RAHNER, KARL
(1904–1984)

One of the most significant Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century and a formative influence upon Vatican II, Karl Rahner was born on March 5, 1904, in the city of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, the fourth of seven children in the family of Karl and Luise (Trescher) Rahner. Upon graduation from secondary school at the age of eighteen, Rahner followed in the footsteps of his elder brother Hugo and entered the Society of Jesus; he was to remain a Jesuit his entire life. During his novitiate studies from 1924 to 1927, Rahner was introduced to Catholic scholastic philosophy and to the modern German philosophers. He seems especially to have been influenced by the work of Joseph Maréchal (1878–1944), the Belgian philosopher and Jesuit, whose adoption of Kant's transcendental method in his five-volume work, Le point de départ de la métaphysique, had led to somewhat of a breakthrough in the appreciation of Kant's philosophy among neo-Scholastics. Maréchal was known as the "father of transcendental Thomism" for his use of St. Thomas Aquinas's epistemology in an attempt to demonstrate that the metaphysical world Kant had secured for practical reason was already inherent in the theoretical.

After teaching Latin at the Feldkirch Novitiate, Rahner studied theology at Valkenburg in the Netherlands (1929–1933), where his Christian spirituality was further nurtured through study of patristic and medieval mysticism, and above all of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), founder of the Jesuit order and author of the Spiritual Exercises. Following ordination to the priesthood in 1932, Rahner commenced study for his doctoral thesis in philosophy at Freiburg, while at the same time attending lectures by Martin Heidegger, whose philosophy of Dasein, or "being in the world," was to be the other primary philosophical influence upon him. His dissertation, a response to Kant's critique of theoretical metaphysics by means of the transcendental Thomism of Maréchal and the existentialism of Heidegger, was rejected by his doctoral director, Martin Honecker, for its departure from more traditional neo-Scholastic interpretations of Aquinas's epistemology, but was later published as Geist in Welt (Spirit in the world).

After failing the doctorate in philosophy, Rahner returned to Austria, where he successfully completed his second dissertation, this time in theology, at Innsbruck in 1936 and was appointed as Privatdozent (lecturer) in the faculty of theology of the University of Innsbruck in 1937. That summer he delivered a series of lectures to the Salzburg summer school on the "Foundations of a Philosophy of Religion," later published as Hörer des Wortes (Hearer[s] of the word).

When the Nazis abolished the theology faculty (July 1938) and the Jesuit college (October 1939) at Innsbruck, Rahner left for Vienna, where he did some teaching and served as a consultant at the Pastoral Institute for five years. After a brief stint as a pastor in Bavaria in the final year of the war, he taught dogmatic theology at Berchmanskolleg in Pullach. In 1948 he returned to the theology faculty at Innsbruck, where he was to reside until 1964. There he lectured on a wide variety of topics to later be included in the essays published as Schriften zur Theologie (Theological investigations), the first volume of which appeared in 1954. Of particular significance was his scholarly preoccupation with the relationship between nature and grace.

During this prolific period Rahner experienced some difficulties within the Church, beginning as early as 1950 when he was prevented from publishing a book on the Assumption of Mary, and continuing through the following decade until 1962, when he was placed under a censorship regulation from Rome. Suspicions over his orthodoxy subsided, however, when the newly elected Pope John XXIII appointed Rahner as one of the theological experts (periti ) at the Second Vatican Council, and the censorship upon him was reversed in 1963. Rahner's influence at Vatican II was widespread; particularly noteworthy is his selection as one of the seven theologians who would develop Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic constitution on the Church), a document fully explicating the doctrine of the Church, and setting forth explicitly in chapter II the Church's inclusivist stance with regard to salvation.

It was during the Second Vatican Council that Rahner was invited to take the Chair in Christianity and Philosophy of Religion at the University of Munich, where he began teaching in 1964, the same year that a Festschrift, Gott in Welt (God in the world) was published in honor of his sixtieth birthday. During his time at Munich, Rahner published a collection of essays in spirituality as the seventh volume of Schriften zur Theologie, and together with Edward Schillebeeckx edited the first issue of Concilium. In 1967 Rahner accepted the University of Münster's invitation to become Ordinary Professor of Dogmatics and the History of Dogma, where he completed three more volumes of the Schriften, before retiring in 1971. Retirement brought him back to Munich, where he prepared Grundkurs des Glaubens (Foundations of Christian faith), the most systematic summary of his theology, and to Innsbruck, where in addition to pastoral and moral essays, Rahner worked out the most developed form of his transcendental Christology, and completed the final volumes of the Schriften, thus continuing the life of the diligent scholar until his death in Innsbruck on March 30, 1984.

Rahner has been criticized for a failure to adequately address the problem of evil, especially in light of his experience as a German Catholic living through the Nazi genocide of two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Neither in the above nor in what follows will it be possible to do full justice to the breadth of Rahner's theological output, which covers almost every aspect of religious thought. The focus here is upon Rahner's efforts at aggiornamento, or renewal of neo-Scholasticism and the philosophical import of two concepts integral to his theological weltanschauung : Vorgriff auf esse and das übernatürliche Existential.

Geist in Welt focuses upon one of the central problems of philosophy, namely the nature and possibility of metaphysics. In this work, Rahner examines one part of St. Thomas Aquinas's metaphysics of knowledge, specifically that section of the Summa theologiae that addresses what appears to sense intuition, conversio ad phantasmata (conversion to the phantasm), in light of Kant's critique of speculative metaphysics. Whereas Kant had rejected theoretical knowledge of God in order to secure a place for metaphysics as a practical philosophy, Rahner uses the tools of transcendental and existentialist philosophy, honed through Maréchal and Heidegger respectively, to retrieve the theoretical metaphysics of St. Thomas. Spirit in the World is thus Rahner's attempt to demonstrate how, given that human knowledge is wedded to the a posteriori, or realm of sensory experience, metaphysics is still possible; and as fraught as the philosophical analysis is, the main arguments are fairly accessible.

Essentially Rahner proffers a teleology of knowledge according to which there is presupposed in every human act of knowing the Vorgriff auf esse (the "pre-apprehension of being" in Heideggerian terms), a transcendental awareness of infinite being, or of God, the a priori condition without which no individual act of knowing could occur. In every act of knowing then, the individual, or "spirit in the world," has already reached out beyond the world and known the metaphysical. This awareness of God, which is always indirect and shrouded in mystery (since we cannot know God as if God were an object among other realities that are present to us), presupposes the transcendental orientation of the human knower to God, who is both the source and ultimate goal of the human quest for knowledge. To be human is therefore to be in relation to God, since we implicitly affirm the existence of God in every judgment we make, regardless of whether or not we ever formally acknowledge this. Ipso facto, human existence itself implies the transcendental experience of God for Rahner, thus satisfying not only the transcendental Thomism of Maréchal and the existentialism of Heidegger, but also the Ignation impulse to "find God in all things."

Hörer des Wortes is formally an investigation into the relationship between philosophy of religion and theology. Philosophy of religion, according to Rahner, consists in showing human beings to be the infinite spirits who, because of our nature, are turned toward a possible revelation, or self-communication of God, since revelation for Rahner is always personal, not propositional. God, the personal infinite, chooses human history as the place of transcendent self-communication (a divine self-communication that finds concrete historical expression in Jesus Christ); theology begins with the human person who has become attuned to God's self-communication, a hearer of God's word. In order to make this case, Rahner develops his "transcendental arguments" further and grounds them more fully theologically. By means of a "theological anthropology," a metaphysical analysis of human nature, Rahner proposes Vorgriff auf esse as a pre-apprehension of infinite being that also elicits the restless yearning of the human spirit (echoing a desire at least as old as Augustine) for fulfillment in and through that absolute being whose self-communication is both the ground and telos of human existence.

This understanding of the human spirit's desire for transcendent meaning, together with God's ineffable self-communication, later has important implications for Rahner's interpretation of the relationship between nature and grace, a relationship examined through his concept of das übernatürliche Existential, the "supernatural existential," first coined during his intervention in the nouvelle théologie debate in 1950 but still being worked out as late as 1976 in Grundkurs des Glaubens. The debate revolved around whether or not the human orientation toward God was natural or supernatural, and Rahner uses the term "supernatural existential" in an attempt to overcome the tendency in neo-Scholastic theology to dichotomize nature and grace, while at the same time safeguarding the gratuity of God's grace. Once again borrowing from Heidegger's vocabulary, Rahner defines an "existential" as a fundamental element in human existence, and claims that the central and abiding existential of human nature is the unconditional desire for grace and for the beatific vision. At the same time, however, he argues that the very fact of this desire already belies God's self-communication, precisely the meaning of grace for Rahner. In other words, since our very existence is permeated with God's constant self-giving, human nature is already grace laden. Das übernatürliche Existential ultimately entails the universal human experience of grace, and similar to the Vorgriff auf esse, this experience, though wedded to the world, is also transcendental and thus can never be directly or concretely realized.

The ubiquitous nature of the "supernatural existential" also undergirds Rahner's Christian inclusivism, itself a corollary of his philosophy of grace, and arguably the theological stance for which he is best known in non-Catholic circles. For Rahner, because God's gracious self-communication has found concrete historical expression in Jesus Christ, all grace is ultimately the grace of Christ; yet, significantly, Christ's universal grace is not narrowly circumscribed by Christianity. If das übernatürliche Existential is a universal given, and just as the Vorgriff auf esse is never directly or concretely realized, then it is possible that a person may accept this gift of grace without explicit acknowledgment and regardless of whether or not one is formally Christian. It is for this reason that non-Christians living lives of grace are "anonymous Christians" from Rahner's perspective, a title not intended as a subtle form of Christian supersessionism, but rather as a theologically astute commitment to the view that God's grace is active well beyond the confines of Christianity. The religious inclusivism espoused by Rahner had an ecumenical import that has proven vital to Catholic interreligious dialogue in the post–Vatican II era and that presumably will continue to be relevant to the burgeoning interest in religious diversity among philosophers of religion well into the third millennium

See also Heidegger, Martin; Maréchal, Joseph; Thomas Aquinas, St.

Bibliography

works by rahner

Geist in Welt: Zur Metaphysik der endlichen Erkenntnis bei Thomas von Aquin. Innsbruck and Leipzig: Felizian Rauch, 1939; 2nd ed., expanded and reworked by J. B. Metz. Munich: Kösel, 1957. Translated as Spirit in the World by W. Dych. New York: Herder and Herder, 1968.

Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums. Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 1976. Translated as Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity by W. Dych. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978.

Hörer des Wortes: Zur Grundlegung einer Religionsphilosophie. Munich: Kösel-Pustet, 1941; 2nd ed., reworked by J. B. Metz. Munich: Kösel, 1963. Translated as Hearer of the Word by J. Donceel. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Karl Rahner: Sämtliche Werke. 32 vols., edited by K Lehmann, J. B. Metz, K. H. Neufeld, A. Raffelt, and H. Vorgrimler. Freiburg: Herder, 1995ff.

Schriften zur Theologie, 16 vols. Einsiedeln und Zurich, 1954–1984. Translated as Theological Investigations, 23 vols. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1961–1984.

works about rahner

Bleistein, R., and E. Klinger. Bibliographie Karl Rahner, 1924–1969. Freiburg: Herder, 1969.

Bleistein, R., ed. Bibliographie Karl Rahner, 1969–1974. Freiburg: Herder, 1969.

Dych, W. Karl Rahner. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1992.

Imhof, P., and H. Treziak. "Bibliographie Karl Rahner, 1974–1979." In Wagnis Theologie: Erfahrungen mit der Theologie Karl Rahners, edited by H. Vorgrimler, 579–597. Freiburg: Herder, 1979.

Imhof, P., and E. Meuser, "Bibliographie Karl Rahner, 1979–1984." In Glaube im Prozess, edited by E. Klinger and K. Wittstadt, 854–888. Freiburg: Herder, 1984.

Kilby, K. Karl Rahner: Theology and Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2004.

Marmion, D., and M. E. Hines, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Karl Rahner. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Pedley, C. J. "An English Bibliographical Aid to Karl Rahner." The Heythrop Journal 25 (1984): 319–365.

Raffelt, A. "Karl Rahner: Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur, 1948–1978." In Wagnis Theologie: Erfahrung mit dem Theologie Karl Rahners, edited by H. Vorgrimler, 598–622. Freiburg: Herder, 1979.

Raffelt, A. "Karl Rahner: Bibliographie der Sekundärliteratur, 1979–1983 und Nachträge." In Glaube im Prozess, edited by E. Klinger and K. Wittstadt, 872–885. Freiburg: Herder, 1984.

Raffelt, A., and R. Siebenrock. "Karl Rahner: Sekundärliteratur, 1984–1993." In Karl Rahner in Erinnerung, edited by A. Raffelt, 165–205. Freiburger Akademieschriften, Band 8. Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1994.

Tallon, A. "Rahner Bibliography Supplement." Theology Digest 38 (2) (1991): 131–140.

Tallon, A. "Rahner Studies, 1939–1989: Part 1, 1939–1973." Theology Digest 36 (4) (1989): 321–346.

Tallon, A. "Rahner Studies, 1939–1989: Part 2, 1974–1989." Theology Digest 37 (1) (1990): 17–41.

Elizabeth Galbraith (2005)