inside america

Knowledge and
the Ordinary Man
In the light of Christ,  and the grace to know Him present in our lives, the ordinary man is extraordinarily transformed in the faith.

by Lorenzo Albacete

Efforts to find “compromises” in the health care legislation being considered by the U.S. Congress reminded me of the words of G.K. Chesterton about what he called an “ordinary man”: “He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic [the ideological man, we could say] of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also… He admired youth because it was young and age because it was not. It is exactly this balance of apparent contradictions that has been the whole buoyancy of the healthy man. The whole secret of mysticism [the religious sense’s openness to Mystery] is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand” (cf., Orthodoxy).

The “ordinary man” does not seek a “compromise” at the cost of truth when faced with a conflict between political positions. Instead, he recognizes that living with contradiction is part of our human condition. This is what lies behind what Cardinal Francis George has called the “evangelically ambiguous quality of every culture” (cf., The Difference God Makes, reviewed on page 41). It is at the basis of what St. Augustine tells us is the best we can expect of the City of Man. It is not a matter of searching for a compromise that reduces the demands of truth; it is a matter of each side recognizing the limitations of the present human condition without denying the existence of truth and man’s ability to know it with certainty.  
According to Pope Benedict XVI, the issue that defines life today is whether man is or is not capable of knowing the truth with certainty. The ordinary man, the man of the religious sense, affirms that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. No more can be expected of the man who remains an “ordinary man.”

But there is another man, an “extraordinary man,” if you will, the man of faith. For him, faith is a form of knowledge, of knowledge of truth with certainty. The key to understanding what this means is an adequate grasp of the nature of the Christian experience. Its starting point is not the efforts of the ordinary man to recognize truth. Instead, insists Fr. Giussani, the Christian experience is “one, single, vital act arising from a triple factor” (cf. The Risk of Education, Chapter 3, reprinted in the previous Traces, Vol. 11, No. 10). It begins with an encounter with an objective fact originating independently of the person having the experience. The significance or meaning of this encounter transcends our power to understand. An act of God is required for us to understand it. However, this act of God is within the encounter itself, not added to it. This is the Catholic view of what grace is. It is a gift of God that enhances the person’s capacity to know the Real (truth) by broadening reason (Pope Benedict’s term), opening it to grasp the meaning of the encounter event. Fr. Giussani calls this the “grace of faith.” It lies within one, single, vital act through which we recognize Christ as present precisely because He can enhance our capacity to know and judge the meaning of all that happens, a meaning which is in fact Christ Himself as the One for Whom all human beings are created and called to share life. The extraordinary man of faith is called to give witness of this grace to the ordinary man. Unlike the ideological man, the ordinary man is called to keep reason open to this gift, and in this way–and only this way–pray to be able to see the apparent contradictions between truths disappear in the presence of the Truth that is Christ.