Another Vaticanista picked up on the Holy Father's use of the word 'genome' in his beautiful mini-homily on the Trinity last Sunday. I translated Salvatore Mazza's commentary from Avvenire yesterday. It turns out Lugi Accattoli had written something similar for his old paper, Corriere della Sera, last Monday.
The creative Pope:
'The Trinity in our DNA'
by Luigi Accattoli
Translated from
July 8, 2009
In the human genome - that is, our DNA - we bear 'the profound imprint of the Trinity, of God-Love'.
The Pope said this yesterday at the Angelus using a term from biology, just as another time (August 21 2005), he had evoked 'nuclear fission' in speaking of the 'eucharistic mystery', and on a third occasion (Easter Vigil, 2006), he called the resurrection of Christ 'the greates mutation' that had ever happened 'in the history of life'.
Yesterday was the Feast of the Trinity, whom the theologian Pope presented as "Three Persons who are one God only, because the Father is love, the Son is love, and the Spirit is love. God is all love and only love, the purest love, infinite and eternal".
God does not "live in splendid solitude" but is the "inexhaustible source of life" that 'gives unceasingly". By communicating this 'creative Love' he transmits "to all that exists" his own 'likeness'.
And here the Pope gets to the human genome: "The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: only love makes us happy, because we live in relationship: we live to love and be loved. Using an analogy suggested by biology, we can say that the human being carries in his own genome the profound imprint of the Trinity, of God-Love".
Never has the Trinity been associated with the human genome. But to speak of mystery, Benedict XVI invents his own language. He is as creative with words as Papa Wojtyla was with gestures.
When I posted Salvatore Mazza's piece from Avvenire yesterday, I referred to my own favorite 'scientific' discourse by Benedict XVI. It was this very spontaneous response to a young college student at an encounter in St. Peter's Square on April 6, 2006, with the youth of the Diocese of Rome and privince of Lazio. Here is a translation:
Question: I am asking you to help us understand better how Biblical revelation and scientific theories can converge in the search for truth. Often we are led to believe that science and faith are enemies; that science and technology are one and the same; that mathematical logic has discovered everything; that the world is a product of chance, and that if mathematics has not discovered God, the theorem 'God is because he is God', simply does not exist.
In short, especially when we are “studying” (for school), it is not always easy to attribute everything to a divine plan inscribed in nature and in the story of man. So, at times, faith wavers or is reduced to a simple act of sentiment. I, too, Holy Father, like all young people, am hungry for Truth, but what can I do to harmonize science and faith?
The great Galileo said that God wrote the book of nature in the language of mathematics. He was convinced that God had given us two books: that of Sacred Scripture and that of nature. And that the language of nature - he was convinced of this – was mathematics, which is therefore a language of God, of the Creator.
Now let us reflect on what mathematics is: of itself, it is an abstract system, an invention of the human mind, and as such, it does not exist as pure essence. It is always realized approximatively, but as an intellectual system, it is an invention of genius by the human mind.
The surprising thing is that this invention of our mind is truly the key to understanding nature, that nature is really structured mathematically, and that our mathematics, invented by the human spirit, is really the instrument with which we can work with nature, place it at our service, make it an instrument through technology.
It seems to me almost incredible that an invention of the human intellect and the structure of the universe should coincide, that the mathematics invented by us truly gives us access to the nature of the universe and makes this nature useful to us. And so the intellectual structure of the human subject and the objective structure of reality coincide: subjective reason and reason objectified in nature are identical.
I think that this coincidence between how we think and how nature came to be and how it behaves is a great enigma and challenge, because we see that in the end, there is “one” reason (primary cause) that connects both. Our own reasoning could not have discovered the other if there had not been a reason common to both.
In this sense, it seems to me that mathematics – in which God cannot appear as such – shows us the intelligent structure of the universe. Now, we even have theories of chaos, but they are limited, because if chaos had the upper hand, then all technology would be impossible.
Technology is reliable only because our mathematics is reliable. Our science, which finally makes it possible for us to work with the energies of nature, assumes that matter has a reliable and intelligent structure.
So we see that there is a subjective rationality as well as a rationality objectified in matter which coincide.
Of course, no one can now prove – as one does through experiment or technical readings – that both systems of reason really originated from one single “intelligence”, but it seems to me that this single intelligence behind the two systems of reason we have is truly manifest in our world. And that the more we are able to instrumentalize the world with our intelligence, the more the design of creation becomes apparent.
At the end, to come to the definitive question, I would say: Either there is a God, or there is none. Only two options exist. One either recognizes the priority of reason, of the creative Reason that is at the origin of everything and is the principle of everything – the priority of reason is also the priority of freedom; or one advocates the priority of the irrational, in which everything that works on earth and in our lives would simply be occasional, marginal, an irrational product, in which case reason would be the product of irrationality!
Ultimately one cannot “prove” one or the other, but the great option of Christianity is to choose rationality and the priority of reason. This seems to me the optimal option which shows us how behind everything there is a great Intelligence, to whom we can entrust ourselves.
However, the true problem against faith today, it seems to me, is evil in this world. How is it compatible with the rationality of the Creator? It is here we really need the God who was made flesh and who shows us that he is not only mathematical reason, but that he, the original Reason, is also Love.
If we look at the major options, the Christian option even today is the most rational and the most human. Because of this, we can elaborate with confidence a philosophy, a vision of the world, that is based on this priority of reason, on our faith that the creative Reason is love, and that this love is God.
I do not think there is any living intellectual, philosopher, scientist or theologian today who can deliver such a cogent, literally amazing statement - off the cuff, yet! - on science, reason and faith as Benedict XVI did above.
Those benighted bigoted physicists at la Sapienza would probably not stand a chance if they chose to debate him on, say, chaos theory. I daresay one of these days the Holy Father is bound to make a reference to string theory, man's latest effort to find a 'unified theory' that explains the universe from the micro- to the macro-cosmos. We believers call that 'unified theory' God.
And by the way, those physicists completely ignored the fact that the man they accused in January 2008 of dissing Galileo had referred positively to Galileo at least three times in the early months of his Papacy. Before this meeting with the youth, he cited Galileo in his mini-encyclical address to the national convention of the Italian Church held in Verona in October 2005, and not long after that, when he opened the academic year at the Pontifical Lateran University.
The entire transcript of the Pope's Q&A with the youth of Rome andf Lazio can be found on
freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=354537&p=4
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 11/06/2009 01:23]