Posted on: October 28th, 2017 Ratzinger & Tradition
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.
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