Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 233–49 233 Scholarship and Sanctity: A Lesson Aquinas Teaches the Priest and Seminarian1 ROMANUS C ESSARIO, O.P. St. John’s Seminary Boston, Massachussetts “[I]t is not praxis that creates truth but truth that should serve as the basis of praxis.” —P OPE B ENEDICT XVI Address to Catholic Educators 17 April 2008 Aquinas and the Life of the Spirit T HE Dominican saint and scholar whom the Church calls the Common Doctor, Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274), instructs us that “the true is the good of the intellect; for an intellect is said to be good because it knows the true.”2 Today, however, many persons think primarily about knowledge as a tool of expediency, that is, as something that helps them to achieve an objective.While many care only about the successful, few, it seems, devote much time to pursuit of the true. For instance, college students oftentimes think of their studies as a means to attain career goals. In other words, they instrumentalize their lessons. Again today, professional and proprietary schools, courses, and programs that train people to supply services (and so find employment) tend to fare better than do schools, courses, and programs that instruct in art, literature, and what broadly we still call liberal studies. Seminaries have not been preserved from these professionalizing tendencies in higher education. Nor have seminarians been preserved from courting an instrumentalist view of human knowledge. Since the 1970s, seminary education in the United States has been influenced, I would aver unduly, by 1 A shorter version of this essay appeared as “Scholarship and Sanctity,” Second Spring 10 (2008): 13–20. 2 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (ScG), trans.Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), bk. 1, chap. 71. 234 Romanus Cessario, O.P. the standards and ideals set by the professional accrediting associations.Take, for example, the Association of Theological Schools (ATS), which follows a professional model of ministry broadly construed to accommodate its ecumenical constituency.Tensions inevitably arise: for example, between the requirements of practical learning based on the supervised social work model and the liberal studies traditionally offered to clerics. The English word “clerisy” gives us a clue about the origin of the word “cleric”: clerisy means a distinct class of learned or literary people. Since the development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of seminaries, Catholic clerics have been formed to become learned and literary men. The Church underwent a hard lesson at the time of the Protestant Reform. This lesson is illustrated in a famous dispute between Catholics and Reformers held at Lausanne in 1536. Not one Catholic cleric could be found to answer the humanist Reformers’ objections that, since the word “sacrament” could not be found in the New Testament, the sacraments must represent superstitious historical accretions to Christianity.3 Since no priest was able to deal with the issue, a Catholic doctor volunteered to reply. He explained that the whole New Testament was about sanctifying the mind—sacra mens—and so the text refers throughout to sacraments that make the soul holy. The Greek scholars scoffed, and the Swiss Canton of Vaud passed over to the reform of Zwingli and Calvin. The word “liberal” in the phrase “liberal arts” comes from the Latin for “free.” Historically, then, liberal studies were meant for those citizens who enjoyed the leisure to think, even though thinking about the traditional liberal arts, for instance, the trivium, grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, involves forms of doing, that is, language, oratory, and logic.4 Roughly until the high Middle Ages, those other than nobles and rich persons who received a liberal education were almost exclusively Catholic clerics. Priests became the learned men in the street.The Church made them free for this purpose. Other persons who were not free enjoyed no leisure, and so were obliged to engage in servile work to ensure their livelihood.They received an education in techne.That is, they were taught how to accomplish certain ˜ tasks but not how to think about the highest principles or causes of the 3 For further information, see Eric Junod, La dispute de Lausanne 1536: La théologie reformeé après Zwingli et avant Calvin, Bibliothéque Historique Vaudoise 90 (Lausanne: Bibliothéque Historique Vaudoise, 1988). 4 The Trivium, the artes sermocinales: grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic (language, oratory, logic) and the Quadrivium, the artes reales or physicæ: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music.The arts admittedly were considered perfections of the practical intellect (recta ratio factibilium), whereas prudence the recta ratio agibilium. Scholarship and Sanctity 235 effects that they produced.Today, even the highest form of technological expertise ordinarily finds its rationale in a task-ordered making of things, whether they be microchips or spaceships. Cardinal Newman reminds us that we proceed at great peril when we forget that the perfection, the good, of the human intellect is the possession of the true, and not the attainment of whatsoever bits of learning, including the acquisition of practical knowledge useful for solving a hereand-now problem.5 When we fail to reach out for the knowledge of the Highest Truth, the stakes become very high inasmuch as the human person stands to lose what is most important in human life.The Church speaks clearly to the point: “[W]hen the sense of God is lost, the sense of man is also threatened and poisoned, as the Second Vatican Council concisely states:‘Without the Creator the creature would disappear. . . . But when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible.’ ”6 In other words, the human race risks losing the truth about what it means to be human. Perhaps more today than in Newman’s period, what is at stake is not only how to achieve the best form of education but also how to preserve the dignity of the human person. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) was once asked what future he foresaw for our civilization. He replied, “Internecine fighting. . . . People killing one another in the streets. . . .”7 Aquinas clearly grasped the connection between knowledge and the good of persons. He replied to those who used the text of 1 Corinthians 8:1,“Knowledge puffs up,” as a weapon against those clerics who devoted themselves to study by saying that “the text applies when science is without love.”8 In other words, knowledge inflates with pride only when knowledge is separated from the embrace of the good. We return to Aquinas’s notion of what perfects the human intellect:“an intellect is said to be good because it knows the true.”9 When one considers the high mindedness of Enlightenment thinkers, especially the Continental ones, social critics and intellectual historians should regard our contemporary cultural circumstances as ironical.Who would have thought that “Dare to know”—Sapere aude (a phrase borrowed from Horace)—would have led eventually to a generation of twentyfirst-century Westerners whose highest aspirations may include something 5 For one example, see John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, discourse 6, and below, note 21. 6 Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, §36, as cited in Evangelium Vitae, §22. 7 Stephen Spender, “Remembering Eliot,” The Sewanee Review 74 (1966): 69. 8 Aquinas, Contra impugnantes, no. 11. 9 Aquinas, ScG I, chap. 71. Romanus Cessario, O.P. 236 so banal as manipulating MySpace?10 Even when we consider the legitimate progress made in human knowing, such as computer technology and space exploration, the fact remains that the instrumentalization of human knowledge leaves the human person at a great disadvantage. If the only thing a person can do successfully is deploy knowledge to achieve practical results, there develops something incomplete in the person’s character. Technocrats forget about loving the true. Thus we encounter the well-known stereotypes of the computer geek without the social skills to make friends or of the astronaut driven to senseless jealousy within a love triangle. In these examples and in other familiar figures from our culture, it is difficult to discover human persons in whom one finds verified the Thomist principle that “an intellect is said to be good because it knows the true.”To put this otherwise, we discover smart but not wise people. “Wisdom,” says Aquinas, “differs from mere science in looking at things from a greater light.”11 We learn from what Aquinas teaches us about the divine image in man that nothing short of God fully satisfies the human mind.12 The intellectually deprived children of educational programs dedicated to the acquisition of information or the aggregation of skills do not suffer definitive lobotomies. Their intellects still want to look at things from a greater height. They remain made in the image and likeness of God, and so by nature desire to know what is true. Indeed, to know the Highest Truth. Herein lies the challenge of Catholic seminary education. Seminarians must learn how to communicate sacred truth to people who have forgotten that truth alone satisfies the human creature. For the priest, the stakes are high. He must preach about the Highest Truth. About God. Otherwise, he falls under the stricture Saint Paul enunciates: “If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast, for an obligation has been imposed on me, and woe to me if I do not preach it” (1 Cor 9:16). Aquinas helps us to see the urgency behind the preaching act: “A man cannot believe unless the truth be proposed to him.”13 The depreciation of the human good illustrates only one dimension of the difficulties that arise in a world saturated with techne .̃ A concomitant result of the modern penchant to regard knowledge only as instrumental to the achievement of created objectives involves the eclipse of God from 10 See Horace, Epistles, I, 2, 40:“Boldly undertake the study of true wisdom: begin it forthwith.” 11 Summa theologiae (ST ) II–II, q. 51, a. 4. 12 See my “Sonship, Sacrifice, and Satisfaction: The Divine Friendship in Aquinas and the Renewal of Christian Anthropology,” Letter & Spirit 3 (2007): 71–93. 13 ST II–II, q. 1, a. 9. Scholarship and Sanctity 237 the conscious activity of human knowing. God becomes a no longer useful hypothesis. It is easy to assess the dimensions of this eclipse.When was the last time you heard someone immersed in techne ˜ talk about the contemplative life? Religion maybe, but not contemplative prayer. The secular philosophical currents of the modern period account largely for the present-day penchant to push God to the margins of thinkable objects. Seminarians study these movements and ideas in their philosophy and theology courses. At the same time, the best professors will instruct their students that the great Christian tradition does not accept the extraordinary myopia that displaces God from the apex of the intellectual life. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit or Idea. Tillich’s Ultimate Concern. Whitehead’s Process.To discuss why God evaporates in modern philosophy and even from some contemporary theology belongs to another essay. But the fact is incontestable. For instance, not everyone who exegetes sacred Scripture shares the premise that Catholics do, namely, that God speaks. Thus divine revelation. Many advance the view that the sacred Scriptures represent man-made expressions of the legitimate aspirations of the human race. Call them, if you will, Neo-Feuerbachians. Thomas Aquinas would find the modern proclivity to marginalize God a strange turn of events.To return to a point already made: he built his whole practical theology, his moral theology, upon the premise that “there can be no complete and final happiness for us save in the vision of God.”14 When Aquinas speaks about a vision of God, he is not referring to a sense vision, obviously. Rather he means the human mind’s capacity “to come through to the essence itself of the first cause” of all things that exist.15 He is talking plainly about God, the maker of heaven and earth. In fact, Aquinas advances the startling claim that “all conscious things implicitly know God in everything they know.”16 Contemplative knowledge of God cannot be instrumentalized.The proof for this axiom is easy to state: nothing exists “beyond” God. So the saints commonly teach that only in God do our souls find rest.They have “come through to the essence itself of the first cause.”The saints should be allowed to set the functional objectives for clerical education. The holy men and women who have done God’s will throughout the ages demonstrate the Thomist axiom that theology forms a science of faith. The classical theologians of the Christian era were not loathe to borrow from ancient philosophy in order to enlarge upon and to express 14 ST I–II, q. 3, a. 8. See also my Introduction to Moral Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2001). 15 ST I–II, q. 3, a. 8. 16 De veritate, q. 22, a. 2, ad 1. 238 Romanus Cessario, O.P. the truths of faith. It has been said that Aquinas baptized Aristotle. This long-accepted practice is discussed in the 1998 encyclical letter of Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio.The Pope in fact refers to the figure of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Here is what the Pope has to say: “Although he made much of the supernatural character of faith, the Angelic Doctor did not overlook the importance of its reasonableness; indeed he was able to plumb the depths and explain the meaning of this reasonableness.”17 Aquinas, it should be emphasized, does not obscure the truths of faith by preparing for them or examining them in light of the conclusions of ancient philosophy. He rather scrutinizes what is held by faith with the help of the philosophy available to him. So when Aquinas tells us that our highest and most perfect fulfillment lies in a knowledge that remains entirely without further usefulness, he reflects what Christian teachers have taught from the beginning. In fact, Aquinas actually builds upon an important element of divine revelation: “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life.”18 In order to see the importance of knowing the true God and coming to share in his own blessed life, one may start with the New Testament. Recall for a moment what Saint Paul says at the beginning of the Letter to the Romans about the natural knowledge of God: “For what can be known about God is evident to them, because God made it evident to them” (Rom 1:19). Saint Paul refers of course to those were without the benefit of the divine revelation made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.The first chapter of the Letter to the Romans goes on to explain that those who failed to draw the right conclusions about God the creator of all things quickly fell prone to committing forms of immorality that brought them special shame: “And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God handed them over to their undiscerning mind to do what is improper” (Rom 1:28).The warning remains valid for us. Saint Thomas commenting on the text of Romans 13:12—“The night is far spent, the day is at hand”—says: “The entire stretch of our present life may be compared to night, because of the darkness of ignorance lying heavily on it; the state of future happiness today, for God’s brightness shines on the blessed.”19 The biblical and Thomist texts capture the theme of our discussion: holiness of life and embrace of the true.The theme merits special attention from seminarians.The priest above all must strive to offer a perspective that allows his parishioners to gain a glimpse of the whole, of a vision 17 Fides et Ratio, §43. 18 CCC, §1. 19 On the Epistle to the Romans, xiii, lect. 2. Scholarship and Sanctity 239 of life that encourages the sanctification of the intellect. “Wisdom,” Aquinas again reminds us,“differs from mere science in looking at things from a greater light.”20 Cardinal Newman offers the same advice. He urges educators to give students perspective: “[I]f one leads students to the mountaintop, so that they see all the surrounding territory, then they may go back and work in detail at some specific spot of the valley. But they will never forget that vista from the top of the mountain; all their work will have reference then to the whole terrain.”21 The seminarian who has scaled the top of the mountain will, as a priest, know how to lead others there.That is, he will have gained a glimpse of God’s brightness that shines on the blessed, at least as much as this is possible in the present life, and then may allow this blessed light to illuminate every other aspect of human life.This illuminating glimpse escapes those who spend all their time in the valleys. The Love of Learning and the Desire for God In the academic year 1955–1956, a distinguished Benedictine monk, Dom Jean Leclercq, gave a series of lectures at Sant’ Anselmo, the Benedictine college in Rome. He pointed out that in the twelfth century, there were two kinds of preparatory schools, a school for monks and a school for clerics, that is, those who were destined to serve as diocesan priests. These latter studied in what was called the “exterior” school, a room not within the monastic enclosure.They received instruction in the seven liberal arts, the Trivium and the Quadrivium, that would prepare them for when they later attended schools of theology, often located near 20 ST II–II, q. 51, a. 4. 21 See John Henry Cardinal Newman, The Idea of a University, discourse 6, section 7 (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 139, 140:“I say then, if we would improve the intellect, first of all, we must ascend; we cannot gain real knowledge on a level; we must generalize, we must reduce to method, we must have a grasp of principles, and group and shape our acquisitions by means of them. It matters not whether our field of operation be wide or limited; in every case, to command it, is to mount above it. Who has not felt the irritation of mind and impatience created by a deep, rich country, visited for the first time, with winding lanes, and high hedges, and green steeps, and tangled woods, and every thing smiling indeed, but in a maze? The same feeling comes upon us in a strange city, when we have no map of its streets. Hence you hear of practised travellers, when they first come into a place, mounting some high hill or church tower, by way of reconnoitring its neighbourhood. In like manner, you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load.”This citation of Newman’s words comes from an address delivered by Dr. Louise Cowan at Thomas More College, Merrimack, New Hampshire. See the college’s Newsletter, vol. 14.3 (March, 1997): 6–9. 240 Romanus Cessario, O.P. a cathedral. Monks, on the other hand, were educated differently. They were instructed individually in “interior” schools under the guidance of an abbot, a spiritual father, through the reading of the Bible and the Fathers, within the liturgical framework of the monastic life.22 We get a glimpse of this monastic pedagogy from the prologue of St. Bernard to his sermons on the Canticle of Canticles, where he addresses the young monks with these words: “The instruction that I address to you, my brothers, will differ from those I should deliver to people in the world, at least the manner will be different.”23 Saint Bernard proceeds on the assumption that the monks already find themselves disposed to love the sacred text, and so he can speak to them not as searchers for but as lovers of what is true. By referring to the provocative essay of Dom Jean Leclercq it is not my intention to comment on the distinctions that he introduces between scholastic and monastic theologies. Still less do I want to lend credence to the view that one should drive a wedge between professional studies for ministry and monastic studies for consecrated persons. The fact of the matter is that Saint Thomas Aquinas has taught us how to combine both the salutary emphases of the monastic tradition with the reasoned argumentation that later developed within the scholastic tradition. It also has been argued that the birth of scholasticism was inevitable once ancient philosophy, especially Aristotle, became known to the universities of Europe from the twelfth century. In any case, Aquinas never lost sight of the importance of the affective theology that Saint Bernard urged upon his monks.Aquinas’s treatment of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the gift of wisdom, affords a good example. Or, we can turn to the text from the Summa contra Gentiles where Aquinas explains that “our intellect . . . extends to the infinite in understanding. . . . But this ordination of the intellect would be in vain unless an infinite intelligible reality existed.”24 In other words, since nothing is loved unless it is first known, the love of learning inevitably leads to the desire for God. Yearning is never absent from Aquinas’s theology, although he admittedly prefers to express the affective movement of the soul in a way that one may call “intellectualist” rather than emotional. In any case, I return 22 Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God:A Study of Monas- tic Culture, trans. Catherine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1974), 3. 23 Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs I, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 2, trans. Kilian Walsh, O.C.S.O. (Spencer, Massachusetts: Cistercian Publications, 1971), Sermon 1,“On the Title of the Book,” 1.1; as cited in Leclercq, Love of Learning, 5, 6. 24 ScG I, chap. 43. Scholarship and Sanctity 241 to the more than fifty-year-old lectures of Dom Leclercq to defend a thesis that today may be considered in some quarters quite controversial, namely, that every authentically Christian approach to knowledge remains monastic in character. This means that all learning is fundamentally contemplative. Study proceeds successfully only within the establishment of a real contact with God.This thesis holds especially true for the training of diocesan priests. Although things may have been different in Saint Bernard’s day, the fact of the matter is that in the reforms that followed upon Trent, reforms that still more or less inspire programs of priestly formation, the distinction between the exterior and interior classrooms was dissolved. All priests are expected to receive an affective training in theology.We call it human, spiritual, intellectual, and pastoral training. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), as we have seen, exemplifies the monastic style of doing theology. He displays a surprisingly modern emphasis on experience. To return to his Prologue, Bernard says of the Old Testament book, the Song of Solomon, or the Canticle of Canticles: “Only the touch of the Spirit can inspire a song like this, and only personal experience can unfold its meaning. Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it; let all others burn with desire rather to attain to this experience than merely to learn about it.”25 It would be a supreme anachronism to interpret Saint Bernard’s emphasis on experience according to the contemporary fashionable but still Marxist-inspired views of experience.When people today talk about experience as a locus for learning they usually proceed on the supposition that knowledge develops only from below, from the bottom up, so to speak, and that the task of the inquirer is to immerse himself as much as possible into the rhythms of the materialist evolution that governs the universe. On the contrary, Saint Bernard held and expressly taught that in the knowledge of divine things, such as the text of a biblical author, it is God who really does the teaching. Saint Bernard’s understanding of experience approaches an affective knowing, an amata notitia. Really, an affective beholding. Aquinas later would take up this same point, observing that there is something of love in knowledge and something of knowledge in love: “[L]ove of the word [dilectio verbi] . . . is a beloved awareness [amata notitia].”26 He learned this principle from his study of the divine persons of the Trinity. Jean Leclercq recapitulates what Saint Bernard emphasizes about the nature of monastic learning: “Just as there is no theology without moral 25 Bernard, On the Song of Songs, Sermon 1, 6.11. 26 ST I, q. 93, a. 9, ad 4:“Ad quartum dicendum quod dilectio verbi, quod est amata notitia, pertinet ad rationem imaginis; sed dilectio virtutis pertinet ad similitudinem, sicut et virtus.” 242 Romanus Cessario, O.P. life and asceticism, so there is no theology without prayer.”27 Prayer is the way that we let God instruct us. Bernard of course shifts the movement of learning from the one who seeks (quaeritur ) knowledge to the one who desires (desideratur ) to know, and from what is to be known (sciendum ) to what is to be experienced (experiendum).The moral life. Asceticism. Prayer.These qualities of life still mark the monastic culture that sets the standard for all authentic learning. In order to develop his thesis about the evolution of monastic culture in the West, Dom Jean Leclercq conducts his reader on a tour of the history of monasticism from the beginning to the dawn of the High Middle Ages. He begins with Saint Benedict and Saint Gregory the Great, and goes on to show how their program of study, contemplation, work, and loving God within the context of a virtuous life was spread throughout Europe during what we call the Carolingian period by Benedictine missionary monks. The love of learning and the desire for God did not create theocracies. The Christianization of Europe did not require the complete suppression of pagan literature and wisdom. Even before the thirteenth century, the monk Rabanus Maurus (c.780–856) wrote, commenting on the provision of Deuteronomy 21:10–13 that allows an Israelite to marry a pagan woman in time of war:“That is what we customarily do, and what we ought to do, when we read pagan poets, when the books of worldly wisdom fall into our hands. If we meet therein with something useful, we convert it to our own dogma [ad nostrum dogma convertimus ].”28 It is worthwhile to note that the methodology that Aquinas developed when he read the works of Aristotle may not have been as innovative as certain researchers sometimes claim. The Angelic Doctor was perhaps developing lessons that he had learned while a young student in the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino. He took Aristotle’s philosophy and converted it to Catholic doctrine. In more areas of Catholic thought than is commonly acknowledged, the Church has canonized this conversion. The great heritage of classical Christian culture recognizes that on the one hand learning is necessary if one is to approach God and to express what is discovered about him, while on the other hand, literature must be continually transcended and elevated in the striving to attain eternal life. Leclercq speaks about “devotion to heaven.”29 The principal literary sources of monastic culture are those that still occupy our attention. Of 27 Leclercq, Love of Learning, 7. 28 Rabanus Maurus, De clericorum institutione III, 18 (PL 107: 396); as cited in Lerclercq, Love of Learning, 60. 29 Leclercq, Love of Learning, chap. 4. Scholarship and Sanctity 243 course, since the contributions of the scholastic and the later doctors of the Church were not yet available to them, the monastic tradition was founded upon the patristic heritage. But if we enlarge the patristic tradition to include the later scholastic and theological tradition, such as Thomism, then we can say that this body of literature, along with the Sacred Scriptures as well as classical literature, a category that can be expanded to include modern classics, remains the source of Christian learning.We see this rule maintained in our seminaries and programs of ongoing formation. Catholic seminary education revolves around three foci: Bible, the tradition, and philosophy. Mention needs also to be made of the Liturgy as the place where the Sacred Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers and the doctors of the Church are first received and where one gives the assent of faith to what these documenta fidei contain. In short, then, what has contributed to the shaping of monastic culture and to the intellectual tradition of the West continues to set the perennial norm for the training of priests. Dom Leclercq urges us to answer the question whether other disciplines taught in Catholic seminaries can contribute to the preaching of the gospel without seminarians standing squarely on the foundations of monastic culture. When he describes the flowering of monastic culture in the early Middle Ages, Leclercq completes his essay on the “Love of Learning and the Desire for God.”This history is well documented.The general storyline is well-known: Monastic schools gradually gave way to the development of the universities. Although some monks participated in the evolution of European education, the most famous actors from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries were drawn from among the friars, and after the sixteenth, from the Jesuits and those congregations of religious men who followed their example. It is not possible at this juncture to trace the history of the effect of the sixteenth-century Reform and of the new humanism that developed after Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote in 1509 his Praise of Folly. The Dispute at Lausanne provides an instructive and perhaps indicative anecdote, however.All in all, we can conclude that the Church has undergone a more difficult time sustaining her seminaries in the last 400 years than she experienced during the first 1600 years of her existence. Take another example: the French school of priestly formation that dates from the seventeenth century suffered the outrageous assault of the French Revolution. Instead of surveying the history of seminary education in the modern period, I would like instead to return to an important lesson that the monastic experience continues to teach seminarians.That is, the importance that holiness of life holds in the advancing toward knowledge of the truth. 244 Romanus Cessario, O.P. How to Develop a Clerical Heart? One of the most important texts in Pastores Dabo Vobis is found at numbers 19 and 20 when the text discusses the spiritual life of the priest. It speaks about a “ ‘specific’ vocation to holiness,” or more precisely of “a vocation based on the Sacrament of Holy Orders, as a sacrament proper and specific to the priest, and thus involving a new consecration to God through ordination.”30 We can discover the foundation for this specific form of priestly holiness in the pattern that has been called monastic. Pastores Dabo Vobis confirms that the relationship of holiness to learning remains as true today as it did during the decades when monastic culture was transforming old Europe. I would like to comment briefly on how to apply to seminarians the principles that monastic culture placed at the center of all human life and learning.They are six altogether.The first group addresses issues of personal discipline. They include the moral life, asceticism, and prayer. The second group specifies the texts that undergird liberal studies, namely, the Sacred Scriptures, works of theological learning, and lastly, philosophical texts. First, the moral life. It was Saint Gregory the Great in his commentary on the book of Job, known as the Moralia, who for the first time presented to the Christian West a pattern of life based on the virtues and vices. Aquinas put systematic order into Gregory’s text. As the Dominican scholar Servais Pinckaers has pointed out, a virtue-based program for Christian living found antecedents in the earlier Fathers, especially in Saint Augustine, and continued to provide the model for giving pastoral care until the mid-sixteenth century.31 It was around the time of the Council of Trent that an alternate model for doing moral theology, what is known as casuistry, arose. The virtues of the Christian life are seven: faith, hope, and charity; prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. It would be impossible to sketch even briefly the material content of these theological and moral virtues.32 Suffice it to observe that it constitutes a high-risk experiment to develop the intellectual virtues without the moral virtues.There are many examples that demonstrate this point: the expert in accounting who does not love justice. Possible outcome: embezzlement. The humanist who is a womanizer. Possible outcome: selfdestruction.The seminarian who is lazy. Possible outcome: pastoral neglect. The seminarian who abets unchastity. Possible outcome: too tragic to think 30 John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, §20. 31 See Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995). 32 See my Virtues, or the Examined Life (New York: Continuum, 2002). Scholarship and Sanctity 245 about.When the moral virtues are not functioning in the way that they should, which is not to affirm that every sin results in the loss of a virtue, the intellectual life falters.33 The human mind is made to know the Highest Truth, and this pursuit proves impossible when we find ourselves consumed by vicious disorders. Or, to return to Saint Bernard, the attainment of the Highest Truth requires passionate desire to embrace the True. Asceticism.The high calling that is the priestly vocation requires of each priest and seminarian a special discipline of the senses.The seminarian and priest are required to think seriously about the ascetical life. In brief, to reflect on an organized pattern of self-denial. Asceticism is not reserved to monks and religious fanatics. Of course, the choice of ascetical practices, especially for the beginner, requires wise counsel. Saints in the past have been reprimanded for their youthful indiscretions. One can offer a short reason for adopting some ascetical practice, such as observing the fasts that occur throughout the Church’s year or sacrificing one’s own pleasure in order to help others in need or to step back from even legitimate entertainments, such as music, computer games, and television. The effects of original sin leave us prone to sin. Saint Augustine devoted extensive reflection to the vice of curiositas, the vice that prompts us to look around unnecessarily. So our movements require vigilant watching. We facilitate this self-discipline by fasting, almsgiving, and voluntary works of self-denial. One of the most unhappy examples of the hermeneutics of discontinuity after the Second Vatican Council is the wholesale abandonment of ascetical practices, fasts, vigils, acts of personal sacrifice, in favor of what was falsely presented to represent their legitimate substitutes. In short, these alternatives included non-burdensome activities such as fulfilling one’s ordinary duties or performing those everyday works of charity that comprise Christian life.Ascetical practices are especially urgent in circumstances when temptations are strong, such as happens with internet pornography and other illicit satisfactions of the concupiscence of the eyes. Because there are so many instances when sinful self-satisfaction is forbidden, the Christian life requires that one become accustomed to self-denial. Prayer.The third and principal element of monastic culture is prayer. It is not often remarked that the pattern of the Church’s official prayer has been set for many centuries. This pattern was developed normatively in the monasteries.Take for example the Liturgy of the Hours or its adaptation for the laity that is found in the monthly Magnificat. The praying of 33 For a discussion of the unity and the connection of the moral virtues, see my The Moral Virtues and Theological Ethics, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 246 Romanus Cessario, O.P. psalms and canticles and readings from the Bible forms the background for Catholic worship.The concrete expressions that these prayers adopt are each monastic in origin. The seminarian may not dispose of the time or schedule to take up the rhythm of monastic hours. He must, however, establish a regular rhythm of prayer at certain set hours. Prayer without times for prayer evaporates. Indispensable moments in this rhythm are morning, evening, and before retiring. Eventually, the seminarian must learn to embrace the complete Liturgy of the Hours. Contemplative prayer complements this commitment, indispensably. The practices of prayer that the Catechism of the Catholic Church recommends are vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplative prayer. The latter form Saint Teresa of Avila describes as “a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us.”34 I would strongly encourage seminarians to read closely what the Catechism has to say about contemplative prayer in numbers 2709–2719. Indeed, I would encourage seminarians to read again the whole of Part Four of the Catechism, which is devoted to Christian prayer. The monastic culture confirms that learning and prayer go hand in hand. Prayer is the place where desire is enkindled. Remember what Saint Bernard told his monks: “Let those who are versed in the mystery revel in it; let all others burn with desire rather to attain to this experience than merely to learn about it.”35 Burning. Desiring. Experiencing.These activities, when they have God for their object, transpire only within the context of regular, personal prayer. The other feature of monastic culture that Dom Leclercq draws to our attention is the program of monastic studies which was built around the Bible, the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and the philosophical texts considered suitable for monastic studies.This is not the occasion to comment on curriculum development. At the same time, the list of subjects that seminarians are required to master makes it clear that they can only complete the program to the extent that they develop the habit of recollection. At this juncture note the congruity between the features of monastic life and the program for priestly formation: human formation, asceticism, spiritual formation, prayer. Human and spiritual formation: the life of virtue. Intellectual formation, study. We should further note the importance that the monastic tradition attaches to the study of the Bible, the tradition, and philosophy. First, the Bible. One may pose the question whether Saint Bernard would have been able to encourage his monks to read the Canticle of Canticles if he 34 Saint Teresa of Jesus, The Book of Her Life, 8, 5; as cited in CCC, §2709. 35 Bernard, On the Song of Songs, Sermon 1, 6.11. Scholarship and Sanctity 247 had known about the requirement of higher exegesis, as it is called. I expect that seminarians are accustomed to read prayerfully the Sacred Scriptures without too much reliance on scientific Scripture studies, at least the first time through. One of the sad results of modern Scripture studies manifests itself in the pulverization of the sacred texts. As one of my friends likes to remark, the commentaries keep getting bigger and bigger. The reason for this obscurantist development is closely linked to the requirements of academic institutions that put a premium to research. In any case, recently the Holy Father has remarked on what he calls canonical exegesis. One feature of this method is to read all the Sacred Scriptures together. In other words, there is an effort afoot to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.The Pope’s own book on Jesus Christ tries to implement the principles of this canonical exegesis. My recommendation to seminarians is that they read the Sacred Scriptures with confidence and devotion. The text of Saint Bernard on the “Canticle” returns with special aptness: “Only the touch of the Spirit can inspire a song like this, and only personal experience can unfold its meaning.” Second, the tradition. No seminarian can ignore the patristic and scholastic traditions and at the same time succeed in his priestly office. There always lingers the temptation to adopt the encyclopedic view of knowledge. Only what is up-to-date is true. I refer to this approach to learning as romantic evolutionary. It is romantic because it places without sufficient warrant a premium on what is the latest. It is evolutionary because it assumes that things keep getting better.The fact of the matter is that there are many good books that are old books. To read Saint Athanasius’s On the Incarnation is worth more than reading almost any 100 of the books written about Christ since 1900.The same may be said for Saint Thomas Aquinas. I made this case in my book A Short History of Thomism. One witness from the Thomist tradition who helps us understand the importance of seeing things from the perspective of the whole is the French Dominican author A. D. Sertillanges, who wrote a short classic translated into English as The Intellectual Life. Sertillanges helps us grasp why holiness and learning must go together. He writes:“Great men seem to us men of great boldness; in reality they are more obedient than others. The sovereign voice speaks to them. It is because they are actuated by an instinct which is a prompting of that sovereign voice that they take, always with courage and sometimes with great humility, the place that posterity will give them—venturing on acts and risking inventions often out of harmony with their time and place and even incurring much sarcasm from their fellows. They are not afraid because, however isolated they may appear to be, they feel that they are not alone. They 248 Romanus Cessario, O.P. have on their side the power that finally settles everything. They have a premonition of their empire to come.”36 He refers to those persons who give themselves over to the Bible, the tradition, and philosophy.37 Philosophy.The importance of philosophy and the classical disciplines that support it, including the classical languages, is central for seminary formation. The Church is taking back some of the ground lost in the 1960s and 1970s when it was thought that human sciences may replace philosophy. If you cannot distinguish, you are left with no alternative but to deny or affirm.To always deny results in recalcitrance.To always affirm makes you a dupe.Today it is not easy to choose the kind of philosophy that one should read.Again, I recommend that one follow the tutelage of Saint Thomas Aquinas.The reason for this suggestion is not partisanship. The suggestion follows the urging of Pope John Paul II in his encyclical letter that I have already cited, Fides et Ratio. Aquinas calls for a philosophy that merits the name of metaphysical realism.“If I insist so strongly,” writes the Pope, “on the metaphysical element, it is because I am convinced that it is the path to be taken in order to move beyond the crisis pervading large sectors of philosophy at the moment [1998], and thus to correct certain mistaken modes of behavior now widespread in our society.”38 This warning from Pope John Paul II brings us back to where we began. Holiness and learning. It would surprise me to discover that Pope Benedict XVI had not read Jean Leclercq’s book.Whether he read it or not, Pope Benedict agrees with Leclercq on the contribution that Saint Benedict made in establishing the Christian intellectual roots of Europe. 36 A. G. Sertillanges, O.P., The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods (West- minster, MD:The Newman Press, 1959), xi–xii. call them recognized spiritual authors. Dominican Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange (+1964), in his monumental work The Three Ages of the Interior Life (Rockford: Tan, 1989), provides a list of the saints and other spiritual giants whose works “we should not ignore” because “these works, though not composed under infallible inspiration, were written with the lights and the unction of the Holy Ghost.” Garrigou-Lagrange’s list of indispensable authors reads as follows: “The chief spritual works of St. Augustine, St. Jerome, Cassian, St. Leo, St. Benedict, St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil, St. John Chrysostom, Dionysius, St. Maximus Confessor, St. Anselm, and St. Bernard.Very useful also is an acquaintance with what most concerns the interior life in the writings of Richard of St.Victor, Hugh of St. Cher, St.Albert the Great, St.Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure. Profit may always be drawn from the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena, the works of [John] Tauler, and those of Blessed Henry Suso, Blessed Angela of Foligno, Blessed John Ruysbroeck, Thomas à Kempis, the probable author of The Imitation” (Garrigou-Lagrange, The Three Ages, 249–50). 38 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §83. 37 We Scholarship and Sanctity 249 These Christian roots mean a great deal to the Pope, and they should also to us. So I urge seminarians to take up the essay of Dom Jean Leclercq and to discover the monastic culture that is required for seminarians to lead a happy life, and to realize the priestly vocation, the seed of which God has placed in seminarians. Marriage is noble and essential for the well-being of the human race. Consecrated or religious vocations adorn the Church with special witnesses to the consuming power of God’s face. But neither the Church nor the world can survive long without priests. So I conclude by encouraging seminarians to fulfill the role that clerics played in creating Western civilization. The world needs wise diocesan priests who desire God ardently. So, as Pope Benedict XVI recently reminded priests and deacons: “Let us be the first to demonstrate the humility and purity of heart which are required to approach the splendor of God’s truth. In fidelity to the deposit of faith entrusted to the Apostles (cf. 1 Tim 6:20), let us be joyful witnesses of the transforming N&V power of the Gospel!”39 39 Benedict XVI, Homily at the Mass at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, 19 April 2008. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 251–67 251 Rescuing Gaudium et Spes: The New Humanism of John Paul II G EORGE W EIGEL Ethics and Public Policy Center Washington, DC O N AUGUST 7, 1945, the day after the world’s first atomic bomb was dropped at Hiroshima, Norman Cousins wrote an impassioned editorial for Saturday Review, an influential American political weekly firmly anchored on the liberal side of the opinion spectrum. Entitled “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” Cousins’s editorial (which later became a best-selling book of the same name) gave voice to the deep anxieties of many in the early days of the Cold War: modern technology, it seemed, had produced threats to the human future to which Technological Man had few, if any, answers. As Cousins wrote, “Man stumbles fitfully into a new age of atomic energy for which he is as ill-equipped to accept its potential blessings as he is to counteract or control its present dangers.”1 On October 11, 1962, seventeen years after Cousins sounded the alarm about the obsolescence of “modern man,” the Second Vatican Council formally opened. On October 15, a mere four days later, President John F. Kennedy was shown definitive photographic evidence that the Soviet Union was surreptitiously emplacing offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba, missiles whose warheads could destroy Washington, New York, and every other major city on the east coast of the United States in a matter of minutes. It has rarely been remarked that the first three weeks of Vatican II—weeks of high ecclesiastical drama in which John XXIII called the Church to a new evangelical activism in the modern world, and the Fathers of the Council sought to wrest control of the Council’s agenda from the Roman Curia—coincided with the Cuban Missile 1 Norman Cousins,“Modern Man Is Obsolete,” Saturday Review, 12 August 1945. George Weigel 252 Crisis: by all accounts, the closest the world ever came to a nuclear holocaust in which “modern man,” rather than being rendered obsolete, would be annihilated.Yet here was a coincidence with consequences. That juxtaposition of the Council’s opening with the terrifying high point of the Cold War had its effects in the Church’s life in the years immediately following. The experience of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which threatened to preclude the work of the Council before the Council had really begun, accelerated the Holy See’s quest for a new Ostpolitik, which would be designed and implemented by Agostino Casaroli during the pontificate of Paul VI. The strange coincidence of a world “one minute from midnight,”2 and the opening of a Council intended to create the conditions for the possibility of a new Pentecost throughout the world Church, was undoubtedly one motive behind John XXIII’s April 1963 encyclical on the imperative of peace, Pacem in Terris. It just as certainly formed part of the historical, even psychological, background from which emerged one of Vatican II’s most controversial documents, known during its developmental phase as Schema XIII. What Gaudium et Spes Was Meant To Do Schema XIII had distinguished ecclesiastical parentage: John XXIII himself; his successor, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini of Milan; and the Belgian Cardinal Leo Jozef Suenens, one of the Council’s four moderators. These churchmen wanted the Council to initiate a pastoral dialogue with modernity—with “modern man,” full of confidence in his new scientific and technological powers, yet fearing his obsolescence (as that quintessential modern man, Norman Cousins, had put it in 1945). Schema XIII was also intended to be the model of a new style of ecclesiastical rhetoric: the rather formal (some might say, petrified) rhetoric of neo-scholastic propositions would give way to a more conversational tone, in which the Church would make respectful proposals to the “modern world,” aimed at eliciting a dialogical response from rapidly secularizing societies and cultures. After four years of gestational travail (in which the archbishop of Kraków, Karol Wojtyl/a, played a significant role as one of many midwives), Schema XIII was finally born at the end of the Council’s fourth period and christened Gaudium et Spes. The Pastoral Constitution began with an introductory reflection on the human situation in the contemporary world, which was followed by two lengthy parts,“The Church and Man’s Vocation” (which continued the analysis of the introduction) and “Some 2 The phrase comes from Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War (New York: Knopf, 2008). Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 253 More Urgent Problems” (which addressed a cluster of specific issues).The structural organization of this second part anticipated the teaching of John Paul II in Centesimus Annus by describing a tripartite modern society in which politics, culture, and economics are in vigorous interaction; this scheme cleared the path in the development of Catholic social thought to John Paul II’s teaching on the free and virtuous society as one composed of a democratic polity, a free economy, and a vibrant public moral culture, with the last being crucial to the proper functioning of the other two. It is the portrait of the “modern world” running through Gaudium et Spes on which I wish to concentrate here, however. For in addition to analyzing specific issues, the Council Fathers highlighted what seemed to them the principal signs of the times—the chief characteristics of modernity, if you will—to which the proclamation of the Gospel had to attend.3 Gaudium et Spes is a complex document containing many enduring insights. But, read from the perspective of 2008—a mere two generations after it was written—the Pastoral Constitution also seems curiously, even 3 Throughout the world Church, the hermeneutical battles over Gaudium et Spes defined no small part of the post-conciliar terrain. In northern Europe, and especially in the Netherlands, Gaudium et Spes was read as endorsing an almost euphoric embrace of modernity. Careening through the cultural white water of “1968,” however, liberal euphoria became a kind of revolutionary zeal which, inter alia, emptied the Christian kerygma of its distinctive content—just as the European churches were being emptied of their congregants. In certain Latin American circles, on the other hand, Gaudium et Spes was judged a matter of bourgeois reformism from the outset.Thus the emergent theologies of liberation would dismiss Gaudium et Spes as hopelessly out-of-touch with their distinctive historical circumstances as they understood them.The northern Europeans, and their counterparts in “progressive” Catholicism throughout the developed world, embraced modernity and found themselves clinging to a phantom; the Latin American liberation theologians wanted nothing to do with the free economies and democratic polities of “the modern world.” However different they may seem, these two readings of Gaudium et Spes each reflect, if in distinct ways, what Pope Benedict XVI has termed a conciliar “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture”: that is,Vatican II understood as a fundamental break with the Christian past and the beginning of a new ecclesial age. (See Benedict XVI,“Address to the Roman Curia,” 22 December 2005.) By contrast, Benedict proposed a “hermeneutic of reform,” which he described as one “of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us.” Genuine reform, that is, presupposes that the Church is “a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remains the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God” (ibid.). The reading of Gaudium et Spes that follows assumes that the majority of the Council Fathers intended the Pastoral Constitution to be understood through a “hermeneutic of reform”—and then asks whether Gaudium et Spes properly read the “signs of the times.” 254 George Weigel strangely, dated. Gaudium et Spes is a photographic still, a snapshot, of the “modern world,” and the image is true enough for that time. But what the Council Fathers describe as the “modern world” turns out to have been a modernity that would soon self-destruct because of internal tensions and contradictions the Council did not address—a modernity that would produce not obsolescent modern man living under the shadow of global nuclear war, but post-modern man. And post-modern man is beset by more, and arguably graver, dangers than Norman Cousins and the Fathers of Vatican II imagined, when they pondered a modernity imperiled by its own artifacts and bereft of satisfying answers to the questions its accomplishments raised. There is no need here to belabor the worthy insights in Gaudium et Spes: the sympathetic treatment of the contemporary human quest for freedom; the dialogical approach to the challenge of modern atheism; the celebration of the genuine achievements of science and democracy; the ecclesiology of a Church that proposes, but does not impose; the touching description of conscience as “the most secret core and sanctuary of man . . . [where] he is alone with God,Whose voice echoes in its depths” (§16). Above all, the Council Fathers grasped the nub of the modern dilemma and the root of the modern possibility in their focus on philosophical anthropology—the idea of the human person—as the crucial question of the day (§12).These insights remain entirely pertinent to our situation, more than two generations after the Pastoral Constitution was promulgated, and we should remain grateful for them. Nevertheless, and in that spirit of gratitude, I would like to focus for a moment on the things that Gaudium et Spes did not see or did not anticipate, with an eye to rescuing the Pastoral Constitution from an undeserved obsolescence. For it is only when we identify these missing pieces that we can begin to understand why the challenge of post-modernity is even greater than the challenge of late modernity.And it is only from that understanding that we can begin to grasp why the new humanism of John Paul II—which is embedded in telegraphic form in key sections of Gaudium et Spes—remains essential for the rescue of the Pastoral Constitution and for the New Evangelization of the twenty-first century. What Gaudium et Spes Missed So, to put the matter bluntly, what did Gaudium et Spes miss in its portrait of what we now call late modernity? And what are the contemporary realities that Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate, but which are crucial components of the post-modern circumstance in which much of the developed world finds itself in the first years of the twenty-first century? Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 255 Gaudium et Spes recognized that a revolution in human self-understanding had followed Darwin and Freud, just as dramatic changes in our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it had followed the discoveries of Einstein and the other great twentieth-century physicists.The introductory section even suggested that humanity has, pace Feuerbach, passed through a “fiery brook,” on the far side of which religious conviction must be a matter of personal decision, rather than a matter of understandings and practices inherited from one’s ancestors and one’s culture. The Pastoral Constitution did not, however, take the full measure of the effects of the discovery of the DNA double-helix by James Watson and Francis Crick, and the new genetics that would follow.Thus the Pastoral Constitution did not anticipate that biology and the other life sciences would rapidly displace the hard sciences (such as physics) as the source of Promethean threats to the human future—and to man’s self-understanding. Gaudium et Spes depicted a world in which the chief philosophical challenges to the Christian worldview and to the Christian view of man are Marxism and existentialism of the Sartrean variety (§10).Yet Marxism was in the ash can of history within a generation of the Pastoral Constitution’s promulgation, and Sartrean existentialism is studied today, if at all, as a matter of antiquarian interest. Moreover, in surveying the intellectual-cultural landscape, Gaudium et Spes does not seem to have discerned that another philosophical challenger, the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and his followers, would mount a more forceful challenge to the Christian view of the human person (and to the possibility of a truth-centered public moral discourse) than Sartre ever managed. Gaudium et Spes welcomed the new roles that women were assuming throughout the world, and has important things to say about marriage and the family (cf. §§47–52). But the Pastoral Constitution does not seem to have anticipated the harder-edged forms of the new feminism that would break out into mainstream Western culture a few years after Vatican II. Nor does Gaudium et Spes seem to have expected the emergence of the two-worker family (in which both parents are wage-earners) and the changes that would effect in family life. Nor did the Pastoral Constitution anticipate the global plague of abortion (a practice closely linked in the West to radical feminism). Nor did it anticipate the “gay rights” movement and what would become a worldwide and historically unprecedented struggle over the very definition of marriage. In short, Gaudium et Spes gave us few, if any, hints that a new gnosticism, teaching the radical plasticity of human nature, was about to hit the Western world like a cultural tsunami: a gnosticism that, married to the biotechnological revolution produced by the new genetics, proposes to 256 George Weigel remake the human condition by manufacturing (or remanufacturing) human beings. Focused in part on the destructive capabilities of modern weaponry, Gaudium et Spes does not anticipate the threat to the human future embodied in the “immortality project” of the new genetics and the new biotechnologies, despite the warnings that had been raised by Aldous Huxley thirty-some years before.4 The Pastoral Constitution does acknowledge that “it is in the face of death that the riddle of human existence grows most acute,” and suggests that “the prolongation of biological life is unable to satisfy” the deepest desires of the human heart (cf. §18). But the Council Fathers do not seem to have anticipated that this “prolongation” was on the verge of becoming virtually infinite, a technological development with the most profound consequences for human self-understanding and for society.5 Gaudium et Spes sympathetically explored modern man’s crisis of religious faith, and rightly suggested that the Church’s failures must be taken into account when analyzing the roots of modern agnosticism and atheism (§§19–21). But Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate the demise of the secularization hypothesis: that once-taken-for-granted claim that modernization inevitably leads to secularization, which has now been empirically falsified in every part of the world except the North Atlantic community and its former colonies in Australasia. Gaudium et Spes does not, in other words, imagine a world that is becoming more religious, and in which religious conviction is having a determinative effect on world politics.6 Yet that is the world in which we live, a world in which, inter alia, radical forms of Islam like jihadism have changed the way each of us lives, works, and travels. The Council Fathers noted that population growth was putting social, economic, and spiritual pressures on many societies and tried to respond in a pastorally sensitive way (cf. GS §47). But there is no hint in Gaudium et Spes that “overpopulation” (whatever that means, for the term is essentially undefinable) would turn out to be a myth. Nor is there any suggestion that one of the gravest problems of the twenty-first century would be a precipitous drop in fertility across the globe, led by a Europe for 4 Huxley’s Brave New World was not only remarkably prescient in anticipating the “technologization” of reproduction, decades before Watson and Crick described the structure of DNA and thus cracked the human genetic code; the British author—an atheist—correctly understood that the benign authoritarianism of the future would be based on a concept of the human condition from which any considerations of teleology were rigorously excluded. 5 See Leon R. Kass, “L’Chaim and Its Limits:Why Not Immortality?” First Things 113 (May 2001): 17–24. 6 See Peter L. Berger, “Secularization Falsified,” First Things 180 (February 2008): 23–27. Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 257 whose lack of children a new demographic term had to be invented: “lowest low fertility.”7 The Council Fathers were not, of course, antinatalist scientific charlatans like Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book, The Population Bomb, did much to popularize the “threat” of “overpopulation.”8 But Gaudium et Spes depicted a world in which too-many-people-withtoo-few-resources is the norm and projected that norm into the foreseeable future; the Pastoral Constitution did not anticipate what seems likely to be the mid-twenty-first-century reality, which, in the aggregate, will be one of too few people in a world of expanding wealth. Moreover, that wealth will be expanding because of something else that Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate: the silicon revolution, the rise of the Internet and other new communications media, and indeed the entire phenomenon of communications-driven “globalization.” That the world would soon become, for economic purposes, a single time-zone world in which virtually everyone is in real-time communication with everyone else, is not something a reader of Gaudium et Spes in 1965 would have learned (see, for example, GS §66). Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate that vast numbers of human beings would in fact lift themselves out of poverty in the late twentieth century, such that by the first decade of the twentyfirst century some five-sixths of the world would be un-poor, or well on the way to being un-poor—while the “bottom billion” would be mired into abject poverty, in considerable part because of something else that Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate: the fantastic corruption and incompetence of post-colonial governments in the Third World.9 In light of the revolutionary upheavals of the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and mindful of the charge (however false) that the Church of 1789 was essentially a department of the ancien régime, the Council Fathers recovered a Gelasian theme from the distant past of the Church’s teaching about civil authority and lifted up the legitimate autonomy of the secular in Gaudium et Spes.10 But the Pastoral 7 On why there is no such thing as “overpopulation,” see Nicholas Eberstadt, “Too Many People?” International Policy Network, July 2007, www.policynetwork.net. On depopulation, see, inter alia, Philip Longmann, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What To Do About It (New York: Basic Books, 2004). 8 Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968). 9 See Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why The Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). 10 See, for example, Gaudium et Spes, §36. On Pope Gelasius I’s distinction between sacred and secular authority, see John Courtney Murray, S.J., We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Image Books, 1964), 196. 258 George Weigel Constitution did not anticipate the emergence of a radical secularism that would seek to enforce a public arena shorn of religious and moral reference points, to the point of imposing what Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger called, on April 18, 2005, the “dictatorship of relativism.”11 Then there was the Council Fathers’ call for a new intellectual synthesis focused on the cultivation of wisdom: surely a worthy goal (cf. GS §56).Yet within a decade and a half, the very idea of “synthesis” in the world of learning would be displaced by theories of the inevitable fragmentation and incoherence of knowledge. Similarly, the Council Fathers had some kind things to say about modern art (in GS §62), seemingly innocent of any concern that the avant-garde might soon decay into new forms of decadence. In terms of international affairs, Gaudium et Spes suggested that economic inequality would be the primary casus belli between nations in the future.Yet it is hard to think of very many wars caused by economic inequality or the desire to plunder resources since 1965. Rather, the world’s wars in the decades following Gaudium et Spes would be caused by ideological conflict and passion, ancient ethnic, racial, and tribal hatreds, and/or distorted religious conviction—aided and abetted by the failures of the United Nations (in which Gaudium et Spes reposed considerable confidence) and the disinclination of the former colonial powers to impose a measure of the tranquillity of order in the places they once ruled (like Rwanda and Sudan) or that were once their close neighbors (such as Yugoslavia). Perhaps most tellingly, Gaudium et Spes suggested that an intellectually assertive atheism would continue to pose a particularly sharp challenge to the Church, when in fact a massive religious indifferentism—described by the Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart as “metaphysical boredom”—would soon descend over Christianity’s European heartland like a thick, choking fog.12 Gaudium et Spes anticipated the possibility of a 11 This lacuna is all the more surprising given the important role played by Henri de Lubac, S.J., in the drafting of Gaudium et Spes prior to the fourth period of the Council. For de Lubac’s 1942 study, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), had ably described the intellectual origins, and anticipated many features, of the new secularism that would be unmistakably evident in post-Cold War Europe, not least in the 2003–2004 debate over the Preamble to the European Constitutional Treaty. On this point, see Joseph Weiler, Un’Europa Cristiana: Un saggio esplorativo (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2003), and George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (New York: Basic Books, 2005). 12 David Bentley Hart,“Religion in America:Ancient and Modern,” The New Criterion, March 2004: 16. Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 259 new, respectful dialogue between belief and unbelief; it did not anticipate that Catholic proposals would be received with a yawn of indifference in cultures whose deepest civilizational subsoil was once tilled by the Church. Gaudium et Spes argued that “atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age”; yet the problem would in fact be much worse (§19). Boredom in both its spiritual and metaphysical forms—a debonair indifference to the question of God, and a stultifying lack of awe and wonder at the very mystery of being—would turn out to be a far more lethal, and far more effective, challenge to the biblical view of man than “scientific atheism” or existentialism ever was. And the net result, in the Western world at least: not an obsolescent “modern man” of the sort imagined by both a secular analyst like Norman Cousins and the Fathers of Vatican II, but post-modern man— metaphysically indifferent, spiritually bored, demographically barren, skeptical about the human capacity to know the truth of anything with certainty, rigorously relativistic in morals, willing to impose that relativism on others through coercive state power, and determined to live according to the conviction that personal autonomy is the highest expression of the human. Modern man may have been “obsolete” in 1945 or 1965.What came next was even worse. The Wojtyl/a Solution What, then, are we to make of these multiple failures to read accurately the signs of the times? Do they suggest a certain naivete about modernity, as Pope Benedict XVI suggested several times in his pre-papal commentary on Gaudium et Spes?13 Was the very idea of a document like Gaudium et Spes misbegotten, as Tracey Rowland and others in the camp of “radical orthodoxy” imply?14 Is Gaudium et Spes hopelessly antiquated? Read from the vantage point of today, Gaudium et Spes does suffer from a kind of historical myopia.The document’s description of the key cultural challenges of “the modern world” sheds some light on the situation in the period 1945–1965; but that analysis does not anticipate, 13 See, for example, Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 378–93. Shortly before his election as pope, Ratzinger praised Gaudium et Spes’s call to a renewed sense of Chistian vocation in the world in a homily at St. Peter’s Basilica: www.vatican.va/congregations/cfaith/ documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20050318_ratzinger-gadium-spes_en.html. 14 See Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition (London: Routledge, 2003), and Tracey Rowland, “Reclaiming the Tradition: John Paul II as the Authentic Interpreter of Vatican II,” in John Paul the Great: Maker of the Post-Conciliar Church, ed.William Oddie (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 27–48. 260 George Weigel much less describe, the end of late modernity and the rise of post-modernity that followed the flashpoint of “1968.”Yet the Pastoral Constitution’s analysis is both correct (for its time) and prescient (with reference to the impending future) on what is perhaps the crucial point: in both the late modern world of Vatican II and the post-modern world of today, the anthropological question is fundamental. And that, interestingly enough, is the question Karol Wojtyl/a wished the Council to address, right from the beginning. The first volumes of the Acta of Vatican II make fascinating reading, being a collection of submissions to the conciliar Ante-Preparatory Commission, which was charged with formulating an agenda for the Council and asked the world bishops, seminary faculties, and religious superiors (of men!) for ideas. Some submissions to the Ante-Preparatory Commission show genuine insight into the Church’s condition, ad intra and ad extra ; they reflect a sense that a good, self-critical stock-taking, and serious pastoral reform, were in order in the Catholic Church. Other submissions, perhaps the majority, suggest that many of the world’s bishops expected a brief, virtually pro forma Council, focused on matters of internal ecclesiastical housekeeping: thus the bishops would come to Rome for a few months, ratify a few adjustments in Church practice, and return home by Christmas, their business done. The tensions between these two visions of what Vatican II should be were the matrix, of course, of some of the high drama in the Council’s opening weeks; as one of the curially experienced reformers among the Council Fathers, Cardinal Montini, put it to a friend on the night that John XXIII announced his intention of summoning an ecumenical council: “This holy old boy doesn’t realize what a hornet’s nest he’s stirring up.”15 Like other bishops, the young auxiliary bishop of Kraków touched on pastoral matters in his submission to the Ante-Preparatory Commission: the possibility of vernacular liturgy; a new urgency in ecumenism; the need for Christian education of the laity; a reform in the intellectual and cultural formation of priests, before and after ordination.Yet the heart of Bishop Karol Wojtyl/a’s response to the queries from Rome was a kind of philosophical essay. What, he asked, was the human condition today? What do people expect to hear from the Church, and what do they need to hear from the Church? What the modern world needed, Wojtyl/a suggested, was an integral vision of the human person, nobler and more comprehensive than other understandings of man then on offer.The Western humanistic project, he 15 Antonio Fappani and Franco Molinari, Giovanni Battista Montini Giovane: Docu- menti inediti a testimonianze (Turin: Marietti, 1979), 171. Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 261 argued, had gone off the rails in recent centuries. Defective, truncated, even demonic ideas of human nature, human community, human origins, and human destiny were everywhere; the most lethal of those false ideas created the cultural conditions for the possibility of the civilizational catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century.16 Why, Wojtyl/a asked, had a century that had begun with such high expectations for the human future produced two world wars, a Cold War that threatened the very survival of humanity, oceans of blood, mountains of corpses, the Gulag, Auschwitz, and the greatest persecution of Christianity in two millennia—and all between 1914 and 1960? The abattoir of the twentieth century, Bishop Wojtyl/a proposed, had been made possible by desperately defective ideas of who man is, which had led to distorted human aspirations and grotesque political projects. Others knew that the anthropological question was central, Wojtyl/a acknowledged, even if their answers were deficient. Scientific positivists, dialectical Marxists, and literary existentialists all imagined themselves humanists; each thought that his method and his insight could lead humanity to a genuine liberation.What did the Church have to say to all of this? After two millennia, the world had questions to put to the Church:What is the Church’s idea of man? What is Christian humanism? How does it differ from the many other humanisms in the modern world? Can Christian humanism answer the burning questions that naturally arise in the human heart—questions that are part and parcel of the struggles of a material creature with intense spiritual longings? Bishop Karol Wojtyl/a, in other words, proposed that the entire project of Vatican II be organized around the anthropological question. The Council was meeting in the middle of a century that prided itself on its humanism. Yet humanism was manifestly in crisis, and had been for decades.The promise of salvation through ultra-mundane humanism had led to grief and slaughter, time and again; accepting the Great Commission (Mt 28:16–20) in these circumstances meant nothing less than mounting a cultural rescue operation. Thus Wojtyl/a suggested that the Church’s central task at Vatican II was to think through a Christian anthropology adequate to the demands of Christian humanism in an age in which humanism’s decay had had lethal consequences. 16 Years later, the American historian David Fromkin would agree, arguing that the corruption of intellectual culture in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Europe had played a significant role in making possible the otherwise incomprehensible, self-destructive slaughters of World War I, from which much of the rest of twentieth-century history flowed; see Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer:Who Started the Great War in 1914? (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004). 262 George Weigel To this task, Wojtyl/a brought the philosophical anthropology he had developed over two decades of reflection, teaching, and writing.Wojtyl/a’s “new humanism” grew from three sources, and at the risk of over-simplification, its sources and main ideas can be summarized as follows. From his readings in St. John of the Cross, Karol Wojtyl/a took the view that the distinctive characteristic of human existence is man’s interiority, which has its roots in the origin of every being—in God. Thus for Wojtyl/a, modernity’s “turn to the subject,” properly understood, is a turn toward God. Cartesian subjectivity—at least as understood by Descartes’s most influential followers, such as Hume—led only to the self.Wojtyl/a’s concept of subjectivity was such that the “turn” need not bracket (or dismiss) the transcendent dimension, or the question of God; rather, the “turn to the subject,” rightly taken, opens up the question of God. From Thomas Aquinas, Karol Wojtyl/a took a realistic ontology that would secure the epistemological foundation of his new humanism. His philosophical anthropology was built on a trust in human experience, and on rationally defensible convictions about the human capacity to get at the truth of things, however incompletely. Thus it posed a challenge to the post-Kantian and (especially) post-Humean hermeneutics of suspicion, which had had such a corrosive effect on the humanistic project. From Aquinas,Wojtyl/a also learned that philosophical anthropology was a matter of both/and: both the old masters of the Western philosophical tradition and contemporary questions and questioners are to be in play in a Christian reflection—indeed, in any serious philosophical reflection—on the question of man.Thus Wojtyl/a’s new humanism would reject the self-regarding “presentism” of too much contemporary thought; by contrast, the new humanism would practice the ecumenism of time. Finally, Wojtyl/a took from Aquinas a determination not to be reductive: the task of philosophical anthropology was to see, probe, and understand man in his full complexity. Thus the spiritual dimension of human experience must be part of any genuinely humanistic account of the human condition. Finally, from Max Scheler and others in the early phenomenological movement,Wojtyl/a learned that feeling and sensibility can disclose metaphysical and moral truths—and that this, too, was part of dealing with man “in full.”17 17 On these points, see Rocco Buttiglione, Karol Wojtyl/a:The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997); Jaroslaw Kupczak, O.P., The Human Person as Efficient Cause in the Christian Anthropology of Karol Wojtyl/a (unpublished S.T.D. dissertation, John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, 1996), and Destined for Liberty:The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyl/a/John Paul II (Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 263 Wojtyl/a deepened his exploration of philosophical anthropology in his graduate-level “Lublin Lectures” during the mid- and late-1950s. These lectures involved a trans-temporal dialogue with some of the great thinkers of the past: Plato,Aristotle,Augustine,Aquinas, Kant, Hume, and Scheler. (Interestingly enough, as if in anticipation of one the challenges of post-modernity cited above,Wojtyl/a also analyzed Bentham and utilitarianism during this period.) And if there was a focal point around which Wojtyl/a’s explorations in philosophical anthropology pivoted, it was the question of freedom.This was a question with a certain existential urgency, of course, given the realities of life in Poland in the immediate post-Stalin period; here,Wojtyl/a honed his claim that communism’s economic and political failures were based on a fundamental anthropological error. At the same time, Wojtyl/a sharpened his philosophical understanding of human freedom by analyzing the defects of the moral theories of Kant (deformed by a certain rationalistic reduction) and Scheler (deformed by a certain emotivist reduction).The net result was a Thomistically grounded, yet thoroughly contemporary, ontology and phenomenology of freedom that was positioned to challenge both the false humanisms of late modernity and the post-modern reduction of freedom to a matter of individualist, autonomous “choice.” Thus for Wojtyl/a, a truly human freedom is “freedom for excellence” (to borrow a phrase from the moral theologian Servais Pinckaers, O.P.): freedom is a matter of freely choosing what we can know to be good, and doing so as a matter of moral habit. Against the assumptions of postmodernism (which, as Pinckaers shows, are actually rooted in an Ockhamite voluntarism), freedom is not to be understood as a free-floating faculty of choice that can legitimately attach itself to anything; this, for Wojtyl/a, is a dehumanizing concept of freedom. Rather, freedom is a capacity into which individuals, cultures, and societies grow. On this analysis, what post-modernity would come to call “autonomy” is in fact a prison, with bars of solipsism and locks of ignorance. Because of that, the post-modern “autonomy project” leads to both auto-enslavement at the personal level and relativism-imposed-by-authoritarianism at the societal level.18 Press, 2000); and Kenneth Schmitz, At the Center of the Human Drama:The Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyl/a/Pope John Paul II (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993). 18 On the Ockhamite origins of a lot of modern trouble, see Servais Pinckaers, O.P., The Sources of Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995). 264 George Weigel This rich theory of freedom is at the heart of Wojtyl/a’s new humanism, and it is crystallized in the two most-quoted passages from Gaudium et Spes in the magisterium of John Paul II: Gaudium et spes §22 (“[I]t is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. . . . Christ the Lord, Christ the New Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father and his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling”), and Gaudium et spes §24 ( “[M]an can discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself ”). These two passages from Gaudium et Spes, in which it is reasonable to speculate that Wojtyl/a had an authorial hand, encapsulate what Wojtyl/a would call, in a 1974 lecture at an international symposium on the seventh centenary of the death of Thomas Aquinas, the “Law of the Gift.”19 And the Law of the Gift was at the center of the moral, indeed ontological, truth about man: we are made for freedom, which means that our lives must be lived as the gift-for-others that life itself is to each of us. For Wojtyl/a-the-Christian, the ultimate ground of the Law of the Gift is the interior life of the Holy Trinity, which imprints itself ad extra on the human person as the imago Dei.Yet Wojtyl/a-the-philosopher was persuaded that one could get to the Law of the Gift, rationally and reasonably, through a serious reflection on human moral agency: a turn-to-the-subject that did not lead to solipsism and “autonomy,” but to love and responsibility. Freedom, lived according to its proper dignity, is always freedom tethered to truth and ordered to goodness. Pope John Paul II would develop this concept of freedom, and deepen the new humanism encoded in Gaudium et spes §22 and Gaudium et spes §24, throughout his pontificate. Freedom for excellence, for example, is the central organizing idea of the 1991 social encyclical, Centesimus Annus, an encyclical that not only “looks back” at the heritage of post-Leonine Catholic social doctrine but also “looks ahead” to the post-modernity of the immediate future—and presciently anticipates some of the major challenges of a world in which history has clearly not ended. John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body,” laid out in his Wednesday catecheses from 1979 through 1984, is perhaps the Church’s most compelling response to the new gnosticism of post-modernity, and challenges postmodern man to rediscover his sacramentality and the sacramentality of the world. Not only does the Church take our human embodiedness as male and female far more seriously than post-modern gnostics, John Paul II suggests; the Church’s sacramental vision of human embodiedness, 19 Karol Wojtyl/a,“The Personal Structure of Self-Determination,” in his Person and Community: Selected Essays (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 194. Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 265 linked to freedom-for-excellence, sheds important light on some of the most deeply controverted issues of our time. In Veritatis Splendor, John Paul challenged the moral relativism that is central to the autonomy project by an appeal to the dignity of conscience as central to human dignity (cf. Veritatis Splendor, §58). In Fides et Ratio, John Paul challenged post-modern man to grow up: to leave the sandbox of metaphysical and epistemological skepticism and, in doing so, to break through to a new, genuinely mature humanism that would be proof against the temptations of spiritual boredom. Then there is the new Catechism, promulgated by John Paul II in 1992 with the Apostolic Constitution Fidei Depositum. The very fact of The Catechism of the Catholic Church, as Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, O.P., has pointed out, is a challenge to post-modernism’s insistence on the incoherence of knowledge. Here, the Church proposes, is a comprehensive and coherent account of what we believe, how we pray, and how we think we ought to live. And with the Catechism, the Church proposes a question to the world: which of these two alternatives strikes you as the more deeply humane, the Church asks postmodern man—the vision of human nature and possibility we propose, or a life in which material wealth is coupled with spiritual boredom and moral insouciance? Finally, mention should be made of the impact of John Paul II’s new humanism, or personalism, on key theological themes of the pontificate: his Christology, as evidenced from the beginning in Redemptor Hominis; his ecclesiology and his theory of Christian mission in Redemptoris Missio; his sacramental theology in Novo Millennio Ineunte and Ecclesia de Eucharistia; his dialogical approach to ecumenism (Ut Unum Sint ) and interreligious dialogue (Redemptoris Missio, again); his treatment of the priesthood (Pastores Dabo Vobis ); and his theory of Catholic higher education (Ex Corde Ecclesiae ). Personalism, the new humanism, and freedom for excellence were also decisive factors in the social doctrine of John Paul II, beginning with his innovative theology of work in Laborem Exercens, continuing with the definition of a “right of economic initiative” in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, and culminating in his empirically sensitive treatment of the dynamics of the free economy in Centesimus Annus. The Next Steps The new humanism of John Paul II is a living thing, a growing body of thought that must be nurtured and developed by the late pope’s intellectual disciples in the decades ahead, if the Church is to respond adequately to the anthropological question that lies at the heart of so many postmodern dilemmas. Such a development must reckon with some of the 266 George Weigel serious questions that have been put to John Paul’s personalism by sympathetic critics and faithful Catholics.20 Granted that Wojtyl/a’s personalist approach to a new humanism works well in promoting an integral vision of the human person, in giving content to the notion of “human dignity,” in catechizing the sacraments, in unpacking questions of sexual ethics, in fostering ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue, and even in explicating doctrines such as the Trinity, but does the personalist approach “work” quite as well when issues of state power are engaged? What, for example, does the new humanism have to say when international conflicts become simply intractable, and further negotiation is both futile and dangerous; does John Paul II’s new humanism lead to a functional pacifism that retains the Church’s tacit adherence to the just war tradition while de facto putting the Church in opposition to virtually every imaginable use of armed force? Is a dignitarian-personalist opposition to capital punishment the last word to be said on that difficult subject? Theologians sympathetic to John Paul II’s personalism have also raised concerns about its methodological effects in moral theology. Pastoral experience suggests that a personalist approach to the central teaching of Humanae Vitae is far more successful than the Thomistic teleology in which Paul VI framed that teaching; yet does such an approach tend, over time, to weaken the Church’s sense of the ontological dimensions of the moral law? Christological and eschatological questions are also engaged: could the late Pope’s stress in his magisterium on the person of the Christ, whose ministry embodies in a perfect way the Law of the Gift, lead to a kind of ecclesial forgetting of the sovereignty of the Risen Lord, who is the world’s judge as well as its servant? Or, in a related matter: does the purification in Purgatory stressed by the Pope’s personalism minimize the penal dimension of that purification—so beautifully expressed, for example, in elements of the funeral liturgy and in Dante’s Purgatorio ? Grappling with these questions will not vitiate, but rather strengthen, the claim that the new humanism of John Paul II, manifest in both his philosophical and theological personalism, is a uniquely valuable resource for responding to the anthropological question which, as the Fathers of Vatican II saw, was central in parsing the human condition in the modern world. It is just as valuable a resource for the post-modern world that Gaudium et Spes seems not to have seen hovering just beyond the immediate horizon. The philosophical and theological anthropology of John 20 On these and related points, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.,“John Paul II and the Mystery of the Human Person,” in his Church and Society:The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988–2007 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 414–29. Rescuing Rescuing Gaudium et Spes 267 Paul II, developed and refined, is thus the key to the rescue of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World from the imprisonment in the dungeon of the sixties to which some of its critics have N&V consigned it. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 269–81 269 Gaudium et Spes, Luctus et Angor: The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition PAUL J. G RIFFITHS Duke Divinity School Durham, North Carolina C ATHOLIC diagnoses of the pain and damage proper to the human condition after the fall can be arranged on a gamut.At one end are those that depict us as utterly corrupt, constantly groaning at the agony of our condition and incapable of seeing or responding to the beauty of the creator’s trace in the created order. At the other are those that depict us as superficially damaged, easily and naturally capable of perceiving and responsively resonating to the Lord’s presence in the world, and suffering moderately, comprehensibly, and sustainably. Positions that approach either of these extremes tend to have more or less deep systematic difficulties and in the end not to be defensibly Catholic. But between these there remains a broad range of possibilities, most of which have found a place within the tradition. Pascal’s analysis of the human condition, for example, or Newman’s, or Augustine’s (in most of his moods), has a very different tone than does Bernard of Clairvaux’s, or Thomas Aquinas’s. Temperament no doubt has a good deal to do with what a particular Catholic thinker is drawn to emphasize when offering such a diagnosis; but so do differences on other theological questions. Answers given to the question of the extent to which, if at all, the human condition can properly be said to have improved over time since the fall are intimate with, even though analytically separable from, conclusions about the extent to which we are damaged and subject to pain.Those close to the positive end of the pain-and-damage gamut are drawn to a progressive view that emphasizes both the possibility and the reality of improvement in our condition. We are capable, according to such views, of self-improvement both materially and morally; and not 270 Paul J. Griffiths only are we capable of it, we have actually done it. Human history, on extreme versions of this view, has been an upward trajectory toward where we now find ourselves; and the human future will be more of the same, onward and upward into an inconceivably better future. The opposed view is that there has been and can be no improvement in the fundamentals of the human condition, and that while we may see occasional and local changes for the better (polio is eliminated, slavery locally abolished), these are always inseparable from unanticipated worsenings of our condition (polio’s elimination is among the conditions of the emergence of some new, much worse disease; the local abolition of slavery causes its increase elsewhere; and so on). Misery remains constant and progress an illusion, according to advocates of this family of views.1 On this question of progress and improvement in the post lapsum human condition, too, the Catholic tradition has been hospitable to a broad range of opinion. It has, however, not usually been so to an unnuanced optimism about progress.That family of views is more at home in secular conceptual settings: it sits well with a certain kind of old-fashioned evolutionism,2 and it has a special affinity with the economic forms of life that belong to late modernity, according to which anything less than constant growth and improvement (in economics, in medicine, in technology) is a disaster. Catholics are more likely to acknowledge the possibility of local improvements in the human condition, while being skeptical about the possibility, much less the likelihood, of fundamental or systemic improvement. These matters, the extent to which and ways in which pain, damage, and improvement ought to be thought to belong to the human condition since banishment from the garden, are relevant to a consideration of Gaudium et Spes almost 45 years after its promulgation (I write in 2009), 1 Neither of these positions is much nuanced, and many distinctions could be applied to make them more so.The first and most obvious one is to distinguish in extenso and with precision between local and universal improvement: it is possible to think that there are many instances of local progress while at the same time denying that universal improvement, progress across the board, ever happens. An important nontheological treatment (and critique) of the idea of progress is Christopher Lasch’s The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991). Some Catholic interpretations of Gaudium et Spes stand in considerable danger of captivity to a narrative of progress.The notion of the normativity of the future, in Mary Elsbernd and Reimund Beringer’s “Interpreting the Signs of the Times in the Light of the Gospel,” in Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in the Light of the Gospel, ed. Johan Verstraeten (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007), 43–97, moves in this direction. 2 Evident in peculiarly intense form in George Bernard Shaw’s 1903 play Man and Superman. The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 271 because for most of that time both its supporters and its critics have attributed to it a position close to the positive end of the gamut on all three topics, and have variously approved or disapproved of it because it accords, or does not, with their own preferred position on these questions. But is Gaudium et Spes in fact positive in an unnuanced way—or at all—about the possibility and reality of improvement in the human condition? Does it minimize the depiction of damage and pain in its depictions of the human condition? I shall try to show that the answer to these questions is no, and that therefore those who either dislike or like the document because they take the answers to both questions to be yes are confused. It is in fact remarkable how little has been written about the emphasis Gaudium et Spes places upon anguish as intrinsic to the human condition;3 the same is true about its clear and repeated statements of the fact that apparent improvements in the human condition are always local and always ambiguous. • • • Gaudium et Spes was promulgated on 7 December 1965, as the last of the Second Vatican Council’s texts. It is the Council’s only pastoral constitution (constitutio pastoralis ). There are, apart from it, nine decrees (decreta ), three declarations (declarationes ), one constitution (constitutio ) simpliciter, and two dogmatic constitutions (constitutiones dogmaticae ).The distinctions marked by these labels are important, and while this is no place for a full discussion of their meaning, which is in any case disputed,4 it is relevant to the topic of this essay to note that the Council Fathers drew explicit attention to what they meant by categorizing Gaudium et Spes as a pastoral constitution in the first note to the text; in that same footnote they also had something to say about what effect calling Gaudium et Spes a pastoral constitution ought to have upon how the text is read and interpreted. Here is the note in full: The Pastoral Constitution “On the Church in the Contemporary World” consists of two parts [i.e., §§11–45 and §§46–89], which together form a unity. The Constitution is called ‘pastoral’ because it intends, in dependence upon doctrinal principles, to express the relationship of the Church to the world and its contemporary inhabitants. However, there is lack neither of a pastoral intention in the first part 3 A notable exception is Paul Bordeyne, L’homme et son angoisse: La théologie morale de Gaudium et spes (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2004). 4 For the details of the discussions at the Council about whether the category “pastoral constitution” is the right one for the document, and what it might mean if it is, see Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5 (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 77–82. 272 Paul J. Griffiths nor of a doctrinal intention in the second. In the first part, the Church develops its doctrine about human beings and the world in which they find themselves, together with its own relationship to these same things. In the second, it concentrates upon diverse aspects of contemporary life and human society, and particularly upon questions and problems that seem urgent in our time. As a result, there is in this latter part material which, though subject to doctrinal principles, has to do with both permanent and contingent matters.Therefore, this Constitution should be interpreted according to the usual norms of theological interpretation, and with proper regard, especially in the second part, for the inevitably changing circumstances inseparable from the matters there treated.5 This programmatic statement is important in several ways. First, the pastoral nature of the text is located in its concern to “express the relationship” (habitudinem . . . exprimere ) of the Church to particular transient and contingent states of affairs—matters of social and political organization, for example, or of local history, or of advance in scientific understanding or technological capacity. It is the fact that the text makes judgments on these matters, mostly in its second part, that makes it pastoral. In making such judgments, and in making recommendations that flow from them, the Church offers guidance, but not prescriptive teaching, to the faithful about how they should respond to the world in which they find themselves. The Council Fathers here function principally as pastores rather than as doctores ; and they signal this in the status allotted to the text. Second, readers of Gaudium et Spes need to show “proper regard” for the “naturally changing circumstances of the matters treated” in the second part. They ought, that is, sit a good deal lighter to what the text says about such matters than to what it says about matters of doctrinal principle.This is because the Church has no special diagnostic expertise: rather, the descriptive claims it makes about the present economic or political condition of the world and the prognostic ones it offers about the likely near-term future of such matters are as likely to be wrong (which is to say very likely) as what the (often secular) authorities upon which it 5 My translation from the Latin given in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 1069. I assume, though I am not sure I am right to do so, that the magisterial weight of notes to conciliar documents is the same as that of the text. On the meaning of the characterization of Gaudium et Spes as a pastoral constitution, and the significance of its title, see, usefully, Hans-Joachim Sander’s analysis in Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath, eds., Herders Theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, 5 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 2005), vol. 5, 691–710. The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 273 draws in making such judgments themselves claim. It is not, therefore, to take a couple of instances almost at random, de fide tenendum that “the modern economy is characterised by our growing mastery over nature” (§63)—the reverse may well be true—or that it is “obviously” the case that we should seek “the establishment of a universal public authority” (§81) to safeguard international peace. If it is true (I think it is) that we should seek the establishment of such an authority, it is not de fide tenendum to think it obviously so. These are prudential, pastoral judgments by the teaching Church, to be accepted precisely as such. But, third, there can be no sharp or final distinction between the pastoral and the doctrinal. The first, largely doctrinal, part has pastoral intent and implications; and the second, largely pastoral, part has doctrinal intent and implications. Judgments about what belongs under which head, and the extent to which pastoral recommendations can be separated from teaching with doctrinal weight, are not easy to make and must be made with care. These first three points, and the passage from which they are drawn, are substantively important.They might, if taken seriously, moderate some of the disagreement about how to read Gaudium et Spes, for that disagreement is, among Catholics, more often about the text’s pastoral recommendations than about its substantive doctrinal claims. If it were better understood that the text’s status as a pastoral constitution, and the guidelines it offers as to how it should be read exactly as such, permit (indeed, probably require) a broad range of positions among Catholics on some of the particular recommendations it makes, a good deal of the odium would be removed from disagreements about how to read and implement it. It is not rare for magisterial texts to provide explicit, self-referential guidelines to how they should be read. But it is rare—I suspect that Gaudium et Spes provides the first instance—for such a text to make an explicit distinction between its pastoral and its doctrinal content, with all the qualifications noted, and to signal thereby a mode of reading attentive to just that distinction. For that reason alone, more attention should be paid to the text’s opening footnote. But even that is not all. If I read the footnote correctly, it makes no reference to the Prooemium (§§1–3), the Expositio Introductiva (§§4–10), or the Conclusio (§§91–93), for these parts of the text belong neither to Part One nor to Part Two, which are the only segments of the text given explicit mention in the footnote. The footnote’s hermeneutic, then, leaves aside perhaps one-tenth of the work, thus providing no guidance as to whether these sections should be thought of as principally doctrinal, principally pastoral, or something else altogether. I suspect that the right answer is 274 Paul J. Griffiths “something else altogether,” and in what follows I offer a close reading exactly of these parts of Gaudium et Spes with two questions in mind.The first is this: where does the diagnosis of the human condition, both Christian and pagan, offered therein belong on the earlier-identified gamut of seriousness about pain, damage, and the prospect of improvement? And the second is: what is the magisterial status of that diagnosis?—Or, put slightly differently, what kind of assent does the diagnosis demand of or suggest to Catholics reading it now, almost two generations after it was composed and promulgated? In dealing with this second question, the guidelines of the opening footnote provide some help. • • • The Pastoral Constitution’s first three words are gaudium et spes (joy and hope); its second three are luctus et angor (sorrow and anguish).The history of the text’s reception and use would certainly have been very different if this order had been reversed. The judgment that Gaudium et Spes is fundamentally and essentially optimistic about the human condition here below is one readers are predisposed to make by the text’s title; it is one even more attractive to those who have not read the text, but who are nonetheless sure they know what is in it.6 A work titled “Sorrow and Anguish” necessarily signals a different angle of vision upon the human condition than does one called “Joy and Hope.” In fact, Gaudium et Spes balances its attention to the positive and negative aspects of the human condition fairly well. It is certainly not unrealistically optimistic, or optimistic at all, about that condition. The sorrow and anguish mentioned by Gaudium et Spes in its second clause, as well as the joy and hope mentioned in its first, belong to those addressed by the text, those who live in the world of the early 1960s.That joy, hope, sorrow, and anguish are shared, the text goes on to say, by the disciples of Christ, for there is nothing human “which does not also echo in their hearts” (§2). So far, then, a balanced evaluation of the human condition: both its delights and its horrors are acknowledged from the outset, and both together are said to order the relation of Church to world. Gaudium et Spes says of itself that it speaks not just or even principally to Christians, but to all of humanity; it has in view the entire world, “the theater of human history, marked by its labor (industria ), its 6 On this see Richard Schenk,“Officium signa temporum perscrutandi: New Encoun- ters of Gospel and Culture in the Context of the New Evangelisation,” in Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in Light of the Gospel, ed. Johan Verstraeten (Leuven: Leuven University Press; Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 167–203, at 176ff. Schenk’s treatment of Lukas Vischer’s memo of 1963 on an early draft of material that was to become Gaudium et Spes is especially helpful. The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 275 tragic disasters (clades ), and its triumphs (victoriae )” (§2). This world has been created and is sustained by God’s love, but has fallen into sin’s bondage (sub peccati quidem servitute positum ) from which it is now liberated by Christ, crucified and risen, so that it might be transformed (transformetur ) and brought to its consummation (ad consummationem perveniat ) (§2). The power of the evil one (potestas maligni —“power of evil” is an equally possible translation) has been broken but is still active. Again, a balanced vision: things are very, very bad, as they always are— sorrow, anguish, tragic disaster, sin’s slavery—but (and) there is hope for their improvement. Joy and hope are braided together with their opposites, as is entirely normal in Catholic diagnoses of the world’s condition. Hope is present and real; but at the same time the world teeters on the brink of the precipice. In its third section, the last of the Prooemium, Gaudium et Spes identifies what the Church has to offer to the joyful and suffering humanity to which the Church itself in part belongs.This offering is one of service (ministerium ) to a genus humanum that is at one and the same time fascinatedly admiring of its own achievements and powers and anxious in its questioning of contemporary changes and their implications. To this admixture of self-regard and anxiety, the Church offers colloquy de variis illis problematibus, bringing the light of Christ to these problems in a spirit of humble service so that people might be saved and human society renewed.This prospect of salvation (salus ) and renewal (instauratio ) is the highest calling (altissima vocatio ) of human beings, and in acknowledging its possibility, the Church also acknowledges “a certain divine seed, implanted within” (§3) each of us. So far Gaudium et Spes’s Prooemium. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the preliminary diagnosis of the human condition given here is of society moving headlong forward toward it knows not what, of its members profoundly anxious about that lack of direction, and of the Church, itself implicated in the condition of all humanity, offering the light of Christ to show the people the way forward.The use of the word admiratio in §3 to label the regard the people have for their own achievements is especially striking: to say that the people are admiratione commotum for their own achievements is to say that they are transfixed with fascination by them.This is not a good thing. The Introduction (§§4–10) begins by affirming, in words that have become the work’s best known, the Church’s officium . . . signa temporum perscrutandi, its office of examining or scrutinizing the signs of the times in order that it might properly serve the world of its time.What follows is a depiction of those signs as the Council understood them. 276 Paul J. Griffiths First, this is a time of rapid change, of “real social and cultural transformation” (§4). Such change introduces difficulties, and Gaudium et Spes treats these first as a series of contrasts.We have extended our power, but we can’t always use it for our own good; we have greater knowledge of the intimate depths of the mind, but are uncertain about ourselves; we are uncovering the principles of social life, but don’t know how to use that knowledge; many of us are richer than any humans have ever been, but far too many are poor and hungry; we value freedom, but “new forms of social and psychological slavery are developing” (§4); we value unity, but are deeply and bitterly divided politically, to the extent that we threaten ourselves with a war that will destroy everything; our means of communication increase in efficiency and scope, but the content of that communication is vitiated by ideology; and, most generally, we seek the perfection of the temporal order without equally seeking spiritual progress.The result is that many of us “fluctuate between spes and angor ” (§4) and suffer from a deep disquiet. This deep disquiet is also characterized as hodierna animorum commotio, today’s unease of souls, or spiritual commotion (§5). This description is conjoined with a strong affirmation of the goodness and importance of technological advances; but it is also said several times that these advances are the principal causes of today’s anguish. Gaudium et Spes also identifies increasing migration, whether across national boundaries or from rural to urban areas, as contributing to spiritual disquiet. There are, it claims, currently gravis perturbationes (§7), serious disturbances, in modes of social behavior and in the norms thought to govern such behavior. Correspondingly, there are changes in the vitam religiosam, by which Gaudium et Spes does not mean the lives of those vowed to particular religious communities, but rather the ways in which people practice Christianity. Some of these changes are good, for example the removal of some superstitions; but some are bad, for example the increasing frequency with which the abandonment of Christianity is publicly advocated. By this last, multi perturbentur, many are disturbed and upset (§7). All the things mentioned in the two preceding paragraphs lead to discrepantiae and inaequilibria, discrepancies and imbalances, of various kinds: between rich and poor, between powerful and weak, between concern for practical success and “the demands of the moral conscience” (§8), and among races and social classes. Gaudium et Spes summarizes these imbalances in this pregnant sentence: “Hence the mutual mistrust, enmity, conflicts, and sufferings, of which we are simultaneously cause and victim” (§8).This mutual mistrust works itself out in part in increased demands for those advantages of which disadvantaged groups are “vividly The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 277 aware that they are deprived” (§9). Gaudium et Spes judges these demands in large part to be good because they show that those who make them are eager for a “full and free life worthy of humanity” (§9). Nevertheless, these demands and the strife to which they often lead contribute to the disturbances of the world of Gaudium et Spes’s time, and in those circumstances it is increasingly evident that the world “faces the road leading to slavery or freedom, progress or regress, fraternity or hatred” (§9). Finally, as a last note in Gaudium et Spes’s Introduction, there is emphasis upon the “dramatic” nature of the human condition.7 We are finite but have infinite appetites; we do what we think we should not; and these facts about us show that we are subject to an internal divisio which obscures itself from us so that we cannot clearly see it. Some respond to this by seeking to perfect the temporal order, truly believing that this can be done by human effort; others despair of any improvement at all, and think that all meaning and purpose is the product of human decision, with no reality greater than the fictive. The light of Christ, Gaudium et Spes affirms, can overcome these errors, and it is the Church’s continuing task to offer that light to the world (§10). So far Gaudium et Spes’s Introduction. It, too, is far from optimistic. I have emphasized its negative notes in the summary just preceding: the dramatic character of human existence, poised between finitude and infinity and balanced between a desire for good and an incapacity to do it; the difficulties connected with rapid and dislocating change; the deep disquiet suffered by many; the political, ethnic, and economic polarizations of the time; disruptive change in the norms governing ordinary social behavior; and the possibility that the world will choose the path of slavery rather than that of freedom. All these themes are taken up in one way or another, some at considerable length, in the body of the work, which is by a considerable margin the longest of the Council’s texts; but it is not my purpose to consider and analyze those more lengthy treatments. Instead, I now turn to an analysis of that other part of Gaudium et Spes apparently not mentioned in the work’s footnote, that is its Conclusion (§§91–93).What has this to say about the human condition? The first note struck in the conclusion is that of incompleteness.What Gaudium et Spes has offered is necessarily incomplete because of its inevitable generality: if the whole world, in all its variety and with its vast range of particular local difficulties, is to be addressed, that address must be of an indoles generalis, a general character, and will require much more 7 The adjective dramaticus/a/um is used twice in the introduction: in §4, the mundus is said to have an indoles dramatica, a dramatic character; and in §10, the inaequilibrium rooted in the human heart is said to yield a status dramaticus for our lives. 278 Paul J. Griffiths to be said before it can be applied in particular cases.That more will need to be provided by the faithful in particular situations. Gaudium et Spes then turns its attention to particular audiences: Catholics; other Christians; and pagans (this is not a word Gaudium et Spes uses), whether sympathetic to the Church or opposed to it. To all these, the Church offers cooperation and support in working toward the goals identified in the body of the work, especially in its second part. It does this under the sign of hope, and with a responsive return of thanks to the Lord who makes everything possible. There is not much here of explicit relevance to the diagnosis of the human condition: conciliar documents typically end, as this one does, with a gesture of obeisance. • • • What, then, do we have here? A diagnosis of the human condition, certainly, and one in many respects closely indexed to the particulars of the first post-war generation.Advances and improvements of many kinds are acknowledged glancingly in the Prooemium and Introduction, and are acknowledged as such in more detail in the body of the document, sometimes in glowing terms. But in the Introduction, such improvements are without exception treated as ambiguous. A clause mentioning an improvement or an advance is typically at once balanced by one depicting the negative concomitants of exactly that advance.The atmosphere is one of tension.8 There is moral and existential tension, certainly: as we welcome, for example, technological advance, we welcome it as Catholics under the guidance of Gaudium et Spes with the certain knowledge that it will bring in its train unanticipated negative consequences.This dual welcome—the simultaneous warm embrace and the suspicious stiff-arm—creates tension in us, as it should. For example, technology has made speedy communication across long distances vastly cheaper and easier than it was even at the time Gaudium et Spes was composed.This is a good, to be applauded, and used by the Church for its own purposes—an example of such use being the instant and free availability of the text of Gaudium et Spes on the Vatican’s own website in a number of languages to anyone with an internet connection. But along with this good go, symbiotically and inseparably, numerous evils, for example, the massive presence of pornographically violent images and text on the Web, and of noxious and 8 Many interpreters take the Introduction to provide an empirical analysis of the state of the human race circa 1965. See, for example, Norman Tanner, The Church and the World: Gaudium et Spes, Inter Mirifica (New York/Mahwah: Paulist, 2005), 41ff.This is odd. It is in fact theological from beginning to end: it provides a set of tropes for the framing of an empirical study. The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 279 dangerous political propaganda of various kinds. Or, consider the genetic modification of crops grown for food: this has increased yields and made it possible to feed many more people than would otherwise have been the case.This too is a good, and a great one, to be delighted in. But along with it goes a loss of genetic variety and an accompanying increase in likelihood that catastrophic and irrecoverable loss might result from new kinds of plant disease. In both cases (and there are many others) Catholics taught by Gaudium et Spes ought to find themselves simultaneously welcoming and rejecting, and aware of the tension in such a mixed response.This is one aspect of the imbalance of which Gaudium et Spes’s Introduction speaks so lyrically. Fortunately, Gaudium et Spes provides a conceptual device in its Introduction to frame this tensive imbalance in such a way as to make an iconic tableau of it. I mean the idea that human existence is essentially dramatic in character.This is most striking in §10, where we read: The imbalances under which the world labors today are connected with a more fundamental imbalance rooted in the human heart.There, many elements oppose one another. On the one hand we are creatures who experience our limitations in many ways; while on the other we are aware of the limitlessness of our desires and of our calling to a higher way of life.Attracted by many urgent solicitations, we are forced to discriminate and to renounce some of them. Also, being weak and sinful, it is not rare that we do what we would not and do not do what we would. And so we suffer an internal division from which many and great societal discordances come. Many, certainly, whose lives are infected by a materialism of the practical order are thereby turned away from a clear perception of this dramatic situation; and others are so overcome by wretchedness that they are prevented from appreciating it. These are, first, claims about the human condition as such: it is dramatic because it is divided against itself while at the same time aware of being so. This internal division has at least two facets: the tension between our limitless appetites and the fact that we can satisfy only some of them; and the tension between what we want to do and what we find ourselves doing. We are, Gaudium et Spes claims, aware of both these tensions, which makes their effect upon us all the deeper: this reflexive awareness of our divided nature is what makes our situation dramatic. We live our lives on a small stage, parts of which are lit brilliantly and parts of which languish in deep darkness; we move back and forth from light to dark while wanting to stay in the light; and we constantly seek to make the stage larger in order that we might be less trammeled, that our strutting and fretting on it might have 280 Paul J. Griffiths larger scope.That desire—the desire to increase our scope—is, Gaudium et Spes implies, among those that inform and motivate our work for technological, societal, and political progress.The extent to which this is the case is also the extent to which our internal divisions get incised into the social and political spheres: those spheres become dramatic in the sense given just to the extent that our lives as human beings are dramatic. This is certainly no facile endorsement of progress and improvement. It is also very far from a minimization of the grip that pain and damage have upon the human condition.The drama of human existence cannot be made undramatic or meliorated by any of the particular advances and improvements mentioned and often endorsed in Part Two of Gaudium et Spes; they find their place as acts in the drama, tensively self-divided and productive of at least as much angor and luctus as gaudium and spes. And this is a peculiar and particular emphasis of Gaudium et Spes: it is the only one among the Council’s documents to characterize the human condition as dramatic.9 • • • This depiction of our condition as dramatically poised between good and evil, and as a fabric necessarily woven from rejoicing and anguish braided tightly together, provides Gaudium et Spes’s framework. It is not precisely a doctrinal analysis of the human condition or a theological anthropology—something approaching that is found in Part One. Neither, certainly, is it a set of diagnostic or prognostic claims about the present condition and likely future of human work and modes of organization—something approaching that is found in Part Two. Nor does it exhibit an understanding or analysis of culture as formative of human activity and self-understanding.10 It provides, instead, scenery and lighting for the stage upon which those two enterprises are then undertaken in the body of the text. 9 There are four instances of the use of the adjective dramaticus/a/um in the corpus of conciliar texts.Three of them are in Gaudium et Spes. In addition to the two already mentioned, there is the phrase luctatio dramatica in §13 to describe the tension between good and evil in human beings.That entire section repays close attention as supportive of the interpretive line taken here.The only occurrence of the adjective outside Gaudium et Spes is Inter Mirifica, §7, where the term is applied, revealingly, to the effects with which the mass media might depict good and evil. I rely here upon Philippe Delhaye et al., eds., Concilium Vaticanum II: Concordance, Index, Listes de fréquence, Tables comparatives (Louvain: Publications du CETEDOC, 1974), 211. 10 Tracey Rowland’s analysis of the idea of culture in Gaudium et Spes, in her Culture and the Thomist Tradition:After Vatican II (London & New York Routledge, 2003), ch. 1, is both largely correct and important. But she misses the importance of Gaudium et Spes’s provision of a set of terms and tropes for the analysis of culture—terms and tropes that are in fact in substantial harmony with the analysis she goes on to offer herself. The Dramatic Character of the Human Condition 281 This (perhaps) is why the first note has nothing to say about Gaudium et Spes’s introductory and concluding sections: they are of a different order than what is in parts one and two. The audience for a play can (and should) forget that they are watching a play; and they are often properly unconscious of the effects carefully wrought by the play’s lighting and scenery and blocking, even while those effects shape their response to what they see and hear. In the case of a written text, however, forgetfulness of the setting can go too far, especially when that setting is alluded to only rarely in the body of the text.We should, as good readers of Gaudium et Spes, take the dramatic tension of the document’s frame seriously, and bear it in mind as we read and think about the particulars of the largely doctrinal analysis of Part One and the largely pastoral analysis of Part Two. Were we to do so, we would read every economic (§§63–72) and political (§§73–76) phenomenon treated by Gaudium et Spes as a dramatic figure, half in the brilliant light of progress and advancement, and half in the shadowy darkness of imbalance and deep disturbance. This reading would need to be maintained especially when Gaudium et Spes is very positive in its depiction of what we human beings make, as for example in §36 and §57, when language of beauty and autonomy is used in these connections.11 We would, that is, do what Gaudium et Spes recommends, which is simultaneously to rejoice and weep over everything that is done and made and thought and said in the world. Confidence in progress and fascinated admiration of our achievements would be modulated and eventually overwritten by hope;12 but hope requires and implies acknowledgment that what we do for ourselves requires not admiratio but, rather, a garment woven of spes and angor. That garment will be more like a hair N&V shirt than a silken tunic. 11 Though even in these cases, Gaudium et Spes very soon qualifies what has been said along these lines, and turns the reader from the brilliantly-lit part of the stage to that in shadow. 12 On this, see Bordeyne, L'homme et son angoisse, ch. 4. See also Lieven Boeve, “Gaudium et Spes and the Crisis of Modernity:The End of the Dialogue with the World?” in M. Lamberigts & L. Kenis, eds., Vatican II and its Legacy (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2002), 83–94. Boeve usefully shows how the reading of Gaudium et Spes into a late-modern narrative of progress has been called into question by the decay of confidence in such narratives. He is, however, insufficiently nuanced in his judgment that Gaudium et Spes is itself bound up with such judgments. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 283–322 283 The “Pure Nature” of Christology: Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 T HOMAS J OSEPH W HITE , O.P. Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC “If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. . . . I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable. . . . [I]f you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. . . . It is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.” —F LANNERY O’C ONNOR Letters to A. Autumn, 1955. A Question Concerning the Christological Evaluation of What is Natural, and the Philosophical (Natural) Evaluation of Christ T HERE is arguably no statement from the Second Vatican Council as well known as paragraph 22 from Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. The paragraph contains these memorable lines:“In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. . . . For since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery.”This statement in turn also alerts us to a fundamental theme of this conciliar document: that human fulfillment, or indeed, that ultimate human meaning, is 284 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. only made possible (and thereby unveiled to human consideration) in the historical mystery of Christ. It is a theme we find solemnly elaborated, again, in paragraph 41:“[T]he Church is entrusted with the task of opening up to man the mystery of God, who is the last end of man; in doing so it opens up to him the meaning of his own existence, the innermost truth about himself. The Church knows well that God alone, whom it serves, can satisfy the deepest cravings of the human heart, for the world and what it has to offer can never fully content it. . . . Whoever follows Christ the perfect man becomes himself more a man.” There are undoubtedly many possible theological interpretations of Gaudium et Spes, and of its presentation of the relations of human nature to the Christian mystery. But it seems unavoidable that any one of these must address in some way one of the most basic themes that the document indicates: the fulfillment of natural human aspirations that is made possible only in the light of Christ, by the grace of his mystery. For on the one hand this mystery is gracious, and is given from God as the gratuitous accomplishment of human history, in such a way that the principles and exigencies of man’s natural searching would not arrive at this terminus by their own powers. (In this respect such grace is extrinsic in origin.) Simultaneously, however, this searching in the concrete historical life of man is undergirded by the energies of grace, in such a way that the nature of man is illuminated in particular by the mystery of Jesus, by his life, death, and resurrection from the dead, and can recognize in him the destiny of its own perfectibility. (In this sense, such fulfillment is intrinsic to the human community, as it comes from within the history of man, and answers to the hidden searching of the human heart.) What is particular to the theology of the Council in this document, then, is the attempt to align a Christological conception of the fulfillment of human nature with a theological understanding of the meaning of history. The history of man and of human nature is itself teleologically ordained beyond itself into the life of God, and concretely this order is only fully manifest and fulfilled within the horizon of human history in the paschal mystery of Christ, and in the mystery of the Church to which it gives rise. In other words, the historical existence of man is only made meaningful (in an ultimate fashion) by means of recourse to the final teleological end of man, the vision of God, and this end is only made manifest in the eschatological recreation of all things in Christ. The historical existence of Christ as God and man in history, therefore, is the condition for the intelligibility of final meaning in human nature. The question this raises, however, is: what is human nature, and how does a theological understanding of human nature relate to Christ’s Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 285 humanity? Or, what is the universalized understanding of human nature that is made available to human thought in light of Christ? And secondly: what is the universalized conception of human nature that is available to human thought apart from or at least in distinction from Christology? Gaudium et Spes is, after all, replete with moral exhortations that are meant to inspire or appeal to the conscience of modern human beings of all backgrounds (including the non-Christian and the areligious) (§§2–3, 21, 41–43), exhortations concerning the nature of marriage and the family (§47), the dignity and rights of human life from conception to natural death (§51), the human political and economic practices of a just society (§§63–72; 73–76), the evil of total war and the basic good of political peace (§§78–82), the rational truth of equality among all human beings (§29), and so forth. In other words, the document is replete with appeal to principles of the natural law.1 This appeal is not explicitly or overtly Christological, and in fact seems to presuppose in the recipients to whom it is addressed at least some genuine human capacity for rational receptivity (principles of synderesis and basic conceptions of the common good and of intrinsic evils that threaten the common good). Likewise the document examines at various intervals, in a form of classical Augustinian apologia, the moral frailties or human weaknesses that are experienced in the struggle to accomplish the natural good. In doing so it suggests a philosophical rationality to the theological claim that man finds himself in need of assistance if he is to accomplish the good that he wishes to do according to the inclinations of his better self, and not the evil that he does not wish to do.2 Although there is a corresponding insistence on the need for the grace of God for the transformation of human action in the concrete sphere of history, this insistence simultaneously appeals to the concrete 1 Explicit appeal to the concept of “natural law” appears three times in the docu- ment, in paragraphs 74, 79, and 89. 2 Gaudium et Spes, §13:“What Revelation makes known to us is confirmed by our own experience. For when man looks into his own heart he finds that he is drawn towards what is wrong and sunk in many evils which cannot come from his good Creator.” See likewise Gaudium et Spes, §§37–38, 41. In a not dissimilar way, Aquinas claims that such arguments are (from a strictly rational point of view) only probable signs of a fallen human nature. See Summa contra Gentiles IV, c. 52: “[P]eccati originalis in humano genere probabiliter quaedam signa apparent.” Such arguments rightly underscore the experiential observation of ontological and moral disorder in human nature and civilization, but cannot demonstrate the rational necessity of a prior creation in a state of grace, or demonstrate that this disorder results as such from the prior loss of grace. The reason for this is that grace is itself a mystery that can be approached only in the light of supernatural faith, and is a principle that (de facto) originates from causes transcending the intrinsic powers of human nature and human reason. 286 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. nature or natural aspirations of human civilization, and promises that only a Christian polity can offer any ultimate resolution even to the historical, intra-temporal aspirations of human beings to the building up of a political common good.3 In short, the document proposes a very developed interpretation of what constitutes human nature, as intellectually distinguishable from the life of Christian grace, and yet simultaneously underscores that the healing, strengthening, and fulfillment of the former is only made possible by recourse to the latter. If nature is not historically and existentially separable from the mystery of God’s gracious action in history, it is nevertheless distinguishable and can even be appealed to precisely as a way toward understanding the goodness of the mystery of life in Christ. Likewise, the mystery of Christ is seen to illumine one’s understanding of the meaning of human nature. In what follows, then, I would like to consider two areas of controversy surrounding the “harmony” of these two poles (natural aspirations answered by Christian life and Christological, graced fulfillment of nature) in the document.The two topics (which can be considered in the form of questions) are the following: Ought we to follow what has become a standard post-conciliar trend in rejecting a theological concept of “pure nature,” so as to make sense of the theology of Gaudium et spes §22? How does this question relate to a corresponding articulation of a natural desire for God in the historical life of man under grace? Second, what does it mean to affirm the Christological fulfillment of human nature in history? What metaphysical presuppositions are present or absent in the claim, as regards the intrinsically historical character of nature as such? In each case, I will consider briefly a major interpreter of the Council’s theology who wrote in the years just after the Council (Karl Rahner, and Marie-Dominique Chenu), and then offer critical reflections on their respective claims. In the last section of the essay, I appeal to Thomistic considerations on the relations of nature, grace, and Christology, thereby suggesting some principles for interpreting the conciliar teaching in what I take to be a theologically constructive and reasonable way. The basic argument of the essay is the following: With3 Gaudium et Spes, §38: “The Word of God, through whom all things were made, became man and dwelt among men: a perfect man, he entered world history, taking that history into himself and recapitulating it. He reveals to us that ‘God is love’ (1 Jn. 4:8) and at the same time teaches that the fundamental law of human perfection, and consequently of the transformation of the world, is the new commandment of love. He assures those who trust in the charity of God that the way of love is open to all men and that the effort to establish a universal brotherhood will not be in vain.” Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 287 out a properly understood concept of pure nature, it is impossible to claim (1) that moral evil (which is prevalent in human nature in its actual state) is in truth unnatural, and (2) that we can only become perfectly human (with a restored nature) by the grace of Christ. (3) What is true for human nature in general is the case in a unique way concerning Christ. To conceive of Christ as truly and perfectly human by contrast and comparison with ourselves requires a mediating concept of pure nature.Without such a concept we cannot rightly articulate why Christ is the fulfillment of what it means to be human. Pure Nature and the Grace-Inspired Desire for God In 1966, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, Karl Rahner writes in this way on the question of pure nature:“Our actual nature is never ‘pure’ nature. It is a nature installed in a supernatural order which man can never leave, even as a sinner and unbeliever. It is a nature which is continually being determined (which does not mean justified) by the supernatural grace of salvation offered to it.”4 Rahner’s remark could be (and has been) interpreted as a kind of gloss on that conciliar document, paragraph 22. Of course there are other interpretations of Gaudium et Spes than that which takes the supernatural-existential theory of Rahner as a starting point.Yet it is clear that this central intuition of Rahner’s was potent, for he could employ it in a theologically consistent way to speak about a broad range of contemporary theological issues that also mirrored concerns of the Council: the possible presence of Christian grace in non-Christian persons and religious traditions,5 the 4 Karl Rahner, S.J.,“Nature and Grace,” in Theological Investigations IV, trans. Kevin Smyth (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1966), 165–88, here 183. 5 See, for example, Rahner,“Anonymous Christians,” in Theological Investigations VI: Concerning Vatican Council II, trans. Karl-H. and Boniface Kruger (London and New York: Darton, Longman & Todd and Seabury, 1974), 390–98; 393–94: “Now that his thinking is illumined by the light of the revelation which has in fact been made in the historically accomplished reality of Christ, [man] can recognize this unapproachable height as that perfection of his own being which can be effected by God . . . that he may more fully recognize the fact that he is ordained to this mystery. . . .The believer will then also grasp that this absolute eminence is not an optional adjunct to his reality; that it is not given to him as the juridical and external demand of God’s will for him, but that this self-communication by God offered to all and fulfilled in the highest way in Christ rather constitutes the goal of all creation and . . . that even before he freely takes up an attitude to it, it stamps and determines man’s nature and lends it a character which we may call a ‘supernatural existential’. A refusal of this offer would therefore not leave man in a state of pure unimpaired nature, but would bring him into contradiction with himself even in the sphere of his own being. . . .The expressly Christian revelation becomes the 288 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. communication of Trinitarian life to the anthropological subject in the secular world6 and amidst the mystery of death,7 and the notion of the Church’s horizon as co-extensive with the mystery of grace as such, and therefore as implicitly present in all the baptized, and indeed, in some latent way, at least, as potentially co-extensive will all humanity.8 Within the context of this larger theological perspective, the concept of pure nature is clearly one that Rahner wishes to disavow (or significantly relativize) for theological use. Characterizing what he takes to be the “average” view of scholastic theology,9 he speaks of the scholastic theory of “pure nature” in the following terms: [T]he orientation of ‘nature’ to grace is conceived of in as negative a way as possible. Grace is, it is true, an unsurpassable perfectioning of nature; God as the Lord of this nature can command man to submit to his de facto will and to be receptive to his grace, which directs man to a supernatural life and end. But of itself nature has only a ‘potentia obedientialis’ to such an end, and this capacity is thought of as negatively as possible. It is no more than non-repugnance to such an elevation. Of itself, nature would find its perfection just as readily and harmoniously in its own proper realm, in a purely natural end, without an immediate intuition of God in the beatific vision.When it finds itself in immediate possession of itself—as part of the essence of the spirit, ‘reditio completa in seipsum’—it meets itself as though it were ‘pure nature’. According to the well-known axiom . . . it is distinguished from pure nature only ‘sicut spoliatus a nudo’. And this ‘state of being despoiled’ is silently considered as a merely extrinsic element with regard to the absence of sanctifying grace. . . . [W]e do not usually think that the lack of grace might be different in the two cases, that of pure nature and that of fallen nature.10 At base, one concern here is that a modern, implicitly secularized vision of man has been advanced inadvertently within baroque Catholic theology by a concept of the normative or purely natural state of man, to which explicit statement of the revelation of grace which man always experiences implicitly in the depths of his being.” 6 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans.William V. Dych (New York: Seabury, 1978), 138–53. 7 Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith, 273–74. 8 See Rahner, “Ideology and Christianity,” in Theological Investigations VI, 43–58. 9 Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 165. 10 Ibid., 168.A similar claim is made in Theological Investigations I: God, Christ, Mary and Grace, trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P. (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1961), “Concerning the Relationship Between Nature and Grace,” 297–318, esp. 298–301. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 289 grace or the Christian life is attached only accidentally or extrinsically. Thus, as we find argued at greater length in de Lubac’s Surnaturel, the late scholastic concept of pure nature in fact introduced into theology a false complacency with the secular, and was itself a theme that helped give rise to a post-Enlightenment thought-world that closes itself off within a horizon of immanence, over and against the world of grace. I will return to this claim below. However, it should also be stated here that Rahner is writing above all against the idea of a merely natural economy of concrete history, one in which per impossibile man might have existed in such a way that he was not—as concrete spirit-in-history—always, already wounded by sin and addressed by grace, always, already being moved or invited to participate in the work of redemption.This idea is countered by Rahner most especially in his own reworking of the Lubacian theme of a natural desire for God, promoted under the auspices of a historically precise interpretation of Aquinas, to whom Rahner attributes the idea of a desiderium naturale in visionem beatificam.11 He takes up what is customarily seen to be a via media between the dialectic insistence of the transcendence of grace vis-a-vis human accomplishment in Barth’s Reformed thought, and what he takes to be the overly reductive integration of natural ends and graced beatitude in the early work of de Lubac.12 Between these two ranges on a spectrum, Rahner opts for a distinction between nature considered essentially and nature considered existentially, where the latter is the only “concrete and real” formulation of nature as we encounter it in salvation history.13 The human being exists concretely in a world in which the transcendental structure of the human spirit is both open naturally (a priori) to a supernatural accomplishment, and in its vital history in the world is always, already addressed by the grace of Christ.14 And it is just on this point that Rahner takes issue with the notion of a historically realized pure nature: 11 Rahner,“Nature and Grace,” 172.This attribution constitutes a regrettable inac- curacy. A contemporary search in the Index Thomisticus shows that the phrase does not exist in Aquinas’s corpus. 12 For Rahner’s implicit but clear criticism of de Lubac, see Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 186. 13 Ibid., 182. 14 Ibid., 180: “If this is so then we may say that the supernatural transcendence is always present in every man who has reached the age of moral reason.That does not mean that he is justified. He may be a sinner and an unbeliever. But where and in so far as he has the concrete possibility of a morally good act, he is in fact constantly within the open horizon of transcendence towards the God of the supernatural life, whether his free act is in accord or in conflict with this prior state of his supernaturally elevated spiritual existence.” 290 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. [I]t follows from the theological data already given that this de facto human nature, as it knows itself here, and in view of all its experiences (especially when this human experience is viewed in the light of the whole history of mankind, where alone its development is fully realized) cannot and need not be considered as the reflexion of that ‘pure’ nature which is distinguished in theology from everything supernatural. Our actual nature is never ‘pure’ nature. It is a nature installed in a supernatural order which man can never leave, even as a sinner and unbeliever. It is a nature which is continually being determined (which does not mean justified) by the supernatural grace of salvation offered to it.15 Yet it is also significant that after disputing the worthwhile pursuit of any concept of a merely natural end for human existence16 and even a “ ‘pure’ philosophy of the essence of natural man,”17 Rahner does come to affirm unequivocally the utility and even necessity of a conception of pure nature as such.The concept is necessary insofar as it permits one to articulate against the backdrop of the historical experience of grace, the possibility of human existence without grace, and the simultaneous gratuity of the gift of the beatific vision as a mystery distinct from the gift of creation.18 Therefore, there is only an intrinsic disposition of the natural final end of the created human spirit (which is the open-ended natural desire to know God immediately) to the final end of man under grace (the beatific vision), and not an identity of the two.The former disposition is proportioned directly to the vision of God only by the later grace.19 This irreducible duality must be upheld even while this vision is 15 Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 182–83. The passage continues: “And these ‘exis- tentials’ of man’s concrete,‘historical’ nature are not purely states of being beyond consciousness. They make themselves felt in the experience of man. By simple reflection on himself, in the light of natural reason, he cannot simply and clearly distinguish them from the natural spiritual activity which is the manifestation of his nature. But once he knows from revelation that there is an order of grace not due to him and not belonging to the necessary constitutives of his being, he becomes more cautious. He must allow for the fact that much of his concrete experience which he is almost automatically tempted to attribute to his ‘nature’ may perhaps in fact be the effect in him of what he must recognize as an unmerited grace in the light of theology.” 16 Ibid., 184. 17 Ibid., 185. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 186:“If it be granted, it follows that there can be no spirit without a transcendence open to the supernatural; but spirit is meaningful, without supernatural grace. Hence its fulfillment in grace cannot be demanded by its essence, though it is open for such grace.” Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 291 also understood as the only possible authentic and final accomplishment of the spiritual life of man in our concrete history. No doubt some would wish to criticize Rahner’s theories as too timid a reform of prevalent scholastic views, and would instead wish to substitute the more robust critical theories of de Lubac, or for that matter von Balthasar, with a different strategy of interpretation as regards the seeming criticism of de Lubac’s Surnaturel in Humani Generis (to which Rahner clearly wishes to show deference). Be that as it may, an important point to be made here is that there is something fundamentally problematic about the construal of the “average” scholastic notion of pure nature by Rahner. For what he is criticizing as the “average” position is in fact the historical position of Francisco Suarez in particular.20 The problem with this characterization is that there were contrasting understandings of pure nature in the scholastic tradition, such that Suarez’s account, far from being generally adopted, was not typical. Ironically, representative Dominican Thomistic scholastics articulated a concept of pure nature that was purposefully intended to contrast with the Suarezian account for reasons similar to those of Rahner, based upon a concrete theological realism concerning the divine economy. Rahner is in fact criticizing a traditional Jesuit position (one that in fact merits prudent theological consideration, rather than a cursory dismissal) while moving only incompletely toward a traditional Dominican one.This can be illustrated briefly by considering the teaching on pure nature of the archetypal Thomistic scholastic of Rahner’s own epoch: that of the French Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange. 20 See Francisco Suarez, S.J., Opera Omnia (Paris:Vivès Edition, 1857),Tome VII (De statibus humanae naturae), Prolegomenum IV, cap.VIII:“Utrum in statu naturae lapsae homo sit intrinsece debilior ad operandum bonum, quam esset in statu purae naturae?” Cap. IX: “Utrum in statu naturae lapsae debilior sit homo ad operandum, quam in pura natura, saltem ob causas extrinsecas?” Suarez’s doctrine of pure nature is in fact quite subtle. He argues that the perfection of human operations in their natural structure, or formal perfection, is not altered by sin, so that a fallen man does not cease to be a human being, or become a different species of being than the one God created originally in his image.The theological interlocutors are those who claim nature is formally corrupted by original sin, so as to be shattered in its integrity. He concludes from this, however, that there must not be said to be any intrinsically less perfect natural tendency to perfection in one who is fallen than in one who would have existed in a state of pure nature. For God sustains fallen nature by his aids in ways that are similar to the ways he would act upon man in a state of pure nature. In an attempt to respond to what he takes to be the excessive metaphysical pessimism of the Reformers, he seems to overcompensate by excess, minimizing the intrinsic wounds to human nature resultant from original sin. (See, for instance, Suárez, De gratia,Tome VII, Prol. IV, cap. I, no. 2 [ed.Vivès, p. 179].) 292 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Garrigou-Lagrange treats the question of pure nature in his commentary on Aquinas’s Summa theologiae, prima pars, in a 1943 work entitled De Deo Trino et Creatore.21 Here he raises the question in particular de variis statibus humanae naturae relate ad gratiam and in treating this question is indebted in particular to Rene Billuart, O.P. (1685–1757) from the latter’s treatise De Gratia, distinction 2, articles 1–3, which was composed as an interpretation of Thomism in purposeful contrast to the positions of Baius and Jansenism as well as those of Suarez.22 So the reflections here should certainly count for authentically “Baroque Thomist,” or at least “average Dominican Thomist,” as distinct from other scholastic traditions or schools. Now what is noteworthy is that the concept of the various states of grace of created human nature is employed by this tradition just so as to reject any kind of equivalency of man’s actual concrete historical nature (as both fallen and subject to the conditions of grace) with the notion of a pure nature or of a rationalistic naturalism that could be considered normative independently of Christian revelation.23 The latter concept of nature in a “pure state” is necessary as a foil (an idea concern21 Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore: Commentarius in Summam Theologicam S.Thomae (Ia q. xxvii–cxix ) (Taurini and Paris: Marietti and Descleé de Brouwer, 1943), 418–51, esp. 421–22. 22 Reacting against the position of Suarez, the Dominican tradition tended to affirm that the essential intrinsic dignity of the human being remains after sin, but that because of the absence of an extrinsic principle (the grace of God, which is necessarily “extrinsic,” at least insofar as it is not purely natural), an intrinsic wounding of human nature results, not from a defect in nature itself, but from the absence of grace, for which it was made. See Charles René Billuart, O.P., Summa Sancti Thomae, vol. 3 (Paris: Letouzey & Ané, 1880), De Gratia, dissertatio II, art. 3: “Utrum homo, in statu naturae lapsae nondum reparatae, minores vires habeat ad bonum morale quam habuisset in statu naturae purae?” 23 Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore, 422. Garrigou-Lagrange goes on (in pp. 435–36) to show that the Dominican tradition continually opposed the notion of a pure nature created without being in a state of grace, or of a fallen nature that could be equated with a pure nature left to its own resources without grace: Capreolus, II Sent. d. 31, a. 3; Cajetan, In ST I–II, q. 83, a. 2, n. IX; Ferrariensis in In ScG IV, c. 52. This position was developed, as he shows, to argue against the Reformers, Baius, and Jansenism, that human nature was created in a state of grace, not merely natural perfection, but that after sin, this same nature remains structurally human, so that nature is not destroyed. On the other hand, the Dominicans argued against Suarez and some other Jesuit scholastics such as Molina, that fallen human nature is wounded intrinsically (in the exercise of its own powers and in the order between them) and can only be healed and fulfilled intrinsically by grace, in its concrete historical state. Consequently, there never has existed a state of pure nature, and the capacities of fallen human nature are more diminished (due to the historical rejection of grace and the concrete consequences of sin) than they would be had something like a state of pure nature ever existed. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 293 ing something that did not exist but that could have existed) which one can contrast with the state of integral nature, a state pertaining to the original innocence of man’s first parents.This original state of natural integrity was itself a result of the gift of grace, insofar as man was truly created in and for the life of grace, and this original state of grace had unique positive benefits upon the nature of man considered as such.Yet in Thomistic parlance, integral nature is not simply identical with the grace of original innocence (or “original justice”). For the notion of original innocence connotes among other things the genuinely supernatural gifts of divine life given to the first parents of man (supernatural friendship with God in faith, hope, and love, the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit) none of which can be acquired by human powers. Integral nature, by contrast, denotes human nature in its fullness considered as nature, yet due to a development made possible by the presence of grace and under grace. In effect, for Aquinas, in distinction from many of his medieval contemporaries, human nature was created originally in a state of grace and for the life of grace and this had positive benefits for nature as such, that would not have existed except for the privileged effects conferred by the state of original justice.24 So, for example, “Status naturae purae importat praecise naturam cum suis principiis intrinsecis et iis quae ex illis sequuntur seu ei debentur, sed absque gratia et donis praeternaturalibus. Unde homo in tali statu habuisset finem naturalem, media naturalia ad hunc finem consequendum, auxilia ordinis naturalis, sufficientia omnibus, efficacia quibusdam. Item habuisset legem naturalem; sed fuisset subditus ignorantiae, concupiscentiae, infirmitatibus, morti.”25 While a nature that was not created in grace 24 Aquinas differs from his contemporaries (including St. Albert the Great) by insisting on the creation of man in a state of grace, and he developed this notion extensively in his mature theology.This is studied carefully by Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., “Nature and Grace in Thomas Aquinas,” in Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought, ed. Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P., trans. Robert Williams, trans. revised by Matthew Levering (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2009), 155–90. 25 Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore, 421.There is no developed concept of “a state of pure nature” as such in Aquinas’s writings, nor one of “praeternatural gifts” given to nature in its original integral state. But as Garrigou-Lagrange rightly notes (ibid., 428–29),Aquinas gives implicit credence to these notions insofar as he considers the majority position of his time (that man was created prior to being in a state of grace, yet without sin) to be metaphysically possible, but theologically unfitting. II Sent. d. 31, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3: “Poterat Deus a principio quando hominem condidit, etiam alium hominem ex limo terrae formare, quem in conditione naturae suae relinqueret, ut scil. mortalis et passibilis esset et pugnam concupiscentiae ad rationem sentiens; in quo nihil humanae naturae derogaretur, quia hoc ex principiis 294 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. would not be free from defects of ignorance, potential subjection to concupiscence, physical infirmities, and the power of death, the status naturae integrae was not subject to these deficits precisely because grace was not unrelated to but intimately present and active within its original constitution. As Jean-Pierre Torrell has recently noted (and as Garrigou-Lagrange accurately comments on Summa theologiae I, q. 97, aa. 1 and 3) the notion of a nature that is “integral” is understood by Aquinas as ontologically distinct and intellectually distinguishable from the graces of that same nature, even as the aforementioned integrity is possible only in a state of original justice, and therefore as a reality ontologically inseparable from the participation in divine life.26 Therefore Aquinas insists that one can analyze “what” human nature could do by its own natural powers (per pura naturalia or in puris naturalibus ) in the state of original innocence as distinguishable from what could be done only under the inspiration and agency of grace.27 This is not an artificial “abstraction” but rather a naturae consequitur.” (See also ScG IV, c. 52.) Now this is simply the position of the later Thomistic tradition, and as Garrigou-Lagrange shows, Billuart appealed to this fundamental idea (De gratia, d. 31, q. 1, a. 2, ad 3) to show against Baius that man was created in a state of grace and not a state of pure nature, but in such a state of integral nature that this integrity was itself a result of grace (i.e., due to the presence of a gift from God), and not by a mere extension of intrinsic natural capacities. But the Thomistic tradition also employed the same idea (as the text goes on to explain in pp. 449ff.) simultaneously against the contrary excess in Jesuit thinkers that tended to ascribe to fallen human nature all the intrinsic capacities of a possible “state of pure nature.” In other words, the Thomists (from Cajetan to John of St.Thomas to Gonet) insisted that grace is so operative in the state of integral nature that the loss of grace affects the internal order of nature itself and leaves the soul no longer subject naturally to God, nor the body to the soul, nor the passions to reason. In this again, the Dominican commentorial tradition is simply reiterating the precise teaching of St.Thomas: see Summa theologiae I–II, q. 95, a. 1. 26 See Torrell, “Nature and Grace in Thomas Aquinas,” here at 169–71. He cites Aquinas at ST I–II, q. 114, a. 2: “Two states of man without grace can be considered, as was said above. One state is of integral nature as it was in Adam before his sin; the other is of corrupt nature as it is in us before the reparation of grace.” It is of course essential to keep in mind that integral nature, for Aquinas, only existed when man was in a state of grace, prior to the fall.The point here, then, is not that integral nature exists in ontological separation from grace, but that it can attain certain goods by intrinsic natural powers, without immediate dependence upon grace for these activities. 27 Torrell, “Nature and Grace in Thomas Aquinas,” 169, n. 38. St.Thomas, Quodlibet I, q. 4, a. 3 [8]: “[S]i homo fuit factus in gratia, ut ex uerbis Basilii et Augustini haberi potest, quaestio ista locum non habet: manifestum est enim quod existens in gratia, per caritatem diligit Deum supra se ipsum. Set, quia possibile fuit Deo ut hominem faceret in puris naturalibus, utile est considerare ad quantum se dilectio naturalis extendere possit.” Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 295 profound form of insight into the natural structure of the graced human being. The archetypal example concerns love: created, integral human nature was so constituted that human beings could love God above all things naturally by virtue of their intrinsic rational and voluntary powers. Were this not the case, then the higher, supernatural love of God given to man in grace would be something alien and purely extrinsic to natural, human love.28 Yet even as human beings created in a state of grace could love God above all things naturally by their own powers, they were moved existentially also to love God above all things by grace in accordance with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. The natural love of God above all things (as an action of human reason and worship), and its graced exercise in subordination to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, remained distinguishable dimensions of a given human action (the perfected worship of God by charity), but were also inseparable, just as nature is distinguishable from grace but completed and perfected by the latter.29 Consequently the third state considered is the status santitatis et justitiae originalis, which is not a state of being ontologically distinct from the previous, but is the same state considered with respect to the supernatural elevation of nature by grace into the life of intimate friendship with God.This two-fold consideration of the same existential reality (man in original innocence) is requisite so that one understands that the fall of man from original justice affects man intimately in two distinct ways: namely it affects not only his possession of the life of divine grace, but also the integrity and harmony of his very nature. Therefore the status naturae lapsae nondum reparatae implies the loss of sanctifying grace, the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but also the loss of the gifts of integrity, and is such that the fallen human being, far from being demoted to a state of pure nature (as Rahner rightly insists it is not), is now affected by the mysterious wounds of original sin that characterize this status naturae lapsae : ignorance in the intellect, malice in the will, concupiscence in the concupiscible sensitive appetite, weakness in the irascible sensitive 28 ST I, q. 60, a. 5:“Since God is the universal good, and under this good both man and angel and all creatures are comprised, because every creature in regard to its entire being naturally belongs to God, it follows that from natural love angel and man alike love God before themselves and with a greater love. Otherwise, if either of them loved self more than God, it would follow that natural love would be perverse, and that it would not be perfected but destroyed by charity.” (My own citations of the Summa theologiae in English are from Summa Theologica, 1920 English Province Dominican Translation [New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1947].) 29 See here, most importantly, Aquinas, ST I–II, q. 109, a. 3, a text I will return to below. 296 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. appetite.30 The natural faculties and powers of the human person are affected internally by the absence of grace: reason is no longer subject naturally to God (as well as supernaturally), the body is no longer subject to the soul (death is a punishment of sin), and the passions are no longer subject to reason.31 Finally, in the “status naturae reparatae . . . in quo est nunc justus a Christo redemptus,” there are the gifts of sanctifying grace, the infused virtues, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, but without the original gifts of integral nature (freedom from error, concupiscence, sickness, and death.) Not wholly unlike Gaudium et spes §39, Garrigou-Lagrange states: “Natura non erit plene reparata nisi in Gloria, et rursus habebit integritatem cum resurrectione mortuorum.”32 The return to the integrity of nature as such is possible for the concrete historical life of fallen man, only through redemption in Christ, and eschatalogically, through the 30 Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore, 422; cf. ST I–II, qq. 83, 85. 31 ST I–II, q. 85, a. 1; See Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore, 449–50: “Respondent multi thomistiae, qui hanc sententiam tenent: Facultates animae tanquam proprietates ejus, sicut ipsa essentia animae, non admittunt plus et minus, praesertim intellectus et voluntas, quae sunt ut spiritualis omnino incorruptibiles et inalterabiles; sic non sunt intrinsece diminutae. Sed homo in statu naturae lapsae nascitur ut habitualiter et directe aversus a Deo fine ultimo supernaturali, et ut indirecte aversus a Deo fine ultimo naturali; nam omne peccatum quod est directe contra legem supernaturalem est indirecte contra legem naturalem praecipientem obedire Deo quidquid jubeat. Adam peccando, sic avertit omnem suam posteritatem a Deo auctore naturae. In natura autem pura non fuisset haec aversio, quia non fuisset peccatum, et homo natus fuisset ut capax tum conversionis positivae ad Deum, tum avertionis a Deo. Unde fuisset magis habilis ad se convertendum ad illum quam ille qui nascitur aversus ab eo. Haec aversio sic pertinet ad vulnus voluntatis, quae, ut dicit S. Thomas I–II, q. 85, a. 3: ‘destituitur ordine ad bonum’. . . . Ex hoc sequitur vulnus ignorantiae in intellectu praesertim practico, quia unusquisque practice judicat secundum inclinationem suam, et si haec inclinatio non est recta, intellectus inclinatur ad errorem; pariter sequitur in appetitu sensitivo vulnus infirmitatis et vulnus concupiscentiae, quia facultates superiores sunt minus fortes ad dirigendum appetitum sensitivum ut oporteret. Unde homo lapsus comparatur homini in natura pura non solum ut nudatus nudo, sed ut vulneratus sano.” Note how the last line stands in contradiction to Rahner’s portrayal of the “average” scholastic position. 32 Garrigou-Lagrange, De Deo Trino et Creatore, 422. Compare Gaudium et Spes, §39: “When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and our enterprise— human dignity, brotherly communion, and freedom—according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom. . . . Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present; when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection.” (Emphasis added.) Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 297 glorification of the souls of human beings, and through the resurrection of their physical bodies from the dead. Interestingly, where Rahner was hesitant to speculate about the “natural” character of the resurrected body in grace (doubting whether one could claim such a thing),33 Garrigou-Lagrange does not hesitate, particularly due to his Thomist notion of “integral nature” under grace, and the corresponding rejection of a historically concrete “state of pure nature.” It is arguably his thought which is closer to the true sense of Gaudium et spes §22! Perhaps to this point, these seem like playful polemics, and in fact on one level they are. But they bear within them a deeper point. Not only is the reflection above meant to suggest that we ought to be careful to avoid historically superficial and rhetorically facile (i.e., lazy) shibboleths against the banshee of pure nature and the arcane plots of baroque Thomists. More to the point, the consideration of the divine economy requires a careful thinking through of the particular theological states of human nature (1) in dependence upon grace, (2) in secession from the life of grace, (3) in the still wounded yet partially redeemed economy of Christian grace, (4) in the eschaton and (5) in Christ himself. None of these states is simply reducible to another, and yet it is necessary to affirm the existence of a persisting human nature undergirding them all, albeit in different states.Were this not the case, consider some inevitable theological consequences: (1) Concerning original justice and the fall: we would be unable to consider man in the state of original innocence as truly and essentially human or we would be unable to consider the fallen human person as retaining his or her essentially human characteristics (as still being made in the image of God, despite the consequence of sin). (2) Concerning redemption: we would be unable to consider the redeemed human person as essentially human in continuity with the fallen human person and yet as more perfect qua 33 Rahner, “Nature and Grace,” 184: “Let us ask, for instance, whether the resur- rection of the body appertains to any form of the fulfillment of man as a spiritperson, or is it something that is only a consequence of grace. Or let us ask how we are to think of the fulfillment of pure nature in the concrete. Then we find ourselves faced with questions which could only be answered if one could make experiments on pure nature and draw up a concrete teleology on this basis.” As Garrigou-Lagrange’s own thought suggests, however, it is in fact quite the opposite. In a state of pure nature (which never existed) the resurrection would not be possible, as it could not be procured by the intrinsic principles of man, who is a spiritual animal, naturally subject to corruption. However, in the concrete Christian economy in which pure nature never existed, but only a nature of integral completeness, such preservation from death was normative, through an effect of the agency of grace, and consequently there is something unnatural about human death, and something profoundly “natural” about the Christian eschatological promise of resurrection. 298 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. human, that is to say, in the potencies of his or her nature. (3) Concerning Christology: we would be unable to understand the incarnate Lord, in his passion and resurrection, as bringing our human nature to an eschatalogical fulfillment, distinct in mode, yet identical in kind to our current state of being. Any understanding of Christ’s redemption thereby would appear wholly alien (i.e., extrinsic) to our human historical condition (and the reason for his redemption of our human nature from “sin” would be unintelligible as well). Or contrastingly, we would be obliged to abolish all distinction of nature and grace, thus seeing our human historical condition as necessarily bound up with Christ such that human salvation in Christ simply would be co-extensive with our “natural” existence (a not-so-subtle version of apokatastasis panton). Nature in separation from Christ would be literally inconceivable. Either of the final alternatives, however, is theologically unfeasible and deeply unrealistic. The respect of the historically configured states of human nature by a complex set of theological-ontological reflections is the precursor and condition for a right understanding of the divine economy in distinctly Christological terms, terms that presuppose original integrity, the fallen state of man, the remainder of wounds of sin and death even in redeemed humanity, and the possibility of eternal loss as well as of eternal salvation.A correct consideration of the divine economy entails comparisons and contrasts which in turn presuppose a concept of human nature, one that applies to all human persons.Without this concept, such a consideration is impossible. But how then should we deal with the question of the historicity of our human nature and that of Christ, a reality to which Gaudium et Spes refers? The Christological Historicization of Human Nature If we turn, then, to the question of the Christological fulfillment of human nature, and of the historical perfection of humanity found in salvation history through Christ, a suggestive exegesis of Gaudium et Spes is offered by Marie-Dominique Chenu. In an essay published in 1966, shortly after the Council, Chenu claimed that the underlying question of the document was the relation of the Church to the world “and therefore underlying this the relation of nature and of grace, considered not in an abstract distinction, but in their concrete situation today.”34 The sub34 Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., “Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” in Peuple de Dieu dans le Monde (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 11–34, here 12. The essay published here was originally the text of a conference given in Rome to the Dutch episcopacy at the beginning of the fourth session of the Second Vatican Council, in regard to the turbulent debate surrounding Schema XIII, from which the Pastoral Constitution was to emerge. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 299 text, then, is also profoundly ecclesiological: how ought the Church to understand her mission in the modern world? Formulated positively, Chenu’s claims in the essay are threefold. First, there is no realm of nature that is not open to God’s transcendent activity and that cannot be claimed “already, from above” for higher, divine ends. Consequently, there is no time or place in history that is not already open to the hidden higher purposes of grace, working within the aspirations of nature (which are in man potentially intrinsically open to a higher completion in Christ).35 Second, man is by definition a historical being, subject to configurations of place and time, and in particular, open to the construction of his own destiny as man through the technological processes and social progress of culture.36 Correspondingly, the mission of Christ is one of God in his human historicity, and the mission of the Church must be itself thoroughly centered on the needs of its historical age. What [the pastoral constitution] is concerned with is not a contingent, and opportune “adaptation” of “eternal truths” but in the strong sense of the word, a “presence” today in act of the Gospel, by and in the Church. “An active presence in the construction of the world” . . . We are no longer dealing here with “solutions” ex cathedra taught from on high and from outside to the evolving problems of the world. . . .These are evangelical stances . . . insofar as grace completes nature within the [concrete] regime of the Incarnation, according to the rhythm of history.37 Otherwise stated, God himself took on historical flesh to bring to fulfillment the dynamic, ever-developing history of man, and so likewise, doctrine must be rearticulated according to the inner living historical spirit of a given age, and in keeping with the adaptive evangelical life of the Church in history. Chenu is well known to have had a life-long 35 In an adjoining essay in Peuple de Dieu dans le Monde (35–55), entitled “Les Signes des Temps,” Chenu claims that there is a Thomistic basis for his interpretation of social development in Gaudium et Spes in the notion of “obediential potency.” 26 Chenu, “Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 20–21: “We observe the upheavals of a scientific and technical civilization at the source of multiple and profound mutations which establish man—in both his body and spirit—in a new condition, by and in which the relation of man to the universe is intrinsically modified. . . .‘Nature becomes the humanized being of man’ (K. Marx), and in humanizing nature, man becomes more human. Already old Aristotle noted in techne a human value.Today, homo artifex reveals himself apt as such to be fully human by the progress of this techne, even prior to the accomplishment in him of the homo sapiens.” (Trans. from French are my own unless otherwise specified.) 37 Chenu, “Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 15. 300 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (perennial!) concern with the topic of the cultural-historical and intrinsically temporally-situated character of human existence, culture, and ecclesial pronouncements. In his early work he proposes ways to make this viewpoint intelligible in Thomistic terms,38 and in his later work (especially after the Council) he criticizes vehemently what he takes to be the ahistorical dogmatic essentialism of his former teacher, GarrigouLagrange.39 Clearly in this text, then, Chenu insists that humanity and the Church are intrinsically historical entities subject to cultural reformulations over time, and sees this viewpoint as being vindicated or embraced by the Council, and by Gaudium et Spes in particular. Third, then, the question is raised: where within man’s historical horizon can one locate an authentic, universal measure of the value of human existence? Here Chenu practices a form of Christological “concentration” to respond to this anthropological question. It is in Christ alone that the full measure and scope of human becoming and of human possibilities are unveiled under grace.The process of transformation that is characteristic of the historical being of man finds its resolution only in Christ. In fact, underlying the debate concerning perennial truth claims there is quite clearly an ambiguity in Chenu’s own thought, one concerning the very notion of human nature as such, since he is engaged in a purposeful attempt to rethink the character of human existence in radically historical terms.What is it that serves as a common measure of the human, across all times? It seems that Christology is introduced in order to resolve the question. For example, it is noteworthy that he appeals to Christological existence not only in order to justify a historically and technologically evolutive vision of human becoming, but also to indicate the place where this becoming is resolved. Christ’s deity is introduced into history such that the latter (understood now as salvation history) is seen as a process of divine-human encounter and communion. 38 See Chenu, “Raison psychologique du développement du dogme,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 13 (1924): 44–51, where Chenu interprets Aquinas’s theory of the Aristotelian agent intellect (knowledge by abstraction, in time, and by progressive synthetic judgments) as the anthropological basis for a historical “evolution of dogma.” On page 49 he suggests that a historically situated determination of the content of faith is “essential” to the faith as such. 39 Chenu, “Vérité évangélique et métaphysique wolfienne à Vatican II,” Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques 57 (1973): 632–40. See on this aspect of Chenu’s thought Henri Donneaud O.P., “La constitution dialectique de la théologie et de son histoire selon M. D. Chenu,” Revue Thomiste 96 (1996): 41–66, and Fergus Kerr, O.P., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 17–26. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 301 [A] new light cast upon man today supports the rediscovery of the Incarnation as the human historicization of God. . . . Over and against an unconscious docetism—which has for a long time nourished itself from an abstract “spirituality” that is atemporal and acosmic—[renewed] interest in the concrete and historical humanity of Christ has led to a recognition of man as partaking of God in the history of the world. “God having become man, man is now the measure of all things.”40 Chenu underscores that there exists no absolute identification of the earthly progress of civilization and of evangelization.41 Nevertheless, ultimately the two rejoin eschatologically. “Creation and the new creation are certainly distinct, but their [common] eschatological finality, already at work in time, forbids us from treating them as two juxtaposed realities in two different domains. . . .”42 Consequently, when the document Gaudium et Spes identifies loci of authentically teleologically oriented natural human developments, these latter are themselves potential indications of the work of Christ’s grace in history. “Wherever human intelligence engages not to the benefit of ideology but in the true service of man: in the construction of the world, of the values of socialization, in the political order of the state, of rights, of science and of morals, we can perceive there the indirect sign of the Lordship of Christ, even outside of the Church.”43 It is evident that Chenu’s reflections in these pages raise numerous theological questions. Often his critics signal the questionable character of the alliance that is envisaged between technology, social “progress” broadly defined, and the Christological concentration of grace.44 Is the 40 Chenu,“Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 19. Chenu claims that the final quote is from Karl Barth, Christengemeinde und Bürgergemeinde (1946), 36. See “Une Constitution,” 20, n. 4. 41 Chenu,“Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 26.“Neither nature nor history has the capacity to reveal the mystery of God. His Word comes ‘from above’ by the initiative of a gratuitous love, engaging itself in a loving communion [with humanity]. Grace is grace and profane history is not the source of salvation. Evangelization is of another order than civilization.To feed human beings is not in itself to save them, even if my salvation requires of me to feed them. The promotion of culture is not in any way equivalent to conversion to the faith.” 42 Chenu, “Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 30. 43 Ibid. 44 See in this respect the very different evaluation of the moral ambivalency of technology in modern culture by Pope Benedict XVI, in Caritas in Veritate, chapter 6, notwithstanding, but rather in continuity with, the appeal to the “signs of the times,” in paragraph 18. See also Richard Schenk, O.P., “Officium signa temporum perscrutandi. New Encounters of Gospel and Culture in the Context of the New Evangelisation,” in Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in Light of the Gospel (Bibliotheca 302 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. grace of Christ not being appealed to here to lend support to a modern culture of technology that all too often in practice disregards true human dignity in favor of technological prowess and power? Is the kingdom of Christ being invoked here to underwrite an intra-human (French 1960s socialist) political vision fixated on the means of production, and the freedom from class alienation that can occur through the technological progress of civilization and a more just distribution of goods? Chenu presents claims to the contrary, insisting that the presence of these latter phenomena must in fact be subordinated to the higher and more ultimate ends of the life of grace and of the Gospel.45 Be that as it may, the query is one worthy of careful consideration. Here, however, it seems to me more germane to focus on the question of the perennial versus intrinsically temporal character of human nature, its relation to the progressive history of human culture, and of the relation of both these (human nature in its historical becoming) to the mystery of Christ. For although the historical character of humanity and the redemptive mystery of Christ are deeply interrelated, the claim that Christ could be the key to understanding the meaning of human nature precisely because he is a historically unique individual (and one in a culturally unique, biblical setting) is one that has received important criticisms in modernity, and it is not clear from the tenor of Chenu’s proposals that he is prepared to meet these objections adequately. First, we could ask with Immanuel Kant whether the historical-cultural particularity of Christ and his moral example is not the proof of an intrinsic limitation to his universal appeal, rather than a sign of the latter. Prior to Kant, Gotthold Lessing and other early Enlightenment historical-critical scholars argued coherently that there is not a guarantee of certitude given to human reason that the historical presentation of Christ offered by the early Christian movement is one that can be proven to be historically accurate. Consequently, its universal mandate is endangered, if we consider it binding upon human assent by virtue of the intrinsic principles of reason alone.46 Following in this line of thinking, Kant is more Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium, CCVIII), ed. Johan Verstraeten (Leuven and Leuven/Paris/Dudley: Leuven University Press and Peeters, 2007), 167–203. 45 See especially Chenu, “Une Constitution Pastorale de l’Église,” 31. 46 Gotthold Lessing,“On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” in Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 53–54: “If no historical truth can be demonstrated, then nothing can be demonstrated by means of historical truths.That is: accidental [i.e., contingent] truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason. . . .We all believe that an Alexander lived who in a short time conquered almost all Asia. But who, on the basis of this belief, would risk anything of great, permanent worth, the loss of which would be Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 303 forceful. Insofar as the moral example of Christ is presented under the forms of a sensible-temporal narrative that implies a historical-cultural setting and particularity, by that very fact this moral example is not universal and cannot attain to the level of first principles that are embedded in transcendental reason, insofar as this reason touches upon practical action.47 We see the echo of both these claims in the modern post-Christian theology (or gnosis) of the religious-pluralism movement, exemplified in a thinker like John Hick. While historical-critical scripture studies demonstrate the culturally limited sphere of the temporal consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth as a first-century Jew (whose identity is not readily assimilated to later dogmatic pronouncements of the Catholic tradition),48 irreparable?. . . It is said: ‘The Christ of whom on historical grounds you must allow that he raised the dead, that he himself rose from the dead, said himself that God has a Son of the same essence as himself and that he is this Son.’This would be excellent! if only it were not the case that it is not more than historically certain that Christ said this. If you press me still further and say: ‘Oh yes! this is more than historically certain. For it is asserted by inspired historians who cannot make a mistake.’ But, unfortunately, that also is only historically certain, that these historians were inspired and could not err. That, then, is the ugly, broad ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap. If anyone can help me over it, let him do it, I beg him, I adjure him. He will deserve a divine reward from me.” 47 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York and Toronto: St. Martin’s and Macmillan, 1965), “The Idea of Pure Reason”, section 1, A568/B596–A570/B598: “[H]uman reason contains not only ideas, but ideals also, which although they do not have, like the Platonic ideas, creative power, yet have practical power (as regulative principles), and form the basis of the possible perfection of certain actions. . . . But to attempt to realize the ideal in an example, that is, in the field of appearance, as, for instance, to depict the character of the perfectly wise man in a romance, is impracticable. There is indeed something absurd, and far from edifying, in such an attempt, inasmuch as the natural limitations, which are constantly doing violence to the completeness of the idea, make the illusion that is aimed at altogether impossible, and do cast suspicion on the good itself—the good that has its source in the idea—by giving it the air of being a mere fiction.”That Kant seems to have the Gospel portrait of Christ in mind can be confirmed by consulting a parallel text: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, trans. A.Wood and G. Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6:60–6:66. 48 John Hick,“Jesus and the World Religions,” in The Myth of God Incarnate, ed. John Hick (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1977), 176: “Thus it was natural and intelligible both that Jesus, through whom men had found a decisive encounter with God and new and better life, should come to be hailed as son of God, and that later this poetry should have hardened into prose and escalated from a metaphorical son of God to a metaphysical God the Son, of the same substance as the Father within the triune Godhead. . . . But we should never forget that if the Christian gospel had moved east, into India, instead of west, into the Roman empire, Jesus’ 304 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. so likewise an expanded contemporary understanding of the profundity of varied religious traditions suggests that the speculative as well as moral truth about Ultimate Reality can only be found in and through a comparative theology that disavows the uniqueness of Christianity and the uniquely saving role of Christ in history.49 A theologically positive way of framing this objection is to ask what metaphysical criteria are required for the Christological concentration that Chenu, following Gaudium et Spes, wishes to defend? For it seems that we are invited to consider at least three senses in which human nature in Christ and in human history must be discernable, that is, under both (1) perennial aspects and (2) particular economic states (i.e., our nature as “typically” encountered in history in fallen and redeemed states), and (3) as particularly perfected in Christ and in the vision of the God-human presented by the Gospel. For if we cannot attain knowledge of nature as such, then we cannot compare the various economic states of this nature evaluatively. (In fact, we cannot even reflect on the question of whether behavior that theology deems “fallen” or “redeemed” has a basis in natural human structures and teleology). And likewise only if we can consider the distinctive state of Christ’s human nature in comparison with both our fallen human nature and the essential and teleological exigencies of nature as such can we think out reasonably the natural perfection of Christ in terms that are universally accessible (in philosophical as well as theological refutation of Kant, Lessing, and Hick). Only such a comparison of states of nature will allow us to develop both an appreciation and critique of other forms of non-Christian religiousity in terms that underscore the universality of Christian truth. A metaphysics of nature is needed in order to articulate the perfection of Christ in keeping with a sufficiently universalist moral teaching and eschatology that are applicable to all human persons. Second, and perhaps more seriously, has Chenu not naively underestimated the degree to which his own theology most especially presupposes recourse to perennial principles of wisdom from which to evaluate the contingent circumstances of a given age? This is especially prevalent in his concept of world-construction as teleologically oriented, as guided by a religious significance would probably have been expressed by hailing him within Hindu culture as a divine Avatar and within the Mahayana Buddhism which was then developing in India as a Bodhisattva, one who has attained to oneness with Ultimate Reality but remains in the human world out of compassion for mankind and to show others the way of life.These would have been the appropriate expressions with those cultures, of the same spiritual reality.” 49 Cf. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1989). Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 305 providential order into a supernatural beatitude that can in intrinsic fashion assume and accomplish the legitimate aspirations of human civilization. What sort of vision could be less explicitly metaphysical and therefore trans-historical, in structure? And if one refuses overt recourse to such perennial principles, how then might one reply to the post-structuralist tradition of reflection that was emerging in Chenu’s own time, and which was to render any idea of a moral and political universal order superfluous or intrinsically problematic for many? Otherwise said, once we admit that human nature is radically conditioned (determined?) by its cultural-historical circumstances, then what is there to prevent us from accepting that truth constructs are historical-critical “all the way down,”50 and that post-modern deconstructionist techniques are simply the most logically consistent outcome of any ontology that would present man as a being subject to becoming through history in all that he is? If this is the case, then a historical-ontology of man is “intrinsically disharmonious” with, or radically alien to, what must be considered purely violent and extrinsic Christian ends that claim for man a universal and transcendent teleology.This was, at any rate, the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche, who perceived in the Christian pretext to historical universalism a purely historically situational and individually interested sacerdotal exercise of the will-to-power.51 This supposedly universal ethic of mercy was 50 As Antonio Gramsci claimed in developing a radicalized interpretation of Marx’s anthropology. Cf. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), and the analysis by Renate Holub, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). Something akin ought to have been familiar to Chenu via the Frankfurt school, for example in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung, first published in 1947. 51 “All that has been done on earth against ‘the noble,’ ‘the powerful,’ ‘the masters,’ ‘the rulers,’ fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual vengeance. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who with awe-inspiring consistency dared to invert the aristocratic value equation (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = beloved of God) . . . saying ‘the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good.’ . . . [W]ith the Jews there begins the slave revolt in morality: that revolt . . . which we no longer see because it—has been victorious.” Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals I, 7, trans.Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York:Vintage, 1989), 33–34.The central issue here is not the question of Nietzsche’s emotional prejudice vis-à-vis the Jewish people, but his intellectually arguable claim that their morality should not carry universal import, and stems at base from a particular cultural self-interest, underscoring the 306 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. a pretext stemming genealogically from the ancient Jewish experience of political impotence, intensified subsequently by the teaching of Jesus as an inauthentic response to the problem of violence.52 Or to formulate the objection (if possible) in a more pointed way (because less distinctly fixated on Christianity), a simple citation from that most ingenious of twentieth-century “deconstructionists” should suffice: [My] essential task was to free the history of thought from its subjection to transcendence. . . . My aim was to analyze this history, in the discontinuity that no teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be deployed in an anonymity on which no transcendental constitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn. My aim was to cleanse it of all transcendental narcissism. . . . It had to be shown that the history of thought could not have this role of revealing the transcendental moment that rational mechanics has not possessed since Kant, mathematical idealities since Husserl, and the meanings of the perceived world since MerleauPonty—despite the efforts that had been made to find it there.53 In other words, is Chenu’s transcendental world order not simply another manifestation of the condescending Christian triumphalism he elsewhere so disparages? And should we not wonder if he could be accused himself by any logically consistent de-constructionist of “narratives of civilization,” of attempting to subject history to the transcendental narcissism of a Christian utopianism? And in this is he not simply the more subtle arbiter of the will to power that is less concealed in the older, triumphalistic ecclesiological dogmatism of the Vatican I epoch (and its scholastic defenders)? Or so the argument might run. Again, framed positively, the argument being underscored here is that Catholic interpreters of Gaudium et Spes cannot avoid a self-consciously and overt metaphysical moment of explanation within theology that responds to the critique of the post-modern anti-metaphysician. The yet more universal will-to-power that inhabited them and every other ancient and modern people. 52 “This Jesus of Nazareth, the incarnate gospel of love, this ‘Redeemer’ who brought blessedness and victory to the poor, the sick, and the sinners—was he not this seduction in its most uncanny and irresistible form, a seduction and a bypath to precisely those Jewish values and new ideals?” Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals I, 8, p. 35.This idea is of course developed at greater length as the central argument of Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ. 53 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse of Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 203. (Emphasis added.) Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 307 latter would see any attempt to assign prescriptive ends to human civilization as nothing less than an overt or covert assault on human freedom through an ultimately arbitrary attempt at world-construal that is purely contingent (and therefore ineffectual). But a response to such a claim entails an articulation of the epistemic basis for a philosophical understanding of human nature. Unless some natural knowledge of essences is possible, then Christian discourse is inevitably reduced to being a mere meta-narrative among others, a tribal rhetoric that is not subject to laws of universal verification in any respect, and that cannot in turn make an appeal to human nature (or educate Christians or non-Christians as to what is proper to nature and to the natural law) even from within the domain of Christology and even in light of Christ. To say the very least, this would entail, for Catholic theologians, the acceptance of a seeming caesura running right down the middle of Gaudium et Spes, separating the Christological hermeneutic of salvation history irrevocably from the multiple appeals to the natural law, and to the profound moral truths that can be attained by human reason. In fact, the two might even be seen (as they perhaps are by some Barthian interpreters) as mutually exclusive. Correspondingly, the same stance would necessarily undermine the theme in the document of a rational apologia which attempts to suggest that life in Christ is more perfectly human and that in fact it is only possible for a culture to be fully human if it is liberated from the denaturalizing irresolution of its own inner tensions (that are the consequence of sin) by the grace of Christ. Christological fulfillment of history, then, requires the Christological accomplishment of human nature and of nature’s various cultures, and therefore establishes a perennial standard of what is human.The apprehension of such a standard must exist at least as regards Christ: what does it mean to say that he is especially human? To announce that God has become human, after all, requires in us some intrinsic natural knowledge of what humanity is, and the realization that he fulfills some of the natural tendencies or aspirations of the human heart that cannot find completion concretely without him or apart from him. If there is not metaphysically perennial, essential knowledge of the human person and its nature, then the message of Christ as the historical fulfillment of human existence is a message purely extrinsic to human culture, a grace that is present to nature “as if from without, lacking a relation to nature and to history . . . as if the Kingdom of God was set on top of the world, like the scaffolding of a future city.”54 54 Chenu, “Les Signs des Temps,” 46. 308 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. What, then, about nature, and how ought we to understand the role of a concept of nature in the theological claim that Christ is the fulfillment of all that is human? In the next and final section of this essay, I would like to consider these questions briefly from a Thomistic point of view. Thomistic Reflections: Integral Philosophical Anthropology as a Necessary Dimension of Christology Karl Rahner famously commented that the Council of Chalcedon could be seen not only as the reference point for the Church’s acquisition of a set of principles by which to discern the parameters of orthodox Christology, but also as a starting point for an ongoing and ever-developing subject matter in theology.55 A different analogy—and one perhaps more apt for the interpretation of Gaudium et Spes—could be drawn from the Council of Ephesus. For if Ephesus identified the hypostatic union as a basic first principle of Christological reflection concerning the God-man (i.e., the recognition of the unity of the person of Christ) then Chalcedon was the proper qualification of this fundamental principle: that within the person of the incarnate Son there exists the distinction without separation of the two natures.The passage was made from unity to distinction of natures in unity. Similarly, what Gaudium et Spes and its primitive interpreters such as Rahner and Chenu rightly underscore is a principle of unity: the existence of humanity within a unique historical economy of grace, such that there exists a concrete phenomenological unity of grace and nature, in which grace precedes and can make use of the diverse historical states of man (as innocent, fallen, and redeemed), his natural abilities and his culture, inviting human beings in varied ways into the life of God, through participation in the redemptive history of Christ. There is not a pure exteriority between grace and nature in exercitu, or a “history before grace.” Likewise, there is a uniquely graced fulfillment of the teleological aspirations of human nature made possible through the designs of God in human history that cannot be found apart from Christ, while Christ is the concrete exemplar or eschatological point of concentration of the human as such. In him the true nature of man and the teleological fulfillment of human desire and of human culture is made manifest in a determinate and final way. Nevertheless, if this principle of the concrete unity of nature and grace is important to recognize, the distinction of nature and grace is no less important and has been significantly underemphasized in recent times.This is particularly the case when nature is deemed something unintelligible in itself (apart from Christ) or when grace is simply rendered synonymous 55 Karl Rahner,“Current Problems in Christology,” in Theological Investigations I, 150. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 309 with history, such that the distinction between the work of salvation and the existential life of human persons is all but eclipsed.56 Either error, however, renders unintelligible the claim that Christ is the fulfillment of natural human aspirations, and ironically makes Christological truth claims something imposed upon human philosophical traditions arbitrarily, that is to say, in a way that is purely extrinsic to them.57 I have suggested above that a rational, philosophical concept of nature is requisite in order to articulate in sufficiently universal terms the distinctly theological claim that Christ is the historical fulfillment and exemplar of human existence. (That this concept of nature might at times be especially well elaborated within the context of Christian culture and even within the context of theological reflection—as in the case of St.Augustine or the high Scholastics—is of significant importance, but it is incidental to my argument.) I have also claimed that a notion of “pure nature” (of nature possibly existing as neither originally graced nor as fallen) is the logical corollary of any claim that human nature was originally graced, is indeed in a fallen state, and has been redeemed by Christ, in whom human nature has attained (by grace) an acutely particular perfection, even while Christ is truly human like us. In the remainder of this essay, then, I would like briefly to address a specific and limited but important aspect of each of these claims.The first concerns the indispensability of a notion of nature as a condition for the meaningful narrative articulation of historical change, and of teleological orientation.The second concerns the indispensability of a notion of pure nature for the articulation of one of the key Christological affirmations of Gaudium et Spes 22: the claim that “it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear.” Nature as the Indispensible Concept Underlying All Meaningful Narrative History Chenu claims that a theology that bases itself on what it presumes to be perennial principles runs the risk of ignoring its cultural circumstances 56 It seems that John Milbank wishes to take his theological interpretation of grace- nature relations in this direction. Cf. Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005). The idea is clearly stated, for instance, on page 15, as programmatic. 57 This would not be the judgment of Blondel, clearly, in his L’Action, a work that sought to argue just the opposite: to provide a rationale from within philosophical scrutiny of the ascending desires of the human will for the uniquely supernatural vision of God as the final end of man. However, the risk of this perspective is that it in fact manages surreptitiously to render natural desires formally unintelligible apart from grace, or to render claims about grace wholly alien to rival philosophical accounts of the meaningfulness of human willing. 310 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. and of failing to construct a theological response to the signs and needs of a given time and locus. Appeals to the perennial are deemed timeless but therefore abstract as contrasted with the temporal becoming of historical and teleological change, circumstances that must be taken into account for a realistic presentation of the Gospel. However, it is reasonable in this context to raise the question of which form of appeal to perennial principles of theology and of human nature one might be referring to. For it was against a Platonic conception of timeless forms which Aristotle considered all too abstract that he was to conceive of progressive (historical) knowledge of an enduring human nature that one discovers experientially in and through time.58 And it was in consideration of Parmenides’s denial of the existence of multiplicity and change that he would insist on the possibility of a universal science of change that could discover the explanatory principles of physical beings not beyond or outside of, but in and through, their formal and teleological developments in time (because change occurs in an intelligible subject and in relation to intelligible ends or the non-realization of these ends).59 Most relevant to the point at hand, Aristotle argued convincingly in Metaphysics IV against the sophist tradition that the condition of possibility for the logical articulation of change is in fact knowledge of unchanging ontological structural principles in realities that are being described.60 Simply put, coherent narratives of change of any kind just to be logically coherent in themselves as forms of discourse must evaluate change in terms of stable forms of identity (essences) that undergo or are the 58 See, for example, the critique of the Platonic theory of the Forms as an account of natural substances in Metaphysics VII, 15–16, culminating in the identification of the substance in VII, 17 as the formal determination of the material individual, abiding in it, and discernable to human thought in and through its history and development.An analogous point is made in Metaphysics XII, 5: 1071a18–23: “The primary principles of all things are the actual primary ‘this’ [the concrete singular existent] and another thing that exists potentially [latent in the matter of what already exists]. The universal causes, then, of which we spoke do not exist [i.e., as separated forms]. For the individual is the source of the individuals. For while man is the cause of man universally, there is no universal man; but Peleus is the cause of Achilles, and your father of you, and this particular b of this particular ba, though b in general is the cause of ba taken without qualification.” Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans.W. D. Ross, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). 59 This is one of the central arguments of Aristotle’s Physics I, 1–8, and leads to affirmations of the formal and final causes of material change in II, 1. See especially 184b15–186a3; 188a13–b26. 60 See Metaphysics IV, 5–8, especially 1010a1–36;1011a3–1011b23. He also raises this point in Physics I, 2, 185a1ff. in response to Parmenides’s denial of the real multiplicity of beings in the world and of contingent change within these beings. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 311 subjects of history, and in terms of teleological grammar.The latter ideas are an intrinsic component of the articulation not only of purposeful development (and therefore of any possible narrative revaluation of values). They are also necessary even for a description of efficient causality, insofar as decisive historical factors that alter the narrative circumstances of a reality point back themselves to an identifiably ordered (i.e., teleological) action. Form, efficiency, teleology and material alterability: these are basic principles of thought, and therefore are also inevitable conceptual properties of any possible discourse. Behind the meaningful use of language, then, there is the implicit assertion of an ontological foundation expressed by the principle of identity (“each thing we experience has a given unity and essence”). An acknowledgement of this truth leads to the admission of a dependence of the science of logic upon the truths of ontology.61 As Aquinas points out in commenting on Aristotle, the sophist (a not-so-distant relative of the present day post-structuralist) can only avoid admitting this by making two artificial and ultimately irrational reductions: one of all ontology to mere logic, the second of the study of logic from being either theoretical or practical to being practical only (for a political use).62 Indeed, the practical study of logic then becomes that of dialectics in view of power, of the use 61 Aristotle himself, in writing against the sophists, sees that behind the realistic presuppositions of language there lies not only the reality of being, but also ultimately the question of God, whose pure actuality and immutability is the ultimate cause of the relative stability amidst change of the physical world: Metaphysics IV, 8, 1012b23–32: “Evidently again those who say all things are at rest are not right nor are those who say all things are in movement. For if all things are at rest, the same statements will always be true and the same always false, but obviously they are not; for he who makes a statement himself at one time was not and again will not be. And if all things are in motion, nothing will be true; everything therefore will be false. But it has been shown that this is impossible.Again, it must be that which is that changes; for change is from something to something. But again it is not the case that all things are at rest and in motion sometimes, and nothing for ever; for there is something which always moves the things that are in motion, and the first mover must itself be unmoved.” 62 Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, IV, lec. 4, 570–77. More accurately, sophist theoretics studies the logical structure of argumentation in view of merely practical use of argument: a mimicry of it or an unmasking of it as a discourse about social power. Nevertheless, sophists have less real effect than philosophers, Aquinas notes, in that their discourse fails to truly convict the intellect through demonstrative reasoning, in contrast to philosophical science. “The philosopher differs from the dialectician in power, because the consideration of the philosopher is more efficacious than that of the dialectician. For the philosopher proceeds demonstratively in dealing with the common attributes mentioned above, and thus it is proper to him to have scientific knowledge of these attributes. And he actually knows them 312 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. of rhetoric as a dialectical art to manipulate the intellectual persuasions of one’s auditors and one’s culture, or to seek to analyze the political and cultural uses of dialectic by others. If ontology is merely the logical manipulation of the culture of thought,Aristotle continues, then indeed all truth is merely appearance, and has no ontological signification.63 But in this case, all propositions can be equally true or untrue (including contradictory ones), and so there is the possibility of affirming a non-finite number of truths simultaneously, or (to speak in ontological terms) of affirming an infinite regression of simultaneous causes.64 If this is the case, then we must abandon the axiom of non-contradiction, which, as Aristotle observed, is what sophists are willing to concede (and which many deconstructionists with certitude, for certain or scientific knowledge is the effect of demonstration. The dialectician, however, proceeds to treat all of the above-mentioned common attributes from probable premises, and thus he does not acquire scientific knowledge of them but a kind of opinion.The reason for this difference is that there are two kinds of beings: beings of reason and real beings.The expression being of reason is applied properly to those notions which reason derives from the objects it considers, for example, the notions of genus, species and the like, which are not found in reality but are a natural result of the consideration of reason.And this kind of being, i.e., being of reason, constitutes the proper subject of logic. But intellectual conceptions of this kind are equal in extension to real beings, because all real beings fall under the consideration of reason. Hence the subject of logic extends to all things to which the expression real being is applied. His conclusion is, then, that the subject of logic is equal in extension to the subject of philosophy, which is real being. Now the philosopher proceeds from the principles of this kind of being to prove the things that have to be considered about the common accidents of this kind of being. But the dialectician proceeds to consider them from the conceptions of reason, which are extrinsic to reality. Hence it is said that dialectics is in search of knowledge, because in searching it is proper to proceed from extrinsic principles. But the philosopher differs from the sophist ‘in the choice,’ i.e., in the selection or willing, or in the desire, of a way of life. For the philosopher and sophist direct their life and actions to different things.The philosopher directs his to knowing the truth, whereas the sophist directs his so as to appear to know what he does not.” Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. John P. Rowan (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox Press), 574–75. 63 Metaphysics IV, 5, 1009a6–1010a15. 64 Metaphysics IV, 8, 1012b14–22: “Further, all such arguments are exposed to the often-expressed objection, that they destroy themselves. For he who says that everything is true makes the statement contrary to his own also true, so that his own is not true (for the contrary statement denies that it is true), while he who says everything is false makes himself also false.—And if the former person excepts the contrary statement, saying it alone is not true, while the latter excepts his own as being alone not false, none the less they are driven to postulate the truth or falsehood of an infinite number of statements; for that which says the true statement is true, is true, and this process will go on to infinity.” Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 313 consider inevitable).65 This means, in turn, that there can be no meaningful articulation of narrative history or teleology, since a determination and its contradictory are simultaneously equally true or untrue.To attempt to narrate even a history of that which one wishes to deconstruct is already to attempt to identify at least a formally intelligible entity with determination and ends (the deconstructive narrative of a person itself). Language that is anti-metaphysical all the way down, then, is incapable even of this.66 What is most important to grasp from Aristotle’s analysis of sophism is not only that the underlying logic of the sophist is incoherent or contradictory as soon as he begins to analyze (though indeed this is the case), but even more fundamentally, this: that language operating without reference to natures simply ceases to mean anything at all.67 Aristotle’s lucid argumentation implies by contrast (and in differentiation from some of Chenu’s statements) that if one is committed to a narrative history of dynamic development, change in view of progress and of fulfillment in some overarching teleological mode, then one is committed to a concept of perennial nature, and indeed, we might even add, to an understanding of human nature that employs the classical four causes (formal, material, efficient, and final). For there must be at least some concept of natural teleological ends in human beings based upon what human beings are that can be identified rationally as a precondition for any narrative of human teleology, theological or otherwise.Were this not the case, the notion of teleological order that is presented in uniquely theological definitions with respect to the Christological and graced “fulfillment” of human nature would have to be unintelligible to one’s natural understanding of man (and therefore purely extrinsic).68 But this is to say that the claims of Gaudium et 65 Metaphysics IV, 8 1012a29–1012b31. 66 Cf. on this the germane reflections of Alasdair MacIntyre, on the thought of Michael Foucault:Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1990), 196–215. 67 Metaphysics IV, 4, 1010a10–14: “It was this belief that blossomed into the most extreme of the views above mentioned, that of the professed Hericliteans, such as was held by Cratylus, who finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once.” Metaphysics IV, 4, 1006a12–15: “We can, however, demonstrate negatively even that this view is impossible, if our opponent will only say something; and if he says nothing, it is absurd to attempt to reason with one who will not reason about anything, in so far as he refuses to reason. For such a man, as such, is seen already to be no better than a mere plant.” 68 This is what I take to be the note of truth in Le Guillou’s appreciative critique of the early work of de Lubac on grace and nature. See Marie-Joseph Le Guillou, O.P.,“Surnaturel,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 34 (1950): 226–43, 314 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. spes §22 concerning the Christological fulfillment of human history would appear necessarily as something purely extrinsic to natural, human action.69 One must speak therefore of natural ends, of a hierarchy of ends (for there are a diversity of natural goods), and indeed of a supreme natural end (the natural desire for God) that is open to the higher end of grace such that the latter is not understood as something violent to or exterior to the former. It is possible in this way to affirm that the grace of divine life can assume integrally (and not extrinsically) all of the former natural ends of man, and most especially his ultimate natural final end, while remaining extrinsic in its originating causes (from God!) precisely as grace. This is the classical Thomistic perspective of the two-fold final end of man as imperfect (in nature) and perfect (in grace), and as a single phenomenological unity. Man is created with his rational, natural desire for God so that he is capable of election to the life of grace, just as one final end is created for the sake of the other. Understood in this way the teleological dimensions of man, as natural and supernatural, stand in existential ordination to one another as intrinsically related.70 Man is naturally open to intrinsic fulfillment from a gratuitous, supernatural source. This view was articulated and the helpful study of Henri Donneaud, O.P., “Surnaturel through the FineTooth Comb of Traditional Thomism,” in Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought, especially 51–55. 69 Or, one’s concept of nature could be merely assimilated to the dynamic history of grace so that nature simply is always, already graced in view of a trans-philosophical end that renders philosophy as a subject of study (and natural reason as such) unintelligible as notions.Thus human reason is simply a dimension of a panChristic immanentism, arguably a form of what Erich Przywara called “theopanism” (see also Garrigou-Lagrange’s contemporaneous criticisms of pantheism), in which humanity simply is always, already the pure expression of God’s divine life outside of himself, from which he is ontologically inseparable, so that the two are determined mutually and theoretically within a common history. On Przywara’s notion of theopanism, see John R. Betz, “Erich Przywara and Karl Barth: On the Analogia Entis as a Formal Principle of Catholic Theology” and David Bentley Hart, “The Destiny of Christian Metaphysics: Reflections on the Analogia Entis,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Anti-Christ or Wisdom of God? ed. Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010). 70 See on this Aquinas, Expos. de Trin., q. 6, a. 4, ad 3; ScG I, c. 2; ST I–II, q. 3, a. 6, and the analysis by Rudi Te Velde, Aquinas on God (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 155–60. J. M. Ramirez, O.P., explains it in this sense:“Quando finis ultimus naturalis subordinatur fini ultimo supernaturali, idem homo potest simul utrumque finem intendere et habere; quando vero finis ultimus naturalis non subordinatur fini ultimo supernaturali, sed ei repugnat seu contrariatur, non potest idem homo simul utrumque habere finem neque intendere efficaciter. . . . Quando finis ultimus naturalis subordinatur fini ultimo supernaturali, non dantur duo fines ultimi simpliciter totales et adaequati, sed unus tantum finis ultimus simpliciter, Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 315 plausibly by persons like Sylvester of Ferrara, John of St. Thomas, and, more recently, Jacques Maritain, J. M. Ramirez, and Marie-Joseph Le Guillou. It certainly can be argued to have the most firm textual mandate from within the writings of St.Thomas Aquinas himself.71 What, however, about the effects of sin? Do they not eradicate the basic capacity of the human person to be naturally orientated toward God, and in this case is it not precisely grace that is necessary in order to render human beings apt to perceive in any way a final and therefore ultimately meaningful teleological end that is characteristic of a truly fulfilled human existence? Aquinas offers a qualified interpretation of the damage rendered by the effects of the fall upon human nature.72 The gifts of grace are destroyed in man by original sin.73 The natural capacity to effectively love God above all things is itself also undermined (which is of central importance for the question under consideration).74 Human qui est finis supernaturalis; nam finis subordinatus alteri, eo ipso desinit esse ultimus finis simpliciter.Atqui idem homo potest simul duos vel plures fines velle et intendere quando ordinatur ad unum ultimum, quem primo et per se intendit. . . . Ergo item homo potest simul velle et intendere finem ultimum naturalem, qui est ultimus secundum quid comparatus ad finem ultimum supernaturalem, et finem ultimum supernaturalem, qui est ultimus simpliciter.” Ramirez, De Hominis Beatitudine, Tome I (Salamanca: Biblioteca de Teólogos Españoles, 1942), vol. 8, 339. This permits us to understand why human beings can will a number of normative final ends, while simultaneously ordering them to one another hierarchically. It also permits us to see that only if there is a natural end open to graced supernatural completion can all of the inferior goods of human existence be effectively ordered from within (intrinsically) to the all surpassing good and final end simpliciter of the beatific vision. 71 See, in recent years, Georges Cottier, O.P., Le désir de Dieu: sur les traces de saint Thomas (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2002); Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St.Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010); Reinhard Hütter,“Thomas on the Natural Desire for the Vision of God: A Relecture of Summa Contra Gentiles III, 25 après Henri de Lubac,” The Thomist, forthcoming. 72 See the aforementioned study by Jean-Pierre Torrell, “Nature and Grace in Thomas Aquinas,” 172–79. 73 ST I–II, q. 85, a. 1. 74 ST I–II, q. 109, a. 3: “[I]n the state of perfect nature man referred the love of himself and of all other things to the love of God as to its end; and thus he loved God more than himself and above all things. But in the state of corrupt nature man falls short of this in the appetite of his rational will, which, unless it is cured by God’s grace, follows its private good, on account of the corruption of nature. And hence we must say that in the state of perfect nature man did not need the gift of grace added to his natural endowments, in order to love God above all things naturally, although he needed God’s help to move him to it; but in the state of corrupt nature man needs, even for this, the help of grace to heal his nature.” 316 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. beings are themselves curvatus in se by virtue of a disordered and malicious will of self-love infecting even the exercise of otherwise natural loves for authentic goods.75 Nevertheless, the natural (i.e., ontological-structural) orientation of the will to God as the supreme good remains inscribed in the rational appetite of the human being as a spiritual animal,76 and so the inclination or tendency of this appetite toward God, while weakened, is still present in fallen man.77 Likewise, certain first principles of moral perception (the principles of synderesis) are ineradicable, and under the right conditions could in principle lead man to the rational understanding of the primacy of the love of God and recognition of basic moral goods.78 (This rational understanding would not suffice, however, for the existential action of virtuous religious behavior. See Romans 1:18–21.79 ) In other words, man has enough 75 ST I–II, q. 84, a. 2, corp. and ad 3; q. 85, aa. 1 and 3. 76 ST I–II, q. 109, a. 3:“Now to love God above all things is natural to man and to every nature, not only rational but irrational, and even to inanimate nature according to the manner of love which can belong to each creature. And the reason of this is that it is natural to all to seek and love things according as they are naturally fit (to be sought and loved) since ‘all things act according as they are naturally fit’ as stated in Physics ii, 8.” See also q. 85, a. 2. 77 ST I–II, q. 85, a. 1: “The good of human nature is threefold. First, there are the principles of which nature is constituted, and the properties that flow from them, such as the powers of the soul, and so forth. Secondly, since man has from nature an inclination to virtue, as stated above, this inclination to virtue is a good of nature. Thirdly, the gift of original justice, conferred on the whole of human nature in the person of the first man, may be called a good of nature. Accordingly, the first-mentioned good of nature is neither destroyed nor diminished by sin.The third good of nature was entirely destroyed through the sin of our first parent. But the second good of nature, viz. the natural inclination to virtue, is diminished by sin. Because human acts produce an inclination to like acts, as stated above. Now from the very fact that a thing becomes inclined to one of two contraries, its inclination to the other contrary must needs be diminished. Wherefore as sin is opposed to virtue, from the very fact that a man sins, there results a diminution of that good of nature, which is the inclination to virtue.” 78 Cf. ST I–II, q. 100, a. 1; ST I–II, q. 94, a. 2. 79 Commenting on Romans 1:21, “For, although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give thanks, but became vain in their thoughts, and their foolish heart was darkened,”Aquinas writes:“That their basic guilt was not due to ignorance is shown by the fact that, although they possessed knowledge of God, they failed to use it unto good. For they knew God in two ways: first, as the supereminent being, to Whom glory and honor were due.They are said to be without excuse, therefore, because, although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God; either because they failed to pay Him due worship or because they put a limit to His power and knowledge by denying certain aspects of His power and knowledge, contrary to Sirach (43:30):‘when you exalt Him, put forth all your strength.’ Secondly, they knew Him as the cause of all good things. Hence, in all things He Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 317 rational and voluntary inclination toward the supreme good that remains, even in the fallen state, to be able to recognize that he should exist for God, that he is less than he ought to be, that he is a noble yet simultaneously wounded and fault-ridden being, and that he is in unresolved contradiction with himself. It is in continuity with such a perspective that Gaudium et Spes addresses the human person, promising him a fulfillment and liberation of his human nature that is possible only with Christ. Grace meanwhile can elicit and strengthen both the natural tendencies toward God and the natural knowledge of these tendencies. Accordingly, a condition for the complete cooperation with grace is the re-actualization or studied pursuit of a Christian philosophical knowledge of the constitution and qualities of human nature.80 This is necessary not only to respond to the post-modernist dissolution of nature into a flux of pure cultural becoming, and into the cultural construction/deconstruction of the self and of society by the will to power. It is also necessary in order to articulate a reasoned evaluation of authentic ends and purposes that transcends a given age and that thereby allows for the determination of the moral health and legitimate aspirations of a given culture or historical period in relation to universal standards.81 Just such a concept of nature is therefore the sine qua non condition for an evaluative narrative history of culture. But this implies consequently that one can provide even from within theology an articulation of aspects of the natural order and of what nature was deserving of thanks, which they did not render; rather, they attributed their blessings to their own talent and power. Hence, he adds: nor did they give thanks, namely, to the Lord: ‘Give thanks to Him in all circumstances’ (1 Thess. 5:18).” In Rom. I, lec. 7, 127, trans. Fabian Larcher, ed. Jeremy Holmes, electronic manuscript, Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal. 80 Evidently it is not my goal here to explore how one might, by a philosophical form of investigation, rightly identify what a human person is, the nature of the human being as a soul-body composite, or reason demonstratively about the final ends of man. Nor do I intend to consider the historical and existential ways that Christian faith affects the concrete historical exercise of natural philosophical reason. On these questions, one may consult with profit the writings of Benedict Ashley, O.P., Lawrence Dewan, O.P., and Robert Sokolowski. 81 Nothing I am saying here excludes the idea that human culture might make progress in its understanding of what a human person is, or that it might not significantly regress as well. Consider here the paradox of our progress in understanding the physical body of the embryonic human person, and our cultural regress in failing to understand the intrinsic dignity of that same person as transcending the rights of the human freedom of others. An augmented scope of scientific understanding of the material world co-exists with an expanding sense of the range of human permissions of the exercise of freedom. The two are commonly understood as mutually reinforcing processes. 318 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. can do (per pura naturalia, in Aquinas’s sense)82 by recourse to natural philosophical and scientific knowledge, and that one can distinguish this as nature acting by its own powers from nature under the motion of grace. Likewise, the same consideration must be able to determine something of what nature should be able to do due to tendencies toward natural ends, tendencies which are nevertheless hampered by sin (or human faults).83 Only the latter (an evaluative concept of sin as in part the unbecoming of nature) will allow for at least some basic evaluation of genuine human good and evil. Such a concept is also necessary in order to articulate distinctly theological notions of original sin and of the redemptive promises of grace, in order to show that these concepts touch upon something “intrinsic” to concrete historical human nature (as wounded and redeemed in its own ontological capacities and tendencies). Finally, then, to recapitulate the argument, a natural sense of teleology and of a hierarchy of goods is necessary (including recognition of a natural end that can be found in God alone as the supreme good who should be desired and loved above all else) to allow for the intelligibility of the promise of supernatural life as a supreme good that is not something violent to human nature, but capable of subsuming all lesser ends and goods into itself, just as Gaudium et Spes would seem to promote. In short, an ontology of human nature and a robust philosophical project that goes with it are indispensible conditions for a sane and viable theology of grace. The Implicit “Pure Nature” of Christology If the scholastic concept of pure nature became a bug-bear of modern Catholic theology, this was especially due to the insistence that historical human nature never did or was never meant to exist outside the field of graced communion with God, and with the consequences of the acceptance or rejection of that communion. This insistence is perfectly warranted, but as I have attempted to show succinctly above, this was the purpose of and justification for a concept of pure nature as it was articulated in the Dominican Thomistic tradition. In addition, one might add that if this tradition did emphasize extrinsic origins of grace vis-à-vis human nature, it was in order to emphasize that grace as a gift of divine life offered to human persons is not something that they can procure in 82 Cf. Torrell on Aquinas’s discussion of the natural capacities as such in fallen human nature in “Nature and Grace in Thomas Aquinas,” 180–84, with reference to 168–70. 83 I am implying that such a concept of nature is a condition sine qua non, but not a sufficient condition for an extensive moral understanding of good and evil. For a clear example of this in Aquinas’s thinking, see ST I–II, q. 85, a. 6. Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 319 virtue of themselves or by reason of their own resources. It was not to claim (in fact the most common perspective is the logical contrary) that grace is something alien to the final purposes or ends of ordinary human nature.The scholastic Thomist tradition was quite sensitive to the claim of St.Thomas that the grace of justification is not a miracle (something wholly outside the order of nature) because it touches upon the intimate natural orientation of the human person toward God.84 Nevertheless, justification and sanctifying grace are pure gifts (sola gratia) and not intrinsic dimensions of man’s natural possession, either in the original state (contrary to the claims of Baius), or in the economy of redemption (as Augustine rightly argued, against Pelagius). What, then, should we make of the claim of Gaudium et spes §22 that “[i]n reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes clear. . . . For since Christ died for all, and since all men are in fact called to one and the same destiny, which is divine, we must hold that the Holy Spirit offers to all the possibility of being made partners, in a way known to God, in the paschal mystery”? Much could be said about this dense and important passage. My goal in this concluding section of the essay is only to make three claims in the light of what has been argued above. First, the notion that the mystery of man only becomes clear in the mystery of the incarnate Word is of course distinct from the notion of the human nature of the Word as it illumines the human nature of all men. The former notion implies the grace of union (of the humanity of the Word to his person) and the capital graces of the Savior; the illumination concerning the problem of evil, suffering, and death that his passion alone affords; and the eschatological revelation of the final end of the human soul and body that is made manifest in his resurrection. None of this is intelligible without the grace of faith. Nevertheless, a studied understanding of Christ’s human nature in relation to our own is an integral part of the theological reflections just alluded to.To take just one example: during the passion narrative, the Lord is struck by a servant of the 84 See ST I–II, q. 113, a. 10. In De Deo Trino et Creatore (430–37), Garrigou- Lagrange comments upon the significance of Aquinas’s teaching that children born prior to the fall would have been conceived in a state of grace (ST I, q. 100, a. 1) and emphasizes (434–37) that this teaching excludes any purely extrinsicist account of the relations of grace to the constitution of human nature.“Nec dici potest, secundum definitivam S.Thomae sententiam, gratiam sanctificantem esse radicem extrinsecam justitiae originalis” (434). He shows that the teaching of Aquinas is mirrored by Cajetan, Capreolus, and Sylvester of Ferrara (436), and contrasts this with what he takes to be the extrinsicism of Suarez and Bellarmine (cf. 449–50). 320 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. high priest and responds in turn, “If I have spoken wrongly, bear witness to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” ( Jn 18:23). The scene takes on its deepest intelligibility only in light of a perception of who has been struck, and reflection on the grace of desire in the human heart of Christ that leads him to bear witness to the truth, and to embrace persecution and the Cross. His charity, which is universal, is expressed in the love for his persecutors during his passion. These are all mysteries of grace. However, there is also present here a profound truth concerning the rectitude of human judgment and the dignity of human virtue in the face of moral evil. If we assign a non-stoic interpretation to this incident, then the natural integrity of Christ is truly remarkable: his sensitive passions are fully ordered to his reason, and his reason is in perfect subordination to God and to the virtue of speaking the truth out of compassion. “Ecce homo” ( Jn 19:5). Like Pilate, we perceive in Christ a nobility to which we might naturally aspire (by our innate moral tendencies and best ethical judgments) but which is also so fragile and endangered in us as to seem almost perilously idealistic. And it is here in particular that we are able to see the correspondence of grace to the integrity of nature, and of the grace of Christ to his uniquely natural humanity, to a human way of being that instructs us more deeply— and universally—as to what it means to be human.This perfection exists only in Jesus and comes to human beings universally from him alone, pace Lessing, Kant, and Hick, as well as Nietzsche and Foucault. Second, then, a Christological accomplishment of all human history presupposes not only the use of a universal concept of the human and its applicability to both Christ and to all other men. It also requires in turn the implicit acceptance of the real ontological possibility of a state of pure nature, even if this state has never concretely existed. Nor is this some kind of trivial point, but it is in fact something quite significant and intrinsic to all basic thinking on the Christological fulfillment of the human. For the claim of Gaudium et Spes (and of Chenu and Rahner) that we are rightly pursuing is the understanding that human beings cannot be fully themselves (in their deepest natural aspirations) without the life of grace within them, and that this life is made most manifest and clear (so as to illumine the whole world universally) only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word. This means in turn that human beings can exist without grace (because it is a gift), that they cannot be fully themselves (naturally) without that gift, and that in its absence (in the wake of sin) they suffer devastating intrinsic effects to their nature, both personally and collectively. Underlying the states of integral, fallen, redeemed, and Christic (Christ’s own) human nature, there is something that is collec- Human Nature and Gaudium et Spes 22 321 tively the same. Just as this reality that is the same did not have to be created in a state of original holiness (although it was) so likewise it did not have to be subject to sin by the faulty use of freedom (although it now is, failing redemption in Christ). Consequently, nature as it existed in original innocence and as it exists now, as fallen and offered redemption in Christ, did not have to exist in either state, due to its intrinsic requirements as nature. It could have existed in a state of pure nature.To think otherwise is simply either to make grace something other than a gift of God, or to make evil a normative (natural rather than unnatural) constitutive dimension of the human person. Finally, these reflections reach their apex when we consider the case of Christ. For if Christ is without moral evil (i.e., sinless) and for this reason (though not exclusively so) more perfectly human than we are, then he is a more perfect example of humanity because evil is not intrinsic to our human nature as such. And likewise, if Christ, the pre-existent Son made human, is truly a gift of the Father (for the Son truly became one of us because the Father so loved the world that he sent his only-begotten Son), then Jesus is not someone we merited or deserved to have as our brother, and is not ours by a kind of natural right or as the product of a merely intra-historical evolutionary history.85 And so although he is the most perfect instantiation of what it means to be authentically human, and though this can be understood even to some extent in philosophically universalizable terms (for instance through a distinctly philosophical examination of the virtues of Christ), nevertheless, he is this only by the gift of God’s grace, the grace of union of the humanity of Christ to the Word, and the gift of indwelling, habitual graces in the human mind and will of Christ. Ultimately what is at stake in a sense of the ontological possibility of a state of pure nature is nothing less than the capacity to hold together three claims: (1) Christ is truly human in the most preeminent and universally intelligible sense; (2) the grace of the Incarnation is the ultimate source of the uniquely perfect human nature of Christ (and yet is distinguishable from the latter as grace ); (3) there is no moral evil in the soul of Christ, and this innocence and virtue constitute a more natural form of human existence, such that we can claim analogously that only with the grace of Christ can human beings truly overcome the power of evil in human history. 85 As I take it Schleiermacher is in danger of suggesting: cf. Friedrich Schleierma- cher, The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), vol. 2, §§94, 99, 103. 322 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Conclusion In guise of a conclusion, let me say that it should be clear that this essay is written in the attempt to challenge respectfully some of the presuppositions or ingrained habits of thought surrounding what constitutes a genuine form of pre- versus post-conciliar theological anthropology. But this dialectical interplay of old and new is not meant to suggest a hermeneutic of discontinuity between the post-conciliar reflections of Chenu and Rahner that have been discussed and the preceding tradition. There is some problematic discontinuity present, no doubt, in the rhetorical posturing of these two theologians, due in part to some of the metaphysical visions they associated themselves with. These are points worth questioning and challenging, and sometimes, or so it is my conviction, by recourse to more classical forms of thought, including that of Aquinas himself. But the deeper point of substance is this: the conciliar majoritypositions often are in need of some nuance, including by recourse to some of the legitimate concerns of the minority-positions.This is not so that these former positions might be alleviated or dissolved, but that they might be strengthened and further developed. The dialectic of Aristotle does not entail a vanquishing of the argument of the other, but the consideration of his or her legitimate concerns, insights, oversights, and errors, in view of a more comprehensive settlement on the fundamental principles, as well as a more distinguishing understanding of their mutual interaction of exercise. The conversation about grace and nature that Gaudium et Spes invites us to is not one that is completed (by judicial fiat of a “spirit of the Council” or by a dismissive disinterest in favor of preconciliar tradition). On the contrary, there is a great deal of reflection yet to be done. It should be done in continuity with the ongoing tradition of the Church, outside of which the thought of the Council is ultimately sterile. To think through the implications of this at times insightful, at times frustrating, document, we could do worse than to have recourse to the thought of the Angelic Doctor . . . and to that of the Thomistic N&V commentary tradition that comes after him. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 323–35 323 Gaudium et Spes: The Task Before Us R ICHARD S CHENK , O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Graduate Theological Union Berkeley, California T HE ESSAY by George Weigel presented to us here for discussion is representative at several levels of the current status quaestionis regarding the Second Vatican Council.The fortieth anniversary of Vaticanum II brought a good deal of detailed scholarship on the genesis and formulation of the Council documents.1 As Weigel’s essay suggests, by its dealing less with the process of writing the pastoral constitution than with its broader interpretative issues in the context of what is widely perceived as the postconciliar transition from late modernity to postmodernity, the theological discussions occasioned by the upcoming fiftieth anniversary are likely to shift to questions concerning the most fitting hermeneutic of the Council. Anticipating the fortieth anniversary, the work of the Bologna school around G. Alberigo documented in generous and accessible detail the dynamic that can be described as an often less-than-pacific coexistence at the Council of two parties, the proponents of which admittedly could shift somewhat from document to document and issue to issue: a majority, willing to assert positions in significant discontinuity from the ecclesial and theological habits of thought and practice dominant in the decades or even centuries prior to the Council; and a minority, hoping to preserve the very continuity that the majority was willing to forego.The documents were a compromise between this majority position of—at 1 Cf. esp. Giuseppe Alberigo et al., History of Vatican II, English version ed. Joseph A. Komonchak (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books 1996–1998), vol. 1–5; as well as the more systematic and synthetic portrayals in Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath, eds., Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2004–2005), vol. 1–5. 324 Richard Schenk, O.P. times—wide-ranging discontinuity and a minority position of resolute continuity.The final acceptance of these dialectically weighted documents by the whole Council and the papacy is not usually referred to as the work of a (super-) majority, although at times Weigel’s essay comes close to this kind of somewhat confusing, if understandable, language.2 The detailed historical analyses associated with the fortieth anniversary of the Council, despite receiving some polemical criticism, provide a reliable guide to primary source material and its place in the history. They also offer what is on the whole a plausible and well-documented account of the debates, bringing important nuance to the four older paradigms that used to dominate readings of the Council. Prior to these works, there had been two common readings by those who saw the Council chiefly as a break with the past: the reading of those who greeted the supposed break,3 sometimes going so far as to view the post-conciliar papacies as betraying the “Spirit” of the Council by repairing the breach, necessitating for the near future a still more novel Vaticanum III to make the rupture irreversible; and the view of those who regretted the alleged rupture, spawning schismatic communities that felt the need to deny the de facto exercise of the Magisterium in order to save its de iure possibilities. Prior to the fortieth anniversary, there had also been two common readings of the Council by those who saw it as largely in keeping with the past: the reading of those who regretted most of the post-conciliar developments in theology as a profound misrepresentation of the Council itself, not the result of the Council’s own weaknesses; and those who regretted post-conciliar papal teaching and leadership as proof that the Council had not yet changed as thoroughly as the pars melior had intended 2 Cf. the programmatic sentence from Weigel’s essay: “The reading of Gaudium et Spes that follows assumes that the majority of the Council Fathers intended the Pastoral Constitution to be understood through a ‘hermeneutic of reform’—and then asks whether Gaudium et Spes properly read the ‘signs of the times’ ” (see Weigel, 253, n. 3). For the legitimate nuances introduced by the post-conciliar reception of the watchword “the signs of the times,” by which later theologians combined the majority desire to look for God’s presence in the world with the minority sense of how our world is often all too far from him, cf. R. Schenk, “Officium signa temporum perscrutandi. New Encounters of Gospel and Culture in the Context of the New Evangelisation,” in Scrutinizing the Signs of the Times in Light of the Gospel, ed. Johan Verstraeten (Leuven: Leuven University Press, and Leuven: Peeters, 2007), 167–203. 3 For a recent, more moderate version of this hermeneutic applied to the conciliar innovations toward non-Christian religions, cf. John T. Noonan, A Church that Can and Cannot Change:The Development of Catholic Moral Teaching (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 325 to change the vision of the Church or traditionally Catholic views on faith, hierarchy, or non-Catholic religions.4 Since the historical work occasioned by the fortieth anniversary of the Council, two more nuanced paradigms have come to the fore. Unlike the trend of many, perhaps most, earlier works, both of these newer readings stress that the Council documents are de facto a blend of innovation and preservation vis-à-vis traditions dominant just prior to the Council. They differ, however, in this: one interpretation tends to view only the majority position as normative and legitimate, while considering the minority position regrettable.This reading is most often proposed by writers who, having personally attended the Council, continue the debates in pretty much the same terms and alternatives familiar to them from the adversarial discussions at the Council.This interpretation rejects as normative the de facto compromise it describes.The frank account by Giuseppe Alberigo in A Brief History of Vatican II 5 provided a helpful example of this tendency. Alberigo identified his circle of friends and mentors with the majority. Freely awarded modifiers, bluntly separating “fortunate” from “unfortunate” developments at the Council, underline the personal stance behind the book, based on memories of personal involvement in the events by the late author and his wife,Angelina Nicora, whose journals are cited here at length as authoritative.6 The book presents the majority’s successful interventions with the pope as something altogether positive. By contrast, the minority’s occasionally successful interventions with the pope are portrayed as nefarious and opposed to the conciliar dynamic. Official and spontaneous subgroups of the majority are portrayed as pro-conciliar; those of the minority, as anticonciliar.7 A similar pattern recurs in other works of this school. Of the three “underlying issues” that John O’Malley identifies in the Council, 4 For the alleged but regretted continuity in the concept of faith, cf., for example, the critical remarks by Eilert Herms,“Offenbarung und Glaube als Gegenstand des ökumenischen Dialogs,” in Jahrbuch des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, vol. 7 (1996), ed. Richard Schenk et al. (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1995), 251–86. 5 Giuseppe Alberigo, A Brief History of Vatican II (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2006); cf. in much the same vein John W. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008); and the first essays in John W. O’Malley et al., eds., Did Anything Happen at Vatican II (New York: Continuum, 2008), which contain a sharp counterpoint to claims of continuity. A one-sided hermeneutic of continuity, though inadequate, is not corrected by a hermeneutic asserting the sole normativity of discontinuity. 6 For example, Alberigo, A Brief History, 52–54. 7 For the qualification as good of cases of influence and preparation by the majority or of papal intervention in its favor, cf. Alberigo, A Brief History, 5–6, 16, 19, 24, 27–31, 36, 52, and 61; for the opposite qualification of similar activities in favor of the minority, cf. 28, 47, 52. 326 Richard Schenk, O.P. namely, the nature of ecclesial change (aggiornamento, development or ressourcement), the shifting of power to either the periphery or the center, and the questions of style (for example, as regards definitive language), he sees the minority influence in the first and especially the second set of issues as a hindrance to the genuine conciliar dynamic.8 Arguably, interpreters can be still too close to the de facto, “political” reality of the Council to see its potential for a truth beyond the experienced conflict. Such a hermeneutic suggests a refusal of the breadth of the Council’s own decisions, the throwing of punches after the final bell had sounded.9 An alternative interpretation, while also accepting the overall account of events as portrayed in terms of divergent majority and minority voices, differs from this first new hermeneutic by accepting the promulgated documents as marking the received parameters of Catholic teaching, from within which a future synthesis should be sought. This hermeneutic proceeds from the expectation, documented in the conciliar texts, that both majority and minority positions point to elements deserving future development, to thoughts that should not be lost.10 What such syntheses will look like has been and will continue to be the task of post-conciliar debates, drawing on the new situations of subsequent times.These syntheses need to be developed from the unique thematic memory of each document. Just as the list of supporters for majority and minority positions at the Council could shift notably from text to text, so, too, the character of a synthetic development of the texts would and will continue to vary too widely to be deduced from common principles alone.The reflection on Dei Verbum, where the co-existence of differing voices in the final text is especially palpable, will seek a synthesis between the self-communication of God and the historicality of the people he calls, between revelation of 8 Cf. O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 298–313, especially: “On the final outcome of the council the minority left its mark on the three issues-under-theissues. On the center-periphery issue the minority never really lost control. . . . Collegiality, the linchpin in the center-periphery relationship promoted by the majority, ended up an abstract teaching without point of entry into the social reality of the church. . . .The majority was consistently frustrated in its efforts to make its will felt through the establishment of real structural changes.” By contrast, the majority often is shown prevailing over the minority, but it is never said to “frustrate” a conciliar dynamic nor to foster “abstract teaching” (311–12). 9 Cf. the analysis of the trend by Robert Spaemann, “Was heißt ‘das Zweite Vatikanum annehmen’?” Deutsche Tagespost 28 (April 2009). 10 Despite the dominant tone and direction of the work, cf. the more even conclusion to O’Malley, What Happened at Vatican II, 312: “By their very nature the three issues do not in practice admit final and absolute resolution. Attempting such a resolution would in the long run spell disaster.” For “the validity of the contrasting values” in the third set of issues, cf. 307. Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 327 the Other and the self-experience of humans in various times and places. The still unfinished task of reading Nostra Aetate will be attentive both to the universal mediation of Christ and the growing appreciation that it elicits or acknowledges for non-Christian religions.The complementarity of voices in Dignitatis Humanae, speaking both for the toleration of the religious practice of others and the right to the free exercise of the unica vera Religio (§1), viewing as rooted in the conscience the dual freedom from coercion to practice or to abstain from religion, was arguably the most explicit synthesis of opposed (contrary, not contradictory) voices in any of the sixteen documents.11 One of the least synthetic was Perfectae Caritatis, although the centrality of diocesan and parochial structures could underscore the importance and relative autonomy of the institutes of consecrated life needed by local churches, if the latter are ever to carry out effectively the munera Christi entrusted to them.12 The ecclesial development since Lumen Gentium suggests the connection between the need to strengthen the mission of the local bishop and the vitality of the papacy, bishops’ synod, and regional episcopal conferences on the one hand as well as the renewal of presbyterium, laity, and religious on the other.The way in which the Church of Christ “subsists” in the Roman Catholic community is one that does not deny the important witness of heterogeneous Christian communities. Sacrosanctum Concilium, too, was most easily misinterpreted, when its internal tensions, including the demands of both ressourcement and aggiornamento, were lost from sight.13 11 Cf. R. Schenk, “Voices of the Conscience,” Villanova Law Review 54:4 (2009): 593–607. 12 Cf. R. Schenk, “Creative Fidelity: Remembrance and Forgetting, Renewal and Accommodation on the 800th Anniversary of the Foundation at Prouille,” Dominican Studies, Inaugural Issue (2007): 4–16. 13 Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, “40 Jahre Konstitution über die heilige Liturgie. Rückblick und Vorblick,” originally in Liturgisches Jahrbuch 53 (2003): 209–21, translated here from the Regensburg edition, Ratzinger, Theologie der Liturgie (Gesammelte Schriften XI) (Freiburg: Herder, 2008), 695–711, here 696–97: “The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy drew together the manifold streams and rivers of the Liturgical Movement and united them into one deep river which ‘brings joy to God’s city’ (Ps 46, 5). Of course there remained behind some residual, free-standing waters, so to speak, which couldn’t be channeled into this river, and in the river itself the different tributaries united in it can still be identified.The currents still show where they came from. Internal tensions have remained, and we will need to discuss them: tensions between the desire to renew the liturgy of the ancient Church once again in its primordiality and the need to situate the liturgy in the present age; tensions between the conservative and the creative element of liturgy; tensions between the worshipping character of the liturgy and its catechetical and pastoral tasks.These of course are tensions that are rooted ultimately in the very essence of the liturgy and 328 Richard Schenk, O.P. Weigel’s chosen topic did not include an attempt to present in detail his sense of the wider hermeneutic of the Council. His reference to Pope Benedict’s first Christmas allocution to the Curia from December 22, 2005, suggests, however, an intended direction. In that address, Benedict first recalled St. Basil’s warning after the Council of Nicea against “falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith.”14 Benedict contrasted here two contrary hermeneutics: one,“a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” which, while rightly identifying the mixed character of the debates and the texts they produced, claims that “the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts. . . .These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the Council.” Benedict’s description of the second option, which he argues is the “right hermeneutic,” does not endorse an assertion of mere continuity (equivalent to what Basil described as the “failure” to receive conciliar insights), but a “hermeneutic of reform, of renewal in the continuity of the one subjectChurch which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.” Reminiscent of J. H. Newman’s insights in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, it is only by the change of surface habits of teaching and practice that a deeper continuity of principles and the preservation of characteristic types are attained.15 It is precisely do not merely reflect different currents of liturgy.The Council sought in impressive ways to establish the right internal balance between these different aspects. But in carrying out the commission of the Council, it could easily happen that the balance of the conciliar text got dissolved in a one-sided way into just one particular direction.This is why there is always a need to reflect anew on the actual statement of the Council.The general ease with which anyone could lay claim to ‘the Council’ to support his or her own wishes led to a false reading of the great task which the conciliar fathers bequeathed to us.” 14 Citing Basil’s De Spiritu Sancto, XXX, 77 (PG 32, 213 A; SCh 17 ff., p. 524).The address of Pope Benedict to the Roman Curia, December 22, 2005, “Ad Romanam Curiam ob omnia natalicia,” was first published in Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. XCVIII ( Januarii 2006), 40–53 (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2006), is also documented on the Vatican web-site: www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/ speeches/2005/december/documents/hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051222_romancuria_en.html. The address is cited here according to the extensive excerpt in Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (eds.), Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), ix–xv, here page ix. 15 Newman’s terminology is reflected here at several points. Having highlighted “three circles of questions” raised by the Council as to “. . . the relationship between faith and modern science, . . . natural sciences but also historical science,” “the relationship between the Church and the modern State,” and “the relationship between the Christian faith and the world religions” (Benedict XVI,“Ad Romanam Curiam ob Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 329 in this combination of continuity and discontinuity at different levels that the very nature of true reform consists. This ideal of a “hermeneutic of reform,” a “synthesis of fidelity and dynamic,” is confirmed here by reference to the first conciliar addresses of John XXIII and Paul VI: “It is clear that this commitment to expressing a specific truth in a new way demands new thinking on this truth and a new and vital relationship with it; it is also clear that new words can only develop if they come from an informed understanding of the truth expressed.”16 George Weigel’s essay also does not attempt to describe in detail the tension that had surfaced during the genesis of Gaudium et Spes itself, focusing instead on the differences between the “worlds” of 1965 and 2009 and what the contemporary aggiornamento of Gaudium et Spes itself might look like. And yet closer attention to the conflicts around the text and the title of the Pastoral Constitution as it developed between 1962 and 1965 could help us elucidate how Gaudium et Spes might assist us today in engaging the world of our own time.Admittedly, the complex debates at the Council about what would become Gaudium et Spes began at the latest with the Aula address of Cardinal L.-J. Suenens on December 4, 1962, in which he called for the agenda of the Council to include reflection on the Church both ad intra and ad extra, and it did not end until December 7, 1965, the day before the Council was brought to a close.These debates led to, accompanied, and followed the several remarkably different drafts.17 The various omnia natalicia,” in Lamb and Levering, loc. cit. xii–xiii, the address continued: “It is clear that in all these sectors, which all together form a single problem, some kind of discontinuity might emerge. Indeed, a discontinuity had been revealed but in which, after the various distinctions between concrete historical situations and their requirements had been made, the continuity of principles proved not to have been abandoned. It is easy to miss this fact at a first glance” (xiii). “The Second Vatican Council, with its new definition of the relationship between the faith of the Church and certain essential elements of modern thought, has reviewed or even corrected certain historical decisions, but in this apparent discontinuity it has actually preserved and deepened her inmost nature and true identity” (xiv). 16 Benedict XVI, address in Lamb and Levering, Vatican II: Renewal Within Tradition, xi. 17 Cf. Hans Joachim Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von heute Gaudium et Spes,” in Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil, ed. Peter Hünermann and Bernd Jochen Hilberath (Freiburg: Herder, 2004–06), 581–869, especially the extensive section on the defining controversies concerning the text of the Pastoral Constitution: 616–91: “Die bestimmenden Auseinandersetzungen um den Text der Pastoralkonstitution.” Sander’s long and well-documented essay brings the additional challenge to the reader of following his own independent development of a “topological” pastoral-systematic method, one attentive to the dialectics of self and other, proper and alien “loci” or contexts, in light of which “every number, every chapter, every major section, and every major division” (702) of Gaudium 330 Richard Schenk, O.P. sides of the debates, which included such unexpected voices as Cardinal Spellman’s support and Karl Rahner’s critique of the Gaudium et Spes project, did not match what might be our easy pre-understandings of Council majority and minority. The voices shifted with the various sub-issues of method, content, and title. Even after its promulgation, Gaudium et Spes would continue to be viewed especially by German theologians with an uncommon ambivalence.18 Even a cursory review of those discussions is beyond the scope of these reactions; but perhaps a brief example of the controversies will be allowed. The challenges to Gaudium et Spes that the German bishops and their theologians articulated in the final weeks of the Council and the robust defense of Gaudium et Spes, especially by French theologians, might well overflow the familiar banks of Rhine-to-Tiber imagery, but these debates illustrate as no others the tensions within the Pastoral Constitution itself.The expertises prepared by the highly respected Jesuit theologians, O. von Nell-Breuning and especially K. Rahner, on the Gaudium et Spes document for the fall meeting of the German Bishops Conference at Fulda and their discussion on August 31, 1965 were highly critical of the nearly finalized draft of Gaudium et Spes.19 Rahner recommended that the text be left for a post-conciliar coetus to finalize (his preferred suggestion) or that at most it be demoted from a Constitution to the status of a mere letter.As he put it, the draft was flawed and nothing on which the Council could congratulate itself. Like most of the German reservations, Rahner’s arguments had to do by and large with a critique of the excessive optimism in the document. Unlike Ratzinger, however, who, perhaps because more engaged with ecumenical issues, was critical of an overly optimistic view of human existence20 and some ten years later would et Spes, as well as the work of all other theologians, are viewed.While this systematic can lead to the impression of an excessive fascination with metaphors of localization and of an indifference to the dangers of self-alienation (“Fremdbestimmung”), Sander’s methodology also suggests a rare possibility to move beyond the present paralysis of the grace-nature-discussion in Catholic theology. 18 Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 844–53, exemplifies this post-conciliar ambivalence of proximity and distance to Gaudium et Spes in the theologies of J. Ratzinger, H.-J. Pottmeyer, and P. Hünermann, as well as in the works of K. Rahner and his students, J.-B. Metz, K. Lehmann, and E. Klinger. 19 Cf. G.Turbanti, Un concilio per il mondo moderno. La redazione della costituzione pastorale “Gaudium et Spes” del Vaticano II (Bologna: Società editrice Il Mulino, 2000), especially 617–27; Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 650–74; and Gilles Routhier,“Finishing the Work Begun:The Trying Experience of the Fourth Period,” in History of Vatican II, ed. G.Alberigo, 49–184, esp. 136–77. 20 Cf. immediately after the Council, J. Ratzinger, Die letzte Sitzungsperiode des Konzils (Köln: Bachem, 1966), in English translation in the collection Theological Highlights Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 331 describe the excessive optimism in and following Gaudium et Spes as a kind of “counter-syllabus” in favor of Enlightenment values,21 Rahner was worried about the appearance of all too optimistic claims by those with faith to solve the problems of the world shared by those with and without faith. His worries paralleled the concerns of many conciliar fathers of varied theological tendencies who were hesitant to apply the title of Constitution to concrete stances toward contingent events and complex problems. Rahner’s reflections on the limits of ecclesial insight might well have accelerated his shift into what Peter Eicher once described as the third phase or moment of Rahner’s thought,“the re-absorption of theology by common reason.”22 Rahner’s critique of Gaudium et Spes was soon reflected in statements by Cardinals König and Döpfner, as well as by Bishop Hengsbach.The discussions with French bishops and theologians that followed in September, 1965, and which inter alia brought Rahner into direct conflict with J. Danielou, M.-D. Chenu, and Y. Congar (who viewed the German criticism as hard but not unfounded) did lead to the decision by the German Bishops Conference to seek to amend but not to prevent or “demote” Gaudium et Spes. The more optimistic view of the world defended notably by the French-speaking side had been expressed in the shift away from the wording that had been in the draft prior to the Zürich text drafted in January, 1964 (possibly introduced by the Angelicum’s L. Dingemans), the shift namely from the early draft, “gaudium et luctus, spes et angor,” to the far more familiar final version, in which the “joy and hope” of the contemporary world, shared by the Church, became of Vatican II (New York: Paulist Press, 1966); and Ratzinger, Pastoralkonstitution über die Kirche in der Welt von heute. Erster Hauptteil: Kommentar zum I. Kapitel, in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, vol. 14, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1968), 315–54, English translation in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (London: Burns & Oates; New York: Herder & Herder, 1967–69). Admittedly, if one compares the criticisms of the Gaudium et Spes draft which Rahner and Ratzinger published just prior to the final session of the Council, it is clear that Ratzinger, too, by sharply contrasting the Christological and the ecclesiological presence to the world, is eager to show the limits of what the Church can be for the world: K. Rahner,“Über den Dialog in der pluralistischen Gesellschaft,” Stimmen der Zeit 176 (August 1965): 321–30; and J. Ratzinger,“Angesichts der Welt von heute. Überlegungen zur Konfrontation mit der Kirche in Schema XIII,” Wort und Wahrheit 20 (August–September 1965): 49–54. 21 J. Ratzinger,“Der Weltdienst der Kirche. Auswirkungen von Gaudium et Spes im letzten Jahrzehnt,” in Zehn Jahre Vatikanum II, ed. Andreas Bauch et al. (Regensburg: Pustet, 1976), 40; cited by Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 657–58, n. 188; cf. also 838–44. 22 Cf. Peter Eicher, Offenbarung: Prinzip neuzeitlicher Theologie (Munich: Kösel 1977), 356–68. Richard Schenk, O.P. 332 more audible than any shared “tears and fears.”23 The dialectic of majority and minority positions here was already implicit in John XXIII’s call for the Council to avoid condemnations of the non-Catholic world while showing solidarity in bearing its problems and worries.Too much celebration of the culture will gloss its problems; too much concern with its problems will lose sight of its strengths.The hermeneutic of reading Gaudium et Spes today in light of a text which pairs praise with concern for the contemporary world means that we would need to show a critical solidarity with the present day in its gaudium et luctus and in its spes et angor. What G.Weigel’s essay provides best is a helpful account of the “tears and fears” which the advent of a perceived “postmodern” age has added to those of “late modernity” (and without prejudice to that debate about whether we have in fact moved beyond late modernity; it is notable that postmodern claims tend to say less about what they are seeking in the future than about what of the past they are fleeing). The less optimistic reading of the contemporary world, although it was the minor key of Gaudium et Spes, continues to have its legitimate place in reading the Pastoral Constitution in postmodern contexts. It belongs to the task of sharing in the luctus et angor of our own age.What would demand considerable more discussion, however, is Weigel’s account of the legacy of Pope John Paul II as the appropriate response of Gaudium et Spes to postmodern weaknesses. Weigel rightly notes, perhaps even understates, Wojtyl/a’s intense involvement in the process of Gaudium et Spes and his dual reading of the strengths and weaknesses of the modern world, though oddly enough the essay illustrates this chiefly by reference to pre-conciliar preparatory documents.The 1964 Cracow draft of an alternative text for Gaudium et Spes, prepared at Wojtyl/a’s initiative by members of the Polish Bishops’ Conference,24 the important address that year by which the Archbishop of Cracow introduced the draft to the Council,25 and the changes he made subsequently to the draft are all passed over here by his otherwise accomplished biographer.Weigel’s reference to the importance that John Paul II attached to Gaudium et spes §22 (and 24) is in no way overstated; even Hans Joachim Sander, who presents side-by-side two quite different portrayals of John Paul II’s take on Gaudium et Spes, terms Gaudium et spes §22 the “gravitational center” of his pontificate.26 And 23 Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 624. 24 AS III 5, 300–14. 25 Ibid., 298–300. 26 Cf. Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 859–61, in contrast to 632–35, citing inter alia John Paul II,“Discorso nel XXX anniversario Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 333 yet, as Sander also points out in other terms,27 these interventions at the Council do not show a clear sense of what J. H. Newman had called “the power of assimilation”: the Church is described here as a teacher, not a learner. Greater attention to Wojtyl/a’s address introducing the alternative Cracow draft for Gaudium et Spes could shed light on the interpretation of Gaudium et spes §22 urged by the most acerbic Catholic communitarian critics of Weigel who celebrate the alleged postmodernity (or merely the premodernity?) of “radical orthodoxy.”28 The Cracow draft anticipated positions on religious liberty that would be promulgated in Dignitatis Humanae: the dignity of conscience demands freedom from the coercion to practice or to neglect religion. At the same time, the Archbishop of Cracow was proposing a dialogue that would not rely on faith and the faith community alone: “In Schema XIII it is necessary to speak in a way that lets the world see us teaching it in a non-authoritarian mode, searching together with the world for true and equitable solutions to the difficult problems of human life. . . . Such a method excludes, on the one hand, all things that display, as I might say, an ‘ecclesiastical’ mentality. Such things include, for example, lamentations about the wretched state of the world, but also those all too facile ‘appropriations’ for the Church of any good whatsoever existing in the world, merely verbal displays of a positive stance toward the world.”29 In Wojtyl/a’s view, neither of these two extremes of distance or accommodation should replace true dialogue with the soliloquy of the faithful. della proclamazione della Costituzione pastorale ‘Gaudium et Spes’ ” (November 8, 1995). 27 Sander, “Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 632–35. 28 Cf. especially Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (London/New York: Routledge, 2003), leading to the opposition between a faith-based involvement in statecraft and the affirmation of the Enlightenment notion of human rights. For a more detailed study of the Christocentric dimensions of Gaudium et Spes and the growing attempts to nuance the alleged optimism of a merely incarnational Christology by increased attention to a theology of the cross, cf.Thomas Gertler, Jesus Christus—die Antwort der Kirche auf die Frage nach dem Menschsein: Eine Untersuchung zu Funktion und Inhalt der Christologie im ersten Teil der Pastoralkonstitution “Gaudium et Spes” des zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils (Leipzig: St. Benno, 1986). 29 AS III 5, 299:“In schemate XIII tamen oportet tali modo loqui, ut mundus videat nos ipsum docere non tantum modo auctoritativo, sed etiam simul cum ipso inquirere veram et aequam solutionem difficilium problematum vitae humanae . . . Methodus talis excludit una ex parte omnia, quae mentalitatem—ut ita dicam— ‘ecclesiasticam’ ostendunt. Qualia sunt, v.g., lamentationes super miserrimum mundi statum . . ., nimis faciles “appropriationes” cuiuslibet boni in mundo existentis pro Ecclesia . . . , ostensiones omnino verbales benevolae erga mundum habitudinis.” 334 Richard Schenk, O.P. The talk continues:“On the other hand, that method of teaching that we call heuristic demands that the mind of those with whom we are in conversation be led by the power of arguments.”30 Unlike some of the recent fideist critics of Weigel,Wojtyl/a did not exclude the power of argument from the suggested ways to engage the sadder sides of our times. Weigel’s comments in this essay on the darker sides of postmodernism are perceptive.31 The need to engage that neo-Manichaeism of our own times described by the essay is part of the task of receiving Gaudium et Spes. But not all dimensions of the pensiero debole can be overcome, even for the believer. It belongs especially to central tenets of the Thomistic tradition, which is claimed here by Weigel, that grace and faith do not destroy all the weaknesses of nature and reason, but preserve many of them and draw them into higher service.32 This programmatic idea, although at times neglected both by a handbook Thomism and its communitarian critics, was clarified in a paradigmatic way by Thomas’s position in the controversies of his own day around the inability of unbelievers and believers alike to find conclusive, rational, or empirical evidence for the beginning of the visible world.33 30 Ibid.: “Altera ex parte methodus docendi, quam dicimus ‘heuristicam’, postulat, ut mens eorum quibus adloquimur ducatur vi argumentorum.” 31 One point, however, that calls for some additional elucidation is the essay’s asso- ciation of postmodernity with autonomy, which is more often associated with a characteristically modern confidence in subjectivity.The moment of fragmentation, which seems to be a common thread running through all the varied notions of postmodernity, calls into question the sense of the autonomous subject touted by the Enlightenment. It is more than a question of definitions. Postmodern society in America seems ever more inclined to restrict the autonomy of the religiously-minded, in order to command a show of respect even towards those who by their own account are more driven than free.That suggests a trend too Nietzschean to worry much about the value of autonomy, one’s own or that of others. On the other hand, this critique of autonomy leads Weigel to omit here any easy identification of genuine liberty with the U.S. American practice of autonomy or freedom, a frequent theme of many of his “neo-conservative” colleagues and arguably a motivating factor behind the bitter polemics of his communitarian critics. 32 On the origins of this central Thomistic axiom, cf. R. Schenk,“From Providence to Grace:Thomas Aquinas and the Platonisms of the Mid-Thirteenth Century,” Nova et Vetera 3 (2005): 307–20; with reference to the thought of Pope John Paul II, cf. Schenk,“Option für den Thomismus in der Enzyklika?” in Die Vernunft des Glaubens und der Glaube der Vernunft: Die Enzyklika Fides et Ratio in der Debatte zwischen Philosophie und Theologie, ed. P. Koslowski and A. M. Hauk (Munich:W. Fink, 2007), 59–81. 33 Cf. Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990); Richard C. Dales and Omar Argerami, ed., Medieval Latin Texts on the Eternity of the World (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991). Gaudium et Spes: The Task before Us 335 This sense of the limits of even the strongest human reason available to us leads to Thomas’s appropriation of a Pauline maxim,“Cum enim infirmor, tunc potens sum” (2 Cor 12:10).The heightened sensitivity of our own age to the often overlooked limits of human achievement, though it too often assumes exaggerated forms and unnecessarily self-destructive dimensions, need not force us to view our age as the “miserrimus mundi status.” Selfdoubt can, but need not, deepen into despair; though dangerous, it is also the necessary condition of faith in Another and the basis of human society as well.34 Without the lasting contribution of the minority voices to the Pastoral Constitution, this attention to the homo in seipso divisus would be missing from our engagement of the contemporary world.35 By pointing in faith to a grace that is not yet evident in our experienced nature and to a hope that is not of this world, there is a heightened Christian response, critical but not dismissive to what is proper to our age, something that shares as contemporaries in its joys and hopes as well as in its sorrows and fears, something that can deepen the solidarity to which Gaudium et Spes is calling us after fifty years:“Benedicite persequentibus; benedicite et nolite maledicere! Gaudere cum gaudentibus, flere cum flentibus” (Rom 12:14–15). N&V 34 Cf. for example Thomas Aquinas, De regno, lib. 1, cap. 1. 35 The section on sin, Gaudium et Spes, §13, beginning “Ideo in seipso divisus est homo,” and continuing with the dual human experience of the “sublimis vocatio et profunda miseria,” was the fruit of the minority critique of what had sounded like an all too careless optimism.These late additions to the draft, which despite the sense of critique arguably brought the text into a closer proximity to the world, eventually gained support inter alia from Cardinal Bea and the commission as a whole; cf. Sander,“Theologischer Kommentar zur Pastoralkonstitution,” 632–35; and J. Ratzinger, Erster Hauptteil: Kommentar zum I. Kapitel, 316–18. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 337–48 337 What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes A NTHONY A KINWALE , O.P. Dominican Institute Ibadan, Nigeria M Y OBJECTIVE in this short essay is to attempt an African reading of Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. It is my hope that such a reading will contribute to the African quest to receive the Council. On January 25, 1959, when Pope John XXIII convoked the Second Vatican Council, my country, Nigeria, was still under British rule. Like many other emerging African states, she was preparing for her independence from colonial rule. Twenty-two months later, precisely on October 1, 1960, she would hoist her Green-White-Green flag in place of the Union Jack. In 1963, she would witness the trial, conviction, and imprisonment for treasonable felony of one of her founding fathers, Leader of Opposition in the federal parliament, Obafemi Awolowo, and some of his companions. From then on, Nigeria stepped on a slippery slope that led to recurrent instability, from the disputed elections of 1964, to the Civil War (the Nigeria-Biafra War) of 1967–1970, through the first military coup of January 15, 1966, and the counter-coup of July 29, 1966. That was an era of fratricide. These dates are important for understanding where Nigeria was before, during, and immediately after the Second Vatican Council. Looking at those dates, it is easy to observe that when the Council began on October 10, 1962, it was two years after Nigeria’s independence; and when the Council ended on December 8, 1965, it was barely one month before the first military coup in the history of Nigeria.The beginning of the Council more or less coincided with the “independence era” on the African continent. A trace of that euphoria for independence can be found in Gaudium et Spes. At that time, Nigeria was young, having been 338 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. put together by the British on January 1, 1900. The Church in Nigeria too was young, barely a century after the third era of evangelization of the African continent.1 At the Council itself, the young Churches in sub-Saharan Africa were marginally represented. Not only were there few bishops from Africa, but only a few of this few were indigenous to the continent, and even these were mostly auxiliary bishops.And at the end of the Council, Nigeria and indeed many of the “newly independent” African states were undergoing a period of political instability marked by ethnic strife and civil wars. These factors—the relatively young age of the new African states artificially created by colonialists, the relatively young age of the Churches in sub-Saharan Africa, the largely marginal participation of missionary prelates from Africa at the Council, and the crisis these new states were undergoing—account for what I consider to be Africa’s slow reception of the Second Vatican Council.2 Was Africa Included in the Picture of Modernity at Vatican II? At the beginning of Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council set out its objective and described the audience it wished to address. Regarding its objectives, it is to resolutely address not only the sons of the Church and all who call upon the name of Christ, but the whole of humanity as well, and it longs to set forth the way it understands the presence and function of the Church in the world of today. (GS §2) 1 Cf. A. O. Makozi and G. J. Afolabi Ojo, eds., The History of the Catholic Church in Nigeria (Lagos: Macmillan, 1982). Historians recognize three phases in the evangelization of Africa. The first phase saw the evangelization of Egypt and North Africa during the first centuries of Christianity. This was the era of Mark the Evangelist, Anthony of Egypt, Origen, Athanasius, Cyril and the Alexandrian school, Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine, to mention but these. The second phase saw the evangelization of parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was the era of evangelization of the Benn Empire, of Mozambique, and of Angola, who celebrated 500 years of evangelization in March 2009. The third phase began in the nineteenth century, and my generation is a beneficiary of that phase. Read the beautiful account of the history of these three phases in John Paul II, Ecclesia in Africa: The Church in Africa and its Evangelizing Mission Towards the Year 2000, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation (Vatican City: Librera Editrice Vaticana, 1995), 30–38. 2 Cf. Anthony Akinwale, The Congress and the Council:Towards a Nigerian Reception of Vatican II (Ibadan: The Michael Dempsey Centre for Religious and Social Research, 2003), 1–8. What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes 339 As to a description of the audience of the Church, Gaudium et Spes spells this out in these words: [T]he world which the Council has in mind is the whole human family seen in the context of everything which envelopes it: it is the world as the theatre of human history, bearing the marks of its travail, its triumphs and failures, the world, which in the Christian vision has been created and is sustained by the love of its maker, which has been freed from the slavery of sin by Christ, who was crucified and rose again in order to break the stranglehold of the evil one, so that it might be fashioned anew according to God’s design and brought to its fulfillment. (GS §2) I have already alluded to the slow reception of the Council in Africa. George Weigel, for his part, has pointed out that the modern world which Vatican II chose as partner in dialogue turns out to be a modern world on the path of self-annihilation because it had “internal tensions and contradictions” which the Council did not address. Despite Vatican II’s recognition and acknowledgement of what it calls the “triumphs and failures” of the modern world, Weigel is still of the opinion that the achievements of modernity raised more questions than those Vatican II addressed.Taking his inspiration from Norman Cousins’s August 7, 1945 editorial for Saturday Review, titled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” Weigel would suggest that the anthropology of Gaudium et Spes was itself obsolete.Vatican II, in other words, was dialoging with a “modern man” who would soon cease to exist. Since my essay is an attempt to read Gaudium et Spes as an African, I do not intend to give a detailed response to Weigel’s perception of the Council’s understanding of the “modern man.” Suffice it to say, however, that Weigel’s critique cannot be sustained by using Cousins’s editorial essay as illustration or inspiration. I am of the opinion that a careful reading of Gaudium et Spes points to a Council that celebrated the achievements of modern man without turning a blind eye to his shortcomings and often self-inflicted anguish.Vatican II, in a way that was even more detailed than Cousins, raised sharper, because theological, questions provoked by the achievements of modernity. It would therefore seem Weigel confused the obsolete anthropology of modernity, so eloquently described by Cousins, with the anthropology of Vatican II. But they do not exactly coincide.3 3 Weigel’s critique seems to have paid little attention to the situation of the human being in the modern world painted in §§4–10 and 33–37 of the Constitution. According to Gaudium et Spes, “In the face of modern developments there is a growing body of men who are asking the most fundamental of all questions or 340 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. Given my stated objective and what I had earlier referred to as the marginal participation of sub-Saharan Africa at Vatican II, there are at least some grounds for asking whether the African was included in the picture of modernity at Vatican II. It would be revealing to find out the extent of participation of African prelates and periti in discussions around the redaction of Gaudium et Spes. But there are other grounds. First, with very few exceptions, the African was and remains different from the atheist and secularist modern man given so much attention in Gaudium et Spes. Secondly, the political turmoil of post-independent Africa, the era in which the redaction of Gaudium et Spes took place, cannot be said to be similar to the increasing democratization of the Western world. Thirdly, the achievements of science and technology, so much felt in the Western world, had not made their presence felt in Africa on such a large scale. Fourthly, developmental needs of the emerging states of Africa received little or no attention. But thanks to Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio, in response to this fourth point, Africa benefitted from a worthy post scriptum to Gaudium et Spes. Yet, neither Gaudium et Spes nor Vatican II can be blamed for Africa’s woes. Africa had her own anthropologies in need of Christianization. Whereas so much has been said and written about African respect for human life, for community life, and for family life, there was something missing from this narrow African humanism, namely, the recognition of are glimpsing them with a keener insight: what is man? What is the meaning of suffering, evil, death, which have not been eliminated by all this progress? What is the purpose of these achievements, purchased at so high a price? What can man contribute to society? What can he expect from it? What happens after this earthly life?” (GS §10). Also showing that the Council was far from the canonization of modernity are these words: “Sacred Scripture teaches mankind what has also been confirmed by man’s own experience, namely, that the great advantages of human progress are fraught with great temptations: the hierarchy of values have been disordered, good and evil intermingle, and every man and every group is interested only in its own affairs, not in those of others. . . .The whole of man’s history has been a story of our combat with the powers of evil, stretching, so our Lord tells us, from the very dawn of history until the last day. Finding himself in the midst of the battlefield man has to struggle to do what is right, and it is at great cost to himself, and aided by God’s grace, that he succeeds in achieving his own inner integrity. Hence the Church of Christ, trusting in the design of the Creator and admitting that progress can contribute to man’s true happiness, still feels called upon to echo the words of the apostle: ‘Do not be conformed to this world’ (Rom 12:2). ‘World’ here means a spirit of vanity and malice whereby human activity from being ordered to the service of God and man is disordered to an instrument of sin” (GS §37). What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes 341 every African, by every African, as a human being and as a citizen. This was, and is still often, sacrificed on the grounds of ethnocentrism. Human and civic rights get abbreviated once the African steps out of his place of ancestral origin, even while he is still within the geographical territory of the country whose passport he bears. Underlying ethnocentrism is an incomplete anthropology that makes it impossible to recognize the common humanity in one another. Africa’s many wars, the plague of corrupt and incompetent government, violation of human dignity by dictatorial regimes, these largely stem from ethnocentrism. For at the root of every violation of human dignity is a defective anthropology.When the real nature of the human person is misunderstood, it becomes quite easy to reduce him or her to an object to be manipulated instead of a person to be related to. But while Gaudium et Spes may not be blamed for Africa’s woes, what Weigel sees as the obsolete anthropology of modernity has something in common with every other inadequate anthropology, including the defective anthropologies of African traditional philosophy. What they have in common is lack of an adequate theological vision of what it means to be human.The stepping stone towards a corrective can be found in the theology of creation in the book of Genesis. Its completion is to be found in the theology of redemption by Christ. An Attempt at a Theological Corrective From the creation narrative in Genesis 1, it is obvious that to speak of creation is to speak of God’s goodness and love putting order in formlessness and bringing something out of nothing. The divinely inspired writer of the Priestly narrative thought it necessary to portray God as an artist, admiring, affirming, and confirming the beauty of his own work, of the universe he has made:“God saw that it was good.”We are familiar with this formulaic refrain in the creation narrative found in the first chapter of the book of Genesis: “God said let there be . . . and there was . . . and God saw that it was very good.”Wisely unveiling the underlying meaning of these words,Augustine of Hippo offers a profound reflection: When the works thus begun had been formed and perfected, God saw that it was good. For He found His works pleasing, in keeping with the benevolence by which He was pleased to create them. There are, it should be noted, two purposes in God’s love of His creation: first, that it may exist, and secondly, that it may abide. Hence, that there might exist an object to abide, the Spirit of God was stirring above the waters. That it might abide, God saw that it was good. And what is said of the light is said of all the works. For some abide in the most exalted holiness next to God, transcending all the changes of time; but others abide 342 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. according to the determinations of their time, while the beauty of the ages is unfolded by the coming and passing of things.4 The creature is good because the Creator is good. Not to discover the root of created goodness in the Uncreated Goodness in the Creator is to misunderstand the nature of the creature.To misunderstand the nature of the creature is to fail to accord the creature its divinely conferred dignity. That is why a correct theological anthropology is crucial towards the elaboration and profession of any humanism worth the name. The narrative tells of a God who did not create one but many different things. And, explaining the multitude and distinction in creation, Thomas Aquinas has this to say: [T]he distinction and multitude of things come from the intention of the first agent, who is God. For he brought things into being in order that his goodness might be communicated to creatures, and be represented by them; and because his goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever.5 God communicates his goodness in the diversity of his creatures. His work of creation was the communication of his goodness and love to each creature he has made. Since none of God’s creatures is a perfect recipient of divine goodness, one creature would not suffice in representing God’s goodness.Variety in creation was necessary for representing divine goodness.The beauty of creation was in its variety and order. There was beauty in each thing God created, and there was beauty in the whole of creation itself.There was beauty in particularity, in diversity, and in the entirety of creation. “God saw all he had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen 1:31). God saw that each thing was good, and God saw that all things were good. There was harmony in the diversity that God willed in creation. Within this diversity, there was also inequality, and even this inequality, said Aquinas, comes from divine wisdom for the sake of perfection of the universe. 4 Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, vol. 1, trans. John Hammond Taylor (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), bk. 1, ch. 8. 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 47, a. 1. What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes 343 It must be said that as the wisdom of God is the cause of the distinction of things, so the same wisdom is the cause of their inequality. . . . [A]s the divine wisdom is the cause of the distinction of things for the sake of the perfection of the universe so it is the cause of inequality. For the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things.6 Each individual represents a grade of goodness within its species, and this gradation of goodness adds beauty to the world. Does this inequality not compromise the dignity of each creature, especially of the human creature? Since it is within the perfection of the universe that the dignity of each creature can be safeguarded, it can be said that the inequality in diversity, which is for the sake of the perfection of the universe, is not the violation but the protection of the dignity of every creature. All this may not sound good in our thoroughly, or pretentiously, egalitarian world. However, one may be able to get a confirmation from art that variety, distinction, and inequality contribute to the good of order in which the beauty of the work of art consists. The example of a soccer team might also be found useful. On a soccer team, the fact that the goalkeeper does not have the skills of a striker, while the striker does not have the skills of a goalkeeper, does point to variety and inequality. But added up, they contribute to the beauty and strength of the team. The Genesis happy story of a well-ordered world of variety was tragically punctuated by the Fall.The “obsolete” anthropology of modernity failed to take this Fall seriously, seeing it as a dispensable myth. The magnificent progress in science and technology was the “apple” that modern man ate. Ironically, having eaten this apple, the apple of progress in science and technology, his eyes were opened in a multiform illusion of omniscience, of omnipotence, and of perfect benevolence. Possibility, pleasurability, and profitability became his moral norms.The story of the Fall is indeed a commentary on modernity. Failing to appreciate the divinely-willed beauty in cosmic diversity and distinction, seduced by the proposition of the Tempter that they could create a better world ordered according to their own laws—in fact, ordered according to themselves, for they thought they could become law—human beings disrupted the order of and thus dissented from divine wisdom. In the same way, the noble achievements of science and technology gave modern man the conviction that he could create a better world, better than what the Author of all things has done. In the harmonious arrangement of original justice, rightness of relation was to take the form of the subjection of other creatures to human 6 Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 47, a. 2. 344 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. beings, and of human beings to God. God had placed human beings above other creatures by creating them in his image and likeness.Their mandate to dominate the earth was a mandate of stewardship. It was mandatory to be subject and accountable to God in the use of the things of this world. Freedom to use them was extensive, yet it ended at the tree of knowledge of good and evil. In the modern re-enactment of the original quest for freedom-without-God, science and technology became the “God” to whom modern man must subject himself. Modern man became a slave to the work of his own hands. Thus came violation of a divinely-willed order, which was a violation of God’s right to will the universe to be according to his wisdom. In a way that re-echoes Anselm of Canterbury’s Cur Deus homo, one could say that the sin of origin was a failed but tragic attempt on the part of human beings to violate God’s honour, just as the honour of the artist is violated by distorting the beauty of his work.The disobedience of Adam and Eve treated God with contempt in an attempt to create or recreate the universe according to man’s design of self-love. Augustine would thus describe sin as “self-love to the point of treating God with contempt” (amor sui iusque ad contemptum Dei ), requiring “love of God to the point of treating the self with contempt” (amor Dei iusque ad contemptum sui ). From the moment God’s rights were violated in disobedience, human beings lost sight of God. Becoming ignorant of who God is, they resorted to the false religion of idolatry. The human self and his achievements in fact became the idol, so that this idolatry took the form of autolatry (selfworship). The tendency to maximize power, profit, and pleasure in pursuit of the illusion of self-fulfillment outside the common good would lead to all the conflicts of race, of classes, of gender, of culture, of religion, etc. That modern science and technology facilitated this maximization is not, in my opinion, something to be debated by any observant bystander. Disconnection from God by autolatry was disconnection from the source of life and love. Hatred and death began their reign. Man’s attempt to steal God’s honour by force led to false religion manifested in ignorance of God. Ignorance of God and ignorance of man and his neighbor go hand in hand. The Son of God’s obedience unto death in his incarnation broke the cycle of human attempts to steal God’s honour by force and thus redeemed the world. Participation in the effects of this redemption requires being human, like Christ, not forcing oneself to be God, like the first Adam. For to force oneself to be God—and science and technology always present this as a beautiful and realizable prospect—would result in the violation of God’s own rights. It takes the form of abbreviation of the same rights What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes 345 and results in alienation from God. Where God’s rights are violated human rights are violated. Man does damage to his dignity when he challenges the sovereignty of God. But where does Nigeria stand in all this? Where does Africa stand? Where can Africa be found in the paragraphs and pages of Gaudium et Spes? African Religiosity Weigel puts his finger on the atheism of modern anthropology. But Africa can hardly be described as atheist. There is an explosion of religiosity across the length and breadth of Africa.Yet Africa is known for her many wars and ethnic conflicts. It is in fact the case that religion in Africa is itself a ready tool in the hands of those who would sow seeds of discord. One only needs to consider the recurrence of “religious” conflicts in some of the cities of northern Nigeria to see that religion is used as a tool for conflicts. The fact is: Nigeria has become a battlefield between militant Islam and aggressive Evangelicals. But it cannot be validly asserted that killing others in the name of God is a sign of respect for the rights of God. Religion is corrupt when it degenerates into abbreviation of God’s own rights. And when God’s rights are violated by corrupt religion, human rights are also affected. As the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria pointed out: The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria guarantees freedom of religion of every Nigerian citizen. But some Nigerians misunderstand their right to religion as right to persecute other Nigerians of different religious persuasion. The right to propagate one’s religion must not be exercised in ways that violate the right of people of other religions. We deplore the use and abuse of religion to trample on the rights of others.We condemn violence on whatever excuse or disguise, and from whatever direction.We condemn it, above all, when its perpetrators blasphemously and fraudulently claim religious justifications.We wish to note that those who claim that they love God while hating their fellow human beings, even to the extent of killing them, are liars. God has not given anyone the right to kill in his name. Neither has he authorized anyone to violate the dignity of other human beings.7 True religion glorifies the Almighty. And, according to the famous statement of St Irenaeus, “the glory of God is man fully alive.” The true measure of authenticity of religion is whether or not it recognizes the 7 Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria,“Conversion for Justice and Reconcil- iation,” Communique at the end of the Second Plenary Meeting of the Conference, Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria, September 12, 2009. 346 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. sovereignty of God and the dignity of the human person.Where there is violation of human dignity there will be conflicts.The sovereignty of the Almighty is not respected and it manifests itself in massive violations of human dignity. Where fundamental human rights are violated with impunity there can be no peace. There can only be a balance of terror. The moment the balance of terror tilts in favour of one person or one group, that person or group is going to fight back.That will happen even if it takes years and centuries, even if it is the great great grandchildren of any person or group who end up with a balance of terror to their advantage. Africa, despite her religiosity, cannot address the many conflicts she faces without a robust tradition of respect and promotion of fundamental human rights in the recognition of the imago Dei in each human person irrespective of religious, ethnic, or gender differences. The fact that Africa has known many wars but is yet to know peace calls for modification of the dictum “If you want peace prepare for war.” Now it has to be said that “if you want peace recognize and respect the dignity of the human person.” But whether Gaudium et Spes had Africa in mind when it intended to “initiate a pastoral dialogue with modernity— with modern man, full of confidence in his new scientific and technological powers” is a matter to be debated.Weigel, for his part, set out to “focus for a moment on the things that Gaudium et Spes did not see or did not anticipate, with an eye to rescuing the pastoral constitution from undeserved obsolescence.” It would seem that the unfolding drama in postcolonial Africa was among the things Gaudium et Spes did not see. That was why, as Weigel points out, the Pastoral Constitution did not foresee “the fantastic corruption and incompetence of post-colonial governments in the Third World.” Yet Africa must learn from Gaudium et Spes, for Gaudium et Spes has fundamental and indispensable lessons to teach Africa. What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes Technology without a vibrant public moral culture, science without conscience: these we must avoid so as not to use technology to dehumanize. Modern man is threatened, not so much by technology but by a crisis of morality, by an inability to work out moral issues on the grounds of objective norms.The tripartite modern society envisioned by Gaudium et Spes, comprising politics, culture, and economics, to which corresponds the tripartite free and virtuous society of John Paul II in his encyclical Centesimus Annus, comprising democracy, a vibrant public, and moral culture, and a free economy: this is something Africa must learn as a matter of urgency.This tripartite structure of modern society of Gaudium et Spes or the corresponding free virtuous society of Centesimus Annus is What Africa Must Learn from Gaudium et Spes 347 dislocated by the futile attempt of a Machiavellian agenda to run common life without virtue, and the corresponding futility of friendship without virtue, which Benedict XVI so eloquently corrected in his encyclical Caritas in Veritate. Post-independent Africa was deprived of this kind of society when some of her founding fathers opted for one form of socialism or the other, from the well-intentioned but ineffective Ujamaa of Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, to the democratic socialism of Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo, the Consciencism of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and the pseudo-Marxism of Benin’s Mathieu Kerekou or Congo Brazaville’s Denis Sassou Nguessou.Apart from these, prolonged military dictatorship supplanted early efforts at democracy, and stifled freedom of expression and moral discourse. It was dangerous to think aloud.There was an attempt to form human beings who were not allowed to form their convictions. Free economy was criminalized and forbidden in an uncritical emulation of the countries of the erstwhile communist bloc. Africa had no time to read Vatican II. But the denial of original sin that characterized its reading in the western world magnified itself in fearful proportion in Africa, in systems of government that would have been effective only if there were no effects of original sin. But one cannot promote human dignity while pretending that there was no original sin. Such pretention would lead to the destruction, not promotion, of human dignity. In Africa, the results of this pretension were devastating. Instead of states run by their people, Africa became a collection of states which run the life of the people—government took over schools run by the Church and voluntary agencies in gross violation of the principle of subsidiarity; there was political repression; control of the media and the academia became fashionable; civil wars, corruption, and incompetence on the part of government, complacency on the part of the people. Government, rather than serving the people, became more powerful than the people and oppressed the people.The state, whose primary responsibility is to secure life and property, became a primary threat to life and property.Today, we have a tragically mismanaged Nigeria, an immensely rich land inhabited by impoverished people, a land of social dislocation, of trauma and superstition-driven religiosity engendering poverty, of commercialized religiosity in the south, and of politicized religiosity in the north, to the point of violence. Weigel was considering the manifestation of the misreading of Gaudium et Spes in a prevailing culture of denial of original sin. I see a manifestation of the denial of original sin in Nigeria in successive governments that pretended to be omniscient and impeccable in directing the affairs of state. 348 Anthony Akinwale, O.P. The denial of original sin is ignorance of what the human being is. But man cannot be known where God is not known, and God is not known because man is not known. Ignorance of man leads to corruption of politics, and ignorance of God leads to corruption of religion. God created us to be free to actualize our personal and collective potential: spiritual, intellectual, moral, technical.The corruption and incompetence of government stifles our aspirations and hinders freedom to actualize potentials. Since Africa’s problem is neither atheism nor religious indifferentism but the corruption of religion in the instrumentalization of divinity, her search for an adequate anthropology cannot be apart from theology. It must be included in the quest for good theology.Theology in Africa has focused so much on freeing the African from cultural alienation and political oppression.This has often led many an African theologian to theologize out of the 2000-year conversation that the Christian tradition is. I have argued that while Western misreading of Gaudium et Spes cannot be blamed for the woes of Africa, the defective anthropologies of postcolonial Africa have something in common with the defective anthropology in the reading of Gaudium et Spes. It is the failure to admit the fallibility of the human person. The implication of the anthropocentric character and supernatural finality of the notion of authentic development in Paul VI’s Populorum Progressio is clear. Since authentic development must have the fulfillment of the human person as its central focus, every violation of human dignity is an act against the attainment of authentic development. Violation of human dignity takes the form of abbreviation of our common humanity and results in the alienation of the human person. Since the fulfillment of the human person is in the attainment of his or her spiritual destiny, every act that disorientates the human person from God is to the detriment of authentic development because it is inimical to the fulfillment of the human person. Rescuing Gaudium et Spes requires the correction of defective anthropologies that constitute the fore-structure of understanding within which the Constitution and indeed the entire Council are read. On the part of Africa, there is need for an anthropology that is, at the same time, a Christianized African humanism and an African Christian humanism, in which elements of African humanism are elevated to recognize the dignity of every human person without discrimination, not just the dignity of the son or daughter of this clan. In union with the wisdom of the JudeoChristian tradition, this Christianized African humanism would affirm that human dignity resides in living a life of virtue, a life lived in solidarity with others and ordered to its supernatural goal in God.This, I believe, is what Africa can and must learn from reading Gaudium et Spes. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 349–68 349 Human Dignity and the Catholic University: A Vision A DRIAN J. R EIMERS University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana “B ORN from the heart of the Church,”1 the Catholic university shares in the Church’s mission. Even if most of what the Catholic university undertakes is not directly religious, its work is to be part of the Church’s work. The Catholic university, like her secular counterparts, prepares its students for work in scholarship, government, commerce, and the professions. Her scholars are as diverse and their disciplines as mutually divergent as those of any other university. The principle of unity for an institution with specialists in both medieval French literature and organic chemistry, whether secular or religious, is not immediately evident, and much less so is its relationship with the Catholic faith. And, we may ask, what has the history of patristic debates about homoiousios and homoousios to do with the anthropologist’s analyses of social structures in post-colonial Africa? This essay proposes a unifying vision for today’s Catholic university, a vision that embraces both teaching and research and which also unifies her diverse multiplicity of disciplines under the aspect of her Catholicity. It is a vision founded on the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, especially as that document has been interpreted by Pope John Paul II. A New Humanism From day to day, in every group or nation, there is an increase in the number of men and women who are conscious that they themselves are the authors and the artisans of the culture of their community. . . . This becomes more clear if we consider the unification of the world 1 John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, §1. Adrian J. Reimers 350 and the duty which is imposed upon us, that we build a better world based upon truth and justice. Thus we are witnesses of the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by this responsibility to his brothers and to history.2 Just what is this humanism? And how do we educators and scholars fulfill that responsibility to build a humanistic culture, responsible to our brothers and sisters and to future generations? We university educators and scholars invariably regard ourselves as “authors and artisans” of our cultures. We pride ourselves on our responsibility to help the national mind, to influence how the young think.The Council defines culture as “everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities.”3 Later in that same document, the Council indicates an important aspect of our role: Furthermore, when man gives himself to the various disciplines of philosophy, history and of mathematical and natural science, and when he cultivates the arts he can do very much to elevate the human family to a more sublime understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty, and to the formation of considered opinions which have universal value.4 This text relates directly to the university, which is where deeper penetration into the various scientific disciplines is carried out and where the arts are cultivated and taught. We must note carefully, however, the value that the Council ascribes to these activities. Although the various academic and scientific disciplines have immense practical value—this is, after all, why good schools are vital to economic development—the principal value the Council finds in them is humanistic. The work of the university can “elevate the human family to a more sublime understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty.”And the Council proceeds to say that such education can lead to the “formation of considered opinions which have universal value.” In other words, the objective should not simply be the preparation of technically proficient specialists, but the formation of minds who are wise, whose views and perspective are universal. Pope John Paul II develops the ecclesiastical implications of this humanist perspective in his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis: 2 Vatican II, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, §55. 3 Ibid., §53. 4 Ibid., §57. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 351 Man in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being . . . this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself.5 The task of the Church, its vocation and mission, is to advocate for man, for the truth about the human being. John Paul here cites the Council’s reference to the human aspiration to “truth, the good, the beautiful, justice and love.”6 Furthermore the Church must remain keenly aware of and confront everything that constitutes a threat to man, and in this initial encyclical, John Paul the Great summarizes these threats:“The man of today seems ever to be under the threat from what he produces, that is to say from the result of the work of his hands and, even more so, of the work of his intellect and the tendencies of his will.”7 If the text of Gaudium et Spes reflects the Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation and growing disparities of wealth in the world, John Paul II’s text reflects on the divisions in man’s heart. His text continues:“All too soon, and often in an unforeseeable way, what this manifold activity of man yields is not only subjected to ‘alienation,’ in the sense that it is simply taken away from the person who produces it, but rather it turns against man himself.”8 What he points to are not simply the objective harms that arise from the development of technological weapons and the irresponsible exploitation of the environment, but also the meaninglessness, the nihilism,9 implicit in the consumer society.“Man often seems to see no other meaning in his natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption.”10 What threatens man, therefore, is the distortion of culture, which results from the “ascendancy of technology,” that is, technological development that is not matched by “a proportional development of morals and ethics.”11 Our concern, therefore, as “authors and artisans” of our culture must be humanistic, which is to say directed toward the full development of human beings precisely as human. Christocentrism A distinctive challenge to the Catholic university is the requirement that it be Christocentric. Let us consider one of John Paul II’s favorite conciliar texts: 5 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, §14. 6 Ibid. Cf. Gaudium et Spes, §57, quoted above. 7 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, §15. 8 Ibid. 9 On nihilism see also John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §91. 10 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, §15. 11 Ibid. Adrian J. Reimers 352 The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. . . . Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear.12 This is a particularly challenging requirement, since it hinges not upon some truth readily accessible to the academic community as a whole but rather to those who have received and embraced the Christian revelation. What this text from Gaudium et Spes asserts is that any understanding of human nature that does not take into account the Incarnation of Jesus Christ is somehow inadequate or even flawed. It follows, therefore, that whoever does not know Christ does not fully know himself.The destiny of the human being, the purpose of human life (“his supreme calling”), is ultimately known only through Christ. This text need not mean— indeed it cannot mean—that the results of the various sciences dealing with human nature (such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, and economics) are false or scientifically incomplete if they do not have recourse to the Gospels. However, it does mean that the humanistic sciences cannot of themselves fully account for the human being and his destiny, that their valid conclusions must somehow be situated in the broader context of what God has revealed in Christ. The Catholic university is securely confident not only that her faith can be reconciled with secular inquiry, but even more that her faith shines essential light on human knowledge. Elements of a Vision If, as George Weigel suggests, “the anthropological question is fundamental” (see Weigel, p. 260), to answer that question becomes a fundamental task for the Catholic university. Because the Catholic university is “born from the heart of the Church,” and indeed, because the university by its very nature is concerned specifically with truth, a central theme for the Catholic university must be, in the words of Redemptor Hominis,“man in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being.”13 From this we may infer a coherent and comprehensive contemporary vision: The mission of the Catholic university is to explore and understand the mystery of the human person and in doing so to manifest his inherent dignity and transcendent destiny.Whatever concerns the mystery of the human person is the object of the Catholic university’s research and teaching. This plainly includes the full scope of the liberal 12 Gaudium et Spes, §22. 13 John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, §15. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 353 and fine arts, and, even if less obviously, the pure and applied sciences as well. Most certainly this mystery can direct our approach to the political, commercial, legal, and medical professions. It will be my purpose here to explore and flesh out the implications of this vision, to find the points of application to the life of a complex and diverse academic institution. Not all academic disciplines pertain directly to human nature. Even if a sociological survey or psychological experiment leads to conclusions about human nature, the physicist’s data from his particle accelerator tell us nothing directly about ourselves. Nonetheless, we can identify two fundamental and universal norms that apply to scholars in all disciplines: the normativity of truth and the vocation to wisdom. The Normativity of Truth Pope John Paul II characterizes the academic calling in terms of its relationship with truth, because the purpose of intellectual inquiry is to attain knowledge and understanding of truth: By vocation, the Universitas magistrorum et scholarium is dedicated to research, to teaching and to the education of students who freely associate with their teachers in a common love of knowledge.14 Some would challenge even this norm, recalling, perhaps, Lawrence H. Summers’s remark in his 2001 presidential installation address at Harvard University:“The university is open to all ideas, but it is committed to the skepticism that is the hallmark of education.”15 Certainly it is true that a spirit of skepticism has taken hold within the higher education establishment in the United States and Europe. To claim certain knowledge of truth—especially revealed truth—is generally unacceptable within the secular academy.16 The contemporary scholar, to be credible, is expected to be skeptical of all truth claims. Indeed he must suspect the very claim that there is such a reality as truth.The great danger, however, to the scholar who abandons truth is that he becomes nothing more than a clever hired hand for other powers—government, military, corporate— who want to make use of his brainpower for their own goals. Indeed, this 14 John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, §1. 15 Lawrence H. Summers, “Address made by President Summers at his Installation ceremony on Oct. 12,” Harvard University Gazette, October 18, 2001. Downloaded September 28, 2007, from www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/10.18/ 04-speechtext.html. 16 Here see Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s homily of the Mass “Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice,” April 18, 2005, accessed June 9, 2005 from www.vatican.va/gpII/ documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html, and especially 354 Adrian J. Reimers is a serious challenge currently facing scientific researchers in the U.S., especially those receiving funding from pharmaceutical firms. Here we are reminded of Thrasymachus’s famous definition of justice as “the advantage of the stronger.”17 Socrates’s provocative interlocutor understood the nature of power and its use, and if the university is simply another realm governed by the exercise of power, then we must look to Thrasymachus for guidance. To refute Thrasymachus, Socrates defended the truth about the human soul and its transcendence toward the true and the good. If it was important to Socrates, the truth about the human person is especially important to the Catholic university. The Catholic university’s intellectual life should be grounded specifically in the truth concerning the human being’s (1) origin and constitution, (2) moral life, and (3) destiny. Origin and Constitution The first chapter of Genesis tells us, “God created man in his image, . . . male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27), and Catholic tradition repeatedly affirms this.18 Because human beings are immersed in and part of the rest of creation, the sciences can study our organic constitution using the tools of biology. Paleoanthropology can search out the origins and ancestors of our species. Every university’s biologists must avail themselves of Charles Darwin’s discoveries and subsequent developments in the theory of evolution by random variations and natural selection. What Catholic scholars cannot accept—and this is something that too many in the secular academy affirm—is the notion that human beings are nothing more than the product of blind chance, that the human being is no more than a particularly sophisticated accident of biological mechanisms. By its very canons biology cannot establish this, and Vatican II rejected it: “Now man is not wrong when he regards himself as superior to bodily concerns, and as more than a speck of nature or a nameless constituent of the city of man.”19 Because his existence is willed by the God whose image he is, the human person cannot be reduced to his physical or social aspects. Rather, noteworthy is his address as Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006, in which the Pope traces the roots of this skepticism in modern thought. Address accessed June 9, 1008 from www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_ university-regensburg_en.html. 17 Plato, The Republic, 338c. 18 See, for example,Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I–II, prologue; Summa contra Gentiles II, chap. 85; The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 355 ff., and Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Mulieris Dignitatem, §4. 19 Gaudium et Spes, §14. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 355 a being at once thoroughly material and spiritual, he transcends the material world.“Though made of body and soul, man is one.Through his bodily composition he gathers to himself the elements of the material world; thus they reach their crown through him, and through him raise their voice in free praise to the Creator.” 20 The human person is a metaphysical being. The Council continues on to affirm, “Man judges rightly that by his intellect he surpasses the material universe.”21 The truths that we pursue in the university are not simply practical survival techniques, nor are they our own inventions. As scholars we stand before something greater than ourselves. Isaac Newton wrote:“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”22 Our capacity for knowledge is far more than an ability to come up with true statements, somehow to store appropriate data within the brain and then apply it technologically.To put the point negatively, Daniel Dennett’s thesis that the brain (and nervous system) are an “anticipation machine,”23 a complex mechanism to detect environmental changes relevant to the well-being of the organism, constitutes an inadequate account of human understanding. Aristotle’s dictum “The soul is in a way all things”24 means that to understand something is to have incorporated its essence—its “what-it-is”—into one’s own mind, so that (for instance) a scientist does not simply know about chemistry; he is a chemist.The structures that govern chemical interactions have become the structures by which his thinking is governed. In this way whoever knows some truth shares in the mind of the Creator. Thus St. John of the Cross could say,“A single human thought is worth more than the whole world.” Our souls, by their very capacity to know the truth, reflect the divine nature. And therefore St. John continues his reflections by saying that “only God is worthy of it.”25 Precisely because the capacity to study and to understand truth is a privileged sharing in the Creator’s own activity, Newton could stand awestruck before the “great ocean of truth.” As John Paul II put it, “One may define the human being, therefore, as the one who seeks the 20 Ibid., §14. 21 Ibid., §15. 22 David Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855), accessed October 1, 2007 from www. quotationspage.com/quotes/Isaac_Newton/. 23 Daniel Dennnett, Consciousness Explained (Boston,Toronto, London: Little, Brown, & Co., 1991), 177, 360 ff, and 382. 24 Aristotle, On the Soul, III, 8 (431b 21). 25 San Juan de la Cruz, Dichos de luz y amor, 34:“Un sólo pensamiento del hombre vale más que todo el mundo; por tanto, sólo Dios es digno de él.” Adrian J. Reimers 356 truth.”26 The very pursuit and knowledge of truth is itself a great sign of human dignity, of his transcendence with respect to the material world. Recognizing the capacity of the human person to transcend the purely physical order, the Catholic university affirms the premise that his origin and constitution necessarily reflects his relationship with and likeness to the Divine. Moral Life When Cardinal Ratzinger addressed the Conclave that was to elect him as pope, he warned against a “dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires.”27 It seems curious to call the affirmation of one’s own ego and desires a “dictatorship.” Nevertheless, despite its attractiveness, relativism undercuts human dignity precisely by negating the seriousness of the moral drama that each person is called to live.To deny the moral character of human nature is to deny our dignity as responsible agents, as persons capable of embracing what is truly good and rejecting evil. This is not to deny, of course, that in many circumstances the line between good and evil can be difficult to determine. At what point may intrusive medical procedures be stopped and the patient allowed to die? What sanctions should be imposed on foreigners who have illegally entered a wealthier land to find work? What rights have the suffering and ill to expensive medications and treatments? We could easily multiply hard questions whose answers are matter for spirited and serious debate. Nevertheless, we may not deny that we have the capacity to know and understand the truth about the good and that each of us is obliged to behave according to that truth. Consider the contemporary debate over global warming. Scientific analysis presents us with the fact that the earth is warming significantly, and, projecting the consequences of this, scientists propose courses of action. It is precisely because we can understand the ecosphere and how our actions affect it that we are responsible for our decisions and actions. More generally, our understanding of the truth about our own human nature and of the world we live in makes us responsible beings. In virtue of the capacity to know the truth about the good, the human person determines himself by freely choosing his own acts.This freedom to define oneself is not arbitrary, as (for instance) Sartre proposes,28 but rather consists in the capacity to direct oneself to the good as it is known by reason. 26 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §28. 27 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Homily of the Mass Pro Eligendo Romano Pontif- ice, April 18, 2005. 28 See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism.” Human Dignity and the Catholic University 357 If from the fact that some moral questions are vexing we then conclude that moral norms are arbitrary or relative, then we have denied an essential component of our human dignity. If we say that because the human being is so thoroughly conditioned by his material nature he lacks moral freedom, then we have reduced him to a thing and denied his dignity as a person. If we say that the law or custom of the society or nation supersedes the individual conscience, then we have violated what the Vatican Council calls the “most secret core and sanctuary” of the person, where he “is alone with God.”29 A grave danger of our age is that we lose sight of the individual person’s moral responsibility, instead ascribing moral responsibility to social groups and institutions. Not only law but social custom and the pressures of “group-think” can blind the individual to the demands of conscience.The United States, which since its founding has prided itself on a commitment to the proposition that all men are created equal, has recently been badly embarrassed by revelations that prisoners were abused at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.These soldiers abandoned conscience because they believed (rightly) that those above them would approve their behavior. Pope John Paul the Great addressed this in his encyclical on the Gospel of Life, where he rejected the principle that a decision arrived at through authentically democratic procedures is always morally acceptable, because such a principle can permit—and, in the case of many of our nations and their permissive abortion laws, has permitted—a tyranny of the strong over the weak.30 It is an essential mark of human dignity that the human person is morally responsible. Our Human Destiny The Catholic university is theistic. Atheism is not a viable option. To be sure, her scholars must study atheistic thinkers—Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre— fairly and objectively, but the institution as such cannot pretend that atheism might be true.This is a matter of simple fidelity to the truth. Because the existence of God is a supremely important fact, its denial is a supremely important error. But atheism is also problematic because it undercuts the ground of human dignity.Vatican II teaches, “The root reason for human dignity lies in man’s call to communion with God. From the very circumstance of his origin man is already invited to converse with God.”31 To deny the existence of the God who created us and destined us to himself 29 Gaudium et Spes, §16. 30 John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, §70. 31 Gaudium et Spes, §19. Adrian J. Reimers 358 is to cut off our dignity at its root. In 1983, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spoke starkly of the fruits of atheism: But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”32 If the human person has a transcendent destiny, then a materialist reductionism must be false which considers him as nothing more than the accidental and interestingly complex outcome of a mindless, random sequence of organic changes guided only by natural selection.To deny this materialism contradicts no scientific finding, undermines no established theory.To affirm it, however, directly attacks the intrinsic dignity of the human person created in God’s image and destined for communion with him. For very much the same reason, the Catholic university—even as her scholars and students ponder the writings of Hume, Bentham, and Mill— must reject this-worldly utilitarianism. When lecturing on ethics at the Catholic University of Lublin, Karol Wojtyl/a, the future Pope John Paul II, argued that utilitarianism neglected the authentic transcendent good of the human person. “Utilitarianism,” he wrote, “commits an important mistake, for it presupposes . . . a false, incomplete, disintegrated view of reality, especially of that reality with which ethics is primarily concerned, and this reality is the human being.”33 The good for the human person must transcend earthly needs and pleasures.We may recall the teaching of the Council, cited earlier, that as authors and artisans of our culture our task is to foster a new humanism,“to elevate the human family to a more sublime understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty.”34 Valuable and important as scientific, professional, and technical proficiency are—and the experience of every prosperous nation attests to this importance—the fostering of this humanism, a humanism directed to what is truly good for man, is even more important. In a significant work on American Pragmatism, Louis Menand comments:“There is a sense in which history is lit by the deeds of men and women for whom ideas were things other than instruments of adjustment. Pragmatism explains everything about ideas except why a person would be willing to die for one.”35 Address32 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,“Templeton Lecture,” May 10, 1983. Downloaded Octo- ber 4, 2007 from www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm. 33 Karol Wojtyl/a, Lubliner Vorlesungen (Stuttgart-Degerloch: Seewald Verlag, 1981), 408. 34 Gaudium et Spes, §57. 35 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 375. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 359 ing the metaphysical root of utilitarianism’s inadequacy, John Paul the Great writes,“Utilitarianism ignores the first and fundamental dimension of good, that of the bonum honestum.”36 The Catholic university, in its teaching, research, and in the ordering of its student life, must acknowledge that the highest good, in terms of which all other goods are truly good, is God alone.37 Vocation to Wisdom In the last analysis, the Catholic university is to take seriously the Christian’s vocation to wisdom. In his encyclical on faith and reason, John Paul II warns: A philosophy which no longer asks the question of the meaning of life would be in grave danger of reducing reason to merely accessory functions, with no real passion for the search for truth. To be consonant with the word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life.38 If skepticism is to be the contemporary academy’s attitude toward truth, the notions of wisdom and “meaning of life” will be completely lost. And therefore what John Paul warns against is precisely what has happened in today’s academy. Having abandoned as meaningless the question of life’s meaning, we have indeed seen reason reduced to an accessory function, a means of attaining technical advantages but not of getting to the truth of things.The American pragmatist William James put this conception of reason very well when he argued, “The truth of an idea is not a stagnant property inherent in it.Truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. . . . Its validity is the process of its validation.”39 From this it follows that “truth” and “utility” are interchangeable concepts: “You can say of [an idea] then either that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful.’ Both these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that gets fulfilled 36 John Paul II, Memory and Identity (Rizzoli: New York, 2005), 35.This concept of the bonum honestum (“fitting good”) is an important concept throughout the writings of Karol Wojtyl/a. See Wojtyl/a,“On the Directive or Subservient Role of Reason in Ethics: In the Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant,” in Person and Community: Collected Essays (New York, San Francisco, Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), 60; and Lubliner Vorlesungen, 186, 407. 37 John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor¸ §9. 38 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §81. 39 William James, Pragmatism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991), 89. Adrian J. Reimers 360 and can be verified.”40 James effectively repudiates the notion of wisdom as a goal worth attaining. The point of intellectual activity is simply to make our way more efficiently through a complicated and somewhat dangerous world.This conception of reason did not originate with James, of course. John Paul II traces its roots to the Enlightenment.41 And it is an important aspect of the contemporary evolutionary materialist account, according to which the human power to reason is simply a survival advantage. Recall Daniel Dennett’s principle: “All brains are, in essence, anticipation machines.”42 Absent wisdom, it follows that our educational task would be simply to develop more ingenious techniques, technologies, procedures, and systems for developing the economy and gaining an advantage over our adversaries.This is indeed the perspective that many of our colleagues in higher education have concerning their vocation. In a recent series of columns in the New York Times, Stanley Fish frankly raises the question of a crisis of the humanities, the liberal arts, those studies that “improve the mind.”43 The general secular concept of education is not about wisdom or improving the mind nor about passing on the cultural heritage. It is about getting marketable skills. It has not always been so. Aristotle’s Metaphysics is a work in search of wisdom, in search of the ultimate causes of things.44 This is a science that necessarily leads beyond the study of material things, indeed directly to divine things.45 As such wisdom is the science that most befits a free man, who is one who directs his own affairs and is not directed by another. In this context it is helpful to recall the Second Vatican Council’s statement that “man is not wrong when he regards himself as superior to bodily concerns, and as more than a speck of nature or a nameless constituent of the city of man.”46 If the human being is to rise above bodily concerns, to be more than a part of nature or the state’s whole, he can do so only in terms of his intellect.The Council Fathers write: The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be, for wisdom gently attracts the mind of man to a quest 40 Ibid., 90. 41 See Karol Wojtyl/a ( John Paul II), “On the Directive or Subservient Role of Reason in Ethics,” Person and Community, 57–72, which treats of the instrumentalization of reason in the thought of both David Hume and Immanuel Kant. 42 Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, Toronto, London: Little, Brown & Company, 1991), 177. 43 Stanley Fish, “Think Again,” The New York Times, January 18, 2009. 44 Aristotle, Metaphysics, I, 1 981b 27–29. 45 Ibid.,VI, 1, esp. 1026a 18–32. 46 Gaudium et Spes, §14. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 361 and a love for what is true and good. Steeped in wisdom, man passes through visible realities to those which are unseen.47 Aristotle could hardly have said it better.The human being is to be master of himself, author of his own acts according to his own grasp of the truth, and this self-mastery requires wisdom. To repeat Weigel’s felicitous expression of John Paul II’s challenge in Fides et Ratio, we are called to “leave the sandbox of metaphysical and epistemological skepticism and, in doing so, to break through to a new, genuinely mature humanism” (see Weigel, p. 265). Wisdom is ultimately a virtue, which implies that wisdom is ascribed principally and in the first instance to the individual. It is the person himself, in the final analysis, who must choose to seek wisdom and obtain it. Nevertheless, the university can foster wisdom in its faculty and students. To do so, the university must strike three vital notes: (1) reverence for tradition, (2) unity of minds and hearts, and (3) orientation to the transcendent. Reverence for Tradition We have been talking about Aristotle, about Plato and John of the Cross. To borrow from a recent comment by David Brooks, an American journalist, we “talk to dead people.” Unfortunately, it has become common, even in our universities, to dismiss the traditional thinkers. Mathematicalempirical science has surpassed the capabilities of Aristotle’s science based on the four causes. It is rare to teach Aquinas’s Five Ways without some student’s objecting that contemporary scientific cosmology, the Big Bang Theory, disproves his arguments. Indeed, it is not hard to find contemporary philosophers who will dismiss the concepts, themes, and projects of our ancient and medieval predecessors as irrelevant, as sophisticated folkthinking. This is a serious error that John Paul the Great was especially concerned to refute. Although technical knowledge can indeed grow by accretion of new facts and approaches, there remains a developing wisdom that we have inherited. John Paul writes: Although times change and knowledge increases, it is possible to discern a core of philosophical insight within the history of thought as a whole. Consider, for example, the principles of non-contradiction, finality and causality, as well as the concept of the person as a free and intelligent subject, with the capacity to know God, truth and goodness. Consider as well certain fundamental moral norms which are shared by all.These are among the indications that . . . there exists a body of knowledge 47 Ibid., §15. 362 Adrian J. Reimers which may be judged a kind of spiritual heritage of humanity. It is as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel that they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way.48 The modern conceit is that we have a way of knowing that is utterly new, discontinuous from the ancient and medieval ways of knowing, that we can dispense with the wisdom of the ancients and be guided by the latest discoveries and theories of the empirical sciences. Such an approach is effectively a denial of the very possibility of wisdom. Wisdom is knowledge of first principles, of the roots of being, of the natures of truth, goodness, and beauty. What we have learned from the recent history of science—I am thinking especially of the developments of relativity and quantum theories—is that the solid truths of fifty years ago may be overthrown tomorrow. Newton’s mechanics were an unshakeable foundation for the knowledge of the physical universe . . . until Einstein wrote his paper in 1905.The impact of the new physics was stunning. It left scientists and philosophers of science deeply perplexed. If Newton’s theory is ultimately false, then what can be true? Relativity and quanta raised fundamental questions about truth and the nature of science. But let us note well what did not happen. Science did not stop. Research in physics proceeded apace. Far from crippling the scientific enterprise, the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century led to dramatic expansion and development of scientific knowledge.What is my point? Even though reigning theories were shaken, science itself survived. The scientific project, to understand the nature of reality by disciplined rational investigation, continued. What the pre-Socratic thinkers had begun, what Aristotle disciplined with his logic and physics, what the medieval logicians and theorists refined—this same project continues today. And this is John Paul II’s point in the passage just quoted. Science and human inquiry in general builds upon the inheritance we have from our forebears. Francis Bacon’s maxim notwithstanding, science is about more than getting power over nature. It is about understanding why things are the way they are. It is about the search for first causes of things. And physical science turns out ultimately to be a manifestation of our metaphysical impulse, of our desire for and vocation to wisdom. And when we lose our way, becoming confused about how to think of things, we do best for ourselves by turning back to the classics, our intellectual ancestors, to get our intellectual bearings straight.We do not need all Plato’s or Aristotle’s answers, but we need their help to formulate the questions and to help direct our thinking. 48 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §4. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 363 Unity of Hearts and Minds “The history of all hitherto existing society,” Karl Marx famously wrote, “is the history of class struggles.”49 And this can be applied to the history of ideas. Although the Marxist project, as Marx envisioned it, has been discredited historically, important elements of his analysis continue to influence our thought. For Marx the capitalist must think as a capitalist and the proletarian as a proletarian. Each thinks in terms of his own class interests. Similarly, men will support the advantages they have over women.White folks will regard as just social structures that support their advantages, structures that their black neighbors will resent. And so it is also with groups defined by religion, economic class, sexual identity, nationality, ethnicity, and so on.Whatever a person may say or write is a reflection of his own personal or class interest. Under the neo-Marxist paradigm, the principles of truth and justice I take to be true are simply those principles that benefit me and people like me. In a way it was to address this kind of problem that John Rawls attempted to draft his “veil of ignorance” procedures for establishing social structures.50 Rawls hoped to devise a system of “contentless” procedures for resolving conflicts of values. It is a project that has not worked well, and for reasons that should be clear. What is needed is not a system of procedures but wisdom. Procedures inevitably presuppose values, and values are not self-validating. (We may think, for example of the value of wealth. Although we all want wealth, it is not immediately evident how much and what kind of wealth is truly good to have.) To determine which values should govern our personal and corporate lives, we need to know what is truly good. Let us recall how the Vatican Council endorsed our studies. Our vocation is not to determine what is true and good simply for Kenyans or Vietnamese or Americans, for nations in the twenty-first century or for societies in conflict with militant Islam. Rather we seek what is universal, a “more sublime understanding of truth, goodness, and beauty” so that our reflections can “have universal value.”51 By fostering the pursuit of authentic wisdom, the Christian university transcends the divisions represented by its constituencies.This is certainly a paradoxical proposition, because scholars are a contentious lot.We argue passionately and sometimes simply for the sake of arguing. In thirteenthcentury Paris, the Franciscan Platonists and Dominican Aristotelians 49 Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. E. Kamenka (New York: Penguin Books, 1983), 203. 50 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), esp. 136–42. 51 Gaudium et Spes, §57. 364 Adrian J. Reimers certainly worked hard to overcome each others’ arguments. What these Scholastic thinkers also understood, however, was that the arguments were not futile. We can and must embrace the hope that the search for first principles of things—ultimately for answers to the meaning of life, as John Paul the Great put it—is not meaningless or in vain. The basis for our intellectual confidence, for this conviction that wisdom is a worthy goal, is the image of our Creator that we bear because of our rational nature. Created in his image and destined to communion with him, we do not seek in vain to conform our own minds to the order of things as they are. And this means that different as we may be in our cultural heritage and in the conditions of our lives, and however diverse may be our starting points and premises, we may nevertheless be partners in the joint pursuit of the ultimate reasons for our existence. Our commitment to pursuing wisdom is the key to the unity among diverse scholars in their manifold disciplines and from their various national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. Vocation to the Transcendent Reverence for wisdom has become, almost by default, the hallmark of the Catholic university. Although our secular universities have achieved marvelous results in their research and in graduating talented students, they have abandoned—in many cases consciously—the pursuit of wisdom.The most prestigious universities in the United States are those belonging to the American Association of Universities. Here is how that Association characterizes the research university: The raison d’être of the American research university is to ask questions and solve problems. Together, the nation’s research universities constitute an exceptional national resource, with unique capabilities: • America’s research universities are at the forefront of innovation; they perform about half of the nation’s basic research. • The expert knowledge that is generated in our research universities is renowned worldwide; this expertise is being applied to real-world problems every day. • By combining cutting-edge research with graduate and undergraduate education, our research universities are also training new generations of leaders in all fields.52 52 “America’s Research Universities: Institutions in Service to the Nation,” White Paper of the AAU, accessed from www.aau.edu/resuniv/WhitePaper1.01.html, June 12, 2008. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 365 The university is here to “ask questions and solve problems.” It is to innovate and apply its expert knowledge to problems in the real world.These are valuable services of course, and these are the principal reasons that our governments support higher education. Indeed, the United States Department of Education has for its mission “to promote student achievement and preparation for global competitiveness by fostering educational excellence and ensuring equal access.”53 Such mission statements take strong notice of the economic benefits of education, as government agencies should. But can we allow them to define our institutions? The effect of such a focus on economic development and prosperity is the fragmentation of the academy. What has economics to do with microbiology and that to do with Slavic literature or geriatric psychology? More important still is the question of what constitutes a problem, and this calls for wisdom, for an understanding of those transcendent values toward which the Second Vatican Council urges us to look. Let us consider some cases. The United States has a significant problem with Mexicans illegally crossing our southern border in search of a better life; Botswana confronts a similar influx from Zimbabwe. Experts can analyze the social and economic effects of immigration. They can identify difficulties in the home country’s policies.They can propose solutions to the crimes and exploitation in the host country that result from illegal immigration. Seldom, however, do they ask what constitutes a “better life,” or address the question of solidarity, of whether and to what extent citizens of a richer country might be obliged for the welfare of the poor next door. Economists and political theorists do not ask how Americans might best love their Mexican neighbors. Science may analyze military, technological, and economic relationships among nations, but do such studies address the roots of the conflicts and tensions between the West and the Dar al-Islam? As Plato taught 2,500 years ago, wisdom has to do ultimately with the good.54 What is the good that the person lives for, that his community and society live for? This question strikes to the core of the relationship between the Moslem world and the increasingly secular West. St. Augustine distinguished the City of God from the city of man on the basis of their respective loves.55 Ultimately the focus of wisdom is on what we should love, and this is a question that we all find ourselves forced, in one way or another, to ask. “One may define the human being, therefore, as the one 53 ED.Gov, U.S Department of Education website, www.ed.gov/about/landing.jhtml? src=gu, accessed June 6, 2008, emphasis added. 54 Plato, Phaedo, 97c–e; The Republic,VI, 508d–509b;VII, 517b–c. 55 St. Augustine, City of God¸ XIX, 24. 366 Adrian J. Reimers who seeks the truth.”56 Since the time of Plato, to address this question has been the task of the academy. Aristotle begins his analysis of the moral and political life by asking about the good.57 Besides exploring the connections among visible earthly realities, the philosopher—and every Christian scholar should be a philosopher in this sense—must seek to understand their relationship with and dependence upon the perfect Good, the Author from whom they have received their being. Because we know the One who is our Creator and that our Redeemer is the Incarnate Word through whom all things were made, we may confidently explore the metaphysical foundations of the real order, knowing that our research is not in vain. An Academic Ethos Whenever the questions of mission, vision, and governance arise in higher education, there also arise questions of implementation, enforcement of norms, and academic freedom. If the university is theistic, what is to become of the atheists on campus? Are the biologists to submit their monographs to a committee of theologians for approval before they ship them to the publishers? If an institution holds that certain things are true and certain values to be fostered, its government must provide for the implementation and realization of these values. But if that institution is a university, which must also value academic freedom, then there seems to be a conflict. Invariably such discussions focus on rules, possible academic regulations, hiring and promotion policies, and the like. And the discussions inevitably stagnate, developing along predictably standard lines. Happily, our task here is not to propose policies as such, but simply to set out a vision. It is appropriate to note, however, that if we take seriously the Incarnation and its sacramental implications, if—following John Paul II—we develop a “theology of institutions” based upon the theology of the body, then we might discover ways to order and reorder our institutional structures such that the vision outlined here may more readily emerge. Do we need to divide the academy along the same lines we have so far? Must the academic and social lives of our students be so strictly separated? We might think creatively about the way our universities are organized and structured. Let me propose that one practical step that can be taken immediately—putting structural and governance issues to the side for now—is to foster a distinctive Christian academic ethos, a set of values by which 56 John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §28. 57 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1. Human Dignity and the Catholic University 367 this community lives, towards whose realization it aims.This ethos can be readily encapsulated in a simple phrase, let us say, “the realization of Gaudium et Spes.” The careful (or even casual, for that matter) reader of the pastoral constitution will note its recognition of the legitimate autonomy of the sciences and earthly affairs,58 an autonomy that leaves wide open the doors of academic freedom. Gaudium et Spes intends to propose how the Church can serve humankind “in fostering that brotherhood of all men which corresponds to this destiny of theirs.”59 We might put it this way: the Church has told us scholars and teachers, professors and researchers what her—which is to say our—concerns are. These are concerns that we can and should make our own for the welfare of our colleagues in the academy, for our students, and for the broader society that we serve. St.Augustine’s famous exclamation “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,”60 applies to every human person, whether he realizes it or not. This is why the mission of the Catholic university is not narrowly confessional. Almost alone in the realm of higher education, the Catholic university has the spiritual and intellectual resources to promote the new humanism that Vatican II called for.This mission, to explore and understand the mystery of the human being and in doing so to defend his dignity and transcendent destiny as a son or daughter of God, has this further benefit. It is a vision and a mission that every member of the university community—student, administrator, or professor—can adopt as the ideal of his work.The Council wrote: In order for individual men to discharge with greater exactness the obligations of their conscience toward themselves and the various groups to which they belong, they must be carefully educated to a higher degree of culture. . . . Above all the education of youth from every social background has to be undertaken, so that there can be produced not only men and women of refined talents, but those greatsouled persons who are so desperately required by our times.61 In recognizing that the human being is “the only creature on earth God has willed for its own sake,”62 the Christian university adopts as its N&V governing principle the law of love. 58 Gaudium et Spes, §§36, 41, and 55–59. 59 Ibid., §3. 60 St. Augustine, Confessions, I, 1. 61 Gaudium et Spes, §31, emphasis added. 62 Ibid., §24. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 369–93 369 Spiritus Sanctus non est Neoconservatus:1 On Weigel’s Reading of Gaudium et Spes RODNEY H OWSARE DeSales University Center Valley, Pennsylvania FEW DOCUMENTS are as capable of dividing interpreters into “camps” as Gaudium et Spes. It would seem from all accounts that it was certainly one of the most, if not the most, contentious documents during the Council, and it has certainly not ceased to be a touchstone in current times. Tracey Rowland’s provocative Culture and the Thomist Tradition 2 can be read as an extended response to the cultural naivety of the document, while the dominant theology of the twenty years immediately following the Council can be read as a two-decade long performance of a fairly superficial reading of one aspect of the document. Furthermore, John Paul II’s pontificate, both in terms of its activity but especially in terms of its encyclicals, could be seen as a protracted attempt properly to retrieve the document—his repeated quotation, in every encyclical no less, of Gaudium et spes §22 should provide some evidence of this. It 1 In his famous debate with Luther concerning the doctrine of predestination, Erasmus stated that, on this issue, he preferred to take his stand with the skeptics. Luther responded, “Spiritus Sanctus non est skepticus.” This title notwithstanding, I should explain at the outset that I am not using neoconservative as an epithet. I mean it in the sense that Alasdair MacIntyre uses “conservative liberal.” In other words, MacIntyre suggests that the only political discourse allowed in America is between liberal Liberals, conservative Liberals and radical Liberals. As I will be arguing, it is precisely the importance that Weigel places on taking sides in this conversation that makes his thought different from either John Paul II or Benedict XVI. 2 Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (New York: Routledge, 2003). 370 Rodney Howsare would not be much of an exaggeration, then, to say that, in spite of the fact that it is clearly not the best or most important document produced by the Council—this honor would clearly have to go to Lumen Gentium or Dei Verbum—it is still the most contentious.That it elicited a seemingly cranky commentary from Josef Ratzinger, during his allegedly more progressive phase (1968), only a few years after its promulgation provides even more evidence of its incendiary qualities.3 George Weigel’s essay stands, then, in good company. And, like many of the commentaries and responses since the time of its writing,Weigel’s comments are often quite critical. In what follows, I would like to examine Weigel’s comments in the light of both the document and its retrieval in the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. My thesis is this: in spite of the fact that Weigel couches his criticisms in terms of the retrieval of Gaudium et Spes in the pontificate of John Paul II, there are significant differences in their respective readings, differences which go beyond matters of prudential judgment to the core of how Gaudium et Spes is to be retrieved for our time. Stated differently and with more content, John Paul II insinuates that the best way to retrieve Gaudium et Spes is in terms of the Christocentrism of paragraph 22; while Weigel pays lip-service to this and even applauds it, he underestimates its full implications. In order to make a case for this I shall proceed in three phases: first, I shall offer a reading of Weigel’s comments which raises questions regarding those aspects of Gaudium et Spes that he finds “curiously dated”; second, I shall compare Weigel’s concerns with those especially of Benedict XVI in order to show that the differences concern more than just matters of prudential judgment; third, I will draw some brief conclusions and offer some tentative suggestions based upon this comparative reading.A corollary of my thesis can be stated accordingly: John Paul II and Benedict XVI provide for a retrieval of Gaudium et Spes that gets to the root of modern errors in anthropology; these errors, at least as far as these two pontificates are concerned, did not begin with the (small “l”) liberalism of the sixties, but with the (big “L”) Liberalism of the Enlightenment. 3 I would like to agree at the outset with the position of Thomas Rourke regard- ing Ratzinger’s reading of Gaudium et Spes: “Clearly, Ratzinger accepted the document as a definitive and authoritative document of an ecumenical council, with all that such a designation entails, whatever his reservations about some of the influences on its formation.” Rourke, “Fundamental Politics:What We Must Learn from the Social Thought of Benedict XVI,” Communio 35 (2008): 445, n. 22. While I wrote the current article before reading Rourke’s, the entire approach that he takes coincides nicely with the central argument of this article. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 371 Weigel’s Lecture: “Rescuing Gaudium et Spes: The New Humanism of John Paul II” Weigel’s comments begin with a recognition of the many important and abiding insights of Gaudium et Spes, along with a brief synopsis of what the document was meant to do. Here Weigel mentions the important role played by then Karol Wojtyl/a, stating specifically that the second part of the document in particular foreshadows many of the things which John Paul II would say in Centesimus Annus. More particularly still, it is noted that Gaudium et Spes, like Centesimus Annus after it, takes a much more positive attitude than previous Church documents towards societies composed of “a democratic polity, a free economy, and a vibrant public moral culture, with the last being crucial to a proper functioning of the other two.”4 But then Weigel moves rather quickly to those aspects of the document that now seem “curiously, even strangely, dated.” 4 One of the difficulties of interpreting Vatican II centers on the issues of “conti- nuity and newness.” Pope Benedict XVI has recently called for a greater attention to the continuity between Vatican II and previous Church teachings, and a fine new study of the Council takes up this charge—Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). In a somewhat curious review of this book—reviewed in conjunction with another more progressive one—the late Richard John Neuhaus says the following, “In the long history of church councils,Vatican II was different.While there is continuity in teaching, something remarkable really did happen at the council. The liberal proponents of a hermeneutic of rupture are not making up their argument out of whole cloth.” Neuhaus, “What Really Happened at Vatican II,” First Things, October 2008.These comments are somewhat striking coming from a well-known “conservative” such as Neuhaus, and it should not be denied that he is generally favorable towards the book. But there does seem to be some discomfort over too much emphasis on continuity. I mention this here, in the light of Neuhaus’s close friendship and collaboration with Weigel over the years, because I think we can see a parallel situation in Weigel’s reading of the social encyclicals leading up to Centesimus Annus. As will be shown at greater length below, this amounts to something like the following: “With Centesimus Annus the Church finally got over all that Socialism on the one hand and Capitalism on the other talk, and began to realize that Capitalism is the only game in town.”Weigel’s now infamous comments on Benedict XVI’s most recent encyclical might be due in part to the fact that it disrupts Weigel’s narrative of progress (from hostility to capitalism in the early encyclical tradition to its full embracing in Centesimus Annus ).The point to be made at this time is this: it is clearly the case that one can err either in the direction of continuity—and here one would be in danger of missing what the Spirit was saying in this particular Council; or one can err in the direction of newness—and here one would find it hard to account for the Spirit’s role in Church documents of the past. I will argue that John Paul II’s Christocentric reading makes this balancing act easier than does Weigel’s neo-liberal/neo-conservative approach. 372 Rodney Howsare At the center of Weigel’s criticisms stands the charge that the Council was not more prescient about the real, incumbent dangers of the modern world. Indeed, he states that the Council seems to have been worried about things that turned out not to be very worrisome even while it worried insufficiently about things which were genuinely frightening.Throughout this litany of things to which the Council did and did not call attention, one cannot help but hear the echoes of America’s very heated and very current culture wars.To put it bluntly,Weigel has a dog in this fight. One cannot help but suspect, in fact, that it is Weigel’s take on the current culture wars that provides the vantage point from which he judges what the Council missed and what the Council got right. The danger here is twofold: (1) that the document is being read in an overly political, if not partisan, manner; and (2) that the Council is being read from an overly narrow (geographically and historically), American perspective. For instance, the Council, in Weigel’s view, is overly concerned about the threats of nuclear war, and not sufficiently about bio-ethical threats, threats to which people like Aldous Huxley were calling attention long before the Council convened. This is a fair enough point and it is certainly the case that the Church has had to turn more attention to such concerns in the years since the Council, but a couple of caveats should also be made in defense of the document’s concerns. It is clear that it was part of John XXIII’s intent to show that the Church was not merely against the various humanistic concerns and projects that marked the modern period: concerns over human rights, freedom, equality, and the like. Indeed, the Council intentionally avoided the language of condemnation (damnat ) even with regard to something as egregious as antiSemitism.With regard to the treatment of atheism in the document, for instance, then Josef Ratzinger put it this way: In fact we may say that the weapon of condemnation had been tried to the limit of possibility by the decree of 1 July 1949, and that it is no longer possible to deal with the problem that way now. It is clear that the Church cannot but reject atheism and must oppose quite universally not only the persecution of the faithful but also the attack on human freedom generally. It is no less clear, however, that in addition it must reflect on its own share in the whole question of Marxism and the defectiveness of its own “humanism”, and so accept the comprehensive question represented by Marxism as also concerning the Church itself.5 5 Josef Ratzinger, commentary on Gaudium et Spes, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” part 1, chap. 1, in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, vol. 5, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 150. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 373 The point here is that a direct condemnation along bio-ethical lines would have gone against the “tone” that the document was trying to strike. Instead, the document presented a positive anthropology which would, by implication, rule out such things as abortion and euthanasia in the name of the dignity of the human person created in the image of God. The worry over weapons of mass destruction, on the other hand, could be seen as a common cause with the so-called secular humanist of “good will.” But even if we grant Weigel’s argument that the Council should have said more about bio-ethical threats, it does not follow that it was the focus on “the destructive capabilities of modern weaponry” that prevented them from seeing this other threat. Nor is it, in my view, the mention of things such as the nuclear threat that makes the document seem “dated.” Is not the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in places like Iran and North Korea precisely a current concern? Is it not the use of such weapons that has given our current pope and his predecessor such reservations concerning the possibility of a just, modern war?6 The question is whether or not these things are simply dated, or whether they are dated from the perspective of an American neo-conservative engaged in a particular way in the culture wars? The next issue that Weigel raises concerns Gaudium et Spes’s failure to predict the “demise of the secularization hypothesis.” “Gaudium et Spes,” 6 See, for instance, the comments of John Paul II to the diplomatic corps in 2003, where nuclear weapons are specifically mentioned:“War is not always inevitable. It is always a defeat for humanity. International law, honest dialogue, solidarity between States, the noble exercise of diplomacy: these are methods worthy of individuals and nations in resolving their differences. I say this as I think of those who still place their trust in nuclear weapons and of the all-too-numerous conflicts which continue to hold hostage our brothers and sisters in humanity. At Christmas, Bethlehem reminded us of the unresolved crisis in the Middle East, where two peoples, Israeli and Palestinian, are called to live side-by-side, equally free and sovereign, in mutual respect.Without needing to repeat what I said to you last year on this occasion, I will simply add today, faced with the constant degeneration of the crisis in the Middle East, that the solution will never be imposed by recourse to terrorism or armed conflict, as if military victories could be the solution. And what are we to say of the threat of a war which could strike the people of Iraq, the land of the Prophets, a people already sorely tried by more than twelve years of embargo? War is never just another means that one can choose to employ for settling differences between nations. As the Charter of the United Nations Organization and international law itself remind us, war cannot be decided upon, even when it is a matter of ensuring the common good, except as the very last option and in accordance with very strict conditions, without ignoring the consequences for the civilian population both during and after the military operations.” Address of His Holiness John Paul II to the Diplomatic Corps, January 13, 2003, §4. Or, note the comments by then Cardinal 374 Rodney Howsare says Weigel, “does not, in other words, imagine a world that is becoming more religious, and in which religious conviction is having a determinative effect” (256). But, again, this criticism is valid—and it may be—only if one accepts a certain reading of secularization, a reading that, it must be said, tends to be favored by American neo-conservatives.7 It must also be said that this is a thesis that has been challenged rather convincingly by the likes of Alasdair MacIntyre and Will Herberg, among others.The substance of their challenge is that, even if, statistically speaking, religion is on the rise, such public professions of faith seem to grow in direct proportion to a daily routine that is increasingly lived as if there is no God, or at least as if God makes no difference. As MacIntyre once put it: The difficulty lies in the combination of atheism in the practice of the life of the vast majority, with the profession of either superstition or theism by that same majority. The creed of the English is that there is no God and that it is wise to pray to him from time to time.8 Ratzinger regarding the justness of the war in Iraq. Notice, again, the explicit mentions of modern weaponry: INTERVIEWER : Your Eminence, a question about current events, in some way connected to the Catechism. Does the coalition war on Iraq come within the canons of the ‘just war’? RATZINGER : The Pope has very clearly expressed his thoughts, not only as the thoughts of an individual, but as the thoughts of a man of conscience occupying the highest functions in the Catholic Church. Of course, he has not imposed this position as a doctrine of the Church, but as the appeal of a conscience enlightened by the faith.This judgment of the Holy Father is convincing from a rational point of view also: reasons sufficient for unleashing a war against Iraq did not exist. First of all it was clear from the very beginning that proportion between the possible positive consequences and the sure negative effect of the conflict was not guaranteed. On the contrary, it seems clear that the negative consequences will be greater than anything positive that might be obtained.Without considering then that we must begin asking ourselves whether as things stand, with new weapons that cause destruction that goes well beyond the groups involved in the fight, it is still licit to allow that a ‘just war’ might exist. Interview in 30 Days, April 2003. 7 Weigel notes, for instance, Peter Berger’s article “Secularization Falsified,” First Things 180 (February 2008): 23–27. But this particular “take” on secularization has been rather ably challenged by David L. Schindler in, especially,“ ‘The Religious Sense’ and American Culture,” Communio 25 (1998): 679–99. 8 Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-Images of the Age (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 26, cited in Schindler, “The Religious Sense,” 679. Benedict XVI’s constant warnings about the pervasiveness, in Liberal societies, of relativism is at least an indication of where he might fit into this debate. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 375 Or, if we were to take Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God— made over a hundred years ago now—we must acknowledge that it had nothing to do with statistics regarding how many people professed belief in God, or even practiced religion. I suspect that church attendance was relatively high in Nietzsche’s Germany even compared to, say, Weigel’s America. It had, rather, to do with the fact that the institutions of modernity were operating as if the God—or at least the God of Jesus Christ— question made no intrinsic difference.9 Of course I need not prove at this point that the “secularization hypothesis” is right and that Weigel is wrong; it is sufficient to show that there are enough formidable defenders of the thesis still around to cast suspicion on the notion that Gaudium et Spes’s attention to it is “curiously dated.” The next issue I will address is a little more complex.Weigel notes that Gaudium et Spes’s concern for widespread economic inequalities now seems dated in the light of the fact of “expanding wealth” (257) and the fact that “five-sixths of the world [are] un-poor, or well on the way to being un-poor—while the ‘bottom billion’ [are] mired into abject poverty, in considerable part because of something else that Gaudium et Spes did not anticipate: the fantastic corruption and incompetence of post-colonial governments in the Third World” (257). And then, in terms of the effects of economic inequality on war and peace,Weigel states: In terms of international affairs, Gaudium et Spes suggested that economic inequality would be the primary casus belli between nations in the future. Yet it is hard to think of very many wars caused by economic inequality or the desire to plunder resources since 1965. (258) 9 It is an interesting question, one which cannot be pursued in this essay, as to why neo-conservatives (or neo-liberals) have such an interest in refuting the secularist hypothesis. One suspects that it has to do with their desire to defend the modern, democratic-capitalist nation state against the charge—from traditionalists and post-modernists of varying stripes—that such regimes invariably lead to an increasing forgetfulness of God. At least this much can be said in defense of the traditionalists: it does seem to be the case that conservative liberals, such as Weigel, are losing, slowly but surely, every one of the culture wars. I once heard Fr. Edward Oakes say that once we have to go into a voting booth to decide whether or not marriage is between a man and a woman, we have already lost the battle. But see also the remarkable new book by James Kalb, The Tyranny of Liberalism: Understanding and Overcoming Administered Freedom, Inquisitorial Tolerance, and Equality by Command (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008). See especially chapter 7, which details why neo-conservative challenges do not go deep enough to challenge the Liberal demands for “more freedom” and greater secularization. 376 Rodney Howsare He goes on to suggest that the real cause of the war between nations these days is nationalist and religious at root. Oh, and of course the failure of the United Nations. Again, we are entitled to ask whether concerns over economic inequality and even over the role that such inequalities play in the wars between nations are really “curiously dated,” or whether they are dated simply from the viewpoint of a particular, late twentieth and early twenty-first century, largely American, largely neo-conservative reading of things. It is not uninteresting that the book that Weigel cites in defense of his position—The Bottom Billion:Why The Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It —is a favorite among neo-conservatives.The main point here, however, is not to contest this reading; the main point is that the question of economic inequality between nations is hardly one that seems to be passé for the pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In his speech before George W. Bush in 2001, John Paul II expressed this concern accordingly: In recent days, the world’s attention has been focused on the process of globalization which has so greatly accelerated in the past decade, and which you and other leaders of the industrialized nations have discussed in Genoa.While appreciating the opportunities for economic growth and material prosperity which this process offers, the Church cannot but express profound concern that our world continues to be divided, no longer by the former political and military blocs, but by a tragic fault-line between those who can benefit from these opportunities and those who seem cut off from them.The revolution of freedom of which I spoke at the United Nations in 1995 must now be completed by a revolution of opportunity, in which all the world’s peoples actively contribute to economic prosperity and share in its fruits. This requires leadership by those nations whose religious and cultural traditions should make them most attentive to the moral dimension of the issues involved.10 And with regard to the role of inequality in the wars between nations, John Paul II had the following to say: [To respond to terrorism means] to undertake new and creative political, diplomatic and economic initiatives aimed at relieving the scandalous situations of gross injustice, oppression and marginalization which continue to oppress countless members of the human family. . . . History, in fact, shows that the recruitment of terrorists is more easily 10 John Paul II, Address of John Paul II to the President of the United States of America, H. E. George Walker Bush, July 23, 2001, §2. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 377 achieved in areas where human rights are trampled upon and where injustice is a part of daily life. . . . [T]he international community can no longer overlook the underlying causes that lead, young people especially, to despair of humanity, of life itself, and of the future, and to fall prey to the temptations of violence, hatred and desire for revenge at any cost.11 These sorts of considerations, according to John Paul II, present a special challenge to the democratic, capitalistic societies of the West, as Christian values are being questioned by cultural models that are: grounded in an exaggerated individualism which all too often leads to indifferentism, hedonism, consumerism and a practical materialism that can erode and even subvert the foundations of social life.12 And in his most recent encyclical, Benedict XVI states explicitly that economic disparity continues to be a real concern, even in spite of the sort of economic growth that Weigel refers to: As John Paul II has already observed, the demarcation line between rich and poor countries is no longer as clear as it was at the time of Populorum Progressio.The world’s wealth is growing in absolute terms, but inequalities are on the increase. In rich countries, new sectors of society are succumbing to poverty and new forms of poverty are emerging. In poorer areas some groups enjoy a sort of “superdevelopment” of a wasteful and consumerist kind which forms an unacceptable contrast with the ongoing situations of dehumanizing deprivation. “The scandal of glaring inequalities” continues.13 More importantly, Benedict XVI raises questions regarding the use of merely economical statistics to prove that capitalism is “working”: Paul VI had an articulated vision of development. He understood the term to indicate the goal of rescuing peoples, first and foremost, from hunger, deprivation, endemic diseases and illiteracy. From the economic point of view, this meant their active participation, on equal terms, in the international economic process; from the social point of view, it meant their evolution into educated societies marked by solidarity; from the political point of view, it meant the consolidation of democratic regimes capable of ensuring freedom and peace. After so many years, as we observe with concern the developments and perspectives of the succession of crises 11 These are John Paul II’s comments in 2002, days before the anniversary of 9/11, and reported at zenit.org/article-5276?l=english. 12 Ibid. 13 Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §22. Rodney Howsare 378 that afflict the world today, we ask to what extent Paul VI’s expectations have been fulfilled by the model of development adopted in recent decades. We recognize, therefore, that the Church had good reason to be concerned about the capacity of a purely technological society to set realistic goals and to make good use of the instruments at its disposal. Profit is useful if it serves as a means towards an end that provides a sense both of how to produce it and how to make good use of it. Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty. The economic development that Paul VI hoped to see was meant to produce real growth, of benefit to everyone and genuinely sustainable. It is true that growth has taken place, and it continues to be a positive factor that has lifted billions of people out of misery—recently it has given many countries the possibility of becoming effective players in international politics.Yet it must be acknowledged that this same economic growth has been and continues to be weighed down by malfunctions and dramatic problems, highlighted even further by the current crisis.14 The point is this: while it may seem that the worries of older social encyclicals and of Gaudium et Spes regarding economic inequalities are obsolete (curiously dated?) in the light of current economic growth, both John Paul II and Benedict XVI have emphasized that this is not really the case: first, because there are still some fairly significant economic inequalities, inequalities that might—contra-Weigel—even be seen as one of the root causes of current conflicts between nations; second, because mere growth in economic terms does not get to the question of whether there has been genuine, human development.15 Given this final point, it is curious that Weigel begins the second part of his lecture commending Gaudium et Spes for realizing that “the anthro14 Ibid., §21. 15 A person working for an American-based company in a lesser developed coun- try may be making more money than he would otherwise be making if that factory were not there; but that hardly gets sufficiently to the question of whether he is actually developing in terms of his humanity. Furthermore, the sorts of statistics that Weigel is drawing on to demonstrate that the free market is working to eliminate economic inequalities can be questioned even from the merely economic point of view. See, for instance, Edward McPhail’s “Distributism and ‘Modern Economics,’ ” in Beyond Capitalism & Socialism: A New Statement of an Old Ideal, ed. Tobias J. Lanz (Norfolk, VA: 2008): “For example, the average pay of the top 100 CEOs chosen by Forbes magazine in 1970 was 49 times that of the average worker. By 1998 that ratio had grown to 2,388 to 1. [Paul] Krugman’s concern is that ‘a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats,’ and that ‘highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt’ ” (109). Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 379 pological question is fundamental,” and that he mentions specifically the significance of Gaudium et Spes’s reorientation of anthropology along Christological lines.The point that I shall make in the second part of this essay is that it is precisely these two moves that Weigel fails fully to grasp. But first to the remainder of Weigel’s essay. The second part of Weigel’s lecture—“The Wojtyl/a solution”—is intent upon showing that, the questions raised in the first part notwithstanding, Gaudium et Spes does still have something to say to us, provided it is read in the light of John Paul II’s humanism. At the root of our modern problems, according to Weigel’s reading of John Paul II, lies a deficient anthropology, and it is this anthropology—and not, say, bad economic theory or misguided foreign policy—that led to the gross injustices and human atrocities of the twentieth century. This fits well with Weigel’s repeated notion—one for which, incidentally, I have great sympathy—that the place to begin curing modernity’s ills is not first to be found at the economic or political level, but at the human and cultural level.This thesis is laid out with particular grace in his 1998 article “John Paul II and the Priority of Culture.”16 There is a danger, however, that what Weigel means by the priority of culture is a relegation of Catholic thought into the realm of culture so that the realm of politics and economics remains metaphysically and theologically isolated. The first aspect of John Paul II’s anthropology that Weigel finds helpful stems from the former’s reading of John of the Cross and concerns the importance of interiority. Here there is a “turn to the subject” which fits nicely with modern concerns, but it is not to the isolated subject of Descartes. Rather, a proper turn to the subject leads directly to the question of God, in keeping with the Augustinian dictum, “Thou art more interior to me than I am to myself.”17 Next, Weigel mentions Wojtyl/a’s Thomistic epistemological optimism in the face of so much modern and post-modern doubt about the human ability to know the external world or metaphysical and moral truth. More important still is Wojtyl/a’s notion of freedom, which serves as a corrective both to Marxist determinism as well as the post-modern 16 George Weigel,“John Paul II and the Priority of Culture,” First Things, February 1998: 19–25. 17 Joseph Ratzinger found a similar “positive spin” on the turn to the subject in Gaudium et Spes, §13, the source of which he attributes to Pascal and Augustine: “We hear echoes of Augustine’s spiritual experience that ‘intimum’ and ‘summum’ coincide, that the distant God is a God who is most near to man, nearer than man is to himself, that man finds himself and God by accomplishing a pilgrimage to himself, into his own inner depths, away from self-estrangement among things” (Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 128). 380 Rodney Howsare emphasis on the individualistic freedom to choose. Here Weigel mentions Servais Pinckaers’s positive notion of freedom as the freedom to do the good. To this is added John Paul II’s notion—taken especially from Gaudium et spes §22—that true freedom can be achieved only when we make a gift of ourselves to God and each other. In this context Weigel makes specific mention once again of John Paul II’s appreciative remarks concerning free economies in Centesimus Annus. Weigel closes his lecture, however, by raising three questions regarding John Paul II’s humanism. These questions concern the adequacy of his “personalist” approach for addressing, first, the issue of capital punishment; second, the issue of just war—which Weigel seems to think has become a de facto pacifism: and, third, “the ontological dimensions of the moral law” (266).This final concern seems to center both on the objectivity of the moral law and on the fact that Jesus is the world’s judge as well as its servant. Weigel implies that John Paul II’s one-sided emphasis on “the Law of the Gift” sometimes led to a softness with regard to the tough realities of crime, national disputes, and Church discipline. As I have heard it put, in other words, John Paul II was a good prophet, a good priest, but not so good of a king.Weigel concludes accordingly: The philosophical and theological anthropology of John Paul II, developed and refined [apparently in the light of the concerns raised by Weigel at the end], is thus the key to the rescue of the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World from the imprisonment in the dungeon of the sixties to which some of its critics have consigned it. (266–67) Assessing Weigel’s Comments in the Light of John Paul II and Benedict XVI Before I proceed to the second part of this essay, I should make a caveat and anticipate a possible objection. First, the purpose of this essay is not to attack George Weigel, who has been more often than not, as they say, on the side of the angels. His excellent biography of John Paul II alone establishes his name among Catholic intellectuals of the post-Vatican II era.The criticisms which I am making are directed at a tendency, whether from the right or the left—a tendency to which Weigel does not always succumb—to read Church documents selectively in terms of prior political commitments.18 This approach was the norm for the dominant, left18 Lest anybody thinks that this fear is unwarranted, I would call attention to Weigel’s recent comments in his “Caritas in Veritate in Gold and Red,” from National Review Online ( July 7, 2009). As stated above, unless the encyclical is read in the absence of some fairly robust form-critical analysis, it appears to cast significant doubt on Weigel’s reading of the social encyclical tradition as finally Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 381 leaning, post-Vatican II theology in America; it is no less obfuscating when it comes from the right. Second, it may be that all the questions which I raised in the first half of this essay can be attributed to differences over matters of prudential judgment, rather than matters of essential theological or moral teaching. Indeed,Weigel has repeatedly proved himself a faithful son of the Church in matters both theological and moral, even in terms of the Church’s wildly unpopular teachings concerning biological and sexual ethics. Can’t orthodox Christians disagree, in short, over matters of war, capital punishment, economics, and the like and still remain faithful to the central teachings of the Church? I will offer two brief responses in advance to this question with the hopes that what follows will provide sufficient grounds for my position. First, the social teaching of the Church is an integral part of its moral teaching, and it is at least possible that one can read the tradition of the Church’s social doctrine so selectively that one has trespassed with regard to the Church’s teaching authority. I am not arguing at this point that Weigel has done this; I simply want to rule out any notion that the Church’s social teaching can be radically separated, in terms of authority, from its moral and doctrinal teaching. Second—and this will actually occupy the bulk of what follows—it may prove to be the case that Weigel’s differences with John Paul II/Benedict XVI prove not only to concern this or that specific ethical issue—just war, capital punishment, the distribution of wealth, and the like—but may stem from fundamentally different starting points.With regard to this latter point, the question concerns the degree to which the Church’s political and social teachings grow integrally from the very Christocentric anthropology that Weigel is so enthusiastic about in the second half of his comments. I would suggest that these two issues—the relationship between the Church’s social doctrine and its moral and theological teachings on the one hand, and the integrated nature of Vatican II’s Christocentric anthropology and its social teaching on the other—are intimately related, and that it is a failure fully to appreciate this that accounts for Weigel’s differences with John Paul II and Benedict XVI. In what follows, then, I shall offer a brief discussion of the central concerns of Josef Ratzinger’s 1968 commentary on the first chapter of the first part of Gaudium et Spes in order to get at the fundamental differences alluded to above. Such an approach may seem unfair or arbitrary, getting it right with Centesimus Annus. Read as a whole (as opposed to being read in “Gold and Red”), the new encyclical can only be seen as a step backwards for somebody of Weigel’s perspective. It must be something like what happens to a member of the Jesus Seminar when he reads the Gospel of John. 382 Rodney Howsare given the fact that no two people are ever going to focus on the same issues in any analyzed text, especially if such analyses are separated by an ocean, a few countries, and forty years! This is only exacerbated by the fact that Weigel’s comments are much more general in nature and concern the document as a whole, whereas Ratzinger’s come in the context of a rather close reading of one part of the document. While taking these objections into mind, I think there is still merit in my approach insofar as the nature of the comments on Gaudium et Spes by Weigel and Ratzinger is typical of their writings over the years; in other words, their comments flow directly from the underlying and unifying principles of their thought. Furthermore, in what follows I am going to assume a common strategy amongst Weigel and his close collaborators Michael Novak and the late Richard John Neuhaus. While I appreciate the differences between these thinkers, I see no evidence that these differences of emphasis amount to differences of principle regarding, for instance, the normative status of the modern, democratically-capitalistically conceived nationstate.19 Finally, while I am focusing on the writings of Ratzinger/Benedict in what follows, I think it would be quite easy to find the same principles in the thought of John Paul II. It is not uninteresting that Weigel’s comments concerning Gaudium et Spes are quite different in tone than those of Josef Ratzinger in 1968. Of course this could be dismissed as merely different emphases at different times, except that, as already mentioned, both sets of comments betray concerns that have been consistent for both thinkers in their numerous writings since the Council. For instance, the central role that Weigel gives to Centesimus Annus for finally realizing that the Church does not have to provide a “third way” between or beyond socialism and capitalism goes all the way back to his otherwise excellent biography of John Paul II. As he then put it: Centesimus Annus made a decisive break with the materialism that had characterized some aspects of prior Catholic social doctrine. That, and John Paul’s “culture-first” approach to analyzing public life, also meant that, with Centesimus Annus, Catholic social doctrine abandoned any quest for a “third way” between or beyond capitalism and socialism. Socialism 19 In his “Response to Mark Lowery” (Communio 18 [1991]),Weigel calls attention to the differences between his work and that of Novak and Neuhaus, but all of these amount to differences of emphasis or specialty; they do not, however, amount to matters of principle, where these three thinkers have mounted a fairly consistent and common campaign for the last two to three decades. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 383 was dead, and there were many forms of capitalism in the world. . . .The questions for the future were what kind of “free economy.”20 And lest anyone think that the sort of free economy that John Paul was commending was not to be found in actual places like, say, North America, on the very next page Weigel sets this notion to rest: In the wake of Centesimus Annus, defenders of “Christian Socialism” tried to argue that “Capitalism A” [the sort, that is, that John Paul defends in Centesimus Annus ] existed only in textbooks.That was both empirically and textually implausible: empirically, because examples of “Capitalism A” could be found in various Western European and North American countries.21 I mention this because I think it gives further evidence for the normative nature that Weigel, Novak, and Neuhaus give to the modern, democratically-capitalistically ordered, nation state, and especially to America.22 An important aspect of this normativity will be the insistence that the problems which are currently arising in contemporary Liberal regimes are not Liberal (as in Alasdair MacIntyre’s use of the word) in nature, but are rather “liberal” (as in Sean Hannity’s use of the word) in nature; that is, they do not stem from a flawed anthropology and epistemology coming out of the Enlightenment as much as they stem from the aggressive secularism, pacifism, anti-Americanism, quasi-socialism, and moral libertarianism of the sixties.23 In contrast to this, Benedict XVI has always traced the roots of 20 George Weigel, Witness to Hope: the Biography of John Paul II (New York: Harper Collins, 1999), 615.This language of “decisive break” is disconcerting in the light of Benedict’s exhortation regarding a “hermeneutics of continuity.” 21 Ibid., 616. 22 For an almost identical reading of the importance of Centesimus Annus, one which claims even more specifically the importance of the American experiment for the document, see Richard John Neuhaus,“The Liberalism of John Paul II,” First Things, May 1997. In this article Neuhaus responds explicitly to the notion found in people like David L. Schindler,Alasdair MacIntyre, Oliver O’Donovan, and others that the anthropology and religious epistemology of the American founding are incompatible with that of traditional Christianity. He says that this is to give the Liberal tradition over to its modern, secularist champions. In short, he, like Weigel, will want to attribute the negative aspects of modern democracies—relativism, consumerism (although it is debatable whether consumerism is really seen as a negative), individualism, collectivism, skepticism, legalism, etc—to a betrayal of Liberalism, which began in earnest in the 1960s.As we shall see, Ratzinger/Benedict XVI will almost always go to the origins of modernity to trace the roots of such ills. 23 For the central importance that Weigel places on the 1960s, see his “The Sixties, Again and Again,” First Things, April 2008. 384 Rodney Howsare such modern ills as relativism and its accompanying false notion of freedom to the Enlightenment’s novel anthropology and epistemology.24 It is no accident that Ratzinger’s criticisms of Gaudium et Spes in 1968 concerned the document’s ambiguity in these very areas.25 I shall now focus on what I conceive to be his central concerns. It should first be pointed out that the various questions which Ratzinger raises throughout his commentary are really just facets of a single, underlying concern, namely, Gaudium et Spes’s (not entirely consistent) dis-integration or separation of anthropology from Christology. Now, it may be asked why a document on the Church’s role in the modern world, a document which, furthermore, wants to strike a “positive tone” and enter into “dialogue” with modern man, should make the rather retrograde assertion that the document needs to be more Christocentric! Isn’t this precisely what “modern man” would deny? Why not begin, in short, 24 Already in his Introduction to Christianity, Ratzinger located a key turning point in history in the change from verum est ens to verum quia factum, that is, from being is truth—which Kant asserted was a mere tautology—to truth is of what is made. This not only changes the relationship between contemplation and action— notice, for instance, that reason becomes first active in this latter formulation; it also changes the relationship between faith and reason. Since reason is now conceived as something purely active, stemming from the isolated subject, it is conceived as the opposite of faith, which, Enlightenment thinkers from Hume to Locke to Kant all agreed, was purely passive. This is why an argument based on reason was considered more sound to them than an argument based on, say, faith in revelation; it was also capable of generating wider support than a more “narrow” argument based on revelation. It is not uninteresting that this is an exact reversal of the position of Thomas Aquinas, found in the first article of the first question of the Summa theologiae, where he argues that an argument based on revelation is superior to an argument based on reason alone, on account both of the rarity of sound thinking and of the fallible nature of human reason. For a brilliant discussion of Benedict’s thought in this regard, see Michael Hanby’s “The Logic of Love and the Unity of Catholic Truth: Reflections on Deus Caritas Est,” Communio 33 (2006): 400–22. For Ratzinger’s treatment of this turning point, see Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 58–63. 25 It should be noted that, as critical as Ratzinger’s comments sometimes are, throughout his commentary he genuinely puts a “positive spin” on the document. Even when he critiques this or that section, he always tries to illuminate what the authors were really trying to do and even offers a hand at helping them do it. He is, that is, in general agreement with the overall intentions of Gaudium et Spes and simply thinks that a change of approach here and there would have actually helped them to achieve what they wanted to achieve even better. This can be seen especially in his suggestion that the anthropology of the first part of the first section should have been better integrated, from the beginning, with the Christology of the second part of the first section, culminating in Gaudium et Spes, §22.This will be made clearer in what follows. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 385 with things that we have in common? But this gets to the central paradox of Ratzinger’s entire approach: he is absolutely convinced that the Church does need to enter into a more positive dialogue with the modern world. He is even prepared to acknowledge the advances made with regard to human rights, individual dignity, religious freedom, economic freedom, the relative autonomy of the political vis-à-vis the ecclesial, and the like. It is simply that he is equally confident that these very positive gains of modernity can only be safeguarded from within a Christological perspective. Indeed, Ratzinger’s entire commentary—which is remarkably consistent with what he has written over the years and even since he has become pope—sounds like an elaboration of a rather programmatic quote from an equally programmatic essay, written by Hans Urs von Balthasar in 1960: Human nature and its mental faculties are given their true center when in Christ; in him they attain their final truth, for such was the will of God the Creator from eternity. Man, therefore, in investigating the relationship between nature and supernature has no need to abandon the standpoint of faith, to set himself up as the mediator between God and the world, between revelation and reason, or to cast himself in the role of judge over that relationship. All that is necessary is for him to understand “the one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ” (1 Tim. 2.5), and to believe him in whom “were all things created in heaven and on earth . . . all by him and in him” (Col. 1.16). Christ did not leave the Father when he became man to bring all creation to fulfillment; and neither does the Christian need to leave his center in Christ in order to mediate him to the world, to understand his relation to the world, to build a bridge between revelation and nature, philosophy and theology.26 26 Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Theology and Sanctity,” in Explorations in Theology, I, The Word Made Flesh (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 194–95. This is precisely what the modern political philosophy which underlies modern, liberal regimes does: namely, prescind from theology in order to work out the relationship between “Church and state.”Therefore, I don’t have to take a stance regarding whether or not the American version of liberal democracy, based as it is on the kinder and gentler “Scottish Enlightenment,” is as hostile to religion as the European version. It is a big deal for Weigel, Neuhaus, and Novak that the American founding was religious friendly. I will grant them this.The more important questions are these.What form of religion is it friendly towards? Is the relationship between nature and grace, faith and reason, God and the world, and the Church and the world worked out from within a Christological perspective or from within a (merely) anthropological perspective? This may seem like a silly question insofar as the answer is obvious and the question seems to be asking for too much; unless, that is, one realizes that some theological vision is going to get incorporated into the institutions and structures, one way or another.To assume that these institutions are not reflective of underlying theological and metaphysical assumptions cannot even be born out at the level of the historical facts of 386 Rodney Howsare While Ratzinger, then, would not disagree with Weigel that Gaudium et Spes marks a new attitude towards societies “composed of a democratic polity, a free economy, and a vibrant public moral culture,” and would not disagree that this new attitude is a good thing, he would want to insist that this new attitude is made possible precisely because of (and must be understood within) what is really “new” with Gaudium et Spes, namely, its Christocentrism. With regard to Gaudium et spes §22, Ratzinger says, “We are probably justified in saying that here for the first time in an official document of the magisterium, a new type of completely Christocentric theology appears.”27 Two initial points:We are back once again to themes of continuity and newness. Weigel alludes to the new attitude towards democratic regimes found in Gaudium et Spes, which then paves the way for the new attitude towards the free market (which Weigel seems to identify with capitalism)28 found in Centesimus Annus. These are of central importance to Weigel’s narrative of the Council.They are also of central importance, it seems to me, in Neuhaus’s review of the text by Levering and Lamb mentioned above (footnote 4).While I would agree with both Neuhaus and Weigel that there is something “new” in the Second Vatican Council, and would therefore agree that it is possible to overemphasize continuity to such a degree that one fails to see what the Spirit is saying to the Church of our age, I would disagree about the location of this newness. Ratzinger situates the new attitude towards such things as religious (and even economic) freedom within the new Christocentrism. Such situating makes all the difference in the world to the kind of freedom that one is embracing. It should go without saying, of course, that neither I nor Ratzinger have in mind anything like total novelty; this would precisely buy into to the “hermeneutics of rupture” that the Levering and Lamb text does such a good job of correcting.The newness is clearly in continuity with what has gone before in the Church’s tradition and therefore provides the best safeguard of that tradition.29 Second, when I say “within the new Christocentrism,” my point is this: the impression is often given that the possibility of Vatican II’s openness to the matter. At the very least, the person who thinks liberal institutions are theologically neutral cannot elicit support for his position from Ratzinger. 27 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 159. 28 This, by the way, is very misleading. Chesterton and Belloc were both in favor of “free economies,” but neither of them considered capitalist economies to be very free. 29 One can find such newness in continuity at many key turning points in the Church’s history: such moments are always turning points which often introduce “new language” or “new syntheses” which are invariably suspicious to the hyper traditionalists of the time.Think of the use of “homoousios” with regard to Jesus’ Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 387 the world is rooted in a willingness to constrain the realm of the Church in order to make room for, say, the freedom of the individual (e.g., freedom of conscience) or the autonomy of the political realm. In such a reading, a more positive notion would be taken of the secular than the older, sometimes integralist or monistic approach. If such is the case, Ratzinger’s insistence on a Christocentric reading of the document—along with John Paul II’s constant quoting of Gaudium et spes §22—could be seen as counterintuitive or even as running in opposition to the general thrust of the document (or the Council), especially if we recall the document on religious freedom. But one finds no evidence in Ratzinger’s commentary that he sees it this way. Indeed, he seems to be suggesting that it is only within this Christological perspective that the Church’s newfound respect for the proper autonomy of the world can make any sense. Furthermore, the dialogue with the world comes in, not by assuring the world that Catholics will agree to circumscribe their territory—say, into the “private sphere”— so that the world will have more room to go about its business. Rather, the dialogue consists in showing the world that mankind and his freedom—and this would include his rightful autonomy—are safeguarded only in Christ. Some specifics from Ratzinger’s commentary should bear this out. First, it is interesting that Ratzinger has no problem at all with the anthropocentric nature of the document. He agrees, that is, that the best place to begin a dialogue with the modern world is in the area of anthropology, on account of the fact that modernity’s central claim is a humanistic one. One need only think of such modern themes as equality, freedom, human dignity, human rights, etc. to see that this is the case. But from the other side, Christianity is uniquely suited for this dialogue precisely because of its unique assertion that God became a man without in any way threatening the humanity of that man. As Ratzinger puts it: What is to be demonstrated, therefore, is that precisely by Christian faith in God, true humanism, i.e. man’s full development as man, is attained, and that consequently the idea of humanism which presentday atheism opposes to faith can serve as the hinge of the discussion and a means of dialogue.30 Indeed, Ratzinger even complains that Gaudium et Spes has a tendency to suggest that the Church and “man” are two separate entities which then relationship with the Father or even the novel use of “hypostasis” in the Cappadocians; think furthermore of Thomas’s use of Aristotle, or Newman’s notion of “real assent.” In each case, however, these “novelties” proved, with the benefit of hindsight, to be the best safeguards of the always living tradition of the Church. 30 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 118. 388 Rodney Howsare need to come into dialogue. Conversely, he notes, the Church is already part of the human family. Second, Ratzinger rejects the notion that the Church should engage in a dialogue with the world based on “pure reason” or natural law alone.31 This seems to be for two reasons. First, if one begins a dialogue on the basis of some purely natural perspective, it is hard not to give the implication that Christ (grace, the Church, etc.) is just a “crowning conclusion” which is not always, already integrated from the ground up, or which is even optional to human flourishing. Here, again, one would play right into the modern assumption that religious faith is extrinsic to the work-a-day world. Secondly, what version of reason is one to engage in, if not a Catholic one? The point is not to downplay the proper role or autonomy of reason; it is simply to call into question the notion of a purely neutral version of reason which has no pre-rational (and even theological) assumptions. “There is, and must be,” Ratzinger states, “a human reason in faith; yet conversely, every human reason is conditioned by a historical standpoint so that reason pure and simple does not exist.”32 31 This would be another important issue in illuminating the differences between the approach of Ratzinger and the Communio school and Weigel and the First Things school. As a reader of First Things for some fifteen years now, I have noticed a proclivity for Robert George’s approach to natural law. In such an approach, the non-metaphysical and non-theological nature of the law is precisely what makes it attractive insofar as it helps to facilitate discussion between Catholics (Christians) and non-Catholics, makes it attractive, that is, because, once again, the modern theologically neutral nation state provides the context in which the law is understood.A central difficulty of this interpretation is that once natural law is treated as something that can be pursued without addressing questions of metaphysics or questions concerning the existence of God, it ceases to look anything like natural law as developed by a thinker like Thomas Aquinas and begins to look a whole lot like Kant’s “autonomous practical reason.” See, in this regard, the excellent article by Steven A. Long, “Natural Law or Autonomous Practical Reason: Problems for the New Natural Law Theory,” in St.Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. John Goyette, Mark S. Latkovic, and Richard S. Myers (Washington, DC:The Catholic University Press, 2004), 165–97. 32 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 118. It would be hard to exaggerate the influence of Josef Pieper on Ratzinger’s thought in this regard. Particularly influential is Pieper’s study of tradition, Tradition: Concept and Claim, trans. E. Christian Kopff (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2008), the central thesis of which is that all philosophy is born within the context of some sacred tradition or other. This is not only true of Plato and Aristotle—so that using Aristotle’s philosophy as an example of what “pure reason” can achieve without the influence of “revelation” can be quite misleading—but even more importantly of the Enlightenment philosophers, who were explicitly pretending to do “pure” philosophy. Of course their “sacred tradition” was Christianity, the very thing that some of them wanted to reject and others wanted to remake in a more “rational” form. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 389 The proper autonomy of reason is here recognized, but it is established from within a Catholic perspective. This would seem to gainsay the notion of a purely natural politics as well. It should also be noted with regard to this second point that Ratzinger blames both Gaudium et Spes’s failure consistently to integrate anthropology and Christology and its sometimes overly neutral notion of reason on an overly “juxtaposed” notion of nature and the supernatural. He seems to side with the theologians “especially from the German-speaking countries,” who “were convinced that fundamentally the text was still based on a schematic representation of nature and the supernatural viewed too much as merely juxtaposed.”33 That this is intrinsically related to the problem of anthropology can be seen from the following: Consequently the perspective remained exclusively that of the theology of creation, but one which is not even adequate to the wealth of a Christian theology of creation, for this is only intelligible in eschatology; the Alpha is only truly to be understood in the light of the Omega.34 Third, Ratzinger suggests that Gaudium et Spes would have been improved if it had incorporated a fuller notion of the human person. Here is perhaps Ratzinger’s most important suggestion and it has remained a consistent theme in his writings over the years. One aspect of this would simply be to call attention to the naturally communal nature of the person, and this is something that Gaudium et Spes explicitly tries to do (see especially §12) in the light of the influence of thinkers such as Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber. Even here Ratzinger would have preferred a situating of this within man’s natural desire for God.“The capacity for the absolute Thou is the ground of the possibility and necessity of the human partner.”35 Furthermore, such a notion of man’s natural sociability gives a very 33 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 119. 34 Ibid., 121.This would be one good place to show the essential continuity between Benedict XVI’s thought and that of John Paul II, especially in terms of the latter’s theology of the body. It is clearly the case that John Paul II’s reading of the Genesis account is written in the light of fully Trinitarian concerns.This theology, then, is about much more than sex; it suggests an anthropology of communion that runs quite contrary to that of such modern political philosophers as Hobbes or Locke. For both of these latter thinkers man is essentially (originally) isolated and out for himself, but must enter into relationships (contractual ones) out of selfinterest. John Paul II’s originally lonely man, on the other hand, quite naturally longs for communion, and this is a symptom of the fact that he is in the image of the Triune and thereby communal God. In such a view the lone individual is in an unnatural state, which, as such, does not feel right and is “not good.” 35 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 122. Rodney Howsare 390 different foundation for the political order than does modern political philosophy. Even for thinkers as allegedly religious friendly as Locke, man enters into social (and contractual) relationships out of a prior self-interest. This is another place where Ratzinger’s Christocentric approach to anthropology provides a better foundation for things like rights, freedom, equality, and the like than the philosophy of the Liberal tradition can. Modernity, then, needs a fuller notion of the person than the one found in the pagan philosophy of Plato or Aristotle or the modern philosophy of Hobbes or Locke, but where is it going to get it? Modern philosophy, in short, does not provide an adequate foundation for an idea that is essential to its continued practice. Why, for instance, given the sometimes brutal state of nature, should I respect the rights of my fellow man? Why should I fight for the equal dignity of all human beings, even when it acts against my own self-interest to do so, or when those human beings are incapable of pleading for their rights? Ratzinger is bold enough to suggest in this section that the notion of person, apart from which the very things for which moderns are constantly clamoring makes no sense, is unavailable to reason, unless that reason is enlightened by the truth of Christ: The concept of the person is a product of theology, i.e. of the compenetration of biblical faith and Greek philosophy. It was formed in the endeavor to elaborate the Christian conception of God (in Trinitarian doctrine and Christology), and apart from those contexts it is neither possible nor intelligible.36 But, unfortunately, Gaudium et Spes failed to integrate sufficiently its anthropology, its Buber-esque personalism, and its Christology: The disadvantage of this arrangement is that the philosophy of love, the whole set of I-Thou questions, are practically absent from the doctrine of man laid down as a basis. Consequently the constitutive character of these realities for human existence does not stand out as clearly as it could have done.37 What the document rightly points out, nevertheless, is how futile modern political discourse becomes when it tries to be purely scientific and avoids questions of metaphysics or ultimate ends. I should not give the impression, however, that Ratzinger’s overall assessment of Gaudium et Spes is a negative one. He clearly sympathizes 36 Ibid., 131. 37 Ibid. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 391 with what the document is trying to do. It is clear that his criticisms are therefore “constructive” in the most basic sense of that word. He is suggesting ways in which the intention of the document can better be achieved. He sees that intention as an attempt to show modern man that without Christ all of the legitimate concerns of modernity—the dignity and rights of the individual, the right to religious freedom, and the like— are in jeopardy.This becomes finally clear in Gaudium et spes §22, which Ratzinger clearly sees as the highpoint and center of the document. And he seems to be suggesting that if Gaudium et spes §22 is correct—that it is only in Christ that we find the final and true meaning of the human person—then his criticisms about the separation of anthropology and Christology seem to be born out by the text itself. Again, Ratzinger’s comments are neither simply negative nor in contradiction to the central intention of the document; rather, he wants to allow the driving theme of the text to be more fully integrated into the text as a whole. The rest of Ratzinger’s commentary simply shows the various problems that arise when such Christological considerations are left to one side. He states rather explicitly that the section on freedom (§17) “is one of the least satisfactory in the whole document.”38 “It even falls into downright Pelagian terminology.”39 Here we have an echo of Balthasar’s quote above about the attempt to work out the relationship between nature and grace, reason and revelation, and, finally, the Church and the world from a vantage point outside of Christ. At any rate, this second section should give us a fairly good sense of Ratzinger’s early attempt to retrieve and interpret Gaudium et Spes. Conclusion: Towards a Proper Retrieval of Gaudium et Spes In the interest of space, I can only allude to a couple of implications40 of the foregoing in support of my thesis that the difference between the 38 Ibid., 136–37. 39 Ibid., 138. 40 In order to keep this essay within reasonable limits, I have intentionally remained at the level of fundamental issues. I am fully aware that in order fully to make the case for which I am arguing, I would have to show how these implications spell out at the level of concrete practice, for instance, at the level of the relationship between Church and state or at the level of economics.This would be necessary to avoid the impression that all of these fundamental issues can and should be addressed at the level of “culture.”While there is certainly some truth in the notion that there is no specifically Catholic politics, it is a whole other thing to suggest that the sort of anthropology that Benedict XVI puts forth would not have radical (to the root) political and economic implications. Since I am not spelling the details of this suggestion out in this paper, I will refer to a few authors who have 392 Rodney Howsare approach of John Paul II and Benedict XVI and Weigel runs deeper than matters of prudential, political judgment. In a now well-known debate between David L. Schindler and “Novak,Weigel and Neuhaus,” Michael Novak responded to Schindler accordingly: For those deep in Catholic understanding, the more theological works of de Lubac and Balthasar quicken mind and heart. However, in writing for Jewish, Protestant, and secular readers, I find the theological language of de Lubac and Balthasar too rich for common understanding. It seems better to go as far as I can with a more “worldly” language, while pointing beyond it, as both Balthasar . . . and de Lubac . . . sometimes did. . . . Taking Balthasar’s vision as his own, Schindler asks a number of important and useful questions of NNW [Neuhaus, Novak, Weigel]. Indeed, one wonders why he simply does not consider himself a colleague, entering as it were into communio with us, while accomplishing this part of our common project himself.41 In defense of this approach Novak makes the classic Liberal move of claiming that the Liberal regime is not loaded with any metaphysical or theological content: done and are doing just that. With regard to the question of the relationship between Church and state, Glenn Olsen has suggested in a number of books and articles that Gregory VII has provided a model of Church/state distinction better suited to Catholic thought than the one flowing out of Liberal political philosophy. See, in particular, Glenn Olsen, Beginning in Jerusalem: Five Reflections on the History of the Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), especially chapter 3, where he defends Gregory’s manner of distinguishing Church and “state” against the charge of monism. See also his review “The Catholic Moment?” Communio 15 (1988): 474–87, and, finally, his “Separating Church and State,” Faith and Reason 20 (Winter 1994): 403–25. In response to the notion that the Second Vatican Council endorses something along the lines of American style disestablishment, see Russell Hittinger’s “How to Read Dignitatis Humanae on Establishment of Religion,” found at the Second Spring website (secondspring.co.uk). With regard to the economic implications of John Paul II’s and Benedict XVI’s anthropology of self gift, see Adrian Walker’s “The Poverty of Liberal Economics,” in Wealth, Poverty and Human Destiny, ed. Doug Bandow and David L. Schindler (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2003), 19–50. And, finally, with regard to the theological non-neutrality of modern political philosophy, see Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), and William Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (New York: Routledge Press, 1999), 182–200. 41 Michael Novak, “Schindler’s Conversion: The Catholic Right Accepts Pluralism,” Communio 19 (1992): 148. Spiritus Sanctus Non Est Neoconservatus 393 A democratic regime is not the kingdom. It is not a church, or even a philosophy. . . . It is designed to create space, within which the soul may make its own choices, and within which spiritual leaders and spiritual associations may do their own necessary and creative work.42 What I have suggested above, however, is that if Balthasar and Ratzinger are right in their assertion that the relationship between nature and grace, between faith and reason, and, finally, between God and the world, is best worked out from within a Christological perspective—recall Ratzinger’s assertion that reason always works within some sort of faith— then the American notion that a metaphysically neutral state creates “space” within which robust cultural and theological sorts of things can then take place is already to privilege the Enlightenment. Telling a Catholic that he is now allowed to start being a Catholic once the political and economic table has already been set in an insufficiently Catholic (quasi-Enlightenment, quasi-Protestant) manner is something akin to telling him that he is not really allowed to be a Catholic at all.43 I think it is this fundamental difference between John Paul II and Benedict XVI on the one hand and George Weigel and his neo-conservative colleagues on the other that accounts for their differences over the seemingly more superficial matters concerning just war, capital punishment, economics, secularism, and the like. Of course this would require more argumentation, but it would also require a whole other article. I leave it, then, as a suggestion following from the principles sketched out above, even as I have tried to alert the reader to authors who have taken the argument to the next level. N&V 42 Michael Novak, “Boredom,Virtue and Democratic Capitalism,” Commentary 88 (September 1989): 34, citied in Schindler,“The Church’s ‘worldly’ mission,” 390. 43 In the introduction to the essay “Separating Church and State” (cited above), Glenn Olsen recalls a comical observation by George Santayana. Once Santayana was asked about Catholicism in America and responded that he had met no Catholics in America, only some Protestants who prayed the rosary! Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 395–424 395 Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI: The “Astonishing Optimism” of Gaudium et Spes in a Missionary Context F RANCESCA A RAN M URPHY University of Aberdeen Aberdeen, Scotland Globalization G EORGE W EIGEL has read Gaudium et Spes and Ratzinger’s 1982 Principles of Catholic Theology, and wonders whether the “multiple failures” of the Pastoral Constitution to discern the real “signs of the times . . . suggest a certain naïveté about modernity, as Pope Benedict XVI suggested several times in his pre-papal commentary on Gaudium et Spes?”1 I cannot find that suggestion in Principles. It claims that “the history of the influence of Gaudium et Spes” shows we need “to discover the real Council,” that is, what Gaudium et Spes actually says, and that that “means that there can be no return to the Syllabus,” for “neither embrace nor ghetto can solve for Christians the problem of the modern world. . . . [A]s Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out” in “1952, . . . the ‘demolition of the bastions’ is a long-overdue task.”2 One of the “signs” of modern times which Weigel believes the Vatican II Constitution ignored is globalization:“Gaudium et Spes did not,” he says, “anticipate the silicon revolution, . . . the Internet and other new communications media, and . . . communications-driven ‘globalization.’ That the world would soon become, for economic purposes, a single time-zone world in which virtually everyone is in real-time communication with 1 George Weigel,“Rescuing Gaudium et Spes:The New Humanism of John Paul II.” 2 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (German 1982), trans. Sr. Mary Frances McCarthy, S.N.D. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 390–91. 396 Francesca Aran Murphy everyone else is not something a reader of Gaudium et Spes in 1965 would have learned.” On his election, John XXIII struck a chord which runs through the Pastoral Constitution: “The various nations are simply communities of men, that is, of brothers. They are to work in brotherly cooperation for the common prosperity of human society.” Wise to the new electronic medium of television, John XXIII hoped that the Council would be a “wonderful Spectacle of unity,”3 and so it was: “both the proceedings and the outcome of the council suggested the formation of a global church. At the council itself, for the first time in the modern era, native bishops from Africa,Asia, and Latin America joined their European and American colleagues.”4 The Council’s opening message, drafted by Congar and Marie-Dominique Chenu, and broadcast in mid-October 1962,“[u]sing almost the same words as Gaudium et Spes, . . . spoke of the Council which ‘unites all nations.’ ”5 Joseph Ratzinger, addressing the “German-speaking bishops” on “October 10, 1962, . . . on the eve of the first session,” reflected on a sermon by Eusebius of Caesarea on Nicea: “The foremost servants of God had assembled from all the churches in . . . Europe,Africa and Asia. And the one Church became . . . worldwide by God’s grace, embraced Syrians, Cilicians, Phoenicians, Arabs and Palestinians as well as Egyptians, Thebans, Africans and Mesopotamians.” . . . [T]he theological statement that Eusebius intended [was that] Nicaea was a new Pentecost. . . .The Council is a Pentecost—that . . . thought . . . corresponded to . . . what we experienced on our arrival in the city of the Council: . . . a lived experience of real Catholicity with its Pentecostal hope—that was the promising signum of those first days of Vatican II.That is the way it was then.6 In October, 1965, Pope Paul VI told the United Nations general assembly, “your identity reflects in the temporal order what the Catholic Church wants to be in the spiritual order: one and universal.”7 It would be surprising if Gaudium et Spes had failed to reflect this experience. Stating that the Council looks toward “the whole human 3 John XXIII, “Ad Petri Cathedram,” June 29, 1959, §§23, 79. 4 John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries:The Catholic Encounter With Race in the Twen- tieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 160. 5 Charles Moeller, “History of the Constitution,” in Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II:Volume V. Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler, trans.W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 9. 6 Ratzinger, Principles, 367. 7 Paul VI, Address to United Nations on the 20th Anniversary of its Foundation, October 4, 1965. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 397 family along with . . . that world which is the theater of man’s history” the Pastoral Constitution describes its vocation as “proclaiming the noble destiny of man and championing the Godlike seed which has been sown in him” and therefore as “offer[ing] to mankind the . . . assistance of the Church in fostering the brotherhood of all men which corresponds to this destiny of theirs.”The human origin in the “divine image” creates a human brotherhood, and her eschatological future is its rebirth and recapitulation, when,“saved by grace, men will offer flawless glory to God as a family beloved of God and of Christ their Brother.”Without confusing it with this divine project, Gaudium et Spes claims that globalization gives us a picture of what Christ’s drawing all peoples into brotherhood means. Gaudium et Spes’s own theological vision of history is the ingathering of all human beings by God into a single family, and it recognizes a sign or symbol of this in the way modern history is moving:“The destiny of the human community has,” it says, “become all of a piece, where once the various groups of men had a kind of private history of their own.” Although the Fathers at Vatican II did not foresee email, they state that, “One of the salient features of the modern world is the growing interdependence of men . . . a development promoted chiefly by modern technical advance. . . . Thanks to increased opportunities for . . . social contact among nations, a human family is gradually recognizing that it comprises a single world community and is making itself so.”8 The Constitution specifies the facilitation of communication, the emergence of a single world “culture,” and global commerce as “razing the bastions” between nations and observes: New ways . . . for the perfection . . . of culture . . . have been prepared by the enormous growth of natural, human and social sciences, by technical progress, and advances in developing and organizing means whereby men can communicate with one another. . . .[C]ustoms and usages are becoming . . . more uniform. . . .The increase of commerce between . . . nations and human groups opens more widely to all the treasures of different civilizations and thus . . . there develops a more universal form of human culture, which better promotes and expresses the unity of the human race to the degree that it preserves the particular aspects of the different civilizations. (§54) Shortly before the Constitution was promulgated, Paul VI had told the United Nations that its “vocation was to create a fraternity, not of some people, but of all peoples,” the “highest” task given to us in the “natural 8 Gaudium et Spes, §§2, 3, 32, 5, 23, 33, cf. 6. 398 Francesca Aran Murphy order,” the building of “humanity.”9 The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World defines modernity in terms of globalization. It inspired a chain of thought about globalization from Populoro Progresso (1967) to Caritas in Veritate (2009). The latter states that “Paul VI clearly understood that the social question had become worldwide and he grasped the interconnection between the impetus towards the unification of humanity and the Christian ideal of a single family of peoples in solidarity and fraternity. In the notion of development, understood in human and Christian terms, he identified the heart of the Christian social message, and he proposed Christian charity as the principal force at the service of development.” Benedict XVI continues,“[t]he principal new feature” since the 1960s “has been the explosion of worldwide interdependence, commonly known as globalization. Paul VI had partially foreseen it, but the ferocious pace at which it has evolved could not have been anticipated.”10 There’s an interconnection between closer human community and the Christian vision of brotherhood: meaning not that the two are one and the same thing, but that they are analogous. Gaudium et Spes calls us to see the new sense of humanity as a single organism which globalization has achieved as a witness, and a moral imperative: the “spiritual and moral” significance of “autonomy” “becomes clear if we consider the unification of the world and the duty which is imposed on us, that we build a better world based on truth and justice.Thus we are witnesses to the birth of a new humanism, one in which man is defined first of all by this responsibility to his brothers and to history.” What is offered is an analogy, not an equation.When the Pastoral Constitution says,“the force which the Church can inject into . . . modern society” is “faith and charity,” adding, “not . . . external domination exercised by merely human means,” it is distinguishing Christian humanism from the secular variety. It claims the Church offers “authentic union,”“namely . . . that faith and charity by which her own unity is . . . rooted in the Holy Spirit.”11 From the seventeenth century, Christian missionaries made the Church advance across the world rather than lurking behind bastions.The Church was drawn to reflect on the symbol of globalization by her missionaries. Gaudium et Spes draws on twentieth-century magisterial teaching about mission.A core theme of the document is “the Church which civilizes by evangelizing.”12 Gaudium et Spes imagines history as the ingathering of all humanity to Christ. The Church’s missionary work was the historical 9 Paul VI, Address to the United Nations, 1965. 10 Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate (2009), §§13, 33. 11 Gaudium et Spes, §§55, 42. 12 Moeller, “History of the Constitution,” 71. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 399 stepping stone to an imaginative eschatology which lends to Gaudium et Spes what Ratzinger calls its “astonishing optimism.”13 The Paradoxes of Imperialism Globalization has been defined as the “rapid integration of international markets for commodities, manufacture, labour and capital.”14 The more we learn about ancient history, the more we appreciate that our modern “globalization” is not entirely novel. Archaeologists have turned up evidences of trade between distant lands occurring back when older history books had led us to imagine they were solitarily gestating their national genius. But “archaic globalization,” or the pattern of international communication and exchange before the nineteenth century, had distinctive features. It was characterized, from Alexander the Great to the Emperor Asoka to the early modern Spanish emperors, by “the idea of universal kingship,” the world-wide expansion of a sacral imperium.These ventures were underpinned by “cosmic religion.” Merchants from the Greek and Islamic to the Chinese worlds also had shared “humoral or moral understandings of bodily health”: their trade in medicines and medical texts was based in ancient, traditional understandings of how the body works.The theory and practice of kingship, of cosmic religion, and of medicine, were all tied to the management of diversity. Fuelled by curiosity about and the desire to possess exotic things and persons, archaic globalization was about “collecting charismatic goods and substances”: this is where it differed “from the market-driven uniformity of today’s world,” the product of the “capitalist globalization” of the nineteenth century.15 The slave trade was originally a product of archaic, not modern, globalization. This “most advanced form of . . . the long range deployment of capital” and of “technologically innovative . . . human beastliness” did not enslave persons on the basis of their “race or nationality.” Early modern slavery was “pre-modern,” in that it came down to a sense of “caste,” a “series of interlocking rankings of people in terms of their embodied status, their honor, or purity or lineage . . . a ‘caste system,’ in the original Portuguese use of the term.”The notion of “blue blood” helps us to understand it:“European aristocratic blood purity provided one pole of embodied status, and slave origins the other.” Within their cosmic religiosity, 13 Ratzinger, Principles, 380. 14 Niall Ferguson, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (London: Penguin, 2008), 287. 15 C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 42–44. Francesca Aran Murphy 400 Mexican, Muslim, and Chinese traders were all able to make use of a notion of “caste” status.16 The one new thing Rome and its Empire gave the world was law, and “law is what regulates transactions.”17 Law enables “the circulation of wealth,” and is a link between archaic and modern globalization.The rise of the Imperial powers, especially the British, co-operated with capitalist globalization, by establishing and policing legal frameworks which lent security to “overseas investment.”18 No myths of cosmopolitan kingship heralded the massive imperial expansion of the British and French into Africa, and of Europeans and Americans in China. “Nationalism” was “a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century.” It holds “that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics that can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is self-government.” Having been taught by the Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789) that “[t]he principle of sovereignty resides essentially in the nation: no body . . . can exercise authority that does not emanate from it,”19 Europe embarked on a century of colonial conquest. The engine of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial expansion was competing nationalisms. The colonial acquisition of peoples by the Imperial powers was legitimated by nationalistic racism. “Imperialism and nationalism,” that is, “were part of the same phenomenon.” Whereas archaic globalization had collected diversities under a single roof, modern globalization tended to impose uniformity, because it came back to national self-assertion. The former was less artificially “idea” driven. Imperial administrators were pragmatists, not ideologues, and took care not to distress the natives. Imperialist writers like Rudyard Kipling were religious pluralists, who deprecated any absolute religious truth claims.Their true church was the nation.The “implications” of the “[r]ace theory, which became dominant at the end of the nineteenth century . . . were almost everywhere worked out in the language of the nation state.”20 Modern globalization is thus a meeting of contraries: on the one hand, driven ahead by nationalistic competition, but on the other, always wanting to slide round the limitations of nationalism. People like communicating with one another. That is why ancient peoples treasured their 16 Ibid., 46–47. 17 Rémi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization (French, 2nd ed., 1992), trans. Samuel Lester (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2002), 31. 18 Ferguson, Money, 295. 19 Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 9, 12. 20 Bayly, Modern World, 230, 237. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 401 artefacts brought from distant lands. So irrepressible is our curiosity about one another that people who are locked into “nationalist” conventions will imagine means of evading them: “The hardening of boundaries between nation-states and empires after 1860 led people to find ways of linking, communicating with, and influencing each other across those boundaries.” Neither the “archaic” practice of “gathering” curiosities nor the modern capitalist globalization of imposing uniformity quite gives vent to the human taste for contact with our fellows, since both are patterns of “consumption,” or assimilation, which, once having absorbed the other, has lost what it wanted from him, which is contact with another person.21 Rémi Brague distinguishes between a relation of “digestion” to a cultural “other,” and the cultural relation of “inclusion.” Digestion absorbs another culture “to such a point that it loses its independence,” whilst inclusion “maintain[s]” and enhances the “otherness” of the “foreign body.”22 If we think of globalization as a work of “the city of man,” conceived on rigid Augustinian lines as the city so intent on self-love that it is evidently “predestined to final damnation,” we must identify its operation solely as “digestive.” “Augustine sometimes reduces history” to “simplifying pairs of opposites . . . two cities, Babylon and Jerusalem . . . two peoples, the reprobate and the elect . . . and two kings, the devil and Christ.” And yet Augustine was no Manichean:“Bad” though the society built on self-love may be, “it does exist,” it is part of God’s creation and providential design to build up the City of God,“and in so far as it exists it is good.”23 We may find Gaudium et Spes’s using globalization as an analogy for Christ’s inclusion of all peoples into his Body unnerving, because globalization ever exhibits what Kant called the “crooked timbre” of humanity. But globalization has sometimes been “inclusive,” to the extent that created humanity itself has operated as an “inclusive” medium, sustaining the sameness of persons in their difference. From the end of the eighteenth century, British and other European powers had engaged in an “unprecedented” degree of missionary evangelization of the “extra-European world.” From one perspective, the marketing of Christianity was a side-effect of the imperialist mission of the West. In 1792, the English Baptist William Carey claimed that “navigation, especially that which is commercial, shall be one great means of carrying on the work of God.”Whilst they were coextensive, imperialist 21 Ibid., 199, 41. 22 Brague, Eccentric Culture, 106–7. 23 Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (French 1949), trans. L. E. M. Lynch (London:Victor Golancz, 1961), 180, 182, 174. 402 Francesca Aran Murphy and missionary expansion were never identical: missionaries lived at close quarters with their converts, and “Christians and their churches” often “provided powerful stimuli for local resistance and opposition to colonial rule.”24 The modern missionaries used the trade routes and peace imposed by the European powers without simply being agents of European imperialism. From the early nineteenth century, theologians presented the Church as a means to universal communication. This is what happens in Adam Möhler’s “mystical body” ecclesiology. “Savage” nations, Möhler wrote in 1830, are those which have lost contact with other cultures, whereas, from ancient times, members of “civilized nations” read one another’s books, and acquire their “spirit.” Hence, Möhler argues,“The maintenance of intercourse and communion with foreigners, and accordingly, the voluntary establishment of relations of dependence on them, is . . . an absolute condition to the general civilisation of man; so that the more this communion and mutual dependence is extended, that is . . . the more the notion of what is foreign disappears, the more is humanity exalted.” “[T]rue emancipation” from auto-didacticism, Möhler argues, “is a problem which . . . religion alone can solve.”25 It is notable that, in the era in which imperialism was beginning to drive globalization, Möhler does not say that teaching or policing foreigners, for instance, establishing the rule of law, is the key to the spread of civilization. For Kant, the “good man is an autonomous man” and “[s]elf determination” thus “becomes the supreme political good.”26 Möhler says the opposite. He argues that what is needed for civilization to expand is the creation of “relations of dependence on” others. This is a model of a “civilizing” or humanizing dynamic which is achieved not by the deprivation of independence, by control from above, but by the recognition of “mutual dependence.”The moral “savage” is the one who does not realize his need of depending on others to expand his horizons, and the civilized human being is the one who does. Rémi Brague contends that an “inclusive” culture is one which recognizes its “secondarity” with respect to another. Its members “know that what one transmits does not come from oneself, and that one possesses it . . . only in a fragile and provisional manner.”“The elevation of cultural secondarity to the level of the relationship with the Absolute,” with God, is, Brague 24 The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 222, 231, 223. 25 Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by their Symbolical Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 269–70. 26 Kedourie, Nationalism, 29. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 403 claims, the defining mark of Christianity, which “knows itself to be second in relation to the Old Covenant.”The Old Covenant is “a permanent foundation” in relation to Christianity, not a “past from which” it “distanced itself progressively.”27 Here we have moved from speaking of globalization to something that occurs at a new level. There is a recognition of dependence and secondarity within the human project of globalization. Recognizing dependence is a religious act, like Aeneas’s pietas. But it is not the supernatural gift of faith. Israel and the Christian Church stake a higher claim: to have been made universal by a gracious, providential sending. Here “progress” or universalization is achieved not only by recognizing dependence but by factually being called into God’s family. One could call such missionary dependence “englobalization.” There’s an analogy between the two, since both come back to dependence: the difference is that globalization is a human project and englobalization is the divine plan. Englobalization is not something that we do: we enter a universal community by being gathered by Christ into his Body, the Church. Baptism “englobalizes” us. That made it a global dynamic to be reckoned with. Benedict XV’s Maximum Illud (1919), called “the charter for the Catholic missionary movement of modern times,” begins by recalling the Great Commission (Mark 16:15).28 The magisterial teachings which paved the way for Gaudium et Spes are those which describe the tasks of the missionaries, with an insistence on the human equality of all peoples, allied to a determination to distinguish Catholic mission from the imposition of an external national identity. Because of the evident effects of racism and nationalistic war-mongering, the popes from Benedict XV to John XXIII were clear-sighted about the human project of globalization: universal peace, which makes possible the international exchange of goods and ideas, is not to be had without acquiescence in the divine project of englobalization. The Church’s Teaching Benedict XV (1914–1922) The Apostolic Letter Maximum Illud: On the Propagation of the Faith throughout the World describes the work of the early modern missionaries:“an army of apostolic men set out for the New World. This great host, which included that glorious son of St. Dominic, Bartholomew de Las Casas, undertook there the twin tasks of protecting the unfortunate natives from human oppression and wresting them from their grinding subjection to the 27 Brague, Eccentric Culture, 40, 110. 28 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 8. Francesca Aran Murphy 404 powers of darkness.”29 The missionary is represented as a counterforce to the imperial expansion which, empirically, brought him to South America. “Remember,” Benedict XV says,“that your duty is . . . the acquisition of citizens for a heavenly-fatherland and not for an earthly one.” In 1919, when the European powers were busy at Versailles, carving up “colonies, protectorates and spheres of influence,” Benedict offered a “post-colonial” view of the Church’s global vocation. Forty years before de-colonialization, Benedict warned that if it appears that the missionary is “serving the interests of his homeland,” the “people immediately suspect everything he does,” “giv[ing] rise to the conviction that the Christian religion is the national religion of some foreign people.”30 All over the world, after the First World War, a “backlash” against globalization took place, entailing “restrictions on trade, migration and investment.” Many unfortunate states aimed for “economic self-sufficiency (autarky), the ideal of a de-globalized society.”31 In China, the French protectorate saw Catholicism as a means to extend French colonial interests, and the Chinese, in turn, regarded Catholicism as the religion of the French. Maximum Illud insists that Catholicism be detached from European interests and enabled to develop a properly “indigenous character”: Gaudium et Spes will describe enculturation as an aspect of evangelization. People like to communicate, so the trans-national quality of Christianity is equally emphasized:“The Catholic Church is not an intruder in any country,” writes Benedict XV,“nor is she alien to any people.”32 The expression is like Terence’s Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto,“I am human: nothing human is alien to me.” So there are potentially no outsiders at all: in his Italian translation, the author of Maximum Illud “[l]ook[s] to the future,” and hears the Lord’s call to “[l]aunch out into deep water” and enfold “tutta intera l’umanita,” the whole of humanity, in the Faith.33 George Weigel suggests that the First World War was the origin of the dechristianization of Europe.34 Since Kant prized autonomy at the expense of dependency, he interpreted political relations between states solely in terms of struggle and “competition.”35 Set in motion by “imperialist rivalries,” that is, by the “internationalisation of nationalism” on 29 Benedict XV, Maximum Illud (Nov. 30, 1919), §4. 30 Ibid., §19. 31 Ferguson, Money, 288, 304. 32 Benedict XV, Maximum Illud, §16. 33 Ibid., §41. In the English and Latin, this hopeful peroration is directed to “the multitudes,” or innumerabiles. 34 George Weigel, The Cathedral and the Cube: Europe, America and Politics Without God (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 36–42. 35 Kedourie, Nationalism, 52–53. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 405 which nineteenth-century global markets rode, the root of the conflict was that “nationalism” involved defining oneself not just by reference to other peoples, but in antagonism to them.36 In his first encyclical, Ad Beatissim (November 1914), Benedict XV asked,“who could believe that such peoples, armed against each other, are all descended from the same progenitor . . .? Who would think they could be brothers, sons of a single Father in Heaven?” His attempts to recall both sides to their common humanity by condemning the atrocities of each and all were parodied by the Allies as the words of the “Boche Pope.” His projects for bringing the warring parties to the peace table were sidelined by the Axis Powers as the works of a Franzosenpapst.37 Benedict marked the ending of the most deadly war in history with the encyclical Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum (Pentecost 1920; Peace, the Most Beautiful Gift of God ). He advised that “all States . . . should unite in a single league, . . . a sort of family of peoples, calculated both to maintain their own independence and safeguard the order of human society.” The Pope presented the Church as the working analogy for any such “league of nations”: “She possesses in her organization and institutions a wonderful instrument for bringing this brotherhood among men, not only for their eternal salvation but also for their material well-being to . . . sure acquisition . . . when the Church pervaded with her spirit the ancient and barbarous nations of Europe, . . . the . . . differences that divided them were diminished and their quarrels extinguished; in time they formed a homogeneous society from which sprang Christian Europe which, under the guidance and auspices of the Church, whilst preserving a diversity of nations, tended to a unity that favoured its prosperity and glory.” Benedict’s message is couched in terms of globalization, presenting the advantage of Christianity as being that it helps a multi-national society to endure. He recalls Augustine’s statement that “[t]his celestial city, in its life here on earth, calls to itself citizens of every nation, and forms out of all the peoples one varied society; it is not harassed by differences in customs, laws and institutions, which serve to attainment or the maintenance of peace on earth; it neither rends nor destroys anything but rather guards all and adapts itself to all; however these things may vary among the nations, they are all directed to the same end of peace on earth.”38 Nineteenth-century papal teaching on politics frequently recalls the hostility between the “city of man” and the “city of 36 Ferguson, Money, 304; Bayly, Modern World, 41, 204. 37 J. Derek Holmes, The Papacy in the Modern World: 1914–1978 (London: Burns and Oates, 1981), 3. 38 Benedict XV, Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum (Pentecost, 1920), §§17–18. Francesca Aran Murphy 406 God.”39 Benedict’s Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum draws on the other side of The City of God, the universal desire for peace.Anticipating Gaudium et Spes, Benedict relinquishes the pained tone of earlier magisterial observations of modern politics and society, out of a clear-sighted recognition of the stark choice faced by the modern world. Whilst Benedict XV’s observations on human brotherhood seem anodyne and unexceptional to us, Maximum Illud and Pacem were written at a time when “social theories had a strong biological character” and the “sense of race was deeply embedded in the worldview of the Anglo-Saxon elites.” Perceived as a “civil war” between “white” tribes, the Great War had undermined Euro-American confidence in white superiority without uprooting its racist bias. Racial thinking and a touching faith in the superiority of some races was a common currency of sociology until the 1930s.40 From the nineteenth century, missionaries both Protestant and Catholic had stood out against such credulity: “Although critical of nonChristian cultures, missionary thinking was profoundly egalitarian,” not subservient to racial-nationalist ideologies, because, to the would-be evangelist, “ ‘race’ was immaterial, humans everywhere corrupt yet equally open to conversion and redemption.”41 After the First World War, missionaries became especially “sensitive to the resentment generated by racist practices.” Unwilling to be equated to a “white tribe,” Protestant missionary groups held conferences in Honolulu in 1925 and in Jerusalem in 1928, declaring at the latter event that “any discrimination against human beings on the ground of race or colour, any selfish exploitation of man by man is a denial of the teaching of Jesus.”42 Within the Protestant churches which had been planted in Africa by English and American missionaries, continuing leadership by Anglophone clergy was resented. In Maximum Illud (1919), Benedict XV declares that “anyone who has charge of a mission . . . must make it his special concern to secure and train local candidates for the sacred ministry.” Non-Europeans are to receive “the same kind of education for the priesthood” as a “European.”The Apostolic Letter marks the establishment of the Congregation for the Eastern Churches. Its “task” was to be “the supervision of the growth and development of the local churches.”43 This practice had wider ramifications: “In 1926, Pius XI reemphasized this theme in Rerum Ecclesiae, along with 39 Gregory XVI, Mirari Vos (1832), §14; Pius IX, Quanta Cura (1864), §4. 40 Frank Furedi, The Silent War: Imperialism and the Changing Perception of Race (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 63, 38, and 5. 41 Porter, Nineteenth Century, 229. 42 Furedi, Silent War, 84, 87. 43 Benedict XV, Maximum Illud, §§14–15. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 407 ordaining large numbers of native clergy. ‘Anyone who looks upon these natives as members of an inferior race,’ Pius XI warned, ‘makes a grievous mistake.’ Papal statements were primarily directed toward church officials in Africa and China, but African-American Catholics, as well as Catholic liberals generally . . . viewed them as applicable to the American situation.”44 Pius XI (1922–1939) The segregated American church was not at the forefront of Pius XI’s mind in the decades of the dictators. In 1924 Mexico’s Communist government initiated its own deglobalization program by progressing from murdering the clergy to exiling them. Pius XI protested that “those men who now in Mexico persecute their brothers and fellow citizens” should “recall . . . that whatever there is of progress, of civilization, of the good and the beautiful, in their country is due solely to the Catholic Church. . . . [E]very man knows that after the introduction of Christianity into Mexico, the priests and religious . . . worked without rest and despite all the obstacles placed in their way, on the one hand by the colonists who were moved by greed for gold and on the other by the natives who were still barbarians, to promote . . . both the splendor of the worship of God and the benefits of the Catholic religion, works and institutions of charity, schools and colleges for the education of the people and their instruction in letters, the sciences, both sacred and profane, in the arts and the crafts.”45 Pius is asking the Mexicans to recognize their cultural dependence on the Church: the Gospel is presented as a force which comes from without to civilize.The persecution of the Church by Communist governments and fascist regimes was answered by a vocal assertion of the humanizing effects of Christian culture.Written in December 1943, De Lubac’s opening contention, in The Drama of Atheist Humanism—“It is not true . . . that man cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can ultimately only organize it against man”—captured the spirit of the Church’s apologetic against totalitarianism in the inter-war years.46 De Lubac heard the denunciations of “racism” by Pius XI and Pius XII as directly addressing anti-Semitism.47 Few today read texts like Mit Brennender Sorge so charitably. Rather than “reverently” picking up the cue of 44 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 9. 45 Pius XI, Iniquis Afflictisque (Nov. 1926), §30. 46 Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Drama of Atheist Humanism (French 1944), trans. Edith M. Riley, Ann Englund Nash, and Mark Sebanc (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 14. 47 Henri de Lubac, S.J., Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism: Memories from 1940–1944, trans. Elizabeth Englund, O.C.D. (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1990), 25–28, 83. 408 Francesca Aran Murphy a trouncing of German anti-Semitism, we feel frustrated by the encyclical’s dancing around the point with generalizations: “Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State,” it says, commits idolatry. “None but superficial minds,” it abjures, would “attempt to lock within . . . the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations.”48 My Catholic students demand to know why the text didn’t simply say anti-Semitism rather than “racism.” Outside such Vatican documents, though, “criticisms of racial thinking in the 1930s were,” according to Frank Furedi, “narrowly focussed on Nazi propaganda.” There were “few consistently anti-racist intellectuals in the 1930s”: most “British intellectuals . . . attacked Nazi racism but were indifferent to comparable practices in the Empire and South America.” For “the principle of racial equality had few intellectual defenders in the 1930s.” Julian Huxley saw “no . . . contradiction between his trenchant attack on German race theory” in We Europeans (1934) “and his paternalistic view of Africans who, he wrote in 1944, had ‘for the most part’ remained ‘in an early stage of barbarism’.”When Mit Brennender Sorge was delivered in 1937, “the term ‘racism’ did not yet have an unambiguously negative connotation”:49 its principal author, Eugenio Pacelli, was spearheading the contemporary meaning of “racism.” Rerum Ecclesiae (1926) and Mit Brennender Sorge (1937) should be compared with the attitudes of inter-war anthropologists toward race and toward cultural difference. Both freely used terms such as “barbarism.” For Pius XI, lack of intellectual development is a result of “material conditioning,” and not genetic or innate: “Experience over a long period of time,” he writes in Rerum Ecclesiae, “has proven that the inhabitants of those remote regions of the East and of the South frequently are not inferior to us. . . . If one discovers an extreme lack of the ability to understand among those who live in the . . . heart of certain barbarous countries, this is largely due to the conditions under which they exist, for since their daily needs are so limited, they are not often called upon to make use of their intellects. . . .We have here under Our very eyes the example of . . . native students attending the colleges of Rome who not only are equal to the other students in ability . . . but frequently even surpass them. Certainly you should not allow the native clergy to be looked upon as if they were a lower grade of priests, to be employed only in the most humble offices of the ministry.”50 Pius XI draws empirical observation into a Thomistic anthropology to promote the development of a native clergy and episco48 Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge (March, 1937), §§8, 11. 49 Furedi, Silent War, 8–9, 108. 50 Pius XI, Rerum Ecclesiae, §26. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 409 pate. A year later, “at the 1938 Summer School for British Colonial Administrators, held at Oxford University, . . . Professor Le Gros Clark’s lecture took exception to the German and Italian versions of race theory, but not to race theory as such. Le Gros Clark took as given the prevailing notions of British superiority and African inferiority. In his lecture the ‘retarded development of the Kenyan adult’ was beyond doubt.The only question was whether this fact was ‘fundamental, or in some way related to the environment.’ ”51 The future for anthropology belonged not to proponents of European racial superiority, but to cultural relativists. The social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was as “scathing” about “Nordic” race supremacism as about “racial equality”: his “ ‘middle of the road’ approach emphasized that all races were different and all worthy of respect.” Under the influence of Malinowski’s cultural relativism,“British anthropology . . . moved away from its concept of superior culture,” substituting for it the notion of fixed cultural difference.The notion of “cultural incommensurability” was “deployed to justify segregation and attack assimilation.” Since “amongst the liberal intelligentsia, the inegalitarian consequences of cultural relativism were rarely explored,”“the celebration of cultural traditions was quite consistent with a paternalistic imperial outlook.” South Africa is a well-known example of the use of “anti-egalitarian logic of the relativists’ notion of difference . . . to legitimatise segregation.” Relativist cultural anthropology cued administrators to conceive societies in terms of a static cultural pluralism, from which evaluative terms like “backward” and “progress” have been eliminated, and in which “rightness” is therefore ascribed to the status quo. In one sense, anthropological “cultural relativism” is inimical to capitalist globalization, because it respects the fixed diversity of traditions whilst disregarding human samenesses. At its lowest common denominator, market-driven globalization has as a prerequisite that people want to eat and drink analogous things. The exchange of goods from consumptibles to artefacts to ideas requires commonality. But in another sense, the anthropologists’ relativism is a fruit of capitalist globalization, because the anthropologist wants the alien to retain its otherness, so that he or she can harvest it. “Native cultures” were rich objects of intellectual consumption for anthropologists. Like museum keepers, they needed their delectable acquisitions housed in optimal climactic conditions. “Dr Margaret Read enthused about Africa because of the research opportunities it provided for Western scholars.” She wrote that “The continent of Africa is in a sense a laboratory and experimenting ground 51 Furedi, Silent War, 108–9. 410 Francesca Aran Murphy for research in the social sciences, for all the nations, who administer colonies here.”52 Nationalist-imperialist globalization knows no commonality between “researcher” and “native,” because what the “native” has to give it is his difference. It wants to “museumize” its objects because their digestible substrate is their past.53 For Pius XI, the future “goal” was “building up a native clergy.” The pope looked to tradition to discern how prudently to act in the present: “sufficient attention has never been paid,” he felt,“to the method whereby the Gospel began to be preached . . . [T]he clergy placed in charge of the faithful in each new community by the Apostles were not men brought in from the outside but were chosen from the natives of that locality.”54 Mit Brennender Sorge admits “spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations,” the “fruits of education and progress.”At the same time, it envisages all peoples as potentially englobed in a single community: The Church is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues; there is room for the development of every quality, advantage, task and vocation which God the Creator and Savior has allotted to individuals as well as to ethnical communities.The Church’s maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergency. . . . But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command, which founded that Church one and indivisible. . . .Whoever tampers with that unity . . . wrenches from the Spouse of Christ one of the diadems with which God Himself crowned her. Therefore,“Should men . . . offer you the seduction of a national German Church, be convinced that it is nothing but a denial of the one Church of Christ and the evident betrayal of that universal evangelical mission, for which a world Church alone is qualified and competent.”55 Pius XII (1939–1958) What may first strike contemporary readers of that passage is not its defiance of German nationalism, but its engulfing conception of the unity of the Church. Pius XII’s 1943 encyclical Mystici Corporis Christi is, to some extent, accurately criticized for the judicial confines which it sets to 52 Furedi, Silent War, 94, 96–97, 224–25, and 97–98. 53 Brague, Eccentric Culture, 103. 54 Pius XI, Rerum Ecclesiae, §19. 55 Pius XI, Mit brennender Sorge, §§18, 22. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 411 membership of the Body of Christ. Because it states that “those who are divided in faith or government” from the Catholic Church “cannot be living in the unity of such a Body,”56 Mystici Corporis Christi seemed to deny any membership to Protestant or Orthodox Christians. This was canonically problematic, since, for instance, Orthodox baptism has always been recognized as valid. “Is the non-Catholic Christian,” Ratzinger pointedly mused in 1960,“the ‘other’ brother only in the sense in which an unbaptized person is?”57 But, in 1943, Pius XII did not present faith in a single Church as harsh medicine. Rather, in the midst of World War II, it was proffered as a symbol of peace: “while before their eyes nation rises up against nation . . . if they turn their gaze to the Church” and “contemplate her divinely-given unity—by which all men of every race are united to Christ in the bond of brotherhood—they will be forced to admire this fellowship in charity.”58 In the United States, “mystical body ecclesiology” had been, since the mid 1930s, a potent political force. “ ‘Jim Crowism in the Mystical Body of Christ’, Bernard Sheil, the Bishop of Chicago, said in 1942, ‘is a disgraceful anomaly.’ ” Americans read the encyclical as directly applicable to anti-racist activism: “ ‘If any one tenet of the Church may be called all-inclusive’, wrote the editor of the Harlem Friendship Review,‘it is this doctrine of the Mystical Body . . . it has no common ground with racial discrimination of any sort.’ ”59 Pius XII’s first encyclical was called On the Unity of the Human Race (Summi Pontificatus). Recalling Maximum Illud’s prescriptions about the “equality” of “native clergy,” the 1939 encyclical announced, “We have chosen the . . . Feast of Christ the King to raise to the Episcopal dignity at the Tomb of the Apostles twelve representatives of widely different peoples and races. In the midst of the disruptive contrasts which divide the human family, may this solemn act proclaim to all Our sons, scattered over the world, that the spirit . . . and the work of the Church” is “that which the Apostle of the Gentiles preached:‘putting on the new (man), . . . according to the image of him that created him.Where there is neither Gentile nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, barbarian nor Scythian, bond nor free. But Christ is all and in all.’ ”60 Englobalization is Christological. Pius XII uses Mystical Body ecclesiology as a form of apologetics, running together “evidentialist” arguments for the human desire for a just society 56 Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §22. 57 Joseph Ratzinger,The Meaning of Christian Brotherhood (German 1960) (San Fran- cisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 87. 58 Pius XII, Mystici Corporis Christi, §5. 59 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 49–52. 60 Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus (1939), §48, citing Colossians 3:10–11. 412 Francesca Aran Murphy with theological claims about that desire’s being fulfilled on a supernatural level, in the Church.The argument is that the “globalizing” tendency of humanity can only be fulfilled by “englobalization,” in Christ. Such apologetics can be seen at the origins of mystical body ecclesiology, for instance in Möhler’s Symbolism.This “providential” conception of globalization became a commonplace of mystical body thinking: “Among the Gentiles as among the Jews,” Henri de Lubac claimed in 1947, the Church Fathers “could discern the Corpus Ecclesiae already in process of formation. For them . . . the Church was nothing else than the human race itself, in all the phases of its history, in so far as it was to lead to Christ. . . . It was the omnis humana conditio.”61 By the mid-twentieth century, the “Unity of the Human Race” had become a matter of life or death. In 1951, in Evangelii Praecones (On the Promotion of Catholic Missions), Pius XII asserted that “missionaries preach to all men the practice of natural and Christian virtues and that brotherly and common fellowship which transcends racial conflicts and national frontiers.”62 The insistence of Humani Generis (1950) on monogenism can be seen in this light.63 Viewing the history of the “Christianization” of Europe with less benignity than Benedict XV, Pius XII asserted, in his first, 1939, encyclical that “even when Europe had a cohesion of brotherhood through identical ideals gathered from Christian preaching, she was not free from divisions, convulsions and wars . . . ; but perhaps they never felt the intense pessimism of today as to the possibility of settling them. . . . In Our days . . . dissensions come not only from the surge of rebellious passion, but also from a deep spiritual crisis.” He names the primary source of this “spiritual crisis” as “forgetfulness of that law of human solidarity and charity which is dictated and imposed by our common origin and by the equality of rational nature in all men, to whatever people they belong, and by the redeeming Sacrifice offered by Jesus Christ . . . on behalf of sinful mankind.”64 Gaudium et Spes has been difficult to assimilate for two related reasons: its mixing “social justice” teaching with ecclesiology, when we are accustomed to thinking about them in separate compartments, and its optimism that global social justice is achievable. Set in historical context, its drawing ecclesiology and social justice together appears as a sort of desperate manoeuvre in the face of total war: either we hope for the 61 Henri de Lubac, Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man (French, 1947), trans. Lancelot Shepherd (London: Burns and Oates, 1950), 93. 62 Pius XII, Evangelii Praecones (1951), §2. 63 Pius XII, Humani Generis (1950), §37. 64 Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus, §§33, 35. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 413 englobalization of humanity, by Christ in his Church, or we abandon ourselves to genocidal warfare between nations. Delivered one month after the outset of war, in October 1939, Summi Pontificatus is grimly optimistic that “in the light of this unity of all mankind,”“imposed by the very force of their nature,” “the nations, despite a difference of development . . . , are not destined to break the unity of the human race, but rather to enrich . . . it by the sharing of their own peculiar gifts and by that reciprocal interchange of goods which can be possible . . . only when a mutual love and a lively sense of charity unite all the sons of the same Father and all those redeemed by the same Divine Blood.”65 All of the themes relating to “global” humanity in Gaudium et Spes can be seen in the magisterial writings of Pius XII.The Pastoral Constitution begins by speaking of “the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age.” It describes the “thinking reed” as ever wanting to hope and ever cast down by self-questioning, and of Christ as answering both. Pius XII’s Christmas Broadcast of 1942 commences by depicting the “message of Jesus” as one which “infuses exuberant and trustful joy into mankind, torn by the anxiety of deep, bitter sorrow.” “That message” which Jesus “consecrated can solve,” Pius XII affirmed, “the most tortuous questions, unsolved and insoluble for those who bring to their investigations a mentality and an apparatus which are ephemeral and merely human; and those questions stand up, bleeding, imperiously demanding an answer, before the thought and the feeling of embittered and exasperated mankind.”66 The Pastoral Constitution on the Church will assert that mission does not impose the “Gospel of Christ” externally or extrinsically upon cultures: rather,“By riches coming from above, it makes fruitful, as it were from within, the spiritual qualities and traditions of every people of every age.”67 The expression “from within” seems strikingly radical, as if the Vatican II Constitution were denoting all potential converts as anonymous Christians. Pius XII’s encyclical on the Promotion of Christian Mission specifically adjures missionaries not to “translate European civilization and culture, and no other, to foreign soil, there to take root and propagate itself.” Rather, he advises that “[t]he Church from the beginning down to our own time has always followed this wise practice: let not the Gospel on being introduced into any new land . . . extinguish whatever its people possess that is naturally good, just or beautiful. For the Church, when she calls people to a higher culture . . . does not act like 65 Ibid., §§42–43. 66 Pius XII, Christmas Message, 1942. 67 Gaudium et Spes, §58. 414 Francesca Aran Murphy one who recklessly cuts down and uproots a thriving forest. No, she grafts a good scion upon the wild stock that it may bear a crop of more delicious fruit.” “Although,” Pius continues, “human nature is tainted with original sin, yet it has in itself something that is naturally Christian; and this, if illumined by divine delight and nourished by God’s grace, can eventually be changed into true and supernatural virtue.”68 “Humanity” has “in itself ” something that is “naturally Christian.” Here, with the use of Paul’s metaphor from Romans 9, we see why Pius generalizes, from Christianity being engrafted into Judaism to its being engrafted into the whole “human race.” One may hold, as I do, that too much was “not said” by the popes from Benedict XV to Pius XII about European anti-Semitism.69 But it should not be forgotten that Pius XII’s own balance sheet concluded as it began, with a denunciation of racism: in 1958, one week before his death, the Pope ordered the American Catholic Church to desegregate, in his own, autocratic words, “at once.”70 From Benedict XV to Pius XII, the simultaneous insistence on the global-and-indigenous character of Christianity had a practical side: when governments expelled “foreign” missionaries, Christianity would go with them unless a native clergy and episcopate had been planted.The Church was compelled to conceive of mission not as the centrifugal extension of a central power, but as the “property” of the converted peoples, by the fact that Southern and Asian governments, like that of China, equated Christian mission with that form of “globalization” which was merely European imperialism by another name. European clerics suffered such expulsions after 1919, and the “anti-global” retrenchment forced the Church to think “non-territorially” about its missions. Pius XII’s development of a properly “theological,” or spiritual, conception of global community began even earlier than that.The loss of territorial power, in 1870, had required a bit of rethinking at the Vatican. If it was no longer a normal “sovereign” state, what kind of state was it? Ever since Boniface VIII, in the thirteenth century, canon lawyers had maintained that law relates to territory, and cannot oblige anyone outside the territory in which the law is made. Eugenio Pacelli’s teachers at the Apollinaire, the College of Canon Law in Rome, taught him that the Church is a “sui generis State,” with an international juridical personality. From the turn of the century, Eugenio Pacelli assisted in the revision of canon law necessitated by the new situation. In 1912, Pacelli published his own contribution to the problem of territorial power: La personalità 68 Pius XII, Evangelii Praecones, §§56–57. 69 Martin Rhonheimer, “What Was Not Said,” First Things (Nov 2003): 18–27. 70 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 91–92. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 415 giuridica e la territorialità delle leggi specialmente nel diritto canonico; studio storico-giuridico. The Thomists of Salamanca, like Vitoria, had developed the modern conception of international law in the seventeenth century. Using Thomas Aquinas and later Thomist writers, Pacelli argues that territoriality is not an essential property of law: “In effect, the idea of territory does not appear as a necessary element of the notion of law; rather, for there to be a genuine and proper law, it suffices that there be given a perfect community.” Law can thus be “international” or supranational, so long as a “community” effects it. It is the mutual reception of legal obligation which makes law possible. Between 1870 and 1914, whilst nationalism reached a global apogee, the Vatican morphed into the world’s first virtual state.This encouraged it to envisage the global bonds between states and peoples in dynamic, spiritual terms. The policy pursued by Pius X was to present the Vatican as a “supra-territorial power,” standing impartially above all national-territorial interest groups. Pius X asserted in 1911 that “the Pope, is independent of all States, he is not bound to the interests of any one people, but is not alien to any people.”71 The expression used later in reference to the missions, “The Catholic Church is not an intruder in any country, nor is she alien to any people,” looks like an offshoot of this. The strange confluence of “social justice” teaching and ecclesiology in Gaudium et Spes has its origins in that theological backwater, the missionary practice of the Church in the twentieth century. The apparently otherworldly belief of the Pastoral Constitution that social justice is achievable for all humanity, not at the behest of a fearful elite, but as emerging from the desires of ordinary people, has its beginnings in the concourse of missionaries and their converts.The missionaries sensed first what was later to become a commonplace experience. At least since the writings of Vitoria and Las Casas, the Church had given notional assent to the shared, universal humanity of all men. Pius XII was evidently versed in their writings. But what comes about first through the “missionary experience” is a real assent to the deep-seated analogies between peoples. When, later in the twentieth century, Father John Anthony Kaiser wrote that the “Abagusii” of Kenya “seemed exactly like the Scandinavian farmers among whom I had grown up in Western Minnesota . . . tenacious and stubborn . . . generous, tight-fisted and grasping,”72 he was expressing a living recognition of shared humanity which was a new moral experience. The experience was a product of a “globalization” deeper than the globalization of commerce, more radical 71 Philippe Chenaux, Pie XII: Diplomate et pasteur (Paris: Cerf, 2003), 49–51, 71–72. 72 Anthony John Kaiser, If I Die (Nairobi, Kenya: Cana Publishing, 2003), 17. 416 Francesca Aran Murphy even than the virtualization of communication, and which is simultaneously entirely ecclesial and entirely human. Something new came about in human self-understanding in the mid-twentieth century; it was filtered through missionary practice into the thinking of the Church, and was formally exhibited in Gaudium et Spes. Missionary experience turned the notional idea of a single global humanity into real assent to fraternity. John XXIII (1958–1963) With the recognition of the indivisibility of opposition after World War II, it became “inevitable that the movement against colonialism would reject the racist assumptions of the imperial powers.”73 As John XXIII put it in Pacem in Terris (1963), “Today . . . the conviction is widespread that all men are equal in natural dignity; and so, on the doctrinal and theoretical level, at least, no form of approval is being given to racial discrimination.”74 “We are witnessing,” he said in Mater et Magistra (1961) “the break-away from colonialism and the attainment of political independence by the peoples of Asia and Africa.”75 Instead of a repetition of the anti-Imperial de-globalization of the interwar years, “[d]rawn together by their common needs nations are becoming daily more interdependent.” Some are beginning to think transnationally: “an everextending network of societies and organizations . . . set their sights beyond the . . . interests of individual countries and concentrate on the economic, social, cultural and political welfare of all nations throughout the world.”76 It might seem from these reflections that englobalization within the Church is merely extrinsically related to the smooth progress of global fraternity. But, as Weigel notes,Vatican II convened, unfortuitously, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. In his first, 1959 encyclical, John XXIII observed, “We are called brothers. We actually are brothers. . . . Why do we ready lethal weapons for use against our brothers?” From John XXIII’s initial expression of horror at the “monstrous weapons our age has devised”77 to the call for disarmament in Pacem in Terris (1963), and from there to Paul VI’s eloquent request to the United Nations, “Si vous voulez être frères, laissez tomber les armes de vos mains,”78 it is clear that the popes who presided over the Second Vatican Council did not think 73 Furedi, Silent War, 19–20. 74 Benedict XV, Pacem, Dei Munus Pulcherrimum, §44. 75 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §49. 76 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §49. 77 John XXIII, Ad Petri, §§27, 34. 78 Paul VI, Address to the United Nations, 1965. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 417 that the human project of globalization was its own security. Far from “repos[ing] considerable confidence” in the United Nations,79 the only reference in Gaudium et Spes to this organisation is a footnote citation following a condemnation of “total war” which alludes to two 1954 allocutions from Pius XII, Pacem in Terris, and Paul VI’s whereabouts when he called for peace.80 Like Gaudium et Spes itself, John XXIII held ecclesial englobalization to be an intrinsic requirement of continuing human globalization, and the desire for global community to be linked to receptivity to baptism. John XXIII stated that “whatever their ethnic background, men possess, besides the special characteristics which distinguish them from other men, other very important elements in common with the rest of mankind.”81 But, at the same time, he was concerned that the process of economic and intellectual globalization should not iron out the differences between peoples, and particularly that the peoples of the global South should not become “Western” at the expense of their full humanity. “The developing nations,” he wrote in Mater et Magistra, “have . . . unmistakable characteristics of their own, resulting from the nature of the particular region and the natural dispositions of their citizens, with their time-honored traditions and customs. In helping these nations . . . the more advanced communities must recognize and respect this individuality. They must beware of making the assistance they give an excuse for forcing these people into their own national mold.”82 Likewise, Gaudium et Spes asks: What is to be done to prevent the increased exchanges between cultures, which should lead to . . . fruitful dialogue . . . from disturbing the life of communities, from destroying the wisdom received from ancestors, or from placing in danger the character proper to each people? How is the dynamism and expansion of a new culture to be fostered without losing a living fidelity to the heritage of tradition? This question is of particular urgency when a culture which arises from the enormous progress of science and technology must be harmonized with a culture nourished by classical . . . traditions. . . . Every sector of the family of man carries within itself and in its best traditions some portion of the spiritual treasure entrusted by God to humanity, even though many may not be aware of the source from which it comes.83 79 Weigel, “Rescuing Gaudium et Spes.” 80 Gaudium et Spes, §2. 81 John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963), §100. 82 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §§169–70. 83 Gaudium et Spes, §§56, 86. 418 Francesca Aran Murphy This respect for the antique “canons” of behaviour in non-Western cultures is more than the antiquarian desire of the cultural relativist that researchable behaviour patterns not be effaced by modernity. Rather, it sees the particular traditions which flourished before global secularization as the religious root upon which supernatural faith is engrafted. These ancient moral and aesthetic traditions should be nurtured because so much of the humanity of non-Western cultures is incarnate within them, and, therefore, so much of their intrinsic receptivity to the Gospel. Gaudium et Spes will present the graces of the Body of Christ as the fulfilment, and not the destruction, of the natural desire for freedom and independence. It does this in clear view of the experience of “globalization” by non-Western cultures as an assimilation or ingestion into the West. Over the course of the twentieth century, the popes had alternated between the cultural language of “globalization,” describing Christianity as a civilizing force, and the ecclesial language of englobalization. So, for instance, John XXIII states that “in bringing people to Christ, the Church has . . . brought them many social and economical advantages. For true Christians cannot help feeling obliged to improve their own temporal institutions and environment. They do all they can to prevent these institutions from doing violence to human dignity. They encourage whatever is conducive to honesty and virtue.” Here Christian faith sounds like the best one can buy, in terms of globalization. But, Mater et Magistra continues by speaking of the Church as sheltering individualities by giving them rebirth:“[I]n becoming as it were the life-blood of these people, the Church is not . . . a foreign body in their midst. Her presence brings about the rebirth, the resurrection, of each individual in Christ; and the man who is reborn and rises again in Christ never feels himself constrained from without. He feels himself free in the very depth of his being, and freely raised up to God.And thus he affirms and develops that side of his nature which is noblest and best.”84 One author argues that after Vatican II,“[n]o longer would the mark of the universal Church be uniformity across time and culture. . . . [C]onciliar documents emphasized the links between evangelization . . . and a sensitivity to local situations.According to Gaudium et Spes, the Church is ‘not bound exclusively and indissolubly to any race or nation, to any one particular way of life, or to any customary pattern of living.’ . . . [T]he bishops . . . strove to create a pluralistic institution, one more deeply rooted in local cultures.” It is not entirely accurate to say that this “altered the terms of the discussion.”85 John XXIII could do more than to quote Pius XII’s 84 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §§179–80. 85 McGreevy, Parish Boundaries, 223. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 419 1939 Summi Pontificatus:“The Church aims at unity . . . ; she does not aim at a uniformity which would only be external in its effects and would cramp the natural tendencies of the nations concerned. Every nation has its own genius, its own qualities, springing from the hidden roots of its being.”86 Gaudium et Spes has nothing to add to this: what it does that is new is more firmly to establish the discourse about universal community within a programmatic description of the communion of the Church. Gaudium et Spes Ratzinger does not convict the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World of naïveté about modernity: he does criticize it for straying into naïveté about “the world” as such. Complaining that Gaudium et Spes uses the term “world” in a “pretheological” way, he argues that “[t]he Church cooperates with the world in order to build up the world . . . thus . . . we might characterize the vision that informs the text. It is not clear . . . whether the world that cooperates and the world that is to be built up are one and the same world. . . . [T]he authors . . . acted on the assumption that they themselves were not the world but its counterpart.”87 In Ratzinger’s youth, a cleric could recall the days “when I was in the world,” as if he were now on another planet. Ratzinger objects to Gaudium et Spes when it strays into sounding like an episcopal version of this bemused cleric, who doesn’t realize that “the church” and “the world” are not two separate, autonomous spheres. Gaudium et Spes states that “the People of God and the human race [ genus humanum] in whose midst it lives render service to each other. Thus the mission of the Church will show its religious, and by that very fact, its supremely human character.”88 Ratzinger finds the “use of the term ‘genus humanum’ to denote the other partner” “unsatisfactory” because “the Church itself is part of the genus humanum and cannot . . . be contradistinguished from it. . . .The Church meets its visà-vis in the human race, . . . in non-Christians, . . . etc. But it cannot stand outside the human race, . . . and then artificially create a solidarity which in any case is the Church’s lot.” Ratzinger ascribes these lapses “to the deep-rooted extrinsicism of ecclesiastical thought, to long acquaintance with the Church’s exclusion from the general course of development and to retreat into a special little ecclesiastical world from which an attempt is made to speak to the rest of the world.”89 Globalization, for instance, is not 86 John XXIII, Mater et Magistra, §181, citing Summi Pontificatus, §43. 87 Ratzinger, Principles, 379. 88 Gaudium et Spes, §11. 89 Joseph Ratzinger, “Introductory Article and Chapter I: The Dignity of the Human Person,” in Commentary on the Documents, ed.Vorgrimler, 119. 420 Francesca Aran Murphy something which the Church suddenly happens to find occurring in the modern world, and offers to help out: the Church has been in the middle of it since, as Benedict XV put it,“an army of apostolic men set out for the New World.”90 These lapses are more than compensated for by the positive contribution made to the Pastoral Constitution by missionary experience itself.There are many reasons within the development of European philosophy why its authors, like Karol Wojtyl/a, put the genus humanum at the centre of the document. But it was missionaries who first realized, at more than a notional level, that it’s possible to talk “man to man” with absolute strangers. It must have been an extraordinary experience to learn the languages of China and India and Africa, and to realize the Gospel could be translated into them, and be preached in them.They realized that the words of Christ could be embodied in any human language, and by that token that every human language is open to Christ. They learned from mission what it is to be human.And so the Pastoral Constitution puts human communication at its heart. Rather than setting the human project at odds with the divine gift of englobalization, it sees the human experience of global “interdependence” as needing the Church and also as forming the Church. The “Church,” Gaudium et Spes says, “sent to all peoples . . . is not bound to any race or nation, any particular way of life. . . . [C]onscious of her universal mission, she can enter into communion with the various civilizations, to their enrichment and to the enrichment of the Church herself.”91 The model is of learning and reception, not because, like the Imperialist administrators, the missionary will take more than he gives, but because what he offers is reception by God. Marxism Sections 19–20 of Gaudium et Spes deal with modern atheism. George Weigel thinks it unfortunate that “Gaudium et Spes depicted a world in which the chief philosophical challenges to the Christian worldview and the Christian view of man are Marxism and existentialism of the Sartrean variety” since “Marxism was in the ash can of history within a generation of the Pastoral Constitution’s promulgation.” Rather than Marxism, he thinks, the Church today is faced with “post-modern man, metaphysically indifferent, spiritually bored.”With the collapse of Soviet Communism, Marxism lost the last of its moral capital. But Marxism seems to be vibrantly alive today: postmodern culture is simply Marxism without the messianism. Retaining the materialism, the interest theory (the concep90 Benedict XV, Maximum Illud, §4. 91 Gaudium et Spes, §§26, 58. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 421 tion of society as a congeries of competing interest groups), and the concomitant conviction that ideas and beliefs are really just strategic means of bluffing one’s way to power, but dropping the hope of Utopia, Marxism thrives in the professional classes.Though the texts of J. P. Sartre may be little perused, and are in that sense only, as Weigel says, “of antiquarian interest” (Weigel, 255), the “existential atheists” to whom the Pastoral Constitution is directed are “people who think waiting for Godot is a hopeless gesture,”92 and there are many here amongst us.The rhetoric of postponement and deferral in postmodernist theory comes back to saying, the Kingdom will not come. Our Marcionite Marxists are bored by metaphysical faith because they imagine that those who maintain it do so either because someone else is capitalizing on it, or because they themselves are capitalizing on pretending to hold it. Marxism was reborn in postmodern capitalism, with its magical conception of money. “Modern” Marxist “man may have been ‘obsolete’ in 1945 or 1965,” Weigel says. “What came next was even worse” (Weigel, 259). Henri de Lubac, who was involved in writing Sections 19–20, described such an outcome in The Drama of Atheist Humanism : [Marx’s] communism offered itself as the only concrete realization of humanism . . . “the religion of the workers has no God,” Marx wrote, “because it seeks to restore the divinity of man.” . . .What has become of man as conceived by this atheist humanism? A being that can still hardly be called a ‘being’—a thing that has no content, a cell . . . merged in a mass that is in the process of becoming:‘social-and-historical man,’ of whom all that remains is pure abstraction, apart from the social relations and the position in time by which he is defined. There is no stability or depth left in him, and it is no good . . . claiming to discover any value exacting universal respect. There is nothing to prevent his being used as material or as a tool either for the preparation of some future society or for ensuring, here and now, the dominance of one privileged group. There is not even anything to prevent his being cast aside as useless. . . . [T]he types of man conceivable vary. . . . But underneath these diversities there is always the same fundamental creature, or rather the absence of any creature. For this man has literally been dissolved. Whether in the name of myth or in the name of dialectic, losing truth, he has lost himself. In reality there is no longer any man because there is no longer anything that is greater than any man.93 Gaudium et Spes speaks to this “hollow man,” neither by accepting his claim to a substantive humanism, nor by calling his bluff, since it doesn’t 92 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 147–48. 93 De Lubac, Drama, 41, 66. Francesca Aran Murphy 422 propose a Marxist hermeneutic of suspicion, but by seeking to kindle the dying flame of his utopianism. Early drafts did not refer to atheism. Cardinal Silva Henriquez of Santiago (Chile) requested it, in October 1964:“He pointed out the humanist character of modern atheism, which cannot be met by a mere condemnation but can only be given a Christian answer in terms of Christ as the new man. . . . [T]he Cardinal . . . declared that one task of the schema would be to outline an eschatology on the basis of the risen Christ.”94 It is not surprising that Marxists gave up on their New Man, because eschatology tries the faith of all believers. It wants us to imagine the Kingdom as really present. But we want to postpone it, for the more concretely exact the dénouement, the more exacting a demand the analogy makes upon faith. Gaudium et Spes, with its own “utopianism,” proposes that the “remedy which must be applied to atheism” is just such eschatological faith: “it is the function of the Church, led by the Holy Spirit Who renews and purifies her . . . to make God the Father and his Incarnate Son present and in a sense visible.This result is achieved chiefly by the witness of a living and mature faith. . . . What does the most to reveal God’s presence . . . is the brotherly charity of the faithful who are united in spirit as they work together for the faith of the Gospel and who prove themselves a sign of unity.”95 The Lord of the World or The Light of the World Doctrinally or conceptually, there is only one orthodox way of conceiving the concluding, eschatological embrace of the “City of God” on earth into the eternal, heavenly city. It is the final “englobalization” of history, brought about by God. Pastorally or imaginatively, this eschatological end can be imagined in at least two ways.These two orthodox ways of imagining the end time each have a heterodox counterpart. In Western Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, the commonest orthodox way of imagining the end is, as it were, tragically.The city of man, conceived as Augustine did, as the idolatrous city fuelled by self-love, will rebel increasingly against God, persecuting the city of God on earth with ever-greater vigour, until God returns in glory to reclaim his martyrs.A fictional version, by Robert Hugh Benson, presents the pope as the last man on earth, saying Benediction whilst the airborne army of the Anti-Christ flies in to bombard him: the novel concludes, “Then the world passed, and the glory of it.”96 Such a vision is represented in Pius XII’s Evangelii Praecones, which states that 94 Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” 143–44. 95 Gaudium et Spes, §20. 96 Robert Hugh Benson, Lord of the World (1907) (Doylestown, PA:Wildside Press, n.d.), 254. Globalization from Benedict XV to Benedict XVI 423 “almost the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction.”97 An example of a heterodox secular version of this “tragic” vision is, perhaps surprisingly, Marxism. For Marxism, struggle is the motor of history, and a catastrophic breakdown of capitalism paves the way for the communist utopia. This is a materialist reconfiguration of the theological image of the reign of the anti-Christ preceding the last Judgement. Marxism is not a heterodox version of a “comic theological” eschatology. Only a bland,“Whiggish” conception of history as an uninterrupted progress toward perfection could be that. There are elements of the “tragic” vision in Gaudium et Spes: it speaks of “all human life,” as “a dramatic struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness.”98 But the overall impression of the Pastoral Constitution is of a comic theological eschatology. For that reason, we have no need to regret that Eastern Orthodox conceptions of the cosmos and history, which were present in early drafts, were ultimately jettisoned.99 They were not. Rather than connoting the antithetical rival of the heavenly city, the “earthly city” is given a positive meaning. Gaudium et Spes speaks of “Christians” as “citizens of two cities,” “exhort[ing]” them “to discharge their earthly duties conscientiously.” For Augustine, one cannot simultaneously be a citizen of both cities: a member of the city of God can use the earthly city, reside in it and “make use of the peace of Babylon,”100 but he is not of its “race.” To the contrary, Gaudium et Spes says, “[T]he Church has a saving and eschatological purpose which can be fully attained only in the future world. But she is already present in this world, and is composed of men, that is, of members of the earthly city who have a call to form the family of God’s children.”101 Paul VI told the United Nations general assembly,“We . . . bear to your terrestrial city of peace the greetings and good wishes of the spiritual city of peace.”102 Even the “Augustinian” Benedict XVI can say, in the wake of Gaudium et Spes,“In an increasingly globalized society, the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations, in such a way as to 97 Pius XII, Evangelii Praecones, §70. 98 Gaudium et Spes, §13. 99 Moeller, “History of the Constitution,” in Commentary on the Documents, ed. Vorgrimler, 72. 100 Augustine, City of God, XIX.26. 101 Gaudium et Spes, §40. 102 Paul VI, Address to the United Nations, 1965. Francesca Aran Murphy 424 shape the earthly city in unity and peace, rendering it to some degree an anticipation and a prefiguration of the undivided city of God.”103 Just as for Bonaventure, according to Ratzinger,“the Spirit . . . achieves a particular power in the final age; but this age . . . is an age of Christ,”104 so Gaudium et Spes is “convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God’s grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design.”105 When it speaks of reading the signs of the times, it means looking for the presence of God’s grace in the world.The “comic eschatological” vision imagines history and the “human city” as achieving obedience to God before the Last Judgment: Benson himself wrote a second novel in which the world reaches its consummation in exact social and political conformity to Rerum Novarum. Benson’s The Dawn of All devises an entirely orthodox, in every sense of the word, eschatological scenario. For in Revelation, “the kings of the earth bring their glory and honour into” the heavenly city (Rev 21:24). The “treasure” which Gaudium et Spes pictures being “raised up” into God is humanity itself: “For here grows the body of a new human family, a body which even now is able to give some kind of foreshadowing of the new age. For after we have obeyed the Lord, and in His Spirit nurtured on earth the values of human dignity, brotherhood and freedom, and indeed all the good fruits of our nature and enterprise, we will find them again, but freed of stain, burnished and transfigured, when Christ hands over to the Father: ‘a kingdom eternal and universal, a kingdom of truth and love, of holiness and grace, of justice, love and peace.’ On this earth that Kingdom is already present in mystery.When the Lord returns it will be brought into N&V full flower.”106 103 Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, §7. 104 Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (German 1959), trans. Zachary Hayes (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971, 1989), 117. 105 Gaudium et Spes, §34. 106 Ibid., §39. Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 425–66 425 Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? Reflections on John O’Malley’s Recent Book J OHN M. M C D ERMOTT, S.J. Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, Michigan J OHN O’M ALLEY has written an engaging account of Vatican II which culminates a series of articles penned over the previous forty years.1 While the articles propound in greater detail the hermeneutical principles governing O’Malley’s reading of the Council, the book presents a more unified view of the Council as a whole; articles and book complement each other without substantial variation in position. O’Malley’s view agrees essentially with the “Bologna interpretation” championed by the late Guiseppe Alberigo and his collaborators.2 This exegetical tradition has emphasized the novelty of Vatican II and its discontinuity with previous ecclesial and conciliar traditions. O’Malley’s articles describe Vatican II as marking a “revolution” in the Church’s self-understanding (Traditions and Transitions, 36, 48, 66, 73, 83, 108), a “notable departure from the fundamental paradigm of Church order that prevailed before the Council” (Traditions and Transitions, 107; also 120). O’Malley was a young graduate student, just three years ordained, when the Council opened, and its impression upon him apparently never waned.The last pages of the book, however, express a regretful nostalgia 1 John W. O’Malley, S.J., What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2008). The articles, published between 1971 and 1988, were collected in Traditions and Transitions: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1989). Page references to the former in our main text will be given in parentheses preceded by What Happened ; page references to the latter will also be given in parentheses, but preceded by Traditions and Transitions. 2 Giuseppe Alberigo, ed., History of Vatican II, 5 vols., English ed. Joseph A. Komonchak, trans. Matthew O’Connell (Leuven: Peters, 1996–2006). 426 John M. McDermott, S.J. for earlier days when it seemed that the Church’s “periphery” would assert itself strongly against the “center” and introduce a more horizontal ecclesiology. Closely tied with the issue of collegiality are two other issues which O’Malley identifies as fundamental: radical aggiornamento, or how the Church deals with change, and the “style” of the Church’s operations and communications. He would have the majority of the Council Fathers opting for a pastoral style instead of the previous legislativejuridical style. Likewise the Fathers allegedly preferred a worldview embracing adaptation to deep cultural changes instead of a view which ignores or downplays the reality and the need of historical and cultural changes. But O’Malley recognizes that wished-for changes have been frustrated.The institutional strength of “the center,” the Roman Curia at whose gates the Council was held and in whose offices the conservative “minority” was entrenched, managed to hold firm and even to strengthen itself. “Collegiality, the linchpin in the center-periphery relationship promoted by the majority, ended up an abstract teaching without point of entry into the social reality of the church” (What Happened, 299–311). The crisis of the traditional teaching on birth control, which was touched upon at the Council and reiterated in Humanae Vitae, led to the reaffirmation of the center’s authority and defined “the style of finding a solution to the problem.” Hence O’Malley opines,“Even before the council ended in 1965, there was a discrepancy between what the bishops hoped they had accomplished and what had happened.The majority was consistently frustrated in its efforts to make its will felt through the establishment of real structural changes” (What Happened, 311–12). Our disagreement with O’Malley’s thesis will proceed in two steps: an examination of his method and a criticism of some major omissions and misreadings. The Methodological Divorce Continuity and Contingency The nostalgia and regret are new to O’Malley because his earlier efforts at interpreting the Council propagated its new vision. For him it marked a novel openness to “history.” Its leading progressive theologians possessed a historical consciousness which was lacking to previous centuries. They were aware of profound historical changes in Church history as expressions of a given culture and therefore “not necessarily irreversible.” He repeatedly quotes J. C. Murray to the effect that “the issue underlying all issues” was “development of doctrine” (Traditions and Transitions, 14, 30, 61–62; What Happened, 9, 39–41, 196, 214–15). In fact the basic battle of Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 427 the Council is conceived in terms of the progressive majority with the conservative minority, who both hold radically opposed “styles of reading history.” The minority’s style, described as “classicism” and “substantialism,” sees basic continuity in history wherein certain developments were preordained by God and are now irreversible.Thus the Church would be “immune to process or to change in doctrine and discipline,” understanding herself primarily as a “doctrinal society,” that is, concerned primarily with protecting doctrine. This style of historical thinking O’Malley describes as “metaphysical, i.e., not historical at all.” In this view “true reform, therefore, consisted in removing threats to the sacred. Men were to be changed by religion not religion by men” (Traditions and Transitions, 34–35, 66–69, 107; What Happened, 37–38). The majority, by contrast, incorporates O’Malley’s preferred style. It emphasizes discontinuity; history is desacralized, a human phenomenon, the result of men’s free actions, decisions, and passions.Though all events are culturally and historically conditioned, they are unique, “radically contingent and particular.” “Every person, event, and document of the past is the product of very specific and unrepeatable contingencies” (Traditions and Transitions, 74–75). Hence they are relativized. Simultaneously the historian’s own understanding is relativized as culturally conditioned and contingent. He cannot hope to grasp past events as they actually happened. Indeed the “past” changes and becomes “new” with different interpretations of historians.As present historians’ interests and needs change, different questions are asked of the past. So Michel de Certeau is quoted with approval,“As we change we change the past.” Rather than despair at the impossibility of the modern historian’s task, O’Malley seems to rejoice in newly found freedom:“If the past imposes no pattern upon us, we are free to try to create the future. . . . [W]e are free to make our own decisions for the future. Indeed, we have no escape from such freedom, fraught as it is with dreadful burdens” (Traditions and Transitions, 35–37, 76–81, 67, 107–08; What Happened, 34). As a consequence Vatican II decided that “religion should be changed by men, in order to meet the needs of men.”This, O’Malley holds, is the basic meaning of aggiornamento, the Council’s pervasive theme and leitmotiv, adaptation to the needs of the time.The Council intended to “bring the Church up to date and make it effective in the contemporary world.” More than mere “adjustments,” this involves “a transformational or revolutionary reform.” “It implies experimentation, adaptation and a keen attentiveness to the lessons of experience as we daily receive them.” It involves “appropriating certain cultural assumptions and values” (Traditions and Transitions, 23, 30, 36, 47–48, 73, 111, 177–78; What Happened, 38, 80, 140, 215, 239, 298–302). 428 John M. McDermott, S.J. O’Malley also recognizes “a strong continuity” in history and identifies its three sources: the documentary evidence remains the same; “the basic operations of the human mind do not radically change from culture to culture”; and generations of historians are culturally linked to each other (Traditions and Transitions, 77–78). It is, however, debatable whether such sources provide adequate continuity for intelligibility. O’Malley’s three sources are only relatively stable, even by his own standards. New documents are constantly being discovered, made available, or reinterpreted, and the authenticity or authorship of others can be easily put into question. The world of biblical scholarship witnesses to many radical changes of interpretation in the last two centuries even before finds at Qumran and Nag Hammadi. While man’s basic intellectual operations may remain the same—this assertion recalls Lonergan’s Insight—the interpretation of human understanding varies greatly from one philosopher to another. The conceptual formulations of understanding have changed over the ages, each novel interpretation claming to improve, if not reject, its predecessor. Hence the intellectual operations to which Lonergan and O’Malley appeal need not provide unassailable continuity. Even Lonergan’s analysis of human cognition underwent a major mutation from Insight to Method in Theology.3 Without doubt, in the realm of “scientific” American historiography, cultural continuity among historians has varied quite a bit in the last 175 years, from Bancroft’s notion of Providence guiding the American republic in the spread of equality to the present pluralism of methodologies, and this has only reflected similar changes in European understandings of historiography.4 3 Bernard Lonergan, S.J., Insight (1958; repr. New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 271–78, 335–36; “Cognitional Structure,” Collection, ed. F. E. Crowe (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 221–39.Yet the late Lonergan abandoned the early Lonergan’s faculty psychology. Cf. John M. McDermott, S.J.,“Tensions in Lonergan’s Theory of Conversion,” Gregorianum 74 (1993): 117–21. Furthermore we have maintained not only a different interpretation of Aquinas—cf. our “The Analogy of Human Knowing in the Prima Pars,” Gregorianum (1996): 261–86, 501–25—but also a different metaphysics, which results in a different rational psychology: “Faith, Reason, and Freedom,” Irish Theological Quarterly 67 (2002): 307–32, and “How Did Jesus Know He Was God? The Ontological Psychology of Mark 10:17–22,” Irish Theological Quarterly 74 (2009): 272–97. 4 David D.Van Tassel, “Historiography, American,” in Dictionary of American History, rev. ed., ed. Harold Chase et al. (New York: Scribner’s, 1976), 3:280–83; Abraham S. Eisenstadt, “History and Historians,” in The Reader’s Companion to American History, ed. Eric Foner and Jahn A. Garraty (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 499–504; James Hoopes, “The History of Ideas,” in Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History, ed. Mary Cayton and Peter Williams (New York: Scribner’s, 2001), 3:643–50; Mary K. Cayton,“History and the Study of the Past,” Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 429 The tension between continuity and discontinuity is endemic to historiography.There has to be narrative consistency if the author wishes to make any sense out of the recorded past and communicate meaning. Yet the abstractions which he must employ in writing cannot grasp exhaustively the individual people and events whose tale he tells. His unavoidable omissions and oversights allow for interpretative revisions by later historians. In this dilemma historians share the common fate of all those seeking to comprehend reality intellectually.The problem recurs in many other disciplines because it is basic to thought. For example, modern physics postulates that space and time are both continuous and discontinuous, depending on the type of physics employed. For Heisenberg time is continuous and space discontinuous, while Einstein postulates discontinuous time—time is relative to the velocity of moving bodies in relation to the speed of light—while his universe closed upon itself presupposes continuous space; yet his space-time continuum, whereby space and time are relative to speed and each other, should introduce time’s discontinuity into space.The Zenonian paradoxes reappear in modern form. Precisely because space and time exhibit such contrary characterizations, the ancients considered prime matter, the principle of individuality which makes something “here and now” as opposed to “there and then,” to be unintelligible, non-being, and, insofar as it cannot be grasped by a finite mind, infinite.5 A similar paradox regards contingency. Unless there were necessity, contingency could not be affirmed; there would be no order in respect to which chance might be recognized. All thought presupposes something necessary or absolute and something contingent. In every true judgment about any reality, historical or otherwise, the judgment implies a certain necessity: this state of affairs is de facto true and cannot be otherwise. As Aristotle wrote, “What is (to on ) must be when it is, and what is not (to me on ) must not be when it is not” (De Interpretatione 9, 19a 25). Yet any finite reality so affirmed, insofar as it is not identical with infinite Being, is contingent, not possessing its necessity in itself. Present historiography seems intent on emphasizing contingency over necessity. On account of O’Malley’s stress upon the uniqueness of every person, event, and document of the past, nominalism or radical existentialism threatens to slip into his philosophy of history. His statement about man being unable to escape from his freedom to create the future recalls Sartre’s in ibid., 3:721–30; Georg Iggers, “Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 129–52. 5 John McDermott, S.J., “Why Matter Matters,” Proceedings of the Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Jesuit Philosophical Association (2006): 19–47. John M. McDermott, S.J. 430 phrase about man as “condemned to be free.” Precisely because there is no determinism, each individual acts as moral legislator for himself, who has to create himself and his values; indeed, since man confers value by his choice, he is “unable ever to choose the worse.”6 Yet, despite his emphasis on human freedom, O’Malley also speaks of man’s freedom as culturally and historically conditioned; indeed he argues that Vatican II can only be understood in the wider cultural context of its times (Traditions and Transitions, 77, 81, 125; What Happened, 3–8), and, as we shall observe, he stresses the symbiotic relation between Vatican II and the world. He has to maintain that balance; otherwise historiography would be impossible: reality would be reduced to a Heraclitean or Humean flux from which no abstract universals can emerge.Then all human thought, which relies upon abstract concepts, would be disqualified a priori. The Hermeneutical Option While O’Malley perceptively notices that continuity and discontinuity are everywhere to be found in history, he surprisingly rejects the usual Catholic emphasis on continuity (Traditions and Transitions, 15–16, 34–36, 47–51, 57–59, 68–73, 79, 174; What Happened, 34). He prefers to stand with modern historians. “Historians have a bias toward emphasizing a discontinuity that is not always verified to the degree they imply to the unwary. . . . It is my persuasion, nonetheless, that Catholics have an inbred tendency to emphasize the continuities in their tradition . . . that blinds them to important discontinuities and thus beclouds their vision of both past and present” (Traditions and Transitions, 174). This choice will have consequences for his interpretation of historical entities, especially the Church, which stands in the middle of history: An institution or an idea could have developed otherwise, for it is the product of human and contingent causes. To reply that providence ordained such a development simply removes the institution or idea from the area of human examination and hence silences both the historian and the theologian. If some given historical reality could have developed otherwise, and if we are still human agents operating in human history, we are free to change and even to reverse the direction of that reality if we so choose.What I am talking about, of course, is revolution, a term which historians use to describe certain phenomena which have occurred in the Church but which ecclesiastical documents never employ except in a pejorative sense. (Traditions and Transitions, 78–79) 6 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Meuthen, 1948), 19–22, 25–27, 60. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 431 On Freedom and Necessity The basis for O’Malley’s option to depart from the usual Catholic interpretation seems to lie in the role assigned to human freedom with its inherent contingency. This is a philosophical preference, not otherwise grounded, which determines the trajectory of his subsequent hermeneutics. At this point, therefore, substantial questions may be raised. We already noted that necessity and contingency stand in a polar tension. One pole cannot be thought without the other. Furthermore we have elsewhere pointed out that this tension accords with many other tensions inherent in human thought which provide the epistemological and ontological presuppositions for human freedom. In order to make choices, human beings must be able to abstract themselves intellectually from the immediacy of experience and recognize various possibilities of action.Yet their intellectual abstractions and the necessary laws of thought do not exhaust reality; otherwise reality would be determined implacably by the laws of thought. In history many interpretations of human freedom have been proposed, for example, independence, doing what one feels like, following reason, indifference (mutual causality of intellect and will), and choosing the good. None has proven adequate by itself. Ultimately there can be no freedom without divine omnipotence as its condition of possibility. Only God can ground the absolute demand of love which overcomes the hesitation beyond which finite rational reasons for a possible choice cannot lead. For finite, that is, relative, reasons cannot ground an absolute commitment. Hence the moral necessity experienced in the demand for self-sacrificial love reveals God’s presence in history. He alone can summon man to the apparent non-being of death; his appeal alone relativizes all the attractions of a finite universe; he alone is strong enough to conquer death by sharing his life of love. Indeed, insofar as there is no history without human free acts, there is no history without God’s omnipotence, the necessary condition of human freedom. Consequently, while contingency and the necessity of thought can be played off against each other—neither pole can be reduced to the other—human freedom and the “necessity” of divine providence coincide in the mystery of love.7 Since God’s presence constitutes history, there is no reason why he cannot intervene decisively and definitively in history.The Christian faith affirms that he did so in his Son’s Incarnation. No divine revelation in history can surpass the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and Jesus entrusted himself to the Church, which he established.The gift of his Spirit 7 McDermott, “Faith, Reason, and Freedom,” esp. 327–31, and “The Mystery of Freedom,” Lateranum 74 (2008): 493–542. 432 John M. McDermott, S.J. ensures that Jesus’ revelation will be preserved throughout history:“He will teach you all things and remind you of all that I said to you” ( Jn 14:26). Were revelation’s fullness not preserved, the Father’s plan of salvation would be frustrated and the Church could not mediate Christ’s absolute demand for faith and adherence. That would undercut the total dedication which love demands. But the Church has always maintained that Christ remains present in his ecclesial Body through Holy Scripture illumined by the Holy Spirit and in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. Although the full revelation and communication of God’s love occurred once and for all in the past, Christ remains constantly active and present in the Church. Hence restrictions which O’Malley imposes upon our knowledge of the past are not ultimate.“We realize that we shall never fully appropriate any past reality in its totality and on its own terms. No insight will perfectly exhaust the data’s intelligibility, most especially if that ‘data’ is God’s self-communication in revelation.Any authenticity is at least somewhat partial and incomplete” (Traditions and Transitions, 79). But God does not reveal himself by halves. His love is fully incarnate in Jesus. Certainly no human mind can exhaust the infinite mystery of God’s being, which is Trinitarian love. Nonetheless his historical revelation must have an intelligible structure and content if it was and is addressed to human freedom. Otherwise St. Paul would never have prayed for the Ephesians that “Christ dwell through faith in your hearts, in order that, rooted and grounded in love, you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breath and length and height and depth and to know Christ’s love surpassing knowledge, in order that you might be filled unto all God’s fullness” (Eph 3:17–19). Not everything in history, therefore, must be revisable. Consequently O’Malley’s affirmation of the mutability of all historical institutions must be restricted.While some aspects of the Church’s institution are subject to change, for example, the College of Cardinals and congregations of the Roman Curia, other aspects constitute the Church’s essential structure and are immutable.The ecumenical councils Lateran IV (DS 811), Florence (DS 1307–8), Trent (DS 1767–70, 1772–74, 1776–78), and Vatican I (DS 3059–64) defined the Church’s sacerdotal hierarchy as essential to her structure and governance. Moreover the Church has also defined and regulated her sacraments, which were instituted by Christ as means necessary for salvation, at Lateran IV (DS 802, 812), Constance (DS 1198–99), Florence (DS 1310–28), Trent (DS 1543–43, 1601–1816). In all of this she was only confirming her belief and practice from the time of the Apostles.8 8 In handling the problem of the historical development of ecclesial structures, Karl Rahner, S.J., “Über den Begriff des ‘Jus Divinum’ im katholischen Verständnis,” Schriften zur Theologie,V (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1962), 249–77, and Grundkurs des Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 433 The Council’s Hermeneutic: The Primacy of Style O’Malley’s preference for contingency and incompleteness gives him the hermeneutical key unlocking the meaning of Vatican II. As he admits, “The Council is not easy to interpret” (Traditions and Transitions, 182). He finds the Council’s documents verbose, boring, vague, hard to interpret, indeterminate, unclear, open to diverse interpretations, “full of compromise and ambiguity” (Traditions and Transitions, 26, 28, 45, 112–14, 116–17, 176; What Happened, 309). They were seeking to reconcile opposing viewpoints; indeed opposed understandings of history—the historical and the unhistorical classicist—are both found in them (Traditions and Transitions, 26, 66, 116, 122–23). Lamentably Vatican II does not offer much help on how aggiornamento with its fundamental question of “the relationship of the past to the present” occurs (Traditions and Transitions, 62, 66). “The Council heads off in a new direction often without indication that an older direction has been abandoned, without much indication even of what that other direction was. In other words, explicit redefinition of what was good and bad . . . had to be done by ‘experts’ outside the Council” (Traditions and Transitions, 113, 178). “The unclarities, the hesitations, the qualifications, the ambivalences that mark the documents reflect the huge committee in which they were hammered out.They were the price paid to obtain consensus” (Traditions and Transitions, 116). Faced with such a multiplicity of opinions seeking to be acknowledged and the confusing compromises of the official texts, O’Malley seeks a tool to help make unitary sense of the Council. He finds it in the primacy of style. “Style is the ultimate expression of hermeneutical meaning. It does not adorn meaning but is meaning. It is a hermeneutical key par excellence” (What Happened, 49, 306). This echoes Marshall McLuhan’s catchword from the 1960s: the medium is the message.9 “One might hesitate to apply here the axiom that the medium was the message, but I must say that I continue to be surprised at how little study has been directed to the rhetoric of the Council. . . . If the style is the man, can we not assume, Glaubens (Freiburg: Herder, 1976), 320–21, allows for a change of “forms” insofar as they all correspond to the Church’s essential nature and for historical decisions by ecclesial authorities that become irreversible in the decision.While I am more inclined than Rahner to see the “decisions” as “recognitions” of the implications of the Church’s basic sacramental structure (e.g., as the meaning of “sacrament” became clearer, its limitation to seven became obvious), even Rahner acknowledges that the Church as perpetuating “God’s historically irreversible promise of Himself ” given in Christ must have a historically irreversible structure. 9 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 2nd ed. (New York: North American, 1964), 23–25 and throughout. 434 John M. McDermott, S.J. at least for the sake of discussion, that to some extent the style is the Council—and then, by extension, that the style is the Church?” (Traditions and Transitions, 26). Later, in describing the Council’s new forma mentis, he answers his previous question decisively: “ ‘The style is the man’—the style is the Council.” Hence “we can not rightly interpret what the Council was struggling to say to us unless we take into account the medium in which it conveyed its message.” In short, “a style choice is an identity choice, a personality choice, a choice in this instance about the kind of institution the council wanted the church to be” (Traditions and Transitions, 176–78; What Happened, 268, 305). Unlike Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, which mocked the equation of man with his clothes, O’Malley takes seriously the equation of style and meaning.The Council “teaches by means of its style” (What Happened, 49). Everything then depends upon his evaluation of the Council’s style. Contrary to all previous ecumenical councils, which considered themselves juridical-legislative bodies,Vatican II issued no canons, no anathemas, and no definitions. Neither did it employ Scholastic dialectics with its abstract, impersonal, ahistorical terminology.Whereas “dialectics is the art of proving a point, of winning an argument, and of proving your opponent wrong,” the Council’s “soft rhetoric,” recalling the epideictic, or panegyric, style of the Church Fathers, seeks to persuade instead of coerce. “It teaches, but not so much by way of magisterial pronouncement as by suggestion, insinuation, and example.” The documents are “pastoral” in tone, upholding ideals. “ ‘Pastoral’ is itself a soft word, a euphemism that obscures the significant shift in values and in the styles of relationships that the documents promoted.” Their vocabulary favors words of reconciliation, cooperation, reciprocity, collegiality, humility, equality, service, development, interiority, and holiness. “Genre together with its appropriate vocabulary also imbues Vatican II with a coherence lacking in previous councils.The enactments of councils before Vatican II have been a collection of discrete units, a collection of enactments, which on the surface have little connection with one another.” Only through its style can one arrive at “the spirit” of the Council (What Happened, 43–52, 80, 306–8, 309–10; Traditions and Transitions, 23, 26–27, 177–80, 305–10). By emphasizing style as the hermeneutic key, O’Malley fits the Council into the modern worldview of historicism. It is concerned primarily not with truth, but with persuasion in the midst of pluralism. So he considers Gaudium et Spes “the document most distinctive of the council and the one perhaps most revelatory of the council’s meaning.” For it opened the Church to dialogue with the modern world; “the church assumes a servant role vis-à-vis the world.The relationship is reciprocal: Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 435 the world helps the church in being true to itself—an unprecedented stance for an ecclesiastical document” (What Happened, 158, 233–34, 268).10 This completes the circularity of O’Malley’s argument. Because the Council’s style encourages openness to the world, the world’s historical consciousness becomes the principal hermeneutical key for interpreting the Council’s documents. The Council’s alleged aim of overcoming “cultural isolation” (Traditions and Transitions, 14–15, 25, 109) allows the world’s hermeneutical standards to interpret the Council. Historical consciousness was allegedly mediated to the bishops by the theologians present at the Council; thus the Council is said to have rested upon modern philosophies of history. Hence there emerges a “symbiotic relationship” between Church and world whereby cultural developments “have had more profound influences on the Church than most selfconscious decisions taken within the Church.” Thus the option to use historical consciousness is justified by the Council’s style. As a result the Council did not intend to say the last word but envisioned a Church “open to the future” with an “open-ended agenda.”The Church’s tradition is dynamic and is to be interpreted “creatively” in many traditions “always relative to the actual needs of those to whom it is addressed.”“By admitting the change-principle, the council implicitly admitted the open-ended character of its own pronouncements.” Its documents “were not an end point but a starting point.”Thus the Council’s “decisions take on a life of their own” insofar as they have to be “received” by the culture and in the process “undergo significant changes.” Change becomes “the precondition for the authenticity” of the Church’s identity (Traditions and Transitions, 28, 42–43, 80–81, 83, 123–24, 169, 185–86; What Happened, 50–51, 228). This allows the Council to be interpreted by its consequences. Despite the ambiguities and compromises in the documents, already in 1971 O’Malley wrote:“Today, some years after the close of the Council, a minimalist interpretation of Vatican II’s ‘accommodation to the times’ no longer seems possible, no matter what the intentions of the Council fathers were” (Traditions and Transitions, 47–48). Unfortunately the notion of “style” can be as vague as that of “spirit,” as in “spirit of Vatican II.” O’Malley admits that “the protagonists [were] perhaps not always realizing the profound implications of what was at stake” in the battles over style and vocabulary (What Happened, 11–12).“Vatican II evidences a strong sense of continuity with the past and a desire to remain true to it.” The Council Fathers “consistently described aggiornamento in 10 Earlier O’Malley considered Lumen Gentium “the centerpiece of the Council . . . without doubt.”To it Gaudium et Spes adds “a long and extremely important codicil” (Tradition and Transitions, 24, 176). 436 John M. McDermott, S.J. terms of adjustment or accommodation,” and “at every critical juncture” the relationship of present to past “was alluded to, usually in the form of an assurance that no substantial change was being made in the patrimony of the past.” Leaders of the majority “argued that their positions were more conservative than those of the conservatives because they were retrievals of traditions fundamental and ancient.” Indeed, in the face of the mass media’s highlighting of innovation they “generally tried to minimize the novelty of some of their positions by insisting on their continuity with tradition” (Traditions and Transitions, 48, 60, 63, 66, 159; What Happened, 114, 196, 214, 292). Ultimately it is in the ressourcement movement calling for a return to biblical and patristic sources that O’Malley locates the basis for the Council’s most radical changes, more radical even than his interpretation of aggiornamento (What Happened, 300–5). Furthermore, at the Council consensus was sought for and achieved, as its documents garnered the approval of vast majorities. O’Malley admits that Paul VI, who was cautious by nature and considered it his role to protect orthodoxy, sought unanimity and intervened numerous times to win the support of the minority, usually with success; both he and John XXIII insisted that the Council should and did remain faithful to the traditional faith of the Church. Indeed while propounding his radical interpretation of aggiornamento, O’Malley confesses, “It can be questioned, in fact, just how clearly some of the fathers understood what they had wrought and now had to communicate to constituencies that understood less than they did” (Traditions and Transitions, 116; What Happened, 95, 107, 172–73, 242–45). If a revolution in the Church’s self-understanding emerged at the Council, it is hard to explain how it occurred.Why did the vast majority of aged bishops who as young men “had been indoctrinated by the [manualist] textbooks” (What Happened, 290), some of whom had suffered persecution or material deprivation for the sake of the traditional faith, suddenly adhere to a revolutionary program? It seems unlikely that the conciliar Fathers were stupid, ignorant of what they were doing, or hypocritically misled by their leaders or theological periti. How, in short, does O’Malley then justify his discovery of “a new ecclesiological paradigm” in Vatican II, even though “the Council never unambiguously articulated that paradigm”? (Traditions and Transitions, 107) He does not appeal much to the content of specific documents, for he admits that the conciliar texts can be interpreted to undergird almost any theological position. He explicitly excludes a “proof-texting” approach to the Council. Instead he appeals to the Council’s style and “sensus plenior—a ‘fuller meaning’—that transcends original intent” as well as “the sum of the Council’s documents” (Traditions and Transitions, 32, 186; What Happened, 12). Repeatedly Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 437 his exegesis employs the words “implicit,” “implication,” and “implies” when he cannot find exact statements to bolster his interpretation (e.g., Traditions and Transitions, 26, 27, 65, 107, 110, 113; What Happened, 39, 44, 46, 50, 144, 245, 269, 307, 310). He even relies upon the argument from silence: for example,“Although in the documents of Vatican II the hierarchical character of the church is repeatedly stressed and the prerogatives of the pope reiterated almost obsessively, the church is never described as a monarchy or the members of the church as subjects—a significant departure from previous practice” (What Happened, 48–49; cf. also 145–46, 245–46, 252–53).11 Since from silence nothing follows and “implications” can be very vague, this method obviously evokes creative reading.Thereby O’Malley causes the suspicion to arise that he sits outside the Council as one of the “experts” telling its participants what they actually meant. Moreover his appeal to this sensus plenior is bewildering. The term is primarily applied to inspired biblical writings to indicate that God can introduce into the text a meaning not explicitly intended by the human author.12 But the appeal contradicts O’Malley’s professed historical method, which “desacralizes” and “deprovidentializes” history, considering it a human phenomenon whose contingent choices are entirely reversible (Traditions and Transitions, 74–79). Is sensus plenior a deus ex machina devised to save O’Malley’s method from itself or does it reflect his Christian awareness that there is a divine governance of the Church, an overriding sense of history, and a God who alone knows, judges, and guides the intentions and acts of men? “The king’s heart is a steam of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He will” (Prov 21:1). Epistemological relativism quickly undermines itself. If a text allows many meanings, if its meanings are open-ended, and if present interpretations change the past, by what standards can O’Malley chastise Church leaders who allegedly “short-circuit the dialogic style that seems an important part of the message of the Council” and introduce “a level of dysfunction in the institution destined to beget even further dysfunction” (Traditions and Transitions, 184)? The future to which O’Malley’s interpretation is open has not yet arrived. How can he vindicate his interpretation as 11 Actually O’Malley does not adduce any evidence of the use of “monarchy” in magisterial documents; I do not know of any, and the word is not listed in the index to Denzinger-Schönmetzer. While the word is found in ecclesiological manuals, to equate the manuals with the Magisterium is excessive. 12 Wilfred Harrington, O.P.,“Senses of Scripture,” in The New Dictionary of Theology, ed. Joseph Komonchak et al. (Wilmington, DE: Glazier, 1987), 945–47. Harrington claims already in 1987 that “the fuller sense theory had a close connection with a neo-scholastic theory of scriptural inspiration which is now abandoned.” 438 John M. McDermott, S.J. superior to that of Giovanni Montini, Karol Wojtyl/a, and Joseph Ratzinger, who were actively engaged in the Council as pope, archbishop, and peritus, and claimed to implement its decrees and intentions? Much as O’Malley dislikes the role played by Paul VI in the Council (What Happened, 107–8, 181–85, 201, 224–26, 238, 240–46, 252–53, 280, 284–85, 287, 293–94), there is no doubt that as bishop of Rome he exercised the principal authority in the Council; without his approval the Council’s decrees would be null. If Paul VI’s interpretation of the documents he signed is not accurate, whose interpretation outranks his? Did the post-conciliar development of episcopal collegiality frustrate the bishops’ wishes or O’Malley’s desires? Finally, O’Malley’s method must admit that his interpretation is always subject to revision. Indeed Joseph Ratzinger ten years after Vatican II offered an almost diametrically opposed interpretation: An interpretation of the Council that understands its dogmatic texts as mere preludes to a still unattained conciliar spirit, that regards the whole as just a preparation for Gaudium et Spes, and that looks upon the latter text as just the beginning of an unswerving course toward an ever greater union with what is called progress—such an interpretation is not only contrary to what the Council Fathers intended and meant, it has been reduced ad absurdum by the course of events.Where the spirit of the Council is turned against the word of the Council and is vaguely regarded as a distillation from the development that evolved from the ‘Pastoral Constitution,’ this spirit becomes a specter and leads to meaninglessness.The upheavals caused by such a concept are so obvious that their existence cannot be seriously disputed. . . . [T]he progress of the Church cannot consist in a belated embrace of the modern world—the theology of Latin America has made that all too clear to us and has demonstrated thereby the rightness of its cry for liberation. . . . [W]e must interpret Vatican Council II as a whole and. . . our interpretation must be oriented toward its central theological texts. . . . [O]nly the whole in its proper orientation is truly the spirit of the Council.13 Which interpretation is to be preferred? Let us see whither O’Malley’s method leads. 13 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, trans. M. McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 390. Cf. also Avery Dulles, S.J., “Nature, Mission, and Structure of the Church,” in Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition, ed. Matthew L. Lamb and Matthew Levering (New York: Oxford, 2008), 25–26, who also rejects the thesis propounded by O’Malley, G. Baum, R. McBrien, and the Lutheran G. Lindbeck that Vatican II introduced a revolution into the Church’s self-understanding. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 439 Omissions, Oversights, and Errors On Content, Style, and Ecclesiology Although for O’Malley the basic change initiated by Vatican II rested upon its implicit adoption of modern philosophies of history stressing discontinuities resultant from human freedom, he leaves rather vague how this influence entered the Council; he seems largely to attribute it to periti open to historical consciousness (Traditions and Transitions, 159). Allegedly the Council’s intellectual debate pitted those open to a modern approach to historical reality against those holding a “classicist” mentality opposed to modernity and generally seeking to retain the power and authority of “the center.” Unfortunately he never spells out the philosophies of history or examines their ultimate metaphysical foundation. His characterization of the debates hardly does justice to the underlying theological and philosophical issues. While sensitive to the changing needs of the Church and world, leading theologians generally try to think the faith systematically, that is, to make a presentation of the Church’s faith in divine revelation coherent with certain initial principles rationally explicated.Within a system they have reasons for the positions which they adopt. At Vatican II almost all the periti were trained in Thomism. It provided a common structure and language. It also allowed the implications of theological positions to be understood quickly. But not all Thomists were of one mind. Tensions exist in the Angelic Doctor’s thought because he sought to produce a synthesis, a unity in diversity, not only of faith and reason but also of Aristotle and the neo-Platonic tradition coming through Augustine and Dionysius. These tensions allow Thomas’s thought to be interpreted in diverse ways. Both sides in the conciliar debates took their positions and fought their battles based on theological and philosophical presuppositions. Ultimately truth and fidelity to Christ’s revelation were at stake. Elsewhere we have sought to delineate at length two broad interpretations of Thomism, which in our opinion helped define the theological issues addressed at Vatican II.The more Aristotelian approach stresses the validity of the fundamental concept of being, which allows all realities to be conceptualized in universals and clearly distinguished from each other. Consequently revelation is understood by this conceptualist Thomism primarily in terms of divinely revealed propositions to be believed on the authority of Christ and his Church. Since revealed propositions are supernatural, surpassing the human mind’s capacity to ascertain directly their truth, they can only be accepted from God and are not subject to human revision. This approach obviously insists upon continuity with 440 John M. McDermott, S.J. tradition. The more neo-Platonic approach insists that truth is attained primarily in judgment, of which the concept is only a part. Judgment involves a dynamic existential synthesis whose movement assumes the concept while surpassing it. Its ultimate term is nothing finite, but the infinite God, who supplies the final attraction for every spiritual act. Since the immediate vision of God is understood by Thomists to be supernatural, there is implicit in every spiritual act of human nature a desire for a supernatural object. Faith consequently involves a “personal” relation with God, mediated historically by Christ and the Church, but it is no longer tied primarily to propositional formulations. Indeed, based on one’s experience of God, which can never be fully conceptualized, it is possible to reformulate the basic truths of faith. Clearly this view, generally designated “transcendental Thomism,” allows more readily for discontinuity in tradition and dogmatic development, while its concern for adaptation seeks to make the truth of faith more accessible to people living in the modern world. The theological consequences of that perspectival shift from conceptualist Thomism to transcendental Thomism can be immense, as subsequent history proved. The most intelligent proponents of each systematic interpretation at and previous to Vatican II were aware of the need for balance.14 There is no 14 John McDermott, S.J., “Faith and Critical Reason in Theology,” in Excellence in Seminary Education, ed. Stephen Minkiel et al. (Erie, PA: Gannon University, 1988), 68–93; “The Methodological Shift in Twentieth Century Thomism,” Seminarium 31 (1991): 245–66; “The Context of Veritatis Splendor,” in Prophecy and Diplomacy, ed. John Conley and Joseph Koterski (New York: Fordham, 1999), 115–72;“Spiritual Theology and Religious Life Before and After Vatican II,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 8:2 (2001): 51–75; “The Path and Progress of Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 13 (2006): 11–42;“Vatican II and the Theologians on the Church as Sacrament,” Irish Theological Quarterly 71 (2006): 143–78;“Lumen Gentium:The Once and Future Constitution,” in After Forty Years: Vatican Council II’s Diverse Legacy, ed. Kenneth Whitehead (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2007), 134–64. On various leading theologians: McDermott, Love and Understanding (Rome: Gregorian, 1983), 143–66; “De Lubac and Rousselot,” Gregorianum 78 (1997): 741–58;“Rousselot et Maréchal,” in Au Point de Départ, ed. P. Gilbert (Bruxelles: Lessius, 2000), 194–217; “Moral Systems: Maritain and Schüller Compared,” Divus Thomas 46 (1985): 3–23; “Maritain on Two Infinities: God and Matter,” International Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1988): 257–69; “Karl Rahner in Tradition:The One and the Many,” Fides Quaerens Intellectum 3/2 (2007): 1–60; “Bernard Lonergan,” in Storia della Teologia: III Da Vitus Pichler a Henri de Lubac, ed. R. Fisichella (Roma: Dehoniane, 1996), 751–64;“Tensions,” 101–40. Cf. also Alberto Cozzi, La Centralitá di Cristo nella Teologia di L. Billot (Milano: Glossa, 1999); Daniele Moretto, Il Dinamismo intellettuale davanti al Mistero: La Questione del soprannaturale nel Percorso speculativo di J. Maréchal (Milano: Glossa, 2001); Benedikt Ritzler, Freiheit in der Umarmung des ewig Liebenden (Bern: Lang, 2000); Raymond Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 441 thought without valid concepts, yet thought also requires judgments; essential and existential orders complement each other. Indeed, the fundamental sacramental structure of Christian revelation demands the presence of the infinite God revealing himself in and through finite intelligible structures. Thus the Church must maintain continuity in faith, which comes from without, that is, from preaching (Rom 10:14–17), while propagating the faith in a language intelligible to the world’s current mentality. Although such a schema contrasting these diverse interpretations of St. Thomas cannot do full justice to the complexity of the issues and personalities at Vatican II—many theologians had different nuances in their interpretation of Thomas and the Catholic faith—it at least provides an intellectual framework for a theological understanding of the Council. The Council’s documents need not be interpreted as a confusing hodgepodge of compromises but as a serious intent to be faithful to Christ’s revelation in the Catholic tradition, utilizing especially the thought of the Angelic Doctor. In any case the schema allows the student of the Council to identify the intellectual content of the documents which were hammered out after much debate and with great concern for precision in order that support from the greatest possible number of conciliar Fathers might be attained. Because O’Malley does not concern himself in detail with the Council’s underlying theological visions, his chosen perspective apparently leads to overlooking or erroneously interpreting certain documents and events.Admittedly every historian must select details which he considers relevant to his interpretation, but there always hovers the risk that his philosophical stance narrows the perception of the details.15 That unfortunately seems to have happened in O’Malley’s interpretation. Apparently because he fails to identify basic theological visions at play in the Council, O’Malley has recourse to style as his hermeneutical key. Dennehy, “Maritain’s Theory of Subsistence,” The Thomist 39 (1975): 543–73; Giovanni Rota, “Persona” e “Natura” nell’Itinerario Speculativo di Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J. (1904–1984) (Milan: Glossa, 1998); Patrick Burke, Reinterpreting Rahner (New York: Fordham, 2002). 15 In The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993) O’Malley likewise tends to read the modern opposition between “spirit” and institution into St. Ignatius’s day. He tends to bypass Jesuits’ vowed obedience to the pope, otherwise strongly accentuated in other histories of St. Ignatius and the Society of Jesus, in favor of general service for the good of souls.Yet Yves Congar, O.P., L’Église (Paris: Cerf, 1970), 369–70, points out, “Ignatius seems to have created this expression ‘hierarchical Church’. . . .There is an identity between what God demands and service in this Church, between discernment of spirits and the hierarchical Church’s judgment.” The Spiritual Exercises refer to “our mother, the hierarchical Church” (nn. 170, 352). 442 John M. McDermott, S.J. Then it is all the more surprising that he ignores some of the most obvious stylistic choices of the Council Fathers. Though the Council distinguished among dogmatic constitutions, pastoral constitutions, decrees, and declarations, O’Malley opines,“the distinction between decrees and declarations, no matter what it originally meant, has become meaningless” (What Happened, 3).That allows him to set aside the decrees On the Mass Media and On the Catholic Eastern Churches while accentuating the declarations On Religious Liberty and On Non-Christian Religions. But are not the dogmatic constitutions On Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum) and On the Church (Lumen Gentium) the central statements, indeed the documents which aroused the most heated debates and set the tone for the other documents? If, then, Lumen Gentium’s chapter 3 on the hierarchy was the most closely scrutinized part of the text (What Happened, 208), would not the chapter’s clear acceptance of Vatican I’s definitions have provided a clue for the Council’s intentions? This chapter is especially decisive in view of Paul VI’s insertion of the Nota Explicativa Previa.As the previous quotation of Joseph Ratzinger indicates, the center of the Council is found in the dogmatic constitutions Dei Verbum and Lumen Gentium. O’Malley’s concentration on style instead of content might also lead to a major oversight even while interpreting Lumen Gentium. He understands the Council’s ecclesiology in terms of “people of God,” a model implying the primacy of horizontal relationships, and designates it Lumen Gentium’s “favorite and characteristic description of the Church” (Traditions and Transitions, 65, 114, 117; What Happened, 11, 52, 78, 141, 174, 177–78, 253; cf. also 306–7).Actually, when questioned on this point, the Theological Committee, responsible for composing the final text of Lumen Gentium, explained that because it agreed with many Fathers that the Mystical Body “is more than an image and leads more deeply into the mystery of the Church,” the paragraph on the Body of Christ was placed after the consideration of other Scriptural images. Among others, Karol Wojtyl/a, speaking for the Polish episcopate, maintained in the aula that “the mystical Body of Christ . . . is more than an image; for it determines the very nature of the Church under a Christological aspect and simultaneously under the aspect of the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption.”16 O’Malley’s lack of attention to the Body of Christ prob16 Theological Committee’s Relatio, in Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II (Vatican:Vaticana, 1970–1978), III/1, 173; Karol Wojtyl/a in Acta, II/3, 857. On the importance of the Body of Christ ecclesiology, to which “People of God” came as a complement, cf.Yves Congar, O.P.,“D’une ‘ecclésiologie en gestation’ à Lumen Gentium chap. I et II,’ in Le Concile de Vatican II (Paris: Beauchesne, 1984), 129–34;“Lumen Gentium no. 7,‘L’Église, Corps mystique du Christ’, vu au Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 443 ably let him interpret the original relation of the Apostles among themselves as based primarily on “direct personal fellowship. A certain egalitarianism was implied because of the implied recognition of the validity of a variety of charisms in a setting where charism was the foundational value” (Traditions and Transitions, 141). Did not Jesus choose the Twelve and grant Peter a preeminent role among them? Did not Paul insist on a hierarchical ordering in the Body of Christ to the charismatic but disjointed Corinthian church? (1 Cor 12:27–30; cf. also Eph 4:11–12). If all value depended upon charismatic gifts, why did Paul, who was filled with the Spirit, so often defend his authoritative apostolic calling? When O’Malley laments the Council’s failure to provide a clear reconciliation of the hierarchical Church of Lumen Gentium, §3 with the “people-ofGod Church” (Traditions and Transitions, 114), he overlooks the role which the constitution assigns to the Body of Christ, an image which he later acknowledges to be used to express “one of the leitmotifs of the council, reconciliation between the vertical and horizontal dimensions in the church” (What Happened, 186).17 Moreover, in the New Testament “Body of Christ” is found much more often than “people of God” to describe the Church, doubtless because it highlights the definitive salvific novelty which Christ introduced beyond the Old Testament. The peritus A. Grillmeier, who helped compose the initial chapters of Lumen Gentium, notes that “people of God” denotes “not the crowd (Schar ) of believers in opposition to the hierarchy, but the Church in her entirety.”The image was chosen to emphasize God’s election, continuity with the Old Testament, and the aspect of communio as well as to go beyond the juridical viewpoint in showing the development of God’s plan in history. But it is terme de huit siècles d’histoire de la théologie du Corps mystique,” in Le Concile de Vatican II, 159–61. The Bologna-school anticipated O’Malley’s position with a bit more nuance: Alberto Melloni, “The Beginning of the Second Period:The Great Debate on the Church,” in History of Vatican II, 3:50, claims that the Council abandoned “the dominance of the image of the mystical body.”While the first schema, which presented the Church primarily as the Body of Christ, was balanced by other images, the Body of Christ remained central in later revisions. Even a quick look at the Index Verborum cum Documentis Concilii Vaticani Secundi, ed. Xavier Ochoa (Rome: Commentarium pro Religiosis, 1967), indicates the equal frequence of “Body of Christ” and “People of God,” with a slight advantage to the former. 17 Cf.Alois Grillmeier, S.J.,“Dogmatische Konstitution über die Kirche: Kommentar zum I. Kapitel,” in Das Zweite Vanikanische Konzil, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler et al. (Freiburg: Herder, 1967–1968), 1:166–70, who also sees “Body of Christ” as reconciling both dimensions. Once in passing O’Malley recognized that both “Body of Christ” and “People of God” had replaced the image of the Lord’s field often employed by earlier councils (Traditions and Transitions, 62). But he failed to employ “Body of Christ” to shed light on the Council’s ecclesiology. 444 John M. McDermott, S.J. “insufficient of itself alone to comprehend the Church’s entire reality”; rather, quoting Y. Congar, Grillmeier holds that “the basic law of the Church can only be manifested in the terminology and theology of the ‘Body of Christ.’ ” Because “people of God” is subordinate to “Body of Christ,” the Church cannot be reduced to the Old Testament notion of the people of God.18 Also questionable is O’Malley’s contrast of the panegyric, persuasive style of the Fathers with scholastic juridical-legislative terminology to justify Vatican II’s “pastoral” approach. Did not the Fathers produce Adversus Haereses, Contra Noetum, Contra Celsum, Adversus Praxeam, Adversus Arianos, to name only a few of their polemical works against heretics and pagans? Did the Fathers not produce an immense polemical literature during the Gnostic, Arian, Pelagian, Nestorian, Monophysite, and Monotheletic controversies? Did they not compose the anathemas of the first eight ecumenical councils—not to mention countless provincial councils and synods—which O’Malley now finds so repugnant to Vatican II’s “pastoral” vision? Furthermore, it boggles the mind that O’Malley should attribute to Vatican II’s documents “a coherence lacking in previous councils. The enactments of councils before Vatican II have been a collection of discrete units, a collection of enactments, which on the surface have little connection with one another” (What Happened, 51, 309–10). The Church Fathers knew their opponents well, and anyone acquainted with the controversies of the time must acknowledge that the creeds, definitions, and anathemas of Nicea, Constantinople I, Ephesus, Chalcedon, Constantinople II and III, and Nicea II hit the nails squarely on the head. Their proclamations were much more precise than Vatican II’s. “Coherence” must then refer only to “stylistic” coherence, which O’Malley prefers to conceptual coherence since he affirms Vatican II’s coherence “despite the compromises, ambiguities, misleading euphemisms, stylistic infelicities, and the hundreds of specific issues that abound in them and sometimes look like clutter” (What Happened, 309).Though content and style should cohere like form and matter—O’Malley protests against “the illegitimacy of separating style from content” (What Happened, 49)—Vatican II is apparently an exception. Then again, “style” is so vague that it can clothe an infinite variety of assertions. It can be “the ultimate expres18 Grillmeier,“Dogmatische Konstitution,” 1:176–78. Cf. also Joseph Ratzinger, Theo- logical Highlights of Vatican II, trans. Henry Traub, Gerard Thormann, and Werner Barzel (New York: Paulist, 1966), 45–46; Ratzinger, “The Ecclesiology of the Constitution Lumen Gentium,” in Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, ed. Stephan Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 126–29. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 445 sion of meaning” (What Happened, 49, 306) only after there has been a failure in understanding content. Though the Council is said to have “sedulously avoided definition” (Traditions and Transitions, 179), not only did it often cite the definitions of previous councils as binding statements of faith but also, in the opinion of Yves Congar, the declaration of Lumen Gentium, §21 on the sacramentality of the episcopate “expresses, by a unanimous act of the extraordinary magisterium, the common doctrine of the ordinary and universal magisterium.” It resolved a long debated question. More importantly, despite the lack of “those declaratory formulas, repeated and solemn, that normally introduce a definition,” “the matter is of such great importance, and its part in the doctrine of the episcopate is so decisive that it proves difficult to admit that the council did not pronounce here a definitive judgment.” Though not strictly a “definition,” it is “sufficient because the proposed doctrine imposes itself as one on which the Catholic magisterium universally agrees.” Umberto Betti, another Council peritus, judges that the declarations of Lumen Gentium, §§14, 20, 21, which begin “the Holy Council teaches,” are “irrevocable” and of “eternal validity.”19 Though O’Malley admits that he simplifies issues to fit his limited narrative (What Happened, 312), a more careful recognition of the Council’s stylistic nuances might change some of his conclusions. On Context and Sympathy Despite O’Malley’s call to read documents in context (What Happened, 3, 12), his reading of neo-scholasticism lacks awareness of its historical context. He judges that its manuals “stood apart in almost determined isolation not only from other forms of contemporary scholarship but to a large extent even from Neo-Scholasticism itself.”Though Aeterni Patris called for a revival of Thomism in 1879, “it was not until after Vatican II that it had any real impact on the theological textbooks used in seminaries.” Younger theologians in Europe, he holds, rejected this “spiritually arid and overly intellectualized theology officially promoted by the church” (What Happened, 62–63, 76). Do theology professors intend to bore audiences and desiccate spirituality? Medieval and Baroque theologians composed long and complicated treatises with intricate, hair-sharp distinctions precisely because such theological points mattered a great deal to them, and they were supported by a vibrant spirituality that constructed magnificent cathedrals, produced prodigies of missionary 19 Yves Congar, O.P., “In luogo di conclusione,” in La Chiesa del Vaticano II, ed. Guiherme Baraúna (Florence: Vallechi, 1965), 1262–63; Umberto Betti, O.F.M., “Qualificazione teologica della Constituzione,” in La Chiesa del Vaticano II, 269–72. 446 John M. McDermott, S.J. endeavor, and nourished martyrs. To us effete postmoderns their texts appear cluttered with distinctions too intricate for consideration because we share neither their trust in intellect nor their vibrant spirituality. We demand “relevance” to stimulate or titillate us, but when relevance is preferred to truth, relevance soon becomes irrelevant. Nothing is more irrelevant than yesterday’s relevance. Reacting against the vague meanderings of idealistic theology or the banalities of rationalist theology, the youth of the latter nineteenth century were attracted to the precision and clarity of the scholastic revival.20 Is it coincidence that today so many younger Catholics, disappointed by decades of faulty catechesis, are turning to Gilson and Maritain, Ott, Garrigou-Lagrange, and Pohle-Preuss? After transcendental theologians, epigones of Rousselot, Rahner, and Lonergan, produced reams of nebulous speculation about relying on personal experience to reformulate dogma and come to moral decisions, even if they are at variance with the Magisterium’s teaching, young believers are seeking clarity about the content of faith, reasons for belief, and moral codes in the face of an increasingly hostile secular world. One has to appreciate the cultural climate in which theologies are generated. O’Malley’s judgment about the effect of Aeterni Patris must be limited to the thesis style of the manuals. For anyone who studies and compares the Suarezian and eclectic manuals common before Aeterni Patris with the Thomistic manuals after the encyclical must recognize the difference in content. The great theologian Louis Billot was forced by Leo XIII upon the Gregorian University and his brilliant Thomist manuals, though retaining some Suarezian positions of the Society of Jesus, soon influenced the entire Catholic theological world.21 Manuals provide an extremely efficient pedagogical tool to offer students the entire teaching of the Church on particular topics as proven from Scripture, tradition, and the Magisterium before they enter into speculative justifications of the thesis under consideration and resolve difficulties. Moreover, the manuals offer a schema whose controverted issues or deeper points a good teacher might develop in lectures. Even the great transcendental thinkers, Rousselot, Maréchal, Rahner, and Lonergan, composed their own manuals. Moreover, the conceptualist theology was very integrated into its culture, perhaps excessively so. O’Malley overlooks the article of J.Wicks on manualistic theol20 Cf. Gerald McCool, S.J., Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Seabury, 1977), esp. 135–44. 21 Ibid., 236–40, and my own reading.When I was teaching at the Gregorian, one of the older professors told me that former students of Billot informed him that Billot’s lectures often moved them to prayer. For the brilliance of Billot’s theology cf. Cozzi, La Centralitá di Cristo (supra n. 14). Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 447 ogy, referred to in his footnotes. Wicks observes that the manuals “were children of their own time, the age of positivism.”As such they “showed an exemplary concern for relating revelation to history and faith to human rationality.” They also, he holds, kept theology in touch with the faith of the day and preserved the transcendence of supernatural revelation.22 In the latter half of the nineteenth century Newtonian physics and Kantian philosophy were enjoying their heyday. Both insisted on the universality of conceptually formulated laws and the primacy of facts.Yet Neo-Scholasticism, while accepting the validity of universal concepts, resisted the rationalist current of the day because it knew an infinite God and, especially for Thomists, a contingent existential order. Admittedly, as any intellectual system is developed, its weaknesses become ever more apparent and it requires multiple hair-splitting distinctions to shore itself up. Even before Fr. O’Malley’s day internal tensions were manifest in neo-scholasticism and it seemed out of touch with the relativism of modern physics and the philosophies of dynamism, evolution, and existentialism. But until Vatican II the system retained many defenders who saw that if the value of concepts was denied or relativized, thinking would be undercut and the Church’s dogmas reduced to transitory articulations of subjective experience. R. G. Collingwood, whom O’Malley cites (Traditions and Transitions, 67–69; What Happened, 37), wrote that a good historian must enter sympathetically into the worlds of values of those undergoing change and that such a task is very difficult, if not impossible.23 In O’Malley’s case a failure to appreciate the values of the conceptualist theology has adversely affected his retelling of Vatican II’s story. Lack of sympathy for conceptualist theologians may have led O’Malley into exaggeration. For example, he writes, “The fundamental error for which most of the Modernists were punished was their historical approach” (What Happened, 261). Actually the condemnations in Lamentabili and Pascendi (1907) did not attack historical research, but the philosophical and theological presuppositions employed by the Modernists. These errors included agnosticism, immanentism, and reliance on religious feeling as the norm of belief. By excluding God from historical interventions, the presuppositions lead to the separation of faith from history and, concretely, the distinctions of the Christ of history from the Christ of faith, the Church of history from the Church of faith, etc. (DS 3401–66, 22 Jared Wicks, S.J., “Theologies: Manualistic Tradition,” in Dictionary of Fundamen- tal Theology, ed. René Latourelle and Rino Fisichella (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 1102–5. 23 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; repr. New York: Oxford University, 1956), 213–31, 240–48, 302–8, 326–34. 448 John M. McDermott, S.J. 3475–3500). Pius X was actually defending historical research as a means of attaining truth. If historical research was condemned, how did Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique and the Bollandists continued to publish excellent historical studies uninterruptedly? Catholic historical research and writing, already strong before Modernism’s condemnation, burgeoned after the alleged condemnation.Actually conceptualist theology relied on historical research to guarantee the veracity of Christ’s message, its sole manner of ascertaining supernatural truths. But unlike “the modern philosophy of history,” which excludes God from history and whose stress on discontinuity and contingency motivates O’Malley’s call for “ecclesial transformation” (Traditions and Transitions, 73–81), Pius X, doubtless relying on his faith in the Incarnation, insisted that God can never be excluded from history, but can be known in and through it, and that historical truth is not a chimera but is really possible. A similar lack of sympathy with the Holy Office results in a false interpretation of its difficulties with Teilhard de Chardin. It attributed to Teilhard grave philosophic and theological errors, opines O’Malley, “presumably related in one way or another to his theories about evolution and the expanding universe” (What Happened, 88). Actually the warning explicitly says, “Putting aside a judgment about matters pertaining to the positive sciences, in philosophical and theological material it is sufficiently clear that the previously mentioned works abound with such ambiguities, also even serious errors, that they offend Catholic doctrine.”24 His scientific theories are explicitly excluded.Any theologian reading Teilhard’s works must recognize the obscurity or confusion about his understanding of the relations between nature and grace, matter and consciousness, freedom and necessity, the historical and the cosmic Christs. Even Teilhard’s friend Henri de Lubac, who corrected many errors in The Phenomenon of Man and was commissioned by Jesuit superiors to write in Teilhard’s defense, admitted that his writings contained many imprecisions and ambiguities. He was “not a theologian nor a philosopher, strictly speaking, but a mystic.”25 In a similarly critical vein O’Malley finds “ironic” that Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine led him “into a church that on the 24 Acta Apostolicae Sedis 54 (1962), 526 (issued June 30, 1962). 25 Henri de Lubac, S.J., The Religion of Teilhard de Chardin, trans. René Hague (New York: Desclee, 1967), 84–91, 125, 183–84, 186–88, 192–93, 202–4, 214–15. It should also be remembered that Teilhard’s difficulties were primarily with the Society of Jesus, whose censors long prohibited publication of his philosophicaltheological writings. Only after his death were they published by lay friends. Cf. Mary and Ellen Lukas, Teilhard:A Biography (London: Collins, 1977), 52–57, 222, 226–27, 243–44, 251–59, 277. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 449 official and unofficial level was denying that such evolution occurred” (What Happened, 77). In leaving friends, position, and his spiritual mother, was Newman so stupid or benighted as not to know the Church he was entering?26 As proof O’Malley refers to Billot’s publication in 1904 of On the Immutability of Tradition against the Modern Heresy of Evolutionism.Actually Billot’s volume, published sixty years after Newman’s conversion and twenty-five years after Newman’s elevation to the cardinalate purple, serves more to refute O’Malley than to support him; it deserves some discussion. Billot recognized a “certain evolution” in the Church’s belief as she went “in the process of time” from simple faith to clearer, more precise understanding.To refute heresy the Fathers developed a more exact, technical terminology. Anticipating Pope John’s words at the opening of Vatican II, Billot saw the need of “distinguishing the ways of understanding and signifying from the realities understood and signified.” He not only admitted that the Holy Spirit’s charism was granted to the Church because “the full presentation of the complete teaching immediately from the beginning would scarcely have been connaturally possible” but he also recognized that heretics usually introduced their novelties cloaked in traditional language without preserving the reality intended by simple faith. On the occasion of heretical distortions, the Fathers arrived at a deeper “intimate penetration of the revealed truth.” He even notes that some Fathers erred in their expressions as they sought to advance from the “state of simple faith” to correct “theological speculation.” He quotes J. B. Franzelin, the nineteenth century’s foremost Roman manualist, Aquinas, and Augustine, as authorities recognizing the same type of dogmatic progress.27 This may not be O’Malley’s understanding of dogmatic development, but, despite its flaws, it accords easily with Newman’s views. If O’Malley had studied the great conceptualist theologians more sympathetically, he might have acquired greater insight 26 In his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 2nd ed. (1878; repr. Garden City: Doubleday, 1960), 33, 36, but originally composed in 1845, Newman presupposes that Christian revelation consists of “a definite teaching from above” which in history manifests “real continuity of doctrine.” Indeed, in his enumeration of the seven notes that distinguish genuine developments from corruptions, he mentions first “preservation of type,” second “continuity of principles,” and sixth “conservative action upon its past” while insisting on “power of assimilation,”“anticipation of the future,” and “chronic vigor” (ibid., 177–207).Vatican I agrees with him in acknowledging “growth and vehement progress” in “understanding, knowledge, and wisdom” regarding the deposit of faith, while simultaneously insisting that the deposit be faithfully preserved in suo dumtaxat genere, in eodem scilicet dogmate, eodem sensu eademque sententia (DS 3020). 27 Louis Billot, S.J., De Immutabilitate Traditionis, 4th ed. (Rome: Gregoriana, 1929), 34–78, esp. 34–39, 48–52, 62–65, 75. 450 John M. McDermott, S.J. into their project. Certainly Newman, Franzelin, and Billot manifested a more flexible notion of doctrinal development than O’Malley, who simply states,“Some doctrines taught by the church in the twentieth century, such as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary, were unknown as such in the church of the apostolic or patristic periods” (What Happened, 37).28 Misreading Sources Though on many points different theological interpretations can be defended, on the relation of Scripture and Tradition more than a difference of interpretation is involved. O’Malley misunderstands his sources. He asserts that H. Jedin’s history of Trent “made clear that subsequent Catholic interpretation of Trent’s few words on the subject, used in polemic against Protestants, had gone far beyond what Trent intended to say.”Then he continues: Other historical studies had noted that before the sixteenth century, “Scripture alone” was in some form, not quite Luther’s, the traditional opinion, held even by Thomas Aquinas. A further problem with the [preliminary] schema [De Fontibus Revelationis ] was its designation of Scripture and Tradition as sources of Revelation, whereas even Trent had made clear that the preaching of Christ and the Apostles was the source, transmitted in two ways—“in written books and in unwritten traditions.” (What Happened, 146–47) As proof of his position O’Malley cites Jedin, the Tridentine decree, and Summa theologiae I, q. 1, especially a. 8, ad 2. These texts do not support him. The Summa text does not use the expression “Scripture alone.” Rather, in discussing the use of authority in sacra doctrina,Thomas holds it necessary to “obey the authority of those to whom revelation occurred.” Thus sacred doctrine “arguing from necessity, properly employs the authorities of the canonical Scripture; it employs the authorities of other teachers (doctores), as if arguing from proper [principles], but in a probable 28 Cf. Xavier Le Bachelet, “Immaculée Conception,” in Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, ed. A. Vacant and E. Mangenot et al. (Paris: Letouzey, 1902–50), 7/1:871–1115 for a complete consideration of all the texts in favor of the doctrine; he even considers the doctrine implicitly revealed in Genesis 3:15 and Luke 1:28. The doctrine was very explicitly proposed in East and West by the Middle Ages, even if some, Aquinas among them, questioned it.Who can forget Hopkins’s praise of Duns Scotus “who fired France for Mary without spot”? O’Malley might quibble in favor of his statement’s correctness with his modifying “as such”; surely the doctrine was not believed with the precision later attained, but why does he deny continuity in faith, even if implicit? Bachelet makes clear, however, that by the Middle Ages the doctrine was explicit. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 451 way (probabiliter). For our faith relies on the revelation made to the Apostles and Prophets, who wrote the canonical books, not on any possible revelation made to other teachers.” “Authorities” here refers primarily to people of authority, not to books, and does not limit their received revelation to canonical Scripture. In the article’s corpus Thomas maintains that sacred doctrine does not have to prove its first principles, “the articles of faith.”29 Later texts make clear that the articles of faith are given in creeds and other conciliar pronouncements binding for faith. He not only cites conciliar statements as authoritative in his explanations (e.g., ST I, q. 29, a. 3; q. 30, a. 1; q. 31, a. 1; III, q. 2, a. 1 and ad 1; q. 2, a. 3, q. 2, a. 6; q. 4, a. 3) but also he explicitly demands that faith affirm the articles of faith proposed by the Church (ST II–II, q. 5, a. 3). Since heresy corrupts the faith, the pope, alone or in an ecumenical council, can authoritatively determine what belongs to the faith (ST I, q. 32, a. 4; q. 36, a. 2, ad 2; II–II, q. 1, a. 10; q. 11, aa. 1–4).30 As Y. Congar wrote,“No Catholic can uphold a principle of Scriptura sola.The facts, moreover, do not allow it.”At Trent, Jedin noted, “[T]he Lutheran principle of ‘the Bible alone’ eliminated [Tradition] as a source of revelation” and was decisively rejected by the Council Fathers. After the appearance of Jedin’s volume, J. Geiselmann ignited a debate, arguing that the substitution of “in written books and unwritten traditions” for a previous “partially (partim) in written books and partially (partim) in unwritten traditions” indicated that Trent meant to recognize a single source of gospel truth transmitted in two manners. H. Lennerz rebutted his contention, showing that the majority of the Fathers at Trent considered Tradition a source alongside Scripture and intended that in their teaching. Other commentators came to a middle position, agreeing with Lennerz’s historical proof but recognizing that Geiselmann’s conclusion was legitimate since the change, made for an unknown reason, did not oblige the Church to acknowledge two separate sources of revelation. Actually, before Lennerz, Jedin had written, “There can be no doubt that though the majority of the theologians of Trent may 29 In the first quaestio Thomas uses sacra doctrina in a double sense: doctrine taught and the act of teaching. Thus sacred doctrine relies on human authorities who received revelation to transmit it and on “articles of faith.” Cf. Gerald Van Ackern, S.J., Sacra Doctrina (Rome: Catholic Book Agency, 1952), 78–117, esp. 107–17. 30 Thomas’s appeal to ecclesial authorities for the content of faith is not new. It is obvious in the Summa contra Gentiles IV, cc. 24–25. For a good example of how dogma serves as the norm for Scripture’s interpretation, even against the apparent literal sense, cf. ST I, q. 31, aa. 2 and 4. Cf. also Thomas Prügl,“Thomas Aquinas as Interpreter of Scripture,” in The Theology of Thomas Aquinas, ed. Rik van Nieuwenhove and Joseph Wawrykow (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2005), 405–6, for Thomas’s exegesis of Scripture within the norm of tradition. 452 John M. McDermott, S.J. not have approved the formula partim-partim, they approved the thing itself, that is, the statement that dogmatic tradition was a channel of revelation which supplemented the Scriptures.”31 Here O’Malley is caught on the horns of a dilemma: if he wishes to interpret Trent as holding for a single source of revelation, he has to “proof-text,” upholding a minimalist interpretation which depends upon a lacuna, that is, the removal of a phrase which actually reflected the intention of the Council Fathers; if, to the contrary, he wishes to interpret the “spirit” of Trent and the intention of the Fathers, he has to affirm two sources of revelation and contradict his method for interpreting Vatican II. Regressive Interpretations Given O’Malley’s hermeneutic exalting the “spirit of Vatican II,” the reader must be wary lest post-conciliar issues distort the interpretations of conciliar texts. For example, the three ecclesiological schemata culminating in Lumen Gentium are said to “indicate in different ways that even the non-baptized who sincerely follow their consciences are somehow joined to the church and saved” (What Happened, 175). That position not only contradicts previous statements of Scripture and the Church on the necessity of faith and baptism for salvation (e.g., Jn 3:5; Mk 16:16; Heb 11:6; Rom 10:9–17), indeed on the necessity of entering the Church for salvation (e.g., DS 802; Lumen Gentium, §14) but also is not found in Lumen Gentium or any other document.Though O’Malley makes reference to Lumen Gentium, §8, which affirms that “many elements of sanctification and truth are found outside [the Church’s] visible bounds,” he allows that the statement “can be interpreted as substantially the same teaching as in the Feeney case.” What then can be the foundation for O’Malley’s assurance on the salvation of the non-baptized? His phrasing recalls Lumen Gentium, §16, a text often cited by K. Rahner to prove his 31 Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent: vol. 2, trans. Ernest Graf (London: Nelson, 1961; German original 1957), 58–62, 73–75; Josef Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. W. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966); Heinrich Lennerz, S.J.,“Scriptura Sola,” Gregorianum 40 (1959): 39–53; Lennerz, “Sine Scripta Traditione,” Gregorianum 40: 624–35; Lennerz, “Scriptura et Traditio,” Gregorianum 42 (1961): 517–22. For the mediating position cf. Johannes Beumer, S.J., “Das katholische Traditionsprinzip in seiner heute neu erkannten Problematik,” Scholastik 36 (1961): 217–40; Beumer, Die mündliche Überlieferung als Glaubensquelle (Freiburg: Herder, 1962), 81–84;Yves Congar, O.P., La Tradition et les traditions (Paris: Fayard, 1960), 214–18; Gabriel Moran, F.C.S., Scripture and Tradition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1963); Joseph Ratzinger (with Karl Rahner), Revelation and Tradition, trans. W. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 32–37, 50–66. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 453 contention that the Council affirmed salvation outside the Church. O’Malley might have been misled by a widespread acceptance of that position, but a careful examination of the text refutes Rahner’s interpretation.32 Let us follow its development. Lumen Gentium, §13 ends with the statement: “Therefore all men are called to this catholic unity of the People of God, which prefigures and promotes universal peace, and in various ways they belong to it or are ordained to it, as Catholic faithful or other believers in Christ or finally all men everywhere who are called to salvation by God’s grace.” The text concerns the orientation of various groups to the Church; it does not treat the question of the salvation of those outside the visible Church. Lumen Gentium, §14 starts with a statement of principle: “The Church is necessary for salvation,” as are faith and baptism. “Hence those men could not be saved who, though knowing that the Church was founded as necessary by God through Jesus Christ, nonetheless would not want to enter it or persevere in it.” Thereafter it considers explicit members and catechumens; the latter are joined to her by an explicit desire. Lumen Gentium, §15 treats the cases of various Christians who “are joined in some real way to us” by the “gifts, graces, and sanctifying power” of the Holy Spirit who moves them to Catholic unity. Lumen Gentium, §16 begins,“Finally those who have not yet accepted the Gospel are ordered to the People of God by various considerations (rationibus ).” After mentioning Jews and Moslems, the chapter turns to those “who seek the unknown God in shadows and images.” God is not far from them since “He gives to all life, inspiration, and all things (cf.Acts 17:25–28) and the Savior wants all men to be saved (cf. 1 Tim 2:4).”Then come the crucial sentences: For those can attain eternal salvation who are without fault ignorant of Christ’s Gospel and Church, but seek God with a sincere heart and, under grace’s influence, try by works to fulfill His will made known through the demand of conscience. Nor does divine Providence deny helps necessary for salvation to those who without fault have not yet arrived at explicit knowledge of God and strive with divine grace to lead a good life. For whatever goodness or truth is found among them the Church considers as a preparation for the Gospel and a gift from Him who illuminates every man in order that they might at last (tandem ) have light. 32 Karl Rahner, S.J.,“Die anonymen Christen,” in Schriften zur Theologie (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1959–84), 6:553–54; Rahner, “Atheismus und implizites Christentum,” in Schriften zur Theologie, 8:189–93; Rahner, “Kirche, Kirchen, und Religionen,” in Schriften zur Theologie, 8:356–57; Rahner,“Das neue Bild der Kirche,” in Schriften zur Theologie, 8:338–45; Rahner, Grundkurs, 156. 454 John M. McDermott, S.J. In Rahner’s theology all grace is understood from uncreated grace, God’s presence in the soul, which produces sanctifying grace and works itself out as actual graces in individual acts.33 According to his theory the text affirms that grace, uncreated grace with its immediate consequence of sanctifying grace, is given to all men of good will. But it is questionable whether the Council Fathers accepted his theology and affirmed all its implications. In the conceptualist theology, in which they had been “indoctrinated” (What Happened, 290), graces are bestowed in reverse order: actual graces arouse the desire for baptism, which brings sanctifying grace, which, rendering the soul holy, prepares it for the divine indwelling.The mere mention of grace does not imply sanctifying grace; indeed, unlike Lumen Gentium, §15, which explicitly mentions the Spirit’s “sanctifying power” active in the lives of Christians, whose baptisms were always acknowledged as valid, Lumen Gentium, §16 makes no mention of sanctifying grace. The good works accomplished under grace are only the preparation for the gospel, and their goodness is given for a purpose:“that they might at last have life.” In quoting Acts 17, Lumen Gentium, §16 depicts with St. Paul the state of men to whom the Gospel had not come, while I Timothy 2 provides the reason for Paul’s mission of preaching to the Gentiles. The statement that people with a sincere heart inculpably ignorant of the Gospel might “attain eternal salvation” says nothing more than what Pius IX declared more than a hundred years previously:“Those who labor under invincible ignorance concerning our sacred religion and who lead an honest and good life, diligently observing the natural law and its commandments engraved by God in all hearts and prepared to obey Him, can, by the effective power (operante virtute ) of divine light and grace, attain eternal life” (DS 2866). Pius IX prudently left that manner of attainment in God’s merciful and just hands. If no one can be sure of his own salvation (1 Cor 4:3–5; DS 1540–41, 1566, 1572–73), pontificating about the salvation of others beyond Scripture and Church tradition risks becoming a presumptuous adventure.34 Alois Grillmeier, one of the periti responsible for the composition of Lumen Gentium, §16, notes that Lumen Gentium, §16 is concerned with the orientation of various non-Christian groups to the Church, not with the question whether anyone can be saved outside the Church. Regarding the salvation of the sincere God-seeker “the constitution says nothing about 33 McDermott, “Karl Rahner in Tradition,” 27–29. 34 On this question cf. our “Storia universale e storia della salvezza,” in Dizionario di teologia fondamentale, ed. R. Latourelle and R. Fisichella (Assisi: Cittadella, 1990), 1193–1206. (Unfortunately the English edition changed our original text for “inclusivism” and introduced various imprecisions.) Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 455 how finally the actual justification (in faith and love) occurs. It is only concerned to show that every connection with God is already aimed at the acceptance of the saving God and thereby also is oriented to the people of God.” Whether sincere God-seekers receive the offered sanctifying grace “within this guiltless theoretical atheism (perhaps through a theism in the non-reflective moral actualization of their concrete existence under grace, which implies revelation and faith) or only through a grace that leads them out of this atheism (when?), about that the text is silent.”35 In a private conversation Grillmeier told me that when he submitted his commissioned commentary on Lumen Gentium I–II to the Herder commentary on Vatican II, Rahner, one of its editors, had the submission returned repeatedly to him, requesting the inclusion of a statement about the possibility of salvation outside the Church. But Grillmeier resisted the pressure since, he said, such had not been the intent of the Council. O’Malley, on the contrary, perhaps taken up into the general theological mood dominant after the Council, does not question the compatibility of his interpretation of Lumen Gentium with previous ecclesial tradition. On another point O’Malley is similarly moved by the post-Vatican II mood. He considers the question of artificial birth control one of the most important basic issues of the Council, even though it was never debated at length on the Council floor. He attributes to Maximos IV Saigh, the Melkite patriarch of Antioch, the view “For the faithful it is a sad and agonizing issue, for there is a cleavage between the official teaching of the church and the contrary practice in most families” (What Happened, 5–6, 82–83, 236–38, 265–66, 284–85, 311–12). While Maximos’s opinion is correctly cited, its truth is never questioned. Actually in the United States sociological surveys before Vatican II show that the great majority of American Catholics agreed with the prohibition of artificial birth control and were following Church teaching.36 From conversations during my own studies in Rome, 1973–76, I learned from third world priests that the majority of Catholics in their countries were also 35 Grillmeier, “Dogmatische Konstitution,” 205–7; for Ad Gentes, §7 cf. Suso Brechter, O.S.B., “Dekret über die Missionstätigkeit der Kirche: Einleitung und Kommentar,” in Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil, 3:141–42. 36 Andrew Greely,“Family Planning among American Catholics,” Chicago Studies 2 (1963): 47–58; Allan Carlson, “The Future of Marriage and the Family in the United States,” in The Church, Marriage and the Family, ed. Kenneth Whitehead (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s, 2007), 310–12; cf. also Ambrogio Valsecchi, Controversy: The Birth Control Debate 1958–1968, trans. Dorothy White (Washington, DC: Corpus 1968), 37–118, who shows that the question of the “pill” was first raised at the very end of 1963, and only in 1965 did the debate really heat up among moralists. 456 John M. McDermott, S.J. obedient to Church doctrine. Humanae Vitae occasioned a tornado of dissent in the first world because Church teaching was publicly challenged by theologians like Charles Curran, who used the confusion after the Council to promote the idea of a “sinful Church,” a pilgrim people of God searching for truth along with others.37 On this issue O’Malley is apparently following his hermeneutical principal whereby subsequent needs determine the interpretation of previous historical events and change their meaning. But one must be careful to ascertain facts before drawing conclusions. According to O’Malley’s Vatican II,“the church needs and learns from the world” and “the world helps the church in being true to herself—an unprecedented stance for an ecclesiastical document” (What Happened, 234, 268). Given the watchful presence of the minority at the Council and the concern of the majority to remain faithful to tradition, O’Malley’s interpretation has to be greatly nuanced. For his opinion he refers in general to Gaudium et Spes. The Latin words for “learn,” discere and ediscere, occur only three time in that pastoral constitution and only once is the Church its subject: [The Church] learned from the beginning of her history to express Christ’s message with the help of concepts and languages of different peoples and, in addition, tried to explain it with the wisdom of philosophers: her purpose was to adapt the Gospel to the comprehension of all men and the requirements of the wise, insofar as it is appropriate. Indeed, this adapted preaching of the revealed Word should remain the law of all evangelization. (Gaudium et spes §44) This text should not be exaggerated, as the conciliar context makes clear. Since Christ, the fullness of revelation in whom and for whom all things have been created, is present in his Body, the Church (Lumen Gentium, §§7, 45; Dei Verbum, §2; Sacrosanctum Concilium, §§6–7), there is nothing essential which the Church has to learn from outside herself. Although, Gaudium et spes §44 continues, the Church should call upon the help of people living in the world, experts in its organization and training, and knowing its mentality, she discerns from her own fullness.“With the help of the Holy Spirit, it is the task of the whole people of God, particularly of her pastors and theologians, to listen to and distinguish the many voices of our times and to interpret them in the light of the divine Word, in order that the revealed truth may be more deeply penetrated, better understood, and more suitably presented.” As a historical social reality 37 For an evaluation of Curran’s position cf. John McDermott, S.J.,“Charles Curran’s Moral Theory: Foundational Sexual Ethics,” Anthropotes 23 (2007): 167–226. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 457 with a visible structure the Church “can be and is enriched by the evolution of social life, not as if anything would be lacking in the constitution given her by Christ, but in order to know more profoundly, to express better, and to accommodate [her constitution] more fruitfully to our times.” The Church admits that from those who promote human community “she receives not a little help, insofar as [the ecclesial community] depends upon external things. Indeed from the opposition of those who resist and persecute her she confesses that she has greatly profited and can profit.” Grace requires nature as a foundation, but grace depends upon God alone. Similarly the Church exists in the world, but her fidelity to Christ and her own essence depends upon the divine gift, Jesus Christ, the fullness of reality. The world may stimulate the Church’s reflection upon her own mystery, but the world cannot tell her who she is or what the meaning of life is.While the world learns in order to come to knowledge of the mystery that man is, going from lack to fullness, the Church lives from fullness unto ever greater fullness. She lives the mystery of the kingdom that is present and still to come, the “already” that is “not yet.” The Church “is [Christ’s] Body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all” (Eph 1:23). From fullness she grows into superabundance (cf. Lk 6:38; 1 Thess 3:12; 2 Cor 4:15; Eph 1:7–10). At the basis of O’Malley’s relativizing interpretation of the Church may be the one-sided theology widely propagated after the Council which reduced Rahner’s theology to a vague Plotinian schema whereby everything emanates from and is attracted back to an infinite, ineffable mystery. Although Rahner insisted on the absolute necessity of Christ, the sole mediator of salvation, his system has difficulty grounding that necessity. If sanctifying grace is a participation in God’s life and God is immediately present to the soul as uncreated grace-revelation, it is hard to justify the need for a further absolute in history where all signs are finite and therefore relative. Moreover Rahner had difficulty defining the notion of person, changing his six definitions according to need and making the beatific vision, usually regarded as the fulfillment of nature, a constitutive moment of the hypostatic union. Indeed in every human nature was implanted a desire for the hypostatic union as well as a desire for the beatific vision, and the two desires were never distinguished.38 Insofar as Rahner recognized that the modern notion of “person” refers to a self-conscious, free center of activity, which classical philosophy applied to a human nature, and Jesus was said to have a human selfconscious, free center of activity vis-à-vis a divine self-conscious, free 38 McDermott, “Karl Rahner,” 36–45, 58–59, n. 112. 458 John M. McDermott, S.J. center of activity, it is hardly surprising that theologians following his thought’s trajectory would declare Jesus a “human person.”39 Although O’Malley never explicitly adopts that position, his distinction of “the person of God” from the “person of Jesus” allows ambiguity: the Council “affirmed what had been revealed to the human race from above was not doctrines as such but the very person of God, especially as the divinity was manifested in the person of Christ. Without explicitly affiliating itself with any specific school of Christology, the council consistently presented Christ as servant and liberator” (What Happened, 295). One perceives the difficulties. God is tripersonal, not a “person,” and it would be much more exact to affirm that while the divinity might be manifested in Christ’s humanity, Christ’s person is divine. This insufficient understanding of person in Christology may also explain the earlier cited position affirming that since it is impossible to exhaust the intelligibility of God’s self-revelation, our authenticity is always “at least somewhat partial and incomplete” (Traditions and Transitions, 79). There are other points on which O’Malley’s interpretation can be questioned. He tends to overstate contrasts as between the Augustinian and Thomistic evaluations of sexuality, the cultic and the social activist priest, conscience and obedience to Church laws, authority and service, etc. Indeed in Vatican II’s change of literary styles from previous councils he perceives the opposition of “almost two different visions of Catholicism: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to ongoing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault-finding to appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to inner appropriation” (What Happened, 307). If style is a matter of identity (What Happened, 305), the Catholic Church must have suffered a traumatic identity crisis at Vatican II and emerged a 39 Karl Rahner, S.J., and Herbert Vorgrimler,“Person,” in Kleines theologisches Wörter- buch (Freiburg: Herder, 1961), 283; Piet Schoonenberg, S.J., The Christ, trans. Della Couling (New York: Seabury, 1971), 71–91; Schoonenberg, “Spirit Christology and Logos Christology,” Bijdragen 38 (1977): 368; Edward Schillebeeckx, O.P., Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, trans. Hubert Hoskins (New York: Seabury, 1979), 601–4, 655–56; Jon Sobrino, S.J., Jesus the Liberator, trans. Paul Burns and Francis McDonagh (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 158–59, cf. also 147–50; Roger Haight, S.J., Jesus Symbol of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 391, 441–43, 461–62;William Dych, S.J., Thy Kingdom Come (New York: Herder & Herder, 1999), 54–55. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 459 totally changed entity! Such exaggerated contrasts seemingly stem from O’Malley’s desire to support his theory of Vatican II’s ecclesial revolution. Desire does control perception. Before concluding, however, our critique should examine O’Malley’s main thesis, the alleged Roman frustration of the bishops’ hopes for a more collegial Church. Collegiality O’Malley sees the Council as an attempt of the bishops, the periphery, to assert themselves over against the center, the pope and the Roman Curia. “Collegiality” is the watchword for this issue, the word “most bitterly contested” during the Council. It is considered, along with clerical celibacy and birth control, to be “so sensitive or potentially explosive that Pope Paul withheld them from the council’s agenda” (What Happened, 6, 49, 163, 302). The preliminary voting (Oct. 30, 1963) on De Ecclesia’s second chapter dealing with the hierarchy was strongly in favor of collegiality; it was “another turning point in the council” when, “despite differences in emphasis and outlook, there was agreement in principle on some critical and controversial issues.” There and then “in principle, collegiality had achieved a secure and central status as a way the church operates—or is supposed to operate” (What Happened, 184).40 This turn marked an adaptation to the democratic temper of the times and was “symptomatic of a more general trend to promote collegial relationships throughout the church” in terms of collaboration with priests and laity (What Happened, 302–5). Maximos IV Saigh emerged as collegiality’s chief advocate since from the Council’s beginning he promoted the authority of patriarchs and bishops against the concentration of all authority in the pope with his Curia. He proposed that a small group of bishops with rotating membership in perpetual session remain in Rome to assist the pope collegially as the supreme body of the Church (What 40 O’Malley actually exaggerates the opposition: 16 percent of the bishops, not “almost 20 percent,” opposed the proposal on the relation of council and pope; 19 percent, not “almost 25 percent,” opposed consideration of the reinstatement of the deaconate, a proposal which O’Malley interprets to have “sidestepped the celibacy issue” (What Happened, 185). (Later, What Happened, 209, notes that the proposal to ordain as deacons young men not bound to celibacy was rejected by the majority. How much support would have been found for any reduction of priestly celibacy? One suspects again O’Malley’s eisegesis in making clerical celibacy a basic issue [What Happened, 6]; even he admits that Paul VI’s decision to exclude the topic from the council “met with applause” from the Fathers when some Brazilian bishops sought to introduce the issue just before the council’s end [What Happened, 271]—in Acta Synodalia IV/1, 41, Cardinal Tisserant’s letter speaks of “repeated applause.”) 460 John M. McDermott, S.J. Happened, 125–26, 191). In its first revision, the decree on the episcopal office, Christus Dominus, §5, proposed “in very general terms” an episcopal body in order “to make collegiality a functioning reality, along the lines proposed by Maximos and others a year earlier.” While its basic orientation was approved, the high number of qualified votes sent the decree back to committee (What Happened, 210–11). Before the committee produced a rewritten document, Paul VI intervened with his motu proprio, Apostolica Sollicitudo, establishing a consultative synod of bishops from the entire world. Although initial reaction was favorable to this institutional expression of collegiality, O’Malley opines that the Fathers desiring collegiality should have had “serious misgivings” at this “preemptive strike by the center.” For the Synod was only consultative and “subject ‘immediately and directly to the power’ of the pope.” “The body described in Apostolica Sollicitudo could hardly have been further from what Maximos had proposed the previous year.With one stroke the text cut collegiality off from grounding in the institutional reality of the church” (What Happened, 252–53). Hence “collegiality, the linchpin in the center-periphery relationship promoted by the majority, ended up an abstract teaching without point of entry into the social reality of the church. It ended up an ideal, no match for the deeply entrenched system.” As a result “the majority was consistently frustrated” (What Happened, 311–12). However widespread was the support for collegiality, O’Malley overlooks the vastly differing understandings of it which were expressed by the Council Fathers. There was no definition, much less a clearly articulated institutional vision, of collegiality which was commonly accepted by the Council.41 That is doubtless why the proposal of a collegiate body in the revised Christus Dominus, §5 was left very vague. It is misleading to take Maximos’s vision of an episcopal assembly or council as normative for all the bishops. Doubtless, because their views on collegiality varied so widely, the bishops gladly accepted the pope’s initiative in Apostolica Sollicitudo. Even the Bologna school admits, “In general the fathers were very receptive of the announcement [of Apostolica Sollicitudo], even though they were not in a position to assess the development of the new institution.” For “the pope’s decision dispensed the Council from a difficult discussion that was far from desired by all. By giving the impression that he had come down in favor of what the fathers wanted, Paul VI gave the majority the feeling that it had won its case; such, at least, was the impression at the 41 Hermann-Josef Sieben, S.J., Katholische Konzilsidee im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993), 316–30. On the development of the ecclesiological schema, cf. our “Lumen Gentium:The Once and Future Constitution,” 138–46. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 461 time.”42 In fact the bishops approved Christus Dominus, §5 by an overwhelming majority, 2,171 in favor, only 8 opposed, the most positive vote for any paragraph in the first chapter of Christus Dominus.The pope’s specification of the synod accorded perfectly with the bishops’ previously expressed views. A preliminary draft of Christus Dominus, §5, which was composed to replace the first document on bishops proposed to the Fathers, expressed the hope that to lighten his work the pope would call some bishops from the whole world to help him “in ways and for reasons to be suitably decided, even, if it should please the same Supreme Pontiff, summoning them for a meeting (Coetus) or deliberative body of sorts [Consilium quoddam—not Concilium].”43 A revised version added the words “by him,” that is, the pope, after “decided,” in accord with the wish of many Fathers, the Theological Committee’s Relatio reported, “in order that it should appear more clearly that it pertains exclusively to him alone to determine beforehand the previously stated prescriptions.”Thereby the opinion of “one or other Father” that the members be elected by bishops’ conferences was put aside. In the revised version the phrase “if it should please the same Supreme Pontiff ” was dropped, probably because it seemed redundant after the previous emphasis on the pope’s free initiative in summoning the bishops. But the next revision restored the phrase in a slightly altered form, “if it should please him (Eidem),” before “even summoning. . . .” The Fathers were clearly leaving the role of the episcopal advisory council up to the pope. The Relatio made very clear that “many Fathers” insisted that the suggested “Central Consilium be the sign of the episcopal college’s participation in the care for the universal Church, but not in the sense, as some desired, that the Consilium be an 42 Gilles Routhier, “Finishing the Work Begun: The Trying Experience of the Fourth Period,” in History of Vatican II, 5:57–60. The next sentence attempts to undermine the unanimity: “Others, however, had the impression that the Pope had snatched from the majority an even more resounding victory.” The only proof of this is the quoted remark of an otherwise anonymous monsignor of San Carlo, a seminary in Rome. For the ideologically perceptive, one swallow makes a spring, one drop amounts to a deluge. 43 In the terminology of Vatican II, consilium is usually employed to describe God’s redemptive plan, or counsel, or an evangelical counsel or proffered counsel. In the limited number of times when it is applied to a gathering of bishops, priests, or laity it is usually clear that the intended gathering offers counsel and does not legislate: Christus Dominus, §§27, 38; Apostolicam Actuositatem, §26. Orientalium Ecclesiarum, §23 assigns a normative role to the patriarchs who determine liturgical, linguistic norms with a synod or a “concilium of prelates.” Only in Perfectae Caritatis, §34, where consilia are listed alongside capitula for religious orders and congregations, might more than a deliberative role be assigned to them, depending on the congregations’ constitutions. 462 John M. McDermott, S.J. exercise of the task of the episcopal college.”44 The final, solemnly approved paragraph specifically responded to that wish. It reads: Let bishops, chosen from different parts of the globe, in ways and for reasons determined or to be determined by the Roman Pontiff, provide to the church’s Supreme Pastor a stronger effective assistance in a deliberative body [Consilium ], which is properly named synod of bishops. Acting on behalf of the whole Catholic episcopate, it certainly gives at the same time a sign that all the bishops in hierarchical communion share the care for the universal Church. This text was substituted for the previous text simply because Paul VI’s motu proprio Apostolica Sollicitudo (Sept. 15, 1965) had resolved the question of the type of the deliberative body, for which the Council’s secretary general lauded the Pope:“Again and again we give thanks to the Church’s Supreme Pastor and most beloved Father and we rejoice greatly because in a question of such great moment there is clearly manifested the perfect union of souls between the members of the episcopal College and its Head.”45 It 44 Acta Synodalia III/6, 122–23, 131; IV/2, 513; for the vote cf. Xavier Rynne, The Fourth Session (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 129. 45 Acta Synodalia IV/2, 618–19; that the term “synod” does not equate it to “coun- cil” is clear because it is chosen by Paul VI, who specified its nature in Apostolica Sollicitudo:“The task (munus) of teaching and giving counsel belongs to the Synod of Bishops by its very nature. It will be able also to enjoy a deliberative power, where this is granted to it by the Roman Pontiff, in whose power it will be in this case to make valid the Synod’s decisions.”The pope decides when the synod is to be called, the matter to be considered, and the order of its agenda; he can also add members to the synod beyond those attending by office or elected by episcopal conferences (Acta Apostolicae Sedis 57 [1965], 776–77, 779).The secretary general’s remarks also make it clear that he understood “synod” as a “deliberative body” (Consilium seu Synodum Episcoporum: Acta Synodalia IV/2, 620). Sieben, Katholische Konzilsidee, 326–30, interprets the request of September 18, 1964 for a consilium already in terms of an episcopal synod. In view of the Relatio hardly any other conclusion seems possible. Given that in previous discussions about the pope’s role with regard to the acts of the whole episcopal college it was already agreed that “the actual exercise of the power of the corpus of the bishops will be determined by the rules approved by the pope” and that no collegial act would be valid without the pope’s approval (cf. Gérard Philips, “Die Geschichte der dogmatischen Konstitution über die Kirche ‘Lumen Gentium,’ ” Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil, 1:144–45), it could hardly be expected that more authority be given to a partial representation of the whole college. Apostolica Sollicitudo was responding perfectly to the bishops’ desires.The world’s leading expert on ecclesial councils with a shelf of published volumes, Sieben (Katholische Konzilsidee, 330), says of Vatican II:“The council’s statements about the ecumenical council only confirm traditional views.” This is far from a revolution in the Church’s self-understanding.The real novelties are the consultative bishops’ synod and the recognition of the bishops’ conferences. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 463 requires great creative imagination to discover in the Pope’s decision a “preemptive strike by the center” frustrating the bishops’ wishes. O’Malley seems to have identified a post-Vatican II liberal rallying cry for democracy in Patriarch Maximos’s conciliar speech and extended it by regressive eisegesis to the whole college of bishops. A small minority’s view of collegiality is erroneously projected onto the majority of bishops. By defining clearly neither the bishops’ nor his own understanding of collegiality O’Malley leaves great leeway for the expression of discontent. He never touches the underlying theological difficulty of balancing the papal authority recognized by Vatican I and II with the authority of bishops. Even today theologians debate who is the subject of supreme authority in the Church: pope, council, or pope and council as two inadequately distinguished subjects.46 How then were the bishops expected to determine precisely the juridical relation of a novel episcopal institution to the pope’s office? (Power of decision requires jurisdiction.) Discussions might have been extended endlessly without resolution.The Pope’s intervention is easily construed as a great assistance to the Council on this issue. It resolved an impossibly contentious issue without committing the Council to any theory, leaving open the possibility of future resolution with maturity of reflection. Perhaps no clear juridical resolution can be found. Much as the Church needs a juridical structure, she is more than an institution. The Body of Christ is a communion of love in which authority is bestowed for service. While a juridical structure requires a single source of authority, the structure does not define the Church’s ultimate reality. Essential as Peter is to the Church, he never is apart from the Church’s apostolic faith and the successors of the Apostles. He is bound to both. In an extreme case a heretical pope ceases to be pope.47 No pope substitutes for Christ, the 46 Cf. Sieben, Katholische Konzilsidee, 330–37, 346–50; and the debate goes on. 47 To the axiom “the first see is judged by no one” was usually joined the proviso “unless he deviate from the faith.” Simony was considered a heresy and justified removing the pope, as in the case of John XII; it was the reason for Gregory VI’s abdication. Pope Marcellinus was long considered (falsely) to have been deposed for apostasy. Cf. Salvatore Vacca, O.F.M. Cap., Prima Sedes a Nemine Iudicatur (Rome: Gregorian, 1993), 61–63, 80, 134, 149–50, 154, 157, 161, 176, 178–80, 187–88, 193, 201, 208, 230–31, 242, 246, 254, 257, 262, 264. Pope Honorius, though dead, was condemned as a heretic (wrongly) by Constantinople III (DS 552).That decision was accepted by his successor Leo II, who excused it as due to negligence in following the lead of the Patriarch Sergius (Mansi 11:733, 1052). John XXII, accused of heresy by the king of France, submitted his view on the particular judgment to an ecclesial committee and publicly retracted his errors, deferring “to the decision of the Church and our successors” (DS 990–91). 464 John M. McDermott, S.J. one Absolute in time, who remains Eucharistically present in his Church. How the Church arrives at a papal impeachment cannot be juridically fixed because such legislation, touching the Church’s structure juris divini, would impossibly establish a juridical instance over the pope, who holds supreme jurisdiction (DS 3060, 3063–64). Nonetheless the bishops enjoy their own proper authority by episcopal consecration (Lumen Gentium, §21) and united “together with their head, the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, they have supreme and full authority over the universal Church” (Lumen Gentium, §22). In times of crisis and confusion, as at Constance, an ecumenical council can choose or determine the identity of the pope and resolve a schism. Yet the very success of Constance went to excess in subsequent decades. Because the Council prescribed the regular convocation of ecumenical councils every five years, Martin V called a council to convene in Pavia in 1423. Since the bishops were too concerned with matters of their own dioceses, few heeded the call and after eleven months of irresolute inactivity the Council dissolved itself. The next summoning resulted in the Council of Basel, which, driven principally by theologians and canonists, sought to place itself over the pope and rule the Church. But it soon disqualified itself by its internal divisions and attempts to curry favor with secular princes. Clearly the ordinary subject of supreme jurisdiction is the pope. It depends on his charity, his responsibility to the Lord Jesus for the well-being of the Church, to heed and serve his fellow bishops.That was always acknowledged in the interrupted Vatican I, which defined papal infallibility and jurisdictional primacy (DS 3061–62, cf. 3113–16).Vatican II emphasized that the bishops as a college “exercise their own proper authority” and possess “supreme power over the whole Church,” not as delegated by the pope but in their own right, though never without the pope (Lumen Gentium, §§19–23).The pope should heed the bishops, and the Synod of Bishops became a new means, alongside the episcopal visits ad limina, of assisting the pope in his universal care for the Church. The Church lives the mystery of Christ’s love, which demands the greatest unity even as it preserves the greatest distinctions. The mystery of unity and plurality, the one and the many, is reflected in the Church because she reflects the mystery of Trinitarian love.The polarities of pope and bishops, of bishops and priests, and of clergy and laity must be maintained in balanced tension and strengthened in mutual service. There is no preordained solution to all possible differences on meeting the demands of charity, but all Christians, pope, bishops, priests, and laity, are called to bear each other’s burdens in different ways; in that their sanctification consists. Did That Really Happen at Vatican II? 465 Conclusion Father O’Malley has written with an engaging style a stimulating account of Vatican II from a “progressive” viewpoint. A child of the enthusiastic Sixties, he expected great changes to follow in the wake of Vatican II. His hopes have been disappointed because the center has held despite the centrifugal forces unleashed in the Council’s aftermath. Despite the pressures for adaptation to the world, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI have striven to maintain continuity with the wider tradition of Christ’s Church, confident that the full reality of Jesus Christ, God incarnate, has never been lacking to his Bride and Body. In this, it seems, they remained faithful to the wishes of the Council Fathers and the wider Catholic sacramental vision. Expectations of a new humanity voiced by many progressives were to be frustrated not only because those expectations, living from an uncharted future, tended to be vague and amorphous, but also because the underlying theological system propelling the progressive hopes, transcendental Thomism, is replete with internal tensions.When controlled by leading theologians, these tensions preserve an openness to God’s freedom without completely relativizing finite, intelligible structures. Unfortunately many of their self-proclaimed disciples, overlooking the need to balance vital tensions, rush to extremes. But the Council itself aimed at a compromise among the various theological visions in play in the aula and conference rooms.The minority and Paul VI contributed mightily to Vatican II, preserving finite intelligibility and continuity with recent Tradition, even as the majority accomplished an adaptation to the modern world with a more personalist, existential, and pastoral language by revivifying older elements of Tradition.They supplemented the limitations of the conceptualist theology.They never intended a revolution. Unfortunately O’Malley’s penchant to emphasize revolutionary novelty hinders his perception of the Council’s sane, sacramental, and Catholic vision. He borrows from secular historians hermeneutical principles which not only relativize themselves but also skew his interpretation of the Council. Because he adopts the relativistic apriori of much modern historiography, he has prioritized style over substance in his retelling of Vatican II. Certainly his own volume reads well, a tribute to his literary style. But it cannot satisfy those who prefer truth to rhetoric, Plato and Aristotle to Isocrates, content to appearance. When our culture again returns to the quest for truth, O’Malley’s book will be set aside. It can hardly expect a better fate since he acknowledges that the future changes the past. But insofar as decisions about life in the Church depend upon interpretations 466 John M. McDermott, S.J. of her tradition, readers of O’Malley’s book should be aware that they are not necessarily obtaining the full truth. His regressive eisegesis reads later issues back into the Council, missing thereby the Council’s intent. In fact, given O’Malley’s philosophy of history, he cannot inform anyone about What Really Happened at Vatican II. Insofar as reality changes with the future, yet the future never arrives short of Judgment Day, O’Malley cuts himself and his readers off from truth. In the meantime Joseph Ratzinger’s realistic philosophy, orthodox theology, and knowledgeable judgments about Vatican II are to be preferred. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 467–83 467 Vatican II Then and Now: A Review Essay on John O’Malley, S.J.’s What Happened at Vatican II K ENNETH D. W HITEHEAD Falls Church, Virginia I A S EVERYONE knows, there has been a vast number of books, articles, studies, memoirs, and the like published about Vatican Council II over the past nearly half a century since the Council first convened. Moreover, these voluminous but still rather scattered writings tend to reflect the differing ideas that emerged at the Council itself concerning what the Council itself was, and what it was supposed to be doing.There was in particular the rather dramatic split that occurred between “liberals” and “conservatives” among the Council Fathers and their supporters. These terms, “liberal” and “conservative,” as applied to the two broad groupings or tendencies that quickly became manifest at the Council itself, are not exactly analogous to the way these same two terms are generally used in the political world; and it is only too true that people very often get the Church wrong by thinking of her or describing her as primarily a “political”-type entity—she is not that—and hence the use of these terms can be misleading in a Church context. The author under review here does not like them, for example, and prefers to use the terms “majority” and “minority” to describe the two great tendencies that were so evident at the Council. And his usage in this regard is certainly accurate enough for the years of the Council itself. However, I nevertheless propose to use the two terms “liberal” and “conservative” anyway, since they describe accurately enough the tendencies they refer to. Nobody is going to mistake who I am talking about or what their attitudes and tendencies were, and the terms have the 468 Kenneth D. Whitehead merit of being applicable to the same tendencies that have persisted since the Council down to the present day. Just as there were two major camps or tendencies at the Council itself then, so today Catholics continue to be divided in how they view Church affairs, including how they view the Council and its consequences, into the camps of “liberals” and “conservatives.” Knowledgeable and well-instructed Catholics, of course, understand that the formal acts and decisions of an ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, when ratified by a pope, become a permanent part of the patrimony of the Church and are binding upon the faithful—and, indeed, are guaranteed as far as faith and morals are concerned by the Holy Spirit, according to the Church’s traditional belief.Vatican Council II was the twenty-first in the long series of ecumenical councils sponsored by the Church over her long history, and hence the Council’s official acts do appropriately “bind” the faithful. Still, one’s opinions about a particular council, including this one, and about how well a particular council may have served the Church—or, in the specific case of Vatican II, about whether one considers it to have been a typical or conventional assembly whose primary meaning is still to be found in its formal acts and decisions, or an unprecedented, open-ended “event” whose “spirit” henceforth changed the course of the Church from what it had traditionally been—one’s opinions about these things can vary considerably. Throughout the entire post-conciliar period, in fact, Catholics have continued to be divided into liberals and conservatives with respect to these and other issues. The writings that have been published on the Second Vatican Council are many and varied, but for a long time an up-to-date overall onevolume history of the Council has been conspicuously lacking. A reader wishing to acquire a general knowledge of “what happened” over the four years, 1962–1965, when the Council was in session, has been up to now pretty much thrown back on the original “instant” histories that first appeared as journalism while the Council was going on and then were collected into book form. I refer to such collections as the articles that appeared in the New Yorker magazine by Father Francis Xavier Murphy, writing under the pseudonym “Xavier Rynne,” which were then published as Vatican Council II (1968); or the articles by journalist Henri Fesquet that first appeared in the Parisian daily Le Monde and then appeared in book form under the title The Drama of Vatican II (1967). Then there was the short but very informative and readable book, The Rhine Flows into the Tiber (1967), by Father Ralph M.Wiltgen, S.V.D., who had operated a kind of news service at the Council. From the end of the Vatican II Then and Now 469 Council on, these have remained the kinds of books that enabled interested readers to acquire an overview of “what happened at Vatican II.” Now comes Georgetown professor John W. O’Malley with a book bearing that very title. His aim, he declares, is to move beyond the partial approaches characteristic of much of the previous writing on the Council—approaches which he recognizes often stemmed from the theological or ideological biases of the writers of whatever camp or school of thought. His approach, however, he says, is to try “to arrive at generalizations about the Council grounded in its narrative contexts and in the vast expanse of the documentation it has left behind” (312).1 He writes with an advantage that earlier writers did not enjoy, since he is able to draw upon the official documents of the Council, including its ante-preparatory and preparatory phases, which are now available to the historian in many hefty volumes. O’Malley is able to mine these official sources, and he does so mostly in a competent enough manner, so it is possible to say that he has considered and weighed “the vast expanse” of the Vatican II documentation. He has accordingly produced a narrative which for the most part records what essentially did happen at the Council. This was something the earlier, “instant” historians were not able to achieve completely.They covered the Council as reporters on the spot, and their accounts emphasized the Council’s major actors and personalities and their interactions that they were witnessing personally; but they sometimes came up short in their understanding of what was taking place before their very eyes, or what its ultimate significance might be. Many questions remained unanswered and even mysterious at the time, which O’Malley is now sometimes able to explain from the official documents that have since become available. Thus it must be conceded that he has produced a fairly good general account. I have been reading and writing and speaking about the Council for years, yet I learned new things from these pages. His account is understandably not quite as dramatic or interesting as the earlier journalistic accounts, which focused more on the Council Fathers themselves. In these earlier reportages, one found clear and expressive descriptions of such prelates as a Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens of Brussels or a Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh on the liberal side, or a Curia Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani or a tenacious Bishop Luigi Carli, of Segni, Italy, on the conservative side.These protagonists are mentioned in these pages too, of course, and O’Malley is sometimes able to bring forth new information about these and other Council Fathers; but his whole presentation is 1 John W. O’Malley, S.J., What Happened at Vatican II (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). 470 Kenneth D. Whitehead much more measured and focused on issues rather than on personalities than were the earlier “instant” histories. So while the reader is able to garner from these pages a more or less accurate account of what did happen at Vatican II, it is in some ways a rather bland and colorless account which does not generate the same excitement that the Council once did. Of course, the subject of the Council is a vast one, and any historian aiming to provide an overview in one volume would necessarily have to pick and choose, as O’Malley has necessarily had to do. II While this book provides a more or less accurate account of the main lines of what happened at Vatican II, it must be noted that it is a decidedly liberal account. I think O’Malley sincerely tries to be objective, and to some extent he succeeds, but his apparent commitment to the liberal interpretation of the Council sometimes appears to prevent him from even realizing what true objectivity would consist of in the conciliar context. His liberal sympathies tend to come out perhaps more clearly in some of his asides than in his main narrative, but they are unmistakably present.Although his account never degenerates into the kind of cheerleading for the liberal bishops and conciliar periti that is found, for example, in Xavier Rynne’s account, where all of the mostly northern European progressive bishops are regularly depicted wearing white hats, while the benighted and reactionary Ottaviani-led conservatives are automatically awarded black hats, his sympathies nevertheless are pretty clearly evident most of the time. They are also especially to be seen in the way that he treats Pope Paul VI’s role at the Council, as compared with the adulatory way in which he, along with nearly all the writers in the liberal camp, treats Blessed Pope John XXIII, the pope who convoked the Council. His liberal tendencies are further seen in some of the sources that he— sometimes uncritically—relies on. He regularly refers to and cites, for example, the five-volume history of the Council produced in several languages by the team headed by Bologna scholar Giuseppe Alberigo. The version of this work in English is the Giuseppe Alberigo and Joseph Komonchak edited History of Vatican II (1995–2006), published by the Maryknoll Order’s predominantly leftist Orbis Press—a publisher not always noted for strict adherence to the Church’s Magisterium, among other things. With regard to this Alberigo/Komonchak opus, this reviewer has been engaged over the better part of the past year in translating a long, scholarly work by Italian Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, Il Concilio Ecumenico Vatican II Then and Now 471 Vaticano II, which will soon be published in English by the University of Scranton Press. In this work, the archbishop severely and effectively critiques the Alberigo thesis that Vatican II disrupted and departed from the Catholic tradition and, by means of what came to be called the famous “spirit of Vatican II,” amounted to a new departure for the Church in which elements once considered integral parts of the authentic Catholic tradition no longer necessarily hold. According to this Alberigo way of thinking, the sixteen documents of Vatican II in which the Council’s acts and decisions are in fact enshrined, do not necessarily embody or express the ultimate meaning of the Council. Rather, it is the “event” of the Council itself—the “happening” that came about by the very fact that there was a Council convoked by Blessed John XXIII at all—as well, especially, as its famous “spirit,” which must be looked to in order to understand the ultimate meaning of the Council.The Alberigo thesis, in other words, represents a novel, tendentious, and fundamentally mistaken way of looking at the Council and its meaning for the authentic Catholic tradition. Archbishop Agostino Marchetto’s lengthy and detailed critique of the Alberigo school is really quite compelling. John W. O’Malley, however, evidences not a hint in this book that he discerns anything untoward or amiss in the Alberigo interpretation of the Council. He quotes the work of Alberigo and his associates as if it truly represented the last word in historical research on Vatican II. While he himself states in words that the Council’s sixteen documents represent its “most authoritative and accessible legacy,” and while he does more or less describe what these documents generally contain, his heavy reliance on Alberigo-related sources tends to belie his words. He tends to treat the Council as an unprecedented, watershed “event” that supposedly changed the Church forever, for example, when he writes about the two different visions of Catholicism: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideals, from definition to mystery, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, from monologue to dialogue, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from rivalry to partnership, from suspicion to trust, from static to on-going, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from fault-finding to active appreciation, from prescriptive to principled, from behavior modification to inner appropriation. (307) Although the Council undeniably adopted some of the new methods and approaches mentioned here, particularly in how the faith might 472 Kenneth D. Whitehead henceforth be better presented to the world, this passage nevertheless represents a gross exaggeration of the new paths adopted by the Council, and is both simplistic and in a couple of ways flat-out wrong.The Council did not, for instance, abandon the “vertical” for the “horizontal,” any more than it abandoned “laws” for “ideals.” Or again, does this author seriously contend or believe that the pre-Vatican-II Church did not “serve,” or that she practiced “coercion”? Some of this is simply liberal mythology. More than that, the author is uncritical generally of works he cites by dissenters from Catholic teaching. These people apparently continue to be valid “Catholic” sources, as far as he is concerned. He cites, for example, open dissenter Dr. John Marshall, a member of the Papal Birth Control Commission, as one of his main sources on that particular topic. On the same subject, he also turns to the tendentious book of Robert McClory. Using such sources is somewhat like citing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in order to explain the reasons for the Iraq War. Why does he make no reference, for example, to the work of another Papal Birth Control Commission member, namely, the late Monsignor George A. Kelly, who thoroughly treated this very same question in his Battle for the American Church (1979)? Indeed, Monsignor Kelly also superbly treated a number of the other Vatican II issues covered by O’Malley in what should have been considered a thoroughly mainstream book based on fundamental research and documentation and published by Doubleday. Nevertheless, Monsignor Kelly’s Battle, like a number of other solid conservative sources, is nowhere to be found among the “vast expanse” of Vatican II research that O’Malley cites. It is as if the Vatican II writings from this perspective did not exist. It is not clear from the text whether O’Malley himself is an avowed and open dissenter from Catholic magisterial teaching; but he definitely seems to be what we might call a doctrinal “minimalist,” in that he regularly accepts as valid the testimony of sources who themselves do not accept Catholic teaching in toto, and, in some cases, openly dissent from it. It is true, of course, that the American bishops themselves in the postconciliar era have generally been willing to tolerate such doctrinal minimalists, and sometimes even outright dissenters, generally allowing them to remain “in good standing” in the Church without correction or rebuke—thus inevitably giving the impression that minimalist and even dissenting positions can now somehow pass as acceptable “Catholic” positions. It might be asked why, if the bishops, the official teachers in the Church, can turn a blind eye to positions that fail to reflect the authentic faith, a mere historian should be expected to identify and label as what Vatican II Then and Now 473 they are positions that depart from Catholic teaching.The answer is that the historian, by virtue of his research and study, should know that some of the positions he encounters are not in accord with what the Church teaches—what the Council taught—and that same historian therefore has an obligation to the truth to say this plainly. However that may be, it is unfortunate—indeed it is something of a minor catastrophe—that this most recent and otherwise largely competent contemporary overview of the history of Vatican II should have been influenced to the extent that it apparently has been by the Alberigo school and by other dissenting voices. This is the kind of book that public libraries will stock as authoritative on its subject, and that average readers in search of general knowledge will pick up. I myself checked the book out of the public library in order to read it. It may well be the version of conciliar history that the present generation will turn to for some time to come. But it is not a version that presents the Council—and the Catholic faith—completely, accurately, and authentically. Rather, readers will continue to get the unfortunately now standard liberal presentation. III Moreover, the problem with this author is not limited to his using or citing sources that are questionably not always accurately or authentically Catholic. He himself espouses some views that are themselves questionable. We need to take note, for example, of what he takes to be the Council’s position on “conscience.” He claims that the Council gave “primacy . . . to conscience over ecclesiastical authority,” and he writes that “in the last analysis the Council affirmed that the moral norm that everybody is obliged to obey is their own conscience.” This is not the case. First of all, conscience, by itself, is in no way a “moral norm.”This seems to be a notion that the author may have picked up from some of his questionable sources. Furthermore, the “primacy” that the Council’s Declaration on Religious Liberty, Dignitatis Humanae, gives to conscience has to do with “freedom from coercion in civil society. . . . [No one may be forced] to act contrary to his conscience” (DH §1, 3).The Declaration precisely does not free conscience from “obedience to ecclesiastical authority.” On the contrary, the Council’s most significant statement about conscience teaches that: in forming their consciences the faithful must pay careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church. For the Catholic Church is by the will of Christ the teacher of truth. It is her duty to proclaim and teach with authority the truth which is Christ and, at the 474 Kenneth D. Whitehead same time, to declare and confirm by her authority the principles of the moral order which spring from human nature itself (DH §14). This same Vatican II document further specifies that “all men are bound to seek the truth, especially in what concerns God and his Church, and to embrace and to hold it” (DH §1; emphasis added); and it further states that “it leaves intact the moral duty of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ” (ibid.). Thus O’Malley gets it wrong about Vatican II and conscience, and, in contrast to what the Council does say about conscience here, as we have just quoted it, he rather lamely writes that “in forming . . . moral judgments, individuals must give proper consideration to the teachings of the Church” (emphasis added). Only “proper consideration”? When the Council plainly characterizes the teachings of the Church as “sacred and certain” and to which the faithful must pay careful attention? What we apparently have here, along with this author’s idea that conscience is some kind of a “moral norm,” while the faithful in forming their consciences are only supposed to give “proper consideration” to the Church’s teaching, is substantially the same erroneous position espoused by the theological dissenters from Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, who quite effectively managed to indoctrinate a whole generation and more of Catholics in the idea that they could just make up their own minds about birth control; no longer were they “bound” by Church teaching; they only had to give it “proper consideration,” which is to say, not much serious consideration at all, since it was supposedly no longer actually binding. This erroneous view of conscience and of what Church teaching requires of the faithful is the situation we are essentially still living with in the Church today. But it surely does not go back to any teaching of the Second Vatican Council. Rather, it seems to resemble what we once formerly thought was “Protestant” private judgment—which the 1968 dissenters essentially adopted when they denied the binding character of the Church’s magisterial teaching. A whole generation and more of Catholics has been effectively persuaded to abandon the Church’s Magisterium in this way. It is sad that nobody even seems to ask any longer how the souls of all these contemporary Catholics might be affected by their now very widespread erroneous belief and practice in the area of birth control. But then these people have been indoctrinated in their erroneous belief and practice from sources within the Church, so perhaps the old idea of “invincible ignorance” can still be invoked to cover their case—but then that idea too is no longer mentioned or thought to be necessary! Vatican II Then and Now 475 IV Just as he fails to treat properly how the Council dealt with conscience, so a fortiori does O’Malley fail to treat properly how the Council handled the always controversial question of birth control itself. Initially, Pope Paul VI wanted to withhold this question from conciliar consideration entirely, along with the questions of clerical celibacy and the reform of the Roman Curia. The reason given was that birth control was being considered by the Papal Birth Control Commission, which Blessed Pope John XXIII had appointed. However, since birth control was already a burning question in those days—the contraceptive “pill” had just been introduced, and the topic was inescapably on everybody’s mind—some of the Council Fathers did not respect the pope’s wishes, but instead openly and quite pointedly raised the question of birth control in some of their conciliar interventions. These prelates included Belgian Cardinal Suenens and Melkite Patriarch Maximos IV Saigh as well as others. O’Malley himself recounts how Cardinal Suenens was obliged by Pope Paul VI to disavow the speech he had delivered, sensationally reported at the time, comparing the birth control question to another potential “Galileo case” for the Church. This incident, in fact, marked a break in what had been the earlier close relations between the Belgian prelate and the pontiff. But not only in individual conciliar interventions did the subject of birth control get raised. The drafters of what became the Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, since they were including a major section on the family, at the very least had to mention or touch upon the question of birth control, if only to say that it was being handled by the Papal Birth Control Commission. But in fact, an intense debate was going on at the time between liberals and conservatives on the subject of the ends of marriage. Those of the liberal persuasion were determined to do away with the distinction, then current in Catholic moral theology, between the “primary” and “secondary” ends of marriage, the primary end being “the procreation and education of children,” while what we now refer to as the mutual love of the spouses was relegated to the status of secondary end. And a substantially complete draft of Gaudium et Spes included language effectively dethroning the procreation and education of children as the primary end of marriage. In this situation, Pope Paul VI found himself obliged to intervene to insure that the final text of this important Council document would accurately reflect the teaching of the Church. Only a little more than a week before the end of the Council, he insisted on some modifications and 476 Kenneth D. Whitehead additions to the text which, after some negotiation with the conciliar subcommission, amounted to the following: (1) the phrase “contraceptive practices” was added to a list of contemporary abuses disfiguring marriage included in the text (GS §47); (2) following language that marriage is indeed ordered to the procreation and education of children, a sentence was added describing children as “the supreme gift of marriage” (GS §50; emphasis added), thus restoring in a different way by the inclusion of this superlative the idea behind children as the “primary” end of marriage (in other words, this idea was not finally dropped by the Council!); (3) in another section listing certain evils (including abortion!) and referring also to “the regulation of births,” a sentence was added stating that the faithful are “forbidden to use methods disapproved of by the teaching authority of the Church” (GS §51); (4) and, finally, footnotes were added referring specifically to recent magisterial documents in which birth control had already been morally condemned by the Church, including, especially, Pope Pius XI’s 1930 encyclical Casti Connubii and Pope Pius XII’s 1951 “Address to Midwives” (note 14 to GS §51). Author John W. O’Malley becomes practically unhinged in describing this intervention of Pope Paul VI in the drafting of Gaudium et Spes.Actually, he is quite critical of virtually all of the instances in which this pope felt obliged to intervene in the work of the Council.The pope, after all, only had the responsibility of ratifying and promulgating all of the Council’s documents—surely he had some responsibility to insure that the Council got things right! Nevertheless, according to this historian (and to the school of thought he represents), the pope was apparently not to be accorded any right or responsibility for how the Council decided and acted—as if the pope were not also a Catholic bishop, as he in fact attested in placing his signature on all of the Council’s documents. However, by insisting that the text of Gaudium et Spes dealing with the family had to include certain essential features of Catholic teaching concerning the family, Pope Paul VI incurs this author’s ire, who demands, querulously: How could the Council make a pronouncement on an issue the pope had removed from its competence? How could it make a pronouncement on an issue it had not discussed? How could it make a pronouncement when another body appointed by the pope himself was examining the matter? How could the sub-commission at this last minute present for a final vote a text in which such a radical statement had been made? Why did the letter come only at this late date, this last minute? If the Council made a statement, would that not render the Papal Commission superfluous? (284–85) Vatican II Then and Now 477 Considering what these questions insinuate about the pope and the nature of the conciliar process, they deserve firm and clear answers, as follows: Although the pope had tried to remove the subject of birth control as such from the competence of the Council, some of the Council Fathers had not respected that papal wish and, in treating of the family in Gaudium et Spes, the Council was necessarily going to get into the subject anyway, and did. Therefore what the Council said or touched upon on the matter had to be right—which was not the case with regard to the text that Paul VI was confronted with at the last minute. Nor is it the case that the subject was not discussed at the Council; it was widely and publicly discussed. The fact that the Papal Birth Control Commission was also studying the issue did not prevent either individual Council Fathers or the conciliar sub-commission from mentioning it as well. And does this author truly believe that the pope’s insistence that the Church’s traditional position on the matter be correctly stated somehow represents a radical statement or change? The pope’s insistence came late only because the sub-commission had failed to produce a text that was complete and correct. And the Council’s brief statements in no way rendered superfluous the more in-depth statements that the Papal Birth Control Commission was presumably going to be making. The way in which, absent the papal intervention, the drafters of Gaudium et Spes apparently planned to treat birth control as a morally neutral issue suggests a liberal mind-set probably wedded to the hopes and expectations of the day that the Church’s teaching on birth control was going to be changed. That a Catholic historian writing about the issue nearly a half century later, after the firm proof provided by Humanae Vitae that the Church’s teaching was not going to be changed, can still reflect the same morally neutral mind-set on this issue, a cast of mind apparently unable to understand that this teaching of the Church cannot be changed because it just happens to be true, is really quite remarkable. That this author can still write in this same vein even after Paul VI proved, with the issuance of Humanae Vitae, that the Church’s teaching was not going to be changed, is little short of amazing, in fact. It appears to be yet another example of what we have termed doctrinal minimalism. It apparently afflicts many minds today, certainly that of this author. It can thus surely be said of today’s Catholic liberals such as O’Malley, what was once said of the aristocratic émigrés from the French Revolution, namely, that “they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” For the properly instructed Catholic, however, Paul VI’s actions in this whole affair seem to constitute proof positive once again that the pope as the supreme teacher is what the Church says he is and he acts accordingly 478 Kenneth D. Whitehead to guarantee the integrity of the faith.To take one more example, imagine how the campaign by the liberals at Vatican II to eliminate “the procreation and education of children” as the primary end of marriage would have served the votaries of so-called same-sex marriage today, if the conciliar liberals had in fact been successful in eliminating it; leaving children out of what essentially constitutes a marriage is exactly what lends superficial plausibility to the claim that homosexual liaisons might somehow be considered to be “marriages.” Pope Paul VI by his intervention effectively headed off that particular possibility at Vatican Council II. V We have already gone on at too great a length on two issues—conscience and birth control—that were not actually major conciliar issues.We have dwelt on them here mainly to illustrate the typical approach to his subject matter of the particular historian of the Council under review here. We could well have selected other subjects to be examined in the same way. There is, for example, another subject that was very important at the Council; indeed, it was central to the Council’s concerns.The subject in question is “collegiality,” the relations of the Catholic bishops with each other and with the head bishop, the bishop of Rome, the pope. Collegiality was one of the principal issues debated and decided about at Vatican II. In treating the subject, the Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, provides what is probably not only the Church’s definitive statement on collegiality but what may well be the Church’s best description of her own nature and structure to be found in her entire history. Since the Church’s governing or leadership structure is based on the pope and the bishops—successors to Peter and the other apostles in the original “college” of apostles—the same body consisting of pope and bishops can be said to constitute a “college.” How the members of this college should relate to and interact with one another, and, especially, how they should relate to and interact with the head bishop among them, the pope, constitutes the subject matter of collegiality and it is all carefully laid out in Lumen Gentium. The episcopal or synodal Church leadership structure described there should receive special recognition by the Eastern Orthodox, since it substantially describes what they have traditionally considered to be the proper and correct Church leadership structure (minus, of course, as far as the Eastern Orthodox are concerned, the primacy of the bishop of Rome, which Lumen Gentium naturally does insist on, often in the same language employed by Vatican Council I). Vatican II Then and Now 479 Among other things, Lumen Gentium settled the question that the Catholic bishops are not delegates of the pope but derive their power and authority directly from their episcopal ordination; Lumen Gentium expressly says they receive it “from the Lord” (LG §24). Catholic dioceses are not “branches” of the diocese of Rome but genuine local Churches in the full sense of the word: the “Church of Christ is really present in all legitimately organized local groups of the faithful, which, insofar as they are united to their pastors, are also quite appropriately called Churches in the New Testament” (LG §26). Contentious and confusing as the debate on collegiality may have seemed at the Council, Vatican II nevertheless got collegiality resoundingly right in the end. The Catholic Church possesses a unique structure, in fact, in which the bishop enjoys what in modern democratic parlance we style executive, legislative, and judicial authority all rolled into one. This plenary authority is nevertheless not absolute, since the bishop must always act in conformity with the law of the Church and of the Gospel. In particular, the bishop must always act with and under the authority of the head bishop in the college, the pope, the successor of the head apostle, Peter, who enjoys the same plenary authority over the whole Church that the individual bishop enjoys over his diocese. In describing this unique organizational structure as it is laid out in Lumen Gentium, O’Malley appears to believe, and quite consistently appears to represent the Council Fathers as believing, that the principal issue in the whole conciliar debate on collegiality was primarily to decentralize “power” in the Church, giving the bishops more power to act independently of Rome, and at the same time curbing the power of the pope, seen as excessively centralized in Rome. Supposedly, the whole idea, in other words, was to introduce a measure of American-style political “checks and balances” into the relationships between the pope and the bishops. All of O’Malley’s objections to the interventions of Pope Paul VI in the work of the Council appear to be based on his apparent view that the pope was not respecting the Council’s independent status (as a separate “branch” of Church government?). He objects, for example, to Paul VI’s creation of the Synod of Bishops as merely advisory to the pope, enjoying no independent (legislative?) authority separate from that of the pope. This is to misconceive the nature of the authority that the Church has from Christ. There is a very important sense in which authority, the power to command, cannot be divided; it is indivisible.The basic truth of this is aptly expressed, for example, in the famous statement of President Harry Truman that “the buck stops here.” This is particularly the case 480 Kenneth D. Whitehead when the authority in question is the kind that Christ gave to the apostles and their successors, namely, the power to declare the truth and command obedience. O’Malley’s position, however, like that of most Catholic liberals, appears to be that the papal or Roman “buck” needed to be carved up in some fashion and parceled out to the bishops—as if the bishops, again, somehow represented another independent “branch” of the Church’s government. Vatican II did, in fact, restore the proper authority of the Catholic bishop, which had been somewhat eroded by various practices. This was one of the more important things that happened at Vatican II. But the Council rightly saw that the bishop must act with and under the head of the episcopal college, the pope. What is somewhat ironic from where we stand nearly a half century later, however, is how little and how relatively ineffectively the Catholic bishops of the world have made use of their restored authority in the post-conciliar era. For as few suspected at the time—although everybody knows all about it today—the post-conciliar era was destined to be a time of turmoil and confusion, when among other things Catholic doctrine would come to be contested from within the Church in a way that was almost unprecedented in the entire history of the Church. This came about some three years after the Council, when Pope Paul VI issued his 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae, reaffirming the Church’s traditional teaching that any use of matrimony must remain open to the transmission of life. Although this had been the constant teaching not only of the Catholic Church, but of all of Christianity up until the year 1930, what probably constituted a majority of the working Catholic theologians of the day openly and publicly dissented from the teaching of Pope Paul’s encyclical, and, equally openly and publicly, called upon the Catholic faithful to reject the teaching as well. For these dissenting theologians, as well as for those of the faithful who responded to their call, the Catholic Church was evidently no longer “the teacher of truth,” as Vatican II had taught (DH §14). Pope Paul VI, for his part, called upon the bishops of the world to give their support to what, after all, was the authentic teaching of the Church. A few of the bishops’ conferences unenthusiastically did so; others, in effect, “damned the encyclical with faith praise” by their obvious lack of enthusiasm for the papal teaching; still others simply remained silent and presumably indifferent. Hardly any theological dissenter from Humanae Vitae was ever rebuked or corrected by any bishop or bishops’ conference. In the few instances where any disciplinary action was taken at all, with few exceptions it was usually left to Rome to take it. Most dissenters Vatican II Then and Now 481 simply remained “in good standing” in whatever position they happened to occupy within the Church’s structure in spite of their dissent. This pretty much remains the case today. The faithful could hardly mistake the message that all this conveyed, namely, that their shepherds were apparently far from being foursquare behind the pope on the subject of birth control. In any case, it was clear that the bishops were certainly not going to do anything about it, whatever they may have actually thought about it. The inevitable conclusion that was massively drawn by the faithful was that the encyclical need not be followed. It quickly became a dead letter and remains so today for the most part. Statistics consistently tell us that more than eighty percent of married Catholics employ “methods disapproved of by the teaching authority of the Church” (GS §51). More than that, once the faithful have come to believe that the Church can be wrong on any one of her solemn teachings, they are henceforth easily disposed to believe that she could be wrong on other teachings of hers as well. And so today we have, for example, the public spectacle of prominent Catholic politicians and other public figures tranquilly defying the Church on, for example, support for legalized abortion, while the faithful in majority Catholic areas such as parts of New England routinely return those same pro-abortion Catholic politicians to office with their votes. What all this denotes, from the perspective of Vatican II, is the failure of collegiality so far in the post-conciliar era. According to Lumen Gentium, “all the bishops have the obligation of fostering and safeguarding the unity of the faith and of upholding the discipline which is common to the whole Church” (LG §23); or, again, “with watchfulness they ward off whatever errors threaten their flock” (LG §25). Since the Council, the Catholic bishops, at least in the Western world formerly known as Christendom, have mostly left these—perhaps admittedly unpleasant—tasks to Rome. In other words, faced with the first great practical test of the collegiality described in Lumen Gentium, which came shortly after the end of the Council, when the bishops were called upon to support the teaching of the Church against those who were challenging it, the bishops failed the test. Collegiality was not observed; the pope was left to uphold the teaching on his own to the extent that it was upheld. VI Nothing of the tumult, controversy, and contestation which followed Vatican II—especially after Humanae Vitae was issued—is covered in What Happened at Vatican II. The encyclical Humanae Vitae rates exactly one 482 Kenneth D. Whitehead reference in the index of the book. Turning to the page indicated, we learn that Paul VI “settled” the birth control question “in favor of the teaching of Pius XI and Pius XII”—not, mind you,“in favor of the traditional and long established teaching of the Catholic Church,” which precisely happened to be the case. Historian O’Malley, however, as seems to be the case with Catholic liberals generally, appears to regard this papal teaching not as a truth taught by “the teacher of truth,” the Church, but rather as a kind of opinion dependent merely on the will of not very well advised successive pontiffs. Nobody holding this view of Catholic teaching was ever going to be able to get the Council entirely right, of course, and that is what we find in the case of this book. Only by deciding not to look at or refer to in any way the post-conciliar era that actually followed Vatican II is a conciliar historian such as O’Malley able to maintain the myth propagated by the Alberigo school among others that the Second Vatican Council was supposedly an “event” that liberated the Catholic Church from her sometimes embarrassing history (as the liberals see it) and now allows her to be presented as a champion of some of their favored liberal causes (while, again, they simply leave aside and ignore those teachings and features of the Church that they do not like and that in their view continue to embarrass; as they see things,Vatican II, according to the Alberigo viewpoint, allows them to leave these unwanted teachings aside). Properly instructed Catholics, by contrast, in spite of some of the questionable developments that undeniably followed the Council, nevertheless can and do accept the official acts and decisions of the Council—as they are found in the sixteen documents of Vatican II—as an integral and permanent part of the Church’s patrimony, and, indeed, as henceforth constituting our “marching orders” as Catholics for now and on into the future. It is nonetheless true that the Council has proved disappointing in many ways up to now, and only now, in fact, nearly a half century after the Council, are we finally getting past many of the missteps, wrong turns, and confusion that followed the Council, so that the Church can now move on into the future implementing the true positive message of the Council. This is not how John W. O’Malley appears to see things; he sedulously avoids even adverting to what happened after Vatican II, namely, all the 1960s-style turmoil and agitation that was already starting to engulf the Church before the Council was even over. For him we still seem to be back at the point where Blessed John XXIII, in his famous Opening Address to the Council, announced to the world that “nowadays the Spouse of Christ prefers to make use of the medicine of mercy rather Vatican II Then and Now 483 than that of severity.” Some of us are old enough to remember how excited we too were at the prospects the jovial pontiff was announcing for the Church in that Opening Address.We did not yet have any idea of how things were actually going to turn out. In those days, even a Xavier Rynne had reasons to believe that Blessed John XXIII’s vision represented what the actual history of the Church was going to be. In the ensuing years and decades, however, some of us have noticed that the actual application of the “medicine of mercy” policy has not always been the unalloyed success that Blessed John XXIII so fondly hoped for.The pope had also declared in his Opening Address that “the greatest concern” of the Council was that “the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine should be guarded and taught more efficaciously”—a “concern” that eventually seems to have gotten lost in some quarters at least; it is certainly not prominently to be found in this book. Author O’Malley, as we have seen, is clearly a minimalist where Catholic doctrine is concerned, and he also seems not to have taken much notice of some of the results of the “medicine of mercy” policy either. In some ways he still seems to be back there cheering for John XXIII’s vision as if nothing had happened in the interim to affect the original plans and dreams of Vatican II. He is still indignant, for example, that some of the Catholic theologians and periti prominent at the Council had been silenced back then; perhaps he prefers the situation today where hundreds of Catholic theologians have confidently assured the faithful that they need not follow the teaching of the Church and have not been silenced. Nor does it seem to occur to him anywhere in his history of what happened at Vatican II that perhaps some of the warnings of the despised conservatives at the Council may have had some merit. In sum, his book can be read for some of its facts, which are mostly researched and presented with reasonable care. We cannot, however, rely on his interpretations of the Council, which mostly turn out to be the conventional positions of today’s liberal Catholicism. Chicago Cardinal Francis George not too long ago characterized liberal Catholicism as an “exhausted project.” If this book provides any indication, however, it is far from exhausted as yet. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition,Vol. 8, No. 2 (2010): 485–99 485 Book Reviews From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution by Étienne Gilson, translated by John Lyon, with a foreword by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), xxii + 241 pp. G ILSON (1884–1978)1 was a giant in the intellectual world for a great part of the twentieth century. He was both an historian of philosophy and a philosopher; indeed, he made the history of philosophy a sort of laboratory for coming to philosophical conclusions.2 He championed Christian philosophy, and particularly the metaphysics of St.Thomas Aquinas. Regularly splitting his academic year, he taught both in Paris and in Toronto. In Paris he reached the summit of public intellectual life, becoming both a professor at the College de France and a member of the French Academy. In Toronto he founded, in cooperation with the Basilian Fathers, what became the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. The range of his interests was most remarkable, but it was particularly towards the end of his long career that he saw the need to write about Darwinism and final causality. How good is this book? Gilson’s great friend and fellow Christian philosopher, Jacques Maritain, bears witness. The last letters exchanged between Maritain and Gilson were on the subject of this book.Writing on Sept. 3, 1971, Maritain says: I want to tell you how much I love this book, which is a model of philosophical critique, admirably lucid and based on the texts themselves (you have read everything!), and a marvellous stimulant for the mind.3 1 For a biography, see Laurence K. Shook, Etienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Insti- tute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984). See also my “Étienne Gilson,” in Penseurs et Apôtres du XXme Siècle, ed. Jean Genest (Montreal: Fides, 2001), 170–82. 2 One sees this most explicitly in his William James Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1936–37, entitledThe Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Scribner’s, 1937). 3 Cf. Étienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Correspondance, 1923–1971, ed. Géry Prouvost (Paris:Vrin, 1991), 247 (letter of Maritain, Sept. 3, 1971): 486 Book Reviews The book is a reflection on the inevitability of the notion of finality or teleology in our observation of nature. The notion is not presented as a scientific one (in the sense of “modern science”).The point is, rather, as Gilson says: It is not certain that every truth concerning nature is scientifically demonstrable. Scientific demonstrations as well as reason may not have anything valid to say about what experience indemonstrably suggests. Thus understood, the existence of natural teleology appears to be one of these philosophical constants whose inexhaustible vitality in history can only be recorded. (1–2) To do theology is not his aim, though it is pointed out at the outset that the association of natural teleology with natural theology is an abiding one through history.The book is strictly a philosophical inquiry as to the testimony of experience. As with all Gilson’s works, the reader is immediately introduced to a whole world of discussion. After an “Aristotelian prologue” that presents to us the goal or end as cause in the domain of life, Gilson gives us a chapter setting out “the mechanist objection”; he sees this as related to the shift from a contemplative science of nature to a quest for utility (Bacon and Descartes). We are introduced, for example, to Claude Bernard (d. 1878) who, on the one hand, reduces “vital properties” to “the physico-chemical properties of organized matter,” but who nevertheless is aware that he is not explaining its organization (36). Much of the book has to do with the efforts of biologists to deny or somehow diminish the testimony of experience in this regard. It has thus an obvious interest in the present time when so much public argument has taken place about Darwinism and Intelligent Design. (The atheists have even taken to putting up billboards trumpeting their contentions.) I wish simply to stress the richness of the intellectual society to which Gilson introduces us. It is a wonderful aid as to how to live with science and philosophy on the contemporary cultural battlefield. Whether he presents to us the mind of Claude Bernard or of Jean Rostand (d. 1977), or of so many other scientific minds who also philosophize, the experience is enriching. je veux vous dire aujourd’hui combien j’aime ce livre, qui est un modèle de critique philosophique admirablement lucide et fondée sur les textes eux-mêmes (vous avez tout lu!) et un merveilleux stimulant pour l‘esprit. I say “last letters”; they are the last contained in the collection published by Prouvost. Book Reviews 487 What would Gilson have thought of Michael Behe? He would, I am sure, have delighted in Behe’s scientific interest in evolution and finality. Let us recall that Behe is not anti-evolution. He considers the evolution of all life from a single cell consistent with the evidence. What Behe rejects is the adequacy of the Darwinian use of random mutation as a complete explanation of that evolution. It can explain the development of particular situations, but is not suitable as the overall explanation of present biological variety. In his first book4 he pointed to irreducibly complex biological systems as being results incompatible with the essentially gradualist Darwinian explanation. Where the Darwinian proposes randomness, he proposes design by intelligence. In his more recent Edge of Evolution book5 he has used studies of the malaria organism and its mutations to suggest what random mutation can and cannot account for. The new foreword by Cardinal Schönborn, besides highlighting for the reader some of the most important points made by Gilson, does a very good job of presenting mechanism and scientism as ruling the modern world view, and particularly of presenting Darwinism as finally bringing biology into the domain of the “ law and particle” world view. In general, it seems to me that the translation is excellent (as witness the scruples the translator occasionally has, so that he includes the French word in brackets here and there: to me a good sign). He has also done some editing, such that he occasionally adds footnotes where Gilson had neglected to do so; also the translator has had to cope with the differences in translations of Aristotle into English or into French. One place that bothered me is at page 101: “sees final causes as efficient causes”; in the French it is at page 142: “il voit les causes finales comme les causes efficientes.”The meaning of Gilson is that both sorts of cause are seen; I suggest: “he sees final causes as well as efficient causes.” In concluding, I wish to call attention, for readers of this review, to another recent publication of Gilson’s work in this domain, work subsequent to the Darwin book. In 2008 the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies published a small book (xi + 145 pp.) edited by Fr. Armand Maurer (with a foreword by Fr. James K. Farge), entitled Three Quests in Philosophy. It contains the last lectures Gilson personally delivered in Toronto, in January of 1972.These are entitled “In Quest of Species,” three lectures in Gilson’s own English. Besides this, there are three lectures under the title “In Quest of Matter.” These are the lectures Gilson 4 Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box:The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Free Press, 1996). 5 Michael J. Behe, The Edge of Evolution:The Search for the Limits of Darwinism (New York: Free Press, 2007). Book Reviews 488 prepared to be presented in Toronto in 1973; however, his health did not permit him to make the trip from France. He sent the text to Fr. Maurer, expressing the desire that they might eventually be published. (A third item leads off the book, a single lecture delivered in French in Montreal in 1963, and translated here as “The Education of a Philosopher.”) Clearly, the lectures on species and on matter follow very much in the line of his Darwin/Aristotle book and are a most welcome addition.6 N&V Lawrence Dewan, O.P. Dominican University College Ottawa, Canada From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution by Étienne Gilson, trans. John Lyon, foreword by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009 ), xxii + 241 pp. ORIGINALLY published in France by the firm J.Vrin in 1971 under the title D’Aristote à Darwin et retour and then brought out by the University of Notre Dame Press in 1984 with the fuller title From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution, the book failed to find much echo, even among Thomists, and quickly went out of print. But among aficionados of the work of Étienne Gilson (1884–1978)—perhaps the most significant and influential Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century—this remarkably vital book was received enthusiastically. (And speaking of vitality, Gilson wrote this, his last book, in his eighties, with no diminution whatever of his characteristic élan and dry humor.) Fortunately, Ignatius Press has rescued Lyon’s lucid translation from the publisher’s limbo where it has been languishing for too long.The bookmaking craft of the editors at Ignatius is stellar: this edition has been newly typeset (and thus differently paginated), and is now outfitted with a fine foreword from the pen of the Dominican archbishop of Vienna, Christoph Cardinal Schönborn. Perhaps recent controversies swirling around evolution (such as fresh Darwinian justifications for materialist naturalism by the recent crop of New Atheists, the debate provoked by the Intelligent Design movement, Pope John Paul II’s letter on evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 1996, biology textbook controversies, etc.) will open 6 I do not mean to slight the lecture on philosophical education; this is a theme that Gilson visited several times, involving his life-long interest in the distinctiveness of the philosophical order. Book Reviews 489 up a new audience for this deeply insightful book. And assuming it gains the audience it deserves, it might even move the debate over evolution from the sterile and jejune categories in which it has lately been fixated. As the (English) subtitle indicates, this book is primarily concerned with teleology, above all its central place in Aristotle’s philosophy of biology and its gradual dismissal from the halls of science under the combined impact of Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin. But the story does not end there, because, as Gilson shows in vivid detail, teleology has a way of cropping up like the Ghost of Christmas Past in the very attempts of scientists to exorcize it from their cupboard. “Final causes have disappeared from science, but have they disappeared from the minds of scientists?” asks the author (150). The fundamental reason why the invocation of final causes has lost its explanatory power in the sciences stems from the way teleology seems, at least at first glance, to reverse the temporal direction of cause (first) and effect (second).The concept of causation hardly makes sense unless causes are seen to precede effects, the way a thunderstorm releases rain which then causes wet sidewalks. But how can the neck of a giraffe or the wing of a seagull evolve gradually over time from minute and supposedly random variations if the neck and wing do not achieve full functionality until their final stages? Is there something in the final result that is “causing” the prior incremental changes to be “led” to the final form? One way out of this dilemma—the obvious one until Darwin—would be to posit a mind guiding the selection process, the way Michelangelo “had in mind” (as we say) an image of Mary cradling her dead Son before this renowned sculptor began carving his Pietà. In other words, as long as there is a prior mind in play, final causality can be seen to follow time’s ineluctable arrow. But precisely because mind must be invoked to keep final causality confined within time’s arrow, by which all causes ineluctably precede their effects, science eventually came to reject teleology as a “conversation stopper.” For example, advocates of Intelligent Design insist a bacterium is too complex in its formation to have been formed by chance, and therefore some sort of “abiotic infusion” must account for, say, the attachment of a flagellum to the bacterium. But such a conclusion would block any further research into bacterial complexity, since the assertion of the presence of a prior mind exceeds the competence of scientific methodology to establish. Or perhaps, as Aristotle held, nature bears this directionality within its own processes “potentially,” but non-mentally, in a directed but entirely internal process he called “entelechy.”That won’t work either for contemporary science, for the problem still refuses to go away, as Gilson explains 490 Book Reviews here: “As soon as one thinks about it, the notion of the end becomes obscure. One asks oneself how it could be that something which does not yet exist could direct and determine that which already is, though it be only to conduct its operations or direct its growth” (10–11). For just that reason Francis Bacon (1561–1626) in his Advancement of Learning called the search for final causes—in a telling image—a lamprey (remora ), referring to a fish that clings, barnacle-like, to the side of a ship impeding its progress. For this influential Elizabethan/Jacobean philosopher, to say that clouds exist in order to diffuse the sun might be proper to metaphysics but not to physics.That seems plausible enough in meteorology, but Bacon applied that same principle to biology too: thus, science could no longer claim, for example, that eyelids are “meant” to protect the eye or leaves exist to protect the fruit. Bacon’s dismissal of finality in the biological world obviously goes too far; for instead of explaining biological complexity, he has merely explained it away. Not even Darwin would countenance such extremism. On the contrary, while natural selection certainly removes mental causation from its account of biological complexity, it does not—because it cannot—remove teleology outright from the organic world. After all, anyone now reading this sentence knows that eyes are meant for seeing. In other words, Darwin’s theory gets its very plausibility precisely because it intends to explain, not explain away, biological functionality. Without functionality (meaning the presence of organs within an organism that serve a purpose), there would be nothing for natural selection to select. Ironically, Aristotle is here much closer to Darwin than Bacon ever was, despite claims from historians of philosophy that Bacon’s expulsion of teleology from science foreshadowed Darwin’s. Lacking a doctrine of creation out of nothing, the Stagirite never thought of his Unmoved Mover and Pure Act as an efficient cause of species. For that reason natural teleology cannot operate, either for Aristotle or for Darwin, in the manner of man’s fashioning of artifacts, as Gilson explains here: In the case of man, whether it is a question of the order of production or that of action, the problem allows of a solution. Because he is endowed with consciousness, man can conceive the not-yet-existent end in view of which, in order that it might be attained, certain antecedent conditions must be fulfilled. . . . Such is not the case with natural teleology. If nature operates in view of ends, neither the philosopher of nature nor the scientist can say in what mind these ends are first conceived. All takes place for them as if no ends of this kind intervened in the production of natural beings and of their structures. (11) Book Reviews 491 Even when that point is conceded, however, the division between man’s indisputably designed artifacts (“designed” here meaning explicitly created from a prior mental image already located in the mind of the artificer) and nature’s allegedly “blind watchmaking” is nowhere near as severe as modern Darwinians like Richard Dawkins claim. Indeed here is the precise point where Aristotle begins to “double back” on the proceedings, as the author brilliantly explains. In this passage, Gilson, while seeming merely to be summarizing a point made in Aristotle’s De partibus animalium, also deftly displays the power and contemporary relevance of the Peripatetic’s insights (as well as, by the way, exemplifying the extraordinary vitality and power of his own prose): Aristotle conceives the artist as a particular case of nature.This is why, in his natural philosophy, art imitates nature, rather than nature imitating art. The contrary is imagined because—every man being more or less an artist, an artisan, and a technician—we know, more or less confusedly, yet with certitude, the manner in which art operates. But insofar as we are natural beings, we are the products of innumerable biological activities of which we know practically nothing, or very little.The manner in which nature operates escapes us. Her finality is spontaneous, not learned. . . . In nature the end, the telos, works as every artist would wish to be able to work; in fact, as the greatest among them do work, or even as the others work in moments of grace when, suddenly masters of their media, they work with the rapidity and infallible sureness of nature. Such is Mozart, composing a quartet in his head while writing down its predecessor. Such is Delacroix, painting in twenty minutes the headpiece and mantle of Jacob on the wall of Saint-Sulpice. A technician, an artist, who worked with the sureness of a spider weaving its web or a bird making its nest would be a more perfect artist than any of those that anyone has ever seen. Such is not the case.The most powerful and the most productive artists only summon from afar the ever-ready forces of nature which fashion the tree and, through the tree, the fruit.That is why Aristotle says that there is more design (to hou heneka), more good (to eu), and more beauty (to kalon ), in the works of nature than in those of art. (12–13; emphasis added) This passage, it should go without saying, in no way seeks to resuscitate Aristotle’s long-superseded biology, with its occasional old wives’ tales—though there are nowhere near as many of them as some modern scoffers claim (a blunder, by the way, Darwin never made, who readily conceded the Stagirite’s greatness, even in biology). On the contrary, for Gilson Bacon’s “lamprey objection” legitimately holds true for modern biology: modern science has eminently good reasons to ignore finality in its methodology. But that will never change the fact that man’s artifacts 492 Book Reviews are modeled on nature’s forms (as airplanes are on birds), and that is a fact philosophy must recognize even if such insights are barred from biology: The analogy with art, then, assists us to recognize the presence in nature of a cause analogous to that which is intelligence in the operations of man, but we do not know what this cause is. The notion of a teleology without consciousness and immanent in nature remains mysterious to us.Aristotle does not think that this should be a reason to deny its existence. Mysterious or not, the fact is there. It is not incomprehensible because of its complexity, which we can only hope science will one day clarify, but because of its very nature, which does not allow it to be expressed in a formula. . . .The difference [in the analogy] is that in the case of art the principle is exterior to the work instead of being interior to it, as it is in the work of nature. (13–14; emphasis added) Which leads Gilson to his central thesis that he will argue throughout the rest of the book: “Natural science neither destroys final causality nor establishes it” (20). For that reason, he can approach Darwin’s achievement with utmost serenity. Darwin-bashers and evolution-deniers will find no comfort in these pages.“Darwin was the very incarnation of the scientific spirit,” Gilson avers,“as avid in the observation of facts as he was scrupulous in their interpretation” (73). And toward the end of the book he says: “Darwin is infinitely attractive; none can gainsay this. He is incontestably a scientist by blood, and quite deserving of respect” (184). In fact, if there is a villain to the book, it would have to be William Paley, the late eighteenth-century Anglican divine who bequeathed to the world his particular version of the argument from design: just as the watch was clearly designed, and since the eye is far more complex than some ordinary timepiece, we too, a fortiori, must have been designed. Gilson will have none of this approach; and in his strictures against Paley’s too-easy argument from design one can detect what would surely be his criticism of its latter-day iterations in the Intelligent Design movement. Indeed, so strong is he here that one can almost hear him ventriloquizing the voice of David Hume when in the eighteenth century he pointed out the “engineering flaws” in creation: The mixture of theology and philosophy of nature has exercised a disturbing influence on the history of teleology. Supposing that, as we think, the living world gives witness to the presence of final causality in all the beings which constitute it, and at the same time the theologian, speaking in the name of first philosophy or metaphysics, affirms the existence of a God who is the creator and ordainer of nature: it still remains most often impossible to infer the intentions of the Creator Book Reviews 493 from the inspection of creatures alone. . . . It is necessary furthermore to grant to the biologist that, side by side with marvelous results, nature abounds with disconcerting failures and flawed workmanship: sickness, the destructive ferocity of beings who live only by the death of others, the colossal mess in the reproduction of plants and animals in which seeds perish in their billions without this prodigality corresponding to any intelligible necessity. If one thinks on the other hand of what ought to be the infinite wisdom of an all-powerful God and compares the detail of his work to his attributes, it is hard to defend him against the feeling that a simple human engineer would easily find many ways to ameliorate the details of his work. (143) Nor, of course, would Gilson have had much trouble skewering such contemporary Darwinian bulldogs like Dawkins. “The antireligious always has a bit of the religious in it,” he mordantly notes (88). He compares these fanatics to those reductionists who explain someone’s railroad journey to Marseilles by concentrating solely on the mechanics of the locomotive: “he observes, to the exclusion of all teleology, something which could not exist without that teleology . . . [and] treats organisms like travelers who would have arrived infallibly at the end of their voyage without having had the intention of going there” (147). I cannot conclude this review without mentioning Gilson’s skill at one-liners.The lengthier passages from his inimitable prose which I have quoted clearly show him arguing his larger thesis while still at the top of his form. But he also peppers his text with witty and devastating ripostes, one-line zingers which invariably hit their mark by exposing the lazy assumptions that infect so much of modern philosophy of biology. Here is one such gem: “We say that primitives take a watch for an animal, but only the genius of Descartes has been able to take animals for watches” (145; a bon mot that of course applies equally to Paley). Or this one, responding to those lachrymose dithyrambs from people like Steven Jay Gould who claim that life (and especially man) is the random outcome of impersonal forces, leaving us stranded in a universe bereft of meaning: “Teleology is perhaps a contestable explanation; chance is the pure absence of explanation” (154). For, as he says elsewhere,“Chance is a byproduct of order, not the other way around” (224, endnote 8); and: “Where there is no order, there can be no muddle” (227, endnote 20). Faithful Thomist that he was, Gilson was always careful about the proper boundaries and the specific competences and methodologies of each science, as readers of his book The Philosopher and Theology already know. It is this careful delineation of separate competences that allows him to bring all of his learning to bear on this knotty problem. If any one Book Reviews 494 passage sums up the central claim of the book, perhaps this one does it the best: If the scientist refuses to include final causality in his interpretation of nature, all is in order; his interpretation of nature will be incomplete, not false. On the contrary, if he denies that there is final causality in nature, he is being arbitrary.To hold final causality to be beyond science is one thing; to put it beyond nature is something completely different. . . . Explanations which rely on final causality have often been ridiculed, but mechanist explanations have often been ridiculed also, and this does not disqualify the legitimacy of either point of view. (31) Or as he says in the last paragraph of the book, “the important thing is to know whether or not [final causality] expresses a fact given in nature; for if we object to final causality as an explanation, it remains as a N&V fact to be explained” (159). Edward T. Oakes, S.J. University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein, Illinois God is Not a Story: Realism Revisited by Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 ), viii + 356 pp. AT THE outset of her introductory chapter, Francesca Aran Murphy observes,“Narrative theology intends to do something indispensable—to make theology less conceptual and more imaginative, that is, less theoretical and abstract, and more biblical” (1). Acknowledging the value of this goal, she asks whether narrative theology succeeds in moving its practitioners out of the merely conceptual realm and to real contact with the living, biblical God. She identifies two kinds of narrative theology, Barthian and Thomist. For both, the biblical story has its own rules, its own grammar, and revealed realities intelligible only within these grammatical rules.We have contact with the living God only from within this biblical story and its grammar. Thus metaphysical inquiry, arising from outside this biblical story and with its own distinctive grammar, cannot contribute (at least on its own terms) to our contact with the living God who reveals himself within the biblical story, above all in Christ Jesus. Nor can historiography or physical science, with their own sets of methodological rules, apprehend the referents of Christian discourse.The remainder of the book offers a critique of this approach. In her second chapter, Murphy argues that the “conversational image of the Church” (30) falls away in narrative theology with its understanding of Book Reviews 495 the Church as one “language” or narrative. Instead of focusing on the Trinitarian Author, theologians become obsessed with the narrative itself, with the result that the narrative’s portrait of God (as a guide for human praxis) displaces the way in which the narrative (as an “image”) mediates God existentially. Correspondingly, our concepts become more important than historical events. Drawing upon the expertise in aesthetics that one finds in her earlier works as well, Murphy here compares narrative theology with the cinema (essentialist conceptualism) as opposed to the theater (existentialist realism).Although sympathetic to narrative theology’s effort to defend Scripture from historical-critical disintegration, Murphy argues that the best way to do this is to appreciate Scripture as communication and conversation (thus recovering history). Since conversation requires an existing dialogue partner, Scripture’s truth cannot be confined to our “performance” of the narrative, but rather must be grounded outside our minds. In the same vein, Christ is not an “identity” known by his action but an “existent” who acts (63), and who thus must be known not only in a performative/regulative narrative but in historical (existential, metaphysical, imagistic) particularity.The Church is not simply shared adhesion to a narrative but rather is a dialogue rooted in personal intention and existential judgment, whose source is “the personal exuberance of the Author” (81). Chapter 3 asks whether the five ways are Aristotelian inductive proofs, starting from finite beings, or are deductions from “the logic of the story as a whole,” the logic or grammar of revelation (92). The latter view proposes that Aquinas’s five ways are investigations into what it means to speak of the Christian God and thus will be intelligible only in light of Christian faith. Murphy goes on to observe that some scholars view the five ways through the prism of the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”This view of the five ways, however, displaces their concreteness, their concern for particular finite things. As Murphy remarks,“The advantage . . . of empirical facts is that chains of them have specifiable characteristics, such as that they move, or that one is a cause of another or that they appear to achieve purposes” (98). From these characteristics arise “how” questions rather than “why” questions. Returning to her comparison of cinema and theater, Murphy observes that “a ‘theatrical’ presentation of the argument would infer its way through designs and moves to an Artist or First Mover, and only then have the temerity to enquire of Him or Her, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ ” (107). In other words, for Murphy theologians misunderstand Aquinas’s five ways when they treat them as deductions from the story of faith and/or move directly to the distinction between esse and nothingness (creatio ex nihilo ). Rather, she advocates looking with Aquinas 496 Book Reviews at the concrete free effects of a free agent.Turning to Karl Barth’s interpretation of Anselm’s Proslogion, Murphy distinguishes between Barth’s “ontology of revelation” and narrative theology’s focus on hermeneutics: “With Barth, God demonstrates himself, and this results in faithful analogical language. With Frei, the analogical language of Scripture is itself the demonstration” (119). Without recognizing it, narrative theology thus falls into anthropocentric univocity, turning “Barth’s self-revealing, scriptural God into a scriptured God of human thought” (121). Chapter 4 inquires into the problem of evil, showing how Aquinas’s metaphysical demonstrations of God’s transcendence transform evil from a logical problem to a practical one, having to do with God’s providence in actual history.The alternative, as Murphy shows in philosophers from Leibniz to Nietzsche (as well as in the movie Star Wars and in Jack Miles’s God: A Biography ), is to stay at the level of ideas, and to pair “good” and “evil” melodramatically as contrasting principles. At this stage Murphy again compares Barth with narrative theology: for Barth we only know evil in Christ; for narrative theology (at least as represented by Robert Jenson) this means that evil belongs to the “identity” of God. In light of Aquinas’s understanding of analogy, however, Murphy argues that attending metaphysically to concrete historical things, as Aquinas does, makes the difference in avoiding a melodramatic account of evil. Chapter 5 begins with an analysis of Herbert McCabe on the Eucharist. Murphy argues that McCabe’s defense of transubstantiation relies too heavily upon linguistic categories and problematically displaces Christ’s “substance” with Christ’s “esse.” She finds a similar emphasis on “esse” in McCabe’s demonstration of God’s existence. Returning to her earlier concerns about the bypassing of concrete things, she warns that the risk is an essentialist ontology that leads narrative theology into conceptualism. By contrast, she argues that “[w]ithin the drama of the relation of human nature and divine grace, marking out who is coming engages us on the most personal level” (203). In a detailed discussion of each of Aquinas’s five ways, guided by Etienne Gilson and Hans Urs von Balthasar, she pays particular attention to the difficulty that narrative theology has with the fourth way, which relies upon the metaphysics of participation and leads “not to a top perfection but to the Perfecter” (213). As she shows, von Balthasar reformulates Aquinas’s five ways so as to start from “the metaphysical structure of that particularly particular existent which is the human person” (221).Von Balthasar’s conclusions, she argues, insightfully exhibit God’s freedom and ours. In chapter 6, Murphy raises another problem for narrative theology: Trinitarian monotheism. As she says, “The defect in descriptive Trinitar- Book Reviews 497 ianism is that it has a psychological conception of what it is like for the Triune God to be one” (239). Examining theologians from Irenaeus, Augustine, and Aquinas to Barth, Karl Rahner, von Balthasar, McCabe, and Jenson, she suggests that von Balthasar achieves a breakthrough by locating “the created analogate to the divine, intra-Trinitarian relations in the real distinction of essence and existence” (252). By contrast, narrative theology identifies the Bible’s purpose as “the description of God rather than of worldly factual events” (255) and replaces a metaphysical understanding of distinct “relations” with descriptive accounts of temporal relationships. Murphy describes this shift as a “cinematic conception of the Trinity” (278) that falls into modalism. She nonetheless applauds narrative theology’s emphasis on how “the historical missions energetically and iconically express the Trinitarian processions” (284). In her view, the West developed more strongly the abstract side of Aristotle’s notion of being, whereas the East developed more strongly Aristotle’s “energetic conception” of being, rooted in being’s substantial operations (285). Von Balthasar draws out the latter with his emphasis on God as active love, whose unity depends on the actions of the distinct lovers. In light of the emphasis of narrative theology on a plotline (beginning, middle, and end), Murphy’s concluding chapter takes up the theology of history, from Augustine and Joachim of Fiore to Georg W. F. Hegel and contemporary theologians. At stake is the relationship of eternity and time, as Murphy shows through particular attention to Jenson’s view that “real eternity is futurity” (302). She notes that this view bears the imprint especially of Hegel, for whom God is love because God’s truth is enacted in story. By contrast, Murphy emphasizes God’s “free personality” in “the eternal self-giving of love” (306–7). Truth is enacted not as story but as dialogic drama. In this drama, only eternal Spirit can act as “the creator of persons and thus as the truth of love” (310). Narrative theology mistakenly replaces the sacramental sense of nature as leading upward to God (through metaphysical analogy) with rhetorical storytelling that can be understood only by believers.What is lost is “the genuinely dramatic quality of the encounter between God and human beings” (313): God reveals himself in and through actual created goods, above all in and through free persons. This realization fuels von Balthasar’s “rethinking Christian metaphysics as theo-drama” (315). Analogy functions here to reveal the expressive, iconic dimension of created reality. This iconic aspect is possible because “God expresses himself in creation as he is in eternity” (319), so that the missions dramatically reveal the processions. In history, God is revealed as total gift of love. Following von Balthasar, Murphy interprets this in the theatrical 498 Book Reviews terms, as tragedy and comedy:“The time in which the tragedy of Christ’s passion occurs is eternal—the Lamb is slain from the foundation of the world. And yet, flowing from the passion into the broad space of history, is the comedy of the Church, in which grace flows from the Eucharistic sacraments of that passion” (324). In God’s energy of self-giving love, one finds both the “tragic” and the “comic” analogously understood.With an eye to theologies of “predestination,” Murphy concludes that not epistemic certainty but hope in the energy of God’s love—dialogically and dramatically at work in the participation in eternity that is historical time—stands at the heart of the Christian vision. Readers who seek in God is Not a Story a full evaluation of the theologians whom she criticizes will not be satisfied. For example, Murphy criticizes David Burrell’s manner of weaving together insights from Bernard Lonergan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Thomas Aquinas (an approach that, as she recognizes, also characterizes the work of George Lindbeck), but she rarely cites any of Burrell’s works other than his 1979 Aquinas: God and Action. Likewise, this is not the book for those who seek to understand, as a historical matter, how philosophical theology was sustained and nourished among English-speaking believers during the past half century. Even so, there is no doubting that this is a major and profound work. Murphy has hit upon two key elements in contemporary theology, one pointing to the past, the other to the future. First, she shows that the metaphysical weakness of much narrative theology leads to an anthropocentric focus. Narrative theology’s displacement of historical reference by grammatical rules and practices/performances aimed to counter the dissolving of Scripture’s (particularly the Torah’s) historical reference by biblical scholarship, but the attendant problems make this solution untenable. By contrast, when Scripture is read in light of Gilson’s metaphysical realism combined with personalist and dialogic emphases, the historicity of revelation and our encounter with revealed realities retain their full dimensions. Murphy’s critique of narrative theology’s metaphysics strikes me as accurate and constructive, although John Milbank’s influential emphasis on neo-Platonic metaphysics means that the narrative theology about which she writes no longer has the purchase that it once had. Second, the full scope of God is Not a Story makes clear that in a key sense the book is actually not about narrative theology, but rather is an extended argument for the need for a better theological appropriation of the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar among English-speaking theologians. When united to her wide theological and philosophical reading, Murphy’s training in literary aesthetics and in Gilson’s Thomism— through Louise Cowan and Frederick Wilhelmsen, respectively—makes Book Reviews 499 her a more astute reader of von Balthasar than most are able to be. She is alert to metaphysical and aesthetic cues that connect von Balthasar’s thought with classical and patristic-medieval sources, where others might see instead the eccentricity of Hegel’s philosophy or Sergius Bulgakov’s theology. On Murphy’s reading, von Balthasar offers a personalist, historically attuned, and ecumenically situated development of the metaphysical insights of Aristotle and the biblical/doctrinal insights of Aquinas. Murphy’s exploration of our encounter through reason and faith with the self-revealing God of love constitutes in this regard a superb companion volume to her earlier Christ the Form of Beauty. Is Murphy’s broadly Thomistic reading of von Balthasar’s doctrinal theology accurate? Should theologians today work within the framework of von Balthasar, integrating the insights of the patristic-medieval tradition, or is the best approach to work within a Thomistic framework, integrating the insights of the nouvelle théologie ? Overshadowing the analysis of narrative theology, these are the fundamental questions that arise from Murphy’s valuable and challenging study. N&V Matthew Levering University of Dayton Dayton, Ohio