“Only the hypothesis of God, only the affirmation of the mystery as a reality existing beyond our capacity to fathom entirely, only this hypothesis corresponds to the human person’s original structure. If it is human nature to indomitably search for an answer, if the structure of a human being is, then, this irresistible and inexhaustible question, plea — then one suppresses the question if one does not admit to the existence of an answer. But this answer cannot be anything but unfathomable. Only the existence of the mystery suits the structure of the human person, which is mendacity, insatiable begging, and what corresponds to him is neither he himself nor something he gives to himself, measures, or possesses.
“The world without God would be a ‘tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.’ So muses one of Shakespeare’s characters, and the very fabric of an atheistic society has never been defined better. Life would be a ‘tale,’ a strange dream, an abstract discourse of an exasperated imagination, ‘told by an idiot,’ and, therefore, without unity. Life would be all splintered into segments, with no true order, with no vision beyond the immediate instant, ‘full of sound and fury,’ that is to say, where the single method of relationship is violence, the illusion of possession.”
— from Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense (McGill-Queens University Press, 1997)
Related reading and listening
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