In St. Paul Address 39 Years Ago . . . Cardinal Ratzinger Notes Important Link Between Faith And Philosophy
By PEGGY MOEN
(Editor’s Note: Benedict XVI is the only Pope I have seen in person — and that was in 1984, years before he was elected to the Chair of Peter. Nonetheless, listening to his erudite yet warm presentation on faith and philosophy showed me that he was a saint and scholar and nothing like the “God’s Rottweiler” decried by the mindless secular media.
(Below is the text of the report that I wrote, and The Wanderer published on February 23, 1984, about Cardinal Ratzinger’s presentation at the College [now University] of St. Thomas.)
- + + ST. PAUL — “Faith does not destroy philosophy, but defends it,” and the priorities of philosophy “have always been linked with the priorities of the religious tradition . . . the starting points in its struggle to find the truth, said Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in a February 13 address at the College of St. Thomas here. His Eminence, the prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, came to the college as part of the Pope John Paul II lecture series sponsored by the St. John Vianney Seminary and the philosophy department of the College of St. Thomas. Archbishop John Roach of St. Paul-Minneapolis introduced the cardinal to the overflow crowd of 700 at O’Shaughnessy Education Center.
In his talk, Ratzinger, the former archbishop of Munich and Freising, noted that St. Thomas Aquinas was the first to elucidate the nature of philosophy and theology. Philosophy is based on “that knowledge which can be gathered from reason…without the teaching of Revelation”; theology is the “examination of God’s Revelation in an attempt to understand.” Philosophy and theology are “distinguished as the study of the natural and the supernatural, respectively.”
These distinctions — particularly if drawn too sharply — raise the question: “Can philosophy and theology ever be brought into a methodological interrelationship?” The German philosophy Karl Jaspers said no, because he “felt that the person who believes that he already possesses the answer is destined to be a failure as a philosopher.”
Yet, the Cardinal replied to this view, the philosopher is asked to answer the fundamental questions about man, and, “Might it not be that such (Christian) answers give the ultimate questions of life and death their real depth and dramatic character?”
If philosophy needs theology, then, similarly, the “rejection of philosophy . . . corrupts theology,” as in Martin Luther’s assertion that using philosophy in religious questions is setting up one’s “own wisdom and justice” against the truths of the Gospel. Yet theology needs philosophy because theology “in its reflections on the word of Revelation simply cannot avoid using the methodology of philosophy,” the Cardinal explained.
Luther — and later Karl Barth — specifically rejected metaphysics, which led Barth to begin to try to reconstruct the faith as a paradox. Cardinal Ratzinger commented that this type of understanding of Christianity meant that faith “could not penetrate the everyday world, nor interpret it.”
At one point in his speech, the Cardinal referred to St. Bonaventure’s use of 1 Peter 3:15 — “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you” — as a justification for the use of philosophy for understanding the Faith. “One must be able to explain to the other why one believes,” he commented. The unfortunate “fact that we are today in real danger of losing sight of this missionary dimension of the Faith is linked with the loss of philosophy, which is a mark of contemporary theology.”
His Eminence summarized developments in modern thought by stating that the “distinction (between philosophy and theology) became a formal opposition.” Both philosophy and theology have rejected ontology; but “both philosophy and theology need” ontology, the Cardinal affirmed: this rejection paralyzes philosophy, and removes the foundation for theology.
Both faith and philosophy “are oriented to the fundamental question about man” posed by death, said Cardinal Ratzinger. “Where man comes from and where he is going” can be answered “only if one knows what lies beyond death.” A Christian philosopher is “the true philosopher because he understands the mystery of death” through the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Following Cardinal Ratzinger’s well-received address, the College of St. Thomas presented him with an honorary doctorate of humane letters. The citation reads in part:
“Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has demonstrated his readiness to name and to address the difficulties that our age presents to the Faith and to its transmission. He suggests that reform dissociated from the work of repentance will, despite many useful innovations, end up a caricature of itself. Further, we must be aware of an illusion the age dangles before us: that a man can find himself without conquering himself, that there is no need to endure the discomfort of upholding Tradition.”
