Unbounded Seas

I was discussing Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals with some friends the other day, and realized that fasting most intensely marks us as free beings.

MacIntyre in the early part of this book tries to remind us that human beings are also animals. Although our rationality is a distinctive aspect of human existence, even our rationality is bound up with our animality. He is, among other things, recapturing Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ hylomorphic insight into human beings not being ‘souls in a machine,’ but rather essentially both body and soul. Our experience of rationality is not like that of the angels, but rather is connected to our senses and brain, our physical capacities for knowing. Therefore, MacIntyre argues, we can learn a great deal from our continuity with other animals, in particular the more intelligent ones, like dolphins and chimpanzees.

Nevertheless, human beings are distinct among animals (as far as we know) in possessing language in the full sense: we have “the ability to construct sentences that contain as constituents either the sentences used to express the judgment about which the agent is reflecting or references to those sentences” (MacIntyre, 1999, pg. 54). We can use language to decide if we have a better reason for doing one thing rather than another, judging that we can attain a better good by seeking this rather than that (Ibid.).

What struck me as my friends and I considered these things is that the distinction between language-users and non-language-users is clearest when one good considered is a spiritual good, such as that obtained by fasting. It is easy to think of a dolphin choosing to fight off predators rather than continuing to play or search for fish. It is difficult to conceive of a dolphin fasting on Fridays. Fasting makes manifest the extent to which human beings can self-determine: we can resist the drive to enjoy a present, material good for the sake of a spiritual good that cannot be seen or touched, and which surely will feel bad to seek in the moment. Our freedom is expressed most strongly in this ability to compare spiritual goods with material ones. Humble fasting is, paradoxically, a key to seeing the distinctive glory of human nature, the power of deliberation and choice imprinted upon it.

This, then, is another motive for fasting: to situate ourselves where we belong in the order of being, somewhere between the dolphins and the angels. Like the dolphins, we hunger and play and come to know things through the senses; like the angels, we can self-determine even in regard to the highest things, though our specific self-determination is relative to the most humble, bodily things, such as limiting our food.

I teach at St. Mary’s Catholic high school in Colorado Springs. Many of my students have gone to Catholic schools for all or most of their school life. I think that, for some of them, the ‘mystery card’ has been played too often: it can be easy for a teacher of religion to avoid hard questions about the Trinity, the Incarnation, or grace by stating that it is a mystery, and then moving on. The word ‘mystery’ becomes a hard stop, a place where intellectual and spiritual inquiry can go no further.

This is the opposite of what mystery is. Mystery is that into which you can always go deeper, like an infinite sea whose bottom cannot be reached and which is unbounded by shores. A mystery is certainly too big for us to get it into our minds. So, the key is to get our minds into it. One cannot swallow the sea, but one can swim in it. And the more time we spend swimming, the stronger and wiser about its ways we become, so that we can go deeper and further on each new approach.

St. Augustine is a prime example of an experienced swimmer of the seas of mystery. He wrote extensively on the Trinity, the Incarnation, grace, and many of the other great mysteries of the Church. And yet, he did not make the mistake of trying to fit God into his mind. In the Office of Readings for today, Thomas Aquinas quotes Augustine, who had commented on Christ’s words from the parable, “Enter into the joy of your Lord.” Augustine’s comment was: “The fullness of joy will not enter into those who rejoice, but those who rejoice will enter into joy.” Here, he speaks of the joy of those who share the life of God eternally. Even in Heaven, they cannot contain the joy of the Lord, for that joy extends to the ‘unlimits’ of God himself. But they are immersed in joy, immersed in the mystery of God, filled with that joy and surrounded by it, as in a sea of glory.

When we swim into the ocean of the mystery of God, we are no longer in control. It is, though, worth the risk, for it is in infinite mystery that our minds and spirits find the joy for which they were made.