1 • A mystery that couldn’t be more mysterious!
At some point during Mass, the priest exclaims, “The mystery of faith!” (and we all chant back in unison, like a flock of Polynesian parakeets, “We proclaim your Death, O Lord, and profess your Resurrection, yada yada yada…“).
But what does “the mystery of faith” mean?
What is this phrase trying to say?
What do theologians mean when they talk about a “mystery“?
Is it something that’s just “way above our pay grade“?
A fact somebody just isn’t aware of?
Something we’re in the dark about?
2 • Analogical Language
Let’s take a step back.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but the Old Testament talks about some strange things:
- talking snakes;
- towers reaching up to heaven;
- floods submerging the earth;
- fire raining down and destroying cities.
As I’ve written before on the blog, in the posts about the origins of the universe and Adam and Eve eating the apple, the Bible often tells us something true not through scientific language or mathematical models, but by relying on images.
The use of images, analogies, and symbols was/is typical of Jewish culture…
…as well as many others.
Just think of:
- the European fairy tale tradition;
- Native American stories about the origin of the world;
- the creation myths of ancient Egypt.
Scientific definitions are clear, unambiguous, exhaustive, comprehensive; but for that very reason, they don’t communicate anything beyond their content.
Images, on the other hand, are allusive, suggestive, evasive, elusive; and while they’re less precise at conveying information, they have far greater communicative potential than definitions, which stay clinical.
This kind of language — capable of saying something true without claiming to exhaust it — is what we call analogical language: a term is “analogical” when it doesn’t describe reality with the precision of a definition, but points to it through resemblance, letting us glimpse more than it explicitly states.
3 • What does the word “mystery” mean?
In one of his many letters, Paul of Tarsus writes these lines to the Ephesians:
[This mystery] was not made known to the sons of men in other generations as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit; that is, how the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body, and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
(Ephesians 3:5-6)
(The word “mystery” comes up a lot in Paul’s letters: see, for example, Rom 16:25; 1 Cor 2:1, 7; Eph 3:4, 9; 5:32; 6:19; Col 1:26-27; 2:2; 4:3)
What do Paul’s words mean?
What does the Apostle mean by the word “mystery“?
I have to be honest: whenever I read certain passages in Paul’s letters, I’m always left a little baffled…
The word “mystery” is an analogical term (see the previous section); in theology, it refers to a reality that, in some way…
- …is related to God;
- …concerns the salvation of humanity;
- …manifests itself in history;
- …is inexhaustible.
When I say “inexhaustible,” I don’t mean “inaccessible.”
In fact, quite the opposite:
The word mystery indicates something incommensurable with us; which does not mean “different,” because, being made in His image, we carry within us the reverberation and the echo of many of its aspects.
Yet even in these things, the manner, the ultimate mode, the decisive measure by which they come about, their final criterion, are not ours.
To adhere to them, we are always called to go out of ourselves, to move past the particular slant with which we tend to perceive the thing.
Even when we try to adhere to them according to the image that our intention strives to make as pure, as obedient as possible, that adherence always comes about through a detachment from self […].
(LUIGI GIUSSANI, Il rischio educativo, BUR Rizzoli, Milano 2016, Kindle edition, 29-30%)
4 • Let’s look at some examples
I’m afraid the definition in the previous section might still be a bit fuzzy…
…so let’s try a couple of examples where the word “mystery” applies.
4.1 • Example #1: Our relationship with God
God is incomprehensible.
“Incomprehensible” means that we can’t fully grasp Him with our intellect… in other words, you can’t cram all of God into your noggin.
However, God is not unknowable.
“Unknowable” means inaccessible to knowledge.
We can, in fact, know something about Him.
For instance, the Greek philosophers had already figured out that God is the first cause of everything that exists, the unmoved prime mover, Being itself, and so on.
Left to our own intelligence, though, we’re stuck with a whole lot of questions about Him:
- Is God good?
- Can we speak of Him in “personal” terms (that is, addressing Him as “Someone”)?
- Why did He create us?
- If He is good, why does suffering exist?
- What about death?
- What is the meaning of life?
[…] the meaning of our life exceeds us; it is enigmatic to us. Man’s religiosity hinges on the fact that our security, our value, “what makes it all worthwhile,” is the mystery.
In nothing else, not even in the observance of moral rules, because the value is the mystery in which we participate by responding to the Christian vocation.
Nor should we stop at the tools or structures that embody our response, placing our certainty and trust in them: our security lies solely in following Him, because He is the very substance of our life.
(LUIGI GIUSSANI, Il rischio educativo, BUR Rizzoli, Milano 2016, Kindle edition, 30%)
So we can say that our relationship with God is a mystery: it’s inexhaustible, meaning that the deeper you go, the more you discover how dizzying it is, how much you still don’t know about Him, how much farther you can go “down the rabbit hole,” and so on.
And if you think about it, this isn’t just true of God; it applies to every relationship: between siblings, in friendship, in love, and so on.
Just to give an example: raise your hand if you’re a husband who could honestly say this about his wife (or vice versa):
“I already know everything about her; there’s nothing new left to discover. Whatever I could know about her — her personality, her desires, her happiness — I already know; this relationship can’t get any deeper than this.”
4.2 • Example #2: the Church
People have always said all kinds of things about the Church:
- That it is a gang of thieves.
- That it is the body of Christ (see Colossians 1:18).
- That it is an NGO.
- That it is a business.
- That it is the bride of the Lamb (see Revelation 19:7).
- That it is a criminal organization.
- That it is a chaste prostitute (see AMBROSE OF MILAN, Commentary on the Gospel of Luke, Book III, 23).
When He proclaimed the kingdom of God, Jesus Himself used some pretty unexpected images:
- A man sowing seed (see Mark 4:26).
- A dishonest steward (see Luke 16:1-9).
- A mustard seed (see Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18-19).
- Yeast, which a woman mixes into three measures of flour (see Luke 13:21).
- A master who entrusts his money to his servants so they can make it grow (see Luke 19:11-27).
- Ten virgins, five wise and five foolish (see Matthew 25:1-13).
We could say that the Church is a group of people.
True… but is it only that?
There are plenty of dishonest people in the Church (see Matthew 7:15). And there have been since day one (in case anyone forgot, Jesus picked Judas as one of the twelve apostles… and He did it knowingly!).
Okay… but is it only that?
The Church is the community, made up of saints and hardened sinners, that Jesus chose for Himself (see SECOND VATICAN COUNCIL, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 8).
Yes… but is it only that?
The Church is the reality in which the mystery of the Father is disclosed: a mystery whose content is the Son, and whose revealer is the Holy Spirit.
*CRICKETS CHIRPING IN THE BACKGROUND*
See?
If the Church is something willed by God, it follows that our language will always fall short whenever it tries to say something about it.
It has to have recourse to a multiplicity of images, representations, and analogies, which, moreover, will never be able to designate more than partial aspects of the reality.
(INTERNATIONAL THEOLOGICAL COMMISSION, Select Themes of Ecclesiology, 2.1)
[All these images], without presenting themselves as a logical whole, […] complement, correct, and balance one another, thus all working together to give us not an exhaustive idea of the Church — an absurd hypothesis — but a knowledge suited to our capacity.
(HENRI-MARIE DE LUBAC, Meditazione sulla Chiesa, Jaca Book, Milano 1979, 72)
Conclusion
In a nutshell, to answer the question in the title, the phrase “the mystery of faith” could be translated as:
- “the inexhaustible richness of the faith”
- “the bottomless depth of our relationship with God, in which we discover something new every day”
- “the boundlessness of God’s love for us, which we’ll never be able to say enough about”
More generally, as for the word “mystery,” I really liked these words by Fabrice Hadjadj (French writer and philosopher of Tunisian Jewish descent, born in 1971):
Not having the last word, letting oneself be torn open by a transcendence, being ripped away from one’s narrow views to enter into a blinding light […].
(FABRICE HADJADJ, La fede dei demoni: ovvero il superamento dell’ateismo, Marietti, Genova 2010, p. 228)
salt
(Winter 2021–22)
Sources/insights
- MARCELLO SEMERARO, Mistero, comunione e missione : Manuale di ecclesiologia, EDB, Bologna 2008
- LUIGI GIUSSANI, Il rischio educativo, BUR Rizzoli, Milano 2016
- LUIGI GIUSSANI, Perché la Chiesa?, BUR Rizzoli, Milano 2003
- ÁNGEL LUIS GONZÁLEZ, Filosofia di Dio, Le Monnier, Firenze 1988
