It's Always Advent
Seeking Christ with Pope Benedict XVI
It is Advent. It is always Advent.
In 1964, Joseph Ratzinger preached three sermons in the Cathedral at Münster in an effort to answer what being a Christian means today. It was Advent at the time, and this comes through in his reflections.
Advent does not celebrate the past alone, remembering the ages of darkness before the light of Christ broke on the horizon. It is not a liturgical recall of the time when fallen man longed for a savior. Instead, “Advent is our present, our reality…the reality of our Christian life.”[1] In celebrating Advent year after year, the Church makes us face the facts, she makes “us admit the extent of being unredeemed, which is not something that lay over the world at one time, and perhaps somewhere still does, but is a fact in our own lives and in the midst of the Church.”[2] Advent does not acknowledge some line of demarcation in history, a point of division between “before Christ” and anno domine, “in the year of the Lord,” as if all of time and space after the moment the Word became flesh are redeemed and we have nothing to worry about. “God has not divided history into a light half and a dark one,” Ratzinger says.[3] Rather, we all stand in need of redemption, even today. Advent is about dividing lines in our own lives. It is about those dark and hidden places in our own hearts that still, even 2000 years after the Word took flesh, still stand in need of his light.
So, we can say, it is Advent. It is always Advent. Advent is an enduring reality, as Ratzinger puts it, wherein we:
Begin to realize that the borderline between “before Christ” and “after Christ” does not run through historical time, in an outward sense, and cannot be drawn on any map; it runs through our own hearts. Insofar as we are living on a basis of selfishness, of egoism, then even today we are “before Christ.” But in this time of Advent, let us ask the Lord to grant that we may live less and less “before Christ,” and certainly not “after Christ,” but truly with Christ and in Christ: with him who is indeed Christ yesterday, today, and forever (Heb 13:8).[4]
Every time I read this passage, I’m struck by Ratzinger’s imperative that we certainly not live “after Christ.” But is not “after Christ” precisely where we are as a culture? After Christ. Post-Christian. Postmodern. The sheer volume of “nones,” and those who “used to be Catholic,” indicates this. Their individual lives have moved from before Christ to with Christ to after Christ, an age just as dark or darker than life before Christ — like the darkness that overpowers your sight when you look at something too bright for a time. It is a pervasive and penetrating darkness. Blinding darkness.
And this blindness does not only pervade the lives of individuals. Post-Christian darkness is a cultural reality. We are living in a dark age. From before Christ to with Christ (i.e., a Christendom culture) to after Christ. We live in a culture that believes it has grown up, matured, and shed its immature, imaginative myths about a God-man born to a virgin in a stable who died on a Cross and rose from the dead. Ours is a kind of teenage culture, a revolutionary one that rejects its upbringing and its roots, putting the axe to its roots and forgetting its origins, instead.
Dostoevsky on Life After Christ
The great Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky, captures this arrogant ethos, tinged as it is with a certain animus, when he asks, “Can one believe while being civilized [i.e., a modern, rational person]…believe without reservation in the divine nature of Jesus Christ, the Son of God?”[5] Is it reasonable to believe in the Incarnation today? How can an enlightened person possibly believe it? Is Christianity not some a vaporous dream from which postmodern men and women have woke?
I would respond to Dostoevsky’s question with a question: What kind of civilization has resulted from not believing in Christ? Is it more civilized than one that does? Is it reasonable to place so much stock in human reason alone?
Such questions would be justified, as we have now seen the terrible destruction of a culture of death over the span of several hundred years. From Cartesian skepticism and Kant’s cry to rely upon reason alone, to Locke’s empiricism and Comte’s faith in science alone. From Vico’s claim that human beings can only know what they themselves have made, to Marx’s emphasis on feasibility and creating a future for mankind. From the scientific revolution to the industrial revolution, and the sexual revolution to the technological revolution, modernity produced one totalizing myth after another, a series of successive revolutions that radically transformed life as we know it. All this progress blew up in grand fashion in the 20th century with dictatorships, two world wars, and the constant threat of nuclear war. Modernity’s grand plans resulted in a culture of death—one that continually denied dependence and repeatedly compensated for our fallen nature. Consequently, we live in a cemetery full of the tombstones of modern thoughts, myths, and lives—some still pristine and polished, while others are in disrepair. In the alleyways of this necropolis, modernity’s specter emerges from the grave as postmodernity, a haunting, nihilistic “condition” that bears striking resemblance to the bones lying in the graves beneath its feet, though seemingly more illusive.
Throughout the course of his life and his conversion, Dostoevsky became aware of the danger that faces men and women who forget God. He made two claims about what would result from modern atheism. First, “in place of the God-man appears the man-god, the ‘strong personality,’ who stands beyond morality, ‘beyond the confines of good and evil,’ to whom ‘everything is permitted and who can ‘transgress’ all laws,” the famed Dostoevsky biographer Konstantin Mochulsky says.[6] Modern man replaced God with himself, a revolutionary ploy that’s been on repeat from the garden of Eden to the tower of Babel, and from Mt. Sinai to Mt. Calvary. But, “when God is forgotten, however, the creature itself grows unintelligible.”[7]
Dostoevsky’s second claim has to do with “the herd.” If all that matters is matter, and the soul is not immaterial and immortal, then we can only live for the here and now. However, since human beings are so unruly and rebellious by their nature, “one must enslave and transform them into a submissive herd.”[8] In this vein, writing much more recently, Michael O’Brien observes, “The mighty of the earth are moving towards absolute power in an effort to establish control over what they perceive to be the chaos of the human condition.”[9] Sound like the silent and welcomed dictatorship of relativism, anyone? The totalitarian and tyrannical efforts of seemingly social justice saturated DEI and woke thinking? The massive invasion of nearly every aspect of life by big tech? Daily life for most people is controlled by forces and corporations far removed from the concrete communities and real relationships that used to constitute daily life and thriving, and yet we submit. To turn again to O’Brien:
The human community is never more endangered than when totalitarianism appears to be benevolent. The new totalitarian’s idealism, his “humanitarianism,” his public image, may all communicate to us many good things, and thus our imagination is captured to the detriment of real discernment.[10]
And so, by rejecting the Incarnation, after about 400 years or so, we, the people of the West, indeed find ourselves “after Christ,” in a modern graveyard haunted by postmodern ghouls. We live a kind of “zombie culture,” one marked by the living dead who have lost a sense of their origin and forgotten their destiny, traipsing about in a sort of half-life until they submit to the absolute nothingness of death or bring it about themselves. The human spirit has collapsed under the weight of its own pride and now wallows in its own false humility. We do all sorts of things without asking or knowing why. After all, the destruction of the modern metanarratives has proven that we thought we could know everything about everything, but in the end, it seems we know nothing for certain and nothing for all. Hence, the popular claim: there is no objective truth. No universal truth-claim. Postmodernity disbelieves certainty and renounces any claim of it.
Seeking Christ and Recalling the Gospel
What can be done about such a grim picture? Does the Incarnation have any place? For generations, now, it seems God has gone silent. Or, perhaps the problem lies in a human inability to hear from him, so we have blocked him out like an angry teen immersed in his noisy EMO and virtual reality. Perhaps we’re apathetic. In such a time, can the Gospel still resonate? Does it have any enduring value? Can it shake men and women from their nihilism?
In the midst of this cultural space, which he knew so well, Benedict XVI recalls the impulse behind the monastic movement that played such a big role in shaping Western culture. He says:
It must be frankly admitted straight away that it was not their intention to create a culture nor even to preserve a culture from the past. Their motivation was much more basic. Their goal was: quaerere Deum. Amid the confusion of the times, in which nothing seemed permanent, they wanted to do the essential — to make an effort to find what was perennially valid and lasting, life itself. They were searching for God. They wanted to go from the inessential to the essential, to the only truly important and reliable thing there is.[11]
Amid certain cultural decadence and depravity, monks sought God. This seeking led to finding Christ, it led to hearing the Gospel again. And this seeking and finding and listening and hearing resulted in a culture of life—the culture of the Incarnation emerged. If this kind of encounter with Christ was possible then, it is possible now.
Over the course of this liturgical year, through the span of this enduring Advent, I want to seek God through the thought of Benedict XVI. I dare to set out to seek God again by following Benedict XVI’s lead and unpacking his work. In short, I hope to present the Gospel afresh as we go out to meet the God who has spoken to us and who still speaks to us today. As Pope Benedict XVI says:
The great suffering of man — then, as now — is this: behind the silence of the universe, behind the clouds of history, is or isn’t there a God? And, if this God is there, does he know us, does he have anything to do with us? Is this God good, then does the reality of good have any power in the world or not? This question is as relevant today as it was then. Many people wonder: is God just a hypothesis or not? Is he a reality or not? Why do we not hear him? “Gospel” means: God has broken his silence, God has spoken, God exists. This fact in itself is salvation: God knows us, God loves us, he has entered into history. Jesus is his Word, God with us, God showing us that he loves us, that he suffers with us until death and rises again. This is the Gospel. God has spoken, he is no longer the great unknown, but has shown himself and this is salvation.[12]
An Enduring Advent
So, it is Advent. It is Advent yet again. It is always Advent. And Advent provokes us to set out again in our seeking the God who, even today, still comes to us. And we, the ones through whom the dividing line between iniquity and redemption runs straight down our hearts, we can go out to meet him with confidence. We can go with confidence to the merciful God who knows there is much in our lives, impacted as we are by the cultural attempt to live “after Christ,” that ends up once again “before Christ” and in desperate need of the coming Savior, Emmanuel, God with us. And this is just the kind of God he is, the one for us and with us.
Grant your faithful, we pray, almighty God,
the resolve to run forth to meet your Christ
with righteous deeds at his coming,
so that, gathered at his right hand,
they may be worthy to possess the heavenly kingdom.
—From the Collect, First Sunday of Advent
[1] Ratzinger, What It Means to Be a Christian, 18.
[2] Ratzinger, What It Means to Be a Christian, 18–19.
[3] Ratzinger, What It Means to Be a Christian, 35.
[4] Ratzinger, What It Means to Be a Christian, 40.
[5] Dostoevsky, Notebooks for “The Possessed,” 237.
[6] Mochulsky, “Introductory Essay,” in The Brothers Karamazov, xv–xvi.
[7] Gaudium et spes, §36.
[8] Mochulsky, “Introductory Essay,” in The Brothers Karamazov, xvi.
[9] Michael O’Brien, The Family and the New Totalitarianism, 15.
[10] O’Brien, The Family and the New Totalitarianism, 213.
[11] Benedict XVI, “Address to Representatives from the World of Culture,” Sept. 12, 2008.
[12] Benedict XVI, “Meditation of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI during the First General Congregation,” Oct. 8, 2012.