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“The Truth of the Resurrection” by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

“The Resurrection narratives are something other and more than disguised liturgical scenes: they make visible the founding event on which all Christian liturgy rests.”

An 11th-century icon of the Harrowing of Hell, in the Greek monastery of Hosios Loukas. (Wikipedia)

Editor’s note: The following excerpt is from Introduction to Christianity (2nd edition) by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Ignatius Press, 1990, 2004; pp. 301-10).
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To the Christian, faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is an expression of certainty that the saying that seems to be only a beautiful dream is in fact true: “Love is strong as death” (Song 8:6). In the Old Testament this sentence comes in the middle of praises of the power of eros. But this by no means signifies that we can simply push it aside as a lyrical exaggeration. The boundless demands of eros“, its apparent exaggerations and extravagance, do in reality give expression to a basic problem, indeed the” basic problem of human existence, insofar as they reflect the nature and intrinsic paradox of love: love demands infinity, indestructibility; indeed, it is, so to speak, a call for infinity. But it is also a fact that this cry of love’s cannot be satisfied, that it demands infinity but cannot grant it; that it claims eternity but in fact is included in the world of death, in its loneliness and its power of destruction. Only from this angle can one understand what “resurrection” means. It is” the greater strength of love in face of death.

At the same time it is proof of what only immortality can create: being in the other who still stands when I have fallen apart. Man is a being who himself does not live forever but is necessarily delivered up to death. For him, since he has no continuance in himself, survival, from a purely human point of view, can only become possible through his continuing to exist in another. The statements of Scripture about the connection between sin and death are to he understood from this angle. For it now becomes clear that man’s attempt “to be like God”, his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on his own. If man–and this is the real nature of sin–nevertheless refuses to recognize his own limits and tries to be completely self-sufficient, then precisely by adopting this attitude he delivers himself up to death.

Of course man does understand that his life alone does not endure and that he must therefore strive to exist in others, so as to remain through them and in them in the land of the living. Two ways in particular have been tried. First, living on in one’s own children: that is why in primitive peoples failure to marry and childlessness are regarded as the most terrible curse; they mean hopeless destruction, final death. Conversely, the largest possible number of children offers at the same time the greatest possible chance of survival, hope of immortality, and thus the most genuine blessing that man can expect. Another way discloses itself when man discovers that in his children he only continues to exist in a very unreal way; he wants more of himself to remain. So he takes refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if be lives on through all ages in the memory of others. But this second attempt of man’s to obtain immortality for himself by existing in others fails just as badly as the first: what remains is not the self but only its echo, a mere shadow. So self-made immortality is really only a Hades, a sheol“: more nonbeing than being. The inadequacy of both ways lies partly in the fact that the other person who holds my being after my death cannot carry this being itself but only its echo; and even more in the fact that even time other person to whom I have, so to speak, entrusted my continuance will not last–he, too, will perish.

This leads us to the next step. We have seen so far that man has no permanence in himself. And consequently can only continue to exist in another but that his existence in another is only shadowy and once again not final, because this other must perish, too. If this is so, then only one could truly give lasting stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but abides in the midst of transience: the God of the living, who does not hold just the shadow and echo of my being, whose ideas are not just copies of reality. I myself am his thought, which establishes me more securely, so to speak, than I am in myself; his thought is not the posthumous shadow but the original source and strength of my being. In him I can stand as more than a shadow; in him I am truly closer to myself than I should be if I just tried to stay by myself.

Before we return from here to the Resurrection, let us try to see the same thing once again from a somewhat different side. We can start again from the dictum about love and death and say: Only where someone values love more highly than life, that is, only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. If it is to be more than death, it must first be more than mere life. But if it could be this, not just in intention but in reality, then that would mean at the same time that the power of love had risen superior to the power of the merely biological and taken it into its service. To use Teilhard de Chardin’s terminology; where that took place, the decisive complexity or “complexification” would have occurred; bios, too, would be encompassed by and incorporated in the power of love. It would cross the boundary–death–and create unity where death divides. If the power of love for another were so strong somewhere that it could keep alive not just his memory, the shadow of his “I”, but that person himself, then a new stage in life would have been reached. This would mean that the realm of biological evolutions and mutations had been left behind and the leap made to a quite different plane, on which love was no longer subject to bios but made use of it. Such a final stage of “mutation” and “evolution” would itself no longer be a biological stage; it would signify the end of the sovereignty of bios, which is at the same time the sovereignty of death; it would open up the realm that the Greek Bible calls zoe, that is, definitive life, which has left behind the rule of death. The last stage of evolution needed by the world to reach its goal would then no longer be achieved within the realm of biology but by the spirit, by freedom, by love. It would no longer be evolution but decision and gift in one.

But what has all this to do, it may be asked, with faith in the Resurrection of Jesus? Well, we previously considered the question of the possible immortality of man from two sides, which now turn out to be aspects of one and. the same state of affairs. We said that, as man has no permanence in himself, his survival could. only be brought about by his living on in another. And we said, from the point of view of this “other”, that only the love that takes up the beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in the other. These two complementary aspects are mirrored again, so it seems to me, in the two New Testament ways of describing the Resurrection of the Lord: “Jesus has risen” and “God (the Father) has awakened Jesus.” The two formulas meet in the fact that Jesus’ total love for men, which leads him to the Cross, is perfected in totally passing beyond to the Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the same time total “being held” by him.

From this a further step results. We can now say that love always establishes some kind of immortality; even in its prehuman stage, it points, in the form of preservation of the species, in this direction. Indeed, this founding of immortality is not something incidental to love, not one thing that it does among others, but what really gives it its specific character. This principle can be reversed; it then signifies that immortality always” proceeds from love, never out of the autarchy of that which is sufficient to itself. We may even be bold enough to assert that this principle, properly understood, also applies even to God as he is seen by the Christian faith. God, too, is absolute permanence, as opposed to everything transitory, for the reason that he is the relation of three Persons to one another, their incorporation in the “for one another” of love, act-substance of the love that is absolute and therefore completely “relative”, living only “in relation to”. As we said earlier, it is not autarchy, which knows no one but itself, that is divine; what is revolutionary about the Christian view of the world and of God, we found, as opposed to those of antiquity, is that it learns to understand the “absolute” as absolute “relatedness”, as relatio subsistens.

To return to our argument, love is the foundation of immortality, and immortality proceeds from love alone. This statement to which we have now worked our way also means that he who has love for all has established immortality for all. That is precisely the meaning of the biblical statement that his Resurrection is our life. The–to us–curious reasoning of St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians now becomes comprehensible: if he has risen, then we have, too, for then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either, for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else (cf. I Cor 15:16f.). Since this is a statement of central importance, let us spell it out once again in a different way: Either love is stronger than death, or it is not. If it has become so in him, then it became so precisely as love for others. This also means, it is true, that our own love, left to itself, is not sufficient to overcome death; taken in itself it would have to remain an unanswered cry. It means that only his love, coinciding with God’s own power of life and love, can be the foundation of our immortality. Nevertheless, it still remains true that the mode of our immortality will depend on our mode of loving. We shall have to return to this in the section on the Last Judgment.

A further point emerges from this discussion. Given the foregoing considerations, it goes without saying that the life of him who has risen from the dead is not once again bios, the biological form of our mortal life within history; it is zoe, new, different, definitive life; life that has stepped beyond the mortal realm of bios and history, a realm that has here been surpassed by a greater power. And in fact the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament allow us to see clearly that the life of the Risen One lies, not within the historical bios, but beyond and above it. It is also true, of course, that this new life begot itself in history and had to do so, because after all it is there for history, and the Christian message is basically nothing else than the transmission of the testimony that love has managed to break through death here and thus has transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us. Once we have realized this, it is no longer difficult to find the right kind of hermeneutics for the difficult business of expounding the biblical Resurrection narratives, that is, to acquire a clear understanding of the sense in which they must properly be understood. Obviously we cannot attempt here a detailed discussion of the questions involved, which today present themselves in a more difficult form than ever before; especially as historical and–for the most part inadequately pondered–philosophical statements are becoming more and more inextricably intertwined, and exegesis itself quite often produces its own philosophy, which is intended to appear to the layman as a supremely refined distillation of the biblical evidence. Many points of detail will here always remain open to discussion, but it is possible to recognize a fundamental dividing line between explanation that remains explanation and arbitrary adaptations [to contemporary ways of thinking].

First of all, it is quite clear that after his Resurrection Christ did not go back to his previous earthly life, as we are told the young man of Nain and Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of death, in the eternity conferred by love. That is why the encounters with him are “appearances”; that is why he with whom people had sat at table two days earlier is not recognized by his best friends and, even when recognized, remains foreign: only where he grants vision ishe seen; only when he opens men’s eyes and makes their hearts open up can the countenance of the eternal love that conquers death become recognizable in our mortal world, and, in that love, the new, different world, the world of him who is to come. That is also why it is so difficult, indeed absolutely impossible, for the Gospels to describe the encounter with the risen Christ; that is why they can only stammer when they speak of these meetings and seem to provide contradictory descriptions of them. In reality they are surprisingly unanimous in the dialectic of their statements, in the simultaneity of touching and not touching, or recognizing and not recognizing, of complete identity between the crucified and the risen Christ and complete transformation. People recognize the Lord and yet do not recognize him again; people touch him, and yet he is untouchable; he is the same and yet quite different. As we have said, the dialectic is always the same; it is only the stylistic means by which it is expressed that changes.

For example, let us examine a little more closely from this point of view the Emmaus story, which we have already touched upon briefly. At first sight it looks as if we are confronted here with a completely earthly and material notion of resurrection; as if nothing remains of the mysterious and indescribable elements to be found in the Pauline accounts. It looks as if the tendency to detailed depiction, to the concreteness of legend, supported by the apologist’s desire for something tangible, had completely won the upper hand and fetched the risen Lord right back into earthly history. But this impression is soon contradicted by his mysterious appearance and his no less mysterious disappearance. The notion is contradicted even more by the fact that here, too, he remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye. He cannot be firmly grasped as he could be in the time of his earthly life; he is discovered only in the realm of faith; he sets the hearts of the two travelers aflame by his interpretation of the Scriptures and by breaking bread he opens their eyes. This is a reference to the two basic elements in early Christian worship, which consisted of the liturgy of the word (the reading and expounding of Scripture) and the eucharistic breaking of bread. In this way the evangelist makes it clear that the encounter with the risen Christ lies on a quite new plane; he tries to describe the indescribable in terms of the liturgical facts. He thereby provides both a theology of the Resurrection and a theology of the liturgy: one encounters the risen Christ in the word and in the sacrament; worship is the way in which he becomes touchable to us and, recognizable as the living Christ. And conversely, the liturgy is based on the mystery of Easter; it is to he understood as the Lords approach to us. In it he becomes our traveling companion, sets our dull hearts aflame, and opens our sealed eyes. He still walks with us, still finds us worried and downhearted, and still has the power to make us see.

Of course, all this is only half the story; to stop at this alone would mean falsifying the evidence of the New Testament. Experience of the risen Christ is something other than a meeting with a man from within our history, and it must certainly not be traced back to conversations at table and recollections that would have finally crystallized in the idea that he still lived and went about his business. Such an interpretation reduces what happened to the purely human level and robs it of its specific quality. The Resurrection narratives are something other and more than disguised liturgical scenes: they make visible the founding event on which all Christian liturgy rests. They testify to an approach that did not rise from the hearts of the disciples but came to them from outside, convinced them despite their doubts and made them certain that the Lord had truly risen. He who lay in the grave is no longer there; he–really he himself–lives. He who had been transposed into the other world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he himself stood in their presence again, that in him the power of love had really proved itself stronger than the power of death.

Only by taking this just as seriously as what we said first does one remain faithful to the witness borne by the New Testament; only thus, too, is its seriousness in world history preserved. The comfortable attempt to spare oneself the belief in the mystery of God’s mighty actions in this world and yet at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason nor to the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and “religion within the bounds of pure reason”; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death.

(Editor’s note: This excerpt was first posted at CWR on April 21, 2019.)


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14 Comments

  1. Ratzinger writes in 1990:
    “We said that, as man has no permanence in himself, his survival could only be brought about by his living on in another. And we said, from the point of view of this ‘OTHER’ [caps added], that only the love that takes up the beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in the other.”

    How different this—attentiveness to the really “OTHER”—from the (early only?) theology of the still-influential Karl Rahner. Rahner [“Horer des Wortes,” “Hearers of the Word,” 1941], is interpreted as a slippery slope into later Marxist theologies—-and, might we now wonder, toward any imagined convergence of a “diversity” of religions(?). Conversion versus Convergence?

    Sampling Ratzinger’s careful critique of Rahner’s early work (Ratzinger, “Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology” Ignatius, 1987, German original 1982, 161-171):

    “For Rahner man is, in fact, self-transcendent [!] being; hence the God-man can be deduced as the true Savior of mankind in terms of man’s own being: the Incarnation of God is the highest instance of the ontological fulfillment of human reality, the successful, perfect transcendence [….]

    “This broadly outlined thesis of Rahner’s has something dazzling, something stupendous, about it. The uniqueness of Christianity and the universality of man’s being coincide [….] But is that really the answer? Is it true that Christianity adds nothing to the universal but merely makes it known? [….]

    “Is it not the main point of the faith of both Testaments that man is what he ought to be only by conversion, that is, when he ceases to be what he is? Does not Christianity become meaningless when it is reinstated in the universal, whereas what we really want is the new, the OTHER [caps added], the saving transformation? Does not such a concept [Rahner’s], which turns being into history but also history into being, result in a vast stagnation despite the talk of self-transcendence as the content of man’s being? A Christianity that is no more than a reflected universality may be innocuous, but is it not also superfluous? [….]

    “The inadequacy of the spiritual formulation in which Rahner’s theology of history finds its concrete expression clarifies for me the at first unexpected conversion of this transcendental deduction into Marx-inspired theologies in the generation after Rahner. [….]

    “This means, in turn, that man does not find salvation in a reflective finding of himself but in the being-taken-out-of-himself that goes beyond reflection—not in continuing to be himself, but in going out from himself.”

  2. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger has rendered immense service to the Church. May the Pope Emeritus be blessed with good health and happy times.

  3. Benedict XVI then Cardinal Ratzinger delves the depths of the great mystery of our salvation. Man’s immortality drawn by the divinity thru Love effected in the Person of Christ. “One cannot have both the Christian faith and ‘religion within the bounds of pure reason’; a choice is unavoidable. He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is to have faith in the love that has conquered death”. Faith absent of Love is sterile pure reason. Love, a sentiment is a willful choice that transcends pure reason. The Church teaches we believe [in Christ] because God has spoken. Not because of reasoned argument. Belief here is faith motivated by sentiment. Reason follows. We can attain to a reasoned belief in a supreme being thru pure reason. Not so with belief in the Son of God who suffers dies and rises from the dead. Love fires that faith transcending human reason to believe that the divinity would so subject himself for us.

  4. The Truth of the Resurrection addressed by Ratzinger as its salutary effect on Man was diminished by Rahner from its preeminence as Revelation demanding belief. “Rahner was inspired by Heidegger’s idea of Being-in-the world; a category that describes the way in which we relate to ourselves and, therefore, Being, through our experience of the world. However, Rahner takes this concept further by identifying this every-day Being-in-the-world as the very mediation of God to us. Rahner rightly asks:what place does Christian revelation have in his system? His problematic response is that history is ‘taking place in an irreversible direction towards the highest and comprehensive self-interpretation of man’ which will become ‘ever more intensely an explicitly religious self-interpretation of this supernatural, transcendental and revelatory experience of God’. It does not justify his ideas of particular revelation and an official ecclesial witness”(Johnston, Lee 2017 A divided theologian: Karl Rahner’s existential ontology and the problem of ecclesiology. MTh(R) thesis U of Glasgow). Phenomenology distancing knower from known is as infectious within Catholic theology as coronavirus is to physical health. Distancing from sense perception as First Principle of all knowledge has never been fully settled although that first premise is irrefutable and absolute (Assent to Truth Fr Peter Morello PhD 2015). Thus the trend to reduce what is revealed in nature and by God to one’s assimilation and self realization rather than simple consent. We believe because God has spoken not because of our rational argument. Karl Rahner SJ devolved to the stage of religion as self discovery. That Rahnerian Jesuit trend infects ecclesiology from layman to today’s pinnacle of authority. Added to Josef Ratzinger’s correction of that trend we might add the significance of the Truth of the Resurrection as Knowledge. Revealed knowledge of an act of divine humility and mercy that transcends human rationale. That the infinitely good God endured the heinous insult of Crucifixion by Man, by the personal insults and sins by which we crucified him. And that rather than condemn us rose from the dead to save us.

      • True Peter, at least as regards Karl Rahner’s immanentism, which follows in modern phi Heidegger’s phenomenological perception of Being realized eminently in Man’s relation to the world, that his acts, specifically concern, realize Being. Rahner understood Man as possessing within himself the inherent structure for self realization and religious expression. Transcendence is realized interiorly. Insofar as such, that all is self referenced ethics is determined within Man’s contextual circumstances, example in Rahner’s Das Dynamische, that we should consider that circumstances can alter an otherwise evil act, in which the circumstances surrounding this type of case are something absolutely individual and make it an absolutely unique case. Similarity to another Jesuit Pope Francis in Amoris Laetitia is striking. We find in this the shift from salvation in self realization in the world rather than Man’s salvation realized in what is depicted as impersonal external rules. It is a form of apotheosis.

        • The new twist–unless I misread him–comes from Cardinal Grech…that the Church itself must transcend/descend (?) itself in relation to a catch-all “diversity of situations,” such that a “uniformity of differences” replaces “uniformity of thought.” Rahner’s “contextual circumstances” and now Grech’s (“rainbow”) “diversity of situations” and “[dis]uniformity of thought”?

          Meaning what, exactly, for the all-embracing and perennial universality of the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic” Church? Writing of Scriptural interpretation, but more broadly applicable, Benedict offered this thought about thought, itself:

          “It involves the ability to unify, to achieve synthesis, which is the reverse of superficial harmonization” (Ratzinger, “Behold the Pierced One,” 1986, p. 45).

          • Yes Peter Beaulieu, the conceptualization of unity of diversity is oxymoronic. Words are emptied of their meaning to satisfy an ideal. As with a universal natural law rights of man, while possessing solvency fails due to Man’s inconsistency of observance, whereas rights are determined for those who are more equal than others [Robespierre’s equality of the citoyen, justice as practiced by the current administration].
            Law fails our fallen nature unless there’s a first principle that ensures a just unity, that principle the unifying dynamic of grace purchased for Man by the pouring out of Christ’s precious blood at the crucifixion, confirmed by his resurrection.

          • A revelatory example of an oxymoronic unity in diversity concept is the liturgy, which previous to this pontificate there was wide diversity and unity. Whereas that unity was realized by a general, sacramental lived uniformity in practice of the faith.
            Our dilemma today is that we no longer have that liturgical unity with the increasing abolition of the TLM, another example the Syro Malabar rite in India. Furthermore the unifying principle of one faith one baptism is disintegrating with a pontificate that accommodates and supports conflicting interpretations of doctrine and moral behavior, adherence to the sacraments. Unity of diversity as such is a falsehood.

  5. I still remember Pope Benedict’s Message for Lent 2007. It made a huge impression on me.

    “Him whom they have pierced”

    Dear brothers and sisters, let us look at Christ pierced on the Cross! He is the unsurpassing revelation of God’s love, a love in which eros and agape, far from being opposed, enlighten each other. On the Cross, it is God himself who begs the love of his creature: He is thirsty for the love of every one of us. The Apostle Thomas recognized Jesus as “Lord and God” when he put his hand into the wound of his side. Not surprisingly, many of the saints found in the Heart of Jesus the deepest expression of this mystery of love. One could rightly say that the revelation of God’s eros toward man is, in reality, the supreme expression of his agape. In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a joy which eases the heaviest of burdens. Jesus said: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men to myself” (Jn 12: 32). The response the Lord ardently desires of us is above all that we welcome his love and allow ourselves to be drawn to him. Accepting his love, however, is not enough. We need to respond to such love and devote ourselves to communicating it to others. Christ “draws me to himself” in order to unite himself to me, so that I learn to love the brothers with his own love.

    https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/messages/lent/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20061121_lent-2007.html

    “In all truth, only the love that unites the free gift of oneself with the impassioned desire for reciprocity instils a joy which eases the heaviest of burdens.”

    This is exactly it!

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