Congar - Christ as the meaning of the world [The Wide World My Parish 3]

There is a hallowed truth in 'personalism', the feeling for the unique value of every person; a person is a whole in himself, one cannot be substituted for another, he is the contrary of Koestler's definition of the individual in a communist society: 'A mass of one million people divided by a million.' But we must not lose sight of other truths. Every man and woman is a person, but they all have something else in common, their humanity. Mankind is made up of persons, but they are born one of another, they need one another in order to expand and develop, each one has his own destiny, but together they pursue a common cause: 'The whole succession of men should be seen as one and the same man, continuing always to exist and to learn.' The world too is a totality; science treats it more and more as a whole, made of the same stuff, and all held together by an aggregate of interactions, attractions and compenetrations. 

The world as a whole has movement and therefore a meaning. Materialism treats this movement and meaning as purely a result of forces within nature, though adding that it is man's business to interpret them by his intelligence and to apply his energies to them. But from the Christian point of view the world as a whole has a meaning which comes to it from God's plan. Plan and meaning are not simply those which the mind can recognize by carefully looking at things. Into the world taken as a whole, into the pattern of human history, God put the revelation and then the gift of something new; it was not contained within the energies of the world but, once given, it became its central point and constituted its meaning: the Covenant, fully actualized in Jesus Christ who is indeed the union of God and man. Jesus is for the world, and the world is for Jesus: totality in quest of a meaning, and fullness of meaning. We cannot be sure that in Jesus Christ the world recognizes its meaning, but it is certain that he is that meaning. 

Let me make a comparison. At one time I was living my life from day to day, and pretty happily, for my job was interesting. But, without having the sophisticated absurdity of Sartre's 'Everything that exists is born for no purpose, continues through weakness, dies by chance', that life of mine was not illumined by the shining light of some clear purpose. Then one day I met somebody who put an idea into my head, something worth-while, an undertaking, in which I recognized the meaning of my life; it not only determined my present and future, but threw light on the past, for everything had been pointing in this direction, although I had not realized it. Taken up with living and doing my work, I had overlooked it, but even so it was the meaning of my life; it made sense of everything and held the whole together. Boris Pasternak is right: 'You have said that facts don't mean anything by themselves—not until a meaning is put into them. Well—the meaning you have to put into the facts to make them relevant to human beings is just that: it's Christianity, it's the mystery of personality.' 

Yves Congar, The Wide World My Parish: Salvation and its Problems (1962) p. 17-19