Point of Order - in an all-too-common moment of confusion, I managed to post the 2nd part of Ratzinger's homily first. So perhaps you should read this, then skip back to the other part. Cheers.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger begins his 4th & last homily on the biblical accounts of Genesis by recalling a comment made by a fellow bishop: today we have cut the Gospel in half! Many people speak about the Good News of Christianity in attractive & palatable ways, but no one dares today to speak the first part of Jesus’ prophetic message: Repent! That is, to acknowledge the reality of sin. Ratzinger says that to repent is “to acknowledge our sinfulness, to do penance, & to become other than what we are (p.61).”
But sin is a very old-fashioned notion these days when many people reject moral norms as the residue of a backward & less-enlightened era. Of this Ratzinger says, “…the whole idea of the moral has… been generally been abandoned. This is a logical development if there is no standard for human beings to use as a model – something not discovered by us but coming from the inner goodness of creation. With this we have arrived at the real heart of the matter. People today know of no standard; to be sure, they do not want to know of any because they see standards as threats to their freedom (p.62).” Here we see that sin & freedom are intrinsically connected together. Man, however, was not given an absolute & boundless freedom; it is subject to the limitations of the one who grants it him.
Ratzinger then considers the two great images of the biblical account: the Garden & the Snake. In the Garden, God establishes man as co-owner & co-creator; together as creature & creator in harmony, man’s life finds fulfillment. The Garden is a place of peace, beauty, & plenty; the very image of God’s plan for man. Indeed, God created man to be one with Himself. Creation, then, is “a gift & a sign of the saving & unifying goodness of God (p.65).” The snake, on the other hand, was a prominent figure in Eastern fertility cults & a great temptation for Israel to abandon its covenant with God & join the milieu of its time. For the Israelites during the dark time of captivity in Babylon, & for us today, the snake sows doubt in God’s power & goodness, even his very existence. Here we must ask, why did God create man in such a way so he would fall? Love must be perfectly free or it is not love. God gave man the power to choose Him or something else. While the choice is free, the consequences are not. Ratzinger notes, “man decides to not accept the limitations of his existence (p.67).”
Today, we clearly see that technology has advanced rapidly & has made life quite luxurious for those that can afford it, but it changes so rapidly as to be disorienting. Art, too, no longer seeks to image the heavenly, but often becomes a putrid image of the fallen instead. In the uniquely human fields of art & science, the only guiding principle is that whatever can be done must be done; but when separated from the beautiful, the good, & the moral, they quickly become monsters. Ratzinger says, “the measure of human beings is what they can do & not what they are, not what is good or bad. What they can do they may do… (p.68).”
Much like the Israelites in captivity who began to forget God & turned toward their captor’s idolatrous ways, it is a trick of Satan today that “we look on [technology] nowadays with incomprehension & ultimately with helplessness… [Men] do not free themselves, but place themselves in opposition to the truth. And that means that they are destroying themselves & the world (p.69).” We think of ourselves as quite advanced today, but only a miniscule few of us actually know how all the electronic devices upon which we rely actually work. Likewise, art has degraded into entertainment, whose goal seems increasingly to be the peddling of smut. In his slavery to technology, Ratzinger notes that men “do not make themselves gods… but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities… (p.70).”
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