“In the middle of the journey of life, I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight-way was lost.” (Alighieri Dante, 1265 – 1321)
Reflecting on his life, the lonely individual comes to realize he is cast into a complex and bewildering universe. He finds himself in a quandary, facing an irrepressible tension between two paradoxical, but core, inner yearnings that require satisfaction, failing which he is destined to live his life in a perpetual state of angst.
On the one hand is a deep and compelling spiritual desire for connection with a supreme, metaphysical, yet knowable Deity. The other is a dialectical need for a coherent explanation of his disjunctive position in life. He faces a visceral need to synthesize disparate notions of purpose, meaning, and identity with a craving, as a born-free individual, for absolute liberty – a freedom from all restraint, from all rubrics of morality.
These conflicting objectives need resolution to make sense of the perplexing creation order and the individual’s part in it. A reconciliation results in a security of being, of ontological wholeness, and emotional stability. However, resolution comes only through acceptance that true liberty, ironically, is to be exercised within a paradigm of rational natural law truths. These ancient rubrics, the first order principles of authentic existence, emanate from theistic precepts as captured in the Hebrew Decalogue, exemplified by their prophets, and endorsed through the Messianic law of the Spirit. In this manner, a moral-ethical structure is imparted to human existence.
The ‘Absurd’
An authentic existence, free of the angst brought on by what the Algerian-French writer Albert Camus referred to as the ‘absurd’ and which results in the malady of philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘nausea,’ is a life that internalizes the cognitive realization of estrangement from meaning and purpose, yet finds a pathway to metaphysical truth and rubrics of morality. It is within the reconciliation of these factors that a dignified life can be achieved.
Furthermore, the merger of disparate yearnings allows for exercise of creative human powers, freedom of choice, and a certain control of one’s future life. In turn comes the opportunity for human intimacy and the satisfaction of a settled familial home, through which the traveller finds his place in society and a degree of peace. In this way, his discordance is satisfied and he is able to enter life in confidence and hope, secure in his spiritual connection and emotional well-being. This outcome ensures his eternal, spiritual, future within the lineal temporality, beauty, and serendipity of life on earth. Faced with many possible detours, which would distract him from his core purpose, the individual has to consciously choose the path leading to wholeness.
In the understanding of Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “It is this complex capacity to speak, think, and choose between alternative courses of action that is at once our glory, our burden, and our shame.” The Rabbi elaborates:
God gave humans the freedom to choose, so that you can never fully predict what they will do. They too – within the limits of our finitude and mortality – will be what they choose to be. Which means that when God gave humans the freedom to act well, He gave them the freedom to act badly.
Excessive focus on the inner-self inevitably leads to narcissism and thus secularism, with its adjunct of practical atheism. On the other extreme, focus on organized religion without personal connection to his Creator or embracing Judeo-Christianity’s moral authority, can lead the individual either to religious fanaticism or hostility towards other faiths. This approach is evident in fanatical jihadist Islamism with its Caliphate utopianism supposedly necessary to usher in an apocalyptic era of divine redemption of all true Muslim believers, meaning those considered dedicated Islamist jihadists.
First Order Truths
The complexity of the human condition comes from an enduring search for meaning, for identity, and for transcendent primary truths. The search was initiated when the first two humans, Adam and Eve, exercised their gift of freedom of contrary choice and rejected the romantic reality of their relationship with the Divine. Until such event, they lived in their Creator’s presence, secure in their identity and purpose, appreciating the privilege of a close spiritual relationship with their Maker.
The first couple also enjoyed a pleasant, organic, and romantic relationship with each other. Their relationship was designed to produce a nuclear family unit, and later a society. Moreover, through their gift of freedom of choice they could engage in rational inquiry and exploration. Only a single caveat was attached to this freedom and that was to not partake of forbidden fruit. To their later regret, albeit enticed by a malevolent entity, they doggedly asserted their free will and did as they pleased, contravening the sole condition of their residence in the sacred Garden of Paradise.
Consequently, the first couple were cast out from their home and found themselves compelled to create a new future, with new paradigms of meaning, in an unknown world. Their journey was poignantly described by the 17th century poet, John Milton who, in his epic work Paradise Lost, tenderly presents this odyssey as a concerning new challenge:
The World was all before them, where to choose
Their place to rest, and Providence their guide
They hand in hand with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
Even so, there was nothing romantic or exciting about the first couple’s expulsion. They were deprived of their exalted status and, losing the reflected divine glory which covered their nakedness, they were filled with trepidation; suffering emotions of angst, alienation, and confusion. Since commencement of their banishment – their Geworfenheit – humankind’s vital search for spiritual reconnection, for individual purpose, meaning, mores, and identity has never ceased. This is due to the innate moral character of man and woman’s being; a position which enables them to comprehend their fragile condition and to desire a solution. The secular humanist theory of a neutral personal moral environment does not hold water in light of the innate consciousness of a pre-existent natural law order – an order which, according to Alexander Hamilton in 1788, can be referred to as “primary truths or first principles upon which all subsequent reasonings must depend.”
The Natural Law
Concerning this natural law, Ambrose of Milan points out, “Law is twofold – natural and written. The natural law is in the heart, the written law on tables. All men are under the natural law.” In that sense, Aristotle’s position (and later, that of John Locke in 1689) of a ‘blank slate,’ a tabula rasa, is defeated by the innatism of humankind through impartation by the Divine of moral consciousness, the essence of natural law.
Professor Stephen Grabill explains that, despite exile from the Garden, “the diminished natural human faculties still function sufficiently to reveal the general precepts of the natural moral law.”
John Calvin, in a similar vein, refers to Divinitatis Sensum – a sense of deity that all humans have, and this sense necessarily incorporates an awareness of virtue. Calvin says, “man’s soul is so illuminated by the brightness of God’s light as to never be without some slight flame or at least a spark of it.” In the Judeo-Christian tradition, natural law jurisprudence has its origin in the Creator’s eternal moral economy. It is upon these moral precepts that the Western juridical tradition was founded. America’s founding documents (including the Declaration of Independence) validate this conclusion.
Secular philosophers, such as Aristotle, also affirm the existence of an eternal law, averring that “Universal law is the law of Nature. For there really is, as everyone to some extent divines, a natural justice and injustice that is binding on all men, even on those who have no association or covenant with each other.” Aristotle’s approach, like that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 thesis, The Social Contract, eventually led to the “Natural law school of jurisprudence” which sought to fabricate a legal system based upon secular principles of eternal law, “even if there is no God.”
Theologian Francis A. Schaeffer scorned this contention when he said there is a “serious problem in trying to construct a system of law upon nature per se, for nature is cruel as well as non-cruel.”
Shaeffer’s remark is perceptive. The ethical concept of malum in se – an act which is wrong or evil in itself – cannot emanate from an incogitative nature due to the truism that a rational determination is required to understand the wrongfulness of an action (actus reus). Theistically-founded natural law therefore remains the only absolute and definitive source of ethical-moral action. All Western principles of justice have these tenets as their reference point, leading to a vast collection of malum prohibitum – acts prohibited by law and designed to ensure the common good of society.
The Need for Relationship
In rejecting a relationship with our Creator, humanity has sought answers via the secular route: through primacy of the autonomous-self with emphasis on fabricated incorporeal structures, idealization and utopianism, philosophical ideologies, technology and scientific explorations. The perceptive words of apologist C. S. Lewis summarize the search in this way, “Human history is the long and terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
The desperate search for a metaphysical solution to the human dilemma is reflected in the pandemic of loneliness in post-modern society. The central need for relationship is recounted in David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, when the character Hal laments, “we’re all lonely for something we don’t know we lonely for;” clarifying that he “misses somebody he’s never even met.” Virginia Woolf explained the emptiness this way, “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.”
The desire for understanding is further complicated by paradoxical rudiments of existence such as life and death, love and hate, beauty and the mundane, order and chaos, angst and solace, morality and licentiousness, the spiritual and the profane, the temporal and the transcendent, of meaning and meaningless – all of which reflect a rational man estranged within a seemingly unpredictable, irrational, and indifferent universe.
The human condition, without guiding rubrics of theistic natural law, inexorably results in angst, hopelessness, and alienation from the primary source of true relationship. It is only within this spiritual relationship that the quest for meaning, personal identity, and purpose in life can be satisfied.
This concludes Part One. In Part Two, I will address the complex questions of existence, of God, of personal identity and meaning.
