Paul Elie's book The Life You Save May Be Your Own (see the sidebar), combines literary crticism and biography. It is an account of the life and thought of four mid 20th Century American Catholic writers and activists, (Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy). He weaves four lives together in a spiritual narrative that explores the dynamic sources of energy in the spirituality of these four very different people.
Here is Elie commenting on a decisive moment in Thomas Merton's conversion, his discovery of God as necessarily beyond the conceptual controls of human thought. While reading The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson,
Merton found a conception of God that he thought plausible and appealing. This God was not a Jehovah or a divine lawgiver, not a plague-sending potentate or a scourge of prophets, not the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ or the stern Judge waiting just past the gate at the end of time, but the vital animating principle of reality – 'pure act,' being itelf or per se, existence in perfection, outside of space and time, transcending all human imagery, calmly steadily, eternally being. "What a relief it was for me now to dsicover not only that no idea of ours, let alone any image, could adequately represent God, but also that we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him."
Two things about this – first this was the kind of reconfiguration of the inner life of intellect and devotion, that developed in Merton into theological humility, and therefore spiritual integrity.
But second, there is serious thought to be given to Merton's overstated but still valid warning, "we should not allow ourselves to be satisfied with any such knowledge of Him." The abstract and near impersonal conception of God articulated in classic mystical thought, can construe God as the Beyond in the Beyond and thereby render God remote and inaccessible. This is not necessarily an improvement on simplistic reductionist conceptions, even distortions, clung to by those desperate to make God more graspable.
Elie's comment above includes amongst reductionist claims, "the heavenly Father of Jesus Christ". It is precisely the Incarnation which creates in Christian thought the meeting place of the beyond and the now, the divine and the human, the incomprehensible and the revealed.
"Being itself begins to be" as Charles Wesley's nativity hymn so succinctly puts it. "In Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell….the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us….God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself…."
Advent – the liturgical Alpha point of the Christian Year, the four week journey into the mystery of knowing the love of God….that passes knowledge.
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