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Questions on Rahner
John Milbank and Aaron Riches
- 25 years after his death, what is the importance of Rahner’s
thought in the present conjuncture of the Church?
Even if his influence has waned in the last decade and a half, Rahner continues to exert the strongest influence on the popular mind-set of post-Conciliar Catholic thought. His influence is still much stronger than Balthasar, for example, although this is rapidly changing amongst younger theologians.
In the years following the Council, Rahner enjoyed an almost hegemonic status among Catholic theologians, in both the curriculums of academic theology departments and in the theological formation of priests. One could conceivably do a whole degree in Catholic systematic theology and virtually read no one other than Rahner. In our own day it would be hard to imagine any one theologian occupying the place Rahner once did. Rahner still enjoyspre-eminence in more than a few seminaries and theology faculties. He is certainly not a marginal figure.
Why is this?
The reason undoubtedly is the simultaneous greater conservatism and yet greater liberalism of Rahner when compared with the nouvelle théologie theologians. This has three aspects:
- His thought was always more self-consciously congenial with neo- scholasticism.
- His position on ‘pure nature’ as a ‘remainder concept’ was always essentially convertible with the doctrines of Cajetan and Pius XII (whose themselves stand somewhere midway between a Lubacian position and the full blown neo-scholasticism of Garrigou-Lagrange.
- The liberal aspect of Rahner is to do with his modified Kantianism. As we now more fully understand, Kant himself lies in the trajectory of neo-scholastic thought via Scotus. Ockham, Suarez and Wolff. (see the work of Muralt, Honnefelder, Courtine etc)
So the crucial paradox to grasp is that the more radical rejection of ‘conservative’ neo-scholasticism by the nouvelle théologie theologians is also allied to a far more authentic traditionalism as compared with that of Rahner.
- What challenges did Rahner perceive as urgent for the 20th century
Christianity?
In an interview in the ‘80’s he said that by 2000 the Church cannot remain merely ‘European’. That it requires pluriform ‘inculturation’, a realisation of ecclesia semper reformanda and the decentralisation of ecclesial authority. Not of course a dismantling of papal authority, but an increase in the authority of local bishops and attention to the needs of diverse cultures.
- What were the influence and the major contributions of Rahner for the
II Vatican Council and for the dialogue between Modernity and Theology?
Within the Church Rahner is at least in part responsible, from the one side, of what the Lefebrites are guilty of, on the other: the popular sense that Vatican II was a decisive ‘break’. Rahner was happy to talk about the end of the ‘Pian’ order. The new, post-Pian Church would not exhibit the same anti-Modernism of the old Church. But this whole idea of a pre- and post- Vatican II Church is rather problematic, because Vatican II meant several different and entirely contradictory things: a new embrace (in some ways an over-embrace) of political liberal democratic modernity; a return to the Fathers and a more authentic Aquinas; a liberal reworking of certain neo-scholastic stresses; an appeal to a more poetic theological culture; an over-instrumentalisation of liturgical forms.
But while the ‘vulgar Rahnarianism’ that flourished after the Council was hardwired for accommodation with Modernity, Rahner himself did not have an entirely rosy view of the latter.
Indeed in terms of a ‘dialogue’ with Modernity – if what is meant by ‘Modernity’ is secularism – Rahner (even while he internalised Modernist philosophical presuppositions into his thinking) never to, our knowledge, provides any real sense of ‘how’ the Church should enter into a ‘dialogue’ with Modernity. In his 1954 essay, ‘Theological Position of Christians in the Modern World’, he offers what can be read as a rather sectarian and pessimistic resignation: Christendom is over, the culture of modernity ‘must be’. There is no hint here of Christian culture ‘pushing back’ or of the Church regaining its counter-cultural nerve.
None of this really resonates with a new 21st C epoch where the triumph of the secular no longer seems so automatic and we are once more threatened with authoritarian, fundamentalist modes of religion. And yet at the same time also threatened with a much more militant atheist critique which in the UK often now comes near to suggesting that religion should be outlawed. No-one, including Rahner, could really have anticipated this.
- Do you think Rahner’s theological ideas were assimilated by the
Theology in general? What Rahner’s ideas are still present in the Church
and in the dialogue with Modernity?
The idea of ‘inculturation’ has huge cache in Catholic Universities in USA. This is connected to the ideas of the supernatural existential and of ‘Anonymous Christians’. Ratzinger, in a critique of Rahner’s ‘inculturation’ (which presumes a general humanity, a religionless culture) argues – we think correctly – that there can only be inter-culturation, since the Church herself is a culture and no culture into which she is introduced is neutral. This tends to move away from the dubious idea that ‘culture’ is just an extrinsic means – a notion that is all too ‘Protestant’ and has had a negative effect upon the liturgy.
- How do you analyze Rahner and Ratzinger’s theologies? In what areas
did they disagree with each other? What happened to Rahner after the
Council?
In his memoir, Ratzinger describes he and Rahner as living ‘on two different theological planets’ even while for a time they stood for the same things ‘but for entirely different reasons’. Ratizinger describes Rahner as too ‘conditioned by Suarezian scholasticism’ and too influenced by the ‘German idealism of Heidegger’.
At the council, Ratzinger and Rahner worked on a draft schema on revelation, this seems to be the ‘common ground’ on which they stood for a time. They both were concerned to undo the ‘positivism’ of the manual tradition and wished to achieve this through a new attentiveness to the connection of revelation with the unfolding of ‘history’. Ratzinger seems to have been interested, among other things, in recovering a sense of ‘development’ as John Henry Newman (in continuity with Irenaeus of Lyon and Vincent of Lérins, Aquinas and Bonaventure) articulated it, where the development of doctrine is logically as well as historically continuous with the apostolic origin. Rahner seems to have come at this from a different angle. He tends to rely on an evolutionary-transcendentalist model, which gives far less of a role to ‘logos’ as the term of mediating continuity and development. Rather, on the evolutionary scheme proffered by Rahner, a subjectivistic vitalism under the impact of the environment tends to replace the reflexive practice of exegesis and mystagogy as the tensive term of logical/rational mediation of continuity and development. In the evolutionary scheme ‘logos’ is suppressed in favour of a subjective (vitalist and environmentalist/existential) ‘transcendentalism’, which ultimately collapses ‘revelation’ into the ‘spiritual history of mankind’. Thus Rahner not only fails to overcome the subject-object dichotomy but remains fully ‘fideistic’ in his theology of revelation, because the actual content of the latter is only left an ‘objective’ and ‘illustrative’ place to fill. All the subjective and spiritual is turned-over to the side of a natural history itself subordinated to atranscendental grounding.
Ratzinger, by contrast, can be seen as more ‘radical’ and more truly post-modern insofar as, drawing on the paleo-Christian vision of the Fathers, he moves to formulate a theology of history that overcomes the subject-object dichotomy through integrating faith and reason, revelation and reflexive logic. His anti-Kantianism (shared with Lubac and Balthasar) now chimes far more even with the mood of secular philosophy (Badiou, Meillassoux, Rorty).
- What was Rahner’s influence on the Liberation Theology and other
progressivist views of the Church?
One of the last things Rahner did before he died was to send a letter to the bishops of Peru in 1983 in support of Gustavo Guttierez and his version of liberation theology. Rahner was – especially later in life – deeply sympathetic with the cause of the poor and rightly saw that the Church’s mission of charity required an active advocacy of justice on behalf of its poorest members. We think it is fair to say that he was rightly moved in a genuine way to see that the Church had a responsibility to contribute to the work of justice, a work it had evidently failed to do in more than some places.
But Rahner was too uncritical of the befuddling practice of absorbing Marx as Aquinas had absorbed Aristotle. He was too uncritical of the false ‘common cause’ of Catholics and ‘Marxist-Leninists’. He should have looked to older traditional Christian socialist models. Today these are being revived and the dualism between a ‘Biblical’ theology of liberation and a natural law- based ‘Catholic Social Teaching’ is being overcome. Instead we are seeing that the Biblical tradition has much in common with the Greek (Platonic/Aristotelian/Stoic) thinking about politics and society while decisively modifying it, especially in terms of a new sense of personhood and the absolute worth of all persons. A new Christian-communitarian virtue-politics is emerging which rejects both statism and the capitalist market and insists that subsidiarity can only ne upheld through the over-arching ‘sanctuary’ that ecclesia provides in its apophatic distance from the coercive law and merely self-interested market-exchange. The ideas of Saul Alinsky, Ivan Illich et al. are being blended with the insights of Gutierrez.
- In your opinion, is Rahner’s theology too optimistic in regards to
Modernity? Why?
Part of the problem here is Rahner’s ‘Antiochene’ tendency to emphasise a ‘Christology from below’ against the ‘factual monophysitism’ he perceived in pre-conciliar Catholicism. In fact it can now be clearly sees that just the opposite was always the case: neo-scholasticism is Nestorian in its Christology, and is not ‘Alexandrian’ enough. Rahner’s ‘turn to the transcendental subject’ perpetuates the modernist dualisms of neo-scholasticism.
Where de Lubac and now RO want a Christologically-centred anthropology which focuses on the ‘heavenly man’, Rahner seems to want an anthropologically-centred Christology which focuses on the ‘earthly man’. Thus, with the Vorgriff, the accent of the desire of the ‘supernatural existential’ lies in a progressive apprehension of ‘form’ in relation to the creature’s activistic reachingout, as opposed to the God-Man’s ‘coming down from above’. Where Rahner privileges the ‘supernatural existential’ as the best way conceiving then human person’s relation to God, RO would want to privilege the ‘paradox’ of the heavenly man, based on the communicatio idiomatum as stressed by Aquinas, Bérulle and Louis Chardon. On the latter view there is little room for so-called ‘anonymous Christianity’, since there is only Christian ethics, politics, culture and doxology where there is an ecclesial mission distinctively formed by the pattern of the heavenly man. At the same time, however, the communication of idioms and the natural desire for the supernatural means that in all of human history and culture there in a typological pointing to Christ which always uniquely illumines Christ in new ways. In this sense the inter-culturation perspectives of Ratzinger and of RO allow more for a substantive learning from different cultures by theology than does Rahner’s semi-Nestorianism and allied transcendentalism. For the latter always subordinates the local and the particular to supposed a priori purely natural human norms.
- How do you analyze the importance of Rahner’s idea of “anonymous
Christian” for the inter-faith dialogue and ecumenism?
The idea is either too innocuous to be associated with the Christian proclamation of the Gospel, or it is so patronising as to be offensive beyond the possibility of speaking ‘love’ to a genuine other – probably it is both. See our answer to the last question for a positive alternative.
- In front of the recent challenges of the Church in its dialogue with
the present culture, is it possible to affirm that the Church became
more immanent and less transcendent after the Council, in front of
Rahner’s ideas?
Yes: Rahner was relatively indifferent to questions of art, music and liturgy. There is a need now fro a return to the perspectives of people like Odo Casel and Romano Guardini, reinforced with the work of Catherine Pickstock, J.-L. Chrétien and several others. Obsessively this-worldly concerns betray this world also and actually don’t allow any genuine socio-political critique. More recent theology has been more concerned with both the phenomenology and the ontology of the transcendent. But perhaps RO is distinctive in its attempts to link these concerns with political issues.
- For Rahner, what is the connection between faith communication,
experience of God and Theology?
This question has perhaps been answered already. Rahner tended to blend transcendentalism with fideism and he compromised the communication of faith in consequence: either faith was anonymously there already, or it was a mere positive datum, a kind of specific ‘seal’ upon something abstractly universal. He lacked a fully Christian sense of the ‘concretely universal’: the idea that what is revealed is the ‘human as such’ which can only be specific. Also the idea that the ‘human as such’ can only be restored to us by a man who was not a human but a divine person, brought into this world by Mary, the perfect human person, whose perfect humanity was only enabled by her destiny as Logos-bearer. Here the idea that humanity is fulfilled and restored by the God-Man is balanced by the notion that the God-Man is only possible through a perfect human relationship of love between the God-Man and his mother, which is the Church at the source. The Incarnation is inseparable from its Eucharistic continuation in the Church which ‘makes’ the Church. Through this mystery we are introduced into the hidden relational life of the Trinity, the life of eternity. Revelation is only shown through a mystagogic practice which introduces us to the hidden life of God. But with Rahner, as with Barth, there was too much a tendency to identify revelation with the self-revelation of God regarded as the adequate display of God within temporal immanence.
For ourselves, as for RO in general we prefer the break of the nouvelle théologie with neo-scholasticism in both its conservative and its liberal forms. This raises many questions of how we can rework the classical Christian tradition in the face of modern experience. But above all it is to be concluded that the loss of the link of reason with faith and with participation in divine reason came about because of an overly-rationalistic construal of reason which in some ways had been gestating in Christianity long before the nominalist deviation. It is no accident that the first retrievers of an authentic Christianity were often literary or artistic figures – one can think of Péguy, Claudel and George Macdonald, for example. They already saw that an authentic reason that participates in divine mystery is inseparable from truly-directed passion, from the sense of the beautiful, the exercise of creative power and a feeling for and care of, nature. This must apply to practical reason also, and so to the political realm.
John Milbank
Aaron Riches