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In stock. Add to cart Add to Wishlist. Other Editions and Formats. Add to cart. Add to Wishlist. Product Details. In it he pointed out that that which is genuinely human in us, while it was.

Here he was pointing to our twilight character: still bearing the image of God from our creation, on the one hand, yet this image had become utterly marred and obscured, on the other hand. As such it needed reversal, transformation.

But even if it did not, Ratzinger, following Bonaventure, might still have remained cautious about ascribing too much to it. This is because Bonaventure, lacking the creaturely optimism of his colleague, Thomas Aquinas - although in his writings he did attempt to accord a certain excellence to human nature Ratzinger - found himself nervous of over-ascribing to nature what might properly be due to God and tended, in the end, towards a certain collapsing of nature into grace for fear that he might otherwise be guilty of eclipsing the divine at the expense of the human Ratzinger , Thus Bonaventure pulls back from ascribing excellence to the human and prefers to emphasise instead human dependence, indebtedness and nothingness.

Avery Dulles pointed to Ratzinger's Augustinianism when writing about the Extraordinary Synod of , which Pope John Paul II had convened to assess the achievement of the Second Vatican Council on the twentieth anniversary of its ending. Of two schools of thought present at the Synod, Dulles said, the first, "supernaturalistic" in viewpoint, tended "to depict the church as an island of grace in a world given over to sin;" he called this outlook "neo-Augustinian" Dulles Dulles spoke of those who had this supernaturalistic outlook as considering that the world had fallen under the power of the Evil One, that collaboration with it was less to be recommended than taking a stance against it and that the Church had become contaminated by the world in the years following the Council Dulles It is not difficult to recognize these sentiments in Ratzinger, who responded as follows to a question about "restoration" that was put to him in the year that the Extraordinary Synod took place:.

If by 'restoration' is meant a turning back, no restoration of such kind is possible But if by restoration we understand the search for a new balance after all the exaggerations of an indiscriminate opening to the world, after the overly positive interpretations of an agnostic and atheistic world, well, then a restoration understood in this sense This is a typical Ratzinger response.

The world contaminates. Purification, about-turn, de-contamination are needed. Today he says that Europe needs this because what Europe is experiencing is ultimately a crisis of faith.

With Augustine, Ratzinger sees sin, ultimately, as loss of faith in God Corkery , Faith is its antidote, fides purgans, faith that purifies, converts, turns us towards God and away from what is ungodly. It is a gift, un-manufacturable by us, bestowed through encounter with Jesus Christ. It is through encounter with him, not through any efforts of our own, that we are purified, forgiven, freed.

This is Joseph Ratzinger at his best. But does it not also echo Luther's and Calvin's repudiation of the doctrine of salvation by works and does it not echo, furthermore, the recent summing up by Professor Ruth Whelan of Jean Calvin's pastoral theology as "the unconditional mercy of God" Whelan 40?

The saving encounter with Jesus Christ, emphasized by Ratzinger perhaps not in classical evangelical language but in his stress on the fact that Christian life begins with conversion, reveals other aspects of his theology that show its closeness, also, to Reformation concerns.

It has been observed that Ratzinger eschews "moralism", an approach to ethics that. In such an approach, Christianity becomes Pelagian; and we are thought to be saved by the good that we do and by the obedience that we practice Rowland , drawing on a text of Lorenzo Albacete. Ratzinger, ever nervous of any flavour of works-righteousness, takes a completely different line, suggesting that being a Christian arises through an encounter - an encounter and an on-going relationship with Jesus Christ - and that it does not result from taking up a lofty idea or making an ethical choice.

Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction But I remember reading, in one of his earliest works, words similar to the above. He spoke simply of the Christian as having love Ratzinger , a love that we do not give ourselves but that is bestowed through encounter with the one who is all love. He made it clear that he was not talking here about an adequate love - in us it will always be lacking - but, he quickly added, this is where faith comes in because it.

Ratzinger's basic point was - back in the mids also, forty years before the first encyclical letter of Benedict XVI on love appeared - that we must be careful to recognize on whom it is that we depend and avoid all suggestion of adequacy on our own parts.

His talk of love may have many different nuances to that of Luther or Calvin , of course, but it hardly amounts to works-righteousness. I am aware that one can be simplistic about the Reformation and that care must be taken not to reduce it to its more memorable dicta. I certainly do not wish to do that, not least when I recall its elimination of any role for "works" in the matter of salvation. Nevertheless it is fair to say that, for the great Reformation figures - Luther, Calvin - insistence on a salvation that depended utterly on God's mercy and not at all on human efforts was paramount.

Indeed, from what we know of their contexts, such insistence was vital. And to attribute it to Ratzinger today also is equally vital because it echoes throughout his theology, fashioned, as this was, in the context and presence of his neighbouring, Reformed theologians. Sometimes they - and he - are accused of an approach to humanity and the human world that is very rejecting, very pessimistic, and this pessimism is attributed, perhaps too easily, to the Augustinian heritage on which they draw.

Ruth Whelan allows "that Calvin opens the Institutes of the Christian Religion with a damning indictment of our humanity" but says that when he speaks of our "turpitude" often translated into English as "corruption" or "depravity" "it is important to replace Calvin's damning indictment of our 'turpitude' in the context of his time" Whelan And that context was one of fear, and of an enormous sense of inadequacy, on the part of people. Calvin wanted to take these things seriously, to speak to people where they were, but his pastoral purpose in so doing was to move them to rely on the unconditional mercy of God and to free them from the tyranny of thinking that there was anything that they could do to save themselves Whelan Joseph Ratzinger would not disagree.

So much for so-called "Augustinian pessimism", often said to be Calvinist and, more often lately, Ratzingerian! Leaving that aside, what is clear, however, is that, according to Joseph Ratzinger's anthropological perspective, we human beings, left on our own, would not amount to much.

Thus there can be no over-confident talk about our making our own future, bringing about a just society, producing the "new man" and the future made by our own hands Ratzinger ; also Corkery , 53 and Yet political and liberation theologies are built on such ideas, Ratzinger is convinced Ratzinger b ; hence his robust opposition to them. One good example - and one on which Ratzinger has spilled a lot of ink - is found in his writing about the theology of the liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutierrez.

While Gutierrez makes, initially, the necessary distinction between the theological and the political levels, this is lost with his interpretation of Jesus in the following words:. For Jesus the liberation of the Jewish people is nothing other than an aspect of a universal and permanent revolution Ratzinger Now at this point the theological line in the thought of Gutierrez meets definitively with his political objectives: history is anthropophany; the situation of the man of today is determined according to the model of the man of tomorrow - with the certainty that man will overcome the present and will enter into a new era, into a world that he himself has created.

In this creating of the new world man shapes and creates himself Ratzinger This is an expression of "makeability", indeed of "salvation by works", from which everything in Ratzinger must shrink. There is a Pelagianism here with which Ratzinger could never be happy. Luther's polemic against 'works' and, indeed, Calvin's reminders that salvation is a matter of the sovereign mercy of God alone, can hardly be far from his mind, even if he would not be in agreement with either of them on all points in this regard Ratzinger c ; Corkery , As I have written elsewhere, I am not in agreement with all that Ratzinger has said - and done - in relation to liberation theology Corkery , and b but what I have wished to allude to in the above is how, influenced by the Reformation polemic against any linking of salvation to "works", Ratzinger was tilted against liberation theology from the outset.

Added to this was, from his studies of Bonaventure's theology of history, an awareness of the danger of looking forward to any form of inner-worldly salvific state - in other words, any form of utopia Ratzinger ; Corkery b and Kissler ff. Towards working for the future, Ratzinger believes, we must "do what we can", conscious that it is God, not we, who brings it about.

We are just of penultimate significance. I mentioned the influence, from Bonaventure, that makes Ratzinger wary of any talk about immanent salvation, about inner-worldly states of well-being. In his day, Bonaventure, against the background of Joachim of Fiore's "utopian" vision and the influence of this on many of Bonaventure's own confreres, had to negotiate a path between what could be legitimately held about the future and any immanent notions of that future envisaged by the Calabrian abbot and his followers.

For Ratzinger, the student of Bonaventure's theology of history seven hundred years later, the emphasis settled decidedly on a wariness about all inner-worldly salvific states Corkery b Ratzinger was conscious that these fragile arrangements would depend on human agreement, always, to maintain and support them, and that such could be "interrupted" by the decisions of persons at any time to do just the opposite.

Hence his insistence that any human contribution is always no more than a "doing what we can" and that a mentality of "making" is misleading in relation to future plans and projects. And now having manifested His Name he can be called on by the faithful; they can turn to Him personally; they can have a relationship with Him.

When men discover that God knows them, they can, in turn, know Him and love Him — or else they can choose to hide from Him because they suspect that that knowledge is a threat to their absolute autonomy. Ratzinger finds the fullness of the theology of the Name of God in the New Testament, particularly in St. In Jesus, this God calls us by our name, entrusts us our vocation through which He incorporates us in his mission, and in this way He definitively personalizes us as sons in the Son.

That is why, Ra- tzinger states with a certain provocative force, the problem of the full knowledge of God is resolved by the problem of the following of Jesus.

Let us not forget that the illustrated rationalism, which excludes the true revelation of God in history, consequently denies the fact that trinitarian doctrine could be of the slightest practical interest. Museo del Prado. What is that unfathomable mystery of intra-divine life? And what interest does it awake in a normal Christian who is not used to enter into such depths?

Ratzinger had the courage to talk of these things to uni- versity students. And he has always continued to teach and preach about God to the Christian people. His explanation of dogmatic data is always accompanied by an existential preoccupation: how does the reality of the personal life of God affect the concrete life of men?

John Jn ; ; ; , Furthermore, a noteworthy influence may come from Au- gustine, who grants a decisive value to the relation of his De Trinitate as opposed to the Arian thesis. And also one must keep in mind — leaping across centuries — the consistency with that category of modern physics, which explains the structure of matter in terms of actuality.

From this or other possible influences Ratzinger links the categories of relation and person connecting its intra-divine mea- ning to anthropology, through Christology. In his judgment the notion of person is impoverished when it is reduced to an individual substance enclosed within itself — as has been occurring in western philosophy and in theology itself.

All of these elements reveal his search for a dialogical, personalist, and existential key to the person — in God, in Christ and in man. In the Trinitarian comprehension of God, Ratzinger says, an anthropomorphic concept of person as we know it in human ex- perience is overcome and it is shown that in God the person is the pure relation, not something added to the person, but that the per- son itself consists in that reference.

That way of being, relational, is primordial, of the same rank as the substance. It is a new way of being, which goes beyond the traditional classification of the cate- gories of being substance and accidents and which is made known to us exclusively through the Trinitarian relation. He insists that both unity and multiplicity are original in God. On the other hand, in order to man- tain the unity of the two aspects which constitute the divine person, that of his incommunicability and that of his relational openness, he finds valuable help in his theology of the divine names.

Each one of the proper names, while they cannot be transferred, denote a refe- rence to the other and thus opens originally to the comprehension of the person as relation. Ratzinger maintains that only this faith in one tri-personal God bestows all its content and dignity on the human person. Though the classical world the Roman, above all already knows the term and grants the person several legal privileges, there is no doubt that the philosophical-theological debates raised by the new Christian faith have enriched this category in an unimaginable way, relating it to the divine persons.

The self is at the same time what I have and that which I least own. Man is made for a loving relationaship, for the recognition of a you and a we without which I cannot attain plenitude. Relying on these considerations on the concept of a divine person, Ratzinger establishes a similar comparison between the proper name of the person Father or Son and the human experience of paternity or filiation. The intratrinitarian relations between the Father and the Son in the Holy Ghost teach us, since always, the meaning of filial dependence in the loving bond with a Source which is pure paternity.

The trinitarian revelation also practices here the critical function of purifying human concepts. Once more the trinitarian dogma, in its apparent paradox and apparent uselessness for normal life turns out to be ex- tremely practical, that which enlightens and helps the most.