Light On Dark Water

Following a link on Eve Tushnet’s blog to this Godspy article about The Weakerthans, a band of whom I know nothing, I find this striking paragraph from John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio:

The truth comes initially to the human being as a question: Does life have a meaning? Where is it going? At first sight, personal existence may seem completely meaningless. It is not necessary to turn to the philosophers of the absurd or to the provocative questioning found in the Book of Job in order to have doubts about life’s meaning. The daily experience of suffering—in one’s own life and in the lives of others—and the array of facts which seem inexplicable to reason are enough to ensure that a question as dramatic as the question of meaning cannot be evaded.

Moreover, the first absolutely certain truth of our life, beyond the fact that we exist, is the inevitability of our death. Given this unsettling fact, the search for a full answer is inescapable. Each of us has both the desire and the duty to know the truth of our own destiny. We want to know if death will be the definitive end of our life or if there is something beyond—if it is possible to hope for an after-life or not. It is not insignificant that the death of Socrates gave philosophy one of its decisive orientations, no less decisive now than it was more than two thousand years ago. It is not by chance, then, that faced with the fact of death philosophers have again and again posed this question, together with the question of the meaning of life and immortality. No-one can avoid this questioning, neither the philosopher nor the ordinary person.

As I may have mentioned before, I didn’t think there would be another pope in my lifetime whom I would like as much as I did John Paul II, and was prepared to be disappointed by his successor. If only for more or less temperamental reasons, I actually like Benedict a little better; he often seems a bit more precise and clear than John Paul, and I like that. And I think he’s one of the outstanding spirits of our time. But as this quotation reminds me, the same was true of John Paul.

I pause in my contemplation of this wisdom to wonder why the Vatican’s web site seems to go out of its way to make these texts difficult to read.

Pre-TypePad

http://js-kit.com/for/lightondarkwater.com/comments.js