Did It Happen or Not?   

Perhaps the most striking oddity of the human mind is the fact that while it is constantly driven to ask questions it may not ignore, nevertheless, given its inherent limitations, it hasn’t the capacity to answer any of them. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? These are questions no rational human being can refuse to ask—indeed, as Pascal would say, “they take us by the throat.” Yet, the answers escape even the best and brightest minds on the planet. That is because they point to an infinite horizon which the human mind, fated by the very nature of its finitude, will never reach. Only God can answer these questions.

Not even secularism has succeeded in squaring that particular circle. Which is why, despite the undeniable success of this or that project of secularization aimed at leveling a world once thought sacred and hieratic, the desire for God has not disappeared. He continues to be the touchstone for what it means to be truly human. Indeed, nothing so perfectly defines us as that hollowed out space which only God can fill.

Still, it is not enough that we should know this to be so—or that the attraction for the infinite is real and, in fact, determinative of who and what we are. We cannot just make the assertion and then move on. For instance, when Tacitus, the great Roman historian, described the idea of divinity among the conquered tribes of the barbarian north as nothing more than “that hidden unattainable reality upon which their lives depend,” he really hadn’t told his readers very much at all.

One has got to be able to assign a name, put an actual face on this Infinite Other, otherwise faith remains only a fantasy, a mere mythological fixation of desperate men. To exclaim that “The gods are everywhere,” as Thales, earliest of the Greek philosophers, famously put it, does not move the needle of the numinous very far. I mean, if they really are everywhere, why can’t we see them? Why hasn’t someone succeeded in making contact with them? And if not, why waste time looking for them?   

And yet, not everyone, it seems, requires proof for the things they believe. Marcel Proust, for example, assures us in Swann’s Way that “facts do not penetrate the sphere in which our beliefs are cherished.” In fact, he goes on to insist, “they neither engendered those beliefs, nor are they powerful enough to destroy them.”  

Say what? Was he lying when he said that, or just being stupid? What sane man would wish to believe something that wasn’t real, something lacking in what the logicians call “existential import”? What has mere nothingness to offer? Is it any better than an episode from Jerry Seinfeld, a species of entertainment featuring so many shows about nothing?

On what does the faith of Christianity depend if not facts? It is a question I should very much have wanted to put to Monsieur Proust. What else is the Incarnation of God if not a fact every bit as plain as an ordinary potato? 

And yet here is a fact so powerful as to not only penetrate that privileged sphere of which Proust speaks but to inscribe therein an image of God Himself wearing, ineffaceably, a human face. If God had not become one of us, I am saying, taking on the very facticity of our flesh, who then was Jesus of Nazareth? Why would any rational person who crossed His path be the least bit curious about Him, much less moved to follow Him?

“We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” reports Peter in his Second Letter, “but we had been witnesses of his majesty” (1:16). Parse the content of his message however you please, you cannot gainsay the fact that here was a real human being, moving about a thoroughly human and material world—who, at the same time, let us not forget, claimed to be God Himself.  

“The Christian proclamation,” Luigi Giussani reminds us, “is that God has become a human presence, carnal, within history. God is not something far away that man tries to reach by his own effort, but Someone who came to join in man’s journey, and become his companion.” 

What set the Christian Story apart from every competing creed in the cosmos was not any sort of idea or mental construct but a specific event in history, thanks to which there is now the possibility for us all to encounter that same event. “The beginning of faith is not some abstract culture,” Giussani explains, “but something that comes before: an event…It is a life and not a discourse about life, because Christ began to ‘leap’ in the uterus of a woman!”

As Christians, therefore, it is not our job to maintain a museum chock-full of cherished memories; so many tokens of piety put dutifully on display for weekend worship. Ours is a life catalyzed into existence by an event entirely unprecedented in the history of the world—to be lived out, moreover, in exactly the same way as when it first unfolded more than two thousand years ago. 

Or more than seven hundred years ago, for that matter. How else does one account for the final movement of the Paradiso, in which Dante, Christendom’s pilgrim-poet par excellence, falls into a state of sheer stupefaction on seeing the human face of Jesus? In the midst of that “all-powerful love which, quiet and united, leads round in a circle the sun and all the stars,” he awakens to the sudden realization of the most stunning fact of all, namely, the eternal godhead itself, “painted with our effigy,” thus riveting both his mind and his heart. Dante will never be the same.

Like some poor “geometer,” he writes, 

who sets himself
To square the circle, and is unable to think
Of the formula he needs to solve the problem,
So was I faced with this new vision:
I wanted to see how the image could fit the circle
And how it could be that that was where it was…

Alas, not a flight for mere mortal wings, even as, in the case of Dante, his whole being will all at once be “struck by a flash / In which what it desired came to it,” leaving both desire and will to be “turned like a wheel, all at one speed, / By the love which moves the sun and the other stars.”

These are not fancies designed to fill the idle hours Dante spends in musing about the Mystery. These are facts too unignorable to be fobbed off as mere woolgathering. Faced with the sheer audacity of the claim, therefore, the only question that really matters is: Did it happen or not? Did God enter the order of human existence? Did He burst through the clouds to become one of us or not? Everything else is epiphenomenal. And if it did happen, what are we going to do about it?