Getting to the Point

One day some old men came to see Abba Anthony. In the midst of them was Abba Joseph. Wanting to test them, the old man suggested a text from the Scriptures, and, beginning with the youngest, he asked them what it meant. Each gave his opinion as he was able. But to each one the old man said, "You have not understood it." Last of all he said to Abba Joseph, "How would you explain this saying?" And he replied, "I do not know." Then Abba Anthony said, "Indeed, Abba Joseph has found the way, for he has said: 'I do not know."

Desert Father Stories

Reflection – I was joking on Facebook yesterday that I’m enjoying this series on the desert fathers so much (and, according to my traffic stats, my readers are enjoying it, too), that I’m finding it difficult to move on to anything else. I might have to change the name of the blog to Ten Thousand Monks.

These really are, as I keep saying, foundational stories for the spiritual life, and ones which have a startling relevance in our modern technological age. This one, for example. One of the features of our culture now is that it is a knowledge culture, and information age. Everyone has to know about things, and to admit ignorance of a subject or lack of understanding of a matter is a terrible loss of faith.

As an aside, I have never quite understood why it is such a grievous insult to call someone ‘ignorant’ but not so insulting to call them ‘stupid’. To me, ‘ignorant’ is not insulting at all. I am quite ignorant on a whole host of subjects—auto mechanics, real estate, hospital administration, to name just a few that have come up in conversations the last few days. Ignorant simply means ‘unknowing’, and how is that insulting? We can always learn new things, right?

‘Stupid’, on the other hand, is a nearly incurable illness, as far as I’m concerned, the incapacity to use the intellect one has been given to take on new knowledge, to reduce one’s natural ignorance. And there is nothing more stupid, then, than to pretend one knows about something that one does not in fact know, to be unable to say the four magic words that open up for us whole vistas of new knowledge and understanding, “I do not know.”

But this is a digression, sort of. But not really. The key thing in this story is that the monks are commenting on Scripture, and not just on any human matter. It is the Word of God that, above all, it is stupid beyond belief to pretend we understand. This is a perilous matter especially for us priests who are required, by the nature of our orders, to preach on the Gospel. Preaching has to begin from a place of deep humility, a firm conviction that ‘we do not know’ what this passage means, really.

If we begin anywhere else, thinking that because scripture scholar A said this about the passage and B said that and C, D, and E all agree on the other position, that we have ‘understood’ the passage, we have gone badly awry and have understood little to nothing of it. When it comes to God and the things of God, the fundamental and unshakable core of the Christian must be this ‘I do not know’, this deep awareness that there is always more to the matter, always a new level of depth, a new height of meaning, that we are bumbling little children trying to learn our ABCs, while the Word of God is the heights of poetry and wisdom literature and elevated discourse.

This is true, too, even of the dogmas and doctrines of our Catholic faith. Everyone who reads this blog knows where I stand on all those matters; I am a faithful Catholic who adheres to the truth of every word that is written in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. But we must never think that we understand the full meaning of these words. The defined dogmas of our faith are carefully constructed in their verbal formulations, not to explain the mystery of God, but to preserve the mystery of God. 

Quite often in our dogmatic and creedal statements, there is a sort of via negativa at work—we are not so much trying to nail down what we do believe as exclude false statements that we don’t. ‘Begotten, not made’, for example—the Son is not a creation of the Father, but is God from God begotten of the Father. This exludes the Arian heresy (which we were discussing at breakfast yesterday, MH being the kind of place where this topic comes up over the oatmeal). But what does it mean that the Son is begotten of the Father? I Do Not Know.

And because of our ignorance, our unknowing, we can spend our whole lives, and into eternity even, contemplating these mysteries, and constantly penetrating deeper into them, in some ways increasing our ignorance, but only because we continually know how much more there is to know that we do not yet know.

So in a sense we only understand a Scripture passage if our first response is to say ‘I do not know what it means.’ If you think you know, you don’t, and that is deep spiritual wisdom, practical and profoundly relevant in our day, from the deserts of 4^th century Egypt.

The prestige enjoyed by the agnostic solution today does not stand up to colder examination. As a pure theory, it may seem exceedingly illuminating. But in its essence, agnosticism is much more than a theory: what is at stake here is the praxis of one’s life. When one attempts to put it into practice in one’s real field of action, agnosticism slips out of one’s hands like a soap bubble; it dissolves into thin air, because it is not possible to escape the very option it seeks to avoid. When faced with the question of God, man cannot permit himself to remain neutral. All he can say is Yes or No—without ever avoiding all the consequences that derive from this choice even in the smallest details of life.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 88-9

Reflection – Well, we’ve been down this road before on this blog – click the agnosticism label at the bottom of the post if you want the full story. But it bears saying again and again; we cannot really suspend judgment on the question of God.

Intellectually, yes we can, of course. It is clearly not psychologically impossible or logically unsound to say ‘I don’t know’ about the God question or any other question. But the God question, unlike, say, the wave/particle nature of light or the average wing span of a swallow (European or African? I don’t know… auggggh!), has direct practical implications for what you and I are going to do today, doesn’t it?

If there is a supreme being—that is, One who created you, holds you in being, and who is the author and end of your life—then you had better be talking to Him/Her/It today, right? If there is a God, you had better be asking this God to show you how to live, right? If there is a God, then prayer is a priority for each one of our lives, without exception.

So if you don’t pray, you are acting as if there is no God. You are a practical atheist, even if you insist that you are an agnostic. It seems to me that there are very few agnostics who end up adopting theistic practice—a rigorous, disciplined life of prayer—while most self-declared agnostics end up living as atheists.

But this whole prayer business opens up for us a whole stance to life that does not stop when we get up off our knees. If there is a God, then the truth, the meaning, the goodness, the point of virtually everything in the universe is not ours to decide. It is ours to discover, but that’s entirely different. Columbus ‘discovered’ North America; he did not invent it. There is a whole attitude towards life that emerges from practical theism as opposed to practical atheism, a reverence, a listening spirit, a deep humility.

I will never forget the shock I had one day when I, still a layman at that point but already in my final promises in Madonna House, realized that by and large I was living as a practical atheist. Generally speaking, I made up my own mind about stuff without much serious reference to… you know, the Big Guy. It was actually a key moment of repentance in my life that led me in a circuitous sort of way to my current state of affairs (where I at least once in a while check in with Him about stuff!).

Anyhow, agnosticism is a bust, practically speaking. Either there is a God or there is not one, and our whole way of life either is based on the existence of God or it is not. It is fairly simple, even though practical atheism can slip into our hearts in myriad subtle ways. And perhaps (realizing that most of my readers are churchy-type people) that’s a good focus for this post—are we living as theists or as atheists? Is God the center of our lives… or something else? Something to ponder…

It may indeed be true that within the network of human relationships it is impossible for each individual to know everything that is necessary and useful for life and that, therefore, our possibilities for action are based on the fact that we ourselves participate by faith in the knowledge of others. Nevertheless, we remain all the time within the sphere of human knowledge that is always in principle accessible to all men.

When, however, we speak of faith in revelation, we pass beyond the boundaries of that knowledge which is typical of human life. Even if the hypothesis could be granted that the existence of God could become an object of ‘knowledge’, at least revelation and its contents would remain an object of faith for each one of us, something that surpasses those realities that are accessible to our knowledge.

Consequently, in this field there is no one in whom we could put our trust or to whose specialized knowledge we could refer, since no one could have a direct knowledge of such realities on the basis of his own personal studies.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 83-4

Reflection – Ratzinger here is referring to the point, undeniable once it is made, that all of us live by faith to some degree, because all of us take the word of others for all sorts of things. None of us has personally proved every scientific hypothesis that we believe to be true, and every time we step foot outside our door we take a leap of faith that all the people driving the roads are neither homicidal or suicidal, and most possess at least minimal driving competence. And so on and so forth—human life really is a tissue of faith, supplemented by direct knowledge.

But there is a difference, and Ratzinger is happy to point it out, between this human species of faith and faith in God and in Christ. All the human data we accept on faith we could indeed find out for ourselves, given enough time and talent. But who God is, what life is about in its essence, whether or not that which has been given us in the Scriptures is true—no amount of human probing and searching can quite get us there, can it? As Ratzinger says, there is no expert, no one with direct knowledge here.

And so in matters religious, in matters pertaining to the essential and absolute questions of life, we are (it seems to me) thrust into radical faith, into a radical choice to take the word of Another—some Word of some Other at any rate—and go with it, live by it. It seems to me that this is unavoidable and undeniable.

To suspend a decision on these matters is to make a decision. To say, I cannot know, and no human being can really know, and so I will hold back from any definite belief, is to say essentially that it doesn’t really matter much anyhow. And to say that is to make every bit as radical a statement about reality as any religious person would ever make.

And so we are confronted by the necessity of faith, not only in the web of human relationships that surround us each day, but in the absolute meaning and value of life. We must commit ourselves to some course of action that by definition we cannot prove to be the right one. To make no commitment is to make a commitment that is every bit as absolute and radical, and every bit as unfounded.

Faith—no way around it! I have chosen, for reasons I have detailed before on this blog, to live by the faith revealed in Catholic Christianity. What’s your choice?

Intellectual honesty and humility in the face of the unknown seem to recommend agnosticism rather than an explicit atheism, since the latter, too, claims to know too much about these things and clearly has a dogmatic element of its own. No one can claim to ‘know’, strictly speaking, that God does not exist. One can at most take his non-existence as a working hypothesis, on the basis of which one then tries to explain the universe. Modern science basically takes this line.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures,  84-5

Reflection – Well, back to philosophy! I’ve had quite a long stint on the blog with theology and spirituality (and rightly so), but it’s good to have the bracing clarity of logical reflection and philosophical rigor once in a while.

I’ve blogged this section of this book quite a bit, Ratzinger’s long exposition of agnosticism, atheism, and religious faith, and his argument in favor of the latter. Here, of course he is not so much critiquing agnosticism (that comes later in the essay), as pointing out atheism’s inherent epistemological overreach.

Episte… what? Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, processes, and limits of human knowledge. What can we know and how do we know it are the basic questions of epistemology.

So the atheist critiques religious belief as a claim to knowledge based on insufficient evidence. We cannot ‘know’ there is a God in the same way that I know I am typing on a lap-top computer right now and you know you are reading these words right now. We have no such direct immediate and inarguable experience that corresponds to the reality ‘God’.

But of course the converse holds true as well. To claim absolute knowledge of God’s existence and to claim knowledge of his non-existence are equally specious. And so, at least at this juncture of the essay, agnosticism seems to be the more credible choice. Ratzinger goes on to show that this is not a satisfactory resolution to the matter, and you can click on the ‘agnosticism’ label at the bottom of this post to examine his reasoning on the subject.

Meanwhile, however, the atheist and the theist seem to be in the same boat (neither of them liking it much), claiming knowledge of things we have no right to. Epistemological overreach—it’s like the common cold! Everyone’s got it.

But is this true? While atheism is a big subject, as is theism, a little bigger and more complex than this wee blog post can exhaust, it seems to me that atheists are hoisted on their own petard on this matter, while theists have a way of resolving the conundrum. Atheism, strictly speaking, if it is going to argue for God’s non-existence as opposed to simply assuming it (a la Sartre or Comte), is committed to argument by strict logical positivist or scientific methods. Direct observation, experimentation, and verification under laboratory conditions—that kind of thing.

But by those criteria, God cannot be disproved. The most one could say, strictly logically, is that evidence for God has not been furnished by these methods. But then, neither has evidence for love, friendship, patriotism, justice, and a host of other crucial and invaluable human goods that few atheists and fewer yet theists would want to discard. If we do not discard these ‘unprovable’ human goods, then we cannot (by strict logical consistency) discard the notion of God, either.

Theists, meanwhile, will grant freely that God’s existence is not ‘known’ in the same immediate direct way that we know sensible objects. But we are not committed to a theory of knowledge that limits us to that kind of direct knowledge. Theists are not logical positivists, nor do we grant for one minute that such logical positivism is the only or even the most credible epistemological theory.

[When considering the question of God’s existence] what we are looking for is the very foundation of all rationality; we are inquiring into how its light can be perceived… there is one fundamental point that seems obvious to me: where everything, and the foundations of everything are involved, the one who endeavors to comprehend is inevitably challenged to get involved with the totality of his being, with all the faculties of perception he has been given.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 90

Reflection – So who knows if God exists or not? And really, does it matter? Who cares, anyhow? It’s irrelevant, right? We’re born, we live, we do stuff, we die. Whether there’s some Sky God up there looking at us is kind of unimportant, don’t you think? What difference does it make?

So goes the reasoning of at least some people today. We can’t know, and it doesn’t matter anyhow. Party on! Or, do whatever else you think makes for a good life. Ratzinger points out in the course of the above essay (which is superb, and from a superb (and short!) book) that of course this only seems to leave the question unsettled. In fact, such people proceed to live as functional atheists. Agnosticism may be intellectually possible—and in a certain sense we are all agnostics, since no one has ever seen God—but in practical terms one lives as a believer or as a non-believer.

Somehow, one never meets a determined agnostic who then concludes that he or she should pray every day and follow the moral law assiduously ‘just in case’. No, agnosticism always yields a lifestyle of practical atheism, ignoring God even if He does exist, because we’re just not certain.

This is funny, if you think of it. If I have reason to think there’s a big mean dog, say, inside a house, but I’m not sure and the evidence of this dog’s presence is inconclusive… well, I won’t just barge into the house as if I’m quite sure there’s no dog there. So if we entertain the possibility that there might just be a big (if not mean!) God in the house, why in the name of all prudence would we spend our lives ignoring such a possible being?

I mean, why not pray and ask this God to reveal Himself more clearly. Or ask Him to make his intentions and thoughts known vis a vis yourself? If you’re truly an agnostic and not an atheist, wouldn’t this be the sensible course of action?

Anyhow, this is, believe it or not, the point Ratzinger is making above in somewhat scholarly language. The question of God is not some abstract intellectual puzzle. The question is rather whether or not there is a Being who fashioned all reality, who is the Lord of all reality, and who therefore has absolute power over all our lives. It’s a question of everything—the difference it makes is the difference of… well, everything. It’s hard to start narrowing it down.

Either life is godless, and hence devoid of ultimate meaning (this is strictly logical), and therefore my only recourse is to live well according to what feeble light I possess (but even there, where did that light come from? What do I mean when I say ‘live well’? If there’s no God, doesn’t it all just collapse into ‘do whatever the hell you want’?), or the other possibility is true. There is a God, this God establishes the heavens and the earth and bestows His meaning and truth upon it. Therefore, the whole point of my life is to find out God’s meaning and truth and conform my choices and behaviors to it.

Is it possible for us, as human beings, purely and simply to lay aside the question of God, that is, the question of our origin, of our final destiny, and of the measure of our existence?.. We are compelled to choose between two alternatives: either to live as if God did not exist or else to live as if God did exist and was the decisive reality of my existence.

Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures, 87-8

Reflection – Ratzinger writes here about the illusion of agnosticism. This is the theory that we can simply suspend our decision about the existence of God. Maybe He is, maybe not, and anyway who can know? And who can know what kind of God this is, if He is, and what He actually wants with us?

Ratzinger points out in this passage, as he does in many places in his writings, that this seemingly humble and reasonable position is in fact untenable. The reason for this is that the existence of God is not a mere piece of data, like the existence of France or koala bears. There, we can be as agnostic as we like. I’ve never been to France, and it’s just possible that the whole thing is a massive put up job, a joke. I mean, c’mon, a nation that prides itself on its sophistication and culture but likes Jerry Lewis movies? Whadya think I am, a chump? You’ll be sending me on a snipe hunt next.

The question of God is not like that. Besides my being ethnically French and loving Brie, the existence or not of France is of no consequence to me (no offense to my French readers! Vive la France! Vive la gloire!).
But, you know,  I can live without Brie. But God? This is not a mere data point; it is the question of the meaning, coherence, direction of the universe and of my own life therein.

Either there is a God, and my life is from Him and towards Him, and I need to live accordingly, or there is no God, and thus no overarching meaning to the universe. I can do whatever I want (until, you know, someone stronger comes along and quashes me) but nothing I do has any meaning or point beyond my own 6 feet and 185 pounds of presence in the cosmos.

It does seem to me (as it does to Ratzinger) that these are the only two logical possibilities. If I’m wrong about that, and there are other possible ways of framing the question, please comment below!

Now the question is left open, if we decide to opt for the God side of the question, of who and what this God is and what does He/She/It want of us, anyhow? But if we decide there is a God or gods or Something(s), it seems our chief priority in this life is to come to some conclusion for ourselves about the matter. Not a snipe hunt, but a God hunt.