Nova et Vetera Winter 2013 • Volume 11, Number 1 The English Edition of the International Theological Journal S ENIOR E DITOR Georges Cardinal Cottier, O.P. C O -E DITORS Reinhard Hütter, Duke University Divinity School Matthew Levering, University of Dayton M ANAGING E DITOR R. Jared Staudt, Augustine Institute A SSOCIATE E DITORS Holly Taylor Coolman, Providence College Gilles Emery, O.P., University of Fribourg Paul Gondreau, Providence College Timothy Gray, Augustine Institute Thomas S. Hibbs, Baylor University Christopher Malloy, University of Dallas Bruce D. Marshall, Southern Methodist University Charles Morerod, O.P., Bishop of Lausanne, Geneva, and Fribourg John O’Callaghan, University of Notre Dame Chad Pecknold, Catholic University of America Michael Sherwin, O.P., University of Fribourg Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Dominican House of Studies B OARD OF A DVISORS Anthony Akinwale, O.P., Dominican Institute, Ibadan, Nigeria Khaled Anatolios, Boston College Robert Barron, Mundelein Seminary John Betz, University of Notre Dame Bernhard Blankenhorn, O.P., Angelicum Steven Boguslawski, O.P., Dominican House of Studies Stephen Brock, Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Peter Casarella, DePaul University Romanus Cessario, O.P., St. John’s Seminary Boyd Taylor Coolman, Boston College Lawrence Dewan, O.P., Dominican University College Archbishop J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P., Pontifical Commission “Ecclesia Dei” Douglas Farrow, McGill University Anthony Fisher, O.P., Bishop of Parramatta, Australia Paul J. Griffiths, Duke University Divinity School Scott W. Hahn, Franciscan University of Steubenville Russell Hittinger, University of Tulsa Paige Hochschild, Mount St. Mary’s University Matthew L. Lamb, Ave Maria University Joseph Lienhard, S.J., Fordham University Steven A. Long, Ave Maria University Guy Mansini, O.S.B., Saint Meinrad School of Theology Francesca Aran Murphy, University of Notre Dame Thomas Osborne, University of St. Thomas (Houston) Trent Pomplun, Loyola University Maryland R. R. Reno, First Things Richard Schenk, O.P., University of Eichstätt Michele Schumacher, University of Fribourg Janet Smith, Sacred Heart Major Seminary Christopher Thompson, St. Paul Seminary Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap., United States Conference of Catholic Bishops William Wright, Duquesne University Instructions for Contributors 1. Address all contributions, books for review, and related correspondence to Matthew Levering, mjlevering@yahoo.com or Reinhard Hütter, rhuetter@div.duke.edu. 2. 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NOVA ET VETERA The English Edition of the International Theological Journal ISSN 1542-7315 Winter 2013 Vol. 11, No. 1 C OMMENTARY Proposing the Christian Vision of Marriage: What Can the Dominican Tradition Teach Us?. . . . . . . . . . . . . H OLLY TAYLOR C OOLMAN 1 The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II . . . . . . . . . . T HOMAS J OSEPH W HITE , O.P. 9 M EDITATION Vineyards and Landscapes: Lectio Divina in a Secular Age. . . . . . . . . . . . . . S R . M ARIA OF THE A NGELS, O.P. 19 A RTICLES The Nucleus of the New Evangelization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . P ERRY J. C AHALL 39 The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis: The Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . R ALPH M ARTIN 57 The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T HOMAS P INK 77 What Happened to the Vulgate? An Analysis of Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . K EVIN R AEDY 123 The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology: Rereading Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio. . . . . . . . . . . B RUNO M. S HAH , O.P. 147 God’s Word and Human Speech . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ROBERT S OKOLOWSKI 187 S YMPOSIUM : S EEING J ESUS THROUGH P OPE B ENEDICT XVI ’ S E YES Jesus the New Temple in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PABLO T. G ADENZ 211 Pope Benedict XVI on Christ’s Descent into Hell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . E DWARD T. OAKES, S.J. 231 The Son’s Filial Relationship to the Father: Jesus as the New Moses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T HOMAS G. W EINANDY, O.F.M. C AP. 253 R EVIEW E SSAY Natura Pura: Two Recent Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . T HOMAS M. O SBORNE , J R . 265 B OOK R EVIEWS The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? edited by Thomas Joseph White, O.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A ARON C ANTY 281 Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham. . . . . . . . . . . R AYMOND H AIN 283 The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God by Gilles Emery, O.P. . . . . . . . . . . . . . A NDREW H OFER , O.P. 288 Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice by Kent J. Dunnington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WARREN K INGHORN 291 Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach by Matthew Levering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TAYLOR M ARSHALL 296 Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas by Steven J. Jensen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . J EROME Z EILER , O.P. 299 The English edition of Nova et Vetera is published quarterly and provides an international forum for theological and philosophical studies from a Thomistic perspective. Founded in 1926 by future Cardinal Charles Journet in association with Jacques Maritain, Nova et Vetera is published in related, distinct French and English editions. The English edition of Nova et Vetera welcomes articles and book reviews in theology, philosophy, and biblical studies that address central contemporary debates and discussions. We seek to be “at the heart of the Church,” faithful to the Magisterium and the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, and devoted to the work of true dialogue, both ecumenically and across intellectual disciplines. Nova et Vetera (ISSN 1542-7315) is published by Augustine Institute, 6160 S. Syracuse Way, Suite 310, Greenwood Village, CO 80111. 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For subscription inquiries, email us at nvjournal@intrepidgroup.com or phone 970-416-6673. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 1–7 1 Proposing the Christian Vision of Marriage: What Can the Dominican Tradition Teach Us?* H OLLY TAYLOR C OOLMAN Providence College Providence, RI I N THIS ESSAY, I do not so much take up the content of a Christian vision, but rather consider what one might call a matter of rhetoric. What does it mean to take the Christian vision of marriage—or, indeed, the Christian vision in a broader sense—and to “propose” this vision to the world? (I would quickly add, however, that even this wording must be slightly amended: in the present context, where our work is re-evangelization, we must also speak of proposing this vision to our students and to our parishioners, to our fellow Christians, and, in fact, even to ourselves.) We would do well to consider briefly the term “propose”—one which I believe to be salutary. Pope Benedict himself has increasingly used this language. Speaking recently in advance of the Holy Father’s visit to his homeland of Germany, Jean-Claude Perriset, papal spokesman in Berlin, told news media this: “The pope will not come to impose Christian values, but to propose them, like Christ himself did.” Indeed, even more clearly, he continued: “People are free to accept [these Christian values] or not.”What the speaker suggests, then, is that it is a particular, and limited, task that we undertake. We are not called to compel assent, but only to display a certain reality, truthfully, beautifully, well.We might say, furthermore, that “a vision” is a helpful way of putting it. We do not seek simply to communicate ideas or principles, or even images. We propose for consideration the whole of a reality, a certain vision, as it has been given to us by God, and as we ourselves have lived it. What, then, does it mean to do this well? * An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the “Thomistic Circles” confer- ence “Marriage: Nature and Sacrament” at the Thomistic Institute of the Dominican House of Studies, Washington, DC, on October 22, 2011. 2 Holly Taylor Coolman Especially, what does it mean to tell this vision, so to speak, in a world that, in many ways, does not even speak the same language that we do? This is a question that is just as important as discussion of the content of that vision. “The medium is the message,” Marshall McLuhan famously asserted—but in the incarnational world inhabited by Christian theology, that is more true than in any other context. In this essay, then, I undertake reflection on the media, and the ways in which we tell the good news that we ourselves have come to know. Drawing on the Dominican Tradition My subtitle suggests that I will consider what it is that the Dominican tradition has to teach us on the matter. This, of course, is a little presumptuous of me, one with no formal connection to the Order of Preachers. But, then again, I do feel as if my life is immersed in the Order. Over twenty-odd years of theological study, my own scholarly interests have come increasingly to center on St. Thomas. Now, in my position at Providence College, I work and teach together with Dominican friars of the St. Joseph Province. I am a member of a parish run by the Dominicans, and my children are taught at our parish school by Dominican sisters who come to us from the Congregation of St. Cecilia, in Nashville. Between these friars and the sisters, there are three Dominican houses within a half-mile of my own home—as I sit on my front porch, it is not at all unusual for me to glimpse a white habit or two, to exchange a few words with this Dominican or that out for an evening stroll, even occasionally to be blessed in our home by the presence of a friar for a meal or just a cup of coffee. So, I suppose I could put it simply: I’m surrounded! The fact is that not only as a scholar, but also as a wife, a mother, and a Christian who lives among the Dominicans, have I learned a great deal from the Dominicans around me, including St. Thomas himself. What, then, might the Dominican tradition teach us? To Act as Magister Let us begin with St. Thomas as he fulfilled a particular vocation, that of the medieval magister, or master—a teacher in the emerging university system. A magister such as Thomas Aquinas had many responsibilities, but none was more important than participating in the practice of the disputatio and of concluding that disputatio by rendering a determinatio. In general, masters were required to carry out this responsibility at a minimum of once a year. Public disputations, which were the more elaborate form of disputation, commonly consisted of several elements. The master decided upon The Christian Vision of Marriage 3 a quaestio. An announcement was made, and usually, within a day or so, the event commenced. In the initial session, the master introduced the question and offered the first arguments both for and against. A debate ensued, with various students offering arguments from different positions. Finally, the disputatio concluded with the master summarizing arguments for and against a particular position and then rendering a determinatio, or an authoritative judgment. Now, present-day professors and teachers, please note: in this role, the teacher did not simply repair to his office and compose a lecture. In announcing a question, the magister intentionally opened the gates to a flood of evidence and arguments, all of which had to be dealt with. And this is, in important ways, the situation that confronts us in relation to the contemporary question of marriage. In the last few weeks alone, I myself have had conversations with individuals who wanted to know why the Church ignores science in opposing same-sex marriage, why the Church punishes those who are divorced, and “why the pastor won’t let us have a unity candle at our wedding.” (I should add that there was also one Catholic who wanted to know why the Church is so lax with regard to annulments!) And there are more complicated questions, too. If a couple is using natural family planning to space the births of their children, what principles or examples or criteria might they follow in order to go about that in a holy and faithful way? Humanae Vitae refers to the “serious reasons” that might lead a couple to natural family planning, but what are those? Or consider another complex question, raised by a reality increasingly common in the culture in which we live, of same-sex couples raising children to their adulthood. The question I would raise is: what account do we give of that ongoing work of parenting project? Is it a good? In what respects? Unless I’m mistaken, from the perspective of Catholic theology, this is a complicated and difficult question. These are matters to be discerned carefully, and conversations among the faithful, governed by prudence and love, would serve us well. The ability to respond to an avalanche of questioning, the ability to respond to some very difficult questions, depends upon honing the skills of the magister. Especially, I want to point to the way the master did his work in the form of intense intellectual precision. The sword of truth is sharp not in order to inflict injury, but in order to divide precisely and delicately between truth and error (Hebrews 4:12). This task of the determinatio is re-presented, of course in a sense, in Aquinas’s Summa, which many still continue to study not only to learn certain arguments, to understand certain directions of thought, but to learn how to argue, to understand how to think. I believe the Summa continues 4 Holly Taylor Coolman to serve us well in this task. Think of the dictum traditionally ascribed to St. Thomas—“Never deny; seldom affirm; always distinguish.” When my students hear this, I find, they understand it as timeless and detached, almost as a general state of disinterest. They hear only a stereotype: a perpetual scholastic propensity for one more miniscule, cerebral distinction. The whole of the determinatio, though, is something more than that; it is a way to come to an avalanche of opinion, in order to to affirm—not halfheartedly, but with precision. In the end, and at its best, the scholastic way is not a commitment to endless mental gymnastics. It is a way to recognize and respond to the complex and really interesting ways in which those around us—and indeed, we ourselves—get things wrong, often, in fact, at the moment we are also, in some other way, getting them right. Anyone who has immersed himself or herself in Aquinas’s work in the Summa knows that Thomas’s scholastic way goes beyond simply reacting and responding, to offer a full, reasonable, and beautiful picture of his position—a position that is always attempting to reflect the mind of the Church. The work that we take up, also, involves not simply dealing with problems and questions and difficulties but offering a picture of sobriety and joy, of dignity and respect, of humility and forgiveness. With specific reference to marriage, this means a vision in which everything—from courtship to cultivating and managing a life together, to living through the painful disappointments and losses that are shared within marriages— can come to share in those characteristics. In this, then, the magister represents the kind of intellectual rigor that must be brought to the task of proposing a Christian vision of marriage. Before leaving the historical figure of the magister, one final point should be made. At a certain point in his career, a student was invited to step into the role of master and to determine disputed questions himself. In order to do this, a student had to appear before a committee of three masters. The character of this meeting, however, is a matter of disagreement in recent scholarship. Some argue that the student was tested; others insist that it was simply a ceremony at which he swore that he had completed the required preparation. If the latter is correct, then the disputes themselves would have functioned as the real and final test.This is the sort of test that any of us who would propose the Christian vision will find.The good news is: we have a model of rigor and of precision to help us. Now, it might seem that if we really did the work of the magister well, entertaining myriad arguments and discerning decisively both truth and error, we would have done enough. But I want to suggest more. We are best served, I would suggest, if we consider the model not only of the magister, but also of the magistra. The Christian Vision of Marriage 5 To Act as Magistra In suggesting the model of the magister, I pointed to St. Thomas and his fellow medieval masters, but here, I point to someone greater: to the blessed Mother herself, whom we might regard not only as “Mater,” but as “Magistra.” Here again, I turn to a figure especially beloved within the Dominican Order. From its earliest days, the Order saw itself as particularly close to Mary, as sheltered and blessed by her. Nowhere, perhaps, is the ongoing devotion to Mary as clear as in the life-giving practice of praying the rosary, a gift of the Dominican Order to the whole Church. Can we think of the Blessed Mother as magistra, though? I am inspired here in part by the title of the Mater et Magistra, a papal encyclical of Pope John XXIII, promulgated in 1962.That document, of course, refers to the Church, but we know the many ways in which the Church learns her true nature in looking to Mary. In any case, the Blessed Mother, to whom the Dominican Order is so closely connected, was the first teacher to our Lord in his earthly life—and if to him, then, perhaps we might also allow, to us. But to return more specifically to our topic: as we go about our work of proposing, in what ways might we see Mary as our guide? Here, we come to a question upon whose answer we could reflect for a long time. Only as a beginning, I would like to suggest three ways. First is an emphasis that appears in Mater et Magistra itself, and can be captured in a brief quotation from it: “ . . . though the Church’s first care must be for souls . . . she concerns herself too with the exigencies of man’s daily life, with his livelihood and education, and his general, temporal welfare and prosperity” (¶3). In this, the Blessed Mother, like the Church as a whole, is surely our guide. Hers is precisely the way of incarnation, of welcoming all of the concrete complexity of everyday existence. She is not a philosopher or a hermitess but a wife and mother. Indeed, one of the most profound descriptions of Mary comes when, we are told in Luke 2:19 that she “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” We can hear the engagement with multiplicity here, not only in the reference to “all these things,” but in the very meaning of the Greek word translated as “reflecting”—or, in other versions, as “pondering.” It is a word that means gathering up many disparate things, of attending to the diversity of things, and drawing them into a whole. In the same way, our task of proposing a Christian vision must do so in the context of exigencies of daily life. To be clear: I don’t want to oppose “theological concerns” to “pastoral concerns” as is sometimes done. These most practical considerations do not require us to soften the truth, or to sidestep the truth. They do call us to intense attention to the specifics of a 6 Holly Taylor Coolman given situation, in the form of care, in the human sense. Determinations must be made in specific situations. Here, I think of a friend of mine, a professor at another university in New England. What not all of his friends know is that years ago, he became the father of a child, although he and the child’s mother did not marry. In fact, that child was adopted. He, however, has been deeply committed—if in a very unusual way—as a father. He supported his child’s mother through her pregnancy and the process of adoption, in which they worked together to choose an adoptive family. Even now, after the adoption, in fact, he has an ongoing connection with his son— and with the blessing of his son’s parents. He wants to make sure this child knows of his love and support. In the end, it is clear to me that he has chosen over and over what he believes is best for this boy. Here, we have a model of fatherhood immersed in some very specific and difficult circumstances. It is remarkable because of, not in spite of, that fact. We, too, are called into a terrain that is surprising and sometimes difficult, and we must develop the nimbleness and flexibility that allows for navigating concrete situations as they arise. A Christian vision of marriage is not communicated only generally or hypothetically, but also precisely in the “exigencies of daily life.” Second, I want to suggest that we can look to Our Lady as a model of gentleness. As I have already noted, a Christian vision can differ sharply from other proposed realities. The disagreements that Christians have with others in the public square—and, indeed sometimes inside the Church—are serious and sharp. It can sometimes feel as if we are being drawn into a full-fledged battle. But, as Christians we know that, in an ultimate sense, our enemies are not the human beings who stand before us. They are our opponents, but they are not our enemies. And we know that, in an ultimate sense, “the battle is the Lord’s” (2 Chronicles 20:15). We must remember, then, that we are not called to respond with an equal and opposite reaction.We must render our determinatio with gentleness, with patience, with kindness. Even, we can say, we must render our determination with a sort of sweetness, if by that word we understand the sweetness of our Lady. Here, although I do not speak of Mary without any sentiment, I do not simply speak sentimentally. We know that her gentleness is not weakness but is indeed strength. Third, I want to suggest that we can look to a characteristic of Our Lady that may be surprising, as it is not often emphasized at the present moment, even though it is often attested in the tradition. This characteristic is her beauty. In the end, what we offer also must be beautiful. If we persuade anyone to accept, fully, the Christian vision, it will be not only because they The Christian Vision of Marriage 7 have found it to be logically sound or practically advantageous, but because they have seen the beauty of that vision.We can all imagine the many facets of a truly beautiful marriage or family: concord and joy; humility and forgiveness; a reality in which each lives for the other. Luckily for us, however, beauty also appears in partial and provisional ways. Here, I think of a Catholic family I know. They always attend Mass together, although the mother and father do not sit together. In fact, this couple obtained a civil divorce some time ago. They have not remarried, and by whatever process, they have come to the decision not only that they will continue to attend Mass, but that they will continue to attend the same Mass. Despite all that is lost, these children see their mother and father every Sunday in worship, and they all share together in Holy Communion. In its own broken and fragmentary way, this fidelity displays a kind of beauty that teaches and even consoles those who see it. And, in all this, Our Lady is our guide. I noted that the student is eventually called upon to step into the shoes of the master. In a similar way, every Dominican—and indeed, every Christian—has Mary for his or her mother. But children also are meant to imitate their mothers, to learn by watching, and to do as they do. As we come to this task concerned with the exigencies of daily life, characterized by gentleness, and by beauty, we can be like her. Magister and Magistra Joined Together The two models are not often considered together. We more often think of the first as “clearheaded” and the other as “soft-hearted,” as if these two were opposed to one another. For us, though, they are simply two ways of understanding, and moving toward, wisdom and holiness. To “think carefully” and “to keep and ponder,” in fact, are activities best understood as linked. Whether we are thinking of ideas, circumstances, or people, both involve ultimately a form of care, and both call us to attentiveness to detail and to preparedness for the challenge at hand. The task of proposing Christian marriage in the present moment is a profoundly difficult one, some might say an overwhelming one. As we take up this task, we must consider not only what we have to say, but how we will say it. The good news is that there are powerful models to whom we can look. By God’s grace, we can fix our eyes on the magister and also on the magistra, and do well the work we are given to do. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 9–18 9 The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II* T HOMAS J OSEPH W HITE , O.P. Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC I F IFTY YEARS after the opening of the Second Vatican Council there are two schools of thought that typically dominate the interpretation of that event. One is derivative of the theology surrounding the postconciliar journal Concilium, which was founded by theologians like Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx. It advances a progressivist reading of the Council:Vatican II stands for engagement with modernity, liberation of women, dialogue with world religions, liberalization of sexual morays, laicization of the mission of the Church, and liberal political advocacy. The other current stems from the thinkers who founded the journal Communio, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger. It reads the Council as a bold new vision of a distinctively Catholic way of being in the midst of modernity. The agenda is inevitably counter-cultural: the Church as a sign and instrument of salvation in Christ, nuptial theology that stresses the importance of gender complementarity, Eucharistic communion and sacramental marriage as the core of a healthy society, teaching and evangelization as the heart of the Christian mission in the modern world. It can be useful to take the debate between these two schools as paradigmatic, employing their opposed interpretations as a framework for thinking about the Council and its aftermath. Perhaps, however, there is another juxtaposition to propose, one that does not overlap exactly with the options mentioned above. On this reading, there are also only two ultimate ways of reading the Council’s message, one through the interpretive lens of John Henry Newman, the other through that of Friedrich Nietzsche. * This essay previously appeared in the November 2012 edition of First Things. 10 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. Nietzsche is undoubtedly the hermeneutic master of our age. His influence, once confined primarily to the Parisian Left Bank and Ivy League English departments is now the intellectual stimulant of the culture at large. Every interpretation of a text, no matter how supposedly authoritative, is always, already laced with the dominant will to power of the interpreter. We invoke authoritative texts (the constitution, the Bible, the Magisterium) not so as to get at the truth but so as to leverage influence over others and for the preferential option of one’s self or one’s ideological tribe. Even more radically, texts are invoked not only to such political ends, but precisely so as to create theory itself. The interpreter is not a discoverer but a fabricator of truth. Prelates and professors spin narratives to believe in. In reality, then, truth claims only ever have the objectivity of works of art. This battle of the “will to power” Nietzsche also calls in his later notebooks a “will to art.” Every time we encounter the other’s opinion, the war of loves ensues. Whose art is better? Which should we love most? Of course, based on this understanding of textual interpretation there is no such thing as a solid truth claim. Everything falls into the realm of preferences and power. Everything is perspectival. However unwillingly or not, the Catholic progressivist left has taken up in its own way the hermeneutical presuppositions of Nietzsche: this in the implicit understanding of an interpretation of Christian teaching that centers above all upon the power of authority. The presupposition of modern Catholic liberalism is that the Church’s teaching down through time is inevitably composed of heterogeneous perspectives, both moral and doctrinal. On this reading,Vatican II is in some way a repudiation of the teachings of Vatican I or Trent. Doctrinal unity does not come about through an intellectual vision of the whole, of the organic continuity of perspective across the ages. Rather, the unity of Church teaching ultimately comes about by way of judicial fiat. It is the product of willful fabrication. How should we interpret the meaning of Vatican II and the essence of modern Catholicism? That depends upon who ultimately is telling the story. The Magisterium (Bl. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, the 1994 Catechism) asserts one reading of the Council, but it is taken as the artificial imposition of an extrinsic, authoritarian will. Against this, we should substitute the will to authority of the laity or the dissenting clergy, who can re-construe the narrative unity of Catholic doctrine from their own heterogeneous perspective, usually with the idea of the Council as revolution. John XXIII “opening the windows” of the Church is something like breaking down the door of the Bastille. This helps explain why the left is so obsessed with incessantly retelling the history of the Council. Recounting their own cathartic story of liberation again and again is The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II 11 not merely the collective means of safeguarding meaning against the telling of the bishops. It is the act of fabrication of an alternative doctrinal truth. Progressivist Catholics then lack any way back to a fundamental doctrinal unity because their hermeneutic of suspicion has blocked any possible appeal to final authority. Instead, we are left with mere human perspectives. Divine revelation is reconstrued as artifice. Of course, in saying all this I seem to be less polite to the Concilium people than I ought to be. After all, I am clearly suggesting that the essence of Catholic liberalism is nihilism, and that seems to be too extreme a claim. But it is in fact simply an accurate claim. There is either meaning in the world or there is not. And Catholic liberalism, because of its hermeneutical stance toward the tradition of the Catholic Church, is unable in the end to sustain a coherent claim that there is meaning in the world. Unlike liberal Catholicism, traditional forms of Protestantism have the advantage of being internally coherent, and therefore more intrinsically credible. They are also deeply unstable as forms of belief and practice, but that is a different problem to have and it is not something inherently incompatible with the affirmation of meaning. The choice between Catholicism and Protestantism is an intelligibly meaningful one. The choice between orthodox and heterodox Catholicism is not. Newman offers us a different view from all of this. Clearly in the late nineteenth century he stood for certain values that anticipated the developments of Vatican II, even things the theological left might consent to: a moderate interpretation of papal infallibility; an emphasis on the ecclesial significance of the laity; theological ecumenism; and the idea that the Church in the modern world should distinguish between her unchanging essence and a particular historical instantiation of Catholicism that predominated just prior to the French Revolution. Presumably for such reasons, Pope Paul VI went as far as to speak of Vatican II as “Newman’s Council.” And yet, Newman’s interpretive principles of Church councils were not liberal. As he made very clear in his Biglietto speech of 1879:“For fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. . . . [It] is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another. . . . It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true.” As it turns out in retrospect, Newman’s Apologia offers the most rhetorically potent defense of Roman authority written in the nineteenth century. His hermeneutical principles function not from the perspective of the primacy of the will to power, but from the perspective of consent over time to a unified and perennial truth, perceived across the ages. Toward this end, he proposes the interpretation of ecclesial texts by something like what has come to be called a hermeneutic of continuity: 12 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. ideas expand and develop in harmonious ways down through time. The Apologia and the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine allow that a fair amount of human dialectic and political battle can be the occasion (but not the inner mechanic) for this development. But on a deeper level, Newman sees through to something more mysterious and more real: the life of the Church as a life of truth and grace. Down through time, the Church goes from being herself more intensively to being herself more fully, from stem to blossom. It is not merely that there are common ideas down through time (though this is true and especially important). It is also that there is a common dynamic development of the inner life of the Church in the world, a mysterious life spanning across ages, growing in a consistent fashion. Not human political art, but divine supernatural life, is the essence of Catholic Christianity. II How, then, can we identify the living expression of the Catholic Church in the modern age? Trent is the first of the great modern Catholic councils, and we might rightly see it as a kind of doctrinal embryo that grows and develops as modern Catholicism blossoms, both at Vatican I and at Vatican II, in organic continuity, not artistic rupture. Here let’s choose three traits of the Council of Trent that reassert themselves in vital fashion across the ages: sacramentality, authority and rationality, and holiness. By these three measures, Vatican II shows itself a council thoroughly grafted onto the genetic legacy of Trent, and one of great organic vitality, as well as intellectual genius. We might speak then of the Tridentine genius, and the Tridentine vitality, of Vatican II. • • • In response to the Reformers, the Council of Trent underscored that the Church is a unified reality, both visible and invisible, composed of political society and of the life of grace. As Bellarmine provocatively put it: “the Church is as visible as the kingdom of France.” The seed notion at work here is that the unity of the Christian religion is grounded in something very visible and particular: spiritual contact with the seven sacraments. Water, oil, the Eucharist, spoken words of forgiveness, a society of ordained clerics, the grace of married love: these are the humble vehicles, encountered in concrete instances, that communicate the grace of communion with God to the world at large. In defining the seven sacraments as both signs and true causes of grace, the Council of Trent made everything very tangible: this sacramental economy is at the heart of the Christian life. Vatican I added to this the emphasis on the particularity of communion with the Bishop of Rome. The Petrine office in the Church is meant The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II 13 to hold together in unity the plurality of a diversity of Churches in the midst of the tumults of the modern world. Here the key interlocutor was not Protestantism, but modern secularism. Nineteenth-century Europe saw the rise of post-Napoleonic regimes that wished to purge public culture of all or most religious influences. In this context, the Catholic Church insisted on the visible bond among all Christians, in visible communion with the Pope, the center and “Greenwich time” of all Christendom. His juridical authority to govern and unite the faithful is the living sign of a deeper vitality that transcends the secular state and the particularities of nationalist politics. The Church unites humanity over and above the totalizing ideologies of the modern nation state and the intellectual velleities of the pundits of secular culture. Admittedly, there is a common account of Vatican II which claims that the Council sought to correct the heritage of Trent and Vatican I on both these points. The ecumenical aspiration of Vatican II downplayed the emphasis on the seven sacraments (because Protestantism typically affirms only two). The tone of openness to modernity sought to soften the stridency of Vatican I. Such an idea is exaggerated, however, because it ignores a core truth. For Vatican II not only presupposes the Tridentine vision of the Church as a concrete, visible reality but reclaims it as the key to understanding the mysterious working of grace in all of humanity. This is the deeper signification of the famous statement of Lumen Gentium 1: “the Church is in Christ like a sacrament or as a sign and instrument both of a very closely knit union with God and of the unity of the whole human race.” Turn that around: All human beings, to the extent that they cooperate with the grace of Christ, come under a kind of implicit relationship to the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. Vatican II universalizes or expands the comprehension of what is already present at Trent.The human person is called into a visible and invisible fellowship with God, within a unified ecclesial body. One can fail culpably to recognize or embrace this mystery (with terrible consequences), but what is of core importance is that this is the deeper mystery of the human race: the visible, sacramental ecclesiality of life in Christ. It is because this is the case, and not in spite of it, that the Church can be open to the modern world in an unthreatened fashion, as the key to unlocking the inner secret at work in that world. At the heart of the world is the mystery of Christ and the Church. Similarly, the emphasis of Vatican I on the unifying role of the papacy is not lost at Vatican II, but it is reasserted as the basis of a communion in the one Church. If each local Church is to be fully herself, she must be in communion with the larger principle of unity, the Church in Rome and her prelate. This does not mean that there are no grounds for 14 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. ecumenism, but rather that ecumenism is truly possible and necessary especially because of the Roman primacy. Because there is a way for Christians to be one in a visible way, holding to a common doctrine, just so, they should seek together to understand and transcend their differences. For how would we find mutual doctrinal accord if there were no way to attain a touchstone of unity? Some form of doctrinal infallibility is the necessary condition for doctrinal unity. Paradoxically, we can say with certitude: no pope, no true and final ecumenism. Analogously, if Vatican II states that it is due to the sensus fidei —the sense of the faith of the laity—that they are to be consulted in their practices and beliefs, it is not because the sensus fidei functions independently of the ecclesial hierarchy. Rather it is because the life of the laity in ordinary society can embody and express with its own unique genius and sanctity the concrete truth of the Gospel proclaimed by the apostolic hierarchy. Because there is a hierarchy, there can also be a distinct and complementary mission of witness and teaching that is particular to the laity. On this reading, Newman is right: the Church is alive in a myriad of ways, both in profound unity and in genuine, diversified vitality: in the sacraments, in the grace of Christ working invisibly to lead persons outside the Church to encounter Christ fully in the sacraments, in the Church in Rome and in her sister Churches, in the bishops and in the laity. The Council’s insistence on the sacramental visibility of the Church becomes a point of continuity with the past, not a point of rupture. III Consider another modern Catholic touchstone: the relationship between authority and rationality. The standard secular narrative is that we have to choose between appeal to a unified doctrinal authority and the openness of human rationality to the fullness of the universal truth. From Trent to Vatican II we see a contrary teaching: authentic apostolic authority and vital human rationality are not only complementary, but deeply mutually enriching. Trent committed the Catholic Church in modernity to this stance through that most authoritative of pronouncements: the affirmation of the Greek-language books of the Old Testament as inspired. By accepting the complete Septuagint as the authoritative Scripture of the Church, the Roman Catholic Church in modernity knowingly committed herself to a very ambitious project of historical study. How should we understand the narrative of the development of the books of the Bible, from the Torah and prophets (in Hebrew) to the inter-testamental literature (Hellenized Judaism), to the New Testament, but also on to the interpretations of the patristic age and the formation of the biblical canon during The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II 15 the time of the early Christological disputes? For the Council of Trent, historical rationality and the divine authority of Scripture are to be seen not in competition but in profound concord. In the wake of that Council, the Church sought to win over the academic culture of Europe by making historical arguments about the true genesis and development of early Christianity. For as Newman said, “to be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” This strategy committed the institution, however, to an ambitious new program of seminary and universities studies, one which was in turn propagated throughout Europe by the episcopacy and which renewed the study of philosophy and sacred theology in the early modern period. Vatican I carried this program forward in conversation with the secular Enlightenment. Dei Filius insisted, against secular reason, on the infallibility of divine revelation: revelation is a gift that human rationality cannot procure for itself. Yet it also underscored the high natural capacities of human reason (our philosophical capacity to know of the existence of God, to cooperate with divine revelation). Thus, against the reductive tendency of modern thought that so easily rejects appeal to divine authority, Vatican I sought to underscore the existence of a fruitful, liberating interaction between sacred theology and human rationality. The two are not at war, but may mutually interact with one another in peace and liveliness. Revelation is a gift to human reason seeking perspective. Reason seeking meaning can arrive at the threshold of the question of God and can therefore admit the open possibility of divine revelation. It is easy to see that the modern Church’s living confidence in both divine authority and human rationality flowers at Vatican II, bringing to greater fullness what is present in seed at Trent and in stem at Vatican I. For instance, Dei Verbum, the document on divine revelation, affirms that the Holy Spirit is the principal author of sacred Scripture but that the Bible is also always to be understood as the simultaneous product of true human authors. There is no rivalry, then, between divine causality and human creativity. Rather, God the Holy Spirit works through the living instrument of human rationality. Consequently, there need be no opposition between the study of the cultural context of a particular author and pursuit of the inspired, deepest meaning of the text. Each should in principle facilitate a deeper appreciation of the other. Analogously, the document Gaudium et Spes called for an integrated understanding of modern cosmology and human political and moral life, in concord with divine revelation. Engagement with the sciences or with the study of modern constitutional law is not inimical to a biblical understanding of reality, but profoundly compatible. More to the point, only the theological vision of the human 16 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. person who is created in the image of God can give final explanation to the development of the physical cosmos and the world of living things. Only theological recognition of the dignity of the human being who is redeemed in Christ can give ultimate justification to the humanist aspirations of modern democratic government and the legal system of rights. In a last example, Nostra Aetate underscored the importance of a search for intelligent points of contact between divine revelation and the diverse religious traditions of humanity. Proclamation of the Gospel and intellectual study of other religious traditions are not competing ideas, if each is rightly conceived. One can seek to explain and promote Christianity while also seeking to understand and learn culturally from the Hindu, Buddhist, and Muslim traditions. Most especially, the Church’s engagement with the Jewish people stems first from her recognition of the authority of Christ. This engagement requires that the Church take account of the theological and moral implications of the grave mistreatment of Jews by baptized persons, in both medieval and modern Europe. As the Church in modernity simultaneously embraces the exploration of divine revelation and the expansion of human reason, the mystery of the faith itself does not change, but the way that mystery is understood, articulated, and transmitted does develop.Through this development, doctrines are clarified and purifications occur. In and through the process, the Church is called to become more herself, more attentive to the truth that she bears within herself, in order to proclaim it with integrity and vitality to the world. IV Consider the third theme, holiness. On one level, the Reformation was most fundamentally about the doctrine of justification: what is it that makes us righteous before God? We know Luther’s bold answer: justification by faith alone, apart from works. The Church took issue with this definition, but the key note of discord had nothing to do with the notion of justification as a gift of grace. All were agreed on that. Nor was the conflict about the need for supernatural faith. Again, the Church insisted at Trent that faith is necessary for salvation. Rather, the heart of the matter had to do with Luther’s formula simul justus et peccator: the claim that one could be just by faith, while simultaneously alienated from God in the will by the interior wound of sin. Against such a notion, Trent taught that the infusion of supernatural charity is an essential dimension of justification. In the fallen human person, the disordered loves of sin turn the human will away from God. By the grace of justification, it is faith, hope, and love together that turn the human person freely and voluntarily away from sin and back toward God, all through the power of Christ. The Tridentine Genius of Vatican II 17 If we step back from the polemics of the Reformation era, we might ask what is at stake in this technical theological argument? One answer is: the Church’s insistence on the essential character of holiness at the core of Christian life. For there is no Christian life without charity. The seed idea of Trent, then, is that charity is at the root of all authentic Christian life. Charity, however, is not something only interior, but is also something lived out in the street. At Vatican I, the Church militant placed insistence on the public and social character of religion, in the face of the militant secular state, which wished to confine religion to a merely privatized “freedom of worship.” The inner core of this Catholic militancy is based on a deep understanding of the all-embracing character of religion. Since charity impels the human person toward the service of God in all things, it is not feasible to ask the religious person to quarantine his or her belief behind the curtain of private life. Catholic charity bears fruit through public, Christian institutions. This is not to say that Vatican I pushed for a state-imposed religiosity (it did not). It did hold for the principle of integrity. For the Catholic Christian is called to submit all the spheres of life to the mystery of God. Holiness is the fruit of such integrity, and it tolerates no half measures of self-offering. It stems instead from the victory in the human person of radical, oblative love. This is a theme that flowers, meanwhile, in Vatican II. The Council emphasized the “universal call to holiness” of all of Christ’s faithful, the people of God. Baptism brings with it intrinsically a vocational calling to holiness that is grounded in the life of charity. Family life and political processes should be affected at their root by this engagement on the part of the laity, and that engagement can transform the world. But the world also can and does resist the holiness of God. It is not surprising then, that Gaudium et Spes should enjoin Christians to public practices of Christian charity that can take place through the instrumentality of the state: education of the poor, economic development in underprivileged countries, the pursuit of international peace. But by the same measure, the Council also demarcates the threats to sacramental married life that strike at the heart of the holiness of a civilization: adultery, abortion, and contraception are all referred to expressly. Of course, this theme of the Council ties in with the sacramental vision mentioned above.We are frail human beings, in need of spiritual healing and elevation, dependent upon nourishment and continual aid from God. The sacramental life is the visible sphere wherein the baptized Christian can be habitually rejuvenated, in order to bring the mystery of Christ visibly and invisibly into the heart of modernity. Vatican II’s emphasis on holiness is grounded in Tridentine presuppositions: the charity of the sacraments of 18 Thomas Joseph White, O.P. reconciliation and the Eucharist stands at the heart of the Christian calling to renew the world. V Some today, particularly among younger Catholics, wonder not if the Council is true, but whether it is of any great help to us in our contemporary setting. After all, the council fathers did not really foresee the radical secularization of Europe and the Americas that was beginning just as the documents were being published. It is not surprising that in our new and very challenging context, many would look back to the liturgical spirituality and theology of Trent and Vatican I as expressions of vibrant Catholic identity. If people think this is strange, they are mistaken. For it makes perfect sense in light of the “life” analogy of Newman. If the organism is under attack from diseases of internal dissent and external persecution, it is normal to go back to the living sap. These earlier configurations of Catholicism are like the stem and the root, wherein the life of the modern Church is expressed in concentrated fashion. In that sense they are not obsolete or lost, but remain present and of perennial importance. Nevertheless, the stem and the root are meant to flower, and the flowering of the Church occurs through the Christian life of charity and the public, credible proclamation of the truth. It is precisely because Catholic Christianity is not sectarian but cosmopolitan and culture-forming that it must remain ever engaged with the world around it. The modern Church is indeed a sacramentally visible order. She recognizes simultaneously the absolute importance of both divine authority and public rationality. She is committed at her heart to the life of holiness. Because all this is true, the confidence of the Second Vatican Council should continue to speak to us. The faith of the Church truly can transform the world, even as leaven in the dough, or as the lamp that illumines an entire room. Newman was acutely sensitive to the great difficulty and simultaneous grandeur of being a Christian in the contemporary age. The Christian is always a stranger in the world, but the Christian is the soul of the world as well. The greatness and promise of this vocation can be underscored by a patient and tradition-based reading of the Second Vatican Council. That Council teaches us confidence. For in modernity the Church surely does travel through a dark night of faith, but she also bears within herself the hidden and radiant presence of the inextinguishable light of Christ. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 19–38 19 Vineyards and Landscapes: Lectio Divina in a Secular Age S R . M ARIA OF THE A NGELS, O.P. Our Lady of Grace Monastery North Guilford, CT “F OR NOW treat the Scripture of God as the face of God. Melt in its presence.”1 We hear references to the approach to Sacred Scripture known as “lectio divina” in an increasing variety of contexts. What do people mean when they use this term? Does what they mean by it enable them to treat the Scriptures as “the face of God” as Saint Augustine’s ancient and still eloquent preaching invites? This question will be explored in the following essay first by considering the goal of the Dominican monastic/contemplative life, then by presenting lectio divina as a primary means to this goal, and, finally, by highlighting some of the obstacles we face to living our life in today’s secular world.2 I will present the goal as a participation in God’s own life that anticipates the life to come. I will suggest that lectio divina is a crucial means of perpetual and vigilant receptivity to and engagement with the Word of God, which has a formative effect on the mind and heart. Understood in this way, lectio provides a foundation for a whole way of life that is fundamentally a liturgical life wherein the mysteries of salvation are rendered present and active through Word and Sacrament. I will also suggest that this liturgically divinizing life is being jeopardized by the pernicious influences of secularism and that it is precisely a renewed understanding of lectio divina, not as simply one practice among others, but, rather, as an undivided life of 1 Saint Augustine, Sermon 22.7, cited in Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 50. 2 Originally delivered on April 27, 2011, to the Novice Mistresses of the Associa- tion of the Monasteries of the Nuns of the Order of Preachers in the United States of America. Slightly modified. 20 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. vigilant availability and docility to the Word of God, that can help to counteract these obstacles and speed us toward our goal. I. Lectio Divina and the Goal of the Dominican Monastic/Contemplative Life In an essentially liturgical life such as ours, the Spirit is always active, causing the sanctification of human persons, enabling them to render worship and praise, in conformity with our great High Priest, the Person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh and the Eternal Word and Wisdom of the Father. Hence, it is a life that conduces to a participation in God’s own Trinitarian life and thus anticipates the life to come. The goal of our lives is nothing less than this. We are moved toward this goal by beginning in the beginning with the Word, for “in order to enter into the world of the liturgy, we must first of all enter into the world of the Bible and place ourselves in the perspective which is that of the Bible.”3 This perspective revolves around the fundamental and unique belief of Christians that God has spoken to us and, with the intention of drawing us into His own relational life of knowledge and love, continues to speak to us.4 God speaks to us in various ways. He speaks to us through the world He created through His Word. He speaks to us in and through His Son, the Word made flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ. He speaks to us through the inspired Scriptures as they are read and interpreted in the Church’s life of faith and sacraments. What does God say when He speaks? What is the message that He communicates to us? In one sense it is all very simple. “God, infinitely perfect and blessed in Himself, in a plan of sheer goodness,”5 although He stood in need of no one and no thing, in an unfathomably generous and mysterious act, brought into existence a created order of beings, the pinnacle of which is created persons, angelic and human.6 These He created and destined to 3 Cyprian Vagaggini, O.S.B., Theological Dimensions of the Liturgy, vol. 1, trans. Leonard J. Doyle (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1959), 3. 4 See Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 25–26, where he explains: “The basic reason why man can speak with God arises from the fact that God himself is speech, word. His nature is to speak, to hear, to reply. . . . Since there is relationship within God himself, there can also be a participation in this relationship. Thus we can relate to God in a way which does not contradict his nature. . . . [M]an is able to participate in the dialogue within God himself because God has first shared in human speech and has thus brought the two into communication with one another.” 5 Catechism of the Catholic Church, prologue. 6 “With unimaginable love you looked upon your creatures within your very self, and you fell in love with us. So it was love that made you create us and give us Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 21 share in His own life of infinite Wisdom and delight.7 All things were created in and through the Word and, bearing an imprint of their Maker, possess, as it were, a “Logos pattern.” This Logos pattern marks all of creation with an intelligibility that can direct the mind and heart back to God. As our Holy Father, following the 2008 Synod on the Word of God, wrote in Verbum Domini: “Creation is born of the Logos and indelibly bears the mark of the creative Reason which orders and directs it.”8 God created all things through the Word and spoke that same Word in time in order to bridge9 the distance caused by our creatureliness and by our sin, and so to lead back to Himself a world which had strayed far from the “creative Reason which orders and directs it.”10 The Word He spoke in time is the Eternal Word that He is always generating, always speaking, and that is therefore infallibly efficacious. Like the snow and rain, the Word is always returning to Him who speaks it, achieving the end for which He was sent.11 That the culmination of God’s speech in creation and in history occurred in the Person of Jesus Christ was something that the early Christians knew well. It was what led some of them out into the desert where they could have an undivided availability to hear and respond to this Word.This availability to the Word was not something that they practiced for a couple of hours a day as some might try to do in a practice of lectio divina. Rather, it marked their whole way of living. being just so that we might taste your supreme eternal good.” Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 13, trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), 49. Later in the Dialogue, God will say to Catherine: “I . . . created them in my image and likeness so that they might have eternal life, sharing in my being and enjoying my supreme eternal tenderness and goodness” (21, p. 58). To which Catherine responds: “O immeasurably tender love. . . .You, deep well of charity, it seems you are so madly in love with your creatures that you could not live without us! Yet you are our God, and have no need of us” (25, p. 63). See also Prayer 10 in The Prayers of Saint Catherine of Siena, ed.and trans. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). 7 “From the beginning God created man out of his own generosity. . . . He who stands in need of no one gave communion with himself to those who need him.” Saint Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Lib. 4, cited in Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 2, 177. 8 Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini: The Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, 8 (emphasis in original). 9 As God says to Saint Catherine: “I have made a bridge of the Word, my onlybegotten Son, and such is the truth” (The Dialogue, 21, p. 58). “ . . . it stretches from heaven to earth by reason of my having joined myself with your humanity, which I formed from the earth’s clay” (ibid., 26, p. 64). 10 Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 8. 11 See Isaiah 55:10–11. Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. 22 The Cistercian monk and scholar Armand Veilleux makes the distinction between the “technical (and reduced) sense” with which lectio divina has been invested in “the spiritual and monastic literature in these last decades” and the meaning which it had for the desert fathers. He explains: The Latin word lectio in its first sense means a teaching, a lesson. In a second derived sense, lectio can also signify a text or a group of texts transmitting this teaching. Thus we speak of the lessons (lectiones) from Scripture read during the liturgy. Finally, in a still more derived sense, lectio can also mean reading.12 He continues: This last sense is obviously the one in which this expression is understood today. In our days, in fact, lectio divina is spoken of as a specific observance; and we are told that it is a form of reading different from all others, and that above all we must not confuse true lectio divina with other forms of simply “spiritual reading.” This is a completely modern version, and as such, represents a concept foreign to the Fathers of the Desert.13 For our monastic predecessors, reading the Sacred Scriptures was not an isolated practice that they engaged in for an hour or two a day. Rather their whole lives were shaped in such a way that the Word was always on their lips, in their minds and in their hearts. This is quite evident in the emphasis placed on the ability to read that is apparent in the Pachomian tradition. For example, we find in the Precepta (The Precepts of Pachomius) that newcomers should be compelled to read even if they did not want to. The precepts go on to state: “[T]here shall be no one whatever in the monastery who does not learn to read and does not memorize something of the Scriptures. [One should learn by heart] at least the New Testament and the Psalter.”14 Familiarity with the Scriptures was essential, since it was the Word of God itself that provided the way of life, the regula, for the early monks and nuns. When Rules eventually began to be written in the fourth and fifth centuries, they were considered to be nothing more than commentaries on the Scriptures or practical advice on how to put the Word of God into 12 Armand Veilleux, O.C.S.O., “Lectio Divina as School of Prayer among the Fathers of the Desert,” a translation of a talk given at the Centre Saint-Louis-desFrançais, in Rome, November 1995. 13 Ibid. 14 “Precepts of Pachomius,” 139–40, in Pachomian Chronicles and Rules, Pachomian Koinonia, vol. 2, trans. Armand Veilleux (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 166. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 23 practice in the shaping of a community and in one’s own daily monastic life. The Scriptures themselves were to be memorized, recited, and reflected upon. This was to be the constant interior preoccupation of every monk or nun and the most frequent topic of their conversation.The goal was to immerse oneself in the sacred mysteries revealed in the Bible to the point that the monastic community and the individual member of the community would be so formed as to recapitulate or appropriate salvation history within themselves. All the structures of daily life were then, as they are today, meant to foster this reception of the Word. The Word, of course, is not simply the written word. It is something living and active. The responsibility of the monk or nun was, and is, to open himself or herself to it, to receive it. It has a power and a dynamism of its own which creates its own response.15 The purpose of the constant study of, and meditation on, Scripture was that the monks themselves would become God’s own people, His adopted children. So, “for the monk reading [was] not one activity but a way of life”16 and a way of life that so transformed the reader that he or she already began to participate in the life of heaven. This transformation, however, was a long, slow, and very arduous process. It engaged the monk or nun in the daily martyrdom involved in the recognition of, and struggle with, his or her own fallen nature and false self. One of the greatest contributions of Egyptian monasticism was the categorization of all the various manifestations of fallen human nature and the ways that human beings are trapped in falsehood and illusion. Evagrius, and Cassian after him, based their writings on the experience of generations of monks and nuns and their efforts to save their souls in the desert.These texts were intended to help the monastic person diagnose, understand, and fruitfully struggle against the disorder in their hearts, the lies that were woven into their fallen human nature. These disorders, these lies, constrict and complicate the human heart, making it a rocky path, barricading it with thorns and briers. The Sower is relentless. The same Word Who searches hearts also bruises and burns, roots up and tears down.17 At the same time, He also 15 “So powerful is the Word of God that we shall be set free by its efficacy and sing triumphantly with the prophet: Lord, you have broken my bonds; I will offer you the sacrifice of praise.” Alonso de Orozco, O.S.A., Tradition Day by Day, ed. John E. Rotelle, O.S.A. (Villanova: Augustinian Press, 1994), cited in Magnificat (December 2011): 141. See also Armand Veilleux, “Holy Scripture in The Pachomian Koinonia,” in Monastic Studies 10 (1974): 143–53. 16 Ivan Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text: A Commentary to Hugh’s Didascalicon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 58–59. 17 See Jer 1:10. 24 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. raises up and gives new life, divine life, through His own power. He accomplishes this by conforming those who receive Him to His own death and resurrection. This very Word is Himself the sword given to wield in the battle against falsehood.18 This is something that the early monks and nuns knew well. It is why they spent their lives dwelling in the Word Who would protect, save, free, elevate, and transform them. When we move from our earliest monastic roots to our more proximate roots in the medieval world, forty-two years before the birth of our Holy Father Saint Dominic, around the year 1128, we find Hugh of Saint Victor’s Didascalicon, a text considered to be “the first book written on the art of reading.”19 There is much we can learn here, for the art of reading is closely connected to the art of the monastic life—to the living of our form of life in a way that is truly beautiful and a manifestation of the glory of God. Ivan Illich, in his In the Vineyard of the Text, a commentary on Hugh’s Didascalicon, describes reading as “an ontologically remedial technique,”20 which brings healing to the disorder that has plagued man since Adam’s sin. He also explains how, for Hugh, “the book page is a supreme remedy; it allows the reader, through studium, to regain in some part that which nature demands, but which sinful inner darkness now prevents.”21 The page is meant to function as a mirror. “Hugh asks the reader to expose himself to the light emanating from the page, ‘ut agnoscat seipsum,’ so that he may recognize himself, acknowledge his self. In the light of wisdom that brings the page to glow, the self of the reader will catch fire, and in its light the reader will recognize himself.”22 In the chapter “Monastic Reading,” Illich emphasizes the process of self-recognition and transformation in the light of wisdom. Reading is presented as a monastic activity which involves assiduous effort and the discipline of combining moral behavior with knowledge. It requires investing “everything in the ascent of the steep road toward wisdom.”23 Illich writes: Meditative reading can sometimes be difficult, a chore which must be faced with courage, fortitudo. But the reader, sustained by the ‘zeal to 18 The Incarnate Word instructed us by His own example in this regard. “ ‘If you are the Son of God command that these stones become loaves of bread.’ Jesus said in reply, ‘It is written: “One does not live on bread alone but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.” ’ ” Mt 3:3–4. 19 Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 5. 20 Ibid., 11. 21 Ibid., 21. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 52. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 25 inquire,’ will derive joy from his application. Eagerness comes with practice. To foster his zeal, the student needs encouraging example rather than instruction. Wisdom is of great beauty . . . ‘Reading’ is an iconogram for the foretaste of wisdom.24 The beauty of wisdom, reading as a foretaste of the wisdom of our beautiful God—these are themes that should appeal to our hearts as Dominican Nuns. Our own Order was born at the dawn of the Middle Ages when the lectio of the monasteries was giving rise to the quaestio of the Schools. Saint Dominic, in a sense, spans both ways of life. During his years as a canon he was immersed in a life of reading. He was said to have arrived at that purity of heart which disposed him to the grace of founding the Order through his reading of Cassian’s Conferences. In the Eighth of the Nine Ways of Prayer we find him seated with an open book, a posture also captured by Fra Angelico in one of his better-known frescoes. Saint Thomas was said to have read from Cassian every day in order to lift his affectus up to God and so be able to return to his study and writing refreshed. Saint Raymond claims that Saint Catherine received infused knowledge of the whole spiritual tradition of Egyptian monasticism, disposing her for listening and engaging in her Dialogue with the Father. We, as Nuns of the Order of Preachers, follow in their steps. We do not have the capacity for memorizing texts that the ancients had and our lives are more properly liturgical than were the lives of our monastic predecessors.Yet, as women called to be living in freedom under grace,25 we have been set apart exclusively for the reception of the same Word that came to them—that beautiful, efficacious Word, that one Word of the Father who always was, and always will be, the Word Who breathes forth Love.26 We have been set apart by that Love, to receive that Word, to the glory of the Father from Whom He was sent.27 Therefore our whole life can be seen and understood as one great act of continuous lectio divina—of receiving, pondering, responding to, resting in, being molded and transformed by the Word in Whose Image we were first created. And this, in such a way that we begin to live, even now, something of the life to come.28 This 24 Ibid., 53–54. 25 See Rule of Augustine, 48. 26 See ST I, q. 43, a. 5, ad 2. 27 See Verbi Sponsa, 3. 28 “Monastic vows are not a sacrament (unlike marriage vows) because, it may be suggested, they anticipate that life—this heavenly life—to which all sacraments mediate entry.” Aidan Nichols, O.P., Christendom Awake: On Reenergizing the Church in Culture (Grand Rapids, MI:William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999), 131. Verbi Sponsa specifically highlights the anticipatory/eschatological 26 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. is, of course, provided that we endure the progressive purification of our hearts, and earnestly seek that purity of heart to which is promised the vision of God. It may be deduced from what has already been said that a life of lectio, a life shaped by the art of reading, is concerned with the acquisition of wisdom, both speculative and practical, that is, with seeing clearly and living well. Reading well means reading towards a wisdom which enables one to perceive, however obscurely, something of God’s own knowledge of Himself and the world He created through the Word, that “creative Reason which orders and directs.”29 Returning for a moment to our monastic roots: This ability to see, to perceive the intelligibility written into creation, to see the natures of things, was precisely what Evagrius proposed as the first fruit of the struggle against disorders of the human heart.30 This knowledge of the created order is the first flowering of the contemplative life. It involves a way of seeing things as they are. But, it does not stop there. Ultimately the wisdom that we read toward, in the whole of our monastic lives, is not something which is limited to the created order. It is not simply a skill that might be acquired, or a deeper knowledge of the things around us. Rather it opens out to Someone: to the Logos, to Wisdom Himself, the Son who is the Word that breathes forth Love, the Word that the Father speaks not only in time but in eternity—the One Who even now is seated in glory at the right hand of the Father. character of the life of cloistered nuns: “. . . the mystery of the exclusive union of the Church as Bride with the Lord is expressed in the vocation of cloistered nuns, precisely because their life is entirely dedicated to God, loved above all else, in a ceaseless straining towards the heavenly Jerusalem and in anticipation of the eschatological Church confirmed in the possession and contemplation of God. Their life is a reminder to all Christian people of the fundamental vocation of everyone to come to God; it is a foreshadowing of the goal towards which the entire community of the Church journeys, in order to live for ever as the Bride of the Lamb.” Verbi Sponsa, 4 (emphasis added). 29 Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 8 (emphasis in original). 30 “. . . there are in Evagrius’ understanding two major divisions within the realm of knowledge, the first and highest being the knowledge of the Trinity, the second being generally all the lesser forms of knowledge. . . . Several general terms cover the whole area of knowledge which lies below that of the Trinity. It is called natural contemplation (φυσική) or also contemplation of created things (θεωρία τῶν γεγονόντων). . . . The scope of such contemplation is . . . a discovery of the reasons (λόγοι) with which the Logos made the world. What these reasons show, step by step, is that all things have been made toward the end of leading the mind to knowledge of the Trinity.” Jeremy Driscoll, O.S.B., The Mind’s Long Journey to the Trinity: The Ad Monachos of Evagrius Ponticus (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 25–26. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 27 Moving from a consideration of our monastic and medieval roots and turning now to the current legislation concerning our way of life as cloistered nuns, it is significant to note that at the beginning of Verbi Sponsa two Gospel scenes are presented: the Baptism of the Lord and His Transfiguration. At both of those events the Father’s voice was heard saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” At the Transfiguration the Father says further, “Listen to him.”31 This is the way that the Church presents the vocation of the contemplative nun. Listen to Him. Read Him wherever He is present, in creation, in the sacraments, in the Sacred Scriptures, in one another. Receive from Him the grace of adoption and become daughters in the Son; return with Him to the bosom of the Father. At home there, in the heart of the Father, begin to taste even now the goal that the whole Church awaits in hope. Similarly, Saint Ambrose, in the first book of Concerning Virgins, which he wrote for his sister Marcellina, speaks of the eschatological character of the life of a nun, in a way both beautiful and profound: Virginity has brought from heaven that which it may imitate on earth. And not unfittingly has she sought her manner of life from heaven, who has found for herself a Spouse in heaven. She, passing beyond the clouds, air, angels, and stars, has found the Word of God in the very bosom of the Father, and has drawn Him into herself with her whole heart. For who having found so great a Good would forsake it?32 Our way of life should be totally ordered to the reception of this Word, the one Word of the Father, now risen from the dead and breathing forth His Spirit wherever the Father wills. The Word Who pitched His tent among us invites us, while we are still in exile, to make our home in His Word, promising that here we learn the truth that makes us free.33 It is here that we read about and linger with the wise love Who pursues, adopts, and refashions us. Here we expose ourselves to the truth that elevates us, heals us, and draws us into the inner life of that “mad lover”34 Who created us for His own sheer delight. “Whoever loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.”35 “On that day you will realize that I am 31 Mt 3:17; 17:5. 32 Saint Ambrose, Concerning Virgins, I. 3, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. X (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 365 (emphasis added). 33 See Jn 8:31–32. 34 Saint Catherine of Siena, Prayer 10 in The Prayers of Saint Catherine of Siena, 79–80. 35 Jn 14:23. Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. 28 in my Father and you are in me and I in you.”36 “I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.”37 Responding to the invitation to make His Word our home means that we make the practice of lectio divina not simply one observance but, rather, a whole way of life, a way of life that is ordered to and anticipates the life to come. The notion that reading the Bible is meant to reintroduce us to paradise is one that appears frequently in the monastic and patristic traditions. Mariano Magrassi, in his very fine book Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina, cites several ancient authors on this theme. He writes: The ancients insisted especially on the link between Scripture and the beatific vision. . . . Rabanus Maurus does not hesitate to say that Scripture “opens to us the gates of the heavenly kingdom.” To understand it here below is already a “kiss of eternity,” adds William of St. Thierry. . . . Pope Gregory sums up the general thinking in these words: “When Scripture recounts eternal events as though they were happening in time, it causes those who are accustomed to temporal thoughts to pass imperceptibly to those of eternity.” When we study the sacred text, we feel as if we had already left the land of slavery to enter the land of freedom and knock at the doors of the kingdom. Reading is seen as an anticipated vision of divine glory.38 If we agree with the teachings of the Church that our lives as nuns are meant to foreshadow the eschatological goal of the whole Church,39 and if there is a direct link between Scripture and the beatific vision, then it is clear that familiarity with the Bible is essential. Therefore, women coming to our monasteries need to learn to linger with the Word within the context of the whole of regular observance. They need to be encouraged to stroll into the “vineyard of the text,” to seek its fruits40 and to 36 Jn 14:20. 37 Jn 15:15. 38 Mario Magrassi, O.S.B., Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina (College- ville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), 24–25. 39 See above, n. 28. 40 The metaphor of picking and eating grapes is one that Guigo II uses to describe the function of reading in his classic text The Ladder of Monks. First he describes the four rungs: “Reading is the careful study of the Scriptures, concentrating all one’s powers on it. Meditation is the busy application of the mind to seek with the help of one’s own reason for knowledge of hidden truth. Prayer is the heart’s devoted turning to God to drive away evil and obtain what is good. Contemplation is when the mind is in some sort lifted up to God and held above itself, so that it tastes the joys of everlasting sweetness.” Afterwards he speaks of the functions of each: “Reading seeks for the sweetness of a blessed life, meditation Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 29 learn to be comfortable in the spaces between the lines. For this they need time, but even more importantly, an atmosphere of silence.41 They need to learn to read, listen, and ponder in order to enter into the world of the Bible, to perceive the unity of the story of salvation history and to glimpse the many and varied prefigurements and presentations of the paschal mystery, in both the Old and New Testaments. Developing a familiarity with the literal sense of the text, through prayer and study, will foster the openness of their hearts and minds to the deeper hidden levels of the text. This will, in turn, enhance their participation in the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, especially the praying of the psalmody. It will foster their immersion in the daily and weekly liturgical cycles, shaped as they are by the whole of the liturgical year, in which we commemorate and re-present the saving actions of our Lord Jesus Christ—the Word made flesh. In this way the story of salvation history becomes their own. What is this story? It is the story of the divine desire to have created persons share in God’s own life of knowledge and love and His willingness to go to the extremes to enable us to accept the invitation. It is one word about a love affair that began in a garden, passes through a desert, climbs a tree and concludes in a city which needs no lamps for light but shines with the glorious radiance of God’s own splendor;42 a splendor now participated in by the elect, who were not only called but chosen and, having been conformed to the Son through the grace of the Holy Spirit, have finally come home to the Father’s house. What God reveals to us is a simple story. The human person was created in God’s image, the perceives it, prayer asks for it, contemplation tastes it. Reading, as it were, puts food whole into the mouth, meditation chews it and breaks it up, prayer extracts its flavor, contemplation is the sweetness itself which gladdens and refreshes.” He proceeds to give an example to develop the idea of reading as putting food whole in the mouth: “I hear the words read: ‘Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.’ This is a short text of Scripture, but it is of great sweetness, like a grape that is put into the mouth filled with many senses to feed the soul.” The Ladder of Monks and Twelve Meditations, trans. Edmund Colledge, O.S.A. (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1981), 68–69. 41 The Holy Father has recently highlighted the necessity of silence for communication with and contemplation of God. “We need that silence which becomes contemplation, which introduces us into God’s silence and brings us to the point where the Word, the redeeming Word, is born.” Pope Benedict XVI, Homily, Eucharistic Celebration with Members of the International Theological Commission, 6 October 2006, cited in his “Between Silence and Word,” Message for the 46th World Communications Day in L’Osservatore Romano, No. 5 (1 February 2012): 5. 42 See Rv 21:22–24. 30 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. image was defaced by sin, is restored by the Image Himself through His incarnation, and passion, death and resurrection. This restoration is gradually accomplished in us through the grace of the Holy Spirit and is perfected in the glory of the beatific vision. This is the end for which God sent forth His Word, a Word that does not return to Him void but accomplishes the end for which He sent it. He desires to accomplish this end in us, whom He calls into the garden, through the desert and up onto the tree, to become co-operators in the work of redemption,43 to suffer with Him in order that we might be glorified with Him.44 Some years ago I was teaching in a high school, and one of the classrooms that was assigned to me had a poster of a rag doll going through one of those old wringer machines that people used before washing machines did the wringing and spinning for us. She looked to be caught about halfway through, and had arms outstretched in agony. The caption read: “The Truth Will Make You Free But First It Will Make You Miserable.” The Truth ultimately does make us free but it begins, if we let it, if we don’t abandon the struggle or run away, by making us miserable, by exposing our own falsehood. Because of our sinfulness, the Word, rather than coming to us as gentle rain,45 as dew from heaven, comes to us as “hammer and fire”46 and begins by exposing, tearing down, uprooting.47 The Word truly becomes “the joy and happiness of our hearts”48 only gradually and through living, over a long period of time, the whole complex unity of the various observances, as these are harmonized by a continual pondering of Sacred Scripture. This is no small task, for as T. S. Eliot wrote, “Humankind cannot bear much reality,”49 and we are complicated. I would venture to say that the ability to read well is possibly the single most important factor of stability in our vocation. Even for women who remain in the monastery, but have not developed good reading habits, there can still be an instability that manifests itself in a restlessness that affects the whole community. There is the temptation to flee, but docile reception of this efficacious Word is precisely the goal of the structures and practices of our lives. Fidelity to it is made manifest in lives in which the image of God is progressively restored and perfected; lives in which our passions are fully alive and properly ordered, disposing us freely, joyfully, and promptly to believe in God, 43 See Liber Constitutionem Monialium Ordinis Praedicatorum (LCM ), 96 I. 44 See Rom 8:17. 45 See Hos 6:3. 46 “Is not my word like fire, says the Lord, like a hammer shattering rocks?” Jer 23:29. 47 See Jer 1:10. 48 Jer 15:16. 49 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in The Four Quartets. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 31 to lean on His power and mercy, and to love and find delight in Him for His own sake. Increasingly caught up by and at home in this Love, tasting the first fruits of paradise as it were, we love those whom He loves and with whom He has joined us, through the bonds of profession, especially those in our particular and unique monastic families. We turn to them and, in generous liberality, bow down and serve; giving ourselves to God through our hidden, self-donative lives in community, spending ourselves entirely, at the heart of the Order of Preachers, for the salvation of souls. Obstacles to the Practice of and Formation in Lectio Divina in a Secular Age We have reviewed briefly the centrality of the Word in the tradition that Saint Dominic drew from and adapted, and how a perpetual and vigilant receptivity to the Word conduces towards the goal of sharing in God’s Trinitarian life. Now we turn to some contemporary difficulties. In our secular age, the ability to linger perseveringly in the Word will perhaps present a greater challenge and take much longer to acquire than it did in the past. This is so because God’s revelation of Himself in the sacred text presents a storyline, a vision, that is radically different from the one that is provided by today’s culture. Reading Scripture is meant to be a subversive activity, a way of life, whereby we are “transformed by the renewal of our minds”50 and put on “the mind of Christ.”51 There should exist in our monasteries a counterculture, a culture that is grounded in and built up on this revelation that God has made of Himself. We need to be aware of the ways in which our post-Christian, and therefore post-biblical, culture has shaped the minds and hearts of those coming to us. And we need to be aware of ways that the prevailing secular culture may have infiltrated our enclosure walls. Our Constitutions remind us that “the purpose of all regular observance, especially enclosure and silence, is that the word of God may dwell abundantly in the monastery.”52 How might our observance of enclosure and silence have been or be affected by the culture in which we live? In his beautiful and astute address promulgating our 1971 provisional Constitutions, the Master of the Order, Fr. Anicetus Fernandez, claimed that “for various reasons the contemplative life has become more difficult today.”53 He went on to suggest that “the great ease in communication 50 Rom 12:2; see also Eph 4:22–24. 51 1 Cor 2:16. 52 LCM 96 II. 53 Anicetus Fernandez, O.P., Address given at Tallaght during the General Chapter of the Brothers of the Order of Preachers, July 22, 1971; printed in LCM. 32 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. through numberless and marvelous inventions results in our living in a state of perpetual external agitation” with thousands of things “which draw us away from the interior life.” The result is that “it is almost impossible to cultivate an interior and contemplative life.”54 This was written more than forty years ago, before the introduction of the internet and all that it entails and makes possible. Needless to say, the situation has only intensified. Have we faced the effects that all this has had on our withdrawal from the world and, more concretely, on our silence? Is there still a place for the Word in our hearts and in our homes? It has been said that the book has been replaced by the screen and the word by the image.55 What effect is this having on us and on the women coming to our monasteries? What effect is this having on our ability to sit quietly with the plain printed text of the Sacred Scriptures?56 These are crucial questions that need to be asked. But the overarching issue of secularism poses an even greater, more pervasive and insidious challenge that is worth considering. What is secularism? Charles Taylor, in his massive work A Secular Age, presents three different meanings of the term.57 First, it can refer to the privatization of religion and the absence of reference to God in the public forum. It can also refer to the decline of religious belief and practices. These are fairly obvious manifestations of secularism that we can all point to as “out there” in the “world.” But Taylor identifies another meaning of secularism, more difficult to define, and possibly affecting us in ways we don’t even realize. Secularism in this third sense involves a whole “context 54 Ibid. 55 “The screen, the medium, and ‘communication’ have surreptitiously replaced the page, letters and reading. . . . The book has now ceased to be the root-metaphor of the age; the screen has taken its place.” Illich, In the Vineyard of the Text, 1, 3. 56 Nicholas Carr, in his The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) offers an account of the import and the effect of the internet within a context of intellectual history and popular science. He suggests that various tools of the mind, e.g. alphabets, maps, clocks, computers, actually reshape the brain and its neural pathways. The development of the printed book, he posits, fostered deep reading and thinking in such a way that the wholly engaged reader could become closely identified, even symbiotically, with the writer and his world. This engagement led to a greater capacity for contemplation and reflection (see 74–75). The use of the internet does precisely the opposite. “Dozens of studies by psychologists, educators, and Web designers point to the same conclusion: when we go online, we enter an environment that promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking and superficial learning” (116). In sum, Carr warns that the use of the internet is rewiring people’s brains towards a constant distractedness “preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively” (119). 57 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 33 of understanding,” a “new spiritual landscape”; or, as Charles Larmore in his review of Taylor’s book articulates it, a “fundamental alteration of world view.”58 Edmund Norman in his book Secularisation: Sacred Values in a Godless World, speaks of an “unconscious orientation of life and thought, [which is] entertained in an inarticulate and unrecognised form.”59 Norman explains: “Secularisation is a subtle process, or accumulation of processes, which many regret but whose evidences they look upon helplessly.”60 He goes on to claim that secularism has “with frightening frequency infiltrated the church members’ perception of their own religion.”61 This particular author wrote his book as an Anglican, and the church he refers to throughout the book is the Church of England. Nevertheless, some of the characteristics or effects of a secular world view do not sound all that unfamiliar.62 Particularly striking to me was a description of secularization that echoed almost verbatim what I have heard older nuns say, in the context of various discussions on the topic of “what has happened, where have we come from, where are we now, and where do we want to go?”These comments of the nuns were made, some with consternation, others with painful resignation; Norman’s comments echo them all too clearly. He writes: Because secularisation . . . does not result from the application of an ideology, or derive from an assault upon religion, and is a practical reorientation of life produced gradually, drip by drip, in a piecemeal abandonment of traditional observances, it has not been resisted in any systematic fashion. People rather regret what is happening but are unprepared to do anything about it.63 58 Charles Larmore, “How Much Can We Stand?” The New Republic 238, no. 4 (April 9, 2008): 40. Norman, Secularisation: Sacred Values in a Godless World (New York: Continuum, 2003), ix–x. Norman’s repeated references to the “corruption” of humanity by sin and his morality of obligation, though problematic in themselves, do not negate his clear and valuable insights into the dynamics of secularization. 60 Ibid., ix. 61 Ibid., x. 62 Norman outlines a dynamic of secularization that may find echoes in our monasteries: human need becoming the sovereign principle (4); intensification of the “human pursuit of security, and an escalating set of entitlements” (6); claims of a “right to a painless human existence” (9); overemphasis on the body. Concerning the latter, Norman states that “modern culture is obsessed by the moral autonomy of the human person and the claims made by people to welfare and repose. In place of God they worship the human body itself ” (8). 63 Norman, Secularisation, 49–50 (emphasis added). 59 Edward 34 Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. I found this frighteningly on the mark. The monastic tradition can teach us to unearth the falsehoods and distortions that lie hidden in the crooked corridors of our hearts and that inhibit the planting and growth of the seed of the Word of God. But who is going to help us to uncover and reverse the lies and distortions of our culture, that have, drip by drip, piece by piece, diluted our monastic contemplative life and diminished its distinctive, specifying elements, at least in some of our monasteries? Do we realize that something has gone wrong? Fr. Aidan Nichols, in his book Christendom Awake, suggests that “one of the strangest features of the decline in Religious life . . . is the tendency of its representatives to deny that anything is wrong at all.”64 What has gone wrong? One explanation is that the Christian view of the human person’s nature and destiny is being insidiously and yet triumphantly replaced by that of secular humanism. There are many characteristic symptoms of this displacement. Let us look at one example: the loss of a sense of sin. Norman writes: Large numbers of Christians today . . . cannot stomach the idea of judgement, of divine discrimination in the matter of human worth. And so the whole concept, once so central, has quietly slipped out of the received interpretation of the faith. Sermons are no longer preached on judgement, people no longer live in terror of hell. There is a bland and general assumption that somehow everyone will be saved. . . . This extraordinary change amounts to a dramatic secularisation at the very centre of Christian understanding of the purpose of life. For the change does not derive from any re-appraisal of biblical texts but from a simple acceptance of the Humanist view of human value.65 If the whole concept of judgment has quietly slipped away, what does this do to our motivation for embracing a truly penitential life? What place do the penitential psalms have in our life? If what was formerly sin is often now seen as sickness, and if our own lives have been diluted by the “triumph of the therapeutic,”66 where do we fit within the Order as a whole founded on Saint Dominic’s ardent and passionate cry, “My God, my mercy, what will become of sinners?” The eclipse of the concept of judgment is but one of many features of the landscape of secularism. There are others: dismissal of the miraculous; demythologization of the Scriptures; domestication of transcendence; loss of a sense of the sacred; overemphasis on health and comfort; crises of 64 Nichols, Christendom Awake, 143. 65 Norman, Secularisation, 66–67. 66 Taylor, A Secular Age, 618. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 35 authority; triumph of individualism; sense of entitlement; loss of a transformation perspective; eclecticism/religious pluralism; a sense of the sovereignty of humanity and its imagined needs, absent any concern for the demands of God; worship of the human body in place of God; the secularization of charity itself, which becomes “caring” or being necessarily “nice.” All of these combined result in the effective replacement of the theocentric focus of the classical world, with its attendant sense of the transcendent, by a this-world focus on the individual human person and their perceived needs. Do any of the above-mentioned features ring true in regard to secular attitudes that may have invaded our cloisters? Not all of them, surely, but perhaps some of them? Let us single out another one, the loss of a transformation perspective. Charles Taylor defines a secular age as one in which the eclipse of all goals beyond human flourishing has become possible. He claims that the heart of secularization is the decline in the transformation perspective. What effect might such a decline be having on our confidence in the power of the Word to change us and draw us out of ourselves into the very life of God, even now? Absent a transformation perspective, there has emerged in modern persons the expectation of finding emotional satisfaction in the practice of religion.When we seek to engage in lectio divina, are we looking for an experience that is going to be emotionally satisfying? Do we soon give up if it is not? Are the young women coming to our monasteries coming with a transformation perspective? Do they want to change, expect that they will have to change? Are they willing to have their individual lives, shaped perhaps by a culturally created need for “authenticity,”67 break out of the “immanent frame”68 that has structured their minds in order to be drawn out of themselves into the corporate world of the Bible, into the common life of the monastery, and through these into a life of divine communio? Are we willing? Do we want to change? Or have we become too comfortable, too shaped ourselves by modern individualism, by a too-secular humanism? Another feature of the landscape of secularism that might directly affect a life of lectio divina is an altered sense of time. Charles Taylor writes: 67 Taylor identifies and defines a culture of “authenticity” as “the understanding of life . . . that each of us has his/her own way of realizing our humanity, and that it is important to find and live out one’s own, as against surrendering to conformity with a model imposed on us from the outside, by society, or the previous generation, or religious or political authority” (ibid., 475). 68 At the beginning of his Chapter 15, entitled “The Immanent Frame,” Taylor explains that “this frame constitutes a ‘natural’ order to be contrasted to a ‘supernatural’ one, an ‘immanent’ world, over against a possible ‘transcendent’ one” (ibid., 542). Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. 36 . . . the disciplines of our modern civilized order have led us to measure and organize time as never before in human history. Time has become a precious resource, not to be “wasted”.The result has been the creation of a tight, ordered time environment. This has enveloped us, until it comes to seem like nature.We have constructed an environment in which we live a uniform, univocal secular time, which we try to measure and control in order to get things done. This time frame . . . occludes all higher times, makes them even hard to conceive.69 When we celebrate the liturgy or pray in secret, what kind of time frame are we acting within? Is a movement out of chronos into kairos still possible for us? Does a “tight, ordered time environment” lead to the “negation of worship” that the Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann suggested is the true definition of secularism?70 It is not a matter of pretending that we are not in the twenty-first century. But we do need to consider the possibility that our openness to the divine perspective, which we considered in the first part of this essay, is perhaps, all unawares, being occluded by the limited and limiting landscape of secularity, understood precisely as “an unconscious orientation of life and thought.”71 Taylor warns that “we are in fact all acting, thinking, and feeling out of backgrounds and frameworks which we do not fully understand.”72 The secular landscape, with its dreadfully low ceiling, leaves one wandering about in a barren field, lost and, as Taylor suggests, with little sense of further purpose, a fading sense of mystery, no sense of grace or its power to lift one up into the very life of God.73 Have we, even if ever so slightly, imbibed this loss of a sense of a further purpose, of mystery, of grace, of the very real possibility of participating, even now, in God’s own divine life? If so, what effect might this be having on the way we live our lives of lectio divina, our lives of worship? Do we need to reclaim a deep and pervasive silence that is the guardian of all the observances, to rediscover the desire, the fortitude, and the leisure, to “waste time” with God, to wander our way into the vineyard of the sacred text, to linger in the spaces between the lines and be truly available and receptive to the one Word of the Father? We need not pretend that we are once again in the fourth or even the thirteenth century in such a way that our monasteries become cultural 69 Ibid., 59. 70 Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crest- wood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 118. 71 Norman, Secularisation, ix–x (emphasis added). 72 Taylor, A Secular Age, 387. 73 See ibid., 222–24. Lectio Divina in a Secular Age 37 ghettoes. But I would suggest that we might need to become less secular and more radically other-worldly and, further, that the Word Himself is our “Ladder” or Bridge in this process. The Word is the Truth Himself, the relentless Sower, Who searches us out, Who surely desires to wake us from our secular slumber and remind us of some very basic truths. For example: we are created; this creation is according to the Image Who is the Son; we live in a created order in a world with its own inner finalities. We are fallen and need to be forgiven and healed and elevated. This healing and elevating and restoring and perfecting of the Image in us can happen only through the grace of the Holy Spirit, which was poured out by our Savior as He hung upon the Cross and is made efficaciously available to us in the sacramental and liturgical life of the Church. The Spirit who groans within us as our bodies await redemption74 is the same Spirit who inspires us to sacrifice our lives to God. This sacrifice, in union with the Person of the Son, is offered so that not just ourselves but others who might be lost will be found and brought home. As we immerse ourselves in the Truth, our lives should radiate the good news that there is another world, that the unavoidable suffering of this world is not the last word but can and should be embraced in union with the Suffering Servant Who heals us with His own wounds. We need to be more firmly set in those wounds, those recesses of the Bridge, Who is our Ladder into heaven. We need to trust that no matter what rung we find ourselves on, the efficacy of the Word can be relied on with total confidence. Saint Paul affirms that all the baptized have died and that their life is hidden now with Christ in God.75 By our monastic profession, this baptismal grace has been intensified in us and we have been freed by our vocation to live the whole of our lives as hidden with Christ in God.76 It is through making His Word our home that we are enabled to set our hearts on what pertains to higher realms, where Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father. The Word is the Ladder, the Bridge. He is First Truth speaking to us in order to draw us to rest in that Truth itself—the Truth and Love of Trinitarian communion. Our faith, nourished by our contact with the Sacred Scriptures, terminates in the Res, in God himself. Perhaps we need to reclaim a confidence in this possibility, which in turn necessitates a renewed understanding of our way of life as a life of “reading” in the sense of a perpetual and vigilant receptivity to the one Word Who fills our monastic day. This one Word Who is operative in the Liturgy of the Word in the celebration of the Eucharist, which prepares 74 See Rom 8:23. 75 See Col 3:3. 76 See Verbi Sponsa, 1. Sr. Maria of the Angels, O.P. 38 us to enter into His Sacrifice, is the same Word that we listen to together in other readings in choir and in the refectory, and it is the same Word that we toss back and forth to each other in the psalmody. It is the same Word that we read and ponder in secret in our cells and as we go about our sacrificial lives. Reading, listening, pondering in our cells, and seeking, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, to incarnate the Word in our daily lives—these in turn intensify our receptivity and the alacrity of our response to the Word in the liturgy. Introits, collects, prefaces and prayers, antiphons, as well as the readings from the Scriptures and the Fathers, take on new depths, as we receive and ponder them in silence, and the beautiful integrity of the liturgy exerts an increasingly profound formative influence on our lives of prayer as wayfarers. And wayfarers we are. We do not yet behold the face of God but we have the Scripture of God to move us,77 not backwards to the Egyptian desert, nor to medieval Europe, but forward—to paradise, to the celestial liturgy, to the beatific vision. It is, I am suggesting, precisely a renewed fidelity to lectio divina that can effect this movement, inasmuch as it is at the heart of our liturgical lives as Nuns of the Order of Preachers. Earlier in this essay, when trying to make a point about the eschatological nature of our life, I used a quotation from one of Saint Ambrose’s works on the life of virginity. In another work of Saint Ambrose, entitled On Virginity, we read “The Word of God moves swiftly; he is not won by the lukewarm, nor held by the negligent. Let your soul be attentive to his word; follow carefully the path God tells you to take, for he is swift in his passing.”78 We need to hear God’s word in such a way that it educates our desires, possesses and transforms our very beings,79 and thus our lives and actions as Nuns of the Order of Preachers. Let us beg the intercession of Our Lady of Grace and Saint Dominic—persons of silence with hearts and minds that welcomed the Word with freedom and joy. Our future might depend on it. N&V 77 See above, n. 1. 78 Saint Ambrose, On Virginity, chap. 12; cited in Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 1, 1243. 79 “Keep God’s word in this way. Let it enter into your very being, let it take posses- sion of your desires and your whole way of life.” Saint Bernard, Sermo 5, In Adventu Domini; cited in Liturgy of the Hours, vol. 1, 169. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 39–56 39 The Nucleus of the New Evangelization P ERRY J. C AHALL Pontifical College Josephinum Columbus, OH M ANY WITHIN the Catholic Church speak of the importance of the “new evangelization.” Although the term “new evangelization” has entered into popular Catholic parlance, often this term is used without much specificity. The purpose of this article is twofold. First, it aims to provide a synthesis of teaching from Church authority on the “new evangelization.”1 This synthesis will include a discussion of the nature of the “new evangelization” in its origin, agents, and goals, the context for the new evangelization, and some basic methods of the new evangelization. This synthesis is drawn from magisterial documents and papal pronouncements in order to present the vision for the new evangelization set forth by Church authority. Secondly, this article will conclude by focusing on the often overlooked role of the family in the new evangelization. It will be proposed, relying on Church documents and papal 1 Other attempts to synthesize aspects of the new evangelization include: Avery Cardinal Dulles, “Evangelization, New,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5, 2d ed. (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 477–80; also by Dulles, Evangelization for the Third Millennium (New York: Paulist Press, 2009), especially chap. 3, “The Program: Paul VI, John Paul II, and the New Evangelization”; also by Dulles, “John Paul II and the New Evangelization: What Does It Mean?” in John Paul II and the New Evangelization: How You Can Bring the Good News to Others, ed. Ralph Martin and Peter Williamson (Cincinnati, OH: Servant Books, 2006). For other essays dealing with aspects of the new evangelization, implications of the new evangelization, and implementation of the new evangelization, see additional essays in John Paul II and the New Evangelization: How You Can Bring the Good News to Others; also see The New Evangelization: Overcoming the Obstacles, ed. Steven Boguslawski, O.P., and Ralph Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 2008); and Communio 21 (Winter 1994) dedicated to the theme “The Church as Mission:The New Evangelization and Western Culture.” 40 Perry J. Cahall pronouncements, that realizing the goals of the new evangelization depends predominantly on the family. In fact, the central role of the family in the new evangelization allows us to see the family as the vital core or nucleus of the new evangelization.2 I. What Is the New Evangelization? Origin, Agents, and Goals Origin The term “new evangelization” was first used by Pope John Paul II when he called for such an effort during his now historic pastoral visit to Poland in 1979.3 Yet, even though he invented the label “new evangelization,”4 John Paul II pointed to the ultimate origin of this movement in the Second Vatican Council.5 In one of his addresses John Paul said Vatican II “called for a new evangelization,”6 and he consistently maintained that the evangelization of the new millennium must refer to Vati2 The XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops met from Octo- ber 7 to 28, 2012 and focused on the topic “The New Evangelization for the Transmission of the Christian Faith.” At the time of the publication of this article Benedict XVI had yet to issue his apostolic exhortation flowing from the synod. However, the Instrumentum Laboris which served as the agenda for the synodal assembly emphasizes “The Family, The Model-Place for Evangelization” in nos. 110–113. Accessed 5 Dec. 2012. www.vatican.va/roman_curia/synod/ documents/rc_synod_doc_20120619_instrumentum-xiii_en.html. 3 Noted by Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the Polish Episcopal Conference on their ‘Ad Limina’ Visit, 3 Dec. 2005. The Holy See. accessed 12 Nov. 2010 www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2005/december/documents/ hf_ben_xvi_spe_20051203_adlimina-polonia-ii_en.html. This corrects the claim that John Paul II first called for a new evangelization in Haiti in 1983 in an address to Latin American bishops (see Steven Boguslawski, O.P. and Ralph Martin, “Introduction,” in The New Evangelization: Overcoming the Obstacles, vii; Dulles, “Evangelization, New,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia; Dulles, “John Paul II and the New Evangelization: What Does It Mean?” 5; Dulles, “Vatican II and Evangelization,” in The New Evangelization: Overcoming the Obstacles, 11). The fact that John Paul II used the term “new evangelization” as early as 1979, toward the very beginning of his pontificate, and in his historically significant visit to Poland, shows how central the term is to understanding his entire papacy. 4 Avery Cardinal Dulles notes that the term “new evangelization” seems to have been used first by the Latin American bishops at their general conference at Medellin, Colombia in 1968 (see “Evangelization, New,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia). However, there is no evidence that John Paul II knew of this usage by the Latin American bishops. If he did know of it, and consciously borrowed the term, he ended up expanding and elaborating on it, thus truly making it his own. 5 See Dulles, “Vatican II and Evangelization.” 6 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization:The Complete Texts of the Holy Father’s 1998 ad Limina Addresses to the Bishops of the United States (San Diego: Basilica Press and San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), Address, June 27, no. 1. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 41 can II.7 The basic foundations of the new evangelization can be seen in Vatican II’s reminder to the faithful: “The Church . . . is by its very nature missionary”;8 it has “an obligation to proclaim the faith and salvation that comes from Christ” (Ad Gentes 5). John Paul noted that, in addition to their origin in the work of Vatican II, the foundations of the new evangelization “were laid down in the Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi of Pope Paul VI.”9 In this document, Paul VI echoed Vatican II when he wrote that “the task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church” and evangelization is the Church’s “deepest identity” because she “exists in order to evangelize”10—a teaching John Paul II and Benedict XVI have reiterated.11 Yet in using the term “new evangelization” John Paul II, following the lead of Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council, made very clear what exactly is “new” about it. First of all, it is not the content that is new. John Paul II said very clearly, in Ecclesia in America, “[T]he vital core of the new evangelization must be a clear and unequivocal proclamation of the person of Jesus Christ, that is, the preaching of his name, his teaching, his life, his promises and the Kingdom which he has gained for us by his Paschal Mystery” (EIA 66). Elsewhere John Paul II made it clear that we are not preaching a theory but a person.12 Thus the gospel, like Christ, remains unchanged. What is “new” about the new evangelization, first of all, is the situation in which the unchanging truth of the gospel must be preached at this point in history. John Paul II said, “[T]he new and unique situation in which the world and the Church find themselves at the threshold of 7 Noted by Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the Polish Episcopal Confer- ence on their ‘Ad Limina’ Visit. 8 Vatican Council II, Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad Gentes Divinitus, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, new revised edition, ed. Austin Flannery (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Co., 1992), no. 2; hereafter Ad Gentes. 9 John Paul II, Apostolic Letter Tertio Millenio Adveniente (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1994), no. 21; hereafter TMA. 10 Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, in Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage, ed. David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1992), no. 14; hereafter EN. 11 John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1999), no. 66; hereafter EIA. Benedict XVI, Motu Proprio Establishing the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization Ubicumque et Semper, 21 Sept. 2010. The Holy See. Accessed 14 Nov. 2010 www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apl_20100921_ubicumque-etsemper_en.html. 12 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, March 17, no. 6. Perry J. Cahall 42 the Third Millenium, and the urgent needs which result, mean that the mission of evangelization today calls for a new program which can be defined overall as ‘new evangelization’ ” (EIA 66). He said on another occasion, “The Gospel message remains ever the same, yet we proclaim it in a culture which is undergoing constant transformation.”13 As part of the new evangelization, John Paul did call for a renewed effort to make Jesus known to those who have not heard his name.14 However, he emphasized that one predominant aspect of the new situation of the new evangelization is that “some Christian cities and countries” are again “mission territory” and are in need of “re-evangelization” (RM 32). These are “countries with ancient Christian roots . . . where entire groups of the baptized have lost a living sense of the faith, or even no longer consider themselves members of the Church, and live a life far removed from Christ and his Gospel” (RM 33). In his document Ubicumque et Semper establishing the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, Benedict XVI said that the mission of the Church to evangelize “has taken on in history ever new forms and modalities according to the times, the situations and historical moments. In our time, one of its singular features has been to be confronted with the phenomenon of estrangement from the faith.” In this situation, John Paul II pointed to the need for a “new evangelization of those peoples who have already heard Christ proclaimed” (RM 30). What is also “new” about the new evangelization is the manner in which the gospel must be spread in this new context. It was in his address to the Central American Bishops in 1983 that John Paul II appealed for a commitment “new in its ardor, methods and expression” (EIA 66). He insisted that “it is necessary to inculturate preaching in such a way that the Gospel is proclaimed in the language and in the culture of its hearers” (EIA 70). In asking for such a commitment, John Paul II was following the program of the Second Vatican Council which said the Church, being “sent by Christ to reveal and communicate the love of God,” must accomplish this task as Christ did—committing “himself to the particular social and cultural circumstances of the men among whom he lived” (Ad Gentes 10). The Council went on to say that Christian teaching and life should be “adapted to the mentality and character of each culture” (Ad Gentes 22).15 13 Ibid., Address, Feb. 27, no. 5. 14 See John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1990), no. 31; hereafter RM. 15 Benedict XVI, Homily for the Papal Mass on the Solemnity of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, 28 June 2010. The Holy See. accessed 14 Nov. 2010 www.vatican.va/ holy_father/benedict_xvi/homilies/2010/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20100 628_vespri-pietro-paolo_en.html. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 43 In fact, Paul VI summed up the objective of the Second Vatican Council in this theme: “to make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the Gospel to the people of the twentieth century” (EN 2). Thus an integral part of the new evangelization is adapting the manner of spreading the unchanging gospel to fit the current cultural climate. In a homily in which he announced his intention to create the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, Benedict XVI summed up what is “new” about the new evangelization when he said it is “new” not in its content but in its inner thrust, open to the grace of the Holy Spirit which constitutes the force of the new law of the Gospel that always renews the Church; “new” in ways that correspond with the power of the Holy Spirit and which are suited to the times and situations; “new” because of being necessary even in countries that have already received the proclamation of the Gospel.16 Benedict explained that the Pontifical Council he was creating would have as its principal task . . . to promote a renewed evangelization in the countries where the first proclamation of the faith has already resonated and where Churches with an ancient foundation exist but are experiencing the progressive secularization of society and a sort of “eclipse of the sense of God”, which pose a challenge to finding appropriate [means] to propose anew the perennial truth of Christ’s Gospel.17 Pope Benedict explained in Ubicumque et Semper that by necessity the new evangelization does not mean elaborating “a single formula . . . the same for all circumstances” in which evangelization takes place. Instead, in the particular social and cultural circumstances of the twenty-first century, through new ardor, methods, and expression, the “program” of the new evangelization seeks to equip the Church to proclaim the gospel in a manner adapted to the mentality and character of an age facing unique challenges, particularly the challenge of estrangement from the faith. Agents John Paul II, following the lead of Paul VI and Vatican II, identified agents of the new evangelization. First of all, both Paul VI and John Paul II made it clear that the new evangelization is not possible without the action of the Holy Spirit who “is the principal agent of evangelization” (EN 75; 16 Ibid. 17 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, May 21, no. 5. 44 Perry J. Cahall RM 21; TMA 45). As in the beginning of the Church, it is the Holy Spirit who is the animating principle of the Church and the driving force behind its growth. However, the Holy Spirit can effect the growth of the Church only with the cooperation of human agents. The faithful must open themselves up to the grace of the Holy Spirit, in the manner of a new Pentecost, in order to accomplish the new evangelization. In this vein, John Paul II, Paul VI, and Vatican II all made it clear that “the whole Church is missionary” (Ad Gentes 35) and that even though Christ passed on to the Apostles the mission he received from the Father, all members of the Church are called to participate in the basic task Jesus sends his disciples to accomplish—evangelizing (EIA 66). Thus, embued by the Holy Spirit, the whole Church, including each individual, is called to evangelize (EN 15). John Paul II consistently stressed that missionary work is the task of all the faithful and “is a right and a duty based upon their baptismal dignity” (RM 71). Pointing to the teachings of the Second Vatican Council in its Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, John Paul II noted that Christ has given the entire people of God a share in his messianic mission as priest, prophet, and king (TMA 21). Within the people of God, the ordained priest has a particular role to play in the new evangelization.Vatican II said that priests must “stimulate and maintain among the faithful a zeal for . . . evangelization” through teaching and preaching (Ad Gentes 39). Paul VI noted that all of the priest’s activities are aspects of evangelization, because proclaiming the Gospel “identifies . . . priestly service” and gives unity to it (EN 68). In one of his addresses to the bishops of the United States, John Paul II said, “It is the priest’s task to lead the faithful to spiritual maturity in Christ, so that they may respond to the call to holiness and fulfill their vocation to transform the world in the spirit of the Gospel.”18 Thus in his ministry and in his service to his parish, the priest, under the leadership of his bishop, must form and direct others in the program of the new evangelization. It is for this reason that John Paul II said the parish should be “the center of the new evangelization.”19 He called for the renewal of parish life in all its dimensions so that the parish may incarnate the Mystical Body and exercise the offices of priest, prophet, and king.20 He called for the parish to be the place where Christians are formed for evangelization and works of Christian love, noting that the Sunday celebration of the Eucharist is the primary moment of formation and that celebrating the 18 Ibid., Address, Mar. 17, no. 4. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 45 sacraments should lead “to a deep and transforming encounter with God.”21 John Paul explained that the parish should be the center of the new evangelization because it should inspire “people to live the Gospel more fully and build a society imbued with Christian values.”22 Yet, nourished by the parish, building this society imbued with Christian values is primarily the work of the laity. Vatican II underscored that the laity are of primary importance by being “a leaven” in the temporal order, directing it “from within” (Ad Gentes 15). The Council recalled that the principle duty of the laity “is to bear witness to Christ . . . by their life and their words, in the family, in their social group, in their professions” (Ad Gentes 21). Paul VI elaborated on the role of the laity when he said that the laity, whose particular vocation is to be in the world, exercises “a very special form of evangelization” (EN 70). While the pastors’ task is to establish and “develop the ecclesial community,” the laity must make the gospel “present and active in . . . politics, society, and economics,” and all aspects of culture (EN 70). Throughout his pontificate John Paul II stressed the role of the laity in the new evangelization .23 He emphasized that the lay faithful should be conscious of their baptismal dignity, that the laity “are largely responsible for the future of the Church,” and that the renewal of the Church “will not be possible without the active presence of the laity” (EIA 44). He explained that the vocation of the laity is first and foremost, in the secular world, which they “are called to shape according to God’s will” by evangelizing “family, social, professional, cultural and political life” (EIA 44). In an address to the bishops of the United States, John Paul II said: The new evangelization that can make the twenty-first century a springtime of the Gospel is a task for the entire People of God, but will depend in a decisive way on the lay faithful being fully aware of their baptismal vocation and their responsibility for bringing the good news of Jesus Christ to their culture and society.24 In the same address, the pope, citing a discourse of Pius XII from 1946, emphasized that “lay believers are in the front line of Church life” and need to be conscious of “not only of belonging to the Church, but of being the Church.”25 He continued, “[L]ay people are at the forefront of the Church’s 21 Ibid., no. 5. 22 Including writing his Apostolic Exhortation Christifidelis Laici (On the Vocation and Mission of the Lay Faithful in the Church and in the World), 1988. 23 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, June 5, no. 1. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., no. 4. Perry J. Cahall 46 mission to evangelize all areas of human activity.”26 Throughout his pontificate Benedict XVI has continued to echo John Paul II’s insistence on the irreplaceable role of the laity in the evangelization and renewal of society.27 Goals The agents of the new evangelization, with the laity at the forefront of the effort, seek to accomplish a twofold goal. The first goal is to share with others the love of Christ and thereby invite them to conversion through a personal encounter with him. John Paul II said, “Evangelization is the Church’s effort to proclaim to everyone that God loves them, that he has given himself for them in Jesus Christ, and that he invites them to an unending life of happiness.”28 Thus the whole project of the new evangelization is founded in personal encounter with Christ. In Ubicumque et Semper Benedict XVI wrote, “[A]t the root of all evangelization lies not a human plan of expansion, but rather the desire to share the inestimable gift that God has wished to give us, making us sharers in his own life.” In proclaiming this good news of God’s love made manifest in Jesus, and facilitating an encounter with him, the aim is to present the opportunity for personal conversion. John Paul II said, “[E]ncounter with the living Jesus impels us to conversion” (EIA 26). He said, “[T]he encounter with the living Jesus is the path to conversion, communion, and solidarity. To the extent that these goals are reached, there will emerge an ever increasing dedication to the new evangelization . . . ” (EIA 7). John Paul II also said that conversion can be understood as “a complete and sincere adherence to Christ and his Gospel through faith,” a “faith which is total and radical” (RM 46). Thus the new evangelization seeks to provide the opportunity for people to encounter, or re-encounter, Christ, allowing him to shape their very lives. Inviting others to embrace this life of faith which is total and radical, John Paul II said that the work of evangelization must bridge the gap between faith and life (EIA 26). He insisted that an essential part of the new evangelization is “the proclamation of moral truth,” that in “every age men and women need to hear Christ the Good Shepherd calling 26 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the Polish Episcopal Conference on their ‘Ad Limina’ Visit. 27 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Mar. 17, no. 2; see also RM 2. 28 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, June 7, no. 1; For comments on the necessity of proclaiming moral truth as part of the new evangelization, see Timothy Broglio, “Catholic Moral Teaching and the New Evangelization,” in Catholic Moral Teaching in the Pontificate of John Paul II, ed. Kevin T. McMahon (Wynnewood, PA: St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, 2004), 34–46. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 47 them to faith and conversion of life.”29 He pointed out that Christ shows that obedience to “God’s commandments . . . is the pathway to genuine liberation and . . . true happiness,”30 and John Paul II made it clear that the new evangelization must proclaim that conversion consists in the “commitment to the Person of Jesus Christ, with all the theological and moral implications taught by the Magisterium” (EIA 53). In this vein, Benedict XVI has said, “Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.”31 Thus, facilitating conversion through personal encounter with Christ is the first goal of the new evangelization. The second goal of the new evangelization is transformation of culture. Paul VI remarked that cultures must be evangelized and “regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel” because the “split between the Gospel and culture is . . . the drama of our time” (EN 20).Thus John Paul II said,“[T]he new evangelization calls for a clearly conceived, serious and well organized effort to evangelize culture” (EIA 70), insisting that Christians “have a particular responsibility to contribute to the renewal of culture.”32 He wrote that the gospel should “penetrate the hearts of men and women . . . and permeate their cultures, transforming them from within” (EIA 70). Benedict XVI has affirmed this need for a renewed evangelization of culture. In doing so he has reminded us that we are social beings who find fulfillment only in love of God and neighbor, and he has pointed out that members of the Church have a personal, but not a private, relationship with God, since they are members of a redeemed community.33 In fact, the second goal of the new evangelization is that the “crisis of culture must be countered by the civilization of love” (TMA 52). John Paul II said, “God’s grace also enables 29 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address June 7, no. 1. 30 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 2008. The Holy See. accessed 14 Nov. 2010 www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/ april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080416_bishops-usa_en.html. 31 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Mar. 17, no. 6. 32 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 33 For elaboration on the “civilization of love” see John Paul II, Letter to Families (Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 1994). See also Christopher J.Walsh, “Building the Civilization of Love: Recent Statements by John Paul II on Evangelizing Culture,” Communio 24 (Winter 1997): 780–93; Carl Anderson, A Civilization of Love: What Every Catholic Can Do to Transform the World (New York: Harper One, 2008); and Perry Cahall, “Civilization of Love,” in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, vol. 1, ed. Michael L. Coulter, et al. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 200–202. 48 Perry J. Cahall Christians to work for the transformation of the world, in order to bring about a new civilization, which my Predecessor Paul VI appropriately called ‘the civilization of love’ ” (EIA 10).34 Thus, the facilitation of individual conversion through personal encounter with Christ reaches its fulfillment when these persons, entering into communion and solidarity with each other, contribute to building a civilization founded on the love they have encountered in Jesus. The individual goal and the cultural goal of the new evangelization are therefore inextricably bound together. II. Context for the New Evangelization While calling all the faithful to accomplish the twofold goal of the new evangelization, the two most recent pontiffs have outlined the context within which this effort is being undertaken.35 They have discussed the context of the new evangelization because, as Benedict XVI has noted, a serious commitment to evangelization must include “a profound diagnosis of the real challenges the Gospel encounters in . . . culture.”36 Undertaking this diagnosis, John Paul II noted that in today’s culture there is “a deep spiritual hunger . . . if not a current of despair,” and an “uncertainty” or a denial “that we can ever know the truth.”37 He observed there has been a “closure of reason to . . . objective truth,” which has led to “skepticism and relativism” and a resultant “pragmatic vision of truth.”38 He noted that in contemporary culture there is a “skepticism regarding the very existence of ‘moral truth’ and an objective moral law.”39 John Paul II identified a “crisis of moral culture” stemming from a confusion of conscience with the “right to self-will.”40 He observed that the notion of “freedom as personal autonomy is . . . a powerful cultural 34 For other comments pertaining to the context of the new evangelization see: Arthur R. Madigan, S.J., “The New Evangelization of American Intellectual Culture: Context, Resistances, and Strategies,” in Creed and Culture: Jesuit Studies of Pope John Paul II, ed. Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. and John J. Conley, S.J. (Philadelphia: St. Joseph’s University Press, 2004), 93–116; David L. Schindler, “Reorienting the Church on the Eve of the Millennium: John Paul II’s ‘New Evangelization,’ ” Communio 24 (Winter 1997): 728–79. 35 Benedict XVI, Responses to the Questions Posed by the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Washington, D.C., 16 Apr. 2008. The Holy See. accessed 14 Nov. 2010 www.vatican.va/holy_father/ benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/april/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080416_ response-bishops_en.html. 36 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Feb. 27, no. 5. 37 Ibid., Address, Oct. 23, no. 5. 38 Ibid., Address, June 27, no. 2. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 49 force”41 and he noted “an acceleration of the human quest for freedom is one of the great dynamics of modern history in every part of the world.”42 He also observed that in many places the “autonomous will of the individual” is the “sole organizing principle of public life,” which is a “prescription for tyranny.”43 John Paul diagnosed the root cause of the “crisis of moral culture” as “a crisis of understanding of the nature of the human person,” reminding us that “the nobility of men and women lies, not simply in the capacity to choose, but in the capacity to choose . . . what is good.”44 On other occasions, John Paul II noted that the shadows of our day include “religious indifference which causes many people today to live as if God did not exist, . . . loss of the transcendent sense of human life, and confusion in the ethical sphere, even about the fundamental values of respect for life and family” (TMA 36). He also noted that “for many Christians, the spiritual life is passing through a time of uncertainty, which affects not only their moral life but also their life of prayer and the theological correctness of their faith” (TMA 36). John Paul went so far as to say there is a “crisis of civilization, . . . especially in the West, which is highly developed from the standpoint of technology but is interiorly impoverished” (TMA 52). He discussed the emergence of a society dominated by the powerful who eliminate the powerless, forging a culture of death: abortion, euthanasia, consumerism, materialism, the death penalty (EIA 63). On one occasion he said quite starkly, “At the end of the second millennium humanity stands at a kind of crossroads.”45 He said there are “signs of a new spiritual crisis” on the personal level and the level of civilization, and, “If this crisis deepens, utilitarianism will increasingly reduce human beings to objects for manipulation.”46 He discerned that because this “spiritual crisis . . . is . . . a flight from the transcendent mystery of God, it is . . . a flight from the truth about the human person.”47 Before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger diagnosed the true crisis of our time as the “Crisis of God.”48 He explained that this crisis is an “empty religiosity” according to which even “Christians . . . often live as if God 41 Ibid., Address, Feb. 27, no. 5. 42 Ibid., Address, June 27, no. 2. 43 Ibid., no. 3. 44 Ibid., Address, Oct. 23, no. 3. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love,” Address to Catechists and Religion Teachers, 12 Dec. 2000. EWTN. accessed 2 Feb. 2010 www.ewtn.com/new_evangelization/Ratzinger.htm. 48 Ibid. Perry J. Cahall 50 does not exist.”49 As pope, Benedict XVI has spoken frequently of the “dictatorship of relativism” that is “a threat to genuine human freedom, which only matures in generosity and fidelity to the truth.”50 He has noted a kind of secularism that causes faith to be viewed as a private matter; faith, rather, is to be brought to bear on business practices, medical procedures, sexual behavior, and the right to life.51 He has also noted that materialism is causing people to think science and technology make it possible to fulfill our deepest needs by our own efforts; and further, individualism, with its focus on personal freedom and autonomy, is causing people to lose sight of their dependence on others and their responsibilities toward them.52 He has further identified “a troubling loss of the sense of the sacred, which has even called into question foundations once deemed unshakeable such as faith in a provident creator God, the revelation of Jesus Christ as the one Saviour, and a common understanding of basic human experiences: i.e., birth, death, life in a family, and reference to a natural moral law.”53 All of the preceding comments by John Paul II and Benedict XVI provide a sobering picture of the context within which the new evangelization must be carried out. However, these pontiffs have identified the barriers that must be cleared away if we are to lead others to encounter the living God.54 John Paul II said, “In response to the spiritual crisis of our times,” we need nothing short of a radical “healing of the mind as well as of the heart.”55 This is why he said in an address to the bishops of the United States, “No demand on our ministry is more urgent than the ‘new evangelization’ needed to satisfy the spiritual hunger of our times.”56 Speaking also to the United States bishops, Benedict XVI said, “[T]he Church in America, at this point in her history, is faced with the challenge of recapturing the Catholic vision of reality and presenting it, in an engaging and imaginative way, to a society which markets any number of recipes for human fulfillment.”57 49 Benedict XVI, Responses to the Questions Posed by the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 50 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 51 Ibid. 52 Ubicumque et Semper. 53 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 54 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Oct. 23, no. 5. 55 Ibid., no. 3. 56 Benedict XVI, Responses to the Questions Posed by the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 57 Conversely, one can understand the incredible harm inflicted on the efforts of the new evangelization by scandal within the Church. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 51 III. Basic Methods of the New Evangelization The question then becomes, “How do the faithful, all of whom are called to engage in the new evangelization, present the Catholic vision of reality in an engaging and imaginative way to promote the radical healing of mind and heart that our culture needs?” Neither Vatican II nor any of the succeeding popes have laid out a detailed program for the new evangelization. This is primarily because, as Paul VI said, methods of evangelization differ with “time, place and culture” (EN 40). One must remember that the overall thrust of the new evangelization is to speak the unchanging truth of the gospel in a new cultural situation in a language that the culture can understand and with which it can resonate. Yet, while being careful not to prescribe a methodology for the new evangelization that is overly specific, Paul VI did say there are methods of evangelization that have “fundamental importance” (EN 40). Following Paul VI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Vatican II it is possible to articulate some basic methods that must be followed if the new evangelization is to be effective. The first and most fundamental method of new evangelization is that of authentic Christian witness.Vatican II articulated that the most important contribution a disciple can make to the spread of the faith is to live “a profound Christian life,” including prayer and penance (Ad Gentes 36). Paul VI affirmed this conciliar teaching when he said, “[T]he first means of evangelization is the witness of an authentically Christian life” (EN 41; see also EN 21). He went on to say, “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers,” and, “It is therefore primarily by her conduct and by her life that the Church will evangelize the world” (EN 41).58 Echoing Paul VI, John Paul II said “The first requirement of the new evangelization is the actual witness of Christians who live by the Gospel.”59 He said being “evangelists of the new millennium” means “witnessing to the faith by lives of holiness.”60 He insisted, “Christ must be proclaimed with joy and conviction, but above all by the witness of each one’s life” (EIA 67). He also said that in the witness which is the first form of evangelization, concern for others is the most appealing witness, as it “stands in marked contrast to selfishness” (RM 42). He noted that wordless witness is a silent, powerful, and effective proclamation of the Gospel, stirring up “questions in the hearts of those who see how they live.”61 Thus, before becoming pope, Cardinal Ratzinger could say, “[T]o 58 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, June 5, no. 4. 59 Ibid., Address, Mar. 17, no. 6. 60 Ibid., Address, June 5, no. 4. 61 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love.” 52 Perry J. Cahall evangelize means . . . to teach the art of living” and that we need the new evangelization to make the art of living known.62 He also noted this art can be communicated only by one “who is the Gospel personified.”63 Although witness is the most fundamental method of the new evangelization, witness in itself is not sufficient. Paul VI said that in addition to witness we also need proclamation (EN 22), and he went on to say that preaching the word is “indispensable” (EN 42). Regarding the indispensability of proclaiming the gospel, John Paul II said to the bishops of the United States, “The spirit of the new evangelization should inspire every aspect of your teaching, instruction and catechesis.”64 He encouraged the bishops of the United States to come to a deeper understanding of the mysteries of the faith and find “meaningful language with which to convince our contemporaries that they are called to newness of life through God’s love.”65 He also clarified that “[t]he new evangelization . . . means that faith cannot be taken for granted, but must be explicitly proposed in all its breadth and richness. This is the principal objective of catechesis, which, by its very nature, is an essential aspect of the new evangelization” (EIA 69). Paul VI had affirmed that evangelization involves catechesis that transmits “fundamental teachings” in a systematic way “to form patterns of Christian living” (EN 44), and he suggested several ways for the Church to undertake this catechetical proclamation of the word in our new context. He noted that “the homily [is] an important and very adaptable instrument of evangelization,” in the celebration of all liturgies (EN 43).66 In addition to the homily, Paul VI asserted that the Church should avail herself of modern methods of social communication (EN 45), including images (EN 42), to transmit the gospel. Linking use of social communication to preaching, Paul said mass media and social communications should be used to evangelize as from a modern pulpit, with the challenge of speaking to the individual (EN 45). Cardinal Ratzinger echoed this emphasis on using modern means of communication to spread the gospel when he said, “Everyone needs the Gospel . . . and . . . we are obliged to look for new ways of bringing the Gospel to all.”67 62 Ibid. 63 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Mar. 17, no. 3. 64 Ibid. 65 John Paul II also insisted that the Sunday homily is an important part of evan- gelization, and that the Catechism is an excellent preaching resource (Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Mar. 21, no. 5). 66 Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love.” 67 The importance of personal contact in spreading the gospel was underscored by Cardinal Ratzinger when he said, “To proclaim God is . . . to teach how to pray. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 53 Yet, lest one think the focus of the new evangelization is on utilizing modern technology to spread the gospel, Paul VI taught that “person-toperson” contact will always be indispensable in evangelization (EN 46). He noted that evangelization is not only the preaching and teaching of doctrine—it “must touch life” (EN 47). He continued by explaining that supernatural life must be seen to penetrate natural life—especially in the sacraments (EN 47). Thus, evangelization must lead to the sacraments (EN 47), which is the ultimate person-to-person contact.68 Beyond witnessing to the gospel and proclaiming it in word through personal contact, with the hope of facilitating personal contact with Christ in the sacraments, the most important “method” of the new evangelization is love. Paul VI said the evangelizer must love those he evangelizes with the love of a father and a mother (EN 79). John Paul II said being involved in mission and evangelization means sharing “Christ’s burning love for souls” and the Church, love that takes “the form of concern, tenderness, compassion, openness, availability, and interest in people’s problems” (RM 89). Addressing clergy, John Paul said, “[P]riests must . . . be alert to the challenges of the world and sensitive to the problems and hopes of their people, sharing their experiences” and encouraging the faithful to “participation and co-responsibility” (EIA 39). He said a renewed parish needs “a pastor who has a deep experience of the living Christ, a missionary spirit, a father’s heart, who is capable of fostering the spiritual life, preaching the Gospel and promoting cooperation” (EIA 41). In an address to the bishops of the United States, Benedict XVI said, “When the faithful know that their pastor is a man who prays and who dedicates his life to serving them, they respond with warmth and affection which nourishes and sustains the life of the whole community.”69 Thus, among the “methods” of the new evangelization, none is more important than love, without which the evangelizer is simply a “noisy gong or a clashing symbol” (1 Cor 13:1). [Because] only by experiencing life with God does the evidence of His existence appear”—this includes personal, communal, and liturgical prayer (Ratzinger, “The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love”). 68 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 69 For other comments on the importance of the family for the new evangelization see: Carl Anderson, “The Family: Sign of Communion in the New Evangelization,” in Called to Holiness and Communion: Vatican II on the Church, ed. Stephen Boguslawski and Robert Fastiggi (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2007), 265–76; and also by Anderson, “The Role of the Family in the Conversion of Culture,” Communio 21 (Winter 1994): 765–75. Perry J. Cahall 54 IV. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization Having discussed the nature of the “new evangelization” in its origin, agents, and goal, the context for the new evangelization, and some basic methods of the new evangelization, what remains is to discuss the vital core or nucleus of the new evangelization—the family.70 The family is at the very center of every aspect of the new evangelization, and without focusing on the family as both recipient and agent of the new evangelization, the goals of facilitating conversion through personal encounter with Christ and transforming culture to build a “civilization of love” will go unrealized. In his Apostolic Exhortation Familiaris Consortio, John Paul II said “the future of evangelization depends in great part on” the family.71 The Pontifical Council for the Family has gone so far as to write, “The family is the heart of the new evangelization.”72 That the success of the new evangelization depends on the family should be evident. First, “the Christian family . . . is the first community called to announce the gospel” (Familiaris Consortio, no. 2), by announcing the gospel to its own members. Second, the “family is the original cell of social life,”73 forming the first society in itself. As the original cell of society the “Christian family has an evangelizing and missionary task” (CCC 2205) to lead others to encounter Christ and to transform culture by witness and proclamation. Thus, Paul VI could say the family has an evangelizing mission as “domestic church,” bearing “aspects of the entire Church,” each member evangelizing and being evangelized by each other, and together evangelizing other families and neighborhoods (EN 71). John Paul II said, “The immediate and in many ways most important arena of the laity’s Christian witness is marriage and the family.”74 He explained that the family helps build a “civilization of life and love,” and “where the family is weak, all human relationships are exposed to instability and fragmentation.”75 In his Letter to Families,76 John Paul II even said “[T ]he family is the center and the heart of the civilization of love,” which one must remember is one of the goals of the new evangelization. He went on to say, “Only if the truth about freedom and the communion of persons in marriage and in the family can regain 70 John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Familiaris Consortio (Boston: St. Paul Books and Media, 1981), no. 52. 71 Pontifical Council for the Family, “Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage,” Origins 26.7 (1996): no. 20. 72 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2d ed. (Città del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vati- cana, 1997), no. 2207; hereafter CCC. 73 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, June 5, no. 5. 74 Ibid. 75 John Paul II, Letter to Families, no. 13. 76 John Paul II, Springtime of Evangelization, Address, Mar. 17, no. 5. The Nucleus of the New Evangelization 55 its splendor, will the building of the civilization of love truly begin.” At the closing of his Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America, John Paul II even issued a special invitation to Catholic families to be “domestic churches” so they can be “true centers of evangelization” (EIA 76). Thus, one can understand why John Paul II said that “ministry to families is an extremely important dimension of the Church’s evangelizing task,”77 urging “a constant increase of pastoral initiatives directed to families” (EIA 46). He warned that the family, established by God at the beginning of creation, is being threatened by practices such as divorce, abortion, infanticide, and contraception (EIA 46). He stressed the need to reassert “that the foundation of human life is the conjugal relationship between husband and wife” (EIA 46), and that life and family must not be separated (EIA 63). He also stressed the urgent need for catechesis on marriage and family, “including a spirituality of fatherhood and motherhood” so the family can be a “domestic church” (EIA 46). In particular, John Paul II noted the need to form couples in the teaching of Humanae Vitae and the theological development that has followed that document.78 He said we “must find the right language and imagery to present this teaching in a comprehensible and compelling way,”79 and he suggested to the bishops of the United States that “the teaching of the Magisterium, the development of the ‘theology of the body,’ and the experience of faithful Catholic couples have given Catholics in the United States a uniquely powerful and compelling opportunity to bring the truth about human sexuality into a society that sorely needs to hear it.”80 In saying that the parish should be “the center of the new evangelization,”81 John Paul II said, “The strength of parish life . . . can be judged above all from the way families pass on the faith.”82 He said, “The parish is a ‘family of families’ and should be organized to support family life in every way possible.”83 He urged, “Since the Christian family is the ‘domestic church,’ couples must be helped to relate their family life in concrete ways to the life and mission of the Church,” and “pastoral planning should also give adequate attention to the needs of ordinary families seeking to live up to their vocation.”84 John Paul II even pointed out that pastoral care 77 Ibid., Address, June 5, no. 6. 78 Ibid., Address, Oct. 2, no. 2. 79 Ibid., Address, June 5, no. 6. 80 Ibid., Address, Mar. 17, no. 4. 81 Ibid., no. 5. 82 Ibid., Address, May 21, no. 5. 83 Ibid., Address, June 5, no. 5. 84 Ibid., Address, May 21, no. 5. Perry J. Cahall 56 focused on the family could enrich the priesthood itself when he stated, “Priests are called to a unique form of spiritual fatherhood and can come to a deeper appreciation of the meaning of being a ‘man for others’ through their pastoral care of those striving to live out the requirements of selfgiving and fruitful love in Christian marriage.”85 For his part, Benedict XVI has said that “a matter of deep concern . . . is the state of the family within society.86 He has observed that the family is declining “as the basic element of Church and society” because of practices like divorce, infidelity, postponing or foregoing marriage, decreases in sacramental marriages, and increases in cohabitation.87 He has reiterated John Paul II’s teaching that the “family is . . . the primary place for evangelization.”88 He has also insisted that bishops need to take responsibility for the pastoral care of the family and proclaim boldly that marriage is “a lifelong commitment between a man and a woman, open to the transmission of life,” and that this truth is a “ ‘yes’ to life, a ‘yes’ to love, and a ‘yes’ to the aspirations at the heart of our common humanity, as we strive to fulfill our deep yearning for intimacy with others and with the Lord.”89 Thus the family is, as John Paul II said in his Letter to Families, the “way of the Church” and, one can argue, the way of the new evangelization. The Pontifical Council for the Family called marriage preparation part of the new evangelization,90 but one could say the same thing of any effort aimed at strengthening marriages and families. If it is true, as John Paul II taught in Familiaris Consortio, that the well-being of society and the good of the Church are tied to the family (no. 3), and that the very “future of the world and of the Church passes through the family” (no. 75), then the primary effort of the new evangelization must focus on strengthening the family in its identity as “domestic church” and, in turn, enabling it to function as an agent of evangelization. The family needs to encounter Christ anew and thereby be empowered to witness to the truth of the gospel, personifying it at home and in culture. The family needs to be enabled to proclaim the gospel through personal contact with others. And, the family needs to be formed to be a sanctuary of life and love, providing a consistent example of love in order to build a civilization of love. Until this happens, the goals of the new evangelization will go largely unrealized. N&V 85 Benedict XVI, Address to the Bishops of the United States at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 “Preparation for the Sacrament of Marriage,” no. 2. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 57–75 57 The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis: The Wisdom of Thomas Aquinas R ALPH M ARTIN Sacred Heart Major Seminary Detroit, MI T HIS ARTICLE argues that, given the collapse of a societal consensus that is supportive of the Judaeo-Christian moral tradition, the Church is facing a sacramental crisis. The crisis consists in fewer and fewer baptized Catholics participating in the post-baptismal sacraments and fewer and fewer of the Catholics who do participate in further sacraments effectively realizing the fruits of these sacraments. Part of the solution to this crisis is to consider carefully the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas on how to identify (and remove) obstacles to sacramental fruitfulness. A Post-Christendom Culture Ever since Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century—even with all the ambiguity that accompanied its new status—the laws, customs, art, architecture, literature, intellectual life, and general culture of the Western countries have been marked by an acknowledgment of God and the moral law. Along with this weaving of the biblical worldview and morality into the culture, there was oftentimes a concomitant respect for the Church enshrined not only in the fabric of culture but also in law. With the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, the subsequent anti-religion rebellion of the French Revolution, and the profound intellectual rejection of the Christian worldview symbolized by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, forces were unleashed in Western culture that eventually led to not only a repudiation of the church-state relationships that had evolved over many centuries but a repudiation of religion itself as a legitimate shaper of culture. The etiology of this disintegration has been well documented and analyzed. The 58 Ralph Martin sadly uncritical acceptance of this ideology on the part of the universities, and the cultural elites formed by the universities, has unleashed in the West anti-religious forces that work consciously to strip from culture the vestiges of respect for the Judaeo-Christian tradition still enshrined in it, now oftentimes, in little more than a nostalgic, symbolic way. Wellfinanced and carefully strategized campaigns to completely remove respect for the law of God from the culture continue apace, most notably now in the campaign to force the culture to accept the active practice of homosexuality as a protected and respected good, and to force into silence—with the definition of new laws protecting it—the churches and synagogues that still hold to Scripture and tradition on this issue. The collapse of Christian culture, as weak and ambiguous as it was in some ways, has profoundly affected the beliefs and actions of baptized Catholics. Whether it be the decline in Mass attendance, the radical drop in vocations, the widespread breakup of Catholic marriages, the increasing frequency of co-habitation by Catholics before or instead of marriage, the shrinking of family size and the concomitant practice of contraception, the statistics are widely known but nevertheless quite shocking.1 What these statistics indicate, among other things, is that there is something like an institutional collapse going on, evidenced by the vast numbers of schools closing, parishes merging, clustering and closing and the multiple assignments that many young priests now are asked to manage. Besides the institutional collapse, there is evidence of a widespread repudiation of the teaching of Christ and the Church by vast numbers of Catholics. Even those who attend Mass regularly often embody a set of beliefs that are closer to the beliefs of the secular elites than to the teaching of Christ. Despite many positive signs, the trends are not encouraging. The radical collapse of the Church in some of the traditionally most Catholic parts of the country—the northeast, the midwest, et cetera—is masked by the large Hispanic immigration that has kept the statistics reported on the total Catholic population relatively stable. But the same secularizing forces are at work among the traditionally Catholic immigrants, and the lack of sufficient numbers of Spanish-speaking priests doesn’t bode well for the future.2 The challenge of evangelical and Pentecostal churches that embody 1 The Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) provides exhaus- tive statistics, continually updated, on many Catholic metrics. Their home page (cara.georgetown.edu) contains a section titled “Church Statistics” that opens to this information. 2 See Jim Graves, “Where are the Priests?” in National Catholic Register, July 17–30, 2011, p. 1ff. While Hispanics now constitute nearly 40 percent of the total U.S. Catholic population (and more than 50 percent of the Catholic youth population), The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 59 more values of the Hispanic culture than the typical Catholic Anglo parish does is also a significant factor.3 A Sacramental Crisis We are now faced with what I think warrants to be called a “sacramental crisis.” One aspect of the crisis is the radical drop in the numbers of those who still bother to approach the sacraments. The statistics reported below track this drop in a large midwestern diocese, but statistics that I’ve seen from other dioceses are very similar and are typical of the Catholic heartland.4 Last Ten Years: Midwestern Diocese Infant Baptisms Adult Baptisms Full Communion with the Church Catholic Marriages Interfaith Marriages Funerals Parishes Annual Appeal Households 2000 16,294 1,442 2010 9,544 704 42.4% decrease 51.2% decrease 1,713 3,641 1,657 10,461 313 960 1,649 783 9,496 273 43.6% decrease 45.3% decrease 52.7% decrease 9.2% decrease 12.8% decrease 317,805 270,451 14.9% decrease The fact that this radical drop has occurred in only a space of ten years is particularly disturbing. Another aspect of the crisis is the apparent lack of sacramental fruitfulness in the lives of many who still partake of the only 10 to 15 percent of the priests ordained each year are Hispanic. Only 9 percent of the bishops are Hispanic. In heavily Hispanic dioceses like Los Angeles and Phoenix, ordinations of any kind are shockingly rare. In Los Angeles, the largest archdiocese in the U.S., only 3 men were ordained in 2010, and only 6 in 2011. In Phoenix only 3 were ordained n 2010 and none in 2011. 3 While there has been growth in the west, southwest and south, a growth that is largely due to Hispanic immigration, not to growth through evangelization, the statistics about the outflow from the Catholic Church in second and third generation Hispanic Catholic immigrants are not encouraging. See Edwin Hernández, with Rebecca Burwell and Jeffrey Smith, “A Study of Hispanic Catholics: Why Are They Leaving the Catholic Church? Implications for the New Evangelization,” in The New Evangelization: Overcoming the Obstacles, ed. Steven Boguslawski and Ralph Martin (New York: Paulist Press, 2008), 109–41. 4 For example, in another diocese, while the Catholic population of the ten counties of the diocese declined by 3.25 percent, the drop in Mass attendance was five 60 Ralph Martin sacraments. One of the most dramatic indicators of this is the experience of many parishes when it comes to the sacrament of confirmation. As I’ve spoken to youth ministers, religious education directors, and pastors in many parts of North America, and in my classroom at the seminary, the most common difficulty that I’ve heard expressed when discussion turns to confirmation is that the majority of youth confirmed are seldom seen in church again. The sacrament that is supposed to express and effect deeper, conscious commitment to being witnesses to the faith seems in many cases to result in directly the opposite. For many youth and their parents, confirmation seems to be a “ritual” that completes the list of what “good Catholics” are supposed to do, and therefore no further religious education or even Church attendance seems necessary. If this is the “green” wood what is the “dry” wood like? This virtually unaiminous anecdotal evidence is verified in the various studies that have been done on what “youth” believe today. One of the most cited of the contemporary youth researchers is Christian Smith. In a comprehensive survey of American youth, he and his team pointed out that Catholic youth are in some ways in the greatest difficulty of any religiously affiliated youth as regards orthodox belief. For example, 57 percent of teenage Catholics stated that they maybe or definitely believed in reincarnation. The authors conclude that even though the “shell” or “form” of traditional religion is there, it has been colonized by an alien spirit which they describe as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.”5 Of course, it would not be accurate to leave the impression that the “secular culture” is to blame for all of this. Years of silence about those aspects of the gospel which the contemporary culture is hostile to—the truths about sin, about heaven and hell, about the need for repentance, about the real meaning of discipleship, about the supreme value of knowing Christ—have contributed to the metamorphosis of Catholicism in the minds of many into a comforting religious ritual of indeterminate meaning. When the American bishops a few years ago commissioned an evaluation of catechetical text books in use over the previous twenty-five times greater—a 16.37 percent decline since the year 2000. There has been an even more precipitous decline in that period in baptisms (–32.81 percent), in marriages (–44.38 percent), and in RCIA participation (–57.7 percent). The diocese notes that the reported decline is not confined to one area of the diocese or clustered in a small number of urban parishes but is widespread. 5 For a recent comprehensive study of the religious beliefs of American youth, see Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 166. The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 61 years, they found a vast majority of them were “defective” in their presentation of one or more key doctrines of the Church, despite having imprimaturs or offical approval by bishops for use in their dioceses. When the eternal consequences that flow from what we choose to believe and how we choose to act are not spoken of for long periods of time, the silence on these dimensions of the gospel is often taken to mean that they are no longer important, true, or relevant. As one Australian commentator has pointed out, when the eternal consequences of believing and obeying, or not believing and obeying, are left fuzzy, “the essential faith of Catholics will then amount to no more than a vague theism with little specific moral content; just what it is for a large proportion of Catholics today.”6 The collapse of doctrinal clarity is certainly a major contributor to the general indifference to the call to evangelization which has so insistently come from the Magisterium since Vatican II. Cardinal Ratzinger called it a “catastrophic collapse” of catechetics. The new evangelization we need so urgently today is not to be attained with cleverly thought out ideas, however cunningly these are elaborated: the catastrophic failure of modern catechesis is all too obvious. It is only the interaction of a truth conclusive in itself with its proof in the life of this truth that can enable that particular evidence of the faith to be illuminated that the human heart awaits: it is only through this door that the Holy Spirit enters the world.7 Avery Dulles, in a foreword to a recent book on evangelization,8 cites unsettling statistics:9 Asked whether spreading the faith was a high priority of their parishes, 75 percent of conservative Protestant congregations and 57 percent of African American congregations responded affirmatively, whereas only 6 percent of Catholic parishes did the same. Asked whether they sponsored local evangelistic activities, 39 percent of conservative Protestant 6 John Lamont, “What Was Wrong with Vatican II,” New Blackfriars 99, no. 1013 ( January 2007): 92–93. See also John Lamont “Why the Second Vatican Council Was a Good Thing and Is More Important Than Ever,” New Oxford Review ( July/ August 2005): 32–36, in which he identifies the positive aspects of Vatican II. 7 Joseph Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, trans. Robert Nowell (New York: Crossroad,1991) 35. 8 Timothy E. Byerley, The Great Commission: Models of Evangelization in American Catholicism (New York: Paulist Press, 2008), ix. 9 Drawn from a book by Nancy T. Ammerman, Pillars of Faith (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 117, 134. Ralph Martin 62 congregations and 16 percent of African American congregations responded positively as compared with only 3 percent of Catholic parishes. Converts to Catholicism often report that on their spiritual journey they received little or no encouragement from Catholic clergy whom they consulted. The Catherine of Siena Institute in Colorado Springs, Colorado, has interviewed tens of thousands of Catholics and their pastors and makes the point that even among the minority of Catholics who come to Church somewhat regularly fewer than 10 percent could be considered “intentional disciples” who have consciously made Christ the center of their lives.10 Cardinal Ratzinger remarked on a strange phenomenon he observed in conjunction with the collapse of the Church in the Netherlands after Vatican II. He pointed out that by every statistical measure the Church in the Netherlands was collapsing and yet, strangely, at the same time an atmosphere of “general optimism” was prevalent that seemed blind to the actual situation. I thought to myself: what would one say of a businessman whose accounts were completely in the red but who, instead of recognizing this evil, finding out its reasons, and courageously taking steps against it, wanted to commend himself to his creditors solely through optimism? What should one’s attitude be to an optimism that was quite simply opposed to reality?11 In the United States, “official optimism” has been quite strong in the midst of radical decline. When the American bishops greeted Pope Benedict XVI on his pastoral visit, they spoke of our “vibrant” Church. Shortly before Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States, Russell Shaw, a respected author and former spokesman for the American bishops, urged the American bishops to stop pretending everything was fine.12 But of course the “catastrophic failure” of catechesis in conjunction with doctrinal confusion and outright infidelity, along with the power of a secularizing culture, are not alone in the “witches brew” of disintegrating forces at work in the life of baptized Catholics. The shock of the ongoing revelation of gravely evil sex abuse, gross financial mismanagement, and other infidelities on the part of the ordained and the widespread cover-up or minimally effective responses on the part of higher 10 See www.siena.org 11 Ratzinger, The Yes of Jesus Christ, 39–40. 12 Russell Shaw, “Please Look Behind the Bishops’ Potemkin Village,” The Catholic World Report (February 2008): 19–22. The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 63 authorities have contributed to the confusion and disillusionment of many. As great as the disillusionment has been in the U.S., the shock in Ireland has been even greater. The problem in the Catholic Church is truly global, but in less developed countries with fewer “deep pockets” to sue and less aggressive media interest, the cases are not as well known. While the crisis we have identified as a sacramental crisis is admittedly broader than the effective administration of the sacraments, one key element in a solution is consideration of what is needed in order for the reception of the sacraments to be effectively fruitful in the lives of those who receive them.This means recognizing that we can no longer presume that those coming for the sacraments still understand what it means to be a Catholic or are even committed to such. Nor can we presume that they even know who Christ is and have made a commitment to him as savior and Lord. Nor can we presume that what they are seeking when they come for the sacraments is what indeed the sacraments are intended to effect. The General (GDC) and National Catechetical Directories (NCD) were prescient when they insisted that catechesis now needs to be seen within the framework of evangelization. We will cite only a few of the important insights contained in these foundational documents. Catechesis, situated in the context of the Church’s mission of evangelization and seen as an essential moment of that mission, receives from evangelization a missionary dynamic which deeply enriches it and defines its own identity. The ministry of catechesis appears, then, as a fundamental ecclesial service for the realization of the missionary mandate of Jesus. (GDC 59) The Christian faith is above all, conversion to Jesus Christ, full and sincere adherence to his person and the decision to walk in his footsteps. Faith is a personal encounter with Jesus Christ, making of oneself a disciple of him. This demands a permanent commitment to think like him, to judge like him and to live as he lived. (GDC 53) Frequently, many who present themselves for catechesis truly require genuine conversion. Because of this the Church usually desires that the first stage in the catechetical process be dedicated to ensuring conversion. . . . Only by starting with conversion, and therefore by making allowance for the interior disposition of “whoever believes,” can catechesis strictly speaking, fulfill its proper task of education in the faith. . . . Catechetical renewal should be based thus on prior missionary evangelization. (GDC 62) This conversion is the acceptance of a personal relationship with Christ, a sincere adherence to him and a willingness to conform one’s life to his. Conversion to Christ involves making a genuine commitment to him 64 Ralph Martin and a personal decision to follow him as his disciple. Through this discipleship the believer is united to the community of disciples and appropriates the faith of the Church. (NDC 17) These directories make clear that conversion can’t be presumed among those who approach the sacraments but must be called forth.They further make clear that sacramental preparation can’t simply be a matter of providing “information” but must involve “formation.” Formation involves a conforming of one’s life to the truth which one is hearing and to the person who is the foundation of these truths and to the community of those who live these truths. It requires from the catechists lives of discipleship into which they are leading those whom they catechize. It is not just “religious education” but an invitation to conversion and a life of discipleship. These documents also make clear that the baptismal catechumenate is a model for all catechesis, as it involves in its essence not just information but formation. The model for all catechesis is the baptismal catechumenate when, by specific formation, an adult converted to belief is brought to explicit profession of baptismal faith during the Paschal Vigil. This catechumenal formation should inspire the other forms of catechesis in both their objectives and in their dynamism. (GDC 59) There is an acute awareness that catechesis must have a catechumenal style, as of integral formation rather than mere information; it must act in reality as a means of arousing true conversion (GDC 29) Based on the example of catechesis in the patristic era, it needs to form the personality of the believer and therefore be a true and proper school of Christian pedagogy. (GDC 33) Our sacramental theology is truly rich, but the state of Christian life among those who receive the sacraments oftentimes does not display the characteristics of conversion and discipleship that our theology and official documents indicate should be the case.Where can we go for some wisdom about factors that determine sacramental fruitfulness? One source is the sacramental theology of Thomas Aquinas, whose insights into the obstacles that block sacramental fruitfulness are remarkably relevant to our contemporary crisis. The Fruitfulness of the Sacraments and Preparation for the Sacraments The reaction to the theology of the Protestant reformers produced in the Catholic Church what could be regarded as an overemphasis on the ex opere The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 65 operato (by the fact of the action being performed) aspect of the sacraments working, to the neglect of the practical importance of the ex opere operantis (from the action of the doer) aspect. The Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the importance of both aspects: From the moment that a sacrament is celebrated in accordance with the intention of the Church, the power of Christ and his Spirit acts in and through it, independently of the personal holiness of the minister. Nevertheless, the fruits of the sacraments also depend on the disposition of the one who receives them. (CCC 1128) In the very heart of our theological tradition resides a great wisdom— that of St. Thomas Aquinas—about the importance of preparation and subjective disposition on the part of those receiving the sacraments in order for them to actually bear fruit in the lives of their recipients. The Baptism of Adults: The Teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas In the third part of the Summa theologiae, where Thomas deals with issues concerning the sacraments, he has some very useful things to say that are relevant to the concerns we have identified. We will only consider here his teaching as it pertains to the baptism of adults and show how this teaching has important application to the sacramental crisis we are experiencing today. He identifies a number of factors that need to be present in order for the reception of the sacrament to be fruitful, as well as factors that block the sacrament’s fruitfulness or effectiveness in the lives of their recipients. He makes the point that a sacrament can be validly given and received but still not be fruitful—an outcome that seems unfortunately widespread today. Repentance Thomas unambiguously teaches that those who are not willing to repent of sin should not be baptized. Quoting Scripture and Augustine to support this point, he states: Now so long as a man wills to sin, he cannot be united to Christ. . . . Secondly, because there should be nothing useless in the works of Christ and of the Church. Now that is useless which does not reach the end to which it is ordained; and on the other hand, no one having the will to sin can, at the same time, be cleansed from sin, which is the purpose of Baptism; for this would be to combine two contradictory things. Thirdly, because there should be no falsehood in the sacramental signs. (ST III, q. 68, a. 4) 66 Ralph Martin Thomas clearly teaches that the kind of repentance necessary before Baptism does not necessitate making use of the sacrament of reconciliation (that is for post-baptismal sin) but rather an “inward confession of sins to God is required before Baptism but not the sacrament of Reconciliation” (ST III, q. 68, a. 6). In contemporary sacramental practice when someone physically presents oneself to receive a sacrament, proper disposition is often assumed. Thomas teaches the contrary. A man is said to be insincere who makes a show of willing what he wills not. Now, whoever approaches Baptism, by that very fact makes a show of having right faith in Christ, of veneration for this sacrament, and of wishing to conform to the Church, and to renounce sin. Consequently, to whatever sin a man wishes to cleave, if he approach Baptism, he approaches insincerely, which is the same as to approach without devotion. (ST III, q. 69, a. 9, ad 3) On the other hand, when a lack of sincerity, such as lack of true repentance or lack of faith or lack of intention to receive and live the unique grace of the sacrament, blocks the fruitfulness of a validly received sacrament, subsequent repentance and recourse to the sacrament of reconciliation can release the fruitfulness of the sacrament. In like manner, when a man is baptized, he receives the character, which is like a form: and he receives in consequence its proper effect, which is grace whereby all his sins are remitted. But this effect is sometimes hindered by insincerity.Wherefore, when this obstacle is removed by Penance, Baptism forthwith produces its effect. (ST III, q. 69, a. 10.) The points that Thomas makes in connection with adult baptism, regarding the necessity of repentance and the sincere intention to receive the graces of the sacrament, have application to other sacraments as well. If one does not will to conduct one’s life in harmony with the purpose of the sacrament, one will not receive it fruitfully. For there to be no “falsehood in the sacramental sign,” the recipient of the sacrament must intend what the sacrament intends. This, of course, raises serious questions about the widespread practice regarding the sacrament of confirmation today, wherein the great majority of those receiving it, rather than becoming more committed witnesses to their faith, drift away from it. There appears to be a widespread “falsehood” in the sacramental sign. The same can be said in many cases of sacramental marriage. The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 67 Faith Thomas clearly teaches that the sacraments aren’t “magic” but require faith on the part of their adult recipients in order to bear fruit. Therefore the sacrament of Baptism is not to be conferred save on those in whom there appears some sign of their interior conversion. . . . Baptism is the sacrament of faith. Now dead faith does not suffice for salvation. (ST III, q. 68, a. 4, ad 2, 3) Right faith is necessary for Baptism, because as it appears from Rom. 3: 22 “the justice of God is by faith of Jesus Christ.” (ST III, q. 68, a. 8) Just as the sacrament of Baptism is not to be conferred on a man who is unwilling to give up his other sins, so neither should it be given to one who is unwilling to renounce his unbelief. Yet each receives the sacrament if it be conferred on him, though not unto salvation. (ST III, q. 58, a. 8, ad 4) It would seem that by “right faith”Thomas is not meaning “perfect faith” but at least a general faith and intention to receive the sacrament as it is understood by the Church (see ST III, q. 68, ad 3). An important point to note here is that in this case—the absence of adequate faith—Thomas considers that the sacrament is validly conferred but the person so baptized is not justified, is not saved! Less radically, once whatever was blocking the fruitfulness of a validly conferred sacrament is removed, the grace of the sacrament is released. Thomas, though, envisions that there can be such a defect of willing the intention of receiving the sacrament that, not only can it be the case that the sacrament is validly conferred but remains unfruitful until the defect is removed—whether the lack be of repentance or of faith—but in some cases the sacrament has not even been validly conferred; in that situation, the person needs to be “rebaptized.” Not only is repentance of sins necessary but also the recipient of the sacrament must “of his own will, intend to lead a new life . . . it is necessary for him to have the will or intention of receiving the sacrament.” St. Thomas cites Romans 6:4, which states that we are buried with Christ “so we may walk in newness of life”(ST III, q. 68, a. 7). “If an adult lack the intention of receiving the sacrament, he must be rebaptized” (ST III, q. 68, a. 7, ad. 2). It is written (Wisd 1:5): “The Holy Spirit of discipline will flee from the deceitful.” But the effect of Baptism is from the Holy Spirit. Therefore insincerity hinders the effect of Baptism . . . consequently in order that a man be justified by Baptism, his will must needs embrace both Baptism and the Baptismal effect. Now, a man is said to be insincere by reason of his will being in contradiction with either Baptism or its effect. (ST III, q. 69, a. 9) 68 Ralph Martin In contemporary sacramental practice, one often hears that even though there appear to be serious defects of intention and preparation in someone who is approaching a sacrament, “the sacrament will take care of it.” Thomas does not agree. Thomas teaches that the reception of the sacrament should not be counted on to remove obstacles of lack of repentance, unbelief, and other forms of “insincerity.” The removal of these obstacles needs to precede the reception of the sacrament.13 When God changes man’s will from evil to good, man does not approach with insincerity. But God does not always do this. Nor is this the purpose of the sacrament, that an insincere man be made sincere: but that he who comes in sincerity, be justified. (ST III, q. 69, a. 9, ad 2) Could there be some—many, even—who are being confirmed or married in the Church, who lack the intention of receiving the sacrament as it is defined by Thomas—lacking the intention to lead the new life that each of the sacraments uniquely signifies, lacking the intention of the sacramental effect? If so, if they come to a subsequent Christian awakening, do they need to be “reconfirmed” or “remarried” (to use the language that Thomas uses in connection with Baptism)? Preparation and Devotion Thomas is aware that the “fruitfulness” of the sacraments can be understood as spanning a continuum in which there are varying degrees of fruitfulness. In any case, he teaches clearly that the degree of fruitfulness in the recipient of a particular sacrament is closely tied to the quality of the preparation that is given before receiving the sacrament and the subjective disposition of “devotion” that has been elicited in the recipient. Adults, who approach Baptism in their own faith, are not equally disposed to Baptism; for some approach thereto with greater, some with less, devotion. And therefore some receive a greater, some a smaller share of the grace of newness; just as from the same fire, he receives more heat who approaches nearest to it, although the fire, as far as it is concerned, sends forth its heat equally to all. (ST III, q. 69, a. 8) In the text just cited, Thomas stresses that the varying receptivity on the part of the recipients accounts for the varying fruitfulness in the recipients’ lives. In another text he indicates that while the grace received by similarly disposed recipients may be similar at the beginning, considerable 13 See Colman O’Neill, Meeting Christ in the Sacraments, rev. ed., Romanus Cessario (New York: Society of St. Paul, 1991), 38 and 126ff. The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 69 divergences can develop over time if one recipient is more attentive to the grace and its growth than another. That greater or lesser grace appears in the baptized may occur in two ways. First, because one receives greater grace in Baptism than another, on account of his greater devotion, as stated above. Secondly, because, though they receive equal grace, they do not make an equal use of it, but one applies himself more to advance therein, while another by his negligence baffles grace. (ST III, q. 69, a. 8, ad 2) The initial fruitfulness of the sacraments is tied to the quality of the preparation and the “devotion” of the recipients. Preparation is needed. The fundamental principle of grace building on nature—that both reason and faith have their important contributions—is insisted upon by Thomas in his sacramental teaching. St. Thomas cites Romans 10:14 concerning how faith comes through hearing/preaching (ST III, q. 71, a. 1) and he says that “the life of grace into which a man is regenerated presupposes the life of the rational nature, in which man is capable of receiving instruction” (ST III, q. 71, a. 1, ad 1). The ongoing fruitfulness of a sacrament is tied to the quality of the “follow-up” or the environment of faith in which one lives, and the ongoing receptivity to the work of the Holy Spirit in the particular grace of the sacrament. Thomas acknowledges—even in his time—that the clergy are too busy to undertake this responsibility solely by themselves but must involve the lay faithful in the task of follow-up. The spiritual regeneration which takes place in Baptism, is in a certain manner likened to carnal generation; wherefore it is written (1 Pet. 2:2): “As new-born babes, endowed with reason, desire milk without guile.” Now, in carnal generation the new-born child needs nourishment and guidance: wherefore in spiritual generation also, someone is needed to undertake the office of nurse and tutor by forming and instructing one who is yet a novice in the Faith, concerning things pertaining to Christian faith and mode of life, which the clergy have not the leisure to do through being busy with watching over the people generally: because little children and novices need more than ordinary care. Consequently someone is needed to receive the baptized from the sacred font as though for the purpose of instructing and guiding them. Also: Dionysius in Ecclesiastical Hierarchies speaks of this “that the parents should hand it [the child] over to some instructor versed in holy things, who would henceforth take charge of the child and be to it a spiritual father and a guide in the road of salvation.” (ST III, q.67, a. 7) 14 See also ST III, q. 66, a. 11, 12; q. 68, a. 2; q. 69, a. 5, ad 1, 2. 70 Ralph Martin His comments on godparents contain an interesting implication about the social environment in which the recipient of a sacrament is being enfolded. Augustine says in a sermon for Easter (#168): In the first place I admonish you, both men and women, who have raised children in Baptism, that you stand before God as sureties for those whom you have been seen to raise from the sacred font. . . . Godparents take upon themselves the duties of a tutor. Consequently, they are bound to watch over their godchildren when there is need for them to do so: for instance, when and where children are brought up among unbelievers. But if they are brought up among Catholic Christians, the godparents may well be excused from this responsibility, since it may be presumed that the children will be carefully instructed by their parents. If, however, they perceive in any way that the contrary is the case, they would be bound, as far as they are able, to see to the spiritual welfare of their godchildren. (ST III, q. 67, a. 8) In response to objection 1, that since “uneducated and ill-instructed” people are “allowed to raise people from the sacred font” there is no need for godparents to instruct their godchildren, Thomas answers: Where the danger is imminent, the godparent, as Dionysius says . . . should be someone versed in holy things. But where the danger is not imminent, by reason of the children being brought up among Catholics, anyone is admitted to this position because the things pertaining to the Christian rule of life and faith are known openly by all. Nevertheless an unbaptized person cannot be a godparent, as was decreed in the Council of Mainz. (ST III, q. 67, a. 8, ad 1) Interestingly, when it comes to choosing godparents Thomas holds that it is not so important who they are if the baptized will be raised among “Catholic Christians” or will be “carefully instructed by their parents” or will be “handed over” to those who will instruct and guide them or will live in a society where “the things pertaining to the Christian rule of life and faith are known openly by all.” When this will not be the case, Thomas indicates that the godparents will then have a serious responsibility and should be “versed in holy things.” Adults Must Be Tested: Don’t Rush Thomas advises that children should be baptized without delay, “because we do not look for better instruction or fuller conversion. Secondly, because of the danger of death, for no other remedy is available for them The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 71 besides the sacrament of Baptism.” Adults, though, should be properly instructed and “tested” before they are baptized, since “adults have a remedy in the mere desire for Baptism. . . . And therefore Baptism should not be conferred on adults as soon as they are converted, but it should be deferred until some fixed time” (ST III, q. 68, a. 3). The remedy for the original sin of children is the sacrament of Baptism, but since adults have a remedy in the “baptism of desire” present in those preparing to receive the sacrament there is no need to rush. It is interesting to note that Lumen Gentium restricts its use of the effectiveness of “desire” precisely to the situation of Catechumens. Catechumens who, moved by the Holy Spirit, desire with an explicit intention to be incorporated into the Church, are by that very intention joined to her. With love and solicitude mother Church already embraces them as her own. (LG 14) In the case of adults preparing for Baptism, Thomas considers it of great importance that the motivation, sincerity, and readiness of those seeking to be baptized be carefully discerned. This is the case, first of all, “as a safeguard to the Church, lest she be deceived through baptizing those who come to her under false pretenses, according to 1 john 4:1 Believe not every spirit, but try the spirits, if they be of God. And those who approach Baptism are put to this test, when their faith and morals are subjected to proof for a space of time” (ST III, q. 68, a. 3). Oftentimes the parables of Jesus are misinterpreted to welcome everyone into the “big tent of Catholicism,” without regard to the actual condition of those entering, either the Church or a particular sacrament. While inevitably there will be “weeds and wheat” growing in the field of the Church, the goal is not to assure a good supply of weeds by lack of adequate instruction, formation, and discernment in administering the sacraments of Christian initiation or other sacraments. Another reason given by Thomas for the careful screening of candidates for adult Baptism is that growth in understanding and the conforming of one’s life to the truth of Christ and life in the Church requires time. He also suggests that administering Baptism in a solemn way in connection with major feasts such as Easter or Pentecost more properly conveys the significance of the sacrament than administering it in more informal ways in ordinary times (ST III, q. 68, a. 3). Thomas therefore ends up fundamentally agreeing with the Council of Agde (can. 34) in recommending an eight-month period of catechumenate before admission to Baptism (ST III, q. 68, a. 3, obj. 2). 72 Ralph Martin With Thomas’s support for an eight-month catechumenate, he again anticipates the decision of Vatican II to restore the adult catechumenate in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Though the RCIA has greatly improved the initiation process in many ways, it is oftentimes conducted as providing information rather than formation. Frequently there is no significant discernment about the readiness of candidates for baptism, in their intention to live a new way of life and in their desire for the graces and obligations of the sacraments. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the de-emphasis of the reality of the catechumenal exorcisms; Thomas warns against attaching little importance to them. The Importance of Exorcisms Thomas, in his fidelity to the teaching of the Apostles and the Fathers, takes very seriously the reality of the devil and the need to remove his influence from the lives of candidates for Baptism. One reason for the lack of proper fruitfulness in the reception of sacraments is that the power of the devil is not dealt with. “The power of the devil is restrained by prayers, blessings, and the like, from hindering the sacramental effect” (ST III, q 66, a. 10). We may note that the objections against the pre-Baptismal exorcisms that Thomas cites have a very contemporary ring. Minimizing the reality of the effects of original sin—and the opening to demonic influence that accompanies it—and the claimed innocence of infants are, in Thomas’s understanding, not warranted by the witness of Scripture and tradition. Against the objections against the necessity of the exorcisms before Baptism, St. Thomas cites Pope Celestine (Letter to the Episcopate of Gaul): Whether children or young people approach the sacrament of regeneration they should not come to the fount of life before the unclean spirit has been expelled from them by the exorcisms and breathings of the clerics . . . Whoever purposes to do a work wisely, first removes the obstacles to his work; hence it is written ( Jerem. 4:3): Break up anew your fallow ground and sow not upon thorns . . . Now the devil is the enemy of man’s salvation, which man acquires by Baptism; and he has a certain power over man from the very fact that the latter is subject to original or even actual sin. Consequently it is fitting that before Baptism the demons should be cast out by exorcisms, lest they impede man’s salvation” (ST III, q. 71, a. 2). Another objection that Thomas responds to claims that, since not everyone is “possessed” by the devil, the exorcisms are not needed in many cases. To this objection St. Thomas replies: “The energumens [the possessed] are so-called from laboring inwardly under the outward operation of the devil. And though not all that approach Baptism are troubled by him in their bodies, yet all who are not baptized are subject to the The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 73 power of the demons, at least on account of the guilt of original sin” (ST III, q. 71, a. 2, ad 1). Here St. Thomas is making the distinction between those more severely troubled by the devil (including the “possessed”) and those less troubled but still in need of exorcism. This of course remains the teaching of the Church; nonetheless, in many cases references to the devil and the exorcisms that precede and accompany baptism are treated as primitive “symbols” of negative “energies.” But in fact, even in Thomas’s time, there was skepticism about the actual existence of the demonic, to the extent that Thomas felt the need to directly address it. Are the exorcisms mere signs or do they really have an effect? It’s startling to read in the objection stated below and in Thomas’s response a temptation to “demythologize” at the height of “medieval” Catholicism. Augustine says (De symbol I): Little children are breathed upon and exorcized, in order to expel from them the devil’s hostile power, which deceived man. But the Church does nothing in vain. Therefore the effect of these breathings is that the power of the devils is expelled. . . . Some say that the things done in the exorcism have no effect, but are mere signs. But this is clearly false; since in exorcizing, the Church uses words of command to cast out the devil’s power. . . . Therefore we must say that they have some effect, but, other than that of Baptism. . . . Those things that are done in the exorcism remove the twofold impediment against the reception of saving grace. Of these, one is the outward impediment; so far as the demons strive to hinder man’s salvation . . . as to the devil not placing obstacles against the reception of the sacrament. . . . The other impediment is within, forasmuch as, from having contracted original sin, man’s sense is closed to the perception of the mysteries of salvation. Hence Rabanus says (De Instit. Cleric. i) that by means of the typifying spittle and the touch of the priest, the Divine wisdom and power brings salvation to the catechumen, that his nostrils being opened he may perceive the odor of the knowledge of God, that his ears be opened to hear the commandments of God, that his senses be opened in his inmost heart to respond. (ST III, q. 71, a. 3) But won’t Baptism take care of the demons? Just as Thomas cautioned against expecting the reception of the sacrament to do the work that was supposed to prepare for it in the matter of repentance from sin and unbelief, and other forms of “insincerity,” he makes the same caution in relation to the necessity of the preparatory exorcisms. To the objection that the sacrament itself will take care of any need for exorcisms, St. Thomas replies: 74 Ralph Martin The power of the devil in so far as he hinders man from obtaining glory, is expelled from man by the Baptismal ablution; but in so far as he hinders man from receiving the sacrament, his power is cast out by the exorcisms. (ST III, q. 71, a. 2, ad 2) Thomas makes clear that the preparatory exorcisms do not need to be repeated, but if they have been skipped, they should be performed when their absence is recognized. Nor are they supplied to no purpose after Baptism: because just as the effect of Baptism may be hindered before it is received, so can it be hindered after it has been received. (ST III, q. 71, a. 3, ad 3) A growing contemporary Catholic literature is beginning to address the question of why and how post-baptismal “minor exorcisms”—but not in the case of the “possessed,” for these are reserved to the official diocesan exorcist, when such have been appointed—can bring significant freedom, even to Catholics attempting to live a life of great devotion and discipline but who are being hindered by various obstacles.15 Thomas, again considering the workload of priests, envisions “Readers and Exorcists” assisting the priest in the task of catechizing and exorcisms (ST III, q. 71, a. 4, ad 2). 15 There is a growing literature which attempts to address the pastoral needs of those praying for others for deliverance from the influence of the demonic.Three that are written by Catholics that many find of help are: Fr. Michael Scanlan, T.O.R. and Randall Cirner, Deliverance from Evil Spirits: A Weapon for Spiritual Warfare (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1980); Francis MacNutt, Deliverance from Evil Spirits: A Practical Manual (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1995); Neal Lozano, Unbound: A Practical Guide to Deliverance (Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2003). A more theological/pastoral treatment of the area is provided by Cardinal Leon-Joseph Suenens in his Renewal and the Powers of Darkness, foreword by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1983). A study on the power of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola to bring about significant inner healing and transformation, which includes “case studies,” is John Horn, S.J., Mystical Healing: The Psychological and Spiritual Power of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996). See also, by Ralph Martin, “The Authority of the Good Shepherd: Overcoming Evil,” in Good Shepherd: Living Christ’s Own Pastoral Authority, Fifth Annual Symposium on the Spirituality and Identity of the Diocesan Priest, Co-sponsored by: The Institute for Priestly Formation and University of St. Mary of the Lake, Mundelein Seminary, March 16–19, 2006: 69–81. See also the seriousness with which the tradition regards the work of the demonic in the life of Christians; for example: John Cassian, The Conferences,VII and VIII; The Institutes V–XII; Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, I:2, 16–17; II:1, 2–6; III: 1; IV:7–9; Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, IV; Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Song of Songs, Sermons 15:6; 19:7; 33:10–11; 63:6; 64:4. The Post-Christendom Sacramental Crisis 75 • • • Many of the problems being encountered in the Church today concerning the lack of fruitfulness in the lives of those receiving the sacraments could be resolved or greatly mitigated by applying the wisdom of St. Thomas concerning sacramental fruitfulness. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 77–121 77 The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae: A Reply to Martin Rhonheimer* T HOMAS P INK King’s College London London, England 1. Professor Rhonheimer’s Theory of Doctrinal Reform T HE DECLARATION Dignitatis Humanae of the Second Vatican Council concerns coercion in matters of religion by the state. Coercion, in the Catholic tradition, centrally involves the issuance of directives backed by the threat of penalties—dislike of the penalties being intended to influence the otherwise unwilling into doing as directed.1 The declaration straightforwardly condemns, as morally wrong, coercion by the state of people’s religious belief and practice, save to protect just public order. But it seems that the Church once endorsed just such state coercion in defense of the Catholic faith. Should we see Vatican II as doctrinally consistent with previous Church teaching, or as contradictory and corrective of it? In his essay “Benedict XVI’s ‘Hermeneutic of Reform’ and Religious Freedom” Professor Rhonheimer maintains that the declaration does contradict and correct previous teaching. The declaration (he says) maintains continuity * I should like to thank Professor Rhonheimer for notifying me of his essay “Bene- dict XVI’s ‘Hermeneutic of Reform’ and Religious Freedom,” Nova et Vetera 9, no. 4 (2011): 1029–54 (citations to page numbers in the Nova et Vetera essay will henceforth be given parenthetically in the text), and for drawing my attention to his criticism there of my discussion on Rorate Caeli [August 5, 2011] roratecaeli.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-religious-liberty-and-hermeneutic-of.html. An expanded version of my Rorate Caeli discussion is also forthcoming under the title “The Right to Religious Liberty and the Coercion of Belief: A Note on Dignitatis Humanae,” in Reason, Morality and Law: The Philosophy of John Finnis, ed. Robert George and John Keown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 1 For a lucid discussion see Aquinas, Summa theologiae I–II, q. 95, a. 1, resp. 78 Thomas Pink at the level of Church doctrine on faith and morals, and in particular, in doctrine concerning the nature of the Church herself (1048). The declaration maintains continuity in its teaching on the principles of the natural law. But the declaration does involve a contradiction of past teaching at the level at which principles of the natural law are applied—at the level of doctrine concerning the state. Natural law as such is therefore not at all affected by the discontinuity that is in question here. The contradiction arises only at the level of the assertion of the civil right, and is therefore only of the political order. The doctrine of Vatican II and the teaching of Quanta Cura with its “Syllabus errorum” are therefore not in contradiction at the level of the natural law, but at the level of natural law’s legal-political application in situations and in the face of concrete problems. (1042) Past magisterial endorsement of religious coercion, in Rhonheimer’s view, was social teaching about the nature of the state, rather than an interpretation of the content of divine revelation. As teaching concerning, not even principles of the natural law itself, but their application, the teaching is fallible and subject to revision. This past Church endorsement of religious coercion involved only teaching about the state of some nineteenth-century popes. And the real purpose of the teaching was simply to defend the truth of Catholicism. It was mistakenly thought (Rhonheimer says) that unless the state were under a general duty to restrict the public practice of false religion, de fide claims as to the unique truth of the Catholic faith would be imperilled. In the preconciliar magisterium, therefore, the doctrine on the unique truth of the Christian religion was linked to a doctrine on the function of the state and its duty to assure the prevalence of the true religion and to protect society from the spread of religious error. (1031) But now, since Vatican II, we see that the truth of Catholicism can be defended without recourse to coercion; and so this social teaching about the state can be given up. According to Professor Rhonheimer, no general council before Vatican II ever pronounced on freedom and coercion in relation to religion: The first case—definition “ex cathedra” or ecumenical council— clearly does not obtain with the question of freedom of religion. In effect, the first and so far the only council to have expressed itself on this subject has been Vatican II. It was precisely this Council which recognized religious freedom. In the same way, not even the universal The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 79 ordinary magisterium seems to be affected here, because never before had the pope and the bishops condemned religious freedom and proclaimed this condemnation as a definitive doctrine of the Church. This was rather the case of a few isolated popes, over a span of about a hundred years, and never of an explicit assertion of wanting to present a definitive doctrine in a matter of faith or morals (even if this was the implicit understanding of the nineteenth-century popes). (1038) So, in opposition to a hermeneutic of doctrinal continuity regarding the teaching on religious freedom of Vatican II, Professor Rhonheimer proposes a hermeneutic of doctrinal change and reform. Dignitatis Humanae is proposing new teaching, contradictory and corrective of the old, on “the sovereignty and competence of the state in religious matters” (1033).This teaching is doctrinally corrective of a previous political ideal, supported by the nineteenth-century popes. This previous ideal was the political establishment of Catholicism as the state religion, with the Church using the Catholic state to coerce on her behalf. Dignitatis Humanae, on Professor Rhonheimer’s interpretation, rejects the Catholic state as any such ideal, presenting instead as just and right, and the correct application of principles of natural law, an equal religious liberty for all and a separation of Church and state (1053–54). Professor Rhonheimer’s contribution is important, in that it raises so many questions pertinent to the interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae and therefore pertinent also to a proper appreciation of the teaching of the Second Vatican Council. He has provided an invaluable opportunity for clarifying the declaration, which is so central to our understanding of Vatican II’s relation to the earlier Catholic magisterium. But this essay will show that Professor Rhonheimer’s account of past Church doctrine on religious coercion is importantly mistaken, as is his interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae in relation to that doctrine. My argument, in outline, will be as follows. True, Dignitatis Humanae is an historic reform. For the first time since late antiquity the Church is now refusing to use the coercive power of the state to support her mission. The Church is refusing to use state power either to hold her own members to obligations of Christian fidelity or to protect her members from exposure to the public practice of, or to proselytization from, other, false religions. And she is now teaching, as she did not teach before, that people have a moral right not to be coerced religiously by the state. But all this arises from a reform at the level of policy and from accompanying change in religious and political circumstance, not from any reform of underlying doctrine. Once the 80 Thomas Pink doctrinal history is properly understood, it will become clear that Dignitatis Humanae in no way contradicts the doctrinal basis of the Church’s previous endorsement of religious coercion. Dignitatis Humanae is a declaration, not on religious liberty and coercion in relation to any authority whatsoever, but rather on religious liberty and coercion in relation to the state and civic institutions. The doctrine it proposes is specific to state or civic institutions: it is the state which lacks the authority to coerce religious belief and practice. But the authority to coerce religious belief and practice, according to the teaching of the pre-conciliar magisterium, never belonged to the state in any case, but only to the Church.The state’s past licit involvement in religious coercion, therefore, was never under its own authority but was always under the authority of the Church, in virtue of an obligation on Christian rulers to the Church, incurred through baptism, to aid her in her mission and to put the coercive power of the state at her disposal. The doctrinal basis for the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion involving the state lay then, not in any application of natural law teaching about the authority of the state, but in revealed doctrine about the authority of the Church, and about that authority’s basis in people’s obligations to the Church incurred through baptism—and, especially, in doctrine about the obligations to her of baptized state officials. The doctrine on which the Church’s historical approval of religious coercion was based was therefore precisely not what Rhonheimer alleges—reformable social teaching about the application of natural law concerning the state. Rather, the doctrinal basis for the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion lay in highly authoritative and longstanding magisterial teaching from revelation about the nature of the Church herself and of her sacraments—teaching that may not be easily reformable at all, and behind which, as we shall see, lies the authority, not just of a number of nineteenth-century popes, but of many general councils and of the canonical tradition of the Church. It is far from clear that Vatican II ever had the authority to contradict this past magisterial teaching. But, in any case, the Council never tried to do so, as this essay will make clear. For the underlying doctrinal basis for the Church’s previous use of the coercive services of the state—traditional teaching about people’s obligations to the Church—is expressly preserved, in Dignitatis Humanae’s very definite and explicit formulation, integer or intact. Professor Rhonheimer attempts to set up a sharp doctrinal opposition between Vatican II and the nineteenth-century papal magisterium. But in its doctrine about the coercive authority of the state, namely that the state lacks an authority of its own to coerce religiously, Dignitatis Humanae The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 81 emerges as deeply continuous with the nineteenth-century magisterium. It is simply maintaining what was already the teaching of Leo XIII in Immortale Dei. Just as Vatican I’s Pastor Aeternus of 1870 reserved supreme jurisdiction over the Church to the papacy, and so to the exclusion of the state, so in Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei of 1885 we find all coercive authority in religion generally reserved to the Church—again to the exclusion of the state. The real novelty at Vatican II is the Church’s refusal of further license for state involvement in religious coercion under her own ecclesial authority. But this refusal is not grounded by Dignitatis Humanae on any doctrine about the limits or extent of the Church’s own authority either to coerce herself or to license or require other agents, such as state officials, to coerce on her behalf. This is precisely because, beyond undertaking to preserve traditional teaching, Dignitatis Humanae very carefully avoids stating any doctrine of its own about the Church’s own authority over those subject to her jurisdiction and under obligations of fidelity to her—namely the baptized. The nature and extent of the Church’s own coercive authority over the baptized, including baptized state officials, is strictly bypassed. Since it is the Church, not the state, that has coercive authority in matters of religion, a doctrinal resolution of questions to do with religious liberty would have to involve teaching on the coercive authority of the Church, and in particular on the juridical implications of baptism. But Dignitatis Humanae never provided such teaching. Dignitatis Humanae simply maintains Leonine teaching on the state’s incompetence to coerce religiously, leaving the crucial teaching on the Church’s own authority unchanged, but otherwise unaddressed. So much by way of outline. Let us now turn to the central question of religious coercion in traditional Catholic teaching. Where does the authority to coerce religiously lie, and what is the normative basis of that authority? 2. Church and State Professor Rhonheimer assumes a distinction between, on the one hand, teaching from divine revelation on the Church and her nature and authority, where doctrinal continuity is both essential and assured, but which is supposedly not concerned with the right and authority to coerce religiously; and, on the other hand, teaching from natural law on the nature and authority of the state, where all past teaching of a right and authority to coerce religiously is supposedly located, and where doctrinal change can occur without endangering the Church’s authority concerning faith and morals. But this distinction is not tenable, having no basis in the past teaching and tradition of the Church. 82 Thomas Pink Rhonheimer is less than clear on the true juridical basis, according to past Catholic teaching, of the state’s involvement in coercion in support of Catholicism as the true religion. But this issue is fundamental to understanding the problem of doctrinal continuity or change in this area. Sometimes Rhonheimer writes of the state in past Catholic doctrine acting as the Church’s agent, in the enforcement of her authority. He talks of the Catholic state as “the secular arm of the Church” (1032). And in relation to temporal penalties being applied in matters of religion, he writes of consultors to the Holy Office regarding state authority “as being in the service of enforcing church laws on the baptized” (1044) (my emphasis). And here it seems that the state is acting as the Church’s agent, applying and enforcing ecclesial laws, and so penalties based on an authority other than its own. But then, in the same footnote where he talks of the state’s acting to enforce church laws, he claims, regarding these same temporal penalties that the state is helping to apply: “temporal” precisely did not refer to ecclesiastical power and penalties, but to the coercitive (sic) power of the state in the service of the true religion. (1044) In which case it looks as though, in acting in support of the Church, the state is acting on the basis of an authority of its own in matters of religion, so that the temporal penalties are legitimized by a native right on the part of the state to impose such punishments for religious ends, in defense of the true religion. We touch here an old debate in Catholic theology, pitting CounterReformation Roman theologians such as Suarez and Bellarmine against Gallicans such as Barclay.2 Are temporal penalties in religion—penalties imposed in the service of revealed religion and supernatural ends, but depriving the penalized of some earthly good—imposed on the authority of the Church, with the state, if involved at all, no more than the Church’s agent? Or is the imposition of temporal penalties for religious or supernatural ends within the state’s own native competence, independently of the Church’s say-so? Or is the imposition of such penalties, as Marsilius of Padua and some Gallicans supposed, even within the competence of the state alone? 2 See William Barclay, De Potestate Papae (1609); Robert Bellarmine, Tractatus de Potestate Summi Pontificis in Rebus Temporalibus, adversus Gulielmum Barclay (1610); and Francisco Suarez, De Fide (c. 1580–1617) and Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores (1613). The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 83 So within past theology there have been two available models of the normative basis of the state’s involvement in religious coercion. The first model might indeed involve nothing more than natural law, or its application. For the state derives its own legitimate existence and authority to coerce from natural law. On this model, the state’s involvement in coercion on behalf of the true religion is an exercise of a natural law–based authority that is native to the state, and that does not derive from the Church. The state’s involvement in religious coercion, if a duty, is a duty because essential to the proper exercise of the state’s own authority, and part of its proper role, as based on natural law. We would have something quite distinct from and independent of “ecclesiastical power and penalties”—namely, a coercive power or authority possessed by the state itself, in support of the true religion. Whereas, on the second model, the authority to coerce in matters of religion belongs to the Church; so that even if civil law is involved, the authority behind the penalties—the authority that legitimizes their application—is that of the Church rather than the state. The state is being authorized by the Church to act on her behalf, as her agent, to enforce her ecclesial directives. But then the authority to coerce does not ultimately belong to the state at all, but to another body, the nature and constitution of which is not given in natural law, but through a divine law that is revealed—the divine law of the New Covenant. And pre-conciliar Church teaching eventually endorsed the second model, not the first. We find clear papal favor given to the second model at the Counter-Reformation: Suarez’s Defensio Fidei Catholicae of 1613 in support of it was commissioned by Paul V. But, decisively, the second model was given direct magisterial endorsement in Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei of 1885, perhaps the most juridically precise of magisterial doctrine to date on the respective authorities and legislative competencies of Church and state. Leo XIII is exact and unambiguous in his teaching. In Immortale Dei, he denies the state any native authority to coerce—to legislate or punish at all, including through temporal penalties—in matters of religion. That authority belongs to the Church under her own constitution—a constitution the coercive nature of which is not a matter of natural law but a matter of revelation, and that serves ends that are supernatural, not natural as are the ends proper to the authority of the state: In truth Jesus Christ gave his Apostles free authority in matters sacred, together with a true capacity to legislate and what follows therefrom, the twofold power to judge and to punish (adiuncta tum ferendarum legum veri nominis facultate, tum gemina, quae hinc consequitur, iudicandi puniendique Thomas Pink 84 potestate) . . . Hence, it is the Church, and not the State, that is to be man’s guide to heaven: and it is to the same Church that God has assigned the charge of seeing to, and legislating for, what concerns religion. (Immortale Dei §11) And further: The Almighty, therefore, has given the charge of the human race to two powers ( potestates), the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, the other over human, things. . . . While one of the two powers has for its immediate and chief object care of the goods of this mortal life, the other provides for goods that are heavenly and everlasting. Whatever, therefore, in things human is in any way of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church (id est omne in potestate arbitrioque Ecclesiae). (Immortale Dei §13–§14) If the state was involved in coercion for religious ends, it was because the state itself could be under an obligation to aid the Church in the exercise of her authority, subject to the judgment of the Church and when she requested such assistance—a request that would itself be an exercise of the Church’s same authority, serving supernatural ends that were properly the Church’s concern. It is therefore simply not possible in relation to religious liberty to make Rhonheimer’s juridical distinction—essential to his case—between, on the one hand, revealed and irreformable de fide teaching on the Church and her authority that has nothing to do with religious coercion; and, on the other hand, teaching that endorsed religious coercion, but which was reformable as merely social teaching concerning the state and involving merely the application of principles of natural reason. Past magisterial endorsement of religious coercion was based firmly on teaching on the Church and her coercive authority—an authority not fixed in natural law, but, as Leo XIII makes clear, known to us through revelation concerning Christ’s gift of the requisite authority to the Apostles and their successors, and exercised not for the natural ends proper to natural law, but for supernatural ends proper to the divine law of the New Covenant. How might the state, an authority sovereign in the civil matters within its peculiar competence, ever be under an obligation in matters of religion to follow the directives of the Church, another and quite distinct authority, and one the legitimacy and coercive nature of whose authority is not a matter of natural reason at all, but of revelation? This is something that The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 85 clearly cannot be explained in terms of Rhonheimer’s model of an entirely natural law–based theory of the state. Indeed, one essential condition of such a duty of obedience to the Church, according to traditional teaching, is a sacrament, baptism— something the nature and significance of which is given, not in natural law, but in revelation. For the unbaptized might have obligations under natural law to God to receive any revelation he might deliver and to worship according to his will.3 But it is the baptized, and only the baptized, who have an obligation of fidelity to the Church, and a consequent obligation to follow her directives. The legislation of the Church, which in the 1917 Code of Canon Law still required the state to assist the Church in the application of ecclesial penalties,4 can bind and obligate only the baptized. So the authority to coerce on behalf of the true religion belongs to an authority the very existence and divine gift of which is a matter of revelation rather than natural reason, with its jurisdiction fixed by baptism, a sacrament of supernatural grace. It is very clear that we are not dealing with the application of principles of natural law. For natural law was seen by eminent and officially approved Roman theologians long before Leo XIII as providing no basis whatsoever for religious coercion in the service of revealed religion. How could the state, Suarez asked, ever coercively repress even false religions such as Judaism and Islam? For these religions are not in themselves contrary to natural law—which is the law that grounds and is served by the coercive authority of the state.5 The state’s coercive authority is limited to concerns proper to natural justice, and does not extend to the imposition of revealed truth. Thus it was nothing new when, in 1965, Dignitatis Humanae said: 3 Leo XIII teaches in Immortale Dei §6 that this natural law duty to adhere to and worship according to whatever proves to be the true religion applies to states as well as to individuals. This is indeed teaching about natural law—magisterial teaching that, moreover, Dignitatis Humanae does not expressly deny. But a duty to worship is one thing; the authority to legislate and punish—to coerce—for religious or supernatural ends, in support of the true religion, is obviously quite another. And Leo XIII makes it clear that this is not given to the state, but to the Church, and not under natural law but through the revealed gift of Christ under the New Covenant. 4 In canon 2198, as discussed below. 5 “The reason is that these [non-Christian] rites are not intrinsically bad in terms of natural law; so the temporal power of a ruler does not extend in itself to forbidding them.” Suarez, De fide, disputation 18, section 4, §10, p. 451. 86 Thomas Pink Furthermore, those private and public acts of religion by which people relate themselves to God from the sincerity of their hearts, of their nature transcend the earthly and temporal levels of reality. So the state, whose peculiar purpose it is to provide for the temporal common good, should certainly recognise and promote the religious life of its citizens. With equal certainty it exceeds the limits of its authority if it takes upon itself to direct or prevent religious activity. (Dignitatis Humanae §3, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 1004) Suarez, in a papally commissioned text of 1613, the Defensio Fidei Catholicae, was already saying much the same, asserting against James I of England similar limits to his or any state’s authority in matters of religion: Punishment of crimes only belongs to civil magistrates in so far as those crimes are contrary to political ends, public peace and human justice; but coercion with respect to those deeds which are opposed to religion and to the salvation of the soul, is essentially a function of spiritual power [the power of the Church], so that the authority to make use of temporal penalties for the purposes of such correction must have been allotted in particular to this spiritual power. Defensio Fidei Catholicae adversus Anglicanae Sectae Errores, Book 3, chapter 23, §19 There is of course a general consideration in favor of the Leonine doctrine that the state can have no authority of its own to legislate and coerce on behalf of the true religion. This is the principle that human coercive authorities exist by virtue of some prior grounding law—and their authority to coerce extends only to ends proper to the law that grounds their existence. They do not possess an authority that extends beyond that law and matters proper to it. Thus, for example, authorities, like local councils, that exist by decree of state positive law, can properly do no more than apply the positive law involved in their constitution. The state’s existence is grounded on natural law, and so its coercive authority extends only to those ends involving natural justice and natural happiness that are proper to natural law. Now though natural law may, as Leo XIII teaches, call on us both individually and as a community to worship God in whatever way he eventually reveals, the true revelation is not itself given in natural law, and a variety of possible revealed religions could be consistent with that law’s content. The duty to believe the Catholic faith is not part of natural law, but a duty under a distinct law, given not by natural reason but through revelation, the divine positive law of the New Covenant, and serving ends that are supernatural. So when it comes to applying the revealed law of the New Covenant, another coercive authority has been instituted—by the terms of that The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 87 same divinely revealed law. That authority is the Church, which has the peculiar charism of authoritatively and even infallibly interpreting the very content of the law to be enforced, and the peculiar right to extend and render more determinate the force of that law through canonical legislation of her own. It is perfectly reasonable to conclude, then, that in matters of revealed religion it cannot be the state that has the authority to give direction and to enforce its direction by penalties. If revealed religion brings with it a law and a coercive authority of its own, then that must itself be a matter for revelation, the content of which fixes both the identity of that coercive authority—the Church—and the extent and nature of its jurisdiction. Which is exactly the position of Leo XIII. So when Rhonheimer writes: In the pre-conciliar magisterium, therefore, the doctrine on the unique truth of the Christian religion was linked to a doctrine on the function of the state and its duty to assure the prevalence of the true religion and to protect society from the spread of religious error (1031) his description is only very qualifiedly true. The state as such had no authority and no duty to prevent or restrict religions just because they were false. If a state might ever be involved in the restriction of false religions as a matter of duty, this was as a Christian state ruled by the baptized, the rulers having under their baptism a duty, as rulers and not just as private individuals, of fidelity to the Church, and so a duty to act on her authority. But the coercive authority, including the authority to impose temporal penalties for supernatural ends with or without state assistance—this authority belonged to the Church not the state. Temporal penalties in the service of the true faith are legitimized by the authority of the Church, not by that of any state. 3. The Church’s Temporal Power It is characteristic of his confusion on this issue that Professor Rhonheimer should suggest that temporal penalties applied for religious ends have primarily been understood in the tradition as “penalties imposed through the state,” and that Quanta Cura and the Syllabus’s defense of temporal penalties in religion is a defense of the power or authority of the state: The consulters explicitly stated that Montalembert’s condemnable proposition [that “the Church does not have the right to suppress violators of its laws by temporal punishments”] referred to the “freedom of worship and press and to material coercion for religious reasons,” and 88 Thomas Pink so in this context “temporal” precisely did not refer to ecclesiastical power and penalties, but to the coercitive power of the state in the service of the true religion. (1045 n 8; my emphasis) First, as far as the magisterial Quanta Cura and Syllabus are concerned, the authority behind these temporal penalties is undoubtedly the revealed authority of the Church, not the authority of the state under natural law. It is, after all, decisive that the condemned proposition 24 (“The Church does not have the power of using force, nor any temporal power whether direct or indirect”) occurs (unsurprisingly, given its explicit content) in the section of the Syllabus—section V, errors on the Church and her rights—dealing with the authority of the Church, and not in the following section on the state, section VI, errors on civil society both considered in itself and in its relations to the Church—where, were Rhonheimer’s interpretation correct, it should have been located. And in Quanta Cura the condemned proposition that “the Church does not have the right to suppress violators of its laws by temporal punishments” similarly occurs in a section not asserting state authority over religion but rather defending the authority of the Church against, in particular, the state—a section which begins: Others meanwhile, reviving the wicked and so often condemned fictions of innovators, dare with signal impudence to subject to the will of the civil authority the supreme authority of the Church and of this Apostolic See given to her by Christ Himself, and to deny all those rights of the same Church and See which concern matters of external order. Of course, in the tradition everyone thought that there were licit temporal penalties, fully within the Church’s authority to impose, the enforcement of which would ordinarily require state assistance were the Church to decide to impose them. If the Church did decide to impose these then, under certain conditions, such as the state’s being Christian and rulers’ obligations under baptism being activated, state rulers would be obligated to follow ecclesial directives and provide that assistance. But the authority of the Church to exercise temporal power and to impose temporal penalties could not by its very nature consist in a form of stateapplied force or punishment—and for a fairly obvious reason. The authority was understood to attach to the Church by her very nature, and to attach to her even under conditions where there is no state ruler under an obligation to follow her directives, and so where she was not in a position to direct the state. This might happen—at least a notional possibility—if there were no state authority at all; but more frequently, it might The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 89 happen if the state were not Christian and were ruled by the unbaptized, who have no obligations of fidelity or obedience to the Church. This, of course, is why the state’s involvement, as a matter of duty, in the application of temporal penalties is very clearly regarded in many of the more precise discussions as a contingent and derivative feature of them. It is dependent obviously on the precise nature of the penalties applied—not all temporal penalties are viewed as requiring coercive state assistance for their application. But also it depends on whether there is a Christian state with baptized rulers under any obligation of obedience to the Church. We can find careful pre-conciliar discussions separated by nearly four centuries that make the secondary nature of state involvement in temporal punishment for religious ends deeply clear. Take Suarez’s discussion of this matter in his subsequent working up of his Roman College lectures De Fide (c. 1580–1617) and in his papally commissioned Defensio Fidei Catholicae (1613) or Cardinal Journet’s immediately pre-conciliar discussion in L’Église du Verbe Incarné (1941).6 Much care is devoted by Suarez to finding exercises of coercion of a temporal kind under the authority of the Church even under pagan Rome, and so occurring quite independently of the involvement of the state. He appeals to cases such as the deaths of Ananias and Saphira in Acts 5 (to illustrate the exercise of the Church’s authority to impose temporal penalties on the baptized), or the blinding of Elymas in Acts 13 (to illustrate the exercise of the Church’s right to use force defensively, to prevent the unbaptized from interfering with her mission), as supposed examples of what Gallicans denied—the Church’s native authority, independent of state consent or cooperation, forcibly to remove, for supernatural ends, earthly goods such as life or sight. Whether or not one endorses Suarez’s scriptural interpretation of the relevant parts of Acts,7 the model of coercive authority in relation to 6 Throughout this essay, page references to Charles Journet’s L’Église du Verbe Incarné are to the 1955 English edition, The Church of the Word Incarnate, volume 1 (London: Sheed and Ward). 7 One issue here is whether the Church has the right to impose death as a penalty. Death was not formally a canonical penalty, and Aquinas denied that ministers of the gospel could have the right to impose it. Aquinas viewed the deaths of Ananias and Saphira as a punishment under divine authority alone—see ST II–II, q. 64, a. 4, resp. But by the time of the Counter-Reformation a Catholic theologian such as Suarez thought that since death was (in conventional theological opinion) a legitimate penalty for heresy, the Church herself must really have the authority to impose it, even if the penalty was applied by the state. For the state could have no authority of its own to punish heresy by any penalty. Indeed, Suarez no longer bothered even to mention Aquinas’s rather different interpretation of Acts 5. 90 Thomas Pink the application of temporal penalties to defend the true religion which that interpretation is being used to defend is very clear. We are not dealing here with a doctrine about the state’s coercive right under natural law, but rather with a doctrine of a right and authority possessed by the Church—an authority specified in divine revelation concerning its gift to her by Christ himself, and attaching to her independently of state authority or cooperation. Again in L’Église du Verbe Incarné, Journet discusses the authority of the Church to impose temporal penalties, as that authority is specified in the 1917 Code, and in terms similar to the 1983 Code canon 1312 §2: The Church has the native and proper right, independent of any human authority, to coerce those offenders subject to her with both spiritual and temporal penalties. (1917 Code, canon 2214 §1) This Code-specified ecclesial authority, retained in the 1983 Code, is expressly treated by Journet as the true object of the teaching of Quanta Cura and of the Syllabus regarding the Church’s right to impose temporal penalties, and as involving, in itself, precisely the Church’s right punitively to remove earthly goods without reference to any “human,” that is, state or civil authority (see Journet, 262 and 270). The discussion of temporal penalties is carefully placed in a section on the Church’s coercive power in itself (see 262–72)—a section that precedes any later discussion of the state’s involvement in the enforcement of these penalties, which is regarded by Journet as a further and distinct, though of course vitally important issue (see 272–304). And whilst by no means endorsing Suarez’s exegesis of the deaths of Ananias and Saphira or the blinding of Elymas as actual cases of the ecclesial authorization of force without state assistance, Journet treats the Suarezian reading of these episodes, as involving the divinely assisted exercise of ecclesially authorized force, as a respectable opinion within the Catholic theological tradition (see 263 and 265). As we have already noted, the Church’s authority to impose temporal penalties was of course officially understood to extend to penalties that, absent direct divine intervention such as that detailed in Acts, would ordinarily require state assistance. Thus the 1917 Code specifically required such needed assistance, when requested, to be provided by those state authorities subject to canonical obligation: Offences against the law of the Church alone, are, of their nature, within the cognisance of the ecclesiastical authority alone, which, when it judges it necessary or opportune, can claim the help of the secular arm. (1917 Code, canon 2198) The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 91 But pre-conciliar theology did not suppose that temporal penalties as such ordinarily needed state enforcement. Thus the Church’s punitive removal of what would otherwise have been a moral liberty to move about, by imposition, as a punishment, of an obligation not to do this, is seen rightly as a perfectly clear exercise of the Church’s right to impose temporal penalties—the punitive removal of a genuine earthly good, a moral liberty that would otherwise have been possessed under natural law.8 But of course a moral liberty is certainly one good the removal of which need not ordinarily require state assistance. It should by now be very clear why the Syllabus’s condemnation of the denial of the right to use force or exercise any form of temporal power for religious ends should have been placed in a section on errors about the Church, and not, where Rhonheimer’s argument would imply, in the section on errors about the state. The issue was fundamentally about the Church’s authority, not about the authority of the state. Rhonheimer uses scare-quotes around the word temporal in relation to the statement of the Church’s authority to impose temporal penalties in the 1983 Code,9 and again refers in this connexion to ‘so-called temporal penalties’10—presumably because the Church is no longer calling on the state to act as the religiously coercive agent, through use of fines, prison etc, of their enforcement. But it is clear by now that his qualifying use of scare-quotes and terms such as ‘so-called’ is unwarranted, just as it would be in relation to the 1917 Code or the pre-1917 Corpus Iuris Canonici.The characterization of temporal penalties in the service of religion as involving the punitive removal of earthly goods on the specific authority of the Church, and apart from any question of recourse to state assistance, is a deeply traditional specification—a very traditional assertion of the Church’s native right to coerce by temporal means for supernatural ends. The modern Code speaks the language of punitive coercion—just as did the 1917 Code and the pre-1917 Corpus. And, as in the past, the Church’s current Code speaks this language in order to direct religious belief and practice. The coercive authority of the Church has historically been seen as one aspect of the pastoral function of the bishop—part of his duty as a shepherd. For shepherds do have to use coercion on the sheep they care for. The shepherd’s staff may have to be employed coercively as a virga or rod—terminology we find used in connexion with the repression 8 See Journet, L’Église du Verbe Incarné, 300. 9 See Rhonheimer, Benedict XVI’s ‘Hermeneutic of Reform,’ 1044. 10 See ibid., 1052. 92 Thomas Pink of heresy by Bellarmine,11 as again in our day also by a modern successor of his in the service of doctrinal regulation: The Church too must use the shepherd’s rod, the rod with which he protects the faith against those who falsify it, against currents which lead the flock astray.The use of the rod can actually be a service of love. Today we can see that it has nothing to do with love when conduct unworthy of the priestly life is tolerated. Nor does it have to do with love if heresy is allowed to spread and the faith twisted and chipped away, as if it were something that we ourselves had invented. As if it were no longer God’s gift, the precious pearl which we cannot let be taken from us. (Benedict XVI, Homily on the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Friday 11 June, 2010) The use of the Church’s rod is to prevent the spread of heresy. The threat of punishment for heresy, including restriction of movement and job loss, is expressly aimed to discourage the spread of false belief.We have then the use of dislikeable penalties in a coercive project aimed at influencing what people religiously believe and do. Indeed, in canon 1311 the 1983 Code itself describes the use of sanctions for heresy and the like as coercive. It is tempting to suppose, in the spirit of Weber, that only states or similar civic or secular bodies really coerce, so that only such secular bodies could ever go in for true religious coercion—the application of real pressure to direct religious belief and practice. Some might deny that the present Code is really coercive, precisely because it no longer calls on the state to act as coercive agent. But this repudiation of coercion is not faithful to the language of the present Code itself; nor was such a denial of the Church as a religiously coercive authority in her own right ever traditional. In his encyclical Libertas, Leo XIII developed further the teaching of Immortale Dei, and explicitly condemned a view of the Church as a non-coercive voluntary association, with mere membership conditions but no more: Others do not oppose the existence of the Church, nor indeed could they; yet they despoil her of the nature and rights of a perfect society, and maintain that it does not belong to her to legislate, to judge, or to punish, but only to exhort, to advise, and to rule her subjects in accordance with their own consent and will. By such opinion they pervert the nature of this divine society, and attenuate and narrow its authority, its office of teacher, and its whole efficiency; and at the same time they aggrandize the power of the civil government to such extent as to 11 See Bellarmine, Controversia Generalis de Membris Ecclesiae Militantis, caput 22, De Laicis, liber 3, p. 523 (Ingolstadt, 1599). The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 93 subject the Church of God to the empire and sway of the State, like any voluntary association of citizens. To refute completely such teaching, the arguments often used by the defenders of Christianity, and set forth by us, especially in the encyclical letter Immortale Dei are of great avail; for by those arguments it is proved that, by a divine provision, all the rights which essentially belong to a society that is legitimate, supreme, and perfect in all its parts exist in the Church. (Libertas §40) By now it should be clear what was the historical basis of the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion. This did not at all take the form proposed by Professor Rhonheimer—a (misguided) theory of the state’s authority under natural law. Rather it lay in a theory of the Church’s authority as a societas perfecta, and constituted as such under the revealed law of the New Covenant. This is a revealed law that gives the Church ‘by a divine provision’ a like sovereignty in the sphere of religion—and so a like supreme legislative and punitive authority to direct and coerce— as the state possesses, under natural law, in its temporal sphere. Of course state officials were historically involved, as a matter of duty, in the exercise of that authority. But the authority enforced did not belong to the state, and its basis did not lie in natural law; and the duty on state officials to cooperate in its exercise, likewise, did not come from natural law, attaching to those officials as it did through baptism—a sacrament of supernatural grace that subjected them to that other sovereign authority beyond the state, the Church. It is clear that the traditional view of the Church as being as properly a coercive authority in her own right as is a political state is in no way incoherent. For any authority can be coercive if it has both the right and the capacity to adopt and execute the requisite sort of project—the deliberate use of the credible threat of the deprivation of a good as a form of directive pressure, where the goods might be ones that even potential wrongdoers would fear to lose. Since it was traditional teaching about the authority of the Church rather than the state that served as the doctrinal basis for past magisterial endorsement of religious coercion, let us now examine that traditional teaching in more detail. Then we can determine whether this teaching is addressed at all by Dignitatis Humanae. 4. The Traditional Teaching on Religious Liberty and on the Church’s Coercive Authority Professor Rhonheimer makes important claims about the magisterial nature of the Church’s pre-conciliar teaching on religious liberty and coercion. In his view, the teaching involved no previous general councils, 94 Thomas Pink and did not even involve the ordinary magisterium of popes and bishops teaching together that certain claims were to be definitively held. It involved only the teaching of ‘a few isolated popes, over a span of about a hundred years’—those he mentions ranging from Pius VI to Pius XII. Unfortunately Professor Rhonheimer’s view does not withstand much historical examination. It is just historical fantasy to suppose that Catholic endorsement of religious coercion at the magisterial level was peculiar to a ‘few isolated popes’ of the nineteenth century. Professor Rhonheimer restricts his attention to explicitly political encyclicals or decrees of the nineteenth-century period. This is of course precisely because he maintains that the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion was part of natural law teaching about the function and authority of the state, and not, ultimately, based on teaching about the content of divine revelation concerning the Church’s own nature and authority. Given his view, it is all too tempting just to assume from the outset that any past Church declarations on her own nature and on the nature of her sacraments and their implications cannot be about religious liberty or coercion. But since by now we see that the Church rather than the state was properly the religiously coercive authority, this inattention to past teaching about the Church herself and the sacraments is likely to be hazardous. A further issue which is not really addressed by Professor Rhonheimer, but which also arises once we understand that the Church saw herself as the properly religiously coercive authority, is the testimony provided by the canonical tradition, and the doctrinal significance of this. For the canonical tradition—the Church’s own past legislative activity—contains claims both implied and express about the Church’s own authority to coerce religiously, as well as about the obligations to her of the baptized. The Church’s legislation and canonical practice was historically treated as of great doctrinal significance, as itself including doctrinal teaching by the successors of the Apostles, whether as individual popes or as bishops gathered in councils both general and provincial, about what the Church had a right to impose by way of obligations or as penalties on those subject to her jurisdiction, and so about the obligations to her of Christians both as private individuals and as rulers or public officials. This body of canonical material was certainly regularly treated by past theologians as sufficient to establish definitive Church teaching and so de fide theological claims. Moreover the interpretation of dogmatic definitions at the level of general councils was regularly carried out by reference to this canonical tradition—and this is especially clear, as we shall see, in discussions of religious liberty and coercion. A complete account of Catholic teaching on religious liberty would therefore need to address the doctrinal significance of The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 95 the Church’s canonical tradition as found in the Corpus Iuris Canonici as well as in the 1917 and 1983 Codes. This is not an issue that can be passed by, as Professor Rhonheimer certainly passes it by, assuming as he does that canon law has no doctrinal significance.12 There are two major forms of coercive authority historically claimed by the Church. The first is the Church’s direct coercive power over those subject to her jurisdiction and authority—the baptized. This coercive power includes the right to use punishments to hold the baptized to their baptismal obligations of fidelity to the Church and her teaching. These obligations centrally include the obligation to faith or belief in the Church’s solemn teaching, heresy and apostasy being punishable crimes as involving formal and culpable breach of this obligation. And indeed the claim to this authority remains. The current, 1983 Code teaches, in canons 1311 and 1312 and elsewhere, that the Church retains a coercive authority, not just over Catholic clergy, and not just over baptized Catholics, but over the baptized in general, with a right to impose both temporal and spiritual punishments for culpable breach of baptismal obligations, including for such crimes as heresy, apostasy, and schism. The second form of coercive authority historically claimed is an indirect or defensive coercive power—a right to use force, or the rod, not to convert the unbaptized to Christianity, which was forbidden exactly because the unbaptized had no obligation of fidelity to the Church, but to prevent the unbaptized from intruding on the Church’s jurisdiction and obstructing her mission.The Church’s possession of this second, indirect coercive authority was defended theologically by appeal to the Church’s revealed and de fide nature as a coercive authority with sovereign jurisdiction in its proper, religious sphere. Any such sovereign authority, it was argued, must have a right not just to enforce its jurisdiction on those subject to it, but to defend its jurisdiction and the ends it serves against intrusion and interference from those not subject to it. But the Church’s possession of this coercive power was also defended by direct appeal to Scripture, such as by reference to the blinding of Elymas when he sought to obstruct St. Paul’s evangelization of Sergius Paulus.13 12 Rhonheimer treats “principles of Catholic doctrine on faith and morality” and “traditions and practices of ecclesiastical law” as unproblematically distinct (1045). But canon law is one medium by which the Church has historically taught regarding her own authority and nature—and still does: see, for example, the 1983 Code, where the Church declares and teaches, in canon 1311, her possession of a coercive power over the baptized. 13 For both lines of argument see Suarez, De Fide, disputation 18. For earlier endorsement of this “defensive” use of religious coercion, see Aquinas, ST II–II, q. 10, a. 8, resp. 96 Thomas Pink In both cases, whether in the exercise of her authority to enforce fidelity on the baptized, or in its exercise to protect her mission and jurisdiction from intrusion on it from without, by the unbaptized, the Church claimed the right to request and obligate assistance for the exercise of her authority from the baptized—including from baptized rulers who had an obligation to the Church not just as private individuals but as baptized holders of public office. We shall now consider these two forms of coercive authority in turn. There is much magisterial and canonical backing for the Church’s direct coercive authority over the baptized, and in particular for her authority to coerce the errant baptized back into Catholic fidelity, and to call on state assistance for such coercion. The principle that baptized heretics and apostates were legitimately to be coerced back into the faith is noted by Rhonheimer as an opinion of Aquinas (1035): Others in truth are infidels who at some time received and professed the faith: as have heretics and apostates. And these are to be compelled, even physically (corporaliter), to fulfil what they promised and to hold what once they received. (Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 10, a. 8 Utrum infideles compellendi sint ad fidem, resp.) This opinion, Rhonheimer also notes, was later invoked by Pius VI in Quod Aliquantum of March 1791. And he rightly recognizes this papal teaching as constituting, along with the opinion of Aquinas to which it referred, a clear endorsement of religious coercion. But this endorsement goes well beyond the teaching of some ‘isolated’ modern popes. First the principle that heretics may properly be coerced back into the faith goes back very far in the canonical tradition, and has been consistently asserted and applied by popes and bishops and their officials throughout most of the Church’s history. One very frequently cited authority for such coercion from the Corpus Iuris Canonici is the fourth provincial council of Toledo of 633—a highly significant canonical text and authority that, we shall see, was also invoked at Vatican II in Dignitatis Humanae. This provincial council forbad coercion of the unbaptized into the faith, and did so on the basis that the act of faith must be an act of free will. But this metaphysical freedom of the act of faith, the same conciliar ruling emphasized, only blocks the coercion of those outside the Church’s jurisdiction. For the council, and with equal force, requires state-assisted coercion (where necessary) of the faith of those who have been baptized; free will is no block at all to enforcement of baptismal The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 97 obligations to belief as well as practice on those already within the Church’s jurisdiction.14 But nor is this teaching a merely canonical tradition. At the highest level of the conciliar magisterium, and in passages that are clearly doctrinal rather than merely disciplinary, and that are consistently interpreted by commentators thereafter not only as doctrinal, but as dogmatic and de fide, the Council of Trent formally endorsed this teaching. In its decree on penance, the Council restricted the scope of the Church’s jurisdiction to the baptized.15 Then in its decree on baptism, the Council taught that the obligation to obey Church authority applies to and binds the baptized irrespective of their own will and consent in the matter.16 Finally Trent specifically taught that individuals’ baptismal commitment to the faith may be coercively enforced, even on those adults baptized without their personal consent as children. Baptism not only subjects the baptized to ecclesial jurisdiction; this jurisdiction comes, it seems, with coercive teeth. Erasmus in his preface to his Paraphrases on Matthew17 had proposed that those baptized as children be asked on growing up publicly to reaffirm their baptismal promises; and that they not be subjected to any punitive coercion back into fidelity save exclusion from the sacraments if they were unwilling to provide the reaffirmation. This Erasmian challenge to the use of temporal penalties to coerce the baptized into fidelity had already been criticized well before Trent by Spanish theologians meeting at Valladolid in 1527 to review Erasmus’s works. Whatever else the individual theologians varyingly thought about the public reaffirmation of baptismal promises, all were hostile to Erasmus’s proposed rejection of any coercive enforcement of fidelity on the unwilling—one theologian expressing the view that a threat of death for the unwilling would be a suitable sanction.18 Trent 14 See Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici (I, 161–62). 15 Council of Trent, Session XIV, decree on penance, chapter 2, 25 November 1551: “The church passes judgment upon no man who has not first entered it through the gate of baptism.” Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 volumes, ed. Norman Tanner and Giuseppe Alberigo (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 2, 704. 16 Council of Trent, Session VII, decree on baptism, canon 8, 3 March 1547: “If anyone says that those baptized are exempt from all the precepts of holy church, whether they are in writing or handed down, so that they are not bound to observe them, unless of their own free will they wish to submit themselves to them: let him be anathema.” Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 686. 17 Erasmus In Evangelium Matthei Paraphrasis (Basle 1522). 18 For more on the universally hostile reception already given at Valladolid to Erasmus’s rejection of a punitive coercion of the recalcitrant baptized back into faith— 98 Thomas Pink specifically cited Erasmus’s proposal, and in canon 14 of the decree on baptism imposed an anathema upon it. And as at Valladolid, the condemnation is not of the simple proposal that people be asked to reaffirm their baptismal commitment; but of Erasmus’s linkage of this proposal to a disavowal of any real coercion of the baptized—his suggestion that those unwilling to make the requested affirmation should be left uncoerced to their own decision: If anyone says that when they grow up (cum adoleverint ), those baptized as little children should be asked whether they wish to affirm what their godparents promised in their name when they were baptized; and that, when they reply that they have no such wish, they should be left to their own decision and not, in the meantime, be coerced by any penalty into the Christian life (suo esse arbitrio relinquendos nec alia interim poena ad christianam vitam cogendos), except that they be barred from the reception of the eucharist and the other sacraments, until they have a change of heart: let him be anathema.19 Subsequent theologians viewed this decree as de fide, and as defining the legitimacy of the use of coercion to enforce baptismal obligations on heretics and apostates, including the central baptismal obligation to faith. a hostility shown even by those theologians otherwise well disposed towards Erasmus—see Lu Ann Homza “Erasmus as hero, or heretic? Spanish humanism and the Valladolid assembly of 1527,” Renaissance Quarterly 50 (1997): 78–118. 19 Council of Trent Session VII, Decree on baptism, canon 14, 3 March 1547, Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 686[0]. Paolo Sarpi gives an account in his History of the discussion by the fathers of Trent relating to this canon. There he reports the argument amongst the Council fathers that since circumcised Jews were rightly coerced into fidelity to the Old Law, how even more right and just, given the dignity of the New Law, that baptized Christians be coerced into fidelity to the New Law. Erasmus’s proposal in the Paraphrases on Matthew was regarded by the fathers of Trent as pernicious precisely because he opposed the evident legitimacy of such coercion. For Sarpi’s account and further important commentary on it, see Le Courayer’s edition of Sarpi, Histoire du Concile de Trente (Amsterdam 1751), 436. PierreFrançois Le Courayer, canon regular and librarian of the Abbey of Sainte Geneviève in Paris, was a defender of the validity of Anglican orders, and becoming a Doctor of Divinity of the University of Oxford eventually took refuge in England. He provides a footnote of his own to this passage of the History. In it Le Courayer opposes the use of coercion to enforce Christian fidelity in terms that are nowadays very familiar: without coercion there would be fewer Christians, but this would be amply compensated for by the fact that the fewer Christians would be better ones. There is an interesting contrast of attitude to coercion with his contemporary, the eminent and undoubtedly orthodox Catholic Billuart, whose views are discussed below. The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 99 Thus to take one example, the eminent Dominican theologian, Billuart, writing around 1750. In his famous commentary on Aquinas, Summa Sancti Thomae, in the Tractatus de Fide, dissertation V, article II, Utrum infideles cogendi ad fidem? Billuart asserts it to be clear Church teaching that the faith of heretics and apostates, but not of the unbaptized, may rightly be coerced. What authority does Billuart cite for this? His treatment is thorough, and carefully links definition of the extraordinary magisterium to relevant theological and canonical tradition. He cites in support of his view of Church teaching : 1. Aquinas’s opinion in the Summa theologiae II–II question 10, article 8 that heretics and apostates may rightly be compelled or coerced into fidelity; 2. the canon law on heresy, specifically including the Fourth Council of Toledo on the coercive retention in the faith of the baptized; 3. for dogmatic teaching by a general council, canon 14 of Trent’s decree on baptism—the condemnation of Erasmus.20 What of Church teaching about the duty to the Church of Christian rulers to cooperate in the enforcement of baptismal obligations, and the kinds of penalties open to the Church to authorize? It is not hard to find teaching at the level of general councils in support of such assistance from baptized rulers. For example, the Fourth Lateran Council declared a penalty of excommunication for those Christian rulers who disregarded what the Council expressly declared as the authority over them of the Church in this matter, and who, despite episcopal instruction to the contrary, dared to tolerate heretics.21 Excommunication for this reason was still being applied by the Church against powerful and otherwise loyal Catholic princes in the period after Trent. The Habsburg archduke 20 Canon 14 is still given unembarrassed discussion in a standard and widely used text by that very central figure of Restoration Roman theology, Giovanni Perrone: Praelectiones Theologicae quas in Collegio Romano SJ habebat (Milan 1845): see volume 7 Tractatus de Baptismo, 103–11. Unsurprisingly Perrone regards the canon as de fide, and as supporting the coercive or punitive enforcement of baptismal obligations on the baptized. See also another standard manual, Hurter, Theologiae Dogmaticae Compendium (Innsbruck 1908) volume 3, Tract IX §§315–16, pp. 281–82 where canon 14 is similarly discussed—Perrone’s earlier discussion is referred to—and the Tridentine argument, mentioned by Sarpi, from the case of the Jews and the Old Law is again used. 21 See Lateran IV, Constitution 3, De haereticis, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 1, 234. Thomas Pink 100 Karl was excommunicated by Gregory XIII in 1579 for conceding toleration to Protestantism in his territories.22 In L’Église du Verbe Incarné Cardinal Journet cites general councils in support of his own view that the Church has historically taught not only her own possession of a right to coerce religiously, but a further right to call on a Christian state to aid her in her exercise of her coercive authority (see 272–73). For example he cites the Council of Constance’s condemnation of Hus for denying the legitimacy of handing those subject to ecclesiastical censure over to the state for punishment,23 a condemnation that was repeated at the Council’s conclusion by Martin V in Inter Cunctas as part of a post-conciliar summary of points of Church teaching on which the followers of Hus and Wycliffe were to be questioned.24 Again, Journet also notes, the Council of Trent’s canons on the reform of marriage call on ecclesiastical judges to request the assistance of the state in the enforcement of penalties for adultery and concubinage, penalties that extend if necessary to expulsion from the place of residence.25 We should also record the Council of Trent’s calling in the help of the secular arm to enforce Church law on monastic enclosure, declaring the excommunication of any secular magistrates unwilling to assist.26 And then we should note the Council of Trent’s solemn admonition to rulers precisely in their capacity as baptized Catholics to enforce Church authority.27 These just-mentioned decrees of Constance and Trent are cited in the 1917 Code of Canon Law in the references to past conciliar and papal teaching basing canon 2198—the canon that calls on the state to help enforce the legislation of the Church. It is not hard to find further clear commitment, at the level of a general council, to the legitimacy of the imposition under the authority of the Church of penalties that are decidedly temporal in their weight. Thus the 22 See Peter Wilson, Europe’s Tragedy: A History of the Thirty Years’War (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 68. 23 See Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 1, 430. 24 “They are to be asked whether they believe that when the disobedience and contumacy of the excommunicated increases, prelates or their vicars have the power of repeatedly increasing the level of excommunication, of imposing an interdict and of calling on the secular arm; and that these censures are to be complied with by inferiors.” Inter Cunctas, article 32. 25 See Council of Trent, Session 24, Canones super Reformatione circa Matrimonium, caput viii in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed.Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 759. 26 See Council of Trent, Session 25, Decretum de Regularibus et Monialibus, caput v in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 777–78. 27 See Council of Trent, Session 25, Decretum de Reformatione Generali, caput xx in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 795. The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 101 Council of Trent specifically instructs ecclesiastical judges to avoid excessive use of the penalty of excommunication, lest it fall into contempt, but to prefer to impose monetary fines and the confiscation of property by way of punishment.28 Backing for the defensive or indirect coercive power of the Church in relation to the unbaptized comes both at the level of general councils and at the level of past canon law.The pre-1917 Corpus Iuris Canonici contains many decrees and instructions that clearly assume the Church’s possession of such an authority, and an obligation on the part of baptized rulers to aid her, when so directed, in its exercise. Consider one very important canonical collection in this area, from the decretals of Gregory IX, liber 5, titulus 6, De Iudaeis, Sarracenis, et eorum Servis.29 This material places a whole variety of restrictions on Jewish and Moslem worship and behaviour. Besides restrictions on places of worship—synagogues may not be located too close to Churches, for example—Jews and Moslems are forced to wear distinctive dress, are restricted from moving about on Good Friday, are restricted from having Christian slaves or servants, from holding political office over Christians, and so forth. For an example of a general council, Lateran IV issues instructions to Christian princes to protect Christians from non-Christian moneylenders, to restrict nonChristian contact with Christians and to ensure that non-Christians ( Jews and Moslems) are clearly identified as such to prevent them being confused with Christians. The same Council also forbids non-Christian public movement on certain Christian holy days, and orders Christian rulers to punish all disrespect shown by non-Christians for Christ. Finally Lateran IV renews the canons mentioned above forbidding the appointment of non-Christians to hold public office over Christians, ordering punishments for any Christian state officials who make appointments in breach of these laws.30 It is important that in this canonical and conciliar material there is no reference to or presupposition of a supposed native authority on the part of the state to forbid the external practice of false religions. All these restrictions are being very explicitly imposed under the authority of the Church, and specifically under papal or conciliar authority, often in instructions to 28 See Council of Trent, Session 25, Decretum de Reformatione Generali, caput iii in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 786. For provision for monetary fines as a possible penalty for any of the faithful under the 1917 Code, see canon 2291 §12. 29 Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici (II, 771–78). 30 See Lateran IV, constitutions 67, 68 and 69, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 1, 265–67. 102 Thomas Pink bishops, sometimes with explicit instructions to Christian rulers just to do as they are told by the Church in this matter. And their purpose is not to forbid the external practice of a religion such as Judaism altogether. To forbid synagogues and the like altogether would be in effect to force Jewish conversion, which the Church had no right to do. Rather the purpose of these regulations was to protect the public space of the Christian religion—the Church’s field of jurisdiction—from being disturbed by practitioners of false religions, who should, nevertheless, still be left with a space for practice of their own. So synagogues would be permitted—but only away from Churches, and in structures of lesser standing. And covert disturbance of the Church’s mission, through camouflaged proselytisation or influence, was as much feared as was overt disturbance. So, far from encouraging it to be hidden, the religious identity of nonChristians would have to be clearly marked. These regulations are of course long defunct, and in respect of their overall morality are deeply repugnant to us now. Their significance lies in the general view of Church authority that they presuppose, especially in relation to the baptized, who are supposed to be under an obligation to aid the Church in her enforcement of such directives. To sum up so far. We are now arriving at a clearer view of past Catholic teaching concerning religious coercion. It is teaching that long predates the papal magisterium of the nineteenth century. Much is to be found at the level of general councils, or as long-standing and much-cited principles of canonical authority and procedure—principles respected and applied over many centuries by popes and bishops and their officials. All of this material concerns the coercion of religious belief and practice, and so religious liberty, and was clearly understood as such at the time. The intimate connexions between the canonical and the doctrinal were recognized and carefully marked. We find religiously coercive canonical principles being methodically linked by eminent theologians such as Billuart to de fide Council declarations and definitions, such as Trent’s condemnation of Erasmus. And the material fundamentally concerns not state authority under natural law, but rather an authority to coerce given through the law of the New Covenant. Its content involves a view of baptism and its juridical consequences that was generally regarded by theologians as de fide and a matter of divine revelation, as part of a constitution and authority communicated to St. Peter and the Apostles by Christ himself, involving doctrine about the nature of the Church herself and about her sacraments. How much of this teaching really is de fide? Certainly Trent’s condemnation of Erasmus, in particular, looks to be such, and just as much so as are the accompanying canons regarding other baptismal heresies associated The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 103 with Calvin and the Anabaptists. And it is clear both from the literature of the time and subsequently what was at issue in the condemnation of Erasmus: an heretical denial of the legitimacy of applying some appropriate but nevertheless real coercive pressure to hold culpably errant baptized to their baptismal obligations in respect of belief and practice. The general nature of past Catholic teaching down to Leo XIII that endorsed religious coercion is very clear. The legitimacy of coercion on behalf of the true religion, even coercion involving the state, was founded, not on the natural law-based authority of the state, but on the revealed, New Covenant-based authority of the Church, and involved a jurisdiction fixed by baptism and based on the baptismal obligations to her of the faithful. What matters now is not how irreformable this teaching on the Church’s authority may be, about which discussion will continue. What matters, as I shall now argue, is that, whether the teaching is reformable or not, Dignitatis Humanae did not in any case aim at its reform. The traditional teaching on the Church’s authority was instead carefully preserved by the declaration—and bypassed. 5. Dignitatis Humanae We have seen that well before Vatican II the Church already taught that coercion on behalf of the faith must, when legitimate, be done under the authority of the Church, not the state. The consequence of this is obvious—and of fundamental importance. Any declaration of the modern magisterium that addressed the doctrinal basis of the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion would, very evidently, have to address the authority not of the state, but of the Church. The declaration would have to address the coercive authority of the Church under the revealed divine law of the New Testament, and treat of the Church’s past conduct to those subject to her jurisdiction—the baptized—and especially of the terms in which she imposed obligations on rulers subject to her jurisdiction—the baptized rulers of Christian states. The declaration would have to address the whole body of Church teaching and of canonical and theological discussion concerning revealed truth about the Church as a coercive institution—material that was still being discussed as such even immediately before Vatican II in as notable a text as Journet’s L’Église du Verbe Incarné, the work of a major theologian who was himself present at the Council and importantly involved in Dignitatis Humanae’s passage. But Dignitatis Humanae clearly does not do this.The declaration plainly declares at the outset that its purpose is to address the rights of individuals and groups in civil society, and, in particular, in relation to the state. The declaration is entitled: On the right of persons and communities to social 104 Thomas Pink and civil liberty in religious matters. And the declaration further announces in the first paragraph that since its concerns are with civil liberty, nothing in the declaration affects traditional teaching concerning people’s obligations to the Church, including those of the baptized: Indeed, since people’s demand for religious liberty in carrying out their duty to worship God concerns freedom from compulsion in civil society, it leaves unchanged (integram) the traditional catholic teaching on the moral obligation of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ. (§1, Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 1002) This passage is often taken to be, at best, a sop to nostalgia for some form of Catholic state establishment. Professor Rhonheimer treats the passage as certainly no more than this. Rhonheimer even claims that the preservation of ‘the traditional teaching’ is only qualified—as presupposing and limited by the Church’s current endorsement of religious freedom.31 But it is not at all clear what the basis might be for Rhonheimer’s reading. The traditional teaching is after all expressly presented as preserved, not in some qualified form, but integer—unchanged or intact or untouched. There is no reference to any form of qualification in the text; what Rhonheimer takes to be such a reference is merely an observation that since the declaration’s concern is with civil liberty, the declaration does not change traditional teaching on another topic, people’s obligations to the Church. One thing is certainly true. If Dignitatis Humanae is to be internally consistent, the traditional teaching preserved unchanged by the declaration must be compatible with the declaration’s claim that the state’s involvement in religious coercion would be wrong, and a violation of individual right based on human dignity. But establishing such compatibility will not be a problem, as we shall see. Now, after our historical discussion, we understand more exactly the content of the Church’s traditional teaching “on the moral obligation of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ.” As a result the full significance of this passage emerges, and it is fundamental to the declaration. The passage’s effect is to preserve integer or unchanged traditional teaching on the coercive authority of the Church. 31 See Rhonheimer: “And what of the ‘traditional Catholic teaching on the moral duty of individuals and societies toward the true religion and the one Church of Christ,’ which according to the conciliar Declaration, remains ‘intact’? This statement, in fact, has often been called up to suggest an uninterrupted ‘continuity’ in the Church’s teaching on religious freedom as well. The Council’s teaching here seems to be ambivalent. The statement, however, is not as ambivalent as it might appear. These duties—as is stated immediately prior to the cited phrase— presuppose a ‘freedom from coercion in civil society’ ” (1036). The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 105 We anyway know that the declaration was intended to bypass the coercive authority of the Church. It was objected to the declaration by worried canonists among the Council fathers that there were examples of religious coercion exercised by the apostles over the baptized that could be drawn from the New Testament itself.32 In reply the the conciliar commission for the declaration noted: Examples and statements brought against the text taken from the New Testament (and also many from the Old Testament) either concern the internal life of the religious community of Israel, in which Jesus and the Apostles lived, or the intra-ecclesial life of the early Christian community. And the declaration does not treat of this life.33 And again, replying to the suggestion that the declaration affirm as compatible with religious liberty that the Church use sanctions to impose her doctrine and discipline on those subject to her, the commission refused, insisting that the declaration was not to address the question of freedom within the Church herself.34 Now what did traditional teaching include in the “moral obligation of individuals and societies towards the true religion and the one Church of Christ”—the teaching that the declaration is expressly intended to preserve unchanged? Clearly included are the moral obligations to the Church of the baptized. These obligations base and constitute the Church’s coercive jurisdiction, and as traditionally understood, both by previous general councils and throughout the canonical tradition to 1965, include obligations on the baptized to aid the Church in enforcing her authority. One effect of the clause is, exactly as required, to ring-fence what was supposed to be ringfenced—the coercive authority of the Church. The part of the declaration entitled “The general principle of religious freedom” that states and argues for this principle then relies primarily on appeal to natural reason—not on appeal to revelation, on which an account of the coercive authority under the New Covenant of the Church would have very importantly to depend. For the Council admits that the right not to be coerced with which it is concerned—a right not to be coerced by the state—is not dealt with in revelation: 32 We have seen Suarez’s citation of a claimed example from Acts—the deaths of Ananias and Saphira. Other conventionally cited examples might include, for example, St. Paul instructing in 1 Corinthians 5 that a sinner within the Christian community be “handed over to Satan for a chastisement of the flesh.” 33 Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, vol. 4, part 6, p. 763. 34 See the same Acta, p. 770. 106 Thomas Pink . . . revelation does not expressly affirm the right of immunity from external coercion in religious affairs. (§9, Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 1006) It is only in a final section entitled “Religious freedom in the light of revelation” that the Council does make some appeal to revelation, and to the history and past teaching and official conduct of the Church. But this is certainly not to enunciate a comprehensive doctrine about the authority of the Church. The appeal is being made only at the end of the declaration, and only to support and reinforce a case that has already been made for what is a civil liberty—and a case that has already been made from reason. And the case is certainly not built on any overall account of the history, conduct and past teaching on coercion generally of the Church. Rather two points are emphasized alone. First, emphasis is placed on what is a clearly revealed doctrine—the metaphysical freedom of the act of faith: And first and foremost religious freedom in the social order is fully congruent (congrua) with the freedom of the act of christian faith. (§9, Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 1006) Secondly, the conduct of the Church in relation to those already baptized is not explicitly discussed. Rather, having announced as one of the chief catholic doctrines that no one must be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against their will, the declaration then emphasizes the fact that from the apostles on, the Church never, at least officially, relied on coercion to evangelize the unbaptized. The declaration’s account of Church history in relation to the non-coercion of faith is entirely centred on the Church’s constant opposition to any coercion of the non-baptized: The apostles, taught by Christ’s word and example, followed the same course. From the very beginning of the Church the followers of Christ strove to convert people to the confession of Christ as Lord, not by any coercive measures or by devices unworthy of the Gospel, but chiefly by the power of God’s message. (§11, Tanner and Alberigo, vol. 2, 1008) There is, it is true, the following rather more general statement about past Church teaching on coercion: Although at times in the life of the people of God, as it has pursued its pilgrimage through the vicissitudes of human history, there have been ways of acting less than in conformity to the spirit of the gospel, indeed contrary to it, nevertheless it has always remained the teaching of the Church that no one’s faith is to be coerced. (§12, Tanner and Alberigo, vol.2, 1009) The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 107 But this statement occurs at the end of a general account of the evangelization of non-Christians, and is plausibly to be understood as referring to the communication of faith in the context of such evangelization. For read as an account of “what the Church has always taught” regarding coercion of the faith and practice of the baptized, this statement about “what has always remained the teaching of the Church” would be a plain falsehood—as our account of the Church’s traditional teaching has clearly shown. There is certainly no more detailed account given of the Church’s past teaching on and policy in relation to coercion generally, and especially with respect to coercion of those already baptized. But such an account would be deeply relevant to—indeed a compulsory feature of—any serious account of the jurisdiction specifically of the Church. Dignitatis Humanae supports its account of Church history by references, in footnote 8, to the pre-1917 Corpus Iuris Canonici. This canonical material is cited by the declaration to support the claim that the Church historically forbad coercion into the faith. The material from the Corpus cited is very exact. It specifically condemns the use of coercion to evangelize the unbaptized, such as forbidding the coercive baptism of Jews and Moslems. Indeed, one canonical authority referenced is that traditional canonical plank, cited by Billuart, for the coercion of the faith in heretics and apostates, the fourth Council of Toledo, which, as we noted before, having condemned coercion into baptism, then, in the very same passage referred to by Dignitatis Humanae, actually and in the same terms and with the same force, demands coercive measures to retain within the faith those who, having been baptized, then attempt to leave.35 The declaration is clearly not telling some story about how Church teaching has always opposed the coercion of religious belief as such—a story that would anyway be utterly false. The noncoercive story told is very clearly restricted to the case of the unbaptized. Why then in the second section on revelation did the Council concentrate just on two specific points—the metaphysical freedom of the act of faith and the Church’s teaching and conduct concerning the evangelization of the unbaptized? The answer is that though such a selective treatment both of revelation and of the past is dangerously misleading for any general account of the jurisdiction of the Church—and obviously so since the history of non-coercion given precisely addresses only the conduct of the Church towards the belief of those not yet within her jurisdiction—it is deeply relevant to what was the Council’s true and immediate concern, which is the coercive authority (or rather lack of it) in matters of religion of the state and other civil institutions. 35 See again Friedberg, Corpus Iuris Canonici (I, 161–62). 108 Thomas Pink Why might the policy of the Church towards those not yet baptized be peculiarly relevant to an argument concerned with a specifically civil liberty of religion? After all, it might be thought, states may well be able licitly to do lots of things not open to, or not the business of the Church.Why should limits to what the Church can rightly do, and in one specific case, be relevant to determining limitations on state action? In fact the answer is fairly obvious. According to perfectly traditional teaching, the metaphysical freedom of the act of faith leaves the unbaptized believer standing in relevantly the same normative relation to the Church as all people, baptized or unbaptized, stand in relation to the state. So if revealed teaching rules out coercion into the faith of the unbaptized by the Church, that supports the case initially made at the level of reason against religious coercion by the state. Why is the relation of the metaphysically free believer to Church or to state in these two cases in relevant respects normatively the same? Because in both cases the bearer of authority is dealing with a being in possession of metaphysical freedom who is not yet bound by a religious obligation to that authority. Why cannot the Church coerce the unbaptized into Christianity? Because, the traditional answer would go, although the metaphysically free believer has a moral obligation to God to believe the true divine revelation, being unbaptized he has as yet no such obligation to the Church. Therefore given the person’s metaphysical freedom and the lack of any such obligation binding him specifically to the Church, the Church simply has no authority to coerce him into Catholic fidelity. But something similar would hold of the state, and whether or not the person is baptized. He is metaphysically free, has an obligation to God in respect of the true religion—but whether baptized or not has no specifically religious obligations to the state. Since no one has any religious obligations to the state, so the state has no specifically religious authority, and so no authority of its own to coerce or direct anyone in any way in religious matters. The parallel between limits to the coercive powers of the Church and those of the state is in this particular case clear. The incompleteness of the declaration’s account of Church teaching and history is not a problem; or, at least, it is not a problem as part of an argument that is primarily based on natural reason, and that specifically concerns the coercive jurisdiction not of the Church herself but of the state and other like civil institutions. The declaration is exactly structured to avoid addressing the coercive authority of the Church, a coercive authority that the framers of the declaration anyway made it clear in replies to modi was not covered by the declaration. The declaration was intended to address only the coercive role of the state as fixed by natural law, referring to the past teach- The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 109 ing of the Church about her own use of coercion only in relation to the evangelization of those outside her jurisdiction, and only by way of illustration of a natural law argument about the incompetence of the state in the coercion and direction of religion. So the declaration simply does not address the very authority on which past religious coercion on behalf of the Catholic faith was based, at least as far as such coercion was endorsed by the magisterium. Nothing is taught about the extent and nature of the Church’s authority to direct or to coerce those actually subject to her jurisdiction. Teaching on the subject is also explicitly reserved from being changed through the declaration by the declaration itself. So Dignitatis Humanae in no way impugns religious coercion as such. Its subject matter is state and civil coercion under natural law; and it teaches the moral wrongness of the state’s involvement in religious coercion. And that wrongness plainly follows given, first, the state’s lack of any authority of its own for such coercion—hardly a new idea, but Counter-Reformation and Leonine teaching; and given, second, the Church’s present and evident refusal to license such coercion by states on her authority. This is a refusal made evident by Dignitatis Humanae in itself, by the Church’s subsequent policy regarding state concordats, and by the absence from the 1983 Code of any requirement on the state to act as a religiously coercive agent. Given this refusal, states completely lack the required normative authority to coerce religiously. And so individuals possess a moral right not to be so coerced by states and state officials, exactly as Dignitatis Humanae says. But is this refusal of the Church to call on the state’s assistance relevant? Was the Church not just wrong in the past to license state involvement in religious coercion, and even demand that Christian states coerce on her behalf and on her authority? Opinions will differ on what is a very complex question. But this is a question concerning the coercive authority of the Church herself, and not one that Dignitatis Humanae actually addresses. All the declaration states is that, as things stand, and given rights against the state attaching to human nature, state coercion of religion cannot be justified. Dignitatis Humanae in no way denies that the Church’s past policy, particularly towards those subject to her jurisdiction, the baptized, was highly coercive; nor does the declaration in any way disavow or contradict the Church teaching that consistently endorsed such coercion, when done under her authority. The declaration even cites, we have seen, and without condemnation, canonical authority actually supportive of such coercion. The whole declaration sidesteps very carefully the issue of the Church’s own coercive authority, and of the legitimacy of past religious coercion done under that authority. 110 Thomas Pink The Church’s present policy regarding state coercion on her behalf is abundantly clear, and is not likely to change soon. But the complete Catholic doctrine on the issue goes beyond this. It depends on the moral obligations of the baptized, including baptized state officials, towards the Church; and it depends on the nature of those obligations not just under present conditions, but also under conditions such as those that held in the past, when state populations were overwhelmingly made up of the baptized, and Church policy was very different. Beyond expressly undertaking to preserve traditional teaching about such obligations—and declarations of Councils such as Lateran IV, Constance and Trent, and the content of the canonical tradition to 1965, all suggest something about the possible content of this teaching—the declaration does not itself tell us what these obligations could involve. The declaration in effect guarantees traditional teaching about the authority of the Church to direct and coerce religiously, without itself telling us what that teaching is. Professor Rhonheimer complains against me that: Many passages of Dignitatis Humanae make it clear, however, that the Council intended precisely much more: to abandon the centuries-old, but certainly not apostolic, tradition of conceiving the temporal power as being in the service of the spiritual power and to return to the message of the Gospel, the teaching of the Apostles, and the practice of the early Christians (see DH nos. 10–12). (1047 n. 10) It is obvious and agreed by Rhonheimer and me that the Council intended through Dignitatis Humanae to abandon, at least for our time, the tradition of using the temporal power of the state in the service of the spiritual power. But to address the traditional teaching about the Church’s authority which legitimized that use, something more would have been required. The declaration would have had to include a constitution on the nature of the Church’s coercive authority and—in particular—on her jurisdiction over the baptized. But such a constitution is entirely absent from the declaration, and is notably absent from the very paragraphs 10–12 dealing with the Church’s historical teaching and practice to which Professor Rhonheimer appeals, and of which I have just given detailed analysis. As that analysis has clearly shown, far from being expounded and addressed, the nature of the Church’s authority and jurisdiction over the baptized, including her authority and jurisdiction over Christian rulers, was very carefully bypassed. Nor should this be surprising. Dignitatis Humanae was immensely controversial precisely because it did constitute the Church’s abandonment, for our time at least, of a policy reaching back to late antiquity— The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 111 her use of the Christian state as her coercive agent.The declaration’s passing was no foregone conclusion; and it would have been made vastly more difficult by expanding the controversy to include a doctrinal constitution on the Church’s own authority to authorize coercion in matters of religion. But that is what would have been required to address the doctrinal basis of the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion, including her past use of the state as her agent. Aside from the sheer disagreement that would have been unleashed,36 the public embarrassment would have been considerable, especially for those most enthusiastic for the declaration’s passing. Who among that group, in particular, would then have had the stomach explicitly to rehearse the Church’s traditional teaching and legislation regarding the coercive enforcement of her own authority and jurisdiction? Dignitatis Humanae is drafted very precisely to avoid doing anything like that. On the other hand that teaching and legislation actually exist and are authoritative as fully part of the Church’s doctrinal self-conception—as the more historically learned Council fathers such as Journet were very well aware. Hence the authority of that past doctrine had to be accommodated and respected, even without its explicit treatment or discussion. The declaration could not simply bulldoze a path through all that past doctrine about the coercive nature of the Church herself; still less could it do so without some actual discussion of that doctrine’s content and significance. Hence the traditional teaching on the obligations of the baptized to the Church, fundamental to the coercive authority of the Church, was left unspecified—it was not the business of a declaration on the authority and competence of another coercive authority entirely, the state, to expound it. But at the same time that body of teaching was still carefully and expressly preserved integer—unchanged. And the result was a declaration that was effective at the level of policy; it brought to an end, at least for our time, the Church’s actual use of the state as a religiously coercive agent. But the declaration did so in a way that remained consistent with the doctrine about the Church herself by which that use of the state had hitherto been legitimized. The Church’s own authority to coerce religiously was 36 For example, it is clear that though some theologians involved in the Council, such as Journet, learnedly described the Church as being herself a coercive authority, others, such as John Courtney Murray, regarded the state as the only genuinely coercive authority, even in matters of religion: “If an authority exists that is empowered to restrain men from public action in accord with their religious beliefs, this authority can reside only in government, which presides over the juridical and social order.” John Courtney Murray, “The Declaration on Religious Freedom,” in Vatican II: An Interfaith Appraisal, ed. John H. Miller (Notre Dame, IN: Association Press, 1966), 565–76. 112 Thomas Pink preserved, while the state’s right to coerce religiously—always at best a loan to it from the Church—being lent no more, was consistently denied. Dignitatis Humanae’s bypassing of the coercive authority of the Church, and so too of the doctrinal basis for the legitimacy of past religious coercion, is an unmistakable and central feature of the declaration’s content and subject-matter. It is not a feature of the declaration that can be made conveniently to disappear “in the spirit of the Council” by postconciliar theological fiat—not even with the help of the post-conciliar magisterium, to which I now turn. 6. Post-conciliar Official Statements Professor Rhonheimer seeks to buttress his reading of Dignitatis Humanae and its significance by appeal to two recent statements of the post-conciliar magisterium. The first is this observation by Pope Benedict in his 2005 Christmas address to the Roman Curia: With the Decree on religious freedom, the Second Vatican Council both recognized and assumed a fundamental principle of the modern state, while at the same time re-connecting itself with a deeply rooted inheritance of the Church. The second is the November 24, 2002, Doctrinal Note from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “On Some Questions Regarding the Participation of Catholics in Political Life,” which endorses some form of laïcité: . . . laïcité, understood as autonomy of the political or civil sphere from that of religion and the Church—but not from morality—is a value that has been attained and recognized by the Catholic Church and belongs to [the] inheritance of contemporary civilization. But unfortunately, these passages are crucially vague, and they no more explicitly address the nature and extent of the coercive authority of the Church than did the original declaration. Indeed, if anything, they are less detailed than the original declaration, rather than more specific clarifications of it. Moreover these statements possess a pretty low level of magisterial authority in their own right, and certainly could not count as developing or refining the declaration’s teaching at any level of authority matching the declaration’s own. Consider Pope Benedict’s 2005 Christmas address. It seems to presuppose no more than what Professor Rhonheimer and I both agree Dignitatis Humanae to say: that there is a right not to be coerced in matters of The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 113 religion by the state. But that is what the modern liberal state believes too. So, certainly, in Dignitatis Humanae the Church is indeed recognizing and affirming a fundamental principle of the modern state. The Pope also refers rather generally to Dignitatis Humanae as constituting a “review or even correction [by the Church] of certain past decisions,” which view of Dignitatis Humanae is again common ground between Rhonheimer and me, the papal claim being vague enough to include changes in or corrections of policy apart from underlying doctrine. For Pope Benedict’s address to be of help to Professor Rhonheimer, it would have to do more than assert a right not to be coerced religiously by the state. It would have to give express teaching on the basis of that right—and teaching that, in particular, explicitly endorsed as magisterial teaching Professor Rhonheimer’s own model of the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion as involving no more than an application of natural law on the authority and function of the state, and of Dignitatis Humanae as a contradiction of the Church’s past teaching so understood. But there is no such content to the address; which is as well, as it would have involved the Pope in clear historical error. What about the Pope’s mention of reconnecting with a deeply rooted inheritance of the Church? Certainly, even before Vatican II the Church taught, in Rome at any rate (we have seen that Gallicans in the Sorbonne thought differently) that we have a right not to be coerced religiously on state authority. Church and state are distinct authorities, each with its own legislative competence. Just as the Church cannot properly legislate on her own authority in civil questions, over which the state is sovereign, so the state cannot properly legislate on its own authority in religious questions, over which the Church is sovereign. But it is precisely such legislation, on the authority of the state alone, that the pagan emperors attempted: The ancient Church naturally prayed for the emperors and political leaders out of duty (cf. I Tm 2: 2); but while she prayed for the emperors, she refused to worship them and thereby clearly rejected the religion of the State. (Benedict XVI 2005 Christmas address) And indeed the pope sees Dignitatis Humanae as in harmony with the teaching of Jesus himself. What is this teaching of Jesus that the Pope cites? That of Matthew 22:21: Then he said to them, Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s. 114 Thomas Pink Far from endorsing Rhonheimer’s theory, this simply affirms that the state has a proper coercive authority of its own, but one that does not extend to religious or supernatural ends. At a fundamental level, then, Dignitatis Humanae expresses again, for our time, a doctrine of the distinct legislative competences of Church and state that is deeply traditional, and that was expressly taught by Leo XIII.37 There is important reference to freedom of conscience in the papal address: The martyrs of the early Church died for their faith in that God who was revealed in Jesus Christ, and for this very reason they also died for freedom of conscience and the freedom to profess one’s own faith—a profession that no State can impose but which, instead, can only be claimed with God’s grace in freedom of conscience. A missionary Church known for proclaiming her message to all peoples must necessarily work for the freedom of the faith. She desires to transmit the gift of the truth that exists for one and all. (Benedict XVI 2005 Christmas address; my emphasis) But again, this seems to affirm a right of conscience and religious liberty against the specific authority of the state.There is no explicit denial of the Church’s religiously coercive authority—her native right to authorize use of the rod to punish culpable heresy or culpably wrong belief amongst those already subject to her. Indeed elsewhere we have seen Pope Benedict actually to teach that authority and right. What of the CDF’s Note? Again the CDF’s appeal to laïcité understood as “autonomy of the political or civil sphere from that of religion and the Church,” is very vague. As Rhonheimer himself admits, laïcité does not plausibly mean here secularist French laïcité, at its limit an aggressive and anti-Christian ideology devoted to excluding religion from the public sphere. But what then does it mean? This Note does not really say, beyond using the word autonomy, of which Rhonheimer makes much. Rhonheimer claims that the autonomy taught is unqualified, in a sense that would exclude any authority on the Church’s part to direct even baptized 37 The division of coercive authority between Church and state as sovereign perfect societies is taught by Leo XIII in Immortale Dei by reference to the same Matthew 22:21: “Whatever, therefore in things human is in any way of a sacred character, whatever belongs either of its own nature or by reason of the end to which it is referred, to the salvation of souls, or to the worship of God, is subject to the power and judgment of the Church. Whatever is to be ranged under the civil and political order is rightly subject to the civil authority. Jesus Christ has Himself given command that what is Caesar’s is to be rendered to Caesar, and that what belongs to God is to be rendered to God” (Immortale Dei §14). The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 115 rulers in matters specific to religion. But I do not see Rhonheimer’s reading asserted in the text. And in actual fact, terms such as autonomy were used of the state and political life before the Council, and in a very strong way, to assert the autonomy of the state in relation to the Church—but in standard and for the time clearly orthodox commentary endorsing of the content of Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei. For Immortale Dei was indeed historically spoken of and understood as teaching a “perfect autonomy” of the state from the Church.Thus, to take only one pre-conciliar example, from the article in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique on Pouvoir du pape dans l’ordre temporel, we read: C’est-à-dire que la cité de Dieu ne doit pas présentement absorber la cité terrestre, qui est le domaine de César: l’Évangile proteste là contre et la tradition chrétienne, malgré ses fluctuations, reconnaît au pouvoir civil une parfaite autonomie d’opération.38 So the state is perfectly or unqualifiedly autonomous—but of course, only in matters that are peculiarly its competence, that properly fall within the civil sphere. (Why should the state have autonomy in matters that are not within its competence?) The value recognized by the Catholic Church, as the CDF Note reports, is that there is indeed a civil sphere in which the state is sovereign, and so immune to direction by the Church—and this is as the CDF Note certainly claims. But does that exempt the state from ever being subject to direction in other matters—in matters religious that fall within the sphere of the Church? Leo XIII thought not; and though this CDF Note repeats, very briefly, the teaching of Dignitatis Humanae on the wrongfulness of state involvement in religious coercion, there is no detailed and specific treatment of the Church’s coercive authority that addresses and specifically denies the traditional, and Leonine, theory. The Note’s strong language asserting state autonomy is clearly nothing new, as already pre-conciliar, and does not of itself give Professor Rhonheimer’s reading of the declaration any independent support. But there is a more fundamental objection to Professor Rhonheimer’s appeal to such relatively low-level papal allocutions and and curial notes. The subject matter of Dignitatis Humanae is very clear, and in particular its ring-fencing of the Church’s coercive authority over the baptized is a marked and intended feature of it. The implications of this ring-fencing 38 Dictionnaire de Théologie Catholique, 2768, vol. 12 (my emphases): “This means that the city of God must not in the present absorb the earthly city, which is Caesar’s domain: the Gospel protests against this and Christian tradition, despite its fluctuations, acknowledges the civil power’s perfect autonomy of operation.” 116 Thomas Pink are also very clear, once we understand the doctrinal history of the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion. These evident features, both of the Vatican II declaration and of the Church’s earlier history, cannot be “magicked” away just by appeal to, in magisterial authority, relatively minor papal allocutions or curial notes—especially allocutions or notes that in no way address, in specific and argued detail, the juridical and normative basis of the declaration. 7. Conclusion The history of Catholic teaching on religious liberty is still ill-understood. Part of this lack of understanding is owing to long-standing internal controversy over many centuries before the Council, between Roman theologians who emphasized the coercive authority in matters of religion of the Church over the state, and others, such as Gallicans, who did the reverse. The magisterium’s formal and explicit siding, in Immortale Dei, with the Roman school is clear and important, but not always recognized and respected as such. Dignitatis Humanae, properly understood, is in part a consistent continuation of Immortale Dei’s earlier and decisive magisterial denial of the state’s authority to coerce religiously. Why has Immortale Dei’s clear teaching on this matter and its significance not been sufficiently appreciated as such? Why has the Church’s past endorsement of the state’s involvement in coercion on behalf of the Catholic faith been misperceived as based on a theory of the state’s supposed native possession, under natural law, of the requisite authority? The answer is obvious, and it lies in the excessive politicization, at least in modern times, of the problem of religious liberty. The old Gallican view that saw past religious coercion on behalf of the faith as a legitimate use of native state authority chimes with a modern prejudice that coercion is fundamentally what states do, so that the problem of religious coercion must really be a problem just about legitimate political authority and its proper use. Or so at least the modern secular mind would suppose, that no more accepts a coercive authority that is supernatural than it accepts a supernatural law and a supernatural end. And modern Catholics, even including those who are traditionalist in sympathy, have outlooks profoundly shaped by modernity. So Professor Rhonheimer will easily find modern traditionalist support for his supposition that the issue of religious coercion has to do just with teaching about the state and its authority. Since, at least after the time of those divinely assisted exercises of non-political force detailed so vividly in Acts, the state was so central an agent of coercion in the service of the faith, the problem of The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 117 that coercion’s legitimacy could easily be mistaken for a problem about the authority of the state. But that is a mistake, and recognizing the mistake is vital to understanding the significance of Dignitatis Humanae. Professor Rhonheimer thinks that the Church’s past endorsement of religious coercion was simply in the support of objective religious truth— a needless and dispensable manoeuvre in a war against indifferentism. And of course, if the Catholic faith had not been thought true, no one would have supported coercion in its defense. But the point of the coercion endorsed, and the basis of its supposed legitimacy, was more complex. For example, as we have seen, the Church thought it right to use coercion to remove heresy altogether from the belief of the baptized, but not to use coercion to force the conversion of unbaptized Jews or Moslems—despite the fact that Islam was certainly viewed as more false and so further from the truth than was much mere heresy in Christians. The true explanation for the more severe coercion of heresy is obvious by now. Licit coercion was not about the state’s protecting religious truth as such, but about the Church’s enforcing and protecting a jurisdiction of her own founded on baptism and obligations that come with baptism—obligations that applied to Christian heretics, but not at all to Jews or Moslems. And this theory of a sovereign and coercive ecclesial authority and jurisdiction, based on baptism and directed at supernatural ends, far from being abandoned at Vatican II, remains fundamental to the Church’s doctrinal and canonical self-understanding.39 No one has managed respectably to propose an alternative model to replace it; and certainly no general council of the Church has yet endorsed any such replacement of it. Likewise, the very ideal of a Church-state establishment, so clearly endorsed by Leo XIII, is hardly explicable just in terms of a misguided war against indifferentism. That pope, like others before and after, taught a vision of Church and state as, at least ideally, united like soul to body. And this again involves a more complex doctrinal model than that proposed by Professor Rhonheimer—a model that is not simply about protecting religious objectivity, but which is instead to do with human flourishing and what that flourishing requires. The driving force is not simply a concern with objective truth, but a concern with happiness. In Immortale Dei, Church and state are presented as distinct coercive authorities with distinct legislative and punitive competences—based 39 See, after Vatican II, Paul VI’s motu proprio, Sollicitudo Omnium Ecclesiarum: de Muneribus Legatorum Romani Pontificis, 24 June 1969: “It is not to be denied that . . . Church and state, each in its order, are distinct perfect societies, each equipped with its own peculiar rights and powers, each applying its own laws, and each with its own field of competence.” 118 Thomas Pink respectively on a revealed law that is supernatural and a rationally given law that is natural. But these distinct authorities do not serve two distinct communities, an ecclesial community and a political community, that should ideally stand apart from and distinct from each other as Cartesian soul stands apart from Cartesian body. Rather, if humanity is to flourish, the two must unite like Aristotelian form and matter, as parts of a single substantial unity—a single community of human persons destined both individually and as a community for a happiness that is both natural and supernatural. And as Pope Leo makes very clear, the Church matters to the state as a condition of the political community’s own flourishing and development. There is an eloquent statement in Immortale Dei of the civilizing effect of the Church, once Christianity had been established, on the once-pagan state. Indeed this is a central theme of the encyclical, which begins: Though the Catholic Church, that imperishable handiwork of merciful God, by her very nature has as her purpose the saving of souls and the securing of happiness in heaven; yet, in regard to things temporal, she is the source of benefits as manifold and great as if the chief end of her existence were to ensure the prospering of our earthly life. (Immortale Dei §1)40 And this civilizing effect is not hard for a Catholic to understand. Aside from the fact that grace perfects nature, grace is required also to heal nature: in a fallen world even the law that is the state’s proper concern, the natural law, will not be fully and reliably complied with apart from 40 See also, later in the encyclical, on how these earthly benefits are secured through state recognition of and support for the Catholic faith: “And, lastly, the abundant benefits with which the Christian religion, of its very nature, endows even the mortal life of man are acquired for the community and civil society. And this to such an extent that it may be said in sober truth: ‘The condition of the commonwealth depends on the religion with which God is worshipped; and between one and the other there exists an intimate and abiding connection.’. . .There was once a time when states were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel. Then it was that the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom had diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the people, permeating all ranks and relations of civil society. Then, too, the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, established firmly in befitting dignity, flourished everywhere, by the favour of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates; and Church and state were happily united in concord and friendly interchange of good offices. The state, thus constituted, bore fruits important beyond all expectation, whose remembrance is still, and always will be, in renown, witnessed to as they are by countless proofs which can never be blotted out or ever obscured by any craft of any enemies.” Immortale Dei §§19–21 The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 119 the help of divine grace.41 So the state’s own interest as a coercive authority in the natural end for man must properly commit it to cooperation with and support for the Church—as the essential channel to the political community of supernatural grace, needed as grace now is, given the Fall, for the state itself properly to do its job. We find this view at the heart of much magisterial teaching on the social kingdom of Christ. The Church exists as a perfect society alongside those of states . . . not of course in the sense that she should detract in the least from their authority, each in its own sphere supreme, but that she should really perfect their authority, just as divine grace perfects human nature, and should give to them the assistance necessary for men to attain their true final end, eternal happiness, and make them more certain promoters of happiness here below. (Pius XI, Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio §48, 1922; my emphasis) The Leonine ideal of the state as recognizing and establishing Catholicism as the state’s own religion is plainly not at all detached from divine revelation, as Professor Rhonheimer makes it out to be. Far from being a mere application of natural law, and as such supposedly reformable, the Leonine ideal is grounded in a theology of the relation of grace to nature that is very much a matter of revelation, and which is hard for any orthodox Catholic to deny. At the level of current political reality, Leo XIII’s ideal of Church-state establishment and cooperation is now profoundly out of reach. Dignitatis Humanae remains a deeply understandable and magisterially authoritative response to this modern reality. And indeed, the declaration may have been dictated by more than simple prudence. For it is not clear that the religious and social constitution of the modern state makes it even juridically possible, still less sensible, for the state now to act as the Church’s agent. The Christian states envisaged in traditional teaching about the obligations of baptized rulers to the Church seem, as a matter of their constitution, to be something like political communities of the baptized ruled by the baptized. It might well be that only in the context of such states could baptism ordinarily obligate officials to exercise coercive state power on the direction of an authority distinct from the state and based on that baptism. But such Christian states, it might be thought, hardly now exist. In which case, it is not clear that the Church currently has the right to require states to coerce religiously on her behalf, even supposing she had the inclination so to direct them. The wrongfulness of religious 41 As famously discussed by Aquinas—see, for example ST I–II, q. 109, a. 2: Utrum homo possit velle et facere bonum absque gratia. 120 Thomas Pink coercion involving the state certainly follows, as we have observed, from the Church’s refusal to license such state coercion under her own ecclesial authority. But the Church’s refusal to issue that license may not be a merely prudential policy decision. That refusal may itself be something morally demanded. The conditions may no longer obtain under which baptism could bring with it the obligations to the Church invoked by canon 2198 of the 1917 Code—to provide state power, if so directed by the Church, to enforce her ecclesial law. But if this were so—something not completely obvious and certainly needing further discussion—that certainly would not imply the falsehood of any of the Church’s traditional doctrine. Rather, it would simply mean that the conditions on political and social constitution presupposed by the traditionally taught obligations to assist the Church do not currently obtain. Dignitatis Humanae has certainly not itself denied the traditional doctrine of people’s obligations to the Church that lay behind canon 2198 and that was taught with such insistence by general councils from Lateran IV, through Constance, to Trent. We have seen that Dignitatis Humanae very carefully makes no such denial, which would have been a reversal, not in the mere application of natural law, but of teaching about the Church’s own authority under revealed law—an authority that Dignitatis Humanae just does not address. Behind the Leonine ideal of Church-state relations stands a complex combination of highly authoritative magisterial teaching on the duty of states as well as of individuals to acknowledge revealed religious truth, on our need in a fallen world for divine grace to live well as a political community, and—essential to the possible legitimacy of religious coercion involving the state—on the possible duties of the baptized under various circumstances to the Church. Dignitatis Humanae certainly does not expressly assert the content of this long-standing magisterial teaching, but neither does it expressly deny this teaching. Indeed it is not obvious that the authority ever existed for the declaration to make such a denial. A properly doctrinal treatment, in Catholic terms, of the legitimacy of religious coercion involving the state would, it is now clear, have to include discussion of baptismal obligations, and under what conditions and in what ways such obligations, understood in line with the Church’s tradition, can take political form—a form that, it was always taught, they could very well take, at least in certain circumstances. Dignitatis Humanae does not even approach providing any such discussion; nor does its evident silence plausibly substitute for or remove the need for such a discussion. Indeed it is hard to see how Dignitatis Humanae constitutes any kind of resolution of the issue of religious coercion, as that coercion was The Interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae 121 historically endorsed by the Church, that is clear and unambiguous at the level of strict doctrine. That issue could never be resolved doctrinally just by reference to natural law and its application. A doctrinal resolution requires what Dignitatis Humanae does not supply or even attempt—a theory of the Church and of her revealed authority, and of how that authority best serves the supernatural end. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 123–146 123 What Happened to the Vulgate? An Analysis of Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum* K EVIN R AEDY Duke Divinity School Durham, NC And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” —Genesis 11:6–7 Introduction THIS ESSAY investigates the role of the Latin Vulgate within the Roman Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. More specifically, my goal is to determine whether the Vulgate retains its status as the normative scriptural text for the purpose of establishing Church doctrine. This inquiry is occasioned in part by the cryptic near-silence of Dei Verbum regarding the Vulgate.1 Despite a substantial discussion on Sacred Scripture, Dei Verbum contains only a single, passing statement on the Vulgate, which, at the time of the Council, had served as the Church’s translation of the Bible for roughly 1200 years.The uncertainty caused by Dei Verbum’s silence is attributable in part to the somewhat nebulous stance of its predecessor document, the papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu.2 The encyclical offers * I am deeply grateful to Paul Griffiths for several discussions that have benefitted this essay. 1 Dei Verbum is the Church’s dogmatic constitution on divine revelation. It was promulgated at the Second Vatican Council on November 18, 1965, under the papacy of Paul VI. 2 The encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu was given by Pope Pius XII on September 30, 1943, with the stated purpose of promoting biblical studies. 124 Kevin Raedy a qualified affirmation of the Vulgate’s authenticity, but the nature and implications of that qualification are not fully specified and thus substantial room remains for interpretation.3 In turn, the near silence of Dei Verbum regarding the Vulgate is all the more puzzling. In this essay, I show that Dei Verbum quietly affirms the Vulgate’s status as the authoritative text of Scripture for the purpose of developing and establishing doctrine, with the original-language biblical texts functioning in an indispensible but primarily confirmatory or corroborative role. I arrive at this conclusion in large part through an analysis of the conceptual relationship, as set forth in Dei Verbum, between Scripture and Tradition. Specifically, my investigation suggests that the continuing primacy of the Vulgate, relative to the original-language texts, results from a combination of two factors: the conversational nature of the interaction between Scripture and Tradition, and the Western Church’s lengthy history of reliance on the language of Latin for both the reading of Scripture and the unfolding of Tradition. Importantly, this essay shows that the stance of Dei Verbum regarding the role of the Vulgate is in continuity with that of Divino Afflante Spiritu. The remainder of this essay is organized into three principal sections followed by a short note and a conclusion. The first section consists of a brief exegesis of the assertions regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate that are set forth in the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu. The second section shows how the motif underlying the relationship between Scripture and Tradition, as set forth in Dei Verbum, provides the basis for an understanding of the continuing primacy of the Vulgate.The third section illustrates the conceptual continuity between Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum and offers concrete evidence of Dei Verbum’s compliance with the provisions of Divino Afflante Spiritu regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate. Prior to the conclusion, there is a brief discussion of the New Vulgate, which was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1979. The Authenticity of the Latin Vulgate The papal encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu addresses a range of issues pertinent to biblical studies. Its emphasis is heavily concentrated, however, on the application of historical-critical and text-critical methods to original3 In modern parlance, the term “authenticity” is often used in the context of a determination as to whether something is genuine or real. In this setting, however, the term is more nuanced and refers to a text’s degree of validity within a particular sphere of interest or activity. Its meaning will become clear as this essay progresses. What Happened to the Vulgate? 125 language biblical manuscripts. At roughly the midpoint of the document, the discussion diverges into a brief explanation regarding the status of the Latin Vulgate.This detour is a natural one in that the heavy-handed endorsement, self-evident throughout, of the original-language texts naturally leaves the reader wondering about the standing of the translation that, for centuries, had served as the authoritative biblical text of the Church. The encyclical’s deliberation over the Vulgate culminates in the following assertion: “[A]s the Church herself testifies and affirms, [the Vulgate] may be quoted safely and without fear of error in disputations, in lectures and in preaching; and so its authenticity is not specified primarily as critical, but rather as juridical” (§21).4 This statement comes across to the reader in a somewhat cryptic, if not jarring, fashion, for two reasons. First, there is a clear indication of some form of qualification of the Vulgate’s authenticity—a striking claim, given the long-standing tenure of the Vulgate as the sanctioned (whether de facto or formal) translation of the Church. Second, the precise meaning of the distinction therein is not immediately obvious, and the encyclical offers little by way of explication. These considerations, combined with the fact that the statement appears to carry some doctrinal weight, suggest the need for a clarifying analysis. In the remaining portion of this section I attempt to discern the meaning of the descriptors “critical” and “juridical” and thus shed some light on the encyclical’s stance regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate. Critical Authenticity With regard to the forms of authenticity mentioned in the affirmatory statement of the encyclical, critical authenticity is the more complex of the two.To gain an understanding of this concept, it is helpful to consider first that one finds throughout Divino Afflante Spiritu references to and sustained discussions regarding the integrity of Scripture—both the text itself and the interpretations accruing to that text. Following on these concerns are exhortations towards the application of text-critical and historical-critical methods to the original-language biblical manuscripts. Divino Afflante Spiritu strongly embraces, for example, recent advances in 4 This statement obviously does not reach the level of a definition; rather, it func- tions to affirm, albeit with a significant distinction (i.e., critical vs. juridical), the position taken at the Council of Trent regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate. For ease of exposition, the statement will be referenced throughout the remainder of this essay as the “affirmatory statement.” All quotations from Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum are taken from the English translations provided at the Vatican website, and all analysis herein is based on those translations. 126 Kevin Raedy the practice of textual criticism.5 The encyclical asserts that, in its current state, textual criticism “has rules so firmly established and secure, that it has become a most valuable aid to the purer and more accurate editing of the sacred text and that any abuse [due to careless or tendentious application] can easily be discovered” (§18). The goal—and, it seems, the expected result—of the application of textual criticism to the biblical texts is that they “be purified from the corruptions” (§17) introduced by copyists due to carelessness or deliberate redaction.6 Given that the objective behind the application of textual criticism is the recovery, to the extent possible, of the biblical texts as they were originally composed, Divino Afflante Spiritu naturally places a great deal of emphasis on facility with the ancient languages in which those texts were written. Such facility is obviously a prerequisite for the use of textual criticism in conjunction with the original-language texts.The encyclical, however, also considers knowledge of the original languages necessary for exegetical attentiveness to “the very least expressions” (§15) found in Scripture. Thus, there is an articulated concern not only for textual accuracy, but also for biblical interpretation that fully accounts for the details of the originallanguage texts, no matter how minor those details may appear. In addition to its praise for the practices of textual criticism, Divino Afflante Spiritu also sees a great deal of promise in historical criticism. The encyclical extols, for example, recent advances in archeological methods and an elevated yield of artifact-based evidence generated by excavation work. Such progress has resulted in substantial new knowledge regarding “languages, letters, events, customs, and forms of worship of most ancient times,” as well as the unearthing of written documents that contain details regarding “letters and institutions, both public and private, especially of the time of Our Savior” (§11). Divino Afflante Spiritu further exhorts biblical scholars to avail themselves of those tools that, although prominent in secular fields of study, can be applied no less advantageously to the study of Scripture.The encyclical makes explicit mention in this regard of philology, literary criticism, and that historical knowledge which pertains to the setting, context, and occasion of the biblical text under consideration.7 The 5 Temporal terms (e.g., recent, current) are used here with respect to the state of affairs at the time the encyclical was written. 6 Divino Afflante Spiritu exudes a palpable excitement regarding the possibilities of textual criticism, indicating that it has evolved to a “high perfection” (§19). One gets the sense from the encyclical that textual criticism has the capacity to bring about a virtual recovery of the autographs. 7 See, for example, Divino Afflante Spiritu §§10, 16, and 34. What Happened to the Vulgate? 127 collective force of these claims is that the application of the historicalcritical method to biblical texts will yield previously unavailable interpretive insights, so that the meaning of the texts may be discerned with unprecedented clarity. Thus, textual criticism brings about a recovery of the original biblical texts, and historical criticism enables a more lucid understanding of those texts—of their content, as it is conveyed through words, idioms, expressions, and narratives.When both forms of criticism are utilized in conjunction with an understanding of the languages in which the original texts were composed, the exegete will be able “to lay hold . . . of the very least expressions which, under the inspiration of the Divine Spirit, have flowed from the pen of the sacred writer, so as to arrive at a deeper and fuller knowledge of his meaning” (§15). This quote captures well the encyclical’s view regarding the aggregate effect of textual and historical criticism. Specifically, their application to biblical manuscripts results in an approach to the word of God as it was originally received and transmitted by the original authors.8 Stated another way, the original-language biblical manuscripts, when subjected to the purifying effects of textual criticism, bear a divine imprint that is accessible to the exegete who is knowledgeable in the original languages and who approaches the text with the rigors of historical criticism. This, it appears, is the sense behind the encyclical’s notion of critical authenticity. Juridical Authenticity In contrast with the case of “critical authenticity,” whose meaning is helpfully elucidated by the recurrence of the words “critical” and “criticism” throughout the encyclical, the term “juridical” appears for the first time in the affirmatory statement and does not resurface for the remainder of the text. Nonetheless, the immediately surrounding context provides a basis for determining the meaning of the term. In the same article that contains the affirmatory statement, the encyclical notes that the stance taken by the Council of Trent—that the Vulgate should be regarded as authentic—was predicated at least in part on “its legitimate use in the Churches [sic] throughout so many centuries” (§21, emphasis added). Further, this prolonged use constitutes evidence that the Vulgate is free from error in matters of faith and morals, and, in turn, that “it may 8 The post-synodal apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini makes clear the multiva- lence inherent in the term “word of God” (see §§6–21). It is used in this instance simply to refer to those texts which the Church recognized to be divinely inspired and hence properly included in the canon of Scripture. 128 Kevin Raedy be quoted safely . . . in disputations, in lectures and in preaching” (§21).9 Importantly, the opening sentence of the article immediately subsequent to that which contains the affirmatory statement includes the following phrase: “this authority of the Vulgate in matters of doctrine” (§22, emphases added). If the antecedent to “this” is the portion of the affirmatory statement that stipulates the proper role of the Vulgate—“it may be quoted safely and without fear of error in disputations, in lectures, and in preaching”—as it appears to be, then the juridical authenticity of the Vulgate is an authenticity that exerts itself in matters of doctrine. More specifically, the Vulgate’s authenticity manifests in the functional roles of developing, establishing, or settling matters of doctrine in settings such as disputations, lectures, and preaching. Thus, juridical authenticity pertains to a legitimate function, or form of use, within the Church. Summary On the basis of these clarifications, it is now possible to burn off some of the fog that clouds the affirmatory statement of Divino Afflante Spiritu. As discussed above, the notion of critical authenticity refers to an intrinsic property of biblical texts that have been “purified” by text-critical analysis and illuminated by the tools of historical criticism. Such texts uniquely bear, in a special way, the imprint of divine revelation. Juridical authenticity, on the other hand, refers to a text’s suitability for the purpose of establishing doctrine—it pertains to a functional role within the Church. The Vulgate attains to this authenticity by virtue of its inerrancy with regard to faith and morals, as evidenced by its centuries-long role in the Church as the arbiter of scriptural truth in such matters. It is important to observe here that the descriptors “critical” and “juridical” arise out of two distinct categories. Rather than mutually exclusive or competitive measures based on a single criterion (e.g., hot vs. cold), they represent non-competitive characterizations that issue from distinct criteria. When viewed in this fashion, the affirmatory statement becomes more clear. It simply reflects a distinction regarding types of authenticity, as opposed to degrees of authenticity. Despite this clarification, a question naturally arises at this point as to why there is any need for the Church to retain the Vulgate, even for juridical purposes. Because it locates the entirety of its justification for juridical authenticity in the notion that the Vulgate is free from error in 9 In other words, the validation of the Vulgate’s authenticity based on several consecutive centuries of use in such matters presumably rests, at least in part, upon the notion that it simply would not have survived for so long as an authority if it were not free from error with regard to faith and morals. What Happened to the Vulgate? 129 matters of faith and morals, there is a subtle sense that the encyclical is offering what might be termed a “negative” affirmation (i.e., freedom from an undesirable quality), as opposed to a “positive” affirmation (i.e., possession of a desirable quality). Stated another way, the affirmation that a particular text is free from error does not carry the same force as the affirmation that a text derives its authenticity from the presence of a divine imprint. Further, it seems obviously true that the critical authenticity possessed by the original-language texts would render them no less free from error than the Vulgate in matters of faith and morals, so that they would be fully suitable for juridical use. The article that begins immediately subsequent to the affirmatory statement appears to suggest as much, stating that “this authority of the Vulgate in matters of doctrine by no means prevents—nay rather today it almost demands—either the corroboration and confirmation of this same doctrine by the original texts or the having recourse on any and every occasion to the aid of these same texts, by which the correct meaning of the Sacred Letters is everywhere daily made more clear and evident” (§22, emphases added). Thus, the encyclical seems to indicate that the critical authenticity of the original-language texts trumps the Vulgate even in the juridical sphere in which its authenticity is affirmed. Nonetheless, the encyclical is unequivocal in asserting that the Vulgate is to be retained for juridical purposes.10 The next section of this essay will attempt to unfold this paradox primarily through an examination of the conceptual relationship between Scripture and Tradition as set forth in Dei Verbum. Dei Verbum and the Internal Conversation of the Church Although Divino Afflante Spiritu can reasonably be understood as a predecessor document to Dei Verbum, the two are not identical in focus. Divino Afflante Spiritu is first and foremost an encyclical about biblical studies. It focuses heavily on the attributes of the biblical text itself, as well as on those technical methods that improve our access to the text. The document also discusses the legitimate approaches to exegesis and interpretation, and it addresses the proper uses of Scripture on the part of bishops, priests, and the laity. Dei Verbum, by contrast, addresses the entirety of divine revelation. While Scripture receives a great deal of attention, the dogmatic constitution is also substantially concerned with Sacred Tradition, and with the 10 Divino Afflante Spiritu explicitly affirms, in §§20–21, the validity of the decrees of the Council of Trent regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate and, as discussed above, it stipulates the authority of the Vulgate within the context of establishing doctrine. Thus, the encyclical indicates a continuing role for the translation within the Church. 130 Kevin Raedy interaction between Tradition and Scripture. This interaction lies at the core of the explanation set forth in this essay regarding the status of the Vulgate at the close of the Second Vatican Council. The Inner Unity of Scripture and Tradition One theme that surfaces at the outset of Dei Verbum is the notion of “inner unity.” God’s self-revelation, the constitution explains, “is realized by deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them” (§2). Thus, the words and deeds that constitute God’s intervention into the temporal order have a mutually edifying effect with regard to his self-revelation. The Council carries this motif of inner unity, albeit implicitly, into its discussion of Christ, who is identified as the unique mediator and the fullness of God’s self-revelation to humanity (§2), and who perfected God’s self-revelation in part “through His words and deeds” (§4, emphases added).11 Intuition dictates that the words and deeds of Christ—the ultimate manifestation of God’s self-revelation—cannot contradict each other and, in fact, they must be coherent, even if that coherence is not always immediately self-evident. The inner unity of the words and deeds that constitute God’s self-revelation serves as an important paradigm for Dei Verbum as a whole. In the opening paragraph of the constitution, the Council states that it “takes its direction” (§1) from the following verses of 1 John: “We announce to you the eternal life which dwelt with the Father and was made visible to us. What we have seen and heard we announce to you, so that you may have fellowship with us and our common fellowship be with the Father and His Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:2–3 as quoted in §1 of Dei Verbum, emphases added). In this quotation, we see the Church’s self-understanding regarding its obligation to pass on the divine revelation with which it has been entrusted. Within the context of the encyclical as a whole, it is evident that what the Church has seen is the work of Christ—his deeds— as witnessed by the Apostles. What the Church has heard is the teaching of Christ—his words—as it issued forth from his very lips in the audience of the Apostles.12 The content of this self-revelation of God is what the Church is obligated to announce to the world, and because it is grounded in the deeds and words of Christ, the revelation that has been entrusted to the Church must itself possess inner unity. 11 Cf. §17, which similarly states that Christ, in his incarnate state on earth, “mani- fested” himself and the Father “by deeds and words.” 12 See, in particular, §7 for an explicit statement of these notions. What Happened to the Vulgate? 131 While God’s self-revelation was conveyed to the Church by means of both the words and the deeds of Christ, Dei Verbum observes that the Apostles similarly preserved and handed down that revelation through a dual-faceted approach: by way of their actions—their observable deeds, formal preaching, and teaching—and by committing some of what they received to writing (§7). The result was the inception of the two modes of divine revelation that the Church safeguards and nurtures to this day: Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. With regard to the former, the Apostles selected bishops as successors, to whom they passed on the authority to safeguard and teach what they had themselves received from Christ. In this way, “the apostolic preaching . . . was to be preserved by an unending succession of preachers until the end of time” (§8). The Council’s understanding of the role of Sacred Tradition, relative to Scripture, is central to the constitution as a whole, and to the argument regarding inner unity that is on offer in this essay. Underlying the commission given to the Apostles by Christ to preach the Gospel—a commission that was fulfilled through the combined effort of preaching and committing to writing what Christ had revealed—was God’s intention that his self-revelation would “abide perpetually in its full integrity” (§7, emphasis added). Similarly, the purpose behind the Apostles’ appointment of successors to preserve what was revealed in Christ was “to keep the Gospel forever whole and alive within the Church” (§7, emphasis added). Implicit in these assertions is the notion that Scripture alone constitutes an incomplete record, so that in the absence of Tradition, the Gospel that remains is no longer whole. A loss of Tradition, however, would amount to more than simply a loss of content. Specifically, it is by the Church’s living Tradition that Sacred Scripture is “more profoundly understood and unceasingly made active” in the Church (§8). Thus, the inner unity between Scripture and Tradition entails an interaction such that the text of Scripture by itself, even where that text is well preserved, represents not just an incomplete revelation, but a revelation whose “full integrity” has been compromised.13 The Council profoundly characterizes the relationship between Scripture and Tradition with the notion that they flow “from the same divine wellspring [and] in a certain way merge into a unity and tend towards the same end” (§9, emphasis added). Here we see the inner unity that characterizes God’s self-revelation explicitly applied to Scripture and Tradition. Just as with the case of God’s self-revelation as manifested in the 13 This latter notion regarding a free-standing, “well-preserved” text of Scripture is purely hypothetical, since a faithfully preserved, comprehensive, and properly demarcated canon could not itself exist in the absence of the Church’s Tradition. 132 Kevin Raedy deeds and words of Christ, the fact that Scripture and Tradition flow from the same divine wellspring implies that they cannot contradict, and further, that they must be characterized by an internal coherence, even if such coherence is not always readily apparent. There must, in other words, be an inner unity which characterizes the whole of God’s self-revelation, and this inner unity is thus intrinsic to the relationship between Scripture and Tradition.14 The Conversation between Scripture and Tradition Dei Verbum offers a further characterization of the relationship between Scripture and Tradition that is consonant with, but not repetitive of, the notion of inner unity. Specifically, the Council asserts that there exists a “communication” between Scripture and Tradition (§9). In light of the claims regarding the relationship between Scripture and Tradition chronicled above, this notion of communication must amount to something more than a fanciful characterization for a mere correspondence, or even a complementarity, between the two. Rather, the Council states that through the living Tradition’s action upon Scripture “God, who spoke of old, uninterruptedly converses with the bride of His beloved Son” (§8, emphasis added). Thus, the “communication” between Scripture and Tradition is an animated and ongoing dialogue. Following upon the arguments above regarding the inner unity of Scripture and Tradition, it is a small leap to the assertion that the conversation between Scripture and Tradition must itself be coherent. The necessity for such coherence is intuitively clear since this conversation, far from being idle in purpose, represents an unfolding of the revelation that was deposited with the Church by Christ.15 Consider further that in Dei Verbum the Council indicates that Scripture and Tradition together constitute “the supreme rule of faith” (§21), and that sacred theology “rests on the written word of God, together with Sacred Tradition” (§24). One can find here an implicit claim of coherence, in that it is implausible that the Council would understand either the supreme rule of faith or sacred theology to be plagued by incoherence. More significantly, in the preface to Dei Verbum itself, the Council states that it “wishes to set 14 The claim made earlier regarding the paradigmatic nature of the inner unity of Christ’s self-revelation as manifested by his deeds and words is not meant to imply a one-to-one mapping between Christ’s words and Scripture, or between Christ’s deeds and Tradition. It is the inner unity itself, and its concomitant internal coherence, which is paradigmatic. 15 See, for example, §8: “the Church constantly moves forward toward the fullness of divine truth until the words of God reach their complete fulfillment in her.” What Happened to the Vulgate? 133 forth authentic doctrine on divine revelation and how it is handed on, so that by hearing the message of salvation the whole world may believe, by believing it may hope, and by hoping it may love” (§1). Thus, much is at stake in the successful interaction between Scripture and Tradition, not the least of which is the salvation of souls. In turn, the assertion made here regarding the necessity of an internal coherence to the communication between Scripture and Tradition constitutes a modest claim, and one that comports with the logic of Dei Verbum. In a generic setting, the notion of conversation implicitly entails some concept of language. In turn, a question that can be raised at this point is whether the issue of language carries any relevance for the conversation which takes place within the Church between Scripture and Tradition. Dei Verbum does not raise or address this matter explicitly, but it does provide some indicators which are helpful to a consideration of the question. One such indicator is found in the final article of chapter III, which addresses the divine inspiration and interpretation of Scripture.The entire article bears repeating here: In Sacred Scripture, therefore, while the truth and holiness of God always remains [sic] intact, the marvelous “condescension” of eternal wisdom is clearly shown, “that we may learn the gentle kindness of God, which words cannot express, and how far He has gone in adapting His language with thoughtful concern for our weak human nature.” For the words of God, expressed in human language, have been made like human discourse, just as the word of the eternal Father, when He took to Himself the flesh of human weakness, was in every way made like men. (§13, emphases added)16 To elaborate briefly, God, as the “author” (§11) of Scripture, condescended to convey his self-revelation in a manner that comports with the limits of human reason. The divine mode of expression that is natural to the triune Godhead—God’s “language”—is unintelligible to created humanity. If God had not overcome this language barrier, his self-revelation would have simply gone undetected by humanity, or, at a minimum, it would have eluded apprehension. Thus, he condescended to express himself in the words of human language. This assertion on the part of the Council does not speak directly to the interaction between Scripture and Tradition, but it does constitute an explicit acknowledgment on the part of the Council regarding the significance of language to the feasibility of successful communication. 16 The quotation in this article is taken by the Council from Homily 17 of St. John Chrysostom’s homilies on Genesis. 134 Kevin Raedy Some of the arguments in Dei Verbum that lead up to the article quoted above are helpful in fleshing out the issue. In addressing the question of the authorship of the books of the canon, for example, the Council emphasizes that, because they are written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they are free from error. At the same time, the men who actually penned Scripture are acknowledged as “true authors” (§11) by virtue of their agency in the process of transmission. The Council partially synthesizes these notions by stating that “God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion” (§12). This statement captures the stipulation expressed above regarding the condescension of God, but it also helpfully conveys the notion that Scripture is God’s word as mediated by humans and expressed in human language. A similar claim is found in the chapter on the handing down of divine revelation (Chapter II), specifically that the living Tradition of the Church, passed on by the Apostles to their successors, develops “in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit” (§8). Here again, just as was described above regarding the transmission of Scripture, although developments in Church Tradition are somehow inspired or influenced by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit works through the successors to the Apostles—the bishops—so that the unfolding of revelation through development in the Church’s Tradition is necessarily mediated by humans and therefore necessarily expressed in human language. The straightforward implication is that, as both streams of divine revelation, which flow from the same divine wellspring, find their expression in human language, so also must the conversation—so asserted by the Council— between these two streams take place in human language. That communication, albeit guided by the Holy Spirit, is necessarily subject to the constraints that attend to human conversation as dictated by the roles and functions of human language.17 Latin as the Language of the Church’s Internal Conversation The success of a human conversation generally requires that the dialogue partners speak to each other in the same language. Perhaps there are cases in which those in dialogue might successfully achieve some degree of mutual understanding by speaking similar languages, e.g., Spanish and Italian. But it requires no heroic appeal to the intuition to claim that in such cases, even when some degree of successful interchange takes place, 17 This, of course, is not to suggest a limitation on the capacity of the Holy Spirit in exercising divine influence on the conversation. Rather, the point is that the natural, ongoing progression of the conversation between Scripture and Tradition, as it has been entrusted to the full participation of human agency, will proceed in accordance with the limits inherent in human language and conversation. What Happened to the Vulgate? 135 the risk and likelihood of a loss of coherence is substantial. Or, to mitigate that risk, the conversation might plod at a pace that prevents meaningful progress. To offer a scenario that perhaps more closely resembles the nature of the conversation between Scripture and Tradition, consider the academician who specializes in the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas. He or she works not through a passive receptivity of the Angelic Doctor’s writings, but through a reception and contemplation that ultimately leads back into that corpus, that is, there is a dialogue between scholar and Church Doctor. In turn, the scholar might find that a facility with Latin is necessary so as to avoid captivity to the tendencies, whims, or incompetence of a translator. As a skilled Latinist, he or she is in a position not only to receive the texts of Aquinas in an unencumbered fashion, but also to penetrate the subtleties and nuances of those texts so that a more meaningful dialogue may take place. On the other hand, such interaction will necessarily be characterized to some degree by static and dissonance, perhaps with significant consequences, if the scholar possesses no acumen with Thomas’s language. Do the claims set forth here carry any freight with regard to the conversation that takes place within the Church between Scripture and Tradition? If so, they could help explain the Church’s decision to retain the Vulgate based on its juridical authenticity. Towards that end, consider that, in the West, both Scripture and Tradition have found their expression in the language of Latin for the vast majority of the Church’s history. Prior to St. Jerome’s completion of the Vulgate, “Old Latin” translations— compiled for those who had facility with Latin but not with the original biblical languages—were produced in piecemeal fashion during the second century. The Old Latin text is frequently quoted in patristic writings, and portions of it were eventually absorbed wholesale into the Vulgate. Hence, it wielded a good deal of influence prior to the ascendancy of the Vulgate. As for the Vulgate itself, it was completed by St. Jerome in 405 and, by no later than the eighth century, it had become the dominant biblical translation in the West.18 Jerome undertook this project at the behest of Pope Damasus, who saw the need, in light of variations in extant Old Latin texts, to establish a single authoritative Latin biblical text. The pope’s request was also driven by “the realization that Latin had become the de facto official language of the Western Church.”19 In 1546, 18 The historical details of the Old Latin and Vulgate translations are usefully summarized in L. F. Hartman, B. F. Peebles, and M. Stevenson, “Vulgate,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, Second Edition, vol. 14, ed. Berard L. Marthaler (Detroit: Thomson/Gale, 2003), 591–600. 19 See J. F. Collins, “Latin (In the Church),” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 8, 362. Kevin Raedy 136 the Vulgate was declared “authentic” at the fourth session of the Council of Trent,20 a status that was reaffirmed at the First Vatican Council in 1870.21 At the time that Pope Pius XII wrote Divino Afflante Spiritu, Latin had been the principal language of Scripture in the West for nearly 1800 years. With regard to the Church’s Tradition, significant doctrinal treatises were being composed in Latin at least as early as the year 197, when Tertullian wrote his Apology in defense of Christianity.22 He was followed by other influential figures, including Cyprian, Lactantius, Hilary of Poitiers, Minucius Felix, Victorinus, and Arnobius, whose writings (in Latin) St. Jerome referred to as a “library of Christ.”23 In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine, writing in Latin, generated a corpus that proved seminal in the history of the Church’s theological life. Contemporaneous with Augustine were the aforementioned Jerome and St. Ambrose of Milan, important Western theologians in their own right. Approximately eight centuries later, Aquinas would produce a body of work in Latin that in many respects remains normative for contemporary Church doctrine.24 As for Church councils, although the canons and decrees of the early councils were composed in Greek, the texts were translated into Latin for use by those bishops in the non-Greek-speaking regions of the Church.25 Beginning with the First Lateran Council (1123) and continuing through the current day, the canons and decrees of the Church’s Ecumenical Councils have been formulated and recorded in Latin.Thus, at the time of Divino Afflante Spiritu the Western Church had been establishing its doctrine in the language of Latin for more than 1700 years. 20 The Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. H. J. Schroeder (1941; reprint, Rockford, IL: TAN Books and Publishers, 1978), 18. 21 See Dei Filius, Ch. 2, §6. 22 W. Le Saint, “Tertullian,” in New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 13, 835. 23 See J. F. Collins, “Latin (In the Church),” 363–64. With the phrase “library of Christ,” the author of the article is quoting from §10 of St. Jerome’s letter to Heliodorus (Letter LX). 24 Not all of the theologians discussed here were bishops, and thus their work was not produced under the influence of the teaching charism that is unique to the successors of the apostles. Rather, it was subject to the consideration and scrutiny of the college of bishops who, by the authority passed down to them, decided what would be explicitly appropriated by the Church. Nonetheless, these theologians, as well as a multitude of others who gave formal expression to their thinking in the language of Latin, contributed in important ways to theological developments that have been incorporated into Church doctrine through the ages. 25 See, for example, Percival’s discussion regarding the number of Nicene canons. Henry R. Percival, The Seven Ecumenical Councils in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, vol. 14, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (1899; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 44. What Happened to the Vulgate? 137 When one considers the cumulative theological development that had taken place in the Western Church over the nearly 1800-year period leading up to Divino Afflante Spiritu, and that that development would serve as the foundation for future theological development, it is not hard to understand why, for all its exhortations regarding the original-language texts, the encyclical does not suggest that the Latin Vulgate has been rendered obsolete. Dispensing with the Vulgate would introduce a disjunction between Scripture and the Church’s living Tradition and potentially destabilize the internal conversation that had been taking place in the language of Latin for nearly the entire life of the Church. The well-documented confusion that accompanied the parallel but independent development of the doctrine of the Trinity in the East and West may helpfully illustrate the dangers inherent in theological dialogue that is dependent on translation between languages. To recap briefly, the East, primarily through the efforts of the Cappadocian fathers, conceptualized the Trinity in terms of one οὐσία (essence or substance) and three ὑποστάσεις (persons), while the West expressed the doctrine in terms of one substantia (substance) and three personae (persons). Difficulty ensued owing to the fact that the Latin translation of the Greek word ὑπόστασις is substantia, so that it initially appeared to the West that the East spoke of three substances, a formulation with decidedly heretical implications.26 Although the confusion was ultimately overcome, the situation helps illustrate the role and significance of language in theological discourse. It is also important to note that the two Trinitarian formulations discussed above developed within separate common-language dialogues between Scripture and Tradition, and thus the illustration may not fully capture the potential for incoherence in a single two-language dialogue between Scripture and Tradition. Summary The argument presented in this section of the essay is grounded in the conceptual relationship between Scripture and Tradition as set forth in Dei Verbum. Specifically, the inner unity of God’s self-revelation implies an internal coherence between the two streams of that revelation that are 26 Placher asserts that one problem with the Eastern formulation of the doctrine as developed by the Cappadocian fathers is that “it depended so much on particular words that one could hardly express it in any language but Greek.” He characterizes Western theologians as “horrified” upon reading Latin translations of Greek texts that appeared, to them, to characterize God as having three substances. See William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction (Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press, 1983), 78–79. 138 Kevin Raedy safeguarded by the Church: Scripture and Tradition. Further, that coherence necessarily manifests in the conversation between Scripture and Tradition that is described by Dei Verbum. Because this conversation is mediated by humans, and hence takes place in human language, such coherence requires that the two dialogue partners—Scripture and Tradition—“speak” the same language. In turn, conditioned on the cumulative development of theology within the Church over the course of roughly 1800 years in the language of Latin, retention of the Vulgate is a matter of necessity. One party to a conversation, in other words, cannot unilaterally shift to a different language without substantially disrupting that conversation. This is particularly true of an ongoing conversation wherein the present attains to coherence only by way of reference, explicit or implicit, to what has been communicated in the past.Thus, the conceptual underpinnings of Dei Verbum help to explain why the Vulgate must be retained for juridical purposes, even when the critical authenticity of the original-language biblical manuscripts implies a juridical authenticity that exceeds that of the Latin Vulgate. The next section will provide evidence that this basis for the retention of the Vulgate does not constitute an argument that is uniquely identified with Dei Verbum. We shall show, rather, that the theoretical constructs of Dei Verbum were developed in continuity with Divino Afflante Spiritu. The Continuity between Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum The previous section offered an explanation for the retention of the Vulgate based on an analysis of the conceptual relationship between Scripture and Tradition as set forth in Dei Verbum.This present section has two objectives: to demonstrate that the conceptual features of Dei Verbum arise not in isolation, but in continuity with Divino Afflante Spiritu; and to substantiate that Dei Verbum complies with the prescriptions of Divino Afflante Spiritu for the use of the Vulgate. Evidence of these two forms of continuity—theoretical and practical—will lend credibility to my argument that the notions of language and conversation are fundamental to an understanding of the Vulgate’s role within the Church. It will also help to clarify the status of the Vulgate in the wake of the Council’s promulgation of Dei Verbum. Conceptual Continuity As noted earlier, Divino Afflante Spiritu is focused almost exclusively on biblical exegesis, rather than on the broader issue of divine revelation. In turn, the encyclical does not devote any sustained discussion to the relationship between Scripture and Tradition. What little exists on this topic, What Happened to the Vulgate? 139 however, tends to be wholly consistent with Dei Verbum, even if it is not as thoroughly developed. Most notable is the assertion that those who are engaged in exegesis, “mindful of the fact that here there is question of a divinely inspired text, the care and interpretation of which have been confided to the Church by God Himself, should no less diligently take into account the explanations and declarations of the teaching authority of the Church, as likewise the interpretation given by the Holy Fathers” (§24, emphases added). The sentiments found in this passage include a clear, albeit tersely expressed, allusion to the deposit of faith entrusted to the Church and jointly revealed in Scripture and Tradition. The fact that not just Scripture, but also its interpretation, have been “confided” to the Church indicates that Tradition is guided by the same Spirit that inspired Scripture. Further, the specified role of Church teaching in scriptural exegesis suggests an interaction between Scripture and Tradition. Elsewhere, the encyclical asserts both that Scripture is “the most precious source of doctrine on faith and morals” (§1), and that exegesis of Scripture should be “in harmony with Catholic doctrine and the genuine current of tradition” (§42). Thus, the collective effect of the encyclical’s claims is that Scripture and Tradition should mutually condition one another. Although the encyclical as a whole devotes scant attention to the full scope of divine revelation, the characterizations that it does offer, as illustrated in the quotes above, generally adumbrate the developments and elaborations of Dei Verbum. There is also evidence of continuity between Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum regarding the issue of language. As discussed earlier, the encyclical places a heavy emphasis on the study of the biblical texts in their original languages, stating within this context that “it is the duty of the exegete to lay hold, so to speak, with the greatest care and reverence of the very least expressions which, under the inspiration of the Divine Spirit, have flowed from the pen of the sacred writer, so as to arrive at a deeper and fuller knowledge of his meaning” (§15, emphasis added).27 The collective force of the strands of argumentation in play at this stage of the encyclical—textual criticism, original-language manuscripts, and the transmission of divine revelation into writing—suggests an interpretation of this quote whereby the substantive content of Scripture and the language in which it is written are inextricably bound together, so that for a particular expression, verse, or 27 In interpreting this sentence, it is important to keep in mind that the encyclical, as noted earlier, expresses an optimism regarding the ability of textual criticism to purge biblical manuscripts of corruptions and, for all intents and purposes, to recover the autographs. Under such conditions, “the very least expressions” found in the manuscripts will be those which were expressed by the original human authors under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. 140 Kevin Raedy passage within the Bible, the language in which it was originally expressed (i.e., Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek), in all its particularities and peculiarities, is itself a carrier of the divine revelation contained therein.The obvious implication is that the process of translation, which is inherently fraught with subjectivity and with difficulties owing to words or idioms that resist conversion into other languages, necessarily entails a substantial risk of loss of content, or, in the case of Scripture, loss of divinely inspired content. Continuing with the theme of language, the encyclical further states that the human authors of Scripture had “certain fixed ways of expounding and narrating, certain definite idioms, . . . so-called approximations, and certain hyperbolical modes of expression, . . . even paradoxical, which even help to impress the ideas more deeply on the mind ” (§37, emphasis added). One gets a fairly clear sense here that the function of language in the process of communication is something more than incidental. Rather, the specific language that mediates a particular communication actually becomes intrinsic to the message, so that the message and the language cannot be separated, not just with respect to the process of conveying the message, but also, as the quote above indicates, with respect to the reception of the message. All told, the explicit and implicit assertions of Divino Afflante Spiritu concerning the role of language—as a carrier of divine revelation and as the participatory mediator of communication between sender and recipient—accord well with the arguments of the previous section regarding the significance of language within the context of the Church’s conversation between Scripture and Tradition. The aspects of Divino Afflante Spiritu discussed here admittedly do not add up to a precursor that is tightly woven together with the conceptual relationship between Scripture and Tradition as it is developed in Dei Verbum. Given, however, that the two documents are separated by a mere twenty-two years—little more than the blink of an eye in the history of the Church—it seems certain that the content of Divino Afflante Spiritu noted here with respect to language and the connection between Scripture and Tradition would have been lurking in the Council’s consciousness as it deliberated over and composed Dei Verbum. In turn, the conceptual continuities described herein are likely to amount to something more than incidental points of contact, even if Dei Verbum does not make the connections in formal or explicit fashion. Tangible Evidence of Continuity Up to this point, I have relied exclusively on theoretical arguments to resolve the apparent paradox in Divino Afflante Spiritu concerning the status of the Latin Vulgate. In closing, let us see what can be inferred about What Happened to the Vulgate? 141 the Vulgate’s status based on the quotations of Scripture found in Dei Verbum. Scripture is quoted eleven times in Dei Verbum, and in one of the eleven cases, there is a parenthetical indication that the quotation is taken from the Greek biblical text. In the other ten instances, there is no such indication. For each of these latter ten quotations, a comparison of the scriptural quote in the Latin text of Dei Verbum with the corresponding text of the Vulgate indicates that the quote has been lifted, word for word, from the Vulgate. For the one quotation bearing the notation “Greek text” (a quote of 2 Tim 3:16–17 in §11), the first portion of the scriptural quote appears in Dei Verbum as “omnis Scriptura divinitus inspirata et utilis ad docendum, . . . ” whereas in the Vulgate the corresponding text reads “Omnis scriptura divinitus inspirata utilis est ad docendum, . . . ”Thus, Dei Verbum makes two changes to the Vulgate text: the linking verb “est” is suppressed, and the conjunction “et” is added.28 These changes do, in fact, result in a tighter correspondence between the Latin text and the Greek text, the latter of which reads πᾶσα γραφὴ θεόπνευστος καὶ ὠφέλιμος πρὸς διδασκαλίαν . . . ” Note the suppression of the linking verb and both the existence and the location of the coordinating conjunction.29 It seems likely that the Council Fathers, in accord with the line of argumentation at this stage of Dei Verbum, desired to emphasize the proposition that all Scripture is divinely inspired, and so in this case they favored the Greek text over the Vulgate.30 The more significant point, 28 Dei Verbum makes no changes, relative to the Vulgate, to the remaining portion of this scriptural quotation. 29 There is a minor complication here in that the Greek text used by the Council is not identified (or, perhaps more accurately, it is not identified in the resources at my disposal). The critical apparatus in the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament, however, does not indicate any textual variants for the portion of the scriptural text that was revised, relative to the Vulgate text, in Dei Verbum (except to acknowledge the absence of the conjunction in the Old Latin and Vulgate texts). See Novum Testamentum Graece, 27th ed., ed. Barbara Aland, Kurt Aland, Johannes Karavidopoulos, Carlo M. Martini, and Bruce M. Metzger (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1993). 30 In other words, the unaltered Vulgate text could plausibly be read as a claim that pertains only to that subset of Scripture which is divinely inspired, a reading which is possible but substantially less likely with the text as it has been revised in Dei Verbum. Thus the change is consistent with the assertion, which appears earlier in the same article, that “the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety, with all their parts, are sacred and canonical because written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, they have God as their author” (§11, emphasis added). See also §12, which states that “since Holy Scripture must be read and interpreted in the sacred spirit in which it was written, no less serious attention must be given to the content and unity of the whole of Scripture if the meaning of the sacred texts is to be correctly worked out” (emphases added). 142 Kevin Raedy however, is that the approach to scriptural quotation documented here offers tangible evidence regarding the Council’s understanding of the role and status of the Vulgate. By way of elaboration, it may be helpful to circle back to Divino Afflante Spiritu and reexamine the final statement found therein on the subject of the Vulgate, which reads as follows: “Wherefore this authority of the Vulgate in matters of doctrine by no means prevents—nay rather today it almost demands—either the corroboration and confirmation of this same doctrine by the original texts or the having recourse on any and every occasion to the aid of these same texts, by which the correct meaning of the Sacred Letters is everywhere daily made more clear and evident” (§22, emphases added). In light of the evidence provided above pertaining to the Council’s approach to citing Scripture in Dei Verbum, it seems clear that a proper understanding of the encyclical’s assertion is that the role of the Vulgate in establishing and informing Church doctrine is too important to permit its use for that purpose without recourse to the insights available from the originallanguage texts.31 The approach taken by Dei Verbum is fully consonant with this understanding of Divino Afflante Spiritu; that is, that in using Scripture to establish doctrine, the original-language texts should serve to corroborate and confirm the content of the Vulgate, and be drawn upon as necessary, but they do not constitute a replacement for the Vulgate. The instance of reliance on the Greek text in the one scriptural quote discussed above provides evidence that the Council did, in fact, keep the original-language texts in view during the formulation of the constitution and did invoke them where necessary or appropriate. Even in this single case, however, other than the revision involving the two words “et” and “est,” the quote is a word-for-word rendering of the Vulgate text. All told, the nearly exclusive use of the Vulgate in the dogmatic constitution supports the inference that, at the time of Dei Verbum, the Council understood the Vulgate to be the authoritative biblical text for the purpose of establishing and supporting doctrine.32 31 Thus, while Divino Afflante Spiritu takes something of a pejorative stance with regard to the authenticity to be accorded to translations (see, for example, §16 of Divino Afflante Spiritu, which indicates that “the original text . . . has more authority and greater weight than . . . even the very best translation”), in the case of the Vulgate, the encyclical, rather than focusing on its deficiency relative to the original-language texts, emphasizes its authoritative status in developing and supporting Church doctrine, i.e., its juridical authenticity. 32 In addition to the eleven quotes from Scripture discussed above, Dei Verbum contains myriad paraphrases of and allusions to Scripture. In only three of these cases does the Council indicate that it is referencing the Greek text (all three cases are from the New Testament). Paraphrases and allusions do not lend themselves to What Happened to the Vulgate? 143 A Note on the New Vulgate The term “Vulgate” is used throughout this essay in a generic sense without any specification as to the particular edition that is under consideration. There is a lengthy history behind the transmission of the Vulgate which need not be fully recounted here, but a few details are in order. More than eleven centuries after Jerome completed his work, the Council of Trent called for the production of a revised Vulgate, but that charge, at least as it appears in the formal decree, is vague as to purpose or objective.33 The historical record of the deliberations of the Council Fathers, however, indicates three issues underlying the need for a corrected text: (1) discrepancies among the various Latin texts in circulation at the time and a lack of clarity as to whether any one text held authoritative status; (2) errors and corruptions that had been introduced into Jerome’s text over the centuries since its completion in 405; and (3) the possibility that certain words or phrases in the Vulgate text may not accurately or adequately capture the meaning of the corresponding original-language texts.34 The concerns raised at Trent ultimately gave rise to the Sisto-Clementine Vulgate of 1592, and that text became the authoritative Latin Bible of the Church, a status that it retained for nearly four hundred years. It was the Latin biblical text of record, so to speak, at the time of both Divino Afflante Spiritu and Dei Verbum, and the analysis involving scriptural quotations conducted in the previous section is therefore based on this edition. Despite its authoritative status, it had become clear long before its eventual subordination that the Sisto-Clementine Vulgate was, from a the type of analysis performed above on the quotations, but the low incidence of reliance on the Greek text in these cases suggests that the Council may well have adhered to a protocol similar to that which was apparently followed for the quotations. 33 At the fourth session of the Council of Trent (April 8, 1546), the Council issued its Decree Concerning the Edition and Use of the Sacred Books, wherein it “decrees and ordains that in the future the Holy Scriptures, especially the old Vulgate Edition, be printed in the most correct manner possible.” Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, Schroeder, 19. 34 See Jared Wicks, “Catholic Old Testament Interpretation in the Reformation and Early Confessional Eras,” in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, vol. 2, From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Magne Sæbø (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 627–29. The three concerns identified here are obviously interrelated to some degree. With regard to the first two, once Jerome completed his translation in the year 405, dissemination of the text necessitated copying and recopying. In addition to the inevitable errors resulting from that scribal process, there were, over the centuries, deliberate attempts at improvement and correction of Jerome’s text. Cf. Hartman, Peebles and Stevenson, “Vulgate,” 594–96. Kevin Raedy 144 text-critical perspective, insufficient to render it an adequate response to the call issued at Trent.35 In 1907, Pope Pius X set the process into motion once again by forming a commission of Benedictines charged with the task of producing a critical edition of the Vulgate as it was rendered by Jerome in the fifth century.36 This endeavor was understood as a preliminary step in the production of a Vulgate text that would ultimately satisfy the concerns of the Fathers at Trent. In 1965, Pope Paul VI formed the Pontifical Commission for the New Vulgate, the task of which was the production of a new Vulgate text. The process that was initiated at Trent reached closure in 1979 when Pope John Paul II formally promulgated the New Vulgate with the Apostolic Constitution Scripturarum Thesaurus.37 At that time, the New Vulgate thus supplanted the Sisto-Clementine edition of the Vulgate and became the Church’s authoritative Latin text of Sacred Scripture. Based, as it is, on critical editions of Jerome’s text, as well as modern critical editions of the original-language texts, the New Vulgate presumably possesses an even greater fullness (relative to the Sisto-Clementine edition) of the juridical authenticity attributed to the Vulgate at the Council of Trent and acknowledged in Divino Afflante Spiritu. Any emendations to the Sisto-Clementine text resulting from the text-critical efforts underlying the New Vulgate cannot, however, have the effect of undermining established Church doctrine. Rather, errors in doctrine owing to textual corruptions in the Sisto-Clementine edition of 1592 (or previous editions) are precluded by virtue of the fact that both conversation partners in the Church’s two-thousand-year, internal dialogue emanate from the same divine wellspring. Because the Holy Spirit is active in guiding the movement of Church Tradition, the inner unity that exists between Scripture and Tradition will not manifest in the elevation to doctrine of an erroneous teaching that derives from a corrupted biblical text.38 35 For a discussion of this matter, see G. D. Schlegel, “The Vulgate Bible,” Scripture 2, no. 3 (1947): 66–67. 36 The original scope of the task assigned to the Benedictines was the recovery of the entirety of Jerome’s Vulgate, but the project appears to have been brought to a close with the completion of the Old Testament. 37 The New Vulgate constitutes something of a “corrected” version of the SistoClementine Vulgate, relying heavily on the Benedictines’ critical edition of the Old Testament of Jerome’s Vulgate and the Wordsworth and White critical edition of Jerome’s New Testament. These texts were further checked against modern critical editions of the original-language biblical texts. See the Praenotanda of Nova Vulgata Bibliorum Sacrorum Editio (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1986). 38 In any case, the possibility discussed here is likely to be purely hypothetical. Wicks notes that the decree at Trent regarding the authenticity of the Vulgate What Happened to the Vulgate? 145 Conclusion This essay represents an attempt to discern the ongoing role of the Latin Vulgate in the Roman Catholic Church in light of what initially appears to be a silence on the matter on the part of Dei Verbum. Based on an analysis which jointly considers both Dei Verbum and its predecessor document, the encyclical Divino Afflante Spiritu, the conclusion of this essay is that the Vulgate retains its status as the Church’s authoritative biblical translation for the purpose of developing, establishing, and articulating doctrine— what Divino Afflante Spiritu refers to as its juridical authenticity. This conclusion is supported by the implications of Dei Verbum’s conceptualization of Scripture and Tradition as two streams of divine revelation that are perpetually in conversation with one another, and by the long history of the language of Latin within the Church as the mediator of both Scripture and Tradition. The analysis further supports that traces of the key conceptual considerations of Dei Verbum which undergird the conclusions of this essay can be found in Divino Afflante Spiritu; conceptual continuity between the two may thus be inferred. The final portion of the essay provides tangible evidence that, in formulating Dei Verbum, the Council understood the Vulgate to be the default biblical translation for the purpose of developing and promulgating doctrine. Such evidence indicates that Dei Verbum is not quite as silent regarding the status of the Vulgate as it might initially appear. Some implications of these findings can be briefly enumerated. To begin, the continuing authenticity of the Vulgate means that, for Catholic biblical scholars, that text should have a voice in the process of biblical interpretation. Perhaps more significantly, the Vulgate should carry substantial weight for Catholic theologians in the explication and development of theological doctrine. Self-evidently, the heavy emphasis found in Divino Afflante Spiritu on proficiency with the original biblical languages would, “rested on a conviction that the Vulgate was a trustworthy text that underlay Church teaching and had never led to heresy” (629). At the outset of the Benedictines’ effort to recover the text of St. Jerome, Gasquet states, “Substantially, no doubt, the present authentic Clementine text represents that which St. Jerome produced in the fourth century, but no less certainly it, the printed text, stands in need of close examination and much correction to make it agree with the translation of St. Jerome.” See Francis Aidan Gasquet, “Revision of the Vulgate” in Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15, ed. Charles G. Herbermann (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1913), 516. Several years into the Benedictine project, WeldBlundell similarly indicates that “[n]o changes in the [Sisto-Clementine] text are likely to be of any grave importance, but those of less importance are numerous.” See Adrian Weld-Blundell, “The Revision of the Vulgate Bible,” Scripture 2, no. 4 (1947): 103. 146 Kevin Raedy for Catholic scholars and theologians, apply with equal force to Latin. Such proficiency may also be important for bishops, who bear ultimate responsibility for the proper catechesis of the laity. Finally, the juridical authenticity of the Vulgate carries relevance for those engaged in the production, new or ongoing, of Bible translations for use by Catholics, especially when such translations include study notes which identify and expound upon the interrelationships between Scripture and Church doctrine. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 147–186 147 The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology: Rereading Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio* B RUNO M. S HAH , O.P. St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish Charlottesville, VA I. Orientation and Introduction to the Problem THE HISTORY of “neo-Thomism” has received much scholarly attention, especially since the centenary of its “magna charta,” Aeterni Patris (1879).1 Through Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, the nineteenth-century * The author gratefully acknowledges his debt to Gregory LaNave for having read and critiqued an earlier version of this article. 1 “Neo-Thomism” refers to a particular focus and prominence of the broader Catholic intellectual revival known as “neo-scholasticism.” This movement proceeded from a certain re-appropriation of medieval systematics of inquiry and judgment, and aimed to combat and evangelize modern perspectives that were threatening the coherence and conclusions of Church doctrine. The dangers posed to the Church’s understanding of faith and reason were officially recognized and rebuked as early as the pontificate of Pope Gregory XVI (1831–46) in his condemnations of kinds of indifferentism, rationalism, and traditionalism (see Enchiridion Symbolorum, Heinrich Denzinger-Adolfus Schönmetzer [DS], 2730–2732, 2738–2756). At Vatican I (1869–70), the Church’s articulation of doctrine on revelation, faith, and reason was expressed in identifiably scholastic and even Thomist terms (see DS, 3000–3045). By 1879, Leo XIII’s Thomist vision for the Church, as particularly expressed in his second encyclical, Aeterni Patris (AP ), galvanized this scholastic ressourcement. Many accounts of neo-Thomism focus on the period between Aeterni Patris and the Second Vatican Council rather than locate the movement in terms of magisterial concerns in and immediately prior to the First Vatican Council. Two accounts in English that acknowledge neo-Thomism’s broader historical and magisterial progeny are those of James A. Weisheipl, O.P., and Gerald A. McCool, S.J. Weisheipl offers a favorable and succinct account; see his article, s.v. “Scholasticism,” in vol. 12, The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967). McCool provides an invaluable secondary resource but divides his history 148 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. Thomist philosophical and theological movement received official Church promotion and was carried well into the twentieth century. Representative modern accounts of this interconciliar, Thomist revival have researched well the philosophical origins and ecclesial scope of Leo’s program for renewal. The common judgment is that the pope’s restorative philosophical endeavor rested on an erroneous historical premise: pace the pope, the Church’s patrimony had in fact not been singularly and authentically developed ad mentem Sancti Thomae.2 Indeed, historical studies that were into two separate books, practically effecting a kind of hermeneutic of discontinuity. See his Catholic Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for a Unitary Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1979) and From Unity to Pluralism: The Internal Evolution of Thomism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989). McCool regrets that, whereas Vatican I was a collaborative ecumenical council that produced a dogmatic constitution concerned with teaching, Leo XIII was a “reigning pontiff,” whose encyclical letter was “a purely disciplinary document, resting upon [his own individual] juridical authority” (see Catholic Philosophy, 1). Differently, the present study considers Aeterni Patris (theologically) as a document of the ordinary Magisterium, containing important teaching about the intrinsic requirements of the Catholic faith’s endeavors toward understanding. McCool’s oft-quoted description of Aeterni Patris as the “magna charta” of neoThomism may owe its inspiration to Charles A. Hart, who twice calls Aeterni Patris “that great modern charter of Scholastic, and particularly Thomist philosophy.” See his “Neo-Scholastic Philosophy in American Catholic Culture,” in Aspects of New Scholastic Philosophy, ed. Charles A. Hart (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1932); and “America’s Response to the Encyclical, Aeterni Patris,” American Catholic Philosophical Association Proceedings 3 (1929): 98–117. In the present author’s opinion, the best overall study of Leonine neoThomism in terms of its broader historical, ecclesial, and intellectual situation is found in the work of Roger Aubert. See his “Le contexte historique et les motivations doctrinales de l’encyclique ‘Aeterni Patris,’ ” in Tommaso d’Aquino nel I Centenario dell’Enciclica ‘Aeterni Patris’ (Rome: Società Internazionale Tommaso d’Aquino, 1979); and Aspects divers du néo-Thomisme sous le pontificat de Léon XIII (Rome: Edizioni 5 Lune, 1961). (Large segments of the latter book are cited verbatim in translation, with only a one-time mention of general indebtedness, by Thomas J. A. Hartley, S.J., Thomistic Revival and the Modernist Era [Toronto: University of St. Michael’s College, 1971].) 2 On this and the points following in this paragraph, see The Church in the Industrial Age, vol. 9 in History of the Church, ed. Hubert Jedin and John Dolan, trans. Margit Resch (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981), 307–24; Marcia Colish, “St. Thomas Aquinas in Historical Perspective: The Modern Period,” Church History 44, no. 4 (1975): 433–49. The standard expositor of the line of reasoning found in this paragraph in the main text above is McCool; see his From Unity to Pluralism, 1–34; “Neo-Thomism and the Tradition of St. Thomas,” Thought 62, no. 245 (1987): 131–46, especially 131–36; and Catholic Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 243–44, 253, 261. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 149 themselves fostered by Leo’s visionary program argued two major points:3 (1) Thomas’s work was not the Church’s intellectual lodestar for seven hundred years, as Leo imagined it had been. (Rather, as some have argued, the Leonine “imposition” of Thomist scholasticism manifested the same mindset as Pius IX’s ultramontane deployment of ecclesial power, which centralization ended with the collegialism of Vatican II.)4 (2) “Thomism” is the spawn of an adulterated genealogy. The very advocacy of “Thomist” philosophy engendered the pullulation of “Thomistic” brands of thought, such that there eventuated “too many Thomisms,” to borrow a phrase from Alasdair MacIntyre.5 Most notably, according to the thesis of Gerald A. McCool, S.J., the Leonine campaign was ultimately victorious precisely insofar as it was “internally” fated to defeat itself: what the Leonine pontificate supported in the name of synthetic 3 For an informed appreciation for Leo’s pioneering historical sensitivity and interest, see Gustave Weigel, S.J., “Leo XIII and Contemporary Theology” in Leo XIII and the Modern World, ed. Edward T. Gargan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), 213–26. 4 For a standard view of neo-Thomism as officially concluded with and by Vatican II, see Joseph A. Komonchak, “Thomism and the Second Vatican Council,” chap. 4 in Continuity and Plurality in Catholic Theology: Essays in Honor of Gerald A. McCool, S.J., ed. Anthony J. Cernera (Fairfield, CT: Sacred Heart University Press, 1998), 53–73. For arguments that Leo’s theological program was ultramontane, see Terence McGuckin, “A Century of ‘Pontifical Thomism,’ ” New Blackfriars 72, no. 852 (1991): 377–84; and J. Derek Holmes, “Some English Reactions to the Publication of Aeterni Patris,” The Downside Review 93 (1975): 269–81. For a putative deconstruction of neo-Thomism, see Pierre Thibault, Savoir et pouvoir: Philosophie thomiste et politique cléricale au XIXe siècle (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1972). Although he does not discuss Aeterni Patris and does not personally espouse any variety of scholasticism, Joseph Ratzinger has offered an insightful historical and theological meditation on the problem of postconciliar pluralism. Among other things, Cardinal Ratzinger locates the provenance of the “pluralism’s” modern usefulness in the socio-political field: Pluralist theories of social organization vaunted the multiplicity of social groupings, to which individuals necessarily belong, in order to militate against the absolute sovereignty of any one social institution. Although the Church is not simply a socio-political entity, theological pluralists tend to deconstruct her precisely in such terms, with deleterious effects upon ecclesial communion and doctrinal orthodoxy. In response, Cardinal Ratzinger offers a patristic consideration of “symphonia,” which allows for a legitimate pluralism in terms of the Church’s inner unity. See Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Pluralism as a Problem for Church and Theology,” in The Nature and Mission of Theology, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 73–98. 5 See chap. 3 of Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), 58–81. 150 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. intellectual unity was intrinsically ordered toward the basic intellectual plurality that is the purportedly hale situation of Catholic philosophy and theology today.6 Arguably, the one aspect that is characteristic of contemporary Catholic theological practice is its sheer diversity. But the sundry styles and approaches that bear different kinds of commitment to the living Magisterium and the Church’s doctrinal history are aggregated in name mostly—“Catholic theology.” There does not appear, as a property of Catholic theology itself, a cohesive formal understanding that shapes and directs a healthy and understandable plurality.7 6 See any of McCool’s works, cited above.This historical and evaluative thesis about intellectual pluralism with particular respect to Thomism and its contemporary prospects is rehearsed (as standard) in Peter M. Candler, Jr., “Introduction,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 83, no. 3 (2009): 319–22. For Candler, “Thomism” is not content-based but rather an “idea” about a “spirit of thought and life,” 321. The question that such a romantic nominalism begs of Catholic doctrinal theology, however, especially when the latter is hermeneutically informed by historical understandings about the theological contexts of doctrinal articulation, is, What makes Catholic theology a “Catholic” kind of “theology”? 7 After this article’s final drafting, the International Theological Commission published “Theology Today: Perspectives, Principles and Criteria” (8 March 2012), a document the commission had begun to conceive in 2004. See www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_doc_ 20111129_teologia-oggi_en.html (original in English). The purpose of the document aligns perfectly with the theological concerns of the present article. Considering the contemporary context, the document presents its orienting question: “The [post-conciliar] period has seen a certain fragmentation of theology, and in [otherwise hale] dialogue . . . theology always faces the challenge of maintaining its own true identity. The question arises, therefore, as to what characterizes Catholic theology and gives it, in and through its many forms, a clear sense of identity in its engagement with the world today” (no. 1). Toward answering this question, “Perspectives” offers no fewer than twelve criteria that should formally direct the proper work of theology: (1) recognizing “the primacy of the Word of God” (no. 9); (2) holding to “the faith of the Church as source, context and norm” (no. 15); (3) understanding theology “as the science of faith [with a properly] rational dimension” (no. 19); (4) “anchoring the Church’s doctrine and practice in [the canonical] witness [of Scripture]” (no. 24); (5) finding necessary “fidelity to the Apostolic Tradition” (no. 32); (6) bearing due “attention to the sensus fidelium” (no. 36); (7) “giving responsible adherence to the magisterium in its various gradations” (no. 44); (8) “practicing theology in professional, prayerful and charitable collaboration” with all Catholic theologians (no. 50); (9) “constantly dialoguing with the world” (no. 58); (10) “striving to give a scientifically and rationally argued presentation” (no. 73); (11) “attempting to integrate a plurality of enquiries and methods into the unified project of the intellectus fidei, and insisting on the unity of truth and therefore on the fundamental unity of theology itself ” (no. 85) (nota bene: the two largest contiguous The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 151 More than the pragmatic possibility of a common discourse encourages the search for unity in theological subject matter, terms, and grammar.8 The unitary dynamism of Christianity is amongst its most prominent and beautiful aspects: it has one baptism, and is therefore one faith; it communes in one Spirit, partakes of one loaf, and is therefore one body; it has one Lord, and is therefore alive in one hope. Indeed, the first of the Church’s four, confessed marks—even before her holiness—is her oneness. Supremely, the Christian faith has “one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (see Eph 4:4–6, 1 Cor 10:17, 12:4–13). Christianity is the religion of plurality in unity. Its God is, after all, three in one—a doctrinal position that was itself articulated out of the ecclesial desire for a theologically articulate unity of confession.9 Beyond practical and spiritual concerns for unity, there is a more fundamental—not to say, more important—methodological problem. As stated above, the popular publication of “revisionist historiographies” began to appear in the nineteen seventies;10 and their methodological characteristics are evident in more recent work as well.11 The criteria in such types of assessment are principally historical. Their discursive mode of presentation is formally narratival, the logic of which is linear and dramatic, ordering successive events in time according to the drama of interpersonal conflicts and crises. The description of events and personages in the history of Catholic thought is thereby given primacy over the role and merit of that sections of the document are those discussing the scientific and unitary criteria of 10 and 11); (12) “seeking and delighting in the wisdom of God” (no. 99). 8 R. R. Reno calls for a “renewed standard theology” amidst the pluralist situation in “Theology after the Revolution,” First Things 7, no. 173 (May 2007): 15–21. Cf. Fergus Kerr, O.P., who seems conflicted by his deference for methodological pluralism and his respect for reason’s unitary objectivity, in “A Different World: Neoscholasticism and Its Discontents,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 8, no. 2 (2006): 128–48. 9 In the first volume of his already classic study of the historical development of Christian doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan makes clear how theologically critical was the issue of doctrinal unity and orthodoxy. The origin of Christianity’s unitary selfawareness emerges from questions of its continuity and discontinuity with Jewish religion, doctrines, and theologies. Indeed, throughout Christianity’s growth, the historical coherence of the Church’s teaching remains a fundamental criterion for establishing the theological design of orthodoxy. See his The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600), vol. 1 in The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 10 See Colish, “St. Thomas Aquinas in Historical Perspective,” 433–34. 11 See, for example, Fergus Kerr, O.P., Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007). 152 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. same history’s properly theoretical issues, such as the nature and tasks of philosophy and sacred theology considered in themselves.12 The historical study of a pope, his encyclical, and their time can rightfully enjoy a certain kind of autonomy of objectives and procedures. But it must be aware of and make explicit its own interpretative limits, apropos the allied disciplines of philosophy and theology that it discusses, and of which it must also make use. Historical inquiry of intellectual movements ought to make plain if it cannot fully address or does not admit the distinction between practical and theoretical orders of being and truth.13 This admission is hermeneutically critical, for it concerns a distinction that is presumed and operative in a text such as Aeterni Patris. Because of this hermeneutical oversight in critical historiographies of neo-Thomism, a major document of the papal Magisterium is absolutely devalued. The charge that Aeterni Patris is erroneous about the history of thought leads to the conclusion that it is wrong about thought itself. As a consequence, basic evaluative claims that a philosophia perennis exists or that the Christian faith is scientifically intelligible would thereby find themselves rejected. For the Catholic theologian and teacher, however, these are no mean or obsolete tenets: they have been consistently supported by the modern Magisterium. 12 This critique is not meant to suggest that historical and speculative modes of inquiry are intrinsically incompatible—only that their proper methodologies must be mutually respectful. Recently, even within traditional strains of Thomism, there have been attempts to use historical enquiry to disclose the fundamental issues of speculative thought and its superiorly conclusive perspectives. For example, see Thomas Joseph White, O.P., Wisdom in the Face of Modernity: A Study in Thomistic Natural Theology (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2009), which, in MacIntyrean fashion, seeks to show the superiority of traditional natural theology, precisely as emergent from historico-phenomenological critiques of the realist objectivity of metaphysical thinking. For two influential, post-Harnackian attempts to discuss the formal prerogatives of historical theology, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Historical Theology: Continuity and Change in Christian Doctrine (Philadelphia:Westminster Press, 1971); and (the more pragmatic) Van A. Harvey, The Historian and the Believer: The Morality of Historical Knowledge and Christian Belief (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961). 13 Cf. Robert A.Ventresca, “ ‘A Plague of Perverse Opinions’: Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris and the Catholic Encounter with Modernity,” Logos 12, no. 1 (2009): 143–68, which offers a well balanced historical assessment of the encyclical. For Ventresca, “[i]t is the historian’s task to understand historical actors and texts on their own terms, to establish intent as well as effect, and to keep historical study from becoming too deeply entangled in contemporary debates,” 144 (italics original). Hence, he is able to render two important judgments, pertinent to our introduction. First, “It is clear . . . that for Leo, not only did thought precede action, it also shaped it, and decisively so,” 153. And “[i]n the end, while many Catholic thinkers welcomed Thomism’s decline and worked to hasten its fall since the 1960s, they may have done so more out of generational rebellion than genuine disaffection,” 164. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 153 Admittedly, one should not condemn particular kinds of work for a failure to answer questions they are not formally designed to ask.14 Nevertheless, it remains that the theoretical aspects of Leo’s encyclical are, in fact, distinguishable from its socio-historical circumstances and results; such, at least, is a basic presupposition of this article. Somewhat despite themselves, then, studies of the Church’s intellectual history of the twentieth-century encourage properly theoretical reflection on the intellectual data of that century. II. Aeterni Patris and Discerning a Criteriology for the Unity of Sacred Theology The following rehearsal of Leo XIII’s second encyclical, Aeterni Patris, will focus on the unitary prospects for theology, considered in its subject matter, intellectual processes, and dialectical shape. As will become clear through our close reading, three criteria are discernible: theology must (1) recognize the fundamental doctrinal authority of the Church; (2) reason philosophically, according to the way perfected by the Scholastics, which has properly scientific prerogatives; and (3) appreciate that proper instruction in Catholic understanding requires discipleship to a master, namely, one who himself recognizes criteria 1 and 2—exemplarily, St. Thomas Aquinas. To be sure, Aeterni Patris is not expressly concerned with the unity of theology. However, the three claims bear upon “the right use of philosophy” and are therefore germane to theological methodology. They are here rendered as a threefold criteriology for the unity of sacred theology. 1. The Church’s Fundamental Doctrinal Authority The first significant aspect of Aeterni Patris is that it is, in fact, a teaching document: even if by way of reminder, the encyclical aims to instruct the faithful about the supernatural truth necessary for salvation.15 The encyclical begins by invoking the salvific expansiveness of the Church’s divine prerogative to teach: “The only begotten Son of the Eternal Father, who came on earth to bring salvation and the light of divine wisdom to men, conferred a great and wonderful blessing on the world when . . . He 14 Romanus Cessario, O.P., makes this concession to Gerald McCool and his work; see “An Observation on Robert Lauder’s Review of G. A. McCool, S.J.,” The Thomist 56, no. 4 (1992): 703. 15 Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Aeterni Patris, Acta Sedis Sanctae, no. 12 (1879): 97–115; English translation: www.vatican.va/holy_father/leo_xiii/encyclicals/ documents/hf_l-xiii_enc _04081879_aeterni-patris_en.html. All references in this section to Aeterni Patris are located parenthetically, in the main text. 154 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. commanded the Apostles to go and teach all nations, and left the Church which he had founded to be the common and supreme teacher of the peoples” (no. 1). Salvific teaching involves communicating the truths of the holy Catholic religion and combating errors against the same. In order that the Church’s members avoid error—a quality of the mind—the Lord ordained for his Body a hierarchical ministry with the authority to teach all that essentially pertains to “salvation” and “divine wisdom [for] men.”16 Leo is concerned about the Church’s teaching ministry and its authority. He judges: “false conclusions concerning divine and human things . . . have now crept into all the orders of the State, and have been accepted by the common consent of the masses” (no. 2). This “common consent” was beginning to accept certain “false conclusions” about God and man, detrimental to the loving exercise of faith: “false opinions, whose seat is in the understanding, influence human actions and pervert them” (no. 2). The Church’s authoritative teaching—necessarily considered both as an active participle and as a substantive noun (doctrina)—was under serious attack. By her very constitution, the Church is an authoritative teacher of truths necessary for salvation. This “authority” means that there is a proper link between the Church’s works of teaching and the Divine Author’s ordinary, revealed initiatives of salvation: man cannot recognizably believe unto salvation without the Church’s teaching.17 “For men 16 Hermeneutically critical questions of authorship and influence will not be addressed. In this regard, generally, see Roger Aubert, “Le contexte historique et les motivations doctrinales de l’encyclique ‘Aeterni Patris,’ ” in Tommaso d’Aquino nel I Centenario dell’Enciclica ‘Aeterni Patris’ (Rome: Società Internazionale Tommaso d’Aquino, 1979); and Claudio Basevi, “Léon XIII y la Redacción de la ‘Aeterni Patris,’ ” Scripta Theologica (1979): 491–533. For an early, standard commentary and assessment of the encyclical, see Franz Cardinal Ehrle, “Die päpstliche Enzyklika vom 4 August 1879 und die Restauration der christlichen Philosophie,” Stimmen aus Maria-Laach 18 (1880): 13–28, 292–317, 388–407, 485–98. Also, as already acknowledged, critical questions of the text’s degree of authority and relationship to other magisterial texts will not be addressed. A prima facie evaluative approach is being taken here, rather than an analytic, interpretive one. (On this distinction between “evaluation” and “interpretation,” see n. 33 below.) Suffice it to say that, as an encyclical, AP is an organ of ordinary papal teaching, which is grounded in the infallible teaching of Leo’s predecessors, and so variously involves credenda, tenenda, and disputanda. For basic introductions in English to the biblical origins, historical development, and contemporary Church’s understanding of the Magisterium, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Magisterium: Teacher and Guardian of the Faith (Naples, FL: Ave Maria Press, 2007); and Francis A. Sullivan, S.J., Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1983). 17 See Vatican Council II, Lumen Gentium, no. 14. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 155 whom the truth had set free were to be preserved by the truth; nor would the fruits of heavenly doctrines by which salvation comes to men have long remained had not the Lord Christ appointed an unfailing teaching authority to train the minds to faith” (no. 1). Hence, the Church’s custody of the depositum fidei necessarily carries an authoritative and pastoral concern for the intellectus fidei—that error be avoided and understanding developed. Significantly, the Church’s work of teaching is related to her power of rule. [The Church’s] constant aim and chief wish [is] this: to teach religion and contend forever against errors. To this end assuredly have tended the incessant labors of individual bishops; to this end also the published laws and decrees of councils, and especially the constant watchfulness of the Roman Pontiffs, to whom, as successors of the blessed Peter in the primacy of the Apostles, belongs the right and office of teaching and confirming their brethren in the faith. . . . [Thus], the supreme pastors of the Church have always thought it their duty [muneris sui] to advance, by every means in their power [totis viribus provehere], science truly so called, and at the same time, to provide with special care that all studies should accord with the Catholic faith. (No. 1) The Church’s tasks of rule and education are intrinsically interrelated because the triplex munera are rooted in Christ’s immediate and personal institution.18 Although these offices to sanctify, teach, and govern are distinct, they are ontologically rooted in the unity of Christ’s personal headship over the Church. Those ordained to exercise a ministerium in persona Christi capitis—especially bishops, who enjoy the fullness of the ministerial priesthood and its sacred power—exercise a diversified ministry that is nevertheless unitarily rooted in a single sacramental character. Hence, one munus is never entirely without the others, at least by implication. Accordingly, Aeterni Patris is not reducible to a set of prudential judgments about the Church’s pastoral exercise of education, since such judgments are intrinsically guided by a particular and authoritative understanding of the faith. These judgments concern her task of teaching the faithful and whole world, which directly concerns salvation. That the Church possesses a divinely authoritative prerogative to present the truths of the faith (as such) that are necessary for salvation is a criterion for the unity of theology: “Theology” is one because its unitary subject matter is apprehended under the aegis of a divinely instituted and assisted authority—the ecclesia docens. As a specific kind of understanding of the faith, then, “theology” possesses a unity that is necessarily rooted 18 See ibid., nos. 18–21, 24–29. 156 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. in and subservient to the Church’s teaching ministry. But how does this “understanding” thence proceed? 2. The Proper Nature and Right Use of Philosophy as Scientia Aeterni Patris’s main concern is for the true faith’s need for and right use of the science of philosophy: “By reason of the gravity of the subject and the condition of our time,” writes the pope, “we are compelled to speak to you on the mode of taking up the study of philosophy, which shall respond most fitly to the excellence of faith, and at the same time be consonant with the dignity of human science” (no. 1). For Aeterni Patris, “philosophy” can be understood as that exercise of reason that leads to conclusions about “the nature of the Divinity, the first origin of things, the government of the world, the divine knowledge of the future, the cause and principle of evil, the ultimate end of man, eternal beatitude, virtue and vice.” Discerning the most ultimate raisons d’être of reality, philosophy is sapiential and ordered to yield that wisdom “which is most necessary to the human race” (no. 10). The desire for wisdom is anthropologically constitutive; man’s nature bears a philosophizing élan and telos. Although the document never uses the term “Christian philosophy,” Aeterni Patris highlights the distinctive dynamics that genuine “philosophia” offers the Christian religion.19 Reciprocally, the Christian faith does not destroy but purifies and elevates the noble integrity of philosophy. “Those . . . who to the study of philosophy unite obedience to the Christian faith, 19 James A. Weisheipl notes that the common ascription, “ ‘The restoration in Catholic schools of Christian philosophy according to the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor,’ is in no official publication of the document, and the phrase philosophia Christiana is nowhere to be found in the entire text.” See James A. Weisheipl, O.P., “Commentary,” in One Hundred Years of Thomism: Aeterni Patris and Afterwards: A Symposium, ed. Victor B. Brezik, C.S.B. (Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1981), 24. Recognizing that “Christian philosophy” is not a term in the text of AP is intended to forestall easy connections to debates around the notion and term in the 1920s and 1930s, which Weisheipl characterizes as “idle.” (On these debates, see Ralph McInerny, “Christian Philosophy,” chap. 4 in Praeambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers [Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 2006], 91–107.) However, Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., discovers that the term “Christian philosophy,” as well as the theme of “restoration,” are explicitly found in speeches of Leo himself, in specific mention of Aeterni Patris. See Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., “The Christian Philosophy of Aeterni Patris,” chap. 1 in Towards a Christian Philosophy (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1990): “The import is that a Christian philosophy existed and flourished in former times. The aim of Pope Leo’s encyclical was to restore the philosophy to its pristine vigor and to further its fruitful growth in the modern era,” 64. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 157 are philosophizing in the best possible way; for the splendor of the divine truths, received into the mind, helps the understanding, and not only detracts in nowise from its dignity, but adds greatly to its nobility, keenness, and stability.” Again: “Faith frees and saves reason from error, and endows it with manifold knowledge” (no. 9). As universal pastor of souls, the pope desires to heal and save all the works of human culture, preeminent among which is philosophical wisdom: “The natural helps with which the grace of the divine wisdom, strongly and sweetly disposing all things, has supplied the human race are neither to be despised nor neglected, chief among which is evidently the right use of philosophy” (no. 2). As the Vicar of Christ, Leo is furthermore determined to teach and preach that only the “right use of philosophy” can discern and safeguard the rational integrity of revealed truth. In this respect, one discovers that the rational explication of the mysteries of the faith (i.e., “theology”) necessarily depends upon a particular conception and use of philosophy, precisely as “scientific.” To be sure, the relationship between theology and the natural sciences in the modern, post-Enlightenment era was one of especial conflict. In many ways, the Magisterium’s negative judgments of error and positive declarations of truth in the time surrounding the First Vatican Council were rooted in this wider cultural conflict. But one of the three main reasons the pope so greatly desired the restoration of Thomas’s teaching was precisely to benefit the natural sciences by “ancient” philosophy’s “study of the nature of corporeal things, inquiring into the laws which govern them and the principles whence their order and varied unity and mutual attraction in diversity arise” (no. 29).20 Leo makes clear that “our philosophy can only by the grossest injustice be accused of being opposed to the advance and development of natural science” (no. 30).21 Rather, the Catholic faith’s understanding and use of “philosophy” is properly scientific, such that any other discipline that is genuinely scientific—whether it be speculative or empirical—need not be found inimical to it. “Every word of wisdom, every useful thing by whomsoever discovered or planned, ought to be received with a willing and grateful mind” (no. 31). Because of this sapiential perspective, intellectual openness is not reducible to an arbitrary 20 The three reasons Leo summons for a restoration of Thomas’s “golden wisdom” are “for the defense and beauty of the Christian faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences” (no. 31). 21 See the monumental 10-volume work of Pierre Duhem, who recognized the great confluence between medieval and modern scientists, hitherto disclaimed by the Enlightenment: Le système du monde: historie des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic (Paris: A. Hermann, 1914). 158 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. harvesting of sundry insights and conclusions. Instead, this openness is a rationally contemplative openness that has for its constitutive goal the integral understanding of reality and the sure possession of truth. For Leo, the rational work that leads to a sapiential possession of the truth is that of “science.” Scientia proceeds from “solid principles” intrinsic to the intelligibility of created reality as such. The most “solid” principle can lead to the most ultimate conclusion, itself the ultimate principium principiorum and the absolute sine qua non—the essentially existent God. Aeterni Patris’s apologetic concern for philosophy’s properly scientific character, then, is both catechetical and evangelical. Because it is proper to the species of homo sapiens, the nature and utilization of scientific enquiry is of absolute concern to the Church’s supreme pastor. “Divine Providence itself requires that, in calling back the people to the paths of faith and salvation, advantage should be taken of human science” (no. 3). Leo proclaims, “[T]he supreme pastors of the Church have always thought it their duty to advance, by every means in their power, science truly so called, and at the same time to provide with special care that all studies should accord with the Catholic faith, especially philosophy, on which a right interpretation of the other sciences in great part depend” (no. 1, emphasis added). Specially, “the duty of religiously defending the truths divinely delivered, and of resisting those who dare oppose them, pertains to philosophic pursuits” (no. 7). The “scientific” integrity of all rational enquiry is of the utmost concern to the Magisterium’s pastoral endeavors, both ad intra and ad extra. And philosophy’s service to theology is especially important. As with other branches of human knowledge, theology must be authentically scientific and oriented by genuine philosophy. Leo teaches that “sacred theology” depends upon philosophy conceived as a science for an integrally discursive unity, in order that [it] may receive and assume the nature, form, and genius of a true science. For in this, the most noble of studies, it is of the greatest necessity to bind together, as it were, in one body the many and various parts of the heavenly doctrines, that, each being allotted to its own proper place and derived from its own proper principles, the whole may join together in a complete union; in order, in fine, that all and each part may be strengthened by its own and the others’ invincible arguments. (No. 6, emphasis added)22 22 Once again, the reader of AP must recognize that the theological prerogatives of Church doctrine are distinct but not separate from the Church’s works of governance. In a manner similar to the way that the Church’s power of rule is exercised so that her worship might bear a clear, reliable, and manifest unity, the The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 159 From the perspective of human agency, theology’s scientific character is precisely that on which the Church’s unitary teaching-as-taught depends. As a science, theology yields a “more accurate or fuller knowledge of the things that are believed, [a] somewhat more lucid understanding, as far as it can go, of the very mysteries of faith . . . ” (no. 6). The scientific work of theology galvanizes and develops the Church’s preaching and teaching. 3. Tradition—Sacred and Scientific A systematic extrapolation of theological methodology is not being attempted here. Rather, Aeterni Patris is being researched for basal criteria that are necessary (even if not sufficient) for understanding the unity of sacred theology. Thus far, we have drawn two such criteria from Leo’s encyclical: (1) pursuant to divine faith, the unity of theology necessarily depends upon the Church’s authoritative teaching of what is necessary for salvation; and (2) because it is an intellectual work of the human creature— who is made in God’s image—the unity of theology formally depends upon the right and integral use of “philosophic study,” understood as a scientia— that is, the reasoned and sapiential knowledge of things according to their proper causes. The third criterion is perhaps the most difficult and controversial to present because it involves a particular school or tradition—and a particular theologian at that. Perforce, the theoretical account for this criterion will be the most provisional of the three. However, it will emerge as a kind of synthesis (not in the Hegelian sense) of criteria 1 and 2. 3.1 Historical Tradition The unity of “sacred theology” is most recognizably thematic in Aeterni Patris’s veneration for “scholastic” methodology: “The doctors of the middle ages, who are called Scholastics, addressed themselves to a great work—that of diligently collecting, and sifting, and storing up, as it were, in one place, for the use and convenience of posterity the rich and fertile harvests of Christian learning scattered abroad in the voluminous works of the holy Fathers” (no. 14, emphases added). But this unity is not reducible to the positive collection of material; it also proceeds according to the formal direction of reason: “By the divine favor of Him who alone gives the spirit of science, wisdom, and understanding, and who, through the ages, as there may be need, enriches His Church with new blessings and strengthens it with safeguards, there was founded by Our fathers, men of eminent wisdom, the scholastic theology . . . [which was] set in order and beautified, and when skillfully arranged and clearly explained in a variety of Church exercises this rule in order to direct (not determine) the unified theological explication of the one depositum fidei. 160 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. ways, handed down to posterity” (no. 14, emphasis added).23 In other words, scholastic science is ordered toward an integral synthesis of traditional doctrine, achieved through discursive intellection and argument. The doctrinal and scientific work of the Scholastics is understood by Leo (citing Sixtus V) as an especially privileged and providential monument in the Church’s divinely guided history and Tradition; it is “handed down to posterity.”24 At the same time, the excellence of a particular school or group of theologians is not being promoted to the exclusion of another or others. Saints Thomas and Bonaventure are equally “glorious doctors,” even if neither is fungible with the other. But much less is scholastic theology being heralded simply for its usefulness in combating contemporary challenges to the faith. Rather, Leo commends the kind of thought practiced by “the Scholastics” as a veritable monument of Church Tradition. Developing the teaching of Sixtus, Leo adds, “Although these words seem to bear reference solely to scholastic theology, nevertheless, they may plainly be accepted as equally true of philosophy and its praises” 23 The three virtues that Leo mentions as proceeding from gifts of “divine favor” are the three Aristotelian-Thomist virtues of the intellect—scientia, sapientia, and intellectus. They are “speculative” or “theoretical” virtues, meaning that their virtuosity rests in disposing their subject to know well.They are distinct from the two “practical” virtues of the intellect, prudentia and ars, which also dispose their subject to know well, but for the purposes of moral action and artful production. See, e.g., ST I–II, q. 57. 24 The notion of “monument” is taken from Yves Congar. Specifically, the kind of “monument” that Thomas’s work represents is that which aids the Church’s understanding of her “constitutive” monuments, such as Scripture and the Apostolic heritage. Congar calls these supplemental monuments “declarative,” and amongst them he includes “theologians (and the use of reason).” The “constitutive” and “declarative” monuments of Tradition compose the Church’s material content or objective rules of faith. In addition, Tradition lives as in a personal subject—the teaching and believing Church. See Yves M.-J. Congar, O.P., Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and Theological Essay (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), 426ff. According to the great scholar of historical theology, Martin Grabmann, “scholasticism” is constitutively traditionary: “Scholastic philosophy is largely determined by the transmission of intellectual material, by the influx of new sources, by the joint action of tradition and independent penetration of traditional treasures of thought. It is precisely in this continuity of life and inheritance, in this organic and progressive unfoldment of previous fundamental doctrines of philosophy that it manifests and proves itself as the philosophia perennis.” See Martin Grabman, “Nature and Problems of the New Scholasticism in the Light of History,” chap. 1 of part 2 in Present-Day Thinkers and the New Scholasticism: An international symposium, ed. John S. Zybura (St Louis: B. Herder Book Company, 1926), 132. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 161 (no. 16). One must infer that, pursuant to its recognized monumentality in Church Tradition, the role of scholastic thought in the Church’s life can never be overturned as such, even should it seem, for a while, passé. Again, Leo cites Sixtus: “The knowledge and use of so salutary a science, which flows from the fertilizing founts of the sacred writings, the sovereign Pontiffs, the holy Fathers and the councils, must always be of the greatest assistance to the Church, whether with the view of really and soundly understanding and interpreting the Scriptures, or for exposing and refuting the various errors and heresies” (no. 15, emphasis added). For Leo and Sixtus, there is a providential commensurability between the depositum fidei and the scientific style of thought that the Scholastics forged.This is to say that the apologetic utility of scholastic thought—just like its doctrinal utility— is perduring. The advent of scholasticism may be historically contingent, but it is henceforth Traditionally incumbent. The pope’s judgments about scholastic philosophy and theology concern the way the Word of God has been transmitted in the past and is present in the Church’s current life. It is a crucial work of the Magisterium to recognize and interpret the monuments of this Tradition. Hence, the pope’s reasons for approving and commending scholastic methodology are not essentially or irreducibly historical, where “history” is understood as an autonomous, secular mode of thought. Instead, the pope’s arguments are about the Traditional preaching of the Church.25 In paragraphs 10 to 25 In its Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, the Second Vati- can Council teaches that “[T]radition [sacra traditio]” is that which “preserves the word of God as it was entrusted to the apostles by Christ our Lord and the Holy Spirit, and transmits it to their successors.” The episcopal successors to the Apostles are those to whom “the task of authentically interpreting the word of God, whether in its written form or in that of tradition, has been entrusted . . . charged with the church’s ongoing teaching function [magisterio], whose authority is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ. This teaching function [magisterium] is not above the word of God but stands at its service, teaching nothing but what is handed down.” Moreover, “ ‘what has been handed down from the apostles’ includes everything that helps the People of God to live a holy life and to grow in faith. In this way, the church, in its teaching, life, and worship, perpetuates and hands on to every generation all that it is and all that it believes.” Hence, the Magisterium’s pastoral exercise is grounded in Tradition, which is both distinct from and yet interrelated with the Magisterium itself: Rooted in the Church’s Tradition, the Apostolic successors, “in turn, enlightened by the Spirit of truth, [are able to] faithfully preserve, expound, and disseminate the word by their preaching. Consequently, the Church’s certainty about all that is revealed is not drawn from holy scripture alone.” See Vatican Council II, Dogmatic Constitution Dei Verbum, Latin with English translation in vol. 2, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1990), no. 9. See Vatican Council II, Dei Verbum, nos. 8, 9, 10. 162 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. 16, Leo is certainly presenting a kind of “history of philosophy,” designed to “prove” his claims “by experience” (no. 10). But this “experience” is precisely that of the Church, as a living subject in time, with the Magisterium as its authoritative interpreter. Leo’s interpretation of the Church’s “history of philosophy” is a description of her Sacred Tradition: his survey is concerned not with mundane intellectual events but the Church’s saving teaching throughout time. Leo teaches that, from the beginning of the Church’s Tradition, “the all-seeing God” has providentially equipped his people with “men of great wisdom, to defend, even by the aid of human reason, the treasure of revealed truths” (no. 10). Much of this work for the pilgrim and militant Church is necessarily defensive; perhaps it is always initially so, but ultimately it is positive and constructive. Thus, while on the one hand, the early Fathers and Doctors of the Church, who well understood that, according to the divine plan, the restorer of human science is Christ, who is the power and the wisdom of God, and in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, took up and investigated the books of the ancient philosophers, and compared their teachings with the doctrines of revelation, and, carefully sifting them, they cherished what was true and wise in them and amended or rejected all else. (No. 10, emphasis added) The “apologists . . . under the guidance of faith, found arguments in human [read: pagan] wisdom to prove that one God, who stands preeminent in every kind of perfection, is to be worshiped; that all things were created from nothing by His omnipotent power; that by His wisdom they flourish and serve each their own special purposes” (no. 11). This doctrinal and apologetic use of “truths [that had] been discovered by the pagan sages” is indicative of a particularly Christian “method” of understanding, “which is not of recent introduction but established use” (no. 4). Because of the intelligible integrity that philosophical reasoning affords, Catholic thought is at once able to defend itself against attack and heresy and to provide reasons for the intrinsic good of the faith. Christian reason is able to judge all things, amounting to a divine perspective. Turning to Irenaeus of Lyons, Leo notes that the first-century bishop “explained (according to Jerome) the origin of each heresy and in what philosophic source it took its rise” (no. 12). At the same time, patristic attention to Catholic, philosophical study “turned the wealth of knowledge which each had gathered up in a course of zealous study”—not only “to the work of refuting heretics,” but further, to “preparing Christians.” This preparation is not reducible to the apologetics of catechesis The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 163 and evangelization but is sapiential in the fullest sense. For example, “the writings on the human soul, the divine attributes, and other questions of mighty moment, which the great Athanasius and Chrysostom, the prince of orators, have left behind them are, by common consent, so supremely excellent that it seems scarcely anything could be added to their subtlety and fullness” (no. 12). The entire field of rational discourse is amenable to the Catholic intellect, which is able to understand, correct, and appropriate thought that is not originally its own. The partly combative and partly positive “sifting” work of the early Fathers and Doctors reached a point of maturity in St. Augustine of Hippo, who “would seem to have wrested the palm from all” (no. 13). With Augustine, the synthesizing perfection of the Scholastics is already inchoate. Not only was he a staunch defender of the faith, in line with the early Fathers; his thought displays a most remarkable breadth and comprehensiveness: “What region did he not diligently explore? . . . How subtly he reasoned on the angels, the soul, the human mind, the will and free choice, on religion and the life of the blessed, on time and eternity, and even on the very nature of changeable bodies” (no. 13). With such an abundance of data for doctrinal reflection, the middle ages faced the unique challenge and opportunity to go beyond “collecting, sifting, and storing up.” Uniquely and providentially, it furthermore belonged to the medieval Scholastic theologians to “skillfully arrange and clearly explain.” As Leo understands it, the specific “endowments” of scholastic theology are its “ready and close coherence of cause and effect, that order and array as of a disciplined army in battle, those clear definitions and distinctions, that strength of argument and those keen discussions, by which light is distinguished from darkness, the true from the false” (no. 16). For the pope, sacred theology’s glory springs from its scientific analogicity. In other words, the “right use of philosophy” having come to full maturity in the Scholastics, “it was the proper and special office of the Scholastic theologians to bind together by the fastest chain human and divine science.” Leo further judges, “[S]urely, the theology in which they excelled would not have gained such honor and commendation among men if they had made use of a lame and imperfect or vain philosophy” (no. 16, emphasis added). If this last statement stood alone, it could be read as an historical opinion. However, read in the context of Leo’s judgments about the role of scientific philosophy and its scholastic apotheosis, it is better read as rhetorical supplement. In summary, the pope’s “history of philosophy” is a doctrino-pastoral interpretation of the Church’s intellectual Traditio: the development of philosophy as a distinct science has served the beautifully stalwart order 164 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. and explication of the faith. But even though this Tradition of scholastic science and wisdom is the common preserve of the Church and her members, nevertheless, its proper instruction depends upon guidance from a suitably Traditional teacher. 3.2 Theological Discipleship The entire encyclical is ordered to one, final exhortation: “Restore the golden wisdom of St.Thomas, and spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences” (no. 31). The promotion of a Thomist restoration is indeed a prudential, pastoral judgment of the practical order (see nos. 28–30); and it is laden with historical presupposition—specifically, that Thomas was once the preeminent philosophical lodestar of the Church. But more fundamentally, this statement indicates that “the right use of philosophy” (see no. 2), as exemplified and directed by the wisdom of Thomas, traditionally and scientifically serves the doctrinal unity of the faith. Leo advocates imbibing from “those purest streams of wisdom flowing inexhaustibly from the precious fountainhead of the Angelic Doctor.” For the pope, these are draughts of “robust” and “solid doctrine” (nos. 26, 27). Leo commends the Angelic Doctor to the Church because his teaching exemplifies a unified methodology of understanding the Church’s one depositum fidei. The unity of Thomas’s “doctrine” is commensurable with the Church’s one depositum. Thomas is a master of doctrinal theology. He is the Church’s supreme theological tradent.26 As was seen above in the first criterion of sacred theology’s unity, an authentically Catholic theology requires original, pistic tenenda, which are properly transmitted by the hierarchical Church. As a second criterion for unity, theology demands a properly scientific mode of enquiry and expression. Leo’s interpretation of Tradition judges that these two criteria are themselves intrinsic to an orthodox understanding of revelation. As a final criterion, Aeterni Patris teaches that one must be trained in the Church’s understanding of doctrine in a way that is both Traditional and scientific. The theologian must learn how to understand “the solid doctrine of the 26 For a classic defense of Thomas’s authority, see Santiago Ramírez, O.P., “The Authority of St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Thomist 15, no. 1 (1952): 1–109. After the publication of Aeterni Patris, there were a number of ecclesial documents of varying degrees of authority that emphasized the substantive doctrine and methodology of Thomas. The comparison of these documents with each other and with AP is beyond the scope of this article. See Pius X, Motu prorio Doctoris Angelici, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 6 (1914): 336–41; Sacred Congregation for Studies, Decree of Approval [the “Twenty-Four Theses”], Acta Apostolicae Sedis 6 (1914): 383–86; Pius XI, Encyclical Studiorum ducem, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 15 (1923): 309–26. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 165 Fathers and the Scholastics”; and he must learn how to “clearly and forcibly demonstrate the firm foundations of the faith, its divine origin, its certain truth, the arguments that sustain it, the benefits it has conferred on the human race, and its perfect accord with reason” (no. 27). Scientific theology is not only Traditional, it is also traditionary—it requires discipleship under a master. Hence, the Church’s universal teaching is categorically assisted when it discerns, amongst the ranks of its doctors, a master of both Tradition and science. For Leo,Thomas is just such a common teacher. “The doctrines of [the Church’s most] illustrious men, like the scattered members of a body, Thomas collected together and cemented, distributed in wonderful order, and so increased with important additions that he is rightly and deservedly esteemed the special bulwark and glory of the Catholic faith” (no. 17, emphases added; cf. nos. 7, 14). Hence, there are material doctrines Thomas treated that are of especial significance to theology; such are his “important additions” to the Church’s traditional theology. But more fundamentally, from a scientific and sapiential point of view, it is the methodology that Thomas uniquely exemplifies that is of perduring and unifying significance: “He reasoned in such a manner that in him there is wanting neither a full array of questions, nor an apt disposal of the various parts, nor the best method of proceeding, nor soundness of principles or strength of argument, nor clearness and elegance of style, nor a facility for explaining what is abstruse” (no. 17). Thomas’s methodology—itself theological—is exemplary because it is perfectly philosophical and faithfully ecclesial. To promote Thomas as directive of doctrinal methodology is, again, a “prudential” decision.27 It is a practical and contingent judgment and, therefore, not of itself proposed to Catholic minds as the Church’s ordinary teaching of faith and morals. However, that the pope deems Thomas exemplary is a theoretical judgment, not practical: The “manner” in which Thomas “reasoned” is itself formally relevant to the nature of understanding the faith. This evaluation is certainly not an infallible judgment about a primary object of the faith; however, neither is it merely practical—since it is dependent upon and indicative of decidedly theoretical understanding.28 27 See Abelardo Lobato, O.P., “Santo Tomas de Aquino en el Magisterio de la Igle- sia desde la ‘Aeterni Patris’ a Juan Pablo,” in vol. 12, Atti dell’VIII Congresso Tomistico Internazionale, 7–30 (Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1981): “The decision entailed by Aeterni Patris constituted an act of cultural politics in the best sense, an act of gubernative prudence,” 14. 28 That St. Thomas Aquinas reasons in a manner that is exemplary for doctrinal theology is arguably a “secondary object” of faith. In distinguishing between primary and secondary objects of magisterial infallibility, Avery Dulles cites from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s 1973 Declaration, Mysterium 166 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. As such, then, Leo’s theoretical judgment calls for extrapolation and probative consideration: What are faith’s possibilities for understanding, such that the pope finds, in Thomas, a superior master? On the one hand, Leo believes that “reason, borne on the wings of Thomas to its human height, can scarcely rise higher, while faith should scarcely expect more or stronger aids from reason than those which she has already obtained through Thomas.”29 On the other hand, the reason why Leo renders this assessment is that “the Angelic Doctor pushed his philosophic inquiry into the reasons and principles of things, which because they are most comprehensive and contain in their bosom, so to say, the seeds of almost infinite truths, were to be unfolded in good time by later masters and with a goodly yield” (no. 18). By virtue of its unique datum—the Church’s deposit of faith—theology must be unitary in some constitutive way. As we have seen, this sacred and doctrinal theology depends upon (1) the Magisterium and (2) scientific philosophy. In turn, the Magisterium’s recognition of theology’s intrinsic need for a Traditional utilization of philosophical science leads her to recognize a third criterion for the unity of sacred theology: the need for (3) disciplinary apprenticeship to a doctor of the Church’s teaching and master of Ecclesiae: “According to Catholic doctrine the infallibility of the Magisterium of the Church extends not only to the deposit of faith [i.e., the primary object] but also to those things without which this deposit cannot be properly safeguarded and explained [i.e., the secondary object].” Dulles then writes, “The extension of infallibility to the primary object is a matter of faith; its extension to the secondary object is theologically certain Catholic teaching.” To say that believing in Thomas’s theological exemplarity is necessary for properly safeguarding and explaining the primary data of the depositum fidei, however, is not to say that being a Thomist (precisely as opposed, say, to being a Bonaventurian or other kind of Scholastic disciple) is necessary for being an orthodox Christian. It is to say, however, that one cannot reject Thomas’s intellectual exemplarity and yet still be able to hold integrally the Catholic faith. Of course, in the same way that one seeks to understand the data of the faith (criterion 1) in a scientific way (criterion 2), so too, one ought to seek to understand and apply the authority of Thomas (criterion 3) in a scientific way (criterion 2). Thomas’s subordinated authority is a theological—not pistic—criterion. Nevertheless, the Church is saying that, if one would learn the unitary nature of doctrinal theology, one must learn St. Thomas, because he has become subjoined to Church doctrine in a way unlike any other Scholastic teacher. On primary and secondary objects of infallibility, including the quotation from the CDF’s 1973 Declaration, see Dulles, Magisterium, 73–74; cf. ST II–II, q. 1, a. 6, ad 1um. 29 One hears Leo’s comment about “the wings of Thomas” echoed in the opening words of John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio (FR), which teaches that “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 167 philosophical science. Given this theoretical judgment, she accordingly promotes such a doctor et magister, who himself recognizes the criteriological significance of both 1 and 2—and this accolade has consistently and uniquely been awarded to the friar from Aquino. Thomas’s doctrina is itself the superior monument of Church Tradition’s doctrinal theology. Paragraph numbers 19–21 of Aeterni Patris explicitly advert to his significance for teaching theology, such that “the minds of all, of teachers as well as of taught, rested in wonderful harmony under the shield and authority of the Angelic Doctor” (no. 21). Amazingly, Thomas’s theological authority bears an analogical similitude to the Church’s authoritative teaching in his own faithful mastery of scientific inquiry (see no. 22). The superior magister seems to participate in the Magisterium. That doctrinal theology is formally something taught and therefore received (rather than invented and constructed) is evident in the criticisms that Leo makes of “novel systems of philosophy.” The two most injurious effects of these systems, originating in “the sixteenth century,” are that they fragment and thus subvert the one, Catholic faith. These effects take place because the faithful have turned to new, overbold teachers. “Men are apt to follow the lead given them.” Thus, once “systems of philosophy multiplied beyond measure” (and once means of communication progressed so as to facilitate the dissemination of these systems),“Catholic philosophers” turned to other, untraditional teachers. “Throwing aside the ancient patrimony of ancient wisdom, [they] chose rather to build up a new edifice than to strengthen and complete the old by aid of the new ill-advisedly, in sooth, and not without detriment to the sciences.”These teachers do not advert to the living Magisterium in a fundamental way (apropos criterion 1), nor are they scientific in a truly philosophic way (apropos criterion 2).30 Neither faith nor reason is adequately appreciated. Furthermore, they vaunt their own teaching and revolutionary projects in place of respecting criterion 3: “A multiform system of [their] kind . . . depends on the authority and choice of any professor.” Obtuse to the interrelation amongst the three criteria of doctrinal theology, they are formally incapable of taking on the role of Catholic teachers. Arguably, it is not until Pope St. Pius X and Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907) that “certain Catholic philosophers” will be 30 Relevantly, James A. Weisheipl writes, “Modern philosophical thought, even in Catholic circles, goes back to the French Catholic philosopher and scientist, René Descartes. . . . Rejecting outright all previous thinkers, he elaborated a new philosophy, which he hoped would be acceptable to Catholic schools.” See James A. Weisheipl, O.P., “The Revival of Thomism as a Christian Philosophy,” chap. 9 in New Themes in Christian Philosophy, ed. Ralph M. McInerny (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1968), 166. 168 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. accused of rejecting criterion 1. At any rate, in 1879, Aeterni Patris makes clear that doctrinal theology cannot—as had been happening—reject criterion 2: For “sacred theology . . . it is absolutely necessary to approach it in the grave manner of the Scholastics, in order that, the forces of revelation and reason being united in it, it may continue to be the ‘invincible bulwark of the faith’ ” (no. 24, emphasis added). And for Leo, St. Thomas Aquinas is the incomparable Scholastic teacher of divine, sapiential science. He is Tradition’s greatest theologian, the Church’s common doctor. 4. Summary of Criteria Three criteria have been drawn from the internal understanding of Aeterni Patris: (1) as pursuant to divine faith, the unity of theology depends upon receiving the Church’s authoritative teaching of that which is necessary for salvation; (2) insofar as it is a work of the human creature, the unity of theology depends upon the integral use of “philosophic study,” classically understood as scientia and a kind of wisdom; and (3) the proper disciplinary understanding of theology requires apprenticeship to a master of criterion 2, who recognizes the fundamental significance of criterion 1; this apprenticeship is formally appropriated by the Magisterium, which is the proper agent of criterion 1. Hence, Thomas’s scientific authority has been introduced into the Church’s pistic authority—he is the master of doctrinal theology nonpareil. Whatever else the work and habits of Catholic theology, it must be schooled in the mind of St. Thomas. III. Fides et Ratio and Confirming the Threefold Criteriology for the Unity of Sacred Theology Here, the unitary theological methodology as discerned in Aeterni Patris is rehearsed in terms of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Fides et Ratio (1998).31 Fides et Ratio is an appropriate historical, intellectual, and magisterial partner to Aeterni Patris. Although the pastoral situation of John Paul’s encyclical certainly differs from that of Leo’s, nevertheless, the two letters are strikingly complementary. Both letters are singularly important documents of popes whose pontificates fell on the heels of the two Vatican Councils. Both are written to combat modern trends of philosophical error. To be sure, the latter pope’s concern for modernity’s intellectual fragmentation is 31 For an excellently balanced and nuanced introduction to the encyclical, see Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., “Faith and Reason: From Vatican I to John Paul II,” in The Two Wings of Catholic Thought, ed. David Ruel Foster and Joseph W. Koterski, S.J. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 193–208. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 169 cast in a phenomenological disclosure of existential wonder. Nevertheless, his encyclical is ultimately concerned with the unitary designs of man’s philosophical dynamism. In the introduction, entitled, “Know Yourself,” Blessed John Paul writes: The one who is desirous of attaining the ultimate truth about life strives to acquire those universal elements of knowing which give him the ability to understand himself better and which lead to the advancement of his own perfection. These fundamental conceptions arise from that wonder which the contemplation of created realities excites in him. . . Without this sense of wondering amazement, man would subside into deadening routine and would bit by bit lose the power of leading a properly personal life. (No. 4)32 John Paul links his existential reflection on man’s unitary, sapiential vocation to what can be justifiably called “neo-Thomist” principles: Despite changing times and an increase in knowledge, we may still admit a sort of nucleus of philosophical ideas, which are regularly present in the history of human reflection. Consider, for example, the principles of noncontradiction, of finality and causality. . . .This means that before our own eyes we may discover something like an implicit philosophy, the principles of which anyone might feel that they possessed, albeit in a general and unconscious way. Since these conceptions are shared in some way by everyone, these same conceptions can effect a certain middle point at which the diverse philosophical schools converge. (No. 4) The extensiveness of Fides et Ratio’s argumentation and intellectual influences preclude an exhaustive treatment of the encyclical in this summarizing and concluding section. There is no want of scholarly debate concerning the encyclical. But, as was our tack with Aeterni Patris, so too, with Fides et Ratio, we shall simply approach the encyclical’s plainly evaluative judgments.33 Now, by way of conclusion, it will be made clear that 32 John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 91 (1999): 5–88. For an English translation, see www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/ documents/hf_jp -ii_enc_15101998_fides-et-ratio_en.html. This translation, however, is widely known to be less than adequate. English quotations are therefore taken instead from the encyclical text as found (with Latin included) in Restoring Faith in Reason, trans. Anthony Meredith, S.J., and Laurence Paul Hemming (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), 2–173. All references in this section to Fides et Ratio are located parenthetically, in the main text. 33 In 2001, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a note that explains the import of the decrees condemning certain aspects of Antonio Rosmini Serbati’s thought, no doubt occasioned by John Paul II’s apparent 170 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio represent a coherent and consistent magisterial teaching about the unitary prerogatives of sacred theology. 1. The Criterion of Authority The first criterion drawn from Aeterni Patris was that the Church possesses a divinely authoritative prerogative to present the truths of the faith necessary for salvation. Because of the Church’s constitutive mission to protect and transmit the deposit of faith, she has a foundational, doctrinal role in handing to theology its proper data. Indeed, according to St. Paul’s understanding of God’s salvific providence, there is a basic confluence between the manifestation of Christ and the Apostolic preaching: “[God] saved us and called us to a holy life . . . according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us before time began, but now made manifest through the appearance of our savior Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel, for which I was appointed [in quo positus sum ego] preacher and apostle and teacher” (2 Tim 1:9–11). In the name of Christ, St. Paul commands bishop Timothy, “Take as your norm [ formam habe] the sound words that you heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. Guard this rich trust [depositum] with the help of the Holy Spirit that dwells within us” (2 Tim 1:13–14). The individual’s salvific introduction to trinitarian life is administered by the hierarchical ministry of the Apostolic Church.34 Accordingly, John Paul’s encyclical teaches about approbation of Rosmini in Fides et Ratio. See Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Note On the Force of the Doctrinal Decrees Concerning the Thought and Work of Fr. Antonio Rosmini Serbati (1 July 2001), www.vatican.va/roman_curia/ congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20010701_rosmini_ en.html. In that note, the CDF makes an important distinction between “interpretation” and “evaluation.” The Congregation warns that a “hasty and superficial reading of these different interventions might make one think that they give rise to an intrinsic and objective contradiction on the part of the Magisterium in its way of interpreting the content of Rosmini’s thought and in the way it evaluates it for the People of God,” no. 2 (cf. no. 7). Historical research is able to shed light on the interpretation of Rosmini’s works that, for many legitimate reasons, was not possible when his works were placed on the Index. Certain of his works and teachings are now understood in a new light, and legitimate “interpretation” has changed. However, the force of the condemned propositions has not changed—even if they are not truly ascribable to Rosmini’s thought: that is, the original “evaluation” remains. Our studies of Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio remain at the level of evaluation, which takes the documents’ arguments and propositions at face value, leaving aside important questions of interpretation. 34 Also see Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction Donum veritatis, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 82 (1990): 1550–70; English translation: www.vatican.va/ The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 171 the word of God’s intrinsic and proper needs for philosophical and theological reason (see no. 85). “The Church, vibrant with the authority which she has in virtue of her being guardian of the Revelation of Jesus Christ, wishes to insist upon the need for this meditation upon truth.” Thus, the pope primarily addresses the encyclical to his brother bishops, “with whom [is shared] the duty of making clear ‘the manifestation of truth’ (2 Cor 4.2)” (no. 6), which office and duty (munus) has “its origin from God himself (cf. 2 Cor 4.12)” (no. 7). Fides et Ratio teaches that the Church Magisterium is formally involved in the transmission of faith— it plays an essential role in theological reflection on revelation.35 Fides et Ratio presents the Church’s munus docendi in terms of a single, overarching duty that is “particularly the Church’s own”—the “Veritatis roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900524_ theologian-vocation_en.html: “From the very beginning of the Church, the ‘standard of teaching’ (cf. Rom 6.17) has been linked with baptism to entrance into the mystery of Christ. The service of doctrine, implying as it does the believer’s search for an understanding of the faith, i.e., theology, is therefore something indispensable for the Church,” no. 1. Although an instruction does not have the same authoritative weight as a papal encyclical, nevertheless, it is to be considered as an authoritative document of the ordinary Magisterium. As Donum Veritatis teaches, “The Roman Pontiff fulfills his universal mission with the help of the various bodies of the Roman Curia and in particular with that of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in matters of doctrine and morals. Consequently, the documents issued by this Congregation expressly approved by the Pope [as Donum Veritatis is] participate in the ordinary Magisterium of the successor of Peter,” no. 18. For an insightful treatment of why doctrinal theology begins with considering the Magisterium as ordinarily constitutive of the Church’s divinely guaranteed teaching, see Giavanni Sala, S.J., “Fallible Teachings and the Assistance of the Holy Spirit: Reflections on the Ordinary Magisterium in Connection with the Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian,” Nova et Vetera (English edition) 4, no. 1 (2006): 29–54. Extrapolating from the logic of the Instruction, Sala argues against positions that would begin with considering the Magisterium’s extraordinary infallibility. For Sala, such positions are the result of a modernly skeptical spirit that encourages dissent and reduces the ordinary Magisterium to an ecclesiastical form of theological opinion. 35 Appropriately, Avery Dulles wrote that “there is an intrinsic connection between the ‘Catholic’ mentality and the specific ecclesial affiliation, though the two are not identical.” Hence, in outlining ten principles of “Catholic theology,” “the Catholic principle par excellence” is the principle of “mediation.”The foundation of this principle is the Incarnation itself, pursuant to which the Church “has received through Christ the fullness of revelation and the fullness of the means of grace.” This mission gives the Church a formally mediating role in the historical work of salvation, and even in the shape of theology. This principle of mediation is further specified by two other principles that Dulles outlines as constitutive of Catholic theology, the “dogmatic” and “hierarchical” principles. See Avery Dulles, S.J., “Principles of Catholic Theology,” Pro Ecclesia 8, no. 1 (1999): 73–84. 172 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. diaconiam” (no. 2). The Church tends both to faith and reason, which “seem to be like two wings by which the human spirit is raised up toward the contemplation of the truth” (no. 1). For John Paul, the unity of theological reasoning is rooted in the unity of truth itself, about which the Church has an ultimate concern. These now-famous “two wings” of the human spirit are not merely, however, two epistemic emphases but two orders of intentional reality, distinct in origin and object. The encyclical focuses on this duplex ordo as a fundamental doctrine of Christianity, critical for Christian thinking. John Paul affirms that Vatican I “solemnly confirm[ed] the doctrine that the ordinary papal Magisterium had always expressed, [making] it quite clear how inseparable and at the same time how distinct from each other are . . . natural knowledge and Revelation of God, reason and faith.” Vatican I “solemnly affirmed” the duplex ordo cognitionis (no. 53; also see nos. 8 and 9).36 Following the existence of a duplex ordo cognitionis, there exist three types of theology. In Fides et Ratio, the three kinds of theological knowledge are named kinds of “wisdom.” John Paul’s decision to speak of three kinds of “wisdom” is rooted in his desire to explicate the intellectual unity of man’s spiritual vocation. Nevertheless, they are clearly qualified as kinds of theology, and are exemplarily located in the person and work of Thomas:37 one is rooted in “the primacy of that wisdom which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and which leads to knowledge of things divine. This wisdom knows by means of connaturality.” There is also a “philosophical form” of wisdom, “supported by the faculty by which the intellect, within its own proper limits, is ordered to the making of enquiries.” Finally, there is “the theological form, which depends on revelation and examines the truths of faith, by attaining the very mystery of God” (no. 44). These three kinds of wisdom accord with the distinction between mystical, natural, and sacred theology. Nevertheless, these three kinds of 36 Peculiarly, the International Theological Commission’s “Perspectives” shrinks from mentioning a duplex ordo of knowledge, even as it speaks in terms of reason’s work in the distinguishable lights of the natural and supernatural. Likely, the authors were apprehensive of supporting what could be taken as the purportedly scholastic and proto-atheistic bifurcation of nature and grace. 37 Cf. Pius XI’s encyclical Studiorum ducem, commemorating the 600th anniversary of Thomas’s placement on the universal sanctoral calendar, which states the following: “Sacred studies, therefore, being directed by a triple light, undeviating reason, infused faith, and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, by which the mind is brought to perfection—no one ever was more generously endowed with these than Our Saint [Thomas Aquinas],” no. 13. See Pius XI, Encyclical Studiorum ducem, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 15 (1923): 309–26; English translation in Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. J. F. Scanlon (London: Sheed and Ward Publishers, 1931), 271–99. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 173 theology are rooted in a unitary wisdom because the origin of all truth is God. “[St. Thomas] argued [ratiocinatus] that the light both of reason and [of] faith comes from God” (no. 43). The complementary benefit of faith and reason establishes the possibility for a truly unitary wisdom that reasons about the revelation the Church transmits. John Paul’s interest in the unity of truth is an interest in “wisdom.” To this end, John Paul goes beyond Aeterni Patris in emphasizing the Christological character of sacred theology: “The unity of truth is a basic postulate of human reason, which finds expression in the principle of non-contradiction. Revelation confirms the certainty of this unity by demonstrating that the Creator God is also the God of the history of salvation. . . . This unity of truth, natural and revealed, finds its living and personal identity in Christ” (no. 34). Just as the incarnate Word is the living mediation between God’s supernatural and natural measures of truth, man’s efforts at theology (in the strict sense) mediate between divine mysticism and discursive reasoning. It is, after all, sacred theology that architectonically distinguishes three kinds of wisdom. “The truth which flows from revelation is one which must also be understood under the light of reason” (no. 35). Human reason is able to work on the data of faith according to its proper processes because revelation itself is, we might say, a humanized word. Concordantly, arguing against a hyper-hermeneuticism, John Paul teaches that “faith clearly requires that human speech should in some universal way give expression—even though voiced analogically, though no less meaningfully—to divine, transcendent reality.38 Deprived of this assumption, the Word of God, which despite its use of human language remains divine [quod semper divinum est licet lingua humana contineatur], 38 An example of the historicism and hermeneuticism that John Paul decries can be found in the work of Claude Geffré, O.P., who summarizes well the methodology of “dogmatic theology” but opposes it to a historical and hermeneutical “critical theology”: “The starting point of theology is always the fundamental experience of salvation offered by God in Jesus Christ.The task of critical theology is to restore this fundamental experience by disassociating it from representations and interpretations belonging to a world of experience that is past. This work of interpretation only becomes possible by beginning with our historical situation and our present experience of human existence.” See Claude Geffré, “The Crisis in Metaphysics and its Consequences for the Future of Dogmatic Theology,” in Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Thought, ed. Richard P. Woods (River Forest, IL: Dominican Publications, 1988), 24–41, at 36–37. Our study of Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio suggests, to the contrary, that theology does not begin with the interpretation of personal experience—the “reading of an event,” in the phenomenological phraseology of Geffré—but with receiving in faith the teaching and preaching of the hierarchical Church. The problem with a methodology such as Geffré’s lies in the 174 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. could signify nothing of God” (no. 84). Turning again to Vatican II, John Paul affirms the intelligible unity of the revealed economy: “This economy of Revelation is realized by the inner unity of the deeds and words: as a result the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and bring to light the mystery they contain” (no. 10). Because truth is one and the revealing God is one, the historical deeds of salvation are commensurable with the logical words of revelation. Even supernatural meaning is logical “by means of that amazing ‘condescension’ that reflects the logical reason of the Incarnation” (no. 94).Theology is a logical science because the human mode of knowledge in which God reveals himself is itself logical. The apprehension of revelation’s intelligible potentiality is the first step of theological exercise. Pursuant to the intelligible appeal of the data of revelation precisely as theological matter, the theologian begins scientific work. “Theology, insofar as it is the science of faith, is ordered by two established methodological principles, which are the auditus fidei and the intellectus fidei. With one principle it makes its own the content of Revelation, illustrated in the progress of time by Sacred Tradition, Holy Scripture, and the living Magisterium of the Church. With the other, theology wishes to reply to the demands of reason by means of speculative reasoning” (no. 65).39 The auditus fidei is not merely the possession of the habit of faith.40 Here, Fides et Ratio considers auditus fidei as a “methodological principle” by which one “makes one’s own” the data of revelation. The impetus to understand is begun. degree to which its hermeneutic of criticism divorces the primacy of particular “experience” from that of the Church’s universal preaching. The fundamental ecclesial “experience” of faith is the auditus fidei. Also, see Reinhard Hütter, “Theological Faith Enlightening Sacred Theology: Renewing Theology by Recovering Its Unity as Sacra Doctrina,” The Thomist 74, no. 3 (2010): 370–405, which makes clear that an existentialistic understanding of faith (in theology) cannot promote the unitary dynamism of theological work, whereas the classical notion of supernaturally infused faith can. 39 Meredith and Hemming’s translation of FR renders “intellectus fidei” as “understanding of faith.” This is certainly an acceptable translation; but the Latin preserves the appropriate ambivalence of the genitive’s subjective and objective function. “Intellectus fidei” is maintained, moreover, for a different reason: “Intellectus” not only properly denotes the perfective work of theological reason; it also suggestively connotes the originative possession of first principles. The Latin “auditus fidei” is preserved for the sake of stylistic balance with “intellectus fidei.” Use of the Latin finally suggests the technicality of these terms. 40 Neither is the auditus fidei a pre-pistic exegesis of data. Consider the following rejoinder Thomas Weinandy, O.F.M., Cap., makes to the Protestant theologian The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 175 The dialectical involvement between such critical apprehension and speculative explanation is affirmed in Fides et Ratio. John Paul notes that philosophy and the history of philosophy can help render more intelligible the conceptualizations of particular ecclesial traditions (no. 65). But John Paul gives precedence to speculative over positive functions of sacred theology. “A serious duty of theology is the interpretation of sources; but there is another of even greater prudence and necessity and that is the perception of revealed truth and the explanation of the intellectus fidei” (no. 97). There is no theology prior to the move from auditus fidei to intellectus fidei. For, if we devote our attention to the intellectus fidei, we ought above all to remember that the divine Truth “which is proposed to us in Holy Scripture understood in accordance with the teaching of the Church,” enjoys its own natural intelligibility, which is so logically coherent that it stands as an authentic wisdom. Intellectus fidei opens up this truth more clearly, both by perceiving the logical and intellectual structures of the propositions which make up Christian doctrine, and above all by making quite clear the salvific meaning contained by these propositions. (No. 66) The intelligible dynamism of revealed data is available only in faith, and, having solicited man’s intellectual operations, it initiates the work of theology. And the intrinsic requirements of this work are such as to require a scientific criterion. 2. The Criterion of Science For Fides et Ratio, the clear shape of intellectus fidei is one of sapiential science, wherein positive and speculative functions interpenetrate. “The beginning and the primal source of theology is the Word of God revealed in history, while its ultimate purpose is necessarily the understanding of that Word, which grows gradually with the progress of time. But since the Word of God is Truth (cf. Jn. 17.17), the human search for truth—the John Webster: “The auditus fidei is not simply the mastery of sources (and even as mastery of sources only in a nuanced sense), but something much more profound. It is primarily the hearing of the Gospel and the accepting of it in faith. . . . What is proposed to the hearer is the Gospel as proclaimed in Scripture as traditionally understood and interpreted and as authoritatively taught by the past and present Church.” Instead, “Webster interprets the auditus fidei as ‘the pretty straightforward matter of mastering the sources, so that theology has the data on the basis of which it can proceed to its much more interesting and intellectually demanding task of speculation.” See Thomas Weinandy, “Fides et Ratio: A Response to John Webster,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 951 (2000): 231. 176 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. philosophical mind obeying its own laws—can only help God’s Word to be better explained” (no. 73). Regardless of its natural or supernatural object, truth is one, and its human mode of apprehension is the same: the adaequatio rei et intellectus of scholastic science (see no. 82). The form of theology, then, is argumentative; and it seeks certainly known conclusions. “Dogmatic theology, for its part, ought to possess the ability of arriving at an understanding of the mystery of the One and Triune God and of the economy of salvation, whether through the structure of narrative, or preferably through the form of reasoning. It ought to achieve this above all by the use of those intellectual conceptions that are formed with critical judgment, in a way communicable to all” (no. 66). Of course, for Fides et Ratio, the end of theology is not mere conceptualization but service of the truth. “The theological work of the Church is assigned as its first priority the proclaiming of faith and catechesis” (no. 99). Theology is a scientific service of the Church’s sapiential mission: “The principal task of theology consists in this, to provide both an understanding of Revelation and the teaching of the faith” (no. 93). Although Fides et Ratio does not develop an analytical apparatus for theology, it clearly has orienting methodological concerns for Tradition’s scientific theology. Hence, it acknowledges the fact of historical conditioning, yet repudiates a historicism that would reduce the data of theology to contingent experience or the work of theology to historical interpretation. “Metaphysics, therefore, exercises an important mediating role in theological research. Theology, however, destitute of a metaphysical outlook, will be incapable of going beyond the investigation of religious experience and will not be therefore the intellectus fidei” proper to absolute truth (no. 83). “No historical expression of philosophy can claim for itself the power of embracing all truth, nor of offering a total explanation of man, the world, and man’s relationship with God” (no. 51). Such a unitary prerogative belongs to sacred theology alone. Thus, for John Paul, the “metaphysical range of reason” is a constitutive dynamic of theology’s proper work. Confirming our premise in approaching the theoretical serviceability of Aeterni Patris, Fides et Ratio teaches that the human intellect must be, by nature, a speculative faculty. “The power of speculation [speculandi potestas] is proper to the human intellect” (no. 4). Fides et Ratio does not proffer irrefutable demonstrations that prove that there is an “intellect” and that it is “speculative.”To engage in such argument falls within the domain of philosophy.41 Nevertheless, 41 Hence, see FR nos. 82–85, under Chapter 7, Postulata Hodierna et Officia, which begins with the section Verbi Dei postulationes haud renuntiandae. Here, John Paul declares the three speculative concerns that are crucial for addressing the “crisis of The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 177 given the tasks of the Church’s teaching ministry, the human intellect cannot but be speculative. Through speculative science, reason is able to form “an exact reflection, and so a logical coherence of assertions is built up through an ordered discipline, distinguished by a firm body of teachings” (no. 4). Still, John Paul is not so interested in rigorously defining a distinction between the practical and speculative finalities of the intellect for Fides et Ratio. He rather melds the two in his phenomenological meditation. However, one can see that the practical exigencies of philosophical reflection point toward speculative ultimates; and John Paul sees this practical-speculative transcendence in all cultures throughout time: “Shining through the variety of human cultures in different regions of the world there exist those primary questions by which human life is marked out: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? Why do evils appear? What remains to us after this life?” (no. 1). John Paul is talking about a philosophical potentiality that is a natural and constitutive dynamism of the human intellect. Because the human intellect is speculative, the speculative science of theology is necessarily principled. Moreover, the role of understanding first principles (intellectus) is part of the Church’s theological heritage. The “fathers” of this heritage, John Paul stirringly suggests, were in fact precursors to the Christian dispensation: “The first task of the fathers of philosophy was to display the close link between reason and religion. As they broadened their view to include universal principles, they no longer acquiesced in the ancient myths, rather they desired to support their belief in divinity on rational grounds. Thus, a journey began that left behind the ancient and local traditions and launched itself into a progress that was in agreement with the demands of universal reason” (no. 36). The natural theology of the pagans adumbrated the sacred theology of the Church. For John Paul, St. Augustine “was the first to produce a complete synthesis of philosophy and theology in which the teachings of Greeks and Latins alike flowed together.” As we saw above, this confluence is not confused. In Augustine’s first attempts at a sacred and sapiential science,“the perfect unity of knowledge resting upon the teaching of the Bible could be supported and upheld by a crown of speculative thinking” (no. 41). Philosophy mediates natural religious knowledge and supernatural theological knowledge (see no. 36). meaning” in contemporary society and for integrally explicating the word of God: the sapiential character of philosophy, the capacity of man to arrive at knowledge of the truth (as the adaequatio rei et intellectus that the Scholastic doctors taught), and the metaphysical range of reason. The Magisterium recognizes these concerns and calls upon philosophy to address them according to its own discipline. 178 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. Hence, Fides et Ratio affirms the intellect’s natural speculative ability to know the existence of immaterial things. For the pagan pilgrimage in preparation for receiving the light of the nations, the “notion of divinity itself was most useful for this journey” (no. 36).42 The encyclical teaches that this ability to know with certitude the existence of immaterial substances—foremost among them, God—rests in the mind’s analogical capacity to measure reality in absolute truth.43 The following passage is 42 Hence, in an interview first published in 1987, Yves Congar is perhaps overly negativist when he says, “It is easier to pray than to talk about God. First of all, this word ‘God’ does not really have a content of itself.We give it one: the Creator, the Lord, the Ruler, the end of all things, but in itself the word does not have any content. If one wants to give a content to God over and above this sovereignty, great though that is (see Islam and Judaism), one must say: God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” It is one thing to say that man does not have innate concepts (much less words) of God, or to say that natural conceptions of “God” are at best negative or indirectly drawn. However, John Paul affirms the propaedeutic and evangelical trustworthiness of analogically drawn notions of God, which, substantially attributive, depend on more than the mere notion of sovereignty (or, one might add, on the subject’s feeling of absolute dependence). Cf. ST, I, qq. 8–12. See Bernard Lauret, ed., Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversations with Yves Congar, trans. John Bowden (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), 59. All this being said, of course, one must see the truth and beauty of Vatican II’s doctrinal and pastoral emphasis on biblical and trinitarian faith. Thus, commenting on Joseph Ratzinger’s Introduction to Christianity, Aidan Nichols writes, “Are we to say that the God of faith is identical simpliciter with the God of the philosophers? No. The biblical revelation could not leave the philosophical concept of God as it stood. In the light of Christ, it had to factor into that concept the notion of all-sustaining love which, left to its own resources, philosophical reflection could not have attained. In this sense, the God of the philosophers is quite different from what the philosophers had thought him to be, though he does not thereby cease to be what they discovered.” See Aidan Nichols, O.P., From Hermes to Benedict XVI: Faith and Reason in Modern Catholic Thought (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 2009), 227. The relevant notion here is FR’s “Christian philosophy,” which John Paul describes in its “objective type, dealing with the material itself: Revelation brings into clear focus certain truths, which, though available to reason, would never have been discovered by it were it left to its own resources. In this general area certain questions are asked about the concept of a personal God who is both free and creator, which have had a profound influence on the progress of philosophical thought, above all with respect to the philosophy of ‘being’ ” (no. 76). That is, divine revelation helps to clarify the philosophical conceptualization of God. 43 Contrary to the opinion that, amongst all magisterial encouragements of St. Thomas and Thomism, no particular philosophical doctrine had ever before received express advocacy (see Knasas, note 45, below), it seems that the Church’s theological tradition holds paramount the doctrine of analogical knowledge and naming. Indeed, the classic text of Rom 1:20 already contains, in nuce, the doctrine; and dogmatically, it was already intimated shortly before the time of The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 179 nothing if not an expression of the doctrine of the analogy of truth, and its intrinsic significance for sacred theology: It is necessary that faithful reason should possess a naturally true and appropriate knowledge of created things, the world and of man, things which are also treated by divine Revelation; even more than this, it should have the capacity for defining this knowledge through the form of understanding and argument [i.e., through the form of science]. For this reason, speculative dogmatic theology presumes and embraces the philosophy of man and of the world, and more profoundly of “being” itself, which rests on objective truth. (No. 66) The analogy of truth is ultimately reducible to the analogy of being. Similarly for Fides et Ratio, “If the intellectus fidei wishes to enfold within itself Thomas at Lateran IV (see DS, 804–806). But in the modern era, i.e., after the “drama [tragoedia] of the separation of faith and reason” (cf. FR, no. 45), the doctrine of analogy receives repeated affirmation, and the authority of Thomas is routinely cited.Vatican I uses the doctrine of analogy without naming Thomas (cf. DS, 3015, 3016). But Pope St. Pius X states the following: “The principles of philosophy laid down by St. Thomas Aquinas are to be religiously and inviolably observed, because [among other reasons]. . . . [t]hey also marvelously illustrate the diversity and analogy between God and his works.” “The capital theses in the philosophy of St. Thomas are not to be placed in the category of opinions capable of being debated one way or another, but are to be considered as the foundations upon which the whole science of natural and divine things is based . . . ” (See Pius X, Motu Proprio Doctoris Angelici, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 6 [1914]: 336–41; English translation in Jacques Maritain, St.Thomas Aquinas, 262–71.) In the promulgated 1917 Code of Canon Law, Pope Benedict XV supported the TwentyFour Theses, published by the Sacred Congregation of Studies three years earlier (following Pius X’s mention of “capital theses” in Doctoris Angelici). Two theses specifically invoke the doctrine of analogy: no. 4, ens, quod denominatur ab esse, non univoce de Deo ac de creaturis dicitur, nec tamen prorsus aequivoce, sed analogice, analogia tum attributionis tum proportionalitatis; no. 22, Deum, esse neque immediata intuitione percipimus, neque a priori demonstramus, sed utique a posteriori, hoc est, per ea quae facta sunt, ducto argumento ab effectibus ad causam: videlicet, a rebus quae moventur ad sui motus principium et primum motorem immobilem; a processu rerum mundanarum e causis inter se subordinatis, ad primam causam incausatam; a corruptibilibus quae aequaliter se habent ad esse et non esse, ad ens absolute necessarium; ab iis quae secundum minoratas perfectiones essendi, vivendi, intelligendi, plus et minus sunt, vivunt, intelligunt, ad eum qui est maxime intelligens, maxime vivens, maxime ens; denique, ab ordine universi ad intellectum separatum qui res ordinavit, disposuit, et dirigit ad finem. (See Acta Apostolicae Sedis, 6 [1914]: 383–86.) Much more recently, the Church’s universal catechism introduces its synthesis of doctrine by explaining the possibility of knowing and naming God in terms of analogy, and with reference to Thomas. See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), nos. 39–43 (cf. 31–35). 180 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. all the treasures of the theological tradition, it must have recourse to a philosophy of being. . . . Within the compass of the Christian metaphysical tradition the philosophy of being is an active or dynamic philosophy, which presents truth by means of structures which are at the same time ontological, causal, and capable of being shared with others” (no. 97). Of course, the ultimate ontological measure of all truth, naturally and supernaturally apprehensible, is God himself. Hence, the appropriate juncture for the analogical complements of natural and supernatural knowledge is in the light of revelation. Nevertheless, the proper functions of philosophical and theological reason are never blurred. “Revealed truth, which begins from the splendor created by that which IS, clearly shines upon all that exists and will enlighten the journey of philosophical reflection. Christian Revelation therefore becomes the true place where the philosophical and theological disciplines in their mutual relationships are yoked together and interact” (no. 79). Although these disciplines enjoy their rightful autonomy, Fides et Ratio recognizes that they are inherently traditional. And the mediator between sacred and philosophical traditions is none other than the Master from Aquino. 3. The Criterion of Tradition According to both Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio, the proper disciplinary understanding of theology requires apprenticeship to a master of theological science who is a faithful son of the Church. The master nonpareil is St. Thomas Aquinas. We have already seen the way John Paul’s encyclical extols the scholastic notion of theology: a speculative task of inquiry into revelation that aims for universal judgments through the scientific connection of principles and concepts. This scientific prerogative of sacred theology is a definitive achievement and internally appropriated dynamic of the living Church. Dogmatic theology is a speculative theology; and the Scholastics are models of such. Above all, however, St. Thomas receives in Fides et Ratio an entire subsection dedicated to his methodology. English translations have rendered this subtitle as “The enduring originality of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas” and “The enduring originality of the propositions of St. Thomas Aquinas,” neither of which adequately captures the Latin: “Perennis sancti Thomae Aquinatis sententiarum novitas.” Arguably, John Paul is evoking an important connection between Thomas and perennial philosophy.44 44 The Latin of FR uses the word “perennis” (or its declined modifications) seven times; (in addition to the subtitle mentioned in the main text above, see nos. 12, 60, 85, 87, 94, and 97). Every instance refers to man’s philosophical desires or endeavors. It would seem John Paul intends to maintain the notion that there The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 181 According to John Paul, “St. Thomas has always been rightly and deservedly regarded by the Church as the Master of teaching and also as an example of the way of undertaking theology” (no. 43). Both Thomas’s doctrine and methodology are traditional. Famously, the encyclical states that the Church does not canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to the others. However, the pontiff means something more subtle than to suggest a vague sort of pluralism: “Suam ipsius philosophiam non exhibet Ecclesia, neque quamlibet praelegit peculiarem philosophiam aliarum damno” (no. 49). Not only is John Paul alluding to the teaching and mindset of Pius XII’s Humani generis (1950). He is saying that the Church does not, of herself, produce a constitutively exclusive philosophical school; and that her preference of a particular school ought not to be taken as a condemnation of others.45 The import of the statement is to declare that exists a “perennial philosophy,” while he expands the appreciation for perennial truth beyond the province of “philosophy.” The Vatican website’s English translation (see n. 1, above) totally avoids using “perennial,” either glossing over the adjective entirely or using “enduring” instead. This rendering is a disservice to English readers, who would be familiar with the subject matter in association with the word “perennial.” 45 Even apart from adverting to the Latin, John Haldane opines, “While the Pope repeatedly assures readers that he is not seeking to accord priority to any single philosophical system—writing that ‘The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others’ (no. 49)—the suspicion arises that in truth he believes that only one approach (or family of approaches) will do.” See Haldane, “The Diversity of Philosophy and the Unity of its Vocation: Some Philosophical Reflections on Fides et Ratio,” in Faith and Reason: The Notre Dame Symposium 1999, ed. Timothy L. Smith (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2001), 142. A bit differently, we believe that one has grounds for more than a protesteth-too-much “suspicion.” For an attempt to single out a particular member from the “family of [Thomist] approaches,” see John F. X. Knasas, “Fides et Ratio and the Twentieth Century Thomistic Revival,” New Blackfriars 81, no. 955 (2000): 400–408. Knasas argues that, alone amongst papal documents advocating Thomism insofar as it advocates a particular doctrine—the primacy of the actus essendi —John Paul II’s encyclical authoritatively endorses existential Thomism of the Gilsonian variety. Differently, Michael Sweeney uses the apparent tension between the encyclical’s openness to other schools of thought and its superior praise for medieval scholasticism as hermeneutically directive. For Sweeney, the pope is not judging the possibilities of modern thought according to medieval thought. Rather, he extols medieval insights into the concept of nature, the metaphysics of truth, and the objectivity of the moral order. At the same time, his notion of “Christian philosophy” admits and even encourages the possibility for other perspectives that would accommodate these fundamental notions and principles. What Sweeney does not sufficiently emphasize, however, is that the possibility for intellectual pluralism in the Church is moored to a unitary vision that finds its traditional explication in the 182 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. the modern Church’s preference for neo-scholastic Thomism does not eo ipso vitiate the validity of other schools. Rather, the reason for the Magisterium’s consistent praising of St. Thomas was and is “to put him forward as both leader and exemplar of the discipline of theology” (no. 78). John Paul admits that this “was not in order to embrace certain philosophical positions” (no. 78). But given our exposition in the two sections above, it seems clear that John Paul does not mean that there are no basic, essential philosophical positions that are intrinsic to the practice of sacred theology—such as the speculative constitution of the intellect, the probative structure of reasoned inquiry, or the analogy of being and truth. Rather, he means to say that these philosophical positions are so basic that they are not the property of Thomas or a particular (Thomist) school, which the Magisterium has selected. Hence, at the same time, John Paul does not shrink from placing Thomas and Thomism on a philosophical and theological—on a sapiential pedestal: “The design of the Magisterium was, and is, to indicate how St. Thomas is an authentic exemplar for those who seek truth. In his reflections, the demands of reason and the vigor of faith found the most profound unity of any that human thought attained” (no. 78). Scholastics (rather than “the medievals”), and above all, in St. Thomas and his progeny. See Sweeney, “The Medievalism of Fides et ratio,” in The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on Fides et ratio, ed. Foster and Koterski, 163–76. Apparently at odds with other statements of the Magisterium, Pius XI’s Studiorum ducem states the following: “We consider that Thomas should be called not only the Angelic, but also the Common or Universal Doctor of the Church; for the Church has adopted his philosophy for her own, as innumerable documents of every kind attest” (emphases added), no. 11. Two things can be said here. First, what the two popes mean by “for her own” likely amounts to two different senses. John Paul seems to mean that there is no one philosophical system that controls—to the exclusion of all others—the understanding of Truth, whether natural or revealed. Pius seems to mean that, if one honestly considers the Church’s most important teachings, especially at Trent and Vatican I, Thomas’s teaching is especially and uniquely employed. These two senses are entirely compatible. Secondly, one must consider that the Latin of Pius says that it is Thomas’s “doctrinam” that “suam Ecclesia fecerit.” This statement is rendered in support of the title “Common” (in addition to “Angelic”). Pius does not call Thomas the “only doctor” or even “doctor of doctors.” Pius is speaking quite generally of “teaching,” and not merely “philosophy” or much less a philosophical “system.” Here, “doctrina” generally refers to Thomas’s “ratio, doctrina, et principia” that Pius has just cited from the 1917 Code of Canon Law. The canon that he extols binds all seminarians to study of the Angelic Doctor’s “method, doctrine, and principles” as foundational to both philosophy and theology (see Can. 1366, §2). And this “ratio, doctrina, et principia” forges a veritable sacra doctrina that is very much the privileged intellectual resource of the Church. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 183 To some, it might seem that John Paul’s promotion of the Angelic Doctor, especially in paragraph number 49, is too reserved to be in continuity with the Church’s previous neo-Thomist fervor. However, consider the judgment of Humani Generis: “We know well from the experience of the centuries, the method of Aquinas is singularly preeminent both of teaching students and for bringing truth to light; his doctrine is in harmony with Divine Revelation and is most effective both for safeguarding the foundation of the faith and for reaping, safely and usefully, the fruits of sound progress.”46 Paragraph number 60 of Fides et Ratio, which discusses the Church’s postconciliar recognition and promotion of philosophical study, supports this judgment. It concludes with a citation of a handful of documents from the hand of John Paul himself, which unreservedly promote the study of Thomas.47 In two documents especially—“Perennial Philosophy of St. Thomas for the Youth of Our Times” and “Method and Doctrine of St. Thomas in Dialogue with Modern Culture”—John Paul links his appreciation for Thomas with that of Leo XIII and all intervening popes. He quotes not only preconciliar encomiums but also the following one of Pope Paul VI: “Without a doubt, St. Thomas, as willed by divine Providence, reached the height of all ‘scholastic’ theology and philosophy, as it is usually called, and set the central pivot in the Church around which, at that time and since, Christian thought could be developed with sure progress.”48 For John Paul, “The hundred years of the encyclical Aeterni Patris have not passed in vain, nor has that celebrated document of pontifical teaching gone out of date . . . . Suffice it to consider the consistent Magisterium of the Church from Pope Leo XIII to Paul VI and what was completed in Vatican Council II . . . ”49 The Magisterium of John Paul “repeat[s] the thought with which Leo XIII ends his Aeterni Patris”: Follow St. Thomas.50 Although Thomas stands out as the exemplary tradent of sacred theology, nevertheless, it is only because he is subservient to a greater tradition of wisdom—that of the Church itself.51 “Theology, in its searching for 46 Pius XII, Encyclical Letter Humani generis, Acta Apostolicae Sedis 42 (1950): 561–78; English translation: www.jesus.2000.years.de/holy_father/pius_xii/encyclicals/ documents/hf_p-xii_enc_12081950_humani-generis_en.html. See no. 31. 47 FR, no. 84. 48 See John Paul II, “Method and Doctrine of St. Thomas in Dialogue with Modern Culture,” in Two Lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Donald A. Gallagher and Ralph J. Masiello (Niagara, NY: Niagara University, 1987), 265. 49 Ibid., 264 50 See John Paul II, “Perennial Philosophy of St. Thomas for the Youth of Our Times,” in Two Lectures on St. Thomas Aquinas, ed. Gallagher and Masiello, 225. 51 Nicholas Rescher makes a helpful distinction in stating that, with regard to dogmatic matters of faith, one owes “allegiance and acceptance” to the Church’s 184 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. truth, by its very nature enjoys the mark of ecclesiality as the tradition of the people of God” (no. 101). Although “truth cannot be confined in one time or cultural form, it is known within history, [while going] beyond history” (no. 95). Hence, the Church’s own teaching cannot but be understood according to the “light of tradition” (no. 87). John Paul’s recognition of knowledge as traditional—both naturally and supernaturally—is arresting. Whoever today wishes to respond, like philosophers, to the demands that the Word of God imposes upon human reflection should, we believe, work out their ideas in accordance with these demands [of a unitary wisdom], and should also point out their coherence with the great tradition, beginning with the ancients, passing through the Fathers of the Church and the masters of Scholasticism, and coming at last to an understanding of the particular fruits of more recent and even contemporary reflection. . . . This appeal to tradition is not simply a remembrance of time past, rather, it recognizes the cultural inheritance which is proper to all men and women. Indeed, it may be said that it is we who belong to the tradition and that it is not ours to dispose of as we wish. Precisely because our roots lie in the tradition itself, are we today able to develop for the future new and original reflections. What is named here applies even more to theology. This is not only because theology possesses as its primary source of knowledge the living Tradition of the Church, but also because theology ought to be able to call upon the deep theological tradition that has marked earlier ages. (No. 85) Fides et Ratio affirms a model of discipleship to sacred Tradition and intellectual tradition as the ground of creativity. The encyclical also invokes the providence of God as directive of wisdom’s twofold traditionality. In paragraph 72, the pope outlines three criteria for engaging in mutually beneficial dialogue with other religious traditions. “The first norm is the universality of the human spirit.” The third is the principle of prudential discernment between that which is particular and capable of Christian receptivity and that which is not. The second, however, covers ex hypotheso necessity, analogous to that of the Incarnation: “When the Church deals for the first time with cultures of great importance, but previously unexamined, it must even so never place Traditional teaching; with regard to classical philosophical doctrines, one owes “respect for the tradition.” Insofar as theological methodology involves specifically philosophical equipment, then, sacred theology owes a profound and orienting payment of respect to the Church’s philosophical tradition. See Rescher, “Respect for Tradition (And the Catholic Philosopher Today),” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 78 (2005): 1–9. The Promise of a Unitary Sacred Theology 185 them before the Greek and Latin inculturation already acquired. Were this inheritance to be repudiated, the providential plan of God would be opposed, who guides his Church down the paths of time and history.This is a law appropriate to the Church of all the ages, even of that which is to come” (no. 72). This providence that has directed the history of revelation also directs and ensures the history of dogma. Thus, “theology has received as a gift an entry into and possession of things by whose vigor the science of faith is able to exist” (no. 101). This judgment immediately follows upon Fides et Ratio’s concluding reaffirmation of Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris (see no. 99). Rightly, then, Fides et Ratio confirms an exploration of theology’s unitary nature as cued by Aeterni Patris. John Paul affirms the intellectual renewal for which Leo called as having been “necessary” and having “made progress of truly historic importance for the life of the Church.” For John Paul, Aeterni Patris is not reducible to a disciplinary or prudential document. For, “a century later many insights of that writing have lost nothing of their usefulness either in practice or from the point of view of teaching [sive re sive paedagogico usu]” (no. 57). IV. Conclusion This analytic review of two important papal encyclicals began with an orientation to the basic shortcoming of revisionist histories of neoThomism. For this critique, it was presupposed that truth is not essentially reducible to constructive and deconstructible categories of historical and sociological understanding. Of course, neo-Thomism itself held that truth is not limited to phenomenality. More significantly, however, the Church continues to affirm as a principle that truth is originally and ultimately speculative, transcending the contingent, practical order; (“heaven and earth will pass away, but . . . ”). Hence, even if an intellectual movement is recognizably concluded—that is, even if “neo-Thomism,” considered as a sociological phenomenon, has been declared dead—it does not follow that such an intellectual movement’s philosophical concerns— whatever its accidental if regrettable excesses and blind spots—are no longer true or relevant for the practice of theology. Both the adherents and the detractors of neo-Thomism considered its neo-scholasticism as the Church’s “official” philosophy and theology. But this institutional force is not all there was to neo-Thomism’s unitary potential. The most fecund of neo-Thomism’s features was its regard for the unitary dynamism (not uniform machinery) of intellectual exercise. Methodic concern for the intellect’s speculative nature and its analogically scientific rationality is precisely the way in which the modern problems 186 Bruno M. Shah, O.P. decried by Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II can yet still be rightly managed by the Catholic theological community. We have shown the consistency of methodological understanding between two historic documents of the ordinary papal Magisterium. Fuller and more rigorous attention needs be given to the modern problems that the encyclicals were designed to face, each in their philosophical and historical contexts: modernist rationalism and historicism for Leo XIII, and post-modern nihilism and activism for John Paul II. The magisterial continuity between the teaching of Vatican I and that of Vatican II—in substance and in mode of articulation—also begs theological address. From our reading of Aeterni Patris and Fides et Ratio, five methodological principles of sacred theology’s unitary nature can be extrapolated from the threefold criteriology. (1) Theology’s data is received from the doctrinal teaching and preaching of the hierarchical Church. (2) Theology’s work is a work of faith that seeks understanding according to the scholastic model of science. (3) Theology is a work of the speculative intellect. (Since it bears an epistemic finality that is distinct from and more constitutive than that of the practical intellect, speculative theology has the prerogative of judging and appreciating all practical kinds of theology—not only “moral theology,” but also historical and spiritual kinds.) (4) Theology is a disciplinary tradition that demands apprenticeship to a magister and docility to the Magisterium.52 (5) Theology’s leader and exemplar is St.Thomas Aquinas.When these five principles are acknowledged by theology—whose exercise certainly does not exhaust the work of theology—the legitimate prospects of theological pluralism and dialecticism will perforce emerge.53 N&V 52 Inspired by Hans Urs von Balthasar, one might also appreciate the constitutive verve of holiness within the practice of theology and therefore seek, as one’s principal master, a theologian of evident—even canonical—saintliness. 53 Criteria 4 and 5 appear additive to the twelve criteria proffered recently by the International Theological Commission (see n. 7, above). Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 187–210 187 God’s Word and Human Speech* ROBERT S OKOLOWSKI The Catholic University of America Washington, DC 1. The Problem T HE S ECOND Vatican Council, in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation, declares, “Holy Mother Church, relying on the belief of the apostles, holds that the books of both the Old and New Testaments in their entirety . . . are sacred and canonical because, having been written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit they have God as their author and have been handed on as such to the Church herself.”1 After this statement that the Scriptures have God as their author, the Council refers to men who were chosen and employed by God and who “made use of their powers and abilities, so that with him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things that he wanted.” God is the author of the Scriptures and men are also true authors of the same Scriptures. The statement needs clarification. In particular the two meanings—divine and human—of the word “author” need to be explained. Concomitantly, the meaning of the word “God” needs to be thought about and related to this context. God and the human writer of a scriptural passage are not “two authors” in the sense in which two human beings can be the co-authors of a composition, with each contributing part of the whole. Nor do we have two authors in the sense in which one person serves as a stenographer for another. In Scripture the divine and the human authors are each * An earlier version of this essay was given as the presidential address at the annual meeting of the Academy of Catholic Theology on May 25, 2010. 1 “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” in The Documents of Vatican II, ed. Walter M. Abbott, S.J., and Joseph Gallagher (New York: Guild Press, 1966), chapter 3, §11, pp. 118–19. My italics in the text. 188 Robert Sokolowski fully authoritative in their own way. The God of Christian faith can be the author of the Scriptures even while the human writers are also its authors. God must be so understood that this formulation is not contradictory. The issue is analogous to the mystery of the Incarnation, where God must be understood as so transcendent to the world that the incarnate Word can be both God and man.2 The Christian mystery of the Incarnation would be an incoherence or a contradiction if understood within the confines of a non-Christian understanding of the divine, or if it were to be understood as the union of an angelic substance and a human being. The persistent Christological heresies of both ancient and modern times continue to show that a god understood as part of the world could not become man in the way Christians believe that the Eternal Son became man. Analogously, a god who is part of the world could not be the author of the sacred writings in the way that the Council says they have God as their author. Phenomenology can help address such issues concerning Scripture. It deals with the manifestation of things. It traces the way things can be identified in speech and human experience. It discusses words and their meaning, clarifies how words present things, examines the difference between both speaking and writing and speaker and author, and shows how things spoken about can remain absent and mysterious while still being intended by us.3 Such phenomena occur in our ordinary use of language and our standard experience of things, but they also occur in a distinctive manner in Scripture and revelation, where they need to be described in their own terms. 2. Beatific Seeing and Hearing We in our present state cannot enjoy the beatific vision, but we do have something like a beatific hearing. Such hearing—as well as the listening associated with it; we need to listen if we are truly to hear—provides the title of this essay, “God’s Word and Human Speech.” God, because he has chosen to do so, becomes present to us in the modality of being heard or at least being heard about, even while we cannot see him. According to our Christian faith, God becomes present to us through human words, which words are also spoken or written by him. 2 An analogous understanding is required in the mystery of grace, where the infused virtues and the actions that follow from them are truly our own while still being the work of God. 3 In this essay the term “to intend” is occasionally used with the sense given to it in phenomenology, where it signifies our cognitive relationship to the things we are aware of or are thinking about. God’s Word and Human Speech 189 We ourselves, in our day and age, do not literally hear God himself, but we do read about him in the Scriptures. The Scriptures, furthermore, present God as actually speaking to men: to Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the prophets, and the psalmist. According to the Scriptures, God speaks to some human beings directly, not just through angelic intermediaries. Furthermore, he also speaks with some human beings, who answer and question him and even argue with him; think of Abraham and Jonah. Man uses his logos, his speech and his reason, not only in regard to God’s created world, but even in the presence of God himself, and while his usage of words and reason is reverent, it can on occasion also be audacious. Human reason and its verbal expressions are not extinguished but perfected in the presence of God. More specifically, in the New Covenant, God—God the Father— speaks to us in a new and distinctive way, in and through Jesus Christ, his eternal Son and eternal Word. God speaks with men by using a particular human voice and making that voice his own. But we ourselves, in our day and age, do not bodily hear the voice of Christ as the New Testament figures did, or as Saul did on the road to Damascus. We hear it through the mediation of words that are written and read, and so we believe even though we have not seen ( Jn 20:29). What are words and what is writing, that they can bring God to our minds and hearts, if not to our eyes? 3. The Difference between Hearing and Seeing To set a stage for the theological issue of God’s word and human speech, consider the difference in the natural order between hearing words and seeing things. Hearing makes things present to us, but in a manner that is associated with a distinct kind of absence. If we just hear about something, about some event or entity in the world, we do not see it. We hear about it instead of seeing it. Hearsay is not vision. If the thing is there before us on its own, then words spoken by someone else might help us to see it better, but the words will not have brought the thing to us in the first place; and yet that is precisely what words spoken about something absent are able to do. They introduce the thing to us, they bring it to mind. Words can even allow us to reach something that has never been seen by us. They allow us to anticipate seeing something for the first time and to anticipate it thoughtfully, not just as a matter of sensory expectation. Words enable us to know what we are hoping for. Speech introduces an intellectual sense of absence into our experience. It allows us to think explicitly about what is not here and to intend it in its absence. It also heightens the sense of presence that we become capable of. When we finally see something we have only heard about, we 190 Robert Sokolowski have a more distinct sense of its being present than we would enjoy if we merely came upon it without such an anticipation. Such presence is more intellectual precisely because of the verbal intervention that has taken place, precisely because the words have come between us and the thing in question. The same thing that we heard about and thought of explicitly as absent has now become present, and this presence is more forceful because of the acknowledged absence that preceded it; the thing is recognized explicitly as not absent any longer and as no longer intended in its absence. We distinctly experience the thing’s identity and being.4 We experience the specific kind of presence that this thing has. Words and sights thus involve an interplay between presence and absence, between what is directly given to us and what we can think about but cannot see.This contrast between the present and the absent, as realized in natural vision and speech, occurs also in Christian life, where we deal with a new and eminently radical kind of absence and transcendence. In Christian faith we respond to the God who is not just very far away; he is more distant than that; we could not expect God to become presented as one of the things in this world, even though he grants these things their being and is intimately present to them through his causation. It would be an incoherence to expect him to appear as part of the world. God is not part of the world, not even a spiritual part of it or one of its powers. Rather, in the words of the book of Job, he is the one who laid the foundation of the earth and determined its measurements and so is there before and beyond it ( Job 38: 1–7). He is not measured within it. But although he cannot be present to us as part of the world, he does come to us through speech. He is presented to us, not only as the one who made and sustains all these things in his wisdom and power, but also as the one who could be in undiminished goodness and greatness even if “all this”—the universe of things—did not exist. This is what it means to say that God is before and beyond the things that are.This is the kind of absence and distance between us and him. This absence is different from all the varieties of absences that we normally deal with. We cannot overcome it by going somewhere or doing something, not even by going on a pilgrimage or a mission. It is not the absence of an entity whose presence we can achieve by our own management, either with incantations that might call him up or with the help of scientific devices. And yet the God who is beyond our vision can be given to us in words that we hear. Words can bring God to mind and they can somehow let him be “in” our minds. St. Anselm bears witness 4 On the relation of names to the presence, absence, and identity of things, see Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence: A Philosophical Investigation of Language and Being (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), chapter 3, 23–32. God’s Word and Human Speech 191 to this when he writes in the Proslogion that the fool, “when he hears this very thing that I say (cum audit hoc ipsum quod dico), . . . understands what he hears (intelligit quod audit ),” and, Anselm continues, “what he understands is in his understanding (quod intelligit in intellectu eius est ).”5 Words serve as the vehicle that allows this theological presence to arrive in our understanding through faith and so somehow to be in us. Anselm’s argument needs the dico and the audit, the speaking and hearing and the persons who speak and hear. What are words, that even in this theological domain they can somehow bring to mind what seeing cannot? In summary, words introduce a sharp differentiation between presence and absence. They do so in regard to ordinary things in the world, but they also let the contrast between presence and absence take on a new meaning and reach into an absence and a hoped-for presence beyond the margins of the world. 4. Writing Writing introduces an even more acute and comprehensive sense of absence than speech. Writing resembles speech because, in both, the object being discussed can be absent, but it differs from speech because in writing the speaker can be absent as well. When we read something, the page and the script are present to us but our minds are turned toward something other than the page we look at, and in addition we are deprived of the presence of the one who speaks to us in and through that page. The page is there instead of the object and instead of the speaker. The written word is detached from the voice that originally uttered it as well as the hand that wrote it. We may not even know who is the speaker behind the words that lie on the page. The unattached words, however, seem to have great authority precisely because they have been written down, and because they say the very same thing every time they are read.6 They are less fleeting than a voice, which vanishes immediately, and they do not waver in their conviction. The written words have greater authority because of their fixity and because someone thought them important enough to set down and to hand on. Writing involves other absences besides those of the object and the speaker. There might have been a scribe, an editor, and also a publisher, someone who selected these pieces of writing for preservation and replication. We can read the written words of the original speaker, but these 5 St. Anselm, Proslogion, in Opera Omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, O.S.B. , vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1946), 101, my translation. 6 On the reassuring sameness of written texts, see Sokolowski, Presence and Absence, 69. 192 Robert Sokolowski other mediators also come into play and they contribute to the reading. We might discover clues in the writing that tell us something about these people, but often enough we know practically nothing about them. It is one thing to trust the words of someone who is speaking directly with us, but how can we trust the words of an unknown speaker or writer that have come through so many unknown hands? The written words are present to us—everything hinges on them, and their presence is unquestionable—but their presence is surrounded by multiple kinds of absence. This complexity of absences occurs in regard to the Sacred Scriptures, and once again the theological context introduces new forms of absence that surpass those found within this world, mysterious and perplexing as these may be. The God we read about in the Scriptures is believed to be the first and ultimate speaker behind these texts. The God who achieved our salvation in the work of his Son is also the God who recorded this achievement in the Scriptures and who now addresses us through them. But since the Scriptures are writings, God as their author is also absent from them, as are the human authors and editors, each in their appropriate manner. The thing we do unquestionably have present to us is the written text, which, however, was brought to us by many different hands. 5. The Church as Speaker of the Scriptures But we do have a tangible and immediate speaker of the Scriptures. It is the Church. Sacred Scripture does not speak on its own; it exists through time as spoken by the Church. The Church, however, presents herself as the collector and transmitter of the written words, not as the author who could rewrite them (even though she can translate them). Once the Scriptures had been composed and canonized—once remembrance had given way to writing—the Church became the speaker who reads and quotes the Scriptures but not the author who writes or rewrites them. Although she, like the apostles at Pentecost, can express the text in different languages, she leaves the text alone. The Church repeats and interprets these words, but she also subjects herself to their authority and measures herself against them, and she must, consequently, accept them as they are given to her. As the Sacred Constitution on Divine Revelation says in the passage we cited earlier, the Scriptures “have been handed on as such to the Church herself.” The Church and the Scriptures are reciprocally related as part and whole. Each is a whole to the other as part. The writings have been composed, collected, and kept alive within the Church, and in this sense the Church is the whole of which the Scriptures are part. But what the writings narrate, the actors and actions that are contained in the writings, God’s Word and Human Speech 193 in turn have established the Church in her being and authority, and in this sense the content of the Scriptures is the whole of which the Church is a part. The Scriptures present the substance and the origin of the Church as well as the normative image to which she must be conformed. The role of the Church as the speaker of the Scriptures is brought out when she presents the Scriptures as the word of God, but this role is even more vividly performed when the Church reads the biblical passages in her liturgy and when she incorporates parts of the Scriptures in her teachings and prayers and makes it possible for us to think and to pray in the same manner.7 We take fragments from the Scriptures and compose our prayers and thoughts from them. Such usage is neither bricolage nor a shoring of fragments against our ruin. The Church’s use of Scripture in her teaching and actions makes possible for us a way of life that is coherent because reconciled with God. It is in such situations of prayerful reading, whether in the Church’s liturgy and teaching or in the private prayer of believers, that the Scriptures most fully come to life. It is there that they serve, not as an object of our curiosity, but as the words through which God speaks to us and we to God. At this point the primary author of the Scriptures, God himself, comes to the fore and acts as author, as the one who authorizes and speaks. At this point the human authors, who have finished their work, recede into the background. As Benedict XVI says, “A voice greater than man’s echoes in Scripture’s human words: the individual writings (Schrifte) of the Bible point somehow to the living process that shapes the one Scripture (Schrift ).”8 Taking the Church as “the closest perceptible speaker” of the Scriptures may be a good way to express the difference between Scripture and Tradition in the Church. If the Church is the one who speaks the Scriptures, she is something distinct from them; she has her own life and 7 Ideally the Church would convey to her people a sense of the glory of God as a setting within which the Word of God can be heard and received. The architecture, decoration, and music in churches should serve this purpose. Speaking about Balthasar’s theology of “theophany” or “epiphany,” Jeremy Holmes writes, “He notes that at decisive places in Scripture God’s ‘glory’ manifests itself before his word is heard. Sinai, the burning bush, the calls of Isaiah and Ezekiel, Tabor, Damascus, the beginning of the Book of Revelation. . . . Man hears God’s word not in his own power, but through the power of God’s grace” (“Translator’s Introduction” to Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Holy Scripture,” Nova et Vetera 5 [2007]: 711). The word of God also makes us more capable of recognizing God’s wisdom and power in the cosmos and in natural phenomena. Such epiphanies, however, would remain under-determined and merely bewildering without the words that followed and defined them. 8 Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J.Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xviii. 194 Robert Sokolowski memory and her own subsistence, as well as her own prudence. She does not disappear into the text or become simply its commentator. She presents and interprets the Scriptures and at critical moments she may need to judge as erroneous certain interpretations of them, but she is there as the speaker who does so, even as she subjects herself to the Scriptures. A speaker who quotes a speech does not vanish into the quotation. The Tradition of the Church, what she hands on in her living faith, is not just the Scriptures but also herself as the one who speaks and interprets them. Scripture and Tradition could be expressed respectively as the Word of God and the immediate, worldly speaker of this Word. Tradition can also be described as remembrance. As Francis Slade puts it, “Scripture as the New Testament is the Church remembering her beginnings and earliest times. To make sense of these things, these beginnings, meant remembering what had preceded them, the Old Testament. These things were proclaimed, indeed are proclaimed, in the liturgy.”9 Slade’s remarks call to mind a remark of St. Justin Martyr, who refers to the gospels that were read in the liturgy as the remembrances of the apostles, the things recounted from memory.10 Slade continues, “The Church reminding herself of her first times is Tradition.” He also comments more generally on the relationship between Scripture and Tradition: “The Protestants had it exactly backwards. The Church is not founded on Scripture as if Scripture came before the Church and the Church derives from it, so that Scripture trumps Tradition.” Scripture is not a detached and isolated text but the written form of memory, and the reading of such writing activates this remembering. To believe the Scriptures is also to believe the Church, whose original witness is expressed and described in the Scriptures. But besides speaking the Scriptures, the Church also epitomizes them in her creed, the articles of her faith. The Nicean, Athanasian, and Apostles’ Creeds are particular formulations of this, but the creed of the Church can be taken in a more general sense as the expression of the substance of her belief. The creed and the catechism of the Church are inseparable from the Scriptures: they need Scripture, but Scripture also needs them if it is to be heard. The Church does not rewrite the Scriptures but she does formulate the creed, which orders the Scriptures and clarifies what is to be taken from them. Doing so is part of her task as the speaker of Scripture. The creed does not simply repeat the Scriptures but 9 Personal communication, used with permission. 10 St. Justin Martyr calls the gospels the memoirs (τὰ ἀπομνημονεύματα) of the apos- tles. See The First Apology, chapters 66–67, in The First and Second Apologies, trans. Leslie W. Barnard, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 56 (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 70–71. God’s Word and Human Speech 195 specifies explicitly the new dimension of being that comes to light in biblical revelation. Such a highlighting of Scripture is not an external addition to what Scripture says; as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it, the creed or symbolum fidei “is not added to Sacred Scripture but rather is drawn from Sacred Scripture.”11 Such a recapitulation and ordering of Scripture through the creed is a distinct activity that is not more repetition or citation. It accomplishes something that the Scriptures could not do on their own. It is an essential part of the way in which the Church speaks them and the way we as believers listen to and repeat them ourselves. In fact, for the Christian believer the catechesis and life of the Church precede the Scriptures phenomenologically. As Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B., puts it, “In most cases, love for Christ exists in the human soul long before the books of the New Testament have been taken up as a spiritual study,” and “No one profits by the gospels unless he be first in love with Christ.”12 6. The Magic of Words In my remarks on Sacred Scripture I have emphasized the theme of absence, but I now wish to discuss the contrary theme of a direct presence. I wish to discuss the presence of words in their material being. All the absences we have talked about circle around and come to rest on the acoustic or visual presence of the very words that make up Scripture. The words in the Bible, as well as the scriptural words used in teaching and prayer, enter essentially into the transactions between God and man. The palpable words of Scripture are the pivot around which our devotional and theological activities occur. My immediate question is: How can we more fully appreciate the power that the words of Scripture possess in their material and yet thoughtful being? This power was formulated by the prophet Jeremiah when he said, “Your words were found, and I devoured them; your word became my joy and the happiness of my heart, because your name was called down upon me, O Lord, God of hosts” ( Jer 15:16).13 Jeremiah devours the words he has found; he carries 11 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 1, a. 9, ad 1: “Quod quidem non est additum sacrae Scripturae, sed potius ex sacra Scriptura assumptum.” This entire question in the Summa deals with the Church’s formulation of the articles of faith. 12 Dom Anscar Vonier, O.S.B., The Personality of Christ, in The Collected Works of Abbot Vonier, vol. 1 (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1952), 100–101. 13 The Latin Vulgate version of Jeremiah 15:16 is particularly forceful: “Inventi sunt sermones tui et comedi eos et factum est mihi verbum tuum in gaudium et in laetitiam cordis mei, quoniam invocatum est nomen tuum super me Domine Deus exercituum.” The role of words is mentioned at the beginning of the book of Jeremiah (1:9): “Then the Lord put forth his hand and touched my mouth, 196 Robert Sokolowski out the two activities that human beings do with their mouth, teeth, and tongue, the two activities of eating and speaking, taking in and sending out. How can things like this happen through the simple and ordinary instruments that we call words? Let us begin again with words in the natural order, and here I would like to introduce a corrective to the way we normally think about words. I wish to claim that it is misleading to think of words as expressing essentially what is in our minds, that is, our ideas or our concepts. We need to find a way to think of words as somehow more obviously containing the things that they signify, not simply our ideas of those things. We need to discover or recover what we could call a better “identity theory” of knowledge and signification. It is not enough to say that there is an identity between the thing known and the intellect or the soul of the knower. We also need to say that there is an identity between the thing known and the word by and in which it is known.We need to find a way to say that the thing we know does not just enjoy a cognitive existence in our minds, but that as a thing named it enjoys something like a cognitive existence in its name. I think that such an adjustment in our theory of knowledge will also help us to see that the thing known does also exist in our minds. It will help us clarify what cognitive existence is. It will, in addition, help us to appreciate the force of the words of Scripture. It seems to me that Thomistic and scholastic theories of knowledge have underplayed the role of spoken words—the external words, verba exteriora—in their metaphysics of knowledge. They say that an object (and its form) can enjoy two kinds of existence: real existence in the “external” or “extra-mental” world, and cognitive or logical existence in the minds of those who know it.14 But I would like to show that the and the Lord said to me, ‘Behold I have put my words in your mouth’.” God says this in response to Jeremiah’s claim that he is only a youth and “I do not know how to speak” (1:6). 14 See, for example, Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Houston, TX: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1985), 29–42. As soon as Owens begins his study of being as being, he distinguishes between real and cognitional being: “The same things, quite apparently, can exist in two different ways. They can exist in reality, they can also exist in cognition; or they may have for the moment the one way of existing, while lacking the other. In contrast to the being that is conferred upon things by real existence, existence in the mind or imagination or sensation may be called cognitive being” (31–32). The distinction between real and cognitional existence gives Owens the resources to distinguish in turn between a thing and its being. If a thing can enjoy cognitional being in the imagination, it seems plausible to me to say that it can also have a kind of cognitional being in a picture or in a name, even though such existence would depend on both the human subject and the pictorial or linguistic vehicle. 197 Jan Lievens, Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram, Scottish National Portrait Gallery God’s Word and Human Speech thing (and its form) can also enjoy an analogous existence in the name of the thing. In fact, I would say that the thing and its form cannot exist cognitively in human minds without the help of names as well as phantasms. A given name serves to specify a phantasm and to register the form that is present within it. The scholastic and Aristotelian theories of knowledge recognize that we need phantasms if we are to think, but I would add that we also need words, whether such words be publicly declared or spoken silently in our hearts. Such spoken words or names are indispensable in human understanding, and our appreciation of Sacred Scripture can be enhanced by recognizing this fact. I would also 198 Robert Sokolowski say that paying more attention to spoken words would make the scholastic theory of knowledge more concrete and more convincing. 7. Words Contrasted with Pictures I will develop this desired analysis by comparing words with pictures. Pictures are more tangible and more philosophically approachable than words, so they serve as a good starting point for our study, and the interplay between pictures and words is an extremely rich philosophical game preserve. Consider a thoughtful painting of some person or theme, such as the portrait of Robert Kerr, the first Earl of Ancram, by the Dutch painter Jan Lievens. Kerr had been a friend of King Charles I. On the execution of the king he went into exile in Holland. His portrait was painted by Jan Lievens, who depicted him as old and dignified but also wasted and impoverished. The painting “contains” Robert Kerr, but because it is so successful as a portrait it also “contains” his intelligibility.15 It captures his intelligibility, that which made and makes Robert Kerr what he is: not only his individuality, but also his humanity, his mind, his aristocracy, and his adversity, along with other things that define him. It contains what can be called his form or eidos, but I find it more helpful to use the word intelligibility instead. But the portrait does more than contain the intelligibility of Robert Kerr (as well as the intelligibility of human being, man, dignity, poverty, and the like). It also pictorially embodies it. The portrait is like an instance of this intelligibility—a replica-instance, it is true, but still an instance. It is something like a copy of Robert Kerr: not another Robert Kerr, nor his son or his clone, but a picture of him. It is Robert Kerr again, pictured. It captures him the way pictures capture things, and it does so “outside the mind.” It seems intuitively obvious that the imaged Robert Kerr and his intelligibility are there “in” the picture that is hanging there on the wall. We are not tempted to say that the pictorial presence is only in our minds or only in our concepts.16 We turn now from pictures to names. The word or the name “Robert Kerr” does not embody Robert Kerr, nor does it embody his humanity or 15 We might contrast a portrait with a mug shot, which contains scarcely any intel- ligibility. It does not really say anything about the person it identifies (a good picture is like a predication). The mug-shot photographer does not have to think about his target when he does his work, but Jan Lievens needs to think about his, and he thinks as a portraitist. 16 Hobbes puts a different accent on these relationships. He says that a picture or statue does not resemble an object but only the artist’s phantasms: “These [statues and pictures] are also called images, not for the resemblance of any corporeal thing, but for the resemblance of some phantastical inhabitants of the brain of God’s Word and Human Speech 199 dignity. It is not a copy or image of Robert Kerr as the picture is. It does not show how he looks. The word does, however, contain his intelligibility, and it contains only that.The word is more spiritual than the picture because it just contains the intelligibility; it does not embody it. The name positively subtracts the embodiment from the picture. But although the word is more spiritual, it is still material. It is a formulated sound or a set of marks. It has its existence in sound waves in the space between speakers or in scratches on paper. But there is in principle no similarity, no iconicity, between the word and the thing, and this very lack of imitation prevents the name from being another pictorial embodiment of thing it signifies. The name as such does not resemble the thing. The more refined spirituality of words also permits words to be combined by grammar into explicit statements and thus allows speech to be more flexible, precise, and declarative than images. Words are radically different from pictures, but both words and pictures capture and carry the intelligibility of the things they represent. Comparing words with pictures allows us to appreciate more fully the objectivity of words, the fact that they are “out there” and not just in the mind, and yet it allows us to see the difference between names and images. We can appreciate the greater spirituality of words and the absence of embodiment in them. We can also see how words can be used to explain the meaning of a particular picture. Even the title of a picture is a kind of explanation, and a caption defines an image (as a word specifies a phantasm). Our words capture the intelligibility more precisely and explicitly than pictures do, which by themselves rather suggest than declare what they mean. Pictures call for words for their explanation, and words call for pictures for their embodiment.17 This is the magic of words. They capture and carry the intelligibilities of things and weave them syntactically into statements, arguments, narratives, and conversations. Our use of words enables us to become datives of manifestation and agents of truth, as we enter into our mother tongue, use our inherited language with greater or lesser proficiency, and thereby play our part in the distributed rationality that is the human conversation. We make things clear for one another and for ourselves. My claim about the role of words does not contradict the scholastic understanding of knowledge, but it does complement it. It does so by the maker.” Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 45, p. 448. See also p. 446, where images made by artists are said to be “representations of their own fancies.” 17 We should also recall that words used to tell a story function something like pictures: a narrative remains verbal but it engenders a pictorial embodiment in the reader’s imagination. 200 Robert Sokolowski adding the verbal dimension to the activity of knowing. Scholastic philosophy insists on the role of phantasms. My approach adds words, which words can also be spoken silently and hence internalized.18 The interplay of pictures and words as public phenomena is paralleled by the interplay of phantasms and speaking that goes on “inside” us in the conversation of the soul with itself. This conversation is, after all, where the Confessions of St. Augustine take place, that is, where Augustine speaks to God, in the manner proposed to us biblically by the psalms. Augustine uses words as well as phantasms to do so, and he takes these words from Sacred Scripture. We do have concepts in our intellects, but they are more inseparably associated with words than the scholastics seem to have acknowledged.19 18 There are two kinds of imagined words or imagined speech: (1) we might imag- ine ourselves speaking with someone else, and (2) we might speak with ourselves silently and imaginatively, when, for example, we are trying to resolve a problem. The second kind is a form of real speaking. See Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 143–47. The issues of the “internal word” and the “intelligible species” are treated on pp. 286–303 of this book. One might ask how Augustine in the Confessions uses these two kinds of internal speech as he addresses God. He does not simply imagine himself speaking with another person. Nor is he merely trying to figure out the solution to a problem, a procedure in which he would essentially be speaking with himself. Augustine is speaking to someone who, according to the faith of the Church, can be understood as truly present to us within our internal life, someone who is more deeply present to us than we are to ourselves. Augustine speaks to someone who hears him. Each person has a singular sense of the presence of God or of the divine; it is analogous to and related to the unique sense we each have of the presence of “myself.” See James G. Hart, Who One Is: Book 2: Existenz and Transcendental Phenomenology, Phaenomenologica 190 (Berlin: Springer, 2009), 538: “God as You is, in contrast to Others, not singled out from among others known in the third-person, as is our use of ‘you.’ . . . When I faithfully think of God of necessity God does not remain a third-person but uniquely second-person. God’s being You contrasts with all You’s who are one among many.” Such an internal sense of God is derived from the liturgy and public prayer in which God is addressed. 19 A few words about St. Anselm might serve as a complement to my remarks about Augustine. The phenomenon of pictures plays a strategic role in my argument. I use it as an analogy: the way things and their intelligibilities exist in pictures sheds light on the way they can exist in their names. I would like to draw a contrast between this argument and a step made by Anselm in chapter 2 of the Proslogion, where he makes use of pictures in his effort to show “That God truly exists.” Anselm uses pictures to bring out the contrast between something’s being in the mind and its being understood to exist: “For when a painter thinks beforehand (praecogitat) what he is going to make, he does have in his understanding (habet quidem in intellectu) what he has not yet made, but he does not yet understand it to be (nondum intelligit esse).” After he has done the painting, however, “he both God’s Word and Human Speech 201 8. The Name of God When we look at the portrait of Robert Kerr, we “see” him and his intelligibility, which his name registers and contains. What intelligibility do we grasp when we read the Sacred Scriptures? We can distinguish three dimensions in the things that are presented to us in the Bible. First, the words of Scripture simply inform us about a lot of things and events, some of them rather anecdotal (such as St. Paul’s shipwreck near Malta) and some of them monumental (such as Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac or the passage of the Jews through the Red Sea). Many words and many intelligibilities are used to describe such events and to convey various teachings to us. Many phenomena are recorded and stories told. But, second, all of these things and teachings are not just worldly occurrences; they are presented as God’s actions and teachings in the world, in Jewish history, and in the life of Jesus and the Church. They are presented as the works of God. But, third, the Scriptures do not stop with such deeds and teachings. The events, actions, and discourses in their turn go so far as to reveal the one who acts in them: they reveal something about God himself. They do not just imply God, as nature does; they reveal him as the one acting in the events that are narrated and as the one teaching what we are taught. The Scriptures even give us the name for God, and has in his understanding what he has made and understands it to be” (Proslogion, 101, my translation). Anselm starts with the planned picture in the painter’s intellect and moves to the actual picture, whereas my argument begins with the actual picture and with what the viewer—any viewer, not the painter only—recognizes in it. Also, Anselm deals with the difference between the picture’s being in the mind and its being among things, but I deal with a thing and its intelligibility as being in the picture. My usage is more phenomenological, his more conceptual. In chapter 10 of the Monologion Anselm uses the example of the craftsman ( faber) to speak about the status of the form that exists prior to things that are to be created: “What else is it [this antecedent form] than a certain spoken expression (locutio) of things within reason itself, as when a craftsman who is going to make something by means of his craft first says (dicit) this work within himself by means of a conception of the mind (mentis conceptione)?” (24). Anselm does not say that the craftsman just imagines what he is going to make; he says that he speaks it in his mind. The relation between speaking and conceiving—word and offspring—should be noted. Anselm also discusses externally spoken words and considers them far less important than “the natural words (naturalia verba)” of the mind: “Where these [the natural, internal words] exist, no other word is necessary for knowing the thing (ad rem cognoscendam); and where these cannot exist, no other one is useful (utile) for manifesting the thing (ad rem ostendendam)” (25). Anselm’s thoughts are obviously influenced by St. Augustine. 202 Robert Sokolowski in giving us his name they also identify him and reveal his intelligibility to us, in a way and to a degree that is appropriate for our present time.20 But I need to correct the way I have put it; I have been saying that the Scriptures reveal God’s intelligibility to us, but I should say that God reveals himself to us. God is the authoritative speaker of the Scriptures, and in all their complexity and variety it is always God who manifests himself in the events and statements that they contain. He even tells Moses (and indirectly us) the name by which he should be identified. In both the Old and New Testaments we learn the name of God in order to be able to say things about him and about what he has done, but that is not all; we learn his name in order to be able to address him. In the Old Covenant God reveals his name to Moses and the Jewish people, and in the New Covenant Jesus reveals the name of God—God the Father—to his disciples and to us. He does so not as a lawgiver or prophet but as the Eternal Son, not as the one chosen by God but as the one sent by him and from him. Christ speaks and acts with the authority and the 20 There is no ordinary proper name—such as Jupiter or Isis—for God in the Bible. Such a proper name would connote an inappropriate familiarity and it would also suggest that its bearer was one of many gods. The name revealed to Moses in response to his question (Ex 3:13) is starkly singular and not one proper name among many. It transcends names and their meanings as its bearer transcends things and their definitions. It may signify the one who simply is, or the one that causes things to be, or the one that will be whatever he will, or the one who will be faithful. (All such meanings reflect and imply one another; God could not be truly faithful if he himself were subject to destiny.) The name revealed to Moses is more of an extreme description than a personal name; it may also be simply a refusal to give a name. As Pope Benedict XVI says, “God’s answer to Moses is thus at once a refusal and a pledge. He says of himself simply, ‘I am who I am’— he is without any qualification.This pledge is a name and a non-name at one and the same time” ( Jesus of Nazareth, 143). Other Old Testament names for God, such as Adonai, Elohim, and El, are words that designate divinities but that become proper to God as he becomes understood as the only one to whom they can truly apply.When this occurs they cease to be common nouns. God becomes revealed as not simply the greatest of the gods but as the only one, and the sense of divinity is changed. The others are seen to be not gods at all, not just as a matter of fact but even as a possibility. What people had taken as a common noun was discovered to be particular, but not as one name among many. (When a Christian loses his faith, the word God loses its particularity of meaning for him and becomes a common noun again. It is also no longer used as a name to address someone.) In the New Testament the name Father becomes paramount because of the way that Jesus speaks of God. His way of using this word is self-involving in such a manner that it leads Thomas the apostle to address the risen Christ as “My Lord and my God.” In the New Testament the name of Jesus acquires, in a derived way, the power and quality that had been proper to the name of God himself. God’s Word and Human Speech 203 status of the God of the Old Covenant. In doing so he reveals the name and the intelligibility of the Father to bring us into the life that comes from the Father; the paradigmatic revelation of the name of God occurs in the prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples when they ask him to teach them to pray. He does so by his words, but also essentially by his actions and his death and resurrection. We do not discover nor do we invent the name for God. We do not find God’s name by investigating nature or history, nor do we devise it by our wit. We are biblically given his name, by himself and by his Son. In this way, we “find the right word” to use when we enter into the presence of God or speak with others about him. But if the right word for something captures the intelligibility of that being, can we claim that God’s intelligibility is present to our minds? Does God himself somehow cognitively exist in us and do we understand what he is? Such claims would be pretentious, not to say irreverent. The name of God is not like other names. It is not the word for one kind of being among others. It is the name for the source of things, which is beyond them all and before their beginning. It does not express the greatest or best thing we can conceive, but that than which nothing greater can be thought and that which is beyond our understanding. It does not point beyond intelligibility but to an intelligibility that we can only darkly apprehend; it gives a new sense to what we mean by intelligibility. This name is not an indefinite symbol. It is extremely specific and even indexical. The name of God is the most proper of all names; it cannot be shared by anyone else, even though it is shared in God’s own life by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It signifies the Creator of all the things that are and the Savior who has spoken to us and thereby raised our speech into a new dimension and made it possible for us to respond to him. God has entered into our discourse as he has entered our world, and he has done so though speech and writing.The fact that there is a biblical text enables and allows us to use the name of God. This biblical text, furthermore, does not merely give us the name by itself; it also tells us what the bearer of that name has done and so tells us something of what he is. It embeds this word into his actions and teachings in the Old Covenant, and it tells us about his actions and teachings as he became part of his creation in the person of his Son. The text informs us about things that happened in our world and it presents them as the actions of God. In doing so it brings out something like the “properties” of God and it also shows how people should—and how they should not—respond to him. The name is not a mere encryption but part of a narrative and a form of address. It thereby gives us a glimpse of an understanding and opens the possibilities of faith. 204 Robert Sokolowski Our minds and our souls are changed by this word and we exist differently because of it. If we receive this name in faith, we become capable of living in response to the One it signifies and addresses. Since an understanding can provide an opening for action, the life of the Church and the lives of her saints can be seen as attempts to manifest the meaning of the name of God. Christian language is internal to a way of life, and to know the idiom of this language is to know the idiom of this way of life.21 We are enabled to live with God and to anticipate seeing him in his kingdom, and these possibilities have been opened to us, rational animals that we are, through the words of Scripture and the names that Scripture gives us. 9. Allowing Words to Do Their Work Words capture the intelligibility of things, and if they are proper names they also grasp particular things themselves in their intelligibility. If this is so, then the very words exercise a power on those who hear and use them. Just having the words exist around us, just hearing them and speaking them, and even just bringing them to mind in silent speech and in the listening associated with internal discourse, is to have the things they signify somehow present to us and in us. The words do the work. What we need to do is to let them sink into us and shape our minds. Even if we do not understand them fully, and even if we do not yet assent to them, they are there exercising their effect. Words can work on us even if what they signify is still only obscure to us. Even as vague and enigmatic, the things and their intelligibilities are fully there, in their entirety, to exercise their logical implication. They have their fields of force. In the case of the Sacred Scriptures, we need to let the words work on us and let them take possession of our minds, which is equivalent to letting the 21 This sentence is an adaptation of one written by Donald W. Livingston in Philo- sophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 140: “Moral language is internal to a way of life, and to know the idiom of a moral language is to know the idiom of a way of life.” In my text I state that understanding can provide an opening for action. It does so when the thing understood is the kind of thing that offers a possibility of acting. There are some understandings that reach beyond action. In the outermost reaches of theoretic philosophy, we can come to know things that cannot be affected by what we do; we cannot really do anything about the principle of noncontradiction, for example, or about the ultimate laws of nature, or about the principles of being. We can only contemplate such things, we cannot do anything in regard to them. Christian faith changes the way we are related to ultimates, because it says that our understanding of the primary principles of things (the truths about God), besides being a contemplative activity, also calls us to act in response to them. We can strive to obey the will of God or we can turn away from it. God’s Word and Human Speech 205 understood presence of God become more and more vivid to us. The words of the gospel, with God as their author, have their own way of doing what they do. They have their own insistence.22 Unbelief can be seen not just as a denial of what these words say, but as a refusal to let them enter into us. Of course, as the Scriptures themselves repeatedly remind us, words alone are never enough. Because of what they express in the Scriptures, they will not have been truly accepted if they have not flowed over into responsive action. Hearing must lead to faith and faith must express itself in hope and in charity. Such responses, however, are themselves given their form through the words that have made them possible. There cannot be hope and charity without faith, nor can there be faith without receptive hearing. Perhaps we are so concerned about not falling into a merely verbal faith that we underestimate the effect that the words themselves can have. 10. The Critical Project Since these words are human things, however, they can be examined by human sciences, and so before concluding I would like to say a word about critical methods in biblical studies. In the foreword to his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI says, “The historical-critical method— specifically because of the intrinsic nature of theology and faith—is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work. For it is of the very essence of biblical faith to be about historical events.” And he goes on to say, “Faith must expose itself to the historical method.”23 In the 22 It is true that we might resist accepting the words of Scripture; some people might go beyond denying them and may try to eradicate them as a bodily verbal presence. We might also try to resist the insistence of words in other domains, as in science or history or in regard to a story that someone else is telling us. There again we would enter into a curious kind of divided thinking: something is presented for our consideration and we voluntarily turn away from the evidencing of the things in question. We don’t want things to be that way and we don’t want them to be said that way. The topic in question might deal simply with a minor issue and our reluctance to face it may have little impact on us and other people.The issue at stake in the words of Holy Writ is more substantial, however, since these words present us with the name of God, and so both the insistence of the words and our acceptance or refusal of them would have a unique and definitive character. 23 Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, xv. Benedict emphasizes the importance of reading the Bible as a whole, which allows one part to shed light on another. The various parts of the Scriptures are intricately interwoven. The injunction to read the Bible as a whole is not a scientific, historical principle. It is related to the understanding of God as author of the Scriptures. 206 Robert Sokolowski exegesis of the past century and a half, we have seen the development of historical criticism, source criticism, and form criticism. These scholarly efforts have helped us understand the Scriptures, and they are legitimate because of the mystery of the Incarnation. God became man in history, and so his human presence must be historically visible. His historical presence in the new dispensation is reflected in Old Testament, which anticipated the Incarnation, as God chose a particular people and became present to them and to the nations as Savior in the world. Furthermore, the human authors of the Sacred Scriptures were writers whose intentions we may be able to determine by appropriate methods. Authorial intent leaves clues in the text, and so does the work of scribes, editors, and publishers. If, for example, the stories of Jonah or of Esther were deliberately composed as stories and not as historical recordings, and if we had at first read them as historical narratives, it would be good for us to learn what their human authors wanted them to be. This sort of form criticism can help and not threaten us in our reading of the Scriptures. The scriptural writers announce God’s presence, and a clearer understanding of what they intended to say can only help us to better receive the Word of God. But there is one aspect of these scientific procedures that I would criticize, and it is the word criticism. I would offer a critique of criticism. Why not just call these activities something like historical investigations (instead of historical criticism), source inquiries (instead of source criticism), and form studies (instead of form criticism)?24 The term criticism has a Kantian overtone and it recalls the Critique of Judgment or the Critique of Pure Reason. In the Kantian project, everything, even reason itself, has to be brought before the tribunal (the Gerichtshof ) of reason. Philosophic reason sits there as judge and carries out its critical judgments “in accordance with its own eternal and unalterable laws.”25 Even religion must be evaluated within the bounds of reason alone. Religion has to present its credentials, its permits to be believed. Who or what is philosophic reason to judge things in this way? What kind of sovereignty does it claim? In this Kantian project, philosophy does not receive and contemplate things, it does not wonder at and clarify what is there, it does not merely distinguish things one from another, nor, in the case of Christian faith, does it simply contrast revelation with other forms of manifestation; instead, it claims that it can determine what really is there, and it claims it can do so on its own terms, the terms of pure reason, not on the terms 24 The term Formgeschichte is less offensive. 25 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 9, Preface to the First Edition, A xii. God’s Word and Human Speech 207 of what is being presented for recognition, not in terms of the being of things. Critical reason claims that it is able to administer the acid test that will determine the truth of things.26 The evidentiary role of prephilosophical reason is taken over by philosophy. In this project, philosophy governs and judges; this is the Enlightenment, not the perennial philosophy. We need to deconstruct the constructivist philosophy and let things be what they are and show up for what they are, including the things of revealed faith. We need to restore and save the phenomena, including the manifestations given in faith. The New Testament declares to its readers that the God who created the world and who guides the people he has chosen has become present within the world and among that people as the man Jesus of Nazareth.This revelation occurs in what the New Testament says about Jesus, in what it says he said and did, and in the way it describes people’s reactions to him. Some people, such as the apostles and disciples, are described as recognizing the man Jesus as somehow the presence of God himself; others are described as outraged by his claims of affiliation with the God he calls his Father and by the actions he performs with an authority that seems to be that of God himself. In the New Testament, God is presented not only as Creator and providential power but as becoming part of his creation and his people as the Savior of men. This revelation does not just tell us about a particular divine accomplishment; it also deepens our understanding of what God is. It shows that God’s transcendence is so intense that he could become part of his creation without diminishing his divinity.27 Or perhaps, instead of saying that it deepens our understanding of God, we should say that it makes more clear to us the unknowability of the God who is so revealed; we know in a new way how God exceeds our understanding. The God who creates the world is beyond our comprehension because of his power and eternity and his difference from 26 It is not the task of philosophy to determine “what really is there.” That is the task of prephilosophical reason, the reason that brings things to light and verifies them in keeping with the manner of manifestation proper to those things. Philosophy can assist such prephilosophical intelligence by clarifying what is going on, but it does not replace it. In particular, religious thinking has its own manner of bringing things to light. 27 See N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 712: “The challenge comes down to a much narrower point, not simply to do with worldviews in general, or with ‘the supernatural’ in particular, but with the direct question of death and life, of the world of space, time and matter and its relation to whatever being there may be for whom the word ‘god,’ or even ‘God,’ might be appropriate. Here there is, of course, no neutrality. Any who pretend to it are merely showing that they have not understood the question.” 208 Robert Sokolowski things created, which give us only the faintest glimpse of his being. The God who becomes incarnate and redeems us through his suffering and death on the cross is beyond our comprehension because of his unimaginable mercy and love.We might come to an appreciation of God’s power through the spectacle of his creation, once we realize that the whole of things cannot account for itself, but who could have anticipated that God himself would save us and would set things right in this way? We might have expected that God might save us through a man, but not that he would redeem us as a man and by descending to this ultimate humility of service. Such redemptive action could not have been anticipated by us, but once it was accomplished its perfection and suitability become evident. What more glorious way could have been conceived for the victory of God over the death and disorder of sin? What more internal way of healing could have been devised? What implications does it have for the way we understand ourselves and conduct our lives? This action of God as an agent within the world deepens the Old Testament demand for a decisive response in faith, a response different from the dialectical inquisition to which religious myths and legends give rise. It calls for theology and not just philosophy.28 God’s act of redemption discloses his love for us, and it also reveals the ingenious benevolence that has been at work from the beginning in the being of things. It reveals in addition the kind of generosity that exists between the Father, Son, and Spirit: it reveals something of the life within God himself.29 When Christ says, “The Father and I are one” ( Jn 10:30) and “The Father is in me and I am in the Father” ( Jn 10:38), he speaks both as the eternal Son and as the man Jesus. This action of God is presented in the Scriptures and epitomized in the creed. Is this action somehow visible to historical method? It depends on what historical inquiry is supposed to discover. History does not just describe bodies in motion. It attempts to recover the intentions and understandings of the people who made the history. It also attempts to recover the understandings of those who recorded it (to the extent that the historian is investigating a text and not things just left behind by the people in question).30 What did Jesus understand himself to be doing, 28 See Erik Peterson, “Was ist Theologie?” in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kösel Verlag, 1951), 14–27. Peterson says, “There is theology only in Christianity and only under the precondition that the incarnate Word has spoken about God” (27). 29 The primary exegesis of God’s action in the world is given in the teachings and especially the parables of Jesus. 30 What is the difference between written texts (scripta) and things just left behind (whether facta, such as tools, pots, and shelters, or relicta, such as bones and wastes)? God’s Word and Human Speech 209 what did his interlocutors take him to be doing and saying, and what did the authors of the New Testament believe him to have done? The historian is obliged to present such intentions and understandings, whether he agrees with them or not.31 He may decide to work independently of the creed of the Church, but he cannot define his project as an alternative to the creed without becoming something other than a historian himself and thereby composing a creed or recapitulation of his own. Earlier we claimed that the Church’s reading of Scripture involves remembrance and that all forms of reading engage memory. What sort of remembering is proper to the historian’s attempt to recover the historical Jesus? The danger involved in a purely historical approach is that one may be inclined to think first that Scripture trumps Tradition and second that history trumps Scripture. 11. Conclusion The issue in the critical project is philosophical and theological, not just historical. The historical and linguistic investigation of the Bible need not neutralize the words of Scripture and render them powerless. Our historical studies of the New Testament need not deconstruct the person of Christ and turn us into modern analogues of the people at Nazareth, who, when Jesus returned to them, took offense at him and said that he is just one of us, nothing more (Mt 13:54–58, Mk 6:2–3). Because God became man, the words of Scripture can be understood as both human speech and the word of God. In both human reason and Christian faith, words are the element in which we live. They are charged with intellectual energy and make possible the kind of life that defines us in our humanity. In the Scriptures and the faith of the Church words enable us, through the redemptive work of Jesus Christ, to become affiliated into the life of God himself. 31 Wright, discussing the Resurrection in St. John’s Gospel and the role of the historian, says: “John intends the narratives to be understood realistically and literally. Of course, he also intends that all kinds of echoes and resonances be heard within them; he always does; but these remain echoes and resonances set off by a literal description of a concrete set of events. This is not to say, of course, that we as historians can yet pronounce on the likelihood or otherwise of such events as having taken place. It is simply to insist that, precisely as historians, in this case readers of ancient texts, we are bound to conclude that this is how John intends us to understand them. . . . The multiple meanings the stories have are multiplications of the basic point, and as with all multiplication you cannot start with zero. The writer believes that these things happened. The indications are that any sources he may have used believed it too.” The Resurrection of the Son of God, 675. Wright offers another comparison (681): “You only get overtones when you strike a fundamental.” Robert Sokolowski 210 The words of Scripture are part of the mystery of the Incarnation and not an afterthought. They are an analogue to the Eucharist, food for the intellect as the Eucharist is food for the soul, and both Scripture and the Eucharist find their place in the corporate community that is the Church. God became present in the world at a given time and place (there and then) and as a consequence he is present always here and now. The words of Scripture activate this presence and make it possible for us to believe in the risen Jesus even though we have not seen him. They enable us to find life in the word that is his name ( Jn 20:28–31; 1:12).32 N&V 32 I wish to thank John C. McCarthy and Kevin White for comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 211–230 211 Jesus the New Temple in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI PABLO T. G ADENZ Seton Hall University South Orange, NJ I N THE three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI gives us his portrayal of the Jesus of the Gospels,1 so that we can, as it were, see Jesus through his eyes. “Seeing Jesus” is a concept the Pope had already explored in one of his earlier works, the book On the Way to Jesus Christ, where he discusses “the concept of the ‘face of Christ’ ” in connection with “a central theme of the Old Testament” that involves “seeking the face of God.”2 In the Old Testament, he explains, “[t]he face of God is encountered in the Temple,” as we find expressed, for example, in the psalms that “have to do with entering the sanctuary, with the entrance of the Ark of the Covenant into the Temple.”3 One such psalm that the Pope cites here is Psalm 24, which speaks of “those who seek him, those who seek the face of the God of Jacob” (Ps 23:6 LXX), and who do so precisely by going up to the Temple.4 The Pope then goes on to explain that in the New Testament, this Old Testament theme about seeking and “seeing the 1 See Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part One: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), xxi–xxii, where he speaks of his “interpretation of the figure of Jesus in the New Testament” and of his “portrayal” of “the Jesus of the Gospels.” 2 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Face of Christ in Sacred Scripture: ‘He Who Has Seen Me Has Seen the Father,” in Ratzinger, On the Way to Jesus Christ, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 13–31, at 16. 3 Ibid., 20. 4 Cf. Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:93–94, where in commenting on the Old Testament background of the Beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God” (Mt 5:8), the Pope similarly takes up Psalm 24, describing how it reflects a liturgy of entrance into the gates of the Temple. 212 Pablo T. Gadenz face of God” in the Temple finds “a new concreteness” in the face and person of Jesus Christ: “He himself is for us the face of God.”5 The Pope here explicitly focuses on the image of the face of Christ, but the image that implicitly underlies the Pope’s thought is that of Jesus as the new Temple: in him the Old Testament longing to go up on pilgrimage to the Temple to see the face of God finds its fulfillment. It is this image of “Jesus the new Temple” in the thought of Pope Benedict that I wish to explore further in this essay. In the Gospels, the correlation of Jesus and Temple is found explicitly in John 2:21 (“he was speaking about the temple of his body”) and in Matthew 12:6 (“something greater than the temple is here”),6 but in more subtle ways, it is also found in many other passages. Drawing on these Gospel passages as well as on passages in Acts and in the letters of Paul, the Pope refers at least twenty-one distinct times to Jesus as the “new Temple” (that is, as the fulfillment of the old Temple) in the three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth alone.7 Moreover, although commentators on the Pope’s thought have briefly noted his treatment of the image of Jesus the new Temple,8 this feature of the Pope’s Christology, to my knowledge, has not yet been studied in systematic detail. Given its frequency and significance, such a study thus seems warranted. It is the goal of this two-part essay to contribute to such a study by sketching some of its broad lines. In the first part of this essay, I will consider the Pope’s treatment of biblical passages from the Gospels in relation to the image of Jesus the 5 Ratzinger, “The Face of Christ in Sacred Scripture,” 27. 6 See the Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 586, which makes reference to John 2:21 and Matthew 12:6 when commenting that Jesus “even identified himself with the Temple by presenting himself as God’s definitive dwelling-place among men.” 7 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:37–38, 108–11, 236–37, 244–47, 258, 306, 316; Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2011), 21–23, 35–37, 38–40, 61, 80, 92, 130, 148, 170, 209, 229–35; and Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, trans. Philip J. Whitmore (New York: Image, 2012), 11, 29, 69. 8 Maximilian Heinrich Heim, Joseph Ratzinger: Life in the Church and Living Theology: Fundamentals of Ecclesiology with Reference to Lumen Gentium, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 272–73, 280, 337–39, 518; Aidan Nichols, The Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to the Theology of Joseph Ratzinger, new ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 2007), 97, 132; Scott W. Hahn, Covenant and Communion: The Biblical Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2009), 52, 80, 148, 165–66; Thomas P. Rausch, Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to His Theological Vision (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2009), 87, 99, 136, 147; Emery de Gaál, The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI: The Christocentric Shift (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 67, 283. Jesus the New Temple 213 new Temple. From an exegetical perspective, such a study is of interest for various reasons. First, as we will see, although the Pope’s objective is not an exhaustive, detailed exegesis of the individual biblical passages (as one might find in large commentaries or specialized monographs), his treatment insightfully provides the big picture, as he explains the significance of many different events in Christ’s life and weaves them together using the image of Jesus the Temple. Second, the Pope’s treatment of the image, found not only in the volumes of Jesus of Nazareth but also in earlier writings going back decades, parallels and perhaps even anticipates the renewal of interest in the subject of Jesus and the Temple among many biblical scholars.9 Third, the Pope in this way is helping to overcome a bias against the study of the Temple cult that has long dominated historical-critical biblical scholarship, a bias that he critiqued back in his 1988 Erasmus lecture on biblical interpretation when he spoke about “the alleged antagonism of the prophetic against the ‘legal’ and, thus, in turn against what is cultic.”10 Fourth, the Pope’s treatment of the Temple 9 See, for example, N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 405, who notes that “[o]ne of the chief gains of the last twenty years of Jesus-research is that the question of Jesus and the Temple is back where it belongs, at the centre of the agenda.” He also addresses the issue of Jesus as Temple: “I think that Jesus saw himself, and perhaps his followers with him, as the new Temple” (426; cf. 432–37). See also E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 61–76. More recent biblical works that deal with the image of Jesus as Temple include: Mary L. Coloe, God Dwells with Us: Temple Symbolism in the Fourth Gospel (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001); Alan R. Kerr, The Temple of Jesus’ Body: The Temple Theme in the Gospel of John, Journal for the Study of the New Testament: Supplement Series 220 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002); G. K. Beale, The Temple and the Church’s Mission: A Biblical Theology of the Dwelling Place of God, New Studies in Biblical Theology 17 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004); Paul M. Hoskins, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple in the Gospel of John, Paternoster Biblical Monographs (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2006); Timothy C. Gray, The Temple in the Gospel of Mark: A Study in Its Narrative Role, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2.242 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010); Brant Pitre, “Jesus, the New Temple, and the New Priesthood,” Letter & Spirit 4 (2008): 47–83; Dan Lioy, Axis of Glory: A Biblical and Theological Analysis of the Temple Motif in Scripture, Studies in Biblical Literature 138 (New York: Peter Lang, 2010); Nicholas Perrin, Jesus the Temple (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2010). 10 Joseph Ratzinger, “Biblical Interpretation in Conflict: The Question of the Basic Principles and Path of Exegesis Today,” in Ratzinger, God’s Word: Scripture, Tradition, Office, ed. Peter Hünermann and Thomas Söding, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2008), 91–126, at 108. Similarly, Perrin, Jesus the Temple, 2, speaks of the “misguided decision to abstract the historical Jesus from his Jewish context. This move is in part explained by the prejudices and philosophical mood of the day, for the anti-Semitic sentiments of the nineteenth and early 214 Pablo T. Gadenz image integrates modern biblical scholarship with a retrieval of patristic and medieval emphases on spiritual exegesis (e.g., the four senses of Scripture), and is therefore a good example of the two-level biblical hermeneutic the Pope has insistently called for, such as in his 2010 Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini.11 In the second part of the essay, I will more briefly consider various theological implications of the Pope’s treatment of the image of Jesus as Temple. Certainly, the Pope’s treatment contributes to his Christology, and it parallels an interest also seen in other recent works on Christology.12 In particular, the image relates to other cultic images for Jesus, such as Priest and Lamb of sacrifice. Moreover, the Pope’s treatment also extends (as the various spiritual senses of Scripture are unfolded) to other treatises of theology, such as ecclesiology, Mariology, theological anthropology, and eschatology. Brief comments will be made on these areas as well, drawing once again on the Pope’s body of writings. The Mysteries of the Life of Jesus, the New Temple In the Foreword of Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, Pope Benedict indicates that what he is attempting to do can be compared to some degree “with twentieth centuries could only serve to extend the tradition of reinventing Jesus as one who stood opposed to Judaism and its allegedly legalistic trammels.” See also Jonathan Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice and the Temple: Symbolism and Supersessionism in the Study of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 11, who speaks of “the dominant antisacrificial bias.” 11 Pope Benedict XVI, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Verbum Domini (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2010), nos. 34–41. On the Pope’s synthesis of patristic and modern biblical interpretation in Jesus of Nazareth, see William M. Wright IV, “Patristic Biblical Hermeneutics in Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth,” Letter & Spirit 7 (2011): 191–207. 12 Recall the section on “Jesus and the Temple” in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 583–586. A brief, related treatment of the Temple is found in Christoph Schönborn, God Sent His Son: A Contemporary Christology, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2010), 249–50. See also Edward T. Oakes, Infinity Dwindled to Infancy: A Catholic and Evangelical Christology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 33–35, who briefly deals with Jesus’ claim to be the Temple in a section discussing Jesus as High Priest. A study of Aquinas’s interpretation of Christ as the fulfillment of the Temple can be found in Matthew Levering, Christ’s Fulfillment of Torah and Temple: Salvation according to Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), esp. 83–107. A classic treatment of Jesus and the Temple is the work of Yves M.-J. Congar, The Mystery of the Temple, trans. Reginald F. Trevett (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1962), 112–50. Congar’s work undoubtedly contributed to the Pope’s thought on the subject; see, e.g., Joseph Ratzinger, The Feast of Faith: Approaches to a Theology of the Liturgy, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 109, n. 23. Jesus the New Temple 215 the theological treatise on the mysteries of the life of Jesus.”13 Indeed, such is also the approach of the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dedicated to the “The Mysteries of Christ’s Life,”14 which, as Ratzinger has elsewhere noted, “has restored a long-lost main component of narrative Christology.”15 The first part of this essay will thus be an exercise in narrative Christology, as we investigate the Gospel texts related to the theme of Jesus the Temple, from his birth through his public ministry to his passion, death, and resurrection, as presented in Ratzinger’s writings. Before we embark on this exercise, however, a word needs to be said about two issues. First, it is important to recall the significance of the Temple for the Jewish people, so as to provide the foundation for understanding Jesus as the fulfillment of the Temple. Two interrelated aspects of the religious significance of the Temple are especially relevant for our study.16 On the one hand, the Temple in Jerusalem was the “house of God,” the site of God’s presence among his people and the dwelling place of his name (2:17, 91).17 The Jewish people would therefore go up to Jerusalem on pilgrimage to appear before the Lord, to see his face. On the other hand, the Temple with its sacrificial system provided the Jewish people with the means of atonement (2:32, 46). The Temple sacrifices enabled the people to receive forgiveness of sins and cleansing from certain ritual impurities. Accordingly, as we will see below, the image of Jesus the new Temple indicates that Jesus is now the dwelling place of God and the means of atonement; he is both presence and sacrifice. The second issue regards the typological interpretation of the Old Testament.18 The image of Jesus as the new Temple is a classic example of typology, in which the Temple in Jerusalem is understood to be a type that prefigured Jesus.19 Not infrequently, however, the objection of 13 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:xvi. The Pope notes the “classic form” of this trea- tise presented by St. Thomas Aquinas (ST III, qq. 27–59). 14 Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 512–70. 15 Joseph Ratzinger, Gospel, Catechesis, Catechism: Sidelights on the Catechism of the Catholic Church (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 70, n. 30. 16 Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 406–12; Timothy Wardle, The Jerusalem Temple and Early Christian Identity,Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2.291 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 14–30, esp. 15–20 on the Temple’s religious significance. 17 As shown, parenthetical in-text citations will be used, where appropriate, throughout the remainder of this essay to give the Part and page numbers for references to Jesus of Nazareth. 18 On typology, see Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, no. 41; Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 128–30. 19 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:61, employs the patristic phrase “sacramentum futuri” in explaining that the Jewish purity laws and Temple sacrifices were types 216 Pablo T. Gadenz supersessionism is raised against such typological readings.20 Without entering here into a general discussion of these complex issues, it is helpful to mention, specifically with regard to the Temple, that Jews and Christians were both confronted with the task of re-interpreting the Scriptures following the Temple’s destruction by the Romans in the year 70. Christians responded with the christological reading using typology, and Jews with the rabbinical reading.21 Moreover, even before the destruction of the Temple, the idea of a new temple replacing the existing one is found in Jewish sources (e.g., 1 Enoch 90:28–29); therefore, there was a context for situating the claim that Jesus replaces the Temple.22 Such considerations may help us better understand the typological presentation of Jesus as the new Temple. Turning now to the Gospel texts, we consider first the birth of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, a Gospel which demonstrates a keen interest in the Temple. In two Christmas meditations from several decades ago, Cardinal Ratzinger suggests a calendric association between the date of Christmas, December 25, and the date of Hanukkah, which begins on the 25th day of the month of Kislev and marks the dedication of the new altar in the Temple by the Maccabees (cf. 1 Mc 4:36–59). Referring in both meditations to an article by the biblical scholar Bo Reicke,23 Ratzinger explains the rationale for pointing toward future fulfillment in Jesus. The phrase recalls the title of a book on typology by Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri: Études sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1950), to which Ratzinger makes reference in his Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology, trans. Mary Frances McCarthy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 151, n. 99. 20 See Adele Reinhartz, “The Gospel According to Benedict: Jesus of Nazareth on Jews and Judaism,” in The Pope and Jesus of Nazareth: Christ, Scripture, and the Church, ed. Adrian Pabst and Angus Paddison (London: SCM Press, 2009), 233–46, esp. 243–44, where Reinhartz explicitly mentions the theme of Jesus the new Temple as an example of supersessionism in Jesus of Nazareth. 21 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:33. Along these lines, Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 4, 104–5, 203–11, 247, speaks of both Christian and Jewish supersessionism with regard to the Temple. 22 David Flusser, “Jerusalem in Second Temple Literature,” in Flusser, Judaism of the Second Temple Period, Volume 2: The Jewish Sages and Their Literature, trans. Azzan Yadin (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 44–75, at 47; Klawans, Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, 128–29. 23 Bo Reicke, “Jahresfeier und Zeitenwende im Judentum und Christentum der Antike,” Theologische Quartalschrift 150 (1970): 321–34, esp. 329–31. (Note that in the English edition of both of Ratzinger’s meditations, the journal name and the page numbering of Reicke’s article are slightly incorrect.) With the reference to Hanukkah, Reicke presents a more sophisticated argument concerning the establishment of the date of Christmas than the common view that simply associates it with the Roman feast of the Sol invictus. Jesus the New Temple 217 the connection: “In his infancy narrative, Luke unfolds a chronology with a profound symbolic meaning, dating it in such a way that the birth of Jesus occurs during the feast of Hanukkah, on the night of lights.”24 “Hence, the date of Jesus’ birth would also symbolize the fact that when he appeared as God’s light in the winter night, the true dedication of the Temple—the arrival of God in the heart of this earth—took place.”25 Pope Benedict returns to this idea in his General Audience of 23 December 2009: To understand better the meaning of the Lord’s Birth I would like to make a brief allusion to the historical origins of this Solemnity. . . . Hippolytus of Rome, in his commentary on the Book of the Prophet Daniel, written in about A.D. 204, was the first person to say clearly that Jesus was born on 25 December. Moreover, some exegetes note that the Feast of the Dedication of the Temple of Jerusalem, instituted by Judas Machabee in 164 B.C., was celebrated on that day. The coincidence of dates would consequently mean that with Jesus, who appeared as God’s Light in the darkness, the consecration of the Temple, the Advent of God to this earth, was truly brought about.26 Forty days after the birth of Jesus, there is his first visit to the Jerusalem Temple at the Presentation (Lk 2:22–38). The Pope considers this passage in relation to the image of Jesus the Temple in his 2011 homily for the Feast of the Presentation. This Gospel scene reveals the mystery of the Son of the Virgin, the consecrated One of the Father who came into the world to do his will faithfully (cf. Heb 10:5–7). Simeon identifies him as ‘a light for revelation to the Gentiles’ (Lk 2:32) and announces with prophetic words his supreme offering to God and his final victory (cf. Lk 2:32–35). This is 24 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Light Shines in the Darkness,” in Ratzinger, The Blessing of Christmas, trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 99–116, at 108. 25 Joseph Ratzinger, “Ox and Ass at the Crib,” in Ratzinger, The Blessing of Christmas, 63–85, at 66–67 (emphasis added). 26 Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience (December 23, 2009), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English ( January 6, 2010), 6. Moreover, in a Christmas Midnight Mass homily in 2008, the Pope compares the newborn Jesus to the Temple, without however focusing on the date of the celebration: “God is in the stable. In the Old Testament the Temple was considered almost as God’s footstool; the sacred ark was the place in which he was mysteriously present in the midst of men and women. Above the temple, hidden, stood the cloud of God’s glory. Now it stands above the stable”: Pope Benedict XVI, Homily (December 25, 2008), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English ( January 7, 2009), 3. Pablo T. Gadenz 218 the meeting point of the two Testaments, Old and New. Jesus enters the ancient temple; he who is the new Temple of God.27 Thus, the birth of Jesus, as the new Temple, emphasizes the aspect of God’s presence among his people, while Jesus’ presentation in the Temple highlights the sacrificial aspect. The Pope briefly echoes these insights regarding the birth and presentation of Jesus in Jesus of Nazareth:The Infancy Narratives. On the one hand, regarding Jesus’ birth, he notes the new mode of God’s presence, since “the manger has in some sense become the Ark of the Covenant, in which God is mysteriously hidden among men.”28 On the other, in his discussion of Luke’s account of the presentation in the Temple, he observes that “[t]he language of sacrificial offering and priesthood is evoked.”29 We move now to an event near the beginning of the public ministry, the temptation of Jesus. One of the temptations involves the Temple; specifically, the devil tells Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple, if he is the Son of God (Mt 4:5–6; Lk 4:9). In Part One of Jesus of Nazareth, the Pope briefly mentions the relationship between this temptation and the Cross: “From this scene on the pinnacle of the Temple . . . we can look out and see the Cross” (1:37). He returns to this temptation when considering in Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, the mocking of Jesus on the Cross: Three groups of mockers are mentioned in the Gospel.The first are the passers-by. They remind the Lord of his words about the destruction of the Temple: “Aha, you who would destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself, and come down from the cross!” (Mk 15:29–30). By taunting the Lord in this way, . . . they try to lead him into temptation, as the devil himself had done: “Save yourself!” Exercise your power! They do not realize that at this very moment the destruction of the Temple is being accomplished and that the new Temple is rising up before them. . . . Just as he refused to be induced by the devil to throw himself down from the parapet of the Temple (Mt 4:5–7; Lk 4:9–13), so now he refuses to yield to a similar temptation. (2:208–10) The Pope’s insightful comments draw attention to a subtle, thematic connection only fully developed in Matthew’s Gospel (compare Mt 4:5–6 and 27:40), in which both the temptation and the crucifixion scenes mention the Temple, the title “Son of God,” and the act of coming down from a high place. The juxtaposition suggests, as the Pope indicates, that 27 Pope Benedict XVI, Homily (February 2, 2011), in L’Osservatore Romano,Weekly Edition in English (February 9, 2011), 4 (emphasis added). 28 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 69. 29 Ibid., 82. Jesus the New Temple 219 Jesus lifted up on the Cross is the new Temple. Even though biblical scholars typically note a connection between the two Matthean passages, they often fail to reach as far as the Pope’s conclusion that the temptation regarding the Temple prepares for the presentation of Jesus as the new Temple on the Cross.30 Another Temple-related event, which occurs during the public ministry of Jesus in Galilee, is the dispute that arises with the Pharisees when the disciples pluck grain on the Sabbath. All three Synoptic Gospels record this event, but the Matthean version develops the Temple motif more than the others. In it, not only does Jesus speak of “something greater than the temple” (Mt 12:6), but he also likens the disciples’ activity in his presence to that of the priests in the Temple on the Sabbath (Mt 12:5). In Jesus of Nazareth, Part One, this Matthean passage is among those discussed in the Pope’s conversation with Rabbi Jacob Neusner. The Pope cites Neusner’s comments that Jesus and his disciples “may do on the Sabbath what they do because they stand in the place of the priests in the Temple: the holy place has shifted, now being formed by the circle made up of the master and his disciples.”31 Agreeing with this assessment, the Pope refers a little later to “Jesus’ claim to be Temple and Torah in person” (1:111). By contrast, some biblical scholars fail to see this connection, arguing instead that the “something greater than the temple” is mercy (cf. Mt 12:7 citing Hos 6:6), so that Jesus is replacing, as a means of atonement, the sacrifices in the Temple with deeds of mercy, much as rabbinic Judaism did following the fall of the Second Temple.32 However, by taking into account other factors such as the Matthean typology that also describes Jesus as “something greater” than “Jonah” (Mt 12:41) and “Solomon” (Mt 12:42), other scholars draw a conclusion similar to that of the Pope, recognizing in this passage the theme of Jesus the new Temple.33 30 Instead, the focus tends to be on the use of the same phrase “if you are the Son of God” in both the first (4:3) and second (4:6) temptations, and also at the crucifixion (27:40), without reference to Jesus as the new Temple; see, e.g., Raymond E. Brown, Death of the Messiah, 2 vols. (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 2:984, n. 1; R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), 1070. 31 Jacob Neusner, A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, rev. ed. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University, 2000), 83; cf. Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:108. 32 Ulrich Luz, Matthew 8–20: A Commentary, ed. Helmut Koester, trans. James E. Crouch, Hermeneia (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 181–83. See the discussion of this position in Leroy A. Huizenga, The New Isaac: Tradition and Intertextuality in the Gospel of Matthew, Supplements to Novum Testamentum 131 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 284–85. 33 Huizenga, The New Isaac, 285–86. Huizenga correlates the theme of Jesus the new Temple with other cultic images: Jesus is the “ultimate sacrifice” (261) and 220 Pablo T. Gadenz Turning to the Gospel of John, we find that a major part of Jesus’ public ministry takes place in the Temple area, during his pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the Jewish feast days. The Pope lists these feast days, considering Passover first: “Right at the beginning of Jesus’ activity we read of the ‘Passover of the Jews,’ which suggests the motif of the true Temple, and thus of the Cross and Resurrection (cf. Jn 2:13–25)” (1:236–37). Indeed, the explicit reference in this pericope to “the temple of his body” ( Jn 2:21) sets the stage for considering the other Temple feasts mentioned later in John’s Gospel in light of their fulfillment in Jesus (1:247). For example, there is the long section that takes place at the Feast of Tabernacles ( Jn 7:1–10:21). At this feast, Jesus announces that “rivers of living water” ( Jn 7:38) will flow from him, in fulfillment of Scripture. The Pope, after recalling a ritual of that feast in which water was drawn “from the spring at Siloam in order to offer a water libation in the Temple” (1:244), comments that there is “good reason to hear a reference to the new Temple echoing through Jesus’ words about the streams of living waters.”34 He also mentions (1:246) Ezekiel’s “vision of the new Temple” (Ezek 47:1–12) as one Scripture text that stands behind these words. Moreover, he notes that Jesus’ words look ahead to the blood and water that flow from his body on the Cross (cf. Jn 19:34); this river of life “shows the body of Jesus to be the real Temple,” as it “signifies the living indwelling of God in the world ” (1:247 [emphasis added]). Whereas the Pope’s comments regarding Jesus at the Feast of Tabernacles thus focus on the aspect of God’s indwelling presence, his treatment of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer ( Jn 17) highlights the sacrificial aspect of the Temple theme, as he associates this prayer with “the theological content of the Feast of the Atonement” (1:237). Developing this idea further in Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two,35 the Pope again employs the image of Jesus the new Temple. “priest” (285, n. 67). As we will see, the Pope similarly associates the image of Jesus the Temple with the images of Jesus the Priest and Lamb of sacrifice. He considers these cultic images to be an integral part of the Christology of the Gospels, complementing the image of Jesus as king. Likewise, on the interpretation of Jesus as Temple and Priest in the Markan parallel to Matthew 12:1–8 (Mk 2:23–28), see Crispin H. T. Fletcher-Louis, “Jesus as the High Priestly Messiah: Part 2,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 5 (2007): 57–79, at 75–77. 34 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:247. Cf. Coloe, God Dwells with Us, 125–33; Hoskins, Jesus as the Fulfillment of the Temple, 160–70. 35 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:76–102, drawing on the work of André Feuillet, The Priesthood of Christ and His Ministers, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1975). Jesus the New Temple 221 In the words addressed by Jesus to the Father, the ritual of the Day of Atonement is transformed into prayer. Here we find a concrete example of that cultic renewal toward which the cleansing of the Temple and Jesus’ interpretation of it were pointing. Sacrificial animals are a thing of the past. In their place are what the Greek Fathers called thysía logike — ˜ spiritual sacrifices [literally: sacrifices after the manner of the word]— and what Paul described in similar terms as logike ˜ latreía, that is, worship shaped by the word, structured on reason (Rom 12:1). (2:80) In his discussion of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer and the Day of Atonement, the Pope also recalls the Temple’s significance as the locus of God’s presence, and specifically as the dwelling place of God’s name (2:91). In the ritual on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would pronounce the divine name (2:77–78), but now in his high-priestly prayer, Jesus says “I made known to them your name” ( Jn 17:26; cf. 17:6) (2:90). The Pope explains that Jesus’ “revelation of the name is a new mode of God’s presence among men, a radically new way in which God makes his home with them. In Jesus, God gives himself entirely into the world of mankind. . . . As the Risen One, he comes once more, in order to make all people into his body, the new Temple” (2:91–92 [emphasis added]). With regard to the Day of Atonement and the Feast of Tabernacles, which are separated in the Jewish calendar by five days, the Pope also intriguingly associates two temporally related events from the Synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 17:1 and Mk 9:2: “after six days”), namely, Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration (1:237, 305–18), once again both related to the image of Jesus as Temple. Drawing on an article by van Cangh and van Esbroeck,36 the Pope comments as follows regarding Peter’s confession: Peter’s confession fell on the great Day of Atonement and should be interpreted theologically against the backdrop of this feast, on which, for the one time in the year, the high priest solemnly pronounced the name YHWH in the Temple’s Holy of Holies. This context would give added depth to Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Son of the living God. (1:306) In the analogy, the Pope suggests that Peter is the true high priest (Cephas rather than Caiaphas, as van Cangh and van Esbroeck note),37 who on the Day of Atonement confesses the equivalent of the divine name in the presence of the new Temple, Jesus. Because of the temporal link between the two events, the Transfiguration would then correspond to the Feast of Tabernacles. Now, besides the water 36 Jean-Marie van Cangh and Michel van Esbroeck, “La primauté de Pierre (Mt 16:16–19) et son contexte judaïque,” Revue théologique de Louvain 11 (1980): 310–24. 37 Ibid., 315. 222 Pablo T. Gadenz libation ritual mentioned above, another characteristic of the Feast of Tabernacles was its celebration as a festival of light in the Temple. In the Gospel of John, it was at this feast that Jesus announced: “I am the light of the world” ( Jn 8:12; 9:5). The Synoptic Gospels record instead the Transfiguration, at which Jesus is clothed with light (Mt 17:2); in this way, “Jesus’ being in the light of God” is revealed,“his own being-light as Son” (1:310). Pursuing the comparison, Peter’s proposal of making three tents (Mt 17:4) would accordingly correspond to the tents (sukkoth) built for the feast,38 while the “bright cloud” (Mt 17:5) would represent “the shekinah . . . the sign of the presence of God himself.The cloud hovering over the Tent of Meeting indicated that God was present. Jesus is the holy tent above whom the cloud of God’s presence now stands.”39 With this image of Jesus as the new Tent of Meeting/Temple, the Pope here also comments on the prologue to John’s Gospel: “ ‘And the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us’ ( Jn 1:14). Indeed, the Lord has pitched the tent of his body among us and has thus inaugurated the messianic age.”40 Summarizing the Pope’s discussion of the Jewish Temple feasts, we could say that Jesus as the new Temple fulfills the Temple feasts in the three dimensions of their significance: creation, salvation history, and eschatological hope (1:237–38, 307, 314–15). According to the Synoptic Gospels, after Jesus’ solemn entrance into Jerusalem there is a key event for our consideration: the cleansing of the Temple. As already noted, in the parallel passage in John’s Gospel we find Jesus’ explicit statement regarding the new Temple of his body ( Jn 2:19–21). Although he does comment briefly on the cleansing of the Temple in Jesus of Nazareth, Part One (1:231–32, 236–37, 247), the Pope treats the event at greater length in Part Two. In his exegesis, he notes that Jesus’ Temple saying in John reappears in Matthew and Mark in a slightly distorted form on the lips of the false witnesses at his trial: “I will destroy this temple made by hand, and in three days I will build another, not made by hand” (Mk 14:58).41 His explanation of these sayings interprets 38 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:313–16. The Pope draws here on the treatment of the Feast of Tabernacles in Jean Daniélou, The Bible and the Liturgy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 1956), 333–47. 39 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:316 (emphasis added). Cf. Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 29. 40 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:315. In Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, the Pope again comments on this text from the prologue to John’s Gospel: “Jesus is, so to speak, the tent of meeting—he is the reality for which the tent and the later Temple could only serve as signs” (11). 41 For further commentary on Mark 14:58, and indeed many passages in Mark 11–15, in relation to the image of Jesus as Temple, see Gray, The Temple in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus the New Temple 223 the event of the cleansing of the Temple in light of the image of Jesus the new Temple: The rejection and crucifixion of Jesus means at the same time the end of this Temple. The era of the Temple is over. A new worship is being introduced, in a Temple not built by human hands.This Temple is his body, the Risen One, who gathers the peoples and unites them in the sacrament of his body and blood. He himself is the new Temple of humanity.42 Then, after discussing the two brief episodes in Matthew’s Gospel which conclude the narrative of the cleansing of the Temple (the healing of the blind and the lame, and the exclamation of the children; Mt 21:14–15), the Pope summarizes by once again referring to the new Temple image: “These two brief episodes, then, announce the coming of the new Temple, the Temple that Jesus came on earth to build.”43 Now, it is interesting to note that the interpretation of the cleansing of the Temple is disputed by biblical scholars, with a variety of proposed interpretations.44 Among these scholarly interpretations, the line of interpretation highlighted by the Pope is compelling, as it forms part of a larger picture that integrates many texts, acquiring a cumulative force on account of its greater explanatory power. 42 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:21–22; cf. 148. See also Jacob Neusner, “Money- Changers in the Temple: The Mishnah’s Explanation,” New Testament Studies 35 (1989): 287–90, at 290. 43 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:23. In a Palm Sunday homily in 2008, the Pope explained the event of the cleansing of the Temple in some detail, concluding in the same way: “The time of the temple built of stone, the time of animal sacrifices, is now passed: the fact that the Lord now expels the merchants does not only prevent an abuse but points to God’s new way of acting. The new Temple is formed: Jesus Christ himself, in whom God’s love descends upon human beings. He, by his life, is the new and living Temple. He who passed through the Cross and was raised is the living space of spirit and life in which the correct form of worship is made. Thus, the purification of the temple, as the culmination of Jesus’ solemn entry into Jerusalem, is at the same time the sign of the impending ruin of the edifice and the promise of the new Temple”: Homily (March 16, 2008), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English (March 19, 2008), 3, 8, at 3 (emphasis added). 44 See the recent, detailed study by Klyne R. Snodgrass, “The Temple Incident,” in Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence, ed. Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 247 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010; repr. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), 429–80. Despite the length of his article (and largely because of his methodology and objectives), Snodgrass does not consider in detail whether the cleansing incident is meant to show Jesus as the new Temple; he merely asks: “Does this incident relate to any thought of a new temple embodied in the relation of Jesus and his followers, as is evident in other expressions of a spiritualized temple?” (475). 224 Pablo T. Gadenz The prophetic sign of the cleansing of the Temple is followed by Jesus’ prophetic discourse, his eschatological discourse (Mk 13 and parallels), in which he foretells the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple within one generation. The Pope continues the same line of interpretation, explaining that Jesus “knew that the age of this Temple was over and that something new was to come, linked to his death and Resurrection” (2:35). He finds added testimony for Jesus’ prediction about the demise of the Temple in the accusation against Stephen (Acts 6:14) and Stephen’s own discourse (cf. Acts 7:49–50), which reveal that Stephen understood that “the new and entirely different Temple” (2:37) was established by Jesus. Turning to the events of the Last Supper, the Pope considers first the washing of feet, understanding by this ritual that Jesus has brought about a “shift in meaning of the notion of purity,” which further illustrates the message about “the end of the animal sacrifices, about worship and the new Temple” (2:61). In his treatment of Jesus’ high-priestly prayer, to which reference was already made above, he also considers the institution of the Eucharist, again in conjunction with the Temple theme: “With the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus transforms his cruel death into ‘word’, into the radical expression of his love, his self-giving to the point of death. So he himself becomes the ‘Temple’ ” (2:80). Later, regarding the institution narrative itself, the Pope explains that “the essence of the new worship [is] established by Christ through the Last Supper, Cross, and Resurrection . . . : here the old Temple worship is abolished and at the same time brought to its fulfillment” (2:130; cf. 141). Regarding the crucifixion, the Pope points out the irony, as already noted above, that those who mock Jesus regarding his words about the destruction of the Temple (cf. Mk 14:58; 15:29) “do not realize that at this very moment the destruction of the Temple is being accomplished and that the new Temple is rising up before them” (2:209). Indeed, at his death, the Temple veil is torn in two, indicating that “the era of the old Temple and its sacrifices is over” and that through Jesus “the pathway to God is now open.”45 Moreover, blood and water flow from his side, fulfilling Ezekiel’s vision of the new Temple ( Jn 19:34; cf. Jn 7:38; Ezek 47:1–12) (1:247). To interpret the event of the crucifixion, the Pope also looks to Paul, who explains the significance of the Cross by analogy with the sacrificial function of the Temple (Rom 3:23–25). The Pope concludes that “at the very heart of Paul’s teaching” is “the belief that all 45 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:209. Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, “Preparation for Priestly Ministry,” in Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today, trans. Martha M. Matesich (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1997), 161–76, at 168. Jesus the New Temple 225 sacrifices are fulfilled in the Cross of Jesus Christ, . . . that Jesus in this way has taken the place of the Temple, that he himself is the new Temple.”46 In his chapter on the Resurrection, the Pope does not explicitly return to the image of Jesus the new Temple, but elsewhere he does discuss the Resurrection in connection with this image. For example, in Jesus of Nazareth, Part One, he notes that it was after and on account of the Resurrection that the disciples remembered and understood Jesus’ saying about the temple of his body ( Jn 2:21–22) (1:231–32). The Pope also associates the Resurrection and the new Temple in his comments on the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1–12 and parallels), in which Jesus “foretells his Cross and Resurrection and prophesies that upon him, when he has been killed and has risen, God will erect a new building, a new Temple in the world” (1:258). He makes a similar comment in Part Two in his discussion of Jesus’ trial: “The hour of the new worship in ‘spirit and truth’ has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple” (2:170). In summary, Pope Benedict’s description of Jesus as the new Temple spans a variety of biblical texts from Jesus’ birth to his death and Resurrection, showing how Jesus fulfills the various aspects of the religious significance of the Jerusalem Temple. As a result, the Pope has drawn attention to a biblical image whose explanatory power is demonstrated in its ability to weave together so many events from Christ’s life, producing a strong cumulative effect. Also, as I have mentioned, his insights are consistent with those of recent scholarship and indeed anticipate one of the directions of further biblical research. For example, N. T. Wright, writing about the future direction of Historical Jesus studies, makes the following comment: “The study of the Gospels in the light of all we now know about first-century Judaism positively cries out for exploration of big, new subjects: Jesus and the temple, Jesus and priesthood. . . . ”47 Pope Benedict’s in-depth treatment of the image of Jesus the new Temple is thus, in a sense, on the proverbial “cutting edge” of research. Moreover, 46 Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:38. A little later, he comments that “Paul has already completely absorbed the Temple and its sacrificial theology into his Christology” (2:40; cf. 230–32). See also Pope Benedict XVI, “Spiritual Worship” (General Audience, January 7, 2009), in Benedict XVI, St. Paul (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 103–10, at 104–5. 47 N. T. Wright, “Whence and Whither Historical Jesus Studies in the Life of the Church?” in Jesus, Paul and the People of God: A Theological Dialogue with N. T. Wright, ed. Nicholas Perrin and Richard B. Hays (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 115–58, at 150 (emphasis added). 226 Pablo T. Gadenz the Pope’s overall treatment of the image of Jesus the new Temple illustrates a biblical hermeneutic that integrates historical-literary study with spiritual-theological interpretation.48 Regarding this second spiritualtheological level, the Pope has frequently made reference to the three criteria found in Dei Verbum: the exegete should pay attention to the content and unity of all of Scripture (canonical exegesis), the living tradition of the Church, and the analogy of faith.49 One notes, first, how the image of Jesus the new Temple is explicitly associated with a canonical reading of Scripture, in which Old Testament and New Testament meet, as the various meanings of the Temple find their fulfillment in Jesus. Second, his interpretation stands within the living tradition of the Church, as seen, for example, in his frequent recourse to the liturgy and to patristic writers.Third, the Pope’s interpretation takes into account the analogy of faith, that is, he takes into consideration the nexus mysteriorum,50 noting how the “mysteries” of the life of Jesus the new Temple are lived in the Church and in individual Christians’ lives, as indeed we will now see in the second part of this essay. Our Communion in the Mysteries of the Life of Jesus the New Temple We began the first part of the essay by recalling the approach of the “mysteries” of the life of Jesus. Now, at the beginning of this briefer, second part, we recall that Christians share in these “mysteries” of the life of Jesus, since Christ lived them for us, presenting himself as our model, and enabling us to live them in him.51 From a consideration of Christology, therefore, I will move to a brief consideration of other treatises of 48 See Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:xiv: “If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character.” 49 Dei Verbum, no. 12; see also the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 112–14. The Pope has frequently referred to these three criteria: e.g., Pope Benedict XVI, Address to the Synod of Bishops (October 14, 2008), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English (October 22, 2008), 13; Address to the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Biblical Commission (April 23, 2009), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English (April 29, 2009), 3, 5, at 3; Address to Academics of the Pontifical Biblical Institute on the Occasion of the Hundredth Anniversary of its Foundation (October 26, 2009), in L’Osservatore Romano, Weekly Edition in English (November 4, 2009), 4. See also Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 1:xviii; Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, no. 34. 50 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 90, n. 51. 51 Ibid., nos. 519–21. For a classic treatment, see Columba Marmion, Christ in His Mysteries, trans. M. St. Thomas (St. Louis: Herder, 1939), 10–16. Jesus the New Temple 227 theology—ecclesiology, Mariology, theological anthropology, and eschatology—showing how Ratzinger extends to these treatises his use of the Temple image. Regarding Christology, the image of Jesus the new Temple correlates with other cultic images, such as Jesus the new Priest and Jesus the new Lamb of sacrifice. Indeed, many interconnected Old Testament institutions all have their fulfillment in him. Extrapolating from a verse in the Letter to the Hebrews, which says that “when there is a change of the priesthood, there is also of necessity a change of law” (Heb 7:12), we might observe that, according to the Pope, we have in Jesus a new Temple, a new priesthood, a new sacrifice, a new worship-liturgy, and a new covenant.52 Regarding ecclesiology, already back in his doctoral dissertation in the 1950s, Ratzinger explored the image of the Church as Temple.53 The Church is a Temple because the Church is the Body of Christ the Temple, as Ratzinger explains: Just as the old Israel once revered the temple as its center and the guarantee of its unity, [. . .] in like manner this new meal [the Eucharist] is now the bond uniting a new people of God. There is no longer any need for a center localized in an outward temple. . . . The Body of the Lord, which is the center of the Lord’s Supper, is the one new temple that joins Christians together into a much more real unity than a temple made of stone could ever do.54 Or again, in a homily on Acts 2:42 (“They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread 52 See, e.g., Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth, 2:81, 88, 108, 112, 130, 141, 170, 187. See also Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, rev. ed., trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 286, where he comments on the text of Hebrews 9:11–15: “Christ . . . was—so the text says—the one true priest in the world. His death . . . was in reality the one and only liturgy of the world, a cosmic liturgy, in which Jesus stepped, not in the limited arena of the liturgical performance, the Temple, but publicly, before the eyes of the world, into the real temple, that is, before the face of God himself, in order to offer, not things, the blood of animals, or anything like that, but himself ” (emphasis added). Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2000), 48–49. 53 Joseph Ratzinger, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche, Münchener Theologische Studien 2.7 (1954; repr. Munich: St. Ottilien, 1992), 36–38, 71–73, 240–47. 54 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Origin and Essence of the Church,” in Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996) 13–45, at 27 (citing his own earlier work Das neue Volk Gottes). 228 Pablo T. Gadenz and to the prayers”), Ratzinger notes that “[t]his passage is telling us that the Church subsists as Liturgy and in Liturgy. She is the living temple that . . . is growing up on the foundation stone of Christ.”55 Relating Mariology to the image of Jesus the new Temple, Ratzinger comments on how Mary becomes a living Temple at her Annunciation (cf. Lk 1:35): The other image in this text—the “overshadowing by the power of the Most High”—points to the Temple of Israel and to the holy tent in the wilderness where God’s presence was indicated in the cloud. . . . Just as Mary was depicted earlier as the new Israel, the true “daughter of Zion”, so now she appears as the temple upon which descends the cloud in which God walks into the midst of history.56 Our discussion of the application of the image of Jesus as new Temple to his mother Mary is a step toward considering all Christians, who are members of the body of Christ, as a temple. Here we move to the realm of the second spiritual sense: the moral or tropological sense. An example of this movement from a consideration of the life of Christ to a consideration of the life of the Christian is found in the first part of Jesus of Nazareth, when the Pope discusses the image of the living water that flows from the Temple ( Jn 7:37–38; cf. Ezek 47:1–12): “The application of this passage primarily to Christ . . . does not have to exclude a secondary interpretation referring to the believer” (1:248). Of course, St. Paul speaks several times of individual Christians as a temple (1 Cor 3:16–17; 6:19; 2 Cor 6:16; Eph 2:21). In one of his General Audiences during the Year of St. Paul, the Pope comments on the moral implications of this temple-status of believers: “in following St. Paul, we should gain a new awareness of the fact that precisely because we are justified in Christ, we no longer belong to ourselves but have become a temple of the Spirit and hence are called to glorify God in our body with the whole of our existence (cf. 1 Cor 6:19).”57 55 Joseph Ratzinger, “The Church Subsists as Liturgy and in the Liturgy: A Homily on Acts 2:42,” in Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 121–29, at 122. 56 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 272–73. See also the essay by Joseph Ratzinger, “Et Incarnatus Est de Spiritu Sancto ex Maria Virgine” in Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger, Mary: The Church at the Source, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), 81–95, at 87–88; and Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, 29. 57 Pope Benedict XVI, “The Doctrine of Justification: The Apostle’s Teaching on Faith and Works” (General Audience, November 26, 2008), in Benedict XVI, St. Paul, 84–88, at 87. Jesus the New Temple 229 Finally, moving to the third and last of the spiritual senses (and the fourth sense overall), one considers the image of Temple on the anagogical or eschatological level. Several times in his textbook on eschatology, Ratzinger refers to Christ the Temple. For example, he explains how the eschatological hope of Christians who await the Parousia of the Lord is manifested in the liturgy by the orientation of prayer to the East: When the ancient Israelite prayed, he turned towards the Jerusalem temple. In this way, he linked his prayer to the salvation history which united God with Israel and was focused and made present in the temple. . . . By contrast, early Christians as they prayed turned towards the East, the rising sun, which is the symbol of the risen Christ who rose from death’s night into the glory of the Father and now reigns over all. At the same time, the rising sun is also the sign of the returning Christ. . . . The fusing together of these two kinds of symbolism in the image of the rising sun suggests how intimately related faith in the resurrection and hope for the parousia really are. The two are one in the figure of the Lord who has already returned as the risen One, continues to return in the Eucharist, and so remains he who is to come, the hope of the world. . . . By turning to the east, the community declares the temple to be superseded by Christ who is the true temple, the world’s future in the world’s present.58 Ratzinger concludes his book on eschatology with a consideration of the Christological nature of heaven: “heaven, as our becoming one with Christ, takes on the nature of adoration. All cult prefigures it, and in it comes to completion. Christ is the temple of the final age; he is heaven, the new Jerusalem; he is the cultic space for God.”59 Conclusion As I hope I have shown, the image of Jesus the new Temple plays a significant role in Pope Benedict’s Christology, and indeed, other areas of his theology. The Pope shows how the various meanings that the Jerusalem Temple had for the Jewish people are fulfilled in Jesus. The Pope’s treatment also serves to illustrate the renewed biblical hermeneutic advocated by the Pope. Seeing Jesus through the eyes of Pope Benedict involves seeing Jesus as the new Temple, and thus as the new Priest and the new 58 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein and Aidan Nichols (Washington, DC:The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 6–7. Regarding the liturgical orientation of prayer in connection with the image of Christ the new and true Temple, as Jewish synagogue prayer was oriented toward the Jerusalem Temple, see also Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 83–84. 59 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 234. 230 Pablo T. Gadenz Lamb of sacrifice. It involves looking “on him whom they have pierced” ( Jn 19:37; cf. Rv 1:7; Zec 12:10), the Lamb once slain (Rv 5:6),60 here now in this life, as we journey on pilgrimage toward the life to come, longing to see in Jesus the face of God. N&V 60 Cf. Joseph Ratzinger, Behold the Pierced One: An Approach to a Spiritual Christology, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 50, 117–20. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 231–252 231 Pope Benedict XVI on Christ’s Descent into Hell E DWARD T. OAKES, S.J. University of St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein, IL AFTER A RELATIVELY quiescent period of neglect, the doctrine of Christ’s descent into hell has recently come to the fore as a controversial issue in theology, especially because of the central role which this mystery plays in the thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Given that controversy, a sober look at Pope Benedict XVI’s apparently similar (though certainly not identical) theology of Christ’s descent should prove illuminating. Theological controversies have of course often served to advance the development of doctrine in the past, which indeed has largely been driven by controversy.1 This overview of the pope’s theology of the descent, however, wishes to eschew these controversies in order to be primarily expository, not interpretative: neither advocating nor attacking.2 By calling this presentation 1 As Augustine certainly recognized: “Only because of the heretics in her midst could the Catholic Church find a more exact way to express herself in words, and the orthodox were preserved in their right-thinking because of the false thinkers among them. . . . For example, was any complete account of the Trinity available before the Arians began to bay at it? . . . Nor had the unity of Christ’s body [the Church] been discussed in such a developed, explicit way until [the Donatist] division began to trouble the weaker brethren.” Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms : 51–72, at Psalm 54:22, trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B. (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2001), 74–75. Modern observers, of course, readily agree: “Orthodoxy—the accepted truth—is established and articulated against a background of heresy. Paradoxically, more often than not dogmas are crystallized in the struggle against their rejection.” Leszek Kolakowski, “Heresy,” in The Two Eyes of Spinoza & Other Essays on Philosophers, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2004): 263–88; here 267. 2 This article is a revised version of a lecture first delivered on November 12, 2011, at a conference on the Christology of Pope Benedict XVI sponsored by the Augustine Institute of Denver, Colorado. 232 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. expository, I mean that it intends to set out, more or less in chronological order and with only explicative comments added on my part, those passages from the writings of Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI touching on the theme of Christ’s descent into the underworld on Holy Saturday. I. Background But before I set out on that primary task, perhaps it would be pedagogically wise to begin with a few general remarks on the meaning of this obscure doctrine—obscure enough to be mentioned in the Apostles’ Creed yet omitted (for whatever reason) in the Nicene Creed—a variation of presence and absence which itself might be an indication of the Church’s puzzled reaction to this event, a puzzlement additionally shown in the variety of voices found in all eras of the Church about the meaning of this doctrine. The obscurity of the teaching on the descent is the result of two factors: (1) those passages in the New Testament that can plausibly be said to refer to this event are not plentiful; and (2), wherever the New Testament does seem to mention the descent, it is not at all clear where exactly Christ descends.What kind of place is it whither he goes? Is it a vague underworld where all and sundry live out a kind of shadowy existence (the Sheol of the Old Testament or the Hades of Homer and Virgil); or is it the so-called limbus patrum (“limbo of the fathers”), where only those dwell who may expect a final redemption; or is it a veritable hell of the damned, where Christ actually must suffer the same kind of pain that the damned do? As to the first point, the Gospels never mention anything at all about Holy Saturday as event, only as interval. For all four evangelists, that day of rest, the Sabbath, was merely the single interposed day between Jesus’ death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, during which his body was also truly (and of course appropriately) resting in the tomb. Moreover, after the resurrection Jesus is never described in the Easter narratives of these four Gospels as having reported anything at all about his “experiences” in the underworld, one way or the other. True, in his earthly ministry Jesus does say the following: “How can anyone enter a strong man’s house and carry off his possessions unless he first ties up the strong man? Then, he can rob the house. . . . A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign; but no sign will be given it except the sign of the prophet Jonah. For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, so the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:29; 39–40).3 The 3 Luke abbreviates the second part of this saying, omitting mention of the three days and nights, but elaborates a bit more in recounting the first part: “When a strong man, fully armed, guards his own house, his possessions are safe. But when Christ’s Descent into Hell 233 pairing of these two sayings would soon be taken to refer to the saving effects of Jesus’s descent into the underworld (including by Benedict, as we shall see later). The mention of the descent as an actual event with saving consequences (and not just as mere interval) is certainly much more explicit in the Petrine and Pauline corpus; but references to it are hardly plentiful even there. Given the relative paucity of Peter’s voice in the New Testament outside of the Gospels, the references to Christ’s descent are particularly striking in the Petrine writings, occurring three times: once in Acts and twice in the first Letter of Peter. On Pentecost Sunday, and therefore in his first “sermon,” Peter says the following: “But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the pains of death [other manuscripts read the word Hades for death], because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. . . . Seeing what was ahead, he [David] spoke of the resurrection of the Christ, that he was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:24, 31).4 Finally, in Peter’s first Epistle we read: “For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit, through whom he also went and preached to the spirits in prison who disobeyed God long ago. . . . For this is why the gospel was preached even to the dead, that though judged in the flesh like men, they might live in the spirit like God” (1 Pt 3:18–20a; 4:6). Paul’s references to Christ’s descent (which are sometimes only mere allusions) are hardly more plentiful; and, given that more survives of his writings than is true of the Petrine corpus, these few references tend to get overwhelmed in the midst of his other concerns, like justification, circumcision, the law, sanctification, church order, and the like. Moreover, Paul will occasionally speak of the descent in rhetorical questions; and since rhetorical questions often presume a prior knowledge on the part of readers which the author assumes he can take for granted, later readers must often puzzle out what that assumed knowledge might be, as here: “Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to someone stronger attacks and overpowers him, he takes away the armor in which the man trusted and divides up the spoils” (Lk 11:21–22). 4 Of all the books of the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles has the most textual variants in the surviving manuscripts, so much so that the cluster of variants (about ten percent of the text) has merited its own moniker: the Western text. At verse 24 the Western text reads Hades for death, the former of which is obviously of greater relevance for the issue at hand. But all manuscripts read Hades at verse 31, so the sermon on the whole is still relevant for the descent, no matter how Luke’s autograph might have read at verse 24. 234 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. bring Christ up from the dead)” (Rom 10:6–7). Perhaps the Roman recipients of this letter understood the reference; but it seems Paul had to make his meaning clearer to the Ephesians, for here he is less allusive, even if he still resorts to rhetorical questions: “This is why it [Scripture] says: ‘When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train and gave gifts to men’ [Psalm 68:18]. But what does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the depths of the earth? He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than all the heavens, in order to fill all things” (Eph 4:7–10).5 From these assertions of the universal reach of Christ’s descent/ascent, Paul is able elsewhere to draw further dogmatic conclusions, even where he is not specifically speaking of the descent, as here: “So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be the Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom 14:8–9), a view also reflected in Revelation, where Jesus is heard proclaiming: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the Living One. I died, and behold, I am alive forevermore, and I have the keys of Death and of Hades” (Rv 1:17b–18). Which brings us to the second issue raised by these verses: What does the word Hades mean here, both in Revelation and in Peter’s Pentecost sermon? What kind of “place” is it? In the New Testament, Hades usually 5 The implication here seems to be that Christ’s descent, precisely by filling all things (ta panta), entails the definitive conquest of evil. After the fourth century, this interpretation would later gain added plausibility, especially among the Latin Fathers, when the Day Star mentioned in Isaiah 14:12 was translated by the Vulgate as Lucifer. Even in its original context, it seems that Isaiah is speaking not of some unnamed Babylonian king, or at least not exclusively, but of Satan himself: “How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of Dawn! How you are cut down to the ground, you who laid the nations low! You said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven, above the stars of God. I will set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of assembly in the far north; I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, I will make myself like the Most High.’ But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the Pit. Those who see you will stare at you, and ponder over you: ‘Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert and overthrew its cities, who did not let his prisoners go home?’ All the kings of the nations lie in glory, each in his own tomb; but you are cast out, away from your sepulcher, like a stunted branch clothed with the slain, those pierced by the sword, who go down to the stones of the Pit, like a dead body trodden underfoot” (Is 14:12–19; emphases added). In other words, a kind of chiasmic effect becomes apparent here when Isaiah is paired with Ephesians: Satan tries to ascend from the depths of hell to claim the throne of God and for his pains gets hurled back to the Pit; whereas Christ descends from heaven to claim his own, and then ascends back to heaven, leading “captives in his train.” Christ’s Descent into Hell 235 refers to a generic underworld where all the dead dwell without regard to their final destiny at the end of time (the rough equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol), whereas by contrast Gehenna will usually refer to something like our notion of a specific and permanent hell of the unredeemed and damned. Then that contrast will double-back on the usual generic connotation of the former word, thereby making Hades something more specific, the rough equivalent of the limbus patrum, where dwell only those plausibly awaiting redemption.6 But if this distinction is meant to assert that Jesus went only to a now-specific Hades but not to Gehenna, then we must conclude that such a distinction finds no support in the New Testament, at least if we take seriously Paul’s line that Christ’s descent into the underworld and his later ascent into heaven was meant “to fill all things” (Eph. 4:10), by which Christ thereby extended the range of his rule to all the living and the dead (Rv 1:18). Nor does Peter distinguish Hades from Gehenna when he is speaking of Christ’s descent to the former; indeed his mention of the “pains of Hades” (Acts 2:24; Western text) and his reference to Christ preaching to “spirits in prison who disobeyed God long ago” (1 Pt 3:19b–20a) indicates that he is speaking of a generic Hades, irrespective of the differentiated state of these “prisoners” according to the differences in their earthly merits. In the patristic period, however, some early Christian writers did begin to distinguish Hades from Gehenna—and they did so specifically in order to limit Christ’s sojourn in the underworld solely to the former. Origen, for example (and quite ironically, considering his later reputation as a universalist), makes heavy use of this distinction, as one noted Origen scholar points out: “By His descent [according to Origen], Christ destroys the Devil’s dominion over captured humanity. . . . [But] if the saints and repentant sinners eventually dwell in heaven, . . . the wicked—unrepentant and hardened sinners—are damned to Gehenna, the place of fire.”7 6 “Gehenna is to be distinguished from Hades, which is either the abode of all the dead in general (Acts 2:27, 31; Rv 20:13–14) or the place where the wicked await the final judgment. . . . Gehenna designates the place or state of the final punishment of the wicked.” Harper’s Bible Dictionary, ed. Paul J. Achtemeier (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), 335. Only once is Hades used in the New Testament to mean “hell,” at Luke 16:23. 7 Lawrence R. Hennessey, “The Place of Saints and Sinners after Death,” in Origen of Alexandria: His World and His Legacy, ed. Charles Kannengiesser and William L. Petersen (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 295–312; here 299, 306. In another passage Origen does not explicitly distinguish Hades from Gehenna, but he does imply that Christ’s sojourn in the underworld did not bring about the conversion of everyone he encountered there: “He [Celsus] says to us: You will not say of him, I presume, that having failed to convince men on earth he travelled 236 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. To add to the irony, Augustine—who certainly held to a vastly populated hell of the eternally miserable—rejects this distinction and holds that Christ descended not just to some realm of the already justified just (the “bosom of Abraham” in his terminology) but also to the very realm of the miserable: Consequently, if holy Scripture had said that Christ after death came [solely] into the bosom of Abraham, without naming hell and its sorrows, I wonder if anyone would dare to affirm that He descended into hell. But, because this clear testimony [of 1 Pt] mentions both hell and its sorrows, I can think of no reason for believing that the Savior went there except to save souls from its sorrows. I am still uncertain whether He saved all those whom He found there, or [only] certain ones He deemed worthy of that boon. I do not doubt, however, that he was in hell, and that He granted this favor to those entangled in its sorrows.8 Just from this quick look at these two authors, we gain some idea of the diversity of voices in the early Church regarding this clause in the Apostles’ Creed. But we can also draw some general conclusions as well. First, as noted patristic scholar J. N. D. Kelly points out: “The belief that Christ spent the interval between His expiry on the cross and his resurrection in the underworld was a commonplace of Christian teaching from the earliest times.”9 Building on that common fund, and as the perspective of the Church widened as she moved out of her Jewish to Hades to convince them there. Even if he dislikes it, we do maintain this: that when he was in the body he convinced not merely a few, but also so many that the multitude of those persuaded by him provoked the conspiracy against him; and that when he became a soul unclothed by a body he conversed with souls unclothed by bodies, converting also those of them who were willing to accept him, or those who, for reasons which he himself knew, he saw to be ready to do so.” Origen, Contra Celsum II.42, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 99–100. The implication of this passage seems to be that roughly the same percentage of those who rejected him on earth and brought about his death would be reflected in the underworld: most would be convinced of his mission, but not all. 8 Saint Augustine’s Letters, vol. 3 (131–64), trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons, S.N.D. (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1953), 386, emphases added. In other words, Origen, the alleged universalist, divides the underworld into two “chambers,” Hades and Gehenna, and holds—at least in Contra Celsum—that Christ went only to the former; whereas Augustine, who certainly held to a populated hell, divides the underworld into two realms, the bosom of Abraham and hell (infernum), to both of which Christ descended, and he leaves open (at least in this passage) the question of exactly how many were rescued from their sorrow. 9 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, third edition (London: Longman Group, and New York: David McKay Company, 1972), 379. Christ’s Descent into Hell 237 matrix into the larger pagan world, the event of Christ’s descent began to be seen in more universalist terms: What is important for us to observe . . . is that by the time the Descent became an accepted article in the creed, a rather different complex of ideas was being associated with it according to which Christ’s activity consisted in completely subjugating hell and the ruler of the underworld. . . . We can see it taking shape in the thought of Rufinus, who argued that Christ consented to die in order that He might spoil death, and expatiated on His victorious combat in the underworld with the Devil. For him, it would appear, the underworld meant hell, and the Descent was coming to be viewed as the occasion of the redemption, not just of the patriarchs of old, but of mankind in general.10 All that needs to be added here for purposes of providing the background to Benedict’s theology of Christ’s descent is the medieval contribution. Precisely because medieval piety increasingly stressed the role of Christ’s suffering as the specific modality of his saving activity,11 it began to be seen 10 Kelly, Early Christian Creeds, 381. As mentioned earlier, the identification of the Day Star of Isaiah 14:12–19 would also prove determinative in this universalizing perspective, especially when paired with Matthew 12:29—the “strong man” Lucifer has now been despoiled. Jaroslav Pelikan gives a similar summary: “The words of Jesus in Matthew 12:29 meant that Satan would be bound with the very chains with which he had bound man and would be led captive. Paraphrasing the passage, Irenaeus said: ‘He [Christ] fought and was victorious; for he was man doing battle for the fathers, and by his obedience utterly abolishing disobedience. For he bound the strong man, liberated the weak, and by destroying sin endowed his creation with salvation.’ From [this statement of Irenaeus] it is evident that not only the resurrection of Christ, but especially his passion and death belonged to the description of salvation as the victory of Christ over the enemies of man. Another event sometimes associated with that victory was the descent into hell. . . . [which] acquired creedal status with its incorporation into the final text of the Apostles’ Creed, no earlier than 370. By that time, however, Western theology was [already] interpreting the atonement as a sacrifice and increasingly as an act of satisfaction offered by the death of Christ.” Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Vol. I: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 150–51. 11 As in the popular devotion of following the Stations of the Cross along erected panels inside the nave of churches; see also Aquinas: “Christ grieved not only over the loss of his own bodily life, but also over the sins of all others. And this grief in Christ surpassed all grief of every contrite heart, both because it flowed from a greater wisdom and charity, by which the pang of contrition is intensified, and because he grieved at the one time for all sins, according to Isaiah [53:4]: Surely he hath borne our sorrows. But such was the dignity of Christ’s life in the body, especially on account of the Godhead united with it, that its loss, even 238 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. how the saving effects of Christ’s descent in the underworld were brought about through Christ’s continued suffering during his sojourn in hell. So we read in Thomas Aquinas’s Exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, where he says that the first reason Christ descended into hell was “to endure the entire punishment due to sin and thereby to atone for all of its guilt.”12 II. Pope Benedict XVI 1. Introduction to Christianity (1968) What remains as the task for the rest of this overview is simply to set out what Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI has made of this variegated tradition. To the best of my knowledge, the first place in his writings where the future pope takes up this theme is in his Introduction to Christianity. A treatment of the mystery of Holy Saturday in this work should not be surprising, since the book is in its entirety a theological exposition of the Apostles’ Creed, the earliest extant creed in which Christ’s descent to hell is mentioned. The author’s first task, of course, is to establish the relevance of the descent clause. For after the middle ages the history of theology witnesses a noticeable falling-off of interest in the doctrine, sometimes amounting to its downright denial, especially among Protestants.13 Nowadays, however, one notices not so much a denial of this particular mystery of redemption as a kind of bafflement, a “shrug of the shoulders,” so to speak, a nonplussed perplexity at what the clause could mean, as the Bavarian theologian notes in this key passage: Possibly no article of the Creed is so far from present-day attitudes of mind as this one. Together with the belief in the birth of Jesus from the for one hour, would be a matter of greater grief than the loss of another man’s life for howsoever long a time. . . . And in like fashion Christ laid down his most beloved life for the good of charity, according to Jeremiah [12:7]: I have given my dear soul into the hands of her enemies” (ST III, q. 46, a. 6, obj. 4). 12 Thomas Aquinas, The Sermon-Conferences of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Apostolic Creed, trans. Nicholas Ayo, C.S.C. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 78:“ut sustineret totam poenam peccati, et sic totam culpam expiaret.” 13 Methodists even dropped the descent clause from the Apostles’ Creed altogether, based on John Wesley’s objections: “Wesley’s resistance to this doctrine is well known and documented. He omitted reference to it from his Twenty-Five Articles [his truncated version of Anglicanism’s Thirty-Nine Articles], and the American Methodist Conference of 1786 followed his lead and deleted the article from the Apostles’ Creed as used in Sunday services. In handling the classical texts, Wesley uniformly opposes the doctrine. . . . [His] note on Acts 2:27 makes the flat statement: ‘It doth not appear that ever our Lord went into hell.’ ” John Deschner, Wesley’s Christology: An Interpretation (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985), 50–51. Christ’s Descent into Hell 239 Virgin Mary and that in the Ascension of the Lord, it seems to call most of all for “demythologization,” a process that in this case looks devoid of danger and unlikely to provoke opposition. The few places where Scripture seems to say anything about this matter . . . are so difficult to understand that they can easily be expounded in many different ways. Thus if in the end one eliminates the statement altogether, one seems to have the advantage of getting rid of a curious idea, and one difficult to harmonize with our own modes of thought, without making oneself guilty of a particularly disloyal act.14 But it quickly emerges that Ratzinger is arguing in the medieval manner here, by first giving the case that he will soon be arguing against (as when a disputed question in the medieval classroom will begin with the Videtur quod passage, outlining the contrary case; then comes the position the author will be advocating). Hence the concessions made in the above passage (a strategy the Roman rhetorician Quintilian called concessum, non datum): for Ratzinger, the descent clause only looks irrelevant, but it is in fact strikingly relevant to the modern situation: But is anything really gained by this [dismissal of the clause]? Or has one simply evaded the difficulty and obscurity of reality? One can try to deal with problems either by denying their existence or by facing up to them. The first method is the more comfortable one, but only the second leads anywhere. Instead of pushing the question aside, then, should we not learn to see that this article of faith . . . is particularly close to our day and is to a particular degree the experience of our [twentieth] century?15 In a way, the desuetude into which the mystery of Holy Saturday fell in modern times can be readily explained by a liturgical quirk: not only are the references in the New Testament to the descent few and those extremely ambiguous, there is also no opportunity in the liturgical calendar for any preaching on the events of Holy Saturday. In the services for Good Friday the preacher obviously will be focusing on the sufferings of Christ’s Passion; the next opportunity for a homily comes at the Easter Vigil late in the night of Holy Saturday, after the Exultet has been sung and the gospel of the resurrection proclaimed, where Christ’s victory over sin and death will be the sole theme of preaching.16 Yet that very 14 Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 293–94. 15 Ibid., 294. 16 Of course, there was even less opportunity for homiletic reflection on the mystery of Holy Saturday when the (by now misnamed!) “Vigil” was celebrated on Saturday morning, a trend that began in the late middle ages, at just the time when, not 240 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. silence of the Church on Holy Saturday, when the tabernacle is empty and all liturgical services cease, is for Ratzinger precisely what constitutes the relevance of this day for our time: On Good Friday our gaze remains fixed on the crucified Christ, but Holy Saturday is the day of the “death of God,” the day that expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him. “God is dead and we have killed him.”This saying of Nietzsche’s belongs linguistically to the tradition of Christian Passiontide piety: it expresses the content of Holy Saturday, “descended into hell.”17 Silence, in other words, is the whole point of the doctrine: liturgical silence serves merely to indicate and symbolize a more embracing silence—God’s: Thus the article about the Lord’s descent into hell reminds us that not only God’s speech but also his silence is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the comprehensible word that comes to us; he is also the silent, inaccessible, uncomprehended, and incomprehensible ground that eludes us. To be sure, in Christianity there is a primacy of the logos, of the word, over silence; God has spoken, God is word. But this does not entitle us to forget the truth of God’s abiding concealment. Only when we have experienced him as silence may we hope to hear his speech, too, which proceeds in silence. Christology reaches out beyond the Cross, the moment when the divine love is tangible, into the death, the silence and the eclipse of God. Can we wonder that the Church and the life of the individual are led again and again into this hour of silence, into the forgotten and almost discarded article, “Descended into hell”?18 The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of Christ’s descent into hell as the turning point of salvation history, as the completion of Christ’s work on the cross, the moment when it becomes true what John says in surprisingly, the theme of Christ’s descent into hell was being either ignored or attenuated. As is well known, Pope Pius XII moved the Vigil service back to its traditional place on Saturday night: first on an experimental basis in his motu proprio of 1951, De solemni vigilia paschali instauranda, and then four years later on a permanent basis for the whole Latin Church in his 1955 decree Maxima redemptionis nostrae mysteria, the latter of which also extensively revised the rites for Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. With this important shift, the liturgical silence of the Triduum was extended from the conclusion of the Good Friday service all the way into the dark hours of Holy Saturday night. 17 Ratzinger, Introduction, 294. 18 Ibid., 296–97; italics in the original. Christ’s Descent into Hell 241 his first Epistle, that Christ “is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for our sins alone, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 Jn 2:2): “The gospel was preached even to the dead” [1 Pt 4:6]. The descent into hell brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfillment. This is the last phase of Jesus’ messianic mission, a phase which is condensed in time but vast in its real significance: the spread of Christ’s redemptive work to all men of all times and all places.19 We find an early adumbration of that same point when the future pope (and of course also the future guiding hand in the drafting of the Catechism during the papacy of John Paul II) says that “in Jesus’ death cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:34), the mystery of Jesus’ descent into hell is illuminated as if in a glaring flash of lightning on a dark night.”20 The Bavarian theologian concedes that exegetes point out—and rightly—that this cry is drawn from the opening line of Psalm 22, which itself culminates in a paean of praise for God’s victory over death. But he demurs when those same exegetes go on to conclude from this universally admitted fact that either Jesus or Mark is signaling thereby that Jesus’ death on the cross in and of itself terminates in victory. Rather, for Ratzinger the final hymn of victory in that psalm only becomes true in the course of Christ’s sojourn in hell, a sojourn culminating in the resurrection: This prayer that rises from the sheer misery of God’s seeming eclipse ends in praises of God’s greatness. This element, too, is present in Jesus’ death cry, which has been recently described by Ernst Käsemann as a prayer sent up from hell, as the raising of a standard, the first commandment, in the midst of God’s apparent absence: “The Son still holds on to faith [says Käsemann] when faith seems to have become meaningless and the earthly reality proclaims absent the God of whom the first thief and the mocking crowd speak—not for nothing. His cry is not for life and survival, not for himself, but for the Father. His cry stands against the reality of the whole world.” After this, do we still need to ask what worship must be in our hour of darkness? Can it be anything else but the cry from the depths in company with the Lord who “has descended into hell” and who has established the nearness of God in the midst of abandonment by God?21 19 Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 364. 20 Ratzinger, Introduction, 297. 21 Ibid., 297; emphasis added. Unfortunately, no reference is given in the text for the quotation from Käsemann. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. 242 As he did on the cross on Good Friday, Jesus continues to endure abandonment on Holy Saturday, but now in the very underworld of abandonment; and he does so by undergoing in our place the fate that should rightfully be ours. But here there is a difference: What to the world looks like Jesus’ final defeat, the ultimate refutation by the Romans of his claim to be “King of the Jews,” now turns into the validation of his claim, precisely through his bringing the standard of love into the ultimate realm where love is rejected: Death is absolute loneliness. But the loneliness into which love can no longer advance is—hell.This brings us back to our starting point, the article of the Creed that speaks of the descent into hell. This article thus asserts that Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness, that in his Passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer.22 Hell now, and henceforth, is marked by the presence of Christ. 2. The Sabbath of History (1969) Introduction to Christianity caught on with the public and became a bestseller in Germany. The next year saw the publication of a set of talks Professor Ratzinger had given earlier for a Bavarian radio station; they were translated much later into English as The Sabbath of History.23 In these talks he again strongly asserts the direct relevance of the mystery of Holy Saturday for our time: Repeated talk of God’s death haunts our time. For [the German novelist] Jean Paul [1763–1825] it was only a nightmare. The dead Jesus proclaims to the dead from the rooftop of the world that he found no heaven in his trip to the beyond, no requited God, only infinite nothingness, the silence of the gaping void. . . . One hundred years later it was Nietzsche in dead earnest who uttered a shrill cry of dread: “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!” . . . For this is Holy Saturday, day of the hiddenness of God. It is the day of that frightful paradox that we recite in the Creed with the words “descended into hell,” descended into the mystery of death. On Good Friday we could at least 22 Ibid., 301. 23 Joseph Ratzinger, Meditationen zur Karwoche (Freising: Kyrios-Verlag, 1969), translated as The Sabbath of History, trans. John Rock, S.J. (Washington, DC: The William G. Congdon Foundation, 2000). This English edition also contains an additional essay from Cardinal Ratzinger written in 1997, which will be discussed in its proper place in this chronological exposition of the pope’s theology of Christ’s descent. Christ’s Descent into Hell 243 look at the pierced one. But Holy Saturday is empty, the heavy stone of the new tomb covers the deceased, everything is over, faith seems definitely unmasked as wishful thinking. No God has saved this Jesus who called himself his son. One can rest assured.The sober ones, who privately may have vacillated at times in their conviction that there is nothing else—they were right all along. Holy Saturday, the day of the burial of God—is that not in an uncanny way our day? Does our century not begin to become one large Holy Saturday, a day of God’s absence . . . ?24 Here we see once more the implied medieval structure of his presentation: it first seems as if God is absent, silent, withdrawn. But the mystery of Holy Saturday proves otherwise: The darkness of God of this day, of this century, that is becoming more and more a Holy Saturday, addresses our consciences. . . . But despite everything, it also has something consoling about it. For God’s dying in Jesus Christ is at the same time expression of his radical solidarity with us. The darkest mystery of faith is simultaneously the brightest sign of a hope that is without limits. . . . Only through the failure of Good Friday, only through the deathly stillness of Holy Saturday could the disciples be led to grasp who Jesus really was and what his mission truly meant. God had to die for them, so that he could truly live in them. . . .We needed the darkness of God, the silence of God, in order to experience the chasm of his greatness and the abyss of our nothingness, which would become manifest if he were not.25 3. Eschatology (1977) After Professor Ratzinger left the University of Tübingen (where he delivered the lectures that were later published as Introduction to Christianity), he moved to the University of Regensburg, where he lectured on and published a textbook called simply Eschatology.26 Though his remarks on hell here are relatively brief and quite outweighed by his treatment of such extremely knotty questions in dogmatic eschatology as the immortality of the soul, temporality in purgatory, the already-present reality of the eschaton in the kingdom of God preached by Jesus, and other complex issues, 24 Ratzinger, Sabbath, 37–38.The reference to Jean Paul refers to the German novel- ist Johann Paul Friedrich Richter who used the pseudonym Jean Paul. His novels are part of the Sturm und Drang movement of German Romanticism but also anticipated, as Ratzinger notes, the Nietzschean nihilism that has so characterized the twentieth century, a nihilism that is answered by God on Holy Saturday. 25 Ibid., 39–40. 26 Joseph Ratzinger, Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. Michael Waldstein, trans. edited by Aidan Nichols, O.P. second edition (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988). 244 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. nonetheless his remarks on hell and Christ’s descent thereto add two new notes not found in his previous book from Tübingen: first, given the condemnation of Origenism, he takes up the question of the range of Christ’s conquest of evil in his descent; and second, he introduces the witness of the Carmelite tradition into his reflections. As to the first issue, Origenism, the Regensburg theologian notes that in Origen’s book On First Principles, where he supposedly asserted the doctrine of universal salvation, the Greek Father was in fact just tossing out a hypothesis, not asserting a de facto universal salvation.27 Ratzinger is not so much exonerating Origen here as pointing out the weakness of any speculative hypothesis of a de facto universal salvation when set over against the reality of evil: Although to the philosopher and theologian evil might be regarded as a privation of being, it nonetheless feels real; and that kind of evil Jesus most definitely experienced, especially on the cross: That Cross throws light upon our theme from two directions. First, it teaches us that God himself suffered and died. Evil is not, then, something unreal for him. For the God who is love, hatred is not nothing. He overcomes evil, but not by some dialectic of universal reason which can transform all negations into affirmations. God overcomes evil not in a “speculative Good Friday,” to use the language of Hegel, but on a Good Friday which was most real. He himself entered into the distinctive freedom of sinners but went beyond it in that freedom of his own love which descended willingly into the Abyss.28 The second additional element the future pope adds to his reflections on this mystery comes from the Carmelite tradition, which (especially in the writings of John of the Cross) makes central to its spirituality the journey to God through a “dark night of the soul,” whereby it is seen that the individual Christian is in fact often closest to God when he or she feels God’s distance and silence the most. But in the most recently canonized Carmelite,Thérèse de Lisieux—who was in addition declared a Doctor of 27 “Origen himself regarded his outline systematics as no more than a hypothesis. It was an approach to a comprehensive vision, an approach which did not necessarily claim to reproduce the contours of reality itself. While the effect of NeoPlatonism in the Peri Archoñ [On First Principles] was to over-accentuate the idea that evil is in fact nothing and nothingness, God alone being real, the great Alexandrian divine later sensed much more acutely the terrible reality of evil, that evil which can inflict suffering on God himself and, more, bring him down to death. Nevertheless, Origen could not wholly let go of his hope that, in and through this divine suffering, the reality of evil is taken prisoner and overcome, so that it loses its quality of definitiveness.” Ratzinger, Eschatology, 215–16. 28 Ibid., 217. Christ’s Descent into Hell 245 the Church by Pope John Paul II in 1997—we find a quite new accent: here we encounter someone who actually volunteers for hell, a moment she recounts in her remarkable autobiography The Story of a Soul: One night, not knowing how to tell Jesus that I loved Him and how much I desired that He be everywhere loved and glorified, I was thinking with sorrow that He could never receive in hell a single act of love. So I told God that to please Him I would willingly consent to find myself plunged into hell, so that He might be eternally loved in that place of blasphemy.29 With this passage presumably in mind, the Regensburg professor draws these fresh dogmatic conclusions about the descent: While the real quality of evil and its consequences become quite palpable here [in hell] the question also arises . . . whether in this event we are not in touch with a divine response able to draw freedom precisely as freedom to itself. The answer lies hidden in Jesus’ descent into Sheol, in the night of the soul which he suffered, a night which no one can observe except by entering this darkness in suffering faith. Thus, in the history of holiness which hagiology offers us, and notably in the course of recent centuries, in John of the Cross, in Carmelite piety in general, and in that of Thérèse of Lisieux in particular, “Hell” has taken on a completely new meaning and form. For the saints, “Hell” is not so much a threat to be hurled at other people but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night. One draws near to the Lord’s radiance by sharing his darkness. One serves the salvation of the world by leaving one’s own salvation behind for the sake of others. In such piety, nothing of the dreadful reality of Hell is denied. Hell is so real that it reaches right into the existence of the saints. Hope can take it on, only if one shares in the suffering of Hell’s night by the side of the One who came to transform our night by his suffering. Here hope does not emerge from the neutral logic of a system, from rendering humanity innocuous. Instead, it derives from the surrender of all claims to innocence and to reality’s perduringness, a surrender which takes place by the Cross of the Redeemer.30 4. The English Preface to The Sabbath of History (1997) As mentioned above, when the English translation of his radio talks of 1969 was in preparation, the author had an opportunity to pen some additional 29 Thérèse de Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, trans. Robert J. Edmonson (Brewster, MA: Paraclete Press, 2006), 122. 30 Ratzinger, Eschatology, 217–18; emphases added. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. 246 reflections on this theme. In these, he focused especially on the knotty exegetical question of the various meanings coalescing around the words Sheol, Hades, and hell.31 The problem is that, whereas ancient references to the underworld (including in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament) are usually vague, they become increasingly specific as doctrine develops. (Think of Dante, who with unrivaled poetic genius painted the afterlife with a powerful specificity not equaled before or since.) So although exegetes rightly point to the vagueness of the concepts of Sheol or Hades in the Bible, Cardinal Ratzinger (as he was at the time of this writing) finds the observation rather beside the point, “banal,” in his word.32 According to this mitigating interpretation, the inferi of the Creed, that in German was first translated by hell and more recently by kingdom of death, is simply the Latin equivalent of the Hebrew word sheol which indicates a realm of the dead that can be imagined as a kind of shadowy existence, existence and non-existence at the same time. It is very similar to the image of hades we have inherited from Homer that coincides rather with the view of the dead of the Ancient East. Accordingly, the word expresses only that Jesus died.33 The cardinal is not attacking historical criticism here; rather, he is saying that the results of scholarly exegesis serve only as a starting point: “Since I always had great respect for the exegetes, I assumed that this statement was as such correct, but saw too that it was not thought through to the end.”34 What is missing in this overly schematic exegesis is an explicit acknowledgment that, yes, Jesus was truly dead, that is, went to the realm where all of us go at death; but more crucially, his death was a transforming death that accomplishes its purposes precisely by Jesus being in solidarity with all the dead in the realm of the dead: Yes, Jesus died, he “descended” into the mysterious depths death leads to. He went to the ultimate solitude where no one can accompany us, for “being dead” is above all loss of communication. It is isolation where love does not penetrate. In this sense Christ descended “into hell” whose essence is precisely the loss of love, being cut off from God and man. But wherever he goes, “hell” ceases to be hell, because he himself is life and love, because he is the bridge which connects man 31 Joseph Ratzinger, “Reflections on the origin of my meditations on Holy Week,” in The Sabbath of History, 17–23. 32 “A banal suggestion of some exegetes . . . ” ibid., 21. 33 Ibid., 21–22. 34 Ibid., 22. Christ’s Descent into Hell 247 and God and thereby also connects men among themselves. And thus the descent is at the same time also transformation. The final solitude no longer exists—except for the one who wants it, who rejects love from within and from its foundation, because he seeks only himself, wants to be from and for himself.35 5. Jesus of Nazareth Volume I (2007) The final location where Pope Benedict speaks of the descent is in the first volume of his now three-volume meditation, Jesus of Nazareth. At first it might surprise the reader to learn that the pope does not refer to the descent at all in his second volume, which is, after all, devoted (for the most part) to the mysteries of Passiontide and Easter. But since none of the four Gospels treats of what “happened” while the body of Jesus lay in the tomb (as we noted above), the absence of any treatment on the pope’s part here should not surprise us. In the first volume, however, Benedict makes a most fascinating connection between Jesus’ descent into the River Jordan at his baptism and his later descent into hell (the connection between Jesus’ descent into the Jordan and his descent into the underworld, with the former serving as the foretype of the latter, is itself a common motif in patristic literature): Jesus’ Baptism, then, is understood as a repetition of the whole of history, which both recapitulates the past and anticipates the future. His entering into the sin of others is a descent into the “inferno.” But he 35 Ibid., 22. These views from 1997 are also reflected in the 1969 book: “[S]till the question remains: what does the puzzling formula, Jesus ‘descended into hell,’ actually mean on closer analysis? Let us say it openly. No one can really explain it; and it does not become essentially clearer by establishing that hell is here a false translation of the Hebrew word sheol that simply signifies the realm of the dead as a whole, and so the formula originally means only this, that Jesus descended into the depths of death, was really dead and participated in the chasm of our mortal destiny. For the questions emerge: what in fact is death? And what actually happens when one descends into the depths of death? We shall have to think too that death is no longer the same since Christ descended into it, since Christ pervaded and accepted it, just as life and human existence are no longer the same since the human nature of Christ was and is allowed to touch God’s own being. Before, death was only death, separation from the land of the living and—even if in contrasting depth—something like hell was the nocturnal side of existence, impenetrable darkness. Now, however, even death is still life, and when we pass through the icy solitude of the gate of death, we even encounter him who is the life, the one who wanted to be the companion of our final loneliness and who in the deadly solitude of Gethsemane’s fear and his cry from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me,’ became sharer of our abandonments” (ibid., 42–43). 248 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. does not descend merely in the role of a spectator, as in Dante’s Inferno. Rather, he goes down in the role of one whose suffering-with-others is a transforming suffering that turns the underworld around, knocking down and flinging open the gates of the abyss. His Baptism is a descent into the house of the evil one, combat with the “strong man” (cf. Luke 11:22) who holds men captive (and the truth is that we are all very much captive to powers that anonymously manipulate us!). Throughout all its history, the world is powerless to defeat the “strong man”: he is overcome and bound by one yet stronger, who, because of his equality with God, can take upon himself all the sin of the world and then suffers it through to the end—omitting nothing on the downward path into identity with the fallen. This struggle is the “conversion” of being that brings it into a new condition, [one] that prepares a new heaven and a new earth. Looked at from this angle, the sacrament of Baptism appears as the gift of participation in Jesus’ world-transforming struggle in the conversion of life that took place in his descent and ascent.36 In this passage one may note two accents that were not as stressed in his meditations on Holy Saturday cited so far: First, the radical distinction of Christ’s descent into the inferno from the one Dante underwent in his poem of that name. For the pope, the central difference is that Christ, in his descent, was affected, that is, moved: he suffered (“whose sufferingwith-others is a transforming suffering”), whereas Dante entered hell merely as an unaffected observer. This insight was presumably influenced by Balthasar’s monograph on Dante.37 Second, the pope places special stress on the exceptionless character of Christ’s suffering in hell and his 36 Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 20; emphases added. 37 “Dante does not distinguish theologically between the pre-Christian Hades (Sheol) and the Hell of the New Testament, nor does he grasp the connection between this Hell and the distinctive kerygma of the New Testament. This journey through Hell, therefore, follows in the footsteps of Virgil rather than of Christ, which for the Christian would be the only possible way of entering this ‘place.’ ” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Volume III: Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, trans. Andrew Louth, John Saward, Martin Simon, and Rowan Williams (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 100. Significantly, when Dante weeps over the fate of the diviners and soothsayers (whose heads were placed backwards “since seeing forward was denied them”),Virgil reprimands him for his lachrymose compassion: “ ‘Are you still witless as the rest? Here piety lives when pity is quite dead’ ” (Dante, Inferno, Canto XX, lines 15, 27–28). In other words, Virgil is ordering Dante not to be moved, whereas for Pope Benedict, Christ omitted nothing in his dolorous and compassionate identification with the fallen. Christ’s Descent into Hell 249 complete identification with the fate and condition of the fallen (“omitting nothing on the downward path into identity with the fallen”). Such a stress on Christ’s full identification with all those suffering in hell of course raises the dread specter, once again, of the heresy of Origenism—even if the historical Origen was not its real author but it was only attributed to him by his enemies (enemies who appeared long after his death). But there are enough indications in what has been quoted above to show that the pope fully concedes the freedom of the individual to reject the proffered love of Christ, whether manifested here or in the underworld, a point also repeated in his encyclical Spe Salvi.38 Moreover, in his criticisms of Origen in Eschatology, he makes clear that Origen’s real problem, at least in his more speculative moments, was an attempt at over-systematization.39 In other words, the outcome of final 38 The views in Spe Salvi were already anticipated in God and the World: “There will be few people whose lives are pure and fulfilled in all respects. And, we would hope, there will be few people whose lives have become an irredeemable and total No. For the most part, the longing for good has remained, despite many breakdowns, in some sense determinative. God can pick up the broken pieces and make something of them.” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God and the World: Believing and Living in Our Time. A Conversation with Peter Seewald, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 129. For parallels to Spe Salvi see nos. 45–46: “There can be people who have totally destroyed their desire for truth and readiness to love, people for whom everything has become a lie, people who have lived for hatred and have suppressed all love within themselves. . . . On the other hand there can be people who are utterly pure, completely permeated by God, and thus fully open to their neighbors—people for whom communion with God even now gives direction to their entire being and whose journey towards God only brings to fulfillment what they already are.Yet we know from experience that neither case is normal in human life. For the great majority of people—we may suppose—there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God. In the concrete choices of life, however, it is covered over by ever new compromises with evil—much filth covers purity, but the thirst for purity remains and it still constantly re-emerges from all that is base and remains present in the soul.” In other words, there seems to be a kind of “Bell Curve” operative here, with roughly equal numbers destined for immediate heaven or hell, with the vast majority obliged to pass through the fires of purgation. Of course, no one knows for sure, which is why the pope explicitly concedes he is hypothesizing here (“we may suppose”). 39 As Ratzinger says in his entry on hell for a German reference work: “The kerygmatic meaning of the dogma of hell is based, according to what was said above, in a statement about God and man. It lets us see, on the one hand, God’s unconditional respect for man’s free decisions. God offers his love but does not impose it; this shows us, on the other hand, the irreversible character of human historicity, whose total decision has definitive force. But both must constantly be linked with the message of God’s mercy and the power of grace in Christ Jesus. For that 250 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. judgment must remain unknown, precisely so that hope may be given its proper room and not be trumped by certainty.40 III. Conclusion While this article has attempted to set out those passages in the large writings of Pope Benedict touching on Christ’s descent into hell without much comment on my part beyond the obviously explicative, so that it almost constitutes a kind of catena of passages, nonetheless I hope it will not seem out of place if I draw some conclusions from this presentation. Even if there are surely distinct accents found in individual passages that are not so stressed in others, still one can easily detect certain common themes in the pope’s theology of the descent, motifs that can be categorized under four headings: (1) silence, (2) relevance, (3) solidarity, and (4) suffering. The stress on God’s silence during Holy Saturday—which is also reflected in the Church’s liturgical silence on that day, when no rites take place (and therefore no homiletic reflections either) until the Easter Vigil—emphasizes the ultimate mystery of that great event, the final import of which remains unknown until the Last Assizes. As we saw, the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls this event the turning point in the history of salvation, but the final outcome of that turning point remains uncertain to us. reason, every frivolous application of the dogma of hell, for example in preaching about sin, must be rejected.” Joseph Ratzinger, “Hölle,” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1986): 446–50; here 449; my translation. 40 The same point applies of course pari passu to Augustine’s certainty that unbaptized infants go to hell; indeed both certainties cancel each other out, as Balthasar explains here: “A classic example of this [taking one of two apparently contradictory statements from revelation and making either one absolute in order that it might be used as a steppingstone for further logical deduction] is the doctrine of double predestination (irrespective of whether ante or post/praevisa merita). According to this, God’s sublime foreknowledge has from the outset appointed a number of men to eternal bliss and a number to eternal damnation. People can adduce God’s absolute sovereignty in support of this, but also man’s freedom. They can quote passages such as Matthew 25.They can do all this without noticing that they have clearly moved away from the central message of revelation and, having reduced the mystery of God’s dealings with us to a logic, they have robbed him of his divinity. Does this mean that we are forced to adopt the converse teaching of the ‘restoration of all things’ and the abolition of hell? By no means. For that too would be to rationalize the love that is only encountered where it actually takes place, a love that demands our participation. We cannot man an observation post over and against this love. The Christian hope for this world is something quite different from rational reportage.” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Truth Is Symphonic: Aspects of Christian Pluralism, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987), 65–66. Christ’s Descent into Hell 251 Second, Benedict’s stress on God’s silence paradoxically highlights the great relevance of this mystery for our godless age. For the pope, the mystery of Holy Saturday tells Christians that God has already enfolded into his providence the “drama of atheist humanism.” Indeed, God speaks through the very pain that arises in the breasts of those who long for God’s presence in the world and cannot find it. Third, attempts by exegetes and later theologians to create a set of differentiations in the underworld to which Christ descended (Hades vs. Gehenna, for example) must take second place to the central and primary reality to which Holy Saturday always refers: the universality of death and the essential loneliness that is its distinguishing mark, no matter who the dead person is or how he lived, how his virtues match up with his vices, and so forth. Solidarity is the key. As the pope says in Spe Salvi: Our lives are involved with one another, through innumerable interactions they are linked together. No one lives alone. No one sins alone. No one is saved alone. The lives of others continually spill over into mine, in what I think, say, do and achieve. And conversely, my life spills over into that of others: for better and for worse. (no. 48)41 Fourth, Jesus genuinely suffered in hell, in the underworld of our darkness.42 The accent on Christ’s suffering in hell is especially noticeable in the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth, where he speaks of Jesus taking upon himself all the sin of the world and then suffering it through to the end— omitting nothing on the downward path into identity with the fallen. Of course he is not implying thereby that Jesus was stuck in hell. Rather, just 41 Solidarity is also the crucial concept that runs through Benedict’s social teach- ing, but that is a topic for another day. 42 Readers of Mother Teresa’s remarkable book Come Be My Light will recall that she finally came to see her long spell of darkness as itself a participation in Jesus’ own darkness: “At the Incarnation Jesus became like us in all things except sin; but at the time of the Passion, He became sin.—He took on our sins and that was why He was rejected by the Father. I think that this was the greatest of all the sufferings that He had to endure and the thing He dreaded most in the agony in the Garden.Those words of His on the Cross were the expression of the depth of His loneliness and Passion—that even His own Father didn’t claim Him as His Son. That, despite all His suffering and anguish, His Father did not claim Him as His beloved Son, as He did at the Baptism by St. John the Baptist and at the Transfiguration. You ask ‘Why?’ Because God cannot accept sin and Jesus had taken on sin—He had become sin. Do you connect your vows with this Passion of Jesus? Do you realize that when you accept the vows you accept the same fate of Jesus?” Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Come Be My Light:The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta,” edited and with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 250–51. 252 Edward T. Oakes, S.J. as it was on the Cross, so too is Jesus’ suffering in hell precisely a transforming suffering, “for Hades could not keep its grip on him” (Acts 2:24; Western text). Hell could not keep its hold on him because he transformed this godforsaken realm of darkness, loneliness, and silence by “overpowering the strong man” (Lk 11:22). How did that happen? Precisely by Christ taking on the punishment due to us: “For God made him who knew no sin to become sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 253–264 253 The Son’s Filial Relationship to the Father: Jesus as the New Moses T HOMAS G. W EINANDY, O.F.M. C AP. United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Washington, DC I WANT to examine in this essay the Christological hermeneutical key to the first two volumes of Pope Benedict’s work Jesus of Nazareth, that is, his understanding of the biblical proclamation of Jesus’ filial relationship to the Father. I wish to do this under Benedict’s rubric of Jesus being the new Moses. The Centrality of Jesus’ Relationship to the Father At the very onset of his first volume, Benedict states that only if the historical Jesus is actually anchored in God does he become real. He continues: This is also the point around which I will construct my own book. It sees Jesus in light of his communion with the Father, which is the true center of his personality; without it, we cannot understand him at all, and it is from this center that he makes himself present to us still today. (1, xiv) Benedict never forgets, throughout the first two volumes, that if we are to grasp who Jesus is, we must ever more deeply understand his relationship to the Father, for it is his relationship to the Father that reveals Jesus to be his only-begotten Son. In anticipating his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, Benedict states: “Above all, what we will see in the next chapter is that Jesus always speaks as the Son, that the relation between Father and Son is always present as the background of his message” (1, 63). Subsequently, Benedict could write: From our study of the Sermon on the Mount, but also from our interpretation of the Our Father, we have seen that the deepest theme of 254 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. Jesus’ preaching was his own mystery, the mystery of the Son in whom God is among us and keeps his word; he announces the Kingdom of God as coming and as having come in his person. (1, 188) As he begins his study of images of Jesus in John’s Gospel, which will manifest even more clearly Jesus’ unique relationship to the Father, Benedict concludes: Listening to the Synoptics, we have realized that the mystery of Jesus’ oneness with the Father is ever present and determines everything, even though it remains hidden beneath his humanity. (1, 218) In volume two, this same Christological hermeneutic is present. In examining Jesus’ high priestly prayer, in which he speaks of the Father consecrating him in the truth, Benedict states: “Thus one may say that this consecration of Jesus by the Father is identical with the Incarnation: it expresses both total unity with the Father and total existence for the world” (2, 87). To examine the mystery of Jesus, as the incarnate Son, through his relationship with the Father, is not in itself a novel notion. Many other Scripture scholars and theologians have previously commented on this. What makes Benedict’s treatment unique and noteworthy is the centrality he gives to the relationship and the manner in which he develops it. It is Jesus’ words and deeds that reveal him to be the only Son of the Father, and for Benedict, Jesus primarily did this by fulfilling an Old Testament prophecy—that is to say, by elevating an Old Testament event to a new and never previously considered understanding. If the Christological hermeneutical key lies in Jesus’ relationship to the Father, then in order to grasp fully and perceive clearly the manner of Jesus’ relationship to the Father, one must turn to the Old Testament, for it is from within the Old Testament that the mystery of Jesus was hidden and is now made manifest. Theological Exegesis Here we must briefly examine Benedict’s exegetical methodology, for it not only authorizes him to read the Bible with the eyes of faith, but it also, in faith,enables him to establish Jesus as the exegetical key for interpreting the Old Testament. While Benedict acknowledges the legitimacy of the historical critical method, he argues that left to itself it can render the Bible sterile, not permitting the full content of revelation to become manifest. In his second volume, he starkly states: If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step The Son's Filial Relationship to His Father 255 forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character.” (2, xiv) Thus, one is able to discern the fullness of who Jesus is and the comprehensive significance of his words and deeds only if one advances beyond the historical critical method.This Benedict proposes to do in Jesus of Nazareth. Following Vatican II’s Constitution on Divine Revelation, Benedict states that “if you want to understand the Scripture in the spirit in which it is written, you have to attend to the content and to the unity of Scripture as a whole” (1, xviii). The person of Jesus Christ is the one who unifies the whole Bible—the Old and the New Testaments. “This Christological hermeneutic, which sees Jesus Christ as the key to the whole and learns from him how to understand the Bible as a unity, presupposes a prior act of faith” (1, xix).What is of immense significance here is not simply that Benedict sees Jesus as the key to understanding the whole of the Bible but that we must learn from him how to interpret the Bible. Jesus himself consciously places his own words and actions within the context of Old Testament revelation. His own words and actions, in the context of the Old Testament revelation, provide the exegetical tool for understanding who he is, and what he is salvifically doing. In so doing, Jesus reveals how he fulfills and brings to completion the whole previous history of salvation. He fulfills it and brings it to completion in a manner that no one could ever have imagined; yet, that whole history having been brought to completion, all the previous revelational content of salvation history is illuminated anew and constitutes, in Jesus, the realization of the Father’s eternal plan of salvation. The scholarly community, therefore, “must recognize that a properly developed faith-hermeneutic is appropriate to the text and can be combined with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole” (2, xv). This “faith-hermeneutic” authorizes one to engage in what Benedict calls “canonical exegesis” or “theological exegesis.” Benedict concludes: “It is obvious that the way I look at the figure of Jesus goes beyond what much contemporary exegesis . . . has to say” (1, xxiii). In his books, Benedict has “tried to go beyond purely historical-critical exegesis so as to apply new methodological insights that allow us to offer a properly theological interpretation of the Bible” (1, xxiii). Again, Benedict, in the end, believes that in these volumes he has attempted to do properly what Vatican II encouraged. Fundamentally this is a matter [his exegetical method] of finally putting into practice the methodological principles formulated for exegesis by 256 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. the Second Vatican Council (in Dei Verbum, 12), a task that unfortunately has scarcely been attempted. (2, xv) With the above in place, I want now to examine only one example of Benedict’s theological or canonical exegesis, in which he is able to perceive and articulate many facets of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of the Father. Throughout the two volumes, one theme that Benedict consistently brings to the fore concerns the various ways Jesus portrays himself as the new Moses. Given such treatment, both Jesus and Moses take on new significance. Jesus, in word and deed, aligns himself with a word said and a deed done by Moses, thus designating himself as the new Moses. Jesus’ “Moses-like” words and deeds advance and elevate something that Moses said and did to a significantly new level of divine revelation, ultimately the fulfillment of divine revelation. Because of this, we are able to grasp the revelational meaning and importance of what Jesus is saying and doing. Moreover, we now perceive the deeper significance of Moses’ original words and deeds. What God revealed in Moses was in anticipation of its being fulfilled in the new Moses, and thus its real significance, long hidden, can only now be seen, in the light of the new Moses. Jesus is able to reveal who he truly is only in the light of Moses, but as Jesus becomes the new Moses, Moses himself takes on his true import. I will point out some examples of this in what follows. Jesus: The New Moses Within the very opening sentence in his Introduction to the first volume, Benedict insightfully notes that the Book of Deuteronomy “contains a promise that is completely different from the messianic hope expressed in other books of the Old Testament, yet it is of decisive importance for understanding the figure of Jesus” (1, 1). Unlike other Old Testament books that look forward to a new David, a new king, Deuteronomy promises a new Moses. Moses is seen as a prophet and it is upon this notion that God makes a promise. “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you . . . him you shall heed” (Dt 18:15). What makes Moses unique among the prophets, according to Benedict, is that he “conversed with the Lord ‘face to face’ as a man speaks to his friend, so he had spoken with God (cf. Ex 33:11)” (1, 4). This speaking with God “face to face” is the basis of Moses’ whole ministry. Only within such an intimate relation could God have given the Law to Moses, the basis of the covenant and thus for leading a godly life. Whereas Moses can speak with God as a friend, he could not see God’s actual countenance, for God placed his hand over Moses’ eyes as he The Son's Filial Relationship to His Father 257 passed by. He could see only the back of God (see Ex 33:18–23). Thus, for Benedict, the promise of a prophet like Moses contains a “greater expectation.” The last prophet, “the new Moses, will be granted what was refused to the first—a real, immediate vision of the face of God, and thus the ability to speak from seeing, not just looking at God’s back” (1, 6). This implies, for Benedict, that “the new Moses will be the mediator of a greater covenant than the one that Moses was able to bring down from Sinai (cf. Heb 9:11–14)” (1, 6). It is because Jesus is the new Moses that the truth expressed in the Prologue of John’s Gospel takes on it true meaning. “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known” ( Jn 1:18). It is because Jesus is the Son that he is able to fulfill, as man, the promise of a new prophet like Moses. He sees and speaks with the Father, not as a friend, but as an only begotten Son. What was true of Moses only in fragmentary form has been fully realized in the person of Jesus: He lives before the face of God, not just as a friend, but as a Son; he lives in the most intimate unity with the Father. (1, 6) Later in the same, first volume, when again treating the Gospel of John, Benedict returns to this same understanding. Benedict argues that Bultmann is wrong in holding that the Gospel of John is rooted in Gnosticism. Rather, it is thoroughly rooted in the Old Testament. This is confirmed in Jesus fulfilling the prophecy concerning the new Moses. The Pope first quotes John. And from his fullness have we all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart, who has made him known ( Jn 1:16–18). Benedict thus sees the promise made to Moses “fulfilled superabundantly” in Jesus. “The one who has come is more than Moses, more than a prophet. He is the Son. And that is why grace and truth now come to light, not in order to destroy the Law, but to fulfill it” (1, 263). I want now to examine some of the ways Benedict sees Jesus, being the incarnate Son of the Father, as the new Moses. The New Moses: Sermon on the Mount In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew, as has often been noted, portrays Jesus as the new Moses. The Pope notes this as well, but he provides a 258 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. deeper and fresh understanding to this image. In the Sermon on the Mount, “Matthew puts together a picture of Jesus as the new Moses in precisely the profound sense that we saw earlier in connection with the promise of a new prophet given in the Book of Deuteronomy” (1, 65). It is not simply that Jesus ascends a mountain, just as Moses ascended Mount Sinai; rather, Jesus ascends a mountain, sits down, and teaches. Benedict comments: “Jesus sits down—the expression of the plenary authority of the teacher. He takes his seat on the cathedra of the mountain” (1, 65). Whereas the rabbis sit on the chair of Moses and have authority, Jesus sits on the mountain “as the greater Moses, who broadens the Covenant to include all nations” (1, 66). The Sermon on the Mount is a dramatic lesson, in word and deed, wherein Jesus assumes the role of the new Moses and thereby reveals that he is the author of the law of the new covenant. In so doing, Jesus also reveals the real significance of the first Moses. Moses’ significance goes beyond his role in establishing the first covenant; rather, in the establishment of the first covenant he became the prefigurement of the new Moses, Jesus. We see the true importance of Moses only in the light of Jesus, for he provides the means by which Jesus is able to reveal who he is—the new and greater Moses, who will establish a new and everlasting covenant for all nations. Moreover, Jesus, the new Moses, is on a new Sinai enacting a new covenantal law, and the atmosphere is far different from that of the first Sinai. Unlike the first Sinai, where the people were terrified by storm, fire, and earthquake, and only Moses ascended the mountain in safety, on this new Sinai “God’s power is now revealed in his mildness, his greatness in his simplicity and closeness” (1, 67). While the scene is pastoral and serene, yet, according to Benedict, Jesus’ message is that of a deeper love, a love that embraces the cross. “Now God speaks intimately, as one man to another. Now he descends into the depth of their human sufferings” (1, 67). Benedict beautifully summarizes what is taking place, in word and deed, on the new Mount Sinai. It should be clear by now that the Sermon on the Mount is the new Torah brought by Jesus. Moses could deliver his Torah only by entering into the divine darkness on the mountain. Jesus’ Torah likewise presupposes his entering into communion with the Father, the inward ascents of his life, which are then prolonged in his descents into communion of life and suffering with men. (1, 68) Benedict’s understanding of what is happening in the Sermon on the Mount is indeed theologically profound. He perceives Jesus teaching us how to understand who he is in the light of the Old Testament. Benedict The Son's Filial Relationship to His Father 259 not only sees Jesus as the new Moses promulgating the new Torah, but he perceives that Jesus is able to do this only because, in a singular fashion— one that differs in kind from that of Moses—he possesses a filial relationship with the Father. Because of this divine filial relationship, Jesus not only proclaims the Sermon on the Mount but also literally embodies the sermon that he preaches. Unlike Moses, Jesus is the new Torah incarnate—the law of love. Because Jesus embodies the new law of love—love for the Father and love for the whole of humankind—he, as Son, will embrace, in filial love, the will of the Father and so ascend the mountain of Golgotha and take possession of the new chair of Moses— the cross. On the cross, Jesus, as the new Moses, will establish the new and everlasting covenant with his Father, a covenant for all nations. The New Moses and the Prayer of Jesus Benedict emphasizes that, because of Jesus’ unique filial relationship with his Father, Jesus’ teaching is not then the product of human learning. Again, fulfilling the experience of Moses: “It originates from immediate contact with the Father, from ‘face-to-face’ dialogue—from the vision of the one who rests close to the Father’s heart” (1, 7). This unity between Jesus and the Father is the source of Jesus’ life of prayer. His prayer— within his human consciousness, intellect, and will—“becomes a participation in this filial communion with the Father” (1, 7). For Benedict, “We must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words” (1, 133). Thus, Jesus is able, as the new Moses, to make known the full name of God. Jesus does this, for Benedict, when he teaches us to pray the Our Father (see 1, 142–45). Also, in the Johannine high priestly prayer Jesus prays to the Father: “I have manifested your name to the men that you gave me out of the world” ( Jn 17:6). Jesus also states: “I made known to them your name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them” ( Jn 17:26). Benedict comments: “With these words Jesus clearly presents himself as the new Moses, who brings to completion what began with Moses at the burning bush” (2, 90–91, see also 1, 144). Knowing the name of God allows the Jewish people to invoke him and so make him present. The Jewish people also knew that God was made known in the Temple, for that was his dwelling (cf. Dt 12:11). When Jesus says that he has made known the name of God, he is stating a truth that again is singularly different from the manner in which Moses made God’s name known. In Jesus “the revelation of the name is in a new mode of God’s presence among men, a 260 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. radically new way in which God makes his home with them. In Jesus, God gives himself entirely into the world of mankind: whoever sees Jesus sees the Father (cf. Jn 14:9)” (2, 91–92). Jesus, as the new Moses, is able to make the Father fully known because, in accordance with Benedict’s Christological hermeneutical key, he and the Father are ontologically one and the same God. The immanence of God, through the revelation of his name in the Old Testament, “has now become ontological: in Jesus, God has truly become man. God has entered our very being. In him God is truly ‘God-with-us’ ” (2, 92). We also see once again that his prayer illustrates how Jesus, in his words and actions, brings new depth to Moses’ speaking with God at the burning bush by expanding who can call upon his name. God the Son, in knowing the Father perfectly, makes his name known, not simply to the Jews, but to all nations. Johannine Images of Jesus as the New Moses Benedict examines two images of Jesus as the new Moses within the Gospel of John—Jesus as the bread of life and the living water. “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst” ( Jn 6:35). Jesus is the new Moses because he will truly give bread from heaven. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh” ( Jn 6:51). For Benedict, “Moses gave manna, bread from heaven. But it was still just earthly ‘bread.’ The manna is a promise: The new Moses is also expected to give bread. Once again, however, something greater than manna has to be given” (1, 241). The reason that Jesus’ flesh gives eternal life is twofold. First, it is once again because of his intimate unity with the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me” ( Jn 6:57). It is because Jesus possesses the very divine life of the Father that all who feast upon Jesus obtain communion with the Father, the author of all life. Secondly, the body and blood that the faithful receive in the Eucharist is not the earthly body and blood of Jesus but the real heavenly manna—the resurrected body and blood of the new Moses—Jesus the risen Lord. At the Feast of Tabernacles, the Gospel of John informs us that “[o]n the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and proclaimed: ‘If anyone thirst, let him come to me. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, “out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water” ’ ” ( Jn 7:37–38). Benedict notes that on the last day of the feast there was a water ritual that commemorated “a piece of salvation history, of the water from the rock that, in spite of all their doubts and fears, God gave the Jews as The Son's Filial Relationship to His Father 261 they wandered in the desert (cf. Num 20:1–13)” (1, 244). For Benedict, not only would the new Moses provide living bread from heaven that would exceed the manna, but he would also provide living water that would quench one’s spiritual thirst. Jesus “is the new Moses. He himself is the life-giving rock” (1, 245). Commenting on John 7:38, “As the Scripture has said ‘Out of his body shall flow rivers of living water,” Benedict follows those Fathers of the Church who interpreted “his heart” as referring, not to the heart of the believer, but to the heart of Jesus. “ ‘His body’ is now applied to Christ: He is the source, the living rock, from which the new water comes” (1, 246). Jesus, as the new Moses, is the source of the life-giving waters, just as he is the bread of eternal life, because he is in divine communion with his Father—the eternal spring of all life. The Transfiguration: The New Moses The typology of Jesus being the new Moses reaches, in the Transfiguration, its climax prior to his death and resurrection. Scripturally the Transfiguration is also closely conjoined to the Feast of Tabernacles, which culminates on the last day with the festival of light. Likewise, it is connected to Moses’ ascent up Mount Sinai. There the glory of God covered the mountain for six days (cf. Ex 24:16). Benedict points out that Mark simply states that Jesus was transfigured before them, noting that “his cloths became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them” (Mk 9:2–3). Matthew, more elegantly, states: “His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Mt 17:2). Only Luke, Benedict notes, indicates the purpose of the ascent. He “went up on the mountain to pray” (Lk 9:28). It was while he was at prayer that “the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white” (Lk 9:29). Here, in the context of the Feast of Tabernacles, Jesus’ closeness to his Father and his being the New Moses become one. Benedict begins: The Transfiguration is a prayer event; it displays visibly what happens when Jesus talks with his Father: the profound interpenetration of his being with God, which then becomes pure light. In his oneness with the Father, Jesus is himself “light from light.” (1, 310) The Transfiguration manifests the prayerful unity of the Father and the Son—a unity that far exceeds the unity of friendship between God and Moses. Jesus’ prayerful unity is ontological in that the Transfiguration illuminates the fact that Jesus and the Father share one and the same glorious divine being. 262 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. Benedict also perceives other similarities and differences between Jesus and Moses. When Moses finished speaking with God “the skin of his face shone” (Ex 34:29–35). Benedict comments: Because Moses has been talking with God, God’s light streams upon him and makes him radiant. But the light that causes him to shine comes upon him from the outside, so to speak. Jesus, however, shines from within; he does not simply receive light, but he himself is light from light. (1, 310) The Transfiguration anticipates the cross and resurrection, for it is through his salvific death that Jesus obtains the fullness of glory. His glorious humanity now completely manifests the ontological depth of his divine filial relationship to the Father. Through his death and resurrection, Jesus absolutely becomes the new Moses, for now his full human intimacy with the Father is established and manifested. This too points to his Second Coming, for when he comes again in all of his glory, Jesus will bring his kingdom to completion and all men and women as well as the whole of creation will radiate from within the divine light of glory. The first Moses will no longer reflect the glory of God as from the outside, but he will share within his very humanity the inner divine life of the new Moses. The New Moses: Obedience and Intercession In examining the Last Supper, Benedict states that the first covenant was founded on two elements: “first, on the ‘blood of the covenant’.The blood of sacrificed animals with which the altar—as the symbol of God—and the people were sprinkled, and second, on God’s word and Israel’s promise of obedience” (2, 132). After the reading of the book of the covenant, the people promised obedience to all that God had told them and, thereupon, Moses sprinkled them with the blood of the covenant. However, immediately after this, while Moses was on the mountain, the Israelites broke the covenant by worshiping the golden calf. As the new Moses, Jesus would need, Benedict states, to forge a new covenant, one that was “founded on an obedience that is irrevocable and inviolable. This obedience, now located at the very root of human nature, is the obedience of the Son, who made himself a servant and took all of human disobedience upon himself in his obedience even unto death, suffered it right to the end, and conquered it” (2, 132). As the incarnate Son of the Father and thus within that intimate relationship, a relationship that exceeded Moses’ with God, Jesus, as man, was fully obedient to the Father’s will even unto death, a sacrificial death that established the new and everlasting covenant. The Son's Filial Relationship to His Father 263 In his sacrificial death, Jesus, as the intercessor for the whole of humankind, is also the new Moses. He does this through his vicarious atonement. Man having broken the covenant, God was angry and threatened to destroy the Israelites. Moses stepped into the breach. He cried out to God: “But now, if you would forgive their sin—and if not, blot me, I beg you, out of your book which you have written” (Ex 32:32). Benedict comments: Moses is “the substitute, the one who bears the fate of the people and through pleading on their behalf is able to change it again and again” (2, 173). As the new Moses, Jesus will stand in the place of humankind and offer himself to the Father on its behalf so that all nations may be reconciled to God. Jesus does what Moses could not do. Because he is the obedient incarnate Son, through the offering of himself in sacrifice, he is able truly to cleanse humankind of sin and transform it into a genuinely righteous and holy people. Conclusion: A Personal Relationship with Jesus, the New Moses Benedict observes that the apostles struggled to articulate who Jesus is, though they did grasp that, because of his relationship to the Father, he is the new Moses, the one who truly speaks to God face-to-face. They perceived him to be “God himself.” Benedict sees this ever-growing clarity culminate in Thomas’s confession. “It [the clarity] could arrive at its complete form only when Thomas, touching the wounds of the Risen Lord, cried out, in amazement: ‘My Lord and my God’ ( Jn 20:28)” (1, 304–5). Only in his death and resurrection did Jesus manifest the full divine oneness that he shared with the Father. In the Paschal Mystery, Jesus accomplished his work as the New Moses—liberating humankind from sin and death and bringing it into the promised land of the heavenly kingdom. Moreover, Benedict emphasizes that, as the Apostles and followers of Jesus had a personal encounter with him while on earth so, even more so, after his resurrection should men and women of faith encounter him now. As Moses helped the Israelites to enter into the presence of God, so Jesus, as the new Moses, not only aids us in knowing the Father but it is actually in union with him, so that humankind is able to enter into the heavenly Holy of Holies, and so, in him, to see the Father face-to-face. At the beginning of volume one, Benedict states that he hopes to “foster the growth of a living relationship with him ( Jesus)” (1, xxiv). Likewise, at the beginning of volume two, he writes: I have attempted to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to personal encounter and that, 264 Thomas G. Weinandy, O.F.M. Cap. through collective listening with Jesus’ disciples across the ages, can indeed attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure of Jesus. (2, xvii) I believe that Benedict has accomplished what he set out to do. In encountering Jesus, the Son, we encounter the new Moses who gives us, N&V in the Holy Spirit, access to the Father. Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 265–279 265 Natura Pura: Two Recent Works T HOMAS M. O SBORNE , J R . University of St. Thomas Houston, TX Aquinas’s Notion of Pure Nature and the Christian Integralism of Henri de Lubac by Bernard Mulcahy (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), 246 pages. Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace by Steven A. Long (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 282 pages. I N THESE TWO BOOKS Bernard Mulcahy and Steven Long defend the classical Thomistic understanding of pure nature. They contribute to the longstanding debate over Henri de Lubac’s understanding of the relationship between nature and grace in Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition. Although Mulcahy and Long criticize de Lubac, they respect his intentions and do not use ad hominem arguments. In order to correctly situate these recent works, it is important to review some elements in the history of the twentieth-century debate over natura pura. The debate began with Henri de Lubac’s Surnaturel (1946).1 In this work, de Lubac claimed that the notion of pure human nature (natura pura) considered apart from grace is a modern novelty that is incorrectly attributed to Thomas.2 He argued that the notion was developed in the context of a theological response to Baianism and especially Jansenism. De Lubac was in particular sympathetic to Jansenism’s call for a return to a more primitive patristic theology. Nevertheless, both Baianism and Jansenism included assorted unorthodox views, among which were views about the relationship between nature and grace. Some Catholic theologians once thought that among the condemned positions of Baianism and Jansenism was their denial that there could have been a state of pure 1 Henri de Lubac, Surnaturel: Études Historiques, Theologie, 8 (Paris: Aubier, 1946). 2 Ibid., 101–27. 266 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. nature. According to de Lubac, although the Catholic Church condemned the two heresies of Jansenism and Baianism, it did not condemn the Jansenist position about the impossibility of a purely natural state. De Lubac wished to preserve their rejection of natura pura while distancing himself from their explicitly condemned views. Although de Lubac was hostile toward Thomists, he was sympathetic to Thomas Aquinas. De Lubac claimed that, by developing a notion of natura pura, Thomists such as Thomas de Vio Cajetan corrupted Thomas’s understanding of nature and grace and opened the way to the even greater errors that arose with the reactions to Baianism and Jansenism. In particular, he said, Thomists incorrectly attribute to Thomas the positions that (1) there is a purely natural happiness proportionate to human nature;3 (2) the natural desire to see God is elicited and merely conditional;4 and (3) human nature has a kind of passive potency to be raised to the supernatural level, which is an “obediential potency.”5 According to de Lubac, humans have a natural desire for the supernatural vision of God, which is the only possible perfect kind of human happiness. However, this vision is still gratuitous, especially since God freely provides the means for attainment of this desired happiness, which is grace. De Lubac’s identification of this view with that of Thomas, if not of Thomists, led him to some unusual readings of Thomas’s texts. For instance, Thomists attribute to Thomas the belief that the natural love of God, in one sense of “natural,” is an elective love. This love is distinguished from charity by its object, since this natural love of God has as its object God as the source of natural goods, and charity has as its object God as the source of supernatural goods.6 De Lubac thought that any elective love of God is charity, and that the love of God can be natural only in the sense of “natural” that is the same as “non-rational.” In addition, Thomas held that the angels’ sin must have consisted in the rejection of God’s offer of supernatural beatitude. Thomists think that this view is based on the fact that the angels could not have rejected that natural happiness which they possessed as a result of their knowledge and love at their creation. De Lubac rejected this assumption.7 At the time of its publication, de Lubac’s Surnaturel received many criticisms for its interpretation of Thomas and the Thomistic tradition. By 1950, Thomas Deman thought that his review of Surnaturel needed justi3 Ibid., 459–65, 293–94. 4 Ibid., 431–38, 467–71, 475–80. 5 Ibid., 137–38. 6 Ibid., 253–55. 7 Ibid., 256–59. Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 267 fication, since the book had been already reviewed so many times, and the criticism had provoked further articles by de Lubac as well as further controversies.8 Most of the scholarly criticism had settled into certain standard and predictable lines. Thomists argued that de Lubac misinterpreted Thomas on at least five points. First, according to Thomas, natural happiness is proportionate to human nature, whereas supernatural happiness exceeds it.9 Thomas himself states that grace is necessary not only for the means to attain supernatural happiness, but even to be ordered to it. Thomas’s positions on the infused virtues and the souls of unbaptized infants entail this distinction between the two kinds of happiness. The distinction between infused and acquired virtue corresponds to the distinction between supernatural happiness and that natural happiness which is proportionate to human nature.10 Furthermore, Thomas’s view that unbaptized children after death enjoy a happiness which is proportionate to their nature entails that there is such a purely natural happiness. Second, Thomas holds that we are not naturally ordered to the beatific vision, and we cannot know about it through natural reason. Consequently we cannot desire it in a pre-elective and absolute way. Although Deman is, in my view, unfairly critical of the traditional Thomistic interpretation of Thomas’s relevant texts, he notes that de Lubac’s interpretation is far more seriously erroneous.11 Third, according to Thomas, even though human nature is not naturally ordered to the supernatural end, it has an ability to be raised to such an ordering.12 The description of this ability as an “obediential potency” was not invented by Cajetan but has medieval roots.13 Fourth, Thomas distinguishes explicitly between two kinds of natural love: one is non-elective and the other is elective.14 De Lubac’s identification of all elective love with charity is an eccentric view that was inherited from Jean Mouroux.15 Fifth, de Lubac’s view that 8 Thomas Deman, review of Surnaturel: Études Historiques, by Henri de Lubac, Bulletin Thomiste 7 (1943–46, pub. 1950), 422–46. 9 Ibid., 434–41. 10 Ibid., 432–33. 11 Ibid., 441–44. 12 Ibid., 427–30. 13 L.-B. Gillon, “Aux origines de la ‘Puissance Obedientielle’,” Revue Thomiste 47 (1947): 304–10. 14 M.-R. Gagnebet, “L’amour naturel de Dieu chez saint Thomas et ses contempo- rains,” Revue Thomiste 48 (1948): 394–446; 49 (1949): 31–102. See my Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteenth-Century Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 70–86. 15 Gregory Stevens, “The Disinterested Love of God According to St. Thomas and Some of His Modern Interpreters,” The Thomist 16 (1953): 326–28. 268 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. the angels would be able to reject purely natural happiness commits him to a view that contradicts that of Thomas, which is that someone cannot directly will against happiness.16 De Lubac modified some of his particular claims in works such as his The Mystery of the Supernatural, but he never retracted the central claims of Surnaturel.17 Thomists have since repeated many of the same criticisms. For instance, J.-H. Nicolas’s masterly Les profondeurs de la grace (1969) contains a chapter that more or less develops and reiterates the previous criticisms of de Lubac and his followers.18 The debate subsided during the 1970s and 1980s, on account of a shift in theological fashion. In 2001, a whole issue of the Revue Thomiste (101) was devoted to the controversy over Surnaturel. This issue has been more recently translated into English.19 During the last ten years, Anglophone criticisms of de Lubac have multiplied. For instance, Ralph McInerny, in his Preambula Fidei (2006), includes de Lubac among those twentieth-century thinkers who helped to obscure the Thomistic understanding of nature and natural theology.20 McInerny recounts in particular Florent Gaboriau’s defense of Thomas de Vio Cajetan in a Francophone context.21 Even more recently (2010), Sapientia Press published a revision of Lawrence Feingold’s 2001 dissertation, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas and His Interpreters.22 This dissertation had already attracted much attention, since it seemed to thoroughly vindicate at length and in a more scholarly fashion the Thomistic tradition’s reading of Thomas on the impossibility of a natural absolute and pre-elective desire for the supernatural vision of God. Despite these criticisms, in many theological circles, and especially among Catholic theologians associated with “Communio,” it is still assumed that opposition to de Lubac is based on the reactionary tempera16 Gagnebet, “L’amour naturel,” 72–86. Deman, review of Surnaturel, 422, mentions an additional debate over this issue. 17 Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967). The original appeared as Le mystère du surnaturel (Paris: Aubier, 1965). 18 J.-H. Nicolas, Les profondeurs de la grace (Paris: Beauchesne, 1969), 331–97. 19 Serge-Thomas Bonino, ed., Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of TwentiethCentury Thomistic Thought, trans. Robert Williams (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2009). 20 Ralph McInerny, Preambula Fidei: Thomism and the God of the Philosophers (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 69–90. 21 Ibid., 63–82. 22 Lawrence Feingold, The Natural Desire to See God According to St. Thomas Aquinas and His Interpreters (Naples, FL: Sapientia Press, 2010). Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 269 ments of his critics rather than on argument.23 Moreover, the influence of de Lubac’s understanding of the supernatural may even be growing in postmodern Protestant circles. For instance, the most prominent member of the theological movement “Radical Orthodoxy,” John Milbank, has used de Lubac’s ideas to argue for a post-secular “integralism,” in which the distinction between nature and grace seems to be set aside.24 Although the two books of Long and Mulcahy are part of this continuing and sometimes repetitious discussion, each makes a distinctive and important contribution to the literature. Mulcahy puts de Lubac’s Surnaturel in its historical context. Moreover, he traces the development and presence of its themes in de Lubac’s other works, as well as its reception by Radical Orthodoxy. Mulcahy’s approach is theological but also historical. He attentively evaluates the arguments and historical claims made by the different parties. Long’s book is a more purely philosophical and theological defense of the notion of “natura pura,” and it is an attempt to show how a variety of contemporary theological and philosophical errors have a connection with, if not roots in, a lack of appreciation for nature, especially as it is understood in traditional Thomistic natural philosophy and even metaphysics. • • • Mulcahy’s book is arranged more or less around the chronological development of thought concerning “natura pura.” Chapter One provides the theoretical background. Chapters Two through Four discuss the roots of the notion in Scripture and in the Fathers, and its flowering in the works of Thomas Aquinas. Chapters Five through Seven consider in detail, respectively, de Lubac’s interpretation of reactions to Baianism and Jansenism, twentieth-century disputes over natura pura, and the more recent effect of de Lubac on Radical Orthodoxy. Chapter Eight is a summary and resolution. Chapter One begins with Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s description of a state of pure nature as indicating precisively “nature with its intrinsic constituent principles and such as follow from them or are due to them” (1–3). Discussions of the state of pure nature became increasingly sophisticated in the sixteenth century. Mulcahy carefully and explicitly follows Martin Stone’s description of the idea’s roots in debates over God’s absolute and ordained powers, the theology of Limbo, and the description of a natural end of human beings. Whether or not Stone’s 23 See Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith:The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 20–21. 24 For an explicit appreciation of de Lubac, see John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). 270 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. description is correct, it appears that Stone straightforwardly plagiarized this article from several sources.25 Mulcahy adds a few other possible historical influences. Then he outlines de Lubac’s characterization of the state of pure nature as fictional, foreign to the Christian tradition, dualistic, and responsible for contemporary secularism and atheism. According to de Lubac, Catholic theology could be renewed by passing over the late scholastics, and especially their use of natura pura, and returning directly to the Fathers. Milbank develops de Lubac’s position by making an argument for an epistemological and even political approach in which the natural and supernatural orders are not so sharply distinguished. At first it seems counterintuitive that Milbank uses the word “integralism” for this outlook. His use of the word becomes clear when Mulcahy notes how Milbank distinguishes between “integrism” and “integralism.” In French, “intégrisme” and “intégralism” both indicate a political and religious reactionary outlook that is not clearly present in Anglophone culture. For Milbank, “integrism” denotes something of this reactionary outlook, whereas “integralism” denotes a rejection of secularism and its roots in earlier theological attempts to separate nature and grace. Although the language comes from Milbank, the ideological source is de Lubac. Chapter Two outlines the remote background to the notion of natura pura. Mulcahy gives an especially strong account of how the notion is in some sense present in Hellenistic philosophy and in Sacred Scripture. Philosophical thought requires that there be regularity and definitions, which presuppose some notion of nature. Similarly, both the Septuagint and the New Testament frequently use the Greek word for nature, physis. More importantly, the Jewish and Christian outlook presupposes a distinction between creation and election, which is a gratuitous addition to nature. Mulcahy argues that this Jewish notion of nature is also present in the Fathers, and especially in Augustine’s distinction between the two cities. The author highlights this last distinction, probably because of Milbank’s failure to separate the secular from the religious. Nevertheless, Mulcahy does not convincingly show that Augustine’s distinction between the two cities is the same as a distinction between natura pura and grace. More importantly, the discussion skips the clarification of this latter 25 M. W. F. Stone, “Michael Baius (1513–89) and the Debate on ‘Pure Nature’: Grace and Moral Agency in Sixteenth-Century Scholasticism,” in Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (Synthese Historical Library 57), ed. Jill Kraye and Risto Saarinen (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 51–90. M. V. Dougherty, P. Harsting, and R. L. Friedman, “40 Cases of Plagiarism,” Bulletin de Philosophie Médiévale 51 (2009): 375–76. According to this 2009 article, Stone has plagiarized from—ironically—de Lubac and Feingold, among others. Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 271 distinction by jumping from Augustine to Thomas. Mulcahy is only the latest to neglect the development of the notion of the supernatural during this intermediate period. It is unclear to me why the debate over de Lubac’s work has passed over Artur Michael Landgraf ’s important 1929 article on the development of the distinction between the natural and the supernatural, which was largely reprinted in his 1952 Dogmengeschichte der Frühscholastik.26 It seems to me that some of de Lubac’s historical claims are incompatible with Landgraf ’s findings. Chapters Three and Four argue that Thomas Aquinas himself uses a notion of natura pura. Each of these two chapters discusses three topics in which Thomas seems to mention or presuppose natura pura. Chapter Five analyzes Thomas’s texts on (1) natural mortality; (2) the distinction between the infused and acquired virtues, and (3) the Limbo of unbaptized departed infants. Chapter Six takes up (4) the identification of the political with the natural in the De regno; (5) the understanding of natura pura in Thomas’s doctrine of natural law, and (6) the distinction between philosophy and theology. Although there is not much distinctive in Mulcahy’s discussion of topics 2, 3, and perhaps 6, he gives an excellent summary of the familiar arguments. His overall case seems solid. Topic 5 covers two familiar issues. The first is about the way in which natural law presupposes a notion of nature apart from grace. The second concerns a particular command of the natural law, namely, to love God more than oneself. Mulcahy’s overall treatment here is convincing, although it seems to me that it should be tied more closely to the distinction between the natural and supernatural ends, which he discusses in the context of topic 2, concerning the distinction between kinds of virtue. Mulcahy introduces somewhat original considerations in his discussions of topic 1, which is on death, and topic 5, which is on politics. The first consideration is unexpected. In the context of the desire for God, discussion of the natural desire to avoid death is usually invoked to explain the meaning of “conditional desire.” In particular, this desire to avoid death is an instance of a natural desire that will not be fulfilled.27 Moreover, Thomists often compare Thomas’s arguments for identifying 26 Artur Michael Landgraf, “Studien zur Erkenntnis des Übernatürlichen in der Frühscholastik,” Scholastik 4 (1929): 1–37, 189–220, 352–89; repr. and rev. in idem, Dogmengeschichte der Frühscholastik, vol. 1.1 (Regensburg: Pustet, 1952), 141–201. 27 Feingold, Natural Desire, 261–69; Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, De revelatione per ecclesiam catholicam proposita (Paris: Lethielleux, 1926), 207–8; Dominic Banez, In I, q. 12, art. 1. dub. 2, in Scholastica Commentaria in Primam Partem Summae Theologicae S. Thomae Aquinatis, ed. Luis Urbano (Madrid: F.E.D.A., 1934; repr. Dubuque, IA, 1964), 249–50. 272 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. perfect happiness with the beatific vision with his arguments for the resurrection.28 Arguments for the suitability of the body’s resurrection, which are based on the soul’s inclination for the body, do not demonstrate the resurrection. Similarly, arguments for the suitability of the beatific vision are not demonstrations that the beatific vision is the ultimate end. Mulcahy takes a different and unusual tack. According to Mulcahy, mortality is relevant because of Thomas’s belief that bodily death is natural for humans with respect to the body’s nature, but contrary to nature with respect to the connection with the soul. This point is connected to the one about the desire to live forever, but it is, I think, a different kind of argument. Before the Fall, immortality would have been gratuitous. The relevant texts of Thomas do seem to presuppose ultimately an understanding of nature that is incompatible with de Lubac’s interpretation. Mulcahy, though, should have stressed more strongly the difference between the gift of immortality and the properly supernatural sanctifying grace possessed before the Fall. In his discussion of topic 5, Mulcahy argues that in the De regno Thomas distinguishes sharply between the supernatural end and that natural end with which the political ruler is concerned. If Mulcahy’s interpretation of De regno is correct, it conflicts not only with de Lubac’s view but even more strongly with Milbank’s appropriation of de Lubac for political thought. However, it seems to me that Mulcahy ignores some difficult features of the text, and especially the conflicting scholarship about the relationship between the De regno and Thomas’s other discussions on the connection between political life and the supernatural end.29 Nevertheless, he could still make his central point about the importance of a natural end, but he might need to take into account the effects of original sin and the political implications of a higher supernatural end. In general, Mulcahy summarizes well the important points in the debate over de Lubac’s interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. But there are several minor infelicities. For instance, Mulcahy does not clearly delineate between natura pura (which excludes grace), integral nature (which excludes injury to the intellect and will by original sin), and corrupt 28 Feingold, Natural Desire, 269–76; Garrigou-Lagrange, De revelatione, 210–11; Banez, In I, q. 12, art. 1, dub. 1 et 2 (ed. Urbano, 248, 250). 29 I. T. Eschmann, “Saint Thomas Aquinas and the Two Powers,” Mediaeval Studies 20 (1958): 177–205; Leonard E. Boyle, “The De Regno and the Two Powers,” in Essays in Honour of Anton Charles Pegis, ed. J. Reginald O’Donnell (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), 237–47; L. P. Fitzgerald, “St. Thomas Aquinas and the Two Powers,” Angelicum 56 (1979): 515–56; Benjamin Smith, “Political Theology and Thomas Aquinas,” Proceedings of the America Catholic Philosophical Association 84 (2010): 99–112. Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 273 nature (which includes such injury) (69–70, 93–94). The distinction between integral and corrupt nature is not primarily about grace but about natural abilities. For instance, someone with integral nature will reason well and be able to love God more than himself out of his natural powers. In contrast, someone with a corrupted nature will have concupiscence, a weakened reason, and be unable, without healing grace, to love God more than himself naturally. Before the Fall, Adam and Eve had integral natures, although, at least according to Thomas, they were never in a state of pure nature. A less important example is his use of the word “supernatural” to describe the view that true knowledge requires “divine illumination” (107). The position that a special divine illumination is necessary for scientific knowledge does not entail that this illumination is gratuitous. Chapter Five discusses de Lubac’s view of how the notion of the supernatural developed in the modern period. This chapter is especially helpful, as most criticisms of de Lubac do not consider thoroughly his description of Baianism and Jansenism. Although Feingold discusses much of the same material, sometimes in a more theologically sophisticated way, Mulcahy provides a more complete historical context.30 Everyone seems to agree that Baius and the Jansenists rejected the notion of natura pura, and that these movements were at least partially condemned by the Holy See. De Lubac defended the unusual view that the condemnation of Baianism and Jansenism did not include a condemnation of their denial of natura pura. In general, de Lubac was sympathetic not only to this denial, but also to the Jansenist rejection of scholasticism and of its attempt to return to the Fathers, especially Augustine. He thought that mainstream Catholic theology reacted too strongly against Baius and the Jansenists, and it consequently developed a notion of natura pura that would ultimately lead to the demise of Catholicism in France and the rise of secularism. Mulcahy traces the development of these opinions throughout de Lubac’s work. De Lubac’s claims about the invention of natura pura in the modern period are adequately refuted by Mulcahy’s earlier discussion of Thomas Aquinas, although Mulcahy could have strengthened his case by mentioning medieval traditions other than Thomism. In this chapter, Mulcahy discusses in more detail the claim that the doctrine of natura pura leads to secularism. He mentions many historians who attribute it to other factors. Although Mulcahy’s discussion of these historians is brief, it may be deservedly so, since it is prima facie implausible that the history of France and even the world was so influenced by the theological understanding of 30 Feingold, Natural Desire, 295–315. 274 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. natura pura. Mulcahy notes that de Lubac passes over the Jesuit rejection of the Thomist and Augustinian tradition on grace. The Jesuit tradition was most distinctively expressed by Luis de Molina and his followers (131–35).The different Dominican and Jesuit reactions to Jansenism were conditioned by their previous disagreement. It is paradoxical that, according to the Dominican Mulcahy, the Jesuit de Lubac represents the negative aspects of both Jesuit scholasticism and the Jansenists, who were the enemies of the Jesuits. Mulcahy thinks plausibly that the Thomists were much better theologians than either the Jansenists or the Jesuits, and that de Lubac passes over this important historical and theological point. This chapter is most helpful for its reference to the diverse texts in which de Lubac attributes errors of modernity to the scholastic understanding of natura pura. In Chapter Six, Mulcahy covers the immediate Catholic reception of de Lubac’s work. He gives a sympathetic account of de Lubac’s formation, according to which de Lubac’s rejection of traditional scholasticism was in part a rejection of a conservative Suarezian philosophy. Mulcahy’s attempt to connect de Lubac’s rejection of natura pura with Suarez’s account of individuation is unconvincing. The chapter’s high point is a delightful account of the reception of the encyclical Humani Generis. Whereas many thought that it condemned the views expressed in Surnaturel, de Lubac and his allies eventually described it as an endorsement. He concludes this chapter with an appreciation of de Lubac’s life and work. He praises de Lubac’s emphasis on communal life and the Fathers, and applauds his rejection of anti-Semitism and Marxism. According to Mulcahy, de Lubac raised interesting questions about the supernatural, even if he gave unconvincing answers. Unfortunately, Mulcahy does not discuss in detail most of de Lubac’s chief critics and de Lubac’s responses. Chapter Seven is about John Milbank’s use of de Lubac for developing his own political theology. Mulcahy gives a basic outline of Milbank’s approach and notes its socialist and anti-Thatcherite origins. He attempts to tie these origins to the thrust of Milbank’s position, which is that reason and even politics must not be separated from revelation. Milbank finds support for his view in de Lubac’s work on the supernatural. Mulcahy convincingly notes that Milbank is even more in conflict with Thomas and Augustine than de Lubac is. As an additional point, Mulcahy notes that Milbank rejects Christian notions of the sacraments and sexual ethics (186). This comment may be a rare instance of ad hominem argumentation. The relevance of these comments was at least unclear to me. They are perhaps helpful for those readers who are unfamiliar with “Radical Orthodoxy.” Chapter Eight summarizes the argument and repeats the conclusion that Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 275 the concept of natura pura is deeply rooted in the Christian tradition and is important for theology. Although Mulcahy’s overall argument is convincing, the book has some scholarly and stylistic weaknesses. At times there is too much of an effort to make de Lubac’s rejection of scholasticism sympathetic. For instance, Mulcahy says without providing much support that scholasticism was “too often allied to politically reactionary and anti-Semitic tendencies” (208). Although he correctly diagnoses de Lubac’s “obvious impatience with criticism” (213), he does not in detail discuss de Lubac’s failure to engage with his early critics, or his dismissive and hostile reaction to them. Mulcahy’s tone concerning de Lubac is generally uneven. For instance, in the Index under “Lubac, Henri de,” one entry is “flawed scholarship and intellectual dishonesty” (242). But this entry refers to a page (148) that mentions flaws but only delicately suggests dishonesty. However, the book is a balanced and informative account of the debate over natura pura in the twentieth century. It should be read by anyone who is interested in this topic. In particular, Chapters Three and Four should be recommended, alongside Feingold’s Natural Desire, to anyone who wants to understand how de Lubac’s position conflicts with that of Thomas Aquinas. • • • Steven Long’s book is an attempt to address the various errors that result from the neglect or ignorance of a Thomistic account of nature. Each chapter focuses on a different target, but all the targets more or less agree in their denial of natura pura. Chapter One focuses on Henri de Lubac’s understanding of obediential potency and the natural desire to see God. Chapter Two considers the influence of de Lubac on the early Hans Urs von Balthasar. Chapter Three is on analytic philosophy. Chapter Four discusses the importance of natura pura for political philosophy. Throughout, Long emphasizes that grace builds upon a natural order, and consequently that this natural order is important for theology and faith. The purpose of Long’s first chapter is to discuss the natural desire for God, obediential potency, and the connected notion of natural order. Long repeats the standard arguments against de Lubac’s view that there is a natural desire for the supernatural vision of God, even though the means to that end are gratuitous. He may at times overstate his case. For instance, he writes, “. . . to desire God as cause of the world is strictly speaking not truly to desire God, who is infinitely more than cause of the world” (20). This statement is confusing. It seems that Long is focusing on Cajetan’s distinction between the way in which God (a) is desired as the first cause by those who are unaware of revelation, and (b) is desired 276 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. according to his substance in himself (secundum substantiam suam in se).31 Long’s position is unclear, because, unlike Cajetan, Long asserts that he is concerned with an elicited, conditional, and inefficacious desire.Thomists after Cajetan hold that such a desire is conditional because we cannot know by natural reason that the beatific vision is even possible.32 We can reason to God’s existence from his effects, and we can then only conditionally desire to know the First Cause’s essence. Cajetan does not consider such a conditional desire to know God’s essence, but merely asserts that the desire to know God as the source of natural goods is not a desire to know God in himself. There are many problems with Cajetan’s interpretation, not the least being that we could know that God is but be unable to elicit even a conditional desire to know what he is.33 What would stand in the way of such a desire? Additionally, Long’s description of natural desire uneasily combines aspects of Cajetan’s eccentric theory with the mainstream Thomistic view. Long writes, “Where revelation makes the real possibility of beatific vision known, this renders the otherwise conditional desire to know God to become unconditional” (21). The whole reason why the desire must first be conditional is because otherwise there would be a natural desire for an end unattainable through natural powers, namely the vision of God’s essence. Apart from revelation, we could think about such knowledge, but we could not know even if it is possible. But Long, on the previous page, argues that if there is no revelation, the desire to know God is not really a desire to know God’s essence. If Long agrees with Cajetan’s apparent position that the desire to know God without revelation is never a desire to know God’s essence, then, like Cajetan, he has no need to say that such a desire is merely conditional. Why would there be only a conditional desire for what can in fact be obtained? The distinction between God as the author of nature and God as known by revelation does not seem to be relevant to the question of whether there is a natural desire for God. The desire to know God in his essence as the cause of natural effects is most probably formally distinct from the desire to know God in his essence as the source of supernatural gifts, and even the Trinity.34 But both are a true desire for God. In his discussion of obediential potency, Long mentions the connection between de Lubac’s interpretation and that of the Franciscan school, which 31 Thomas de Vio Cajetan, In ST, I, q. 12, art. 1, nn. 9–10, in Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia (Rome: Leonine, 1888-), vol. 4, 116). 32 Garrigou-Lagrange, De revelatione, 207–10; Feingold, Natural Desire, 261–76. 33 Feingold, Natural Desire, 167–75. 34 Garrigou-Lagrange, De revelatione, 209–10. Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 277 was a “susceptibility to miracle” (22). It seems to me that not only de Lubac but also his critics generally neglect the importance of Thomas’s distinctive understanding of the human ability to be elevated to the vision of God’s essence, and its connection to the Thomistic distinction between essence and existence.35 Long is especially helpful in his description of the natural order to a natural end, which is subordinated to a distinct supernatural end. Obediential potency is the ability to be raised and ordered to this supernatural end by grace. He argues that de Lubac rejected obediential potency because he did not understand the way in which grace raises and perfects an already existing natural order. At this point, Long departs from the earlier criticisms of de Lubac by connecting the rejection of obediential potency with the mistakes of Kant, Hume, Comte, Hegel, and even the Jesuit Luis de Molina (37–41). The last is especially interesting, since Mulcahy also mentions the controversy over Molinism. Long’s argument is that Molina’s understanding of human freedom leads ultimately to the view that human action is outside of Providence, and consequently to the further view that humans do not have a natural proportionate end. It seems to me that Long’s historical and philosophical arguments need to be distinguished from each other and developed. In Chapter Two, Long addresses the understanding of natura pura in von Balthasar’s The Theology of Karl Barth.36 Von Balthasar seems to be influenced by de Lubac when he writes that Thomas Aquinas did not have the conceptual resources to distinguish between natura pura and grace. Long points out two meanings of natura pura (81). First, it can be an original state without grace. Second, it can be nature considered in precision from grace. Thomists are primarily concerned with the second, but von Balthasar seems aware of only the first. Since von Balthasar agrees with Thomists that there was no original state of pure nature, his identification of a natural end with an actual state of pure nature leads him to deny that there is a natural end. Long points out that in rejecting natura pura, de Lubac and von Balthasar deprive theology of considerations involving natural reason and a natural end, and they make apologetics impossible. Chapter Three is concerned with the importance of pure nature for philosophy. In particular, Long criticizes analytic philosophy for being an 35 Norbert del Prado, De veritate fundamentali philosophiae Christianae (Freiburg: Consociatio Sancti Pauli, 1911), 590–626. For a different contrast with Suarez’s understanding of an active obediential potency, see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, trans. Patrick Cummins (St. Louis: Herder, 1950), 55–56, 308–9. 36 Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. John Drury (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971). 278 Thomas M. Osborne, Jr. empty method without content. Long seems to think that analytic philosophy is incompatible with Thomistic natural philosophy. His target is not those who prefer analytic to continental philosophy, but those who would substitute formation in analytic philosophy for formation in Thomistic physics and metaphysics. If someone agrees with Long that the Thomistic understanding of nature is correct, then it would seem almost obvious that such formation is indispensible. Why does Long make this point? He makes several criticisms of analytic thought. He is clearly correct that almost none of those whom we might describe as analytic philosophers understand Thomistic natural philosophy or would be likely to accept its main theses. He seems to make the stronger point that there is something incompatible with all forms of analytic philosophy and Thomistic natural philosophy, or perhaps at least with formation in them. A problem for Long is that it is difficult to say what analytic philosophy is. His description of analytic philosophy sometimes seems outdated, and the choice of issues idiosyncratic. It is hard to account for a hundred years of Anglophone philosophy in one chapter. Moreover, many trained in some of analytic philosophy’s many varieties would agree with Long’s assertion that “there is no analytic philosophy” (121). Why is he arguing against it then, rather than against one of its more prominent varieties? Long seems to think that Thomists have little or nothing to learn from the more prominent contemporary philosophers. According to Long, for Thomists “the concern for dialogue with analytic logicism, or with analytic thinkers generally, is an apologetic and secondary aim.” (156) He tends to think of the relationship between different academic traditions as one of criticism and defense. But interaction often increases understanding and precision. For instance, later Thomists became more precise as they interacted with Scotists, Nominalists, and even Suarezians. I would not argue that any analytic philosophers are on the level of Scotus or Suarez, or that interaction with them would be more fruitful. But Long seems to neglect the development that might occur if enough Thomists, already formed in natural philosophy and theology, took into account twentieth-century philosophy. He ends the chapter with a biographical discussion of I. M. Bochenski (1902–95), who devoted himself to logic and abandoned Thomism. It seems to me correct that Bochenski should not have abandoned Thomism, but it is not obvious that his story has contemporary relevance. I would love to read Long’s comments on philosophers such as Peter Geach and John Haldane, since they claim to be both Thomists and analytic philosophers. In Chapter Four, Long considers the relevance of natura pura to politics. In particular, he considers the work of Jacques Maritain, Jean Porter, and Natura Pura: Two Recent Works 279 David Schindler. Maritain arguably neglected the Thomistic understanding of prudence and perhaps even of natural law in favor of a merely practical consensus on a list of “rights.” Persons with different ideologies, religions, and outlooks would be able to agree at least on a basic list. Long sides more with Jean Porter, who thinks that an agreement on rights is insufficient, and that there must be an underlying agreement about the natural law. Nevertheless, he thinks that Porter, like Maritain, unnecessarily limits the number and kinds of truths that need to be recognized in order to support rights and a just social order. Schindler is equally skeptical about the success of natural law reasoning, but for a different reason. Like Milbank, he seems to deny that natural reason can function independently of theology in the speculative or the practical order. All three are skeptical about the ability of natural law reasoning to obtain any rich practical consensus. Long argues that a theoretical account of human nature and natural law can provide a broad basis for human law and rights. Nevertheless, Long recognizes that the effects of original and actual sin impede the natural order. Some explicit recourse to revelation is necessary. If Mulcahy had recognized these points, he might have given a more sympathetic reading of Milbank’s political philosophy. Chapter Five summarizes and ties together the book’s main conclusions. In an Appendix, Long connects his emphases on the preambula fidei and the rationality of the natural law with Pope Benedict XVI’s work, including the controversial Regensburg Lecture. The variety of Long’s important arguments, distinctions, and observations is stimulating. Often the points need more development and clarity. To some extent the book lacks unity. In particular, the chapter on analytic philosophy seems out of place. I should perhaps mention that Long’s style can be awkward. For instance, he concludes a long sentence about de Lubac’s views with “. . . and these seminal errors should be corrected rather than for apologetic reasons permitted to define the essential contours of theology; and that the price of escaping their force without disavowing them is a strategic disequilibration of the Christian synthesis” (4). Long states that he will conclude the first chapter “by observing the protean implications of these issues for the effort to understand, and to transcend, an invertebrate postmodern theological pluralism that itself presupposes the loss of natural order as a theonomic principle” (11) The style might deter some readers from considering Long’s important contributions. Both books are welcome additions to the literature on the controversy over natura pura, and consequently over the relationship between nature and grace. Mulcahy provides a historical and theological account of the debates origins, and more clearly explains the weakness of de Lubac’s work. Long explains why natura pura is important today. N&V Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2013): 281–302 281 Book Reviews The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? edited by Thomas Joseph White, O.P. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), xiv + 440 T HIS VOLUME gathers a number of essays pertaining to the debate in the early twentieth century regarding the analogy of being. The principal characters are Erich Przywara, Karl Barth, and Thomas Aquinas, although other figures, such as Bonaventure, John Calvin, Gottlieb Söhngen, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Ferdinand Ulrich appear, as well. The book has four main sections; the first examines the historical context of the debate between Przywara and Barth regarding the analogy of being, the second offers ecumenical proposals, the third situates the analogy of being within the context of Thomistic ressourcement, and the fourth proposes how the analogy of being can renew contemporary theology. Essays by John Betz on Przywara and by Bruce McCormack on Barth locate the origins of the debate over the analogy of being and how Przywara and Barth developed their respective understandings of analogy throughout their careers. The fundamental problem revolves around the relationship of creation to God and the extent to which knowledge of God can be derived from creation on the one hand and from revelation on the other. Betz cites Przywara’s notion of creation as a “suspended middle” between potentiality and end (telos). He notes that while Przywara’s concept of analogy, as an intermediate term between extremes, addresses how creation participates in God’s being and thus highlights the similarity between God and creatures, it also presupposes the “ever greater” difference between God and creation and the fact that any “similarity” of creation with God is grounded in God’s infinite otherness and the sheer gratuitousness of creaturely existence. The notion of creaturely similarity to God was unsettling to the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, whose statement that the analogy of being was the “invention of the Antichrist,” is historically contextualized by McCormack’s essay. McCormack argues that Barth’s condemnation of 282 Book Reviews the analogy of being, which he never withdrew, was directed primarily against liberal Protestantism, not Catholicism. Barth’s contention was that if creation was conformed to God in any way, it was not through existence as such but through the gift of faith—hence his articulation of an analogia fidei in the Church Dogmatics. In other words, what is similar between God and humanity is not infinite and finite “being” but the faithful obedience of God; humans are “similar” to God only when sharing, by faith, in the Son’s eternal obedience to the Father. While appreciating Hans Urs von Balthasar’s sympathetic presentation of Barth’s theology, McCormack argues that Balthasar could not have understood fully Barth’s position on the analogy of being, because Balthasar’s study of Barth was published in 1951, before Barth had articulated his later Christology and doctrine of election in Church Dogmatics IV/1–2. The second section of the book addresses ecumenical proposals and reflects on how the debate between Przywara and Barth might lead to convergences between Catholic and Protestant theological priorities. Kenneth Oakes broadens the concept of analogy as found in Przywara’s Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1926) and Analogia Entis (1932) by examining other works of Przywara, such as his later sermons and exegetical studies. Oakes concludes that Przywara’s concept of analogy is much more theological and Christocentric than one might conclude from reading Barth’s criticism of the analogy of being. Richard Schenk writes about the historical origins of the analogy of being and its relationship to the scholastic axiom “grace presupposes nature”; he argues that the analogy of being can be the occasion for Catholic theology to explore further grace and faith, in contradistinction to nature and experience. Peter Casarella explores how Hans Urs von Balthasar interpreted Przywara’s explication of the analogy of being and how Balthasar maintained a sympathetic understanding of Barth’s critique while developing a Christologically oriented version of analogy. The volume offers several essays pertaining to the analogy of being and Thomistic ressourcement. Reinhard Hütter offers a detailed explication of the analogy of being, both as logical and as ontological concepts, in Thomas Aquinas; he refutes opposing critiques of Aquinas’s use of analogy by Wolfhart Pannenberg and Eberhard Jüngel.Thomas Joseph White examines, through a reading of Aquinas’s scriptural commentaries (among other texts), how analogical predication is necessary for understanding the person of Jesus Christ and the dogmatic language involved in describing the hypostatic union. Bruce Marshall argues that the conventional understanding of Aquinas’s emphasis on analogical predication has led to a marginalization of texts and arguments that demand univocal language for certain topics, such as Christology. The fact that God has become human implies that some Book Reviews 283 things can be predicated univocally of God and human beings; the Incarnation shows that God has been born and has worked, prayed, and suffered as all human beings do, in such a way that what we mean by “birth,” “work,” “prayer,” and “suffering,” is the same for all human beings including the man who is the Son of God. Martin Bieler explores the analogy of being in the modern German philosopher Ferdinand Ulrich (1931–); Ulrich is important as an interpreter of Aquinas, as a source for Balthasar, and for his position that finite being (esse) ultimately is not self-subsisting and should be seen as a gift received by something outside of itself (i.e., God). The last section of the book offers reflections about how the analogy of being can be recovered by contemporary theology. Michael Hanby suggests that the analogy of being can be appropriated by both contemporary theology and science in order to emphasize the gratuitous beauty of the natural world. John Webster offers a structure of Reformed dogmatic theology that synthesizes the analogy of being—understood as a theologoumenon that emphasizes the “ever greater” difference between God and creatures—with Scripture and certain insights of Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. Finally, David Bentley Hart reflects on the future development of the analogy of being, arguing that an adequate Christology (grounded in the dogmatic teaching of Nicaea and Chalcedon) maintains a balance between the error of absolute identity between God and creation and the error of absolute otherness between God and creation. Even though the studies on Barth and Thomas Aquinas in this volume are substantial, one of the volume’s most important features is its presentation and exposition of texts from Erich Przywara, whose works have largely remained unavailable to the anglophone theological world. The volume’s bibliography is fairly expansive, as well, and guides readers to further resources. Readers will find The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? an important contribution to the controversy over the analogy of being and “natural theology” in the early twentieth century, its historical origins, and its implications for contemporary theology. N&V Aaron Canty Saint Xavier University Chicago, IL Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law: Alasdair MacIntyre and Critics edited by Lawrence S. Cunningham (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), xiii + 374 pp. IN 2004, then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to The Catholic University of America, the Ave Maria Law School, and the University of Notre Dame, 284 Book Reviews asking each to examine “the values rooted in the very nature of the human person” (vii) in order to develop our understanding of a moral “common denominator” shared among all peoples. This volume is Notre Dame’s response to that letter. It consists of a long opening essay by Alasdair MacIntyre presenting his approach to moral disagreement and Thomistic natural law, eight response essays ( Jean Porter, David A. Clairmont, M. Cathleen Kaveny, Daniel Philpott, Gerald McKenny, Kevin L. Flannery, S.J., John J. Coughlin, O.F.M., and Thomas Hibbs), and a substantive closing response from MacIntyre. MacIntyre’s essay, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” just over fifty pages long, is the best, clearest presentation of his views on natural law that I know of, and it will repay careful study. His eight interlocutors offer stimulating and surprisingly diverse responses, though MacIntyre does a truly marvelous job of drawing the many strands together into a coherent unified dialogue in his final essay. Here I will focus on MacIntyre’s claims and the responses of Jean Porter and Gerald McKenny. How can advocates of the natural law, begins MacIntyre, “claim the authority of reason in support of their views and yet be unable to convince certain others who are, it seems, not only quite as intelligent, perceptive, and insightful as they are, but also quite as philosophically skillful and informed, yet who remain in radical disagreement?” (2–3). The typical response to this problem is to look more carefully at the arguments in favor of traditional natural law positions in order to make them clearer and stronger. But MacIntyre approaches the problem the other way round, from the perspective of the disagreement. Notice first, he says, that at every point in our lives we must be open to the revision of our in certain ways incurably inadequate and partial understanding of the good. Moral disagreement therefore “has a positive function in the moral life, that of stimulating us to reflect upon the sources of our immediate practical disagreements” and consequently making possible the necessary “self-questioning” that allows for moral development (18). If disagreement plays this role in our moral lives, “[w]e need therefore to resort to enquiry as to what the truth about these matters is, in company with those others who hold opposing views” (20). Inquiry, in turn, is successful only if interlocutors abide by certain rules: we will not speak openly and impersonally if we fear for the safety of our life, liberty, or property, or for that of our family and friends; nor can we be deceptive, or make promises which we do not keep, and so on. “But we need go no further than this to recognize that the set of precepts conformity to which is a precondition for shared rational enquiry as to how our practical disagreements are to be resolved have the same content as those Book Reviews 285 precepts that Aquinas identified as the precepts of the natural law” (23). And like the precepts of the natural law, these rules are universal, exceptionless, the same for everyone, and fundamental in the sense that we do not derive them from other principles, but instead “discover that we have already—implicitly, characteristically, rather than explicitly—had to accord them authority” (24). It turns out, therefore, that MacIntyre has “advanced an argument designed to show that Aquinas’ account of the precepts of the natural law, far from being inconsistent with the fact of moral disagreement, provides the best starting-point for the explanation of these facts” (26). MacIntyre acknowledges that the force of this argument is itself determined by our ability to recognize the presuppositions of the moral life, and so he does not claim that this account of the natural law will enable its defenders “to refute their opponents in ways that are or should be compelling to any rational individual, whatever her or his standpoint” (51). Instead, we must bring to bear all the resources of traditions in conflict that can eventually allow the defeat of one tradition at the hands of another. Here I can only mention the excellent, and lengthy, account MacIntyre gives of the conflict between Thomistic-Aristotelianism and utilitarianism, along with the reasons we have for supposing utilitarianism fails by its own lights in ways Thomistic-Aristotelianism can best explain. (This alone, I might add, makes MacIntyre’s essay well worth reading.) Jean Porter, however, is “not persuaded that the natural law as Aquinas understands it is tantamount to, or can be made to yield, normative precepts that are both specific enough to be put into practice and valid and binding in all times and places” (55). The natural law as such, though an important resource for framing the moral life, gives us no good reasons for thinking that it will yield universal normative precepts, despite the universality of the first principle of practical reason: It is far from clear that Aquinas’ theory of the natural law provides a basis for a compelling argument that an alternative cultural norm is simply wrong—for example, that we in the West are right and those in many Asian societies are wrong, to insist that the choice of one’s marriage partner is an overriding individual right. It might be that contrary views on this question, taken together with the very different construals of marriage and family life that they reflect, represent two alternative ways of construing the human inclinations towards reproduction and kinship associations, each rationally defensible as a legitimate expression of human nature, but neither rationally compelling as the only, or even the clearly superior, alternative. (86) 286 Book Reviews Porter is less concerned with MacIntyre’s particular strategy (though she does briefly say that his argument, considered on its own merits, “is at best underdeveloped” [74]) than she is with the use of natural law more generally as a foundation for universal, concrete moral norms; but MacIntyre’s own arguments are precisely meant to establish such a foundation, and so Porter’s reply, sweeping as it is, is meant for MacIntyre too. MacIntyre responds that Porter seems to believe that many moral concepts, such as the concept of “murder,” are “open-textured” such that they are “open to development and to application in different and incompatible ways, between which there may be no grounds for rational decision, apart, that is, from the moral and other commitments of some particular community, derived from its particular tradition” (320). But if we actually consider the concept of “murder” and its development, it appears that “ ‘murder’ is not open-textured in the way and to the extent that Porter suggests” (321). Consider, for example, the development of just defense excuses for killing, or of one’s moral responsibility for unintentional killing. It is always open to Porter to respond that we have overlooked a particularly persuasive example of a particular moral concept, but then we must take Porter’s argument on a case by case basis, and though MacIntyre cannot prove that she will fail, he sees no reason for thinking that she will succeed. Gerald McKenny begins his response by contrasting MacIntyre and Ratzinger with another, rival interpretation of reason and morality. This rival claims that reason does not give us “the kind or degree of knowledge of what is morally good which the Catholic tradition and its Protestant counterparts have claimed it gives us” (199). Whereas thinkers like Karl Barth, Oliver O’Donovan, and John Howard Yoder all look to theology as a fundamentally necessary source of moral truth (either because reason is too badly damaged by the fall to be a source of reliable moral insight, or because God has always intended reason to operate in significant dependence upon God’s self-revelation), MacIntyre and Ratzinger both try to maintain the independence of reason from revelation while explaining our undeniable inability to agree on common moral norms. MacIntyre and Ratzinger do this by developing error theories that can account for the inability of reason to bring about moral agreement. For MacIntyre, we must understand the importance of “the inability of reason since the early modern period to secure agreement on a single conception of the good life” (200), whereas for Ratzinger “while moral truth is in principle accessible to reason, in practice it can be concretely recognized as truth only as it is embodied in a historical tradition. If appeals to reason fail to arrive at moral truth, this is due at least in part to the modern Book Reviews 287 separation of reason from the historical traditions in which alone moral truth is effectively recognizable as such” (201). But once we understand the working of rival traditions at any one time (MacIntyre) and the relation between moral knowledge and temporally extended moral traditions (Ratzinger), we also can see that practically speaking, though not in principle, the views of MacIntyre and Ratzinger begin to look like relativism, since there is no real difference between their predictions and those of relativism about the appearance of contemporary moral disagreement. And for this reason, they begin to look more like Barth, O’Donovan, and Yoder than like traditional defenders of the power of reason. MacIntyre’s response is, in many respects, a reiteration of themes he has long developed: “What makes my position not relativistic is my commitment to holding that my views on substantive moral questions can be maintained with integrity only for so long as and insofar as I can show that they can be sustained against their rivals by rational argument, so also committing myself not just to continuing disagreement, but to continuing conflict with those who reject the precepts of the natural law and with those who uphold the authority of positive law that is at odds with the natural law” (341). It is again disagreement itself that becomes valuable, for so long as arguments with others are possible, so is resolution, since the possibility of argument presupposes a deeper level of agreement. The relativist has not yet given us good reason to think that some day the disagreement will be total (and therefore that relativism is the proper response, or on the other hand that the abandonment of reason in favor of revelation is the proper response), and so we should not be without hope. This is, I’m afraid, a woefully inadequate review of a complex collection (I have of course left to one side the other six contributors and MacIntyre’s insightful responses to them, but also many claims and nuances of the essays I did consider). Those interested in natural law should give the book a careful reading, if only because MacIntyre’s approach to the natural law both harmonizes with traditional interpretations and adds fresh, and necessary, developments for us who live in the age of unreason. N&V Raymond Hain Providence College Providence, RI 288 Book Reviews The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God by Gilles Emery, O.P., translated by Matthew Levering, Thomistic Ressourcement Series, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011), xvi + 219 pp. N O ONE has contributed more to Thomistic Trinitarian theology in the past twenty years than Gilles Emery, a Swiss Dominican friar and ordinary professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Fribourg. The present book under review is not yet another marvelously detailed exposition of the Blessed Trinity in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. Rather, it is a masterly overview, employing a blend of scriptural, historical, liturgical, cultural, catechetical, and systematic considerations to introduce readers to the Catholic teaching on the Trinity. Emery, who has penned several studies highlighting the different scholastic pedagogies employed by Aquinas in his various texts, chooses a pedagogy that places this work firmly in some of the best currents of theology today. After the introduction, the first three chapters elucidate the essential elements of the Church’s teaching. The first is on “Entering the Trinitarian Faith”; the second presents the New Testament teaching on the revelation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and the third considers the confessions of faith, especially the Creed of the first Council of Constantinople (381). The second half of the book dwells upon what Emery calls the “Trinitarian Christian culture,” which was formed from the achievement of the Fathers. The three chapters of the second half pay particular attention to the teaching of Aquinas. Chapter Four sketches the principles of person/hypostasis. Chapter Five presents a doctrinal synthesis on the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Chapter Six returns to the creative and saving action of the Trinity. The brief conclusion recapitulates the book’s study of the economy through the witness of Scripture, the speculative tradition in articulating the Trinitarian dogma, and the speculative reflection on the action of the divine persons in the world. Before its basic bibliography (for example, it lists only three of Emery’s many previous works on the Trinity) and index, the book also offers a glossary (199–203) that ranges from “appropriation” to “vestiges” and supplies two to nine lines of definition for each term. Throughout the book, Emery shows himself to be a careful teacher. Given the enormous difficulty of writing an introductory text on the Trinity, Emery presents the riches of the Catholic tradition with clarity, calmness, and joy. He does not resort to polemics in settling old scores, but deftly explains what is at stake in learning who God is. For example, he writes, “The teaching of Scripture concerning the Trinity is, at the Book Reviews 289 same time, simple and difficult. . . . Scripture’s manner of speaking is accessible to all: it is not esoteric. But to grasp its profundity is difficult” (19). Quoting from Augustine’s Epistle 138, to Volusian, Emery emphasizes how Scripture both “nourishes” all believers and “exercises” the minds of the more advanced. One can sense that Emery’s own book serves this same dual purpose, for it is written in plain language to nourish readers in general, and, at every step, its lucidity also points to exercises of the mind for readers to ascend further in contemplating the Trinity. The present review now engages in only one such exercise. What does it mean to call God “Father”? Emery expounds upon the analogical meanings of that name by making a fourfold distinction (115–20): (1) the Father of his only Son; (2) our Father in the Son; (3) Father of all human beings; and (4) Father of the world. In undertaking the spiritual exercise of thinking about the meaning of “Father” when speaking about the Trinity, we are thus led into considerations of the life of the Trinity, our entrance into the divine life by receiving the Spirit of adoption through the Son, our creation to the image of God, and the loving creation of all things. Each one of these aspects, expounded by Emery, can serve as a springboard for further meditation. The first identification, naming the Father of the Son, is the most proper sense of the term “Father.” Emery quotes St.Thomas: “Fatherhood and sonship in their fullest meaning are to be found in God the Father and God the Son, since their nature and glory are one” (ST I, q. 33, a. 3). Emery thus insists that when we call God “Father” we speak primarily of the Father’s eternal relation to his only Son. He also says that the Holy Spirit is not absent from the relation between the Father and Son. Emery writes: “the procession of the Holy Spirit is inscribed in the mutual relation of the Father and the Son. This means that the procession of the Holy Spirit is connected in itself to the generation of the Son by the Father” (116). Therefore, a meditation on the proper name of “Father” leads to a consideration of the Trinitarian relations concerning not only the Father and the Son, but also the Holy Spirit. For the second meaning of “Father,” Emery distinguishes how we receive by grace the sonship which the only begotten Son enjoys by nature. This sonship allows us to say “Father” to the one whom the Son calls “Father.” It is precisely in this aspect that Emery takes up the question of what we mean when we pray “Our Father.” Emery considers the question from three points of view. The first is from what he calls the “ontological” perspective, which is the view that some scholastics used, in referring to the whole Trinity as “Our Father.” In this sense, “Our Father” is not prayed uniquely to God the Father. Emery writes: “The 290 Book Reviews whole Trinity is the cause of our sonship and of the gifts that God gives us. So, if one considers our sonship (our relation to ‘Our Father’) under the aspect of its cause, it refers us to the whole Trinity” (117). The second point of view is still from an “ontological” perspective, but now with a consideration of the divine persons’ order. Since the Father is the principle of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, we ask God the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit for the goods of this life. In the third point of view, quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2789, Emery considers what he calls the “intentional” aspect. When we have faith and charity in the Church, we are personally united to the Father, and we enjoy a distinct relationship with the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Emery writes: “Christian prayer is addressed distinctly and properly to the person of the Father” (p. 118). This meditation on the Lord’s Prayer thus leads us to a greater understanding of calling out “Father” in Christian liturgy. The third and fourth meanings of “Father” in reference to God can be considered together.The third calls upon God as “Father” by virtue of our creation to the image of God, an image that cannot be lost by sin. Even in the rejection of grace and when the image of God is obscured, “the paternal gift of life still remains and, indeed, our human nature still points beyond itself to its fulfillment in God” (119). The fourth considers the aspect of creation from the stance not just of the human race, but of all creation. By the name “Father,” we can recognize how God is provident over the entire world—including wholly material creatures. These final meanings of “Father” allow us to see God’s Fatherhood—not just over all in a life of grace, but over all peoples, and over all things in the universe. While something of Summa theologiae I, q. 33, a. 3 can be seen behind this fourfold exposition, that article cannot be the complete explanation for Emery’s distinctions. Aquinas seems to agree with article 3’s first and second objections, that the prayer of the “Our Father” is addressed to the Trinity (cf. Augustine, De Trinitate 5.11.12). Emery recognizes that “ontological” perspective, but places greater emphasis, like the Catechism of the Catholic Church, on praying in the Lord’s Prayer to the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Even to consider the Trinity in the context of the “Father” in the Lord’s Prayer is unthinkable in some recent theology.Yet, Emery preserves a place for that interpretation. In fact, he could also have referred to the priest’s doxology concluding the Lord’s Prayer in the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: now and forever, and unto the ages of ages” (cf. John Chrysostom’s preaching on Matthew 6:9 in his Homilies on Matthew 19.6). In his expo- Book Reviews 291 sition of the Lord’s Prayer, Maximus the Confessor writes: “In beginning this prayer we are directed to honor the consubstantial and superessential Trinity as the creative Cause of our coming into being” (Expositio orationis dominicae, lines 258–60). One thing that must be affirmed is that God the Father is never divided from the Son and the Holy Spirit, but in both East and West, one can find different emphases of considering the Trinitarian aspects of the Lord’s Prayer. The tradition is not monolithic. What Emery has done, in this exercise of the mind, is to provide a cogent explanation of various ways of the analogical use of the term “Father,” including the “Our Father” of the Lord’s Prayer. His writing can prompt readers not simply to debate, but to meditate on God as Father. This book could be read with much profit by the general reader of theology, and teachers could assign it in a variety of courses on God. It would be an excellent text for acquainting undergraduate students with Catholic teaching on the Trinity. For graduate courses, Emery’s book could be paired with Karl Rahner’s The Trinity, which originally appeared as a long essay in the Mysterium Salutis series, in a study of contrasts of approaches on how to renew Trinitarian theology. Unlike Rahner’s very influential work, Emery’s new book demonstrates an authentic implementation of what Optatam Totius 16 calls for in priestly formation. In fact, those studying the Trinity for a seminary education could, for their future ministry, have perhaps no surer, more reliable guide to the “central mystery of Christian faith and life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church 234) than Emery’s The Trinity. This book is the first to appear in a series called “Thomistic Ressourcement,” edited by Matthew Levering and Thomas Joseph White, O.P. We look forward to many other volumes in a series with such an intriguing title. N&V Andrew Hofer, O.P. Dominican House of Studies Washington, DC Addiction and Virtue: Beyond the Models of Disease and Choice by Kent J. Dunnington (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2011), 197 pp. “T HE TOTALIZING devotion of addiction,” Kent Dunnington writes in Addiction and Virtue, “is a devastatingly deficient devotion” (175)—and with these words he completes an extended argument that the moral philosophies of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas can free Christians from the inadequate and reductionist accounts of agency that dominate modern conversations around “addiction.” Modern speech about addiction, Dunnington argues, is characterized by the false and unhelpful dichotomy 292 Book Reviews between voluntarist accounts of addiction (particularly, but not only, addiction to alcohol and other substances), in which addiction is presumed to be due to misguided but unconstrained willful choice; and disease accounts of addiction, which presume that addictive behavior is rendered involuntary as a result of genetic vulnerability and physiological change. Dunnington argues, to the contrary, that neither voluntarist nor involuntarist accounts are adequate for the complex reality of addiction, in which individuals can find themselves powerless over their use of a drug and yet, through admission of their powerlessness, can discover volitional resources for recovery. Instead, he argues that persons torn between addictive behavior and the cognitive desire for abstinence suffer from a lack of the proper “embodied knowledge,” or habits, which would allow desires to be informed by knowledge, and knowledge by desire (53). In argument reminiscent of the thought of Pierre Bourdieu (The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990], 53), Dunnington contends that Aquinas’s conception of habit mediates between the modern dichotomies of instinct and disposition, determinism and voluntarism, voluntary and involuntary; he proposes a conceptualization of addiction as a “rationally informed habit” (73). Invoking Aquinas’s claim that humans judge the goodness or badness of objects not only by natural instinct but “by means of a coalition of ideas” (ST I, q. 78, a. 4), such that the animal estimative sense becomes, for humans, the “cogitative estimative,” Dunnington claims that addictions should be thought of as “habits of the imagination and cogitative estimation” (81). One might expect addiction therefore to be classified in Thomistic terms as a form of the vice of intemperance, but Dunnington argues that this is not so. Intemperance, he claims, names the inordinate pursuit of sensory pleasures, but addicted persons often report receiving no pleasure from their addiction. For Dunnington, this indicates that addiction is not the inordinate pursuit of sensory pleasures (intemperance) but is rather the pursuit of certain “moral and intellectual goods” (95).The moral and intellectual goods pursued through addiction, Dunnington argues, are precisely those which have been rendered invisible in the teleological fragmentation of modern culture; in the face of modern consumerism and technological boredom, addicted persons pursue certain goods so tenaciously that they stand as modern prophets: “major addiction can therefore be interpreted both as a response to the absence of teleology in modern culture and as a kind of embodied critique of the late capitalist consumerism which this absence has produced” (112). Specifically, Dunnington claims, addicted persons are pursuing an overarching principle by which to order their everyday actions and also “an integrating principle that renders the immanent activities of Book Reviews 293 human persons meaningful in light of some transcendent pursuit” (142). Addiction pursues the transcendent; in some ways, it resembles Aquinas’s description of charity in that it “commands all other activities of a person and directs each of those activities to a unified and substantial end” (150). Unlike charity, however, addiction is not ordered to God; it is a “counterfeit worship” (159), and in this light churches would do well to consider how they might become communities of recovery and friendship for addicted persons—communities which, embodying true rather than counterfeit worship, are at least as beautiful and captivating as the addiction itself. Dunnington’s project, which originated as a doctoral dissertation in philosophy, is ambitious, interesting, and deeply needed. Addiction names a space in which matters of urgent pastoral and social concern run headlong into difficult, contested, and sometimes unexplored theoretical questions; theory must illumine practice, and vice versa, for any morally intelligible account. The phenomena of addiction should be of especial interest for Christian interpreters, as religious voices are deeply ingrained in the social history of alcoholism in particular, and as the still-dominant twelve-step approaches to addiction treatment (such as Alcoholics Anonymous), despite their disavowal of confessional specificity, still display a distinctly Christian logic. Dunnington’s work, then, is a welcome contribution which, we may hope, will invigorate theoretical Christian work on addiction. His analysis of addiction through Aquinas’s conception of habit is full of possibilities for further development; his invocation of Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings as a resource for thinking through the complex agency of addicted persons is thoughtful and well developed; his challenge to the church is bold and much needed. Dunnington’s book should be read not only by clinicians and pastors working with addicted persons but by persons who wish to bring Aristotelian-Thomistic virtue theory to bear on a problem of immense personal and social import; grappling with and thinking through Dunnington’s treatment is both exciting and potentially fruitful. Dunnington’s work does much to extend theological conversation around addiction and virtue theory, and one hopes that both he and others will continue to explore and to develop the questions that he introduces here. In that spirit, it is therefore worth noting three areas in which Dunnington’s argument might be improved upon, or might benefit from further clarification. First, although Dunnington’s work does indeed challenge some of the philosophical presumptions from which many modern neuroscientists and clinicians speak about addiction, his first chapter depicts modern clinical conversations in overly simplistic terms. Citing mostly government websites and books written for general audiences about the addictions, 294 Book Reviews Dunnington places four propositions in the mouths of hypothetical defenders of medical/disease models of addiction: (a) that substance addiction is always accompanied by the physiological phenomena of tolerance and withdrawal (18); (b) that “changes in behavior that can be traced to changes in brain structure and function are involuntary” (20); (c) that genes predispose to, and therefore determine, addictive behavior (20–22); and (d) that because addiction is a chronic physiological disorder, it should therefore be treated through medical intervention (24). None of these propositions, however, represent the strongest or most nuanced understanding of addiction researchers and clinicians. The revised fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2000), the current standard for diagnostic psychiatric nomenclature, makes clear that tolerance/withdrawal are neither necessary nor sufficient for a diagnosis of substance dependence; neurobiologists are as aware as anyone that agency is embodied and that casual attribution in genetics is dangerous; within medical practice, there is no clear boundary between the medical and the non-medical, and at any rate many medically oriented clinicians still encourage participation in twelve-step programs. Had Dunnington approached these debates with more nuance, his subsequent theoretical arguments would perhaps be more persuasive to researchers and substance-use clinicians who might happen upon his work. Second, and more substantial for his philosophical argument, Dunnington’s insistence that addiction is not intemperance is a puzzling move, and not only because Aquinas himself places drunkenness (ebrietas) within his larger treatment of the vices opposed to temperance without any such qualification (ST II–II, qq. 149–50). Dunnington states that, whereas intemperance entails the inordinate pursuit of sensory pleasures, addiction entails pursuit of “moral and intellectual goods” (95); but this seems to get both intemperance and addiction slightly wrong. For Aquinas, as for Aristotle before, him, all human action, including vicious action, intends happiness as its final end (ST I–II, q. 1, a. 7); intemperance occurs not when humans stop pursuing “moral and intellectual goods,” but when they seek the fulfillment of those goods in mutable pleasure-giving (or pain-reducing) things (ST I–II, q. 72, a. 2; II–II, q. 142, a. 2). Though it is unclear whether Aquinas would want to classify addiction as intemperance or incontinence (ST II–II, q. 156, a. 3)—this would likely vary on a case-bycase basis—there is no need to assign addiction to a class of habit distinct from either of these. That addicted persons sometimes claim to derive no pleasure from their addictive behavior is an insufficient reason to claim otherwise, as such judgments are always made in retrospect, in the light of the guilt and shame and brokenness that follows such behavior. Something Book Reviews 295 about the experience of ingesting an addictive substance—ecstatic pleasure, perhaps, or relief from pain, anxiety, or boredom—propels the person to further use, which fits quite nicely with Aquinas’s account of intemperance and (especially) incontinence. This second qualification would seem to be only a technical issue of Thomistic exegesis, but it directly leads to a third qualification at the heart of Dunnington’s project.Though Dunnington clearly states that addiction is not a virtue and that it is ultimately idolatrous and destructive, he nevertheless describes addiction in a way that borders on romanticism. Addiction “makes accessible certain kinds of moral and intellectual goods” (101); it is “a sort of rejection of consumerism’s enthronement of the immediate over the teleological” and is “an embodied critique of . . . late capitalist consumerism” (112); addicts “may be our most forceful and eloquent modern prophets, reminding us of the peril that a denial of the transcendent brings” (145). In all of this, Dunnington paints a picture of the addict as someone who rejects the banality and teleological nihilism of late-modern society and, by focusing so intently on a single object of will and desire, stands in prophetic critique over that society. But this language, in particular that of “prophet,” is difficult to square either with biblical descriptions of prophecy or with the Thomistic conception of vice. Unlike Dunnington’s “modern prophets,” for instance, biblical prophets were aware that they were prophesying, and their prophetic speech-acts, though often controversial and countercultural, were not per se sinful. But Dunnington holds that addiction is often “not incommensurate with the category of sin” (133), and indeed Dunnington’s analysis of addiction and sin points toward a possible alternative rendering of the addicted person in the light of modern culture. In such a rendering, addicted persons would be seen not as embodied critiques of modern culture but, instead, as embodied signs of it, bearing in their bodies the brokenness, the unfulfilled longing, the panicked pursuit of mutable things which can never deliver what they seem to promise. There is no glory in addiction under this alternative description, but there is certainly hope: hope for healing, hope for redemption, hope for the transformation of desire. As Dunnington correctly holds, such healing cannot arise from addiction itself; it comes from without, from one who loves first, and in that loving, enables the return of that love. Such, at least, is the Christian story toward which Dunnington’s book so powerfully and helpfully points. N&V Warren Kinghorn Duke University Medical Center Duke University Divinity School Durham, NC 296 Book Reviews Biblical Natural Law: A Theocentric and Teleological Approach by Matthew Levering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), viii+ 288 pp. R EGRETTABLY, natural law theory often dwells in the shadows of academic suspicion. On one hand, some philosophers dismiss natural law as a religious invention smuggled under the cloak of a philosophy of nature. On the other hand, some theologians look askance at natural law because it seems to be a philosophical position advertised under the banner of only a couple biblical proof-texts. Within this context, Matthew Levering’s Biblical Natural Law attempts to set each party at ease both by vindicating the biblical witness to natural law and by examining the appropriation (or misappropriation) of natural law by the philosophical tradition. Biblical Natural Law, then, begins not with contemporary natural law scholars but with biblical scholars of various stripes. Through new insights in the study of Second Temple Judaism, biblical scholarship is enjoying a rediscovery in natural law. The Protestant biblical scholar Richard B. Hays and Jewish scholar David Novak in particular are leading the charge in establishing the place of law rooted in nature as something ubiquitous in Jewish legal theory. Novak demonstrates that the primordial accounts of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and Noah and the deluge presuppose a law of creation that includes natural obligations along with rewards and punishments. The Torah, then, is not opposed to a cosmological law; rather, it is based upon it. Rather than rely on specific proof-texts, such as Romans 2:15, “the work of the law written in their hearts,” biblical scholarship concurs that the Hebraic doctrine of creation itself assumes human teleology and thus a notion of law based on human nature. Of course, the biblical account of natural law is not unique and there are various versions of natural law, both ancient and modern, which compete with the biblical notion. Levering examines Cicero’s teleological account of natural law and demonstrates how Augustine transforms it with a theocentric interpretation. Perhaps, we might even name Augustine’s approach as a “theotelic” version of natural law. Although Augustine’s appropriation underwent some modification in the medieval era, the truly variant versions of natural law emerged after Thomas Aquinas. The most important contribution of Biblical Natural Law lies in its close analysis of the disintegration of the received philosophical notion of “nature” and consequently, the disintegration of “natural” law. Beginning officially with Ockham, the doubtful place of formal causality and final causality led to the abandonment of the essence and teleology of human nature. As the concept of “nature” becomes ambiguous, so also the concept of “natural law.” Book Reviews 297 Particular attention is given to the seventeenth-century Dutch thinker Hugo Grotius. As Richard Tuck explains in a passage quoted by Levering, Grotius holds that “what God has shown to be his will, that is law” (84). This complements Grotius’s assertion that natural law would be true even if God did not exist. The once-comfortable marriage of philosophy and politics was rent asunder by this received assumption of Grotius. Here marks the modern shift in natural law theory, since it openly divorces law from metaphysics. Heinrich Rommen laments that this move “split the scholastic doctrine of natural law to its very core” (quoted on 85). This philosophic shift eventually gave way to the Leviathan of Hobbes, since there was no longer any metaphysical grounding for law besides coercive force. This problem continued to reverberate through the pens of John Locke and David Hume as a form of politicized nominalism. In the voice of Rousseau natural law became repackaged as a rejection of political civilization. In the philosophical realm, it gave birth to Kant’s desire to root the constitution of law in the individual’s practical reason, and also to Hegel’s pursuit to ground law in the historical evolution of Geist. In Nietzsche it reached its crescendo when the voluntaristic “will to power” supplanted an intelligible human nature. The problems raised by modernity are answered by Levering’s suggestion that ecstasis, the radical self-giving of a person to another, is the missing piece, which captures authentic human personhood. This feature of self-giving rests also at the center of biblical revelation, yet it has its first inclination in nature. Rather than embracing this social aspect of personhood, modernity considered the human person as an “individual”—the most basic indivisible unit of society. Notably, modernity lacked the ancient philosophical obsession with friendship. As natural law became more anthropocentric, the doctrine of the human person became far too narrow. The corrective is to view human persons as “ecstatically” ordered to the particular flourishing of a personal communion with God. This ecstatic model of human nature is what Levering identifies as the teleological and theological aspect of natural law.The first principle of the practical reason, as defined by Saint Thomas, is that “the good is to be done and pursued and the evil is to be avoided.” As Germain Grisez has emphasized, the first principle is not an imperative but a gerund implying inclination—and Thomas Aquinas explicitly bases natural law on inclinations. Hence, reason is naturally inclined to the good of the human person. Every Thomist knows that the good has the nature of an end, and so natural law must be understood teleologically. Levering cites Servais Pinckaers and Graham McAleer as grounding human teleology rightly in a metaphysical framework of nature. By articulating ecstasis toward the 298 Book Reviews good, the traditional terms of human nature, inclinations, and the good are not only preserved but underscored. The natural human inclination toward self-giving and friendship begs for an account for the relationship between law and love, and this topic forms the final chapter of Biblical Natural Law. There is a Western prejudice, thanks in part to Martin Luther, that “law” is constrictive to natural inclinations, whereas “love” transcends rules, enabling a perfect outpouring of the person. This false dichotomy depends ultimately on a faulty definition of law. If the traditional definition of law were maintained, then the dichotomy would not exist. “Law is an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated” (ST I–II, q. 90, a. 4). It is the final cause, “the common good,” that moderns neglect, and this is the reason why moderns cannot articulate a teleological version of jurisprudence. Biblical Natural Law, then, begins as an apologia to the theologians, next addresses the philosophers, and ends again with an appeal to the theologians. In the conclusion we find that natural law, like everything in nature, is ordered to the supernatural. That “grace perfects nature” is yet again the answer to one of the great problems of faith and reason. Natural law cannot be alone, since it is oriented to something beyond it. Here the theologians find comfort. Natural law is not our participation in God through faith or through the beatific vision. It is something much lower. Nevertheless, the teleology of natural law entails the ecstatic aspect of human nature. Nature longs for an end that is beyond its natural means. As Levering puts it, “natural law, in its very structure, carries us outside ourselves,” or as Romanus Cessario puts it, “The end draws” (221). Contemporary authors of natural law theory sometimes neglect the need for a robust investigation of human teleology, as if this topic were not proper to human nature qua human nature. By contrast, Levering examines this problems head on, and as a result, his analysis is particularly insightful. Few authors are able to weave together the writings of Cicero, Saint Paul, Descartes, Hegel, and Nietzsche in under two hundred fifty pages, yet Levering accomplishes the task by his keen appreciation of the problems of “nature” and “law” in the great tradition of the West. The reader of Biblical Natural Law is sure to find a refreshing treatment of natural law, because it directly addresses why natural law must include an account of human nature. N&V Taylor Marshall University of Dallas Dallas, TX Book Reviews 299 Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas by Steven J. Jensen (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), xiv + 324 pp. AT A TIME ripe with controversy among Catholic moral theologians and philosophers concerning a number of the most difficult moral questions of all time, Steven Jensen has courageously contributed a significant, timely, and welcome contribution with his book Good and Evil Actions: A Journey through Saint Thomas Aquinas. The book is evidently the work of a profound, precise thinker who has carefully read and considered not only several works of St. Thomas that few other moral theologians and philosophers have even opened, but countless articles and books from just about every contemporary scholar who has made any contribution whatsoever to this discussion. For this reason alone, the book is a “must read” for any serious Catholic moral theologian. Any moral theologian alive today would benefit from reading this masterful work. In fact, if I were to mention even a relatively small portion of the ways in which this book has clarified my own thinking on the subject, this book review would be far too long. Therefore, I restrict my comments to Jensen’s principal concluding thesis. Concerning this, I offer the following respectful critique as food for thought. In the penultimate chapter of the book, Jensen clearly states what is apparently his principal thesis: “Can we, in short, explain all sin, murder as well as bestiality, by way of some normative teleology from which the action falls short? Yes, indeed” (260). Applying this principle to explain why murder is intrinsically wrong, Jensen continues, “Murder is wrong because we should love other people as subjects of the good, with a love of friendship, and not with the love of utility” (260). He further explains that this principle depends upon a teleology that “arises from the will itself, which is naturally inclined to love others with friendship.” This thesis, as stated, is perhaps the most important and decisive (and in a certain respect, most original) conclusion of Jensen’s dialectical journey, a journey that culminated with definitive stands on some of the most difficult moral questions of all, in chapter 5. In that chapter, Jensen concluded that craniotomy, for example, is wrong precisely because the doctor seeks to introduce in the material (the child) “the good of subordination or use for some further end” (208).The act is wrong because the doctor “cannot possibly seek to introduce the good of the subject itself, which is the good that the love of friendship would seek” (208). With regard to the question of palliative sedation, on the other hand, which has the unintended effect of causing the death of a patient, Jensen judges that 300 Book Reviews this act may be licit, but only because the doctor “seeks to change the patient for his own good, namely, that he might be relieved of pain” (209). The question of the morality of the act is once again reduced to the question of whether or not one person uses another. In his evaluation of the hysterectomy case (when a life-threatening, diseased uterus— having a non-viable embryo living within it—is removed in order to save the life of the mother), Jensen concludes that one principal reason why this act can be licit is because “the doctor ends up placing the unborn child in a dangerous situation, but this change—of the child being in a dangerous situation—is not a means to achieve her goal; rather, it is a consequence of her action” (216). And finally, in the case of self-defense (the particular case of shoving a life-threatening assailant off oneself, foreseeing that he will probably fall off a cliff and die), Jensen concludes that this particular kind of self-defense can be licit because “the defender does not aim to place the assailant in a dangerous situation as a means to save her life; rather, she aims to remove him from her, from the position in which he threatens her life” (218). In every case, the act in question (which in some way leads to the death of an innocent person) is morally wrong if it amounts to “using” someone, and the act is perhaps morally permissible if it does not amount to this. Taking many arguments such as these (regarding the morality of acts that involve directly or indirectly killing human persons) along with other arguments that invoke teleology to explain the wrongness of certain actions—for example, lying is wrong because it violates the teleology of human speech, and bestiality is wrong because it violates the teleology of the reproductive act—Jensen draws the following, most universal, conclusion: All human actions, then, even those that engage merely the power of locomotion, are good or evil in relation to some teleology. . . . When the will turns to act upon another human being, then it naturally seeks the good of that person; consequently, actions arising from the will and directed upon this person must realize this order. Since using another is opposed to the love of friendship, acts of using human beings are natural errors of the will, failures to realize the order implemented by reason (263). Despite the many fine attributes of Jensen’s book, which one would be hard pressed to enumerate even in the most summary way, this most comprehensive conclusion—which is by far the most worthy of careful consideration and comment—seems to be neither entirely Thomistic nor true. Jensen admits that this argument has a “Kantian flavor,” but he insists Book Reviews 301 that it is “rooted in St. Thomas, who distinguishes between two kinds of love, love of concupiscence and love of friendship” (134). ( Jensen cites ST I–II, q. 26, a. 4.) Now admittedly, we should love human persons not merely for what they can do for us but also for who and what they are, and St. Thomas is very clear about this. But it does not seem that Jensen’s conclusion follows therefrom, either in truth or in the mind of St. Thomas. For example, if I go up to a cashier and ask, “May I have change for a dollar?” it suffices that I respect him or her for who he or she is (as a human person). Evidently, I do not, in order to avoid moral fault, need to intend a particular change in that person that is for his or her good every time I interact with him or her. And in general, there is nothing morally wrong with friendships of utility. Every employer/employee relationship is a friendship of utility. Certainly we should love every human person for who he or she is, but it suffices if our intention for their personal good is habitual. In any case, St. Thomas never comes close to saying that whenever we have any physical interaction whatsoever with another human person, we are required to intend a change in them which is for their betterment. Moreover, it seems that it is not necessarily wrong even to act directly on another person, even contrary to their will, in a way which is for their overall harm. For example, if the only way that I can save the life of an innocent person is by pushing another innocent bystander down in such a way that he or she breaks his or her arm, this may be laudable, depending on the circumstances. If that bystander, knowing my intentions, still resents the fact that I broke his or her arm, this is really irrelevant. His or her will might be disordered. Finally, it does not even seem to be necessarily wrong to “use” someone, contrary to their will, in a way that ultimately (and almost certainly) leads to their death! Does not the government continually “use” innocent people to protect itself against enemy armies? I think it is safe to assume that any Thomist would agree that it does not matter if being drafted and consigned to the front line of the Battle of the Bulge is against the soldier’s will, so long as it is not against his conscience. I do not mean to imply that this act is a form of killing (on the part of the persons drafting), but it is certainly a form of use which is physically harmful to innocent persons. These examples seem to demonstrate that harmful, involuntary “use” (even in the extreme) is not what makes murder wrong. Rather, it seems that what really makes murder intrinsically wrong is what St. Thomas actually said: murder is the killing of a man who is good (and not merely as useful) 302 Book Reviews both in himself and in relation to others (ST II–II, 64, 1 and 6).What makes murder wrong, according to St. Thomas, is the fact that there is not due proportion between the action and that upon which the act bears. Extending this critique to the general current behind Jensen’s thought, one must doubt that it is a universal principle that what finally makes intrinsically evil acts evil is the violation of a certain teleological order. It seems that at least some acts are intrinsically wrong because they simply violate the nature of things (of which teleology is a part, but not the whole). For example, one should not worship as God what is not God, and one should not use the name of God as if it were profane. Is not the most general and universal principle of morality simply that it is right to act in accordance with the nature of things, and it is wrong to act in violation of the nature of things? Is it not then simply the nature of things (of which teleology is an essential part) that first and finally determines the rightness or wrongness of human actions? In any case, even if we must offer this respectful critique of Jensen’s principal thesis, there is no doubt that any serious Catholic moral theologian or philosopher will benefit greatly from reading this book. There is simply no way to make the subtle distinctions that need to be made without joining Jensen in this kind of courageous, dialectical journey. N&V Jerome Zeiler, O.P. St. Gertrude’s Priory Cincinnati, Ohio