by Michael Bettencourt

Created on: April 21, 2008

ULTIMATE QUESTIONS

Right now I'm slowly making my way through Hans Kung's Does God Exist?, an 800-page tome whose ultimate answer, with elaborate erudition, is simply "Yes."

Kung's title is the primum inter pares of ultimate questions. Also included in the brood of which Kung's title is patriarch are questions which have troubled people all through time: what is the nature and purpose of life? what is the nature and purpose of the individual human being? do we have a soul? is there life after death? These questions have propelled people to do incredible and monstrous things, to found monasteries and spark long personal quests, but also to mortify the flesh and justify the worst excesses of massacre and inquisition. We have then deduced from all the energy and concern expended on finding the answers to the questions that the questions themselves are important, are worthy of our attention and somehow evoke what is noble in our characters. That, however, may a mistaken assumption.

When I was a teenager I was taken over by these questions. As a serious Catholic, a Catholic boy seriously contemplating a career with the Trappists, these questions were the meat-and-potatoes of my religious existence, my reason for being. And when the religious impulse died under some very expert tutoring by a priest who was later defrocked, the intensity of the questions still persisted, fueled by the usual idealism of adolescence. I soon began to take on a casual Keatsian air, the young romantic unwilling to soil himself with questions of mundane reality, but who instead kept his sights on the celestial nature of things, who, in his own mind, was a noble character because he dared to ask and face the essentials questions of life.

I continued this innocent sentimentality on into my first years at college, where my airiness could be nourished by a 5-million volume library and hordes of intelligent and committed teachers. I searched among the various philosophies and religions for answers, I argued long hours with roommates over minor points of meaning, I wandered in existential angst up and down the banks of the river. In short, I indulged in the life of the knight errant in quest of the Grail, feeling sterling because tragic, justified because unsuccessful.

This may sound foolish but I assure you I was dead serious about all this. The problem, of course, was that I was getting nowhere. I continued to be racked by unappeased desires for certainty, and certainty, in the form of answers to

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