A regular activity of mine is trying to locate a book in my bookcase, some book that I have read and enjoyed and wish to read again, or at least to read again some sections of it. That I almost always find the book is amazing. I have so many books on my shelves that if one more book enters my room, I may have to move out.
To carefully look through the titles of the hundreds of books I have read leads me to reflect on how my ideas have changed over a lifetime of teaching philosophy. The books I have read have shaped and formed me for better or for worse. To allow serious authors into our lives is a risk. It is a risk that I have taken often, and I believe even authors with whom I almost completely disagree have helped me reach whatever vision I have of the human person.
As far back as I can remember, even back to my days as a college student, I have been looking for a vision that ties everything together, a vision that unites all sorts of insights. This is probably the desire that accounts for the increasingly central place that Father Pierre de Chardin’s theological vision has in my vision of the human person.
In college, I struggled to understand the difference between what I called the natural and the supernatural order. I am grateful to the late Father Michael Himes for his succinct dismissal of how I thought of the natural order. Michael pointed out that if by the natural order you mean some place where God is not present, there is no such order. I think immediately of Pope Francis’ statement that he is certain that God is part of everyone’s life.
Typing these words, I immediately think of St. Therese’s statement, with which George Bernanos ended his great novel “The Diary of a Country Priest”: “Grace is everywhere.” Teaching philosophy has enabled me to study many attempts to prove God’s existence. One attempt greatly appeals to me. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., offered it in his excellent book “The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics” (University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana. 2001, PP. 324).
The proof for the existence of God that I studied when I was a seminarian looked for evidence in the world for the existence of God. The proof argued that the existence of God was demanded by the existence of limited beings. God is the only sufficient reason to account for the existence of all other beings. I agreed with the argument when I was a seminarian, and I still do, but there is another argument that Clarke offers that I find fascinating. Clarke wrote the following:
“Instead of directing our drive to know toward seeking out the ultimate sufficient reason for the world around us (the Cosmological Argument as it is called), we can also rise directly to the discovery of the Infinite Fullness of being through the interior dynamism of the knowing-willing subject oriented toward the infinite by its very nature, as to the only adequate goal that can fulfill its innate natural longing.” (p.226)
What Clarke is suggesting is there is a pattern to our knowing and loving that indicates that nothing less than infinite truth and infinite good will satisfy our drive to know and to love. He notes that any time we know the truth of any being, there is a temporary enjoyment, but as soon as we discover that it only delivers partial truth, we move on in our search for a truth that will completely fulfill our desire to know.
A similar pattern occurs when we love any being. Once again, there is partial enjoyment of its goodness, but as soon as we realize that we are longing for an infinite good, we move on. This pattern occurs again and again. Eventually, we realize that only infinite truth and infinite good will satisfy us. We are left with a radical choice. Clarke writes that only Infinite Truth and Infinite Good will satisfy us.
Clarke points out that every time we know or love any being, we are left with a radical choice. Clarke writes the following: “Either there exists a positive Infinite Fullness of being and goodness, which is somehow possible to be obtained by me — at least as a free gift — and then my human nature becomes luminously and completely meaningful, intelligible, sense-making, and my life is suffused with hope of fulfillment.
“Or, in fact, there exists no such real Infinite at all. And then my nature reveals in its depth a radical defect of meaninglessness, of coherence, an unfulfillable void of unintelligibility, a kind of tragic emptiness: a natural desire that defines my nature as a dynamic unity, but is in principle unfulfillable, incurably frustrated, a ‘useless passion,’ … oriented by its very nature toward a non-existent void … kept going only by an ineradicable illusion.”(p.327)
I choose meaningfulness!
Father Lauder is a philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica. His new book, “The Cosmic Love Story: God and Us,” is available on Amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble.
