in touch with the encompassing horizon of mystery in their lives and in the world around them. Books on the problem of God would not be so abundant if mystery were self-evident in our cultural experience. For ultimately, “God” means mystery, and the prevalence of a sense of mystery would render books like this one superfluous.
Unfortunately, the dimension of mystery, though never absent from the experience of any of us, has been lost sight of by our theoretical consciousness. It still hovers around the fringes of our spontaneous involvements in life, in our relations to nature, other persons, and ourselves. And it is intimated in the symbols and stories that inform our consciousness. But in a world where the mastering methods and techniques of science have become so dominant, the cognitive surrender that a sense of mystery requires of us has often been subordinated to an “epistemology of control.”57 That is, the handing of ourselves over to mystery has become almost impossible whenever knowledge has been understood in terms of power. Confrontation with the uncontrollable domain of mystery often leaves us feeling insecure, restless, and even hostile. So we strive to suppress the unmanageable horizon of mystery and vanquish the need for any surrender of self to it.
In the face of this eclipse of mystery, the very possibility of speaking meaningfully about God has likewise diminished, even to the point of almost vanishing. And yet mystery cannot be completely suppressed. It still functions as the silent horizon that makes all of our experience and knowledge possible in the first place. In its humility and unobtrusiveness, it refuses to force itself upon us, but nonetheless it graciously undergirds our existence and understanding without making itself obvious. We go through the course of our lives enabled by the horizon of mystery to think, inquire, adventure, and discover, but we seldom become explicitly aware of its encompassing presence-in-absence or extend our gratitude to it for giving us the free space in which to live our lives. My objective in the preceding has been to render this dimension of mystery somewhat more obvious by leading up to it with alternative names. But because of its highly theoretical nature, such an approximation still leaves us only at the doorway of mystery. Only the actual living of our lives—and not the mere reading of a book—can lead us into the realm of mystery. The most that any book like this can do is merely point the reader in a certain direction. It cannot substitute for experience itself.
A theoretical introduction to mystery may not be a necessity to many people for whom the term already possesses a symbolic power sufficiently expansive enough to open up to them the ultimate horizon of their existence. But for countless others, the term “mystery,” like the words “God” and “sacred,” has also lost its power and meaning, or it has become so trivialized by common usage that it no longer evokes in them any deep sense of the inexhaustible depths of reality. For some, the notion of mystery has even become altogether empty. For that reason, it is essential today to provide a sort of pedagogy to mystery. I do not in any way consider my own attempts adequate, and I have presented them only as starting points for introducing some small part of what is designated theologically by the notion of divine mystery. At this point, then, it may be well to speak a bit more directly about the word “mystery” as such, if indeed this term is finally the most suitable one we can use in thinking of God.
Mystery and Problem
The term “mystery” is often misunderstood simply as a gap in our knowledge, a temporary hiatus that might possibly be closed as scientific consciousness advances further. According to this narrow view, as our intellectual mastery of the world progresses, we will find answers to the “mysteries” which remain in principle answerable but in fact are unanswered at the present. Thus the realm of “mystery” will allegedly be gradually diminished and “knowledge” will take its place. As noted psychologist B. F. Skinner has put it, the objective of science is to eliminate mystery.58
When “mystery” is understood in this fashion, namely as a gap to be replaced by scientific knowledge, it is little wonder that the word no longer functions to evoke a religious sense of the tremendum et fascinans. For in this case, “mystery” is merely a vacuum that begs to be filled with our intellectual achievements and not an ineffable depth summoning us to surrender ourselves completely to it. If such is the meaning of mystery, then it is hardly adequate as a term for the divine.
But the gaps in our present understanding and knowledge would better be called problems than mysteries.59 “Problem” points to an area of ignorance that is eventually able to be solved by the application of human ingenuity. Perhaps at the present time, a “problem” remains unsolved and even unsolvable by the devices at our disposal, but it should not be called a mystery, for it is at least open to some sort of future solution. For example, a science that connects gravitational, electro-magnetic, and other forces into a unified field theory is at present unavailable. But since such a science will probably emerge at some future time it is better to call this quandary a problem rather than a mystery. A problem is in principle open to a scientific, logical, or technological solution. It is somehow under our human control and can be mastered by our intellectual or technological powers.
Mystery, on the other hand, denotes a region of reality that, instead of growing smaller as we grow wiser and more powerful, can actually be experienced as growing larger and more incomprehensible as we solve more of our scientific and other problems. It is the region of the “known unknown,” the horizon that keeps expanding and receding into the distance the more our knowledge advances. It is the arena of the incomprehensible and unspeakable that makes us aware of our ignorance, of how much more there yet remains to be known. No one to date has shown Socrates to be wrong in his insistence that we are truly wise only when we are aware of the abysmal poverty of our present cognitional achievements. Such an awareness of the lowliness of our knowledge is possible, though, only if we have already been made aware of the inexhaustibility of the yet-to-be-known—that is, of mystery. It is wise for us to emphasize that this state of “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia) is possible only to those whose horizons have expanded beyond the ordinary; in other words, to those who have begun to taste the mysteriousness of reality.
Mystery, in contrast to problems, is incapable of any “solution.” Whereas problems can be solved and thus gotten out of the way, mystery becomes more prominent the deeper our questions go and the surer our answers become. Mystery appears to consciousness at the “limit” of our ordinary problem-oriented questions. It reveals itself decisively at the point where we seriously ask what may be called “limit-questions,” questions that lie at the “boundary” of our ordinary problem-solving consciousness.60 For example, while science is dominated by problems for which some resolution or definitive answer is expected, the scientist might find himself or herself eventually asking: Why should I do science at all? Why search for intelligibility in the universe? Is the universe completely intelligible, as scientific questioning seems to take for granted? At this point, the scientist has reached the limit of the problem and has asked a kind of question that explicitly opens up the horizon of mystery. This type may be called limit-questioning since it does not fall within but rather only at the boundary of ordinary scientific inquiry.
Naming the Mystery
The question remains, however, why we may call this mystery by the name “God.” Is it not sufficient that we simply have a vivid sense of the horizon of mystery? And is it essential that we give it any specific name? I think that in the case of some of us, because of the psychologically unhealthy images evoked by the word “God,” it may be better not to use this word at all. There are individuals for whom the word “God” may actually stand in the way of a healthy sense of mystery. However, I would suggest that this is due less to the term itself than to a faulty religious education or trivialization through its usage in self-justifying political and ecclesiastical discourse. When the word has been so misshapen, it is better to abandon it—at least until such time as its usage once again opens us to a sense of mystery.
On
