Questions and Answers

by Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Catholic World Report

The essence of modernity
stems from Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Bacon. Its project is to build man’s estate
on the basis of “rights” that he himself defines. No transcendent order can be
located. The City of God and the City of Man are not separate. Only the city of
man’s own making “exists.” Man has no transcendent end, nor any information
about himself except what he wills to acknowledge. Revelation, even if it were
possible, must be ignored because its origin is not in man.

Man knows himself to
exist and to exist as the kind of being he is. Why he is this kind of a being,
however, is not something that he himself has formulated. Nor did he cause
himself to exist, to come to be out of nothingness. The human condition is
complicated by the fact that man knows this condition. His self-reflection
cannot but leave him with wonderment about why he is at all, about why he is
not something else.

Evidently, things other
than himself exist and pose the same questions to man’s curiosity. Why does
something besides one’s-self exist? Likewise, many things that might exist do
not. A world of “imagined” or “possible” beings might have come about. While it
is not particularly fruitful to worry about the so-called “might-have-beens,” the
fact that we can pose the questions concerning them still causes us to wonder about
the exact nature of things that do and do not exist. 

Moreover, we never find “existence”
itself confronting us, only existing things. What we find are things limited to
be this or that kind of existing being. Our minds seem to be such that we can
know all that is. The Latin expression
that mind is “capax omnium,”
capable of all things, seems accurate. At first sight, this capacity is perplexing.
It incites us to pose a series of “why’s,” almost as if this posing was what
this power is for.

However, we do not ask merely
the “why?” of something. We ask both: “Why is it this way and not that way?”
and “Why is it at all?”

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