Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? Part XIII

Part XIII in a series.

Here’s a take-home question for you. Are you at home in the world? I mean, entirely and completely at home? Are you, to put it in a boringly pedantic way, perfectly reconciled with your place of residence in a world bound by space and time, a world framed by the window of the five senses through which you perceive and receive it?   

If you are not, and there is evidence to suggest that you are not alone—that growing numbers of disaffected people agree with you—what is it that prevents your being wholly at home in such a world?

Are you perhaps like that tiresome Neo-Platonist fellow named Plotinus, who flat out refused to give his address because he was so ashamed to be in the body? Is that your hang-up? Finding yourself far too fastidious for the flesh, is that it? Or maybe you are just one of those contrarians, who find themselves always at sword’s point with the world, whose pretensions tend to enrage you all the time, which is why the relationship you have with the world remains permanently mutinous?

So, why won’t you simply accept that this is the way things are? And if you can’t submit serenely, well, then do so sullenly.

On the other hand, could it be that you were never really meant to remain in the world? At least not forever, which would be an utterly intolerable imposition. I mean, if the world made by God is a finite place, which necessarily includes an expiration date, then most certainly it will all come to an end. And isn’t that a good thing?

Pope Benedict certainly thought so. “To continue living forever—endlessly—appears more like a curse than a gift,” to quote from Spe Salvi, which he wrote in 2007. And while we should all wish to put off the Old Guy as long as possible, nevertheless, he insisted, “to live always, without end…can only be monotonous and ultimately unbearable.”

Indeed, death was never intended by God from the beginning, and only due to sin did it first enter in. But, strange to say, owing to God’s mercy, it became a kind of remedy for life made unbearable by so great a weight of sin. Here is how St. Ambrose explained it in a sermon preached at his brother’s funeral, as cited by Pope Benedict in his encyclical: “Human life,” he explains,  

because of sin…began to experience the burden of wretchedness in unremitting labor and unbearable sorrow. There had to be a limit to its evils; death had to restore what life had forfeited. Without the assistance of grace, immortality is more of a burden than a blessing.

Thus, paraphrasing Ambrose, death must be no cause to mourn, but rather, to rejoice—owing to its having become the proximate cause of our salvation. We should welcome death, therefore, much as we would any stranger who comes bearing gifts, however mysterious.

Life, too, must give us no reason to mourn. If there be evils in the world, and only the willfully blind would think not, they are not found in being, which is good, but only in the will, which is bent upon committing them. Evil is but an absence, a privation of what otherwise abides, and lacking ontological weight, it has only nothingness to commend. If we must speak of it at all, then let us call it love’s shadow. After all, if God made the world, then it must in some conclusive and significant sense be a good place to be.

And yet, for all that, our faith enjoins us not to grow too enamored of the things of this world, knowing that they shall, like the flowers and the fields full of clover and grass, wither and die. Yes, we must remain in the world, at least until God calls us home, but not of the world. How can this be unless God intended that we are not to stay here forever?

It’s all right, therefore, not to be altogether at home in this world. It is most fitting, actually, that we should feel that way, that we not become too comfortable and cozy amid the fleshpots, knowing with complete moral certainty that no finite thing will ever be found to fulfill the deepest desires of the heart. If each of us is this “hollowed-out space,” of which St. Augustine speaks, waiting for God to fill it, why shouldn’t we feel less than satisfied with every mortal and sensate pleasure?

We are all on a journey, in other words; and until we arrive, reaching at last our place of destination beyond the stars, there can be no lasting place here below. Nor will we succeed in banishing altogether a certain dis-ease of the soul, that “repining restlessness” of which the poet George Herbert speaks, knowing that here below is no place of permanent residence.

The intuition, not surprisingly, is among the salient themes of Holy Scripture. “For here we have no lasting city,” the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, “but we seek the city which is to come” (13:14).

Or the passage in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, reminding us that because “we are citizens of Heaven, we eagerly await a savior from Heaven, the Lord Jesus Christ” (3:20). Notice that St. Paul is telling us not only that we await a Savior, as if He were just another salesman peddling a product, but that we do so most eagerly, which suggests a decided relish at the prospect of spending an eternity in His company beyond the remotest frontiers of this world.

Or St. Peter in his First Letter, in which, addressing the members of the Jewish Diaspora, he exhorts them, “Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh that wage war against your soul” (2:11). Why else would Peter speak in that peremptory way unless it were true, finally and ineluctably true, that here is no lasting home, that God has destined us for another, which beckons us at every turn far, far beyond the reaches of this one?

And then, outside the pages of Scripture, we see more of the same. In a letter sent by Pope St. Clement I, perhaps the only correspondence we have from him, to the troubled Church in Corinth near the end of the first century, we read of the Church’s “exile” status, implying not only the alien condition of her members forced to live in a pagan world but, more importantly, that of pilgrims languishing in a strange land yet destined for another, truer home, which is Heaven.

In other words, none of us are entirely at home in the world. Like the Archangel Raphael in that luminous prayer penned by Ernest Hello, “whose home lies beyond the region of thunder,” we have all been called to inhabit “a land that is always peaceful, always serene and bright with the resplendent glory of God.” Who among us would not pine for Paradise if handed a travel brochure describing its precincts in such terms? If one’s home finally were Heaven, then it would not be the least bit unnatural to evince a certain impatience in getting there.

Life, as the sainted Teresa of Avila has described it, is no better than “a night in a third-class hotel.” Having been to Avila and sampled one or two of its accommodations, I can testify to the accuracy of the account. Who wants to spend a lifetime stuck in a slum when a much nicer hotel beckons? It would be a kind of madness, never wishing to leave.

In a wonderful little book called The Feast of Faith, Joseph Ratzinger reminds us that in the experience of the Church’s liturgy, “the absolutely Other takes place, the absolutely Other comes among us.” And citing the commentary of St. Gregory of Nyssa on the Song of Songs, he  relates how man is described therein as one “who wants to break out of the prison of finitude, out of the closed confines of his ego and of this entire world.” And it is true, Ratzinger assures us, “this world is too small for man, even if he can fly to the Moon, or one day perhaps to Mars. He yearns for the Other, the totally Other, that which is beyond his reach.”

What is ultimately behind all this yearning of the heart, of course, is the most exigent need of all: namely, to escape death, and thus to surmount the oppressions of a merely time-bound world

“In all their celebrations,” continues Ratzinger, “men have always searched for that life which is greater than death. Man’s appetite for joy, the ultimate quest for which he wanders restlessly from place to place, only makes sense if it can face the question of death.”

It is because we must all die, bound to the wheel of a broken and fallen world, which rolls remorselessly on and on, leading but to the grave, that we feel the need to get out, not to resign ourselves to a mere material fate. We may be finite beings, circumscribed by what appears to be only a closed world, hermetically sealed on all sides, but our longings are not finite. They remain infinite, which means that they may be met only by an Infinite Other, who loves us infinitely. And He set about proving it by having made Himself small in order that He might then raise us up to a height equal to His own.