2.1 Contemporary Definitions of Freedom
Karl Marx defines freedom as the ability “to do one thing today and another tomorrow; to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, breed cattle in the evening and criticize after dinner, just as I please.”107 Similarly, Ratzinger holds that popular opinion defines freedom today, “as the right and the opportunity to do just what we wish and not to have to do anything which we do not wish to do…Freedom would mean that our own will is the sole norm of our action and that the will not only can desire anything but also has the chance to carry out its desire.”108 Here, one has arrived at a postmodern understanding of freedom, as that which need not have recourse to reason, or to nature. How did this separation between freedom and truth, between will and reason, between history and being come about? A full treatment on this topic is not possible within the scope of this study, so a brief survey following Ratzinger’s assessment will have to suffice.
Ratzinger begins his history of the development of the contemporary understanding of freedom by considering Martin Luther, and Luther’s cry for the freedom of conscience in the face of the authority of the Church.109 The Church, her structure and magisterium, were now seen, not as a support, but as an impediment to freedom. For Luther, “Redemption now meant
105 Ratzinger, “The Holy Spirit as Communio,” 176.
106 Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ, 113. See also Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 84. 107 Karl Marx and F. Engels. Werke, 39 vol. (Berlin, 1961-1971), 3:33, as quoted in Joseph Ratzinger, “Truth and
Freedom,” Joseph Ratzinger in Communio: Anthropology and Culture, trans. Adrian J. Walker (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 148.
108 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 148.
109 For a more thorough treatment of Ratzinger’s historical survey, see Peter John McGregor, Heart to Heart: The Spiritual Christology of Joseph Ratzinger (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2016), 244-49. See also Andrew T.J.
Kaethler, “Freedom in Relationship: Joseph Ratzinger and Alexander Schmemann in Dialogue,” New Blackfriars (2014), 398-401.
liberation, liberation from the yoke of a supra-individual order.”110 Next, Ratzinger treats the Enlightenment’s cry for rationalism, at the bottom of which lies a Cartesian skepticism that tends to cast doubt on sense perception, tradition, and the like.111 Descartes’ cogito ergo sum112 further opened the growing divide between being and knowing. The Church no longer holds a place of authority, and, “reason shall reign, and in the end no other authority is admitted than that of reason. Only what is accessible to reason has validity; what is not reasonable, that is, not
accessible to reason, cannot be binding either.”113 Rationalism is the way to an enlightened form of freedom and, as Ratzinger points out, Enlightenment rationalism would generally proceed in one of two socio-political philosophies. The first is what Ratzinger calls the “Anglo-Saxon current,” “with its predominantly natural rights orientation and its proclivity toward
constitutional democracy.”114 This understanding becomes the foundation of democracy, that “freedom is not bestowed on man from without. He is a bearer of rights because he is created free,”115 and the individual, with his individual rights, must be protected from the community. The second procession of rationalism can be identified in Marxism. Marxism “proceeds from the principle that freedom is indivisible, hence, that it exists as such only when it is the freedom of all. Freedom is tied to equality.”116 Ratzinger goes on to note that the Marxist idea of individual freedom as dependent on the whole means that the struggle for freedom ultimately means changing the macro level.117 In many ways, these Enlightenment projects have ground to a halt. The limitations of Marxism and democracy have been revealed, and a third trend within the Enlightenment pursuit of liberation now becomes dominant — anarchy. Ratzinger says, “The anarchist trend in the longing for freedom is growing in strength because the ordered forms of communal freedom are unsatisfactory. The grand promises made at the inception of modernity have not been kept.”118 Rousseau’s concept of freedom in anarchy involves separating reason
110 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 151.
111 See Rene Descartes, “Meditation I - Of the Things of Which We May Doubt,” in Meditations on First Philosophy
(New York: BN Publishing, 2007), 75-79.
112 See Rene Descartes, “Part IV,” in Discourse on Method (New York: BN Publishing, 2007), 31. See also
Descartes, “Meditation III - Of God: That He Exists,” in Meditations on First Philosophy, 92. Here, Descartes says, “I am because I doubt.”
113 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 152. 114 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 152. 115 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 152. 116 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 154. 117 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 154-55. 118 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 156.
and will from nature, it is an anti-metaphysical position, that sees nature as anti-rational.119 This attempt at freedom aims to sweepingly annul norms and to extend individual liberty.120
Rousseau’s anarchic movement aimed at autarchy, a radical particularism and the complete freedom of the individual. Postmodernism’s rejection of the metanarrative, and its apparent separation of reason and nature results in a an apparent triumph of the will, unfettered by reason, over nature. As a final point, here, Ratzinger argues that Sartre’s philosophy of freedom captures this radical understanding. He characterizes Sartre’s philosophy as regarding:
Man as condemned to freedom. In contrast to the animal, man has no “nature.” The animal lives out its existence according to laws it is simply born with; it does not need deliberate what to do with its life. But man’s essence is undetermined. It is an open question. I must decide myself what I understand by "humanity,” what I want to do with it, and how I want to fashion it. Man has no nature, but is sheer freedom. His life must take some direction or other, but in the end it comes to nothing. This absurd freedom is man’s hell…The isolation of a radical concept of freedom, which for Sartre was a lived experience, shows with all desirable clarity that liberation from the truth does not produce pure freedom, but abolishes it. Anarchic freedom, taken radically, does not redeem, but makes man a miscarried creature, a pointless being.121
In a most striking way, anarchic freedom manifests itself in gender ideology. Margaret McCarthy, in her article “Gender Ideology and the Humanum,” traces the development of contemporary gender ideology through the decades, beginning with John Stuart Mill’s argument that society has brought about the subjection of women, and moving to De Beauvoir’s theory of gender as a “social construct,” before addressing Firestone’s turn away from addressing
“outside” problems like society, eduction, etc. and considering the problem to be the female body itself (namely, its biological demands with regard to reproduction). McCarthy goes on to point out that Judith Butler takes both threads (external = society, and internal = body) and
119 McGregor, Heart to Heart, 247.
120 Ratzinger, “Truth and Freedom,” 166. To this point, one could add Derrida’s definition of deconstructionism as
an apt descriptor of postmodern freedom: “the dissolution of ‘essentials’ or ‘essences.’” See Gerl-Falkovitz, “Recent Developments in International Feminist Philosophy,” 2.
argues that the body itself is a social construct, throwing out the idea of the givenness of nature, and clearly a path “for a bodily construct of one’s own making, with no opposing bodily evidence in the way.”122 At the bottom of it, person is now understood according to a radical individualism as a “self-maker.”123
In response to this historical survey, Ratzinger asserts that while Austrian philosopher, Ernst Topitsch, held that no reasonable man could still, today, want to be like, or equal to God, “if we look more closely we must assert the exact opposite: the implicit goal of all of
modernity’s struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another.”124 Within this thirst for freedom, however contorted by modernity and postmodernity, lies a fundamental truth that Topitsch denies: that the “thirst for freedom and liberation lives in every human being,” and that “nothing from what has been attained really corresponds to our desire.”125 Following this historical assessment of the status of freedom, one is left to question: What is freedom, actually? Where does freedom come from? In order to come to a more complete understanding of the role of the Son in human freedom, the present study will briefly treat Ratzinger’s understanding of God and his understanding of the hypostatic union.
2.2 Ratzinger’s Definition of Freedom as Rooted in God
With regard to freedom in Ratzinger’s thought, Peter John McGregor points out that the starting point is Logos,126 or as Ratzinger calls it, “the primacy of the logos as against mere matter.”127 Logos is “idea,” “freedom,” and “love,” and faith means “deciding for the view that thought and meaning do not just form a chance by-product of being; that, on the contrary, all being is a product of thought and, indeed, in its innermost structure is itself thought.”128 Ratzinger calls logos, in this sense, the “objective mind,” that stands before and above human
122 See Margaret McCarthy, “Gender Ideology and the Humanum,” Communio 43 (2016), 278-85, quote on 284. 123 McCarthy, “Gender Ideology and the Humanum," 286.
124 Ratzinger, "Truth and Freedom,” 159. 125 Ratzinger, “Jesus Christ Today,” 19.
126 See McGregor, Heart to Heart, 251-56. See also Bonagura, “Logos to Son,” 476-82. 127 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 151.
“subjective mind,”meaning “our thinking is, indeed, only a rethinking of what in reality has already been thought out beforehand.”129 From here, Ratzinger notes that one has come to the key distinction between materialism and idealism. Matter is that “being” which “does not itself comprehend being, that ‘is’ but does not understand itself.”130 Conversely, “mind” can be “described as being that understands itself, as being that is present to itself.”131 This idealistic solution to the problem of being “signifies the idea that all being is the being-thought by one single consciousness. The unity of being consists in the identity of the one consciousness, whose impulses constitute the many things that are.”132 Christian belief actually goes beyond both positions. Indeed any being is the result of being-thought, and, while matter cannot comprehend itself, it can point beyond itself. And, in response to idealism, Christianity claims:
Being is being-thought — yet not in such a way that it remains only thought and that the appearance of independence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks more closely. On the contrary, Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence….While [Idealism]…explains everything real as the content of a single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other hand, is true being itself.133 While all being is being-thought, the source of unity within being (or between being (lowercase) and Being (uppercase)) is not found in the “single consciousness” of the “objective mind.” Instead, at the core of Christianity lies the truth that this “objective mind” creates in such a way that being is not only being-thought, but is the being-thought of Logos who is not only “idea,” but who is “love,” and, therefore, “freedom.” To be is not only being-thought, but being-thought and given freedom, which stands as a source of possible unity should the person love in return.
129 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 153. See also McGregor, Heart to Heart, 252. 130 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 156.
131 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 156-57. 132 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 157. 133 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 157.
In his commentary on freedom as it is discussed in Introduction to Christianity,
McGregor points out that up to this point, Ratzinger is only treating being-as-such, and has not yet engaged being-as-personal.134 Hence, in the next section, Ratzinger notes that Christian belief in God as logos, “in the preexisting, world-supporting reality of the creative meaning,…is at the same time…belief in the personal nature of that meaning…not an anonymous, neutral
consciousness but rather freedom, creative love, a person.”135 He adds:
If the Christian option for the logos means an option for a personal, creative meaning, then it is at the same time an option for the primacy of the particular as against the universal. The highest is not the most universal but, precisely, the particular, and the Christian faith is thus above all also the option for man as the irreducible, infinity-
oriented being. And here once again it is the option for the primacy of freedom as against the primacy of some cosmic necessity or natural law.136
Christianity goes beyond idealism in that it maintains the primacy of the particular, which is to say, the primacy of freedom. The universal, the all, is not the only reality, but instead, the particular, the “many,” holds equal footing. Universal necessity is not all, or, as noted in Ch. 2, substance is not the only primordial reality — relationality stands alongside it. Therefore, the personal nature of Logos means that freedom must be taken into account. Logos, who thinks being into existence, is, insofar as it has revealed itself, personal being. Logos-as-personal means not only is creative thinking the precondition and ground of all being and that this “objective mind” knows the whole of its thought, but that this Logos not only thinks, but also, as noted above, loves. Because Logos loves, indeed, because Logos is love, “it has given its thought the freedom of its own existence, objectivized it, released it into distinct being…this thinking knows its thought in its distinct being, loves it and, loving, upholds it.”137 Ratzinger notes that the implications of this freedom are “extensive.” By this he means that the structure of the world is
134 McGregor, Heart to Heart, 253.
135 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 158. See also McGregor, Heart to Heart, 253. 136 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 158.
not cosmic necessity, but that a certain incalculability resulting necessarily from freedom, is an inescapable part of the world. Logos-as-love, Logos-as-person, means being exists in the “arena of love” which is also “the playground of freedom,” and that evil (i.e. freely choosing against love) is possible.138 This also means that person differs from individual. Greeks saw the
individual as a reproduction, a splitting up of the idea of matter. Instead, the person is unique and unrepeatable, and oneness (i.e. sameness of human being) is “not the unique and final thing; plurality, too, has its own and definitive right.”139
Ratzinger’s The Spirit of the Liturgy takes up the topic of freedom in the concepts of
exitus and reditus. Plotinus conceived of exitus, not as a going out, but a falling down — a
falling away from divinity. Reditus, on the other hand, marks the reversal, the journey back, a redemption from finitude — a climb that marks the burden of our lives. Christianity takes up this schema but understands them in a thoroughly positive manner:
Exitus is not a fall from the infinite, the rupture of being and thus the cause of all the
sorrow in the world. No, exitus is first and foremost something thoroughly positive. It is the Creator’s free act of creation. It is his positive will that the created order should exist as something good in relation to himself, from which a response of freedom and love can be given back to him...The creature, existing in its own right, comes home to itself, and this act is an answer in freedom to God’s love. It accepts creation from God as his offer of love, and thus ensues a dialogue of love, that wholly new kind of unity that love alone can create...This reditus is a “return”, but it does not abolish creation; rather, it bestows its full and final perfection. This is how Christians understand God being “all in all.”140
Christianity understands the reality of the person as thoroughly positive and free. It is marked by the free act of the creator - an act that gives freedom and respects freedom. Man is free to
respond to God, to be in dialogue, in relationship with God, and in so doing, man steps into himself, is himself. In this act of response, this act of giving himself, man is most fully “person.”
138 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 160. See also McGregor, Heart to Heart, 254. 139 Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 161.
The person is in the image of God, the Logos, who is personal, and who is free to the extent that he receives his being from God, to the extent that he receives himself as “image of God.” Man is free to reject this original relationship or free to accept and enter into it. He was designed by Relationship and made for relationship, by Love and for love, and the extent to which he accepts this reality, lives in it, and is transformed by it is the extent to which he is free.
God freely creates man in freedom and endows man with freedom for
communion/relationship, i.e. freedom to exist as person. With this observation, one returns to the anthropological pattern explicated above. To be made in the “image of God” is to be made in the image of the “real God,” who is:
By his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Man, for his part, is God’s image precisely insofar as the “from,” “with,” and “for” constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern. Whenever there is an attempt to free ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity [as, in our infinite pursuit of freedom might lead us to believe], but to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth.141
Here, Ratzinger’s theological anthropology coincides with his anthropology of freedom. Man is being-in-relation insofar as man is made in the “image and likeness” of God. This is the truth of his existence. Precisely because man is created in the “image of God,” the thirst for freedom is its expression, “it is the thirst ‘to sit at the right hand of God,’ to be ‘like God.’”142 It is also true,
however, that because he is a being-in-relation to Love, he is a being-in-freedom. Man is free to choose if he will embrace the truth of his being-in-relation, his fundamental anthropological pattern, or not.
This fundamental anthropological pattern, this truth that stands at the heart of and which preconditions freedom, touches the whole person, including his or her “body” and “corporality.”