The Mystery of Things

The seeming technological “mastery” of the world, as I have suggested before, is a kind of new Gnosticism: that hidden knowledge of things, uncovered through an ultimately all-powerful scientific tool, once ours will be the means of our salvation (in this scheme of things, a final conquering of death and the beginning of human immortality in this world). We have little reason to believe that this endeavor will be successful (actually, no reason at all). For when we reflect on the human condition, we recognize that our mortality – death being the punishment for sin – finds it’s origin not in our bodies, which we are frantically trying to liberate from death, but in that deeper aspect of our being, which we call the soul. There, in the spiritual aspect of man, sin first took hold, and the subsequent mortality of our bodies is its mere effect. Science, in other words, cannot get to, and solve, the root of the problem. The help that we so desperately need must come from “outside,” beyond ourselves. And that help, we Christians believe, has been revealed in the Gospel and made available to us through Christ, who died and rose again to deliver us, not only from our mortality, but also from the power of sin that is the source of our experience of death.

The fact that science is ultimately powerless here should not really surprise us. For science is of no real avail to explain to us the most astounding thing about us – that is, our existence itself. Human knowledge about this world has made great progress in explaining much about what already is, but it is nearly mute when it comes to trying to see how it is that anything that is exists at all. Being itself – that “underlying” reality that is always presupposed when examining any existent – being, and why there are things rather than nothing, science just cannot comprehend. Darwin may have claimed to explain the “origin of the species,” but if his evolutionary theory is actually true, then at best he has only explained the changes of something that was already there. So it is with the theories such as the “big bang”: it may very well have occurred (let science investigate), but it still has not solved the mystery of how anything was already there – the near infinite density of mass and energy that long ago exploded into our universe.

To return to Darwin: he may have discovered much about the emergence of life and its evolution from simpler to ever-more complex forms (a theory that is encountering more and more critical scrutiny), but this does very little, if anything at all, to explain the reality of the human being as he really is and not merely some evolving creature pictured in biology text books. How to explain, that is, the emergence of a creature who can explore his process of development supposedly from mindless matter? Whence human reason? How do we get from the non-rational to the rational? How is it that mind could have just emerged out of matter? And so forth. All this is to say that because we have accomplished so much technologically, we easily fall under the false impression that all can be accomplished, every seeming mystery solved, all without recourse to something – or Someone – beyond ourselves. This explains the oft-repeated “scientific” reaction to the claim of an occurrence of a miracle: without so much as an investigation of the reported phenomena, there is the frequent dismissal of even the possibility. But why, since science really has no means of deciding whether there is such a One as a miracle-worker?

Many former mysteries of our world have been explained by the genius of scientists, but there are, as I have mentioned, persistent and permanent mysteries still with us, which will never be answered by science, because the method of science has no means to do so. Again, that biggest of all mysteries, being, existence itself, as well as questions that flow from this, questions concerning the human desire for meaning and purpose, the source of rationality, the human habit of religion and of the production of art, questions about morality and our experience of evil, about love, suffering and beauty, etc. The current fashion of presuming all mysteries are simply minor details that will be cleared up by future progress in scientific knowledge reveals a serious dearth of hard thinking and reflection. It is a Gnostic presumption that will only lead humanity to yet another dead end, a hopeless predisposition to deny all mystery, even though we have come hardly any closer than the ancients did to resolving and understanding, apart from divine revelation, the mystery of being.

Today, we celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist, a mystery, not because it has no meaning for us, but a mystery because it is not fully comprehensible. There have been those occasions, the stories of which are legendary, of the stolen, consecrated Host taken into the laboratory to be examined by scalpel and microscope to see if there has been any essential change in the Host, which is much like the attempt to delve into the heart of a tree, to zero in on its smallest constituent parts in order to discover and “see” the being of that tree. The Church’s answer to such a vain enterprise is to restate her constant teaching about the sacramental nature of all reality, analogous as it is to the Sacrament of the Eucharist itself: that everything in this world that is observable by man (including man himself) is an outward, visible and tangible sign of a hidden reality, being, existence. The scientist, armed with the most powerful tools of our technology, cannot observe being itself, but can only investigate these “outward signs” that attest to the unfathomable mystery of being. So with the Eucharist: bread and wine that have become the Body and Blood of Christ – a hidden reality of the change of substance from the natural to the supernatural, the former being retained in the outward signs of bread and wine by means of which we can receive and imbibe this Gift, and the latter, the hidden reality of Christ Himself as truly and really present as is the mysterious presence of being, displayed before our senses in everything that exists.