Caritas in not-quite-enough Veritate

Some thoughts I typed up in response to the recent encyclical Caritas in Veritate for Theology and the Global Economy class:

Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate is in some ways a breath of fresh air, but in other ways, leaves a nagging sense of “more of the same that got us into this mess.” It is refreshing to hear a Christian leader speaking out so authoritatively for causes that would be considered “liberal” or even “socialist” in my background, deemed to have little or nothing to do with Christianity’s values. It tickled me that Benedict speaks so casually at a number of points of the need for “redistribution of wealth”--a phrase that would give conservative American Christians a heart attack, or perhaps we should say a Red Scare. I appreciated in particular his emphasis on the need for both commutative and distributive justice in the marketplace, which really helped some things click into place for me. Capitalist ideology has insisted on the need for only commutative justice, and treated distributive justice only under the heading of “mercy,” and for whatever reason, conservative American Protestantism has leapt on board with that definition, jettisoning the traditional emphasis on the need for both.

However, despite being quite pleased with the document as a whole, I was left with some nagging concerns. First, what is the role of the State, and of large-scale political organizations, in all this reform that needs to happen? It seems to be a very large role for Benedict. He assumes the central importance of the State, and indeed, in many places, seems to want to increase its role as the institution that oversees justice in society and in the marketplace. In many places, he seems to be addressing this encyclical more toward national governments than to individuals, telling them the reforms they need to implement. But this seems to contradict his repeated insistence that economic justice is not possible without Christian truth and Christian love, in other words, the Augustinian dictum that we encountered in week 1 of this term--true justice between men is not possible unless God is being given his due. Now, if all this is true, and we can’t simply expect justice to come from improved human wisdom or good intentions, then how could we possibly expect economic justice to come from some of the most corrupt and godless engines of secularism in history--namely, national governments? Now, I admit my American anti-government bias, but still...it would seem that, on Benedict’s own principles, the state could not be the main source of this justice unless it first confessed Christ. Of course, he also puts a lot of faith in the UN, which seems to me even more dubious than most nation-states.

Second, what is the role of the Church? I was surprised that a Catholic--the Pope no less--who should have as high an ecclesiology as anyone, barely mentioned the Church as a social body. Is the Church’s role simply to act as the conscience of economic society, giving moral advice about how to run things better? Or is the Church supposed to act as a visible social body in economic society, acting out and living out more just means of exchange? It seems to me that the latter is more effective, and more in line with what we see in Scripture. I am willing to grant that the Church may well need to do both, but Benedict hardly mentioned the latter. I would like to see a creative exploration of the way in which the Church, as a body, can encourage just economic arrangements which lead to human flourishing, both in local congregations, and on a worldwide institutional level. I mean, the Catholic Church is a bigger worldwide institution than the UN, isn’t it? Why shouldn’t it be a greater institutional engine for bringing about charitable economics than the UN?

Ratzinger on Christ as Word

Sorry, but I feel compelled to continue the onslaught of Ratzinger. I've finished the book now finally, so it can't continue forever. This, in keeping with my typical laziness, will essentially be a copy-and-paste from something I already typed up for someone:

Why is Christ the perfect self-revelation of God? How do we know that in Christ, we're getting the real
thing, the authentic revelation of God? How can we be sure that the Christ about whom we learn is really how
Christ was? In other words, how can we be sure that "Jesus" and "Christ" are completely equatable?
Ratzinger says it is because, for Christ, being and word, being and action, are merged, in a way that they
are for ordinary fallen men:
"with Jesus, it is not possible to distinguish office and person; with him, the differentiation simply becomes inapplicable. The person is the office; the office is the person. . . . there is no private area reserved for an 'I' that remains in the background
behind the deeds and actions."
"To understand him as the Christ means to be convinced that he has put himself into his word. Here there is no 'I' (as there is with all of us) that utters words; he has identified himself so closely with his word that 'I' and word are indistinguishable: he is word."
I shall attempt to unpack the significance of all this. See, the dilemma is that for any of us, who we are as a person always eludes grasp to some degree; it cannot be defined or confined in what our various positions in life are, what our actions are, what our words are. It can be glimpsed, but discovering the true authentic person is so very difficult. When people seek to get to know each other, how do they do it? Well, largely through words--through conversation. But how authentic is this? I can be deceptive in what I choose to say, and you can't always tell the difference. I may not be intentionally deceptive, but I may be selective in what I choose to say, so that my words are not always an accurate representation of my thoughts. People have habitual ways of expressing themselves (known as social skills) that put somewhat of a disconnect between the way they come across to others and the way they really are. How authentic then, are words? With humans, we can never really be sure we know who someone really is merely by their words. So we have the benefit of actions, right? You know someone partly by the things they do. But again, how can one be sure these are not just part of a self-scripted drama? Or, again, if not deceptive, selective...my actions only make public a small sliver of me. Or, again, my actions could be tailored to fit certain circumstances, so that they come to represent more what I am expected to do than who I really am. There is again a disconnect--how do we get at the authentic person behind the mask of words and deeds? To some degree, we never can, in this life, at least.

But Jesus Christ transcends that disconnect--for him, his words, his teachings, are inseparable from his being; he is incarnate Word. At the same time, his deeds are inseparable from his being; his role as prophet, priest, and king, is the authentic full revelation of his being from all eternity. He is the divine essence in pure, unimpeded action. At the same time, he is the perfection of humanity, because, as the first human who is fully, authentically himself, he satisfies at last the human thirst to truly know one another, to commune with one another, and he prefigures for us the perfect transparency we will
enjoy in our glorified state.

A couple long quotes showing how Ratzinger starts to apply this:
"His crucifixion is his coronation; his kingship is his surrender of himself to men, the identification of word, mission, and existence in the yielding up of this very existence. His existence is thus his word. he is word because he is love. From the Cross faith understands in increasing measure that this Jesus did not just do and say something; that in him message and
person are identical, that he is all along what he says. John needed only to draw the final straightforward inference: if that is so--and this is the Christological basis of his Gospel--then this Jesus Christ is 'word'; but a person who not only has
words but is his word and his work, who is the logos ('the Word', meaning, mind) itself; that person has always existed and will always exist; he is the ground on which the world stands--if we ever meet such a person, then he is the meaning that comprises us all and by which we are all sustained."

"For anyone who recognizes the Christ in Jesus, and only in him, and who recognizes Jesus as the Christ, anyone who grasps the total oneness of person and work as the decisive factor, has abandoned the exclusiveness of faith and its antithesis to love; he has combined both in one and made their mutual separation unthinkable. The hyphen between Jesus and Christ, the inseparability of person and work, the identity of one man with the act of sacrifice--these also signify the hyphen between love and faith. For the peculiarity of Jesus's 'I', of his person, which now certainly moves right into the center of the stage, lies in the fact that this 'I' is not at all something exclusive and independent but rather is Being completely derived from the 'Thou' of the Father and lived for the 'You' of men. It is identity of logos (truth) and thus makes love into the logos, the
truth of human existence. The essnence of the faith demanded by a Christology so understood is consequently entry into the universal openness of unconditional love. For to believe in a Christ so understood means simply to make love the content of faith, so that from this angle one can perfectly well say, love is faith."

Ratzinger on the Trinity

Ok, so, as an intermission between barrages of Cavanaugh, I have another Catholic to bring to you--namely, the Pope.

In his Introduction to Christianity, he has a positively amazing section on the Trinity. I have here a whole bunch of quotes from it, selected mainly because I've already typed them up for other arenas--though you can be sure they represent some of the best selections:

"We can only speak rightly about Him if we renounce the attempt to comprehend and let him be the uncomprehended. Any doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, cannot aim at being a perfect comprehension of God. It is a frontier notice, a discouraging gesture pointing over to unchartable territory. It is not a definition that confines a thing to the pigeonholes of human knowledge, nor is it a concept that would put the thing within the grasp of the human mind."

"In other words, all these statements [of heresy] are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy."

"Faith consists of a series of contradictions held together by grace."

"He who tries to be a mere observer experiences nothing. Even the reality 'God' can only impinge on the vision of him who enters into the experiment with God--the experiment that we call faith. Only by entering does one experience; only by cooperating in the experiment does one ask at all; and only he who asks receives an answer. . . . Indeed, we must go a step farther: that we put any questions or make any experiments at all is due to the fact that God for his part has agreed to the experiment, has entered into it himself as man. Through the human refraction of this one man we can thus come to know more than the mere man; in him who is both man and God, God has demonstrated his humanity and in the man has let himself be experienced."

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“God as substance, as ‘being’, is absolutely one. If we nevertheless have to speak of him in the category of triplicity, this does not imply any multiplication of substances but means that in the one and indivisible God there exists the phenomenon of dialogue, the reciprocal exchange of word and love in their attachment to each other.

They are not substances, personalities in the modern sense, but the relatedness whose pure actuality (‘parcels of waves’!) does not impair the unity of the highest being but fills it out. St. Augustine once enshrined this idea in the following formula: ‘He is not called Father with reference to himself but only in relation to the Son; seen by himself he is simply God.’

Here the decisive point comes beautifully to light. ‘Father’ is purely a concept of relationship. Only in being for the other is he Father; in his own being in himself he is simply God. Person is the pure relation of being related, nothing else. Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as it is with us; it only exists at all as relatedness.

“Expressed in the imagery of Christian tradition, this means that the first Person does not beget the Son as if the act of begetting were subsequent to the finished Person; it is the act of begetting, of giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act of self-giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but the act of giving.

In this idea of relatedness in word and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified among the ‘accidents’, Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept of person, which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere idea of the ‘individual.’ Let us listen once again to St. Augustine:

‘In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation.’ Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the sole dominion of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought’; a new plane of being comes into view.

It is probably true to say that the task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed—so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, without which it would be inconceivable.”

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Relational ontology, man!