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.

Rowland - Balthasar and Ratzinger on Marian ("Feminine") vs. "Masculine" Church

When he criticized what he called the “masculinization” of the Church Balthasar was in no way criticizing the reservation of the priesthood to men, but rather, the trend toward an excessive bureaucratization of the Church. When Balthasar speaks of a “masculine” church he means a church obsessed with its own governance structures, a church obsessed with committees and meetings and talk-fests. He called this the “photocopying Church.”

Paradoxically, it is precisely the increased bureaucratization of the Church that is a popular project for feminist activists. It is they who are, according to a Balthasarian analysis, seeking to masculinize the Church by setting up new boards and committees and angling to get themselves appointed to such bureaucratic structures. . . .

Balthasar and Ratzinger and other academics in their Communio journal study circles were acutely aware of the situation in Germany with its stark contrasts between the wealthy Church agencies or “Catholic Inc.” and the Church lived and understood as the Body and Bride of Christ. Catholic Inc. runs on secular corporate governance principles, the Body and Bride of Christ runs on a sacramental economy. The former is, in the idiom of both Balthasar and Ratzinger, “masculine,” while the latter is “feminine.”

There is some theological and scriptural backstory to the use of these descriptions. Balthasar suggested that the network of figures surrounding Christ during his life on earth were prototypical of future ecclesial leaders. There is thus the Petrine charism associated with St. Peter and hence with ecclesial governance, the Johannine charism associated with St. John the beloved apostle and hence with the contemplative life of the Church, the Jacobine charism associated with St. James and hence with guarding the tradition and teaching it to new generations uncorrupted, and the Pauline charism associated with St. Paul and hence with prophetic insight and in our own time with ecclesial renewal movements. Only one of these charisms, the Petrine, is focused on ecclesial governance, and only this one is exclusively masculine. There are plenty of contemplative women with the Johannine charism, plenty of scholarly women trying to teach the faith that was handed down from the apostles to new generations, and plenty of women involved in the new ecclesial movements that have mushroomed over the past century. So then, three out of four of these charisms are found equally in men and women.

Further, Balthasar spoke of the Marian charism. Its hallmark is its receptivity to divine will. It is a kind of overarching charism that all members of the Church, male and female, should exhibit. Receptivity to the divine will includes respect for Sacred Scripture, especially the teachings of Christ. With reference to the arguments of those who contend that Christ may have decided not to ordain women simply because the Jewish people of the time had psychological barriers to the acceptance of such a practice, Balthasar commented: “[E]ven though we might always assume that the Sovereign God could have acted differently from the way he actually deigned to act, we nevertheless are by no means licensed to relativize his logic – he being absolute Reason and Logos itself – by imagining other courses of action which he could have taken.”¹ In other words, a high level of humility in the face of revelation is part of the Marian charism along with the gift of the Holy Spirit described as “Fear of the Lord” or reverence and awe before the divine majesty. . . .

When Balthasar talks about masculinizing the Church he therefore means something like a myopic focus on the Petrine charism and on governance structures to the neglect of the other charisms, a church obsessed with institutional maintenance. Thus, in his Elucidations, he wrote:

Since the Council [i.e., Vatican II] the Church has to a large extent put off its mystical characteristics; it has become a Church of permanent conversations, organizations, advisory commissions, congresses, synods, commissions, academies, parties, pressure groups, functions, structures and restructurings, sociological experiments, statistics: that is to say, it is more than ever a male Church, if perhaps one should not say a sexless entity, in which a woman may gain for herself a place to the extent that she is ready herself to become such an entity.²

Balthasar concluded that “the masses run away from such a Church.”

Similarly, in his Church, Ecumenism and Politics, Cardinal Ratzinger declared:

The Church is not some piece of machinery, is not just an institution, is not even one of the usual sociological entities. It is a person. It is a woman. It is a mother. It is living. The Marian understanding of the Church is the most decisive contrast to a purely organisational or bureaucratic concept of the Church. We cannot make the Church: we have to be it. And it is only to the extent that faith moulds our being beyond any question of making that we are the Church, that the Church is in us. It is only in being Marian that we become the Church.³

Ratzinger concluded that: “a Church which is nothing but a manager is nothing at all; she is no longer tradition, and, as an intellect that knows no tradition, she becomes pure nothingness, a monster of nothingness.”⁴

In summary, when Balthasar suggested the Church should be more feminine and less masculine, he did not mean that we needed women priests or more women on governance boards. To misuse his comments in that manner is to show a high-level of ignorance of his ecclesiology.

What we need now is an affirmation of the feminine dimension of the Church. For Balthasar this in some sense would entail a heightened interest in the operation of the Johannine, Pauline, and Jacobine charisms. Instead of a craze for committees and quangos there might be a focus on deep monasticism and consecrated virginity, on family ministry work, on Catholic scholarship and beautiful liturgy, including beautiful liturgical music. There might also be a heightened interest in fostering the sense of sacramentality, a deepening of the faithful’s understanding of the role that each of the sacrament’s play in the economy of our salvation. There would certainly be a heightened interest in the Eucharist.

My favorite quotation from Balthasar appears in his Theology of History. It reveals a lot about what he thinks or who he thinks are the most important members of the Church and they are not necessarily priests. He wrote:

Those who withdraw to the heights to fast and pray in silence are, as Reinhold Schneider made so vividly credible, the pillars bearing the spiritual weight of what happens in history. They share in the uniqueness of Christ, in the freedom of that nobility that is conferred from above, that serene untamed freedom which cannot be caged and put to use. Theirs in the first of all aristocracies, source and justification for all the others, and the last yet remaining to us in an unaristocratic age.⁵

Of all the charisms categorized by Balthasar the Marian is the most important. It takes priority even over the Petrine, because the Petrine itself must be Marian in the sense that it must be receptive to divine revelation. What really matters is receptivity to the divine will. This is what is most noble and thus aristocratic, where aristocratic is understood as an adjective meaning desiring only the highest and most excellent. In contrast, the fixation on structures and committees, and who sits on the committees, and who does the paperwork, is not aristocratic but gauchely petite-bourgeois!

1  Hans Urs von Balthasar, “How Weighty is the argument from ‘Uninterrupted Tradition’ to Justify the Male Priesthood?” in The Church and Women: A Compendium, edited by Helmut Moll (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 154; cf. 153–160.

2  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Elucidations (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998), 70.

3  Joseph Ratzinger, Church, Ecumenism and Politics: New Essays in Ecclesiology (New York: Crossroad, 1988), 20.

4  Joseph Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology: Building Stones for a Fundamental Theology (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1987), 101.

5  Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 124.

From Tracy Rowland, "Spinning Balthasar" on the What We Need Now substack.

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