One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it. This is a mistake as I will argue in painful detail in a separate entry. For now I merely invoke the authority of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:
Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand or live, cannot be made but only received.
To which I add: if there is no meaning there to be received, then there is no meaning.
Recent Comments