Pentacene-fullerene

First, we might identify the human condition by speaking of homo dolens (the human being who suffers). Human beings suffer through all that they have lost and continue to lose, as well as through what they fear about the present and the future. Loss, sometimes terrible loss, and fear, sometimes paralysing fear, constantly characterize the lives of men and women. In a remarkable poem written during the Second World War, ‘Ecce homo’, David Gascoyne (1916–2001) pictured the awful story of human pain and linked it to the passion of Christ. ‘He is in agony till the world’s end, j And we must never sleep during that time!’¹Everywhere suffering characterizes the human condition.

1D. Gascoyne, Collected Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). He quotes here Blaise Pascal, Pense´e 919 in A. J. Krailsheimer’s trans. (Harmonds-worth: Penguin, 1966); numbered 553 in some other editions.

In a particular way, Christ drew near to all human beings in pain.

His body on the cross expressed his presence to those who suffer anywhere and at any time. His death on Calvary between two crim-inals symbolized forever his solidarity with those who suffer and die, an identification with human pain expressed also by the criteria for the last judgement (Matt. 25: 31–46). The final blessings of the kingdom will come to those who, without recognizing Christ, have met his needs in the people who suffer by being hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, sick, or imprisoned. To articulate the worldwide presence of Christ in all who suffer, we might say: ubi dolor, ibi Christus (wherever there is suffering, there is Christ). A homo dolens version of the human condition would display this radical need met by the redemption revealed and embodied in Christ.

Second, we might be attracted to the theme of homo interrogans (the human being who asks questions). With their many questions, children express in their own way the ceaseless drive towards meaning and truth that human beings are born with.² Sooner or later, we question ourselves: where do we come from? Who are we? What does our existence mean—in its sinful failures, apparent successes, and future destiny? Is there a supreme Being in whose presence we play out our lives? Do we go to meet that Being beyond death? The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl (1905–97), the founder of logotherapy, understood the struggle to find meaning to be the principal driving force in human beings.³

Philosophers and theologians, like Joseph Mare´chal (1878–1944) and Karl Rahner (1904–84), have unfolded the dynamic thrust of the human intellect that constantly presses beyond the immediate data of sense experience towards the fullness of meaning and truth in the Absolute. In Rahner’s vision of the human condition, human beings put everything in question and do so within an infinite horizon of questioning. Every answer prompts a new question. Human beings

2 Robert Coles, in The Spiritual Life of Children (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990), shows how, with surprising feeling and subtlety, children ponder the great questions about the human predicament: our origin, our nature, and our final destiny. On Coles’s work, see G. O’Collins, Jesus our Redeemer: A Christian Approach to Salvation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 77–80.

3 See V. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy, trans. I. Lasch (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1964).

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are the question that they can never adequately settle and answer by themselves.⁴

Artists and writers find their place among those who have expressed strikingly the questing and questioning spirit of homo interrogans. Shortly before his death in Tahiti, the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) wrote out three questions on a large triptych he had completed: ‘Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?’ Great writers, like Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), have constantly raised these eternal questions in their novels and dramas. A homo interrogans anthropology or vision of humanity aligns itself with a tradition that goes back to Paul and his radical questions (Rom. 7: 13–25). Without using the term, the Second Vatican Council in Gaudium et Spes (the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world) took over a method of correlation practised by Paul Tillich: ‘Man will be ever anxious to know, if only in a vague way, what is the meaning of his life, his activity, and his death’

(Gaudium et Spes, 41; see 10). The divine revelation correlates with our most serious questions: ‘The most perfect answer to these ques-tionings is to be found in God alone, who created human beings in his own image and redeemed them from sin; and this answer is given in the revelation in Christ his Son who became man’ (Gaudium et Spes, 41).⁵Revelation matches the reality and need of human beings as those who are essentially questioners.

A third possibility would be to follow Wolfhart Pannenberg and present humanity as homo historicus (my expression, not his), as the being embedded in history, which is still incomplete but moving towards its final consummation. In a tour de force, Pannenberg brought together the religious implications of (human) biology, cultural anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history to construct a religious account of human beings as both created in the image of God and marred by sin that breaks and distorts their true identity. Part of the natural world, human persons are social beings, whose subjective

4K. Rahner, Foundations of Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans. W. V. Dych (New York: Seabury Press, 1978), 31–3.

5As it does elsewhere, Gaudium et Spes holds together here the orders of creation and redemption (God who ‘created’ and ‘redeemed’ us). The ‘perfect’

answer to our radical questioning (as opposed to imperfect, partial, or inadequate answers) is found in Christ, the final and universal mediator of revelation and redemption.

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identity is shaped by society, with its institutions, political order, and culture that is expressed and developed in a particular way by language.

Pannenberg understands history to embrace all these realities and to embody the concrete reality of human life.⁶ Such a vision of the human person as homo storicus would coordinate well with the divine self-revelation in biblical history that looks for its consummation at the end of time.

Homo symbolicus (the human being as symbolic) is a fourth attractive option for the fundamental theologians fashioning a vision of the human condition. The human person is essentially symbolic, a being that is both material and spiritual and hence constantly ex-presses itself in symbolic acts. Human beings reveal themselves to others and to themselves when they perform properly human acts which are always symbolic: speaking, working, dressing, eating, love-making, travelling, worshipping, falling ill, and dying. Symbolism ranges right across everything that human beings do and endure.

Such cultural anthropologists as Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) and Claude Le´vi-Strauss (1908–2009) and such philosophers as Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) and Susanne Langer (1895–1985) have high-lighted the symbol-creating activity of human beings.

A brief account of a symbol could run as follows: (1) something or someone perceptible that (2) represents dynamically something or someone else, especially something invisible or abstract. The ‘some-thing perceptible’ could be a story we hear, a group of people we see united for prayer, a body we touch, the perfume we smell, or the wine we taste. Our five senses constantly take in the symbolic reality that surrounds us. Whatever they may be, symbols always reveal, represent, or—even better—‘re-present’ (in the sense of somehow actually making present) what is symbolized. A letter, a portrait, or the tombstone of my deceased mother symbolizes her, mediating and realizing for me her presence. These symbols re-present a person whom death has made invisible. The incarnate and visible Word of God symbolized and re-presented the invisible Father. In John’s language, ‘he who has seen me has seen the Father’ (John 14: 9).

Symbolic language can also express such ‘abstractions’ as the qualities of prudence and simplicity: ‘I send you out as sheep in the midst of

6 W. Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, trans. M. J. O’Connell (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985).

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wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ (Matt. 10: 16). The symbols of defilement, unfolded in Leviticus and other biblical books, represent the invisible, inner reality of human sin and guilt.⁷

A homo symbolicus vision of humanity can appeal to the way in which the divine self-communication ‘corresponds’ to our symbolic nature. If God wishes to communicate with homo symbolicus, this revelation must take a symbolic form or road. God the revealer is necessarily God the symbolizer. The symbols of revelation take such (1) linguistic forms as oracles, parables, and formulas of self-presentation (‘I am the bread of life’, ‘I am the good shepherd’,

‘I am the vine and you are the branches’, and so forth—from John’s Gospel). (2) Symbolic actions and events run from the Babylonian captivity and the liturgical feasts of the Israelites, through the miracu-lous deeds of Jesus and his crucifixion, down to the use of water in baptism by missionaries and ministers from the beginning of Christianity. (3) Persons find their place in this summary of symbols:

prophets with their symbolic actions and words (see Jer. 16: 1–21;

Ezek. 24: 15–25; Hos. 1: 1–8), Jesus himself, Pilate and the other persons immediately responsible for his death, the apostles—not least Paul who recognized the deeply symbolic nature of his ministry as being led captive by God the victor in a triumphal procession (2 Cor. 2: 14) or as being a mother in the pain of childbirth until Christ is formed in his converts (Gal. 4: 19)—and countless other persons down the centuries. Through what they do and suffer, all men and women (and not least the sick and the old) present themselves as symbolic beings who can mediate to others something of the divine truth or sinful resistance to that truth. (4) Finally, all created things are potentially or actually symbols appropriate to the revealing activity of God: for example, fountains bubbling with water (see John 4: 13–14), olive trees (Rom. 11: 17–24), lumps of clay moulded by potters (Rom. 9:

19–21), and other human artefacts like icons and printed copies of the Bible. As is the case with human beings themselves, all other created things can symbolize and make present what is invisible—in particular, the invisible things of God.

7See P. Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); id., Evil: A Challenge to Philosophy and Theology, trans. J. Bowden (London: Continuum, 2007).

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An anthropology of homo symbolicus can also deliver much. Human life is nothing if not symbolic. Both among ourselves and before God, all that we do and experience begins and ends in symbols. Yet it is human experience, whether special experiences or common human experiences of pain (homo dolens), of questioning (homo interrogans), of multi-faceted and incomplete history (homo storicus), and of sym-bol-creating (homo symbolicus), that discloses and conveys God’s revealing and saving activity. Our experience is the medium through which we encounter the self-communication of God. This holds both for the foundational recipients of revelation in Old and New Testament times, for later Christian and Jewish believers, and, as we shall see in a chapter below, for all people anywhere who respond in faith to God.

God’s self-manifestation either meets us in our experience or it does not meet us at all. Given the essentially personal and interpersonal character of revelation, non-experienced revelation would be a simple contradiction in terms.

Hence I prefer to offer an account of the human person as homo experiens (the human being who experiences), a theme which we find vividly deployed in the Yahwist account of creation and its astonish-ingly subtle picture of the universal human condition. Creation and sin put their mark on all history, right from the beginning. In experiencing their created and then sinful condition, the primal couple form a prototype of humanity as a whole, an image of what human beings experience always and everywhere.⁸ Encouraged by this example, I will bring together fourteen points to illuminate the reality of human experience in general and then add some items on religious experience in particular.