religiocity

Posted on: January 21st, 2021 Schelling, Augustine, Remembering

Grant Kaplan on Schelling: “The Urmensch adam was ‘connected with the divine consciousness’ and ‘in immediate communion [Gemeinschaft] with the creator.’”[1]

One could, and should, spend costly time and effort of thought trying to imagine, to imaginatively discover, what this “immediate communion” with God—this direct and surely intimate relationship between man and God—was like.

I have often used as a sermon illustration the image of my daughters running to me after getting home from work, unlocking the front door, running up to me, jumping up onto me, screaming: “Daddy! Daddy! You’re home!” This, to me, is a dim intimation of what such intimate, loving communion with God must have been like in the Garden of Eden.

For Augustine (as a good Platonist), this is the primal memory which determines man more than any other. The pilgrimage of the Christian life, for him, is the process of recollecting, uncovering, getting back into touch with, this primal memory of communion with God in the garden.

For the Psalmist (especially in Psalms such as Ps 119, and within that especially in sections such as He, Waw, Zayin, Heth, and Teth), this is the point of the law, of meditating on God’s law day and night, with one’s “whole heart,” Ps. 119:34, 58 (BCP). To meditate on God’s torah, I have come to believe, is, at the deepest level, to dwell on God’s words to Moses (and the people of Israel) in Exodus 19:

You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,

How I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.

Now therefore if you obey my voice and keep my covenant,

You shall be my treasured possession out of the all the peoples.

Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be to me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.

These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites.

It seems to me that here, we see God’s heart for humanity. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else in Scripture, we get a glimpse of the direct, intimate communion between God and man in the Garden.   

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[1] Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment 86a.

Posted on: January 5th, 2021 Language, Reality, & “Awoman”

On Sunday, January 3, 2020 U.S. Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (at the time serving provisionally as the chaplain of the House), ended a prayer offered on behalf of the House not with the traditional “Amen,” but rather with “Awomen.”

However well-intentioned Cleaver may have been in that moment, I’m reminded of the words of Cyril O’Regan, discussing Hans Urs von Balthassar’s rejection of a traditional theological maxim—a litmus test for Catholic orthodoxy—put forth my Vincent de Lérins (a maxim rejected by Joseph Ratzinger as well, and hence by the official posture of the Second Vatican Council):

Lérin’s definition [was] in danger of denying the symbolic nature of all language with respect to the divine and promoting the view that doctrine is adequate to the mystery to which it refers. (Tracey Rowland, Benedict XVI: a Guide for the Perplexed, 55.)

Believe me, I’m not expecting Mr. Cleaver to grasp the deep import of O’Regan’s words here, but if one wants an actual, serious, theological rationale for rejecting the foolish revision of theological language (in legion of its forms), this is a good starting point.

In short, advocates for the revision of traditional theological language, more often than not, are laboring under the illusion that such language—especially in liturgical contexts—are univocal or “literal.”

But they were never intended to be.