Mysterium: For Pope Francis

By now, we would have been about five days into hearing of the death of Pope Francis. Even as we braced ourselves during his bout with pneumonia, his death nonetheless came as a surprise, and a rude shock to the festivities of Easter. 

To mark this occasion, we have released a special episode on Pope Francis on our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians.

I have now seen speculatory posts about who the next pope is going to be, and do not wish to join them. In this post, I only wish to focus on what is immediately ahead of us, which is this liminal period between the Church’s mourning of a pope that has passed, and welcome the pope to come. It is one of those very visceral experiences of mystery. 

As a species, we do not take well to mystery. We want to know things and prefer to foresee disaster than live with the unknown. Whilst it can contribute to a raft of entertainment artefacts like disaster, zombie and dystopian movies, games and television, the more “real-life” counterparts can be anything but entertaining.

As we hinted at in our second installment of our two-part series on mystery in our podcast Awkward Asian Theologians, the human inability to live with mystery can lead one to properly adopt the posture of receiving divine revelation, opting instead to impose one’s presuppositions - political, philosophical, socioeconomic and even experiential - in order to give familiar shape to that revelation. What one ends up with is not so much revelation as such, but a human construct - an ideology - posing as revelation.

As I argued in that episode, ideology does not just end up killing mystery, but ends up killing reality. Reality in its fullness, as Byung-Chul Han indicated in The Agony of Eros, involves what he calls an “atopia” of the other, that is the inability to full grasp and control that which is outside of us. In other words, because reality encompasses this “atopia” and otherness, it also involves a complexity that lies outside our ability to control (which in the case of mystery, lies outside our ability to predict and presuppose). As Thomas Aquinas suggested in his Summa, reality is far greater than what our minds can conceive.

We therefore live with an epistemological tension, with a desire to know reality in all its complexity and an inability to live with that complexity. As we indicate in our episode, this is where the Church, living as it has in every age, time and place, plays a vital role in living within that tension, and also holding that tension together. In other words, the Church plays a vital role in aiding our inhabiting of this zone of mystery. Outside that Church, there is no ability to live with that mystery, and flowing from that, there is no ability to live with reality in its fullness.

You can listen to our two part series in full by clicking here (for Part 1) and here (for part 2).

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