Jospeh Cardinal Ratzinger - In the Beginning

A big question for me as a young person was how to understand & reconcile the Bible's account of the creation of man with the scientific account.  Over the years, I have come to peace with this issue & now cherish the profound truths found in the words of Scripture & the teaching of the Church on this matter.  But clear, concise, & orthodox writing on this subject can be scarce.  It was a great joy, then, to discover a small book by then-Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger called In The Beginning, a collection of homilies he gave in Munich some years ago, in addition to a forward & an epilogue.

I posted a series of summaries of this important work & have collected them together in this post, but you really should just read the book.

Homily 1 - Part 1 & Part 2

Homily 2 - Part 1 & Part 2

Homily 3 - Part 1 & Part 2

Homily 4 - Part 1 & Part 2

Epilogue - Part 1 & Part 2

On this question of origins, one should note the different starting points of the Church & the modern scientific culture.  The latter starts from a presupposition of skepticism, that God does not exist & that man is nothing more than a particularly bright animal with no particular meaning to his existence.  Here man demands that God be proven, that he be picked apart like a frog on a high school biology lab table.  For the Church, however, God is already known, because he has revealed to himself to man & has shown man the tremendous dignity of his being & the glory for which he is destined.  It is a presupposition of faith based on a knowledge much deeper than facts.

While the skeptical methods of science have great merit when studying the natural world, they have little application in the supernatural realm (Obviously Sts. Thomas, Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, etc. applied profound principles of reasoning to theological matters; so here I mean specifically the presupposition of skepticism, not scientific reasoning in general).  To do so is to apply the wrong tool the problem - a bad, even dangerous, result is virtually guaranteed.

So if two men approach you and one says, "Your existence is meaningless; freedom is an illusion, as everything you are or do is predetermined by molecular interaction; there is no such thing as love; there is nothing beyond this life; your destiny is darkness & silence," and the other says, "you are a beloved child of the most high Father; you are made for an eternity of unimaginable glory, if only you would choose it," to whom are you going to lend your ear?

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.

In the Beginning by J. Ratzinger - Homily 4, Part 1

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 4^th & 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).”

We end with man enslaved to the idols of his own creation; but next time we will see the response of the New Testament.

In the Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger - Homily 2, Part I

Joseph Ratzinger opens his second homily by reviewing two realizations from his first homily: firstly, that Christians read the Scriptures with Christ, who is their guide, “indicating to us in reliable fashion what an image is and where the real, enduring content of a biblical expression may be found. He is freedom from a false slavery to literalism and a guarantee of the… truth of the Bible, which does not dissipate into a cloud of pious pleasantries but remains the sure ground upon which we can stand (p.21).” Secondly, that faith in creation is reasonable.

The early development of the sciences operated on an ancient principle that the heavens were of divine nature & therefore eternal & unchangeable, which the newly-discovered mathematical formulae that described & governed the physical realm seemed to support. As things progressed, however, a messier & more complicated picture of the cosmos emerged. Ratzinger notes science began to see that “the universe is subject to both becoming & destruction… Temporality is inscribed upon it… a passage from a beginning to an end (p.22).”

Indeed, on both the tiniest & the largest scales, science continues to reveal to us many surprising, startling, frightening, & awe-inspiring things. The very complexity of the universe – especially life – seems to render absurd any explanations rooted in inherent necessity or random chance, & frequently the attempts of science to explain things are untenable. One writer noted that what atheistic scientists wish to impose on us is far more unbelievable than anything Christianity has ever taught. But with faith one sees the rational hand of God at work in the cosmos. Ratzinger says, “the natural sciences… have given us a new & unheard-of creation account with vast new images, which let us recognize the face of the Creator and… realize… that at the very beginning & foundation of all being there is a creating Intelligence (p.24).”

Pope Pius XII’s encyclical letter Humani Generis of 1950 set the Church’s rules of engagement with modern science, which I will vainly attempt to sum up as: science never by itself & never for itself, but always in light of Jesus Christ & with the guidance of the Church. Pius spends a lot of time mapping out the role of the Church as a custodian of science, but I will leave that for you to explore. However, the idea of science never in isolation is important to Ratzinger because he knows it can only lead to a false &, ultimately, meaningless view of the cosmos & of man himself. In this overly-rationalistic climate a person is only value insofar as they are productive, & all matter – even human matter – serves merely as raw material to be manipulated & used for the sake of the idol of progress.

But the good news of Christianity (which it shares with the Jewish faith) is that every human being has profound meaning as an image of God & has a noble purpose which is nothing less than union with God himself. Without God, a creation hurtling toward its end is completely devoid of hope. What Christianity proposes is a creation that is a gift from the Creator & is on a journey toward an ultimate destination – a truly unimaginable conclusion that is only known in the mind of God.

In the second part of his homily, Ratzinger will return to the Genesis text again and consider more deeply the imagery within it, what he calls the enduring significance of the symbolic elements in the text.

A Brief Review of Two Papal Encylicals

An amazing result of the vast technological achievements of man is that men are generally much more ignorant than they ought to be. People, including me, come out of school inexcusably poorly read in the classics of literature, history, ethics, civics, philosophy, & religion. I spend a great deal of my time attempting to make up for lost ground on these accounts.

Since I travel a lot, I've found that I can take a massive amount of great reading material with me in a very small package by taking a CD of the contents of the New Advent website. I think it costs about $20, but if one were to collect the actual books of all the material on it, I'm sure it would cost thousands & take up rooms.

Below are just a handful of thoughts on 2 very different papal encyclicals I read recently in the New Advent library archives, but both with connections to my philosophy studies (I also read Leo XIII's encyclical against duelling, Pastoralis Officii, but it was only loosely connected)...

Sublimus Dei - On slavery in the New World, Pope Paul III, 1537

Theology & philosophy from ancient times throughout the Middle Ages largely strove to understand the nature of person in the context of the Divine Persons of the Trinity, & perhaps secondarily to man, but only then with a view toward man as a species, often called the "cosmological" view. The full working-out of the nature of man as a person - including his interior life, the "personalist" view - is a rather recent happening.

So, what happens when fifteenth & sixteenth century Europeans come into contact new races of humans, whose appearance & culture are markedly different from their own? Well, the sub-title given to the papal encyclical gives a clue.

In 4 short paragraphs, the Holy Father notes that God has established that "all are capable of receiving the doctrines of the faith," and that those who hold that the "people of whom We have recent knowledge" are mere "dumb brutes" are in league with that ancient enemy of man. Of course, if these newly discovered peoples are not really human persons, but just man-like animals, then there can't be much wrong with owning or using them, right?

He declares flatly that, "the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it." He goes on to say that they shall not have their property taken nor be reduced to slavery, but "should be converted to the faith of Jesus Christ by preaching the word of God and by the example of good and holy living." An absolutely priceless phrase that applies today as much as it did 500 years ago.

Now, I have been on record as stating that the Vatican did not officially denounce the evil of slavery until Pope Leo XIII's In Plurimis of 1888 (curiously directed toward the bishops of Brazil). Some may wonder why the 1573 decree does not decry all slavery or indentured servitude, but only as pertains to the newly-discovered peoples of the Americas. My understanding for this is that the Church does not see slavery as a direct impediment to salvation, as did not St. Paul (1 Cor 7:20-24, et al.) (though another of Leo XIII's encyclicals on slavery, Catholicae Ecclesiae, opens with numerous citations to show that the Church has always opposed slavery as evil. There is also Gregory XVI's In Supremo Apostolatus from 1839). Yet, as the Church emerged from a limited way of thinking about human persons inherited from antiquity & the Middle Ages, it has increasingly come to see not just in terms of pure salvation/damnation, but also in terms of justice due human person. Slavery itself may not be a hindrance to salvation, but it is unworthy of persons to either try to own another or to be owned by another. This fullness of understanding of the inherent value of human life continues to be worked out, as we wrestle with issues ranging from abortion to human cloning to euthanasia.


Mit Brennender Sorge - "With Burning Sorrow," On the Church & the German Reich, Pope Pius XI, 1939

Given the recent upheaval surrounding the cause for canonization of Pope Pius XII (who is thought to have heavily contributed this encyclical while Papal Nuncio to Germany) & my own interests in this issue, I read this encyclical with wonder. I honestly can't imagine what it must have been like to live through this time in Germany.

The background of the letter is that the Holy See & the Reich had entered into a concordat in 1933 which guaranteed that the Church would be able to continue to operate freely in Germany, including the running of schools & seminaries (though I haven't read the concordat itself yet). It is clear from the language here that the government has now undertaken a campaign to actively disregard the provisions of the prior agreement & to undermine the Church's moral & spiritual authority.

While this is a long & penetrating document covering the salvation of man through Jesus Christ alone, the role of the Church in bringing Christ to the world, the Natural Law, the rights of parents to rear & educate their children as they see fit, & the condemnation of racial crimes - including a note that Jesus himself was a Jew - the thing I find intriguing & which I comment upon here is a reference to a kind of German religion set up by the Reich - a paganistic & pantheistic alternative religion which deifies the well-ordered universe as reflected in the well-ordered State & whose sacraments are scientific progress & societal purification.

The Holy Father notes quite sharply, "Whoever identifies, by pantheistic confusion, God and the universe, by either lowering God to the dimensions of the world, or raising the world to the dimensions of God, is not a believer in God. Whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God... Neither is he a believer in God. [7]"

While circumstances have certainly changed, there are still any number of people today who hold that the earth, the universe, the collectivity of all life, or whatever is the real divine being, & that we are the ones who sin against her when we damage her with oil spills, pollution, etc. Since we are the problem, we must be contained, esp. through population control. The thing is, it all seems so reasonable at the time.

The philosophical error here, as I see it, is what Dietrich von Hildebrand calls "value judgment." It is simply the recognition & justice due a given person, thing, or circumstance. Ice cream is nice on a hot summer day, but it hardly calls for for the adoration due God. If one of your scoops falls on the ground, you may be disappointed, but it hardly calls for the same outrage as against Hitler or the same tears as over millions exterminated.

We often live for this merely "subjectively satisfying," while rarely giving due consideration to those things of real value. Many thinkers, even St. Thomas himself, seems to have failed to make this distinction among the various goods. Even the entire universe, as inconceivably vast & wonderful as it is, is still just a thing without a soul, & so does not dwell on the same plane of value merited by a single human being, of whom John Henry Cardinal Newman called, "an infinite abyss of existence." This is why we respect the dignity of all human beings: they merit it simply by being human beings. This is why we adore God - because God is inherently adoration-worthy due to his perfections. How we respond to a value placed before us has implications for our own selves. If we respect or revere a thing according to what it due it, we make something greater of ourselves. But if we either ignore or rebel against this call for a value response, or if we give a thing more honor than it deserves, then we degrade ourselves as person.

This reasoning also has something to do with why Catholics cannot participate in Masonic organizations (see papal encyclicals Humanum Genus & here & here, & the CDF's pronouncement against Masons here). Despite their various benevolent works, they are basically a rival religion, who pay homage to an unspecific, generic maker & orderer of the universe. While this sounds harmless enough, the problem is that God is not a nameless, generic deity, but a very specific Being whom we know (though we don't know everything), because he has revealed himself to us.

The Holy Father says, "Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect, one in the Trinity of Persons, tri-personal in the unity of divine essence, the Creator of all existence. Lord, King and ultimate Consummator of the history of the world, who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side. [9]"

To continue to address a mysterious & nameless deity while standing in the light of full revelation is simply untenable. This is also the concern with any ecumenical movement or program that disregards or eliminates revealed truths of the Faith for the sake of an easy, though false, unity.

In a different vein, there is a little phrase that begins the last cited paragraph to which we should be attentive: "Beware, Venerable Brethren, of that growing abuse, in speech as in writing, of the name of God as though it were a meaningless label..." I was really taken back to find that "My God!" is a phrase used frequently by Chinese English-speakers to denote surprise or exasperation. I'm sure they are just parroting what they have heard elsewhere - probably Western films - & know not what they do. Less forgivable is how common we've allowed the flippant use of "OMG!" to become in our own culture.

Similarly, the Holy Father notes that Christian religious language has been appropriated & given new meanings by the Reich, blurring the distinction between the Church & the new State Religion. Using the example of the term "immortality," the pope declares that, "Whoever only means by the term, the collective survival here on earth of his people for an indefinite length of time, distorts one of the fundamental notions of the Christian Faith and tampers with the very foundations of the religious concept of the universe, which requires a moral order. [24] " Immortality in the Third Reich refers not the individual, but the indefinite survival of the Reich itself.

But instead of wasting your time reading what I think these mean, go read them yourselves. There is a vast wealth of wisdom & insight to be found in all of these papal writings (including the truly brilliant ones by our most recent popes), no matter the time or circumstances in which they were written. Here we find the very best of the men who were personally called by Christ to feed his sheep & confirm the brethren.