Title: READING RATZINGER , By: Grafton, Anthony, New Yorker, 0028792X, 7/25/2005, Vol. 81, Issue 21
Benedict XVI, the theologian
In May, 1984, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger summoned the Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff to Rome. In the nineteen-seventies and eighties, Boff had helped create the movement known as liberation theology, working with poor Catholics in Latin America to create small, autonomous groups called "base communities." Influenced by Marxism, the movement redefined Christianity as a critique of the oppressive social and economic order, and it often considered the Roman center of the Church part of that order. In "Church: Charism and Power," a collection of essays published in 1981, Boff argued that the base communities were the core of the true Church: "The Church is directed toward all, but begins from the poor, from their desires and struggles." He justified the base communities as an essential part of the radical changes produced by the Second Vatican Council, in the early nineteen-sixties. These changes included the performance of Mass in the vernacular and a willingness to acknowledge elements of religious truth in other Christian denominations and even in other religions.
At the time, Ratzinger was the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office formerly known as the Inquisition. It was a job he had for nearly twenty-five years, before becoming Pope, last April. When Boff appeared at the yellow palazzo where the Congregation does its work, Ratzinger questioned him on relations between the Catholic Church and Christianity as a whole. In reply, Boff cited Chapter 1, No. 8 of Lumen Gentium ("Light of the Nations"), one of the documents of Vatican II, which explained that the true Church "subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the bishops in communion with him. Nevertheless, many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines." Boff took this passage as a qualification of the Church's traditional exclusivity.
The history of this paragraph suggests that those who drafted it shared Boff's interpretation. For the first two years of the Council, the draft document stated simply and directly that the mystical body of Christ "is" the Catholic Church. But in the fall of 1964 the word "subsists" was added, together with the passage about elements of truth from outside the Church. The official commentary explained that the change was meant to make the text "more harmonious with the affirmation of ecclesial elements which are elsewhere." The Dominican theologian Yves Congar glossed the passage the way Boff did: "Vatican II acknowledges, in sum, that non-Catholic Christians are members of the mystical body." Ratzinger himself published a short book on Vatican II in which he wrote enthusiastically, if generally, of the Church's new openness.
Yet now, in 1984, Ratzinger read the same text in a very different way. To understand the chapter, he argued, one must bear in mind a theologically weighty noun--substantia--closely related to subsistit, the verb that the Council fathers had used. Substantia, meaning "substance," refers to the essence of a thing (as in "transubstantiation"). According to Ratzinger, when the Council used the verb "subsists" it stated in the strongest terms that the true Church "both is, and can only be, fully present" in the Roman Church, with all its hierarchies. Lumen Gentium, he argued, offeted no support for Christian institutions created without Rome's sanction. Refraining the debate in this way, Ratzinger went well beyond the historical circumstances of the document's origin; nowhere had the drafters mentioned the noun "substance." Ratzinger treated Boff with respect, and listened attentively to his defense of his views, but he did not soften his judgment. After Boff returned to Brazil, the Congregation published a formal critique of his work stating that Boff had drawn from Lumen Gentium "a thesis which is exactly the contrary to the authentic meaning of the council text"--that is, to Ratzinger's rather acrobatic interpretation of it. Less than two months later, another notice required Boff to cease writing, editing, and teaching, and to maintain "obedient silence" for an unstated period, a verdict that Boff accepted.
This story, as minute and vivid as a medieval miniature, reveals Ratzinger at work, wielding proof texts that in his hands are as powerful, and as malleable, as articles of the Constitution in the hands of an ideologically partisan jurist. Are such attitudes typical of the new Pope? In his time as Prefect, Ratzinger treated a number of other Catholic dissidents in much the same way. He was a censor, and he did his job well. Liberal observers have for years seen him as the Church's Cerberus, a snapping guard dog who threatens all dissidents with appropriate punishment. Many conservative Catholics, by contrast, revere what they see as the austere purity of his beliefs.
Whatever observers think of Ratzinger's views, all agree that what he does will matter tremendously. The Pope is the spiritual head of the oldest and largest religious organization in the world, a church with more than a billion members. There has been speculation about whether the Grand Inquisitor will show a milder countenance in his new office, but one vital form of evidence about him has generally been ignored. Before Ratzinger became a bishop and a censor, he was a professional theologian. He comes to his work as an intellectual, an academic dedicated to interpretation. For many years, he wrote learnedly on a vast range of questions, from the Church's doctrines to the religious life of the ordinary Christian. My local source of Ratzingeriana--the library of the thoroughly Presbyterian Princeton Theological Seminary--lists a hundred and thirty items by him in its catalogue. Reading Ratzinger provides a way to understand this man as he thinks and reflects, rather than as he reacts to the questions of journalists and the challenges of office. It is also to see that many of his more recent attitudes and actions grow from deep roots in his personal history.
"Milestones," a short autobiography that Ratzinger wrote in the late nineteen-nineties, warmly evokes the world he grew up in--a world of tiny Bavarian towns like Marktl am Inn, where he was born, with little squares surrounded by solid, tile-roofed houses, and bright Christmas shop windows, "like a wonderful promise." Joseph Ratzinger came from a modest household. His father, a staunch anti-Nazi, was a policeman. Starting at the age of ten, Joseph received a rigorous education at a Gymnasium, the classic German high school, and he became an excellent Latinist, which proved important when he was a theological consultant at the Second Vatican Council, where Latin was the official language. The war disrupted Ratzinger's education--still a teen-ager, he was drafted into an antiaircraft battery--but, as he looks back, his early life seems as clean and neat as a village scene in a snow globe, threatened only by forces outside his and his Church's control: "On the whole, village life continued as it always had."
Catholic tradition touched Ratzinger's little world at two points. There was the liturgy--the public life of the Church. From the start, he loved the complex, moving services of village churches, the Mass in which every word and gesture carried meaning: "The Church year gave the time its rhythm, and I experienced that with great gratitude and joy already as a child." His favorite book was "Schott," the richly layered Latin-German missal: "It was a riveting adventure to move by degrees into the mysterious world of the liturgy, which was being enacted before us and for us there on the altar." Although Ratzinger grew up under the Nazis and came to maturity in postwar occupied Germany, he lived most intensely in a world of his own, an enchanted castle of Latin song and prayer, incense and sacraments, which he has spent the rest of his life exploring.
There was also the institution of the Church--the great theologians and prelates whom Ratzinger hoped to emulate. As a seminary student just after the war, he treasured seeing Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, the Archbishop of Munich, perform Mass in the cathedral: "What moved me deeply about him was the awe-inspiring grandeur of his mission, with which he had become fully identified." Faulhaber, a decent and scholarly man, deplored the Nazis' persecution of Jews and other "non-Aryans," but he failed to protest, seeing the preservation of the Church as his central task.
Ratzinger became a professional theologian in the nineteen-fifties. It was a lively time. Two great Protestant innovators, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth, had pulled down the temples of liberal theology. Bultmann "demythologized" the New Testament, and Barth replaced the certainties of nineteenth-century theology with a powerful emphasis on the radical distance between God and humanity. Meanwhile, young Catholics like Ratzinger were inspired by the writings of Romano Guardini, who stressed meditative spirituality over the formal neo-Thomist theology that had dominated Catholic seminaries. In the evasive public silence of the Federal Republic in the nineteen-fifties, students hungered for messages. Theologians tried to show that the idea of a Creator could still have meaning for people, even in the age of Sartre's "No Exit." By the early sixties, German-speaking professors of theology had become rock stars. The audiences for their lectures filled the largest auditoriums, and publishers competed to print their long, erudite books. Barth appeared on the cover of Time.
Catholic theology was at its most provocative in France and Belgium. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin challenged the Church to come to terms with the results of modern science. For Ratzinger, the most important scholars were the Jesuit Henri de Lubac and the Dominicans Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar, who insisted that no doctrinal system could encompass all truths. The Church, they demonstrated, had lived in history, and the modern hierarchy must be willing to accept knowledge from its own past, to steep itself in the long tradition of Catholic theology and exegesis, as well as in contemporary thought. Strikingly, although these thinkers spent their time examining arcane works that even learned Catholics had forgotten, they were often more astute than more conventional theologians in confronting the terrors of the twentieth century. Lubac, for example, saw hatred of the Jews as a violation of true Catholic doctrine; in 1941, he helped create a Catholic Resistance paper, Cahiers du Témoignage chrétien, which denounced the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis and Vichy France.
The young Ratzinger wrote his doctoral dissertation on St. Augustine's ideas about the House and People of God. He realized that he could understand Augustine best by examining his work against the backdrop of North African culture--the culture from which the pagan Augustine came to Italy, and to which he returned a Christian, serving as Bishop of Hippo. North Africa was the center of Donatism, a movement that believed that any priests who, during the recent persecution of the Church, had surrendered their copies of the Scriptures to the Romans must cease to serve, since they would infect the sacraments they dispensed. Augustine argued that the Donatists' refusal to recognize the sacraments when administered by these clerics showed their lack of a fundamental Christian virtue--charity. As Ratzinger put it, "Augustine regards the lack of caritas as the defining characteristic of Donatism." The true Church could not be founded on the exclusion of others.
Ratzinger's thesis sparkled with insight into the world of the early Christian Church. Discussing what Augustine meant when he spoke of mater ecclesia, "mother church," Ratzinger noted that a recently discovered mosaic from the period showed a complete basilica labelled "Ecclesia mater." He took this as evidence that Augustine "was speaking the language of the people," who believed that God would protect those who built a splendid house for his worship. But Ratzinger also showed that Augustine had learned-from pagan Neoplatonists like Plotinus, who felt ashamed that he even had a body--that the highest realities were spiritual, not material. In the end, Ratzinger wrote, Augustine's "People of God" consisted not of any single congregation or building but of a spiritual body united by liturgy and sacrament: "Like the City of God, the People of God, as the community in which the City consists, is identical with the Church, in so far as that is the people on its pilgrimage--that is, that group of the Saints of God who are called from among men." What defined the true Church of the living was its members' common participation in the Eucharist, the central ritual of Christianity. (This definition has remained crucial to Ratzinger in his later roles; for instance, he recently approved the exclusion from the Eucharist of Catholic politicians who defend abortion rights.) In his dissertation, he showed with subtlety and power how one of the greatest of Christian thinkers had learned vital truths from the enemies of his religion.
The complex dialectical relation between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, already important in Ratzinger's work on Augustine, became a central question in his Habilitationsschrift--the second dissertation required of anyone who wants to become a professor in Germany. This second project, completed in 1959, dealt with Bonaventure, a thirteenth-century Franciscan saint, and, in particular, with his theology of revelation; the thesis was later published in English as "The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure." Trained in Paris, Bonaventure became Minister General of the recently founded Franciscan Order. He wrote what became the standard life of St. Francis of Assisi--it was decreed that all other accounts be destroyed--and he did his best to keep the peace between two factions of his fellow-mendicants. At the time, a group of friars known as the Spirituales were insisting on a strict return to the rule of the founder, who, like Jesus, had told his disciples to take no thought for the morrow. A more pragmatic group, known as the Relaxati, accepted the need for the order to own property so that it could educate its members and secure continuity. Bonaventure compromised. He took action against the more radical Spirituales, but also accepted elements of their critique and tried to reform the order as a whole.
Ratzinger showed that Bonaventure had paid close attention to prophetic texts, popular with many Franciscan Spirituales, by the twelfth-century abbot Joachim of Fiore. Joachim claimed that, just as the age of Jesus and Christianity had followed that of the Father and Judaism, so a third age, of the Holy Spirit, would supersede the second. In the third age, which Joachim prophesied would arrive in 1260, men of spirituality would create a new Church, superior to the old one. This vision of history, embodied in spectacular diagrams that posited precise correspondences between the Bible and recent events, proved attractive to clerics who were unhappy with the worldly and legalistic enterprise that the Church had become.
Bonaventure never mentioned Joachim explicitly, and firmly rejected his idea that a third Church could ever replace the second, or that a third prophet would challenge the central position of Jesus. Nonetheless, in Ratzinger's reading, Bonaventure learned from Joachim to see the details of history as the unfolding of a divine plan:
Scripture points to the future; but only he who has understood the past can grasp the interpretation of the future because the whole of history develops in one unbroken line of meaning in which that which is to come may be grasped in the present on the basis of the past.
Ratzinger saw that Bonaventure accepted one claim of the Spirituales: the patterns of the past revealed that Francis was one of the figures whose appearance had been announced in advance by the Book of Revelation. And he pieced together Bonaventure's interpretation with the meticulous attention to detail of a great restorer reassembling a shattered mosaic. Discussing Revelation 7, where the world is racked with plagues, he notes:
Four angels stand at the four corners of the earth and create a great silence by holding back the four winds. At this moment, "another angel" ascends from the rising of the sun "with the seal of the living God." He commands the plagues to cease until the servants of God have been marked with the seal of God. They are 144,000 in number.
Taking up the idea of the "seal of God," Ratzinger points out that Francis bore the stigmata: "Had not the seal of the living God--the figure of the crucified Christ--been impressed on the body of the Saint?" Joachim, for his part, had "in brilliant words predicted the coming of the angel with the seal of the living God," who would become the "universal pope of holy Jerusalem." As Revelation and Joachim illuminated one another in Bonaventure's reading and meditation, the Biblical and the modern, the prophecy and the biography became one: "Apocalyptic prophecy and the actualized reality of the life of Francis are woven together for Bonaventure ever more into an insoluble unity." For Ratzinger, Bonaventure's example, like that of Augustine, showed that the most exalted figures in the Church could learn new truths even from men who challenged orthodox doctrine; within carefully prescribed limits, the hierarchy could learn from its heretics.
One of Ratzinger's two readers rejected the greater part of this second dissertation as dangerously subjective, because it argued, in a manner influenced by French theologians, that "revelation," for Bonaventure and his contemporaries, referred not only to Scripture but also to "something greater than what is merely written down," a transaction between God and a "receiving subject." Ratzinger was lucky to pass with an abridged technical study of salvation history. He later recalled that he had shown how Bonaventure, "as a man of the center, had striven to keep what was useful in order to integrate it into the ecclesial order."
The great universities of West Germany competed to attract the young theologian. Hans Küng, a passionately dissident Catholic liberal, helped bring him to the University of Tüibingen. This sleepy-looking half-timbered town has served as a seedbed of German academic talent ever since the Renaissance, when the astronomer Johannes Kepler studied there. Ratzinger succeeded brilliantly. He collected a throng of pupils so loyal that many of them returned every summer, year after year, for intensive private seminars with him. Through the nineteen-sixties, most Catholics saw Ratzinger as a theological liberal, and it is easy to understand why. Having had his own work censored in his youth, by narrow-minded theologians who did not share his interest in the new ideas from France and elsewhere, he "made the resolve not to agree easily to the rejection of dissertations" but, whenever possible, "to take the side of the weaker party." Intellectually, he took the French position that Catholicism itself existed in history, and that its intellectual borders had always been permeable, even if its core remained unchanged.
But Ratzinger was never quite so open as Küing and others who saw him as an ally in the sixties. His books may have dealt with the ways in which great churchmen had learned from outside sources, but they also showed how these churchmen had defeated challenges to orthodoxy. In public, too, Ratzinger steered a more careful, traditional course. He attended Vatican II as a peritus, or theological expert, in the entourage of Cardinal Josef Frings, the liberal Archbishop of Cologne. Frings caused a sensation at the Council by denouncing the Inquisition as a "scandal" and calling for radical reform in its procedures. Applause broke out, against the Council's rules. A consensus seemed to have emerged about the need to open the windows of the Catholic world. Many thought--many still think--that it was the youthful Ratzinger who raised this call for radical change. But Frings's biographer Norbert Trippen examined the surviving draft of the speech. Ratzinger, he showed, chose the loaded term "scandal," but the old Cardinal, not the young adviser, added the sharp attacks on Inquisition procedures which gave the speech its precision and its bite.
In the late sixties, when politicized students began to confront their professors, life at Tübingen, as elsewhere, became one long series of provocations and responses. It is not clear what opposition Ratzinger encountered, but it is certain that he responded to the radicals with a radical change of course of his own. In 1969, he moved to a recently founded, highly conservative university at Regensburg. Then, in 1977, he accepted a papal invitation to become the Archbishop of Munich-Freising, the start of a new career that soon took him to Rome and into the upper reaches of the Church hierarchy. In these years of straggle and ascent, Ratzinger's views of the Church and the world crystallized.
In an extended interview he gave in 1984, later published as "The Ratzinger Report," Ratzinger expounded on the legacy of the sixties, noting that "many Catholics moved from a narrow, inward-fixed Christianity to an uncritical openness to the world." He saw this as a dangerous development, a result largely of the expansion of the European universities, which had produced a "new tertiary-educated bourgeoisie with its liberal-radical ideology of individualistic rationalistic hedonistic character." Catholic teachers forgot the coherent vision that underpinned the old catechisms and wrote new ones that they tried to make ecumenical and palatable. In Latin America, people confused the liberation offered by the Church with social and economic liberation, while rich Westerners mistook it for a license for sexual experimentation.
To Ratzinger, the world of the sixties looked rather like a vast and frightening engraving in the manner of Gustave Doré, in which fanged demons of sensuality and "liberal-radical libertarian culture" attacked the few angels who still tried to defend God's Gothic, pinnacled towers. The enchanted castle had become--in Martin Luther's terms---a "mighty fortress," and the world outside it was evil and threatening, just as when the Nazis tried to de-Christianize Germany. Ratzinger expressed these views again and again--for example, in a lecture, "The Situation of the Church Today," which he read before more than eight hundred priests in Cologne Cathedral in 1970. Invited to give a eulogy for Cardinal Frings on the sixtieth anniversary of his ordination, Ratzinger barely mentioned his former mentor. Instead, he denounced the intellectuals who confused social reform with Christianity and the ecumenists who thought all religions equal. The vast cargo of erudition that Ratzinger had accumulated over the decades he now mobilized, as he saw it, on behalf of ordinary Christians and the honest clerics who served them. Only faith, he told the priests, not reason, would never err:
Surprisingly, this secure vision is often to be found far better established in simple believers than where Reflection is advertised with a capital R. The intellect does not always grant vision, but provides the conditions for intellectual games, and artfully conjures syntheses into existence where there is really nothing but contradiction. This is no rejection of intellect and reflection, but a reference to their limits and to their dangerous corruptibility.
Ratzinger now described the limits and dangers of his specialty more eloquently than its potential for good.
As bishop and cardinal, as professor and censor, the later, hard-edged Ratzinger developed a strikingly coherent intellectual style. To begin with, there is the formal theologian, the man of the word. When Ratzinger takes on a particular theological issue, he starts from the words of Jesus in the Gospels and the whole mass of scholarship devoted to them. In his book "Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life" (1977), for example, he addresses "the doctrine of the last things," known as eschatology. He acknowledges that, at times, Jesus seems to have predicted the imminent coming of a literal new world, a "Kingdom of God," but he emphasizes that the words of the Gospel are not in themselves sufficient. To understand Jesus, you must know what his words meant in their historical context. You must also compare the multiple versions of Jesus' words; the Gospels do not offer an absolutely uniform account and must be experienced as "a choir of four." In addition, anyone who hopes to understand the eschaton must compare Christian texts on death and the afterlife with those of pagans and Jews, which influenced the Christian vision of a kingdom of God. Some rabbis had already preached that "redemption, the days of the Messiah, could be brought nearer through repentance, keeping the commandments and good works."
Ratzinger's way into a problem, then, leads through the old scholarly crafts of history and philology and the higher theological arts of hermeneutics and exegesis. He uses these tools to construct a vast argumentative structure out of solid German footnotes, mortared together with tough, sticky material from the whole range of theological and exegetical scholarship. If the foundations of this edifice are solid and heavy, its pinnacles are a high and delicately detailed tracery of paradox. The coming kingdom of God, for example, turns out to be around us all the time, even though believing Christians await its definitive arrival in the future: "The answer to the question of the Kingdom is, therefore, no other than the Son in whom the unbridgeable gulf between already and not yet is spanned."
Ratzinger never shrinks from asserting the scriptural doctrines that are hardest for weak-minded moderns to accept: "No quibbling helps here: the idea of eternal damnation, which had taken ever clearer shape in the Judaism of the century or two before Christ, has a firm place in the teaching of Jesus." But he always finds unexpected and productive ways of dealing with such doctrines--of finding a deeper meaning in them--in the later history of the Church:
In the history of holiness which hagiology offers us, and notably in the course of recent centuries, in John of the Cross, in Carmelite piety in general, and in that of Thérèse of Lisieux in particular, "Hell" has taken on a completely new meaning and form. For the saints, "Hell" is not so much a threat to be hurled at other people but a challenge to oneself. It is a challenge to suffer in the dark night of faith, to experience communion with Christ in solidarity with his descent into the Night. One draws near to the Lord's radiance by sharing his darkness.
Still, for Ratzinger historical context is only necessary, never sufficient. If you simply read Scripture as its first contemporaries would have, it remains dead, confined to the past and to the page, for God has continued to reveal to Catholics, over the centuries, truths that the Bible's original readers could not have seen. The divine providence that guides the Church has enabled Catholic thinkers to assemble--from dozens of Biblical passages and also from the Fathers of the Church, the declarations of councils, and the pronouncements of Popes---a magnificent patchwork of doctrines and beliefs, varied in the origins of its ingredients but coherent and perfect in its final design. Like the Orthodox Jews who believe that an oral Torah guards and interprets Scripture, Ratzinger treats later revelations to God's Church as what the andent rabbi Akiva called "a fence for the law"--a vital protection for the written Bible and, at the same time, part of the Word of God in its own right.
Ratzinger's vision of Revelation encompasses texts by Jews and Greeks, and by Catholic writers of all eras, including contemporary theologians. Ratzinger regularly acknowledges the theological insights that he himself has gleaned from reading a vast variety of non-Christian literature, from the modern writings of Martin Buber, which cast the relations between man and God in a vital new light, to ancient Jewish teachings on the Shekhina, or divine presence, which helped Ratzinger express the way in which the Christian God "is present among us whenever we are gathered together in his name." To that extent, the early Ratzinger--who saw that the core of Christianity was strengthened by the looseness of its external borders-has continued to speak eloquently in the writings of the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. When Ratzinger discusses materials from outside the Catholic world, he is always workmanlike and respectful. His work on eschatology, for example, provides brief, thoughtful introductions to Jewish and Greek visions of time, history, and the soul. These are dense, packed with information. They resemble the Western Civ lectures of an experienced and effective teacher, and, like Western Civ lectures, they are not always up to date. Writing in the seventies, Ratzinger sharply contrasted the linear time of the Jews with the cyclical time of the Greeks, as Oscar Cullmann had in the late nineteen-forties, although in the interim the Old Testament scholar James Barr and the historian Amaldo Momigliano had shown that this sharp contrast cannot stand.
The more recent or secular the ideas or practices that Ratzinger discusses, the more likely he is to describe them with a strikingly flat vocabulary--the affect-free language of an administrator, writing from within the machine. In "The Ratzinger Report," for example, he explained that by the mid-eighties the Church had already taken on board everything of permanent worth that modernity had to teach:
The problem in the sixties was to take on the best values that two hundred years of "liberal" culture had produced. For there are values that, though they appeared outside the Church, yet, suitably purified and corrected, have their place in its world-view. And that has taken place.
Eamon Duff, a brilliant historian of the Church who teaches at Cambridge, was only one of many Catholic intellectuals whom these comments infuriated:
This is breath-taking in its superficiality. "Values" are not detachable entities which can be removed from the structures--intellectual, social, political, economic--which give them shape and coherence. They are not pills which (suitably gilded) can be swallowed painlessly, taking care not to exceed the stated dose. Really to "take on" the "best values of liberal culture" would involve for the Church deep structural transformations.
The criticism is legitimate. For Ratzinger, it seems, liberalism is another alien creed, like Judaism but far less profound, and consists of "values" that can easily be identified, summed up, and extracted for Christian use." These views have dramatic implications. In a recent column in the Times, Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna surprised those who believed that the Catholic faith had come to an accommodation with Darwin by arguing that the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is "ideology, not science." To support this claim, he cited no scientific data; rather, he cited "the real teaching of our beloved John Paul"--clear proof that he has no idea what science is, or, for that matter, ideology. His rhetoric was classic Ratzinger--asserting that those who had perceived a softening in the Church's teaching were mistaken. There is every reason to believe that Ratzinger shares the Cardinal's impoverished understanding of the scientific enterprise, and that his views will shape Catholic teaching on a wide range of scientific and medical issues.
Ratzinger's descriptions of the Church's ancient ritual life and dogmas, meanwhile, are as "thick" as his analyses of foreign ideologies are "thin." When Ratzinger traces the complex interplay of Church architecture, priestly speech and gesture, music, and congregational response present in a single Mass, or patiently explains those doctrines, like the Immaculate Conception, which seem most alien to a rationalist turn of mind, his discourse glows with local color and detail. His deep love for the Catholic past is manifest whenever he engages in the priestly acts that clearly mean the most to him. Young Catholics describe with phosphorescent enthusiasm the delicacy and devotion with which Ratzinger celebrates Mass. His loving eulogy for John Patti II, and the funeral Mass over which he presided, filled Cardinals and pilgrims alike with affection for him, and helped him win rapid election as Pope. It is telling that, when devising his new coat of arms, Benedict XVI chose not to use the traditional papal crown on the crest, which would symbolize the Pope's worldly power, but, rather, a simple mitre, emphasizing his role as Bishop of Rome.
"Theory," says Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, "is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green." Ratzinger, in the end, sees all traditions and historical experiences outside his own as gray; while the castle of Catholic tradition that he inhabits is suffused with the deep reds and blues of stained glass and the flame of candles:
What does Corpus Christi mean to me? Well, first of all it brings back memories of special feast days when we took quite literally what Thomas Aquinas put so well in one of his Corpus Christi hymns: Quantum potes tantum aude-- dare to do as much as you can, giving him due praise.... I can still smell those carpets of flowers and the freshness of the birch trees; I can see all the houses decorated, the banners, the singing; I can still hear the village band, which indeed sometimes dared more, on this occasion, than it was able!
In some sense, Ratzinger may be right: the form of our devotions certainly shapes our religious experience. Even in the secularized West, religions and denominations from Catholicism to Reform Judaism have found that a liturgy rich with music and cast in a sacred language continues to attract and hold worshippers. Yet Ratzinger's passion for a particular world of Catholic beliefs and devotions is more than a recipe for a revived Catholic worship. His emotional vision underpins and buttresses at every point the doctrinal structures that he has made as a scholar. In the end, it determines what he can accept as suitable and what he rejects. As the organ and liturgy drown out the weaker voices of liberal critics, as the searchlight of orthodoxy retrospectively reveals the errors of Leonardo Boff and other dissidents, the Pope and the magisterium-the centralized authority of Roman Catholic wisdom--have no need to look outside for enlightenment.
So at least the Cardinal thought, as he paced the battlements of the Church's "mighty fortress" and interrogated dissident clerics. So he continues, at times, to argue, as when he condemns the use of condoms to fight AIDS in Africa. But the successor to John Paul II cannot stay within the castle. The Pope's job demands things that Ratzinger's old position as censor did not, and he is a man of duty who does what he is called to do. It will be fascinating to see if the young scholar, with his passion for learning from the dissidents, sometimes reappears in the imperious prelate whose mission now requires him not only to judge the city and the world from inside the walls of the Curia but also to confront and try to save them. On the other hand, last week's revelation that the new Pope a few years ago endorsed a German critic's attack on the Harry Potter books suggests it doesn't take much to startle and send him back inside the walls of his fortress. A prelate who fears that the "subtle seductions" of J. K. Rowling will stunt the spiritual growth of young Christians may find it harder than he thinks to take on modernity in all its sprawling strangeness.
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By Anthony Grafton