Philosophic Underpinnings of Textual Exegesis

“I Believe… That The True Time of Vatican II Has Not Yet Come”[1]

Benedict XVI interviewed by Robert Moynihan offered the challenge:[2] “Ought we to accept modernity in full, or in part? Is there a real contribution? Can this modern way of thinking be a contribution, or offer a contribution, or not? And if there is a contribution from the modern, critical way of thinking, in line with the Enlightenment, how can it be reconciled with the great intuitions and the great gifts of the faith”

“Or ought we, in the name of the faith, to reject modernity? You see? There always seems to be this dilemma: either we must reject the whole of the tradition, all the exegesis of the Fathers, relegate it to the library as historically unsustainable, or we must reject modernity.

“And I think that the gift, the light of the faith, must be dominant, but the light of the faith has also the capacity to take up into itself the true human lights, and for this reason the struggles over exegesis and the liturgy for me must be inserted into this great, let us call it epochal, struggle over how Christianity, over how the Christian responds to modernity, to the challenge of modernity.”

Moynihan: “You use the phrase ‘epochal struggle’…”

“Yes.”

“Well, at the very least, that means it is a struggle of enormous historical importance…”

“Yes, certainly.”

“And it seems to me,” he continued, "that this was the true intention of the Second Vatican Council, to go beyond an unfruitful and overly narrow apologetic to a true synthesis with the positive elements of modernity, but at the same time, let us say, to transform modernity, to heal it of its illnesses, by means of the light and strength of the faith.

“Because it was the Council Fathers’ intention to heal and transform modernity, and not simply to succumb to it or merge with it, the interpretations which interpret the Second Vatican Council in the sense of de-sacralization or profanation are erroneous.

“That is, Vatican II must not be interpreted as desiring a rejection of the tradition and an adapting of the Church to modernity and so causing the Church to become empty because it loses the word of faith.

“Augustine, as you know, was a man who, on the one hand, had studied in great depth the great philosophies, the profane literature of the ancient world.

“On the other hand, he was also very critical of the pagan authors, even with regard to Plato, to Virgil, those great authors whom he loved so much.

“He criticized them, and with a penetrating sense, purified them.

“This was his way of using the great pre-Christian culture: purify it, heal it, and in this way, also, healing it, he gave true greatness to this culture. Because in this way, it entered into the fact of the incarnation, no? And became part of the Word’s incarnation.

“But only by means of the difficult process of purification, of transformation, of conversion.

“I would say that word ‘conversion’ is the key word, one of the key words, of St. Augustine, and our culture also has a need for conversion. Without conversion one does not arrive at the Lord. This is true of the individual, and this is true of the culture as well…”[3]

The Interpretation of Texts

Vatican II:

“Its documents were quickly buried under a pile of superficial or frankly inexact publications. The reading of the letter of the documents will enable us to discover their true spirit. If thus rediscovered in their truth, those great texts will make it possible for us to understand just what happened and to react with a new vigor. I repeat: the Catholic who clearly and, consequently, painfully perceives the damage that has been wrought in his Church by the misinterpretations of Vatican II must find the possibility of revival in Vatican II itself.”[4]

The Faulty Interpretation of Vatican II: “The question arises: Why has the implementation of the Council, in large parts of the Church, thus far been so difficult?

"Well, it all depends on the correct interpretation of the Council or - as we would say today - on its proper hermeneutics, the correct key to its interpretation and application. The problems in its implementation arose from the fact that two contrary hermeneutics came face to face and quarreled with each other. One caused confusion, the other, silently but more and more visibly, bore and is bearing fruit.

"On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call "a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture"; it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. On the other, there is the "hermeneutic of reform", of renewal in the continuity of the one subject-Church which the Lord has given to us. She is a subject which increases in time and develops, yet always remaining the same, the one subject of the journeying People of God.

"The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar 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. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.
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. In this way, obviously, a vast margin was left open for the question on how this spirit should subsequently be defined and room was consequently made for every whim.

"The nature of a Council as such is therefore basically misunderstood. In this way, it is considered as a sort of constituent that eliminates an old constitution and creates a new one. However, the Constituent Assembly needs a mandator and then confirmation by the mandator, in other words, the people the constitution must serve. The Fathers had no such mandate and no one had ever given them one; nor could anyone have given them one because the essential constitution of the Church comes from the Lord and was given to us so that we might attain eternal life and, starting from this perspective, be able to illuminate life in time and time itself”[5] (underline mine).

Example of the "Hermeneutic of Discontinuity" in interpreting, say, Gaudium et spes as: “A Compromise Document” (the Bologna School)

“As a preliminary point, it should be noted that all commentators agree that Gaudium et spes was a compromise document – that it is the outcome of quite intense debates about the relationship between nature and grace and in particular the tension between the incarnational and eschatological dimensions of Catholic theology… In his account of the history of the document’s drafting, Charles Moeller stated that in the last two stages of the drafting process a decision was taken that a ‘balance must be struck between the opposing tendencies,’ and as a consequence the document acquired a ‘dialectical character with multiple contrasts.’ In effect, this means that Gaudium et spes cannot be read without an overarching theological framework in which the contrasts can be reconciled. However, no such framework was offered by the Conciliar fathers and as a consequence the document became the subject of a riot of interpretations, especially by those plain persons who lacked a training in theology and philosophy, as well as many clergy and religious in positions of authority within the Church’s institutions….

“The form of the document also bears evidence of a series of compromises. The form alternates between sociological observations and theological propositions, between an emphasis on the common hopes of Catholics and non-Catholics and an emphasis on the inadequacy of all non-Christocentric perspectives, and between a conversational tone and a more dogmatic tone.”[6]

Sacred Scripture:

The same problem obtains with regard a fortiori with regard to Sacred Scripture. Particularly in the ‘50’s there was a widening discrepancy between Jesus of Nazareth as found in the texts of the New Testament, and the Jesus Christ of faith. Benedict XVI begins his “Jesus of Nazareth” with the following: “As historical-critical scholarship advanced, it led to finer and finer distinctions between layers of tradition in the Gospels, beneath which the real object of faith – the figure [Gestalt] of Jesus – became increasingly obscured and blurred. At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum, Jesus was the Anti-Roman revolutionary working – though finally failing – to overthrow the ruing powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief… Since then there has been growing skepticism about these portrayals of Jesus, but the figure of Jesus himself ahs for that very reason receded even further into the distance.”[7]

Philosophic Pre-Suppositions of Modernity for Interpreting Texts

Benedict on Kant: “But I think we must go yet a step further in order to appreciate the fundamental decision of the system which generated these particular categories for judgment. The real philosophic presupposition of the whole system seems to me to lie in the philosophic turning point proposed by Immanuel Kant. According to him, the voice of being-in-itself cannot be heard by human beings. Man can hear it only indirectly in the postulates of practical reason which have remained as it were the small opening through which he can make contact with the real, that is, his eternal destiny. For the rest, as far as the content of his intellectual life is concerned, he must limit himself to the realm of the categories. Thence comes the restriction to the positive, to the empirical, to the "exact" science, which by definition excludes the appearance of what is "wholly other," or the one who is wholly other, or a new initiative from another plane.

In theological terms, this means that revelation must recede into the pure formality of the eschatological stance, which corresponds to the Kantian split. As far as everything else is concerned, it all needs to be "explained." What might otherwise seem like a direct proclamation of the divine, can only be myth, whose laws of development can he discovered. It is with this basic conviction that Bultmann, with the majority of modern exegetes, read the Bible. He is certain that it cannot be the way it is depicted in the Bible, and he looks for methods to prove the way it really had to be. To that extent there lies in modern exegesis a reduction of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means of philosophy.
The real question before us then is, can one read the Bible any other way? Or perhaps better, must one agree with the philosophy which requires this kind of reading? At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians: it is rather a philosophical debate. Only in this way can it be carried on correctly. Otherwise it is like a battle in a mist. The exegetical problem is identical in the main with the struggle for the foundations of our time. Such a struggle cannot be conducted casually, nor can it be won with a few suggestions. It will demand, as I have already intimated, the attentive and critical commitment of an entire generation. It cannot simply retreat back to the Middle Ages or to the Fathers and place them in blind opposition to the spirit of the present age. But neither can it renounce the insights of the great believers of the past and pretend that the history of thought seriously began only with Kant.
In my opinion the more recent debate about biblical hermeneutics suffers from just such a narrowing of our horizon. One can hardly dismiss the exegesis of the Fathers by calling it mere "allegory" or set aside the philosophy of the Middle Ages by branding it as "precritical."[8]

The Positive Element of Kant

The Turn to the Subject: The split between subject and object that took place in Descartes’ disengagement of reason from empirical experience, left reality to be found in the object. The subject was not real as identified with consciousness, and was the only locus for the truth and the absolute. Hence, to speak of absolute truth and values was to speak of unreality, the un-provable and relativism.
Immanuel Kant does not solve this problem of “reality,” but he had a profound sense of the dignity of the self as a morally autonomous agent. Absolute values are all identified in reason (in this case, “practical reason”). There is not such thing as deriving intellectual or moral value from experience which he calls “heteronymous.” Autonomy and heteronomy are the bookends of anthropology. Hence, at this stage we can say that Kant, as the entire Enlightenment philosophy, works within the Cartesian dualism of thought/thing and becomes, perhaps, the clearest exponent of the separation of the two. However, by recognizing the freedom and autonomy of the subject, he opens the way to the discovery of experience (that will be latent in Hegel) of the subject as being and hence on to a phenomenology of the person/subject as protagonist of the act of Christian faith. In a word, a purified Kant, rendered metaphysically coherent by a phenomenology and metaphysics of being as in Wojtyla, could be the philosophical underpinning of Benedict’s understanding of faith as personal response to the Revelation as the Person of Christ.

The Negative Element in Kant

Since Rudolph Bultmann exercises exegesis with the philosophic pre-suppositions of Immanuel Kant, let us, for brevity, simply quote Bultmann as to what he "sees" in the Gospel texts and what Kant "sees" in sensible reality.

Bultmann: "The world picture of the New Testament is a mythical world picture... The presentation of the salvation occurrence, which constitutues the real content of the New Testament proclamation, corresponds to this mythical world picture. The proclamation talks in mytholoogical language: the last days are at hand; 'when the time had fully come' God sent his Son. The Son, a pre-existent divine being, appears on earth as a man (Gal. 4, 4; Phil. 2, 6 ff.; 2 Cor 8, 9; John 1, 14, etc.); his death on the cross, which he suffers like a sinner (2 Cor. 5, 21; Rom. 8, 3) makes atonement for the sins of men (Rom. 3, 23-36; 4, 25; 8, 3; 2 Cor. 5, 14, 19; John 1, 29; 1 John 2, 2, etc.) His resurrection is the begining of the cosmic catastrophy through which the death brought into the world by Adam is annihilated (1 Cor. 15, 21-22; Rom. 5, 12 ff)... All of this is mythological talk, and the individual motifs may be easily traced to the contemorary mythology of Jewish apocalypticism and of the Gnostic myth of redemption. Insofar as it is mythological talk it is not credible to men and women today because for them the mythical world picture is a thing of the past... through science and technology that no one can or does seriously maintain the New Testament world picture" (Michael Waldstein, "The Foundations of Bultmann's Work," Communio 2 [Summer, 1987] 117).

Ratzinger-Benedict: "The real philosophic presupposition of the whole system seems to me to lie in the philosop[hic turning point proposed by Immanuel Kant. Accordingto himk, the voice of the being-in-itself cannot be heard by human beings. Man can hear it only indirectly in the postulates of practical reason which have remained as it were the small opening through which he can make contact withthe real, that is, his eternal destiny. For the rest, as far as the content of his intellectual life is concerned, he must limit himself to the realm of the categories. Thence comes the restriction to the positive, to the empirical, to the 'exact' science, which by definition excludes the appearance of what is 'wholly other,' or the one who is wholly other, or a new initiative from another plane.

"In theological terms, this means that revelation must recede into the pure formality of the eschatological stance, which corresponds to the Kantian split. As far as everything else is concerned, it all needs to be 'explained.' What might otherwise seem like a direct proclamation of the divine, can only be myth, whose laws of development can be discovered. It is with this basic conviction that Bultmann, with the majority of modern exegetes, read the Bible. He is certain that it cannot be the way it is depicted in the Bible, and he looks for methods to prove the way it really had to be. To that extent there lies in modern exegesis a reduction of history into philosophy, a revision of history by means of philosophy.

"The real question before us then is, can one read the Bible any other way? Or perhapss better, must one agree with the philosophy which requires this kind of reading? At its core, the debate about modern exegesis is not a dispute among historians; it is rather a philosophical debate. Only in this way can it be carried on correctly. Otherwise, it is like a battle in a mist. The exegetical problem is identical in the main with the struggle for the foundations of our time" (See footnote 8).

Benedict’s Understanding of Faith

“I had ascertained that in Bonaventure… there was nothing corresponding to our conception of `revelation,’ by which we are normally in the habit of referring to all the revealed contents of the faith: … Here, `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.’ Where there is no one to perceive `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 thorough my reading of Bonaventure, were later on very important fort 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 is 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…, because an essential element of Scripture is the Church as understanding subject, and with this the fundamental sense of tradition is already given.”[9]
It should be noted that Benedict finishes his remarks on Michael Schmaus’ dislike and rejection of part of his habilitation thesis. In a word, Schmaus saw Ratzinger as falling into a modernist subjectivism. Ratzinger remarked: “Michael Schmaus, who had perhaps also heard annoying rumors from some in Freising concerning the modernity of my theology, saw in these theses not at all a faithful rendering of Bonaventure’s thought (however, to this day I still affirm the contrary) but a dangerous modernism that had to lead to the subjectivization of the concept of revelation”[10] (underline mine).

A Second Rendering of the Above

Since this point is of such transcendence in understanding Benedict’s “Jesus of Nazareth,” let me offer another rendering of the same point which he gave in a paper presented in France in 1983. Hans Urs Von Balthasar remarked in the “Introduction” that “only Cardinal Ratzinger’s lecture met with displeasure, partly because he came from Rome, and partly because he candidly pointed out things that were still lacking in catechetical textbooks in France, despite many years of efforts to develop proper materials for religious instruction. The strange fascination exercised by Bultmann over French theology to this day (which was over in Germany by the early 1950s) is probably to blame for the failure to bridge adequately the ‘horrid trench’ between the ‘historical Jesus’ and the “Christ of faith’”[11](underline mine).

Ratzinger: “About thirty years ago [in the 1950s], when I was trying to write a study on the ways that revelation was understood in thirteenth-century theology, I stumbled upon the unexpected fact that in that period it had not occurred to anyone to characterize the Bible as ‘revelation.’ Nor was the term ‘source’ applied to it. This is not to say that the Bible was held in less esteem then than it is today. Quite the contrary: the respect for it was much more unconditional, and it was clear that theology, by right, can and should be nothing other than the interpretation of Scripture. But their concept of the harmony between what is written and what is lived out was different from contemporary notions. Therefore the term ‘revelation’ was applied only, on the one hand, to that ineffable act which can never be adequately expressed in human words, in which God makes himself known to his creature, and, on the other hand, to that act of reception in which this gracious condescension [Zuwendung] of God dawn upon man and becomes revelation. Everything that can be grasped in words, and thus Scripture, too, is then testimony to that revelation but is not revelation itself. And only revelation itself is also a ‘source’ in the strict sense, the source by which Scripture is nourished. If it becomes disengaged from this living connection to God’s condescension within the ‘We’ of the faithful, then it is uprooted from the ground in which it lives and becomes merely ‘the letter,’ merely ‘the flesh.’ Much, much later, after the term ‘source’ had acquired a historicist sense and had then been applied to the Bible, the intrinsic and essential self-transcendence of Scripture was thereby excluded at the same time, and so reading the Bible necessarily became one-dimensional as well. It could now arrive only at what is historically probable, but the fact that God acts is just not part of what a historian could or should regard as probable.

When one views the Bible merely as source in the sense in which that is understood by the historical-critical method (which it no doubt also is), then the only competence that there can be in interpreting it is that of the historian. It also follows that only historical questions can be investigated on the basis of this ‘source.’ The historian, however, has to try, if at all possible, to turn a God who acts in history into an unnecessary hypothesis. If, on the other hand, the Bible is the precipitated (or product) of a much greater, perpetually inexhaustible process of revelation, and if accordingly its contents only come to the reader’s attention when this greater event has touched him, then this does not diminish the Bible’s importance, but it does fundamentally transform the question about competency in interpreting it. For that means that the Bible is part of a referential context, in which the living God communicates himself in Christ through the Holy Spirit. It means that it is the expression and instrument of that communion, in which the ‘I’ of God the ‘Thou’ of man come into contact within the ‘We’ of the Church that Christ ahs inaugurated. [The Bible] is then part of a living organism, through which it came into being in the first place – an organism that through the vicissitudes of history has nevertheless maintained its identity and hence holds the `copyright’ to the Bible, as it were, and can speak about it as its very own. The fact that the Bible – like any work of art and even more than all other works of art – says far more than what can be demonstrably gathered from the letters of the text in a given reading follows from the fact that it puts into language, after all, a revelation that is reflected in the words without being exhaustively expressed in them. This also explains why, when revelation has ‘arrived’ and has again become a living revelation, the result is a deeper union with the Word than when it is merely analyzed as a text. Hence it follows quite logically that the ‘sympathy’ of the saints with he Bible, their compassion with the Word, was able to understand more of it than all the methods and devices of the Enlightenment. In this way the phenomenon of tradition also becomes comprehensible as well as the phenomenon of the Church’s Magisterium.”[12]

Now, a More Adequate Philosophy: The Metaphysic of Relation

Since the root of the problem to a proper exegesis is the hegemony that Cartesian dualism has exercised particularly in the West where the person is split into thought (which is “disengaged” from the thing [body]) and paralleled in revelation by the dualism of myth and text, the solution is akin to quantum physics where the observer is not “disengaged”[13] from the sensible world (the experiment, the text) but enters into the perceived world and experiences it from within with sym-pathia. In physics, reality transcends both wave and particle, but are distinguished by the subjective point of view of the immersed observer. So also, “preparation is required to open us up to the inner dynamism of the word. This is possible only when there is a certain ‘sym-pathia’ or understanding, a readiness to learn something new, to allow oneself to be taken along a new road. It is not the closed hand which is required, but the opened.”[14]

Philosophically, then, we can see two (2) levels of knowing corresponding to two (2) levels of experience. The deeper - because unmediated by sense or concept - level is the direct experience of the self that is the deeper reality of Being that we know in consciousness and conscience. Ratzinger call this “anamnesis” (non-forgetting) because it is an experiential remembering of who we are as created images of the divine Persons.

The more superficial level is the sensible experience that gives rise to abstract thinking which –as we saw in a Platonic vein (as in the phenomenon of quantum physics) raises new questions and creates new possible paradigms of explanation of what is perceived through the senses.

The so-called “modern” philosophy of the Enlightenment is immensely positive and important in its turn to the subject. Without this turn, we would still be trying to reduce God to our way of knowing and our mode of conceptualization and categorization. It is negative in that it has disengaged the subject from reality and created the dualism of object-subject; real-unreal, and this specifically because it had failed to have at hand the tool of phenomenology to disclose the experientiality of the subject, the "I." We will hopefully how phenomenology becomes the epistemological key to the recovering the realism of the subject - the "I" - without surrendering its ontological content or rendering it as object (and therefore losing its unique individuality by reduction). In fact, in Wojtyla we saw that the self, exercising itself as moral agent, discloses itself phenomenologically not only as being but the privileged locus ("Fides et Ratio" #83) of the unmediated access to being and reality. The act of faith as the act of self gift to the revelation of the Father in the Person of Jesus Christ becomes the source of the experience and knowledge of God that is the "meaning" of the empirical text of scripture. Benedict's large point is that this experience of the Person of Christ by the self-gift of faith is the key to hermeneutics and the key to the exegesis to the scriptural texts.

Both levels of experience – perception of the external world, the self in moral activity (faith) – give us the two levels of knowing that will yield the one truth necessary: Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus the Christ, Son of the living God (Mt. 16, 17). Both levels are given in modern philosophy, but “experience” by faith with a philosophy informed by the anthropology of the faith act can turn the formalized critical philosophy of Kant into a true metaphysics of the subject and an adequate tool of an exegesis faithful to revelation. It has been done in Karol Wojtyla.

[1] J. Ratzinger, “The Ratzinger Report,” Ignatius (1985) 40.
[2] “The Spiritual Vision of Pope Benedict XVI: Let God’s Light Shine Forth,” Doubleday, ed. Robert Moynihan (2005) 34-35.
[3] Ibid 35-36.
[4] J. Ratzinger, “The Ratzinger Report,” op. cit 40.
[5] Benedict XVI, Address to the Curia Romana, December 22, 2005.
[6] Tracey Rowland, “Culture and the Thomist Tradition, - After Vatican II,” Routledge (2005) 17-18.
[7] Ratzinger-Benedict (henceforth R-B), “Jesus of Nazareth” Doubleday (2007) xii.
[8] J. Ratzinger “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today,” Lecture delivered on 27th January 1988 at St. Peter’s Church in New York.
[9] Ibid. 108-109.
[10] J Ratzinger, “Milestones” Ignatius (1997) 109.
[11] J. Ratzinger, “Handing on Faith and Sources of Faith,” Handing on the Faith in an Age of Disbelief, Ignatius (2006) 7.
[12] Ibid . op. cit 29-31.
[13] See Charles Taylor’s “Sources of the Self,” Harvard (1989) 143-158.
[14] J. Ratzinger “Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: On the Question of the Foundations and Approaches of Exegesis Today,” Lecture delivered on 27th January 1988 at St. Peter’s Church in New York. He refers to Gregory of Nyssa’s critique of the rationalist Eunomius: “The mystery of theology is one thing, the scientific investigation of nature is quite another.” One cannot then “encompass the unembraceable nature of God in the palm of a child’s hand.”