The figure of Joseph Ratzinger was blurred for a long time by political polemics (“conservative”, “Bavarian”) and covered up by his functions in the visible Church (prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, strict guardian of Orthodoxy) . One would have had to ask what he wanted to keep and why. As it was a little difficult, his detractors too often shared with his laudators a common defect: not having read him, therefore not having seen him as what he was and will remain – one of the greatest theologians of post-modernity, on a par with Barth, Balthasar and Lubac.
Long before having the chance to meet him within the framework of the international committees of the journal communion (from 1974), this very young professor ordinarius of theology, learned and brilliant, modest and benevolent, struck me with a study on The originality and tradition of Augustine’s concept of confessio (published in 1957, but pronounced in 1954 in Paris): he underlined that the confession of faith not only is never separated from the confession of sins, but that they constitute the two faces of the recognition that God is God and that, me, I am only me, that I only know him if I praise him like god. We only know God by recognizing him as such. This conviction supported, some twenty years later, his habilitation thesis on Bonaventure, Bonaventure and not Thomas Aquinas whose neo-Thomist systematizations he challenged (like the majority of the great theologians of his generation, and even Gilson). His study on Bonaventure’s understanding of Revelation and the theology of history, exposed, not without reluctance on the part of its jury (the complete text only appeared in 2009), that the Revelation does not consist first and foremost in theoretical propositions, which could be analyzed to complete those of philosophy, but in the meeting of a call and a response, of an intervention of the Word in provoking person, or not, the response of a witness. No Revelation without someone to receive it, no knowledge without confession, no intelligence without faith, according to the biblical principle that “if you believe not, you will not understand”.
That theology is normalized by faith means that the rationality of God implies communion with him. This may bother some theologians, but should not confuse most contemporary philosophers: from Nietzsche to Levinas, from Heidegger and Husserl to Ricœur and Gadamer, from Wittgenstein to even Jean-Louis Chrétien, they have established the hermeneutical rule that all speech is first gives as a question and that this question is rationally articulated only in the answer.
From this knowledge, Ratzinger has developed results. Let’s take only two.
First, the monumental synthesis of Jesus of Nazareth, which draws up a final assessment in my eyes of the achievements and limits of the historical-critical method in biblical exegesis: the New Testament was written as an interpretative commentary on the First Testament (Jewish, which Christians called the “Scriptures”), with a stake principal: Did Jesus fulfill what the promises of a Messiah announced or not? So the testimonies about Jesus were written from the standpoint of his status as Christ fulfilling the “Scriptures”; they can only be read from the point of view from which they were written; the Jesus of history can therefore only be conceived and constituted as the Christ of faith. Otherwise, if the distance between Jesus and Christ is maintained (as has been the rule since Strauss and Renan), the texts become incoherent and unintelligible. We recognize here the doctrine of HU von Balthasar concerning Jesus, Jesus inseparably the Christ, as “figure”. And in fact, contemporary exegesis, for several decades, has been progressing on this basis.
Then the encyclical Deus Caritas is. This formula, taken from the first Letter from John (IV, 16), states what Bonaventure considered to be the last and first divine name. In doing so, Ratzinger was one of the few pontiffs to show that if God reveals himself as love – love that longed for the love of every man (for God, says Gregory of Nyssa, longed for),− to know him is to love him. The mode of thought which responds to a love, we already experience it sometimes in our poor lives, consists in love in return. This is par excellence the thought of God. For faith has its reasons, which reason should recognize in order to remain rational and reasonable.