Ratzinger's 'nature' isn't natural
Moore, Sebastian
RATZINGER'S 'NATURE' ISN'T NATURAL AQUINAS, CONTRACEPTION & STATISTICS SEBASTIAN MOORE Christianity was born of a revelatory explosion of the infinite within the heart of the finite, and it has...
...The notion of a privileged insight of faith into the human generative process is a classy form of "creation science...
...One of the leading revisionists was Joseph Ratzinger...
...In our day, Lonergan compared the emergence of this theorem (actually discovered by Philip the Chancellor, but understood in its full theological potential by Aquinas) after all the rhetoric that had preceded it, to the noonday sun emerging from the clouds over the Italian landscape...
...But does this resistance come from finitude...
...Back to the Fathers...
...Vast seminary buildings raised in this country on the eve of Vatican II, a veritable monument to the two-story, two-class church, now stand empty...
...For what is going to be the result of going back to Augustine, for whom "nature" still meant nature as involved in the struggle between sin and grace, and forsaking Aquinas's insight which differentiated simple creaturehood and the supernatural, the finite in contrast with the transforming infinite...
...In the ferment of Vatican II, with a whole image of spiritual reality breaking down, it was very natural, and probably inevitable, that the blame for the old constriction would be laid to the door of "scholasticism...
...And really desperate is the expedient of trying to return to an earlier period, before the explosion of new questions that was the glory of high scholasticism, to a way of thinking which owed its beauty precisely to the fact that the questions had not yet been raised but were still, if you like, active in the psyche as an undifferentiated and childlike hunger for the truth...
...In other words, there's not a two-story theological universe...
...Yet it kept the two realities together, as they are given together in our experience...
...A towering figure in this history is that of Aquinas...
...I have also been concerned, before and since Humanae vitae, with the church's position on birth control...
...Gone, in the name of an imposed mysticism of nature, is the whole precious heritage of natural law...
...Thus for Aquinas nature and supernature are not two realities, one above the other...
...And yet the theorem does not involve separating the divine from the human.,(I recall my dear friend, Kenelm Foster, O.P, in one of our many walks in Cambridge in the old days, trying to commend to my fiery Augustinian mind the merits of Aquinas, and ending, "And God, how he purified the Latin...
...Aquinas understood what sin is-the absolutizing of nature-and what grace is-the transforming of nature...
...A friend who is familiar with the work of Ratzinger has pointed out what a small role, if any, is played in it by what Lonergan calls intellectual conversion, the discovery of intellectual blind spots, the recalling of the point where they first occurred: not, as I have already suggested in this case, with Aquinas, but after Aquinas...
...became a frequently heard slogan...
...The tragedy is that as long as such insight is lacking, all failures in the church are going to be attributed to moral and religious causes, not to intellectual oversights...
...I have long been fascinated by Lonergan 's concern to recover Aquinas's "theorem of the supernatural," with its wonderful liberation of nature for our exploration and of grace for our silence...
...But all this is made irrelevant when we no longer consider nature as subject to "right reason" and consider it understandable only through the eyes of faith, the definitive organ of which is the papal magisterium...
...Indeed, a really vigorous and confident response to the new questions would be the best evidence of that perennial sensitivity to new questions that was present in scholasticism at its best...
...The two orders were reified and tended to become itemized...
...Strange bedfellows, all associated, in spite of themselves, in the flight from understanding...
...It becomes sacralized...
...Sooner or later, this deep crisis in the ruling theology will have to be addressed by the whole church...
...This was a moment of liberation from the baroque, out-there two-story theological universe that was all we knew of what we thought was Aquinas...
...In vain, for example, does one point out to exponents of this position that the relationship between coition and conception is statistical: that the possibility of conception resulting from intercourse has its own intelligibility, not understood in the ancient world, and that this new understanding dissolves the moral difference between "natural" and "artificial" birth control: for both interfere with the probability-shaped relationship between coition and conception...
...There is no such thing as "nature" over there and "supernature" over here and above it...
...But at the deepest level of its motivation, it is neo-Augustinian...
...The cost of this theological tour de force is enormous...
...We are still very much in the aftermath of this cataclysm...
...And the mind of God is disclosed, partially, to us through the church...
...Vatican III...
...Rather, taken together they form a theorem for thinking about the existential realities of sin and grace that does not collapse into the rhetoric of grace-versus-sin to which theology had been confined by the Fathers until the theorem was created...
...It is anything but that...
...Alas, what tended overwhelmingly to happen to Aquinas's idea after him, what I will call "baroque" scholasticism, was precisely that: it became a two-story universe...
...But the theorem only keeps the two orders together provided we remember it is a theorem-a posited, coordinating idea-and not a description...
...It brings together Ratzinger and the various promoters of anti-intellectualism, the touchy-feely people, the New Age people--yes indeed, Matthew Fox...
...But a deeper analysis seems called for...
...So the "grace" (the other member of the existential dyad) that enables the creature for divine union is, in its essence, a transforming of the finite, and, only as a result of this, a healing of the sinful...
...Indeed, it was the slogan of the revisionists, the dismantlers of the ecclesiastical triumphalism on which I was raised...
...I have argued elsewhere (London Tablet, October 7, 1989) that no sound theology lies behind the ban on contraception...
...What I am pointing to is something more generic, the attempt to recover a predifferentiated awareness, of which fundamentalism is a very crude subset, and of which there are many other forms...
...To say, in any intelligible sense, that married people have to "intend" conception with every act of intercourse is simply a mistake, and a rather dumb one...
...The conclusion of this article is that a very unsound theology underlies the present escalation of that ban to a quasi-faith status.at ban to a quasi-faith status...
...Of itself, this nature is not able to attain to union with God-not mainly by reason of sin, but because the finite cannot grasp the infinite...
...One hears rather of an "overemphasis" on this or that...
...Thus, while it may appear to the common, inquiring mind that the coition-conception relationship in the post-Aristotelian biology is not inviolable, and that the Catholic acceptance of Natural Family Planning (NFP) implies the acceptance of this position, to the eyes of "faith," attentive to "faith's" ecclesial interpreter, this relationship appears quite differently...
...The usual criticism of this theology is to say that it is ultramontane...
...Grace, the unimaginable mystery of the transforming infinite, is no longer to be defined as the remedy for sin...
...His most recent book is Jesus the Liberator of Desire (Crossroad...
...Thus certain activities and lifestyles were characterized as supernatural-the priesthood, the religious life, for instance-while others were classified essentially as natural-marriage, for instance...
...I well remember the sense of liberation I had when some theologian said, "For God's sake, the two poles are not supernature and nature, but good and evil...
...How do we speak coherently, and instructively, about this continuing action of the incomprehensible God in the experience of a community, an action recognizable in its worship and ongoing life...
...All of us at the time of Vatican II, I think, were so enamored of the patristic vision that baroque scholasticism had totally obscured that we forgot that the church we were liberating from that straitjacket consisted of people imbued with the culture of science and instant communication, mass media, and democracy who were not about to become the congregation of Augustine or the catechumens of Cyril of Jerusalem...
...Gone are the grounds for papal statements to address themselves not just to the church but to "persons of good will," as John XXIII was so fond of doing...
...At the watershed that was Vatican II, the two-story universe of baroque scholasticism came down in ruins...
...But how on earth can they be tackled by a mind that is out of synch with the intellectual passion that gave us Aquinas's theorem of the supernatural...
...2) not be something to be defined by examination of its constitutive principles and acts...
...And of the church, the Petrine office is the definitive magisterium...
...Lonergan used to predict that in the present crisis of culture, most people will either go with every new trend or try to recover a vanished mental world, while only a small minority will be about laying the foundations of the future...
...It is the finite creature resisting the infinite Creator's claim on him/her...
...And of course, the present crisis over contraception is only the tip of the iceberg...
...Does this notion of a privileged faith-insight into nature that bypasses science and instead hearkens back to an early, undifferentiated vision remind one of anything...
...Assuredly, today there are new questions, some of them rather frightening...
...By "nature," Ratzinger and his followers have reverted to a pre-Aquinian, mystical understanding, "nature as in the mind of God...
...I think we have our answer in the treatment handed out to these movements by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith...
...And it was brilliant...
...Thus "nature," in terms of which that magisterium is now saying that contraception is contra-nature, is nature as seen by Christian "faith," into which that faith has a privileged insight...
...For instance, how is liberation theology, how are the base communities in Brazil, going to look to a mind that does not accord to nature its proper integrity but sees it always under the shadow of sin shutting out grace...
...RATZINGER'S 'NATURE' ISN'T NATURAL AQUINAS, CONTRACEPTION & STATISTICS SEBASTIAN MOORE Christianity was born of a revelatory explosion of the infinite within the heart of the finite, and it has been the task of theology in succeeding ages to appropriate this event using all the resources of mind and heart...
...Sin is the conscious creature's resistance to grace...
...It freed up nature to be all of itself, not constrained to reflect God in some mystical way...
...And on the other hand, grace establishes its character as beyond nature, not as against sin-in other words, as supernatural...
...Underlying the present Roman position on birth control is the Augustinian concept of nature, not yet subject to the Thomistic differentiation between the natural and the supernatural that is the watershed of Catholic theology, and therefore not subject to the critique of Bernard Lonergan who, authentically updating Aquinas, invokes a post-Aristotelian biology with its statistical relationship between coition and conception, and observes that to regard this relationship as inviolable is to exclude NFP as well as so-called artificial contraception...
...It is the same blind spot as the fundamentalists' escape from reason, and it seems to have an uncanny power in our time...
...It freed up the Godhead to be its infinite incomprehensible self...
...But instead of admitting this, the remedy has been to foster a more deeply ingrained fortress mentality, an ever more centralized papacy, and a church that has less and less credibility on these issues...
...The vital distinction-between Aquinas's vastly intelligent way of thinking about grace and nature, and its baroque successor-was lost to view...
...All this may seem esoteric...
...Is it not possible that Ratzinger's bitter disappointment with the post-Vatican II church is because of the latter's inevitable failure to live up to the beautiful, liturgically rich prescholastic scenario that he had for the church...
...How seldom does one hear theological critiques of official positions talking about "mistakes," "confusions," or "simply getting it wrong...
...No, it comes from the false judgment that finite existence is sufficient unto itself, is its own raison d'etre...
...So a distinction emerges: between nature-or the structured finitude of the creature-and the sinful absolutizing of nature...
...You've got it: fundamentalism...
...If anyone had told me that these two concerns are closely connected, I would have laughed...
...Until we have an adequate theory coordinating the two orders, the human being's wrestle with God is bound to be understood in a way that tends to confuse finitude with sinfulness and to reduce grace to being the opposite of sin...
...In confusing scholasticism as a vigorous heuristic with scholasticism as a tottering edifice of reified abstractions, and abandoning both, contemporary Rome is engaged in the very un-Roman activity of emptying out the baby with the bath water...
...This diagnosis-a mis-diagnosis-will prove to be of critical importance later in this article...
...But they are...
...But take out "nature," this new middle term, and sin and grace lock into a conflict that pulls into its orbit all our understanding of the world and God...
...It is...
...The comparison is a loose one, of course, but it points to that rare magic worked by a new idea on a whole cluster of problems...
...Of course, I am not suggesting that Ratzinger is a fundamentalist...
...It is a great deal more sophisticated than telling geologists what their fossils "really" mean, but it is the same in structure: the return, within an inalienably scientific culture, to a way of thinking that preceded all the questions that gave rise to that culture...
...Above all, it enabled the mind to allow for the total, mysterious gratuitousness of transforming grace, in a way that also allowed full scope to the mystery of our freedom...
...The important point about Ratzinger's theology, at this moment in the church's history, is his preference for the Augustinian vision over the mind of Aquinas, and his preference, within the medieval period, for Bonaventure over Aquinas...
...In transforming nature, grace fulfills the creature's openness to the Creator so that the creature lets go of its tight grip on itself as all that there is...
...Aquinas's distinction between nature and nature-sinfully-absolutized is both beautiful and freeing...
...And thus this pope can say that the ban on contraception is "grounded in central Christian beliefs about God and man...
...Grace transforms nature while sin absolutizes it...
...Lonergan was of the opinion that Thomas's theorem of the supernatural does for the complex data of religious experience the massive job of ordering and clarifying that Einstein's theorem of General Relativity does with the data of the physical universe...
...But when this preference becomes a standpoint from which the whole theological life of the church is being overseen and disciplined, it is necessary to uphold against it the history of theology, in particular the latter's historic engagement with the growing Western mind, a mind that needed to be liberated by theology into an unimpeded exploration of the natural world...
...I don't see how any of us can feel sure of belonging to the latter category...
...The proponents of these ideas were all seeking to understand our life, in the perspective of faith, as the struggle SEBASTIAN MOORE, O.S.B., is chaplain at Boston College...
...Beneath lies the crisis of a ruling theology that is ignoring the key-moment in its tradition, and is in consequence lining up with the anti-intellectualism of the age, whose fruit is fundamentalism...
...Significant consequences follow...
...In recent years, it is customary to point to a dramatic change in his theology from "liberal" to "conservative...
...Aquinas's theorem of a supernatural order gets us beyond the confusion that arises if the existential way of speaking is all we have, which is the crisis of Augustinianism, for all its dramatic superiority...
...The fatal turn had been taken, it then seemed, by Thomas himself: the turn from a monastic, unified theology, to a disputatious, dialectical theology...
...Such a preference is a matter of temperament, which it would be invidious to fault...
...and (3) therefore be "truly known" only when placed in the full vision which faith permits...
...That would be a preposterous way to speak of a serious theologian...
...Gone, above all, is what is perhaps the most brilliant theological insight ever conceptualized and systematized, Aquinas's theorem of the supernatural...
...But by using "nature" in this restricted sense, a whole different approach to apprehending reality comes to the fore, and Aquinas's vast achievement is undermined...
...The result of such a retreat is that "nature" will (1) not be something which "right reason" can discover...
...This would make the creature intrinsically sinful...
...it is between sin and grace...
...For on the one hand our nature, while always involved in the struggle between sin and grace, does not get its shape from that struggle, but only from its Creator, who is, as it were, wooing the beauty that first came from his hand...
...Gone precisely is the "nature" that Aquinas's theorem freed to be itself, independent of and not shaped by some mystical vision...
...His major achievement was to find a way of systematizing the many diverse ideas so far produced for understanding the divine action in human experience...
Vol. 117 • January 1990 • No. 2
