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The Truth of the Resurrection | Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger | From
Introduction to Christianity
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To the Christian, faith in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is an expression of certainty that
the saying that seems to be only a beautiful dream is in fact true: "Love
is strong as death" (Song 8:6). In the Old Testament this sentence comes
in the middle of praises of the power of eros. But this by no means signifies that we can simply
push it aside as a lyrical exaggeration. The boundless demands of eros", its apparent exaggerations and extravagance, do in
reality give expression to a basic problem, indeed the" basic problem of human existence, insofar as they
reflect the nature and intrinsic paradox of love: love demands infinity,
indestructibility; indeed, it is, so to speak, a call for infinity. But it is
also a fact that this cry of love's cannot be satisfied, that it demands
infinity but cannot grant it; that it claims eternity but in fact is included
in the world of death, in its loneliness and its power of destruction. Only
from this angle can one understand what "resurrection" means. It is" the greater strength of love in face of death.
At the same time it is proof of what only immortality can create: being in the
other who still stands when I have fallen apart. Man is a being who himself
does not live forever but is necessarily delivered up to death. For him, since
he has no continuance in himself, survival, from a purely human point of view,
can only become possible through his continuing to exist in another. The
statements of Scripture about the connection between sin and death are to he
understood from this angle. For it now becomes clear that man's attempt
"to be like God", his striving for autonomy, through which he wishes
to stand on his own feet alone, means his death, for he just cannot stand on
his own. If man--and this is the real nature of sin--nevertheless refuses to
recognize his own limits and tries to be completely self-sufficient, then
precisely by adopting this attitude he delivers himself up to death.
Of course man does understand that his life alone does not endure and that he
must therefore strive to exist in others, so as to remain through them and in
them in the land of the living. Two ways in particular have been tried. First,
living on in one's own children: that is why in primitive peoples failure to
marry and childlessness are regarded as the most terrible curse; they mean
hopeless destruction, final death. Conversely, the largest possible number of
children offers at the same time the greatest possible chance of survival, hope
of immortality, and thus the most genuine blessing that man can expect. Another
way discloses itself when man discovers that in his children he only continues
to exist in a very unreal way; he wants more of himself to remain. So he takes
refuge in the idea of fame, which should make him really immortal if be lives
on through all ages in the memory of others. But this second attempt of man's
to obtain immortality for himself by existing in others fails just as badly as
the first: what remains is not the self but only its echo, a mere shadow. So
self-made immortality is really only a Hades, a sheol": more nonbeing than being. The inadequacy of both ways
lies partly in the fact that the other person who holds my being after my death
cannot carry this being itself but only its echo; and even more in the fact
that even time other person to whom I have, so to speak, entrusted my
continuance will not last--he, too, will perish.
This leads us to the next step. We have seen so far that man has no permanence
in himself. And consequently can only continue to exist in another but that his
existence in another is only shadowy and once again not final, because this
other must perish, too. If this is so, then only one could truly give lasting
stability: he who is, who does not come into existence and pass away again but
abides in the midst of transience: the God of the living, who does not hold
just the shadow and echo of my being, whose ideas are not just copies of
reality. I myself am his thought, which establishes me more securely, so to
speak, than I am in myself; his thought is not the posthumous shadow but the
original source and strength of my being. In him I can stand as more than a shadow;
in him I am truly closer to myself than I should be if I just tried to stay by
myself.
Before we return from here to the Resurrection, let us try to see the same
thing once again from a somewhat different side. We can start again from the
dictum about love and death and say: Only where someone values love more highly
than life, that is, only where someone is ready to put life second to love, for
the sake of love, can love be stronger and more than death. If it is to be more
than death, it must first be more than mere life. But if it could be this, not
just in intention but in reality, then that would mean at the same time that
the power of love had risen superior to the power of the merely biological and
taken it into its service. To use Teilhard de Chardin's terminology; where that
took place, the decisive complexity or "complexification" would have occurred;
bios, too, would be encompassed
by and incorporated in the power of love. It would cross the boundary--death--and
create unity where death divides. If the power of love for another were so
strong somewhere that it could keep alive not just his memory, the shadow of
his "I", but that person himself, then a new stage in life would have
been reached. This would mean that the realm of biological evolutions and
mutations had been left behind and the leap made to a quite different plane, on
which love was no longer subject to bios but made use of it. Such a final stage of "mutation" and
"evolution" would itself no longer be a biological stage; it would
signify the end of the sovereignty of bios, which is at the same time the sovereignty of death; it would open up
the realm that the Greek Bible calls zoe, that is, definitive life, which has left behind the rule of death.
The last stage of evolution needed by the world to reach its goal would then no
longer be achieved within the realm of biology but by the spirit, by freedom,
by love. It would no longer be evolution but decision and gift in one.
But what has all this to do, it may be asked, with faith in the Resurrection of
Jesus? Well, we previously considered the question of the possible immortality
of man from two sides, which now turn out to be aspects of one and. the same state
of affairs. We said that, as man has no permanence in himself, his survival
could. only be brought about by his living on in another. And we said, from the
point of view of this "other", that only the love that takes up the
beloved in itself, into its own being, could make possible this existence in
the other. These two complementary aspects are mirrored again, so it seems to
me, in the two New Testament ways of describing the Resurrection of the Lord:
"Jesus has risen" and "God (the Father) has awakened
Jesus." The two formulas meet in the fact that Jesus' total love for men,
which leads him to the Cross, is perfected in totally passing beyond to the
Father and therein becomes stronger than death, because in this it is at the
same time total "being held" by him.
From this a further step results. We can now say that love always establishes
some kind of immortality; even in its prehuman stage, it points, in the form of
preservation of the species, in this direction. Indeed, this founding of
immortality is not something incidental to love, not one thing that it does
among others, but what really gives it its specific character. This principle
can be reversed; it then signifies that immortality always" proceeds from love, never out of the autarchy of
that which is sufficient to itself. We may even be bold enough to assert that
this principle, properly understood, also applies even to God as he is seen by
the Christian faith. God, too, is absolute permanence, as opposed to everything
transitory, for the reason that he is the relation of three Persons to one
another, their incorporation in the "for one another" of love,
act-substance of the love that is absolute and therefore completely
"relative", living only "in relation to". As we said
earlier, it is not autarchy, which knows no one but itself, that is divine;
what is revolutionary about the Christian view of the world and of God, we
found, as opposed to those of antiquity, is that it learns to understand the
"absolute" as absolute "relatedness", as relatio
subsistens.

To return to our argument, love is the foundation of immortality, and
immortality proceeds from love alone. This statement to which we have now
worked our way also means that he who has love for all has established
immortality for all. That is precisely the meaning of the biblical statement that
his Resurrection is our life.
The--to us--curious reasoning of St. Paul in his First Letter to the
Corinthians now becomes comprehensible: if he has risen, then we have, too, for
then love is stronger than death; if he has not risen, then we have not either,
for then the situation is still that death has the last word, nothing else (cf.
I Cor 15:16f.). Since this is a statement of central importance, let us spell
it out once again in a different way: Either love is stronger than death, or it
is not. If it has become so in him, then it became so precisely as love for
others. This also means, it is true, that our own love, left to itself, is not
sufficient to overcome death; taken in itself it would have to remain an
unanswered cry. It means that only his love, coinciding with God's own power of
life and love, can be the foundation of our immortality. Nevertheless, it still
remains true that the mode of our immortality will depend on our mode of
loving. We shall have to return to this in the section on the Last Judgment.
A further point emerges from this discussion. Given the foregoing
considerations, it goes without saying that the life of him who has risen from
the dead is not once again bios, the biological form of our mortal life within
history; it is zoe, new,
different, definitive life; life that has stepped beyond the mortal realm of
bios and history, a realm that has here been surpassed by a greater power. And
in fact the Resurrection narratives of the New Testament allow us to see
clearly that the life of the Risen One lies, not within the historical bios,
but beyond and above it. It is also true, of course, that this new life begot
itself in history and had to do so, because after all it is there for history,
and the Christian message is basically nothing else than the transmission of
the testimony that love has managed to break through death here and thus has
transformed fundamentally the situation of all of us. Once we have realized
this, it is no longer difficult to find the right kind of hermeneutics for the
difficult business of expounding the biblical Resurrection narratives, that is,
to acquire a clear understanding of the sense in which they must properly be
understood. Obviously we cannot attempt here a detailed discussion of the
questions involved, which today present themselves in a more difficult form
than ever before; especially as historical and--for the most part inadequately pondered--philosophical
statements are becoming more and more inextricably intertwined, and exegesis
itself quite often produces its own philosophy, which is intended to appear to the
layman as a supremely refined distillation of the biblical evidence. Many
points of detail will here always remain open to discussion, but it is possible
to recognize a fundamental dividing line between explanation that remains
explanation and arbitrary adaptations [to contemporary ways of thinking].
First of all, it is quite clear that after his Resurrection Christ did not go
back to his previous earthly life, as we are told the young man of Nain and
Lazarus did. He rose again to definitive life, which is no longer governed by
chemical and biological laws and therefore stands outside the possibility of
death, in the eternity conferred by love. That is why the encounters with him
are "appearances"; that is why he with whom people had sat at table
two days earlier is not recognized by his best friends and, even when
recognized, remains foreign: only where he grants vision is he
seen; only when he opens men's eyes and makes their hearts open up can the countenance
of the eternal love that conquers death become recognizable in our mortal
world, and, in that love, the new, different world, the world of him who is to
come. That is also why it is so difficult, indeed absolutely impossible, for the
Gospels to describe the encounter with the risen Christ; that is why they can
only stammer when they speak of these meetings and seem to provide
contradictory descriptions of them. In reality they are surprisingly unanimous
in the dialectic of their statements, in the simultaneity of touching and not
touching, or recognizing and not recognizing, of complete identity between the
crucified and the risen Christ and complete transformation. People recognize
the Lord and yet do not recognize him again; people touch him, and yet he is untouchable;
he is the same and yet quite different. As we have said, the dialectic is always
the same; it is only the stylistic means by which it is expressed that changes.
For example, let us examine a little more closely from this point of view the
Emmaus story, which we have already touched upon briefly. At first sight it
looks as if we are confronted here with a completely earthly and material
notion of resurrection; as if nothing remains of the mysterious and indescribable
elements to be found in the Pauline accounts. It looks as if the tendency to
detailed depiction, to the concreteness of legend, supported by the apologist's
desire for something tangible, had completely won the upper hand and fetched
the risen Lord right back into earthly history. But this impression is soon
contradicted by his mysterious appearance and his no less mysterious
disappearance. The notion is contradicted even more by the fact that here, too,
he remains unrecognizable to the accustomed eye. He cannot be firmly grasped as
he could be in the time of his earthly life; he is discovered only in the realm
of faith; he sets the hearts of the two travelers aflame by his interpretation
of the Scriptures and by breaking bread he opens their eyes. This is a
reference to the two basic elements in early Christian worship, which consisted
of the liturgy of the word (the reading and expounding of Scripture) and the
eucharistic breaking of bread. In this way the evangelist makes it clear that
the encounter with the risen Christ lies on a quite new plane; he tries to describe
the indescribable in terms of the liturgical facts. He thereby provides both a
theology of the Resurrection and a theology of the liturgy: one encounters the risen
Christ in the word and in the sacrament; worship is the way in which he becomes
touchable to us and, recognizable as the living Christ. And conversely, the
liturgy is based on the mystery of Easter; it is to he understood as the Lords approach
to us. In it he becomes our traveling companion, sets our dull hearts aflame,
and opens our sealed eyes. He still walks with us, still finds us worried and
downhearted, and still has the power to make us see.
Of course, all this is only half the story; to stop at this alone would mean
falsifying the evidence of the New Testament. Experience of the risen Christ is
something other than a meeting with a man from within our history, and it must certainly
not be traced back to conversations at table and recollections that would have
finally crystallized in the idea that he still lived and went about his business.
Such an interpretation reduces what happened to the purely human level and robs
it of its specific quality. The Resurrection narratives are something other and
more than disguised liturgical scenes: they make visible the founding event on
which all Christian liturgy rests. They testify to an approach that did not
rise from the hearts of the disciples but came to them from outside, convinced
them despite their doubts and
made them certain that the Lord had truly risen. He who lay in the grave is no longer
there; he--really he himself--lives. He who had been transposed into the other
world of God showed himself powerful enough to make it palpably clear that he
himself stood in their presence again, that in him the power of love had really
proved itself stronger than the power of death.
Only by taking this just as seriously as what we said first does one remain
faithful to the witness borne by the New Testament; only thus, too, is its
seriousness in world history preserved. The comfortable attempt to spare
oneself the belief in the mystery of God's mighty actions in this world and yet
at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the
biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason
nor to the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and
"religion within the bounds of pure reason"; a choice is unavoidable.
He who believes will see more and more clearly, it is true, how rational it is
to have faith in the love that has conquered death.
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| From Christ, The Ideal of the Priest
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