PART II DOES GOD SPEAK TO US? CHAPTER 10 HISTORICAL CRITICISM AND THE GOSPELS Without Christ, God has no face. Why we need divine revelation The last achievement of reason, Pascal says, it where it recognizes that there are, above it, realities it cannot achieve. A hot-air balloon can bring us closer to the moon, but it cannot make us land on it. Reason, together with intuition, takes us nearer to God, allows us to discover God's existence, but it does not allow us to understand God's intentions. Why do we persist in wanting to get on the moon in a hot air balloon? And why must we renounce the moon if we could find the sense of our life in it? If there is no divine revelation, we are lost in the desert of doubt and ignorance about the most important realities: sorrow, sense of life, after life. "Here we are, Annamariam" Van der Meer wrote before converting to faith, two poor solitary beings lost in the immensity. Look at these flowers: unintelli- gible this blossoming, is not it? Look at our hands: they are alive. We live. And we cannot penetrate the inmost sense of this word: life. I feel around me impen- etrable darkness; still I want to see. Why am I not pleased with what is in front of me? Why does my spirit call for the infinite, the eternal?" Although it is true, as we showed in the first part, that reason can understand God's existence, with- out the demonstration and the acceptance of revelation it is perplexed and tor- mented by thousands of doubts. The reader will have experienced that reason, even when it goes hand in hand with intuition, does not thin out the thick fog to see clearly what are the reasons why God created us and placed us on the surface of this strange life. Ask ten passersby and seven won't know of an authentic revelation, couldn't tell you why we are in the world. Reason does not shed enough light on the most exciting problem for common people who cannot devote much time to long and tiring research. And even for the majority of thinkers it is like a candle that cannot light up a whole landscape. Pirandello represents truth in the figure of an unknowable woman, object of endless discussion and of contrary interpretations. When summoned, she ar- rives veiled and answers: "For me, I am the person they think I am." In the novel Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal) people are represented as wanderers in the darkness, each one of them with a little lantern (each one's own opinion). Some go here, others go there, some come back, others walk around. Whom have we to address? Is it not contradictory to believe in a deaf and dumb God who does not hear our requests for light or who does not want to answer us, and who does nor allow us to know the goal and the means to use to attain it, when God created us for a Primary Objective? Many people today rely on the poor hot-air balloon of reason without difficulty, but they dare not enter "Christ's spaceship." They are against the "dogmatism" of faith. But, if I have good rea- sons to think certain affirmations are revealed by God, they are dogmas of faith, -105- |