Hope and the Hopeless: The Contemporary Addressee of Gaudium et spes

Abstract

Henri de Lubac argues that Christians today lack an appreciation of the centrality of the Gospel to human meaning. This apologetically disastrous deficiency is related, for him, to Cajetan's “corruption” of Thomas's understanding of nature and grace. After presenting this issue, this article examines the reception of ideas akin to Cajetan's conception by Christians and popular culture, which latter has accordingly adopted an indifferentist mentality toward religion. Other impediments to thinking through the Gottesproblem today are taken up next, specifically the legacy of critical atheism and the distraction that shields persons from this problem's relevance. Distraction, although aimed at saving persons from the thought of death and from anxiety, actually produces a deadening and banalization of human hope. The hope of Gaudium et spes, which is addressed last, is not the eviscerated hope of contemporary persons. The language barrier centering on “hope” between the Council fathers and contemporary persons can only be bridged by addressing the formative causes of the hope of those indifferent to the Gospel.

When chapters 19–21 of the Second Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, were written, the world addressed was different in ways that are relevant to the ongoing reception—or lack of reception—of this document. The aim of this paper is to examine a profound cultural shift where belief is concerned with a view toward focusing the insight of the Council fathers on a problem that is today “plus actuel”. The cultures that Gaudium et spes sought to address have changed, but the constitution is not less relevant for this fact; indeed, an audience dimly envisioned during the Council has moved squarely into the document's sights—that of the culture of religious indifferentism.

With the following comments I mean to address (only) a few of the cultural and psychological phenomena associated with the problem of religious indifferentism. In the present context, “indifferentism” is intended to designate an insensitivity to the question of God in its urgency. I mean neither to address the relativism that puts itself above the plurality of religious systems¹ nor to construct a kind of artificial person, who is truly oblivious to the idea of God. Instead, the indifferentist will be treated as a polar type, toward which many contemporaries gravitate in unequal measure. Finally, some of the particular problems that contribute to the culture of indifference today will be our focus rather than the originating causes of widespread indifference. We must allow that the support for indifference to religion is itself shifting; even if we were successful in identifying the causes that have precipitated the last decades' crisis in interest in religion, we would not be justified simply in transposing these to our own time. The origination and sustenance of religious indifferentism are possibly overlapping but ultimately different issues.

In particular, we will consider that which is perhaps one of the most significant apologetic shortcomings of Christian self‐presentation today, a lack of appreciation of the centrality of the Gospel to the meaning of the human. The immanence to man of the Christian message will first be examined with reference to Henri de Lubac's insistence on the single and supernatural character of the human vocation over against the so‐called two‐tiered model of Cajetan. Next, we will look at notions parallel to the “two‐tiered” system of nature and grace that are held by Christians and in culture at large. In the third place, we will investigate one of the most important impediments to thinking through the Gottesproblem today, the legacy of critical atheism, and one of the key mechanisms by which persons shield themselves from this problem's relevance, distraction. Distraction is aimed at shielding persons from anxiety, which is concentrated in the thought of death, but the unintended outcome of distraction is less than positive: it produces a deadening and banalization of human hope. This hope is the subject of the Second Vatican Council's Gaudium et spes, which document is treated last in this essay. In its chapters devoted to atheism (co‐authored by de Lubac),² the Council intends to impart hope to persons of its day, but its understanding of hope has begun to be heard in an increasingly equivocal sense. A gap in the language of hope must be acknowledged and overcome for Gaudium et spes to make its voice heard; the sustaining causes of contemporary man's despairing hope will be examined as a step toward this end.

Nature, Grace, and Apologetics in de Lubac

Henri de Lubac has received much attention for his treatment of the classical problem of nature and grace. A rehearsal of this problem and of the arguments and controversies surrounding it fall outside of the scope of the present discussion. I would like to indicate, however, one of the practical implications at stake for de Lubac in defending that which he regarded as the more classical Christian teaching. Cajetan's interpretation of St. Thomas on the subject of nature and grace—which maintained the reality of a natural, human end realized along with an additional, supernatural end—served the purpose of defending the faith against tendencies to conflate nature and grace, from those of Baius to those of Modernism. As with any other oversimplification of Christian faith, however, the good this conception obtained was purchased at an exorbitant price.

[I]l est arrivé que ce qui aurait dû stimuler la pensée comme un problème, l'a fait reculer comme un scandale. On a couru au plus pressé, à ce qui paraissait d'emblée le plus “sûr”, et la vérité dogmatique a pu paraître possédée bien en paix. Mais, pour ne rien dire de plus, on n'a point aperçu que, par cette manière trop facile de maintenir la gratuité de l'ordre surnaturel, on reculait dans son intelligence. On en faisait, non pas simplement un “accident”— ce qui peut parfaitement s'entendre—mais quelque chose de tout accidentel, au sens français du mot, et par là, disons‐le, quelque chose de superficiel. On se condamnait à n'y plus voir qu'une sorte de superstructure. Il s'ensuivait, qu'on le voulût ou non, non seulement que l'homme aurait fort bien pu s'en passer, mais qu'il pourrait fort bien aujourd'hui même, sans inconvénient majeur, le dédaigner. On lui enlevait tout prise sur la pensée comme sur l'existence humaine. La pensée chrétienne s'est trouvée de la sort enfermée dans un cercle étroit, dans “un canton retiré de l'univers” intellectuel, où elle ne pouvait guère que s'étioler. Par les soins mêmes de quelques‐uns de ses représentants, qui s'imaginaient préserver ainsi sa transcendance, elle ne fut plus qu'une “exilée” …³

Cajetan's Corruptorium of Thomas' thought,⁴ which was more or less uncritically accepted by “traditional” theology for several centuries, entailed an alienation of those persons from Christianity who would come to see Christian promise as extrinsic to the human condition. The Cajetanian tradition's simplistic way of explaining the relationship of nature to grace eventually resulted in the latter's being regarding as superficial. The end belonging to and (in principle) achievable by pure human nature was seen to stand distinct from end proffered by grace. These ends were only understood as coincident by virtue of the Potentia obedientialis—the capacity human nature to be lifted up to a supernatural end by grace or, seen even more narrowly, nature's mere non‐repugnance to the offer of grace. Christian thought itself, for its part, came to share the fate of grace and was seen as separated from real life.

A rising chorus, beginning in the early part of the twentieth‐century and taking as a significant point of departure Maurice Blondel's 1893 L'Action, insisted that human nature has a single, supernatural vocation and voiced dissatisfaction with the two‐tiered approach and its consequences.⁵ The sectarianism to which the distancing of grace from nature and concrete life leads could only contribute to a disinterest in and repudiation of the supernatural.⁶ Grace, under this aspect, only stands to lose ground if the nature that it purports to complement is taken to be realizable on its own terms. De Lubac says, paraphrasing an atheist in the making:

Si ma propre nature d'homme a naturellement sa fin en elle‐même, qu'est‐ce qui m'obligerait ou seulement m'inciterait à scruter l'histoire pour y chercher si d'aventure un autre appel se serait fait entendre? Pourquoi devrais‐je prêter l'oreille à cette Eglise, porteuse d'un message dépourvu de tout rapport aux aspirations de mon être?⁷

The wedge driven between nature and grace, by Christian theology itself, created the prongs of a decision for the Christian: since he could not manage to reconcile supernature, on the one hand, and his own thoughts, awarenesses and activities in the world, on the other, he would opt for the one or the other. He would retreat from the world, closed in on himself, or else actively pursue a very secular and worldly cultivation.⁸

From the starting point of a real separation between nature and grace it is difficult to understand how Christ could be said to reveal man to himself. Fundamentally, the Gospel would not touch human nature and so appeal to it; it would only offer something additional and not radically compelling.⁹ A self‐sufficient human nature as to its end does not, in a certain respect, need God as its ultimate explanation. By contrast, human nature, does not make sense on its own in the conception of nature and grace argued by de Lubac. He says:

Rappeler à l'homme quelle est sa fin dernière, ce n'est pas lui dire quelque chose qui, substantiellement, ne l'intéresse pas, quels que soient les obstacles, ceux de la vie courante et ceux de l'idéologie régnante, qui l'empêchent de s'en rendre compte. C'est lui découvrir le sens total de son être en l'aidant à trouver, puis à déchiffrer l'inscription gravée en lui par son Créateur. C'est l'arracher à l'angoisse, au désespoir, ou à l'apathie, ou à l'acceptation d'une condition basse,—en même temps que le délivrer des illusions néfastes.¹⁰

Only this outlook, which reveals to man the ground of sense that stands at the center of his being, renders effective testimony to the disbelieving world of today. A vision that puts Christ at the heart of the human bears more effective witness than does the timid and defensive conception of a two‐fold human destiny, according to de Lubac. The ultimate truth of man's destiny and likewise that of the world is beyond both in the Christ that stands at the centers of both. Of Christ, who is the sense of the world that he has concretely entered, de Lubac quotes Jules Monchanin, saying “L'homme universel, vers lequel se tend l'humanisme des nos jours n'est qu'un mythe en dehors de cet homme.”¹¹

Nature, Grace and Apologetics in the Concrete

The apologetic consequence of the two‐tiered understanding of nature and grace may strike us as a theoretical, rather than real, problem. Supposing that de Lubac had in mind a direct, rather than trickle‐down, influence here, we may wonder whether anyone who has read Matthias Scheeben, for example, has understood the natural and the supernatural to occupy two relatively discrete strata in the Christian imagination, and has opted for an unchristian humanism as a result. Such a person would be a strange sort of indifferentist—since coming to terms with the grace question requires anything but indifference—or atheist—since the Christian's proposition is accepted as true in order to reject Christianity.¹² For all of the difficulties in accepting de Lubac's point, however, we do not have to be credulous to think that at least implicitly Christianity has in fact been presented as an extra in popular culture and even in ecclesial circles. This is true without prejudice to the fact that Christianity is also presented as a requirement. Christianity appears today as a kind of mandatory hobby.¹³

The Cultural Side of the Problem

The marginalization of Christianity emerges in part as a by‐product of the practice, acceptable in itself, of considering most people of whatever professed religion as basically good. If, as popular culture suspects, people are good regardless of their adhesion or not to Christ—and being good is popularly considered to be the ultimate goal of Christianity—then what does Christ offer, even to Christians? Adherence to Christianity, in this light, becomes simply a matter of duty, the obligation correlative to a positive command that is often seen voluntaristically in the conceptual framework that Western culture has inherited from the Reformers.¹⁴ Yet this adherence may only be perceived as a duty by those who believe in the reality of the command and the command‐duty dynamic as a stand‐alone sells short the attractiveness of God's self‐revelation. If being good is flatly perceived as the goal of Christianity, one may more easily be attracted to a figure that elicits a kind of natural goodness without purely heteronomous commands. Adherence to supernatural revelation in faith and pursuit of supernatural goodness in sacramental worship, for example, become simply add‐in components, extrinsically commanded and covered in nebulous, mythical, even childish conceptions that are removed from the originally purposed and otherwise realizable goal of “being good”. This fact continues to apply even when the Schwerpunkt of Christianity is phrased differently as “flourishing”, “living a meaningful life”, etc. Supernatural love is no longer conceived of as the form of the virtues and the notion of love itself has already been dramatically attenuated and banalized. By the popular conception Christianity is reduced; it holds a clear position on only one (natural) level, however this be understood and even if it certainly no longer involves any notion of the contemplation of the Causa causarum in natural beatitude.

The reduction of Christianity to the natural has as its complement an etherealizing of the supernatural. The natural world is receding from the supernatural and the mystical apace with an increase in the misconception and trivialization of these latter terms. “Supernatural” today means paranormal, while the banalizing of Christian mysticism is catalyzed by a banalizing of mysticism in general. Relegation of mysticism to the esoteric, to self‐help books, and to generic gurus of whatever variety have served to soften and undercut the seriousness with which many people take any mystical claims at all. In this conception of the mystical there is both the recognition and the effecting of strangeness and, with this, unreality. Man is distanced from the object of mystical focus by pseudo‐mysticism. He feels at a certain level that he betrays himself in attempting to believe the unbelievable, no matter how earnestly he may try to do so. Thus, the distance between man and an artificial‐ or constructed‐sounding mysticism grows to the increasing preclusion of the possibility of identifying, in any concrete way, with the object of any (even the true) mysticism. The estrangement of the natural and the supernatural, which secular culture has in large measure on loan from Christians, impedes access to the heart of the Christian message.

The Christian Side of the Problem

The fault for widespread indifferentism lies no doubt with well‐intentioned Christians in some measure.¹⁵ Believers seem very often to share their secular counterparts' conviction that the “being good” of Christianity is little different from that of secular culture(s). Gérard Dufois, among others, has drawn attention to the consequence of today's dull line between Christian proclamation and secular aspirations.

Ils nous interrogent aussi dans la mesure où nous avons ≪banalisé≫ l'espérance chrétienne en des formules, des valeurs et des projets peu différents de ceux qui circulent dans la société. Comme tels ils ne disent plus rien neuf du christianisme.¹⁶

The rapid decline in the Gospel's ability to awaken interest coincides in some measure with the recrudescence of domesticated Christianity. Christianity withers wherever it would leech life from an alien body.

The gravity of this naturalized conception of Christianity has pulled its adherents down from an increasingly unnatural supernatural. There is among Christians a tendency analogous to that of wider culture to see the supernatural as the province of pixies. To this mystifying realm they pay an increasingly vague piety if they perceive this as owed at all. Many Christians see their religion as something that either highlights values proper to secular culture or as something removed from human life. Most often, perhaps, they see Christianity as some ungainly combination of both of these and find themselves concretely implicated in the dichotomy between the two worlds and struggling vainly to mediate between them. Where Christianity is not merely the ape of worldly culture, i.e., where a supernatural reality is also (mis)perceived, believers in the main imagine the need to divide themselves between the world and the “otherworldly” as if these occupied discrete compartments to which relative quantities of time and energy were due. Some of life, it seems, should be dedicated to God—the measure differs according to the degree to which one's Christianity has assimilated worldly values—and some time and energy should be reserved to enjoyment, work, family, etc. Supernatural life is distanced from “real” life by sealing the former within an apportioned time. The immanence of charity to all spheres of action is overlooked with the result that something like cultic exercise is presented and perceived as a series of acts disjoined from other acts and not as determinative of them in any way. When supernatural life is so understood, it becomes unclear how one's ordinary life is substantially different because of the supernatural or would suffer without the supernatural and the Christian proves incapable of giving an alluring account of his happy hope.¹⁷ The Christian's foray into the nebulous noumenal is accomplished because it is commanded and because he knows that it pertains to his religion, but he cannot make clear to himself or to anyone else what this has to do with the natural goodness to which his religion seems commend him. He has traded supernatural hope for a natural hope.

A final word may be said about the self‐presentation of believers and their faith today in connection with indifferentism. There has been a significant distancing from the notions of sin and punishment on part of pastoral ministry and speculative theology.¹⁸ The notion of being good mentioned above, flatly interpreted and applied nearly universally, is of great consequence again here. An exclusionary emphasis by Christians on the mercy of God and a minimization of the number of situations in which one is willing to conceive of oneself as truly sinful have trivialized for non‐Christians the importance of a response to the question of God. The indifferentist feels no real need to decide for or against God when even Christians seem to hold that he is merciful in a such a way that Hell is no longer a real possibility. Not only does the idea of God seem to fail to make one a different person, but the degree to which one must change to avoid punishment appears as negligible. The indifferentist feels little need to pass beyond a simple, implicit thought: “If God does not exist, he will not punish me; if he does exist, he will not punish me.”

Doubt and Diversion

Few if any of the considerations so far outlined are entertained in a fully deliberate way by indifferentists; refusal to decide the question of God—even to ask oneself seriously whether this is an important question—is, once again, the defining feature of the indifferentist. How does one accomplish an offhand and relatively unconsidered dismissal of such an important question? It is worth enquiring into the mechanism by which one may shield oneself, more or less consciously, from asking whether or not there is a God who requires a relationship that includes certain moral obligations. By way of preparing an answer to this, we must first ask if there is anything, other than the perceptions of Christianity's content just mentioned, that deflates one's interest in the question of God from the outset.

Critical Doubt as an Occasion for Indifference

It is often said today that the problem of critical atheism is somewhat passé and that the real crisis in belief is that of indifference.¹⁹ True though this be, these two moments in the rejection of God are closely linked. Indifference rests on the uncertainty into which atheism has thrown the question of God in the popular mind.²⁰ The question of God is hardly asked in part because it seems to be unanswerable; contemporary man breathes in the “atmosphere of uncertainty”.²¹ The fact of the plurality of theistic religions as contributing to uncertainty should not be underestimated.²² The very number of versions of theism is potentially upsetting to someone undecided as to whether or not to seek involvement in a religion. However, the various atheisms and agnosticisms, often posthumously, perhaps exert a greater influence in creating a general mistrust in any affirmative answer to the question of God. In view of so many possible answers to the question about God—and so many of these are versions of the outright denial of God's existence—a clear and singular opting for belief in a particular religion can leave the impression of an irrational commitment. Interest in the pursuit of religion as absolute truth is frozen in the bud by despair in the possibility of rising above the cacophony of voices. Despite the prevalence of indifferentism, it must be said that being relatively indifferent does not mean that one has always been so and is so naturally. Indifferentism bears a connection to more systematic atheisms because it is built on glances, however fleeting and unreflective, at the tumultuous state of the question of God. The solid footing on which Christianity once stood has been shaken in the public eye. That which once was considered a certainty is now reckoned to be nothing more than a chance and in the shortsighted mathematics of contemporary culture, so different from the consciousness of eternity that eggs on Pascal's wager, a chance is not something for which a person should change his life.²³

Doubt holds sway, even if indifference itself entails at least one concrete and certain implication regarding the question of God, namely, that the risk of foregoing a God worth involving oneself with is tolerable. That momentous assumptions could be lightly hazarded owes something to a despairing resignation in the face of conflicting claims about the divine.

Divertissement and Death

Divertissement. Le hommes, n'ayant pu guérir la mort, la misère, l'ignorance, ils se sont avisés, pour se rendre heureux, de n'y point penser … Il faudrait, pour bien faire, qu'il se rendît immortel; mais ne le pouvant, il s'est avisé de s'empêcher d'y penser.²⁴

It scarcely needs pointing out that today, if one wants to eschew confrontation with the problem of God, there is plenty of sand to bury one's head in. Consumer culture distracts man from considering ultimate questions²⁵ and, what is perhaps more, it is born of and in turn nurtures a lateralizing of desire and élan. Today horizontal transcendence replaces vertical transcendence.²⁶ Western culture, like any other, is the expression of that which persons value; shopping‐mall cathedrals represent the exteriorizing of inner life and the search for transcendent value in the mundane order.²⁷ Seeking the infinite cannot be extricated from the human condition; only poor substitutions can be made.²⁸ De Lubac says:

Horreur d'un monde sans Dieu, sans stabilité ni mystère, qui se croit clair à lui‐même, et qui va s'abîmant dans un devenir sans signification et sans issue, dum nil perenne cogitat.

Désespoir atroce d'une société que les idoles temporelles ont séduite, et où meurt étouffée la mens avida aeternitatis.²⁹

Transcendence of the finite in the absence of God is sought through an absolutizing, which means idolizing, of the finite itself. One seeks to attain to all potential loves through one love as a kind of concretion of the universal beloved; the immediate love is made to stand as a kind of mediator—one may say, a sacrament—of the universal. However, no finite thing can really hold the seeker of the infinite or, put differently, one cannot continue to prop up any particular finite object by sheer force forever. Practically, then, this substitution of the finite for the infinite amounts to a serial search for transcendence in successive idols. Today there is a high turnover in careers, hobbies, spouses, and gadgets and not simply because all of the above, as renewable resources, are in plentiful quantity.

There is a hidden danger in relating to the world in this way. Man cuts himself off from the possibility of real transcendence with his every mockery of transcendence. When everything is but an experience, a particular and immanent fake for transcendence, the object even of true religion is dealt with in the same way, as a hobby.³⁰ The contemporary propensity to relate in the way of experiencing dovetails with the suspicion that that which one experiences is not universally true. No person gives himself to a fad diet except with half‐hearted commitment; no person gives himself to a religion that he suspects except in a way that betrays the intention of the religion itself. Such an arm's‐length commitment becomes yet another diversion from the authentic pursuit of religion in which one can immerse oneself in the self‐gratifying but impersonal way of a spectator. When man has damned himself to be only a spectator, moments of wonder or nascent piety drift in sentimentalism. The experience is enjoyed, though it is unsettling in some respects; it is exploited and parlayed against an authentic verve for action (“I am not religious, although I am spiritual”).

The more that persons seek the serial enjoyment of fictitious absolutes the more that they sense themselves to drift in senselessness.³¹ Boredom is not alleviated by distraction (divertissement) but has this as its greatest ally. Spiritual restlessness seeks an expenditure of energy; yet this can be diffused in distraction. The failure of spiritual élan to find its proper outlet is a debilitating frustration, however, notwithstanding the temporary relief afforded by this diffusion of vigor. One seeks to imbed oneself in the particular, to the best of one's abilities (this beloved, this pass‐time, this car) and the particular is something which requires a faint heroism to achieve.³² The effort required flows from and returns to an absolutizing or idolizing of the particular and the effort so spent is always finally in vain. On the far side of the sham optimism and dull giddiness that go with this worship stand the specters of deflation and depression.

Moreover, in distraction from the infinite by the finite persons seek to quantify, manage, or control the thought that is the source of anxiety—the thought of God. This is especially true where the idea of God itself has been practically rendered finite.³³ Inadvertently, however, there is in this a truncation of hope as well, since hope and anxiety share a common source. Hope is lateralized in one case and buried along with anxiety in the other—the word of hope spoken by Gaudium et spes can only resonate as a faint and idyllic intonation in the world today.

Death is a special motivator for the obsession with distraction as Pascal saw or, better said, the subject of death and contemporary culture's avoidance of it cast into particular relief the motivation behind distraction in general.

We think of death today as something that comes toward us. This is often to personify it. The most vivid, if childish, representation of this is the figure of the Grim Reaper. We are reluctant or unable, however, to see death, not in more or less vividly personified terms, but as the term and concretion of our personification. Death is for us today a glitch, a mishap that happens to happen to all, an unpleasantry best put out of sight. There is, though, something more important in death. Rahner, in creatively following Heidegger, is correct to see death as the very focal point of human existence. In circumstances as they are, as part of the drama of sin and redemption, there is no confrontation of man with himself that is definitive, all revealing, and consummating of personhood that is not death. Avoidance of death is avoidance of the essential existential question.

Many have pointed out that death is avoided in the main today and indicated the strange trappings by which modern man seeks to insulate himself from mortality. Rarely does one see (real) death—it is a private tragedy played out on hospital sheets and “arrangements are made”. Rarely does one speak about death at all and virtually no one talks about a “good death”; few wish that Catholic wish of being conscious in the final moments of one's life to collect oneself before God—such sentiments have passed out of vogue in favor of softer expressions such as the “passing” of a loved one and the comically circumlocutory Italian designation, la scomparsa, “the disappearance”, of the bereaved. Death is dealt with in an obsessively sanitized way or it is robed in mawkish parody. While cinematographic violence and the costumed posturings of “Goths” appear to treat of death, both fail to reckon with it in a forthright way. In spite of their failure, we should not be surprised by cultural‐underground movements such as the “Goths” or obsession with death in film. Failure to deal with almost any issue in a healthy way forces aberrant outlets. It cannot be argued that every other time and culture had a better way of dealing with death than we do today—we should not, for example, harbor nostalgia for the dance macabre. It is worth noting nonetheless that our culture suffers from a strange nervousness that avoids the eye of death.

The relatively successful avoidance of the subject of death has allowed a large number of people today to love themselves, although mortal, as if they were immortal³⁴ and this is always to love in a self‐veiling way. Man loves a projection of himself; an ideal self is loved for whom immortality is substituted for a virtual interminability. No end colors the course of human life with significance; one loves oneself as frivolous. Therefore, even when a person cannot avoid a kind of introspective depth, reflection on mortality centers on the cessation of life and not on a rendre compte with one's life in a mediation between hope and anxiety. Avoidance of death is, here again, avoidance of the thought of God.

The Relevance of Gaudium et spes

Hope is naturalized by Christians and culture, abandoned because of doubt, lateralized by commerce, and ignored with anxiety. The true voice of hope is in a language foreign to contemporary man and it should not come as a surprise that he remains indifferent to its beckoning.

It is perhaps curious to us today that modern indifferentism is hardly mentioned in Gaudium et spes 19's catalogue of modern crises in belief. Alongside enumeration of atheist humanism, atheism for the sake of science, atheism motivated by the theodicy problem, and others is a brief mention: “Alii quaestiones de Deo ne aggrediuntur quidem, quippe qui inquietudinem religiosam non experiri videantur nec percipiant quare de religione iam sibi curandum sit.” The judicious use of “videantur” here forestalls the impression that there are real people who never think about God, as does the document's insistence that atheism is not the natural human condition.³⁵ In spite of the fact that no one can never think of the divine, indifferentism has encroached significantly in the past decades such that that which was but one trend alongside other, more important, “atheisms” now dominates the field. The generation gap between the council fathers and the sons of the contemporary world is evident in the relatively small importance it attributed to indifferentism as well as in the hope by which it sought to redress the problem. Hope for the Council was neither a nebulous and disconnected mystification nor something purely natural, akin to some ephemeral yet absolutized entertainment.

The fact that contemporary persons seem to have discounted questions concerning God owes something to a diminution and flattening of a sense of wonder that corresponds to the betrayal of hope outlined above. Wonder is reserved almost exclusively today for that which seeks to predict and determine and for that which is predictable and determinate—science monopolizes wonder. Wonder is unmoored from the unknowable, from mystery—the sense of which atrophies quickly and quietly in true wonder's absence—and is affixed to that which happens to be unknown and to its discovery. Openness to mystery is an ever more restricted aperture.

As wonder is cornered by science, only specifically intense experiences seem to demand concentrated attention on the idea of God. At the most dramatic moments of life, questions that lead to God cannot fail to arise.³⁶ As argued above, however, the attempt to live one's life out of the way of all unpleasantly momentous situations and conditions, specifically anxiety and the awareness of death, has the untoward consequence of enclosing one in resigned and despairing security. Here, precisely, the question of God is not perceived in its urgency and every such Godless limbo is Hell. If de Lubac (and Blondel before him) are correct about the singularity of the human vocation, then this blindness to the supernatural spells the defeat of the very meaning of human nature and this not merely by the accidental reason that supernatural grace would fail to heal fallen nature; persons would fail to attain the gratuitous gift of communion with God in supernatural love for which very reason they were created—Fecisti nos ad Te …

Persons are not insulated from the thought of God simply by avoiding the intensity of life most of the time. More than in 1965, the allure of engulfing distraction threatens today. The Council rightly saw that the hope it sought to inculcate would meet resistance along these lines. It saw the increasingly accessible palliative of distraction as debilitating and deafening the world. “Ipsa civilizatio hodierna, non ex se, sed utpote nimis rebus terrestribus intricata accessum ad Deum saepe difficiliorem reddere potest.”³⁷ Headphones do not make hearers of the word. Distraction follows on an alienation from hope and this alienation seeks further distraction in an ever tightening vicious circle.

While it is perhaps difficult to see atheists or indifferentists as directly motivated in their rejection of God by Cajetan's two‐tiered understanding of nature and grace, it remains true that hope has become a lateral élan for which a transcendent aspect can only appear as unreal and as anything but immanent to man.³⁸ Even when expectation is lifted above the pursuit of a purely animalistic beatitude,³⁹ it often does not reach an understanding of the supernatural that is at once something clearly delineated from sentimentalized naturalism—in perception of its transcendence—and faithfully rescued from the mists of mystification—in appreciation of its immanence. Yet this seldom heard hope is the only hope audible.