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13. Transcending: from what, to what?

The anthropological outline presented in the main part of our study was based on certain first principles. Man is not yet man: in other words, each individual is not yet all he that can come to be. Man therefore is a being "in the making". His fulfillment - that is, the full development of the personal life he is capable of - lies ahead of him, as a goal to be worked for and achieved; or missed. Man is free. His fulfillment depends on his efforts and his free choices [1], and so this fulfillment is not something that each one attains automatically. The person who makes wrong choices, accepting options that undermine, reduce, or paralyze his human potential, will never reach fulfillment, but may on the contrary end up in human failure and frustration. Man is not self-sufficient [2]. He must grow towards self-fulfillment; but that can only come about through a process of opening out - towards values; values to be discovered, appreciated, responded to, assimilated [3].

The purpose of our subsequent analyses was not so much to offer the reader blueprints, or ready-made strategies, as to open horizons and to provoke questions. No one knows exactly where he is going or what lies ahead of him. Each person's existence is a series of question marks: about the choices to be made at the next crossroads, about the general direction of his life, and about the final goal it is leading to. Only you can say whether the answers you have at hand give sufficient sense to your life - or still leave it, in its major aspects, as a mass of hypotheses and, ultimately, as an unresolved enigma.

In the preceding chapter we touched on some of the reasons why man, faced with his limitations, wants to overcome and reach beyond them. "Man transcends man": this means in effect that man wants to surpass himself and his own limits. He wants to test and reduce the hypotheses and solve the enigma. He wants explanations that really explain [4]. "People seek an absolute which can give to all their searching a meaning and an answer - something ultimate, which serves as the ground of all things. In other words, they seek a final explanation, a supreme value, which refers to nothing beyond itself and which puts an end to all questioning. Hypotheses may fascinate, but they do not satisfy. Whether we admit it or not, there comes for everyone the moment when personal existence must be anchored to a truth recognized as final, a truth which confers a certitude no longer open to doubt" [5].

The horizons of anthropology inevitably transcend the limits of man. Once we raise our eyes from the earth, we are looking out "onto" infinity.

In this last chapter we want to return to certain major questions dealt with earlier in general terms, but kept nevertheless within an earthbound perspective, and see what answers to them might occur to a mind open to transcendence. Again it is up to the reader to decide whether these further insights, now offered from a broader viewpoint, can help resolve his own personal questions; or whether he prefers to remain with the answers, along with the doubts, he already has.

Before doing so, however, it is good to dwell for a moment on something that the reader has no doubt noticed, as implicit more than explicit, in the anthropological exposition we have been unfolding: the idea of "human nature", as something objective and given.

The issue of human nature

We said that man is free, even if he is not a law unto himself. He has his own life in his hands - as raw material which he can turn into a truly human and fulfilled existence, or into one that has gone off its rails and is running amok. The sensation of having so mismanaged one's life that it is now altogether out of control is frequently met in fiction and in fact. Dorian Gray, in Oscar Wilde's novel, gives himself over to a life of vice, although no one can notice it from his serene features. He himself, however, is conscious of the "various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control" [6]. What does it mean to "lose control of one's nature"? Why should we have to control that nature? Is it in order to become what we can naturally become, and so be fully human? Is it for fear of that unnatural something that we could also become, thus practically ceasing to be human? Both possibilities, we believe, lie before each one of us.

We hold that there is such an objective reality as "human nature", and that it is given to each of us as a gift and as a program, as a resource and as a goal that can be realized. But we also believe that this gift of human nature can be mismanaged to the point of total human frustration.

Anthropology is surely not intended to be (and has little interest if it is) restricted to the esoteric study of primitive societies. And one could question its utility and interest if it were a sort of science of "abstract man", removed from all actual reality. What is needed today is an anthropology which seeks to be a science of man as he actually exists - or, perhaps more exactly, as he can exist and needs to become if he is to be truly human. The principles it proposes should have the effect of showing man how to be man in practice, and how to avoid the alternatives: ending up with a poorly fulfilled humanity, or as a totally dehumanized reality.

It is true that up to this point we have spoken little of "human nature". It is also true that "human nature" (along with the related concept of "natural law") is generally considered a "politically incorrect" notion, and carefully avoided by many philosophical or anthropological schools of thought today. Yet the whole of anthropology is an attempt to interpret the phenomenon of man: what he is or seems to be, and (since he is a living, free and changing being) what modes of change make him more human, more a man, and what modes limit his growth in humanity or perhaps frustrate it. What else, then, is the science of anthropology than the study of what is implied in "being human" - that is, in possessing a human nature? If there is no such thing as "human nature", if human beings have nothing in common - no truths or values, no rights or duties, no rules or possibilities or limits, that apply to them all - , then can there be any anthropological science or study of "man" at all? How then could people be called on to live together in a human way? Would real social life or a truly human society even be conceivable?

We spoke earlier of "human rights" - the defense of which is properly regarded as the bulwark of a democratic and just society. Unless the reality of a common human nature is acknowledged, do any valid grounds exist for appealing to "human rights", precisely as rights that belong to each of us by the simple fact of our being human? From this, and not from any government, state or positive law, our human rights draw their inherent legitimacy, which is such that any law violating them, whatever its source, is intrinsically unjust and has no power to bind consciences.

Human beings can be an object of an anthropological study only if, with all their individual differences, they have something fundamental in common: basic faculties of intellect and will, human rights and duties, conscience, shared needs, a specific human sexual identity and a natural tendency towards the peculiarly human phenomenon of marriage. That "something fundamental in common" is what we call human nature. If it does not exist, is there any sense in calling some actions "unnatural" or "antinatural"? Or can anything be natural to man? Do we actually mean anything when we speak of "humanity"? Does it make sense to qualify certain acts as "human" and others as "inhuman"? What do we mean by "human rights"? On what grounds can a person or a regime be accused of "crimes against humanity"?

Steel has its nature and, according to the quality achieved in its production, will withstand certain pressures and loads, and collapse under others. Engineers and architects need to know the nature and quality of the steel they are thinking of using in their projects. Can we - should we - say that, somewhat similarly, man has a nature according to which much, but not anything or everything, can be fashioned; that he can achieve definite goals and find fulfillment in responding to certain demands, while the attempt to live as if one were made for no goal (or, more importantly, as if one were bound by no limitations) can lead to frustration and perhaps total collapse? Can we say that knowledge of man's nature - of its potential, its powers, and its limits - is essential for each one in order to tackle the task of building his own life? And that whoever tries to build his humanity without knowing what is genuinely human and what is not, runs a grave risk of undermining that humanity through his choices and actions, and of gradually dehumanizing himself?

Nature and freedom

These questions are inseparable from any consideration of the human freedom we studied in Chapter Two; of its power and limitations. Are all men free? Or better, ought all to be free, in the sense that those who are not free are deprived of something proper to man? Our answer here is a strong affirmative. Is freedom a human right - something due to human nature? The reply is an equally strong affirmative. Does freedom go so far (as Sartre held that it does) as to be itself the first and only "value", which entitles us to shape or create our very nature as each one wishes [7]? Here we would answer with an equally strong negative, and add that those who "exalt" freedom to this extent do not understand freedom, do not understand man, and in the ultimate analysis are offering a formula for anthropological suicide.

"That man is free who is conscious of being the author of the law he obeys" [8]. A "radical" assertion of some sixty years ago which does not withstand much critical analysis [9]. In any case it is not probable that many secular psychologists or philosophers today would subscribe to it as it stands; they would not find it radical enough, balking especially at two words which many have come to regard as incompatible with human freedom and dignity: "law" and "obeys". Yet they might have little difficulty if the sentence were modified to read, "that man is free who is conscious of being the author of the values he holds". The peculiar modern sensitivity to language which this reveals can be passed over. It is more to our point to note that the two phrases express the same basic view: man's freedom depends on his being able to define the terms on which he is or will be free. Does such a "philosophy" make sense? Can any man actually do that? Is being free or being freed simply a matter of defining freedom in one's own terms? Or is what we have here the phenomenon of man's wanting to "free" his life from any objective rules of development or from limits to his possibilities?

"I have no given 'nature'; I am my own life-project; I make myself. My project, both in its formulation and in its realization, is conditioned by nothing else than what I choose" [10]. There is no such thing as a 'nature' within which I must work, or a 'truth' that rules me from above. I am free to make my own nature, my own truth, and my own values. For many people today, the "self" has become the ultimate criterion of everything, and "is defined by its ability to choose its own values" [11].

This is the outlook described by John Paul II in his 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor: the outlook of those who hold not only that freedom and nature have no essential interdependence, but that the very concept of "nature" is a threat and an enemy to freedom. For them, "nature needs to be profoundly transformed, and indeed overcome by freedom, inasmuch as it represents a limitation and denial of freedom ... This ultimately means making freedom self-defining and a phenomenon creative of itself and its values. Indeed, when all is said and done, man would not even have a nature; he would be his own personal life-project. Man would be nothing more than his own freedom" [12]. Nature needs to be "overcome by freedom"! What the Pope describes is man at war with himself; man pitting his freedom against his nature - against any idea of an objectively given or limited nature.

In any case, whether one's nature constitutes a limitation to be overcome or a possibility to be realized, one needs to know it. If a captain is unfamiliar with his ship and ignores its capacities and limits, or if he chooses to navigate with no heed for the forces of wind, currents, and water, he is not likely to reach port.

When considered in its most important and bluntest context, our freedom means the freedom to be human, but also the freedom not to be human. It means the power to make ourselves more human, to humanize ourselves; but also the power to make ourselves less human, to dehumanize ourselves. Since I am human, I am free [13]. But since I am free, I can dehumanize myself and lose my humanity, and freely lose my freedom with it. This of course is meaningless to those for whom the very idea of "being human" is itself meaningless.

We have the power to form our character - but not to define or settle the limits of our nature. My choices indeed make me: not necessarily according to what I want to be, but according to the natural consequences of the choices themselves. Bad choices make for bad consequences. I can freely cast myself into the shape of a thoroughly unpleasant and unhappy "me".

The view that each person is by right "self-defining" not only involves the denial of a common human nature, but undermines the very basis of any truly human society marked by freedom and animated by mutual respect. It puts each individual potentially at war with all the others, each of whom is presumably also seeking to fulfill himself by an exercise of a freedom that draws up its own rules and knows, or wants to know, no limits. If society is not held together by a voluntary consensus on common values and laws, it will disintegrate, or else will end under the rigid control of the most powerful. "This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another ..., society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds ... At this point everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life ... The "right" ceases to be such, because it is no longer firmly founded on the inviolable dignity of the person, but is made subject to the will of the stronger party. In this way democracy, contradicting its own principles, effectively moves towards a form of totalitarianism ... When this happens, the process leading to the breakdown of a genuinely human co-existence and the disintegration of the State itself has already begun" [14].

To his own imagination, the "self-defining man" appears as a virtual giant. In reality he tends to shrink into a dwarf, losing freedom, horizons, and happiness in the process. Only in opening himself to transcendence can he freely aspire to all he is made for. "Whatever diminishes man ̵ whatever shortens the horizon of man's aspiration to goodness ̵ harms the cause of freedom. In order to recover our hope and our trust at the end of this century of sorrows, we must regain sight of that transcendent horizon of possibility to which the soul of man aspires" [15].

Values

Let us turn from freedom and nature to values, which we considered especially in our third chapter. "Values", in our presentation, are the key to man's growth and fulfillment. Freedom is a value; but without the existence and discovery of other values, freedom itself loses all value, because it is reduced to the power of choosing between worthless things.

In that sense we saw that the importance of freedom depends on the availability of worthwhile things to choose. The more things there are to choose, and especially the greater their value, the more our human freedom appears as a great possession. Narrow the field of choice or reduce the worth of what can be chosen, and a person's effective freedom is diminished. Most people would hold that the freedom of a desert island or a concentration camp offers little that could fulfill man.

We leave the reader with the problem - because it is up to him to solve it - of how to acquire adequate standards by which to judge values, distinguishing higher from lower, and ultimately being able to distinguish genuine, true values from those that are false. It is not indifferent for the type of life one is likely to have, whether one places money higher than love in one's scale of values. Only a very superficial appreciation of freedom stops at the power to choose, and attaches little importance to what one chooses. Not everything which attracts is a value that enriches life. If one cannot distinguish authentic values from those that are false, it is practically speaking impossible to achieve fulfillment and to avoid frustration. Underlying the crisis of freedom besetting man today is a crisis of values. Unless man recovers his values, he will never recover or have effective use of his freedom.

Contemporary education imparts few criteria by which to differentiate between true and false values [16], or even between those that are higher or lower. "It is essential that the values chosen and pursued in one's life be true, because only true values can lead people to realize themselves fully, allowing them to be true to their nature. The truth of these values is to be found not by turning in on oneself but by opening oneself to apprehend that truth even at levels which transcend the person. This is an essential condition for us to become ourselves and to grow as mature, adult persons" [17].

"Levels which transcend the person" ... There, in the last analysis, is the biggest issue facing each one of us. Whoever recognizes his personal incompleteness and insufficiency, and opens - responds - to values and to others, has engaged in battle against the temptation to put self at the center of his universe. If one perseveres, one's horizons grow. One's response becomes a quest for absolute values. One becomes more and more open to the idea of transcendence.

Do I want to transcend myself? If not, I will stay stuck and locked within myself, no matter where I get to. Life certainly yields little to the person who has no ambition. But is it then enough to ask myself, How high do I want to reach? How great do I want to be? How far do I want to go? People, after all, can climb very much higher and go very much farther than where they are now and still not transcend themselves, because they always take themselves with them. To transcend self is to take a jump beyond self, to go so far as in some way to leave self behind, to look so high as to have lost sight of self.

Is this a contradiction in terms? Does "losing oneself" not represent the ultimate alienation? Yet we have recalled the Gospel paradox of the need to lose one's self so as to find one's self. Not every loss of self-attributes is negative. Loss of self-consciousness or of self-pity can be an immense liberation. A person can "forget self" in response to a great value, losing self in reverence and admiration. And that is truly to transcend self.

Thomas More, outstanding lawyer, famous humanist and Chancellor of England, was someone who gave every indication of believing in life and believing in himself. A man of enormous resourcefulness, confident in his views, yet as free from arrogance as he was from subservience to others; a man fond of life, fond of others, admired by all: and yet nothing in him shows the least trace of vanity, self-absorption, or concern with self-image. Many regard him as the greatest Englishman of all time. Nevertheless, this man, who believed in himself, believed in more than himself. His human greatness and appeal are inseparable from his possession of a personal hierarchy of values and his fidelity to it. The preface to Robert Bolt's A Man for all Seasons expresses this splendidly.

"Thomas More", says Bolt, "as I wrote about him, became for me a man with an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off, what area of himself he could yield to the encroachments of his enemies, and what to the encroachments of those he loved. It was a substantial area in both cases for he had a proper sense of fear and was a busy lover. Since he was a clever man and a great lawyer he was able to retire from those areas in wonderfully good order, but at length he was asked to retreat from that final area where he located his self. And there this supple, humorous, unassuming and sophisticated person set like metal, was overtaken by an absolutely primitive rigour, and could no more be budged than a cliff ... What first attracted me was a person who could not be accused of any incapacity for life, who indeed seized life in great variety and almost greedy quantities, who nevertheless found something in himself without which life was valueless and when that was denied him was able to grasp his death".

So it is not a question of not believing in oneself, but of believing in something "more than oneself". If you are not able to believe in anything more than yourself, you may end up not believing in anything worthwhile at all. Then, logically, comes the temptation to suicide - the final (though not inevitable) recognition of the inadequacy of the self one once wished to believe in as an absolute.

The United States of America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the land of limitless opportunities and boundless frontiers. Admirable qualities of enterprise, fortitude, and optimism marked the pioneering Americans who pushed their country's borders ever forward. Yet there were already students of the American phenomenon who wondered - what would happen when the frontiers end?

In a sense they have ended today; or have been turned into dead ends. Self or self-esteem, money or prestige, has become the irresistibly beckoning frontier. No small part in this has been played by humanistic psychology which proposes the contented inner self as its goal and ideal, and which has come to dominate American education and outlook over recent decades. Self, the center of each one's diminutive world - "his little world of man" [18] - , becomes the creative source of everything, even religion. And everything, even religion, becomes a prop to the "creative" (but objectively shrunken) self [19].

The concept of self-denial was mentioned in chapter nine. Some regard it as perhaps the most negative and frustrating idea in Christianity. They fail to grasp how it is to be understood, which is precisely in the sense of selfishness-denial: the refusal to build one's life on self-centeredness, to shrink and become small, to close around oneself. Those who want to grow must open out from self. We have the lungs, but we don't have the air; the breath that gives life has to be drawn in from outside.

Then, is the ultimate ideal, for each of us, just that of "celebrating myself" [20]? Is self-contentment synonymous with happiness? Can contentment with self last beyond temporary situations or passing moods? Can I attain a condition where I will celebrate without limitations of time or persons? Is it possible to enter into a celebration where the jubilee is of all in all and with all? The Bible says it is possible, and calls that jubilee the joy of the Lord [21].

America - indeed the whole western world - stands in need of new frontiers which challenge the individual to escape from the prison of self-centeredness and the illusion of self-contentment, and to open out, in commitment, to higher goals [22]. It is urgent to discover new - or old - horizons of genuine fulfillment.

Which can go farther, imagination or reality?

There is one human faculty that seems unconstrained by natural limits: the imagination. Inside his mind, a very imaginative person can "create" without limits. However, the "reality" he or she creates remains "virtual", not real. One can, of course, pass from the virtual to the real - if what is imagined is within the bounds both of possibility and of the person's powers of artistic or practical execution. Then it may be endowed with a consistency and reality of its own. This is more to "incarnate" - give body or form to - a value, than to create it. So, only in this very qualified way can we be said to "create" values. An imaginative person can invent and tell a story and even find the creation of this value easy. A hungry man can imagine a square meal, but cannot create it - though he may be able to go out and buy or earn it, even if perhaps not easily.

Man cannot live off imagination alone. Imagination can provoke wonder, but the life of the person who is able to wonder only at imaginary things may collapse at any moment. One's life grows as the ability to admire and wonder at reality grows; it shrinks when this ability deteriorates. The Second Vatican Council says: "the human spirit must be cultivated in such a way as to lead to a growth in its ability to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense" [23]. It is significant that the first capacity highlighted here is the ability to wonder - at what is real, not just at fiction. Without that, man will never understand reality in any depth, his judgments will be flawed and superficial, his religion (if he has any) will be mere formalism, and his moral and social sense will never be inspired by respect for others or a sincere interest in them.

"Our sense of wonder, in the philosophical meaning of the word, is not aroused by enormous, sensational things - though that is what a dulled sensibility requires to provoke it to a sort of ersatz experience of wonder. A man who needs the unusual to make him "wonder" shows that he has lost the capacity to find the true answer to the wonder of being ... To perceive all that is unusual and exceptional, all that is wonderful, in the midst of the ordinary things of everyday life, is the beginning of philosophy. And that, as both Aristotle and Aquinas observe, is how philosophy and poetry are related. And Goethe, in his seventieth year, ended one of his short poems, Parabase, with the words: Zum Erstaunen bin ich da, which might be rendered by saying "to marvel is my raison d'etre". Ten years later Eckermann records him saying that "the very summit of man's attainment is the capacity to marvel" ... The capacity to wonder is among man's greatest gifts" [24].

The ability to admire stirs us to emulate what can be emulated, and to be astonished at and grateful for what is so far beyond us that we realize we can never reach or imitate it, even though we also understand that to be able to admire it is in itself an enrichment.

Education at all levels today does little to disturb the individual's concern with the image of self, rather than with its true worth. This squares with the prevailing tendency of modern life to form persons capable of taking in little more than the surface of things, content with appearances rather than realities. In more and more young people the longing for wonder is stirred (for shorter and shorter periods) by virtual reality, but not by the reality that makes up their customary lives. They readily follow Hollywood into fantasy worlds - worlds moreover often characterized by violence and imbued with fear - and return with a diminished appreciation of the everyday reality and the ordinary people around them; less able to treat them familiarly and humanly, to trust them, or simply to be at home with them. Not much will change until educators learn once more to communicate to their students enthusiasm for real values, and to elicit in them the capacity to be impressed by everyday things and to admire others.

It is said that the last thing, the last value, to die is hope. The person who has lost hope is left with no positive human reason for living. Then fear alone may make him continue to live. A rational and deep optimism is open only to the person who hopes, with firm faith, that death is not the end of this life - with its promises and deceptions and ultimate limitations - , but the beginning of a new life that surpasses our wildest imaginations and dreams. The power of such faith and hope transformed the lives of the early Christians and, through them, the world. How forcefully it permeated the message of those who first preached in the name of Jesus Christ! It echoes time and again through the letters of the apostles. "We rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God" (Rom 5:2); "creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rom 8:19-21); "in this hope we were saved" (Rom 8:24); "since we have such a hope, we are filled with confidence" (2 Cor 3:12); "through him you have confidence in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God" (1 Pet 1:21); "see what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And every one who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure" (1 Jn 3:1-3). This is to hope for everything; it is impossible to hope for more.

Many people today are haunted by a sense that their life is running out of values. Looking back may help them; but to be able to look forward is the only real solution. Values from the past may be treasured, but are not enough. Without a firm conviction that the future can bring better things, one's taste for life turns sour, one's very desire to live may go. Good memories, looking back; good hopes, looking forward [25]. Even when the former are not there, the latter can still offer life-saving support.

If we are to believe St. Paul's half-veiled confession, it seems he was allowed to have a momentary glimpse of heaven while still here on earth: "I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven - whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise - whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows - and he heard thing that cannot be told, which man may not utter" (2 Cor 12: 2-4). Perhaps he had only been dreaming, although he seems quite convinced that his experience was more real and more vital than anything he had known before in his life. "No eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him" (1 Cor 2:9). He leaves us to make what we wish of what he saw - or imagined. Are we capable of that much imagination, if it was imagination? Are we ready for so much reality, if it was reality? What greater difference than that between the person who believes in God and the person who does not? Which of the two has wider horizons? Which lives a bigger life? In which life is there more space in which to breathe?

Conscience: whose voice?

In chapter six we looked at the extraordinary phenomenon of conscience, that singular voice speaking from within and passing judgment on one's actions. There we suggested that, more than the voice of the intellect, conscience appears as an echo of a prior voice of truth. Anyone who takes conscience seriously must be seized by a sense of awe: "These are not just my thoughts. There is something higher and deeper behind this: something in me, and yet above me". Is there not another pointer to transcendence here? To follow one's conscience not only guides one's actions along a path of duty, it raises one's heart and one's whole perspective higher. This is why Cardinal Newman considered conscience to be one of the most compelling proofs, and certainly the proof that is most interior and personal to each of us, of the existence of God. He was, of course, speaking of those who take conscience seriously.

Examining the awareness of duty and the force of conscience, Newman concluded: "all this is an intimation, a clear evidence, that there is something nearer to religion than intellect; and that, if there is a way of finding religious truth, it lies, not in the exercise of the intellect, but close on the side of duty, of conscience, in the observance of the moral law" [26]. Newman's observation goes to the heart of the matter. Without a readiness to face up to duty, without a will geared to the moral struggle involved in following the demands of a sincere conscience, no one is likely to think himself into accepting the existence of God.

Anyone seeking seriously to understand his own life will pause at length over the problems and pointers offered by the phenomenon of conscience. How to explain this voice of judgment on my actions, a voice that I have not called up or appealed to, and that judges me according to standards I have not chosen? How to explain that even if I make up my mind to ignore these standards (say, with reference to chastity), and tell others that they are meaningless to me since I no longer believe in sin, I can much more easily convince others than persuade myself that this is so?

How, then, explain the mysteriously independent status of conscience? It speaks with authority, requires obedience, and will not be silenced. If I do not like what it says, I can try to be deaf to its questionings, commands or prohibitions. By insistently centering my mind on arguments that seem to justify what I prefer to do, I may gradually reduce my conscience to the apparent status of a minor scruple speaking from the background or periphery of my existence, and even to the category of an alien voice, a simple reflection of extraneous influences to which my life has been subjected. Yet, reduced and all, it still speaks - and not from the outside, but from the very depths of my being. It is a part of myself that never ceases, however muffledly, to call for a hearing. To the very end of my days, my inner sincerity, and perhaps my whole destiny, depends on my readiness to respect, and not to want to ignore or instrumentalize, this most intimate expression of my worth and dignity.

Like most people, I can probably present myself as self-contented and quietly self-sufficient on the outside, while not being at peace inside - there where no one can penetrate unless I open myself, where I am completely alone in my own privacy. Or am I in fact never completely alone? Why is it that I often cannot silence this voice of conscience, charged at times with tones of reproof? Is it so independent because it is in fact the voice of another? Is there Someone on whom I can never really close the door of my privacy?

This is the point where some people panic and run away. They are afraid to follow out any line of reasoning that could lead from conscience to God. And, not having got beyond the idea of God as a rival to their ego or as a spoilsport to their whims, they are afraid of having to meet God. Ironically, in turning away from a false idea of God, they are running away from a real part of themselves: that most intimate aspect of their faculty of self-knowledge where God has made himself specially present and where special access to him is possible.

To others it seems the height of immaturity and foolishness to be afraid of figuring oneself out. They want at any cost to get to the depth of this mystery of conscience. If it is not just my voice that speaks, it must be the voice of someone else, someone who knows me more truly than I know myself, and who also knows better than I the true value or effect of my actions on my life.

Once conscience is seen as an echo of truth, it is more easily sensed to be a reflection of love. It can then be listened to, and asked questions of, as the loving voice of someone who knows us from within and, with full respect for our freedom, tries delicately, wisely, and affectionately to show us the right and the wrong roads that keep appearing at every juncture of life. Then it no longer appears as a voice to be afraid of. What is rather to be feared is our capacity to turn away from it.

Callista, the heroine of one of Newman's novels about the early Christians, still pagan but more and more drawn to Christianity, explains her awareness of Someone (not "something", as her fellow pagans consider their god), who speaks inside her. She asks a pagan philosopher if he believes in one God. "Certainly", he answers, "I believe in one eternal, self-existing something". But she replies that she feels God in her heart. "He says to me 'Do this; don't do that'. You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me ... My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness - just like that which I find in pleasing or offending some revered friend. So you see, I believe in what is more than a mere 'something' ... An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and fear" [27].

The voice of conscience is firm - but quiet rather than loud. Therefore I must be prepared to fine-tune my reception of it, in order to gradually get its message in greater clarity. Newman says that conscience, "is so constituted that, if obeyed, it becomes clearer in its injunctions, and wider in their range, and corrects and completes the accidental feebleness of its initial teachings" [28]. The opposite is also true, however. If a person, with all the strength of a selfish will, deliberately turns a deaf ear to the initial and almost imperceptible, but highly personal, voice of conscience, he can come to confuse all the signals arising from within, and end up being guided not by the voice of conscience, but by that of selfishness - with all its capacity for self-deception.

A thinking person can decide (regardless of whether this is wise or foolish) to ignore the question of death, leaving it for a more or less remote future when it overtakes him. Conscience cannot be dealt with in this way. It is too irremediably and urgently present to be ignored by anyone who takes himself seriously. It gives advice unasked for, approves some of our actions, condemns others, and just will not go away. It speaks, and demands to be heard. It claims authority, and we feel the force of that authority without being able to deny or explain it.

To describe conscience as a voice of judgment is not to suggest that it always judges negatively. It would therefore be an error to think of it as no more than a disturbing inner voice of self-recrimination, apt to render a person's life intolerable. No. To command and to prohibit are the important functions of conscience. If one goes against its commands or prohibitions, then comes the reproach, precisely in the form of a self-reproach: "I have done wrong; I have done what I should not have done, or I have failed to do what I ought to have done" [29]. If on the contrary one follows the imperatives of conscience, it will signify its approval, usually by ceasing to speak, perhaps at most with a simple, "Well done; now get on with the rest of your life". It is wise, however, not to dwell too much on the approving conscience. To do so can foster that self-satisfaction which in turn easily leads to self-deception. We can be certain about the occasions when we acted against conscience. But that we have acted in full accordance with conscience, and that conscience itself has guided us properly, can only be a matter for hope. St. Paul is not aware of sin, but still is not totally sure of himself: "I do not even judge myself. I am not aware of anything against myself, but I am not thereby acquitted. It is the Lord who judges me" (1 Cor 4:3-4).

Anyone with experience in psychological or spiritual counseling has known people with unhealthy and exaggerated feelings of guilt, out of all proportion to any possible wrongdoing. Nevertheless, while one can be haunted about possibly wrong actions, one can be indifferent about really wrong ones. The latter is probably the worse pathology. And yet there is something still worse.

A person can purposely seek to be free from any suggestion (coming from outside or inside) that he has done wrong. There is a healthy sense of having done wrong; and there is an unhealthy persuasion - which at times amounts to a pathological determination to be convinced, with a conviction that others must not shake - that one has never done wrong. It is the contemporary obsession with self-esteem, that predominant Victorian and modern "value" we mentioned earlier: craving for personal approbation, posturing for a perfect self-image, striving to create virtual virtue.

The mindset of our age is to put self first, to be Number One in our own interests and estimation. Self-protection may seem reasonable; yet if it means closing in on self, it is an effective block to self-fulfillment. Self-esteem has a legitimate scope, but becomes dangerous when cultivated as a priority. Self-protection, just like self-esteem, is a favorable mood for self-deception.

Self-esteem, in any case, must remain an ambiguous concept for a Christian. The Christian estimation of self - his or her sense of identity - always has two sides to it: "I am a son or daughter of God" (an overwhelming truth which is a constant source of consolation and peace); and "I am a sinner in need of forgiveness and redemption" (an inescapable conviction of having done wrong and of being in peril, to one's last moment). The two appraisals are true; only Christianity makes it possible to combine the two in a life of war and peace.

The "selfism" of humanistic psychotherapy has no place for sin, guilt, repentance, or forgiveness; it offers peace on easier terms. In building self from self, it sees personal experiences not only as singular to each one but also as the right experiences for him, so as to construct a unique self. "Weaknesses" become strengths, "defects" become rightful traits of character; it all depends on how one chooses to see them. How far this is from the Christian approach to personal weaknesses! If the Christian need not lose peace over his defects it is because God continues to love him - despite them. But these defects still threaten his growth. He needs to fight them, trusting in God's grace so as to overcome, and returning to the fight whenever he has failed. Selfism proposes a totally different norm. A defect is a hindrance to growth when it is "ego-dystonic", i.e. a disturbance to one's personal sense of well-being. One can fight to get rid of it; but that may not be necessary, for it can be neutralized or, rather, integrated into a positive pattern of "growth" through a new personal decision of accepting it as part of "me" and therefore "right for me". And so, by a simple change of approach, one achieves an "ego-syntonic" contentment: self-esteem from within, without limit or reproach, and on one's own terms [30].

----------------------------

In our anthropological analysis, openness/acceptance toward values emerges as the key to personal development. The fullest and happiest life is that of the person who has many genuine values - in possession or in firm hope - along with a high capacity to appreciate them. The person, in other words, who manages not to get used to his situation; who keeps his appreciation and his acceptance alive.

Thus the process of fulfillment is one of appreciation and response, of admiration, of readiness to look up and to break narrow and confined horizons, so as to assimilate and be filled. Is there a limit to this process? Is death the end and frustration of all fulfillment? We left the answers to the reader; and, with a final comment, we will still leave them there where they belong - with each one.

Presupposing that death is not the ultimate frustration - believing that death marks a beginning more than an end [31] - , man's capacity for transcendence now takes on the character of a potential for infinity, for eternity. Man becomes capax Dei, capable of living the very life of God.

I can find my fulfillment only through and in another "I". Only by giving myself to another "I", abandoning myself and losing myself in Him, can I find my own real self, become myself, in becoming more than myself.

"Christian revelation excludes reincarnation and speaks of a fulfillment which man is called to achieve in the course of a single earthly existence. Man achieves this fulfillment of his destiny through the sincere gift of self, a gift which is made possible only through his encounter with God. It is in God that man finds full self-realization. This is the truth revealed by Christ. Man fulfills himself in God, who comes to meet him through his eternal Son. Thanks to God's coming on earth, human time, which began at creation, has reached its fullness. 'The fullness of time' is in fact eternity; indeed, it is the One who is eternal, God himself. Thus, to enter into 'the fullness of time' means to reach the end of time and to transcend its limits in order to find time's fulfillment in the eternity of God" [32].

God: on stage or off stage?

This is the point at which we take leave of the reader, but not without a reference back to the "Niagara Falls syndrome" mentioned in an earlier chapter. Any deliberate limiting of wonder is a refusal of fulfillment. To feel reduced by the achievements or greatness of others is to reduce oneself in fact. "I will look up, but not to any height, not as far as it is possible to see", is an impoverishing choice of shortsightedness.

Aware of the cramping power of jealousy, I must learn to use envy as a stimulus to emulation, and if emulation is beyond me, to admiration; ready to admire to the utmost limit, and hoping that I may encounter what can be admired without any limit - a value and, behind the value, a person, capable of stirring me to the joy of unending wonder.

An anthropology of values may not lead on to the discovery of God, unless due heed is given to what was noted in chapter seven; the fact that it is seldom difficult to admire the work of some artist or athlete who is dead or at least totally unknown to us, whereas admiration or appreciation may prove less spontaneous and more difficult if we happen to know the talented person. In other words, it is easier to translate appreciation of a work into admiration for the artist when the latter has, so to speak, disappeared from the stage, has become a glory of the past but is not a real and present danger, a living and active threat to my personal glory or self-esteem [33].

Insofar as this is so, it can provide a clue to why some people prefer never to let God onto the stage of their lives. God, if He exists, cannot ever be relegated just to the past. He is present in the life of each one, and to admit his presence means to face up to the need to build everything around a new frame of reference. I do not occupy center stage, even in my own life. God does; and only if I learn to discover and admire his action can I learn to play my own role to the full and successfully - even triumphantly.

It is certainly true that if I let God onto the stage of my life, a lot of things will need readjusting. There is a piece to be played from beginning to end: my life. I am the protagonist; the main part is mine. But as regards the script, it no longer appears as something that I must make up as I go along. There is a plot - a superb one - already set, composed specially for my individual talents, and in which I can more than excel myself. The main lines of the script are already there, together with plenty of scope for me to fill in, or to make impromptu interpretations. The Writer, who is the greatest Master of scripting, is also Producer and Director, and of such outstanding talent that to be the leading player in the piece is - if I am able to grasp this - a much more extraordinary bit of luck than if I were my own writer-producer-director, playing - perhaps - to a world TV audience (or, perhaps, before a lethargic group in a back street theater). My privilege is that I have been chosen by the greatest Director as star in a one-time-only performance, to go down in history and to be played before an audience of all generations, who are not only wholeheartedly with the Director in his choice of leading actor, but also fully confident that I can play a masterful role.

This is the final dilemma and choice. If I am not capable of looking out and looking up, of forgetting myself and responding, I will remain in my own self-sufficiency - for what it is worth. If, because absolute independence is my non-negotiable ideal, I am not capable of any lasting commitment to anything or anyone, I am most likely headed for total isolation and utter loneliness [34].

T. S. Eliot urges the need to avoid "the final desolation / Of solitude in the phantasmal world / Of imagination, shuffling memories and desires". His Celia comments, "That is the hell I have been in". And the reply comes: "It isn't hell / Till you become incapable of anything else ..." [35]

A last word about this possible final destination. If I am incapable of admiration and wonder, if I have not combatted petty jealousy towards men, I may fall victim to a diabolic jealousy towards God. For I can indeed choose to be the limit of my own horizons, the maximum object of my own esteem, the ultimate value in my own life. What, then, will I give in exchange for my life? What price can I put on it? What is it worth? And, as my years come to an end, what was its worth?

If God does not exist, my life, in the end, is worth nothing.

If God exists, my life, in the end, is worth - can be worth - everything.

My life is not yet a completed project. It has its present worth, more or less satisfactory to my eyes and more or less corresponding to its possible worth, but changing ever day. What will be its definitive worth? That is up to me. My life - a life still in the making - is in my hands and those of no one else. In the end - in the definitive beginning - it will be what I have made of it.

Notes
[1] In a certain sense, a "free society" could be described as "one that allows me to make the effort to realize myself".
[2] Nevertheless much of modern psychology is leading people into the rudimentary error of believing in an immanent human sufficiency, in a fulfillment that can be achieved solely from within. Christianity says: No, "our sufficiency is from God" (2 Cor 3:4).
[3] This anthropological analysis of human fulfillment - that man's realization depends on his somehow turning "away from" himself or being led "out of" himself in response to values, especially as present in others - will strike many as paradoxical and perhaps downright alienating. Yet it is certainly not new, being even more drastically present in the evangelical norm that we must "lose" our life so as to find or save it (Mt 10:39). This same norm permeates the modern philosophy of christian personalism which therefore, although new in name, is directly rooted in the message of Christ. Quoting the key formula of the Second Vatican Council - "man can fully discover his true self only in a sincere giving of himself" (Gaudium et Spes, no. 24) - , John Paul II writes, "the Holy Spirit, strengthening in each of us 'the inner man,' enables man ever more fully to find himself through a sincere gift of self. These words of the Pastoral Constitution of the Council can be said to sum up the whole of Christian anthropology": Dominum et Vivificantem, no. 59.
[4] See Appendix One.
[5] Fides et Ratio, no. 27.
[6] The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 11.
[7] "Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values": Veritatis Splendor, no. 32.
[8] Robert F. Knight: "Determinism, "freedom", and psychotherapy", Psychiatry, vol. 9 (1946) p. 256.
[9] It could be reasonably paraphrased: "that man is free who is author of the rules of the game he plays". But will anyone else play that game with him? The formula reflects the psychology of childhood, and makes for a total isolation. Yes, it is typical of the child to want the rules of a game to be subject to his authority, and to try to change them whenever they do not suit him. The child who regularly insists on changing the rules of the game ends up playing alone.
[10] For Sartre, as we noted, freedom is the only "given" man has; he works on from there as he likes. But to accept any one given element is already to posit a "nature". How does one then justify the exclusion of other elements from that given nature - e.g. the power to think, to discern, to judge ...?
[11] Bellah et al.: Habits of the Heart ..., p. 75.
[12] Veritatis Splendor, no. 46.
[13] Precisely because freedom springs from our being human, it is conditioned by the limits of our humanity. We may be "free" to attempt things "beyond" our human nature, but we are not of ourselves free to achieve them; and if what we choose is destructive, we can destroy ourselves.
[14] John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, no. 20.
[15] John Paul II, Address to the General Assembly of the United Nations, October 5, 1995.
[16] Thomas Aquinas sees our lack of discernment about values as a consequence of original sin: "The result of this disorder in man is that he does not appreciate things at their true value": Summa contra Gentiles, III, Ch. 141, n. 7.
[17] Fides et Ratio, no. 25.
[18] Shakespeare: King Lear, Act 3, Sc. 1.
[19] cf. Habits of the Heart, p. 229.
[20] See Walt Whitman's poem, "Song of Myself", whose first line is, "I celebrate myself".
[21] See Matthew, 25:21.
[22] Yet for forty years humanistic psychology has been confidently preaching the gospel of non-committed self-sufficiency and praising "the triumphant therapeutic [which] has arisen out of a rejection of all therapies of commitment" (Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 254). No real healing comes to the solitary self that has been led to believe nothing is worth committing oneself to. As therapy this is not a triumph but a devastating failure.
[23] Gaudium et Spes, no. 59.
[24] Joseph Pieper: The Philosophical Act, pp. 100-102.
[25] Contrast the emptiness Robert Frost depicts in "The Death of the Hired Man", "And nothing to look backward to with pride,/And nothing to look forward to with hope"; though the looking backward is of more genuine profit when inspired by gratitude rather than pride.
[26] Cf. Wilfrid Ward, Life of Cardinal Newman, vol. II, p. 330.
[27] John Henry Newman: Callista, Ch. 27.
[28] Grammar of Assent, Ch. 10.
[29] Note how it speaks: the admonishment does not come as from an outside source or an extraneous judge, saying, "You have done wrong". It is I myself, from the depths of my self-awareness, who reproach myself, saying, "I have done wrong". We have stressed the independent status of conscience; it is not a yes man of my mind or my will. Nevertheless, it is mine; it is part of me.
[30] These unusual terms of differentiation - "ego-dystonic" and "ego-syntonic"- were given coinage by the American Psychiatric Association in the twenty-one-year process (1973-1994) through which homosexuality was gradually removed from the classification of a psychic disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the official diagnostic manual of the APA, was first published in 1952; the second edition, DSM-II, in 1968. Both unqualifiedly classify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It appears as the first among "Sexual Deviations", being followed by fetishism, pedophilia, transvestism, etc. (DSM-II, p. 44). Regarding all these deviations, the general observation is made: "Even though many find their practices distasteful, they remain unable to substitute normal sexual behavior for them" (ibid.). In 1973 the governing body of the APA voted to eliminate homosexuality from the category of a psychic disorder. DSM-III (1980), in adapting to this vote, invoked a concept of syntonia/dystonia. "Homosexuality that is ego-syntonic is not classified as a mental disorder" (p. 282), although "ego-dystonic homosexuality" is still categorized as a psychosexual disorder (261; 281-282). This is further explained: "a homosexual arousal pattern that is unacceptable to the individual would be ego-dystonic, whereas, if the individual were not distressed by the pattern and experienced it as acceptable, it would be ego-syntonic" (p. 359). This peculiar distinction was maintained, albeit in a rather veiled way, in DSM-III-R, the revised 1987 edition (see pp. 561 & 296), and then dropped completely in DSM-IV (1994) when any mention of homosexuality disappeared from this well-known and influential manual. A full account of this process, and of the considerable contention it generated among psychiatrists themselves, is given in my article, "Psychiatry: A 'Value-Free' Science?" (The Linacre Quarterly, vol. 67 [2000], pp. 59-88), which is itself drawn from a Sentence of the Roman Rota, coram Burke, of July 9, 1998. See at www.cormacburke.or.ke/node/693; and node/469.>>
[31] I say believing, because there is no way of knowing that there is a life after death, just as there is no way of knowing that there is no life after death. Regarding an afterlife, atheistic denial is just as much an act of faith as is Christian hope (see Appendix One). The agnostic who admits he doesn't know, is at least sincere (though hardly happy and self-contented) about his ignorance. He is ignorant. The atheist is a believer, no less than the theist. The former chooses negative faith - to believe in ultimate annihilation. The latter chooses positive faith - to believe in ultimate deification.
[32] John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, no. 9.
[33] The greatness of someone like Napoleon was lessened by his self-centeredness, always wanting more glory for himself. Such greatness is small when compared to that of the non-self-centered person who is able to respond to glory and who does so, rather than seeking it simply as a means to inflate his own ego. He grows more; paradoxically he becomes greater.
[34] "Absolute independence is a false ideal. It delivers not the autonomy it promises but loneliness and vulnerability instead": Habits of the Heart, p. 247.
[35] The Cocktail Party, Act 2.