Frank Sheed says, “A Mystery is an invitation to the mind. For it means that there is an inexhaustible well of Truth from which the mind may drink and drink again in the certainty that the well will never run dry, that there will always be water for the mind's thirst.”
Persons are mysteries. They are not questions to be solved, or an ambiguities to the resolved. If they were, that would mean persons would be like problems that could be finitely determined. As such, that would end thought as well as the creative impulse to understand and wonder. It doesn't mean a person can't be understood, but like any mystery it can't be understood completely. There is something to a person that is inexhaustible and endlessly knowable.
Today's secular world loses sight of this. Instead it prefers to see persons in terms of collectives or groups of collectives. This undermines the dignity of the person, and reduces the freedom he/she has to choose good and evil. We are very good at hiding this, because acknowledging sinful choice requires something of us. As Stanley Jaki notes about having sin move to the background: “moral responsibility is dulled so that sinful acts may not cause psychic trauma if they do not cause physical discomfort.”
As such, persons are seen as dependent on impersonal forces around economic conditions, social constructions, and systemic prejudices. Since persons are determined by outside forces, the mystery gets lost. Persons are now problems to be solved, where creativity gets stifled as these solutions can be seen simplistically through the eyes of packaged ideologies. Is this justice served, or just an approach to solve a problem and move on?
There is no doubt that modernity requires something of us to solve issues. After all, the whole impulse is about the perfectibility of man. But man can not be perfected when the mystery won't allow for monocausal origins. Moreover, social ills are always deeper than the materialistic plane will allow for.
Rod Dreher notes,
“What we call social justice today, in a contemporary secular way, defines itself wholly in materialistic terms. The individual becomes nothing more than a bearer of his identity, within the cosmology of identity politics. Justice is determined mechanically, as if judging the affairs of men was no different than herding sheep or sorting butterbeans. Social justice, understood in this way, becomes monstrous.”
Our material problems are truly spiritual solutions. As such, we need to recover the deeper metaphysic of persons as mystery, with the dignity to make choices and that those choices are rooted in something beyond the person himself. It does not mean that our choices will resolve the problems we endure, but that the nature of what we endure has meaning beyond the choice.