First Reaction

The questions Karl asks here are as profound as they are insoluble. Yet, for these kinds of eternal questions, the human mind stays restless for an answer. So, Sisyphus-like, we keep on asking. As Chesterton once wrote, we keep trying to "'eff' the ineffible." My own quick opinion is that, though Sisyphus-like, regularly considering these unanswerable questions doesn't mean being exactly like Sisyphus. What Sisyphus did was futile. Philosophic inquiry is more than merely necessary, it's salvational, both individually and for our species. Just look at what one contemporary incurious president has wrought. There's a reward that comes to the searcher through approximation to the unreachable answer rather than acquisition. In Plato's dialogues Socrates speaks of his own utter lack of certainty regarding eternal moral truths while at the same time believing strongly enough in his convictions to be martyred for them. He wasn't certain, he said, but his life of philosophy had, finally, convinced him of the correctness of certain "right opinions." To use the more fitting medieval metaphor of divine illumination, while we cannot travel to the sun, we can, with each step, move further out of the cold. For the present, I've resolved some of Karl's questions regarding Jesus by considering the medieval notion of Christ as a moral exemplar. If one is honest, as even the most ardent philosophers of the early Church were, and recognize that most of the essential articles of the Christian faith are logic-defying and supernatural--God being both divine and human, one and three, etc.--one begins looking for other, more personal and subjective, modes of verification. After all, Christianity is supposed to be a covenant of faith, not a covenant of reason. Jesus was many things, but the one constant interpersonal moral theme of the Gospels, instantly recognizable, is his absolute preference for the disempowered elements of the society he inhabited. He was also in the habit of forgiving faults, but nowhere in the narrative is he more strident, demanding and enraged than he is toward those who use their exulted political, economic or religious station to manipulate and control the lower elements of the social order. While this is hardly objective proof, and may in fact not even be the slightest bit persuasive to most people, I cannot escape the increasingly strong conviction that if God ever were to incarnate himself and live amongst us this is precisely the manner in which he'd do so.