Benedict XVI - Ecce Homo: Jesus Embodies Human Suffering, God's Presence In It

“Ecce homo”—the expression spontaneously takes on a depth of meaning that reaches far beyond this moment in history. In Jesus, it is man himself that is manifested. In him is displayed the suffering of all who are subjected to violence, all the downtrodden. His suffering mirrors the inhumanity of worldly power, which so ruthlessly crushes the powerless. In him is reflected what we call “sin”: this is what happens when man turns his back upon God and takes control over the world into his own hands. 

There is another side to all this, though: Jesus’ innermost dignity cannot be taken from him. The hidden God remains present within him. Even the man subjected to violence and vilification remains the image of God. Ever since Jesus submitted to violence, it has been the wounded, the victims of violence, who have been the image of the God who chose to suffer for us. So Jesus in the throes of his Passion is an image of hope: God is on the side of those who suffer.

 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Part Two: Holy Week (2011), p.199 

Benedict XVI - Trial Before Pilate: Kingdom of Truth, Not Power

Yet during the interrogation we suddenly arrive at a dramatic moment: Jesus’ confession. To Pilate’s question: “So you are a king?” he answers: “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice” (Jn 18:37). Previously Jesus had said: “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world” (18:36). 

This “confession” of Jesus places Pilate in an extraordinary situation: the accused claims kingship and a kingdom (basileía). Yet he underlines the complete otherness of his kingship, and he even makes the particular point that must have been decisive for the Roman judge: No one is fighting for this kingship. If power, indeed military power, is characteristic of kingship and kingdoms, there is no sign of it in Jesus’ case. And neither is there any threat to Roman order. This kingdom is powerless. It has no legions. 

With these words Jesus created a thoroughly new concept of kingship and kingdom, and he held it up to Pilate, the representative of classical worldly power. What is Pilate to make of it, and what are we to make of it, this concept of kingdom and kingship? Is it unreal, is it sheer fantasy that can be safely ignored? Or does it somehow affect us? 

In addition to the clear delimitation of his concept of kingdom (no fighting, earthly powerlessness), Jesus had introduced a positive idea, in order to explain the nature and particular character of the power of this kingship: namely, truth. Pilate brought another idea into play as the dialogue proceeded, one that came from his own world and was normally connected with “kingdom”: namely, power—authority (exousía). Dominion demands power; it even defines it. Jesus, however, defines as the essence of his kingship witness to the truth. Is truth a political category? Or has Jesus’ “kingdom” nothing to do with politics? To which order does it belong? If Jesus bases his concept of kingship and kingdom on truth as the fundamental category, then it is entirely understandable that the pragmatic Pilate asks him: “What is truth?” (18:38). 

It is the question that is also asked by modern political theory: Can politics accept truth as a structural category? Or must truth, as something unattainable, be relegated to the subjective sphere, its place taken by an attempt to build peace and justice using whatever instruments are available to power? By relying on truth, does not politics, in view of the impossibility of attaining consensus on truth, make itself a tool of particular traditions that in reality are merely forms of holding on to power? 

And yet, on the other hand, what happens when truth counts for nothing? What kind of justice is then possible? Must there not be common criteria that guarantee real justice for all—criteria that are independent of the arbitrariness of changing opinions and powerful lobbies? Is it not true that the great dictatorships were fed by the power of the ideological lie and that only truth was capable of bringing freedom? 

What is truth? The pragmatist’s question, tossed off with a degree of scepticism, is a very serious question, bound up with the fate of mankind. What, then, is truth? Are we able to recognize it? Can it serve as a criterion for our intellect and will, both in individual choices and in the life of the community? 

The classic definition from scholastic philosophy designates truth as “adaequatio intellectus et rei” (conformity between the intellect and reality; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 21, a. 2c). If a man’s intellect reflects a thing as it is in itself, then he has found truth: but only a small fragment of reality—not truth in its grandeur and integrity. 

We come closer to what Jesus meant with another of Saint Thomas’ teachings: “Truth is in God’s intellect properly and firstly (proprie et primo); in human intellect it is present properly and derivatively (proprie quidem et secundario)” (De Verit., q. 1, a. 4c). And in conclusion we arrive at the succinct formula: God is “ipsa summa et prima veritas” (truth itself, the sovereign and first truth; Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 5c). 

This formula brings us close to what Jesus means when he speaks of the truth, when he says that his purpose in coming into the world was to “bear witness to the truth”. Again and again in the world, truth and error, truth and untruth, are almost inseparably mixed together. The truth in all its grandeur and purity does not appear. The world is “true” to the extent that it reflects God: the creative logic, the eternal reason that brought it to birth. And it becomes more and more true the closer it draws to God. Man becomes true, he becomes himself, when he grows in God’s likeness. Then he attains to his proper nature. God is the reality that gives being and intelligibility. 

“Bearing witness to the truth” means giving priority to God and to his will over against the interests of the world and its powers. God is the criterion of being. In this sense, truth is the real “king” that confers light and greatness upon all things. We may also say that bearing witness to the truth means making creation intelligible and its truth accessible from God’s perspective—the perspective of creative reason—in such a way that it can serve as a criterion and a signpost in this world of ours, in such a way that the great and the mighty are exposed to the power of truth, the common law, the law of truth. 

Let us say plainly: the unredeemed state of the world consists precisely in the failure to understand the meaning of creation, in the failure to recognize truth; as a result, the rule of pragmatism is imposed, by which the strong arm of the powerful becomes the god of this world. 

At this point, modern man is tempted to say: Creation has become intelligible to us through science. Indeed, Francis S. Collins, for example, who led the Human Genome Project, says with joyful astonishment: “The language of God was revealed” (The Language of God, p. 122). Indeed, in the magnificent mathematics of creation, which today we can read in the human genetic code, we recognize the language of God. But unfortunately not the whole language. The functional truth about man has been discovered. But the truth about man himself—who he is, where he comes from, what he should do, what is right, what is wrong—this unfortunately cannot be read in the same way. Hand in hand with growing knowledge of functional truth there seems to be an increasing blindness toward “truth” itself—toward the question of our real identity and purpose. 

What is truth? Pilate was not alone in dismissing this question as unanswerable and irrelevant for his purposes. Today too, in political argument and in discussion of the foundations of law, it is generally experienced as disturbing. Yet if man lives without truth, life passes him by; ultimately he surrenders the field to whoever is the stronger. “Redemption” in the fullest sense can only consist in the truth becoming recognizable. And it becomes recognizable when God becomes recognizable. He becomes recognizable in Jesus Christ. In Christ, God entered the world and set up the criterion of truth in the midst of history. Truth is outwardly powerless in the world, just as Christ is powerless by the world’s standards: he has no legions; he is crucified. Yet in his very powerlessness, he is powerful: only thus, again and again, does truth become power. 

In the dialogue between Jesus and Pilate, the subject matter is Jesus’ kingship and, hence, the kingship, the “kingdom”, of God. In the course of this same conversation it becomes abundantly clear that there is no discontinuity between Jesus’ Galilean teaching—the proclamation of the kingdom of God—and his Jerusalem teaching. The center of the message, all the way to the Cross—all the way to the inscription above the Cross—is the kingdom of God, the new kingship represented by Jesus. And this kingship is centered on truth. The kingship proclaimed by Jesus, at first in parables and then at the end quite openly before the earthly judge, is none other than the kingship of truth. The inauguration of this kingship is man’s true liberation. 

At the same time it becomes clear that between the pre-Resurrection focus on the kingdom of God and the post-Resurrection focus on faith in Jesus Christ as Son of God there is no contradiction. In Christ, God—the Truth—entered the world. Christology is the concrete form acquired by the proclamation of God’s kingdom.

 Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Part Two: Holy Week (2011), p.189-193 

Benedict XVI - Trial Before Sanhedrin: Jesus Inaugurates a Non-Political Messianic Kingdom

One is tempted to say that the motive for acting against Jesus was a political concern shared by the priestly aristocracy and the Pharisees, though they arrived at it from different starting points; yet this political interpretation of the figure of Jesus and his ministry caused them to miss completely what was most characteristic and new about him. Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path. 

Nevertheless, we must not be too hasty in condemning the “purely political” outlook of his opponents. For in the world they inhabited, the two spheres—political and religious—were inseparable. The “purely” political existed no more than the “purely” religious. The Temple, the Holy City, and the Holy Land with its people: these were neither purely political nor purely religious realities. Anything to do with Temple, nation, and land involved both the religious foundation of politics and its religious consequences. The defense of the “place” and the “nation” was ultimately a religious affair, because it was concerned with God’s house and God’s people.

. . .

It is an overlap that corresponds to what we discovered in the cleansing of the Temple. Jesus fights there, on the one hand, as we saw, against self-serving abuse of the sacred space, but his prophetic gesture and the interpretation he gave to it go much deeper: the old cult of the stone Temple has come to an end. The hour of the new worship in “spirit and truth” has come. The Temple of stone must be destroyed, so that the new one, the New Covenant with its new style of worship, can come. Yet at the same time, this means that Jesus himself must endure crucifixion, so that, after his Resurrection, he may become the new Temple. 

This brings us back to the question of the interweaving and the separation of religion and politics. In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a non-political Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another, as we said earlier. But this separation—essential to Jesus’ message—of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world.

. . . 

Jesus accepted the title Messiah, with all the meanings accruing to it from the tradition, but at the same time he qualified it in a way that could only lead to a guilty verdict, which he could have avoided either by rejecting it or by proposing a milder form of Messianism. He left no room for political or military interpretations of the Messiah’s activity. No, the Messiah—he himself—will come as the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven. Objectively this is quite close to what we find in John’s account when Jesus says: “My kingship is not of this world” (18:36). He claims to sit at the right hand of the Power, that is to say, to come from God in the manner of Daniel’s Son of Man, in order to establish God’s definitive kingdom.

This must have struck the members of the Sanhedrin as politically absurd and theologically unacceptable, for it meant that Jesus was claiming to be close to the “Power”, to participate in God’s own nature, and this would have been understood as blasphemy. However, Jesus had merely pieced a few scriptural quotations together and had expressed his mission “according to the Scriptures”, in language drawn from the Scriptures themselves. But to the members of the Sanhedrin, the application of the noble words of Scripture to Jesus evidently appeared as an intolerable attack on God’s otherness, on his uniqueness.

Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth Part Two: Holy Week (2011), p.169-171, 180 

Ramage - "Mystical Elevation" Perspective on Transubstantiation (Barron/Ratzinger/Sokolowski)

[Bishop Robert Barron, Monsignor Robert Sokolowski, and Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI] share the conviction that transubstantiation might be more profoundly understood if we approach it beyond the confines of a strictly Aristotelian framework. Their goal is not to do away with the Church’s classical understanding, but to complement it by emphasizing that the Real Presence is not the result of an inner-worldly transformation of one substance into another at the same level of being. This intriguing perspective suggests that transubstantiation is best conceived as the elevation of nature to a higher ontological plane, a lifting of creation above itself resulting in a non-competitive presence of God within the created order. , , ,

Elevated to a Higher Order: Benedict XVI on Transubstantiation

[W]hile by no means opposing earlier magisterial teaching, the manner in which [Pope Benedict] described the mystery of transubstantiation stands out in relation to what we find in traditional sources like the Council of Trent:

[W]hat happens to the bread and wine in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist? Something is not added to them temporarily, but rather bread and wine are snatched away from the things of this world so as to enter into the new world of the risen Jesus Christ. . . . [The] bread and wine are no longer created realities of this world that consist in themselves, but rather are bearers of the mysteriously real form of the Risen Lord.¹

These words are but a short distillation of a theological vision that Ratzinger elaborated in greater depth at various points during his active ministry. For instance, in the tremendous little book God is Near Us, Cardinal Ratzinger exhibited a special sensitivity to doubts faced by the faithful, and this awareness prompted him to address a series of obstacles to belief in the real presence of the Lord. . . . 

The third and final of these challenges confronted by Ratzinger is especially crucial today, as it touches on the claim that the doctrine of the Real Presence has no place in a modern scientific worldview. In Ratzinger’s words, this same blunt question can be framed in several different ways:

Has the teaching about the Real Presence of Christ in the eucharistic gifts not long been refuted, rendered obsolete, by science? Has the Church not, with her concept of substance—for she speaks of “transubstantiation”—fettered herself, to far too great an extent, to a science that is basically primitive and obsolete? Do we not know precisely how material is constituted: made up of atoms, and these of elementary particles? That bread is not a “substance,” and, in consequence, none of the rest of it can possibly be true?²

In response, the cardinal opened with a reflection on what the Church means and does not mean with the words “substance” and “transubstantiation,” noting that the word “substance” was initially adopted by the Church “precisely to avoid the naïveté associated with what we can touch or measure”—to avoid the misapprehension that we “eat flesh, as cannibals would do.”³ Having ruled out this misconstrual of the Real Presence, Ratzinger characteristically paused to reflect on the providence surrounding such mistaken attempts to capture the Eucharistic mystery. Even as errors are not intrinsically desirable, the cardinal observed that disputes like these have nevertheless “helped the Church to develop a more profound understanding of reality.”⁴ Echoing the thought of one his favorite theologians, John Henry Newman, Ratzinger adds that this struggle indeed contributed positively to the development of doctrine in the Church—of making explicit truths that had hitherto been held truly but only implicitly:

After wrestling with the difficulty, the insight was made explicit: “Reality” is not just what we can measure. It is not only “quanta,” quantifiable entities, that are real; on the contrary, these are always only manifestations of the hidden mystery of true being. But here, where Christ meets us, we have to do with this true being. This is what was being expressed with the word “substance.” This does not refer to the quanta, but to the profound and fundamental basis of being. Jesus is not there like a piece of meat, not in the realm of what can be measured and quantified. Anyone who conceives of reality as being like that is deceiving himself about it and about himself. . . . Concerning the Eucharist it is said to us: The substance is transformed, that is to say, the fundamental basis of its being. That is what is at stake, and not the superficial category, to which everything we can measure or touch belongs.⁵

. . . 

While not renouncing the Medieval theology of transubstantiation (indeed, he begins here by praising Aquinas’s text for the liturgy of Corpus Christi), Ratzinger explains the doctrine in different language from that deployed by Thomas Aquinas. . . . Instead, Ratzinger describes transubstantiation as the event in which the Lord takes ordinary bread and wine and lifts them up into an unfathomably higher order of existence:

What has always mattered to the Church is that a real transformation takes place here. Something genuinely happens in the Eucharist. There is something new there that was not before. Knowing about a transformation is part of the most basic eucharistic faith. Therefore it cannot be the case that the Body of Christ comes to add itself to the bread, as if bread and Body were two similar things that could exist as two “substances,” in the same way, side by side. Whenever the Body of Christ, that is, the risen and bodily Christ, comes, he is greater than the bread, other, not of the same order. The transformation happens, which affects the gifts we bring by taking them up into a higher order and changes them, even if we cannot measure what happens.⁶

Inspired by St. Augustine, at this point Ratzinger presents an analogy with bodily nourishment to spell out what is taking place here. He begins by recalling the saint’s experience in which a voice informed him, “I am the bread of the strong, eat me! But you will not transform me and make me part of you; rather, I will transform you and make you part of me.” Teasing out the theological implications of this event, Ratzinger explains that Eucharistic transubstantiation functions in the inverse manner of natural metabolic processes. In the ordinary course of things, a being of higher ontological status assimilates lower beings so that they become part of his own substance. But with Eucharistic communion it is the other way around: Christ lifts us beyond ourselves, drawing our lives into his.⁷

Ratzinger then adds these words on the question of how it can be that the Eucharistic species that have been “lifted” or “taken up,” undergoing substantial change while remaining the same from the standpoint of physical appearances:

When material things are taken into our body as nourishment, or for that matter whenever any material becomes part of a living organism, it remains the same, and yet as part of a new whole it is itself changed. Something similar happens here. The Lord takes possession of the bread and the wine; he lifts them up, as it were, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order; even if, from a purely physical point of view, they remain the same, they have become profoundly different.⁸

Bishop Barron and Monsignor Sokolowski: The Eucharist as Sacramental Prolongation of the Incarnation

 . . .

Like the late pontiff, it appears that Barron and Sokolowski are not fully satisfied with a strictly Thomistic approach to articulating the Eucharistic mystery. Even as he continues to employ traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic language, Bishop Barron contends that an insufficient grasp of this framework can make it tempting to reduce Christ’s presence in the Eucharist to the same level of being occupied by physical creatures:

Within an Aristotelian framework, the Real Presence comes to be thought of as a sort inner-worldly change, some new and unprecedented way for finite natures—one spiritual and the other material—to relate to one another. But within the biblical context, things can make a bit more sense. For, in this reading, God is not one nature among others, one being within the world, but rather the Creator of the world, the ground of all finite things.⁹

At this juncture, the bishop references Monsignor Sokolowski, who urges us to beware of regarding our Lord’s Eucharistic presence as that of a worldly substance akin to that of any creature that we might encounter in this world:

The Real Presence in the Eucharist is therefore not just the concealed presence of one worldly substance under the appearances of another, but the presence of the full mystery of God’s being and his work, the mystery hidden from all ages and now made manifest to us, the point of the universe and of creation. It is this presence, this glory, that is the substance of the Eucharist and the core of the doctrine of Transubstantiation.¹⁰

In identifying this as the core of the Church’s doctrine of transubstantiation, Barron and Sokolowski echo Ratzinger’s teaching that I unfolded above. As these theologians see it, our Lord’s Eucharistic presence is not such that he exists “in the same way, side by side” with the creatures he has made. The transubstantiated host is no longer on the same plane of being as the bread had previously existed, for it has been taken up into a higher order of reality through the sacrifice of the Mass.

Returning to Barron’s writing, the bishop proceeds by elaborating on an idea that Ratzinger only briefly touched on. Importantly, he recalls the Thomistic distinction between two orders of causality: divine and creaturely (i.e., God as the primary cause of all things and creatures as secondary or instrumental causes). However, Barron develops this in a direction that Aquinas did not explicitly go:

And thus God can relate to matter in a non-competitive way, becoming present through it without undermining it. The supreme instance of this non-competitive involvement of God within creation is, of course, the Incarnation, and the Eucharist is nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation. Thus, God can use the material as a vehicle for his presence without ceasing to be God and without overwhelming the matter that he uses. The Eucharist does not involve the supplanting of one finite nature by another—as though a tree becomes a leopard but continues to look and react like a tree—but the non-competitive presence of God within an aspect of nature he has made. . . . [W]hen the Church speaks of Christ being substantially present in the Eucharist, even as the material appearances of bread and wine remain, it is assuming this uniquely biblical perspective on the relation of spirit and matter.¹¹

From this standpoint, understanding the doctrine of transubstantiation requires us to grasp that the conversion of the bread and wine into Christ’s body and blood is not the same sort of action by which bread might be transformed into some other creaturely being like a rock, tree, or cat. As Barron stresses, it is not as if one finite nature supplants another in the Eucharist but rather that God—who exists on an altogether higher order of being in comparison with creatures—becomes present in a non-competitive way “within an aspect of nature he has made.”

Note that Bishop Barron is not claiming to advance a position akin to the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Like Ratzinger and Sokolowski, Barron rejects the notion that the substances of ordinary bread and wine coexist alongside our Lord’s body and blood in the Eucharist. The bishop’s position would likewise distinguish itself from the theory of impanation, according to which Christ is present in the Eucharist through a substantial union of his human body with the substances of bread and wine. Rather than saying that God has been made bread (Deus panis factus), for Barron the nature of transubstantiation is such that the bread and wine as they previously existed have indeed been transformed and now exist on an altogether higher order of being.

In this connection, it is especially important and beautiful that Bishop Barron describes the Eucharist as “nothing but a sacramental prolongation of the Incarnation.” Often attributed to second-century Doctor of the Church St. Irenaeus of Lyon, this view invites us to consider our Lord’s presence in the Eucharist in an analogous way to the manner he dwelt on the earth as a man. As Christ’s human nature was not overwhelmed or destroyed but rather ennobled by its union with the divine person of the Word, this perspective holds that the Eucharistic species are transformed and elevated by virtue of their being “taken up” into the divine nature. As such, they are no longer the substance of bread and wine any more than Jesus Christ was substantially a human person. As there is no second hypostasis (no human person) in Jesus but only the divine person of the Word united to his human nature, after consecration the hypostases of bread and wine are truly gone—which is to say transubstantiated. . . .

Even granted [some] lingering issues, the proposal presented in various ways by Ratzinger, Barron, and Sokolowski is a welcome contribution toward unveiling the meaning of transubstantiation in language that is accessible to modern man. Whatever we may make of the intricacies surrounding the ins and outs of how precisely it all transpires, the overarching claim that the Eucharist extends the Incarnation through space and time is true and valuable. It provides us a way of envisioning that, just as God was made present in the world in his body, blood, soul, and divinity two thousand years ago, this presence continues to abide with us in the Eucharist.

Further, I find that this modern approach to transubstantiation in terms of elevation coheres well with the Christian conviction that the entire created order will one day be renewed and transfigured rather than subverted or destroyed (see Rom 8:21–22). Indeed, so bold was Ratzinger’s perspective on the eschatological end of creatures that he spoke of a time when the entire created order will one day be “transubstantiated” in heavenly glory.¹² On the solemnity of Corpus Christi, Benedict expounded on this concept by teaching that “this little piece of white Host . . . appears to us as a synthesis of creation” and that “in some way, we detect in the piece of bread, creation is projected towards divinization, toward the holy wedding feast, toward unification with the Creator himself.”¹³ In a remarkable homily, the pontiff taught that the role of the priesthood is “to consecrate the world so that it may become a living host, a liturgy: so that the liturgy may not be something alongside the reality of the world, but that the world itself shall become a living host, a liturgy.”¹⁴

1  Benedict XVI, “The Meaning of Communion,” in What Is Christianity? The Last Writings (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2023), 156–57.
2  Joseph Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 83–84.
3  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 84.
4  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 84.
5  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 85.
6  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 86.
7  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 77–78.
8  Ratzinger, God Is Near Us, 86.
9  Robert Barron, This Is My Body: A Call to Eucharistic Revival (Grove Village, IL: Word on Fire, 2023), 107.
10  Robert Sokolowski, “The Eucharist and Transubstantiation,” in Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 103.
11  Barron, This Is My Body, 107-108.
12  Benedict XVI, Address at the Commemoration of the 65th Anniversary of the Priestly Ordination of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI (June 28, 2016).
13  Benedict XVI, Homily for the Mass of Corpus Christi (June 15, 2006).
14  Benedict XVI, Homily (July 24, 2009).

From Matthew Ramage, "Mystical Elevation: A Modern Perspective on the Ancient Doctrine of Transubstantiation" in Church Life Journal, September 18, 2025.

Ratzinger - Women in the OT Central to Spousal Theology of Christianity

If one begins by reading backwards or, more precisely, from the end to the beginning, it becomes obvious that the image of Mary in the New Testament is woven entirely of Old Testament threads. . . . .

In the history of the patriarchs, Sarah-Hagar, Rachel-Leah, and Hannah-Penina are those pairs of women in whom the extraordinary element in the path of the promises stands out. In each case the fertile and the infertile stand opposite each other, and in the process a remarkable reversal in values is reached. In archaic modes of thought, fertility is a blessing, infertility is a curse. Yet here all is reversed: the infertile one ultimately turns out to be the truly blessed, while the fertile one recedes into the ordinary or even has to struggle against the curse of repudiation, of being unloved. The theological implication of this overthrow of values becomes clear only gradually; from it Paul developed his theology of spiritual birth: the true son of Abraham is not the one who traces his physical origin to him, but the one who, in a new way beyond mere physical birth, has been conceived through the creative power of God’s word of promise. Physical life as such is not really wealth; this promise, which endures beyond life, is what first makes life fully itself (cf. Rom 4; Gal 3:1-14; 4:21-31). 

At an earlier stage of the Old Testament’s evolution, a theology of grace was developed from this reversal of values in the song of Hannah, which is echoed in Mary’s Magnificat: the Lord raises the humble from the dust, he lifts the poor from the ashes (1 Sam 2:8). God bends down to the humble, the powerless, the rejected, and in this condescension the love of God, which truly saves, shines forth both for Hannah and for Mary, in the remarkable phenomenon of unblessed-blessed women. The mystery of the last place (Lk 14:10), the exchange between the first and the last place (Mk 10:31), the reversal of values in the Sermon on the Mount, the reversal of earthly values founded upon hybris, all of this is intimated. Here also the theology of virginity finds its first, still hidden formulation: earthly infertility becomes true fertility. . . . 

Near the end of the Old Testament canon, in its late writings, a new and, again, entirely original type of theology of woman is developed. 

The great salvific figures of Esther and Judith appear, taking up again the most ancient tradition as it was embodied, for example, in the figure of the judge Deborah. Both women have an essential characteristic in common with the great mothers: one is a widow, the other is a harem-wife at the Persian court, and thus both find themselves—in different ways—in an oppressed state. Both embody the defeated Israel: Israel who has become a widow and wastes away in sorrow, Israel who has been abducted and dishonored among the nations, enslaved within their arbitrary desires. Yet both personify at the same time Israel’s unconquered spiritual strength, which cannot boast as do the worldly powers and for that very reason knows how to scorn and overcome the mighty. The woman as savior, the embodiment of Israel’s hope, thereby takes her place alongside the unblessed-blessed mothers. It is significant that the woman always figures in Israel’s thought and belief, not as a priestess, but as prophetess and judge-savior. What is specifically hers, the place assigned to her, emerges from this. The essence of what has previously been seen is repeated and strengthened: the infertile one, the powerless one becomes the savior because it is there that the locus for the revelation of God’s power is found. After every fall into sin, the woman remains “mother of life”. 

In the theological short-story type of the woman-savior, one finds already presupposed and newly expressed what the prophetic preaching had developed with theological profundity from the image of the great maternal women and what is considered to be the proper center of the Old Testament’s theology of woman: Israel herself, the chosen people, is interpreted simultaneously as woman, virgin, beloved, wife and mother. The great women of Israel represent what this people itself is. The history of these women becomes the theology of God’s people and, at the same time, the theology of the covenant. By making the category of covenant comprehensible and by giving it meaning and spiritual orientation, the figure of the woman enters into the most intimate reaches of Old Testament piety, of the Old Testament relationship with God. Probably the notion of covenant was at first largely patterned after the model of ancient Eastern vassal indentures, in which the sovereign king assigns rights and duties. This political and legal notion of the covenant, however, is continually deepened and surpassed in the theology of the prophets: the covenant relation of Yahweh to Israel is a covenant of marital love, which—as in Hosea’s magnificent vision—moves and stirs Yahweh himself to his heart. He has loved the young maiden Israel with a love that has proved to be indestructible, eternal. He can be angry with the wife of his youth on account of her adultery. He can punish her, but all this is simultaneously directed against himself and pains him, the lover, whose “bowels churn”. He cannot repudiate her without rendering judgment against himself. It is on this, on his personal, innermost bewilderment as lover, that the covenant’s eternal and irrevocable character is based. 

How could I betray you, Ephraim, or hand you over, Israel. . .? My heart turns against me, my mercy catches fire all at once. I do not act according to the fire of my anger, I no longer annihilate Ephraim, for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst. I do not come to destroy all in flames (Hos 11:8 f).

God’s divinity is no longer revealed in his ability to punish but in the indestructibility and constancy of his love. 

This means that the relationship between God and Israel includes not only God but also Israel as woman, who in this relationship with God is at once virgin and mother. For this reason the covenant, which forms the very basis of the existence of Israel as a nation and the existence of each individual as Israelite, is expressed interpersonally in the fidelity of the marriage covenant and in no other way. Marriage is the form of the mutual relationship between husband and wife that results from the covenant, the fundamental human relationship upon which all human history is based. It bears a theology within itself, and indeed it is possible and intelligible only theologically. But above all, this also means that to God, the One, is joined, not a goddess, but, as in his historical revelation, the chosen creature, Israel, the daughter Zion, the woman. To leave woman out of the whole of theology would be to deny creation and election (salvation history) and thereby to nullify revelation. In the women of Israel, the mothers and the saviors, in their fruitful infertility is expressed most purely and most profoundly what creation is and what election is, what “Israel” is as God’s people. And because election and revelation are one, what ultimately becomes apparent in this for the first time is who and what God is. 

Of course this line of development in the Old Testament remains just as incomplete and open as all the other lines of the Old Testament. It acquires its definitive meaning for the first time in the New Testament: in the woman who is herself described as the true holy remnant, as the authentic daughter Zion, and who is thereby the mother of the savior, yes, the mother of God. In passing, one might mention that the acceptance of the Canticle of Canticles into the canon of Scripture would have been impossible if this theology of love and woman had not existed. The Canticle is certainly, on technical grounds, a collection of profane love songs with a heavily erotic coloring. But once the songs have entered the canon, they serve as an expression of God’s dialogue with Israel, and to that extent such an interpretation of them is anything but mere allegory.

Thus we can now say the figure of the woman is indispensable for the structure of biblical faith. She expresses the reality of creation as well as the fruitfulness of grace. The abstract outlines for the hope that God will turn toward his people receive, in the New Testament, a concrete, personal name in the figure of Jesus Christ. At that same moment, the figure of the woman, until then seen only typologically in Israel although provisionally personified by the great women of Israel, also emerges with a name: Mary. She emerges as the personal epitome of the feminine principle in such a way that the principle is true only in the person, but the person as an individual always points beyond herself to the all-embracing reality, which she bears and represents. To deny or reject the feminine aspect in belief, or, more concretely, the Marian aspect, leads finally to the negation of creation and the invalidation of grace. It leads to a picture of God’s omnipotence that reduces the creature to a mere masquerade and that also completely fails to understand the God of the Bible, who is characterized as being the creator and the God of the covenant—the God for whom the beloved’s punishment and rejection themselves become the passion of love, the cross. Not without reason did the Church Fathers interpret the passion and cross as marriage, as that suffering in which God takes upon himself the pain of the faithless wife in order to draw her to himself irrevocably in eternal love.

Joseph Ratzinger, Daughter Zion p. 12-24