As a child I lived in a world of my own. Nothing mattered. Nothing interested, except things ecclesiastical. An introvert without challenge or society, I was adrift in my own fascinations, sedate in my own bathos. I found the concretization of my innate retreat in an alcove of the library, a corner consecrated with the exotic scent of dust and old books. There I could withdraw into the esoteric world of a Catholic Encyclopedia in which the allure of foreign words—theotokos, hypostasis, imagio, perichoresis—and their scholarly exposition filled me with tingling wonder. From the gravity of that place I could enisle myself in the luminous serenity of the church, a marbled adytum hung with the lingering air of bee’s wax and frankincense, bedecked with bronzes and the glitter of gold mosaic. In these two places the fabric of my mind, my life, was woven. Later in life when I was afforded an education in philosophy and theology the arras crumbled. I shall not revisit the devastation of self and world that was consequent to that. Let it be sufficient to note that I had absorbed the great dogmas and their fettling in art and architecture only to find them deliquesce into fable and fantasy, and so orphaned of my infantile anchorings I was set free to discover their truth. Happily, age and grace, or perhaps merely a loss of sophomorism, have offered solace and vistas never to have been imagined in juvenile times.
To my criticasters I reply that I neither denigrate dogmatic theology, nor dispute its efforts. I do, however, deny it its posturing of itself as a science, a reasoned and reasonable body of knowledge about things properly unknowable and unspeakable, things believed to be revealed to the mind and the things therefrom extracted. I do not doubt the human mind can be illuminated my wonder, or if you will, by Wonder, but upon such light no science can be built. In that light human nature may flourish. Without that light the human spirit is prone to decurve, and that inchoate etiolation is attested to, plangently, blatantly, the world round in the unbridled glorification of self and of things.
No aspect of theology is science. All the great dogmas are, in essence, visions rising up from the soul, prayers evanescing from the heart enlaced in the fulguration of love. They are all fragrant ephemeral mists ascending to dissipate on the winds of being and time. They are not mathematically certain formulae for constructing the proper mind set. They are songs to praise and to soar the heights of hope and wonder. I realize this is a liberal and protestant position, one muchly in the debt of Luther, to whom I also am muchly in debt, perhaps muchly to the annoyance of my Roman confreres. But, I do not see how any other position can exhibit either gravitas or relativity in modern society. I think it reliable and reasonable, albeit, as with all the works of men, subject to misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and misuse.
That which is so adored, so wondrously beheld cannot be touched, even by such devotion. The object of love cannot be touched. Sartre’s prolonged and tortured analysis of love is an ode to the futility of that endeavour. Indeed, can the object of love ever be rightly termed “object”? But, if “object” is a term inappropriate, is “subject” a term any more applicable? Are the opposing terms “subject” and “object” too far below and beneath love to designate the reality of its dignity, its glory, its inherent communality?
Judeo-christian thought has traditionally described the object of its dogmatics as subject, as actor, as active, as action. The Holy is said to define itself as “I am”, or as “I am who I am”, or “I am that I am”. Howsoever the unspeakable divine tetragram be interpreted, it and its interpretation are theological reflections, an anociative that we are from birth confronted with a world of organizing matter we can comprehend only within the parameter of what we are, persons. The absoluteness of this givenness of the world that so confronts us in wonder and awe gives rise to all our efforts in art, science, philosophy, theology, and the society of humankind, the persons, they engulf and create.
This absoluteness is indescribable, in-comprehensible. Yet, the experience, the crush, the rush of it informs us, makes us, activates us. No definiens can delineate it. All evaporates before it; all dissipates, and falls into our world, our orbit, our concepts, ideas, ideals. No descriptor touches it. Yet, being touched by it, one can express one’s sense of relation with this inexpressible font of all experience, all being. Dogma enunciates that as a personal relationship. It, as I am given to express it, places a mask over that reality; it portrays it as a familial relationship, a relationship betwixt parent and child, “Father-Son-Spirit” constituting a pictogram of the cosmic absoluteness of reality that we are encompassed in, which confronts us with endless question and so ever draws us onward.
“Son” may be understood to depict my tether to the absoluteness of reality, “Father” my valuation of my selfhood as informed in and by the absoluteness of reality, and “Spirit” the vitality of the inner relatedness of all reality. But, having expressed the matter thus, we have made an anile and doddering statement before the dynamic actuality of it, and so, we turn, we must turn, to the poetics of dogma, the passions of art and artistry to express the heart and mind caught up in the power, wonder, dread and joy of being, the sheer love of being. Yes, we love being, and every prayer for life eternal, every sigh of hope for a tomorrow of health and happiness is a confession of that love and its longing.
Love is not expressed in the logic of science, and all attempts to call any form of theology a science are as frivolous as any efforts to name ballet a science. The mind may find in any human effort some order. This is our modus operandi: we organize stuff in our endeavours to make sense of it. But organizing stuff, finding in our experience of things the capacity of ordering, creating a system of approach or a methodology, does not make everything “science” as the term is colloquially or technically applied. Theologians need to step down from this erroneous exaltation of their work, and humbly acknowledge they are not scientists but troubadours. Better to be a songster for the Holy than an alchemist dandling one’s own thoughts.
Thus, the equilibristic logic of dogmatics need not exert or evaginate the powers of any mind. Song, poetry, art are all lost in their analysis. They exist to breathe in, not to dissect. Love is alive in the living it, not in its deciphering. In the language of philosophy, love is about being, not knowing. I ultimately say “I” not because I know, or doubt, or believe (as some philosophers would have it), but because I experience myself valued in and as I am, because I experience myself as beheld and held, as loved.
Love is always personal, a relationship with a person. (The “love” of a thing is merely a misplaced projection, a catoptric apprehension.) We cannot love the absoluteness of all reality, but the heart knowing itself in its very depths loved, cannot know itself loved without returning love. Thus the absolute of all reality is received into the imagining, into the image-making mind, as a person–Thee I love; and with Thee Thy works. This love of the absoluteness is the essential affirmation of self as bounded in the primacy of affirmation and creativity.
In the attribution of personhood to the absoluteness of all reality, in this cosmic attribution, all the attributes of personhood are given. Thus one can envision the absoluteness of all reality as creator, or parent, or lover, or supreme lord. But always, that depiction, that mask, that attribution, renders to absoluteness a “Thou”. That “Thou” we presume to address is neither a person like unto any of daily encounter, nor the pure abstraction of the idea of person, but in itself the very font and source of personhood. Here is not a “you” or even an “I”, but the definitive and absolute “I am”.
If one wishes to take that dogmatic, that fundamentally ritualistic action and properly receive it into prayer and the exercise of spiritual integration and growth, then one must submit to one of these attributes to the exclusion of all others. One must decide how one will orient oneself to the absolute. One must select an orbit and be self-confirmed in it. One’s inclinations may lead one to be embraced by the vista of the lover; another may be called out by the vision of parent or lord. The vision is relative to the individual. But the necessity of a singularity of vision is absolute.
We have the testimony of the great mystics that there may come a time in prayer or in grace wherein the attribute(s) set before the absolute will dissolve, and one may experience unfiltered unity with the absoluteness. Jesus beholds himself the Christ, the life begetting spirit. Prince Gautama is extinguished the Buddha. The absoluteness of all reality is here—beyond experience, knowledge, hope–not other than that which is named self. “I think therefore I am”, “I can be deceived therefore I am”, “I believe therefore I am”–all these portals of the mind to the designation of self now operate in a purer, a purest light, all opposites are transcended, the dichotomy twixt being and nothingness dissolves, meaning fades away, and if any word can be used here, all that remains is the absolute knowing itself as its own heart and mind, beyond word, beyond all, and yet, this absolute is as much incessant and timeless self-binding as endless and everlasting creativity and creating. Thus, we reach a point, really a pointlessness, a consistently dissipating transparency, wherein our logic and our language are rebuked and truth claims that this absolute both is and is not—purest All and purest Nothing.
Aquinas formulated the proposition thus: the essence of God is existence. Cajetan, his great repriser, observed essence does not exist. I shall leave it to you to complete the syllogism and to find your own understanding as to why logic, not God, is herein exhausted. The hearts and minds of East and West are not at variance on this matter, they simply sing in different tongues and songs lend themselves not to translation.