I Want You to Be: On the God of Love [1 ed.] 0268100721, 9780268100728

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I WAN T Y OU T O BE

I Want You to Be u

ON T HE GOD OF L OVE u

TOMÁŠ HALÍ K Translated by GERALD TURNER

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

Published by the University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu Copyright © 2016 by Tomásˇ Halík All Rights Reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Halík, Tomásˇ, author. Title: I want you to be : on the God of love / Tomásˇ Halík ; translated by Gerald Turner. Other titles: Chci, abys byl. English Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020342 (print) | LCCN 2016019554 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268100742 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268100759 (epub) | ISBN 9780268100728 (hardcover : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Love—Religious aspects—Christianity. | God (Christianity)—Love. | Christianity and culture. Classification: LCC BV4639 (print) | LCC BV4639 . H22513 2016 (ebook) | DDC 241/.4—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020342

ISBN 9780268100742 ∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected].

As one of his many pupils, I dedicate this book to the memory of Dr. Josef Zveˇrˇina (1913 – 90), Czech theologian and human rights advocate, imprisoned by the Nazis and Communists, author of The Theology of Agape, in gratitude to this teacher of faith, love, and civic courage.

Amo: volo, ut sis (I love you: I want you to be). —attributed to St. Augustine

There is a certain relationship between love and the Divine. . . . Love is indeed “ecstasy,” not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving. . . . But this process is always open-ended; love is never “finished” and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself. —Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est

And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love. —1 Cor. 13:13

Contents

– Love—Where from, and Where To – 1 2 – Waiting for the Second Word – 11 3 – Does Love Have Precedence over Faith? – 23 4 – The Remoteness of God – 35 5 – I Want You to Be – 53 6 – The Closeness of God – 71 7 – An Open Gate – 85 8 – Narcissus’s Deceptive Pool – 97 9 – Is Tolerance Our Last Word? – 107 10 – Loving One’s Enemies – 119 11 – Were There No Hell or Heaven – 127 12 – Love the World? – 143 13 – Stronger than Death – 157 14 – Dance of Love – 167 1

Notes

– 174

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Love—Where from, and Where To ———————— ——u———— ——————

“I have often asked myself, but found no answer, / where gentleness and goodness come from / I still don’t know today, and now must go,” wrote Gottfried Benn.1 The authenticity and sadness of this verse is what captivates. Something profounder and more universal shines through the poet’s humble sincerity—a testimony about the times we live in. The constant flow into the sea of human knowledge simultaneously conceals and reveals that notknowingness, the chasm of helplessness when we are confronted by the question of the ultimate where from that defies all attempts to name it. In the first half of the twentieth century, against the background of all the horrors of war and genocide, the age-old question, Whence cometh evil?, was posed afresh with new urgency. 1

It is quite possible that nowadays we have become so accustomed to evil, violence, and cynicism that we ask ourselves with surprise another question: Where do tenderness and goodness come from? What are they doing here in our cruel world? Do tenderness and goodness—like evil and violence—emerge from somewhere in the conditions of our world (do evil and good depend chiefly on how we organize society?) or from some still unexplored corners of our unconscious or complex processes in our brains? There are plenty of scientific studies about the psychoneurobiological processes that accompany all our emotions, and about the centers in the brain that are activated when we receive or show tenderness, and when we do good or people are good to us. I do not doubt that everything we feel and think first passes through countless portals of our “natural world” and is affected and influenced by our organism and our environment, and by the culture we are born into, including the language in which we think. After all, our bodies and our minds, our brains, and everything that happens in them are part of “the world” or “nature,” that intricate corridor through which the river of life flows. But where is the truly ultimate source? Can we simply reject the ancient intuition that goodness and tenderness, the light and warmth of life that we almost hesitate by now to give the overworked name of “love,” enter our world— and hence our minds and behavior—not simply as a mere product of ourselves and our world, but as a gift, as a radically new quality, which rightly fills us again and again with amazement and gratitude? Isn’t the world itself a gift? Aren’t we a gift to ourselves? And isn’t this gift renewed over and over again and revived from that “therefrom” from which love springs? But if we go seeking that source beyond our world—outside—will we not miss the opportunity to encounter it where we overlook it because it is so close, namely, inside? Where do tenderness and kindness have their source? Do I know, perhaps? I have to admit that I don’t. All the answers that occur to me feel like a heavy curtain covering the open window of this question. There are some questions that are too good to spoil

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with answers, that should remain an open window. Such openness need not lead to resignation but to contemplation. Those who are aware that the author is a theologian are by now possibly waiting impatiently for me to say at last that the answer to the question about the ultimate is God, of course. But the conviction has gradually matured within me that God approaches us more as a question than an answer. Maybe the one whom we mean by the word God is more present to us when we hesitate to say the word too hastily. Maybe he feels better with us in the open space of the question than in the constrictingly narrow gully of our answers, our definitive statements, our definitions and our notions. Let us treat his Holy Name with the greatest restraint and care. Maybe the moments in history when polite or indifferent silence about God reigns in the world of academe are a precious opportunity for the theologian to make amends for the pious garrulousness of the previous epoch and return to what the holy teacher of the faith Thomas Aquinas emphasized at the beginning of his philosophical and theological investigations: God is not “evident.” Of ourselves we do not know what or who God is. Let us not fear vertigo when looking into the depths of the Unknown. Let us not fear the humble admission, “I don’t know.” After all, this is not the end but always a new beginning on the endless journey. Besides, for faith (and also hope and love), for all these three forms of “patience with God,” with his hiddenness,2 “we don’t know” is not an insurmountable barrier. ———— —— — u————— For many people around me the biblical statements about love (God is love; love the Lord your God with all your heart; God so loved the world; love your enemies) sound like phrases in an unfamiliar, incomprehensible, or long-forgotten language. Those people often consider themselves “unbelievers” (or at most people who believe differently than those who subscribe to Christianity

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or Judaism). In the world of the Bible, theology, and Christian faith, they are strangers. So it is not surprising that religious statements of that kind sound like music from distant worlds, or like the ruins of cities once inhabited by the generations of their ancestors. And what about us? Let us not duck the question about how and to what extent those sentences are understood by us who declare our courage to continue to regard ourselves as Christians in this world. Those sentences are close to our hearts because we have heard them many times, but how do they tally with our experience, our everyday world? This brings to mind the story of the young Jewish boy who enrolled in a rabbinical school against the wishes of his rich merchant father. When he came home for vacation his father welcomed him sarcastically: “Well, my son, what have you managed to learn in the space of a whole year?” The boy replied, “I learned that the Lord our God is the only God.” Outraged, the father grabbed one of his assistants by the shoulder: “Isaac, do you know that the Lord is the only God?” “Of course,” the simpleton replied. But his son exclaimed with passion, “I know he heard it. But did he learn it?” In this book I want to give an account of what I have tried to learn, what I strive to understand more profoundly about those few seemingly simple biblical sentences about love. But I admit at the outset that regarding those statements about God’s love, about love of God, and about love of one’s enemies—which are by no means as “plain” as some might think—not to mention their “translation” into the language of our everyday experience, I am far from saying my last word. This book, like all my earlier ones, is also simply an “interim report” of my journey, and seeks to be an inspiration and encouragement for your journey, for your own courage to seek, rather than a set of reliable maps. ———— —— — u————— “You’ve already written books about faith and hope. When will you write one about love?” The young man who asked this ques4

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tion during a discussion I was having with some of my readers must have been surprised to find that it evidently caught me off guard. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that,” I mumbled. But at that moment I knew that his question presented me with a challenge that I wouldn’t be able to resist forever. When my friends were curious to know what my new book would be about, and I told them I would be writing about love, the uneasy astonishment of their reaction did not surprise me. Many years ago, when I happened to be present at a wedding in the cathedral in Budapest, I asked my guide, who, unlike me, understood Hungarian, whether the word that the priest had repeated about thirty times already in the course of a short address meant “love.” When he nodded, I vowed that if ever I became a priest I would treat the word like gold dust. In religious bookshops I have always instinctively avoided books that had the word love in the title, fearing that the opening chapters would be redolent with the cheap sickly perfume of pious sentimentality that never fails to turn my stomach. “Secular literature” is saturated with the topic of love—from erotic poetry to psychological counseling handbooks about interpersonal relations. What can philosophical theology, the hermeneutics of faith, add to all that today? “Love is shown more in deeds than in words,” wrote my favorite saint, St. Ignatius of Loyola. But reflection, if it is honest, is of itself a deed, and may inspire deeds that are not superficial. So on what should one focus one’s reflections at the present time in order to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between love and religion and between love and Christian faith? No doubt some representatives of analytical philosophy would instantly dismiss the sentence “God is love” as inadmissible in their linguistic games. After all, the statement can be neither borne out nor refuted. The word love, like the word God, is a typically polysemantic expression; it would be hard to find two other words that mean such different things to different people. I would like to try in this book to contribute to reflections on love by concentrating on two typically Christian aspects, which are lacking in the secular concept of love and about which many

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pious handbooks speak in superficially banal terms. I am referring to love of God and love of enemies. I am convinced that this dual aspect—which is profoundly connected with man’s relationships to himself and the world—is far more urgently needed in our day than might appear at first glance. Love means self-transcendence. And what is more radical than to abandon self-absorption—which is especially pronounced nowadays—in favor of an “absolute mystery” (i.e., God) and the disturbing and threatening alien environment of the world, which turns its hostile face to us (i.e., the enemy)? In my earlier reflections, I reached the conclusion that faith (in the original biblical sense) is not a matter of adopting specific opinions and “certainties” but the courage to enter the domain of mystery: Abraham “set out, not knowing where he was going.”3 It strikes me that the same applies to love (both love of God and love of one’s enemy): it is a risky endeavor whose outcome is never certain, a path on which we travel without knowing for sure where it will lead. If I maintain this about “love of one’s enemy” (that absurdsounding command of Jesus) it is certainly understandable. But the same equally applies to our “love of God.” Will it eventually turn out to have been simply an illusory projection of our dreams of heaven? The expression “love of God” sounds just as absurd to many of those around us as the words “love of one’s enemy.” And after thirty-five years of pastoral ministry I venture to maintain that the sentence, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Deut.  6:5), is also disconcerting for quite a number of believers. What does he specifically want of us? My books are not intended for those who are absolutely sure that they fully understand what is meant by the commandment to love God. They certainly already have their reward. I address myself to those who seek the meaning of those words, whether they consider themselves believers (of whatever denomination, because I am sure that in all churches and religious groupings there are 6

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those who regard their faith not as “a possession” but as a method, an ongoing journey), almost-believers or erstwhile believers (who in the course of their lives have lost their former religious certainties for one reason or another), doubters and agnostics, or nonbelievers (because in the multifarious world of “nonbelievers” there are always those who don’t consider their unbelief a comfy bed at their life’s destination but are “people on a journey”). I address the people I meet around me every day who are simul fideles et infideles, believers and unbelievers at one and the same time. In other words, they are by no means “religiously tone-deaf ”: on their path of faith they know moments of God’s silence and their inner aridity; sometimes they lose their way and then find it again; they have unanswered questions and also experience moments of revolt. I address people who are obliged to call out again and again, like the man in the Gospel, “I believe; help my unbelief !”4 Theologians are professional doubters. Even when they are fully anchored in God by sincere and ardent faith, it is their duty to be part of the band of seekers by exploring questions in the light of their own way of living, understanding, and expressing their faith. A faith that is constantly unsettled by doubts and has to struggle with unbelief also within itself is no “halfhearted faith.” In several of my books I deal with the dialogue between belief and unbelief, which I suggest is not a quarrel between two “warring parties” but is something that takes place within many people. At the same time I try to demonstrate that belief (of a certain kind) and unbelief (of a certain kind) are two different interpretations, two views from different angles of the same mountain veiled in a cloud of mystery and silence. Time and again I have interpreted the unbelief of our epoch as a “collective dark night of the soul,” as the Good Friday moment of “the eclipse of God,” which nonbelievers may interpret as the “death of God” and believers as the necessary passage to the Easter morning. In this book I am taking another step along this road. I show that the “disappearance of God” need not be simply a “dark night.” The commandment of love can lead to a mystical experience in which “God disappears” and “the ego disappears,” because love

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transcends the boundary between “subject” and “object,” and by locating God in a world that was strictly divided in the spirit of modern philosophy into “subjective” and “objective” spheres, the God of the Bible was fatally replaced by the banal god of modernity. That god fully deserved his rejection by atheists!5 A god that is “merely objective” or “merely subjective,” one that is only external or internal in relation to the world and people, is not worthy of belief or love. Linking the commandment to love God and the commandment to love one another—the core of Jesus’s gospel—is a way of rediscovering the God who “disappeared,” and specifically, in our relationship to our neighbor. God happens where we love people, our neighbors. Jesus refuses to exclude anyone a priori from the category of neighbor, not even enemies. When asked who we should consider our neighbor, he inverts the question and tells us: Make everyone your neighbor. In the same way that linking the command to love God with the command to love one another overcomes the temptation to turn God into an object, an abstract idol, so also the command to love our enemies overcomes the similar temptation to turn humanity into an abstract idol. When we are asked who God is and who are our neighbors, we must not have a ready-made answer. We must go on seeking that answer all the time and experience how, in the process of searching, the horizon of possible answers continuously broadens. To break down the barrier between God and human beings is also to break down the barriers between people, and to refuse to accept as inalterable any division of people into “us” and “them.” I am convinced that the “next word” after the death of God, the return, which, according to the Gospels, started that Easter morning and will be accomplished at the end of time, is the discovery of love—love in the radical sense in which it is used in the Gospel: love as an unconditional and all-embracing force of unification with God and with all people, including our enemies. Jesus speaks about a love that fulfills people’s age-old yearning for perfection, to be like God: “be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is

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perfect,” “for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:43 – 48). But this is quite a different understanding of love than the romantic notion of love as an emotion, which, even among Christians, has dragged the word into the shallows of sentimentality. Love as it is understood in the Gospels has very little in common with romantic emotional turbulence. It is the courage to die to one’s selfishness, to forget oneself because of others, and to step out of oneself. Let us say it yet again. Love is essentially transcendence, crossing the borders that surround our existence: “this world,” the world of things. (In the words of Martin Buber, it is a question of shifting from the world of “it” to the world of “Thou.”) 6 That is why love is fundamentally a religious and theological theme and that theme cannot be left solely to the mercy of literature, psychology, and the natural sciences. At the same time it should not ignore how the theme of love can be enriched from other perspectives. ———— —— — u————— But this book also has a “subplot.” As in my previous books it is an attempt to link spiritual and theological-philosophical topics with a tentative diagnosis of our times. I don’t want to speak about love as a private feeling. In his analysis of history, Teilhard de Chardin wrote in the face of the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century that “love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them.” 7 As I observe the West nowadays, and particularly Europe, which, although it is moving in the direction of political, economic, and administrative unity, desperately lacks a credible and fundamental unifying spiritual vision, I try hard to consider more deeply and further develop my idée fixe that the future of Europe depends on finding a dynamic compatibility between two European traditions: the Christian and the secular humanist. Moreover, in this book I mention the confrontation and contention

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between three currents in Europe today: Christianity, “secular humanism,” and “neo-paganism.” And since I have learned from Teilhard de Chardin not to be afraid of visions that might seem utopian to some (because every vision is fundamentally utopian, although this does not in any way detract from their power and significance), I dare to ask: In the controversy between the various concepts of the West won’t the decisive issue eventually be which of them provides the greatest scope for “goodness and tenderness”? In his “paean of hatred for religion,” that remarkable flowery text, of which people generally know only his metaphor about religion as the opium of the people,8 Karl Marx calls religion the heart of a heartless world, the spirit of spiritless conditions. Marx definitely did not intend his comment as a compliment. But phrases have a life of their own. Could we not interpret the statement differently, and could we not place it at the service of our search for “the source of tenderness and goodness”? Doesn’t religion play a good and important role in a heartless world by preserving the source of what sharply contrasts with its heartlessness, or at least maintains the quest and thirst for that source? What is more important, of course, than an answer to the quest for the source of goodness and tenderness is an answer to the question of what to do or refrain from doing to prevent this threatened light in the world from going out, to prevent this living water from drying up. And if, perhaps, we fail to come up with a satisfactory answer, then at least let us remain determined to keep on asking.

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Waiting for the Second Word ———————— ——u———— ——————

I have come to believe that God does not approach us as an answer but rather as a question. At a time when the question of God not only remains unanswered, but generally isn’t even raised, maybe God addresses us as he once did his servant Job: I will question you, and you tell me the answers! In my previous books I took up an idea that the philosopher Richard Kearney remarkably developed in the course of a meditation on the biblical story of Moses and the burning bush, namely, that God does not approach us as a “fact” but as a possibility, as an appeal, an invitation, a challenge. If you undertake the task that I am sending you to perform, I’ll be with you, is Kearney’s interpretation of the Lord’s answer to Moses’s request for God to reveal his name.1 Today I would add that to reflect on God is to ask

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oneself the questions, Who are you? Where are you? And also, Where is your brother?2 I have gradually learned to read the Bible so that I seek questions in it rather than answers. Sometimes it even strikes me that in the entire Hebrew Bible God asks more often than he answers. For many of our questions we don’t find answers in the Bible, at least not direct and clear answers. People often reach for the Bible to find an answer to the question whether God exists. They are then surprised to find that not only does the book fail to resolve the question, it doesn’t even raise it. It doesn’t waste time with speculatively “proving God’s existence” but instead contains stories about people that allow us to enter into their experience with God. In the following reflections I have prepared another surprise that I encountered in my reading of the Gospels: God clearly expects something else from us that is quite different from whether we believe in his existence. To think that the “question of God” is settled simply by answering in the affirmative when faced with the dilemma of whether or not God exists is to remain still far short of Christian faith. ———— —— — u————— There was a theologian who devoted his entire life to scriptural study who declared that if one reads the Bible conscientiously one cannot help asking oneself at various points whether it really is inspired by God or whether it is directly dictated by the Devil himself.3 Among such chapters is undoubtedly the story of Abraham’s sacrifice.4 If Abraham had obeyed to the letter the first command God gave him and ignored the second he would have become his son’s murderer. But how to distinguish between “sacrifice your son to me” and “don’t do anything to him”? Maybe fundamentalists are those who hear only the first utterance from God’s lips and don’t wait for the next. But let us not be quick to look down on them. Who is really capable of understanding a God who expresses himself so ambiguously? Isn’t our faith also so captivated by the first utterance

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we hear from God’s lips that we fail to hear the next? Maybe we don’t wait for any more because we don’t want to hear it—or maybe because we don’t want to be deprived of the certainty of our previous understanding. But can any of us—atheist, agnostic, or religious believer of whatever variety—really state with certainty that our current judgment about God is not based on something that has yet to be fully stated? And which of us is bold enough to expose ourselves to a God who systematically transcends the ideas we have created of him and thereby obliges us to reassess all the time our opinions about the world and ourselves? Is it any wonder that people go on preferring to create idols of their own (previously of bronze and wood, now of ideas and notions), with which they know conclusively how they stand and what they can expect? ———— —— — u————— Søren Kierkegaard’s incisively analytical brain, passionately fevered poetic imagination, and painfully chaotic soul were constantly tormented by the story of Abraham’s sacrifice. An eternally restless seeker, eternally dissatisfied with himself, the world, and the church, he circled around that story like a moth around a burning flame. That Nordic thinker put himself in the position of the man who had been summoned by God from the safe land of his past and is then called on to kill his son, and with him the entire future he has been promised, the man for whom there remained just the present moment, the testing moment, the fateful choice between belief and nonbelief. Abraham took with him the sacrificial knife of unconditional obedience but also the hope that if he makes this leap of faith God will not allow him to fall into the abyss of nothingness and absurdity. On his path of faith he had to travel through the storms and darkness of doubt, and at the same time not to let the tiny flame of incomprehensible hope and trust in an incomprehensible God go out. And it was precisely that hope (“hope against all hope,” as the apostle Paul called it) 5 that opened his ears to God’s next, saving word.

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In his reflections on Abraham, the father of the faith, Kierkegaard inadvertently invented a new type of philosophical theology. He was not interested in a “science about God,” because it was impossible to capture the mystery of a God revealed in biblical narratives of that kind, as well as in the paradoxes of our world and paradoxical human life stories, in the web of some “scientific rationality,” what Nietzsche called the spider’s web of reason. What can we truly “know” about God except that he radically transcends all our knowledge? After all, haven’t St. Anselm, Pascal, and Kant already taught us that the greatest feat of reason is to recognize and admit the limits of its knowledge? The path that Kierkegaard discovered consists in the philosophical and psychological analysis of the human experience of faith (both rough and smooth), of the experience of self-transcendence, of the courage to step into the inscrutable cloud of mystery, determined not to swerve from the abyss before which reason suffers vertigo and often retreats cautiously into the bushes of its objections and self-justification. We ought not abandon the path of religious thinking that Kierkegaard discovered just because it doesn’t lead to the security of ready-made answers. Disciples of Jesus must not be frightened to walk upon water. They must not fear the abyss of questions that is not crossed by any bridges of definite answers. Kant, the prince of rationalists, defined the frontiers of what reason can say with certainty about God. In his words he sought to “limit reason in order to make room for faith.” If I understand him rightly, Kierkegaard inspires us to limit the realm of “religious certainties” and thereby make room for faith as a bold, risky spiritual adventure. Can we allow ourselves to believe in a God that we know so little about—when what we do know often consists of paradoxes and mutually contradictory statements? And can we love such a God? And let us also ask, Does the word love, all smeared with the sickly jelly of pious and worldly sentimental clichés, still make any sense? And let us take yet another step: Does what we refer to with the word have any sense at all? 14

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I am convinced that those two questions—Does God exist? and Does love make sense?—are not only conditional on each other, but they are actually (in the framework of another “word game”) one and the same question. I know of no better translation of the statement “God exists” than the phrase “love makes sense.” The place for verifying those statements is not the classroom of the old metaphysics (which both Kant and Kierkegaard led us out of, each of them through different doors) but life itself; a positive answer to that dual question cannot be proved, only demonstrated. It can only be indicated and corroborated through our own lives. ———— —— — u————— If we want to get closer to the meaning of important religious affirmations and render them more approachable by those for whom religion has so far been a foreign language, we must patiently and responsibly attempt to “translate” them. We live in an era in which the face of the human world and the horizons of knowledge are changing rapidly and radically. Human beings have acquired power of life and nature that they never had before, and, as a result of that power, they confront the unprecedented threats of total destruction of themselves and their planet. It is therefore not surprising that at such a time of upheaval many of the statements that previous generations largely regarded as definitive answers have once more become questions for our contemporaries. It definitely applies also to many statements of religion (and atheism); after all, how could we protect reflection on “ultimate things” from such upheavals? After all, our spiritual life (if it really is life, i.e., movement) and our religious notions are not completely detached from our life as a whole, from our knowledge, thinking, feeling, and experience, from our “lived world” (Lebens welt)! God has placed us in time and space in which faith but also atheism are challenged to leave the cozy abodes of security in which they were settled and set off anew on a path of seeking. We hear and read about the declining numbers of believers in our cultural space—but that assertion, repeated ad nauseam, is

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only valid if the term “believer” is wrongly applied solely to people who are “at home” in one of the traditional forms of religion. Moreover, the numbers of “convinced atheists” are also declining. But there are growing numbers of seekers, “people on a journey.” And isn’t it indeed Abraham, the father of the faith, who set off again and again on a journey (“and he set out, not knowing where he was going,” scripture says),6 who is the father of just such a faith: faith on a journey, faith as a journey? Abraham set off up the steep path of faithfulness and obedience. And yet he never, it would seem, completely abandoned the hope that the word of God that he had heard, and which rightly seemed to him incomprehensible and absurd, would not be his last word. He did not abandon the hope that God would return him his son, that God himself would provide the lamb for a burnt offering. And the Lord did indeed speak to him again. ———— —— — u————— Christian tradition regards the lamb that Abraham sacrificed in place of his son as an exemplar of Christ and his Easter sacrifice on the cross. But the New Testament story of Easter also contains two different words of God. The cross is not the last word of Christ’s story. The dawn of Easter morning brings another message, another challenge: God spoke once more. (And it must be added that the New Testament texts do not conceal how hard it was for this further word-event to penetrate the grief and distrust of Jesus’s closest friends and disciples.) My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? According to Mark’s Gospel Jesus left this world with those words on his lips. After much searching, this harrowing sentence has become more and more the cornerstone of my faith, the starting point for my re flections on faith, and the basis of my theology. This strange testament of Jesus can of course be understood as a hopeless cry of despair, as an admission of his final defeat, as Jesus’s calling into question his own life, as a denial and retraction of his entire teaching of faith, love, and hope. Does there remain any space at all for 16

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some kind of Christianity beyond the dark abyss of that cry? But we can phrase the question differently: Isn’t the Christianity, which crossed the abyss too easily, which found a facile explanation for those words and displaced them from its memory—or even preferred to ignore them—too shallow? As we read in numerous reassuring commentaries, at that moment Jesus was simply quoting Psalm 22, which starts with these harrowing words but ends with the calm resignation of faith. But even if that were so, does it attenuate in any way the urgency of the verse that Jesus uttered? Chesterton made his oftcited comment on those words to the effect that if atheists were to choose a religion they should choose Christianity, because it is the only one in which God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist.7 Theologians defending the thesis that God died in Christ 8 are implicitly saying that only the All-knowing—unlike we mortals or the “Immortals” (pagan gods)—knows what death is. By citing Jesus’s cry on the cross the Gospel would seem to be describing what the Apostles’ Creed expresses in the words “he descended into Hell.” Jesus’s cry and the phrase “descended into Hell” are two different ways of expressing the fact that Jesus’s solidarity with sinners was so great that he took upon himself the “wages of sin”—the boundless void of desolation, of total alienation from God. After all, what else does the word hell mean? 9 When human imagination peopled hell with demons and torture chambers, perhaps it was trying to conceal the even greater horror aroused by the inconceivable void of eternal Nothingness. A somewhat different line of reflection was suggested to me by the opinion that a more faithful rendering of Jesus’s words would be, “My God, for what purpose have you abandoned me?”10 It then becomes evident that “Jesus’s testament” is not the cry of resignation of someone in despair, looking back on his past and renouncing his faith and hope, but a question uttered in an urgent prayer to God, aimed at the future and the meaning that will only now emerge. What is the purpose of it all, God? That question is not asked of us, and we are not competent to think up an answer in the

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form of speculative theories about the meaning of the cross. That question can be asked only at the moment of death, of departure from this world, because the world itself has no answer to it. The question is directed beyond the horizon of the world as we know it and can know it, beyond our collective experience and the subject of our knowledge. It is a question that bursts through the world and life in the world toward a radical mystery, the Unknown that we call God. But in Jesus that Unknown descended among us, into history, into the world—yes, and into our pain, are dark moments, our death and our hells. Jesus’s question on the cross can only be directed at God— and not we but God himself can answer it. But what we can ask is how God answered the Son’s question. The Gospel’s answer is a cipher, a word denoting something that the apostles didn’t understand when Jesus spoke to them about it,11 and which—let’s admit it—we don’t really understand today, namely, the word resurrection. This central concept of the Christian confession is too important for us to shy away from it into naive notions of the mere revival of a corpse (resurrection is not resuscitation and return to terrestrial life) or facile symbolization (resurrection is not simply a mythological expression of the belief that “Jesus’s ideas are eternally alive”). Perhaps we could try to express God’s answer to the cross differently: After people had eliminated Jesus from the earth, God “put him back into the game.” But the Jesus who was put back was changed. “The world did not know him”—and those who knew him intimately scarcely recognized him. The disciples on the road to Emmaus thought he was a stranger from foreign parts, Mary Magdalene took him to be the gardener, and Thomas asks for “physical proof.” His disciples recognized him in the gesture of breaking bread, Mary through his voice, and Thomas through his wounds. 12 In the breaking of bread, his voice, and his wounds, they encounter his love. That is his “proof of identity.” That alone showed itself to be a power stronger than death. Those of whom he spoke in his description of the Last Judgment met him (although they didn’t recognize him) when they 18

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showed love for him in “the least” and “the needy.”13 And when the resurrected Jesus meets Peter, he asks him about love: Do you love me more than these?14 If the cross, whose deepest pain is expressed by Jesus’s question, remained without any answer from God, it would be absurd. If there were no other answer to the pains of the world, to death, to desperate questions, and to the unquenchable thirst for life than those provided by “this world,” then neither this world nor life in it would have any meaning, because no satisfactory answer can be found within its bounds. But God’s answer is not some “other world” but once more Jesus. Even in his dying and death he does not cease to be God’s Word to us. At the moment of his death, Jesus himself becomes a question. And God’s answer is once more Jesus, but a hidden, unfamiliar Jesus—the “stranger on the road.” He comes as a stranger and a traveler, who must not be held onto on his journey to the Father. “Do not hold onto me,” he tells Mary Magdalene. And at Emmaus, as soon as he lets himself be recognized he disappears from the disciples’ sight.15 The familiar Jesus, “Jesus from the human viewpoint,”16 is no longer here. Si comprehendis, non est Deus—if you think you know something, then you can be sure it is not God, wrote St. Augustine. It equally applies to the Risen Christ, who loved surprises; if you think you don’t need to look for him anymore, then you won’t meet him. It was no accident that at the Areopagus in Athens the apostle Paul chose the altar to the Unknown God as an appropriate place to preach about the resurrection.17 We also won’t recognize him until we manage to answer from the depth of our hearts the question he directs at us as well, the question that he embodies, in the way that Peter answered: Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you (John 21:17). Jesus does not require from his disciples a theory of resurrection but instead that they should “rise from the dead” and start here and now to “walk in newness of life”18—and the newness of that life consists of love, and a Jesus-like attitude to others, to the world, to life, and to God.

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“Jesus is the Answer!,” we read on banners of charismatic evangelicals. Yes, but it is the second answer. Only the Jesus who endured the silence of death, which was the first immediate answer to that harrowing question on the cross, can become the answer to the questions of those who have touched the darkness of Good Friday. ———— —— — u————— C. G. Jung mentions somewhere that indigenous tribes of “primitives” still living an ancient way of life reconciled with Nature and original human nature distinguish between “small” (private) dreams and “big” dreams that are of significance for the entire tribe. I have always thought of Nietzsche’s scene with the herald of “God’s death” in The Gay Science as the record of a dream—but a big dream with prophetic significance for our entire “tribe.”19 At the same time I felt that the message “God is dead” is only the first sentence, which must be followed by another, a second sentence, in the same way that Good Friday was an important message to us from God, but it was not the final one. “God is dead!” That sentence uttered at the end of the nineteenth century continued to fascinate for the next hundred years. Maybe it was not only a sentence about God and against God but also one containing something of God’s message to us. A God who has not endured death is not truly Living. A faith that does not undergo Good Friday cannot attain the fullness of Easter. Crises of faith—both personal and in the histories of culture— are an important part of the history of faith, of our communication with God, who is concealed and returns again to those who do not stop waiting for the unique and eternal Word to speak to them once more. ———— —— — u————— In John’s Gospel Jesus himself promises “another Comforter,” the Spirit of truth, which will lead us into the fullness of truth and re20

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call his words to us.20 After all, isn’t the call to leave the hearth of old certainties the Spirit speaking? Wasn’t it the Spirit of God himself—the selfsame Spirit that led Christ into the desert to be tempted by the devil, as we read in scripture—that led us into the great trial, the temptation to do without God, “to kill God”? And isn’t it that same Spirit that has that second saving message for us at moments when everything seems lost? “Today, if you hear his voice,” says scripture, “do not harden your hearts.”21 It is precisely at the hour of trial—and for those who have not shied away from it and stood the test—that God usually has a further message. I repeat: Abraham maybe stood the test not because he was willing to sacrifice his son but because at the moment when God was hidden from him in incomprehensibility he did not totally abandon the hope deep down in his heart that God would not abandon him in this trial, that God would not disavow himself and behave like a bloodthirsty demon. Maybe that is why he did not miss that second, decisive word, from God. Hope, however small and incomprehensible, is generally the chink through which the “still, small voice”22 of God’s message can reach us. “Where is God?,” asks Nietzsche’s madman as he announces the night storm that will throw the coming period into total turmoil. He himself provides the answer: “We have killed him.”23 I am familiar with moments when people are close to “giving up on God.” But those who seek to kill the God within them should not miss the moment when God himself stays their hand, in the way he did the hand of Abraham. It is precisely at the moment of greatest crisis that those who do not harden their hearts can hear God’s second saving word. We should not fear any crises; we should only fear being blinded in a crisis by despair (what Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death”), the loss of hope—the hope that we are in the company of the one who has the words of eternal life, even when it is sometimes truly difficult to understand and accept them. When he has spoken one word he can say a second one too. Yes, God is the Word 24 and is unique in his Word; in that sense, there is no “second Word of God.” But if we look from our human

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perspective we can see that there are many ways in which that word enters history and human stories. Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets (Heb. 1:1). In many and various ways he has spoken and still speaks to us and will speak to our children, because one moment people listen and understand, while the next they are deaf and uncomprehending; one moment they are awakened and enlightened, and the next they are apathetic and torpid; one moment they are on Mount Tabor and the next in the Garden of Gethsemane, and God is a patient and inventive communicator. Samuel as a little boy had to be woken up three times before eventually he is told that the voice is not of human origin but comes from God. How often have each of us—yes, and maybe the church too, at certain moments—not been awake to his call, or failed to understand it? ———— —— — u————— In this book I want to reflect on the answer that Jesus gave when asked which was the greatest commandment in the Law. His reply—if we think about it carefully—is much more profound and exacting than it may seem at a casual reading. Jesus was asked about one thing, one commandment, and in fact he gave two answers, by linking two commandments: love of God and love of one’s fellow man. The religion of those who were immediately fired by the first commandment but did not wait for the second at times has led to fanaticism or wild illusions about God created by human projections of fear and ambition. It is the second sentence—that truly difficult commandment to love one’s neighbor—that “grounds” love and faith. God often speaks more than once, and one word is complemented by the next. But let us not jump the gun.

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3

————————————————————

Does Love Have Precedence over Faith? ———————— ——u———— ——————

I can’t help thinking that God doesn’t particularly care whether we believe in him or not. What really does matter to him, however, is whether we love him. Or more precisely: he doesn’t care about our faith in the sense that the term is often used, namely, that to believe in God is to be convinced of God’s existence. I don’t think our salvation depends on our religious opinions, notions, and convictions. St. Thomas Aquinas maintained long ago that we do not know what “being” means in the case of God, because God exists in a way that is different from how things exist. What really matters to God and what he will presumably judge us by are not our opinions but the nature and degree of our love. He is not concerned with faith in the sense of “opinions” but faith that is fundamentally associated with love. Faith without

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love is hollow; indeed, it is often no more than a projection of our wishes and fears, and in that respect many atheist critics of religion are right. Faith without love is dead, like salt that has lost its taste: “It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”1 “Even the demons believe that and tremble,” scripture tells us.2 In the very first sentences of his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI declared that being Christian is not the result of ethical choice or a lofty idea but the loving encounter with a person. Christianity is not simply an ethical system or a system of catechistic sentences.3 It is—the pope says using other words—a “love story.” Becoming a Christian is not accepting some “worldview” but loving God. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your mind and with all your strength!,” Jesus says when asked which was the greatest and most important commandment of the Law.4 But how is that done? My God, couldn’t you give me some specific instruction? ———— —— — u————— God cannot be the object of love because God is not an object; objective perception of God leads to idolatry. I cannot love God in the same way that I love another human being, my city, my par ish, or my work. God is not in front of me, just as light is not in front of me: I cannot see light; I can only see things in light. Likewise I cannot see and visualize God. Even faith does not “show” him (“No one has ever seen God,” the Bible declares resolutely).5 With faith all I can do is “see” the world “in God.” Even the statement, “God is a person,” expresses a metaphorical idea of God. That metaphor (or analogy, if we wish to stick to scholastic terminology) may even be misleading; often the objection is understandably raised that the expression is too anthropomorphic. For centuries on end Christian theology resolutely maintained that God is a person, that the Christian God—unlike other gods—is a personal God. It seemed—and it still seems to

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many people—that this concept of divinity (the concept of God as a person) was the be-all and end-all of Christianity. (In many cases that emphasis was and still is a stumbling block in the dialogue between religions: Christians are prey to the temptation to regard an impersonal understanding of divinity as “a lower stage of development,” while the representatives of Eastern spiritualities suspect the Christian concept of a personal God of being crude anthropomorphism.)6 The expression “person” was borrowed by the fathers of the church in antiquity from Greek drama, in which person ( prosopon, persona) denoted a mask: an actor could use changes of mask to “change his identity” and represent different persons while remaining the same person. The theologians of that ancient world borrowed the idea as a metaphor to help explain the mystery of the Trinity: the one and only God has a triple “identity.” He is “one in three persons.” Some theologians have looked for other metaphors. Augustine spoke about the states of water or the three powers of the soul: memory, intellect, and will. And St. Patrick expounded the same thing to the Irish holding a shamrock. But every metaphor, every symbol, and every analogy is something, which, at one and the same time, reveals and conceals the reality it refers to. Woe betide us should we forget that a metaphor is “only” a metaphor, for we would become bogged down in the shallows of fundamentalism. The concept of God as a person introduced the notion of person into the very heart of Western culture and made it into what is possibly the most exalted notion in Western culture. Personalist understanding is the basis of philosophy and human rights; where would jurisprudence, sociology, political science, economics, and all the other “humanities” be without the personalist principle, without the attitude to the human being as a unique and distinct person! The metaphorical declaration “God is a person” is extremely important as a statement about what God isn’t, namely, an amorphous and solely material “it.” Justification for the use and usefulness of the person metaphor is the experience of prayer throughout

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the spiritual history of mankind, and not just the history of Christianity. Is it really possible to pray to “an impersonal principle”?7 We can’t simply “remove” or challenge the concept of the personal God without an attempt to go deeper into it: God is more than a person; God is more radically “a person” than the human being is a person. But at this point (as so often in theology) we come up against the boundaries of human speech and imagination: as people we are incapable of imagining a person other than as a human person, as an individual. Statements that God is “suprapersonal,” “suprarational,” a “superbeing,” and so on, sound rather unreal to most people, rather like Eckhart’s and Tillich’s “God above God.” These statements say more about man than they do about God: they indicate that man is a clue to what God is, since God created man in his image. Nietzsche was aware that man is a bridge— but not to the Übermensch (Superman or Overman), a construct whereby Nietzsche tried to fill the gap left by the God who had been killed; it is more a bridge to a presentiment of God. But one must be careful when crossing this bridge as it crosses the deep abyss of eternal difference.8 To sum up these reflections: To many people in the field of theology and religious imagination (if a soberly rational Western person would dare to have any religious imagination now that so many religious notions have been discredited), the concept of person seems to obscure rather than elucidate God. Similarly, the concept of father—taken out of the context of ancient patriarchal notions—tends to complicate rather than facilitate the journey to the “absolute Mystery.” But is it possible to love “absolute Mystery”? ———— —— — u————— Scripture is at hand to help us. It tells us that “God is love.” Of course it is hard to make love itself the object of one’s love. We love God by loving “in God.” We love people and the world “in God,” in the way that we see people and the world in the light.

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God is the fact that we love and how we love rather than the “object” of our love. He is the “biosphere” of all real love. What does it mean to “love in God”? Let us go back to the metaphor of light. When we look at things in the light we are usually unaware of the light itself. As with air, we are aware of light chiefly at the moment we feel the lack of it. But there the metaphor ends: how many people today, in a civilization without God, long for God in the way a person suffocating longs for air, or someone deprived of sight longs for light? Do those in whom the light of faith has gone out, or has never shone, suspect what they are missing? But what have they been deprived of, in fact? What is the difference between “loving in God” and simply experiencing “human love” without any religious consideration? Since scripture says “God is love,” then we can certainly take it to have the same meaning as in the liturgical hymn of Holy Thursday, Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est—where there is real love, God is present. God happens where we love. Together with St. Augustine and many teachers of the faith we can affirm that God is there even when we don’t recognize, acknowledge, or name him. However, if we truly are believers it means that we count on God—even when we “do not see him” and “do not know him.” Through our faith we are open to that mystery of absolute love. At that moment our love for people and the world is different from that when our spiritual world is closed in that direction and is strictly limited to concerns of our “inner world.” Those who existentially “count on God” are freer in their love. Their love for the world and people is free of the anxiety and tension that derive from clinging onto the world. If our inner world is open to that dimension of reality that transcends all that is known and knowable, named and nameable, if it relates to “what no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived,”9 then that faith truly gives us a certain detachment in regard to many things. In love that “detachment” does not take the form of coolness but of greater purity.

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It is not detachment from those that we love but detachment from our selfishness that would seek to bind and own them. The difference between those kinds of love corresponds, I believe, to the difference that the philosopher Gabriel Marcel proposed when speaking about possessive love (l’amour possessif ) and oblative love (l’amour oblatif ), love that takes possession and love that gives itself away. I don’t think readers can suspect me of thinking that believing Christians (in the sense of “churchgoers”) have a monopoly on sacrificial love or of asserting that everyone else has no option but possessive love, which is not in fact real love. Any deeper experience of life would cause such a naive and arrogant contention to burst like a bubble. Instead it seems to me that it will be possible to distinguish between “God’s people” and “the children of this world” by the manner of their love. But God alone can make that distinction. No one else has the right to classify people (in terms of this single fundamental difference between people). “Do not judge,” says Jesus. ———— —— — u————— When we hear the word Christianity, our minds immediately assign the concept to the handy cultural compartment of religion or faith. To assert that Christianity is not primarily about faith in God but about love—love of God (and one’s neighbor)—might come as a surprise. Admittedly the word faith occurs more often in the New Testament than the word love, but faith in that context doesn’t mean “believing in the existence of God” but “believing in God’s love.”10 One doesn’t become a Christian by believing that “God is” but by believing that God is love. In what sense does love have “precedence” over faith in Christianity? Aren’t we perhaps reviving the old controversy about what has precedence, faith or works? By no means: that controversy truly is a thing of the past. It must be clear nowadays to an informed reader of the New Testament that Paul’s polemic against “works”11 is not directed against acts of love, but against relying 28

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on the redemptive significance of “works of the Law,” that is, ritualistic and legalistic religion. For its part, James’s emphasis that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead”12 is not directed against Paul’s concept of faith but only against its misapprehension and vulgarization; nowadays we would say, against the reduction of faith to hollow fideism,13 or to mere “theoretical conviction,” or even an ideology. If there is something that can truly damage Christianity (as it has many times already in history), then it is turning faith into an ideology. But a more serious objection arises. Doesn’t the first of the Ten Commandments say, “You shall believe in one God”?14 I reply: Yes, but Jesus systematically reinterprets the commandments and amplifies the meaning of each of them. He does so with a remarkable divine freedom: “You have heard that it was said . . . But I say to you . . . ” You shall not kill no longer relates to outward acts but also includes the heart and mind: You shall not harbor anger, hatred, or the spirit of vengeance in your heart. You shall not commit adultery no longer concerns solely the act of infidelity: You will drive lust out of your heart and eyes; you will perceive a woman as a human person not as a mere object of sexual lust. Similarly, when Jesus is asked about the first and greatest commandment, he reinterprets, amplifies, and internalizes this commandment of the Mosaic law: To truly believe in God and honor God means to love him. The Hebrew Bible already acknowledged that true faith and true love did not dwell in the head and on the lips alone but concerned the whole person: the whole heart, the whole being, and the whole strength: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”15 That “codicil” that Moses appended to the Ten Commandments is the central confessional prayer of Israel, both collective, synagogal and private. However, the main “innovation” and particularity of Jesus’s response to the question about the first and most important commandment is his inseparable linking of love of God and love of human beings.16 It is that linkage that represents Jesus’s “hermeneutic key” to the meaning of the entire

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Hebrew Bible: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”17 ———— —— — u————— I once admitted that I feel myself more of a “theophile” than a theologian, if theology is thought of as “a science about God” in the sense of modern sciences. Theophiles differ from such theologians in the way philosophers differ from sophists: they know that they don’t know much about God, but they love him nevertheless. Philosophy too begins with the statement attributed to Socrates that all he knew was that he knew nothing. In the days when I was studying stultifying neo-Thomist tracts about God’s attributes, I couldn’t help suspecting that their authors didn’t know that they didn’t know. “I don’t know” is a fundamental stance for me, and it can’t be otherwise. It is undoubtedly a reaction to the excessive rationalism of some theological trends and the shallow sentimentality of certain schools of piety. I’m convinced that “I don’t know,” spoken with humility, leaves more free space to God than the two other unfortunate extremes that took root in the Catholic Church, particularly in the nineteenth century. But St. Augustine poses to all “theophiles” (i.e., himself, in particular) a question: How can I love something I don’t know? And another question comes back to him like an echo: And how could I know something that I did not love? Thus Augustine introduces into the fundamentals of Christian philosophical and theological thinking the Platonic herme neutical circle (mutual conditionality) of knowledge and love, and he amplifies it. After all it is not possible for me to love what I don’t know, and I can’t really get to know something I don’t love. Love without knowledge, and knowledge without love, is not real knowledge. Faith also requires understanding, intellectual reflection—fides quaerens intellectum—but faith and knowledge require and expect love, and only in love do they achieve their fulfillment. 30

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Platonic knowledge presumes passion, eros, stimulated by the sight of beauty (initially corporeal beauty), then climbing a spiral staircase to the idea of Good. This passion is by no means foreign to St. Augustine’s African temperament. (I am grateful to Pope Benedict for emphasizing that Christian love is not just spiritual agapē; it can never abandon eros.18 Eros without agapē degenerates into something merely instinctive, while agapē without eros becomes a dull idealistic abstraction.) St. Thomas Aquinas stated that the love of God is better than the knowledge of God, because knowledge cannot grasp God as he is in himself but only his image in man; love, on the other hand, is directed to God himself.19 This is a very fine distinction and a typical expression of Thomas’s genius. However, this distinction proceeds from Thomas’s theological anthropology, according to which love is an act of the will, whereas knowledge is the fruit of the intellect. For Augustine, the will, love, and knowledge coalesce. But he makes other distinctions, such as between real love and sexual desire (concupiscentia). (This recalls Marcel’s concept of oblative and possessive love.) J. B. Lotz writes in his commentary to the patristic and scholastic understanding of love: In desire the one who loves grants being to the beloved for the sake of the one who loves, whereas in benevolence the one who loves grants being to the beloved for the sake of the beloved, which is why the lover invests himself, and may even sacrifice himself, to obtain and increase the being of the be loved. It is clear to see that only benevolence is truly realized love. 20 That distinction, Lotz adds, concerns both love and God: “In desire human beings yearn for God and unity with him for their own sake, so that they themselves might achieve fulfillment through God. . . . In contrast, in benevolence, human beings orient their loving entirely toward God by wanting God to be entirely God and recognized as God. This amounts to total dedication to God

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without any reservations.”21 Even this devotion is not free of yearning (desire), but it is mature, profound longing, cleansed of egocentric volition: “The more that humans dedicate themselves to God the more richly and profoundly do they find and achieve themselves. The one who sacrifices everything to God will receive everything from God.”22 Thomas Aquinas speaks about dilectio naturalis, a natural but unconscious love of God as the origin and ultimate goal of every being, which is implicitly contained in every act of human love. Therefore egocentric love (what Augustine calls selfish “amor sui”) is perverse love. In its essence love is transcendence—stepping out of the prison in which the human individual is bound to itself (incurvatus in se ipsum, curved in upon itself )—and so every step on the path of real love is essentially a step toward the One who is both absolute transcendence (the entirely other) and what is deeper within us than our own self. This predisposition is so deeply and primordially rooted in the human being that it naturally precedes any “knowledge about God” in the sense of rational cognition and explicit confession; a human life is placed in that movement of love much earlier than it can utter the word God and acquire any “religious conviction.” It probably dwells within it even when it does not acquire any such “conviction”; and besides, theology was always well aware of the limitation of such conviction (suffice it to recall the abovementioned statement of Thomas Aquinas that rational perception cannot attain to God, as he really is, only to his human image). From the above we could, of course, draw another conclusion, namely: religious notions and convictions that grow within the individual untouched by that existential primeval experience of love (or by any other genuine experience of love, most probably) are not only “skin-deep,” anemic and illusory, but they generally have something perverse about them, a whiff of the prison in which a person without love remains incurvatus in se ipsum. That sort of religion is not only a mere projection of the person but also a projection of his lack of love. It would seem to be the origin of images of a harsh, vengeful God that has twisted so many pious 32

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souls and driven so many people into the arms of atheism, besides bearing responsibility for all the blood spilled in religious wars and acts of terrorism. There is a saying of C. S. Lewis’s that definitely applies to the outcome of the religion of people who are closed to love, one whose truth I have often verified myself: “Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.” The statement that religion makes good people better and bad people worse certainly does not apply without exception: many scoundrels have changed their way of life as a result of religious conversion. But there is an element of truth in the statement that if people who are truly not people of clean hearts become involved in religion, they often yield to the temptation to turn it into an instrument for their own unclean intentions and for justifying their own unclean acts. Only if one struggles with one’s own sins, weakness, and bad tendencies can one be sure of “fighting the Lord’s battles”; all other “holy wars” are simply “human, all too human”—and frequently inhuman! When someone dubs himself “a warrior of God” he is placing himself in the field of play of God’s ancient adversary. If a person of hate redefines his expressions of hatred toward others as “a holy war” and part of a cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, he is burning any bridges that might lead to reconciliation and reasonable agreement. If the lamented “decline of religion” means the disappearance of that kind of religion, then there is nothing to regret; if the oftmentioned “return of religion” means the return of that kind of religion, then there is cause to be afraid. ———— —— — u————— Augustine’s constant question, “What do I love when I love my God?,” as well as the relationship between love and faith and between love and God, is the subject of a provocatively challenging book by that prominent representative of postmodern philosophical theology, John Caputo.23 Are Augustine and medieval theology right to assert that when people truly love anything, they are ipso facto already on the path to God, even when they don’t realize it,

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because God is love? Or is modernity (starting with Feuerbach) right when it states that God is simply a religious synonym for love? Is God love, or is Love god? Premodern theologians “unmask” love in order to reveal God as its hidden objective and source; modern thinkers “unmask God” as a metaphor, as just one of many words by which in reality we mean human, earthly love. Caputo opts for a third, postmodern way.24 This does not seek to unmask anything or anyone, it has no pretentions of uncovering the “Really Real,” and it doesn’t even want to unmask the two previous approaches and propose some kind of redemptive synthesis. He admits that he doesn’t know how things are “in Reality”—and this doesn’t lead to either panic or chaos. He recalls two sentences of Augustine’s: inquietum est cor nostrum (our heart is restless), and quaestio mihi factus sum (I have become a question to myself ). Caputo is convinced that undecidability is precisely the place for the faith, what makes faith faith, as opposed to “Knowledge” (gnosis). And once again I too humbly support the position that “we don’t know.” But does the assertion that love precedes the certainty of faith (faith in the sense of “religious knowledge”) really hold water? Doesn’t love of God presume a clear and firm conviction about his existence? My answer to that logical-sounding objection is that only in the experience of love do we find the space to glimpse the meaning of the word God. “Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love,” said St. John.25 Perhaps anyone wanting to talk about God should first look into their own heart and see if it contains enough love—or at least a yearning for love, a readiness to learn to love.

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4

————————————————————

The Remoteness of God ———————— ——u———— ——————

In every age the task of the theologian is to reveal the Christian concept of God as a linking of transcendence with immanence, a linking of God’s hiddenness, otherness, and remoteness with God’s incredible closeness. Experience of an age when God seems not to be present offers dizzying scope for demonstrating the first of those two poles. But it is also a challenge to reveal his closeness in a fresh and more radical way (and unmask “false closeness” or “the closeness of false gods”). It is clear that God’s hiddenness is the first word whereby God speaks (or more precisely, is silent, because silence is an important form of communication) to those who ask about him. So it is not surprising that many are not patient enough to wait for his next word and become atheists or agnostics; we live in a culture of impatience. 35

Nevertheless, I am convinced that the commandment that Jesus made the center of his teaching, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself !”—and above all the second part, the emphasis on love of one’s neighbor—indicates the path on which it is possible to hear that second word, and newly discover the “other face” of God’s immanence. But if one is to discover God’s closeness—or even ask about it—one must first take absolutely seriously his hiddenness and remoteness, experience it profoundly, feel it and reflect on it. Without that experience—the outcome of many difficult years—we might easily confuse the Christian faith with some of the commonplace idols that now crowd the shop windows of the religion merchants. ———— —— — u————— If there is something that might be described as the religious experience of late modern man, then it is the experience of God’s hiddenness, of the fact that God is not evident reality. Theology (unwillingly at first) had to abandon notions of a God who was too close, one who dwelled just behind the scenes of nature and history. Evolutionary biology discredited the idea of God as an immediate mechanical cause of the story that we call the world and life. Religious studies, historiography, and literary theory have disproven the image of God dictating directly to the pens of the sacred writers. Experience of the tragedies of recent history shook confidence in a God constantly and directly conducting the orchestra of human society and instantly expelling any player undermining the harmony of history. Psychology and neurology revealed a world of unknown and also previously unresearched influences on the human consciousness (and hence also on religious notions), and as a result the idea of God directly operating “within the human soul” paled in significance. The sociology of knowledge showed that all our notions, including religious no-

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tions, are not poured directly into our consciousness from somewhere up above but reflect among other things many features of the society and historical moment in which we live. Analytical philosophy reminds that that the sense of any utterance, including religious statements, cannot be understood immediately, that is, without knowledge of the context of the “linguistic game” of which the utterance forms part and the “way of life” out of which it emerges. If God exists, then he is located much deeper than bygone generations believed; if he is the “first cause,” then we must affirm that he is not as detectable or “demonstrable” than it seemed to those who still did not know enough about the complex jungle of “secondary causes” that drive nature, human beings, and history. We must look more deeply and thoroughly for God now that we know we won’t find him in the prompt box or the easily accessible director’s office of the theater known as the world. The knowledge acquired over the past century naturally rocked the fixed systems of religious notions (and almost all the existing fixed systems). But I am profoundly convinced that this situation is a blessing for faith, and an opportune moment (kairos), because faith again becomes more of a free act, one that is unenforceable—indeed a courageous personal choice. Besides, upheavals and the necessity of choice are nothing new in Christian history and most likely occurred every time faith crossed the threshold of a new cultural context. After all, didn’t Pascal declare at the moment that modernity started to triumph over the tidy world of the Gothic cathedrals that faith is a choice, a “wager,” because “there is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition”?1 ———— —— — u————— I do not regard scientific knowledge, particularly in those fields I’ve just mentioned, as unprofitable for faith. On the contrary I consider it a necessary ally of theology in purging faith of primitive

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fundamentalism. If we take science seriously and do not confuse it with ideology (including the ideology of scientism, which is my main objection to Dawkins and “new atheism”), then it can help to show that the theist and atheist interpretations of the world and scientific knowledge are two options for our free choice. When making this choice, neither believers nor atheists, if they are honest, can pass the buck by hiding behind science and thereby shirking their responsibility for their choice and its risks. Neither atheists nor believers (unless they are fanatics of one side or the other) have the right nowadays to accuse each other of being intractable enemies of the truth. At the Second Vatican Council the Catholic Church recognized that the traditional Christian image of the atheist as someone with an intellectual or moral defect was no longer tenable. The world is ambivalent and full of paradoxes, and if atheists opt for one of the various possible explanations, namely, that life and the world are a story without God, etsi Deus non daretur, then there can be many reasons for it and their choice may be an honest and at least subjectively honorable one. Christians who don’t live in a mental or cultural ghetto definitely know people who are honorable and intellectually honest without being explicitly religious. There is no need for Christians to demonize all atheists as they so often did in the days when they were afraid of them. I was born in a country where, at that time, atheism was considered “normal.” Unquestioning, conformist atheism on a mass scale was initially a political duty imposed by the totalitarian re gime before becoming a cultural convention; there are places even today where to be a believing Christian in this geographic and cultural zone is tantamount to nonconformity, deviating from the mass. The fall of the old atheistic regime, with its police-monitored conformity of souls and the return of spiritual freedom, has not changed things very much. Nevertheless, these days—as, indeed, it certainly did before— the conformist statement, “I am an atheist,” conceals all sorts of things, but it is seldom the total absence of religiosity or the absolute certainty of belief in the nonexistence of God. If we leave 38

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aside various pseudoreligions, superstitions, esotericism, magic, and cults of idols old and new, we often find a mixture of agnosticism and apatheism (apathy, noninterest in “religious matters,” which sometimes goes hand in hand with an antipathy to the church, or rather their own idea of the church and religiosity), as well, of course, as the widespread cult of a personal god.2 The Jewish thinker Pinchas Lapide also considers that there are far fewer real atheists than people think because the atheist label applies essentially to three groups of people to whom that designation—whether applied to them by others or chosen themselves—really does not really appertain.3 The first are anticlericals “who object to so-called God’s administrators who hold God responsible for everything that his earthly personnel commit.” The second group consists of pseudoatheists who are “angry at the caricature of God that they were made to believe in at home or at school and that has nothing to do with the longing for faith that moves their hearts.” The third group, in Lapide’s view, is specific to Judaism: these are antitheists who argue with God like Job did (because they are unwilling to countenance evil in the world), or struggle with him like Jacob, who, through grappling with God, received the name of Israel. Even they are not atheists according to Lapide, because atheism “is the attitude when one yawns in God’s face.” Lapide believes that real atheism is what I call “apatheism”: apathy toward God.4 Yes, even in respect of intrapersonal relations we could state that the real opposite of love is not hate (which is often the expression of that ambivalent emotion we call love-hate) but rather indifference or twisted love. Many of those who are called or call themselves atheists could be our allies on the path of deepening faith. “Scientific atheists,” who often only take a stance against the fundamentalist caricature of faith, could be our allies in revealing God’s transcendence. Where these atheists differ from Christian faith as I understand it (and particularly mystic negative theology) is above all in the fact that they have so little time for the mystery of God’s hiddenness— which is the only thing I repeatedly hold against them, that they jump to conclusions about the “inaccessibility of God.” In a sense

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they are not unlike religious fundamentalists: they too are deaf to the exquisite mystical music of God’s silence; their faith is too infantile and fearful; they fear to enter patiently and contemplatively into the depth of God’s silence but instead go on loudly repeating the set phrases they have learned. They shout them to drown out both their own unacknowledged doubts and anxiety (deficiencies of faith, of mature faith) and the quiet voice of God. Secular humanists, for their part, can share our journey toward God’s immanence. They have a sense of “something divine in man,” even though they then lapse into some variety of gnostic worship of “Man as god.”5 Christian belief, however, commits us to resist idolatry of all kinds, including the deification of man and humanity. We cherish humanness and every human being as the image of God, but our worship is reserved for the original: God himself. To the believer, the greatness of man points to God. But if humankind wishes to refer to itself alone, to be the center and ultimate meaning of everything, if it wishes to play at God, it thereby demonstrates, on the contrary, its vulnerability and nakedness (like Adam in the Garden of Eden). ———— —— — u————— But let us dwell a little longer on the spiritual experience of God’s remoteness, his transcendence. The great uncertainty to which God exposed the traditional form of the Christian religion in the previous lengthy chapter of Western spiritual history in the modern age, the most radical description of which was Nietzsche’s wellknown phrase “God is dead,” was, and remains, God’s Word to us. I am profoundly convinced of its momentousness, which is why I return to this idea in various connections in the present book. Understandably, to many Christians this Word (and the whole “eclipse of God”) has seemed bleak, incomprehensible, and absurd, like the command to kill his son must have felt to Abraham. The religious upheavals of modern times were a challenge from God that believers found hard to understand and accept. How many have actually set out for Mount Moriah with the courage 40

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to sacrifice their previous religious certainties—but also with the hope that even in that darkest and most perplexing moment of crisis God will not let them down, and they would not return sad and alone? Of course there were many who thought they must abandon God and were determined to kill God within themselves. And indeed many have done so or wish to. The challenge to their certainties was not a temptation from the devil (as many suppose who have not managed to hear the challenge to “leave your house”) but part of a test. (After all, even Satan’s temptations can be part of God’s pedagogy, as we know from the Book of Job or the story of Jesus’s fasting in the desert: then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil!)6 I am convinced nevertheless that those who have undergone that trial and stood the test may have lost many religious certainties, notions, and illusions, but they did not lose God himself; they simply experienced that God dwells deeper than they previously thought and were told—and therefore faith also must “launch out into the deep.” After all, hasn’t that precisely been the urgent message of the great Christian mystics of all time, particularly the great duo of Carmelite saints, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila? ———— —— — u————— Yes, we will find valuable keys to understanding hours of “the eclipse of God,” the “death of God,” the “dark night”—whether experienced in our own faith stories or in the history of cultures— in the works of the mystics who endured such hours in the pro cess of coming to maturity. I understand why René Girard (no doubt provocatively for many) calls Nietzsche “the greatest modern theologian after St. Paul.”7 I agree; I would simply add: and also after Master Eckhart. Master Eckhart borrowed from Paul’s letters the distinction between the “inner man” and the “outer man” and developed the concept in a remarkable way: the outer man has an “outer God”;

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the inner man knows an inner God, “a God above God”—a depth of divinity infinitely transcending the pious notions, theories, and fantasies of superficial religiosity. If alienation remains between a person’s outer and inner being (which is Eckhart’s interpretation of “original sin”), access to the inner God is hidden behind a veil of oblivion. The outer man is caught up in the web of dependencies on many external things; he is the slave of a world of overabundant “things.” He wants “something,” he wants to be “something,” to know “something.” He wants to constantly multiply this “something” through his actions and procurement, until in the end he himself becomes “something”—a thing among things. Someone who is depersonalized in this way and no longer free cannot encounter the living, inner God, because it is not a thing among things; if a superficial person worships God (and everyone worships some god, even if they have to become their own god), all they have is an “outer god,” a human notion, a projection of their desires and fears— an idol. Thank God for atheism, if it destroys gods such as these! The outer god must die if the veil of oblivion about God is to fall, ending the confusion between superficial religiosity and faith, that is, a relationship with the living God. 8 But this must also mean the death of the “outer” superficial person. ———— —— — u————— How can the “ego” die? By breaking free and gaining inner freedom from dependence on the world as a collection of achieved or anticipated “somethings.” Eckhart and his disciples maintain that it is necessary to have nothing, know nothing, want nothing, be nothing. Or more distinctly: to want nothing, have nothing, to be nothing—and to know that that nothing is God. Whoever is completely free is equal to nothing—and thus equal to God. In the world, in this rich palette of countless “somethings,” God is nothing, and thus many who maintain that God “doesn’t exist” are right in a way: at the very least he is not here and is not something. 42

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Only someone who has total inner freedom can actually encounter him: the “naked soul meets the naked Godhead.” It is useful to bring these key ideas of Eckhart’s mystic theology continually to mind. “Letting go” can indeed happen like a “breakthrough,” a dramatic quantum leap, instantaneous enlightenment—like we read about in Eckhart but also in many masters of Zen Buddhism, who understandably regard Eckhart as a kindred spirit and the greatest spiritual master of Christianity and the Western world. But we may also regard this transformation of an outward man into an inner man, who has “died to the world” and let the “outward God” die within him, so that he is now rich with God alone, as a discreet, lifelong process. In the course of it, naturally, that breakthrough is glimpsed and briefly experienced, but sometimes such moments are immediately followed by a beneficially humbling relapse of “dependence” of the outward man on old and new “somethings.” (How often have I naively thought that such experiences of God’s touch were the final, definitive “epiphany.” It took the subsequent confrontation with my own weaknesses and doubts on the “downward journey from Mount Tabor” to remind me of the angel’s words to Elijah: “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”)9 As Eckhart and other mystics say, that total freedom of “letting go” and the total certainty of repose in the nakedness of God’s truth (let us not forget that the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means “disclosure”) are the death of the ego. And although it is possible for us to experience numerous “deaths” of that kind (even worldly experience speaks of the lover’s abandonment of self in sexual intercourse as “la petite mort”), it would seem that the definitive impoverishment is reserved for the moment of death: that is where we lay aside all the structures of the world of something and fall into the fullness of God’s nothing. There is something else we should recall: One cannot freely and joyfully surrender everything until one has found deep within oneself the treasure for which, like the man in Jesus’s parable, one

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has sold everything to acquire.10 This is no self-seeking commercial calculation, as a superficial reading might suggest. For that “treasure in the field” is “the kingdom of heaven,” that nothing, in other words, that can no longer be traded, as it can buy nothing in the market of this world. It weighs nothing, and none of the money changers and traders prize it, and they will pay nothing for it. So the free exchange of “something” for “nothing” cannot take the form of an exchange of goods, and only love will find the courage for it. ———— —— — u————— But let us go even deeper. There exists yet another experience of “the death of God” and “the death of the ego.” The path to it is in many ways similar to Eckhart’s, namely, the path of Zen. I do not think that the direction taken by that path is essentially any different from the paths taken by the great mystics of Christianity. I mention it here because for many seekers nowadays—as was once the case for me—that apparent deviation via the Far East might help them to discover afresh “that treasure beneath the hearth” of their own culture, namely, Christian mysticism and the “negative (apophatic) theology” that derives from it. I once had the rare opportunity to make the acquaintance of two masters of Zen meditation: the Jesuit priest Hugo Enomyia Lassalle and Kakichi Kadowaki. I got to know them personally, not just through their books, and also engaged in repeated exercises in Zen meditation under the direction of each of them. The experience of joint meditation was subsequently revealed in a remarkable fashion by Kadowaki’s book Zen and the Bible: A Priest’s Experience.11 Kadowaki is convinced that Japanese thinking, and particularly Zen, is very close in character to the Bible message, and acquaintance with it can reveal to Christian theology a new approach to the heart of that message, which was considerably obscured by entirely different thinking, namely, the metaphysics of antiquity (and particularly of Aristotle). Many sayings in scripture, and par44

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ticularly the logia and parables of Jesus, have less in common with metaphysical syllogisms than with koans—paradoxical anecdotes or riddles, whose meaning cannot be revealed by means of the classical Western logic and rational deliberation to which we are accustomed, but only through meditation.12 “The last will be first and the first last”; “Those who wish to save their lives must lose it”; “For to those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away”; all the Beatitudes; many of the parables and “God’s Incarnation” itself (the Word became flesh and was born in a stable to the Virgin); the theanthropos dying as a criminal on a cross with the cry, “My God why have you forsaken me?” Aren’t these all one koan after another? What is reason trained by classical Western logic to make of it all? Kadowaki recommends the method of Zen. When you have exhausted reason’s vain attempts to “think its way through” to the meaning of those riddles, sit down and meditate and halt the flow of your thoughts. And when you feel you are in a state of samadhi, total immersion and deep meditation (which is the opposite of forced concentration), that word surfaces of its own accord. And should you exercise conscientiously, with patience and maximum exertion, but without any striving for “achievement,” then (perhaps) it will surrender its meaning. It will come like lightning from the sky or a tiny ray of light from beneath a closed door. The key declaration of our reflections—the two great commandments—is more than appropriate for such an approach. I don’t wish to pose as someone who has solved this koan for good and all. But there is one experience that I can share. After a time both actors “disappear”—the one who is loved and the one who loves, God and man—and only love remains. One suddenly understands a number of Eckhart’s sayings, which must sound suspicious to someone who has never had this experience: “Simple people imagine that they should see God, as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.” And further: “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and

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God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.” And finally: “To lose God for God, is a great gain, not a loss!” In the flame of the intense mystical experience of love, of mystical union, there is no longer any duality. God isn’t “out there.” God disappears in the darkness, but the darkness, as John of the Cross teaches, is the result of the dazzling excess of light that God causes the person of faith to experience. Faith is knowledge that “exceeds all human reason” (excede todo humano entendimiento sin alguna proporción);13 “the light of faith in its abundance suppresses and overwhelms that of the intellect.” Make no mistake, John of the Cross had a profound respect for rational and sensory cognition but was aware of its limits; real faith, in his view, begins at those very limits and transcends them. Faith conveys to us something we have never seen or heard and cannot be compared to anything (“because there is nothing like it”). And yet we can and must allow ourselves to listen, “to give our soul permission to hear” (consentimiento del alma de lo que entra por el oído).14 One must transcend and abandon all one’s established stereotypes (habitual modes of understanding, perceiving, and experiencing) and enter into “that which has no mode, and that is God” (lo que no tiene modo, que es Dios).15 It is necessary to bare one’s soul, because only when nothing remains between us and the will of God can there happen that union with God that is called love. At that moment we are “transformed into God by love” (trasformados en Dios por amor). We return once more to Eckhart: I and God are one. But this is the exact opposite of the proud ego that naively and blasphemously plays at God. ———— —— — u————— God is not out there. This profound experience of the mystics needs to be introduced fully into theological and philosophical thinking about God. Rather than an object, God is a point of reference from which to perceive and understand the world and ourselves: “And just as it is impossible for a viewpoint itself to be perceived, in the 46

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same way everything is included in the light of God, but God himself only in the mirror of what is perceived in his horizon.”16 This assertion is of considerable philosophical importance. The contemporary German theologian Klaus Müller makes the additional point that the idea of God conceived in this way and the acknowledgment of his existence are fundamental conditions for the exercise of human consciousness itself: Just as I know very well that I mean me, when I say “I,” so too do I know that it is not within my power to know from where I have this knowledge. Despite being irreducible, selfawareness is experienced in such a way that it refers back to a point to which it does not itself have access, but which is activated, not through self-awareness, but rather only in the event of its own occurrence. That was the meaning of what was formerly described as “ground of being.”17 How do you know that that ground is God?, the atheist asks skeptically. I answer: I don’t know beforehand, whereas your skepticism indicates a notion of God that you do already have beforehand. Only experience of contact with that ground subsequently allows me to grasp in a certain way what we denote by the word God. I can reply with a question in return: What would be the point of having the word God, if it did not signify that ground of being? ———— —— — u————— In a certain way, when one is profoundly immersed in meditation on the commandment of love, one touches that ground, which disrupts the separation of I and Thou. God is the focal point, and “I” (the ego) is no longer the subject, no longer the last source of vision but the one that is seen. The task of one meditational exercise is to step out of oneself and try to “observe one’s observer.”18 What enables one to reflect on one’s ego is the possibility to step out of it in a certain manner, to step back from oneself. There

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is a dual space into which we may “step out of ourselves”—and that dual space is offered by two different perspectives. The first consists of our surroundings, our human environment. One may, to a certain extent, “see through another’s eyes” (and there are actually people who are perhaps incapable of perceiving other than through the standards and assessments of others). We can share in a vision of ourselves from outside. But that vision records only certain external attributes; we see ourselves in the light of comparison with others. From that perspective we do not see our real being (what Martin Heidegger would call “echtes Sein”) but only that one is “such and such” (So-Sein), such as smarter or wealthier than anyone else. But there is yet another authority involved, for which German and English, for instance, have another word (das Selbst, self ). In the language of the mystics this “deeper I,” “the core,” which tends to be hidden from superficial gaze by the ego, this “soul of our soul” or “spark at the bottom of the soul” is the place where God dwells in us, the place of God’s immanence. Other authors speak in this connection about the heart. Suffice it to mention Pascal’s dictum: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” St. Augustine employs the term “memory,” but this not to be confused with the way that term is used in modern empirical psychology; if Augustine’s memoria is similar to anything in modern psychology, then it is most likely to Jung’s “collective unconscious,” the numinous realm of archetypes. In all events it is something that opens up particularly in mystic experience: in the human being there is something even deeper than the conscious ego. What is this self, “das Selbst,” this core into which we may descend in meditation and then gaze therefrom at our ego and its realm? Is it really “a place” and is it still “inside us”? Every occasion of meeting one’s own core, one’s self, is an opportunity to experience the deepest human mystery, namely, that man is a creature that transcends itself, that is always, in a certain sense, “more than man.” In his precise and perceptive analyses of human cognition and behavior, the philosopher Maurice Blondel demon48

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strated that “in our thinking there is always something more than our thinking” (our living thought always goes beyond our scholarly thought, our rational reflections beyond our sensory cognition, our unitive contemplation beyond our rational analysis; each piece of knowledge anticipates and brings into play something more than what it seemed to emerge from), “in our being there is more than our being” (we recognize ourselves as finite beings, precisely through our participation in events that transcend finiteness), “in our action there is more than our action” (the impulse of our will, and desire always go beyond what we want; it is not simply a creation of our mind but something through which we become aware of our creative ability). Something resides in us that is no longer us; it is not something that would have been placed in us from outside. “It is a stimulation that operates within the most intimate part of ourselves and without which we would not be what we are,” the commentary on Blondel’s work concludes,19 and suggests that this part of us that is more intimate than the most intimate is what Augustine called God (Deus interior intimo meo). ———— —— — u————— In light of that experience, something I have often reflected on reveals itself to me even more sharply.20 At the moment in modern times, starting with Descartes, when reality was separated into subject and object, God was made homeless. It was then logical for atheism to say: there is no God. God is truly not to be found in a world viewed that way, because God is neither an “object,” a thing among things, a being among beings, or even part of the human subject; God is not simply our idea, emotion, concept, or fantasy. But this form of God’s absence from the object-subject world need not necessarily be interpreted atheistically. There is another possible interpretation, namely, the encounter with God’s hiddenness and intangibility, God’s transcendence. The encounter with God’s transcendence is only the first word, however; Christian theology always seeks the complementary pole, the experience of God’s immanence, the closeness of God.

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“The God who ‘is’, does not exist.” This paradoxical statement by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which is very much in the spirit of Master Eckhart, expresses the deep truth of negative theology, which emerges from the depths of mystic experience. A God who would “be” in the way that things “are,” that is, in the manner of a material occurrence, would not be God; God, if we understand at all the meaning of that term, cannot, by the nature of things, be a single contingent being that “is” (i.e., that can also not be). God cannot not be, because contingent existence—a being that need not necessarily be and cannot not be—is, by definition, not God. That is the basis of an argument that runs through the history of the philosophy of religion from Anselm of Canterbury up to modern logic and the philosophers of language (often under the confusing title “the ontological proof of God’s existence”). The fact that I have elsewhere subscribed to Kearney’s concept of a “God who may be” is not in contradiction to the above. Kearney is not speaking about “God’s being” but about how God enters our lives and how we can experience him—not as a simple fact (a fact among facts, a thing among things), but as an appeal, a challenge, an offer, and, in that sense, a possibility. A God who cannot not be can be hidden from our eyes and our experience (such as in “the dark nights” in our own lives and in the history of cultures) and discovered once more. Even the “dark nights” contain the message that God resides much deeper than we generally imagine. When I speak here of “the end of religion” I am referring to the increasing implausibility of a “banal image of God.” Faith, hope, and love, which survive the “death of the banal god” and the decline of one form of Christianity, provide the opportunity to seek God in the deep dimension of reality and in life’s paradoxes. ———— —— — u————— I don’t believe that what is described nowadays by the phrase “the return of religion” is God’s “second word,” the real resurrection after “the death of God.” But maybe the spiritual thirst that is un50

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doubtedly manifesting itself in these present-day phenomena (for which, however, the strangest beverages are offered on today’s “religious market”) could be perceived as the first glimmer of a new dawn. After all, doesn’t St. John of the Cross tell us that in the night thirst itself is the light that leads us to the springs of water? I don’t intend to be besotted by illusions of a universal religious revival. I sometimes get the feeling that our civilization is like a convoy of ships that Western humanity gradually built up over the course of its history. For a long time there sailed our seas the lone venerable ship “Christianitas” of Christian universalism, into which the late medieval church loaded many values of Greek and Roman pagan culture. And then the moment came when that ship was overtaken by the comfortable ship of European modernity equipped with every technical advance. It carried aboard it an optimistic faith in humanity, progress, science, and technology, as well as objectivity and the power of rational cognition, but also those “neologisms” of Western culture, materialism and atheism. That modernity inherited from Christianity a belief in the universal validity of its values and ideals. And at the close of the twentieth century they were joined by another vessel, one that looked very strange to many: the ship of postmodernity, with its radical skepticism and relativism and slogans of multiculturalism and political correctness. I have no wish to fall prey to apocalyptic moods, but sometimes I really can’t help feeling that all three of them have gradually foundered in the shallows. And now all we have available are just little lifeboats, and possibly only very little time to decide what to salvage from the sinking ships. To act as if nothing was happening could have fatal consequences. To think that any of the boats is reparable or that we can salvage everything would seem naive; to try to cut our losses and let everything that was on board sink to the bottom of the sea would be irresponsible. Old Noah was better off; he had taken time to prepare for the flood and had God to advise him what to take and leave behind, as well as a promise that his ark would survive the deluge. The Lord hasn’t given us any such advice, and if he did we haven’t taken too much notice.

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Will we agree on what is worth saving? If an answer is required without lengthy reflection, I would salvage from the ship of postmodernity a sense of the plurality and perspectivism of human knowledge and from that of modernity critical reason and respect for the human person. When it comes to Christian culture, my decision would be the most difficult of all; I am too familiar with its treasures and have a profound emotional attachment to them. But it is indeed impossible to salvage everything, and it would probably not be a good idea anyway. Let us not allow the Bible to go under; it is a treasure house of marvelous stories, not to mention the Ten Commandments and Jesus’s parables and the Beatitudes. From the rich library of theology and philosophy let us at least save “negative theology,” which grew out of the depths of mystical experiences and is an essential tool in the battle against idolatry, a battle that we were enjoined to wage by the first commandment; after all, now more than ever before, it is necessary to distinguish faith from superstition and esoteric delusions. But maybe what the theology of tomorrow—that Kierkegaardinspired philosophical reflection of the experience of faith as a specific life orientation pervading every aspect of human existence—should retain and develop above all is the “mystery of the Trinity,” that paradoxical union of plurality and singularity. Our future theology should definitely not lose sight of “the Trinity in heaven and on earth”; it should encourage deeper thinking about God, who is the unifying basis of all plurality (the Trinity), and also about how the triune nature of God is reflected in the triune experience of Christians: in their faith, hope, and love. The task I assumed when I started to write books of philosophical and theological essays about the spiritual challenges of our times and the relationship between belief and nonbelief brought me back again and again to this “earthly Trinity.” But the theme of love, which the apostle Paul tells us is the greatest of the three, has not received fair treatment in my books so far. But perhaps the experience of love—love for and among people—is the royal route to the discovery of God’s closeness. 52

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5

————————————————————

I Want You to Be ———————— ——u———— ——————

I have spoken about the experience of God’s remoteness that is part of modern Western culture, in which traditional religiosity has dwindled and belief in God is no longer by any means an omnipresent fact of life. I am not satisfied with the widespread atheistic interpretation of this and have tried to reflect on it theologically and attempt a spiritual diagnosis of secularism. I perceive the experience of “God’s absence from culture” as a possible encounter with one of the two poles of the Christian concept of God, namely, God’s transcendence, his otherness, his inconceivability. I am indeed convinced that “God’s hiddenness” is now an important first word from God to us—and believe that his next word will follow it. Maybe there must come a period of silence from time to time so that the word of God may be heard more clearly therein. If the first word was the experience of God’s remoteness, his

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transcendence, perhaps we can expect that the second word will be an encounter with God’s closeness, his immanence. Where and how are we to seek it? ———— —— — u————— Over recent decades historians’ and sociologists’ analyses have totally challenged the view that was still universally accepted until quite recently (and still prevails in places) that secularization is history’s last word and is an irreversible one-way process. Instead the history of mankind tends to provide evidence of constantly repeated cycles of growth, decline, and repeated upsurges of various forms of religion. Religion can no longer be considered—as it was in the nineteenth century under the influence of Auguste Comte and his positivist heirs—the “childhood of mankind” and simply a passing phase of development. On the contrary, it would appear to be an anthropological constant and an inseparable dimension of human culture. When one specific form of religion loses its vitality and the ability to harmonize with other elements of the cultural system, it goes into decline and is marginalized, and the space left vacant is occupied by a new phenomenon. In that way there can be a revival of a variation of the same religion or denomination, or of some entirely different strand of religion, or in some cases the emergence of a phenomenon, which was previously “secular” in nature, but at a certain moment starts to adopt first the social role of religion and then many other of its characteristics.1 When Darwin turned biology into history and projected onto nature the social experience of the capitalism of his day—the competitive economic struggle for “the survival of the fittest”—that brilliantly creative idea introduced an extremely influential model that stimulated advances in both the natural and the social sciences. (Theology ought to be very grateful to the theory of evolution for doing away with naive creationism and offering new scope for spiritual reflection on the amazing inner dynamic of creation.)2 But all large metaphors of this kind, which become a powerful

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myth (and those who employ it forget it is a metaphor, a working model for a new categorization of phenomena and not an eternal truth), have certain limitations and a limited period of validity. The theory of secularization as a conviction about the necessary demise of religion on the one-way path of the inexorable progress of modern knowledge was one of the many vulgarized versions of Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest. When the final victory of progress and “scientific atheism” over religion predicted by Marxism went on failing to materialize, the Marxist regimes tried to help achieve the promised goal by the use of violence and sometimes by the merciless genocide of believers. But before the cocks announced the imminent dawn of Christianity’s third millennium, the specter of communism had disappeared from Europe along with the other phantoms of the dark nights of the twentieth century. But those who expected that Christianity in its previous form would occupy the space vacated after communism’s failure were also disappointed. The forms and content of religion are changeable; religion is a current that is too diverse, vital, and dynamic to be regulated permanently within firm boundaries. “You cannot step twice into the same river,” applies in this case too; religious renewal and revival are never a return to the same thing. It is true about those forms of religion that from the outside look like stable, unbroken continuity and take great pains to emphasize their “immutability,” as we often hear, particularly in Catholic circles. But continuity and immutability are two fundamentally different things! The most important work about religion in our times, Charles Taylor’s monumental Secular Age, demonstrates convincingly how in Christianity the historical and cultural context constantly transforms what remains apparently intact. Even though today’s Christians believe “the same thing” as in past centuries, they believe it differently; even when they say the same words, they understand them differently; even when they perform the same rituals in the same surroundings, those surroundings and those rituals play a different role in their lives than they did in the lives of their ancestors.3

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I was recently witness to a personal and Internet discussion among clergy of several denominations about whether and to what extent it makes sense to repeat in religious services the ancient words of the creed that reflect theological conflicts of antiquity and contain expressions whose original meanings are totally lost on the majority of today’s Christians who recite them. Who is aware nowadays that the creed combines two very different concepts of God—the Hebrew concept of God as a subject (there can only be one God, the Lord, the Creator of Heaven and Earth) and the Greek concept of “God” as a predicate—and it therefore allowed Christians in a Hellenic or Hellenized culture to talk about the divinity of Jesus without committing the blasphemy of dualism?4 In the course of that debate the question was also raised whether a creed recited as part of a peaceful religious celebration was still a creed in the same sense it was understood when those who confessed it risked public execution? Someone else responded to those who wish to update the language of the creed by quoting Chesterton’s saying that tradition is the democracy of the dead: we cannot exclude the voice of so many previous generations and place greater significance on the proud oligarchy of those who happen to be present at a given moment on this ancient scene. Nevertheless, here too the objection can be raised that the monolithic nature and unanimity of that vague host of the dead might actually be an illusion on the part of us who view it with hindsight. When we truly delve into the documents of the past we are generally very surprised to find how diversified they are. Zealous destruction of traditions is undoubtedly an act of barbarity. What sensitive guardianship of tradition requires is conscientious interpretation, because tradition itself is a living stream of continual reinterpretations of the entrusted legacy. Tradition is the historical movement of never-ending attempts to reach a deeper understanding of that legacy and render it understandable in a particular phase of a constantly changing cultural and historical context. If we just mechanically repeat inherited forms we mutilate the content; this does not benefit the tradition but rather diverts it, abandoning the current of the river for a little remote is56

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land. (The “traditionalists” among conservative Christians are surprised when we show them how relatively modern and extremely limited is the form of Christianity that they wish to conserve, and what enormous intellectual and spiritual wealth resides in much older traditions of the church; suffice it to recall the desert fathers, the Greek patristics, the negative theology of Dionysus the Areopagite, the medieval mystics, etc.) ———— —— — u————— Maybe what some called secularization and the decline of religion and others “the death of God” marked the beginning of theology’s inability to respond creatively to the changing picture of the world and mankind on the threshold of modernity, having exhausted itself with interdenominational conflict. Theology in those early days of modernity adopted unthinkingly, inadvertently—and hence uncritically—modernity’s division of reality into subject and object and to a great extent adapted the medieval dichotomy of the order of nature and the order of grace, the natural world and the supernatural world, to that new division. Emphasis on the “objectivity” (now the antithesis of subjectivity) of God and the order of grace also meant externalizing him and became a fatal step into the abyss of atheism. A purely “objective” God (emphasis on transcendence at the expense of immanence) is a God distinct from man. This undermines and even displaces the mystics’ experience of God dwelling in man. It is then quite understandable that at a time of growing awareness of human grandeur and power, people regard that kind of “external God” as competition and an obstacle to their emancipation (whereas previously he was simply an obstacle to human pride)—and eventually as an enemy to be eliminated. When the Enlightenment’s new concept of nature and natural order became universally accepted, “natural” began—naturally— to be regarded as a synonym of “real.” The “supernatural,” including the modern theological concept of God, then paradoxically found itself in the dubious sphere of purely private opinion, or

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worse still, in the dusty cupboard of discarded children’s toys and fairy tales, among the elves and gnomes. There was no place for the objective (external) supernatural in the new naturalistic image of the world, in the new concept of objectivity. “Nature” now designated the aggregate of what was perceptible by the senses, measurable and clearly apprehended by reason; it was granted a monopoly on “reality” and “objectivity.” Anything that fell outside those categories was “unreal.” Old religion started to be regarded as a purely subjective (private) matter; the radical wing of the Enlightenment considered it to be “superstition,” while Marxists saw it as a briefly surviving relic of a social order being led to the execution ground of history by the class-conscious proletariat. God thus becomes in the minds of “modern people” a banal god, who is only fit to serve as an ornament for certain celebratory moments, a favorite cliché of political rhetoric, a bogeyman for disobedient children, and a whipping boy for atheists, from Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx to Dawkins and Co. The failure to take into account the consequences of the longstanding gradual replacement of the biblical God with the Aristotelian concept of god proved fateful for Catholic theology in the modern age.5 If that classical philosophical concept of god had been seen as simply a metaphor and greater consideration had been given to the richly variegated biblical images of the Lord speaking both in a tempest and in the stillness of the heart, maybe a the ology drawing on the mutual tension of biblical images and philosophical concepts might have avoided both the rigidness of neoscholasticism and biblical fundamentalism. It would then have been obvious that God is neither “solely objective” nor “solely subjective” and that thinking about God cannot be tied to the artificial object-subject matrix. A god who is “solely objective” and a god who is “solely subjective” is a banal god; both fundamentalism and fideism are blind alleys of Christianity. The occasional passionate protests—the most striking of which was Pascal’s cry in his Memorial, “ ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,’ not of philosophers and scholars. . . . God of Jesus Christ”—remained ignored. It was not until Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and “death 58

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of God” theology that Christian theology came to realize that the death of God announced by Nietzsche and others was the death of the banal god of modern times and that that event could be liberating for Christian faith. But that liberation is far from constituting any sort of triumph but is rather a challenge to seek, to engage in intellectual activity, to “launch out into the deep.” Nicholas Lash speaks about the “end of religion.”6 By this, he means of course the end of one historically conditioned form of Christianity, which established itself particularly at the time of the Enlightenment, namely, religion as one sector of culture alongside others. But he mentions what, in his conviction, does not end, and that is faith, hope, and love. And I shall take that as my inspiration here. ———— —— — u————— Our era is becoming accustomed to a new designation, the post secular age. Secularization was the slogan of the modern age; postmodernism transcends that phase. As we enter the coming post-world, the world of multiple “posts,” it is time to set aside the paradigm of secularization along with other inventions of the Enlightenment thinkers. Postmodernism represents an interesting and attractive proposition for theology, and it is therefore not surprising that many theologians have seized on this proposition. The contemporary Belgian theologian Roger Lenaers, SJ, distinguishes three approaches to reality, three worldviews: heterono mous, autonomous, and theonomous.7 The Bible and the entire ecclesiastical tradition—patristics, scholasticism, dogma, liturgy, conciliar statements (and many homilies and pious books right up to the present)—came into existence in the world of heteronomous understanding: the basic unproblematized axiom of that approach is the existence of another, different (heteros), higher world on which our world is dependent and from which its laws (nomos) derive. Part of that world is a statement about a Redeemer, who “descended from heaven” and returned thereto; in heaven there is God and the objective of our life.

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Modernity meant rejection of the existence of “a world beyond” (as Nietzsche mockingly termed it in his controversies with “the world beyonders,” who sought, in the spirit of Platonism and Christianity—that “Platonism for the people”—to deny this world its true value). The naturalism of the natural sciences and Enlightenment humanism established a new axiom: this world is governed by its own laws; it is autonomous. Man also belongs to the world; he is the culmination of its development. Man therefore merits freedom and autonomy and must be the creator of his own ethical laws. The “other world” became unnecessary, and soon its supreme resident and ruler, the transcendental God, was declared dead, or even someone who had never really existed. Modernity is our world. For its part, postmodernity is selfcriticism but not a denial of modernity; there is no legitimate path back to premodernity. But in its criticism of modernity, postmodernity can reveal something that modernity remained blind to because of its fascination with human thought and achievement: the deeper dimension of reality.8 God, who had no place in modern autonomy, can find an even highly respectable place in the postmodern outlook, not somewhere on the fringe, in the mysterious gloom of so far unexplored enigmas, in occultism and esotericism, but in the very heart of reality, in its depths. God not “outside” but within. God as the deepest creative core of the cosmic process itself—this reconciliation of autonomy with belief in God (undoubtedly inspired by Teilhard de Char din) Lenaers calls the theonomous principle. “In this theonomous thinking, there is only one world: ours. But this world is sacred as it is the ongoing self-revelation of the sacred mystery that we call ‘God.’ ”9 This view is close to my own understanding of postmodernity and postsecularity. I came to a similar view of the world and God after a lengthy search, on a path influenced by phenomenology, depth psychology, existential philosophy, and theology, not to mention Jung, Tillich, Ricoeur, Teilhard, Lévinas, Nicholas Lash, and Jean-Luc Marion. Neither premodern religion nor modern atheism is able to answer my question about the ultimate “where 60

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from.” There is no need to construct or reconstruct an “other world,” but neither can one remain solely on the surface of the world that John’s Gospel calls “this world.” It is necessary to question the depths, to “launch out into the deep.” Here there is only this world. But it is here (in front of us, around us, and within us) together with its depth, its multiple meanings, and its paradoxes. There are many ways for us to interpret it and lead our lives: we can either seek its depth or remain on the surface. The transcendence that we call love and regard as the fulfillment of the profoundest scope of human beings does not lead somewhere away from reality but to its source, to the source from which springs that which words (God, man, neighbor, world) divide but love unites. “Whence” is external to the one who is turned inward but internal to the one who remains open. Love, Teilhard maintained, means “se décentrer,” to stop making oneself the center; and I add: to remain open to the Center, to the core. Only by constantly seeking the core (das Selbst), which we cannot grasp by definitions, notions, and concepts, which we can approach only by constantly transcending everything that tempts us into a false sense of “owning the truth,” can we avoid both rocks, the Scylla of fundamentalism and the Charybdis of atheism, and above all the banal god that is related inversely to both extremes. Beware of the banal god’s return in a new guise! The great task of theology and of pastoral spiritual accompaniment nowadays is to reject the banal god (which fundamentalism proclaims and atheism seeks to disprove) and seek the living God of the Bible and mystics, the God of paradoxes, who showed himself to Nicholas of Cusa as a “unity of contradictions” and to Pascal as fire, fire, fire—God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, God of Jesus Christ. 10 There are too many trumpets and drums on the present-day scene. On the one hand, the naively militant “new atheism” of Richard Dawkins and Co. and, on the other, its equally noisy and similarly naive counterparts: Christian fundamentalism and the “religious Right.” Let us leave the two sides to display their rival bombastic slogans on the sides of city buses and wrestle with each other. The Lord who spoke to Elijah in a still small voice is not

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present in those stormy quarrels. Great truths, as good old Nietzsche taught, “come on dove’s feet.” ———— —— — u————— How is one to accommodate the anticipated closeness of God? By longing, longing and thirst, which should deepen and be purified in the night of faith. John of the Cross maintains that in that night, thirst is our only light. In several of my texts I have dealt with the forms of atheism that are in some way akin to Christian belief: their critique can help to remove images of God that are too naive; they can be regarded as a “religious experience” of a kind, as a “Good Friday” experience of the death of God, as an encounter with the hiddenness of God and radical transcendence, and so on. A mature Christian faith can “embrace” such kinds of atheism and integrate their “partial truth”; in dialogue with them it can demonstrate that faith too experiences similar moments of “dark nights.” My readers have already found plenty of reflections on this in the present book and several of my previous books. But there also exist very different types of atheism; there is also the radical existential godlessness that is truly a sin against God. The antithesis of this godlessness is not faith (faith as a conviction) but love—faith linked with love of God. For years now I have been fascinated by a definition of love that is ascribed to St. Augustine: amo: volo, ut sis, I love you: I want you to be.11 I will try to demonstrate that we can apply this “definition” both to love of a human being and to love of God. The godlessness I referred to is its antithesis. It says to God: I want you not to be. ———— —— — u————— We proceed from the situation of people for whom this book is primarily intended, namely, those whose reflection on God leads them every time to admit humbly, we don’t know. (I have already 62

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indicated that this respect for mystery is common to a certain type of agnosticism and a certain type of faith.) If our reason (or more precisely, modern rationality) leaves us in a state of uncertainty, then we can ask ourselves the simple but cardinal question, Do I want God to be or not to be? This question awaits an answer from the profoundest depth of our hearts, from the very core of our being. Perhaps the answer to this question is far more important than our answer to the question that people ask us, that is, our opinion about whether or not God exists. If someone answers that they don’t know whether God exists, that need not conclude their reflection on God. They can ask another question: Do I yearn for him? Do I want God to be? God is not received by us as a simple fact among facts or a thing among things; God is a mystery accessible only to faith, to the gift of grace. Faith is infinitely more than acknowledgment of God’s existence on the basis of logical reflection on the work of creation spoken of by the apostle Paul and by the dogma of the First Vatican Council, which defended the competence of reason against biblical fundamentalism and merely emotional fideism. Longing and desire are certainly closer to the essence of faith than mere “conviction,” than our mere opinion. “I want” is neither “mere wishing” nor “mere feeling” but existential consent. That is why the question whether one fundamentally, from the depth of one’s heart, wants God to be may be put both to those who think that there is no God and to those who think there is, and also, of course, to those who know that they don’t know. Conviction issues from reason alone; consent gushes up from somewhere deeper, from the core (das Selbst), from the center of perceptive cognition “l’esprit de finesse,” which Pascal called the heart.12 Even those for whom the answer to the question about what God is like and what “God is” means dissolves into the cloud of unknowing, that cloud can be pierced by the arrow of deep longing: this thirst of the human heart for God (which can be hidden within a genuine thirst for meaning, for love, and for justice) penetrates God’s heart more surely than mere rational agreement with defined articles of faith. A faith permeated and kept alive by a

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yearning for love means yes not only to utterances about God but also to God himself. It is an answer of the entire person, of an entire human existence to God’s yes to us, which is also an incandescent word of love, not an expression of cool and reserved opinion. But there are also “unbelievers” who are unable to count themselves among believers for some reason and yet essentially yearn for God to be. And there are also certain “believers” who are convinced of God’s existence but for whom faith in God, as they perceive it—often as a result of perverse religious education—causes such difficulties that they intensely wish that God did not exist. Naturally I cannot “summon up” God by wishing for him; that would be Feuerbach’s or Freud’s god as wish-fulfillment, as “nothing more” than a wish. “Wishing” in this case is not “longing” or “desire” (concupiscentia) but a fundamental yearning of the heart. If I were to yearn for God in order to “have” him and use him to fulfill my wishes and my “psychological needs,” it would be akin to magic, the antithesis of faith—or selfish craving, the antithesis of love. “I want,” when it is full of love, is a conscious act of opening up the space of my freedom, in which I want to let God be God. Of course God is absolutely independent of what I wish or don’t wish, but his respect for the gift of freedom—the greatest gift that we receive from our nature—means that his explicit presence in my life (my encounter with him in faith and dwelling with him in love) presupposes and requires that yearning “I want.” God has no wish to break his way into our hearts like an uninvited guest. He wants to enter through the gate of freedom, the gate of yearning love. As the mystics would say: God himself yearns for our yearning. ———— —— — u————— Perhaps it will become much clearer to us if we relate Augustine’s definition of love to love of a human being. Here too by my love I tell my beloved: I want you to be. Clearly this phrase expresses no doubts about the existence of the loved one; their existence 64

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is obvious to me, and my senses can prove it. The sentence expresses my fundamental approval of my beloved’s existence, my joy that they exist. I don’t simply note their existence; I gratefully experience it as something that fundamentally enriches my own life; without the one I love, my self would no longer be entire; without the one I love, my world would be desolate and woefully gray. In love I open a place of safety within me for the person I love in which they can be fully and freely themselves. They don’t need to put on an act for me or pretend anything, and they don’t have constantly to merit my love by their actions. Furthermore, only in that safe space of love can a person become what previously they only potentially were. Only now can they realize their full potential, which, without love, would remain stunted, withered, and choked at the very root. I am glad that I met you; I rejoice in the miracle of love; I want the person I love to go on being with me. Yes, I would like us to be together forever. Augustine’s “I love: I want you to be” leads us to another saying, namely, Gabriel Marcel’s splendid definition: “To love someone, is to tell them: ‘You will not die.’ ” Yes, ultimately both of these “definitions of love,” which seem odd at first glance, link love with what is its mysterious transcendental source: eternity. Within true love there is always a thirst for eternity. ———— —— — u————— I want God not to be. This is not “sorrowful atheism” (I would like to believe, but I’m not able to because there are wars, etc.), or naive positivist atheism (science hasn’t discovered God, heaven is empty), or even militant anticlerical atheism, allergic to the church and the behavior of believers. “I want God not to be” is atheism that is aggressive in a different way, not only toward the church and religion, but toward God himself: God must not be. This “postulatory atheism” can be heard in Nietzsche’s wellknown saying, If there were a God or gods how could I bear not being one of them?

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Of course the answers “I don’t want there to be a God,” “I want there not to be a God,” and “There must be no God” can be motivated by many different attitudes. Probably the most common reason for rejecting God is that someone has an idea of God that is psychologically or morally unacceptable for them (e.g., the idea of a tyrannical, punitive schoolmaster, associated with childhood traumas and a twisted religious upbringing). If they reject that kind of god, they are right to do so, and it is good for their spiritual and mental health. At the time of the Enlightenment and its fascination for the ideal of human adulthood and emancipation, the idea of a patriarchal celestial monarch was rejected in the name of human liberty; now that our knowledge of dynastic and politically absolutist monarchs tends to be limited to textbooks, this idea of God (and hence fear of it) would seem fairly rare in my view. Nonetheless, I continue to encounter it all the time in its subtler form, namely, that of a god torturing human beings with inward pangs of conscience. Christians can ascertain just how pathological and anti-Christian this notion can be by means of the time-proven traditional practice of repentance. If after honestly renouncing their faults and what gave rise to them—as much as they are able—in the act of repentance, acknowledging them before God and accepting the assurance of God’s forgiveness (the assurance that is the core of the Gospel), those pangs of conscience go on returning and disturbing their peace of mind, then they can be sure that these feelings are not the voice of God and are not to be taken seriously. This time-honored advice dates back to the desert fathers and the saintly confessors and is still part of pastoral recommendations today, which are supported by contemporary psychological and pedagogical findings. In the minds of many nonbelievers, the concept of God is not entirely an “an empty drawer” lacking any notion; they cannot be said to be totally ignorant of what is meant by the term “God.” They have some idea (albeit vague, maybe) about what they are rejecting. One can readily understand that those who nurture inside themselves some obscure idea of God “want God not to exist”—sometimes quite simply because they don’t know 66

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what they would do in their world with the bogeyman that they imagine the word God to mean. In all those cases, as believers we can understand their position; I am sure we also would not want such a god to exist, or for God to be like that. The question of God is not theoretical but existential. When we reflect on it we don’t ask it on “neutral ground”; we don’t build our answer to it like a house on a green field: as a rule we have already answered it somewhere in the unconscious depths of our existence before we theoretically and explicitly asked it. The explanation that they reject only a caricature of God cannot be applied to all who reject God. People who follow the paths of willfulness and live a lie have already made a decision: they need to believe in the nonexistence of God.13 The denial of God—as Nietzsche already knew well— can be “the revenge on the witness.”14 There are people who (often without admitting it) want God not to be quite simply because they do not want the moral order and fundamental ethical commandments based on belief in God to apply. If there was a God, and all the Ten Commandments (including the first ones) really applied, then their way of life would be blameworthy; they would no longer be “marvelously successful” but simply bad people. If God exists, then success is not a god, then power and money and all other earthly powers no longer have the last word; if God exists, then values other than those commonly revered among people would have real worth. It is said that when the news of the death of Cardinal Richelieu was announced to the pope, the pope said nothing for a long time and then commented, “If there is a God, Cardinal Richelieu will have much to answer for. If not, he has done very well.” All who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, the Bible says. Dostoevsky says something similar in his famous sentence, “If there is no God everything is permitted.” I have already written much about the possible subjective honorable motives of many atheists. But let us not ignore the fact that there are also people whose existential “no” to God, whose longing for God not to be, stems from fear of the light in which they would see the

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unpalatable truth about themselves, from fear of the voice that would awaken the conscience that they have managed to put to sleep. It is possible that there still exists a devoutness of some devout people based on fear; but there definitely exists an atheism dictated by fear. When I wrote some time ago following the death of an actress who was also a Communist official that I believed she was now no doubt surprised to find that God existed after all and that I wished sincerely for it to be a pleasant surprise for her, because God is mercy itself and boundless love, I received a flood of nasty hateful letters: How dare I declare that God exists! If those atheists had really been sure of their atheism they would have simply brushed my words aside as naive silliness; the extent to which my words incensed them, however, revealed that they are not altogether sure about it, and the mere fact that someone recognizes divine judgment after death fills them with unsettling fear. Moreover, some of those seemingly consistent atheists did not hesitate to wish that I fry in hell for eternity after my death on account of my words, while others assured me rather illogically that when I died I would be surprised to find that nothing exists after this life. ———— —— — u————— I have just presented examples of somewhat comical atheism. But is it possible that someone knows in their heart of hearts that a God exists, yet wants him not to be? Yes, even this “radical godlessness” is conceivable, although we can only contemplate it theoretically and have to be careful when tempted to attribute that attitude to someone in particular. I think that there are two forms of this kind of rejection of God: demonic rebellion and despair. Christian and Jewish traditions attribute the ultimate source and origin of demonic rebellion to the “rebellion of the angels”: that haughty “Non serviam” (I will not serve) addressed to God by a perfect original being. That rebellion is echoed in “original sin,” the disobedience of the first parents in the Garden of Eden: seduced by a demon they refused to trust God, his word or his 68

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will; they wanted to “be like God, knowing good and evil”— de facto taking the place of God and deciding for themselves without God and against God what is good and what is bad. That is the traditional theological version of the answer to the question about the origin of evil. From a psychological standpoint, ratification of that “original sin” is narcissistic pride, inflated ego, playing at God, the attempt to take charge of one’s own life without any concern for one’s surroundings or for others. Fanatical deification of one’s own truth and the truth of one’s own group, lack of social consideration, exploitation, and irresponsible treatment of nature are just some aspects of that attitude. “We’ll tell the wind and rain when to rain and to blow,” the Communists sang when I was a boy. Even after over twenty years, our country hasn’t fully recovered from the Communists’ attempt to take nature, history, and human souls under their control, and it is far from cured. In the end, God is the only barrier to the tragic “success” of such self-annihilatory plans that destroy God’s image in man, and in nature, the magnificent symphony of creation. If God is God, man cannot be God. (And inversely, as the Hasidic rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk put it, “God can be God only if you aren’t.”)15 That is why the darkest and profoundest expression of the original sin of playing at God—one constantly repeated throughout human history—is the longing for God not to be. The second expression of the same is despair. This is often the tragic outcome of playing at God when one realizes that the game is doomed to failure. The well-chosen response to that failure and a healthy expression of overcoming pride is the healing process of repentance. The tragic reaction is despair: instead of turning to God, hopelessly turning into oneself. We can sometimes confuse despair with the principal disease of our times: depression. Although these two phenomena may go hand in hand and merge in some cases, they are nonetheless distinct: depression is an illness, whereas despair is a sin. There exists human and psychologically describable despair as a reaction to many life tragedies; such despair is serious, because it

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can result in mental breakdown and end in suicide. But the despair that constitutes the refusal to change after failure of the lie of pride is something else, something deeper and more terrifying. I fear that beneath the mask of “fun,” which is omnipresent in our civilization, there hides not merely joylessness, boredom, and depression, but quite often that spiritual despair that Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death.” ———— —— — u————— Maybe those who are totally convinced of God’s existence, whether they inherited their religious certainties from their forebears or were born into a setting where they imbibed them with their mother’s milk, so to speak, or whether they arrived at them through personal conversion, consider that the longing for God—that “I want you to be”—is irrelevant for them. Perhaps they consider what I write to be useful for beginners who are still seeking, who have gotten no further than the anteroom of faith, whereas they are much further ahead; they have already found and possess their reward, a firm place in the inner sanctum of the church and faith. I passionately disagree with such a concept of religion. A faith that considers that it no longer needs the flame of yearning is deathly cold; if it considers that it no longer needs to set out on a further journey of seeking and asking, it is paralyzed. If religious conviction does not comprise passionate consent, if “I know you are” is not enlivened by the longing of love, by that “I want you to be,” then faith turns into ideology. It thereby loses its unmistakable spicy saltiness and is no longer of any use but only fit to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.16 As happens to it frequently, and rightly so! Once again: crucial to whether or not I am truly, existentially, a believer or a nonbeliever, to whether I am open to God and his love or closed to him in perverse self-love, is not what I think about God’s existence but what I profoundly want or do not want God to be. God does not depend on it; but my salvation clearly does. 70

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6

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The Closeness of God ———————— ——u———— ——————

I have indicated at least a few possible answers to the question of where and how to seek the closeness of God at times of God’s remoteness (in the history of cultures or in one’s own spiritual seeking). God is present in our patience, the patience of faith, love, and hope, when we are confronted with God’s silence and the impatience of atheists, religious fundamentalists, and enthusiasts.1 God is here in our very yearning for him: from a theological perspective that yearning is a gift, an expression of grace. “For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure,” the apostle Paul writes.2 Some Christian mystics and Jewish rabbis, particularly in commentaries on the Song of Songs, are fond of expanding on the idea that all our

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seeking and longing are, without our realizing it, responses to God’s previous loving search for us. In his Confessions, Augustine testifies to this with passion: I searched because I had already been sought; I searched for God in all possible ways and in all possible places, but while I was outside he was already within, right inside me. “You did not choose me but I chose you,” Jesus says. But there applies here also what Thomas Aquinas emphasized: Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipiendi recipitur.3 Even the ways in which someone seeks and longs for God depend on the nature of the person and the subjective conditions in which they live and the language in which they think. These might take the form of yearning for meaning, love, or truth; I believe that even when yearning assumes such forms, wherever we encounter it, we are permitted to hope that they are instinctive reactions to that expectant closeness of God that preceded them, about which we read in the closing book of the Bible: “I am standing at the door, knocking.”4 But we must never duck the skeptical questions. Are we not too glibly confusing human matters with divine matters? Will our endeavor to reveal God in the human end up with us revealing in our understanding of God only the human, the all too human? Isn’t there a danger in our yearning for God that our emotional enthusiasm will turn God into a screen onto which it will be easy to project the contents of our wishes, dreams, and fantasies? Doesn’t the authenticity of that longing still need to be tested in some way? ———— —— — u————— When I prepare couples for marriage, I put to them what I regard as a fundamental question: Is your relationship in the “falling in love” phase or the phase of love? Falling in love is a beautiful phase of life, but there is a danger that what we really love in the other person is our own (often unconscious) image of an ideal partner. It is “transference,” the projection of part of ourselves

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onto the other. A marriage entered into hastily in this poetic but still immature phase can end in mutually bitter disappointment of the partners when the initial enchantment wears off, and mutual punishment for the rest of their lives because the one failed to fulfill the unrealistic expectations of the other. Converts are at similar risk: falling in love with God and the church needs to come up against reality and undergo the crisis that such a confrontation usually engenders. Reevaluation of an idealized image of the church happens quite soon, particularly nowadays. 5 (This need not come as such a shock now, because people joining the church are already prepared for the worst, thanks to the media and its references to religion; often, on the contrary, they discover to their relief that the church environment is not as bad as the liberal media make out and as most outsiders imagine.) But of course there exist idealistic notions not only about the church as an institution but also about spiritual life, and these excessive expectations have to run aground as well.6 We are still at the tail end of the great cultural revolution caused by the popularization of psychoanalysis and humanist psychology, when the restraints of traditional social conventions were broken down and emotionality and its attendant “libidinous energy” were no longer held in check. Many people continue to confuse authenticity with emotional spontaneity, and regard the intensity of an emotional experience as the main criterion for assessing an event in their own lives. That shift had a crucial impact on how the concept of love was perceived, and the confusion of love with a mere emotional experience has had tragic consequences both for marriage and for spiritual life. People are so fascinated with the blossom and then suddenly disappointed when the blossom naturally fades that they don’t wait around for the fruit. “I don’t feel anything for her anymore”: this somewhat exaggerated description of the development of a relationship from the romantic phase of falling in love to the realism of everyday sharing is becoming an excuse for ending a marriage or killing off a relationship. “After all, I can’t make myself pray if I don’t feel anything when I do it,” is the equally bogus

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excuse given for abandoning loyalty and patience on the road to spiritual maturity. Where is there still for people to discover that crises are not a sign to give up or even to passively “put up with things” but a challenge to react creatively and go deeper? Love between partners needs to finally leave the Eden of springtime romantic enchantment and put down roots in everyday life; only then can the very necessary occasional return to that Eden be experienced as a refreshing festive gift. A loving partnership needs to be rooted, “grounded.” The foolish yearning for endless holiday leads to boredom and disenchantment. It is only when one makes a faithful home in the everyday world that the holiday makes sense as a regular return to the roots of mutual love. The longing for a permanent holiday without any workdays, that typical disease of our times, was accurately described by Milan Kundera in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which has become a cult novel in certain circles. The protagonist of the book seems to me like a further illustration of an attitude to life that many these days describe as “postmodern”; Kierkegaard called that “stage of life” “aesthetic” and chose Don Juan as its archetype. An aesthete lives on the surface, fascinated by the everchanging play of the waves on the surface of the sea and never venturing into its depths. Like Don Juan, Kundera’s Tomáš changes his partners and his experiences, but he himself does not change; his life is a constant return of the same thing. Nevertheless, in the very title of the novel Kundera indicates a certain message to the reader: this lightness is unbearable. The Czech poet Vladimír Holan expressed it with surprisingly unlyrical pithiness: “Being is not a light matter . . . only turds are light.” 7 From my own practical experience of psychotherapy and the confessional, I know quite a lot about the price people pay for that “lightness” of living on the surface, what Heidegger called the “inauthentic life of pastimes.” Often the price is depression, a frustrated need for meaning and deeper rootedness; and anxiety at the strenuously displaced awareness of the transience and futility of this way of life, the fear of an eventual fall into the “nothing” on which such a life is built and which, in spite of all the 74

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amusement, they catch a glimpse of from time to time. Yes, in the end that kind of life, that “nothing” built on sand—which is the exact opposite of Eckhart’s Nothing—is boring, empty, and unbearable. When I was pondering a possible remedy for the unbearableness of that lightness, St. Paul’s words came to mind: Love bears all things. In the New Testament love is not perceived as an intoxicating sense of erotic enchantment but as a remarkable force that “bears all things,” including the real burden of life that people flee from into the illusions of lightness. Freud once unmasked religion as an illusion, as an escape from the harshness of the world into a world of fantasy that readily fulfills the deep but unreal wishes of people who refuse to stop being children. Of course there exist forms of religion to which Freud’s diagnosis applies. But nowadays Freud’s analysis is far more applicable to a widespread type of atheistic nihilism that produces postmodern earthly paradises—those fun parks of the “lightness of being” that are so enticing at first glance but unbearable on closer inspection. Can Christianity today offer an alternative path away from that illusory lightness, one that would teach how to endure the burden and entire truth of life? And if this way is love, as we read in scripture, what is the nature of “Christian love”? What is the nature of this love that Christians say is identical with what they call by the name “God”? ———— —— — u————— For an answer to that question we must recall the whole of Jesus’s saying about which of the commandments of the Law is the greatest: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”8 Jesus fundamentally links love of God with love for one’s neighbor. And in so doing he “grounds” it, rooting it deeply in the everyday reality of life. Should we be too tempted to be carried

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away by the romantic sentimentality of “celestial love,” there is always a neighbor just outside our door. Sometimes the neighbor stands or lies there in a very inconvenient way, like the man set upon by robbers in the parable of the Good Samaritan who delayed and got in the way of people hurrying to the temple to fulfill their religious duties.9 But with that parable, which in the Gospel immediately complements and explains the dual commandment to love, Jesus teaches that the path we hurry along, ignoring the pain and needs of other people, really does not lead to God. By bringing love of God down to earth in this way Jesus submits it to a test of authenticity. In a certain manner he brings our relationship with God down to earth too. For him “on earth as it is in heaven” applies here and now. Jesus offers no ideological scheme for the revolutionary reconstruction of human society aimed at building “paradise on earth” through human power; we’ve lived through enough tragic experiments of that kind. But his teaching that “heaven” (God, who seemed so remote) is already here, and here in our neighbor: that is “revolutionary” without any doubt. I can experience it in my relationship with the person to whom I become a neighbor. “Hell is other people,” said Sartre in the words of one of the characters of his well-known play. “Heaven is other people,” says Jesus. When you show caring, compassionate, and practically helpful love to your neighbor you are already experiencing “heaven.” God is not out there, we have agreed. But our neighbors are, and when I take a loving step toward them, God will be in that love between us. The kingdom of heaven is already among you, Jesus told people whose pious gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the horizon of the world and history. According to the New Testament “love of God” that is divorced from compassionate, selfless, and helpful love of people is hypocrisy: “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”10 Those who hurry to the temple before reconciling themselves with their brother, or fail to recognize their brother in the “wounded man at the side of the road,” 76

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are steered back from this blind alley of their inhuman piety: the smoke of their ritual sacrifices will not rise to God, and God will not hear their prayers. Acts of love implicitly contain faith, and faith can be demonstrated in them, whereas mere faith (albeit “explicit”) is simply dead without that dimension, as the apostle James declared,11 and as I have already recalled in my reflections on implicit faith. According to Jesus, compassionate love for one’s neighbors, particularly “the least”—the needy, the suffering, the sick, and the oppressed—implies love for him, and indeed that love is present in the lives of those who did not know him.12 ———— —— — u————— So in answer to the question of where we are to seek God’s closeness, we may reply categorically in the spirit of Jesus’s dual commandment to love: in our neighbor, in love for our neighbor. But that answer has its snags too: Aren’t we thereby dissolving Christianity into mere humanism? In order to avoid running aground in that way, let us give some thought to the legacy of Ludwig Feuerbach and Emmanuel Lévinas, two philosophers who have dealt in two very different ways with the religious dimension of love between people. The first is the forefather of secular humanism, for many people (including Marx and other “left Hegelians”) the guide on the journey to atheism; the other was a modern French philosopher of Jewish ancestry who inspired many postmodern thinkers to take a new path of philosophical reflection about God. Feuerbach was the chief architect of the temple of Man-God, modern humanism. Man will be a god for man, he promised, and in order to achieve that ideal one essential condition must be fulfilled: God must be eliminated. Feuerbach regarded himself as “an heir of Christianity” (and on other occasions as the “new Luther”), and he presented his atheistic philosophy as a radical reinterpretation of the Christian message for the modern man.13 His ambitious plan was to “abolish and transcend” Christianity.14

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Theology should be abolished and reduced to anthropology! Feuerbach therefore proposed a new hermeneutics of religious language in the spirit of secular humanism and attempted to reinterpret religious sayings in popular language. So the sentence, “God is love,” in fact means nothing but love is divine. Let us not pour the baby out with the bathwater, Feuerbach the atheist urges: Let us erase the noun God but retain its attributes: love, mercy, philanthropy, forgiveness, goodness are divine. But now the enlightened Man is the god. “The external god,” the “celestial one,” is simply a human projection. Man simply projected onto the heavens “his own nature” and in so doing has allowed himself to be deprived of it. God as a projection of man, of the part of him that has been stolen, if man regards it as a fact, limits and threatens him. After exhalation (sending one’s dignity to the distant heavens) there must follow inhalation: man must bring the heavens down to earth and God back to himself. After religion has been abolished and transformed into earthly humanism man will no longer be a wolf for man; man will be god for man! Paradise on earth! The atheist experiment doesn’t seem to have had the anticipated result, however. In particular, attempts to implement Feuerbach’s therapy of alienation—the drawing of God into man—has had fatal results. Nowadays people in the West don’t have the problem of a God competing with them and thereby harming them but rather of the hypertrophy of their own ego that is the result of drawing the divinity down to earth. The problem is that a deity pulled down to earth still remains “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,”15 something that defies our control, and empowers, enraptures, or shakes us. Our problem is more what are we to do with this deity that we have appropriated. People have successively projected it into the idea of nation, race, leaders, the historically chosen class of proletarians, political parties, the affluent society, or the “invisible hand of the market” that sorts everything out; at other times it has been regarded as a powerful, mysterious demon of some international conspiracy or other global threat. 78

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A stolen deity is not so easy to tame as Marx’s hero Prometheus thought; it is too dangerous and uncontrollable a fire, with which it is inadvisable to play too long. So many destructive conflagrations on our planet have already been caused by the godlike demands of individuals or groups, as well as the projections of a deity hauled down from heaven and embodied in various earthly values, ideas, and ideologies! “God drawn down into man” neither cures nor enriches human nature but deforms it. “Contamination by God” might be the diagnosis we could apply today to those atheists who are in thrall to the religious worship of worldly values and the absolutization of the relative.16 When man becomes a god it doesn’t transform earth into paradise; rather the contrary. A deified man can be a competing god with respect to another man-god; besides there always tended to be quarrels and wars among the gods, rather than celestial peace. I don’t know about the conditions in heaven, but earth is definitely too small and restricted for the godlike demands of so many pretenders to the throne of the Lord of the Universe. The man who abolished God, who killed him and ate him (let us recall Freud’s fascinating myth of the origin of religion and morality in the event of killing and devouring the Father),17 did not rid the world of fear, anxiety, and violence; rather the contrary! ———— —— — u————— And yet there is a spark of genius in Feuerbach’s view. There can be no doubt that people project into their image of God a lot of themselves—their wishes and fears, their experiences and their hidden fantasies. This fragment of truth, this penetrating observation (which admittedly had already been voiced by the “enlightened” among the philosophers of ancient Greece regarding the gods of Greek mythology, and the prophets of Israel with respect to the pagan idols, though few were bold enough to think the same in a Christian environment), was duly developed by Marx, Freud, and, in a certain sense, Nietzsche and many others. One could apply to Feuerbach’s philosophy what I have been trying to

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say in my earlier reflections on atheism: atheism contains only part of the truth; it doesn’t say the rest; it stops short and finishes its argument too soon and abruptly.18 Feuerbach is one of phenomenology’s forerunners. Had he freed himself from the naïveté of nineteenth-century materialism and positivism and his intuition had brought him to the point eventually reached by twentieth-century phenomenology, then perhaps he would have become a fellow traveler of Lévinas—and maybe, like Lévinas, whose original philosophy of religion is touched on later, he would have been a witness of the “hidden birth of religion in the neighbor.” Would he not have come to believe that “exactly in the transcendental depths of man the revelation of the absolute takes place”?19 Feuerbach’s limiting error was above all that positivistic simplification of nothing but: God is nothing but a human projection. Of course it would be worthwhile to accomplish one part of Feuerbach’s plan: to unmask and deconstruct the purely external god, that caricature of God located among objects (albeit “sacred” or “celestial” objects). But to negate that “objectivist” notion of God in the conviction that God is “nothing but” a subjective human notion is too rash and brutal. For a very long time already mysticism has known a different answer: the discovery of God in radical immanence, God who resides in the depth of my self, yet is not simply part of my self, because the human self is fundamentally open and transcendental. Another answer is proposed by Lévinas, Buber, and the entire modern philosophy of dialogue: God is revealed in the Thou of the neighbor. This opens up an entirely new perspective for thinking about God and for the theology of love. The idea that man will be God for man is certainly too beautiful for us to quickly abandon it. If we are to find a Christian sense in that idea, then it is the sentence, “God is love.” It is not a matter of a person regarding himself or another person as God; indeed, I regard the fact that a person will not play at God or deify another person as a fundamental condition for them both to discover the “divine” in

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the depth of the mutual relationship. God is not “a third person” in the relationship between two people; God is the basis and source of that relationship. Can one agree with Feuerbach’s statement that “love is God”? Yes, to a certain extent; but I don’t think that the statement necessarily implies an atheistic conclusion. We may also—borrowing a favorite phrase of his pupil Marx—turn Feuerbach “on his head.” Feuerbach discovered the humanist content of religion and reduced religion to a human anthropology; but now we can emerge from “reduced humanism” into “integral humanism”: if the Enlightenment thinkers were able (rightly) to glimpse (human, all too human) humanism through the forest of religious assertions, then God may slowly filter through to us through humanity, through humanism, and eventually shine once more. ———— —— — u————— And where and how will I meet God then? Emmanuel Lévinas’s answer to that was a remarkable assertion: When I look into the face of the other the idea of God surfaces within me. “When I encounter a face God comes to mind. God speaks through the face.”20 I can’t meet God in a direct relationship, in some theoretical acquaintance, Lévinas maintains (because God cannot be apprehended by reason), or in some mystical fusion. A relationship with God is only possible through the Other, only in the Other’s face is Infinity revealed. One human being and another human being, this is the setting for transcendence. “Looking into the face of the Other” is of particular and even crucial importance in Lévinas’s philosophy. The face is a revelation, a visitation, an ethical irruption into the order of the world. The face of the Other is naked, uncovered, vulnerable. The face of the Other brings to mind the commandment Thou shalt not kill. In the nakedness of the Other’s face is not simply defenselessness but also unconditional authority: in the nakedness of the Other’s face there appears an implicit appeal of Infinity and its exteriority.

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By “exteriority,” Lévinas meant the right to one’s own territory; I respect the other only when I respect their difference and I give up attempts to draw them onto my territory, that is, to assimilate and modify them to myself. Infinity (God) also has “its space,” its difference; it is absolutely different from everything we know and control. Lévinas diverges from traditional metaphysical ontology. For him as for the mystics, God is “above being,” nay more: for him transcendence means that “God and being cannot be thought about together.”21 God is what challenges me when I meet the Other faceto-face. And the substance of that challenge, of that implicit appeal, is a calling and vocation to responsibility for the other. According to Lévinas, responsibility for the Other is “the harsh name we call love of one’s neighbor.”22 In this responsibility resides the meaning of every human life; this responsibility is also the meaning of love. There is nothing romantic about love in Lévinas’s thinking; it is the fulfillment of a commandment: love is the law. The essence of humanity does not reside in Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” but in the answer to God’s call in the spirit of the Israelite prophets: “Here I am.” One is the hostage of one’s neighbor, says Lévinas. But this “commitment” and pledge is precisely a source of freedom: “A free man is pledged to his neighbor.” This is a “difficult freedom,” however, Lévinas adds.23 In the face-to-face relationship, he maintains, I can never have a clear conscience, I can never say I have done enough. Another aspect of Lévinas’s concept of love as responsibility is his emphasis on the asymmetry of the relationship: the Other must always have priority over oneself. If the relationship was mutually balanced, each would wait for the other to start to show concern. That asymmetry in favor of the Other is the fundamental condition for the existence of good in the world. This entire ethic of responsibility is demanding. Lévinas admits that there is a “seed of madness” in the requirement for that extreme responsibility for the Other. He knows that this is not

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the way our world “operates.” But isn’t its demanding nature remi niscent of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, or his radical demand, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”24 ———— —— — u————— To sum up: what Christianity has to match against egomania and contamination by a deity credited to man is the specific Christian concept of love. It is necessary to discover anew what Jesus’s “dual commandment” means—first through thorough reflection but at the same time “in practice,” because genuine reflection and life experience cannot be separated so easily. I have tried to show in my reflection on Feuerbach’s project of secular humanism why I don’t believe in the simple reduction of that dual commandment to one single commandment. In the same way that I fear a religion that forgets man on account of its zealous attachment to God, I distrust the reduction of Christianity to mere worldly humanism. “Humanism is not enough.”25 In answer to the question what are we to do with a “deity” that we cannot “return to heaven” but already did so much damage as long as people took ownership of it, drew it into their ego, or projected it onto various worldly realities, we can certainly declare with Lévinas that what can and should be holy for us is the Other, our neighbor. But at the same time we must resist the temptation to “deify” any human being (which the Lord of the Bible explicitly forbids) or even the very “idea of humanity.” What we need to do is discover the Thou, overshadowed by our I (ego)—and be capable of giving Thou priority over I. Only then through love for the human “Thou” can we glimpse or experience the “Thou” of God himself. If I had to give some succinct definition of love, then it would probably be, We really love that to which we are able to give priority over I. Loving means putting the one we love first. Loving means freely and joyfully retreating into the shadow of Thou.

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“A guest in your house is God in your house,” an old Czech saying goes. “The other” (whether foreigner or guest) represents God. The saying holds a deep truth for us: If we love so that we forget about ourselves, so that we transcend our own egoistic interests and demands, then in the one we love in this way, such as a person to whom we show love selflessly and unconditionally, we truly (albeit “anonymously” perhaps) encounter that which (or the one who) radically transcends us: with God. “God is love,” scripture says. If I had to give some succinct “definition of God,” I would say, God is the depths that we enter when we transcend ourselves in love.

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7

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An Open Gate ———————— ——u———— ——————

We are meditating on the challenge to love, to love God and people—all people, including our enemies. I am aware that there are still many omissions, but before I make bold to reflect further on this radical challenge, let us turn our thoughts to the one from whose lips and heart that challenge to human history emerged: Jesus of Nazareth. Pope Benedict XVI has often spoken about the fact that for many people nowadays (and, let me add, for many people in the church or on its fringes) God tends to be an unknown, mysterious God—an absolute mystery.1 In his first policy encyclical, Deus caritas est, possibly the most beautiful papal encyclical that has ever been published, Pope Benedict deals less with the traditional metaphysical preamble of faith and the philosophical proof of God and prefers instead to cite the words of scripture saying that no one has ever seen God.

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But soon (maybe too soon for some readers) he proposes a traditional Christian solution: reference to Christ. After speaking about the impenetrable mystery of God he immediately adds that God did not wish to remain simply a hidden God, of course: that is why he revealed himself, and particularly in his Word, his incarnate Word, Jesus of Nazareth. ———— —— — u————— For many people who have difficulties with the notion of a transcendental God (and who doesn’t?), it is not difficult to fall in love with the man Jesus as he is described in the Gospels. Maybe it is feasible for them to accept the man from Nazareth as “a window into God at work” and accept his words: Whoever has seen me has seen the Father and I am in the Father and the Father is in me.2 If we wanted to gain a truly authentic understanding of the sentences used by the church down the ages to interpret Jesus’s words, “The Father and I are one” (e.g., Jesus is the incarnation of God’s Word, the Only-Begotten Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, consubstantial with God in his divinity and consubstantial with us in his humanity, etc.),3 we would have to immerse ourselves in the history of theology and the history of dogma, and in the context of those sentences, as well as in the history of perception of the philosophical concepts and mythological images used here. Moreover, trying to find an interpretation of those sentences that was understandable for today’s perceptions (while avoiding the creation of new versions of many of the old Christological heresies) is by no means easy. On the other hand, learning simply to repeat the dogmatic statements in their popularly diluted catechistic form without understanding the context hardly substitutes for the joyful “I learned it!” of the rabbinical pupil in the Hasidic story mentioned in the first chapter of the present book. Maybe a more appropriate path would be to return to the stories in which the Gospels describe the moments when it suddenly dawns on Jesus’s disciples that their master Jesus is Lord, and for some unknown reason they were open to the immediacy

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of God’s presence: the transfiguration on the mountain, the feeding of the multitude, the supper at Emmaus, the sight of the scars left by the nails of crucifixion for Thomas. It is my belief that love for the man of Nazareth grows out of conscientious meditation on the Gospel texts and that love will help us understand and experience his uniqueness. Only when we can say sincerely with the apostle Peter, “You know I love you,” may we truly (“in the Holy Spirit”) pronounce the key sentence in the confession of faith: Jesus Christ is Lord.4 ———— —— — u————— For many people today the assertion of Christ’s uniqueness sounds like the apostle Paul’s talk of resurrection did to his listeners at the Areopagus in Athens: “We should like to hear you on this some other time,” they say and turn away.5 The Christian allusion to Christ is associated with a claim to exclusiveness that smacks of cultural narrow-mindedness or even outright ideological imperialism to the inhabitants of the multistoried, multifaceted, and multicolored structure of global civilization. Why only Jesus and not anyone else? But here too a careful distinction must be made. Yes, the God of the Bible is a “jealous God,” and Christians have no intention of including the Only-Begotten Son and Savior of the World that they have come to believe in among the pantheon of deities and heroes. They refuse to conceive of him as just one of the many examples of the sacred studied by religionists. This is undoubtedly a legitimate attitude and one that Christ’s disciples cannot retreat from. Nevertheless, at the same time it is necessary to admit that some of the ways in which Christians have presented and continue to present Jesus and his uniqueness, as well as the manner in which they interpret some of his sayings, are indeed needlessly arrogant and misleading. To take just one example: Jesus’s statement, “No one comes to the Father except through me.”6 Few words of Jesus have been so often misused against the Spirit of

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Jesus—his spirit of generous love transcending all boundaries! Those who regard themselves as the “exclusive owners of Christ” and hence owners of all truth and defenders of their monopoly use those words chiefly as a No Entry sign for those who show any kind of sympathy for what isn’t explicitly Christian and suspect them of the heresy of “religious pluralism.” Jesus’s path is indeed arduous and steep; it is not a comfortable all-inclusive road. But Jesus’s embrace is not narrow. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me,” Jesus says in the well-known scene of the Last Judgment.7 That means that one of the outcomes of the Incarnation of God’s boundless love shown in Jesus—and it only appears fully at the moment of the Judgment— is also that in every poor and needy person Jesus himself is waiting for us. And if we respond to the need of the poor we meet him and through him we enter the door leading to the Father. And thus we attain to the joy of the chosen ones at the right hand of God— even when our motives for loving solidarity are not explicitly Christian, even when we do not recognize Christ until the very hour of the Judgment. In the scene of the judgment of humanity the “chosen ones” are surprised to find that it was toward Jesus they had acted out of love: “Lord, when was it that we saw you?” “I am the gate,” Jesus says;8 but let us take care not to limit Christ’s “I,” which he himself broadened by identifying with all the needy (and certainly not only the needy in a material and social sense). Let us take care not to close the wide open gate of his love, or to block it and “screen out” those who are not allowed to enter: that is not our job. Jesus refused and still refuses to answer the curious questions of his disciples about how many will be saved and who they will be.9 “Strive to enter,” is his response to their concerns. Jesus is the gate, and this gate is open in every person who needs our help and closeness. In that sense, without denying Jesus’s uniqueness, we experience him as infinitely multiple gates. “The little ones” represent Christ in this world. The great, the hard-hearted, the worldly wise, the cunning, they won’t reveal 88

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him; their egos eclipse him. They don’t consider themselves needy, even though they often lack life’s real happiness or treasure. When we are considering the poor and the least who represent Christ (they literally re-present him to us), who are the gate to Christ and through him to the Father, God, we must not only have in mind those who are potential “objects” of our social concern. We too can and should become small—until we become like children once more,10 until we shrink our egos in order to enter the kingdom of heaven and be able to help others along this path. These words bring to my mind the low door into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem and a saying from the treasury of Hasidic wisdom: Nowadays no one is capable of finding God, because they are unwilling to stoop low enough! We have before us another of Christianity’s koans: What is great in the eyes of people is small in the eyes of God, what people consider small and insignificant, God considers great.11 ———— —— — u————— Jesus is a gate—an open gate! Hardly any of the statements in the Gospels whereby Jesus opens our understanding of what he is are so perfectly kenotic, that is, express the kenosis (self-giving, selfsurrendering, self-emptying) that Paul talks about in his letter to the Philippians: Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of  God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death— even death on a cross. (Phil. 2:5 – 8)

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A gateway is above all an open, empty space through which one may pass: coming in and going out; it is the opposite of ramparts, which enclose and are impenetrable. There are many places in the New Testament where Jesus is described as the goal, the alpha and omega, the head, the High Priest, the one seated at the right hand of God’s throne, as the one who will “draw all people” to himself. But precisely as such he is also the one who alludes through himself and beyond himself: My words are not mine but my Father’s; who sees me sees the Father. There are many other similar places we could recall. Jesus is the way, he is the opening, the gateway that is the entry to the Father but also the gate to the sheep; it is the path to God and to the people. As we gaze on Christ we see God and man; if we apply to Jesus, or rather to our view of Jesus, the phrase of Eckhart mentioned earlier, then we can suddenly understand slightly differently the statement about Jesus as “God and man,” who is at the same time (of one substance, homoousios, according to the dogma of the Council of Chalcedon) with God and with people. Jesus is the gate and the window to God and to people; in him is the human view of God and God’s view of us through one gaze. To the extent we are linked to Christ (by our very humanity and, in addition, by our faith), that gaze is our own gaze, and we share that view. “Those who see me, see the Father”—and they can also see each of their fellow human beings from God’s perspective, in love. To love a person means to see them with God’s eyes. If we were truly one with Christ and our gaze was clear, we would remove from our eyes that beam of prejudices, bias, and judgmentalism, 12 and we would see the whole truth and be perfect in love. How distant we still are from the kingdom of God! “The only real tragedy in life,” said Léon Bloy, “is not to become a saint.” ———— —— — u————— Truly radical Christian discipleship, says one of the outstanding spiritual theologians of today,13 does not consist of foolishly trying to copy or externally imitate his person and life story, or solely 90

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following his teaching, but above all of accepting Jesus’s internal attitudes. That is why it is necessary to meditate on scripture truly in depth and try to break through the letter into the spirit of the text. But won’t we end up with what emerged during the meditation on Jesus’s commandment to love God, namely, the need to make oneself nothing? The openness, which is the favorite slogan of “modern Christianity,” is only authentically Christian if it is kenotic in character. Being truly open doesn’t mean an uncritical attitude to the world around us. Rather it means making oneself “transparent,” being penetrable glass, so that Jesus (the light of the world) may strike the world around us like an illuminating ray. For this to happen one must go on studying the arduous path of self-forgetting love, so that our “I” should not overly obscure the light on this journey. The more we learn to diminish our egos, the more we can become signposts to the source of “gentleness and goodness.” But that, of course, means a patient lifetime of struggle with the demon of modern times: narcissism, egomania, various forms of which we ingest willy-nilly from the climate of contemporary society. Perhaps that mental illness is most dangerous when it is inconspicuous and low-key, so that its carriers are able to maliciously point to the narcissism of others while ignoring the beam in their own eye. “Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall,” scripture says. 14 It strikes me that the “bloated egos” and excessive individualism omnipresent in modern society are further truths of Chris tianity that have “gone mad.”15 Individualism could scarcely have germinated elsewhere than in the soil of belief in a personal God, who made every individual human being in his unmistakable image. But where that image stops turning back to the Original to correct itself, it gradually loses some of its important features, and a person turns into an individual. Persons gravitate toward each other and create societies— precisely by mutually complementing each other in their uniqueness. Individuals compete. Our world is full of people who would happily mirror God’s omnipotence, but there are far fewer who

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bring to mind God’s kenotic selfless love. And don’t we also belong to that vociferous majority? ———— —— — u————— “If any want to become my followers,” says Jesus, “let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”16 But Jesus’s way of denying himself and becoming nothing is not a path of grim asceticism. Jesus was perceived by his contemporaries—in comparison to the ascetic followers of John the Baptist—as a “a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax-collectors and sinners.” With him there came into the world God’s wisdom “rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human  race.”17 In him God loved the world—infinitely, incomprehensibly.18 Perhaps the most eloquent and symbolic expression of Jesus’s self-surrender—and therefore his daily liturgical representation for two thousand years—is bread, which is broken and eaten and feeds the people. That is why the liturgy in memory of Jesus’s last supper, which is at the same time a memorial (anamnesis) to his sacrifice on the cross, was originally called a love feast: agapē. If love is to be understood in the spirit of Jesus, then there must be a constant return to the upper room of Easter, to the servile acts of washing of feet and breaking of bread. This can still be a source of inspiration for the courage to “give oneself as food”: I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you!19 ———— —— — u————— However, Jesus’s Easter supper is also a source of inspiration for a political understanding of love. Jesus’s appeal for humble mutual service that accompanies the description of feet washing in John’s Gospel, is described in greater detail in Luke’s account of the Last Supper: “A dispute also arose among them as to which one of them was to be regarded as the greatest. But he said to them, ‘The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those in authority over them are called benefactors. But not so with you; rather the 92

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greatest among you must become like the youngest, and the leader like one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table? But I am among you as one who serves.’ ”20 The community of Jesus’s disciples is to be a corrective contrast to the world of power forever. Let it not be thus among you! Never let power and the desire for power and leading positions destroy the spirit of fraternal equality and solidarity! Power and authority are natural components of every society, along with property; but power and wealth also represent a risk for those who are endowed with them. Power and wealth can fill those people with pride and render them oblivious to poverty and to the needs of the poor and powerless; they can corrupt their hearts. One must be constantly on guard and train oneself in the struggle with these temptations in order to preserve one’s inner freedom with regard to power and money. Those who are entrusted with power, authority, and leading positions must accept that task and fulfill it as a service—a service of love. Jesus did not kneel at the feet of the apostles in the upper room in order to abase himself, but “having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.”21 Jesus’s kingdom is not of this world, as we read in the scene of the trial before Pilate in John’s Gospel,22 but that is precisely why he holds up a relentless mirror to the powers of this world. The reference to the reign of God denies the worldly powers absolute control of the human conscience: God must be obeyed rather than any human authority!23 Likewise Jesus’s answer to the question about whether it was lawful to pay taxes to the occupying power was not—as it is so often interpreted—advice to compromise between the realm of politics and the kingdom of God.24 Jesus does not forbid them to pay taxes but demands something else: Don’t give the emperor what belongs to God! The most important thing in our lives is not what we owe the emperor but that for which we have to thank God and why we are committed to him. No authority, not even the highest authority in the land, has any right to that.

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Jesus’s attitude to state power stems from the tradition of the prophets, who constantly removed the sacred aura from the heads of the rulers and told them: You are no god but simply a man! Jesus explains the sense of his kingdom to Pilate in a single sentence: I came to testify to the truth.25 When confronted with power, truth often appears powerless, and yet we must resist the temptation to defend or promote truth by might and violence. All that one may and must do for truth is to testify to it. What is truth? Jesus only seems not to answer that question of Pilate’s. His answer, his testimony to the truth, is his sacrifice on the cross. Should a cross hang on the walls of parliaments and government buildings? No, if its function is the same as on the standards of the emperor Constantine26 or on the banners of the Crusaders. Yes, if it can remind politicians that truth is more than power. ———— —— — u————— How can one become a Christian, a disciple of Christ? By baptism, is one answer, and one that is undoubtedly true. But the question should be asked somewhat differently. How does one become a Christian? One doesn’t suddenly become a Christian; it is a process. The more people I accompany on the path of preparation for baptism and the more I baptize, the more I realize that baptism is a dynamic sacrament. Like marriage and ordination, baptism is an event that is not completed at the moment the sacrament is conferred but has the effect of permeating the rest of a person’s life. In my earlier books I put forward the idea of resurrectio continua, ongoing resurrection. The event of Jesus’s victory over death cannot be limited solely to one moment in the past, however decisive that moment was. It is a continuous action that operates in the deep dimension of history and human lives and occasionally gushes up from those depths: moments such as Paul’s or Augustine’s conversion (and countless touches of grace in the lives of countless numbers of people) are real participation in the mystery of the Resurrection.27 94

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Similarly one may speak about the sacraments as continuing action. However surprising it may sound to many ears, it is simply a slightly different way of expressing the traditional teaching on grace, the divine energy that is poured into the world of people by means of the sacraments (and not only them). And certainly it applies not only to the sacrament of baptism by water but also to the “baptism of desire,” a venerable part of the church’s tradition. God’s presence in people’s spiritual thirst is a dynamic story, a complex process, often a gripping drama with many acts, with unexpected twists of the plot, as well as intervals and catharses. What does it mean to truly, not just formally, become a Christian? I have arrived at the following answer: it means discovering Christ in the place we have already spoken about—“in the core,” in das Selbst (the self ) of the human being. Believers also feel a certain tension between their I (ego) and Christ. To identify their “I” with Christ would be a mixture of madness (megalomania) and blasphemy. Our “I” is always on a path toward Christ, and if we are truthful to ourselves, we know that we continue to stumble on that path. (One contemporary theologian bases his philosophy and tolerance on that distinction: since we are not Christ we are not the truth and cannot be the possessors of truth.) 28 When St. Paul says in his famous sentence (which I regard as the cornerstone of Christian mysticism and spirituality, and on which I have based the underlying idea of this chapter), “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” he does not place Christ in his ego—in our terms—but discovers him as his Selbst. Christ took upon himself human nature, runs one of the key articles of the Christian faith. And what is the very core of “human nature” if it is not the point at which one overcomes oneself, one’s Selbst, one’s inner “I,” the depth from which gushes forth the source of our being, the open gate to what transcends us? Christ is within us as the “gateway to the Father.” If our ego is too enlarged and resembles a camel loaded down with a burden of

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riches that restrains and enslaves us, then the gate is too narrow, like the proverbial eye of the needle. Christ lives in us to the extent to which we shift the center of our life from the “I” (ego) to the core (das Selbst). But because the core of the self is an “empty space,” a passageway, we cannot achieve it by remaining within ourselves and in “self-contemplation” but precisely by going out of ourselves.29 It is going out toward others and going out toward God. But there are not two gates to others and to God; the path to our neighbors and to God passes through the same gate. That too is the meaning of the commandment to love God and one’s neighbor; it is also the meaning of Jesus’s words: “I am the way.”

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8

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Narcissus’s Deceptive Pool ———————— ——u———— ——————

The opposite of love is not hate but self-love. The opposite of faith is not atheism but self-deification. Both love and faith (love of God) offer true freedom—release from the harshest prison, imprisonment within oneself. Psychologists speak about spontaneous “primary narcissism” of the small child, which regards itself as the all-powerful center of events. Later, with the help of “transitional objects” (apart from toys and other material objects, these can include characters from fairy tales or the earliest religious ideas), the child learns to move from this illusory world into the real world (and not suffer various painful traumas too soon when it arrives). Narcissism, fondness for oneself, will then gradually assume acceptable and healthy forms. If one were to lose the entire complex of positive feelings about oneself (self-respect, self-acceptance,

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self-confidence, pride in oneself, pleasure from one’s own success, etc.), it could have an adverse effect on one’s personality and life. On the other hand, an excessively swollen ego—a pathological narcissistic disorder—has other negative consequences. The newer schools of depth psychology teach us to distinguish between “healthy narcissism” and pathological forms of self-fixation. There are occupations that would seem to require a greater than average degree of narcissism, probably to inure people against various frustrations and rid them of self-consciousness in the face of others. In particular, these are professions associated with public performance, from actors and politicians to preachers. The narcissism of people in such jobs ought not to surprise or cause us offense; nor should people in that position be too depressed to discover they have an above-average level of narcissism. It is a matter of accepting it, being aware of it, and learning to manage it. Many saints, if we read their life stories attentively, were markedly endowed with narcissism (oh, my dear St. Augustine!), but they were able to “harness it to the plow” (to borrow a nice image from the legend of St. Procopius). It is simply a matter of taking care always not to let that power dominate us, harness us to a plow, and plow with us! What I shall subsequently say about fear also applies to narcissism: it is not possible not to have it, but we must not let it get out of hand and we must not hand it our life’s rudder. The point is that narcissism can act like alcohol or a drug; you can become accustomed to its effects, lose self-control, and increase the dosage, which gives rise to dangerous dependency—dependency on applause, admiration, and popularity. It is very important for us to distinguish the various types of relationships we have, although this is not altogether easy. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” Jesus says, and thereby conveys an important message to us: One should love oneself. Those who are incapable of saying a grateful and joyful yes to themselves (even when knowing lots of things about themselves that they are justifiably not proud of ) are not really capable of accepting others. People suffering from inferiority complexes and constant feelings of vic-

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timhood, as well as manifestations of self-hate and self-disdain, often compensate for these pathological states with vanity, or they project them onto others; people who can’t stand themselves can’t stand others. When people run away from themselves, sometimes even into the caring professions, they are unable to help others; what then appears to be extremely self-sacrificing love often turns out to be covert manipulation. Of course, a doctor who has experienced injury is better at healing than one who has never known pain. Those who have come to recognize their own weaknesses have greater tolerance and understanding for the weaknesses of others; service to others takes them out of the prison of excessive concern for themselves, and concern for others can help them see their own concerns in perspective. But service to others must not become a stultifying drug, a way of escaping one’s own problems. If people go on constantly failing to solve their own problems and are unwilling to work on themselves and come to terms with themselves and their lives, these become simply an infection that they go on spreading. And then in a certain sense “physician heal thyself ” really does apply! Ascetic literature often talks about the need for self-hate. I used to regard self-hate (sometimes rightly I expect) as one of the masochistic manifestations of extreme asceticism, or a theological error stemming from inadequate biblical literacy. When Jesus talks about the need to “hate” something or other, what he means—as most contemporary translations know and respect—is to make it a “secondary consideration.” However, in certain cases authors of books about religious life, even when they are only a step away from sainthood, are very well aware of what can, at the last moment, before the final goal of the spiritual journey, after all the exercises in discipline and virtues, drag them into the abyss: namely, pride, self-satisfaction, and narcissistic pleasure in the halo growing around their own heads. In such cases a method that St. Ignatius of Loyola termed agere contra was recommended: push the rudder vigorously in the opposite direction in order to avoid both rocks and shallows. Some resorted to flagellation; others possibly made use of a large dose of humor and self-irony (an essential

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component of a first-aid kit for spiritual journeys). In such circumstances self-hate can simply be an exaggerated expression for the necessary deconstruction of the “false ego” and liberation of the real “I”—the real “I” that those who do not love sadly fail to notice in themselves. ———— —— — u————— The most important experience, the one most necessary for life and healthy development, is feeling that one is (or has been) loved. This is the one and only true apprenticeship for love; the only way to learn love is for it to “infect” you. Someone who is not loved will never manage to love. Scripture assures us that our very existence is a manifestation of a love that precedes any love of our own: “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins”;1 “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love”;2 “You did not choose me but I chose you. . . . I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”3 To be, scripture asserts, means to be loved by God; to believe means “to believe in love.”4 However, when someone is constantly denied any human love (starting with parental love), it is very difficult for him to believe in the love of God. The main cause of much pain and frustration, but also of severe character deformations, tends to be people’s (never acknowledged) feeling that nobody loves them, or nobody loves them as they would liked to be loved or the way they (sometimes unwittingly) expected. Such phenomena are on the increase now that love is becoming rarer in our world, and what is often presented and described as love is not actually love. The place that love should occupy has been taken over by various kinds of pleasures (from sex to drugs) and even more by self-love, narcissism, which, with the spread of modern and postmodern individualism, has become not simply a problem of individuals, but one of the most typical characteristics of our culture. 100

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Consumption demands advertising, and advertising demands narcissism: a narcissist most easily succumbs to ingratiating, flattering, and seductive manipulation. A narcissist can easily be caught with a bit of flattery like a bee with honey or an alcoholic with an open bottle of whiskey. Narcissists lack the necessary selfcriticism, dispassionate self-control, or sensitivity to critical feedback that our surroundings provide us with all the time. Their perception is choked and distorted by their illusory self-image. They lack the strength of character provided by humility and discipline; these have already been drowned in the pool, in whose surface they admire themselves. Narcissists are shallow and empty inside: they expect everything from outside, from the assessment and admiration of others. Self-love is the way they compensate for their unacknowledged sadness at not being really loved and not being able to love. They fear love, sensing that it would require much of them, and they themselves prefer to demand admiration rather than love. Narcissists naturally wear themselves out with their vain selfcentered activity and their battles to obtain shows of appreciation that only satisfy them for a short while, and they increasingly become weaklings. Weaklings—and only weaklings—then often resort to cruelty and violence, sometimes only in their imaginations but sometimes in reality. Narcissists can be cruel and vengeful, particularly toward those who in some way have injured, damaged, or called into doubt their self-image. Their perception and memory zealously erase, suppress, and disregard anything that might threaten their exaggerated self-evaluation; but if that selfimage has already been damaged narcissists have the memory powers of an elephant: they are never ready to forget or forgive. In their subconscious and their fantasies they plot revenge, and if the conditions are right, they wreak it. Where narcissists do not live alone (something they seldom manage to do because they can’t put up with themselves and are not able to cope on their own), their revenge often assumes the character of mental terror toward their intimates. Understandably it is the latter in particular who are unwilling to play the role of extras in their theatricals,

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and they set up a mirror to them, even unwillingly perhaps. Narcissists are terrified of mirrors. They only want “magic mirrors,” like the one owned by the evil queen in the fairy story, which will answer their questions only with assurances of their magnificence. If the magic mirror goes wrong and turns into a real mirror, then they perceive it as the Medusa’s face: the truth no longer makes them free but paralyzes them and turns them into stone. I suspect that the ever more frequent phenomenon of “mad gunmen,” who suddenly, out of the blue, start to slaughter people around them unprovoked, isn’t simply a product of online “conflict games” and action horror films in the media; such dangerous implements tend to be only accelerating mechanisms or triggers. It would seem that it is often the tragic expression of an individual’s anger, the anger of someone whose narcissistic image of himself and the world has been shattered by reality. In his eyes, a society that has failed to operate according to his notions deserves nothing but destruction. The ideological gloss (reference to religious or political symbols) tends to be simply “added value,” simply a drug that the perpetrator needs in order to intoxicate and desensitize himself, to give himself courage for the deed. In the past the collapse of a narcissist’s world most likely led to suicide (who knows whether Narcissus’s drowning in the mythical story wasn’t actually an indirect allusion to suicide). These days suicide seems to be accompanied or even replaced by the murder of others—and the more, the better. The martyrs’ paradise, cult status in a religious or political sect, and coverage in the media are ways by which Herostratus’s present-day emulators try to “survive their deaths” and achieve fame transcending death: a caricature of eternity. They are often driven by a wish projection not unlike the mad endeavors of the most pathological narcissistic megalomaniacs of history, from Nero to Hitler, to ensure that the spectacular backdrop to their suicide will be a burning megalopolis with piles of corpses. The idea of hell will not dissuade them from their deed: after all, hell has become a favorite stimulant in the culture of mass entertainment (suffice it to recall the names of many rock and heavy-metal bands). Nevertheless, the most ex102

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treme forms of immoderate self-love already carry the germ of hell within them: self-love of that kind turns into self-hate and self-destruction in the end. ———— —— — u————— In addition to individuals suffering various degrees of narcissistic injury in our world, there are many kinds of group narcissism, of which nationalism is one of the most poisonous. My country, right or wrong, was the watchword of the British colonizers. Wrong. The nationalist poison must be opposed. Truth, law, and justice count for more than loyalty to homeland and nation. We must not oppose justice or suppress the rights of others under any flag, not even the one we like the most. But not even the most varied religious groups are immune to narcissistic self-adoration, frequently accompanied by hatred of those who are different. Where the word God becomes a projection of a narcissistic and jealous group “we,” the dragon’s egg of intolerance is laid in the common nest. “Tell him to stop it, because he isn’t one of us!,” the apostles called to Jesus when they met one of his disciples who didn’t belong to their group. “Do not stop him,” Jesus replies. “Whoever is not against us is for us.”5 But how often have Christians preferred to adopt the contrary position: who isn’t with us is against us.6 ———— —— — u————— Nationalism and various forms of group chauvinism fairly soon unmask themselves by their fanaticism. The collective narcissism of modern and postmodern Western culture is much more subtle and artful. One of the symbols of proud Renaissance humanity on the threshold of modernity, Michelangelo’s David, always struck me as an inversion of its biblical model: in place of the little lad, whose only strength is trust in the Lord, here stands a magnificent, proud and perfect athlete, who would be better fitted to the role of the proud giant Goliath. When that sculpture was

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completed, the era of “supermen,” which culminated in the invulnerable monsters of present-day action films, had just begun. Nietzsche did not manage to tell the end of his dream about the Übermensch, the being that was to occupy the throne left vacant after god had been killed. For such a being, man would be no more than an embarrassing reminder of his lower forebears farther down the evolutionary ladder, like the apes appear to someone with knowledge of Darwin.7 Others demonstrated how they envisaged this ideal—and they left behind them ruins and the stench of millions of burned bodies. But isn’t there contained within the slogans of humanistic psychology (self-realization, self-actualization), which have dominated the omnipresent products of advertising since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, the nub of the narcissistic strivings of secular humanism as a whole? “Transpersonal psychology,” that child of the New Age movement, countered the modern ideal of self-realization with the ideal of self-transcendence. But if “selftranscendence” chiefly denotes a quasi-religious technique of “consciousness expansion,” is it really self-transcendence or rather a further expansion of the ego? Doesn’t what is on offer on the market of postmodern religion continue to operate in the sphere that Kierkegaard called “aesthetic”? Isn’t Kierkegaard’s Don Juan— the one who allows himself to be excited by the waves of the “constant alternation of the same” while remaining unchanged within himself—a consumer of spiritual wares? What can bring about the true conversion and healing of the culture of narcissism and its human products? The answer is easy, though hard to achieve: humility and love. Narcissists are in thrall to their illusions and instinctively fear the truth and real life. Humility is the courage to confront the truth. Those who love the truth do not fear it. That is God’s challenge to the narcissist: switch from love for yourself to love for the truth. Dare to love reality: not the reality you would like to have and see, but reality as it is. The prayer of the sufferer of narcissism should be the prayer of the blind beggar in the Gospel: Lord, let me see again. During the Last Supper, Jesus prayed for his disciples, whose narcissism 104

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repeatedly manifested itself to him:8 Holy Father, sanctify them in the truth!9 ———— —— — u————— People who suffer from lack of love or the feeling that no one loves them are sometimes told by Christians: God loves you! This is undoubtedly a profound theological truth and one of the profoundest mystical experiences. Nevertheless, I am not surprised that quite a lot of people are incensed at the sight of posters at evangelizing rallies proclaiming, “God loves you!” or “Jesus is your friend!” It is not just those whose hackles are raised by any reference to religion who find it infuriating, but sometimes also those who are truly offended when big truths are turned into cheap slogans, when “the mysteries of faith” slip all too hastily and facilely from the lips of a certain type of person (I would be tempted to say, seep from their mouths like foul breath). It strikes me that those who have experienced the love of God when a difficult interpersonal relationship has been at a low ebb, a relationship in which they have to give much of themselves, know more about God’s love than those who gush with emotion during community singing of pious religious pop. Yes, during the liturgy or prayer, or when overcome by the splendor of mountains and waterfalls, or when listening to Handel’s Messiah, you can receive a powerful and authentic sense of absolute mystery, full of love; I have known such moments, and they are among my life’s treasures. But don’t such touches of grace still belong rather to the realm of “falling in love,” the anteroom of love? In my opinion, to love God and experience his love means saying all the time a mature and faithful yes to life—including everything I suffer and everything that remains a mystery and is a source of constant amazement. It entails knowing about the depths of life even at moments when I am so absorbed by what is happening on its surface that I am scarcely aware of its depths. It means to give up playing at the lord and master of life, of my own life and the lives of others—and to do so with understanding, joy,

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and freedom. To love God means being profoundly grateful for the miracle of life and expressing that gratitude through my life, assenting to my fate, even when it eludes my plans and expectations. To love God means accepting human encounters patiently and attentively as meaningful messages from God, even when I am unable to properly understand them. To love God means to trust that even the most difficult and darkest moments will one day reveal their meaning to me, so that I will be able to say to them, “God was in there? Well then, once more!”10

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Is Tolerance Our Last Word? ———————— ——u———— ——————

Many religions link faith and morality. The uniqueness of Jesus’s teaching is his fundamental linkage of love of God with love of man and his emphasis on the universality and unconditionality of that love, which even encompasses our enemies. To declare that I love God, whom I have not seen, but do not love the brother who stands before me is hypocritical and self-deceiving religion; loving only those who love us is barter, not the virtue of love, we are told in the New Testament. To a certain extent, this unconditional and boundless love invites comparison with two other concepts in the ancient and modern history of culture: Buddhist compassion and modern Western tolerance. Nevertheless, I do not think we should confuse either of them with the Christian concept of love, because in Christianity it is something else. 107

Universal compassion for all living beings (karuṇā), and particularly detachment as a remedy for suffering as proposed by Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, may arouse respect in Christians, not to mention inspiration on more than one account. Even though I have devoted considerable time to the study of Buddhism and had contact with Buddhist monks and scholars in traditionally Buddhist countries, I would not venture to offer here a sufficiently qualified interpretation of the idea of karuṇā. It was Buddhists who convinced me that it is not the same as the Christian message of love. A number of my Buddhist friends in traditionally Buddhist countries are skeptical about and view with irony many “Western Buddhists”: they say that these people have never understood or properly absorbed Buddhism, that what they cultivate under the label of Buddhism is actually Christianity, a Christianity that they have divested of the features they don’t like, such as church institutions and the demands of morality. (That would maybe explain to a certain extent something I noticed a long time ago, namely, that some of the “Buddhists” here in the West display certain typical features of Christian love in a gentler and more convincing manner than in many church circles; among these “anonymous Christians” one often finds people who take Jesus’s teaching of unselfish love more seriously than many church leaders.) The “oceanic feeling” that floods over us in deep meditation, whether we are Buddhists, Christians, or entirely “nonconfessional,” allows us to feel that our “small I” is part of a much bigger whole. At such moments I have perhaps been able to understand better the Buddhist assertion that “I” does not exist and is simply an illusion. Westerners tend to suffer a certain dizziness at the thought of this and cannot help worrying whether this experience, which is often described as the “dissolution of the subject in the ‘cosmic I,’ ” is not simply a regression to the “primary narcissism” of the infant, as described by psychologists of the neoanalytic schools. Isn’t the “expanded consciousness” offered by transpersonal psychology with reference to the spiritual experience of the East such an enticing vision for Western “seekers” chiefly because their narcissistic need is satisfied by a form of nar-

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cissism that is highly sublimated and perhaps all the more dangerous for that reason? Is the cosmic “I” in which the harassed Westerner finds blissful rest (no doubt evoking primal experiences from the mother’s womb) really the same as what Augustine refers to when he says that only in the “Thou” of God will the unquiet heart (inquietas cordis) find rest? I doubt it, in the same way that in common with my Buddhist friends I doubt that what is practiced by the Western sympathizers of Buddhism (inspired also by a man of whom I am sincerely fond, the Tibetan Dalai Lama, who has adapted Buddhist themes to Western taste)1 is authentic Buddhism. A friend of mine maintains that what we now call Buddhism and Hinduism—selected themes from old Eastern cultures essentially refashioned into religious systems (“isms”)—are in reality the fruit of reformist endeavors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inspired by Anglo-Saxon liberal Protestantism. Many of today’s followers of Hinduism, yoga, Buddhism, and so on (and not only in the West but also in India, particularly in international meditation centers) are in fact more like Unitarians or theosophists than disciples of Buddha and the original world of Indian mythology. 2 Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, Suzuki, Gandhi, and many others would seem to have been influenced by a certain type of Christianity to a greater degree than they were capable of admitting; and what their present-day Western and Eastern pupils practice today probably contains more elements of liberal Protestantism than original Eastern spirituality and religiosity. But I do not venture to answer the question as to what constitutes authentic Buddhism, because it can only be answered by someone who truly knows Buddhism from within. I am a friend of Buddhism and a friend of Buddhists, but I am not a Buddhist; I am a Christian. ———— —— — u————— The more I study particular cultures and religions and come to them also through direct experience during my journeys, the more

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I am convinced that they are not as similar as it might seem to superficial and external gaze. Buddhism and Christianity are not interchangeable. Christianity is not a “successor” replacing Judaism and rendering it obsolescent, however much the apologetics that emerged from the early disputes between church and synagogue tragically sowed that idea in the consciousness of popular Christianity. Likewise Islam is not simply a continuation and replacement of Christianity, as some apologists of Islam naively describe it. Christians are pleased that Muslims have sincere respect for Jesus and his mother but rightly object if Muslims try to “preach” that their understanding of Jesus, of his life and significance, based on certain texts of the Qu’ran, disproves and replaces what the Gospels and church tradition tell us. This could help us in some way to understand the Jews who feel something similar when we try to demonstrate that Christians understand their holy book (which we call the Old Testament) better than they do. In a world in which religion and cultures mingle far more than we were used to, 3 it is necessary to preserve and cultivate one’s own identity and responsibility for one’s own cultural heritage (which is anyway a basic precondition for interreligious dialogue). The only thing that the dearly bought experience of past ages should add to that principle is the discovery that loyalty to and esteem for one’s own tradition, culture, and faith do not require one to deprecate others or their traditions, cultures, and beliefs. (And I once more add straightaway that respect for others naturally does not imply the prohibition of all criticism and critical differentiation that the latter-day secular inquisitors sometimes try to propose in the name of multiculturalism and extreme “political correctness”; the fact is that love and respect for others sometimes requires us to voice our criticism to them and provide “feedback” in the form of correctio fraterna.)4 ———— —— — u————— My reflection has gradually shifted to another topic: the ideal of tolerance. First let us pay tribute to the enlightened and highminded men who recalled Jesus’s parable about the weeds in the 110

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field of wheat5 at a time when one side had no proper idea of what the other side believed but were absolutely convinced that God would be pleased if they cut the others’ throats on account of their belief. When the church was first coming into being Jesus already had to admonish his disciples for wanting to play at the angels of the Last Judgment and “finally put the world to rights” by eradicating evil (on the basis of their infantile notions about what was good and what was evil). Let both of them grow together, Jesus told them, urging patience—yes, “eschatological patience,” because the bright light in which it would be possible to distinguish between good and evil without the risk of tragic mistakes would arrive only beyond the horizon of history, not in this valley of shadows. Fanatics, fundamentalists, revolutionaries, and inquisitors (religious and today’s secular variety) have one sin in common: they ignore Jesus’s counsel of patience, which would help prevent those attempts to implement heaven on earth here and now, which render life on earth hell. Jesus warns those who “are ablaze for the truth” that their flames are more likely to ignite fires to burn heretics or heretical books that contain a somewhat different concept of the truth. Jesus’s concept of truth is radically different from the one espoused by such zealots. Nowadays official documents of the Catholic Church declare that truth is only real truth if it goes hand in hand with love and freedom, that truth, freedom, and love are mutually conditional. Not long ago, however, many of those who thought that way and acted accordingly had hell to pay both in the church and in the world. Every time we hear the word tolerance, we should bow deeply to their memory: that word is their legacy to us. ———— —— — u————— Nonetheless, the concept of tolerance—as it was inscribed on the banners of the Enlightenment and its heirs—cannot be for us an inviolable idol for all time. Is it really the last word, the ultimate and most dependable pronouncement, the still valid prescription for healing the wounds of our times?

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Tolerance is, of course, a secular translation of the Gospel injunction to love one’s enemies. But when religious concepts are translated into secular language and notions something tends to get lost. Many of the Enlightenment concepts represent “minima moralia”—the little bit of Christian morality that could be digestible for those for whom Christian belief as a whole and the religious bases of Jesus’s ethics seem unacceptable. We don’t have to love our enemies exactly; it is sufficient to put up with them. So far so good, we could say. But before we can be entirely satisfied with the concept of tolerance let us not ignore some of the reverberations that often occur when those principles are interpreted. To tolerate, as the Latin origin of the word suggests, means to bear or endure something that is usually burdensome or unpleasant. In order to tolerate an unpleasant neighbor I really don’t need to love him in any sense. It is enough for me to ignore him, since I don’t care about him. We each have our own life, our own style, our own truth. A certain model of “multiculturalism” based on the principle of tolerance resulted not in a polis, a community of citizens or neighbors, but in a conglomeration of ghettos. “Let everyone live as they like, so long as they don’t disturb or restrict others.” This is certainly a more humane situation than constant quarrels or even permanent warfare, but can it be a lasting solution? That sort of tolerance is fine for people living alongside each other but not for people living together. However, our world, the “global village,” has become too cramped for us to live undisturbed like that alongside each other. Our numbers have grown, and, like it or not, there are more and more people who are “different” from us. Our fences are not as far apart as they used to be. We can see into the kitchens and smell the aroma of exotic soups from the dining rooms of those others. We can overhear family rows that we had no inkling of before. The tolerance model was created for a different world, for a different city architecture. But those cities of yore are no longer standing, or they look completely different from the way they used to. Nolens volens we live together—and therefore we must 112

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find different rules for this coexistence than simply “keep out of my circle.” ———— —— — u————— But our circles have already been violated. Such close proximity inevitably leads to conflict. How can we forestall and solve it? One way, which I would like to warn against, is the “naive imperialism of love,” to which not only certain enthusiastic and kindly Christians are predisposed but also many proponents of secular humanism. “Jesus loves everyone,” “We are all children of one Father”—that is undoubtedly true, but the Father has diverse children. A failure to respect that diversity and to rejoice only at the fact that we are all the same need not signify an excess of love. In fact it betrays a lack of respect, respect precisely for that diversity. These days, Karl Rahner’s well-intentioned and, for its time, useful—nay groundbreaking—perspective on likable atheists and believers of other religions, whom he described as “anonymous Christians,” can be more of a hurdle to real friendship and dialogue than its removal. Others need not necessarily be flattered by our assertion that they strongly resemble us. A good-hearted declaration that all religions are actually the same, that they are of equal value, that we all essentially believe the same thing, is both naive and arrogant. Who do you think you are to arrogate the right to stand so high above all religions that you have a perfect knowledge of them and can fairly assess and compare them and correctly judge their worth? That assessment must be left to God alone. Cling to your faith, friend, if it answers the demands of your conscience, your reason, and your heart; be sure enough of its truth that you won’t need to affirm it by belittling the faith of others. If you are convinced that you are right (and you would be crazy to profess something about which you are not sincerely convinced that it is true), don’t rashly and foolishly add to that that only I am right. Truth tends to be deeper than it seems to shallow minds, who enjoy claiming a monopoly on the truth. If we believe that in the final analysis we all believe

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in the same God, then let us believe it but give God the right on Judgment Day to verify or disprove our conviction. When love is too enthusiastically embracing, it rashly takes other’s property and makes it its own and transforms difference into sameness (which is what I mean by “the imperialism of love”); real love, however, is linked with respect for others’ difference. It honors their “exteriority,” as we heard from Lévinas; it does not deny them the right to their own spiritual territory and recognizes their distinctiveness. At friendly meetings with Buddhists, Jews, or Muslims I like to set the table with many of the good things that Christianity’s kitchen has to offer so that they can sample what and how much of it they fancy, and I enjoy explaining as much as they want me to and as well as I am able why these delicacies are dear to me. Of course I will be gratified if they come to love Jesus and Francis of Assisi. But do not require of me to tell them at the same time that what they themselves serve up on their own tables are unappetizing and dangerous dishes and poisoned wines. I really do not feel entitled to do so. ———— —— — u————— The contemporary German sociologist Ulrich Beck has shown that John Locke’s classic Enlightenment proposal regarding tolerance (the Letter Concerning Toleration of 1689), which meant taking religion out of the public sphere (believe what you like, but don’t bother others with it), could only work in a fairly homogeneous Protestant environment.6 This is because it presupposes a Protestant understanding of religion, in other words, what the Reformation created out of Christianity: privatization, confessionalization, and above all the individualization of religiosity. Not surprisingly it was fairly successful in northwestern Europe and America, where, in Chesterton’s words, “even the Catholics are Protestants.” (The idea of tolerance also found its place in the Catholicism reformed by the Second Vatican Council, which, to the horror of traditionalists, took a leaf out of the book of American Catholics, with their 114

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political and cultural experience, and managed to absorb much of what was positive in the Reformation tradition without renouncing Roman Catholic identity.) The problem is that Locke’s tolerance model is no longer of use in a multicultural society in the era of globalization. It is no longer functional even in societies where there are large Christian communities that do not accept it (such as the Orthodox) and religions for which it is alien, particularly Islam.7 It is significant that the tragically naive notion that modern democracy of a Western type (including the “separation of religion and politics”) can be implemented in a purely Islamic environment by means of military intervention (the motive for Bush’s intervention in Iraq and for the New World Order Project, for instance) emerged chiefly from American evangelical circles of the religious Right. Like all fundamentalisms, the latter did not realize or would not concede that it was culturally conditioned, regarding itself as a universally applicable truth worthy of spreading by missionary activity—not excluding the use of force. The English philosopher John N. Gray has shown that these recent developments in the political philosophy of the American Right means that since the end of the Cold War and September 11, 2001, this type of conservatism has abandoned what was the basis of conservative convictions, namely, the Calvinist notion that because of original sin, human weaknesses are a constant component of human nature and human society. With its practice of “preventive wars” and “war on terrorism,” and its adoption of laws permitting the torture of terrorist suspects, based on its millenarian hopes for the “end of history,” it has been converted to the typically left-wing revolutionary utopian idea that the world can be improved with the help of violence. 8 This is in stark contrast to the clear position of the Catholic Church, based on the experience of European history, which is embodied in the documents of the last Vatican Council and was reiterated on many occasions by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. This affirms that truth must be advanced solely through the power of truth itself and must never be imposed by violence.

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Violence is morally justified only when there is no other immediate way to defend the innocent from violent attack; in all other cases it constitutes an irresponsible risk of setting in motion a spiral of retribution and vengeance. ———— —— — u————— In our multiply interlinked world, “each has his own truth”—the mantra of enlightened and tolerant relativism—cannot be the last word, and it certainly must not be the first, since it bars the way at the outset to a closer and deeper knowledge of others and their truth. Blasé tolerance can conceal indifference and lack of interest in the truth of others, or in others themselves, or in the possibility of understanding them better. Truth has a tendency to be hidden, all the more in an increasingly complex world. But we cannot be indifferent to truth, and we cannot offend against it by failing to seek it and declaring that the only truth is what we have found and “own.” Truth is such a precious value in our world that we cannot permit ourselves to ignore any fragment of it that we find, and we cannot a priori and from a distance declare as bogus what is held to be true by someone whose spiritual world is remote from ours. Nevertheless, we cannot read the scriptures and other treasures of wisdom amassed in the treasuries of their tradition casually—“over their shoulders.” We must be open to conversing with them about their tradition if they are willing, and to listen to them with respect. I have made an effort to understand their treasures of wisdom; I am not one to judge the level of my understanding, but one thing I know for sure: this encounter has contributed to the treasury of mutual respect and trust. And isn’t that precisely the treasury that our world needs most of all? ———— —— — u————— In the world of “the others” there are people who hate our culture and regard us as enemies, treat us as enemies, and strive to 116

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destroy us. It is not possible to retreat in the face of violence; it is necessary to protect and defend the innocent. If worse comes to the worst, much of what I have just been speaking about ceases to apply. One can only turn one’s own cheek, if there is hope that it will put a stop to evil, but not the cheeks of others. They must be defended. That is our responsibility. But we can and must do everything to prevent things from getting to that stage. In many places under threat there is still time for preventive measures to deal with the violence that is simmering but has not yet boiled over to such an extent that hatred and the sight of blood have befuddled people’s brains like a drug. Meaningful dialogue is possible only between people with clear heads. The current hostility between cultures and religions is generally rooted in age-old unremedied historical conflicts, inherited in legends and myths, in the genes of contemporary culture. In this case healing would seem to require some kind of spiritual, moral, and psychological “genetic manipulation”—intervention in the deep core of our cultural group identity, a radical reassessment of that “birthright.” Enemy images branded into the “collective unconscious” of nations, ethnic groups, and religious communities must be brought out into the light in order to recognize their absurdity and danger. Would the horrors of the Holocaust have happened if anti-Semitism had been pilloried in time? Would so many people have remained silent when Communist militia transported priests, nuns, farmers, and “capitalists” off to internment camps if someone had reacted in time to the malicious slanders and hate-inciting caricatures of clergy or the “bourgeois” and declared that the prejudice and false generalizations were poisonous? Would the postwar atrocities in the Czech border areas have occurred if someone had countered the slogan “A good German is a dead German” with Jan Hus’s words, “I’d sooner have a good German than a wicked Czech”? When Jesus spoke about loving one’s enemies, he used a fairly provocative statement that was intended to arouse consciences lulled by stereotypically repeated clichés and half-truths about

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people who are “different” and to unsettle our seeming certainties about who “we” and “they” are, how we are and they are, what we are supposed to think about “foreigners,” and how we are to treat them. If we have felt the need to replace Jesus’s exacting requirement with the softer word tolerance, doesn’t that indicate that we’re still running away from what Jesus expects from his followers?

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Loving One’s Enemies ———————— ——u———— ——————

We have come to realize that the humanist concept of tolerance— with all due respect for that ideal and for all those who have helped bring it into being—is still not the final word that would express the entire New Testament message of loving one’s neighbor. There is still another aspect of unconditional, unbounded love, and that is loving one’s enemies. “Love your enemies,” Jesus teaches. To many that saying seems to be the hardest and most exacting command of all his commandments, and to some it seems quite absurd. When we hear the word enemy faces and names of various people spring to mind: perhaps those who have inflicted trauma when we were children or adolescents, those who disappointed or betrayed our love and friendship, ruthless or dishonest rivals in life and at work,

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or those who vehemently espouse political or religious views that seem to us unacceptable or harmful. During periods of totalitarian or dictatorial regimes, the role of “the enemy” is occupied more obviously and dramatically. When such faces come to mind “our hackles rise” and unpleasant emotions come to the surface; if these emotions are particularly powerful and we are not good actors, the features of our face, the tone of our voice, and the expression of our eyes all change. Are we supposed to rid ourselves wholesale of all such feelings and replace them with feelings of love? That would be absurd, wouldn’t it? Yes, it would indeed be absurd; to attempt to do so would probably mean lying to ourselves or engaging in self-deception. First: Jesus certainly didn’t demand nor does he expect us to fulfill any of his exacting requirements “wholesale,” in a trice or superficially; most of the time it is one aspect of a lifelong process of conversion that is never fully completed on this earth. Second: it is not at all a matter of feelings and emotions; Jesus’s commandments don’t refer to them. Negative emotions such as anger and hatred are definitely harmful to our mental and physical health, and we ought to try to deal with them and manage them as much as we can. But that is something for mental hygiene and courses in human relationships, not a subject of Christian ethics and spirituality. Jesus would not seem to be too interested in the ripple of feelings on the surface of our psyches or storms in teacups; his concern is what lives and grows in the depth of human existence, in the roots of our fundamental attitudes to life. The commandment to love one’s enemy is clearly a paradoxical exhortation, a koan, a riddle that none of the usual philosophizing will solve; the solution only comes through meditation. One possible solution is suggested by an old Hasidic legend about a man whom fate had dealt such harsh blows that he had endured illness and extreme poverty, and yet he preserved his inner calm and wore a joyful childlike smile. When his neighbors asked him how he managed to preserve his equanimity in the face of such disasters in his life, he responded with disarming spontaneity: I don’t know what you’re talking about. Nothing bad has ever happened to me.

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I can imagine a saint who has made himself a lot of enemies (as many saints and people who “step out of line” do) being asked how he was able to preserve his good humor and equanimity answering with similar saintly frankness: I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t have any enemies! This is not being blind to the obvious facts but looking farsightedly beyond the facts into the heart of the matter. We cease to have enemies the moment we refuse to treat anyone as an enemy, regard them as an enemy, to enter into an inimical relationship. Enmity (like friendship) is a mutual relationship. If this relationship doesn’t happen—and it won’t happen if I don’t enter into it—enmity and the enemy will cease “objectively to exist.” 1 Negative feelings may remain on one side or the other, but hostile feelings are not yet enmity. Feelings are like a swarm of mosquitoes that we cannot simply wish out of existence. What I do with my feelings is my own “private matter,” whereas, by their very nature, friendship and enmity cannot be a purely private and one-sided matter. It takes two to create enmity or friendship; the desire must be mutual. So in a certain sense the existence, genesis, and termination of enmity is within the power of both of them. I can and ought to confront feelings of anger, aggression, and enmity in the way I deal with “thoughts” when engaging in Zen-type meditation: they come, they go; I don’t nourish or develop them, but neither do I strenuously suppress and expel them; I learn to observe them disinterestedly, as if from outside: I do indeed (occasionally) have feelings of annoyance, helplessness, hurt, self-pity, rancor, desire for revenge, and everything that belongs to that snakes’ nest, but I don’t identify with them; I am not that anger and enmity. It’s an annoying insect that I cannot completely get rid of but have no intention of indulging or nurturing. Were I to become a welcoming roof for such a hornets’ nest, I would eventually be the one they would harm most of all. Am I perhaps saying that one should achieve such a degree of spiritual detachment that seething human conflicts and quarrels

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are so “far below” one, so remote, that one can no longer make out who are “ours” and who are “foreign,” so that enmity between people no longer concerns one? By no means; it seems to me that such indifference would not be human. We are called to be detached only in respect to our own egos, not regarding other people. When it comes to those who hate us or cause us harm we should not take ourselves off haughtily to some distant, elevated place but instead try within ourselves to come closer to “the enemy.” We should have the courage to take a look under their mask of war and look them in the eye—and, if we are already able (if we are not too constrained by our projections and paranoid anxiety), to try to look into their heart. Richard Kearney has something very apt to say about this: Nowadays the world is full of monsters and specters.2 We ourselves have created them by our mutual demonization. And he recalls the advice given by a psychoanalyst to a patient: Before you wake up out of that dream in horror (and when one is half awake one can deliberately finish a dream, I would add), try to look into the face of the monster pursuing you. Maybe you’ll be surprised to find that the monster is not entirely unlike yourself. Yes, says Kearney, let’s try to look our enemies in the face and have the courage to acknowledge that they are more like us than we were ready to admit. ———— —— — u————— There are two other thoughts that I should briefly refer to in this connection, even though I repeat them ad nauseam perhaps, because I consider them very important—particularly these days with the threat of the “clash of civilizations” and ethnic and religious conflicts. One is again a Hasidic story. After asking his students at what moment night ends and day begins, a certain rabbi gave his own answer: It’s the moment when it is light enough to look into the face of any person and recognize that person as our brother or sister. Until we’re able to do that, it is still night. 122

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And the second comes from the depth psychology of C. G. Jung: When we are unable to recognize our own shadow, that dark side of our own nature that we ourselves consciously reject, then we often dispose of it by means of a projection mechanism. We attribute our unacknowledged bad characteristics and faults to others—and there we are able to do battle with them (although actually with ourselves without our realizing it!). Whenever we hate someone, or someone irritates and annoys us (and the more irrational our anger, the more acute it is), let us look at them as in a mirror. It is often what we can’t stand in them that reminds us of our ourselves; it is an irritating and unpleasant, albeit important, reminder of a displaced truth: That’s what we are like! When we achieve humble self-recognition “we integrate our shadow,” and we are able to draw the projection back into ourselves. In so doing, not only do we deepen our understanding of ourselves to an astonishing degree, but we can also radically heal our relationships. After all, doesn’t Jesus’s parable about noticing the mote in our brother’s eye while ignoring the beam in our own say something very similar?3 In relation to love of enemies, Jesus says something that seems to be an equally unachievable demand: Be perfect.4 Be perfect here does not mean be without faults but rather to be whole, entire. So long as we are unable with a humble mea culpa (“through my fault, through my most grievous fault”) to accept responsibility for our dark sides, our sins and faults, so long as we project them onto others, we are not whole, we are not true to ourselves; we are a hypocritical mask without a face. Humble self-recognition heals our relationships and overcomes our shallowness, incompleteness, and fragmentation. It makes us whole and leads us to integrity. ———— —— — u————— In the prayer that he taught us, Jesus included this request: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us. Not wanting to forgive means closing the door of God’s mercy on

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ourselves. In other words, God makes his power to forgive our wrongs conditional on our readiness to forgive those who wrong us. Here too that amazing symmetry applies: the door of my heart that I open to those who wrong me is the very same door that God’s mercy opens to me as an offender. Readiness to forgive and to ask for forgiveness depends on my readiness to recognize my faults; to yearn for forgiveness depends on my recognition that I need God’s forgiveness. Here we are speaking about sin in all seriousness, not about many shortcomings in fulfilling some particular commandment. Sin is a debt to God—and that debt is essentially a lack of love, faith, and hope. And whoever is without that sin, let them cast the first stone! We also learn love in forgiveness. Yes, the remnants of wounded feelings linger, and sometimes old scars reopen. But that’s not the point! Sometimes we are incapable of forgetting, because the wound is still painful, but that doesn’t mean we are incapable of forgiving. God wants us to have merciful hearts, not a poor memory! It’s a question of how we deal with the memory scars—whether we lacerate them by pouring into them caustic hatred and thirst for vengeance, whether we allow the painful memory to turn into a trauma pathologically generalizing the experience of our injury (I’ll never believe any man; I’ll never love anyone again), or whether we patiently allow time to work its healing power and are receptive to those experiences that overcome, or at least call into question, our anti-faith, leading to resentment and cynicism, that says evil will always have the last word in life. Forgiving means not letting ourselves be dragged by the wish for revenge onto the playing field of evil; forgiving means refusing to repay evil with evil. “We forgive those who trespass against us,” is not a declaration that the job is finished but a commitment not to let up on this process of change of heart—to persist in this process which always, in a certain sense, directly or indirectly, visibly or invisibly, also affects those who have done us wrong. The wound I have inflicted on another is healed not only by my willingness to recognize my faults but also when the one I

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have harmed burns my misdeed in the flame of their own (and thereby God’s) forgiveness, when they remember me in the words “as we forgive those who trespass against us.” If your friend is in distress, help him, says Jesus. He also offers us a course in the important and perhaps only effective therapy for evil: to offer the angry, offended, or guilty person scope for corrective experience—not “I’ll treat you the way you treated me” but “I’ll treat you the way God treats me.” “If you, O  Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand?,” the psalmist asks (Ps. 130:3). Those who have profoundly experienced that they are alive thanks to God’s forgiveness are capable of such behavior. Jesus does not say, forget what happened between you; he says, don’t let what happened condition your behavior. Don’t let yourself be shackled by a bad past; open the way to a better future. Whoever pays back in kind is not free: that behavior is simply a reaction; it is conditioned and determined by the other’s behavior. The principle of “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” does not dictate what one should do but what one should not do: one must not avenge the loss of one eye by tearing out two, or one knocked-out tooth by knocking out ten. It is a principle that replaces the path of evil and violence and the spirit of unbridled vengeance, but it does not replace the path of generosity. It does not direct us to repay with the same coin; it forbids us to add anything to an act of retribution, but it does not forbid us from totally relinquishing vengeance and the right to retribution. Jesus knows what people have inside them. He knows that a spark of injustice can fall on a thatched roof and the next moment the wind of anger can ignite a fire that will leap from roof to roof and will be very hard to extinguish. Anger for us is like wine for alcoholics; they don’t know their limit and when to stop. All they can do is give up intoxicating drinks for good. In like manner Jesus wants us to give up the spirit of enmity for good. Stop looking back all the time at how you were wronged. Look up: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect,”

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“for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”5 ———— —— — u————— At a time of disintegrating families and a crisis in paternal authority, for many people the metaphor “Father” that Jesus used so readily to designate God is even emptier than the metaphors “person” or “heaven.” Symbols are bridges that are serviceable to the extent that they have a bearing on our experience. For how many people—particularly the young—in this “society without the father”6 is the word father an empty sound unrelated to experience; or worse still, it is a word burdened with painful associations, memories of traumatic experiences with their own fathers who did not fulfill the role of a kind and selflessly loving protector? (And the recent avalanche of revelations of so many old cases of child abuse by priests revealed yet another tragic form of frustrated trust in “the father.”) But there is at least one important reason for retaining this metaphor: if we believe that God is the father of all people, then we are committed to perceiving all people, in spite of all differences, as our brothers and sisters and treating them accordingly. People choose their friends, but their siblings are given to them. Nevertheless, and precisely because of that, we are responsible for them. We cannot answer God’s question about any human being by passing the buck like Cain and saying, Am I my brother’s keeper? We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. We are responsible for all of them, including our enemies. The question the Lord might ask is, What have you done to educate your enemies (and thus yourself also), to show them (and yourself ) that love and friendship are a better way forward than enmity, to show them that hatred is a blind alley in life, and that the way to solve disputes is reconciliation and forgiveness and not the escalation of the spirit of revenge and retribution?

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11

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Were There No Hell or Heaven ———————— ——u———— ——————

“Perfect love casts out fear,” we read in the letter of St. John (1 John 4:18). How does it do it? Above all, by giving us the courage to transcend our egocentrism and put ourselves in second place. Most of our fears are not fears of something but various manifestations of our fear for ourselves. Even fear for others tends to comprise more fear for ourselves than we are often ready to admit (our fear of losing them). Of course there is nothing wrong about being afraid for ourselves. Never being afraid, like never feeling pain, is not heroism but instead suggests a deficiency or failure of certain feedback processes in our psyche. Feelings of fear and pain are important signals; they tell us about looming danger and let us know that something detrimental is happening around or in us. A failure to feel, or to ignore fear, can cause the

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virtue of courage to degenerate into the sin of “presumption of God’s mercy”: behaving recklessly where it is totally inappropriate. If one’s ego is disciplined and one has a healthy love of oneself, then one’s fear will not be pathological and cowardly but more often an expression of the natural instinct of self-preservation. At the time of the Communist regime, when I worked clandestinely in the “underground church” as a secretly ordained priest—and not even my mother was allowed to know that I was a priest—I was visited one evening by a close friend who was partly in the know about my activity and tried to assist us. He brought me bad news: one of the secretly ordained priests had been found dead in a pool of blood. Because the victim was connected with the Russian underground church, we naturally suspected that responsibility for his death lay to the east. He was most likely murdered by KGB agents, but even now the case remains unexplained. My friend asked me, “Are you scared?” I replied, “I am, but I couldn’t give a damn.” (I can’t confirm or deny his version, according to which I used a stronger expression.) It has always been my conviction that it’s not a matter of not being afraid but of not allowing fear to govern us and determine our behavior. We must never let fear take the helm of our lives. The police regimes in central and Eastern Europe have fallen and the Cold War ended long ago, but even the present situation provides our civilization with lots of real reasons for fear of many kinds, including the fear that mankind will be destroyed and the environment will suffer irrevocable devastation. There is fear of the social and moral consequences of corrupt behavior in politics and business, fear about migration and the clash of cultures, fear of terrorism or the destruction of human nature through irresponsible genetic manipulation, and many other dangers. Much has been written about all these things, and these days we hear from many sources so many dreadful apocalyptic forecasts that most of us have stopped taking any notice of them, or we register them only subliminally, like we do commercials on television. Nevertheless, the actual reason for increased fear is not so much the threats themselves but how we interpret and confront

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them, and in that respect our general attitude to life, our moral stances, and our faith play a crucial role. If I had to provide a spiritual diagnosis of the causes of the omnipresent fear of the present day, I would definitely mention two phenomena: selfism (exaggerated care for our ego and the fear for ourselves that it engenders) and the loss of what the tradition described as “fear of God.” I think that these two phenomena are in fact profoundly connected. ———— —— — u————— Nowadays there is a tendency to confuse three concepts that designate three very different phenomena: fear (actual fear of or for something), anxiety (a human disposition, anguish without any evident external cause), and awe (profound respect for what is sacred, unfathomable, and unmanipulable). Fear and anxiety are primary psychological states, but they are also cultural and social phenomena. Awe, unlike them, is chiefly a religious phenomenon, but the extent to which it is present or absent has a profound bearing on the culture of society and the mentality of individuals. The Enlightenment thinkers linked religion—its origin and essence—with fear. There are, of course, pathological forms of religion that stem from fear and which spread fear. But the most typical religious phenomenon is something quite other than fear and anxiety, namely, awe—a dizziness at the immensity and unfathomable nature of the sacred, often linked with a sense of how small, vulnerable, and finite human beings are. Maybe Kant’s wonder and awe at the sight of the starry heavens above us and respect for the unconditional in us (conscience, the moral law) touches slightly on what I have in mind when we speak about “fear of God.” “We can love God, but must fear him,” C. G. Jung maintained. This statement by a sage who was for a long time one of the greatest and most inspirational of intellectual authorities for me was one that I wrestled with at length. After comparing it with many other texts by that author I came to the opinion that by “love of God” Jung is talking here about the naive familiarity

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of certain pious people, who, in his words, forget that people by themselves know about as much about God as a caterpillar does about the British Museum. And conversely for him “fear of God” does not mean ordinary human fear but instead that disquieting experience of God’s greatness and magnificence that accompanies the fundamental religious experience: the encounter with the sacred, with that “fearful and fascinating mystery.”1 God is—let us remind ourselves again and again—the depth of reality, which is for us that radically other absolute mystery, transcending not only everything we have ever known heretofore, but everything we could ever imagine. Those who have never experienced vertigo when contemplating that depth should probably avoid using the word God, because they are in danger of using it to mean simply the gods that we manufacture in our minds and treat as we like. At best we deny such products of our imagination any real existence (even though in a way they do exist and have an impact) or we treat them in a utilitarian fashion, turning them into good luck charms, instruments for fulfilling our wishes, cultural symbols, educational tools for disciplining children, and so on. These are all manifestations of idolatry and superstition, which are the antithesis of faith. I believe along with Jung that without experiencing that vertigo, that sacred awe that also reveals to us our finiteness and imperfection, any talk of God, including the love of God, is barren. It strikes me that so many pious handbooks about love of God are terribly stuffy and full of sickly sentimentality and religious kitsch because their authors probably never experienced that fall into the depth of being, that wonderment at the non-self-evidence of the world’s being and of ourselves, that deafening crash as all our previous certainties and mental constructions collapsed, when the words and images that formed the glass in the window of our soul shattered, letting air and light flood in so powerfully that we close our eyes and gasp for breath. Only at such moments does one realize why the people of the biblical world believed that the moment man encountered God he must die (for in a certain sense it is true: something inside 130

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must die) and why at the moment when God addresses and summons someone—such as the prophets or Mary of Nazareth—his first words are, “Don’t be afraid!” ———— —— — u————— Awe disappeared from Western culture in the process of secularization that started with the Enlightenment and its emphasis on the greatness and freedom of man and his sovereignty (and his emancipation from religion). But what has filled the space left vacant? I can’t help thinking that the disappearance of the “fear of God” has provided increasing scope for fear and anxiety, both in the secular sphere and in the modern form of religion; often, however, this fear is unacknowledged and repressed. To a considerable extent we create our world through our vision of the world, through our perception and assessment of those near to us. Fear prevents forethought (pronoia) and instead pathologically projects our past anxieties into the present and future ( paranoia). There is a saying that fear has a hundred eyes—and when we use them to look at those who are “different” (such as immigrants and minorities), we frequently transform them into enemies in our minds (and all too often “in fact”); we then often see enemies where there are none. (Kant himself spoke about tolerance as the right of foreigners not to be regarded as enemies when outside their own country.) Fear of specific things and events can be transformed into chronic fear without an actual subject, in other words, anxiety— an indefinite fear of everything and everyone. Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom . . . when . . . freedom looks down into its own possibility.”2 This typical feature of modern civilization is testified to by Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Franz Kafka, and the entire existentialist tradition in philosophy and literature, as well in many twentieth-century works of music and art (such as the paintings of Edvard Munch or Francis Bacon). Understandably it has also been dealt with by many schools of psychotherapy and has received the attention of theologians, particularly Eugen

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Drewermann, who also produced an incisive analysis of how, in the course of history, certain forms of religion, churches, and spiritual formations helped “manufacture fear.”3 Anxiety restricts the inner space of our lives to an unbearable degree, so that in the end it is so narrow that there is no room left for joy and freedom; eventually it is so restricted that there is no room to breathe. Yet breathing is a very apt metaphor for prayer and spiritual life in general. I read one excellent commentary about the sole task of the high priest when he entered the Holy of Holies in the Jerusalem Temple once a year, namely, to pronounce the unpronounceable name of God, the tetragram YHWH, a name without vowels. The attempt to pronounce all those consonants at once creates a sound something like the sound of barely audible breathing. So what did the high priest do in the inner sanctum? Quite simply, he breathed before the Lord, says one rabbinical tradition.4 Maybe in addition to other therapies for fear and anxiety we ought to try what is meant by the third word that people often place in the same category as those two: awe, the fear of the Lord. Maybe we should enter the inner sanctum, hold our breath in the presence of God’s majesty, and then, before him and in him, breathe. In other words, bow down and pray. ———— —— — u————— It seems to me that awe—that profound religious primal experience—has also faded from the modern form of religion. Awe is a reaction to the ambivalent character of the sacred, the holy, that paradoxical unity of opposites, complexio oppositorum, as Nicho las of Cusa described God. The holy is mysterium tremendum et fascinans—both enticing and terrifying. The biblical concept of God as an inapprehensible mystery (let us recall the Book of Job or the story of Abraham’s sacrifice) has been gradually and inconspicuously replaced by the banal image of a God who lacks any dark side. It is precisely this one-dimensional and monochrome conception of God as “only good” that was criticized by Nietzsche and Jung, for example. If we take the biblical image of God seriously, 132

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then we have to agree with them: the God of the Hebrew Bible, in particular, radically transcends our human notions of what is good and evil and is anything but a kindly old man behind the scenes of the world, from whom we already know in advance what to expect. However, this banal one-dimensional god, the good-hearted old fellow in heaven, continued to outweigh the horror element in religion: the terror of Hell. Medieval and particularly baroque fantasies about underground torture chambers and stinking devils around a cooking pot for boiling sinful souls have not disappeared even from modern-day popular piety or from the repertoire of popular missionary homilies. When we consider the history of fear we Christians ought to be very humble: let us not forget that the Catholic Church also tragically got its values mixed up, alas, and instead of “sacred awe,” it taught fear, and that a certain type of Protestantism, particularly Calvinist puritanism, introduced into the European soul the virus of profound anxiety. Eventually the traditional images of Hell were overshadowed by experience of the tragedies and horrors of the twentieth century. In their concentration camps regimes that promised heaven on earth created such a hell that traditional religious descriptions of hell became laughable. At the same time, even the banal image of God as only good (as a guarantor that what people regard as good would be victorious) ceased to be credible in the face of these tragedies. ———— —— — u————— It is good that fear of hell has now disappeared from Christianity. We continue to hear laments that priests no longer preach about hell and that the church has even “closed its eschatological counter.”5 Well, I’ve heard a few sermons about Hell, but after them I’ve always said that silence would have been preferable; this is because rather than telling us about eschatological realities, the preacher inadvertently gave us far too much detailed information about his inner demons and their shenanigans in the dark corners of his own subconscious. Far healthier, it seems to me, is the sort

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of piety expressed on an old Czech hymn: “O, God, I love Thee not / Out of any fear. . . . Yea, were there no hell or heaven / Yet would I love Thee still.”6 While the present-day popularity of exorcism and exorcists proves that people are aware in some way of the presence of the “demon of fear” in our culture, I doubt that the mechanical application of ancient church rituals would provide adequate and sufficient therapy. I would sooner trust Jesus’s challenge: “Repent— change your way of thinking!” And yet to go on forever sidestepping the issue of the immense mystery of evil (mysterium iniquitatis) would be to devalue Christian hope, turning it into a pious version of the socialist hallucination about paradise as a product of unstoppable world progress. From the doctrine of freedom and from our belief that freedom is the greatest gift given to man by God, who respects it unreservedly, it logically follows that God cannot force human beings to accept salvation, forgiveness, and mercy. It is possible, in theory, that someone, through a profound desire for “God not to be,” could assert this perverted wish so consistently that he really would fatally elude God and condemn himself to eternal alienation and separation from him. We are simply forbidden to assert with certainty about any actual person that in his case this tragic possibility has become a reality. The church offers us a view “into heaven.” It tells about countless people who came to a victorious end and found their rest in God, and recalls them every day in its liturgy; but it has not been authorized to provide a specific account of what goes on at the other end of the eschatological spectrum, including whether it is empty there, or overcrowded. The church declares resolutely that the visions of those—saints or not—who thought they had lifted the veil of that mystery are “private revelations,” which can only commit visionaries themselves to believe them. Pious projections of personal notions onto the closed door of eschatological mystery not only led to baroque fantasies about infernal torments being discredited, but also to the reluctance of believers nowadays to even think about such matters. However, we should not 134

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rashly regard such reluctance, which is a reaction to centuries of mental terror in sermons about “last things,” as loss of “belief in eternity,” let alone loss of faith as such. If belief in last things is divested of the notions that it really has grown out of and which really were too small for it, then it can be clothed in a simple gown of hope. But even if it remains simply naked faith, it need not be ashamed. ———— —— — u————— Some old fears and anxieties have certainly disappeared or are disappearing from today’s culture, but others have been added. The sexual anxieties caused by puritanical upbringing, which, for many people, grew into agonizing neuroses, have, thankfully, largely receded over recent decades. We should honorably admit that to a considerable degree this is due to pedagogy and psychotherapy based on modern findings, from Freud’s Viennese lectures to the Kinsey Reports, as well as to uncensored literature and film, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, the widespread availability of contraceptive methods, the liberal perception of homosexuality, and goodness knows what else. However, another, less discussed aspect of the liberation of sex from taboos and repression has been the gradual exodus of sexuality—that important dimension of human life—from the sphere of the sacred to the sphere of the banal, the world of commerce and entertainment. One critic of the commercialization of sex in the entertainment and advertising industries at the present time expressed it in the following words: “Sex is everywhere, except in sexuality.” What ingratiating advertisements on the streets of Western cities describe as “erotic” really has very little to do with eros in its original classical meaning. It is certainly healthy that fear has been expelled from the paradise of sexuality; but maybe in the process there has also been a certain loss of respect from that sphere, as well as of real love, including the culture of tenderness, that is unthinkable without respect. It is good that people do not feel pathological shame about their sexuality, but this need not lead to the other extreme, when

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sexuality loses the natural protection of private and intimate matters. The fact that the word love is conflated with the word sex in the minds and speech of so many people today possibly blocks the possibility of a deeper understanding and more extensive experience of both mysteries, love and sex. The naive equation of love and sex paradoxically disguises not only the difference between those domains but above all makes it difficult to understand the real link between them. When confronted by the repercussions of the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s the Christian understanding of sexuality should not descend to petty bourgeois prejudice and Manichaeism in the guise of puritan prudery. It should instead try to free those repercussions from superficiality, banalization, and commercialization and demonstrate the spiritual depth of erotic love shown in the poetry of the Song of Songs, those exquisite verses full of the heady juices of ripe fruit. ———— —— — u————— I doubt we will ever discover all the causes for the shaking of our world or why our ideas about its foundations and Creator have been thrown out of kilter. As I have already mentioned, I resolutely refuse to attribute responsibility for this to science or modern scientific discoveries, let alone the changes in our image of the world that flow therefrom. 7 After all, the stability offered by religion is not essentially based on “conviction” or on ideas about the world (these being the field of science and philosophy) but on existential experience of anchoredness, on faith. But how many people were capable of anchoring their faith deep enough to prevent its being shaken by the waves and whirlpools that dramatically rocked the ship of European civilization in the storms and changes of the last century? I really can’t imagine why the changes in the image of the world, humankind, and culture occasioned by modern biology, physics, cosmology, depth psychology, critical historiography, religious studies, and other scholarly disciplines would shake belief in 136

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God if that faith was anchored more deeply in the core of human existence and was not equated with “religious notions.” Understandably, religious notions, like all human notions, are culturally and historically conditioned. They are necessarily affected by historical upheaval and the world’s cultural changes, as well as by changes in our perception of the world. Being a human social and cultural manifestation of faith, “religion” is sometimes shaken, like everything human, sometimes less, sometimes more, but why should that undermine and call into question faith as such? The crisis of religion is essentially a crisis of religious notions (imagination) and of the language in which they are expressed— and affects the specific form of religion to the extent to which it emphasizes these notions and how dependent it is on a certain type of language. So let us consider religious notions, two of them in particular. We can say that God is above good and evil and outside good and evil, if by this we mean our notions of good and evil, which simply reflect our feelings and our necessarily limited experience of matters in the world. If God is God, then he transcends all human notions, including our notions of good and evil, or our notions about a good and a bad god. Our concepts express our potential to perceive and grasp the world,8 not the One who radically transcends the world. The critique of religious notions and concepts is therefore the ongoing task of theology. Just as we have rejected the banal notion of God as a nice old fellow, we must equally take exception to the contrary notion of an uncompromisingly severe and harshly punitive god. That notion was used not only to terrify and manipulate children, and immature or infantile adults, but also to foist responsibility for human acts onto God. The image of God punishing people with wars and disasters of the Holocaust variety still survives to a certain extent, even though nowadays it is probably more commonly found among atheists than believers; more people these days would seem to regard it as the object of criticism rather than the subject of their faith. This caricature of God also serves some people as a fairly welcome

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self-justifying alibi for the cheap trick they use to dismiss all religion out of hand (such a wicked and vindictive god must be rejected naturally) and by rejecting it they straightaway rid themselves of any commitment that a religious faith could entail. The implicit assumption behind the favorite question, How is it possible that an all-powerful and good God could permit wars and the Holocaust?, is a naive image of a god whose characteristics (goodness and omnipotence) are modeled on human notions of goodness and omnipotence. The only answer one can give to this loaded question is that God’s goodness does not consist of depriving people of their freedom and responsibility, or of saving us from the consequences of human deeds and attitudes that lead to wars and slaughter. It is also necessary to take a further step and say that the idea of a cruel or disinterestedly inactive god is a projection onto the heavens of our own experience of human cruelty, malice, and indifference. “Goodness and omnipotence,” as we imagine them and which we find lacking in God, along with the cruelty and inactivity that we blame God for, are purely human categories. I believe the only thing that is not a mere human projection and that we can apprehend as the manifestation of God in history is God’s commandment “You shalt not kill” and Jesus’s appeal for love and forgiveness. These are radically different values that transcend our human world of notions, expectations, wishes, and fears. Love, as the Bible speaks about it, and as Jesus embodies it and testifies to it, is something “completely different”: it is how God is present in human history. Everything else that we people fill history with is human—all too human—and often inhuman. What God brings into history and where we need to seek him is love. I am a Christian because I have come to believe in this love. If we want to look into the face of this love—since “no one has ever seen God”—let us look into the face of Christ. It was he who brought this radical Other into the world (expressed in the image “he came down from heaven”) and thus understandably became a sign that will be opposed (Luke 2:34). He was the one who came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him; 138

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but to all who received him . . . he gave power to become children of God (John 1:11–12), to be his witnesses. They too would confront evil throughout history, and no B-movie “delivering angel” would be sent down to save them, just as it wasn’t for Jesus; the Devil alone offers angels of that kind.9 And yet the children of God need not fear: perfect love banishes fear. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love,” we read in scripture (1 John 4:18), and it is preceded, just a few lines earlier, by the best-known and probably the most perfect “definition of God”: God is love. He himself is that perfect love that overcomes fear. So long as we are rooted in him through our faith and love, fear and anxiety will lose their power over us. ———— —— — u————— Let us return to the historical experiences that horrified humankind so much that the religious confidence of many people was shaken. Were the effusions of evil and violence to which Western humanity has been exposed over the past hundred years—starting with the world wars and the totalitarian dictatorships—too intense, or is it simply because of our greater social sensitivity and our awareness of human rights and dignity that we are more conscious of the absurdity of mass slaughter and are more appalled by the cruel manipulation of people? (Our perception of the Holocaust, the gulags, the Armenian genocide, and the world wars is commented on somewhat ironically and sarcastically by African thinkers, who say, Dear white Western people, what really appalls you about them is that someone dared to treat you the way you’ve been treating us for centuries!) I have noticed that in the case of a number of Jewish intellectuals who survived Auschwitz and whom I got to know personally, those events did not shake their belief in God (that is too deeply written into the genes of Jews) but their love of him. “God (probably) exists, but I don’t talk to him. Since Auschwitz I have

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refused to communicate with him,” one of them explained. With all due respect to the torments and the wounds of that hell that I have not experienced and find hard to fully imagine, his words have always made me shudder. Some never gave up their dispute with God and never stopped arguing with and accusing him. God has been used to that since the days of his favorites: Abraham, Job, the psalmists, and the prophets. That’s nothing new in communication between God and people; the history of faith is full of it. But an ongoing disgruntled silence, a loss of interest in God, can be indeed a cooling of love and a much deeper and more dangerous threat to a relationship than disputes and arguments, as many people know from married life or partnerships. And what is faith without love? Sometimes the frustrations of love lead to belligerent hatred, and some kind of “disappointment in love” is certainly part of the case history of many ardent atheists. But even in such cases there is hope that the hatred will continue to retain the form of a lovehate relationship and some element of love will remain—as attentive ears will hear particularly in Nietzsche’s jeremiads. Such hatred has truly more in common with love than a silent “returning of the ticket.” One response to a faith wounded by traumatizing historical experiences is the Jewish and Christian post-Holocaust theology, which has frequently inspired me in the past, and I have tried to broaden it slightly with a “post-Gulag theology.” (But clearly, of course, the victims of communism—a regime more overtly atheistic than was neo-pagan Nazism, which masked its hatred of the God of Jews and Christians with the inscription “Gott mit Uns” on its belts—tended to be confirmed in their faith by the suffering inflicted by the Communists, and indeed many people actually found a belief under those conditions and converted to a deep faith from atheism, agnosticism, or purely formal church membership.) A very radical form of post-Holocaust theology, and one that many Christians certainly found startling at first, is offered by the American rabbi and inspirational author Lawrence Kushner. 10 He separates tragic events strictly into “bad” and “evil.” The evil ones 140

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are those that are caused by human malice and ill will: these include wars, concentration camps, genocides, acts of terrorism, murders, and misfortunes caused by human negligence and irresponsibility. To blame God for these ills and not ourselves, free beings who have received clear commandments from God, is absurd and blasphemous. It is simply misusing God to shirk our own responsibility. We cannot gloss over human responsibility and freedom not to do evil; it is too precious a gift and task from God. I have already discussed this topic. But Rabbi Kushner refuses to hold God responsible even for “bad events” that are not caused by people, such as natural disasters. They too fill people with fear and sometimes engender the perverse notion of an enraged god, hidden behind climate changes and geological processes, a god that punishes people with volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and floods. God did not die after the Holocaust, Kushner writes. What did die was a notion of a god manifesting itself in nonhuman nature—even though this idea is present in many texts of the Hebrew Bible. If we now know that we cannot naively adopt the cosmological notions of the biblical authors, the rabbi continues, we ought not with similar naïveté adopt literally all the historically and culturally conditioned religious attitudes of all the levels of biblical text. The description of God’s behavior in the nonhuman sphere, such as the shaking of mountains and opening of seas, is a metaphor that was never meant to be taken literally, says Rabbi Kushner, and presents a weighty argument; namely, if the world of the Bible was so ontologically different from our present-day world that it was possible for such divine interventions to take place in it, then the truths of those times would be irrelevant for us now.11 I don’t want to open up here a debate about “demythologizing the Bible,” which is nothing new in Christian theology. (It strikes me that those who anxiously ask “What will be left of the Bible afterward?” if the biblical concept of nature is regarded as a reflection of historically conditioned notions and treated as a metaphor have never really studied the Bible. Don’t worry: it won’t detract in any way from the true essence and meaning of

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the biblical message. On the contrary, the message will probably stand out more clearly!) I was struck by the rabbi’s impassioned plea for us not to seek God behind the scenes of human wars, or, for that matter, behind the scenes of natural disasters. God gave nature its beauty and power but did not endow it with a moral conscience. That he reserved for us, declares another inspiring American rabbi, who coincidentally has the same surname, Harold S. Kushner.12 To a great degree, he says, the Creator delivered nature into our hands, and so we must treat it responsibly and sensibly. But there is no rational reason that we should regard nature’s demonstrations of its power over us, or its reactions to our irresponsible behavior toward ourselves, as God’s punitive rod. People thought up a god responsible for wars in order to shirk responsibility for human evil in the world, and a god responsible for natural disasters in order to escape fear of the absurdity of evil that defies human control. Only when one accepts the entire hard truth about history and nature can one glimpse the majesty of the living God behind the fiction of a god manufactured for our use. God doesn’t want us to alleviate the truth by such religious speculations but calls on us to see it unadorned, to accept it and bear it. And to that end he gives us the strength of faith. Let us not expect from faith (and teachers of faith) perfect explanations for all the disturbing mysteries of nature and history. They offer us something far more important: the strength to confront honorably and without fear all these phenomena and the whole of unadorned reality.

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12

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“Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them,” wrote Teilhard de Chardin. The statement is characteristic of the faith of a man who was scientist, theologian, and poet. It typifies that great visionary of the planetary unification of humankind in the cosmic Christ, in the “omega point,” the objective of the universal evolutionary process. It was probably intended as a response to the attempt of the twentieth-century totalitarian regimes to unite Europe and the world by revolutionary violence. Teilhard believed that love of the Earth and matter in combination with trust in the creative force of man and nature would bring into the world sufficient élan to complete the evolutionary process of cosmic convergence. Is present-day Christianity capable of such a creative force of renewal? Is it ready to seize the initiative in this way? When asked whether Christianity is still in its diapers, as Teilhard believed, or whether it is in its final death throes, as Freud, 143

Marx, and many others predicted, my usual reply is that Christianity today (in Europe, at least) is more likely experiencing “noonday fatigue”; its historical afternoon is yet to come. The afternoon of life, maintained C. G. Jung1—another man who dreamed of a radical therapy for the Christianity of his time—is an important time of maturing, an opportunity to switch from outward structures to inner content, a propitious time for discovering the treasures stored deep inside. I have an aversion to vociferous appeals for “new evangelization” if I sense that it implies simply new attempts at reconquest, a religious mobilization to recapture positions lost in the past. If “new evangelization” is truly to be new it must rid itself of nostalgia for yesterday and strike out this time on a kenotic path of love. Building outward structures and “Christianization,” the endeavor to conquer “for Christ” new geographic and culturalspiritual territories and annex them to the existing Christian empire (Christianitas), was a mission that Christians fulfilled during the morning of their history. Instead of the conversion of pagans, a “new evangelization” should start by the conversion of Christians, a turning away from the outward to the inward, from the letter to the Spirit, from the static to the dynamic, from “being a Christian” to “becoming a Christian.” If this process is to be in some sense a return, it must not be a vain attempt to return to any of the extinct historical forms of the church but instead a return to the One, who, although he was the equal of God, chose human form.2 If we wish to follow Christ we must renounce any yearning for Christianity to occupy a privileged place in this world. Each of us must become “one of the people” and take seriously this solidarity with the people of our time, to which the church committed itself in the beautiful words at the beginning of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”3 Let us not be afraid of losing ourselves in the crowd thereby, or losing our Christian identity. What will distinguish us from the

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mass of people around us (but what will also link us with those with whom we ourselves would not seek to be allied) is not the crosses on the banners and on the walls of public buildings but precisely our willingness “to take upon ourselves the form of a servant.” Such an attitude (kenosis, the self-emptying of one’s own will) means adopting a markedly nonconformist stance amid a civilization geared mainly to material success; those who live that way can be both a concealed “salt of the earth” and also a highly visible “light of the world.” Christians (this is how I understand the message of the Council): Don’t be “a separate people” any longer. The apostle Paul led you out of those confines long ago. Don’t be afraid to immerse yourselves in the world, be one with the people of these days in their cares and questions, their anxieties and their hopes. Weep with them that weep, rejoice with them that rejoice. But never forget: this is not a call to conformity but to love. ———— —— — u————— May a disciple of Jesus love the world? On this point, as on many others, we find various statements in the New Testament that at first sight at least contradict each other. On the one hand: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). On the other hand: “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live forever.4 But maybe it is only a seeming contradiction. The one who loves and is able to love the world is God; God can be a “lover of the world” precisely because God is not of the world. We, on the other hand, are naturally of the world, which is why we cannot love the world; our love of the world will always be no more than self-love.

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Only if we are called by Christ to follow him5 and if by that call “the world has been crucified to us and we to the world,”6 can we, paradoxically, love the world. That call does not detach us from the world or separate us from people and from their yearnings, needs, joys, or cares but from the “spirit of this world,” from the superficiality that distracts and constrains. Only then can we love the world “in Christ and through Christ.” Not with an enrapturing, possessive love but with a kenotic, self-sacrificing, ministering love, following Christ’s example. No one has greater love than this, 7 and Jesus’s final wish, a new and eternal commandment, a new covenant (which we continue to renew in so many words whenever we celebrate the Eucharist, “the Lord’s Supper”)8 is precisely this extreme form of love: “Love one another as I love you.”9 For the disciple of Christ, loving the world does not mean loving it with the “uncritical” (idolizing) and often also manipulatory love of “the children of this world.” We are warned against that; it is the concupiscentia (desire) that Augustine describes: “sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life.”10 The love with which we are to love the world is solidarity and service. Covetous love for the world of things (and also of people, perceived as things, as objects to be manipulated) relates to the “world of It” in the sense of Buber’s celebrated book.11 Sympathetic, ministering, kenotic love relates to the world of persons “the world of Thou.” But even components of the nonhuman world, such as animals, or the landscape, or art treasures, if we have a nonmanipulatory relationship with them, one of real care, tenderness, and responsibility, can belong not simply to the realm of “It,” but can assume for us the character of “Thou.” They too can become a medium through which to view the absolute Thou. Teilhard, who passionately loved the Earth and “holy matter,” was neither a neo-pagan idolater of nature nor a covert atheistic materialist, as some suspected him to be, but instead a mystic of God’s presence in creation, who, like St. Francis of Assisi, through his love for sister matter, discovered more and more dimensions of the Divine milieu—creative, self-giving, unbounded love. Yes, this 146

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love—and this love alone—points to the source “of goodness and tenderness.” ———— —— — u————— We can only love the world “in God.” That means with the “detachment” or critical distance that faith gives us but also with the responsibility and warmth, which are also the gift of a living faith and love. If we are joined to God through faith and love, God gives us a certain share in both his transcendence and his immanence in our relationship with the world, allowing us to “be in the world, but not of the world,” to show solidarity but not to conform. To be in the world but not of the world is another of the koans that Jesus gave his disciples at the Last Supper, according to John. 12 That is the source of the most intrinsic dynamic of Christian existence in the world, in society, and in history. Yes, both God’s transcendence and God’s immanence are possibly more evident to us today than ever before. We recognize that God is more different and at the same time closer than we thought in the past. In my earlier books I showed that even God’s radical closeness is a variety of his hiddenness (in the same way that our own face is hidden from us; we can only see a reverse image of it in a mirror). That radical hiddenness throws wide the doors of human freedom. It undoubtedly permits (more than before maybe) the choice of an atheistic, “naturalistic” interpretation of God’s inaccessibility, but in so doing it also offers the freedom of belief. An act of faith is now more an act of human freedom than ever it was in the past (when, to a certain extent, it was driven by a traditional religious image of the world, transmitted by culture and supported by society); but that does not stop it being at the same time a gift from God, “through grace.” Faith requires the courage to choose and trust. Hence the difficulties of faith in our time but also its beauty and grandeur. Faith is difficult because if it is not to remain in the shallows of noncommital feelings, it must take up the cross of great moral responsibility (precisely the responsibility that people

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often rid themselves of by transferring it to God). But my burden is light, Jesus assures us. “Love bears all things,” the apostle teaches.13 ———— —— — u————— The crucial spiritual problem of our time is not to demonstrate faith to “the shaken”(in the sense of convincing them of God’s existence) but again to link faith and love because only such a faith is living and convincing. The first essential step toward love is trust. The only way to restore to “the shaken” their trust in God is to restore their trust in people. A while ago I read the results of a sociological values orientation survey in Europe. One remarkable correlation emerged from it: the lower the religiosity in a given society, the lower the mutual trust between people. If we are concerned that a certain society is truly sick because of a lack of interpersonal trust (which has fatal economic and political consequences, since trust is the fundamental prerequisite if democracy, business, and the market economy are to function), we should not underestimate the spiritual causes. The restoration of missing trust (particularly in cases where the culture of civil society was suppressed for a long time or deliberately shattered by authoritarian regimes) is a long-term process. When asked a very long time ago what would be the future of Russia after the fall of communism, Alexander Solzhenitsyn re plied: a long, long, long recuperation. Naturally our trust in the human world cannot be so naive and uncritical that we underestimate evil and the danger that the powers of evil represent. Restoration of trust always presumes a certain courage to take risks and also a readiness for sacrifice. The same applies to our trust in the world as it does to our love for ourselves: if it is lacking we are not capable of genuine love for others or God; if it is excessive and uncritical our capacity to love others and God will be similarly affected. No wonder; after all “we” are still “the world.” However, the sentence “The world— that is us” has another possible meaning: The world is always a “with-world”—Mitwelt. 148

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———— —— — u————— For years I have been exploring the idea that the future of our world (by which I mean here the world of our Western civilization) depends on the capacity of two types of humanism to coexist and be mutually compatible, namely, Christian humanism and secular humanism. In the spirit of the present book we might talk in terms of two kinds of love, two kinds of love for the world and for people. How can they inspire each other? Wherein lies the danger in the one-sidedness of the one that could be compensated by the other and vice versa?14 In a sense secular humanism is the “unwanted child” of Western Christianity. It strikes me that the time has come for Christians to stop regarding secular humanism as the “prodigal son,” in other words, to stop looking on it from the unspoken viewpoint of the upright older brother in Jesus’s well-known parable.15 It is time for us to change our point of view and look at ourselves and our partners through the eyes of the inexplicably generous father. The behavior of the father in the story will remain inexplicable to us until we realize his secret: that secret is his unconditional love. Love for both sons. The parable of the “prodigal son,” or more accurately, of the two brothers and the generous father, sends a message to the Pharisees among both Jews and Christians: Your virtue could ensnare you in pride and superiority. If you cease to consider as brothers those whom you long perceived to be misguided sinners, you might find to your bitter astonishment—like the elder brother in Jesus’s parable—that they will precede you into the house of the merciful and forgiving Father, whose love is generous and unconditional. Those who have “lost themselves in the world” may come to realize something “in that far country” that those who constantly remain “at home” have overlooked and failed to fully appreciate. Not until modern-day Christianity takes secular humanism seriously and accepts it as a brother will contemporary secular culture, for its part, take Christian faith seriously. During their mutual alienation, both “brothers” have acquired valuable perceptions along the way and have plenty to share with each other. LOVE THE WORLD?

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In lectures and debates in various countries I invariably emphasize, in my contributions about the issue of European identity, which is so widely discussed nowadays, that the modern identity of Europe is derived neither solely from Christianity nor solely from secularity but from the compatibility of Christianity and secularity. Were Christianity to turn its back on modernity it would sink into bigotry and fundamentalist religion; and conversely, were modernity to turn away completely from Christianity it would itself become an intolerant pseudoreligion.16 All the crises and tragic experiences of “late modernity” with which secular humanism has had to come to terms since World War I at the very latest (and, it must be added, to which it undoubtedly contributed due to its one-sidedness) also helped it mature. Besides militant secularism and aggressive “new atheism” (about which there is really nothing new apart from its astonishing intolerance), there are authors to be found among the heirs of Enlightenment rationalism who are very perceptive about the moral, spiritual, and often overtly sacred dimensions of reality, and are potentially valuable partners in dialogue for theologians.17 It would be extremely nonsensical to continue the dispute over whether to say yes or no to modernity, a dispute that has divided Christians for so long and exhausted both camps (as well as causing the church to waste many opportunities to tackle genuine problems and the signs of the times). Modernity is part of our identity, and indeed the “conservatives” are more deeply rooted in the paradigms of modernity than they are prepared to admit,18 and fundamentalism, however much it swears by tradition, is a typically modern phenomenon. ———— —— — u————— Some time ago I was invited to give a lecture at a Polish Catholic university about whether present-day Europe is de-Christianized, and if so, to what extent. I was struck by a certain disparity between the English and Polish versions of the proposed subtitle of my talk. In the English version of the subtitle I found the expres150

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sion “radical laicity,” while in the Polish it was “neopogaństvo” (neo-paganism). Not the same thing at all! I immediately protested. Then I said to myself, maybe this discrepancy conceals a profounder misunderstanding. Maybe it wasn’t simply a mistranslation. Maybe these two things really are confused in the thinking of some people today. In my view, laicité (secularity, the product of secularism) and paganism (including neo-paganism) are quite different, even contrary phenomena. If I were to represent paganism, Christianity, and secular humanism (laicité) graphically I would draw three circles in that order one after the other along a time axis. Or even better, paganism would partly overlap with Christianity on one side, and on the other side I would show an overlap between Christianity and laicité. Christianity, secular humanism, and neo-paganism (various attempts to revive pre-Christian and non-Christian religiosity) are nowadays three separate propositions,19 just as in ancient times there was the triad Christianity, Judaism, and ancient paganism. The contemporary triad is more obviously present in European culture than the oft-cited triad of “Abrahamic monotheisms,” Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, even though Islam is beginning to play a growing role in the West. They are three propositions, three different paths, but today, even more intensively than in late antiquity, these worlds are overlapping; there is interpenetration and attempts at synthesis, as well as new and old conflicts and new and old alliances. There are experiments in allying Christianity with secular culture, particularly scientific rationalism, in opposition to “neo-paganism,” particularly esoteric spiritualism and various irrational cults that are thriving in the almost boundless tolerance and relativism of postmodern society. The most vocal proponent of such an alliance was Benedict XVI. The pope justified his appeal for a “new alliance of faith and rationality” by pointing to what he called the decisive and irreversible step taken by early Christianity, when, in the culture of antiquity, it did not ally itself with its religion (paganism) but with its philosophy, and in particular with the

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ancient “Enlightenment”—the philosophical critics of religion. That conviction had led Ratzinger to make a number of radical statements that in some ways are surprisingly reminiscent of the heralds of “religionless Christianity”: “The Christian faith is not based on poetry or politics, these two great sources of religion; it is based on knowledge. . . . In Christianity, rationality became religion, no longer its adversary.”20 Another version of the alliance between Christianity and secular humanism is cooperation in the civic and political fields, and in particular, common ventures in defense of human rights, social justice, and solidarity (in this respect pioneering work was done by dissidents in central and Eastern Europe, Pope John Paul II, and the Christian social activists in the so-called Third World). Moreover, Christianity has even made overtures to “neopaganism,” the current awakening of awareness for the sacred and mystical. This chiefly takes the form of the search for the deeper common basis for mysticism that Ernst Troeltsch once called a sort of third type of Christianity alongside the churches and sects; he even regarded it as a kind of universal religious philosophy present in all the great religious cultures. This “broad ecumenism,” a supradenominational and interreligious spiritual alliance of contemplative people, is sometimes presented as a human defense against the negative influences of the modern technological civilization created by Western secular rationality, a civilization alienated from humankind, nature, and God. In this category are interreligious meditative meetings, such as cooperation in the field of ecology— the protection of creation from the damaging effects of a civilization of unlimited growth. ———— —— — u————— I started by clearly distinguishing between paganism and laicité. However, where Christianity is unable to provide inspiration for contemporary culture and anxiously isolates itself, it opens the way for a third possible alliance, an odd partnership between “nostalgia for pagan religiosity” and the consumerist form of secular culture. 152

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What present-day sociology calls the “return of religion” mostly ends up as “neo-paganism.” The yearning for the sacred and a thirst for spirituality, particularly when there is nothing authentic on offer from the churches, give rise to esotericism of every kind—variations on themes from the Far East or the dim and distant past (Celtic worship of the forces of nature, etc.). Secular culture also senses this dearth and gladly opens its markets to these new religious goods. The disenchanted world (remember Max Weber) is readily allowing itself to be enchanted and beguiled once more. Yes, that too could be the meaning of the “the postsecular age” concept that is widely spoken about. Is Europe de-Christianized? In a certain sense, not at all: for one thing traditional Christianity isn’t as dead as many secular media outlets would have it, and for another, the dominant secular culture of the West today continues to contain (often without admitting it) many features of its Christian origins. However, looked at from another angle, present-day Europe—or at least a large part of it—is indeed markedly de-Christianized. Christianity lost the political role of religion as a universal bond and moved out of the political sphere into the cultural sphere. The very word religion that we continue to apply to Christianity, without registering how the meaning of the word has changed over the past few centuries, now refers to a particular sector of culture.21 That is also why the West, which was accustomed to a politically paci fied Christianity, was so taken aback and shocked by the repoliticization of the religion that is spreading more and more in the world, namely, Islam. Even in the framework of the current global repoliticization and deprivatization of religion that sociologists refer to,22 religiosity remains a “private matter” for most European Christians, and one that increasingly eludes the socializing and oversight role of the religious institutions. I am not surprised but find it disquieting when, in reaction to this development, we hear war drums from certain Christian circles (particularly the American religious Right) calling for a religious and political mobilization and a “cultural war,” whether against modern secularism or

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against the “Muslim threat.” I consider crusades against modernity lost in advance; in fact, both sides could emerge the losers— and if Christianity were transformed into a political ideology it could betray its own essence. ———— —— — u————— Liberalism’s cultural victory in the West would seem to be irreversible. Nevertheless, the decisive battle about the complexion of our civilization—particularly a unifying Europe—will most likely take place within liberalism itself, between two models of liberalism. I am very concerned that both “camps” within Christianity today (the traditionalist camp that rejects liberalism out of hand and the “progressive” camp that sometimes flirts with it uncritically) are incapable of distinguishing between those two models. It will be a conflict between two versions of liberalism that have been precisely described by the contemporary British philosopher John N. Gray,23 namely, between the pluralist model, which seeks to create space for mutual respect and freedom for all (including in respect of religion), and the universalist model, which presents liberalism as a binding ideology (and often goes hand in hand with an aggressive and intolerant secularism); between liberalism as a model of coexistence, which can be achieved in many regimes, and liberalism as a recipe for a regime that claims universal validity. Today’s crises (and not just the economic ones) would seem to be caused by the fact that after the downfall of many structures of modern times (such as the collapse of the Marxist empire) no real new style has been found. Over the centuries Christianity created a whole series of cultural styles that shaped art, philosophy, spirituality, and social structures, as well as people’s way of thinking and their lifestyle. A distressing feature of the cultural and spiritual impotence of nineteenth-century Catholicism was its tendency to pseudo-styles: neo-Romanesque, neo-Gothic, and neo-Baroque churches were built; and neo-Thomism and neo-scholasticism were promoted. But the pastors of the the church at that time had little in common with the wise householder who in Jesus’s parable 154

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brought out new and old treasures. The new was woefully lacking, or, scarcely had it come painfully to birth, it was unwisely and insensitively uprooted by those who, in spite of Jesus’s warning, played at being angels at the Last Judgment and pulled up lots of wheat along with the tares.24 At a time when they are beginning to constitute a minority in the West, will Christians be a creative minority, as Benedict XVI repeatedly appealed to them to be, or instead a sterile, closed ghetto? In other words, will a new style emerge from this minority that can prove an inspiration for seekers outside that minority? I must admit that when I repeatedly heard from the lips of the great popes Paul VI and John Paul II the expression “civilization of love” I could not help asking myself whether it was a pious cliché or a utopian idealistic project. People who have experienced for themselves the attempt to implement an Orwellian world, including its “Ministry of Love—Miniluv,” in the second half of the twentieth century are somewhat allergic to similarsounding slogans. Nonetheless, the sentence with which I opened this chapter became permanently fixed in my memory. It is the sentence by Teilhard de Chardin, the great prophet of globalization (what he called “planetary civilization”): Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them. Are the negative and destructive aspects of this irreversible trend of global unification and the interpenetration of civilizations, which are hard to ignore today, also a sign that this force does not have enough space in our world, that—biblically speaking— “the love of many has grown cold”? Will we prove capable of turning the globalization process into a culture of communication? Will we make the transition from toleration to unconditional and unbounded love? That is the question, as the Prince of Denmark would say. But on it depends our future—whether we are to be or not to be.

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Stronger than Death ———————— ——u———— ——————

“Love is stronger than death,” referring to a verse in the Song of Songs (Song of Sol. 8:6), can be read on tombstones and death announcements and heard in funeral orations. But is it stronger than the death of God? The death of God, that unconscious murder that was well concealed and for which people have not yet accepted responsibility, did not manifest itself as the cosmic chaos that Nietzsche wrote about in The Gay Science. It would be better to talk about the quiet death of God in language. The word God first started to disappear unobtrusively from natural science treatises (“We had no need of that hypothesis”),1 then gradually from philosophical writings, from the academic language of universities, from preambles to constitutional documents, from witness testimonies at court, from politicians’ speeches, and sometimes even from pulpits. And where it remained in everyday language it was most often used for involuntary curses. 157

“Why do you go on talking about God; why do you introduce that old, loaded, empty, confusing, equivocal word once more into the language, even though you are aware of its ambiguity and problematical nature, which you even write about yourself ?,” I am asked by a university colleague who professes secular humanism. “Since you assert that God is love, wouldn’t the simple term ‘love’ suffice? When I’m reading your books am I to delete the word God in my mind and replace it with the word love? I would find them far more approachable and understandable if I did. What would be the difference? Wouldn’t you bring your philosophy of love closer to actual experience?” But on the contrary, I want to open up “actual experience” slightly, to inspire and enrich it by indicating the source and foundation of life and love. For me the word God does not refer to something beyond the world’s stage but instead to its forgotten depths. No, I’m not offering some kind of “Platonism for the people,” which would depreciate our world and our everyday experience and view it as a deceptive realm of shadows, as an unreal reflection of some supernatural realm of eternal, immobile gods/ ideas. The God I am talking about doesn’t dwell somewhere outside our reality but right within the movement of life and love. We share in him insofar as we are fully immersed in life and the life of love; we share in him insofar as we do not simply surf over the surface of life and do not regard love as an attractive amusement park. Our human demonstrations of affection are often a reaction to something. They are evoked by and conditional on something (such as some person’s beauty and goodness), and quite often they are accompanied by anticipated reciprocity; we love those who love us, says Jesus. But when I talk about God’s love and God as love, I am talking about absolutely unconditional love. “God doesn’t love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good,” is the way one contemporary author sums up the core of the Gospel message about God.2 Yes, maybe this unconditional love is closest to deep maternal love: a mother also does not love her child because it is beautiful, good, moral, and smart; she loves it even when it is none of those

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things; she loves it because it is her child. For God’s love, no child, no person (even the worst), no part of the world is alien. He loves them all and he loves them all equally and completely. Such a love does not exist? Certainly the world cannot give it—and that’s precisely why I am talking about God. The world certainly isn’t a dissection room in which I could cut everything to pieces until I cried out at last, I’ve found it: here is God and his love; I can show it to you! But perhaps it’s a concert hall in which, when I let myself be totally carried away by the symphony of life, I can hear and experience for a brief moment something of the unfathomable intensity and beauty of absolute love. But such moments are sacred in the sense that I cannot carry them back in their full intensity into my everyday life, because they fundamentally transcend the everyday—which is what a holy day is. I can’t “make three tents” here and create heaven on earth all on my own because I want it. The holy cannot be manipulated; that is one of its fundamental characteristics. To return to the metaphor of the concert hall: the place where joy and beauty is ecstatically experienced is undoubtedly love between people, and particularly love between a man and a woman. If it is deep and genuine, that is where, in a certain sense, the “cosmic convergence” occurs, to borrow a term from Teilhard. It is there that the polarity that God introduced into creation as the source of all life’s dynamism and fertility is fulfilled and also transcended. That is why love between a man and woman, including its physical manifestation, has been for mystics of all ages and religions the most eloquent symbol of love between God and man. It is also why the love between people of the same sex—with all due respect for its possible emotional bounty—can never have the same value as the relationship between a man and a woman. God made love between a man and a woman, the linking of two noninterchangeable poles, the sanctum for the transmission of life and the antechamber of the holy of holies, the mystery of his inner life, his matchless, absolutely unconditional love. The sentence “God is love” has the same meaning as “God is the unity of opposites”: love is the unification of what is different and even contradictory.

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Yes, the key to encountering that love that transcends everything that the human eye has seen, that the human ear has heard, and that has entered any human mind does not lie solely on the altars of temples built by people; we can find it in human love— the temple built by God himself—albeit not on the surface, which suffices for many of those for whom the word love is no more than a cliché, only in its depths. Real love, scripture tells us, prefers to give rather than receive. And the love of which we speak here gives itself. Only in total self-giving is human love the image of that unconditional, absolute love, on account of which and for which I stand up for the word God. ———— —— — u————— “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” Jesus says in John’s Gospel at the Last Supper. And the next day his sacrifice on the cross expands this sentence further: he gives himself for all, including his enemies, and asks for forgiveness for those killing him. Jesus’s love breaks through all barriers; it manifests itself in forgiveness, absolute freedom from the spirit of revenge and enmity. When Christians speak about absolute love they often refer to the cross and Jesus’s life sacrifice—and rightly so, in accordance with scripture and the entire theological tradition. Nevertheless, I believe that the meaning of Jesus’s words about laying down life extends beyond his cross to include, for instance, the entire galaxy of martyrs for the faith. And in addition there are everyday, undramatic, and nonviolent “life-giving” sacrifices. With all due respect to the martyrs who sacrificed their lives, we should not be blind to any act of self-sharing. Even what appears to be an entirely everyday act of self-sharing can be a manifestation of “heroic love,” if we may borrow that concept from the decrees of the papal Congregation for the Causes of Saints, particularly when a human life is spent quietly and inconspicu-

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ously in such actions (and without hope of attention from the aforementioned Congregation), like a candle on an altar. From my many years of pastoral practice I am aware not only of human weakness and sins, but also that there are more of those hidden, ungilded altars than we think, and very precious sacrifices are brought daily to them. If I speak with respect about God’s love, then my deep respect applies also to all those who bring it into the world. And if their testimony to that experience speaks of the love and strength for it as a gift, then it is no mere cliché of feigned humility. The word God for them is no mere easily discardable linguistic ornament. With all the seriousness of their experience and from its depth, they thereby indicate “whence” they draw their perseverance on the path of self-forgetting love. We have no right to treat their witness lightly. ———— —— — u————— If “giving one’s life” conjures up in our minds the word death, we need not necessarily think immediately of a martyr’s death. “Ordinary death” can also be an act of self-giving and giving of life. This attitude to death offers an alternative to the tragic and anxious perception of death. However, in order to perceive death as a gift, one must first deeply experience life as a gift. If there is a primal foundation of a religious attitude to life, then it is not notions about God or gods but a deeply experienced awareness that life is a gift. If there is something truly godless, then it is ungrateful disregard of the fundamental non-self-evidence of our life and the fact that we have been given to each other; truly godless is that banal perception of life as an “accident,” as a purely biological fact without any spiritual content and meaning. One must not only recognize in theory that life is a gift; we must profoundly experience it. Of course this “profound experience” need not take the form of some exceptional mystical encounter; it is more a matter of “everyday mysticism”: with every deed

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and experience in one’s life one uncovers this reality and is grateful for it. If someone has this experience and is reluctant to talk about God in relation to it—and they prefer to speak about gratitude to life itself or to nature—then it usually simply means that their personal concept of God is too narrow to encompass that experience, and they are actually using concepts such as life and nature as “pseudonyms of God.” But why deify life and nature mythologically when there is a word that characterizes precisely what implies nature and life but also infinitely transcends them? Why deify something that isn’t God? Why present the conditional as the unconditional? Why absolutize life phenomena when we have a word that denotes the Absolute itself, the Absolute that allows anything that is not absolute to be practically and realistically relativized? I use the word God sparingly; I mean by it solely that supreme mystery, the Unknown, that shines through life as we know it. Or is it really so important for us to assert against all experience that we already know everything, and what we don’t know we will sooner or later get to the bottom of by using our reason and its tools? Isn’t it humbler and also wiser to say instead with Pascal that the greatest achievement of reason is to recognize its own limits, or to accept Anselm’s “working definition of God,” namely, that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived? ———— —— — u————— If I perceive life as a gift, then I can also view death as a gift. “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”—it is this mental balance that Job struggled to achieve.3 Death is not a mere returning of the gift of life. Only loans are returned, and to return a gift is always regarded as an insult to the donor. The entrance ticket to life (think of the conversation between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov) is not returnable. Life is not just a gift; it is also an assignment. At the moment of death, the handing on of the life that was given to us as an opportunity and

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entrusted to us as a task is—in religion terms—a sort of completed task report, the hour of truth about the extent to which we have fulfilled or squandered the opportunity we were given. Aversion to that religious concept of death is possibly only assisted by arguments from the arsenal of materialistically interpreted science, although in fact it is more likely based on the anxiety aroused by the need to render an account to a Judge who cannot be bribed or influenced. Compared to that the atheist view that everything comes to an end at death is a comforting dose of opium! When the biological substrate of our consciousness seeks to function, in all probability that consciousness—our ego—expires, but is life, our life, simply our little ego and nothing else at all? May we reduce the mystery of the life we were given solely to our “biological presence”? ———— —— — u————— The word used by faith in response to the question what will there be after death is eternity, the eternal NOW. It does not denote something “to come” but what is now. Eternity, the unimaginable—unimaginable because it surrounds and totally transcends time, in other words, the category in which our concepts and thinking operate—has been placed in the future by our imagination and conceives it usually as the future incessantly prolonged. Of course the future is an image and symbol of God only insofar as it is not available to us; but our entire future life, as well as all the time granted to humankind and our universe until they end, is NOTHING compared to the incomparability of eternity, which “is” and transcends every “was” and “will be.” It is not “longer” but simply different. Eternity is God, who is absolutely different from everything that is not God and at the same time is the now that is, was, and will be eternally present at every moment of our lives. What once happened is true, and the fact that it happened (such as the fact that you have just read or heard a reading of this

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text of mine) will be eternally true until we are no longer here and this book will be no longer, and until the stars go out; simply the moment will never come that something of what happened will no longer be true. And by the words God or eternity, we mean precisely the reference point in relation to which the truth was, is, and will be, as Robert Spaemann maintains in his book Der letzte Gottesbeweis (The Last Proof of God).4 The fact that we give that point different names is neither here nor there; but why should we give it a different name? Why and for what would we then be saving the word God? God is the reference point, the eternal “whence” of all reality and its truth, as well as the everlasting nature of that truth; it is the truth of eternity. The concept of God as unquenchable memory, preserving the truth of past things, has helped me cope with one particularly burdensome feature of the pain from loss of one’s kith and kin, namely, the thought that with them a bit of my life, our joint memory, departs into the ineffable; the things we could remember together are truly lost for good at that moment. “To love someone, is to tell them: ‘You will not die,’ ” the phrase of Gabriel Marcel’s mentioned earlier, is apposite in this context. To forget a person we have loved, whether they have died or are still alive, is to let them die. Inability to “release” a deceased person means a refusal to surrender them to God; it reveals that our love for the person was and still is too possessive and has yet to mature into love that is giving. Remembering the deceased in prayer means finding that person in God and presenting oneself with them in immutable peace; it means knowing that that portion of life that we experienced together is now in eternity, in unceasing memory. I am still alive, but through what I experienced with the person who has preceded me into eternity, I am already in eternity. The fact that I am aging and my friends depart does not impoverish my life, but bit by bit it moves into a dimension that amplifies my life here and broadens it into an enduring dimension. My death will simply bring to an end the exodus that is happening all the time and which is brought to mind repeatedly when I take leave of those near to me. 164

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———— —— — u————— What will be after death is already now; this is what emerges from the preceding reflections. “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?” With this superficial and profoundly untrue statement, Epicurus and the hedonists of all ages have tried to banish anxiety in the face of the unavoidable and indisputable moment when life meets death. I offer a different reason for not fearing death: what will be after death—eternity—is already now, and there are moments in this life when we can encounter it. They are not moments that we should fear, although if we live them to the full they will justifiably arouse sacred awe, because they are part of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. They are primarily ecstatic moments of coalescence in profound love. The aforementioned verse from the Song of Songs, which is misquoted on tombstones and death announcements, in fact reads, “for love is strong as death.” There is nothing funerary or sepulchral about these words. They refer to the strength of the amorous union of a man and woman, sometimes referred as la petite mort, “the little death.” Yes, there is always a sense in which powerful love (and not merely the flame of self-surrender in the arms of a loved one) is already death. The mystics, those passionate lovers of the absolute, wrote exquisite pages of theological poetry about it. Love is the death of the ego, the small “I,” which unites with the “kernel of man” (das Selbst) and through this gate (“I am the gate,” Christ says) enters eternity. In the course of our lives, these dramatic moments of ecstatic connection, of contact with eternity, bring us back over and over again to the fragmentation of time, to what sometimes was, at other times is, and on yet another occasion is still to be. But the moment will come when we will not have to come back again. At that moment we will already be fully and lastingly permeated with what is already now and forever.

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Dance of Love ———————— ——u———— ——————

Vitriolic, disgruntled, and farsighted, Nietzsche will probably always remain my guide along the tortuous paths of religion, although I’ll probably never write my planned confession under the title “Nietzsche as Educator,” inspired by his book about Schopenhauer. Nietzsche taught me the courage not to shy away from any objection or doubts, to “dare to venture out into the sea of doubt, without a compass”; not to fear the ambivalence of reality or perceiving everything from various sides at once; not to hesitate to have “two opinions about everything”; not to fear going it alone or swimming against the tide; to disdain nationalism, the herd mentality, and idolatry, simply because the things idolized are regarded by many as incontestable and eternal; to disregard No Entry signs on thought paths; and not to ask the way but to question the ways themselves.1 He taught me that apart from the

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world of the day and the light of reason there also exists the truth of the night, when the world is deeper than it ever seemed to the day.2 If I learned anything from that, may the Lord credit it to the “most godless of the godless”! He it was who taught me that great thoughts and ideas deserve to have great enemies (Christianity has had more than enough petty enemies), and we often owe more to enemies than to the applause of friends. Besides, I believe that the Lord co-opted him for all eternity among the Old Testament prophets, the passionate destroyers of idols and those children of Jacob-Israel of whom it may said that “he heroically wrestled with God and stood the test.” All those nights he spent wrestling and all the wounds he suffered in the process! With all that blaspheming, he summoned God, whom we had killed with our atheistic indifference, back among us! With what urgency he demonstrated to bandwagon atheism and hollow, conformist piety that they are both far from the truth! It is true that when he battled with “the otherworldly” and asserted faithfulness to the earth, he roared like a wounded and enraged lion. But have we overlooked the fact that he regarded the lion’s pride as simply a transitional phase on the path to a new childlike innocence?3 Can we redress all the wrongs done to him by those who misused his words or those who anathematized him because they both mistook him for his caricature, “the ape of Zarathustra”? True, in many ways it was his own fault, because of his plain speaking and his notorious penchant for provocation and incitement! After all, he himself knew that “we often contradict an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it is expressed that is unsympathetic to us.”4 But how better to conceal his subtlety than by meeting rudeness with rudeness in the form of militant rhetoric? With his fine sense of smell the Hermit of Sils-Maria disclosed “the human, all too human!” behind many aspects of religion and many “heavenly speeches.” To a great extent he was right, as I can testify from my own experience. But it is precisely because of his courage in questioning so many things and so many aspects of religion that it seems to me that this zealot was less a Dionysian bard

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than a—possibly unwitting—disciple of the one who said, “Man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man”! There is just one thing that Jesus the great questioner never called into question, one thing that he regarded as absolute, unconditional, and sovereign above all else, and that is love. ———— —— — u————— Love is undoubtedly a “human matter.” Every human being is aware of it in this form: some know it from experience, others at least from hearsay. In this book I have reflected on various facets of love, particularly those that secular discussion of love tends to ignore, such as love of God and God’s love for us. Would Nietzsche also say that it was a “human, all too human” matter? If the answer is yes, then on this issue I would have to part company with him. I understand his aversion for those who fly away from faithfulness to the earth into otherworldly realms. I think I know the reasons that in his book Human, Too Human, he so vehemently resists any references to “beyond” and “above.” Yet the depth of eternity that I perceive does not diminish in any way my inner yes to the here and now. This is not the absent gaze whereby we insult someone by looking through them when we are not thinking about them and are unaware of them. We might compare the manner of observing I mean to the attentive way a teacher looks with hope and confidence at his students, and perceives within them the gifts that they themselves are not even aware of yet; or the gaze with which the bridegroom perceives his bride as the future mother of his children. If sometimes we manage for a moment to see ourselves with the eyes of the one who loves us and trusts us, all our overwhelming feelings of unworthiness and inadequacy are immediately dispelled, and we are encouraged to fulfill the potential that still slumbers within us, the potential that love alone can see and awaken. Indeed wasn’t it Nietzsche—maybe more than anyone else— who suspected that within the human being there slumbers a hint of something that is yet to manifest itself ? And, paradoxically,

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isn’t it also thanks to the courage with which Nietzsche proclaimed the death of what people had loaded onto the word God that we are able, once more, to use that word for what he tentatively termed the “Übermensch”? ———— —— — u————— If I now had to express in a nutshell the nub and principal message of this book, I would put it as follows: Love is simply “too human,” too profoundly human, to be solely human. Positivist assertions that it is “nothing but” crumble in the face of love. Love is too strong to be no more than a human emotion. Love is so profoundly human that most of all it testifies to the depth in which man is more than man, in which man transcends man. And isn’t transcendence the profoundest expression of the essence of humanity? The longing for eternity, for the moment to last forever, is the vertigo of passionate love. It is the passionate nature of love that directs the gaze toward eternity; it is an intimation of and yearning for eternity, a “foretaste of eternity.” Many languages use the same word to express passion and torment. Concealed within the passion of love is the torment of unfulfillment; it is a portent, here on earth (in the world, in this life—in saeculum), of what the earth cannot give, a portent of eternity, saecula saeculorum, world without end. Human love, if it is truly deep and thus not confused with the various love substitutes, also bears that divine seal. And what we said about love of God applies to human love as well: when two people are in love the “object” of that love is a specific person, but the other is never an object. The other is not an it but a Thou, and as Martin Buber would say, every Thou points to an “absolute Thou.”5 Christians are educated to this understanding by teaching about Christ and the liturgical practice of the sacraments: Jesus’s humanity does not diminish his divinity; the water during baptism and the wine and bread during the Eucharist do not become seeming water, wine, and bread. The fact that what is human, cor170

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poreal, and material becomes a sign does in no way destroy its “reality,” or its humanity, worldliness, or materiality. Were the “corporeality” of the sign negated or depreciated, the sign would cease to be a sign and could no longer be the point of encounter with what lies beneath the surface: “out of sight.” The entire theological and liturgical vision of the world derives from the paradox of the Incarnation: the universal is not accessible without the tangible, and the tangible is only fulfilled as part of the universal. The universal cannot be reached if the tangible is evaded; but clinging to the tangible has the same outcome. The universal— the “divine”—is to be found only in the tangible: through him with him and in him is all honor and glory. In a certain sense, what Christian doctrine teaches us about Jesus is what we are to apply to all people. When I love Christ the man, I love through him and with him and in him God also—even if my notion of God is very vague or nonexistent—because Jesus’s “I and the Father are one” applies. When I love another person with Jesus’s love, the root and object of my love lie so deep that they are beyond my gaze, because “those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Such love points to the source, “where gentleness and goodness come from”—nay more: it is my participation in it. ———— —— — u————— The supreme goal of the mystics’ spiritual path is participation in the divine nature. “We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed,” St. John says, expressing this promise by way of a somewhat enigmatic hint, adding immediately: “We will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”6 We all have various kinds of experience of the many ways we participate in the life of society and play a certain role in it. But how can we “participate in God”? Theologians who have read scripture in a somewhat mystical way or listened closely to mystics describe this in a manner that is difficult to translate into “secular language,” namely, participation in the inner life of God, in the life of the Trinity. Here too it is worth switching from theological

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definitions to stories and images. Kearney recalls an icon on which the life of the Holy Trinity is depicted as a circle, as a dance of persons who give way to each other.7 Old theology invented the splendid expression perichoresis—interpenetration and mutual permeation—to denote this dance. That is the case with the persons of the Trinity, and at the very least it applies to the divine and the human in Christ: they are together, unmixed and inseparable. And what applies in heaven applies on earth: what applies to the Holy Trinity applies to the earthly trinity of “godly virtues”— faith, hope, and love. These virtues are godly because they are an unmerited free gift of grace and human because they are a free human act, otherwise they could not be virtues. The godly and the human are inseparable in them, and yet they are not mixed: God’s freedom does not limit human freedom and vice versa. There also exists a certain perichoresis among these virtues. The question that we were considering about whether love has precedence over faith turns out to be a pseudo-problem, so long as, in contemplation, we immerse ourselves in that icon of the divine dance: the three virtues mutually give each other precedence. Moreover they are substantively contained in each other, and they merge. As I emphasize to future married couples, genuine love is not founded on emotional ardor but on faith and trust. Faith concerns “things that we hope for,” which are simply not here, yet hope gazes at them with yearning and love draws us and conveys us toward them. Faith without hope is blind, and without love it is dead. Hope without faith is empty, and without love its perseverance will not survive life’s trials of patience, because only firm love “endures all things.”8 ———— —— — u————— God is dance, I say to myself before the icon depicting perichoresis, the fellowship of the persons of the Trinity mingling with each other like a dance fellowship. And at the same time I recall Nietzsche’s words: “I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance!”9 Hic Rhodus, dance here, I respond; there’s no need to 172

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run after Dionysus and join the drunken riot with the Bacchae, which simply ends in a hangover; we’re too old for such foolishness and not demented enough yet, dear Hermit of Sils-Maria. Here, at the heart of the Trinity, is the source of that sobria ebrietas,10 here we can amply refresh ourselves with the wine of the Spirit, which gladdens the human heart.11 After all, our Lord saves the best wine until the end!12 Here is the God who sets the world turning with the motion of love. Here is the God who invites you to his dance of love, in which heaven and earth, grace and natural behavior, divine and human, the Holy Trinity and the three virtues, all mingle, in which we dance into eternity. Eternity is not the peace of the graveyard; eternity is eternal motion, the dance of love! ———— —— — u————— “It’s only human nature, after all!,” is the excuse we use for our weaknesses. Of course. Weaknesses, sins, and vices are all part of our humanity, and they too are a partial answer to the question, what is humankind? But it is not the complete answer, because human beings do not only have weaknesses; they also have strengths. Let us not look solely at the vices, but let us look always at the virtues, particularly “the three.” “And the greatest of these is love,” says the apostle.13 In love we are most truly ourselves. In love we are human, most truly human. But precisely and only when we are most profoundly human, fully human, human to the utmost, when we are too human, are we shown and given what is more than human. Written during two summer sojourns in the hermitage of a contemplative monastery in the Rhineland in August 2011 and July 2012.

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Notes

1.

Love — Where from, and Where To

1. From the poem “Menschen getroffen” (1955). Translation by Gerald Turner. 2. I write about this aspect of the “divine virtues” in my book Patience with God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us (New York: Doubleday, 2009). 3. Heb. 11:8. 4. Mark 9:24. 5. More about this later in the book, particularly in chapters 4 and 5. 6. Cf. Martin Buber, Ich und Du (1923). English translation by Walter Kaufmann, I and Thou (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970). 7. More on this in chapter 12. 8. Cf. Karl Marx, Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (1884). English translation: Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).

2. Waiting for the Second Word 1. See Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 20 – 38. 174

2. A reference to God’s questions to Adam and Cain in the Book of Genesis (Gen. 3:9, 4:9). 3. This statement by the distinguished Czech Protestant Old Testament scholar, Slavomir Ctibor Daněk, was reported to me by his former students. 4. See Gen. 22:1–18. 5. Rom. 4:18. 6. Heb. 11:8. 7. See G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (London: Bodly Head, 1908). 8. The orthodoxy of this paradoxical sentence—in seeming contradiction to the article of the faith that Jesus died on the cross in his human, not his divine, nature—is guaranteed by an important methodological principle of Christian theology: “communicatio idiomatum.” On the basis of the hypostatic union of the human and divine nature in the person of Jesus Christ, characteristics of God’s World (Logos) can be applied to the man Jesus and human characteristics to the Logos. 9. Joseph Ratzinger in his book on eschatology, Eschatologie: Tod und ewiges Leben (Regensburg, 2007; English translation: Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1988]), goes even further in his commentary on the phrase “descended into Hell”: “With Jesus’s descent, God Himself descended into Sheol: as a consequence death ceases to be a forgotten land of darkness and a place of the merciless alienation from God. In Christ God Himself descended into the land of death and turned it from a place without communication into a space of his presence.” 10. See Viktor E. Frankl and Pinchas Lapide, Gottsuche und Sinnfrage (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 2005). 11. See Mark 9:32. 12. See Luke 24:15; John 20:15 –16, 20:25. 13. See Matt. 25:40. 14. See John 21:15 –18. 15. Cf. John 20:17 and Luke 24:31. 16. Cf. 2 Cor. 5:16. 17. See Acts 17:23. 18. Rom. 6:4. 19. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft: Der tolle Mensch. English translation: The Gay Science (New York: Vintage Books, 1974). 20. See John 16:13. 21. Heb. 3:7– 8; Ps. 95:8.

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22. 1Kings 19:12. 23. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 125. 24. See John 1:1.

3. Does Love Have Precedence over Faith? 1. Matt. 5:13. 2. James 2:19. 3. Benedict XVI, God Is Love—Deus caritas est, Encyclical Letter, USCCB, 2006. Available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en /encyclicals/documents/ hf_ben-xvi_enc_20051225_deus-caritas-est .html. 4. Cf. Mark 12:28 – 34;  Luke 10:25 – 28; Matt. 22:34 – 40. 5. Cf. 1 John 4:12 (John 1:18). 6. I hasten to add that in my view the sine qua non of Christianity is another concept, namely, that of the Trinity, which is largely connected with the idea of God as a person (and surprisingly, this concept, as Raymundo Pannikar, Gavin D’Costa, and others have demonstrated, actually deepens interreligious dialogue). 7. What I have in mind here is the “classical” form of Christian prayer as a “conversation with God.” In those religions that do not recognize a “personal God”—but also in the case of many Christian mystics— it is more a contemplative immersion in the sacred presence. A distinctive feature of the crisis of the “person metaphor” in present-day Christianity is a shift by many Christians toward contemplative forms of prayer. If we are familiar with the tradition of Christian mystic spirituality, we should not suspect this trend of importing “pagan elements” into Christianity, even if some Christians might be inspired by the mystic and contemplative traditions of the Far East (such as Zen). 8. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) defined one extremely important methodological principle of theological thinking, namely: One cannot note any similarity between Creator and creature, however great, without being compelled to note an even greater dissimilarity between them (“maior dissimulitudo in tanta similitudine”). This provided scope from then on for “negative theology” in Catholic thinking. 9. Cf. 1 Cor. 2:9 or Isa. 64:3. 10. Cf. 1 John 4:16b. 11. Cf. Rom. 3:27– 28. 176

NOTES TO PAGES 21–2 8

12. James 2:17. 13. I.e., understanding faith solely as an (emotional) act of trust. 14. This is a literal translation of the “catechismic” form [in Czech, which differs from other languages in this respect; translator’s note]; the place in the Bible that is the basis of the “first commandment” does not speak about “belief ” as such. It says: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3). The parallel place in Deuteronomy adds Moses’s “commentary” to the Decalogue: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:4 – 5). And that is what Jesus cites, most fully in Mark’s Gospel (Mark 12:29– 30): “ ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ ” In the parallel passages in the other synoptic Gospels (Matt. 22:37– 40 and Luke 10:25 – 28) there are slight variations. Matthew begins with “You shall love . . . ,” and Luke puts the answer in the mouth of the questioner himself; but in each case Jesus supplements the commandment with the commandment to love one’s neighbor. 15. Deut. 6:4 – 5. 16. In his reply Jesus inseparably links two passages in the Hebrew Bible (the “Old Testament”): Deut. 6:4 – 5 and Lev. 19:18. 17. Matt. 22:40. 18. See Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, chap. 7. 19. Summa theologica I, q. 82, art. 3. 20. J. B. Lotz, Allein die Liebe macht sehend (Freiburg: Herder, 1988), 87; emphasis mine. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 89. 23. John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001). 24. Ibid., 126 – 31. 25. 1 John 4:8.

4.

The Remoteness of God

1. See B. Pascal, Pensées sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets, No. 430. English translation: Pascal’s Pensées (New York: E. P. Dutton &

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Co., 1958). Pascal’s emphasis here on faith as a free choice seems profounder and more congenial to me than the well-known “wager argument” that seems too calculating and somewhat undermines the reference to the courage of faith. 2. “I don’t believe in that ‘God of the church,’ I have my own God,” is something I often hear around me. I say to myself: What image of the “God of the church” does that statement betray, and where did the person derive it from? There is an excellent analysis of “finding a God of one’s own” in a sociological study by Ulrich Beck, Der eigene Gott: Von der Friedensfähigkeit und dem Gewaltpotential der Religionen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2008). English translation: A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 3. See Viktor E. Frankl and Pinchas Lapide, Gottsuche und Sinnfrage (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 2005). 4. Ibid. 5. More on this in a later chapter concerning Ludwig Feuerbach, the father of atheistic humanism. 6. See Matt. 4:1. 7. I reveal more about my love of Nietzsche, that passionate warrior against the Christianity of his day, who understandably astonishes and offends many Christians, in the closing pages of the present book. 8. I call this “external God” (and likewise the contrary subjectivist notion of a solely “internal God”) a banal god (a banal notion of God). See also my reference in the next chapter to the “heteronomous paradigm” (in the sense in which it is used by the theologian Roger Lenaers, SJ). 9. See 1 Kings 19:7. 10. Cf. Matt. 13:4. 11. Kakichi Kadowaki and Joan Rieck, Zen and the Bible: A Priest’s Experience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977). 12. What the literature about Zen generally describes as meditation is close to what classical Christian mystical theology refers to as contemplation, i.e., something quite different from mere meditative (still rational and discursive) cogitation; it is submersion in the “inexpressible,” beyond words, images, and thoughts. 13. St. John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo, chap. 3.1. 14. Ibid., chap. 3.3. 15. Ibid., chap. 4.5.

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16. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Die Wirklichkeit des Möglichen: Hermeneutische Religionsphilosophie (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 467. 17. Klaus Müller, Gottes Dasein denken: Eine philosophische Gotteslehre fur heute (Regensburg: Pustet, 2001), 177. 18. According to a major representative of contemporary sociology, Niklas Luhmann, on this point mystical theology has a considerable head start over other sciences, because it always took into account “an unobserved observer,” whereas the other sciences were bogged down for a long time in subject-object metaphysics and gnoseology and are only now discovering the need for self-reflection from this perspective. 19. Cf. Paul Archambault, Initiation à la philosophie blondélienne en forme de court traité de métaphysique (Paris: Librairie Bloud & Gay, 1941). 20. See, e.g., Tomáš Halík, Night of the Confessor: Christian Faith in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Image Books, 2012), 21.

5. I Want You to Be 1. In that sense political ideologies, sports, the media, etc., are said nowadays to play a religious or pseudoreligious role. See also Tomáš Halík, Prolínání světů (Merging of the Worlds) (Prague: Nákladatelství Lidové noviny, 2006), 229. 2. Teilhard de Chardin, both theologian and natural scientist, who displayed the greatest courage in his attempts at theological reflection on evolution, confronted enormous difficulties in the church and in his own Jesuit order, which, in previous times, had so often had the charisma of courage to think and to read the signs of the times. 3. Cf. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 4. The bridge to Christian statements about the divinity of Jesus was the theology of the later books of the Hebrew bible that were influenced by Hellenistic thinking (the so-called wisdom literature) in which the characteristics of God (in particular, divine Wisdom), the Spirit, and the Word of God are spoken about as divine beings, fundamentally linked (“consubstantial”) with God. 5. I am deliberately referring to the modern, not the Cartesian, object-subject model, set up against metaphysics. I am not entirely sure whether those who blame the emergence of the “banal god” on the

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entire history of metaphysics do not, after all, do a certain injustice to medieval theology, which was constantly renewed by the corrective current of negative theology and mysticism. 6. Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. Roger Lenaers, Der Traum des Königs Nebukadnezar (Leuven: Kleve Copy-us-Verlag, 2005). English translation: Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream or the End of a Medieval Catholic Church (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2007). Citations are to the English translation. 8. Ibid., 16. 9. Ibid., 18 (these words remind me of Nietzsche’s sentence from Also sprach Zarathustra: “The heart of the earth is of gold!”). 10. A reference to Pascal’s Memorial, a text in which he recorded his experience of enlightenment and which he carried on his person for the rest of his life. 11. This saying of Augustine is quoted by J. B. Lotz from a speech by Heidegger in honor of Ludwig von Ficker, but he adds that he was unable to find the original. See J. B. Lotz, Allein die Liebe macht sehend (Freiburg: Herder, 1988). After consulting many experts on Augustine’s work I also have been unable to find the source; they suggested that the saying should be presented as “a phrase attributed to St. Augustine.” 12. I stress once more that we should not confuse Pascal’s (and also Augustine’s and the Bible’s) concept of heart with mere emotionality; it does not involve any “sentimentality”! 13. Robert Spaemann has made a similar point. See Robert Spaemann, Das unsterbliche Gerucht (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2004), 17. 14. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, pt. 4, chap. LXVII, “The Ugliest Man” (n.p.: Booklassic, 2015), 86. 15. Quoted from Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality, and Ultimate Meaning (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993). 16. Cf. Matt. 5:13.

6. The Closeness of God 1. I develop this idea especially in my book The Patience of God: The Story of Zacchaeus Continuing in Us (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

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2. Phil. 2:13. 3. “Whatever is received is received according to the capacity of the receiver.” 4. Rev. 3:20. 5. This is a case where the writing of St. John of the Cross, or at least books that provide a specific introduction to the practice of spiritual life, such as Bernard Ugeux’s Retrouver la source intérieure (Paris: Atelier, 2001), should be compulsory reading. 6. That is why I also recommend to converts as compulsory reading C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2013). 7. V. Holan, “Nepřátelům,” published in the journal Divoké víno, no. 7 (1968). 8. Luke 10:27. 9. See Luke 10:30 – 36. 10. 1 John 4:20. 11. See James 2:17. 12. See Matt. 25:31– 46. 13. This was a view propounded by the Czech philosopher of dialogue Milan Machovec. See P. Žd’ársky, Hovory s Milanem Machovcem (Conversations with Milan Machovec) (Prague: Akropolis, 2008). 14. He used the German verb aufheben, which has both meanings. 15. Rudolph Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1922). English translation: The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). 16. A reference to a once very influential book, Tilman Moser’s Gottesvergiftung (Poisoned by God) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1976). 17. Paul Vitz aptly comments on this explanation of Freud’s from Totem and Taboo: rather than explain the origin of religion, Freud actually analyzes the origin of modern atheism. See Paul C. Vitz, Sigmund Freud’s Christian Unconscious (New York: Guilford Press, 1988). 18. I say more about this in my book Patience with God. 19. See Christoph Moonen, “The Anthropological Essence of Christianity in Ludwig Feuerbach and Michel Henry,” ET Bulletin (Jan. 2008), a noteworthy interpretation of Feuerbach and his “unfinished phenomenology.”

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20. See Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1984). 21. Emmanuel Lévinas, ed., Ethique et infini (Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1982), 72. 22. Emmanuel Lévinas, Entre nous, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 88. 23. Lévinas’s concept of human freedom is not based on the principle of autonomy, as it was in the case of Kant and the Enlightenment philosophers, but instead on the idea of heteronomy, acceptance of responsibility for the other. 24. Matt. 5:48. 25. This is not solely the conviction of Christian theologians; one may cite Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism or the—in some respects inspirational—contemporary left-wing philosopher Slavoj Žižek. See Michael Hauser, Humanism Is Not Enough: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek (Prague: Rybka Publishers, 2008).

7. An Open Gate 1. From this the pope draws the conclusion that the church should create a “courtyard of the Gentiles” after the model of the Temple in Jerusalem, i.e., a space for these seekers. I dealt with that suggestion, which Pope Benedict probably first mentioned in a conversation with Czech journalists during his journey to the Czech Republic, in a large part of my book Divadlo pro anděly (Theatre for Angels) (Prague: Nákladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010). 2. John 14:9 –10. 3. John 10:30. 4. Cf. Phil. 2:11. 5. Cf. Acts 17:16 – 34. 6. John 14:6. 7. Matt. 25:31– 46. 8. John 10:9. 9. Luke 13:23 – 24. 10. Matt. 18:2 – 5. 11. 1 Cor. 1:25 – 28. 12. Matt. 7:1– 5.

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13. Amedeo Cencini, Amerai il Signore Dio tuo (Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane Bologna, 1982). 14. Cf. 1 Cor. 10:12. 15. I am referring her to Chesterton’s well-known definition of heresy as a “truth that has gone mad,” having broken free of its original context and swollen until it is unrecognizable. 16. Matt. 16:24. 17. Cf. Prov. 8:31. 18. Cf. John 3:16. 19. 1 John 13:15. 20. Luke 22:24 – 27. 21. John 13:1. 22. See John 18:33 – 38. 23. See Acts 5:29. 24. Cf. Luke 20:21– 26. 25. Cf. John 18:33 – 38. 26. More about this in my book Dotkni se ran (Touch the Wounds) (Prague: Nákladatelství Lidové noviny, 2008) (in process of translation). 27. More about this in my book Patience with God, 165. 28. Cf. Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996). 29. This is the mystery that Pope Benedict is referring to when, in his encyclical on love, he speaks of love as ecstasy. It is ecstasy in the sense of “a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving.” . . . But this process is always open-ended; love is never ‘finished’ and complete; throughout life, it changes and matures, and thus remains faithful to itself ” (Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, chaps. 6, 17).

8. Narcissus’s Deceptive Pool 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

1 John 4:10. John 15:9. John 15:16 –17. Cf. 1 John 4:16. Cf. Mark 9:38 – 40.

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6. However, Jesus’s statement, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters” (Matt. 12:30), refers solely to himself; Christians must not apply it to themselves and use it to justify intolerance and hatred of others in opposition to the spirit of Jesus. 7. Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra (1883). English translation: Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common, rev. H. James Birx (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), Book 1, Zarathustra’s Prologue, 3. 8. A graphic example is the request of the sons of Zebedee to sit to the right and left of Jesus in the Kingdom of God (Matt. 20:20 – 23) or their quarrels about which of them was the greatest (Luke 22:24). 9. John 17:17. 10. I am paraphrasing the well-known line in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the latter teaches love of fate (amor fati), culminating in the declaration, “Was that life? Well then, once more!” 9.

Is Tolerance Our Last Word?

1. When the traditionalist Catholics recently labeled the Dalai Lama “religious kitsch” I reluctantly had to admit there was a grain of truth in their assertion, even though the media and the advertising industry is more to blame for this than this undoubtedly holy man himself. But wouldn’t we then be obliged to describe John the Apostle, who seemingly spent his old age repeating over and over again, “Dear children, love one another,” also as a “producer of banal kitsch”? 2. I allude here to interesting conversations I had with Martin Putna following his travels in the United States and India; his observations tally with what I experienced when traveling in both those countries. I also came across similar ideas in the lectures of Nicholas Lash (see Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996]). 3. Even though, let us add, many generations of Christians had also to come to terms with a wide range of spiritual paths in their immediate surroundings, and on occasion they did so successfully (such as in the case of the mutual enrichment of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in Spain under Muslim rule). 4. Brotherly reproof, as it is stipulated in the rules and practice of certain monastic orders in accordance with the biblical injunction in Luke 17:3. 184

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5. Cf. Matt. 13:28 – 30. 6. Ulrich Beck, Der eigene Gott: Von der Friedensfähigkeit und dem Gewaltpotential der Religionen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2008). English translation: A God of One’s Own: Religion’s Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010). 7. Beck notes that this model of total separation of public life from religion cannot be applied even in Israel. 8. See John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Macmillan, 2007).

10.

Loving One’s Enemies

1. During his time in Communist prisons Father Josef Zvěřina used to say about his tormentors: “However powerful they are, there is one thing they will never achieve—they will never make me hate them.” Nowadays as I look at the politicians and big businessmen who are destroying our country and society—not simply subverting and robbing its economy, but also poisoning and damaging its moral climate—I often repeat these words of Zvěřina’s like a mantra. But it is not easy, I have still a lot to learn! 2. Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003). 3. Cf. Matt. 7:3. 4. Matt. 5:48. 5. Matt. 5:48; 5:45. 6. A reference to the title of a well-known book by the German psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich (1908 – 82): Auf dem Weg zur vaterlosen Gesellschaft: Ideen zur Sozialpsychologie (1963). English translation: Society without the Father: A Contribution to Social Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992).

11.

Were There No Hell or Heaven

1. Rudolf Otto and other classics of the phenomenology of religion called the holy “a fearful and fascinating mystery” (mysterium tremendum et fascinans). See Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der

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Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen (1922). English translation: The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923). 2. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 3. See Eugen Drewermann, Kleriker: Psychogramm eines Ideals (Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1989). 4. Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality, and Ultimate Meaning (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 1993). 5. Cf. Piero Coda, “Senza aldilá che fede é?,” Avvenire, November 18, 2009, 3. 6. Inspired by a hymn of St. Francis Xavier, it comes from the hymnal of the Czech Matěj Václav Šteyer, which was first printed in Prague in 1683. 7. See chapter 4, “The Remoteness of God.” 8. Let us recall once more the principle of St. Thomas Aquinas: “Quidquid recipitur ad modum recipiendi recipitur”—Whatever is received is received according to the capacity of the receiver—and also what the Fourth Lateran Council added with the doctrine of analogia entis, about the similarity between the Creation and the Creator: In every similarity between the world and God, there is an even greater dissimilarity. 9. Cf. Luke 4:10 –11. 10. Kushner, God Was in This Place. 11. Ibid. 12. Harold S. Kushner, Conquering Fear: Living Boldly in an Uncertain World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009).

12.

Love the World?

1. This is how Murray Stein interprets Jung’s attitude to the Christianity of his day. See Murray Stein, Jung’s Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition (Wilmette, IL: Chiron Publications, 1985). 2. Cf. Phil. 2:5 – 8.

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3. Gaudium et spes ( Joy and Hope), Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, preface, art. 1. www.vatican.va/archive/hist _councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_cons_19651207_gaudium -et-spes_en.html. 4. See 1 John 2:15 –17. 5. Cf. John 15:16. 6. Cf. Gal. 6:14. 7. Cf. John 15:13. 8. Cf. Matt. 26:28; 1 Cor. 11:23 – 27. 9. Cf. John 12:15. 10. Cf. 1 John 2:16. 11. See Martin Buber, I and Thou (London: A&C Black, 2004). 12. Cf. John 17:15 –16. 13. 1 Cor. 13:7. 14. That was the tenor of the famous dialogue at the Catholic Academy in Munich in 2004 between Cardinal Ratzinger and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas. 15. Cf. Luke 15:11– 32. 16. There are well-known examples of both extremes, e.g., the crudely politicized forms of Catholicism or orthodoxy mixed up with nationalism and xenophobia, on the one hand, and militant atheism, on the other. I write at greater length about this in my book Divadlo pro anděly (Theatre for Angels) (Prague: Nákladatelství Lidové noviny, 2010), e.g., in the chapter “God and Meteors.” 17. I have in mind, for instance, Jürgen Habermas, particularly since his celebrated speech at the Frankfurt Book Fair shortly after September 11, 2001 (www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/sixcms /media.php/1290/2001%20Acceptance%20Speech%20Juergen%20H abermas.pdf ); and his dialogue with Ratzinger in 2004 (Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion [San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006]); Herbert Schnädelbach and his “pious atheism” (see, e.g., “Der Fromme Atheist,” Neue Rundschau 118, no. 2 [2007]: 112 –19); or Slavoj Žižek in his dialogue with John Milbank (Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009]). 18. The Jesuit theologian and now auxiliary bishop of Zurich, Peter Henrici, rightly asserts that the term “modern theology” would better suit Catholic theology between the Council of Trent and Vatican II

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because that kind of theology was determined (mostly negatively) by modern European thinking. “The protestant Kant was a covert father of the Church,” particularly with his emphasis on fulfilling God’s commandments and cultivating the virtues. See Peter Henrici, “Modernity and Christianity,” Communio: International Catholic Review 31 (2004): 140 – 51. 19. It should be stressed, of course, that we use the terms “Christianity,” “secular humanism,” and “neo-paganism” as “ideal types” in the sense of Max Weber’s sociology. In reality all three phenomena are extremely differentiated internally. 20. J. Ratzinger, “Christianity: The Victory of Intelligence over the World of Religions,” 30 Days, no. 1 (2000): 33 – 44. 21. Marcel Gauchet speaks about how Christianity has moved from the infrastructure of society, from public and political life, into the “cultural superstructure.” See Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris, 1985). English translation by Oscar Burge: The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, with an introduction by Charles Taylor (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). 22. See Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); and Gilles Kepel, The Revenge of God: The Resurgence of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism in the Modern World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). 23. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). 24. I particularly have in mind here the paranoid witch-hunt during the “antimodernist struggle” that entailed the intellectual self-castration of Catholicism on the brink of the twentieth century and undermined the church’s ability to influence modern culture in a truly creative way and effectively confront the attempts to marginalize it in modern society.

13.

Stronger than Death

1. A reference to the oft-quoted alleged reply of Laplace to Napoleon’s question why he did not mention God in his discourse on secular variations of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter. 188

NOTES TO PAGES 151–1 5 7

2. See Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (New York: Crossroad, 2009). 3. Job 1:21. 4. Robert Spaemann, Der letzte Gottesbeweis (Munich: Pattloch, 2007). (I deal more fully with Spaemann’s argument in my book Stromu zbyvá naděje [Prague: Nákladatelství Lidové noviny, 2009], 146 ff.)

14.

Dance of Love

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. Thomas Common (Los Angeles: Indoeuropean Publishing, 2009), Third Part, “The Spirit of Gravity.” 2. Ibid., Third Part, “Before Sunrise”; Fourth Part, “The Drunken Song.” 3. Ibid., “Zarathustra’s Discourses,” “The Three Metamorphoses.” 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008). 5. Though I hasten to add once more that this “passage” through love by its “object” by no means devalues that “object” or diminishes one’s relationship with it. On the contrary! 6. 1 John 3:2. 7. Richard Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion, Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). I dwell in greater detail on this in the chapter “Dancing God” in my book Touch the Wounds (Dotkni se ran; in process of translation). 8. 1 Cor. 13:7. 9. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, “Zarathustra’s Discourses” (about reading and writing). 10. “sober inebriation” quoted from the Latin hymn of St. Ambrose, Splendor paternae gloriae. 11. Ps. 104:15. 12. John 2:10. 13. 1 Cor. 13:13.

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T O M Á Š H A L Í K worked as a psychotherapist during the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia and at the same time was active in the underground church as a secretly ordained Catholic priest. Since the fall of the regime, he has served as general secretary to the Czech Conference of Bishops and was an advisor to Václav Havel. He has lectured at many universities throughout the world and is currently a professor of philosophy and sociology at Charles University. His books, which are best sellers in his own country, have been translated into many languages and have received several literary prizes.

Under the pseudonym of A. G. Brain, GERA LD T URNER has translated numerous banned authors from Communist Czechoslovakia, including Václav Havel, Ivan Klíma, and Ludvík Vaculík. His many published translations include Tomáš Halík’s Patience with God (2009) and Night of the Confessor (2012). He received the US PEN Translation Award in 2004.