Usually I encounter people who simply think that their mind can master reality entirely. They erroneously think that reason can easily control their lives and those of others. They also claim that what exists has to exist in their minds first. Otherwise it does not exist at all.
In Blessed John Henry Newman’s view such an attitude amounts to isolationism because reason shuts itself in on itself. This sorry state of argumentation denudes reason from its inherent dignity. How come that human reason refutes the existence of another field of knowledge simply because it is placed outside its parameters? How can human reason reject that some truth might exist apart that which
infiltrates through it?
Unfortunately rationalists humiliate reason because they fail to recognize its God-given capacity to transcend itself. Pope Benedict XVI spoke about the catastrophic consequences when the dictatorships of rationalism and relativism have their way in our way of living.
“Contemporary society is facing challenges that are just as demanding and may have become even more complex. If in his [the Holy Curé of Ars] time the ‘dictatorship of rationalism’ existed, in the current epoch a sort of ‘dictatorship of relativism’ is evident in many contexts. Both seem inadequate responses to the human being's justifiable request to use his reason as a distinctive and constitutive element of his own identity. Rationalism was inadequate because it failed to take into account human limitations and claims to make reason alone the criterion of all things, transforming it into a goddess; contemporary relativism humiliates reason because it arrives de facto at affirming that the human being can know nothing with certainty outside the positive scientific field. Today however, as in that time, man, ‘a beggar for meaning and fulfilment’, is constantly in quest of exhaustive answers to the basic questions that he never ceases to ask himself”.
Present in all religions and cultures is the feeling of what Rudolf Otto called “the sacred”. In his classic book “The Idea of the Holy”, which had as its subtitle, “The Irrational in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational,” Otto showed that the feeling of the numinous (the supernatural) is the revelation of the “tremendous and fascinating”. Such feeling is “irrational” in the sense that it is “outside of reason”. It cannot be mastered by any rational category of the mind. The apex of the numinous is to be found in the demonstration of God’s holiness, as is shown in the biblical Qadosh.
The great twentieth century theologian, Karl Rahner, stated: “The Christian of tomorrow, will either be a mystic or he won't be.” By this statement what he meant to say was that in the future the Christian faith is kept alive by the fervent witness of people who nourish a deep personal experience of God rather than the manifestation of their rational validity. Pope Paul VI made the same claim when he declared in “Evangelii Nuntiandi”: “Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses” (§ 41). Adding to this, when Saint Peter exhorted his fellow believers to “be prepared to make a defense to anyone who calls [them] to account for the hope that is in [them]” (1 Pet 3:15) he was not referring to speculative and dialectic reasons but to practical reasons which involved their experience of Christ intertwined with the apostolic testimony that strengthened it.
Christmas is the highest “manifestation of the Sacred”. The birth of Jesus in the silence of the night in Bethlehem becomes the saving light of the world. With Mary let us kneel, adore and be silent before him!
Fr Mario Attard OFM Cap