The aspiration of every human being for salvation, or in more common language happiness, derives from his experience of the fragility of human life and the idea of the infinite or absolute that he cannot help but feel is a secret part of his own self: a desire, aspiration to exist. In certain schools of thought this desire coincides with salvation: a human being is spontaneously directed towards the absolute in an effort to give meaning to the precarious nature of his own existence. Understanding – the capacity of man to aspire to salvation – becomes salvation itself.

 To understand and to understand oneself; to understand the reality of the world around one and the reality of oneself; to give meaning to one’s own existence; the need to understand the salvation we long for – all of these things become reality to the extent that understanding coincides with salvation. In other words one can be saved by understanding that part of the infinite or absolute that is found within. This understanding by itself would be enough to save us and give meaning to our precarious life. But this image of salvation is simply an idealization – the product of our imagination and cognitive ability – it is not linked to the real world.

 To explain the mystery of our own existence, the idea that understanding is directly related to salvation is not foreign to Christian tradition. The idea of revelation would make no sense if it did not reveal an understanding of God as the origin and end of man and of the universe. A question remains to be answered: does understanding suffice to define what is meant by salvation. For the so-called doctrines of “salvation through understanding” the answer to this question is “yes” – knowledge is the very source of salvation. Certain of these schools of thought have assumed the nature of a religion: Gnosticism in the early centuries of the Church. Their knowledge/understanding was revealed from on high and granted to a small group of initiates, an elite. The “knowledge which saves” is something, esoteric, hidden, secret, the possession of a few. Other schools of thought believe in understanding without revelation – philosophical wisdom. Understanding is seen as a form of salvation which makes life less dramatic and gives meaning to the precariousness of human existence.

I. Salvation as Perfect Understanding

 During the first centuries of Christianity the seductive power of the Gnosis (a Greek word for knowledge/understanding) was so strong that many Fathers of the Church mounted a vigorous defense against it. Recent scholars believe gnosticism arose in Jewish circles and was influenced by oriental syncretism; these Jewish circles were discouraged by the delay in the coming of God that had been foretold by the prophets and apocalyptic texts. In the ruins of this disappointed hope a radical pessimism and neurotic anxiety took root. There was a genuine obsession with evil that led gnosticism not just to reject and curse an intrinsically evil world, but the creator of this world, who would be the creator of evil. Certain schools of Gnostic thought identified this creator of evil with the God of the Old Testament.

 This negative view of creation and human history had enormous consequences for early Christianity. Everything that was corporeal or material was considered evil. The humanity of Jesus and the resurrection of the body were rejected. It was necessary to escape from this world and this history – evil in and of themselves – through ascetic practices which would free the soul from the tyranny of the body; not infrequently this attitude approached moral indifference. It hardly mattered whether one lived a moral or a depraved life. The world into which one had been born, in which one lived and indeed one’s very body were fundamentally evil. It was not possible to distinguish or separate good from evil. The secret and most intimate part of a man, the divine and eternal aspect of his being, was the recipient of a special revelation from God. It was completely foreign to matter; it was the captive of flesh and time, with which it had nothing in common, a hostage of the created world dominated by the powers of evil.

 This was the heresy that the early Fathers of the Church attacked. The study of comparative religion teaches us that gnosticism is a widespread phenomenon that goes far beyond the boundaries of early Christianity. It was a vast movement that outstripped the Judeo-Christian context in which it was developed. It can be found in all the great religions under a variety of guises and has survived up to our own times. Certain characteristic elements arise from those never entirely suppressed esoteric tendencies in Christianity: a dualistic vision of the world neatly divided into spirit and matter, good and evil; the presence of a divine spark in man somehow trapped in this wicked world; secret understanding/knowledge will re-ignite the spark; once man has been reborn and divinized he will find himself and gain self-consciousness through a revelation which is not simply intellectual but effective inasmuch as it contains answers to the problems of human anguish and anxiety. We have seen all of these ideas in the past: Manichean Dualism, the Bogomil and Cathar heresies, some of the great mystics. Now they are part of our philosophical culture. They show up everywhere – from psychology to those numerous present-day religious movements with North American and Hindu roots, in which enlightened prophets bring a message of liberation.

2. Philosophical Reason Saves

 While the Gnostic vision of the world is shot through with radical pessimism, the wise man’s search for understanding takes an optimistic view of reality; it is a way of living and thinking enlightened by understanding and directed to acquiring wisdom. The ultimate ideal of the wise man is to achieve happiness through purely rational understanding. He longs for this rational understanding as a saving virtue, similar to the Gnostic’s knowledge born of external revelation.

 History teaches us that almost all the great religions strive to free man from his finite condition and from the evils that surround him. For the ancients this liberation or salvation implied assimilation of the rational soul into the Godhead – the eternal principle of all things. The Greeks dreamed of becoming part of the family of the gods – as if the soul would find its origin there. The assimilation of the rational soul into divinity was the specific task of philosophy. By conforming to his appropriate end through contemplation or by seeking the goal of his existence through an understanding of the universe man can become immortal, or at least achieve peace of mind while facing a destiny fraught with fear of God, suffering and death. 

 Even Christianity has not put an end to the idea of autonomous rational understanding which can of itself bring salvation. Modern philosophy frequently manifests the desire to seek through rational understanding a good superior to the usual objects of men’s desires. For some philosophers this superior good is God. But one cannot reach this God except through rational understanding – that is through an intellectual process that gradually elevates man until he becomes God’s equal. Philosophical rationalism denies any sort of positive or revealed religion, it prefers a complete naturalism to any sort of supernatural reality. It is a religiosity arrived at through rational understanding. Through this religiosity one gradually constructs salvation. It consists of feeling and experiencing that beyond all transitory vicissitudes “we are eternal.”

 From this brief overview of various Gnostic ideas it is apparent that a close link exists between man’s desire for knowledge/understanding and his desire for salvation. The two paths differ on how this understanding is acquired: direct enlightenment from on high, or as the end result of a rational process. In both cases knowledge makes existence bearable, it frees what is great and universal within us from our inevitable personal limitations.

 These are the principal formulations of the hypothesis of “understanding saves.” We need not recall here that science too has devised a possible escape from the agony and despair that surround human beings. It has promised them scientifically programmed remedies – or in some cases, psychoanalytic therapy. We are still left with the question of whether man’s desire for understanding coincides with his desire for salvation and can this salvation be identified with the sort of understanding/knowledge that is given to only a few enlightened souls. Is salvation the same as giving meaning to life? In other words we can ask if an understanding of “what we are” gives a satisfactory response to the question “what do we want to be.” A positive answer to this question does not do justice to the deepest and most fundamental aspirations of man. We cannot be satisfied with this definition of salvation.

3. Salvation Without God

 The idea that man can reach his goal, salvation, without God, finds expression in certain forms of atheism and materialism which deny the religious discourse and confine themselves to giving a purely earthly and human meaning to existence. Men of science and technology are inclined to see themselves as the point of departure, the core and the goal of their own research. Their thought begins with the world as it is experienced and terminates in reality as something that can be experienced and controlled. They are uncomfortable with the idea of “interiority” – of a place where personal encounter with the absolute is possible. This critical and pragmatic thought reflects a state of mind in which the metaphysical and the transcendent are alien. These men are convinced that they alone can give form to themselves and to their lives, they alone can construct their inner greatness and give meaning to existence, they are their own saviors.

 In this scheme of things religion has no other task than to broadcast an illusion – alienation as Marx would call it – that makes a false and abstract salvation glitter and appear as true and real. Rather than hope for a world beyond human experience, for a salvation that is forever postponed, man prefers to find salvation here in this world where he lives. He is convinced that he can achieve salvation on his own. Man takes the place of God. “Salvation through the action of God” is replaced by “Salvation without God.” Man no longer need have recourse to God to guarantee his salvation. The very concept of God and the sacred are conditioned by the meaning man assigns to himself.

 The metaphor of the mirror, one looks at one’s own image and believes one is seeing another, explains the projection of himself man assigns to God. “Religion,” says Feuerbach, “is the infancy of mankind; it is the child who sees his own reflection as another human being.” When he grows up and passes through this initial “mirror stage” he will see his reflection and realize that it is himself and at that point he will become self-aware. This analysis reduces all discourse about God, theology, to a discourse that is actually about man, anthropology. When man speaks about God he is talking about himself; there is no salvation outside himself.

 With this identification (illusion, religious alienation) as his point of departure, Marx claims that religion is the result of human misery, it is a reaction to man’s material poverty. In itself it too is poverty, it is the sigh of the oppressed creature. In short, it is the opium of the people. Genuine happiness demands the elimination of religion which is a false and alienating happiness. If there is anything like religious salvation it consists in the feeling of consolation which serves as an antidote to suffering and psychologically attenuates the effects of suffering. A concept of happiness that corresponds to reality will reflect real life, human praxis – those activities through which man reproduces himself and produces the material and social conditions for his own existence and his own world. The locus of salvation – a religious term Marx never uses but with whose meaning he is familiar - is the historical existence of man, his subjective and objective becoming.

 This concept of salvation, motivated by fidelity to man, does not render us indifferent to man’s life and history – as some Gnostic schools of thought would have it – but rather prompts us to recognize and accept that the essential object of salvation is the concrete existence of man. It reminds us that salvation is not something applied to man from outside – a one-size-fits-all program. Man’s existence is not soft wax upon which the seal “meaning” – coming from God knows where - is impressed. The deepest meaning of man’s life, salvation, becomes apparent with the unforeseeable unfolding of history. One might ask if in seeking salvation in real history man is alone vis-à-vis himself or if he can give substance to his life by looking beyond himself. This is the difficult question we must answer.

4. The Quest for Salvation in the Post-modern Era

 John Paul II’s statement: “It is no longer obvious to today’s man in what the salvation we proclaim consists,”[1] reflects the real situation of so many men and women today when they encounter the proclamation of salvation. On the one hand there is a lively quest for religion in the modern era, but on the other there is widespread ambiguity about the paths that lead to God.

 With the collapse of ideologies accompanied by the disappearance of that intellectual veto of the religious phenomenon there is a re-emergence of religiosity all around us. This religiosity is more sentimental than intellectual; the search for truth is overwhelmed by an uncritical acceptance of superstition. There is a sort of “supermarket” religiosity: confused, individualist, promising much and offering a here-and-now salvation in this world. It seeks a comfortable refuge in the spiritual and ignores the social and communitarian. It ignores the great challenges of the present. God is available; you can take Him or leave Him as you please or as it suits your needs. God plays no part in your life choices, your morality or your behavior. One no longer hears the slogan of a few years ago, “Christ, si – Church, no.” We are more likely to hear “God si – Jesus Christ, no!” Jesus of Nazareth with his radical and evangelical demands is no longer welcome to those who want a God defined as “positive energy”, “benevolent force” …

 If we were to ask a young person – especially one of the western world – what he understood by the word “salvation” it is unlikely we would receive a religious answer. His cherished expectations are many and varied. He may be seeking meaning in life – but he does not expect a savior, he does not long to go to heaven. It is enough that his daily life be free of crises; that he find a remedy for anxiety and depression in simple escapist distractions. In short, the men and women of post-modern society find salvation without God. They are satisfied with surrogates for God – the classical trinity of idols: power, pleasure and money.

Points for Reflection

- We know people who have no faith in God. What values do they cling to in an effort to give meaning to their lives? What does “salvation” mean for them? What longings, what values do these people nurse in their hearts? How do they express these values?

- How do I, in my ministry, guide and help people who may not see the presence of God in their lives but still long for something more?

- How do people who do not believe in God view the Christian idea of Salvation? When is this idea seen as something “alienating” and why?

- Which are those “Christian” values that every man “of good will” accepts, respects and defends and which can serve as a point of departure for dialogue and practice?

- How can we make an impact on the minds of men and women of the post-modern era?

[1] Discourse to the Missiology Congress (Pontificia Università Urbaniana) in Acta Apostolicae Sedis 81 (1989-I), pp. 310-311.