The Day Is Now Far Spent by Robert Cardinal Sarah & Nicolas Diat

Author:Robert Cardinal Sarah & Nicolas Diat
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781642290905
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2019-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

We can say of them, as Tertullian said of Christ, “However wretched his body may be. . . , it will always be my Christ” (Adv. Marc. III, 17, 2). However great their suffering may be, however disfigured or dimmed their human existence may be, they will always be the favorite children of our Lord and they will always be his image in a special way.

The Cross is the final response to this ideology that, in order to escape weakness, dreams of doing away with all finitude: fatigue, pain, sickness, and even death. I think, on the contrary, that the heart of our civilization is accepting and loving finitude. The Promethean dream of an unbounded life, of an infinite power, is a lure, a diabolical temptation. Transhumanism promises that we will become gods “concretely”. This utopia is one of the most dangerous in all of human history: the creature has never before tried to distance himself definitively from the Father to this extent. The words of Nietzsche in The Gay Science are becoming a reality: “God is dead!. . . And we have killed him!. . . The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed has bled to death under our knife. . . . Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?”15

Scientists will certainly ridicule me and my ignorance. But as a man of faith, I would like to proclaim without shame or fear that the “superman” is a myth and that the Promethean project is fundamentally wrong.

This folly paradoxically expresses the tragic nostalgia for a lost paradise. Before original sin, man was not supposed to experience death but to remain eternally with God. Man seems to want to regain by his own efforts the good that he lost through his own fault. We know deep down that death and suffering cannot have the last word. We sense within us the call of eternity and of the infinite. Nevertheless, man cannot cease to be because of his human nature a creature at an infinite distance from his Creator. By his human effort, man will never manage to meet God, to raise himself to his level, and to live with his life. Man cannot live by God’s life, which is called sanctifying grace, unless God gives it to him as an altogether gratuitous gift. Man has no right to it, for on God’s part it is sheer gratuitous love, and it infinitely transcends all the potentials of human nature. Man is fundamentally dependent. He knows that he is called by God to a purpose that surpasses him. God willed it so; we do not find the full realization of our happiness on this earth alone. God did not create us for a merely natural perfection. In creating us in his image and likeness, God had a purpose infinitely superior to the perfection of nature. We exist only for this supernatural life.

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