The Lost Taste for God: Attenuated Reason and Postmodern Ageusia
The twentieth-century debates over the natural desire for the supernatural largely begin with the common conviction that the human person, in some sense, desires God. Yet under contemporary conditions, the Augustinian “restless” heart has slowed, not because it has found its true contentment, but out of indifference, and modern culture increasingly appears marked not by intensified longing but by doubt, skepticism, and what Henri de Lubac diagnosed as the loss of the “taste for God.”[1]
Postmodern ageusia and its symptomatic agnosticism, however, derive from an unexpected ailment: the attenuation of reason under rationalism. In sidelining faith to privilege reason, having mistaken their relationship as a zero-sum game, modern rationalism did not enlarge its capacity as intended. Rather, it unwittingly imposed limits upon its range, enclosing it within the finite when it had once traversed the infinite. No longer looking beyond itself toward the transcendent, reason comes to think too little of its own capacity, and thereby too readily concludes its search in a posture of resigned uncertainty.
Based on appearances, the postmodern person would seem to exemplify the Neo-Scholastic conviction that the natural desire for God is not innate but elicited, grounded in an obediential potency and therefore not constitutive of human nature itself. Yet even though the palate has become malformed, the appetite itself has gone unsatisfied, nor indeed could it be satisfied by the finite objects to which reason turns. If human reason reflects the imago Dei, then its act is unrestricted in scope, unfolding according to the infinite measure of what it images and only fully sated upon beholding truth itself, bare and unmediated by finite concepts.[2]
In the end, agnosticism betrays itself. If it belongs to the nature of reason to affirm the truth, then skepticism will never satisfy. Left unsated by the finite, reason must be reunited with its partner faith. Faith alone can unveil the face of the eternal toward which reason already tends, and so ennobled beyond its presumed limitations, reason can again answer the invitation to feast upon the mystery from which it comes and for which it was made.
The Rise of Agnosticism at the Limits of Rationalism
In his encyclical Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II identifies the two daughters of rationalism: agnosticism and relativism.[3] At the outset, one would not think them to be related to their parent, given their divergent traits and appearances. While reason had been vaunted by rationalism, it fell out of favor in postmodernity, which claims little certainty on its behalf beyond positive knowledge and settles instead for skepticism, especially in matters of human purpose.
Perhaps unexpectedly, the sidelining of faith to make greater room for reason did not enlarge its capacity and scope as intended, but rather contracted them. As though having pitched a canopy that closed off the vast sky above, postmodern reason can look only to what lies within its finite horizon, and whatever extends beyond its empirical gaze is offered up not to wonder but to doubt, not to marveling but to indifference.
For de Lubac, identifying the trajectory of agnosticism nearly a half-century before its appearance within this encyclical, “the most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present age, and the most alarming, is that to all appearances at least it has lost the taste for God.”[4] John Paul II adopts and forwards this same diagnosis of postmodernity, which, rather than recognizing the capacious scope of human knowledge, has “preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned,” and thereafter, grows apathetic: “with false modesty, people rest content with partial and provisional truths, no longer seeking to ask radical questions about the meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal and social existence.”[5] Once the light of the transcendent has been lost, blindness even in immanent matters follows, and with the dignity of reason so obscured, many postmodern philosophies conclude that “the time of certainties is irrevocably past, and the human being must now learn to live in a horizon of total absence of meaning, where everything is provisional and ephemeral.”[6]
Postmodern ageusia results, then, not from a true absence of desire, but from an attenuation of reason. If the finite mind is taken as the sole and final measure of truth, nothing beyond its radius can be known, but must be relinquished in the name of agnosticism. Nevertheless, though this posture arises as a corollary of rationalism, it is not as though reason thinks too highly of itself. Rather, it considers itself far too lowly. Unaccompanied by faith, it has forgotten how to reach for what transcends itself, withdrawn into habituated doubt. Yet the summons for postmodernity has not been extinguished. However far it advances, doubt will always shun contentment, and the skeptic never finds true rest.
Always, the appetite for God remains, even if the taste has been lost, for “the idea of God within us is perpetually menaced with extinction, but is always reborn.”[7] This hope for rebirth is not unfounded, but emerges precisely from the nature of reason itself, made in the imago Dei, for which nothing short of absolute truth can fully satisfy. As the psalmist claims, deep calls unto deep: God left his fingerprint upon the human person at creation, and only the infinite reaches of God can correspond to that impression.
De Lubac, Blondel, and the Natural Desire for the Infinite
Agnosticism cannot help but refute itself, and for de Lubac, this is because “the intelligence can never abdicate. It cannot renounce its own formal law, it cannot cease judging, and that always means affirmation.”[8] Behind every doubt, the unresolved question lingers and haunts, and reason ever inclines toward certainty despite its best effort to claim indifference. John Paul II situates the drama of human knowing within an irrepressible orientation towards ultimacy: “it is the nature of the human being to seek the truth. . . . Their search looks towards an ulterior truth which would explain the meaning of life. And it is therefore a search which can reach its end only in reaching the absolute.”[9]
Although the taste for God may wane, the hunger for meaning never truly goes sated. This discontentment reveals not only the image in which reason was made and the true object of its desire, but also the pervasiveness of God in each act of intellection, or, as Thomas Aquinas describes: “all knowers know God implicitly in all they know.”[10] Even if not known by name, God belongs to every act of knowledge because he is truth, and for this reason, de Lubac writes, “in its primary and permanent state the idea of God is not, then, a product of the intelligence. It is not a concept. It is a reality: the very soul of the soul; a spiritual image of the Divinity, an ‘eikon.’”[11] Because reason bears the imprint of God, no finite object can perfectly satisfy its search for ultimate truth; rather, it consistently looks to name and to encounter unmediated that which has accompanied it in each act from the beginning. Always, it seeks union with truth, with the absolute, with God.
This perspective casts the debate on the natural desire for God in a new light. While de Lubac often frames the issue in the classic terminology of nature and grace, the dyad appears under many names throughout theological discourse. In each case, the pairing concerns the relation between the human and the divine, the particular and the absolute, the creature and the Creator. And, in the context of modern rationalism, reason and faith.
As a key precursor to de Lubac on this issue, Maurice Blondel articulates the dyad in terms of philosophy and theology, particularly in his The Letter on Apologetics. For Blondel, while philosophy can provoke certain questions, especially regarding the purpose and destiny of humanity, it cannot supply every answer. It cannot give grace, though it may disclose the “vital need” for it.[12] In this way, the human person discovers within themselves a demand that exceeds their own capacities.[13]
If the natural desire were truly only elicited, then postmodern agnosticism could leave one content not to know what lies beyond the canopy pitched at the limits of reason. It would leave the skeptic in a kind of self-contained stability, at least within the immediate horizon of reason and human nature. In actuality, however, this desire for the true and final object of reason always remains, described by Blondel as “possible but not legitimate to thrust aside—and which we can never suppress.”[14] The skeptic may try to dismiss that ever-present tug, yet “to turn away from one’s destiny is not to free oneself from its control.”[15] Inevitably, this very dynamism, Blondel continues,
constrains us to the avowal of our insufficiency, leads us to recognize the need of a further gift, gives us the aptitude not to produce or to define but to recognize and to receive it, offers us, in a word, by a sort of prevenient grace, that baptism of desire which, presupposing God’s secret touch, is always accessible and necessary apart from any explicit revelation, and which, even when revelation is known, is, as it were, the human sacrament immanent in the divine operation.[16]
To operate only within the finite horizon, without ever opening itself to more, reason would never attain true fulfillment but would rather produce for itself a kind of hell: the attempt to be happy on its own terms, grasping at fulfillment by means of anything but God alone.[17] This restlessness would endure were reason not brought to rest through faith, which discloses the term toward which it was already implicitly directed. Faith removes the canopy that reason had erected over itself and lifts its gaze to the infinite sky, thereby both ennobling its capacity and awakening delight in the true object of its fulfillment.
Abyss Calls to Abyss: From Postmodern Malaise to the Gratuity of Grace
Blondel understands the relation between reason and faith as one of correspondence: reason discerns the need at the end of a question, while faith expands the horizon of inquiry, ushers in the mystery, and carries reason to satiety. As he writes,
For both faith and reason teach that the supernatural must be humanly inaccessible. What faith imposes upon us as a reality, reason conceives as necessary but impracticable for us. The one declares to be gratuitously given what the other can only postulate inevitably, so that they coincide not by overlapping but because one is empty and the other full.[18]
Through this complementarity, deep calls unto deep. In de Lubac’s estimation, this depth of emptiness and fullness can be formulated in a mode of self-discovery through self-gift: “man needs a beyond which can never be grasped, a beyond that always remains beyond. He cannot find himself without losing himself. At each stage, the final solution of the human problem lies in adoration. It can only be found in ecstasy.”[19] Faith stirs reason to reach beyond; it restores proper taste by redirecting its hunger toward the object that alone can satisfy it.[20] Faith speaks a Word to reason—not in an altogether foreign language, but familiar and comfortable for its native tongue to adopt—and, indeed, enlarges its capacity once received, so that it may not only begin to speak but to sing with this Word. The contemplation that faith brings to reason does not abolish its autonomy but opens a new horizon, emboldening it to behold what it had previously anticipated only by impressions. Postmodern malaise is thus met by grace as an altogether gratuitous and yet resonant reawakening, as reason comes to recognize what it was truly made for, even if beyond its wildest imaginings.
The innate desire for God, as recalled by de Lubac in the face of postmodern ageusia, carries with it the risk of presuming upon grace for human fulfillment, thereby threatening to strip grace of its defining gratuity. Yet the intellect’s natural appetite for absolute truth, by which it tends beyond the finite horizon, does not constitute a claim upon its giver but rather finds itself in a posture of complete humility before the indefatigable generosity of the one upon whom it depends.
When the sun pours forth its rays in abundance, travelling across an immense distance and through the dark and cold reaches of this corner of the universe, it touches even the smallest blade of grass with warmth and light. The blade was designed to receive light, but it cannot give it to itself; it is fulfilled by light alone, but it cannot place a demand upon its giver. And yet the good news for the blade is that while the sun is not compelled to shine, it nevertheless always does and will—every new day, every dawn that comes with the morning, to flood the earth with its bright rays, its very self—again, and again, and again.
So too must the human person trust in the abundance of God, who has imprinted his image upon the heart and placed within reason an appetite and a “taste” that can only be satisfied by the infinite. For he has made us for himself, and in him alone do we find our fulfillment. Indeed, in him do we find ourselves.[21]
[1] Henri de Lubac, The Discovery of God, trans. Alexander Dru (Eerdmans, 1996), 83.
[2] The notion that the intellect is unrestricted in scope, or that “the soul is in a sense all things,” comes from ancient Greek philosophy, yet was adopted by Christianity; see Aristotle, De Anima, III.8; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 14, a. 1, corp.
[3] Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio (Encyclical Letter on the Relationship between Faith and Reason), The Holy See, September 14, 1998, §5.
[4] De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 83. Emphasis mine.
[5] “Yet the positive result achieved must not obscure the fact that reason, in its one-sided concern to investigate human subjectivity, seems to have forgotten that men and women were always called to direct their steps towards a truth which transcends them…Reason…has wilted under the weight of so much knowledge…Rather than make use of the human capacity to know the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this capacity is limited and conditioned.” Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §5.
[6] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §91. “In the wake of these cultural shifts, some philosophers have abandoned the search for truth in itself and made their sole aim the attainment of a subjective certainty or a pragmatic sense of utility. This in turn has obscured the true dignity of reason, which is no longer equipped to know the truth and to seek the absolute” (§47).
[7] De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 197.
[8] “The more successfully science and improved techniques bring the word under human control, the more does being, which cannot be brought under that control, evade us…And in the face of that new and apparently final defeat, the great temptation is agnosticism. But agnosticism, which was conceived as a way of saving logic at least from the wreck, proves in its turn contradictory. The position is untenable. But how can one continue to affirm an Absolute which is admittedly unknowable? It seems, in fact, impossible to avoid complete skepticism. But the intelligence can never abdicate. It cannot renounce its own formal law, it cannot cease judging, and that always means affirmation. Skepticism oppresses and undermines the mind because it introduces contradiction not only into the various contents of its various affirmations, but into the intelligence itself, into the heart of its every act.” De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 67.
[9] John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §33.
[10] Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate, q. 22, a. 2, ad. 1.
[11] De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 40. Hans Urs von Balthasar makes a similar connection in the Theo-Logic, Vol. I: The Truth of the World; see especially I. Truth as Nature, B. The Subject.
[12] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 135.
[13] “Thus the immanent affirmation of the transcendent, even of the supernatural, does not prejudge in any way the transcendent reality of the immanent affirmations—a radical distinction which no one, perhaps, has preserved with complete consistency.” Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 157.
[14] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 163.
[15] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 163.
[16] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 162.
[17] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 163.
[18] Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics, 160.
[19] De Lubac, The Discovery of God, 192.
[20] “It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason.” John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, §56.
[21] “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, introduction.
