The Facts of God

The basic form of Christian faith is not: I believe something, but I believe you... faith is not primarily a colossal edifice of numerous supernatural facts, standing like a curious second order of knowledge alongside the realm of science, but an assent to God who gives us hope and confidence.

Faith and the Future, 20-1

Reflection – Well, here I am in Halifax, after 30 hours of marathon traveling by car, train, cab, train, and car. The highlight of the trip was our train running out of gas in Montreal (I didn’t know they could do that!), and a wild cab ride through the city to (barely) make our connecting train to the East coast. The CCO Rise-Up conference begins this afternoon, so as promised, here I am resuming regular blogging in the meantime.

When Ratzinger writes the above reflection on the nature of faith as opposed to science, we have to be careful that we understand him rightly. There is a whole approach to faith, which in this same book he explicitly rejects, where religion has nothing to do with facts or historical events, but is simply a matter of emotion or ethics or aesthetics. All the dogmas and creedal formulations are mere symbols that help us towards an ethical or beautiful way of life.

No – God has indeed communicated to us certain things about Himself, and these are essential to faith. His triune nature, His action of incarnation ex Maria virgine, and all that Jesus said and did in His life, the whole historical fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection and its effect on humanity, the reality of the ascension and the gift of the Spirit to the Church—all of these are facts, not mere symbolism or myth. The human language we are necessarily required to us to express these facts is, of course, inadequate to the nature of God, but nonetheless, the revelation is real and the facts are facts.

Ratzinger’s point here is that all of these facts are not merely given to us in the sense that scientific data is given to us, as bare statements about the world which we either find useful or not, but which are nonetheless given to us as information about reality.

This is not the dynamism of faith. Faith is all about making a choice about this core relationship with this One who reveals Himself to us. God reveals Himself as Father—my choice is to trust Him and base my life on His love. God reveals Himself as Son—my choice is to recognize in the Son the way to the Father and the pattern of my own life as a son of the Father. God reveals Himself as Spirit—my choice is to cry out ‘Come, Holy Spirit’, to know and live my life out of the surety of God’s action and gift to me of His own self.

And so it goes. Every little bit of the facts, the data God reveals to us is for the sake of eliciting a response of trusting love and joyful obedience in us. Now at this point a voice from the peanut gallery can perhaps be heard. ‘Yeah, right!’ it seems to say.

Because of course it is the feast of the Holy Innocents today, isn’t it. And with that feast, right in the heart of all the joyful facts about baby Jesus and mother Mary and the noble awesome doctrine of the Incarnation—God becoming man, the Word taking flesh—well, suddenly we have a lot of other facts to contend with.

Dead babies. Murdered children. Lots of them. A violent, brutal world in which the weakest and most innocent, the vulnerable and the small are run over and torn apart by the cruelty of wicked men and the selfishness of our modern ‘civilized’ way of life. We look to our Church, where the facts tell us the Spirit has been poured out, and alas! More abused children, a betrayal of trust, and deep sorrow and rage.

These are all facts, too. And so we have the facts of God and the facts of man. That which God has shown us, and that which humanity shows us. And of course world and church are full of goodness and kindness and sympathy—it’s not all wicked cruelty. But there it is, and we all know it.

It seems to me that in the face of what we all know about the world and what happens to people, especially the small and weak in the world, we can choose to despair in God, in the ‘facts of God’ which at any rate do not seem to be strong enough to stop human evil from propagating. Or we can choose to take our stand on these facts of God, the promises of God, the action of God, the love of God in the world. Ally ourselves to it, commit our lives to receiving it, following it, and imitating it, and so become ourselves a ‘fact of God’ in the world. A saint, in other words.

Or we can cry and scream and curse the darkness and curse or deny God. We may need to cry or even scream at times, in the face of terrible evil and suffering. But always we are confronted with the choice to love, to turn to God, to take up the task, the burden, and the glorious mission of love in the world, and so be one with the One who bore that burden in full and has carried the whole world—all the suffering children, all the abused and the abusers who make them suffer—in his Sacred Heart to the heart of the Father, to be healed and raised up with Him in a new world where such things are no more, and every tear will be wiped away.

 

Happy feast day, holy innocents, and all us less-than-innocent ones, too.

Update: It appears that wifi access is going to be very limited this week, and the schedule rather full. I am currently working from a nearby Tim Hortons! So... talk to you all in the New Year, and meanwhile keep CCO Rise-Up in your prayers.

One Day I Will Wake Up

Faith in the risen Christ is nothing other than the faith of Abraham – the promise of a future and of a country… now this future is concerned in an incomparably more radical fashion. It strides across the frontier of death, which is the real antithesis to man’s attachment to the future. Man has been made so that he cannot live without a future.

Faith and the Future, 39-40

Reflection – Happy All Souls’ Day. Is that the right sentiment? It’s not exactly a ‘feast day’ – it’s one of two days in the church calendar that doesn’t fall under the usual scale of ferial-memorial-feast-solemnity (the other is Ash Wednesday). It is a day to be called to prayer for the dead, as Ash Wednesday is a day of prayer for forgiveness of sin. However, prayer is a happy act, and our faith is that God is both merciful towards sinners and desires the salvation of all, so I guess ‘Happy All Souls’ Day’ it is.

This beautiful passage from Ratzinger helps with the general happiness around this day and the subject of death in general, though, too. Man cannot live without a future—this is so true. Most of the time, most people don’t like to think about death, talk about death, contemplate their own death. There is something about the prospect of being cut off, ended, terminated, that somehow bothers most people.

Christians can be as prone to this as anyone, which is a lamentable commentary on the state of our faith. There is a normal natural anxiety around death, at least natural in our fallen condition—fear of the unknown, fear of pain, fear of an unhappy end. But Christians must, if we have faith, temper that anxiety with a lively faith in Christ.

Christ is this one striding over the frontier of death, like Moses striding across the Red Sea, like Joshua striding into the promised land. The whole Christian attitude towards death must be entirely Christ-centered, a sure and certain hope for eternal life and happiness based entirely on the resurrection of Christ.

This, I realize, is becoming increasingly incomprehensible in the secular world. We have become in our culture so earth-bound, so dreadfully confined to this life, this world, these current prospects for happiness and health and security. Even in the Church and among Christians who truly are of good will and faith, there is a curious reluctance to look upwards to the true future of mankind, the true hope in store for us.

God wants us to go to heaven, you know. We are not made to remain on this earth and in this mode of existence for a prolonged period of time. We come into being here, we are born here, and our life here and now matters tremendously… but it’s not our final destination.

And neither is the grave and the rot and corruption therein. We are made for glory, for new and lasting life in the love and light of God. The future Christ opens up for us is a beautiful joyous one. I really don’t know why our contemporary secular culture and even church culture has turned away from that with such force.

So Happy All Souls’ Day. It’s a good day to pray for all our dead, asking that God be merciful to them all and welcome them into his kingdom. And it’s a good day to have a good hard look at the reality of death—our own death, the death of everyone we know and love—and claim our deep Christian hope in the resurrection.

Catherine Doherty said about death once, “I love to talk about death, but nobody ever wants to talk about it!.. One day I will wake up and realize that I have lived in a splendor the likes of which I could never imagine. And I will understand what my heart has searched for always. I will understand love. God’s love for me, my love for God, for you, for everyone. Doesn’t that make you want to dance, want to sing, want to be happy?” Amen - that's the Christian attitude towards death.

Invasive Surgery

God came not as a deus ex machina to set everything externally in order, but as the Son of Man in order interiorly to share in the passion of mankind. And this too is precisely the task of the Christian: to share in the passion of mankind from within, to extend the sphere of human being so that it will find room for the presence of God.

Faith and the Future, 86

Reflection – Why doesn’t God just fix everything? Who has never asked that question? If God is so real and so powerful and so good, why does everything just go on and on and on the way it is: war and violence, exploitation and injustice, selfishness and greed. It’s a dirty old world, and God doesn’t seem in any great hurry to clean it up.

We can go three directions faced with this rather obvious problem, fundamentally the problem of evil in the world. We can choose the path of atheism, either denying God’s existence outright, or coming up with some conception of God that is not-God—God as limited in power or not really good. While this seems to solve the problem, it does so at a very high cost: without God, reality becomes utterly incoherent and meaningless, and indeed the problem of evil that led us to deny God vanishes before it appears, as the perception of evil is ultimately vacuous without a Goodness that is real and ultimate.

We can also choose the path of superficiality. Just don’t think too hard about these things. Shore up a little safe world for yourself, as best as you can, and don’t get all morbid. Allied to this are the various simplistic solutions to the problem of evil, from the old standby of ‘well, they had it coming!’—evil as a punishment for sin, to the rather blasé accounting of evil as  result of free will. God lets us be free, and so we freely choose to make the world what it is.

While this is certainly true, it is not enough. God is not sitting on his hands up their in heaven watching us destroy each other, periodically sighing to himself, ‘Free will… oh well.’ God has entered into the world and its passion, but from within. This is the path of faith, hope, and love.

God in Christ enters the pain of the world; we are to enter the pain of the world. God in Christ is present to every suffering person; we are to be present to every suffering person. God in Christ allows the world’s evil to penetrate his being; we are to allow the world’s evil to penetrate our being, not in becoming complicit in it, but in compassionate love.

This is the plan of God, in our  Christian faith, for the healing of the world. Some may object, ‘Why? Why can’t God just fix everything? Why this long slow passion? Why must we go on suffering? Why would He do it this way?’

I think ultimately such questions can only be answered by God Himself, the Divine Wisdom finally satisfying our human folly. I would point out that if God was to come down, today, and ‘fix everything’, whatever that would look like, and then retreat back into heaven, within a week the world would be just as messed up as before. In other words, it is our free will that drives the world’s devastation. The problem is in the heart of man; all the ‘evils’ and problems are merely symptoms. And God is a good physician, not just treating symptoms but attacking the disease.

The disease is our lack of faith, hope, and love. So God has come, has made Himself very near to us, has revealed to us as much as He can of his goodness and love in Jesus Christ, and bids us in Christ to walk the path of suffering love, enduring hope, radiant faith.

This is the only way the world can be really healed. And this is how He is healing the world. It is radical, it is difficult, it is a deep and invasive surgery, a searing radiation, a strong medicine indeed, working on and cutting into the very heart of mankind. But it works, and that’s the main thing.

It's Not About You

[Schleiermacher] arrived at the independence of religion from metaphysics, from the operation of pure reason in general. Religion was experience, the experience of the infinite and of the dependence of men upon it… the contents in which religion expresses itself become no more than forms of piety which in the end are purely secondary… the place of faith is taken over by piety, or in other words, in place of an objective partner who comes to meet me, who binds and yet frees me, we find the identity of the subject who sees the eternal. This all becomes particularly clear in Schleiermacher’s verdict of Jesus Christ, whom he portrays as the man with the highest and purest sensitivity to God… consciousness never spills over in the direction of being, or vice versa; consciousness takes the place of being.

Faith and the Future, 55-6

Reflection – ‘It’s all about me.’ This is the simplified version of the above passage. It’s all about me and how I feel and how religion engenders in me certain attitudes of mind and heart which help me to be a better person… this is Schleiermacher’s view of it, and while many of you may never have heard the name, clearly his influence has been profound.

Religion as a form of therapy, of self-improvement, of elevated consciousness, but never, ever, ever, as a true statement about how the universe really is, what God really is, what our actual metaphysical situation is. This is still very strong in our world today. It’s not a far leap from this to religion being a servant of politics, a ‘force for social order’, a dispenser of government-approved (of course!) charity, a vague and not-terribly specific benediction on the powers that be.

Religion at the service of… something. My own peace of mind or social peace; self-actualization or soup kitchens. Religion, however, cannot be subordinated to other ends and goods.

Our religion simply is, in our Catholic understanding, true. God really is, in reality, what and who we say Him to be; Jesus really is and really did what we say; the path of life forged by Christ in the world really is made known to us in the way of life of a Catholic Christian—sacrament, creed, commandment, community.

All of this may indeed bring us to peace and certainly has fostered social charity and justice wherever it has been practiced… but that’s not the point. The point is, it is true. As I said two days ago, God really wants us to know the truth about things, and so has told us the truth of things, so we can build our lives on the truth about the universe, God, and ourselves. This is our Catholic faith, anyhow.

Schleiermacher’s view of faith reduces it, inevitably, to a private phenomenon, and this is where it gets a bit ominous. If religion is just some nice way to make us feel a certain way, and the contents are essentially irrelevant to those interior feelings, then religion becomes wholly interiorized, wholly private. It becomes arrogant at best to share one’s religious beliefs with anyone, and certainly unwelcome to bring any religious content into a public discussion.

This too is a common reality today. And it is toxic—why exactly should religious speech be beyond the pale of acceptable discourse? Why should, as happened recently in Canada, a religious t-shirt be banned from a public school while other students could wear atheist or other-messaged shirts? When religious faith becomes identified as a uniquely private matter, free speech is weakened, and when free speech is weakened, a free society is illusory at best.

Now Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion is not wholly responsible for this. Neo-Marxism and Comtian scientism have a big role to play in our world today. But his view of religion does support this relentless driving of faith-language and religious expression into the realm of the private, behind the closed doors of churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and homes. And so we must clarify that we believe that what we believe is true, that it is universally true, and that our obligation to express, explain, and promote that truth is essential to our freedom of religion, today and always.

Breaking the Spell

[After Kant], the thing to suffer most has been the reliable certainty that man can press, by solid intellectual argument, behind the realms of physics to the being of things and to their ultimate cause… there is thus no point at which faith can any longer link up securely with human thought.

Faith and the Future, 53

Reflection – Now, I have to start here by saying that I am no expert on Kant. In fact, I have always found Kant’s thought somewhat elusive. He is not an easy writer. All of that is to say that, if any smart person is reading this who actually knows Kant better than me, and I happen to put a foot wrong in this post, be nice to me and correct me in the comments.

The whole problem of Kant and his massive influence on philosophy is precisely in the area of epistemology, or the theory of knowledge. If I get him correctly, Kant holds that merely the phenomena of things present themselves to us—raw sensory data. The resolution of these phenomena into known objects comes entirely from our own minds, as we impose our own categories of meaning and truth onto what are otherwise jumbles of meaningless data.

This means that the real world is certainly out there, but there is no correspondence between the real world (things as they really are) and the contents of our minds (things as we know them to be). In other words, reality is inaccessible to our minds, and all we have is our internal mental acts.

Anyhow, Kant is complex and blogging is supposed to be concise, so let’s leave it at that for now (again, apologies to the philosophy majors reading this!). The problem with Kant and the post-Kantian world, of course, is that we are cut off from any real intellectual contact with the world and its deep truth. Questions of meaning, goodness, God become not matters of intellectual discussion and questing, but at best expressions of emotion, feeling, and at worst literally meaningless nonsense.

And this has indeed been the trend of philosophy since Kant. The shying away from metaphysics as a subject with any validity, the concentrating on language’s structures and rules apart from any considerations of truth, the flight into political theories of praxis and radical critique of society (i.e. Marxism and associated fields)—all of this flows from a sense that reality in itself is inaccessible and so all that remains is the human project of imposing meaning onto the world.

Of course this has terrible effects on Christian theology. Our whole religion is based on the possibility of our having a real relationship to God and to the cosmos as it truly is. We are a ‘reality-based’ religion—a Christianity that is seen as simply a projection of human meaning onto an indifferent universe is not the Christianity of the Bible, the Fathers, the saints, or the Church. Kant, whether he intended this or not, makes the whole notion of revelation and genuine encounter with God impossible.

But Kant’s philosophy, and the subsequent developments, in fact lock each one of us in the prison of our minds. We have no way out, no way to really encounter real reality. We have only our radically subjective experiences, our imposed ‘truth’ on a world that hides its true face from us. Again, I’m not sure that Kant fully intended that, but this has been the influence of Kant on human intellectual development.

It is important, then, to question just how persuasive Kant is. His influence has been immense; is that really warranted? Is Kant king? Why? His philosophy closes so many doors to us, doors that even the most irreligious of us may not want to be so firmly shut. Doors like inter-personal relationships… or human community… or a binding moral law… So many things that Kant and his followers decree to be off limits. On what authority? By what compelling argument? Who sez?

By breaking the Kantian spell on the modern mind, we can break through to the world, to one another, and the door is opened to the possibility of God and the knowledge of God. Those of us who would like to have a real relationship with the world and each other and have this possibility of God need to shake off the Kantian chains that bind us, and get on with the task of thinking about reality, its meaning and purpose, its goodness and truth.

I Need a Saint!

What faith really means for a man cannot be represented abstractly; it can be made visible only by and in men, who have lived out this attitude to its logical conclusion... by and in such men, and basically only thus, can faith declare clearly what sort of decision it really is… Such men show that faith is fundamentally a particular kind of passion, or, more correctly a kind of love which seizes a man and points the way he must go, even if that way is wearisome.

Faith and the Future, 26

Reflection – Ratzinger is talking here in this early work of his about the saints, and how it is the saints who alone can show us what Christianity really means and is. Our faith is not an abstract system—the systemic bits of it are very much antecedent to the lived heart of the matter. Our faith is not a code of ethics—the moral law is real and must be obeyed at great cost, but it is not the heart of our faith.

Our faith is… well, if Ratzinger is right, I can’t say what our faith is, not on this blog, not in words! I can try to describe it, I guess, in some of the very beautiful people I have known in Madonna House and who I would not hesitate to call saints, leaving any definitive determination about that to the Church, of course. I will confine myself to those who have died, so as not to embarrass the current bunch of saints I’m living with!

There was Mary Pennefather. She was a brilliant woman who suffered from crippling social anxiety all her life, causing her to literally tremble with fear much of the time. In MH her limitations meant she spent her life mending clothes, washing dishes, folding laundry… and praying. And praying, and praying, and praying. Mary was a mighty prayer warrior while doing the most menial ‘low’ tasks there were. And light and grace and peace and beauty flowed forth from her, trembling and all…

Then there was Jim Guinan. A little Irish-American leprechaun of a man, full of Irish charm and wit. His constant stream of (very funny) jokes and teasing concealed an extraordinarily loving and praying heart. Jim simply loved everyone who crossed his path every day, and somehow always found ways to express that love in warmth and personal interest, always accompanied with a joke and a smile. Being around Jim was like warming your hands at a wood stove on a cold winter day – he exuded love and warmth.

Then there was Fr. Gene Cullinane. A brilliant man, a ‘great man’ in his younger days, he had been a pioneer in Canadian social justice circles, an educator and scholar of some reputation. But then God and his beloved Mary picked him up and deposited him at MH in its earliest years when it was a ragtag bunch of suspect Catholic fringe radicals. And so began a great process of simplification, of being little, of doing little things well for God. When I knew Fr. Gene he was an old man entering a time of physical fraility and illness. He spoke very little, but in his silence communicated total dedication, total prayer, total listening to God and an iron determination to obey whatever God asked him. I learned from Fr. Gene what a priest was, although he was past the point of being able to celebrate Mass, give direction, or ‘do’ much priestly ministry. He simply was a priest— a living offering to God. At the end, when I entered his sick room, I always had a powerful urge to genuflect towards his hospital bed—he was like a living tabernacle.

I realize, writing this little portraits, that they communicate little if anything. And those reading who didn’t know these people (i.e. the vast majority of my readers) might say, ‘Well, these were nice people. That’s… nice, I guess.’ The world is full of nice people, actually, and it’s not really a big deal to be nice.

These three (and I could easily go on with another ten – I have been blessed to live among saints, really), were not ‘nice people’, really. Something else flowed through them, something bigger than them. Something not quite human, although it flowed through all their human powers. It cannot be communicated in words; it must be experienced. And those who have known a saint or two know exactly what I’m talking about.

Those of you who haven’t – well, pray that God sends you one. “I need a saint, Lord, pronto, so I can see what our faith is, finally!” Or, hey! “Make me a saint, Lord, so I can live what our faith is, finally, and maybe even show it to others.” Now that’s a prayer…

Words About Words

[With writers such as Wittgenstein] positivism has now very largely taken possession of philosophy… this means that today both natural science and philosophy no longer seek truth, but only inquire about the correctness of the methods applied, and experiment in logic… quite independently of whether the starting point of this form of thinking corresponds to reality. In any case, reality seems to be inaccessible.

Faith and the Future, 17

Reflection – OK, so we’re back in territory that is a bit unfamiliar to most of you, right? And perhaps you’re thinking, ‘Well, I’ll come back tomorrow when Fr. Denis is writing about love or the Eucharist or the US presidential elections or something.’
Stop! Don’t touch that mouse pad! Yes, I’m talking to you! Hang in there.
While details of Wittgenstein’s thought are, indeed, a little beyond us all (I studied this stuff, but a looong time ago, and the details are hazy), the basic point is not beyond us at all. In fact, it’s quite a familiar refrain.
In the intellectual world, the academic business of philosophy, there is this strain that has abandoned metaphysics. We cannot know anything about ‘reality’ as such, so let’s forget all about it. Philosophy in this sense becomes a matter of words, ‘words about words’, making sure that we follow correct rules around the use of language. What ‘correct’ means in this form of philosophy, since we have no idea of truth or reality, is where I get lost, I must confess… how do we know our use of words is correct if we have no access to extra-lingual correctness? What standard do we apply to judge our use of language?
But here’s where all this admittedly rather abstruse philosophy actually has to do with us. We too can easily say ‘no, I don’t really care about the big picture, about what is true or not. All I care about is how things work, and getting them to work for me.’
While Wittgenstein-ian philosophers are a rare breed these days, people who say some variation on the above are common as dirt. But the same objection holds. How do you know things are ‘working for you’ if you don’t know what your life is about, what it’s for? If you manipulate and lie and cheat and steal and mess around because ‘that’s what works for me!’ you may find yourself burning in Hell for all eternity. Frankly. So I guess it didn’t work too well for you after all, eh?
So the big questions of life, death, God, sin, virtue, and judgment are not questions we can just bracket off as irrelevant to our daily business and getting the job done. The choices we make each day are either opening us up to Life or closing us off from Life, and hence killing us. Isn’t it just about the most practical concern in the world to figure all this out? To figure out which way is up, in other words?
I guess I’m still really worried about all these young people I read about the other day who just don’t bother their little heads about matters metaphysical, about deep questions of life. Don’t they ever stop and think that the car they’re driving merrily along down the highway of life might be heading for a cliff? And if there are large signs posted to that effect, and guard rails—well, isn’t it practical to take note of such things?
When we reject authority as any sort of guide to our choices, then the only teacher we have left to us is experience—and Experience is a mean, mean teacher. Experience teaches with a boxing glove to the face, a kick in the groin, a blow to the kidneys.  Experience sometimes kills its pupils.
Gee, it’s too bad there’s no other way to learn, isn’t it? Too bad God didn’t think of establishing an authority on earth to preserve and pass on moral wisdom to each generation! Oh wait… you say he did… well, where is it?

Throwing Down the Gauntlet

Our life today is marked not only by dissatisfaction with faith, but equally by dissatisfaction with the world of science. Only if we describe this double dissatisfaction… will we provide a reasonably fair representation of the presuppositions of the problem of faith and knowledge today.

Faith and the Future, 16

Reflection – This passage from Fr. Ratzinger dates from the early 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race, the burgeoning oil crisis, and various forms of naturalism or back-to-the-land movements, he identifies a suspicion or discontent with the promises of scientific progress.

What he is describing is not so much a questioning of the validity of science, but of its sufficiency. Science and technology are what they are, and they do work, if done properly. That is, we get real insights into how the world works and how to make the world work for us better.

But science cannot tell us what this ‘better’ is—that’s the central point. The scientific method is a powerful tool, but there is no laboratory test that can tell us what we are here for and what the true good of man is.

This is also the problem with faith in the modern world, from a different angle. People resist faith (in the sense of formal religious commitment) for a similar reason. The perception is that as science simply tells us what we can do, the list growing longer every year, religious faith simply tells us what we cannot do, the list seemingly drawn up by and under the control of a small group of all too human authorities who themselves may or may not observe it too closely.

Science allows us to do everything (almost) but cannot tell us what we should do. Religion (it is seen) forbids us from doing much that we want to do, but gives us no convincing account of why we should listen to it or to its representatives. And so post-modern man bobs along without direction, driven by the currents of culture, more often than not manipulated by the powerful and clever who don’t actually know any more than we do what is good and true, but certainly know what they want and how to get it.

Ratzinger’s entire career as a theologian is bound up with charting a course out of this impasse. He has presented over and over religious faith as a positive vision of human life in the world, one aspect of which is moral prohibitions, but which far more centrally and crucially is an encounter with transforming love in Jesus Christ.

This encounter leads us to a fuller understanding not only of God but of the human person, our dignity and freedom. Out of this understanding, the scientific community can take direction on how to best utilize its discoveries for the true good of humanity.

This is the vision Ratzinger, and really, the Catholic Church, presents to the post-modern world. Many will not find it attractive or persuasive, it must be granted. But in laying out such a sweeping, creative vision of faith and reason, science and religion working together, Ratzinger has thrown down a challenge to those unwilling to accept his position. Namely, suggest something better! What is the true good of man, and how do you reason your way to it? How are we to govern human progress so that it is true progress, and what are we progressing towards? If not the New Jerusalem, then where is our destination? And will it be truly human? Will we be free there? Will dignity be acknowledged there?

The Pope has truly thrown down the gauntlet (admittedly in his characteristic gentle, kindly fashion) to secular modernity by presenting a powerful synthetic vision of humanity for the 21^st century. His challenge has mostly gone ignored, unheard, unheeded. Part of my desire for this blog is that by popularizing his vision, it will seep out slowly and begin to have the influence it deserves in fashioning the world to be a place human beings can live in, in truth, goodness, and beauty.

Embracing a Wider Reality

The future of the Church will emerge from those whose roots are deep and who live from the pure fullness of their faith. It will not issue from those who accommodate themselves merely to the passing moment, or from those who merely criticize others… nor will it issue from those who take the easier road, who sidestep the passion of faith, declaring false and obsolete, tyrannous and legalistic, all that makes demands upon men… the future of the Church, once again as always, will be re-shaped by the saints… who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.

Faith and the Future, 101

Reflection -  A happy feast of All Saitns to you! Fr. Joseph Ratzinger wrote the above words in a 1970 essay called "The Church in the year 2000". In the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, as factions were set up against factions, as theologians took out full page ads in the New York Times decrying papal encyclicals, as the faithful reeled and rocked under what seemed like one radical wave of change after another, this young German professor took a deep breath and plunged into the heart of the matter for the Church, whether it was the Church of the first century, twelfth century, 1970 or 2011.
We cannot live at the level of controversy, of criticism, of polemics and partisanship. We cannot live at the level of mediocrity, accommodation, going along to get along. We cannot live a life half-asleep, nor can we live a life permanently enraged at everyone who doesn't 'get it' exactly as we get it.
We have to sink our roots deep. We have to enter the passion of faith - the only way to creatively engage and move through the tragedies and confusion of our world today is to suffer them with Christ. We have to embrace this wider vision - Christ in all and through all, loving all, serving all, the Holy Spirit bending over the world with 'ah! bright wings' in the words of Hopkins, and the Father, the source of all being and the lover of all He made, surveying, looking out for all his prodigals, occupying our streets as we occupy some other street, waiting for us to come home.
It is this wider vision that we must embrace, and it does take us into the passion of Christ. But it is this and this alone (as I keep saying) that will bear fruit in our lives and make our lives bear fruit in the world.
Happy All Saints Day. Let's join them. Let's become saints, with God's help. If we do not do that, we will have wasted our lives.

Don't! Stop! Thinking About Tomorrow!

[Abraham] gave up the present for the sake of what was to come. He let go of what was safe, comprehensible, calculable, for the sake of what was unknown. And he did this is response to a single word from God. He had met God and placed all his future in God’s hands; he dared to accept a new future that began in darkness… the center of gravity of reality, indeed the concept of reality itself, changed. The future took precedence over the present, the word heard over comprehensible things.

Faith and the Future, 30-31

Reflection – ‘The future took precedence over the present.’ Hey, wait a minute! Aren’t we always being told to live in the present? That ‘now’ is what matters – tomorrow’s not here yet, yesterday is gone, etc., etc.? And what about the ‘duty of the moment’ that Madonna House folk are always talking about, the call of Christ to encounter him, serve him, love him, obey him by paying attention to what is in front of us right now?

Has young Fr. Ratzinger (this book is from 1971) gone a little awry here? How can we say that the future is more important than the present, and what does this mean for our life?

Well, we can say it because it’s true, for starters! The future is more important than the present. What is the future we hope for? Eternal life in heaven with God. That is inherently more important than the few years we spend rattling around on earth – I don’t see how we can argue otherwise.

In medieval philosophy, the starting point for any discussion of human life and activity was to distinguish two ways of being human. Human beings are either viatores or comprehensors. In English, wayfarers or comprehenders. And all human modes of being and acting are affected profoundly by whether you are in one camp or the other.

You are (in case you’re unclear here) a viatore, as is every human being you have ever met, unless you happen to have had an apparition of Our Lady. The comprehensors are those enjoying the beatific vision, and most especially the Mother of God herself who enjoys this vision in her resurrected, assumed flesh.

But for us, we are on the way – we’re not there yet. And the whole dynamism of our life is towards our goal, towards that end. And so, yes, the future is more important than the present, because, like Abraham leaving everything to go to the promised land, all our actions and choices are meant to be a continual ‘leaving everything’ for the sake of the promised land to which we are headed.

What of being present to the present moment, then? What about the duty of the moment, and living in the now? Well, that’s how we leave everything to get to God’s future for us. To get to heaven, we have to stay on the path. And to stay on the path, we have to be deeply attentive to its twists and turns. And these twists and turns are the demands of love, now. The call of Christ, now. What’s in front of you to be done, now. But all is for the sake of the end of the road, the glorious ‘then’ to which all our little nows are bearing us.

Answering the Fundamental Crisis

To make positivity an absolute… makes not only enquiry about God, but enquiry about man and reality in general quite impossible… We are facing… a fundamental crisis in reality in general, and the displacement of theology is but the most concrete expression of the fundamental dilemma of existence into which we have been precipitated by the triumphant advance of positivistic thought.

Faith and the Future, 70-71

Reflection – By positivity, Ratzinger is not referring to having a positive mental attitude. Logical positivism is the philosophical system which reduces intelligible reality to two things: immediate sensory experience and scientifically verifiable data. Everything else is nonsense, literally meaningless.

Ratzinger points out here that the positivistic stance, if taken as the only possible way to think about the world, eliminates a lot more from the field than just God. We cannot directly observe or scientifically demonstrate answers to a whole host of questions that most people consider significant. What is human life for? What do we owe to one another? What is the meaning of love? Is lifelong commitment possible, or desirable for human beings? What is happiness?

None of these questions can be either raised or answered in a strictly positivist system, and attempts to do so are generally embarrassingly shallow or covertly import non-empirical, non-verifiable data into the equation.

Without a concept of human reason that allows for more than positivist methods, these questions fall to the sphere of emotion, of sentimentality. What do I feel is important?

But this fails, too. We know, when we ask what human life is for, that we are not asking ‘what do I feel about being human?’ And the same holds true for the other questions. We are asking about something real, solid, substantial, not a mere changing emotion.

Ratzinger has consistently and firmly called for a reclaiming of a broader concept of reason. There is no logical reason to limit reason to the positive. There is no empirical evidence for empiricism, no scientific test proving the truth of scientific positivism. The consequences of this historical irony-the acceptance of a theory of knowledge that contradicts its own premises-are to render the deepest concerns of human beings incoherent and unintelligible. Ratzinger has dedicated his life, in some measure, to a reclaiming of the fullness of human reason, within which the truth of life can be known and embraced.

The Future

[Faith] is not a system of semi-knowledge, but an existential decision – it is life in terms of the future that God grants us, even beyond the frontier of death. This is that attitude and orientation that gives life its weights and measures, its ordinances, and its very freedom. Certainly a life lived by faith resembles more an expedition up a mountain than a quiet evening spent reading in front of the fire; but anyone who embarks upon this expedition knows and feels more and more, that the adventure to which it invites us is well worthwhile.” Faith and the Future, p. 50.

Reflection: Ratzinger here summons us to the adventure of life, to a journey towards our true future.

The question of ‘the future’ is a key one today. So many ideologies that governed the course of world events in the 20^th century were essentially eschatological, that is, future-oriented. Marxism anticipated a workers’ paradise, and was willing to smash everything and everyone to get there. Nazism heralded the glorious Third Reich when the Master Race could order all things in beauty and peace… once all the inferior races were cleared out of the way, especially the Jews.

Scientism promises an end to suffering… if we just let them experiment on and vivisect us in whatever way they please. Environmentalism, meanwhile, holds out a grim specter of eschatological doom, a sort of Judgment Green Day when all our carbon sins will come home to roost. We must repent before it is too late, in sackcloth, if not in nasty carbon-producing ashes. Again, if only we can abort and contracept enough people, environmental doom can be forestalled.

Human eschatology always seems to involve human sacrifice.

Ratzinger surveys all of these throughout his writings and holds out the Christian alternative. There is a glorious future held out for humanity; there are great deeds to be done, obstacles to be surmounted, works to be achieved. But this future is held in the heart and hands of God, not in human endeavor alone. The human efforts to secure the eshcaton end in horror, bloodshed, tyranny. Placing our hands in God’s hands, and allowing Him to guide us to the future of man allows us all the joy, excitement, expectation and greatness of spirit that we yearn for in these ideologies, while grounding all of this in truth, love, and a deep respect for the human person.

The weights and measure of life given by faith are just that: that each person is included or at least invited into this glorious future, that it is seen in the love and tenderness of God, in Christ, for every single human being, and that our own path to this glorious future is precisely this path of love, service, mercy, in imitation of Christ.