In the Beginning…'

A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall

Pope Benedict XVI

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 1995
• ISBN:
  9781467428064
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

In four superb homilies and a concluding essay, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, provides a clear and inspiring exploration of the Genesis creation narratives.While the stories of the world's creation and the fall of humankind have often been subjected to reductionism of one sort or another — literalists treat the Bible as a science textbook whereas rationalists divorce God from creation — Ratzinger presents a rich, balanced Catholic understanding of these early biblical writings and attests to their enduring vitality.Beginning each homily with a text selected from the first three chapters of Genesis, Ratzinger discusses, in turn, God the creator, the meaning of the biblical creation accounts, the creation of human beings, and sin and salvation; in the appendix he unpacks the beneficial consequences of faith in creation.Expertly translated from German, these reflections set out a reasonable and biblical approach to creation. 'In the Beginning...' also serves as an excellent homiletic resource for priests and pastors.

APPENDIX

The Consequences of Faith in Creation

G. K. Chesterton was often blessed with the gift of a striking turn of phrase. He certainly hit upon a decisive aspect of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas when he observed that, if the great doctor were to be given a name in the style of the Carmelite Order (“… of the Child Jesus,” “of the Mother of God,” etc.), he would have to be called Thomas a Creatore, “Thomas of the Creator.”¹ Creator and creation are the core of his theological thought. It says something for the thesis that it was only with the full intellectual penetration of faith in creation that the Christian penetration of the inheritance of antiquity reached its goal. That is why the theme of creation suggests itself for a celebration of St. Thomas. However, just as St. Thomas and his theology have become distant from us, so, until recently, the theme of creation has been far from central to contemporary theological thinking. In fact, the theme of creation has played only a small role in the theological discussion of recent years, indeed decades.² It has seemed a question devoid of concrete anthropological importance. At best it has been discussed as a detail of a current issue: the compatibility of creation and evolution, a question which of its very nature is centered on humankind. Is there something proper to human beings that ultimately can be explained only in theological terms? Or, in the cold light of day, must humankind be relegated to the domain of the natural sciences? But even this question remained on the fringe because it did not seem sufficiently “practical.” Theology has been seeking its truth more and more “in praxis”; not in the apparently unanswerable problem, “What are we?” but in the more pressing, “What can we do?”

Only in recent years has the doctrine of creation begun to have an unprecedented topicality. Human beings’ concentration on “doing,” on fashioning a new and eventually better world for themselves, has made the resistance to creation stand out with increasing clarity: God’s creation and “nature” are having to defend themselves against the limitless pretensions of human beings as creators. Human beings want to understand the discovered world only as material for their own creativity. Suddenly humans’ own creations no longer appear simply as a hope, possibly humankind’s only one, but rather as a threat: humans are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The real creation seems like a refuge, to which they look back and which they seek anew.

In a radical about-turn, the Christian doctrine of creation is now regarded as the cause of the pillage of the world. Hitherto creation has been a theme for theoretical reasoning, a, so to speak, purely “objective theme”; now it is becoming practical and can no longer be ignored.³ Redemption cannot happen without or against creation. Indeed, the question arises as to whether perhaps creation is the only redemption. It is becoming clearer that we cannot give the right answer to the question about where we should be. “What can we do?” will be false and pernicious while we refrain from asking, “Who are we?” The question of being and the question of our hopes are inseparable.

Thus the awakening and rediscovery of the doctrine of creation opens up a wide field of questions and tasks that can only be touched upon here. I can only try to set before you a few fragments and merely suggest in a sketchy way how they fit together. This Appendix will be concerned more with pointing out a task to be accomplished than with offering solutions or developing a complete synthesis. If we want to reappropriate faith in creation with its basic content and direction, then we must first bring it out of the obscurity that has just been described in the diagnosis of our current theological situation.

The Suppression of Faith in Creation in Modern Thought

The obscuring of faith in creation, which eventually led to its almost complete disappearance, is closely connected with the “spirit of modernity.” It is a fundamental part of what constitutes modernity. To go straight to the point: the foundations of modernity are the reason for the disappearance of “creation” from the horizons of historically influential thought. Thus our subject leads us to the very center of the drama of modernity and to the core of the present crisis—the crisis of the modern consciousness.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a drastic transition took place from the medieval to a new state of mind. This shows itself in three different ways, each of which is a deviation from faith in creation. First, we must mention the new philosophy of Giordano Bruno. At first sight, it may seem strange to accuse him of suppressing faith in creation, since he was responsible for an emphatic rediscovery of the cosmos in its divinity. But it is precisely this reversion to a divine cosmos that brings about the recession of faith in creation. Here “re-naissance” means relinquishing the Christian so that the Greek can be restored in all its pagan purity. Thus the world appears as a divine fullness at peace within itself. Bruno sees that creation, by contrast, signifies the world’s dependence on something other than itself. The Christian idea of the world’s dependence on this something else seems to deprive the world of its power. The world has to be protected against this threat: it is self-grounding; it is itself the divine. The contingency of individual things is indisputable, but the contingency of the world as a whole is not accepted.⁴ In the final analysis, this is just the aesthetic prelude to an increasingly prominent idea in the modern mind: the dependence implied by faith in creation is unacceptable. It is seen as the real barrier to human freedom, the basis of all other restrictions, the first thing needing to be eliminated if humankind is to be effectively liberated.

In Galileo we see the return to Greece, not in its aesthetic and emancipatory form, but in a reversion to the mathematical side of platonic thought. “God does geometry” is the way he expresses his concepts of God and nature as well as his scientific ideal. God wrote the book of nature with mathematic letters. Studying geometry enables us to touch the traces of God. But this means that the knowledge of God is turned into the knowledge of the mathematical structures of nature; the concept of nature, in the sense of the object of science, takes the place of the concept of creation.⁵ The whole of knowledge is fitted into the schema of subject and object. What is not objective is subjective. But only the object as defined by natural science is really objective, in other words, only the things that can be concretely exhibited and examined. The subjective is everything arbitrary and private, everything outside of science; as arbitrary, it is unworthy of knowledge. “God does geometry.” Determined by this axiom, God has to become platonic. He dwindles away to be little more than the formal mathematical structures perceived by science in nature. Of course, for a time, while the method had still not reached its complete form and the extent of knowledge was limited, the idea of creation continued to exist in the form of a postulated first cause. One may be tempted to say that it was the very idea of creation that had the most stable position in the faith in the sense that the postulate of the first cause showed that a concept of God, an idea of God “made rational,” was still valid. However, at this point the fundamental interconnectedness of the elements of the Christian faith makes its appearance. A mere “first cause,” which is effective only in nature and never reveals itself to humans, which abandons humans—has to abandon them—to a realm completely beyond its own sphere of influence, such a first cause is no longer God but a scientific hypothesis. On the other hand, a God who has nothing to do with the rationality of creation, but is effective only in the inner world of piety, is also no longer God; he becomes devoid of reality and ultimately meaningless. Only when creation and covenant come together can either creation or covenant be realistically discussed—the one presupposes the other. A mere first cause does not express the idea of creation because it thinks of causa in terms of the scientific idea of causality. Such a cause is not God, but just a cause—a hypothetically postulated active member of a series of things that can be postulated in science. The idea of creation is on a different level altogether. Reality as a whole is a question pointing beyond itself. If we are to grasp the concept of creation, we must expose the limitations of the subject/object schema, the limitations of “exact” thought, and we must show that only when the humanum has been freed of these limitations will the truth about humankind and the real world come into view. And yet we must not try to overstep the limitations by denying God, because that would also be the denial of humankind—with all its grave consequences. In fact, the question at stake here is: “Do human beings really exist?” The fact of human beings is an obstacle and irritation for “science,” because they are not something science can exactly “objectify.” Ultimately, science does center on humankind—but in order to do so, it has to go further and focus on God.⁶

We encounter a third and entirely different form of deviation from the idea of creation in Martin Luther. Bruno and Galileo represent the passionate return to a pre-Christian, Greek and pagan world. They want to get back, beyond the synthesis of Christianity and ancient Greece, to something purely Greek; in so doing, they lay the foundation of the post-Christian world of reason. For Luther the Greek element symbolizes the alienation of Christianity. He wants to get rid of it; he wants to establish a pure Christianity free from Greek influence.⁷ The Greek element that he tries to eliminate from Christianity he finds above all in the concept of the cosmos, in the question of being, and therefore in the area of the doctrine of creation. For Luther, the cosmos, or, more correctly, being as such, is an expression of everything that is proper to human beings, the burden of their past, their shackles and chains, their damnation: Law. Redemption can take place only when humankind is liberated from the chains of the past, from the shackles of being. Redemption sets humans free from the curse of the existing creation, which Luther feels is the characteristic burden of humankind. I should like to support this idea with just one, albeit very typical, text: “Man is man, until he becomes God, who alone is true. By participation in Him he himself also becomes true. This participation occurs when man clings to God in real faith and hope. By coming out of himself in this way, he returns, as man, to nothingness. For where will he arrive, he who hopes in God, if not to his own nothingness? And whither will he depart, he who departs into nothingness, if not to Him whence he comes? Man comes from God and from his own nothingness, which is why he who returns to his own nothingness returns to God.”⁸ Grace is seen here in radical opposition to creation, which is marked through and through by sin; it implies an attempt to get behind creation.

In the background to all this, we can detect a particular experience of creation—the kind of experience expressed in the Lutheran-influenced prayer book of the Duchess Dorothea of Prussia. It changes the meaning of Psalm 6 in the cry: “I should almost prefer you not to exist than be troubled by you any longer.”⁹ In the first place, this is completely contrary to the Renaissance experience of the cosmos. But, for the modern age, the dualism becomes typically one between “divine” geometry, on the one hand, and a world of intrinsic corruption, on the other. Without the mystery of redemptive love, which is also creative love, the world inevitably becomes dualistic: by nature, it is geometry; as history, it is the drama of evil.¹⁰

It was Hegel who made the systematic attempt to resolve this antinomy and thereby to achieve the supreme philosophy. Hegel’s system is ultimately “a gigantic theodicy.”¹¹ God must not be seen as the eternal self-existent Almighty, who stands facing the evil world for which he is responsible. Instead, God exists in the process of reasoning, which can come into being only in the other and in exchange with it. Thus, and only thus, does God come completely to himself. The whole universe, the whole of history, is, then, this process of reason. The individual moments in the process, in themselves meaningless or evil, find their meaning as parts of the whole. The historical Good Friday becomes the expression of the speculative Good Friday, of the necessity of rising up to oneself after the experience of defeat. The problem of theodicy is thus resolved. “Insight” takes the place of the concept of “sin.” Evil is necessarily bound up with finitude, and so, from the standpoint of the Infinite, is unreal. Suffering is the pain of limitation, and when it is taken up into the whole, it is abolished.¹²

For Hegel himself, this position remains largely theoretical and therefore “idealistic” (though his philosophy is by no means devoid of political motivation). Only with Marx does it become a call to action. Redemption is now construed strictly as the “praxis” of man, as the denial of creation, indeed as the total antithesis to faith in creation. It is impossible to describe this in detail here. I should like briefly to mention just two of its features.

1. The individual is taken up and abolished in the whole; the individual is robbed of reality, and sin is replaced by “providence.” In other words, only the species counts, not the individual. The instrument by which history operates is the party, which is the organized form of class. The following statement of Ernst Bloch’s is a typical expression of the idea: the materialist dies, he says, “as if all eternity were his.” “This means he had already ceased to regard his ‘I’ as being of any importance; he had class consciousness.”¹³ Individual consciousness is taken up into a class consciousness, where individual suffering no longer counts. All that matters is the logic of the system and the future, a future in which humans are redeemed by their own creation work.¹⁴

2. Creation is defined as dependence, origin ab alio. Its place is taken by the category of self-creation, which is accomplished through work.¹⁵ Since creation equals dependence, and dependence is the antithesis of freedom, the doctrine of creation is opposed to t...