Ratzinger Prize winner draws from late pope’s engagement with modernity

ROME (CNS) — “We don’t have another theologian, it seems to me, that has been as engaged with modernity as Benedict,” said Cyril O’Regan, a co-winner of the 2024 Ratzinger Prize, often dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Theology.”

Speaking with Catholic News Service Nov. 21, the eve of having an audience with Pope Francis and receiving the award, the Irish theologian explained how the late Pope Benedict XVI forged a path in dialogue between Catholic theology and modern philosophy that informed his own work.

The Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI Vatican Foundation had announced the recipients of the award Sept. 18. Etsuroō Sotoo, a Japanee sculptor, was the other award winner for 2024.

O’Regan, a professor of systemic theology at the University of Notre Dame since 1999, characterized his own academic work as analyzing modern philosophy through a Catholic lens to determine, “What can we assimilate and what can we not assimilate? And it’s generally a process of discernment.”

In the same way, he said, Father Joseph Ratzinger, the theologian who would become Pope Benedict, sought to recover a type of mediation between philosophy and theology that was prevalent in the pre-modern era, for example, such as the mediations that occurred between the early Christian theologians and Platonism and Neo-Platonism.

For Ratzinger, he said, “it’s precisely that maximalist negotiation that he uplifts as quintessentially Catholic, structurally, not necessarily in terms of what we can borrow.”

In other words, engaging with philosophy as a Catholic theologian requires avoiding both an “allergic rejection” of modern ideas as well as an uncritical “acceptance of everything” simply because of the ideas’ intellectual prestige.

“When we put out our hand looking for something, we’ve got to look at whether it’s a gift or whether it’s poison. That is the dialectic of cultural negotiation,” he said.

Through his theological legacy, Cardinal Ratzinger elevates the mantra of “faith and reason,” both of which O’Regan said are important in the future development of Catholic theology.

To develop a theology that emphasizes faith without reason may give rise to the “temptation to think that we have any and all discourse that we need,” O’Regan said, “a discourse where we’ve decided that various dogmas have been adduced and are reducible from Scripture, and that’s it.”

This approach, he said, might lead to the conclusion that “no continuing negotiation with philosophy is required.”

“The danger of that is, and (Cardinal Ratzinger) points it our explicitly, is fideism,” or the assertion that faith is independent of reason, which O’Regan said the late pope saw as “a very non-Catholic venture.”

As far as Cardinal Ratzinger was concerned, fideism “was the problem with the Reformation,” O’Regan said, which is why he does not support a “fideistic substitute for Catholic Christianity; (Catholicism) always was involved in cultural negotiation, it always was involved in negotiation with philosophy in particular.”

O’Regan, who has written extensively on Hegel, modern Gnosticism, apocalyptic theology and Father Hans Urs von Balthasar and wrote a forthcoming volume on St. John Henry Newman and Cardinal Ratzinger, said that the former pope’s approach to theological inquiry has informed his own academic style.

In his research on Hegel, for example, O’Regan said the 19th-century German philosopher, though not writing on theology, “reminds us that aesthetics and art is important as a conveyor of truth.”

Hegel’s philosophy of aesthetics seeks to understand how art expresses the human spirit’s striving toward the absolute, and he categorized and classified art forms to analyze their capacity to express universal truths.

“Yes, we Catholics have the transcendentals,” he said. However, drawing on the theological insights of Father von Balthasar, St. Newman and Cardinal Ratzinger, O’Regan approaches Hegel “as someone who is taking the ontological value of art via beauty seriously, so we should make note of that and the other gifts he gives as well before we start the criticism.”

By focusing only on the transcendental, O’Regan said, Catholics risk neglecting serious reflection on Christian art, other artistic traditions or whether such distinctions even exist. Hegel’s systematic approach to aesthetics, he said, “tells us these judgments must be made.”

Hegel, he said, can help Catholics “validate, by concrete discussion, transcendental beauty by actually thinking about beauty in these particular genres and also beauty as it is exhibited over history.”

Two years after the death of Pope Benedict, O’Regan said that he hopes the legacy of Joseph Ratzinger the theologian will not be limited to one who countered modern ideas about humanity, but rather engaged with them precisely to elevate Catholic teaching.

“It’s not simply, ‘This is what I think the church is,’ yes, he’s certainly doing that, but also he’s suggesting to the world that the ways in which Christianity forms a subject — in which it makes a self or a human being — is far thicker, far more substantial, far more worthy and valuable than modernity,” he said.