Franciscan Penance Library

THE INDIVIDUAL, THE WHOLE, AND JESUS CHRIST

All of us often encounter people who are spiritual and even follow Jesus Christ in some way, but don’t want to have anything to do with the Church and especially the Catholic Church.  Professor Joseph Ratzinger deals with this question in part II of Introduction to Christianity.   For us men of today the basic stumbling block of Christianity lies first of all simply in the superficiality to which the religious element seems to have settled down.  It irritates us that God should have to be mediated through outward forms: through Church, sacraments, dogma, or even just through the Gospel (kerygma), to which people like to withdraw to reduce the irritation and which is nevertheless itself something external.  All this provokes the question, Does God dwell in institutions, events, or words?  As the eternal Being, does he not make contact with each of us from within?  To this we must first of all simply say Yes and then go on to say that if there were only God and a collection of individuals, Christianity would be unnecessary.  The salvation of the individual as individual can and could always be looked after directly and immediately by God, and this does happen again and again.  He needs no intermediary channels by which to enter the soul of the individual, to which he is more present interiorly  than he is to himself; nothing can reach more intimately and deeply into man than he, who touches this creature man in the very innermost depth of his being.   For the salvation of the mere individual there would be no need of either a Church or a history of salvation, an Incarnation or a Passion of God in this world.  But precisely at this point we must also add the further statement:  Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that , on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is “spirit in body”.   Thus, God does certainly speak to us as individuals.  Yet, as Christians, we really do need the structures of the Church since we are a part of the whole not just a self-sufficient entity in ourselves.  We also know that many people in modern culture reject God, Christ, and the Church because of all the problems and deficiencies  which they see in the Church.  Even if they maintain belief in Christ, they retreat into a very individualistic relationship with Christ.

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Professor Ratzinger next discusses the root of this modern mentality which is so irritated by Church structures and Christian dogma in general.  He places the root of the modern mentality in the ideas of the famous seventeenth century philosopher Rene҃  Descartes, (1596 – 1650) who is famous for his phrase, I think, therefore I am (cogito, ergo sum).   Descartes is often regarded as the father of modern philosophy.   Descartes attempted to find the ultimate ground of human knowledge.   He did this by doubting everything including all knowledge from the senses.  He reasoned that sense knowledge could come from an evil, deceiving demon rather than from the good and loving God.  Since Descartes could  not ground knowledge from anything outside himself, he grounded it in the self.  He could not doubt the existence of himself since he was thinking  which proved that he existed.   This was a huge shift in philosophical thinking.   The search for truth no longer starts with God, but rather starts with the self.  Even if a modern thinking person comes to believe in the truth of God, this truth comes from the self and not God.

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Even though Professor Ratzinger discussed this in the 1960’s, in  Introduction to Christianity, the effects of this way of thinking  in the wider culture is even more evident now than it was then.   For example, now  a biological human male (or female) who thinks that he (or she) is of the opposite sex is considered by society to actually be of that sex.  In some places a transsexual young male can shower with the girls.  Those women who think that their preborn child  is “just blood” can have an abortion with a clear conscience.  Since truth starts with the self and not with God, marriage is no longer a divinely ordained institution, but simply a human custom which can be changed by those with the power to do so.  One can site many other examples of how this thinking permeates society.

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Professor Ratzinger rejects this way of thinking.  Just as self-love is not the primordial form of love but at the most a derivative of it, just as one has only arrived at the specific nature of love when one has grasped it as a relation, that is,  as something coming from another, so, too, human knowledge is only reality when it is being known, being bought to knowledge, and thus again “from another”.  The real man does not come into it at all if I only plumb the loneliness of the “I”, of self –knowledge, for then I exclude in advance the point of departure of his ability to come to himself and thus his most specific characteristic.  That is why Baader, consciously and quite rightly, changed the Cartesian “Cogito, ergo sum” into “Cogitor, ergo sum”: not “I think , therefore I am,” but “I am thought, therefore I am”.  Only from man’s being known can his knowledge and he himself be understood.  Thus all of us exist because we are all known by others or at least by God.

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This is explained further by Professor Ratzinger.  One needs only to note that our mental life depends entirely on the medium of language and to add, then, that language was not invented today.  It comes from a long way off;  the whole of history has contributed to it and through it enters into us as the unavoidable premise of our present, indeed as a constant part of it.  And, vice versa, man is a being who lives for the future, who continually takes care to plan ahead beyond the passing moment and could no longer exist if he suddenly found himself without a future.   Just as our past depends on others and ultimately on God, our future also depends on others and ultimately on God.  Professor Ratzinger goes on to explain:  We must say, therefore, that such a thing as the mere individual, the man-monad of the Renaissance, the pure “Cogito ergo sum” being does not exist.  Humanity belongs to man only in the web of history that impinges on the individual through speech and social communication; and the individual for his part lives his life on the collective pattern in which he is already previously included and that forms the scene of his self-realization.  It is simply not the case that every man plans himself anew from square one of his own freedom, as it seemed to the German idealist philosophers.  He is not a being who keeps starting again from scratch; he can only work out his own new approach within the framework of the already existing whole of human life that stamps and molds him.   

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Many Christian doctrines make sense  only when we see the individual as part of the whole.   Talk of original sin means just this, that no man can start from scratch any more, in a status integritatis (completely unimpaired by history).  No one starts off in an unimpaired condition in which he would only need to develop himself freely and make plans for his own happiness; everyone lives in a web  that is a part of his very existence.   Other Christian doctrines such as the Last Judgment, Resurrection, and the Redemption also strongly depend on the collective nature of humanity.

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Professor Ratzinger now gives us the climax of these reflections.  At this point there occurs an absolutely decisive further step, which at first seems to represent a complete about –turn but in fact is the necessary corollary of our reflections up to now.  If one is a Christian in order to share in a loving service for the whole, then this means at the same time that, precisely because of this relation to the whole, Christianity lives from the individual and for the individual, because only by the action of the individual can the transformation of history, the destruction of the dictatorship of the milieu come to pass.  It seems to me that this is the reason for what to the other world religions and to the man of today is always completely incomprehensible, namely, that in Christianity everything hangs in the last resort on one individual, on the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified by the milieu---public opinion---and who on his Cross broke this very power of the conventional “everyone”, the power of anonymity, which holds man captive.   This power is now confronted by the name of this individual, Jesus Christ, who calls on man to follow him, that is, to take up the cross as he did, and , by being crucified, to overcome the world and contribute to the  renewal of history.  Precisely because Christianity wants history as a whole, its challenge is directed fundamentally at the individual; precisely for this reason it depends on  the single individual in whom the bursting of the bondage to the forces and powers took place.  In other words, because Christianity relates to the whole and can only be understood from the idea of community and with reference to it, because it does not mean the salvation of the isolated individual but being enlisted in service to the whole, which he neither can nor may escape, for this very reason it is committed to the principle of  “the individual” in its most radical form.  Here lies the intrinsic necessity of the unheard-of scandal that a single individual, Jesus  Christ, is acknowledged as the salvation of the world.  The individual is the salvation of the whole, and the whole receives its salvation only from the individual who truly is salvation and who precisely for this reason ceases to exist for himself alone.

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Other world religions do not have this radical relationship between the individual and the whole.  As Christians we are part of a whole, but we are made into a whole and indeed saved by one individual, Jesus Christ.   We have an individual relationship with the Savior, Jesus Christ, but only as a part of the whole.  When we try to break ourselves away from the whole and seek Jesus Christ as an individual in our own individual way and according to our own thinking, we lose Christ.  This is one reason why so many lose the faith.

--Jim Nugent, CFP