The Church and the Secular Establishment: A Philosophical Dialog between Joseph Ratzinger and Jurgen Habermas

Abstract

Virgil Nemoianu is William J. Byron Distinguished Professor of Literature and Ordinary Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He is the author or editor of over fifteen books and has published approximately six hundred scholarly articles, reviews, and presentations on four continents. He is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Figure 1.

January 19, 2004: Professor Jürgen Habermas speaking with then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger at the Bavarian Catholic Academy in Munich. Used by permission. © Katholische Akademie in Bayern 2004.

Dialogs between leading thinkers of the Roman Catholic Church and other philosophies, theologies, or bodies of opinion and power are not a novelty. In fact, it would be correct to say that they have been a characteristic of the Catholic tradition over centuries or millennia, and that they constitute a salient difference between Catholicism and most other confessions or religions. Intersections and combinations with Platonism and Aristotelianism date from the very beginnings of Christianity. The Catholic Church or some of its leading intellectuals have responded in nuanced and complex ways to philosophies such as rationalism (Descartes), the classical and romantic movements, phenomenology, and even extreme left- and right-wing ideologies. One small example of such a dialog was a very few years ago the exchange of public letters between Archbishop and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and the semiotic critic and philosopher Umberto Eco.

Some of these dialogs have proved to be highly fruitful and enriching, while others turned out to be dead ends or even deleterious. We can leave history the privilege to make detailed judgments on each of these, but we can also agree, I think, that this incessant process maintained the healthy liveliness of Catholic intellectual life. That is why the discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger (as the future Pontiff Benedict XVI was called at the time and as I shall call him throughout this presentation) stirred unusually high waves in European intellectual life.

It is perhaps redundant, but I will nevertheless introduce the two figures by short summaries of their careers and views.

Overview of the Work of Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas

Joseph Ratzinger's academic career covered the period 1953–77. In 1977 he became archbishop of Munich and Freising, soon thereafter cardinal, and by 1981 he moved to Rome in the high position of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which he held for twenty-four years, although he continued to write, publish, or give public lectures and scholarly papers, over and beyond the production of official doctrinal documents and statements. During his years of doctoral and post-doctoral studies (doctorate and "Habilitation" under the German university rules), between 1953 and 1959, he worked on Saints Augustine and Bonaventure. He taught at the universities of Bonn, Münster, Tübingen, and Regensburg, and he was also one of the cofounders of the extremely important quarterly theological journal Communio. This journal was the brainchild of Hans Urs von Balthasar, arguably the greatest Catholic theologian of the twentieth century, and continues to appear in twelve languages and variants.

It is somewhat difficult to assess accurately the number of publications by Ratzinger, since some of them tend to overlap and the versions in different languages are not always identical. Nevertheless, we can speak about approximately twenty-five books. It is clear that Ratzinger's thinking derives from that of Hans Urs von Balthasar: a mode of thought that is extremely difficult to assign to either ecclesiastical "conservatives" or "liberals," a thinking that goes back to the Patristic sources of Christianity, beyond its medieval structures and somewhat distanced from the pre-Vatican II neo-Thomism (though not necessarily hostile to it), and a mode of thought that admits the importance of the Beautiful at the level of the True and of the Good. However, unlike Balthasar, and even his close counterpart the Jesuit priest (and eventually cardinal) Henri de Lubac, Ratzinger was more decisively steeped...