Advent Adhortations II

Of the two possibilities — God or no God — only one serves my need. I have therefore two good reasons for adhering to its logic: it is useful and it does nothing to contradict my sense of my humanity.

The Apostles’ Creed in Russian, sung by the Choir of Comunione e Liberazione, Rimini, December 10th, 2011

A Language to Hope In

The concluding chapter of my 2010 book Beyond Consolation (On How We Became Too Clever For God . . . And Our Own Good), inspired by the public witness of my Irish Times colleague Nuala O’Faolain, shortly before her (anticipated) death in 2008. (See Advent Adhortations I)

Nuala O’Faolain had spoken many times for a particular generation of Irish women, and in the end she spoke for several generations of Irish people, men and women, who have imagined for themselves an abyss in consequence of pursuing the failed hypothesis that humankind can live without God. The despair she expressed is the despair of a generation which imagined it could establish a utopia of reason free of the encumbrances of tradition and the dread of the absolute. What she described so perfectly in this moment when she had nothing to lose is the abyss that our culture has created for us, the abyss that we have conjured up out of some fatalistic, pessimistic, joyless perception of ourselves. We look in the mirror and we see hopelessness. A society on the one hand speaking of progress and happiness for its people through time can imagine nothing but oblivion for the individual human being.

Most of the time, people who know they are close to death are either too distracted by illness, too medicated, or too engrossed in prayer to come out and put words on the moment. Nuala applied to the process of dying the same talkativeness she had applied to so many things in her public life, but afterwards we insisted on patronising her to, as it were, death. People talked afterwards of her ‘honesty’ and ‘courage’, but what moved me was not so much her honesty as her articulateness about despair. What she did really was make visible the feelings that lie in wait for any of us in the culture we have helped to create. This culture is functional in many ways to do with what we think of as living, but is a bad culture to be dying in.

We call it reason, but it is not that at all. What, remotely, might be the reasonable basis for the idea that the answer to the question that is humanity might be a void, an abyss? How reasonable is it to believe that, after chasing illusions all our lives, we face the dark alone? How, driven by the deepest desires of the human heart, can we reject such a miraculous incidence of correspondence between the question of the human heart and the answers contained in the stories and traditions we have inherited? What, other than a life-denying pessimism, could have convinced us that the accounts handed to us through history, verified along the way by countless human beings much like ourselves, is not the most persuasive evidence concerning the meaning of human existence? How can we gaze on the beauty of the world and imagine that this is all there is, that this is possible because it is, but nothing else is possible because we cannot see how? Perhaps we can arrive at such a conclusion, but it is not reasonable. It is pessimism, pure and simple. It is despair.

And it is not what our hearts tell us. Beating within us, our hearts bear witness, second by second, to the idea that there is hope beyond the hope we can rummage through, the flimsy hopes of the marketplace that draw us to themselves and then dissolve in our hands, before our eyes. If this is all there is, why do we continue?

The wonder in our hearts knows that there is more than what we see and hear and touch and taste. For such deep-set hopes to be merely imagined, conjured up, an invention of a self-deluding human intelligence, is not merely unthinkable, but actually unreasonable. For the human heart to nourish the hopes it does and for these to be baseless, delusional, would be a betrayal of nature of unparalleled proportions. Nowhere in nature do we encounter such a betrayal.

Reason belongs not just to the head, to logic and proof, but to the heart also, to the fruits of experience, to feeling, intuition, instinct. When we recognise this, faith becomes not merely reasonable, but an acknowledgment of what is — excepting nothing, postponing nothing, ascribing nothing to chance. Our culture’s prevailing reduction of reason leads us to deconstruct not just our beliefs but also our capacity to trust and hope.

Almost everything we do involves faith. Faith, therefore, is the greater part of reason, because to reason is to live in the light of infinity, totally connected with reality, accepting what exists and seeking to live in accordance with everything we truly know, which is so much more than we think.

A cosmic detective might say that mankind had a strong motive for inventing God, whether God existed or did not. In a way, it doesn’t matter. These arguments do not reach any conclusions that serve any purpose for man in his need. If my reason tells me I have a need for something greater, I do not solve my dilemma by deciding that this something does not exist. By doing so, I resolve, ever so quietly and deep within myself, to wind up my existence, and to convey to my descendents that they should not bother with these questions.

In the main, atheistic objections to the God hypothesis seem to centre on cultural notions of probability: Is it likely that God would behave as religious culture would have us believe? It is possible for even deeply religious people to have sympathy with elements of this outlook, but generally they allow themselves to perceive the content of religion as the material that has emerged in human cultures to enable the limited human imagination to know what is essential.

Of the two possibilities — God or no God — only one serves my need. I have therefore two good reasons for adhering to its logic: it is useful and it does nothing to contradict my sense of my humanity. Already the cosmic detective may be coming to the conclusion that, since there is no smoking gun, this case will be decided on the circumstantial evidence. But he must examine all the evidence and test each hypothesis in the light of man’s reason, and not just the parts that render themselves easy to measure and count.

Let us postulate that the idea of God is simply an imaginative mechanism of mankind to simplify the great questions of human existence, the mysterious and unknowable aspects of reality that define us and yet cannot be seen or understood. Let us put aside, for the moment, the idea of Christ, leaving the issue of its validity or meaning for another time. It is possible, then, to see that, quite apart from what anyone thinks of religion in general, or any specific religion in particular, there is an imaginative problem in a society which seeks to remove religion from public sight and public discussion. What happens to such a society is not that it finds some new kind of language to embrace the great questions in its new-found ‘rational’ belief system, but that the mysterious and unknowable elements of reality disappear from the conversations by which the society and its members seek to understand their human journeys.

The ‘truth’ of ‘God’ is beyond description. But if, in an attempt to combat the rational-atheistic logic, which inevitably closes down not merely the issue of God but also the semantic path to the absolute dimension, you suggest that religion is simply a metaphorical way of summoning up the unknowable, you are in difficulty with religious people who insist that their beliefs are literal and anyone who claims to believe in God but seeks to fudge the specifics is actually worse than those who lay claim to no beliefs at all. There is something in this viewpoint, but not enough to overcome the urgency that the present moment presents for those who seek above all to restore our culture’s capacity for openness in the interests of their children. Specificity is essential to even limited comprehension of what matters, but the problem with specificity is that it provides also the straw men for the pseudo-rationalists to knock down. The knocking down, then, becomes the total event in the eyes of a culture with little capacity for poetry or mystery.

I have never had a supernatural experience. I do not really understand what mysticism is. I know almost nothing of theology, and to be honest most of it bores me stiff. I am not good at praying. My back goes up at the slightest sign of piety. Many religious people annoy me tremendously with their pat assumptions about what the idea of my believing implies. I resist with every fibre of my being the clubbability of what is called faith, and the sense believers often give off that all this is obvious. To me it is not obvious. To me, in the culture I must live in, the idea that there is no God is more ‘obvious’ than the idea that there is. But this is my problem: this answer does not satisfy me, at any level of my humanity. My attention is therefore directed to the question of how our cultures decide what is obvious and what is not.

Because, of course, I am part of this culture, or perhaps I should say that it is part of me — I too am infected by the national pessimism. How could it be otherwise?

Sometimes, as I have explained, I feel great sorrow at the prospect of the loss of the beauty of this world, however qualified this may have been or may yet become by virtue of the pain inflicted on me by reality and the absence of a consistent and central sense of meaning. I have in recent years felt such an acute increase in my sense of this pain of impending loss that I wonder if I will be able to bear it all if it increases to any significant extent. My intellectual and sometimes emotional acceptance of the reasonable probability that there is more to existence than what I encounter here can sometimes be eroded by a sudden incursion of despair, or a sense of pointlessness, or even occasionally a sense that, no matter what happens in the next life, it cannot be better than this one is, right here, right now. When I think about it in such moments, I too am unpersuaded by the versions of the afterlife on offer, not necessarily by their probability, possibility or even plausibility, but by the detail of them, the sense of — to take the most crude and banal example — walking around on clouds for ever, being nice to everyone in a rather bland and, frankly, sickening way. I can imagine worse things, but still none of the standard tableaux seem to me to be worth the trouble of achieving them.

I wonder if, in heaven, I will be able to tell someone to fuck off if they are annoying me, or if I will be past annoyance and will be able to tolerate the kind of people I am now moved to cross the road from when I see them drawing near. Or, I think about Saint Peter manning the gate and imagine him like one of those guards you see at Dublin airport who stop people with black skin but give me a wink because they recognise me from the telly and nod me on without even glancing at my passport. [This, remember, was written roughy fifteen year ago! JW, December 2024!]

All this, of course, is nonsensical. I know that, whatever comes after, it will be nothing like what I know now, and nothing like what the mind I have now is capable of contemplating, and nothing like any of the things the words I am capable of using are capable of evoking for myself or anyone else. I sense that my present thoughts are like the caterpillar in comparison to the butterfly. If there is a language in heaven, it will not square up to or bite into reality in the way our languages do in this dimension.

But, trapped in my earthly logic, I have enough sense by now to sense that if I allow these undoubted facts to govern my relationship with my ultimate destiny and its meaning, I will come to conclusions that fall far short of what my humanity at play in reality tells me is possible without showing me how.

So, all these words are pointless? Perhaps, perhaps not. At the very least you have to admit that words are all we have. We cannot know God, if He exists, if ‘He’ is the right word. Our attempts to invoke or describe this reality must necessarily be worse than pathetic, but we have nothing else to work with. Words are pretty much all we have to think, to imagine with.

I do not think the words exist to say the things my mind is incapable of formulating about God and the meaning of human existence. I am caught with my desire on the one hand and, on the other, the sense that in order to create a harmonious connection between this desire and all earthly reality, I need to construct something that might be termed a set of beliefs. I cannot even think about my own total reality because most of the language I can locate to do it in has already been colonised and/or discredited.

I need a language to hope in. I need words to express my infinite longing that do not make me sound mad, superstitious, reactionary or stupid. It’s not that I care what people think of me. I really don’t, or at least not as much as I did once. When I was younger, I used to care what my peers thought of me, mainly writers, artists, left-wingers — all people who had the best of reasons for taking up certain stances against the way things used to be. There was a time when for me the scorn of such people would have been among the worst things imaginable. But now I care less and less, because the questions concerning my place in reality and what my ultimate destination might be are much bigger than any consideration of fashionability or acceptability.

I ask these questions not because I have suddenly capitulated to conservatism in middle age (perhaps I have, but if so it is an unrelated phenomenon) or because I am terrified of the Last Judgment, or preparing for the next life. No, I ask them because I have to, because the need to understand myself to the fullest extent that I can before it is too late exceeds any other consideration, even the friendship of those whose love I still crave. I wish it were otherwise, but that’s the way I find myself.

This is as frightening as anything about death. It seems I am destined to step out of the culture, or, even worse, to remain in it while seeing through its insubstantiality, but still unable to make out what lies beyond.

I don’t ‘believe’. I can’t. If believing is just gritting my teeth and adhering to some proferred concept of what is and might be, I cannot do it. If a ‘faith’ is merely a collection of people, a club, in which everybody affirms everybody else, and together they affirm a set of dogmas that have been agreed long before by others, then count me out. Unless my ‘faith’ accords with the knowledge derived through my own existence, it is not faith at all, but blind acceptance of an ideology. Faith is knowledge.

The paradox of this is that, somewhere along the way, there must be a leap of something – I almost said ‘faith’ but that would be a tautology, a short in the circuit of reason. But then I know, too, that I cannot reason my way to certainty, or heaven, or the certainty of heaven. I cannot reason myself into the arms of Christ. There will always be a gap between my train of thought and my sense of a destination. The question is: do I take this gap as absolute, in the sense that my capacity to think in a straight line of logic is unable to cross it; or do I simply come to rest alongside it and wait for something to happen? My life has been not a line but a circuitous journey, which brings me back to where I began. After all my voyaging, I lie down in the spot on which I was baptised, the spot on which I cried and kicked at the coldness of the water.

For all the difficulties and horrors associated with this, the fact is that Ireland has long been a Catholic society, which means that it depends for its very life on the tradition, however imperfect, that we know as Catholicism. The language we depend on to perceive ourselves in our totality is therefore a language forged in the culture of Catholicism. We, as Christians, are bequeathed a belief that the Mystery, in a disposition of mercy, became flesh and presented Himself as the answer to death and despair. It is all but impossible, in conventional discourse, to separate this from the debris of piety and power-play and see it for what it is: our most vital guiding idea, the source of the hope-beyond-hope that, as human beings, we most desperately crave and depend on.

Catholicism, then, comes after the fact of my religion. I am not religious because I am a Catholic, but Catholic because I am religious. My need for religion is like my need for air, and comes from approximately the same region of my body: my heart, nestling beside my lungs.

Religion has to do with my natural structure, my createdness/creature-ness, my intrinsic desires, my dependence, my mortality, and my relationship with reality, pregnant with evidence of the Mystery that defines me. I call myself a Christian because for me this Mystery has at its centre the Presence of Christ, Lord of History. I am not an incidental phenomenon, randomly arrived and soon to depart, but an intrinsic part of infinity reality, my identity unbounded by the three-dimensional impediments or the laws and principles that govern this physical realm. That I am part of infinite time and space is a description of my very nature.

There is a hope inside me that is bigger than what the world thinks of as me, that overwhelms me with confidence and optimism, and that rests its heavy expectation upon the light that it has placed just beyond my sight, beyond the horizon of human understanding. My desire tells me of the promise Christ made, a promise that something is always coming, something is always happening, something is always waiting for me, just as I am always waiting for it. Nothing I can see, hear, touch or smell comes near to satisfying this desire.

Catholicism comes into this because I was born a Catholic and, after years of running away, I decided that the specificity of this cultural experience is vital to my sense of Christ, the Mystery incarnate. Because there is this distance, this disproportionality, between what I hope for and what I can find in this dimension, I have in the past tended to shift around the place, mooching for a correspondence. Belatedly, it came to me: the optimal position resides in what is, in the specificity of what is there, which implicitly has been given for a reason. Our culture seduces us to think of what might be elsewhere, or different, or other. But the Other is already here, where we are, right now.

Our cultures do not understand what freedom is, defining it as the ability to do as we please, blind to man’s experience which consistently reveals that this avenue of exploration leads ultimately to disgust and disaster. Real freedom resides beyond our reach, like a shape floating in the corner of the eye. Only in repose do we begin to discern its shape.

For all kinds of reasons to do with corrupted notions of both religion and freedom, our cultures have been led to believe that religion is something imposed, and therefore something that can be discarded at will, in order to be more ‘free’. This is impossible, because religion is an original essence of the human being. You can, of course, claim you have ‘moved beyond it’, as I did for nearly twenty years, but this won’t change your fundamental structure. Religion is not a choice, but a fact. We may choose to identify ourselves outside the embrace of formal religion, but this changes nothing. Our natures remain.

Even if it were possible to shake off this essence, it would be an act of self-destruction. I am not a Hindu or a Buddhist. If you have a path, why waste time looking for one? I see no point in fighting the Catholic Church any more than I might think it a good idea to fight the air or kick a tree. Neither do I see the Church as a refuge or a club, or a political party, still less a source of moral guidance. The Church is someplace I look to in order to maintain a structured engagement with the Mystery and also in my need for a source of reflective experience of the human condition.

Belonging to the church doesn’t for me relate to any social or political circumstance, but to my fundamental humanity and destiny, to my relationship with reality and with Infinity, which is just another word for Mystery. This, not Catholicism per se, is my religious identity.

There is another virus in our culture today, equally deadly to the human spirit, which separates believing from knowing. This became manifest in the idea that religion comprises the action of going into some room, even a very big room, getting on your knees, scrunching up your brain in an attempt to ‘believe’ something, and then entering a hostile world holding this quality of ‘faith’ in front like a shield. But faith is not an irrational leap in the dark: it is the reasonable response to the real.

Reality is God-given. It therefore cannot be hostile to God, except in a superficial sense usually arising from the operation of man-made elements of reality. For example, modern man’s inability to accept the limits of his own structure has created conditions of thought in our cultures which are hostile to the idea of God. But reality per se is neither antagonistic nor neutral towards someone seeking to connect with the infinite dimension of being. If I stay for long enough in reality with the questions that come teeming from my heart, the answers become visible. Reality cannot, by definition, be other than sympathetic to my essential condition, which is religious.

Faith, then, is the force that animates my total humanity, that allows me to stand up straight against gravity and wait in hope for what is promised. ‘Believing’ doesn’t come into it. Faith is knowledge, which derives from experience of the promise with which reality is pregnant. Faith is no more than honesty before reality. What do I see? Where did it come from? And then, where did I come from? What or who made me? What makes me now, in this moment, if I do not make myself? Sooner or later, the true intelligence arrives at God, because God is what intelligence derives from.

Religion involves not some esoteric engagement with the mystical, but the prosaic process of going into the great outdoors knowing what I am engaged in and open to seeing what is there. I cannot ‘believe’ in God by looking at reality — I can only know that He is. This is a reasonable inference — the only reasonable one — from reality and my deepest experience of it.

I cannot merely hope. That alone would not sustain me. Hope must be connected to the processes of reason, or it cannot survive. Hope without reason is like a bucket with a hole in the bottom. It holds nothing.

What is hope anyway? Hope is the force within me that keeps me going, the light that must never go out, or else I’m halfway to being dead.

What then? Knowledge. I don’t ‘believe’. I know. I know there is a force that equates to my concept of creation, and I am happy to call this God. I know there is a Beyond, which I am happy to call Heaven. I know Jesus came from this Beyond and I feel fairly sure He was who He told us He was. He didn’t lie about anything else. He wasn’t confused about anything else. His words remain, every one, as clear and vital as in the moments he uttered them. In the ‘modern’ world, with its sense of perpetually ‘going forward’, all this seems increasingly implausible. But if it is, any use of my deeper intelligence must alert me to the problems with the thought process which have arrived at this sense of implausibility, because nothing else I have heard has seemed to offer the answers this story does.

Such thinking seems an affront to ‘rationality’. Perhaps it is. But the false rationality our cultures conventionally employ present us with a false choice: belief in things that are demonstrable only, or superstition. The problem is that believing only in what is demonstrable leaves vast gaps in my knowledge and self-understanding. And no matter how much I ‘know’, in ‘rational’ terms, there is still the Mystery, not least the mystery of myself. I can sit here writing and take myself for granted: a machine-like entity performing the obvious and banal task of making marks on a page. Or I can detach myself from this, and indeed from what I think of as myself, and observe the astonishing nature of what is happening. I step outside my body and contemplate myself. Who is this strange but familiar figure crouched over this white machine? Where did he come from to arrive here. Why? No matter how often these questions are rubbished or otherwise disposed of, they remain as the core and most vital thoughts of my being. No matter how much I distract myself or bury myself in the logics of the man-made world, they continue to jump up into my consciousness when I least expect it.

Either God made the world or He did not make the world. There are no other possibilities. If I decide He did not make the world, I have to come up with a better explanation, and this has for millennia taxed more practised minds than mine. I need, just to exist, a working hypothesis of reality in its totality, and only the God hypothesis gives me that. Without the concept of God, then, I am disconnected from reality, from my infinite circuitry, and am, by definition, unfree.

If I know — as I do — that there is more to reality than what I see hear and touch, I need some affirmation, some structural entity that will make that relationship real. In the culture that I live in, this means the Christian proposal.

The Christian event is not a story, not history, not a morality tale, but an event of this very moment. The Resurrection happens moment to moment before our eyes, but in our pessimism we look and see nothing but randomness. Christianity cannot really be transmitted by theologians, only by witnesses who see clearly and describe what is there.

This is where Catholicism figures in my life. The Church is where I go to be educated about my deeper structure and nature, and where I find companionship for the journey towards my destination. The Church fails me most of the time, as I fail myself most of the time, but without it I might be alone in a culture that denies my nature at every turn. The trouble is: if I am disposed to place my faith in the Great Hope, then the shopkeepers and innkeepers and prostitutes have a problem selling me things that may momentarily strike me as the answer to the question my humanity exudes.

Most people cannot even approach this fundamental truth about themselves because the initial access from our culture needs to be achieved through language, which has been booby-trapped by an ideological war waged on the one hand by a faction too ‘modern’ and ‘intelligent’ to give any credence to the idea that man is fundamentally religious, and on the other by those calling themselves religious-minded, who have fuelled what is called secularism by holding faith up as a moral shield against the world. Between these two warring sides most of us have to find the true essence of our humanity.

So it is good and useful to have a ‘club’ to go to. It gives me, sometimes, a sense of other people struggling with the same things, although sometimes it pushes me towards a short circuit and I resist that with every atom of my being. I will be standing or sitting there trying to imagine myself in my infinite dimension, and someone will utter something that doesn’t ring true, or which sounds like a platitude, or smacks of trying to control other people’s lives by foisting upon them some half-baked idea of what they should or should not be doing in the middle of the night. It is in moments like this, more than in any moments of introspection, that I am seized by doubt, by a feeling that, if the consolation of religion did not already exist, we would have to invent it.

The writer I love more than any other is Franz Kafka. The most beautiful book I have read is The Trial, the first sentence of which reads: ‘Somebody must have been telling lies about Josef K. because, without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one fine morning’. These twenty words prefigure not just the novel, but an entire age, prophesying the era of the ism, in which guilt or innocence could no longer be decided on facts, but became a matter of ideological conformity. I think of Kafka as an Angel of Mystery, a strange, unearthly spectre come to make us shudder at what we take for granted and give us new words to understand the space between us and the Mystery. Josef K., the protagonist of The Trial, is Kafka, but also me, and perhaps also you. Imbued with a craving for reason and justice, he inhabits a world in which such concepts provoke hilarity and suspicion. In the end he is brought to face the inevitability of his error: the absence of reason is itself reasonable; his insistence, in this dimension, on the existence of justice is absurd. In a time when we are more and more subject to rule by a nightmare of senselessness — bureaucracy, arbitrary power, political correctness, tribunals —  the character of Josef K. embodies the spirit of  an age in which nobody can any longer claim to be innocent because anyone may be deemed guilty at any time.

This is what it adds up to: I see the path. It makes sense from my starting point, which is my desire that there be a destination and that it be the one that will finally quieten the crying inside me. Because I desire it so much, it cannot fail to exist, because otherwise this world and my place in it represent a betrayal of my desire such as appears to be unprecedented. And then I could not trust my desires to tell me anything else. I could not be sure than I am hungry or lonely or tired, for fear that my desires, again, were misleading me.

I have a burning desire for an absent good whose shape I can apprehend from the knot of desire within me. I am a black hole into which the heavens have imploded, filling me with their expectation but denying me their pleasures. When I go through the process we call death, the heavens will unleash themselves from my belly and I will be free once again.

Meanwhile, I walk in a kind of daze, seeking the destination that all the while is inside me, because this is my only sense of what a journey is. In a mist beyond me I make out the shape of the destination, but the path seems to break down some way ahead. For the moment I can keep on walking, but perhaps there will be a time, in the future, when I will encounter a ravine. I may have to jump it, I don’t know. But for now I keep on walking. From time to time I glimpse the path entering the gates of the castle which I recognise as my destination. Will the path break down before I get there, or after that? I don’t know. I keep walking. I see someone rushing past, making for the same place. The gate ahead appears to open. I hurry onwards, but the gate seems no closer.

This is faith. Perhaps tomorrow there will be no path, but today there is. This is hope.

Without this there is only consolation, the drowning out of the distant howling of the wind in the abyss. Entertainment, art, what is called ‘nature’, all these can provide such consolation. And so can religion, presented just a semitone off key.

The word ‘consolation’ itself already implies a lie: something dreamed up to compensate for the loss of the true prize. If faith is consolation, it is a lie, perhaps a greater lie than the pessimism it seeks to supplant, because instead of turning away from hope, it mocks and parodies hope to its face, patronising it to death.

Imagine yourself in an old, disused building, perhaps the ruin of a church. You are looking around when you hear a noise overhead. You look up and see, flying among the rafters, a bird. He has blundered in from outside, perhaps through a broken window, and now cannot get out. You watch him for a while. Sometimes, he flies about, seemingly without a pattern, swooping low into the belly of the building. Sometimes he rests, looking about him curiously. Sometimes he tries to get back outside, making lunges at the light he sees blinking through cracks in the roof. Then he reverts to flying. In the end he gets away, perhaps through an open door, and is gone.

This is the way for a human life in our culture. We watch each other come and go, but nothing makes sense. There is no pattern to be seen in the lives of others, or even in our own, other than an alternation of swooping and the crazed search for escape. In the end we seem to disappear as pointlessly as we appear to have arrived.

This is not the truth about us, but it is what our culture has decided and what it whispers to us every waking moment. This is a problem of knowledge.

It seems strange, in the midst of the information age, to be talking about knowledge as a ‘problem’. We are bombarded with information: 24-hour news, and instant access to facts on the internet. Never in the history of the planet was so much knowledge available to mankind. True knowledge, though, is not just fact, but fact accompanied by meaning. It arrives into a context where it fills a waiting gap, and there is a ‘ping!’ of recognition as the knowledge goes to its place in the working hypothesis of an evolving self-understanding. This is largely absent from our information age. Because we have forbidden ourselves a total hypothesis, we learn things without ever knowing them. Something may be absorbed, understood and recorded, but its meaning is held in abeyance, as though we are waiting for the primary facts to be decided before we know what to do with this new information. We ‘know’ many things, but we do not know what they mean, where they fit in our reasons. We therefore merely use fragments to fill the void with rationalisations of our pessimism.

This process may not have been the occurrence of a single moment. Perhaps it started with the Enlightenment, perhaps it began at the moment when human culture started to whip itself up to a speed for the first time faster than the speed at which the species itself was developing. Perhaps it happened with the invention of television or the development of the mass media society.

However or whenever it began to happen, it is as if our sense of knowledge has flipped over; that, having pursued an understanding of the world from the point of total unknowing, we have, on the basis of a few modest insights into the way reality works, inferred from these understandings that total understanding would soon be ours. On the collateral of a little knowledge, we have taken out a mortgage on all possible knowledge and, in effect, decided that we already, in a certain sense, ‘know’ everything.

We caught a glimpse of the possibility of the total mastery of reality through knowledge. It was not that we really ‘knew’ everything, or even imagined we did, but that our demeanours started to imply that we had. Knowledge had been devolved to human ownership. The Mystery was no longer ‘The Mystery’ but was redefined as the Unknown, which implied that it was potentially within the control of man, in the same way as The Future had became Going Forward. In this demeanour, everything that remains unknowable is an affront to our sense of ourselves.

Man’s sense of his own place within reality changed: although his knowledge of things had grown only marginally, he was already, in his own mind, at the centre of his own existence, seeking dominion over everything. Because he had eliminated from his thinking the idea of a creator, he sought meaning now not from some coherent chronology of order that centred on his own existence, but randomly in a reality that seemed to have no purpose. His search was defined therefore not by a quest for a greater understanding of his own place in reality — a matter already decided — but by curiosity of a narrow and almost abstracted type.

Man became more and more successful at discovering things, but less so at understanding the meaning of his own life. Because the acquisition of knowledge was no longer a matter of understanding his relationship to the Mystery, but of building on his growing sense of his own potential omnipotence, the sense of exultation that knowledge had once bestowed began to wane. There was all this information, but it did not necessarily fit into any pattern that could be acknowledged. It was tentative, provisional. The fields of knowledge had become fragmented and disconnected from one another and from any overall pattern that could be described or defined. Man was waiting to break the codes of the universe, and expected a breakthrough any day now. His sense of suspension was merely a symptom of his impending omnipotence, and so could be lived with for a while.

But, implicit in the whole exercise was a weakening of man’s sense of his own meaning, and therefore of his motivation, his will to live.

In pursuit of the freedom to break the laws that had governed him, but which he had become convinced were arbitrary and gratuitous, he had struck out in great waves of adventuring. But, having untied himself from the taut entanglement with infinity, his freedom resulted not in a greater autonomy but in the slackness and wriggling of a worm cut in two. No longer stretched between the non-existent poles of Eternity and Infinity, the freedom he found gave him nowhere to go but, rather, imprisoned him within the narrow dimensions of time and space. He turned inwards to the core of his own mind, but here found that, though his thoughts seemed to mimic the vastness of the universe, these were but abstractions and games, without an end, without a purpose, a fizzling of energy that died in time. Man, ‘free’ at last, could not think of anything he really wanted to do with himself. His freedom bored him because it had no purpose outside itself.

It is as though modern man has lost some essential element of his own being, as if some vital part of his mechanism had fallen out and not been missed. And, without this part, nothing made sense, and the more information he gleaned the less sense it all made. Having pulled down the heavens and erected a ceiling of his own, man walked about with a kind of stoop, his own sense of pointlessness bearing down on him. His children grew like flowers in a chimney, somehow undernourished, seeing something up above them — a movement, a flash – that drew their attention, but left them pessimistic as to its capacity to answer their needs. In the end it seemed to have gone away, and soon they would go too.

In The Salt of the Earth, a book-length interview with Cardinal Ratzinger by Peter Seewald, published originally in German in 1996, Seewald asks his subject about the idea that it might ever again be considered ‘modern’ to live the Catholic faith, ‘even if, when examined closely, it actually appears as the most non-conforming, wide awake and radical lifestyle that could be imagined in the present circumstances’.

It is hard to imagine any proposition seeming less plausible to our present culture, which perceives all religion as imposing on freedom, and Catholicism being especially ‘reactionary’ in this regard.

Ratzinger responded: ‘Many consider the Church to be an outdated and fossilized system which has become constantly more isolated and inflexible, creating around itself a defensive shell which is crushing its own life. Such is the impression of a large number. Not many manage to perceive that, on the contrary, it holds something surprisingly new for them, something daring and generous which entails a rupture with the routine habits of life. However, it is precisely those who have had to endure the full brunt of modernity who discover this.’

It is an interesting phrase: ‘those who have had to endure the full brunt of modernity’. Only when we have explored to our fullest satisfaction the option of freedom as presented to us in conventional culture can we turn, usually in considerable pain, to look at the laws that reveal our experiences as inevitable, and this, we tend to find, broadly corresponds with what the Church has been saying. I do not say this to vindicate the Church, nor do I say it with any sense of satisfaction. It just happens to be observably true. There is a significant part of my being that still wishes it otherwise, that still wishes the Church wrong about everything.

I am sometimes inclined to venture out again, just to see if perhaps I have been doing things wrongly or misunderstanding something fundamental about myself, to see if perhaps I might be able to find what I am looking for in the places my instincts lead me to. When, from time to time, I do this, the outcome is always the same as before. I make another tick in my notebook and hope that I am one tock closer to a final understanding.

It is not that I have grown tired and wish to submit myself to some authority that will take away my choice and freedom and quiet my desiring. I am not a good penitent. I feel no sense of smugness or schadenfreude to find myself in the company of virtuous people. I am turned off by a strain in almost all organised religions, and strikingly in the more traditionalist strains of Irish Catholicism, which seem to glory in the vindication of seeing people brought to their knees. I have no sense of being a prodigal son come home to be feasted. I shudder a little when someone congratulates me for ‘returning to the faith’. I have returned noplace, except closer to an understanding of myself.

I desire my choices and freedoms as much as I ever did. But I have started to see something about how they work, these choices, freedoms and desires.

And the point is not that they get me into trouble, though they do all the time. The point is not that I need to lock these choices and freedoms and desires away from myself, because I am not balanced enough, or mature enough, to be sensible about them, although there is enough accumulated wreckage around me to suggest that as a plausible way of putting it. I have discovered that there is nothing wrong with having choices, freedoms and desires. They are the breath within me. My problem has been with what they mean, where they go, what I think they are for. When I pursue my desire in a particular direction and chase it as far as I can, the pain I invariably find myself entering is not a symptom of an angry God’s wish to punish me but of the fact that, in searching for something in the wrong place, I have become lost in a fog.

I shout out no Hallelujah! I do not beat my breast. Instead I look in on myself in puzzlement and frustration, like a mechanic peering into an engine, his ear down listening for a clue concerning some elusive stutter. What matters here is not the idea of repentence, but of understanding. What matters is that my experience whispers to me, again and again and again, that there is a way of living that, understanding the nature and limits of human desire, and harbouring no sense of superiority or smugness, derives from a pattern in human experiences that is consistent and ineluctable and in total harmony with everything I really am.

To buy John a beverage, click here

If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.