Ever since the beginning of his academic activity, Ratzinger has been interested in the problem of God.1 In the 1959 lesson “The God of Faith and the God of philosophers,” he considers that in order to face this task we need to re-elaborate theologically the relation between belief and knowledge, between religion and philosophy, between general reason and religious experience.2 The living God of revelation and the God of philosophy must recuperate the recipro- cal relation which is typically catholic and which has been obscured and deformed by the theological currents alluded to by Ratzinger in his text.3 A recurrent theme of his is that God cannot be reduced merely to a theoretical problem for fear of frustrating the possibility of knowing and loving Him.
Ratzinger has always crisscrossed the dogmatic and fundamen- tal dimensions in theology. Before as well as after the Council, he compares dogma with the aspirations or objections of his contempo- raries. This quality manifests when he tackles the subject of God. In his writings, the question of God is confronted both from the angles of faith and reason, and is accompanied by reflections on their reci- procal relationship. This is why if we want to grasp the originality of Ratzinger’s intellectus fidei on God, we must begin with these aspects. We shall now go into some of its dogmatic contents.
in the framework of the profession of faith: i believe in god
Ratzinger speaks of God starting from the profession of faith. This is how he affirms before his interlocutors, be they believers or non-believers, one of his most rooted convictions: faith is not a private attitude merely pious or sentimental which superimposes itself almost superfluously over a rational autonomous knowledge of reality. When the Creed is professed, the believers’ view of God is a rational view which knows reality through divine revelation, acquiring thus all its depth. That knowledge of the believer is gran- ted in an elementary and unique act, in which it is possible to make legitimate distinctions between natural and supernatural aspects.
In order that we may understand this knowledge well, Ratzinger places before our eyes the figure of the Jew who professes his ad- herence to Yahweh: “reciting the Creed is the act through which [the Israelite] fills his part in reality.”4 Professing one’s faith does not con- sist in declaring the “ideology” of the group one belongs to, but in opening reason to the whole of reality, and recognizing it as being intelligible, good, and trustworthy. The real knowledge of God is given in the profession of faith and with it, that of reality itself: that knowledge is inaccessible to him who pretends to confront it from a neutral stance. We shall see later that only he who is open to the facts of reality questions himself, and only he who questions finds an- swers. On the contrary, the pretended neutral stance is incapable of curiosity about any sphere of reality, and least when it is a question of enquiring into the very foundations of that which is real.
A theological implication of this first characteristic is the relation between faith, Baptism, and the knowledge of God. As the profession of faith is essentially linked to Baptism, the Bavarian theologian tea- ches that the full knowledge of God comes from Christ’s sovereign gesture in the sacrament that binds man for ever and turns him into a new creature, transforming him ontologically in his being and in his spiritual dynamisms of knowledge and love. Thus, the baptized is the new subject of knowledge and therefore, of the new culture.
An existencial-anthropological statement: the answers emergent from the questions
The same Ratzinger who adopts this “professing” posture adopts the questions men ask themselves, their difficulties and their objec- tions, as the starting point for a Christian reflection on God. This is why, for example, you may notice a difference in the way he tackles the subject of God from the 1959 lesson to the Introduction to Christia- nity of 1968. The cultural, social, and theological transformations of that decade can be felt in this last text which begins by looking into the various questions in which the men of those years of turmoil focus the “problem” of God. In 1968, before presenting the doctrine on God, Ratzinger looks at the restlessness he perceives in society and asks himself why God has become such a problem for men of that generation.5
This attentive attitude does not limit itself to expressing a certain sensibility – as one who treats his interlocutor with delicacy – but lies on a profound anthropologic conviction: “In his questioning, man is always involved in the possible answers from God,”6 so that a lo- ving understanding of God is only possible for those who engage in profound inquiries and exigent requirements. These can derive both from a condition of plenitude as well as from more urgent needs. It is true that God is not a “stopper” for human needs and there is an ex- ceptional beauty in the recognition of God merged with the plenitu- de of life, but with a thorough realism Ratzinger does not ignore the suffering cry which can also unfold a relation with Mystery. A socie- ty which censures the suffering of existence and denies the fact that it can be a means to transcendence benumbs men and deprives them of their dignity, leaving them at the mercy of alternative powers.
A few years later Ratzinger will reach a very lucid conclusion, infrequent in the pastoral life of the Church. He will consider that the crisis in the Christian announcement –in the last century– is not due to lack of energy or clarity in recurrent doctrine but, sur- prisingly, it is due to the fact that “the Christian answers put aside men’s questions; they were and still are correct, but as they were not developed from those questions as a starting point, and from within them, they remained ineffective. Consequently, questioning together with men who are also searching, is an unrenounceable part of the announcement itself, because only then the word Wort can be turned into an answer, Antwort.”7
So, the regard for the human search which Ratzinger shares with other theologians of his generation has never led him to disguise the revelation’s proposal. He always reminds us that Christian faith cannot be reduced to questions which are born out of pure human experience, but that it encloses something which is always greater; so much so that, in fact, only Jesus Christ –inasmuch as being the answer which preceeds all questions– succeeds in making man rai- se his questions once again, discloses them when they would tend to be closed, and formulates them adequately.
A reflection on history as a starting point and to shed light on history
The Ratzinger “Theo-logy” starts with the history of salvation: it reflects on the dialogue which takes place between God and man. Once again he reminds us that God has acted and acts in history’s present, according to a realism which seems outrageous to other religious and philosophical positions. The Christian God is the God of the Alliance, that is to say, it is the Creator who intervenes in the history of the people and in each person. It is therefore from within reality that we get to know the God who has wished, in this man- ner, to manifest Himself and communicate with men.
For our theologian, an important methodological implication ensues from here: he chooses a historical course which allows him to reach the speculative interrogations about the reality of God and his properties. One way to achieve this is to compare the questions and needs which constitute the human condition with the answers which have been given by religions and, in particular, with that unparalleled answer which had been given the Israelite people so as to reach, from that point, the unheard of historical event of the incarnation-death-resurrection of Jesus Christ as the definitive in- terpretation of God. The conversation with atheism and the ancient and modern idolatries also tends to unfold from the point of view of human history.
The god of philosophers and the god of faith
From the very beginning of his “theo-logical” reflection, as we have seen, Ratzinger has asked himself about the relation between the God of faith and the God of philosophers. It is not a question of circumstantial interest but of establishing properly that relation which is decisive for catholic theology and its ecumenical opening. That is why before a pure positive theological statement, reduced to the study of historical sources, theology always requires an adequa- te philosophical reflection in critical dialogue with old and modern streams of thought. Our theologian incorporates constitutively the moment of speculation to the intellectus fidei.
Already in 1959 he shows how in this problem, labelled as “God of faith and God of philosophers,” are intertwined various different levels of discussion. In effect, the well known quotation from Pascal could suggest that there are only two terms for comparing this pro- blem: on the one hand, the God who recognizes Christian faith (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – the God of the living and of the dead), and on the other, the philosophical God as the object of pure rational reflection.
If that text – and many others which came later – is properly read, however, one understands that Ratzinger bears in mind other aspects as well. Before going into the strictly “supernatural” sphere of revelation, the Bavarian theologian has already been engaged in examining the relation between a purely philosophical and a reli- gious approach to the God that every man can know through his own strength. That is why he has often asked himself about the rela- tionship between religion and philosophy, for instance with regards to their respective ways of searching for the truth. His well known quotation from Tertullian on Christ being the truth and not the ha- bit, has as a background the different aims pursued by pagan reli- gions and philosophy and thence their different value as delegates of the nascent Christian faith.8
Now, in this philosophy a new precision is needed because the concept one may have of human reason and how one makes use of it bears essential differences in the way of thinking about God. One of the battles Ratzinger has been continuously fighting is that against the rationalist reduction of knowledge, exhorting us to always use reason in an open and existential way. It is under this perspective that his appraisal of the difference between esprit de géométrie (Des- cartes) and esprit de finesse (Pascal)9 is understood.
An adequate comprehension of reason bears a determining weight in Ratzinger’s argumentation. It is only when reason is pro- perly used that it can be shown that God is real, more real than any other thing we think is real, and which is not merely “theoretical.” Our author warns against the danger of reducing the knowledge of God to concepts which pretend to exhaust the meaning of the divine. The value of definitions and concepts will be greater as they serve better this reality of God and do not hide Him by means of abstractions which substitute the reality they intend to point out. This defence of the reality of God does not respond to any school of controversy, but to a much simpler and decisive purpose: only a real God can stir up the interest of a normal man, that’s to say, of a man whose reason is made to know and love reality. Hence only a real God and not merely a “theoretical” one can awaken in man a vital, existential attraction, turning into a decisive factor of his “practical” attitude, into an inner source of his moral behavior.10
God exists and can be known: what are the proofs of his existence?
When speaking of the proofs of the existence of God, Ratzinger is coherent in his concept of reason. The characteristics of human reason specify the nature of those proofs.
The starting point of the rational reflection on God is the expe- rience of one’s own existence and the confrontation with the world and its mysteries.11 God is not an isolated “object” about which one can think of separately to the reality of oneself and the world around; on the contrary, in order to reach Him one has to enter dee- ply into reality. Ratzinger says that what actually happens is that man discovers himself to be previously “placed” in reality, just as he can tell from his original experiences in the basic relations I-you- us. Reality “is before” the subject inasmuch as it is not produced by him neither when he began to live nor in each following moment; similarly, man discovers himself “being with” others, which makes him also an individual subject. These previous data (Vorgabe) are original in everyone’s experience: we find ourselves placed in a re- ality we have not produced, and we discover ourselves inevitably related to others. No one can presume that his concrete existence has not consisted nor consists of these factors.
However, facts do not impose their meaning automatically, but are presented so as to be interpreted by each one from the whole complexity of the circumstances of our life. For some, these data will mean the existence of a limit, and perhaps even a dangerous threat to his own self-realization; for this reason they will have to be submitted to through the sovereign knowledge and power of the subject who prefers to make himself absolute in his loneliness. For others, instead, it will mean the given possibility to be able to be oneself, to unfurl the foundations of confidence which makes one`s own freedom possible in the company of others/of Another. For the former, the facts show an unacceptable imposition – who from? – from which one must rid oneself: for the latter, it means a gift, which calls for gratefulness.
Ratzinger points out that this primary position on reality and its interpretation according to one of the two mentioned directions, constitutes basically the beginning of the problem of God, and it is previous to the “proofs.” As both interpretations are possible – and we all adopt one or the other – but are not equally reasonable, it is essential to excercise, from within concrete existence, the rational and systematic appraisal which will allow us to recognize which of the interpretations brings better credit to all the factors of reality. The different speculative routs which we call “proofs of God’s exis- tence” acquire there probative strength when they are grafted onto this first rational decision of the man about his own situation in the world, and are developed in a systematic and critical manner. Both reason and freedom are implied in that decision, so that the proofs of the existence of God can never be scientific ones in which the sub- ject remains outside the experiment, outside reasoning. Man cannot place himself as a pure observer of the problem of God; he is always within the experiment.12
Once this explanation has been made, which he considers cru- cial, the Bavarian theologian has made use of almost all kinds of common proofs in the Treatment of God: the anthropological, the cosmological, and historical-religious ones.
In the anthropological sphere we have frequently seen the ap- peareance of his argument dealing with the sense and happiness of human life, as well as the moral argument on the relation between God and conscience. He affirms the worth of the contents of what is traditionally called “natural law,” even though he recognizes that some of the formulae with which it has been presented are inade- quate in our present setting.
As it has already been said, one of Ratzinger’s most characteristic convictions is that faith in God bears the possibility of un- derstanding reality. Given his openness to scientific arguments, he builds with them the way to cosmological proofs, showing how God’s existence insures the metaphysical intelligibility of the diffe- rent laws and movements of the created world. This being a delicate ground, our theologian carefully shuns the risk of conceiving God as a ground-work of the physical cosmological laws which could reduce Him to a mere function within a cosmovision (in the style of certain “creational” currents), or as a first entity of the same ontolo- gic condition as other entities, even though it be the first one.
His appeal to the history of humanity has not been less frequent when pointing to the existence of God: the examination of the triad polytheism-monotheism-atheism as it has appeared in different cul- tures and religions is a common reflection of his. One may suggest that the history of religions offers him a privileged space on which to centre the anthropological questions on God. On the one hand, this shows his ability to display his speculative arguments within a historic context, and on the other, it confirms his inclination to compare the religious- philosophical arguments of humanity with those of the faith of Israel and that of the Church.
We must add yet another consideration regarding man’s rational access to God. Ratzinger’s trust in man’s reason and in the world’s intelligibility goes hand in hand with the clear conception of the “incomprehensibility” of the divine mystery which always exceeds the measure of our finite understanding. This is why God cannot be instrumentalized or manipulated as a legitimizing element of any instance of power, though unfortunately in history we have painful proofs of this idolatrizing temptation.
Ratzinger connects with the theology of Augustin and Thomas who were able to combine God’s knowability and incomprehensibili- ty without opposing them. In this tradition, the clue to the knowled- ge of God resides in the consideration of the knowing subject, as imago Dei. The notion of imago Dei presupposes, in the first place, that man is endowed with the natural capacity which is nothing less than to know God – because he is the image of God – and moreo- ver presupposes that this capacity cannot embrace God precisely because man is a creature, he is an image which participates in the only divine model. In the second place, Ratzinger maintains that the nucleus of imago Dei is freedom: in order to establish the correspon- dence between God and man he privileges freedom, both divine and human. This being so, the reason why God cannot be grasped com- prehensibly is not only because of his infinite character (as if it were something indefinitely great), but because of his being spiritual and free. God cannot be grasped as an object and unraveled in the uttermost of his being. His revelation is necessarily due to his own free decision. It is only in his free nature that his full identity is accessible in the reciprocal trust of he who gives himself and he who receives, that is to say, in interpersonal love. Any other means of neutral or ob- jective knowledge, even if it seems powerful, is indeed powerless in discovering God’s mystery and ends up taking God’s name in vain.13
A theology on the name of god: he reveals his name and calls us by our name
The theology of God’s Name brings us to what is probably the core of Ratziger’s reasoning. We approach it from the compelling distinctions in his theology between “concept,” “number,” and “name”. If he has denounced the insufficiency of “concept” when it is reduced rationally, he also rejects the “number” when it becomes a simple anonymous measure. He thus wants to avoid an undue theorization or generalization which might diminish the value of the particular. The “name,” instead, expresses that which is proper to each one, his exclusive identity; it identifies him as a singular sub- ject whom must not be submitted to general laws or criteria which reduce him to a mere part of the whole, depersonalizing him.
Well, what characterizes the revelation of God in history is that He wants to manifest His Name freely. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance the Bavarian theologian concedes to this theology of the name of God and its consequences in man’s life. Perhaps it is because of this that the figure of Emil Brunner has appeared in key moments of Ratzinger’s reflections. He has allowed himself to be in- fluenced by the importance which the protestant Swiss theologian concedes to the fact that God reveals His Name, but does not accept the clues with which the latter reads the Scriptures.14
How does the Bible speak of God? An unheard of event occu- rred in history, narrated in the book of Exodus. It is the irruption of Jewish monotheism which will fully become Christian monotheism. All the philosophical-religious history of humanity finds itself sum- moned before the scene in which God reveals his Name to Moses: “’ehyeh ašer ’ehyeh” (Ex 3, 14). Ratzinger concentrates in this scene and comments on its exegetical and philosophical-theological im- plications, so as to display the originality of biblical monotheism. He even affirms that all later reflection is the rethinking of this formula. In that scene, God preserves in part His mysterious cha- racter by giving an answer which at first seems to hide His Name. This marks the essential difference with gods and idols; the di- vine incomprehensibility is respected. Yet He also freely wanted to reveal His identity by making us know his proper Name. In Ratzinger’s opinion, the characteristic of monotheism as opposed to polytheism is not only in defense of the oneness of the absolute before the multiplication of gods. In his judgment, polytheisms so- mehow also recognize that there is a final absolute towards which plurality must be led back, but it is unaccessible to mortals and per- haps to the gods themselves. On the contrary, monotheism appears to be the assertion that the Absolute is not only One but that it can be appealed to by man: it is an infinite You with which the finite you can dialogue. The God of Exodus is not the God of some place but rather the God of the fathers, the God of somebody. And now having manifested His Name he can be called on by the faithful; they can turn to Him personally; they can have a relationship with Him. Through God’s gratuitous initiative, through which He en- counters the faithful, it is also possible that they come to encounter Him. When men discover that God knows them, they can, in turn, know Him and love Him – or else they can choose to hide from Him because they suspect that that knowledge is a threat to their absolute autonomy.15
Ratzinger finds the fullness of the theology of the Name of God in the New Testament, particularly in St. John. According to the fourth gospel Jesus’ mission is to make known to men the name of the Father (John 17:6 and 17:26). Actually Jesus himself is God’s name because his own name (Yeshua) contains God’s name and his mission towards humanity (Yahveh saves). He is the living and ex- tant “Logos” who tells us personally who God is and introduces us to the tri-personal mystery of his intimate life. Ratzinger reminds us that for the New Testament the full imago Dei is Jesus Christ (Col 1:15; 2Cor 4:4) and that therefore it is He who establishes the true “proportion” of correspondence with God. His life – his deeds and words, above all his miracles and the Easter mysteries (passion, death on the Cross, resurrection) – is the great “language” with which God shows us his paternal countenance, filial, loving, in a word: merciful.16 This is the only way through which we discover that the ultimate Foundation of all things is personally Father, and that his creative redeeming action in the Son and the Spirit reveals the ultimate goodness and infallibility of the salvation plan for crea- tion and sin.
In Jesus, this God calls us by our name, entrusts us our vocation through which He incorporates us in his mission, and in this way He definitively personalizes us as sons in the Son. That is why, Ra- tzinger states with a certain provocative force, the problem of the full knowledge of God is resolved by the problem of the following of Jesus.
«His explanation of dogmatic data is always accompanied by an existential preoccupation: how does the reality of the personal life of God affect the concrete life of men? Let us not forget that the illustrated rationalism, which excludes the true revelation of God in history, consequently denies the fact that trinitarian doctrine could be of the slightest practical interest. With his correction towards wholeness, Ratzinger has always revindicated the implications of the trinitarian doctrine for man’s knowledge and morality.» The Holy Trinity by El Greco. Museo del Prado.
God shows us the mystery of his intimacy: divine persons as relations
The revelation of God the Father through his Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost opens for us the intimacy of divine life. In other words, “God is as He manifests Himself” in history. What is that unfathomable mystery of intra-divine life? And what interest does it awake in a normal Christian who is not used to enter into such depths? Ratzinger had the courage to talk of these things to uni- versity students. And he has always continued to teach and preach about God to the Christian people. His explanation of dogmatic data is always accompanied by an existential preoccupation: how does the reality of the personal life of God affect the concrete life of men? Let us not forget that the illustrated rationalism, which excludes the true revelation of God in history, consequently denies the fact that trinitarian doctrine could be of the slightest practical interest. With his correction towards wholeness, Ratzinger has always revindica- ted the implications of the trinitarian doctrine for man’s knowledge and morality. As he has not exactly written a Treatise De Deo Trino, it follows that he hasn’t explained equally all the dimensions of this mystery, but that he has privileged those closest to his existential- anthropological interests.
The core of his trinitarian reflection is the definition of the divi- ne “person” as “relation.” To reach this statement he undoubtedly relies on the Scriptures, especially in St. John (Jn 5:19-30; 10:30; 15:5; 17:11,12). Furthermore, a noteworthy influence may come from Au- gustine, who grants a decisive value to the relation of his De Trinitate as opposed to the Arian thesis. And also one must keep in mind – leaping across centuries – the consistency with that category of modern physics, which explains the structure of matter in terms of actuality. From this or other possible influences Ratzinger links the categories of relation and person connecting its intra-divine mea- ning to anthropology, through Christology.
In the Bavarian theologian we perceive a marked interest in over- coming a “substantialist” and “individualist” concept of the human person. In his judgment the notion of person is impoverished when it is reduced to an individual substance enclosed within itself – as has been occurring in western philosophy and in theology itself. In this context must be placed, for instance, his reservations before a certain comprehension of personal self as substance, or before the classic boetian definition of person, or before the risk of a monoist reduction of the augustinian psychological analogy, or, in contrast, Richard de San Victor’s revindication of the concept of person. All of these elements reveal his search for a dialogical, personalist, and existential key to the person – in God, in Christ and in man.
«The same Ratzinger who adopts this “professing” posture adopts the questions men ask themselves, their difficulties and their objections, as the starting point for a Christian reflection on God. In 1968, before presenting the doctrine on God, Ratzinger looks at the restlessness he perceives in society and asks himself why God has become such a problem for men of that generation.»
In the Trinitarian comprehension of God, Ratzinger says, an anthropomorphic concept of person as we know it in human ex- perience is overcome and it is shown that in God the person is the pure relation, not something added to the person, but that the per- son itself consists in that reference. That way of being, relational, is primordial, of the same rank as the substance. It is a new way of being, which goes beyond the traditional classification of the cate- gories of being (substance and accidents) and which is made known to us exclusively through the Trinitarian relation.17 This revindica- tion of the original character of the relation in God is not traduced, in Ratzinger’s theology, into a dissolution of the divine substance in the relations, or, vice versa, into an ultimate absorbtion of the relational in a kind of divine monism. He insists that both unity and multiplicity are original in God. On the other hand, in order to man- tain the unity of the two aspects which constitute the divine person, that of his incommunicability and that of his relational openness, he finds valuable help in his theology of the divine names. Each one of the proper names, while they cannot be transferred, denote a refe- rence to the other and thus opens originally to the comprehension of the person as relation.
Ratzinger maintains that only this faith in one tri-personal God bestows all its content and dignity on the human person. Though the classical world (the Roman, above all) already knows the term and grants the person several legal privileges, there is no doubt that the philosophical-theological debates raised by the new Christian faith have enriched this category in an unimaginable way, relating it to the divine persons. The starting point of this reflection is, once again, the Gospel, in this case Matthew 10:39: “he that shall lose his life for me shall find it.” It is from this that the Christian can discover under a new light, how his self is: “the most mine, that which ulti- mately belongs to us, our own self is at once the least own because we have not received it from ourselves and for ourselves. The self is at the same time what I have and that which I least own.”18 When theology affirms that in God there exists only actual relations, it sheds light on the essential human relationship and its meaning. Man is made for a loving relationaship, for the recognition of a you and a we without which I cannot attain plenitude. If the previous fact we had found in the common experience of all men was “to be-with,” in the light of the trinitarian mystery it is possible to interpret it in the profoundness of its positive meaning – and not in the negative one, as certain modern anthropologies have asserted. Likewise, the fact that each spiritual subject discovers itself “already installed” in reality, will not be inter- preted as an unadmissible impostion but as the most solid and reaso- nable sign of a loving predilection which preceeds us.
Relying on these considerations on the concept of a divine person, Ratzinger establishes a similar comparison between the proper name of the person (Father or Son) and the human experience of paternity or filiation. The intratrinitarian relations between the Father and the Son in the Holy Ghost teach us, since always, the meaning of filial dependence in the loving bond with a Source which is pure paternity. The trinitarian revelation also practices here the critical function of purifying human concepts. Man’s basic experiences, such as frater- nity – or paternity or filiality – can be obscured to such a degree in the course of history that they may be affected by a final ambiguity. We wouldn’t get very far if we had to explain universal fraternity with Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus as examples. This is why God himself has taken the initiative to reveal the true anthropolo- gical content through Jesus Christ’s filial experience, which teaches us how they are fully accomplished in God: filiation, paternity, and, therefore, fraternity. Once more the trinitarian dogma, in its apparent paradox and apparent uselessness for normal life turns out to be ex- tremely practical, that which enlightens and helps the most.19
To turn to god as our father: prayer
The importance of what we have been saying about divine na- mes and the relationship with divine persons converges existentially in the experience of prayer as the summons from God to man and as the loving answer of the believer. This is one of the dimensions of God’s mystery most loved by our theologian.
The relationship between God’s You and the I of each man has an unmistakable concrete modality, which is prayer. The premise of Christian prayer is precisely that of a non-mechanistic vision of God and the world, but a spiritual and free one. The kind of relationship we call prayer can only be established between two personal freedoms.
Among the different forms of prayer, Ratzinger especially va- lues that of petition, which has often been discussed by secularized thought. He insists that the true condition of man before God is that of the beggar. He refers us to the eucharistic liturgy in which the pe- nitential act invites us to begin the sacramental act with a pleading invocation: “Jesus, have mercy on me!” He asks himself how often we do it with the humble and expectant conscience of the blind beggar who followed Jesus saying those same words along the streets of Jericho (Mk 10:47).20
Only a true prayer of petition and adoration can rescue the Christian man – and especially the theologian – from the danger of empty and sterile erudition. He needs to open his heart from its very depths and receive the initiative of the Resurrected Spirit which urges us to enter into the divine intimacy. The means which teaches that attitu- de is that of Jesus’ prayer, particularly the “Our Father” in which Christ’s unsurpassed mediation concretizes itself to reveal to us God’s face. Christian faith, Ratzinger says, is the explanation of Je- sus’ prayer, of the Only Son of the Father, in which is revealed the full meaning of Christian prayer.
