Ne Dimittas Legem Matris Tuae

The center of theological learning in Germany has long been Tübingen, the beautiful little town on the river Neckar, inhabited mostly by students, who punt down the river on spring afternoons, gliding past the suitably romantic tower where the poet Hölderlin was confined in his madness, and refreshing themselves with bottled beer and bretzel, which they buy from the canny, tight-fisted Swabian townspeople. The uneasy relations between the students and the townspeople are a fitting symbol of Tübingen theology, which is characterized by a tension between enthusiastic Romanticism and skeptical rationalism. Philip Melancthon was a student at Tübingen in the early sixteenth century. In the eighteenth century Hölderlin, Hegel, and Schelling were famously roommates at the Protestant seminary. In the nineteenth century the Catholic theological faculty was revived and Johann Sebastian von Drey and Johann Adam Möhler founded the Catholic Tübingen School in theology, with its deeply Romantic sensibilities. In Protestant theology, the skeptical “younger” Tübingen School was the work of Ferdinand Christian Baur, one of the founders of the historical-critical method of biblical exegesis. Among Protestant theologians who either studied or taught in Tübingen were Karl Holl, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Ernst Käsemann, and Helmut Thielicke. Among the Catholics were Romano Guardini, Theodor Steinbüchel, Bernhard Häring, Hans Küng, and Josef Ratzinger, who took up a professorship in 1966.

The first volume of Peter Seewald’s biography of Pope Benedict XVI, which has now appeared in English translation, goes up to the end of Vatican II in 1965, the year before Ratzinger moved to Tübingen. Nevertheless, in reading it my thoughts turned to the town on the Neckar. I was reminded of a resolution that I myself made there as a child. My father was spending a research sabbatical at Tübingen University, and I was attending school for the first time (having been homeschooled up to that point). I was in third grade, and our teacher had just read us a story about a child who was misunderstood by his parents. “Why don’t the grown-ups understand?” a classmate of mine asked. “After all, they used to be children themselves.” “They don’t remember what it is like to be a child,” Frau Valverde, our teacher, answered. I was struck by the words, which seemed to me an indictment of the system of which Frau Valverde (a very Swabian lady, despite her Spanish name) was a part. I resolved in my heart not to forget as a grown-up what I knew as a child.

Of the theologians who brought in the new theological paradigm at Vatican II, Ratzinger was perhaps the one who most remembered what it was like to be a child, and was most faithful to his childhood piety. Ratzinger himself gave a poignant account of his own childhood in his autobiography, Milestones. Milestones is a gem of a book—simple, modest, but written with considerable depth and artistry. Seewald’s biography does not match the literary achievement of Ratzinger’s own work, but it does round out the picture somewhat.

What was it that Ratzinger knew as a child? I want to suggest two things in particular that were of great importance for his future work as a theologian. The first has directly to do with theology, and the second with authority.

The first, and most important, was the knowledge of the truths of the faith that he received through prayer—both the devotions of popular piety and the sacred liturgy. “What my memory recalls most sharply,” Ratzinger says about his childhood church in Tittmoning, “is the ‘Holy Sepulcher,’ with many flowers and colorful lights, that would be set up in this church between Good Friday and Easter and that, before any rational comprehension, brought home the mystery of death and resurrection to both my exterior and interior senses.” That contact with the mystery of Christ was to become the guiding light of Ratzinger’s life. It was deepened as he moved “by degrees” into the “the mysterious world of the liturgy.” He came to see this inexhaustible world of the liturgy as “a grand reality transcending all particular individuals and generations.” The kind of “knowledge” that contact with this reality gives is certain but indistinct. Many things are contained in it, in an implicit, hidden way. Ratzinger’s work as a theologian is largely concerned with drawing out what is implicit in the kind of knowledge that is received in the liturgy.

Reflecting on how he knew what he knew also helped Ratzinger formulate his chief contribution to the council: his understanding of the theology of revelation. Seewald’s biography shows just how important Ratzinger’s work was to the text of Dei Verbum, the council’s document on revelation. Indeed, Ratzinger’s vehement struggle against the pre-prepared schema on revelation, and the struggle that Cardinal Frings made on his advice, brought about a turning point in the council, which had been expected to rubber-stamp the neo-Scholastic schemata prepared by Roman theologians. Instead, the fathers largely abandoned neo-Scholastic language, thus bringing about a kind of paradigm shift in Catholic theology.

What Ratzinger objected to in neo-Scholastic accounts of revelation (as he understood them) was the reduction of revelation to a set of explicitly formulated statements. Instead, Ratzinger argued, revelation is the act of God revealing Himself. The definitive revelation is Jesus Christ: His words, His deeds, and His very person. And Jesus revealed Himself above all to His apostles, who lived with Him, listened to Him, saw Him, and touched Him with their hands. What He revealed to them they passed down to us: not only through the scriptures, but also through the whole way of life of the Church, and especially in the Mass. There is always more to what has been revealed than what can be captured in written formulations. The Church can always draw forth things that are contained in revelation, but have not yet been explicitly formulated.

But the objections made by Ratzinger’s neo-Scholastic opponents at the council are also important. They feared that orthodox texts would be interpreted in a modernist sense and the objectivity of revelation reduced to the subjective response of the Christian people. And, indeed, their fears were justified by the way many theologians after the council reduced revelation to the structure of human consciousness facing its transcendent horizon, or of human psychology with its religious sense. This was, of course, one of the issues that led to the famous break between the Concilium theologians (Rahner, Küng, Schillebeeckx, et al.), and the Communio theologians (Ratzinger, Balthasar, de Lubac) with their opposite interpretations of Dei Verbum.

While the Communio school had deep insights into revelation, I believe that certain ambiguities remained. To clarify these ambiguities, I think it would be necessary to synthesize Ratzinger’s insights with more Scholastic approaches. A first step would be to see that Ratzinger is actually closer to the Scholastic approach than might at first appear. Contrary to a “calculative” understanding of logic among certain neo-Scholastics, the best Scholastic accounts of logic follow Aristotle in seeing all knowledge as going back to “confused” first conceptions of things, which are full of insight. The aim of logical method is to make explicit what is already implicitly contained in those first conceptions. This is deeply analogous to the way Ratzinger thinks about theological principles.

The second thing that Ratzinger knew as a child, and refused to forget as an adult, is the goodness of authority. Seewald’s account suggests to me that Ratzinger learned this from his father. The elder Ratzinger was a police officer, and modeled a humane form of authority in service of the common good. In the Weimar years Ratzinger senior had to intervene constantly against National Socialist mobs. Thus his son saw clearly that the Nazis were at bottom a force of chaos, opposed to true order and authority. The Nazi propaganda suggesting that they alone could restore order was a lie.

This insight was to be crucial to Joseph Ratzinger in the post-conciliar years. Many other theologians had drawn opposite conclusions from the experience of the Third Reich. Seeing how some Christians used obedience and order as excuses for collaboration, they distrusted and were even hostile to ecclesiastical authority. We see this very clearly, for example, in Bernhard Häring. In German Protestant theology this tendency was even more pronounced. Helmut Koester, the Protestant New Testament scholar, once remarked to my father that obedience is the root of all evil. Ratzinger was mostly free of such ressentiment.

Unfortunately, Ratzinger as a young theologian did not understand the severity of the threat of anti-authoritarian theologians. During the council he made common cause with them in the attempt to bring about a new paradigm in ecclesiology. Ratzinger advised Frings to reject the prepared schema on the Church for using “rather legal language, deriving more from theological textbooks than from Scripture or the church fathers.” Ratzinger wanted to focus more on the Church as communion of many in the life, love, and truth of God than on the Church as a juridically perfect society. The emphasis on communion is of course important, but it is in no way opposed to understanding the Church as a societas perfecta. The juridical language is based, in fact, upon an understanding of society as communion in a common good. In the case of the Church, this common good is Christ Himself. Ratzinger did not adequately appreciate the vital insights that the Roman School of ecclesiastical public law—from Tarquini and Cavagnis to Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the great opponent of Cardinal Frings (and Ratzinger) at the council. What the Roman School realized was the necessity of a strong juridical account of the Church as a perfect society, with a juridical authority independent of earthly powers, to the struggle against the secularizing power of liberalism. The change in ecclesiological attitudes following the council led to a kind of auto-secularization in the perception of the Church. Ratzinger was later to lament this development, but he failed to anticipate it.

Cardinal Müller likes to call Ratzinger “the Mozart of theology.” The expression is very apt. “Mozart has always moved me profoundly,” Ratzinger himself said, “because he is so light and at the same time so deep.” Ratzinger’s theology retains a lightness and brilliancy for all its depth. He has nothing of the ponderous technicality of many of his colleagues. There are also many more accidental resemblances. Ratzinger grew up near Mozart’s native Salzburg—the glorious baroque city above the river Salzach—and often visited its cathedral to hear the Church music. As a teenager he went to concerts at the Salzburg festival. “Ever since [Ratzinger’s] earliest childhood,” Seewald writes, “Salzburg had stood for cheerfulness, beauty and a kind of heavenly peace.” Ratzinger’s theology is more a Salzburg theology than a Tübingen theology.