Introduction

If we know how to listen, we can hear above the noise of the world the questions put to us by the meaning of things. More than ever before, human existence entails the need for clarity and asks the sole question that can be addressed to every man. Beyond all catechetical or propaganda literature, and at the level of a conscience freed from every prejudice, the 20th-century believer is invited to ask: “What is God?” and the atheist, the one who denies, is invited to make clear the object of his negation.

The question causes surprise, and if the answer is slow in coming, the silence is refreshing. This question is revealing for man himself; it is also a way of saying: “Who are you?”

The one who would say God is creator, providence, savior, reviews the chapters of a textbook or gives testimony to a theory, to a dialectic distance between God and himself. God, in this case, is not the All, passionately and spontaneously grasped in the immediate content of his revelation. St. John Climacus, one of the most severe of the ascetics, said we should love God as a young man loves his betrothed.^0.1 A lover who is passionately in love would say: “But that is all. That is my life. There is nothing but that; the rest does not count; it is non-existent.” St. Gregory of Nyssa, at the height of his emotion, let these words escape him: “Thou whom my soul loves...”^0.2

Atheism rejects only an ideology, a system, a theory, which man has too often misused; it never rejects divine reality, which is revealed only through faith.

Patristic tradition does not attempt any definition of God, for God is beyond all human words. “Concepts create images of God, wonder alone grasps something,” confessed St. Gregory.^0.3 For the Fathers, the word God is a vocative addressed to the Ineffable.

The difficulty in regard to man is just as great. It caused Theophilus of Antioch to say: “Show me your man and I shall show you my God.”^0.4 The divine mystery is reflected in the mirror of the human mystery. St. Peter speaks of homo cordis absconditus, the hidden man of the heart.^0.5 Deus absconditus, mysterious and hidden, has created his vis-a-vis, his other self, homo absconditus, mysterious and hidden.

The spiritual life springs forth in “the pastures of the heart”,^0.6 in its free spaces, as soon as these two mysterious beings, God and man, meet there.

“The greatest thing that happens between God and the human soul is to love and to be loved,” affirm the great spiritual writers.^0.7

“No man sees me and still lives.”^0.8 For the Fathers, this biblical warning meant that we cannot see God with the light of our reason, and that we can never define God, for every definition is a limitation. However, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. In the depth of his astounding proximity God turns his face to man and says to him: “I am... the Holy One.”^0.9 He chooses among his names the one that veils him most. He is even “thrice holy”, as the angels proclaim in the Sanctus, thus throwing in relief the incomparable and absolutely unique character of divine holiness. Wisdom, power, even love, can find affinities and similarities, but holiness alone has no analogy here below; it cannot be either measured or compared to any reality of this world. Before the burning bush, in the face of the devouring fire of “Thou alone art holy”,^0.10 every human being is but “dust and ashes”. For this reason, as soon as the holiness of God manifests itself, the hagiophany immediately arouses the mysterium tremendum, a sacred fear, an irresistible feeling of the “wholly other”.^0.11 This is not a fear of the unknown, but a characteristic and mystic awe that accompanies every manifestation of the divine. “I will have the fear of me precede you”,^0.12 God says; and again: “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy ground.”^0.13

Having thus marked off the uncrossable abysses that separate the divine from the human, God immediately reveals their mysterious conformity: “Deep calls unto deep,”^0.14 and “As in water face answereth face.”^0.15 God, the lover of man, transcends his own transcendence toward man, whom he draws from his nothingness, and calls him in his turn to transcend his immanence toward the Holy One. Man can do this because divine holiness has willed to take on man's face. Even more, the “Man of Sorrows” shows us the “Man of Desire”, the eternal magnet that attracts all love and enters into us in order that we may live again in him. He says to every soul: “Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm; for stern as death is love... its flames are a blazing fire.”^0.16

This is why Scripture tells us: “Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.”^0.17 When Peter wishes to define the aim of our Christian life, he speaks of our participating in the holiness of God.'^0.18 Likewise Paul, speaking to the Christians, addresses himself to the “saints” of Rome or Corinth. Would he still address himself today to the “saints” of Paris or London? Would the modern believer recognize himself among this group?

As soon as anyone speaks of sanctity, a psychological block is formed. We think of the giants of former days, the hermits buried in caves, stylites perched on columns. These “illuminati”, “equal to the angels”, no longer appear as belonging to this world. Sanctity seems out-of-date. It belongs to a past that has become strange to us and unadapted to the discontinuous forms, the syncopated rhythms of modern life. Today a stylite would not even arouse curiosity. He would provoke the question: “What good is he?” A saint is no longer anything but a sort of yogi, or perhaps to put it more crudely, a sick or unadjusted person; in any case, a useless being.

Before our eyes the world is losing its sacred character without meeting any resistance. Formerly the sacred was a sign formed by the matter of this world and reflecting a “wholly other”, translating this and testifying to its presence by means of the sign. Does this “wholly other” speak to man today? For him the transcendent no longer transcends anything; it has lost all correspondence with the real. It is non-existent. How symptomatic of this brutal fact is the recent appearance of a form of atheism that is organic and normal. Far from seeming to be a neurosis of civilization, it appears rather to express a certain health, a psychic state free from all metaphysical disquietude, occupied fully with this world, insensible to religion. Such a “profaneness”, such a smiling and disillusioned scepticism does not fight against anything. Neither does it any longer ask questions about God. To be intelligent today means to understand everything and to believe in nothing.

At its best, this attitude politely relegates sanctity to the cloister, far from the world of men; this means that the spiritual life scarcely interests modern man. He considers it a useless object hampering him, fit only to be stored in the attic of history.

In addition, there are other attitudes. Even, and perhaps above all, in circles conforming to an established religion, anything religious provokes in sincere souls an immediate reflex of boredom. Boredom with services and ceremonies performed in an archaic language, or with childish hymns proclaiming a joy devoid of meaning, boredom with a symbolism misleading in its hermetic character, the key to which is lost forever.

There is also the world of black-clad clerics, seemingly sinister whether they are traditionalists or progressives, sincere or ridiculous. There is moreover the pious style of rules and restraints with their oppressive gravity. There is the mediocrity of “the good”, who take themselves seriously and impose on others their own mentality, formed by edifying discourses and sermons where empty formulas are displayed in a superfluity of words. A religious life that has been domesticated, socialized, democratized, has the least attractive appearance. Its intellectual content is very low, keeping to the level of old-fashioned manuals with their limited ideas and their system of apologetics no longer accepted today. On the world scale it is an enormous social obstacle, reinforcing the dominant ideologies that are hostile or indifferent to anything religious. In the face of revelation, however, it is not a question of man alone, and the miracle of the judgment of faith is produced. In the light of a serious analysis, we quickly discover that, having drawn near each other by their fundamental insufficiency and the metaphysical poverty of their respective visions, the outdated religious man and the modern irreligious man meet back to back in an immanence imprisoned within itself.

Footnotes

... betrothed.^0.1

Ladder, XXX, 3; col. 1156C.

... loves...”^0.2

P.G., 44, col. 801A.

... Gregory.^0.3

P.G., 44, cols. 377B, 1028D.

... God.”^0.4

P.G., 6, 1025B.

... heart.^0.5

1 Pet. 3, 4.

... heart”,^0.6

St. Makarios, Spiritual Homilies.

... writers.^0.7

Kallistos, P.G., 147, col. 860A-B.

... lives.”^0.8

Ex. 33, 20.

... One.”^0.9

Hos. 11, 9.

... holy”,^0.10

Apoc. 15, 4.

... other”.^0.11

See R. Otto, Le Sacré (Paris, 1929), p. 22.

... you”,^0.12

Ex. 23, 27.

... ground.”^0.13

Ex. 3, 5.

... deep,”^0.14

Ps. 42, 8.

... face.”^0.15

Cf. Prov. 27, 19.

... fire.”^0.16

Canticle of Canticles 8, 6.

... holy.”^0.17

Lev. 19, 2.

... God.'^0.18

2 Pet. 1, 4; Heb. 12, 10.