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THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF REVELATION:
The “Dogma” of Modernity
The fruit of the rationalistic mentality is the fact that today we can find those who, using reason, come to admit Mystery, but very few for whom the apex of reason is the presentiment that the Mystery intercepts my humanity, very few for whom reason is at the height of its exercise when it registers something that happens

By Lorenzo Albacete

The doctrine that defines modernity is not the denial of the existence of God, but the denial of the possibility of Revelation. This denial is, for example, the key to understanding man’s failure to reconcile individualism and identity based on the experience of belonging. The dogma of the impossibility of revelation–as Fr. Giussani called it–forces man to give up on the possibility of grasping the reason for the polarities that define human existence, and therefore prevents us from grasping what it means to be a person.
Without the revelation of Christ, we cannot know what we are.
It is not surprising that where the mystery of Christ is not known or not accepted, human life becomes a tragedy to be made bearable by the contradictions, reductions, and the suppressions of a modernity trying desperately to preserve the fruits of the Incarnation while rejecting the Event. Such an arrangement cannot last, which is why it can only lead to nihilism.
The fruit of the rationalistic mentality is the fact that today we can find those who, using reason, come to admit Mystery, but very few for whom the apex of reason is the presentiment that the Mystery intercepts my humanity, very few for whom reason is at the height of its exercise when it registers something that happens.
Protestantism led a great portion of Christianity to the denial of reason’s ability to have a presentiment of revelation because of its view of nature and grace.
The same happened in the Catholic Church when Christianity ceased being presented as an event and faith as beginning with a human encounter. This reduced Catholicism to an intellectual and moral system in which it was difficult to find a need for the Incarnation except to pay for the damage of sin.
In the First Epistle of John we find: “We are children of God now (because of our union in Christ), but what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We know though that when He is fully manifested, we shall be as He is, because we will see Him just as He is” (cf. 1 Jn 3,2). From the perspective of the Incarnation, to live “in Christ” means to be already a child of God, generated by God, but not to know the full meaning of what this is like. I do not know what I am already. Belonging to the “body of Christ,” being a person in Christ, gives us the experience of an identity in this world that is experienced, so to speak, in formation, in gestation. It is an identity experienced as being continually born again, through conversion or metanoia.
An obstacle to this understanding is the reduction of these terms to the moral dimension. This is the first step in the direction of a psychological reduction of the drama of the human person. Instead, we must be as bold as Pope Benedict XVI, who has compared the risen state of Christ’s body to an evolutionary jump in the constitution of the human being and the Resurrection’s effect on Christ’s humanity as the completion of the creation of the human being. The Catholic doctrine of the Assumption of Mary also marks an important growth in our understanding of personhood according to the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. And the reality of the Eucharist incorporating us into the Body of Christ as a communion of life is a crucial part of this vision of the identity of the human person and its destiny.
The impasse between an identity constituted by a belonging and individuality, characteristic of modern man, can be overcome by our faith in a way that preserves the value of the experiences that the proponents of either side attempt to preserve. This is the Church’s contribution to the drama of modern life–namely, to be faithful to itself.