“Deus Caritas Est” and The Second Vatican Council
On December 22, 2005, Benedict XVI addressed the Roman Curia on the “Interpreting Vatican II,” among other timely themes. His main thrust centered on the interpretation of the Council, principally because of the commonplace for anyone who has read the documents: the Council has not been assimilated by the Church. Benedict opened his questioning with, “What has been the result of the council? Was it well received? What, in the acceptance of the council, was good and what was inadequate or mistaken? What still remains to be done?” He then asserted, “No one can deny that in vast areas of the church the implementation of the council has been somewhat difficult….” He then quotes St. Basil description of the aftermath of the Council of Nicea: “The raucous shouting of those who through disagreement rise up against one another, the incomprehensible chatter, the confused din of uninterrupted clamoring has now filled almost the whole of the church, falsifying through excess or failure the right doctrine of the faith” (De Spiritu Sancto, XXX, 77; PG 32, 213 A; SCh 17 ff p. 254).
Hermeneutic of Discontinuity and Rupture – Hermeneutic of Continuity and Reform
A) Hermeneutic of Discontinuity and Rupture: In the same discourse, he said, “(Discontinuity) “risks ending in a split between the preconciliar church and the postconciliar church. It asserts that the texts of the council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless… These innovations alone were supposed to represent the true spirit of the council, and starting from and in conformity with them, it would be possible to move ahead. Precisely because the texts would only imperfectly reflect the true spirit of the council and its newness, it would be necessary to go courageously beyond the texts and make room for the newness in which the council’s deepest intention would be expressed, even if it were still vague. In a word, it would be necessary not to follow the texts of the council but its spirit.”
Same Ratzinger Assessment in 1984 and 1997: In “The Ratzinger Report” of 1984, Cardinal Ratzinger said:
“This schematism of a before and after in the history of the Church, wholly unjustified by the documents of Vatican II, which do nothing but reaffirm the continuity of Catholicism, do nothing but reaffirm the continuity of Catholicism, must be decidedly opposed. There is no `pre-‘ or `post-‘ conciliar Church: there is but one, unique Church that walks the path toward the Lord, ever deepening and ever better understanding the treasure of faith that he himself has entrusted to her. There are no leaps in this history, there are no fractures, and there is no break in continuity. In no wise did the Council intend to introduce a temporal dichotomy in the Church.”[1]
“Is There Something New in Vatican II?”
Not Discontinuity, But, Yes, “Enrichment”
“Enrichment” will not mean more concepts as “truths” of faith, but entering into the horizon of the subject of the believer, and therefore into the Subject of Revelation as the principal content of Revelation. Since the God of Revelation has disclosed His Name to be “I AM,” what else could the deepest access to knowledge of divinity be but an experience and consciousness of “I AM” by activating the “I am” of the believer?
Two Key Texts: From Karol Wojtyla and Josef Ratzinger:
1) Wojtyla: “If we study the Conciliar magisterium as a whole, we find that the Pastors of the Church were not so much concerned to answer questions like `What should men believe?’, `What is the real meaning of this or that truth of faith?’ and so on, but rather to answer the more complex question: `What does it mean to be a believer, a Catholic and a member of the Church?’ They endeavored to answer this question in the broad context of today’s world, as indeed the complexity of the question itself requires.
“The question `What does it mean to be a believing member of the Church?’ is indeed difficult and complex, because it not only presupposes the truth of faith and pure doctrine, but also calls for that truth to be situated in the human consciousness and calls for a definition of the attitude, or rather the many attitudes, that go to make the individual a believing member of the Church. This would seem to be the main respect in which the conciliar magisterium has a pastoral character, corresponding to the pastoral purpose for which is was called. A `purely’ doctrinal council would have concentrated on defining the precise meaning of the truths of faith, whereas a pastoral Council proclaims, recalls or clarifies truths for the primary purpose of giving Christians a life-style, a way of thinking and acting. In our efforts to put the Council into practice, this is the style we must keep before our minds.” [2]
2) Ratzinger: “`Revelation’ is always a concept denoting an act. The word refers to the act in which God shows himself, not to the objectified result of this act. And because this is so, the receiving subject is always also a part of the concept of `revelation,’ no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed. By definition, revelation requires a someone who apprehends it. These insights, gained through my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important for me at the time of the conciliar discussion on revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Because, if Bonaventure is right, then revelation precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. This in turn means that revelation is always something greater than what is merely written down. And this again means that there can be no such thing as pure sola scriptura (`by Scripture alone’), because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[3]
The text of Wojtyla reveals that the “site” of belief is not a faculty such as intellect and/or will as an “accident” of “substance,” but the entire person as subject, i.e. as “I.” He explains: “I have already drawn your attention to the difference between the catechism formula, `accepting as true all that God reveals,’ and surrender to God. In the first definition faith is primarily intellectual, in so far as it is the welcoming and assimilation of revealed fact[4] (underline mine). On the other hand, when the constitution Dei Verbum tells us that man entrusts himself to God `by the obedience of faith,’ we are confronted with the whole ontological and existential dimension and, so to speak, the drama of existence proper to man.”[5] John Paul goes explains more profoundly when he continues: “The Surrender to God through faith (through the obedience of faith) penetrates to the very depths of human existence, to the very heart of personal existence…It is much more than a purely intellectual theism and goes deeper and further than the act[6] of `accepting as true what God has revealed.’”[7] It is here then that he coincides with Ratzinger’s discovery in his work on the habilitation thesis (this very part of which was rejected by Michael Schmaus, but central in Ratzinger’s theological advisory work in the document Dei Verbum). He remarks: “When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and personal.”
The Ratzinger text is an equally profound work of epistemology revealing a theological anthropology that is all of a piece with it. It is like knowing the anatomical architecture of the human eye in terms of the function of sight. Every part of the eye is what it is, and the parts are related thus and so such that the eye is able to be the instrument of the entire organism seeing. The eye doesn’t see. The entire organism sees. So also, intellect and will do not believe, but the entire person through the mediation of what we call “intellect” and “will.” In a word, the person is relational and called to believe by loving and giving the whole self. He can understand himself for what he is only when he is operating in love in response to the Creator Who calls him.[8]
Both these texts deal with the human person called to belief as a relational act. The are a call to subjectivity and relation as a new perception of being. It is not a call to belief as a Cartesian consciousness, but as an act of ontological relation – self-gift - to a revealing Subject. Wojtyla, now as John Paul II, will announce the metaphysical ramifications of this when he says in Fides et Ratio#83: “Persona, nominatim, locum constituit praecipuum ut quis congrediatur cum actu essendi ac, propterea, cum meditatione metaphysica” (the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with being and hence with metaphysical enquiry). Notice, that person is the place where the act of being is immediately accessed without the mediation of objectified conceptualization. The explanation of this is the burden of his work “The Acting Person” that gives an account of the person as believing being and the priviledged locus to access it without any mediating distortion.
This access to being as the source of all intelligibility cannot be without intellectual content even if it is pre-conceptual.
This is the “enrichment” of Vatican II that does in fact represent the “discontinuity” that makes Vatican II of such novelty that there has never been another council like it, and yet it is in total continuity with all the councils of the past and the content of the faith of always. In fact, it is in greater contact with revelation since it is precisely bringing forth the “I” of the revelation of Christ in its full realism as “I Am.
Hence, it must be integrated into all the previous councils, and all the previous councils
must find themselves in it:
But note! that as the words of the Council do not introduce a rupture in doctrine, they do introduce what John Paul II called “Enrichment.” In this sense there is a “discontinuity” in the semantic “style” and content of the words in that they symbolize a turn to subjectivity and the person-in-relation in preference to objectivized conceptual categories. For example, John W. O’Malley S.J. observed summarized “some of the elements in the change in style of the Church indicated by the council’s vocabulary: from commands to invitations, from laws to ideas, from threats to persuasion, from coercion to conscience, form monologue to conversation, from ruling to serving, from withdrawn to integrated, from vertical and top-down to horizontal, from exclusion to inclusion, from hostility to friendship, from static to changing, from passive acceptance to active engagement, from prescriptive to principles, from defined to open-ended, from behaviour-modification to conversion of heart, from the dictates of law to the dictates of conscience, from external conformity to the joyful pursuit of holiness.”[9]
What is the Enrichment that causes this Discontinuity? John O’Malley suggests the answer without naming it. He says: “The council’s rejection of the style in which preparatory documents like De ecclesia and De fontibus were composed was not about esthetics. Nor was it just about replacing a theological method. It was about something much more profound: a rejection of ways to thinking, feeling, and behaving of which style was the emblem and engine. It was the rejection of a whole mental and emotional framework that found expression in genre and vocabulary. Style in this sense is not an ornament, not a superficial affectation, but expression of deepest personality. It is the ultimate expression of meaning. Le style, c’est l’homme meme. My style – how I behave – expresses what I am in my truest and deepest self. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks….
“This means that Vatican II, the `pastoral council,’ has a teaching, a `doctrine’ that to a large extent it has been difficult for us to formulate because in this case doctrine and spirit are two sides of the same coin. Cardinal Ottaviani was correct when he insisted in the council that pastoral could not be separated from doctrinal. The council taught a number of things. Among them is a teaching on the style of the Church. It did not `define’ that teaching but taught it on almost every page through the form implicit but an insistent call for a change in style…” [10]
The answer is the epistemological recovery of the “I” as the ontological subject of the believer. John Paul II as Cardinal of Krakow initiated his powerful catechism of the Council, Sources of Renewal, with the chapter “The Need for an Enrichment of Faith.” The entire epistemological horizon in which Vatican II operates is from the perspective of the believing subject. John Paul began Sources of Renewal[11]: “The implementation of Vatican II, or the process of Conciliar renewal, must be based on the principle of the enrichment of faith.”[12] He opens with a quotation from Dei Verbum #8: “Thus, as the centuries go by, the Church is always advancing towards the plenitude of divine truth, until eventually the words of God are fulfilled in her.” This means that the Church develops in the experience and consciousness of the Revelation that is the very Person of Christ Himself. This development depends on “the enrichment of faith” that is the degree of likeness of the “I” of the believer to the “I” of the revealing Christ. And this, because like is known by like.”[13] Wojtyla goes on: “This advance on the Church’s part at the same time indicates the basic direction in which faith develops and enriches itself. The enrichment of faith is nothing else than increasingly full participation in divine truth. This is the fundamental viewpoint from which we must judge the reality of Vatican II and seek ways of putting it into practice” (emphasis mine).
It is most important to realize that “divine truth” is the very Person of Christ. It is equally important to realize that the Person of Christ is the divine Logos Who is pure Relation to the Father. As Revelation of the Father, the Logos is total Self-Gift to us, and can be experienced only by the action of the believer as total self-gift to Christ. This is the meaning of “like is known by like.” Wojtyla goes on to pin point the way that Vatican II is not only in objective, doctrine continuity with the teaching-of-always, but how it is precisely in discontinuity. He says:
“If we study the Conciliar magisterium as a whole, we find that the Pastors of the Church were not so much concerned to answer questions like `What should men believe?’, `What is the real meaning of this or that truth of faith?’ and so on, but rather to answer the more complex question: `What does it mean to be a believer, a Catholic and a member of the Church?’ They endeavored to answer this question in the broad context of today’s world, as indeed the complexity of the question itself requires.
“The question `What does it mean to be a believing member of the Church?’ is indeed difficult and complex, because it not only presupposes the truth of faith and pure doctrine, but also calls for that truth to be situated in the human consciousness and calls for a definition of the attitude, or rather the many attitudes, that go to make the individual a believing member of the Church. This would seem to be the main respect in which the conciliar magisterium has a pastoral character, corresponding to the pastoral purpose for which is was called. A `purely’ doctrinal council would have concentrated on defining the precise meaning of the truths of faith, whereas a pastoral Council proclaims, recalls or clarifies truths for the primary purpose of giving Christians a life-style, a way of thinking and acting. In our efforts to put the Council into practice, this is the style we must keep before our minds.” [14]
Wojtyla then proceeds to parse and conjugate every document of the Council under two headings that are immensely significant: consciousness and attitude. The consciousness is experiencing self as alter Christus, which occurs after the attitude of making the sincere gift of self. This is the meaning of the Revelation that is Jesus Christ, and it is the description of the meaning of the human person in the act of belief. And this just so happens to be the description of Christian anthropology that is the asymptote of every definition of man that is found in Gaudium et spes #24: “man, the only earthly being that God has willed for itself, finds himself by the sincere gift of himself.” As John Paul II said in his interview with Andre Frossard: “When God reveals himself and faith accepts him, it is man who sees himself revealed to himself and confirmed in his being as man and person.”[15]
Hence, what is afoot here is the passage epistemologically from object to subject and the perception of the entire Vatican II in that perspective of the “I” of the believer who is not reducible to the “disengaged”[16] Cartesian “consciousness.” Rather, the believer is existentially person analogically as Jesus Christ is existentially Person and grows in the consciousness of the "content" of who Christ is by the experience of mimicking self-gift. Every concept that was possessed objectively before as category or symbol, now passes to be experienced in a new way as oneself. Truth is now understood to be not only adequatio rei et intellectus but to be self-gift the way Jesus Christ, the very Truth itself as Person, is self-gift to the Father as obeying Logos. This obtains for the “good,” “relation” sin……..
(Fides et Ratio #83).
[1] J. Ratzinger, “The Ratzinger Report,” Ignatius (1985) 35.
[2] “Sources of Renewal,” op. cit. 17.
[3] Josef Ratzinger, “Milestones,” Ignatius (1997) 108-109.
[4] “Facts” are judgments of the intellect. They do not exist in reality.
[5] John Paul II/Andre Frossard, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 66.
[6] Such an “act” is the operation of a faculty such as abstraction or judgment.
[7] Ibid. 67.
[8] “What he [man] is by nature is related to his essential calling as the complicated anatomy of the eye is related to the act of seeing makes use of an infinite variety of physical, chemical and physiological processes to accomplish the one thing necessary: the simple, clear and unclouded act of seeing. The accompanying processes have no other purpose than to make possible this act of seeing that could not exists without them, but that in no way derives from them or is the sum of their parts. The same relationship exists in the creature between its `nature’ as a creature composed of body and soul and its calling, which is love. Not that the creature itself is love, for only God is love. The creature is a being in the service of love;” Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Christian State of Life,” Ignatius (1983) 70.
[9] John W. O’Malley, S.J., “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” Theological Studies, March 2006, Vol. 67, No. 1, 29.
[10] Ibid. 30-31.
[11] Karol Wojtyla, “Sources of Renewal,” Harper and Row, (1979: originally 1972 in Krakow).
[12] Ibid. 15
[13] J. Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 25.
[14] “Sources of Renewal,” op. cit. 17.
[15] John Paul II, “Be Not Afraid,” St. Martin’s Press (1984) 67.
[16] Charles Taylor, “Sources of the Self,” Harvard (1989)
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