“[T]he biblical creation account is characterized by its use of numbers. These numbers, however, reflect not the mathematical structure of the world but, rather, the inner pattern that is woven into its fabric, so to speak — the idea upon which it is built. Predominant among them are the numbers three, four, seven, and ten; and for now I would like to focus on only two of these, seven and ten. The words ‘God said’ appear ten times in the creation account. And since this is a very careful and deliberate account, we can say with certainty that this is no coincidence. Rather, by having God speak ten times in the creation account — ten words of God — the creation narrative already anticipates the Decalogue; that is, the Ten Commandments. In this way, it already points to the inner unity of God’s singular action in creation and history, of his singular act of speaking, thus revealing to us, in the very pattern of creation, the God who speaks for history. It allows us to see that the ‘ten words’ that we call the Ten Commandments are, as it were, nothing less than the echo of creation. They are not arbitrary inventions meant to put up barriers to human freedom, but signs pointing to the spirit, the language, the meaning of creation. They are thus a translation of the language of the universe, a translation of the logic of God, which this world anticipates. So that is the number ten, then. The Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, are simply a translation, so to speak, of the inner Word of creation itself and of the action that emanates from it, which is present within creation and does not override our own action.
“The other number, the one that dominates the whole creation account, is seven. Indeed, the schema of the seven days makes it impossible to overlook how thoroughly the entire account is shaped by this number. Seven is the number of days in a lunar phase, and thus we are told throughout this account how the rhythm of our heavenly companion reveals to us the rhythm of human life as well. It becomes clear that we human beings are not trapped within our own little ‘I’ but that we are part of the rhythm of the universe; that we too can learn from the heavens, as it were, the rhythm, the movement, of our own lives by attuning ourselves to the reason inherent in the universe.
“I believe that this is something very important. Human existence is perpetually open to the cosmos; we are not entangled in the things of the earth, let alone our own affairs and the little bit of work that we do; rather, the whole universe is locked together in a rhythmic cycle from which we derive the rhythm of our own lives, and by taking our place in this rhythm we consummate the world as we ought.
“But then the Bible takes this idea one step farther. It tells us that the rhythm of the heavenly bodies is, in a deeper sense, an expression of the rhythm of the Heart that created the heavens and mankind, an expression of the rhythm of God’s love, which manifests itself in them.”
— from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Divine Project: Reflections on Creation and the Church (Ignatius Press, 2022). This book is based on six lectures delivered in 1985 when Cardinal Ratzinger was prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
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