Joseph Ratzinger on the Foundations of Moral Theology

Abstract

Joseph Ratzinger on the Foundations of Moral Theology D Vincent Twomey SVD Christian faith and morals For Joseph Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI, now Pope Emeritus, Christianity cannot – in the tradition of Kant – be reduced to ethics.1 Rather, it is about grace, about that transforming encounter with Christ which radically transforms human behaviour from within. It is about our human greatness in Christ, about that magnanimity – that aristocracy of the spirit – which transcends the mere calculus of rationalist thought (as found in the various forms of utilitarianism). Christianity is about the universal call to holiness;2 in other words, it is a call to heroism. That, in sum, is Ratzinger’s deepest conviction. Morality is, in a sense, secondary; friendship with Christ is primary. As Tracey Rowland points out, Ratzinger flagged his approach to morality as early as 1964, when, during a series ofAdvent sermons to the Catholic student community of Münster, he asked the question: ‘What actually is the real substance of Christianity that goes beyond mere moralism?’3 His rejection of moralism of every kind remained a constant in his writings right up the end of his career as a theologian. In the second volume of his trilogy, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI (writing as a private theologian) rejected the attempt by some theologians such as Adolf von Harnack to interpret the new commandment of Jesus – ‘love as I have loved you’ to the point of laying down one’s life for the other – as an attempt to define Christianity ‘as a form of extreme moral effort’.4 This he strenuously rejects, pointing out that the newness of the New Law ‘can only come from the gift of beingwith and being-in Christ’.5 He quotes Thomas Aquinas: ‘The new law is the grace of the Holy Spirit’.6 Because we are transformed within through our sacramental sharing in the redemptive mystery of Christ, ‘[t]he command to do as Jesus did (cf. John 13:14–15) is no mere moral appendix to the mystery, let alone an antithesis to it. It follows from the interior dynamic of gift with which the Lord renews us and draws us into his own’.7 He returned to the Studies • volume 109 • number 435 304 same basic truth in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, when he affirmed in the opening paragraphs that: ‘Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction’.After quoting John 3:16 (‘God so loved the world …’), the pope comments: ‘In acknowledging the centrality of love, Christian faith has retained the core of Israel’s faith, while at the same time giving it new depth and breadth’. As distinct from that area of moral theology which deals with specific moral or practical issues, fundamental moral theology is the speculative reflection on the nature of morality (practical reason) in the light of Christ. It is, if you wish, Christian moral theory. It is, perhaps, to this field that Ratzinger made his, admittedly limited, but significant, contribution to moral theology. It should be noted that, on the whole, he avoided the technical terminology of that discipline,8 and, with perhaps two exceptions, does not engage in the debates that have pitted moral theologians against each other for over 50 years. His contribution to moral theology is precisely his ability to get behind such terms to the more fundamental, indeed existential, human issues at stake in a post-Christian world shaped by modernity, and to do so in a Church unsure of its moorings. Perhaps his unique contribution might be more accurately termed the pre-dogmatic foundations of moral theology. The essence of what is moral In a speech at Eichstätt in 1988,9 Joseph Ratzinger attempted to analyse the contemporary crisis of values, and to propose the Christian answer to that crisis. It is so central to his thought that it merits close attention. The crisis of values today, he maintains, is caused by the fact that ‘that which is moral has lost its evidential character’.10 In other words, moral...