Joseph Lawler

Introduction to Christianity
By Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

Introduction to Christianity is a slightly misleading title. 

It’s not an introduction to Christianity in the sense of being a starting point for a non-Christian looking to learn about the basic tenets of Christianity. Instead, it is an introduction to and apologia for Christianity in the context of modern theology and philosophy, especially metaphysics. It’s dense and challenging enough to repel anyone who isn’t interested in grappling with some tough concepts. And it goes in surprising directions. 

Three aspects of this book, which is based on a series of lectures Ratzinger gave to graduate students in Germany in 1967, stood out to me. 

1. Belief, doubt, and existentialism

The entire first part of the book is focused on interpreting the first line of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe.” 

Here’s one key line I would like to explore, sort of the conclusion of a meditation on the dichotomy of belief and doubt:

Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man.

What is the dilemma of being a man he’s referring to? In my understanding, it is that man is conscious, self-aware, and rational in the sense that he is built to seek the truth. So, on the one hand, he cannot accept the idea that existence has no meaning or underlying reality. On the other hand, he cannot attain absolute certainty regarding the fundamental reality and meaning of life.

This line reminded me of the famous line of the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre: “Man is condemned to be free,” which I take as resolving the dilemma raised by Ratzinger by embracing one of its horns.

Sartre’s argument was that, since there is no God or creator, therefore man is necessarily responsible for everything he does, including defining meaning for himself, which is a form of liberty. 

Ratzinger’s approach, though, is rather to go around the dilemma by embracing a different view of metaphysics. 

The metaphysical point of departure for Sartre’s resolution of the dilemma is René Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, meaning that consciousness is the only absolute truth that can be known and thus the foundation of all understanding of reality. From that vantage point, it easily follows that understanding of reality radiates outward from the self, and that it is up to the self to define meaning — the opposite of trying to understand the world as created and revealed through phenomena and forms. That is the basis of existentialism: existence precedes essence.

Ratzinger, though, spends much of the first section of the book arguing that a wrong turn was taken around the time of Descartes’ cogito, in terms of understanding reality. 

In fact, he attributes the intellectual revolution not just to Descartes and, following him, Kant, but to the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who he says was the first to formulate the understanding of reality as verum quia factum — that is, all that we can truly know is what we have made ourselves. That formula stands in distinction to the scholastic one that preceded it: verum est ens — being is truth. 

A next stage in the revolution of thinking, according to Ratzinger, was Marx’s statement “So far philosophers have merely interpreted the world in various ways; it is necessary to change it.” Ratzinger says this is the formulation of verum quia faciendum — the truth of concern is of feasibility. This is the idea that what is knowable is what is repeatable, as in a scientific experiment. It is the elevation of techne from a means of knowledge (its proper function) to the “real potential and obligation of man.”

Ratzinger explores the tensions in these modes of approaching reality at length, and then concludes with a definition of belief: 

It is a human way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable with knowledge; it is the bestowal of meaning without which the totality of man would remain homeless, on which man’s calculations and actions are based, and without which in the last resort he could not calculate and act, because he can only do this in the context of a meaning that bears him up…. Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received. 

In connecting the ideas of reality and belief, Ratzinger engages in an extended analysis of the Burning Bush in the Book of Exodus, the point at which the God of the Jewish tribe reveals himself as “I am who I am.” This instance, he says, raises the question of the relationship of the God of the Bible to the God of the Greek philosophers — that is, God as the source of being, not just a personal deity. 

He writes that “early Christianity boldly and resolutely made its choice and carried out its purification by deciding for the God of the philosophers and against the gods of the various religions.” In other words, God was revealed to the Jews as the source of being and was identified as such by Christians from the very beginning. 

Turning back to the the broader question of faith and philosophy, Ratzinger says that history has produced two ways of explaining the mystery of being, namely materialism (being is stuff) and idealism (being is being-thought, traceable back to the mind).

“Christian belief in God means that things are the being-thought of a creative consciousness, of a creative freedom, and that the creative consciousness that bears up all things has released what has been thought into the freedom of its own, independent existence,” he writes. In that sense, Christian belief differs from monism in that it allows for the idea of freedom — its characteristic mark. “One could very well describe Christianity as a philosophy of freedom,” he concludes.

2. Anselm versus accelerationism? 

The most surprising aspect of this book, to me, is Ratzinger’s near-outright rejection of the theory of atonement advanced by St. Anselm of Canterbury.

Anselm, in Cur Deus Homo, presents an argument that Jesus had to die to redeem humans from sin based on an exhaustive, step-by-step detailed analysis of the demands of justice. At the risk of oversimplifying, the idea is that the infinite debt incurred by sin by man against God could only be repaid by the self-sacrifice of God-man. 

Ratzinger, though, says that the theory of Anselm, while dominant in Christian thought for centuries, can make God “appear in a sinister light.” 

This line caught me by surprise. I wondered if it might be a problem with the translation. Yet, in a collection of Pope Benedict’s last writings published this year, What Is Christianity?, he writes that the conceptual categories used by Anselm have “become for us incomprehensible.” He goes further and says that the idea of a contrast between a Father who insists on justice and a Son who accepts the cruel demands of justice “from the standpoint of Trinitarian theology, is in itself all wrong.” 

So what’s the alternative understanding of why Christ died? 

A short answer is provided in What is Christianity?, where Benedict says God’s participation in suffering is the “true intimate overcoming of evil that ultimately can be realized only in the suffering of love.” 

A longer and more surprising answer is in Introduction to Christianity, where he lays out a framework that sounds a lot like a version of Christian accelerationism. His focus is on Jesus as the “last Adam” referenced in 1 Corinthians 15:45: “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.”

Here’s the key passage: 

Faith sees in Jesus the man in whom on the biological plane the next evolutionary leap, as it were, has been accomplished; the man in whom the breakthrough out of the limited scope of humanity, out of its monadic enclosure, has occurred; the man in whom personalization and socialization no longer exclude each other but support each other; the man in whom perfect unity —”The body of Christ”, says St. Paul, and even more pointedly “You are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal 3:28) — and perfect individuality are one; the man in whom humanity comes into contact with its future and in the highest extent itself becomes its future, because through him it makes contact with God himself, shares in him, and thus realizes its most intrinsic potential. From here onward faith in Christ will see the beginning of a movement in which dismembered humanity is gathered together more and more into the being of one single Adam, one single ‘body’ — the man to come. It will see in him the movement to that future of man in which he is completely “socialized”, incorporated in one single being, but in such a way that the individual is not extinguished but brought completely to himself.

Here, and later, he references the thought of Teilhard de Chardin. I was not familiar with Teilhard before reading this book, but he was a Jesuit theologian and paleontologist/evolutionary theorist who later became controversial both within the Catholic Church and in the scientific establishment. It’s worth noting that, although Ratzinger includes a caveat that aspects of Teilhard’s work were objectionable, he never condemned him — in fact, he again cited him decades later while pope. 

To simplify, Teilhard saw the world progressing in terms of technology and society to a stage — the “omega point” — in which all humans and nature are brought together in one consciousness. It’s a concept with great overlap with the idea of a technological singularity. Ratzinger said that Teilhard performed a service by recasting the understanding of Christianity in such terms. 

Later, in a section on the promise that Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead, Ratzinger says that cosmos is history and it has a direction, namely toward the Omega Point. 

He writes that 

boundaries between nature and tech are already beginning to disappear…such processes hint at a kind of world in which spirit and nature do not simply stand alongside each other but in which spirit, in a new ‘complexification,’ draws what apparently is merely natural into itself, thereby creating a new world that at the same time necessarily means the end of the old one. Now the ‘end of the world’ in which the Christian believes is certainly something quite different from the total victory of technology. But the welding together of nature and spirit that occurs in it enables us to grasp in a new way how the reality of belief in the return of Christ is to be conceived: as faith in the final unification of reality by spirit or mind.” [Emphasis added]

Earlier, in the section on Anselm, citing John 12:32, Ratzinger writes “for history, God stands at the end, while for being he stands at the beginning.” The event of the crucifixion is a turning point at which the “man-monads are drawn into the embrace of Jesus Christ.”

The entire line of argument, for me, is a difficult one to comprehend. But I will say that one theme throughout the book is the elevation of the idea of the Communion of Saints, and, generally, the concept that communion and relation are constitutive properties of being for humans and the church, and that all are brought together in Jesus in this framework. 

3. Girardian thought

To follow up on the previous point, Ratzinger, in discussing the idea that being, for man, is dependent on others, makes a point that could be lifted straight out of René Girard. He doesn’t mention Girard, though, and as far as I can tell never cited Girard in any of his writings or speeches, even though they were contemporaries. 

To back up, Ratzinger cites the German philosopher Franz von Baader in (again) in rejecting the cogito of Descartes. Baader instead backed the idea of cogitor, ergo sum, namely that only by being known can man’s knowledge and himself be understood. As an example of this dependence on others, Ratzinger notes human reliance on the use of language, which was created by the whole of humanity throughout time. 

“Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual, but it comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, men is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for being who is ‘spirit in body,’” Ratzinger writes. 

All of that leads into this Girardian conclusion, that the Church and Christianity exist to save history and transform humanity as a collective. 

According to the Epistle to the Ephesians, Christ’s work of salvation consisted precisely in bringing to their knees the forces and power seen by Origen in his commentary on this passage as the collective power that encircle man: the power of the milieu, of national tradition; the conventional ‘they’ or ‘one’ that oppresses and destroys man. 

That reads like a reference to Girard’s understanding of “religion” (a term he uses in a negative sense) as the systems of the dynamics of mimetic rivalry that lead to an (evil) order in society through the scapegoating mechanism. To greatly simplify, the idea is that human desire is formed by mimesis, meaning by what is modeled as desirable by others. This naturally leads to rivalry with others and conflict that can only be relieved through scapegoating, namely by the sacrifice of some victim to content the rivals. In a complex society, the cycle of mimetic rivalry might include less visible conflict and violence but more subtle pressures and coercions for individuals. An example would be someone facing social sanctions for wearing the wrong clothes or flying the wrong flag. 

In Girard’s theory, Jesus’s death on the Cross represents the reversal of those otherwise universal systems of human relation. To the extent you’re not following Jesus, you are inevitably engaging in some form of culture that is really mimetic rivalry and evil. 

Ratzinger’s comments echo that framework, namely that salvation is Jesus countering the power of the milieu, with several related points. One is the idea of original sin — that no man can start from scratch, that everyone is part of a web of humanity, which is another way of saying that everyone is born into a culture that is shaped by mimetic rivalry. Another of his points is that being a Christian is in its first aim not an individual but a social charisma.

Of course, participation in “religion” in the Girardian sense is inevitable, and thus so is sin. Ratzinger touches on this point a few minutes later in a note on the Sermon on the Mount. Although many people can live up to the strictures against killing and committing adultery, for example, no one can avoid falling prey to anger, to envy, or to other smaller-scale sins. Yet, in doing so, they participate in the system of injustice that also extends to much larger and more serious sins. 

“If one takes the words of the sermon on the mount seriously…the beautiful black and white to which one is accustomed to divide men changes into the great of a universal twilight,” he writes. (As an aside, I would note that that is one of many passages throughout this and all of Ratzinger’s writings that stand in absolute contrast to the caricature of him as a reactionary martinet.)

“Let us be blunt, even at the risk of being misunderstood: the true Christian is not the denominational party member but he who through being a Christian has become truly human; not he who slavishly observes a system of norms, thinking as he does so only of himself, but he who has become freed to simple human goodness,” he writes.