Fr Nuehaus in the December First Things has a couple of entries on Ratzinger’s 1988 Erasmus Lectures, part of which were published under the title “On The Way To Christ.”
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0512/public.html
I found this part interesting (compare it with the prevailing norms of Liberalism), and wanted to share it.
” The first time I had occasion to engage Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, over several days of conversation was in connection with our annual Erasmus Lecture, which he gave in 1988. The conference following the lecture addressed the contemporary crisis in biblical interpretation and resulted in a little book, Biblical Interpretation in Crisis: The Ratzinger Conference on Bible and Church, now, unfortunately, out of print. The gist of Ratzinger’s argument is nicely caught in an essay on the tenth anniversary of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and included in a fine collection just published by Ignatius Press, On the Way to Jesus Christ. . . .
Bear with me, for there is so much good stuff in On the Way to Christ. Herewith an extended reflection on the moral life. “The Catechism does not claim to offer the only possible or even the best systematic formulation of moral theology—that was not its purpose. It demonstrates the essential anthropological and theological connections that are essential to the moral activity of men. Its point of departure is its description of the dignity of man, which constitutes his greatness and at the same time the basis of his obligations. Then it shows that man’s desire to be happy is the interior driving force and guide of moral action. Man’s primordial drive, which no one can deny and which no one, ultimately, opposes, is his desire for happiness, for a successful, fulfilled life. Morality, for the Catechism, which relies on the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, is doctrine concerning the prosperous life—so to speak, the elaboration of the rules in the game of happiness. The book combines this primordial human thought with the beatitudes of Jesus, which detach the concept of happiness from all banality, reveal its true depth, and thus manifest the connection between happiness and the good in general, the Good in person—God. Then the basic components of moral action are set forth: freedom, the object and intention of the act, the passions (emotions), conscience, the virtues, sin—which is a failure of virtue—the social character of being human, and then finally the relation between law and grace. Christian moral theology is never simply an ethics of law, yet it also goes beyond the framework of an ethics of virtue. It is an ethics-in-dialogue, because the moral activity of man unfolds from his encounter with God, which means that no longer is it just one’s own self-sufficient and autonomous action, mere human accomplishment, but rather a response to the gift of love and so an involvement in the dynamic of love—God’s own Self, a dynamic that makes man truly free and brings him to the true height of his dignity. Moral action is therefore never simply one’s own accomplishment, but neither is it just something propped up from outside. Genuine moral action is entirely a gift, and yet precisely in this way it is entirely our own doing, because what is one’s own can unfold only in the gift of love, and, conversely, the gift does not render man powerless but rather brings him back to himself.â€
Thanks for posting that instructive excerpt
“Morality, for the Catechism, which relies on the Church Fathers, especially Augustine, is doctrine concerning the prosperous life—so to speak, the elaboration of the rules in the game of happiness. The book combines this primordial human thought with the beatitudes of Jesus, which detach the concept of happiness from all banality, reveal its true depth, and thus manifest the connection between happiness and the good in general, the Good in person—God. Then the basic components of moral action are set forth: freedom, the object and intention of the act, the passions (emotions), conscience, the virtues, sin—which is a failure of virtue—the social character of being human, and then finally the relation between law and grace.” (—from the forum post)
One of the astronauts was once on TV explaining how complicated the orbital docking manoeuvre was. He said, “People don’t understand it’s not easy to do. If you see the ship you want to dock with in orbit ahead of you, you can’t just step on the gas and accelerate to come up to it as you would driving a car because if you do, you move to a higher orbit and miss ship you’re trying to dock with. There are special and complicated ways you have to do it.”
Liberals consist of two kinds of people: dim ones who think all you do to get from point A to point B is step on the gas, and clever ones who know that’s not always true but won’t let on, because they benefit in some way from the mistakes of the dim ones.
When liberals raised taxes on luxury pleasure boats expecting it would generate more tax revenue (or, the dim liberals expected that) the wealthy people who buy these boats avoided the tax by no longer patronizing their traditional sources of them, the boat-building yards making yachts and cabin cruisers along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts, and simply took their business offshore to builders in the Bahamas or the Caribbean or I forget where exactly, where prices were lower anyway.
The American yards went out of business and the overall effect of the new tax law was net loss of tax revenue to the government due to worker layoffs and business failures along the Maine and Massachusetts coasts and still no payment of the increased luxury boat tax by the rich—which of course the dim liberals couldn’t understand because they didn’t see how if you raised taxes you could get less money, and the clever liberals understood perfectly but wouldn’t explain it to their dim friends because they benefit in this or that fashion from their friends’ dimwittedness.
In the same way, morality in its depths—not superficially, but in its underlying depths—is not that easy a subject, and there are special and complicated ways you have to look at it or it won’t cohere and the whole idea of morality as we in the civilized West know it will risk falling apart. What things like the Catholic Catechism do is give us the distilled wisdom of subtle, highly moral thinkers accumulated over centuries since antiquity—the long, arduous working-out of morality’s underlying details so as to make them self-consistent as much as is humanly possible and something we can believe in and apply no matter how deeply we dig into their depths.
“Moral action is therefore never simply one’s own accomplishment, but neither is it just something propped up from outside. Genuine moral action is entirely a gift, and yet precisely in this way it is entirely our own doing, because what is one’s own can unfold only in the gift of love, and, conversely, the gift does not render man powerless but rather brings him back to himself.†(—from the forum post)
This of course touches on, or expresses in a slightly different way, two of the deepest aspects of Christian morality: 1) the fact that we are endowed by our creator with free will—not with some semblance of it, but with the real McCoy, and 2) the extremely profound and moving (extremely profound and moving to me, at least) phenomenon that knowing confession and repentance bring forgiveness strengthens rather than weakens our resolve to try to do right and not sin (one might think, in other words, that forgiveness in Christianity seemingly being “so easily had” could make Christians more careless of sin and doing wrong, but it’s the opposite, and what I find so moving and profound is the question, “Why is it the opposite?”).
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Long live free Flanders!