Michel De Certeau

In his book, L'tranger ou l'union dans la diffrence, the French Jesuit historian Michel de Certeau (1921-1986) wrote,
When we confess our incapacity to know others, we confess simultaneously their existence, our own (to which we are returned) and a fundamental reciprocity between them and us. To the extent we agree not to identify ourselves with anything they can expect from us and not to identify them with satisfactions or assurances we hope to take from them, we discover the sense of the poverty which funds all communication. This poverty signifies in effect both the desire which unites us to others and the difference which separates us from them. The same is the structure of faith in God.
An elegant statement which opens for its reader a way to understanding how, like a relation of trust in any other, Christian Faith in the Other, God, begins and ends with the unknown. Humans are incapable of fully grasping others either with their minds or their wills; the same is true of the relation of Faith in the Other. Given humans are ever different from but desirous of union with others, the everyday ideal of all communication in trust is an attitude which has as its goal neither control nor change of the other but rather 'union in difference', also therefore the everyday ideal in Faith.


George B. York, II, holds an MA from St Louis University, an M.Th. from the Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, and is currently completing a Ph.D. at the Gregorian University, Rome. He lives in Denver, Colorado, where over fifty years ago he was introduced to the Jesuits who became his way to meeting his mentor, Michel de Certeau.