Friends, in my Catholic Sacraments class, we recently read Ratzinger’s “Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence” and Louis Bouyer’s Cosmos. I love Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). His writing always hits that perfect balance of pastoral and theological. I cried when he died. It’s taken me a while to warm up to Bouyer, because he’s not an easy read. His writing style is often circuitous, but when he gets spirited about something, he’s very pithy. My blog assignment is:
Write 1000 words making some connection (could be thematic themes shared in common, could be a difference of distinction, could be something your professor hasn’t noticed) between Ratzinger’s article on the sacraments and Bouyer’s Cosmos.
Bouyer begins Cosmos by considering the world and its relationship to God. Drawing on Johannine texts, he notes a scriptural tension about human existence in the world. Bouyer calls readers to First John’s cautionary words: “Do not love the world or the things in this world (1 Jn 2:15). Yet the Gospel of John also pronounces, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).
Bouyer understands the verse from Frist John as a caution not to love the world at the exclusion of God. This is a caution not to “desacralize” the world, or fail to recall and perceive that it is, in fact, permeated with God’s activity. Bouyer presents a way to understand the world as loved by God because it is created by a God who is goodness. Bouyer traces this belief across several philosophies, including Christianity. He points to Plato’s conclusions that the Creator is all Good, the source of everything that exists, and that the nature of this Good is to diffuse itself (Bouyer, p. 78). Bouyer also points out Aristotle’s belief that God is a “thinking thought” or the “prime mover,” which was adopted by Thomas Aquinas in De veritate, where he described that God, as the “prime mover” who created the human soul in the imago dei. (p. 112).
With a profession that human sin has distorted humanity’s reflection of the image of God, Bouyer asserts that we see God’s enduring and profound love for His created world in the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, the “body of the Word and Son . . . bring together those shattered fragments of mankind.” (p. 230). Through the Son in the Spirit, Bouyer writes, “We thereby receive the gift of being not only known and loved by the Father in the Son . . . but also of knowing the Father and loving him in return.” Christ, operating historically and eternally, draws all people toward himself and toward the Father. (p. 192).
St. Maximus the Confessor explained, “no creature can be associated with divine life and uplifted in the Father’s agape to a new level of being without going through a metamorphosis.” (p. 104). St. Paul described this as a being “crucified with Christ, so that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Yet even with God’s personal interaction with the world through Christ, Bouyer and Ratzinger both observe that the culture forgets or resists this reality.
Bouyer attributed this resistance to several developments. First, he cites, a misappropriation of science and technology. Bouyer writes that the person who is interested in science merely for the advantages to be drawn from it, “attempts without scruples or compunction to take the place of the creator as master of the universe.” (p.153). Rather than participating in God’s creation, or even better, offering their lives to God as a gift of love, these people approach science as magic, “an effort to subordinate all things, even realities in which the hand of God may be recognized, to the self-centeredness of an arrogant and sensual man.” (p. 152).
Second, Bouyer attributes this resistance to what he calls the “Christian bourgeois,” or middle class The middle class’ financial security has caused a progressively stronger craving for wealth rendering faith in God superfluous to self-sufficiency. (see p.122). Finally, in more modern decades, Bouyer noted that Marxism has exacerbated this sad state because all value is placed on materialism with “matter devitalized as a soulless mechanism.” (154). Bouyer concludes that man has lost the “ability to see the world as a meaningful cosmos oriented toward transcendence.” (122).
Writing decades later, Ratzinger reached a similar conclusion about modern culture. Rather than tracing Christian development and sacramentality through philosophy, Ratzinger asserts that sacramentality always existed. Ratzinger paints an image of the world’s “primeval” sacraments, which he defines as “fissures through which the eternal looks into the uniformity of the human routine” (Ratzinger, p. 156). These primeval sacraments, which include birth, death, sex, and even a meal, are instances where a person is “overwhelmed by a power that he can neither summon nor control, that already embraces and carries him along” (Ratzinger, p. 156).
Particularly with a meal, a person perceives the juncture of his biological life with an existence beyond himself in the unity of relationships around the table and the discovery that he lives in receptivity of the gift of nourishment; he is not the founder of his own being. (p. 166). In these “primordial sacraments,” which are emphatically historical and biological, man experiences transparency of the biological and can glimpse the spiritual and eternal. (see p. 158).
Ratzinger concretely ties the Christian sacraments to the work of Christ. Through the Incarnation God not only inserted himself into the cosmos, but also into history that originates in Christ. The Christian sacraments, express what Ratzinger describes as a vertical dimension, namely, God’s call to humanity, and a horizontal dimension through Christ, which is union with God’s eternal love. (p. 164). Through Christ, the sacraments become not just transparencies through which humanity glimpses the eternal, but “in Christ the guide rope of salvation that pulls us to the shore of eternity.” (p. 164).
Like Bouyer, Ratzinger believes that modern culture has a desacralized understanding of the world. However, Ratzinger does not specifically blame ruthless scientific pursuit or a Christian bourgeois, but he, like Bouyer attributes descralization in the modern world to Marxism. He writes, “we have grown accustomed to seeing in the substance of things nothing but the material for human labor.” (p. 153, see also p. 166). Bouyer began Cosmos by drawing on First John’s caution not to love the world, and Ratzinger’s belief that descralization stems from Marxism explains why: when the world is viewed as only matter, and matter simply material for utility or functionality, “there is no room left to see transparency of reality toward eternity.” (p. 153).
Ratzinger, like Bouyer, observes that understanding God’s action in history through the Incarnation is a stumbling block for many people today. Ratzinger, also notes a point of hope for the Church in her effort to evangelize, one which we must act on pastorally: people are still “ready to attribute some divine mystery to the cosmos.” (p. 163).