1. Introduction
What ontological grammar governs the predication of realities first disclosed in the doctrine of the Triune God to the human person while safeguarding the irreducible distinction between Creator and creature? This question concerns the ontological grammar governing the movement from Trinitarian theology to theological anthropology. Although theological anthropology has undergone a profound conceptual reconfiguration, the analogical conditions that render such predication possible have remained largely unthematised.Footnote 1 As Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen observes, the premodern tradition principally situated theological anthropology within the doctrine of creation, construing the distinctiveness of the human being through the imago Dei.Footnote 2 While this broad characterisation captures an influential trajectory within the Christian tradition, it does not command universal agreement, as many scholars have argued that premodern theological anthropology cannot be adequately reduced to a doctrine of origins alone, given its enduring orientation toward deification, communion with God, and eschatological fulfilment. Nevertheless, as Alistair McFadyen argues, where creation became relatively isolated from the telos of salvation and eschatological fulfilment, anthropology was correspondingly reduced to an account of origins governed by essentialist categories.Footnote 3
Modern theology, by contrast, inaugurated a methodological shift from the metaphysics of nature to the primacy of the human subject. Rather than treating the human person principally as an object of metaphysical inquiry, theological anthropology increasingly began from the structures of human consciousness and experience, making subjectivity the privileged locus of theological reflection. As Kevin M. Vander Schel observes, the modern ‘turn to the subject’ transformed the human person from one topic within theology into the methodological point of departure for theological inquiry as a whole.Footnote 4 Ratzinger neither rejects this turn to subjectivity nor accepts it in its autonomous form. Rather, he argues that the human subject becomes fully intelligible only within a relational ontology grounded in the Trinitarian life revealed in Christ.Footnote 5
Recent scholarship has significantly advanced the study of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological anthropology. Mary Frances McKenna, Isabel C. Troconis Iribarren, Andrew Kaethler, Matthew Levering, Tracey Rowland, Aidan Nichols, and Bogumił Gacka have variously demonstrated the centrality of Christology, communion, imago Dei, and, in a sense, relational personhood within his thought. These otherwise illuminating accounts established the principal theological coordinates of human existence: creation grounds the creature’s dependence upon God, the imago Dei identifies the distinctive mode of human existence, and humanity’s finality is understood in relation to its participation in divine life. What they leave comparatively underexplored, however, are the metaphysical conditions that render these claims systematically coherent, particularly the analogical ontology by which creaturely participation in the Son’s filial life can be understood as real without erasing the ontological distinction between Creator and creature. The decisive question, then, is how finite human beings can truly participate in the Son’s filial existence without either collapsing the Creator–creature distinction or reducing participation to metaphor.
This article argues that Ratzinger’s theological anthropology is best understood through an implicit analogical ontology. The claim is not that Ratzinger develops a systematic doctrine of analogy, but that his account of the human being, particularly in relation to creation, Christ, and participation in divine life, presupposes an ontological relation between divine and creaturely being that cannot be adequately described in either univocal or merely equivocal terms. The study therefore proposes analogy as a fundamental category for interpreting the transition from Ratzinger’s Trinitarian and Christological theology to his theological anthropology. Rather than treating analogy as a subsidiary problem of theological language, it investigates whether the structure of Ratzinger’s anthropology itself points towards an analogical account of participation. In doing so, the article seeks to clarify a dimension of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology that has remained insufficiently explicit in existing interpretations and to show how the question of analogy may illuminate its underlying ontological architecture.
The argument unfolds in three stages. The first reconstructs Ratzinger’s retrieval of the Christian concept of person, showing that relational ontology emerges from revelation’s transformation of classical metaphysics. The second demonstrates that his doctrines of creation, Christology, and adoptive sonship presuppose a participatory ontology irreducible to either univocal or equivocal predication. The third argues that this participatory ontology is governed by an implicit analogical ontology, in which analogy functions as the transcendental condition of possibility for creaturely participation in the filial life of the Son and, thereby, discloses the systematic unity of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology.
2. Historical conditions for an analogical anthropology
2.1. Ratzinger on the patristic development of the concept of person
Joseph Ratzinger locates the emergence of the Christian concept of person within the Church’s Trinitarian and Christological reflection. Rather than regarding persona as a philosophical category subsequently appropriated by theology, he argues that the concept arose from the Church’s effort to articulate the unprecedented realities disclosed in divine revelation. As he famously observes,
The concept ‘person’ grew out of reading the Bible, as something needed for its interpretation … it grew out of the idea of dialogue, more specifically, it grew as an explanation of the phenomenon of the God who speaks dialogically. The Bible with its phenomenon of the God who speaks, the God who is in dialogue, stimulated the concept of person.Footnote 6
In this sense, the historicity of the concept is inseparable from the Church’s Trinitarian confession and its Christological determination in the incarnate Son. For Ratzinger, this development signifies not merely the emergence of a new theological vocabulary but the transformation of classical metaphysics itself. While drawing upon categories such as ousia, hypostasis, and prosopon, revelation fundamentally reconfigured their meaning to articulate realities beyond the reach of philosophical speculation.Footnote 7 The decisive innovation concerned the category of relation. Within Aristotelian metaphysics, pros ti belonged to the accidental predicates of substance; a substance remained what it was independently of its relations. The Christian doctrine of God, however, required a reconfiguration of relation’s metaphysical status. Ratzinger locates this breakthrough in the Cappadocian distinction between one ousia and three hypostaseis, where relation ceases to be accidental and becomes constitutive of personal subsistence, effecting a genuine revolution in metaphysics.Footnote 8
This conceptual transformation did not end with the Cappadocians. For Ratzinger, Augustine’s doctrine of relatio provides the metaphysical precision required to affirm both the unity of the divine essence and the real distinction of the persons, while his relational anthropology also converges with Richard of Saint Victor’s conviction that personal existence is fulfilled in communicative love, thereby preparing the question of how creaturely participation in the divine life remains possible without compromising the analogical distinction between Creator and creature.Footnote 9
2.2. Ratzinger’s rearticulation of the Christian concept of person
The theological provenance of the concept of person is encapsulated in Ratzinger’s programmatic statement:
The concept of person, as well as the idea that stands behind this concept, is a product of Christian theology. More specifically, the concept of person arose from two questions that have from the very beginning urged themselves upon Christian thought as central: namely, the questions, ‘What is God?’ and ‘Who is Christ?’.Footnote 10
Ratzinger’s first foundational question, What is God?, concerns the mode of God’s self-revelation rather than an abstract inquiry into the divine essence. Its decisive theological achievement, he argues, was the recognition that in God relation is not an accidental determination of substance but the very mode of personal subsistence. The divine persons are, therefore, ‘nothing other than actual, real relations’, such that relation is not predicated of the person but constitutes the person as person. This ontological revolution finds its classical expression in Augustine’s dictum, In Deo nihil secundum accidens dicitur, sed secundum substantiam aut secundum relationem, according to which relation is no longer an accidental predicate but an irreducible mode of subsistence by which the one divine essence exists personally.Footnote 11
For Ratzinger, this ontological reconfiguration does not arise from speculative metaphysics but from the Church’s conceptual explication of revelation, above all, the Johannine witness. Christ’s confession, ‘The Son can do nothing of his own accord’ (Jn 5:19), together with his declaration, ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30), discloses a mode of existence in which the identity of the Son is constituted entirely by relation to the Father. Person thus emerges as subsistent relationality, whose ontological intelligibility lies not in autonomous self-possession but in self-communication and receptive origin. This Trinitarian ontology, however, receives its decisive Christological determination only through the second question from which the concept of person historically emerged: Who is Christ?
2.3. Christ as the revelation of the person
Accordingly, Ratzinger’s second foundational question, Who is Christ?, provides the decisive hermeneutical key to the mystery of the human person. If the first establishes the ontological meaning of person in the Triune God, the second discloses its anthropological fulfilment in the incarnate Son, who is not an ontological exception but ‘the genuine fulfilment of the idea “man”’, revealing that person is understood not primarily as substance but as subsistent existence. In this respect, Richard of Saint Victor’s definition of person as incommunicabilis existentia marks a significant metaphysical development by relocating personhood from substance to the mode of existence, thereby anticipating, though not directly informing, Ratzinger’s relational ontology.Footnote 12
David H. Kelsey resists grounding anthropology exclusively in Christology, interpreting the human person instead within the complementary economies of creation, reconciliation, and eschatological consummation. Similarly, Wolfhart Pannenberg emphasises humanity’s historical openness and eschatological destiny, resisting any reduction of anthropology to a single Christological narrative. Yet both continue to locate human identity within God’s revelatory economy. Ratzinger’s distinctive claim is that this economy is intrinsically Christological: creation, reconciliation, and consummation receive their anthropological intelligibility only in the incarnate Son, who reveals not merely one possibility of human existence but its definitive ontological form.
From this Christological premise, Ratzinger develops a theological anthropology grounded in relational ontology. Human existence is essentially relational because spirit attains itself only in self-transcendence, so that ‘being with another is its form of being with itself’. Christ perfectly embodies this mode of being: as the eternal Son whose existence is wholly from and for the Father, he reveals that communion with God is the fulfilment of humanity. Thus, ‘In Christ, the man who is entirely with God, humanity is not abolished but, rather, arrives at its highest potential’. What belongs to the Son by nature becomes, through grace, the creature’s mode of existence by participation, raising the central question of this study: how is participation in the Son’s filial relation ontologically possible without compromising the irreducible distinction between Creator and creature?
3. Anthropological conditions for an analogical participation
3.1. Creaturehood and the ontology of received being
As noted earlier, the distinctiveness of the human person has traditionally been interpreted through the doctrine of the imago Dei. This very affirmation presents an inherent metaphysical tension: Nonetheless, the resemblance between God and humanity cannot be conceived, in a strict sense, as reciprocal; while the human person bears the image of God, the Triune God is not correspondingly in the image of humanity. The divine archetype is never measured by its created image; rather, the image derives its intelligibility from the archetype. Ratzinger’s account of the God–human relation makes this metaphysical principle explicit: the language of likeness, when employed with respect to God as the principium essendi, cannot signify reciprocity or ontological equivalence, but only an analogical resemblance founded upon participation (per participationem) in that which God possesses by essence (per essentiam).
He observed that the creation account reminds the human person that he has an origin, that this origin is known, and that it is grounded in the creative causality of God. A human being, therefore, is not God but a creature whose existence is received rather than self-possessed. The Creator–creature distinction establishes the horizon within which every comparison between God and the human person must be understood. As Ratzinger maintains, the human person is intelligible only as a creature whose existence originates in and remains wholly dependent upon the creative Word of God. The creature’s likeness to God is, therefore, founded upon the participation of finite being in the divine plenitude of esse, not upon any autonomous possession of existence.Footnote 13 Such comparison proceeds neither univocally nor equivocally but analogically: God is the analogatum princeps, possessing by essence (per essentiam) what the creature possesses only by participation (per participationem), so that the human person constitutes the analogatum secundarium. Human relationality is, therefore, genuinely analogous to divine relationality because creaturely existence is itself an analogical participation in the being and communion of the Triune God. The participans, in this sense, is the human person; the participatum is the participated perfection of divine communion and relational being, received according to the proper proportion (secundum modum recipientis) of created existence. This participatum is articulated by Ratzinger as a created participation in the filial mode of existence revealed in Christ, whereby the human person comes to exist from, with, and for another in a manner analogous to the communion that subsists perfectly in God.Footnote 14 Thus, the human person neither reproduces nor participates in the subsistent relations (relationes subsistentes) of the immanent Trinity as such; rather, creaturely participation in the divine life is mediated according to the proper proportion of created existence.
3.2. Christ as the archetype of participatory personhood
The metaphysical account of participation established above remains incomplete unless the form of creaturely participation is identified. For Ratzinger, this form is disclosed not through speculative reflection on participation itself but in the person of Christ. The relation between God and the human person is, therefore, not mediated by an abstract metaphysical principle but by the Logos in whom both God and humanity are made known. As he writes,
If it is true that the term Logos – the Word in the beginning, creative reason, and love – is decisive for the Christian image of God, and if the concept of Logos simultaneously forms the core of Christology, of faith in Christ, then the indivisibility of faith in God and faith in his incarnate Son Jesus Christ is only confirmed once more.… If God has truly assumed manhood and thus is at the same time true man and true God in Jesus, then he participates, as man, in the presence of God, which embraces all ages. Then, and only then, is he not just something that happened yesterday, but is present among us, our contemporary in our today.Footnote 15
The significance of this Christological claim extends beyond the inseparability of faith in God and faith in Christ. For Ratzinger, the incarnate Logos discloses the concrete form of the analogical participation already implicit within creation itself. Ratzinger consistently argues that the mystery of the Logos constitutes the proper starting point for theological anthropology. Because the Logos is decisive both for the Christian understanding of God and for the confession of Jesus Christ, the knowledge of humanity cannot be detached from Christology. Correspondingly, Christ, in this sense, appears not merely as the Son of God but also as the ‘last man’, the definitive form in which humanity is disclosed.Footnote 16 In the thought of Ratzinger, anthropology, therefore, does not constitute an autonomous point of departure from which theology subsequently ascends to God; rather, it receives its ontological measure from Christ, in whom the truth of God and the truth of humanity are disclosed together. He maintains that the participation established in creation does not, in a sense, disclose the determinate form of the human person’s communion with God. As imago Dei, the human person participates analogically in the divine being and is thereby constituted as capax Dei. For him, because the image is analogical, it remains intrinsically ordered to its archetype. Therefore, according to him, in the incarnate Son, the eternal imago of the Father, this participation receives its Christological determination.
In this way, according to the thought of Ratzinger, what belongs to the Son per naturam is communicated to believers per gratiam. Human nature does not merely participate in God as the source of its being; through the incarnate Son, it is admitted, by grace, to share analogically in the Son’s relation to the Father. Participation thus assumes a specifically filial form. The human person remains irrevocably a creature, receiving according to the proper proportion (secundum modum recipientis) of created existence, while the participatum is no longer described simply as likeness to God but as participation in the Son’s filial communion. Adoption (filiatio adoptiva) is, therefore, neither an external juridical status nor merely the imitation of Christ; it is the gracious configuration of the believer to the Son through the Holy Spirit. Because the eternal Son has assumed human nature, the participation bestowed in creation as imago Dei reaches its Christological fulfilment in adoptive sonship. Christ, therefore, not only reveals the destiny of the human person but effects it by communicating, through the Spirit, what belongs to him by nature to those who receive it by grace.
3.3. Analogy as the ontological grammar of participation
The participatory anthropology developed thus far culminates in a fundamental metaphysical question. If creaturely existence is constituted through participation in the creative Logos and perfected in the filial existence of the incarnate Son, by what ontological principle does such participation remain both real and irreducibly creaturely? The question is no longer whether human persons participate in the Son, but how such participation is ontologically intelligible. Without a determinate mode of participation, communion with Christ either collapses the Creator–creature distinction through univocal predication or renders participation merely extrinsic through equivocity. Neither alternative can account simultaneously for the reality of filial communion and the integrity of created existence.
The logic of Ratzinger’s anthropology therefore presupposes a third metaphysical possibility. Although he nowhere formulates a systematic doctrine of analogy in relation to theological anthropology, his account consistently operates within an implicit analogical ontology. Analogy constitutes the transcendental condition of possibility for creaturely participation, making intelligible how what belongs to the Son per naturam is communicated to believers per gratiam without ceasing to belong properly to him. Participation is, therefore, real, because the believer truly shares in the Son’s filial relation through the Holy Spirit, yet irreducibly creaturely, because the communicated gift is received secundum modum recipientis. The creature neither reproduces the Son’s eternal relation nor merely imitates it externally; rather, it participates really, though analogically, in the filial mode of existence. Analogy thus emerges, in the thought of Ratzinger, not as a supplementary theological category but as the ontological principle that secures the simultaneity of real participation and the irreducible Creator–creature distinction.
Recent scholarship has substantially provided more clarity to the principal contours of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology. Mary Frances McKenna has demonstrated that human personhood is fundamentally receptive, constituted through the gift of divine communion rather than autonomous self-possession.Footnote 17 Andrew Kaethler has further shown that this participatory existence assumes its concrete form through incorporation into Christ, particularly within the Eucharistic and eschatological dimensions of Christian life.Footnote 18 Likewise, Isabel Troconis has argued that filial communion provides the hermeneutical centre of Ratzinger’s theological vision, such that the identity of believers is intelligible only in relation to the Son’s communion with the Father.Footnote 19 Matthew Levering, in turn, has situated these themes within the broader participatory metaphysics of the Christian tradition, demonstrating the remarkable coherence of Ratzinger’s doctrines of creation, Christology, ecclesiology, and sacramental theology.Footnote 20 These studies disclose the structural primacy of participation, communion, and relationality within Ratzinger’s account of the human person. They also bring into sharper relief a more fundamental metaphysical problem: by what ontological principle is it possible for the creature to participate truly in the Son’s filial life while preserving the irreducible distinction between Creator and creature?
The present study’s reconstruction raises a more difficult question: if Ratzinger never formulates a systematic doctrine of analogy, on what grounds may analogy be said to govern his theological anthropology at all? The evidence suggests that the answer lies less in any explicit terminological commitment than in the ontological relations presupposed by his accounts of creation, Christology, adoptive sonship, and ecclesial communion. Across these accounts, the creature is described as genuinely receiving what belongs properly to the Son without thereby becoming what the Son is; participation is, therefore, neither identity nor mere resemblance. Could this coherence be explained without recourse to analogy? Perhaps, if participation, relation, and communion are treated simply as complementary theological descriptions. The difficulty, however, is that such an account leaves unexplained how finite being can genuinely share in a mode of existence proper to the eternal Son while remaining irreducibly creaturely. Analogy appears to supply precisely this missing mediation: it permits real participation without univocal identification and genuine likeness without equivocal separation.
4. Analogy as the unifying principle of Ratzinger’s anthropology
4.1. Relational personhood as the existential consequence of analogical participation
The analogical structure of participation established in the preceding section discloses the existential form of creaturely personhood. If human beings participate truly, though not univocally, in the filial relation of the Son, then relation cannot be conceived as an accidental property subsequently acquired by an otherwise self-contained subject. Rather, relationality belongs to the very mode in which created persons exist before God. Precisely because this participation is analogical, creaturely relation neither reproduces the eternal processions of the Trinity nor remains an external imitation of them. Instead, human existence is transformed into a genuinely filial mode of being while remaining irreducibly creaturely.
Ratzinger’s understanding of personhood follows directly from this analogical logic. Christ is ‘the true fulfilment of the idea of the human person’ – not simply because he exemplifies authentic humanity, but because in him humanity is disclosed as the analogical participation of created existence in the eternal Son. Human relation is, therefore, in a sense, constitutive of personhood because the creature’s identity is determined by participation in the divine communion from which it receives its being and towards which it is ordered.
The preceding analysis also permits a constructive integration of the principal trajectories within contemporary Ratzinger scholarship. McKenna’s conception of receptive personhood and Troconis’s account of filial communion each captures a constitutive dimension of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology. Their systematic convergence, however, presupposes an ontological account of participation capable of preserving both the reality of filial communion and the irreducible asymmetry of Creator and creature. The implicit analogical ontology reconstructed in this study provides precisely this metaphysical ground. It thereby demonstrates that receptivity and filial communion are internally related as complementary existential determinations of a single participatory ontology.
4.2. Ecclesial communion as the historical mediation of analogical participation
The analogical structure of participation not only discloses the existential form of personhood but also determines the historical mode in which participation in the Son is realised. If, as the preceding discussion has argued, the human person participates analogically in Christ’s filial relation, that participation cannot remain a merely interior or individual reality. It necessarily assumes an ecclesial form, for participation in Christ is inseparable from incorporation into his Body. Yet this immediately raises a further ontological question. How can believers truly become members of Christ’s Body without identifying the Church with Christ himself or reducing ecclesial communion to an external association of religious individuals? Ratzinger’s ecclesiology becomes fully intelligible only within the analogical ontology of participation developed above.
For Ratzinger, the Church is neither a sociological community constituted by common religious commitments nor a continuation of the Incarnation in the sense that the distinction between Christ and believers is abolished. Rather, the Church exists because the filial communion proper to the incarnate Son is genuinely communicated to believers through grace according to the finite mode of creaturely existence. Ecclesial communion is, therefore, analogical. What belongs to Christ per naturam is communicated to the Church per gratiam, so that believers truly participate in his filial life while remaining redeemed creatures. The Church is thus not an addition to participation but its necessary historical mediation. As Ratzinger observes, ‘the Church is communion with God through communion with Christ’. Baptism initiates this participation, while the Eucharist continually deepens it by conforming believers ever more fully to the Son whose life they receive.
The Eucharist, accordingly, occupies a decisive place within Ratzinger’s theological vision. His well-known affirmation that ‘the Eucharist creates the Church’ expresses more than a sacramental or ecclesiological conviction; it presupposes an analogical ontology. Eucharistic communion effects a real participation in Christ’s self-offering, without reproducing the unique filial relation that belongs to him eternally as the Son. In this context, the Church consequently exists as the historical communion of those who participate analogically in the Son’s filial relation through the sacramental economy.
Ecclesiology, therefore, emerges not as an independent locus appended to Ratzinger’s anthropology but as the necessary historical expression of analogical participation. Because participation in the Son is intrinsically ecclesial, the Church constitutes the concrete historical communion in which creaturely personhood is progressively conformed to Christ through grace. The analogical structure that governs creation and Christology thus also governs the Church, preparing the way for the final consummation in which participation reaches its eschatological perfection without ever ceasing to be the participation of creatures in the life of the Triune God.
4.3. Eschatological fulfilment as the consummation of analogical participation
The analogical participation that grounds creaturely existence, assumes its filial form in Christ, and is historically mediated in the Church remains intrinsically ordered towards an eschatological fulfilment. This final horizon raises the last and most decisive question of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology. If human beings truly participate in the life of the Triune God, does the consummation of that participation ultimately transcend the Creator–creature distinction, or does it bring that distinction to its highest perfection? The answer to this question determines whether participation culminates in the deification of the creature as identity with God or in the perfection of creaturely communion with God. Ratzinger’s eschatology consistently presupposes the latter because the participation inaugurated through grace remains analogical even in its consummation.
For Ratzinger, eternal life does not consist in the dissolution of creaturely existence into the divine being but in the perfection of communion through ever deeper conformity to the incarnate Son. The vocation disclosed in creation and realised through adoptive sonship reaches its fulfilment in the beatific vision, where the human person participates perfectly in the triune life while remaining irrevocably a creature. Eschatological fulfilment, therefore, intensifies rather than abolishes the analogical structure of participation. The creature receives the fullness of divine life according to the finite mode proper to created existence, such that communion becomes complete without becoming identity. The Creator remains the inexhaustible source of being, while the redeemed creature attains its perfection precisely through the continual reception of that divine life as a gift.
This systematic integration discloses the architectonic unity of Ratzinger’s theological anthropology. Creation establishes participation in being; Christ reveals its filial form; the Church sacramentally mediates it within history; and the Kingdom brings it to eschatological perfection. These are not discrete theological loci but successive determinations of a single analogically mediated participation in the triune life. Analogy thus emerges as Ratzinger’s implicit ontological principle, rendering creation, Christology, ecclesiology, sacramentality, and eschatology systematically coherent. His distinctive contribution, therefore, lies not simply in affirming participation, relational personhood, or filial communion, but in presupposing an analogical ontology through which communion with God perfects, rather than abolishes, creaturely existence.
5. Conclusion
At the heart of Joseph Ratzinger’s theological anthropology lies an implicit analogical ontology that renders intelligible the creature’s real participation in the filial life of the Son, while preserving the irreducible distinction between Creator and creature. This study has argued that creation, Christology, adoptive sonship, ecclesial communion, and eschatological fulfilment are not independent theological loci but successive determinations of a single participatory ontology. Their systematic coherence depends upon an analogical mode of participation in which what belongs to the Son per naturam is communicated to believers per gratiam according to the finite mode proper to created existence. Human personhood is, therefore, relational not because it reproduces the subsistent relations of the Trinity, but because, through grace, it participates analogically in the filial mode of existence revealed and communicated by the incarnate Logos.
Read in this light, analogy is not merely an ancillary theological category within Ratzinger’s thought but the ontological grammar that governs the movement from Trinitarian theology to theological anthropology. It alone secures the simultaneity of genuine communion and ontological asymmetry, making possible a participatory account of personhood that neither collapses the Creator–creature distinction through univocity nor reduces participation to metaphor through equivocity. The originality of the present study, therefore, lies not in identifying relationality, participation, or filial communion as themes within Ratzinger’s theology – each has already received considerable scholarly attention – but in arguing that an implicit analogical ontology provides the metaphysical principle that unifies these themes into a coherent theological vision.
This reconstruction also suggests a broader implication for contemporary theological anthropology. By retrieving the analogical structure that underlies Ratzinger’s account of personhood, it becomes possible to affirm both the reality of creaturely participation in the triune life and the enduring integrity of created existence. Ratzinger’s theology thus offers more than a relational account of the human person; it provides a metaphysical framework within which participation, communion, and personhood may be understood as internally coherent without sacrificing either the transcendence of God or the genuine dignity of the creature. In this respect, analogy emerges not simply as an interpretive key to Ratzinger’s anthropology but as its unifying ontological principle and, consequently, as a constructive contribution to contemporary debates concerning relational ontology and the theological understanding of the human person.
Declaration of interest
The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial conflict/competing interests to disclose.
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