Today’s world could seduce us to make dangerous comparisons. Already Saint-Augustine said that people, while constructing their own world by the means of basic, natural material, tend to make a specific failure concerning their view on reality as a whole. It concerns a failure that rests on an unjust inductive reasoning. This failure originates from the fact that we tend to assume that, similar to our constructed world, also nature, out of which we recruit the material to build our world, should be nothing more than another construction. Admitted on the one hand that it is possible to consider nature as if it were a construction, and that engineers factually cannot consider it otherwise while it is their duty to submit the forces of nature to man’s will as to realise his deepest aspirations — we, on the other hand, must experience repetitively that this ‘construction’ of nature, time after time, turns out to be very different from what we believed it to be, and it also seems to be much more complex than we had thought before. And this experience warns us not to take our knowledge for an absolute one: we have to stay aware of the fact that our ideas about nature are just provisional creations by ourselves and that these ideas will never loose their provisional character. While constructing the world, we consider nature as our example: we build up our world similar to the wonderful example that is nature to us, tending to consider God as a kind of a ‘super-engineer’ and, in this way, our constructing activity makes us feel a little divine. Nevertheless, the ennobling effect ascribed so frequently to human work can never result from any similarity with the divinity: the concerned analogy reduces the divine to human proportions rather than it should deify man.

This remark is not just a game with words: in the illusion of any deification of one’s self by the means of one’s work, the divinity is being reduced just to be a worker and an engineer, and nature is being reduced to a mere construction. Yet no one of us, made of flesh and bones, is able to create flesh or bones. We cannot create any breath of life, any spirit or any living being. Man just makes material constructions. When ever working with living material, our activity is limited to the process of trial and error concerning those mechanisms in life which are subdued to the mechanics of lifeless matter. In this way, man can produce tools that, in their turn, can ameliorate the reach and the efficiency of his actions. Man’s tools are a kind of ‘lengthening-pieces’ of his hands, his body and his mind, but without the body and the mind they cannot function as they do not have any autonomy; they do not have any functionality on their own. Man’s tools borrow their meaning and their whole being integrally and exclusively from man himself: without man they have not the slightest utility, and so it is excluded definitely that one ever could ascribe some intrinsic value to these objects, which means that they can never ‘exist’ apart from man and on their own.

An analogy between man and society has been applied more often in the course of the history of man inquiring the being of his own identity: as we all know, billions of cells constitute the unity of the human body thanks to the specific laws of nature which keep them together, which keep them all functional, which keep them alive. As a consequence of this, we spontaneously tend to compare the body with society that has its citizens as its own specialised cells which stay functional thanks to the existence of social laws. Sometimes, this analogy is being made that far that some of us ascribe to society a kind of a ‘spirit’, an ‘identity’ — even so strongly that one could easily think that its value were superior to the value of the human persons which, in that very case, are being identified with the mere citizens. E.g. in certain forms of communism this failure is being made very often, but also all those kinds of systems which are being subdued to entities even much more difficult to identify, such as an uncontrolled ‘free market’-system. In contemporary Western societies, ‘welfare’ is often being identified blindly with ‘well-being’, often representing nothing else but an economy which is going ‘well’, in the mere sense of just ‘fast’. As if the quality of our life and our happiness ever could depend on velocity, and more specifically: on the velocity of economical changes. This evil only suggests that Western people are often ‘people on the flight’, for it is only in this very situation than one can get advantage from the speed characterising his movements. Apart from this, it would be much more natural to identify happiness with rest, which we all tend to do spontaneously. It is true that one can find some sound analogies between man and society, as he can find them as well in comparing the world of the atoms to the world of the stars — countless analogies of that kind are thinkable. We just want to say that thought in terms of analogies is in fact an old and a primitive modus of thought: it has certainly its own qualities if applied well, yet it can also mislead us badly; and it has never been an easy task to overcome the inertia of thought. In comparing the human being to a society, we may never forget that the unity of a man is not in an exhaustive way comparable with the unity of a society. Alike man is not comparable exhaustively with a machine, a computer or an animal. It is often due to the mentioned inertia, laziness or superficiality that there is given way to misconceptions; yet we can become their victims quite easily.

One of those dangerous analogies manifesting themselves more often in the minds of certain writers, concerns the so-called mind-body-problem. For more and more one tends to use the analogy between, on the one hand, the body and the mind and, on the other hand, the hard-ware and the soft-ware, i.e.: the computer (or: the infrastructure, the internet) and its content. This much to easy comparisons quickly lead to conclusions concerning human existence which consider the human body to be the carrier of its mental content, and in which the human body is being considered as being fully replaceable — and the stuff that it carries were no longer some personal soul or identity, but rather some kind of a ‘common good’ which can be described as a principally ‘immortal’ ‘culture’. In the human considering of himself by the turning of the considering of one of his own products, one makes the same mistake of induction against which Saint Augustine did warn sixteen hundred years ago. In the course of history this failure pervaded thought in a broad rank of various forms and it kept on in doing so until today. What makes the mentioned way of considering so special, is the interplay of some factors which ask our attention for just one moment.

The new technologies have appeared very suddenly: they are the fruits of the work of skilled and specialised people who, in their turn are ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’, as poets expressed it — giants who never before reached so high above us all. At the same time, new technology never before manifested itself in such a quickly, visible and user-friendly way for the benefit of almost all layers of the populations of the whole world. The knowledge and the skills required for the conduction of a motorised vehicle means literally nothing compared to the skills required for the development and the production of it, and this is still truer concerning the most recent of technologies. And so we now can observe that not only the new technology is being sold easily: we also swallow some ideas that seem to accompaign the mere material products, e.g. the idea that this technology would be that superb that probably life itself could take an example to it. And this remembers us of a story in the Old Testament, telling us about the potter ad his clay: “You turn things upside down, as if the potter were thought to be like the clay! Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, "He did not make me"? Can the pot say of the potter, "He knows nothing"?” (— Isaiah 29:15-17).

In brief: the idea that the mind-body-problem could be resolved, or at least that it could be explained thoroughly by the means of the perspective of the newest technology, is very misleading: it tends to make us believe that some clear solution for the very mystery of our existence would be on its way. In fact, in this way we do not make the slightest progress — on the contrary, for this mentality only weakens our vigilance.

Ironically enough the mentioned ‘new’ concept of man implicitly refers to an outdistanced and old-fashioned concept, holding that the body and the mind would be separable from each other. Yet man is made of one single piece, while only in the world of our conceptions, man can be divided up into a body and a soul. Analogously, we can speak about the matter and the form of a concrete thing, knowing very well that those two components are mere concepts: we will never find them in reality, simply because they cannot exist on their own — i.e.: autonomously and separated from each other. The body-length has no existence apart from the body that is being measured, as already Plato did remark, and in no way one can ask himself earnestly what it is that makes someone’s body longer than the body of some other person: is it because of the head, or is it because of the legs? In the same way, space and time do never appear separately, at least not in the real world, while nevertheless we still need both of the concepts in order to be able to describe our (real) experiences. In though, we divide the unity of the being, we break it up into pieces, exactly in the same way that we break up nature into pieces in order to build our world by the means of them.

But nature has not been built up out of pieces: nature is a unity and we ourselves make part of it — which makes this unity principally unknowable in an exhaustive way. Now, exactly the same happens concerning our language by the means of which we have to describe and to represent reality — which in fact is our thought. Our language is being built up out of its own elements, which we call ‘words’, ‘numbers’, and more things like that; yet those elements do not have a vast place in the real world which they try to describe, because, as the first of all poets, Heraclites, said: everything is flowing. The ‘spirit’, building up itself in language, is alike the world which we try to build up out of stones and other materials. But our world is not identical to nature as such, out of which it recruits its building-stones. In the same way, our thought — our language — is not identical to spirit. Nature and the spirit stand apart from the world and language respectively, and it looks alike this gap between both of them will always remain: the world will never become nature — the most splendid cities with gardens and acres disappear as soon as we stop to maintain and to cultivate them, while nature just remains what it is. In the same way, language and though in general will never approach the spirit out of which they recruit their ideas by the means of our dreams. The insight that comes out of our dreams precedes its formulation that, in its turn, stagnates, freezes and becomes stone as soon as it is being pronounced or written down. And this is the fate of all thoughts from the moment on that they are being expressed, written down and embedded by the framework of ratio which is identical for all of us. The raison why Old Greek civilisation adored ratio lays in the fact that, opposite to our dreams, ratio is identical for all of mankind. Yet simultaneously this characteristic of ratio is its own most tragic restriction. For the dream, once concretised and expressed in a specific idea, has become a dead dream, and the death of our dreams is the price they have to pay in order to be reborn in our common world. For that raison the (personal) dream is eternal, and the idea, the ratio that we all have in common, is temporarily — it has to be refreshed regularly, it has to return at vast times to the dream out of which it originates in order to resource; it has to die in order to be able to stay alive. And in this way it does not differ from man himself, for one’s individual life must die if at least human existence wants to survive.

Let us first consider again the Bradatanian view, stating that we, human beings, on the strength of the fact that we are able to tell stories, have the ability to step into the footprints of our own Creator.

This very possibility offers us the supreme solace of our life that is in contrast with the inexorable phantom of our temporality — which is death. And now let us ask the following question: for what kind of reason was it a necessity to our own Creator — who is ‘the great Creator’ himself, God — to search for a solace; for that is definitely what He is doing in creating a world full of creatures, man included, who has been made in his own image, as says the book on the origin of all things — Genesis? Why did God need to start up creation, while — in contrast with ourselves — He was not at all faced with the bogey of his own death, as He is immortal by definition? What misfortune made Him search for a solace while He himself became an Author, started to tell stories and created characters? For He himself is at last ‘uncreated’, as states the Catechism, and fully ‘immortal’, while He himself created time. Did God find no fulfilment in his own being, while He suddenly took that initiative to create, alike an author starts writing because he cannot bear any longer that everlasting, cruel perspective on the end of life? For it is unthinkable that God would have been created in his own turn by another God, a super-God, standing another level higher than He himself is — a divinity from the mind of whom his existence would be totally dependent?!

Yet let us consider the next. At least in Christianity, it is definitely not true that God was not faced with death: one of the divine persons, namely the Son, dies on the cross and — in the natural perspective — He dies exactly the same death that all of us must die as well. Now God, being the creator of time, apparently must have foreseen this: Also as the Son, who is “uncreated and from the beginning of times one with the Father”, he must have known his destiny; and Holy Scripture, from Genesis on, tells repeatedly about the advent of the Messiah who will offer his life for the sake of man. So it is not at all true that God did not have to face death — He even faced death although He never deserved it. The question now arises how to chord this with the kind of solace He did apparently ‘search’, while actually it has been this very solace — namely his creation, containing original sin and the need for humanity to get salvation — which made him long for it! Indeed, if we could call this a divine solace, then we must ascertain that the reason for God’s solace couldn’t lay elsewhere but in the solace itself!

And in this way we came out at the point we were searching for: the solace that creates the need for that solace itself — which means: the need that must coincide with its own solace — cannot be something or someone other than… the beloved one. For only in love — that we ourselves may experience as well, albeit in a human form — the beloved one is at once the creator of one’s own need for his or her solace: he in fact is coinciding with his solace. For without the beloved one, we do not miss anyone; yet once we got the acquaintance with the beloved one and once we do love him, we do need him as well and, further on, he or she will be the only one capable to give us that solace that we really need. In this way, the wonderful ‘construction’ of divine creation seems to focus on this one question of making possible this unique reality whose reflection may be experienced in human love.

Let us first synthesize once more our interpretation of Bradatan’s statement, which had to ensure us that it could hold in the mere philosophical sense. ‘Imitatio Dei’ — more specifically man’s free activity that is being carried out in the creative work and par excellence in the telling of stories — is comforting us because in doing so we believe to step in the footprints of God himself: in his very ‘novel’ — at least in the literary approach by Unamuno, referring to Berkeley, Schopenhauer and Indian philosophy — we come across ourselves as its very characters. And now Costica Bradatan states that our ability to tell stories in fact is a kind of a proof for the existence of God. During our first interrogation of this statement, we had to point at the fact that the Bradatanian statement essentially grounds a constructivist world-view which — at our point of view and in a philosophical perspective — should be rejected because in there ‘divine creation’ and ‘human construction’ are being considered as mutually interchangeable things which — implicitly or explicitly — allow the use of the unjust concepts of ‘human creation’ and ‘divine construction’. Next we searched for another en probably more acceptable interpretation in order to save the mere philosophical value of the Bradatanian statement that he shares with many other great thinkers. During this research we asked ourselves whether God himself needed some solace, while it seems that He threw himself in the solacing activity of his creation, nevertheless He is immortal and cannot be characterized by us but as the being of ‘all of the good in a supreme measure’. After this we did find out that — at least in Christianity — God himself is definitely being faced with death, more specifically in the person of his Son who dies totally innocent. As a consequence the conclusion raised that in this very perspective some solace for God was not indispensable, and so He might have started his creation in order to find in it the solace that He apparently needed.

Yet this reasoning doesn't fit unless we can come in terms with something special that is going on here: for it is a fact that in God's case, solace precedes to the happening that grounds his need for solace. For we know that, first of all, God created man — who is his solace — and afterwards man has fallen and needs the salvation that God offered to him by his Son's death on the cross — which is the need. For sure it is possible to clear this problem by referring to God's providence; yet in doing so something else turns up, plenty of mystery: if it is a fact that in the case of God, the need for solace and solace itself coincide in one and the same being, then this has to signify that the mentioned being in question cannot be someone else but the 'beloved being', 'the beloved one'. We know by our own, human experiences that only in the person of the beloved one, the need for solace coincides with solace itself: without the beloved one there is no one missing and there is no need for solace; though as soon as the believed one enters reality, this need suddenly comes into existence, and it cannot be fulfilled but by the means of the beloved one himself: need and solace coincide in love. Divine reality appears to be a wonderful 'construction' that essentially concerns the possibility of love.

Simultaneously we must be aware of the fact that also this very story — arisen from our approach of the Bradatanian statement — can be the subject of its very own critique that originally concerned the Bradatanian statement. As a matter of fact, in a second step it transgresses this critique again. In this way, this 'story' — as we may call our philosophical approach in here — does not seem to differ from all other stories that it is woven with in the attempt to explore the known facts. This tissue probably can serve as a breeding ground to the specific intuition that probably might make possible a better understanding of our conception of love — not in the sense that we could solve it but, on the contrary, in the more positive sense that, in doing so, we might get some awareness of the real depth of this mystery.

The wonderful character of the matter that we named a 'divine construction' — in fact this is no proper name, though we got stuck with these terms while sound descriptions seem to be unavailable — actually is yet embedded in the word 'imitatio', for love can be considered as a kind of 'imitation'. 'To imitate' is what an echo does, and an echo is not the original sound; it is not the source of the sound; it is just a reflection of it in the whole surrounding. We get knowledge of the fact that the sound has manifested itself in his environment, just by the fact of its echo, which is a very primitive — an original — answer to this 'call'. The most 'original' answer is the repetition of the question by its imitation. Now it is in this sense that creature, and especially man — while man himself is not original, for he is not his own source, he is not causa sui — is an echo of his Creator, an imitation of God. And so is his free, creative activity. The beloved one is the echo of the loving one; he is his answer, or rather: he is the answer to his love.

Furthermore: love itself does not seem to be just a 'call': it is a question. But it is not a question springing from a lack, from a real need or from dependence: on the contrary it is a creative and a giving question — a question springing from an abundance that it wants to share with others. The call, which is a question, creates its own answer by its echo, by its creature, by the one who echoes or imitates, referring in this very way back to his proper source. In this very context the loving one and the beloved one 'come into existence' in no other way than by their mutual presence to each other — a presence making them aware of the fact that they are each other's echo and source: they are each other's need and solace. And this reality of love is so deep that our thought is never able to grasp and to comprehend it. We just can guess or anticipate that this reality as well must be an echo of the Absolute itself.

But what has this 'echo' in common with death? Must we accept that there cannot be love without death and its tragedy? And that death is a necessary condition for love? Does the opposition of life and death contains a dialectics comparable to the dialectics that are at work in the opposition of need and solace? If this indeed would be the case, then death might get an extremely important signification. We already know that the beloved one causes the need for him or for her and that he is at once the only one who can give solace to this need. If so: would it be thinkable that a reality alike, holds concerning life and death? In other terms: is it thinkable that life itself creates the need for it — a need manifesting itself par excellence in the reality of death — while this need for life cannot be comforted but by life itself? By the way, we remember the conclusion that arose spontaneously concerning the subject of death, namely: that it cannot be supposed to exist in a relevant way unless it is by the means of the specific beings that live, have lived or will live. There is not just death as a concept on its own: death is always someone’s death — it is a death belonging to someone who lives, who has been alive or who shall have been alive. Death needs life in order to be able to exist itself, which does not mean that life would stand in the service of death — on the contrary: it is death that stands in the service of life.

In fact death is the echo of life; it is the answer to life, the repetition of it, and its radiation in those regions where the source of life is absent. The horror of death just consists of the horror of the absence of love. And now, spontaneously, Saint-Augustine’s words arise: “evil isn’t but a lack of the good.” When evil is causing pain, then it does so because a lack of the good is painfully, alike the absence of the beloved one puts him in depression rather than does the absence of ‘just someone no matter who’. Without the sorrow manifesting itself in the absence of the beloved one, the longing for the beloved one is impossible and fictitious and so is love itself. 

Perhaps, and in a similar way, it can now be said that life gets its strength and its energies from the possibility of its absence, which means: from the threatening of death. Just alike consciousness and freedom cannot exist unless the possibility is given for the misuse of them. We repeat: God gave man the possibility to disobey Him — not in order to make him sin, yet in order to offer him the capacity to obey consciously and freely. Maybe death might just have the special task of offering to life a dimension that can raise the intensity of existence to levels unknown before. Therefore we do not have to fear death — as we do not have to fear sin… as long as we do not intend to commit it. Yet this of course is one more topic. 

At least a hitch is hidden in the ‘analogy’ above, and it is certainly not just a minor flaw: it is affecting the very analogy indeed. The fact that God, by his offering of freedom to us, simultaneously gave us the possibility to disobey — not in order to make us sin, yet in order to make possible our conscious and free obedience — can be understood quite easily. After all, the conscious choice for the good definitely would be impossible if we did miss the ability to choose evil. But does it still hold to state, analogously, that, in saddling us up with death, God intended — not that we should die, but — that we should live consciously en freely, whereby life would reach to a higher existential dimension? After all, in the former case it follows that we nevertheless can choose not to do evil, while in the latter case death continues to be an absolutely unavoidable reality — a reality that, sooner or later, will be ours.

And now just watch how a strange illusion is bothering us in here. For the mentioned critique on this analogy is definitely unjustifiable! After all, our ability to renounce evil, does not at all exclude the possibility that evil befalls us; and in exactly the same way, the ability to renounce death neither excludes the possibility that death befalls us.  

We can renounce evil just by not to believe in it, by not to lean on evil and, as a consequence, by renouncing to engage in it, even if it promises us many profits in a world constructed by man — profits often described as “the good fortune of the evil one”. Similarly, we can renounce death by not to believe in death, by not to take death in our advantage. As a matter of fact, the reality of evil and the reality of death coincide perfectly in here. As Saint-Augustine found out, evil is nothing else but a shortness of good things: evil is the painful longing for the good when it is missing. Similarly, death is nothing else but a lack of life: it is the immense longing for life that has been there or that could have been there, on the moment that it isn’t there any longer or that it cannot be there any more. The coincidence of both of these realities — the reality of evil and the reality of death — signifies nothing else but the coincidence of life and the good: “ens et bonum convertuntur” (“the being and the good are one and the same.”) [This theological statement must be ascribed to Dionysos Areopagita, “De Divinis Nominibus” (“About the divine names”), Chapter 4, § 7. Later on, it has been repeated by Thomas Aquinas, “De veritate” (“About Truth”): q.1a.1s.c.2, by Bonaventura and by many others.]

Now still this question is left: if we choose by ourselves for the good and for life, then why can evil and death still befall us? After all this is the piercing question thrown up by the sceptics: we may be able to choose consciously for the good and for life — the possibility that evil and death befall us just remains a fact, undiminished. So the sceptical question arises whether free choice can still have some value in the perspective of evil and death, which are being executed during our life, despite of the mentioned freedom that we believe to possess.

Against that sepsis there is only the weapon of testimony: the testimony of all those people who, ever since Plato and thus some centuries before Jesus of Nazareth, state that the undergoing of the evil is far most preferable above the doing of it. As a consequence, and equally, the undergoing of death is far most preferable above the doing of evil. This truth is that deep that it is worth a serious meditation. All things considered and besides other things, this means that death that can befall us — if it may be called an evil — nevertheless must definitely be an evil of an incomparable minor dimension when compared to the evil that we commit freely by ourselves. Plato’s Socrates cries out this truth in several ways in his Apology. Saint-Paul, in his famous letter, does exactly the same when stating that life without love is deprived from any significance. (Cor. 13:1-8) This can be a solace to them who fear death; simultaneously it is a warning to them who do not fear the committing of evil.

§ 15. A first attempt in the disentwining of the mystery of death.

§ 16. The soul and the self in the perspective of death.