What is the Point of Religion?

The essence of an image consists in the fact that it represents something… with the fact that it goes beyond itself… thus the image of God means, first of all, that the human being cannot be closed in on himself. If he attempts this he betrays himself. To be the image of God implies relationality. It is the dynamic that sets the human being in motion toward the totally Other. Hence it means the capacity for relationship; it is the human capacity for God.

Joseph Ratzinger, In the Beginning

Reflection – ‘What is the point of religion, anyway?’ In a novel I read on my holidays, one of the characters, completely steeped in secular values and irreligious, asked this perfectly reasonable question. What is the purpose of prayer in human life, of religious observance, of turning towards God?

It is an important question – one might argue that it is the question the world poses to the Church right now. What are we bringing to the table? We have to avoid, it seems to me, giving answers that are utilitarian in nature. Religion helps us to be more peaceful… or helps us to work for social justice… or makes us more generous… or creates a more stable society…

All of these may be true to greater or lesser degrees, but none of these is the ‘point’ of religion. Prayer, and hence God, are not tools we use to achieve some greater purpose, some end of our own. This quote from Ratzinger gives us the real answer. The real answer to the question, hard as this may be to present to a thoroughly secular person, is that the point of God is that God is the point of everything.

We are not religious people because we hope to gain some other good from being religious—having our prayers answered so that we get what we want, or some variation on that. We are religious people because we believe that the purpose of creation is to enter into relationship with God.

Really the question is not ‘what is the point of religion?’ The question is ‘what is the point of anything?’ Life can be about professional success… but why bother with that? Life can be about happy family relationships… but why bother with that? Life can be about cramming in as much pleasure as we can into each moment (YOLO!)… but why bother with that?

At each twist and turn of trying to find some ultimate meaning and purpose to life, we are always confronted with human finitude, with the inevitability of death and the insufficiency of strictly human goods to genuinely satisfy us. What is the point of anything, really, unless everything is pointing us beyond the human and the finite and the mortal?

Once we open the door to that other reality, to God and to faith and to prayer, then everything becomes charged with meaning—our work, our loves, our families, our pleasures all become taken up in a world of meaning that is not doomed to the futility of the grave.

The point of religion, of faith, is that it gives a sure and solid and indestructible meaning to everything else in life, and without this meaning, everything else is really very fragile. It is quite a mysterious affair—it is only when we allow for the invisible, the unprovable, that which no eye has seen and no ear has heard, that which seems to be so insubstantial and fleeting, that all the things that are near at hand, obvious, plain, become fully solid and real with a lasting meaning and purpose.

Secularism has turned its back on the invisible and indemonstrable matters of God and the spirit in favor of what can be proven and known to the senses. Ironically, we find ourselves in a world devoid of lasting value or purpose, a world of brute matter and physical forces, a world where there is no meaning save what our frail and feeble humanity can impose on it for a short span of years.

Faith allows for this one element of impenetrable mystery—God!—and so the whole universe becomes charged with crystalline purpose and goodness, all the brute matter echoes like a resonating glass vibrating with the music of the angels, and all of humanity becomes the great priesthood of the cosmos, offering praise and worship to the Creator and so enacting that which is the utter fulfillment of all creation, the utter fulfillment of our own human destiny and vocation, the absolute and final and endless point of all that is.

And that is the point of religion.

It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up

Human beings can only be healthy when they are true and when they stop suppressing and destroying the truth.

In the Beginning, 80

Reflection – A little vintage one-liner from Ratzinger here – let’s see what I make of it. I don’t have the book in front of me, so can’t tell you what the context of this is; quite possibly he is talking about the lies of the serpent in Genesis 3, and how the fall of our humanity into sin and sorrow came in the form of lies and deceit.

Of course, all sin is a form of lying. Theft is a lie about property and meaning and value of the world’s goods. Murder is a lie about the relative value of human life and the respect it is due. Sins of violence are a lie about human freedom and dignity. Sins of superstition and false religion are a lie about the nature of  God and the nature of creation. Specific sins of disobedience to the Church are a lie about the nature and God-given authority of the Church. And sexual sins are a lie about the nature of love and its bodily expression.

All sin is flight from reality, denial of truth. But it seems to me that the real damage is done to our humanity, not by the initial fall into sin to which (alas) we all are prone. No, it is the denial of the sin, the hardening of the heart against repentance, the construction of rationalizations and alternate ethical constructs—whatever it takes so that we can keep doing what we want to do.

In other words, it’s not the crime, it’s the cover up. It’s not that the sin itself is harmless—sin by definition harms—but that the real, lasting, and eternally damaging harm is impenitence more than sin. All the harms of sin can be healed by a sincere turning to God for mercy, but the refusal to turn to God for mercy cannot be healed at all.

And so we had this past weekend the spectacle of 500 000 pro-life protestors walking the streets of Washington, an event that was apparently near-invisible to the media, who saw at most ‘thousands’ (technically accurate, in the same sense that ‘hundreds’ of people were killed in WWII), and who made sure to photograph and interview the five pro-abortion rights protestors at the Supreme Court in the interest of ‘balanced reporting’.

There is a desire to cover up the reality of abortion, to do anything to avoid having to talk about it, look at it, honestly discuss what happens in an abortion, to honestly discuss the scientific facts of when a human life begins and the real legal and moral implications of those facts. It is this suppression and distortion of the truth—and of course abortion is only one instance of it, if perhaps the most serious one with the highest body count—that is the deep pathology of humanity in our time.

Abortion hurts everyone. It kills the fetus, does incalculable damage to the woman, unmans the man in the deepest reality of his masculinity, which is to protect and provide for his own. It damages the medical system horribly by negating its whole purpose, which is to heal and save lives. It robs politicians of their integrity. It makes the mass of society complicit in a web of lies and nonsense—silly slogans about choice and reproductive health substituting for actual thought, and the result is another year of wholesale slaughter of babies in the clinics and hospitals of our land.

I promise to move on to another subject tomorrow. I realize this is a heavy one that can only be looked at for so long before it all becomes a little too much. But we need to be clear that the truth does, in fact, set us free, even if our freedom may involve some weeping, some sorrow of contrition, some painful call to conversion. But the truth is good: God is merciful and loving, human beings are infinitely precious in his sight, and so must not be destroyed, the world is a good place, and love truly is the answer to every problem, every hurt, every ailment, every life.

We need not fear the truth; we need not flee from the truth; we need not distort or suppress the truth about anything, however painful, however humiliating. God’s mercy and his power to heal and save are greater than all that, and the fullness of truth he brings us into is beautiful, glorious, and joyful. And with that, we will put the subject of abortion to rest for a little while, and turn our minds to some aspect or other of that glorious truth tomorrow.

A Bold Project, An Audacious Move

We can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. The human being is not a mistake but something willed; he is the fruit of love. He can disclose in himself, in the bold project that he is, the language of the creating Intelligence that speaks to him and that moves him to say: Yes, Father, you have willed me.

In the Beginning, 71-2

Reflection – These words from Ratzinger, originally published decades ago, ring with ever-increasing relevance today. There are just so many attacks on human dignity, on the divine origin and goal, and the divine valuing of the human person.

Besides the obvious ones of abortion and euthanasia—the reducing of human life to something other human beings can dispose of at will—there are many faces and forms to this reduction of humanity. There is the whole hyper-sexualization of women, in particular, reducing the value of the feminine person to physical measurements and ‘hotness’. There is the reduction of the person to an economic unit of production, the virtual return of the caste system where human worth is measured by net worth. There is the ominous growth of collectivism in much of the democratic world, with its tendency to subordinate the person to society, and society to the state and the government. And then there is the terrible outright denial of human dignity that flows from radical atheism, viewing human beings as ‘meat’ living briefly in a meaningless dead universe.

All of this is all too familiar to us, so I won’t dwell on it further. Instead, this radiant picture Ratzinger presents to us is worth pondering. We have to take this personally, I think, to be able to really take hold of it. In other words, it is a good spiritual exercise to take the above passage, and every time he says ‘human being’ or some related pronoun, to replace it with ‘I’ or ‘me.

I am indeed a divine project which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. I am not a mistake but something willed; I  am the fruit of love. I can disclose in myself, in the bold project that I am, the language of the creating Intelligence that speaks to me and that moves me to say: Yes, Father, you have willed me.

Beautiful, eh? This is good self-esteem, Christian style! Personally, I like the idea of God having to be audacious to think of making Fr. Denis Lemieux, as if there was a risk that this particular one could all go terribly wrong. But this is all very beautiful—nobody is a mistake, nobody is extra, surplus, unwanted. Everyone is a bold project of God from the moment of his or her conception, with God having a special plan for how you and I are going to express, disclose the language of the creating Intelligence who made us.

We have to take this to heart, pray for the grace to really believe this about ourselves, and then be very serious about communicating this to everyone in our world. If everyone you meet today is willed by the Father and is the fruit of love, a divine project, then you will treat them with respect, right? It changes our attitude towards others, if we really believe it.

And this, to me, is the deep and consistent pro-life ethic that we simply must strive to live if the terrible assaults on human dignity are to be turned back in our times. We have to treat people like they are of divine origin and destiny; we have to, simply, love one another as Christ has loved us. The more we do this, the more all these terrible tragedies of abortion and euthanasia and exploitation and injustice simply will not happen.

So… let’s get on that today, why don’t we?

Something Worth Watching

The technical and scientific attitude has produced a certain kind of certitude… this has give humankind a certain freedom from anxiety and superstition, a certain power… but now there is a temptation to view as reasonable and therefore as serious only what can be corroborated through experiment and computation. This means that the moral and the holy no longer count for anything.

In the Beginning, 61

Reflection – Science and technology work. That is a principle argument, as I grasp it, of the New Atheists as they first (falsely) oppose science and religion, and then come down on the ‘side’ of science on that basis.

It works. Scientific experimentation leads to discoveries that translate into inventions and medicines that do what we want them to do. And so science is true. And because religion does not produce inventions and medicine, it is not true, or at least there is no reason to consider its truth claims seriously.

I think I’ve done justice to the New Atheist position there. If I have not, I am committing the logical fallacy of the straw man, which is the bane of the internet and much public discourse today: misrepresenting your opponent’s position and then critiquing your misrepresentation.

It is difficult for me to give a fair accounting of atheism, as I have little natural sympathy for the position. There’s not much atheist in me, and one of the hardest thing to do is give a fair rendering of a position that you have little respect or liking for.

At any rate, I think I did OK here. But the New Atheist position is so illogical! First, there is no real opposition between religion and science, and hence no need to choose one over the other. The actual practice of science proceeds on atheistic grounds—that is, science can only be done by seeking natural explanations for events—but there is no reason whatsoever that a scientist cannot be a person of faith. Many are. And there is no logical opposition whatsoever between scientific method and religious truth.

Meanwhile, the statement that ‘x is true’ does not immediately entail ‘not-x is false’. The truth of x precludes the falsehood of anti-x, not other truths besides x.

Simply because our reason works in one direction, towards material reality, in such a way as to understand and manipulate it, we cannot say on that basis that our reason can only work in that way. It is illogical and arbitrary to limit reason to scientific computation and experimentation, simply because we know those things work.

Humanity has 3000 years (and counting!) of reasoning about God, humanity, morality, the meaning and purpose of life, and this reasoning has produced, not toasters and TVs, but an outpouring of poetry, music, art, architecture, literature of unsurpassed beauty. Science gives us the i-pod; religion gives us Bach. Science gives us TV; religion gives us Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Eliot, Dickens… something worth watching, in other words.

In other words, the atheist arguing that ‘science works’ has weighted the scales by subtly defining the word ‘works’ in a narrow way that nobody really accepts. Who wants a world filled with technological gadgets and gizmos if there’s nothing worth doing with them? Who wants a world of medical interventions and life-saving treatments if life itself is a meaningless mess?

In other words, religion ‘works’, but in a wholly different way and according to a wholly different metric than science. Yes, religion does not produce certitude in the way science does. Yes, religion’s ‘products’ are of a different kind than science’s, and the mode by which religion begets all these cultural human artifacts is indirect and diffuse.

I won’t even go into the argument that one of the artifacts of religion is… well, science. For now, let’s leave it that the atheist argument that only science works and therefore only science is credible is illogical, arbitrary, and unproven. And hence (irony alert!) unscientific.

It Is Very Good (To Be Very Good)

[In Genesis 1] the words ‘God said’ appear ten times… in this way the creation narrative anticipates the Ten Commandments… [they are] an echo of creation;… not arbitrary inventions for the purpose of erecting barriers to human freedom but signs pointing to the spirit, the language, and the meaning of creation.

In the Beginning, 39

Reflection – Here we have in a few short sentences the substance of Catholic moral thought and our natural law tradition. The moral law springs from the very God-given structure of created reality. God says, and it is so, and it is good. Good human action, then, corresponds to the creative design and purpose of God’s created order. We are part of that order, and find our happiness and freedom within it.

We also have a good lesson by example here on how Catholics read Scripture. The creation account in Genesis is not a science textbook nor is it in the strict sense of the modern word, history. It is a work of theology and poetry, and its truth claims must be understood in light of the type of work it is.

This is not some insight of modern Scripture study; the fathers of the Church read Genesis this way. And so here we see that the author of Genesis 1, inspired by the Holy Spirit, links the creative will of God with the law revealed on Mount Sinai. The creation account is a relatively late writing, probably written in the Babylonian exile. The law codes with the Decalogue at their center are much older.

So the human author assisted by God is communicating something very deep here, as he meditates on God as the source and absolute master of all that is. Human moral behavior—obedience to the law—is an act of faith in the doctrine of creation. God made the world, not us. The truth of life and of the world comes from Him, not from us. Our commitment to that doctrine entails obedience to the moral law as revealed to us.

But there’s more to it than that. God said, and it came to be. Ten times God spoke, it happened, and it was good. God says to us what to do, and we do it, and it is good. Moral behavior, then, is our entry into being co-creators with God. You want your life to be creative and not destructive? Don’t steal. You want to be building up the world and not tearing it down? Don’t tell lies. You want to live and not die? Don’t kill or commit adultery. You want to be friends with God, and walk in his presence and do his work? Worship Him with great reverence and keep holy the Sabbath.

By obeying the moral law as it comes to us in the Decalogue and, yes, as it comes to us through the Church’s 2000 year tradition of reflection and consistent teaching on that Decalogue, we both live our faith in God the creator and enter into his creative work.

I have meditated for years now on why Jesus said in Matthew 5 that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. Perhaps here we have something of the answer. If the law springs from the heart of God’s creative will, then we see that Jesus came not to abolish creation but to fulfill it. Jesus came to heal and bring to completion the work the Trinity began ‘in the beginning.’ And so Christianity is not a religion that abolishes all the rules and regulations and reduces everything to a sort of anomic niceness. ‘Just love everyone—that’s the only law now!’ Well, no. Christ did not nullify the created order that He, the Logos of God, established in the beginning. And love of God and neighbor will always mean serving and honoring that created order.

But he did come to fulfill the law. That is, we experience the law without Christ as an extrinsic thing coming at us. Rules imposed from on high, and we all know this is an unpleasant experience, even if in our faith and love of God we choose to accept and abide by ‘the rules’.

Christ came to make this something much better. He came to live in us and make His life our life by the power of his Holy Spirit in us. And so the Law and its demands is no longer to be something extrinsic and heavy, something we bridle under even as we may choose to obey it out of fear or even out of love.

Rather, we are meant to be son with the Son, so much in God in Christ that the Law becomes our law, something personal and intimate and joyous. We don’t tell lies, not because we’ve been told not to and are afraid of hellfire, but because in Christ we are truth. We don’t fornicate, not because of a heavy burden of unpleasant commandment and shame, but because in Christ our very bodies are taken up into covenant love and fidelity. We don’t kill because in Christ we cannot imagine treating a human being with violence and hatred.

And so Christ wants to fulfill the law in us by living in us with such intimacy and personal love and care that we, in a sense, become the ones saying ‘Let there be light… and earth… and heaven… and animals… and men and women…’ and looking on what God (and we) have made, to say, and mean, that it is very good. And this, in a nutshell, is Christian moral behavior.

2 + 2 = 4 -- Really!

Previously human beings could only transform particular things in nature; nature itself was not the object… of their activity. Now, however, it itself has been delivered over to them in toto. Yet as a result they suddenly see themselves imperiled as never before. The reason for this lies in the attitude that views creation only as the product of chance and necessity. Thus it has no law, no direction of its own.

In the Beginning, 51

Reflection – Ratzinger, writing here at the height of the Cold War, is referring here to the threat of nuclear extinction. The very structure of physical reality—the ‘atomic’ level of matter—has been made accessible to physical manipulation, and in consequence destructive forces have been unleashed that could destroy us all.

Of course this is still true today, even though the specific political configuration has changed. The dangers of nuclear weaponry are still with us. I wonder, though, if Ratzinger is not touching on an underlying spiritual problem. There is, it seems to me, a fundamental crisis that has beset humanity over the past several centuries.

I would call it a crisis of humility. Where is our humility? Humility is the virtue of limitations, the virtue that constrains us to live within our true boundaries. ‘Humility is truth’, goes the somewhat clichéd formula these days. Humility is about choosing to live within reality, and not trying to shape reality according to our wishes, as if we were God.

For example, 2+2=4. We may want it to equal 5 or 3, but it really does equal 4. The looming global economic collapse is a result of all sorts of people deciding that we can pretend 2+2=5 and just keep juggling the books and shuffling the papers until it magically does so. I do realize that it’s more complex than that, but that’s precisely the problem.

2+2=4 is not complex, and a global economy based on real numbers and real goods and services being exchanged for real money is not so complex. We’ve failed in humility, and tried to create a fantasy economy based on funny math and imaginary money. We are not God, and our efforts at creation ex nihilo are failing.

The same holds true with human sexuality. Man and woman come together in sexual union, and nine months later, perhaps, a child is born. There is union, and there is pro-creation. There is a beautiful, radiant simplicity about the whole thing, and a clear conformity between that which is given (bodily structures of genitalia and reproductive organs), what is manifestly good (the creation and raising of children in a safe, secure environment) and what is done (pro-creative sex, in a stable committed relationship).

But we know better! We have all sorts of ideas about what sex is, how children should be created and raised, and so on and so forth. And so we disregard our bodily structures and combine, mix and match as we please. Now – be clear! I’m not talking about the weakness of all flesh here, and the struggle for sexual purity and chastity that is the lot of fallen man. I’m talking about ideologies—rewriting the moral law to suit ourselves.

A crisis of humility—and the same holds true with nuclear weapons. We seem to have thought that it was wise and good for some human beings to hold in their hands the ability to destroy the human race. Somehow, we thought we were strong enough, good enough, pure of heart enough for this. And now we have a terrible mess on our hands, a dangerous terrible mess, the details of which I hardly need to lay out here.

Humility—knowing our limits, knowing that we are not God, and that God has made the universe with ordered structures, with a purpose and a goal. And committing ourselves to listening, to praying, to seeking out the truth of things and serving the end of things. This is our human vocation, and humility is at the core of it.

On the Verge of Pouncing

Sin has become a suppressed subject… [which] has nonetheless remained real. What is remarkable to me is the aggressiveness, always on the verge of pouncing, which we experience openly in our society—the lurking readiness to demean the other person, to hold him guilty whenever misfortune occurs to him.

In the Beginning, 80

Reflection – Ratzinger again shows just how aware he is of the dynamics of contemporary society. It is a tremendous irony, this aggressive censoriousness of secular society. We reject the idea of good and evil, but denounce Obama/Santorum/Romney/ Gingrich/Harper/whoever as ‘evil’. We reject the notion of sin, but delight in ill-natured gossip about the misdeeds of the rich and famous. We preach tolerance and relativism, and fiercely attack those of different political or religious persuasions than ourselves.

And all this happens in the secular sphere. It seems that this is an application of the old saying about kicking nature out the door only to have it come in by the window. We can kick our sinful nature out, but it sneaks back in.

Of course, the trouble with the secular reappropriation of sin and evil (generally using other language, of course) is that once God is taken out of the picture, we are left to the judgment of man. And hence, judgment without pity, without mercy, without compassion. And so we have this ‘agressiveness… the lurking readiness to demean the other person, to hold him guilty…’

If we’re going to have sin, and it seems like we can’t really navigate our human waters without having some concept of it, then we had better have forgiveness, too. Otherwise we are truly trapped in a cycle of sin and blame, condemnation and contempt. We are named by our sins these days, at least by those of the ‘opposing’ camp. Our stumbles, our wrongs, our failures, our sins are understood to reveal the true person, the true reality of our situation.

Religion—authentic Christianity, anyhow—names us differently. We are not named by our sins, but by the love of the Father. We are not defined by what is wrong with us, but by what God has given us. Sin is not master in our life or the world’s life; Jesus is.

And because of this, we have no fear of looking at our sins, frankly acknowledging them, refusing to rationalize them away. Because there is mercy, and mercy is stronger than sin, we don’t need to hide our sins.

And in that same awareness of mercy, we have no need to be harsh or aggressive or judgmental of anyone. We’re all sinners; we’re all in need of mercy; mercy is poured out for all who wish to receive it. This is the spirit of Lent, and as we head into its final weeks, let’s pray for a gift of mercy to descend upon all hearts, so that hatred and contempt be washed away by the love of God given to us in Jesus Christ.

We Are Not Pigs

The relationship of creature to Christ, of the first to the second Adam, signifies that the human person is a being en route, a being characterized by transition. He is not yet himself; he must ultimately become himself.

In the Beginning, 64

Reflection – Have you ever noticed that your dog doesn’t have too many existential crises? That cats don’t spend much time anguishing over their identity? I’m just wrapping up writing my latest book (publication details pending…) on the effects of technology on our humanity, the subtitle of which will be Staying Human in a Digital Age. But we don’t see pigs publishing books about staying porcine in a bovine age, or fish publishing about staying piscine in a mammalian age.
And its not just because of the lack of opposable thumbs, either. There is something deeply human about the very fact that we don’t know what being deeply human means. We have to struggle and wrestle and labor at our humanity, toiling and spinning around madly in a way that the birds of the air and the lilies of the field just don’t have to do. They just are; we just aren’t, not without a fight.
This is actually one of the great arguments against atheistic materialism, if you think about it. If human beings are just one more form of protoplasm, just one more blob of tissue in a universe that is nothing but one big blob of tissue… then why do we mind so much? Why, if we are just meaningless products of a wholly material universe, do we constantly kick against the goad, constantly look for some deeper meaning, some deeper definition or identity or human expression? Because we do, you know, and it’s across cultures and civilizations, across history and place.
Human beings ask questions about human being, and seek to become what we are not.
Ratzinger explains this universal human experience in light of the creation of the first Adam in the image of the second Adam. Adam (humanity in its origin) is made with a view to, in consideration of Christ (humanity as perfected by the divine indwelling).
Human beings are created, then, to be open vessels, empty cups, a space in which God can give Himself in a unique way, a being incomplete in itself, but opening up to be completed by the gift of its Maker. We are a creature endowed, not only with a present reality, but a future destiny that surpasses it, that surpasses our own capacities.
Sin complicates this, of course, as we try to fill that empty space with any number of created goods and fulfill our destiny in all sorts of self-directed ways. And so we get all confused and conflicted and frankly miserable.
But this second Adam, who is not merely an abstraction or an idea, but the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, son of Mary, the Christ of God, comes to each of us, I maintain, to work in us precisely this completion of our humanity.
It ties back to exactly what I wrote about yesterday. Love comes to us; love is given to us. Love is our destiny, our divine identity, and to be filled with the divine love is what we are made for. And this love comes to us, not just 2000 years ago when Jesus was born, but here and now, every day. And not just in some abstract or mysterious esoteric way—no, Love comes as food and drink, concrete, specific, real, tangible, in the Eucharist.
We are creatures in transition, en route, becoming. But this becoming has to be guided and shaped by the One who is our destiny, or else it goes badly awry. Cats and dogs, pigs and fish, birds and flowers are all OK. We need help! And that’s OK, as long as we know that help has been given, it is available, and all we have to do is show up and ask nicely for it.

That Terror Be Put to Flight

Marx was the one who said that humankind should no longer inquire into its origins and that to do so would be to act foolishly. Marx’s intention here was to move away from the question of understanding the ‘whence’ of the universe and its design… since creation in its innermost reasonableness attested most strongly and ineluctably to the Creator…. The question is seen as foolish from the very start. Creation is of no consequence; it is humanity that must produce the real creation, and it is that which will count for something. This is the source of the change of humanity’s fundamental directive vis a vis the world; it was at this point that progress became the real truth and matter became the material out of which human beings would cerate a world that was truly worth being lived in. Ernst Bloch intensified this idea and gave it a truly terrifying mien. He said that truth is now what we take it to be and that the only truth is change. Truth is, accordingly, whatever prevails, and as a result reality is a ‘signal to invade and an instruction to attack.’

In the Beginning, 49-50

Reflection – Might makes right, and the winners write the history books. So we have all been told. This is not new with Marx or the less well known Bloch. Ruthless and unscrupulous people have generally been able to articulate such as their philosophy, when they bothered to take time out from their busy schedule of rape, pillage, and looting to have a philosophy.

With the Marxist development (and Marxism is far from dead, and far from being limited to its explicit historic development in political-economic communism), the great brake that always bore on the schemes of the unscrupulous is removed.

This brake was the sense, the intuition, the barely grasped idea (at times), and firmly stated and codified idea (at other times) that there is an order to things that human beings cannot change.

We can rape, pillage, and loot—sure thing! But it was always at least dimly grasped that in time a bill would be presented, a debt exacted, that there were weights and measures valuing our deeds, that, in the words of an old Spanish proverb: “Take what you want… and pay for it!”

The Marxist sense is that there is no order to things, no scale in which we are balanced, no one to make us pay because there is no One there. We can do what we want, and make the world however we want. ‘Truth’ is a future-only concept, and the truth will be forged by whoever is strongest.

The theology of creation is more important than ever, in the face of this philosophy, which I firmly believe has broken free of its specifically Marxist context and is now a largely regnant rule of life in the year 2011. That God fashioned all that is, that it has a meaning and a purpose from Him, not from us, and that even our own fashioning, and the freedom with which we move through the world, is from Him, and has its own purpose in His schemes—this is the truth that liberates us from the ‘terrifying’ vista of Ernst Bloch, the vision of  a world in which all are at war with all to see whose truth will prevail among its many versions.

To recapture the sense of creation requires, I believe, a recapturing of the contemplative spirit in the world. It is Advent; we are all very busy. It can be very difficult to figure out how to contemplate cooking supper once more this time of year, let alone anything more profound.

But the Advent season calls us to this quietness. Not without difficulty, not without struggle. To stop, at least some time; to listen. To watch the snow fall on the hard earth, to hear the wind in the pine trees, to look at the winter stars. To receive creation as it is from God; and in that reception to know our own selves as received, as given, as gift. This is the wellspring of peace out of which we can truly act to fashion the world in justice and beauty. This is the open space we can create so that God can come into our world and have a place to lay his head, a place to be born anew. So that joy can enter the world again, and terror be put to flight, again.

Can You Be More Specific?

When the human person is no longer seen as standing under God’s protection and bearing God’s breath, then he begins to be viewed in a utilitarian fashion. It is then that the barbarity appears which tramples upon human dignity.

In the Beginning, 60

Reflection – Lily Tomlin, in a one woman Broadway show that was a big hit back in the 1980s (I misremember the name of it right now!) had a line I’ve always remembered. “I always wanted to be someone,” she said, “but I now realize I should have been more specific.”

Human dignity, human value, the precious gift of each human person as a ‘someone’ and not a ‘something’—this is something the whole wide world, or at least those of us in the post-Christian West, can easily get on board with. Of course every human being is precious and valuable and all that good stuff.

But why? Our behavior is not always so precious and valuable. Our ideas and desires are not so unique and fascinating: most people tend to fall into a fairly conformist mode of life and thought. We’re not all rock stars, fashion models, or Mensa members.

Without God’s protection and God’s breath, can we credibly uphold human dignity and specialness? Without God, who is this ‘someone’ who is supposed to be worth so much. What’s the specific that makes me someone you or anyone should care about?

In fact, the history of the last hundred years (and indeed deeper and broader human history) shows that outside of this sense of God’s love and inestimable valuing of each human person, there has been little if any sense of human dignity, human worth. The poor and wretched, in particular, have been accorded little value and no rights in much of the world, for much of the human story. It’s hardly self-evident, this human dignity and worth business.

Christianity did bring this into the world, admittedly not as quickly as one would have liked, and with a terrible uphill battle against precisely the barbarism Ratzinger describes in this passage. But it is a historical fact that the very notion of human rights flowing from our divine origin and destiny is wholly a product of Christian theology reflecting on the doctrines of creation and redemption.

Without God to protect us and hold us in his love, we are very vulnerable to all the forces of barbarism: exploitation, political repression, utilitarian calculation, and the unfettered killing of the weak and helpless who come out on the wrong side of the equation.

As God is increasingly thrown to the side of social structures or worse, thrown in the ‘dustbin of history’ as an irrelevant relic of past superstition, we must take here. Where are we to find a secure notion of human dignity and freedom? The state? Academia? Market forces? A vague trust in human goodness? Have any of these shown themselves to be reliable guardians of these values?

We have to ask ourselves these questions, and ask them of those who want to forge an entirely secular ethic. Barbarism looms before us; some would argue that a society where babies can be killed at the will of their mothers has already gotten there. And so we have to ask: without God, where does human dignity come from and where is it held secure?

The Sustaining Forces of Reality

We must not in our day conceal our faith in creation. We may not conceal it, for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God in the Lord of all things because he is their Creator... freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather they are the sustaining forces of reality.

In the Beginning, 28-9

Reflection – One of the most unfortunate aspects of the culture wars that have raged in the past decades has been the effect it has had on certain necessary conversations. Take this one, for example: these days, as soon as a Christian mentions faith in creation, it is almost automatically assumed to be a faith in the literal-six-day-creation-story-in-Genesis-1. God planted the dinosaur bones as a test of our faith, and all that stuff. You know the drill. None of which has anything to do with authentic Catholic doctrine and reading of Scripture.

Meanwhile, the theory of evolution is held up as definitively disproving all that nonsense of a Creator God (hint: it doesn’t). And so all discussions of these matters tend to founder very quickly on mutual misunderstandings, ignorance, and disdain. Especially discussions on the Internet, which are prone to that anyhow.
But the doctrine of creation is at the very heart of our Christian understanding of reality, and Ratzinger in this passage, and indeed in this entire book, describes beautifully just how central it is. That the universe is the product of love, not chance, a Father’s care, not a cosmic accident, a free choice and not a determination of physical laws—it all means that love and freedom are at the very heart of reality.
And so we can, as he says, go forward into the future in that spirit of love and freedom. Creation is the ground of action, mission, service, sacrifice. Without the clear and abiding sense of God as Creator and creation as thus good, we are deeply compromised in our ability to throw ourselves into life with generosity and joy.
And we can throw ourselves into it in such a way because we know that God our Father is meeting us on the other side of that choice, that He will catch us, and that in His love and care for us, his creative work will not be in vain.

Good Physics Makes Lousy Metaphysics

The universe is not the product of darkness and unreason. It comes from intelligence, freedom, and from the beauty that is identical with love.

In the Beginning, 37.

Reflection – You are not the result of random process of evolution. Every person is made; every person is loved. This is the ringing testimony of Pope Benedict XVI at his installation Mass as Bishop of Rome in 2005.

It is of the essence. Over the past two hundred years, the physical sciences have pushed back the frontiers of ignorance about the processes of matter and energy to a truly exhilarating degree. We know a great deal now about cosmology, sub-atomic movements, and the structures of physical reality.

When this surge of physical knowledge, however, is transferred (illogically!) to the metaphysical level – when all of reality is deemed (without rational argument!) to be the result of random physical processes, then terrible consequences follow.

The deep sense of futility, emptiness, pointlessness of life that so many carry today flows from this (unsubstantiated!) viewpoint. The great modern/post-modern plunge into hedonism, workaholism, dissipation of various kinds, or political radicalism can be linked to this (unverified, and unverifiable!) presentation of reality.

It is only a metaphysic, a whole view of reality, that contains with itself an originating mind that can establish us in a world that is good and true. It is only a metaphysic that contains within itself an originating mind that is disposed to love what it has made that establishes us in a world that is genuinely beautiful. The empty void, the dark cold caverns of space, understood as the ultimate, most significant realities, leave us empty, cold, and in darkness, in a dangerous universe that cares not for us, because it cannot care for anything at all.

Only when we begin to believe that all that is in the physical realm is held by a Person, a Mind, a Love, can we rest, and open ourselves to both receive reality and give our own reality to one another. Christianity provides such a metaphysic. Atheism does not.

The Trinity: Why Bother?

Being made in the image of God means that the human person is a being of word and of love, a being moving toward Another, oriented toward giving himself to the Other and only truly receiving himself back in real self-giving.

In the Beginning, p. 63

Reflection – What difference does the Trinity make, anyway? (The doctrine, that is, not the reality.) Many Christians would be unable to give a coherent answer to that question, let alone a coherent account of what it even means to say that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

What difference does it make? Why bother with this difficult dogma? This very brief quote of Ratzinger’s points to an answer. While the Trinity is an unfathomable and infinite mystery, which even in heaven we will never exhaust, our Scriptures and our theological tradition has spoken of the Son as the Word, the perfect self-knowledge of God, and of the Spirit as the perfect love emanating forth from the Father’s perfect knowledge of the Son and the Son’s reciprocal knowledge of the Father.

The Scriptural testimony of humanity being made in the image of God, then, means that we are made in the image of the Trinity – made to know and to love, made to receive and to give. That the human person is not a closed off fortress, an autonomous self made to grab and grasp and consume as much of the world’s riches as possible. Rather, he is known by God, made to know God, loved by God, made to love God. An inherently relational creature, whose very being is only found and made comprehensible in this constant circle of gift, reception, and gift.

God as Trinity, taken together with man as made in the image of God breaks us out of the terrible burden of competition, self-aggrandizement, and isolation. The two together reveal to us that at the deepest depths of reality, of Being, is relation, communion, love, and that out of this flows glory, delight, beauty, and joy. The Trinity reveals to us that infinite happiness, found in a communion of persons, is at the heart of all that is. That’s the difference it makes.

Creativity

“We can only be really creative if we are in harmony with the Creator of the universe. We can only really serve the earth if we accept it under the aegis of God’s word. Then we shall be able to further and fulfill both ourselves and the world.”

From: In the Beginning, p. 52.

Reflection:

It is fitting as I begin this blog, which is a creative work, to start ‘in the beginning’ – with a quote on creativity from Ratzinger’s book of the same name.

The typical modern attitude holds that to be creative means to produce something entirely my own. To be creative is to extend my being, my person, my ego into the raw material of the universe. That’s it, period. The typical modern attitude regarding creative activity is domination and control, especially control of truth, of meaning, of language, of the narrative. Who will get the last word? This is the critical issue of modernity.

Ratzinger reminds us in this quote that the true critical question here is not who gets the last word but ‘who had the first word?’ Furthermore, whose Word is continuing to hold and sustain all reality in existence? There is indeed a Creator God, and his creativity gives being and structure, truth and purpose, to every atom that is. A true creative work must begin there.

To make a contribution to the truth, beauty, and goodness of the world through some creative work, whether it’s composing a sonnet or baking a cake, requires an attentive listening and contemplative beholding of the existing structures of the cosmos. Otherwise, the cake will burn, or fall flat as a pancake. The sonnet will fall flat, too.

And it is in this attentive and contemplative work alone that we can be truly creative and truly ‘fulfill both ourselves and the world.’ God’s creative work is not in competition with ours; unlike Sartre and Nietzsche, we don’t need to do away with God to be creative. His creativity is the foundation, the wellspring, the guarantor of ours. To be in relationship and in obedience to the Creator of All is the only way to have a joyous, full, rich life.