Natura Pura: On the Recovery of Nature in the Doctrine of Grace

Appendix

Appendix Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict XVI It is essential to our argument in the preceding text that there is indeed a proportionate natural end from which the human species is derived, and that indeed the praeambula fidei are susceptible of apodictic speculative knowledge. Here, however, we clearly draw a conclusion that seems in tension with the earlier teaching of then-Cardinal Ratzinger1 in his work Truth and Tolerance. In the light of our argument above, it is perhaps helpful to consider how in one limited early articulation, the thought of Cardinal Ratzinger was affected by the problematic evacuation of the ontological density of nature while even so beginning to move beyond it (affirming the essential need of theology for metaphysics ), in the direction of the strong affirmation of the role of reason seen in the Regensburg Lecture. In doing so, one may see the fashion in which the restoration of the classical Catholic understanding need not imply what it often is taken to imply, and how even in an early commentary affected by the teaching of de Lubac and Balthasar regarding nature and grace, the dynamism of the text even of the early Ratzinger is toward transcendence of this position. In Truth and Tolerance, responding to Kantian reductionism that would deny the very possibility of divine revelation, Ratzinger offers the following thoughts in the extensive quotation below: The problem concerning exegesis, as we have seen, to a great extent coincides with the problem of philosophy. The desperate situation of philosophy—that is to say, the desperate situation into which reason obsessed by positivism has maneuvered itself— has become the desperate situation of our faith. Faith cannot be Appendix: Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict XVI  set free unless reason itself opens up again. If the door to metaphysical knowledge remains barred, if we cannot pass beyond the limits to human perception set by Kant, then faith will necessarily atrophy, simply for lack of breathing space. Of course, the attempt to use a strictly autonomous reason that refuses to know about faith, to pull ourselves out of the slough of uncertainties by our own hair, so to speak, can hardly succeed in the end. For human reason is not autonomous at all. It is always living in one historical context or other. Any historical context, as we see, distorts the vision of reason; that is why reason needs the help of history in order to overcome these historical limitations. It is my view that the neoscholastic rationalism that was trying to reconstruct the praeambula fidei, the approach to faith, with pure rational certainty, by means of rational argument that was strictly independent of any faith, has failed; as it cannot be otherwise for any such attempts to do that kind of thing. In that sense, Karl Barth was right when he rejected philosophy as a basis for faith that is independent of faith itself: for in that case, our faith would in the end be based on changing philosophical theories. Yet Barth was mistaken in declaring faith on that account to be a sheer paradox, which can only ever exist contrary to reason and quite independent of it. By no means the least important practical function of faith is to offer healing for the reason as reason, not to overpower it or to remain outside it, but in fact to bring it to itself again, so that—now that faith has set it on the right path again—reason can once more see properly for itself. We have to strive toward such a renewed process of dialogue between faith and philosophy, for each has need of the other. Without faith, philosophy cannot be whole, but faith without reason cannot be human.2 These lines are susceptible of diverse interpretation. Their initial af- firmation seems utterly at one with the thesis of this present book, whereas their later express propositions would need, were they to be consistent with the thesis here argued, to be interpreted along the lines of the Regensburg Lecture, and with the corresponding meaning of  Appendix: Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope Benedict XVI ‘‘apodictic’’ referring to the apodicticity of the positive sciences despite the clear reference to ‘‘neoscholastic rationalism.’’ These initial lines are of course favorable: ‘‘Faith cannot be set free unless reason itself opens up again. If the door to metaphysical knowledge remains barred, if we cannot pass beyond the limits to human perception set...