Sailing the Sea of Rahner's Mystery

Karl Rahner, S. J. (1904-1984)

For all other understanding, however clear it might appear, is grounded in this transcendence.  All clear understanding is grounded in the darkness of God.

I'm doing a little writing on Karl Rahner's concept of human nature and grace and reread this perennially phenomenal passage from the Introduction to his Foundations of Christian Faith.  Enjoy . . .


What is made intelligible is grounded ultimately in the one thing that is self-evident, in mystery.  Mystery is something with which we are always familiar, something which we love, even when we are terrified by it or perhaps annoyed and angered, and want to be done with it.  For the person who has touched his own spiritual depths, what is more familiar, thematically or unthematically, and what is more self-evident than the silent question which goes beyond everything which has already been mastered and controlled, than the unanswered question accepted in humble love, which alone brings wisdom? In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island in a vast sea that has not been traveled.  It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only beacause it is can we be borne by it.  Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery? Is the little light which he illuminates this island—we call it science and scholarship—to be an eternal light which will shine forever for him? That would surely be hell.


If a person wants, of course, in the concrete decisions of his life he can always choose to accept this infinite question only as a thorn in the side of his knowledge and his mastery and control.  He can refuse to have anything to do with the absolute question except insofar as this question drives him to more and more individual questions and individual answers.  But only when one begins to ask about asking itself, and to think about thinking itself, only when one turns his attention to the scope of knowledge and not only to the objects of knowledge, to the transcendence and not only to what is understood categorically in time and space within this transcendence, only then is one just on the threshold of becoming a religious person.  From this perspective it is easier to understand that not many are, that maybe they are not capable of being, that they feel that it demands too much.  But anyone who has once raised the question about his transcendence and about its term can no longer let it go unanswered.  For even if he were to say that it is a question which cannot be answered, which should not be answered, and which, because it demands too much, should be left alone, even then he would have already given an answer to this question, whether the right one or the wrong one is here besides the point.

Caspar David Friedrich The Monk by the Sea, 1810