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. Cardinal Ratzinger - Epilogue, Part II

Epilogue: Consequences of Faith in Creation, Part II

The next figure Cardinal Ratzinger considers after Bruno, Galileo, & Luther is Wilhelm Hegel, who saw God as the “process of reason (p.89),” where sin, grace, & personal salvation all evaporate before the emergence of a new humanity that pulls itself up by its own bootstraps, so to speak.  If Hegel proposed this as a theory, Marx made it a reality: “Redemption is now construed strictly as the ‘praxis’ of man… the total antithesis of faith in creation (p.90).”  Ratzinger notes two aspects of Marx’s scheme.  Firstly, the individual no longer matters; only the whole.  “Individual consciousness [& suffering] is taken up into class consciousness… All that matters is the logic of the system… a future in which humans are redeemed by their own creation work (p.91).”  A cheery prospect, no?  G.K. Chesterton in his book What’s Wrong with the World calls this not the bravest, but the most cowardly ideology of all: ever gazing toward a perfect future that never seems to arrive.  Secondly, Marx says a creation ordered toward another is dependency & weakness.  It is man that must create his own universe & destiny through work.  The Marxist is utterly forbidden to ask where the universe came from, to what it is ordered, & how man finds his place it in.  Collectivism promises freedom, but the first thing it eliminates is the freedom to ask a question.  In denying the question, it also denies the truth that answers it.  Disguised as work, Marxism admits only contempt for both man & creation.

Based on these historical observations, Ratzinger says belief in creation these days is obscured & denied three main ways: scientific rationalism, radical environmentalism, & a view of creation as hostile to grace.  The first false view would reduce creation to simply a thing to be examined through microscope & telescope, mere matter to be manipulated.  What is beyond empirical observation is “dismissed as meaningless (p.92).”  Matter has no questions to ask, no morality to struggle with, nor hopes or desires to pursue; all that remains is what science can do.  In such a view, all that is definitively human is swept aside.  Yet, isn’t every aspect of human life inseparably linked to questioning & decision making as to what it right, what it true?  Science by itself separates man from his anchor in the truth; substituting a false god of progress.

The second trend against creation we are seeing more & more today is the idolatry of radical environmentalism: the view of man “as the disease of nature (p.93).”  Even the old pagans that worshipped the earth believed that man had a place on it.   This environmentalism views the human intellect as the source of the damage, so it is a highly anti-intellectual movement.  Further, it is self-hatred of the gift that is human life.  It is ultimately a nihilism in which man finds no grace, no future, & no redemption.

The third false understanding of creation would not permit it to be redeemed by God; it remains an irredeemably corrupted obstacle for man.  Ratzinger recalls Paul’s words, “It is not the spiritual that is first but the physical, and then the spiritual (1 Cor 15:46) (p.94),” indicating that grace & creation are two poles of the Christian Faith that must never be set against one another.  Indeed, the Christian view sees creation as the gateway to the world as grace.  Understanding God as lover presupposes faith in God as creator.  Ratzinger calls this “the freedom to accept myself as well as the any other member of the Body of Christ…  it is a way of saying ‘Yes’ (p.95)” to the gift of God.

In his conclusion, Ratzinger proposes that ultimately there are really only two philosophies of creation: the Gnostic model & the Christian model.  “Gnosticism, in all its different forms and versions, [is] the repudiation of creation (p.p.96).”  Here, God’s redeeming love seems too shaky a ground on which to found our lives; it is not something we can force & control.  On the contrary, in humility & dependence the Christian receives a redeemed creation as a gift & a promise from the God who entered his own creation to save us.  The Gnostic option is, in fact, hostile to God as it aims “at power through knowledge… [it] will not entrust itself to a world already created, but only to a world still to be created.  There is no room for trust, only skill (p.97).”

The Christian truth is exactly opposite: man is dependent.  In acknowledging this, he rejects every attempt to create himself & his world from within.  However, “there is nothing degrading about dependence when it takes the form of love… for only love transforms dependence into freedom (p.98-99).”  The center of man’s redemption is Jesus Christ, the God-man, hanging on the cross.  Thus, “the doctrine of creation is, therefore, inseparably included within the doctrine of redemption (p.99),” which must be proclaimed to prevent the reduction of man to just another animal in nature & the redemption of man as the future we can build by our own powers.  With a proper understanding of the Incarnation & the Resurrection, man finds the truth of God & himself within a genuinely Christian understanding of creation.

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 J. Ratzinger - Homily 4, Part 2

The first Adam through his disobedience brought a legacy of sin & death upon all his children, who to this day have continue to seek a replacement for God & to build a paradise on earth without his help, an effort that always brings hellish tragedy & leaves man himself degraded.  The New Testament offers a remedy for our situation.

As noted earlier, the Church reads the Old Testament, not exclusively for its own sake, but as the story of God’s revelation of himself to his people, a revelation fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ.  Therefore, we can see that the catastrophic fall of the first Adam into sin & death in the Old Testament gives way to the atoning sacrifice of the second Adam in the New, a sacrifice that reconciles God & man & brings new life.  Man was originally created to be in a relationship of love with God; in Christ, this relationship is not only possible again, but reaches new & previously unimagined heights.

Ratzinger notes that, “Jesus Christ goes Adam’s route, but in reverse.  In contrast to Adam he is really “like God.”  But this being like God… is being a Son, & hence it is totally relational… Therefore [he] does not hold graspingly to his autonomy… [but] he becomes a slave… he does not go the route of power but that of love (p.75).”  So, from the beginning, man has asked “Who am I?”  “What is my purpose?”  “Does my life have meaning?”  “For what was I made?”   Not “for what,” but “for whom.”  He was not made to be alone or autonomous.  He is made to be a son, even a son of God.

But how can the new Adam undo the damage caused by the first one & bridge the chasm between God & man?  How do we receive our sonship?  The answer is the Cross: “…the place of [Christ’s] obedience, is the true tree of life…. now approachable… and… the true pole of the earth, by which it is itself once more set aright (p.76).”  The first man was not allowed to eat of the fruit of the tree of life lest “he live forever (Gen 3:22),” but now by way of Christ’s obedience, man is welcomed to approach the divine.  His destiny in Christ is now to be “partakers of the divine nature (2 Pet 1:4).”

And now, something quite surprising: “Therefore the Eucharist, as the presence of the cross, is the abiding tree of life, which… to receive it, to eat of the tree of life, thus means to receive the crucified Lord & consequently to accept… his life, his obedience, his ‘yes’… It means to accept the love of God… our truth – that dependence on God which is no more an imposition from without than is the Son’s sonship.  It is precisely this dependence that is freedom, because it is truth & love (pp.76-77).”

Were you expecting that!?!  To start with the words of the creation of the world & end up with the Flesh & Blood of Christ Jesus in the Eucharist that is offered & received at every Mass?  Will this change your view of the sacred Scriptures?  The way that you approach Holy Communion?  Your relationship with God?  Ratzinger ends his fourth homily with the hope that his listeners “be touched by the words of Jesus in their entirety: ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ (Mark 1:15).”

Photo of Christ as the Tree of Life taken at Munich's Marienplatz. in 2008.

In the Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger - Homily 3, Part 2

Jesus Christ is origin, end, & reference point of all things, especially for Christians wishing to understand the Scriptures. Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that, “only in the New is the deepest meaning of the Old to be found (p.49).” When read this way, we see that Christ, the new Adam, shows us the real & complete meaning of what human beings are meant to be in the plan of God: not only the highest created beings, but when related to Christ as brother - as first Adam to second Adam - we can come to relation & communion with God himself. Thus, we are not just another creature in creation, but transitional beings destined to become what we are not yet. Of this, Ratzinger says, “Human persons are not to be understood merely from the perspective of their past histories or from that isolated moment that we refer to as the present. They are oriented toward their future… We must always see in other human beings persons with whom we shall one day share God’s joy… members of the Body of Christ… children of God (p.49).”

In recent times, there has arisen a perceived ideological conflict between faith & reason, which often manifests itself in a debate between Creation & Evolution. Ratzinger says these are actually two complimentary terms that respond to different aspects of reality: “The story of the dust of the earth & the breath of God… does not in fact explain how human persons came to be but rather what they are (p.50).” The Genesis accounts of creation describe our inmost origin, the “project” that we are. Evolution, in the sense of a scientific theory, seeks to understand & describe the biological development of all life & of man. What it cannot explain the “whys” of man’s existence: why is man what he is, for what is he made, where is he going?

As scientists continue to make amazing discoveries into the “mechanisms” of life, they find a natural parallel between organisms & machines: “a thoughtful & considered plan, which is itself coherent & logical (p.54).” However, there are some significant differences. Ratzinger notes that machines are quite dull compared to the boundless creativity of life itself. Organisms move from within, whereas machines require an outside operator. Further, life reproduces itself, bringing about another like itself, & continuing its “project.” This brings us to the ideas of coming to be, perishing, & stability. In the past, the universe was understood as having been put in place in an instant basically in the form we see it now, much as the literal creationists do. While the Church once held this position, too, we can now see the universe & things in it as mutable: changing, growing, “becoming.” The catechism takes up this language when it speaks of creation as unfinished & in a state of journeying. However, the materialistic atheist is forced into to an awkward position; for instead of a personal Creator, he has only random chance to point to as the cause of things.

As the modern sciences initially developed, , many scientists felt that all things operated according to a fixed set of rules, like a grand, cosmic clock whose interactions & outcomes were assured; a universe with a comfortable predictability & permanency. Now, in the era of quantum physics & dark energy, the universe seems “messier” & more unfathomable. Few things have a shorter half-life than the latest scientific theory. Even the atheist must admit to an element of chance in the universe, an unpredictable & uncontrollable element which the Christian understands simply as freedom. Ratzinger quotes James Monad, a scientist who notes that life itself is mathematically improbable in the extreme, but then notes that our very existence must mean that we have hit the cosmic jackpot.

Yet, in this cauldron of action & reaction, Monad realizes something unexpected & important: “there is not only becoming, whereby everything is in constant change, but also permanency (p.55).” Monad notes that life is conservative - it reproduces itself exactly. While the universe is in a constant state of change, the opposite is true for life; it is largely unchanging. Still, he believes life does evolve in the form of errors in the transmission of itself, errors which are preserved & accumulated & give rise to new things. Monad summarizes his position as, “We are product of haphazard mistakes.”

Ratzinger responds, “What response shall we make to this view? It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow & how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance & error (p.56).” Because creation is reasonable & intelligent, we must recognize the divine Reason & Intelligence behind it. Science itself seems to reveal this Reason with every new discovery. “Human beings are not a mistake but something willed; they are the fruit of love… Yes, Father, you have willed me (p.57).”

And so we return to Jesus Christ. As man ponders who he is, what he was made for, & what is his destiny, he can find the answer not in random chance or error, but in the divine Son of God who become man & revealed the truth of humanity to itself. Christ is the man in whom we can recognize the fullness of God’s project, for ourselves & the whole world. In his humiliation, we can see how tragic human life can be, wracked with hate & sin (the topic of the 4th homily). But in his suffering love, we can see God’s response. At the end of his third homily Cardinal Ratzinger concludes, “[Jesus Christ] is the man who is loved by God to the very dust (p.58).”

In The Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger, Homily 3, Part 1

Made in God's Image

“God formed man from the dust of the ground. There is here something at once humbling & consoling (p.42),” reflects Joseph Ratzinger at the opening of his third homily on Genesis. First, we must observe that the Bible upholds man’s dignity from the outset by illustrating how he is “one humanity formed from God’s one earth, (p.44)” which at once shows the unity of all mankind and the evil of all division, especially along lines of ethnicity.

Further, man’s dignity is elevated in his creation in God’s own image & likeness. It is true that there is something of man from “below,” that is, of the earth; but it is likewise true that man bears within him something from “above,” something heavenly, something of God. Ratzinger says that each individual human being, “realizes the one project of God… the same creative idea of God (p.45).” Therein lies man’s dignity: “Each one bears God’s breath in himself or herself, each one is God’s image. This is the deepest reason for the inviolability of human dignity, & upon it is founded ultimately every civilization.”

Often today, this image is besmirched & goes unrecognized. “When the human person is no longer seen as… bearing God’s breath, then the human being begins to be viewed in utilitarian fashion [&] the barbarity appears that tramples upon human dignity (p.45).” In this case, Ratzinger asks, not rhetorically, if the dignity of the human person can be defended in a world of technology?

While it is true that science has given man a certain amount freedom & control over his world, there is a grave danger that those things that cannot be scientifically verified, like morality, holiness, or love will be cast aside as relics of man’s unenlightened past. In this way, instead of liberating, science can destroy what is most distinctly human. But this is a ground that Ratzinger is unwilling to concede, as man’s rationality is also defining of him; so he now distinguishes between two kinds of reason: the scientific & the moral-religious. He suggests that the moral-religious dimension of man must not be dismissed because it isn’t mathematical. In fact, it is actually the more “human” of the two. It is what prevents man from being reduced to just another thing in nature, to an animal. It keeps man from destroying himself.

Returning to the image of God in man, the Cardinal notes that “An image… represents something... It points to something beyond itself (p.47).” We then see that man, too, points to something beyond himself. It is easily observable that man is made for relations with other persons. He is not closed in on himself; he is oriented toward an Other. As fulfilling as human relations can be, man finds within him a longing for union with something transcendent, which he instinctively knows to be God, his origin and his destination. This desire for communion with the divine Other is the root of all prayer.

So we can see that it is not only his rationality that makes man what he is, but his capacity to both think and pray. “Human beings are, as a consequence, most profoundly human when they step out of themselves & become capable of addressing God…, when they discover their relation to their Creator (p.48).” We discover our origin, purpose, meaning, & destination only when we see ourselves in reference to God, from whom we receive our being.

P.S.: Folks, I've had ZERO time to write, other than this series of articles of the KOC newsletter. I have a colossal project at work launching that's not going well, & I am way behind on my Metaphysics studies for Franciscan U. I could use a few prayers. Thanks.

In The Beginning by Joseph Ratzinger, Homily 2, Part II

After exploring the great hope that lies in belief in a personal Creator & the dangers of trying to make sense of the cosmos without God, Cardinal Ratzinger goes on to explore what he calls “the enduring significance of the symbolic elements” of the Genesis account of creation.

In Genesis 1, Ratzinger notes that God “speaks” 10 times, recalling for us the Decalogue, the Ten Words or Commandments, in which God enumerates man’s obligation to him as well as to one another. Ratzinger also notes the prominence of the number 7: the number of days in a phase of the moon & thus the number of days in the week; it is the rhythm of the cosmos of which man is a part. We can see that all creation is ordered toward the Sabbath, the day of worship & rest and the sign of the covenant between God & man. He observes, “Creation is… ordered to worship [&] fulfills its purpose and assumes its significance when it is lived, ever new, with a view to worship.” Here he rightly recalls the motto of St. Benedict: Operi Dei nihil praeponatu, - “Put nothing before the service of God.” Worship follows the rhythm of creation, but also gives it its meaning. We find our meaning, too, when we discover & respond to the rhythm.

The Sabbath structure of creation is reflected in the Sabbath ordinances of the Torah. In the gift of the Sabbath, God’s expresses his love for man & renews his covenant with him. Man’s right response to this gift is worship. And true worship takes up God’s entire moral order: the right relation of man with God, with himself, & with one another. Further, in this worship-rest man discovers who he is & the grand destiny to which he is called. The Sabbath rest is not just an empty “doing nothing,” but a being taken up into God’s peace. Man is elevated out the natural world & takes his place as a supernatural being in the divine order. Here, the plan for the cosmos is restored & God’s new creation begins.

Now, every culture has intuitively known the rhythmic connection between creation & worship, but today our technological civilization is in grave danger of losing the rhythm that connects us to both God & others. Modern man finds it difficult to rest, indeed, rejects the idea of such a rest as “unprofitable.” Is it not true that fallen man would work himself virtually to death if not instructed by God to put down his tools, whether plow or keyboard? Isn’t there always one more task to do, one more dollar to make? Indeed, people today – even Christians – largely see the Lord’s Day not as the first day of the new creation in Christ’s Resurrection, but rather the last day of the week, useful for catching up on chores & finish shopping before the work week begins again. This self-centered view of existence has serious implications. In rejecting the Sabbath rest, we reject God &, necessarily, who we are & for what we are destined. We lose ourselves & one another. The cosmic order is ruptured.

Perhaps this is why God told the Israelites that every seventh year would be a Sabbath year when the land would rest & man along with it. The land was taken from the toil & profit of human hands & returned back to God, its rightful owner. Thus, man could receive it back from God again as a gift. In 2 Chronicles 36:21, Ratzinger discovers a key phrase: “The land enjoyed its Sabbaths… seventy years,” a reference to the conquering of Israel by the Babylonians. Why did God permit this to happen, & why this connection to the Sabbath rest? Ratzinger suggests, “The people had rejected God’s rest, its leisure, its worship, its peace, its freedom, and so they into gave the slavery of activity… They had to be snatched from their obstinate attachment to their own work … God had to… free them from the domination of activity (p.32).” They had to give up the idolatry of their own self-sufficiency & learn to trust in the loving God who created all, sustains all, & draws all back to himself. This Operi Dei is not the work of productivity, but liturgia, work on behalf of God before which nothing else may come & wherein we rest in his freedom, rest, & peace. Only in this, Ratzinger concludes, can man find his identity & truly live.

Easter Vigil

Blogging on Easter Sunday? Only if it's Pope Benedict's homily from Easter Vigil Mass. Further, the Holy Father here summarizes & deepens the thoughts he first laid out in his book In The Beginning 30 years ago. Ad multos annos, Papa!

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The liturgical celebration of the Easter Vigil makes use of two eloquent signs. First there is the fire that becomes light. As the procession makes its way through the church, shrouded in the darkness of the night, the light of the Paschal Candle becomes a wave of lights, and it speaks to us of Christ as the true morning star that never sets – the Risen Lord in whom light has conquered darkness. The second sign is water. On the one hand, it recalls the waters of the Red Sea, decline and death, the mystery of the Cross. But now it is presented to us as spring water, a life-giving element amid the dryness. Thus it becomes the image of the sacrament of baptism, through which we become sharers in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Yet these great signs of creation, light and water, are not the only constituent elements of the liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Another essential feature is the ample encounter with the words of sacred Scripture that it provides. Before the liturgical reform there were twelve Old Testament readings and two from the New Testament. The New Testament readings have been retained. The number of Old Testament readings has been fixed at seven, but depending upon the local situation, they may be reduced to three. The Church wishes to offer us a panoramic view of whole trajectory of salvation history, starting with creation, passing through the election and the liberation of Israel to the testimony of the prophets by which this entire history is directed ever more clearly towards Jesus Christ. In the liturgical tradition all these readings were called prophecies. Even when they are not directly foretelling future events, they have a prophetic character, they show us the inner foundation and orientation of history. They cause creation and history to become transparent to what is essential. In this way they take us by the hand and lead us towards Christ, they show us the true Light.

At the Easter Vigil, the journey along the paths of sacred Scripture begins with the account of creation. This is the liturgy’s way of telling us that the creation story is itself a prophecy. It is not information about the external processes by which the cosmos and man himself came into being. The Fathers of the Church were well aware of this. They did not interpret the story as an account of the process of the origins of things, but rather as a pointer towards the essential, towards the true beginning and end of our being. Now, one might ask: is it really important to speak also of creation during the Easter Vigil? Could we not begin with the events in which God calls man, forms a people for himself and creates his history with men upon the earth? The answer has to be: no. To omit the creation would be to misunderstand the very history of God with men, to diminish it, to lose sight of its true order of greatness. The sweep of history established by God reaches back to the origins, back to creation. Our profession of faith begins with the words: “We believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”. If we omit the beginning of the Credo, the whole history of salvation becomes too limited and too small. The Church is not some kind of association that concerns itself with man’s religious needs but is limited to that objective. No, she brings man into contact with God and thus with the source of all things. Therefore we relate to God as Creator, and so we have a responsibility for creation. Our responsibility extends as far as creation because it comes from the Creator. Only because God created everything can he give us life and direct our lives. Life in the Church’s faith involves more than a set of feelings and sentiments and perhaps moral obligations. It embraces man in his entirety, from his origins to his eternal destiny. Only because creation belongs to God can we place ourselves completely in his hands. And only because he is the Creator can he give us life for ever. Joy over creation, thanksgiving for creation and responsibility for it all belong together.

The central message of the creation account can be defined more precisely still. In the opening words of his Gospel, Saint John sums up the essential meaning of that account in this single statement: “In the beginning was the Word”. In effect, the creation account that we listened to earlier is characterized by the regularly recurring phrase: “And God said …” The world is a product of the Word, of the Logos, as Saint John expresses it, using a key term from the Greek language. “Logos” means “reason”, “sense”, “word”. It is not reason pure and simple, but creative Reason, that speaks and communicates itself. It is Reason that both is and creates sense. The creation account tells us, then, that the world is a product of creative Reason. Hence it tells us that, far from there being an absence of reason and freedom at the origin of all things, the source of everything is creative Reason, love, and freedom. Here we are faced with the ultimate alternative that is at stake in the dispute between faith and unbelief: are irrationality, lack of freedom and pure chance the origin of everything, or are reason, freedom and love at the origin of being? Does the primacy belong to unreason or to reason? This is what everything hinges upon in the final analysis. As believers we answer, with the creation account and with John, that in the beginning is reason. In the beginning is freedom. Hence it is good to be a human person. It is not the case that in the expanding universe, at a late stage, in some tiny corner of the cosmos, there evolved randomly some species of living being capable of reasoning and of trying to find rationality within creation, or to bring rationality into it. If man were merely a random product of evolution in some place on the margins of the universe, then his life would make no sense or might even be a chance of nature. But no, Reason is there at the beginning: creative, divine Reason. And because it is Reason, it also created freedom; and because freedom can be abused, there also exist forces harmful to creation. Hence a thick black line, so to speak, has been drawn across the structure of the universe and across the nature of man. But despite this contradiction, creation itself remains good, life remains good, because at the beginning is good Reason, God’s creative love. Hence the world can be saved. Hence we can and must place ourselves on the side of reason, freedom and love – on the side of God who loves us so much that he suffered for us, that from his death there might emerge a new, definitive and healed life.

The Old Testament account of creation that we listened to clearly indicates this order of realities. But it leads us a further step forward. It has structured the process of creation within the framework of a week leading up to the Sabbath, in which it finds its completion. For Israel, the Sabbath was the day on which all could participate in God’s rest, in which man and animal, master and slave, great and small were united in God’s freedom. Thus the Sabbath was an expression of the Covenant between God and man and creation. In this way, communion between God and man does not appear as something extra, something added later to a world already fully created. The Covenant, communion between God and man, is inbuilt at the deepest level of creation. Yes, the Covenant is the inner ground of creation, just as creation is the external presupposition of the Covenant. God made the world so that there could be a space where he might communicate his love, and from which the response of love might come back to him. From God’s perspective, the heart of the man who responds to him is greater and more important than the whole immense material cosmos, for all that the latter allows us to glimpse something of God’s grandeur.

Easter and the paschal experience of Christians, however, now require us to take a further step. The Sabbath is the seventh day of the week. After six days in which man in some sense participates in God’s work of creation, the Sabbath is the day of rest. But something quite unprecedented happened in the nascent Church: the place of the Sabbath, the seventh day, was taken by the first day. As the day of the liturgical assembly, it is the day for encounter with God through Jesus Christ who as the Risen Lord encountered his followers on the first day, Sunday, after they had found the tomb empty. The structure of the week is overturned. No longer does it point towards the seventh day, as the time to participate in God’s rest. It sets out from the first day as the day of encounter with the Risen Lord. This encounter happens afresh at every celebration of the Eucharist, when the Lord enters anew into the midst of his disciples and gives himself to them, allows himself, so to speak, to be touched by them, sits down at table with them. This change is utterly extraordinary, considering that the Sabbath, the seventh day seen as the day of encounter with God, is so profoundly rooted in the Old Testament. If we also bear in mind how much the movement from work towards the rest-day corresponds to a natural rhythm, the dramatic nature of this change is even more striking. This revolutionary development that occurred at the very the beginning of the Church’s history can be explained only by the fact that something utterly new happened that day. The first day of the week was the third day after Jesus’ death. It was the day when he showed himself to his disciples as the Risen Lord. In truth, this encounter had something unsettling about it. The world had changed. This man who had died was now living with a life that was no longer threatened by any death. A new form of life had been inaugurated, a new dimension of creation. The first day, according to the Genesis account, is the day on which creation begins. Now it was the day of creation in a new way, it had become the day of the new creation. We celebrate the first day. And in so doing we celebrate God the Creator and his creation. Yes, we believe in God, the Creator of heaven and earth. And we celebrate the God who was made man, who suffered, died, was buried and rose again. We celebrate the definitive victory of the Creator and of his creation. We celebrate this day as the origin and the goal of our existence. We celebrate it because now, thanks to the risen Lord, it is definitively established that reason is stronger than unreason, truth stronger than lies, love stronger than death. We celebrate the first day because we know that the black line drawn across creation does not last for ever. We celebrate it because we know that those words from the end of the creation account have now been definitively fulfilled: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good” (Gen 1:31). Amen.

Courtesy of Whispers in the Loggia

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.