Merton wrestling with concepts of God . . .
I marked three other passages, so perhaps the best thing would be to copy them down. Better than anything I could say, they will convey the impact of the book on my mind.
When God says that He is being [reads the first sentence so marked] and if what He says is to have any intelligible meaning to our minds, it can only mean this: that He is the pure act of existing.
Pure act: therefore excluding all imperfection in the order of existing. Therefore excluding all change, all “becoming,” all beginning or end, all limitation. But from this fulness of existence, if I had been capable of considering it deeply enough, I would soon have found that the fulness of all perfection could easily be argued.
But another thing that struck me was an important qualification the author made. He distinguished between the concepts of ens in genere— the abstract notion of being in general—and ens infinitum, the concrete and real Infinite Being, Who, Himself, transcends all our conceptions. And so I marked the following words, which were to be my first step towards St. John of the Cross:
Beyond all sensible images, and all conceptual determinations, God affirms Himself as the absolute act of being in its pure actuality. Our concept of God, a mere feeble analogue of a reality which overflows it in every direction, can be made explicit only in the judgement: Being is Being, an absolute positing of that which, lying beyond every object, contains in itself the sufficient reason of objects. And that is why we can rightly say that the very excess of positivity which hides the divine being from our eyes is nevertheless the light which lights up all the rest: ipsa caligo summa est mentis illuminatio.
His Latin quotation was from St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium.
The third sentence of Gilson’s that I marked in those few pages read as follows:
When St. Jerome says that God is His own origin and the cause of His own substance, he does not mean, as Descartes does, that God in a certain way posits Himself in being by His almighty power as by a cause, but simply that we must not look outside of God for a cause of the existence of God.
I think the reason why these statements, and others like them, made such a profound impression on me, lay deep in my own soul. And it was this: I had never had an adequate notion of what Christians meant by God. I had simply taken it for granted that the God in Whom religious people believed, and to Whom they attributed the creation and government of all things, was a noisy and dramatic and passionate character, a vague, jealous, hidden being, the objectification of all their own desires and strivings and subjective ideals.
The truth is, that the concept of God which I had always entertained, and which I had accused Christians of teaching to the world, was a concept of a being who was simply impossible. He was infinite and yet finite; perfect and imperfect; eternal and yet changing—subject to all the variations of emotion, love, sorrow, hate, revenge, that men are prey to. How could this fatuous, emotional thing be without beginning and without end, the creator of all? I had taken the dead letter of Scripture at its very deadest, and it had killed me, according to the saying of St. Paul: “The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.”
I think one cause of my profound satisfaction with what I now read was that God had been vindicated in my own mind. There is in every intellect a natural exigency for a true concept of God: we are born with the thirst to know and to see Him, and therefore it cannot be otherwise.
Yes, I am still very much alive. Every night this past week, I have sat down with my laptop, intending to post something, and I have found myself, two hours later, asleep at the keyboard with phrases like "I slpurblat thas srptlbvhs ass blosargaeg" glowing on the screen before me. Mysterious concoctions of letters that seemed to hold some secret meaning. Unfortunately, I had no Rosetta stone to decipher them. Like Merton in the passage above trying to unravel the mysteries of God's existence, I tried to unlock the grammars of my exhausted mind and failed miserably.
Life is often like that. We are confronted by circumstances or ideas that are ineffable, and we do our damnedest to try to figure them out. It's like reading the ending of an Agatha Christie book first and then working your way backward to see how Hercule Poirot figures it out. (By the way, that IS the way I read mysteries. I like knowing the answers immediately instead of living in a state of negative capability where anyone can be killer.)
Of course, the universe doesn't come with an owner's manual. It would be wonderful if it did. Then, when I woke up this morning, I would have looked in the glossary under "November," ran my finger down to "19th," found the instruction "see CONVINCING SON TO DO SCHOOLWORK," flipped to that heading, found the page number (464), and opened the manual to that page, in the section "RATIOS AND THE FIVE-PARAGRAPH ESSAY," and learned that my son was not going to do his math work today and write only one paragraph of his paper on S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders. I would have also found out in a footnote that my almost 20-year-old daughter would pile dirty dishes in the sink and go to bed without touching the dish rag and soap. It would have saved me a lot of frustration to know all this at the outset.
Instead, I'm sitting at my laptop once more, dizzy with sleep but refusing to go to bed until I finish and publish this blog post. I have to have something to show for this day. In the final paragraph of the passage above, Merton says that we are all born with the thirst to love and see God. Craving for mystery is in our DNA. It's not for us to know what's going to happen in the next minute or hour or day or week. Our job is live in the present and trust that, in the end, Hercule Poirot will reveal who murdered Edward Ratchett on the Orient Express. And that my son will finish his essay for English and problems for math (showing all his work). And my daughter will wash her dirty bowl, plates, and fork.
Trust is a hard thing, though, especially if you're a person, like me, who likes to be fairly self-sufficient and not depend on other people. Yet, that is the exact opposite of what being a Christian is, for sure. In fact, I would say most world religions rely a great deal on the notion of trusting in the powers of the universe. Living in the present, safe in the knowledge that the future will work itself out to our greater good.
So, here's to this exhausted moment, with my son's incomplete homework assignments, my daughter's stack of dirty dishes, and my unfinished blog post. They will all, eventually get done. I believe that. Light does prevail over darkness. Good guys finish first. Murder mysteries are solved. And God will continue to remain a mystery.
I accept all those statements as
truth. Believe in them with all my heart. Because, otherwise, we
are all part of a plotless novel. A story without a point. A
whodunit without a who.
Tonight, I trust in this moment, and know that the Orient Express
of tomorrow will be solved soo enough.
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