The New Evangelization: How to Know God.
“The Year of Faith” 2012-2013
Augustine “Grant, LORD, that I
may know myself that I may know Thee.
Nietzsche: We are
unknown, we knowers, to ourselves… Of necessity we remain strangers to
ourselves, we understand ourselves not, in our selves we are bound to be
mistaken, for each of us holds good to all eternity the motto, ‘Each is the
farthest away from himself’ as far as ourselves are concerned we are not
knowers.”
The only way we can
know ourselves is by exercising ourselves, not in knowing outside of ourselves
or by reflecting back on ourselves from within. We experience ourselves by
abandoning our own premises and dealing with another.
Walker Percy: “(T)he self is
literally unspeakable to itself. One cannot speak or hear a word which
signifies oneself, as one can speak or hear a word signifying anything else,
e.g., apple, Canada, 7-Up.
The self of the sign-user can never be
grasped, because, once the self locates itelf at the dead center of its world,
there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self
has not sign of itself. No signifier applies.[1]
John Paul II: “The man who wishes
to understand himself thoroughly – and not just in accordance with immediate,
partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his
being – he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and
sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak,
enter into Him with all his own self, he must ‘appropriate’ and assimilate the
whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find
himself.”[2]
This is the real
epistemology of realism. It means that the only person I have experience
of is myself. And this because I am the only being who can master me. That is,
God has made me “the only earthly being… for itself.”[3]
That means that I cannot be used by anyone, not even God, for an end beyond
myself. I am a self-mastering freedom and my being as a self-determining
freedom cannot be exercised by anyone else.
Only I can believe. No one can believe for me. No one can exercise my
freedom for me.
When I exercise my freedom to move my
total self, I experience myself for what I am, the image of the divine Persons.
Therefore, in experiencing myself as image of God, I experience what it is to
be like God. And, therefore, I experience and know God.
Thus only by knowing myself in the act of
believing, I know God. And this is everlasting life as Jn. 17, 3: “This is
everlasting life, that they know you the one true God, and him whom you have
sent, Jesus Christ.”
The realism becomes unassailable when
you consider that the Word of God is only true reality. Benedict XVI: “the Word of God
is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be realistic,
we must rely upon this reality. We must change our idea that matter, solid
things, things we can touch, are the more solid, the more certain reality. At
the end of the Sermon on the Mount the Lord speaks to us about the two possible
foundations for building the house of one's life: sand and rock. The one who
builds on sand builds only on visible and tangible things, on success, on
career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one day
will pass away. We can see this now with the fall of large banks: this money
disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true
realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. The
one who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on
appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all
reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is
reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is the
one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the
foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his life on this
foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to
discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to
build life.”[4]
Response to Nietzsche: We experience and know ourselves (and therefore God) only by the act of faith. It is the only act in the world whereby we become self-transcendent, and therefore, self-experiential.
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