The power of fiction is perceived as a fraud on the given in fact-checker times. Fictional signals for as-if worlds are considered disreputable. One thinks one can say what is, as if human recognition had the character of an image. In reality, one perceives creatively, if one perceives at all. Such design elements, starting with the formation of concepts, have a fictitious character throughout, they owe themselves to the imagination and are not simply the result of the given.
Religious consciousness, made aware of the productive quality of cognition, wrongly rejects such perspectivity as relativism. The claim to refer to the divine as a given remains at the discretion of religion if it professes its conditions of knowledge. So it is a mystery to him, writes Walter Cardinal Kasper, a sparring partner of Joseph Ratzinger for over sixty years, "how Ratzinger, who reflected on the subjective historical element of knowledge in his Bonaventure studies and laid the foundation for a corresponding historical view, later criticized it rather undifferentiated as relativism."
The reference to the formulas of late antiquity
In an article for the current issue of the theological journal "Communio", Kasper also speaks very fundamentally about the lasting significance of Greek thought for Christian theology. Without reference to the dogmatic formulas of late antiquity, Kasper is correctly understood, in particular her understanding of freedom remains flat. When he "youthfully cheeky" identified a Platonizing theology in Ratzinger's 1968 classic "Introduction to Christianity" and thus set the tone for further Ratzinger criticism, "platonic" was by no means meant by him, Kasper, as a dirty word: "Of course, I did not mean to say that Ratzinger was a Platonist in a substantive sense, which would be a completely nonsensical assertion. Nor was it a question of de-Hellenization and thus of a 'de-Platonization' of Christianity."
Rather, what Kasper criticizes is that the points of contact between Neoplatonism and modern thought, as convincingly worked out by the philosopher Werner Beierwaltes, have not been sufficiently appreciated by Ratzinger. It is Beierwaltes who, in his book "Platonism in Christianity", also points out "the momentous difference between the genuinely Christian and the Greek" and thus looks at the Logos speech in the prologue of the Gospel of John ("The Word has become flesh").
In the critic's understanding, Kasper's early criticism was therefore not directed against Ratzinger's adherence to the Hellenic concepts of Christianity. Especially since in Ratzinger's "Introduction to Christianity" the dogma is worked out as a language regulation using the example of the late antique formula "One being – three persons", which is "in a certain sense accidental".
In view of this finding, Ratzinger warned against constructing the concepts that had become dogmatic "as the only possible ones, inferring from thinking that it could only be said in this way and not otherwise. To do so would be to fail to recognize the negative character of the language of the doctrine of God, that of its merely experimental speech." Plato as a guarantor for the future viability of Christian theology? A fictional signal, to be kept tentatively.