Veritatis Splendor, Spe Salvi, and the fundamental option

I recently had occasion to look over Veritatatis Splendor. Formed as I am in the writings of Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, I admit to finding aspects of the encyclical jarring, almost to the point of crisis.

When St. John Paul II wrote Veritatis Splendor, it was the first-ever papal encyclical on moral theology. Prominent in its mission was an attempt to discipline certain tendencies in the moral theology of that time. One whole section of the work addressed the fundamental option. 

The debates regarding the application of a "fundamental option" to moral theology have occasioned some confusion and controversy over time – not least because neither the term itself nor its application have generally been clearly defined or understood. 

In Veritatis Splendor, St. John Paul II takes a very hard line: "The Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia reaffirmed the importance and permanent validity of the distinction between mortal and venial sins, in accordance with the Church's tradition," reinforcing the conclusion that "man is able, in a brief lapse of time, to sever radically the bond of communion with God." By the definition provided in the encyclical, the fundamental option entails an “athematic” transcendental stance that regulates the overall moral direction of an agent, while individual concrete acts, ordered to mere particular goods, occur at a lower rung of personhood.

In the encyclical Spe Salvi, we find a sharp contrast. Pope Benedict XVI writes, “For the great majority of people – we may suppose – there remains in the depths of their being an ultimate interior openness to truth, to love, to God” – a seeming modulation on the fundamental option. Taking only the data of these excerpts from the two encyclicals in isolation, two entirely different Weltanschauungen (nod to my favorite papal theologian) can be extrapolated. What is at issue in that case is an apparent irreconcilable contradiction, and between immediately successive papacies, no less. This says nothing of the work of our current Holy Father, which will be addressed in a future post.

To put this into context, it is worth noting that Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Francis have all, at least aspirationally, teased the notion of universal salvation. Pope John Paul included the following in his Catechesis on Hell: "Eternal damnation remains a real possibility, but we are not granted, without special divine revelation, the knowledge of whether or which human beings are effectively involved in it. The thought of hell – and even less the improper use of biblical images – must not create anxiety or despair, but is a necessary and healthy reminder of freedom within the proclamation that the risen Jesus has conquered Satan, giving us the Spirit of God who makes us cry “Abba, Father!” (Rm. 8:15; Gal. 4:6).”

That "whether" should constitute a real shock to anyone who was paying attention. It is perhaps interesting to note that the Vatican website has censored the statement. Pope Francis said, remarkably, "The good Lord will save everyone."

I love and trust each of these popes – and, more, the undivided Spirit uniting their papacies, which I experience as profoundly internally cohesive, yielding writings which are deeply mutually supportive. Harmonizing statements so disparate on the surface takes work, and is likely a cue that this is an area in which there is much work to be done. Still, a tension remains, even in the body of St. John Paul's work taken by itself.

A prominent Catholic lay apologist lamented as regrettable the optimism I cited in Spe Salvi, naming it "unfortunate" that Benedict XVI restricted eternal perdition to "a few, really evil people." Of course, taken under the aspect of dogmatic violation (if one sincerely believed such to have occurred), this would be accidentally unfortunate. In and of itself, not so much; that we and our brethren in humanity be spared unending sin and misery, that mercy triumph over justice, and, most importantly for the soul who loves Christ, that his sacrifice not be rendered ineffectual, be met with the disappointment of Jonah, just doesn't seem spiritually healthy to me.

But set aside, for now, questions of ultimate destiny; loss of relational bond with God in this life is devastating, utterly annhilating, even where it is quickly restored. For my part, I am more proximately concerned with this than I am with my judgement. Sure, mortality is a thrill a minute, but I take measures to safeguard my health, pray against sudden death, and am convinced of a mission which has scarcely begun.

Taking together the two encyclicals cited, the first reality which comes into focus is that humanity, for whom "the permanent distinction between mortal and venial sin is maintained," and which bears within itself nevertheless an almost irrepressible orientation to truth and goodness, exists upon this earth in a state of tragedy and peril. This being so, the most spontaneous response can only be the tenderness of mercy. Wanting to see a single soul alienated from God through mortal sin or damnation for any reason, much less to shore up the foundations of moral rectitude, seems gravely misplaced. (Yes, I am well advised on S.T. III, q. 94, a. 3.)

My writing here is only preliminary. I have yet to delve into the subtleties of Karl Rahner (whom I take very seriously), or into the roots of the fundamental option said to reach back to figures as intellectually great as Jacques Maritain and as spiritually great as Matthias Joseph Scheeben. Yet a priori, I can say that for a sin to genuinely be mortal, a transgression against personal conscience, not simply against exteriorized law, is necessarily entailed. This much is plain in Veritatis Splendor itself, which, of course, specifies the conditions interior to the person beyond grave matter. And here, one gleans the sense that the great pope, saint and philosopher has concerns other than consigning the vast part of humanity to damnation.  

It stands to reason that a disintegrated agent, a house divided against itself, cannot be at peace with the Kingdom where all are one. It also stands to reason – and is maybe even highly predictable – that the author of The Acting Person would be keen to locate the work of morality and salvation in the concrete, historical, and therefore knowable deeds of individuals. A quasi-Gnosticism, whereby people can simultaneously be good and do evil, is problematic, pharisaical, and really, quite disturbing. I'm not convinced that all proponents of the fundamental option argue along lines which are so unsophisticated, but that is to be a later stage of inquiry; in its broad outlines, Veritatis Splendor has settled the matter.

As an aside, Karl Rahner did originally define the fundamental option as an act – specifically, an act at once of human self-realization and of transcendental human response to God's offer of grace, "expressed" and constituted by our categorical actions. The relationship between the self-realizing and transcendental act and the quotidian, "categorical" act is stated, but not fully explained; indeed, it seems to be understood differently by different exponents of fundamental option ethics. 

Recall, however, that Karol Wojtyła was an actor and playwright, and risked his very life in the preservation of the art, over and against the Nazis. That the drama of God-person-salvation be played out precisely in act was absolutely vital for him, particularly as his thought was augmented by his encounter with the Balthasarian-theodramatic dynamic.

Where Descartes discerned his existence via thought, John Paul II is insistent that person is commensurate with a flow of extra-mental dynamism, for all of its immanent and transitive complexity – keeping in mind that, for the pope as a Thomist, being is itself an act. Only this vision can salvage a potent metaphysics of being from the post-Enlightenment wreckage, while yet opening wide the doors, as it were, to the integration of various philosophies and cultural outlooks. As John Paul writes elsewhere, "It should never be forgotten that the neglect of being inevitably leads to losing touch with objective truth and therefore with the very ground of human dignity."

It is because humanity is of such dignity, because salvation unfolds historically and person (etymologically originating from the Greek prosopon, a term itself drawn from theater) plays out in event, that the pastoral genius of the Francis papacy can center so effectively on encounter and accompaniment.

As concerns the sobering, terrifying deduction of Veritatis Splendor of the ease and velocity with which sanctifying grace can be forfeited: leaving aside that life itself can be taken in a flash via minutia (I almost got t-boned at a good speed by distracted teen-aged drivers earlier in the day), let's postulate the worst-case scenario.

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If my neighbor can lose the peace and sweetness and beauty of God at the proverbial drop of a hat, am I not constrained to live in habitual compassion? Let's take this proposition really seriously. Even the state, for all its professed (and appropriate) secularity and its notable (and lamentable) mercilessness, favors those condemned to execution with a lavish last meal of their choosing. What love should a Christian pour out, as a mere matter of course, if so many are at enmity with God, condemned? But I am worse off than my neighbor. Am I then not to live in habitual fear, trembling and vigilance… in humility?

And yet somehow this is nonetheless consonant with a restlessness for God, ineradicable in humanity as a whole. This, from Veritatis Splendor itself: "In the depths of his heart there always remains a yearning for absolute truth and a thirst to attain full knowledge of it." For Benedict XVI, it is quite possible that what is going on in Spe Salvi is the dislodging of the question of sin and its gravity from the context of salvation, narrowly taken. Benedict was utterly versed in the work of his predecessor, and, as Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the CDF, had long undertaken his own work as subordinate and ancillary. In a book from that time which dedicates a significant amount of text to the explication and defense of Fides et Ratio, Ratzinger (perhaps shockingly) disentangles the question of the religions from the question of salvation:

“[T]he three basic lines of response in the present discussions about Christendom and world religions – exclusivism, inclusivism, pluralism – are all determined by this way of putting the question: the other religions are always treated as being ultimately of more or less equal value, always looked at from the point of view of their value for salvation. My view, after the years I had devoted to the study of the history of religions, was that a phenomenological investigation, which would not straightaway concern itself with the value of these religions for eternity – thus imposing upon itself the burden of a question that can in fact be decided only by him who shall judge the world – needed to precede such theological judgments about other religions.”

If anyone fails to concern himself with the confusion through which we fumble and the hell we make on earth here and now, needing recourse to rewards and torments of the beyond, he is not really paying attention. John Paul himself was well aware of this; recall the unusual and misplaced furor which his Catechesis on Hell garnered in the press. But within his work there is tremendous nuance, and his insistence on this nuance is similarly hard line:

"[D]ogmatic statements, while reflecting at times the culture of the period in which they were defined, formulate an unchanging and ultimate truth. This prompts the question of how one can reconcile the absoluteness and the universality of truth with the unavoidable historical and cultural conditioning of the formulas which express that truth. The claims of historicism, I noted earlier, are untenable; but the use of a hermeneutic open to the appeal of metaphysics can show how it is possible to move from the historical and contingent circumstances in which the texts developed to the truth which they express, a truth transcending those circumstances.

The dogmatic pragmatism of the early years of this century, which viewed the truths of faith as nothing more than rules of conduct, has already been refuted and rejected; but the temptation always remains of understanding these truths in purely functional terms. This leads only to an approach which is inadequate, reductive and superficial at the level of speculation. A Christology, for example, which proceeded solely ‘from below,’ as is said nowadays, or an ecclesiology developed solely on the model of civil society, would be hard pressed to avoid the danger of such reductionism."

So yes, Veritatis Splendor formulates permanent and unchanging truth, as all the while the development of doctrine (which is reliant upon defined dogmatic truth as indispensable) retains an astonishing freedom to open out organically into new horizons of transcendent love and mercy

What is, I think, above reproach is the reality that God has a fundamental – no, a preferential – option for each of us. The theological mentor of the young Wojtyła, Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., goes to tremendous lengths in emphasizing that "in the work of salvation, all comes from God, even our cooperation." If mortal sin were to come to man all too easily, it is Garrigou who reminds us (quoting St. Bernard of Clairvaux), that man can also "make acts of charity, the least of which has greater value than all angelic natures taken together."

The very potential for encounter, for authentic communio, increases proportionate to the gravity of a truth, even a truth that is “important and permanently valid.” It is St. John Paul II who has declared it: "To believe it possible to know a universally valid truth is in no way to encourage intolerance; on the contrary, it is the essential condition for sincere and authentic dialogue between persons. On this basis alone is it possible to overcome divisions and to journey together towards full truth, walking those paths known only to the Spirit of the Risen Lord." 

Nonetheless, the possibilities afforded to personal freedom I find highly discomfiting. Many of the implications do not at this point (and I'll leave it at that) meet my experience of the world. What does bring solace in this spiritual-existential Sturm und Drang is the poetic, breathtaking stridency of the Song of Songs: Love is strong as death, and its jealousy hard as hell.