On June 7, 2008, Benedict XVI issued an explicit challenge “to relaunch philosophy” in a way that “widens the horizons of rationality.” He makes reference to his own thought expressed in “Introduction to Christianity:” “Christian faith has made its clear choice: against the gods of religion for the God of philosophers, in other words against the myth of mere custom for the truth of being.” The “myth of mere custom” consists in naming gods within the visible cosmos experienced sensibly. At Regensburg, Benedict spoke of an expansion of reason – a first enlightenment - that transcended sensible experience. He spoke of the removal of the Jews from the Promised Land that liberated their vision of the (provincial) God of the burning bush to be the universal Creator of all lands. The God who said “I am” was the God of all that is. A mutual enrichment by cross-fertilization of Jewish faith and Greek philosophy occurred in the fifth and sixth centuries B.C. whereby the Hellenic search for the “absolute” began in Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, etc. on the one hand while Abrahamic faith was translated into Wisdom literature and rendered as profound human insight. “Thus,” Benedict said, “despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic periods, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment…”[1]
Based on this exilic experience, Benedict says that “early Christianity boldly and resolutely made its choice and carried out its purification by deciding for the God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions.” And since the gods of the various religions inhabited the sensible cosmos, this choice definitively demythologized the world and religions of the world. But it did more. It changed the very meaning of “being.” Consider the tension that the meaning of being as “substance” underwent (i.e. as “to-be-in-self-standing-under-the-accidents”) when it was asked in the struggle with Arianism to account for the equality of the Father and the Son and yet at the same time to account for their difference. This Christian ontological account of “I and the Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30), and “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14, 29) in which the Father and the Son are equally being yet they are two irreducibly different Persons beggars the Greek conceptual metaphysic. The same occurs with two realms of “substantial” being in
the one substantial being of Christ, or the union of the supernatural being of grace and the substantial nature of man. In a word, the Greek meaning of being that has been so useful over the ages is ultimately unuseful in giving an account of the faith in such a way that it can become universal reason. In the case of accounting for the relation of the divine and the human in Christ, the use of the Greek concept of nature as principle of activity stymied the post-Chalcedonian period for 230 years (451 – 681) in which the divine and the human “natures” were conceived to be “in parallel.” Benedict commented that “It is common enough for the theological textbooks to pay scant attention to the theological development which followed Chalcedon. In many ways one is left with the impression that dogmatic Christology comes to a stop with a certain parallelism of the two natures in Christ.”[2] This parallelism – which is the ground of all the dualisms that are still aporetic for us: grace/nature, supernatural/natural, faith/reason, Church/State, etc.) – seeks resolution in what Benedict offers of “compenetration” of the human and the divine will as ontologically distinct but instruments of the same Subject-Agent of the Person of the Logos. In a word, the solution is to be found not in being as substance where the will says “Yes,” but in being as Person exercising two ontologically distinct wills as one “Yes.” The relational person says “Yes,” not the will. But I get ahead of the argument.
In the same “Introduction to Christianity,” Benedict remarks in giving a relational account of the Persons in the Trinity. He quotes Augustine: “In God there are no accidents, only substance and relation.’”[3] Then he throws down the challenge to philosophy: “Therein lies concealed a revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today ‘objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that eh task imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed…”[4] In other areas, Benedict holds to the same line: “I believe that if one follows this struggle in which human reality had to be brought in, as it were, and affirmed for Jesus, one sees what tremendous effort and intellectual transformation lay behind the working out of this concept of person, which was quite foreign in its inner disposition to the Greek and the Latin mind. It is not conceived in substantialist, but… in existential terms… Remaining on the level of the Greek mind, Boethius defined ‘person’ as naturae rationalis individual substantia, as the individual substance of a rational nature. One sees that the concept of person stands entirely on the level of substance. This cannot clarify anything about the Trinity or about Christology; it is an affirmation that remains on the level of the Greek mind which thinks in substantialist terms.”[5]
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