NSoC 19: From Faith to Wisdom

See Notes on this series...

A long, muddy chapter that my brain struggled to process nevertheless yielded some gems.

God lies infinitely beyond our reach, Merton writes, and therefore any conception we may entertain of him is infinitely beneath him. We can't see him, so to find him we must pass the seen into darkness. We can't hear him, so to find him we must pass the heard into the silence. We cannot imagine him, so we must pass all likenesses into obscurity. We can't understand him, only he can, so we must pass beyond ourselves into completeness in him. I think. I didn't really understand this last part.

Regardless, faith, again, is that key that recognizes that we know him apart from likenesses and forms, in other words, intangibly.

He then addresses faith as more than mere submission to will, that deeper faith produces deeper doubt because of the anxiety that comes with heightened awareness, that deeper faith resides in deeper darkness because the light of the created images fades away until "...God Himself becomes the Light of the darkened soul..."

Communion begins with faith, continues Merton, and deepens with it. Known and unknown merge beyond what mere rationalization can provide, revealing the unknown mysteries of our selves. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what he means. After that, he begins to deal with the conscious and sub-conscious mind, explaining the Greek Fathers' concept of anima (psyche), animus (nous), and spiritus (pneuma), as sort of an image of the Trinity.

Then he ties all that somehow into the sophia (wisdom), but I think I missed a step somewhere. I love his closing sentence, though. "The darkness of faith bears fruit in the light of wisdom."

Quaff:
This chapter reminded me of the recent revelations about Mother Teresa's "dark night of the soul." Read about that here, here, and here. Then watch Lyle Dorsett here.