Gegenwart der Offenbarung: Zu den Bonaventura-Forschungen Joseph Ratzingers ed. by Marianne Schlosser, Franz-Xaver Heibl (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 621 Gegenwart der Offenbarung: Zu den Bonaventura-Forschungen Joseph Ratzingers. Edited by MARIANNE SCHLOSSER and FRANZ-XAVER HEIBL. Ratzinger Studien 2. Regensburg, Germany: Friedrich Pustet, 2011. Pp. 516. 35€ (cloth). ISBN: 978-3-7917-2292-4. As is well-known, the young Joseph Ratzinger’s Habilitation almost did not succeed. In the face of Michael Schmaus’s stinging criticism, he withdrew the first half of the manuscript, which contained an interpretation of Bonaventure’s theology of revelation. The budding young theologian then presented only the second half of his work, an analysis of Bonaventure’s theology of history. The latter text would later be translated into many languages, while the study on revelation according to Bonaventure languished in Ratzinger’s desk drawer. Sometime after his papal election, then-Pope Benedict XVI commissioned the Bonaventure expert Marianne Schlosser to edit the first part of his Habilitation. The long-awaited 2009 publication of the full 1955 Habilitation was accompanied by the first-ever academic colloquium on this work. Gegenwart der Offenbarung offers the fruits of this colloquium in the form of eleven essays (in German). It presents the first extensive historical and theological analysis of Joseph Ratzinger’s entire Habilitation manuscript. Indeed, no study on Ratzinger’s reading of Bonaventure’s theology of revelation published since 2009 matches the breadth and depth of these essays. In addition, Gegenwart der Offenbarung includes valuable articles and book reviews on the second half of the Habilitation published since the 1960s in German, Spanish, Italian, and French. The present review focuses on the eleven original essays. In chapter 1, American Dominican Richard Schenk offers a historical and systematic analysis of the analogia fidei in Ratzinger’s study on Bonaventure. The essay moves smoothly among thirteenth-century intra-Scholastic debates, Vatican II’s discussion of the doctrine of revelation, and hermeneutical options for the twenty-first-century reception of the council. Schenk begins with an incisive critique of both the “hermeneutic of discontinuity” and the “hermeneutic of continuity” concerning Vatican II, as he draws inspiration from both the “early” and “late” Ratzinger. Schenk’s reading of the council is refreshingly nonideological: he refuses to bend or ignore texts in order to fit Vatican II into a predetermined schema. He offers the reader a dense yet fascinating overview of the immediate theological setting for Ratzinger’s Habilitation, namely, Gottlieb Söhngen’s approach to grace/nature as a response to Karl Barth. Schenk also traces how, building on his Habilitation research, the peritus Ratzinger appropriated both Bonaventure and Aquinas to overcome the limitations of the first conciliar drafts of the constitution on divine revelation. The young peritus tackled key issues such as the unicity or duality of revelation’s means of transmission (Scripture and Tradition as a single source or as dual sources) as well as the distinction between Scripture and revelation. Schenk then turns back to the theological setting of the 1950s. He makes the provocative claim that, due to the influence of Bonaventurian apophatism, Ratzinger’s Habilitation quietly refuses Karl Barth’s and Hans Urs 622 BOOK REVIEWS von Balthasar’s immense confidence in faith’s capacity to gain knowledge about God (30-36). Schenk’s reading is original and convincing. It exposes a noteworthy diversity in the Communio school concerning the limits of theological knowledge, a difference that has hitherto not been recognized. The theme of apophatism then brings Schenk to another comparison, this time between the Seraphic and Angelic doctors. The former places much stock in our ability to interpret the significance of current historical events via the allegorical exegesis of Scripture. Aquinas is more cautious, being more attentive to the literal sense of the Bible and allegory’s relation to it. Schenk then proposes that, as Bonaventure’s career progressed, he came gradually closer to an intense Dionysian apophatism in his approach to the human knowledge of God (44-48). This can be seen, for example, in the antiScholasticism of the Collationes in Hexaëmeron. Here, Schenk could have added that, in the view of the late, semiJoachimite Bonaventure, rational theology will only be overcome in the final age of history. That is, the negation of Scholasticism is yet to come...