In the Beginning…' Quotes

“Creation is designed in such a way that it is oriented to worship. It fulfills its purpose and assumes its significance when it is lived, ever new, with a view to worship. Creation exists for the sake of worship. As Saint Benedict said in his Rule: Operi Dei nihil praeponatur”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Jesus Christ goes Adam’s route, but in reverse. In contrast to Adam he is really “like God.” But this being like God, this similarity to God, is being a Son, and hence it is totally relational. “I do nothing on my own authority” (John 8:28). Therefore the One who is truly like God does not hold graspingly to his autonomy, to the limitlessness of his ability and his willing. He does the contrary: he becomes completely dependent, he becomes a slave. Because he does not go the route of power but that of love, he can descend into the depths of Adam’s lie, into the depths of death, and there raise up truth and life.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Only being loved is being saved, and only God’s love can purify damaged human love and radically reestablish the network of relationships that have suffered from alienation.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“This means that human beings who deny the limitations imposed on them by good and evil, which are the inner standard of creation, deny the truth. They are living in untruth and in unreality.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“But from this it is also clear that human beings alone cannot save themselves. Their innate error is precisely that they want to do this by themselves.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Human beings who consider dependence on the highest love as slavery and who try to deny the truth about themselves, which is their creatureliness, do not free themselves; they destroy truth and love. They do not make themselves gods, which in fact they cannot do, but rather caricatures, pseudo-gods, slaves of their own abilities, which then drag them down.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“We should see that human beings can never retreat into the realm of what they are capable of. In everything that they do, they constitute themselves. Therefore they themselves, and creation with its good and evil, are always present as their standard, and when they reject this standard they deceive themselves.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“But it means, if one is to be consistent, that there is an area where human beings can ignore their limitations: when they create art, then they may do what they can do; then they have no limitations. And that means in turn that the measure of human beings is what they can do and not what they are, not what is good or bad.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“more clearly discern God’s response: Yes, that is the man who is loved by God to the very dust, who is so loved by God that he pursues him to the uttermost toils of death.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“It is the affair of the natural sciences to explain how the tree of life in particular continues to grow and how new branches shoot out from it. This is not a matter for faith. But we must have the audacity to say that the great projects of the living creation are not the products of chance and error. Nor are they the products of a selective process to which divine predicates can be attributed in illogical, unscientific, and even mythic fashion. The great projects of the living creation point to a creating Reason and show us a creating Intelligence, and they do so more luminously and radiantly today than ever before. Thus we can say today with a new certitude and joyousness that the human being is indeed a divine project, which only the creating Intelligence was strong and great and audacious enough to conceive of. Human beings are not a mistake but something willed; they are the fruit of love.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“According to Monod, there is in the universe not only necessity but also chance. As Christians we would go further and say that there is freedom.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“here, too, the progress of thought in the last two decades helps us to grasp anew the inner unity of creation and evolution and of faith and reason.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the “project” of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary—rather than mutually exclusive—realities.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“When the human person is no longer seen as standing under God’s protection and bearing God’s breath, then the human being begins to be viewed in utilitarian fashion.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Operi Dei nihil praeponatur: Nothing ought to be preferred to the work of God, nothing ought to be placed ahead of the service of God. This phrase represents the correct attitude with respect to the preservation of creation as opposed to the false worship of progress, the worship of changes that crush humankind, and the calumny against the human species that destroys the earth and creation and keeps it from its goal. The Creator alone is humanity’s true savior, and only if we trust the Creator shall we find ourselves on the way to saving the world of human beings and of things.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Our age is the first to experience that hideous narcissism that cuts itself off from both past and future and that is preoccupied exclusively with its own present.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Christianity is said to have transformed all the powers of the universe, which were once our brothers and sisters, into utilitarian objects for human beings, and in so doing it has led them to misuse plants and animals and in fact all the world’s powers for the sake of an ideology of progress that thinks only of itself and cares only for itself.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“What we had previously celebrated—namely, that through faith in creation the world has been demythologized and made reasonable; that sun, moon, and stars are no longer strange and powerful divinities but merely lights; that animals and plants have lost their mystic qualities: all this has become an accusation against Christianity.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“The worship of God, his freedom, and his rest come first. Thus and only thus can the human being truly live.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“God created the universe in order to be able to become a human being and pour out his love upon us and to invite us to love him in return.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“To this must be added the fact that Torah, the law, is an expression of Israel’s history with God. It is an expression of the covenant, and the covenant is in turn an expression of God’s love, of his “yes” to the human being that he created, so that he could both love and receive love. Now we can grasp this notion better. We can say that God created the universe in order to enter into a history of love with humankind.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“This rhythm is itself at the service of a still deeper meaning: Creation is oriented to the sabbath, which is the sign of the covenant between God and humankind”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“In the Bible this thought goes still further. It lets us know that the rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, more profoundly, a way of expressing the rhythm of the heart and the rhythm of God’s love, which manifests itself there.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“The number that governs the whole is seven; in the scheme of seven days it permeates the whole in a way that cannot be overlooked. This is the number of a phase of the moon, and thus we are told throughout this account that the rhythm of our heavenly neighbor also sounds the rhythm of our human life.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“There the numbers three, four, seven, and ten dominate. The words “God said” appear ten times in the creation account. In this way the creation narrative anticipates the Ten Commandments.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“this does not imply that the individual passages of the Bible sink into meaninglessness and that this bare extract alone has any value. They, too, express the truth—in another way, to be sure, than is the case in physics and biology. They represent truth in the way that symbols do—just as, for example, a Gothic window gives us a deep insight into reality, thanks to the effects of light that it produces and to the figures that it portrays.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Thus far it has become clear that the biblical creation narratives represent another way of speaking about reality than that with which we are familiar from physics and biology.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“As Christians we read Holy Scripture with Christ. He is our guide all the way through it. He indicates to us in reliable fashion what an image is and where the real, enduring content of a biblical expression may be found. At the same time he is freedom from a false slavery to literalism and a guarantee of the solid, realistic truth of the Bible, which does not dissipate into a cloud of pious pleasantries but remains the sure ground upon which we can stand. Our second realization was this: Faith in creation is reasonable.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Therefore we must not in our own day conceal our faith in creation. We may not conceal it, for only if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings. God is the Lord of all things because he is their creator, and only therefore can we pray to him. For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather that they are sustaining forces of reality.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

“Christ frees us from the slavery of the letter, and precisely thus does he give back to us, renewed, the truth of the images.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, In the Beginning…': A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought