The Soul You Lose May Be Your Own: Historical Considerations on Theology and Culture

I. Introductory Remarks

About twenty years ago when I was living in Bologna, Italy, the then-Cardinal Ratzinger came to speak at one of the “Evenings of St. Dominic,” as they were called. You may remember that at that time he had become famous for the series of interviews published as the Ratzinger Report, which amounted to a fairly critical evaluation of the trajectory of Catholic life in the post-Vatican II period. The subject of his lecture, given in the grandiose Renaissance salon called the Sala del Cinquecento, was “The Office of the Theologian.” In the talk, he described the theologian as mediating between the lived experience of Christians and the Church’s ongoing tradition.

It was very much a reprise of the visions of the theologians who influenced the documents and spirit of the Council Fathers: De Lubac, Congar, Chenu, and others. There was little evidence that the cardinal was influenced by Karl Rahner, or had appropriated much modern philosophy in the mode of Edward Schillebeeckx or Bernard Lonergan. There was certainly no hint of liberation theology or “deconstruction” of a postmodern sort. It seemed to me a somewhat old-fashioned talk, and I do not mean that as negative, nor even faint praise.

I do not think it would be a caricature to summarize the cardinal’s understanding of the theologian’s office this way: the theologian’s task is to interpret and articulate the Christian experience of God’s action in the world, in the light of the Scriptures and the Church’s tradition, under the corrective guidance of the magisterium. I would have supposed that the prominent role of Scripture and tradition in this formula, as well as the explicit inclusion of Vatican oversight in it, should have played well in the Bologna environment, where the Ratzinger Report was the current refectory reading. But I was wrong.

The next morning, after Lauds, when I found my way into the little nook where the friars usually stood around breakfasting on stale bread in bowls of caffe latte, I found a sizeable group of the Dominican faculty, perhaps the majority, and including the academic dean, Padre Alberto Galli, denouncing the cardinal’s heresies of the night before. The consensus was that his understanding of the theological project simultaneously denuded it of objectivity by founding it on the shifting sands of personal experience, while rendering it authoritarian and fideistic through the institutionalization of what amounted to an oracular magisterium. I would not say that the cardinal was the object of the proverbial odium theologicum, but to say the friar professors were unhappy would be putting it mildly.

It seems I had chanced on what was perhaps the last sizeable group of neo-scholastics in charge of theological formation—at least it was the only one I can remember encountering. For Padre Galli and theologians like him, the objectivity of theology was founded on the objectivity of its first principles. Again, I do not think that it would be a parody to describe their understanding of the theologian’s office this way: the theologian is responsible for defending and elaborating the “Deposit of the Faith,” a series of propositions about God, Christ, and the Church, found in Scripture and tradition, and defined by the councils and popes as normative. This elaboration takes place by a logical method, whereby, through syllogistic arguments, new propositions are propounded, and then offered to the magisterium for canonization as articles of the Faith.

The magisterium does not exist without the theologians. Indeed, in the words of one Bolognese friar, the magisterium would have nothing to declare de fide if the theologians did not propound new propositions from old. Not only was this enterprise “objective,” a nonbeliever could probably pursue it, fashioning new propositions, logically consistent with a set of first principles that he might very well reject. No shifting sand here. And frankly, whatever one might think of this kind of theology, the cardinal’s version did look...