Tuesday, May 17, 2005
SOMEONE ASKED...
so I'm going to bore you all to death with my thoughts on Cardinal Ratzinger's/Pope Benedict's book Truth and Tolerance which I finished reading recently.
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TRUTH AND TOLERANCE
Jesus Christ is Lord of history.
Jesus Christ is Lord of history for Catholics.
Both statements are true, yet there is a shift in thinking to get from the first to the second. The first claims this truth applies to all of creation, that it is absolute, and not contingent on the thinking of every, nor even of any individual. It is fact separate and apart from those who think about it. The second claims that Catholics believe this, but concedes that not all of humanity believes this, which can be compatible with the first, or the direct opposite of the first, depending upon who is doing the thinking. Concept No. 2 can easily accommodate concept No. 1, but it also allows the rejection of concept No. 1.
In his preface to the book Truth and Tolerance, Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:
In a world that is drawing ever closer together, the question about the
meeting of religions and cultures has become a most important subject, and one
that is certainly not just the business of theology. The question of the
peaceableness of cultures, of peace in matters of religion, has also moved up to
become a political theme of the first rank. Yet it is nonetheless first of all a
question directed to the religions themselves, how they relate to one another
peacefully and how they can contribute to the “education of the human race” in
the direction of peace. This complex of problems applies especially to the
Christian faith, in that from its very origin, and in its essential nature, it
claims to know and to proclaim the one true God and the one Savior of all
mankind: “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under
heaven given among men by which we must be saved”, said Peter to the rulers and the elders of the people of Israel (Acts 4:12). Can this absolute claim still be
maintained today?
That, of course, is the burning question of the moment in Roman Catholicism, particularly now that Cardinal Ratzinger has become Pope Benedict XVI, and Archbishop Levada, supporter and promoter of United Religions Initiative, has been called to Rome. The book consists of eight essays on the topic, most of which have been previously published, beginning in 1964. The theology presented has been influenced by Karl Rahner. It appeared to me to be a development of Cardinal Ratzinger’s thinking from 1964 to the present on this subject.
On the Feast of Christ the King, Fr. Don Ware, C.P. opened his sermon with these words:
Today is the feast of Christ the King… The Scripture readings describe Jesus
as King who “receives dominion, glory, and kingship over all peoples and
nations… a kingship which will not be destroyed.” (1st reading from Daniel). The
2nd reading describes Jesus as the “firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings
of the earth.” The Gospel has Pilate proclaim, “Aha, you are a king” after Jesus
tells Pilate that his kingdom “Is not of this world.”
While we recognize that this is not a description of an earthly power trip, we also recognize that it means that Christ has shown us the way to Truth, and His Kingship is a Kingship of Truth. To proclaim that Christ is King is also to proclaim that absolutes exist. The very idea of this belief in absolute Truth is placed on the table for discussion by Cardinal Ratzinger’s question cited above, “Can this absolute claim still be maintained today?”
Another way to state it is to ask the question, “Does error have rights?” The Traditional Catholic answer to that question was “no,” and therefore the Church used every means within Her power to insure that all of humanity would not fall into error, or would be rescued from error by whatever means were available. Contemporary Catholicism departs from this Traditional thinking. The Church no longer believes in conversion at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun or a burning pyre. The Church has determined that while error has no rights, people do have rights even if their belief is in error. The primary right is the right to life.
The floodgates have thus been opened in what were once Christian countries for a variety of beliefs, and this flood brings us to the interreligious dialogue table, and questions about what may a Catholic say and do while abiding there. Truth and Tolerance discusses the various perceptions about the multitude of religions that humanity has brought to the dialogue table, and how Christianity fits in.
One perception is that the “limitless plurality” gives way to the “hidden identity of the religious worlds, which are distinguished from one another in name and superficial images but not in the great fundamental symbols or in what these ultimately stand for.” (p. 25)
Another perception is that at the mystical level all religions are the same, but this level is attainable by only a few mystics who experience this firsthand—the esoterics—while the great majority—the exoterics—must receive this as “passed on” knowledge also called “faith,” from the mystics. This is a Traditionalist position and was the basis for the "Paths to the Heart: Sufism and the Christian East" conference and the book of talks from that conference edited by James S. Cutsinger, which I've blogged about in the past. Ratzinger disagrees with this mystical commonality of all religions, saying “Yet it is equally clear that the whole phenomenon cannot be thus conceived; rather, any attempt to do so would result in a false simplification.” (p. 27)
A third perception is the inclusivist position that all religions contain an element—a moving toward—Christianity, and it is this element that makes other religions outside of Christianity also salvific. He writes:
Rahner is reckoned to be the classical advocate of inclusivism: that
Christianity is present in all religions, or (putting it the other way around)
that all religions, without knowing this, are moving toward Christianity. It is
from this inner direction that they derive their power to save: they lead to
salvation insofar as they carry the mystery of Christ hidden within them. In
this view of things, on the other hand, it remains true that only Christ, and
the relationship with him, has any saving power; on the other, we can ascribe a
salvific value—albeit on loan, as it were—to other religions and thus explain
the saving of men outside the “ark of salvation” of which the Fathers speak.
(p. 51)
This gives the strong impression of a departure from the belief that Catholicism is the one true and complete faith, since a large part of humanity lives and dies within the belief held by other religions, meaning that there is little reason to come to Christ, if some other religious system can save.
Pluralism, another perception, takes this one step further:
Pluralism makes a clear break with the belief that salvation comes from
Christ alone and that his Church belongs to Christ. People in the pluralist
position are of the opinion that the plurality of religions is God’s own will
and that all of them are paths to salvation, or at least can be so, while an
especially important, but by no means exclusive, position can be assigned to
Christ in particular. (p. 52)
Pluralism seems to be the position of the messages from Medjugorje where the BVM is reported to have said that "God rules over all faiths like a sovereign."
A third perception is exclusivism which states that the Christian faith alone saves people and that other religions do not lead to salvation. (p. 49) That, of course, is the Traditional Catholic position. Built within it is the difficulty that people outside of Catholicism are able to demonstrate a high level of goodness. God’s justice precludes excluding such people from heaven, though Cardinal Ratzinger does not point this out.
He synthesizes these three perceptions by saying that it is the seeking for something more of God that is the heart of religions;
it is the dynamic of the conscience and of the silent presence of God in it
that is leading religions toward one another and guiding people onto the path to
God, not the canonizing of what already exists, so that people are excused from
any deeper searching. (p. 54)
That statement is confusing. Incredibly, he gives the impression of rejecting the Roman Canon as inadequate. If we must move beyond the Canon, into a mystical presence of God, are we then permitted to alter the Canon as a result of our deeper searching? Only doctrine can form a framework within which we can search safely. Decoupled from doctrine, our searches largely reflect only our own biases.
If the “silent presence of God” does not bear the name of Christ, whose name does it bear? What God is silently present for the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Jain? Is he proposing a multiplicity of identities? He does not say, though he has just previously spoken of the “real encounter with Christ” (p. 54) so one hopes this is what he means.
One difficulty seems to be that while he is talking about what the world believes, there appears in some instances to be a bleed-over into what he believes. The lines of separation between the world's beliefs and his beliefs are not always clear. The book appears to be written for non-Christians as an exploration of the range of ways that the Christian faith can be interpreted. If he were writing for Catholics, limitations on techniques of mystical encounter would have been essential.
On page 55 he moves into a discussion of “Christian universalism”:
It was not the drive to power that launched Christian universalism but the
certitude of having received the saving knowledge and the redeeming love to
which all people have a claim and for which, in the inmost depths of their
being, they are waiting.
This takes him into a discussion of mission and inculturation. He notes the difficulties with inclusivism, and pluralism when applied to other cultures:
When we think, for instance, of how on the occasion of the most recent
rebuilding of the main Aztec temple, in the year 1487, “at the very lowest
estimate, twenty thousand people” bled to death, “over four days, on the altars
of Tenochtitlan” (the capital city of the Aztecs, in the upper Mexico valley) as
human sacrifices to the sun god, it will be difficult for us to encourage the
restoration of this religion. Such a sacrifice took place because the sun lived
on the blood of human hearts, and the end of the world could only be prevented
through human sacrifice.” (p. 74-75)
"Difficult"? How about "unthinkable"?
He tells us that
Mere pluralism of religions, as blocks standing forever side by side, cannot
be the last word in the historical situation today. Perhaps we will have to
replace “inclusivism…with some better concepts. It is certainly not the
absorption of religions by one single one that is meant; but an encounter, in a
unity that transforms pluralism into plurality, is something necessary. Today it
is certainly desired. (p. 83)
“Pluralism into plurality”? Doesn’t “plurality” mean "religions as blocks standing forever side by side”? The statement is ambiguous. It can easily be read as a sort of defense of Christianity, but it leaves room for other interpretations, such as all religions are equal.
Rene Guenon proposes something quite like a recommendation for pluralism in The Reign of Quantity. He came to this conclusion after abandoning Catholicism and experimenting with occultism, ultimately taking up Sufism. Guenon adds to this the concept of a mystical union of all religions at the esoteric level. Would Cardinal Ratzinger reject Traditionalism? After reading this book, I could not answer a definitive “yes” or “no.”
Ratzinger then backs away from inclusivism or plurality:
If I have rightly understood, there are currently three models for this: the
spiritual monism of India—the mysticism of identity…[which] can offer all other
religions a place, allow them to stand in their symbolic significance…and at the
same time transcend them in an ultimate profundity. It “relativizes” all of them
and, at the same time, lets them stand in its relativity; the absolute value
with which it surrounds them lies beyond anything that can be named… (p.
83-84)
Love, he proposes, is the “highest word, the truly last word to be said”….All our reflections hitherto, and everything that follows, serve to make more clear how this Christian “model” is the true power for uniting, the inner goal of history.” (p. 84)
Love? Defined how, exactly? Emotion? Certainly emotion is not the solution to our religious diversity. Love was once defined as “charity.” Christian charity is laudable. Can we assume this is what he is talking about, or does the “love” of Rosicrucianism shade his thinking? It’s hard to tell.
In light of my recently blogged comments on The Medjugorje Deception, I found this statement especially insightful:
Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it
wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic. (p. 116)
though I doubt that Cardinal Ratzinger had Medjugorje in mind when he wrote that.
He seems to be well aware of the difficulties present in dialogue:
[Dialogue] has become the very epitome of the relativist credo, the concept
opposed to that of “conversion” and mission: dialogue in the relativist sense
means setting one’s own position or belief on the same level with what the other
person believes, ascribing to it, on principle, no more of the truth than to the
position of the other person. Only if my fundamental presupposition is that the
other person may be just as much in the right as I am, or even more so, can any
dialogue take place at all. (p. 120)
Right after his election, the Western Catholic Reporter, in an article by John Thavis of Catholic News Service, reported that “promoting unity in the Church and dialogue with the world” were high priorities of his papal ministry. Does that mean that he sees the Catholic Church as equal to the world, and that the world “may be just as much in the right” as he is?
His argument for the truth of Christianity is convincing, and he understands well why it must be convincing in the current climate:
Only if the Christian faith is truth does it concern all men; if it is
merely a cultural variant of the religious experience of mankind that is locked
up in symbols and can never be deciphered, then it has to remain within its own
culture and leave others in theirs. (p. 184)
Ratzinger tells us that
There are in fact sick and degenerate forms of religion, which do not edify
people but alienate them… (p. 204)
This is directly in opposition to the intentions of United Religions Initiative which considers all religions including Paganism to be equal. URI does not intend to leave anyone within their religious culture. Rather it intends to morph all religions into one.
The last chapter, “Truth—tolerance—Freedom,” is the summation of his developing thought. He writes:
Are Christian faith and modernity compatible? If tolerance is one of the
foundations of the modern age, then is not the claim to have recognized the
essential truth an obsolete piece of presumption that has to be rejected if the
spiral of violence that runs through the history of religions is to be broken?
Today, in the encounter of Christianity with the world, this question arises
ever more dramatically, and ever more widespread becomes the persuasion that
renouncing the claim to truth in the Christian faith is the fundamental
condition for a new universal peace, the fundamental condition for any
reconciliation of Christianity with modernity. (p. 210)
Well, yes, that is precisely what Episcopal Bishop William Swing would tell us. It is hard to deny the truth of that analysis. There has been and continues to be a great deal of murder in the name of God.
A good bit of this chapter is devoted to the difficulties with the philosophy of J. Assmann who presents the concept of the “Mosaic distinction”:
For his part, Assmann depicts in detail the longing for Egypt, for a return
to the time before the Mosaic distinction, from the Renaissance with its
reverence for the Corpus Hermeticum as a primeval theology to the
Enlightenment’s Egyptian dreams, with Mozart’s Magic Flute as the wonderful
artistic embodiment of this longing. (p. 213)
(Incidentally, Mozart’s Magic Flute is frequently referred to as his Masonic Opera.)
What is meant by the “Mosaic dictinction” is the “introduction of a
distinction between true and false in the realm of religion.” (p. 211)
With the introduction of belief in a single god, something completely new and revolutionary occurred accordingly: this new kind of religion was of its nature an anti-religion”, which excluded everything that came before as “paganism” and was a medium, not of intercultural translation, but of intercultural alienation….the potential for hate and for violence was set down in writing, and in the history of monotheistic religions this has ever and again taken concrete form.” With this potential for violence, the story of the Exodus appears as the foundation myth of monotheistic religion and is at the same time an enduring depiction of the way it works.
The conclusion to be drawn is clear: the Exodus must be reversed; we must go
back to “Egypt”… (p. 212)
Assmann…sees the “Mosaic distinction”, which is what the Exodus is for him,
as the source of the evil, distorting religion and bringing intolerance into the
world.” If this can be accomplished, Assmann contends, “the distinction between
true and false can be removed from religion if the distinction between God and
cosmos disappears, if the divine and the “world” are once more seen as an
undivided whole. (p. 213)
In other words, an argument for pantheism is being proposed as the solution to religious war by J. Assmann.
What is characteristic for Egypt, he says, is…the “moral optimism to ‘eat
your bread with enjoyment’, conscious that ‘God has already approved what you
do’--one of the Egyptian verses in the Bible’ (Eccles 9:7-10). ‘It looks’,
writes Assman, ‘as though sin came into the world with the Mosaic distinction.
Perhaps that is the most serious reason for questioning the Mosaic
distinction.” (p. 214)
But, Ratzinger counters,
If we can no longer recognize what is true and can no longer distinguish it
from what is false, then it becomes impossible to recognize what is good; the
distinction between good and evil loses its basis. (p. 214)
Clarifying further, he writes:
One final reflection is needed. Assman praises the way that the gods may be
transposed one into another, since it appears as a path of intercultural and
interreligious peace. The “intolerance” of the First Commandment and the
condemnation of idolatry as a fundamental sin are opposed to this. This, in
turn, looks like a canonization of intolerance, as we have seen. Now, it is true
that the one God is a “jealous God”, as the Old Testament calls him. He unmasks
the gods, for in his light it becomes clear that the “gods” are not God, that
the plural of “God” is as such a lie. (p. 227)
He closes the book with a discussion of freedom, what its real nature consists of and the false concept of freedom that we live with today.
Man has rights on the basis of his creation, rights that must be brought
into effect, that justice may prevail. Freedom is not granted to man from
without; he has rights because he was created free. (p. 238)
Cardinal Ratzinger presupposes that this argument for freedom, based on nature and the nature of creation to be free, is valid. It then refutes this argument by defining the essential nature of Truth. Freedom is only the freedom to do that which is good, and freedom cannot exist without a corresponding sense of responsibility.
How can the argument that nature is free be valid? Nature is filled with constraints. First of all a chicken doesn’t hatch a whale. A human doesn’t have animal children. Nature segregates.
Nature tells us that a body must have a beating heart which does not function like a liver or a big toe. The parts are not interchangeable. In fact nature is a rigid enforcer of her own laws. To argue that we are created free by nature is an argument based on a false premise.
Nature is not a liberator. Nature is a constrainer. Nature punishes transgressions of her laws with dire consequences. Step in front of a speeding train. If you can still argue that nature is a granter of the freedom to act in whatever way you wish once the train has passed, I will reconsider. What I suspect, however, is that you will not be here to make the argument when Nature is finished making her point.
While Cardinal Ratzinger’s argument for Truth over freedom is solidly Christian in outlook, this basic underpinning of a false premise bothers me enough to make me wonder what I have missed in his other arguments. My caution increases in reading the following assessment:
The principle of responsibility establishes a framework that needs to be
filled with some content. It is in this context that the suggestions of
developing a universal ethic, to which Hans Kung is above all passionately
committed, needs to be seen. No doubt it makes sense, and indeed in our present
position it is necessary, to search for the basic elements held in common by the
ethical traditions in the various religions and cultures; in that sense, such
activity is certainly both important and appropriate. (p. 251)
He cautions, however, that
[S]uch an ethical minimum distilled out of the world religions, would in the
first place lack any binding character, that inner authority which any ethic
needs. And despite all efforts toward understanding, it lacks also the rational
evidence that…could and should probably replace authority; it lacks also the
concrete character that alone makes any ethic effective.
One thought, which is probably associated with this attempt, seems to me correct: Reason needs to listen to the great religious traditions if it does not wish to become deaf, blind, and mute concerning the most essential elements of human existence.
There is no great philosophy that does not draw its life from listening to and
accepting religious tradition. (p. 252)
What an odd statement for the now leader of the Roman Catholic Church to have made. A leader who is supposed to defend the faith as the fullness of truth wants to listen to the world’s religions in an effort to find that truth. One would hope that the man who is pope would already have found it.
He offers one last insight at the end of the book:
[T]he atheistic systems of modern times are the most frightful examples of
passionate religious enthusiasm alienated from its proper identity, and that
means a sickness of the human spirit that may be mortal. When the existence of
God is denied, freedom is, not enhanced, but deprived of its basis and thus
distorted. When the purest and most profound religious traditions are set aside,
man is separating himself from his truth; he is living contrary to that truth,
and he loses his freedom. Nor can philosophical ethics be simply autonomous. It
cannot dispense with the concept of God or dispense with the concept of a truth
of being that is of an ethical nature. If there is no truth about man, then he
has no freedom. Only the truth makes us free. (p. 258)
He will get no argument about that from me about the need for God. It would be a lot more comfortable about the statement, though, if he had said "Christ".
Will Pope Benedict XVI sign on to United Religions Initiative? Will he sign on, and then alter its direction from within? Will he reject it outright, pointing out the serious flaws it contains? If not URI, will he take up the position of the Traditionalists who want all religions to exist side-by-side in peace—a tradition that Rene Guenon and the Grand Orient Lodge have embraced? Whatever course he decides to follow, it seems clear from this book that he will not support the Traditional Catholic position that Roman Catholicism has no equal, at least not when he sallys forth into the marketplace of ideas, though I have no doubt that he will continue to teach that for a Catholic Jesus Christ is the Lord of history, the sole, unique, and divine Savior of the world. I guess when you are pope, you can promulgate a contradiction with impunity. Such is the nature of Catholicism.
Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us!
