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Early Writings of Pope Benedict XVI
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Excerpt of Chapter IV Starting at Page 151 From Ratzinger’s Book Introduction to Christianity. Written from notes while he was teaching; first published when he was a Cardinal; and now republished as Pope Benedict XVI
[Comments in [Brackets] added by web editor.]
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Chapter IV
FAITH IN GOD TODAY Page 151
After all we have said, what does it mean today when a man says, in the words of the Church's Creed,
"I believe in God"? Anyone who utters these words makes first and foremost a decision about values
and emphasis in this world that is certainly comprehensible as truth (and, indeed, in a qualified sense
must be regarded as a decision for the truth) but in the last analysis can only be attained in the decision
and as decision. What thus takes place is also a decision in the sense that a separation is made between
various possibilities. What Israel had to do in the early days of its history, and the Church had to do
again at the beginning of her career, must be done afresh in every human life. Just as in those days the
verdict had to be delivered against the possibilities symbolized by Moloch and Baal, against custom
and in favor of truth, so the Christian statement "I believe in God" is always a process of separation,
of acceptance, of purification, and of trans- formation. Only in this way can the Christian confession
of faith in the one God be maintained in the passing ages. But in what directions does this process point today?
I. THE PRIMACY OF THE LOGOS
Christian faith in God means first the decision in favor of
the primacy of the logos as against mere matter. Saying "I
believe that God exists" also implies opting for the view that
the logos-that is, the idea, freedom, love-stands not merely
at the end but also at the beginning, that it is the originating
and encompassing power of all being. In other words, faith
means deciding for the view that thought and meaning do
not just form a chance by-product of being; that, on the
contrary, all being is a product of thought and, indeed, in its
innermost structure is itself thought.
To that extent faith means in a specific sense deciding for
the truth, since, to faith, being itself is truth, comprehensi-
bility, meaning, and all this does not simply represent a sec-
ondary product of being that arose at some point or other
but could have no structural, authoritative meaning for
reality as a whole.
This decision in favor of the intellectual structure of the
kind of being that emerges from meaning and understanding
includes the belief in creation. This means nothing else than
the conviction that the objective mind we find present in all
things, indeed, as which we learn increasingly to understand
things, is the impression and expression of subjective mind
and that the intellectual structure that being possesses and
that we can rethink is the expression of a creative pre-
meditation, to which they owe their existence.
To put it more precisely, in the old Pythagorean saying
about the God who practices geometry there is expressed
that insight into the mathematical structure of being which
learns to understand being as having been thought, as intel-
lectually structured; there is also expressed the perception
that even matter is not simply non-sense that eludes under-
standing, that it too bears in itself truth and comprehensi-
bility that make intellectual comprehension possible. In our
time, through the investigation of the mathematical con-
struction of matter and the way it can be conceived and
evaluate in mathematical terms, this insight has gained an
amazing solidity. Einstein said once that in the laws of nature
"an intelligence so superior is revealed that in comparison
all the significance of man thinking and human arrange-
ments is a completely worthless reflection.” [1]
This surely means that all our thinking is, indeed, only a
rethinking of what in reality has already been thought out
[The word ”only” seems weak, “actually” might be better translation.]
beforehand. It can only try in a paltry way to trace over that
being-thought which things are and to find truth in it. The
mathematical understanding of the world has here discov-
ered, through the mathematics of the universe, so to speak,
the "God of the philosophers"--with all its problems, as is
shown when Einstein over and over again rejects the con-
cept of a personal God as "anthropomorphic", ascribing it
to the "religion of fear" and the "religion of morality", with
which he contrasts, as the only appropriate attitude, the
"cosmic religiosity" that to him expresses itself in "enraptured
wonder at the harmony of the laws of nature", in a "deep
faith in the rationality of the structure of the world", and in
the "longing for understanding, if only of a pale reflection of
the intelligence revealed in this world".[2]
Here we have before us the whole problem of belief in
God. On the one side, there is the transparency of being,
which as being-thought points to a process of thinking; on
the other, we have the impossibility of bringing this think-
ing of being into relation with man. It becomes easy to see
________________
Footnotes: Page 153
[1] A. Einstein, Mein Weltbild, ed. by C. Seelig (Zurich, Stuttgart, and Vienna,
1953), p. 21.
[2[ Ibid.. pp. 18-22. In the section entitled "The Necessity for an Ethical
Culture" (pp. 22-24) there are signs of a loosening of the previously intimate
connection between scientific knowledge and religious wonder; his percep-
tion of the specifically religious seems to have been somewhat sharpened by
previous tragic experiences.
_______________
FAITH IN GOD TODAY Page 154
the barrier to equating the "God of faith" and. the "God of
the philosophers” constituted by a narrow and insufficiently
pondered concept of the person.
Before we try to make any progress on this point, I should
like to cite another similar statement by a scientist. James
Jeans once said: "We discover that the universe shows traces
of a planning and controlling power that has something in
common with our own individual minds, not, so far as we
have yet discovered, feeling, morality, or aesthetic capacity,
but the tendency to think in a way that, for lack of a better
word, we have called geometry." [3] This is the same thing all
over again: the mathematician discovers the mathematics of
the cosmos, the being-thought-ness of things; but no more.
He discovers only the God of the philosophers.
But is this really surprising? Can the mathematician who
looks at the world mathematically find anything else but math-
ematics in the universe? Should not one rather ask him
whether he has not himself at some time or other looked at
the world in a way that is other than mathematical? Whether,
for example, he has never seen an apple tree in blossom and
wondered why the process of fertilization by the interplay
between bees and tree is not effected otherwise than through
the roundabout way of the blossom, thus including the com-
pletely superfluous wonder of beauty, which again, of course,
can only be understood by cooperation, by relying on that
which is already beautiful even without us? When Jeans opines
that this kind of thing has so far not been discovered in the
mind of which he speaks, one can confidently say to him
that it will indeed never be discovered by physics and cannot
be, because in its investigations it abstracts, in accordance
_____________
Footnotes: Page 154
[3] Quoted in w: von Hardieb, Das Christentum und die Gegenwart, Stifter-
bibliothek, vol. 21 (Salzburg, 1953), pp. 18£.
_______________
FAITH IN GOD TODAY Page 155
with its nature, from the aesthetic feeling and from the moral
attitude, questions nature from a purely mathematical point
of view, and consequently can also catch sight only of the
mathematical side of nature. The answer depends quite sim-
ply on the question. Yet the man who seeks a view of the
whole will have to say: In the world we find present, with-
out doubt, objective mathematics; but we also find equally
present in the world unparalleled and unexplained wonders
of beauty, or, to be more accurate, there are events that appear
to the apprehending mind of man in the form of beauty, so
that he is bound to say that the mathematician responsible
for these events has displayed an unparalleled degree of
creative imagination.
If we summarize the observations we have strung together
in a sketchy and fragmentary fashion we can say: The world
is objective mind; it meets us in an intellectual structure, that
is, it offers itself to our mind as something that can be reflected
upon and understood. From this follows the next step. To
say "Credo in Deum---I believe in God" expresses the con-
viction that objective mind is the product of subjective mind
and can only exist at all as the declension of it, that, in other
words, being-thought (as we find it present in the structure
of the world) is not possible without thinking.
It may be useful to clarify and confirm this statement by
inserting it--again only in broad strokes--into a kind of self-
criticism of historical reason. After two and a half thousand
years of philosophical thinking it is no longer possible for us
to speak blithely about the subject itself as if so many differ-
ent people had not tried to do the same thing before us and
come to grief. Moreover, when we survey the acres of shat-
tered hypotheses, vainly applied ingenuity, and empty logic
that history shows us, we might well lose all heart in the
quest for the real, hidden truth that transcends the obvious.
Yet the situation is not quite so hopeless as it must appear at
first sight, for in spite of the almost endless variety of oppos-
ing philosophical paths that man has taken in his attempts to
think out being, in the last analysis there are only a few basic
ways of explaining the secret of being. The question to which
everything finally leads could be formulated like this: In all
the variety of individual things, what is, so to speak, the com-
mon stuff of being --what is the one being behind the many
"things", which nevertheless all "exist"? The many answers
produced by history can finally be reduced to two basic pos-
sibilities. The first and most obvious would run something
like this: Everything we encounter is in the last analysis stuff,
matter; this is the only thing that always remains as demon-
strable reality and, consequently, represents the real being of
all that exists-the materialistic solution. The other possi-
bility points in the opposite direction. It says: Whoever looks
thoroughly at matter will discover that it is being-thought,
objectivized thought. So it cannot be the ultimate. On the
contrary, before it comes thinking, the idea; all being is ulti-
mately being-thought and can be traced back to mind as the
original reality; this is the "idealistic" solution.
To reach a verdict we must ask still more precisely: What
is matter, really? And what is mind? Abbreviating drastically,
we could say that we call "matter" a being that does not
itself comprehend being, that "is" but does not understand
itself. The reduction of all being to matter as the primary
form of reality consequently implies that the beginning and
ground of all being is constituted by a form of being that
does not itself understand being; this also means that the
understanding of being only arises as a secondary, chance
product during the course of development. This at the same
time also gives us the definition of "mind": it can be described
as being that understands itself, as being that is present to
FAITH IN GOD TODAY 157
itself. The idealistic solution to the problem of being accord-
ingly signifies the idea that all being is the being-thought by
one single consciousness. The unity of being consists in the
identity of the one consciousness, whose impulses constitute
the many things that are.
The Christian belief in God is not completely identical
with either of these two solutions. To be sure, it, too, will
say, being is being-thought. Matter itself points beyond itself
to thinking as the earlier and more original factor. But in
opposition to idealism, which makes all being into moments
of an all-embracing consciousness, the Christian belief in God
will say: Being is being-thought-yet not in such a way that
it remains only thought and that the appearance of indepen-
dence proves to be mere appearance to anyone who looks
more closely. On the contrary, Christian belief in God means
that things are the being-thought of a creative conscious-
ness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative conscious-
ness that bears up all things has released what has been thought
into the freedom of its own, independent existence. In this it
goes beyond any mere idealism. While the latter, as we have
just established, explains everything real as the content of a
single consciousness, in the Christian view what supports it
all is a creative freedom that sets what has been thought in
the freedom of its own being, so that, on the one hand, it is
the being-thought of a consciousness and yet, on the other
hand, is true being itself.
This also clarifies the heart of the creation concept: the
model from which creation must be understood is not the
craftsman but the creative mind, creative thinking. At the
same time it becomes evident that the idea of freedom is the
characteristic mark of the Christian belief in God as opposed
to any kind of monism. At the beginning of all being it puts
not just some kind of consciousness but a creative freedom
that creates further freedoms. To this extent one could very
well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom. For
Christianity, the explanation of reality as a whole is not an
all-embracing consciousness or one single materiality; on the
contrary, at the summit stands a freedom that thinks and, by
thinking, creates freedoms, thus making freedom the struc-
tural form of all being. [Plato came to a similar conclusion
and coined the phrase all Christians adopt
“Goodness diffuses itself.” Bonum diffusus sii.]
2. THE PERSONAL GOD
If Christian belief in God is first of all an option in favor of the
primacy of the logos, faith in the preexisting, world-supporting
reality of the creative meaning, it is at the same time, as belief
in the personal nature of that meaning, the belief that the orig-
inal thought, whose being-thought is represented by the world,
is not an anonymous, neutral consciousness but rather free-
dom, creative love, a person. Accordingly, if the Christian
option for the logos means an option for a personal, creative
meaning, then it is at the same time an option for the primacy
of the particular as against the universal. The highest is not the
most universal but, precisely, the particular, and the Christian
faith is thus above all also the option for man as the irreduc-
ible, infinity-oriented being. And here once again it is the
option for the primacy of freedom as against the primacy of
some cosmic necessity or natural law. Thus the specific fea-
tures of the Christian faith as opposed to other intellectual
choices of the human mind now stand out in clear relief. The
position occupied by a man who utters the Christian Credo
becomes unmistakably clear.
Moreover, it can be shown that the first option –for the
primacy of the logos as opposed to mere matter -- is not pos-
sible without the second and third, or, to be more accurate,
FAITH IN GOD TODAY 159
the first, taken on its own, would remain mere idealism; it is
only the addition of the second and third options-primacy
of the particular, primacy of freedom-that marks the water-
shed between idealism and Christian belief, which now
denotes something different from mere idealism.
Much could be said about this. Let us content ourselves
with the indispensable elucidations by first asking what it
really means to say that this logos, whose thought is the world,
is a person and that therefore faith is the option in favor of
the primacy of the particular over the universal. In the last
analysis, the answer can be put quite simply: It means noth-
ing else than that the creative thinking we found to be the
precondition and ground of all being is truly conscious think-
ing and that it knows not only itself but also its whole thought.
It means further that this thinking not only knows but loves;
that it is creative because it is love; and that, because it can
love as well as think, it has given its thought the freedom of
its own existence, objectivized it, released it into distinct
being. So the whole thing means that this thinking knows
its thought in its distinct being, loves it and, loving, upholds
it. Which brings us back to the saying to which our reflec-
tions keep leading: Not to be encompassed by the greatest,
but to let oneself be encompassed by the smallest ---that is
divine.
But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and
encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love,
[Note correlation to transcendentals: truth, goodness & unity.]
then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the
world is not cosmic necessity but freedom. The implica-
tions of this are very extensive. For this leads to the con-
clusion that freedom is evidently the necessary structure of
the world, as it were, and this again means that one can
only comprehend the world as incomprehensible, that it
must be incomprehensibility. For if the supreme point in
the world's design is a freedom that upholds, wills, knows,
and loves the whole world as freedom, then this means that
together with freedom the incalculability implicit in it is an
essential part of the world. Incalculability is an implication
of freedom; the world can never --if this is the position--be
completely reduced to mathematical logic. With the bold-
ness and greatness of a world defined by the structure of
freedom there comes also the somber mystery of the
demonic, which emerges from it to meet us. A world cre-
ated and willed on the risk of freedom and love is no lon-
ger just mathematics. As the arena of love it is also the
playground of freedom and also incurs the risk of evil. It
accepts the mystery of darkness for the sake of the greater
light constituted by freedom and love.
Once again it becomes evident here how the categories of
minimum and maximum, smallest and greatest, change in a per-
spective of this sort. In a world that in the last analysis is not
mathematics but love, the minimum is a maximum; the small-
est thing that can love is one of the biggest things; the partic-
ular is more than the universal; the person, the unique and
unrepeatable, is at the same time the ultimate and highest thing.
In such a view of the world, the person is not just an individ-
ual, a reproduction arising by the diffusion of the idea into mat-
ter, but, precisely, a "person". Greek thought always regarded
the many individual creatures, including the many individual
human beings, only as individuals, arising out of the splitting
up of the idea in matter. The reproductions are thus always sec-
ondary; the real thing is the one and universal. The Christian
sees in man, not an individual, but a person; and it seems to
me that this passage from individual to person contains the
whole span of the transition from antiquity to Christianity, from
Platonism to faith. This definite being is not at all something
secondary, giving us a fragmentary glimpse of the universal,
FAITH IN GOD TODAY 161
which is the real. As the minimum it is a maximum; as the
unique and unrepeatable, it is something supreme and real.
From this follows one last step. If it is the case that the
person is more than the individual, that the many is some-
thing real and not something secondary, that there exists a
primacy of the particular over the universal, then oneness is
not the unique and final thing; plurality, too, has its own and
definitive right. This assertion, which follows by an inner
necessity from the Christian option, leads of its own accord
to a transcending of the concept of a God who is mere one-
ness. The internal logic of the Christian belief in God com-
pels us to go beyond mere monotheism and leads to the belief
in the triune God, who must now, in conclusion, be discussed.
[THAT DISCUSSION IS IN CHAPTER V
CHAPTER IV ENDS HERE]
