"This [the last post] also clarifies the root of the conception of creation: 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 which 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, thinking, creates freedom, thus making freedom the structural form of all being."


-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity,
   Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1992, p. 110.

And so, in the end, love alone matters!

"The Christian belief in God is not completely identical with either of these two solutions [matter or mind].  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 independence discloses itself to him who looks more closely as mere appearance.  On the contrary, 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.  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 true self-being."


--- Ibid. p. 110


This is most important: "Creative Freedom", God, is so magnanimous, so generous, so selfless, so overflowing with Charity, that It has created creatures that are also free beings!  Thus, creation points to an utterly, absolutely, and sovereignly free Creator, who does not feel at all threatened to allow His creatures to participate in His freedom, so that they may indeed be acting as truly free agents, who in their own right can think, create, decide, choose, make!  Thus, the Original Freedom is also Love!  Thus, we have this "equation": Logos=Consciousness=Creative=Freedom=Love!
Amen!  Deo Gratias!

"Loneliness is indubitably one of the basic roots from which man's encounter with God grew up.  Where man experiences his solitariness, he experiences at the same time how much his existence is a cry for the 'You' and how ill-adpated he is to be only an 'I' in himself.  This loneliness can become apparent to man on various levels.  To start with it can be comforted by the discovery of a human 'You'.  But then there is the paradox that, as Claudel says, every 'You' found by man finally turns out to be an unfulfilled and unfulfillable promise; that every 'You" is at bottom another disappointment and that there comes a point when no encounter can surmount the final loneliness: the very process of finding and having found thus becomes a pointer back to the loneliness, a call to the absolute 'You' that really descends into the depths of one's own 'I'.  But even here it remains true that it is not only the need born of loneliness, the experience that no sense of community fills up all our longing, which leads to the experience of God; it can just as well proceed from the joy of security.  The very fulfillment of love, of finding one another, can cause man to experience the gift of what he could neither call up nor create and make him recognize that in it he receives more than either of the two could contribute.  The brightness and joy of of finding one another can point to the proximity of absolute joy and of the simple fact of being found which stands behind every human encounter."

-- Ibid.

"Thus faith is the finding of a 'You' that bears me up and amid all the unfulfilled -- and in the last resort unfulfillable -- hope of human encounters gives the promise of an indestructible love which not only longs for eternity but guarantees it.  Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning, but this meaning knows me and loves me, I can entrust myself to it like a child that knows all its questions answered in the 'You' of its mother.  Thus in the last analysis believing, trusting and loving are one, and all the theses around which belief revolves are only concrete expressions of the all-embracing about-turn, of the assertion 'I believe in You' -- of the discovery of God in the countenance of the man Jesus of Nazareth."

--  Ibid.


This is Ratzinger's unique Christian existentialism!  This is how he has successfully demonstrated the perfect correspondence between object of the Christian faith and the deepest desires of the human heart -- it is an encounter with a Person, who alone can fill it.  This is why faith matters, even in the day-to-day living -- it bears our existence up and keeps it from sinking into despair (especially in this dreadful weather!!!).

"Let us return after this little detour to ask once again and more comprehensively: what is belief really?  We can now reply like this: it is a way of taking up a stand in the totality of reality, a way that cannot be reduced to knowledge and is incommensurable by knowledge;  it is the bestowal of meaning with 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.  For in fact man does  not live on the bread of practicality alone;  he lives as man and, precisely in the intrinsically human part of his being, on the word, on love, on meaning.  Meaning is the bread on which man, in the intrinsically human part of his being, subsists.  Without word, without meaning, without love he falls into the situation of no-longer-being-able-to-live, even when earthly comfort is present in abundance.  Everyone knows how sharply this situation of "not being able to go on any more" can arise in the midst of outward abundance.  But meaning is not derived from knowledge.  To try to manufacture it in this way, that is, out of the provable knowledge of what can be made, would resemble Baron Munchhausen's absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair.  I believe that the absurdity of this story mirrors very accurately the basic situation of man.  No one can pull himself up out of the bog of uncertainty, of not-being-able-to-live, by his own exertions;  nor can we pull ourselves up, as Descartes still thought we could, by a 'cogito ergo sum', by a series of intellectual deductions.  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."


-- Ibid., pp 42-43


At this moment, I am thinking of Christopher Hitchens, . . . 

". . . belief signifies the decision that at the very core of human existence there is a point which cannot be nourished and supported on the visible and tangible, which encounters and comes into contact with what cannot be seen and finds that it is a necessity for its own existence."

-- Ibid.


Belief remains a decision to go beyond feelings, beyond the sensible world - Always!  And yet, it is also a personal decision resulted from an encounter with a Person . . . .

Thought for the day . . .

"Man's natural center of gravity draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own.  He has to turn round inwardly in order to see how badly he is neglecting his own interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural center of gravity.  He must turn round to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes.  Without this change of direction, without this resistance to the natural center of gravity, there can be no belief."

-- Ratzinger's Introduction to Christianity (published by Ignatius Press, 1992)

Exactly!  Even for believers, there must be this on-going "turning round" if
faith is to remain.

This is a test