Vigils Reading – Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

In memory of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI:

A Reading from Eschatology[1]

by Joseph Ratzinger

…the confrontation with physical death is actually a confrontation with the basic constitution of human existence.  It places before us a choice: to accept either the pattern of love, or the pattern of power.  Here we are at the source of the most decisive of all questions…The God who personally died in Jesus Christ fulfilled the pattern of love beyond all expectation, and in so doing justified that human confidence which in the last resort is the only alternative to self-destruction.  The Christian dies into the death of Christ himself…The uncontrollable Power that everywhere sets limits to life is not a blind law of nature.  It is a love that puts itself at our disposal by dying for us and with us.  The Christian is the one who knows that he can unite the constantly experienced dispossession of self with the fundamental attitude of a being created for love, a being that knows itself to be safe precisely when it trusts in the unexacted gift of love.  Man’s enemy, death, that would waylay him to steal his life, is conquered at the point where one meets the thievery of death with the attitude of trusting love, and so transforms the theft into increase of life.  The sting of death is extinguished in Christ in whom the victory was gained through the plenary power of love unlimited.  Death is vanquished where people die with Christ and into him.  This is why the Christian attitude must be opposed to the modern wish for instantaneous death, a wish that would turn death into an extensionless moment and banish from life the claims of the metaphysical.  Yet it is in the transforming acceptance of death, present time and again to us in this life, that we mature for the real, the eternal, life.

…For man’s own truth is that he passes away, having no abiding existence in his own right.  The more he takes a stand on himself, the more he finds himself self suspended over nothing.  He falls prey to that nothingness which, taken by himself, he will assuredly enter everlastingly.  Only by handing oneself over to truth and rightness does one find that communication which is life.  It is intrinsic to my life that I find life only in endless receiving from others, being powerless to achieve it through my own active efforts.  It is not works that are vivifying, but faith.

…Such faith and love are simultaneously God’s acceptance of my life and my will to embrace the divine acceptance.  And all this is from the God who can be love only as the triune God and who, in thus being love, makes the world bearable after all.

The person who does not confront life refuses his life.  Flight from suffering is flight from life.  The crisis of the Western world turns not least on a philosophy and program of education which try to redeem man by bypassing the cross.  In acting against the cross, they act against the truth.  Let us not be misunderstood: the relative value of actions of this kind is undoubted.  They become a help to man when they see themselves as part of a greater whole. But taken by themselves, absolutely, they lead into the void.  The only sufficient answer to the question of man is a response which discharges the infinite claims of love.  Only eternal life corresponds to the question raised by human living and dying on this earth.

[1] Joseph Ratzinger. Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life 2^nd Edition.  Trans. Michael Waldstein. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988. 96-103.