Bergoglio and the deepest meaning of life

Someone sent me a book chapter entitled “For Man.” Its author was Jorge Mario Bergoglio. The book, Generative Thought: An Introduction to the Works of Luigi Giussani (Mcgill Queens University Press, 2003; edited by Elisa Buzzi), is an appreciation of Msgr. Luigi Giussani’s own book, The Religious Sense. Msgr. Giussani is the founder of Communion e Liberazione, a dynamic religious movement now found in some sixty countries. [Editor: Bergoglio’s chaper is available in PDF format online] What struck Bergoglio about Giussani’s influential book was that it hardly ever spoke of God, of any of the normal questions about his existence or meaning. Rather it was about man. Reminiscent of John Paul II’s Redemptor Hominis and many writings of Benedict XVI, the issue was the being of man—of whether he bore within himself the image of God, of the nature of human knowledge.
At the time this essay was written, John Paul II had just published Fides et Ratio. Bergoglio cites the famous beginning passage of this powerful document wherein John Paul lists the important questions about the meaning of human life and death, of evil and good, of our final destiny. Pope Wojtyla had noted that such questions are present in almost all human cultures and traditions, not merely in Christian ones. He concludes from this survey that these very questions reveal something basic about human nature. They must be asked and considered if we are to face what we really are.
Leibnitz and other philosophers had asked: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and “Why is this thing not that thing?” Many philosophers such as Eric Voegelin took up this same theme, as did several documents of Vatican II. Of course, these questions also go back in their own way to Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas. The theme of Giussani that Bergoglio especially liked was that, to know what we are, we have to take into consideration more than just scientific or systematic reasoning. Benedict had often pointed out that the range of our reason includes intuitive and practical knowledge that is real enough but cannot be reduced to a rationalism based on mathematics. The sciences are justly based on the fact of matter but things exist that are not simply matter. Our intelligence itself is one of them.
What bothered Bergoglio was the fact that so many people are not bothered by these ultimate questions and the answers they seek. Citing Reinhold Niebuhr, we discover that many keep in their souls “unasked questions”—questions such as “Why do I exist?” and “What is death?” We cannot pretend that such questions go away simply because we refuse to or are afraid to ask them. Bergoglio writes: “But if we wish to answer questions that we do not dare to answer, do not know how to answer, or cannot formulate, we fall into absurdity.” In other words, a human being who
Using the classical notion of knowledge of the heart rather than of only the head, Bergoglio, in effect, associates himself with Benedict who insisted in this breadth of our knowledge capacity that included all of reality. There are many things we know that cannot be reduced to a scientific formula. There is nothing wrong with scientific methods, except when these methods are considered adequate for what is not matter. This enables Bergoglio to say, “The drama of the world today is the result not only of the absence of God but also and above all of the absence of humankind.” What does this “absence” of man mean? It means that we refuse to ask what kind of beings we really are. Why do we do this? Largely, I think, because we are afraid that the proper answer to the unasked questions will require us to live in a truth we do not want to accept.
Bergoglio speaks of a reason “open to reality in all its factors and whose starting point is experience, whose starting point is this ontological foundation that awakens a restlessness in the heart.” It is being itself that makes us uneasy, yet curious. What is this but Aquinas, with his stress on what is, on beginning with experience, and Augustine with his restless hearts? We cannot, Bergoglio adds, raise the question of God “calmly,” as if it were not a burning drive we find in our souls. Indeed, it is this spiritual lethargy in our souls that most seems to bother Bergoglio. How is it possible not to wonder what we are?


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