What is the man hungry for today? Of love and meaning (Nicolae Steinhardt).
Faith is an analogical concept. Just as we discover something in created reality, we can also discover it in the uncreated, a concept understood by archaic man.
Man is a religious being in his depths (homo religiosus). It is natural that within us, in our identity as fallen humans acquired at genesis, there is a hunger for the sacred or a hunger for light. But if today you say you’re hungry for money, that’s fine, whereas if you say you need light, you’ll be asked if you’re all right.
The ancient man related the immanent to the transcendent and operated with analogical reasoning. He wondered: What has man done to deserve a sunrise or sunset? In the light of sunrise and sunset, the religious man saw the transcendent good, the beauty of God. Plato, for example, was a mystic who believed that through this transcendent good, God touches our soul, and through this, he arouses our longing for him. Aristotle was a rationalist, but he understood that there must be a prime mover from which all things started in an orderly movement. The Stoics believed that there was a transcendent Logos, who traces his presence by laws.
This ancient cosmology is very different from the modern world we plunge into through Descartes, Spinoza, and Newton in the 17th century, where the discussion of God is secondary and all that matters is the measurement of tangible things by measuring instruments. Modernity is no longer interested in either faith or glory, losing this contemplative exercise and relying on the analytical one. At some point, the relativist and nihilist movement represented by Nietzsche emerged, who said that God no longer exists and that science does not give us satisfaction. At the same time, Darwin shows us that man is descended from the ape and therefore there is not much ontological difference between him and the animal. While Darwin and Nietzsche did this work of deconstruction, we see Karl Marx, who speaks of history as a permanent class struggle, and instead of love, what lies behind people’s decisions is power and the need for control, thus justifying the revolution that would later be implemented by Lenin. Later, the conception that man is subject to sexual predetermination also appears, through Freud. Is man merely the victim of economic determinations (Marx), of biological accidents, as Darwin says, and merely a display in an absurd universe, as Nietzsche would say?
All these thinkers believe that man is not free. Behind the fact that we exist, there is only randomness, and accident, there is no sufficient reason to justify our existence on earth. And so we dive into the world of Camus’ absurdism, for example, and the existentialism of the 20th century. To find meaning, people invest themselves in social or civic-ecological projects, because they are disillusioned, without God, without awareness of their freedom, without a satisfying historical horizon, and without the conviction that founding a family makes any sense. So they invest themselves in ideological, social, civic, and political causes and burn like a candle for 15-20 years, after which they burn out, angry that the dreams of their youth have not come true (although they fought for equality, the gap between rich and poor people is growing, although they fight for environmental protection, climate effects are becoming more and more volatile, etc.).
People who invest themselves today in environmental and civic social causes are likely to be disappointed. Lacking the belief system that medieval or ancient man had at his disposal, contemporary man is doomed to suffer in the existentialist current – the only way to live in the absence of God, says Camus, is the heroic way of Sisyphus, who carries a stone on his back, but without the satisfaction that the stone will contribute to an edifice.
However, beyond the philosophical aspects presented, scientists intervene to tell us that it is worth living because discoveries are being made. But they are in the minority. Not everyone can handle the complexity of understanding a physical phenomenon. Modern science continues to make great discoveries, and these are astonishing, enlightening, and even necessary, no one disputes. But has this progress also manifested itself on an inner level? Our generation has a very hard time when it comes to listening to symphonies, memorizing psalms or poetry, or simply concentrating on only one thing for a couple of hours. We live in the cult of entertainment (it is not for nothing that TikTok is representative of many people’s ability to concentrate), and this is the source of human misery, in the sense of loss of dignity when it takes hold of us.
The gamble of emancipation, of human maturation, has not been won. Although Kant considered that it was only through critical reason that we can separate ourselves from infantilism, this experiment is not valid. After all, we do not have the necessary evidence to demonstrate the superiority of modern man over archaic man. As for the horrors, abuses, and pathologies that society has suffered in modernity (wars, totalitarian regimes), these do not stem from an excess of faith, but rather from an area where decisions have fallen into the hands of ideologues who no longer had access to Judeo-Christian ethics.
We have left the reflection on right and wrong in the hands of politicians, experts, and, more recently, influencers, not understanding that to make this distinction it is enough to activate an organ of knowledge that Jews and Christians spoke of in the first centuries – the heart. The boundary between good and evil runs through the heart of every human being, says Solzhenitsyn. The decision to do good or evil must be made by activating the moral sense and recovering the sensitivity and cognitive aptitude available to us. The face of the Creator is still in us. Are we willing to find it again?
