03 October 2014

There is no clean intellectual coherence...

The frustration we feel when trying to explain or justify God, whether to ourselves or to others, is a symptom of knowledge untethered from innocence, of words in which no silence lives, of belief occurring wholly on a human plane. Innocence returns us to the first call of God, to any moment in our lives when we were rendered mute with awe, fear, wonder. Absent this, there is no sense in arguing for God in order to convince others, for we ourselves are not convinced...

There is no clean intellectual coherence, no abstract ultimate meaning to be found, and if this is not recognized, then the compulsion to find such certainty becomes its own punishment. This realization is not the end of theology, but the beginning of it: trust no theory, no religious history or creed, in which the author's personal faith is not actively at risk.

Christian Wiman - My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer




...And Wiman quoting Rainer Maria Rilke

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns relationship, and there arises a namelessness that must begin once more in our relations with God if we are to be complete and without evasion. The experience of feeling him recedes behind an infinite delight in everything that can be felt; all attributes are taken away from God, who is no longer sayable, and fall back into creation, into love and death.


...And Further Wiman




You know the value of your doubt by the quality of the disquiet that it produces in you. Is it a furious, centrifugal sort of anxiety that feeds on itself and never seems to move you in any one direction? Is it an ironclad compulsion to refute, to find in even the most transfiguring experiences, your own or others', some rational or "psychological" explanation? Is it an almost religious commitment to doubt itself, an assuredness that absolute doubt is the highest form of faith? There is something static ans self-enthralled about all these attitudes. Honest doubt, what I would call devotional doubt, is marked, it seems to me, by three qualities: humility, which makes one's attitude impossible to celebrate; insufficiency, which makes it impossible to rest; and mystery, which continues to tug you upward - or at least outward - even in your lowest moments. Such doubt is painful - more painful, in fact, than any of the other forms - but its pain is active rather than passive, purifying rather than stultifying. Far beneath it, no matter how severe its drought, how thoroughly your skepticism seems to have salted the ground of your soul, faith, durable faith, is steadily taking root. 

1 comment:

  1. Good quotes and presentstion. Two connections appears in the strugle for certainty: one is science, particularly physics. The same strugle shows up trying to reach understanding and certainty. The religious and the rational quests are similar; one balances the other in a sea of wonder and beauty.
    The other connection is the reality of the life and words of the Manifestations. They are very similar to the "reality" shown in for.instance, particle physics or relativity. Both touches in the horizon The certainty you get in one os similar.to the.one.you get in the other. There is a mistery or fuzzy vision that elevates you

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