It is no easy thing to sum up the thought of a man whose academic and ecclesial career spans some of the most tumultuous and epochal recent historical events in Church and world, whose written pages number in the tens of thousands or more, and whose legacy will, I think, be among the most significant of his generation.
There was in the immediate days and weeks after Benedict XVI’s passing into eternity a remarkable outpouring of reflections on his life and work. We have been saturated with personal tributes and memories, and big picture accounts attempting to situate his theological and intellectual legacy against the backdrop of his life and times.
Rather than replicate the genre of personal tribute and wide-focus accounts of Ratzinger the man and his legacy, I wish to supply here instead a more content-driven summary of a theological vision that was centred on interpreting the Gospel above all through the lens of God’s love made flesh in Jesus Christ. What follows, then, is very forensic account of Ratzinger’s “gospel of love” as it shaped his account of Christian faith.
God is love
“God is love” may appear a very straightforward and obvious statement to the Christian. And yet what does it mean, exactly? What did it mean against the backdrop of ancient philosophy and religion? What did it mean throughout the tumultuous events in Church and culture that Ratzinger witnessed in the 20th century? In many of his writings in the late 1950s and early 60s Ratzinger was preoccupied with questions of belief and faith in a modern age of doubt and change. His Introduction to Christianity (1968), as well as many of the essays in Principles of Catholic Theology (1982) were born of this concern.
Time and time again in this period and beyond he would return to the question of whether belief in God is still possible today, and what it might mean amidst wars, revolutions, and ideologies that were shaking faith in a manner beyond the normal existential doubts and questioning of the individual—both inside and outside the Church. Conscious, first, of rotting Tridentine structures that no longer mediated a living faith and, second, of the danger of post-conciliar aggiornamento which threatened to absorb Christ into the fast-emerging secular zeitgeist of Modernity, Ratzinger felt the need to articulate anew the core Christian kerygma.
Central to the theological dimension of Ratzinger’s answer to this suite of concerns was his articulation of the primacy of love when it comes to speaking about God, man, and their relation. To speak of the truth and the reason of God, for him, meant above all speaking of his love. As he would explain in Introduction to Christianity, what makes Christianity unique is that “the God of faith is basically defined by the category of relationship” (147). This “corrects philosophy and lets us know that love is higher than pure thought.” It lets us know that God in himself is not thought thinking itself or the ground of sufficient reason but rather the eternal exchange of love.
This new discovery made by Christianity, thought Ratzinger, sparked a revolution not just for how man understands God, but also for how man comprehends himself and the entire cosmos. For if God is love, then the “logos of the whole world, the creative original thought is at the same time love” (148). What we take to be the truth cannot be measured only by man’s finite reason (which Ratzinger of course long confirmed was an essential instrument opening man to truth), but must now also account for the fact that the highest truth has in the Incarnate Son been revealed as an infinite and eternal love.
From here, Ratzinger would as pope, in his first encyclical Deus caritas est, make St. John’s words about love his own: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn 4:16). That is to say, abiding in God, abiding in truth, means abiding in love. “These words,” argues Ratzinger, “express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith: the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny.” That “we have come to known and to believe in the love God has for us” (1 Jn 4:16) would remain for Ratzinger a “skeleton key” of his soteriological and anthropological thought.
Love as event and encounter with a person
Love, of course, is not love unless there is encounter, dialogue, and exchange. To abide in God’s love implies that God has shared this love with us and expects our response. And this is what the Incarnation is all about: an event, the appearance of a person, God incarnate, in history, that brings the love of God into the world for us as gift and invitation. The event of the Incarnation of the Logos, says Ratzinger, is an “the Event of the new and unexpected” that has brought “eternity into time and time into eternity” (The Feast of Faith, 26). In the Incarnation, eternity comes to man as a person.
For this reason, Ratzinger saw the categories of encounter, relationship, and dialogue as fundamental for understanding the nature God’s revelation of himself to man. The God who is love in his own being gives himself to be known by establishing a relationship of love with us. Christian faith, therefore, the essential meaning of what it means to be a Christian, is “not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea” (Deus caritas est, 1). It is not reducible to a moral code (what Ratzinger would often call “moralism”) or to a metaphysical truth in the abstract. No, it is rather, in the much-quoted opening passage from Deus caritas est, “the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and decisive direction.”
The very nature of revelation, for Ratzinger, is thus at its heart an exchange of being, an encounter between God and man that does not impart mere information about God but starts a dialogue that aims at “unity and transformation,” as he expressed it in his commentary on Vatican II constitution Dei verbum. The consequence of this real encounter, relationship, and dialogue that allows a unity of love between God means that being a Christian simply means “having love,” as he put it in an early homily. Or, as he explained it in a meditation on Holy Saturday: “In the authenticity of his being [man] lives by the fact that he is loved and is himself given the faculty to love” (“Three Meditations on Holy Saturday”).
Christocentric love
The love of the Incarnate Logos that man is now capable of “having” or abiding in, for Ratzinger, features very specific lineaments if it is to be called true.
This love that man finds himself belonging to is not self-referential and unredeemed eros, where the tendency of desire is to overwhelm and erase the other. Rather, the agape of God in Christ is “concern and care for the other” that “seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice” (Deus caritas est, 6). And yet God is the lover who loves with perfect eros, who desires us and our salvation, and who empties himself in his agape for us.
In the Crucified One, then, eros and agape come together in the supreme act of love on the Cross in a “turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him” (Deus caritas est, 12). This, says Ratzinger, “is love in its most radical form,” the deepest meaning of the claim that God is love. In receiving and contemplating this love, “the Christian discovers the path along which his life and love must move.”
Faith and conversion to love
Love therefore must always take the shape of apprenticing oneself to the Cross of Christ, and so growing more deeply into the image of Christ. Man “comes to himself by moving out beyond himself” and this happens when there is a “coinciding of God and man” (Introduction to Christianity, 235). This movement Ratzinger time and time again speaks of in the language of faith as conversion. He says that the credo of faith can “be literally translated by ‘I hand myself over to’ ‘I assent to’.” This, he continues, “signifies an all-encompassing movement of human existence…” (88).
Metanoia (conversion) represents the progressive movement that proportions man to love by an affirmation of faith that unfolds in its fullness within the continued response of his freedom. Metanoia is not therefore “just any Christian attitude but the fundamental Christian act per se… To be a Christian, one must change not just in some particular area but without reservation even to the innermost depths of one’s being” (Principles of Catholic Theology, 60). It means “humility in entrusting oneself to the love of the Other, a love that becomes the measure and criteria of my own life,” as he expressed it in a lecture on evangelization in the year 2000 (‘The New Evangelization: Building the Civilization of Love”).
Finally, it is metanoia, then, that “forms Christians and creates saints” (Principles of Catholic Theology, 66-7).
The blueprint and precedent for this movement of conversion that makes Christians and saints Ratzinger finds in the person of Christ himself, specifically, in the “mutual indwelling” of the human and divine natures in Christ (an emphasis he takes from Maximus the Confessor) that reaches its apogee in the Son’s prayer of obedience to the Father on the Cross: “Not what I will, but what though wilt” (Mk 14:36). To be true, to be perfectly proportioned to God, the love encountered in Christ must move towards participation in Christ’s perfect kenosis in obedience to the Father. For Christ “is the one who has moved right out beyond himself and, thus, the man who has truly come to himself.”
His prayer to the Father is thus the opening of his human nature to complete union with God: “By imparting his own I, his own identity, to this human being, he liberates him, redeems him, makes him God” (Behold the Pierced One, 47). Ratzinger calls the prayer of Jesus “freedom’s laboratory,” and claims that “[h]ere and nowhere else takes place that radical change in man of which we stand in need, that the world may become a better place” (42).
Eucharist as union of love
Christian prayer presupposes that there is an actual exchange of being going on between God and man when in prayer, like Christ, man aligns his will and freedom with God. It implies, therefore, the possibility of a “radical change” in man in consequence of this dialogue that in the humanity of Christ that now extend to all humanity. The source of possibility for this dialogue and radical change as the terminus of man’s movement toward God lies in the fact that Christ’s prayer to the Father that brings about God’s perfect act of saving love does not remain a mere exemplum “out there” to which man must from a distance and by his own powers emulate and attain.
It is at this point that we encounter Ratzinger’s robust sacramental theology as key to his account of how a relationship with Christ can transform and capacitate human nature.
The radical change that has become possible for us has its origins in the radical change effected by Christ’s perfect sacrifice of love. All of the partial and ultimately futile efforts of man to reconcile himself with God in the Old Covenant are overcome in Christ’s sacrifice which brings about a real reconciliation of man with God in and through his body. “With his Resurrection,” says Ratzinger, “the new Temple [the new dwelling place of God] will begin: the living body of Jesus Christ, which will now stand in the sight of God and be the place of all worship. Into this body he incorporates men. It is the tabernacle that no human hands have made, the place of true worship of God, which casts out the shadow and replaces it with reality” (The Spirit of the Liturgy, 25).
This living body of Jesus Christ that is the new temple into which man is incorporated, so finding the reality of God, of course refers us in a fundamental way to the Eucharist, the sacrament of his passion, death, and resurrection, by which we are made contemporaries and participants in Christ’s sacrifice, and so truly encounter him there. The Eucharist, first, is real union with Christ. “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation,” says Ratzinger. “More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving” (Deus caritas est, 13). Eucharistic communion is the “fusion of existences” (Called to Communion, 37), “peak” revelation, we might say (if revelation is understood as unity and transformation), and Ratzinger, following St. Paul, adduces nuptial imagery to explain the nature of this union: the eucharistic communion of God and man is analogous to “what happens when a man and wife become one on the physical-mental-spiritual plane.” (“Eucharist and Mission,” in Joseph Ratzinger: Collected Works, 338).
Therefore, in encountering and receiving the eucharistic Lord, man is made a contemporary and participant in the mystery of Christ’s saving event of love and so finds here nourishment that will make possible that radical conversion (or transubstantiation, we could say) of his nature into Christ’s. “The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of ‘nuclear fission’ … which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28)” (Sacramentum caritatis, 11).
The Church as communio
As a consequence, the Eucharist is also the principle of the communion of the entire Church, those who are now united together by participating in the eucharistic feast and who really belong to Christ’s body. Above all else, then, Ratzinger says time after time, the Church is the communion of those united with the eucharistic Christ. “The Church is communio,” he stresses, “she is God’s communing with men in Christ and hence the communing of men with one another—and in consequence, sacrament, sign, instrument of salvation. The Church is the celebration of the Eucharist; the Eucharist is the Church; they do not simply stand side by side; they are one and the same” (Principles of Catholic Theology, 53). Sacramental communion, participation in sacrifice and prayer, defines the being of the Church and the members that constitute Her.
Of course, Ratzinger was not unaware that the communion of the Church is sadly more often than not marred by her members’ failures of love so to the detriment of Her communion. His 1985 book-length interview The Ratzinger Report featured a frank recognition and assessment of the ill-health of the Church, as did his much earlier (1958) reflections on “pagans” in the Church, where he said: “The outward shape of the modern Church is determined essentially by the fact that, in a totally new way, she has become the Church of pagans, and is constantly becoming even more so. She is no longer, as she once was, a Church composed of pagans who have become Christians, but a Church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians, but actually have become pagans” (“The New Pagans and the Church”).
If I may be permitted an aside, we might wish to say that because the Church is the body of Christ with Christ as her head it follows that the guarantee of the Church’s subsistence over time is also one about her sanctity. But, actually, the inexorably corrupt and depraved face of the Church in her members is explained better by reference to the centrality of the principle of communion than by any canonical or juridical abstraction. The Church is sinful, the Church is marred, precisely because and when the human subjects who compose her refuse love and fail in the “metanoiac” movement of their freedom toward it.
The opposite of communion, which brings persons together, is what tears us apart; in Pauline terms, “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies, and the like” (Gal 5:20-21). St. Paul knows what he is talking about. This is the human, all too human reality of the Church that occurs when her members are no longer “in Christ,” when we refuse the Spirit who will guide us into the truth of the love of Christ. For “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires” (Gal 5:22-24). It’s always, apparently, a work in progress.
Baptism as sacramental metanoia
Which takes us back to the centrality of metanoia in Ratzinger’s thought. For the price of the failure of metanoia is eucharistic and ecclesial communio torn apart by the “flesh.” But it is here that baptism emerges for Ratzinger as a fundamental set-piece in the sacramental efficacy of faith where, in the mystery of really going down with Christ into death, the believer can rise up and truly be proportioned to eucharistic and ecclesial communion by the power of grace. Baptism is “initiation into a way of life” (Principles of Catholic Theology, 129), a process of immersion into a sacramental way of life that aims toward and makes possible “a process of conversion” and a “confession of faith” (124). Baptism can be the essential engine of conversion because in it the mystery of everything accomplished in Christ is given to the person as the gift of a sacramental identity.
“Being baptized,” explains Ratzinger, “means assuming the name of Christ, means becoming a son with and in him… For it demands that our existence become ‘sonlike’, that we belong so totally to God that we become an ‘attribute’ of God… Baptism means, then, that we lose ourselves as a separate, independent ‘I” and find ourselves again in a new ‘I’. It is the sacrament of death and—by that fact, but also only by that fact—the sacrament of resurrection” (33). Made sons in the Son by Baptism, the believer is granted entry into “Jesus’ relationship with God” (32).
And this returns us again to the fundamental posture of Jesus Christ the Son in relation to the Father: a loving yes. “If being baptized in the name of the triune God means man’s entrance into the Son’s existence,” Ratzinger notes, “we know from what has been said that this demands an existence centred around a prayerful communion with the Father” (32). Or, “[i]f this ‘yes’ of the Lord really penetrates me so that it makes my soul reborn,” he says (as it does in baptism), “then my own ego is saturated with him, is marked by sharing in him: ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Gal 2:20)” (The Yes of Jesus Christ, 102). It is from this precisely baptismal point of radical transformation and conversion, then, that a perfect eucharistic communion can be attained.
From love to joy
The effect of perfect love is joy: delight in the beloved, thanksgiving in the Cross of Christ, joy in the communion of the Church. For Ratzinger, the message of Christianity is therefore glad tidings that evokes joy, because in union with Christ man finds his salvation and transformation. “Christianity is, by its very nature, joy—the ability to be joyful” (Principles of Catholic Theology, 81). Christianity is this joy, thinks Ratzinger, precisely because it is the fruit of the affirmation that God’s love brings to the person, that allows man to see himself as God sees him. Joy, as something that I feel, of a happiness that belongs to me, is the effect of the discovery of one’s dignity as known and loved by God. It is the discovery that it is good that I exist and that God loves me.
In this sense, “
In conclusion, Ratzinger’s gospel of love witnesses to the fact that there might still be good reasons to have faith, even when everything seems hollow and broken, and when joy may seem hard to find. After all, this is the gospel of a love that is not rainbows and butterflies, but whose supreme triumph comes in the moment when all seems lost. For it was only by Christ’s apparent failure, by his descent into death and to hell, by the mysterious loss of God’s power and divinity, that love could penetrate into the darkest separation and solitude and so bring the triumph of life.
“From the moment there is the presence of love in death’s sphere,” says Ratzinger, “then life penetrates death… Man’s insuperable solitude was overcome from the moment He entered it. Hell was beaten from the moment love entered the region of death and the no man’s land of solitude was inhabited by him” (“Three Meditations on Holy Saturday”).
Precisely in the suffering and death of the Cross, then, is a vision of that love alone that is credible, to borrow a phrase from Hans Urs von Balthasar. Ratzinger’s gift to us is a vision of an encounter with love that makes it possible to still believe that Christ can truly conquer the depths of evil and suffering in my life and in the Church’s, and so transform man and the Church into a new creation. Whether we know it or not, the embers of this love lie deep within the stillness and silence of the hidden Church’s faithfulness to Christ, the Church that Ratzinger once prophesied would become small and would lose much.
What matters for us today is our ability to perceive and encounter love even through suffering and crisis, through the many Good Fridays and Holy Saturdays that we are not spared. Ratzinger’s gospel of love reminds us that where there is the encounter with a person, where there is participation in Christ’s prayer to the Father, where there is the movement of a metanoia that goes down with Christ into death, where there are even just a few believers united in the communio of the Church, there can still be encountered the joy of being personally and eternally loved by God.
This is how I will remember Ratzinger.
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