The human being between intimacy and forgetfulness

We easily get swept up in the bustle of daily life, the turmoil of political life, the atmosphere of conflict in which we wear one another down mercilessly. This bustle, this turmoil, these conflicts take our minds away so completely that within them we lose sight of our point of departure, of the reasons we came here, of the reason and nature of our relationship with other people.

The person I compete with is someone like me. His existence is part of my own existence too. We came into being from the same Being, came from the same place, and are going to the same place. The reason I am human is my intimacy with another human being. Without this intimacy, our quality of being human would remain incomplete. But the interesting side of the matter is that one dimension of the story of being human, that is, of the word itself, also subsists on forgetfulness.

To the extent that we are intimate with one another, we also forget the nature of our relationship with one another, and the true Being who brought us into being; we consign them to oblivion. The tragic side of being human is that forgetting is part of this existence, and even defines the quality of being human all the more.

We forget the Creator, our covenant with Him, that we were created by Him, that He is the Owner of everything we presume we possess, our body, our beauty, our life, our provision, our healing, our nature, our existence, our tongue, everything; and we do a great many things without even letting it cross our minds.

We forget that we were born (were brought forth) with certain traits given to us under conditions not in our own hands; we suppose that all the traits given to us belong to ourselves, and we plunge into the heedlessness, the forgetfulness, of vaunting and acting superior to others on account of them.

Yet a significant part of our political arguments rests on the forgetting of this primary knowledge, this core knowledge. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, pandemics, floods and hurricanes show us, by rubbing it in our faces, that nothing we know to be ours in this world is actually ours. For a moment someone among us remembers, but then, within a short time, we are seized by the same forgetfulness and resume our heedlessness from where we left off.

Yet in every moment of our lives these signs, these warnings, come to us, remind us of our reality, awaken us to our truth. We come to see how wretched we are, how helpless, how powerless, and at this point how much alike one another. A reality we are confronted with at that moment is how little different we are from one another. This knowledge, this indistinguishability, proclaims in all its splendor that we should not serve one another or bow to one another, and that no one is able to give what we expect from others. We certainly receive it, everyone receives this proclamation, writes it in some corner of his mind or does not, and shortly afterwards we forget it.

These reminders of ours are not exactly humanist, of course. The Enlightenment, as the commonly accepted source of belief that dominates our world today, has for two hundred and fifty years been working on us the loftiness and greatness of man and his claim to be the sovereign subject. Would the man who knows everything, learns and is enlightened ever fall into heedlessness again?

We have not seen that man. Wherever he is. That magnificent man who acts purely by reason, free of every kind of emotion, arrogance, ambition, caprice, inferiority or superiority complex, who accumulates the knowledge he acquires without ever forgetting it, and who illuminates the world with the reason he has reached. This is the man of humanism. This is the man the Enlightenment pictured.

What our theologians, who so often surrender to this mythology of man held by the Enlightenment thinkers through a historicist reaction, have forgotten is the Divine Word, which tells us about the human being himself in all his truth.

Yet the catastrophes caused by this knowing, enlightened man, made thoroughly arrogant by his sovereign attributes, being alienated from his true reality, having forgotten that reality and falling into heedlessness toward his actual truth, are far greater than the sum of humanity's discoveries. Man, who was expected to build up the earth, forgot his real task and wrought corruption on earth. Yet the trust he took upon himself, which he was expected to fulfil, had been offered before him to the heavens, the earth and the mountains, and they knew better what was what, but man volunteered for this trust, this role, this mission, because man is very forgetful, afflicted with forgetfulness.

Knowing is not enough; with what he knows he cannot cure his ignorance, and by supposing that ignorance can be cured by recording a piece of knowledge once in memory, he reproduces ignorance.

The subject is not a matter of informal knowledge; it is knowledge that man is constantly inclined to forget. Otherwise, who does not know that he was born of a mother and a father when he was nothing? Who does not know that, at a moment he never wished for and does not know, he will be drawn out of this world again against his own wish? Who does not know that when he dies nothing he has amassed in this world will go with him, and that he will have to leave everything behind?

Everyone knows, but most people live, to one degree or another, forgetting this barest, most fundamental truth. Straying after guidance is among man's most habitual states. For man to live as though he did not have the most basic knowledge, and to try to treat other people as though they did not have this knowledge either, is a state of jahiliyya beyond forgetfulness.

The grave consequences of our having forgotten our covenant with our Lord, of having forgotten the wisdom and truth of our existence in the world, which has been declared to each of us unmistakably through our very existence, are not limited to ourselves. The forgetting of knowledge brings with it our forgetting one another and our distancing from the other.

What are we, as human beings, to one another?

One who forgets his Lord forgets himself, and one who forgets himself forgets other people too. His duty toward them, his responsibilities and his place. Do not all problems arise from here? Then we must start asking from where the problem begins:

What are we to one another? Could our intimacy, which brings us into being, be abandoning us to our own forgetfulness?