Introduction to Christianity

Part 3, The Meaning of the World is a Person

One more post sharing reflections on faith from Joseph Ratzinger's (the late Pope Benedict XVI) popular book Introduction to Christianity. 

Again, Ratzinger's famous definition of faith concerns the meaning-fullness of existence, a meaning upon which I take a stand. Ratzinger reflecting more on that idea:

The tool with which man is equipped to deal with the truth of being is not knowledge but understanding: understanding of the meaning to which he has entrusted himself. And we must certainly add that "understanding" only reveals itself in "standing", not apart from it. One cannot occur without the other, for understanding means seizing and grasping as meaning the meaning that man has received as ground. I think that is the precise significance of what we mean by understanding: that we learn to grasp the ground on which we have taken our stand as meaning and truth; that we learn to perceive that ground represents meaning. 

The contrast Ratzinger is making here between knowledge and understanding is the difference between scientific insight and technological mastery--what Jacques Ellul calls technique, "the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity"--with an understanding of human existence that embeds us in the fullness of truth, beauty and goodness. For Ratzinger, coming to trust in that fullness, taking a stand upon that ground, is faith. 

But there is more. What makes the ground of life meaning-full is that it subsists in the Logos. Existence is meaning-full because material existence isn't lifeless and inert but is held and ordered by the Logos--the Word, the Mind, the Intelligibility, the Meaning. But most importantly, the Logos is the Person.

The Logos is more than the Rationality and Meaning-fullness of created existence. The Logos is a Person--the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, who became incarnate in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus, taking a stand upon the Meaning-fullness of Existence is not an exercise in existential philosophy. Even though the Logos is Rationality Itself, our relationship with the Logos isn't solely or primarily intellectual. The Logos is a Person. Thus, meaning is inherently relational. 

Ratzinger observes:

In all that has been said so far the most fundamental feature of Christian faith or belief has still not been specified; namely, its personal character. Christian faith is more than the option in favor of a spiritual ground to the world; its central formula is not "I believe in something", but "I believe in you." It is the encounter with the man Jesus, and in this encounter it experiences the meaning of the world as a person...In [Jesus'] life, in the unconditional devotion of himself to men, the meaning of the world is present before us...The meaning of the world is the "you"...

...Christian faith lives on the discovery that not only is there such a thing as objective meaning but that this meaning knows me and loves me, that I can entrust myself to it like a child who knows that everything he may be wondering about is safe in the "you" of his mother. 

Or, stated even more simply, Ratzinger shares this lovely line:

[We live in] a world that in the last analysis is not mathematics but love.

That is Christian faith in a nutshell, the conviction that the ground of the world isn't mathematics but love, and that taking a stand upon this love, relationally entrusting yourself to this love, is the very ground of your existence.