Do you integrate?

The French philosopher Sartre is reputed to have claimed that with out an infinite reference point, man is doomed to absurdity, or words to similar effect.

Absurdity comes from both the grandeur and wretchedness of man being equally terminally inconsequential and without any final significance.

For Sartre, Camus and the rest of the existentialist cheer squad, even the 'integration' that might come from some decisive existential gesture was hollow, because one would never know if any particular act or experience would be that consummating event. Ironically, the individual, in this scheme, is left to 'faith' in the ultimate event being an obtainable experience to (self) actualize one's life. Futile!

Francis Schaeffer* resolves man's humanity in the word 'mannishness': his being god-like in a material cosmos as having personhood, of being able to communicate and come to personal encounter with another, with the ability to understand himself and his setting in rational propositional terms, at least to some degree.

The dilemma of man (not his absurdity), comes in his failure to live fully as a human, a person in the image of his maker, the creator God, but to have features of this in his grandeur: however marred, his creativity, his joy in others, his loves, compassion, and humility, disrupted at every point by the inversion of his humanity: his cruelty, selfishness, conceits of wisdom and understanding that alienate man from man and man from maker.

Why cannot we be our own 'integration' point? Is this not the mature, wise man at ease in his own being?

In a world conceived in purely material terms, no integration point is available, because all reality is finally materially determined and oblivious to personhood. It is contingent and reality and our place in it can only be framed as dependent on a prior cause...and prior causes go all the way to a meaningless  actual infinite chain of causes, with no identifiable actual cause, or to an explosion of what amounts to dust. All that sits beneath a stream of contingencies is more contingency; nothing that is necessary, or independently real.

A disintegration point that is illustrated in this conception in every man whose life is a brief tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing between two piles of worm dung (Shakespeare: Macbeth).

In a world conceived as an impersonal (spiritual) monist illusion, the infinite regress disappears into a nullifying absorption into the 'great' one of what amounts to a nothing machine.

So the soul can find no base, no connection with what is truly real in either.

As Sartre said, the integration point must be infinite, perhaps meaning self-existent or it is nothing but more of the same; it must also have a personal basis, or our personhood is reduced and Shakespeare again sees the pointlessness. In Othello: "it is a silliness to live when to live is torment; and then have we a prescription to die when death is our physician."

Our creator is our integration point, or rather we integrate properly in our human calling in Christ, enlivened by his in-dwelling Spirit to grow into life in companionship with our creator.

*Schaeffer, The Trilogy; The God Who is There, Escape from Reason, He is There and is not Silent.