Epistemo-paloosa!

After Mass on Trinity Sunday, Father & I were talking about Mystery. No, not Aurthur Conan Doyle or Dan Brown (my apologies to Sir Doyle) type mysteries. But genuine Mystery.

Modern man doesn't much like Mysteries. They remind us too much of our limitations & finitude. We don't mind them in stories when they eventually resolve themselves - usually by our own wit - into a self-gratifying conclusion. But Mysteries before which we simply stand dumbfounded & "fold the wings of the intellect"? Not so much.

Christians holds for many Mysteries, but the central Mystery, the one on which all others dependant & without which all vanish like a vapor is the Holy Trinity - one God in Three Persons. It cannot be reasoned; man cannot figure this out on his own; it can only be revealed by that same Trinity.

St. Thomas said that truth is reality in accord with right reason. When we perceive something to be a certain way & it really is that way, then we have stumbled upon the truth. The truth resonates with human beings. Despite our fallen condition, we still intuitively seek the truth. In fact we crave it. For one, the success of Law & Order testifies to this.

When it comes to God; however, the truth is so overwhelming that many balk at attaining to it. It goes without saying that our own limitations posit no obstacle for God in revealing himself & continually calling us. However, he does require our cooperation & consent. Yet, so many balk...

In many ways, our responses to this invitation to know & participate in this Mysterious Truth are like Jesus' parable of the sower of seed (Matthew 13). We come up with all kind of schemes to avoid staring straight into the heart of this Mystery. Three things come to mind. We profess belief with our mouths but not with our hearts & lives. We alter the Truth to something more palatable - perhaps the most common today. Or we simply turn our backs, throw up our hands, declare that the truth is unknowable, & get on with the practicalities of life.

The point Father made in his homily is that, while we cannot know everything about a Mystery, it does not follow that we cannot know anything about it (BTW, this is where the Church runs afoul of so many today - it actally has the gall to claim that it is the custodian of the fullness of revealed truth, & that any other person or institution is, by definition, deficient). It means that no matter how much you yearn, no matter how much you explore, & no matter how much you strive to learn, there is always more & richer depths to plumb. In mathematics, it would akin to the properties of ininite numbers. It is reasonable that this "ever knowing more" is part of the experience of the Beatific Vision.

Note that my usage of Mystery & Truth has somewhat merged, which might seem a paradox. Yet, they truly are one, because they are ultimately God himself. A God that loves us & calls us to communion with him. Yet, the father of lies plants that evil seed & we doubt whether there is really an attainable truth. Maybe it is all man's attempt to explain the world we observe before the advent of modern science. Maybe there is no God. Or maybe we simply have no way to know.

And here our human nature, without any reference to revelation, comes to our aid. If there is no God, then we are just a random occurence, merely the most articulate of all animals. Then we are freed of any moral obligations & perfectly justified in tearing at each other as competitors for vital resources, even if the competitor is mother's own child in the womb. What a dismal picture of humanity emmerges, but one that doesn't really jive with our natural sense of worth & dignity; the produndity of the depth of our own being & of others around us; our desire to love & be loved. It is clear that man is an uncomfortable sojourner on the earth, always searching, always questioning, never content.

It is in this longing that we turn our minds upward - a metaphor for reaching above the carnal earth. We recognize a likeness of ourselves to the Other. We hear when he calls us. Our souls find solace in his presence. We find our higher purpose. We find in the heart of this Mystery Truth.

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I could go in a hundred different direction here, relaying all kinds of sincere conversations or bizarre encounters I've had about how we can possibly know the truth of anything. I encourage you not to let anyone shake your faith on this. You can approach this Truth, you can enter into this Mystery simply because God wants you to.

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Photo of Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Hangzhou, China taken in May 2010.

Back From China

Greetings All, I'm back from the Orient (again). Still fascinated by getting a chance to meet & live with these people first-hand, because I assure you that stereotypes don't really work there. It is an extremely complicated place. However, some generalizing is required unless we want to just throw our hands up & stop asking questions, because we know that the common culture gives people a common frame of reference for most of their internal & external activities.

So, with that in mind, I would like to share some results of a little mental experiment I've conducted while in China. Because of the sheer number of people, I've tried testing a few of the assertions made in Franciscan U. philosophy of the human person class against the culture.

1. Persons belong to themselves, & therefore cannot belong to another.

It is true that every person & relationship is colored by the uniqueness of the individuals in question, but it is in conflict with other forces - citizens belonging to the state, workers belonging to the factory, or possibly children belonging to the parents. But I noticed that even in factories where everyone dresses in drab uniform, many will accentuate their individuality & independence by adding a pink scarf, or a bit of jewelry, or a crazy hairdo. People inherently know of their own dominion over themselves & seem to naturally rebel against the idea of conformity, sameness, or ownership, even in China.

2. Persons are wholes of their own, & never mere parts.

In a country with something approaching a billion & a half people, it is tempting to for both the individual & the state to take this approach - that every one fits into the society as gears fit into a machine. However, people do not fit into society like parts of a machine; they are a complete machine unto themselves. Or if you prefer a more organic example, people are never arranged in society like organs in a body, each with its own & purpose & function, but each individually only making sense when properly fitted into the whole. No, persons are wholes bodies, literally & otherwise. Newman said each person is an "infinite abyss unto himself."

However, people feel a little uneasy about the idea of a billion and a half infinites walking around, and perhaps we either tend to avoid or downplay the responsibility that comes with having such a completeness of existence unto ourselves. This is evident in China, just as it is in our land; however, there is some evidence that people in China are waking up to their birthright as an infinity, as a whole unto themselves. Much of the clamor for material comforts & the rampant rise of consumerism in China may be a kind of unhealthy expression of this discovery of self, not as a part, but as a complete whole.

3. Persons are never mere instrumental means, but are ends in themselves.

In a pseudo-Communist society, the first three of these proposals resonate rather strongly. In this statement, we say that a person must act according to their own wills & nature, & that no one can appropriate that self-determination, either with or without the person's knowledge or permission. It is unclear to me if the idea of self-determination is strongly present in China, though I have undoubtedly met many individuals who have the strength of character that manifests personalistic self-determination. It is only a recent development in Western philosophy that people are their own ends & therefore determine themselves. But on a natural level, we seem so beholden to so many ties & limitations, whether family, friends, church, work, school, society, politics, charity, even our own bodily limitations & failings. With all of these present, no wonder we have such a hard time seeing ourselves as the strong self-determinants we were meant to be.

Unlike here in the U.S. where most people seem to work to provide a high living standard capped by the pursuit of leisure, in China, the cost of living is much higher, the work load is much heavier, & just getting by is the order of the day. It is the rare individual that has the space in their lives to ponder such things. Perhaps this is one reason for the recent emergence of a full-bodied philosophy of the person - people have a hard time pondering such things when they don't know if they will be able to feed their family.

There are also some other cultural factors like history or religion that are harder to pin down. It seemed to me that most people in East China are Buddhists. Even if not practicing, they seem to carry some of its ideas in their thinking - such as the notions that everything is in essence a unity & that everything proceeds in cycles. These seem to rub harshly against the concrete individualism, self-distinction, & self-completeness proper to each human person. Also, the pervasive belief in luck, astrology, & magic seem to undermine the person's self-determination in favor of spiritual forces that just blow us along for the ride.

In the end, the most interesting results were found by comparing my observations of the Chinese culture to our prevailing post-modern culture, & then to contrast those with the notion of person proposed by Catholic Christianity. There are more similarities than one might think between East & West, but I would finish by noting that history shows that the attempt to build a society without accounting for the nature of the human person will generally leave man in the most depersonalized & unhappy state.