March 2022 Print

By Fr. Dominique Bourmaud

The figure of Karl Rahner, highly praised by some, and surrounded by secrecy and religious mystique by others, has marked the 20th century. In Germany, he was given the title novus praeceptor Germaniae and Cardinal Frings of Cologne hailed him the greatest theologian of the century. In his wake, every theologian of the Rhineland, whether mitred or not, echoed the Jesuit’s chorus of praise. Numerous talents identify themselves with this singular individual. And since he is recognized by all, friends and enemies alike, as the most influential theologian, we propose to show that Karl Rahner, far from being the greatest theologian of the twentieth century, was in actual fact the greatest modernist of the modernist century, and of all time. To achieve this, following a brief sketch of his intellectual career, we will see what properly defines a modernist theologian and then apply this to our subject.

Rahner’s life and works

Karl Rahner, born in Fribourg, Breisgau in Germany, entered the Jesuit order at an early age, like his brother Hugo, and studied theology in Holland before returning to Fribourg to pursue philosophy under Heidegger and to prepare for a doctorate in philosophy and theology. His philosophical thesis, Geist in Welt (Spirit in the World), was quite comprehensive. Rejected by his supervisor but nonetheless published in 1939, it proposed to be an existentialist interpretation of Thomist thought. It is Thomism, but revised and modified by Kant, Heidegger and Maréchal. From then on, the greater part of his work revolved around the Department for Dogmatic Theology in Innsbruck, Austria. It was from there that he wrote the majority of his books and articles. He also directed the Latin edition of the Denzinger (compendium of the Church’s dogmatic texts) from 1960 to 1965. He published major works, disseminating his new theology in all German-speaking universities, including: Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Dictionary of Theology and the Church), and Quaestiones disputatae et Schriften zur Theologie, which runs to 20 volumes.

In spite of the Roman mistrust which threatened his writings until the opening of the Council, due in particular to questions concerning concelebration (1949), virginal maternity (1960) and the married diaconate (1961), Cardinal Köning of Vienna decided to take Rahner under his wing and make him his theological expert at the Second Vatican Council. This was the moment that gave rise to his worldly fame. His influence at the Council dominated as soon as the European Alliance took over the leadership of the Council. He was considered such a master of thought in the German-speaking countries and on the banks of the Rhine that everyone was bowing down to his every wish. The attitude became: “Magister dixit, causa finita.” His placet and non placet carried a lot of weight in the burning debates: the question of the diaconate, of the liturgy, of the sources of Revelation, of the refusal of the mediation of the Blessed Virgin, of religious freedom, of ecumenism, not to mention collegiality, which Rahner defined as the decapitation of the papacy and the democratization of the Church. And this influence was to be consolidated and perpetuated by the Concilium Review—the bulletin of avant-garde theology—which he co-directed at the time alongside Schillebeeckx, Vorgrimler, Metz, Lehmann, Küng, and Ratzinger, his friends and students. Appointed a member of the International Theological Commission from its foundation in Rome (1969-1974), he was to become the apostle of ecumenism and of relations between Christians and Marxists. Called back to God in 1984, he left in his wake some 4000 works that confirm him as the most prolific and original theologian of all times.

What is a modernist theologian?

Modernism, which was reviled in the time of St. Pius X, was defined by the Pope saint as the collective sewer of all heresies and the fruit of Kantism which attacks all the branches, near and far, of the Magisterium of the Church: faith, dogma, philosophy, apologetics, Holy Scripture, history. In the Pope’s judgment, therefore, it is indeed a very particular heresy. The “traditional” heresies were in fact limited to a few dogmas and, around this clearly circumscribed poison, they intended to preserve the whole corpus of doctrine on which they were based.

The “modernist” heresy is unique. It is a complete apostasy that ignores the entire body of dogmatic and moral doctrine, for it is the very concepts of religion, faith and dogma that are radically distorted, since God and his immutable truth are rejected outright. Modern man no longer accepts a faith imposed upon him from the outside by a transcendent God. To this rejection of all dogma is added the inseparable correlative of the rejection of all revelation which is external to man. God, in the person of the Word made flesh, could not reveal himself, speak and act like any other man: the historical Christ differs completely from the Christ of the Faith as narrated in the Gospels. At the root of all this doctrinal and scriptural agnosticism is a radical skepticism which denies that things exist, that they have a nature and that our intelligence can know them. It is this refusal on three levels, philosophical, scriptural and dogmatic, that constitutes modernism. Modernism, condemned by St. Pius X and Pius XII, is defined as ontology without being, revelation without the historical Christ and theology without God. It is really the vertigo of emptiness, intellectual and moral nirvana.

Any heresy must be able to seduce its followers with more tempting propositions than pure and simple truth. If Luther’s free will could exert a certain appeal of freedom and independence over the masses, the modernist void on the other hand, presents none. The nakedness of modernist error must therefore be adorned with false ornaments in order to become attractive and act under the guise of the Church. That is why modernists are, by definition, professional impersonators. They are sheep transformed into wolves who pretend to convert the Church to their nihilistic ideas, so that the good modernist is an apostate and a traitor. At the level of ideas, these adornments are the craze of immanentism which makes everything come out of man, who becomes the center of the world. They are also the new interest in evolution, which makes everything come out of nothing and makes it evolve into everything. Finally, there is the desire to accommodate faith and truth in the world in order to obtain its salvation, as if truth, and not the world, were to be sacrificed for the salvation of man.

Rahner, prince of the Modernists

Philosophy teaches us that there is always a princeps analogatum of some kind. The modernist genre must also have its princeps, its first and its prince who exhausts all its possibilities. It is Rahner who holds this place, since he perfectly fulfils the definition of it.

Rahner’s philosophy is meant to be eclectic. This is not without drawbacks, especially when it is a question of amalgamating opposites such as Thomistic truth based on reality and Kantian truth based on the thinking subject: cogito-volo-est – I want, therefore I think, therefore everything exists. The philosophy of common sense thinks being because beings are. Since Kant, modern thinking thinks its thinking, and then beings are. Under the pretext of interpreting Saint Thomas, Rahner undertakes to introduce into Thomism the following idealistic principles: identity between the intelligent, the intelligence and the being; unity of sensibility and intelligence; identity between the object and the subject. According to him, the truth of existing beings is not specified in a determined structure, but resides in the uninterrupted becoming of historical consciousness, in accordance with existential factors at work in time. This is the philosophical basis of the dogmatic historicism of the modernists, according to which truth varies with time and morals.

For our protagonist, Revelation is also a purely human and internal affair:

“I have experienced God, the nameless one, the unfathomable, the silent God, and yet close, he turned to me in the Trinity. . . God himself; it is God in himself that I have experienced, and not human words about him. . . (an experience which generates such a) certainty of the Faith that, if Holy Scripture did not exist, I would still remain unshakeable.” As a good pupil of Heidegger, the immanentist prison renders him incapable of speaking of a revelation that is not revelation by and for the thinking subject. “If one wishes to speak of God, one must speak of man. When man surpasses himself and the world, he encounters transcendence: God. Naturally, the first experience of God. . . can only be thought of as an experience of God given above all and before all with the transcendence of man, as the horizon of this transcendence. That is to say, man as man is oriented towards God. Orientation towards God is part of his being. . . ‘Transcendence’ is given at the same time as human nature. . . It is not grafted onto nature, as the neo-scholastic says, but it is its basis, its foundation.” When one reads this, it is not surprising that Rahnerian philosophy is for some the key to a third Copernican revolution, where human subjectivity is the foundation of the revelation of being and of divine revelation in general.

Upon such irrational and unscriptural foundations, what theology will he be able to articulate? It will be anthropological theology, which will also circle around man, the navel of the world and, why not, the navel of God! It is above all dependent on Hegel. In the latter, the Being within oneself needs the Being outside oneself in order to become the Being for oneself. The Infinite needs the finite in order to become the conscious Infinite. This conscious infinite is the necessary consequence of the finite that becomes the infinite, which defines God as the Being dependent on man and man as the being who makes himself God. No wonder the Hegelian system has been defined as the most logical and implacable pantheism ever conceived. Rahner was to establish the Hegelian system as a theological system. He focused his study on human nature, the obligatory meeting point between God and matter, for man is the link between the created and the uncreated, matter and spirit. It is the nature in which the Word was annihilated and begotten, and it is the same human nature which, in men, is open to the divine. We are taught that man shares the essence of the Word, that it is defined as the capacity to become the Word and the exteriorization of God. In fact, the Rahnerian man presents himself as the configuration, the photographic negative of God. In Rahner’s case no more than in Teilhard’s, there is no solution of continuity between the links of this Hegelo-Rahnerian chain that goes from God to the non-God (man-world) to return to the super-God (conscious God).

Our theologian of man completes the work begun by finally identifying God and man. It is that man is the abbreviation and the number of God, and that God has annihilated himself to the point of becoming a non-God, that is to say, man. “If God himself is man and has been so from all eternity; if for this reason all theology is eternally anthropology, if man is forbidden to hold himself for little, for then he would hold God for little, if this God continues to be the ineffable mystery, then man is from all eternity the mystery of God expressed, who participates from all eternity in the mystery of his foundation. This reality proper to God Himself, which He cannot abandon as outdated, must be for us as our true salvation, beyond the difference between God and the creature.”

Rahnerian theology has an obvious apologetic purpose: God is good, therefore he wants to save all men, therefore he saves all men: Outside the Church, salvation! His theology identifies the unbeliever with the believer since, by nature, every man is an answer to the question of God, and he feels God on the horizon of his conscience, “He who, therefore (even if he is far from Revelation and the Church) accepts his existence, and thus his humanity. . . he says yes to Christ, even though he does not know it.” In the process, it is the very concept of the visible Church—the Ghetto Church—that falls under the blows of the democratic theology of the automatic salvation of man as a pure man. Out of the ashes of the Vatican Church will rise the pantheon of the modern ecumenical Church, which joyfully blends opposites, letting each one live in its own mellow stratosphere, in a climate of cordial understanding, in the perfect acceptance of differences, and in the refusal of a realistic, unchanging and scandalously exclusive revelation. Rahner’s religion is based on man and remains his private property. The supernatural being thus erased, one can only identify nature and supernatural: man is naturally supernatural; he is called to grace and glory by his own strength.

In addition to his cerebral fantasies in a closed vase, there is a dubious morality in which our author acts as a double man. It is obvious that, as early as Geist in Welt, Rahner was warned by his mentor to remain faithful to St. Thomas or to abandon any serious philosophical or theological effort. It could only have been with full knowledge of the facts that Rahner systematically used St. Thomas to forge viscerally anti-Thomistic and anti-realistic theses. Far from being an impetuous Teilhard who does not know how to quit while he is ahead, Rahner knew how to imitate perfectly his French colleague Henri de Lubac who knew how to act under cover while relentlessly pursuing the destruction of perennial philosophy and Thomistic theology. He could testify to his satisfaction in 1981 of “having contributed to the ousting of the neo-scolasticism of the 19th and early 20th centuries,” but this presupposed a conscious contempt for “the monolithism of the Magi,” that is to say the Magisterium of all time. Lehmann, a disciple of Rahner, explained that his thought was “a concealed revolt against a traditional and outdated philosophy and theology.” Rahner had the fine idea of keeping the classical terms, thus giving the illusion of preserving their content, a task made all the easier by the fact that he had to do so in the first place. When the Holy Office threatened to censor him and all his works, Rahner wrote to his friend Vorgrimler: “I have already declared that in this case I will write nothing more (and I thought: then my name will be Vorgrimler, Metz, Darlapp). I have already warned König, Döpfner, Volk and Höfer in a long letter.” Around him, powerful trump cards stood guard and prevented the muzzling of the spokesman of the new theology, who was going to make the sunshine and the rain on the future German-speaking Council Fathers and, from there, take the reins of the Council. In the same way, when it was known that the new Abelard had his Heloise in the person of Louise Rinser from the Council, the Jesuits did everything possible to hide the affair that risked compromising the ascendancy of his revolutionary theology which served as the locomotive for the wagon of the conciliar Church.

Conclusion : Rahner, paragon of Modernism

It seems natural to conclude our study with an objective assessment of the scope of Rahnerian theology. Whilst Rahner did not have the international influence of a Loisy during the modernist crisis, nor the charisma of a Teilhard and his reputation as a scientist and poet, or the consummate prudence of a Lubac in protecting his interests, he satisfied perfectly the definition of a modernist. On this point in fact, he greatly surpassed his predecessors, for reasons which are multiple.

As for its achievements, this new Rahnerian theology reaches the perfection of the genre by its camouflage under orthodox and Thomistic appearances, while the principles and conclusions are diametrically opposed to faith and Thomism. There is not a single Trinitarian heresy that has not been endorsed by Rahner, not to mention his lapsus linguae in speaking of “Christian polytheism.” There is no Thomistic thesis that has not been vitiated by his truth and his religion born of pure conscience. There is no vision of creation and of the salvation of man that has not passed under the wheels of the bulldozer that swallows God from man, the supernatural from nature and Jesus Christ from man pure and simple, to end up with a Hegelian-type pantheism. It seems that the new Rahner-style theology is based on the sacred Gnostic tripod dear to Hegel: the devaluation of the world, the mystical flight to the beyond and the means of this flight, Gnosis or esoteric knowledge. Now, such an apotheosis of the Rahnerian cerebral elucubrations alone constitutes the Omega point of modernism.

As for the means used to reach the final goal, it must be said that Rahner far surpasses his predecessors. Until the neo-modernism of the interwar period, the heretics still being hunted down had not been able to clearly state their guiding principles. The new theology was in vogue with its sails unfurled. Its principles are the cogito-volo-est of the existentialists who come to deny the essences of things, and Hegel’s dialectical principle according to which the infinite is poured into the finite to become the conscious infinite. These principles have nothing of the acidic aspect of pure Kantian criticism nor of the vertiginous evolutionism of Bergson and Loisy.

Not only are the Rahnerian principles in full view, but they take on an attractive richness and fullness thanks to this theology of pure consciousness. It is knowledge walled up within oneself and closed to beings. It is the most complete immanentism which, by its natural inclination, leads straight to narcissism and selfishness. This point of view is the exact opposite of realism open to being. And these principles command all intellectual effort according to an implacable logic worthy of Hegel. They are valid both for theology and for philosophy, so that, leaning on a Kantian philosophy of consciousness, drawn from the Heideggerian revelation, Rahner’s Hegelian theology is defined as a theology of consciousness without God, that is to say, properly atheistic. This is why, with the combination of Kant-Hegel-Heidegger-Rahner, it seems that neo-modernism reaches the perfection of its genre. We will no doubt be able to clarify it—our authors’ language is as obscure as one could wish—it will be difficult to improve it. In fact, for forty years now, thinking heads have been simply warming up dishes prepared with Rahner sauce.

But paradoxically, on this negative aspect of man closed in on himself, forging his own truth, is also grafted a broad-mindedness towards all systems of thought. One is sensitive to the most contradictory creations. Within the pantheon that is the Universal Synarchical Church, there is a niche for all gods, even for Jesus Christ. In the Rahnerian theology of consciousness, in the religion of man by man and for man, all find a refuge there, excepting no creed or Revelation, since all individuals are Christians who ignore each other. Nowhere has modernism succeeded in offering a synthesis that is both more logical with its basic principles and more advantageous for all.

That is why it seems that our thesis has strong points of support. Rahner represents the Omega point of modernism. Insofar as such a theology represents the most perfect depravity of divine wisdom, to call it by its name, it should be called human folly to the highest degree.