The text
Karl Rahner
THE
CONTENT
OF FAITH
The Best of Karl Rahner’s
Theological Writings
Edited by Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt
Translation edited by Harvey D. Egan, S.J.
CROSSROAD
NEW YORK
•
This printing: 2000
The Crossroad Publishing Company
370 Lexington Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Originally published as Rechenschaft des G/aubens. Karl Rahner-Lesebuch
© Verlag Herder Freiburg im Breisgau
Benziger Verlag Zurich 1979.
English translation© 1993 by The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rahner, Karl, 1904-1984
[Rechenschaft des Glaubens. English]The content of faith : the best of Karl Rahner’s theological writings I edited by Karl Lehmann and Albert Raffelt ; translation edited by Harvey D. Egan.
p.
em.
Translation of: Rechenschaft des Glaubens.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8245-1221-9 (cloth)
I. Theology.
I. Lehmann, Karl, 1936-
. II. Raffelt, Albert.
III. Egan, Harvey D.
IV. Title.
BX89l.R35213
1993
230′ .2- dc20
92-27765
CIP
Contents
Translation Editor’s Preface xi
Introduction
Karl Rahner: A Portrait, by Karl Lehmann
WHAT IS C HRISTIANITY?
1 . A Short Formula of the Christian Faith 45
2. The Sacramental Structure of the Christian Salvation-Reality 49
3. Christianity and World Religions 5 1
4 . Christianity Is Not an Ideology 55
5. Jesus Christ: The Synthesis 63
6. Why Remain a Christian? 66
THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENC E
7. The Mystery o f the Human Person 73
8. Nature as C reation 82
9. Life 85
1 0. The Human Person as God’s Creature 89
1 1 . The Human Spirit 90
1 2 . “You Ar e Dust! ” 92
1 3. Freedom Received from and Directed toward God 96
1 4. Freedom as the Total and Finalizing Self-Mastery of the Subject 1 00
1 5. Freedom and Ensnarement in Guilt 1 03
1 6. Love: The Basic Human Act 1 07
1 7. Propositional Knowledge and Primordial Consciousness 1 1 4
1 8. Intellectual Honesty and Human Decision 1 1 6
1 9. The Divided and Enigmatic Nature of Humanity 1 1 8
20. Individuality and Community 1 2 1
2 1 . The C hild 1 23
v
vi • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
22 . The Challenge of Growing Old 129
23. The Pilgrimage of Life
1 3 1
2 4. Human Death 1 35
2 5. On Work 1 37
2 6. Patience
138
2 7. On Illness
1 4 1
28. Renunciation and Self-Realization 1 44
29. Laughter 1 48
30. On Getting About 1 52
3 1 . Seeing and Hearing 1 54
32 . Primordial Words
1 59
33. Hearer of the Word 1 64
34. The Contemporary Inner Threat to Truth 1 69
35. “Freedom”: A Contemporary Slogan 1 74
36. Chris tian Faith and Secularization 1 77
37. When Are We Peace-Loving? 1 79
38. Creative Hope for Peace
1 80
39. The World and the Angels I 1 82
40. The World and the Angels II 1 88
4 1 . The World and History as the Event of God’s Self-Communication 1 93
42 . Evil and the Devil 1 96
43. The Need of Redemption 1 99
ON THE LIVING GOD
44. The Word “God” 205
45. Images of God 2 1 1
46. Troubled Atheism? 2 1 3
47. God Is Far from Us 2 1 6
48. Natural Knowledge of God? 22 0
49. Experience of Self and Experience of God 222
50. God Is No Scientific Formula 22 7
5 1 . The True God 230
52 . God in the Old Testament 232
53. God in the New Tes tament 233
54. The Uniqueness of God in the New Tes tament 237
55. God as Person in the New Testament 240
56. On the Personal Being of God 247
57. God Is Love 250
58. God, Our Father 257
59. Non-Chris tian and Chris tian Conceptions of God 259
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60. God and Creatures 2 6 1
6 1 . God’s Self-Disclosure and the Human Word 2 64
62 . A Prayer: God of My Life 266
JESUS CHRIST
63. Jesus of Nazareth between Jews and Christians 2 73
64. Seeking Jesus Christ 2 77
65. Approaches to Jesus Christ 2 79
66. “I Believe in Jesus Christ” 283
67. The Birth of the Lord 286
68. The Everydayness of Jesus’ Life 289
69. Jesus’ Self-Consciousness 291
70. The Core of Jesus’ Proclamation 293
7 1 . The Will for the Cross 297
72 . “Behold the Man” 298
73. The High Point of Jesus’ Mission 302
74. The Cross as the Revelation of God’s Love 304
75. Gratitude for the Cross 308
76. Jesus’ Resurrection 3 1 1
77. The Easter Message 3 1 9
78. The Glorified Lord 32 4
79. Christ’s Ascension into Heaven 32 7
80. The Eternal Significance of Jesus’ Humanity 332
8 1 . The Christological Dogma 334
82 . The Credibility of the Dogma on the Incarnation 337
83. The Two Basic Types of Christology 339
84. The Christian Doctrine of Redemption 345
85. Incarnation and Imitation 348
86. A Prayer to Jesus Christ 35 I
THE HOLY SPIRIT
87. The Holy Spirit as the Fruit of Redemption 355
88. Pentecost 359
89. The Holy Spirit and the Church 361
90. The Holy Spirit and the Mysticism of Everyday Life 367
9 1 . The Triune God I 375
92 . The Triune God II 377
93. The Triune God and Monotheism 382
94. A Prayer at Pentecost 384
viii • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
THE PEOPLE OF GOD IN HISTORY
95. Witness to the World’s Salvation 389
96. The Church: The Basic Sacrament of the World’s Salvation 390
97. The Closure of Revelation 40 1
98. Scripture as the Book of the Church 402
99. Truth and the Development of Dogma 406
1 00. What Is “Demythologizing?” 409
1 0 1 . The Holy Church 4 1 0
1 02 . The Sinful Church 4 1 3
1 03. The Church and Freedom 4 1 6
1 04. The Priest 4 1 7
1 05. Ministry of the Word 4 1 9
1 06. Women and the Priesthood 424
1 07. Charisms 433
1 08. Religious Life 437
1 09. Religious Life and Change 440
1 1 0. Pastoral Care of the Laity 443
1 1 1 . Mission 449
1 12 . Mary and the Church 45 1
1 1 3. The Feast of Mary’s Immaculate Conception 455
1 1 4. Mary’s Assumption 459
1 1 5. Does Mary Divide the Denominations? 463
1 1 6. The Marian Dogmas and Protestant Theology 465
1 1 7. The Roman Catholic Church 466
1 1 8. Toward Ecumenical Dialogue 469
1 1 9. Theses for the Unity of the Churches 476
120. Dangers for the Church 478
12 1 . Trust within the Church 479
122 . A Servant Church 483
123. The Church as a Tiny Flock 485
124. A Declericalized Church 487
125. Democratization of the Church 49 1
126. A Letter from the Pope in the Year 2020 492
127. The Church as a Critic of Society 494
128. Assent to the Actual Church 495
12 9. What the People Actually Believe 501
CHRISTIAN LIFE
1 30. One Must Name the Mystery 507
1 3 1 . Prayer as the Fundamental Act of Human Existence 509
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1 32. Pray Daily Life! 5 1 0
1 33. The Prayer o f Petition I 5 1 3
1 34. The Prayer of Petition II 5 1 8
1 35. Love o f God 520
1 36. Baptism and Confirmation 524
1 37. Original Sin 526
1 38. Sin and Guilt 531
1 39. Venial Sin 535
1 40. Morality without Moralizing 537
1 4 1 . Existential Ethics 543
1 42. Penance and the Anointing of the Sick 544
1 43. The Eucharist 547
1 44. The Meal of Pilgrims 550
1 45. The Mystery of Christian Marriage 553
1 46. The Sobriety of Christian Life 556
1 47. Calm Readiness for God 560
1 48. Christian Flight from the World 562
1 49. Christian Joy in the World 566
1 50. Grace and Dying with Christ 568
1 5 1 . To the Greater Glory of God 5 7 1
1 52. The Unity o f Love of God and Neighbor 579
1 53. Internal Threat to the Faith 58 7
1 54. The Christian in the World 588
1 55. The Missionary Task of the Christian 592
1 56. Christianity and Literature 597
1 57. Faith and Culture 599
1 58. A Prayer to the Lord Who Is Present 604
HOPE IN GOD
1 59. Utopia and Reality 609
1 60. Christian Pessimism 6 1 2
1 6 1 . The Advent Person 6 1 6
1 62. The Real Future 6 1 9
1 63. The Christian Understanding of Death 625
1 64. The Intermediate State 63 1
1 65. Judgment 632
1 66. Purgatory 633
1 67. Eternal Damnation? 634
1 68. Eternity in Time 637
1 69. Hope of Eternal Life 64 1
1 70. The Beatific Vision 649
x • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
I 7 1 . Heaven 65 1
1 72 . Resurrection of the F lesh 652
1 73. Christian Optimism 657
1 74. Prayer for Hope 658
Selected Bibliography 663
Translation Editor’s Preface
Karl Rahner was a Jesuit for sixty-two years, a priest for fifty-two years, and he led a “theological life” for almost forty-five years. H e taught theology a t lnnsbruck, Munich, and Mu nster, and h e lectured all over the world. Four thousand written works, paperbacks in excess of one million copies, numerous entries in multivolume theological encyclopedias and reference works, as well as several volumes of television, radio, and newspaper interviews make up his bibliography.
Not only did Rahner write on almost every significant theological topic, but he also entered into dialogue with atheistic, Buddhist, Jewish, Marxist, Muslim, Protestant, and scientific thinkers the world over. H is unanswered questions have provided fresh points of departure for a host of theological thinkers. Add to this his significant impact upon the Second Vatican Council, his fourteen honorary doctoral degrees, and the large number of doctoral students he directed, and one can see why he is aptly called “the quiet mover of the Roman Catholic Church”
and “the Father of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century. “
So prolific and variegated is his work that one should speak of the “many Rahners.” He enjoyed the sobriquet “theological atomic physicist,” endured the often-misunderstood label “transcendental Thomist,” and eschewed the epithet “Denzinger theologian.” He considered it essential to wrest the hidden vitality remaining in the often-desiccated school theology of his time and to transpose for the contemporary person the traditional wisdom he had mastered. Those who dismiss Rahner as an abstract and convoluted thinker overlook the “mysticism of everyday life,” which runs throughout his writings.
Rahner the pastor, the homilist, the spiritual director, and the teacher of prayer is never very far from the surface of even his most difficult works.
Rahner not only explained critically and precisely what the Christian faith is, but he also sought to unite people with it. To Rahner, theology is more than faith seeking understanding; it is as well a mystagogy that gives the people of God experiential union with the faith by leading them into their own deepest mystery. Thus, he was more a “sapiential”
than an “academic” theologian.
xi
xii • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
I have been reading Karl Rahner for almost thirty years and teaching his thought for over fifteen. I consider this anthology to be the best point of entry into the life’s work of this remarkable theologian. No anthology can substitute for reading all the works of this theological titan. Nonetheless, as the best cross-section of Rahner’s theological writings available, l consider it the “Norton’s” of all the anthologies of his work.
With a view to an English-speaking audience, I slightly emended Lehmann’s introduction, eliminated extensive German footnotes, and added others. ! altered verb tenses in the Lehmann “portrait” of Rahner, because Rahner died on 30 March 1 984. Footnotes were substituted for the awkward “list of sources” section of the German text. Corrections, but not major retrans1ations, of already existing English translations, were made. Subheadings within individual selections were eliminated.
Numbers 39 and 40, “The World and the Angels,” were added, not only because they illustrate Rahner’s fascinating angelology, but also because they explicate his notion of evolutionary creation as “created self-transcendence” that is not only becoming, but also becoming more. Number 92 , “The Triune God,” focuses upon the most creative theological reflections on the Christian mystery to occur in hundreds of years.
Number 1 06, “Women and the Priesthood,” addresses not only a timely topic, but also illustrates how Rahner approached authoritative declarations of the magisterium with critical reverence. One of the most daring approaches to ecumenical dialogue may be seen in number 1 1 9,
“Theses for the Unity of the Churches.” Number 12 6, “A Letter from the Pope in the Year 2020,” is a masterpiece of Rahner’s view on the papacy and on a more vitally spiritual church. Number 129, “What the People Actually Believe,” underscores a frequent Rahnerian theme: the need for the magisterium to listen to the “catechism of the heart” of the faithful.
Number 1 4 1 , “Existential Ethics,” offers a critical corrective to the essentialistic ethics that dominated Catholic theology for so long. To Rahner, the human person not only shares a common human nature with others, but is also unique. Ethics must reflect this anthropological fact. This entry also indicates the influence of St. Ignatius of Loyola on Rahner, especially Ignatius’s spirituality of the discernment of spirits.
Number 1 59 illustrates Rahner’s emphasis on a spirituality that loves the world, maintains its hope in eternal life, and never reduces God to an element in this world. Number 1 60, “Christian Pessimism,” underscores Rahner’s conviction that human finitude and sin will never permit an intraworldly utopia, that everything must pass through death,
TRANSLATION EDITOR’S PREFACE
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and that God alone must be a Christian’s true utopia. Numbers 1 64, 1 66, 1 70, and 1 71 bring his rich eschatology into sharper relief. Finally, number 1 73, “Christian Optimism,” illustrates his strong conviction that no matter what life may bring, everything “ultimately ends in the arms of an eternally good, eternally powerful God.”
Harvey D. Egan, S.J.
Boston College
INTRODUCTION
Karl Rahner: A Portrait’
by Karl Lehmann
I. HIS LIFE AND THE HISTORY OF HIS WORK
Karl Rahner was born on 5 March 1 904 in Freiburg im Breisgau. His parents, Professor Karl Rahner (1 868-1 934) and Luise Rahner, whose maiden name was Trescher (1 875-1 976), came from the Freiburg area.
Just like their parents, the seven brothers and sisters (Karl was in the middle) were true descendents of the Alemanni tribe: a bit reserved and brooding, but quite reflective and with a somewhat melancholy humor.
Karl Rahner grew up in the city from 1 908, when the family came to F reiburg, until 1 922 . His father was a respected Gymnasium professor in Pfullendorf and Emmendingen, and later active in the training of teachers in Freiburg. His father’s ancestors came from Tirol. His mother was uncomplicated and brave, but very intelligent and devout. The soul of the home, she created the family’s Catholic and open atmosphere. All seven children passed the matriculation examination (Arbitur) which admitted them to university studies, and they did go on to study.
Hugo, who was about four years older than Karl, entered the Jesuit order in 1 9 1 9. Both Karl and Hugo had great praise for Professor Meinrad Vogelbacher, the religion teacher who taught them both. Karl Rahner did not have much to say about his school days. He received the usual schooling “with good, but completely ordinary results,” and obtained his Arbitur.
In April 1 922 he told his brother Hugo that he, too, was going to enter the Jesuit order, but that Hugo had in no way inf luenced him to do so.
Then came two years in the novitiate at Feldkirch (in the Voralberg).
I. Slightly emended for an English-speaking audience. -Translation editor.
2 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
After three months of further humanistic education, he studied philosophy for the usual three years at Feldkirch and at Pullach, near Munich ( 1 92 4-2 7). According to Jesuit custom, Rahner taught Latin in the juniora te at Feldkirch for two years ( 1 92 7-29), and studied theology at Valkenburg (Holland) from 1 929 to 1 933. Cardinal Faulhaber ordained Rahner at St. Michael’s Church in Munich, on 26 July 1 932 . His religious superiors decided tha t he should pursue a scholarly career in the history of philosophy. Accordingly, in 1 934, after the so-called tertianship (the final year of spiritual training), he was sent to his home-city of Freiburg for doctoral studies in philosophy at the university there .
1. Beginnings and Influences
For more than forty years Karl Rahner has been a towering figure in theology. His early philosophical publications, Spirit in the World (1 939)2
and Hearers of the Word ( 1 941),3 placed him in the front ranks of the young and gifted shock-troops of Catholic philosophers, who broke out of the narrow confines of the neoscholastic school philosophy in the 1 930s by bringing into prominence, again, the original Thomistic intellectual heritage through confrontation with post-Kantian, modern philosophy. Joseph Marecha l -and, perhaps to a less explicit degree , Erich Przywara – were his clearly identifiable mentors.
Among his philosophical companions were , above all, his friends J. B. Lotz , G. Siewert, M. Muller, and B. Welte. In Martin He idegger’s seminars at the University of Freiburg they all learned the art of philosophical questioning , the meditative pene tration of incessant thinking , and the mastery of alert interpretation.
But to Freiburg the young Karl Rahner brought with him other, and no Jess essential, experiences. His first publications4 bear witness to an intense reading of Origen, the fathers of the church, and the grea t mystics of the high Middle Ages, and the ever-present influence of his older brother Hugo. His reworking in German of M. Viller’s 1 930 book, Aszese und Mystik in der Viiterzeit (F reiburg i. Br. : Herder, 1 989, new unchanged edition), published in 1 939, is a result of these concerns.
Very early on, the education and training in the Society of Jesus developed that triad of his tension-filled spirituality that dominated Ra hner’s thinking and action to the day he died: ( 1 ) the restrained passion 2. Trans. William V. Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968). For practical purposes, I have eliminated Lehmann’s extensive German footnotes and added some of my own.
-Translation Editor.
3. Trans. Michael Richards (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 969). This seriously flawed translation is soon to be replaced by one done by Joseph Donceel.
4. See, for example, nos. 6-7, Theological Investigations XVI, trans. David Moreland (New York: Seabury Press, 1 979), 81-134.
INTRODUCTION
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of a deep personal piety; (2 ) the constant struggle with objective forms in the church, theology, and obsolete forms of life; and (3) finding God in all things.5 The collection of meditations Encounters with Silence, 6
which came into being – not by accident, and not without an inner connection – with the work on his projected dissertation, Spirit in the World, is a helpful book for many to this day. It offers a good insight into the depth of the spiritual forces and dynamics at work in his theologica l thinking .
At the same time, i t i s from this vantage point that one can appreciate wha t has been Rahner’s hallmark from the start: his concrete concern for the believer. Although he never explicitly associated himself with the proponents of the “kerygmatic theology” of his day, this proclamation-related approach to theology, in Innsbruck during the 1 930s, involved the intense effort of his closest Jesuit colleagues and was well-known to him. Also in everything , in his philosophica l, pa tristic, spiritual, and pastoral writings, there lay hidden a secret revol t of his vita l and original faith against the bland and desicca ted scholastic philosophy and theology given to him during his studies, according to the long tra dition of his religious order.
Granted tha t Rahner, the young student and teacher, may have been skep tically reserved toward this “Scholasticism stuff,” still it is clear that, in almost every area , he certainly mastered this immense mass of learning in the church’s tradition. It is also obvious tha t he quietly came to terms with it repea tedly and sought to make it fruitful by formula ting it in a different way.
The many years of activity in this school “of hard knocks” did not rob this bright spirit of the desire to think, as it had so many others.
Ra ther, it gave him wings, disciplined his “objective” reflection, and required him again and again to bring his new vision into contact with the church’s tra dition. La ter, Rahner said of himself: “But if I’m going to sing my pra ises here I should say that this didn’t happen by presenting a thought-system different from scholastic theology . . . . I tried to ferret out the inner power and dynamism which is hidden within scholastic theology. Scholastic theology offers so many problems, and is so dynamic, tha t it can develop within itself, and then, by means of a certain qualitative leap , can surpass itself. As a result, even as a simple scholastic theologian, one can make considerable progress.”7
5. See Theological Investigations Ill, trans. Karl H. Kruger and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 967).
6. Trans. James M. Demske (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1 960).
7. “Grace as the Heart of Human Existence,” Faith in a Wintry Season, ed. Paul Imhof and Hubert Biallowons, trans. ed. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 990), 1 7.
4 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
2. Basic Studies and Breakthrough
The irony of history and a Ca tholic philosophy professor did not want Karl Rahner to teach philosophy, as his religious order had originally intended. The incident is well known. Martin Honecker, Karl Rahner’s dissertation director at Freiburg, did not accept his dissertation Spirit in the World (Tf XVII, 243, “my philosophical thesis for M. Honegger [sic I was turned down”). After so long a preparation, the switch to theology happened very quickly, due primarily to the shortage of teachers.
Soon Rahner received his doctorate in theology at Innsbruck. His stillunpublished dissertation of 1 36 pages was “£ latere Christi: The Origin of the Church as the Second Eve out of the Side of Christ, the Second Adam: An Investigation into the typological Meaning of John 1 9:34”
(1 936). In 1 937 he received his Habilitation (postdoctoral degree) and was appointed to the faculty as a professor of Catholic dogma on the basis of his earlier works in patristics and the history of dogma. He taught at 1nnsbruck from 1 937 until the spring of 1 964, except for the interruption brought on by the Nazis and the war.
The following years gave birth, in addition to the already mentioned more comprehensive books, to his first great scholastically formula ted articles on uncreated grace, to writings on the theological question of
“concupiscence,” and to his only biblical-theologica lly oriented article,
“Theos in the New Testament.”8
From the very beginning the Rahnerian aspect of his theology stamped his specific teaching assignment. Above all, his intensive work on grace and on the history and systematic theology of the sacrament of penance determine the essential structure and the hermeneutical profile of this doctrinal theologian to this very day. His patristic and historical-dogma tic interest now turned its attention to more precise research in the early history of the sacrament of penance , which resulted in numerous articles published between 1 948 and 1958.9
In addition to his theology on the sacrament of penance, the focal points of his teaching at lnnsbruck were : creation, the primordial human condition, and grace. Extensive and frequently hectographed manuscripts of those lectures in doctrinal theology are an important source for the unfolding of Rahner’s theology.
Shortly after he began to teach at l nnsbruck, he was interrupted for almost ten years. In 1 938 the National Socialists dissolved the theological faculty. But it continued, in part, in Sitten/Wallis, where Hugo Rahner worked. Karl Rahner lived in Vienna from 1939 to 1 944, where 8. These articles are in Theological Investigations I, trans. Cornelius Ernst, O.P.
(Baltimore: Helicon Press, 196 1 ) .
9 . Theological Investigations X V. trans. Lionel Swain (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 982).
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he collaborated in numerous ways – preaching, lecturing , g iving retreats, teaching courses, and providing theological expertise – in the pastoral institute directed by the prelate K. Rudolf. After a brief interlude spent in the pastoral care of the local residents and displaced persons in lower Bavaria toward the end of the war in 1 944 to 1 945, Rahner taught theology at Berchmanskolleg in Pullach near Munich until 1 948, a period he called a kind of “emergency theology.” Rahner often emphasized that this unpropitious period left almost no time for real scholarly work.
Prolific publication in the area of spiritual theology took place right after the war. More than one hundred thousand copies of his Lente n sermons On Prayer, 1 0 which were delivered in bombed-out Munich in 1 946, circulated in the German language alone. This book is certainly one of Rahner’s most read and most helpful publications. Two other aspects of his theological interest appeared during these years: his explicit attention to the church’s pastoral and pastoral-theological situation and questions of church reform.
3. Difficulties and Obstacles
Despite all sorts of criticism, Rahner engaged, cautiously, in a positive discussion with situation ethics. The thunderstorms caused by the encyclical Humani generis (1950) bypassed Rahner for the time being.
The penetrating essay on the problem of the relationship between nature and grace shows his independent creative power as applied to timely que stions. II
An almost five-hundred page , comprehensive study – from the perspective of the history of dogma and systematic theology – of the
“new” Marian dogma of 1 950 was not published because of disagree ments, which reached Rome , among the censors within his re ligious order. This study, unpublished even to this day, would have been the only serious theological work written in German on Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. One can only guess what its ecumenical contribution to this dogma would have been. This often-mimeographed manuscript, which appeared in many editions, is the source of his extensive treatise on death, and the essay on the development of dogma.12
In a 1 954 address, Pius XII publicly rejected a portion of Rahner’s 1 0. No translator named (New York: Paulist Deus Books, 1 968).
I I . “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace,” Theological Investigations /, 297-3 1 7.
1 2. On the Theology of Death, trans. C. H. Henkey, revised by W. J. O’Hara, 2d edition (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 967); “The Development of Dogma,” Theological Investigations I, 39-77.
6 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
courageous theological reflections in his The Celebration of the Eucharist, 13 quoted out of context, of course, and imprecisely interpreted, but without mentioning anyone’s name. The “quotation” was given to the pope in such a way that he suspected nothing about the hidden target of his address, for this had been concealed by Father Robert Leiber, S.J., the pope’s private secretary.
A far greater conflict occurred in 1 962 , just before the start of the Second Vatican Council. There is no doubt that a certain circle wanted to limit Rahner’s publicity and activity in view of the address “Do Not Stifle the Spirit,” 14 given at the Austrian Catholic Congress on 1 June 1 962 .
This lecture seemed to be the suitable excuse for imposing on Rahner a kind of watered-down “prohibition to publish” without previous Roman censorship. The Paulusgesellschaft, 15 comprised of an overwhelming number of German-speaking Catholic academicians and chaired by the then German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, gathered signatures on Rahner’s behalf. Archbishop Herman Shaufele of Freiburg im Breisgau also intervened because he was the “protector” of the multi-volume Lexikon fiir Theologie und Kirche and feared work on this project would stop, because Rahner was the key editor. These, along with other initiatives, persuaded Pope John XX III not to enforce the prohibition, but it was never lifted. Characteristic until the day he died was Rahner’s attitude toward such difficulties. 16
4. Theological Investigations
What only the limited and specialized world of theological experts knew about Rahner’s widely diverse works – published in such varied ways – became available for a wider audience when the collected 1 3. With Angelus Hauss ling, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 968).
1 4. Theological Investigations Vll, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 97 1 ), 72-87.
1 5. See Rahner’s laudatory remarks concerning the Paulusgesellschaft in his preface to Theological Investigations V, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 966).
1 6. In I Remember: An Autobiographical Interview (trans. Harvey D. Egan [New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 985 ]), 63, Rahner says about this episode: “First, I would say that all the things that happened did not affect me as terribly as they might affect young theologians today. You see, if a person is a member of a religious order, a Jesuit, and really takes into account that his religious superior can send him to India or to the African bush – and that can happen without further ado – then one does not gel so frightfully worked up about getting into occasional difficulties with Rome over one’s theological work. When the Congregation of Faith in Rome under Cardinal Ottaviani once said that I could write only in conjunction with a special Roman censor, then I said to myself: ‘Well, I just won’t write anymore, and then the maller is over and done with, right?’ But nothing came of it because the council arrived. And according to Roman methods, such instructions are then silently forgotten. But you see from this that in the old days a Catholic theologian didn’t get as worked up about this sort of thing as one does today. “
INTRODUCTION
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articles appeared in 1 954 to 1 955 as the first two volumes of Theological InvestigationsY Here was one of the few theologians capable of rethinking the church’s tradition freshly and radically. Rahner intended through this collection of essays to “confirm young theologians in the conviction that Catholic theology has no reason to rest on its laurels, fine though those may be; that on the contrary it can and must advance, and precisely, so that it may remain true to its own laws and its tradition.”18 Perhaps it was precisely this unusual viewpoint that was fascinating. Here was a representative of Catholic theology honestly confessing that there were many stones, and not much bread, in the centuries-old cupboard of church tradition. But this was no superficial move to accommodate the “spirit of the times,” nor a self-forgetful sneering at the highly significant questions posed by Protestant theology. It was clear that precisely here one did Catholic theology in an unquestioning, unpretentious, “obvious,” unhampered encounter with the problems posed by modern philosophy, exegesis, and the natural sciences. Rahner’s view came to fruition in the collection of essays in the first two volumes of the Theological Investigations. The third volume, which appeared in 1 956 and was subtitled The Theology of the Spiritual Life, made it immediately and absolutely clear that a Christian could really live with, and even die with, this theological giant as a mentor.
Karl Rahner’s reputation grew extraordinarily in those years. It seemed as if the great success and the ready acceptance of these certainly difficult to read volumes now opened all the previously closed sources of his thinking. All his energy seemed unleashed. He felt himself entitled to speak and to fight. In an unusually short space of time, one important theological contribution followed another. They were collected especially in volumes IV ( I 960) and V ( I 962) of the Theological Investigations, and translated into many languages. When Rahner died in 1 984, there were sixteen German volumes.
5. Contributions to Theology and Participation at the Second Vatican Council
During this period he also began the long years of work on the second edition of the monumental Lexikon fiir Theologie und Kirche ( 1 95 7 -65) and on the Quaestiones Disputatae series ( 1 958ff.), which he coedited with Heinrich Fries. The collection of pastoral theological es-1 7. Theological Investigations /; Theological Investigations II, trans. Karl H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 963).
18. Theological investigations I, xxii.
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says Sendung und Gnade (1 959) followed.19 Soon thereafter came the scientific-theoretical plan for Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, which appeared in four volumes from 1 964 to 1 969.
These were unimaginably productive years. If Rahner had withdrawn from real life and from the church’s spontaneous needs during these years, then one assumes that he certainly could have written a great “Catholic systematic theology” in the seclusion of his study. But he decided otherwise. This became especially evident when he took over the chief responsibility for publishing along with J. Hofer the Lexikon fiir Theologie und Kirche. For Rahner the best of theology should not just remain stuck in a few elite heads, but should be made available for the use of all those with responsibility in the church. He was invited to speak or to lecture in almost every major middle-European city and university. Translations of his books – including the formidable Theological Investigations – spread abroad in all major languages.
His success undercut the untrue claims that Rahner spoke with teutonic obscurity and that he was all but impossible to understand.
Perhaps the starting point for many of his reflections – “school theology” – is the reason his way of thinking attained international acclaim and acceptance. Every theologian knew the state of the question from his or her own study of the traditional theology, and thus could more easily follow its further development. And the success of his mature systematic synthesis, Foundations of Christian Faith ( 1 976; ten German editions and translations into all major and many minor languages)20
underscores his continuing appeal in international circles.
In 1 960, before the Second Vatican Council, Rahner was named an advisor to the commission on the sacraments, although it never made use of his expertise. As we have already seen, ultraconservatives attempted to have Rahner disqualified just before the council. However, Cardinal Konig of Vienna made Rahner his advisor, thus opening up the possibility for him to collaborate, from the beginning, as a peritus (expert) on the theological commission. Soon he was officially named a peritus.
Only now can the history of Rahner’s influence on the Second Vatican Council be written. In so doing one must not think first of the individual sentences he wrote in the conciliar documents. Rahner collaborated wholeheartedly in the teamwork of the many who put 1 9. Published in three English volumes as: The Christian Commitment: Essays in Pastoral Theology, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1 963); Christian in the Market Place, trans. Cecily Hastings (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1 966); Theology for Renewal: Bishops, Priests, Laity, trans. Cecily Hastings and Richard Strachan (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1 964).
20. Trans. William V. Dych (New York: Seabury Press, 1 978).
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together the final drafts. He never considered any document to be the product of a single author. But the nature of the situation demanded that Rahner defend one position rather than another.
Rahner’s influence, however, came not only from his collaboration during the council, but also from the international preconciliar acceptance of his theological ideas whose conciliar spirit paved the way for this council. In virtue of his “authority” Rahner succeeded, with Y. Congar, E. Schillebeeckx, J. Ratzinger, C. Moeller, G. Philips, H. Kung, and others, in supporting those forces that wanted to reject the prepackaged and already prepared schemata, and to break through into freer theological territory.
Cardinal Dopfner also made Rahner his theological advisor. In this way Rahner participated indirectly in some of the council’s critical moments in the autumn of I 962 when the German-speaking, French, and Dutch bishops were able to influence important preliminary issues: for example, the selection of the episcopal members of the various conciliar commissions and the withdrawal of the schema on the “sources of revelation.”
Rahner attached great importance to the statement that the collaboration among bishops and theologians was in no way “organiz ed” that it was not, as some claimed, a conspiracy of theologians from the Rhine’s right and left banks – but rather something that arose spontaneously. His numerous lectures to the various bishops’ conferences on conciliar themes made him an unpretentious but important advisor to many council fathers. Here his brilliant mastery of Latin served him well. His coediting of the documents and the commentaries on the texts of the Second Vatican Council (three supplementary volumes of Lexikon fiir Theologie und Kirche and the Kleines Konzilkompendium
[with H. Vorgrimler]), and his numerous interpretations of conciliar statements, have made Rahner, to our day, a trailblaz er who made this council a living reality.6. In the Postconci/iar Situation
On 1 April 1 964, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, Rahner succeeded Romano Guardini as the holder of the chair for Christian “world view”
and the philosophy of religion at the University of Munich. His many obligations connected with the council burdened him while he held this chair. Ultimately Rahner wanted to rejoin a theological faculty in the postconciliar period. Besides, the time for “professors of world views”
was over. Because the theology faculty at the University of Munich could not fulfill his wish to direct doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations, Rahner accepted a call to the Catholic theological faculty at the University of Munster, which had conferred on him an honorary doctorate in 1 964.
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There he taught dogma and the history of dogma from I April 1 967 to I October 1 97 1 .
The overall postconciliar situation in the church soon made theological work difficult. Camps, which before were rather easily discerned as “conservative” or “liberal,” separated. Previous allies now defended propositions, either from the right or from the left, which Rahner would not accept without opposition. His two-year discussion with Hans Kung about the latter’s book Infallible? An Inquiry ( 1 970)21 is the most prominent example. The situation grew murkier, the way even more burdensome. At the same time Rahner became concerned that the will to reform initiated by the Second Vatican Council was weakening. Rahner had often delineated the perspectives of the postconciliar church. 22
Now he believed that he was obliged to brand regressive tendencies.
This branding probably began in Munich in March of 1 970, with the lecture “Freedom and Manipulation in Society and the Church,”
the occasion being the conferral on Rahner of the Guardini prize of the Catholic Academy in Bavaria. 23 The position on issues taken by the joint synod in Germany in 1 972 prompted him to make many statements about church reform in his The Shape of the Church to Come. 24 Quite a few of his former supporters found some of these ideas hard to accept. The suspension of the weekly newspaper Publik was, to Rahner, symptomatic of the German Catholic church’s “march into the ghetto.”25 Rahner’s position in this regard became especially evident at the plenary sessions of the joint synod of West German dioceses from 1 97 1 to 1 975, above all in his disagreement with Cardinal Hoffner. When the international theological commission established by the Holy See did not meet his expectations, he resigned before the end of his five-year appointment ( I 969-74).26
It cannot be denied that Rahner lost many friends in those years. Of course he also won new ones. One may certainly have differences of opinion about this or that statement from Rahner. Much is an expression of a certain resignation, a deliberate acidity, or an intentional onesidedness, “because otherwise no one will listen.” Perhaps many of his ideas in earlier publications were more nuanced and less easily mis-2 1 . Trans. Edward Quinn (Garden Cily, N.J.: Doubleday, 1 972).
22. See The Church after the Council, trans. Davis C. Herron and Rodeline Albrecht (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 966).
23. In Meditations on Freedom and the Spirit, trans. Rosaleen Ockenden, David Smilh, and Cecily Bennett (New York: Seabury Press, 1 978), 33-71 .
24. Trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury Press, 1 974).
25. See “Open Church,” The Shape of the Church to Come, 93- 1 01 .
26. On this matter, see “The Congregation of the Failh and the Commission of Theologians,” Theological Investigations Xllf, trans. David Bourke (New York: Seabury Press, 1 976), 98-1 1 5.
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understood. Now his ideas – often oversimplified and juxtaposed –
caused more excitement. Perhaps people had not really taken notice of what he had actually said and repeated, again and again.
Yet it seems to be patently unfair to judge all of Rahner’s work on the basis of these isolated, and mostly negative, outcries about the church’s situation. Without attempting to trivialize those provocations, one must still try to understand and judge them in the total context and in the total meaning of his work up until now. Perhaps we are still too close to these events to be able to make a balanced judgment.
One thing is certain, however: his energetic objections and complaints about a repeated lack of readiness for conversion of the church’s system came from a wounded heart, which loved even the church of his day with the same passionate zeal as before. Frequently one gets the impression that those in the church who often spoke against Rahner – some from rather high watchtowers – became so forgetful that they hardly remember anymore his almost invaluable achievements for, and service to, the church. In order to maintain the power of the Christian promise against all forms of defeatism, time and again Rahner purposely waxed almost utopian. Will people hear this call?
II. BASIC STRUCTURE AND PROFILE OF HIS THEOLOGY
The basic structure of Rahner’s theological thinking is hard to summarize. To separate out – from a multidimensionally interwoven and highly complex life’s achievement – individual, discrete “elements”
would be transparently wrong. All too easily one aspect of his theology considered without the other becomes false. Radical immediacy to God, speculative ingenuity, pastoral concerns, sensitivity to the importance of the theological tradition – one would have to be able to say all this and many other things at the same time in order to articulate the origin and clarity of his theology.
I. A Theology That Knows History
Rahner’s main achievement – along with other theologians of course – was to bring a doctrinal theology trapped in its own tradition slowly back to its sources again. One must be perfectly clear about the conditions under which a reform of the traditional school theology was at all possible. Except perhaps for the theology at German universities, the firmly established and highly uniform state of the question, structure, and content of traditional dogmatic theology offered no other possibility for deepening and widening its scope than for talking to itself. To be sure, there were always important theologians – such as Romano Guardini and Hans Urs von Balthasar – who simply set up
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shop alongside the marketable scholastic theology. But their thinking was more often than not unrelated to it. These undoubtedly influential thinkers, therefore, did not have a transformative effect precisely where dogmatic theology was translated into the church’s lived life, in the day-in and day-out theology of the schools.
Because of his studies in the Jesuit order, Rahner was thoroughly immersed in this theology, usually taught by intelligent scholastic theologians, especially by H. Lange and F. Htirth. Only a few of them knew all the branches of the traditional school theology as well as Rahner.
He had truly mastered it, knew it from within, and was comfortable with it. Many were just “trained” in it, and simply “passed it on.” This is the main reason for their sterility. Rahner often fiercely combated this petrification of thought and empty formalism. Rather early in his career he was reproached for this. Overlooked in this reproach was the fact that here was someone who spoke in this way from an intimate and penetrating grasp of this way of thinking. He clearly perceived the ambiguity in what was assumed to be conceptually “precise.” He also saw the sterility of worn-out methods of making “distinctions.” But he also recognized its healthy drive toward relentless intellectual discipline. Despite all the concrete subjectivity present in the process of handing on this theology, he mastered the objectivity and universality of theological reflection. He smiled at the many fastidious sophistries, but by no means did he laugh at the sometimes hidden clarity and the penetrating power of the essential and fundamental experience of the faith – even if this was occasionally distorted almost beyond recognition.
From the viewpoint of the history of ideas and church politics, Rahner had no choice but to enter into this “milieu.” This took courage, because many had dried up in an endless conceptual wasteland or, at best, erected a few of their own curious, but mostly, irrelevant opinions. The self-assurance of his thought, which did not drown in the endless, dead mass of material, reminds one of what Hegel says in his Phenomenology of Spirit: “the life of the spirit is not the life that is afraid of death, or keeps clear of devastation, but the life that endures death and maintains itself in the midst of death.” In fact, at first, Rahner took up very precise individual problems in scholastic theology,27 a theology whose inner power to change and whose systematic consistency become apparent, perhaps, only slowly. The concepts “supernatural existential” and “anonymous Christian” are born in the context of a 27. See “Concerning the Relationship between Nature and Grace” and “Some Implications on the Scholastic Concept of Uncreated Grace,” Theological Investigations I, 297-346.
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more precise interpretation of the encyclical Mystici corporis, 28 and out of the accompanying tension-filled circumstances, although they were developed very early and fully developed later on. The new theologoumena proved their inner necessity and their functional worth in this confrontation with already existing categories.
Karl Rahner would never have been able to decipher the theses of scholastic theology if he had not been thoroughly familiar with the writings of the great fathers of the church and of medieval theology.
Scholastic theology was, after all, derived from the great fundamental theological experiences. One cannot understand Rahner’s theological achievement if one does do not take into account, and constantly presuppose, his decades-long, intensive, mainly hidden wrestling with the great tradition.
Rahner’s often all-too-modest self-characterization conceals somewhat the richness he gained through association with the tradition.
After all , the “speculator,” as his colleagues who were more expert in history often dubbed him, did receive his doctorate and teaching appointment because of his patristic and scholastic investigations. More than one-thousand additional pages of patristic and dogmatic-historical studies clearly document that Karl Rahner also understood, or, as the case may be, learned something about, subtle historical study and its virtues. If one has only come to know the Rahner of the late 1 950s, ’60s,
’70s, and ’80s, one would almost miss the richness and mastery of his historical thinking, which is the very foundation on which his thought stands. This would be the case, in part, because precisely these historical works were only published later, or never in any comprehensive way (this is especially true of his studies on Mary).
2. Against Positivism
Very little of this vast knowledge is directly discernible in his publications over the last twenty years [ 1 959- 79 ) . It is not particularly emphasiz ed, but it is “at work,” nonetheless. Many individual details may no longer be explicitly present in the wealth of this learning, but the enduring basic experiences are silently at work. When needed they are suddenly there, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world to know all about them: his vast knowledge of scripture, the history of Montanism, the baptismal theory of Gregory of Nyssa, the basic ecclesiological problems of Augustine, the decisions about semi-Pelagianism, the theo/ogia negativa of Thomas Aquinas, the mystical experiences 28. See “Membership of the Church according to the Teaching of Pius XII’s Encyclical
‘Mystici corporis Christi,'” Theological Investigations II, 1-88.
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of John Ruusbroec, the subtleties of late scholastic theology (Molina, Suarez, Ripalda).
Of course, to Rahner historical work was never an end in itself.
Complaints about how fruitless many historical works are for dogmatic and systematic theology grew louder and louder. “What is it that makes the properly historical in studies like those of de Lubac or de Ia Taille so stimulating and to the point? Surely it is the art of reading texts in such a way that they become not just votes cast in favor of, or against, our positions (positions taken up long ago), but that they say something to us which we in our time have not considered at all, or not closely enough, about reality itself. This is not to say that we should study the history of theology in order to justify our own private innovations, although this sort of culpable silliness is by no means unknown; but we should enter into association with a thinker of the past, not only to become acquainted with his views, but in the final analysis to learn something about reality. It is because historical theology is too much lecture-room disquisition . . . that we learn from it only about that part of the past which is, in any case, already preserved in modern theology, but not about that part which shapes our future from our past. It is no wonder, then, that the great work of historical theology, one which deserves our constant praise for our positive gains from it, has so far been able to exert so little pressure toward overcoming the deficiencies of the textbooks.”29
We need not waste words in stating that tradition here does not mean merely recognizing what exists or glorifying the past. Rahner is familiar with the classic power of the “theology of distinctions,” in order to develop with its help an inner, critical sensitivity to the value of the actual tradition. Conceptual thinking is necessary, but definitions alone are just a poor beginning, nothing more. Tradition is important because it can activate, expand, and perhaps even correct, contemporary reflection on the faith.
Above all Rahner hates sterile positivism that carries on in a bombastic way. However, the deeper impulses of positivistic “thinking” are thoroughly at work in him: inexorable confrontation with reality, sensitivity for a theological “advance” achieved (no matter how this is expressed conceptually), and the creative confirmation of what has been achieved. Critical trust in a refined tradition of faith knows that such insights have come about throughout the history of the church.
“No real achievement is ever lost to the church. But theologians are never spared the task of prompt renewal. Anything which is merely conserved, or which is merely handed down, without a fresh, personal 29. Theological Investigations /, 9-10.
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exertion beginning at the very sources of revelation, rots as the manna did.”30
It is precisely his immediate familiarity with the sources of the faith which gives birth to the daring and candor of his theological thought.
Again and again his thought has an extraordinary reliability because of his awareness of the complex historical experiences connected with the subject, because aspects of the faith – some essential, some not – surface (the analogy of faith), because he senses warning signals and limitations, and all this in the context of the freedom of his own historically sensitive theology.
It is only the truly multidimensional knowledge of a great expert which enables this often uncannily sure-footed theologian to walk along the edge. The path to such certitude had its own share of danger, doubt, and dead-ends, of course. This multidimensional knowledge is also the source of his unerring sense of theological “tact,” which hardly any of his “followers” (this does not mean “students”!) have, because they cling to him literally (e.g., the various interpretations of the
“anonymous Christian”), or fixate on individual trains of thought, rather than focus on the nuanced context as a whole, and thus construct a problematic “system.”
Because Karl Rahner placed himself squarely on the historical path of theological thought when dealing with familiar theological questions, his thought gained an astonishing world-wide power to communicate, to transcend many languages and mind-sets, and apparently to overcome difficulties of expression effortlessly (without thereby failing to recognize the achievement of good translators, and without, at the same time, overestimating the lasting, profound effect of such an influence).
The dry ideas passed on in the theological schools were known almost everywhere. Virtually every theologian on the face of the earth had learned them and put up with them. There is no doubt that before, during, and after Vatican II Rahner could show the “Roman” theology its limits from the inside, and that it was not just disdained “from above.”
His universal and profoundly understanding way of thinking, despite all disputes, gained him great respect during the council even among many conservative theologians.
Again and again, his sophisticated knowledge of church history and theology gave Rahner a surprising trustworthiness, and this allowed him to exercise a certain recklessness in his theological thinking on the most difficult questions (nature and grace, the development of dogma, the basis for christology ), and in the most dangerous of times (and these 30. Ibid., 1 0.
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go back to the years before World War II!). We can hardly evaluate, directly, the importance of such vast knowledge today; we can only surmise its importance in a sort of “historical” retrospective glance.
3. Faith Seeking Insight
Although a direct insistence upon “positive facts” is far from Rahner’s way of thinking, nonetheless it does not undervalue the important and emphatic nature of the “factual.” Rahner’s basic formula, “spirit-inworld,” is still valid, and shows his recognition of the importance of
“matter,” the world, and history right from the start. This is, ultimately, why Rahner could never accept the kind of thinking that revolves in a closed circle, or that is content with being turned in on itself. Thus he has critical reservations not only vis-a-vis classic, formal logic, but also concerning certain forms of modern hermeneutics. Yet an infinite passion for questioning is characteristic of his theological thought.
“Hard, sober questioning – drilling when necessary – really is an act of piety incumbent upon the Christian who is intellectually alive.”31 He answers everything conscientiously, in strict confrontation with the way contemporary men and women understand existence and the world; everything is thoroughly exposed and subjected to realistic testing.
Everyone knows the movement so characteristic of Rahner’s questioning and searching spirit. The thought surfaces slowly, often self-consciously and shyly. And so many of his essays are a bit uneven and tiresome to read, because of the long “preliminary remarks.” First, the subject to be investigated is carefully circumscribed. Then the state of the question, and the position of the one questioning, as well as the problem, are carefully delineated. Traditional categories and ways of thinking are tested for their ability to give information about, and answers to, current questions. At the same time, as a sort of “tutorial,”
Rahner reminds his reader of the traditional material dealing with the subject.
This is the unmistakable hallmark of his unique, experimental style of thinking. He tries to arrive at a deeper determination of the essence of the matter by coming at it from all possible angles. He critically evaluates the traditional answers and tries as many fresh approaches as possible. This “method” of investigation is not a pedagogical whim intended to train, or to win over the reader. It is the lively movement of his thinking itself. When Rahner writes, his thought is both experiment and accomplishment. Although much reflection has already taken place, a
“result” is just not simply presented.
In a peculiar kind of dialectic that can be traced back to Plato, Rah-3 1 . lch Glaube an Jesus Christus (Einsiedeln: Benziger Verlag, 1 968), 8.
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ner’s thought visibly ignites itself out of its own inner necessity. Then the one liberating thought appears – always a bit suddenly, although prepared for – and he pursues this thought to its ultimate practical consequences. The “preliminary remarks” create space, so that beyond the information currently available the full reality can be revealed in all its aspects.
Once the keyword that delivers the insight is found, then the thought can evolve precisely because the complexity of the reality, which has been thoroughly preserved, is carried forward and is made fruitful in the multidimensionality of theological thought. For this reason Karl Rahner’s writing style and individual sentences in so many of his works appear at first so “boxed-in.” But one thought remains which runs like a powerful leitmotif throughout, and yet hesitates to shut out completely the areas that are connected with it.
It is clear that inherently such a way of thinking has limitless possibilities. No question is too “stupid,” no scholarly knowledge too removed, no labor spared. Again and again, he approaches problems in new ways. The gospel is constantly made more fruitful by productive conflict.
Yet his thought never smacks of placing everything in question.
Whoever accuses Rahner of this has totally misunderstood him. His passionate probing spirit has no formal apriorisms. His thinking is never a self-satisfying “glass-bead game.” His treatment of a topic never lets his reader go with a soothing answer, but no one ends up in just empty questioning either. He always demands something substantial.
He never revels in any sort of hollow, pathetic “intellectual honesty”
that in the end would consist of impotent, subjective demands that have nothing to do with the real issue of faith and thought.
Nor can this kind of thinking simply be separated into “method”
and “content.” Rahner never uses these two for their own sake. His theological work always has something worthwhile to say, because his own concrete theological thinking handles the given, unavoidable questions smoothly. His new-born insight – often written down right after he has come to it – may often be awkward stylistically, but it is almost always a clear thought that breaks new ground. For this reason Rahner may be hard for some people to understand, but he is always intelligible to those who make the effort to think along with him.
Rahner’s importance for ecumenical theology is based on this same kind of thought process. There is very little expressly ecumenical or
“controversy-oriented” in the first half of this creative theological work.
Rahner’s impact on ecumenical theology is primarily the result of his precise, self-critical, and carefully nuanced presentation of Catholic theology. And this theology is always presented with the sensitivity
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of a man who is thoroughly knowledgeable in the field of Protestant theology.
Rahner gained this kind of global knowledge as a member of the ecumenical working-group of Protestant and Catholic theologians (the Jaeger-Staehlin group), to which he belonged beginning in 1 948. The early Rahner offered an essentially indirect ecumenical theology. His basic tendency continues later on, and here one discerns a more focused and immediate engagement with the questions of ecumenical theology.32 The basic problems common to the great Christian churches vis-a-vis the contemporary social situation captured Rahner’s interest, as many of the essays in the Theological Investigations attest.
The dialogue with the reformed churches was more natural for him, and, therefore, one finds relatively little material on the theology of the Eastern churches. But these particular writings of Rahner should not obscure the fact that his theology is ecumenical from the outset. The method he used most often, namely, indirect ecumenical theology, reaches its limit where Rahner has not explored his partner’s position enough, and yet he draws far-reaching conclusions out of his own reflection. This is especially true in the case of his Vorfragen zu einem okumenischen Amtverstiindnis (Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1 974). Yet this undeservedly neglected text is an important example as a “test” of how far the Catholic understanding of office in the church seems able to be modified. Foundations of Christian Faith presents a beautiful example of a natural relationship to what is Catholic, in the original sense of the word, and for an on-going ecumenical dialogue, even if it often occurs only implicitly.
4. Spiritual Inexhaustibility
Karl Rahner was no rationalist. From the very beginning he insisted upon his inability to exhaust his own thinking. The thinking subject, even in its own infinite inner space, understands itself to be a question, which, in its own finitude, exists in reference to the other which is not itself. This essential self-limitation of thought does not hinder the thought, but gives it an inner legitimacy.
The ultimate theological ground of such a state of being-inreference-to-the-other, which the thinking spirit experiences, reveals itself as that which we call “God.” This is the source of the deep certitude of his thought. Its entire dynamic and its inexhaustible ability to renew itself are found here. The ever-greater-God dimension of his theological thinking paves the way for the infinite search, without dis-32. See Karl Rahner and Heinrich Fries, Unity of the Churches: An Actual Possibility, trans. Ruth C. L. Gritsch and Eric W Gritsch (Ramsey, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1 985).
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solving into despair or pessimism. 33 This radical breakthrough to the ever-greater God gives his theology an alert, critical sense for the concepts it develops. With every fiber of its being his theology wants to avoid simply putting a label on God, or to allow all-too-human depictions of God. Again and again, he asks whether there could not be something greater and more suitable for God.
Nourished and made wise by a deep awareness of transcendence, this skepticism vis-a-vis what is currently offered and available is present, basically, only in order to allow God alone to have the last word.
Such a basic point of view also results in the fact that Rahner, despite his critical affirmation of tradition, does not lose himself in external history or in the abundance of an indifferent positivism. Nor does he go astray in the aimless, formless, incessant going-beyond-everything that is characteristic of the transcendental movement of the finite spirit.
The ever-freshly revealed originality of the faith, presented meditatively in Encounters with Silence, and powerfully developed later on in “Science as a ‘Confession,’ “34 gives rise to that self-critical instrumentality which spiritual tradition calls the gift of the “discernment of spirits.” It is no accident that in Rahner such considerations almost naturally flow into the spiritual dimension of concrete faith, where they ultimately become the most evident.
But this means that transcendence gained in this way is, at the deepest level, already mediated, because – precisely as experienced –
such transcendence has already become to some degree “immanent.”
The power of transcendental experience shows its true depth precisely in this: it rediscovers itself in thousands of ways in the concrete experience of the world. This does not mean that the experiences of the world are too quickly made into something theological. For example, work remains work, and the unavoidable fear of death cannot be denied.
Rahner allows the human to express itself. Precisely in doing so human beings prove that they cannot avoid themselves as a total question. The accompanying phenomena – for example, unconditional personal love, absolute obedience to one’s conscience, an experience of the insurmountable finitude of one’s own existence experienced in guilt, pain, and death – reveal, once they have been accepted (perhaps with resistance and pain, but nonetheless joyously), the secret call of that most radical, protecting, and forgiving nearness of the mystery of God. We are not talking about some sort of eccentric theological concept, but rather about that truth regarding human beings and things that brings their undisguised reality into true consciousness for the very 33. See “Being Open Lo God as Ever Greater,” Theological Investigations VII, 25-46.
34. Theological Investigations Ill, 385-400.
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first time. A particularly successful example of this seems to be the little book “Everyday Things.”35
The reason Karl Rahner has become a gentle spiritual teacher for so many companions on the way is because of his enduring ability to mediate the distance and the nearness of God as a presence, hidden in faith, for all the situations of human life. The power of Christian faith is present not in the realm of the purely “supernatural,” but rather right in the daily existence of real people. This faith shows itself to be fraternal, in the best sense of the word, precisely because it is ready to tackle all human questions courageously, and because it does not seek excuses for avoiding any genuine need. Such an attitude makes the offer of faith arising out of these situations not only attractive, but, in the midst of all complex reflections, it uncovers the “pastoral” roots and the missionary solidarity of such faith. Rahner’s pastoral or pastoraltheological “interest” is not something extraneous, the “application” of an unmediated theological theory. Rather, his pastoral concern arises out of one and the same basic direction, that of seeking and finding in faith.
III. PHILOSOPHICAL-THEOLOGICAL STARTING POINTS
This basic pattern translates into the concrete form suited to it in contemporary thinking, namely, philosophy and theology. This brief portrait cannot touch upon the full scope of the themes which Karl Rahner has dealt with in his voluminous works. We are going to limit ourselves to the philosophical and theological starting points from which the individual categorical developments take their origin, and to which they keep returning.
1. The Transcendental Posing of the Question
It is not easy to make this starting point clear, because it lies on a multilayered level of contemplation that is hard to comprehend. The transcendental posing of the question means especially that Rahner’s thinking does not simply accept “the given” without examining it. He sees an advantage in the intensified inclusion of concrete subjectivity for the articulation of the faith (formally and materially), an advantage which he will not do without. For this reason, with modern philosophy (from Descartes to Heidegger) he asks, expressly, about the conditions of possibility for the facts of a case, to the extent that these can be 35. Found in Belief Today, trans. M. H. Heelan, Rosaleen and Ray Ockenden and William Whitman (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1 967), 1 -43.
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made clear from human subjectivity, and by going back to i t through an analysis of the constitutive “moments.”
The use of such a way of thinking in the theological field is easily suspected of being primarily an a priori construction, which attempts to deduce what cannot be deduced by “natural reason,” namely, the objective-historical dimension and Christianity’s absolutely graced dimension. In reality this suspicion is unfounded. Without a doubt the early Rahner – at least in Spirit in World – begins with a metaphysics of finite knowledge without anchoring himself directly in a theological foundation for this kind of thinking. This way of proceeding is only fair and reasonable for a philosophical treatise.
But as early as Hearers of the Word, his basic approach clearly changed: to begin with, the reality and actuality of Christian revelation is presupposed, and from there he asks about the subjective, anthropological, and religious-philosophical conditions why a human being, as knowing and freely acting, is able, and allowed from his own “nature,”
to have anything to do with something such as “revelation.” One can rightly call such a manner of thinking a “transcendental” explication that presupposes the “facticity” of a reality and simultaneously – in a sort of suspension of its positing character ( positivity) – makes
=
an inquiry before the bar of reason into the ground of legitimacy of its being thus [Sosein ] .
O f course, such a consideration cannot b e called ” a philosophy of revelation,” especially since the starting point in this case is already a fact of Christian theology, which then, on its own, seeks after the
“natural” and with that the humanly accountable presuppositions of revelation. Such a starting point, at the heart of theology, poses a transcendental retrospective question about the conditions necessary for the valid reception of revelation by a human subject. And, basically, this already transcends a general “philosophy of religion.”
But theological “facts” are not accepted ideologically and uncritically; rather, they are subjected to transcendental verification “from below,” inasmuch as this is possible. The dimension of the transcendental positing of the question is, above all, the realm of human subjectivity whose own multidimensionality and living depths may remain hidden. The answer must be elicited, in the first place, from the questioned content of the correlative conditions within human subjectivity. Transcendental method is “critical” precisely in this way: namely, it avoids “flying over” immediately into the “transcendental” realm.
Of course, this is where the various transcendental philosophies part company. In contrast to Kant and neo-Kantianism, Rahner builds on P. Rousselot and J. Man chal in presupposing that there is an ultimate identity between reality and the transcendental structures which
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have been shown, a oneness of knowing and being (in the classical sense). Along with the concept of “spirit” in German idealism (not only!), “reality” is interpreted as being present-to-itself, especially as this manifests itself in the execution of reflective thinking, and in the mediation that occurs in this reflective thinking (reditio completa in seipsum
complete return to oneself).
=
Rahner avoids idealism’s latent danger with help from Heidegger’s philosophy and from the theological concept of creatureliness, by radically maintaining the finitude of human existence – and without detriment to the inner limitlessness of the human spirit with all its potential. He stresses that finite knowledge is dependent on taking in objects, and that finite reflection cannot grasp itself by itself.
A metaphysics of limited knowledge, mediated by Heidegger’s 1 929
book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, and the Thomistic conversio ad phantasma (turning to sense appearances), a central motif in Spirit in World, play a large role in the first moment. The second element in Rahner’s thinking comes from a global criticism of idealism and of Heidegger’s notion of “ontological disposition” (Befindlichkeit) and perhaps, even if less significantly, from M. Blondel’s Action. Rahner’s knowledge of these is partly filtered through French-Belgian Jesuit theology. Ignatius of Loyola often contributes.
Rahner’s own philosophy of life plays a certain role, yet not one to be overestimated. The unique field that arose between traditional
“realism” and the modern “transcendental” way of thinking became a sort of hard-to-determine philosophical middle ground between the two usual philosophical fronts. This kind of thinking is relatively foreign to both traditional scholastic philosophy and modern transcendental philosophical reflection. In this sense Rahner consciously uses a pedestrian concept of “transcendental,” which proves its worth more in concrete theological practice than in methodological reflection as such. The immediate effectiveness of this kind of thinking is clearly beyond doubt. Thus Rahner quite correctly sees traces of “transcendental” thinking, already in transcendental form, in Plato, Thomas of Aquinas, and so on – in any case before Kant. But the fact of the matter is not expressly proven philosophically.
With this in mind, two other points of view become clear, namely, the relationship of Rahner’s thought to Heidegger’s and the omission of certain philosophical perspectives, or themes, in the way the young Rahner thought. That Rahner was a pupil of Heidegger is beyond dispute – and Rahner himself often admitted this. Yet Rahner’s remarks indicate a deep uncertainty about the relationship itself.36 In any case, 36. See Karl Rahner, Faith in a Wintry Season, 1 5- 1 6.
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Rahner’s work cannot be labeled “dependent” on Heidegger, or hardly so. Rahner is too much of a thinker oriented to theological issues to reflect much about such a “historical” connection. The essential points of contact with Heidegger have already been noted. But it is evident, despite very important reference points (e.g., the concept of Befindlichkeit, existential, and so on), that basically Rahner’s thought does not pursue Heidegger’s basic concern, namely, the question about the meaning of Being and the problem of a fundamental ontology. There are hardly any common formulations of the question in these areas.
For example, Rahner never mentions the difference between Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, in the specific sense of the word, and the general concept of modern “subjectivity.” This is not a reproach but merely a hint that the relationship, which has been vastly overestimated, should be put back in its proper perspective. Many of the same concepts in the writings of both men are used in very difference senses: “existential,” for example. In my opinion only one strong similarity exists: between Rahner’s reflections on a theology of mystery and Heidegger’s 1 943 work, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, given in lectures and heard by Rahner in 1 935.
Of late, Rahner had to contend with the criticism that his philosophical starting point, at least in Hearers of the Word, was simply based on the model of nonhuman, material beings, and hardly on intersubjective, personal coexistence. Upon closer examination this criticism is unfounded. It also seriously overlooks what was philosophically feasible in the prewar years, and underestimates the position he took in comparison to the other attempts of his contemporaries. The prewar period could not develop a “transcendental philosophy” (which one?) and a fully developed personalism, or a philosophy of intersubjectivity. To this day this has not been done sufficiently well.
Because of Thomas Aquinas’s authoritative influence, Rahner’s early concepts of “historicity” and “personality” can be traced back very clearly to the old scholastic philosophy, and that means an orientation to material beings. In criticizing this, one forgets – apart from the circumstances already mentioned – that to a great extent Rahner tried very quickly to close this loophole in his theological works.37 It is, after all, characteristic that precisely the earlier critics of Hearers of the Word (for example, B. K. Primm and E. Quinn) emphasized the working out of the personal aspect of the revelation-event and its reception. But this really does not get to the heart of the matter. What has to happen is a 37. A striking example or this is his now Famous essay, “Reflections on the Unity or the Love or Neighbor and the Love oF God,” Theological Investigations VI, trans. Karl-H. and BoniFace Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 969), 231 -49.
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renewed reflection on the relationship of philosophy and theology in Rahner’s thought.
2. The Role of Philosophy in Theology
We need not waste any words about Rahner’s philosophical talent. But this is not to say that he first developed a philosophical system which he then imposed, from outside, on theological questions. In fact, one cannot distill a pure philosophical structure out of his theology. In the beginning, as long as Rahner was still working extensively in the field of philosophy, one would be more likely to get such an impression, although this would not be true for Hearers of The Word. His transition from philosophy to theology soon brought a noteworthy change of orientation, even if this new direction would only be worked out thoroughly, much later.
To Rahner, in the realm of Catholic theology there was no longer a “pure” philosophy that could be isolated or clearly demarcated.
Rather, there was primarily a transcendental posing of questions within theological experience and statements. The considerations about the
“supernatural existential” and about the relationship of nature and grace strengthened this conviction in him. It is from within theology that he asks about the conditions of possibility why, for example, one of us, a human, could become God.38 This is not a transcendental deduction in the idealistic sense, but rather presupposes, in faith, the event of revelation. Of course Rahner does not deny the autonomy of philosophical thinking, but his efforts as a thinker are in the service of theology right from the start.39 The goal-orientation of Rahner’s thinking is incontestable. Still P. Eicher’s 1 970 book, Die anthropologischer Wende: Karl Rahners phi/osophischer Weg vom Wesen des Menschen zur persona/en Existenz, shows how fruitful a philosophically oriented examination of Rahner’s thought can be. In many ways Rahner offers more thoughtful reflection on the riddles of God, humankind, and the world than many a professional philosopher.
There is not much to say at this point about his transcendental way of beginning “from below.” It is clear that his fundamental approach, namely, to take the starting point of transcendental thinking into his theology, became increasingly greater in the course of time.40 As a result, Rahner became more and more skeptical of a closed system of thought 38. “On the Theology of the Incarnation,” Theological Investigations IV, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 966), I 05-20.
39. See “Some clarifying Remarks about my own Work,” Theological Investigations XVII, trans. Margaret Kohl (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 98 1 ), 243-48.
40. See “Philosophy and Theology,” Theological Investigations VI, 71–8 1 , and “Phi-
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that is prior to, and independent of, all theology. The scholastic system of thinking, which he himself further developed and handled masterfully, can no longer demand this degree of binding power. Several philosophical ways of thinking have gained entrance in Catholic theology (even officially in the documents of Vatican II; see the theological anthropology found in Gaudium et spes, for example).
Noteworthy considerations regarding theology surface in different philosophies, each in its own right (hermeneutics, linguistic philosophies with a metaphysical and analytical stamp, the philosophy of society, of history, etc.) without necessarily leading to a new philosophical synthesis. Thus the philosophicalpraeamubula fidei (preconditions for believing) dissolve in their own apologetical clarity, and so, in part, lose their own immediate power to convince. Does this mean the end of philosophy in theology?
The end of a particular, uniform, ready-made, presupposed philosophical system is not the end of thinking in theology. Rahner included transcendental thinking more and more forcefully in his theology. This is the source of his critical formulation of questions in the last fifteen years ([ 1 964-79 ] for example, in “transcendental christology”).
There are, of course, checks and balances, especially in christology, which have not been thoroughly examined. The increasing pluralism of philosophies is forcing theology to its own reflections in the matter of faith. And theology can get impulses and help for theological reflection from many ways of thinking, even from those it does not, at first, suspect.
In his later years Rahner had a basic “skepticism” against one philosophy (just look at his reflections regarding plans for the study of Catholic theology). In this matter Rahner, the theologian, had primarily a missionary motive; he had the ability to hold fast to faith’s ultimate universality, in all its radicality, that goes beyond the necessary generality of a philosophical system. Faith may not make itself dependent upon specific philosophical concepts, otherwise it loses its own explosive power, which can be made visible through many philosophies, and yet transcends all of them.
It is probably for this reason, also, that in his later years Karl Rahner no longer used “isolated,” basic philosophical considerations to deepen his “philosophical” starting point. One may regret this, but it is appropriate, at least from a theological point of view, at least if one takes into account the missionary-pastoral dimension of all theological investigation. His withdrawal from the purely philosophical field losophy and Philosophizing in Theology,” Theological Investigations IX, trans. Graham Harrison (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 972), 46–63.
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happened as planned, and is in no way a kind of self-chosen virtue in the midst of distress or resignation, because it produced an immense heightening and tightening of theological questioning and thinking, as such. At the same time the theological concern of this thinker became, of itself, ever “more direct. “41
3. Anthropologically Oriented Dogmatic Theology The transcendental way of thinking that unfolds at the core of his theology remains, essentially, in the area of the question about the human person. For this reason people have often misunderstood the anthropological focus of his theology as an anthropological abbreviation of theology, because they have interpreted the human as a separate theme “alongside” God, matter, and the angels.
But Rahner understands the human person as, by nature, a being of transcendence toward the world and toward God. Thus this very determination, which means that human beings at the very core of their being are open to a// existence, in and of itself rules out any naive anthropocentric narrowness. The true essence of the human person as being “somehow” everything (as, for example, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas formulate it) does not at all permit a simplistic anthropological reduction. Such a reduction would destroy the uniqueness of the human person.
From this point of view, because a human being is essentially drawn to God (which we do not want to prove now), and, in addition, because a human being cannot speak about this God without having a possible relationship to him, then “anthropocentric” and “theocentric,” properly understood, are not in opposition. Rahner develops three principle reasons for the necessity of an anthropological “turn” in theology.42
1 ) The question about a particular object is, from a philosophical and theological point of view, only possible, basically, when the question about the knowing subject is also raised, because a priori the subject must include the horizon of the possibility for such objective knowledge. This means theologically, then, that revelation, which is given primarily for the salvation of human persons, encounters human beings, inasmuch as they are capable of receiving it, in their transcendental being, even if, in fact, they resist it.
2) Contemporary philosophy and theology cannot and may not lag behind the transcendental-anthropological way of posing problems 4 1 . See, for example, “The Current Relationship between Philosophy and Theology,”
Theological Investigations Xlll, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 975), 6 1 -79.
42. See “Philosophy and Philosophizing in Theology,” Theological Investigations IX, 46-63.
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found in modern philosophy (from Descartes, Kant, through German idealism to the fundamental ontology of Heidegger).
3) Every responsible theology has to consider the connection between the human person’s experience of self in the world and the content of strict theological truth. On the basis of what has been said so far, this cannot present, primarily, merely a formal-logical context for deduction or explanation, but demands the illumination of the correlative meaning (which does not mean merely a “continuity” of human knowledge and experience) between the human questions about the world and existence, and divine revelation.
The working out of such connections is not only of a religiouspedagogical and didactic kind, but rather forms the precise task of systematic theology. It must formulate the gospel challenge for contemporary persons in such a way that latent misunderstandings, skewed ideas, and meaningless conclusions remain removed from the truth of the faith. This fundamental-theological-apologetical determination of all theology is best realized with the help of the transcendentalanthropological method in theology.43
4. Rahner’s Basic Theological Starting Point
In addition to these formal determinations and foundations, we have to ask where the formal and material theological starting point is to be found, which makes the systematic filling-out of such an anthropological-transcendental theology possible. In 1 970, when the theological literature hardly raised the question (to say nothing of giving an answer), I suggested that the fundamental theological experience – which corresponds to the methodological demands already mentioned, and which did not mean a material-theological abbreviation, and which contained in itself a genuine systematic potency for development – was to be found in the experience of grace.
Then I noted that a more precise study of Karl Rahner’s writings could surely offer several basic constellations. Meanwhile, several other attempts at an answer have been actually undertaken, and these can only be welcomed. Karl Neufeld proposed the thesis, and made it intelligible to a certain extent, that the central idea of Rahner’s theology is sin as the loss of grace (including thoughts on the sacrament of penance). As Neufeld’s 1 97 4 article in Stimmen der Zeit says, “The notion of sin as the loss of grace unlocks the substantial unity in Rahner’s theology and philosophy, in his sermons and in his spiritual advice. All 43. See “Reflections on Methodology in Theology,” Theological Investigations XI, trans.
David Bourke (New York: Seabury Press, 1 974), 68-1 14; “Reflections of a New Task for Fundamental Theology,” Theological Investigations XVI, 1 56-S6.
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the important theological questions intersect at this point: the question about God, about the human person, the human being’s knowing and deciding, about revelation and salvation, about the church and the world. This is where the experience of faith and scientific work, traditional teaching and new hypotheses, theology and spirituality meet.
And so everything is contained in this seed.”
As the person who worked on Rahner’s collected works on penance,44 Neufeld certainly uncovered an important vein in Rahner’s thinking, as I also mentioned above about the importance of Rahner’s historical and systematic theology of the sacrament of penance. And yet one can show historically that long before the studies on penance, which were first published between 1948 and 1 955, the central structure of Rahner’s theology can be recognized. The formula “sin as the loss of grace” seems to me, however, to be too little developed with regard to content. This formula presupposes the reality of grace as a more fundamental dimension.
Johannes B. Metz made an impressive attempt to examine the creative mediation of dogmatic theology and personal life-history in Rahner’s entire theological corpus.45 Rahner placed the “subject”
squarely into the consciousness of traditional dogmatic theology. But here it is not a matter of a transcendental subject, but rather the “subject is the human person enmeshed in his own experiences and histories, and out of these identifying himself ever anew” (Metz, 307).
With that, the human person in his history of religious experience is again the objective theme of dogmatic theology. And so Rahner’s theology is dogmatic theology applied to life-history, combining the biographical and one’s religious denomination, that is, theology as mystical biography of a Christian person today. “Rahner’s theology should be called biographical, because the mystical biography of religious experience, of life-history before the veiled countenance of God, is written into the doxography of faith. And it should be called biographical in order to point out that Rahner’s so-called transcendental theology is not a high-handed deducted theology, which gains its correctness and irrefutability at the price of tautology, but rather a conceptually shortened and condensed story of life lived in the presence of God” (Metz, 308).
To be sure, Metz does not mean a “new theological subjectivism.”
In fact, he is quite accurate about Rahner’s style. Metz knows that this
“life-history dogmatic theology,” without prejudice to its biographical 44. See Theological Investigations XV.· Penance in the Church.
45. Johannes B. Metz, “Karl Rahner – ein theologisches Leben. Theologie als mystische Biographie eines Christenmenschen heute,” Stimmen der Zeit 99 ( 1 974): 305-1 6.
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and denominational nature, “is applied in everything, as in no other theology, to that which is objectively teachable” (Metz, 308). I think that this element of emptying and “revealing,” of mission and communication, at one with the new ecclesiological dimension of his theology, ought to claim a still greater place of importance.
In the meantime, the investigations, particularly of Klaus Fischer and ofT. Mannermaa from Finland, have confirmed the earlier suggestion about seeing a central crystallization of Rahner’s theology in the experience of grace. An enormous amount of material has unfolded and further developed this insight considerably, in its many individual dimensions. Basically, the first larger historical and systematic works deal with determining the relationship of human existence, God, and grace. The experience of grace is the point where this relationship crystallizes. Here grace is not primarily created grace, but God in God’s own self-communication.
Viewed anthropologically, “grace,” precisely as communicated, is not a thinglike reality in the human person, but rather a determination of the spiritual subject, who by grace comes into immediate contact with God. The only reason grace is not understood mythologically, or as if it were a thing, is because grace is understood from the point of view of the subject.
We do not particularly need to describe the phenomenon itself at this point. Rahner himself tried to do this again and again.46 He was particularly successful in the two works “Everyday Things” and ” Experiencing the Spirit.”47 He mentions the theological background of this
“experience,” in a preliminary way, in his works about the relationship of nature and grace, as well as in his works about the supernatural existential.
Rahner achieved something decisive by using this starting point.
The “most objective” dimensions of the reality of salvation, namely, God and his grace, simultaneously appear as the human person’s most subjective dimension, namely, the immediacy of the spiritual subject to God through God himself. The transcendence of the human spirit, which by its nature is already unlimited and, as such, cannot be totally distinguished from its supernatural finalization by simple conceptual reflection, implies a multitude of levels of such an experience.
With this point of view Rahner uses a scholastic theological thesis, namely, that with the existence of a supernatural, grace-elevated salvific act, eo ipso, an a priori formal object is given, which as formal 46. See, for example, “Reflections on the Experience of Grace,” Theological Investigations Ill, 86-90.
47. In The Spirit in the Church, trans. John Griffiths (New York: Seabury Press, 1 979), 1 -3 1 .
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cannot be attained by any natural act (traces in scripture: the experience of the working of the Spirit, “the grace of enlightenment,” “the light of faith”). Thus Rahner finds in the classic “analysis of the act of faith”
the earliest statements that correspond to a transcendental-theological method, because in the analysis of faith the question is explicitly raised about the a priori conditions for the possibility of the knowledge of a particular reality. Also, this makes evident that such a formulation of the question is itself only possible when the respective subject area, as such, is already known.
This kind of transcendental theology knows, essentially, about the real irreducibility of history. This basic relationship is made evident with an analysis of the act of faith: Why is revelation that is heard and accepted, that, as such, appears in the first place only in the human person’s knowing and willing (and thus in a certain way must correspond to the a priori structures of the human spirit), why is such revelation not just a human word – even if it is also a word caused by God about God – but rather God’s very own word, even though it has entered into the human horizon of understanding? Answer: the hearing of God’s revelation as the very word of God (in the sense just explained) presupposes as a condition of possibility in the human subject that God, as coprinciple, is supporting the hearer’s act through God’s own self-communication.
In focusing on the experience of grace Rahner first proceeds with the phenomena that are closest to ordinary human existence, or which gradually root them in their ultimate ground. Because he understands the human person, right from the outset, as “spirit-in-world, ” this experience of grace does not mean a description of introverted, subjective
“events.” Thus he uses as examples of these experiences of grace such things as sleeping, eating, standing, laughing, and so on. At this point, at the latest, it becomes clear how much lgnatian spirituality and his own original spiritual experiences, with the already mentioned elements, coincide in his starting point.
Rahner also uses this starting point for a more profound analysis for understanding revelation. 48 1n this context the task arises of bringing the transcendental relationship with God, as just mentioned, into contact with the history of revelation. The revelation-event exhibits two aspects: the constitution of the grace-elevated transcendence of the human person as an enduring, even when denied, always effective, grace-filled existential, and therein the resulting, already mentioned, experience of God’s absolute and forgiving nearness.
48. See Karl Rahner and Joseph Ralzinger, Revelation and Tradition, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 966).
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However, because all human transcendence fulfills itself in history and is historically mediated, the historical-categorical selfinterpretation of revelation also belongs to this moment which we have just mentioned. The thematic objectification of this supernatural transcendental experience occurs in it. The transcendental, a priori opening-up of the human person to the triune God, and the God of grace, does not occur in an individualistic and unhistorical introspection. “It is necessarily accomplished in the history of the action and thought of humankind, and may be so very explicitly or quite anonymously. Consequently, there is never a history of transcendental revelation in isolation. History in the concrete, both individually and collectively, is the history of God’s transcendental revelation.”49
God’s self-communication in grace is certainly a “transcendental”
existential of the human person, but it comes to itself, and to the individual, only as mediated in salvation and revelation history. The transcendental and the historical-categorical moment are not sideby-side, but rather form a unity, and are characterized by their own reciprocal relationship of conditioning each other.
This basic point of departure runs through Rahner’s entire theology. Again and again, this fundamental insight is reflected in different variations and communicated concretely down to the final concrete formulations of the question.
Under certain conditions one can discern three phases in the unfolding of his “transcendental theology.” In the first phase, which lasted until the mid-fifties, his transcendental thinking, for the most part, occurred only in a few especially suitable problem areas and within the given, basic structures of classical theology. The second phase takes up, more explicitly and comprehensively, the transcendental leitmotif within theology. Now the concept of “transcendental theology” appears programmatically. At this time Rahner was mainly working out a “transcendental christology.”50
His efforts in this direction systematically simplified the area of the historical-categorical and, in a certain way, left it “abstractly” behind.
It was, perhaps, mainly for this reason that criticism of his transcendental starting point mounted. The criticism has to do, mainly, with arguing that Rahner’s transcendental starting point neglected the intersubjective, personal, and, especially, the sacramental dimensions. He is also criticized for leaving out of his considerations the brutally real, the political, and more comprehensive social relationships.
In more recent years (the end of the sixties) a third, more inten-49. Ibid., 1 7.
50. See Foundations of Christian Faith, 206- 1 2.
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sive, effort began which thematized more clearly the a priori elements in theology, above all, the concrete, nondeductible dimension of history, and the fact that faith ultimately cannot be captured by reflection.
Transcendental theology remains primary, but he broadened the area of the transcendental; above all, the limits of transcendental theology are made clear.
And so the christology of this third phase achieves a new emphasis, in that the historical Jesus comes into sharper relief. This is evident in the book he wrote with Wilhelm Thi.ising, A New Christology. 5! Without a doubt, from a completely different angle, his conversations with Johannes B. Metz contributed to the nuancing of his transcendental starting point.
And so it is clear that he worked very hard at resolving the relationship between the transcendental and the categorical-historical.
For many reasons, and with some justification, the transcendental dimension predominates from volume eleven through nineteen in his Theological Investigations.
This is not the final word, of course since important investigations are still going on. Thus, for example, too little attention has been paid to the very extensive “On the Theology of Symbol,”52 where he offers such a resolution. The span of his efforts reaches from his theological dissertation to the essays on the theology of the Sacred Heart, and on the lgnatian Exercises to the already-mentioned third phase.
In this context a comment by his brother Hugo is worth mentioning because of its importance for the comprehensive interpretation of Rahner’s theological thought. Hugo thinks that the treatise “On the Theology of Symbol” embodies the whole direction of Karl’s theology.
In this context his extensive theology about things, the body, everyday virtues, and secular accomplishments – based to a great extent on the lgnatian spirituality of “finding God in all things” – has not yet received proper attention.
The above-mentioned third phase is connected with the work of his early years (Investigations 1-111). The unity and nuancing of these same efforts are a good example of the fact that, on the whole, there are no radical changes in Rahner’s theology, although there are decisive and powerful shifts of emphasis within it, and questions are approached, again and again, in new ways. In several individual problems, as, for example, the matter of monogenism and the “intermediate state,” Rahner expressly changed his earlier opinion, which was connected to classical theology, and proposed new hypotheses.
5 1 . Trans. David Smith and Verdant Green (New York: Seabury Press, 1 980).
52. Theological Investigations IV. 22 1-52.
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Difficulties in understanding arise now and then when statements from several phases are put together in one text, as, for example, in the brief section on christology in Foundations of Christian Faith. Moreover the question remains whether his transcendental starting point does not often make itself independent of the richness of its own dimensions.
5. The Concrete Development of His Basic Thought One always creates the impression of being a schoolmaster in trying to reduce the manifold themes and theses of such rich reflection to one basic thought. Yet it is still necessary, in all truly systematic thinking, to grasp the many disparate movements of such a thought-process at their center of origin. An exhaustive presentation would have to show how the basic starting point which we have sketched is reflected repeatedly in Rahner’s numerous individual treatises, and how it always achieves concrete clarity and nuanced confirmation. Since this kind of compartmentalizing excerpted from the fullness of the basic experience cannot be presented here, I may be permitted to touch upon just a few basic themes as they originate from this constructive center. Moreover, this is the time to point people quite simply to Rahner’s work itself. No
“portrait” can substitute for the requisite working with the sources.
His interpretation of revelation-history, in the above-mentioned sense, brings with it a totally new conception of the relationship between world-history and revelation-history.53 Properly understood, salvation history is, on the whole, coextensive with human intellectual history. Of course, concrete history is never simply the history of revelation. “The latter takes place in the former, always in an indissoluble unity, with error, misinterpretation, guilt, abuses; it is a history both just and sinful. . . . “54 It is also here that Rahner’s efforts at a theology of non
Christian religions and of the “anonymous Christian” occur. Christians ultimately achieve their diacritical possibility for discerning a genuine revelation history in the whole of human history only from Christ; he, himself, is the unique climax of revelation history, which, carried by God’s grace, moves in the world’s constant self-transcendence toward this omega point. 55 The transcendentally understood relationship between (graced) spirit and (revelation) history implies the absolute savior, the Godman,” as the climax of the history of grace in the world.
He is the historical, unsurpassable, irreversible, and thus eschatological 53. See “History of the World and Salvation-History,” Theological Investigations V. trans.
Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 966), 97-1 1 4.
54. Revelation and Tradition, 1 7-18.
55. See “The Secret of Life,” Theological Investigations VI, 1 49.
34 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
manifestation of God’s victorious self-communication to the world.s6
From this starting point one could easily show the inner connection to Rahner’s sacramental theology and his ecclesiology.57
In this context we can point out that Rahner himself presented a glimpse into the inner structure of his theological thought in the different sketches for “The Need for a ‘Short Formula’ of Christian Faith.”58
These reflections would be incomplete without always keeping in mind the addresse of theology which Rahner always kept before him: the contemporary person’s need for and understanding of faith. It is only here that theology can gain entrance.
6. Concern for Pastoral and Practical Theology From the very beginning Rahner’s theology has a sense for pastoral questions and a concern for the faith of his companions in faith. To this day he is a pastor for many people. His “pious” books, as he liked to call them, have become quiet guides to vital Christian spirituality. This faith shows that it is, in the best sense of the word, fraternal, in that Rahner was ready to take up courageously all human questions and not to avoid any genuine need. Very early on, Rahner worked at clarifying the spirituality of the founder of his order and exploring, for example, the deeper meaning of the lgnatian “finding God in all things,” and the experience of the “ever-greater God.” Among his earliest works were treatises on the spiritual life according to the church fathers.
If one wishes to appreciate his interest in, and achievements for, practical theology and pastoral praxis, one has to understand that Rahner’s theology is rooted in a deep spirituality, in a deeply personal experience of faith, and in pastoral activity. This practical dimension of his theological thought, then, is no subsequent application of a presupposed theology. Nor does it come primarily out of an “existentiell, “59
personalistic or an habitual way of thinking of this theology. To be sure, 56. See “Jesus Christ,” Encyclopedia of Theology: The Concise Sacramentum Mundi (New York: Seabury Press, 1 975), 764-72.
57. See The Church and the Sacraments, trans. W J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 963); “The Second Vatican Council’s Challenge to Theology,” Theological Investigations IX, 3-27.
58. Theological Investigations IX, 1 1 7-26; Foundations of Christian Faith, 448-59.
59. “Existentiell” refers to human existence in the concrete and to the ways in which the structures of human existence are given concrete content. “Existential,” on the other hand, is a generic term applied to those characteristics or capacities of human existence (for example, self-transcendence, self-consciousness, and freedom) which make it specifically human and distinguish il from other modes of existence. Thus, for example, one’s existential relationship to the Trinity and to Christ becomes existentie/1 through explicit, personal, formal prayer. “Existentiell,” then, refers to one’s subjective, personal appropriation. – Translation editor.
INTRODUCTION • 35
Rahner mastered numerous literary genres – from the stringent treatise to very personal prayer, for example, Watch and Pray with Me, 60
which appeared under the name Anselm Trescher, which goes back to his mother’s family. He never denied that publications of this sort were a special obligation for him. He often said that “several smaller and larger ‘pious’ books are just as important to me as those which claim to be theological works.”61
The wooing mediation of the offer of revelation to human beings, and from that the church’s concern for their salvation, do not belong to the “pastoral” consequences, but rather to the innermost driving force, of his theology – a dynamic prior to all scholarly theology. It is only logical, then, that Rahner was concerned, again and again, with the encounter of ” theory” and “practice” in academic theology. The anthology Sendung und Gnade ( 1 959), subtitled “Essays in Pastoral Theology,” is a first impressive witness to the constant and numerous efforts he made in this regard. Rahner’s concern in presenting these essays was, above all, to offer a service that arises primordially out of the very heart of theology, and is directed at praxis and ultimately at its theory. The goal of the essays flowed from the conviction “that the mission to the apostolate, and to pastoral care, is a saving event supported by God’s grace.
For this reason pastoral theology is ultimately not psychology, pedagogy, sociology, and the like, but rather theology. Thus only that person who trusts solely in God’s grace will measure up to such a mission.”62
What Rahner accomplished, actually and implicitly, in the different essays in this volume was to develop, more and more in the following years, into a scholarly concept of pastoral theology. Sendung und Gnade contains a significant prolegomenon in the chapter entitled
“The Present Situation of Christians: A Theological Interpretation of the Position of Christians in the Modern World.”63
In this lecture delivered in Cologne in 1 954, Rahner states that the actual situation of Christians in a present moment basically coconditions their salvific activity. Eventually this notion then led to a new starting point for practical theology as a scholarly discipline among the theological specialties. With the help of Heinz Schuster and the collaboration of German-speaking pastoral theologians, Rahner drafted his Plan und Aufri/3 eines Handbuches der Pastoraltheo/ogie (Plan and Sketch for a Handbook of Pastoral Theology).64 The five-volume Handbuch der 60. Trans. William V. Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 966).
6 1 . “Selbstportrat,” Forscher und Gelehrte, ed. W. Ernst Bohm (Stuttgart: Battenberg, 1 966), 2 1 .
62. Sendung und Gnade, foreword to the third edition, 1 96 1 .
63. The Christian Commitment, 3-37.
64. Freiburg i. Br.: Herder, 1 962. Not translated into English.
36 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
Pastoraltheologie (1 964-72) tried to carry out this plan, insofar as it is even possible. The first three volumes, newly revised and updated, are also available in new editions. Translations into the major European languages have given this work an even wider circulation.
To be sure, not everything succeeded as originally planned. If Rahner himself had not personally taken a hand in the project, the first two volumes especially would hardly have been published. In retrospect it is clear that many areas were a little neglected or excluded from the start.
For this reason the Handbuch der Verkiindigung (“preaching”) and the Handbuch der Religionspiidagogik have only been published recently.
The basic overall concept is much more important than such concrete, individual sections, or thematic amplifications. Despite all the appreciation, however, it is precisely the methodological reflections that have scarcely found a real and lasting echo. For that reason, let me sketch the most important perspectives here: 1 ) In contrast to doctrinal, or essentialistic, ecclesiology, which tries primarily to describe the “enduring” nature of the church, in practical theology it is a matter of the church inasmuch as the church is a concrete historical reality, a reality which, with the help of a sociological-theological analysis, must come up with precepts for dealing with the daily accomplishment of its salvific concerns.
2) So understood, practical theology is not only intended for the
“clergy” as the “subject” of the church’s pastoral activities, it also turns its attention to the church as a whole, in the midst of the contemporary world. In so doing, it focuses upon all the official and nonofficial bearers of concrete responsibility for the faith, for example, the faithful and the pope.
3) The formal point of view of practical theology is that all ecclesial functioning is conditioned by the actual present moment. In addition, a thorough theological analysis of the present is necessary, an analysis which must find a nuanced viewpoint in all the statements of practical theology.
After years of not engaging in a scholarly, theoretical discussion such as one finds in the Handbuch der Pastoraltheologie, pastoral theology recently “joined the club” through the works of N. Mette and P. Neumann. Rahner’s impulses, which, by the way, go beyond, and are not simply coextensive, with the Handbuch,65 are, of course, not 65. See “Practical Theology within the Totality of Theological Disciplines,” Theological Investigations IX, 1 0 1 – 1 4 ; “On the Problems Entailed in a ‘Pastoral Constitution,’ “
and “Practical Theology and Social Work in the Church,” Theological Investigations X, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 973), 293-3 1 7, 349-70; “The New Claims which Pastoral Theology Makes upon Theology as a Whole,” Theological Investigations XI, 1 1 5-36; “Theology as Engaged in an Interdisciplinary Dialogue with the
INTRODUCTION • 37
just hidden in his expressly scholarly-theoretical treatises. Despite all subsequent nuances and corrections, Rahner’s programmatical ideas still have a future because something like the initial impulse remains.
Karl Rahner was not a dreamy-eyed theologian, lost in the clouds of speculation, far from the reality of the church’s present situation. He didn’t play theoretical or historical mind-games for himself or for his own little clique. He always placed himself at his church’s disposal.
By name, or anonymously, he often handled many of her “hot potatoes.” His collaboration at the council clearly showed that he could give up his own ideas and suggestions when the greater good and the common good were at stake. Often, during momentous theological consultations of the council, and in the following year, he put a stop to the endless, and often somewhat self-complacent debates, by stepping in suddenly, and saying with his own uniquely “grumpy charm”
(Mario v. Galli): “Enough clever talk! We need a text! “
He saw his work for the church as an offer for better understanding the faith, about which one can decide in freedom, without using backroom politics and tricks to have “his” ideas prevail. Rahner knew that his dialogue with the real church could be fraught with conflict. He wrote the important essay Free Speech in the Church66 in 1 953, and he never tired of writing, or of taking a public position, if he thought that truth, love, freedom, or justice were being violated in the church. In this sense, he hardly ever espoused any splinter group within the currents in the church. He could only take the unpredictable position of one who wants to help in every way possible, and who speaks fearlessly for, or against, something, because he always remains concerned about the universal good of the church. It is for this reason that he always practiced a controversial and critical theology – without ever descending to the level of sheer grumbling, or vain knowing-better. If he criticized, then he only took a position if he had positive counter-suggestions to offer.67
In this effort, whether he had something to say or something contradictory to say, a charism – extremely rare among theologians –
came to light. It is easy to have an abstractly loyal relationship to one’s church. One can keep such a proper distance that basically one never comes into conflict with it. Many – be they conservative or progres-Sciences,” and “On the Contemporary Relationship between Theology and the Contemporary Sciences,” Theological Investigations XIII, 80-93, 94-1 02; Perspectives for Pastoral Theology in the Future,” Theological Investigations XXII, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 99 1 ), 1 06-1 9.
66. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1 959.
67. See The Shape of the Church to Come; “Opposition in the Church,” Theological Investigations XVII, 1 2 7-38.
38 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
sive – demonstrate this by moving back and forth securely on the stilts of theological scholarship, above the immediate concerns of the real church.
Rahner took an active part in all the great questions without becoming a foot-dragging church officeholder, or a hawker of current interests that made headlines. What so seldom happens in the theological “business” is the passionate, pugnacious, ever-hopeful yes to the real church, despite every disappointment. 68
At the same time Rahner knew that the contemporary church has a dangerous tendency toward an introverted narcissism, preoccupied with itself and with its “cares.” Asked what he thought of the contemporary church on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1 964, he replied with a bit of a grumble: “The church, and all of us, ought to talk more about God and God’s grace.”
Rahner helped form the church and the theology of our time. For this he received many honors and great esteem. Times change. In 1 968
he wrote: “Now I seem to be someone who must suddenly defend positions which are actually in the center of the church’s tradition . . . .
Indeed, a ‘leftist’ can become a ‘rightist’ because others have changed their positions, not because you have changed yours.”69 He often used the image of a war on two fronts, in which he had placed himself.
He remained faithful to his theological task in everything he did.
In this sense there is nothing, or hardly anything, “private” that can be called “biographical,” alongside his service. He stood totally in the service of the mission he undertook. This is the only way to grasp his unusual productivity. He used himself up for God and the people of the church.
And so, ultimately, he had an indifference toward, and distance from, theology as scholarship. He could say with clear irony: “I am no
‘scholar.’ In this work [of theology] I also want to be a man, a Christian, and, as much as possible, a priest of the church. Perhaps a theologian cannot desire anything else. In any case the science of theology, as such, was never important to me.”70 He valued precise scientific knowledge, but he feared the narrow-minded specialist.
As a great “generalist” or theological “universalist,” he asked himself, seriously, how this immense task could be done responsibly in 68. See “Concerning our Assent to the Church as She Exists in the Concrete,” Theological Investigations XII, trans. David Bourke (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 974), 1 42-60.
69. Die Antwort der Theo/ogen (Dusseldorf: Patmos, 1 968), 1 3. See “The Church’s Angry Old Men,” Karl Rahner in Dialogue, ed. Pau1 1mhof and Hubert Biallowons, trans.
ed. Harvey D. Egan (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1 986), 330-33.
70. “Selbstportrat,” 2 1 .
INTRODUCTION
39
•
the face of the methods of theological specialization. “Forty years ago the ratio between that which I knew, and that which was available, with regard to the problematic, the knowledge, and the methods was perhaps 1 :4; today it is probably 1 :400.”71 He has shown how someone can do theology in such a situation. With a disarming openness, to the frustration of all scientific pretensions, he declared: “To a certain extent I want to be a deeply-thinking dilettante – and one who at the same time thinks deeply about his dilettantism and factors it into his thinking – but all with reference to theology’s ultimately foundational questions. “72
Rahner suffered from the excessive demands of thousands of questions, a long tradition, and life’s complexities. He called the “method”
of a fragmentary mastery “dilettantism.” But who actually are the dilettantes in this case?
Rahner’s work served the church and theology in a specific historical period. It is hard to say, today, how one can best describe this transitional period. Theologically, this step surely means – but not only! – the transition from a universally valid scholastic theology, in the broadest sense of the term, into a larger multiplicity of theological models that compete with each other, without detriment to a unity in the church’s confession of faith. Since no one really knows where the journey is ultimately going, none of those people who believe that they have to go faster than Rahner should speak lightly about “overtaking” him. Those who entrust themselves to the power and the strength of Rahner’s way of thinking come up with and raise questions, especially if they remain critical, which they cannot adequately answer so quickly.
Ultimately the individual assertions of this theology are not important, even though this theology need not shy away from them.
What is important is the inner tension that survives lively oppositions and contradictory situations and makes them fruitful. Maintaining the unity-in-diversity of tradition and its interpretation, of past historical experiences and pressing contemporary concerns, of the inherited
“substance” of the faith and critical reflection – this endures as his thought’s excellent, and rare, basic characteristic.
And so this fundamental “transition” from one moment to the other is, ultimately, not a sign of a unique historical constellation, but rather an exemplary manifestation of Catholic theology in general. It is precisely in this regard that his theology can hardly ever be essentially
“surpassed.” Of course this example does not tolerate any imitation.
7 1 . “Grace as the Heart of Human Existence,” Faith in a Wintry Season, 1 9.
72. Ibid.
40 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
Rather it remains valid, as such, only if its one basic experience survives new challenges.
In this sense, Rahner is even now something like a classical theologian, full of the explosive power of his creative thinking, and of a unique spiritual presence which surprises us again and again. Rahner is like an Atlas, a giant who has taken upon himself the heavy burden of doing theology in our time, in a responsible and simultaneously creative way, and on behalf of all Christians, with the full effort of his whole self, to the very limits of his human capabilities.
IV. THE STRUCTURE AND USE OF THIS BOOK
At this point there are just a few things to say about the structure, selection, and arrangement of the texts – and, above all, their use.
1. Arrangement and Selection
The purpose of this anthology is to be neither a compendium of Rahner’s theology, as Rahner himself has presented it in outline form in his Foundations of Christian Faith, nor a summary of the many statements in Theological Investigations. It is also not a “system” of Rahner’s thought dreamt up by the editors. Despite all the correct conclusions coming from Rahner’s reflections, most attempts at reducing his theology to a strict common denominator have forced it into a procrustean bed, and have robbed it of the freedom of its intellectual movement, as well as of its inexhaustible mystery.
This work is just an anthology, which takes selected material from Rahner’s extensive writings in order to present to those who are interested a palette of the great themes, a series of impressive texts and important thoughts. One ought not to be deceived about the “systematic” which undergirds it. Of course it does take its cue from the structure of Rahner’s theology, as seen in his Foundations of Christian Faith, his “short formulas of the faith,” his numerous systematic treatises, and his various encyclopedia entries. However, it does not follow any of these models slavishly. Many texts could easily have been placed under another heading or in another place. For similar reasons, this anthology could not assemble all the themes of his theology. It would have been presumptuous to imagine that we could include everything. It is by all means conceivable that more specialized criteria for choosing will allow for other anthologies on Christian life, on pastoral care, and the like.
Nevertheless, we did try to present Rahner’s thought whole and unabridged. We wanted to include all the essential perspectives and dimensions of his theological work – from the strict definition of con-
INTRODUCTION
41
•
cepts, his objections in the area of church politics, to the intimacy of prayer. A more systematically prepared American understanding strengthened us in our purpose. 73 Of course, readers must decide themselves whether the editors’ good intention really succeeded.
2. The Editing of Texts
We did as little editing as possible. Reductions were unavoidable. What has been omitted in the text is not expressly noted. The text has been arranged uniformly with regard to format (abbreviations, quotations, and the like). For the sake of greater clarity, we made more use of paragraphing. Latin and Greek concepts, as well as technical terms, were both translated and explained. We did this, however, only the first time the word came up in a text. At times transitions in the text had to be recast. Only in one place (no. 22) did we make a change in paragraphs. Greek texts were immediately translated.
Quite a few places contained printing errors and oversights. Without damaging Rahner’s unique and unmistakable style, several harsh expressions were carefully toned down. Footnotes were left out. The headings are mainly the work of the publishers, although often based on the formulation of the texts. For technical reasons (above all, because of the makeup of the pages) slight shortenings of the texts were necessary in several places, but none of them were significant.
Those with scholarly interest should consult the original publications for comparison, as given in the footnote to each entry heading.
3. Reading Tips
The reader should enjoy as much freedom as possible in using this book. However, we recommend that the less-prepared reader not begin with the first section of this book. This first section presents a reflection on the whole of Christianity, and it is not easy to digest, for conceptual and linguistic reasons. Concrete anthropological phenomena (such as laughter, walking, aging, and the like), things about Christian life (such as Pentecost, the pilgrims’ meal, judgment, and the like) are more easily accessible. Therefore we consciously recommend to the reader a choice of readings. This book wishes to invite the reader “to browse.”
Of course, one can read it right through from beginning to end.
Despite its marked limitation with regard to systematic composition, this book affords a certain overview of the breadth and dynamics of Rahner’s thought. The bibliography at the end of this volume makes 73. Gerald McCool, ed., A Rahner Reader (New York: Seabury Press, 1 975).
42 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
clear, of course, that this cannot be a smooth, royal road for making all of Rahner available in the easiest possible way.
The footnotes found with each entry heading, in addition to providing documentation, also serve to refer the reader to the complete texts.
It may lead the person to reread, or to read for the first time, one book or another, be it The Eternal Year or On Prayer. Perhaps some readers will pick up the fundamental, early, philosophical works, Spirit in the World and Hearers of the Word.
All our efforts have only one goal: to guide people to Rahner’s spirituality and thought, with as much authenticity and diversity as possible, and – what is more important to Rahner, as well – to prepare the reader who is open for an encounter with the living God: ”All subtle theology, every dogma, all canon law, every adaptation, and all the church’s nay-saying, all institutions, every office and all its power, every holy liturgy, and every brave mission has as its only goal: faith, hope, and love of God and human beings. All the church’s other plans and actions would be absurd and perverse where she to abandon this commission and seek only herself.”74
Translated by Robert J. Braunreuther, S.J.
Boston College
7 4. The Church after the Council, 3 1 .
WHAT IS
CHRISTIANITY?
1 • A Short Formula
of the Christian Faith*
Christianity is the assent on the part of the whole community (church) formulated and held explicitly by that community to the absolute mystery which exercises an inescapable power in and over our existence, and which we call God. It is our assent to that mystery as pardoning us and admitting us to a share in its own divinity; it is that mystery as imparting itself to us in a history shaped by our own free decisions as an intelligent being; and this self-bestowal of God in Jesus Christ manifested itself as finally and irrevocably victorious in history.
I believe that what is definitive in the Christian faith is expressed here, and that too in a formula which, provided it is rightly understood and explicated, will also be found to cover the further contents of the Christian faith as well, as long as these are not taken to include those positive definitions freely enunciated by the church which belong to the dimension of historical and contingent fact as such, and which, moreover do not represent any particular problem on any reasonable approach to the question of intellectual honesty.
Let us examine the formula we have constructed, bearing in mind the provisos mentioned above. What it asserts first and foremost about Christianity and about belief in it is that God is the incomprehensible and impenetrable mystery, and that God must be recognized as mystery in this sense. Christianity is not a religion which, in its evaluation of human existence, postulates the idea of “God” as a recognized and acknowledged landmark, so to speak, one factor among the rest, which can be manipulated and combined with them so as to produce a satisfactory final estimate. On the contrary, Christianity is a religion that projects the person into the dimension of the incomprehensible surrounding and permeating his or her existence.
It prevents the person from falling on merely ideological grounds (for this is the ultimate significance of the Christian religion) into the mistake of supposing that there is a basic formula of existence which is comprehensible to us, which is available to us ourselves to manipulate, and on the basis of which we can construct existence.
* Theological Investigations VII, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 97 1 ), 60–64.
45
46 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
Christianity constitutes a radical denial of all such “idols.” It aims at bringing a person into contact with God as the ineffable mystery without any diminution of his own human freedom, and without the hubris of attempting to control God. Christianity recognizes that a person knows God only when he is reduced to silence and adoration by the experience of this mystery. All religious utterances are true only insofar as they constitute the ultimate word introducing the silence with which he reacts to the presence of this mystery, in order that it may remain present to him in itself, and not be replaced by the mere idea of God.
But Christianity knows that this mystery permeates its own existence as the ultimate reality of all and as the truth of truths; that the Christian in his thoughts, in his freedom, in his actions, and in the conscious acceptance of his own death, always and unquestioning goes beyond that which can be defined, comprehended and conceptually manipulated in the dimension of the concrete and the particular which he encounters in the sphere of life and knowledge.
The Christian never simply “comes across” God (indeed in that case it would not be God at all) as one specific phenomenon among others within the sphere of human existence, one, therefore, which falls within the limits of his ideas and his actions. He is in contact with the living God as the all-encompassing and the unencompassed, as the ineffable upholder of being such that to call him in question is to call everything in question also, ourselves included; one who is not, so to say, conjured up by our questioning, but is already there in that he himself makes it possible for us to raise questions about him by providing beyond all question the basis from which such questions can be put, opening the door to them and raising us to the level at which we can ask them.
Rightly regarded, Christianity is not a fortress of truth with innumerable windows, which we must live in order to be “in the truth,” but rather one single aperture which leads out of all the individual truths (and even errors) into the truth which is the unique incomprehensibility of God. But Christianity insists relentlessly, in season and out of season, that this overwhelming brightness that is darkness and silence to us, which encompasses our life and permeates everything, that is all other lights and the darknesses that correspond to them, shall not be lost sight of by us, that in our existence we shall not allow our attention to be drawn away from this strange and unearthly brightness, but rather face up to it, trembling indeed yet resolute (in our commitment to it), calling it by its nameless name, never endowing our own idols with that name.
But Christianity has something more to assert of this unearthly and ineffable mystery, and this is its real message. For the moment it makes no difference whether a person dares to learn of this real message of
WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY?
47
•
Christianity from the innermost promptings of his own conscience as moved by grace, or whether he has the impression that this message constitutes the basic motive force, purged of all extraneous elements, in the religious history of humankind (for in this too the mysterious grace of God is at work), or even whether he simply receives this message from the witness of Christ and his apostles. In any case, the true message of Christianity has this to say to us: God is the incomprehensible mystery of our existence which encompasses us and causes us to realize, however painfully, the limitations of that existence, which he himself transcends.
But he does not only present himself to us in this guise as the ultimate horizon of the knowable, toward which the course of our existence as spiritual beings is oriented and by which it is corrected, even while God himself remains remote and silent to us. He does indeed perform this function, setting us at a distance from himself so as to make it possible for us to “return to ourselves” in knowledge and freedom and thereby to give coherence and intelligibility to the environment of sensible experience in which we live, viewing it as a cosmic whole and as our environment. And in the very fact of doing this he makes us experience for ourselves our own finite state. But there is more to it than this.
The mystery which we call God gives himself in his divine existence, gives himself to us for our own in a genuine act of self-bestowal. He himself is the grace of our existence.
We shall say, therefore, that what we mean by creation is that the divine being freely “exteriorizes” his own activity so as to produce nondivine being, but does this solely in order to produce the necessary prior conditions for his own divine self-bestowal in that free and unmerited love that is identical with himself. He does this in order to raise up beings who can stand in a personal relationship to himself and so receive his message, and on whom he can bestow not only finite and created being distinct from himself, but himself as well. In this way he himself becomes both giver and gift, and even more the actual source of the human being’s own capacity to receive him as gift.
Thus, the finite, of its very nature as finite, finds its ultimate fulfillment in God as the mysterious infinite. The “creator-creature”
relationship belongs necessarily and indispensably to the very mode of reality as such, but does not constitute its actual content. God creates because he himself wills to impart himself by “externalizing” and so giving himself.
The distance between him and us is there in order that the unity of love may be achieved. Creation, covenant, and law are there (as providing a framework for the finite) in order that love may exist in boundless measure. Obedience is imposed in order that we may re-
48 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
ceive God’s freedom. We are set far from God in order that the miracle of his nearness to us to bless and even to forgive our sins may be made possible.
The purpose of all this is not that the mystery may be wholly penetrated and resolved by our minds, but rather that as mystery it may become the blessings of a person’s spirit, which possesses this mystery directly and in a manner that draws it out of itself in order that in total self-forgetfulness it may love this mystery as its only true light and life.
This is the real content of Christianity: the ineffability of the absolute mystery that bestows itself in forgiveness and in drawing us into its own divine nature. Moreover, it bestows itself in such a way that we can sustain it, accept it, and once more really receive the capacity to accept it, from itself.
It can be seen, then, that this self-bestowal of God (upon the human being in the history that he shapes for himself as a free and intelligent being) has a threefold aspect. Now the three aspects involved, inasmuch as they mutually constitute the self -bestowal of God, are inherent in the divine nature as such. In this self-bestowal on God’s part, therefore, what we Christians are accustomed to call God’s triune nature is already present.
A further factor that belongs to the very essence of Christianity is the person from whom its name is derived, Jesus Christ. But the mystery that is Jesus Christ is bound up in the closest possible manner with the one mentioned above. The mystery of God’s self-bestowal, in which God himself in his innermost glory becomes the absolute future of the person, has a history of its own because it proceeds from God himself as his free act, and because the person, as existing in the dimension of history, is involved in the historicity of humanity considered as a single whole. Also because he has to achieve the ultimate transcendentality of his nature, “divinized” as it is by God’s self-bestowal, in the “spacetime” dimension of history itself in and through a concrete encounter with the concrete world.
For it is in this that he exists, is aware of himself, and realizes himself.
The self-bestowal of God, even though it constitutes the innermost and transcendental basis for the world’s existence and its history, even though it represents the ultimate entelechy of the world, nevertheless has a history of its own, that is, an inner dynamism such that it manifests itself, unfolds itself, and achieves its fulfillment in space and time. We call this the history of salvation and revelation.
However, there is a point at which the manifestation of the divine self-bestowal as something offered on God’s part, and as something freely accepted, even though accepted only with the help of God’s grace, on the person’s part, attains its acme and the stage at which it
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becomes absolute and irrevocable. It is the stage at which the dialogue between God and man who is the man, that becomes substantiated in him (so that it is not merely conducted by him as something distinct from his own essence) resolves itself in an absolute assent from either side, and manifests itself as such.
In other words, the man in whom this identity is achieved appears as God’s absolute and irrevocable assent as uttered to and as accepted by humankind. And it is at this point precisely that we find what Christian faith means by the incarnation of the divine Logos. It is ipso facto present when the divine self-bestowal appears in history as absolutely and irrevocably uttered, and absolutely and irrevocably received. Admittedly there still remains the irreducible factuality of the history that has really been lived through, the fact that this takes place and is experienced precisely in Jesus of Nazareth.
What we mean when we speak of the “church” is the eschatological presence of God’s truth and God’s love in this entity by word and sacrament. And this means nothing else than that the historical facts are enduring and valid, that in Jesus of Nazareth the history of God’s self-bestowal has manifested itself in an irrevocable form, and in this form remains present and remains the object of belief.
2 • The Sacramental Structure
of the Christian Salvation-Reality*
Christianity is first and fundamentally Christ himself. It is therefore in the first place a salvation-reality which is given in the order of human history in the fact that the incarnate Son of the Father became, in virtue of his personal dignity and his membership of the race of Adam, the head and representative of the whole of humanity, and as such performed the act of worship of God and offered the absolute and final sacrifice that fundamentally redeemed humanity. The presence of this fact of salvation (as God’s unique, free, historical act) in human history is the foundation of Christianity.
But this reality, in which Christianity first exists for us is: (a) posited by God himself. The crucial reality through which we reach God is therefore not our prayer and the offering made by us insofar as it is our own accomplishment, but an act of God himself, by means of which
* Theological Investigations Ill, trans. Karl-H. and BoniFace Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 967), 243-46.
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the human being is capable of positing an act that pays homage to God and sanctifies himself; (b) It is “sacramental”; therefore, (c) the word is an essential constitutive part of it. These last two points we must here explain in greater detail in themselves and in their mutual connection.
Through the Logos’s incarnation God’s salvific will became a genuine reality in the order of human existence. That is why the human being does not find God in any process of rising beyond this world, whether this be conceived in an idealistic, gnostic, mystic, or any other fashion. He does not find God in the abandonment of the spheres of his “natural” existence (that is, of his existence as always given), but only in a turning to Jesus Christ, that is, to a reality within the sphere of his own existence and history, to Jesus in whom God himself came to us.
The salvific presence of God in the flesh, that is, within human history – the perennial stumbling block of all philosophy and autonomous mysticism – is nevertheless of such a kind that it is not immediately accessible to the grasp of human experience in its own inner self. This is excluded by the strictly supernatural character of the reality of this presence.
But if it is not only to exist “in itself” but also to be given “for us,” to be “present” (and this is the only way for it to become a reality of salvation), then apart from the corresponding subjective a priori of which the human being has need in order to grasp it – the grace of faith, and so on – its proper, inner, total essence must contain an element that makes possible the presence of something transcending human experience without making it necessary for this reality to appear in its own proper self: the sign that makes present for us what exists in itself.
But for us, only the word can be considered as constituting such a sign. For all human reality – considered in isolation and apart from this supervening word that forms and interprets it – is out of the question as a sign indicative of the presence of a strictly supernatural reality, because such a nonhuman reality could function as a sign of this kind only in its positive being. But this would mean, in effect, that the natural being of a thing could have a univocal reference to a supernatural reality, and this is excluded from the beginning by the very supernatural character of that which is to be shown.
Such a reference can be effected therefore only by means of the word. For only in the word is there the possibility of negation pointing to another reality. Only the supervening of such a negation can transmute a positive mundane thing into the sign of a supernatural reality. We conclude, therefore, that among the intrinsic constitutive elements of the presence of a fact of salvation within human history – here in the
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first place the saving reality o f Christ himself- must b e numbered the word as sign.
This means in the first place that the Christian salvation-reality is essentially sacramental. For we may justly call sacramental all divine, supernatural salvation-reality that takes place in history and is therefore present to us only in sign. And this leads us to the conclusion that the word belongs to the fundamental constitutive elements of sacramental reality, and in such a way that the “sacramental” function is inherent in the word when it first makes its appearance in the essence of Christianity.
For if Christianity in its foundation and origin is not primarily the communication of truths (as true propositions) but the reality of the incarnate, crucified, and risen Son of God, and if this fundamental reality (as salvation-reality for us in the order of our existence) includes the word as an intrinsic element, then this can only mean that in its first Christian application the word is sacramental: a sign in which God’s saving will is made present for us in our history.
The Christian word – or, to express it differently, the word insofar as it is Christian – is not primarily a discussion about something already given in other ways, not a means for reaching understanding between two persons about an object that each of them can attain in his own way, but a making present of the salvation-reality itself.
As applied to Christ this means that his revelation is not originally an imparting of true propositions, which perhaps no one would have thought of otherwise, but the self-revelation of his own being, a selfrevelation by means of which he first becomes the Christ for us.
Christian preaching (that is, where it is not the “form of the sacrament” in the usual sense) is therefore nothing more than the further exposition of, or preparation for, the strictly sacramental word: it is always founded upon this, indeed it is in the broad sense itself “sacramental”: the sign of the hidden and yet present salvation-reality of Christ, a sign which – in the case of the strictly sacramental word –
itself brings about this presence.
3 • Christianity and World Religions*
The Catholic church is confronted by historical powers that she cannot neglect as wholly “secular,” but which are important for her, even though they are opposed to her. It is her duty to establish a relationship
* Grace in Freedom, trans. and adapted by Hilda Graef (New York: Herder and Herder, 1 969), 8 1 –86.
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with them and to understand their existence insofar as she cannot simply approve of them. But she must bear the scandal of their opposition and conquer it by herself becoming the higher unity that embraces it.
This is what is meant by “open Catholicism.”
One of the most difficult elements of this pluralism is the multiplicity of religions that exists even after two thousand years of Christianity and its missionary activities. For no other religion claims to be the religion and the absolutely unique and only valid revelation of the one living God. Moreover, today the existence of many religions threatens the individual Christian more than ever before. For in the past another religion was at the same time also the religion of a different civilization, with which there were only very peripheral contacts. It was the religion of foreigners. Thus it is not surprising that the existence of such a religion should not have affected oneself at all.
Today the situation is very different. Everyone is everyone else’s neighbor and therefore, whether willingly or unwillingly, conditioned by a communications system embracing the whole planet. Every religion has become a question and a possibility for every person. Hence it challenges the absolute claim of one’s own Christianity.
We would therefore explain the basic characteristics of a dogmatic Catholic interpretation of the non-Christian religions, and thus help to solve the problems of the Christian position with regard to contemporary religious pluralism. We call it a dogmatic interpretation, because we consider the question not from the empirical point of view of the history of religions, but from the dogmatic standpoint of Christianity’s own conception of itself.
We begin with the statement that Christianity claims to be the absolute religion destined for all people, which cannot tolerate any other as having equal rights beside it. This thesis is the basis for the Christian theological understanding of other religions. Christ, the absolute Word of God, has come in the flesh and reconciled (united) the world to God through his death and resurrection, not only theoretically but in reality.
Ever since, Christ and his permanent historical presence in the world that we call church are the religion which binds the person to God.
However, it should be noted that Christianity has a historical beginning in Christ. But this means only that this absolute religion, too, must come to all people historically confronting and claiming them as their legitimate religion.
Therefore, the question is: Is the moment in time at which this absolute historical religion makes existentially real demands on people the same for all, or has the beginning of this moment itself a history and thus is not the same in time for all people, all civilizations, and periods of history?
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If we suppose that our second theory is correct, this means that we can understand our first thesis in a more differentiated way. For we shall state positively only that Christianity is meant to be the absolute and therefore unique religion of all people, but we leave open the question at which moment in time it is objectively binding for any person and any civilization. It should be noted that we are therefore concerned with the fact that a social entity is needed for salvation. Hence we may, indeed must, say without hesitation that this thesis implies that its social organization belongs to the very essence of religion.
Moreover, we may say that paganism continues to exist not because it has rejected Christianity, but because it has not yet met it in a sufficiently impressive encounter. If this is true, paganism will cease to exist in this sense, because the West has begun to enter the history of the whole planet. Or, to express it more cautiously, we enter an entirely new phase in world history, in which Christians and non-Christians, living in the same situation, confront each other dialogically.
Until the gospel actually enters the historical situation of a certain person, a non-Christian religion contains not only elements of a natural knowledge of God mixed with depravity caused by original sin and human elements, but also supernatural elements of grace. It can therefore be acknowledged to be a legitimate religion, even though in different graduations.
According to the first part of this thesis even non-Christian religions may be said a priori to contain supernatural elements of grace. This opinion is based on the theological principle that, as Christians, we must profess the dogma that God wills the salvation of all people even in the postparadisiacal period of original sin. On the other hand this salvation is specifically Christian, for there is no salvation apart from Christ, while, on the other, God truly and seriously wants all people to be saved. Both statements can be combined only by saying that every person is exposed to the influence of divine grace that offers communion with God, whether or not it is accepted.
The second part of our second thesis, however, goes further. It says that because of this pre-Christian religions, too, need not simply be regarded as illegitimate but that they, too, can very well have a positive meaning. This also applies to religions that, in their concrete forms, may contain many theoretical and practical errors.
This is shown, for example, by a theological analysis of the structure of the old covenant. For in the old covenant as it appeared in history there was much that was right and willed by God, but there were also a great many errors, wrong developments, and depraved ideas, while there was no permanent infallible authority to separate the two.
Hence we must give up the prejudiced idea that we’may confront
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a non-Christian religion with the alternative of being either wholly of divine origin or a merely human thing. If in these religions, too, the person is under grace, the individual must have the possibility of a genuine saving relation with God.
The human person is a social being, and in earlier times he was even more radically involved in social ties. Hence it is unthinkable that he could have realized his relationship with God individually and interiorly, outside the actual religion which offered itself in the world around him. For, as has already been said, it belongs to the characteristics of a true, concrete religion that individual religious practice is embedded in a social religious order. Hence the salvation God wanted people to have reached them according to the divine will and permission in the concrete religion of the historical conditions and circumstances of their life, though this did not deprive them of the right and the limited opportunity to criticize and to pay attention to the reforming impulses that God’s providence always inspired in such a religion.
If this second thesis is correct, Christianity confronts an adherent of a non-Christian religion not only as a mere non-Christian, but also as a person who may already be regarded in certain respects as an anonymous Christian.
It must be possible to be not only an anonymous theist but, as has been said, an anonymous Christian. There is a twofold reason for this.
For the one who becomes the “object” of the church’s missionary activities may have approached and even found salvation without having yet been reached by the church’s preaching. Secondly, this salvation which the person has found must also be the salvation of Christ, because there is no other.
And so it is true that in the last analysis the preaching of the gospel does not make into a Christian a person absolutely forsaken by God and Christ, but that it transforms an anonymous Christian into a person who realizes his Christianity in the depth of his grace-endowed nature also objectively and in the church’s communal confession.
This implies that this express self-realization of a formerly anonymous Christian is a higher phase of development of this Christianity, demanded by his nature. Hence we may on no account conclude that the preaching of Christianity is superfluous, because a person is an anonymous Christian without it.
Christianity is demanded, first, by the incarnational and social structure of grace and Christianity, and, secondly, by the fact that a clearer and more reflected comprehension of Christianity offers a greater chance of salvation to the individual than his status as an anonymous Christian.
True, we cannot hope that religious pluralism will disappear in
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the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, Christians themselves may well regard the non-Christian world as an anonymous Christendom. Therefore, it follows that today the church will not so much regard herself as the exclusive community of candidates for salvation, but rather as the avant-garde, expressing historically and socially the hidden reality which, Christians hope, exists also outside her visible structure.
The church is not the community of those who possess God’s grace as opposed to those who Jack it, but the community of those who can confess explicitly what they and the others hope to be. Of course, this explicit confession and the historical institution of this salvation of Christ which is offered to all is itself a grace and part of salvation. The non
Christian may think it supercilious that the Christian attributes all that is good and whole in every person to the fruit of Christ’s grace and regards the non-Christian as a Christian who has not yet found himself.
But the Christian cannot do otherwise. Actually this seeming superiority is the way in which his greatest humility is expressed, both as regards himself and his church. For it lets God be greater than both the individual and the church. The church will confront the non-Christian with the attitude of Paul who said: “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” Hence we may well be tolerant and humble toward all non-Christian religions.
4 • Christianity Is Not an Ideology*
It is really impossible to suspect Christianity of being an ideology by the mere fact that it makes absolute declarations with the claim to truth, in the perfectly simple and ordinary sense of this word, that is, because it makes declarations that can be called “metaphysical.” On the one hand, they are declared with an absolute claim to truth and, on the other, they cannot be directly verified as valid on the empirical plane of natural science.
Of course, anyone who holds that every “metaphysics” is false or nondemonstrable cannot consider authentic Christianity, even as understood by itself, as anything but an ideology. That person may go on to reflect – in what would be an existentially irrational way – on why this Christianity can and should nevertheless have an essential significance for his life. He would then of course be overlooking the fact
• Theological Investigations VI, trans. Karl H. and Boniface Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 969), 48-55.
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that such a reflection on an irrational positing and ideologizing of life would itself imply a metaphysics, even though it be a bad one.
Of course, what has been said here is not meant to imply that the knowledge of faith and philosophical metaphysics are the same in their structure and merely differ with regard to their declared objects. It is true, all the same, that the Christian declaration of faith and metaphysics do coincide with regard to the just mentioned claim to truth, so that where the possibilities of a metaphysical declaration are denied in principle and from the outset, Christianity too can only be accorded the rank of a subjective ideology. For in this view, a subject before whom such an absolute claim to truth can be announced and to whom it can be imparted, just does not exist. In such a view only individual persons exist, individuals who try to make their existence a little more bearable and dignified by such mental fictions.
Hence, in defense against the reproach that Christianity is an ideology, it must in the first place be emphasized that metaphysics must not be suspected from the outset and in every case of being an ideology. This is shown by the very fact that the proposition stating that every metaphysics is in the last analysis a nonbinding ideology is itself a metaphysical proposition, whether it be expressed reflectively with theoretical universal binding force or is implied in the attempt to live life free from metaphysics (by an absolutely skeptical epoche regarding all matters beyond the immediate brute experience of life and natural scientific knowledge).
Relativism and skepticism, whether they be theoretically formulated or non theoretically attempted in life, are metaphysical decisions.
Metaphysics is inescapably given together with the human person’s existence. He always interprets his existence within a horizon of a priori predecisions that have already preceded this experience and embrace it. True and genuine metaphysics goes further and, precisely speaking, only consists in reflection on those transcendental, inevitably given implications which actually bear their evidence and certainty already within themselves and are necessarily posited together with every intellectual and free exercise of human existence.
Metaphysics, as reflex knowledge, does not produce these implications but simply reflects on the implications there and so renders them systematic. It is therefore a systematizing of a transcendental experience that, as the unsystematic ground of every empirical experience and understanding of truth, essentially transcends the latter in insight and certitude.
This metaphysics can therefore unashamedly admit the unfinished nature of its reflection, the necessity of always beginning anew and its imperfection. And yet it can say quite confidently that its meaning,
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that is, transcendental experience itself, is still the common property of all persons open to the truth. It shows itself as such even in the plurality of metaphysical systems, even where these systems appear totally contradictory to the superficial regard of the ordinary person and even of the bad historian of philosophy, and thus gives the impression of being merely mental fictions and arbitrary subjective assumptions.
Only someone capable of utter silence and absence of any thought, that is, someone capable of living in a purely animal immediacy to his biological existence and who therefore would not even know anything about his metaphysical suspension of judgment (in other words, someone who would not exercise it at all), would be really free of metaphysics and could avoid the claim of being made for absolute truth.
However, if there can be a metaphysics, at least in principle, that cannot be simply disposed of as an ideology from the very start, then a fortiori Christianity cannot be rejected as being an ideology simply because the horizons of its declarations of faith do not coincide with the primitive, factual everyday experience and the experience of the empirical natural sciences.
The fact of a pluralism of world views cannot be a legitimate reason for dismissing every world view (insofar as one wants to subsume metaphysics and the Christian teaching of faith under this title) as a mere ideology. Precisely this attitude would itself go beyond the objects of empirical experience and their functional connections and would make experience as a whole – which as such is not an object of experience – the object of a declaration which by definition would then itself be an ideology.
The right relationship to the pluralism of world views and metaphysical systems cannot consist in a flat suspicion of every world view as mere mythology. It can only consist in an attitude that carefully and critically examines, holds itself open to further knowledge and modifications of previous knowledge, is modest, tries to discover the transcendental experience in all the “systems” put forward, and yet has also the courage to make decisions, to commit itself with the quiet assurance that absolute truth is already reached even in an historically conditioned, finite, incomplete, still open declaration – even though this absolute truth always ultimately remains that unspeakable, holy mystery that can no longer be confined in any system superior to it and manageable by us.
When and where metaphysics understands itself in the last analysis as that rational or, better, intellectual introduction to the attitude of openness toward the absolute mystery – an attitude that always holds sway in the ground of our intellectual and freely responsible existence
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but for this precise reason must not remain indifferent in itself for the person – then metaphysics loses its appearance of being merely an ideological fiction, even when confronted with the pluralism of world views of our existence.
This pluralism of world views destroys in reality only the rationalistic presumption of any false metaphysics which might maintain that in it the person can grasp the totality of reality right down to its last bases and so manage it in his own system, instead of- as in life – of being struck dumb in reflecting on the implications of the ground of total reality by which one is seized.
Proceeding from this, it can be seen under a still wider aspect that Christianity is not an ideology. We have already said that the basis of all metaphysically and valid knowledge of truth is transcendental experience (even before any objective and individual experience), an experience by which the person is always already referred to the unembraceable totality of reality and into its very ground, which is that always already present holy mystery that removes the person into the distance of his finiteness and guilt – and this we call God.
This transcendental experience possessed in knowledge and responsible freedom is again unsystematically also the basis, the necessary condition and horizon of everyday experience and as such is the first and proper “place” for the reality of Christianity, and this without prejudice to its historicity and history about which we will have to speak later.
Christianity cannot be an ideology because, on the one hand, this experience of transcendence, being the introduction to an absolute sacred mystery which is no longer grasped but which, on the contrary, lays hold of one, makes every ideology transcendent by its own transcendental necessity insofar as such an ideology turns a certain limited intramundane experience into an absolute one.
On the other hand then, insofar as Christianity is not abbreviated in any way and represents in its teaching the right interpretation of this transcendental experience as it really achieves itself in its own, unabridged being, Christianity signifies in its reality precisely this adequate transcendental experience. Thus Christianity cannot be an ideology.
This is not the place to ask in what sense such a starting point for the understanding of Christianity is to be found, and what effect it has, in Rudolf Bultmann and others. Can we not say that the reality of Christianity is what Christians are accustomed to call grace? Is grace not God’s self-communication to the finite creature, the direct presence to God, the dynamism directed toward participation in the life of God who is above every finite and mortal creature?
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Does not grace signify that the person, in spite of his finiteness and guilt, is superior to all worldly powers and forces, even when he suffers under them to the bitter end? Is not grace always offered to all persons on account of God’s universal will and is it not effective in everything even when people close themselves to it in free guilt? Taking all this together, it means surely that the human person is someone who is borne by God himself and is driven toward direct presence to God in the very ground of his personal being. In other words, what we call grace is the real truth and the property, freely given by God, of the transcendental experience of the openness of the personal spirit to God.
If Christianity in its proper being signifies grace, and if grace is the innermost possibility and reality of the reception of God’s self-communication in the very ground of human existence, then Christianity is none else but the deepest reality of the transcendental experience, the experience of the absolute and forgiving nearness of God himself who is distinct from and above all intramundane reality and yet is the one who in this very way (even in this absolute nearness) remains the holy mystery to be worshiped.
However, if this is the proper nature of Christianity, then every ideology has already been surpassed because every ideology is concerned with what is verifiable in intramundane experience, whether this refers to blood and soil, sociability, rational technologization and manipulation, the enjoyment of life or the experience of the person’s own emptiness and absurdity, or whatever else, and it posits this as the basic condition of human existence.
Christianity declares these powers and forces, the masters of unredeemed existence, not merely theoretically but absolutely basically to be worthless idols that must never become our masters. It declares that the person has in the ground of his existence always already overcome these powers and forces in grace, and that the real question is whether he assents in his free actions to this his transcendental openness to God’s immediacy through grace, which is eternal life – his free action itself originating once more from the power of this grace.
Therefore, since the basic fulfillment of Christianity finds its point of insertion in the very midst of the human person’s transcendentality, a transcendentality that always arises above any intramundane ideology, even though merely or rather precisely because it is a transcendence toward the absolute mystery of God in his absolute and forgiving nearness), Christianity is from the outset no mere ideology. At least, it is not an ideology of immanence. However, the transcendence referred to here is not a superadded dimension to the realm of the human person’s intramundane existence. Hence it cannot be regarded as a subsequent
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ideologization of human existence, as if it were superfluous for the fulfillment of human existence in the world.
Christianity, however, is also at the same time essentially a history, since it directs the human person’s attention toward spatia-temporally fixed events of human history, understanding them as saving events that find their unsurpassing summit, center, and historical measure in the absolute saving event of Jesus Christ.
If this history itself is part of the nature of Christianity, and not just an accidental interchangeable stimulus of that transcendental, supernatural experience of the absolute and forgiving nearness of the holy mystery which overcomes all intramundane forces and powers, then Christianity appears clearly as the negation of every ideology of transmanence and transcendence. (This must not be understood as the annihilation of transcendence, but must be seen as the negation of the ideologization of transcendence into a bare and empty formalization of genuine transcendence.)
Two things will have to be understood if we are to be able to think of this concept. First, it will be necessary to make clear the inner connection between the genuine and unsurpassable historicity of Christianity in its turning to history regarded as a real event of salvation and the transcendental nature of Christianity understood as the openness by grace to the absolute God. In other words, it will have to be shown that genuine transcendentality and genuine historicity determine one another and that the human person by his very transcendentality is referred to real history, a real history he cannot “annul” by a priori reflection.
Second, it will have to be understood that by the genuine imposed nature of real history, the human person is empowered and indeed bound to take things really seriously even in his profane existence and to be really involved in the external historical reality, even where he recognizes and experiences by suffering the contingency and thus the relativity of this historical reality.
As regards the first question, it must be said straight away that the history of the human person, correctly understood, is not an element of mere chance imposed on the person in addition to his existence as a being of transcendence, but that it is precisely the history of his transcendental being as such. He does not live out his existence oriented to God in a pure or even mystical interiority, in some sort of submersion, running away from history, but lives it out precisely in the individual and collective history of his very being.
Hence Christianity can still be seen to consist absolutely in the graceconstituted transcendental being of the human person and yet in very truth be the actual history in which this being is achieved and which confronts the human person himself in spatia-temporal facti city. Truly
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there is then a history-of-salvation of the human word in which the divine word gives itself.
The church furthermore is truly the assembly of salvation and the sacrament, even though all these historical objectifications of the person’s absolute depth-of-being open to God’s grace only have and retain their own nature when all these historical manifestations appear as what they are, namely, as instruments of mediation and signs pointing to the incomprehensibility of a God who communicates himself in all truth and reality to persons through these signs so as to become directly present in an absolute and forgiving manner.
If and as long as these historical mediations are really mediations to the presence and acceptance of God’s mystery, and while retaining their relative nature yet prove themselves even in this way as unavoidable for the human person’s historical being in this aeon before the direct vision of God is reached, history and transcendence will never be subject in Christianity to an ideology of immanence, that is, to the idolization of intramundane powers, or to an ideology of transmanence and transcendence, that is, to the idolization in empty, formal abstractions of the person’s transcendentality by grace.
Two further points must be noted in this connection. First, the human person’s historicity, understood as mediation of his transcendental being elevated by grace, reaches its unsurpassable climax in Jesus Christ, the Godman. In him God’s promise of himself to the world, its historical mediation and its acceptance by man have become absolutely one in a union that is not fusion and yet eliminates separation.
Thus this represents God’s historically unsurpassable eschatological communication to man himself through the history of grace in the world (without it being thereby possible simply to identify in some monophysite sense the historical mediation of God and God himself).
The human person can and must accept this mediation-byimmediacy to God as something quite irreplaceable, by humbly accepting it in his own transcendentality by grace as something that is historically ordained and freely contingent.
The person’s reference to this historical mediation of his own grace inserted in the ground of his being does not take place merely or in the first place by a theoretical, historical knowledge about these historical events of salvation, a sort of knowledge that could be suspected as an ideology. It is given in an immediate, realistic manner which, through the living unity of the history of salvation, through the church (which is more than just the subsequent totality of the theoretical opinions of those who agree), through sacraments and worship, through what we call anamnesis, tradition, and the like, burst open any merely theoretical information.
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Because the human person is mediated to the historical event of salvation and this mediation does not take place merely by way of theoretical information – since he experiences this mediation as the event of his own transcendental and supernaturally elevated being –
he has always gone beyond the three above-mentioned basic forms of ideology.
Second, it must be stated that the necessary historical mediation of transcendentally established grace also draws the Christian’s attention to the fact that he can and must also take his “profane” history absolutely seriously. He does this not by turning it into an ideology and by thus erecting it into an absolute, but by the fact of experiencing it as the concrete expression of the will of God who posits it in freedom: thereby he both removes it from himself as the conditioned and historically contingent and lends it the seriousness proper to the situation in which an eternal destiny is decided before God.
There is a final point to be stressed against the thesis that Christianity is an ideology. Ideologies mutually exclude one another in their doctrine and intention and are nothing more than the factor by which they negate and fight each other, since what is in fact common to them exists in a sense in spite of the ideological theory and not because of it.
Christianity, however, includes in its teaching what we will simply call “anonymous” Christianity. Christianity does not restrict that which constitutes its most proper reality, that is, forgiving and divinizing grace, to the circle of those who explicitly acknowledge the reflex and historical, instructive objectification of this ubiquitously active grace of God, in short, the explicit Christian doctrine and its bearer, the church.
Christianity, therefore, in view of God’s universal salvific will and the possibility of justification even before reception of the sacraments, includes its doctrinal opponents in its own reality and hence cannot even regard them as opponents in the same sense ideologies do and must do.
Ideologies, if they are tolerant (which cannot be completely reconciled with the nature of an ideology) may indeed accept their opponents insofar as they are human beings or have some other neutral common basis. But no ideology can admit that what is really meant, what is specific in its own position, can be conceded to its opponents on the plane of theoretical reflection and social constitution. An ideology cannot admit a third possibility outside itself that could bring about this community of reality before and behind the differences of its reflex explicitness.
An ideology can never be greater than itself, whereas Christianity is more than itself precisely in the sense that it is the movement in which the human person surrenders himself to the unmasterable mystery and
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insofar as, fixing its regard of Jesus Christ, it knows that his movement actually finds the sheltering nearness of this mystery.
5 • Jesus Christ: The Synthesis*
The basic human hope and the experience o f Jesus Christ sustain and justify each other in an ultimately indestructible bond that may be grasped by a person of integrity and reasonable conscience, as long as he assumes a stance of what Christians call humility in the face of the incomprehensible mystery.
The encounter with Christ is mediated both through the gospel of Christianity and of the church based on Jesus’ message and also through the ultimate hope of God’s grace.
What does a Christian see in Jesus? The answer may originate from various elements of experience and so the following considerations cannot represent the only possible description of the encounter with Jesus or own which is universally binding. On the other hand, the experience itself, for all its different aspects does possess a unity.
The history of Christianity, which has its own unique importance, envisions one man who loves and is faithful even unto death, whose whole human existence, embodied in word and action, lies open to the mystery which he himself calls, “Father,” and to which he surrenders himself in trust even when his world is shattered. The dark chasm of his life is for Jesus the sheltering hands of his Father. He stands fast in his love for men and women. He is sure in hope, even when everything seems to collapse in the destruction of death. He was convinced that in him and his message the kingdom of God was at hand, that is, that God in direct love and forgiveness vigorously pledges himself to us, transcending all the good and evil forces that influence human existence.
For the person who listens to Jesus’ message a new and decisive opportunity for the human being has come about, which is never to be surpassed. This experience also means that we are faced by a man who, in his life and death, does not fail to match up to the demands that are involved in being human. Thus Christianity is convinced that, despite every reason for skepticism in our experience of man, we may with innocent trust and total abandon surrender ourselves to the one man in absolute dependence.
* Theological Investigations XVI, trans. David Moreland, O.S.B. (New York: Seabury Press, 1 979), 1 5- 1 8.
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Jesus’ followers shared the experience of Good Friday without any illusions. And yet they then became aware, as a gift from Jesus himself, that his life is not in ruins, that his death is in fact a victory and that he is the one totally and finally accepted by God’s mystery. In a word, they experienced the fact that he is risen.
Of course one should not conceive of this resurrection as a return to the limits of a life restricted by space and time and the facts of biology. One should rather think of it as the ultimate salvation of the one complete person, body and soul, in God.
The mystery is the “incomprehensible God” and so the manner of this acceptance cannot be given imaginative form. But whenever the absolute hope of the human person and the experience of Jesus’
life and death meet, we can no longer reckon with Jesus’ destruction without thereby denying this absolute hope and allowing the self-abandonment of the human person, whether willingly or not, to emptiness and futility.
If on the contrary we search for the historical personality who permits us to trust that in him our hope is fulfilled, then we cannot find any other name except the one presented by the witness of the apostles. The experience of Jesus gives us, insofar as we freely commit ourselves to our own hope, the strength and the heart to affirm from the center of our own experience and from the hope that lies within it, that he is risen.
The basic human hope and the historical experience of Jesus are bound together for a Christian as a unity. Jesus of Nazareth is accepted by God and in Jesus God has answered the question that the human person constitutes in his unlimited, incomprehensible nature. Human existence is here finally and gloriously blessed and the skeptical human question, fashioned in guilt and futility, is transcended. The courage to hope is sealed.
So Jesus is the ultimate answer that can never be surpassed, because every conceivable question is annihilated in death and he is the answer to the all-encompassing question of human existence in that he is the risen one. As Word of God he answers the question that we ourselves pose.
From this starting point there arise the statements about Jesus Christ contained in the traditional teaching and theology of the church, that is, orthodox christology. But the reverse is also true: whoever accepts Jesus as the unsurpassable Word of God, as the final seal of his own hope in history, is and remains a Christian, even if he cannot follow the traditional christological formulations or finds great difficulty in doing so, because they come from a framework of meaning not easily intelligible today.
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Cross and resurrection belong together in the authentic witness to Jesus and in genuine and responsible faith in him. The cross means the stark demand for the human person to surrender self unconditionally before the mystery of his being that he can never bring under his control, since he is finite and burdened with guilt. The resurrection means the unconditional hope that in this surrender the blessing, forgiveness, and ultimate acceptance of the human person takes place through this mystery. It also implies that if the human person abandons himself to this movement, no further destruction lies in store.
Cross and resurrection clearly show how this self-abandonment is taken up by God in Jesus’ fate, and how the possibility of self-surrender, the hardest task of our life, is irrevocably promised to us in Jesus Christ.
For the Lord is an absolutely concrete fact. A person need only involve himself with this specific individual in unconditional love and he then possesses everything. Certainly one must die with him; no one can escape this fate. Why not, then, utter with him the words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” or “Into your hands I commend my spirit”?
In Jesus’ destiny every human philosophy receives for the first time a truly specific and concrete form. What exactly this philosophy looks like or should look like is not exactly important. Once a person has reached Jesus, then it contains this simple message: just to be prepared to make the final act of hope and self-surrender to the incomprehensible mystery. Yet this covers everything because Jesus’ fate, a death that is life, has brought this philosophy into being, not of course in mere talk about death but in the actual experience and suffering of death.
For us this moment still lies in the future. Our life is directed toward it without our knowing exactly when it will appear in our life. But only then has the essence of Christianity been grasped and conceived. A person can and should, however, prepare himself to be open to this event. The glory of our present existence is not thereby removed. Rather it gives everything its proper value and makes the burden light.
Christianity is thus simplicity itself because it embraces the totality of human existence and leaves all the details to the free responsibility of the human person, without providing an exact recipe for them. At the same time it is the hardest thing of all, a grace offered to all that can be and is received, even when unconditional hope has not yet discovered its seal in Jesus of Nazareth.
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6 • Why Remain a Christian?*
Where are we to start when it is a question of stating and showing that one may have the courage of one’s belief? If it is impossible to say everything, then we must choose and also determine our starting point somewhat arbitrarily.
I begin with the fact that I have – quite simply – always been a believer and that I have met with no reason which would force or cause me not to believe anymore. I was born a Catholic because I was born and baptized in a believing environment. I trust in God that this faith passed on by tradition has turned into my own decision – into a real belief – and that I am a Catholic Christian even in my innermost being. This, in the last analysis, remains God’s secret and an unreflected reality deep down within me which I cannot express even to myself.
I say that – in the first place – I, this believer, have not encountered any reason that could cause me to cease being what I am.
I understand that one would have to have reasons for changing in a way contrary to the pattern according to which one has set out. For anyone who would change without such reasons – who would not even be willing in the first place to remain true to the situation in life in which he has been placed and to the definite commitment of his spiritual personality – would be a person falling into emptiness, and no more interiorly than the shadow of a person.
If a person does not want to abandon his very self, then he must basically regard what is already there as something to be taken over and to be preserved until he has proof of the contrary. One can live and grow only out of those roots that already live, and precisely as they live – only out of that beginning in which one places one’s original trust in life. What is transmitted to us may have provided us with lofty and sacred values. It may have opened up infinite vistas and taken hold of us by an absolute and eternal call. This alone, in the form of unreflected experience and simple practice without deceit or doubt, may not yet represent in the face of critical conscience and questioning reason any expressible and reflected proof of the simple truth of this tradition.
However, one thing has always remained clear to me – in spite of every temptation against the faith, which I believe I, too, have had to undergo – one thing has supported me as I kept fast to it: the conviction that we must not allow what has been inherited and transmitted to be consumed by the emptiness of the ordinary, of a spiritual indifference
* Theo/ogical lnuestigations V. trans. Karl-H. Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 966), 4-9.
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or apathetic and somber skepticism, but at the most only by something stronger, something that calls us to greater freedom and into a more inexorable light.
Certainly, inherited belief also has always been faith tempted and liable to temptation. But I have always experienced it as the faith that asked me: “Will you too go away?” and to which I could always merely reply, “Lord, to whom shall I go?” I have always experienced it as the faith, powerful and good, and the only possible reason permitting me to give it up would be the proof of the contrary. And nobody – not even my experience of life – has furnished me with this proof.
I realize that such a proof would have to go very deep and would have to be very comprehensive. There are, of course, many difficulties and many bitter experiences for the person in life. But it is quite clear that no difficulty could claim consideration as a reason against my faith unless it were equal to the dignity and deep-rootedness of what it is trying to threaten and change.
There may be many intellectual difficulties in the realm of the particular sciences – such as the history of religion, scriptural criticism, the early history of Christianity – for which I have no direct and, in every respect, satisfactory solution. But such difficulties are too particular and – compared to the reality of existence – too slight objectively speaking to be used as the basis for decisions about the ultimate questions of life. They are not weighty enough to be allowed to determine the whole, unspeakably profound depths of life.
My faith does not depend on whether exegetes or the church have or have not already found the correct interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis – on whether some decision of the Biblical Commission or of the Holy Office is the last word in wisdom. Such arguments, therefore, are beside the point from the very start.
Of course, there are other temptations which go deeper. But these are the very ones that bring out true Christianity, provided one faces them honestly and, at the same time, humbly. They reach the heart, the innermost center of life; they threaten and confront it with the human person’s ultimate questionableness as such. But precisely in this way they can be for the person the labor pains of the true birth of Christian existence.
The argumentation of human existence itself makes the person feel lonely, as if placed into loneliness, as if involved in an infinite fall. It delivers him up, as it were, to his freedom – and yet he does not feel assured of this freedom. It makes him feel as if surrounded by an infinite ocean of darkness and an immense unexplored night –
always managing to survive from one contingency to another. It leaves
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him fragile, poor, agitated by the pain of his contingent nature. Always it leaves him convinced once more of his dependence on the merely biological, on ridiculous social elements and on the traditional (even when one contradicts it). He feels how death is the final limit, beyond which he himself cannot pass. He feels the ideals of his life grow weak and lose their youthful luster. He experiences how one becomes weary of all the smart talk on the fairground of life and of science – even of science.
The real argument against Christianity is the experience of life, this experience of darkness. And I have always found that behind the technical arguments leveled by the learned against Christianity – as the ultimate force and a priori prejudgment supporting these scientific doubts – there are always these ultimate experiences of life causing the spirit and the heart to be somber, tired, and despairing. These experiences try to objectify themselves and to render themselves expressible in the doubts of scholars and of the sciences, no matter how weighty these doubts may be in themselves and however much they must be taken seriously.
For this very experience is also the argument of Christianity. For what does Christianity say? What does it proclaim? Despite the complicated appearance of its dogmatic and moral theology, it says something quite simple – something simple that all particular Christian dogmas articulate in some way (though perhaps it is seen to be simple only once these are given).
For what does Christianity really declare? Nothing else, after all, than that the great mystery remains eternally a mystery, but that this mystery wishes to communicate himself in absolute self-communication – as the infinite, incomprehensible and inexpressible being whose name is God, as self-giving nearness – to the human soul in the midst of its experience of its own finite emptiness. This nearness has become a reality not only in what we call “grace” but also in the tangible reality of the one whom we call the Godman. In these two ways of divine selfcommunication – both by their radical, absolute nature, and by reason of the identity of the “existence-of-itself” of God and his “existence-forus” – there is also communicated, and thus revealed, to us the duality of an inner-divine relationship: in other words, what we profess as the trinity of persons in the one Godhead.
The human person, however, experiences these three absolute mysteries of the Christian faith (that is, the Trinity, the incarnation, and grace) by his inescapable experience of the fact that he is grounded in the abyss of the insoluble mystery, and by experiencing and accepting this mystery (this is what we call “faith”), as fulfilling nearness and not as a burning judgment, in the depth of his conscience and in the
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•
concreteness of his history (for both are constitutive elements of his existence).
That this radical mystery is nearness and not distance, selfsurrendering Jove and not a judgment that casts out the human person into the hell of his own nothingness – this person finds difficult to accept and to believe. It may appear to us as a light almost darker than our own darkness. Indeed, it may take, and in some sense consume, the whole power of our soul and heart, of our freedom and our whole existence, to accept it.
And yet, is there not so much light, so much joy, Jove and glory, both internally and externally in the world and in the human being, to make it possible for us to say that all this can be explained only by an absolute light, joy, Jove, and glory – by an absolute being and not by an empty nothingness that cannot explain anything – even though we cannot understand how there can be this our deadly darkness and nothingness if there is the infinity of fullness, albeit as a mystery? May I not say that I am right to hold on to the light (even though it is faint) rather than the darkness – to the happiness rather than to the hellish torment of my existence?
If I were to accept the arguments against Christianity to which human existence gives rise, what would that offer me for my existence? The valor of the honesty and the glory of the resolution to face up to the absurdity of existence? But can one think of these as great, as obligatory and glorious, without implying once more (whether one really knows it or not, wants to or not), that there is something which is glorious and worthy of esteem? But how could this be, in the abyss of absolute emptiness and absurdity?
In any case, anyone who courageously accepts life – even a shortsighted, primitive positivist who apparently bears patiently with the poverty of the superficial – has really already accepted God. He has accepted God as he is in himself, as he wants to be in our regard in Jove and freedom – in other words, as the God of the eternal life of divine self-communication in which God himself is the human person’s center and in which the person’s form is that of the Godman himself.
For anyone who really accepts himself, accepts a mystery in the sense of the infinite emptiness which is the human being. He accepts himself in the immensity of his unpredictable destiny and – silently, and without premeditation – he accepts the one who has decided to fill this infinite emptiness (which is the mystery of the human person) with his own infinite fullness (which is the mystery called God).
And if Christianity is nothing other than the clear experience of what the human person experiences indistinctly in his actual being – which in the concrete is always more than just spiritual nature but is spirit,
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illuminated from within by the light of God’s gratuitous grace – what reason could I have then not to be a Christian?
For when the person accepts himself in this way wholly and entirely, he accepts this light (that is, he believes) even though he does so unthinkingly and without expressing it. Thus, what reason should I have for not being a Christian, if Christianity means taking possession of the human person’s mystery with absolute optimism?
I know of only one reason that weighs heavily on me – the despair, the lassitude, the sin I experience within me. This is the only reason that oppresses me – the crumbling away of human existence in the gray skepticism of our daily life, when we can no longer even raise a protest against mere existence, but just leave the tacit, infinite question that we ourselves are, well alone – a skepticism that cannot stand or accept this question but avoids it by losing itself in the wretchedness of everyday life.
This is not meant to deny that even everyday existence lived in the quiet honesty of patiently doing one’s duty can also be a form of ” anonymous” Christian living. Indeed, many a one (if he does not skeptically or stubbornly raise this way of living in its turn into an absolute system) may in actual fact grasp Christianity more genuinely than in its more explicit forms that can often be so very empty and be used as a means of escape before the mystery instead of openly facing up to it.
Nevertheless, the abyss opened up by the above reason could paralyze the infinite optimism that believes that the person is a finite nature endowed with God’s infinity. If I were to give way to this argument, what could I put in place of Christianity? Only emptiness, despair, night, and death. And what reason do I have to consider this abyss as truer and more real than God’s abyss? It is easier to let oneself fall into one’s own emptiness than into the abyss of the blessed mystery. But it is not more courageous or truer.
This truth, of course, shines out only when it is also loved and accepted since it is the truth that makes us free and whose light consequently begins to shine only in the freedom that dares all to the very height. Yet this truth is there. I have called out to it and it has declared itself to me. This happiness gives me what I must give to it, that it may be and remain the happiness and strength of my human existence it gives me the courage to believe in it and to call out to it when all the dark despairs and lifeless voids would swallow me up.
THE MYSTERY OF
EXISTENCE
7 • The Mystery of the Human Person*
What do we mean by the human person? My reply, stripped to its essentials, is simple: The person is the question to which there is no answer. It is true that everyone goes through a large number of experiences in the course of his life. Drawing on those experiences, he gains knowledge about himself. It is also true that there are a large number of human sciences whose findings on the human person are continually growing. There is a metaphysical and even a theological science of the human person, and I am far from saying that it is all foolishness or uncertainty. On the contrary.
However, what is the situation with regard to our own experiences (including their extensions in reading poetry, looking at paintings and so on)? We go through them and then promptly forget about them.
We have experiences and later we lose our understanding of the conditions which made them possible and we are unable to live them through again. Experiences should be lessons from the past for the future. However, the old situations in which they arose do not recur.
What do we really know about our earlier experiences? When we try to sort, evaluate, arrange, and reduce them to some sort of system, even in our own minds, we undergo a skeptical self-mistrust –
one of the least trustworthy of feelings. We are afraid that this whole assessment of life’s experiences is too much a prey to ill-thought-out prejudices – “prejudgments” – for us to have clear or certain knowledge about ourselves. When we hear others speak of their experiences (with all the selectiveness, arbitrariness and narrowness of which they are capable), we fear for our own experiences. We notice that each one of us has his “own” experiences, and only those. Yet we all want them to be in some way “objective.”
And what do we really know about ourselves, once we have experienced how limited our own experiences are, how much “arranged”
they are by our own freedom (which we can never knowingly grasp), and that they mean the renunciation of experiences which we could have had but did not have.
Who can say with certainty that he does not use his “experiences”
(which are always at the mercy of a person’s unconscious manipulation) to deceive himself about himself? We have all experienced the
• Christian at the Crossroads, trans. V. Green (New York: Seabury Press, 1 975), 1 1 -20.
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fact that we are still a question to which we can give no answer on the basis of our own lives (as a collection of experiences). Experience gives answers, but no answer which would make what we are questioning – the human person as a unity and as a whole – intelligible. (It is not my purpose here to inquire into whether this one, all-embracing question is really directed at the intelligibility of the person, or whether this intention does not indicate the basic error as to the proper goal of this fundamental question, and therefore as to the person who is this question.)
And what about the conclusions of the natural sciences? Much of the answer to this question is expressed in our thoughts on “experience,”
because ultimately these sciences are no more than the systematically acquired results of human experience. Once it is established that these can give no answer to the question that is ourselves, the same may be said in advance of whatever is subsequently affirmed about them.
Do not misunderstand me: all praise to those sciences. If I am successfully operated on for appendicitis, if a sleeping pill induces peaceful sleep, if I need no longer Jive like Neanderthal man, if I can watch a football game in California by satellite; and if we can honestly say that we are not willing to forgo all this, despite our protests against consumer society, outrages, and injustice, if therefore we affirm it, then of course we are profiting by those sciences. We praise them with our lives; we should not revile them with our mouths.
Also the research they pursue can bring with it, in itself and not just because of the vital uses it discovers in things, a commendable euphoria of discovery and knowledge, even an aesthetic enjoyment. But do they give an answer to the question, or just an answer to questions?
(Later on I shall reply to the objection that this distinction between question and questions is nonsense, that over and above the sum of questions there is no further question over which the individual need trouble either his heart or his head.)
The pluralism of these sciences is insuperable, and hence no answer can be extracted from their answers. By insuperable I mean that the findings of these sciences cannot be combined into a comprehensive “formula of the human” of which all particular findings would be merely applications and special cases, because the “psychic” (which is certainly a part of the person) cannot be reduced to the “physical,”
however much it may be the business of the human sciences to examine the unity (not identity) of spirit and matter and throw an increasingly penetrating and permanent light on it. This fundamental irreducibility exists because an identity of spirit and matter – if such there were –
would still be an identity in thought of a subject; the thought of unity and the unity that is thought of would still be two different things, even if we
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could reduce everything to thinking and even if we could understand the content of thinking as a merely dependent function of thinking, which the “realists” of the modern natural sciences are least willing to do.
Further, because of the limitations of my IQ, the restricted time at my disposal for learning, and my freely chosen range of interests (as I emphasize this or that), the sum of all the human sciences cannot be accommodated in “my” (a single individual’s) mind. A computer does not help, although it can be fed with vastly more knowledge than my brains. The computer is quite indifferent to the “knowledge” fed into it, and only a limited amount can be transferred to my brains even when the computer is fully programmed. Ultimately only the knowledge “stored up” by me from the computer is of significance to me. All I am left with is a very limited and ultimately a very arbitrary choice from everything that the human sciences might know “in themselves.”
Presumably “other” knowledge – knowledge which is “out there”
but not in my head – is used by others only so that they can control me without my noticing or being able to guard against it. And even supposing that the sum of all these sciences were in my head, they would still be only in my head as my thoughts, arranged by me and used by me as a free subject.
This subject of freedom – this free individual – would know of its own basic decisions (which can never be the adequate object of reflection, because reflection is always itself in the concrete, an act of freedom) nothing distinct and nothing exhaustive. The sum of scientific answers would, if they were the content of the free individual’s thought processes, frame an unanswered question. And we can add, for the person who does not fully appreciate this, that in any case all these sciences are still “on the way.”
They have more questions than answers. Even today the sum of the questions seems to grow faster than the sum of the answers. Therefore today’s short-lived I – I who cannot wait for the infinitely extended future of the sciences (in which everything in any case would still be finitely clear), or console myself with this future in the obscurity of present-day science – am in actual fact and inescapably the subject who receives more questions than answers from the science which is really accessible to me.
What, finally, do we notice about metaphysics and the human person – about metaphysical anthropology? If it has a correct understanding of the human person, then it must grasp him as the essence of an unlimited transcendentality, as the subject who goes beyond (and in going beyond, creates himself as spirit) each individual (finite) ob-
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ject. It must grasp the person as the being who can nowhere come to a final standstill.
But this infinite extent of possible knowledge, insights, and experiences never reaches total fulfillment from within itself and with the means at its disposal. The space or “warehouse” in which experience, life, knowledge, happiness, pain, and so forth are stored is infinite, and so is always half empty (a generous estimate!).
Because we reach out beyond each finite object, but directly grasp only finite objects, we will never be content in this life, and so every ending is just a beginning. Hence the horrible tedium of it. We are constantly feeding new material into the warehouse of our consciousness.
It constantly disappears into an infinite expanse which, not to put too fine a point on it, is just as empty as before. Our experience is like that of someone on a fixed bicycle: he pedals until he is ready to burst, but stays on the same spot.
It is easy to say that every moment of life offers something of beauty and that we should enjoy the present hour as it comes, without attempting to see beyond it. Anyone who takes this as a working principle has only to try it to find it does not work. At least once in his life that “beautiful” moment is filled with the emptiness of death. The anticipation of the person’s transcendental nature beyond every individual thing (in which he has the impression of reaching forward into the void) is sometimes a part of that spiritual dying which in “biological” death is inevitable, even for the least sensitive. Why should we ever wish to hide it from ourselves?
At this point we are not looking at a “beyond” of which philosophy has nothing to say. In our lived existence, our acquired knowledge is a process extended in time. And our time is finite and ends with death, which is always close. In such finite time as this, the only product of a process of knowledge extended in time is a finite knowledge.
We see that quite clearly: the progress of knowledge means only that we experience all the more vividly the infinitude and permanent nonfulfillment of our questioning. The spirit’s pride in never needing to come to a final standstill is also its ever sharper pain at never really getting there. We may, of course, dismiss this philosophy of transcendentality permanently unfulfilled in this life as mere fancy. Or we may assert that today it could hardly be called modern; or that such transcendentality is no more than the impulse behind the particular knowledge of the individual, in which function it has fulfilled its purpose without being able to lay any claims to significance in itself.
Nevertheless, this unfulfilled transcendentality remains, even though it may be pushed to one side. It is at work behind countless phenomena of individual and collective life: in boredom, the mists of
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which swallow up the variety of real life; in aggressive irritation at the present because it comes at us with such intolerable incompleteness that we are tempted to flee it into a kind of utopian dreamworld of the future; in psychological attempts to escape a world which seems (with every justification) too narrow and desolate; in the attempt to enhance or raise the finitely pleasant or finitely significant into pure enjoyment or an ideology; in the hope that the phenomenon of the finiteness of all these enhanced realities will cease to make its presence felt; in the attempt to overcome radical evil by acquiring an infinitude which will give us something more than the inevitably finite good; and so on.
I am not trying to maintain that it is impossible to drug oneself against the pain of transcendentality’s nonfulfillment. Is any drug effective, however, in all the situations of life? And even if it should be, would its user not be freely opting for the human person’s definitive unhappiness? Isn’t damnation the freely chosen, definitive situation of the “bourgeois” who has no interest in the unattainable?
In the past, the evil which led to damnation could be lived only in actions which even in the realm of immediate experience were worked out as destruction and pain. Today, real evil can be lived out in “middleclass” normality insofar as that normality limits itself to the normal and attainable, rejects the sacred utopia of absolute hope as stupidity, and ultimately reaps its own punishment: condemnation to eternal narrowness.
The philosophy of unlimited transcendentality makes the person an unlimited question without its own answer. It reflects only what the experience of life and the human sciences already experience and suffer, and expresses the actuality of these experiences in their inner necessity.
What am I to say about faith and theology? Surely they promise a fulfillment of the individual’s infinite capacity with the eternal “possession” of God who bestows himself, without any creaturely mediation, in his very own reality, just as he is, in and for himself? Yes, they do, and that is the individual’s sacred hope. But this hope must also assert that even in eternal beatitude God remains the incomprehensible. How could it be otherwise? If God were comprehensible in his blessedness, he would be circumscribed, and the human person’s transcendentality would reach out beyond God and triumph over God and turn itself into God. How, then, can God the incomprehensible be the person’s goal and happiness? How (to turn the question round) is the person to be conceived if this incomprehensible God is his happiness?
There is no easy answer to this, because the conception of what is incomprehensible is a knowledge that cannot be calculated on other forms of knowledge and their comprehensibility. Understanding that
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one does not understand is a peculiar form of knowledge; it cannot be an isolated case on the margin of understanding to be totted up with other forms of understanding. Either an understanding of nonunderstanding does not exist because it is self-contradictory, or it must be the most fundamental form of understanding on which all other forms of conception depend.
The anticipation of transcendentality beyond the totally comprehensible (apparently into the void) must also be the supportive precondition of the understanding of God’s incomprehensibility in the beatific vision. The vision must be the most radical and inevitable experience of God’s incomprehensibility, and therefore the fulfillment of the human person’s transcendentality toward the uncircumscribable.
The incomprehensibility of God in the beatific vision must be understood not as the mere index of creaturely knowledge’s finitude, as the buffer at which that knowledge is brought up short, but as the very
“implosion” of its inner dynamism. If that is correct, the essence of knowledge itself is in fact changed: it takes on another essence for which incomprehensibility is no longer a limit that rebuffs but, precisely as incomprehensibility, the very object of its search.
The dry statement of God’s incomprehensibility even in immediate vision is apt to puzzle most people and Christians. They think that the beatific vision will supply enough knowledge and perception to make them happy for eternity. They also say that once we see God, all the riddles and incomprehensible things in life will dissolve into radiant brightness and clarity, and that eternity is there for us to see that God has made everything good.
These Christians forget, however, that we cannot divide in God the incomprehensible from the perceptible, that what is seen is precisely what is incomprehensible, that this is true not only of God’s “essence”
but also of his free decisions disposing of our life and so of our eternity, that the sting of incomprehensibility (it could have been different; why was and is it just so and not otherwise for all eternity?) is not pricked out of our hearts, but will be experienced and felt with burning clarity in the vision of God as eternally valid, without there remaining the possibility of delusion or the faintest possibility that it will one day change. In Christian teaching, beatitude is the everlasting and irrevocable vision of God’s incomprehensibility and therefore also (because it is grounded in the incomprehensibility of God’s freedom) of our own incomprehensibility to ourselves.
Is it not true, then, that the human person is a question to which there is no answer. If the answer to this question is yes, then of course by the “answer” which is not, is meant an answer in which one fact is understandable as the compelling consequence of another, which
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itself (because there is no progression into infinity) is “comprehensible” simply in and by itself, which is to say . . . Yes, what exactly is it to say?
How far will individual realities “lead back”? And what is it to which, ex supposito, they do lead back? What does it mean to say that something must be understandable in itself and therefore necessary? We say this of God. But are we not really saying that this ultimate reality is incomprehensible? (Why do we not say “unfathomable?” Would it not be the same thing, and do we find it embarrassing to use the word
“unfathomable” for fear that we shall notice the goal of our intellectual odyssey, namely, the incomprehensible?)
If, however, there is to be an “answer” to the unanswerable question which is the human person, then it can consist only in heightening, not in answering, this question; in conquering and piercing the dimension in which the question is posed in the way to which all questioning must conform; therefore, it must itself remain an unanswerable question.
To make a long story short (I could not in any case make it very long, because the real “answer,” which does not and never can exist, cannot be derived from the question, and because therefore our only course, when we have come to an end of the hitherto existing dimension of the question into understanding, is a leap, into what is totally other), and in view of the incomprehensibility which makes an answer impossible: we must renounce any such answer, not experience this renunciation as in the least painful (otherwise where would our beatitude be?).
We must let ourselves go into this incomprehensibility as into our true fulfillment and happiness, let ourselves be taken out of ourselves by this unanswered question. This incomprehensible venture, which sweeps all questions aside, is customarily referred to as the (devout) love of God. Only that turns darkness into light.
By “love” in this context, we are not to understand something the meaning of which we could grasp by comparison with other things.
Instead we are to accept this description of letting ourselves go into the incomprehensible (whereby the letting go is at once destiny and act, and therefore free and willing) as the definition of love from which this word “love” takes its significance. (I am not inquiring here into how what we usually experience as and call “love” contains a part of what I understand by love here.)
“St. Teresa says of Satan that ‘he does not love,’ ” writes Montherlant.
That is correct, and it reveals the essence of damnation. The damned do not love and do not wish to love for eternity, and look for happiness in being dispensed from having to let themselves go into God’s incomprehensibility. Satan believes he loses nothing by not seeing God,
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because in the logic of definitive guilt, guilt dispenses us from having to contemplate ( love) incomprehensibility, which we hate because by
=
definition it does not surrender to us. Love, however, is the surrender by which we definitively relinquish control of ourselves and of everything else. For one who loves and knows what love is, the loveless person is damned.
If we wished to call the attempt to do without the incomprehensibility of love and the beloved “happiness” (one of many possible forms of happiness !), even Satan would be happy. He “comprehends” himself only as he wants to, relying on the alternative to selfless love, which is the effort toward self-assertion and autonomy. The one who loves has escaped this unhappiness, because in the loving leap into one alternative (the acceptance of God’s incomprehensibility) the person has put the other alternative (isolated self-possession) behind.
The human person is the unanswerable question. His fulfillment and happiness are the loving and worshiping acceptance of his incomprehensibility, in the love of God’s incomprehensibility with which we can learn to “cope” only by the practice of love and not by the theory of the desire to understand. (How could Aquinas say that the essence of happiness consists in an act of the intellect, when he knew that God is incomprehensible; when he prayed: “I worship you, 0 hidden Godhead,” and knew that in the beatific vision God’s incomprehensibility does not disappear? It comes to the light of eternity so radically and irrevocably that either we must travel to hell where, at least on the surface, one has no more to do with this incomprehensibility, or we must ourselves go with the happy despair of love into the incomprehensibility of God?)
Many people think they know where they stand: in themselves, in their society, in their life, or in their mission. Of course we know a lot about all these things. And why should not these insights be our food and escort on the road to the incomprehensibility of God and of ourselves? But we notice increasingly how all knowledge is really only the road to (known and accepted) incomprehensibility; that the proper essence of knowledge is love in which knowledge goes out of itself and the individual allows himself to go willingly into incomprehensibility.
We can cope with life’s incomprehensibilities only if we do not try to master them with that philistine foolishness which often passes for brave lucid wisdom. In that way we can accept the fact that all the single insights of life (however modest, ambitious, loving, unsentimental, ind).lstrious, critical, “positive,” intelligent, and so forth they may be) will never form a whole. We do not then imagine that there could be a well-tempered synthesis of all these disparate insights which could cater for them all.
THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE • 8 1
Al l that I have said about the human person might strike the reader as being very abstract and pale. But the more exact and comprehensive physics becomes, the more obscure and abstract it is. And it is correct, even though only a minority understand it and yet conduct their lives by laws they do not understand.
The same may be said of a theory about the human person’s true essence. It makes sense to think about it, and most people in day-to-day practice conform with this essence even though they do not understand it “theoretically.” That does not matter, because this theoretical essence is not theory but Jove surrendering to the incomprehensible (which is the denial of theory).
Therefore, we may be human without “comprehending” it, because true knowledge even of one who knows can be gained only when he resigns his knowledge in favor of the blessed and eternal docta ignorantia, or the ignorance of the wise.
Yet how simple Christianity is. It is the determination to surrender to God’s incomprehensibility in love. It is the fear that one does not do this, but instead draws a line at the comprehensible and so sins; the belief that Jesus managed to achieve this surrender and in doing so was definitively accepted by the one who enabled him to achieve it; the belief that in achieving this surrender in Jesus God has irrevocably promised himself to us as well.
A Christian is a true and most radical skeptic. If he really believes in God’s incomprehensibility, he is convinced that no individual truth is really true except in the process (which necessarily belongs to its real essence) in which it becomes that question which remains unanswered because it asks about God and his incomprehensibility. The Christian is also the individual who can cope with this otherwise maddening experience in which (to formulate it with poor logic but accurate description) one can accept no opinion as wholly true or wholly false.
Anyone who in a hasty reading finds the above foolish and superficial should pause to consider that in any objection he might be tempted to offer, he is elaborating the only alternative with an empty no, and so lets it reach into this void. This reach is in fact the first act of openness to God’s incomprehensibility, the invitation and grace to accept it and in his acceptance to find one’s own incomprehensibility.
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8 • Nature as Creation*
Christians know that in the light of revelation they have in principle the most comprehensive and, from a human point of view, the most authentic relation with nature. Their knowledge of nature, however, has a curious ambiguity about it, not because it is false or distorted, but because nature itself is ambiguous, and they have the courage to recognize its ambiguity and to accept it.
They see the vastness of nature, its splendor and power, its matterof-factness, its beauty, its order and adaptability, its trustworthiness.
They also know something of its unfathomable depths, its inexhaustibility. The psalms and the parables of Jesus give clear expression to this side of their relation with nature. Christians can even understand that humankind is tempted repeatedly by the glory of nature to worship it and to see it as God.
Christians also know a very different nature, a threatening, merciless, cruel, life-giving and life-destroying nature, a nature that humans experience as a multiplicity of impersonal and enslaving forces to which they seem to be helplessly delivered. They experience in themselves the power of death, the drive of instinct, the blind law of what is merely physical and chemical. Such things seem to pursue their own course without any concern for the claims of the spiritual person, for his or her freedom, dignity, and ethical responsibility. Nature thus appears to be simultaneously both ground and abyss, home and something foreign, bathed in splendor and sinister, heavenly and demonic, life and death, wise and blind.
They can only overlook one or other of its aspects when they deny a side of themselves, spirit or nature, the coming together of which constitutes the mystery of their being. They cannot deny themselves and become merely a part of nature, an animal with technical sophistication; nor can they so act as if the spiritual center of the person in its autonomy and freedom were somehow elevated above, and free from, nature.
How can a person be both? How can one endure the inescapable ambiguity of nature precisely as it applies to oneself? Here as elsewhere human beings must not abandon their role as the measure of all things. To measure nature in this way, however, is to recognize it and humankind as a part of it as an enigma.
To flee nature is to become rootless and artificial. To abandon oneself to it is to become inhuman, to become nothing more than the point
* Der christlicher Sonntag 13 ( 1 96 1 ) : 229-30. Trans. Daniel Donovan, University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto.
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at which nature’s meaninglessness becomes cruelly self-conscious. In attempting to subdue nature one might win a thousand battles, but they will all end in final defeat, the defeat of death which either nature inflicts on us or which we bring upon ourselves through it.
There is no peace or meaning or final harmony in which only nature and the human person are involved. That final ground of meaning in which nature and humans are bound together in unity can be found neither in humankind nor in nature. If the problem is to be solved, it must be broadened to include another dimension. Some solution there has to be if we are not simply to fall into absolute nihilism before the question about the meaning of existence or, at least for a while, irresponsibly evade the question altogether.
“I believe in almighty God, the creator of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen.” In terms of our reflections, this means that behind humankind and nature lies a unity. Although behind them, it truly exists.
Spirit and nature, the spirit which we are and the nature in and out of which we live, are not the same. Every kind of monism, every attempt to reduce the breadth of our experience to a single element is an oversimplification that does violence to the pluralism of reality.
And yet both, the human being as personal spirit in self-consciousness and freedom and nature as a less than spiritual reality, issue from the same creative ground. This ground which differs from humankind and the world and yet gives being and becoming to everything is what we call God. Thus nature and humanity are able to be both different and yet related to one another.
Neither idealism which tends to reduce everything to a manifestation of logical thought processes, nor materialism for which everything spiritual finally is nothing more than the universally present inner dimension of what is material, does justice to reality such as it presents itself to an impartial viewer. If there is to be unity and not oneness between the two aspects of our being, then there must be an original unity that lies behind the world and humankind, a unity from which they both come.
If that is the case, material nature is no longer radically foreign to spirit, no longer the dark and blind reality that can be nothing more than the uncomprehending opponent of humankind. What we think of as natural laws, finality, order, context, and the intelligibility of nature is a reflection, an image and likeness of the eternal creative Spirit from which in a free and spiritual act material reality comes. On the other hand, the spirit which we are, because it comes from the same creative act of God, encounters in nature something related to itself. It can calmly sink the roots of its life into this earthly world without worrying
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that by doing so it will be untrue either to its spiritual character or to its eternal task.
Humankind and nature are neither the same thing nor so radically opposed as to have to fight one another to the death. For both are made by the one creative love of an eternal ultimate reality that lies beyond all duality and which we name God. The dark side of our experience of nature reminds us of the unmistakable dignity of the human person as spirit, the light side of the same experience points to the fact that nature comes from the same source as human spirit.
The true and originating unity of both realities, God, may well be to us darker and less comprehensible than that which it is intended to explain, the difference and unity of humankind and the world, but explain them it does. Real light is shed on both finite spirit and the world when they are seen in relation to the unspeakable mystery without which everything is flat and dull and tends to disintegrate. We can either lose ultimate meaning, which is always unity, or seek it there where alone it can be found, in the one creator of spirit and nature, in God.
With this, the question that we have been treating is not yet completely answered, the question how a human being, understood as a moral being, can exist in a nature which seems to be based on other laws than those which correspond to the dignity of a moral person.
The ultimate presupposition for a positive solution to the question has already been given: the origin and final goal of nature and humankind are one. This and this alone undermines any final opposition between spirit and flesh, law of being and pure demand of value, facts and ethics, consciousness and object, logic and physics, an opposition that we are so often and to our despair tempted to see between humankind and nature. Only when theology is added to physics and ethics can one hope to resolve the tension between what is and what ought to be, between matter and humanity.
One thing should be added here and it follows from what has already been said. Where something springs forth from a source and is still underway, still in a process of becoming, its fulfillment, its perfect harmony, belongs to the future. The theology that traces the origin of humankind and nature back to God needs to be complemented by an eschatology of the eternal kingdom of God at the end of time.
Situated between beginning and end, humans have the task, within nature and in fidelity to its laws, to fulfill their destiny as moral and spiritual beings.
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9 • Life*
The contemporary world-picture is characterized b y a predecision for unity and development. It sees matter, life, and spirit as held together in one single history of evolution. Such a concept is not necessarily false as long as it remains discreet and realistic and does not play down essential differences within this unity.
Actually, the idea of evolution does not exclude but includes an essential self-transcendence continually going on within it, since otherwise nothing would ever really become new. This self-transcendence has been conserved in some sense even within dialectical materialism under the idea of the “qualitative leap.” The Christian philosopher and the Christian theologian will always conceive this self-transcendence, by which a being surpasses and “transcends” itself into something essentially higher, as happening under the dynamism of the divine being and under the continuous divine creative power.
Under this presupposition, however, evolution and essential selftranscendence (seen as the manner of the former) is an absolutely possible way of conceiving matter, life, and spirit as one connected reality and history and even to regard the divine self-communication to the rational creature by the grace of God’s Spirit as the highest, freely given unsurpassable step and phase of this one evolution.
In such a predecided world-picture, that concept will be most easily suitable for understanding the content of the one evolving history which (a) expresses the reality in which it is given to us most immediately within this whole unity, and which (b) always makes what precedes and what follows this reality still comprehensible by means of this one history. Such a reality is “life,” as we experience it in our own human life.
Starting from this life, which is most close to us, is the most likely way of rendering matter and subhuman life intelligible, and this concept is also, as shown by the Bible, the creed, and dogmatic theology, suited for expressing the ultimate good of salvation, the perfection of the human person in God himself. It now becomes clear also that the concept of life actually enables us to have a continuous even though, of course, also gradual and analogous understanding of this one history of created reality.
We should look at life as a form first of all from the point of view of an inner unity and in a heterogeneous (i.e., physico-chemical and spatia-temporal) plurality which is not simply coordinated but hierarchically subordinated. Add to this the fact that this form has an
“interiority” which governs and preserves, as from a central point, the
* Theological Investigations VI, 1 48-55.
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self-construction, self-preservation, and relation to the environment, which at the same time separates and opens itself for the rest of the surroundings in a final and spontaneous relationship, and which conserves itself, incorporates, causes itself to appear in the whole and in all the parts, has the source and end of self-movement within itself and has a living-space and inner time-form all its own. Looking at life in this way, we will get a description of (to begin with, biological) life (without going into the distinction between animals and plants) which can be used as a model for understanding both higher and lower reality: that is, the one whole being and history of experienced reality.
To begin with then, we can understand inorganic matter as the first elementary step, as a collection of instruments, as a kind of vocabulary of biological life, as a boundary condition and value, and at the same time as a “deposit” for life. “Dead” matter is then the asymptotic zerocondition of life in which the interiority and openness-to-the-other of life approaches equally to the lower boundary-value. The individual material thing is apparently quite open to the totality of material reality, since it is a pure function of the whole and is completely tied up in the causal chains external to it.
Yet precisely in this way it has no true openness for the whole or reality; it exists merely as a moment of this reality itself, since it has not (yet) that interiority and that concentration in itself (at least as “form”) vis-a-vis the whole (at least of an environment) which characterizes the living. It is lost in the other and hence in this absolute self-alienation it is also incapable of experiencing the other as such; it is not truly “open”
since it is not interior to itself.
It has already, nevertheless, at least the passive possibility for such an interiority and openness, a possibility which grows in the same measure as it can be built up into heterogeneous systems which, if the “miracle” of self-transcendence toward self-possession and selfassertion should happen to them, signify precisely the interiorized form of the organic. Put in a different way, one could say and in this hit on the interconnection and distinction of the inorganic and the living in one blow: when the heterogeneous material system, built with a view to a unified, prescribed effort (at least of self-preservation) appropriates its orientation as such to itself, that is, interiorizes itself, then we have something living.
Starting from the concept of life, it is quite possible to understand the spirit and person as the radicalization and self-surpassing of life.
The environment becomes simply the world, interiority becomes existence as a subject, assimilation of the environment by assimilation of nourishment becomes appropriation of culture and the machine, all
THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE • 87
through harmonization of the environment beyond the properly biological sphere; interiority of consciousness becomes self-consciousness; finite openness to the environment becomes infinite transcendence toward being as such.
It must be remembered in all this that we know of no personal subjectivity in our experience which is not in itself biologically alive and which does not presuppose itself as its own condition. It must be remembered that the fact of having to allow itself to be encountered which belongs to the “other” of the world, which is essential for commencing finite subjectivity, is precisely the nature of the biological, of the sensibility of the spirit, by definition. It must be noted that this is not contradicted by the Christian doctrine of the angels, since even they can be perfectly well conceived as mundane and cosmic beings, so that materiality and biosphere are merely different words for the sphere of the necessarily receptive spirituality and for intersubjectivity.
Seen in this light, the unity of nature of the finite spirit (even though transcendentally and infinitely open) and of matter is once more confirmed. Biological life and spiritual life have something in common in that they both constitute the unity of the one human life which is biological and sensible so as to be capable of being spiritual; even if the biological existed for itself alone, it would therefore remain valid that the openness toward the “other” grows in the same measure as, and not in inverse proportion to the degree of self-possession and self-direction arising out of an inner unity.
Where the openness of such life becomes unbounded and there thus appears the inner unity in the form of self-disposition, proper subjectivity and freedom, there is the real life of the spiritual person. Even this is always still “life” in the genuine “biological” sense, a life which the individual has not simply “in addition” side by side with his life as a spiritual person but rather as the inner, necessary moment of the life of the spiritual person itself.
Hence his spiritual life in his transcendence toward meaning in general, toward the world as such and its secret ground (God), is still always supported by corporeality, by environment, by spatia-temporal encounter, by sense experience, by witness, bodily intercommunication, and sociability. In short, it is true that the spirituality of the human person is and remains life in the very hard and sober everyday sense, and conversely, that his life is always and everywhere opened toward the breadth of the spirit.
In him it is impossible to live the biological life itself without the personal life, nature without culture, and natural history without the history of the spirit. Since, however, this inner unity of life is given in the form
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of bios and of spirit in that biological life constructs itself in a directly recognizable way into an ever greater and more complex interiority and into an ever wider environment (and both at once), it can be said without hesitation – presupposing any essential self-transcendence to take place under the divine dynamism – that life, transcending itself, unfolds itself in the history of nature into spiritual life itself.
According to Christian teaching, this one life finds its highest summit in God’s self-communication. God is not only the ground and innermost dynamism of this one history of nature and the spirit. He is also its goal, not merely as the asymptotic final point toward which this whole movement is oriented but also in the sense that he gives himself in his most personal, absolute reality and infinite fullness of life, to the life of the human person as its innermost power (called grace) and as its innermost goal which communicates itself in its own proper reality. This is a sovereignly free, unowed self-communication but is as such the final fulfillment of life, because that toward which life is opened now becomes also its innermost ground and most interior possession, since the world of life becomes the life of life itself: eternal life.
Even here, this life of the human person does not leave behind or reject the corporeality of the one human being as if it were something nonessential. Whether one’s biological side can still be called “biological” when the person is perfected in God is ultimately an indifferent question. The whole person (and hence also his spirit) will be changed.
The whole person (and hence also his corporeality) will be saved. That we cannot imagine the preserved salvation of the bodily individual is not surprising: the whole glorified person is withdrawn from us in the absolute mystery of God.
God’s self-communication, however, together with the divine Trinity given with it and with the historical appearance of this selfcommunication in Jesus Christ, constitutes the whole of what Christianity professes and hopes for, and that toward which the Christian lives. Because and insofar as the possession of this divine selfcommunication can be understood as the highest, most absolute stage of life, Christianity can be understood quite correctly as the teaching about life as such, as the profession of God, the living God, and of eternal life. For this reason, we always conclude the Credo with the words:
“and the life of the world to come. Amen.”
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1 0 • The Human Person
as God’s Creature*
In the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the saint says: “The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by that means to attain salvation. The other things on the face of the earth are created to help the person attain the end for which he is created” (no. 23).
If it is not to be misunderstood, the phrase ” the human person is created” must be understood, not as referring to people in general, but as referring to me. Otherwise “the other things” are not clearly seen.
What is meant here is “!” and no one else. It is true that there are others like me, but only in a certain sense. For each person must perceive the splendid and terrible reality, the fact that places him in isolation before God: that he is unique and exists once only.
He must do this: he cannot retreat into the mass; he cannot hide himself in that which holds always and for all. A human being: this is what I am, completely alone, however true it is that every other human being must also say the same of himself. In fact, what he says of himself is simply a generalization, but the “general” must here be heard, read, experienced, and accepted in the absolute solitude of the individual, in the existence that is on each occasion “mine.”
What is said here then about “the human person” must be understood as referring to “me.” When I say “!,” everything else must fall back into that circle of the “other things” in regard to which I am the unique, incommensurable one, with a partner ultimately only in God, so that when I am afraid in this uniqueness, when I feel the dizziness and dread of this loneliness, I can take refuge only in God.
The phrase “the human person is created” must be read as a statement in the present tense. I have not been created once and for all in the past, but I am now the created one, my being created is something that is constantly taking place. Hence it must be said that I am the creature, now, uniquely. I am the one known to myself, that one who is directly the sole creature that has this characteristic of being immediately known, the characteristic which enables me to reach everything else. And at the same time I am the one unknown to myself.
I am being-present-to-myself, I am freedom. “I am” means: I am inescapably; I am the appointed beginning which cannot get back behind itself, and this beginning is “there.” If I were to kill myself, if I were to protest against my existence, if- in Dostoievsky’s words – ! “wanted
* The Priesthood, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Seabury Press, 1 973), 1 9-22.
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to return my entry card into this world,” I would again be confirming my existence, I would again be placed before this absolute barrier that I am and that I am not nonexistent.
To say that I exist as a creature means further that I am finite and I know it. In me this finiteness becomes aware of itself and here alone becomes radically finite. I endure myself then; I know my limits, I overstep them and at the same time keep to them. Nevertheless I am: I am not merely appearance, not merely an illusion; not everything about me is unreality which could be overridden. I am as I am, inescapably as the known-unknown, as the being become present to itself and as that which is in control of itself, which – how incomprehensible it really is – is given into its own hands.
As such, however, I am always the one who is directed away from myself: I am present to myself and always look away from myself. This toward-which-l-am is God and we call him therefore the incomprehensible, absolute freedom, over which we have no control. When we say, “I am referred to God,” we cannot simply add that all is then clear, but we are basically saying: “I am that one who, if he is really the one referred to God, can never ‘become clear’ to himself about himself.”
For if we are those who are referred to God, if we are created, then we understand ourselves adequately, we become transparent to ourselves, only when we understand God. And this is denied the creature for all eternity, even in the beatific vision. Or, better, it is not denied us, but the bliss of eternity lies in the fact that we are dealing with a God who himself is close to us as the incomprehensible mystery, and as infinite incomprehensibility lays hold on us down to the last fiber of our being.
1 1 • The Human Spirit*
Spirit is transcendence. Spirit grasps at the incomprehensible inasmuch as it presses on beyond the actual object of comprehension to an anticipatory grasp of the absolute. The “whither” of this anticipatory grasp – which in the act of grasping the individual and tangible attains the all-embracing incomprehensible – may be called obscure or lucid.
Its reality, indescribable because nonobjectivated, may be experienced as a divine darkness, or greeted as the light which illuminates all else, since the individual object of knowledge is only present and definable in relation to it.
* Theological Investigations IV, trans. Kevin Smyth (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 966), 42-43.
THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE • 9 1
But i n any case, this nameless region beyond all categories, on which the transcendence of the spirit lays hold without comprehending, is not an accessory or a preliminary sphere of darkness which is to be gradually lit up. It is the primordial and fundamental which is the ultimate transcendental condition of possibility of knowledge. It alone makes categorical clarity possible in the distinct knowledge of contours.
If then reason which gives shape and contour to the object lives by the indefinable; if the lucidity of the spirit comes from its being open to the divine and truly superluminous darkness – what are we to think of mystery? Can it be regarded as a defective type of another and better knowledge which is still to come? Is ratio, understood in the standard sense, just incidentally and secondarily the faculty of mystery, precisely because of its almost too taut tension? Or is it, in spite of the obscurity cast by the standard terminology, the very faculty which is originally and basically the faculty of mystery, and only derivatively ratio in the ordinary sense of the word, as supposed by Vatican I and the theology of the schools?
We are met by the same challenge when we consider the nature of spirit as being one in the perichoresis ( circumincession) of knowledge and love. The positivism which places knowledge and love merely de facto beside one another in an unreconciled dualism must be excluded.
For one thing – no one knows why – the same existent thing is both knowing and loving. Hence, in spite of a real multiplicity of faculties and acts, this one total relationship to itself and absolute being: a basic act, whose components are the interrelated and interdependent of knowing and willing, of insight and love, as we call them empirically.
But this must ultimately mean that while guarding the distinction between knowing and willing, we must understand the act of knowing in such a way that it will explain why knowledge can only exist in a being when and insofar as that one being realizes itself by an act of love. In other words, the self-transcendence of knowledge, the fact that it comes to be only insofar as it passes over into something else must be understood in this way: knowledge, though prior to love and freedom, can only be realized in its true sense when and insofar as the subject is more than knowledge, when in fact it is a freely given love.
This is only possible if knowledge is ultimately a faculty ordained to an object attainable only because the object is greater than the faculty.
And what but the incomprehensibility of mystery can be such an object of knowledge, since it forces knowledge to surpass itself and both preserve and transform itself in a more comprehensive act, that of love?
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1 2 • “You Are Dust! “*
The prayer that accompanies the distribution of ashes comes from Genesis (3: 1 9), where the divine judgment is pronounced over all human beings, who had become sinners in their first parents. The divine judgment falls dark and hopeless over all: “For out of the earth you were taken; you are dust and to dust you shall return.”
We dare not introduce into this text our platonic outlook on life, and think, “Oh, fine, the human body is clearly declared to be mortal. But what of it, for the soul is certainly immortal, and it can find no fault with this death, which in the long run isn’t so bad.” On the contrary, this text, this judgment is directed to the whole person: “You are dust.”
Dust is an image of the whole human being. We may subsequently modify this image by distinguishing a twofold meaning: one meaning for the human body and one for the soul. Even in this distinction, however – which is certainly justified in itself – we stick to the one compact statement of scripture only when we do not forget that the assertion made in Genesis is concerned first of all with the whole person; and that this one assertion contains everything that pertains to the person, body and soul, even if it does so in different ways. The human person, therefore, and not just a part of his essence, is dust.
Understood in this way, dust is naturally an image, a graphic symbol.
But it is an image that is fuller and deeper than our metaphysical ideas, which are often so remote and diluted. What, then, does this image tell us about the human person?
The symbol of dust was used as a declaration of the human person’s essence not only in Genesis. “For he [ God ) knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (Ps I 03: 1 4). In Ecclesiastes 3:20 we read,
”All are from the dust and all turn to dust again.” Pessimistic? Yes, but this must be endured so that the joyous message of the new covenant can be grasped. Even pessimism can be inspired by God.
In the book of Job ( 4: 1 9), the despondent Eliphaz complains in these words, “Even in his [God’s) servants he puts no trust. . . . How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed before the moth.” “I am merely dust and ashes,”
says Abraham to God, in order to move him to pity for a sinful race (Gn 1 8:27). And if a person’s death is to be described, Qoheleth again has recourse to the image: “before the silver cord is snapped, or the pitcher is broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern, and dust returns to the earth as it was . . . . Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity” (Eccl 1 2:6-8).
• The Eternal Year, trans. John Shea, S.S. (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1 964), 57-ti3.
THE MYSTERY OF EXISTENCE • 93
Dust – truly a splendid symbol. Dust, this is the image of the commonplace. There is always more than enough of it. One fleck is as good as the next. Dust is the image of anonymity: one fleck is like the next, and all are nameless.
It is the symbol of indifference: What does it matter whether it is this dust or that dust? It is all the same. Dust is the symbol of nothingness: because it lies around so loosely, it is easily stirred up, it blows around blindly, is stepped upon and crushed – and nobody notices. It is a nothing that is just enough to be – a nothing. Dust is the symbol of coming to nothing: it has no content, no form, no shape; it blows away, the empty, indifferent, colorless, aimless, unstable booty of senseless change, to be found everywhere, and nowhere at home.
But God speaks to us: “You are dust.” You – the whole of you are dust. He does not say that human beings are only dust. It is an existential expression, not a complete formula of our essence. It can be spoken, though, even by itself, because the truth that it expresses must be experienced and endured to the full, so that whatever further is to be said about us (and there is a lot more, indeed everything, left to be said), this first assertion is not denied, watered down, nor essentially restricted.
For it lies in a completely different dimension. We are not a little dust and also at the same time and in the same dimension, still a lot more, so that to be a creature of dust would not be so bad. Rather, we are all dust, and are more than dust only when we really admit this dust-existence: I accept it, and “endure through it” with body and soul.
And because it is a question of an existential formula in this sense, then scripture can address this formula to human beings plainly, in all its harshness. Scripture need not add the comforting thought that we are more than dust, because this added notion, spoken in the wrong place, would be no comfort at all. Rather it would be the temptation not to take this dust-existence seriously, but to deceive ourselves about it.
Truly, then, scripture is right. We are dust. We are always in the process of dying. We are the beings who set our course for death, when we set out on life’s journey, and steer for death, clearly and inexorably.
We are the only beings who know about this tendency to death. We are dust!
To be sure, we are spirit, too. But left to its own resources, what is spiritual existence except the knowledge of things incomprehensible, the knowledge of guilt, and the knowledge that there is no way out of all this. We have enough spirit in us to know God. But what does this mean except that we know we stand before an unfathomable being whose ways are unsearchable and whose judgments are incomprehensible?
What does this mean except that we stand before the holy one as lost
94 • THE CONTENT OF FAITH
sinners? What does this mean except that with our minds we grasp the meaning of what we are in reality: dust and ashes?
Perhaps this dust might want to boast that it is immortal spirit. If so, what would this boast mean except that this dust is, by its very nature, subject to the judgment, that as a sinner this dust has already been judged? What else would it proclaim by this boasting of its eternity except that it is dust, nothing but the commonplace, nothing but the abnormality of guilty indebtedness, nothing but anonymous insignificance, nothing but nothingness? Taken by itself, what is the spirit except the possibility of measuring the finite with an infinite norm, only to perceive with horror that the eternal cannot be reached.
And so through practical experience we come to realize that we are dust. Scripture tells us that we are like the grass of the field, an empty puff of air. We are creatures of pain and sin and of drifting perplexity, who are constantly and continually losing our way in blind alleys. We torture ourselves and others, because we do not know whether guilt comes from pain or pain from guilt. Despair is always threatening us, and all our optimism is only a means of numbing our hopeless, bleak anxiety. Dust, that is what we are.
It is not easy for the person to avoid hating himself (as Bernanos tells us). Actually, if dust really belongs to us, is really a part of us, then we shouldn’t hate it. That is why oriental people, keenly aware of their origins, had such a remarkable relationship with dust, our proper image. He strews dust on his head, weeping and lamenting (Jos 7:6