01-10-2006 - Traces, n.9

Benedict XVI

Is Reason
the Enemy of the Mystery?

The following is the conclusion of a talk given August 22, 2006, at the Rimini Meeting, by Fr. Javier Prades, lecturer in Dogmatic Theology at the Madrid Theological Faculty

The itinerary of reason
The questions that arise from the impact with reality as a given fact
An adult is someone who is not afraid of the questions of life and for the whole of his existence does not give up the personal search for an answer, using all the knowledge and all the information he has at his disposal, confronting this continually with his own personal experience in such a way as to express his own position, reflected in affirmations like: “I love you; I accept a risk in my job; I know that this is true and this is false; I made a mistake; I forgive you; I believe in God and love Him.”
Let us briefly consider the itinerary of reason as a source of maturity and freedom for man. We say that man’s proper condition is openness to reality, to the world, to persons and things, since it arouses a question about their ultimate explanation. A man who is always, untiringly, seeking an exhaustive understanding of himself, of the world and of God, in all that he does, is a religious man.
It is essential to realize that the starting point for an adequate use of reason is contact with reality. We enter into the mysterious depth of reality through the impact with some of its concrete expressions….

Could Schubert not have finished the “Unfinished” Symphony?
The West today is dominated by a reduced vision of human reason, an instrumental vision, which tends to limit its capacity of looking at reality, to reduce its depth of vision, so that we enjoy only an appearance of things separated from their true meaning. In this sense, reason can become an enemy of the Mystery, with sad or even harmful consequences.
This anecdote I was told shows instrumental reason in action–it can be seen in the attitude of people who have never read either Maritain or Nietzsche. It goes like this: The general manager of a company was invited to a concert which included the performance of Schubert’s 8th Symphony, the “Unfinished.” Since he was unable to go, he gave the ticket to the head of personnel. The following day, he asked him if he had enjoyed the concert, and the head of personnel answered, “You’ll have my report on your desk by midday.” When he got the report, which he had not actually even asked for, the general manager read it with some surprise. It was given in five points: 1) for quite long intervals the four oboes have nothing to do–they ought to reduce the number and share the work out amongst the rest of the orchestra; 2) the twelve violins play the same notes, so the number of violins should be drastically reduced; 3) there is no point in the brass repeating the notes that the strings have already played; 4) if these redundant passages were eliminated the piece could be reduced to a quarter of its length; 5) if Schubert had taken note of this he could have finished the symphony.
What happened to the personnel manager with the music can happen to all of us with life itself. In this way, we will never come to know what reality has to offer; since we don’t grasp its mystery, we stop short at the predictable surface of appearances.
The adequate use of reason revolves around this first simple and dramatic acknowledgment that reality refers beyond and within what appears.

The acknowledgment of a You
The itinerary of reason prompts man to question himself about the mysterious depths of all things: of music and nature, of work and enterprise, of man and woman–in other words, of concrete reality that startles us, attracts us and sets us in motion. Thus, reality shows its nature as a “sign,” since it refers our reason to something else, beyond, to something that lies within and beyond all things, and which everyone calls “God,” as Thomas Aquinas used to say. Thus, Mystery makes its appearance as the ultimate horizon of reason!
The various circumstances of life, the web of events and relationships, are the locus in which the divine Mystery takes the initiative and addresses us, reveals His existence to us, and calls our whole person to adhere to Him. What is this adhesion? In the first place, it is the astonished acknowledgment that life was given to us by an Other, that we are not self-made at birth. The awareness of having been made at the origin continues as the awareness that in this moment we are not making ourselves; in other words, as the rational understanding of the fact that, instant by instant, everything is born of Another, as the evidence of the fact that we are being made now–I am made by an Other to whom I belong totally. If this is true, then we can say that life is a gift, and that Someone is giving it to me in this moment, the You that is the Mystery. A religious man is one who lives a deep and grateful awareness of the fact that his life and the whole world come, instant by instant, from the benevolent design of this Mystery.

Through signs that are never bypassed in order to reach the Mystery “directly”
I would like to pause at a crucial point of our journey. We have said that if we start off from the circumstances of reality, we can get in touch with the Mystery, that which everyone calls God. One of the most repeated objections to this argument can be summarized by a wisecrack of the Soviet astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. When he came back, he said that he had been up in heaven, but hadn’t seen God. Although this seems banal, the objection reveals a conception of Mystery that, paradoxically, is shared by not a few believers. What is this conception? I still remember my philosophy textbook at school, in which there was a picture of a chain of rings hanging in the air and on top of it was a question mark. The reasoning was that you cannot go on indefinitely hanging a ring from the one above it, and that in the end you had to affirm, as it were, a first ring that holds everything up, a first cause who was God. In that example prevailed the idea that God was a “thing” alongside, or beyond, other things–if you like, the first and most important of things, on which all the others depend but, in the end, within the grasp of reason just as we can get to know the things of the world. Unfortunately, this image of God can be accepted by both those who believe in God and those who deny Him.
In order to avoid the risk of conceiving God simply as the first Thing (Ens), that is to say, as a first Thing that is known in an objectivistic way, it is crucial to stress the impassable role of the sign for human knowledge, and particularly for knowledge of the Mystery. In order to keep reason and Mystery together, without reducing one or the other of the terms of our initial question, we have to bear in mind that all the realities that present themselves to our experience have the character of a sign. Even the Mystery comes into the ambit of our experience and can be known only in a “symbolic” manner, that is to say, showing itself in a sign, without ever bypassing it. The sign is not merely a reference that can be bypassed in order to possess the Mystery “directly,” but it is the impassable manifestation of that which is (Being, Mystery); that which is can be known only in as much as it manifests itself in the sign. For example, another person’s face, in as much as it is the appearance of a “you,” is the eminent case of an irreducible manifestation that cannot be bypassed in its singular concreteness in order to reach some “idea” of the other that would reduce it to an object of dominion.
When faced with the sign–a face, a work of art–man is called to get involved with his whole self, using all the energies of his reason and freedom. In this sense, knowledge of all things always implies an original attitude of simplicity of heart so as not to reduce this itinerary of reason by means of signs leading to the Mystery, from the first impact with things. The pedagogy of signs exalts man’s reason and freedom, and “forces” him to engage himself completely, in this way revealing his ultimate attitude to reason and to himself. In analogical-symbolic knowledge, morality–in other words, the involvement of the whole person–is always inherent. It is never a detached, purely instrumental knowledge that reduces things to an object of dominion. Thus, we can understand how this conception of reason is totally compatible with scientific research, with the question of evil in its ultimate root, with the question of the meaning of religion in our society. If Nietzsche came to think that the existence of Mystery devalued the world and took away all commitment from life, perhaps he had never met anyone who had this conception of religion and reason that we have described, whose consequences are diametrically opposite regarding the world and life.
When He revealed Himself in history, God respected this structure of man’s elementary experience where things are signs of the Mystery, and He chose a “sacramental” mode–in other words, by means of signs–to reveal Himself to man. The Son of God, in becoming man, subjected Himself to this law of experience and knowledge; He accepted to become a particular Sign that challenges reason and freedom. A man who meets Christ receives the grace of being able to acknowledge in that fragment the Whole, that for which we are born and toward which we tend, the “Sign of signs.” The singular exceptionality of the historical Fact of Jesus does not eliminate this pedagogy of the sign, or sacramental pedagogy, but rather intensifies it since it claims to concentrate the meaning of the world in a single humanity, that of the Son of God.

Life is being called by
an Other: vocation and memory,
and even preference

In conclusion, I would like to point out two dimensions of life that emerge in this conception of reason (and freedom) enlightened by grace, and that make life humanly delightful–quite the opposite of the tiredness that is dominating Europe today. I am referring to the awareness of life as vocation and to the perception of the Mystery present (memory) so much so as to acknowledge some presences as a “preference” toward each one of us.

1. Life as vocation
If the consistency of my life–from its origin to its destiny, passing through the present instant–lies in belonging to the Mystery, then a man’s life will find its fullness in adhering, using all the means with which reality provokes him, to the benevolent Presence. Since all things speak of God to those who are ready to listen, the dialogue with the Mystery of God takes place always within and not outside reality (memory).
My life belongs to an Other and so is a gift made to me, and at the same time it is a task and a mission because, by the very fact that I exist, I am called to live for an Other. This is the pivot of the wealth and expressivity of a wholly human life. When I become aware of a gift (Gabe) and of a task (Auf-gabe) in God’s benevolent plan, then I am able to live everything with an eternal meaning, and as useful for myself and for the world. Then it can be said that life is “vocation”; life as such is a call by God to existence–as the Bible describes–and it is a call to answer Him lovingly in all our actions.
Man is free because he answers Someone who loves him first, like a Father. The most complete form of using our reason and our freedom is exactly that of acknowledging ourselves as children of God, in order, in this way, to be fathers, generating others not only to biological life, but to the meaning of life. What we most need in every ambit of life is man like this, whether they are entrepreneurs, doctors, scientists or jurists of the highest level. This requires that these professionals be men, adults capable of communicating the meaning of life and of bringing up others who in their turn love and value life. Only in this way can they rise to the challenge of documenting within their own ambit of work all the consequences implicit in this perception of the human. In this way, a society for the future can be built and the vitality of a people for the future assured. Whoever communicates life with its meaning goes on growing, and whoever is no longer able to do so begins a decline that gets him bogged down in his own interests, making him, in the end, so confused and bored that he will not start again.

2. Memory: objectivity and preference
This vocational journey is possible only if founded on the category of “memory” understood as loving acknowledgment of God’s Presence in the web of day-to-day facts and circumstances. There are two inseparable dimensions of this memory: on one hand, it is concentrated in the objective actions of Christian life like prayer, silence, the sacraments, community life, unity, where everything is created and wanted by the Mystery explicitly as the objective sign of His presence (Eucharist); on the other hand, so as to facilitate to a maximum the itinerary of reason and freedom to the point of loving acknowledgment of the Mystery in the circumstances, God reveals Himself and attracts us more powerfully by using those situations, relationships, and faces in which we ourselves feel reality vibrating with particular intensity–this is “preference.” Before what attracts us most, what is of most interest, we are urged to commit ourselves completely in order to understand and embrace totally what is before us. Never as in those situations does our humanity demand an answer of exhaustive meaning. We will never conform with a merely instrumental, superficial answer. When Fr. Giussani spoke to engaged couples, he made full use of this method of the sign as it expresses itself existentially in preference. We can well imagine how crucial the presence of the other is for a boy or a girl, and how they are (almost) spontaneously ready to commit all their energies in the relationship. In those situations, Fr. Giussani would not set knowledge and love of the person against knowledge and love of the Mystery, since one–the person–is sign of the Other–the Mystery. He would rather link the two dimensions inseparably together, through three questions which have now become famous: “Who had you meet her/him? What is his/her ultimate consistency? Who will preserve him/her for you forever?”
Whoever lives this experience knows very well that affective knowledge of the other as sign of the Mystery present is the way a relationship between reason and Mystery is lived. So this is the answer to the question in the title, and it indicates the way for living everything (relationships, work, science, law, economics and politics) in such a way that at every step of the way this hypothesis is found to be true: that our reason and our freedom are favored by the existence of the benevolent Mystery who is calling us.