Nineteenth Sunday of the Year – August 8, 2004

    The work of historians and archeologists has given us a lot of information about the past. One of the more interesting facts about the civilizations of the past, those civilizations that we now look back on as great or high or complex -- one of the more interesting facts about them is that they were all religious. But not merely religious; it seems their whole life as civilizations revolved around religious ideas and cult. Their religions were highly developed, often splendid in their ceremonies and architecture. The center of the great cities of these civilizations was most often the Temple.
And there is another very interesting fact about many of the civilizations of the past, a fact that is often skipped over these days. And that is that out of these religious endeavors grew what we now call philosophy. Historically, we know, it required a religious worldview, a religious mindset, for philosophy and indeed science itself, to be born. For it was the religious inquiries, the search for the divine, the love of something higher than this world, that caused human minds to speculate about the possibility of Truth, of a truth around which the whole world is structured, a truth that would explain to mankind his origin and destiny. Philosophy.
    We see strong hints of this very thing in Holy Scripture itself, in the book of the New Testament called The Acts of the Apostles. The Apostle Paul, we see in this book, has made his way to Athens, preaching the Christian gospel, to the very city that gave birth to much of western philosophy. And still in St. Paul’s day, Athens was the philosophical center of the world. It was there that the Greeks first began to speculate about the astonishing world in which they found themselves. This kind of speculation reached its high point with Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. And their contributions, which we rightfully still study today, were called forth by a group of pseudo-thinkers called the sophists, who argued deviously that there was no possibility of ever knowing any kind of ultimate truth. Interesting isn’t it that the greatest philosophers in history made a name for themselves by standing up for and arguing beautifully for the existence of objective truth, the very thing we these days seem so eager to get rid of.
    Anyway, the Apostle Paul makes his way to the capital of Philosophy, to Athens, and there what does he find? Religion everywhere. And he said to the Athenians: “I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”
    Now, I’m sure, this seemed a bit arrogant to some of those Athenian scholars, that what they had been unable to come to a conclusion about after centuries of searching by the most brilliant of minds, this man named Paul was going to show them! “What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” But St. Paul, in one sense, was simply following in the great tradition of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle -- in the tradition of philosophy informed by pagan religion which insisted that there is a truth that the human mind seems designed to seek after and know. And Paul is saying, okay, you have searched as well you ought. The Apostle is recorded in the New Testament as telling the Athenians that this Unknown God they worship has allotted people time on this earth to do that very thing, “that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him. Yet he is not far from each one of us.” And Paul goes on to give them the Christian story of how God is very near us in His love for us, and that Jesus Christ is that divine love, God Himself, coming very, very near to us, when He was conceived within and born of the Virgin.
    In other words, St. Paul is saying the search is over (even if philosophy rightly continues). It is over in its ultimate sense and for two reasons: first because the answer, though wonderfully approached by religious and philosophical genius, cannot be found by the human mind; and second, because the answer has been revealed. What could not be completely figured out by human minds has been given to us. And what has been given to us is that Truth that all the great religions and philosophies struggled so hard and often so brilliantly to find -- that One truth that Plato and Aristotle hesitatingly called God -- that truth has been revealed, and He has a name: Jesus who reveals God the Father. The ancients were on the right track; they asked pretty much the same questions; but no two could completely agree on the answer. And that’s because the answer had to be given or revealed.
    And all of this we have to take in if we would begin to understand what today’s second reading is all about, when it says, “Faith is confident assurance concerning what we hope for, and conviction about things we do not see.” Faith then is the movement of the human heart and mind, influenced by God’s grace, to accept this answer, to say “yes” to this revelation. It is the joyful acknowledgment that human religion and philosophy -- good as they can be -- are not enough. Faith is a kind of surrender to reality, to the reality that the answer must come from outside of me, from the God who is the key and Himself the answer to all of life’s riddles. Faith is a commitment to begin to conform one’s life to this revelation, this revelation who is Jesus Christ, the God of all glory who entered our world as a man to reveal to us the Divine, the One who planted in the hearts of men and women everywhere the desire to know Him and seek after Him. Now the search is over. God has spoken. St. John described how God thus spoke, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.... No one has ever seen God,” John goes on to say, describing the endeavors of the philosophers, “No one has ever seen God; the only Son, Jesus, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known.” Faith is our yes to that.