Folia Theologica 17. (2006)
Hugh Barbour: Salvare Apparentia
SALVARE APPARENTIA 311 vation of the inhabitants of Mars. Revelation remains for theology essentially geocentric, for it is addressed to men and confers upon them the truth as it is relative to their salvation under the conditions which belong to the reality of life on earth. The Fathers saw in the parable of the Good Shepherd, coming down to seek one erring sheep from the mountains where he has left the remaining ninety-nine of his flock, an allusion to the smallness of the cosmos as a whole, and with the angelic aeons in particular...The cosmology of revelation is necessarily geocentric... Copernican cosmology, from a psychological or rather spiritual point of view, corresponds to a state of religious dispersion or off-centeredness, a relaxation of the soteriologi- cal attitude, such as is found in the gnostics or the occult religions. The spirit of the insatiable thirst for knowledge, the restless spirit of Faust, turning to the cosmos, breaks through the constricting limits of the heavenly spheres to launch out into infinite space; where it becomes lost in the search for some synthetic understanding of the universe, for its own understanding, external and limited to the domain of becoming, can only grasp the whole under the aspect of disintegration which corresponds to the condition of our nature since the fall... One may quote by way of interest the suggestion of a modern Russian theologian who was also a great mathematician, Fr. Pavel Florensky, that it would be possible to return to a geocentric cosmology on the basis of the scientific theories of our own time. It is hardly necessary to add that such a bold and, possibly scientifically defensible synthesis has no real value for Christian theology which is able to accommodate itself very easily to any scientific theory of the universe. " Thus the first sed contra. Now the second. In 1998 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made a controversial appearance at a colloquium held in honor of the seventieth birthday of Johann Baptist Metz. His participation was held by some to be an offence. Appearing on the same stage as Metz and along with Juergen Moltmann, in the Royal Hall of the Ahaus Palace, the then prefect of la Suprema held forth on the theme of the symposium: The End of Time: the Provocation of Talking about God. Ratzinger provides a critique of the Aristotelian notion of the relation of time and eternity, and goes on to a sympathetic treatment of the perfection of circular motion in St. Thomas' introductory presentation of the rationes for the Incarnation in the Commentary on the Sentences. Here is a prefatory observation to his reflections, germane to the matter at hand today:
