In the Beginning by J. Card. Ratzinger - Epilogue Part 1

Epilogue: Consequences of Faith in Creation, Part 1

We have seen that faith in creation & the Father’s plan for mankind are inextricably bound together. However, in an appendix to his four homilies on creation, Cardinal Ratzinger notes that much of the Church’s recent theology has been directed toward “doing,” which sets aside the study of creation as something “not sufficiently practical.” “Theology has been seeking its truth more and more ‘in praxis’; not in the apparently unanswerable problem, ‘What are we?’, but in the more pressing, ‘What can we do?’ (p.80)”

Certainly, the world threatens God’s creation with ever-new movements & projects, all of which ultimately are philosophic in nature. Card. Ratzinger begins to examine these movements by noting that creation and nature must now “defend themselves against the limitless pretensions of human beings as creators. Human beings want to understand the created world only as material for their own creativity.” In this, “humans are sawing off the branch on which they sit (p.81).” Man’s salvation is intrinsically tied up with a proper understanding of creation, so it cannot be culled out of any plan to achieve man’s proper end. Ratzinger will now introduce a series of historical figures that mark various antithetical stances against a properly Christian view of creation.

First, we find Giordano Bruno (d.1600), a fallen-away Dominican who posited the idea of God-as-cosmos. We might wonder, if Bruno so elevated creation to divinity, how is his view antithetical? He desired to “relinquish the Christian so that the Greek could be restored in all its pagan purity (p.81).” However, Christian creation is contingent; it is dependent on the divine. Many moderns have taken the next step to claim that “the dependence implied by faith in creation is unacceptable… [As] a real barrier to human freedom [it is] the first thing needing to be eliminated if humankind is to be effectively liberated (p.82).”

Ratzinger also sees in Galileo (d.1642) a return to Greece, but this time in a Platonic movement of God-as-mathematics. Discovering the formulae that correctly describes the function of the universe is to approach the divine. “The whole of knowledge is fitted into the schema of subject and object. What is not objective is subjective. [And] the subjective is everything arbitrary and private, everything outside of science… unworthy of knowledge (p.84).” In this structure, God is reduced to being merely “the first cause,” which is detached from & unaffected by - even unaffecting of - the universe. Attempting to split the God who created the cosmos from the God who created you is lethal to both man & God. He is not God who merely dwells in the outer sphere of the universe, nor is he God who dwells only in the inner world of human piety, for in God ”creation and covenant come together (p.85).” Here Ratzinger gives an interesting, but undeveloped, idea that human beings are actually “an obstacle and irritation for ‘science’ (p.86),” as they cannot easily be “objectified.” He spies a way out of this modern mire, however: by seeing the person not just as another object in nature to study & ‘figure out,’ but in the light of God, the creator.

If Bruno & Galileo sought to break apart the Christian synthesis of Athens & Jerusalem, but keeping only the Greek, then Martin Luther (d.1546) would also seek to split the two minds, but so as to abolish the Greek entirely to rediscover a “pure” Christianity. In doing so, the cosmos became for Luther a fallen creation for fallen man: “the burden of their past, their shackles and chains, their damnation: Law (p.87).” Here, in an ironically Platonic twist, Luther stretches man between being & nothing: only insofar as his soul attains to God does he have any existence whatever; considered in himself, man is nothing, a non-being. In this scheme, “Grace is seen here in radical opposition to creation, which is marked through and through by sin; it implies an attempt to get behind creation (p.88).” This philosophy naturally breeds dualism, which sets the spirit against the flesh. Ratzinger sees this dualism developing in the modern world along two lines: one of “divine geometry” and one of “intrinsic corruption.” We will see how Ratzinger concludes this line of thought next time.

Postscript: In The Spirit of the Liturgy, Cardinal Ratzinger introduces the topic of worship in general by proposing the ideas of the descending & the ascending, the going away from & the returning to. He proposes that many, if not most, religions of the pre-Christian/Judeo ancients rightly saw divinity as the pure state from which all material things fell & to which they seek to return. In other words, creation was a disaster, a tragedy. Though surely unintended, Luther in his doctrine of the utter depravity of man has, in fact, brought in a classic pagan principle, albeit in a Christianized version – the physical order as the result of a complete fall from the divine order, and from which we must separate ourselves if we are to return to the state of divine grace. The Catholic tradition, in great contrast, sees creation as a wondrous gift to be celebrated, enjoyed, & cherished; a great good from the God that looked over his work & pronounced it good.