I Repetition and Mythos: Ratzinger's Bonaventure and the Meaning of History Matthew R. Boulter Submitted in Partial Fulfillme
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library Repetition and Mythos: Ratzinger’s Bonaventure and the Meaning of History Matthew R. Boulter Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Ph. D. in Philosophy, Revised under the direction of John Milbank and William Desmond Maynooth University (The National University of Ireland, Maynooth) Philosophy Department July, 2020 Philipp W. Rosemann, Head of Department Philipp W. Rosemann, Research Supervisor i Table of Contents Introduction 1 I. There and back again: a word about method 1 II. Preliminary outline 8 III. Introduction of key themes 9 IV. Descriptive chapter outline 21 Ch. 1 The struggle for wise phronêsis: the Sitze im Leben of Bonaventure and Ratzinger 28 Introduction 28 I. General historical overview 30 II. Geworfenheit and the respective implementations of writing 49 III. Respective responses to the emergence of a new kind of science 56 IV. Crises of eschatology: two attempts to re-narrate history 62 Conclusion 69 Ch. 2 Coordinating mythos and history: Ratzinger’s Bonaventure versus Aristotle 70 Introduction (opposition to Aristotle: Ratzinger’s claim) 70 I. Aristotle on the relation of myth to history: no overlap 72 II. Mythos in the Hexaëmeron 78 III. Mythos and history: the alternative configuration of Catherine Pickstock 84 IV. A modest definition of mythos 97 V. History as mythos (and vice versa) for Ratzinger 104 VI. History as meaningful: implications for temporality (with attention to Physics IV) 109 Conclusion 114 Ch. 3 Bookending mind: the structural role of intellectus 116 Introduction 116 I. The character of the days: intellectual light 116 II. The A—B—A’ pattern of the six days 120 III. First intellect: intellectus as the precondition for dianoia 126 IV. The character and necessity of dianoia 129 V. Final intellect: the fulfillment of dianoia (together with appetitive formation) 138 VI. How the structure of the intellect entails mythos, or narrative 142 Conclusion 151 ii Ch. 4 Living without scientia (but not dianoia): faith and the “man of desires” 152 Introduction 152 I. Kierkegaard: faith as faithful comportment 154 II. Comportment as Bonaventurian compunction 163 III. Ratzinger’s analytic of Christian Glaube 169 Conclusion 178 Ch. 5 The eschatological whole (I): Joachim and Bonaventure 180 Introduction 180 I. Neither Hegel nor Voegelin: an “in-between” approach 181 II. The content of Joachim’s logos of history or eschatology 184 III. Responding to Joachim: the position of Ratzinger’s Bonaventure 192 Conclusion 201 Ch. 6 The eschatological whole (II): Ratzinger and Milbank 202 Introduction 202 I. Confirmation and supplementation from Josef Pieper 202 II. Vindicating Bonaventure: heresy and tradition in Ratzinger 207 III. A rejoinder to Milbank’s critique of Ratzinger 224 Conclusion 232 Conclusion 234 Works Cited 242 iii Acknowledgements For the completion of this dissertation, I am indebted to too many people to mention. Thanks, first of all, must go to Philipp W. Rosemann, who provided attentive feedback through my journey of graduate philosophy coursework (including grueling term papers) at the University of Dallas, including five different graduate courses with him personally at UD. In addition, he facilitated a graduate seminar on Ratzinger’s Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (which provided the original impetus for this dissertation). Most importantly, he has served as an invaluable dialogue partner, intellectual mentor, and scholarly example at every point. Finally, I am humbled and grateful that he invited me to “follow” him to Maynooth University, where I completed this dissertation under his direction. Likewise, the rich intellectual community at University of Dallas, including Professor Joshua Parens and Joe Aziz (with whom I journeyed through comprehensive exams), remains a true gift. I am grateful for the “great books” perspective of UD, and its Institute of Philosophic Studies, but also the freedom to mount serious critiques of the dominant perspectives which hold sway in the Catholic and Western intellectual traditions. Two especially important intellectual dialogue partners are the Rev. Dr. Nathan Jennings (with whom I was exposed to the “good infection” of theologically-oriented philosophy under the sway of Professor Louis Mackey at the University of Texas, circa 1994) and Mr. David Beadle (with whom I read Pickstock’s Repetition and Identity as I supervised him in his undergraduate honors thesis). I express gratitude to Dr. Christian Schaller for his warmth and kind hospitality at the Pope Benedict XVI Institute in Regensburg, Germany during the summer of 2018. My two months in residence at the Priesterseminar (where the Institute is housed) in Regensburg was an unforgettable learning experience. What an honor it was to be examined in my viva voce by two lifelong luminaries of mine, Professors John Milbank and William Desmond. Deepest thanks are due for their attentive reading of my dissertation and constructive criticism. I am thankful to my diocesan bishop, the Right Reverend Andrew Doyle, for his consistent interest in and support of my Ph D and dissertation. The Reverend David Luckenbach, the rector of the parish where I serve (Christ Church in Tyler, Texas), and a close mentor and friend, was sacrificial and supportive for the more than seven years during which I labored on this doctoral degree. That he allowed his associate rector to be a near-fulltime Ph. D. student still boggles my mind! Thanks go to my sister, Libby Boulter, for proofreading the final dissertation and providing translation help in German. Thanks, too, to Jane Neal and Hannah Venable for translation help with French. Thanks to Dr. Christopher Wells, Executive Director of the Living Church Foundation, I was able to use the Foundation’s space in Dallas, Canterbury House, near the campus of Southern Methodist University. Most of all, I am thankful for my two daughters, Isabella Ruth and Eleanor Bay, for sharing their daddy with innumerable texts with which they will likely never concern themselves, and to Bouquet, my best friend and the love of my live. To her this work is dedicated. iv Abstract Writing his Habilitationsschrift as a young man in the late 1950’s, future Pontiff Joseph Ratzinger opined that, when St. Bonaventure composed his Collationes in Hexaëmeron in the spring of 1273, not since St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei contra Paganos had the world seen such a ground-breaking work on the logos of history. Indeed, Ratzinger has much in common with his thirteenth-century predecessor: both led tumultuous lives intellectually and practically, lives which demanded prudence in the extreme. Such vicissitudes, in fact, impacted and shaped their respective theologies of history in riveting ways. Both, moreover, faced challenges coming from both science and novel eschatologies. At issue in Bonaventure’s historical work is the widespread assumption, rooted in the newly “rediscovered” Aristotle, that history is unintelligible. For Bonaventure, deeply committed to historia salutis narrated in Scripture, this stance is however unacceptable. Here I show how mythos mediates the difference between science and history, yielding a non-positivistic approach to history. But this history: is it static or progressive? Building on the dynamics of Plato’s Divided Line, I show that the days of creation, narrated by Bonaventure, structure both history and thought. Progressive though it be, on this journey the destination nevertheless returns back to its origin in a non-identical repetition ending on a higher plane. Yet the journey, crucially, must encompass the dimension of human affect, for both thinkers insist that, in order to reach our divine destination, our passions must be transfigured. In the end these common features of mind and history must apply to the whole, on the largest possible scale. If history is a story, it has beginning and eschatological end. In the spirit of Bonaventure and Ratzinger, I insist that history and hence eschatology, finally, have a recognizable form. What is the logos of history? It turns out that it is mythos. v Introduction I. There and back again: a word about method At the end of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, Socrates provides the second of three images in an attempt to convey to his interlocutors something of the meaning of “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.” As in the final figure he imagines (that of the Cave), in the image of the Divided Line, Socrates has in mind something of a process, a movement, a journey of the mind. It is as if he wants his interlocutors within the dialogue (just as Plato wants his readers) to begin at the bottom of the line, and then move up through the successive elements or segments of the line, up to the point of ultimate knowing, simultaneously the point of ultimate being. Now, the four stages or phases or segments on the line (from the bottom to the top) are as follows: eikasia, pistis, dianoia, and noêsis. I understand these, respectively, as 1. the reception of images by means of visual sense perception, and the concomitant grasping of such images by the mind; 2. the trust, or faith, that these images, now perceived in the mind, are actually real objects in the world;1 3. reasoning, or the process of taking various elements received in the first two phases, and “putting them together” (and “taking them apart”) in various logical ways that, in the context of some kind of argumentation, fruitfully generate demonstrable conclusions; and 4. ultimate recognition. Noêsis, from the Greek word for mind, nous, is distinct from reasoning (dianoia) in that it is not a process of synthesis and analysis. Rather, it is the result of the latter, and as such it is a simple beholding. It is a restful gaze, a comprehensive vision of some object of the mind, a beholding that is possible only because the intellectual labor of the previous stages has been completed.