01-04-2007 - Traces, n. 4
Anniversary Karol Wojtyla (1920-2005)
Authentic Openness to Reality
The “I” and Its Destiny
Two years ago, Pope John Paul II died. We recall him by offering the texts of two Wednesday audiences in 1983 which deal with the formulation of the human problem, the need for an on-going comparison with reality, the experience of radical loneliness, and the discovery of communion. These themes are of great relevance today
General Audience
Wednesday, October 12, 1983
Reflection on one’s
own existence
1. The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty” (Jn 4:15). In its most profound sense, the Samaritan woman’s request to Jesus expresses man’s boundless need and inexorable desire. For every man worthy of the name inevitably discovers a congenital incapacity to answer that desire for truth, for the good and for beauty that springs from the depths of his being. As his life goes on, he discovers, just like the Samaritan woman, that he is unable to quench the thirst for fullness that he carries within himself.
From today up to Christmas, the reflections in this weekly meeting will be on the theme of man’s longing for Redemption. Man needs an Other; whether he realizes it or not, he lives in expectation of an Other, who will redeem this innate incapacity to satisfy his expectation and his hopes.
But how can he meet this Other? A condition sine qua non for this resolving encounter is that man become aware of the existential thirst that afflicts him and of his radical impotence to quench this thirst. For today’s man, as for man in every age, the way to reach this awareness is reflection on his own experience. Ancient wisdom had already perceived this. Who does not remember the inscription that was displayed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi? It read, “Man, know yourself.” This imperative, expressed in different forms, even in the most ancient civilizations, has come down through history and re-proposes itself with the same urgency to present-day man. In some salient passages, John’s Gospel testifies rather well how Jesus himself, in proposing himself as the One sent by the Father, appealed to this capacity man has to understand his mystery by reflecting on his own experience. Suffice it to think of his encounter with the Samaritan woman, with Nicodemus, with the adulteress, and with the man born blind.
A complex of needs,
wants and desires
2. But how can we define this profound human experience that shows man the way to authentic self-understanding? It is the on-going comparison of the “I” with its destiny. True human experience happens only in that authentic openness to reality which enables the person, understood as a unique, conscious being, full of potentialities and needs, capable of hopes and desires, to know himself in the truth of his being.
And what are the characteristics of such an experience, which enables man to take up decisively and seriously the task of this “knowing yourself,” without getting lost along the way in this search? There are two conditions he must accept.
First, he must be ardently attached to that complex of needs, wants and desires that characterize his “I.” Second, he must open himself up to an objective encounter with reality as a whole. St. Paul never stops reminding Christians of these fundamental characteristics of every human experience when he forcefully stresses: “Everything is yours, and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s” (1Cor 3:23), or when he invites the Christians of Thessalonica to “Test everything and hold fast to what is good” (1Thess 5:21). In this on-going comparison with reality in the search for what corresponds or not with his destiny, man has the elementary experience of truth, that which the Scholastics and St. Thomas wonderfully defined as “adjusting the intellect to reality” (St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 1 a. 1 corpus).
The expectation of an Other
3. If in order to be true the experience must be whole and open man to totality, we can well understand where lies the risk of error for man: he must avoid every partialization. He must overcome the temptation to reduce experience, for example, to mere sociological questions or to exclusively psychological elements.
He must also beware of mistaking for experience schemes and “prejudices” that the environment in which he normally lives and works proposes to him–prejudices so much more frequent and risky today because they are clothed with the myth of science or the presumed completeness of ideology.
How hard it is for contemporary man to reach the certain shore of genuine experience of self, that which can reveal to him the true meaning of his existence! He is continually threatened by the risk of yielding to those errors of perspective that make him forget his nature as “being” made in the image of God, and leave him in the most desolate despair, or, even worse, in the most unassailable cynicism. In the light of these reflections, how liberating are the words pronounced by the Samaritan woman: “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty again…” This is true for every man; moreover, it is a profound description of his very nature.
For the man who looks at himself seriously and observes his experience with clear eyes, according to the criteria we have expounded, discovers himself more or less consciously to be a being at the same time loaded with needs for which he cannot find an answer, and pervaded by a desire, a thirst for self-realization that he is unable, on his own, to satisfy.
Thus man finds himself placed by his own nature in an attitude of expectation of an Other who might complete what he lacks. A restlessness pervades his existence in every moment, as Augustine suggests at the beginning of his Confessions (I, 1): “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” If he takes his humanity seriously, man perceives that he is in a situation of structural impotence!
Christ is the One who saves him. He alone can rescue him from this stalled situation by quenching the existential thirst that torments him.
General Audience
Wednesday, November 9, 1983
Radical impotence
and profound loneliness
1. The page of Sirach we have just listened to, dear brothers and sisters, invites us to reflect on the mystery of man–this being “created from the earth,” to which he is “destined to return” and yet “formed in the image and likeness of God” (Sir 17:1,3); this ephemeral creature, to whom are assigned “limited days of life,” and who nevertheless has eyes capable of “contemplating the majesty of God’s glory” (Sir 17:11).
In this originary mystery of man is rooted the existential tension which lies at the core of all his experiences. The desire for the eternal, present in him thanks to the divine reflection that shines on his face, clashes with the structural incapacity to actuate it that undermines his every effort. One of the great Christian thinkers of the beginning of the century, Maurice Blondel, who dedicated a great part of his life reflecting on this mysterious human aspiration for the infinite, wrote, “We are forced to want to become what, by ourselves, we cannot reach or possess… It is because I have the ambition to be infinitely that I sense my impotence: I did not make myself; I cannot get what I want; I am forced to go beyond myself” (M. Blondel, L’action, Paris, 1982, p. 354).
When, in the concreteness of his existence, man perceives this radical impotence that characterizes him, he finds himself alone, in a deep, boundless loneliness–an originary loneliness that results from the acute and sometimes dramatic awareness that no one, neither himself nor others like him, can give a definitive answer to his need and satisfy his desire.
From loneliness to community
2. Paradoxically, however, this originary loneliness, in order to overcome which the person knows he cannot count on anything purely human, generates the deepest and most authentic community amongst men. Precisely this suffered experience of loneliness is at the origin of a true sociality, ready to renounce the violence of ideology and the tyranny of power. It is paradoxical, for if it were not for this profound “compassion” for the other, which one discovers only if he discovers this complete loneliness in himself, what would drive man, aware of his state, into the adventure of sociality? With premises such as these, how could society not be the place of domination by the strongest, of the homo hominis lupus, which the modern concept of state has not only theorized, but put tragically into action?
It is thanks to a vision so loaded with truth about oneself that man can feel in solidarity with all other men, seeing in them other subjects pervaded by the same impotence and by the same desire for complete realization. Thus, the experience of loneliness becomes the crucial step in the journey toward the discovery of the answer to the radical question. For it generates a deep bond with other men, who are bound together by the same destiny and animated by the same hope. So from this abyssal loneliness is born man’s serious commitment to his own humanity, a commitment that becomes passion for the other and solidarity with each and every one. In this way, an authentic society becomes possible for man, because it is not based on a selfish calculation, but on attachment to what is truest in himself and in everyone else.
Ordered coexistence
3. Solidarity with the other becomes more properly encounter with the other by means of the various existential expressions that characterize human relationships. Of these, the main one seems to be the affective relationship between man and woman, since it stands upon a value judgment in which man invests, in a most original way, all his vital dynamisms–intelligence, will and sensitivity. Therefore, he experiences that radical intimacy, and not without pain, that the Creator placed in his nature at the beginning: “The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man.” (Gen 2:23).
Following on from this primary experience of communion, man sets about building, with others, a “society” understood as ordered coexistence. The sense of solidarity thus gained with the whole of mankind becomes concrete first and foremost in a network of relationships in which man is first of all called to live and express himself, offering them his contribution and receiving in return a considerable influence on the development of his own personality. It is in the various environments in which he gradually grows that man is educated to perceive the value of belonging to a people, as an essential condition for living the dimensions of the world.
The cry to an Other
4. The binomials man–woman, person–society, and, more radically, soul–body, are the dimensions that constitute man. An attentive look reveals that the whole of pre-Christian anthropology can be reduced to these three dimensions, in the sense that they represent everything that man can say of himself without Christ. But these dimensions are characterized by their polarity; in other words, they imply an inevitable dialectical tension. Soul–body, male–female, individual–society are the three pairs that express the destiny and the life of an incomplete being. They are once more a cry that rises from the most intimate human experience. They are an entreaty for interior unity and peace, a desire for an answer to the drama implicit in their mutual relationships. We can say that they are the invocation of an Other who may quench the thirst for unity, truth and beauty that emerge when they confront each other.
Thus from within the encounter with the other–we can therefore conclude–there opens up the urgent need for the Other to intervene, so as to save man from a dramatic, and otherwise inevitable, failure. |