image: It is continuous with the divine action. In the
second case, the stress lies rather on the image-character of sacred art: It is
a sign that is humanly constructed, though for a God-given purpose.
We can call these two perspectives, then, Christological and liturgiological, respectively.While we may employ the two perspectives alternately
in quick succession—as we shall see, Benedict does not keep them
hermetically sealed from each other, the distinction between them is plain.
Though the material content discussed in one or the other perspective

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will overlap, the formal entertainment of that content is proper to each.
At the same time, as Ratzinger handles these matters, other major themes
of philosophical and theological importance also make their appearance.
The Christological Perspective
The Christological perspective is well-evidenced in Ratzinger’s essay on
“The Face of Christ in the Holy Scriptures,” which takes as its starting
point the Johannine saying, “He who has seen me has seen the Father”
( Jn 14:9). Ratzinger underlines the Old Testament background of Jesus’
conversation with St. Philip in the immediate aftermath of the Last
Supper Discourse in St. John’s Gospel.
The primordial human longing to see God had taken the Old Testament form of “seeking the Face of God.” The disciples are men who
seek the face of God.That is why they came across Jesus and followed
him. Now Philip brings this seeking before the Lord and receives a
surprising answer, in which the novelty of the New Testament—the
new thing that is coming through Christ—seems gathered up as if in a
crystal:Yes, man can see God.Whoever sees Christ sees Him.1

But just how are we to look at Christ in such a way that we can see
the Father? Ratzinger refers us back to the earlier incident in the Fourth
Gospel where pagan Greeks had approached Philip—himself from a
strongly Hellenized region of Palestine—asking to see Jesus, to which the
reply, from Jesus himself, is a riddling reference to the fruitfulness of his
Passion ( Jn 12:24). The Hellenic world—indeed, the pagan world as a
whole—will see Jesus (and through Jesus, the Father), but only via his
Passion. The Passion is glorification, whereby he will come to them in
the risen power of the Holy Spirit, and do so in such a manner that there
is “a new seeing, which happens in faith.”2 Ratzinger emphasizes that this
never leaves the Passion behind. “The seeing happens in discipleship.
Discipleship is a life in that place where Jesus stands, and this place is the
Passion. In it and no place other is his glorification a present reality.”3 In
the pregnant saying of the Johannine Passion narrative, which finds here
the fulfillment of a prophetic prediction (Zec 12:10),“They shall look on
him whom they have pierced” ( Jn 19:37).
Ratzinger admits that the Old Testament vocabulary of “the face of the
Lord” does not in fact recur in St. John. But he holds stoutly nonetheless
1 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus (Augsburg: Sankt Ulrich

Verlag, 2003), 12.
2 Ibid., 13.
3 Ibid., 14.

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to a deep underlying continuity between that motif of the Hebrew Bible
and Johannine thought. If that is disputed, then at least there is one
Pauline text that can support his thesis for the New Testament more
generally, since in Second Corinthians St. Paul makes the connection
quite explicit: “It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’
who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the
glory of God in the face of Christ” (4:6).
Over a quarter of all uses of the word panim, “face,” in the Old Testament Scriptures refer to the divine face, rather than human (or angelic)
countenances.That amounts to an astonishing total of one hundred texts.
Ratzinger comments on the thought-provoking fact that this plethora of
references to seeking God’s face issues from an aniconic religion. Were the
divine face to be found embodied in a cult-object, this pervasive vocabulary would be understandable. But no. “The image is prohibited, yet the
seeking of the face remains.”4 That is certainly curious.The divinity ceases
to be objectified yet its face endures. Precisely as the One who must never
be imaged, God can, it seems, be seen. The materialization of the divine
in cult is abolished and yet its innermost direction emerges clearly as never
before. Relation to the divine personality:That is what the Old Testament
holds out to us, and vividly so, in this paradoxical concatenation.5
Ratzinger finds it unsurprising that, as biblically derived discourse
mutates linguistically in its passage through Greek to Latin, panim
becomes in the first prosopon and then, in the second, persona. The face
brings us to the mystery of the person. God is ein uns zugewandtes Wesen,
an “Essence turned toward us.” And Ratzinger hints strongly that the
notion of sensuous perception that “face” suggests ought not to be eliminated—just as it was not so eliminated for Israel’s experience of the face
of the Lord in the rich cultus of the Jerusalem Temple (compare Ps 24:6
and the “liturgical calendars” of Ex 23, Ex 34, and Deut 16). That is so
even if the prophets and the psalmists alike emphasize the moral and spiritual preconditions of such seeing in right living and purity of heart—
and even if a key text for his account, the beautiful fragment that is Psalm
17:15b, the seeing in question is eschatological, lying beyond our historical existence: “[W]hen I awake, I shall be satisfied with beholding thy
form.” For other texts again (for example, Ps 4:7b), the “light” of God’s
face means life for Israelites here and now. In any or all of these senses,
4 Ibid., 16.
5 Ratzinger points out there is an analogy here with Old Testament talk of the

“Name” of God, referring his readers to his Einführung in das Christentum, 2nd
ed. (Munich: Kösel, 2000), 122–24.

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for God to “hide” his face is penalization.The deprivation of God is the
contrary of flourishing; it is tiefstes Unheil, “deepest woe.”6
The Pauline passage from Second Corinthians, in which Ratzinger
found a safe anchor for his claim to New Testament relevance for this Old
Testament material, invokes a more particular comparison: between Moses
and Christ. In the dramatic encounter of Moses and the Lord that follows
the deviant worship of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32, we are told, seemingly contradictorily, that Moses “spoke with the Lord face to face”
(33:11), and yet was warned by God, “You cannot see my face, for man
shall not see me and live” (33:20), a statement whose opening prohibition
is solemnly repeated three verses later. The New Testament writers, so
Ratzinger explains, find here a significant ambiguity. Putting together
various disparate passages from the proto-martyr Stephen’s speech to the
Sanhedrin in the Book of Acts, the Letter to the Galatians (at 3:13) and
the First Epistle of St. John (at 2:1), Ratzinger concludes that the Son
stands always face to face before the Father.“He could see the Face of God
and on his face is the glory of God visible for us.”7 If Moses were told
only the Lord’s “back” might be seen, for St. Gregory of Nyssa in his Life
of Moses that is because we can only encounter God when we follow
“behind” in the manner of disciples. Ratzinger makes this more concrete:
Gregory should have written “in the manner of disciples of Jesus.”8
What is new about the New Covenant in this regard is not new
themes, but a new person: Jesus, the face of God for us. At this juncture
one might say that what Ratzinger is carrying out may usefully be called,
in the words of Kevin Mongrain about Balthasarian thought, an “Irenaean
retrieval.”9 According to a key expression of St. Irenaeus’s Adversus haereses, the Son is the visibility of the Father. What we have heard so far in
“The Face of Christ in the Holy Scriptures” is a biblically informed
defense of this claim.And Ratzinger’s summary conclusion on the difference the New Testament makes to the Old—“not new themes, but a new
person”—seems a verbal reminiscence from book 4 of Irenaeus’s great
treatise:“Know that he brought all novelty by bringing himself who had
been announced.”10
Out of this awareness, writes Ratzinger, there arose the art of the icon,
which cannot of course claim to be the end of our quest for the face of
6 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 22.
7 Ibid., 24.
8 Ibid., 25, with reference to Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Moysis (PG 44, 408D).
9 K. Mongrain, The Systematic Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar.An Irenaean Retrieval

(New York: Crossroad, 2002).
10 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, IV, 34, 1.

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God, not even when the icons concerned are miraculous icons, the
acheiropoeitai or images “not made by hands.”11 The crucial question to
emerge from the iconoclast dispute for Ratzinger is, Do the icons “carry
the dynamic of transcendence”? Can they “point beyond themselves”?
Are they an “invitation that brings us onto the [right] road in the search
for the Lord’s face”?12 If so, they lead us further on the path of discipleship which in this life has no end. The icons are seen justly only when
they are seen in terms of this eschatological aim.The love of neighbor and
the Eucharistic cultus furnish us with anticipations of the Kingdom we
hope for. But we need the holy icons to remind us that the “true healing and the true repletion” will be looking on God’s face.13
The Christological perspective—readily sanctioned by a work to
which Ratzinger has elsewhere made laudatory reference, Christoph von
Schönborn’s L’Icône du Christ—has the possible disadvantage of concentrating an account of the origin and meaning of the cult of icons on the
central Figure of Christianity, to the detriment of the wide iconographic
range of early Christian art—unless, that is, the additional themes (Mariological, hagiological, sacramental, and the like) are treated as aspects of a
wider Christological constellation.14 Where, however, Ratzinger differs
from his fellow cardinal lies in the way he underscores the subjective,
rather than objective, significance of iconic making and perception.
Whereas Schönborn emphasizes the dogmatic foundations of the icon in
the Greek patristic Christology of dual nature and single hypostasis,
Ratzinger stresses the transformed subjectivity that alone can allow us to
grasp and profit by the new Image of God in Jesus Christ. In Balthasarian terms, within the unity of the entire perceived Gestalt, always both
objective and subjective together, it is the “subjective evidence” (which is
far from “subjective” in any pejorative, self-referential sense of that word)
he prefers, in this context, to explore.
Ratzinger returned to the topic—still in what I am calling the “Christological perspective”—in an essay titled “Wounded by the Arrow of the
Beautiful: the Cross and the New ‘Esthetic’ of Faith,” which, among other
things, shows his debt to the theological aesthetics of Hans Urs von
Balthasar just mentioned. He begins from the liturgical use of Psalm 45,
the Epithalamion psalm for the marriage of an Israelite king, but applied
in the Lenten Psalter to the nuptial relation of Christ and the Church. The
11 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 26.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid., 29.
14 C. von Schönborn, O.P., L’Icône du Christ. Fondements théologiques élaborés entre le Ier

et le IIe Concile de Nicée (325–787), 2nd ed. (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1976).

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acclamation “You are the fairest of men and graciousness is poured upon
your lips” (v. 3) is not, so Ratzinger points out, simply an act of praise of
the outer loveliness of the Redeemer. For what appears on his “lips” is “the
inner beauty of his word, the splendor of his message.” What “appears” in
him is, accordingly, “the splendor of truth, the splendor of God Himself,
which carries us away, which so to say inflicts on us the wound of love.”
This is the “holy eros” whereby in and with the Church we can respond
to the love that calls us.15 But in Holy Week the same psalm, when used
in the liturgy, is qualified by juxtaposition with an antiphon that radically
changes its sense. The antiphon is drawn from the Servant Songs of the
Book of Isaiah: “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at
him . . . ” (53:2).The contrast cannot but strike the attentive worshipper.16
The fact to which it draws attention certainly struck one attentive
reader: Augustine of Hippo, who concluded from the marring of the
Passion, itself the most admirable of events, that in the events of the Great
Week the entire Hellenic aesthetic is Christologically called in question.
Both Old Testament texts, applied to Christ, are breathed out by the same
Spirit. Their contrasting sounds, which lack all audible harmony (so
prized by the Greeks), are what place before us the true beauty. The
suffering Christ tells us that “the beauty of truth includes wounding,
pain, and even the dark mystery of death itself.”17
Actually, the Greeks were not without some distant surmise of this. In
the Phaedros Plato showed his awareness that beauty has the power to
draw us out of our contentment with the everyday, and by unsettling us
makes us uncomfortable. Ratzinger goes so far as to say, on Plato’s behalf,
that “the arrow of longing strikes man, wounds him, and in this way gives
him wings and draws him upward.”18 In his treatise Life in Christ, the
Byzantine theologian Nicholas Cabasilas baptizes this thought. People
who have a longing that outstrips their nature are those “the Bridegroom
has wounded; he has dispatched to their eyes a ray of his beauty.”19 That
is how God awakens them to their highest destiny.
Ratzinger denies that all this is superficial aestheticism, much less irrationality.“Beauty is knowledge—yes, a higher kind of knowledge, because
15 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 31.
16 The alternation of unlovely and lovely in the Christusbild of the Fathers was

noted in A. Grillmeier, S.J., “Die Herrlichkeit Gottes auf dem Antlitz Jesu
Christi,” in idem, Mit ihm und in ihm. Christologische Forschungen und Perspektiven
(Freiburg: Basel,Wien, 1975), 19–75, but without the use of Ps 45.
17 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 32–33.
18 Ibid., 33.
19 Nicholas Cabasilas, Das Buch vom Leben in Christus, 3rd ed. (Einsiedeln: Johannes,
1991; in English Life in Christ), 79.

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it brings home to man the full magnitude of truth.”20 Contrasting knowledge through true report with knowledge through direct experience of
things, Cabasilas, unsurprisingly, privileges the latter, which is a being
touched by reality, and in the case of the Gospel, by the personal presence
of Christ himself. In Ratzinger’s words: “[B]eing overwhelmed by the
beauty of Christ is a more real and profound kind of knowledge than
would be mere rational deduction.”21 Through the impact of such beauty,
“reason is freed from its stupor, Betäubung, and made capable of action.”22
Ratzinger warns that this should not be taken to devalue careful theological reflection.Yet the latter is of secondary importance compared with the
encounter of the heart with beauty.This Ratzinger takes to be the central
claim of Hans Urs von Balthasar in the opening volume of his theological aesthetics.23 Ratzinger regrets that so little response has been made to
this central claim, not only in dogmatics but also in pastoralia—for the
Church public, and the unevangelized too for that matter, need to meet
the Lord in his beauty. People think theological reason is a wax nose; one
can make of it any shape one likes. Being wounded by the Lord’s beauty
gives one a measuring rod for judgments in matters of discourse about
revelation, and the capacity to weigh arguments in contemporary theology and, by this criterion, find them, if need be, wanting.
In the art of the Byzantine icon, in the creations of the Romanesque
and Gothic periods, one finds oneself vis-à-vis what the palpable power
of the beautiful truth of God has made present in the inspiration of the
artist. The artist has rendered the reality he experienced something in
which we too can partake. This will make demands on us. Ratzinger
seconds the proposal of the Russian Orthodox lay theologian Paul
Evdokimov that the icon calls for a “fast of seeing,” a going beyond ordinary sense perception, the learning through prayer and asceticism of a
“new, deeper seeing,” since what shines through the sensuous matrix is
the radiance of divine glory.24 What can be said so confidently of the
icon can be affirmed of all “the great images of Christian art.”The beauty
our faith has generated forms its chief apologia—along with the reality
of the saints.These are our greatest treasures.

20 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 34.
21 Ibid., 35.
22 Ibid., 37.
23 H. U. von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit. Eine theologische Ästhetik. I. Schau der Gestalt

(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961).
24 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 36–37. Cf P. Evdokimov, L’Art de l’icône.

Théologie de la beauté (Paris: Desclée Brouwer, 1970), 153–65.

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Some will say, beauty may provide positive experiences in spots of time,
but in the long run reality is more likely to be largely wretched. After
Auschwitz who can write lyric poetry? For Ratzinger that objection is to
“Apollo,” to the Hellenic aesthetic of beautiful harmony, not to the
aesthetic embodied in the glory of the Cross, the thorn-crowned beauty
of Christ for which the Shroud of Turin may stand as symbol.This is the
beauty of the charity that loved us to the end. Here Ratzinger returns to
the starting point of the Epithalamion psalm and its fruitful liturgical
ambiguity. The icon of the Crucified liberates us from the prison-house
of believing the “lie” that would make the denial of beauty’s ultimacy the
last word.The splendid Passion likewise frees us from that other lie offered
us by an aesthetic of hedonistic possession, whose artists would content us
with the here and now, stifling rather than stimulating the movement of
transcendence to go beyond. When in Dostoevsky we hear that beauty
will save the world, we can too easily forget that the beauty concerned is
specifically the “redemptive beauty of Christ.”25
The Liturgiological Perspective
When we turn from the primarily Christological to the chiefly liturgiological perspective, we discover that Ratzinger’s liturgical iconology
remains distinctly Christocentric, just as his Christological iconology
bears significant reference to the liturgy—whether Jewish, for the cultic
context of seeking God’s face, or Christian, as in the stimulus he found
to such reflection in the use by the Roman Office of the theme of the
marred splendor of Jesus, the suffering King.
He sets out from where we would normally expect a theology of
images to begin—from the issue of Israelite aniconicism, the anti-iconic
commandments in the Hebrew Bible. He points out how, in the making
of the golden cherubim to flank the Tabernacle’s mercy seat (Ex 25:22),
the Book of Exodus transgresses the very command it elsewhere (Ex
20:4) asserts. I note that to speak here, as he does, of an “exception,”
Ausnahme, assumes the prohibition of the Decalogue to strike unconditionally at all graven images and not simply those intended to represent
the divine.26 Be that as it may, by using philosophical dialectic, he coun25 Ratzinger, Unterwegs zu Jesus Christus, 40.
26 See the recent discussions in O. Keel and C. Uehlinger, Gods, Goddesses and Images

of God in Ancient Israel (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998);T. N. D. Mettinger, No
Graven Image? Israelite Aniconicism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context (Stockholm:
Almqvist & Wiksell, 1995).There is a substantial review article prompted by the
latter study:T. J. Lewis, “Divine Images and Aniconism in Ancient Israel,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 118 (1998): 36–53.

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ters that to render the guardians of the divine mystery visible is precisely
to underline the invisibility of the mystery itself.27
The question of the original intent of the anti-iconic commandment
is raised again when Ratzinger calls the thoroughgoing aniconicism of
rabbis contemporary with the high patristic era a “radical” interpretation
of the Torah, in contrast to the more moderate understanding that
permitted the rich synagogue art of Dura-Europos, our fullest surviving
example of a sacral figurative art in the synagogues of the early centuries
of the common era.
The frescoes of the Dura synagogue come with no handy manual of
textual interpretation. Ratzinger offers a “high” theology of these paintings, accommodating them to the Jewish haggadah of the period as its
visual equivalent. In so doing he produces a Jewish counterpart for the
way the Second Council of Nicaea (the seventh ecumenical council)
would treat the icons as the visual counterpart to the New Testament
Scriptures—themselves, of course, a “reading” of the Scriptures of the
Israel of old.The representations of Old Testament scenes on the walls of
the Dura synagogue are not just “images of past events.” Rather, they
participate in the liturgical re-presentation of the original happenings.
That is an ontological possibility since those happenings were not merely
moments in human development but “God’s action in time.”28
The images in the Christian catacombs, so Ratzinger holds, take this
sort of synagogue art into a “new kind of presence.” That “presence” is
“new” because it depends on the Incarnation and the inauguration of the
sacramental era.And it is really a “presence” because the biblical events in
which, through sacred art, Christians were sharing are now inserted into
the reality of the risen Lord as he masters time through his exaltation to
the Father’s side. It is from there that he dispenses his life-giving sacraments—in catacomb art so often typologically indicated—via their
human ministers in the Church.
This prise de position enables Ratzinger to establish a distinctive theology of the image, which he does by treating all Christian images as being
in some way Easter-oriented, ordered to the Session when Christ
receives universal Lordship. He can make good his claim that early Christian art, whatever its limitations of technique, always furnishes “images of
hope,” Hoffnungsbilder, if the entire iconology of the Church consists in
fact of Auferstehungsbilder, “images of the Resurrection.”29
27 Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie. Eine Einführung (Freiburg:Verlag Herder, 2000),

99.
28 Ibid., 100.
29 Ibid., 101.

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368

A more obvious Christological framework for the discussion of sacred
art is surely that provided by the Incarnation itself—which would, no
doubt, include a reference to the Resurrection mystery but not necessarily keep its focus there.30 In fact, Ratzinger cannot do without some
more pervasive appeal to the sheer entry of the Logos into the sensuous
realm—prescinding, then, from the Word’s eventual destiny in the return,
his humanity glorified, to the Father. The early painterly or sculptural
images of Christ as teacher, Christ as shepherd, speak of the wisdom of
the Logos now entering the human world, and his pastoral guardianship
of the human creation that he carries “home” on his shoulders, the
Church of Jews and Gentiles.31
One reason for Ratzinger’s anxiety to deflect the iconological center to
the Resurrection soon becomes plain. It is those excessive claims for the
continuity of the image with the Incarnation made in the context of
images believed to be “not made by human hands.”The appearance of the
acheiropoeitai—Ratzinger thinks especially of the Cappadocian image
called the Camuliana and of the mandylion of Edessa whose (controversial)
identification with the Shroud of Turin he seems to favor—led the faithful to ascribe to (at any rate, certain) images, a capacity to yield communion with the Savior, and indeed the gift of his real presence, thus rendering
the holy images competitors and rivals of the Eucharistic mysteries themselves. After all, the affinity in causal origination between the achieropoeitai
and the Babe of Bethlehem was, to say the least, striking. These “true”
icons no more had a human artist as their author than the Word incarnate
himself had a human father as his progenitor. Ratzinger thinks that images
modeled on the acheiropoeitai—whose supernatural provenance, incidentally, he nowhere denies—became the very “midpoint of the entire canon
of images,” die Mitte der Bilderkanon.32 He sees here a twofold danger: that
icons could usurp the role of sacraments, and that they might be taken as
loci of direct vision of God here and now.
In the circumstances the Iconoclast controversy might be called a
cruel necessity. Ratzinger recognizes the role of non-theological factors
in the official adoption by the Isaurian dynasty of Iconoclasm (though
where a theological position is concerned every other consideration
necessarily takes on a theological coloring). Essentially, however, the crisis
enabled the Byzantine church to grasp the nature of the icon as a vehicle for evangelical faith by teasing out the notion of a new kind of looking,
30 See for instance, A. Nichols, O.P., The Art of God Incarnate:Theology and Image in

Christian Tradition (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1980).
31 Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie, 102.
32 Ibid., 103.

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a looking that penetrates through the sensuous to the Christological
center of the supersensuous realm beyond. In Ratzingerian terms, the
Iconoclast dispute enabled the Church to grasp the Resurrection character
of all Christian images. “The icon wants to draw us onto an inner path,
the path ‘to the East,” ’ toward the Christ who will return.”33
As my use of the neologism “Ratzingerian” suggests, this account
reproduces neither the language of the dogmatic definition of Nicaea II,
nor that of the Iconophile fathers who worked for the vindication of the
icons.34 It is a contemporary theological re-presentation, a kind of
Roman Catholic equivalent to the Eastern Orthodox theology of the
icon that flourished in Russian Orthodoxy in the late nineteenth century
(for Russia itself) and the early twentieth century (for the Russian diaspora in the West). In particular, echoing the iconological essays founded
on a Christological perspective described earlier, Ratzinger does not hide
his admiration for Evdokimov’s theology of the icon, which is cited
liberally in Der Geist der Liturgie. Whereas in the neo-Orthodox appropriation of the patristic sources (not least for Evdokimov), the icon is
dependent—ontologically and epistemologically—on the paradigmatic
moment of Christ’s Transfiguration as reiterated references to the “Light
of Thabor” make plain, for Ratzinger the key mystery in which to see the
icon is the Resurrection. And yet the manner of his appeal to the Easter
event is entirely Evdokimovian in feel. In both cases the crucial consideration is the “unity of creation, Christology and eschatology,”35 the
coincidence of the light of the “first” day and the light of the “eighth”
day in the illuminated countenances of Christ and his saints. Both
Evdokimov and Ratzinger are suspicious of an excessively or unilaterally
apophatic theology.The radiance of God streaming forth from the glorified form of the Easter Jesus is—in a phrase of Evdokimov’s adopted by
Ratzinger—the “apophatic ‘Yes,’ ” ein apophatisches Ja.36
The reason Ratzinger prefers, in the liturgiological perspective, a Resurrection-centered iconology to an Incarnation-centered one, is not only
that it fits better his wider emphasis on the eschatological orientation of
33 Ibid., 105.
34 A. Nichols, O.P.,“The Horos of Nicaea II: A Theological Evaluation,” Annuarium

Historiae Conciliorum 20 (1988): 171–81.
35 Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie, 107.
36 Ibid., 106. On Evdokimov, see P. C. Dinh Phan, Culture and Eschatology:The Icono-

graohical Vision of Paul Evdokimov (Berne: Peter Lang Pub Inc, 1985). I have
provided a brief entrée in my essay, “Paul Evdokimov and Eschatology,” in A.
Nichols, O.P., Light from the East:Authors and Themes in Eastern Orthodoxy (London:
Sheed and Ward, 1995), 194–204.

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the liturgy itself. It is also because through that very congruence we are
able to discern the peculiar pertinence of a Paschal iconology to the ultimate goal of the Incarnation, which is not to draw the Logos down here
to where we are but to take us up with him to his home. It is at “human
ascent” that “divine descent” aims. Of course, to maintain continuity with
the theological doctrine of the image offered in the Christological
perspective, we shall have to remind the reader that the Resurrection is
precisely the Resurrection of the Crucified. Ratzinger makes the same
point the other way round when he says of even the most anguished Late
Gothic images of the Passion that, by finding and communicating consolation even in such horror, they “carry within them the message of the
Resurrection.”37
That doctrinal suture forms part of an interesting analytic survey of the
chief periods of Western Christian art—issuing in some prescriptions for
the future. Ratzinger regards the Romanesque as, despite its emphasis on
sculpture, Latin Byzantinism. He considers that Early and High Gothic art,
owing to its admirable fidelity to the unity of the Testaments, reproduces
much in the ethos of Eastern Christian iconography even if, with the relativization of Christian Platonism in the high medieval West, salvation
history now strikes people rather as “Historie” than as “Sakrament.”38 We
have seen how he deals with the often agonized Passion paintings of the
Late Gothic period, maintaining by a bold inversion of more conventional
interpretations, that these are covertly Paschal images, since only by tacit
reference to the Resurrection can ghastliness console. It is curious that he
does not mention the well-documented fact that the practice of depicting
the dead Christ on the Cross is a tenth-century Byzantine innovation
subsequently received in the West through early Franciscanism. (The
making in Byzantium of images of the Christus patiens—showing the
Crucified with eyes closed, head sagging to one side—figured among the
charges against the church of Constantinople brought there in 1054 by the
papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida.) Ratzinger offers a glowing testimonial to medieval glass, the “iconostasis of the West,” where the church
walls, in interplay with the sun, become an image sequence in their own
right. As a Bavarian Catholic, he naturally defends the Baroque at least in
its “best” forms, which he describes as a visual equivalent to the jubilation
of a melismatic alleluia from the Latin chant. His coldest comments are
reserved for the Renaissance, in which he joins hands not only with
modern Eastern Orthodox critics but with also internal dissenters in the
37 Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie, 110.
38 Ibid., 109.

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Western tradition. Not for nothing did the nearest English Victorian equivalent to the Nazarene school call itself the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.”
Ratzinger excoriates the Church art of the Renaissance. It made no proper
distinction between the world of meaning of the Gospels and that of
ancient myths. It excluded fear of sin and the pain of the Cross. It
pronounced an apotheosis of beauty for its own sake.
It is curious, then, that at the first synod of bishops at which he presided
as pope, namely the Synod on the Holy Eucharist, which met at Rome
in October 2005, Ratzinger arranged for an image from the art of
Raphael, the Disputation on the Sacrament, to be projected on a large screen
above the presider’s table in the synod aula. He likewise commissioned the
American-born, Florence-based art historian Father Timothy Verdon to
provide an authoritative commentary on the painting in L’Osservatore
Romano for October 12, 2005. Though the painting appears to confirm
Ratzinger’s strictures on Renaissance art (notably, it presents its Eucharistic subject in parallel with a companion painting on a patently pagan
theme, The School of Athens), Verdon’s commentary rescues it from the
theological dumping ground to which, prematurely, it might have been
consigned.Verdon argues that the principal message of Disputation on the
Sacrament concerns eschatology anticipated by the liturgy—absolutely in
line, then, with Ratzinger’s own theology of the image.The center of this
fresco, after all, is the glorified Christ displaying his wounds—a reminder
of the general judgment (compare Apocalypse 1:7), with, below him, the
dove of the Holy Spirit fluttering above the Eucharistic altar and the Host
to whose conversion from bread to the Body of the Lord the Spirit’s work
is crucial. (Verdon thinks Raphael intended here an irenic reference to the
Greek theology of the Mass, not long previously adumbrated at the
abortive reunion Council of Florence.) Even the pagan companion piece
contributes to the full effect of this image of the Church gathered in the
presence of the Trinity in Eucharistic adoration. Raphael, so Verdon
argues, wished to emphasize the intellectual fascination the Eucharistic
mystery has aroused.The Christian doctors shown in the one painting are
no less animated in their search for truth than are the pagan philosophers
portrayed in the other, while the latter have laid some vital conceptual
foundations for the work of the former.When the two paintings are seen
together, as was intended, they show how even the pagans share in the
Church as unwitting co-travelers in her pilgrimage to God.
Evidently, here is one Renaissance image that could be taken to
embody, rather than traduce, the prescriptions for sacred art that Ratzinger
offers. How in his own conclusion does he sum them up? Briskly. First,
iconoclasm is not a Christian option: It is tacit denial of the Incarnation

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of God. Second, the principal topic of sacred art (that is, a doctrinally
informed art capable of serving as a monument of Tradition) is the salvation history of the two Testaments, seen as ordered to “the day of the
Resurrection and the Second Coming” of Christ. That by no means
excludes as a secondary topic the saints, since they are corporately or individually an “unfolding of the history of Jesus Christ.”39 Third, the images
qua sacred art are essentially connected to the sacramental liturgy, which
is the enduring visibility of the mystery of Christ on earth. That in turn
means the center of iconography is Jesus Christ in the unity of his Passion
and Resurrection—since this is the center of the liturgy itself. Ratzinger
reiterates his claim that all images must be in some way images of Easter—
hinting at the Christ who suffered, rose, will come again, and now reigns
hiddenly in and over time. Fourth, the holy images are born of contemplation and issue in contemplation. The eyes of faith they require—and
inspire—are the eyes of the Church herself, the primary subject of Christian vision. Fifth and finally, the Church of the West must make her own
the common dogmatic formulation owed in practice, at the seventh
ecumenical council, to the Church of the East.The theology of the icon
proposed at the council is absolutely normative—even if stylistically a
variety of iconographic manners may be compatible with its affirmations.
Conclusion
Pope Benedict is to be lauded for the rapid way in which, on assuming the
office of bishop of Rome, he sought to put into effect his high view of the
place of holy images in Christian catechesis and mystagogy. The fourteen
sacred images included in the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic
Church, presented by Benedict XVI on June 28, 2005, were, the pope
insisted, not merely illustrations but an integral part of the new text. Each
image receives a detailed commentary in the Compendium with generous
citations from the Bible and the Fathers of the Church.The new pope had
learned from the fate of the 1992 Catechism issued by his predecessor, John
Paul II, whose far more modest total of illustrations (here probably the word
was apt) suffered the indignity of mutilation, replacement, or elimination in
some translations. For the Compendium, all translations must reproduce the
holy images exactly, and in the position indicated.
As patriarch of the West, Benedict XVI has the right and duty to act as
overseer of the iconographic patrimony of the Latin Church. Writing as
Cardinal Ratzinger, he was correct to draw attention to the continuing
importance of the Second Council of Nicaea for Catholics of the West as
39 Ibid., 113.

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well as of the East. His statement that its theology of the image is normative sits rather oddly, however, with a certain lack of zeal in investigating
that theology in its historical context.The dogmatic definition of Nicaea
II and the theological doctrine of the iconophile Fathers are not the same,
after all, as the neo-Orthodox theology produced by Russian devotees of
the art of the icon, however gifted, in the modern period.
Actually, I think Ratzinger might have gone further and declared Byzantine practice (and not simply Greek conciliar thinking) to enjoy a normative significance likewise.40 The Byzantine church is the only ritual church
in Christendom to have worked out with full liturgical and dogmatic
coherence an iconographic scheme for the decoration of church interiors,
the setting of the Eucharistic action.That alone grants it a special status that
could usefully act as a criterion for the re-conceiving of iconographic
schemes in a Latin Catholicism too often haphazard or, more recently,
minimalistic in this respect.The Byzantine is, furthermore, the only church
whose art shows so consistently (albeit not entirely consistently) a “Paschal
aesthetic” in the stylistic manner iconographers employ, combining austere
Good Friday and lavish Easter Sunday qualities in a unity of asceticism and
salvific fullness. Latins, and other Easterners, would do well to note.
Meanwhile, we can take courage and consolation from the magnificent
words Benedict used at the ceremonial presentation of that compendium
of the Church’s faith, when he declared:
Image and word illuminate one another in turn. Art always “speaks,” at
least implicitly, of the divine, of the infinite beauty of God, which finds
its reflection in the icon par excellence: Christ the Lord, the image of the
invisible God. Sacred images, with their beauty, are also heralds of the
Gospel and express the splendor of Catholic truth, showing the
supreme harmony between the good and the beautiful, between the via
veritatis [way of truth] and the via pulchritudinis [way of beauty]. While
they give witness to the age-old and prolific tradition of Christian art,
they encourage all, both believers and non-believers, to discover and
contemplate the inexhaustible wonder of the mystery of redemption,
continually providing a new impulse for the lively process of its inculN&V
turation in time.41

40 A. Nichols, O.P., “On Baptising the Visual Arts: A Friar’s Meditation on Art,” in

idem, Scribe of the Kingdom. Essays on Theology and Culture, vol. 2 (London: Sheed
and Ward, 1994), 183–96.
41 Pope Benedict, speech upon presentation of the Compendium of the Catechism of the
Catholic Church ( June 28, 2005), n. 5.“Occasione publicae exhibitionis Compendii
Catechismi Catholicae,” Acta Apostolicae Sedis XCVII, 6–7 (2005), 829.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007): 375–402

375

Reflections on Deus Caritas Est
A Tour Through the Casbah
M ICHAEL S HERWIN, OP
University of Fribourg
Fribourg, Switzerland

T RAVELERS TO Algeria have long been captivated by the narrow
streets and exotic inhabitants of the ancient district in the heart of Algiers
known as the Casbah, a word synonymous with mystery.1 Those who
study the nature of love enter a similarly ancient and exotic inner fortress:
the Casbah of human culture, a place where the attentive traveler
encounters all the varied realities that commonly bear the name of love.
In his brief encyclical, Pope Benedict does not explore all the twisted
lanes of love’s topography. Instead, he introduces its essential features.
Benedict is an experienced guide who chooses the points of interest with
care.2 He traces his itinerary by means of the questions he asks, explicitly
posing twelve of them (six in each of the encyclical’s two parts). It is the
answer he gives, however, to an unexpressed thirteenth question—Why
write an encyclical on charity?—that reveals the encyclical’s particular
relevance for Christians today. Indeed, in relation to the pope’s implied
question, the experience of Algeria offers more than a mere metaphor for
love. It can serve to illustrate the pope’s primary concern. Specifically, the
witness of the Trappist monks of Tibhirine, who were martyred during
Algeria’s most recent civil war, embodies Benedict’s conception of Christian love. This essay will consider the pope’s questions and sketch the
theology of charity he develops in answer to them. It will then offer in
1 An earlier version of this essay was delivered as the Charles Cardinal Journet

Lecture, April 7, 2006, at Ave Maria University, Naples, Florida.
2 See, for example, his encyclopedia article on the history of love: Joseph Ratzinger,

“Liebe: III. Geschichte der Theologie der Liebe,” in Lexikon für Theologie und
Kirche, vol. 6, eds. Josef Höfer and Karl Rahner (Freiburg: Herder, 1961), 1032–36.

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conclusion the example of Algeria’s martyred monks as a model of the
charity Pope Benedict is calling us to live.
I
The First Question: Love’s Plurality
The pope begins his exploration of charity by posing the age-old question of love’s plurality.We speak of loving God and of loving our neighbor. There is romantic love and also the physical act of “making love.”
People even speak of loving their dogs or a horse or a good glass of wine.
In light of this plurality, Benedict asks:“[A]re all these forms of love basically one, so that love, in its many and varied manifestations, is ultimately
a single reality, or are we merely using the same word to designate totally
different realities?”3 Josef Pieper calls this question the “true difficulty”
confronting the student of love.4
The pope will subsequently answer his first question on the side of
unity, discerning a single reality underlying all our loves.5 Before doing
so, however, Benedict focuses on two types of love, employing the Greek
terms eros and agape to distinguish them.This narrowing of focus is justified because these loves seem to signify opposite extremes.6 Indeed, some
authors even present them as mutually exclusive.7 Eros signifies the
passive aspect of love, which is proper to romantic love and is conveyed
by such expressions as “falling in love” or being “love sick.” It is powerfully experienced in the “love between man and woman which is neither
planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings.”8
Agape, on the other hand, expresses the active aspect of love proper to the
biblical conception of love and conveyed in such expressions as “love
seeks not its own” (1 Cor 13:5).While eros is a desire to possess the other,
agape is a concern for the other that seeks the other’s good even to the
point of renunciation and self-sacrifice. Although some accuse Catholi3 Deus Caritas Est, no. 2.
4 Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 145. In

the early sections of Deus Caritas Est, the pope follows Pieper’s analysis closely.
5 Deus Caritas Est, no. 8.
6 Josef Pieper explains his own focus on eros and agape in words that Pope Bene-

dict could have used to explain his similar focus on them:“Eros and agape remain
more important, as the words that with presumably mutually exclusive intent
rally the sides and determine the character of the philosophical and theological
disputation in which we mean to intervene vigorously in the course of the
following pages.” Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love, 156–57.
7 Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1953), 51–52.
8 Deus Caritas Est, no. 3.

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cism of corrupting biblical agape by mixing it with pagan eros, Benedict
first addresses the opposite critique: that Christianity denigrates and
suppresses eros.This leads Benedict, even before he has answered his first
question concerning love’s plurality, to ask another.
The Second Question: Christianity’s Attitude Toward Eros
Pope Benedict cites Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism that “Christianity
gave Eros poison to drink—but he did not die of it. He degenerated into
a vice.”9 The pope then asks,“But is this the case? Did Christianity really
destroy eros?”10 To answer this question he turns to the pagan experience
of eros, which enables him to clarify further the distinction between eros
and agape. Although the Greeks recognized the presence of eros in the
passionate love between a man and a woman, they never reduced eros
merely to sex.11 They regarded it as a phenomenon similar in its effects
to intoxication and as a reaction provoked by the beauty and goodness of
the beloved. Eros draws the lover out of himself toward union with the
beloved and ultimately toward union with the divine—toward the source
of the beloved’s beauty and goodness. The promise of eros, therefore, is
happiness through union with the divine. It is the love that inspires the
poet to search for his ideal of beauty, and the mystic to search beyond
created things for their creator.12 Benedict notes, however, that pagan
9 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, part 4, no. 168.
10 Deus Caritas Est, no. 4.The pope describes the notion that Christianity destroys

eros as a “widely held perception” expressed in questions such as: “Doesn’t the
Church, with all her commandments and prohibitions, turn to bitterness the
most precious thing in life?” (Deus Caritas Est, no. 3); “Doesn’t she blow the
whistle just when the joy which is the Creator’s gift offers us a happiness which
is itself a certain foretaste of the Divine?” (ibid.). The pope’s own second question is thus a summary of these concerns.
11 Josef Pieper cites with approval the following observations by Rollo May: “The
curious thing to our ears is how rarely the Latins speak of sexus. Sex, to them,
was no issue; it was amor they were concerned about. Similarly, everyone knows
the Greek word eros, but practically no one has ever heard of their term for ‘sex.’
It is phýlon . . . a zoological term” (Rollo May, Love and Will [New York: Norton,
1969], 73); “We are in flight from eros—and we use sex as the vehicle for the
flight” (ibid., 65). See Pieper, Faith, Hope and Love, 157–58. Although anyone
who has read Ovid might hesitate to affirm too great a distinction in the Roman
mind between amor and sexus, May’s point is well taken and accords well with
the pope’s critique of the contemporary tendency to reduce eros to sex. See also
C. S. Lewis’s observations on the relationship between sex and eros, especially the
patently obvious but often overlooked fact that the former can exist without the
latter. C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Harper Collins, 1960), 111–40.
12 See, for example, St. John of the Cross’s description of his bittersweet encounter
with created things, all of which whisper to him, “Pouring out a thousand

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religion too often expressed this insight by means of fertility cults and
“sacred” prostitution, thereby misunderstanding the true nature of the
divine fellowship that eros desires. Human experience teaches that eros
must be purified if it is to attain its goal: “[E]ros tends to rise ‘in ecstasy’
towards the divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet for this very reason it
calls for a path of ascent, renunciation, purification, and healing.”13 Benedict offers here his initial response to the notion that Christianity destroys
eros. Although there have been currents in Christian history that have
denigrated the bodily aspects of eros, the true goal of the Gospel message
is to purify, not destroy eros. “Purification and growth in maturity are
called for; and these also pass through the path of renunciation. Far from
rejecting or ‘poisoning’ eros, they heal it and restore its true grandeur.”14
Up to this point Pope Benedict has said nothing that Plato, Plotinus, or
any of the neo-Platonists could not have said as well. They too were
dismayed by the vulgarities of pagan ritual.They too sought to purify eros
and ascend to union with the divine.15 The uniquely Christian contribution to our understanding of eros emerges when one considers the
nature of the purifications that eros requires. It is in this context that
Benedict introduces his third and fourth questions.
The Third and Fourth Questions:
Christianity and the Purification of Eros
After affirming the need to purify eros in its ecstatic assent toward the
divine, the pope asks two related questions: “Concretely, what does this
path of ascent and purification entail? How might love be experienced so
that it can fully realize its human and divine promise?”16 Benedict dedicates the bulk of the remaining first half of his letter to addressing these
graces,/he passed these groves in haste;/and having looked at them,/with his
image alone,/clothed them in beauty,” which only leaves John desiring God all
the more, and no longer satisfied by his created messengers: “Do not send
me/any more messengers;/they cannot tell me what I must hear” (Spiritual
Canticle, vv. 5 and 6, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., rev. ed. [Washington, DC:
ICS Publications, 1991]). John’s description of his experiences is also influenced
by the Confessions, where Augustine affirms that whoever cultivates internal
silence will hear the transient things of this world whisper: “We did not make
ourselves, but He made us who abides forever.” Confessions, 9.10.
13 Deus Caritas Est, no. 5.
14 Ibid.
15 See John Rist, Eros and Psyche: Studies in Plato, Plotinus and Origen (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1961).
16 Deus Caritas Est, no. 6.

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two questions. He first turns to a literal reading of the Song of Songs. As
“love-songs” written “to exalt conjugal love,”17 the book contains insights
into the nature of marital love. Here again we find two different words for
love.There is the overtly sexual word, dodim, with which the book begins
(Sg 1:2:“Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth! More delightful is your
love [dodim] than wine”), and there is the more general biblical term for
love (ahabah) that is often used to express God’s love for his people and is
employed here in such key texts as “stern as death is love [ahabah], relentless as the nether world is devotion” (Sg 8:6).The pope sees these poems
as portraying passionate love in the context of a mutual self-revelation that
leads the lovers to seek each other’s good, even to the point of renunciation and self-sacrifice.This aspect of love’s dynamism reveals the true sense
in which love is an ecstasy. It is an ongoing and liberating journey from
“the closed inward-looking self ” toward a self-giving concern for the
other. As such, it is also a movement toward “authentic self-discovery and
indeed the discovery of God.”18 In this movement, love becomes “finalized,” in the sense that it attains a definitive object and duration. It is an
exclusive and unending love for this particular person.19
In his analysis of love’s purification Benedict is simply summarizing
the experience of faithful lovers throughout history. Their love often
begins with romantic infatuation that leads the lovers together. The
beloved becomes the all-consuming object of the other’s attention; yet at
this stage the lover’s knowledge of the beloved remains superficial. In a
sense, the lovers are in love with being in love, and the beloved is viewed
in many ways from the perspective of the pleasure he or she produces in
the lover. In other words, romantic love often begins with a powerful
element of self-love (even though this element may be unperceived by
the lovers themselves):The beloved holds me enthralled partly because of
the joy she brings me, because of the ways in which she completes what
in me is lacking.There is much in this initial stage that is illusion.We are
in love with an ideal type that no creature can fulfill. The very force of
romantic infatuation, however, pushes the lovers toward learning more
about each other and, thus, toward a truer understanding of the other.
Eventually, through the crises and trials of the relationship the lovers
come to see each other more truly, and a shift occurs.While romance will
always have a place, an element that was present in the beginning begins
to grow in prominence. It is the celebration of the other: the affirmation
through word and deed that “it is good that you exist, that you are in this
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.

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world.”20 There is also that element of finalization, where each is led to
choose the other as an exclusive partner for life. Once again another shift
in emphasis occurs, and an element that was already present acquires new
prominence. Mature human love is not so much two gazing into each
other’s eyes, as two people shoulder to shoulder focused on the common
object of their love.21 In the economy of the family, this entails the lovers’
common concern for their children. Their love, however, also naturally
tends toward a common concern for the ultimate source of their love,
which is in God. Like spokes on a wheel that converge at the center, the
lovers draw closer as they focus on God by making him the center of
their lives. In all of this, the romance and power of eros leads faithful lovers
to the mature celebration of the other in the affirming love of agape.
At this point in his analysis, the pope answers his first two questions.
He begins by sharpening the distinction between eros and agape. Eros
signifies a “worldly,” “possessive,” and “ascending” love, while agape is a
faith-shaped, “oblative” (that is, sacrificial), and “descending” love.22
Benedict notes that both in theology and in philosophy the distinction
between these two loves has often been radicalized to the point of establishing “a clear antithesis” between pagan eros and Christian agape.23 The
logical consequence of this antithesis would be to detach Christianity
from the fundamental relationships and experiences of human life.24 The
pope counters that “eros and agape—ascending love and descending
love—can never be completely separated. The more the two, in their
different aspects, find a proper unity in the one reality of love, the more
the true nature of love in general is realized.”25 Thus, just after he has
contrasted these two loves most sharply, Benedict begins to blur the
distinction between them. First, true eros always contains an element of
agape. Second, true agape always also has an element of receptive eros.
Even if eros is at first mainly covetous and ascending, a fascination for
the great promise of happiness, in drawing near to the other, it is less
and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the
other, is concerned more and more with the beloved, bestows itself and
wants to “be there for” the other.The element of agape thus enters into
20 See Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, 167–69.
21 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Terre des Hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1939); Lewis, The

Four Loves, 73.
22 Deus Caritas Est, no. 7.
23 Ibid. This is no doubt a reference to the views of Anders Nygren in his classic

study Agape and Eros (London: SPCK, 1953).
24 Deus Caritas Est, no. 7.
25 Ibid.

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this love, for otherwise eros is impoverished and even loses its own
nature. On the other hand, man cannot live by oblative, descending love
alone. He cannot always give, he must also receive.Anyone who wishes
to give love must also receive love as a gift.26

Through affirming the interconnectedness between eros and agape, the
pope is able finally to answer his first question concerning love’s plurality by affirming an underlying unity:
Fundamentally, “love” is a single reality, but with different dimensions;
at different times, one or other dimension may emerge more clearly.Yet
when the two dimensions are totally cut off from one another, the
result is a caricature or at least an impoverished form of love.27

The recognition of this underlying unity also enables Pope Benedict to
respond to his second question concerning Christianity’s attitude toward
eros: “Biblical faith does not set up a parallel universe, or one opposed to
that primordial human phenomenon which is love, but rather accepts the
whole man; it intervenes in his search for love in order to purify it and
to reveal new dimensions of it.”28
Although Benedict has already begun to sketch answers to his third
and fourth questions, it is only when he turns to “the newness of biblical faith” that he develops the features of these answers. Thus far in his
analysis, even though he has frequently included proleptic references to
the role of Christ and the theology of the early Church, the pope has
remained close to the general human experience of love. Now, however,
his “somewhat philosophical reflections” have led us “to the threshold of
biblical faith.”29 It is by crossing this threshold that we discover the
deeper meaning of the relationship between eros and agape.
The Newness of Biblical Faith
Biblical faith brings to the human experience of love the radical discovery
that God loves us with a personal and passionate love. God is not merely
the object of eros, as Aristotle held; he is also a lover. He loves humanity
with eros.To understand what this means for Benedict, we must turn to the
work of the patristic author whom he cites to justify this claim. PseudoDionysius was a sixth-century theologian who attempted to convey the
Christian message to the pagan and neo-Platonic culture in which he lived.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., no. 8.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., no. 7.

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In a work dedicated to studying the divine names, he asserts that both agape
and eros are proper names for God.30 Although he recognizes that eros
appears nowhere in the New Testament, Pseudo-Dionysius affirms that the
two terms are synonymous.31 The goal of this identification is not to
reduce agape to eros, but to reveal in neo-Platonic language an essential and
revolutionary feature of God’s love that is at the heart of biblical revelation.32 The pagan philosopher Proclus had already developed the view that
there was a “descending eros” exhibited by a particular group of gods in
their providential care for humans.33 Moreover, Plotinus had already characterized the first principle of all things as Eros.34 As such, Eros provoked
ecstasy in all things, an ecstatic eros whereby they moved toward the
Eros/One because of its beauty. Pseudo-Dionysius reworks these neoPlatonic elements to make a very un-neo-Platonic affirmation: God
himself is an ecstatic eros. Unlike Plato’s notion of eros, which always
implied a lack, God’s eros springs from the superabundance of his goodness.35 God, freely from the riches of his goodness, loves and cares for his
creation.36 Thus, as the pope underlines, God’s eros is entirely agape.37 It is
gratuitous in the sense that it is unmotivated and freely given. It is not a
response to the beauty and goodness of creation, but is the cause of it. God’s
love is said to be passionate by analogy with the intensity of human passion.
Divine passion, however, is not based on a lack existing in God, but rather
on the unfulfilled character of human existence. God passionately desires
that we attain the fulfillment for which the human community was
created: perfect union with him in the community of the Trinity. Ultimately, the character of this passionate love is revealed in the Incarnation
and cross of Jesus who suffers to make this fulfillment possible.38 The cross
also points to the second agapic feature of God’s eros, a feature already
30 In this identification he is following the example of Origen (Commentary on the

Song of Songs, prologue [PG 13, 70D]), who also cites Ignatius of Antioch’s affirmation in an apparent reference to Christ: “My Eros is crucified.” Letter to the
Romans, 7, 2.
31 Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, 4.12 (709B).
32 See John Rist,“A Note on Eros and Agape in Pseudo-Dionysius,” Vigiliae Christiane 20 (1966): 235–43; A. H. Armstrong, “Platonic Eros and Christian Agape,”
Downside Review 79 (1961): 105–21.
33 Proclus, Commentary on Alcibiades, 56, 2–6, p. 25 (Westerink). Rist, “A Note on
Eros and Agape,” 239.
34 Plotinus, Enneads, 6.8.15. Rist, “A Note on Eros and Agape,” 239.
35 See Plato, Symposium, 211. Rist, “A Note on Eros and Agape,” 243.
36 Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, 4.13 (712A and B). Rist, “A Note on
Eros and Agape,” 241.
37 Deus Caritas Est, no. 9.
38 Ibid., no. 10.

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revealed by the Old Testament prophets: God’s love is forgiving. God not
only loves us, he overcomes our infidelity by forgiving us our sins. It is here
that the Song of Songs emerges in a new light.39 According to their fuller
meaning (sensus plenior), the book’s poems describe God’s love for his
people and the Church’s response of love.As such they point to the deeper
interconnection between eros and agape.The people’s desire for God leads
them to a mature worship of God whereby they affirm his goodness, and
love and desire what He loves and desires.At the same time, however, their
generous and sacrificial love is possible only because of the love God
himself has poured into their hearts.
Benedict notes that biblical revelation not only offers a revolutionary
understanding of God’s love, it also reveals the unique beauty of human
love.As a created participation in God’s eros, eros is a positive and holy part
of human nature that is called to grow ever more deeply agapic in character.This occurs in a unique way through marriage. Human eros “directs
man towards marriage,” which by its monogamous character is a visible
sign of God’s permanent and faithful love for his people. From this
perspective, family life and the daily ordinariness of marital love acquire
a dignity and a relationship to God that “has practically no equivalent in
extra biblical literature.”40 In the sacrament of marriage, couples are
called to love each other in ways that reflect and participate in God’s
generous and forgiving love.
Jesus Christ—The Incarnate Love of God
Benedict underlines, however, that God reveals the fullness of his love for
humanity in the Incarnation. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ
give “flesh and blood” to the biblical conception of love.41 It is especially
by Christ’s death on the cross that we encounter “love in its most radical
form.”42 Indeed, it is by “contemplating the pierced side of Christ” that
the Christian learns what it means to affirm that “God is love.”43 Benedict even goes so far as to assert that the cross of Christ is the true starting point of the Christian definition of love. It is here that the pope offers
his fullest answer to his third and fourth questions. Initially the pope
affirmed, in answer to the fourth question, that it is by living “a life of
fidelity to the one God”44 that love can fully realize its human and divine
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid., no. 11.
41 Ibid., no. 12.
42 Ibid.
43 1 Jn 4:8; Deus Caritas Est, no. 12.
44 Deus Caritas Est, no. 9.

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promise. The pope has also, in answer to his third question, traced the
general features of the purifications required of human love. Now he
portrays the cross of Christ as the concrete path of ascent and purification through which Christian love must pass. “In this contemplation [of
the pierced side of Christ] the Christian discovers the path along which
his life and love must move.”45
When the pope portrays Christ as the way by which the ascent of love
must pass, he is echoing the famous passage from the Confessions where
Augustine describes how his attempts at mystical ascent failed because
they were not rooted in the humility and charity of Christ.46 Augustine
describes how, following the advice of the Platonists, he was able to
ascend to a fleeting mystical union with God, but fell back because of his
weakness. Lasting ascent only becomes possible by embracing Christ who
is the “Mediator between God and Man” and “the way, the truth, and the
life.” It is by descending with Jesus that we are able to rise to the heights
with his rising.Augustine confides that this led him to see the vast difference between seeing the goal and seeing the way to it.47 In a passage that
will subsequently shape Dante’s description of his own plight at the
beginning of the Divine Comedy, Augustine concludes:
It is one thing to see the land of peace from a wooded mountaintop,
yet not find the way to it and struggle hopelessly far from the way, with
hosts of those fugitive deserters from God, under their leader the lion
and the Dragon, besetting us about and ever lying in wait; and quite
another to hold to the way that leads there, a way guarded by the care
of our heavenly General, where there are no deserters from the army
of heaven to practice their robberies—for indeed they avoid that way
as a torment.48

The delights of human eros are like the heights of a wooded mountaintop.
They offer a glimpse of our goal, but not the way to it. C. S. Lewis explains
the implications of Augustine’s analogy by distinguishing between “near45 Ibid., no. 12.
46 Augustine, Confessions, 7.9–21. For an excellent analysis of this experience at

Milan and a comparison of it in relation to Augustine’s experience at Ostia (ibid.,
9.10), see Thomas Williams, “Augustine vs Plotinus: The Uniqueness of the
Vision at Ostia,” in Medieval Philosophy and the Classical Tradition in Islam, Judaism,
and Christianity, ed. John Inglis (New York: Curzon Press, 2002), 169–79.
47 Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.The pope also portrays St. Benedict as having passed
through an analogous purification and assent. See Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and
Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 2004), 159–61.
48 Augustine, Confessions, 7.21. Cf. Dante, Inferno, 1.1–60.

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ness-by-likeness” and “nearness-of-approach.”49 All human loves are near
to God by likeness, for God is love. This is especially true in their most
noble expressions as in family affection, friendship, or devotion to one’s
community. These loves are near to God the way one mountain peak is
near the next, through a nearness-by-likeness. Being on the top of one is
like being on the top of the other. It is not, however, the same as being on
that other peak. To be there requires “that slow and painful approach
which must be our (though by no means our unaided) task.” This nearness-of-approach, Lewis explains, is “an imitation of God incarnate.”50
The pope has long placed “great weight” on this section of the Confessions not only because of its focus on Christ, but also because of the way
Augustine presents the centrality of Christ in an ecclesial and Eucharistic context.51 The Christ who strengthens Augustine is the Eucharistic
Christ: “who brought into union with our nature that Food which I
lacked the strength to take: for ‘the Word was made flesh’ that Your
Wisdom, by which You created all things, might give suck to our soul’s
49 Lewis, The Four Loves, 5. Lewis reworks Augustine’s metaphor, making it a more

prosaic mountain walk where one is close to the village while above it on an
outcrop, but to arrive there one must follow a long trail (ibid., 5–7).
50 Lewis draws his study to a close through words that mirror the pope’s teaching
closely and also reveal some hint of the sufferings Lewis had recently experienced during the first onset of his wife’s cancer:“Man can ascend to Heaven only
because the Christ, who died and ascended to Heaven, is ‘formed in him.’ Must
we not suppose that the same is true of a man’s love? Only those into which
Love Himself has entered will ascend to Love Himself. And these can be raised
with Him only if they have, in some degree and fashion, shared his death; if the
natural element in them has submitted—year after year, or in some sudden
agony—to transmutation.The fashion of this world passes away.The very name
of nature implies the transitory. Natural loves can hope for eternity only in so far
as they have allowed themselves to be taken into the eternity of Charity; have at
least allowed the process to begin here on earth, before the night comes when
no man can work. And the process will always involve a kind of death.There is
no escape. In my love for wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of Love Himself.” Lewis, The Four Loves, 165–66.
51 With regard to this passage, Aidan Nichols in his 1988 study of Joseph
Ratzinger’s thought affirms that,“Ratzinger places great weight on a text of the
Confessions where Augustine laments that a momentary vision of God which
once came to him could not be sustained or re-created in memory, owing to
human ‘infirmity.’ Because of such weakness some means of help beyond the self
must be sought. . . . Since he cannot bear the divine ‘food’ in its pure form, the
divine Word has mingled itself with flesh so that man may be able to enjoy it. In
the Church, the divine humility has provided a medicine by its own example for
the sickness from which none is immune.” Aidan Nichols, The Theology of Joseph
Ratzinger (London:T&T Clark, 1988), 32.

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infancy.”52 Not surprising, therefore, the pope links our following of
Christ to the Eucharist and develops its ecclesial implications. Echoing
the language of St. Augustine, the pope affirms that Jesus gave his sacrificial love “an enduring presence through his institution of the Eucharist
at the Last Supper. He anticipated his death and resurrection by giving
his disciples, in the bread and wine, his very self, his body and blood as
the new manna.”53 Once again, the pope underlines how God’s action is
the fulfillment of the deepest aspirations of the human heart: “The
ancient world had dimly perceived that man’s real food—what truly
nourishes him as man—is ultimately the Logos, eternal wisdom: this same
Logos now truly becomes food for us—as love.”54 The Eucharist is not
something static that we receive passively. Instead, through the Eucharist
“we enter into the very dynamic of [Christ’s] self-giving.”55
Here we find the pope’s fullest response to his third question. Our love
is purified through the “sacramental mysticism” of the Eucharist, which
exceeds both in height and in breadth anything that human culture could
imagine on it own. Not only does this sacramental mysticism raise us “to
far greater heights than anything that any human mystical elevation could
ever accomplish,”56 it also goes out to all people, uniting us in the one
bread, the body of Christ. As such, the Eucharist was rightly called agape
by the early Church, because “there God’s own agape comes to us bodily,
in order to continue his work in us and through us.”57 This means on the
one hand that the Church’s good works can never be separated from the
life of grace, faith, and the sacraments, while on the other hand the reception of the sacraments always implies an ethical commitment to works of
charity. As a consequence, “Faith, worship, and ethos are interwoven as a
single reality which takes shape in our encounter with God’s agape. Here
the usual contraposition between worship and ethics simply falls apart.”58
In language reminiscent of Dom Virgil Michel’s insistence on the social
implications of the Eucharist,59 the pope explains that “ ‘worship’ itself,
52 Augustine, Confessions, 7.18.
53 Deus Caritas Est, no. 13; cf. Jn 6:31–33.
54 Deus Caritas Est, no. 13.
55 Ibid.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid., no. 14.
58 Ibid.
59 See Virgil Michel, “The Liturgy the Basis of Social Regeneration,” Orate Fratres

9 (1934–35): 536–45 (reprinted in American Catholic Religious Thought:The Shaping of a Theological and Social Tradition, ed. Patrick W. Carey [Marquette: Marquette
University Press, 2004], 424–33).

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Eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of
loving others in turn.”60 Consequently,“a Eucharist which does not pass
over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.”61
Through living the reality of the Eucharist in our lives, Christian love
extends out to all people. All people become our “neighbor” through a
love that “is now universalized, yet remains concrete.”62 It is here that
Pope Benedict poses the last two questions of the encyclical’s first part.
The Fifth and Sixth Questions:
On Loving God and Neighbor
The pope’s fifth and sixth questions enable him to probe more deeply
what it means to love God. He first ponders whether we can “love God
without seeing him.” Then, in reference to the biblical commandments
to love God and neighbor, he inquires whether love can be
commanded.63 The pope begins with the observation that although no
one has ever seen God as he is in his essence, nevertheless, “God is not
totally invisible to us.”64 First, he became visible to a particular historical
generation in Israel through the incarnation of Christ. Second, the incarnate Christ remains visible to us in word and deed through the Scriptures
and the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Third, God is visible to us
through the lives and example of the people we meet who share his love.
“In the Church’s Liturgy, in her prayer, in the living community of
believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence, and
we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives.”65 This
encounter with God’s love enables us to love God in return: “He loves
us, He makes us see and experience his love; and since He has ‘loved us
first,’ love can also blossom as a response within us.”66
Notice that Benedict does not proceed here in the way one might have
expected. In responding to the question of how to love an invisible God,
the pope refuses to reduce the love of God to the love of neighbor.
Although he accepts the Johannine insight that we cannot love God if we
hate our neighbor, he refuses to say that the way to love the unseen God
is simply and solely by loving the neighbor we can see. Instead, the pope
60 Deus Caritas Est, no. 14.
61 Ibid.
62 Ibid., no. 15.
63 Ibid., no. 16: “[C]an

commanded?”
64 Ibid., no. 17.
65 Ibid.
66 Ibid.

we love God without seeing him? And can love be

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keeps the focus on God by partially denying his question’s premise.We can
love the unseen God, because God has in a certain sense made himself visible. He reveals his love for us, and it is by experiencing this love that we
can learn to love him in return.
In his description of how we grow in the love of God, the pope considers the ways in which love is a choice. As we have seen, the pope follows
a long tradition of employing the term eros to describe those aspects of
love that do not seem to be voluntary. It is a passion that comes over us
or something we fall into.As love grows, however, an element of freedom
enters into it. Indeed, at the core of love’s purification is its deepening
presence in the spiritual heart of the person: in his intellect and will.The
experience of being loved by God “engages our will and our intellect,”67
and thus empowers us freely to love him in return. In a free act we both
acknowledge God and accept his will for us in an act that “unites our
intellect, will, and sentiments in the all-embracing act of love.”68 Moreover, all mature human love entails a union of wills over the essentials, and
our love for God is no exception.“The love-story between God and man
consists in the very fact that this communion of will increases in a
communion of thought and sentiment, and thus our will and God’s will
increasingly coincide.”69 The result of this affective communion is that
God’s will and his commandments are no longer experienced as “an alien
will” or as “something imposed on [us] from without.”70 These two
features of our mature love for God—its freedom and interiority—are
what make love something that God can command of us. He can
command it because by loving us he both gives us the ability to fulfill the
command and the desire to do so.71 As the pope states in the encyclical’s
introduction, “Since God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn 4:10), love is now no
longer a mere ‘command’; it is the response to the gift of love with which
God draws near to us.”72 We can thus make Augustine’s prayer our own:
“Give what you command, and command what you will.”73
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid.
69 Ibid.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., no. 18. Benedict develops this theme in subsequent sections of his letter.

First,“the command of love of neighbor is inscribed by the Creator in man’s very
nature” (ibid., no. 31). Second, for those who have encountered the love of God
in Christ, “love of neighbor will no longer be for them a commandment
imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from their faith,
a faith which becomes active through love (cf. Gal 5:6)” (ibid., no. 31).
72 Ibid., no. 1.
73 Augustine, Confessions, 10.29.

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It is only at this point, after considering how the mature love for God
involves the whole person (intellect, will, and emotion) and entails a
communion of heart and mind with God, that the pope sketches how the
love of neighbor is “possible in the way proclaimed by the Bible.”74
Because of God’s loving initiative, which is communicated to us through
the liturgical and communal life of the Christian community, we can
begin to see all people as our neighbors whom we are disposed to love—
even those whom we do not “like,” do not know personally, or even
those who are our enemies. In the gift of faith we can see them “with the
eyes of Christ,” and in the gift of charity we can love them with the love
of Christ.75 The patristic aphorism that “His friend is my friend,”
becomes true to such an extent that we can even treat our enemies from
God’s perspective: as those called to be our intimate friends in heaven.76
This last feature of our love of neighbor has important implications for
how Christians organize their charitable acts and their social and political engagement in the world, which is the subject of the encyclical’s
second part.
II
Although it is true that the second part of the encyclical draws on material already in preparation before Joseph Ratzinger’s election as pope, the
final product is very much crafted according to his own deepest
concerns.77 In his 1954 doctoral dissertation on the ecclesiology of St.
Augustine, Ratzinger already emphasized that works of charity are an

74 Deus Caritas Est, no. 18.
75 The pope also underlines how the two objects of our love interact:“The saints—

consider the example of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed their
capacity for love of neighbor from their encounter with the Eucharistic Lord,
and conversely this encounter acquired its realism and depth in their service to
others” (ibid., no. 18). In other words, our love for God pushes us to love our
neighbor and our encounters with our neighbor deepen our love for God.
76 Ibid., no. 18.
77 Pope Benedict explains elsewhere that, “A first reading of the Encyclical could
possibly give the impression that it is divided into two parts that are not very
connected: a first part, theoretical, which speaks about the essence of love, and a
second, which speaks of ecclesial charity and charitable organizations. I was particularly interested, however, in the unity of the two themes that are well understood
only if seen as a whole.” “Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Participants at the Meeting Promoted by the Pontifical Council Cor Unum” (Monday, 23 January 2006), www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/
january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060123_cor-unum_en.html.

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essential feature of the Church’s mission.78 The pope reiterates this truth
in the introductory sections of the encyclical’s second part. By means of
a quick historical sketch of ecclesial practice that begins with the Acts of
the Apostles and continues to the Church at Rome under Gregory the
Great, the pope underlines “two essential facts.”79 First, “ecclesial charity,”80 which Benedict describes as a “well-ordered love of neighbor”
administered communally,81 is an expression of the “Church’s deepest
nature.”82 Specifically, in an activity that flows from the Triune economy
of God’s action in the world, the Church expresses itself in the threefold
activity “of proclaiming the word of God [kerygma-martyria], celebrating
the sacraments [leitourgia], and exercising the ministry of charity [diakonia].”83 Benedict emphasizes that the ministry of charity is as essential to
the Church’s life as is the celebration of the Eucharist and has consequently always been associated with it.84 Second, ecclesial charity has a
twofold character: It is directed toward the needs of its visible members
(because no Christian should go without the essentials of life), and it is a
universal love that goes out beyond the visible Church to all those in
need.85 After these introductory remarks, Benedict considers charity’s
relationship to justice.
The Seventh Question: What Is Justice?
In his study of Augustine’s ecclesiology, Ratzinger underlined the role of
faith and the role of charity in the Church’s life.86 Pope Benedict does
the same here. First, he emphasizes the importance of faith in helping
secular society discern the requirements of justice.The Church acknowledges the “autonomy of the temporal sphere,” and thus also the distinction between Church and State. The State must not impose a particular
religion upon its citizens, but neither must it exclude the legitimate freedom of religion to exist within society.87 Moreover, the just ordering of
society is the responsibility of politics. Secular society, therefore, cannot
78 Joseph Ratzinger, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche (People

and House of God in Augustine’s Doctrine of the Church) (Munich: Herder,
1954). See, Nichols, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, 27–50.
79 Deus Caritas Est, no. 25.
80 Ibid., no. 23.
81 Ibid., no. 21.
82 Ibid., no. 25.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid., nos. 22 and 32.
85 Ibid., no. 25.
86 See Nichols, The Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, 32–33.
87 Deus Caritas Est, no. 28.

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avoid the question of Justice. “What is justice?”88 The issue here is not
the definition of justice, but its application to particular situations. Each
society is faced with the question,What does justice entail in this specific
situation? Benedict does not intend to answer the question, but to underline that the answer requires a judgment of practical reason. Reason,
however, is constantly threatened by the temptations of power and selfinterest. To function properly, practical reason must continually be purified. This is where the contribution of faith emerges. The gift of faith
purifies and strengthens reason, enabling reason “to do its work more
effectively and to see its proper object more clearly.”89 From this perspective, the Church’s role in political life is not to control the State or to
takes its place. Instead, through its social teaching, which appeals to reason
and the natural law, it seeks to persuade the citizens of secular society
concerning the requirements of justice. This process of persuasion seeks
both to form consciences and to instill a “greater readiness” to act according to the dictates of conscience.90 The pope is concerned to show, as he
has argued elsewhere, that Christian faith is not irrational but seeks to
strengthen reason in its quest for truth and justice.91 Far from being a
threat to society, the Church’s efforts to form consciences about the
requirements of justice can help society protect itself from irrational
enthusiasms and destructive special interests. Nevertheless, even the most
just society needs charity.92 This is true because even when material
needs are satisfied people still experience suffering and loneliness, challenges that can only be met through a “loving personal concern” that
offers them “refreshment and care for their souls.”93 This leads the pope
to ask his eighth question.
The Eighth Question: On Christian and Ecclesial Charity
The pope begins his analysis of ecclesial charity by distinguishing it from
the charity that animates the political engagement of individual Christian
citizens. Although “charity must animate the entire lives of the lay faith88 Ibid.
89 Ibid.
90 Ibid.
91 See, Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance, 138–258.This was also a theme in the pope’s

controversial address at Regensburg. “Meeting with the Representatives of
Science: Lecture of the Holy Father, Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg” (September 12, 2006), www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/
speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_universityregensburg_en.html.
92 Deus Caritas Est, no. 28.
93 Ibid.

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ful, and therefore also their political activity,” this activity is not the sum
total of the Church’s charitable action. There is also “ecclesial charity”
administered by the Church’s “charitable organizations” as an “organized
activity of believers” and constituting an “opus proprium” of the Church.94
After considering some features of the current situation in which ecclesial
charity is lived, the pope asks, “what are the essential elements of Christian and ecclesial charity?”95 The pope answers this question by identifying three such elements. First, Christian charity is a response to immediate
needs in specific situations:“feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring
for and healing the sick, visiting those in prison, etc.”96 Moreover, this
response entails not merely professional competence on the part of these
workers of charity, but also “a formation of the heart” that enables them
to lead those whom they help to “experience the richness of their humanity.”97 Thus, in order to respond to the integral needs of those whom they
serve, these workers must themselves receive a formation that, through an
encounter with Christ, “awakens their love and opens their spirits to
others.”98 Second, “Christian charitable activity must be independent of
parties and ideologies.”99 Ecclesial charity is neither a means of “changing
the world ideologically” or of preserving the status quo. Instead, in imitation of the Good Samaritan, charity flows from “a heart that sees.” It is a
heart that “sees where love is needed and acts accordingly.”100 Third,
Christian charity is not a means of engaging in “proselytism,”101 by which
the pope means that charity is not a stratagem for persuading individuals
to convert.
Those who practice charity in the Church’s name will never seek to
impose the Church’s faith upon others. They realize that a pure and
generous love is the best witness to the God in whom we believe and
by whom we are driven to love. A Christian knows when it is time to
speak of God and when it is better to say nothing and to let love alone
speak. He knows that God is love (cf. 1 Jn 4:8) and that God’s presence
is felt at the very time when the only thing we do is to love.102

94 Ibid., no. 29.
95 Ibid., no. 31.
96 Ibid.
97 Ibid.
98 Ibid.
99 Ibid.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 Ibid.

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As a personal love, charity is never a means to a further end except in the
sense of being ordered to love God. Charity is a free gift of love for one’s
neighbor springing from the neighbor’s inherent dignity. This does not
mean that charity excludes God from its activity or sees the acceptance
of Christian Revelation as an unwanted byproduct of its activity. Ecclesial charity always bears witness to Christ. It does so, however, as a free
gift and through quiet acts of service, speaking about God with words
only when the moment is right.103
After identifying these three essential elements of ecclesial charity, Pope
Benedict turns to those who administer this charity. Although the Holy
See and the bishops have a unique responsibility for administrating ecclesial charity, the duty of charity is “a responsibility incumbent upon the
whole Church.”104 In this context, the pope reiterates the traits of character that workers of charity should have: “[T]hey must not be inspired by
ideologies aimed at improving the world, but should rather be guided by
the faith which works through love.”105 Since it is through experiencing
Christ’s love that love of neighbor is awakened within us, the deepest
requirement for those who practice ecclesial charity is that they be “moved
by Christ’s love.”106 The inspiration underlying their activity should be St.
Paul’s affirmation that “the love of Christ urges us on.”107 In essence the
pope is affirming that those who administer the Church’s organized good
works must be animated in their actions by the agape described in the first
part of his letter. It is not enough simply to want to do good.As an expression of ecclesial love, their actions must flow from “a love nourished by an
encounter with Christ.”108 One who loves with this agape recognizes with
St. Paul that “if I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned,
but do not have love, I gain nothing.”109 Pope Benedict even goes so far as
to assert that “[t]his hymn must be the Magna Carta of all ecclesial service;
it sums up all the reflections on love which I have offered throughout this
encyclical letter.”110 Ultimately, as this agape grows within us, we are
inspired by the example of Christ “to live no longer for ourselves but for
him, and, with him, for others.”111 The pope, however, recognizes the everpresent danger of discouragement before the overwhelming needs that
103 Ibid.
104 Ibid., no. 32.
105 Ibid., no. 33; cf. Gal 5:6.
106 Deus Caritas Est, no. 33.
107 2 Cor 5:14; Deus Caritas Est, no. 33.
108 Deus Caritas Est, no. 34.
109 1 Cor 13:3; Deus Caritas Est, no. 34.
110 Deus Caritas Est, no. 34.
111 Ibid., no. 33.

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confront us and the seemingly insignificant results that we are able to
attain. This leads Benedict to pose a series of questions that confront our
relationship with God in the context of human suffering.
Questions Nine Through Eleven: The Question of God
Pope Benedict acknowledges that the immensity of the needs confronting
us can give rise to two powerful temptations. We can either be drawn
toward an ideology that offers the illusory promise of “doing what God’s
governance of the world apparently cannot: fully resolving every problem,”
but which comes at the price of an “arrogant contempt for man,” or we
can succumb to a resigned inertia, “since it would seem that in any event
nothing can be accomplished.”112 Benedict explains that during such times
of temptation “a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep
on the right path.”113 Yet, how to cultivate such a relationship? The pope
poses this question by quoting the words of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta:“We
need this deep connection with God in our daily life. How can we obtain
it?” Mother Teresa’s answer is decisively simple: “By prayer.”114 It is a
response that summarized the answer the pope had already begun to
develop. Benedict appeals to the reader to see that “prayer, as a means of
drawing ever new strength from Christ, is concretely and urgently
needed.”115 Countering the danger of a restless activism, the pope
contends that “people who pray are not wasting their time, even though
the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone.”116 Once
again Benedict offers Mother Teresa as an example. The balanced life of
prayer and service that she practiced and that her sisters continue to live
illustrates that “time devoted to God in prayer not only does not detract
from effective and loving service to our neighbor but is in fact the inexhaustible source of that service.”117 Indeed, time spend in prayer protects
us from a form of discouragement that Benedict regards as closely linked
to the secular rejection of God. It protects us from the disappointed rejection of God because of God’s seeming indifference to human suffering.
“An authentically religious attitude” that the life of prayer sustains within
us “prevents man from presuming to judge God, accusing him of allowing
poverty and failing to have compassion for his creatures.”118 It is poignantly
112 Ibid., no. 36.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid., no. 37.

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in this context that the pope asks his tenth question, a question he leaves
his readers to answer for themselves:“[W]hen people claim to build a case
against God in defense of man, on whom can they depend when human
activity proves powerless?”119 In a manner reminiscent of Augustine’s argument with the Stoics, the pope is inviting non-believers to recognize the
powerlessness of human effort before the mystery of death. He makes this
invitation with the confidence that in God’s grace an honest recognition
of human limitation will open the non-believer to seek the ultimate meaning of his existence in the God who cries out to him.
Although the pope rejects the case against God, he acknowledges that
human suffering nevertheless confronts the believer with a deep and
painful mystery. The suffering of the innocent and the apparent inactivity of God are mysteries that the believer will never fully understand in
this life.The human heart, however, cannot help but question God about
this. Thus, although the pope asks a question of non-believers, he
proposes a question for believers to ask their God. It is a question drawn
from the Book of Revelation: “Lord, holy and true, how long will it
be?”120 The pope regards this question as the equivalent of Jesus’
agonized words from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you
forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46).These words themselves hold the key to interpreting Jesus’ attitude from the cross, because they are the initial words of
Psalm 22. Although this psalm begins by describing the agony of the
psalmist, it ends with the psalmist proclaiming God’s praises:“I will tell of
your name to my brethren; in the midst of the congregation I will praise
you” (Ps 22:22). The experience of the psalmist is that God “has not
despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted; and He has not hid his
face from him, but has heard, when he cried to Him” (Ps 22:24). By
citing this psalm from the cross, Jesus reveals this confidence to be his
own.The pope invites us to do the same. By embracing a question from
the Book of Revelation, we are called to have the same confidence that
the book itself symbolically proclaims: that “in spite of all darkness [God]
ultimately triumphs in glory.”121 Those who live the Church’s charity,
therefore, question God in the midst of the sorrows of their ministry, but
do so in faith, hope, and charity. United to the suffering Christ, their acts
of charity are a light revealing the God whom they serve.122 As we shall
see, the pope offers Mary as an example of one who lives this charity.
First, however, before turning to Benedict’s twelfth and final question—
119 Ibid.
120 Rev 6:10; Deus Caritas Est, no. 38.
121 Deus Caritas Est, no. 39; cf. Rev 21:1–22:21.
122 Deus Caritas Est, no. 39.

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the question of Mary—we should address the unexpressed question that
has, in a certain sense, guided the pope’s entire letter.
The Unexpressed Question:
Why Write an Encyclical on Charity?
Pope Benedict famously introduces his encyclical with the Johannine
affirmation that “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God,
and God in him.”123 Benedict describes this affirmation as “the heart of
the Christian faith.”124 Christian faith is about a personal encounter with
God who reveals himself as love.The fundamental act of faith is thus “to
believe in God’s love.”125 The consequence of faith in God’s love is eternal life: “God so loved the world that whoever believes in Him should .
. . have eternal life.”126 The pope begins, therefore, by affirming that since
God is love the object of Christian faith is love. It is in relation to this
core message that the pope explains why he chose charity as the topic of
his first encyclical.
In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with
vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both
timely and significant. For this reason, I wish in my first encyclical to
speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn
must share with others.127

The pope wishes to speak to us about God’s love because of the ways in
which God, and by implication religion, have been associated with
vengeance, violence, and hatred.
The pope returns to the theme of violence when he addresses the
danger of ideology. As we have seen, Pope Benedict underlines that
Christians must avoid the ideological temptation. Benedict offers the
historical example of Marxism. Through its strategy of viewing charitable works as something that delays the advent of the liberating revolution, Marxism sacrificed the people of the present “to the moloch of the
future,” a revolutionary future that Marxism was itself never able to inaugurate. The lesson the pope draws from this historical example is that,
“one does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely
here and now.”128 An integral part of Benedict’s conception of ideology
123 1 Jn 4:16; Deus Caritas Est, no. 1.
124 Deus Caritas Est, no. 1.
125 1 Jn 4:16; Deus Caritas Est, no. 1.
126 Jn 3:16. Deus Caritas Est, no. 1.
127 Deus Caritas Est, no. 1.
128 Ibid., no. 31.

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is that ideologies always paradoxically entail “an arrogant contempt for
man.”129 In their misguided attempts to serve God or save humanity,
ideologies lose sight of the individual humans we are called to love and
respect. As we have seen, the pope regards prayer and a personal experience of Christ’s love as what keeps us from succumbing to ideology.
In arguing for the priority of prayer, Benedict introduces two further
concepts, “fanaticism and terrorism.” By associating these terms to ideology, the Holy Father reveals that he intends ideology to signify something
more contemporary than Marxism. In a passage that counters the assumptions of radical religious fundamentalism as well as those of radical secularism, the pope asserts that “a personal relationship with God and an
abandonment to his will can prevent man from being demeaned and save
him from falling prey to the teaching of fanaticism and terrorism.”130 If the
pope is here making (at least in part) a veiled reference to violent forms of
Islam, his remarks cut in two directions. First, they pose a challenge to the
consciences of pious Muslims.The reference here to “an abandonment to
his will” is not without import, since the literal meaning of the word
“islam” is “surrender” or “abandonment.”131 As every Muslim knows, Islam
is a call to “surrender to the will of God.”132 Essentially, the pope is saying
here that true Islam should reject the ways of fanaticism and terrorism.
Moreover, the pope is inviting Muslims to deepen their “personal relationship with God” as a way of avoiding the demeaning effects of ideology. At
the same time, however, the pope’s remarks counter the secularist view that
religion by its very nature promotes intolerance and violence.Throughout
his encyclical the pope takes pains to affirm that the goal of biblical religion is to promote an “integral” or “true” humanism.133
At the deepest level, however, the pope’s primary audience is neither
Islam nor secular society.The pope is primarily addressing his remarks to
Christians themselves.134 Benedict’s references to the Roman emperor
129 Ibid., no. 36.
130 Ibid., no. 37.
131 It is worth noting that the Latin version of the encyclical employs the word dedi-

tio, which literally means “surrender.” In German, it is Hingabe (“devotion” or the
act of “giving oneself to”), which is also closer to the literal sense of “islam” than
“abandonment.”
132 The word “islam” derives from the Arabic word salama, which actually means
both surrender and peace. A Muslim is one who surrenders to God’s will and
thereby finds inner peace.
133 Deus Caritas Est, nos. 9 and 30.
134 Note that the Holy Father does not, as is often the current practice, include
among the intended recipients of the encyclical “all men and women of good
will.” The letter is addressed “to the bishops, priests and deacons, men and

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Julian the Apostate are instructive in this regard. The Holy Father could
have described Julian in any number of ways, but he chooses to portray
him as follows:
As a child of six years, Julian witnessed the assassination of his father,
brother, and other family members by the guards of the imperial palace;
rightly or wrongly, he blamed this brutal act on the Emperor Constantius, who passed himself off as an outstanding Christian.The Christian
faith was thus definitively discredited in his eyes.135

The pope explains that the one aspect of Christianity that Julian admired
was its organized works of charity. It is worthy of note that the pope
chooses this example—the reaction of one who rejected Christianity
because of the violence he had suffered at the hands of publicly professed
Christians—to underline the importance of Christian charity. Whatever
one may think of the legitimacy of the West’s interventions in the Islamic
world over the last sixty years, it is an undeniable fact that a growing
number of Muslims have shared Julian’s experience. They too have
witnessed the death of their loved ones at the hands of Christians or their
surrogates. From this perspective, the pope’s encyclical offers a concrete
proposal for how Christians should live in an environment increasingly
shaped by Islam, by which I mean Europe. Muslims are a growing presence in Europe, and if the demographic projections are correct, this trend
will continue and accelerate. Whether Christians wish to or not, therefore, we shall be forced to formulate a response to this Islamic presence—
both individually and collectively as a Church.What will be our attitude
before our Muslim neighbors? This, I believe, is the unexpressed question
that guides the Holy Father’s analysis of charity. His encyclical is nothing
short of a pastoral plan for living among those who have been shaped by
experiences analogous to those that formed the anti-Christian views of
the Emperor Julian.136
women religious, and all the lay faithful” (an die bischöfe, an die priester und
diakone, an die gottgeweihten personen, und an alle christgläubigen).
135 Deus Caritas Est, no. 24.
136 Shortly after the publication of Deus Caritas est, Pope Benedict explained that
he chose to write an encyclical on love because our understanding of love
needed to be purified, especially in its relation to faith. Faith informed by love
changes us and configures us to Christ. Benedict explicitly linked this renewed
conception of faith and love to the violence of our contemporary culture:“In an
epoch where hostility and greed have become superpowers, an epoch where we
support the abuse of religion to the point of deifying hatred, neutral rationality
alone cannot protect us. We need the living God, who loved us even to death.
And so, in this Encyclical, the themes ‘God,’‘Christ’ and ‘Love’ are fused together

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The pope offers us what he describes as a “sacramental mysticism.” It
is a mysticism centered on Christ and dedicated to loving our neighbor
with the love of Christ. As noted above, this sacramental mysticism is
deeply influenced by the theology of St. Augustine. Augustine develops
this theology, however, in relation to martyrdom. He describes the
martyrs as those who have followed the admonition to “observe carefully
all that is set before you, for you also must prepare such a banquet.”
Augustine then explains that
the banquet is none other than the Lord of the table himself. No one
has his guests feed upon himself, and yet this is precisely what Christ our
Lord does; though host, he himself is both food and drink.The martyrs
recognized the food and drink they were given, in order to make repayment in kind. But how can they make repayment, unless he first spends
his riches on them and gives them the means to repay? . . .The Lord of
the heavens directed their minds and tongues; through them he overcame the devil on earth and crowned them as martyrs in heaven.137

Augustine was writing in the context of the collapse of Roman culture
in North Africa and the pastoral challenges this raised for his suffering
flock. Augustine responded both by engaging his pagan contemporaries
(telling them that the cause of this collapse was not the Christian religion) and by offering the Christian faithful a vision of how to live in
their violent world: through a sacramental mysticism ready to die for the
love of Christ. Pope Benedict, as a student of Augustine, is offering a
similar proposal to his Christian flock throughout the world, a flock
that—ever since September 11—finds itself in an analogous situation. In
this context, the example of the Trappist monks at Tibhirine acquires
special relevance.
The Christian theology of martyrdom does not focus on the dying,
but on the living that led to it. A Christian becomes worthy of the title
“martyr” only because his violent death is the culmination of a life
as the central guide of Christian faith.”“Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to
the Participants at the Meeting Promoted by the Pontifical Council Cor Unum”
(Monday, 23 January 2006). Benedict developed this theme further in his address
at Regensburg where he underlined that neither secular rationality nor religious
fundamentalism can preserve and renew our contemporary cultures, but only the
charity that flows from the eternal Logos, which renders our life and worship a
“ ‘kocivg kasqeía,’ worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our
reason.” “Meeting with the Representatives of Science: Lecture of the Holy
Father, Aula Magna of the University of Regensburg” (September 12, 2006).
137 Sermo 329 (PL 38, 1454–56).

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configured to the love of Christ.The murdered monks at Tibhirine were
truly martyrs in this sense. Their manner of living among their Muslim
neighbors offers a concrete model of the charity Pope Benedict wishes
to promote. Indeed, the words of one monk to his Muslim friends well
encapsulates the pope’s message:
The only thing I have to say to you is the “I love you” that Jesus said
to the Church. This “I love you” is not simply for us [Christians] but
for the whole world—for you Mohammed, Ahmed. . . . This “I love
you” is for everyone.We all need the love of God to live.138

This is not the place to relate the history of that particular North African
monastery or to tell the full story of the events that led up to the monks’
deaths during Algeria’s violent civil war. I wish only to note that a small
community of very diverse personalities was quietly and collectively
dedicated to living lives of prayer and Christian charity in the midst of
their humble Muslim neighbors. Cardinal Duval had described the
Church’s vocation in Algeria as a ministry of presence, prayer, and sharing (la présence, la prière, et le partage).139 This is what the monks lived.They
took care of their neighbors’ medical needs (old Brother Luc had helped
at the births of several generations of villagers), helped alleviate their
material poverty, attended their celebrations, shared their joys and
sorrows, and prayed for them continually.The community’s prior, Christian de Chergé, also made the monastery a place of intellectual and spiritual dialogue, where Christians and Muslims met regularly to discuss
their differences and prayerfully celebrate what they shared in common.
The monks had no illusions about their situation. Although they were
given ample warning of what might befall them, they decided to stay. A
deciding factor was that the local Muslim population repeatedly begged
them to remain. During the violence of that time, one Muslim villager told
the monks, “If you go away, you will rob us of your hope, and we’ll loose
ours.”140 Later, this same villager would simply say of the monks,“you are
the branch and we are the birds.”141 In his last testament, which was to be
138 These words were expressed by Fr. Christophe Lebreton on the day of his ordi-

nation. See John W. Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), 74. For a study of Fr. Lebreton’s thought,
see Marie-Dominique Minassian, “La Spiritualité de Frère Christophe moinemartyr de Tibhirine: éléments d’une théologie du don” (University of Fribourg,
STD dissertation in preparation).
139 Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine, 81.
140 Ibid., 156.
141 Ibid., 163.

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401

read in the event of his murder, Christian de Chergé forgave his executioners and expressed the wish that “Insha Allah” he and they, “like happy
thieves,” would one day meet in heaven as friends. He also explained that
although he did not wish to die this way, he would be grateful to them
because “my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity.”
At last, I will be able—if God pleases—to see the children of Islam as
He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of
God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring
forth our common humanity amidst our differences.142

The pope’s encyclical invites us to begin to see this way now.We are to
see even our enemies “with the eyes of Christ.”143 What would it mean
for us to see our Muslim neighbors as Christ sees them? What would it
mean to love them as he loves them? The pope is aware that the greater
threat to Christianity than Islamic violence is a disordered Christian
response to it. During his community’s discernment over whether they
should remain in Algeria, Brother Paul Favre-Miville wrote home,“How
far does one go to save his skin without running the risk of losing his
soul?”144 In our post-9/11 world, this is a question that all Christians
must face.
The Twelfth Question: The Example of Mary
Our Lady of the Atlas Mountains, which is what Tibhirine’s Trappist
monastery is called, lies only sixty miles south of the ancient heart of
Algiers known as the Casbah. To this day the vandalized statue of the
Lady, whom the Muslim villagers call “Lalla Mariam,” Mother Mary,
watches over the monastic compound from the nearby hilltop. A keen
chronicler of the events at Tibhirine relates that “over the years, Muslim
women from the surrounding villages had worn a path to her feet
through the dense cork-oak forest to seek her aid and blessing.”145 It is
142 Ibid., 245. Christian de Chergé’s death brought his life to full circle. He had first

come to Algeria as a French soldier during Algeria’s war of independence. A
Muslim friend with whom he had many discussions once asked him,“you Christians don’t know how to pray.We never see French soldiers praying.You say you
believe in God. How can you not pray if you believe in God?” (ibid., 8). That
friend was subsequently murdered in retribution for having saved de Chergé's
life. Fr. Christian dedicated his life to answering his friend's question. He
returned to Algeria to be a witness of Christian prayer.
143 Deus Caritas Est, no. 18.
144 Kiser, The Monks of Tibhirine, 198.
145 Ibid., 82.

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appropriate, therefore, that after listing “the entire monastic movement”
as bearing clear witness to the character of Christian charity, the pope
ends his letter by offering the example of Mary. He describes her as “a
woman who loves,” and asks his final question: “How could it be otherwise?”146 She, more than any other creature, embodies the love of God
and neighbor. She was the first to be configured to the love of Christ; in
her role as our mother, which Christ entrusted to her from the cross, she
continues to love her neighbor with a mother’s love. As a woman
honored by all three of the faiths that trace their lineage to Abraham, she
can teach us how to love our neighbor as Christ does. In the grace of her
son, this humble daughter of Sion is the best guide through the twisted
lanes of love’s Casbah.
N&V

146 Deus Caritas Est, no. 41.

Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 5, No. 2 (2007): 403–30

403

A Remedy for Relativism:
The Cosmic, Historical, and Eschatological
Dimensions of the Liturgy according to the
Theologian Joseph Ratzinger
G EOFFREY WAINWRIGHT
Duke University Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

I N HIS ADDRESS to the college of cardinals on the eve of his election as bishop of Rome, Joseph Ratzinger spoke critically of the contemporary “dictatorship of relativism.” Such relativism manifests itself not
only in philosophy and in society but also in the arts. It runs counter to
the Christian faith, for which truth, goodness, and beauty are permanently and universally grounded in the triune God who is the maker of
all things and who has a final purpose for his human creatures.The relativist challenge summons Christians to a response that will ultimately
benefit humankind.The answer may draw on resources that are intellectual and ethical but are also lodged in the liturgical tradition of the
Church. Crucial to the theological vision of Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope
Benedict XVI, are the cosmic, historical, and eschatological dimensions
of Christian worship.These I will now explore as he sets them in relation
to the crisis of late modernity.
As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger often touched on liturgical matters
in the course of more general reflections. More specifically, he devoted
occasional thematic pieces to the liturgy, gathered especially in the collections Das Fest des Glaubens (1981) and Ein neues Lied für den Herrn (1995).1
1 Joseph Ratzinger, Das Fest des Glaubens: Versuche zur Theologie des Gottesdienstes

(Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1981), in English, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a
Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press,
1986); and Ein neues Lied für den Herrn Christusglaube und Liturgie in der Gegenwart

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All these find some synthesis in Ratzinger’s single most systematic work
in this area, Der Geist der Liturgie (2000); and this book will therefore
constitute my standard reference.2 Its title—which is a reprise of the
admired classic text by Romano Guardini, Vom Geist der Liturgie (1918)—
may be taken as a hint that Cardinal Ratzinger judged the Catholic
Church itself and its liturgical practice to be in need of a recovery of
certain qualities, and even particular features, that had been lost to “the
spirit of the age” in an over-hasty rush to reform on the alleged basis of
the Second Vatican Council.3
The Crisis in Contemporary Culture
Not surprisingly—since treatment of the liturgy entails such things as
iconography and service music—Ratzinger sometimes frames his analysis of modernity in terms of the arts.We shall look first at the visual arts
and what Ratzinger calls today’s “iconographic crisis of the West.”4 Then
we shall hear the challenge posed to music by “the cultural revolution of
recent decades.”5
Absurdity in Art
A theological foundation for his critical reading of contemporary art is
borrowed by Joseph Ratzinger from the Orthodox thinker Paul Evdokimov: “The light of the first day and the light of the eighth day meet in
the icon. Present already in the creation is the light that will shine in its
full brightness on the eighth day in the Resurrection of the Lord and in
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1995), in English, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in
Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad, 1996).
2 Joseph Ratzinger, Der Geist der Liturgie: Eine Einführung (Freiburg im Breisgau:
Herder, 2000), in English, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000).
3 In order to declare my own fundamental sympathy with the vision of Joseph
Ratzinger, I hope I may be allowed to cite at the outset, without mentioning
them again, some of my own writings at the intersection between systematic
theology and liturgy: Eucharist and Eschatology (London: Epworth Press, 1971;
2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Doxology:The Praise of God in
Worship, Doctrine, and Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); For Our
Salvation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997); Worship with One Accord (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997);“Babel, Barbary, and the Word Made Flesh:
Liturgy and the Redemption of the World,” Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical
Renewal 3 (1998): 5–14; “Christian Worship: Scriptural Basis and Theological
Frame,” in The Oxford History of Christian Worship, ed. Geoffrey Wainwright and
Karen Westerfield Tucker (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–31.
4 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 120.
5 Ibid., 147.

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405

the new world, the light that enables us to see the splendor of God.”6 In
the history of Christian art, right up to the end of the Romanesque
period,“there is no essential difference between East and West with regard
to the question of images. . . . It is always the risen Christ, even on the
Cross, to whom the community looks as the true Oriens.”7 “With the
emergence of Gothic,” however,“the depiction is no longer of the Pantocrator, the Lord of all, leading us into the eighth day. It has been superseded by the image of the crucified Lord in the agony of his passion and
death.”8 Again Evdokimov is cited for the view that “the turn from
Platonism to Aristotelianism during the thirteenth century” played a part
in this shift:
Platonism sees sensible things as shadows of the eternal archetypes. In
the sensible we can and should know the archetypes and rise up
through the former to the latter. Aristotelianism rejects the doctrine of
Ideas.The thing, composed of matter and form, exists in its own right.
Through abstraction I discern the species to which it belongs. In place
of seeing, by which the supersensible becomes visible in the sensible,
comes abstraction.The relationship of the spiritual and the material has
changed and with it man’s attitude to reality as it appears to him.9

Admittedly, late medieval art both drew upon and further nourished a
popular devotion to the suffering of the incarnate God; and Ratzinger,
in his reading of the historic West, does not wish either to forget “the
glorious art of Gothic stained glass”:
The windows of the Gothic cathedrals keep out the garishness of the
light outside, while concentrating that light and using it so that the
whole history of God in relation to man, from creation to the Second
Coming, shines through.The walls of the church, in interplay with the
sun, become an image in their own right, the iconostasis of the West,
lending the place a sense of the sacred that can touch the hearts even
of agnostics.10

The Renaissance, however, “did something quite new. It ‘emancipated’
man”:“Now we see the development of the ‘aesthetic’ in the modern sense,
the vision of a beauty that no longer points beyond itself but is content in
the end with itself. . . . Man experiences himself in his autonomy, in all his
6 Ibid., 123.
7 Ibid., 124, 125, original emphasis.
8 Ibid., 125–26.
9 Ibid., 126.
10 Ibid., 128–29.

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406

grandeur.”11 The Baroque, inspired by the Council of Trent, prompted an
“interior renewal . . . [in] seeing”:“The altarpiece is like a window through
which the world of God comes out to us. The curtain of temporality is
raised, and we are allowed a glimpse into the inner life of the world of God.
This art is intended to insert us into the liturgy of heaven.”12 This respite
ended with “the Enlightenment [that] pushed faith into a kind of intellectual and even social ghetto. Contemporary culture turned away from the
faith and trod another path, so that faith took flight in historicism, the
copying of the past, or else attempted compromise or lost itself in resignation and cultural abstinence.”13
So, “today we are experiencing, not just a crisis of sacred art, but a
crisis of art in general of unprecedented proportions,” and “the crisis of
art for its part is a symptom of the crisis of man’s very existence”:
The immense growth in man’s mastery of the material world has left
him blind to the questions of life’s meaning that transcend the material
world.We might almost call it a blindness of the spirit.The questions of
how we ought to live, how we can overcome death, whether existence
has a purpose and what it is—to all these questions there is no longer
a common answer. Positivism, formulated in the name of scientific seriousness, narrows the horizon to what is verifiable, to what can be
proved by experiment; it renders the world opaque. . . . Art turns into
experimenting with self-created worlds, empty “creativity,” which no
longer perceives the Creator Spiritus, the Creator Spirit. It attempts to
take his place, and yet, in doing so, it manages to produce only what is
arbitrary and vacuous, bringing home to man the absurdity of his role
as creator.14

Mayhem in Music
Ratzinger’s reading of the history of liturgical music, and of Western
music more generally, runs parallel to his reading of iconography and the
visual arts. In both East and West, vocal music rightly subserved the
primordial and evangelical Word—until the point at which, in the West,
“artistic freedom increasingly assert[ed] its rights, even in the liturgy”:
Music was no longer developing out of prayer, but, with the new
demand for artistic autonomy, was heading away from the liturgy; it was
becoming an end in itself, opening the door to new, very different ways
11 Ibid., 129.
12 Ibid., 130.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 130–31.

The Liturgy according to Joseph Ratzinger

407

of feeling and of experiencing the world. Music was alienating the
liturgy from its true nature.15

Trent intervened to “make it a norm that liturgical music should be at
the service of the Word; . . . and the difference between secular and sacred
music was clearly affirmed.”16 A high point was reached, in both the
Catholic and Protestant worlds, with Bach, Haydn, and Mozart. But
danger signs were already apparent:
Subjective experience and passion are still held in check by the order
of the musical universe, reflecting as it does the order of the divine
creation itself. But there is already the threat of invasion by the virtuoso mentality, the vanity of technique, which is no longer the servant
of the whole but wants to push itself to the fore.17

Philosophically, the cosmic character of music was grounded in the
Pythagorean theory—still held by St. Augustine—whereby the cosmos
“was constructed mathematically, a great edifice of numbers,” and
“beauty comes from meaningful inner order.” Still for Goethe, “the
mathematical order of the planets and their revolutions contains a secret
timbre, which is the primal form of music,” and “the music made by man
must . . . be taken from the inner music and order of the universe.”18
Modern physics, from Kepler, Galileo, and Newton onward, retains a
“mathematical interpretation of the universe, [which] has made possible
the technological use of its powers”;19 but, among the philosophers, the
nineteenth century moved away from “metaphysics” as “outdated”:
Hegel now tried to interpret music as just an expression of the subject and
of subjectivity. But whereas Hegel still adhered to the fundamental idea of
reason as the starting point and destination of the whole enterprise, a
change of direction took place with Schopenhauer that was to have
momentous consequences. For him, the world is no longer grounded in
reason but in Wille und Vorstellung. The will precedes reason.And music is
the primordial expression of being human as such, the pure expression of
the will—anterior to reason—that creates the world.20

15 Ibid., 145–46.
16 Ibid., 146.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 152.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 154.

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408

The result is the triumph of the “Dionysian” over the “Apollonian,”21
epitomized in “Rock”:
“Rock” . . . is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals
it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to
Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by
the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of
rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of
having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were,
beneath the elemental force of the universe.22

In sum, we confront today an “anarchistic” theory and practice of “art,”
which coincides philosophically with “deconstructionism.” Optimistically
considered, the very “dissolution of the subject” might help contemporary
people to “overcome the unbounded inflation of subjectivity.”23 But in the
face of contemporary culture, so analyzed in terms of the arts, a more active
requirement is surely made of Christians, if people are to be led again to
recognize that “a relationship with the Logos, who was at the beginning,
brings salvation to the subject, that is, to the person, . . . and puts us into a
true relationship of communion that is ultimately grounded in Trinitarian
love.”24 One urgent need is to “identify the principles of an art ordered to
divine worship.”25 Logically, the prior and fundamental task is to understand and practice worship as the focal point and effective enactment of the
entire nature, calling, and destiny of humankind and the world in which
we are set. That is precisely how the theologian Joseph Ratzinger in his
writings interprets, expounds, and promotes the rites and signs of the
Christian liturgy in terms of what he calls a “symbolic theology.”26
The Three Dimensions of Christian Worship
Ratzinger takes the framework for his theology of worship from the
structure of the Bible and its overarching narrative; and within that
general frame he interprets and expounds particular scriptural events,
episodes, sayings, and gestures that bear a more or less direct reference to
the liturgy, bringing out always their correspondence to the overall and
21 Ibid., 150.
22 Ibid., 148. For more on music, see Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith, 97–126 (“On

the Theological Basis of Church Music”); and idem, A New Song for the Lord, chs.
6–8 (pp. 94–146).
23 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 155.
24 Ibid., 155.
25 Ibid., 131.
26 See ibid., 60–61.

The Liturgy according to Joseph Ratzinger

409

recurrent pattern. That pattern has three dimensions: the cosmic, the
historical, and the eschatological. The themes of creation, redemption,
and consummation are constantly interwoven. According to St. Irenaeus,
“the glory of God is man alive, and the life of man is the vision of
God”;27 and “cult,” says Joseph Ratzinger, “exists in order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that glory is given to
God.”28 In the midst of the world, humankind is made in the image of
God, and (to borrow a formulation from a different part of the Christian
Tradition, the Westminster Catechism of the Reformed family) “man’s chief
end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.”29 The course of human
history is both conducted and corrected by the triune God, the crucial
and decisive event being the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of
the Son. The story stretches from Adam through Abel, Melchizedek,
Abraham and Isaac, Moses and the Exodus, Joshua and David, the
Promised Land, the Exile, and the Return, to Jesus, born of Mary, crucified, risen, and again awaited. Foreshadowed by the Old Testament, the
Church of the New fits in the overlap of “image” and “reality,” where the
End is anticipated but still “through a glass darkly.” Against any overly
realized eschatology, Ratzinger points to the sufferings and pain, and
indeed the sin, guilt, and futility, in the world of the “not yet.” But hope
is in place, since the “new world” has begun with the Resurrection of
Christ while the promise of God’s finally being “all in all” is secure.
Our author fixes on two major signs with liturgical (and intrinsically
Christological) reference that bring the three dimensions—cosmic,
historical, eschatological—comprehensively together: the sun and the
Cross. In each case, the range is both temporal and spatial.
The Sun
Ratzinger makes much of orientation as the traditional Christian direction of prayer. A biblical basis is found in Psalm 19:6–7, where “the sun
comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber. . . . Its rising is from
the end of the heavens, and its circuit to the end of them.” Christians
interpret this psalm of “creation” and “law” in terms of “Christ, who is
the living Word, the eternal Logos, and thus the true light of history, who
came forth in Bethlehem from the bridal chamber of the Virgin Mother
and now pours out his light on all the world.”30 Moreover, the Christ
27 Irenaeus, Adversus haereses, 4.20.7, quoted in Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 18.
28 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 18.
29 From the opening exchange of the Shorter Cathechism of the Westminster

Assembly (1647–48).
30 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 68.

Geoffrey Wainwright

410

who “rose” in his Resurrection will also return “from the east” (cf. Mt
24:27–31).Thus, liturgically:
The fact that we find Christ in the symbol of the rising sun is the indication of a Christology defined eschatologically. Praying toward the
east means going to meet the coming Christ.The liturgy, turned toward
the east, effects entry, so to speak, into the procession of history toward
the future, the New Heaven and the New Earth, which we encounter
in Christ. It is a prayer of hope of the pilgrim as he walks in the direction shown us by the life, Passion, and Resurrection of Christ.31

In fact, orientation in prayer signifies that “cosmos and saving history
belong together”: “The cosmos is praying with us. It, too, is waiting for
redemption. It is precisely this cosmic dimension that is essential to
Christian liturgy. It is never performed solely in the self-made world of
man. It is always a cosmic liturgy.”32
Practically, Cardinal Ratzinger deeply regretted the post-Vatican II
move to the priest’s celebrating the liturgy versus populum, attributing the
priest’s westward volte-face to the misunderstood consequence of an accident of terrain in the Roman basilica of St. Peter’s.33 He appealed to the
liturgical historians Joseph Jungmann, Cyrille Vogel, and Louis Bouyer for
the view that the important thing, traditionally and theologically, was that
the priest and the entire congregation be “facing in the same direction,
knowing that together they were in a procession toward the Lord.They
did not close themselves into a circle; they did not gaze at one another;
but as the pilgrim people of God they set off for the Oriens, for the Christ
who comes to meet us.”34
As history and the cosmos cohere in Christ, so do time and space
intertwine in the Christian calendar, where once again the sun serves to
symbolize Christ through temporal rhythms just as it did in spatial direction.The Gospel accounts insist on “the first day of the week” as the day
when the Lord’s Resurrection was discovered;35 Justin Martyr might
have been quoted for the weekly Eucharistic assembly as occurring on
“the day called after the sun, because it is the first day, the day on which
God transformed darkness and matter, and made the world, and Jesus
Christ our Savior rose from the dead.”36 Then, too, Sunday is the “third
31 Ibid., 69.
32 Ibid., 70.
33 Ibid., 76f.
34 Ibid., 80.
35 Mt 28:1; Mk 16:2, 9; Lk 24:1; Jn 20:1.
36 Justin Martyr, First Apology, 67.

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411

day” (cf. 1 Cor 15:4), when “seen from the Cross”; Ratzinger notes that
“in the Old Testament the third day was regarded as the day of theophany,
the day when God entered into the world after the time of expectation.”37 Finally, Sunday, in relation to the whole preceding week, is the
“eighth day”38 and thus, according to the patristic designation, the “new
time that has dawned with the Resurrection,” “looking toward the final
consummation.”39 Sunday thus embodies “a unique synthesis of the
remembrance of history, the recalling of creation, and the theology of
hope.” It is “the day on which the Lord comes among his own and invites
them into his ‘liturgy,’ into his glorification of God, and communicates
himself to them.”40
In the annual rhythm, cosmos and history have their most charged
encounter at Easter, “the Christian Passover,” where lunar calculations—
with the moon a “symbol of transitoriness”41—also play a part. At the
Exodus from Egypt, Israel began “its own journey in history as the People
of God.”42 Christ defined his paschal death—which would have “a significance for history, for mankind, for the world”43—as his “hour.”44 The
theologian Ratzinger cites Pope Gregory the Great as pointing out that
“according to the Bible, Easter should fall in the first month, . . . the time
when the sun is passing through the first part of the Zodiac—the sign of
Aries [the Ram]”: “The constellation in the heavens seemed to speak, in
advance and for all time, of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of
the world ( Jn 1:29).”45 At Easter, “transitoriness is taken up into what
never passes away. Death becomes resurrection and passes into eternal
life”:46 “The ‘hour’ of Jesus makes its appearance, again and again, within
the unity of cosmic and historical time. Through the feast we enter into
the rhythm of creation and into God’s plan for human history.”47
In connection with Christmas also, the other focal point of the calendar (for Christians confess the one Christ inseparably as the Incarnate Son
37 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 96.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 97.
40 Ibid., 95. Chapter 4 of Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord, is devoted to “the

meaning of Sunday for Christian prayer and life” and includes a current reflection on “weekend culture and the Christian Sunday.”
41 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 101.
42 Ibid.
43 Ibid., 98.
44 Ibid., 101.
45 Ibid., 100.
46 Ibid., 101.
47 Ibid., 103.

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412

and Redeemer), factors to do with solstice and equinox played their part
in fixing the festal celebration (scholars differ over the details). St. Jerome
is cited for a Christmas sermon: “Even creation approves our preaching.
The universe itself bears witness to the truth of our words. Up to this day
the dark days increase, but from this day the darkness decreases. . . . The
light advances, while the night retreats.”48 The corresponding date of the
Annunciation—March 25—matches an ancient reckoning of the day of
creation. In these ways,
the cosmic serves the historical. Only in history is the cosmos given its
center and goal. To believe in the Incarnation means to be bound to
Christianity’s origins, their particularity, and, in human terms, their
contingency. Here is the guarantee that we are not chasing myths; that
God really has acted in our history and taken our time into his hands.
Only over the bridge of this “once for all” [ephapax/semel] can we come
into the “forever” [aiônios/semper] of God’s mercy.49

Seasonally, the world’s spring and autumn are connected by Christ. St.
John’s Gospel and the Epistle to the Hebrews interpret Christ’s “hour”
not only with a reference to Passover (spring) but also in light of the Day
of Atonement (autumn):“The autumn of declining time becomes a new
beginning, while the spring, as the time of the Lord’s death, now points
to the end of time, to the autumn of the world, in which, according to
the Fathers, Christ came among us.”50 The lectionary readings concerning “the sowing of the seed”—“which is [also] a metaphor for the
spreading of the Gospel”—can be accommodated in both spring and
autumn, for “in both seasons the mystery of hope is at work and reaches
its proper depth in the waning year, which leads beyond decline to a new
beginning”:
It would be a great work of inculturation to develop this approach and
to bring it into the common consciousness of Christians in the two
hemispheres, southern and northern.The South could help the North
to discover a new breadth and depth in the mystery, thus enabling us all
to draw afresh on its richness.51

With regard to the solar and related symbolism thus recalled by
Ratzinger, it must be admitted, sociologically, that it is difficult in late
48 Ibid., 108.
49 Ibid., 104; cf. 56.
50 Ibid., 104.
51 Ibid., 105.

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modernity to feel with quite the same force as earlier generations the
impact of the sun and the seasons.Technology brings us indoor living, artificial lighting, year-round provision of an entire range of foods. But amid
this redeployment of space we are still dependent on the created “cosmos”
in many ways, as ecological concerns about global warming and the
depletion of earthly resources demonstrate; we have an inheritance from
the past and a responsibility for the future. Moreover, the passage of time
remains an ineluctable experience for every human being, and “history”
is no less real for having assumed geopolitical proportions. The universal
frame is still there that allows and requires these matters to be considered
in a consistent, coherent way; and the Christian liturgy provides a place
and an occasion for such attention and an inspiration and guide for appropriate living.
The Cross
“The most basic Christian gesture in prayer,” says Joseph Ratzinger, “is
and always will be the sign of the Cross”:
It is a way of confessing Christ crucified with one’s very body, in accordance with the programmatic words of St. Paul . . . [1 Corinthians
1:23f.; 2:2]. To seal oneself with the sign of the Cross is a visible and
public Yes to him who suffered for us; to him who in the body has
made God’s love visible, even to the utmost; to the God who reigns not
by destruction but by the humility of suffering and love, which is
stronger than all the power of the world and wiser than all the calculating intelligence of men.52

A recurrent picture in Ratzinger’s writings is that of the pierced heart of
Christ on the Cross (cf. Jn 19:34–37). From the opened side flow with
the water and the blood, according to a patristic interpretation, the
constitutive sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist.53 The image of the
wounded Christ stays to the end, for “they shall look on him whom they
pierced” (Rev 1:7). “And I,” said Jesus, “when I am lifted up from the
earth, will draw all men to myself ” ( Jn 12:32). Ratzinger cites Lactantius
from the fourth century:“In his Passion God spread out his arms and thus
embraced the globe as a sign that a future people, from the rising of the
sun to its setting, would gather under his wings.”54 A Methodist may
think of Charles Wesley’s words:
52 Ibid., 177.
53 Cf., for example, ibid., 84 and 222.
54 Ibid., 182–83.

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The arms of love that compass me
Would all mankind embrace.55

The cosmic scope of the Cross is already found in St. Irenaeus,“the real
founder of systematic theology, in its Catholic form,” who in his Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching echoes St. Paul’s teaching in Ephesians
3:18ff.The crucified Christ is
the very Word of Almighty God, who penetrates our universe by an
invisible presence.And for this reason he embraces the whole world, its
breadth and length, its height and depth, for through the Word of God
all things are guided into order. And the Son of God is crucified in
them, since, in the form of the Cross, he is imprinted upon all things.56

St. Justin Martyr, in his First Apology, found a “prophecy of the Cross”
already in Plato’s “idea of a cross inscribed upon the cosmos,”57 as
Ratzinger explains:
Plato took this from the Pythagorean tradition, which in its turn had a
connection with the traditions of the ancient East. First, there is an
astronomical statement about the two great movements of the stars
with which ancient astronomy was familiar: the ecliptic (the great circle
in the heavens along which the sun appears to run its course) and the
orbit of the earth. These two intersect and form together the Greek
letter Chi, which is written in the form of a cross (like an X). . . . Plato,
again following more ancient traditions, connected this with the image
of the deity.58

Our author recalls also the idea from Indian religions of “the cross-shaped
tree of the world that holds everything together.”59 From all these signs
he concludes that “the cosmos speaks to us of the Cross, and the Cross
solves for us the enigma of the cosmos. . . .When we open our eyes, we
can read the message of Christ in the language of the universe, and
conversely, Christ grants us understanding of the message of creation.”60
In late modernity, the natural sciences offer us speculative accounts of
beginnings and endings—and of apparently universal structures at the
macroscopic and microscopic levels—that seem to be grounded in obser55 From the hymn “Jesus! the Name High over All” by Charles Wesley.
56 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 182.
57 Ibid., 180; cf. Timaeus, 34ab and 36bc.
58 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 180–81.
59 Ibid., 182.
60 Ibid., 181.

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vations and calculations not available hitherto. But our common human
questions of direction and purpose, of suffering and moral evil, remain.
Here certainly are pistes de recherche for theologians to pursue in company
with interested natural scientists if, with the aid of the Christian liturgy, we
are to find (as Joseph Ratzinger does) the sacrificial love of God inscribed
in the universe and offering us the way of salvation. It must and may be
hoped that poets, musicians, and visual artists, working within the semantic context set by the faith, teaching, and liturgy of the Church, will find
timely ways to embody valid new insights so as to grip the minds and
imaginations of the contemporary communities at worship.
Matter and Spirit
Our location in the universe, our temporal existence as embodied creatures, our calling to an eternal destiny with the transcendent God: All
these things raise questions about matter and spirit, which find the offer
of an answer in a Christian liturgy that bears cosmic, historical, and eschatological dimensions.
Joseph Ratzinger’s fundamental understanding of worship is that of
logikê latreia—the “reasonable service” of God.61 In the light of Christ,
the notion found in Romans 12:1 achieves two things: First, it resolves
the Old Testament paradox epitomized in Psalm 51:15–19, with its
tension between animal sacrifices at the temple-altar and the spiritual
sacrifice of heart and lips;62 and second, it borrows from the Greek mind
“the idea of a mystical union with the Logos, the very meaning of all
things,”63 while yet avoiding the Hellenistic temptation that “allows the
body to fall into insubstantiality.”64 On those terms, “spiritual
worship”—a Christologically grounded “worship in spirit and in
truth”65—became “the Christian response to the cultic crisis of the
whole ancient world.”66 It continues to offer a means to contain and
counter the disorder of relativism at all levels:
The sacrifice is the “word,” the word of prayer, which goes up from
man to God, embodying the whole of man’s existence and enabling
him to become “word” ( logos) in himself. It is man, conforming himself
to logos and becoming logos through faith, who is the true sacrifice, the
true glory of God in the world. . . .
61 Cf. especially ibid., 45–50.
62 Cf. also Ps 50:12–15.
63 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 46.
64 Ibid., 47.
65 Jn 4:23; cf. 7:39; 14:6.
66 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 45–46.

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The idea of the sacrifice of the logos becomes a full reality only in
the Logos incarnatus, the Word who is made flesh and draws “all flesh” into
the glorification of God.When that happens, the Logos is more than just
the “meaning” behind and above things. Now he himself has entered into
flesh, has become bodily. He takes up into himself our sufferings and
hopes, all the yearning of creation, and bears it to God.The two themes
that Psalm 51 (50) could not reconcile, the two themes that throughout
the Old Testament keep running toward one another but do not meet,
now really converge. Now “word” is no longer just the representation of
something else, of what is bodily. In Jesus’ self-surrender on the Cross, the
Word is united with the entire reality of human life and suffering.There
is no longer an Ersatz cult. Now the vicarious sacrifice of Jesus takes us
up and leads us into that likeness with God, that transformation into love,
which is the only true adoration. In virtue of Jesus’ Cross and Resurrection, the Eucharist is the meeting point of all lines that lead from the Old
Covenant, indeed from the whole of man’s religious history. Here at last
is right worship, ever longed for and yet surpassing our powers: adoration
“in spirit and truth.”67

The mention of the Eucharist suffices to hint at the sacraments proper,
which will figure in our discussion later, but first we shall look more
generally at “the psychosomatic unity of man,” which “express[es] itself
in the bodily gesture” as “the bearer of spiritual meaning” in worship.68
Ratzinger devotes the final section of The Spirit of the Liturgy to “the body
and the liturgy”; and there he writes in his most catechetical style, occasionally anecdotal, sometimes autobiographical, and here and there (it
67 Ibid., 46, 47; cf. 57, 61. One may just wonder whether, in insisting so strongly

and persuasively on Christian worship as what the Roman canon calls oblatio
rationabilis, Joseph Ratzinger has been led to underplay, both historically and
theologically, the “meal” character of the rite that Protestants have ecumenically
learned to call “the Eucharist” but which they have more customarily designated
“the Lord’s Supper.” It is surely well within scriptural and traditional bounds to
understand (“dogmatic content”) and practice (“liturgical form”) the sacrament
as importantly—albeit not exclusively—a foretaste of the heavenly banquet, the
marriage supper of the Lamb (cf., for example, Mt 26:29; Rev 19:7–9). Again,
the present sacramental anticipation of the communion to be lived and enjoyed in
the pax of the City of God provides a context in and from which to begin the
overcoming of—this time—social relativism. Ratzinger’s brief (and, to my mind,
unnecessary) critical remark on the “meal” question in The Spirit of the Liturgy,
78ff., derives from his much fuller arguments in favor of eucharistia as the governing category of the rite in “Form and Content in the Eucharistic Celebration,”
in The Feast of Faith, 33–60 (“Gestalt und Gehalt der eucharistischen Feier,” in
Das Fest des Glaubens, 31–54).
68 Cf. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 190.

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will be thought today) even mildly idiosyncratic.69 Among liturgical
postures and gestures, it is kneeling and bowing which receive most
attention from our author. The key passage from Scripture is “the great
hymn of Christ in Philippians 2:6–11”:70
All bend the knee before Jesus, the One who descended, and bow to
him precisely as the true God above all gods. . . .The Christian liturgy
is a cosmic liturgy precisely because it bends the knee before the crucified and exalted Lord. Here is the center of authentic culture—the
culture of truth.The humble gesture by which we fall at the feet of the
Lord inserts us into the true path of the life of the cosmos.71
The supplices—our being “bowed low”—is the bodily expression, so
to speak, of what the Bible calls humility (cf., “he humbled himself,”
Phil 2:8). . . . Humility is the ontologically appropriate attitude, the state
that corresponds to the truth about man, and as such it becomes a
fundamental attitude of Christian existence. St. Augustine constructed
his whole Christology, indeed I would say his entire apologetics for
Christianity, upon the concept of humilitas. He took up the teaching of
the ancients, of the Greek and Roman world, that hybris—self-glorifying pride—is the real sin of all sins, as we see in exemplary form in the
fall of Adam. Arrogance, the ontological lie by which man makes
himself God, is overcome by the humility of God, who makes Himself
the slave, who bows down before us.The man who wants to come close
to God . . . must likewise learn to bend, for God Himself has bent
down. In the gesture of humble love, in the washing of feet, in which
He kneels at our feet—that is where we find Him.72

Our author is well aware that learning again to kneel and to bow will not
come easily to “modern man.”73 Even post-Vatican II liturgists may have
undervalued such “a physical reminder of the spiritual attitude essential
to faith.”74
“In our times,” observes Ratzinger,“in a variety of forms, the fascination of Gnosticism is at work.”75 Attitudes toward the human body are
tell-tale in this respect. If I may just this once quote myself:

69 See, for example, ibid., 214–16, in favor of an occasional quasi-silent recitation

of the canon of the Mass.
70 Ibid., 192.
71 Ibid., 193.
72 Ibid., 205–6.
73 Ibid., cf. 194, 206.
74 Ibid., 206.
75 Ibid., 32.

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The transformation of our senses by the Word of God takes on a particular poignancy in our contemporary North American and West European culture.We live in a very sensate and sensualist society.We are in
some ways absorbed in our senses, a people defined by materialism and
sexuality.Yet in other ways we are curiously detached from our bodies,
as though we were not really affected by what happens to us in our
bodies or what we do in them. The contradiction between indulging
our senses and disowning our bodies is only an apparent one. If our
bodies are not us, then we are not responsible in and for them; and that
irresponsibility may assume the character of license or, indeed, of withdrawal. The same phenomenon occurred in the Gnosticism of the
second century. Saint Irenaeus countered its threat to Christianity by
retelling the authentic biblical tale of the divine Word’s history ad extra
as the single sweep of universal creation, the making of humankind, the
incarnation in Jesus the Christ, the constitution of the Church, the
institution and practice of the sacraments, and the awaited resurrection
of the body.76

“The body,” says Ratzinger, “must be trained . . . for the resurrection.”77
“Laid hold of by the Logos and for the Logos in our very bodies,” we
meanwhile learn to cooperate with the will and action of God:“The true
liturgical action is the deed of God, and for that very reason the liturgy
of faith always reaches beyond the cultic act into everyday life, which
must itself become ‘liturgical,’ a service for the transformation of the
world.”78 It is noteworthy that twentieth-century Orthodox theologians
took to speaking of “the liturgy after the Liturgy.”
For human beings, as corporeal creatures, the body is the point of
contact with the rest of material creation. We apply matter to ourselves,
we take it into ourselves, we work outwardly upon it. Matter is neither
to be absolutized nor to be despised. In conjunction with the words of
the Word, material elements—which “the Lord himself chose”—serve as
sacramental signs: water, (olive) oil, (wheaten) bread, and wine:
Whereas water is the common element of life for the whole earth and
is therefore suitable in all places as a door of entry to communion with
Christ, in the case of the three other elements we are dealing with the
typical gifts of Mediterranean culture. We encounter this triad in
explicit association in the glorious psalm of creation, Psalm 104, where
the Psalmist thanks God for giving man the food of the earth and
“wine to gladden the heart of man, oil to make his face shine, and bread
76 Geoffrey Wainwright, For Our Salvation, 18. The first five chapters of that book

are devoted—indulging in a pun—to “The Senses of the Word.”
77 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 176.
78 Ibid., 175.

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to strengthen man’s heart” (v. 15). These three elements of Mediterranean life express the goodness of creation, in which we receive the
goodness of the Creator Himself. And now they become the gift of an
even higher goodness, a goodness that makes our face shine anew in
likeness to the “anointed” God, to his beloved Son, Jesus Christ, a
goodness that changes the bread and wine of the earth into the Body
and Blood of the Redeemer, so that, through the Son made man, we
may have communion with the triune God Himself.79

Thus both universality and particularity are respected—“geographically,”
culturally. “In the interplay of culture and history,” however, “history has
priority”:
The elements become sacraments through connection with the unique
history of God in relation to man in Jesus Christ. . . . Outwardly, that
history may seem fortuitous, but it is the form of history willed by God,
and for us it is the trustworthy trace that he has imprinted on the earth,
the guarantee that we are not thinking up things for ourselves but are
truly touched by God and come into touch with Him. Precisely
through what is particular and once-for-all, the here and now, we
emerge from the “ever and never” vagueness of mythology. It is with this
particular face, with this particular human form, that Christ comes to us,
and precisely thus does he make us brethren beyond all boundaries.80

That brings us to the personal and social constitution of humanity,
which we may follow out first in the structures of the world and then in
the structures of the Church. Once more we see how these are envisaged
by Joseph Ratzinger in terms of liturgy.
A Social Covenant
In retelling the story of the Exodus,81 Ratzinger insists that Israel’s deliverance from Egypt was for the sake of worship, in order to “serve God.”82 In
“the wilderness of Sinai” (Ex 19:1), Israel “discovers the kind of sacrifice God
wants.”83 From the mountaintop, God speaks and makes his will known to
the people in the Ten Commandments (cf. Ex 20:1–17) and, through the
mediation of Moses, makes a covenant with them (cf. Ex 1)—“a covenant
concretized in a minutely regulated form of worship”; “cult, liturgy in the
proper sense, is part of this worship, but so too is life according to the will of
79 Ibid., 223.
80 Ibid., 224.
81 Cf. ibid., 15–23.
82 So, Ex 7:16; 8:1, 25–27; 9:1, 13; 10:3, 24–26.
83 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 17.

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God.”84 This service of God was to be maintained in the land across the
Jordan first promised to Abraham, for the land will be given to the people as
“a place for the worship of the true God,”“the place where God reigns,”“the
realm of obedience, where God’s will is done and the right kind of human
existence developed.”85
Ratzinger draws broad conclusions from the covenant ordered on
Sinai.“Law and ethics do not hold together when they are not anchored
in the liturgical center and inspired by it”:86
On Sinai the people receive not only instructions about worship, but
also an all-embracing rule of law and life. Only thus can it become a
people.A people without a common rule of law cannot live. It destroys
itself in anarchy, which is a parody of freedom, its exaltation to the
point of abolition.When every man lives without law, every man lives
without freedom. . . . In the ordering of the covenant on Sinai, the three
aspects of worship, law, and ethics are inseparably interwoven. . . .When
morality and law do not originate in a God-ward perspective, they
degrade man, because they rob him of his highest measure and his
highest capacity, deprive him of any vision of the infinite and eternal.
This seeming liberation subjects him to the dictatorship of the ruling
majority, to shifting human standards, which inevitable end up doing
him violence.87

In “the modern age,” says Ratzinger, we witness “the total secularization
of the law and the exclusion of any God-ward perspective from the fashioning of the law.”88 On the ethical front, Ratzinger, in another
context,89 recalls Goethe’s Faustian recasting of the Johannine “In the
beginning was the Word” to “In the beginning was the Deed”:
In our own times this continues in the attempt to replace “orthodoxy”
by “orthopraxy”—there is no common faith any more (because truth
is unattainable), only common praxis. By contrast, for Christian faith, as
Guardini shows so penetratingly in his masterly early work, The Spirit
of the Liturgy, logos has precedence over ethos. When this is reversed,
Christianity is turned upside down.90

84 Ibid.
85 Ibid.
86 Ibid., 20.
87 Ibid., 18–19.
88 Ibid., 18.
89 Ibid., 154–55.
90 Ibid., 155.

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It seems that “Christendom” needs to hear (again) the warning contained
in the story of the golden calf (Ex 32):
The cult conducted by the high priest Aaron is not meant to serve any
of the false gods of the heathen.The apostasy is more subtle. . . .And yet
it is a falling away from the worship of God to idolatry. This apostasy,
which outwardly is scarcely perceptible, has two causes. First, there is a
violation of the prohibition of images.The people cannot cope with the
invisible, remote, and mysterious God. They want to bring Him down
into their own world, into what they can see and understand. Worship
is no longer going up to God, but drawing God down into one’s own
world. He must be there when He is needed, and He must be the kind
of God that is needed. Man is using God, and in reality, even if it is not
outwardly discernible, he is placing himself above God. . . . [Second,] the
worship of the golden calf is a self-generated cult. When Moses stays
away for too long, and God Himself becomes inaccessible, the people
just fetch Him back.Worship becomes a feast that the community gives
itself, a festival of self-affirmation. Instead of being worship of God, it
becomes a circle closed in on itself: eating, drinking, and making merry.
The dance around the golden calf is an image of this self-seeking
worship. It is a kind of banal self-gratification. . . . Ultimately, it is no
longer concerned with God but with giving oneself a nice little alternative world, manufactured from one’s own resources. Then liturgy
really does become pointless, just fooling around. Or still worse it
becomes an apostasy from the living God, an apostasy in sacral disguise.
All that is left in the end is frustration, a feeling of emptiness.There is
no experience of that liberation which always takes place when man
encounters the living God.91

This is the background against which to see Cardinal Ratzinger’s insistence on the “givenness” of instituted and traditional rites in face of the
“creativity” (or, more sharply, the “Beliebigkeit”) of some sophisticated
contemporary pastors and congregations.92 Churches are summoned to
permanent vigilance concerning what is required of them by the divine
covenant that makes them—and their liturgical assemblies—the place in
which, under God, persons and societies are shaped for life in this world
and beyond.
The Ecclesial Community
The contemporary search for personal and social “identity”—often individualistically and divisively conducted—is offered an available response in
91 Ibid., 22–23.
92 Cf., for example, ibid., 80 and 159–70.

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baptism as insertion into the paschal mystery of Christ and membership of
his Body, the Church. Joseph Ratzinger brings these things together thus:
In the light of Easter, Christians see themselves as people who truly live.
They have found their way out of an existence that is more death than
life. They have discovered real life: “And this is eternal life, that they
know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent”
( Jn 17:3). Deliverance from death is at the same time deliverance from
the captivity of individualism, from the prison of self, from the incapacity to love and make a gift of oneself.Thus Easter becomes the great feast
of Baptism, in which man, as it were, enacts the passage through the Red
Sea, emerges from his own existence into communion with Christ and
so into communion with all who belong to Christ. Resurrection builds
communion. It creates the new People of God.The grain of wheat that
dies all alone does not remain alone but brings much fruit with it.The
risen Lord does not remain alone. He draws all mankind to himself and
so creates a new universal communion of men.93

A Protestant Christian may express gratitude for two liturgical gifts in
particular from Catholicism over the last sixty years: first, the revitalization of the Paschal Vigil, begun already under Pius XII, with its rehearsal
of the biblical story of salvation, and as an occasion for baptisms and
baptismal renewals; and then the Rite of the Christian Initiation of
Adults, created after Vatican II, which has contributed to a recovery of
catechesis, whether initial or remedial, in an era of needed reevangelization. It may be significant that these two features largely escaped strictures from Cardinal Ratzinger in his concerns over some developments
in recent Catholic practice. One might just regret that he did not actively
welcome the ecumenical scope of the Easter Vigil and a strengthened
initiatory practice, for his commitment to the cause of authentic Christian and ecclesial unity in the truth of the Gospel is not in doubt.
Meanwhile, here is a pastoral word that all Christians may hear from
the theologian who is now bishop of Rome:
When we make the sign of the Cross, we accept our Baptism anew;
Christ from the Cross draws us, so to speak, to himself (cf. Jn 13:32) and
thus into communion with the living God. For Baptism and the sign of
the Cross, which is a kind of summing up and re-acceptance of Baptism,
are above all a divine event: the Holy Spirit leads us to Christ, and Christ
opens the door to the Father. God is no longer the “unknown god”; He
has a name.We are allowed to call upon Him, and He calls us.94
93 Ibid., 102.
94 Ibid., 178.

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Or again, concerning the adoption of the orans posture in prayer,“one of
the primal gestures of man in calling upon God and found in virtually
every part of the religious world”:
By extending our arms, we resolve to pray with the Crucified, to unite
ourselves to his “mind” (Phil 2:5). In the arms of Christ, stretched on
the Cross, Christians see a twofold meaning. In his case, too, this gesture
is the radical form of worship, the unity of his human will with the will
of the Father, but at the same time these arms are open toward us—
they are the wide embrace by which Christ wants to draw us to himself
( Jn 12:32).Worship of God and love of neighbor—the content of the
chief commandment, which sums up the law and the prophets—coincide in this gesture. To open oneself to God, to surrender oneself
completely to Him, is at the same time—the two things cannot be
separated—to devote oneself to one’s neighbor.This combining of the
two directions of love in the gesture of Christ on the Cross reveals, in
a bodily and visible way, the new depth of Christian prayer and thus
expresses the inner law of our own prayer.95

Finally, the ecclesial and human community, we are not surprised to
read, has for Ratzinger not only a synchronic but also a diachronic—and
ultimately eschatological—range. Gathered in the Holy Spirit (though,
with the notable exception of the chapter on “Music and Liturgy,” epiclesis is more an implicit than an explicit category in Ratzinger’s writing—
despite the title of our principal book!), the liturgical assembly embodies
and enacts the anamnesis of Christ, which has past, present, and future
reference. Ratzinger speaks often of “the communion of the saints.” Of
icons, he writes that “the images of biblical history have pride of place in
sacred art, but the latter also includes the history of the saints, which is an
unfolding of the history of Jesus Christ, the fruit born throughout history
by the dead grain of wheat.”96 Or of the Eucharist:“Eucharistic personalism is a drive toward union, the overcoming of the barriers between
God and man, between ‘I’ and ‘thou’ in the new ‘we’ of the communion
of the saints. . . . Only the true Body in the Sacrament can build up the
true Body of the new City of God.”97
Recalling his own priestly and episcopal ordinations, and the singing of
the Litany of the Saints by the whole congregation, Joseph Ratzinger wrote:
The fact that the praying Church was calling upon all the saints, that
the prayer of the Church really was enveloping and embracing me, was
95 Ibid., 203–4.
96 Ibid., 132.
97 Ibid., 87–88.

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a wonderful consolation. In my incapacity, which had to be expressed
in the bodily gesture of prostration, this prayer, this presence of all the
saints, of the living and the dead, was a wonderful strength—it was the
only thing that could, as it were, lift me up. Only the presence of the
saints with me made possible the path that lay before me.98

And his own unforeseen election to the chair of Peter gives a special
poignancy to what he wrote, in historical and theological vein, about the
location of that chair in the basilica of the Vatican:
In St. Peter’s, during the pontificate of St. Gregory the Great
(590–604), the altar was moved nearer to the bishop’s chair, probably
for the simple reason that he was supposed to stand as much as possible above the tomb of St. Peter.This was an outward and visible expression of the truth that we celebrate the Sacrifice of the Lord in the
communion of saints, a communion spanning all times and ages. The
custom of erecting an altar above the tombs of the martyrs probably
goes back a long way and is an outcome of the same motivation.
Throughout history the martyrs continue Christ’s self-oblation; they
are like the Church’s living altar, made not of stones but of men, who
have become members of the Body of Christ and thus express a new
kind of cultus: sacrifice is humanity become love with Christ.99

Ratzinger cites St. Augustine for the view that “the true ‘sacrifice’ is
the civitas Dei, that is, love-transformed mankind, the divinization of
creation, and the surrender of all things to God: God all in all (1 Cor
15:28). That is the purpose of the world. That is the essence of sacrifice
and worship.”100 We come thus to a final reading of the liturgy in the
three dimensions of cosmos, history, and consummation.
A Universal Prospect
History is conceived by Joseph Ratzinger as the cosmic story of created
humankind en marche toward the City of God and the New World that
has already dawned in Christ. Within the great “arc from exitus to reditus,”101 the “great historical process by which the world moves toward
the fulfillment of God being ‘all in all,’ ”102 the smaller units “carry within
themselves the great rhythm of the whole, give it concrete forms that are
98 Ibid., 188.
99 Ibid., 76.
100 Ibid., 28.
101 Ibid., 33.
102 Ibid., 59.

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ever new, and so provide it with the force of its movement.”103 These
include “the lives of the different cultures and communities of human
history, in which the drama of beginning, development, and end is played
out.”104 Given “the Christ-event and the growth of the Church out of
all the nations,”105
Christian liturgy is a liturgy of promise fulfilled, of a quest, the religious
quest of human history, reaching its goal. But it remains a liturgy of
hope. It, too, bears within it the mark of impermanence. The new
Temple, not made by human hands, does exist, but it is also still under
construction.The great gesture of embrace emanating from the Crucified has not yet reached its goal; it has only just begun. Christian liturgy
is liturgy on the way, a liturgy of pilgrimage toward the transfiguration
of the world, which will only take place when God is “all in all.”106

In this universal historical context a recurrent liturgical trope of
Ratzinger’s is “the procession of the nations.”107 The feast of the
Epiphany celebrates, among other things, the arrival of the Magi as “the
beginning of the Church of the Gentiles, the procession of the nations to
the God of Israel (cf. Is 60)”:
The narrative of the adoration of the Magi became important for
Christian thought, because it shows the inner connection between the
wisdom of the nations and the Word of promise in Scripture; because
it shows how the language of the cosmos and the truth-seeking
thought of man lead to Christ. The mysterious star could become the
symbol for these connections and once again emphasize that the
language of the cosmos and the language of the human heart trace their
descent from the Word of the Father, who in Bethlehem came forth
from the silence of God and assembled the fragments of our human
knowledge into a complete whole.108

How, in this (liturgical) light, are we to distinguish between legitimate
diversity, problematic pluralism, and the castigated “relativism” in matters of
religion and culture? It is clear that the test must be Christological (and,
derivatively, ecclesial); and that is precisely what we find stated in the declaration Dominus Iesus emanating from the Congregation for the Doctrine of
103 Ibid., 29.
104 Ibid., 30.
105 Ibid., 54.
106 Ibid., 50.
107 See, for example, ibid., 76, 110.
108 Ibid., 110.

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the Faith in the year 2000 while Cardinal Ratzinger was its prefect: “On
the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the [Catholic]
Church.” While “the Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and
holy” in non-Christian religions (no. 2, citing Vatican II, Nostra aetate, no.
2), Dominus Iesus declares that “the Church’s constant missionary proclamation is endangered today by relativistic theories which seek to justify
religious pluralism, not only de facto but also de iure,” so as to lose “the definitive and complete character of the revelation of Jesus Christ”:
The roots of these problems are to be found in certain presuppositions
of both a philosophical nature and theological nature, which hinder the
understanding and acceptance of the revealed truth. Some of these can
be mentioned: the conviction of the elusiveness and inexpressibility of
divine truth, even by Christian Revelation; relativistic attitudes toward
truth itself, according to which what is true for some would not be true
for others; the radical opposition posited between the logical mentality
of the West and the symbolic mentality of the East; the subjectivism
which, by regarding reason as the only source of knowledge, becomes
incapable of raising “its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the
truth of being” [John Paul II, Fides et ratio, no. 5]; the difficulty in understanding and accepting the presence of definitive and eschatological
events in history; the metaphysical emptying of the historical Incarnation of the Eternal Logos, reduced to a mere appearing of God in
history; the eclecticism of those who, in theological research, uncritically
absorb ideas from a variety of philosophical and theological contexts
without regard for consistency, systematic connection, or compatibility
with Christian truth; finally, the tendency to read and to interpret Sacred
Scripture outside the Tradition and magisterium of the Church.109

Our question in this essay has to be: How is all that to be properly dealt
with, and countered, in the realm of liturgy—and, through liturgy, in the
realm of an entire culture? How are Christian worship—and the entire
faith—to cope with a culture and its intellectual, social, and religious
components? How, at our particular time and place, are the distinctions to
be drawn between diversity-in-unity and an ideologically affirmed pluralism that amounts to relativism? The theologian Joseph Ratzinger stated
some principles, and gave some examples, of his own discernment in the
book to which we have been devoting our principal attention. In principle, he detects an early Christian realization that “the paths of religious
history converged on Christ, . . . that philosophy and religion gave faith
the images and concepts in which alone it could understand itself.”110 Yet
109 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Dominus Iesus, no. 4.
110 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 183.

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he is very suspicious of what recent and contemporary liturgists have
meant by “inculturation”;111 and he proposes an alternative:
The first and most fundamental way in which inculturation takes place
is the unfolding [Entfaltung] of a Christian culture in all its different
dimensions: a culture of cooperation, of social concern, of respect for the
poor, of the overcoming of class differences, of care for the suffering and
dying; a culture that educates mind and heart in proper cooperation; a
political culture and a culture of law; a culture of dialogue, of reverence
for life, and so on. This kind of authentic inculturation of Christianity
then creates culture in the stricter sense of the word, that is, it leads to
artistic work that interprets the world anew in the light of God.112

“In the religious sphere,” says Ratzinger,“culture manifests itself above
all in the growth of authentic popular piety.”113 He instances devotion to
the Passion of Christ among suffering peoples, and “Marian devotion, in
which the whole mystery of the Incarnation, the tenderness of God, the
participation of man in God’s own nature, and the nature of God’s saving
action are experienced at a profound level.”114 And thence into liturgy:
Popular piety is the soil without which the liturgy cannot thrive. . . .
One must love it, purifying and guiding it where necessary, but always
accepting it with great reverence, even when it seems alien or alienating, as the dedicated sanctuary of faith in the hearts of the people. . . .
Tried and tested elements of popular piety may pass over, then, into
liturgical celebration, without officious and hasty fabrication, by a
patient process of lengthy growth.115

Two further remarks are in order here. First, our author himself recognizes that it was freely composed poetry and music that “provided the
point of entry for Gnosticism, that deadly temptation which began to
subvert Christianity from within”—and conciliar control (as in the
fourth-century “Canons of Laodicea”) was needed to “save the identity
of biblical faith”; so that in fact “the very rejection of false inculturation
opened up the cultural breadth of Christianity for the future.”116 And
second, the mention of “purifying,” “guiding,” “trying,” and “testing” in
the previous passage confirms the need for magisterial control (as Pope
111 Cf., for example, ibid., 200ff.
112 Ibid., 201.
113 Ibid.
114 Ibid., 202.
115 Ibid.
116 Ibid., 144–45.

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Pius XII stated in his encyclical of 1947, Mediator Dei, in a neat twist on
a familiar dictum: ut lex credendi legem statuat supplicandi ).
Since religion, in one shape or form, seems always to be woven into
culture, the question of “religious pluralism” must always arise in the
presentation of the Gospel and in the regulation of Christian worship.
According to Joseph Ratzinger, “one of the great realities in the history
of religion” is that “man is always looking for the right way of honoring
God, for a form of prayer and common worship that pleases God and is
appropriate to his nature.”117 From the revelation communicated in
Christ certain criteria must be brought to bear. In the context of our
current discussion, two detailed applications made by the theologian
Ratzinger are of some significance. First, he notes that “the lotus position
of Indian religiosity, which is regarded as the proper posture for meditation,” is “again being practiced, in different ways, by some Christians.” He
does not “want absolutely to rule out” its use for Christians, recognizing
that “the Christian tradition is also familiar with the God who is more
interior to us than we are to ourselves”; yet “the sitting position of oriental meditation” has no proper place in the liturgy of the Church:118
With all of today’s empiricism and pragmatism, with its loss of soul, we
have good reason to learn again from Asia. But however open Christian faith may be, must be, to the wisdom of Asia, the difference between
the personal and the a-personal understandings of God remains. We
must, therefore, conclude that kneeling and standing are, in a unique
and irreplaceable way, the Christian posture of prayer—the Christian’s
orientation of himself toward the face of God, toward the face of Jesus
Christ, in seeing whom we are able to see the Father.119

The second application concerns dance. “Dancing,” Ratzinger judges,
“is not a form of expression for the Christian liturgy.” It was, in fact,
rejected by the Church when, around the third century,“certain GnosticDocetic circles [attempted] to introduce it into the liturgy” in place of “the
liturgy of the Cross, because, after all, the Cross was only an appearance.”120
More generally, “the cultic dances of the different religions have different
purposes—incantation, imitative magic, mystical ecstasy—none of which is
compatible with the essential purpose of the liturgy of the ‘reasonable
sacrifice.’ ”121 The “dancing pantomimes” currently fashionable in “creative
117 Ibid., 159.
118 Ibid., 197
119 Ibid., 198.
120 Ibid.
121 Ibid.

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liturgy” are a far cry from what occurs in “the [traditional] Ethiopian rite
or the Zairean form of the Roman liturgy [officially since 1988]” as “a
rhythmically ordered procession very in keeping with the dignity of the
occasion, . . . provid[ing] an inner discipline and order for the various stages
of the liturgy, bestowing on them beauty and, above all, making them
worthy of God.”122 That last remark about beauty and worth is a reminder,
too, that authentic cultural achievements in the broader sense—“whatever
is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, gracious” (Phil 4:8)—may find a proper
place among “the glory and the honor of the nations” that will in the end
adorn the City of God (cf. Rev 21:22–27).
Conclusion
To adapt H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic Christ and Culture (1951): Instead
of taking his five “typical” attitudes as fixed and divergent stances historically manifested by different Christian believers toward all human
culture as such, it may be appropriate to see them as indicating the possibility of, and need for, a discriminating attention on the part of all Christians toward every human culture whatever the time and place.Whereas
a particular cultural configuration may appear as predominantly positive
or negative in relation to the saving purposes of God, it is likely that most
cultures will contain some elements to be affirmed; some to be negated,
resisted, and even fought; some to be purified and elevated; some to be
held provisionally in tension; and some susceptible to a radical and
profound transformation toward God’s kingdom. The liturgy can function not only to sift but also to inspire a surrounding public culture.
As a theologian, Joseph Ratzinger has argued that the Church’s liturgy—
as divinely instituted and responsibly celebrated—has the potential to operate in those ways toward a contemporary culture that is marked by a false
and debilitating relativism at the intellectual, social, moral, and religious
levels. His argument has been conducted with intelligence, learning, and art.
Now, as Pope Benedict XVI, he is in a position as never before to use pastoral
and magisterial powers of persuasion. His skills as a preacher and his grace as
a presiding priest—both evident to many millions at the funeral of Pope
John Paul II and at his own installation Mass—are cause for hope. My use of
the word “remedy” in the title of this essay would be quite contrary to Joseph
Ratzinger’s character if it were taken to imply merely a “quick fix” that
would leave people unchanged. He rightly understands himself at the service of a liturgy that, by serving God, will work for the redemption and transN&V
formation of humankind toward its true nature, calling, and destiny.
122 Ibid., 198–99; cf. 169f.

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Discussion
Acts Amid Precepts:The Aristotelian Logical
Structure of Thomas Aquinas’s Moral Theory
by Kevin Flannery, SJ
(Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 2001)
L AWRENCE D EWAN, OP
Còllege Dominicain
Ottawa, Canada

T HIS IS A STUDY of practical reasoning, and the shape proper to
it, as taught by St.Thomas. Father Kevin Flannery, dean of philosophy at
the Pontifical Gregorianum University in Rome, provides us with a
searching investigation, showing a most impressive familiarity with a
wide range of scholarship. Anyone who reads this work carefully will
benefit hugely. I say this quite apart from any incidental disagreements
one might have with the author.
In his first chapter, Flannery provides an argument for the existence of
absolutely fixed principles of practical reasoning according to Aristotle,
tied to the doctrine of Motion of Animals.1 This challenges Martha Nussbaum’s interpretation of Aristotelian ethics and is very effective. Flannery
neatly shows that the role of the ends, the first principles in Aristotelian
ethics, for our conduct is akin to that of the immobile starting point that
Aristotle discerned in animal movement, a source of “leverage” as Flannery says (24).
1 Cf. p. 21. In his note 44 there, Flannery mentions the commentator Michael of

Ephesus as seeing the products of crafts as to be identified with the end of practical reason. Flannery, later in the book, uses the products of crafts as a principle
for understanding double-effect reasoning in morals (chs. 7 and 8).

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Rather than go through the book chapter by chapter, I will here focus
on two important points where I have some disagreement.The first point
occurs in Flannery’s chapter 2, a presentation of the precepts of natural
law. Flannery is in the course of presenting a stratification of practical
reason analogous to that found in theoretical reason. He places first the
apprehension of the intelligibility of “the good,” and second the first principle of practical reason.Third come the “common precepts” (42). On this
level Flannery points to such precepts as (1) “ill is to be done to no one,”
(2) “one should act rationally,” and (3) “love of God and (4) neighbor.”
This leads him to explain how these four “common precepts” are parallel
to the “common axioms” of theoretical reason. I am concerned here only
with his discussion of “love of God” in this context (44).
The love of God is described by Thomas as a first and common precept
of natural law, known by virtue of itself to human reason, either by nature
or by faith; it is related to all Ten Commandments as principle to conclusions.2 Flannery takes into consideration the teaching of St. Thomas that
the existence of God is a demonstrable conclusion rather than a proposition per se nota quoad nos. How, then, can the precept “love God” be so
known? Flannery’s solution amounts to substituting for the precept “love
God” the precept “love happiness” or “seek happiness,” on the basis of the
teaching of St.Thomas that the existence of God is thus known in a way,
in that we have a natural desire for happiness and God is in fact happiness.3
This is hardly satisfactory.We are, after all, speaking of the best-known
items in the domain of practical reason. Consider what is said about the
precept to love God above all else. For example: “That which is maximally and firstly natural to man is that he love the good, and most especially the divine good and the good of one’s neighbor.”4 Moreover, it is
natural to love God more than ourselves by a friendly love, not merely a
concupiscible love; and our love for happiness is merely concupiscible.5
Flannery claims to be taking his cue from Thomas’s comments on
Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, as follows:
And it can be said that all men have appetite for the same delight in
virtue of natural appetite, though not, nevertheless, according to their
2 Cf. ST I–II, q. 100, a. 3, ad 1, referred to by Flannery at 43, note 54.
3 Flannery refers us, in nos. 57 and 58, to ST I, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1; In Boet. De trin. 1.3,

ad 4; and to De veritate 22.2.
4 ST II–II, q. 34, a. 5: “Id autem quod est maxime et primo naturale homini est

quod diligat bonum, et praecipue bonum divinum et bonum proximi.”
5 On friendly natural love for God more than for ourselves, cf. ST I, q. 60, a. 5;

whereas the love of God involved in his being our happiness is presented by
Thomas as concupiscible love, at ST I–II, q. 2, a. 7, ad 2.

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own judgment; for not all reckon in their heart nor say orally that the
same delight is best; still, nature inclines all to the same delight as to the
best, namely, to the contemplation of intelligible truth, inasmuch as all
men by nature desire to know. And this happens because all have naturally within themselves something divine, namely, the inclination of
nature which derives from the first principle; or else, namely, the very
form which is the principle of this inclination.6

Now this involves moving from whatever people judge and say they find
supreme pleasure in to their actually finding supreme pleasure in the
contemplation of intelligible truth. However, that move does not take us
from what is humanly known intuitively (we desire happiness) to what is
known only through demonstration or reasoning (happiness is to be
found in God). Thus, it does not really provide a model for what Flannery is doing with “love happiness” standing in for “love God.”
However, Flannery also makes reference to the Summa contra Gentiles,
book 3, question 38 (2161), though he does not quote it.7 This, in fact, is
quite a different doctrine from the one he has featured. It is not about an
implicit knowledge of God through an actual knowledge of happiness. It
is about a remarkable dimension of our natural life, namely, a natural
6 In Ethic. Nic. 7.13.14, where Thomas is explaining Aristotle at 7.13 (1153b31–32):

“Et potest dici quod omnes homines appetunt eamdem delectationem secundum
naturalem appetitum, non tamen secundum proprium iudicium; non enim omnes
existimant corde, neque dicunt ore eamdem delectationem esse optimam, natura
tamen omnes inclinat in eandem delectationem sicut in optimam, puta in
contemplationem intelligibilis veritatis, secundum quod omnes homines natura
scire desiderant. Et hoc contingit, quia omnia habent naturaliter in se ipsis quiddam divinum, scilicet inclinationem naturae, quae dependet ex principio primo;
vel etiam ipsam formam, quae est huius inclinationis principium.”
7 In no. 58, he refers to SCG, bk 3, ch. 38. In no. 57, he mentioned in more
detailed fashion ST I–II, q. 89, a. 6. I notice that Flannery presents the topic of
ST I–II, q. 89, a. 6, as whether it is possible for a youth to sin venially before
sinning mortally.The topic is rather whether one can have only original sin and
venial sin on one’s soul (no mortal sin).The answer is no.The idea is that before
one can commit a venial sin one must either get rid of original sin or one will
commit a mortal sin. Thus, it is quite possible, according to the doctrine, to sin
venially before sinning mortally.This is so, if one first turns to God, thus eliminating original sin, and then sins venially.The doctrine in this text, with its reply
to objection 3 about the obligation to turn to God at the very start of the moral
life, I would say should be read in the light of the doctrine of natural reasoning
that I mention below. However, Cajetan read it as requiring one to recognize,
through deliberation, only the bonum honestum as such (as one’s proper end),
rather than actual knowledge of and turning to God; cf. my paper “Natural Law
and the First Act of Freedom: Maritain Revisited,” Études Maritainiennes/Maritain
Studies 12 (1996): 3–32, in the section on Cajetan, ca n. 27.

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reasoning to a conclusion that God exists. We should not envisage the
natural dimension of our cognitive life merely in terms of simple apprehensions of such items as being, unity, act, and potency.8 We should not
even limit the picture to the primary axioms, such as the impossibility for
the same thing to be and not be.9 Rather, a further dimension of what is
naturally conferred on us is our natural reasoning. Three texts come to
mind.There is the just mentioned Summa contra Gentiles item.There is the
Summa theologiae II–II, question 85, article 1, on natural law as requiring
the offering of sacrifice to God, and, least known of all, there is Thomas’s
commentary on Psalm 8, a text from his final activity in Naples.10
The Summa contra Gentiles text occurs in a context where it is already
clear that ultimate human happiness consists in a knowledge of God.
Thomas is beginning a series of chapters in which various modes of
human knowledge of God are considered as possible candidates for such
happiness, a series beginning with the most imperfect knowledge.Thus,
Thomas speaks of a knowledge had by pretty well everyone, the sort of
knowledge of God that has led some thinkers to say that such knowledge
is per se notum. He himself holds that it is really the result of natural reason
(naturali ratione) proceeding from our experience of the order of natural
8 Thomas Aquinas, Sententia libri Ethicorum Aristotelis 6.5 (ed. Leonine, t. 47–2, Rome,

1969:Ad Sanctae Sabinae, lines 102–106 (concerning Aristotle at 1141a12–17) (ed.
Pirotta, no. 1181): “existimamus quosdam esse sapientes totaliter, idest respectu
totius generis entium . . . illa quae est sapientia simpliciter est certissima inter omnes
scientias, inquantum scilicet attingit ad prima principia entium, quae secundum se
sunt notissima, quamvis aliqua illarum, scilicet immaterialia, sunt minus nota quoad
nos. Universalissima autem principia sunt etiam quoad nos magis nota, sicut ea quae pertinent ad ens inquantum est ens: quorum cognitio pertinet ad sapientiam sic dictam, ut patet
in quarto Metaphysicae” (emphasis added). And Thomas, In Meta., prologue: “illa
scientia maxime est intellectualis, quae circa principia maxime universalia versatur.
Quae quidem sunt ens, et ea quae consequuntur ens, ut unum et multa, potentia
et actus.”
9 St.Thomas describes this as the maximally first principle: cf. In Meta. 3.5.6.
10 This work is presented by James Weisheipl, Friar Thomas D’Aquino: His Life,Work,
and Thought (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1974), 368–69 and 302–4, as
Postilla super Psalmos. Ps. 1–54 (Naples, 1272–1273). He explains that the given
title reflects the use of the psalms in the liturgy of the Church, but that Thomas
is really writing what would be more properly and simply described as Super
Psalmos (incomplete) (Friar Thomas, 303). Speaking of the period September 29,
1272, to December 6, 1273, from the beginning of the academic year 1272–1273
to the moment in the following term when Thomas stopped writing, Fr.
Weisheipl says that “this is the only academic work that can be attributed to this
period with certainty” (Friar Thomas, 302). By “academic work” here is meant
actual lecturing; the Super Psalmos is a reportatio by Reginald of Piperno,Thomas’s
personal secretary.

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things to an orderer of natural things.The stress is on the imperfection of
the knowledge, the “confused” character of the knowledge. One should
note particularly, in the same chapter, that a person who does not have
such knowledge is morally blameworthy. Thus, it is knowledge very
much linked to our common membership in the moral order.
While the Summa contra Gentiles text relates the reasoning to our experience of “the order of natural things,” the Summa theologiae II–II text is
more closely linked to our experience of our own imperfection.We read:
natural reason [naturalis ratio] declares forcefully [dictat] to man that he is
placed under some superior [being], because of the defects which he
experiences in himself, with regard to which he needs to be aided and
directed by some superior. And whatever that [superior] is, this it is
which among all [men] is called “a God.” But just as, in natural things,
the lower are naturally placed under the higher, so also natural reason
strongly declares to man, in accordance with natural inclination [naturalis ratio dictat homini secundum naturalem inclinationem], that he [should]
exhibit, in a way in keeping with his own self, submission and honor
to that which is above man.11

Here the resulting precept is not precisely the love precept, but rather
pertains to the virtue of religion, the highest form of justice.12 Nevertheless, what interests us is the nature of the knowledge of God that is
involved, the fruit of natural reasoning. And it is seen as universal, that is,
pertaining to man by his very nature.
Lastly, and in many ways most impressively, we have the comment on
Psalm 8, speaking of the manifest character of the divine greatness, seen
by mere “infants.”There had previously been mention in the psalm of the
majesty of God.Thus,Thomas says:
Then, when he says: “Out of the mouth” [ex ore], he shows that it [the
majesty of God] is maximally manifest. And firstly he shows the manifestness; secondly the reason for it, there [where he says]:“Because I will
see” [Quoniam videbo].
That it is manifest he proves: because that is manifest which is placed
within [inditum] all, no matter how simple [they are], as by a sort of natural
knowledge [quasi quadam naturali cognitione]. For there are two sorts of
men who follow natural and right instinct [naturalem et rectum instinctum], namely, the simple and the wise. That the wise know God is no
great matter; but that the simple do is [a great matter]. But there are
some who pervert the right instinct, and these people reject knowledge
11 ST II–II, q. 85, a. 1 (ed. Ottawa, 1861b48–1862a6).
12 Cf. ST II–II, q. 122, a. 1.

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of God. Cf. Psalm 81: “They have not known,” that is, they willed not
to know, “nor have they understood” etc. Cf. Job 22: “They have said
to God: Go away from us; we do not want your ways.” But God has
brought it about that through them, that is, through the simple people
who follow the natural instinct, are confounded those who pervert the
natural instinct. By “infants” the simple are signified, cf. 1 Peter 2:“Like
new-born infants, reasonable, without guile.” Therefore he [the
Psalmist] says:“Your name is admirable”; but in such a way that “out of
the mouth of infants and nurselings you have brought praise to perfection,” [you] who interiorly instigate to this; and this “because of your
enemies,” who oppose your science and knowledge. Cf. Philippians 3:
“Enemies of the cross of Christ” etc. . . . This takes place when the
simple recognize God, and others pervert the study of natural knowledge, lest they know God himself.13

Though Thomas speaks of a “natural knowledge” had by the simple, and
of them following “natural instinct,” he still sees this phenomenon as
having its reason, its source, in a grasp of the cosmic situation.14 He sees
the common man as spontaneously sizing things up, somewhat as in the
Summa contra Gentiles and the Summa theologiae II–II texts.
13 Emphasis added.The commentary continues, speaking of the celestial phenomena

as the ground of the natural reasoning, in keeping with the text of the psalm:
“Next, he subjoins the reason for this manifestness, saying ‘Because’ [Quoniam].
Tully says in the book De natura deorum, and it was said also by Aristotle, though in
those books of his that we have among us it is not found, that if some man were
to enter a palace, which he would see [to be] well disposed, none is so lacking in
intellect [amens] that, even though he would not see how it had been made, he
would not perceive that it had been made by someone. And this the order of the
celestial bodies especially shows. For there were some who, erring, attributed the
causes of things to the necessity of matter: hence, they said all had been made
because of the warm, the cold, the dry, and the wet: as by the elements which have
these properties. But this, if it can have an appearance [of truth] regarding other
things, can in no way [have such appearance] in [the case of] the celestial bodies;
for they cannot be attributed to the necessity of matter, where one is so distant
from the other, and they take so great a time to complete their course.That cannot
be traced back to anything but an intelligent cause.And so Scripture, when it wants
to manifest the power of God, directs us to a consideration of the heavens.”
14 Clearly the presentations in the SCG and the In Psalm. relate to Thomas’s “fifth
way” of proving the existence of God (ST I, q. 2, a. 3). It is also notable that it is
this line of thinking, purpose as opposed to chance as a source of the cosmos,
which is presented in Thomas’s popular sermons on the Apostles’ Creed,
concerning the existence of a God. Cf. In Symbolorum Apostolorum expositio, in
Opuscula theologica, t. II, ed. R. Spiazzi, O.P. (Rome and Turin: Marietti, 1954), no.
869. Here Thomas insists on the regularity of the celestial movements.This work also
dates from 1273, in Naples. And once again, Thomas speaks of the rarity and
stupidity of people who do not believe that the cosmos is governed.

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It seems to me perfectly acceptable that the natural love that man has
for God more than for his own self be seen as following from this natural
knowledge of God that man has by a spontaneous, inborn reasoning to the
existence of God. I think this is better than attempting to see such a
primary precept as “love God above all else” merely in the way it is present in the desire for happiness.
The natural love for God above all else is present in every creature, but
in each according to its own mode or measure. In the rational creature, that
is, angels and man, it is “in the mode of will.” Such natural love presupposes
natural intellectual knowledge of God.15 In the angel such knowledge is a
mediated intuition.16 In the human being, it is a natural conclusion, the fruit
of a spontaneous, universally inborn discursive operation. Our intellectuality
is “rational,” as possessed of a weaker light than the angelic.17
Notice that it is inasmuch as God is known as the author of being, life,
and intelligence that he cannot be hated, but must be loved.18 That we need
a commandment concerning such love stems from the possibility (through
habituation to sin) of our not living according to it in particular choices.19
My understanding is, then, that Thomas presents the existence of God
as naturally known to all, even though naturally reasoned to.That someone
15 In ST I, q. 60, a. 1, it is seen that natural love is present in each creature accord-

ing to its own mode, and that for angels and men, this is secundum voluntatem. In
ST I, q. 59, a. 1, it was seen that will is the most perfect mode of inclination
toward the good, in that it follows upon the intellectual vision of goodness,
considered universally. In ST I, q. 60, a. 5, ad 1, it is seen that all naturally love
God more than themselves, each in its own mode (and notice that the sed contra
there links this love to the natural law).
16 Cf. ST I, q. 56, a. 3.
17 Cf. ST I, q. 58, a. 3.
18 Cf. ST II–II, q. 34, a. 1.
19 Cf. ST I–II, q. 99, a. 2, ad 2:“It is to be said that it was fitting for the divine law
that it provide for man not only as to those matters which are beyond the capacity of reason, but also as to those concerning which it does occur that human
reason suffer impediment. Now, human reason concerning the moral precepts, as
regards the most common precepts of the natural law, could not err, taking them
universally, but nevertheless, because of habituation in sinning, it has been
obscured regarding particular things to be done.”
Cf. also ST I–II, q. 100, a. 5, ad 1, as to why the ten commandments speak of
our duty to God and to our neighbor, but not of our duty to ourselves: “The
precepts of the Decalogue are related to the precepts of love. But a precept had to
be given to man concerning the love of God and neighbor because in that respect
the natural law had been obscured because of sin; not as regards the love of himself,
because in that respect the natural law was still in vigor.” Cf. also ST I–II, q. 109,
a. 3, on our natural love for God above all else, and the effect of original sin.

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professes ignorance of the existence of God stems from moral disorder (as
the Psalms commentary as well as the SCG text asserts). I would say that
this natural knowledge would fill out the picture of the commandment
of love as known by virtue of itself to all. Given that one has knowledge
of God as the author of being, one has knowledge of him as lovable by
us, indeed as more lovable that ourselves.20
My second main point of difference with Flannery concerns the principle of double effect and fixed paths. In his introduction (cf. xiii), Flannery tells us that the problem of the morally right action that one does,
knowing that its outcome will be bad in certain respects, is what generated
the book.The text of St.Thomas that most immediately relates to the principle of double effect is that on the licitness of self-defense, Summa theologiae II–II, question 64, article 7. There Thomas explains that an act can
have two effects, only one of which is intended.This is the case with selfdefense, where it is natural and good to defend one’s own life, even
though this requires, in a particular instance, killing the adversary.21 Even
with a good intention, the act will be illicit if one uses more force than
necessary. One cannot, moreover, have the intention of killing the adversary, since that is exclusively the responsibility of the public authority.
Flannery mentions at the outset of the relevant chapter (ch. 7, pp. 167
ff.) that he wonders how the public authority can intend to kill the criminal, since that has the appearance of an action that opposes a basic
human good. He promises to return to this.
His discussion features some modern issues related to the principle of
double effect.The problem is, as it seems, that in some situations one can
treat the bad feature of the situation as unintended whereas in other situations this is not acceptable. A hypothetical case to illustrate this is “the
fat potholer.”This member of a group of spelunkers becomes fixed in the
only escape-hole, thus constituting a threat to the lives of the group. Is it
licit for the group to blow the person away in self-defense? The case was
20 As I have often pointed out, the first level of natural inclinations spoken of in ST

I–II, q. 94, a. 2, is the natural inclination common to all creatures; it is not ordered
merely toward the preservation of the individual self. It covers everything spoken
of in ST I, q. 60, as natural love: love of the individual self, love of one’s species
more than the individual self, and love of God more than oneself or any creature. The second level of inclination in that text is not about reproduction, for
that is common to all substances, but about the perfect animal mode of reproduction. The third level is not about love of God, but about seeking the truth
about God, as well as living in society: The rational animal by nature desires to
know, and especially to know the truth concerning God.
21 “The act” has two effects, taken as a physical act; the moral act is simply “saving
one’s own life.” Cf. ST I–II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3.

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designed to show that, while the answer is “no,” it is not easy to say why
this is so. (Some discussants even said “yes.”)
More actually encountered situations are the surgical treatments of pregnant women. It has been held that the removal of a cancerous uterus
(“hysterectomy”) is acceptable, even though this inevitably means the death
of the fetus, whereas crushing the skull of a fetus (“craniotomy,” for short)
in order to save the life of the mother is unacceptable. Finding in discussions such descriptions of one victim as “close” and another as “more
distant,” or “direct” and “indirect,” Flannery expresses dissatisfaction, and
the conviction that the disputes, so presented, can never be settled. He
suggests that there is something missing from the discussion, something
that was present of old, namely a context of fixed human practices.
Having noted appeals along these lines in Plato and Aristotle, he
focuses on the practice of medicine as something with definite procedures. The hysterectomy procedure has its place in medical practice,
whereas the “craniotomy” case has not. Flannery explains this in terms of
what constitutes treatment of the patient; he sees the fetus in the craniotomy case as a very badly treated patient.
Flannery, in this line of thinking, is now obliged to say what fixed
practice Thomas is involved with in his self-defense article. His answer is
law.Thus, he calls to our attention the references to law as characterizing
the context of Thomas’s discussion. In answer to the possible objection
that this is a “legalistic” solution, he recalls the way positive law in
Thomas’s doctrine flows from natural law.
I cannot say I am happy with this treatment. It seems to me that nature
and the natural should have been given more prominence. Flannery’s difficulties stem in part, I would say, from not reading the Summa theologiae
II–II, question 64, article 7, as part of the whole question 64. I am
concerned that so little attention has been given to the pedagogy of the
question.The first article, establishing our right to kill plants and animals,
begins with the premise that no one sins in treating a thing in accordance
with its purpose.22 The first thing we learn, after the case of plants and
animals, is about the justification of the public authority killing the criminal.The second thing is that the private person cannot kill the criminal.
The third is that the killer of the criminal cannot be a cleric (who, of
course, can have public responsibility; his ministers must perform the
22 In speaking of the natural purpose of plants and animals, Thomas even makes

reference to Aristotle, Politics 1.8 (1256b15). This text falls in with Flannery’s
appeal to arts as fixed paths, though modern readers might not like to see war
presented as an art of acquisition (of slaves).

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execution: cf. the ST II–II, q. 64, a. 4, ad 3).The fourth is that one cannot
kill oneself:This applies even to the ruler who is a criminal, since no one
is to judge oneself.We then come to the case of the killing of the innocent: It is altogether forbidden. Only then do we come to that problematic figure, the attacker of the private citizen. No judgment will be made
as regards his state of soul, but the person attacked has the right to take the
necessary steps to save himself, even though this sometimes must result in
the death of the attacker. Lastly, we have the case of accidental killing.
This rich context first sees the criminal as analogous to the beast, and
as analogous to the diseased bodily member; all are cases of the imperfect
being for the sake of the perfect.The human individual who menaces the
community may have to be “used” for the well-being of the community,
even to the point of being executed. Article 3, forbidding the killing of
the criminal by a private person, makes clear the reason for this: The
killing of the criminal is for the sake of the common good only, and thus
it is for those responsible for that good to make the necessary judgment
about the criminality of the criminal.The reply to objection 2 should be
especially considered:
The man who is a sinner is not naturally distinct from just men.Therefore, there is need of the public judgment, in order to discern whether
someone is to be killed for the common welfare.

The insistence is on the need for right discernment concerning the
public need and the moral condition of the accused, in inflicting such
great harm on a person.23
This need for public judgment throws great light on the situation of
the private self-defender. His act simply cannot be a killing of the attacker
as a malefactor. In this same line, the lesson for us from the anti-suicide
article is that even a supreme judge, himself a criminal, cannot, having
come to condemn himself personally, do away with himself. Public judgment is a matter for “someone else.”
How important, then, is the absolute rejection of all killing of the innocent! First we have the obligation to love the nature that God has made
and which is destroyed by killing: Thus, no one, just or sinner, is a killable
23 The question on homicide leads the discussion of vices violating the justice of

exchange, and in particular involuntary exchanges:This is to say that some harm
is visited upon one’s neighbor against his will, either as to deed or word, and
among deeds, those that harm the person or the associate of the person, or the
property. Homicide comes first as maximally harming one’s neighbor. Cf. ST
II–II, q. 64, prol.

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object, just in himself. Second, we have the case of the public authority to
kill the public enemy: Since the innocent primarily constitute the
community (which is essentially a school of virtue), killing the innocent
is analogous to amputating the head to save the arm.
It is with these premises in view that we come to the self-defender.
He is faced with an attacker, but has no right to judge that attacker to be
a criminal, a public enemy; no right to kill a criminal. Nor has he any
right to kill an innocent human being. He has no right to kill at all.
Here I believe it would be helpful to recall the distinction between the
physical act performed by the human being and the moral act. Thomas
explained this very early in the Summa theologiae I–II.24 One same species
of physical act, that is, killing a human being, can be two different species
of moral act, namely, murder and capital punishment.The moral act gets
its species from the intention. Here in the Summa theologiae II–II, question 64, with self-defense, we are still dealing with a physical act of homicide. St. Thomas teaches that it cannot be a moral act of killing at all:
Morally, it is neither justified nor unjustified homicide.
The “craniotomy” case Flannery speaks of is a killing of an innocent;
thus, it is simply not available for any motive. The “fat potholer” case is,
again, a killing of the innocent.The “hysterectomy” described is an amputation; the resultant death of the fetus is a “letting die,” not a killing at all.25
The true private self-defense case is one where there is obviously a menacing human being.What makes it a special moral matter is the inappropriateness of privately judging the attacker. Thus, also, the public authority’s
“intention to kill” relates directly to that authority’s power of discernment.
Flannery is quite right in arguing that this “intention to kill” cannot be
a seeking of the death of the culprit in the way that an act of hatred toward
the culprit would be. As St. Thomas teaches in the article rejecting all
killing of the innocent, the human being, considered just in himself, is not
a possible candidate for homicide, since even in any evildoer whatsoever
we ought to love the nature that God has made and that is destroyed by
killing; it is only when taken relative to the well-being of the community
that the public authority can rightly judge that a person is too great a
menace to let live. In so judging, it is considered that the good to be
gained is greater than the bad to be endured.That is Thomas’s rationale for
all punishment. It is only in such a per accidens way that the bad is intended.
There must be no hatred for the executed person; on the contrary, one
24 Cf. ST I–II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3.
25 It is not my intention to brush off the question of a mother’s responsibility as

easy to resolve.

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must act charitably toward that person. It is definitely a judgment favoring human life, not opposing it.26
The responsible act of the society is thus morally specified as an act of
homicide, in that the killing is deliberately employed in the interest of the
community.The private act of self-defense is, when the adversary dies as
a result, physically an act of killing, but morally not a homicide, not an
“act of killing a human being” at all.
Flannery focused on law as the practice to be considered in Thomas’s
discussion of both private and public licit killing.There is no doubt that
in the article on private self-defense law is referred to. The sed contra is
taken from the Old Law (though there is here not merely the element of
a human practice but the authority proper to revelation). There is also
reference to canon law.This is a significant use of legal authority. Nevertheless, I do not like Flannery’s contention that in the teaching of the
licitness of private self-defense, but without intention to kill, “law is
simply basic here” (192). Flannery immediately adds that “neither is this
law without sense.There is good reason for a society not to allow private,
intentional killing. If such intentional personal self-defense were licit,
how could private executions for defensive purposes be prohibited?”
Thomas’s article is not about a law against intention to kill. That is
rather a matter of personal conscience. It is true that excessive use of force
might be a sign that the intention has been to kill. However, that is not
said. It is said that the use of excessive force will make even an act done
26 I quote from my paper,“Thomas Aquinas, Gerard Bradley, and the Death Penalty:

Some Observations,” Gregorianum 82 (2001): 162, quoting Thomas:“God does not
will the damnation of someone under the aspect of damnation, nor the death of
someone under the aspect of death, because he ‘wills that all human beings be
saved’ [1 Tim 2:4], but he wills these under the aspect of justice. Hence, it is sufficient regarding such matters that the human being will the preservation of the
justice of God and of the natural order.”
This implies that, in the case of private self-defense, what is forbidden is the
intention ‘justice through execution.’ No one (whether a public official or a
private person) is ever allowed to ‘intend the death of this person,’ in the way that
that involves pleasure in that person’s suffering, or hate of that person as possessed
of human nature. But the private person has not the right even to restore the
order of justice through any sort of punishment.
Notice that even in punishment, what is bad, such as the death, is willed only
per accidens. Since we say, as well, that in private self-defense the death of the
adversary is per accidens, it seems to me that “intending the death” in the case of
capital punishment must be a mode of the per accidens closer to the per se than in
the case of private self-defense, where the death of the adversary is per accidens in
the way that the physical species of the act is per accidens relative to the moral
species of the act. Cf. ST I–II, q. 1, a. 3, ad 3.

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with good intention illicit. And it is concluded that an act done with
moderate violence will be licit. Here the law is quoted as explicitly
permitting moderate force in self-defense.
Moreover, I am not happy with the translation of licet and related
terms by “lawful.” For example, there is no law, human or divine, against
a venial sin as such, and yet such sins are “illicit.” Flannery’s use of the
word “lawful” (also found in the old English Dominican translation of ST
II–II, q. 64, a. 7) is deceptive.27 Thomas makes it sufficiently clear that he
is basing his judgment on nature:
Actus igitur huiusmodi ex hoc quod intenditur conservatio propriae vitae, non habet
rationem illiciti, cum hoc sit cuilibet naturale quod se conservet in esse quantum
potest. [Such an act, therefore, as intending the preservation of one’s own
life, does not have the character of the illicit, since it is natural for each being
whatsoever that it preserve itself in being to the extent this is possible.]

It seems to me that the practices Flannery refers to have their basis in
long experience with nature. Thus, there is good sense in Flannery’s
caution that one should look at the context. One might consider the use
Thomas makes of the doctrine that art imitates nature in his prologue to
the Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics. In order to effect the highest of
human reason’s products, the very order of the human community, the
science must proceed by imitation of nature.
Lastly, I will mention a particular claim of Flannery’s, concerning the
date of De malo 6. He argues that it predates De veritate. I think the
Leonine editors dating, namely, 1270, is correct. However, this is not
central to his project.
An appendix contains a text and translation of De malo 6. Footnote 1
stresses the literalness of the translation, following even the Latin word
order as much as possible. However, what I immediately note is the translation of:
Cum ergo voluntas se consilio moveat, consilium autem est inquisitio quaedam
non demonstrativa, sed ad opposita viam habens, non ex necessitate voluntas
seipsam movet.
27 Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), for “licet”

start off with “it is lawful,” but soon come to “one is at liberty to do so and so.”
The systematic use of “law” in the translation is deceptive. One sees that by
comparing the use of the word concerning all lying as illicit, even lies which are
venial sins: cf. ST II–II, q. 110, a. 3, ad 4; a venial sin, as such, is not against any
law whatsoever: cf. ST I–II, q. 88, a. 1, ad 1. I might note that there is no
common linguistic origin for “lex” and “licet.”

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Flannery translates:
Since, therefore, voluntas moves itself to counsel, but counsel is an
enquiry that is not demonstrative [line 318] but oriented toward opposites, voluntas does not move itself of necessity.

This, I submit, is wrong.The translation should be “by counsel.”The will’s
self-motion has its willing the end as cause and its choosing the means as
effect; its instrument, through which it so moves itself, is deliberation, a nondemonstrative act of reason; and thus the resultant choice is a non-necessitated act of the will.This most important point of doctrine is obscured.
Jean Oesterle rightly has “by.”28
While I have chosen to indicate the few points where I differ with
Flannery, I return in conclusion to my view that this is a very valuable
study, stimulating reflection on a rather neglected sphere of Thomistic
N&V
methodology.

28 Cf. St.Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, trans. Jean Oesterle (Notre Dame, IN: Univer-

sity of Notre Dame Press, 1995), at 241, before note 40.

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Analogical Concept versus Analogical Judgment:
Whose Aquinas, Which Rationality?
A Discussion of Speaking the Incomprehensible God:
Thomas Aquinas on the Interplay of
Positive and Negative Theology
by Gregory P. Rocca
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2004)
R EINHARD H ÜTTER
Duke University Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina

B ERNARD Montagnes, OP, opens The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being
According to Thomas Aquinas—originally published in 1963, but only very
recently available in English translation—with a pertinent observation
leading up to two questions:
Several recent worthwhile works have come to revive interest in the
Thomist doctrine of analogy—which unfortunately has become a
subject of somewhat hackneyed scholarly interest and upon which, it
seems, too much has already been written. Is it still necessary, after these
recent works, to run the risk of adding a new title to a bibliography
whose discouraging mass would rather suggest to us abandoning such
an enterprise? Does the contribution made by these recent studies leave
any room for a new study?1

1 Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being According to Thomas Aquinas,

trans. E. M. Macierowski, ed. Andrew Tallon (Milwaukee: Marquette University
Press, 2004), 7. Originally published as La doctrine de l’analogie de l’être d’après Saint
Thomas d’Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires/Paris: Béatrice-Nauwelaerts,
1963).

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Unsurprisingly, these questions did not keep Montagnes in 1963 from
adding an important study to an already sizable library of Thomists treating “analogy in Aquinas.” Nor did it keep Gregory Rocca in 2004 from
seeking to integrate this increasingly complex discussion into the even
wider horizon of cataphatic and apophatic God-talk by reconstructing
how for Aquinas precisely the exigencies of such God-talk call for the
practice of theological analogy.
Even the slightest familiarity with the delicate question of the proper
interplay between cataphatic and apophatic theology in general, and in
the thought of Thomas Aquinas in particular, commands an immediate
sense of respect for Rocca’s achievement. His book offers a highly nuanced
and impressively comprehensive treatment of the topic: of St.Thomas in
the context of his Platonic, neo-Platonic, and Aristotelian sources; of the
tradition of Thomist commentators; and of the contemporary Thomist
discussion. In short, the work under discussion represents an impressive
exemplar of Dominican scholarly dedication to St. Thomas’s profoundly
complex as well as profoundly rewarding thought.An exhaustive bibliography together with very useful indices of names, subjects, and especially
works of Thomas Aquinas round off a substantial study, making it a premier
guide for in-depth research on the given topic.
Offering a sustained investigation into and presentation of St.Thomas’s
theological epistemology, the book is in no way just another treatment of
the arguably overworked topic of “analogy in Aquinas.” Rather, Rocca’s
project, quite ambitiously and in a much broader scope, aims at demonstrating that “Aquinas’ theological epistemology is a combination of negative and positive theology and that his positive theology is rooted in an
analogy subsisting in judgments, including the judgments of faith” (xvi).
Conceived in this way, the project entails a distinct polemical edge in that
it aims at substantiating a claim, as crucial as it is controversial, that for St.
Thomas the unity of theological analogy rests not in the unity of an
alleged analogical concept but in the act of judgment. An all-too-clear
signal for those sufficiently initiated into the intricacies of intra-Thomistic
disputes, this claim amounts to a crisp line drawn between, on the one
side, the venerable tradition of Cajetan’s interpretation of St. Thomas’s
account of analogy upheld in the twentieth century by Thomistic luminaries Antonin Sertillanges, Gerald B. Phelan, Charles Journet, Eric
Mascall, James F. Anderson, and Jacques Maritain and, on the other side, a
respectable, recent line of fundamental critique of Cajetan’s “conceptualist” approach advanced by Hampus Lyttkens, Santiago Ramírez, George P.
Klubertanz, Ralph McInerny, and Bernard Montagnes, recently reaffirmed by John F. Wippel, and now also embraced by Gregory Rocca.

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Precisely because Rocca argues that the unity of theological analogy does
not rest in an analogical concept but in the act of judgment, he is anxious
to relate the question of analogy to the truths of faith instead of focusing
exclusively on what neo-scholasticism considered St.Thomas’s philosophical doctrine of God. In other words, he is eager to present the theological
epistemology of the doctor communis as a second-order reflection that arises
organically from the first-order theological judgments that are constitutive
of his doctrines about God and creation.
Rocca approaches what he calls the “fragile though fruitful unity of
Aquinas’ positive and negative theology” (xvi) in four consecutive steps
constituting the four parts of the book: “God the Incomprehensible and
Negative Theology,”“Analogy and the Web of Judgment,”“Crucial Truths
about God,” and “The Divine Names.” In all four parts, Rocca displays a
magisterial command of the topical threads running through the vast net
of St.Thomas’s oeuvre. In addition to drawing consistently on the Summa
theologiae as well as the Summa contra Gentiles, he pays commendably close
attention to the early Scriptum super libros Sententiarum as well as the
important disputed questions De veritate and De potentia, the biblical
commentaries (especially the one on the Gospel of John), the relevant
commentaries of Aristotle’s work (Physics, Metaphysics, Peri Hermeneias,
Posterior Analytics) and of his commentator Averroes, and the neo-Platonic
tradition as addressed in St. Thomas’s commentaries on Denys’s De divinis nominibus and the Liber de causis.
Rocca treats his subject matter—Aquinas’s theorizing about the very
logic of the discourse about God in light of Aquinas’s own practice of
such discourse—in a genetic-historical way. Such an approach yields a
richly nuanced picture of St.Thomas’s thought, which in its very development over the years, remains profoundly faithful to the central axioms
operative across a vast spectrum of material and topics. However, the
distinct disadvantage of a genetic-historical reconstruction of Aquinas’s
thought is that this approach intrinsically inhibits the transition to a speculative mode of discourse in which the subject matter itself—in the way,
after all, it concerned St. Thomas himself—could be investigated in the
proper speculative mode of metaphysical as well as theological discourse.
While the genetic-historical approach allows one to advance considerations about theological and metaphysical matters—due to its specific
formal object, the genealogy of Aquinas’s own thought in the context of
the relevant historical and textual sources—any consistent instantiation of
this method must, however, refrain from theological and metaphysical
discourse proper lest it lose the unity and specificity of its particular
formal object by way of which the theological and metaphysical matters

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are addressed. Nevertheless, it becomes quite obvious to any appropriately attentive reader that beneath its genetic-historical surface there is a
commendable speculative energy at work in Rocca’s discourse, an energy
barely tamed by the strictly historical-reconstructive conventions as they
still, quite arguably, dominate much of the recent renaissance of
Thomistic scholarship.
I
In the first part, “God the Incomprehensible and Negative Theology,”
Rocca offers a concise account of the tradition of negative theology up
to Pseudo-Dionysius and John Damascene, as well as a substantive chapter on God’s dual incomprehensibility, a discussion that arises from a
sophisticated interpretation of question 12 in the prima pars of the Summa
theologiae. By analyzing in detail how St. Thomas subtly qualifies the
unmitigated apophaticism operative in the negative theology of the
Areopagite and his followers, Rocca clears the path for an appreciation
of Aquinas’s own, markedly different via negativa, which includes the way
of causality, the way of negation, and the way of preeminence. Rocca
argues convincingly that St. Thomas employs the via negativa in a threefold way, applying it differently in various contexts, but most importantly
using it “as an integral whole in those situations where a positive predicate is first affirmed of God, then denied, and finally affirmed once again
in a supereminent fashion” (72–73). Most helpful is Rocca’s astute identification of three types of theological negation operative in a rather
implicit way in St.Thomas’s via negativa: qualitative, objective modal, and
subjective modal. Rocca summarizes the matter in a succinct way:
Qualitative negations are absolute denials, while modal negations are
relative denials; objective modal negations remove the finite mode of
the creature from God, while subjective modal negations refuse to
assert of God those imperfections arising from our human manner of
understanding and signifying. (62)

Already in this first part, Rocca drives home again and again a central
point too-often neglected in the context of contemporary postmodern
flirtations with a consummate apophaticism that happily assimilates
Dionysius and Meister Eckhart with Heidegger and Derrida, and that
suggests a serendipitous proximity of Thomas Aquinas: Negative theology
in St. Thomas functions as an integral, corrective, and subsequent
moment to an antecedent affirmative theology.As Rocca rightly emphasizes, “For the sake of his theological project, Thomas requires a specific

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

449

knowledge of God as close to essential knowledge as possible, and the
strategy of successive qualitative negations serves that end” (64). These
negations cannot arise from any intuitional insight into God. Rather,
Thomas does base the negations upon some primary affirmations which
assert that God is pure act and infinite subsistent being; in various ways
he claims that God is the infinite positivity of being without knowing
what that pure positivity is or how it is God.Yet, it is from these affirmations that his negative theology lives and moves and has its being. (64)

With this programmatic statement Rocca anticipates the central claim of
part three,“Crucial Truths about God.” However, it is precisely in light of
the nature and weight of such a far-reaching anticipation that the following question imposes itself: What difference would it have made had he
opened up the book with the “Crucial Truths about God,” that is—dare
I say it—with the praeambula fidei? Such an order would have followed
more closely the ordo disciplinae of the Summa theologiae, where these affirmations arise from the recently rather unjustly disparaged and sidetracked
“five ways” of rationally demonstrating the existence of God, as Rocca
expressly states later in part three:
Aquinas fashions the proofs for God’s existence into formidable theological tools: they are indisputably foundational for his systematic theology because he seeds within their premises and harvests in their
conclusions the monotheistically revolutionary truth that God is the
pure, infinite, subsistent act of being. (224)

However, instead of following St.Thomas’s ordo disciplinae by privileging
the ontological premise of God as ipsum esse subsistens, Rocca frontloads
the problematic of theological epistemology, being faithful thereby again
to a genetic-historical entry into his particular topic instead of privileging the substantive as well as conceptual exigencies of the subject matter
per se. Nevertheless, Rocca is perfectly clear that an ineluctable affirmation, being at the very root of sacra doctrina as well as the metaphysics of
esse, remains primordially antecedent to all subsequent epistemic and
linguistic entailments:
Aquinas’ via negativa is . . . a moment within [rational theology] serving
to correct the oversights and deficiencies of affirmative theology and
doing the best it can to construct a negative theology of the One who
cannot be known essentially. . . . Affirmation and infinite positivity are
the fecund roots of all subsequent negations. (72)

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This, in other words, means that apophatic discourse is not superadded upon
but is all the way down integral to a robustly cataphatic Christian theology.
II
Part two, “Analogy and the Web of Judgment,” constitutes the heart of
the book. After an informative chapter on analogy in Aristotle and in
neo-Platonism, Rocca ably sketches the scathing critique of analogy
advanced in twentieth-century Protestant theology, most prominently by
Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and Eberhard Jüngel. To state their
respective concerns briefly: Barth is haunted by an allegedly overarching
conceptual univocity of being, with the term applicable to both Creator
and creature such that human beings by way of natural theology secure a
comprehensive conceptual handle on the Creator and, hence, conceive
an idol of their own making. Barth decries the “analogy of being” as the
epitome of “natural theology,” the latter being a synonym for the kind of
metaphysical presumption typical of unredeemed theological inquiry
under the condition of sin. In short, for Barth, between the analogy of
being and the analogy of faith there obtains an irreconcilable and, hence,
interminable “hamartiological” conflict. Quite likely, however, Barth
attacked in Aquinas a concept of analogy he saw advanced by his
contemporary Erich Przywara, S.J., who on this matter was arguably
closer to Scotus and Suarez than to Aquinas. The early Pannenberg, a
more subtle medievalist and a Scotus scholar, brings greater precision to
the Barthian concern. He contends that constitutive of any form of analogy is an indispensable conceptual core of univocity, a “common logos”
that ultimately compromises God’s transcendence. Jüngel, quite contrary
to Pannenberg, conceives the fundamental problem of analogy along the
lines of Kant’s reduction of all analogy to the analogy of improper (exterior or metaphorical) proportionality and consequently of such profound
apophatic entailments that in the end the God of the Gospel is utterly
obscured—a concern more recently forcefully expressed by the late
Colin Gunton.The strategy of these critiques is only all too obvious: to
reduce analogy to and consequently to dismiss it either as the ultimately
unmitigated univocity of predication and being between God and
creation—and thus to impale it on the horn of idolatry—or as the
consummate equivocity of predication and a consequent positioning of
God beyond being and nonbeing—and thus to impale it on the horn of
agnosticism. Rocca astutely uses this set of criticisms as a foil to present
St.Thomas’s genuine account of analogy, an account that in its substance
constitutes a devastating witness either to the lack of hermeneutical
goodwill from the side of the Protestant critics or to a disconcerting lack

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

451

of familiarity with St.Thomas’s oeuvre.
Building on the work of Lyttkens, Montagnes, Klubertanz, and McInerny, Rocca makes what strikes me as a conclusive case against Cajetan’s
theory of analogy as four-term proportionality being the proper interpretation of St. Thomas’s own account of analogy. The analogy of proper
proportionality according to Cajetan predicates inherent perfections of
each analogate and is held together by one analogous concept “that transcends all the analogates, possesses a unified meaning proportionally the
same, and abstracts from the proper concepts of the analogates” (114).
One problem with Cajetan’s theory is that the analogous concept oscillates between a clear concept (actually many concepts and only proportionally one concept) and a common but confused concept achieved by
a special abstraction.
At least the historical and hermeneutical side of the question can now
be regarded as settled: Cajetan seems to rest the case of his interpretation
of St.Thomas exclusively on a particular stage in the latter’s development
reflected in a position advanced in De veritate, question 2, article 3, ad 4;
question 2, article 11; and question 3, article 1, ad 7, to which he never
returned. Moreover, Rocca rightly points out that, quite conceivably, an
argument can be advanced “that analogy as proportionality is ultimately
grounded in the properties of analogy as referential multivocity, also
known as analogy of attribution” (124). Still, it should not be forgotten
that a convincing historical and hermeneutical case does not per se
constitute a demonstrative argument. On the metaphysical level,
however, the defenders of Cajetan’s theory deserve such an argument.
While, for reasons already mentioned, Rocca does not offer such an argument, one can find a rather sustained metaphysical engagement of Cajetan’s
account in Montagnes’s earlier study.
The strength of Rocca’s genetic-historical approach is this: He can
convincingly demonstrate that St.Thomas’s advance beyond his transitory
position in De veritate, and, hence, his final mature solution, hinges on an
expanded meaning of the term proportio: “This broad sense of proportio as
‘direct relation’ is the bridge that allows theological attributes to cross
from us to God and, more generally, is the philosopher’s stone Aquinas
utilizes to transmute analogia as four-term proportionality into analogia as
referential multivocity” (123). Rocca employs the term “analogy of referential multivocity” in order to designate the linguistic practice of analogia
in which multiple predications of one name to many things occur. Such
multiple predications can be based on reference, attribution, or proportion
to some one reality. In the latter case, proportio tends to carry the broad
meaning of any relation at all: It is “ ‘proportion with a reference to one’

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(proportio ad unum)” (107). Rocca makes a persuasive genetic-historical
case for this thesis by way of a close textual reading of a wide range of St.
Thomas’s writings, an analysis that builds carefully on the prior work of
Klubertanz and especially Montagnes.
While Rocca’s relationship to Montagnes is explicit and far-reaching,
it is instructive to observe the difference between the two. Montagnes,
whose primarily philosophical study was guided by an intrinsic metaphysical concern and discourse, offers a clearer conceptual account of the
reasons why St. Thomas was able (after the short experimental stage in
which he considered proportionality) to return in his mature work to the
analogy of relation: It is the metaphysics of participation that enables
Aquinas to shift from the problematic formal causality centrally employed
in the Scriptum to the efficient causality of his later work that enables him
to conceive the analogy of attribution as an intrinsic analogy.2 In short,
St. Thomas was for a relatively brief time conceptually stuck with the
problems that arose from the way he employed formal causality as the
premier conceptual tool to understand the analogical causality between
God and beings, the fundamental problematic being the serious risk of
comprising both in one and the same form. Consequently, for a while he
entertained the analogy of proportionality precisely to overcome the
conceptual dangers of univocal, formal similarity inherent in formal
causality. However, as soon as St.Thomas saw his way through to conceive
the causal dependence of creatures upon God as one not of formal but
rather of efficient causality by way of participation, he was able to return
to the analogy of intrinsic attribution.
Whereas Montagnes insists by way of metaphysical argumentation that
for St. Thomas the analogy of relation arises from the metaphysics of
participation—and, hence, the practice of epistemic judgment arises from
the order of being3—Rocca, characteristically using the term “analogy of
2 Ibid., 75–79.
3 Ibid., 77: “According to [the] analogy unius ad alterum, must beings be defined

starting from God or God starting from beings? This question calls for two
complementary replies. Our knowledge follows an order per prius et posterius
which goes from beings to God. It never coincides with the ontological order of
creative causality: what is first for us is never first in itself.Whatever we know of
God we know by means of beings, by ascending from the effects to their cause.
In short, for us, the primary analogate is the creature. But since beings receive by
participation what God is by essence, they depend upon Him as the primary
instance from which they have what they are. Of itself, being does not include
dependence upon a cause in its definition, otherwise one would have to say that
God is not a being, since He is not caused. Still, if being pertains to God per prius
and to creatures per posterius, one must conclude that beings cannot be defined

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

453

referential multivocity,” clearly privileges the linguistic practice of epistemic
judgment (“speaking the incomprehensible God”!) in a way that keeps
the precise relationship between the orders of being and knowledge in
Aquinas somewhat in suspense. On the one hand he emphasizes the
primarily logical nature of the practice of analogical judgments:
For Aquinas the analogy of referential multivocity is primarily a logical
mean between univocity and pure equivocity and as such is neutral as
regards the ontological question of whether a subject possesses an analogous predicate intrinsically or not. (127)

On the other hand, he wishes to affirm a certain notion of this logical
order arising from the order of being:
That being said, however, it is also true, as a kind of corollary to our
main thesis, that Aquinas grounds the analogous predication of the
divine attributes in the real similarity between creatures and the
Creator-God, and also uses the notion of analogy to refer not merely
to logical realities but also to metaphysical structures of causality within
the real world. (127)

Rocca leaves the matter with the broad affirmation of such a relation,
which clearly privileges the logical nature of the practice of analogical
judgments. Montagnes, in contrast, leaves no doubt about the precise
metaphysical relationship obtaining between the order of being and the
order of knowing:
In the last analysis, the unity of being rests upon the unity of the first
cause of being. The unity that one discovers is not only that of the
concept of being, but also the real unity of the Principle of being.
Hence, the structure of analogy and that of participation are rigorously
parallel: they correspond to each other as the conceptual aspect and the
real aspect of the unity of being.As long as one has not returned to the
real unity of the Principle, the multiplicity of beings has not yet truly
been reduced to One. In short, the analogy of being . . . suppose[s] to
reproduce the unity of order which ties beings up with their Principle.
Thus and thus only does the realistic and critical character of the theory
of the analogy of being show up within Thomas’s philosophy.4
independently of their dependence upon God, as the effects of creative causality: esse quod rebus creatis inest non potest intelligi nisi ut deductum ab esse
divino.The causal dependence on God creates the relation necessary for analogy
by reference to a primary instance without risk of confounding beings and God
in one and the same form or notion.”
4 Ibid., 91.

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Montagnes’s way of putting the matter presses the question how the
metaphysical and the properly theological aspects of analogy are precisely
related. If one follows Rocca, St.Thomas seems to have moved back and
forth between, on the one hand, the unfolding of sacra doctrina informed
by a deep theological intuition—giving rise to the interplay between
cataphatic and apophatic God-talk—and, on the other hand, the best of
logical tools available to conceptually support and unfold this theological
intuition. If one follows Montagnes, however, St. Thomas treats analogy
first and foremost in an ontological way in the sense that whenever analogy is applied, the content of what is said must be taken into account first
and foremost. Unlike Montagnes, Rocca conceives analogy pertaining
primarily to the domain of logic: That is, he understands it as a formal
structure of predication.And indeed, such a primarily logically conceived
notion of analogy is more conducive to an immediate application to the
theological interplay between cataphatic and apophatic God-talk.
However, at the same time it remains rather unclear in Rocca’s reconstruction whether, and if so how, for St. Thomas proper metaphysical
discourse—as the intellectual reception and speculative penetration of
reality and the analogy of participation in being—is at least integral to, if
not constitutive of, the scientific execution of sacra doctrina. Rather,
Rocca’s impressively learned and comprehensive genetic-historical reconstruction suggests in so many ways—perhaps against his own best intentions—that St. Thomas practiced a highly personal form of bricolage,
albeit an overwhelmingly successful one due to his conceptual “wizardry”
(124, note 75), fusing from highly disparate and historically contingent
conceptual material a personal metaphysical synthesis of doubtless ingenuity, but which was in no way integral to (while formally independent
of) his theological project. It is in conveying the impression of “Aquinas
the metaphysician” that Rocca fails to convince. Precisely in this regard,
on the contrary, Montagnes does convince by reconstructing St.Thomas’s
metaphysics in the speculative act itself, that is, in the procedure proper
to the formal object of metaphysics.
Hence, while Montagnes and Rocca are in fundamental agreement
about their shared opposition to the Cajetanian interpretation of analogy
as proper proportionality, a difference as instructive as it is significant opens
up between the two. Briefly, contrary to Montagnes, Rocca prioritizes—
especially in matters theological—the act of judgment over the mind’s first
act of simple understanding, the act of obtaining concepts. Rocca plays off
Aquinas’s ex professo treatment of this matter against what he reconstrues as
St.Thomas’s de facto practice. According to Rocca, St.Thomas employs a
rather broad meaning of the terms apprehensio and conceptio, such that at least

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

455

some concepts turn out to be the result of epistemic judgment and other
related rational procedures. Fundamentally, for Rocca,“every predication is
a judgment seeking and bespeaking the truth” (154). Consequently, judgment is involved in concept-formation such that at least some concepts
follow from judgment and not vice versa. Drawing upon Edward Schillebeeckx,William Hill, Etienne Gilson, Henri Bouillard, David Burrell, and
Colman O’Neill, Rocca accounts for the practice of analogical judgments
without any need to seek recourse in some “analogous concept”; rather,
“analogy is a matter of making true predications about God, of using
concepts in judgments” (157). It is quite worthwhile to attend closely to
Rocca’s central thesis:
Analogy as judgment . . . , which is analogy-in-the-act rather than analogy-after-the-fact, uses and abuses concepts by claiming in their very
employment to refer to a Transcendent that is not open to conceptual
insight. Theological analogy, paradoxically, in its truth-claim sans intuitive apprehension, asserts what cannot be fully conceived or defined,
and yet makes its assertions with concepts inextricably bound to creaturely modes.
Aquinas’ theological analogy subsists in the judgments he makes
about God, judgments that necessarily transcend the very concepts that
comprise them. The basic unit of theological analogy is the complete
statement, and the meanings of discrete concepts must be referred back
to the truth-claim of the whole proposition. Moreover, while analogyin-the-act arises in the judgments themselves, his formal doctrine of
analogy is only established once he takes a reflexive look at his original
theological judgments and analyzes what must be the case epistemologically in order for them to be true. If we tend automatically to think
of judgments as built up out of concepts, so that truth is meaningdependent, in the case of theological analogy we must also reverse the
direction and think of the meaning of the divine names as truthdependent. (194–95)

However, what does it mean exactly to say that “the meaning of the divine
names [is] truth-dependent”? In se, this surely is true, but quoad nos this
claim remains problematic. Does the very practice of judgments not
presuppose in all cases the initial obtaining of concepts: In other words, can
there plausibly be any “original theological judgments” without antecedent
“concepts inextricably bound to creaturely modes”? Of course, the very
point of the supernatural virtue of faith is to actively receive a broad range
of concepts and judgments by way of Scripture and tradition that inform
faith’s discursive activity. However, Scripture and tradition together with
the concepts and judgments they convey can only be effectively received

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in a context in which the analogicity of creaturely concepts in their regular creaturely modes is already fully at play, inexorably producing meaning,
and open to a proper metaphysical analysis. Hence, the question arises—
and Montagnes and Rocca seem to come down on different sides—
whether in the speculative order there obtains an indissoluble and
constitutive relation between predicamental and transcendental analogy,
reflecting the analogical unity of being, or whether theological analogy
explodes any relation such that the meaning of divine naming has to
become inherently truth-dependent? Ultimately, Rocca seems to see unity
in theological analogy arise solely from the acts of judgment that use and
abuse concepts in their attempted reference to the transcendent. By
contrast, Montagnes insists also in matters of theological analogy on the
analogical concept and its special unity per prius et posterius:
[T]he analogical concept has a totally special unity; it does not stand
above its inferiors but it applies to them without any intermediary, and
it does not represent them equally but applies to them per prius et
posterius. . . . Accidents and substance, creatures and God are gathered in
the unity of being only in virtue of the relation of causality and participation which binds the second term to the first, the accidents to the
substance, the creatures to God. Being stands above neither predicamental nor transcendental diversity; it belongs per prius to God and per posterius
to creatures.The concept of being immediately designates God or creatures, substance or accidents, not separated and disjoint [sic], but considered within the unity of the relation that binds them to the primary
instance. For predicamental analogy, there is no primary instance other
than substance, and for transcendental analogy no primary instance other
than God, the ultimate term of reference of all the meanings of being,
the principle of order by relation to which all else is unified. In short, the
unity of being hangs upon the real unity of the First Being.5

Contrary to Montagnes, Rocca advances a reading of St. Thomas that
allows the concept of being as the root of all judgments as well as the fruit
of some of them. He rests his case on the fact that Aquinas understands
the mind’s concept in a broad sense, that is, as “a definition, a judgment,
or anything at all in which the intellect speaks its interior word” (173).
The key for Rocca is the “final concept” (173) that constitutes the telos
of a process of antecedent judgments. And so he concludes that
Aquinas’ theological or transcendental analogy may also be seen as
broadly conceptual, in the sense that the meanings of that analogy are
5 Ibid., 81–82.

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

457

themselves the fruit of a web of interwoven theological first-order
judgments stretching out toward the truth. (173)

To put the matter differently, Rocca’s reading of St. Thomas can
arguably be understood as awkwardly poised between, on the one hand,
a Thomist account that—along the lines of Montagnes—reciprocally integrates the transcendent analogy and the analogy of being, and, on the
other hand, Karl Barth’s “analogy of faith” (analogia fidei).6 Because human
language has no inherent capacity to refer properly to God, God in a
gracious act of self-revelation contingently confirms human language—
and does so again and again in the Spirit’s freely faithful and faithfully free
activity—such that it can give appropriate witness to God’s self-revelation.
It is the truth of God’s self-revelatory act that produces the meaning of the
gratuitously confirmed language such that the meaning of all proper theological concepts in their utter contingency upon God’s self-revelation is
all the way down truth-dependent.While it might go against his own best
intentions, it seems clear that Rocca occupies ground rather proximate to
Barth when he claims that “Aquinas’ theological or transcendent analogy
may also be seen as broadly conceptual, in the sense that the meanings of
that analogy are themselves the fruit of a web of interwoven theological
first-order judgments stretching out toward the truth” (173). In short, the
more Rocca loosens the relationship between predicamental and transcendental analogy, the more his reading of St. Thomas approximates
Barth’s analogia fidei, an analogy cut loose from any substantial moorings
in predicamental analogy and allegedly arising solely out of true judgments about God and creatures as normatively witnessed to in Scripture
and as expanded under the guidance of the Spirit by the grammar of faith.
6 According to Bruce McCormack, one of the most able contemporary inter-

preters of Karl Barth’s theology, for Barth “the ‘analogy of faith’ refers most
fundamentally to a relation of correspondence between an act of God and an act
of a human subject; the act of Divine self-revelation and the human act of faith
in which that revelation is acknowledged. More specifically, the analogy which
is established in a revelation event is an analogy between God’s knowledge of
Himself and human knowledge of Him in and through human concepts and
words. . . .There is nothing in the being or knowing of the human subject which
helps to bring this event about—no capacity or pre-understanding which might
be seen as a necessary precondition to its occurrence. . . . God’s self-knowledge
does not become analogically related to a prior human knowledge of Him in
revelation; rather human knowledge is conformed to His. God’s act is the
analogue, ours is the analogate.” Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 16–17, original emphasis.

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III
The third part of Rocca’s work,“Crucial Truths about God,” is inherently
linked to the first part; and, arguably, according to the ordo disciplinae, it
should have preceded part one, a point made above.This part ends with
a chapter carrying the same heading in which Rocca offers a brilliant and
rich account of St. Thomas’s profound theological vision. He concludes
the chapter with a particularly helpful discussion of the notion of participation and the complex discussion around it, concluding with Cornelio
Fabro’s claim that “participation is the special ontology of analogy, and
analogy the special semantics of participation” (287).And again the question arises: If, instead of functioning solely as an adage, Fabro’s claim had
functioned as axiomatic and, hence, had governed Rocca’s first part all
the way down, would it not have required Rocca to acknowledge the
essential metaphysical relationship between predicamental and transcendental analogy—very much along the lines of Montagnes?
However, the main point of this third part, an extensive commentary
on the relationship between Aristotle and St. Thomas, is not only to
display “the primary supportive pillar of his theological epistemology—
the existence of God the Creator” (199), but also to show that in ascertaining the philosophical underpinnings of this pillar, St.Thomas operates
all the way down as a theologian; that is, while he employs discursive
reason to the utmost degree in the form of an ancillary metaphysical speculation, he consistently gives pride of place to faith and theology. In order
to demonstrate this thesis—a thesis that, especially in its finer points,
remains hotly debated among Thomists—Rocca employs the hermeneutical strategy of reading Aristotle not “through” or “by way of ” St.
Thomas’s own commentatorial interpretation, but rather “over against” it,
in order that the theological presuppositions operative in Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle become traceable. Consequently, he reads Aristotle
in light of the best of recent historical scholarship and, unsurprisingly,
encounters a deeply aporetic philosopher in general and, in particular, a
profound tension between the account of a first mover offered in the
Physics and the one offered in the Metaphysics. According to Rocca, it is
not St. Thomas’s superior metaphysical insight, the work of a more
profound and consequent speculation, that overcomes the aporetic
moments in Aristotle. Rather, St.Thomas is able to synthesize Aristotle on
the basis of his antecedently and independently held theological beliefs.
Aristotle, in other words, only gains overarching consistency under St.
Thomas’s able commentatorial hands, which are consistently guided by
faith: “The deeper truth that Aquinas possesses is the knowledge of God
as creative pure act and subsistent being, as the infinitely perfect Creator

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

459

and absolute initiator, out of nothing, of all being, motion, and time”
(220). Rocca substantiates this claim in a magisterial discussion of the way
St.Thomas handled Aristotle’s proof for God’s existence based on motion,
creation ex nihilo, and the question of the philosophical (non)-demonstrability of the world’s eternity. Tucked away in a long footnote we find
Rocca’s own position: “In my opinion, Aristotle never taught a philosophy of creation, nor did he even possess the proper principles from which
he might have deduced it. Instead, Thomas has completely transformed
Aristotle’s ‘principle of motion’ into the ‘bestower of being’ ” (229). Needless to say, with this claim Rocca puts himself into opposition with much
of traditional Aristotelian Thomism. And on purely genetic-historical
grounds, he might even have a point. But genetic-historical grounds are
categorically different from proper metaphysical grounds.The former are
extrinsic to the speculative act of metaphysical discourse, the latter are
intrinsic.While I agree with Rocca’s point that faith in God the Creator
was the decisive “context of discovery” in which Aquinas read Aristotle’s
works, I would also want to maintain that his speculative interpretation
and development of Aristotle occurs in a completely consistent way based
on the formal object of metaphysics itself in the parameters of its proper
“context of justification.” Hence, while St. Thomas’s “transformation” of
Aristotle might possibly be ascertained on genetic-historical grounds, an
answer to the question whether this transformation amounts to a consistent and compelling metaphysical advance beyond Aristotle’s position
requires entering proper metaphysical discourse. In short, the larger question opened up by Rocca’s third part is one in large part extrinsic to his
claims about the practice of judgment constituting the unity of theological analogy. Rather, this question pertains to the pressing problem after the
accomplished reconstruction, as successful as it is comprehensive, of the
“genuine, unadulterated, historical Aquinas”: whether Thomist theology
and its entailed metaphysics can be appropriated only hermeneutically in
a fundamentally interminable historical mode of ongoing efforts of reconstructive interpretation or whether it is possible, and by now mandated, to
retrieve a substantive continuation of the speculative discourse ad mentem
S.Thomae informed by the respective dual formal objects of sacra doctrina
and metaphysics.To be sure, Rocca’s historically plausible way of construing the relationship between a historically “original” Aristotle and St.
Thomas’s creative reception of him undoubtedly contributes to an unbroken contemporary trend of “liberating” St. Thomas’s crucial theological
insights from their alleged Babylonian captivity in the fetters of an irretrievably outdated Aristotelianism.And, of course, these theological truths
are per se in no need of any metaphysical underpinning—Aristotelian,

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Platonic, or otherwise. This is always important to remember, and St.
Thomas would be the first to do so (ST I, q. 1, a. 6, ad 3; and a. 8, ad 2).
However, St.Thomas’s unique and lasting contribution to theology (quite
different in that regard from the theologians of the earlier patristic period)
was to contemplate the theological truths in such a way that their deepest understanding was fostered by and ultimately coincided with a true
metaphysical analysis of the world: in short, the formal object of metaphysics being an integral component in the elucidation and defense of the
knowledge received by way of the formal object of theology. Rocca’s
genetic-historical reconstruction, as nuanced, comprehensive, and astute as
it is, however, tends to sever the one from the other. So the crucial theological truths come to hang strangely, un-Thomistically mid-air, held aloft
by a somewhat Augustinian/Barthian “from aboveness,” in their retrieved
core ultimately unencumbered and unsupported by a proper metaphysical argumentation operating “from below.”
IV
The fourth part, “The Divine Names,” is the shortest but brings home
the arguments of the preceding parts. First, Rocca offers a lucid account
of Aquinas’s positive theology of the Divine Names, stretching from the
Scriptum super libros Sententiarum via the De potentia to the famous question 13 in the prima pars of the Summa theologiae.“The substantial, proper,
and analogical divine names are predicated primarily of God as regards
the absolute perfection they signify, for God is the perfection in an infinite manner and causes the participated perfection in creatures” (329).
The concluding chapter on the distinction between the reality signified
and the manner of signification brings to closure Rocca’s central thesis
on analogy—drawing here especially upon the prior work of William
Hill and the early Edward Schillebeeckx:
Analogy comes to pass when the mind predicates the name and its
meaning of God in an act of judgment claiming a truth about the holy
darkness of God, which transcends anything the concept can intuitively
grasp on its own. . . .The truth of the judgment is what makes us realize that the concept, as used but not as conceived, has been extended
beyond the creaturely realm. We never really know in a clear conceptual fashion what a divine name might mean for God, and whatever we
do know about such a name is always a consequence of the judgments
we have already made about God. (350)
Since in Aquinas the analogical nature of divine predication and
the use of the res/modus distinction are matters of judgment instead of
concept formation, the danger of the “common core of univocity” is

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avoided. His theological analogy depends not on a more profound
conceptualization but on a recognition of the truth about God. (351)

I regard Rocca’s account of the analogical nature of divine predication as
a correct and moreover succinct reading of Aquinas. Rocca indeed
successfully avoids the danger of the “common core of univocity” by
squarely placing the res/modus distinction into the realm of logic by
making it a matter of predication that is ultimately based on faith, on the
recognition of the truth about God that does not directly and integrally
depend on the knowledge of God by way of creatures. But here the question arises whether Rocca—in order to avoid the rightly dreaded
“common core of univocity”—has poured out the baby with the bathwater. While “the act of signifying goes further than the ratio nominis,” as
Schillebeeckx rightly insists, both the act of signifying and the ratio
nominis ultimately depend on the analogy of participation in being.
Whatever is predicated of God according to this analogy must be understood as indeed a knowledge of God, even though it remains a knowledge of God by way of God’s creatures. It seems to me that the
predication in the act of judgment always presupposes the analogy of
being and all the concept formations entailed in it.The conceptualization
inherent to the analogy of participation in being constitutes an indispensable vehicle for a recognition of the truth about God.While theological
analogy as the practice of judgments is in no way limited to the scope of
the analogy of being, the former always comes by way of the latter as
grace always comes by way of being.
V
Rocca’s book is an impressive achievement of stupendous scholarship and
lucid analysis. It proffers an excellent reconstruction of St. Thomas’s
thought that deepens our understanding of his theology at crucial points
of contention and that sets a high mark to be reached by alternative
Thomist accounts in the tradition of Cajetan.A magisterial contribution to
Thomistic studies, Rocca’s work will be the foremost study on St.Thomas’s
theological epistemology in general and on analogy in particular for years
to come. Rocca clearly presupposes and draws upon the strong tradition of
historical Aquinas research in the wake of Martin Grabmann and MarieDominique Chenu, but under the surface of his genetic-historical method
one can clearly sense a renewed interest in the normative “so what” question on the other side of an exhaustive and at points exhausting historical
reconstruction of the “authentic” Aquinas. However, the adopted method
does not allow Rocca to transition substantively into the normative and

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speculative mode of inquiry constitutive of the theological and metaphysical discourse proper and characteristic of St.Thomas.
Nevertheless, Rocca is passionately interested in and committed to the
theological substance of St.Thomas’s thought and the entailed practice of
analogical judgment. Such a return to a reconstruction of St. Thomas’s
theology in light of its proper formal object and with an eye to its ongoing contemporary relevance is warmly welcomed. The return to speculative theology proper, however, also brings back the notorious question
of how the formal object of theology and the formal object of metaphysics relate to each other and whether it is advisable in general as well
as in the particular case of St. Thomas to reconstruct theological
substance and practice in light of the former, unmediated by and only
contingently related to the speculative exigencies of the latter. In other
words, the specter of the long-standing but lately derided commentatorial tradition of Aristotelian Thomism looms as the unaddressed “other”
on the margins of Rocca’s genetic-historical discourse. While Rocca
displays an impressive command of the best current historical scholarship
(internationally) on the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic strands in Aquinas’s
thought, his reconstructive discourse remains in large part extrinsic to the
substantive metaphysical issues preoccupying St.Thomas in his encounter
with Aristotelian and neo-Platonic texts. In consequence and in comparison to Montagnes, Rocca’s Aquinas displays less than his full speculative,
metaphysical force, which consists largely in his compelling integration
of neo-Platonic elements into an unmitigated Aristotelian framework
and hence thereby properly and successfully expanding Aristotle’s metaphysics of substance on its own grounds into a metaphysics of esse.
It is never a good practice to enlarge an already-large volume; however,
the book ends rather abruptly.While a convincing reconstruction is one
thing, reimplementation is another. How can and should St. Thomas’s
theological epistemology and his practice of analogical judgment inform
contemporary theology? A return in a concluding chapter to the discussion with the Protestant theologians Barth, Pannenberg, and Jüngel, as
well as the Catholic theologians and philosophers Gustav Söhngen and
Erich Przywara, would have helped to more forcefully make Aquinas’s
ongoing relevance bear upon the dominant discussions of twentiethcentury theology. Rocca opens the door wide but remains on the threshold. Hopefully, in his next book he will offer a more expansive
engagement of the twentieth-century criticisms of analogy as well as the
presently widespread infatuation with an unmitigated apophaticism.
However, even in its present form, Rocca’s work offers a salutary antidote to a number of important contemporary readings of St. Thomas’s

On Gregory Rocca’s Speaking the Incomprehensible God

463

thought. For one, his reconstruction achieves a most desirable mean
between two lines of thought: Thomists in conversation primarily with
contemporary analytic philosophy of religion (and its strong Scotist/
Suarezian undercurrent of conceptual univocitism in God-talk), such as
Eleonore Stump,7 whose philosophical doctrine of God—despite gestures
to analogical predication—makes God all too knowable; and Thomists
deeply influenced by the subtle adoption of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy
(in Cornelius Ernst’s, Herbert McCabe’s, and Fergus Kerr’s versions of
Thomism), such as the early David Burrell8 and Denys Turner9 promoting an apophaticism that makes God all too unknowable. Moreover, and
now in agreement with Denys Turner as well as Aristotelian Thomism (to
mention just Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Jacques Maritain, and Ralph
McInerny) and in marked contrast to Radical Orthodoxy as well the
reading of Aquinas advanced by Henri de Lubac and other representatives
of the “nouvelle théologie,” Rocca rightly emphasizes the central role the
philosophical proofs for God’s existence play in Aquinas’s way of “doing
theology,” a role that can be disregarded only at the grave peril of seriously
distorting the overall coherence of his project.
Most important, for contemporary Catholic theology Rocca’s book
constitutes a salient invitation to return to a serious consideration of St.
Thomas’s unique balance between positive and negative theology; the
ongoing mandate for Catholic theological epistemology should be nothing
short of this balance.While Cardinal Léger’s concern about an ecclesia unius
doctoris10 might have been apropos in the heyday of neo-scholasticism, the
present state of Catholic theology seems more likely to conjure up the
specter of an ecclesia nullius doctoris (Nikolaus Lobkowicz). Moreover, while
legitimate and substantive objections to his reconstruction of Aquinas’s
account can be raised from other Thomists or, for that matter, Scotist or
Suarezian perspectives, Rocca’s study nevertheless serves as a salutary
reminder of the level of conceptual sophistication to which the Catholic
theological tradition is committed in order to truly and faithfully think
7 Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003).
8 David B. Burrell, CSC, Aquinas: God and Action (London and Henley: Routledge

& Kegan Paul, 1979).
9 Denys Turner, Faith, Reason, and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2004).
10 At the Second Vatican Council, Cardinal Léger exclaimed, “Vae Ecclesiae unius

doctoris!” as in the course of the council discussion on section 15 of the decree
Optatam totius on the theological education of priests several bishops pressed for
the explicit mentioning of Thomas Aquinas instead of leaving the matter with
the more general rendition of a patrimonium philosophicum perenniter validum. See
Acta synodalia, pt. III, vol.VII, 709.

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about, speak of, and most importantly proclaim the Triune God, Creator,
and Redeemer.Theology has to a large degree abandoned the commitment
to search for and contemplate the truth (singular!); consequently it is
progressively eroded by a secular as well as ecclesial culture that feeds on the
fast-food of intellectual consumer choice and the pragmatic concerns of
pastoral expediency. Only the increasing submission to the rigor and labor
of speculative theological contemplation—to which Rocca untiringly
gestures beyond the confines of his genetic-historical reading—will help
avert the danger of the ever-increasing banalization of Christian God-talk
N&V
in the very discipline of theology itself.