“‘The glory of God is the living man, but the life of man is the vision of God’, says St. Irenaeus (cf. Adv. Haer. 4, 20, 7). . . . Ultimately, it is the very life of man, man himself as living righteously, that is the true worship of God, but life only becomes real life when it receives its form from looking toward God. Cult exists in order to communicate this vision and to give life in such a way that glory is given to God. . . .
“[O]n Sinai the people receive not only instructions about worship, but also an all-embracing rule of law and life. Only thus can it become a people. A people without a common rule of law cannot live. It destroys itself in anarchy, which is a parody of freedom, its exaltation to the point of abolition. When every man lives without law, every man lives without freedom. . . . In the ordering of the covenant on Sinai, the three aspects of worship, law, and ethics are inseparably interwoven. This is the greatness of the Sinai covenant but also its limitation, as is shown in the transition from Israel to the Church of the Gentiles, where the interweaving was to unravel, to make room for a diversity of legal forms and political structures. In the modern age this necessary unravelling has led finally to the total secularization of the law and the exclusion of any God-ward perspective from the fashioning of the law. But we must not forget that there is an essential connection between the three orders of worship, law, and ethics. Law without a foundation in morality becomes injustice. When morality and law do not originate in a God-ward perspective, they degrade man, because they rob him of his highest measure and his highest capacity, deprive him of any vision of the infinite and eternal. This seeming liberation subjects him to the dictatorship of the ruling majority, to shifting human standards, which inevitably end up doing him violence. . . . When human affairs are so ordered that there is no recognition of God, there is a belittling of man. That is why, in the final analysis, worship and law cannot be completely separated from each other. God has a right to a response from man, to man himself, and where that right of God totally disappears, the order of law among men is dissolved, because there is no cornerstone to keep the whole structure together.”
— from Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (Ignatius Press, 2000)
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