Benedict XVi: A Guide for the Perplexed by Tracey Rowland (review)

92 Antiphon 15.1 (2011) Book Reviews Tracey Rowland Benedict XVI: A Guide for the Perplexed London: T&T Clark International, 2010 216 pages. Paperback, $19.95 Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI’s private and pontifical writings cut deeply into the philosophical façade of postmodern culture. Tracey Rowland’s well researched exposition of Benedict’s ongoing critique, published in T&T Clark’s A Guide for the Perplexed series, might carry the more apt title Benedict XVI and the Catholic Response to Postmodernity. Rowland, who analyzes several “subject areas which Ratzinger has himself identified as critical fronts in contemporary Catholic theology ” (1), structures her book around what Ratzinger has called “‘the fundamental crisis of our age:’ developing a Catholic understanding of the mediation of history in the realm of ontology” (8). Unlike some contemporary commentators, Ratzinger does not believe that the current cultural—and with it, ecclesial—crisis stems from the Second Vatican Council and the coinciding rebellions of the 1960s. According to Rowland, Ratzinger instead locates the disassociation of history and ontology in “the collapse of the prevailing Christian historical consciousness at the time of the Reformation” (96). Ontology, “the basic philosophical expression of the concept of continuity” (96), was rejected by Luther, whose individualist orientation and elevation of secular rulers over the Church introduced a radical break in the Christian understanding of salvation. Without ontology, truth and theological anthropology became victims of historical caprice. Thus in the early eighteenth century Giambattista Vico redefined truth from “that which is” to “that which we make” (122), paving the way for Hegel’s equation of being with historical process and Marx’s economic determinism. In 1968 Europe’s avant-garde rejected the “pure reason” of modernity and inaugurated a new era of “postmodernity” that promised “salvation through the globalization of capital and universal access to commodities” (160). Truth is now “that which we must do” to improve humanity through science (122). Ratzinger’s deep acquaintance with these epochal developments began as a seminarian when he immersed himself in the robust theological milieu of the post-war era. Rowland traces the seeds of this milieu to the early nineteenth century at the University of Tübingen , where Catholic thought first engaged the Romantic movement, 93 Book Reviews which favored history, culture, and beauty in reaction to Kant’s rationalism. The Tübingen theologians described God’s revelation in historical rather than positivistic terms, and they stressed the role of the individual in receiving revelation. In the twentieth century Cardinal Newman’s teachings on conscience and the development of doctrine became available in German and popular among the intellectuals whose books Ratzinger and his classmates were reading in the seminary. The young Ratzinger also encountered personalism through Martin Buber, and he developed his Christocentric understanding of revelation and history from St. Bonaventure courtesy of two theses by Romano Guardini. In fact, Rowland notes that a central theme of Ratzinger’s theology—that the essence of Christianity is an encounter with the person of Jesus Christ—is “one of those Guardinian watermarks ” (112) of his thought. Throughout the book Rowland points out other influences and antecedents in Ratzinger’s work, including Augustine’s epistemology; Josef Pieper on tradition, the relation of faith and reason, and the theological virtues; Henri de Lubac on secularism and communion ecclesiology; and Hans Urs von Balthasar on love and on the centrality of the Incarnation in human history. The centrality of the Incarnation carries particular import because Ratzinger proposes “the humanism of the Incarnation” in response “to the nihilist Romantics of the nineteenth century and the marketers of nihilism and philistinism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries” (46). Following de Lubac, Ratzinger identifies culture as “an opening to the divine;” thus he “believes that the uniqueness of Christian culture is rooted in the Incarnation and that all of its specific characteristics disintegrate when this belief is eclipsed” (28). In the modern era the West’s slide into secularism followed from this eclipse. Rowland argues that secularism is not a value-neutral standpoint; it is a “political theology which provides the infrastructure for…the ‘culture of death’” (160). Within this culture the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love “have been mutated, losing...