I was mightily impressed with the power of Joseph Ratzinger's intellect when I first read his Introduction to Christianity in 2016. I have been recently re-reading it. Ratzinger makes quite the contrast with the benighted Bergoglio.
How do we best honor a thinker? By re-enacting his thoughts, sympathetically yet critically, appropriating and developing what stands up to scrutiny. One attempt on my part is my Substack article, Ratzinger on the Resurrection of the Body. Another is The Ultimate Paradox of Divine Creation. A third is my defense of the controversial Regensburg speech.
Other minor pieces are collected in my Ratzinger category. Here is an excerpt from one of them:
Jerusalem needs Athens if theism is not to degenerate into a tribal mythology. (That Athens needs Jerusalem is also true, but not my present theme.)
I don't believe I am saying anything different from what Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) says in his Introduction to Christianity (Ignatius, 2004, orig. publ. in German in 1968). Here is one relevant quotation among several:
The Christian faith opted, we have seen, against the gods of the various religions and in favor of the God of the philosophers, that is, against the myth of custom and in favor of the truth of Being itself and nothing else. (142)
Writing of the unity of belief and thought, Ratzinger tells us that
. . . the Fathers of the Church believed that they had discovered here the deepest unity between philosophy and faith, Plato and Moses, the Greek mind and the biblical mind. (118)
Plato and Moses! The God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are one and the same.
The problematic is rich and many-sided. More later.
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