‘Come, see the place where he lay.’
'Sometimes the bird 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.'
Courtesy Towards Christ
Extracts from 'Beyond Consolation', (2010), By John Waters (with minor edits).
Reviewing, in 1984, the volume Letters to Olga, the then recently published letters written to his wife from prison by Václav Havel, the German writer Heinrich Böll observed that Havel appeared to be the manifestation of a new form of religiousness, ‘which out of courtesy no longer addresses God with the name which has been trampled underfoot by politicians’. Böll noted that Havel used careful constructions, such as ‘absolute horizon’ and ‘spiritual order’, rather than applying the name that is in general use, by which he implied ‘God’ or ‘Christ’.
Havel had wrestled with the subject in many of the letters: ‘I have the feeling that something more than intellectualistic subterfuge is preventing me from admitting my belief in a personal God,’ he wrote to his wife. ‘Something deeper is concealed behind these subterfuges: what I am lacking is that extremely important “last drop” in the form of the mystical experience of the enigmatic address and revelation. There is no doubt that I could substitute the word “God” for my “something” or for the “absolute horizon”, and yet this does not seem to be a very serious approach.’ He acknowledged his closeness to Christian feelings, and was pleased when this was recognised by others — but still, he felt, one must choose one’s words well. He baulked at the articulation of words that, though they might literally convey the reality of his belief, could also place him in a camp that would make him uncomfortable.
But although Havel avoided the intentional use of the word ‘God’, Böll concluded: ‘I dare say that Christ is speaking in these letters, albeit a Christ who does not describe himself by that name and yet is still a Christ, and yet I must quickly erase this description again before those every ready Christian drummer boys, representing their explosive version of Christianity, lay their hands on it.’
This is an insightful description of the modern — or perhaps the postmodern — dilemma in respect of accessing the absolute dimension. These phenomena of semantic confusion and evasion are replicated throughout our culture — in the language we use, in the convolutions we engage in, in the irony we employ to deflect the gaze of the domineering culture that scrutinises our every gesture. It is even possible that this domineering culture is by now unmanned, in the sense that it is theoretically possible that each and every one of us is quietly looking out in search of the something else that defines us, while at the same time imagining ourselves to be alone in this forbidden search. ‘Our’ cultures, in other words, may be on automatic pilot, dictating, imposing, oppressing, but ungoverned by actual living human beings. Human beings operate the culture and police its logic, but nobody any longer remains in control. Each us us has had his stock of hope diminished or defused, but each of us also contributes to the sabotage of the hope of others, because we refuse to bear witness to our own unique humanity.
Good Friday is the darkest day in Irish Catholic calendar, the day that is all night. It is a remarkable commentary on the power of a Catholic childhood that, despite the movability of the feast and the social changes that have in recent years rendered Good Friday largely indistinguishable from other days, at 3pm every Good Friday, no matter where I find myself, it grows dark all around my head. In ways beyond metaphor, the clouds gather and the sun shrivels away. Even if I should find myself sitting in Starbucks in the Dundrum Town Centre [perhaps especially so! — JW, 2025], I will shiver a little and feel bereft. The death of the Saviour will assert itself as the remembrance of a real event and I will experience the horror all over again. This is the power of culture.
Remarkably, Easter Sunday does not for me have an equivalent religious power. Somehow, the meaning of Easter, as I have apprehended it, seems to derive more from myth than history. My impression, born of the same culture, is that Easter represents a lifting of the shadow of the Crucifixion, but only in the sense that I feel permitted to cast off the sackcloth and embrace the Spring, to live again in the world with a sense of undeserved reprieve. It’s my favourite time, but mainly because it brings this sense of release and relief. I may have caused Christ to be crucified, but somehow He has gotten me off the hook.
Whereas Good Friday is unambiguously religious, Easter Sunday in our culture feels more like a secular feast, a celebration of the fact that we have shucked off the guilt and gloom of religion. The chocolate eggs accentuate this feeling: a corrupted symbol of rebirth that diverts rather than deepens meaning.
A couple of years ago, talking to a Puerto Rican priest, Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete [since deceased, RIP], a man with an acute gift for simplicity, I found myself embarrassedly asking if he could explain to me the core meaning of Christianity. He urged me not to feel bad, since about 95 per cent of Christians do not understand Christianity either. He told me that, a short time before, while lecturing in a Catholic seminary in the US, he had been approached by a young man, about to be ordained, who asked him a related but more specific question: he wanted to know the meaning of the Resurrection.
Monsignor Albacete took the young man to a graveyard and picked a grave at random. The headstone indicated that a man named Daniel was buried there. What, the priest asked the young seminarian, do we know of Daniel? The young man shrugged. We know, said the priest, that Daniel is dead; that his body is inert, his mind a void; that, even if we were to bring 20 dancing girls and have them cavort around his grave, Daniel would continue to display a radical uninterest in reality.
On the evening of that first Good Friday, he went on, this is how it was with Jesus. But then, 40 hours later, something happened that would change everything: Jesus came back to life. Let us be clear, he emphasised, Jesus began to breathe again, grew warm, started to move, re-engaged with reality, became interested in things around Him. Having been as dead as Daniel, He became, once again, as alive as we are. This too is history.
This, he told me, is both the meaning of the Resurrection and the central idea of Christianity: that death has no dominion, that beyond the end there is a new beginning. Christianity, he said, is the announcement to the world of the death of death.
In 50 years of immersion in a Catholic culture, I had never heard it put like that. Although none of the story was new, I had never before quite grasped its meaning. In a life spent in Catholic churches and schools, reading Catholic periodicals, nobody had ever succeeded in communicating to me that the central message of Christianity is about hope beyond human imagining. If you had put me on the spot to explain the core of Christian belief, I would have mumbled something about Jesus dying for our sins. Why? Not sure. I had a strong sense that I was responsible for the death of Jesus, and very little sense that I was entitled to feel anything other than undeserved relief about Him rising again.
I don’t think I’m alone in this warped thinking. Something in the kind of Christianity we have inherited suggests that the point is to feel bad, mostly, but occasionally to celebrate, because, though we are unworthy, God is merciful and good. In its constant reiteration of rules, the Catholic Church in Ireland has seemed to forget that there is a need to tell people why — rather than out of blind obedience and a perverse desire to be told how to live their lives — they might want to listen to its message. Very often those who are the voices of the Church fail to emphasise the most important part: that, once in history, 2,000 years ago, God came to Earth as a man to demonstrate that death is a myth born of the limited human imagination.
Recently I have ‘invented’ or discovered a new way of perceiving this religious/mythical reality. It involves placing myself in the situation of Andrew and John, that first time when they met Jesus, and then to think of this moment as if it were happening to me. I might be sitting having coffee with a friend and then find myself looking towards the spare chair at our table. I begin to think: ‘What if somebody were to come here now and sit here now before us?’ What matter of exceptionality would it take for me to begin to understand that this was the Christ? What would He look like, in this moment now? Would he surprise me? In what way would he surprise me? Would he be dressed casually or would he wear a suit? Would he have a beard and would it be trimmed? Would his hair be long or would it be short, and so on. I try to enter into the feeling of Andrew and John and all those others who encountered Jesus Christ ‘in the flesh’. Were I to experience this myself, what would it take to strike me? Of course, this is beyond my imagination. I cannot imagine somebody who is both a man and a God, I cannot think of how this might manifest itself.
I realise this may happen or may not. I do not rule it out, but it seems unlikely. For me, however, there is a necessity for another kind of encounter, if not with the person of Jesus then certainly with what I understand Jesus to represent: the Presence of the Mystery in three-dimensional reality, an encounter with Christ in the culture of the moment.
So, today, I find it helpful, in the first instance, to think of Christ as an essence, a presence in reality, which defines that reality, not in the way we see it, but in terms of what lies behind: the Beauty for which the mountains and the beautiful women are but signs. This enables us to go on using the name of Christ as an agreed cultural indicator of something, without necessarily signing up to everything each of those who claim to follow Him would seek to have us believe He stands for.
For me, Christ remains an idea. Although, after many years of searching, I continue to have this desire to actually meet Him, I have not yet done so. I have met many people who have met Him, or who have told me they have met Him, but for me He remains an abstraction. Listening to many of those people who told me of their encounters with Jesus, I remained unconvinced by the literal content of their descriptions, and yet conscious from their demeanours that they had indeed encountered something exceptional. I did not doubt that they had come to ‘know’ Christ, but was unable to glean from their talking about this anything that would take me to the place where they had met Him. It was as though the words fell apart as soon as they parted the lips of the speaker, and could not be reintegrated as they reached my ears. Even worse, I noticed in myself a tendency to pretend that I understood when I did not, to imply in my demeanour and body language a sharing of the experience, which in fact remained mysterious to me.
As a child I had been given what I had imagined to be a profound relationship with Christ. Growing up in the Ireland of the 1960s, I was a devout and pious boy. I loved Jesus, or so I felt certain. How could I not? It would have been impossible not to love this perfect Being, this Beautiful Jesus who had died to save me. And yet, on the threshold of adulthood, seduced by the freedoms of the world, I had turned my back on this Jesus. This turning away was accompanied by considerable emotion on my part, mostly anger at the abuses I perceived in the administration of Christianity in my own culture, though there were other emotions as well. It strikes me now that I never once attached any of this anger to the person of Jesus, never once had a negative thought about Him, never once felt that I should blame Him for anything. I don’t think I am alone in this. Strangely, although our cultures have turned their backs on Jesus, they have never actually rejected Him. Despite the many harsh things that have been said against faith, religion, church and Bible, there is almost no suggestion in our cultures that Jesus was anything other than an exceptional being. Perhaps we cannot fully believe in Him, but still we do not condemn or castigate Him. Even the most insistent secularising voices in our cultures do not, as a rule, attack the person of Christ, or suggest that He was not who He claimed to be. Usually, they attack the authority or record of those who, through history, have claimed to speak for Christ. Despite everything, the icon that is Christ remains intact in our culture — venerated by some, but quietly respected even by those who deny belief in or adherence to the Christian proposal. This is strange and interesting.
It is as though the impulse towards freedom has required us to turn away from Him, but that we have done so with a degree of reluctance, of regret. In fact, if you were to try to identify the central emotion that governs our present rejection of Christ, you would possibly fix not on something like anger or contempt, but rather on something close to shame. We are ashamed of our rejection of Jesus, but our desire for freedom seems to give us no alternative, because He had become so inextricably linked to the former culture of oppression and moralism and probibition.
And yet, to introduce into a discussion in most secular contexts today, the name of Jesus Christ is to risking bringing all conversation to a sudden stop. It is not that the name itself is resented, but that it immediately sets off a short-circuit. Something has happened to the name that we cannot name. It is as if the mention of Christ is an invitation to agree to something we cannot quite sign up to.
We know too much. We understand, or imagine we understand, ourselves too well. Our cultures create hermetically sealed logics which seduce us by their symmetry. Our self-defined understandings of our own natures seem increasingly plausible. Having detached ourselves from an absolute consciousness of reality, it is difficult to go back to seeing ourselves in the old way, especially as there is no immediate reason to, and since by doing so we might have to surrender certain ideas about freedom. In the culture I speak of, the very name of Jesus has become contaminated by prejudices and fears that render it all but impossible to utter without setting off the alarm bells that the culture has installed within our heads.
Language lets us down here, because words in this context have become sclerotic and no longer enable us to get beyond the fossilised notions which, while seeming to contain what there is of the religious, the transcendent and the sacred, actually reject all our attempts to relate what is here to something fundamental in ourselves.
I believe that everyone is ‘religious’, whether they know it or not — or like it or not — because religion is no more and no less than the total relationship with reality. I contrast this with the ideological view of reality, by which I mean a partial understanding, one that arrives at concepts of reality which appear coherent, and which allow the believer to move about within that reality in a fairly easy and predictable way, but which are nevertheless partial in that they deliberately exclude certain possibilities, even in the absence of certainty about what is actually true. ‘Religion’, on the other hand, requires me to invite everything in, to open up to the whole of reality, a large element of which is mysterious and unknowable.
We live in a culture that insists that reason involves only that which is knowable, which excludes the idea that, moment to moment, I must deal with things, like Death and Time, of which I have only the most partial understandings. Since attempts to redefine these concepts to fit into an ideological concept of reality is impossible due to the inadequacy of words to this end, I must live with them as they are, hoping to understand more but accepting that they must remain to a high degree unknowable.
The ‘trick’ resides in an acceptance of limits, which ideology by definition refuses: there are limits to human knowing, and this is not always bad. Of course there is nothing wrong with a thirst for knowledge. But it is a question of demeanour, of how I live in the world. Do I fight my unknowingness out of a refusal of limits — i.e., a misplaced sense of myself in reality — or do I persist in my searching with a sense that I am defined by the Mystery and not by my potential to unscramble it?
Moreover, no amount of knowledge of the external world is of any use if I do not achieve a similar level of understanding of myself, of my essential structure, of how I relate to reality, of what patterns emerge from my relationship to it, and what these tell me about what I call my freedom. It is here that organised religion has focussed its attention, sometimes clumsily but usually with the proper intention of offering to man the means to avoid the grief that comes from abusing his own freedom. Thus, my relationship with reality is defined not merely by the vast expanse of the Mystery, but also by the internal dynamics which define my humanity, which is also mysterious. The details of our personalities and our functionality may change through time and culture, but we continue to be driven by a desire for something that does not appear to exist, or does not exist in what we can discover, but seems to draw us over the horizon towards what we cannot see. The idea, then, of ‘living a good life’ becomes not an obvious pursuit of freedom but a far more complicated engagement with the totality of the facts, external and internal.
Some of the greatest scientists to have lived were or are deeply ‘religious’ in the purest sense. Their sense of religion has provided no impediment to their searching for knowledge. Nobody ever suggested it should, except perhaps a few frightened souls who think of Adam and Eve as literal history.
Science is simply the pursuit of knowledge, and this is self-evidently a good thing. What people who speak of an incompatibility between science and religion often appear to be reacting against is an obscurantism associated with some religions, which encourages people to blinker themselves against knowledge for fear that it will unseat their present understandings. I don’t believe this is religion at all, but merely a form of refuge for those who are so frightened by reality that they need to pin it down and put it in a box, another excellent working definition of ideology. An ideological understanding allows the human being to achieve coherence of a sort, but closes down the relationship with infinite, absolute reality. The relationship with the infinite embraces a near total state and acceptance of unknowingness, which needs to be accompanied by humility, and this seems to be a difficult position for ideologues to adopt.
There is no necessary contradiction between having a hunger for knowledge about what is not known or knowable, and acceptance of this unknowability as a vital dependence, even weakness, in myself as a human being. To live in the consciousness of the Mystery is not a matter of simply being randomly or even systematically curious about it for the purposes of conquering it, but of accepting it while remaining open both to the possibility of more knowledge and also the inevitability that this knowledge will always remain partial and contingent.
Yet, all this is mere words, and God is beyond words, which renders the entire exercise as fruitless as it is essential. This is the kind of paradox that the Mystery throws at us. Reality is reality. God is just another ‘word’, a tool for getting to grips with this. But it is a ‘word’ that, used in a careful way, can be made to open things up rather than close them down.
In ‘modern’ society and culture, Christ has become peripheralised, as much in language as in reality, indeed perhaps in reality because first of all in language. Except that He is not outrightly rejected, but placed in a cultural Limbo, a figure with whom we associate love, and consolation, and mercy, but not anything concrete to do with the present, with our natures as they are in this fleeting moment. The harangues of the smugly certain, insisting that all these questions can be reduced to glib moralisms, far from driving us back to any sense of the absolute connection which Christ represented to us as children, merely confirm for us the correctness of our decision. For surely if Christ was as He seemed to be, then he would not associate Himself with such simplistic moral blackmail?
But let us agree, for the sake of argument, that the idea of Christ/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. It is abundantly clear that, in the constructed rationalism of the ‘modern’ moment, and quite apart from what anyone thinks of religion in general or any religion in particular, there is an imaginative problem in a society which seeks to remove questions of God and transcendence from public sight and public discussion. What happens to such a society is not that it finds some new kind of language to capture its new-found ‘rational’ belief system, but that the mysterious and unknowable elements of reality simply disappear from the conversations which enable the society and its members to understand their human journeys.
The logic of this argument implies, of course, that religions might well be inventions, or at least that their invention would have once seemed to be in mankind’s interest, regardless of truth. A cosmic detective might say that mankind had a strong motive for inventing God, whether God existed or did not. Of course, it might well be argued that the God explanation is at least as plausible as anything else that has been arrived at. In the main, atheistic objections to the God hypothesis seem to centre on cultural notions of probability — is it likely that God would be and behave as religious culture would have us believe? It is possible for even deeply religious people to have sympathy with this outlook, but generally they appear to simply shut out all doubts or questions and blindly surrender to ‘belief’, or else allow themselves to perceive the stuff of religious culture as the material to enable the limited human imagination to know what is essential to a fully functional human existence. 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 find yourself 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.
I’ve 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 almost 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 and assertions about what I should and must believe, as well as the sense they convey that all this is obvious.
I have with age come to know what is meant by the idea of the world as a ‘vale of tears’, though of course this to is but a partial truth. Sometimes 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 of 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 at all if it increases to any significant extent. I too am infected by the national pessimism that afflicts my country, Ireland. How could it be otherwise? 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, I too am unpersuaded by almost any of the versions of the afterlife on offer, not necessarily by its possibility or even plausibility, but by the detail of it, the notion — for example — of walking around on clouds for ever, being nice to everyone in a rather bland and, frankly, sickening way. I wonder if, in heaven, I will be able to tell someone to fuck off if they are annoying me, or whether I will be past annoyance and will be able to tolerate the kind of people I now cross the road when I see them drawing near. 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 [this was written some fifteen years ago! — JW, 2025] but give me a wink because they recognise me from the telly and nod me on without even glancing at my passport. All this, of course, is nonsensical. Deep in myself, I know that, whatever comes after, it will be nothing like what I know now, and that my present thoughts are like the caterpillar by 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 this logic and its language to govern my sense of my destiny and its meaning, I will come to conclusions which fall far short of what everything around me tells me is possible without telling me how. The very existence and substance of reality tells me that any certainty concerning the limits of total possibility is bound to be misplaced.
So, all this rumination and attempted explication is pointless? Perhaps, perhaps not. At the very least you have to admit that logic and language 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.
If you started to read this hoping that I would ‘prove’ God exists in much the same way as Richard Dawkins ‘proves’ he doesn’t, then I apologise for wasting your time. I don’t really know what (if anything) of it might be true. I don’t think the words exist to say the things my mind is incapable of formulating just beyond my reach. 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 of 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 — yes, as Heinrich Böll said, ‘trampled underfoot by politicians’.
But still I need a language to hope in. I need words to express my infinite longing that don’t make me sound mad, or superstitious or 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 used to. I once cared what my peers thought of me, mainly writers, artists, left-wingers — all, presumably, well-intentioned 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 rather less, because the questions concerning my place in reality and what my ultimate destination might be are much bigger than any consideration of acceptability or hipness. I ask these questions not because I have suddenly capitulated to ‘conservatism’ in middle age, or because I am terrified of the Last Judgement, or am already preparing for the next life. No, I ask them because I need 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 affection I still crave. I wish it were otherwise, but that’s the way I find myself. This is a 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 proffered concepts 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, then count me out. I accept that, somewhere along the way, there must be a leap of something — I almost said ‘faith’ but that would be either a tautology or an oxymoron. I cannot reason my way to certainty, or Heaven, or the certainty of Heaven. There will always be a gap between my train of thought and my idea of a destination.
I have no problem going to the club. I like it. 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. When it happens, I will be standing or sitting there trying to imagine myself into some infinite space, and someone will utter something that doesn’t ring true, or 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. In moments like this, I am seized by doubt, by a feeling that, if the consolation of religion did not already exist, we would have to invent it.
I can’t just hope. That alone would not sustain me. Hope without reason is like a bucket with a hole. It holds nothing.
But what is hope anyway? Hope is the force within me that keeps me going, the pilot 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’, or even ‘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 abut anything else. He wasn’t confused about anything else. His words remain, every one, as clear and relevant as they were in the moments, two millennia ago, when he uttered them.
I don’t need to know about the ‘curia’ or the ‘magisterium’ to know that my heart cannot be satisfied by anything other than what all this signifies. This Power is not an earthly one.
The writer I love more than any other is Franz Kafka. Arguably, the greatest book in any language 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 20 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 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, and nobody can be trusted to describe their own desires because they have an inadequate understanding of psychotherapy.
Don Luigi Giussani, in his book, The Risk Of Education, quotes from Kafka’s The Silence of Mermaids, Posthumous writings and fragments, 1917-1924: ‘There is a point of arrival but no way to get there’.
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 must 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 would represent a betrayal of my longing such as appears to be unprecedented. 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 or certitudes. When I die they will unleash themselves from my belly and I will be free once more.
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, in the distance, 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 seems 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. If faith is simply 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. The word ‘consolation’ itself already implies a lie: something dreamed up to compensate for the loss of the true prize. Maybe the same is true of the word ‘hope’; maybe ‘expect’ is a better word?
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 without trace.
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 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 had 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. But is this really knowledge, or something else?
True knowledge 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 man’s evolving self-understanding. This is largely absent from our information age. 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.
It seems that, sometime in the not too distant past, something odd happened to our sense of knowledge. This may not have been 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.
It is as if our sense of knowledge flipped over, that having pursued an understanding of the world from the point of total unknowing, we had, having arrived at a few modest insights into the way reality worked, inferred from these understandings that total understanding would soon be ours. On the collateral of a little knowledge, we took out a mortgage on all possible knowledge and, in effect, decided that we already, in a certain sense, ‘knew’ everything. It is as if we glimpsed 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’. Man’s sense of his own place within this 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 in culture — but by curiosity of a narrower 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 Mystery, but of building on mankind’s 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 areas 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 soon. Moreover, 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 which had governed him, but which he had become convinced were arbitrary and gratuitous, he 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. Since he was 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, manifesting a fizzling of energy that died in time. Man, ‘free’ at last, could not think of anything he really wanted to do with his freedom. His freedom bored him, because it had no purpose other than itself.
It is as though modern man has lost some vital element of his own being, like some vital part of his mechanism that has fallen out and not been missed. And without this part nothing makes sense, and the more information he gleans the less sense it all makes. Man becomes passive and bored, as though the meaninglessness itself is bearing down on his shoulders. Having pulled down the heavens and erected a ceiling of his own, he walks about with a kind of stoop, his own sense of pointlessness bearing down on him. His children grow like poppies in a chimney, somehow undernourished, seeing something up above them — a movement, a flash — that briefly draws their attention and sparks a brief spurt of new blossoms. But, they remain puzzled by the meaning of this, and pessimistic as to its capacity to answer their needs. In the end it seems to have gone away, and soon they will too. They wither and die. The darkness reasserts itself.
In The Salt of the Earth — a book-length interview with Joseph 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 nonconforming, 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 as being especially ‘reactionary’ in this regard.
Ratzinger responded: ‘Many consider the Church to be an outdated and fossilised 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 that discover this.’
It is, first of all, an interesting phrase: ‘those who have had to endure the full brunt of modernity’ — i.e., those who have stumbled and fallen because their desiring, finding no match for itself, led them to all the wring places. 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 make our experiences 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. From time to time I still do this, and the outcome is always the same as before. 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 ostentatiously pious or virtuous people. I want my choice and freedom 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 these get me into trouble, though they do all the time. The point is not that I need to lock these choices and freedoms and desire 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 good. They are the breath within me. My problem has been with what they mean, where they go, what I think they are for. My sense of things is that, when I pursue my desire in a particular direction and chase it as far as I can, the pain I invariably find myself encountering 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 kind of mist. I heard a noise that I thought was a friend calling in the distance, followed it and ended up in a bog, sinking to my waist. The bog is beautiful and good, but I did not mean to end up like this. I do not belong here. It was not what my desire was urging me towards. I have pursued a will-o-the-wisp. What has gone wrong? Nothing, really There was no other way of discovering that what I was seeking, what my heart cried out for, was something beyond the obvious. I do not say this in a satisfied way, although I accept that, given the manner in which the language of religious perception has developed, it is very difficult to get it to read otherwise. I am turned off by a strain in almost all organised religions, and strikingly in traditionalist Irish Catholicism, which seems to glory in the vindication of seeing people brought to their knees. But 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 to no place, except that I have crawled sodden from the bog. I shout out no Hallelujah! Instead I look in on myself in puzzlement and frustration, like a mechanic peering into an engine, his ear down listeing for a clue concerning some elusive stutter. What matters here is not the idea of repentance, 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 about it, derives from a pattern in human experiences that is consistent and inescapable. This, I have come to realise, is the correct ‘use of reason’.
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