472627ITQ78210.

1177/0021140012472627Irish Theological QuarterlyDalzell

2013

Article

Irish Theological Quarterly

78(2) 103­–122
Eucharist, Communion, © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0021140012472627
Theology of Joseph itq.sagepub.com

Ratzinger

Thomas G. Dalzell
All Hallows College, Dublin

Abstract
In Joseph Ratzinger’s approach to the Eucharist, the Church as communion, and orthopraxis, there
is a critique of horizontalizing trends. His solution is to stress what he calls the ‘vertical dimension’
of the Eucharist, the one Church’s participation in Trinitarian communion, and the transformation
of praxis into Christian responsibility. This article argues that the reason for Ratzinger’s preference
for the vertical over the horizontal is not his Platonism, but his theological idea of salvation as a
gift received, not made, from the Logos sent from above.

Keywords
communio ecclesiology, Eucharist, Platonism, praxis, Ratzinger, salvation

E ucharist, communion, and orthopraxis are closely linked themes in the theology of
Joseph Ratzinger.1 In June 2002, Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to the Bishops of
Campania in Italy linked all three. There is in his theology a circumincession of the
Eucharist as orthodox, or right glorification of God, the Church as communion, and soli-
darity as orthopraxis, or right action in the world. But, in his approach to all three, there
is a certain prioritizing of the vertical over the horizontal. Where others have understood
this in terms of his philosophical presuppositions, this article will argue that, ultimately,
it is due to his theological understanding of salvation as a gift received from above, rather
than made by human beings.2 First, however, we will listen to what he has to say about

1 This paper was read at DePaul University, Chicago, in April 2012.

2 The original reads ‘receives’ (Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster
[San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990], 202; Einführung in das Christentum: Vorlesungen über das
apostolische Glaubensbekenntnis [Munich: Kösel, 1968], 251).

Corresponding author:
Thomas G. Dalzell, All Hallows College, Grace Park Road, Dublin 9, Ireland.
Email: tdalzell@allhallows.ie

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104 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

the three themes. Where texts of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or of
Benedict XVI are cited, the criterion for their selection is their content also being present
in the writings of Ratzinger the theologian.

Eucharist
It is well known that there is a correlation in Ratzinger’s thinking between orthodoxy and
orthopraxis, right doctrine and right action. But, for Ratzinger, orthodoxy is more than
right teaching or belief. First and foremost, for him, orthodoxy means authentic glorifica-
tion of God. Orthopraxis, action in the world for peace or justice, if it is to be right action,
in his view, has to go hand in hand with orthodoxy, authentic glory and praise of God;
and what is relevant to us is that Christian orthodoxy for Ratzinger is primarily eucharis-
tic. And just as he prefers to understand the Church as ‘communion’ rather than ‘council,’
communio rather than concilium, what has priority in his approach to the Eucharist is its
early name, agape, love, rather than synaxis, assembly. While St Paul called the Eucharist
the ‘Lord’s Supper’ and Luther advocated a return to that term, Ratzinger reads the
biblical term from the perspective of Tradition and Church practice, and this allows him
to understand the Eucharist not so much as a meal, but as the sacrament of the sacrifice
of Christ.3 Of course, he recognizes that Jesus instituted the Eucharist in the context of
the Last Supper, which he accepts was a Passover meal.4 But his emphasis is on what was
new about that event, what was specifically Christian. In his view, Jesus did not instruct
his disciples to repeat the Passover meal.5 If he does recognize a continuity between the
Old and New Covenants, the Eucharist, to his mind, is not only a development of the
synagogue’s Liturgy of the Word and the Temple’s sacrifice, but also their ultimate fulfil-
ment.6 In fact, for Ratzinger, the Eucharist is the culmination of all the lines which lead
from the Old Covenant and from religious history as such. The passage from the Old
Covenant to the New, from the assembly for the Passover to communion in the sacrifice
of Christ, constitutes for him what is specifically Christian about our three themes, praise
of God, people of God, and even transformative action. Now it is possible, he thinks, to
give God thanks in a more profound way, a universal way, in the Church, because even
death has been transformed by the action of Christ.
The Last Supper was a Passover meal, but Ratzinger would contend that the meal was
actually extrinsic to what Jesus was doing. What was essential was not the eating of the
lamb, but Jesus offering himself in his thanksgiving prayer, which concluded with the

3 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Lecture by Cardinal Ratzinger to the bishops of the Region of Campania
in Benevento, Italy, on the Topic: “Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity” (Sunday, 2 June
2002),’ http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_
doc_20020602_ratzinger-eucharistic-congress_en.html (accessed November 20, 2012), 2, 5.
4 Joseph Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000),
78.
5 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 6.
6 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The New Covenant: A Theology of Covenant in the New Testament,’
Communio: International Catholic Review 22 (1995): 635–51, at 638–40; Ratzinger, Spirit of
the Liturgy, 48–49.

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Dalzell 105

institution of the Eucharist as the definitive form of orthodoxy.7 Where others, such as
Edward Kilmartin, have understood the meal and the Eucharistic sacrifice as inseparable,
for Ratzinger, the heart of the Last Supper was not the meal, but the Eucharist as such.8 And
while it might be argued that the gradual separation of the Christian Eucharist from the
context of a meal was for practical reasons—the increasing number of Christians—rather
than theological ones, in Ratzinger’s thinking, the Church gave the sacrament its final form
under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, so as to identify the true essence of the Eucharist
(which was not the meal). Here we can already see a certain priority of the vertical over the
horizontal in his eucharistic theology. The Eucharist is not so much an assembly for a sup-
per, as a communion in the sacrifice which Christ offered to God the Father.
This also comes to expression in his liturgical theology as such. He questions the
practice since the Second Vatican Council of the priest facing the people during the
Eucharist, although he does accept Erik Peterson’s solution of placing a cross on the altar.9
In his book, Spirit of the Liturgy, named after the 1918 book by Romano Guardini and,
according to D. Vincent Twomey, perhaps the most important of his later works, Ratzinger
makes the case for a return to the apostolic practice of facing towards the East.10 Drawing
on Louis Bouyer, he argues that not even at secular meals in early Christian times, did the
president face the guests. This would have been impossible, since the other side of the
table was to be left free to enable service. The communal character of the meal was
emphasized by the fact that all the participants were on the same side of the table.11 As
for the Eucharist, Ratzinger’s idea is that the priest, facing East, leads the congregation
into the new heaven and the new earth that are encountered in Christ returning to meet
us.12 But the priest’s turning towards the people, he would argue, has turned the com-
munity into a self-enclosed circle. As he puts it: ‘It no longer opens out on what lies
ahead and above, but is closed in on itself.’13 Furthermore, he also makes room for a
cosmic dimension to the Eucharist. If Christianity presupposes a break with the Temple,
but still inherits its sacrifices, he recognizes that the glory of God present in the Temple
is now present in the whole cosmos. The Eucharist, for him, therefore, is not an event in
the self-made world of human beings alone. Rather, since all of creation is waiting for
redemption from ‘the pierced one’ returning in the East, he defines the Eucharist not only
by an interconnection of Temple and synagogue, Word and sacrament, but by the bring-
ing together of history and the cosmos.14

  7 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 8.

 8 Edward J. Kilmartin, The Eucharist in the West: History and Theology (Collegeville:
Liturgical, 1998), 340.
 9 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 78–84; Erik Peterson, ‘Das Kreuz und das Gebet nach Osten,’
in Frühkirche, Judentum, und Gnosis (Freiburg: Herder, 1959), 15–35.
10 Vincent Twomey, Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age, A Theological Portrait
(San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 71.
11 Louis Bouyer, Liturgy and Architecture (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame, 1967),
53–54; Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 78.
12 Ratzinger, ibid., 79–80, 69.
13 Ibid., 80.
14 Ibid., 79.

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106 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

We will see shortly that Ratzinger’s view that the Eucharist does not begin and end
with the local community also comes to expression in his communion ecclesiology. The
priority that he attributes there to the universal Church is based on his belief that univer-
sality is an essential feature of the Eucharist itself. In other words, the Eucharist is never
just an event organized by a particular group. It is never merely a self-celebration of the
local church. As was made clear by the 1992 letter that he issued as Prefect of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Communionis notio (On Some Aspects of the
Church Understood as Communion),’ the eucharistic sacrifice is never a celebration of a
particular community alone. Rather, the universal Church is thought to be present in every
Eucharist, the one Church, which in his 1991 book, Called to Communion, was said to
be ‘ontologically and temporally prior’ to the local church, a phrase he repeated in
Communionis notio, causing considerable controversy.15 While Maximilian Heinrich Heim
has shown a basis for his view in Lumen gentium’s speaking about the trinitarian constitu-
tion of the Church (Lumen gentium, nos. 2–4), the Church’s dynamic orientation to the
Kingdom of God (Lumen gentium, no. 5), and in the Church’s sacramental structure,
Medard Kehl has argued that it contradicts the sacramental structure of the Church, and
Walter Kasper, as we will see, regards it as Platonic.16 For Ratzinger, the Church as com-
munion is not to be reduced to the relationship between the local churches and the universal
Church. Rather, communion primarily concerns the participation of the one Church in the
communion in God, and, for Ratzinger, this is the essence of the Eucharist. Just as Henri de
Lubac had shown that the term ‘mystical body’ originally referred to the Eucharist, and
that, for Paul and the Church Fathers, the term ‘body of Christ’ was inseparable from the
Eucharist, Ratzinger’s own communion ecclesiology is thoroughly Eucharistic.17
But, as for the Eucharist of the local church, Ratzinger regrets that, for pastoral reasons,
the understanding of the Eucharist as participation in the sacrifice of Christ can be replaced
by the goal of creating community and avoiding the isolation of modern existence. As he
put it in his 1995 book, A New Song for the Lord, if the aim becomes the creation of experi-
ences of liberation or joy or reconciliation, the community is creating its own liturgy, rather
than receiving it. Rather than participating in the heart of the Eucharist, the paschal mys-
tery, it is merely portraying itself and celebrating itself.18 Hence his thinking that if there

15 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Communionis notio (Letter to the Bishops of the
Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church Understood as Communion),’ 28 May 1992,
nos. 11, 9; Joseph Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans.
Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), 45.
16 Maximilian Heinrich Heim, Joseph Ratzinger: Kirchliche Existenz und existentielle
Theologie unter dem Anspruch von Lumen gentium, ekklesiologische Grundlinien, Bamberger
Theologische Studien 22 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2004), 344–46; Medard Kehl, ‘Zum jüng-
sten Disput um das Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirchen,’ in Kirche in ökumenis-
cher Perspektive. Festschrift für Walter Kasper, ed. Peter Walter, Klaus Krämer and George
Augustin (Freiburg: Herder, 2003), 81–101; Walter Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ trans. Ladislaus
Orsy, America 184 (2001): 8–14, at 13.
17 Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (Slough: St
Paul, 1988), 7.
18 Joseph Ratzinger, A New Song for the Lord: Faith in Christ and Liturgy Today (New York:
Crossroad, 1996), 32.

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Dalzell 107

has to be a sign of peace between the participants, it ought to take place before the presenta-
tion of the gifts, so as not to distract the participants from what is more important, their
receiving Holy Communion.19 Again, what we find is a priority of the vertical over the
horizontal. In fact, he thinks that it is this—the paschal mystery, not the style of liturgical
celebration—that makes the Eucharist beautiful. Of course, he believes that Church music
has a role to play here. But modern popular music, he would hold, has no place in Christian
worship since it intends the senses, rather than spiritualization.20 In his 1980 paper,
‘Theological Problems of Church Music,’ he argued that the transition from the liturgy of
the Temple to that of the synagogue did not mean a transition to the profane. Rather, just as
Plato had promoted the spiritualization of music away from the senses, and the Church
Fathers understood the development from the Temple to Christian cult as a spiritualization,
he would argue that worldly music, or what he calls ‘the music of the cosmos,’ is spiritual-
ized by the Eucharist. Such Church music, in his view, is not profane, but follows stricter
laws than everyday music, for it is subject to the incarnate Word and the direction of the
Holy Spirit. For Ratzinger, this is what makes the Eucharist beautiful. It is not merely a
meal, but a feast that lives from splendour.21 And, as in Hans Urs von Balthasar, the splen-
dour in question is the beauty of the cross. In the 2007 apostolic exhortation, Sacramentum
caritatis, we find that liturgy is inherently linked to beauty as the splendour of the truth.
Finding support in Bonaventure, Benedict remarks that ‘in Jesus, we contemplate beauty
and splendour at their source,’ and that ‘the truest beauty is the love of God who defini-
tively revealed himself to us in the paschal mystery.’22 And here too it is argued that care is
needed if the liturgical action is to reflect its innate splendour. The Eucharist, to his mind,
is essentially an actio Dei (action of God) and cannot, therefore, be ‘held hostage by the
latest trends.’ Hence his preference for sacred music as such. As he already made clear in
Spirit of the Liturgy, this music is a charism of the Holy Spirit, but it is regulated by the
Logos and, only as such, is it fit for worship in spirit and in truth (John 4: 23). It is a sign of
the sursum corda (the lifting up of the human heart), drawing it to what is above, rather
than subjecting the human spirit to the senses.23 Once again, what we find is an emphasis
on the vertical. In this, Ratzinger’s theology of music clearly bears the mark of Plato as
mediated to him through the Fathers. It represents the triumph of spiritualization over the
senses, of Greek humanity over the music of the religions. But whether or not the ultimate
source of his stress on the vertical is Platonism remains to be seen.

The Church as Communion

When Balthasar, Ratzinger, De Lubac, Bouyer, and others had the idea of founding a new
journal to promote the thinking of the Second Vatican Council, what was decisive for its

19 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 170.

20 Ibid., 150.
21 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Theologische Probleme der Kirchenmusik,’ Internationale katholische
Zeitschrift Communio 9 (1980): 148–57, at 153–54, 156–57, 148–49.
22 Bonaventure Sermones 1.7, 11.10, 22.7, 29.76 in Sermones dominicales: ad fidem codicum
nunc denuo editi, ed. Jacques Guy Bougerol (Grottaferrata: Collegio San Bonaventura, 1977),
135, 209, 292, 337; Benedict XVI, Sacramentum caritatis (2007), nos. 35, 37.
23 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 151.

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108 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

name was that the term ‘council,’ concilium, did not adequately express the essence of
the Church.24 Hans Küng, one of the founders of the journal of that name, believed he
had found an equivalence between ekklesia and concilium and so the Church was thought
to be a continuing council in the world. Ratzinger was initially taken by that definition,
but he came to think that the Church is more than a council and that Küng’s vision, while
containing some truth, needed correction. The Church does not exist, he realized, to
deliberate, but to live the Word given by God, and the term that best expressed this
essence of the Church was koinonia, communio, communion.
The concept of ‘communion’ appeared in nine paragraphs of Lumen gentium and its
interpretation was discussed in Communionis notio. There, it was regretted that some
approaches to ecclesiology had not sufficiently integrated the awareness of the Church
as a mystery of communion with the concepts of ‘people of God’ and ‘body of Christ,’ or
given due importance to the relationship between the Church as communion and the
Church as sacrament.25 In fact, communion ecclesiology was less central in the Council
documents than is sometimes claimed, for example, by the final report of the 1985 synod
on the Council’s reception. The idea of the Church as communion only gained wider
acknowledgement after the synod. After the Council, most attention was actually paid to
the Church as ‘people of God.’ In 1969, Ratzinger published a book called the New
People of God: Sketches of an Ecclesiology.26 But its ideas on the Church as communion,
rather than council, did not receive much attention, since the concept of communion only
came to prominence after the 1985 synod. In 1984, he argued that Liberation theology
had transformed the Council’s emphasis on the people of God into a ‘Marxist myth.’27 In
1985, in the Ratzinger Report interviews, he sharpened his distinction between the ‘peo-
ple of God’ in the Old Testament and the New. In that study, there was no truly New
Testament concept of the Church without a direct relation, not with sociology, but, first
and foremost, with Christology.28 And his 1987 book, Church, Ecumenism and Politics,
continued to express these views.
The 1985 synod sought a new beginning by highlighting the word ‘communion’ and
this referred above all to the Eucharistic centre of the Church. But, just as Ratzinger
saw communion ecclesiology as a corrective to the people of God concept, Communionis
notio, in 1992, contended that certain forms of communion ecclesiology were in need
of correction. As Ratzinger himself would put it ten years later, it was unavoidable that
the meaning of this New Testament word, used as a slogan, would suffer the same fate
as the people of God concept in terms of a diminishment of its biblical and theological
meaning. In 2002, he specified this reductionism in terms of a pluralist ecclesiology, a
federal sense of unity as opposed to a centralist idea of Church, and a stress on the
relationship between local churches and their culturally pluralist forms of liturgy,

24 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 11–13.

25 Lumen gentium, nos. 4, 8, 13–15, 18, 21, 24–25; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
‘Communionis notio,’ no. 1.
26 Joseph Ratzinger, Das neue Volk Gottes: Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1969).
27 Joseph Ratzinger and Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1985),
174–86, at 181.
28 Ibid., 47.

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Dalzell 109

discipline, and doctrine. To his mind, communion was being understood in a horizontal
sense and the Church as communio was barely distinguishable from the notion of the
Church as concilium. The emphasis was on self-determination by the local church
within the wider community of Churches and the horizontal dominated. As a corrective
to this, he drew support from what he called the ‘vertical dimension’ of the Eucharist.
Just as the synod had promoted the word ‘communion’ by referring to the eucharistic
centre of the Church, he employed Paul’s words on ‘one bread … one body’ to argue
that the Church as communion is anchored in communion in the sacramental body and
blood of Christ, the new manna given by God. By being inserted into the dynamic of
the sacrifice of Christ, those who communicate were said to be dynamized to be for
others. But the social significance of the Eucharist, he argued, could not be reduced to
an exclusively horizontal perspective.29
Back in 1992, Communionis notio was concerned that in the relationship between
the local and the universal Church, a unilateral emphasis was being placed by some
on the local. As we will see, Ratzinger has since taken issue with this in Kasper’s idea of
communion and responded to the charge that his own idea of communion is Platonist.
According to the 1992 letter, the Eucharist renders impossible any self-sufficiency on the
part of local churches, a point re-affirmed by the encyclical of John Paul II, Ecclesia de
Eucharistia.30 Ratzinger’s own 1991 primer of Catholic ecclesiology, Called to
Communion, had understood versions of the focus on the local church in terms of a
fusion of Eastern Orthodox and Protestant ideas of Church. If the Petrine Office is
excluded in favour of the local bishop, it argued, a ‘worldly pattern’ of unity is adopted.
And if the Church as institution is not given a theological status, but only the local con-
gregation, the universal character of the Church is lost, a point already made in 1987 in
Church, Ecumenism and Politics.31 As he put it in 1991: ‘Communio is catholic,’ by
which he meant universal, ‘or it simply does not exist at all.’32 In Communionis notio, the
point was that the eucharistic body draws the local church into communion with the
universal mystical body. Other Churches, including the Eastern Orthodox Church, were
recognized as particular Churches in communion with the universal Church, but not in
full communion. This would be reiterated in John Paul II’s Dominus Iesus.33 The latter
document, on the unicity and universality of Jesus Christ and the Church, was not just a
response to pluralist approaches to interfaith dialogue, but it argued that the Church is not
the sum of particular Churches and ecclesial communities. In Ratzinger’s Called to
Communion and in Communionis notio, the universal Church is ontologically and tem-
porally prior to particular Churches.34 But if, for Ratzinger, the Church is not to be

29 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 16–19; Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 82.
30 John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia (2003), no. 39.
31 Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology, trans.
Michael J. Miller (Slough: St Paul, 1988), 9.
32 Ratzinger, Called to Communion, 79–82.
33 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Communionis notio,’ no. 17; Dominus Iesus
(2000), no. 17.
34 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Communionis notio,’ no. 11; 9; Ratzinger, Called
to Communion, 45.

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110 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

understood in terms of sociology, this is not to say that he sees no room for a horizontal
axis in ecclesiology. Even in his eucharistic theology, concern for others is not absent.
Nevertheless, like Balthasar, unity with Christ comes first, unity with neighbour sec-
ond.35 Contemplating Christ in the Eucharist leads to the realization of being united
organically with every other person receiving him no matter where they are. Only as such
does Ratzinger regard the Eucharist as a social sacrament. There are two axes in his idea
of the Church as communion as well, vertical communion with God and horizontal com-
munion with others. However, the two are related in such a way that the vertical is pre-
sented as logically prior to the horizontal. Communion is a gift from God. It originates
from God’s initiative. It is a new relationship between God and the world that has been
established in the paschal mystery. Only secondly does this extend to a new relationship
between human beings.36 Tracey Rowland would, therefore, seem to have a point when
she claims that, at the time of the Council, Ratzinger was eager to foster the horizontal
dimensions of the Church, to loosen centralized curial control, but that, by the late 1970s,
he was more interested in strengthening the Church’s vertical dimension.37
In fact, Ratzinger’s ecclesiology of communion has been categorized as Platonic.
As Edward Hahnenberg has argued, there are two broad approaches to Vatican II’s idea
of the Church as communion. The first can be termed ‘Aristotelian’ in that it begins
with the real and concrete historical Church at the local level. Its understanding of
communion is horizontal in that it amounts to local churches living in communion with
one another. Hence the title of Jean-Marie Tillard’s 1987 book, Church of Churches.38
And, while Kasper can be situated here in highlighting the pastoral dimension of the
local church, this approach also includes the ecclesiologies ‘from below’ of Liberation
theology.39 Ratzinger’s communion ecclesiology clearly falls into the second of
Hahnenberg’s approaches. After the critiques of Kasper and Avery Dulles, it can be
called ‘Platonic’ in that it prefers to regard the universal Church as an ideal reality.40
Its understanding of communion is primarily vertical in that the one Church is thought
to exist prior to horizontal unity between the local churches. More recently, this
approach has become known for its attempts not only to counteract the reduction of the
Church to the horizontal and the sociological, but also its reaction to liberal trends in

35 Hans Urs von Balthasar, ‘Communio: Ein Programm,’ Internationale katholische Zeitschrift
Communio 1 (1972): 4–17, at 12–15; Thomas G. Dalzell, ‘Lack of Social Drama in Balthasar’s
Theological Dramatics,’ Theological Studies 60 (1999): 457–75, at 462.
36 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Communionis notio,’ nos. 3–4; Ratzinger, Spirit
of the Liturgy, 49.
37 Tracey Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI (Oxford: Oxford
University, 2008), 12.
38 Jean-Marie Tillard, Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion, trans. Rowland C.
De Peaux (Collegeville: Liturgical, 1992).
39 See Walter Kasper, ‘Zur Theologie und Praxis des bischöflichen Amtes,’ in Auf neue Art
Kirche sein, ed. Werner Schreer and Georg Steins (Munich: Bernward bei Don Bosco, 1999),
32–48, at 43–44; Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 8; Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
‘Notification regarding L. Boff, Church: Charism and Power,’ Origins 14 (1985): 683–87.
40 Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 13; Avery Dulles, ‘A Half Century of Ecclesiology,’ Theological
Studies 50 (1989): 419–42, at 440.

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Dalzell 111

Catholic theology as such. Hence the sub-title of David Schindler’s book, Communio
Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation.41
The Plato/Aristotle distinction is useful to a certain extent if it is expressed in a less
dialectical way than is usual. In this regard, it is instructive to return to the main points
of the well-known Ratzinger/Kasper exchanges in which Kasper described his own
approach as Aristotelian and Ratzinger’s as Platonic.42 In 1999, Kasper published an
essay on the theology and praxis of the office of the bishop in a German Festschrift in
which he criticized the view in Communionis notio that the universal Church is ontologi-
cally and temporally prior to the local church.43 To his mind, the understanding, in the
1992 letter, was that the Church of the four notes applied to the universal Church apart
from the local churches. And where it had spoken about the Pentecost Church as the
universal Church (and so temporally prior), Kasper would accept only as long as it was
recognized that this universal Church was also a local church. More controversially,
Kasper contended that the letter had reversed the teaching of Vatican II on the universal
Church existing ‘in and from’ the local churches, and he implied that Communionis notio
was a renunciation of Vatican II’s communion ecclesiology and an attempt to restore
Roman centralism.44 In 2001, he would explain that he had adopted his line of argument
not from abstract reasoning, but because of pastoral experience. As bishop of Rottenburg-
Stuttgart, he had observed a growing gap between norms promulgated in Rome for the
universal Church and the needs of his diocese, and, as examples, he cited the refusal of
communion for divorced and re-married persons and restrictive rules for eucharistic
hospitality.45
In December 2000, Ratzinger replied in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and
asserted that Comunionis notio had been misinterpreted by Kasper.46 He commented
again that the word ‘communio’ had become ‘horizontalized’ and that communion eccle-
siology had been reduced to the relationship between local churches and the universal
Church. He found it difficult to understand Kasper’s objection to the thesis of the onto-
logical priority of the Church, and he was concerned that if the theological idea of the
Church was crossed out, it would be reduced to a human and empirical organization with
its unity and differences. This, for Ratzinger, would be to depart from the New Testament
idea of the Church as the heavenly Jerusalem and from the patristic position on the pre-
existence of the Church based on the rabbinical teaching on the pre-existence of Israel.
In relation to temporal priority, he disagreed with Kasper’s view that the early Jerusalem
community was both universal and local. Acts 2 was not about the local church, he main-
tained, but the new Israel, which, in Luke’s text, existed prior to the local Jerusalem

41 David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Centre of the Church: Communio Ecclesiology,
Liberalism , and Liberation (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1996).
42 For a summary of the exchange, see Kilian McDonnell, ‘The Ratzinger/Kasper Debate: The
Universal Church and Local Churches,’ Theological Studies 63 (2002): 227–50.
43 Walter Kasper, ‘Zur Theologie und Praxis,’ 32–48.
44 Ibid., 43–44.
45 Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 8.
46 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Nicht nur eine Frage der Kompetenzverteilung: Das Verhältnis von
Universalkirche und Ortskirche aus der Sicht des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils,’ Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, December 22, 2000, 46.

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112 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

community. A response from Kasper was published in Stimmen der Zeit, and an English
translation appeared in the magazine America in April 2001.47 Again citing pastoral rea-
sons for his argument, Kasper stated that the teaching of Vatican II on the office of bishop
ought to have led to a decentralization, but the opposite had happened. He found
Ratzinger’s approach too theoretical and claimed that it did not take concrete pastoral
situations into account. Furthermore, he took Ratzinger’s remarks about his proposing a
Church without theological depth and reduced to empirical communities as misrepre-
senting and caricaturing his position. On the contrary, he pointed out that had consist-
ently fought against such sociological tendencies. But rather than beginning in the
abstract, Kasper’s starting point here was the unfolding of the Church in history. Citing
Joachim Gnilka, he claimed that the local church was at the centre in St Paul’s letters,
while the universal Church came into focus in the deutero-Pauline ones.48 In addition, he
argued that the Church in the later centuries had excluded both a unilateral emphasis on
local churches and a unilateral emphasis on the universal Church. Hence, his actually
agreeing with objections, in Communionis notio, to a one-sided stress in communion
ecclesiology on the local church and to the view that the universal Church was the end-
result of unity between the local churches. On the other hand, Kasper repeated his view
that Ratzinger’s ontological and temporal priority of the universal Church meant that the
local churches existed in and from it, and that this was a reversal of Vatican II’s position.
He also questioned Ratzinger’s interpretation of the Pentecost Church as universal and
prior. To his mind, a correct history of the beginnings of the Church was to be found in
the narrations of its early expansion, not in the theological construction of Acts 2. The
more important issue was ontological priority. On the pre-existence of the Church as the
heavenly Jerusalem, Kasper contended that the Pauline texts did not unilaterally support
the pre-existence of the universal Church, but the simultaneous pre-existence of both the
universal and particular churches in the eternal mystery of God. Citing De Lubac, his
argument was that a universal Church existing apart from the particular churches would
be a mere abstraction, and it was in this context that he labelled Ratzinger’s approach
‘Platonic.’ In fact, he had already accused Ratzinger’s 1968 book, Introduction to
Christianity, of Platonism back in 1969.49 As he now put it: ‘The conflict is between
theological opinions and underlying philosophical assumptions. One side [Ratzinger]
proceeds by Plato’s method; its starting point is the primacy of an idea that is a universal
concept. The other side [Kasper] follows Aristotle’s approach and sees the universal as
existing in a concrete reality.’ In fact, Kasper argued for a recognition of both theological
opinions, just as the medieval debates between the Platonic and Aristotelian schools had
been conducted within the parameters of their common Catholic faith. Nevertheless, he
still insisted that a one-sided emphasis on universality was detrimental not only to local
pastoral situations, but also to the ecumenical movement.50

47 Walter Kasper, ‘Das Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirche: Freundliche

Auseinandersetzung mit der Kritik von Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger,’ Stimmen der Zeit 218
(2000): 795–804; Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 8–14.
48 Joachim Gnilka, Theologie des neuen Testaments (Freiburg: Herder, 1994), 110, 334; Kasper,
‘Das Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirche,’ 797.
49 Walter Kasper, ‘Das Wesen des Christlichen,’ Theologische Revue 65 (1969): 182–88, at 184–86.
50 Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 13.

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Dalzell 113

In our view, Ratzinger’s final reply gives the real key to this dispute.51 Where Kasper’s
original article had understood communion in terms of the relationship between the uni-
versal and local churches, for Ratzinger, communion ecclesiology was primarily about
communion with God. He explained that his initial response to Kasper had been to deal
with the relationship between the universal Church and local churches in the context of
the link between the Church and God—what we are calling the vertical axis—and, again,
that the 1992 letter never dreamt of identifying the universal Church with the Roman
curia. He made it clear, in relation to Kasper’s thesis on the simultaneity of the universal
and local churches, that he could accept the formula that ‘the local church and the uni-
versal Church are internal to one another.’ In fact, as Susan K. Wood has noted, a clarifi-
cation of Communionis notio had appeared in L’Osservatore Romano in 1993, which
stated that incorporation into the universal Church was as immediate as incorporation
into a particular church. The clarification asserted that every particular church is truly
Church, but not the whole Church—or as Wood has put it, ‘the local church is wholly
church, but not the whole Church’—but the clarification was more nuanced than
Communionis notio in that it granted that the universal Church is not distinct from the
communion of particular churches.52 The Congregation stated in 1994 that this statement
had an authoritative character.53 Nevertheless, in his 2001 reply, Ratzinger argued that
Kasper’s mutual interiority formula had missed his point about pre-existence. He
repeated what he had said before about the patristic view (based on rabbinical teaching)
of the Church’s pre-existence, and he stated again that the Church was the one bride of
Christ, not many brides.54 At the root of Kasper’s view, according to Ratzinger, was the
problem of centralism. But this made no sense to him since, to his mind, Rome was a
local church with a universal responsibility, not the universal Church as such. The prece-
dence of the one Church, the one bride, over all its empirical realizations, he argued, had
nothing to do with centralism. In his view, the argument about Church politics had missed
the heart of the matter. More relevant to us, however, was his stating that the main issue
was not Platonism or Aristotelianism, but the notion of salvation history in the Bible. The
one word of God, which precedes the Church and calls it together, needed the one Church
as subject, as he put it, in order to be really present in history. This was the true theologi-
cal and, to his mind, concrete content of the idea of the Church as universal.55 And where
Kasper had cited Gnilka on the priority of the local church in Paul, he humorously
pointed out that Bultmann had said the opposite, and that he, Bultmann, could never be
accused of Platonism or of favouring Roman centralism.

51 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘The Local Church and the Universal Church: A Response to Walter
Kasper,’ America 185 (2001): 7–11.
52 Susan K. Wood, ‘The Church as Communion,’ in The Gift of the Church: A Textbook on Ecclesiology
in Honor of Patrick Granfield OSB, ed. Peter C. Phan (Collegeville: Liturgical, 2000), 159–76, at
174; ‘La Chiesa come Communione,’ L’Osservatore Romano, June 23, 1993, 1, 4.
53 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Lettera ‘Communionis Notio’ su alcuni aspetti
della Chiese intesa come Communione (28 Maggio 1992) (Rome: Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
1994), 6.
54 Ratzinger, ‘The Local Church and the Universal Church,’ 10.
55 Ibid., 11.

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114 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

Kasper took Ratzinger’s reply to mean that his ecclesiology was no longer being judged
to be purely sociological. In a final letter published in America in November 2001, he said
he was happy that Ratzinger had accepted his formula on the perichoresis and simultaneity
of the universal and local churches, but he made no reference to Ratzinger’s remark that
this had missed the point about pre-existence.56 Furthermore, he no longer attributed too
much importance to the speculative question about simultaneity applying to the pre-existent
Church. He saw some movement on Ratzinger’s side in his biblical talk of the one bride,
and, where he had distinguished their respective positions in terms of Platonism and
Aristotelianism, he now granted that unity as a transcendental determination of being
makes multiplicity possible in both metaphysical approaches. He agreed with Ratzinger
that, through baptism, one becomes a member of the Catholic Church, but he still argued
that this happens in a specific local church. Here too, he thought, the principle of simultane-
ity held true, though he was clearly still emphasizing the local church as the door to the
universal. Nevertheless, Kasper did not altogether give up his view of Ratzinger’s ecclesi-
ology as Platonic. Still stressing the concrete rather than the abstract, he restated the lack of
attention to the concrete that he perceived in Ratzinger’s idea of communion, and he
remarked that ‘if one takes seriously the fact that, in the Catholic view, the Church is not
some sort of Platonic republic, but a historically existing divine-human reality, then it can-
not be wholly wrongheaded and chalked off as mere political reductionism to ask about
concrete actions, not in political, but in pastoral life.’57
Kilian McDonnell has identified the key to this debate as Kasper’s thesis on the simul-
taneity of the universal Church and local churches, and their perichoresis.58 But
simultaneity is a vague notion. It does not resolve the question of logical priority between
‘universalist’ and ‘particularist’ approaches, to use Dulles’s terminology.59 If Ratzinger
was willing to accept Kasper’s thesis on simultaneity, he still maintained his idea of the
universal Church as ontologically prior, and Kasper did not give up his idea that the uni-
versal Church is realized ‘in and from’ the local churches. McDonnell is right that if
Ratzinger accepted simultaneity, he still insisted on the sequence of universal first, local
second. In our own view, the sequence is: vertical communion first, horizontal commu-
nion second. While the dispute appeared to be about the tension between the universal
and local churches, Ratzinger’s real concern was with the one Church’s communion with
God, in contrast to what he regarded as a one-sided stress on the horizontal. The heart of
the matter, for him, was the one Church, the one bride, not many brides, being addressed
by God’s Word from above. Hence his criticism that to focus on communion as social
unity between the churches leaves out the Church’s trinitarian depth. Rather, the one
Church is willed from above. Its unity has its origin in the unity in God and is mediated
by the paschal mystery. In his view, post-1985 Communio ecclesiology had become
horizontalized. The Church had been reduced to a sociological unity between empirical

56 Walter Kasper, ‘From the President of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity,’ America
185 (2001): 28–29.
57 Ibid., 29.
58 McDonnell, ‘The Ratzinger/Kasper Debate,’ 247.
59 Avery Dulles, ‘The Church as Communion,’ in Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley
Lectures, 1988–2007 (New York: Fordham, 2008), 129–41, at 135.

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Dalzell 115

communities, and the Church as a properly theological concept had been forgotten.
Ratzinger’s solution was to stress the vertical as a corrective.
Kasper relativized his earlier sharp distinction between the respective approaches in
terms of Plato and Aristotle and recognized that unity enabled multiplicity in both Plato
and Aristotle. Even back in April 2001, he had argued that Aristotle’s approach should
not be misconstrued as if it reduced all knowledge to mere empirical data.60 Obviously,
Plato and Aristotle ought not to be presented in a dialectical way, as if they were oppo-
sites. Likewise, the vertical and horizontal axes ought not to be regarded as mutually
exclusive in Ratzinger. It is not a question of either/or, vertical or horizontal, but of logi-
cal priority in a both/and. Whether it is a question of the Eucharist or of the Church as
communion, the vertical has priority in his thinking. Hence, in his final response to
Kasper, his speaking about his attempt to relate the Church to the question of God.61
What has priority for Ratzinger is participation in divine communion. If, for him, this
acts as a corrective to what he would consider to be overly horizontal approaches, he
does not exclude the horizontal. It is not either/or, but both/and. Even Joseph Bracken’s
recent interpretation of the Ratzinger–Kasper debate has argued for complementarity.62
To his mind, the difference between Ratzinger and Kasper is not so much the difference
between Platonism and Aristotelianism, but differing paradigms for understanding the
relation between the One and the Many in a metaphysics of being, on the one hand, and
a metaphysics of becoming, on the other. Rather than Ratzinger’s One, as a higher-order
entity, ordering the Many in their relations with each other, Bracken’s metaphysics of
becoming (which owes more to Alfred North Whitehead than Aristotle) thinks of the One
as a shared field of activity, which is generated and sustained by the dynamic relations of
the Many to each other. In this approach, which clearly prioritizes the horizontal over the
vertical, the Many, the particular churches, co-create the reality of the One, the universal
Church, not as an institutional reality greater than themselves, but as the context for their
on-going interrelation. But in this respect, Bracken is perhaps unfair to Kasper. He pro-
poses that Kasper’s Aristotelianism is closer to this metaphysics of becoming without his
fully understanding it. But Kasper’s ‘Aristotelianism’ does not regard the universal
Church as some sort of amalgamation of individual churches. More importantly, he does
not think of it as only existing from the local churches, but as realized in them, both in
and from. In response to Ratzinger’s humorous remarks about Gnilka and Bultmann,
Kasper actually took the opportunity to point out that he had quoted Gnilka not only in
relation to the priority of the local church in Paul, but also on the Church as one in the
deutero-Pauline letters. And, in that context, he had reiterated his position that he did not
see the Church as the sum of particular communities.63
For his part, Joseph Komonchak has demonstrated that support can be found for
both the particularist and universalist approaches in the documents of Vatican II, and,

60 Kasper, ‘On the Church,’ 13.

61 Ratzinger, ‘The Local Church and the Universal Church,’ 8.
62 Joseph Bracken, ‘Communion Ecclesiologies after Vatican II,’ Milltown Studies 68 (2011):
37–71, at 39, 50–52, 71.
63 Kasper, ‘From the President of the Council for Promoting Christian Unity,’ 29; Kasper, ‘Das
Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirche,’ 797.

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116 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

following Komonchak, Susan K. Wood has taken the balanced view that, in the tension
between the two, it is not a question of one over and against the other, but of they being
mutually corrective.64 It is perhaps also worth remembering that De Lubac, the ‘master
of paradox,’ as Dennis M. Doyle has called him, was able to combine the mystery of
the Church and its being a social reality at the same time. Ratzinger clearly does this
too. As we have seen, his idea of communion has both vertical and horizontal axes. But
if his exchanges with Kasper show that he is willing to accept the simultaneity aspect
of a paradox, which De Lubac identified, it is not clear that he is willing to give up the
logical priority of the vertical within a simultaneity of the vertical and horizontal.65
Ratzinger does not go as far as mutual correction, but only ever regards the vertical as
a corrective to the horizontal.

Orthopraxis
Our third theme is orthopraxis, and Ratzinger’s approach to it can be understood by way
of an adaptation of the Kantian dictum: ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions
without concepts are blind.’66 For Ratzinger, orthodoxy without orthopraxis is empty;
orthopraxis without orthodoxy is blind. The question of orthopraxis was addressed in the
Congregation’s 1984 Instruction, Libertatis Nuntius. In 1986, Libertatis Conscientia
considered liberation from the perspective of Tradition. But even before the 1984
Instruction appeared, Ratzinger, as private theologian, wrote a short theological text,
published in the Ratzinger Report, which was highly critical of Liberation theology and
its idea of praxis. What had led to this practical theology, to his mind, had been the post-
Council theological situation: first, dissatisfaction with traditional methods and a prefer-
ence for Scripture and the signs of the times; secondly, a turning to the world, which, in
his view, had deteriorated into a naïve belief in psychology, sociology, and a Marxist
interpretation of history; and, thirdly, criticism of Tradition by modern biblical exegesis,
which encouraged new constructions. He also believed that the post-war philosophical
situation had made a contribution, with neo-Marxism appearing to hold out more prom-
ise than existentialist philosophy. To his mind, this theological and philosophical situa-
tion had invited a new answer to the challenge of poverty and oppression, one which was
based on the apparent hope proposed by Marxist philosophies.67 Given his emphasis on
the vertical, it is not surprising that he was particularly critical of the Marxist concept of
history having become a crucial interpretative category. In his remarks on the anthropo-
logical vision behind Liberatis conscientia, he added to the Marxist heritage the

64 Joseph Komonchak, ‘The Local Church and the Church Catholic: The Contemporary
Theological Problematic,’ The Jurist 52 (1992): 435–36, at 435; Wood, ‘The Church as
Communion,’ 176.
65 Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith, trans. Paule Simn, Sadie Kreilkamp, and Ernest
Beaumont (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 12; Dennis M. Doyle, ‘Henri de Lubac and the
Roots of Communion Ecclesiology,’ Theological Studies 60 (1999): 209–27, at 212.
66 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan,
1929), A51/B75, 93.
67 Ratzinger and Messori, The Ratzinger Report, 177–78.

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Dalzell 117

influence of evolutionary ideas, Hegel, and sociology.68 History had become the real
revelation and the real interpreter of the Bible. The Magisterium with its emphasis on
abiding truths had come to be seen as inimical to historical progress. He even went so far
as to claim that history had swallowed up the concepts of God and revelation.69
Ratzinger’s critique of Liberation theology is well known. Christianity had become the
historical praxis of liberation, with metaphysical theology being regarded as idealistic and,
therefore, lacking in reality, or condemned as a vehicle for the maintenance of the status quo.
He also singled out Liberation theology’s understanding of ‘the option for the poor.’ In his
view, this had become an amalgam of a basic Christian truth—God siding with the poor—
and an unChristian fundamental option. The biblical concept of the poor had facilitated a
fusion of the biblical idea of history with Marxist dialectic. And so the key problem, in his
judgement, was the stress on praxis. In Liberation theology, the Kingdom of God was
defined by reference only to the praxis of Jesus, and not theoretically. It meant an active
transformation of historical reality into the Kingdom. Following the central example of the
Exodus, salvation had become the praxis of liberation. The paschal mystery had been
reduced to a revolutionary symbol, and the Eucharist was being seen as a celebration of
liberation in the sense of politico-messianic hope and praxis. The fundamental question, to
his mind, was the nature of truth. Liberation theology did not understand it metaphysically
since that would be idealism. Rather, truth was realized historically in praxis. Action was
truth and, therefore, the only true orthodoxy was orthopraxis. The way to counteract such a
re-interpretation of Christianity, Ratzinger proposed, was to make more visible in the Church
the logic of faith and to present it as a logic of reality attested to in lived experience.70
The 1984 Instruction maintained that liberation is first and foremost a liberation
from the slavery of sin, rather than earthly and temporal servitude. Like Balthasar and
Ratzinger himself, this Instruction, and Liberatis conscientia after it, emphasized the
link between the Exodus experience and the Covenant on Mount Sinai, and stressed
that the Exodus cannot be reduced to a political liberation.71 The first effect of sin was
on the relationship between God and humanity—what we have been calling the verti-
cal axis—and could not be restricted to ‘social sin.’72 But, because of the Marxist
conception of reality, it asserted that there was in Liberation theology a subversion of
the meaning of truth. There was no truth apart from partisan praxis: truth was made in
the class struggle, and this had given rise to a historicist immanentism.73 According to
the Instruction, there was a tendency to identify the Kingdom of God with the human

68 Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 256.

69 Ratzinger and Messori, The Ratzinger Report, 182.
70 Ibid., 185–86.
71 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Libertatis nuntius, nos. 4.3, 10.5; Congregation for
the Doctrine of the Faith, Liberatis conscientia, no. 3.44; Thomas G. Dalzell, The Dramatic
Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000), 232; Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 267.
72 John Paul II’s encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987) expressed an awareness of ‘structures
of sin’ (Sollicitudo rei socialis, no. 40); Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Libertatis
nuntius, nos. 4.3, 4.14.
73 Sollicitudo rei socialis, nos. 8.2–7.

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118 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

liberation movement and to regard history as the subject of its own development
and a process of human self-redemption—what we might call the horizontal axis of
the Kingdom. Where Balthasar understood this in terms of a secularized semitism,
Libertatis nuntius spoke of a ‘purely temporal messianism.’74 As in Ratzinger’s own
text, there was in the theologies of Liberation a confusion of the Biblical poor and
the proletariat of Marx. Faith, hope, and charity had been given a new content and
emptied of their theological reality. Against this, it was asserted that a true theology
of liberation would be one founded on the Word of God, correctly interpreted by the
Magisterium. The 1984 Instruction addressed the link between orthodoxy and
orthopraxis too.75 It asserted that the new hermeneutic had led not only to a political
re-reading of the Scriptures, but also a relativizing of theological criteria for truth.
Orthodoxy, or the ‘right rule of faith,’ had been replaced by ‘orthopraxy’ as the
supreme criterion of theological truth. Against this, the indispensable pillars of
human progress and liberation were said to be the truth about Jesus Christ, the truth
about the Church, and the truth about humanity and its dignity. And, as for praxis,
it was stated that a healthy theological method would take the praxis of the Church
into account, a praxis that comes from faith and is a lived expression of it.76
These latter remarks are important in that they demonstrate an order of priority. Rebecca
Chopp has demonstrated that in certain forms of Liberation theology, praxis was being under-
stood as faith itself, not the expression of faith.77 According to the Instruction, an authentic
theology of liberation would prioritize the faith of the Church and understand praxis as a
consequence of it. In Ratzinger’s own thinking, this comes to expression in the priority of
logos over ethos. This formula he borrowed from Romano Guardini. The seventh chapter of
Guardini’s 1918 book Spirit of the Liturgy bore the title ‘The Primacy of the Logos over the
Ethos.’78 In Ratzinger’s 1986 lecture, Politik und Erlösung, he accused Gustavo Gutierrez of
putting ethos before logos and of irrationality.79 In his view, Gutierrez had collapsed libera-
tion as socio-economic and theological into liberation as utopian, something which Gutierrez
later denied.80 Defending Gutierrez, James Corkery has demonstrated that Gutierrez nei-
ther reduced praxis to social liberation, nor prioritized praxis over faith. In his view,
Ratzinger’s judgement that logos follows ethos in Gutierrez was somewhat exaggerated.81

74 Ibid., nos. 9.4, 10.6.

75 Ibid., no. 10.3.
76 Ibid, nos. 11.5, 5.8, 10.3.
77 Rebecca S. Chopp, The Praxis of Suffering: An Interpretation of Liberation and Political
Theologies (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1986), 52.
78 Romano Guardini, Vom Geist der Liturgie (Freiburg: Herder, 2007), 79–88.
79 Joseph Ratzinger, Politik und Erlösung: Zum Verhältnis von Glaube, Rationalität und Irrationalem
in der sogenannten Theologie der Befreiung (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1986), 15–18, 20.
80 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation: Fifteenth Anniversary Edition with a New
Introduction by the Author (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1988), xxxix–xl.
81 James Corkery, ‘Joseph Ratzinger on Liberation Theology: What Did He Say? Why Did He
Say It? What Can Be Said?’ in Movement Or Moment? Assessing Liberation Theology Forty
Years After Medellín, ed. Patrick Claffey and Joe Egan (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 183–202,
at 200; James Corkery, Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Ideas: Wise Cautions and Legitimate
Hopes (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1979), 79.

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Dalzell 119

When Guardini saw the primacy of logos over ethos, he meant that the will does not
create truth, but has to admit the primacy of knowledge over it. Likewise, Ratzinger’s
2002 address to the bishops of Campania maintained that the will without knowledge is
blind and, consequently, that orthopraxis without knowledge is blind and leads to the
abyss.82 Where the early Christians had seen orthopraxis as inseparable from right glori-
fication of God, Ratzinger’s view is that without God, no orthopraxis can save the world.
The logos in question here is God’s own Logos. In his Christology, which is closer to the
neo-Chalcedonianism of Balthasar than the pure-Chalcedonianism of Rahner, Jesus is
the Logos of John’s Gospel, God’s own Rationality, sent into the world. Praxis, he would
hold, even liturgical praxis, cannot prescind from it.83 He does recognize that doctrine
without action is just as empty. As he put it: ‘The truth is concrete. Knowledge and action
are closely united, as are faith and life.’84 Nevertheless, he clearly orders ethos to logos,
or, in his words, ‘there does not exist an orthopraxis which is simply just, detached from
a knowledge of what is good.’85 In Ratzinger, the incarnate Logos is God’s truth and
goodness that has reached down to us.86 Thomas P. Rausch has rightly interpreted this
priority of logos over ethos in terms of a primacy of ‘reception,’ but he would regard
this as an expression of a Platonic primacy of the idea.87 In our own approach, it indicates
once again the priority of the vertical over the horizontal in his idea of salvation. Ratzinger
clearly does not do away with the need to practise justice in the world, but he orders this
practical expression of faith to truth, not the truth according to Marxist logic, but the
truth already revealed in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Logos, the truth as theological, the
truth, which has reached down to us from God. As he put it to the new Cardinals at
the consistory in February 2012: ‘may your mission in the Church and the world always
be in Christ alone, responding to his logic and not that of the world.’88

Not Platonism but a Theological Idea of Salvation

The recent critique of Ratzinger by Corkery has found a number of polemical dualisms
in Ratzinger’s theological ideas. The opposition between the wisdom of God and the
wisdom of the world, the truth of the content of Christian faith and the falseness of
various ‘isms’ in the world, Corkery traces to Ratzinger’s early life in Catholic Bavaria,
and particularly the then tension between the Church, which upheld the truth, and the
ideology of National Socialism which effaced the truth. The opposition between the

82 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 4, 2.

83 Benedict XVI, Sacramentum caritatis, no. 35.
84 Ratzinger, ‘Eucharist, Communion and Solidarity,’ 4.
85 Ibid.
86 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Vorfragen zu einer Theologie der Erlösung,’ in Erlösung und Emanzipation,
ed. Leo Scheffczyk (Freiburg: Herder, 1973), 141–55, at 141.
87 Thomas Rausch, Pope Benedict XVI: An Introduction to His Theological Vision (Mahwah,
NJ: Paulist, 2009), 44.
88 Benedict XVI, ‘The Logic of Faith is Service: Homily on the Occasion of the Ordinary
Public Consistory for the Creation of 22 New Cardinals, 18th February 2012,’ L’Osservatore
Romano, February 22, 2012, 10.

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120 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

beauty of the faith and the lack of beauty that he had experienced is thought by Corkery
to have created an antecedent inclination for contrast.89 The theological roots of this he
relates to Ratzinger’s preference for Augustine over Aquinas, Augustine who coun-
tered the Manichees, Pelagians, and Donatists, and contrasted the ‘city of God’ and the
‘earthly city.’ In addition, Ratzinger’s later study of Bonaventure and his theology of
history, again rather than Aquinas, is judged to have been a missed opportunity to con-
sider the integrity of nature and its not being destroyed by grace.90 Likewise,
Komonchak has seen a consistent neo-Augustinian, Bonaventurean approach in
Ratzinger and compared the late Bonaventure’s anti-Aristotelianism with Ratzinger’s
post-Vatican II counter-cultural stance.91 And while Rausch has noted the preference
in Ratzinger for the Platonic heritage over an Aristotelian one, he recognizes that
Ratzinger actually privileges Augustine over Plato, since Plato’s philosophy was ulti-
mately hypothetical, whereas Augustine discovered true wisdom in Jesus as the subsis-
tent wisdom of God.92 The reason for this Augustinian preference, as is well known,
was Ratzinger’s impatience with neo-scholasticism, which turned him against its
emphasis on St Thomas. Finding it too impersonal, he preferred the personalism of
Augustine.93 Where Aquinas’s own epistemology can be understood as intellectualist,
Ratzinger would think that the intellect alone is insufficient for true knowledge of God.
In Ratzinger, after Augustine, it is the heart that knows God.94
Corkery recognizes that one of the features of Ratzinger’s theology is that the God
of Christian faith and the god of the philosophers are one, as in Aquinas. Nevertheless,
he would question Ratzinger’s idea that faith does not perfect philosophy, but, after
Augustine again, purifies it. And relevant to our own argument about a stress on the
vertical is Corkery’s highlighting in Ratzinger a priority of receiving over making.
Rowland, for her part, has contended that it is too much of a broad brush approach to
explain Ratzinger’s theological stances in terms of a preference for Augustine and
Bonaventure over Aquinas. To her mind the choice is between Rahner’s Transcendental
Thomism and what she calls the ‘Augustinian Thomism’ of De Lubac and Balthasar.95
Komonchak, for one, had described Ratzinger’s approach in Augustinian terms shortly
after the papal election. He had earlier distinguished typically Augustinian and
Thomist ways of doing theology. The Augustinian approach, he wrote, makes a sharp

89 Corkery, Joseph Ratzinger’s Theological Ideas, 21–22, 25.

90 Ibid., 26.
91 Joseph Komonchak, ‘The Church in Crisis: Pope Benedict’s Theological Vision,’ Commonweal
132–33 (2005): 11–14, at 13.
92 Rausch, Pope Benedict XVI, 42–46; Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology:
Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 347.
93 Joseph Komonchak, ‘A Postmodern Augustinian Thomism?’ in Augustine and Postmodern
Thought: A New Alliance against Modernity? ed. Lieven Boeve, Mathijs Lamberigts, and
Maarten Wisse (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 123–46, at 125.
94 Saint Augustine, Eighty-three Different Questions, trans. David L. Mosher, The Fathers of
the Church, ed. Hermigild Dressler et al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America,
1982), question 35, 63–67; Joseph Ratzinger, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the
Jordan to the Transfiguration (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 92–93.
95 Rowland, Ratzinger’s Faith, 16, 150.

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Dalzell 121

distinction between sin and grace, reason and faith, with the natural world having no
solidity except as a sign pointing to the spiritual and supernatural, whereas the Thomist
approach attributes to nature its own solidity, laws and autonomy, and regards sin as a
falling short of nature and the supernatural as fulfilling nature.96 Like Rausch,
Komonchak does not ignore the debt which Aquinas owed to Augustine. But against
Rowland’s Augustinian Thomism, which he understands to be, in some respects, an
attempt to counteract efforts to set Augustine and Aquinas apart, he would still hold
that there is something to be learnt from exploring distinctively Augustinian and
Thomist ways of engaging culture.97
If it is true that it is more accurate to speak of a preference in Ratzinger for Augustine
over Aquinas, rather than Plato over Aristotle, we have stressed the priority of the vertical
over the horizontal because these are terms which appear in his own texts on the Eucharist,
communion, and orthopraxis. He has openly stated that he developed his theology in dia-
logue with Augustine, and admitted to Peter Seewald that he is, to some extent, a Platonist.98
But, as he asserted in response to Kasper, the heart of the matter is not a question of
Platonism or Aristotelianism, but the notion of salvation history. In Ratzinger’s idea of
salvation, what has primacy is God’s addressing the world from above. This is why he has
criticized the emphasis on the Church as the people of God. That notion is too sociological,
too horizontal, to his mind. In fact, he has argued that the New Testament references to the
People of God mostly concern the people of Israel, and only rarely the Church.99 Rather,
just as the rabbis taught that God wanted a people that would live for God’s will, he under-
stands the Church, the new and universalized Israel, the one bride of Christ, to be God’s
partner addressed from above. In this sense, his debate with Kasper can be misunderstood
as simply a disagreement about the priority of the universal Church over the local church.
Far more important is his understanding communion ecclesiology primarily in terms of the
vertical communion which begins with God. For him, the Church, as the editor of the
Frankfurter Allgemeine expressed it, is a ‘great divine idea,’ not a ‘swarming together.’100

Conclusion
It is not being argued here that Joseph Ratzinger ignores the horizontal axis, whether in
relation to the Eucharist, communion, or orthopraxis. He does not advocate a neo-Platonic

  96 Joseph Komonchak, ‘Vatican II and the Encounter between Catholicism and Liberalism,’
in Catholicism and Liberalism: Contributions to American Public Philosophy, ed. R. Bruce
Douglass and David Hollenbach (New York: Cambridge University, 1994), 76–99, at 87.
  97 Komonchak, ‘A Postmodern Augustinian Thomism?’ 124, 145–46; Tracey Rowland, Culture
and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican Two (London: Routledge, 2003); Rausch, Pope
Benedict XVI, 47–48.
  98 Joseph Ratzinger, ‘Glaube, Geschichte und Philosophie: Zum Echo auf Einführung in das
Christentum,’ Hochland 61(1969): 533–43, at 543; Joseph Ratzinger, Salt of the Earth: The
Church at the End of the Millennium, An Interview with Peter Seewald (San Francisco:
Ignatius, 1997), 41.
 99 Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics, 18.
100 Editor, ‘Die groβe Gottesidee “Kirche” ist keine Schwärmerei,’ Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, December, 22, 2000, 46.

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122 Irish Theological Quarterly 78(2)

escape from the world. Nor is his theology as dialectical as Karl Barth’s. He speaks about
faith and reason. Faith without reason, in his view, becomes pathological. And if he
stresses the spiritual over the material, he is not a Gnostic. For him, it is a question of
knowledge and love. The incarnate Logos is not only God’s wisdom, but also God’s love,
which moves us to love others. Likewise, the vertical does not do away with the horizon-
tal in his approach. It is not either/or, but both/and. The Eucharist involves heaven and
earth, God and the communion of all who worship in spirit and in truth. As Spirit of the
Liturgy put it, ‘everything comes together, the horizontal and the vertical.’101 Ecclesial
communion, while it is understood primarily in vertical terms as the new relationship
between God and the world, is thought to extend horizontally to a new relationship between
human beings. And orthopraxis has its place in his idea of the transformation of horizon-
tal solidarity into Christian responsibility for others. Nevertheless, there remains in his
theology a stress on the vertical, and the horizontal is subordinated to it. Suchen was
droben ist (seek what is above) is one of its Leitmotifs.102 But, ultimately, this priority is
not philosophical, but due to his idea of salvation as a gift that is received from above.
The priority of ‘receiving over making’ in his theology is not due to his Platonism, or
neo-Augustinianism, but to his theological idea of salvation as God redeeming the world
in the Logos sent from above.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Author biography
Thomas Dalzell SM is head of theology at All Hallows College, a college of Dublin City University.
His first doctorate was on the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and his second on Freud and
Lacan. He is the author of The Dramatic Encounter of Divine and Human Freedom in the Theology
of Hans Urs von Balthasar (2nd ed., Lang, 2000) and Freud’s Schreber between Psychiatry and
Psychoanalysis (Karnac, 2011). His current research is on what theology can learn from Lacan.

101 Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, 49.

102 Joseph Ratzinger, Suchen was droben ist: Meditationen das Jahr hindurch (Freiburg: Herder,
1985); Joseph Ratzinger, Seek that which is Above: Meditations through the Year (San
Francisco: Ignatius, 1986). I am very grateful to Associate Prof. Jim Corkery SJ, Prof. Brendan
Leahy, and Dr Declan Marmion SM for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article.

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