As I continue to press on in my dissertation research, investigating Joseph Ratzinger’s The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (the English translation of a major section of his Habilitationschrift, or “second dissertation”), one important issue I’m attending to is how he thinks about tradition. This is because, like history itself (as well as eschatology), tradition is a phenomenon constituted by time.
In his memoirs entitled Milestones (first published in Italian in 1997), the then future Pontiff writes that during his theological studies at Munich (prior to his doctorate),
‘Tradition’ was what could be proved on the basis of texts. Altaner, the patrologist from Würzburg … had proven in a scientifically persuasive manner that the doctrine of Mary’s bodily Assumption into heaven was unknown before the fifth century; this doctrine, therefore, he argued, could not belong to ‘apostolic tradition.’ And this was his conclusion, which my teachers at Munich shared. This argument is compelling if you understand ‘tradition’ strictly as the handing down of fixed formulas and texts. This was the position that our teachers represented. But if you conceive of ‘tradition’ as the living process by which the Holy Spirit introduces us to the fullness of truth and teaches us how to understand what previously we could not grasp (cf. John 16:12-13), then subsequent ‘remembering’ (cf. John 16:4, for instance) can come to recognize what it had not caught sight of previously and yet was already handed down in the original Word. But such a perspective was still quite unattainable by German theological thought.
The conception of tradition which Ratzinger here articulates is quite compatible with his presentation of St. Bonaventure’s logos of history as he (Ratzinger) articulates it in his Habilitationschrift. In that work Ratzinger’s Bonaventure parts company in significant ways with the eschatologically innovative Joachim of Fiori, yet all the while giving the Calabrian monk a qualified “high five” with respect to his provocative vision of a future: a kind of democratized sapientia nulliformis, a community of wise humans who peacefully enjoy an unmediated vision of God.
My claim here is that Ratzinger’s conception of tradition as an open “remembering” of content previously unacknowledged is a necessary condition for his endorsement of Bonaventure’s innovative Joachimite eschatology.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues against the benefit of writing (as opposed to oral speech), saying that written manuscripts undermine true understanding, and serve merely as a kind of “sub-memory” (hypomene). Be that as it may, this is precisely how I sometimes use my blog, as a location or a platform on which to store bits of text which I think will benefit me later.
This blog post is an example of such a use, and it contains a quotation and four paragraphs on Richard Hooker. (http://www.pbsusa.org/2009/08/19/scripture-tradition-and-reason-hookers-supposed-3-legged-stool/)
What Scripture doth plainly deliver, to that first place both of credit and obedience is due; the next whereunto is whatsoever any man can necessarily conclude by force of reason; after these the voice of the Church succeedeth. That which the Church by her ecclesiastical authority shall probably think and define to be true or good, must in congruity of reason over-rule all other inferior judgments whatsoever ( Laws, Book V, 8:2; Folger Edition 2:39,8-14).
We notice that he speaks of Scripture, reason and the voice of the Church, and in that order.
Hooker differs from the Puritans (Presbyterians) of his day in the relation of Scripture and reason. He is much nearer to Thomas Aquinas than to say Walter Travers or Thomas Cartwright or even to John Calvin or Theodore Beza. All these men agree that the Scripture delivers to us knowledge from God and that this knowledge is not available anywhere else in a world infected by sin. That knowledge pertains unto the identity of God as a Trinity of Persons, the Incarnation of the Second Person, our Lord Jesus Christ, the nature and means of salvation, the Christian hope and the mystery of the Church.
But Hooker departed from many of his fellow Elizabethans, especially the Puritans, in asserting that Scripture does not destroy nature but perfects it, that Scripture presupposes reason and requires its use and that Grace presupposes nature. For Hooker reason was God’s greatest gift to human beings, enabling them to understand God’s plan for the whole of reality, to situate themselves within it and to specify proper moral forms of human activity. This approach to Reason is rather different than that which is attached to the modern expression “Scripture, tradition and reason,” where reason is separated from Scripture and seems to be that understanding of reason’s place that we find in modern philosophy since the Enlightenment and the work of Immanuel Kant.
By “the voice of the Church” he meant the major decisions of ecumenical councils and of national churches which relate to important matters on which Scripture is silent or only supplies hints – e.g., the structure and content of Liturgy in terms of Rites and Ceremonial. These rules are morally and spiritually binding on Christians, part of the Christianity to which they are attached by providence and grace. They are not things indifferent left to the individual conscience.
Have you ever asked yourself, “What is good, and how can I know?”
In Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle teaches (according to Joe Sachs) that there are three “levels” of goodness: utility, pleasure, and beauty (in that order).
Let’s apply this hierarchy to the human activity of eating. I find that people eat for different reasons.
Some people eat merely for nutrition. I call this approach to eating “the food-as-fuel” approach. Fitness freaks in the 1990’s who advocate a diet of mainly rice cakes, runners who eat “runners goo” to maintain energy levels on a long run, or weight-lifters who consume whey as a means to increase muscle mass: these are all forms of eating as utility. Here one eats as a means to some other end, an extrinsic end: weight loss, added muscle mass, etc.
Others east for pleasure. For Aristotle, this motive is superior to utility, for eating for pleasure is an activity which is a means to an end which is intrinsic to the activity itself. Here one eats because food is delicious and tasty. One drinks, for example, because beer is pleasurable. The Christian tradition gives Aristotle a “high five” for advocating pleasure, and arguing not only that it is good, but that it is better than mere utility.
Finally, however, we come to what, for Aristotle, is the most noble level of the good: beauty. You see, body builders eat for utility; hedonists and “foodies” eat for pleasure. But there is one other group of people, one other “tribe,” which consists of folks who eat not for utility and not for pleasure, but for beauty.
Beauty itself.
This tribe is called the Christian Church, the Eucharistic community, the people of God. When we feast on the body and blood of Christ at the Table where Christ is the host and we are the guests, where God and man at table are sat down, we eat not for utility, not for pleasure, but for beauty.
Elsewhere in the Ethics Aristotle teaches that beauty is, in essence, completion. It is that of which nothing is lacking, nothing is needed. In the harmony of all its parts, it is complete and perfect. It is for this that Christians eat at the holy altar. Here, we eat not to get more physical energy, and not because the elements taste so good. Rather, it is here that the cosmos is completed in all its parts: God and man, heaven and earth, nature and supernature.
All of this is included in the ritual of Holy Eucharist, when we chew on and swallow the Word made flesh, and injest his body and blood. Not by ourselves, but with each other.
For years I have said, in various contexts and to various audiences, that for the New Testament writers, there are only two kinds of humans: Jews and Gentiles. This, for them (being good first century Jews), is how humanity is carved up. (Yes, one can “slice & dice” it at a finer level: in addition to Jew & Gentile, you also have other political demographic types such as Barbarian & Scythians, etc.—see Col 3:11.)
If this sounds to you like a scene from Quinton Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman’s character interviews John Travolta’s character with questions like “Are you an Elvis person or a Beatles person?” (although, technically, she never asks him this question), then you are onto something.
Nowhere is this division of the human race into two fundamental types, Jew and Gentile (or sometimes stated as “Jew and Greek”) more apparent than in Gal 2:15-16:
We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners; yet we know that a person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified.
If I were to teach an intro to philosophy of religion course (which I’d love to do), I would approach the course in the following way:
I. God according to “Natural Reason.”
A. Parmenides on Simple Being.
B. Aristotle’s Qualified “hi-5” to Parmenides.
• “P., you think you’re describing “Being,” but really you’re describing God.”
• “Yes, ultimate reality is simple, but we must respect sense perception.”
C. From Aristotle to Plotinus. Teasing out threeness from Divine Oneness.
II. God (& creation) according Revelation (or the Hebrew Scriptures).
A. Tautologies & Jewish Jibberish: “I am what I am”. Huh?!?
B. The opposite end of the cosmological spectrum from God: the tôhu vbôhu, terra vacua et inanis of Gen. 1:2. Sounds like “prime matter,” devoid of form & logos.
III. Putting it all together, both legacies fulfilled: the logos becomes flesh.
