Chapter 1 — Theological and Catechetical Backdrop: Modern and Postmodern Trends since Vatican
1. Historical-Theological Context: On the Problem of Being in Time
1.1 Modernity and Neo-scholasticism
As a young theologian, Joseph Ratzinger, frustrated by a neo-scholastic theological tenor marked by a Kantian emphasis on “pure reason” and “pure nature,”4 described Neo-scholasticism
as containing an academic fear that would not confront the “Heideggerian problematic,”5 that is,
“the problem of the relationship of history and ontology, of the mediation of history in the realm of ontology.”6 He was referring to neo-scholastic attitudes within academia that Fergus Kerr calls
a “straightjacket” — one which all the greatest theologians were rebelling against at Vatican II and in the years that followed.7 Susan Baumert, looking specifically at a theology of revelation,
notes that prior to the Council, many theologians, educators, and biblical scholars were unsatisfied with the traditional interpretation of divine revelation as “the communication of a system of ideas rather than a manifestation and self-giving of a Person [Jesus Christ] who is Truth.”8 The intellectual “star wars” of the mid-twentieth century largely centered around Neo-
scholasticism and the position in which one took in relation to this way of thinking.9 In order to
better understand this historical context and how it pertains to evangelization, this study will briefly treat the development of Neo-scholasticism, and the emergence of the “Heideggerian problematic.” Conor Sweeney’s Sacramental Presence after Heidegger will serve as the primary vehicle by which to access these developments.
4 See Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5. 5 Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 5.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 158.
7 See Tracey Rowland, “Catholic Theology in the Twentieth Century,” Key Theological Thinkers: From Modern to Postmodern, eds. Stalle Johannes Kristiansen and Svein Rise (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 55.
8 Susan Baumert, “Instruments of Change: The Christian Brothers’ Catechetical Texts, 1943-1969,” U.S. Catholic Historian 32, no. 4 (2014): 63.
9 For an overview of the “star wars,” see Joshua R. Brotherton’s “Development(s) in the Theology of Revelation:
From Francisco Marin-Sola to Joseph Ratzinger,” New Blackfriars 97, no. 1072 (November 2016): 661-
676. Brotherton traces the rise of Neo-scholasticism and points to Dominican Marin-Sola as the early 20th century challenger of Garrigou-Legrange’s Strict Observance Thomism. See also Rowland, “Catholic Theology in the Twentieth Century,” 37-ff.
Sweeney’s work provides a genealogy of Neo-scholasticism beginning with the classical "analogical imagination” marked by participation. Describing the “analogical imagination,” he says:
The world…“participates” in God but it does so according to a structure of analogy: while the world cannot claim a univocal “identity” with the divine, it can nevertheless claim an analogical similarity, on the basis that all that is is derived from God and therefore in some way bears his trace and image….The particular being, while
participating in universal Being (as noun), is in fact the only way in which Being-as-noun is actualised, that is, through being-as-verb—to be. This allows a clear first affirmation that the world itself is not God and neither is it an extension of God.10
From here, Sweeney traces what he calls the "Nominalist Turn” from Scotus, to Ockham, and finally to Suárez.11 Generally speaking, and with due caution against oversimplification,
Sweeney describes nominalism as “the loss of an analogical imagination,” and a process that “begins with Scotus, Ockham, and Suárez’s cutting loose of the particular from the mediation of the universal, and thereby collapsing the analogical distinction between God and man into univocity.”12 Sweeney goes on to say, “According to von Balthasar, Scotus [1265-1308]
conceives being as a formal concept rather than a reality,” before citing Boersma, who claims that “what Scotus did is make the created order independent of God.”13 Ockham (1285-1387)
applies Scotus’ line of thought and conceives of “the relationship between grace and nature as extrinsic, asserting the absolute freedom of God, eliminating any natural desire for the
supernatural, and therefore rendering theology non-contemplative, fideistic, and purely practical.”14 Suárez (1548-1617) systematizes this position and, as a result, is accused of
“instantiating a purely natural metaphysics that asserts a purely natural end for the human being, and thereby makes Revelation extrinsic.”15 Tracey Rowland follows the Communio scholars and
10 Conor Sweeney, Sacramental Presence after Heidegger (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2015), 26-27.
11 See also Gerard O’Shea, “Nature and Grace and the Appearance of Insincerity. Silencing the Catholic Voice,” Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics 2, no. 1 (2012): pgs. 3-4.
https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/solidarity/vol2/iss1/6.
12 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 30. 13 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 30. 14 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 30. 15 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 30.
their claim that the collapse of the analogical imagination and the rise of Neo-scholasticism ushered in modernism. Rowland cites +Javier Martinez, who says:
Once the analogy of being and the idea of being as participation in being was rejected by Duns Scotus in the thirteenth century and was substituted by the idea of the univocity of being, God had necessarily to be “separated” from the world, and at the same time, he had to be reduced to "a being” among others…This move was accompanied by other intellectual changes needed or provoked by it, all of which were loaded with
consequences: human beings began to understand themselves and their relationship to the world as a “copy” of this infinitely intelligent, powerful, and capricious being that
usurped the name of the Christian God.16
Following Martinez, Rowland points out that with the loss of the analogical imagination, the relationship between persons, or between egos, is dominated by use because the ego is
absolutized — as the ultimate arbiter. Consequently, nature is no longer seen as a sign pointing beyond itself (analogia entis), but is now viewed as an artifact, a commodity to be used, or even as that which must be overcome in order for man to be free.17
The 19th century followers of Suárez aimed to find common ground between Catholic and non-Catholics by anachronistically and historically reading Aquinas as an interlocutor amid the strains of Cartesian and Kantian rationalism that dominated the intellectual and cultural landscape. Their position has become known as Neo-scholasticism. Alasdair MacIntyre criticizes such Leonine Thomists (Thomists at the time of Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) who had adopted Suarez’s Neo-scholasticism) for “deforming central Christian positions for apologetic
purposes”18 and for, as Rowland notes, “reworking Thomistic themes in Kantian terms.”19
16 Tracey Rowland, Catholic Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 96. 17 Rowland, Catholic Theology, 96-97.
18 Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Routledge, 1999), 70. Quoted in Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 19.
19 Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 19. To be clear, the critique of Neo-scholasticism presented here is not a criticism
aimed at Aquinas’ thought, rather, it is a criticism of an anachronistic application of Aquinas’ thought without due consideration for the historical context in which Aquinas was writing.
Rowland explains, “The idea was that Catholics and non-Catholics could find common ground on the territory of ‘pure nature’ [or pure reason], while the more socially contentious
supernatural beliefs and aspirations of Catholics could be relegated to the privacy of the individual soul.”20 This “two-tier” theory of nature and grace was originally developed by
Cajetan (1469-1534) who, as described by Gerard O’Shea, speculated “that a Duplex Ordo theory was taught by St. Thomas Aquinas, with antecedents in Aristotelian philosophy. In explaining this thesis, Cajetan needed to raise the question of whether it was possible for human beings to have a natural desire for God. His answer was no. (Herein lies the root of the Catholic acceptance of arguing only from natural premises when dealing with ‘natural’ human beings.).”21
Ruard Tapper (1487-1559) and Luis de Molina (1535-1600) advanced Cajetan’s thesis by developing the idea of a finis naturalis — “a natural end for a natural order.”22 Suárez inherited
these positions, and proposed the theory of “pure nature,” which O’Shea describes as “a human nature that was completely devoid of any natural orientation to the grace of God, thus taking Cajetan’s speculations into the mainstream of theology.”23 Against this position prior to Vatican
II, the Ressourcement scholars of the 20th century argued that “the Thomism which had
flourished since the publication of [Leo XIII’s] Aeterni Patris not only represented a distortion of classical Thomism, but that it had unwittingly fostered the secularization of western culture with its ‘two-tier’ theory of the relationship between nature and grace.”24 MacIntyre, speaking of
Suárez, concludes, “Both in his preoccupations and in his methods, [Suárez] was already a distinctively modern thinker, perhaps more authentically than Descartes the founder of modern philosophy.”25
20 Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 20.
21 O’Shea, “Silencing the Catholic Voice,” 4. 22 O’Shea, “Silencing the Catholic Voice,” 4.
23 O’Shea, “Silencing the Catholic Voice,” 4. See also Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 33.
24 Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 19-20. Elsewhere, Rowland notes that in Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, “the ‘perennial
philosophy’ of St. Thomas was promoted as the antidote to varieties of scepticism, agnosticism and relativism. This project may be characterized as an attempt to answer the Enlightenment charge that the Catholic faith was irrational by the promotion of a hyper-rational Neo-scholasticism.” See Rowland, “Catholic Theology in the Twentieth Century,” 38. See also Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 34.
25 MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions, 73. Quoted in John Montag’s “The False Legacy of Suárez,” in Radical Orthodoxy, eds. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (London: Rutledge, 1999), 41.
Neo-scholasticism does not see faith as a response to God’s act of self-revealing, but as the ratification of revealed truths. Faith now ratifies propositions — it becomes a theoretical matter that may or may not touch the everyday realities of life. Rowland explains that “For Suárez, revelation does not disclose God himself, rather it concerns pieces of information which God has decided to disclose and whereas for St. Thomas, things revealed led to faith, for Suárez faith confirms what is revealed.”26 Rowland adds, “Suárez fostered a propositional account of
Revelation by which Revelation does not disclose God himself so much as pieces of information about God.”27 Suárez does not found his systematic organization on the life of faith as Thomas
did. Instead, John Montag notes, Suárez:
Set as his foundation the life of reason, separating philosophy and theology as he had learned to do from Duns Scotus…Metaphysics further serves as the proper foundation of theology for Suárez…Suárez sees theology as standing on the structure provided by philosophy, specifically an ontologically univocal metaphysics. In order to speak well about God, one must begin with the clear foundation provided not by sacra dotrina, but the metaphysical structure of Being, which rises up to meet what is revealed.28
In Suárez’s view, revelation takes on an impersonal nature as something that occurs “‘on its own,’ as if it were a thing apart, before becoming part of human thought and experience.”29
Speaking of the “reversal” that takes place in Suárez, that transition from revelation as self- manifestation (the interpersonal act of removing the veil) to propositions God hands over as “things to be believed” and the transposition of metaphysics over theology, Milbank, Ward, and Pickstock say:
[The Suárezian reversal] assumes the loss in the late Middle Ages of the metaphysical framework of participation, and the concomitant loss of an intrinsic link between sign and the thing signified. As a result, the content and the authorization of revelation are prised apart, and both aspects are thought of as isolated occurrences grounded in the will rather
26 Rowland, Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed, 49.
27 Rowland, Catholic Theology, 48. See also Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 48. 28 Montag, “The False Legacy of Suárez,” 53-54.
than a necessity intrinsic to the real. Revelation is now something positive in addition to reason, precisely because a rational metaphysics, claiming to comprehend being without primary reference to God, frames all discourse, including the theological. Ironically, revealed truth becomes something ineffably arbitrary, precisely because this is the only way it can be construed by an already intrinsically godless reason.30
Revelation is no longer truly necessary because metaphysics can comprehend being without primary reference to God. This Kantian conception of “religion within the realm of reason” alone renders faith somewhat superfluous, perhaps even divisive, in the face of the pure reason
accessible by all.31 For the naturally autonomous “pure nature,” faith is not a relationship with
God (i.e. a participation in the very life of God through the theological virtue of faith), but instead the “knowability” and “believability” of an object.32 Furthering this point, Rowland adds,
“Whereas Aquinas looked at faith from the ‘inside’ and focused on the change that faith brings about in the human being, Suárez looked at faith ‘from the outside’ and described the way we can see it working.”33
1.2 Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Shift Toward Postmodernism
Nietzsche’s philosophy initiates the shift from Enlightenment rationalism to what has become the postmodern “condition.” Nietzschean nihilism is the response to what Balthasar calls
30 John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock, Radical Orthodoxy, 5. Quoted in Rowland, Catholic Theology, 48-49.
31 See Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960). Kant
concerns himself with the Enlightenment ideal of a universal brotherhood, which he believes cannot be conceived on the basis of revelation or ecclesiastical faith. He adds that, in the face of the Enlightenment, new revelation with new miracles seems unlikely. Therefore, Scripture might be able to provide instruction for those who are already
Christian, but it should not stand as a prerequisite for salvation. Instead, the moral norm of the categorical imperative is the standard by which men attain salvation through reason alone (148-ff). Kant says, “It must be inculcated painstakingly and repeatedly that true religion is to consist not in the knowing or considering of what God does or has done for our salvation but in what we must do to become worthy of it. This last can never be anything but what possesses in itself undoubted and unconditional worth, what therefore can alone make us well-pleasing to God, and of whose necessity every man can become wholly certain without any Scriptural learning whatsoever,” 123.
32 Gerard O’Shea, “Historical Discontinuity in Contemporary Views on Revelation,” PhD thesis, John Paul II
Institute for Marriage and Family, Melbourne, 2007.
a mystical “identity” metaphysics “wherein reason inexorably comes to claim more and more for itself the status of God” in the likes of Descartes (whose thought ruptures the relationship
between being and knowing) and Kant (whose categorical imperative attempts to place religion within the limits of reason alone).34 Quoting MacIntyre, Sweeney holds that Nietzsche “codifies
the nihilist-esque position that ‘there is no such thing as truth-as-such, but only truth-from-one- or-another-point-of-view.’”35 Nietzsche (1844-1900) signals the shift “away from the Cartesian,
Kantian, and neo-scholastic conditions of rational thought,” and opens the door for Husserl’s phenomenology, which, generally speaking, “sets the conditions for Heidegger’s key ideas,” namely that “rational thought cannot simply ignore the contextual conditions of its genesis.”36
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) criticized Husserl (1859-1938) for remaining “too much within the realm of consciousness” and failing to exorcise the ghost of Descartes. He breaks away from Husserl in a more historical and hermeneutical direction.37 Heidegger claims that Being “today
has been forgotten,”38 an indictment he levels against western metaphysics dating back to Plato.
According to Sweeney, Heidegger:
Argues that ever since Plato (and Aristotle for that matter) Western thought has reified a counterfeit, objectified version of Being, something described in the lowercase, being. … [According to Ian Thomson] Heidegger [first] reads the history of Western philosophy as an attempt to answer the question about the “whatness” of Being. This he calls ontology (the “onto” in onto-theology), and Thomson explains that the mark of this study is that “it looks for what all beings share in common;” it looks for the rational “ground" of
beings…Second, the question “what is being?” is simultaneously approached from the perspective of the highest or Supreme Being (the “theo” in onto-theology). Heidegger
34 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 31. Henri de Lubac claims that Nietzsche’s “death of God” expresses a choice
— not a statement of fact, a lament, or a bit of sarcasm. God, who Nietzsche describes as the mirror of man, an illusion, passing away, opens the way for man’s producing out of his very self the revelation of his own divinity by his own show of endurance in bringing it about. “God is dead, long live the Overman!” See Henri de Lubac, The
Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley and Anne England Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995),
42-58, quote from 56.
35 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 31-32. 36 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 35. 37 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 36.
calls this the theological dimension. Metaphysics becomes theology when it attempts to explain “whatness” via Supreme Being.39
Further defining onto-theology, Sweeney quotes Thomson, saying, “The metaphysical tradition establishes the foundations for every epoch of intelligibility by ontologically grounding and theologically legitimating our changing historical sense of what is.” Sweeney goes on to explain:
In other words, metaphysics as onto-theology is accused of imposing an a priori interpretive grid over top of temporality and historicity, and thereby determining in advance the interpretation of Being in time. In essence, Being is no longer able to reveal itself as Being in any given historical epoch because it’s [sic] meaning has already been artificially established in advance….Onto-theology conceives of entities in terms of their essence, their whatness, of their timeless self-identity.40
The “Heideggerian problematic,” to use Rowland’s expression, now comes into focus. Heidegger shifts from onto-theology’s metaphysical “grid” that is superimposed upon being as a “timeless,” “bird’s eye view,” to what he calls Dasein (literally, in German, da = there, sein = be; there-be, being-there, existence, presence). Dasein is foundational to Heidegger’s project, and according to Wheeler, “we might conceive of it as Heidegger's term for the distinctive kind of entity that human beings as such are.”41 Wheeler points out that “entity,” in this case, is not in reference to
biological make-up, but two ways in which human beings engage in life — two ways of understanding Dasein. First, human beings alone are capable of encountering the question of what it means “to be,” by operating with some understanding of Being, however pre-ontological, implicit, or vague, and to reflect back upon it.42 The second understanding of Dasein results from
interpreting the da of Da-sein as “open.” In this case, Wheeler defines Dasein as “the having-to-
be-open. In other words, Dasein (and so human beings as such) cannot but be open: it is a
necessary characteristic of human beings (an a priori structure of our existential constitution, not
39 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 36-37. 40 Sweeney, Sacramental Presence, 37.
41 Michael Wheeler, "Martin Heidegger,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford University, Fall
2017 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/heidegger/.
an exercise of our wills) that we operate with the sense-making capacity to take-other-beings- as.”43 Similarly, Hemming defines Dasein as “‘the standing open of humans to whatever is, ek- stasis,’ where historicity takes precedence.”44 Wheeler, concludes by noting that the two
interpretive paths are not necessarily in conflict as both pertain to “standing out,” “standing back,” or “standing open.” On the one hand, Dasein can stand back or outside of itself and reflect back upon itself, and on the other hand, Dasein “stands out in an openness to and an opening of