"Let him damn me a
hundred, a thousand times, it is enough that he exists."
This sentence, placed in the mouth of a character in a
theatrical work by Jean-Paul Sartre, is a mark and a measure (I dare to believe)
of a revelatory metaphysical hunger.
Does he exist? The question lingers (and will always linger)
unanswered. "If I must say whether or not God exists, I am closer to His
truth when saying that He does not exist, since God is something entirely different
from that which I recognize as existence." (A confession of great boldness
from Maximus the Confessor)
If God were a given in Newtonian physics, there would not have
been any rational human person. And this for the same reason that an infant
will never enter the world of language and symbols, the human world, if its
mother holds it day and night in her arms and gives it her breast. We are
ushered into language and understanding because within the context of the care
of the infant the mother is both the joy of presence and the pain of absence -
because the need for food is a desire for relation. A God who gives himself as
a matter of necessity would abolish the presuppositions for the transformation
of need into demand, of desire into language and symbols, into reason and
rationality.
Humans are rational because their being is erotic [by “erotic” Professor Yannaras means the
love that takes us outside ourselves] and it is erotic because God is
absence. But absence means vital lack, painful thirst, and distressing
darkness. "I walk in your night," continues Sartre's character.
"Give me your hand, tell me, you are the darkness, right? The night -
harrowing, complete absence. You are the one present in the all-embracing
absence, the one we hear when everything falls silent, the one we see when
nothing is visible. Immemorial night, great night that precedes all that there
is…"
This Absence humanizes us but we experience it as night and
cannot bear it. The reasons for this are difficult to discern. In any case it
is clear that instead of Absence we would rather have tangible fetishes,
irrefutable evidence of existence and presence. We want to be in possession of
certainties, private proofs, and from proofs to derive power. We are interested
in ourselves only, God is simply an 'accessory' of our ego. We need Him so that
He may lend us self-confidence, authority, social status; so that He may ease
our difficulties in life, and be the psychological antidote to our phobias and
panics; and finally so that He may 'save' us and guarantee our existence even
after death, so that our ego will exist eternally, without end.
But consider now how the 'atheist' Sartre overturns our
egocentric (supposedly 'religious') soteriology. "Let him damn me a
hundred, a thousand times, it is enough that he exists." The 'atheist', in
an unexpected leap, reaches the heights of erotic selflessness. If he exists,
that's enough for me, even if I am damned. My foremost desire is Him. If He
exists, everything has meaning: my existence and my damnation, the good and the
bad, justice and injustice, the world and history. If He exists, everything
begins from love and aims at love, everything is related to Him, everything is
judged in accordance with the degree to which His manic love for His creatures
is reciprocated.
Existence has meaning when life becomes relation - relation is
not something that can be destroyed by death. If "even the hairs of your
head are all numbered" (Luke 12:7, Matthew 10:30), if there is a Love
which composes the miracle of the world, if the wisdom and beauty of creatures
call forth in the fullness of relation, then the thirst of the human person has
a vital purpose and his hope is realistic. We thirst for life - that is, to be
related to Him, not to survive forever as an individual unit, not the hell of
the endless loneliness of the ego.
With the brain nothing is explained, countless 'why's' remain
unanswered. Why should death cut little children down, why the biological
insanity of cancer, why injustice, and why do the unscrupulous come out
victorious? Relentless, unbearable questions, without end, show up the human
journey as a wild absurdity. And the 'answers' formulated by ideologically
driven religions (the 'scientific' apologetics of their governing institutions)
crudely offend against the intelligence and dignity of humanity. The blame,
they say, lies with the 'freedom' of the human being, not that individual
'freedom' of ours which is ensnared by genetic and socio-historical factors,
but rather some dilemma of choice symbolically figured in the 'first' human
being (was he a cave man? an ancestor of homo sapiens?) and as a result of his
actions we are now faced with the absurdity and horror of human existence.
If we want to get serious, answers might be forthcoming after the
leap recommended by Sartre - the leap involved in renouncing egocentric
soteriology. In the enthralling pictorial language of so-called 'Byzantine'
iconography, by which means was expressed that ecclesiastical experience that
is impervious to the uses of power, Christ crucified on the cross is the
reality of the Resurrection. This is because death is "trampled upon"
only "by means of death", only with the leap towards the height of
erotic selflessness.
The 'gospel' of the church is not announced with the language of
Apologetics, the language of ideology. It is proclaimed only with the language
of the Feast, the language of color and music, of poetry and drama - a language
that can be accessed only from within the battle of ascetic self-renunciation.
