Pope Benedict's renuntiatio

Benedict XVI is no longer Pope. It has been for me a real bereavement. I loved, I can’t say the man, which is reductive, so let’s say the person. Persona, in Latin, meant originally the mask a man wears in society, the face by which he shows who he is. Now he was the Pope, that was his person.

What is to be a Pope? Pope is the bishop of Rome, as successor of Saint Peter, and Peter was the man invested by Jesus, according to the Gospels, to herd his sheep, the rock on which his ecclesia, the converging of all the people recognizing themselves in him, was to be built. 

And again, who was He? Who was Jesus (the) Christ? The king par excellence, the anointed one (as it was the case with the Old Testament kings), through whom it shines forth the glory of the Lord, real ultimate authority from whom all things come and on whom all things rest.

Moreover, what does a king do? The answer is simple, he represents the people. And don’t take this to mean that there is a people already existing, and afterwards there is a king representing it. No, the people exists only through him who represents all those belonging to it. This makes the king a sacrificial figure.

To live as people we have to recognize each other as men, i.e., conversely, reciprocally to represent each other in our common humanity. A man, though, cannot represent another in what in he has, his properties, which can differ (starting from being male and female, and consequently sons and daughters of a man and a woman converging in marital alliance), but only by giving, which means by stripping himself of the properties he has. Sure, we identify each other by what we give. So, only he who gives all can represent everybody. But to give all means to give one’s life: in a giving exchange, though, in which life is renewed, being given back. This is what the king does: effectively to represent with his person the reciprocal life giving and receiving people are involved in.

I know I have been very short: these lines summarize in fact the common sense of all kind of evidence, historical and ethnographical, of human affairs, collected by some of the best cultural anthropologists and theologians. Everywhere giving takes the ceremonial form of gift, in which the things given expressly stand for the ones who give. And everywhere we find gifts turning decisively into something like sacrifice, i.e. into rituals in which the person feigns a dying and a coming out from death renewed. Even now days there are (in spite of all denials and psychological reductions) actions of which we must say that by them an older self dies and a new one is born. Such are the actions performed by kings. But what is performed elsewhere as a ritual action, becomes full reality with Jesus Christ.  

Here is the universal meaning of the Cross, symbol of a passage in which life is taken and given, of which every Christian is called to share through the sacraments. Anointed with chrisma, he becomes himself a “Christ”. But, for Catholics, the anointment finds a special representations in the person of bishops, and, among bishops, in the bishop of Rome.

Back then to Benedict’s renuntiatio. What was it its meaning? We were all stricken by it, we who love him, and those who don’t love him. Some, mostly among these, have seen in it a kind of surrender to the intrigue of the Curia, and/or to the aggression on the Church by a totalitarian liberal (I prefer to say, instead of the banal “secular”) world. It would be like saying that Jesus Christ didn’t deliver himself voluntarily to his enemies, thus challenging them, but more or less cowardly gave in to them not opposing any resistance. This, however, if anything, is not the story the Gospels tell.

Losing strength – the strength necessary to govern the Church – was the reason given by Benedict for his renuntiatio. He choose with it to live his papal, Christian persona to the very end. In a different way, but meaning the same as his predecessor. With the Parkinson undermining him, John Paul II, asked whether he meant to retire, replied in turn with a question: «Can one descend from the Cross?». Obviously not. Aware that some might have taken in this sense his renuntiatio, Benedict, in one of his last public words, said: «I am not descending from the Cross.». Retiring in clausura, disappearing from the eyes of the world, he showed himself in that very passage symbolized by the Cross, where through death shines forth life.

These long overdue lines of comment on Benedict’s renuntiatio are meant, at the eve of the conclave, as a prayer, to see come out of it a new Pope as saintly as he. Equally endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom and understanding, counsel and strength, knowledge, fear of the Lord and justice.

A need of philosophy

I was waiting for the LD to chip in, but he lingers. So, here I am, to raise for the reader the question of why among the most meaningful speeches given by the Pope is giving, there are those of a more philosophical than theological tenor. How does this fit with his specific magisterium?

On the site www.chiesa.espressonline.it (also in English version), Sandro Magister has been recording a controversy going on among theologians and historians about the meaning of the Vatican II, with those of a more “traditionalist” bent denouncing its lack of continuity with the tradition, which for some makes it outright heretical, and those of a more “progressive” bent who extol that same lack of continuity, arguing that that is what the Council really meant.

Benedict’s position on this regard is well known, he made it clear little after his election: renewal in continuity.

This seems, however, to leave everybody, so to say, unhappy. “Progressives” look at him as a staunch conservative, “traditionalists” ask for a clarification, e.g., to submit the Council’s documents to scrutiny by a theological committee, which should judge their adherence to the orthodox doctrine. Of course I am expressing rather bluntly positions which are, in the contributions to the controversy recorded by Magister, quite more nuanced. But here I am not interested in nuances, to go rather to what appears to me the core of the question.

To state offhand my thought: the issue concerning the Vatican II documents is not theological but philosophical.

(And who are you, I could be asked, to pass such a sentence. Well, let me say in a humbly presumptuous’ way: a man trained in philosophy and theology, and before them in jurisprudence and social sciences.)

There is an analogy between the reading of the Council’s documents and the reading of law. So, let me start from this, because the issue of the nature of law was raised in the Reichstag speech.

Benedict mentioned there a German law professor, by the name of Hans Kelsen, who exerted an enormous influence. His conception of law echoes that of one of the most famous, and infamous, political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes: known as a defender of absolute monarchy, he actually theorized in the Seventeenth Century the absoluteness of the State, that today we give for granted. Already for him the law isn’t but the will of the Sovereign, one or assembly: in our terms, democratic or not, it makes no difference. Thus Kelsen in the Twentieth Century maintained that all process of law is lawgiving: down from the highest legislative bodies, like Congress, to the least of judges. It’ll be the latter to say which is the will of the law; and this means as a consequence that he can make the law say whatever he wills. This consequence follows from the fact that the law needs to be interpreted, and, missing any other criterion of interpretation except the will, the judge can make it will whatever he wants. It doesn’t save from the arbitrariness of judgment the possibility of appeal to a higher court, thus making the process of law giving to re-ascend the ladder all the way up to the Supreme Court. The question stays the same: on what criterion will the law be interpreted? You can’t say the Constitution, because this is again a law to be interpreted.

To say in other words, the judge will carry in his interpretation of the law his understanding of things: what we would call today his “philosophy”, meaning rather his opinion.

As I said, the same is the question with the Council’s documents. They lack indications on how they want to be read, in the way of continuity with the tradition, or break from it. I’d say that what they lack is philosophical breath, if I were sure that the reader of these lines understood that I meant, by it, a truly theological one.

The right ambition was to address non only Christians, but all people. But, unfortunately, this ambition was betrayed precisely in the “pastoral constitution” dedicated to “the Church in the contemporary world”, with the unhappy distinction of people in “believers and non believers”. It was meant to be the most philosophical of the Council’s constitutions, saying even to non believers what it means to be human, but it failed, because of that distinction (which I think I already criticized in a previous post), to clarify that all man are “believers”, the only question being to discern the truth that can rightly demand our believing. Because of this, not only the Council was unable to address “non believers”, but also left “believers” on their own when it came to the interpretation of the other “dogmatic constitutions” (e.g. on Revelation or on the Church): it left them free do bring to bear on it whatever presumed “philosophy”, i. e. opinion, they had a penchant for.

Given my (trained) sensibility, those other constitutions have a strange effect on me: like when I hear certain homilies in which the preacher fills his mouth with plain God speech. It makes me uneasy, because those Vatican II documents, like that preacher, don’t seem to take into account that in today’s culture at large speaking of God doesn’t find many point of contact. Christians share – alas – of that culture, and even they like any other men of our time need to be reintroduced to it. To find and show the missing points of contact is what I mean with giving real philosophical breath to theological talk.

Now, Benedict addresses that need with his philosophical speeches, thus exercising with them his papal magisterium.

HD

Cardinal blunders

A few facts everybody should know about the history of the Church.

There are two basic dogmas of Christianity, meaning teachings to be accepted if one wants to belong to the Church.

The first one was proclaimed in the year 325 in Nicaea, where was held the first ecumenical council. It declares that God is one substance in three persons.

The second one was proclaimed in the council held in Calcedonia more than hundred years later, in 451. It declares that Christ is utterly human and utterly divine, one person with a double nature.

I could be legitimately asked what do they mean. Especially the first in fact is hard to understand. But it is not to expound about them that I recalled the two dogmas. I could even try do to it, but it would take some room. I keep satisfied therefore with suggesting to have a look at Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity, or, more simply, to read the first part of Benedict XVI' encyclical Deus caritas est. There one could discover the basic import the teaching of the Church has on our understanding of man.

Notice: I didn't say "on our religious understanding", but simply on our "understanding of man". If anyone didn't get it, this means that it isn't as if we had a religion, which could differ, side by side with an identical self-understanding.

Now, here it is the trouble that plagues us today: those two basic dogmas were explicitly rejected by Muhammad in the Qur'an.

They are not stated as such in other traditions, with no previous notion of Christianity. So Christianity, in its effort at catholicity, could tray to show how the truth of its teaching was already inchoative in them. But what to do when they are explicitly rejected?

I can't but marvel when I hear a cardinal of the Holy Catholic Church, the archbishop of Milan, express his concern about the right of Muslims to have a place of cult, therefore soliciting the public authorities to let them build a mosque. What kind of message does he give this way to his flock? A flock, by the way, in need of reinforcement, with church attendance dwindling. It is so perhaps also because of the contradictory message it is given: on one side the affirmation of the truth of the Church teaching, on the other the reduction of this teaching to a religion among other, that people have a right to practice.

If there is such a right, it belongs to the secular authorities to guarantee it, while defining the conditions for it. It is no concern of a cardinal, who otherwise can look, by defending it, to be granting the superiority of the State as creator of a public space in which also the Church finds her rights.

I marvel less when I hear POTUS state, to calm the waters agitated by the threat of reverend Jones to burn the Qur'an, that the enemy is not Islam, but Bin Laden (what about Achmadinejad and so many other Islamic tyrants?). He is speaking the language of diplomacy. For what concerns the truth of the statement, however, my comment would be, in scholastic style, sic et non. But about this to a next post.

HP