Getting to the Point

Fools say in their hearts, “There is no God.”

They are corrupt, they commit abominable acts;

there is no one who does good.

God looks down from heaven on humankind

to see if there are any who are wise,

who seek after God.

They have all fallen away, they are all alike perverse;

there is no one who does good, no, not one.

Have they no knowledge, those evildoers,

who eat up my people as they eat bread,

and do not call upon God?

There they shall be in great terror,

in terror such as has not been.

For God will scatter the bones of the ungodly;

they will be put to shame, for God has rejected them.

O that deliverance for Israel would come from Zion!

When God restores the fortunes of his people,

Jacob will rejoice; Israel will be glad.

Psalm 53

Reflection – Well, we’re heading into a bumpy patch of road on the Monday Psalter, that’s for sure. If you look ahead at the next bunch of psalms (as I did on my poustinia day last Friday) you will see that the 50s find the psalmist in a pretty sour mood, pretty darned beleaguered, pretty unhappy with humanity in general.

While none of us would want to live in the world of Psalm 53 ff., I suppose few of us have wholly avoided these moments in our life. ‘You’re all a bunch of idiots! The whole world is insane! It’s all going to hell in a handbasket!’ And so on. And so forth. My own country is having a federal election today, and I have been lamenting in various virtual and real world conversations the real lack of any good outcome. Lots of fools, for sure, but very few indeed who are ‘wise, who seek after God.’

It is this whole business of saying in one’s heart ‘there is no God’ that is the root of all our human folly. And I am not thinking here of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens (RIP) and the like, although certainly they are part of it. I’m thinking of myself, and you. But mostly me.

Folly is living as if God does not exist, and a person can be going to church twice daily and living a life that seems to be all about God one way or another (I don’t personally have too much else going on in my life)… and yet, that folly persists.

The folly of not praying in the face of a difficult situation. The folly of thinking it’s all on us and our intellects to figure things out, that God has no help for us, the Spirit no guidance to offer us. The folly of maintaining a stubborn little corner of autonomy, that one place in our life where we erect a pathetic little sign, ‘No Trespassers – And God, That Means You!’

The folly of investing our value, our sense of self, our meaning, purpose, happiness, life goal and life project in creatures, one way or another, rather than in the Creator and our communion with Him. The folly of living as if this world and what is in it is all that there is, and there is no world to come, no gravitational pull of not just our own life, but the whole life of the cosmos, towards the future kingdom of God. The folly of thinking that there is anything whatsoever in this world worth giving a particle of energy towards besides loving God with all our heart, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

All of that is the practical atheism of the heart, the folly that none of us can safely claim we are wholly free from. And it is out of this that all the gross and subtle forms of foolish choices, disastrous mistakes, bad ideas come from. And worse yet, the horrific evils that ‘eat up people’, that cause the actual destruction of human lives—tragedies of abortion, terrorism, addictions, cruel economic exploitation and greed.

In all of this—and this will come up in every one of these psalms over the next week, after surveying the landscape of human failure and wickedness, the psalmist turns his eyes to God with a simple plea for deliverance and merciful redemption. And this is always our resting place, no matter how we’re doing or how we’re feeling about the human scene and its various follies, and our own. ‘O that God would speedily deliver us – Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy!’ That’s the ticket. In fact, that is wisdom itself – the turning of the human mind and heart heaven-ward to receive the grace that comes from above, so that He may show us the way forward through the folly of the world into the kingdom of the wise and the true.

The attempt, carried to extremes, to shape human affairs to the total exclusion of God leads us more and more to the brink of the abyss, toward the utter annihilation of man.

We must therefore reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment [to live by only those truths that would be true even if God did not exist] and say: even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice that I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Reflection – I am back from holidays, nicely rested up thank you, and ready to roll for another year of blogging (among other things). I thought I would start off this round with a return to some vintage ‘Ratzinger blogging’. Those who have discovered my blog more recently may not know that it used to be called ‘Life with a German Shepherd’ and was dedicated exclusively to the writings of Pope Benedict. I did my licentiate thesis on his thought, and have a wealth of references from him in my files.

I always recommend the book quoted here as a good starting point for those who want to read something by Ratzinger. It is short, topical, lively, provocative. Today’s quote is a good example. Fashioning a social world without reference to God seems to many to be the path of freedom and tolerance. Let everyone think what they wish, privately, about religious matters, but let our public life together be officially agnostic, if not atheistic. This has been advanced, and continues to be advanced, as the most peaceful way to live together.

It is illusory, though. We cannot, individually or communally, avoid ultimate questions. If there in fact is no God, or if we at least live our lives as if there is no God, the ultimate questions about truth and meaning and what is good do not simply wither away on the vine. Human beings are made for meaning—we cannot stop looking for meaningfulness in life. And if that meaning is not given, it must be fashioned. If it is not something to discover, it is something to make. It cannot be, and never is, something we just forget about. We’re not really built that way.

And so we have, in this seemingly tolerant agnostic/atheist approach to social life, the transference of questions of ultimate meaning, truth, and goodness to the sphere of political and sociological transformation of the world. When there is no God in heaven to which we can refer the matter of ultimate happiness and the consummation of human striving for perfection, then we must labor to create a heavenly life (or some poor facsimile of same) on earth.

And if this does not take place in the sphere of political ideologies or moral crusades (some people, after all, are genuinely apolitical by temperament), then it will take place in the naked pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power, or some potent combination of these. But all of this—ideological agendae and self-seeking gratification—are in fact matters that occur in public that affect all of us. The religious impulse, the sense of God and of ultimate reality that is outside of us, is forced into a private expression that is more and more hemmed in, while all of the other efforts to force meaning upon a meaningless reality rampage publicly and increasingly intrude upon us all.

And so we have the seemingly mild and irenic advice given by Cardinal Ratzinger. Act as if God exists, even if you can’t see your way to really believe that. Act as if the questions of ultimate meaning and happiness are in fact given and not made, as if there is a hope for human fulfillment that lies outside our own striving and violent effort. Act as if we do not have to press so hard to make this life on earth a heaven for ourselves, as if there might just be a heaven awaiting us.

It seems like a very mild and simple prescription for what is truly a complex and very serious problem, but I believe he is pointing the way to a real remedy for our post-modern ills. If God does not exist, we are plunged into an abyss of meaninglessness which forces us into a terrible strife and clash with one another and with a cold and lifeless cosmos. 

If we but grant the existence of God, leaving aside for the moment the specific questions of His nature and revelation to us, we find ourselves on solid ground, able to simply work with a measure of peace to make this world a more kindly and lovely place, since at the bottom of the abyss lies not black nothingness but a Living Presence that sustains and supports us and gives us hope that all is not lost, that all, in fact, shall be well in the end, well not by our own efforts and virtues but by a mercy that comes to us from the One who made all that is. And that is what we have, if we decide to live ‘as if God exists’.

Even if metaphysical questions are not rejected in principle, there is a second objection to the God of revelation. This was already formulated in the philosophy of the ancients, but it has acquired far greater force in the modern scientific and technological world.

It can be put like this: a rationally constructed world is determined by rationally perceived causality. To such a scheme the notion of personal intervention is both mythical and repugnant. But if this approach is adopted, it must be followed consistently, for what applies to God also applies equally to man.

If there is only one kind of causality, man too as a person is excluded and reduced to an element in mechanical causality, in the realm of necessity; freedom too, in this case, is a mythical idea. In this sense it can be said that the personalities of God and of man cannot be separated.

If personality is not a possibility, i.e., not present, with the ‘ground’ of reality, it is not possible at all. Either freedom is a possibility inherent in the ground of reality, or it does not exist. Thus the issue of prayer is intimately linked with those of freedom and personality: the question of prayer decides whether the world is to be conceived as pure ‘chance and necessity’, or whether freedom and love are constitutive elements of it.

Joseph Ratzinger, Feast of Faith, p.20

Reflection – The attitude that the future pope Benedict describes here is not a relic of 19^th century positivist philosophy. It is alive and well in the new atheism of our day. It is, in fact, the essential premise on which the supposed opposition of religion and science, faith and reason rests. Scientists and those who use their reason (we are told) believe in an ordered universe of empirically observable and rationally provable causes and effects, predictable and unswerving sequences of events based on the interplay of natural forces.

Religious people (who don’t use their reason) believe that Jesus fed 5000 people with five loaves of bread, walked on water, and raised the dead. And so, in the rather crudely thought out dialectic between science and reason, religion and faith, it is the former that has all the credibility, the latter none.

Ratzinger identifies well what is wrong with this rather simplistic division. Leaving aside the obvious fact that many people of faith have been people of science and reason as well (a fact borne out by any study of European intellectual history), and so existentially there is clearly no real opposition between the two, there is also no rational opposition between them either.

God establishes a universe that runs, to a large degree, along basically mechanistic lines, that has an ordered course of operation that can be studied, learned, predicted, and then channelled to serve particular human ends—science and technology, in a nutshell.

But the God who ‘built’ the machine is also a Person not defined or limited by the machine, any more than a human being who makes a machine is not a slave to that machine. So this God can act, for reasons of His own, in the universe He made, to achieve this or that end.

Miracles, by the way, are not limited to biblical manuscripts or medieval legends. There is a chronicled, documented history of miracles that is fairly consistent from the time of Christ up to the present day. Atheists are sublimely uninterested in all that, by and large. Personally, I have seen physical healings following on prayer; people I know have experienced first-hand the miraculous multiplication of food, generally in places where the poor are served. Perhaps atheists are not aware of that because they don't tend to hang out in those places...

But all of that aside, Ratzinger makes here the very good point that to exclude this out of court as an absurdity really does not end with God and prayer and miracles. It extends, by strict logical necessity, to excluding real human freedom from the scene, and with the exclusion of freedom, love too is a casualty of atheistic materialism.

If there is nothing but matter and physical forces playing against each other, if all reality is to be interpreted only in this rubric of mechanism and strict necessity, then human beings too are machines, essentially, and consciousness and all that goes with it (the illusion of freedom, the illusion of love, the illusion of spirit) is merely a spandrel, a meaningless by-product, an emergent property that has no real significance or actual reality.

And if that is repulsive to us (and I think it is both that and utterly ridiculous to boot), then where on earth does freedom, love, and spiritual being come from in a materialistic universe? If we are not just machines following our programming, then how can the universe that produced us be only a machine, and how can there be nothing else besides us that transcends the machine?

If we lose God, we lose humanity. If we retain humanity, God sneaks in by the back door. And not one word of this, not one implication of this, in any way, shape, or form, weakens the commitment to scientific rigor, reason, or advance. It never has, never did, never will.

"Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day; he saw it and was glad" (Jn 8:56). According to these words of Jesus, Abraham’s faith pointed to him; in some sense it foresaw his mystery. So Saint Augustine understood it when he stated that the patriarchs were saved by faith, not faith in Christ who had come but in Christ who was yet to come, a faith pressing towards the future of Jesus.[13] Christian faith is centred on Christ; it is the confession that Jesus is Lord and that God has raised him from the dead (cf. Rom 10:9). All the threads of the Old Testament converge on Christ; he becomes the definitive "Yes" to all the promises, the ultimate basis of our "Amen" to God (cf. 2 Cor 1:20).

The history of Jesus is the complete manifestation of God’s reliability. If Israel continued to recall God’s great acts of love, which formed the core of its confession of faith and broadened its gaze in faith, the life of Jesus now appears as the locus of God’s definitive intervention, the supreme manifestation of his love for us. The word which God speaks to us in Jesus is not simply one word among many, but his eternal Word (cf. Heb 1:1-2). God can give no greater guarantee of his love, as Saint Paul reminds us (cf. Rom 8:31-39). Christian faith is thus faith in a perfect love, in its decisive power, in its ability to transform the world and to unfold its history. "We know and believe the love that God has for us" (1 Jn 4:16). In the love of God revealed in Jesus, faith perceives the foundation on which all reality and its final destiny rest.

Lumen Fidei 15

Reflection – Tuesdays with Francis time again, although this week we’ve been with him already for a couple of days. Actually this section of Lumen Fidei is directly relevant to the imbroglio over the recent statements by the Pope that have ruffled people’s feathers.

We’ve been marching, very beautifully, through the Old Testament journey of faith of Abraham and others, and now come to the great leap forward in faith from Abraham and Moses to Jesus Christ.

This is where the words of the Lord quoted here come in: “Abraham saw [my day] and was glad.” All the genuine faith of Israel, all the striving of the prophets to faithfully communicate God’s word, all the efforts of godly kings to order the nation to God’s law, all the sacrifices of the priests, all the sincere and heartfelt obediences of all the people of the covenant are now shown to have been, implicitly, faith in Christ. Christ is the Word of God, Christ is the Law of God, Christ is the acceptable sacrifice, Christ is the New Covenant. And so every choice for the word, the law, the sacrifice, the covenant is ultimately a choice for Christ, even though the full revelation was not yet given.

But the Church has understood, and extended this same gracious reality, to all people. Lumen Gentium 16, the Vatican II Constitution on the Church, makes it clear that the salvation won by Christ can be operative outside the visible boundaries of the Catholic Church. We simply do not teach, and in fact have formally condemned as heresy, the idea that one must be a member of the Roman Catholic Church to be saved.

We have to step carefully here, as there are great pitfalls on all sides. Everyone who is saved is saved by the blood of Jesus Christ; there is no path to heaven except through the Way, the Truth, and the Life. And everyone Jesus saves, He saves by making them a member of his body, the Church. There, we enter into great mystery, as the visible institution of the Catholic Church, which is truly the Church and from God, reaches out in the Spirit and in the invisible order of grace to embrace people who may know nothing of the matter, and even be indifferent or hostile to what they perceive the Church to be.

It is all about God’s mercy. He wants all men to be saved and come to the fullness of life and truth and beauty and goodness in Christ. So a person who through no fault of their own does not know Christ or the Church as that beauty, truth, and goodness of God, but who really is choosing the best truth, the deepest goodness, the most beautiful way of life that he or she knows to choose, is implicitly choosing Christ.

He is the Truth; someone striving to life in truth is striving to live in Christ. He is the Goodness of God; someone striving to live a morally good life is striving to live in Christ. He is the beauty of God; someone striving to live in beauty is striving to live in Christ.

Now of course we are supposed to evangelize and present the fullness of truth of the Gospel and the Catholic faith to all men and women. We are all sinners, and the world is a dangerous place full of the enemy’s snares. It is much easier to be saved within the visible Church and the sacramental graces it is a conduit of, and the clear teaching it provides. But the grace of salvation, which is the merciful love of God, is at work in every human life, to bring everyone to conversion and repentance and openness to the grace of Christ.