I was reading an old review from the Tablet today and it made me smile. It was discussing Cardinal Ratzinger before he was elected as Pope and made some interesting assertions that are rarely discussed any more, but were accepted at the time:
“It is certainly strange that the ‘enforcer’ of Catholic orthodoxy should be a self-confessed anti-Thomist. His dislike of the views of Aquinas has never been disguised and it underlies both the criticisms he did make of the Second Vatican Council even at the time and his subsequent development. For him Thomists are altogether too optimistic about human nature. His pessimism about the corruption of the human condition – and here at least his temperament is very different from the profound optimism which shines through Pope John Paul, as it shone through Vatican II – at times looks so Lutheran that he has to assert his differences with Luther a trifle self-consciously.
It was this pessimism which made him dislike so much in Vatican II’s Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes. Again and again, in his 1967 com-mentary on the council’s work, Ratzinger declares that sections of the constitution are ‘quite unsatisfactory’. The attitude which shaped Gaudium et Spes, he lamented, ‘is not at all prepared to make sin the centre of the theological edifice’. Even Lumen Gentium, in its teaching on salvation outside the Church, he found ‘extremely unsatisfactory’, its formulation bordering on Pelagianism. The truth is that Aquinas, the Second Vatican Council, and liberation theology alike represent shifts away from Augustine in a semi-Pelagian direction – shifts which Ratzinger deplores as Utopian.”
As an old ecclesiastical historian once said, Augustine is the grandfather of the Western Church. Jaroslav Pelikan wrote that he was the most influential theologian in the history of Christianity. However, in the Latin Church, Augustine was replaced in the 13th century with St. Thomas Aquinas, a self-professed disciple of Augustine, but a neo-Aristotelian rather than a neo-Platonist (like Augustine). Over time there has been a “hermeneutic of continuity” (to use one of Ratzinger’s own phrases) to blur the lines between Aquinas and Augustine, but all it takes is a quotation like the following to remind us of how ‘radical’ Augustine was in his anthropology:
In the Enchiridion St. Augustine wrote:
“But this part of the human race to which God has promised pardon and a share in His eternal kingdom, can they be restored through the merit of their own works? God forbid. For what good work can a lost man perform, except so far as he has been delivered from perdition? Can they do anything by the free determination of their own will? Again I say, God forbid. For it was by the evil use of his free-will that man destroyed both it and himself. For, as a man who kills himself must, of course, be alive when he kills himself, but after he has killed himself ceases to live, and cannot restore himself to life; so, when man by his own free-will sinned, then sin being victorious over him, the freedom of his will was lost. For of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. This is the judgment of the Apostle Peter. And as it is certainly true, what kind of liberty, I ask, can the bond-slave possess, except when it pleases him to sin? For he is freely in bondage who does with pleasure the will of his master. Accordingly, he who is the servant of sin is free to sin. And hence he will not be free to do right, until, being freed from sin, he shall begin to be the servant of righteousness. And this is true liberty, for he has pleasure in the righteous deed; and it is at the same time a holy bondage, for he is obedient to the will of God. But whence comes this liberty to do right to the man who is in bondage and sold under sin, except he be redeemed by Him who has said, If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed? And before this redemption is wrought in a man, when he is not yet free to do what is right, how can he talk of the freedom of his will and his good works, except he be inflated by that foolish pride of boasting which the apostle restrains when he says, By grace are you saved, through faith.
And lest men should arrogate to themselves the merit of their own faith at least, not understanding that this too is the gift of God, this same apostle, who says in another place that he had obtained mercy of the Lord to be faithful, here also adds: and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. And lest it should be thought that good works will be wanting in those who believe, he adds further: For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God has before ordained that we should walk in them. We shall be made truly free, then, when God fashions us, that is, forms and creates us anew, not as men— for He has done that already— but as good men, which His grace is now doing, that we may be a new creation in Christ Jesus, according as it is said: Create in me a clean heart, O God.” – St. Augustine of Hippo (Enchiridion 30-31)
Reading this, and then reading Thomas is like night and day.
Ultimately, Pope Benedict XVI is not and probably never was a Lutheran in his understanding of faith, however, he’s probably the closest to him of any to other Popes since Clement I. As Ratzinger always reminded people, he wholeheartedly accepted Augustine’s doctrine of the Church which it is often said the Churches of the Reformation rejected. Papa Benny sees salvation flowing to the Church from Christ its head, which is visible in the form of the Bishop of Rome (Pope), without whom, the world would be damned, since he is the link between God’s grace and baptized humanity.