Circle Dance of Time, The [1 ed.] 026802605X, 9780268026059

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The Circle Dance of Time

JOHN S. DUNNE

The Circle Dance of Time

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved Copyright © 2010 by University of Notre Dame Published in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunne, John S., 1929– The circle dance of time / John S. Dunne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ( p. ) and index. ISBN-13: 978-268-02605-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-268-02605-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Spiritual life—Catholic Church. I. Title. BX23050.3.D86 2010 248.4'82—dc22 2010007651

∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Contents

Preface

vii

Reasons of the Heart 1 Heart as Center of Stillness Heart Surrounded by Silence God Sensible to the Heart God Kindling the Heart God Illumining the Mind

3 12 21 23 31

The Vision of Emanation 41 “A melody that sings itself ” 43 “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces” The Vision of Return 63 “Our heart is restless” 65 “Until it rests in you” 74 The Far Point on the Circle 83 Love Passing through Loneliness 84 Light Passing through Darkness 94 Life Passing through Death 104 The Vision of God with Us Circle Songs Notes Index

135 159

129

115

52

Preface

D

“

eath is long,” the ghost of Darius says, “and there is no music.” 1 If there is life, on the other hand, and there is music at journey’s end, then the journey of life is a circle dance where “In my beginning is my end,” as T. S. Eliot says, and “In my end is my beginning.”2 I was originally going to call this book Faith Seeking Understanding, echoing Saint Anselm and Karl Barth, but as I got into it I changed the name to The Circle Dance of Time. Using the metaphor of the circle dance, I wanted to describe the great circle implied in the words of the old Bedouin to Lawrence of Arabia, “The love is from God and of God and towards God.”3 I found that circle also in the Gospel of John in the words “The wind blows where it wills and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes” (John 3:8), and in the words “I came forth from the Father and am come into the world; again, I leave the world and go to the Father” (John 16:28). In the Enneads of Plotinus the great circle is actually a dance, a choral dance he says, around the One.4 I thought myself of the circle dance, the folk dance where the women form an inner circle holding hands and moving clockwise and the men an outer circle moving counterclockwise, and when the music stops the person opposite you is your partner for the next dance. Circling implies a center, “the still point of the turning world,” and indeed “we all have within us a center of vii

stillness surrounded by silence,”5 as Dag Hammarskjöld says in his little brochure for the Meditation Room at the UN. This center of stillness is the heart, I want to say, not just the seat of emotions but the place where thought and feeling meet and unite. So “the reasons of the heart” that Pascal speaks of would be the way things appear to us when we are in our center of stillness. We are not always there. When I am upset or afraid or depressed, “I am outside my heart, looking for the way back in.”6 When I am dwelling in my center of stillness surrounded by silence, on the other hand, then I can see things aright and make sound judgments and decisions. And the silence surrounding our center of stillness I take to be an encompassing presence. “Here is what faith is” (Voila que c’est la foi), Pascal says, “God sensible to the heart” (Dieu sensible au coeur).7 I suppose it is the presence of God that is sensible to the heart, the silence surrounding our center of stillness. That presence, that silence can kindle the heart, illumine the mind. How? The silence speaks when the heart speaks. So it is by waiting, waiting on the heart, waiting on the silence that we come to a kindling and an illumining. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” Malebranche says,8 and attention here takes the form of a listening silence. I think of a passage in Four Quartets where T. S. Eliot speaks of waiting, “I said to my soul, be still, and wait . . . So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”9 If we wait in a listening silence, “the darkness shall be the light,” that is, the mind will be illumined, “and the stillness the dancing,” the heart will be kindled. Silence can be terrifying. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me,” Pascal says, “the infinite immensity of spaces I do not know and that do not know me.”10 The answer is in the Upanishads, God in the heart viii

Preface

and God in the universe are one and the same. The silence surrounding our center of stillness, according to this, and the eternal silence of these infinite spaces are one and the same. A listening silence can be our relation to the universe then, as well as to the heart. What is there to be heard in this listening silence? The music of the spheres? The speech of all things? Maybe we could say the silence speaks just as the silence does surrounding our center of stillness, and what the silence says is simply the presence, “I am.” “Our heart is restless until it rests in you,” Saint Augustine’s saying at the beginning of his Confessions,11 comes true when we are in our center of stillness surrounded by silence. When “I am outside my heart, looking for the way back in,” I feel the restlessness of desire and imagination, moving from one thing to another, from one person to another. How to go from restlessness to rest? “The oarsman sat quietly and praised the voyage,” Werner Herzog says at the beginning and end of a screenplay.12 To sit quietly and praise the voyage I have to enter into my center of stillness surrounded by silence. Praising the voyage means praising the whole journey of my life. That seems to be what Saint Augustine is doing in his Confessions, confession as praise, coming to peace with the journey of his life. If the journey of life is a great circle, however, from and of and towards God, there is a far point on the circle, like the far point on the earth’s orbit around the sun, where love must pass through loneliness, light must pass through darkness, life must pass through death. “The oarsman sat quietly and praised the journey,” as Herzog says at the beginning, “and the oarsman sat still and praised the voyage,” as he says at the end of his screenplay, means praising even the passage through loneliness and darkness and death, for the name of the screenplay is “Every man for himself and God against all.” I can Preface ix

praise the passage if it is love passing through loneliness, if it is light passing through darkness, if it is life passing through death. I can praise the far point if it is on the great circle. “Thinking is thanking” then, as in the mystic saying, in sitting quietly and praising the voyage. “Every man for himself and God against all” gives way in “Thinking is thanking” to a journey with God in time, a vision of “God with us.” The turning point is a “Thanks!” and “Yes!” like that in Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings where he says “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”13 The “Thanks!” and “Yes!” is a passing from a standpoint of autonomy to a standpoint of prayer. There is a natural progression from before others to before self to before God, as in Saint Augustine’s life from the standpoint of the rhetorician to that of his Soliloquies to that of his Confessions. Autonomy is a cutoff at the standpoint before self. “Every man for himself and God against all” goes with that cutoff autonomy. Prayer then and “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul” is a breakthrough into a journey with God, a vision of “God with us.” This is the argument then of my Circle Dance of Time. The idea is like that of Picasso’s painting of a circle dance of peoples of the world in color, black and white and yellow and red, around the dove of peace. And there is music. I have composed a song cycle at the end in rondo form, twenty-one songs, and I have the music for the first song in the text of my chapter “The Vision of Emanation.” It is the key to the others, In the beginning is the song, and it will be in the ending, now a presence x Preface

in our hearing, now an icon in our seeing, all creating, emanating, and evolving —the Word of life out of silence all around.

Preface xi

Reasons of the Heart

We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence. —Dag Hammarskjöld

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hen it comes to faith, “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know,”1 Pascal says. Those reasons, though, can become known to the mind, I believe, and insight or understanding is what happens when reasons of the heart do become known to the mind. “Faith seeking understanding,” a phrase of Saint Anselm going back to Saint Augustine, is a seeking to know the reasons of the heart for believing in God and in Christ and in eternal life. Faith seeking understanding, Karl Barth says, is the method of theology.2 Years ago when I was studying theology in Rome, I thought of going to Basel to study with Karl Barth, but when I learned that would not be possible, I thought instead of staying in Rome and studying with Bernard Lonergan. From him I learned the idea of understanding as insight into image.3 Thus faith seeking understanding became for me faith seeking insight into the great images of 1

faith, especially life and light and love, the three great metaphors of the Gospel of John. Later I came to my own notion of insight as what happens when the reasons of the heart become known to the mind. It became essential for me then to explore the realm of the heart and to understand the human heart and the heart’s desire. “For if there is anything that stands out more clearly than all else in the vital choices of this book,” Helen Luke says of Tolkien’s trilogy, “it is that the right choice always springs from the heart—the word being used here to mean, not the seat of emotions, but the place where cold intellect and the hot desires meet, are honored, and then unite in true objective feeling.”4 What then is the heart, if not the seat of emotions? It is the central place where thought and feeling meet, where both are respected, and where they unite with one another. What is that central place? I think of the opening sentence of Dag Hammarskjöld’s brochure for the Meditation Room at the UN, “We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.”5 That center of stillness I take to be the heart in such phrases as “the heart’s desire” and “the reasons of the heart,” and the surrounding silence I take to be the surrounding presence of God. It is true, Pascal’s own understanding of the reasons of the heart is, as he says, “Heart, instinct, principles” (Coeur, instinct, principes).6 If I take the heart to be our “center of stillness surrounded by silence,” though, I can say that when we are in our center of stillness we see things as they truly are, but when we are off center, caught up in anger or anxiety or depression, our vision is distorted. So what Pascal had in mind does come true for us in our center of stillness, and what he goes on to say about faith as “God sensible to the heart” (Dieu sensible au coeur)7 coincides with our taking the surrounding silence to be the surrounding presence of God. 2 Reasons of the Heart

Heart as Center of Stillness “How do you find that center of stillness?” students of mine asked me, visiting me in California where I was on sabbatical leave. “Let’s go to the Muir Woods,” I replied, “for the giant redwoods will take you right into your center of stillness.” And so they did, and so do other situations where you encounter nature, sitting by a lake or by the seashore or looking at the mountains or looking up into the night sky. Once you have found your center of stillness, you can find it again more easily, and when you have found it again and again, you can begin to live in it. Then a further question begins to arise, how to live in your center of stillness. All our troubles, Pascal says, stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room.8 Sitting quietly in a room, nevertheless, can mean dwelling in our center of stillness. Our inability to sit quietly in a room is our inability to stay in our center of stillness, our inability to sustain that stillness and its surrounding silence. “At first the practice of inward prayer is a process of alternation between outer things and the Inner Light,” Thomas Kelly says in A Testament of Devotion, “Yet what is sought is not alternation, but simultaneity.”9 Those Quaker terms, inner light and alternation and simultaneity, are very helpful here. When I am in my center of stillness, I see things as they truly are, I see them in the “inner light,” but I am not always there, I am sometimes off center, caught up in my hopes and fears, thus “alternation” between being in and being out, and yet I seek to live there in my center of stillness surrounded by the silence of the divine presence and thus in “simultaneity” between my outer life and my inner life. I see then my own task at this point in my life, to learn to dwell in my center of stillness surrounded by the silent presence of God. Reasons of the Heart 3

We are travelers rather than dwellers, Bruce Chatwin argues against Pascal in The Songlines; the human being is a “wanderer in the scorching and barren wilderness of this world.”10 Thus the Songlines are tracks across aboriginal Australia, each with its own guiding song. We are both dwellers and travelers, I want to say instead, and our center of stillness surrounded by silence is the quiet eye of a moving storm, the quiet eye of a hurricane. So we dwell in our center of stillness, and yet we travel in space and in time. The reasons of the heart, therefore, are the reasons of dwelling and also the reasons of traveling. There is a unity nonetheless that I call “the heart’s desire.” Thus there is the plurality of the reasons of the heart, and yet there is the unity of the heart’s desire. What is the heart’s desire? For the traveler it is adventure, for the dweller, serenity, but if we consider the transcendence of longing, how our heart is never satisfied with any finite object, how “our heart is restless until it rests in you,” going for adventure and for serenity leads to living in the eye of the hurricane, living in the quiet eye of the moving storm, living in our moving center of stillness surrounded by silence. There we find “the inner light,” but we do not see the light itself. Instead we see things in the light. Do we long to see the light itself? If we do long to see the light itself, then our heart’s desire is well expressed in Newman’s lines “Lead, Kindly Light,” Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home— Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me.11

4 Reasons of the Heart

It is true, the inner light can lead us while we see things in the light and do not see the light itself. The experience is that of “catching the light” as Arthur Zajonc says 12—just as physical light is unseen as it passes through the darkness of outer space, unseen except where it strikes an object, so the inner light too is seen only when it shows us the way or the next step on the way. All the same, our consciousness of the inner light illumining our way, that it is a “kindly light,” can lead to a desire to see the light itself, and dwelling in our center of stillness surrounded by the silence of the divine presence is a repose in light. “Wisdom is repose in light,” Joseph Joubert says.13 The inner light leads us in our restless traveling in space and time, and wisdom is our rest, our dwelling in it, reposing in light. What is “repose in light”? Maurice Blanchot commenting on Joubert’s words says “repose in light can be— tends to be—peace through light, light that appeases and that gives peace.” On the other hand, he adds “but repose in light is also repose—deprivation of all external help and impetus—so that nothing comes to disturb, or to pacify, the pure movement of light.”14 The two meanings are like heaven and hell. I met a man on a plane once who said the German word Hell means “light” (I looked up the word afterwards and found the adjective hell means “bright, shining, clear, distinct, light, fair, pale as in pale ale”), and he said that is what hell is to him, counsel without comfort, without consolation. “I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time,” Wendell Berry says. “It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven.”15 The dead pass like Dante, according to this, from hell to

Reasons of the Heart 5

heaven. I suppose the living too, again like Dante, who was living when he made his journey, may pass from hell to heaven in this same way. If hell, as my friend on the plane said, is light, counsel without comfort, without consolation, then heaven too is light, but counsel with comfort, with consolation. The Greek word parakleitos, describing the Holy Spirit in the Gospel of John, is translated Counselor in the Revised Standard Version, but Comforter in the King James Version. We go from counsel to comfort, and the light becomes the “kindly light.” “Wisdom is repose in light,” Joubert’s saying, comes true especially when other lights in life go out. It is like the light given to Frodo in Tolkien’s trilogy, “May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”16 Suppose death is imminent. That is indeed a time “when all other lights go out.” Or suppose you are aging and ways once open to you are closed. Then indeed the inner light is “a light to you in dark places,” for as the “kindly light” it is able to lead you one step at a time on an adventure with God in time. As Newman concludes, So long Thy power hath blest me, sure it still Will lead me on, O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till The night is gone.

If repose in light is wisdom, is it what Vico calls “poetic wisdom”? Certainly I find it in poetry, in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in Eliot’s Four Quartets, in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Light is one of the three great metaphors in the Gospel of John, life and light and love, and so we could assume repose in light is also a metaphor and thus belongs to poetic wisdom. I wonder too if repose in light is as near as we can come in this life to the blessedness of “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”17 What does 6 Reasons of the Heart

it mean to be pure in heart? “Purity of heart is to will one thing,” Kierkegaard says.18 Is willing one thing the same as seeing God? Not unless the one thing is the will of God. “His will is our peace” (la sua voluntate e nostra pace), Dante says,19 and that is how we can tell what the will of God is at every crossroad—it is the way of peace. When I live in the peace of God’s will, I am able to see with the heart, and “it is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” as Antoine de Saint Exupéry says; “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”20 If “purity of heart is to will one thing,” does that mean the heart is the same as the will? No, I would say, it is our center of stillness surrounded by silence. Our will emerges through the exercise of choice, but there comes a moment when we pass from will to willingness, as when Dag Hammarskjöld writes in his journal, “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”21 At that moment our will becomes conformable to our center of stillness, and it is then that we come to the purity of willing one thing. The self as will becomes one with the deep self of our center of stillness. It is, as Gabriel Marcel says, “the subordination of self to a superior reality, a reality at my deepest level, more truly me than I am myself.”22 Actually Marcel here is defining love, where will yields to something other than will, and thus to see with the heart is to see with the eyes of love. There is a fine rabbinic story about seeing God. “In the olden days there were men who saw the face of God. Why don’t they any more?” a student asked a rabbi. “Because nowadays no one can stoop so low,” the rabbi replied.23 Indeed “the subordination of self to a superior reality” means stooping low, and with our ideal of autonomy “nowadays no one can stoop so low” unless we renounce our autonomy, unless I recognize “a reality at my deepest level, more truly me than I am myself.” Our Reasons of the Heart 7

autonomy makes us incapable of seeing God, and if Marcel’s definition of love is right, our autonomy makes us incapable as well of love. It is true, even if I do stoop so low, renouncing autonomy, subordinating myself to a superior reality, “a reality at my deepest level, more truly me than I am myself,” my seeing is only “catching the light,” seeing things in the light and not yet seeing the light itself. All the same, my finding in love “a reality at my deepest level, more truly me than I am myself” is an answer to Saint Augustine’s prayer in his Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!” (noverim me! noverim te!)24 Learning to love is learning to find that reality, learning to find my center of stillness, to find the surrounding silence, learning to dwell in my center of stillness, learning to move with it as the quiet eye of a moving storm. In the language of the Upanishads this would be learning to find God in the heart (Atman) who is the same as God in the universe (Brahman). “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential,” Kierkegaard says; “if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair?”25 But there is an eternal consciousness in us, Kierkegaard wants to say and I want to say, eternal in the sense of timeless. To say there is sounds like the Atman of the Upanishads, God in the heart, but Kierkegaard is thinking rather of an I and thou with God, the I and thou of prayer. The I there is indeed “a reality at my deepest level more truly me than I am myself.” It is “a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” but God is the thou of prayer and the presence of God is the surrounding silence.

8 Reasons of the Heart

“If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim,” Kierkegaard goes on, “if an eternal oblivion always lurked hungrily for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches—how empty and devoid of comfort would life be!” To be sure, Kierkegaard here is talking about rescuing someone from oblivion by remembering as the poet remembers the hero, and Kierkegaard here is the poet and Abraham the hero. Goethe rescues himself from oblivion by turning the truth of his own life into poetry. Saint Augustine does so by turning the truth of his life into prayer, and that leads into a more profound sense of rescue, like that of Enoch in Genesis, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.”26 There is a further step then, from prayer to indwelling, from the I and thou of prayer to the I in them and thou in me of indwelling. “We can know more than we can tell,”27 Michael Polanyi says, and we do so by indwelling. That formula, “I in them and thou in me,”28 is from the Gospel of John, and it seems to combine the I and thou of prayer with the in them and in me of indwelling. The I and thou of prayer is a relationship with the eternal, but the in them and in me of indwelling is the eternal in us, and so it becomes for us the basis of eternal life, and the words describing it are “words of eternal life.”29 Indwelling brings us back to the heart as “a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” Dag Hammarskjöld ends his brochure on the Meditation Room at the UN by saying “It is for those who come here to fill the void with what

Reasons of the Heart 9

they find in their center of stillness,” for the Meditation Room with its bare rock of iron ore and the beam of light falling upon it is like an emptiness waiting to be filled. I take it that Buddhists will let the emptiness be empty, Jews and Muslims will fill it with an I and thou relation with God, Hindus and Christians will fill it with indwelling—Hindus with “God dwells in you as you,” Christians with “Christ dwells in you as you.”30 Following Christ, I believe, is making his God my God, as he says to Mary Magdalene, “my Father and your Father, my God and your God,”31 and entering thus into his relation with God means his dwelling in us and God dwelling in him, I in them and thou in me. What then are the reasons of the heart? And what is the heart’s desire? In its primordial form the heart’s desire is for eternal life—that is the theme of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh. This may be the reason for the transcendence of longing, that our heart is never satisfied with anything finite, that as Saint Augustine says in prayer “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”32 At the same time “our heart is restless” may be the first and fundamental reason of the heart, and “until it rests in you” may be the second and the fulfillment of the heart’s desire. The two can be separated, as when Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit speak of “the restlessness of desire”33 without any thought of “until it rests in you,” and on the other hand Joseph Joubert speaks of “repose in light” without mention of the restlessness of the heart or thought of repose in light as repose in God. Again, “it is for those who come here to fill the void with what they find in their center of stillness,” to fill it with “the restlessness of desire,” to fill it with “repose in light.” There is a unity, nevertheless, in this variety of experience, a possible unity. I call it rest in restlessness. It is the poise of a whirling gyroscope, the quiet eye of a moving 10 Reasons of the Heart

storm, the still point of a turning world. It is the center of stillness we all have within us surrounded by silence, understood as a moving center, leading us on a journey with God in time. So there is repose and yet restless movement, repose in light and yet the restlessness of desire. Wisdom then is this repose in restless movement. By accepting my own restlessness I come to rest in it. Wisdom, though, is in dwelling in our center of stillness, dwelling in it and moving with it. That is how it is rest in restlessness. It is the wisdom thus of dwelling and of traveling. Buddhist wisdom is in letting the emptiness of the empty center be empty. Jewish and Islamic wisdom is in filling it with an I and thou relation with God. Hindu and Christian wisdom is in filling it with the divine indwelling. Here again we come upon “the variety of religious experience” as William James calls it. “There is an ancient saying that the sense of a vessel is not in its shell but in the void,” Hammarskjöld says. “So it is with this room,” and then he goes on to draw the conclusion we have been considering, “It is for those who come here to fill the void with what they find in their center of stillness.” I take it then that there is a common experience here, that of our center of stillness surrounded by silence. It is an insight into the experience proper to each of the religions. Passing over to the religions therefore is possible in virtue of this common experience of a center of stillness surrounded by silence, but passing over means entering into the insight proper to each religion. There is a unity of religious experience, therefore, as well as “the varieties of religious experience,” and the unity is that of the heart as our center of stillness surrounded by silence, while the varieties are those of the reasons of the heart known in the various religions. There is a coming back, moreover, from these reasons to those of one’s own religion after passing Reasons of the Heart 11

over to the others, a coming back enriched with new understanding. For all our understanding, though, there is still the unknown. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,”34 Pascal says. Heart Surrounded by Silence If “we all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” I take it that the surrounding silence is the presence of God. In Buddhism, to be sure, the surrounding silence is simply silence. If I take the silence to be the presence of God, however, I am surrounded by the presence, and the practice of this awareness is what is called “the practice of the presence of God.” It means I am walking with God and God is walking with me. It is true, taking the surrounding silence as the presence of God is an interpretation, and yet living out that interpretation is a real experience. It is an experience of the name “Emmanuel (which means, God with us),”35 according to the Gospel of Matthew. “Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak,” Isak Dinesen says. “Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness.”36 Here the story is that of “God with us.” I think of the film King of Hearts set in a French village during the First World War.37 A Scottish soldier takes refuge in the local insane asylum when German soldiers come into the village. A German officer comes and asks the inmates each who they are, looking for enemy soldiers who might be hiding among them. One says “I am the Duke of Clubs” (Le Duc de Trefle) and the others name themselves for other playing cards. When he comes to the Scottish soldier (played by Alan Bates) he says “I am the King of Hearts.” The other inmates exclaim “The King of Hearts! 12 Reasons of the Heart

The King of Hearts!” After the soldiers leave, the inmates walk into the empty village and begin to take up their old occupations, barber, hairdresser, and the like, and “The King of Hearts” is king. Eventually soldiers return and the inmates go back to the asylum, and you are left wondering “Who is crazy?” Is it the inmates, who are happy and peaceful, or is it the soldiers, who are killing one another? When the film is over and the story is told, then the silence speaks. To me it says something about “God with us,” even tells the story of “God with us,” that he is “The King of Hearts” and those who follow him can seem crazy to a world that is busy destroying itself. He is a king, but of hearts—“my kingdom is not of this world.”38 Thus if we are faithful to the story of “God with us,” the surrounding silence will speak, will be for us the surrounding presence of God. “We can know more than we can tell,” as Polanyi says. We can tell the story of “God with us,” but we can know more, we can know the relationship of “God with us” by dwelling in it and God dwelling in us. We can know “I in them and thou in me.” Here I am, though, telling of it, but we cannot understand such telling except by entering into the relationship, as Saint Paul says to the Ephesians, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.”39 “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces” of Pascal’s saying doesn’t seem to imply the divine presence like the surrounding silence of our center of stillness. If we connect the latter with Atman or God in the heart and the former with Brahman or God in the universe, though, we could take “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” to be also the surrounding presence of God. What then of “God with us?” “I in them and thou in me” may be the key, “I in them” to God in the heart, “and thou in me” to God in the universe. Reasons of the Heart 13

If we read the Gospels side by side with the Upanishads, we find God in the heart, according to both, is one with God in the universe. “We listen to our inmost selves,” Martin Buber says, “and do not know which sea we hear murmuring.”40 The silence surrounding our center of stillness speaks, and so does “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” It speaks at least in the Gospels and in the Upanishads, and we “do not know which sea we hear murmuring.” Let us pass over then to the Upanishads and come back with new insight to the Gospels, (1) passing over to God in the universe (Brahman), (2) coming back to the God of Jesus (Abba), (3) passing over to God in the heart (Atman), and (4) coming back to Christ dwelling in the heart by faith (“I in them and thou in me”). To say God is personal or impersonal does not really describe God so much as our relationship with God. It is true, Pascal’s saying, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” would suggest an impersonal God in the universe like Brahman. His own faith, nevertheless, was in a personal God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ. We can understand the God of the Upanishads, Brahman, by thinking simply of the unknown, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces,” the terror and the wonder of the unknown in the universe. What we are understanding then is not the unknown itself, as if we were coming to know it, but our relation to it, its terror and wonder for us, its “eternal silence,” “these infinite spaces.” To say it “frightens me” or it “terrifies me” points to my relationship with it but does not tell me what it is. The unknown is still the unknown to me. “How can the Knower be known?”41 the Upanishads ask, arguing there is no consciousness after death. There is no personal immortality, according to this, but there is an impersonal immortality insofar as you are one with the 14 Reasons of the Heart

Knower, “Thou art That” (tat tvam asi).42 In both contexts the same example is used, that of salt being dissolved in water. When it is dissolved, you cannot see it but you can still taste the salt in the water. You are the salt; the Absolute is the water. There is no personal immortality, no consciousness after death, I gather, because there is no personal relationship with the Absolute, no I and thou, but only an impersonal relationship, only indwelling, “God dwells in you as you,”43 another way of saying “Thou art That.” “How can the Knower be known?” In no way except by a vision of God, as in the beatitude “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” What comes to light here is that the I and thou is essential to the hope of consciousness after death. “We do not know what God is” (nos non scimus de Deo quid est),44 Saint Thomas Aquinas says, and it is said of Saint Thomas that as a child he used to ask “What is God?” To know what God is for him would be to see God, as is promised to the pure in heart. The question of the Upanishads “How can the Knower be known?” seems to imply the same thing, that we do not know what God is, that God is the unknown. It is possible, nevertheless, to have a relationship with God, a relationship with the unknown. I take it then that it is possible to have an I and thou relationship with the unknown, to call the unknown “thou” or even “Abba” as Jesus did, and it is possible to have an indwelling relationship, to think of the unknown as dwelling in me as me, as in “Thou art That.” Coming back to the personal God of Jesus from the impersonal God of the Upanishads, we come back from an indwelling of the unknown in us to an I and thou with the unknown, but do we come back also to an indwelling? Viewing Jesus from the standpoint of Judaism, Martin Buber speaks of “unconditional relation in which the man calls his Thou Father in such a way that he himself is Reasons of the Heart 15

simply Son, and nothing else but Son,” but he adds “It is useless to seek to limit this I to a power in itself or this Thou to something dwelling in ourselves, and once again to empty the real, the present relation, of reality.”45 I want to say, though, that we come back not simply to I and thou but to indwelling as I in them and thou in me. This I in them is “power to be children of God”46 that Christ gives us, and thou in me is the divine indwelling in him. But does this “empty the real, the present relation, of reality?” Does it “limit this I” or “limit this thou?” It would limit this I and this thou if it were something we already have within us. It would “empty the real, the present relation, of reality,” empty “unconditional relation” of reality. I see the power and the indwelling, on the other hand, as something new that comes to us when we enter into the I and thou of Jesus with the unknown, “my Father and your Father,” as he says to Mary Magdalene, “my God and your God.” If I make his God my God, calling the unknown “Thou” and “Father,” then this power to become a child of God comes to me and the divine indwelling comes to me, as is promised in the Gospel of John, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”47 Entering into the I and thou of Jesus with God, therefore, leads us into the indwelling. “Whenever he says I he can only mean the I of the holy primary word that has been raised for him into unconditional being,” Buber goes on to say of Jesus. “If separation ever touches him, his solidarity of relation is the greater; he speaks to others only out of this solidarity.”48 Here Buber is interpreting the “I am” sayings of the Gospels in terms of I and thou. David Daube, also speaking from a Jewish standpoint, interprets them in terms of indwelling and has it that when Jesus says “I am” he is speaking of the Shekinah, the presence 16 Reasons of the Heart

of God.49 “If separation ever touches him . . .” refers to “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and the absence of God, but “his solidarity is the greater” in that even then Jesus is in a stance of prayer, crying out “My God, my God . . .” If we take I and thou alone, then as Martin Buber says, “I and thou abide; every man can say Thou and is then I, every man can say Father and is then Son: reality abides.”50 If we take indwelling alone, then as David Daube says the “I am” sayings are transcendent (“God is here”) but not personal (“It is I” or “I am he”).51 But if we put the two things together, I and thou and indwelling, we get something like orthodox Christianity, I in them and thou in me, “and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”52 Passing over then to God in the heart (Atman), we come to the four states described in the Upanishads: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep, and oneness (Atman).53 I wrote a song about this called “One”: O Wisdom, lead me from waking before you to sleep in your surrounding, and from finding rest to dreaming of you and me, and from dream to dreamless sleep together, and from one another to one.54

These four states seem to go with the idea there is no consciousness after death (in the same Upanishad) and “How can the Knower be known?” for what is affirmed here instead is oneness with the Knower, oneness with Atman, God in the heart. Reasons of the Heart 17

I wonder, though, if this union or communion with ultimate reality is not conscious. If we make a distinction between consciousness and perception, we could say that the union or communion is conscious without thereby saying it is perception of God as an object. I think of Nicholas of Cusa and his little treatise on The Vision of God,55 where he takes our vision of God to be not so much a vision of God as an object but a seeing of what God is seeing. It is, then, a consciousness of God but at the same time a perception of what God perceives, as if we were seeing with God’s eyes and feeling with God’s heart. Thus it is a oneness with God but it is nonetheless conscious. What is more, if we say there is oneness with God after death, we can also say there is consciousness after death. Thus another translation of the question “How can the Knower be known?” would be “How can the Perceiver be perceived?”56 I find a similar question coming up in the interpretation of The Cloud of Unknowing. “If, for example, the individual feels or experiences himself as being in unity with God,” Ira Progoff says of The Cloud, “that very feeling and awareness of an experience indicates that real unity has not yet been achieved.”57 There is, I think, a confusion here between consciousness and perception. “One who sets out for God does not find God,” Al-Alawi says, “but one who leans on God for support is not unaware of God.”58 There is a striving and a searching for God that keeps God at a distance, it is true, but there is a leaning and a relying on God that allows us to be aware of God. I imagine this is what Pascal means by “faith” when he says “Faith is God sensible to the heart.” It is a leaning or relying on God for support that is aware or conscious of God. This being “sensible to the heart” is an awareness or consciousness of God. If God in the universe (Brahman) and God in the heart (Atman) are one and the same, according to the Upani18 Reasons of the Heart

shads,59 this comes very near to an I and thou relationship with God, “and then he saw that Brahman was joy: for from joy all beings have come, by joy they all live, and unto joy they all return,”60 and if we can make a distinction here between consciousness and perception, then we can perhaps say “and unto joy they all return,” meaning they all return to a conscious union or communion with ultimate reality. Coming back then to Christ dwelling in the heart by faith, we are coming back from finding God in the universe (Brahman) one and the same as God in the heart (Atman) in the Upanishads to finding God in the heart (“I in them”) and God in the universe (“and thou in me”) one in the Gospels (“I and my Father are one”).61 This oneness is problematic from a viewpoint of pure I and thou like that of Martin Buber. “The doctrines of absorption appeal to the great sayings of identification,” he says, “the one above all to the Johannine ‘I and the Father are one,’ the other to the teaching of Sandilya: ‘The all-embracing, this is my Self in my very heart.’”62 What is missing in the viewpoint of pure I and thou, I believe, is the concept of indwelling. “I and my Father are one” is true in virtue of indwelling, “and thou in me.” When I enter into the relationship of Jesus with his Father and make his God my God, as he says to Mary Magdalene, “my Father and your Father, my God and your God,” then I enter into his I and thou with God and he lives in me and I in him—that is what I mean by indwelling. I see this as the sign of his divinity in that “only God enters into the soul” (solus Deus illabitur animae),63 and I believe we can say “Christ dwells in you as you” in Christianity as “God dwells in you as you” in Hinduism. The difference between the two sentences is that “God dwells in you as you” says indwelling while “Christ dwells in you as you” says indwelling and also I and thou, the Reasons of the Heart 19

relationship to “my Father and your Father, my God and your God.” Indwelling then and I and thou are among the principal reasons of the heart, if we take the “heart” to be “a center of stillness we all have within us surrounded by silence.” Earlier we said our heart is restless may be the first and fundamental reason of the heart, and until it rests in you may be the second and the fulfillment of heart’s desire, and we went on to say the two can be brought together in rest in restlessness like the poise of a whirling gyroscope. This poise, this rest may be through indwelling, and this by entering into the I and thou of Jesus with his Father, making his Father my Father, his God my God. And so we have five basic reasons of the heart: 1. our heart is restless 2. until it rests in you, 3. rest in restlessness, 4. indwelling, 5. I and thou.

“We can know more than we can tell,” Polanyi’s principle, comes into play here, though these reasons of the heart really belong to what we can know more than we can tell. The paradox here is my trying to tell of these things. We can tell the story of our lives and we can tell the story of Christ, the “good news” of the Gospel, but we can know our relationship with God when we enter into that of Christ, “I in them and thou in me.” Telling of that we are getting into what we can know more than we can tell, and so telling fails, except for the person who enters into the relationship and verifies it for himself. “If you believe, you will understand,”64 as Saint Augustine says, if you enter into the relationship yourself, you will understand, and that is the understanding that faith is seeking. 20 Reasons of the Heart

God Sensible to the Heart

Faith is God sensible to the heart —Pascal

I

“ t is the heart that senses God and not reason,” Pascal says. “Here is what faith is: God sensible to the heart not to reason.”1 As I understand it, the heart senses God and God is sensible to the heart when the heart is kindled, and when that happens the mind is also illumined. Faith is “God sensible to the heart and not to reason,” but when my heart is kindled with enthusiasm it is my mind that sees which way then to go. It is my mind that sees the road of the heart’s desire. What I mean by the kindling of the heart is the sort of thing Tolkien describes in Frodo at the beginning of his adventure: He did not tell Gandalf, but as he was speaking a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart— to follow Bilbo, and even perhaps to find him again. It was so strong that it overcame his fear: he could 21

almost have run out there and then down the road without his hat, as Bilbo had done on a similar morning long ago.2

This describes the kindling of the heart that enables the mind to see the road of the heart’s desire among the many possible roads one could take into the future. But where is God in all this? In a meditation called “The Heart Determines,” reflecting on the Psalmist’s words “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel,” Martin Buber says The guiding counsel of God seems to me to be simply the divine Presence communicating itself direct to the pure in heart. He who is aware of this Presence acts in the changing situations of his life differently from him who does not perceive this Presence. The Presence acts as counsel: God counsels by making known that He is present. He has led his son out of darkness into the light and now he can walk in the light. He is not relieved of taking and directing his own steps.3

When I ask God to guide me, God answers in effect “I am with you” but doesn’t tell me which way to go, and yet the Presence, “I am with you,” does somehow guide me. I act differently in the changing situations of my life than if I were unaware of the Presence. I am not relieved, though, of taking and directing my own steps. So “The Heart Determines” as Buber entitles this meditation. There is a gap here between “I am with you” and the kindling of the heart. One is relational, the Presence, but doesn’t tell us which way to go, and the other is experiential, the kindling of the heart, and does tell us. And so “The Heart Determines,” as Buber says, and yet it is God who kindles the heart, I want to say, and the grace of God 22 God Sensible to the Heart

is a kindling of the heart and an illumining of the mind. It is the Presence that kindles and illumines. God Kindling the Heart “Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward receive me to glory.” That is the full sentence from Psalm 73 Buber is commenting on, but he does not want to take the second half of it as referring to a life after death. “It is into His eternity that he who is pure in heart moves in death, and this eternity is something absolutely different from any kind of time.”4 I gather that what Buber is denying here is a life in time after death, but he is affirming a life in eternity. “In each Thou we address the eternal Thou,” he says in I and Thou, and “through contact with every Thou we are stirred with a breath of the Thou, that is, of eternal life.”5 Yet that breath is not a breath of immortality but a breath of eternal life. We have met a God, he says, “who is not ‘immortal’ but eternal.”6 What is the difference between immortality and eternal life? “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness,” Wittgenstein says, “then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”7 So immortality would be infinite temporal duration, but eternity would be timelessness. Eternal life, though, I would say, would not be simply living in the present but living in the Presence. Eternal life belongs to those who live in the Presence. So it begins already in this life, as is said in the Gospel of John, and continues on after death. Simply living in the present, if one could do it, would mean living without regret of the past and living without fear of the future. Living in the Presence, on the other hand, would mean living in an I and thou relationship with God, and saying like Dag Hammarskjöld “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” It would mean God Sensible to the Heart 23

relating to the past and the future but in a positive way, Thanks! and Yes! that allows a kindling of the heart and an illumining of the mind. If then eternal life belongs to those who live in the Presence, those who live in the Presence are open to the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. This kindling and illumining occur in the decisive situations of life, for instance the ones Martin Buber describes in The Way of Man: “heart-searching,” “the particular way,” “resolution,” “beginning with oneself,” “not to be preoccupied with oneself,” and “here where one stands.”8 I interpret: heart-searching to finding whom you love and what you are to do, to finding your particular way in life, making your decision, beginning with your own desires and abilities but going beyond that to where your desires and abilities coincide with the world’s need, and ending where you are starting or starting where you are ending (“In my beginning is my end / In my end is my beginning”).9 That ending, that beginning is in the center of stillness we all have within us surrounded by silence. I am taking the surrounding silence to be the Presence of God. So the Presence is relational, i.e., I am relating to the surrounding silence as the Presence. The experiential thing is the silence. The relational thing is the Presence. With this relation to the silence the heart may be kindled and the mind illumined. “Silence will speak,” as Isak Dinesen says, “where the storyteller is loyal to the story.”10 What story? Here the story of the Presence. According to Jung in his Answer to Job there are three phases in the story of the Presence: there is the unconscious Presence in the Many before Christ, then in Christ the conscious Presence in the One, and now after Christ the conscious Presence in the Many.11 The kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind take place, I would 24 God Sensible to the Heart

say, when we pass from the unconscious to the conscious Presence. Jung is assuming, though, the Presence is an experience. If we say instead the Presence is a relationship (and the silence is the experience), then we would have to say, with Martin Buber, before Christ there was an I and thou relationship with God, then in Christ an “unconditional relation” of I and thou, and now after Christ the participation of the Many in unconditional relation (“every man can say Thou and is then I, every man can say Father and is then Son”).12 When I make his Father my Father, his God my God, my heart may be kindled and my mind illumined. It is true, we usually come to this with our own God, our own notion of God. “God is like me,” as Zorba the Greek says, “only bigger and stronger and crazier.”13 So to make the God of Jesus my God requires a turning, a conversion of mind and heart and soul. The key here is “unconditional relation” as Buber calls it: “For it is the I of unconditional relation in which the man calls his Thou Father in such a way that he himself is simply Son, and nothing else but Son.”14 Is it possible for me to live in such a relationship with God? I gather it is not possible for me to do this, to live in such a relation by myself and without Christ. I can do it only in Christ and through Christ, so that “I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.”15 Am I doing violence to myself, though, in making his God my God? Jung has it that “historical trends led to the imitatio Christi, whereby the individual does not pursue his own destined road to wholeness, but attempts to imitate the way taken by Christ.”16 Here again the answer is in “unconditional relation.” If I make the God of Jesus my God, I am entering into an unconditional acceptance of who I am. It is true, I am also entering into an unconditional demand to love, but that means learning to love “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all God Sensible to the Heart 25

your might.” It is a call to wholeness, and so I am not missing my own destined road to wholeness. But is this my own destined road to wholeness? “We can know more than we can tell,” as Polanyi says.17 We can tell the story of Christ, but we can know more, namely his relationship with God. If I let Christ be the Christ, and do not try myself to be the Christ and to save the world, then I can enter into his relation with God and learn to love with all my heart and soul, and with all my mind, and with all my might. As I understand it then, the road I have taken in life will rejoin the road I have not taken, for me the way of words will rejoin the way of music, and this will indeed be my own destined road to wholeness. Following Christ, if it means entering into his relationship with God, making his God my God, can lead me from mimetic desire to heart’s desire and thus to a kindling of the heart. The spiritual adventure usually begins with mimetic desire, as Tolkien tells of Frodo, “a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart—to follow Bilbo and even perhaps to find him again.” So too a great desire to follow Christ may flame up in my heart, to follow him and even perhaps to find him again. Following this desire, mimetic as it is, I am led on to make his Father my Father, his God my God, and thus to learn to love with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my might, and as I learn to love, mimetic desire becomes heart’s desire, and I find myself on my own destined road to wholeness. Thus in the end I am able to say like the old Tolstoy, “God is my desire.”18 Starting with mimetic desire, seeing what others want and wanting what they want, say I am inspired by reading the lives of saints, as I actually was by the lives of Saint Francis and Saint Thomas as told by G. K. Chesterton, how Saint Francis was in love with God and how Saint 26 God Sensible to the Heart

Thomas when told “Ask what I shall give you” said “Nothing, Lord, but you.” The mimetic desire to be myself in love with God and to seek God alone leads right into the transcendence of longing, how “you have made us for yourself,” as Saint Augustine says to God, “and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” At the same time I feel the restlessness itself leading away in every direction, like Lord Ronald who “flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions.”19 There is already a kindling of the heart in being inspired by the lives of others, though the desire is mimetic. My heart was kindled reading Chesterton’s chapter “The Real Life of Saint Thomas”20 on Saint Thomas’s inner life of prayer. I too wanted to have a “real life” like that, and I too wanted to be in love with God like Saint Francis. As I came to have a “real life” and to be in love with God, my heart’s desire was kindled. Mimetic desire, though it is a kindling of the heart, leaves an unkindled residue, but heart’s desire is a kindling of the whole heart. Learning to love, nevertheless, comes about in stages. There is loving with your mind, coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and returning to God, and there is loving with your heart and soul. For me the first thing was learning to love with my mind, for that touches the heart with its peacefulness of vision and opens the way to loving with your heart. These then are the preliminary steps in learning to love, being inspired by the lives of others and coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and returning to God, for as the old Bedouin told Lawrence of Arabia, “The love is from God, and of God, and towards God.”21 Being inspired by the lives of others is a kindling of the heart, and coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and returning to God is an illumining of the mind. The vision is one of a great circle that goes God Sensible to the Heart 27

“from and of and towards” God, and the lives take place on that great circle where, as Wendell Berry says, “even love must pass through loneliness.”22 There is a far point on the circle, as you go around, where love must pass through loneliness, and that is where you pass from the preliminary to the later and more decisive stages in learning to love. In his poem “Dark Night” Saint John of the Cross speaks of “the way and manner which the soul follows upon the road of the union of love with God.”23 He is calling the far point on the circle a “dark night” but at the same time saying the passage through loneliness is on the great circle of “the road of the union of love with God.” The passage through loneliness is twofold, it seems to me, the loneliness of the prospect of death and the loneliness of loss and letting go. Learning to love with all your heart comes of love passing through the loneliness of facing the prospect of death. Learning to love with all your soul comes of love passing through the loneliness of loss and letting go. It is at this far point of loneliness, it seems, that you become aware not just of a kindling of the heart but of God kindling the heart, In the happy night, in secret, when none saw me, nor I beheld aught, without light or guide, save that which burned in my heart.24

Learning to love with all my heart came for me with life opening up before me all the way to death. I had been living in my mind, but the realization that I would die someday, when this became real and vivid to me, pulled me down into my heart. I imagine the more normal way of being pulled into the heart is by falling in love, but it was death rather than love that did it for me, though once I began to live in my heart I became vulnerable to love. 28 God Sensible to the Heart

Heidegger’s earlier thought seems to focus on this awareness that comes of life opening up before you all the way to death. Dasein, “being there,” is his term for human existence. “Dasein as human life,” he says, “is primarily being possible.”25 You aren’t able to “be there” fully, he thinks, until your life opens up before you all the way to death and you choose or discover your way in life, your “life project.” Learning to love with all your soul, as I understand it, means learning detachment in love, something I found very difficult, for it meant passing through the loneliness of loss and letting go. I think again of Heidegger here as I search for words to describe this, his later thought where the essential word is Gelassenheit, “letting be” or “releasement.” If Dasein, “being there,” is the essential word in his early thought, Gelassenheit, “letting be,” is the essential word in his later thought, as his understanding of Being goes from “being there” to “letting be.” Along with “letting be” he speaks of “openness to the mystery.”26 I find both of these phrases helpful in trying to make sense of loss and letting go in my life. I have to let be, let the person I have lost be, and I have to be open to the mystery in our relationship. As I learn to let be and be open to the mystery, I learn to love with all my soul—the most difficult step in learning to love. Learning to love “with all your might” then is the final step in learning to love, and it seems to mean learning to love with your body, as in the words “And David danced before the Lord with all his might.”27 For me it meant a return to music, for the road I had taken in life was the way of words, writing and teaching, and my road not taken was the way of music, composing and performing. So in my later years I returned to music, composing song and dance cycles, and though I did not do the singing and dancing myself but only played the piano God Sensible to the Heart 29

accompaniment, still I seemed to participate in the exhilaration of the dance. More generally, learning to love “with all your might” seems to mean letting the road not taken in life somehow rejoin the road taken. How this is to be done, though, is a question that seems to call for a kindling of the heart and an illumining of the mind. Words and music have a relation to each other, though there are “songs without words,” as Mendelssohn calls them, and there are words without music. It may be, nevertheless, that “the world’s first languages were in song,”28 as Vico said, and it may be that the separate evolution of words and music is headed for a convergence. Inspiration in words and music is no doubt a kindling of the heart, and so the reunion of words and music will require indeed a kindling of the heart. I see such inspiration in the last works of Beethoven, in his last symphony and his last string quartet ending in words and music instead of music alone. I don’t yet see how to achieve a reunion, like the world’s first languages in song, but I imagine there is a way. I see a parallel to this in Einstein’s search in his later years to unify gravitation and electromagnetism in one general field theory. His efforts apparently failed, for a classical field theory, it seemed, could not account for quantum phenomena. “However that may be,” Einstein said, “Lessing’s comforting word stays with us: the aspiration to truth is more precious than its assured possession.”29 Indeed, “the aspiration to truth” is a kindling of the heart, but “its assured possession” is an illumining of the mind. There is a kindling of the heart in Einstein’s quest and in my quest, it seems, but not yet an illumining of the mind. How do we get from a kindling of the heart to an illumining of the mind? There is a preliminary work of the mind here, an exploration of possibilities. When the heart 30 God Sensible to the Heart

is kindled then, one of the possibilities appears to be the way, and that is the illumining of the mind. That is the discovery of the road taken in life. Here in both my quest and Einstein’s we have a road taken and a road not taken. What we are seeking is a rejoining of the roads as in Tolkien’s saying (about Bilbo), “He used to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”30 Finding the one Road is different than finding the road not taken. In a way the road not taken is already known, but the one Road is not yet known. There are three principles here: “that two worlds are really one, that figure and ground can be reversed, and that the whole is more than a sum of the parts.”31 If the two worlds of words and music are really one, then “In the beginning was the Word” can become “In the beginning was the Song.”32 If figure and ground can be reversed, then Salieri’s “first the music, then the words” (Prima la musica, poi le parole) can be reversed, “first the words, then the music.”33 And if the whole is more than a sum of words and music, the whole is song and as Saint Thomas Aquinas says “Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound” or “Song is exultation of the mind upon eternal things breaking out into sound.”34 The leap of mind or exultation of the mind is an illumining of the mind. God Illumining the Mind Alas for those that never sing, But die with all their music in them!

Oliver Wendell Holmes says in his poem “The Voiceless.”35 He himself was a poet and a physician (his son was God Sensible to the Heart 31

the jurist) and I suppose he is using the word “music” in the old sense of song where it has words as well as melody and harmony and rhythm. He would count his poetry as singing. To be “voiceless” is to have no expression. For me my return to music in my later years was, as he says, lest I die with all my music in me. My two worlds of words and music are really one, if what we have been saying is true, and figure and ground can be reversed, for along with the revival of music there have come words in the form of poetry where before they were in the form of prose, and so the whole is song. The illumining of the mind for me then is the “leap of mind” or the “exultation of the mind” that Saint Thomas speaks of, and it has to do with the eternal. How does this leap or exultation of mind come about? “Imagination is the beginning of creation,” George Bernard Shaw says, “you imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will.”36 Actually this makes desire the beginning. There is desiring, imagining, willing, creating. Then too Heidegger argues that thinking is not willing but letting be. That would mean we create the way God does, “Let there be light.” Thus there is our heart’s desire and out of that comes our imagining and our creating by letting be. What is more, “Thinking is thanking,” as Heidegger says. So our letting be, our creating, our thinking is a “Thanks!” and a “Yes!” like Dag Hammarskjöld saying “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” You can feel “the leap of mind” or the “exultation of the mind” in thinking that is thanking. Insight into image, as my teacher Bernard Lonergan called it,37 is that leap of mind, that exultation of the mind that occurs as we go from desiring and imagining to thinking and thanking. It has to do with the eternal, for time, according to Plato, is “a changing image of eternity,” and so insight into image is always an apprehension 32 God Sensible to the Heart

of the eternal in the changing image of time. It expresses itself in song when it breaks out into sound. Thus Saint Thomas’s definition of song in his preface to the Psalms, the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound. I think of the words of Psalm 27, “I will sing and make music for the Lord.” “Thinking is thanking” then is the locus of the illumination of the mind. I think of Saint Augustine and his writing block in his early unfinished works and then his breakthrough in his Confessions where he is echoing the Psalms, where he is “singing and making music for the Lord.” The breakthrough is the illumination of the mind or God illumining the mind. I think too of Stravinsky and his Symphony of Psalms. My own echoing of the Psalms is especially the following, echoing “The Lord is my shepherd,” O Lord, go with me and be my guide, in my most need be by my side: if you are guiding me I shall not want, if you are guarding me I shall not fear, though I am walking in the valley of the shadow of my dying, you are walking with me, and when I am not you will have taken me.38

If “attention is the natural prayer of the soul,”39 as Malebranche says, this echoing of the Psalms is a way of learning attention. Thus in this my echo of Psalm 23 there is God Sensible to the Heart 33

guiding and guarding and walking and dying, and there is attention to these things. When I look to guiding and guarding, to walking and dying, I am looking to my life. I am paying attention to the things that come my way. “I have learned to look close at most things that come my way,”40 Mary Stewart has Merlin say. And if I look close at most things that come my way, I can discern a guiding and a guarding, a walking and a dying. What is important, though, is “you are walking with me.” Here I am echoing Genesis, “Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.”41 I am expressing a hope of eternal life, “and when I am not you will have taken me.” Is this thinking that is thanking? Is this an illumining of the mind? “In the forest clearing to which his circular paths lead, though they do not reach it,” George Steiner says, “Heidegger has postulated the unity of thought and of poetry, of thought, of poetry, and of the highest act of mortal pride and celebration which is to give thanks.”42 That is the meaning of “Thinking is thanking” for Heidegger, a unity of thought and poetry. For Saint Augustine, on the other hand, who has come from the stance of the person before himself in his Soliloquies to that of the person before God in his Confessions, thinking can take place in the solitude of the heart but it can also take place before God and there it does indeed become thanking. That is the stance I am taking too in echoing “The Lord is my shepherd,” the stance before God. So what I am doing here is thinking that is thanking, not simply in meditation but in prayer. But is it an illumining of the mind? Walking is an image, but what is the insight into the image? “If you are ready to leave father and mother, brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled 34 God Sensible to the Heart

all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk,” Thoreau says.43 Just as the insight into dwelling in the world is Dasein, “being there,” so the insight into the image of walking or traveling is Gelassenheit, “letting be.” The insight is the understanding of being that is hidden in the image. Walking with God is my understanding here, or “God with us.” I think too of the idea of “wandering joy” in Meister Eckhart: one who has let oneself be and let God be lives in a wandering joy or joy without a cause.44 What is the difference between the unity of thinking and poetry and the unity of thinking and prayer? They overlap when they embody Saint Thomas’s definition of song as “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” There is a difference only when “Time can become constitutive” and that is “only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost.”45 Thus in the prologue to Being and Time Heidegger speaks of “time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being.”46 So then the difference becomes that between time and eternity. Heidegger’s later idea of time as “the lighting up of the self-concealing” (Lichtung des Sichverbergens)47 is closer to Plato’s notion of time as “a changing image of eternity.” Does this reestablish “connection with the transcendental home”? At any rate, the link between time and eternity exists in the unity of thinking and prayer, as in Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and the link with the transcendental home, the great circle of us coming from God and returning to God. “Time can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost.” That sentence (quoted by Walter Benjamin from Georg Lukács speaking of the novel) suggests two alternative visions, one like Heidegger’s in which time is constitutive, the other in which there is a transcendental home like the one God Sensible to the Heart 35

I am implying in my echoing of “The Lord is my shepherd.” Yet the vision I am implying is not simply the great circle beginning and ending in the transcendental home but a vision of “God with us” that places God at the center of the great circle. There is still the far point on the circle where “Even love must pass through loneliness.” It is far from the transcendental home but not far from God who is with us. “Am I my time?” Heidegger asks and wants to answer “Yes.”48 No, I want to answer, I am in my time. Saint Augustine too, thinking on time in his Confessions, in a stance of prayer before God and eternity, asks What is time? a measurement? a distension of soul? And he comes to a vision of the great circle, “that the story of the soul wandering away from God and then in torment and tears finding its way home through conversion is also the story of the entire created order.”49 His vision is also one of “God with us,” and twice in his Confessions he says “that in all his wanderings, he never lost his belief in the being and the providence of God.”50 So his story is not only the story of a journey away from God and back again to God but also and all along a journey with God in time, and so too, according to his thinking, is the story of the entire created order. When he goes on to tell that story in The City of God, he is still in the stance of prayer, I believe now, insofar as “attention is the natural prayer of the soul.” He is no longer speaking to God but listening to God speak; he is Augustine the Reader,51 reading the word of God in the Scriptures, as in his moment of conversion in the garden when he heard the child’s voice singing “Take and read! Take and read!” He is taking and reading the Scriptures, reading the story of the great circle of everything coming from God and returning to God, reading the story of “God with us.” He is reading aloud, as was done in those days, 36 God Sensible to the Heart

reading aloud to us, as it were, by writing. He is like “The Singer of Tales” that Albert Lord describes, and “The Singer [who] Resumes the Tale,”52 who does not simply repeat the tale word for word but tells it anew, and here again “The song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” Where in all this is “the leap of mind,” the illumining of the mind? It is, I would say, in what Pierre Hadot calls “the simplicity of vision.”53 Hadot is speaking of Plotinus and his vision of all coming from the One and all returning to the One, mone, proodos, epistrophe, the One, the emanation, and the return. This is the vision also of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas, except there is also in them the vision of “God with us.” Thus Saint Thomas divides his Summa Theologiae into three parts, the first on everything coming from God, the second on everything returning to God, and the third on Christ the way. “The simplicity of vision,” according to Hadot, goes with a kind of belief in simplicity. “I sincerely believe,” he says, “that our most urgent and difficult task today is, as Goethe said, to ‘learn to believe in simplicity.’”54 If time is a great circle of emanation and return and if time is “a changing image of eternity,” then eternity too is a great circle, as in Henry Vaughan’s poem, I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.55

Indeed, if we think of time as full of eternity, if we think of the eternal in us, then eternity is that same circle that time is, considered all at once. “Time is a child playing,” Heraclitus says. “The kingdom is the child’s.”56 But the word he is using is aion, time full of eternity, not chronos, time empty of eternity. You can say of time full of eternity God Sensible to the Heart 37

that it is “the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of Being,” I believe, but you cannot say that of time empty of eternity. I think of the Ancient Child in George MacDonald’s story The Golden Key, who is time playing, and Tangle, who watches him play, “felt there was something in her knowledge which was not in her understanding.”57 She knew more of time, seeing the child’s play, than she could tell. “We can know more than we can tell,” Polanyi’s principle, comes into play here. We can know more of time than we can tell. “What then is time?” Saint Augustine asks in his Confessions. “Provided that no one asks me, I know. If I want to explain it to an inquirer, I do not know.”58 So he knows more than he can tell. If I watch the circle dance of time, I feel, like Tangle, there is something in my knowledge which is not in my understanding. “She stood looking for a long time, for there was fascination in the sight; and the longer she looked the more an indescribable vague intelligence went on rousing itself in her mind.”59 So it is for me, the longer I watch the circle dance of time, as she watched the child playing, the more an indescribable vague intelligence goes on rousing itself in my mind. This way of describing the illumining of the mind, she “felt there was something in her knowledge which was not in her understanding” and “the longer she looked the more an indescribable vague intelligence went on rousing itself in her mind,” does seem to illustrate Polanyi’s principle, “we can know more than we can tell.” And so does Saint Augustine’s thinking on time in his Confessions. If then we can know more of time than we can tell, then there is the circle dance of time, the story we can tell, and there is something more, our relationship with time. Saint Augustine “pursued the question so far as to ask whether spirit itself is time,” Heidegger says, 38 God Sensible to the Heart

“and Augustine left the question standing at this point.”60 And so Heidegger ends his lecture on time with the question “Am I my time?” I want to say, though, not that I am my time but that I am in my time. I want to say I am in my time in order to make room for eternal life. “So it is in you, my mind,” Saint Augustine says, “that I measure periods of time” (In te, anime meus, tempora metior),61 and Heidegger is quoting this to say Saint Augustine “pursued the question so far as to ask whether spirit itself is time.” But Saint Augustine is saying it is in the spirit or in the mind (animus) that he measures periods of time. I gather from this that I am in my time as my time is in me, not that I am my time. It is true, if I think of time as full of eternity, as in Heraclitus’s saying, “Time (aion) is a child playing” and “the kingdom is the child’s,” then I must become the child playing in order to enter the kingdom, as in the Gospel imperative, “unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”62 So my relationship with time changes or can change from being in time to becoming time full of eternity. That is because the person is the eternal in us and the life, from birth to death, is the temporal, as I am conceiving it, but the inner life of the person is eternal life in us already begun. So it is when I have become a child playing that I am my time and the kingdom is mine. And that is coming home on the great circle of time, to “the transcendental home.” Thus you can play against time, but you will lose because “the kingdom is the child’s,” or you can play with time and become the child.63 Or in the imagery of the circle dance of time you can join in the dance, “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”64 According to Plotinus there is a circle dance around the One, “and we are always around it [the One] but do not always look at it,” he says; “it is like a choral dance . . . God Sensible to the Heart 39

but when we do look to him [God], then we are at our goal and at rest and do not sing out of tune as we dance our divinely inspired dance around him.”65 There is both song and dance then in this circle dance around the One, and the song, as Saint Thomas says, is “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound” or more exactly, keeping to his Latin, “Song is the exultation of mind (canticum est exultatio mentis) over eternal things (de aeternis habita) breaking out into sound (prorumpens in vocem).” I think of the epigraph song to the last movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet, Grave Must it be? Allegro It must be! It must be!66

What must be? Originally it was a joke about a debt to be paid and was cast in the form of a short canon for four voices, but when it reappears in the last string quartet it has become serious and appears with the title “The difficult resolve taken” (Der schwer gefasste Entschluss). I imagine it to be the movement from “infinite resignation” (Grave) to “faith” (Allegro). I think of Kierkegaard and his image of the dancer in Fear and Trembling who dances the dance of infinite resignation, simple acceptance of life, and who dances then the more complex dance of faith, willingness to die and yet hope to live, willingness to walk alone and yet hope of companionship. The circle dance around the One, I imagine then, is a dance that goes from the Grave of infinite resignation to the Allegro of faith as the heart is kindled and the mind illumined.

40 God Sensible to the Heart

The Vision of Emanation

One and from the One the Many in cascading radiations, first Mind (Let there be light!) then Soul (Let there be life!) then Body (Let there be love!) —from my “Song of Emanation”

Emanation was the ancient vision of the origin of

things, and evolution is the modern vision, and yet the one is the reflection of the other, like the return of a light ray from a surface it encounters into the medium it has already traversed. Evolution rising from matter to life to intelligence is the reflection of emanation cascading down from intelligence to life to matter. Each is a vision, an image, a story that can be told, but there is also an insight into the image. “We can know more than we can tell,” as Polanyi says; we can tell the story of emanation or the 41

story of evolution, but we can know more, we can know of the relationship that is imaged in the story. Creation, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, is essentially a relationship, the relationship of creature to creator,1 not a process like emanation or evolution. It is indeed what we can know that is more than we can tell in telling of emanation or evolution. It is true, Saint Thomas uses the term emanatio, and speaks of creation as “the mode of emanation of things from the first principle”2 and then too, apart from creation, he speaks of “the intelligible emanation”3 of the eternal Word and the Holy Spirit from God. All of these emanations, though, turn out to be essentially relationships. If emanations are essentially relationships, so are evolutions. But are they the same relationships? Only if we speak of the overall relationships of intelligence to life and of life to matter, the emanations cascading down from intelligence to life to matter and the evolutions rising up from matter to life to intelligence. Otherwise evolution is the reflection of emanation just as a light ray or light wave returns from a surface it encounters but in a manner that is usually diffuse or irregular. I think of the diagram of an evolutionary tree I saw that shows twenty species, including the human, arising from the composition of a single type of protein.4 It is the relationship with the transcendent One, though, that is creation, the relationship of creature with creator. This is an encompassing relationship, and so there is no real conflict between the idea of creation and that of emanation or that of evolution. The relationship of matter to life and to intelligence is one of situating: matter situates life and situates intelligence while itself being situated in space and time. So the brain, for instance, is not the mind but situates the mind. Thus I want to say matter is a dimension like time and like the three dimen42 The Vision of Emanation

sions of space.5 The living organism, Pierre Hadot says, is “a melody that sings itself,” and so are the forms or ideas, he says, in the vision of emanation that he calls “the simplicity of vision.”6 He is ascribing an autonomy to life and to intelligence. All the same, life and intelligence, I would say, are situated by matter in the human being. “A melody that sings itself ” A melody sings itself in the mind of the singer and in the memory of the listener, and when the singer is a “listening composer,”7 it sings itself also in the memory of the singer. If learning is recollection, as Plato has it in the Meno, then “a melody that sings itself” is music in memory. A vision of emanation, such as we are considering here, goes with an idea of recollection, just as a vision of evolution, on the other hand, goes with an idea of learning from scratch. What I mean is that in emanation everything is cascading down from the One, and so everything is given, while in evolution everything is rising up to the One, and so nothing is given, when it comes to learning. Does this give us a way of deciding between the two visions? Actually it doesn’t, for the singer of tales learns the songs from others and yet is free to improvise, according to Albert Lord in The Singer of Tales and The Singer Resumes the Tale. There is a “tension of essences”8 in the tale, he says, that allows it to come out in different ways, happy ending and sad ending. And so there is something the singer is learning from without, as in the vision of evolution, and something the singer is learning from within, as in the vision of emanation. In Bach’s chorales too, we can see there are traditional melodies, and yet they are all transformed by something coming from within him. So The Vision of Emanation 43

the singer of tales, and Bach too, is a “listening composer.” If we look more closely at the tale being sung, we may find that “myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him,” as Claude Lévi-Strauss says, though “this has been much discussed and even criticized by my English-speaking colleagues, because their feeling is that, from an empirical point of view, it is an utterly meaningless sentence.”9 It is indeed meaningless in a vision of evolution, but not in a vision of emanation. “But for me it describes a lived experience,” Lévi-Strauss continues, “because it says exactly how I perceive my own relationship to my work. That is, my work gets thought in me unbeknown to me.” To say myth gets thought in us unbeknown to us is indeed to say myth is “a melody that sings itself,” especially if we think of myth getting thought in the singer of tales. For me too “my work gets thought in me unbeknown to me”—I take one step at a time, a paragraph a day, out of the heart, going from insight to insight. “The landscape thinks itself in me,” Cezanne says, or actually “The landscape reflects, humanizes, thinks itself in me” (Le paysage se reflete, s’humanise, se pense en moi).10 So everything, from matter to life to intelligence to God, thinks itself in me, and is “a melody that sings itself” in me, and to that extent I am a “listening composer.” What then do I hear if I listen? What do I sing if I compose? “In the beginning is the song,” Michel Serres says in his Genesis of the creative process in us, as if it were true also of the creative process in the universe. He is arguing against the view that “one does not write initially with ideas, but by making use of words,” and he wants to say instead “one writes initially through a wave of music, a groundswell that comes from the background noise.”11 Actually, though, words and music go together, a song has words, but I want to keep the method of analogy between 44 The Vision of Emanation

the creative process in us and that in the universe. So I too want to say “In the beginning is the song” in us and in the universe. What song? What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life . . .

That is my translation of the prologue of Saint John’s First Epistle.12 Yet can I say the Word of life is what I hear if I listen and what I sing if I compose? Bach could say that, I believe. “Bach and Beethoven . . . walked with God,” W. J. Turner says, “Mozart did not. Mozart danced with the masked daughters of Vienna . . .”13 But I think of Mozart’s Ave Verum, a hymn to the Word of life written in the last summer of his life. No, they all sang the Word of life. This is so if we take the Word to be inclusive, as in Ursula LeGuin’s saying, “My name and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars.”14 The Word of life is that great word made flesh. Thus it can be “heard” and “seen” and “looked upon” and “handled.” It is with songs as it is with icons: according to the makers of icons, only angels and prophets were allowed to see the glory of God before the coming of Christ, but now we are all able to see.15 Or again, the Word of life we hear if we listen and we sing if we compose is “the word beyond speech” that Broch has Virgil hear on his deathbed. “It was the word beyond speech” is the last sentence in Broch’s Death of Virgil.16 That phrase, though, points to transcendence. If it is The Vision of Emanation 45

“beyond speech,” is it also beyond song? The transcendence of the Word corresponds to the transcendence of our heart’s longing, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” But the transcendence of longing, how it goes beyond every finite object, can be spoken, as Saint Augustine speaks it in those words about the restlessness of our heart, and it can be sung. Virgil is struggling on his deathbed with the inadequacy of words, according to Broch, and he wants to burn The Aeneid, but he is persuaded not to, and then he hears “the word beyond speech.” It is “beyond speech” in that it cannot be reduced to speech, but it can be heard, and if it is heard it can be sung. Yet how can the Word of life be heard, granted it can be sung? The Word can be seen as coming out of silence and returning into silence, the silence of God. That silence is the same as the surrounding silence, I gather, in “we all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” Here again, Isak Dinesen’s saying is helpful, “Where the storyteller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness.” So if I am faithful to the story of the Word of life, the story told in the Gospels, the silence out of which the Word comes and into which it returns will speak. Instead of “storyteller” I could say “the singer of tales,” and instead of “will speak” I could say “will sing.” Word, Logos, is the key, I believe, to all three of the visions we are considering, that of creation, that of emanation, and that of evolution. It is clearly the key to that of creation, according to the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word . . .” But it is also the key to the vision of emanation if we think of the Word as “an intelligible emanation” of God, as Saint Thomas Aquinas says, and if we think of the ideas of all things being contained in the Word, that all “was life in him,”17 46 The Vision of Emanation

for then we can say that all things emanate from God in the Word. It is also the key to the vision of evolution, according to Teilhard de Chardin, for the Word of life is the Omega of evolution, and “everything that rises must converge” on the Omega.18 How then to sing the Word of life? I have set the prologue of Saint John’s Gospel to music and included it in my “Songlines of the Gospel” and then later in my “Symphony of Songs.” 19 Now perhaps I should do an adaptation of the prologue of Saint John’s First Epistle, In the beginning is the song, and it will be in the ending, now a presence in our hearing, now an icon in our seeing, all creating, emanating, and evolving —the Word of life out of silence all around.

Christ is called “the Word of life,” I believe, because he has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). To speak of the Word of life “creating,” then, and “emanating,” and “evolving” all things makes sense only if these terms of origin have to do with eternal life. Creation and emanation and evolution are visions of the origin of things. They have to do with eternal life only if eternal life is somehow inscribed in the origins. The vision of the great circle of love in the words of the old Bedouin to Lawrence of AraThe Vision of Emanation 47

bia, “The love is from God, and of God, and towards God,” does indeed inscribe eternal life in the origins, especially if we think of it as the great circle of life and light and love. I think again of Henry Vaughan’s verse, I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.

“In the beginning is the song.” That would be true for Tolkien in his Silmarillion, speaking at the beginning of “The Music of the Ainur,” and it would be true also for C. S. Lewis in his Narnia tales, having the lion Aslan sing the world into existence.20 “Nothing exists without music,” Isidore of Seville says, “for the universe itself is said to have been framed by a kind of harmony of sounds, and the heaven itself revolves under the tones of that harmony.”21 Yet if we wanted to hear that original music, that original song, nowadays after the Copernican revolution, we would have to listen not for “the music of the spheres” but for “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Thus I sing “the Word of life out of silence all around.” Sometimes you learn a lot about the meaning of words by setting them to music. I think I see better now what Saint Thomas Aquinas meant by saying “Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” He was thinking of the Psalms, but the Word becoming flesh is perhaps the supreme instance of the eternal breaking out into sound. There is “a tension of essences” that song expresses and resolves. The tension, as I understand it, is that of the “perturbations of the mind”22 as they were called in ancient times, desire and gladness, fear and sadness, and their resolution is in peace of mind. The eternal appears in the peace, for “his will is our peace,” as Dante says, la sua voluntate e nostra pace. Here the eternal peace is 48 The Vision of Emanation

Song in the Beginning

John S. Dunne (2004)

Andante

In__ the be-gin-ning is the song.

and_ it___ will be in the end-ing

now a pre-sence in our hear-ing

all cre - a- ting, em-a - na - ting and e - vol - ving

the Word of life out of

si - lence all

now an i-con in our see-ing

-

-

-

-

-

-

a - round.

in the Word of life that appears in human form in the midst of our tension of essences, and the peace can be felt in the peaceful music of the song. Time, according to Plato, is “a changing image of eternity,” and that is the key, I think, to the song as “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” If we think of human life as a becoming, going from nothing (no I am) to being (I am), then we are seeing it as a story of creation. If we think of it as a recapitulation of the story of all life, we are seeing it as a story of evolution. And if we think, like Kierkegaard, “though I am myself, I have to become myself,”23 we are seeing it also as a story The Vision of Emanation 49

of emanation, how I have to become in time the person I am in the eternity of the Word. The song then is “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound” where the eternal is this being I am becoming in time. My lifetime is a changing image of this eternal being. My song for “the singer of tales” is a singing of this tale of my life. My story nevertheless is part of a larger story of creation, emanation, and evolution. I think of Saint Augustine ending his story with the story of Genesis, or of Geronimo beginning his with the Apache story of creation. If I see my story in the larger story of creation, I may see it as Saint Augustine saw his, at the far point of the great circle from God and to God, “Late have I loved thee!” If I see my story in the larger story of emanation, on the other hand, I may see it as Meister Eckhart saw his, becoming in time what I already am in eternity. And if I see it in the larger story of evolution, I may see it as Teilhard de Chardin saw his, rising and converging upon an Omega which is not only coming but is present already in time. All of these come together in the vision of the great circle, “The love is from God, and of God, and towards God.” These three that I am considering, creation and emanation and evolution, are not the only visions of the larger story. There is also that of “violent origins,”24 such as the vision of René Girard and also of Saint Augustine in The City of God, but we could take this as a particular extension of the story of creation. If we look for “a melody that sings itself,” however, we find it in the great circle of life and light and love. It is true, Pierre Hadot has in mind Plato’s ideal forms or those of Plotinus when he quotes this phrase from Uexkhull, who in turn had in mind living organisms.25 I see the connection with emanation in Hadot’s thinking and with evolution in Uexküll’s thinking. By uniting both emanation and evolution with cre50 The Vision of Emanation

ation I am coming to a larger story where “a melody that sings itself” is “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” “In the beginning is the song,” however, as Michel Serres meant it, suggests still another vision of origins, that of an information theorist for whom the principal categories are information and noise. Genesis then, as Serres names his book, is about message or information coming out of chaos or noise, and his telling of the story takes the form of a stream of consciousness. If I set this thinking alongside creation and emanation and evolution, an image comes to mind, that of standing on a seashore and hearing the thunderous noise of the surf. Is this the song? “We listen to our inmost selves,” Martin Buber says, “and do not know which sea we hear murmuring.”26 This is the song, the sound of the inner sea rather than the outer sea. Yet when we listen, we “do not know which sea we hear murmuring.” It is then the outer Word of life, the presence in our hearing, the icon in our seeing, that tells us which sea we hear murmuring. God spoke one Word and then kept silence, Saint John of the Cross says in The Ascent of Mount Carmel.27 That one Word, though, is “very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars,” as Ursula LeGuin says, and is the song we hear when “we listen to our inmost selves,” as Martin Buber says. So the Word made flesh that Saint John speaks of in his Gospel and his Epistle reveals to us (“you have the words of eternal life”) what is being very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars, what is being sung when we listen to our inmost selves. “The rest is silence,” the silence out of which the Word comes and into which the Word returns. If I see song as “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound” and song in the beginning as the emanation of the eternal that governs creation and evolution, something we hear when “we listen to our inmost selves, The Vision of Emanation 51

and do not know which sea we hear murmuring,” and I recognize it when I hear “the words of eternal life,” then I sing “In the beginning is the song,” and my own song too is a “leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” as if my own song were an echo of that song in the beginning which will also be “in the ending.” I recognize that song in “the words of eternal life” and I echo it in my own song. There is an emanation of the eternal in my own song, therefore, a recognition of creation and evolution. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces” If I sing then the Word of life out of silence all around,

I am relating the Word of life to “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” that Pascal speaks of and says it “terrifies me.” I am singing the Word of life coming out of this eternal silence and returning into this eternal silence. The Word of life and the eternal silence of these infinite spaces are analogous to our human word and our human silence. But since the Word of life has become flesh and dwelt among us and has spoken “the words of eternal life,” the silence out of which the Word of life comes and into which the Word returns has come closer to us as well. If “language is the house of being”28 as Heidegger says, language has been enhanced by “the words of eternal life.” So the eternal silence is broken by the Word of life that comes to us in “the words of eternal life,” and these words interpret for us “the great word that is very slowly 52 The Vision of Emanation

spoken by the shining of the stars.” This is what we have in place of the music of the spheres. It is true, there is something in our present-day perspective that corresponds to the spheres of, say, Dante’s world. There is “the event horizon,” the horizon of our observation, like the primum mobile of his world, and beyond that a convergence to a luminous point, “the big bang” of our world, the Prime Mover of his.29 Is there then a music of the spheres even in our present-day perspective on the universe? There is indeed “the poetry of the universe,” the mathematics of the universe, that is, something very akin to music. There are “three voices of poetry,”30 according to T. S. Eliot, and there is a silence, we could say, corresponding to each voice. There is a music too for each voice. The first voice is that of the One alone, and the silence is the stillness and silence of which Dag Hammarskjöld speaks when he says “We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” The second voice is that of the One before the Many, and the silence is that of which Michael Polanyi speaks when he says “We can know more than we can tell.” The third voice is that of the dialogue and interaction of “I and thou,” and the silence is that of which Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks when he concludes “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”31 “In what remains unsaid” in the speech of all things, Meister Eckhart says, “there is God, only God.”32 Silence then is a fullness, not an emptiness, and the silence surrounding each of the three voices of poetry can speak, or it can sing, and so can the silence surrounding the speech of all things. Speaking of “the message of the pathway” that he is walking, Heidegger asks “Is the soul speaking? Is the world speaking? Is God speaking?”33 There is a silence then in the first voice of poetry, “a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” and I take the silence to be the surrounding presence of God. “You The Vision of Emanation 53

have to be at peace to compose,” a friend of mine who is a jazz musician learned at a seminar on composing. And it seems to be true of composing poetry as well as music. “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” Wordsworth says: “it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,”34 not from raw emotion, he is saying, but “from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and so too does music, and so you have to be at peace to compose, you have to be dwelling in your “center of stillness surrounded by silence.” So even if music or poetry expresses “the agony and the ecstasy,” it arises not from raw agony and raw ecstasy but from agony and ecstasy recollected in tranquillity. For God the Father Almighty plays upon the harp Of stupendous magnitude and melody . . . For at that time malignity ceases And the devils themselves are at peace . . . For this time is perceptible to man By a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.

Those lines are by Christopher Smart, the mad poet of the eighteenth century, and they have been set to music by Benjamin Britten in “Rejoice in the Lamb.”35 They speak of that tranquillity where emotion is recollected. They speak out of “a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” When Christopher Smart says “For at that time malignity ceases and the devils themselves are at peace,” he means that the devils who are troubling him in his madness cease for a while and leave him in peace, and that peace is indeed the peace of God, as he says, imagining God playing upon a harp. “It may be what we cannot know we should not speak of, but sing of it we may,” Wilfrid Mellers says of Messiaen’s music.36 He is referring, I think, to Wittgenstein’s 54 The Vision of Emanation

famous concluding sentence, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” If we speak out of a conscious unknowing, however, like The Cloud of Unknowing, we can speak of the unknown, and so too we can sing of it. If indeed “song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” then that is what song is all about, and song comes out of “a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” for that is where we are in touch with the eternal. If the eternal is a dimension of life, a vertical dimension passing through the horizontal, and time is the horizontal, our center of stillness is the point where eternity and time intersect. “But to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is an occupation for the saint,” T. S. Eliot says.37 To live in that point of intersection is to live in our center of stillness surrounded by silence. “We all have within us,” saints or sinners, “a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” as Dag Hammarskjöld says, and so we all have the capacity “to apprehend the point of intersection of the timeless with time.” To live in that stillness, to live in that silence, though, “is an occupation for the saint.” I take the surrounding silence to be the surrounding presence of God. To live in that stillness, to live in that silence is to live in the presence of God. “If we take eternity to mean not endless temporal duration but timelessness,” Wittgenstein says, “then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”38 I want to say instead eternal life belongs to those who live in the presence. “We can know more than we can tell,” the second form of silence we have to consider is related to the first, the center of stillness we all have within us surrounded by silence. It is the presence of God that we can know that is more than we can tell. Here I am telling of it, but we can know it only by dwelling in it. I think here especially of the Christian story, how we can tell the story of Christ, but we can know more by entering into the relationship of Christ The Vision of Emanation 55

with God, and that relationship brings us into the indwelling presence, “I in them and thou in me,” Christ in us and God in Christ. It is true, there are many stories about the Shekinah, the presence of God in the world, for instance the tales of Rabbi Nahman, but we can know more than we can tell by actually dwelling in the presence. “Story is our only boat for sailing on the river of time,” Ursula LeGuin says, “but in the great rapids and the winding shallows, no boat is safe.”39 It becomes essential in the great rapids and the winding shallows to live in the presence. The great rapids are the boundary situations of life, I imagine, like pain and death, and the winding shallows are the times of desolation. In these times and situations “faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.”40 Seeing light with your heart, I take it, means living in the presence of God. I think of the poem of Saint John of the Cross, “Dark Night” describing the dark night of the soul as a night of faith, In the happy night, in secret so nobody saw me and I saw no thing, with no light no guide other than that burning in my heart.41

“In the real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning,” F. Scott Fitzgerald says in The Crack-Up.42 Here the words have lost the sense of “seeing light with your heart” and kept only that of “when all your eyes see is darkness.” Actually the real dark night of the soul is a “happy night” because of the inner light “burning in my heart.” The “inner light,” as the Quakers call it, is the light of faith. They also call it “the Christ within,” and that is what it is or what it leads to in Saint John’s poem, 56 The Vision of Emanation

It guided me more sure than noonday light to where awaiting me was someone I knew well, there where no one appeared.

This second form of silence then, tacit knowing in “we can know more than we can tell,” goes with indwelling. And when it comes to telling the Christian story, it goes with the indwelling of Christ, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.”43 The dark night of the soul thus is the night of faith, “seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness,” and that light you see with your heart is the Christ within, Christ dwelling in your heart by faith. Entering into his relationship with God, making his Father my Father, his God my God, I live in him and he lives in me. Speaking of the risen Christ, Saint Peter in the story Quo Vadis says “He was like light, and like the happiness in our hearts.”44 To us too, we can say, he is like light and like the happiness in our hearts. Or perhaps, to be more precise, we see things in the light rather than simply seeing the light, and that is the third form of silence, showing as distinct from saying. “There is indeed the inexpressible,” Wittgenstein says. “This shows itself; it is the mystical.”45 In terms of the inner light this is called “catching the light.”46 Just as physical light passing through outer space is invisible until it strikes an object, so the inner light cannot be seen except in the things it illumines. These things then “catch the light” or they “show themselves.” Heidegger adds another aspect to this, saying the mystery is “that which shows itself and at the same time withdraws.”47 So the mystical, as Wittgenstein calls it, shows itself, and the mystery, as Heidegger calls it, shows itself and at the The Vision of Emanation 57

same time withdraws. This third form of silence is in showing rather than saying and in withdrawing as well as showing. I think for instance of “the green flash” that can sometimes be seen as the sun is setting or rising, as a physical analogy of this showing and withdrawing. “Real presences,”48 as George Steiner calls them, especially in the poem, the painting, the musical composition, as they reveal a transcendent reality, are like “the green flash” of the rising or setting sun. It is again the presence of God, the Shekinah, that is there in the silence of showing and withdrawing, as it is also in the surrounding silence of the center of stillness we all have within us, or in the silence of knowing more than we can tell. I think of the inscription on a German opera house: Bach gave us God’s word. Mozart gave us God’s laughter. Beethoven gave us God’s fire. God gave us music that we might pray without words.49

I think this is the sort of thing Steiner has in mind by “real presences,” the presence of God’s word in Bach, the presence of God’s laughter in Mozart, the presence of God’s fire in Beethoven, the silence of praying without words in music. All these forms of silence, that of showing and withdrawing, that surrounding our center of stillness, that of knowing more than we can tell, that of praying without words, seem to come together in that of the presence of God. I think again of Heidegger quoting Meister Eckhart, “In what remains unsaid” in the speech of all things “there is God, only God.” I suppose what we have been finding here is that in what remains unsaid in our human speech there is God, only God. If we pass then from our 58 The Vision of Emanation

speech to the speech of all things, we find again in the silence there is God, only God. We are getting close now to “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” Can we say that in this silence of these spaces too there is God, only God? God in the universe (Brahman) and God in the heart (Atman) are one and the same, according to the Upanishads, and so perhaps we can say “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” and the silence surrounding our center of stillness are one and the same. If I can take the silence surrounding our center of stillness to be the surrounding presence of God, then perhaps I can also take “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” to be the eternal presence of God. And so too in what remains unsaid in the speech of all things in the universe, I can say, there is God, only God. What is being said in the speech of all things? Being? And what is speaking? “Is the soul speaking? Is the world speaking? Is God speaking?” These are Heidegger’s questions. What Heidegger means by Being or the Simple here, I think, is what Wittgenstein means by the mystical, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.”50 If that is what is meant, then it makes sense to say all things are saying it. But in what is unsaid in their saying “there is God, only God.” If I contemplate the wonder of existence, that the world is, that I am, I am led to the existence of God. I think of looking up into the night sky at the summer stars when I was a child, and how I felt then the wonder of existence, the wonder of the world’s existence, the wonder of my own existence, and the insight “there is God, only God.” “Is the soul speaking? Is the world speaking? Is God speaking?” If “heart speaks to heart” as Newman’s motto has it, then we have the answer, “Hallelujah from the heart of God,”51 as the mad poet Christopher Smart sings The Vision of Emanation 59

to Benjamin Britten’s music, goes to the heart of the world and to the human heart. This “Hallelujah from the heart of God” is “perceptible to man by a remarkable stillness and serenity of soul.” It is as though the Hallelujah resonates in the human soul, but the resonance is in the stillness and serenity. So the silence speaks, or the silence sings and is singing. The surrounding silence is not empty but is the surrounding presence of God. It is saying, or it is singing to us, “I am with you.” So “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” is “a melody that sings itself.” Or I take it to be, taking the silence surrounding our center of stillness to be the surrounding presence of God, and taking God in the universe to be one and the same as God in the heart. Thus I am taking our world to be a world of “real presences.” Why take it this way? I think again of Isak Dinesen’s saying “Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak,” and then again “Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness.” What story? Here it is the story of Godwith-us. That is why I say the silence surrounding the center of stillness we all have within us is the surrounding presence of God, and that it is saying or singing to us “I am with you.” This story is that of the Gospels, “a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is God-with-us.”52 “In the beginning is the song,” I agree with Michel Serres. But the song comes “out of silence all around” instead of noise. The two categories of information theory, noise and information, seem insufficient to account for the genesis of things. The song is “all creating, emanating, and evolving.” Creation, the vision of the Bible, and emanation, the ancient vision of origin, and evolution, the modern vision of origin, are compatible if we understand 60 The Vision of Emanation

them in terms of relationship. The song is “the Word of life” that Saint John speaks of, the Word that was “in the beginning,” and is “now a presence in our hearing, now an icon in our seeing.” It is the Word of creation, the Logos of emanation, the Omega of evolution, and “it will be in the ending,” as Hermann Broch says in the last sentence of The Death of Virgil, “it was the word beyond speech.”

The Vision of Emanation 61

The Vision of Return

Our heart is restless until it rests in you —Saint Augustine

A

“ n enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests.”1 That is how Heidegger describes what he calls the Realm (die Gegnet). There is a vision of return (epistrophe in Greek) in every vision of the origin of things, creation and emanation and evolution. If I am on the right track in saying these visions of origin are compatible with one another, then it should be possible to speak of the return as one in all of them. If God in the heart and God in the universe are one and the same, as is said in the Upanishads, then it should be possible to speak of the return in terms of the heart, as Saint Augustine does, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”2 “There is a raying out of all orders of existence, an external emanation from the ineffable One (proodos),” 63

Robert Vaughan says in Hours with the Mystics, quoting a letter of Plotinus, and “there is again a returning impulse drawing all upwards and inwards towards the centre whence all came (epistrophe).”3 The return, the epistrophe, is really a formal doctrine only in the vision of emanation, and there it is the return of all intelligence to the divine One. In the vision of creation there is a similar return with the doctrine of eternal life, as that doctrine emerges in the Old Testament and in the New, especially in the Gospel of John. And in the vision of evolution there is a return, not with Darwin, but with Teilhard de Chardin’s thinking on the noosphere (the realm of intelligence) and the Omega, “everything that rises must converge.” The return that Heidegger speaks of is universal in that “enchanted region where everything belonging there returns to that in which it rests.” For the human heart “that in which it rests” is God, and so the return for us is from restlessness to repose in God. There is a point of view, however, in which the restlessness of the human heart is recognized but not the repose in God. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit in The Forms of Violence speak of “the restlessness of desire”4 but do not speak of coming to rest in God. The subtitle of their work is Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture. There is a fascination with violence, Bersani and Dutoit argue, that is disrupted, broken up by the restless movement of desire from image to image. This restless movement is embodied for instance in the Assyrian Palace Reliefs depicting the lion hunt, but the fascination with violence is embodied in certain modern narrative forms such as the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic and masochistic narratives. Although this is not one of their examples, the contrast between narrative and a series of pictures can be seen in Adam’s Rib by Robert Graves.5 Read one way (right to left like Hebrew) the series of pictures he gives tells the 64 The Vision of Return

story of Adam and Eve, read another (“as the ox ploughs”) it tells an entirely different story. What this shows, it seems, is the ambiguity of a series of pictures compared with a narrative. It is by telling the story, as Saint Augustine does in his Confessions, that we can pass from the restlessness of desire to repose in God, for in story, as in poetry, we have “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” “Our heart is restless” “Patience, and shuffle the cards,”6 that is one of the proverbs in Don Quixote. If we think of “the restlessness of desire” the way Bersani and Dutoit do, as expressing itself in a series of images like a deck of cards, then the proverb makes sense, “Patience, and shuffle the cards,” be patient and let’s have another way of looking at things and dealing with things. The proverb occurs in the story of Montesinos’ Cave, an episode not unlike Plato’s Cave in The Republic, where two men under a spell of enchantment hope the great Don Quixote can free them from the spell, “And if not,” one of them says, “what I say is patience, and shuffle the cards” (digo, paciencia y barajar).7 There is something corresponding to the deck of cards in storytelling and that is what is called “the tension of essences”8 that allows the story to come out in different ways, happy ending and sad ending. The tension of essences is embodied in what Saint Augustine calls “four perturbations of the mind,”9 desire and fear, sadness and gladness. Thus the restlessness of the heart is not only the restlessness of desire but also that of fear and of sadness and even of gladness. “Our heart is restless,” that is, with the tension of essences in the story that allows it to come out with a sad ending or a happy ending. There is the desire of the happy ending, the fear of the sad ending, the The Vision of Return 65

expectant gladness of the happy ending, and the expectant sadness of the sad ending. Image and reality are being sharply distinguished in Cervantes’ Cave and in Plato’s Cave, the world of shadows and that of realities. Insight into image, however, comes about somewhat differently when you have a set of discrete images like a deck of cards and when you have connected images like a story. Where there is simply a set of essences embodied in the discrete images of playing cards, there is instead a tension of essences in the connected images of a story. It is true, when playing cards are used to tell fortunes, a certain sequence of cards is interpreted as a story. It is necessary, though, to put the cards in a storylike sequence to get something like a fortune told. What a story seems to tell, on the other hand, is who a person is. “For within our whole universe the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart of its characters,” Isak Dinesen says, “that one cry of heart of each of them: Who am I?”10 So the restlessness of the heart, if I am on the right track here, is expressed in the cry of the heart Who am I? Or it is expressed in the prayer of Saint Augustine in his Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!” That was ten years before his Confessions and before the repose he found in “emotion recollected in tranquillity” which he considers repose in God, a knowing of self and a knowing of God. If “the story only has authority to answer that cry of heart,” then the passage from restlessness to rest in God is in the telling. The telling of the story, however, involves a choice, the choice to accept one’s own life, to say like Dag Hammarskjöld in his diary Markings, “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” In one of her stories Ursula LeGuin has the sage say “he had spent his life learning how to choose to do what he had no choice 66 The Vision of Return

but to do.”11 To say “Thanks!” and “Yes!” is to rest in the restlessness of the heart. It is like the poise of a whirling gyroscope. The restlessness that you rest in is not simply the shuffling of the cards you have been dealt in life but the movement of the journey that is told in your story. So this rest in restlessness is a “wandering joy” as Meister Eckhart calls it, the joy of an adventure with God. There are three phases then: (a) restlessness, (b) rest in restlessness, and (c) repose in God. Restlessness pure and simple, the first phase, is indeed like shuffling the cards you have been dealt in life. “Patience, and shuffle the cards” implies a kind of waiting restlessness. Each sequence of the cards is a possible story, and you may think you are in one story when you are actually in another. Each time you shuffle the cards, you are trying out another story to see if it fits. As long as you keep shuffling you are restless; as soon as you stop shuffling you are at rest. “You’ve got more directions in you than you know,” Wendell Berry was told as a young man.12 Each direction is a possible story. You stop shuffling when you are at peace. “His will is our peace,” as Dante says in the Divine Comedy, and so when you find the peace, you have found the will of God for you, and you come to rest. Rest in restlessness, the second phase, comes with the “Thanks!” and “Yes!” of being at peace with one’s life. It is rest in restlessness, and not rest pure and simple, because of the restless movement of one’s journey in time. It is like being in the quiet eye of a moving storm. I choose to do what I have no choice but to do, insofar as my “Thanks!” for things past and my “Yes!” to things to come is a choice. “Thinking is thanking” (Denken ist Danken),13 the mystic saying of the seventeenth century that Heidegger is fond of quoting, suggests a process of recollection, as in “Count your blessings!” a recollection The Vision of Return 67

of my past life with thanksgiving that involves the peace and rest of “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” When I come to the edge of “Yes!” to the future, I go from “remembrance of things past” to “dreaming on things to come”14 and I remember I am still on a journey in time. The “Yes!” to the future and even to my own death is a “Yes!” to my personal destiny. Repose in God, the third phase, seems to depend on the idea that time, as Plato says, is “a changing image of eternity.” Our life is a journey in time, but insofar as time is “a changing image of eternity,” there is an element of the eternal in our life, and our life is a journey with God in time. “The love is from God, and of God, and towards God,” the words of the old Bedouin to Lawrence of Arabia suggest a great circle from and of and towards God, “the circle dance of time” as I am calling it here. It is again the poise of a whirling gyroscope, eternity in the poise and time in the whirling. Thus rest in restlessness becomes repose in God and the restlessness itself becomes the circle dance around God. “And we are always around it [the One] but do not always look at it,” Plotinus says; “it is like a choral dance . . . but when we do look to him [God], then we are at our goal and at rest and do not sing out of tune as we dance our divinely inspired dance around him.”15 If the restlessness of the heart is expressed in the cry of the heart Who am I? and the story only has authority to answer the cry of the heart, the story’s ultimate form seems to be the circle dance of time, as in Yeats’ lines, O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?16

The dance begins then with restlessness pure and simple and goes through many tentative movements, “shuffling 68 The Vision of Return

the cards” as it were, before it acquires the poise of a whirling gyroscope by rest in restlessness, and then ultimately the shape of a great circle from and of and towards God. An ordinary circle dance is one where the dancers join hands and move in a circular direction, and especially one where the women form a circle moving clockwise and the men a circle around them moving counterclockwise, the man and woman opposite one another when the music stops becoming partners in the next dance. It is, as it were, a shuffling of partners. So the circle dance of time is the reverse of an ordinary circle dance, for it begins with a shuffling and ends with a great moving circle. The shuffling at the beginning is like that in Alice in Wonderland, “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”17 The Mock Turtle sings this “very slowly and sadly” while dancing with the Gryphon around Alice. I think too of Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa18 where the five women, hearing the music, begin to dance in a circle, forming the inner circle of women as in the circle dance but without the outer circle of men. What the shuffling is all about is joining the dance, and there is a choice, “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?” In the song it is the snail who is being invited to join the dance, and the snail replies “Too far, too far!” There is indeed a far point on the circle dance of time where love passes through loneliness, where light passes through darkness, where life passes through death. To join the circle dance of time is to enter into the great circle of the love that is from God and of God and towards God. “It is as though a room were filled with music though one can have no sure knowledge of its source,” Bernard Lonergan says. “There is in the world, as it were, a charged field of love and meaning; here and there it reaches a notable intensity; but it is ever unobtrusive, hidden, inviting each of The Vision of Return 69

us to join. And join we must if we are to perceive it, for our perceiving is through our own loving.”19 It is already there before we perceive it. We are already in the circle dance of time before we know it. We love with a love we do not know, that is, insofar as our heart is restless until it repose in God. “And we are always around it [the One] but do not always look at it,” as Plotinus says. For the unconscious is the direction we are not looking, and love is a direction. The circle dance of time is “like a choral dance,” as he says, “ . . . but when we do look to him [God], then we are at our goal and at rest and do not sing out of tune as we dance our divinely inspired dance around him.” The choice to join the dance then is the choice to look in the direction we have not been looking, towards God. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,”20 as Malebranche says, and so looking in the direction we have not been looking, towards God, is prayer. At first, prayer is usually brief, a glance in the direction of God, like Saint Augustine’s short prayer in his Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!” In The Cloud of Unknowing it is said “Short prayer penetrates heaven.”21 If I pray that short prayer “May I know me! May I know thee!” I am uttering “the cry of the heart Who am I?” I am praying with all my mind and heart and soul, and that, according to The Cloud, is why my short prayer penetrates heaven. There is rest then in the restlessness of the heart because I am giving expression to the restlessness. This isn’t yet the answer, but it is indeed the question. I am living the question, as Rilke advises a young poet, and living into the answer.22 There is a long prayer at the beginning of the Soliloquies, but Saint Augustine sums it up in a single sentence, “I desire to know God and the soul.”23 So it comes to the same thing as his short prayer “May I know me! May I know thee!” Something comes to light in this parallel, 70 The Vision of Return

though, to “know me” is to “know the soul.” I do prefer the formula in the short prayer because it puts the relationship with God in terms of I and thou, the relationship we find later on in the Confessions. The other formula, “God and the soul,” suggests that the human being is the soul, that I am my soul. I want to reject formulas like “I am my world,” “I am my time,” “I am my body,” and say instead “I am in my world,” “I am in my time,” “I am in my body.”24 What then of “I am my soul”? Perhaps all these others, that I am in my world and in my time and in my body do suggest I am my soul. Let us stay nevertheless with the I and thou formula, “May I know me! May I know thee!” The point of rejecting formulas like “I am my world” and “I am my time” and “I am my body” is to make room for eternal life, and that is what Saint Augustine is doing in his Soliloquies, only instead of speaking of “eternal life” he is speaking of “the immortality of the soul.” His Soliloquies, however, are unfinished, like his other early works, as if there was some kind of writer’s block that he could not overcome until he wrote his Confessions. Maybe he was searching for the eternal in us and did not find it until he could pass from short prayer to sustained prayer, until he could go from the standpoint before self that he has in his Soliloquies to the standpoint before God that he has in his Confessions. When you begin to rest in the restlessness of the heart, the restlessness becomes a quest of eternal life, like the ancient quest of Gilgamesh, at least I have found it so. Thus Saint Augustine in his Soliloquies considers the Platonic doctrine of recollection, that learning is remembering, and remembering from pre-existence suggests an afterlife as well. “People well trained in the liberal arts bring to light in the process of learning, knowledge that undoubtedly is buried in oblivion within them,” he says, The Vision of Return 71

“and in a way they disinter it.”25 Later, though, in his Revisions (or Retractations) he takes that back and says we seem to remember because we see the timeless truths in “the light of eternal reason,”26 and that inner light is the thing in us that points to eternal life. Inner light, also called “the light within” and “the Christ within,” is for the Quakers the light of faith giving spiritual enlightenment, moral guidance, and religious assurance. Saint Augustine’s theory of illumination is similar and is at the source of this way of thinking, except that he wants the inner light to be common to all human beings, “the true light that enlightens everyone coming into the world” (John 1:9). Rest in restlessness, as I am conceiving it, is “repose in light,” as Joubert calls it, repose in this inner light that gives enlightenment and guidance and assurance. The rest is repose in light, the restlessness a quest of eternal life. Maurice Blanchot comments on this double aspect, “repose in light can be—tends to be— peace through light, light that appeases and that gives peace, but repose in light is also repose—deprivation of all external help and impetus—so that nothing comes to disturb, or to pacify, the pure movement of light.”27 As I understand it, “the pure movement of light” takes the form of a spiritual enlightenment, and this comes about through a quest of eternal life. There is the wisdom of the ancient epics, Gilgamesh and the Iliad and the Odyssey, a consciousness of mortality, and the wisdom of the later epics, the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy, the immortality of the soul. Apparently “the pure movement of light” goes through a consciousness of mortality to a sense of the immortality of the soul. For myself conscious mortality allows “the words of eternal life” in the Gospel to speak to the heart and leads to a faith in eternal life. For others, like my friend Robert Jay Lifton, conscious mortality as a problem leads to a solution in the form of 72 The Vision of Return

“symbolic immortality,” for instance the symbolic immortality of being survived by one’s children, physical or spiritual. There is a rest in restlessness in the faith in eternal life and even in the sense of symbolic immortality, and there is an inner light and a moral guidance. What eternal life and symbolic immortality point to is the eternal in us, and that leads to something like a categorical imperative such as Kant describes, that I am called on to recognize the eternal in myself and in others, to treat myself and others as having eternal significance. It is equivalent, I believe, to Kant’s formula that I am called on to treat humanity in myself and in others as an end and never as a means to an end. The eternal in us is where I rest or dwell while restlessness moves on through time. I am on a journey with God in time, as if eternity were a vertical dimension moving through the horizontal dimension of time. It is, again, like being in the quiet eye of a moving storm. Religious assurance is there in the quiet eye of the moving storm, living in uncertainty (the storm) without despairing (faith vs. despair). “The quiet eye” as a seeing eye is a way of seeing everything. It is an approach to art, as Sylvia Judson says in The Quiet Eye.28 There is the quiet eye of the artist and the quiet eye of the viewer, for instance in Andre Rublev’s icon where the mystery of the Holy Trinity is made to seem open to the viewer (where there is an open place at the table of three, open to the viewer as to a fourth). Likewise as a way of seeing things that happen it is a seeing with the eyes of faith, letting be and being open to the mystery that is showing itself and at the same time withdrawing. Letting be allows the eye to be quiet, and yet openness to the mystery keeps the eye open to the showing and withdrawing. There is an assurance then that lets the mystery, though unknown, be open to the viewer. The Vision of Return 73

“Until it rests in you” Inner light, even though we do not see the light by itself but only see things in the light, is a resting place indeed for “repose in light,” when we realize we are seeing things in the light. This is Saint Augustine’s theory of illumination, I believe, and his idea of repose in God. It is not meant to be a seeing of God face to face in this life. It is eternal life, already begun in this life, but does not become face-to-face vision until life after death. All the same, it is repose in God as “repose in light.” It is one thing, that is, to see things in the light, and that is compatible with the restlessness of the heart. It is another thing, though, to realize you are seeing things in the light, and that is repose in God. And it is still another thing to actually see the light, and that is face-to-face vision of God. It is a matter then simply of realization, to go from seeing things in the inner light to knowing you are seeing them in the light. “Eternal rest give unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them,” that is the song in the Requiem Mass, Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis.29 That rest and that light comes after death, but there is a rest and a light that comes during life on earth. The rest and the light go together in life and in death insofar as eternity is “a great ring of pure and endless light.” In life eternity passes through time; in death eternity stands by itself. In life the light shines in the darkness; in death the light simply shines. “Repose in light,” therefore, repose goes with light and light with repose, and the inner light is the secret of repose for the restless heart. “Wisdom is repose in light,” Joubert’s saying, then means wisdom is consciousness of the inner light, I gather, and willingness to follow the inner light. If the 74 The Vision of Return

inner light is common to all, as Saint Augustine seems to have thought, then this consciousness and willingness would be the faith that the Quakers speak of when they speak of the inner light. It is as faith that the inner light is what they call the Christ Within, as Saint Paul says to the Ephesians (3:17), “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith.” Consciousness and willingness go together: I have to be willing to be conscious and conscious to be willing. Thus even though the light is common to all, it is perceptible only to those who believe in it and rely upon it, and it is perceptible to them not in itself but in the things it brings to light. Apart from faith it works in an unconscious and unintentional way. Spiritual enlightenment, moral guidance, and religious assurance, the three things ascribed to the inner light, are the constituent elements of the heart’s repose in God. The restless heart is the heart seeking enlightenment and guidance and assurance. The enlightened and enlightening heart, the guided and guiding heart, the assured and assuring heart is the heart at rest in God. What is enlightenment? There is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, a movement maintaining the primacy of reason over faith, and there is the ideal of enlightenment in Taoism, a state of being in harmony with the laws of the universe, and the ideal of enlightenment in Buddhism, the realization of universal truth. Spiritual enlightenment coming from the inner light is seeing with the eyes of faith, and so would imply the primacy of faith, the ideal of harmony with the will of God and that of realization of inner peace, as in Dante’s saying “his will is our peace” (la sua voluntate e nostra pace). Spiritual enlightenment is essentially the realization of the transcendence of longing, how our heart is restless until it rests in God, how it is essential to focus our longing on God and nothing less than God. The Vision of Return 75

Inner enlightenment shows itself then in purity of heart where “purity of heart is to will one thing,” as Kierkegaard says, and that one thing is the will of God where “his will is our peace,” as Dante says. If we compare it with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, we are comparing “the quiet eye” of inner peace and contemplation with the unquiet eye of a restless search for truth, “the quiet eye” of the heart in repose with the unquiet eye of the restless heart. If God held all truth in his right hand, and the lifelong pursuit of it in his left, Lessing said, speaking for the Enlightenment, I would choose the left.30 I would choose the right and the life of contemplation. In fact, though, I have been engaged in a lifelong pursuit of truth. If we compare inner enlightenment with the ideal of enlightenment in Taoism, a state of being in harmony with the laws of the universe, we are comparing a quiet eye that sees with the quiet eye of a storm. They are one and the same, or they differ only as the will of God transcends the laws of the universe. “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,” Wittgenstein says.31 The harmony of Taoism is with how the world is; that of the inner light is with the mystical, that the world is. Thus happiness, in the one perspective, is to be in accord with how the world is; happiness, in the other, is to be in accord with that the world is. The harmony of the inner light goes with faith in the transcendent, “Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me.”32 If then we compare inner enlightenment with the ideal of enlightenment in Buddhism, we are comparing self-transcendence with the Buddhist doctrine of no-self (anatta). The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, “All egocentric life is suffering. This suffering is caused by misknowing and its consequences. There is a real freedom from this suffering. The path to that freedom is eight76 The Vision of Return

fold,”33 seem to revolve around the idea of no-self. Selftranscendence, going beyond self, is implied by the transcendence of longing, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” There is a kind of practical equivalence, it seems to me, between no-self and self-transcendence, for both of them lead to a state of inner peace of mind. What then of moral guidance? It comes of inner enlightenment. There is the moral guidance of a categorical imperative, like that of Kant, appropriate to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the idea of acting on principle. But there is a truer and more ample guidance in the idea of acting on insight, following the inner light. I think of Newman and his lines, Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home— Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene—one step enough for me.34

I think too of a story Patricia McKillip tells of a young man who is learning to be the healer for a village on a river, learning from the old healer who is dying. But the old healer dies before communicating to him any of the formulas of healing, saying only “Everything is simple.” Then the young man gazing on the river from the door of the healer’s hut, realizes “The future—any future—is simply one step at a time out of the heart.”35 Here again there is the idea of “one step,” “I do not ask to see the distant scene, one step enough for me” and “The future is simply one step at a time out of the heart.” It is true, in following the inner light of the heart, there is what Kant calls “practical” guidance, Do this and don’t do that, but not what he calls “technical” guidance, The Vision of Return 77

If you do this, that will happen.36 In other words, the guidance is moral or ethical. All the same, the guidance is more comprehensive than the guidance afforded by a formal principle like his categorical imperative. For instance in choosing one’s way in life there is a waiting on the heart to speak, as in Tolkien’s trilogy when one of the characters says “My heart speaks clearly at last.”37 If you were going simply by a categorical imperative, it could not decide between ways that were morally good, but only between good and evil. There is an incompleteness of formal systems in ethics, then, just as there is, according to Godel’s proof, in logic and mathematics.38 There are undecidable propositions in formal systems, undecidables also in ethics having to do with a person’s way in life. There is “the road taken” as well as “the road not taken,” as in Robert Frost’s poem, Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.39

If both roads are morally good, then a categorical imperative, an ethical formalism, cannot decide between them, though one is more traveled and the other less. On the other hand, this does not mean the choice is arbitrary. For the heart can speak, and following the inner light of the heart I can decide. There is an assurance that comes of following the heart, from the experience of being led by the “kindly light,” as Newman calls it, one step at a time. “As God is one,” he says, “so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one.”40 That impression, I take it, is that of “God with us.” That is my assurance, God saying in effect

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“I am with you.” So it is an assurance of the presence of God, not just the existence of God. Religious assurance has to do with “real presences” as George Steiner calls them, not just with existences, my own existence as a primordial certainty and God’s existence as established for instance by the ontological argument that existence belongs to God’s essence. Instead Saint Augustine’s prayer “May I know me! May I know thee!” is answered with real presences, my own and God’s. Presence to myself is an answer to the prayer “May I know me!” It is not an answer in the form of a proposition but is indeed a real presence and thus can lead to one proposition after another. My existence can be expressed in the proposition “I am,” but my presence to myself has something inexhaustible about it. It is true, “I am” is sometimes used to express presence, like the “I am” sayings in the Gospel, and then it has that same inexhaustible quality that the presence has itself. The “I am” sayings of Jesus can be taken to express the Shekinah, the divine presence, and thus can suggest that the divine presence is also entailed in our “I am.” If the divine presence is implied, then the answer to “May I know me!” is inseparable from the answer to “May I know thee!” There is a depth also in “I am,” though, simply as an expression of my existence. I think again of Wittgenstein’s saying, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” I put this alongside Meister Eckhart’s saying, “Existence is God” (Esse est Deus).41 There is a numinous quality about existence, about the world’s existence, even about my existence. There is the wonder of existence, that the world is, that I am. I remember feeling it especially as a child looking up at the stars on summer nights. My presence to myself seems to entail the presence of God in this wonder of existence that has its focus not on myself or on

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God but on the world, “that it is.” It is the wonder of the world’s existence, “that it is,” that involves the wonder of my existence, “May I know me!,” and the wonder of God’s existence, “May I know thee!” So if the wonder of existence poses the question, real presences have the answer, my presence to myself, God’s presence to me. Saint Augustine’s Soliloquies are a model of the question, and his Confessions are a model of the answer. His presence to himself in the Confessions is there in recollection, and God’s presence to him is there in prayer. My presence to myself and God’s presence to me is enacted likewise in prayer and recollection. There is an inner peace in recollection, as “emotion recollected in tranquillity,” and there is an inner peace in prayer, as “his will is our peace.” It is the peace of the contemplative life, the dimension of life largely missing in our society, where there is the life of action and the life of enjoyment, but the life of contemplation is mostly absent and its empty place tends to get filled with violence. Contemplative life then is the repose in God where the restless heart finds rest. There is movement nonetheless in contemplation, three movements according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the linear, the circular, and the oblique.42 It is the circular movement that I have been describing in this book where “The love,” as the old Bedouin said to Lawrence of Arabia, “is from God and of God and towards God.” The circular movement seems to contain the others, the linear and the oblique, in its “from and of and towards.” It is like the mountain in a story that “holds great beauty and great sorrow, and I could not desire anything less for it, than that it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself.”43 It “holds great beauty and great sorrow,” the circle dance of time, and “it yields always, unsparingly, the truth of itself.” The circular movement of contemplation 80 The Vision of Return

revolves around this truth and this sorrow and this beauty. Yet what is this truth, this sorrow, this beauty? Is it simply mortal existence, or is it eternal life? Is it a dance of death or a dance of life? I think of a film, Logan’s Run, where there is a circle dance of death, called the Carousel, in an underground city of the future, and the story is one of a man and a woman escaping into freedom.44 The words “The love is from God and of God and towards God” point however to eternal life, coming from God, and walking with God, and going home to God, and so the circular movement of contemplation circles around God, following the path of love “from and of and towards.” We too can feel at times that we are on something like a carousel, a circle dance of death, and eternal life can appear as an escape into freedom. But if we see eternal life as beginning already in this life, as in the Gospel of John, then it is not so much an escape as a deepening of life. It means a life not only of action and enjoyment but also of contemplation, a life of knowledge and love. Reading Saint Thomas Aquinas on the life of contemplation in his Summa Theologiae,45 you can see his intellectualism: contemplation is the life of the intellectual virtues, as in Aristotle, and also the life of the intellectual gifts of the Holy Spirit, but it also encompasses love and especially the love of God. It is a life of knowledge and love. Eternal life, then, is the contemplative resting place of the restless heart. What, though, is the focus of contemplation? There is a double focus in Kant’s famous exclamation, “The starry skies above me and the moral law within me!”46 but the focus in traditional thinking is the One. Saint Thomas goes from a differentiation between the speculative (“the starry skies above me”) and the practical (“the moral law within me”) like Kant’s, placing wisdom and understanding in the one category and counsel and knowledge in the other, to an integration in a The Vision of Return 81

knowing that is loving and a loving that is knowing.47 I see the integration also in Spinoza’s idea of the intellectual love of God as simple joy at the thought of God. “All excellent things are as difficult as they are rare,”48 Spinoza’s closing words in his Ethics, suggest that repose in God through contemplation is difficult and rare. Saint Augustine’s words on the opening page of his Confessions, on the other hand, “our heart is restless until it rests in you,” suggest that the restlessness of the heart is easy and common. Rest in restlessness, I want to suggest, is the way from the one to the other, living in the quiet eye of the moving storm of life.

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The Far Point on the Circle

Even love must pass through loneliness. —Wendell Berry

I

f “the love is from God and of God and towards God,” as the old Bedouin said to Lawrence of Arabia, then there is a far point on the circle where “even love must pass through loneliness,”1 where even light must pass through darkness, where even life must pass through death. It is like the aphelion, the far point in the earth’s orbit around the sun. Life and light and love, the three great metaphors in the Gospel of John, all pass there through their opposites, life through death, light through darkness, love through loneliness. I suppose this goes with the great circle in the Gospel’s vision, “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it but cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going: so is every one who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). Or again, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father” (John 16:28). 83

These metaphors, life and light and love, are “conceptual metaphors,”2 if I may borrow a term from present-day cognitive science, and the cognition here is what Nicholas of Cusa calls “learned ignorance” (docta ignorantia), the knowing unknowing of “the cloud of unknowing in which a soul is oned with God,” and their relation with their opposites is what Nicholas calls “the coincidence of opposites” (coincidentia oppositorum).3 The key experience here, though, is “going through,” the underlying experience of the Gospels, what it is for love to pass through loneliness, what it is for light to pass through darkness, what it is for life to pass through death. The key words in the Gospel are those in the Prologue of Saint John, “And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it,” or “the darkness did not overcome it,” or the “darkness did not overshadow it” (John 1:5).4 My interpretation is that the light is Christ, and that it continues to shine as the inner light, the Christ Within, and the darkness does not comprehend it, does not overcome it, does not overshadow it. So too as the love, the loneliness does not comprehend it, does not overcome it, does not overshadow it, and as the life, death does not comprehend it, does not overcome it, does not overshadow it. Yet what is it for love to pass through loneliness, for light to pass through darkness, for life to pass through death? Love Passing through Loneliness “Alone with the Alone,” the climax in the ascent to the One in the Enneads of Plotinus, became Newman’s description of our relationship with God, solus cum solo as he said, quoting the Latin translation of the phrase.5 It became even more true for him in his moment of conversion 84 The Far Point on the Circle

to Catholicism. Je mourrai seul, he quoted from Pascal, “I will die alone,” thinking of the moment of turning from Anglicanism to Catholicism, or really of the moment in between, when he was neither with the Anglicans he knew nor yet with the Catholics he did not know. “How could I in any sense direct others who had to be guided in so momentous a matter myself?” he said in his Apologia. “My only line, my only duty, was to keep simply to my own case. I recollected Pascal’s words, Je mourrai seul. I deliberately put out of my thoughts all other works and claims, and said nothing to anyone, unless I was obliged.”6 Yet there is also such a thing as loneliness without love. Of Queen Elizabeth (Tudor) the historian J. R. Green says “the loneliness of her position only reflected the loneliness of her nature” and “if she was without love she was without hate,”7 and generally of the loneliness of rulers he says, referring I suppose to words like those of Machiavelli, “The loneliness which breathes in words like these has often begotten in great rulers a cynical contempt of men and the judgements of men.”8 Cynicism is a distrust, a disbelief in the sincerity, the benevolence, the uprightness, the competence of others. There are at least three possible attitudes here, I believe: naiveté, cynicism, and deliberate naiveté. This last amounts to acting as if others were sincere, of goodwill, upright, competent, even while knowing better, but doing so because that tends to bring out the best in others, even though at times it fails. Beyond all these there is trust in God. “Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me.” Isn’t it simply possible, though, to trust in trustworthy persons? Loneliness means being alone and longing to be unalone. It is the longing to be unalone that can become love and that love can become. “Even love must pass through loneliness” tells of love being alone and longing The Far Point on the Circle 85

to be unalone. The loneliness is that of the great circle one must travel, going away before one can come home. “Time can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost,” Walter Benjamin says, quoting Georg Lukács.9 It is when time becomes constitutive, when connection with the transcendental home has been lost, that love passes through loneliness. If it is love, though, and not simply loneliness that is passing through loneliness, then time is not really constitutive, though it seems to be, and the connection with the transcendental home is not really lost, though it seems to be. Our link with our transcendental home is our heart’s desire, the transcendence of our longing, the fact that “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” This link is still there even when we are at the greatest distance from our transcendental home, when time seems to have become constitutive, when death seems to be the end. Let us see how this link may be found when “even love must pass through loneliness.” “Am I my time?”10 Heidegger asks in an early essay on time, and to answer “Yes” as he wants to do would mean that time is constitutive. If “I am” is the eternal in time, on the other hand, then time is not constitutive by itself but is the horizontal dimension of life while the eternal is the vertical dimension passing through the horizontal. Love passing through loneliness then is the eternal in us passing through time. I think of the title scene in War and Peace where Tolstoy has Prince Andre fall flat on his back in the midst of the Battle of Austerlitz and look up into the infinite peaceful sky. He is looking up into peace in the midst of war, into eternity in the midst of time. War is in the horizontal dimension, peace in the vertical. “How quiet, peaceful, and solemn; not at all as I ran, not as we ran, shouting and fighting,” he says to himself. “How was 86 The Far Point on the Circle

it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!”11 It is with “the quiet eye” that we see that infinite sky, and when we realize “even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!” we come to the quiet place in our own heart, “a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” Here is where love and loneliness meet. I think again of the African love song “I walk alone.” It is an expression of loneliness and yet also an expression of love, really of love passing through loneliness. “Alone with the Alone,” on the other hand, is an expression of loneliness transformed into love, the love of God. I keep playing with these words: I walk alone and unalone —You are walking with me on the way.12

or again I walk alone with you all one; alone with you I walk all one.13

“We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” Dag Hammarskjöld says in his little brochure for the Meditation Room at the UN. Yet the most frequent word in his diary Markings (besides “and,” “the,” and “but”) is “loneliness.” The turning point in his diary is when he goes from living in loneliness to living in The Far Point on the Circle 87

his center of stillness, when he exclaims “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”14 He goes essentially from “I walk alone” to “alone with the Alone.” He goes from love as longing (Eros) in loneliness to love as “Thanks!” and “Yes!” (Agape). It is almost a definition of love as longing (Eros) to say it is love as longing in loneliness, and it is almost a definition of our human participation in divine love (Agape) to say it is love as “Thanks!” and “Yes!” “Never less alone than when alone,” those words of Samuel Rogers describe what it is to dwell in “a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” But there are moments which he calls his own, Then, never less alone than when alone, Those whom he loved so long and sees no more, Loved and still loves—not dead—but gone before, He gathers round him.15

When I am in my center of stillness, those who belong to my life are present to me, even those who have “gone before.” So then I am “never less alone than when alone.” Cicero says something similar, “Never less idle than when idle, nor less alone than when alone,”16 describing a happy aloneness, not an emptiness but a fullness. Loneliness then is felt outside of “a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” It is a homelessness longing to come home. “I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in.”17 That is a pregnant expression of loneliness, and it can be given three different interpretations, I think, an outer, an inner, and a transcendental interpretation, as the homeless longing is for the outer home, the inner home, or the transcendental home. In the story where this sentence occurs it is the outer home that is being missed, the loved one and the loved ones. Really there are two issues here, 88 The Far Point on the Circle

“What do you do?” and “Whom do you love?” The earthy reality of these two things, love and work, can make the other two, the inner home and the transcendental home, seem figments of imagination. “What do you do?” points to the what, and “Whom do you love?” points to the who of heart’s desire. In Martin Buber’s terms of I and it and I and thou, the questions become “What is the it of my life?” and “Who is the thou of my life?” When I put it in these terms, I and it and I and thou, I seem to have encompassed the entire issue. All the same, “I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in” can also suggest longing to be in the quiet and peace of my “center of stillness surrounded by silence,” longing not just for the outer home but for the inner home. What is more, the outer seems contained in the inner, as those who belong to my life are present to me when I am alone and dwelling in my center of stillness. When we speak of the what and the who of heart’s desire, we are speaking not only of the outer and earthy reality of love and work but also of the inner and spiritual presence of I and it and I and thou. So the standpoint of the person before others is contained within the standpoint of the person before self. Still, it is a step forward in inwardness to go from before others to before self. A further step forward in inwardness is to go from before self to before God, and that sentence, “I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in,” could well be a sentence in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, describing his state before his moment of conversion. His story is “the story of the soul wandering away from God and then in torment and tears finding its way home through conversion.”18 Here the home is the transcendental home. There is already a hint of it in the statement “We all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence” if we take the surrounding silence to be the surrounding The Far Point on the Circle 89

presence of God. If we take it this way, the inner home and the transcendental home are one, as eternal life, according to the Gospel of John, begins already now as the deeper life and light and love. When “I’m outside my heart, looking for the way back in,” I am on an odyssey seeking to come home to my heart. The three interpretations, the outer, the inner, the transcendental, are really three stages of insight into homecoming (nostos in the Odyssey of Homer). At first I see the answer to our loneliness in someone or something, someone to love, something to do, the someone or something of the outer home. Then I see the inner home as the secret of the outer, inner peace as the secret of the human relationship and of the creative work. Then finally I see “our heart is restless until it rests in you” and “his will is our peace” in returning to the transcendental home. Love passing through loneliness then is an odyssey of the heart, and this odyssey, like the original of Homer, has two parts, wonderland and homeland. Dread and fascination are the ordeals of wonderland. Odysseus has to stand in the dread and fascination without yielding. Something similar happens in the odyssey of the heart. Kierkegaard in The Concept of Dread speaks in the end of “dread as a saving experience by means of faith.”19 It is a V experience as he describes it, going down and coming up again. The two elements in loneliness, being alone and longing to be unalone, can take the form of dread of being alone and fascination with the intimacy of being unalone. The V experience is one of going down into the dread and fascination of loneliness and coming up into a love that “casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). To say love casts out fear does not mean I cease to feel fear but that love is stronger than fear. Love then, as Spinoza says, is simply joy at the thought of the loved one, and love of God is simply joy at 90 The Far Point on the Circle

the thought of God—for me joy at the thought of “God with us.” The second part of the odyssey of the heart, like that of Homer’s Odyssey, is the homecoming to loved ones, the outer home, the homecoming to joy, the inner home, and ultimately the homecoming to God, the transcendental home. The odyssey of the heart then is one of “wandering joy,” as Meister Eckhart calls it. One who is heartfree, he says, “experiences such a joy that no one would be able to take it away,” but such a one “remains unsettled.” One who has let oneself be and let God be “lives in a wandering joy, or joy without a cause.”20 Yet this idea of remaining unsettled seems to conflict with the idea of homecoming. It suggests Dante’s thought that Odysseus could not stay home after coming home but continued afterwards to wander, as Nikos Kazantzakis went on to tell in his modern sequel to the Odyssey.21 Wandering joy, as I understand it, is joy at being on a journey with God in time. It looks forward to being with God in eternity, as in the words of Genesis 5:24, “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” There is a continuity, I want to say, between being on a journey with God in time and being with God in eternity. So there is not just a sense of perpetual wandering but the hope of a real homecoming. I think of the song “Going Home” based on the slow movement of the New World Symphony of Dvorˇák. There is a feeling there of true nostalgia, “longing for home.” There is in wandering joy a similar longing, as there is in Homer’s Odyssey, not just “My soul, your voyages have been your native land”22 as in the modern sequel to the Odyssey by Kazantzakis, where time is constitutive and the connection with the transcendental home has been lost, but a true longing for home that is the heart’s desire. Going home to God is the heart’s desire if “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” The transcendental home The Far Point on the Circle 91

goes with the transcendence of longing, as the human heart is never satisfied with someone or something finite. So to set my heart on the finite always leads to disappointment. “There are two tragedies in life,” George Bernard Shaw says. “One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.”23 That is true of setting your heart on the finite. The promises of Christ, on the other hand, have to do with the infinite, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2). So if “love is a direction”24 it becomes essential to direct my heart to the infinite, and that is not easy. I tend to get stranded in the tragedies of heart’s desire, setting my heart on the finite. I may have to experience the disappointment of getting and not getting my heart’s desire in order to set my heart on the infinite. Setting my heart on the infinite is easy in one way and very difficult in another. It is easy to love God if love of God, as Spinoza says, is simply joy at the thought of God, or as I am conceiving it, joy at the thought of “God with us.” It is very difficult, though, to set your heart on God alone, as in the motto over the entrance of a monastery, “God alone.” For to set your heart on God alone requires letting be, Gelassenheit as Meister Eckhart says, letting all things be. “What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is?” Heidegger says. “Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks . . . ?”25 Say I am in love with someone or something. To set my heart on God alone I have to let that someone be, to let that something be, so that my love of that person or that thing is a letting be. That is still love but it is the divine love, “Let there be light!” Having passed through loneliness, love is a heart according to God’s heart. Joy at the thought of the loved one must pass through loneliness and longing, “I walk alone,” and joy at the thought of God-with-us must pass through the loneliness of the human condition, “alone with the Alone.” Wander92 The Far Point on the Circle

ing joy, letting things be, letting me be me, letting God be God, as I understand it, is the joy of being on a journey with God in time. I have to let me be me and let God be God, I mean, to be on a journey with God, for the journey reveals me to me and God to me. “The oarsman sat quietly and praised the journey,” Werner Herzog says in the epigraph of a play, and I too sit quietly and praise the journey, or as Herzog says in the last line of the play, “and the oarsman sat still and praised the voyage.”26 Loneliness becomes love then in wandering joy, and “alone” becomes “all one.” Yet feelings are not abolished, for what changes is our relation to our feelings, our relation to the things of our life. So on a journey with God in time I sit quietly and praise the voyage, praising the whole journey of learning to love. “Journeys end in lovers meeting,”27 Shakespeare says in Twelfth Night, and it is true also of a journey with God in time, or that is my hope. Knowing takes things in, according to Saint Thomas Aquinas, but loving goes out to things, and so knowing and loving form a circle, going out leads to taking in and taking in leads to going out. It is the great circle that is the theme of this book, the circle dance of time. “Journeys end in lovers meeting” in that going out to one another in love leads to taking in one another in knowledge. A journey with God in time, learning to love with all your mind and heart and soul, ends according to this in a vision of God. Since the journey takes in all love, though, it ends not only in meeting God but in meeting all the loved ones of your life. Although journeys do end in lovers meeting, still there is an element of unknowing here, as Tolkien says, “for even the very wise cannot see all ends.”28 That is, even the very wise cannot see how all lives will turn out with happy or sad endings. Thus when Sam asks “I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” Tolkien has The Far Point on the Circle 93

Frodo answer “I wonder, but I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you are fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happyending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”29 What we can know, it seems, is “the tension of essences” that allows life stories to come out in different ways, happy or sad. Thus as “even love must pass through loneliness,” so even light must pass through darkness, even knowing must pass through unknowing. Light Passing through Darkness “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” That is a prayer addressed to Christ as “the man who stood at the gate of the year.” And his reply is “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”30 It is an invitation, I take it, to enter into his relationship with God, “my Father and your Father,” as he says to Mary Magdalene, “my God and your God” (John 20:17). There is light and light. I suppose going out into the darkness and putting your hand into the hand of God means being led by the inner light rather than the outer light of “a known way.” It is like saying “Beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Trust me.”31 Spiritual enlightenment coming from inner light, the Christ Within, is just this, it seems, going out into the darkness and putting your hand into the hand of God. Enlightenment is seeing in the dark. Some forms of enlightenment, it is true, such as the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, are more like being color-blind, but spiritual enlightenment is a seeing in the dark, a seeing with the eyes of faith. And out of enlightenment there 94 The Far Point on the Circle

comes a guidance, as though you were indeed being led by the hand of God, and there comes an assurance, as though your own hand were indeed in God’s hand. Enlightenment, guidance, assurance, all come of trusting God beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope. Light passing through darkness is a phenomenon of physical light as well as spiritual or inner light. Passing through the darkness of outer space, physical light cannot be seen unless it strikes an object. So too the inner light cannot be seen by itself but things can be seen in the inner light. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,”32 Malebranche’s saying, goes with the idea of things being seen in the inner light, for it is by attention to the things appearing in the inner light that I become aware of the light itself. What things? Spiritual truths like these: Things are meant; there are signs; the heart speaks; there is a way.33

And not just the universal truths but the particular meaning of things that happen, particular signs, what the heart is now saying, what the next step is on the way. All these things come to light in the inner light, and the natural prayer of the soul is to attend to them. Let us consider three poems about light passing through darkness, my poem “Dark Light,” then “Dark Night” by Saint John of the Cross, and finally the prologue of the Gospel of John about light shining in the darkness. My poem “Dark Light” goes like this, Why is it dark at night? —a thousand stars The Far Point on the Circle 95

are like a thousand suns! Why is it dark before me, if your light shines on my path? I can know more than I can tell of light and darkness, for if your eyes open, there is light, if your eyes close, then there is dark, but light inside my heart.

I have encoded many things in those words: Olbers’ paradox (why is it dark at night?), a shining path, a tacit knowing, Ra’s eye opening and closing, an inner light. And I have set the words to music.34 There is darkness and darkness. There is the darkness of unknowing in my poem “Dark Light,” and there is the darkness of desolation in “Dark Night” by Saint John of the Cross, and there is the darkness of the human heart in the prologue of the Gospel of John. The darkness of unknowing is the most fundamental and is included in the others. It is also the more positive in its significance as “the cloud of unknowing in which a soul is oned with God.” My poem begins with the physical darkness of Olbers’ paradox, “Why is it dark at night?—a thousand stars are like a thousand suns!” and then it goes on to the darkness of unknowing, “Why is it dark before me, if your light shines on my path?” The path is shining with the inner light, and so my poem is about the inner light passing through the darkness of unknowing. “I can know more than I can tell of light and darkness,” the next lines evoke Polanyi’s tacit knowing, “We can know more than we can tell,” and apply the idea of 96 The Far Point on the Circle

tacit knowing to light and darkness, here to inner light and the darkness of unknowing. Then what follows, “for if your eyes open, there is light, if your eyes close, then there is dark, but light inside my heart,” is like the words of Psalm 139:11, “Darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day; darkness and light to you are both alike.” What to us is unknowing to God is knowing. But what of tacit knowing? What of inner light? Setting the words to music, I learned more. Of tacit knowing I learned from the words what “we can tell” and from the music what “we can know” that is “more than we can tell.” The music I composed in two stages, first the melody, then the accompaniment. The melody is a simple pentatonic melody that leads back into itself with a rhythm that matches the rhythm of the words. The accompaniment is in broken sevenths that I preferred to an alternate accompaniment in broken tritones, for the tritones sounded strange and the sevenths sounded romantic and hopeful. Of inner light then I learned how it can guide us not only in what we can tell but also in what we can know that is more than we can tell. Words express what we can tell; music expresses what we can know that is more than we can tell. “Dark Night” by Saint John of the Cross is also about the inner light passing through the darkness of unknowing, but it has the added dimension of “consolation” and “desolation” (if I may use terms from the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius), the consolation of light and the desolation of darkness. Here is my translation of the first half of the poem: In dark night with longings kindled into loves —O lucky venture! I set out unseen, The Far Point on the Circle 97

my household now at rest. In darkness and in safety, by the secret ladder, in disguise, —O lucky venture!— In the shadows and in hiding there, my household now at rest. In the lucky night, in secret so nobody saw me and I saw no thing, with no light no guide other than that burning in my heart. It guided me more sure than noonday light to where awaiting me was someone I knew well, there where no one appeared.35

This dark night is essentially the same, I believe, as “the cloud of unknowing in which a soul is oned with God.” For inner light passing through the darkness of this dark night illumines what Saint John of the Cross calls “the road of the union of love with God.”36 And the union of love is what he describes in the second half of the poem: O guiding night! O night more lovable than dawn! O night uniting love with loved one, changing her into her love! Against my flowering breast, all kept for him alone, he lay asleep, and I was fondling him, and fanning cedars gave a breeze,

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the castle air, as I played with his hair, and he with his serene hand touched me on my neck, and put all my senses in suspense. I lay and I forgot, my face reclined upon my love; all ceased and I let go, leaving my care among the lilies out of mind.

One thing that throws me off here is that he becomes feminine with God or with Christ. It seems to me I can still be a man in union with Christ just as a woman can still be a woman in that union, “I in them and thou in me,” as Christ says in the Gospel of John 17:25, or “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith,” as is said in Ephesians 3:17. Or as Ramón Lull says of the cloud of unknowing in his Book of the Lover and the Beloved, Love shines through the cloud which came between the Lover and the Beloved, and made it bright and resplendent as is the moon by night, as the day-star at dawn, the sun at midday, the understanding in the will; and through that bright cloud the Lover and the Beloved held converse.37

It is true, what we have here in Ramón Lull and Saint John of the Cross is Christ-mysticism, as Albert Schweitzer calls it in his Mysticism of Paul the Apostle.38 For me too that is the way of union with God. I suppose the desolation of “the dark night of the soul,” therefore, hardly mentioned in the poetry but described in the prose commentary by Saint John of the

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Cross, is essentially a going with Christ through suffering to joy. I understand this not as an experience of violence or of violent purification but as a matter of eyes and heart, of seeing and feeling, a seeing with Christ’s eyes and a feeling with Christ’s heart, like making the Stations of the Cross in the Rothko Chapel, contemplating the dark abstract panels by Mark Rothko, facing suffering and death and yet feeling inner peace, and thus perceiving a joy that runs deeper than sorrow, a life that runs deeper than death.39 Here is my translation then of the third poem; I call it a poem, the prologue of the Gospel of John, where the darkness is the darkness of the human heart: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This was in the beginning with God; all came to be through this, and without this nothing came that ever came to be. In this was life, and the life was the light of humankind, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overshadowed it.

I set this also to music, first for baritone in a song cycle called “Songlines of the Gospel” and then later for soprano in the first movement of “A Symphony of Songs.”40 Sin is the darkness of the heart in the prologue of the Gospel of John. Or it is the heart of darkness, as Joseph Conrad suggests in his novel Heart of Darkness.41 It is essentially separation, I believe, as the German word Sunde

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suggests, like “sunder” in English, separation from God, separation from others, separation from self. It is experienced as a spiritual numbness, a lovelessness, like the ice at the bottom of hell in Dante’s Inferno. It is a darkness that includes the darkness of desolation and that of unknowing but is not defined by them, is not necessarily present in them. “If separation ever touches him, his solidarity of relation is the greater,” Martin Buber says of Jesus in I and Thou.42 Even when Jesus cries “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” that is, he is praying and quoting Psalm 22. In the Gospel of John, then, he is the light shining in the darkness of sin and separation, and what is said of Christ in the Gospel can be said of the inner light as the Christ Within. Or is it true to say also of the inner light in us “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overshadowed it”? Those words, I think, refer to the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, how the darkness that put Jesus to death was not able to put out his light. The inner light in us is the light of the inner life, the life of love and knowledge, that is not put out by death in us but is able to live through death and survive it. So the parallel is there, Jesus rising from death and the deeper life in us living through death and surviving it. In the Gospel of John the three great metaphors, life and light and love, are one: the life is the light and the light is the light of love. And so also in us the inner life is the inner light and the inner light is the light of a love that is “from God and of God and towards God.” Our inability to guarantee today who we will be tomorrow is what Hannah Arendt calls “the darkness of the human heart.”43 It undermines perpetual commitments like vows and marriage. It seems related to the “heart of darkness” we have been talking about, separation from

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God and others and self, especially separation from self. The answer to it, I believe, is “we all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence.” To live in that center is to live clear down in your heart. The Quakers speak of “alternation,” being in and out of your center, and “simultaneity,” living in your center while dealing with the outer world.44 The power of promise then, the power of making a perpetual commitment, seems to depend on “simultaneity,” on dwelling in your center of stillness surrounded by silence while simultaneously dealing with human affairs. “Light of Christ,” the opening words sung in the Easter Vigil, as the Easter candle is lit, point up the light that passes through the darkness. Those words suggest the resurrection but also “the words of eternal life,” the words of teaching, as in Peter’s saying “You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Those words of life bring light into the darkness of the human condition, the darkness that could not “comprehend” the light, the darkness that could not “overcome” the light, the darkness that could not “overshadow” the light, three readings of what is said in the prologue of the Gospel of John 1:5. It is the human condition that is being illumined by the light of Christ. That is why Christianity spread in the Roman empire, and that is why it spreads still in the world. What is the human condition? Is it simply mortal existence? It is a paradoxical combination, it seems, of love and loneliness, of light and darkness, of life and death. “Light of Christ,” the light Christianity brings to the human condition, is the light that comes of “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (John 20:17). If I let his Father be my Father, his God be my God, I see the light, I see the light of Christ, or rather I see things in the light, I see things in the light of Christ. I see love and

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loneliness, light and darkness, life and death in the light of his Father and my Father, his God and my God. I think of Saint Augustine’s verses, an evening song to be sung at the lighting of the candle, These goods are good because they are of you, and nothing ours is in them but our sin of love inordinate of yours for you.45

They are lines full of sin-consciousness but also of insight into the heart restless until it rests in God. Lighting the candle here is the image of the “Light of Christ,” the light shining in the darkness, lighting the Easter candle or simply lighting the candle at evening song. It is the image also of the inner light, the Christ Within, the Light Within, the light shining in the darkness of our unknowing, in the darkness of our desolation, in the darkness of our heart. “One who follows me will not walk in darkness” (John 8:12). Those words of the Gospel of John are also the opening words of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. On first reading those words, I was moved to follow Christ, without knowing how to define light or darkness. A light that is not put out by death is “perpetual light,” as in the Requiem Mass, “Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them” (Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis). I think of Mozart composing his Requiem on his deathbed. I think also of Franz Cumont who had written Afterlife in Roman Paganism but in later life, when he came actually to believe in eternal life, wrote a revision called Lux Perpetua, “Perpetual Light.”46 The great metaphors of the Gospel of John, life and light and love, speak to the problem of death, “If I must die someday, what can I do to

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fulfil my desire to live?”47 Or perhaps we should say they speak to the mystery that “shows itself and at the same time withdraws”48 in our life and death. Life Passing through Death A mystery shows and withdraws in our living and dying, for we don’t simply live and die like other living organisms, but we always have a relationship to our life and to our death. The mystery shows in that we don’t simply live and die, but it withdraws in that we do nevertheless live and die. “Only connect,”49 E. M. Forster says, and that seems to be the answer, to connect, to relate to the things of our life, to relate to the persons of our life, the I and it with things, the I and thou with persons. The deeper answer, that of eternal life, is then in the I in them, and thou in me of the Gospel of John 17:23, Christ in us and God in Christ, the indwelling of the eternal in us that comes of entering into his I and thou with God. “Only connect.” There are the things of life, and there is our relation to the things.50 Really the “things” socalled are twofold, things and persons, and the relation is twofold, knowledge taking the things in and love going out to the things. There is the love and knowledge of things, of I and it, and there is the love and knowledge of persons, of I and thou. I see the life of knowledge and love as the deeper life that is lasting, even everlasting, and the life of things and persons entering and passing as the life that is passing. Perhaps the essential of a lasting and even everlasting life is a relationship with the eternal. I see this idea in Plato’s Dialogues when he is arguing for the immortality of the soul, and I see it in the New Testament in the relationship of Jesus with God, whom he calls Abba, as if on familiar terms with God. In the Lord’s Prayer then 104 The Far Point on the Circle

he teaches us as well to be on familiar terms with God and to call God Abba. “Deserts of vast eternity,” Andrew Marvell says, The grave’s a fine and private place, But none I think do there embrace.

He says this in his poem “To His Coy Mistress.”51 Relationship, I and thou, if that is the key to eternal life, would mean an embracing beyond the grave and something more than “deserts of vast eternity.” It is true, Meister Eckhart speaks of “the still desert of the Godhead,” but I wonder if this does not correspond to what W. H. Auden calls “the deserts of the heart,” In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start,52

and the healing fountain starts in the I and thou, or rather in the I in them, and thou in me. What I mean is that instead of advancing from I and thou to I and it with God, from personal to impersonal, we advance rather from I and it to I and thou, from impersonal to personal. For an I and it is less of a relationship with God than an I and thou. I think of Martin Buber’s advance, for instance, “from mysticism to dialogue,” from mysticism, where he said there is “no more Thou in the I,” to dialogue where he spoke of “I and thou.”53 Yet I think there is something to be said for mysticism and indwelling and the impersonal as well as for dialogue and I and thou and the personal. You can see both in I in them, and thou in me. The indwelling oneness of persons, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30), may be the key to the mystery of death and eternal life. Let us start then with the mystical and impersonal. “We listen to our inmost selves and do not know which sea we hear murmuring,” Buber’s formulation of The Far Point on the Circle 105

the mystical, and Wittgenstein’s, “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is,” seem both to point to the sea of Being.54 We listen to our inmost selves, like putting shells to our ears so we can hear the sea, and we do hear a sea murmuring, an inner sea, an inner wonder, an oceanic consciousness of Someone or Something. So too when we are asking how the world is, posing scientific questions like Olbers’ paradox “Why is it dark at night?” we are taking for granted that it is, but when we begin to wonder at that and no longer take it for granted, looking up at the stars on a summer night, we come upon an outer wonder, the wonder of existence, that seems to correspond to the inner wonder of our oceanic consciousness of Someone or Something. “Existence is God” (Esse est Deus),55 Meister Eckhart says, but he doesn’t mean thereby to decide between Someone or Something. So we still “do not know which sea we hear murmuring.” Father or Son or Holy Spirit is Someone, but the Godhead or the divine essence they share is Something, and that according to Meister Eckhart is “the still desert of the Godhead.” Personal immortality or personal survival after death seems to go with relationship with the divine persons, Father and Son and Holy Spirit. When God laughs to the soul and the soul laughs back to God, Meister Eckhart says, the Trinity is born in us.56 Impersonal survival goes with relationship with the divine essence, “the still desert of the Godhead.” I think of the words of Leonardo da Vinci in a novel by Leo Perutz where he is speaking of the death of François Villon, “Die? I think of it differently. He has proudly rejoined the whole and thus escaped from earthly imperfection.”57 To rejoin the whole is an impersonal survival, an impersonal immortality, like a drop of water rejoining the ocean in the Upanishads where “You are That” (tat tvam asi),58 you are that oceanic consciousness rather than just 106 The Far Point on the Circle

the drop of personal consciousness that rejoins it. “Only connect” would suggest connecting our drop of personal consciousness with this oceanic consciousness, and “We listen to our inmost selves, and do not know which sea we hear murmuring” would suggest listening, that is attention, as the way of connecting, and “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul” would suggest that listening is somehow prayer and that prayer, at least in this form, is possible not only in a personal but even in an impersonal relationship with God, “and do not know which sea we hear murmuring” would suggest the relationship is very like that in “the cloud of unknowing in which a soul is oned with God.” “We are too late for the gods and too early for Being,”59 Heidegger’s saying, would suggest that we are too late for the gods of personal consciousness and too early for the oceanic consciousness of Being. The limitations of our personal consciousness lead us to recognize the existence of incalculable forces outside of ourselves and greater than ourselves, the gods, but the scientific study of the universe leads us to believe these forces are impersonal and calculable and so now “we are too late for the gods.” Our experience of our own limitations can lead us, however, to recognize a power greater than ourselves that is nevertheless within ourselves, an oceanic consciousness greater than our personal consciousness, but insofar as we are not yet ready to recognize this oceanic consciousness we are “too early for Being.” There is an insight in the Upanishads that God in the heart (Atman) and God in the universe (Brahman) are one and the same, and this may be a way into this oceanic consciousness of Being. Thus Heidegger in his early work looks for the way to Being (Sein) in Being There (Dasein) of human existence, and in his later work in Letting Be (Gelassenheit) of the mystic road. It is our relationship to The Far Point on the Circle 107

oceanic consciousness that counts, our relationship to Being, the intensity, the richness of our relation, and that is something that brings us back again into the realm of personal and interpersonal consciousness, as in Martin Buber’s “road to I and thou,” a road “from mysticism to dialogue.” I think of Plato’s Dialogues, “an endless conversation” as Diogenes called Plato’s philosophy,60 but where the mysticism is not lost in the dialogue, and I think even more of the Gospel of John and of I in them, and thou in me where the indwelling is not lost in the I and thou. An indwelling I and thou may thus be the way into an oceanic consciousness of Being. “Oceanic feeling,” as Freud called it, “the experience of transcendence,” as Robert Jay Lifton calls it, is one of the basic modes of “symbolic immortality.”61 It is indeed a symbol but, as Paul Tillich says, “the religious symbol, the symbol which points to the divine, can be a true symbol only if it participates in the power of the divine to which it points.”62 Life and light and love, the three great metaphors of the Gospel of John, all participate in the power and reality of the divine. Oceanic consciousness, moreover, is a real experience. It is an answer to death insofar as it is a participation in a larger reality, a power and reality that is greater than ourselves. Participation (methexis) is a term in Plato’s philosophy, a term both of mysticism and of dialogue, of mysticism because it points to our union or communion with ultimate reality, of dialogue in the Parmenides where he considers the objections to it. My own work began with a study of participation in the theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas,63 participation in life and light and love, the three metaphors of the Gospel. Oceanic consciousness of Being then, as I understand it, is a consciousness of life and light and love that is “from God and of God and towards God.” How real is all this? It 108 The Far Point on the Circle

is “symbolic immortality” no doubt, but is it also what Plato called “really real,” ontos on? I suppose the very name is our answer. Oceanic consciousness of Being is by its nature ontos on, literally “Beingly Being.” We can say this without saying whether Being is the transcendental object of understanding, as Plato would say, or the immanent content of understanding, as Aristotle would say. Which is it? Being is the transcendent object, I would say, oceanic consciousness is the immanent content. Being is transcendent and oceanic consciousness is immanent, I want to say, just as God is transcendent and “from God and of God and towards God” is immanent, and so life and light and love, the great metaphors of the Gospel of John, are symbolic not only of transcendence but also of immanence, not only of a power greater than ourselves but also of a power within ourselves, as in the words of the Gospel, “to them gave he the power to become the sons of God” (John 1:12). I suppose then the power to become the children of God is what is being expressed in the formula, I in them, and thou in me, an indwelling I and thou. It is a relationship with the eternal, but is it eternal itself and can it survive death? It is and it can, I think, because the eternal is on both sides of the relationship, an eternal I, an eternal thou, an eternal I and thou. Indwelling is the key, an indwelling I, an indwelling thou, an indwelling I and thou. So the eternal is not only transcendent but also immanent, not only above us but also in us. Thus if God in the heart and God in the universe are one, if personal consciousness and oceanic consciousness are one, then indeed “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). As for consciousness, Kierkegaard speaks of “eternal consciousness” in us. “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,” he says, “if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething The Far Point on the Circle 109

power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what would life be then but despair?”64 If there is an eternal consciousness in us, on the other hand, then there is a deeper life in us that can live on through death and survive. Eternal consciousness thus is the life that can pass through death. The name, it is true, suggests life before life as well as life after life. Wittgenstein’s remark seems to cast doubt on both, “If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present” or “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”65 I want to say instead eternal life belongs to those who live in the presence. Thus eternal consciousness is eternal in the presence of God. If we understand it this way, we can connect eternal consciousness with the great metaphors of the Gospel, life and light and love, and speak of eternal life, eternal light, eternal love, eternal in the presence of God. The reality of eternal consciousness then is that of “real presences,” the mutual presence of I and thou, and the mutual and indwelling presence of I in them and thou in me. On the other hand, “not to be able to die,” according to Kierkegaard, is “the torment of despair.”66 This gives us an inverse point of view, the desire to die instead of the desire to live. I think of a friend of mine, a priest working in northern Mexico, who felt eternal consciousness in himself as a flame he couldn’t blow out—he wished he could blow it out and live simply a human life and die a human death. He felt this eternal flame as a call and that he was called to say Yes. Thus too when Dag Hammarskjöld writes “Thanks!” and “Yes!” in his diary at the turning point of his life, he is saying Yes to his personal destiny. The image of a flame that cannot be extinguished 110 The Far Point on the Circle

is an image of eternal life but also an image of hell. I met a man once in an airport who said the German word Hell means “light,” and that is what hell is to him, counsel without comfort, without consolation. “It is Hell until it is Heaven,” Wendell Berry says,67 until comfort comes, until consolation comes. “I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time,” Wendell Berry says. It is of this light that he says “It is Hell until it is Heaven.” By relating to myself and willing to be myself, Kierkegaard says, I am “grounded transparently”68 in God. That “transparently” is the light already in this life, and the relating and the willing is my “Thanks!” and “Yes!” as I say with Dag Hammarskjöld “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” It is hell, that relating to myself without comfort, without consolation, until it is heaven when I am willing to be myself and am grounded transparently in God. “It is Hell until it is Heaven.” That is true of love passing through loneliness, of light passing through darkness, of life passing through death. A divine comedy? Hell—“Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgement.” Purgatory—“And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled.” Heaven— “In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.”69 All this is true, it seems, already of the inner light as it shines in this life on our loneliness, on our darkness, on our death. And so eternal life, as is said in the Gospel of John, begins already in this life and The Far Point on the Circle 111

continues on through death and beyond. So it is that Dante could see all this, and even experience it, while he was still alive in this world. Hell is light, therefore as in German, as my friend told me in the airport, the inner light when it is experienced as counsel without comfort, without consolation. The name of the Holy Spirit, parakleitos in the Gospel of John, is translated Comforter in the King James Version and Counselor in the Revised Standard Version. The two go together, the Comforter is the Counselor, but they can be separated in our experience, counsel without comfort, without consolation. The separation occurs in our experience of relating to ourselves when we are not yet willing to be ourselves and not yet grounded transparently in God. Thus the Buddhist doctrine of “no self” (anatta) as an answer to suffering with the thought that all egocentric life is suffering. I think of a friend of mine named John Martin, years ago in my student days in Rome, who used to say to himself “John Martin, you don’t exist!” before diving into an icy pool where we were vacationing in the Alps. Purgatory is a purification of the heart, as in Kierkegaard’s formula “purity of heart is to will one thing,” where we go from simply relating to ourselves to willing to be ourselves, saying in effect “For all that has been— Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” There is a willingness here to pass through loneliness, to pass through darkness, to pass through death that becomes an affirmation of life and light and love. “Thanks!” and “Yes!” go “in suffering that light’s awful clarity” with “seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled.” What leads to “Thanks!” and “Yes!” is a process of recollection, “Thinking is thanking,” where relating and willing are combined in “emotion recollected in tranquillity.” When this is conjoined with being “grounded 112 The Far Point on the Circle

transparently” in God, as in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, then there is a passing from purgatory to heaven. Heaven then is the transparent grounding in God that comes about in prayer. That transparent grounding comes about already in this life in prayer, and can be a heaven on earth, and then hopefully turns into the vision of God in the life to come as in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father who art in heaven.” There is a continuity, it seems, between being “grounded transparently” in God, as Kierkegaard describes it, and seeing God face to face in the life to come. We can see the transparent grounding in the sustained prayer of the Confessions of Saint Augustine and in the Psalms he is echoing, or again in something like the Symphony of Psalms of Stravinsky, but we can only imagine seeing God face to face as in the life to come—thus Dante describes his vision as alta fantasia.70 We see things in the inner light but we don’t yet see the inner light itself. All the same, if we can discern a continuity between the transparent grounding in God experienced in prayer and the beatific vision of God to come, then there is substance in this alta fantasia, this high fantasy. What is now inner life becomes eternal life.

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The Vision of God with Us

. . . and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is God with us. —Matthew 1:23

M

“

y life is a journey in time, and God is my companion on the way.” So I wrote years ago in a diary when I was setting out on a journey through Latin America. Now I realize how bold these words were. One of my graduate students said “Dante had Virgil and Beatrice, but you have God!” Yet I believe now that we can all say God is our companion when we realize what it is to say Emmanuel, “God with us.” It was loneliness that led me originally to say “God is my companion on the way,” for I had before me the prospect of a journey alone in foreign lands. The companionship of God, it seemed to me, was an answer to my loneliness. There is a deep loneliness, I have come to see, that belongs to the human condition, and it is felt especially in the boundary situations of human life, for 115

instance in facing the prospect of death. Being alone in a foreign land is also a boundary situation. Certainly it does seem to activate that deep loneliness. I thought of the concluding words of Joyce in Finnegans Wake, “a way a lone a last a loved along the,” and how they lead into the opening words, “riverrun . . .” and so form a perfect circle, “a way a lone a last a loved along the riverrun.”1 So my way was “a way a lone,” and when I looked at all the air tickets I had for flights to the capitals of Latin America, I thought it might also be “a last,” and when I thought of God being with me, I felt it was “a loved,” and when I considered the whole circle of the journey, there and back again, I thought it was “along the riverrun.” Now, contemplating the larger circle implied by “The love is from God and of God and towards God,” I keep to the idea of a journey with God in time. The deep loneliness of the human condition has two elements, being alone and longing to be unalone, and this second element, the longing to be unalone, I believe, is what becomes the love. That process is what seems to be happening in the Divine Comedy, as Dante goes from being lost in a dark wood in the opening words to being caught up in the closing words in “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” This love is the love that is from and of and towards God. Being caught up in this love then means being caught up in the circle dance of time that Plotinus speaks of in the Enneads, the choral dance around the One. A journey with God in time can be seen as equivalent to a circle dance around God in time. It is true, while the two images, a circle dance of time and a journey in time, are in some sense equivalent, there is a different relationship of God with time. God stands still and timeless in the circle dance, but God is in time in the journey, and that no doubt is the meaning of

116 The Vision of God with Us

Emmanuel, “God with us.” Yet the two images can be brought together again if we think of time with Plato as “a changing image of eternity.” There is a way in which we too stand still and timeless in that “we all have within us a center of stillness surrounded by silence,” and yet this center of stillness is like the quiet eye of a moving storm. So it is that we have to keep moving to stay in the quiet eye or else the moving storm will overtake us. Thus there is the stillness of the center and yet the movement of the journey. There is a saying of Jesus, not recorded in the Gospels but remembered among Muslims, “This world is a bridge: pass over it but do not build your house on it,”2 that seems to carry the imperative to keep moving, but the more well-known saying from the Gospels, “The kingdom of God is within you,” seems to carry the idea of the center of stillness. “God with us” conveys both of these things, I take it, the indwelling and the movement in time, the vertical dimension of eternity passing through the horizontal dimension of time, for “God with us” is essentially the eternal in time. “I am” sayings, David Daube used to say, are the strongest affirmations of the divinity of Jesus in the New Testament, but they are transcendent not personal, they affirm God in Jesus but do not say Jesus is God.3 Erik Erikson, on the other hand, speaking of “The Galilean sayings of Jesus,” thought they were personal as well as transcendent.4 Anyway the “I am” sayings affirm “God with us,” though they are mostly translated “I am he” or “It is I.” If they are transcendent and not personal, as David Daube maintained, speaking from a Jewish point of view, they affirm God at work in time. If they are personal as well as transcendent, as Erik Erikson said, they affirm incarnation, as in the Gospel of John, “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), a much stronger sense of

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God in time, and if we combine that with the concluding words of Matthew, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” an abiding presence in time. A journey with God in time, if we take “I am” to be transcendent but not personal, is an I and thou with God in time. There is an ambiguity here: does our relationship with the eternal thou mean eternal life for us, or is the relationship simply that of a mortal I with an eternal thou? Once when I spoke to a Jewish group at a temple, I was told “We don’t have a promise of eternal life, but we believe God will give us whatever is good for human beings, a life after life, or else simply a life on earth.” There is a similar ambiguity in Buddhism around the question, Does one exist or not after having entered nirvana? There is certainly a relationship of the human being with the eternal, but does this mean what Kierkegaard called “an eternal consciousness”? I want to think it does, or if it doesn’t, then, as he says, “what then would life be but despair?” A journey with God in time, if we take “I am” to be personal as well as transcendent, is an I in them and thou in me with God in time. Here there is the idea of indwelling as well as I and thou, and God is on both sides of the relationship with God, on the Son side as well as the Father side. And so there is the idea of eternal life already begun in this life on earth and carrying on into a life after life. What is now the inner life with the inner light, the Christ within, continues as the life after death. “God with us” in this point of views means the Father dwelling in the Son and the Son dwelling in us. It is as in Donne’s “Hymn to God the Father,” I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun My last thread, I shall perish on the shore; Swear by thyself, that at my death thy Son Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore; 118 The Vision of God with Us

And having done that, thou hast done, I fear no more.5

“Faith is God sensible to the heart,” Pascal’s saying, Voila que c’est la foi: Dieu sensible au coeur, implies that “God with us” is an experience not just a belief. I think of Al-Alawi’s saying, “One who sets out for God does not find God, but one who leans on God for support is not unaware of God.”6 One who searches for God does not find God, he seems to be saying, but one who relies on God is aware of God. Faith is relying on God, leaning on God for support, and one who is relying on God or leaning on God experiences not just the relying or the leaning but also the support. We experience not just our own believing, that is, but the presence of God as a real presence. Thus Paul’s saying in Ephesians 3:17, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” seems to imply an experience of real presence. How is God sensible to the heart? There is the relationship, I and thou, and there is the indwelling, I in them and thou in me. God is present to us as known in knower, as loved in lover. We sense God kindling the heart, illumining the mind. Looking at this more closely, we can say the relationship is sensible to the heart, and the indwelling is sensible as the known in the knower, the loved in the lover, and the known is sensible as illumining the mind, the loved as kindling the heart. So what we experience is the relationship in the knowing and the loving, the illumining and the kindling. And looking at it still more closely, we can say the knowing comes of the loving, the illumining comes of the kindling. There is moreover a sense of being known and loved that comes of the kindling and illumining, and this is what Nicholas of Cusa calls The Vision of God in his little treatise on what is really the gaze of God.7 The Vision of God with Us 119

God kindling the heart is an experience of ours, but if we look at the experience closely, what we find is just the kindling itself. Consider for instance the passage I quoted earlier from Tolkien where Frodo’s heart is kindled, He did not tell Gandalf, but as he was speaking a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart—to follow Bilbo, and even perhaps to find him again. It was so strong that it overcame his fear: he could almost have run out there and then down the road without his hat, as Bilbo had done on a similar morning long ago.8

The kindling of the heart is described, but there is no mention of God. Is God sensible to the heart then in the experience of the heart kindling? Here I suppose we have the three things that come up in any phenomenology: description, interpretation, and evaluation. A description of a kindling of the heart can be given without mention of God, but God can come up in the interpretation and the evaluation. When it comes to God, we encounter “the cloud of unknowing” in which we have to unknow all we think we know of God, and let God reveal God to us and let God reveal us to us. This brings us to God illumining the mind. How then do we experience God illumining the mind? We experience the illumining itself, the insight, but we do not see the inner light. Instead we see things in the inner light, much as we do not see physical light traveling through outer space except when it strikes an object, and then we see the object in the light. To experience God illumining the mind, I am supposing, is to experience the inner light. And so we experience God as we do the light, by seeing things in the light. “God speaks everyday,” Gandhi says, “but we don’t listen.”9 I suppose he means our heart speaks everyday, but our mind doesn’t usually 120 The Vision of God with Us

pay attention. If we do pay attention, then the kindling of the heart leads to the illumining of the mind, and “attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”10 Inner light thus emanates from God and returns to God, but we see only things that it illumines. Emanation is a vision then of insight into insight, as in Henry Vaughan’s words, I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright.11

We see only things the light illumines and that is insight, but our insight into insight reveals the light itself. It is an understanding of understanding, a knowing of knowing such as Aristotle ascribes to the Prime Mover and Hegel to Absolute Knowledge, but with us it is a more modest knowing of our unknowing, “the cloud of unknowing in which a soul is oned with God.” And in our knowing of our unknowing, our “learned ignorance,” we do have an understanding of understanding, an insight into insight that reveals eternity as “a great ring of pure and endless light, all calm, as it was bright.” Our knowing of our unknowing allows us to enter into the darkness with light and “into the darkness with love.”12 If we come to our unknowing with Saint Augustine’s questions, “May I know me! May I know thee!” we come into the darkness of God and the soul with light and with love. Our knowing of our unknowing of God and our loving of the unknown God allows us, following Christ, to dare to call the unknown God by the name of Abba. At the same time, following Christ, it allows us to speak of “God with us,” of God with our unknown selves. “May I know me! May I know thee!” becomes then an entering “into the darkness with love,” a love-longing to know me, to The Vision of God with Us 121

know thee, and so a relationship with ourselves and with God, with the mystery of God and the mystery of self. There is a music and there is a silence in our knowing of our unknowing, “a melody that sings itself” and “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.” The music expresses the knowing insofar as “we can know more than we can tell” in words; the silence expresses the unknowing. Our knowing of God and the soul is through recollection, it seems as Plato has it, and our recollection is a searching for God in time and memory, as Saint Augustine does in his Confessions (books 10 and 11), but we come there upon our unknowing. So we search with those prayer-questions “May I know me! May I know thee!” and we come upon the mystery God is to us and we are to ourselves, and we find there, Saint Augustine says, “a mysterious inner kinship” of music and the soul.13 Silence, “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal says. It is the silence of our unknowing, “the infinite immensity of spaces I do not know,” he says, “and that do not know me.”14 Here again, following Christ, I am able to go “into the darkness with love,” knowing I think therefore I am, the cogito, but if I am I am known and loved. That holds true if I believe in the God of Jesus. So calling the unknown God by the name of Abba, “my Father and your Father,” as Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, “my God and your God,” I am able to relate even to these spaces I do not know and that do not know me, thinking God in the heart and God in the universe are one and the same, and the silence surrounding our center of stillness and the eternal silence of these infinite spaces are one and the same. I take the silence surrounding our center of stillness to be the surrounding presence of God. If this be true, our return to God is a matter of becoming conscious of the surrounding presence. Jung in his Answer to Job speaks of 122 The Vision of God with Us

three historic phases in this process: the unconscious presence when God is seen as outside of us, the conscious presence in the One, that is in Christ, and the conscious presence in the Many, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.15 These same three phases, we could say, occur in the life of the individual. We see God as outside of ourselves, then as present in the One who is our personal savior, and then at last as present in ourselves the Many, I in them and thou in me. The vision of God, however, in the life after life would be a passage from consciousness to perception. Now we see things in the light but then we would see the light. Consciousness but not yet perception: the nearest we come to perception during life would be seeing with God’s eyes and feeling with God’s heart, not seeing God so much as seeing what God is seeing, feeling what God is feeling. The metaphor of God’s eyes and heart is there in the scriptural words about the Temple, “my eyes and my heart will be there for all time,”16 meaning my eyes will be there to see your needs and my heart will be there to help you, to answer your prayers. Seeing things in the inner light of faith, I take it, with its enlightenment and guidance and assurance, is seeing with God’s eyes. Feeling with God’s heart goes with the repose in light that Saint Augustine speaks of, “our heart is restless until it rests in you.” A return to God can seem incompatible with restlessness of heart if we think of “the restlessness of desire”17 in Freudian terms as a perpetual motion of desire from image to image, or until we consider the idea of rest in restlessness, like the poise of a whirling gyroscope. If I accept my own heart and its restlessness, I do come to rest in restlessness, and that becomes a return to the eternal in time. My acceptance of my own restlessness can be a “Thanks!” and “Yes!” like that of Hammarskjöld, “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” This is The Vision of God with Us 123

clearly a reflective stance, recollection of the past and anticipation of the future where “Thinking is thanking.” Restlessness of the heart, on the other hand, is an unreflective process, a “primary process” in Freudian terms, where desire and imagination go from one thing to another, from one person to another. But rest in restlessness is reflective. It is the self relating to itself, as Kierkegaard says, and willing to be itself so that it becomes “grounded transparently” in God. Rest in restlessness becomes repose in God as it becomes conscious prayer, “Thanks!” and “Yes!” as prayer, “Thinking is thanking” as prayer. Thus Saint Augustine goes from repose in himself in his Soliloquies written just after his conversion to repose in God in his Confessions written ten years later. There are really just two phases here: the primary phase of restless movement of desire and imagination, and then the reflective phase of rest in restlessness or repose in oneself that becomes repose in God. The rest in God is continuous with the reflective phase of rest in restlessness. The only difference is that the repose becomes ever more consciously prayer. Where Goethe speaks of turning the truth of his life into poetry, we could speak of Saint Augustine turning the truth of his life into prayer. The reflective phase is thus what Joubert calls “repose in light,” but the light is the inner light that illumines prayer. Secularism is a temptation on the far swing from God when love passes through loneliness and light passes through darkness and life passes through death. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” as Malebranche says, may be the answer, attention as the reflective prayer of rest in restlessness, the attention involved in “Thanks!” and “Yes!” in “Thinking is thanking.” The “Thanks!” is for life and light and love; the “Yes!” is to passing through loneliness and darkness and death. The self, as Kierke124 The Vision of God with Us

gaard conceives it, is a union of opposites, infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity.18 Perhaps we could say it is also therefore a union of these opposites, life and death, light and darkness, love and loneliness, and so relating to itself means relating to them and willing to be itself means willingness to go through them, and it is thus that the self is “grounded transparently” in God. Love and loneliness are not exactly opposites, I learned from the African love song “I walk alone,”19 but loneliness becomes love, the longing in loneliness to be unalone, that is, becomes love. On the other hand, “even love must pass through loneliness,” as Wendell Berry says, going around a great circle before coming home. “Alone with the Alone,”20 Plotinus’ conclusion in his Enneads, puts the two ideas together, love passing through loneliness and loneliness becoming love, for if I am alone with the Alone, I am unalone. When Newman adopts this phrase, solus cum solo,21 it takes on the Christian meaning of “God with us,” and Dante’s journey seems to be from loneliness in a dark wood to love in his vision of the great white rose. It is a journey from the darkness to the light. “And the light shines in the darkness” (John 1:5), on the other hand, is the light passing through the darkness. Here again the two processes come together, “So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing,”22 and this happens in waiting on God, in the historic waiting on God that leads to the coming of Christ and in the personal waiting on God that leads to the coming of the Christ within, the inner light. Waiting on God is attente de Dieu, as Simone Weil phrases it,23 and so again “attention is the natural prayer of the soul” and is the heart of waiting on God. In the dark night of the soul, Saint John of the Cross says, there was “no light no guide other than that burning in my heart.”24 The Vision of God with Us 125

It is the inner light burning in the heart, I believe, that is the life capable of passing through death and surviving it, the Christ within like the light in the prologue of Saint John, In this (Word) was life, and the life was the light of humankind, and the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overshadowed it.25

What is said of Christ, I mean, can be said of the inner light, of the Christ within, that the life is light and that the darkness does not comprehend it, does not overcome it, does not overshadow it. The inner light with its enlightenment and guidance and assurance is the eternal in us, I want to say, the deeper life that can live through death. It is the Christ within and so it is the realization of “God with us” at the beginning of Matthew’s Gospel and the words at the end, “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” The connection between this inner and spiritual reality and the words of the Gospel about a concrete historical person is faith, “that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith” (Ephesians 3:17). If we believe in him, then he lives in our hearts by faith, and we can speak of him the way Albert Schweitzer does at the end of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings 126 The Vision of God with Us

which they pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.26

One thing I would add to this is the idea of making his Father our Father, his God our God, as he says to Mary Magdalene, “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (John 20:17). The reason I make so much of this is that this is his I and thou with God, and our entering into his I and thou is the secret of his indwelling in us. So it is not just indwelling, as in the Upanishads where God in the heart (Atman) is the same as God in the universe (Brahman), nor again just I and thou, as in Martin Buber’s interpretation of Judaism, but an indwelling I and thou, I in them and thou in me. So he does indeed come to us as One unknown, as he did of old by the lakeside, and he speaks to us the same words, “Follow me,” and sets us to the tasks he has to fulfil for our time, and to those who do follow him he reveals himself. His presence, though, is a real presence, dwelling in our hearts by faith, the reality of “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world,” the reality of “God with us.” So our life becomes a journey with God in time in which we come to know ourselves and to know God, as if in answer to a prayer like Saint Augustine’s, “May I know me! May I know thee!” The knowing of me and thee is in an I and thou relationship with “my Father and your Father, my God and your God.” It is a knowing by indwelling, a tacit knowing where “we can know more than we can tell.” And so, “as an ineffable mystery,” we are indeed learning in our own experience who we are and who he is. Our own experience of who we are and who he is, I in them and thou in me, is an experience of I in them, his indwelling in us, and thou in me, God’s indwelling in him. It The Vision of God with Us 127

is an experience of presence, of real presences as George Steiner calls them.27 And the practice of the presence, the practice of remembering God, of remembering “God with us,” leads us to a sense of our life as a journey with God in time. “Death is long,” the ghost of Darius says, “and there is no music,”28 but another prospect opens up before us in a journey with God in time. At journey’s end there is life and there is music.

128 The Vision of God with Us

Circle Songs

Song in the Beginning In the beginning is the song, and it will be in the ending, now a presence in our hearing, now an icon in our seeing, all creating, emanating, and evolving —the Word of life out of silence all around.

Heart’s Reasons Our storyboat, our argosy upon time’s river, searching for a happiness only a vision can fulfill, sails onto oceanic

consciousness of Being: we do not just choose but we discover our own mystery of I and thou, of I in them and thou in me, the mystery of our loneliness, sailing alone and unalone along the riverrun.

Quiet Eye We all have within ourselves a center that a silence is surrounding, stillness like a quiet eye, the heart of hurricane, a seeing eye, an eye of God, the peace of presence, for eternal life belongs to those 129

who live in presence in the peace.

it trusts God and is wise beyond sense.

Divine Milieu Kindled Heart The silence that is round our inward center is the presence of God in the heart who is the same as God in the universe, and Parousia is the presence of the Christ with us all days unto the end, when presence now that’s hidden will be manifest to all.

Take the ring of promise, for your labors will be heavy, but it will support you in the weariness you take upon yourself —it is a ring of fire and with it you are able to rekindle other hearts, although the world is growing cold, and your own heart, alive with passion, heart’s desire, will cast out fear.

Heart Sensible Illumined Mind Faith is God sensible to heart, Pascal says, and so heart is sensible to God, aware of God, if beyond logic, beyond reason, beyond hope 130 Circle Songs

Inner light that comes of faith is Christ within, and is enlightenment of spirit, and is guarding guidance on the way, blessed assurance we are known and we are loved,

and we see in the light but do not see the light until it is perpetual.

for all that has been and Yes to all that shall be, Thanks! and Yes! that turns a life around.

Emanation Eternal Silence All emanates in One, a Word of life we know in all the words of everlasting life he spoke in time, words of the Word that is eternal, and the world’s first languages in song were from the Word and for the words that he would speak.

Eternal silence of these spaces I do not know and that do not know me, yet harmony and music of the spheres (What do I know and who knows me?) —I call my God the unknown God, the God of Jesus, and I trust beyond all knowing my God knows and loves.

Singing Timelessness Return (Epistrophe) A melody that sings itself, a singing timelessness of heart, an emanation of the One —this is the source of thinking that is thanking

Everything returns and goes back to its origin, and we return to our own origin in God, to find therein our own true being, for we have come forth from there Circle Songs 131

into the world, and then again we leave and we return to God, going home with all the love that is from God of God to God.

at the center we all have within ourselves, surrounded by the silence of your presence, God with us.

Transcendent Longings Far Point Our heart is restless til it rests in God, or else it gets and does not get its heart’s desire, if it is set upon the finite, til by letting be and openness to mystery that shows and then withdraws it rests in restlessness.

On the circle of our dancing there must be a far point where we pass through death and darkness in our loneliness becoming love, —we change by knowing into what we know, by loving into what we love.

Heart’s Rest Walking Alone Our restless heart can rest in You, when it goes from its rest in restlessness, its poise as of a whirling gyroscope, into the stillness 132 Circle Songs

Love is joy at the thought of one you love, and loneliness is longing to be unalone,

and love of God is joy too at God with us, and loneliness is love when it is longing to be oned all one with God alone.

death after death, instead how shall I live an inner life, an inner light, a deeper life in love, the love of God, joy that none can move, love that none can part, a heart that speaks to heart of peace eternal peace.

Seeing in the Dark Into the dark with love, the dark of our unknowing, and the dark of desolation, and with Christ into the dark of sin, the heart of darkness, and the light is shining there in darkness of the heart unable still to comprehend, to overcome, to overshadow light.

God with Us Call his name Emmanuel for God with us, an answer to my loneliness, God with me on my journey, my companion on the way in time, a changing image of the presence of eternity.

Living toward Life Circle Song Shall I live toward death or shall I live toward life? That is the question, not life after life,

I sing of love an old man Circle Songs 133

of the desert sang, “The love is from God and of God and toward God,” a circle of love ever circling from God through us toward God.

Circle Dance Ring around a golden rose of all the blessed seeing God, an outer circle of the men, an inner circle of the women, moving round and round about, caught up in love with sun and stars in circle dance around the One.

134 Circle Songs

Endtime Song and Dance What if the world ends in beauty and in golden light? Surprise ending! Is our end in our beginning, our beginning in our ending? Surprise beginning! What if the world begins in beauty and in golden light?

Notes

Preface 1. The last words of the ghost of Darius in a new version of Aeschylus’ The Persians by Ellen McLaughlin which I saw performed by the Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley on October 15, 2004. 2. The first and last lines of “East Coker” in T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), pp. 23 and 32. 3. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin and Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 364. See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart (New York: Macmillan, 1978; pbk. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), p. 1. 4. Plotinus, Enneads 6:9 in A. H. Armstrong, ed. and trans., Plotinus, vol. 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 333 and 335. See my discussion in my Music of Time (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 159. 5. Dag Hammarskjöld, “A Room of Quiet: The United Nations Meditation Room” (New York: United Nations, 1971), opening sentence. 6. Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (New York: Ace, 1991), p. 92. See discussion below in the chapter “The Far Point on the Circle: Love Passing through Loneliness.” 7. Pascal, Pensees (#278 in ed. Brunschvicg) in Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, ed. Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 1222. Quoted below in the chapter “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 1. 135

8. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Genevieve RodisLewis and Germain Malbreil (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), vol. 1, p. 1132 (my trans.). Quoted below, “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 39. 9. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 28 (“East Coker,” lines 123–128). 10. Pascal, Pensees (#206 in ed. Brunschvicg) in Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, p. 1113 (my trans.). The saying about the infinite spaces “I do not know and that do not know me” is #205 in ed. Brunschvicg. 11. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 3 (bk. 1, chap. 1). 12. Werner Herzog, “Every man for himself and God against all” in his Screenplays, trans. Alan Greenberg and Martje Herzog (New York: Tanam, 1980), pp. 97 and 172. 13. Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, trans. Leif Sjöberg and W. H. Auden (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 89. Reasons of the Heart 1. “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point.” Pascal, Pensees (#277 in ed. Brunschvicg), Oeuvres Completes, p. 1221. 2. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (Faith in Search of Understanding), trans. Ian W. Robertson (Cleveland and New York: World/Meridian, 1962). 3. Bernard Lonergan, Insight (London: Longmans, 1957). 4. Helen Luke, “Choice in the Lord of the Rings” (Three Rivers, Mich.: Apple Farm Paper, n.d.), p. 12, an unpublished essay she gave me permission to use. 5. Dag Hammarskjöld, “A Room of Quiet.” 6. Pascal, Pensees (#281 in ed. Brunschvicg), Oeuvres Completes, p. 1221. 7. Ibid. (#278), p. 1222. 8. “Tout le malheur des hommes vient d’une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos dans une chambre,” Pascal, Pensees (#139), pp. 1138–1139. 136 Notes to Pages viii–3

9. Thomas R. Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 40. 10. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Penguin, 1987), pp. 161–162 (his critique of Pascal). The words he is quoting here, as he says, are those of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. 11. Newman, Prose and Poetry, ed. George N. Shuster (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1925), p. 116. 12. Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 13. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, ed. and trans. Paul Auster (San Francisco: North Point, 1983), p. 180 (Joubert’s entries for October 22 and 24, 1821, quoted by Maurice Blanchot in a commentary at the end of the volume). 14. Ibid., pp. 180–181. 15. Wendell Berry, A World Lost (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), p. 150. 16. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (one vol. ed.) (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 397. 17. Matthew 5:8 (KJ). 18. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1956). 19. Dante, Paradiso 3:85 in E. Moore and Paget Toynbee, Le Opere di Dante Alighieri (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 107. 20. Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince, trans. Katherine Woods (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 87. 21. Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 89. 22. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having, trans. Katherine Farrer (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 167. 23. The story is recounted by Jung in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaffe and trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1963), p. 355. 24. The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine (Latin and English), ed. and trans. Thomas F. Gilligan (New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service Co., 1943), p. 70 (Latin) and p. 71 (English). I have modified the translation a little. Notes to Pages 3–8 137

25. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1988), p. 49. 26. Genesis 5:24 (RSV). 27. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1983), p. 4. 28. John 17:23 (RSV). 29. John 6:68 (RSV). 30. See my discussion of these formulas in Peace of the Present (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 99–101. 31. John 20:17 (RSV). 32. Saint Augustine, Confessions, p. 3 (bk. 1, chap. 1). 33. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 110–125. 34. “Le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie,” Pascal, Pensees (#206 in ed. Brunschvicg), p. 1113. 35. Matthew 1:23 (RSV). 36. Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), Last Tales (New York: Random/Vintage, 1975), p. 100. 37. King of Hearts (Alan Bates, Genevieve Bujold, Jean Claude Brialy, Micheline Presle, Michel Serrault, Pierre Brasseur, Francoise Christophe, Julien Guiomar, Palau), directed by Philippe de Broca, screenplay and dialogue by Daniel Boulanger, music by Georges Delerue (1967 Fidebroc S.A.R.L.) (2001, MGM Home Entertainment Inc.). 38. John 18:36 (KJ). 39. Ephesians 3:17 (KJ). 40. Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, ed. Paul MendesFlohr, trans. Esther Cameron (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 11. 41. The Upanishads, trans. Juan Mascaro (New York: Penguin, 1965), pp. 45 and 132 (Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad). See my discussion in The Way of All the Earth (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. 193 and 228. 42. The Upanishads (Mascaro), pp.117–118 (Chandogya Upanishad). See my discussion in The Way of All the Earth, p. 219. 43. See my discussion of this sentence in Peace of the Present, p. 101. 138 Notes to Pages 8–15

44. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (one vol. ed.) (Rome: Editiones Paulinae, 1962), p. 12 (I, q. 2, a. 1), my translation. 45. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), pp. 66–67. 46. John 1:12 (RSV). 47. John 14:23 (RSV). 48. Buber, I and Thou, p. 67. 49. See my Peace of the Present, pp. 93–95 (a conversation with David Daube). 50. Buber, I and Thou, p. 67. 51. See my Peace of the Present, pp. 94–95. 52. John 17:23 and John 1:14 (RSV). 53. The Upanishads (Mascaro), pp. 83–84 (Mandukya Upanishad) and pp. 134–138 (Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad). 54. See my Love’s Mind (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 125. 55. Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, trans. Emma Gurney Salter (New York: Ungar, 1960). 56. Or “by what means can one perceive the perceiver?” in The Upanishads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 30. 57. Ira Progroff, trans. and commentary, The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Dell, 1957), p. 37. 58. See my discussion of this saying of Al-Alawi in The Homing Spirit (New York: Crossroad, 1987; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), p. 76. 59. The Upanishads (Mascaro), p. 83 (Mandukya Upanishad). 60. Ibid., p. 35 (from Taittiriya Upanishad). 61. John 10:30 (KJ). RSV has “I and the Father are one.” 62. Buber, I and Thou, p. 84. 63. See my discussion of “Only God enters into the soul” in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 57–58. 64. See the texts of Saint Augustine collected under the title “Crede ut intelligas” by Franciscus Moriones in his Enchiridion Theologicum Sancti Augustini (Madrid: Editorial Catolica, 1961), pp. 14–19. Notes to Pages 15–20 139

God Sensible to the Heart 1. “C’est le coeur qui sent Dieu, et non la raison. Voila ce que c’est que la foi: Dieu sensible au coeur, non a la raison.” Pascal, Pensees (#278 in ed. Brunschvicg) in Pascal, Oeuvres Completes, p. 1222. 2. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (one vol. ed.) (London: Allen & Unwin, 1976), p. 76. 3. Martin Buber, Good and Evil, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribner’s, 1953), p. 43. 4. Ibid., p. 47. 5. Buber, I and Thou, pp. 6 and 101 (the eternal thou in the human thou) and p. 63 (the breath of eternal life). 6. Buber, The Way of Response, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1966), p. 99. See my discussion in Reasons of the Heart, p. 123. 7. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 147 (#6.4311). 8. Buber, The Way of Man (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1966), chapter titles. 9. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, pp. 23 and 32 (first and last lines of “East Coker”). 10. Isak Dinesen quoted above in the first chapter, n. 36. 11. C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: Meridian, 1960). 12. Buber, I and Thou, pp. 66–67. 13. Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, trans. Carl Wildman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), p. 105. 14. Buber, I and Thou, pp. 66–67. 15. Galatians 2:20 (KJ). 16. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 280. 17. Polanyi quoted above in the first chapter, n. 27. 18. Max Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, trans. Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky, and Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1948), p. 23. 19. Stephen Leacock, Nonsense Novels (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1943), p. 60 (this novel is Gertrude the Governess). 140 Notes to Pages 21–27

20. G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday/Image, 1956), pp. 120–143. 21. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p. 364. See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart, p. 1. 22. Wendell Berry, The Wheel (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), p. 26 (opening line of poem “Setting Out”). 23. Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Doubleday/Image, 1990), p. 34. 24. Ibid. 25. Martin Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill, English-German edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 12E. 26. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, a translation of Gelassenheit by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 55. 27. 2 Samuel 6:14 (RSV). 28. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, p. 176. Cf. Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. David Marsh (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 96. 29. Einstein quoted by Abraham Pais in his Einstein biography, “Subtle is the Lord . . .” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 468. 30. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 93. 31. Murray Cox and Alice Theilgaard, Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy (London and New York: Tavistock, 1987), p. x. 32. See my discussion in Reading the Gospel (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), p. 23. Both Tolkien and C. S. Lewis have the world created by song or by the Word as song. 33. This is the title of Salieri’s comic opera written in competition with Mozart. See my discussion in Love’s Mind, pp. 31 and 111. 34. Canticum est exultatio mentis de aeternis habita prorumpens in vocem. This sentence occurs in Saint Thomas’s preface to his commentary on the Psalms. See my discussion in The Road of the Heart’s Desire (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 87. Notes to Pages 27–31 141

35. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Voiceless” in Poetical Works, vol. 1 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 247. 36. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah (New York: Brentano’s, 1929), p. 9. These words are the epigraph of Padraic Colum’s fine little essay Storytelling New and Old (New York: Macmillan, 1968). 37. Bernard Lonergan, Insight (London: Longmans Green, 1957). 38. I put this first in my “Songlines of the Gospel” in Reading the Gospel, p. 143, and then as the epigraph of my A Journey with God in Time (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 39. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Genevieve RodisLewis and Germain Malbreil (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), vol. 1, p. 1132 (my translation). See my discussion in Love’s Mind, pp. 86–87, and in Reading the Gospel, pp. 7 and 11. 40. Mary Stewart, Merlin Trilogy (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 436. 41. Genesis 5:24 (RSV). 42. George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 158. 43. Henry David Thoreau, Walking (Boston/Cambridge: Applewood, 1987), pp. 2–3 (pages are not numbered). 44. Reiner Schurmann, Wandering Joy (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2001), p. xx. 45. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), p. 99 (quoting Georg Lukács). 46. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 19. 47. Heidegger’s preface to William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), pp. xx and xxi. 48. Heidegger, The Concept of Time (trans. McNeill), p. 22E. 49. Henry Chadwick’s introduction to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, p. xxiv. 142 Notes to Pages 31–36

50. Ibid., p. xx (the two places are bk. 6, chap. 5 and bk. 7, chap. 7). 51. See Brian Stock, Augustine the Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap/Harvard, 1996). 52. Albert Bates Lord, The Singer of Tales (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964) and The Singer Resumes the Tale, ed. Marie Louise Lord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 53. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, trans. Michael Chase (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 54. Ibid., p. xi (cf. also p. 40). 55. Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 227. 56. See my discussion of this saying of Heraclitus in my Time and Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1973; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 3. 57. George MacDonald, The Golden Key (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), p. 60. 58. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Chadwick), p. 230 (bk. 11, chap. 14). 59. MacDonald, The Golden Key, p. 60. 60. Heidegger, The Concept of Time (McNeill), pp. 5E–6E. 61. Saint Augustine, Confessions, p. 242 (bk. 11, chap. 27). The Latin is in Augustine, Confessions, ed. and commentary by J. J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), vol. 1, p. 162. 62. Matthew 18:3 (RSV). 63. See my discussion in The Way of All the Earth, pp. 154–155. 64. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald Gray (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), p. 79 (chap. 10). 65. Plotinus, Enneads 6:9 in A. H. Armstrong, trans., Plotinus, vol. 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 333 and 335. Translation modified. See my discussion in The Music of Time, p. 159. 66. Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major (Op. 135) (London: Eulenburg, 1911), p. 20 (cf. explanation on pp. i–ii). Notes to Pages 36–40 143

The Vision of Emanation 1. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (one vol. ed.), p. 223 (I, q. 45, a. 3), and Summa Contra Gentiles (Rome: Leonine manual edition, 1934), p. 104 (bk. 2, chap. 18). 2. Saint Thomas, Summa Theologiae, p. 221 (title of question 45 and I, q. 45, a. 1). 3. Ibid., p. 142 (I, q. 27, a. 1). 4. Robert John Russell, William R. Stoeger, and Francisco J. Ayala, eds., Evolutionary and Molecular Biology (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory Publications and Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1998), p. 52 (the diagram is also on the cover). 5. See my discussion in The Mystic Road of Love (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 137–141 (“A Note on the Dante-Riemann Universe”). 6. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, p. 40. 7. I am taking this phrase from George Perle’s title, The Listening Composer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990). 8. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, pp. 97–98, and The Singer Resumes the Tale, ed. Marie Louise Lord (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 49 and 62. 9. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken, 1995), p. 3. 10. Cezanne quoted by Joachim Gasquet, Cezanne (Paris: Bernheims-Jeune, 1926), p. 132 (my translation). See my discussion in The Homing Spirit, pp. 43–44. 11. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielsen (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 138 (the concluding paragraph of the book). 12. 1 John 1:1, my translation in my Reading the Gospel, p. 23. 13. W. J. Turner, Mozart (San Francisco: Heron House, 1989), p. 25. 14. Ursula LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea (Berkeley, Calif.: Parnassus, 1968), p. 185. See my discussion in my House of Wisdom (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 13. 144 Notes to Pages 42–45

15. See my discussion in my House of Wisdom, p. 154. 16. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1995), p. 482. 17. The usual reading of John 1:3–4 is “all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life . . .” (RSV). But an alternate reading is “was not anything made. That which has been made was life in him” (also RSV in a footnote). 18. See Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper, 1959), pp. 254– 272 (on the Omega). 19. I have the music in my Reading the Gospel, pp. 26–27; see also my “Symphony of Songs” and CD in my Deep Rhythm and the Riddle of Eternal Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 20. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 15–22, and C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (bk. 6 in The Chronicles of Narnia) (New York: Collier/Macmillan, 1970), pp. 98–99. 21. Isidore of Seville quoted by Mark Sebanc in the epigraph to his Flight to Hollow Mountain (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1996). 22. Saint Augustine lists “the four perturbations of the mind” in his Confessions (Chadwick), p. 191 (bk. 10, chap. 14). 23. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (along with Fear and Trembling) (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1954), p. 168 (“The self is just as possible as it is necessary; for though it is itself, it has to become itself”). 24. See Walter Burkert, René Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith, Violent Origins, ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1987). 25. Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision, p. 40. 26. Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, p. 11. 27. The Collected Works of Saint John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1979), p. 179 (Ascent of Mount Carmel, bk. 2, chap. 22). Notes to Pages 45–51 145

28. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 239. 29. See Robert Osserman, Poetry of the Universe (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1995), and my “Note on the DanteRiemann Universe” in my Mystic Road of Love, pp. 137–141. 30. T. S. Eliot, The Three Voices of Poetry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1954). 31. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, trans. C. K. Ogden (New York: Dover, 1999), p. 108 (#7, his concluding sentence). 32. Meister Eckhart quoted by Martin Heidegger, The Pathway (from Listening, Spring 1967, vol. 2, no. 2), ed. and trans. Thomas O’Meara, p. 7. 33. Ibid., p. 9. 34. Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” in William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 611. 35. Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment A41 and B246, 248, 249 in Karina Williamson, ed., The Poetical Works of Christopher Smart, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), pp. 4 and 53. Benjamin Britten put these words to music in Rejoice in the Lamb, opus 30 (composed for the consecration of St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton, September 21, 1942). See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil (New York: Macmillan, 1982; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), pp. 122–123. 36. Wilfrid Mellers in The Messiaen Companion, ed. Peter Hill (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus, 1995), p. 222. See my discussion in my Mystic Road of Love, p. 86. 37. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego, New York, London: Harvest/Harcourt Brace, 1988), p. 44 (“The Dry Salvages,” lines 200–202). 38. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness, p. 147 (#6.4311). 39. Ursula LeGuin, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea (New York: Harper Prism, 1995), p. 159. 146 Notes to Pages 52–56

40. I haven’t been able to trace the source of this quotation, but I have used it often, for instance in Reading the Gospel, pp. 129–130. 41. From my translation of the poem of Saint John of the Cross, “Dark Night,” in my book Love’s Mind, p. 100. I have changed my translation of dichosa from “lucky” to “happy.” 42. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up (New York: New Directions, 1945), p. 75. 43. Ephesians 3:17 (KJ). 44. Henryk Sienkiewicz, Quo Vadis, trans. Jeremiah Curtin (New York: Heritage, 1960), p. 168. 45. Wittgenstein, Tractatus (Ogden), p. 107 (#6.522). 46. Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 47. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 55. 48. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 49. I have this inscription on a plaque someone gave me, but I have been unable to locate the source. 50. Wittgenstein, Tractatus (Ogden), p. 107 (#6.44). 51. See above, n. 35. 52. Matthew 1:23 (KJ). The Vision of Return 1. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 65. 2. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Chadwick), p. 3 (bk. 1, chap. 1). 3. Robert Vaughan, Hours with the Mystics, 3rd ed., vol. 1 (London: Strahan, 1880), p. 80. 4. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 110–125. 5. Robert Graves, Adam’s Rib with wood engravings by James Metcalf (London: Trianon Press, 1955/New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1958). Notes to Pages 56–64 147

6. Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Burton Raffel (New York/London: Norton, 1995), p. 471 (part 2, chap. 23). 7. Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Antonio Paluzie Barrel (Barcelona: Editorial Ramon Sopena, 1975), p. 608. 8. See above, my chapter “The Vision of Emanation,” n. 8. 9. See above, ibid., n. 22. 10. Isak Dinesen, Last Tales (New York: Random House/ Vintage, 1957), p. 26. 11. Ursula LeGuin, The Other Wind (New York: Ace Books, 2003), p. 200. 12. Wendell Berry, A World Lost (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), p. 148. 13. Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, p. 85. See George Steiner, Martin Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 15, 131, 146. 14. Shakespeare, Sonnets 30:2 and 107:2. 15. Plotinus, Enneads 6:9 in A. H. Armstrong, trans., Plotinus, vol. 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 333 and 335. See my discussion in my Music of Time, p. 159. 16. W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 214 (last lines of his poem “Among School Children”). 17. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (chap. 10) quoted above in “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 64. 18. Brian Friel, Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). The dance occurs in act 1 of the play, but in the climax at the end of the screenplay by Frank McGuinness, Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). 19. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), p. 290. 20. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Genevieve RodisLewis and Germain Malbreil (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), vol. 1, p. 1132 (my trans.). See my discussion in my Love’s Mind, pp. 86–87, and my Reading the Gospel, pp. 7–12. 21. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Clifton Wolters (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 105 (chap. 38). 22. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1954), p. 35 (letter #4). 148 Notes to Pages 65–70

23. The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine (Latin and English), trans. Thomas F. Gilligan (New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Service Co., 1943), p. 17 (bk. 1, chap. 2). 24. See my discussion of these sentences in the second chapter of my A Vision Quest (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 25. Saint Augustine, Soliloquies (Gilligan), p. 147 (bk. 2, chap. 20). 26. Ibid., pp. 156–157 (from his Revisions or Retractations). 27. Maurice Blanchot in The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (Auster), pp. 180–181. 28. Sylvia S. Judson, The Quiet Eye (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 1954). 29. See my discussion of these opening words of the Requiem Mass in the first chapter of my Deep Rhythm and the Riddle of Eternal Life (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008). 30. Lessing as quoted by Kierkegaard in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 97. 31. Wittgenstein, Tractatus (Ogden), p. 107 (#6.44). 32. Patricia A. McKillip, Riddle-Master (New York: Ace Books, 1999), p. 179. 33. Robert A. Thurman, Inside Tibetan Buddhism (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 17. See my discussion in my Reading the Gospel, p. 92. 34. John Henry Newman, Prose and Poetry, ed. George N. Shuster (New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1925), p. 116. 35. Patricia McKillip, The Moon and the Face (New York: Berkeley, 1986), p. 88. 36. This is a footnote in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis–New York: BobbsMerrill, 1956), p. 25, note. See my discussion in my Way of All the Earth, p. 96 and n. 54 on p. 106. 37. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 439. 38. See Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Godel’s Proof, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter (New York: New York University Press, 2001). Notes to Pages 70–78 149

39. Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken and Other Poems (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 1. 40. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, ed. J. M. Cameron (Baltimore: Penguin, 1974), p. 114. See my discussion in my Love’s Mind, p. 9. 41. Master Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans. Armand A. Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), pp. 85–86. See my discussion in my House of Wisdom, pp. 3–4. 42. See my discussion of the three movements of contemplation in my Love’s Mind, pp. 53–82. Cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Fromman-Holzboog, 1980), ed. Roberto Busa, p. 744 (Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 180, a. 6). 43. Patricia McKillip, Riddle-Master, p. 296. 44. Logan’s Run (1976), directed by Michael Anderson, starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter. 45. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Opera Omnia, vol. 2, pp. 742– 745 and pp. 746–747 (Summa Theologiae, II-II, qq. 180 and 182). 46. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (trans. Beck), p. 166. 47. See my discussion in my House of Wisdom, p. xi and n. 7 (p. xiii). 48. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Andrew Boyle and rev. G. W. R. Parkinson (London: Dent/Everyman, 1993), p. 219. The Far Point on the Circle 1. Wendell Berry, The Wheel (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), p. 26. 2. Nowadays metaphor in cognitive science is held to be more than just a figure of speech, and “metaphorical mappings are systematic and not arbitrary,” George Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez, Where Mathematics Comes From (New York: Basic Books, 2001), p. 41. See my discussion in my A Vision Quest in the chapter entitled “Riddling, perplexed, labyrinthical soul,” pp. 45–65. 150 Notes to Pages 78–84

3. Nicholas of Cusa, Of Learned Ignorance, trans. Germain Heron (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954). 4. The first two readings are from KJ and RSV. The third (“has not overshadowed it”) is from Peter Levi, The Holy Gospel of John (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1985), p. 7. See my discussion in Reading the Gospel, p. 24 where I prefer “overshadowed.” 5. John Henry Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), p. 195. 6. Ibid., pp. 217–218. 7. John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, rev. Alice Stopford Green (New York: American Book Company, 1916), pp. 375 and 376. The judgments of others on his work left him “lonely” (p. xiii). 8. J. R. Green quoted in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, ed. Philip Babcock Gove (Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1961), p. 566. 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 99. See my discussion in my Love’s Mind, pp. 27–28. 10. Heidegger, The Concept of Time, trans. William McNeill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 22 (conclusion). 11. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, the Maude translation edited by George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 244 (bk. 3, chap. 13). 12. These are the words for “Soul Dance” in my Mystic Road of Love, p. 120. My first discussion of “I walk alone” is in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 2–3. 13. These are the words for the Prelude to “The King of the Golden River” in my Road of the Heart’s Desire, p. 123. See also the song “All One” in my Music of Time, p. 113. 14. Dag Hammarskjöld on the center of stillness. See above, “Reasons of the Heart,” n. 5, and on his “Thanks!” and “Yes!” see ibid., n. 21. 15. Samuel Rogers, Human Life (1819) as quoted in The Oxford Minidictionary of Quotations (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 284. Notes to Pages 84–88 151

16. My translation of Cicero’s words Numquam se minus otiosum esse quam cum otiosus, nec minus solum quam cum solus esset in De Officiis, ed. Walter Miller (New York: Macmillan, 1913), p. 270 (bk. 3, chap. 1). 17. Patricia McKillip, The Sorceress and the Cygnet (New York: Ace, 1991), p. 92. See my discussion in my Love’s Mind, p. 15. 18. Henry Chadwick’s introduction to Saint Augustine’s Confessions, p. xxiv. 19. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 139. 20. Reiner Schurmann, Wandering Joy (Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2001), p. xx. 21. Nikos Kazantzakis, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, trans. Kimon Friar (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958). See Dante, Inferno, canto 26, lines 94ff. on Odysseus continuing to wander. See my discussion in my Time and Myth, pp. 32ff. 22. Kazantzakis, Odyssey, bk. 16, line 959. 23. G. B. Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Constable, 1930), p. 171. 24. Simone Weil, Waiting for God, trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Putnam, 1951), p. 135. 25. Heidegger quoted by Reiner Schurmann in the epigraph of Wandering Joy, p. v. 26. Werner Herzog, “Every man for himself and God against all” in his Screenplays, trans. Alan Greenberg and Martje Herzog (New York: Tanam, 1980), pp. 97 and 172. 27. Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act 2, scene 3, line 45. 28. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 73. 29. Ibid., p. 739. 30. M. L. Haskins quoted by King George VI in a Christmas broadcast in 1939, King George VI to His Peoples (London: John Murray, 1952), p. 21. 31. Patricia McKillip, Riddle-Master, p. 179, quoted earlier in this chapter and above, “The Vision of Return,” n. 32. 32. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Genevieve RodisLewis and Germain Malbreil (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), vol. 1, p. 1132 (my translation). See my discussion of this saying in my 152 Notes to Pages 88–95

Love’s Mind, pp. 86–87, and my Reading the Gospel, pp. 7, 11–12, 74, 100, and 129. 33. I culled these four sentences from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. They are chapter titles, chaps. 3, 4, 5, and 6 in my House of Wisdom. 34. The poem is in my Mystic Road of Love, pp. x–xi and 104–105, and the music is on p. 106. 35. My translation of “Dark Night” by Saint John of the Cross is in my Love’s Mind, pp. 100–101. But see above n.41 in the chapter “The Vision of Emanation” on translating la noche dichosa as “the happy night” instead of “the lucky night.” 36. A translation of el camino de la union del amor con Dios in the preface to The Dark Night of the Soul, also in my Love’s Mind, p. 99. 37. Ramón Lull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: SPCK, 1923), p. 49 (#118). 38. Albert Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 5. 39. See my description of making the Stations of the Cross in the Rothko Chapel in my House of Wisdom, pp. 81–92. 40. The music is in my Reading the Gospel, pp. 26–27, and the words also on pp. 24 and 141. 41. See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil, pp. 4–5 and 13–15. 42. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Scribners, 1958), p. 67. See my discussion in my Reading the Gospel, p. 123. 43. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 244. 44. Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 40. 45. My translation of Saint Augustine’s verses, the only ones we have from his pen, in The City of God, bk. 15, chap. 22, Haec tua sunt, bona sunt, quia tu bonus ista creasti. Nil nostrum est in eis, nisi quod peccamus amantes Ordine neglecto pro te, quod conditur abs te.

Notes to Pages 95–103 153

I am using the Loeb edition by Philip Levine, vol. 5 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), p. 544. In Love’s Mind, p. 112 I translated These goods are good because they are by you, and nothing ours is in them but our sin of loving them by you instead of you.

But there I couldn’t get Augustine’s phrase ordine neglecto into the third line in my blank verse translation. 46. Franz Cumont, Afterlife in Roman Paganism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1922) and Lux Perpetua (Paris: P. Guethner, 1949). 47. My formulation of the problem of death in my first book, The City of the Gods (New York: Macmillan, 1965; rpt. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), pp. v and 217. 48. Heidegger’s definition of “mystery” in his Discourse on Thinking, p. 55. 49. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (New York: Knopf, 1946), p. 214 (chap. 22). 50. This is a distinction I make in the first chapter of my Time and Myth. 51. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress” in Six Centuries of Great Poetry (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1955), p. 258. 52. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” in Auden, Collected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991), p. 249. 53. Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, ed. Paul Flohr and trans. Esther Cameron (San Franciso: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 7. See Paul Flohr, “The Road to I and Thou” in Texts and Responses, Studies Presented to Nahum N. Glatzer, ed. Michael Fishbane and Paul Flohr (Leiden: Brill, 1975), pp. 201–225. 54. Buber’s formulation is the concluding sentence of his introduction to his Ecstatic Confessions (cited above) and Wittgenstein’s is in his Tractatus (Ogden), p. 107 (#6.44). 154 Notes to Pages 103–106

55. See my discussion of Eckhart’s sentence “Existence is God” (Esse est Deus) in my House of Wisdom, p. 3 and my Music of Time, p. 26. 56. See my discussion of Eckhart on the Trinity born in us in my Reasons of the Heart, p. 48. 57. Leo Perutz, Leonardo’s Judas, trans. Eric Mosbacher (New York: Arcade, 1989), p. 1246. See my discussion in my Peace of the Present, p. 57. 58. Chandogya Upanishad, VI, 12ff. See my discussion in my Way of All the Earth, p. 219. 59. Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 4. See my discussion in my Road of the Heart’s Desire, p. 17 and p. 64. 60. Diogenes’ description of Plato’s philosophy in Herakleitos and Diogenes, trans. Guy Davenport (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1983), p. 47 (aphorism #47). 61. Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 25 (Freud on “oceanic feeling”), and pp. 24–35 (Lifton on “the experience of transcendence” as “symbolic immortality”). 62. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), vol. 1, p. 239. 63. See my article “St. Thomas’ Theology of Participation” in Theological Studies, vol. 18 (1957), pp. 487ff. 64. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (with The Sickness unto Death), trans. Walter Lowrie (New York: Doubleday, 1954), p. 30. 65. Wittgenstein, Tractatus #6.4311, p. 106 (Ogden) and p. 147 (Pears and McGuinness). 66. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (with Fear and Trembling) (Lowrie), p. 150. 67. Wendell Berry, A World Lost (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), p. 150. 68. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (with Fear and Trembling) (Lowrie), p. 147. 69. Berry, A World Lost, pp. 150–151. 70. Dante, Paradiso, canto 33, line 142. Notes to Pages 106–113 155

The Vision of God with Us 1. See James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (New York: Viking Press, 1939), first and last lines. 2. See the discussion of this saying by Kenneth Cragg, Jesus and the Muslims (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 47, and by Joachim Jeremias, Unknown Sayings of Jesus, trans. R. H. Fuller (London: SPCK, 1964), pp. 111–118, and my discussion in my Peace of the Present, p. 102, and my Reading the Gospel, pp. 60–61. 3. See my conversation with David Daube in my Peace of the Present, pp. 93–95. 4. See my conversation with Erik Erikson, ibid., pp. 97–99. 5. John Donne, “A Hymn to God the Father” in Donne, Selected Poems, ed. Shane Waller (New York: Dover, 1993), p. 70. I am reading “Son” for “sun.” 6. See my discussion of Al-Alawi’s saying in my Homing Spirit, p. 76. 7. Nicholas of Cusa, The Vision of God, trans. Emma Gurney Salter (New York: Ungar, 1960). See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 39–40. 8. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 76, quoted above in “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 2. 9. I have been unable to locate the place where I found this saying in Gandhi’s writings. 10. Malebranche’s saying quoted above in “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 39. 11. Henry Vaughan quoted above in “God Sensible to the Heart,” n. 55. 12. This phrase is from “Dionysius’ Mystical Teaching” (Dionise Hid Divinite) in The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Clifton Wolters (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 211. 13. Saint Augustine, Confessions (Chadwick), p. 208 (bk. 10, chap. 33). 14. Pascal, Pensees, #205 (Brunschvicg) (my translation). “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces” is #206 (Brunschvicg). 156 Notes to Pages 116–122

15. Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954). See my discussion and references in A Search for God in Time and Memory, pp. 196–197. 16. 1 Kings 9:3 and 2 Chronicles 7:16 (RSV), the epigraph of my book The House of Wisdom. See my discussion there of the eyes and heart, God’s, Christ’s, and ours. 17. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 110–125 on “The Restlessness of Desire.” 18. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (with Fear and Trembling) (Lowrie), pp. 162 and 168. 19. See my discussion of “I walk alone” in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 2–3. 20. The words of Plotinus are “a flight of the alone to the Alone” ( fuge monou pros monon). See my discussion in my Music of Time, p. 28 and n. 44 on p. 191. 21. Newman, Apologia pro Vita Sua (London: Longmans, 1908), p. 195. 22. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 28 (“East Coker,” line 128). 23. Simone Weil, Waiting for God (a translation of Attente de Dieu by Emma Craufurd) (New York: Harper & Row, 1951). 24. My translation of his poem “Dark Night” in my Love’s Mind, p. 100. 25. My translation of John 1:4–5 in my Reading the Gospel, p. 24. 26. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 403. See my discussion in my Reading the Gospel, p. 127. 27. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 28. See above, n. 1 of my preface.

Notes to Pages 123–128 157

Index

Abraham, 9, 14 Adam, 65 Adam’s Rib (Graves), 64 Aeneid (Virgil), 46, 72 Afterlife in Roman Paganism (Cumont), 103 Al-Alawi, 18 Alice (character), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis), 69 Alice in Wonderland (Lewis), 69 Anselm, Saint, vii, 1 Answer to Job (Jung), 24–25, 122–23 Apache story of creation, 50 Apologia (Newman), 85 Arendt, Hannah, 101 Aristotle, 109, 121 The Ascent of Mount Carmel (John of the Cross), 51 Aslan (character), The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), 48 Assyrian Palace Reliefs, 64 Auden, W. H., 105 Augustine, Saint, ix, x, 1, 8, 9, 10, 20, 33, 34, 35–37, 38–39, 46, 50, 63, 65, 65–66, 66, 70–72, 74–75, 79, 80, 82, 89, 103, 113, 121–24, 127 Ave Verum (Mozart), 45 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 43–44, 45, 58

Barth, Karl, vii, 1 Bates, Alan, 12 Beatrice, 115 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 30, 40, 45, 58 Being and Time (Heidegger), 35 Benjamin, Walter, 36, 86 Berry, Wendell, 5, 28, 67, 83, 111, 125 Bersani, Leo, 10, 64, 65 Bilbo (character), Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 26, 31 Blanchot, Maurice, 5, 72 Book of the Lover and the Beloved (Lull), 99 Britten, Benjamin, 54, 60 Broch, Hermann, 45–46, 61 Buber, Martin, 14, 15–16, 16–17, 19, 22–23, 24, 25, 51, 89, 101, 105–6, 127 Cervantes, Miguel, 65–66 Cezanne, Paul, 44 Chardin, Teilhard de, 47, 50, 64 Chatwin, Bruce, 4 Chesterton, G. K., 26–27 The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis), 48 Cicero, 88 “Circle Songs” (Dunne), 129–34 The City of God (Augustine), 36, 50

159

The Cloud of Unknowing, 18, 55, 70 The Concept of Dread (Kierkegaard), 90 Confessions (Augustine), ix, x, 33, 34, 35–36, 38, 65, 66, 70–71, 80, 82, 89, 113, 122, 124 Conrad, Joseph, 100 The Crack-Up (Fitzgerald), 56 Cumont, Franz, 103 Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel), 69 Dante Alighieri, 5–6, 6–7, 48, 53, 67, 72, 75–76, 101, 112, 113, 115, 116, 125 Darius, ghost of (character), Aeschylus’ The Persians (McLaughlin play), vii, 128 “Dark Light” (Dunne), 95–97 “Dark Night” (John of the Cross), 28, 56–57, 95–99 Darwin, Charles, 64 Daube, David, 16–17, 117 David, 29 The Death of Virgil (Broch), 45–46, 61 Dialogues (Plato), 104, 108 Dinesen, Isak, 12, 24, 46, 60, 66 Diogenes, 108 Divine Comedy (Dante), 6, 67, 72, 116 Donne, John, 118–19 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 65–66 Duino Elegies (Rilke), 6 Dunne, John S., x–xi, 17, 41, 47, 49, 95–97, 100, 129–34 Dutoit, Ulysse, 10, 64, 65 Dvorˇák, Antonín, 91 Eckhart, Johannes (Meister), 35, 50, 53, 58, 67, 79, 91, 92, 105, 106

160 Index

Einstein, Albert, 30 Eliot, T. S., vii, viii, 6, 27, 53, 55 Elizabeth, Queen of England, 85 Enneads (Plotinus), vii, 84, 116, 125 Enoch, 9, 91 Erikson, Erik, 117 Ethics (Spinoza), 82 Eve, 65 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 40 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 116 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 56 The Forms of Violence (Bersani and Dutoit), 64 Forster, E. M., 104 Four Quartets (Eliot), viii, 6 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 26–27 Freud, Sigmund, 108 Friel, Brian, 69 Frodo (character), Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 6, 21–22, 26, 94, 120 Frost, Robert, 78 Gandhi, Mohandas, 120 Genesis, 50, 51 Genesis (Serres), 44 Geronimo, 50 Gilgamesh, 10, 71 Gilgamesh, 72 Girard, René, 50 Goethe, 9, 37, 124 “Going Home” (song), 91 The Golden Key (MacDonald), 38 Gospel of John, vii, 2, 6, 9, 16, 23, 47, 51, 64, 72, 81, 83, 84, 90, 92, 94, 95–104, 105, 108–9, 111–12, 117–18, 125, 127 Gospel of Luke, 109 Gospel of Matthew, 12, 115, 118, 126

the Gospels, 12, 14, 16, 19, 46, 51, 60, 84 Graves, Robert, 64 Green, J. R., 85 Gryphon (character), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis), 69 Hadot, Pierre, 37, 43, 50 Hammarskjöld, Dag, viii, x, 1, 2, 7, 9–10, 11, 23–24, 32, 53, 55, 66, 87–88, 110, 123–24 “The Heart Determines” (Buber), 22–23 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 100 Hegel, Georg W. F., 121 Heidegger, Martin, 29, 32, 34, 35–36, 38–39, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 67, 86, 92, 107 Heraclitus, 37, 39 Herzog, Werner, ix, 93 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 31–32 Homer, 72, 90–91, 91 Hours with the Mystics (R. Vaughn), 64 “Hymn to God the Father” (Donne), 118–19 I and Thou (Buber), 101 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 96–97 Iliad (Homer), 72 The Imitation of Christ (Thomas à Kempis), 103 Inferno (Dante), 101 Isaac, 14 Isidore of Seville, 48 “I walk alone” (song), 87, 125 Jacob, 14 James, William, 11

Jesus, 14, 15, 16–17, 19–20, 79, 101, 104, 117, 122 John, Saint, 45, 46–47, 61, 126 John of the Cross, Saint, 28, 51, 56–57, 95–99, 125 Joubert, Joseph, 5, 6, 10, 72, 74 Joyce, James, 116 Judson, Sylvia, 73 Jung, Carl, 24–25, 122–23 Kant, Immanuel, 73, 77–78, 81 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 91 Kelly, Thomas, 3 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7, 8–9, 40, 49, 76, 90, 109–13, 117–18, 124–25 King of Hearts (film), 12–13 Lawrence of Arabia, vii, 27, 47–48, 68, 80, 83 “Lead, Kindly Light, Lead Thou me on” (Newman), 4 LeGuin, Ursula, 45, 51, 56, 66–67 Leonardo da Vinci, 106 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 44 Lewis, C. S., 48, 69 Lifton, Robert Jay, 72, 108 Logan’s Run (film), 81 Lonergan, Bernard, 1, 32, 69–70 Lord, Albert, 37, 43 The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 6, 21–22, 26, 31, 93–94, 120 Lukács, Georg, 35, 86 Luke, Helen, 2 Lull, Ramón, 99 Lux Perpetua (Cumont), 103 MacDonald, George, 38 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 85 Malebranche, Nicolas, viii, 33, 70, 124 Marcel, Gabriel, 7–8

Index 161

Markings (Hammarskjöld), x, 66, 87–88 Martin, John, 112 Marvell, Andrew, 105 Mary Magdalene, 10, 16, 19, 94, 122, 127 McKillip, Patricia, 77 Mellers, Wilfred, 54 Mendelssohn, Felix, 30 Meno (Plato), 43 Merlin (character), Merlin Trilogy (Stewart), 34 Merlin Trilogy (Stewart), 34 Messiaen, Oliver, 54 Mock Turtle (character), Alice in Wonderland (Lewis), 69 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 45, 58, 103 Muir Woods, 3 “The Music of the Ainur” (Tolkien), 48 Mysticism of Paul the Apostle (Schweitzer), 99 Nahman, Rabbi, 56 Newman, John Henry, 4, 6, 59, 77, 78, 84–85, 125 New World Symphony (Dvorˇák), 91 Nicholas of Cusa, 18, 84, 119 Odyssey (Homer), 72, 90–91, 91 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (Kazantzakis), 91 Olbers’ paradox, 96, 106 the old Bedouin, vii, 27, 47–48, 68, 80, 83 “One” (Dunne), 17 Parmenides (Plato), 108 Pascal, Blaise, viii, 1, 2, 3–4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 52, 85–86, 119, 122

162 Index

Paul, Saint, 13, 75, 119 Perutz, Leo, 106 Peter, Saint, 57, 102 Picasso, Pablo, x Plato, 32, 35, 43, 49, 50, 68, 104, 108–9, 117 Plotinus, vii, 37, 39–40, 50, 64, 68, 70, 84, 125 Polanyi, Michael, 9, 13, 20, 26, 38, 41–42, 53, 96 Prince Andre (character), War and Peace (Tolstoy), 86–87 Progoff, Ira, 18, 55, 70 Psalms, 33, 48, 101; Psalm 22, 101; Psalm 23, 33–34; Psalm 73, 23 The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Schweitzer), 126–27 The Quiet Eye (Judson), 73 Quo Vadis (Sienkiewicz), 57 “The Real Life of Saint Thomas” (Chesterton), 27 “Rejoice in the Lamb” (Britten), 54 The Republic (Plato), 65–66 Requiem (Mozart), 103 Revisions (Retractations) (Augustine), 72 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 6 “The Road Not Taken” (Frost), 78 Rogers, Samuel, 88 Rothko, Mark, 99 Rublev, Andre, 73 Sade, Marquis de, 64 Saint Exupéry, Antoine de, 7 Salieri, Antonio, 31 Sam (character), Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), 93

Sandilya, 19 Schweitzer, Albert, 99, 126–27 Serres, Michel, 44, 51, 60 Shakespeare, 93 Shaw, George Bernard, 32, 92 The Silmarillion (Tolkien), 48 The Singer of Tales (Lord), 43; character, 37 The Singer Resumes the Tale (Lord), 43; character, 37 Smart, Christopher, 54, 59–60 Soliloquies (Augustine), x, 8, 34, 66, 70–71, 80, 124 “Song in the Beginning” (Dunne), x–xi, 49, 129 The Songlines (Chatwin), 4 “Songlines of the Gospel” (Dunne), 47, 100 Spinoza, Baruch, 82, 90–91, 92 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius of Loyola), 96–97 Steiner, George, 34, 58, 79, 128 Stewart, Mary, 34 Stravinsky, Igor, 33, 113 Summa Theologiae (Thomas Aquinas), 37, 81 Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky), 33, 113 “A Symphony of Songs” (Dunne), 47, 100 Tangle (character), The Golden Key (MacDonald), 38 A Testament of Devotion (Kelly), 3 Thomas à Kempis, 103 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 15, 26–27, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 40, 42, 46, 48, 80, 81–82, 93,108

Thoreau, Henry David, 35 Tillich, Paul, 108 “To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell), 105 Tolkien, J. R. R., 2, 6, 21–22, 26, 31, 48, 78, 93–94, 120 Tolstoy, Leo, 26, 86–87 Turner, W. J., 45 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 93 Uexküll, Jakob von, 50 Upanishads, viii–ix, 8, 14–15, 17, 18–19, 59, 63, 127

Vaughan, Henry, 37, 48, 121 Vaughan, Robert, 64 Vico, Giambattista, 6, 30 Villon, François, 106 Virgil, 45–46, 72, 115 The Vision of God (Nicholas of Cusa), 18, 119 “The Voiceless” (Holmes), 31–32 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 86–87 The Way of Man (Buber), 24 Weil, Simone, 125 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 23, 53, 54–55, 55, 57, 59, 76, 79, 106, 110 Wordsworth, William, 54 Yeats, W. B., 68 Zajonc, Arthur, 5 Zorba the Greek, 25

Index 163

JOHN S. DUNNE is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of twenty books, including Deep Rhythm and the Riddle of Eternal Life (2008) and A Vision Quest (2006), both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.