On this Labor Day, I’ve continued my reading of the Pope Emeritus’ work, a way of passing the time which is a true labour of love. To read Scripture with the eyes of Ratzinger, or Augustine, or Aquinas is to read it with the eyes of the Church, and to read Scripture with the eyes of the Church is to be oriented always to Christ who is the magnetic North to whom all of Scripture points.        

 

One negative consequence of reading the Bible with what Ratzinger calls the “literal-mindedness … which contradicts the entire inner nature of the Bible”, isolating the parts from the whole, was the “conflict between the natural sciences and theology which has been, up to our own day, a burden for the faith”. Whereas the traditional symbolic reading of Scripture, as taught by the Church since the days of the Fathers, always integrates fides with ratio, an integration which is the goal of the true science of theology, Ratzinger accused literalism of creating a false dichotomy between faith and reason. Indeed, the modern perception that faith was at war with reason was a consequence of this faulty “literalist” reading of Scripture. It was, therefore, necessary to refute the errors of these false methods of biblical exegesis and refuse their right to be considered authentic expressions of orthodox theology. Instead, scriptural theology must seek a re-fusion of faith and reason, thereby dispelling the confusion caused by the artificial schism between the various sciences. The purpose of a series of homilies that Ratzinger gave in 1981, when he was Archbishop of Munich, was to insist that the Catholic understanding of Creation and the Fall of Man, as told in the Book of Genesis, was not only in conformity with the doctrinal teachings of the Catholic faith but was also in conformity with the demands and constraints of reason:

[F]aith in creation is not unreal; even today it is reasonable; even from the perspective of the data of the natural sciences it is the “better hypothesis”, offering a fuller and better explanation than any of the other theories. Faith is reasonable. The reasonableness of creation derives from God’s Reason, and there is no other really convincing explanation. What the pagan Aristotle said four hundred years before Christ – when he opposed those who asserted that everything has come to exist through chance, even though he said what he did without the knowledge that our faith in creation gives us – is still valid today. The reasonableness of the universe provides us with access to God’s Reason, and the Bible is and continues to be the true “enlightenment”, which has given the world over to human reason and not to exploitation by human beings, because it opened reason to God’s truth and love.

In his citing of the great Greek philosopher to buttress his claim that the cosmos was created and did not come into being in some cosmic accident, through blind chance, Ratzinger is insisting that the Christian belief in Creation is entirely rational. Such a belief is the true consequence of good reason (merito), meriting its acceptance by the rational mind. Furthermore, the role of theology is not in opposition to reason but enlarges it, enabling it to go to places and to see things that the “unenlightened” reason, acting on its own, in the absence of revelation, would be unable to reach or see. Theology and philosophy (the Word of God and the love of wisdom) are, therefore, allies in the quest to see and know truth. The Bible, as “the true ‘enlightenment’”, leads us to the fullness of wisdom, which can never contradict reason.