Images of Hope

by Joseph Ratzinger

  Let us look now at the next level of the altar: the empty cathedra made of gilded bronze, in which a wooden chair from the ninth century is embedded, held for a long time to be the cathedra of the Apostle Peter and for this reason placed in this location. The meaning of this part of the altar is thereby made clear. The teaching chair of Peter says more than a picture could say. It expresses the abiding presence of the Apostle, who as teacher remains present in his successors. The chair of the Apostle is a sign of nobility—it is the throne of truth, which in that hour at Caesarea became his and his successors’ charge. The seat of the one who teaches reechoes, so to speak, for our memory the word of the Lord from the room of the Last Supper: “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren” (Lk 22:32). But there is also another remembrance connected to the chair of the Apostle: the saying of Ignatius of Antioch, who in the year 110 in his letter to the Romans called the Church of Rome “the primacy of love”. Primacy in faith must be primacy in love. The two are not to be separated from each other. A faith without love would no longer be the faith of Jesus Christ. The idea of Saint Ignatius was however still more concrete: the word “love” is in the language of the early Church also an expression for the Eucharist. Eucharist originates in the love of Jesus Christ, who gave his life for us. In the Eucharist, he evermore shares himself with us; he places himself in our hands. Through the Eucharist he fulfills evermore his promise that from the Cross he will draw us into his open arms (see Jn 12: 32). In Christ’s embrace we are led to one another. We are taken into the one Christ, and thereby we now also belong reciprocally together. I can no longer consider anyone a stranger who stands in the same contact with Christ.

  These are all, however, in no way remote mystical thoughts. Eucharist is the basic form of the Church. The Church is formed in the eucharistic assembly. And since all assemblies of all places and all times always belong only to the one Christ, it follows that they all form only one single Church. They lay, so to speak, a net of brotherhood across the world and join the near and the far to one another so that through Christ they are all near. Now we usually tend to think that love and order are opposites. Where there is love, order is no longer needed because all has become self-evident. But that is a misunderstanding of love as well as of order. True human order is something different from the bars one places before beasts of prey so that they are restrained. Order is respect for the other and for one’s own, which is then most loved when it is taken in its correct sense. Thus order belongs to the Eucharist, and its order is the actual core of the order of the Church. The empty chair that points to the primacy in love speaks to us accordingly of the harmony between love and order. It points in its deepest aspect to Christ as the true primate, the true presider in love. It points to the fact that the Church has her center in the liturgy. It tells us that the Church can remain one only from communion with the crucified Christ. No organizational efficiency can guarantee her unity. She can be and remain world Church only when her unity is more than that of an organization—when she lives from Christ. Only the eucharistic faith, only the assembly around the present Lord can she keep for the long term. And from here she receives her order. The Church is not ruled by majority decisions but rather through the faith that matures in the encounter with Christ in the liturgy.

  The Petrine service is primacy in love, which means care for the fact that the Church takes her measure from the Eucharist. She becomes all the more united, the more she lives from the eucharistic dimension and the more she remains true in the Eucharist to the dimension of the tradition of faith. Love will also mature from unity, love that is directed to the world. The Eucharist is based on the act of love of Jesus Christ unto death. That means, too, that anyone who is incapable of love views pain as something that should be done away with or at least left to someone else. “Primacy in love”: we spoke in the beginning about the empty throne, but now it is apparent that the “throne” of the Eucharist is not a throne of lordship but rather the hard chair of the one who serves.

  Let us now look at the third level of the altar, at the Fathers who bear the throne of serving. The two teachers of the East, Chrysostom and Athanasius, embody together with the Latin Fathers Ambrose and Augustine the entirety of the tradition and thus the fullness of the faith of the one Church. Two considerations are important here: love stands on faith. It collapses when man lacks orientation. It falls apart when man can no longer perceive God. Like and with love, order and justice also stand on faith; authority in the Church stands on faith. The Church cannot conceive for herself how she wants to be ordered. She can only try ever more clearly to understand the inner call of faith and to live from faith. She does not need the majority principle, which always has something atrocious about it: the subordinated part must bend to the decision of the majority for the sake of peace even when this decision is perhaps misguided or even destructive. In human arrangements, there is perhaps no alternative. But in the Church the binding to faith protects all of us: each is bound to faith, and in this respect the sacramental order guarantees more freedom than could be given by those who would subject the Church to the majority principle.

  A second consideration is needed here: the Church Fathers appear as the guarantors of loyalty to Sacred Scripture. The hypotheses of human interpretation waver. They cannot carry the throne. The life-sustaining power of the scriptural word is interpreted and applied in the faith that the Fathers and the great councils have learned from it. The one who holds to this has found what gives secure ground in times of change.

  Finally, now, we must not forget the whole for the parts. For the three levels of the altar take us into a movement that is ascent and descent at the same time. Faith leads to love. Here it becomes evident whether it is faith at all. A dark, complaining, egotistic faith is false faith. Whoever discovers Christ, whoever discovers the worldwide net of love that he has cast in the Eucharist, must be joyful and must become a giver himself. Faith leads to love, and only through love do we attain to the heights of the window, to the view to the living God, to contact with the streaming light of the Holy Spirit. Thus the two directions permeate each other. The light comes from God, flows downward awakening faith and love, in order then to take us up the ladder that leads from faith to love and to the light of the eternal.

  The inner dynamic into which the altar draws us allows finally a last element to become understandable. The window of the Holy Spirit does not stand there alone for itself. It is surrounded by the overflowing fullness of angels, by a choir of joy. That is to say, God is never alone. That would contradict his essence. Love is participation, community, joy. This perception allows still another thought to emerge. Sound joins the light. One thinks he hears them singing, these angels, for one cannot imagine these streams of joy to be silent or as talking idly or shouting. They can only be perceived as praise in which harmony and diversity unite. “Yet you are . . . enthroned on the praises of Israel”, we read in the psalm (22:3). Praise is likewise the cloud of joy through which God comes and which bears him as its companion into this world. Liturgy is therefore the eternal light shining into our world. It is God’s joy, sounding into our world. And it is at the same time our feeling about the consoling glow of this light out of the depth of our questions and confusion, climbing up the ladder that leads from faith to love, thereby opening the view to hope.

  Easter

  ______

  “I Do Indeed Hear the Message. . .”

  The Easter poem of Reiner Kunze from the year 1984 expresses quite accurately the impressions of our time with respect to the Easter proclamation.

  The bells rang,

  As if they were clanging for joy

  over the empty grave

  Over that which once

  so consoled,

  and that has sustained astonishment for 2000 years

  However even though the bells

  hammered so forcefully against the midnight—

  not
hing in the darkness changed.

  In considering these words I realized that Goethe’s Faust said the same thing in a different language. In the moment of despair over the poverty of the human condition, over the impossibility of coming near to the divine, he wants to put an end to his life. The contradiction of human existence becomes unbearable for him. There is the longing for the infinite, the highest, that cannot be dismissed. It goes together with the impossibility of breaking out of the limits of our knowledge, of seeing what actually is, of seeing whether there is a purpose for our existence. The same Faust will later experience that his assistant Wagner succeeded in producing a man in vitro. But this extension of human power cannot vitiate the despair over the darkness of our existence; rather, it only augments it. For blind power is even more terrible and above all more dangerous than the blindness in powerlessness. This Faust stands for modern man, who at first experiences himself at the dawn of the new age as having the same rank as God and believes he can take creation in hand in a new and better way, only then to fall into the despair of one who is in fact only a worm who writhes in the dust. The abolition of man seems thus to be the best solution, and Faust takes it symbolically in hand by seeking the drunken stupor of the deadly draft. If he cannot beat death, then he wants at least to cause his own death.

  At this moment, when the despairing Faust sets about redemption through causing his own death, the Easter bells ring. The proclamation sounds: Christ is risen. When this announcement becomes audible, precisely what Kunze described occurs: joy that there was once something so consoling and that the astonishment has lasted two thousand years. To be sure, Faust is not in a position, either, to believe the proclamation, but would he also say, “Nothing in the darkness was changed”? He does not believe, but remembrance of the astonishment moves his soul. Remembrance of what was once faith brings him back to the courage of existence. Has not something in the darkness indeed been changed? Even after the loss of faith, does not an afterglow remain that has awakened him? Is it not the case that even in doubt and in disbelief the peculiar proclamation of the empty grave leaves behind a mysterious disquiet that we deny because we are indeed enlightened men and know that such a thing does not happen, but that pursues us nonetheless? Are we not like the disciples who dismissed what they presumed to be women’s prattle but who, in the stillness of their manly wisdom, suddenly were no longer so sure? The Fathers depicted the Church as woman, and perhaps John already saw an image of the Church in Mary Magdalen, who was the first to see the Risen One. She comes even today into our quite technical world with the seeing simplicity of her heart and tells it what does not seem to fit at all: Christ is risen. And somehow no one can any longer completely bypass this proclamation. It could well be true . . . Who may exclude it, since the newest science teaches us that, on the one hand, everything is possible and, on the other hand, nothing is really certain and dependable?

  What should we do in such a situation, how should we celebrate Easter? The doubting [Zweifel] of all certainties—nothing any longer can be held to be impossible, nor can anything be held to be definitively certain—does not lead us out of Faust’s despair [Verzweiflung]. Doubt only does away with the pathos. Certainly, it is worth something when the walls of ossified certainties collapse with which the spirit of the modern age wanted permanently to enclose the world and man. But scepticism is not a foundation for life. “One does not gamble one’s own fate away with the dice of a hypothesis”, George Bernanos once said, in order to be sure to illuminate the tragedy of a theologian for whom the hypothesis had become the only source of his analysis. How can we approach the Easter faith? How can we bring the message to us or us to the message so that a bit of darkness is dispelled and we learn to live anew? In view of this moving question, a saying of the martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch, from his letter to the Romans, comes to mind; he writes: “Christianity is not the work of persuasion, but of real power” (3:3). One cannot be persuaded to faith; one also should not be persuaded. But what then? How does one come to the great, to the power of the real itself, to which Ignatius points?

  The answer of the ancient Church was that one has to be on the way, one has to take the word as way. One must immerse oneself in it in order through the experiment of life to come to the experience of reality. For this reason the catechumenate was created. That means that faith was not proclaimed as something purely intellectual, as mere information, but rather was tested and acquired gradually in a process of familiarization and practice. That is also quite logical. Every insight demands its own method. The way must be adjusted to the particular kind of knowing person. I cannot just theoretically philosophize about medicine. If medicine is to become the art of knowing and of being able to know, it demands real interaction with the patient and with the illness. And even that demands again more than the ability to use instruments and to read off amounts. It demands regard for this man, in whom it is not just a chemical process that has been disturbed, which I can control and rectify with other chemical procedures. The man himself suffers. In the chemical procedure, his whole humanity is involved. If I leave out the living person, then I have excluded the real subject of the event. It becomes clear in this example that a way of thinking that wants to take things in hand, to analyze and control them, does not lead to the goal. Some things are discerned, not through domination, but only through service, and these are the higher ways of perception. For what we are able to dominate is beneath us. A thinking that persists in dissecting and putting together is in its essence materialistic and reaches only to a certain threshold. So beyond dissecting and analyzing, the physician needs dedication to the person in whom the characteristics of the sickness appear.

  Our example has unexpectedly brought us directly to the subject itself, for faith in the Resurrection is concerned with the sickness that afflicts us. It is concerned with the inner wounding of our existence by death and with the hidden God who encounters us in death and there lets himself be recognized. We are on a dead-end street if we think that the Easter Proclamation is exclusively about a historical-critical problem of an alleged fact of long ago. One could leave that issue to historians, who can establish whether it is believable or not. But how do they want to determine this? They are as unequal to the task as we all are. They cannot recall it, any more than we can, and they have no other sources at their disposal than those that are available to us all. The determination of this or that discrepancy between the different reports is not sufficient for a judgment. The fact that a series of testimonies independent of each other substantially agree is much more important. But the distance of two thousand years naturally cannot reconcile them. Then the modern world-view usually must help out; this supposedly tells us that there could not really have been a resurrection because we do not know of such a type of dematerialization or of the lightning-like transformation of matter. So we leave the body in the grave. What then remains are a couple of more or less subjective visions. Decay has the last word, and the Resurrection has withdrawn into idealistic talk. In truth the method here simply expects too much, and the approach is wrong. Whoever reduces the Easter proclamation to the fact of a past event has already passed it by. For how could one want to build an entire life, present and future, on a moment lost in the past and now far removed from us?

  What the Easter proclamation tells us reaches into a depth we cannot plummet with a few intellectual tools. What is stimulating and new, however, is that God, as the Beirut theologian Jean Corbon puts it, does not preach the gospel down to us from above; but rather, he tells it to us by drinking the chalice of death. Then, however, we cannot hear him from above down but must encounter him as he encounters us, with the entire realism of our existence, which is delivered over to death. Let us hear Jean Corbon again: “If God’s arrival in man did not reach all the way to death, he was mocking man. And that is the case in all religions and ideologies: Since they cannot drive out death, they distract man from it.” The “folly of mystery” of which Saint Paul speaks (1
Cor 1:17-25) “lies in the opposite, namely, in entering into death”. In addition, there is something else that Corbon has also indicated. All empirical events are transient. They are bound to a particular time period of unwinding history and then are over, even if each of them leaves behind a more or less deep trace in the figure of history. But that death is dead is an event that breaks out of the course of death and becoming. It is a whole in the wall of transitoriness that now stands open. It does not simply sink into the past. It to be sure once occurred, but, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, this once is a once and for all, and it opens to an always. So it is since then. What has happened remains, and we must seek access to this present, to this always, so that we can recognize the once—not the other way around.

  How does one arrive at this present of the past, at this always of the once and for all, at the today of Easter? As a first ground rule we can say: on this path we need witnesses. That was so from the beginning; it belongs to the structure of this insight. The Risen One does not show himself in a great public spectacle before the masses. That is certainly not the way of perception that could come closer to him. He shows himself to witnesses who accompanied him on a part of his path to death. In accompanying them, one can encounter the truth. This path has various stages and ways. I would like to recall as an example a path to conversion in our time, namely, that of Tatjana Goritcheva. She had learned that the goal of life is to excel, “to be cleverer than the others, more capable, stronger. . . . Never, however, did anyone say to me that the highest thing in life does not lie in surpassing and defeating others but rather in loving.” In the gradual encounter with Jesus she realized this internally, until one day, in praying the Our Father, she experienced a new birth, and she perceived in an insight that overturned all being, “not with my laughable intellect but with my whole being—that he exists”. That is a thoroughly true insight, experience, repeatable and thereby verifiable experience—verifiable, to be sure, not in the attitude of the spectator, but only in entering into the experiment of life with God.