from a human perspective

Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine, vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine.

Cujus latus perforatum unda fluxit et sanguine. Esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine.

O dulcis, O pie, O Jesu, fili Mariae, miserere mei. Amen.

Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary, truly suffered, sacrificed on the cross for mankind.

From whose pierced side flowed water and blood. Be for us a foretaste in the trial of death.

Surely, we exclaim, this cannot be true of the highest processes of intellectual thought! Surely there at last we will come to the very empire of consciousness, where all is spread out in a golden clarity and all the orderly processes of reason go on in a full publicity of awareness. But the truth has no such grandeur. The picture of a scientist sitting down with his problems and using conscious induction and deduction is as mythical as a unicorn. The greatest insights of mankind have come more mysteriously. Helmholtz had his happy thoughts which “often enough crept quietly into my thinking without my suspecting their importance . . . in other cases they arrived suddenly, without any effort on my part . . . they liked especially to make their appearance while I was taking an easy walk over wooded hills in sunny weather!”

At times I feel like an alien body plunging, sometimes almost literally, into a territory—a world of particular symbols, narratives, and meanings—that feels strangely foreign. Yet I know far too well the effects of that supposed neutrality, of nondifferentiation and lostness, of existing as an alienated observer of beliefs rather than one who inhabits them. The view from nowhere is itself a way of seeing, and it is no less situated than the faith it presumes to stand above.

The Holy Spirit truly comforts, heals, and sanctifies. Yet brokenness does not disappear on this side of creation. The apostle who was caught up to the third heaven still bore a thorn in the flesh. The disciple who proclaimed the resurrection still knew imprisonment, hunger, loneliness, and weariness. Christian maturity is therefore measured less by perpetual peace than by steadfast faithfulness amid life's unresolved tensions.

Perhaps this is why it is worth imagining Paul not only dictating Romans or preaching in the marketplace, but quietly stitching tents together with roughened hands. The same apostle through whom profound mysteries of grace were revealed also spent countless ordinary hours engaged in manual labor. One wonders what occupied his mind in those moments. Perhaps he prayed. Perhaps he pondered the Scriptures. Perhaps he simply worked in silence. Whatever his thoughts, the kingdom of God was no less present in the workshop than in the synagogue.

There is something profoundly liberating about this. God does not ask his people to manufacture extraordinary lives. He asks them to be faithful in the lives they have been given.

The hidden years of Christ in Nazareth remind us of the same truth. Before the public ministry came decades of ordinary work, family life, prayer, and obscurity. The greater part of the incarnate life was not marked by miracles but by quiet fidelity. If the Son of God sanctified ordinary existence through his hidden life, then the ordinary can no longer be regarded as spiritually insignificant.

A mature Christian faith therefore does not make a spectacle of spiritual highs. It receives moments of consolation with gratitude, but does not depend upon them. Its confidence rests not in emotional intensity but in the finished work of Christ. It is content to labor, to pray, to love, to forgive, to suffer, and to persevere without demanding that every day feel extraordinary.

Perhaps holiness looks less like ascending beyond ordinary life and more like discovering that Christ has always been present within it.

There is no final psychological breakthrough awaiting the believer before the resurrection. There is only the daily invitation to abide: to remain in Christ through joy and sorrow, clarity and silence, consolation and dryness. The Christian hope is not that every wound will disappear today, but that every wound has already been claimed by the crucified and risen Lord, who will one day make all things new.

What has shifted does not feel like something I constructed, but something that acted upon me—structurally, even at the level of desire and perception. It makes it difficult to reduce the mind to mere matter, or to symbolic properties emergent from material interactions alone.

Even at a half-century’s distance, Father Carré cannot evoke that evening without awakening within himself the emotion of the original experience. As a general rule, in what we call “memory,” the traces of the remembered event are just barely sufficient to prevent forgetting. Here, on the other hand, they are so profound that the word memory seems upon reflection to be inadequate. Immediately after the passage I have just read, Father Carré returns to the Neuilly experience and, without noting his own about-face, defines it as the opposite of a memory:

“An absolute beginning (or that which is closest to being one): that is how, more than fifty years after the fact, I would characterize the only event that ever gave me certainty about my faith, the event, too, that brought me a joy that no other joy was subsequently able to surpass.”

...The first feature is the passive, involuntary character of the mystical experience. No warning precedes it and it requires no effort. A second aspect is joy, “that no other joy was subsequently able to surpass.” A third is the impression of eternity that it gives, which is inseparable from its infinite power of renewal, its extraordinary fecundity. The last feature sums up all the others and it is the intuition of a divine presence.

For those who turn away from mystical experience, its “imprecision” is, I think, only a pretext for avoiding the controversies that the notion inevitably arouses. For staunch nonbelievers, it is necessarily an illusion or a sham. Without excluding these possibilities, believers add another: real, authentic mystical experience. It is then the pearl of great price spoken of in the Gospel, so precious that everything must be sacrificed to its acquisition.

Having written ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche returns immediately and overwhelmingly to his idea — or maybe to mine, I no longer know which. One would say that he is seeking to prevent the kind of falsification to which his aphorism has always been subjected. He can guess his readers’ desire to escape the murder. Shrewd as they are, they will take advantage of the somewhat too-neutral formula ‘God is dead’ which the author has imprudently handed them. To forestall this danger, Nietzsche insists once again on the murder. The caricatural, Grand Guignol quality of the description contradicts categorically the connotations that the habitual consumers of the aphorism have always conferred on ‘God is dead,’ its connotations that exclude collective violence.

‘God is dead’ is not incorrect in its context. In writing this sentence, Nietzsche says nothing that contradicts his message or in any way attenuates it. Of someone who has got himself murdered one can always say, among other things, that he is dead. There is no risk of making a mistake. The passive formula is always accurate. Whether someone who dies is murdered or not, the result is the same. But, death from natural causes being the most common sort, that is quite obviously what is understood when it is said simply that somebody has died without its being specified how.

In the aphorism, ‘God is dead’ is framed by two thunderous announcements of collective murder. Taken out of context, ‘God is dead’ slips quietly back into meaning the natural death of God. The murder is dropped as if by an inadvertent gesture which passes without notice. One must admire the efficacy of the maneuver, which is all the more deft for being ignorant of its own cunning. A quotation from Nietzsche is provided which is in appearance accurate and complete but in reality truncated, due solely to the fact that it is emphasized separately, made into the title of the aphorism. The ‘God is dead’ which circulates in this world does not sum up the Madman’s words, it grossly falsifies them.

For the philosophy of the Enlightenment, God can only die a natural death. Once the naive period of humanity is behind us religion ceases to be ‘credible,’ as we say these days. Rationalist optimism is supposed to be long dead, fallen victim in principle to the epidemic triggered by the death of God. In reality, it survives in the very idea of a God who dies of senile exhaustion. This first idea supposes a second: modern atheism is more reasonable than its predecessor, religion. For beings who have attained the ‘maturity’ on which we pride ourselves, such atheism alone is truly ‘credible.’ Other beliefs are purely medieval, not to say antediluvian.

The ‘death of God’ maneuver evacuates the Nietzschean idea to return on tiptoe to the easy idea, the banal idea, the vulgar idea. Nietzsche is careful not to cross his t’s. Part of him fully enjoys being the misunderstood madman. The aphorism lays a kind of trap for us which everyone identifies but falls into all the same: the trap of vulgar atheism.

The real difference between the crowd’s atheism and the Madman’s thinking is none other than the difference between death and murder.

Through the intermediary of the formula ‘God is dead,’ all those who start out by making fun of the Madman end up co-opting the aphorism and cutting it down to the size of their own thinking. They claim to distance themselves from the vulgar atheism but then reinstall it serenely in the very text which repudiates it, with a mighty helping hand from the incantatory formula ‘God is dead . . . God is dead.’

If the interpreters quote only the first lines of the aphorism that is because, in the rest, there is no longer any question of anything but collective murder. At the first appearance of the latter everyone runs away, like the disciples at the time of the Passion. And the same reasons which render this rout universal render it invisible to those who participate in it. Insist on the murder and you will immediately be taken for a ‘madman.’ It happens to me all the time . . .

For a long time I thought ideology belonged only to religion or overt systems of belief. Everything else simply appeared to be “reality” itself. But now I think every culture carries hidden metaphysical assumptions about what a human being is and what constitutes a good life. As Alasdair MacIntyre observed in different ways throughout his work, human beings are tradition-formed creatures whether they recognize it or not. No one stands nowhere. We inherit moral vocabularies, narratives, ideals, and habits of perception from the worlds we inhabit. Some worlds revolve around success, visibility, romance, self-expression, or endless reinvention. Others elevate irony, transgression, or personal authenticity above all else. One does not merely observe these worlds from a neutral distance; one inhabits them. Over time they begin to shape perception itself.

What has surprised me most is how Christianity has not narrowed my vision but clarified it. It has given me a kind of distance from the endless stream of competing narratives that once carried me along unconsciously. Not a rejection of art or thought or culture, but an ability to ask deeper questions of them. What vision of life is being presented here? What kind of person does this world encourage one to become? Why do certain forms of beauty leave the soul restless while others seem to deepen peace and gratitude?

I think discernment is less about paranoia toward culture and more about learning to see clearly. Human beings are permeable creatures. We become like what we contemplate. The things we repeatedly give ourselves to — whether noble or shallow, sacred or trivial — slowly shape the architecture of the inner life.