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Not my “Faith on Sunday”

Yes, you guessed it – another Sunday, another rant against the “Faith and Reason” column of the “Our Faith on Sunday” newsletter.¹ This time the topic being butchered is the relationship between science and faith – a topic close to my heart, brain and mind.

To make matters worse, the column actually starts with an encouraging statement (“Could this be the first one that’s not utterly muddled?,” I ask myself while reading the opening lines.):

“[R]eason and faith can never truly be in opposition[, and] neither can science and religion[, since] the truths they seek are, once discovered, perfectly reconcilable.”

But then the column’s unidentified author returns to form and veers off into the morasses of confusion:

“[I]t cannot be too often repeated that the truths each seeks are in different orders of knowledge.”

Actually, it ought never to be repeated again! What a heretically dualist worldview lurks behind this sentence! As a Christian I believe in one Truth – God. The Truth that expresses the workings of the universe as much as it does the inner life of the Trinity. All truth, regardless of its object, is a manifestation of the Truth and, as such, is of equal standing. To suggest that truths pertaining to events accessible via the scientific method, reason, faith or religion are of different natures or orders is to place one’s world view alongside Gnostic dualism – a world view that divorces nature from God, joy from charity, beauty from experience and truth from reason.

“It is altogether outside the scope of natural science to enquire into the origin of the universe, because its origin is super-natural.”

This is neither self-evident (why couldn’t the universe have existed ab æterno?) nor does it follow from the scientific method’s principles and constraints (empirical data being pursuable, repeatability being a meaningful goal and evidence-theory consistency being seekable). Science is perfectly capable of enquiring into the origins of the universe and I would like to argue that it’s findings enrich me as a Christian in spelling out the workings of the existence that I believe God created. By this I don’t mean to suggest that science has fully explained the origins of the universe (what happened before the big bang, or even during the Planck epoch at its very beginning? where did the laws governing the quantum states of matter and the expansion following the initial singularity come from?), or even that I believe that it will. To go from there to asserting that “it is altogether outside the scope of natural science to enquire into the origin of the universe” is a fallacious leap and one that I categorically decline.

“Science treats of natural phenomena, i.e. things that fall under the purview of human sense perception (with or without the aid of scientific instruments). But the origin of the universe is a question about the origin of natural phenomena in general.

Let me pick up here on two misconceptions that bubble under the surface of the above two quotes. First, that somehow science is more dependent on sensory perception than religion is. How is it that I first learned about God, Jesus, the life of the Saints, the teachings of the Church, the love shown to me by my family, friends, strangers? How is it that St. Peter came to be a follower of Jesus or St. Francis develop his love for the poor? Did this take place in some supernatural, a-sensory world of ideas, or was it by sight, hearing and touch that the Gospel first reached me and continues to affect me? To deny the necessity (without saying sufficiency!) of sensory perception for the development of faith is to deny the Bible’s insistence on God seeing “that it was good” throughout the process of creation (cf. Genesis 1:10). Second, the above also suggests a very narrow, naïve view of science – a science that is constrained by sensory perception (albeit aided by “scientific instruments”). To my mind this is at best a mediaeval view, conjuring up images of astronomers looking through telescopes. Contemporary science is certainly reliant on evidence, but to claim that this is only on the basis of human sensory perception with or without the aid of instrumentation is somewhat naïve. What human sensory perception is being aided in the case of measurements of the universe’s background radiation?

“Now it is only in transcending the order of phenomena by human reasoning that we can hope to give a satisfactory answer to the question.”

What is the column’s author referring to here? Theoretical physics? He might as well be (although I don’t think that was their intention). Isn’t it a “transcending of phenomena by human reasoning” that is the bread and butter of theoretical physics? How are M-theory or the initial postulating of the Higgs Boson bound by phenomena? They are open to verification and potential consistency or inconsistency with empirical data, but no one would deny their scientific nature even during the very long stretches of time when no evidence is available either in agreement or contradiction with them.

Not to be just destructive, let me propose my alternative to the above science-religion positioning (while keeping its first sentence) and open myself too to criticism. For the sake of greater specificity, let me attempt to do so from a Christian, rather than a generic religious perspective:

“Reason and faith can never truly be in opposition, and neither can science and religion, since the truths they seek are, once discovered, perfectly reconcilable. Here science seeks to predict the events of the material world by striving for consistency between theory and empirical data. Such theories often start in unstructured, intuitive ways, before being developed with formal rigor and confronted with data gathered using means of measurement that both aid repeatability and extend far beyond what is within the reach of human senses. Christianity supplements the scientific view with the truths revealed in the person of Jesus – the God who became man – and by those revealed to the people of Israel before him. While some of these are extra-empirical, others are not, and their understanding is furthered by the application of the same reason that is also applied to science.”

¹ The previous ones having protested against the abuse of “cf.,” the perversion of philosophy and a plagiaristic ignorance of infinity.

Pope Francis: Jesus in the Church and in every person

Earlier today Pope Francis addressed the cardinals and I would just like to share with you the points from his talk that most stood out for me:

Referring to the period culminating in the conclave, Pope Francis said: “In this very cordial atmosphere our reciprocal knowledge of one another and mutual openness to one another, grew. And this is good because we are brothers. [… W]e are that community, that friendship, that closeness, that will do good for every one of us.” To my mind he yet again places himself among, not above the cardinals, just as he did immediately after his election when he refused to sit on the raised papal throne and instead welcomed the cardinals’ pledge of obedience standing at their level.
Emphasizing the role of the Holy Spirit. he said: “He, the Paraclete, is the supreme protagonist of every initiative and manifestation of faith. It’s interesting and it makes me think. The Paraclete creates all the differences in the Church and seems like an apostle of Babel. On the other hand, the Paraclete unifies all these differences – not making them equal – but in harmony with one another.” Here I was particularly pleased to see Pope Francis’ underlining of the concept of unity in diversity (rather than identity) that Benedict XVI also pointed to repeatedly.
“Stimulated by the Year of Faith, all together, pastors and faithful, we will make an effort to respond faithfully to the eternal mission: to bring Jesus Christ to humanity, and to lead humanity to an encounter with Jesus Christ: the Way, the Truth and the Life, truly present in the Church and, at the same time, in every person.” Jesus is in every person, within and outwith the Church, and it is for us to to facilitate for others to encounter him. This is an all-inclusive and non-imposing stance that I derive great joy from.
Pope Francis then returned to the Holy Spirit, who “is the soul of the Church, with His life-giving and unifying strength. Of many He makes a single body – the mystical Body of Christ. Let us never give in to pessimism, to that bitterness that the devil tempts us with every day.” Aside from his reference to the devil, which already in the few speeches since his election seems to me more prominent than it was in Benedict’s language – but even with it, this is again a very positive, hope-filled and forward-looking take on the challenges ahead.

I look forward to getting a better grasp on Pope Francis’ mindset, but I am greatly encouraged by everything I have heard so far!

Pope Francis: "Brothers and sisters, good evening!"

Habemus Papam!

Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio of the Society of Jesus, born in Argentina of Italian parents, is Pope Francis. His election fills me with joy and a great desire to find out as much about him as possible and to support him with my prayers and actions.

Already the words he shared from the balcony of St. Peter’s this evening are a joy to receive (and, please, do stay away from the ghastly BBC translation that obscures the humility, immediacy and ease of his words – their original being here in Italian and the following containing my own, crude translation):

He starts with a simple greeting: “Brothers and sisters, good evening!” No pomp and circumstance – just a plain, fraternal greeting.
Then: a joke! “You know that the job of the Conclave was to provide Rome with a bishop. It seems as if my brother cardinals went almost to the ends of the earth to get him …”
Next, a call to prayer for Pope emeritus Benedict XVI – and not just a call but an actual prayer! Pope Francis leads those present in St. Peter’s square and all following him live over the internet by reciting the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory Be there and then
What follows then is the core message of his greeting: “And now we begin this journey: bishop and people. This journey of the Church of Rome, which presides in charity over all the Churches. A journey of fraternity, of love, of trust among us. We always pray for each other. We pray for the whole world, so that fraternity may grow in it.” Journey. Fraternity. Churches. World.
What comes next is a masterclass in humility and in being serious about the fraternity which his very first words expressed and which punctuated his message: “I would like to ask you for a favor: before the bishop blesses the people, I ask you that you pray to the Lord that He bless me: the prayer of the people, asking a blessing for its bishop. In silence, lets make this prayer of you over me.” Pope Francis then bows his head for a good 15 seconds to receive the blessing he requested.
Only then does Pope Francis turn to the expected “Urbi et Orbi” blessing after which he shares is plans for tomorrow: to pray to Mary for the protection of Rome.

In an attempt to learn more about Pope Francis, and wanting to do so from his own words as opposed to journalistic analyses or lists of dates, places and offices held, I first had to get past the myriad permutations of his biography now flooding the web (a particularly good and extensive one being here, and a more telegraphic one here).

The first source I arrived at are his homilies and pastoral messages as the Archbishop of Buenos Aires, whose archive is available here in Spanish. Here, let me just pick out a couple of passages from his Lenten message, dated 13th Februray 2013 and therefore serving as a very recent glimpse of his mindset. These lines seem to me to give a sense both of his concerns and of his style (translation again mine – apologies for its crudeness):

“Bit by bit we are getting used to hearing and seeing, through the mass media, the dark chronicles of contemporary society, presented almost with perverted joy, and we are getting used to touching and feeling it in our environment and in our own flesh. […] We live with murderous violence that destroys families and intensifies wars and conflicts in so many of the world’s countries. We live with envy, hatred, slander, worldliness in our heard. The suffering of the innocent and peaceful keeps slapping us; the contempts for the rights of the most fragile persons and countries are not far from us; the rule of money with its demonic effects like drugs, corruption, human trafficking – including of children – together with material and moral misery are currency. The destruction of decent work, painful emigrations and the lack of a future also join this symphony. Our errors and sins as Church aren’t left out of this large panorama either. [… All of this] speaks to us about our limitations, about our weakness and about our incapacity to transform this endless list of destructive realities.

The trap of powerlessness makes us think: Does it make sense to try and change all of this? Can we do something in the face of this situation? Is it worth trying, if the world continues its carnival dance that masks everything for a while? Nevertheless, when the mask slips, the truth appears and, in spite of it sounding anachronistic to many, sin appears again, which wounds our flesh with all its destructive force and twists the destinies of the world and of history.

Lent presents itself to us as a cry of truth and of hope, certain to answer a yes to the possibility of no longer putting on make-up and painting on plastic smiles as if nothing was going on. Yes, it is possible for everything to become new and different because God continues to be “rich in goodness and mercy, always ready to forgive” and encourages us to start again. Today we are invited again to undertake a Paschal journey towards Life, a journey that includes the cross and renunciation, that will be uncomfortable but not in vain. We are invited to recognize that something is not right in ourselves, in society or in the Church, to change, to turn, to convert ourselves.”

The second source I’d like to just mention is a book he co-authored with Rabbi Abraham Skorka, head of the Latin-American Rabbinical School, entitled “On Heaven and Earth,” where the two discuss a variety of topics from Christian and Jewish perspectives, seeking common ground while each remaining faithful to their own religion. In many ways this reminds me of Cardinal Martini and Umberto Eco’s dialogue, which I am a great fan of. For now, let me just pick out the following passage from this very promising book:

“Dialogue is born of an attitude of respect towards another person, of a conviction that the other has something good to say; it requires that we make space in our heard their point of view, their opinion and their position. Dialoguing involves a heartfelt welcome and not prior condemnation. To dialogue, one has to lower ones defenses, open the doors of one’s home and offer human warmth.”

Viva il Papa!

Breathe, think, struggle, love: pray

To me one of the highlights of the last weeks has been the ability to follow Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi’s Lenten spiritual exercises, delivered to the Vatican’s staff and to Pope Benedict XVI before his resignation. Being able to download them as podcasts, or purchasing their text in book form, means that anyone (who understands Italian :|) can follow them and in effect participate in an event that in the past would have been open to only a very select audience. I don’t mean to dwell on the fact of this new openness and would instead like to focus on the specific content that Cardinal Ravasi created and shared.

I have to admit that I am a huge fan of Cardinal Ravasi and have been ever since I first found out about the Courtyard of the Gentiles initiative launched by Benedict XVI and executed by the Pontifical Council for Culture under Ravasi’s leadership. The Courtyard fosters dialogue between believers and non-believers and has resulted in multiple events already at which Christian, agnostic and atheist speakers were invited to speak about different topics (the first one was in Paris and subsequent ones took place also in Stockholm and Assisi). Instead of just being a job that Ravasi has to oversee, this open, broad dialogue comes across as a core passion of his and a thread that can be traced through his publications and talks. In many ways Ravasi takes a similar view of the believer/non-believer dichotomy as Cardinal Martini did (who asserted that there is a part of both in each one of us, including himself), by declaring it as unhelpful and quoting Nietzsche, who said that “Only a person of deep faith can afford the luxury of skepticism.” Ravasi has also been quoted as saying that “[h]alf of my friends are non-believers” and answering “Absolutely not.” when asked whether he wanted to convert atheists. In short – a cardinal very much after my own heart and one who, I believe, embodies the following verse from the Gospel: “For whoever is not against us is for us.” (Mark 9:40).

Let me now return to the Lenten spiritual exercises that Cardinal Ravasi lead in the Vatican only a couple of weeks ago. Their theme was “The Face of God and the Face of the Human Person in the Prayers of the Psalms” and they consisted of 17 half-hour talks delivered over the course of a week. The topics spanned a very broad spectrum from creation, via wisdom, suffering and happiness to the family and immortality, to name but a few. While their backbone were the Psalms, Ravasi – in his characteristically open-minded style – took advantage of the insights of sources as diverse as Kierkegaard, Planck, Evdokimov, Bloch and the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III – just to give you a flavor …

The first thing that attracted me to this theme, beyond being delighted that it was Ravasi whom Benedict XVI picked to deliver it, is the fact that the Psalms are essentially the collection of prayers that Jesus himself used. Jesus, being a Jew, grew up with the Psalms as his prayer book, which means that when I pray with their help, I am following his example and am united with him. As soon as I heard that these spiritual exercises were centered around the Psalms, my first thought was immediately directed to prayer, which made it particularly pleasing that this was precisely the subject of Ravasi’s first talk too.

That’s where my ability to anticipate Ravasi’s moves ended though and his take on prayer was both novel, greatly thought provoking and deeply enjoyable. Instead of trying to give you an overview of all 17 talks, which I highly recommend in full, let me at least share what to me were the first talk’s highlights.¹

To begin with, Ravasi approaches prayer by setting out to “outline the essential map of its structure,” which he does by identifying the four verbs of prayer. The first is “breathing,” which he kicks off by quoting Kierkegaard: “Rightly the ancient peoples used to say that praying is breathing. It shows how foolish it is to talk about whether one has to pray. Why do I breathe? Because, otherwise I would die. That is also how it is with prayer.” The link to the Psalms then comes in the form of highlighting that there is a single Hebrew word – nefesh – for “soul” and “throat,” which allows for a dual reading, e.g., of Psalm 42:3 “My soul/throat thirsts for God, the living God.” This in turn emphasizes a “physicality,” which leads Ravasi to the following exhortation:

“We, therefore, have to recover that spontaneity and constancy of an explicit, praying breath that the woman of the Song of Songs [… expressed as] “I was sleeping, but my heart was awake.” (5:2). Faith, like love, does not take up only some hours of existence, but is its soul, a constant breathing.”

The second verb of prayer is “thinking,” which leads Ravasi to the following affirmation: “Prayer is not simply an emotion. It has to involve reason and the will, reflection and passion, truth and action.” The model here is Mary, who, after giving birth to Jesus is reported by Luke to have “kept all these things, reflecting on them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19). Ravasi then digs deeper into the Greek word symballousa that is translated in the Gospel as “reflecting” and points out that its meaning is more of a “joining together in transcendent unity,” which is the “true “thinking” according to God.” The part on prayer as thinking concludes with a quote from Wittgenstein’s notes from World War I, where he says: “Praying is thinking about the meaning of life.”

“Struggling” is then the third verb of prayer, which has its roots in Jacob, Job and Jesus. Jacob, who at Penuel (Genesis 32:23-33) wrestled a mysterious, unknown being, so strong that it not only changed Jacob’s life and mission, but even his name (to Israel). This struggle is later referred to by Hosea as a cry to God and therefore a prayer: “He contended with an angel and prevailed, he wept and entreated him.” (Hosea 12:5). Job’s struggling prayer even refers to God as follows: “He pierces me, thrust upon thrust, rushes at me like a warrior.” (Job 16:14). Finally, in Jesus this aspect of prayer finds its peak on the cross, where he cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mathew 27:46), quoting verse 2 of Psalm 22 in his moment of extreme suffering.

The verbs of prayer culminate in “loving,” which Ravasi introduces by quoting from St. John of the Cross’ Spiritual Canticle and thereby smoothly transitioning from struggle:

“Where have You hidden Yourself,
And abandoned me in my groaning, O my Beloved?
You have fled like the hart,
Having wounded me.
I ran after You, crying; but You were gone.”

Next, Ravasi introduces the transcendence and inaccessibility of God that is prominent in some religions and starts with the example of the Sumerians, who said about their chief deity, Enlil, that he was “like a knotted bundle of yarn than no one could untangle, like jumbled-up threads where no end is to be seen.” In Christianity the relationship is one of intimacy instead, since God is addressed as “abba” – Father (or more precisely, “daddy”) and this closeness can also be seen in some aspects of Islam, from where Ravasi quotes the 8th century Muslim mystic Rābiʿah al-Baṣrī:

“My Lord,
Each love is now alone with his beloved.
And I am alone with You.”

Finally, Ravasi concludes by the following passage from Psalm 123:1-2 and leaves us in a “silent meeting of gazes, where prayerful contemplation blossoms”:

“To you I raise my eyes,
to you enthroned in heaven.
Yes, like the eyes of servants
on the hand of their masters,
Like the eyes of a maid
on the hand of her mistress,
So our eyes are on the LORD our God,
till we are shown favor.”

¹ All quotes from Ravasi’s talks here are my own translations from Italian – their crudeness is all mine.

Gödel, Church teaching, Holy Spirit

Gödel

One of the most disconcerting, but profoundly beautiful pieces of Mathematics are Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which he proved in 1931 and which show that “no consistent system of axioms […] is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers […]. For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system [… and] that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.”

Here axioms are a system’s premises or starting points that are taken for granted (as self-evident or as expressing a property of the entities the system refers to), and are not provable within that system, and theorems are statements derived from these axioms. Gödel’s theorems therefore say that no matter how complex a system of consistent axioms (i.e., axioms that cannot lead both to a theorem and its negation), the set of all possible theorems derived from it will not include all true statements about natural numbers. In other words, that there exists an arithmetic statement that is true but not provable within that system of axioms (i.e., not derivable from them). Gödel achieves this using an ingenious device – the so-called “Gödel sentence” – which in essence claims that it (the Gödel sentence) cannot be proved within a given, consistent axiomatic system.

If this theorem (the Gödel sentence) could be proved using a system’s axioms, then the system would contain a theorem that contradicts itself (i.e., the theorem stating that it cannot be proved would be proved). The system would therefore be inconsistent. However, since the axiomatic system is consistent, the theorem cannot be proved within it. The system’s consistency renders the theorem both true and outside the system. The system is therefore incomplete (not containing the true Gödel sentence) and provability-within-a-system-of-axioms is not the same as truth. This is the gist of the first of the two theorems, put in as plain language as I could manage.¹

If you are still reading this, I guess you may be wondering “when do we get to the Church teaching bit?” and I apologize for the unusually lengthy preamble and for passing through the following de-tour, before attempting a bringing together of the strands I set out in the title. That detour regards the Theory of Everything (that I name-dropped in an earlier post) and the death-blow it was dealt by Gödel’s theorems. The Theory of Everything is “a putative theory of theoretical physics that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena, and predicts the outcome of any experiment that could be carried out in principle.” While such a theory does not exist, for a long time it has been the goal that science has been striving for and that it believed to be progressing towards. One day it would arrive at a level of understanding of the universe that would allow it to predict any event and to do so using a single, unified theory.

Without going into to the varied arguments for the impossibility of such a theory, let me just quote Stephen Hawking:

“What is the relation between Gödel’s theorem, and whether we can formulate the theory of the universe, in terms of a finite number of principles. One connection is obvious. According to the positivist philosophy of science, a physical theory is a mathematical model. So if there are mathematical results that can not be proved, there are physical problems that can not be predicted. One example might be the Goldbach conjecture. Given an even number of wood blocks, can you always divide them into two piles, each of which can not be arranged in a rectangle. That is, it contains a prime number of blocks.

[…]

Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory, that can be formulated as a finite number of principles. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. I’m now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end, and that we will always have the challenge of new discovery. Without it, we would stagnate.”

So, what does all of this have to do with Church teaching or with the Holy Spirit? Well, if you look at any system of reasoning, where some statements are derived from others and where validity can be determined by comparing a statement with the system’s premises according to its rules of reasoning (themselves being premises), then such a system can be seen as having an underlying mathematical model, which thanks to Gödel is now forever revealed as incomplete. The Church’s teaching, as a set of premises (e.g., dogmas, Scripture, etc.) and statements derived from them, is therefore also subject to Gödel’s catch and, even from the perspective of logic alone, incapable of claiming to contain all truth.

Before you shout “Blasphemy!”,² let me argue that this is neither negative nor new. The Church aims to proclaim the Good News of God’s love that Jesus brought both by his own teaching and – completely – in his own person. When Jesus says during the Last Supper: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:11) and that “[I have] been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me”, he is telling us that he – Jesus the person – is the message and that he cannot be reduced only to the teachings he explicitly shared with his disciples during those three short years of public ministry.

In fact, he proceeds to tell those assembled in the Upper Room that: “The Advocate, the holy Spirit that the Father will send in my name—he will teach you everything and remind you of all that [I] told you.” (John 14:26). During his last address to his followers, Jesus emphasizes the fact that the Church will, to use Hawking’s words “always have the challenge of new discovery,” thanks to the Holy Spirit, who will supply it with a continuous stream of inputs.³ Essentially, the Church can claim to have the Truth insofar as it is the Mystical Body of Jesus, who is its head, who is one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who is God and who therefore is the fullness of Truth. As far as its explicit, finite set of teachings is concerned, it is subject to incompleteness. This is so not only because of the underlying limitations of any system that employs premises and statements derived from them (as Gödel’s theorems prove), but also because God, who is infinite, always-greater, cannot be encapsulated in a set of human-readable rules and statements. If we thought otherwise and viewed the Church’s teaching (qua teaching) as complete and comprehensive, “we would stagnate” (again borrowing Prof. Hawking’s words).

I believe the above is highly consistent with how Benedict XVI presented the aims of the Year of Faith that is currently in progress. Instead of calling the members of the Church to swat up on its rules and regulations, he invited them to “an encounter with a Person,” a “friendship with the Son of God.” This does not mean that knowledge of the understanding that the Church has gained since Jesus walked the Earth is not valuable (it is!), but that the Christian faith is “no theory.” To conclude, Benedict sums the centrality of the person of Jesus up as follows:

“The joy of love, the answer to the drama of suffering and pain, the power of forgiveness in the face of an offence received and the victory of life over the emptiness of death: all this finds fulfilment in the mystery of his Incarnation, in his becoming man, in his sharing our human weakness so as to transform it by the power of his resurrection.”

I would like to thank my überbestie, PM, for the sanity check, his Nihil Obstat and Transferitur.

¹ For those of you who are mathematically inclined, the Wikipedia page on the incompleteness theorems both contains a sketch of the proof (including his beautiful arithmetization syntax, which allows for the Gödel sentence’s expression in arithmetic axiomatic systems) and points to more in-depth material. It also addresses how even adding the Gödel sentence to a set of axioms (i.e., making the Gödel sentence an axiom of a system) fails to defeat it :).
² And proceed to purchase a small packet of gravel from Harry the Haggler.
³ E.g., see also the Second Vatican Council’s Dei Verbum saying: “Sacred tradition and Sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, committed to the Church.” and “This tradition […] comes from the Apostles [and is] develop[ed] in the Church with the help of the Holy Spirit.”

Ascending the mountain

The last words one shares before a departure, especially one from which a return is unlikely or impossible, tend to contain the essence of what one wants those who stay behind to understand and internalize. It is with this in mind that I followed as much as I could of Pope Benedict XVI’s last days in office and listened with heightened attention to his words. Words that I found to be brimming with wisdom and love and whose highlights I would like to share with you.

Let me start by quoting from Benedict’s final Angelus greeting that took place on the last Sunday of his pontificate. It was there that he first introduced the picture of the mountain that then underpinned everything else he said during the following week:

“The Christian life consists in continuously scaling the mountain to meet God and then coming back down, bearing the love and strength drawn from him, so as to serve our brothers and sisters with God’s own love.”¹

This is a beautiful synthesis of the two constituent aspects of being a Christian: the vertical, that refers to my relationship with God, and the horizontal, that relates to my relationship with fellow humans. Benedict’s image further emphasizes that it is the vertical that impels us to the horizontal and that the two are in a continuous dynamic.

Against this backdrop, Benedict presents his own role as follows:

“The Lord is calling me to “climb the mountain”, to devote myself even more to prayer and meditation. But this does not mean abandoning the Church, indeed, if God is asking me to do this it is so that I can continue to serve the Church with the same dedication and the same love with which I have done thus far, but in a way that is better suited to my age and my strength.”

To me this is the first of the gems of last week: service does not equal activity – instead it is a frame of mind, an attitude. While it may under many circumstances lead to activity, it can also manifest itself differently if one is incapacitated, while fundamentally remaining the same service.

On Wednesday, 27th February, during his last general audience Benedict returns to his role following the resignation by elaborating on the above picture as follows:

“I do not return to private life, to a life of travel, meetings, receptions, conferences and so on. I do not abandon the cross, but remain in a new way near to the Crucified Lord. I no longer wield the power of the office for the government of the Church, but in the service of prayer I remain, so to speak, within St. Peter’s bounds. St. Benedict, whose name I bear as Pope, shall be a great example in this for me. He showed us the way to a life which, active or passive, belongs wholly to the work of God.”

Far from being an opt-out, a return to the life of a leisurely academic or a move to the speaking circuit that retired politicians favor,² Benedict remains close to the suffering Jesus whom he served in office and whom he will continue to serve away from the world. This is the second gem for me: Benedict’s move is not a giving up, but instead an expression of utter humility and a putting of the good of the Church before his own.³

Finally, we arrive at Thursday, 28th February – the last day of Pope Benedict XVI as the Bishop of Rome. The first thing that struck me here was the fact that all his activities during this day were streamed live on news.va, which meant that anyone could listen in both to him saying his farewell to the cardinals and later to the inhabitants of the town of Castel Gandolfo, where he will spend the first weeks after his resignation. I found this to be a wonderful thing for the Church to do and I hope that this openness and accessibility will persist.

In his short address to the cardinals, the first thing that struck me was Benedict’s perspective on his pontificate as a walk “in light of the presence of the Risen Lord,” which points squarely to Jesus’ appearance to his disciples on the road to Emmaus and which is the first nod to the Church being the living body of Christ that morning.

The second comes very soon after, when Benedict expresses his wish: “so that the College of Cardinals is like an orchestra, where diversity, an expression of the universal Church, always contributes to a superior harmony of concord.” Here we again have the image of a living body – the orchestra – as well as the introduction of a diversity that is constituent of harmony, which echoes his insistence on “the possibility of a unity which is not dependent upon uniformity” delivered during a talk in Jerusalem in 2009.

The third, and most explicit, angle, which Benedict says “is close to my heart” is a quote from Romano Guardini:

“The Church is not an institution devised and built at table, but a living reality. She lives along the course of time by transforming Herself, like any living being, yet Her nature remains the same. At Her heart is Christ.”

To which Benedict adds:

“[…T]he Church is a living body, animated by the Holy Spirit, and truly lives by the power of God, She is in the world but not of the world. She is of God, of Christ, of the Spirit. […] The Church lives, grows and awakens in those souls which like the Virgin Mary accept and conceive the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. They offer to God their flesh and in their own poverty and humility become capable of giving birth to Christ in the world today. Through the Church the mystery of the Incarnation remains present forever. Christ continues to walk through all times in all places.”

This, to me, is the third gem: remember that the Church is alive, that its diverse, yet harmonious, ever changing, yet of constant nature, that it is Her who makes the Incarnation persistent and that it is through Her that Jesus walks the Earth wherever and whenever She is.

Mind. Blown.

Yet again Benedict transmits that serenity, calmness, confidence and at the same time humility that he has shared on previous occasions⁴ and takes advantage of this last official occasion to deliver yet another masterclass.

Then there is the brief greeting to the inhabitants of Castel Gandolfo, which to my mind is core to the conclusion of his papacy and which finishes with the following:

“I am simply a pilgrim beginning the last leg of his pilgrimage on this earth. But I would still with my heart, with my love, with my prayers, with my reflection, and with all my inner strength, like to work for the common good and the Good of the Church and of humanity. […]

I now wholeheartedly impart my blessing. Blessed be God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Good night! Thank you all!”

This is the fourth of the gems I have received during this week from Pope Benedict: we Christians are all simple pilgrims, striving for the common good and for the good of the Church and even the position of greatest responsibility and power is only to be exercised as long as it is out of service. When it is then relinquished, one reverts to the shared Christian pilgrimage.

Finally, I keep coming back to the following thought of Cardinal Dolan’s, when asked what he is looking for in the next pope: “You always look for somebody that reminds you of Jesus.”

Dearest Holy Father, Benedict XVI, thank you for reminding me of Jesus!

¹ Actually this is a quote from his Lenten message.
² See, e.g., Hillary Clinton’s plans.
³ See him saying the following when he announced his resignation: “[I]n order to govern the barque of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.”
⁴ To my mind one of the most staggering instances of this has been a passage I have quoted before, but one whose conclusion I’ll repeat here again: “I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.”

Utter confusion (cf. profound insight)

1+1=3 (cf. A. Whitehead and B. Russell, Principia Mathematica).

Two words: Falk lands (cf. Oxford English Dictionary).

The element of surprise (cf. D. Mendeleev, The Dependence between the Properties of the Atomic Weights of the Elements).

If you have read this blog before, you won’t be surprised if I tell you that this post (like two previous ones – here and here) will be about the infamous “Faith and Reason” column in the “Our Faith on Sunday” newsletter that my parish subscribes to. To be more specific, it will be a rant triggered by the abuse of the imperative singular form of the Latin verb conferre – abbreviated as “cf.”.

Last week I was already on the verge of charging at the column’s previous installment, which argued that reason is what is best about being human, but I decided against giving such a blatantly narrow-minded idea air time. When the column continued along the same track today and when it went from just being blinkered to plain ludicrous, my blood-pressure rose, and when its author suggested that their stumbling echoed Benedict XVI’s masterful Regensburg address,¹ I snapped!

So, what did the column say today:

That “[a]s a result of the fall man’s reasoning faculty was seriously damaged.”
That “even after baptism his capacity to reason is handicapped by the scars of Original Sin.”
That “[r]ationality is “of the inner nature of God”, and so in assuming a human nature, He especially assumes that human attribute which is most like Himself and which is at the same time most constitutive of human nature.”
That “[r]isen, ascended, and glorified, human Reason now resides in the bosom of the Father.”
“(cf. Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensburg, 2006.)”

Instead of expletives, let me try and argue against each of the above points, which to my mind are even more confused that the typical militant atheist jabs at Christianity:

The assertion that “[a]s a result of the fall man’s reasoning faculty was seriously damaged” conjures up images of Adam and Eve discussing the, sadly now elusive, Theory of Everything before the fall. Taking a bite from the fruit of the forbidden tree then turns them into gibbering savages who are barely in a position to count their own fingers. While this sounds like an entertaining sketch, it has nothing to do with Genesis or with its contemporary Catholic exegesis. In the Genesis account of the fall, the immediate consequences are the appearance of shame and knowledge of good and evil and the subsequent burdening with hard work, tensions between man and woman and expulsion from the Garden of Eden, meted out as punishment. At no point is there any mention or indication of an impact on rational faculty. Turning to the Catechism, the discussion of Original Sin (§396-421) there centers on abuse of freedom, and of God’s trust and friendship, with the consequences being loss of holiness and harmony (with God, between man and woman, …) and a distortion of God’s image. The only mention there of anything to do with reason is man’s being “subject to ignorance, suffering and the dominion of death” (i.e., the building blocks of “concupiscence”). As far as ignorance is concerned, I’d be the last person to deny it, but it is hard to attribute it to the fall, since it was Adam and Eve’s pre-fall selves who were tricked by the snake in the Genesis creation myth …
Saying that “even after baptism [the] capacity to reason is handicapped” also sounds bizarre, suggesting that baptism has – albeit limited – reason-enhancing properties! If that were the case, you’d expect for pre- versus post-baptism IQ tests to show statistically significant differences and one would have to think carefully when such a boost of intelligence would be most beneficial in a person’s life. Again, this is not only nonsensical, but also in direct contradiction with the Catechism, where §1264 says that “frailties inherent in life[, such] as weaknesses of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence” remain after baptism.
The assertion that rationality is the human attribute that is most like God is akin to saying that the most important part of the human body is the brain. This too is absurdly reductive and I’d just let St. Paul counter-argue: “If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be?” (1 Corinthians 12:17).
Suggesting that Jesus’s resurrection and ascension into heaven result in “human reason” residing in the bosom of the Father also smacks of great confusion. Is there a reason substantially different from God’s (as opposed to differing from it by degree) that before the resurrection was lacking in God and that the resurrection “imported”?
Finally, let me turn to the part of today’s column that pushed me to writing this post: “(cf. Benedict XVI’s address at the University of Regensburg, 2006.)” When I read this I knew there was no way Benedict XVI could have said anything like the above – not even as a joke. Nonetheless, let’s follow up on the “cf.” and see what the cited source has to say about original sin, baptism, human reason and the other topics that the column’s unknown author strung together. Interestingly the Regensburg address contains precisely zero mention of baptism or indeed Original Sin (even “sin” only occurs as part of the words “single” and “since,” each used precisely once). What about “human reason”? Surely that phrase does occur in a talk entitled “Faith, Reason and the University. Memories and Reflections.” Here I have to admit that it does … once: “[T]he fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.” Wait, what? “Human reason” is part of faith and “consonant with the nature of faith”? Yet our trusty anonymous illuminator places it outside God, brought within His remit only thanks to the resurrection … At best the reference in today’s “Faith and Reason” column to Benedict XVI’s gem is (as the Marxist² saying puts it) like military music is to music or military justice is to justice – and that’s being a shade unfair to the military.

¹ And I mean his actual talk, to which I will return in a future post, as opposed to the reduction of its misinterpretation as being anti-Muslim that gripped the media at the time.
² Groucho, not Karl – obviously …

Evening came and morning followed: the roots of science in Genesis

The hallmarks of the scientific method include its basis in empirical evidence and its reliance on repeatability for the sake of verifying or falsifying hypotheses accounting for and predicting observations that can be aided by measurement. An aspect of the above that has interested me for a while now has been the nature of repeatability (or reproducibility), which certainly does make good intuitive sense, but where I had questions about whether some other principle couldn’t be used instead to form an equally consistent method of enquiry. Essentially, I was wondering to what extent the scientific method, as anchored in repeatability, allowed for a formalistic reading (like mathematics does – in contrast with conceiving of it as a form of realism).

The breakthrough for me came when my bestie NP wrote a soon to be published article to stimulate dialogue between science and faith and listed the following two of the assumptions of science: namely, that “the universe is intelligible […] and that it has a rational structure.” While both of these may sound self-evident and be taken for granted, having them called out made me think more carefully about intelligibility. What is it that renders an event or entity intelligible and how does a successful understanding demonstrate itself? Especially the latter is a staple of epistemology and the philosophy of science and I don’t mean to review the literature on explanatory power or models of scientific explanation like the deductive-nomological one here. Instead, I’d like to focus on the role of repeatability and to argue that it is necessary not only for science but that it is inextricable from any expression of reason.

The repeatability of events, of the meaning of concepts and of the modes of reasoning is essential to rationality. If such recurrence and persistence of relationships and states did not exist, then each event would be a one-off and it would be impossible to conceive of it using human reason. Language would not exist since words would at most be labels for individual entities and the games it relies on would be impossible too since they require regularity and repetition. Understanding of any kind would also be impossible since reflection and either deductive or inductive modes of analysis would have a sole window of opportunity in which to relate to an event or entity. There would be no laws, rules, regularities or even statistics, since everything that would be, would be a unique, a one-of-a-kind. This necessity of repeatability and its being a constituent of rationality are also expressed in Einstein’s definition of “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In science, the insistence on repeatability is then anything but arbitrary and instead becomes an expression of its rationality. It can even be seen as closing the loop that starts with the assumption of the repeatability and regularity of phenomena by requiring of a theory to be repeatably applicable to their recurrences to merit the status of scientific. In other words, the requirement of repeatability in science mirrors the assumption of the repeatability in nature to which it strives to correspond.¹

With the above thoughts in mind, and having read and hugely admired John Paul II‘s analysis of Genesis from the perspective of the human person, I proceeded to attempt an imitation from the point of view of science, knowing full well that it could at best be as if seen through a mirror, darkly. Nonetheless, I believe that I have found – to me – surprising traces of the scientific method in the first chapter of the Bible.² Before making these explicit, I would like to emphasize that I am not looking for a justification of science in the Bible (it is solidly derived from reason alone as sketched out above as well) and neither am I setting out to anachronistically twist the Genesis text to fit contemporary thought (although I am necessarily looking at it from a contemporary perspective). Instead, inspired by John Paul II, I am attempting to look for the roots of what today is the scientific method and I would have been unperturbed even if I had found no traces of it there.

The first thing that struck me when re-reading Genesis 1 over the weekend is its use of the following, exact sentence to conclude the account of each “day” of creation: “Evening came, and morning followed—the [n-th] day.” (verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23 and 31). Instead of the creation myth³ being a single “poof” event or a random sequence of entities popping into existence (à la Eddie Izzard’s great sketch⁴), it has a repeating structure as its backbone. Once set up on the first day (“God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.”” 1:4-5), the alternation of day and night repeats itself and becomes subject to predictability and intelligibility.

The second feature of Genesis 1 that is worth noting in this attempt to trace the roots of science in the Torah is the repeated reference to visual observation. As early as verse 4, after the creation of light, we hear that “God saw that the light was good” and as far as the various translations and analyses I have seen, the term translated into English as “saw” does refer to ocular perception as opposed to just understanding in the abstract. Then, in verses 10 (after dry land is separated from water), 12 (after the introduction of vegetation), 18 (after the sky is populated), 21 (after fish and birds are created) and 25 (after animals living on land enter the scene) we are told repeatedly that “God saw that it was good.” From this perspective of visual perception, it is also worth noting that it is employed in a categorically different way once the two first humans are present.

Instead of vision only being a means for God to assess His own work, in His relationship with humans he calls them to use it as a source of evidence for His actions: “God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; and to all the wild animals, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the earth, I give all the green plants for food.” (Genesis 1:29-30). In fact, the very last verse of Genesis 1 (verse 31), brings both visual observation and the repetitive, predictable nature of the universe together: “God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good. Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day.”

What the above means to me is that Genesis, and therefore the whole of Judeo-Christian thought, is rooted in an account of creation that, albeit being in the form of a myth, has features that clearly contain two core aspects of the scientific method: repeatability and predictability on the one hand and sensory observation as a means of obtaining evidence on the other. While not a factual account of cosmogeny, Genesis nonetheless hints at how nature is to be approached also from the perspective of understanding it: that regularity can be expected and that the senses are a basis for engaging with it. Instead of being a source of superstition and confusion, the Bible to me is a source of gems that reinforce rather than oppose rationality.

¹ I think it unlikely for this train of thought to be novel, so the absence of references is an expression of my ignorance rather than innovation. All I can offer here is the acknowledgement of Aristotle’s already realizing that “there is no science of the individual” (“If they are individual and not universal, real things will be just of the same number as the elements, and the elements will not be knowable.” Metaphysics XIII, 10).
² I don’t wish to scare you off by setting out to link science directly to the Bible. Let me assure you that my intentions couldn’t be further from those who consider the universe to the 6000 years old or who run lunatic websites like answersingenesis.org (scarily that was the website that the vast majority of Google “science Genesis” searches point to). On the topic of answersingenesis.org, I was particularly struck by their attempt to distinguish between two flavors of science: historical (explaining past events) and operational (applied in the present for utilitarian ends). What the @#$%?!
³ I am using the term myth in the way in which John Paul II employed it: myth “does not refer to fictitious-fabulous content, but simply to an archaic way of expressing a deeper content.” (Man and Woman He Created Them).
⁴ “So then God created the world, and on the first day he created light and air and fish and jam and soup and potatoes and haircuts and arguments and small things and rabbits and people with noses and jam – more jam, perhaps – and soot and flies and tobogganing and showers and toasters and grandmothers and, uh … Belgium. And the second day he created fire and water and eggnog and radiators and lights and Burma and things that go “urh” and … and Colonel Gaddafi and Arthur Negus. On the third day he probably got lists and said, “I can’t remember what I’ve invented now. I’ve just been ad-libbing so far.”” (Eddie Izzard, Glorious, 1997)

Igino Giordani: the oxymoron of a catholic party

I have long been aware of the figure of Igino Giordani through his writings, of which the most beautiful one to me is his “Diary of Fire” and I also knew of his having been an MP in the Italian parliament, a journalist and an expert on the Fathers of the Church. It is only now though, after having read his memoirs (“Memorie d’un cristiano ingenuo” – “Memoirs of a simple christian”) that I am beginning to realize more fully the enormity of his example. While in the past I have very much admired certain aspects of his life, I am now seeing that it is really his life as a whole that is an instance of his imitation of Jesus. To give you a sense of what I mean, let me pick out just a couple of moments from his autobiography.

While I don’t intend to summarize his story, it is worth noting that Giordani (1894–1980) was the first of six children of a bricklayer and his illiterate wife and that he initially trained to become a bricklayer like his dad. Thanks to his father’s employer, who provided him with the necessary financial support, Giordani ended up attending a junior seminary and eventually studying humanities at the University of Rome. On the verge of going to university, he was conscripted and sent to fight in the First World War. There a bullet shattered a ten centimeter segment of his right femur, requiring a three year stay in hospital and a series of 18 operations (the first of which was performed without anesthetics!).

It is at this point of exposure to war, that I was particularly impressed by the following passage, where Giordani talks about the impossibility he felt of “killing a human person: a brother”:¹

“The five or six shots that I fired, in the air, I did out of necessity: I could never aim the barrel of my gun at the enemy trenches, with the intention of killing a child of God.”

Upon being discharged from hospital at the end of the war, Giordani immediately finds himself confronted with another battle: that of opposing the fascist regime and the alignment of parts of the Church with it. Here he speaks out against clericalism, which is:

“an exploitation of religious power for the political ends of a government, a party, a bank, … [… It is an] iron belt, disguised as gold, by which the freedom of the children of God was restrained, the proclamation of the Gospel deformed and the spirituality of the Church compromised.”

And adds that:

“During other periods Christianity was being attacked in the name of reason and freedom, while today we can affirm that it is only by a destruction of reason and freedom that Christianity can be attacked.”

A particularly poignant assessment of that period is also expressed by him as follows:

“Christ wasn’t crucified because Judas betrayed him, but he was crucified because Pilate washed his hands of him.”

Giordani’s outspoken attacks against the abuse of clerical power and offenses against reason, published also in the monthly “Parte Guelfa” whose editor he was, led to a clear and direct condemnation by Church authorities in 1925. Instead of rebelling and placing himself in opposition against the Church, Giordani chose obedience and published one final issue of the magazine. There, on the first page, he reprinted the authorities’ condemnation and added that the magazine “submits itself fully” to the Church’s judgment and “happily offers its loyal and disinterested allegiance,” evidenced by its decision to shut down. This struck me in many ways like St. Thomas More’s silence, which in “A Man For All Seasons” was described as “bellowing up and down Europe!” or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s obedient submission to being denied permission to publish his theological and philosophical works.

After the war, Giordani moves from being part of the antifascist resistance to joining the public political life, which results in his becoming a member of the Italian parliament. Here, the following reasoning about how the Church and politics are to relate struck me in particular (and I believe it prefigures the Vatican II position also expressed in Lumen Gentium²):

“The Church incarnates the Gospel: but it mustn’t become a party, confuse itself with a category (party or regime) because it is catholic, i.e., universal, and, as the mystical Christ, it must love all, serve all, even enemies.”

All of the above paints a very clear picture to my mind of someone who was all about following Jesus, disregarding whether that brought him into conflict with state or Church, but also of someone who did it with tremendous humility and, as the memoirs’ title indicates, simplicity. A great example of this attitude is also the following event:

“One day Pius XII called me […] and asked me: “Giordani, but what have you written in that newspaper³ of yours? I have received complaints saying that you are a revolutionary” He then quoted a phrase from my latest cover story, where it says that the excess of the rich is the lack of the poor: that unjust or unjustly used property is theft.
“Holy Father,” I answered, “that is a quote from Saint John Chrysostom.”
“But you should have said so …”
“Holy Father, when an article is written in half an hour or an hour, there is not time for citing sources.”
“True, true, ” he said, beginning to smile, “They say that you are a revolutionary. But, don’t worry, they also say that about me: what do you think? In fact, in these days, Roosevelt put it as “too radical””
“But,” I replied, “a true christian is necessarily a revolutionary: don’t we want to change the world? But, our revolution is beneficial, it builds rather than destroys; brings love instead of hatred, it brings society back together in solidarity.”

There would be so much more to say about him (e.g., his life as a lay, married person and father of four, his establishing of the modern Vatican library (and publishing a journal of library science that both the Moscow and Beijing libraries subscribed to during the height of communism), his career as a writer, his encounters with the great minds of the 20th century, etc.), but that will have to wait for a future post. To conclude, let me instead leave you with the following poem by Igino Giordani, which also gives us a glimpse of his interior life:

“I have begun to die
and what happens,
matters to me no more;
now I want to vanish
in the forsaken heart of Jesus.
All this sinning,
by greed and by vanity,
in love disappears:
I have reconquered my freedom.
I have begun to die
to death that no longer dies;
now I want to rejoice
with God in his eternal youth.”

It should come as no surprise that Igino Giordani – Servant of God – is in the process of being recognized as a saint – a saint I will be very proud of!

¹ All the quotes from Igino Giordani here are from “Memorie d’un cristiano ingenuo,” with the crude translations from Italian, for which I apologize, being mine.
² “[T]he faithful should learn how to distinguish carefully between those rights and duties which are theirs as members of the Church, and those which they have as members of human society. Let them strive to reconcile the two, remembering that in every temporal affair they must be guided by a Christian conscience, since even in secular business there is no human activity which can be withdrawn from God’s dominion. [… I]t must be admitted that the temporal sphere is governed by its own principles, since it is rightly concerned with the interests of this world.” (Lumen Gentium, §36)
³ “Il Quotidiano” was a daily newspaper, directed by Giordani 1944–1946.

Benedict XVI: Servant of the servants of God

B16

The papal title that has always impressed me the most by far is Servus servorum Dei (Servant of the servants of God), first used by Saint Gregory the Great, and I believe Benedict XVI’s shock resignation today is an extreme expression of taking it seriously. When a servant can no longer serve, the ultimate manifestation of service is to resign. The Italian economist Prof. Luigino Bruni put this particularly clearly by saying that Benedict XVI’s humble decision has “shown us that the Pope is not a king but a servant.”

Having spent the day thinking about what to say, I have decided against the following, all of which would have been great choices:

Reflecting on the specifics of his beautiful resignation message (a highlight being his affirmation that the Petrine ministry “must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering.”).
Reviewing the many heartfelt messages arriving from all around the world (a great example being Israeli Chief Rabbi Yona Metzger’s spokesman saying that “I think he deserves a lot of credit for advancing inter-religious links the world over between Judaism, Christianity and Islam. During his period there were the best relations ever between the Church and the chief rabbinate and we hope that this trend will continue.”)
Surveying both the historical precedents (admiring in particular Saint Pontian, who in 235 AD “was arrested and sent to the salt mines, and in order for a successor to be able to be elected in Rome, […] resigned his office.”) and the canon law applicable in this case (pausing over the fact that for the resignation to be valid it does not need to be accepted by anyone).
Arguing that at the heart of both Benedict XVI’s resignation and John Paul II’s persistence in spite of his crippling illness (retorting that “Christ did not come down from the cross either,” when asked whether he’d consider resigning), which prima facie look contradictory, lies a profound commitment to discerning and heroically acting on the will of God.

Instead, I will share with you those insights and teachings of Benedict XVI that have most encouraged, guided and delighted me:¹

His joint highlighting of the saints and of art: “[T]o me art and the Saints are the greatest apologetic for our faith. [… I]f we look at the Saints, this great luminous trail on which God passed through history, we see that there truly is a force of good which resists the millennia; there truly is the light of light. [… H]eart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge, and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth, the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too, and to express itself in a convincing form of art.”
His insistence on a fearless seeking of the Truth, backed by a profound trust in God: “[T]he search for knowledge and understanding always has to involve drawing closer to the truth. […] As far as preserving identity is concerned, it would be too little for the Christian, so to speak, to assert his identity in a such a way that he effectively blocks the path to truth. Then his Christianity would appear as something arbitrary, merely propositional. He would seem not to reckon with the possibility that religion has to do with truth. On the contrary, I would say that the Christian can afford to be supremely confident, yes, fundamentally certain that he can venture freely into the open sea of the truth, without having to fear for his Christian identity.”
His freedom to recognize truth even in sources that don’t have the Church’s approval, such as quoting Origen attributing the following saying to Jesus: “Whoever is close to me is close to the fire” – a statement not found in Catholic canonical Scripture, or praising Teilhard de Chardin’s vision that “At the end we will have a true cosmic liturgy, where the cosmos becomes a living host.”
His clear denunciation of fideism, by affirming that Catholic tradition “has always rejected the so-called principle of ‘fideism’, that is, the will to believe against reason. […] Indeed, although a mystery, God is not absurd. […] If, in contemplating the mystery, reason sees only darkness, this is not because the mystery contains no light, rather because it contains too much. Just as when we turn our eyes directly to the sun, we see only shadow – who would say that the sun is not bright? Faith allows us to look at the ‘sun’ that is God, because it welcomes His revelation in history. […] God has sought mankind and made Himself known, bringing Himself to the limits of human reason.”
His passionate emphasis of the centrality of joy: “Joy is at the heart of the Christian experience. [W]e experience immense joy, the joy of communion, the joy of being Christian, the joy of faith [… and w]e can see the great attraction that joy exercises. In a world of sorrow and anxiety, joy is an important witness to the beauty and reliability of the Christian faith.”
His proclamation that closeness to God is not contingent on a belief in His existence:² “[A]gnostics, who are constantly exercised by the question of God, those who long for a pure heart but suffer on account of our[, the Church’s,] sin, are closer to the Kingdom of God than believers whose life of faith is “routine” and who regard the Church merely as an institution, without letting their hearts be touched by faith.”
His insight that faith is not a subscription to this or that dogma, but an encounter with the person of Jesus: “[M]any Christians dedicate their lives with love to those who are lonely, marginalized or excluded, as to those who are the first with a claim on our attention and the most important for us to support, because it is in them that the reflection of Christ’s own face is seen. […] It is faith that enables us to recognize Christ and it is his love that impels us to assist him whenever he becomes our neighbour along the journey of life.”

¹ Thanks to my bestie PM for this great suggestion!
² The truth of this was yet again brought home to me today, when my expressing admiration for Pope Benedict was met with understanding from an agnostic and an atheist friend of mine and with mockery from two Christian ones …