Revisited 2017

This is a section of a paper written in the autumn semester of 1965. It was after the summer spent at Cornel University studying Anthropology. This had been my first exposure to a truly secular university.  The theology assignment topic was “The nature of the Church” – about which there was much being written under the impact of Vatican II.

Having recently rediscovered this text, written years before any exposure to developmental or psychoanalytic theory, I was surprised to see how this conceptualization has continued to influence my thinking. It reflects a dramatic change of direction in my then worldview. It mirrors my quest for the possibility of meaning during the dissolution of my beliefs – beliefs that had sustained me for so long. The studies in Anthropology confronted me for the first time with the realization that we create meaning; that meanings are not ‘given’. It was a dramatic loss of an assumed sense of transcendence; a loss that abides even to this day.

After the summer experience at Cornell, I struggled with this assignment. This paper was my attempt to integrate the studies in anthropology as well as my wrestling with concepts of time and history. At the time, I was particularly concerned with contrasting the historical determinism inherent in Nazis and Stalinist notions of history with an open Christian conception. I saw this deterministic trend in runaway Capitalism as well as the many current ‘movements’ within the Church and society. To me they seemed driven by a predetermined program to maintain a sense of meaning rather than an open approach to life and faith grounded in risking the discovery of meaning.

The first section of this paper (not included here) was written using the terms I had gleaned from the current theology of that time – stimulated also by the excitement of Vatican II. It was an excitement I shared but was marred by an intensely felt doubt. Theology was beginning to feel like a sophisticated exercise of wishful thinking. It triggered in me a deep sense of anxiety and loss. The second section, presented here, was a reframe of those theological terms attempting to accommodate the changes in my own thinking. What remained was not theology but Jesus as a model to face the question of meaning – expressed more clearly the following semester in the essay “Person and presence: a venture for a sense of the real”.

For the first time, ‘faith’ was disconnected from ‘belief’ and re-anchored in the allowance of oneself to radically be in question.

***

Man in his culture, in his plan for survival – that is at the same time the expression of his self-understanding with regard to his experienced realities – speaks his ‘word’ regarding his meaning in a manner shaken by ambiguity. His structures are an expression of hope in the face of the threat of a radical insecurity. At the same time they can be a defense against being forced to face this insecurity and seriously take it into account.

The cumulative consequences of the ‘word’ of man’s self understanding – his culture and the structures in society that seek to avoid the questions of radical insecurity and meaning – is what defines social injustice: structures and meaning systems in society that refuses to take all men into consideration. This is a form of social despair or fate.

We live in two cities. The two cities are not consequent in time but simultaneous: one being the ever groping and inadequate expression of the other.

Man in his culture and his city, is the expression of his own enigma – of his ever-inadequate self-understanding. He is always seeking to understand himself:  he is longing to be aware. He is also always seeking to express his understanding and have it affirmed: he is longing to be known. This is man as historical being – man as project. He exists and seeks his meaning in the tension between the two.  It is in this condition of coming to grips with the reality as being-in-time – of his constant living in the tension between perpetual call to open-endedness and the desire to know where one stands and where one is going –that a man is most deeply able to identify with Jesus.

The experience of time is essential to man.

Man strives to experience himself as a unity through a multitude of changing circumstances and situations. He is continually as existing through a multiplicity of relationships through which he passes both biologically and psychologically. As he passes through this multiplicity of continuously changing relationships, he is constituted in awareness through his increasing consciousness of them. In and through the experiencing of this multiplicity of relationships, man becomes aware of himself in as much as his awareness of reality leads him to experience a sense of direction. When he becomes sufficiently conscious to ‘expect the next step’ – when in his being through a multiplicity of relationships, he begins to feel himself as a unity through and in his sense of direction and expectancy, then time begins to emerge as a reality.

Time is man realizing himself as a story, a meaningful sequence of event – of things that happen. He becomes aware of the dependence of himself as a unity upon the direction of the happenings of passing events. His sense of expectancy and his options to act that flow from that sense affirm him as a unity understandable and meaningful in the direction he perceives. In these directions and his options to act out of expectancy, he seeks to further define himself as a unity as completely as he can in terms of what he already perceives as direction in the events of his life.

Man begins to live according to a project – a schedule, if you will. That is how man is defined.

Time is self-consciousness being constituted in its inquiry for unity in his being through a multiplicity of passing events.  Options to act that arise out of expectancy are the self-conscious effort of man to establish and control his relationships with the reality that constitutes him in terms of his perceived direction. He begins to order reality in his defining of himself; and all his ordering of reality – his entire making things happen is an expression of his self-understanding in relation to reality.

As man is a maker of clocks and a keeper of diaries, he is a meaning-maker, a producer of culture, a builder of cities.

The expression of man’s being is culture: the city of man. And it is always changing. There are always new realities impinging on him from within himself and from the whole world through which he seeks to understand himself. They are unsettling and always demanding to be taken into consideration: new feelings that don’t fit present self-concepts; new people to consider and take seriously, new discoveries that threaten former presuppositions.  They are an unending call to further conversation – a summons to step into possibility.

The city of man is always passing. It is never completely defined; never adequately expressed: this is the condition of his being-man.  Man is always being-called to further conversation. His reality does not consist in expression alone; his process of expression is an opportunity for the manifestation of deeper reality within himself.

The city of man, ever passing is a sign.

In the city of man there is disorder and confusion. Because his self-understanding and expression are always inadequate, he is frightened by the threat of a radical insecurity: If am not this, I may be nothing! He experiences himself to be constantly being called into nothingness, into possibility. He experiences that radically significance is out of his control.  In his fright, he refuses to listen: I will make myself something: I will be this! New realities impinge and are not taken into consideration: the many ‘others’, hunger, advances in knowledge and technology, etc. Man is increasingly dissonant in his evolving situations – and we have aggression, conflict and world wars.

The two cities are inseparable – just as there is no such thing as man without culture. There can be no manifestation of man, of what he is, except through his culture – his city.

The expression is always good in as much as it is true; that is in as much as it takes all things into consideration, listens to the inexhaustible richness of reality, and faces what may seem to be the threat of nothingness and steps into possibility. The expression of man is good, as long as he honestly faces the open question of his destiny.

The Christian is a man and therefore has an expression that is a participation in the expression of all the men with whom he lives.  He speaks within a context in which he is defined by other men, as well as by himself. In his search for self-understanding as a Christian, he speaks his ‘word’ by the consequences his options have within the context in which he finds himself, and, in a certain sense within which he is himself.  His authenticity to reality is his sacramentality. The manner in which he participates in the continuing alteration of his context is his word as a Christian. As with all men, his speaking is his searching.

As he seeks his self-understanding, his name, his vocation, he is one who sees reality in a certain way: as creation. And who further, sees creation in a certain light: as the possibility of God’s self communication.  Therefore, in his seeking out his name and in his exploration of the phenomenon of a man as a meaningful reality, he is inquiring into and expressing what is involved for a Christian in the affirmation of reality. Before his mind he has a certain picture of reality as he lives out his search: the picture presented in Jn.19:33-35. It is the picture of a man’s affirmation of reality. And as he looks into the question of himself, he is asking and manifesting how this picture happened and what it means.

So, as with every man, it is important that the Christian man say what he says and do what he does significantly. That is, conscious of what and why he says what he says, and in a manner in which he, himself, stake himself on his word and action. It is important that he act significantly – that is testing the truth of his acceptance of himself as being in a radically meaningful relationship with all reality by taking a chance, in his options and decisions to act to step into as welcome as good a new and undefined situation into which reality seems to be leading him. It is important that a man be free in his affirmation of reality, that he decide to act, to express in an existential word (a word with consequences) his relationship with reality in such and such a way. His expression is true in as much as he speaks his word of truth after the pattern of Jesus. His word is that all true expression is good, but is not to be clung to. Man, in fact, is called to an unending and ever deepening conversation with reality. He only signs, speaks his word, when in his own way – by staking his life on the truth that is there – he works to transform the structures of the city of man to express the ever new realities of the Kingdom of Heaven that is already with us.

The city that is to come is the one that is always coming now. That seeking is always through the terrestrial realities through which man inquires into and seeks to express his self-understanding.  It is in the face of all the ramifications of his awareness of himself as an historical and contingent being that a man must decide to act – must speak a word on his significance. He must decide, and he does decide, and his ‘word’ is his culture.

It is to and through the dynamics of this decision that his action speaks and embodies social action as a manifestation of Christian sacramentality.

Bibliography

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—————.  Confessions. New York: Mentor-Omega Books. 1963

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——————. Science, Religion and Christianity. London: Burns and Oates, 1958.

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—————. Evangelical Theology. New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1964.

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—————–. Letters and Papers from Prison. New York: Macmillan Co., 1962.

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—————–. The Resurrection. London: Sheed and Ward, 1960.

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——————-. The Sermon on the Mount. London: Athlone Press, 1961.

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——————. An Anthropologist Looks at History.
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—————-. Mission and Grace I. London: Sheed and Ward, 1963.

—————-. Nature and Grace. London: Sheed and Ward, 1963.

—————-. Theological Investigations I. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961.

—————-. Theological Investigation’s II. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1963.

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—————–. Systematic Theology II, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1951.

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Second Vatican Council:

Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy

The Church and the Modern World

De Ecclesia

Mater et Magistra

Pacem in Terris.

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