The 2024 Ratzinger Prize Award Speech: On Gratitude
On an occasion such as this only on the most forsaken would have difficulty expressing immediate and heartfelt thanks to Cardinal Parolin (Secretary of State) who, representing the judgment of the Ratzinger Foundation, has bestowed such an honor on both myself and the extraordinary sculptor, Etsuro Sotoo. Just as it is no more than justice to give a heartfelt thank you to the distinguished scholars who make up the scientific committee of the Ratzinger Foundation, Cardinals Koch, Ladaria, Ravasi, and the Excs. Msgr. Fisichella and Voderholzer, who made the final recommendation regarding the awardees.
The visibility that you have conferred on me with this award requires fulsome public acknowledgement. And as it so happens, there are words in languages great and small, those in use and those fallen into disuse, that cover the occasion. They are words such as Danke, Gracias, Grazie, Merci, as well as the English Thank You. There are the Irish phrases go raibh mait agat (may good things happen to you) and the slightly more hyperbolic go raibh mile maith agat (may a thousand good things happen to you), the Scottish pair tapadh leat or the hyperbolic cead mile taing (a hundred thousand thanks), and the Welsh diolch or diolch fawr, and finally, because we should mourn languages in their death throes, leaving us less, in the almost now obsolete Manx (Isle of Man) language, let me add Guramieayd. I want to express my thanks in all of these languages, first because, since I am Irish, more is always more; second, because one or other term will resonate more deeply with a particular member of the scientific committee; and third, for my part, some of these expressions are more resonant and companionable for an Irishman who has now spent more than half his life in the U.S., and who for this occasion would like to dress up in a language that was once his familiar and who considered these other Celtic languages to be a kind of extended family that in due course he might come to know.
Whatever the deeper roots of these words, there can be no doubt that nowadays they function as protocols, unguents to keep society functioning in the way of honor exchange. I think these words do not quite capture what I want to say about this award and my experience of receiving notice of it from Fr. Lombardi in advance of the official announcement of this year’s awardees on September 18. The letter was a veritable bolt out of the blue; though happily, unlike Jupiter’s trident, it did me no harm. The feeling was one of pleasure, though I resist saying satisfaction, if by satisfaction is indicated a feeling flush with vindication. Even less was it a feeling of desert, though, as one can imagine, friends and colleagues began and ended their congratulations by saying something like “richly deserved.” I find that I cannot say that for reasons that I can fairly easily provide, though it would have been an affectation of a sanctity that I do not possess were I to have insisted to all those fine people who congratulated me that, as a matter of fact, I did not deserve the award.
Yet this does not change the truth of the matter. For someone schooled in Leibniz, Heidegger, and the Christian mystical tradition, simply on intellectual grounds, one has to say that my selection fell far short of satisfying the principle of sufficient reason. I believe in reason, as most Catholics do, and am convinced that there was a process of discernment in which reasons for choosing me as an awardee were provided and that ultimately these reasons proved persuasive. Yet, given the huge variety of option, not to mention that under every possible category one could find extraordinarily talented people, it would be vain of me not to think that my selection was not something that resembled election, and took on more nearly the face of gift than desert. Perhaps not a gift in the Pascalian sense of caritas, but nonetheless, gift in the proper Catholic sense of being in excess of reason, even if not necessarily being hostile to it. It is in this second, more dispositional register I want to say thank you, this time, a thank you that more nearly resonates with a second Irish word for thank you to his eminence Cardinal Parolin, to the scientific committee, and to Fr. Lombardi who has been nothing short of graciousness itself. This other Irish word is Buiochas which, not incidentally, is usually associated with God, Buiochas le Dia, meaning “thanks be to God.” Such is the tightness of connection that rarely—if ever—do we find Buiochas going solo.
In this new register of thank you, I want to say thank you to my wife, Geraldine Meehan, who over the last two thirds of my life has given meaning to my actions and passions, who has many times turned my “ought” into “can” and my “can” into “ought,” and whose laugh excites everything into life and tinctures every moment that passes with joy. I want to thank my son, Niall, who cannot be here, for the courage to have grown into the man he has become, to have become—if you like—the hero in his own story. I also want to recommend Geraldine’s remarkable father of 97, to all who are here, as an example that I cannot match of Catholic faith in action over a lifetime.
I cannot let this occasion pass without recalling my mother, Philomena, who led a life full of suffering and want, and to whom I owe the very fiber of my soul, the heart of all my longing, and the hope for all that is lost in oneself and in others. I want to acknowledge my siblings, Michael, Marianne, and Tommy (RIP), their children and their children’s children. I want to express my thanks to the splendid Notre Dame contingent in the audience, especially my close friends Jenny and Jay Martin, both considerable theologians in their own right, as well as Fr. Edward Ondrako and Fr. Aaron Pidel, both of whom I have had the honor to teach. I wish to remember my good friends and colleagues at Notre Dame who are not here, who have meant and continue to mean everything to me, especially Larry Cunningham who currently is in hospice care. I want to acknowledge Tony Sciglitano, who teaches at Seton Hall, who for over thirty years has shown what it is to be a real friend.
I also want to recall my Irish friends, living in Ireland and abroad, a friend such as Fr. Brendan Purcell who was teacher, mentor, and the priest who married my wife and I, the unforgettable companions of my early years, Tony Mullins and Donal Conway, and my two extraordinarily gifted intellectual fellow travelers, David Walsh and William Desmond, one working at the intersection of metaphysics, history, and politics, the other at the intersection of metaphysics, theology, and poetics.
Finally, I want to thank all the students (undergraduate and graduate) whom I have taught, especially those almost 150 doctoral students with whom I worked in some capacity on dissertations that were as various and brilliant as they were. They gave me far more than I gave them. They set me free to imagine with them and for them what far country they could enter, and allowed me, in my exile from myself in such imagining, to be more rather than less myself. They enriched me and made me in the kind of fugal thinker I imagine myself to be.
This second round of thanks in a more dispositional register fairly naturally leads me to the question of whether gratitude might be considered the fundamental disposition of the theologian. My longtime friend and colleague, John Cavadini, for over thirty years of teaching at Notre Dame has said to any undergraduate who would listen that theology has a definition that is hidden in plain sight: it is learning how to say “thank you.” This is hardly reductive in terms of catechesis, and even less so in a world culture increasingly given to avoiding at all costs saying “thank you.” It is not a coincidence that Cavadini is an Augustine scholar, and indeed, I will in due course turn to the great Latin Father who seems to take the pulse of our age as well as his own and who, especially in his Confessiones, can be thought to provide the template for the defining attitude or disposition of the theologian.
Yet, not before I speak to the ecclesiastic and theologian who has given his name to the awarding Foundation. One can find in any biography of Benedict XVI a reference to the fact he left Tübingen for Erlangen in 1969. The usual reporting of the fact is at once laconic and sensational; laconic in that it is a shift of postal address not unusual for academics, sensationalist in that it signifies a political act, an act of protest against a theological institution built to promote prestige and dissent as the only two viable theological paths. That the leaving had a critical valence and that Ratzinger discerned an eclipse of even the prospect of fidelity to an ecclesial tradition is doubtless true. He was convinced after all of the necessity of giving tradition—as Gadamer has argued in support—the benefit of the doubt. Yet, I want to suggest that there is a deeper dimension to all of this, namely the freedom of having a theological voice primed to say thank you. This is not to say that the insight is original to Ratzinger/Benedict, or that he would claim it to be such—though he embodies it in a particularly public manner. He shares it with de Lubac and Balthasar, and it is a signature of Communio in general.
In turn, as theologian, cardinal and pope, he wanted to share it with the world, both by continually saying thank you to what he with every Christian has received as gifts, for example, scripture, creeds, liturgy, catechisms, theologians, martyrs, and saints, as well, of course, the Church which is constituted by these gifts and functions as the site of their dispensing. Perhaps we might add gifts of beauty that increasingly became important to Ratzinger/Benedict, for example, the ravishing beauty of nature (Black Forest) and the beauty disclosed in the artwork, whether Mozart, Dante, or Michelangelo that is at the same time a signature of truth and goodness.
Even more Ratzinger/Benedict wanted to share the insight that all of the above are forms of thank you to the God who so loved the world that he sent his Son who is the inviolable object of our prayer and praise while making both possible. It is by living in and into this milieu of gratitude that gratitude both comes to be and deepen in us, becomes so habitual that we can come to say thank you in our loneliness, suffering, and weakness. Of course, to become adepts in gratitude is to move towards the condition of being prayer: this is the mark of the saint. In the meantime, there is the endless beads on the chain of thank you that are prayers, private and public, informal and formal. All prayer, even petitionary prayer, as Balthasar has taught us, moves towards the condition of giving thanks, because no prayer is a prayer unless built into it is “Thy will be done.” With regard to prayer, one might say that in every act of prayer there is the learning and enabling of it. The blocks are many, yet, happily, there is the Holy Spirit who is the great enabler and unblocker. It is not difficult to see that for Ratzinger/Benedict this is the meaning of his life and the mark of the Christian vocation.
I have remarked in a number of places that Ratzinger/Benedict is from beginning to end and through and through an Augustinian theologian. This is not only because of his studies of Augustine and the Augustinian tradition (especially St. Bonaventure), his many references to de trinitate, de civitate dei, and ennerationes in psalmos, but also because his positions on scripture, creed, on eschatology and protology, and on Christ and the Holy Spirit have an indelible Augustinian flavor. What I want to emphasize here is something different, that is, point to a posture that makes sense of the red thread of recollection of Augustine and the non-identical repeating of him that can speak to what is living and dead in the modern secular age.
I would like to think that just as Benedict wants us to be assimilated and formed by scripture as God’s Word, he would like us to find ourselves inscribed in a text of longing and fulfillment in which we find God because God has already found us in Christ. This text, of course, is the Confessiones. Despite Augustine’s powerful gift of description and his ability to render so vividly his sins of the flesh and the errors of the intellect as challenges to us now, the condition of the possibility of writing of straying, conversion, repentance, and praise is that the God who accompanied him on his journey has found him. What is crucial is the opening up to the God who is rendered in scripture, a God too much for the Manichaeans because sovereign, too little for the Neoplatonist, because he has offered all of himself in his Son who has gone into the “land of unlikeness” for our sake. This God has also made prayer possible and thereby the gratitude that it carries and underwrites.
From the first book of the Confessiones Augustine is giving thanks to God in and through the language of the Psalms that says all that he has to say by way of saying thank you. The Confessiones is a text not only of multiple expressions of gratitude, but about becoming gratitude, about coming to be assimilated to the Thank You—none greater than which can be thought—as a member of Christ’s body. I dare say that no other text in the theological tradition captures so vividly and succinctly the disposition that we move towards what is the foundation of Christian life. As Ratzinger/Benedict reads himself and us into the biblical text, he also reads himself and us into another text that disowns the author and gives him his proper name and his vocation, which is everywhere and in all circumstances to say thank you in a dynamic movement toward becoming that which you say.
If my sense of being a theologian has continually recalled me to this disposition over the past forty years of teaching and scholarship, Augustine and Ratzinger/Benedict—with a little help from de Lubac and Balthasar—have reminded me of this somewhat elusive goal. This disposition is operative in my analyses of thinkers such as Newman, de Lubac, Balthasar, and Przywara and, of course, Ratzinger/Benedict, all of whom have superbly rendered it. It has also played a role in my genealogy of modernity as “Gnostic return,” in my critique of German Idealism and Romanticism as well as the Enlightenment and its truncated view of reason, my resistance to Heidegger and his postmodern followers whose dizzying speculations are calculated to make thank you either redundant or anachronistic. What animates the critique of modern and postmodern forms of thought that are only superficially companionable to Catholicism, is in the end the deep experience of already having been grasped by a Thank You that is Christ, which is spoken in the Church and made alive in the Spirit. Whatever intellectual excellences I might be deemed to possess is inscribed in this Thank You that has brought me to Rome and has given me this day to express gratitude, while reminding me how far I am away from its perfect expression.