The Goodness of Life

BY LORENZO ALBACETE

It is good to be alive. Everything that exists is good. To affirm this is to affirm what Father Giussani calls the "positivity of reality." The greatest contribution of the Christian faith to the world is to make this affirmation, to defend it again and again, and to give witness to it in all circumstances of human life, both individual and social.

It is certainly true that there are many for whom being alive means a great suffering, a great burden, at times even intolerable. To affirm the positivity of reality, the supreme value of existence, is not to take lightly their pain. Indeed, suffering threatens to diminish our own existence. The adequate response to it is solidarity. Solidarity is the willingness to share our existence with the one who suffers, and thus to strengthen it. This is how we give witness to our experience that to have been born, to have come to exist, is a wonderful thing, and that human life is of inestimable value.

Is this conviction reasonable? At the beginning of the 21st century, this has become the most important question of our lives.

The arguments against this conviction are many. Science, philosophy, politics, and economics all at times seem to point to the relative insignificance of the life of individuals, making us afraid to appear to be naïve, uncritical, or ignorant when we insist that at the origin of the life of each individual person there is a mystery that demands absolute respect.

For us Catholics, the teaching of the Second Vatican Council is clear. The human person is the only creature on earth created by God “for its own sake,” that is, for no other purpose than the goodness of its existence (cf Gaudium et Spes 24). Each human person is, in a certain way, the entire universe. The value of each individual cannot be measured by how much he or she can contribute to society; rather, society exists to highlight, affirm, and defend the value of each human person. The unsurpassable value of the life of each human person is expressed through the capacity for freedom. Human freedom is destroyed when people are deceived by powers that manipulate their desires, forcing them to act in ways they would never have chosen if they had known the truth. When the link between the human person and the mystery is severed, power moves inevitably to destroy human freedom.

Recently, The New Republic printed a letter written by Isaiah Berlin to George Kennan about human dignity. For Berlin, the “deliberate tampering with human beings so as to make them behave in a way which, if they knew what they were doing or what its consequences were likely to be, would make them recoil with horror and disgust” is what he calls "the one heinous act which would destroy the world." No utilitarian paradise, he insists, no promised heaven beyond this life, will ever make us accept the “use of human beings as mere means.” To destroy in a human being his or her capacity for freedom is, Berlin wrote, quoting Jesus, the “real sin against the Holy Ghost.” No matter how much suffering there is, he insists, there is still hope, there is still human life, as long as the dignity of each individual is respected by respecting his or her desire for freedom from spiritual manipulation. To destroy this desire is to “destroy the soul.”

Berlin wonders whether Catholics hold this view. Yes we do, and we hold it not because of some irresistible longing of the human heart, but because of something that happened, called Easter, that confirms and fulfills this longing way beyond its most daring hopes.

“A man had two sons…” begins the parable of the Prodigal Son. As Peguy wrote, this parable speaks so powerfully to believers and unbelievers alike because it touches the human heart at the very point where the mystery behind our existence is encountered, “a unique point, a secret point, a mysterious point, ‘a’ point of correspondence” that recognizes in the parable the fulfillment of its most daring desires, a “point of sorrow, a point of desolation, a point of hope, a point of pain, a point of restlessness, a scarred point.” The message of this parable grasps us in the heart like the teeth marks of an old faithful dog that will never go away no matter how badly we treat it. No other word of God reaches farther than this parable, so that it accompanies us the farthest we can stray from goodness, staying with us no matter how far we wander, no matter how shamelessly we behave. This parable does not know what shame is. It will never leave us in peace, and for this we are secretly grateful, no matter how far away we go from the mystery at its origin. From it, hope against hope springs always.

A man had two sons. In Rembrandt's painting of this parable, the man embracing his prodigal son has a male hand and a female hand. It is the mystery of the Origin of all fatherhood and motherhood. Those of us who follow Christ will recognize in this Origin the one that Jesus called “the Father.” On that first Easter, on that third day after the death of the Son of Man, the Father showed that neither death nor sin are greater than his love and mercy. That is why we affirm the positivity of reality. This is why we affirm the goodness of life even in the face of death, without fear of being blind to the problems, the betrayals, the moral ambiguities in our lives. This is why we affirm that life is beautiful, that it is worthwhile to work, to struggle, to fight for that truth, that beauty, that goodness, that justice that corresponds to the infinite dignity of each single human being from the first moment of his or her existence until its disappearance into the arms of the mystery that brought us into existence. Jesus Christ has risen from the dead. Everything that exists is good.