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us, can our desire to know ever really emerge as the dominant motivational force in our lives? The absurdist reply is that the hostility of the universe toward us is the very occasion for our exercising an honesty and courage, which gives us an even deeper sense of self-esteem than we could have had in a beneficent universe. Facing the challenge of living without hope requires a heroism which allows us to feel better about ourselves to the extent that we face courageously the insurmountable challenge of an absurd universe. Thus, in order for us to be honest about ourselves, there is no need for an ultimate or transcendent context of love. All we need is to summon up from within ourselves the courage to “face the facts.”

      The tragic or absurdist interpretation which holds that our courage comes only from “within” us is a position which promotes itself as the only honest interpretation of the facts of human existence. Its apparent heroism and honesty has made the tragic vision an attractive one, for at least some people, for centuries. On the surface, it seems to be an exemplary instance of following the desire for truth, no matter how much it hurts. At first sight, this “tragic” interpretation appears to avoid self-deception and to face the truth by renouncing the need for love, approval, and acceptance. The self can stand on its own in complete lucidity about its situation in the world without the support of the universe or even of other people.

      And yet, on closer examination, the tragic alternative, in its denying the basic dependency and interdependency of all things, is itself also conducive to self-deception. It seems to fall short of complete honesty inasmuch as it fails to acknowledge the necessity of sources of courage beyond the individual’s own heroism. The tragic hero who announces the absurdity of the world stands up courageously against the alleged hostility of society and the universe, which often explains the appeal tragic heroes have to the rebellious tendencies within us. But the absurdist hero is oblivious to the sustenance our courage receives from our environment, and this is where a certain dishonesty begins.

48. Previously published in Haught, What is God?, 92–114. Reprinted with permission.

49. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 175.

50. See Lonergan, Insight.

51. Lonergan, “Cognitional Structure,” 221–39.

52. See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents and Camus, Myth of Sisyphus.

53. For the most explicit formulation of an “absurdist” perspective, see Camus, Myth of Sisyphus.

6: Mystery54

The most important way of responding to the question, “what is God?” is of course to say that, essentially, God is mystery. For many believers, the term “mystery” is resonant with the depth, future, freedom, beauty, and truth to which I have pointed in this book. And undoubtedly, for many such individuals, the term “mystery” is more religiously appropriate than any of the five notions that I have used. Rudolf Otto considered mysterium to be the very essence of the sacred and theological reflection may no more casually abandon use of the term “mystery” than the word “God.”55 The notion of mystery is indispensable to our discourse about the divine.

      Therefore, we must come back to this word “mystery” at the end of our obviously unsatisfactory attempts to verbalize the “whatness” of God. To say that God is ultimately mystery is the final word in any proper thinking about the divine. Recourse to the notion of “mystery” is essential in order to accentuate the utter inadequacy of any thoughts we may formulate about God. And it is also necessary to evoke in us a cognitive “feeling” of the inexhaustibility we have pointed to by way of our five metaphors.

None of the five notions I have employed can be substituted for that of mystery. My objective in resorting provisionally to them has been simply to provide several avenues leading up to the idea of mystery as the most appropriate designation for the divine. In the esoteric language of theology, it might be said that my purpose in writing this little book has been to provide a simple “mystagogy,” that is, an “introduction to mystery.”56 We live in an age and culture in which there reigns an “eclipse of mystery.” And the difficulty people have in connecting their experience with the word “God” is, for the most part, a consequence of the lack of a sense of mystery in their lives. Mystagogy would not be necessary if we could presume that people were universally in touch with the encompassing horizon of mystery in their lives and in the world around them. Books on the problem of God would not be so abundant if mystery were self-evident in our cultural experience. For ultimately, “God” means mystery, and the prevalence of a sense of mystery would render books like this one superfluous.

Unfortunately, the dimension of mystery, though never absent from the experience of any of us, has been lost sight of by our theoretical consciousness. It still hovers around the fringes of our spontaneous involvements in life, in our relations to nature, other persons, and ourselves. And it is intimated in the symbols and stories that inform our consciousness. But in a world where the mastering methods and techniques of science have become so dominant, the cognitive surrender that a sense of mystery requires of us has often been subordinated to an “epistemology of control.”57 That is, the handing of ourselves over to mystery has become almost impossible whenever knowledge has been understood in terms of power. Confrontation with the uncontrollable domain of mystery often leaves us feeling insecure, restless, and even hostile. So we strive to suppress the unmanageable horizon of mystery and vanquish the need for any surrender of self to it.

      In the face of this eclipse of mystery, the very possibility of speaking meaningfully about God has likewise diminished, even to the point of almost vanishing. And yet mystery cannot be completely suppressed. It still functions as the silent horizon that makes all of our experience and knowledge possible in the first place. In its humility and unobtrusiveness, it refuses to force itself upon us, but nonetheless it graciously undergirds our existence and understanding without making itself obvious. We go through the course of our lives enabled by the horizon of mystery to think, inquire, adventure, and discover, but we seldom become explicitly aware of its encompassing presence-in-absence or extend our gratitude to it for giving us the free space in which to live our lives. My objective in the preceding has been to render this dimension of mystery somewhat more obvious by leading up to it with alternative names. But because of its highly theoretical nature, such an approximation still leaves us only at the doorway of mystery. Only the actual living of our lives—and not the mere reading of a book—can lead us into the realm of mystery. The most that any book like this can do is merely point the reader in a certain direction. It cannot substitute for experience itself.

      A theoretical introduction to mystery may not be a necessity to many people for whom the term already possesses a symbolic power sufficiently expansive enough to open up to them the ultimate horizon of their existence. But for countless others, the term “mystery,” like the words “God” and “sacred,” has also lost its power and meaning, or it has become so trivialized by common usage that it no longer evokes in them any deep sense of the inexhaustible depths of reality. For some, the notion of mystery has even become altogether empty. For that reason, it is essential today to provide a sort of pedagogy to mystery. I do not in any way consider my own attempts adequate, and I have presented them only as starting points for introducing some small part of what is designated theologically by the notion of divine mystery. At this point, then, it may be well to speak a bit more directly about the word “mystery” as such, if indeed this term is finally the most suitable

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