Reason (or Purpose)
Reason is most often thought of in relation to our intellect, that is, as the process which discerns logical connections between objects governed by the first principles of logic. But reason can also be known in relation to our will, and in that case the best way to describe it is with the word “purpose.” For instance, when we ask, “What is the reason for my existence?” we are asking “what is the purpose of my life?” The meaning of “reason” as purpose -- reason in relation to our will – opens up a somewhat forgotten dimension of reality and has fascinating implications.
I am strangely unhappy because the pattern of my life is complicated, because my nature is hopelessly complicated; a mass of contradictory impulses; and out of all this, to my intense sorrow, pain to you must grow. The centre of me is always and eternally a terrible pain-a curious wild pain-a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite-the beatific vision-God. –Bertrand Russell (a famous atheist and philosopher)
The origin of poetry lies in a thirst for a wilder beauty than earth supplies. --Edgar Allan Poe
…certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy Earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at it’s best and least corrupted, it’s gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’. –J.R.R. Tolkien
We are exiled from our homeland – but it’s memories haunt us. --St. Augustine
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. –C.S. Lewis
I saw Him with the eyes of my soul more clearly than I could ever have seen Him with the eyes of the body…I was much harmed at the time by not knowing that one can see with other eyes than that of the body. –St Teresa of Avila
It was a summer morning and the child I was walked down through the orchard alone and came out on the brow of a sloping hill where there was grass and a wind blowing and one tall tree reaching to infinite immensities of blueness. Quite suddenly after a moment of quietness there, earth and sky and tree and wind-blown grass and the child in the midst of them came alive together with a pulsing light of consciousness…I remember the child looking everywhere for the source of this happy wonder, and at last she questioned “God?” because it was the only awesome word she knew. Deep inside, like the murmurous swinging of a bell, she heard the answer, “God, God.” How long that ineffable moment lasted I never knew. -- Mary Austin
When we look around us every living thing is striving to reach it’s fulfillment. We know what the living being inside the Robin egg is going to grow up to be if it’s life is not frustrated by external circumstances. We know what the acorn, given the right conditions, is destined to be—a majestic oak tree. We know, from past experience, that a thing has a definite end, a state of completion, which it’s incomplete life is seeking to attain—there is no exception. When we come to the existence of human beings, however, many people want to make an exception. But there’s a striking fact to note about this phenomena: human beings are the only living creatures, in our experience, who can choose to seek the attainment of their final end, their state of completion; we’re the only creatures who can choose to make an exception. All other creatures, as far as we know, are driven from within by forces beyond their control, entirely driven by instinct and desire in addition to their subjection to external circumstances, and are therefore subject to fortune when it comes to attaining their end. Human beings are also largely subject to fortune, both internally and externally, but not completely. Roughly speaking there are four categories of things human beings need on the natural level. These are called natural goods. We need external goods, such as financial stability and freedom. We need biological goods such as food, water, health. We need social goods, such as family, friends, and society. These three types of goods all rely on good fortune. The fourth type, however, relies on self-effort, on ourselves. The fourth type concerns making our own choices, gaining knowledge, and building the habit of virtue.
In regard to those people who want to make an exception for human beings and deny the end for which we’re made, they face one major problem. The general end for which we’re made just happens to be one of the very few self-evident facts we actually know. Aristotle noted around three thousand years ago that there’s one thing we choose for itself and nothing else: happiness. The Philosopher Mortimer Adler put it this way, “any other good (wealth, health, freedom, knowledge) we can always say that we desire it for the sake of something else… But it is impossible to complete the sentence beginning with the words ‘We want to be happy or want happiness because…’” Happiness, Adler notes, is defined as "that state of human well-being which leaves nothing more to be desired"; it is what human beings are made for, our state of completion.
If we were to confine the human end, happiness, to life on Earth, to these four types of goods, then we would find that a state in which all our desires are satisfied could not exist in a single moment of time. We would have to say, instead, that happiness is a good life spread out as a whole, a lifetime spent attaining things that fulfill our human nature. But we also know that human beings desire more than this natural end.
Human beings are constantly trying to transcend their every day sober existence. We want to leave the normal state in which we find ourselves. Yet we also know that most means – alcohol, drugs, power, sex, wealth -- by which we attempt to achieve this transcendence ends us, eventually, in the opposite state of happiness: they land us, at the very least, in frustration and ultimately in misery. In addition, none of these things drive us to face, head on, the true state of our souls (by “soul” I mean the part of us involved in the fourth type of good). In fact, we continually run from this reality. We drown ourselves in the other goods, which are not part of our primary, essential happiness. When our souls are attached to these other, less important goods in ways they shouldn’t be, when we seek our happiness solely in attaining them, then our souls are being frustrated, constantly let down. However, when our souls become habitually detached from their overemphasis on these and other goods through the practice of the Cardinal virtues -- when we start to place these goods of fortune in their proper order -- then the soul starts to face itself, it begins to understand more of itself. And what it discovers is a steady longing for something “ineffable”, something indescribable. It soon realizes that the permanent happiness it seeks is not found in any of the natural goods, for they could be taken away at any instant; hope in them for it’s happiness is therefore illusory, it’s a fantasy, though one in which most of us choose to live.
When our soul realizes and inescapably feels the true state it’s in -- that this world cannot provide it with lasting happiness -- then it will accept either one of two states in which to live: despair or hope. Despair comes from either being unable to believe that the eternal object which we desire above everything else exists, or being unable to believe that, if it does indeed exist, there is a way that we can be united to it. Hope comes, on the other hand, with sensing the existence of this eternal object and finding reason to think it is attainable.
We, mankind, have, apart from God, done our best to create a world which distracts us from realizing the true state of our souls, we’ve done our best to avoid feeling the ultimate despair which is the fruit of placing our hope in things which will pass away; we’ve done this setting up selfish gratifications as our ultimate purpose in life. The world is run, in large part, by greed driven people who profit from our lack of self control, who appeal to our lusts and overindulgences. The world is run by people who need to feed their illusions, their false pursuits of happiness, by feeding off of our illusions, our distractions -- our illusions feed each other, it’s a vicious circle. St. Augustine called this man made world The City of Man, and contrasted it with what he called the City of God. Since we’re all too familiar with The City of Man -- with greed, power, lust, impersonality, etc., let us see what the alternative holds.
In contrast to the pursuit of greed, power, and lust, the alternative – the City of God, if you will -- holds out this purpose for man: “We were made to know, love and serve God in this world, and to enjoy Him forever in the next.” We’ve made a grave mistake by forgetting that God is not just a person who happens to be good, He’s more than a person with whom we can be in spiritual union; a spiritual union that is peace, satisfaction, ecstasy, bliss. Heaven is not a glorified church service, nor is it merely the continuation of our world but without pain and death. Heaven is everything we long for but cannot attain in our misguided pursuits and our most sought after experiences.
I opened this essay with two quotes from people who were not religious but found this longing for The City of God within themselves. I followed those and other quotes with a rational observation by a former atheist (who went on to become one of the greatest Christian writers in history) about what such longings mean: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” “Another world,” the City of God, happiness as the only end we seek for itself; these are all different ways of describing the same thing. I think the next thing we begin to wonder is, is this other world completely separated from us? Do we who are doomed to live our lives here in the City of Man have any connection, now, in the present, to the City of God? The sages of the past answer yes; we begin to feel this other world in our highest ideals, in practicing the Cardinal virtues, in meditating on all things good (nature, literature, music), in the very idea of deepening our religious life through the Church “-- prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration". Most interestingly we find that many of those who’ve made these ideals the guiding light of their lives -- who've acquired a heroic will for loving God and their neighbor -- have been places; many of them have, like St. Teresa, found new types of knowledge opening up on a world which bears relation to the realities such as Mary Austin and countless others have experienced:
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold. The gates were at first the end of the world, the green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal cherubims! And the young men glittering and sparkling angels and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the streets, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die. But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver was mine, as much their sparkling eyes, fair skins, and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine, and I the only specatator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor bounds nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possessors of them. So that with much ado I was corrupted; and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which I now unlearn, and become as it were a little child again, that I may enter into the Kingdom of God. --Thomas Traherne
Heaven may not be precisely like this, this is really only a hint, a glimpse: it can only be something unimaginably better.
Beauty is the grandest awakener of this desire. Baudelaire writes,’ . . . it is this immortal instinct for the beautiful which makes us consider the earth and its various spectacles as a sketch of, as a correspondence with, Heaven. . . . It is at once through poetry and across poetry, through and across music, that the soul glimpses the splendors situated beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the eyes, these tears are not proof of an excess of joy, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, a demand of the nerves, of a nature exiled in the imperfect and desiring to take possession immediately, even on this earth, of a revealed paradise. –J. Maritain
These random glimpses we receive, says C.S. Lewis, are sign posts pointing us somewhere. They’re pointing us, according to the Saints, to the enchanted reality of lived Christianity where the path truly begins, where Heaven and Earth overlap, and where this piercing of the Heavenly veil becomes tied to the very fabric of our being. The glorious fact is that those who have completely left the City of Man for the City of God have not been disappointed; neither are their lives disappointing. Indeed, their lives are surrounded by a curious strangeness, for they’ve brought back a bit of that otherworld to our present world. Who can say that Jesus was of this world? Who can say that Mother Teresa served the sick and dying by the motivation of any promise the world of man offers? Who can read Brother Lawrence, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Therese of Lisieux, or any of the other Saints and great religious figures throughout history and deny that they thrived off of some foreign energy unknown to vast majority of us? Who can question the stigmata of a Padre Pio and a St. Francis, or the incorruptibility of a St. Bernadette (whose dead body lies in a church in France, perfectly preserved in a beautiful state of repose as if she’s Sleeping Beauty), among others; who can question the accounts of Fatima, Lourdes, etc., which inspire devotion and, to this day, produce miraculous healings; who can question that these unexplained phenomena just so happen to be found among the persons who most seriously lived their lives according to the values of the City of God? No, we feel it in our bones, this is the path to human fulfillment, to the end we’re made for: happiness.
The Saints, then, call us to this path; they call us to begin at the point which they all have in common: obedience to Jesus Christ. All God asks of us is to believe in His Son, to follow the guidance of His Church, to be baptized, to confess our sins, to take communion, and to persevere in love for God and our neighbor. We must seek with all of our hearts to stay out of mortal sin, and to confess it right away if we don’t. As the path progresses, as our relationship deepens, we become more and more like the Saints -- more and more satisfied and radiant with eternal happiness.
http://www.geocities.com/jmyth2/Sober_Inebriation.html
