Ratzinger, Joseph. The Spirit of the Liturgy. Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2020. Part One: The Essence of the Liturgy. Chapter 2: ‘Liturgy―Cosmos―History’.
Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy), Promulgated by Paul VI, Rome, 4 December 1963, nn. 5-20.
The background for this chapter is the apparent conflict between ‘cosmos’ and ‘history’ in Christian liturgy as suggested from comparison with other religions and certain philosophies.
The whole purpose of the chapter is to show how ‘cosmos’―the external world, creation, and history―the space where the actions of man are recorded, are not in opposition but rather closely linked, as shown in the liturgy.
According to some, especially ancient religions, the gods had power over men in different ways (weather, health, nature), and men had a sort of power over the gods as the latter needed sacrifices or offerings from men to continue existing or having power (eg Huitzilopochtli for the Aztecs, the blood-thirsty feathered snake holding close links with the sun).
In the Bible there is also a connection between the only God and its creatures. The account of creation in Genesis 1 shows the work of God geared towards the Sabbath, when God rests.
When the Torah, the law is given to the Israelites in Sinai, that same Sabbath is the essence of the Covenant between God and man. The Sabbath is a day of rest for work, a day when all men are equal and a day of special relation, re-linking to God.
Creation is the space God creates in love for man to live and to respond to his gratuitous love. Man is free and because of that he can respond to God and love him. That love to God is not any kind of love, it is called ‘worship’ (the kind of love appropriate to God). The Sabbath is the day where man rests, where he is free and equal with all fellow men, and where he can especially love, worship God.
The equality and dignity of all men, and of every one of them becomes evident in light of the covenant of God with men. That is why man when man is in covenant with God he becomes truly free.
Creation is the space for the covenant to take place. Creation already implies the free gift of God to man and the invitation for him to respond. His response of love is worship. Therefore creation is a place for the love between God and man to happen and for worship, the liturgy, to occur.
In Exodus 40 the Jewish people, following God’s directions through Moses, build a ‘tent of the meeting’ where God will inhabit. The construction of the Tabernacle develops in seven stages until it is finished and ‘the glory of the Lord’ fills the Tabernacle (Ex 40:34). The Tabernacle is a miniature replica of the universe. Through it, God comes to be with man.
This of course has a strong link with a further step in God’s love for man. Eventually he becomes ‘flesh’ and dwells ‘among us’ (Jn 1:14), he becomes a living Tabernacle, he ‘pitches his tent’ in this world of men.
In the Sabbath after creation in Genesis, as with the tent of the meeting in Exodus, and as with the Incarnation in John, God and man become united, there is a bridge or ladder between them.
Creation (‘cosmos’) looks towards the covenant (‘history’) and the covenant completes the work started at creation.
The completion of the tent in Exodus anticipates the completion of creation, ie the final stage in salvation history when heaven and will be united. And this anticipation is already present in the liturgy.
Liturgy, worship rightly understood allows man to not only be saved but to also enter in communion, in personal relationship with God.
In most ancient religions worship implies the destruction of something to offer it to the gods (in our example about the Aztecs they needed a quota of human hearts offered to Huitzilopochtli to strengthen him in his fight against night and darkness so that the sun could continue to appear).
In Christianity, however, worship does not have anything to do with destruction. Worship means emergence from a state of separation, of isolation or existence in and for self toward man’s ‘divinisation’, the filling of ourselves with God. Creation, ‘cosmos’, is in movement towards and end. That movement is ‘history’. In this sense cosmos and history are not parallel or disconnected entities but they belong together.
To explain how this connection between cosmos and history happens, Ratzinger recurs to two different explanations. The first one explores ideas of Pierre Teilhard the Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist who participated in the excavations of the Man of Pekin fossils and attempted an intellectual connection between evolutionary science and the Christian faith.
For Teilhard the Chardin the Host’s Transubstantiation anticipates the transformation and divinisation of all creation through Christ Eucharist.
The second explanation Ratzinger uses to explain the connection between cosmos and history belongs to a more traditional line of thought in Christianity using the idea of a circular movement of exitus, ‘departure’ and reditus, ‘return’.
This idea is not unique to Christianity and has existed in other religious and philosophical conceptions too. One that Ratzinger analyses due to its importance as a misleading interpretation of this circular movement is Gnosticism, a theory and semi-religious movement dating back to Plotinus, a philosopher from the III century BC whose thought was inscribed in the philosophical tradition initiated by Plato.
Plato explained the visible world (including man) as an appearance of the real world of which we would only have faint memories or awareness. The most famous exposition of this idea is exposed in his work The Republic. In the Allegory of the Cave, some people have lived in the cave since childhood. A fire burns behind them. When people behind carry objects between the fire and the prisoners facing the wall they see shadows of real things projected on the deeper walls in front of them.
That is their idea of ‘reality’ until one of them breaks free to the outer world and finds out what things are really like. When he returns and tells the others they don’t believe him. He is a type of the enlightened, who through knowledge penetrate into the meaning of reality.
Following in this tradition, Plotinus and his followers conceived of an original state of reality in the infinite. At some point beings fall from there and are cast into this world and become finite. This is the departure, ‘exitus’. Finitude is negative, is a lack.
The way to ‘redemption’, the return or reditus, occurs when we those who become aware that they have fallen through knowledge―gnosis in Greek―start their way towards infinitude where they initially belonged. Cult is equated to knowledge.
But not everybody can become thus enlightened, only philosophers, those minds capable of higher thought. They are the only ones who can ascend towards liberation from finitude. For the rest the hope is provided by the theory of transmigration of souls, whereby they jump from one existence to a different one in the hope that they may find the higher one at some point.
A similar perspective exists in some religions of ‘the Far East’ as Ratzinger calls them, but which are likely to be Buddhism and some Hindu religions. They offer redemption in the relaxing of the body or emptying of the mind in very appealing ways event to the secular societies of the West (think of some sorts of ‘meditation’ and yoga).
For Christians, however, the departure or exitus can be seen in creation, which from the beginning is conceived as ‘very good’ (see Gen 1:31). God creates the universe so that man can live there, realise God’s love for him and have the opportunity to love him back (worship him) and thereby become more and more ‘divine’.
The Fall is a rejection of God and option of self, for isolation and separation. But God goes further and becomes man to show him the way back to him. Jesus provides healing for man’s wounds, unties the knots he has made for himself and brings him on his shoulders back to God.
Christ’s historical Paschal sacrifice constantly enacted through the liturgy therefore is an act of new creation, the restoration of creation to its true identity.