The Divine Lamp

Dane from CatholicClasses.org alerted me to the podcast their site is hosting.  The first talk can be heard:  HERE.  Don’t let the musical introduction or the introductory banter turn you off.  In this podcast they look at the Pope’s forward to the book, along with his introduction.

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Mister Jay Dyer, a self-proclaimed “amateur theologian” who, apparently on the basis of this grand status he has conferred upon himself, decided to defect from Catholicism to Orthodoxy has now, on the same basis, accused Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) of Nestorianism. Nestorianism is defined as the belief that Jesus was two persons with two natures united in a single subsistent entity. Here is what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say on the matter:

466 The Nestorian heresy regarded Christ as a human person joined to the divine person of God’s Son. Opposing this heresy, St. Cyril of Alexandria and the third ecumenical council, at Ephesus in 431, confessed “that the Word, uniting to himself in his person the flesh animated by a rational soul, became man.” ⁸⁹ Christ’s humanity has no other subject than the divine person of the Son of God, who assumed it and made it his own, from his conception. For this reason the Council of Ephesus proclaimed in 431 that Mary truly became the Mother of God by the human conception of the Son of God in her womb: “Mother of God, not that the nature of the Word or his divinity received the beginning of its existence from the holy Virgin, but that, since the holy body, animated by a rational soul, which the Word of God united to himself according to the hypostasis, was born from her, the Word is said to be born according to the flesh.” ⁹⁰ (Source)

Is Ratzinger a Nestorain? Does he contradict the ancient Doctrine? Before answering these questions, it would, I think, be a good idea to inquire into the competence of Mister Dyer to answer them.

Dyer the Amateur Theologian

It is logic which put the “logy” in theology. Is mister Dyer possessed of the logic necessary to undertake theology? I do not believe he is.

Mister Taylor Marshall, of the CANTERBURY TALES blog responded to Dyer as follows:

Some Eastern Orthodox bloggers… have accused the Holy Father of heresy - Nestorianism no less! They have found two quotations in Ratzinger’s God and the World (pp. 293-294) that they believe proves that Benedict XVI is heretical.

I took a look at the quotes and they are not as tight as one might expect, but I think that one should first check the English translation of the work. It may be just fine in the German. The Ratzinger zinger-line is this one, which does sound a little strange:

“[Mary] was in the sense of having been the mother of the man that was entirely at one with God.”

One would expect “the mother of the person” because “man” in English does not necessarily mean “person”. But we don’t know what it was in German. Also, we should be willing to grant that Cardinal Ratzinger was not being absolutely precise. I don’t think that makes him a formal heretic. I guarantee that if you asked him personally, the Holy Father would provide a beautiful and orthodox account of the incarnation.

To which Mister Dyer responds:

The real zinger, is, in fact, the later statement:

“The Greek theologian Maximus the Confessor depicts this process in a particularly impressive way. He shows us how the “alchemy of being” is accomplished in the prayer on the Mount of Olives. Here, Jesus’ will becomes one with the will of the Son and, thereby, with the will of the Father. All the rebelliousness of human nature, which shuts itself against death and against the horrors he can see, comes to the surface in this prayer. Jesus has to overcome man’s inward resistance against God. He must overcome the temptation to do it some other way. And now this temptation reaches its zenith. Only the breakdown of this resistance makes this yes possible. It ends with the fusion of his own individual, human will into the will of God, and thus, with a single petition: “But let not my will, but your will, be done (God and World, pg. 327).”

There is no sense in which Jesus united himself to the Son of God. And I’ve had 2 years of German, so this is no German mistake.

Whether Dyer truly understand Ratzinger’s quoted statement here will be dealt with below; for now I wish to focus on this self-proclaimed amateur theologian’s expertise as a German linguist. Notice that mister Dyer nowhere quotes or analyzes the German text. Indeed, he never even tells us he has read it. When Father Al “the Pontificator” Kimel presented an english translation of the German text done by a German friend of his, Mister Dyer did not dispute it; nor did he present us with his own translation; he simply ignored it.

“And I’ve had two years of German, so this is no German mistake.” First of all, the possibility of a mistake isn’t about the German; rather, it’s about the English translation. Notice that the “this” in the quote refers not to the German text, but to the English. If I understand him correctly, the scatologian is claiming to be able to assure the validity of the English translation by working it back into German, after all, he has made no reference to the actual German. It needs hardly be said that, if this is what he intends with the above statement, then it is illogical. If I read an English translation of a German math book and suspect that the equation “two plus two equals five” is erroneous, then I cannot simply re=translate that text back into German because I’ll see the same suspected error. One can only establish the validity of a translation by comparing it to the original language text.

Several people noted that some of the quotes he gave of Ratzinger were capable of being understood in an un-orthodox sense but were not necessarily so. It was further noted that Ratzinger was giving and interview, not writing a carefully crafted theological tome. To bolster their arguments some respondents to Dyer appealed to theological works of Ratzinger which were unequivocally orthodox, to them Dyer replied:

Also, again, it doesn’t matter what Ratzinger says in some other place, when this statement is heretical. Its always been the province of heretics to cloak their words in ambiguity. So, quoting him somewhere else begs the question.

Try putting that into an Aristotelean syllogism and the only thing one would come up with is a Dyerian sillygism.

State of the question: Is such and such a statement by Ratzinger Nestorian?

Premise 1: Certainly this statement is Nestorian. Evidence to the contrary is to be ignored because

Premise 2: Ratzinger is a nestorian.

Conclusion: Ratzinger is a Nestorian.

Dyer the Moralist:

Father Al Kimel, in a response to Mister Dyer prefaced the response with this sound advice:

I agree that the two citations from Ratzinger are awkward and certainly vulnerable to a Nestorian construal; but before advancing the charge of heresy, one has a moral obligation to read the Pope’s published work and to understand his Christology. This Mr. Dyer has clearly not done.

I myself wrote:

From the Catechism: 2478 To avoid rash judgment, everyone should be careful to interpret insofar as possible his neighbor’s thoughts, words, and deeds in a favorable way:

Every good Christian ought to be more ready to give a favorable interpretation to another’s statement than to condemn it. But if he cannot do so, let him ask how the other understands it. And if the latter understands it badly, let the former correct him with love. If that does not suffice, let the Christian try all suitable ways to bring the other to a correct interpretation so that he may be saved.

Sound advice. However, Mister Dyer, it appears, will have none of it. He proof-texts a passage From Ratzinger’s writing, declares it heretical, and then, this amateur theologian, when presented with texts that don’t square with his declaration, wipes them away like snot on the end of his nose. ‘Fools!’ he says. ‘Et dilettante locuta est: causa finita est’ (the dilettante has spoken: the matter is finished). Then, to end with a comic flourish, he declares his opponents guilty of his own illogical crime: “…it doesn’t matter what Ratzinger says in some other place, when this statement is heretical. Its always been the province of heretics to cloak their words in ambiguity. So, quoting him somewhere else begs the question.”

So, why hasn’t Mister Dyer fulfilled his moral obligation? Apparently he feels he doesn’t have to because this particular moral obligation is a Catholic thing. Here is how he responded to me and my use of the catechism:

I’m not Novus Ordo anymore, so quoting the Novus Ordo catechism at me is meaningless.

The old adage that, “truth is where you find it,” which is so near and dear to both Eastern and Western Christianity, apparently no longer applies. It needs hardly be said that not paying attention to the requirements of the 8th commandment comes in very handy when a man wishes to engage in a hermeneutics of discontinuity.

So, is Ratzinger a heretic?

Dyer sees this quote from Ratzinger as heretical:

A Human Being as the Mother of God!

This is in fact a great paradox. God becomes small. He becomes man; he accepts thereby the limitations of human conception and childbirth. He has a mother and is truly woven into the tapestry of our human history, so that in fact a woman is able to say to him who is her child, a human child: the Lord of the world is within you.

Dyer sees the bold faced words as being heretical. It’s rather obvious however that this is only because he sees them in isolation from the rest of the text. First of all, as the context makes clear, Ratzinger is here repudiating Nestorianism. It needs hardly to be said that a man of average intelligence, who possessed a respect for the 8th commandment might begin to wonder if his understanding of Ratzinger’s words are correct. Notice first of all that the Cardinal’s words appear under the heading “A Human Being as the Mother of God!” Notice that those words are followed, not by a question mark, but by an exclamation point. Furthermore, notice how Ratzinger begins his statement: “God becomes small. He becomes man; he accepts thereby the limitation of human conception and childbirth. He has a mother…” The personal pronoun throughout relates to the God who “became small”. There is no indication of a change in personal pronoun. Dyer himself describes “the principle error” of the Nestorians as, “ascribing simultaneous personhoods to both the humanity and the divinity.” But it is rather clear, when one see the words Dyer finds objectionable in their context, that he has not ascribed a personhood other than the divine to the humanity of Jesus. So, let’s look again at the words Mister Dyer thinks heretical: “so that in fact a woman is able to say to him who is her child: the Lord of the world is within you.” Who is the “him” who is her child? Dyer would have us believe that it was the non-divine person of the Nestorians, but the introductory phrase is conjunctive: “so that in fact a woman can say to him…” So, who is the “him”?

the “God who became small;” he who became man and accepted the limitations of human conception and childbirth.

Ratzinger continues:

For a long time, there was a great deal of controversy about the expression Mother of God. There were the Nestorians, who said she did not of course give birth to God; she gave birth to the man Jesus. Accordingly she should be called the Mother of Christ, but not Mother of God. It was basically a matter of the question of how profound a unity there is between God and man in this person Jesus Christ, whether it is so great we can say, Yes, the one who is born of her is God, and so she is God’s Mother. Obviously she is not God’s Mother in the sense of his having come from her. But she was in the sense of having been the mother of the man that was entirely at one with God. In this way she entered into a quite unique union with God.

The words in italics in the above quote are what Dyer finds objectionable. He writes: “Did you get that? St. Mary gave birth to a ‘human child’ who has ‘God within him,’ and this child was a ‘man’ who was united with God”

But recall that Mister Dyer himself has stated that the Nestorians refused to admit that Mary could be called the Mother of God. With that in mind re-read this statement by Ratzinger: “Obviously she is not God’s mother in the sense of his having come from her. But she was in the sense of having been the mother of the man that was entirely at one with God.” Notice here that Ratzinger is not denying that Our Lady can be called Mother of God; rather, he is describing the sense in which that can be done. Because Mister Dyer wants to prove Ratzinger is a Nestorian he understand the reference to “the man” according to Nestorian theology. Take this assumptiion away, and the Cardinal’s words are orthodox. She is the Mother of God because she was the mother of the man that was entirely at one with God. It’s precisely this oneness that was accomplished by the incarnation when Mary became pregnant. Who was entirely at one with the man? The divine person of the son of God. This is how she can be termed Mother of God. This is how Ratzinger can speak (as we saw earlier) of God becoming small and accepting the limitations of conception and childbirth.

Mister Dyer Gives the following quote from Ratzinger:

“The Greek theologian Maximus the Confessor depicts this process in a particularly impressive way. He shows us how the “alchemy of being” is accomplished in the prayer on the Mount of Olives. Here, Jesus’ will becomes one with the will of the Son and, thereby, with the will of the Father. All the rebelliousness of human nature, which shuts itself against death and against the horrors he can see, comes to the surface in this prayer. Jesus has to overcome man’s inward resistance against God. He must overcome the temptation to do it some other way. And now this temptation reaches its zenith. Only the breakdown of this resistance makes this yes possible. It ends with the fusion of his own individual, human will into the will of God, and thus, with a single petition: “But let not my will, but your will, be done

Dyer comments:

This is astonishing, Did you notice that the human Jesus is said to unite his will with the will of the son! Then, he states the strange view that Jesus had a natural inclination against God, and after Jesus overcame this, he was united in will to God-God the Son. While it is true that there are two sills, these two wills pertain to the two natures in Christ, and not to two persons in moral conjuction.

Again Mister dyer insists on interpreting thing with the assumption that Ratzinger is a Nestorian.

First, regarding the statement that “he states the strange view that Jesus had a natural inclination against God.” No, that is not what he says. He speaks about the rebelliousness of human nature which Jesus sees in his prayer on Mount Olivet. The temptation Jesus experiences to “do it some other way” is clearly an outward temptation, not the product of his own human nature which was un-fallen. Perhaps this would have been a little clearer to Mister Dyer had he paid attention to the previous paragraph which he nowhere quotes:

Jesus can see the whole abyss of human filth and human awfulness, which he has to carry and through which he must make his way. In what he sees, which goes far beyond anything of which we can be aware — and even we can feel horribly sick if we take a look at the awfulness of human history, into the abyss of denial of God, which can destroy people — in this he sees how dreadful is the burden that is being laid upon him. This is not just anguish in the face of his execution; it is being confronted with the entire, fearful, abyss of human destiny, which he has to take upon himself.

As is clear from the above, along with the mention of the name St Maximus the Confessor, the “alchemy of being” refers to the fact that the one divine person, who possessed two natures showed forth the unity of those natures in one person in the prayer on Olivet. Rather than listening to the scatologian’s torturous eisegesis of the Cardinal’s theology ought not look at the Cardinal’s teaching itself?

“It is common enough for the theological textbooks to pay scant attention to the theological development which followed Chalcedon. In many ways on e is left with the impression that dogmatic Christology comes to a stop with a certain parallelism of the two natures in Christ. It was this same impression that led to the divisions in the wake of Chalcedon. In fact, however, the affirmation of the true humanity and the true divinity in Christ can only retain its meaning if the mode of the unity of both is clarified. The Council defined this unity by speaking of the `one Person’ in Christ, but it was a formula which remained to be explored in its implications. For the unity of divinity and humanity in Christ which brings `salvation’ to man is not a juxtaposition but a mutual indwelling. Only in this way can there be that genuine `becoming like God,’ without which there is no liberation and no freedom.

“It was to this question, after two centuries of dramatic struggles which also, in many ways, bore the mark of imperial politics, that the Third Council of Constantinople (680-681) addressed itself. On the one hand, it teaches that the unity of God and man in Christ involves no amputation or reduction in any way of human nature. In conjoining himself to man, his creature, God does not violate or diminish him; in doing so, he brings him for the first time to his real fullness. On the other hand (and this is no less important), it abolishes all dualism or parallelism of the two natures, such as had always seemed necessary in order to safeguard Jesus’ human freedom In such attempts it had been forgotten that when the human will is taken up into the will of God, freedom is not destroyed; indeed, only then does genuine freedom come into its own. The Council of Constantinople analyzed the question of the two-ness and the one-ness in Christ by reference to the concrete issue of the will of Jesus. It resolutely maintains that, as man, Jesus has a human will which is not absorbed by the divine will. But this human will follows the divine will and thus becomes one will with it, not in a natural manner but along the path of freedom. The metaphysical two-ness of a human and a divine will is not abrogated, but in the realm of the person, in the realm of freedom, the fusion of both takes place, with the result that they become one will not naturally, but personally. This free unity – a form of unity created by love – is higher and more interior than a merely natural unity. It corresponds to the highest unity there is, namely, Trinitarian unity. The Council illustrates this unity by citing a dominical word handed down to us in the Gospel of John: `I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me’ (Jn. 6, 38). Here it is the divine Logos who is speaking, and he speaks of the human will of the man Jesus as his will, the will of the Logos. With this exegesis of John 6, 38 the Council indicates the unity of the subject in Christ. There are not two `I’s in him, but only one. The Logos speaks in the I-form of the human will and mind of Jesus; it has become his I, has become adopted into his I, because the human will is completely one with the will of the Logos. United with the latter, it has become a pure Yes to the Father’s will.

Maximus the Confessor, the great theological interpreter of this second phase of the Christological dogma, illuminates this whole context by reference to Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives, which as we already saw in thesis I, expresses Jesus’ unique relationship to God. Indeed, it is as if we were actually looking in on the inner life of the Word-made-man. It is revealed to us I the sentence which remains the measure and model of all real prayer: `Not what I will, but what thou wilt’ (Mk. 14, 36). Jesus human will assimilates itself to the will of the Son. In doing this, he receives the Son’s identity, i.e., the complete subordination of the I to the Thou, the self-giving and self-expropriation of the I to the Thou. This is the very essence of him who is pure relation and pure act., Wherever the I gives itself to the Thou, there is freedom because this involves the reception of the `form of God.’ [The Absolute].

But we can also describe this process, and describe it better, from the other side: the Logos so humbles himself that he adopts a man’s will as his own and addresses the Father with te I of this human being; he transfers his own I to this man and thus transforms human speech into the eternal Word, into his blessed `Yes,’ Father.’ By imparting his own I, his own identity, to this human being, he liberates him, redeems him, makes him God. Now we can take the real meaning of `God has become man’ in both hands, as it were: the Son transforms the anguish of a man into his own filial obedience, the speech of the servant into the Word which is the Son.

Thus we come to grasp the manner of our liberation, our participation in the Son’s freedom. As a result of the unity of wills of which we have spoken, the greatest possible change has taken place in man, the only change which meets his desire: he has become divine. We can therefore describe that prayer which enters into the praying of Jesus and becomes the prayer of Jesus in the Body of Christ as freedom’s laboratory. Here and nowhere else takes place that radical change in man of which we stand in need, that the world may become a getter place. For it is only along this path that conscience attains its fundamental soundness and its unshakable power. And only from such a conscience can there come that ordering of human affairs which corresponds to human dignity and protects it. Every generation has to seek anew this right ordering of the world in response to a conscience that is alert, until the kingdom of God comes, which God alone can establish.

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Christianity is the good tidings of Christ.  Christianity is Christ.  This is the message that gives foundation and content not only to the moral imperatives and ethical standards, but also to the dogmas, the truths of our faith.  For ultimately it is the Annunciation of Christ that is our confirmation of the dogmas Deus revelan and the Deus trinus; that there is a living God, revealing himself to man,  and that this God is triune.  Only through him has the world attained the unfailing certainty that the Father reigns in heaven, and that this Father begot in eternity a Son of his essence, to whom he is bound  in eternal love by the Holy Spirit, and through whom he binds himself to us.  Thus far the idea of the triune God is of the heart of Christ’s message.  We pray to the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit.  In the history of our salvation, it was not as if the Son were reached through the Father, nor as if the belief in the Trinity came first and the belief in Christ second.  “No one knows the Father except the Son, and him to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”  Only in the Son do we attain certainty about the Father and the Holy Spirit.  For the Son is the living revelation of God’s personal goodness in the Holy Spirit.  And only the conviction that the Son is of the same nature as God, and that he is the son of God, led Christian thought to ascertain processes and sources of life within the Godhead, and to develop the dogma of the Trinity on all sides.  Only belief in Christ produced belief in the Trinity.  Although in our creed the dogma of the trinity has logical priority, in the history of the revelation it came second.  Christology, the doctrine of the person and the work of Christ, comes prior in the history of revelation to the dogma of God the one and three-in-one.

Similarly with the dogmas of creation, of the first state of man, of original sin, and salvation.  It is the belief in the Son of God made man that  gives to all these articles of faith their peculiar place in the Christian Gospel as a whole, their particular form and foundation.  The attempt to understand the mystery of Jesus and his significance for the salvation of man nurtured the searching faith which was to illuminate the relationship ordained by God between creation and the Creator, and to uncover the deeper causes why redemption should be necessary.  These were the questions directed toward the first state of things, toward the fall of man, towards the meaning of the Lord’s incarnation and of his death on the cross.  Only Christology brought permanence and light to these questions.

The same holds true for the Church’s doctrine of grace, the sacraments, eschatology, and last, but not least, the idea of the Church itself.  All these dogmas grew from the seed of the Christological dogma.  What they do is describe the intensive and extensive influence of the mystery of Christ, both in the individual soul and in the bosom of the believing Church.  The articles of the faith of grace, the sacrament, and the Church are fundamentally the universal contemplation and confirmation of the salvation wrought by Christ and his spirit in the individual and in the community.  Without Christ there can be no grace, no sacrament, no Church, no hope for the future.

This leads us to maintain that Christology lies at the heart of all Catholic dogma.  Catholic dogma is centered on Christ.  The mystery of God become man is the holy tabernacle of the Church.  From it the light of our faith shines out on all sides, interpreting and explaining, but also wakening, kindling the spirit, bringing new birth.  Thus do we say in truth:  Christianity is Christ.  In the name of “Jesus Christ” this is exactly what our faith avows: Jesus is the Christ.

Thus our entire religious position stands or falls with the belief in Christ.–Karl Adam, THE CHRIST OF FAITH

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