On True Belief, False Mysticism and Reading the Cosmos
Part X: More on Reading the Cosmos
In my last post, I thematized the passage of Laudato si’ which proclaims the world as a sacrament of communion. The encyclical includes this teaching as well: “[T]here is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face.” This spiritual import derives from the founding concept, directly preceding that passage in the text: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely.” In discussing the spirituality of place, the sacredness of spatial extension, I treated of why the Frenchman (or Olympian, or tourist) may very well be in Paris, but Paris, in turn, is in the angel. Now we see that the entire universe is in the divine, which is also immanent to it at every point; truly, there is nothing outside of God.
The encyclical, indeed, footnotes the lines I quoted with an excerpt from writer Ali al-Khawas, Anthologie du soufisme, published in the late 1970s: “Prejudice should not have us criticize those who seek ecstasy in music or poetry. There is a subtle mystery in each of the movements and sounds of this world. The initiate will capture what is being said when the wind blows, the trees sway, water flows, flies buzz, doors creak, birds sing, or in the sound of strings or flutes, the sighs of the sick, the groans of the afflicted...”
Lest this interfaith verification of lived wisdom give rise to any suspicion or undue dismay, two great doctors of the Church are immediately invoked: For St. Bonaventure, contemplation deepens proportionate to “the encounter with God in creatures outside ourselves”; for St. John of the Cross, the world “is present in God eminently and infinitely, or more properly, in each of these sublime realities is God,” by which statement, the Mystical Doctor gives the accent to interiority.
The distinction between this paradigm of experience – known to, or at least touched by, mystics and artists across the board, as well as the pre-Christian philosophers – and pantheism is not even remotely subtle, yet it is a worthwhile exercise to check our adherence to the authentic understanding within the tradition. This hinges on a doctrine promulgated by the Fourth Lateran Council, in 1215. To that Council, convoked by Innocent III, the Church owes its infallible definition of transubstantiation; the doctrinal working out of the sacramental relationship obtaining among form, matter and the divine stands as its highest achievement, and this contextualizes its second famous decree, which is of the province of metaphysics.
Among many other outcomes, it furnished the condemnation of ideas and movements associated with the abbot Joachim of Fiore (who was not himself condemned, was likely an inspiration to Dante Alighieri later in the same century, and may be poised for a minor rehabilitation in our time). What Joachim himself did do, however, was attempt to construct an arching eschatological narrative whereby each of the trinitarian Persons successively is concretized in history. In response, perhaps, to the misplaced and literalistic identification of world and divine, the Council issued the following: “One cannot note any similarity between Creator and creature, however great, without being compelled to note an even greater dissimilarity between them.”
The Latin maior dissimilitudo in tanta similitudine is of exceptional import, as it establishes by implication the dogmatic assertion of the analogia entis (in English, the analogy of being), an all too neglected interpretive key to reality. I am highly privileged to have been formed in the analogia entis by my late mentor, Dr. Roger Duncan. For its primary modern exponent, the Jesuit philosopher-theologian Erich Przywara, that “even greater” of the formula is also an “ever greater.” To borrow an incisive phrase, there is between creation and God a “dynamic disproportionality.” 1 That the chasm separating finite from infinite indeed be infinite, i.e., without measure, truly must it resist being taken as some kind of static metric; its boundaries are elusive, grounding, as it were, the expansion of the universe and the exponential fruitfulness of nature. What we are treating of is a distance that has no end, nor even precisely an “endlessness”, as in that theoretically postulated of a series – a blowing-up of the first Kantian antinomy. God is infinitely Self-communicating fecundity. We find in St. Faustina the mysterious idea that the Divine Mercy cannot be exhausted because it increases as it is given away; from the vantage point of the creature, John of the Cross writes of the mystic’s sense of “losing sight of the boundaries”.
God is not the leaf, nor the dewdrop; neither leaf nor dewdrop is divine. But, most emphatically, neither is God “in” the foliage nor the bead of moisture in the sense of “as contained.” (Nor, for that matter, is any soul “in” a body, but rather self-actualizes as body; as I have said before, it informs the body precisely as substance.) What is at issue is an all-encompassing human-divine interface of relational encounter, opening out into the eternally ever-greater.
Any false mysticism badly misses the mark in thinking to read creation in the manner that one plays an acrostic cryptogram, where, say, every “A” is represented by an “X,” every B by an “R,” and so forth; you look for the one and two letter words, which in English vastly limit the possibilities, and make logical deductions/totally random guesses based on the alphabet set which remains, having been narrowed by the exclusions. Joachim of Fiore, whose hopes for an age of peace in the Holy Spirit are not without value, presumed to “solve” the Book of the Apocalypse. The abbot believed himself to have understood the tripartite epochs of the historical process, as encapsulated in the verse: Then I saw another angel flying high overhead, with everlasting good news to announce to those who dwell on earth, to every nation, tribe, tongue, and people. I remember vividly one of Paul’s 2021 community college students asking how to evaluate her grandmother’s fearful contention that vaccination via mRNA technology was foreknown to John of Patmos as the mark of the beast; no, really. All of this brings us to a foundational error: a univocal estimation of being, whether it proceed from impulses which are pantheistic, chiliastic, generally conspiratorial or some unwholesome melange thereof. Being – being as analogical – simply cannot submit to interchangeable substitutions. Those who attempt this maneuver would seek to collapse being, reducing out the mystery coming of its plenitude of bewildering suppleness to the spooky opacity which comes of seeing oneself as subjugated to a higher power that is in constant need of management and appeasement.
But the God of the analogia entis is – necessarily – pure light, illuminating each existent from within; to fill all things and yet be an attribute of none: in this, Aquinas tells us, consists the meaning of infinity. Nor can the individual being unique to each existent suffer from such a God any violation or be twisted to a meaning alien to its own. For the Source is fully causative, loving each creature into existence in eternal simultaneity.
And even the ever-greater, the dissimilitude spanning from creation to God, is not something foreign to the immanent Trinity. God is, himself, the ever-greater, to ground and to sanctify, in a sense, even the maior dissimilitudo in tanta similitudine. From Balthasar:
We begin to see that, in the eternal process of being begotten, the Son eternally receives himself from the Father in a presence [emphasis in the original] that includes both his always-having-been and also his eternal future (his eternal “coming”) from the Father. His acceptance of himself, of his being, of the absolute fullness of the Godhead, is from before all time: it has always been, yet never in isolation from that act whereby the Father begets in love... So his eternal presence as such is not a stans in the original meaning of the word; rather, it is an entirely event-filled presence for and in response to the Father... Insofar as the event is always the coming about of something that has always been, it is always the overfulfillment of an expectation: something transcendent, something “ever more.”
A first approach, I propose, to reading the cosmos is understanding not only its transparency to the divine, but also what such a window does – and does not! – actually offer. A creation transfigured in Christ, who is “the Sacrament of God,” as per St. Augustine, cannot but stand as a contact point with a dynamism not merely disproportionate, but also communal; in creation, it is always an eternally expansive we whom we ourselves encounter, rendering creatures themselves as both transcendent and ever-more – and in this we find a firm basis for their latent sacramentality. We will be returning to this.
Already before the Second Vatican Council, Josef Pieper wrote in his Scholasticism:
There is still another stock of tradition which has become accessible to us…. I am speaking of the non-European, above all the Far Eastern, cultures. Can this vast wealth of knowledge of man and of philosophical interpretation of reality be assimilated – if at all – in any other than a "scholastic" manner?
Such opening and broadening of the boundaries of the human community has been a crucial element in the development of doctrine, over the centuries – above all in our own time. A sad contrast: despite all its intellectual brilliance, the Fourth Lateran Council did not leave a legacy of interreligious openness in its wake – indeed quite the opposite. It remains to the honor of our day that we find interreligious mutual dialogue at the caliber of our contemporary encyclical.
The excellent work of scholar Stephen H. Webb has been very helpful to me on this point.