The answer comes from … the 4th Century B.C. (after some, only from the 2nd), and was expressed by China’s greatest philosopher, who is not Confucius, but his Taoist rival, Chuang Tzu :

“Suppose you and I have had an argument. If you have beaten me instead of my beating you, then are you necessarily right and am I necessarily wrong? If I have beaten you instead of your beating me, then am I necessarily right and are you necessarily wrong? Is one of us right and the other wrong? Are both of us right or are both of us wrong? If you and I don’t know the answer, then other people are bound to be even more in the dark. Whom shall we get to decide what is right? Shall we get someone who agrees with you to decide? But if he already agrees with you, how can he decide fairly? Shall we get someone who agrees with me? But if he already agrees with me, how can he decide? Shall we get someone who disagrees with both of us? But if he already disagrees with both of us, how can he decide? Shall we get someone who agrees with both of us? But if he already agrees with both of us, how can he decide? Obviously, then, neither you nor I nor anyone else can decide for each other. Shall we wait for still another person?

“But waiting for one shifting voice [to pass judgment on] another is the same as waiting for none of them.”

The spiritual life is an event in the interior of the spirit. Seen from the outside, it easily lends itself to misunderstandings and to frequent confusion with psychism. Thus psychologism formulates this classic question, which is beside the point, namely: “Does there exist a correspondence between the subjectivity of religious experience and the objectivity of its object?”

Thus propounded, the question prejudges its simplistic solution: the object of the experience–God–is only an aspect immanent in the soul, esse in anima. Man enters into dialogue with the elements of his own psyche, romanticizes them and makes them a mythology.

The error is to introduce a speculative distance between the experience and its object; religious experience is at once the manifestation of its object.

It is not a question of conformity between the experience and the spiritual reality, for the experience is this reality. The experience of the saints and mystics is the coming of the Spirit. The idea of God is not anthropomorphic. Man does not create God according to his own image; he does not invent him. However, the idea of man is theomorphic; God has created him in his image. Everything comes from God. The experience of God also comes from God because God is closer to man than man is to himself. As soon as God manifests his presence, man sees it. That is why nothing can be proved one way or another, but one who denies the reality of experience can at the most only prove that he has not lived it. The person of Christ is the place where once for all the experience of man by God and that of God by man have converged. It is this Christic reality that precedes every religious experience and actualizes it in Christ: “You are in me and I am in you.” This reality interiorizes religious experience even to the point of divine intimacy.

Every compelling proof violates the human conscience and changes faith into simple knowledge. That is why God limits his almighty power, encloses himself in the silence of his suffering love, withdraws all signs, suspends every miracle, casts a shadow over the brightness of his face. It is to this kenotic attitude of God that faith essentially responds. It keeps and will always keep an element of darkness, a crucifying obscurity, a sufficient margin to protect its freedom, in order to guard its power to say no at any moment and to build on this refusal. It is because a man can say no that his yes can attain a full resonance; his fiat is then not only in accord, but on the same dizzy level, of free creation as the fiat of God.

Faith is a dialogue, but the voice of God is almost silence.

… God consents to be unappreciated, refused, rejected, expelled from his own creation. On the cross, God took the part of man against God.

…

Science imposes its vision of visible and verifiable things and obliges me to accept them. I cannot deny an earthworm, nor a virus, but I can deny the existence of God. This is because faith, according to St. Paul, is “the evidence of things that are not seen”. It transcends the order of necessity. “Blessed are those who have not seen and who have believed” means blessed are those who are not compelled, forced, constrained.

Faith thus appears as a step beyond reason, commanded by reason itself when it reaches its limits. Faith says: “Give up your puny reason and receive the Word.” It is a transcendence toward evidence, toward the hidden reality that reveals itself. It suppresses all demonstration, all intermediaries, all abstract notions of God, and it makes that someone who is the most intimately known immediately present.

The insufficiency of the proofs of God’s existence is explained by a fundamental fact: God alone is the criterion of his truth, God alone is the argument of his being. In every thought concerning God, it is God who thinks himself in the human mind. That is why we can never prove his existence rationally nor convert another by arguments, for we can never do so in the place of God. We cannot submit God to the logic of demonstrations nor enclose him in a chain of causes.

If God is the sole argument of his existence, this means that faith is not invented. It is a gift, and it is to its royal and gratuitous nature that man must bear testimony, for faith is given to all in order that God may effect his Parousia in every human soul.

According to the Bible, the fool is free to say in his heart: “There is no God.” However, the meaning of the negation changes according to the level of depth and suffering in the one who denies. That is why “Perfect atheism (perfect here means lived even to suffering) is at the top of the ladder, on the second last step before perfect faith,” as Dostoievski affirms. When, far from formless indifference, atheism and faith are carried to “perfection”, they can meet together above senseless talk, in the silent combat of the angel with Jacob, and of grace with despair. Consistent atheism, burning with suffering, knows its own paradoxical cross. At the end of his life, on notes scribbled at the height of his madness, Nietzsche wrote his definitive name–the Crucified. Likewise the atheistic Great Inquisitor made fun of materialism and positivism, but he attained his true grandeur in his passion for man. His no, in spite of himself, would almost participate in the love of God for man, though he is not conscious of this. Perhaps passion for man goes beyond a certain level that is merely human. Is not the essence of the divine heart this same passion, and would there not be here one of those mysterious “passages to the limit” [i.e., `liminal stages' --ed.]? Perhaps it is necessary to be a saintly “philanthropist”, in the manner of God, in order to feel the deep correspondence. There exists a purifying atheism, according to the words of Jules Lagneau, “that salt which hinders belief in God from corrupting itself”. In this function of protection and safeguard, it cooperated with grace. That is why the Christ of the Legend of Dostoievski is silent, and kisses the face of the Great Inquisitor contracted with suffering.

But it was not always so. The 20th century Christian mystic Simone Weil writes :

“One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it.” (my underlining)

Or, as someone else once said, “a Christian is a potential mystic, while a mystic is an actual Christian”…

It’s funny that militant atheists disparage Christians by calling them “mystics”, while Christians themselves continue to reject the term as improper to their religion ! So mysticism has gone down the drain too, along contemplation, leaving behind a world ever discontented of itself, but never willing to do the slightest effort to … just look toward something else.