Good afternoon everyone. My pleasure to welcome you to this university-wide lecture, Nature, Grace, and Secular Culture. My name is Fr. Joseph Larcy. I'm the Associate Professor and Chair of Systematic Theology here at UCF.
Why don't we begin with a prayer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be, for all of us. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen. This lecture is a collaboration of many campus units, including Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology, the Center for Catholic Studies, the Programming in Catholic Studies, the Core Curriculum, and the Office of Mission and Ministry. It's my great pleasure to welcome Father Christian Eardy.
Father Eardy is a graduate of the University of Western Australia where he earned his degree in law. He's an expert seminary and was... ultimately sent to Rome for theological studies, earning his STD, STL, and doctorate in sacred theology in the classical tutorial at the university.
Father Eardy is a parish priest in Australia, Archdiocese of Perth. He is the pastor of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Parish, and he's also an adjunct professor at the University of Notre Dame, Freemantle, and St. Charles Seminary in Gilbert. Thank you. It's a privilege for us to have Father Yerdy with us to share the fruits of many years of research which culminates in this wonderful book, How to Be a Good Christian Star.
Welcome, Father Yerdy. Thank you, Father Joseph, and ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending this lecture and for your generous support of my research. I see many copies of the book already on the table.
I'm honored, thank you. I arrived here in New Jersey only a few days ago, so you'll have to forgive me if I'm a bit jet-lagged. I did fly halfway around the world. It was an 18-hour flight, and that was just the second leg of it.
But anyway, I'm very much honored to be with you this afternoon. I propose then just to go through the basic structure of the book by means of this lecture. So to take you through what motivated the research. to give you a broad brush summary really of my research with respect to the nature of grace debate, then Milbank's view on the matter, Ratzinger's view on the matter, and then a brief comparison.
So as I say, we'll just follow the lines of the book in broad strokes so you'll get an idea of the research. So why did I pick this topic? Well, Australia, much like the United States, but probably worse, is very secular.
And the church. It certainly is presenting many challenges and I found that to be the case as a priest and a pastor too. Convincing people of the need of religion, particularly in public life, and its value in culture is a challenge. And so I selected Ratzinger and Milbank because both have had quite a bit to say about the challenge that secular culture presents.
So to begin our uh lecture this afternoon and therefore i thought we'd start um as i do also in the book with with scripture uh specifically a reference to sir matthew's gospel and really this is what drives us uh in everything we do with respect to the evangelization of culture and the concern for secular culture go therefore and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always to the close of the age. Now, as we know, this is our missionary mandate, because Christians are called, as we know, to be witnesses to Christ in the world in which we live, salt of the earth, light of the world, by means of everything we do. So, as the Second Vatican Council also noted, it's not an easy task to evangelise culture. I mean, even Pope Francis, rather, gave these comments in 2015 at a meeting with the delegates from the Conference of European Rabbis, and he said, Today's rampant secularism, when it becomes an aggressive cultural rejection of God's active fatherhood in our history, is an obstacle to authentic human fraternity.
So all of the recent popes have been well aware. of the challenge that secularism presents. And look, anyone who's paying attention, anyone who's engaged with their faith, with their parish, with the church at any level, knows the challenge that it presents.
The Second Vatican Council spoke about the importance of culture generally. And it said that in Galium et Spes, paragraph 53, man only comes to a true and full humanity through culture, that is to say through the cultivation of the goods and values of human nature. Now the word culture here really means everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities and thereby renders social life more human, both in the family and in the civic community. So therefore it follows, if our culture which plays such an important role in shaping human beings is deprived from the life of the gospel and doesn't know Christ, or the one who reveals man to man himself, can't assist man in becoming truly and fully human.
That's also Galvian Experts 22. So it is a serious concern. I'm stating the obvious, but this is really what motivates my research. And really, it's a way of understanding from the point of view, at least my point of view, is that...
pastor, how can we understand the challenge that secularism presents, not to be intimidated by it, but make the challenge with Christ. It is such an important vocation that the church has. Cardinal Walter Caspar said, the church in our own time is dealing primarily with a crisis of relevance. I couldn't have said it better myself. I really agree with the cardinal's sentiment there.
I think. Maybe some of us feel the same sometimes as we look at our society. The Cardinal also goes on to say that the key questions that the Church should be asking herself are, how does the central concept of the Christian faith relate to our modern and frightfully secular culture?
How does it relate to our everyday experiences and issues that confront us on a daily basis? What is the meaning of the message of grace for the Church and our culture? on our way into the third millennium. Now, these are very, very good questions that he raises, very concrete issues. And when you translate those issues into the language of theology, what you're now dealing with is the relationship between nature and grace.
That's really the key fundamental theological issue at the heart of this debate. How does the church engage with secular culture? Well, then... Tied into that very, very intimately, of course, is how does nature and grace, and how do nature and grace relate to one another? And how we conceive of the relationship with nature and grace will, in turn, determine how we think the church should interact with the world.
So Henri de Lubac, a very famous figure in 20th century Catholicism, and I'm sure everyone's heard of him if you've studied theology, a big figure at the Second Vatican Council. said that the question of how nature and grace relate to each other is at the very bottom of discussions with modern unbelief and forms the crooks of Christian humanism. So it's at the very bottom of discussions with modern unbelief. I mean, it just shows, even Henri de Lubac shows, how critical the nature-grace debate was.
And here we have a picture there of Henri de Lubac. And what motivated his research, likewise, was the secularization of the European part. That was one of the main factors that drove his research into the nature of grace debate, and to understand it correctly.
So really, this is why, as I say, I chose two theologians that drew their research, Neil Bank and Ratzinger, drew their research from Henri de Louvain. So what I propose to now do is just... trace the broad outlines of the nature and grace debate as it's taken place in the 20th century. So as I said at the beginning, how nature and grace relate to each other isn't just some arcane matter proper to in-house debate between theologians. It's an issue that goes to the very heart of what it means to be a Christian because as I said at the beginning, our vocation as Christian people is to speak Christ to the culture, is to evangelise the people and win them over for Christ.
And so therefore, in order to have the courage to do so and to understand the culture that we're evangelizing or we should be evangelizing, we need to understand, as I say, that this question of nature of grace and grace is so crucial to that mission. So it's also one of the most consistently debated issues amongst 20th century Catholic theologians. Again, if you know anything about theology, you will know how much it was debated over the course of the 20th century and even to our present day.
And really, it's not overstated to say that the topic of nature and grace, how the two go together, touches almost any and every theological and human question because it underlies the very notion of the encounter between man and god i mean is there any question more fundamental than that it goes to the very heart of the notion of the encounter between man and god that just shows how important it is to have a good grasp of the nature of grace debate so really the The main developments in the Nature of Grace debate really, I think, came about from the time of the Reformation. I mean, it's multifaceted, it's complex, and I already have an hour with you, more or less, so I'm not going to go through it all now. But in the book, as you'll see, I kind of begin the historical summary, really, of the main points from the time of the Reformation.
The reason is, because at that time, Catholic theologians were... trying to steer a middle ground through two extremes. On one extreme you had Calvinism, which really was denigrating human nature. And on the other extreme, a heresy called Wyanism, which elevated human nature and said that man could basically get to God just using his own natural merits. So that was actually a condemned heresy by Pastor Fitt, condemned that in 1566. So in order to kind of steer that middle ground through these two extremes, theologians at the time proposed the theory of the duplex cordo, and we'll come to discuss what that means in a bit.
So this device helped to buttress traditional Catholic teaching against the challenges of Calvinism and Bionism. However, What it tended to do, see duplex auto of course is Latin for two borders, what it tended to do was separate reality into the natural and the supernatural. And we'll see in a minute why that was a problem for secularism really, or the church's role with secular culture. So Cajetan was of the view...
that the duplex Bordeaux found strong support in Thomas Aquinas with antecedents in an Aristotelian philosophy. And he addressed the question specifically whether it's possible for human beings to have a natural desire for God. We'll see why this is important in a minute.
Is it possible for human beings to naturally desire God? And then de Molina was another theologian around the year 1600 more or less, who proposed the idea of the Venus Naturalis, which is to say that man as a natural human being, so man can be separated into two orders, his human nature and then supernatural grace which God gives him. And therefore, with respect to his human nature, he has a natural end, he has a natural beginning.
finis naturalis and then Suarez took that idea and developed it into what he called pure nature and he quoted Aquinas. This is where you get the idea that grace builds on nature. That's a neo-scholastic idea, one that Dürerbach didn't like and Ratzinger and Dürerbach likewise.
That when we have you know like this this neat human nature that's sort of finite in itself, and then grace comes and is poured on top of it and sort of super adds to what we already have. That's a neo-scholastic idea of nature and grace. And it's what we call extrinsicism, an extrinsic way in which grace and nature relate to each other.
Therefore, for an extrinsicist, we cannot, man cannot naturally desire God because... to naturally desire God or to have a desire for God that arises out of our human nature, they thought, therefore, grace is no longer a gratuitous grace of God. Somehow God owes us grace because of our human nature requiring it. And they really wanted to get away from that idea because grace is a gift of God.
So, therefore, we can't in any way have God be in our debt. That was the idea they were really trying to get away from. And so the way that they did that was saying, well, human beings have a natural end. They can be naturally happy in their humanity. Then if they have grace they can be supernaturally happy which then builds on our natural human happiness So that's the idea that's it's a complex theological idea But it's very very important for our for our conception of nature grace with respect to secular culture And I'll show you why in a minute So after all of this This is what I was just saying After all of this The Nobel theologi emerged in the period between World War I and World War II, and it really came out of France.
And as I said before, Henri de Lubac was one of the main proponents of the Nobel theologi. Now, what made them different from the theologians that came before them with respect to the nature of race debate, and more generally, was number one that they drew from Maurice Blondel. They also embarked on a method called ressourcement, which was to go back in time and recover the sources of our Christian faith and try and apply the understanding of the sources of our Christian faith, like scripture, the patristic writings, the early theologians, see what they had to say, and then go back and see if we can now apply that to the questions that our contemporaries had.
And you see around World War I and World War II, of course, society was changing very rapidly. You know, people were coming back from these wars really damaged, and rightly so. And they had very deep questions of God.
And so theology was unfortunately quite limited in that time. It was very manualistic, propositional. You just sort of wrote learned points about God, like bullet points. And so a lot of theologians... particularly as I say these French Jesuits, thought, well, how is this going to help people that have come back from the war and have real questions about the nature of reality, about God, how could God let this happen?
And so theology was sort of, it was felt to be inadequate perhaps, or the method of theology at that time was considered to be inadequate, to be able to help these people. And so these Jesuits developed, this was really the beginning of fundamental theology, which is my own field. And so they sought really to engage with the questions that people had in their own day and age, and develop theology in that way.
And so for Henri de Lubac, he sought a much more intrinsic, an intrinsic relation between nature and grace. So for Henri de Lubac... He said he challenged the duplex ordo in his work, Sudato El. And he basically said it's absurd to say that human beings have some natural happy, like a natural end, and then a supernatural end. Like to say as human beings we can be like naturally happy and then we can be supernaturally happy for him was absurd.
Because we're created in the image and likeness of God, if we don't have God, then we just end up frustrated and unhappy. And he observed that because we're created in the Immanuel Day, the image and likeness of God. So he said, created spirits naturally desire the beatific vision.
So as people, as human beings created in God's image and likeness, it's part of our nature to want God. And only when we have God are we really happy. And that's a very, very important insight that he had.
So the problem was, of course, so then he said, as I said, like the natural desire is so fundamentally constitutive of the nature of man that to fall short of the object of this desire, which is union with God, leaves man frustrated and unhappy. And I agree with him. Like to speak of a natural happiness, like I can be naturally happy.
It sort of begs the question, well then why do I need to be supernaturally happy if I'm naturally happy? Like why do I need God at all? I'm happy, right?
I'm happy. I don't need God. So this is the challenge with the duplex auto theory or theology. I understand why it was developed as an instrument to deal with challenges at the time.
But really, that was the beautiful insight of Henri Dubé back. Now. People will then accuse Lubeck and say, yeah, okay, if you're going to say that man naturally desires God, how can you then say that grace is a free gift given to him?
Because his nature requires grace in order to become what it's meant to be. So how then, therefore, doesn't God owe us a matter of justice to us to be given grace? Well, de Lubac came up with an idea called the paradox. Now, some people say, oh, it's a cop-out. Well, no, it's not, because our faith is full of paradoxes.
The hypostatic union, most especially. How can Christ be fully human and fully divine? Well, it's a very paradoxical idea, but it's true. And this was the way that de Lubac sought to hold in tension these ideas. Nature and race are paradoxically united to each other.
Paradoxically. And it's a very, very important idea. Just as the human and divine natures in Christ are united, so also nature and race relate to each other in this mysterious paradox. And we'll come to that more in a minute.
But basically, that's the great insight of Dulu Bhai. One of the greatest insights, and this is what Milbach and Ratzinger draw from, was that if you separate nature and grace into this extrinsic way so that we can be naturally happy and then supernaturally happy, so like race is super added to our nature, if you do that, de Lubac said that idea was directly and indirectly led to the possibility of secularism. and the encouragement of secular humanists. The reason was because then society started to think of itself in that way. Well, why do we need God?
As a society, as a culture, we can be naturally happy. We don't need the church. We don't need grace. We don't need the Gospels.
You see, so this was the great insight of Honoré Dujoubeck. And he was saying in that way, theology had colluded in its own banishment from the public life of the state. Because...
you know that was never the intention you know the intention was to try and preserve the church from the confusion of sort of the 16th and 17th centuries and the various heresies and errors but if you're going to separate the world or reality into worldly and spiritual nature and grace well then as i said before why do we need grace i can be naturally happy as a culture we're sort of There's a finis naturalis, as it were. So a lot of Veluvat's writings sought to deal with that challenge. And basically Milbach and Ratzinger picked up on it.
So in summary, there's two ways of understanding how nature and race associated with each other. This was sort of, by the end of the 20th century, there were kind of two ways. Number one, as I say, an extrinsicist way of looking at it, the duplex order. So that's where we look at our human nature as having its own pure nature, and then grace is super added to it.
Grace builds on nature. It's a very neo-scholastic view. Or a Christocentric framework, which is the one that Dulubac favours. It's one that the Second Vatican Council favoured, and Ransling and Milbank and most modern theologians would favour that sort of view, and intrinsic, a more intrinsic view.
A view in which grace isn't super added to nature. Grace affects nature. That's key.
So grace doesn't so much as build on nature. Grace affects nature. So to become who we really are, we need God's grace.
That's the Christocentric view. All right, so much for the nature-grace debate. So now we'll go and have a look at John Milbank. The first of the authors. There's John there.
Now John Milbag was, not to get into too much detail about his biography, he was born in 1952 in England and ended up basically teaching at the University of Nottingham. And he's one of the founders of the theological movement called Radical Orthodoxy. It's primarily an Anglican movement. Now radical orthodoxy, in case you're wondering what that means, it's sort of like a loose association of like-minded theologians. Some of them, well most of them are Anglican, there are a couple of Catholics amongst them as well.
But basically they take the view that, number one, secular modernity came about because of a perverse theology, that's their words. Number two, the opposition of reason to revelation is a modern corruption. Number three, all thought which brackets out God is ultimately nihilistic. And number four, the material and temporal realities of bodies, art, sociality.
which modernity claims to have value, can be truly upheld only by acknowledgement of their participation in the transcendent. And I'll talk more about that point. So essentially, why is it called radical orthodoxy? Well, orthodoxy meaning they're all creedal Christians, they're Christians, and radical meaning, like the Lubeck, they wanted to go back to the roots of the faith, the patristic era, the fathers, the scriptures, things like that, and to resurrect that much later.
Henri de Dubac was doing. So Milbank bases everything, as I say, he bases his project on the insights of de Dubac and then of Thierry Rouget. So he's an intrinsicist, as I've been saying. One of his main motivating factors was the challenge that liberal secular culture presents to the church.
And we see this in a big way in Australia. Every time I come to the US, I'm so impressed about how religious everyone is. I mean, I don't know if you guys probably don't agree, maybe you do, I don't know, but Australia is aggressively secular. And I mean, even you need to look at like our political leaders, like there's not even a pretense of religious affiliation if you're running for government in Australia. In fact, it would do you harm for you to kind of come out and say, yeah, I'm a practicing Catholic or practicing whatever.
It's better you keep that to yourself. That's actually encouraged. That's it.
Milbank, like English culture, although it's Anglican, is also quite secular, really, culturally, and we've inherited it in Australia. Milbank, one of the first lines in his book, which is Theology and Social Theory, he says, once there was no secular. The secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined both in theory and in practice.
Now, that's quite a good insight. Once there was no secular. So his idea was, okay, well then how did it come about?
When did it begin? Because if you think back even to the Middle Ages, to speak of secular culture was nonsense. I mean, the idea of a secular priest was just to speak of a priest who wasn't in a monastery.
Or secular concerns, as I say, just concern, everyday kind of concerns. But... The idea we would have a secular culture meaning devoid of religion, well obviously like that as Smilbank is saying, had to be invented.
And so basically then he goes on to say, well it came about like all ideas and therefore we don't need to accept the premises of those ideas and we certainly don't need to accept the assertion that secularists make that secular culture is neutral territory. Because you hear that a lot. I mean, again, especially in Australia, like the presupposition is, well, if you're secular, you're going to be balanced and rational and neutral.
The minute you introduce religion, it's like introducing a fairy tale, this irrational kind of thing that is just going to skew public discourse. Now, Milbank's whole project, which is why I chose to study him, was to challenge that idea, because it's a wrong idea. And as we'll see, you know... Milbank goes on to say that secularism has just as many theological presuppositions as any mainstream religion. So we don't need to accept that it's neutral.
When we extricate religion from public life, we have some neutral, clear air where public discourse can take place. So Milbank really wants to attack these ideas on the basis of... the idea of methexis.
Now if you've done any theology you will have heard of the platonic notion of participation. Long story short, everything that exists participates in God's active existence. So we exist because God holds us in existence. Therefore he says there's no, there cannot be any realm separate from God. Because if God is holding us all in existence, how can you have any part of reality which is separate?
from God. So that's an interesting idea that he comes up with. So the idea of the paradox in particular and the natural desire for the supernatural and for God are fundamental insights that Milbank wants to defend. So basically he brings into play, Milbank brings into play de Lubac's idea and also this neoclatonic or platonic idea of participation.
That's how he wants to get around. the secularist notion that we can have an area of public life that is separate from God. So, and he goes back and talks about, as I say, Even the hypostatic union in Christ. Christ stands in what he calls a suspended middle between the divine and the human, the finite and the infinite, between divinity and humanity. So this is where he really does rely very much on a delude back as I say.
Now just moving along, we'll continue. Yeah, so now having said all of that, My assessment of Milbank was that he tends to collapse nature into grace. Now, this idea of a paradise that de Lubac came up with, right, you've got two poles, nature and grace, held in paradoxical tension.
The thing with our human minds is we don't like paradoxes and we don't like when there's things held in tension. We like to resolve problems. dialectics, for example, if you've studied Hegel.
But the challenge in theology, particularly Christian theology, is to maintain that tension and maintain the paradox. We don't necessarily like it, but it's really, really important. The trouble, I think, in Milbank is that he tends to collapse nature into grace, where everything is seen as in grace. Because what he does is conflate the idea of participation. which is sort of that platonic philosophical idea, with God's grace.
Now, the problem when you do that is, if my act of existence is a gift from God and I'm equivocating the word participation with grace, what happens when I commit sin and lose God's grace, like mortal sin, for example? Do I cease to exist? That's the challenge.
If you conflate all these terms and see everything is in grace, what happens if I'm not baptized, so I don't have any grace? As I said, it's a serious sin. Why don't I just cease to exist?
So this is the problem when you start conflating terms and collapsing nature into grace. And the other problem with Milbank, I thought, too, was we as Catholics consider... you know, in Christ, Arengold sort of exceeds what the original plan for humanity was. And Christ is one of even greater victory.
And in Christ, we have even more grace available to us than if original sin had never happened. So it exceeds the order of creation. But Milbank thinks really, you know, the intent of God's grace is just to restore things to the status quo, as they were basically in the garden of Eden. So again, These are other criticisms that I have, basically, of Milbank.
The other problem as well is, you're going to push this question of participation, frankly, to the breaking point. Milbank will go on to say that there's no secular standards of truth that could be ever normative for the church. So that's a pretty bold statement.
So basically he's saying, like, the world can't teach the church anything, because... everything in the world is in grace and participates in God. Therefore, everything should be within the purview of theology. That's a pretty radical statement. That's a pretty bold statement.
So, you know, he's saying there's no way there can be any neutral space that theology can't touch on. Theology doesn't have something to say about. Now, again, that's... That's pretty full on, that's pretty right. And we'll see in a minute that Ratzinger certainly doesn't accept that.
Okay, so we might just move on to Ratzinger basically now. So that's all we need to say about Neil Bain. Essentially as I say, Bill Bain in a nutshell, wants to meet the challenge of secularism, doesn't like it, another one. The way he tries to get around it.
is by asserting the notion of methexis, participation. Everything that exists participates in God's own act of existence. Therefore, nothing can be outside the purview of God and of theology.
Some things are good about that. Other things are a challenge, as I say, when you push it to breaking point. That's the problem. So now we come to Ratzinger. Now we have all heard of Joseph Ratzinger I presume, but Benedict XVI.
I won't go too much into his biography, in fact I won't at all. We'll just get straight into his theology in the interest of time. Ratzinger, like Milbank, was deeply concerned with the secularisation of the West. He said it many, many times, speaking as the Pope, you know, it really, really is a massive challenge to the Church. However, he takes a very different approach to Milbank.
Although he draws from the insights of de Lubac and the Nobel Theology, he prefers a Christocentric, personalist approach to theology. And what he tends to do then in this theology is hold the incarnation and the cross in paradoxical tension. Again, if you study 20th century theology, you'll find that there's a tendency to go to one school or the other.
People would say someone like Karl Rahner is more in the incarnationalist school of thought. If you go into kind of caricature of his theology, you would say he asserts the goodness of the incarnation of God. and of the existence of human nature, etc., etc., as opposed to a more Pauline view, which emphasizes the importance of the cross, of, I mean, the purification of grace, of repentance, things like that. They're the kind of two battles within theology.
Now, Ratzinger holds those two poles, I think, very well in tension, like a paradox. Now, the Christocentric... personalist approach to Christianity, however, goes on to say, to emphasize our personal relationship with Jesus. So this is why he was a big fan of Guadini as well, and basically said that Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism.
Christianity is instead an encounter. a love story, it is an event. That's what he preached at the funeral for Giussani in 2005. So basically this Christological approach, a Chalcedonian Christological centre is how you would really describe this theology.
Now that's very, very important because at the end of the day what he's saying is Christ's own kenosis holds before man the template of what it means to be fully human. In the union of wills between man and God, man finds his true foundation, the ultimate goal of his being. Now, in a sense, what he's saying now is that the cross has to be always present within our conception of who mankind is meant to be. Because that's who Jesus is. Jesus'self-emptying in love on the cross teaches us what it means to be human.
So we can emphasize how good it was that God became man in the incarnation, but Raksing is saying that that's not the full picture. Christ also died on the cross, and he gave himself totally in love to God and for our sake and poured himself out in that act of kenosis. And that's what really also reveals what it is to be fully human.
So certainly there's the affirmation of the goodness of our humanity in Christ's incarnation, but we can't just stop there. So, yeah, it's good to be human. It's good to do human things.
It's good to be a normal, healthy, functioning human being. But we need to go further than that, and we need to look to Christ on the cross for what it really means to be. fully human and indeed even fully divine as of Christ.
And we're going to take after him as well in grace. So this is Ratzinger's idea of nature and grace. So he's saying grace doesn't build on nature, but heightens and affects it. Just as the cross doesn't destroy our human nature, but shows us humanity at its peak. Because it's at its peak.
Because when Christ was on the cross, it was the revelation of the greatest love that was ever shown on the face of this earth. So you see why the incarnation and the cross in Ratzinger really is what shows forth his idea of nature and grace and how the two go together. So the cross is an essential part, too, of our understanding of what it means to be human. Because the cross is, as I say, what shows us.
what purifies us, what calls us to higher things, and what we're meant to be in our Christian vocation. So it's a pastoral mode of relation between nature and grace. And Raxinger loves this word, the exodus, the coming out of myself, exiting from my self-sufficiency into self-gift in love in Christ. That's how we become effective in Christ.
That's a really important spiritual point too, by the way. I mean, even as priests, like we preach a lot about this, it's so important. I mean, going out from myself in love to another person is what makes us happy and what makes us like God.
That's what revelation is ultimately too. So that's a very, very key idea in Ratzinger. And because that's his idea of nature and grace, it will also shape his idea of how the church should interact with the world. There's this fundamental law of Exodus.
affected in the Christian mystery of the past, which is the pastoral mystery, is the fundamental law of revelation and the fundamental law of the spirit. So it's a going out of myself in love to meet another person and to meet God ultimately. So that's what really I think we can say about Ratzinger's idea of nature and grace. So now, because we've only got about 10 minutes left or so, we'll now compare the two and show how the two are different and what they can teach us about how we should interact.
other churches should interact with secular culture in the modern age. So as I said at the beginning, Milbank really relies on the notion of participation to ground his whole theological system. And he blames Scotus as the one who really broke down. Now I won't get bogged down into all that, we just simply don't have time, but it's in the book.
But Ratzinger, like Milbank, look at the importance of the analogia antis. That's a key idea in theology, again I wish I had time to explain more about that, but it's really really fundamental to this topic and this discussion that we understand what the analogia entis is, and it really anchors both their theologies, especially this idea of grazia presupponit natura, which is the Bonaventurian idea of grace presupposes nature, or grace perfecting nature. not building upon it.
So therefore in Ratzinger he connects the analogia entis with the analogia fide. Again I wish we could spend more time talking about that but we don't. Ratzinger sees a revival of Christian realism which Milbank does not.
It's a very important idea as well. Also the Christocentric emphasis in Ratzinger is one thing that Milbank doesn't have. You just don't see this personalism in Milbank that you do in that scene.
That my relationship with Jesus is this personal, loving bond that anchors my whole approach in everything that I do, including my efforts to evangelize the world. So both draw from the Nebuitology, as I say. However, Milbank tends to radicalize Dilliback's position and is inclined to do nature and grace.
phases in a single extension. So what we'll do now is just shoot forward to this idea of how they approach the question of the secular. Now basically both agree that secular culture is not a neutral reality at all. devoid of theological presuppositions.
This is really what's emphasized in Milbank, and I think one of his key insights. Both Ratzinger and Milbank demonstrate that this neutrality is just simply not the reality at all. However, with Ratzinger, he's much more in favor of a certain positive secularism. and it might be surprising to hear him say that but ratzinger um thinks that there can be a certain type of positive secularism in which the church is seen as a valuable contributor to the public life of the state but isn't somehow like in millbank theologically responsible for every single aspect of society so that there can be two realms each with its own proper competence but A positive secularism in Ratzinger means that the church isn't locked into what he calls a ghetto of subjectivity or what Tracy Rowland calls a spiritual nature reserve, which is kind of, if you're going to go to church, if you're going to do religion, do it in your own private time, don't bring it into the public life of the state or into parliament or into public discourse and debate. So that's what he calls a negative secularism.
positive secularism in Ratzinger is where we understand the church has its role, the state has its role, they're two different things but the two are not antagonistic to each other and we shouldn't accept Any sort of philosophy or theology that puts the two at loggerheads with each other. And this is what Ratzinger and Milbank are both arguing for, although they do it a little bit differently. Milbank, however, doesn't admit the possibility of secularism at all. He says, no, to speak of even positive secularism, I'm not going to accept that at all.
Any secularism at all. is drawn from Christian heresy and has as its base what he calls an ontology of violence as opposed to an ontology of peace, which is to say that basically we're all in each other's throats and if it wasn't for the law and the police force, then society would just be crazy. Again, quite a pessimistic view really that he has. But, I mean, again, what you find in Ratzinger is a much more moderate view.
and in Milbank a much more sort of radical view of what should be permitted with respect to secular culture. So Milbank actually goes on to say that the church's role is to actually establish what he calls ecclesial socialism. He's a bit of a socialist, Milbank.
And he says that that kind of approach to politics best captures Christianity. Whereas Ratzinger says, well, no, Christianity can't be reduced to any particular political system. And it's dangerous to try to do that.
You know, there's pros and cons to each. But to say that Christianity has to necessarily establish ecclesial socialism, you're going to end up with big problems. So, you know, Milbank really is creating a heavy burden for the theologian if he has to seek the ecclesialization.
of everything and that's certainly not what the church tries to do in our own social theology. So this is what I just said, Ratzinger said that the faith can't be reduced to any political system because no one system is exhaustively expressive of it. So in a sense, Ratzinger, much like in his idea of nature and grace, that the cross is what heightens and perfects human nature. We can boil it down to this.
Much like race heightens and perfects human nature, the church's role in society is to heighten and perfect our culture, our society, our public life. That's our role. That's our vocation as Christian people.
That's our role as the church. So we shouldn't accept an aggressive secularism that tends to push us into the corner and say, no, we don't need the church because without the church now we have a neutral space for... public discourse.
Ratzinger is saying no, not at all, it's not neutral. It's just that you fail to acknowledge those presuppositions to the phenomena of secularism, because once there was no secularism it will make sense. The role of the church, much like nature and grace, or grace and nature, is to heighten and perfect the society in which she finds herself.
That's our vocation as Christian people. And that's why I started it. And I started the book and I started the presentation with that quote from St. Matthew's Gospel. You know, it's our job to go and make disciples of all nations and baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And really Pope Benedict is saying, when we do that, that's how we change the face of society, by making, as he would say, by creating the conditions for which people can fall in love with Jesus.
Because if you think about it, if the proponents of the public life of Christ, the state, our politicians, our judges, anyone who works in public life, all of us. If we really were in love with Christ, wouldn't the world be very different? It would be very different indeed.
So rather than sort of these kind of top-down approaches, even like in Milbank, oh, we need to just impose ecclesiastical or ecclesial socialism and that will sort of fix it. Partially in Milbank, I'm much more in favour of... of what Ratzinger has to say.
You know, when we become disciples in love with Christ, on fire for love of Christ, that's how you change society. So really the project, this book really is just to challenge the idea that we don't have to accept, you know, being pushed into this corner. You know, this is secularism correctly understood.
The church doesn't have to be responsible for everything in public life, but it does have... a place and it does have a role because if we don't accept that then what we're accepting is a form of sectarianism And then how can dialogue even take place? Because we're not welcoming the voice of the church in public life. So really, it's a call. I don't want to say it's a call to arms, but it's a call to some courage, really.
As we meet a culture that's becoming more atheistic and perhaps more secular, we just all need to really, I think, firstly in our own lives, ask ourselves the question, like, am I someone who really loves Christ? And do I take my vocation, the vocation given to me in my baptism, really seriously? Because that vocation, that task given to me in my baptism, is to go out and make disciples.
Now, I might be in a society that doesn't want to hear my voice, but does that mean I don't keep speaking and I don't keep trying in every which way to get through to them with God's help? So really, that's, as I say, the motivating force, the motivating... factor for which I wanted to write this book and do the research. I hope that it's clarified some concepts. Look, it's a tremendously complex area.
I recommend the book to you. Hopefully it will be some help as you read it. And all these big ideas can be just unfolded more quickly.
But at the end of the day, as I say, our vocation is to bring Christ to the culture. That's the mission of the church. And so to sort of have the world be on fire with love for Jesus.
That's all. Any questions or anything? Thank you so much, Father. You made a wonderful presentation. We do have time for some questions.
I've got one. While I'm here from a lot of the kids now, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. Oh, that little chestnut. Yeah.
Would that be falling under Ratzinger's positive secularism? No. I mean, I think what they mean when they say that is, like, I don't want to belong to any institutional religion.
and I want to make myself the criterion of religious truth. So, I mean, Ratzinger would certainly oppose that, because in Ratzinger, obviously, you see an emphasis on revelation above personal experience, because he's Christological. Christ is the center of his whole theology. So, much like what I said before in terms of this necessity for an exodus, like, I need to come out of myself and go and meet Christ.
Now, if I'm making myself the criterion of religious truth, how am I going to meet God who's trying to speak to me? Because I'm deciding, like, well, God's not over there, God's not over there. Like, I've just decided, right?
So it's harder for me to... So it's probably not so much within positive secularism as more of a, I don't know, this quirk that we have in our modern day and age of, like, yeah, not wanting to be part of any institution or something like that. Yeah. Are you familiar with the Integralist movement in America?
No, explain. So, our new Vice President is purported to be an Integralist disciple of a scholar named Patrick Deneen. Okay.
Okay? And it's just this notion that, you know, when possible, because man has a supernatural end. Yeah.
And his fullest humanity and happiness depends on somebody being a steward of this for everyone in society that is really the old Catholic physician, you know, advancing Christian civilization. Okay. Okay.
That state, when possible, should favor the church or true religion for man's supernatural good. Yeah. Okay, so this is a little bit beyond, it's not as far as Milbank, but a little bit beyond Ratzinger. Yeah. Any thoughts?
Yeah, I mean, I'm not very familiar with that movement, I couldn't really speak to it. But it sounds like your assessment would be correct, it's a bit beyond Ratzinger, but not as far as Milbank. Yeah, Professor.
Actually, Milbank thinks the inter-russ are fascists. Okay, there we go. Way beyond Milbank.
There you go. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, just... Yeah, the interval is really, yeah, that's what Millbent says.
He's written that. Yeah, I mean, really because the interval is, as I understand it, anyway. I want to go back to sort of the time in the Middle Ages when the church stood over the state. Right, okay. Milbank wouldn't go for that at all.
No, no, no. I think one of the differences, I'm not sure the theological differences between Milbank and Ratzinger are quite as profound as you're saying, but I think they're there. But I think there's this historical difference that Ratzinger comes up in Germany in the post-World War II context, and Milbank is an advocate who thoroughly believes in the king as the head of the church, right? Absolutely. So that's just like his idea, his Victorian socialism, goes way back in that tradition.
It does, yeah. And so I think some of it is just the historical difference in the way he... It's not my difference, because I'm an American legal scholar, but I can't go to similar places he goes, because I'm just not an Anglican church in the state.
I mean, even in Australia, like, I mean... where the inheritance of British culture in so many ways but yeah it's not like England in the sense of like yeah the king is as head of the church and and the prominence of the of the church of England as it is it's not so strong in Australia but anyway here we are yeah you talk a lot about how the church has been placed in the state but not necessarily all over it would you say that building policies on the Christian ordeals or would that be a different implication? Yeah I mean definitely certainly our vocation is to have politicians that are trying to see Christian ideals in their policy making. How would we do that now in this very secular world?
Are we just supposed to just throw people in there who aren't as the best speakers, being the best policy makers just because they have those ordeals or ideals? Are we trying to now... build people up with those ideals and hopes of the weekend.
Yeah, I think as you say, it's not going to be a five-minute solution. It's to, in our own little way, when people come to know Christ, they want to share Christ, right? That's the idea, right?
And so whatever my vocation is, whether it's to be a lawyer, a politician, a priest, a teacher, whatever, whatever my walk of life is, my vocation is to bring Christ there. So if I'm a policy maker, then yeah, I will seek to make policies that are going to bring Christ to that place. So that would be probably, yeah, the direction, the certain direction that Matt's saying we'll take.
Yeah. It's sort of a similar question, but you were saying that based on Matt's perspective on secularism, like the church should be involved but not super involved. Do you think, like, just speak in the UN, which is like, it's not really influential, it's not like it's saying anything, but it can like, voice its opinion.
Do you think that's enough or the church should be slightly more involved? Yeah, I think like when Ratzinger talks of positive secularism, I mean what he's saying is like we don't want a theocracy, like where like priests and bishops are like concerned about garbage collection and stuff like that, right? It's like there is a proper sphere of competence for secular authorities as there is also for the church authorities, right?
And it's the question of like how the two go together. I mean, and that's the balance that needs to be found in every society, in every culture. But what we're saying is, like, it's no good to say that the church doesn't have a role in the public life of the state, that religion should be privatized, or that it is in some way harmful to sort of balance public discourse.
That's kind of what we're saying. So, yeah, like, I mean, what I didn't do in the book is, like, going to specifics in terms of, like, Okay, the church should specifically do this in any given society or this, and like Ratzinger doesn't do that either, I'd say. Because it's up to us to figure that out, that's kind of my job. Yeah?
Jonathan Heath, I'm the director of the Berger-Monaghan Institute here, and so you won't be surprised that I'm going to ask you a question about the theological method. Yeah, that's right. I'm interested to hear your thoughts about how you were very affirmative of the Lubach's paradox.
I'm interested in your thoughts on how you distinguish between when in theology one has a kind of stable theological paradox versus when one simply has a theological problem to which you don't yet have an adequate solution, but in principle you could later down the road. The apparent paradox could be resolved. Is there some principle for distinguishing those? Yeah, I mean, again, Ratzinger wouldn't even offer one himself other than just to sort of demonstrate in his theology and his writings how... how like you know just the product of it being held in tension because again in rat singer I mean his theology is not so systematic which makes it a bit of a challenge to kind of even crystallize what is even his view on nature and I said it's an effort right but again because you don't see an emphasis on method you see an emphasis on content not meth in Ratzinger, you know, Parché-Lonaghan, he wouldn't address that.
But it's a really good question, and I'm not sure I have the answer to it. Professor, do you have any thoughts on that? So, I mean, I can just say for Milbeck, I was... I was a student of Milbank, that's why. Anyway, sorry.
Yeah, I mean, Milbank actually likes to refer to Nicholas of Cusa. Okay, yeah, of course. And the coincidence of opposites.
And Milbank actually at some points seems to say he just doesn't really believe in the principle of non-contradiction, ultimately. Sometimes he seems to be saying there are things that are just going to be contradictions, because we're human, and sometimes he seems to be saying, nope, the opposites just coincide. So he's perfectly happy throwing paradoxes.
out there and just letting that be. Again, I think that is one of the points where it's useful to say, well is there like a natural law or something else that you know that's a good pushback. Any final questions?
It's very simple, but I think the role of a personal account is what triggers an intensity of love of Jesus. And I think that's what Rochtinger really was referring to, and why he became so Christop-centric. It seems like it goes to all of his writings.
keep people don't have that personal intense encounter yeah it's just I really agree with you man and thank you for that contribution and that's why you're seeing ranting a preference also for Augustine like when he was studying at um at seminary like he never really liked I wouldn't say didn't like Aquinas, but the neo-scholastic way of presenting Aquinas, he found it really dry and boring. He in fact famously once said, a sullen bonum doesn't need a mother. He's speaking of like, you know, that. But he loved Augustine because he said, you know, that man who had that intense love for God, despite his personal failures and his history, he said it just came through and captured him. And I really love that about Ratzinger because I guess I'm a bit the same.
I just love that approach to theology. Personalistic. And that's what makes converts, I think, at the end of the day. Yeah.
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks to all of you for your participation and presence.
God bless.