Pedro Cuartango and the theology of uncertainty

Pedro G. Cuartango 's book doesn't aim to solve the enigma of God, but rather to pose it. Nor does it aggravate it. It simply opens the door to uncertainty with the key of conscience. In other words, it dares to look within when the world has grown accustomed to seeking the spirit in self-help manuals, abdominal exercises, and Silicon Valley oracles.

Cuartango ( Miranda de Ebro , 1955) neither proselytizes atheism nor catechizes faith. His is a gospel of doubt, a testimony somewhere between autobiographical and philosophical that confesses that God is not dead, but is hiding. He hasn't spoken, but we sense it. We don't see him, but he looks at us. From afar. Through the inner pupil. As if the Creator —the original driving force—had preferred to hide in a black hole so as not to sully his perfection with our contaminated prayers.

The most disturbing thing about this essay, and perhaps the most noble, is that Cuartango doesn't try to convince anyone. He only has to strip down. He only has to recall the distant, severe figure of Pius XII at the head of his bed, to recall the Latin litanies of his childhood, to evoke the Jesuit priest who explained Saint Anselm 's ontological argument to him as if it were a magic trick. He also has to recall Descartes, with his innate ideas, and Saint Thomas , with his five paths towards a God who cannot be found either by the paved roads of reason or by the sentimental paths of childhood.

The idea of ​​God, says Cuartango, may impress our conscience, but that doesn't mean He exists. Just as we can imagine unicorns or mermaids, without them emerging from the mud or grazing in shipyards. Faith is not the argument, but vertigo. And vertigo, like love or the fear of death , is not reasoned: it is suffered and sends us back to coexistence.

The most disturbing thing about this essay, and perhaps the most noble, is that Cuartango doesn't try to convince anyone. It's enough to strip naked.

That's why the book isn't presented as a quest, but as a confession. An agnostic, almost sacramental confession, in which Cuartango situates himself halfway between the existential anguish of Camus and the lukewarm consolation of Montaigne . What's the point of living? Why prolong the game if there are no rules, no referee, no scoreboard? Cuartango doesn't ask this question solemnly. He does so with the ease with which one might sip a coffee in an empty square, convinced that the beauty of the moment needs no explanation or theological foundation.

There's something stoic and twilight-like about this book. Something reminiscent of an exile's walks through his hometown. Returning to Miranda de Ebro isn't a tourist attraction, but an intimate liturgy. The author strolls through the orchards, gazes at the still bed of the Ebro, and understands that the river doesn't flow, but remains. That generations have passed over that bridge like someone crossing the threshold of life, unaware that they are in transit toward nothingness. And yet, the awareness of that finitude doesn't generate cynicism, but compassion. For oneself and for others . For the child who was and is no longer. For the father who died without being told "I love you." For the idea of ​​God that dissolved like a sugar cube in the coffee on Sundays without mass.

In these times of liquid dogmas and kiosk religions , Cuartango has written an insolent book. Not because it provokes, but because it thinks. Because it thinks slowly. Because it dares to use the word "God" without quotation marks or sarcasm, without exhibitionism or fuss, as if it still believed in the healing power of questions. Even those that have no answers.

Who dares to write today that "God is a drop of water"? Who allows themselves to doubt without displaying it as a gesture of sophistication or moral superiority? Who transforms the loss of faith into an act of literary honesty and not a pretext for strutting their skepticism ? Doubting doubt is the most hurtful paradox of agnosticism.

Words of Pedro García Cuartango. The same man who weeps over the corpse of John XXIII. The same man who dreamed of being a missionary in Africa. The same man who prayed for God to save him from the sins of his adolescence. The same man who, approaching seventy, finds himself old and lucid, sentimental and unbelieving, with more questions than ever and less time to answer them.

At the end of the day, even God's silence can be a form of response. Or an echo.

There are no certainties in The enigma of God But there is one certainty that sustains it all: the awareness that asking is better than remaining silent. And that, at the end of the day, even God's silence can be a form of response. Or an echo. Or a mirror.

Amidst so many unanswered questions, amidst so many dark nights of the soul, there are moments when mystery becomes a presence. Not a dogmatic or supernatural presence. Not the thunder of Yahweh or the burning bush. Rather, an intimate, almost physical vibration. Like when Bach plays.

Because Bach doesn't respond . Bach doesn't prove anything either. But it happens. It happens like a metaphysical event. Like an epiphany without dogma. Bach's music is the closest we get to God without needing to pronounce his name. And Cuartango himself knew this, writing this book as if he had written it with an open score in the background: the Goldberg Variations at dawn, the Chaconne in D minor as a personal requiem, the Magnificat as the last refuge of transcendence.

You don't have to believe to listen to Bach . But it's impossible to listen to him without intuiting that there's something more. An invisible logic. A harmony that predates the Big Bang . An order that doesn't impose, but rather consoles. Bach's God neither threatens nor watches. Bach's God doesn't speak, but sings. And he sings from the intimacy of a cell, from the arithmetic of the spheres, from the secret pulse of our consciousness.