A Pope who uses
the vocabulary of science
to explain the Creative Spirit
by Salvatore Mazza
Translated from
June 9, 2009
That by itself - using metaphors from science - tends to catch his listeners unprepared.
Last Sunday, Benedict XVI used 'an analogy suggested by biology' to say that "the human being carries in his genome the deep imprint of the Trinity, of God-Love".
In his post-synodal exhortation
Sacramentum caritatis, he used the image of 'nculear fission' to explain how "the substantial transformation of bread and wine to the Body and Blood of Christ introduces into creation the principle of radical transformation, that is, a nuclear fission takes place in our most intimate being, a change destined to set off a transformation of reality whose ulltimate form would be the transfiguration of the entire world, to that condition in which God will be everything in all".
This application of scientific terminology to spiritual language is evidently not, for Papa Ratzinger, mere rhetorical srtifice. Rather, it expresses his conviction - affirmed many times and at various levels - that the two spheres, science and faith, not only are not destined to conflict, but on the contrary, to integrate together.
As in the case of the star that led the three Wise Men, whom, as the Pope said last Epiphany, "were most likely astronomers" who followed the comet necause they were capable of looking at the starry skies and understanding that beyond all this, there could not be just 'a cold and anonymous mover'.
"Mathematics as such," he told the delegates to the Italian Church convention in Verona in October 2006, "is a creation of our intelligence: the correspondence between its structures and the real structures of the universe inspires our admiration and poses a great question. In fact, it implies that the universe itself is structured intelligently, in a way that there is a profound correspondence between our subjective reason and the rational objectivity of nature.
"It then becomes inevitable to ask ourselves if there must not be a single original intelligence which is the common source of one and the other."
In this way, "the tendency to give primacy to the irrational, to chance and to necessity, is turned on its head, leading back our own intelligence and freedom to that original source"; and "on this basis, it even becomes possible once again to widen the spaces of our rationality, to reopen it to the great questions about the true and the good, conjugating together theology, philosophy and the sciences, in full respect of their respective methods and their reciprocal autonomy, and in full awareness of the intrinsic unity that holds them together."
The Pope's point of view has multiple aspects: "The fact that the earth, the cosmos, mirror the creative Spirit," he told the Roman Curiq last December 22 , "means that their rational structures, which are almost pallpable beyond mere mathematical order and experiment, also carry within an ethical orientation."
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My own favorite discourse on science by Benedict XVI was an answer he gave during his Q&A with the youth of Rome in St. Peter's Square, when he spoke spontaneously about how mathematics and science reflect the unimaginable order of the universe. It was breathtaking! As soon as I can dig it up, I will post that quotation here.