Objective and Subjective Elements of Faith in John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger
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University of St. Thomas, Minnesota UST Research Online School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity Spring 2017 Objective and Subjective Elements of Faith in John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger. Bryce A. Evans University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.stthomas.edu/sod_mat Part of the History of Christianity Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Evans, Bryce A., "Objective and Subjective Elements of Faith in John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger." (2017). School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects. 18. https://ir.stthomas.edu/sod_mat/18 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity at UST Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects by an authorized administrator of UST Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SAINT PAUL SEMINARY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS Objective and Subjective Elements of Faith in John Henry Newman and Joseph Ratzinger A THESIS Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Divinity Of the University of St. Thomas In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Master of Arts in Theology © Copyright All Rights Reserved By Bryce A. Evans St. Paul, MN (2017) Table of Contents: Introduction: ................................................................................................................................. 1 Part I: Objectivity and Subjectivity .......................................................................................... 17 A. Faith’s Objectivity .................................................................................................................................. 17 B. The Subjective Aspect ............................................................................................................................ 25 i. The Individuality of the Human Person: Newman’s Personal Liberalism ....................................... 34 ii. Implicit - Explicit .............................................................................................................................. 41 iii. The Imagination ............................................................................................................................... 51 iv. Conscience ........................................................................................................................................ 63 C. Conclusion: the Apologia and Overcoming Modernity from Within ..................................................... 73 Part II: Reading History ............................................................................................................ 81 A. Development and Stability ..................................................................................................................... 81 B. Personalism and the Christian “Idea” ................................................................................................... 101 C. Ratzinger’s Christocentric Imagination ................................................................................................ 109 Part III: Important Objections ................................................................................................ 119 Part IV: Communal Subjectivity ............................................................................................. 124 A. The Church as Communal Subject in History ...................................................................................... 124 i. Revelation as Dialogue ................................................................................................................... 127 ii. The Role of Tradition ...................................................................................................................... 130 iii. The Communal Subject .................................................................................................................... 137 iv. Authority and Subjectivity ............................................................................................................... 142 v. The Hermeneutic of Faith ................................................................................................................ 148 vi. The Redemption of Reason .............................................................................................................. 154 B. History and Truth ................................................................................................................................. 160 Conclusion: ................................................................................................................................ 163 Bibliography: ............................................................................................................................. 174 0 Introduction: “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” It is a noteworthy curiosity of modern thought that, however much it may be typified by its famed “turn to the subject,” it has nevertheless been marked at nearly every crucial step by a quest, not for subjectivity, but for objectivity.1 It was for the sake of dispelling the illusions of intellectual caprice so as to focus us resolutely on solid, practical reality that Bacon waived consideration of formal and final causality in favor of the material and the efficient.2 Similarly, it was to clear away the crooked and irregular alleyways3 of scholastic controversy that Descartes took up his “wrecking-ball” of methodological doubt,4 uncovering the self-knowing cogito as the foundation of shared certainty. And it was to overcome Humean skepticism that Kant set upon a new course for knowledge through his thematization of the transcendental subject.5 Yet at each juncture, the result was a recession from, rather than a securing of, the object of the mind’s quest.6 A tragic dimension emerges here. The more the mind sought to grasp, the 1 “Objectivity” is loosely defined here as shared knowledge independent of incommunicable individual perspectives. Naturally, the notion undergoes significant alterations through the course of the centuries. Kant, for instance, entertains a quite different understanding than Aquinas would have had in his day. Hence a broad application of the term is necessary here. As the two terms are correlative to one another, the same must go for “subjectivity” as goes for “objectivity”: its application must be similarly broad. Initially we can define it as the incommunicable sphere (or locus) of experience and action. As the paper proceeds, both concepts will attain to greater clarity. 2 See Francis Bacon, Cogitata et Visa. cf. id., The New Organon, Book II, aphorism 9. 3 cf. Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part II. “When one observes their indiscriminate juxtaposition…and the consequent crookedness and irregularity of the streets…I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away.” 4 The expression is Hume’s, but it captures well the Cartesian approach. cf. Descartes, Mediations on the First Philosophy, I: “The removal from below of the foundations necessarily entails the downfall of the whole edifice.” 5 See Immanuel Kant, Introduction to Critique of Pure Reason. 6 This cannot be regarded as purely innocent or accidental. From the outset, the modern project involved a certain subordination of theory to the “relief of man’s estate” (see Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I, v, 11), which cannot but also entail a subordination of the intellect to the will that inhibits the pursuit of truth. Nevertheless, this is not the whole story. There is a sincerity in these figures’ quest that needs to be respected. 1 less it possessed. Bacon, by effectively silencing its deepest questions, helped pave the way for a positivism that could no longer discern being as an object for the mind, but only the “factual” phenomena presented to the senses. Descartes, with his “new” foundation of knowledge, set the table for all manner of skepticism, and generated a dualist occasionalism that could no longer bridge the gap between the intellectual and material realms. The same pattern echoes down the centuries. Husserl’s clarion call in his development of phenomenology was “back to the things themselves,”7 but this did not prevent his desire for scientific rigor from eventually forcing him into solipsistic starting point.8 And Heidegger, for all his moments of brilliance in recalling the mind to an attentiveness to being-as-it-unveils-itself, ended by resolving philosophy back into a poetic agnosticism.9 Amid this rather desperate slide, Kant might briefly have appeared as a beacon of hope, and would seem almost to have succeeded in his quest, if only his assertion of the universality of the forms of transcendental understanding could be believed. But this dream was short-lived. With the rise of cultural and historical consciousness in the nineteenth century, it soon dissolved into the mists of Germanic folklore. For “cultural consciousness” amounted to the realization that men of different places and tongues often think in strikingly different ways, ways not easily reducible to so many erroneous deviations from the Prussian ideal. And to this realization, “historical consciousness” provided the diachronic complement. For to be deep in history is, among other things, to