On Theology, I - The Breast Of Christ Admits No "Tension"
"Tension", "Analogy", "Mystery", and the Knowledge of God
A Preface:
The Christian tradition has held that theology (God words) is only possible through Christology (the Word of God). Therefore theology and prayer have existed as two reciprocal modes of “one and the same Son”1, whereby God has spoken Himself—really communicated the “fulness of God”(Col2:9)—in the human flesh of Jesus; and thus we, as humans, can become baptized into this Word, and become one flesh with it, and respond to God in the gushing adoration of prayer. Thus St. Evagrius of Pontus says “If you are a theologian you will pray truly; and if you pray truly you are a theologian”2. Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement captured the reciprocity of theology and prayer well: “Prayer and theology are inseparable. True theology is the adoration of the intellect. The intellect clarifies the movement of prayer, but only prayer can give it the fervor of the Spirit. Theology is light, prayer is fire”3. Good theology prays well. It can be carried into the secret place of Christ where the door of the senses is shut to the world and the soul soars up into God to know and be known in the Person of the Word. Good theology honors the infinite ineffability, the Mystery, of the nature of God but recognizes with the scriptures that “the Mystery of God is Christ” (Col2:3). And, it discerns in His ineffable incarnation a transcendence that transcends transcendence and is thus immediately present to us in the marital embrace of love. The call of theology, therefore, is to guide the soul beyond the bounds of concepts and abstractions about God into the concrete and Personal experience of His glorious majesty, the tender beauty of His love. “Without any doubt, the mystery of godliness is great: [God] was revealed in flesh…” (1Tim3:16). True Theology is incarnational, concrete, and it opens out upon the mystical knowledge that comes from the warmth of personal experience. As St. Maximus says “the flesh of the Word is true virtue, His blood is true knowledge, and His bones are ineffable theology”4. Bad theology remains ideal, appealing only to concepts and abstractions about God, attempting to sidestep the Person of Christ—”the Image of the Invisible God” (Col1:15)—and grasp after the Divine Essence through the intellect alone. We are warned by the theologians and mystics of the church to avoid this path: “Nothing is so destitute as a mind philosophizing about God when it is without Him”5.
The (Tyrannous) Tension of Analogy
You will be hard pressed these days to hear a single presentation of academic theology or even a popular sermon preached in church where the scholar or preacher does not use the words “tension”, “balance”, “paradox” or “mystery” (in the negative sense) to describe the relation between God and creatures; between the infinite and the finite; between transcendence and immanence and so on. Recently a '“who’s who” of academic theology (David Bentley Hart, John Millbank, Sarah Coakley, Graham Ward, John Betz, Catherine Pickstock, Andrew Louth etc were only a few of the esteemed guests present, all of whom are very special to me and my theological development) descended upon Cambridge University for a celebration of one the greatest, and most significant, theologians of our time Rowan Williams. For the entire first half of the day, presentation after presentation, the language of “tension” ubiquitously colored the theological presentations. I don’t think it’s a misjudgment to presume that this pervasive sense of “tension” when these Cambridgians describe the creature’s relation to, and encounter with, God is caused by their unwavering devotion to the analogia entis (the analogy of being). The broad majority of these elite scholars unflinchingly hold that the highest truth of creaturely reality is analogical to God Himself. The whole fulness of created being is not, nor ever could be, identical to God (often libeled “pantheism”) nor is creation infinitely different from God having no common middle ground, so for these theologians there is a cascading fountain of God’s presence in all things (often lauded “panentheism”). We can confidently say that analogically God is in all things. This is a vision of a hierarchy of created essences, from angels, to men, to fauna and flora all analogically relate back to and beyond to God Himself. This is what Jesus Himself appeals to when He says that we can trust our Heavenly Father to give us good gifts because even our evil fathers—analogically related—wouldn’t give us a snake if we asked for bread. This is all good and well. But, this Ultimate presupposition of the finality of the analogy results in a “tension”. When one climbs this noetic ladder to the top somehow God is “supposed” to be present, but is actually always deferred or delayed by an analogical interval.
In a myriad of poetic and prosaic attempts this ultimately analogical account of God and creature seeks to square itself to Christ and Christian theology, and therefore to christian prayer and its inner life. When this is attempted, apparently, the theologians in question cannot help but feel a sense of “tension” as one seeks for, longingly grasps after, God but knows that one only gets Him in pieces, in analogies. Though these analogies are comfortingly true (God is a Father like our fathers just infinitely better) one still feels the tension of never really having God, never really having the fulness. The whole. (It is certainly ideal that God be better than my earthly father, but at least I can really touch and know my father in concrete experience—is not a finite good actually experienced more real than an infinite good only known analogically?). This is a tension, a paradox, a mystery. One paper spoke of “the gargantuan tension” between Christ’s human and divine natures and this “tension/paradox lies at the heart of Christology”; another paper spoke of Christ and the “tension of the disclosure of the [infinite] glory of God in finitude”.
Having some rational, or ecclesial, commitment to the idea of a real knowledge of the fulness of God available to us—it’s clearly untenable to say that we know the Infinite in pieces/fragments—these theologians thus project the tension into God. The conclusion of much of this discourse is to somehow show that God is the tension, the suspense, the ultimate analogy ever beyond our grasp. After having laid out a classical philosophy of the analogy of being and its sense of “gargantuan tension” over the Creator/creature relation they then turn to Christ for succor and consolation. Christ is the tension, or something like that.
Something Deeper Than Analogy?
Given the christian traditions binding its theological life to its life of prayer as One mystery, One Person, One Life we must ask ourselves: are we truly confined to speak, with these intellectual titans, of a “gargantuan tension” in the relation between God and creatures, between love of God and the knowledge of God, between the God-talk of speculative theology and the God-talk of prayer? When we experience God do we experience a tension? When the christian mystics of the ages relay their experiences of God do they speak of tension? Or do they, rather, speak of a homecoming, nuptial embrace, and identity? Surely the latter. Of course, there is the inner tension of the soul, the drama, the narrative eros that brings one to the cross to suffer the Love of God, to share in divine abandonment of the false self in its sinfulness, and to die with Christ into God. But, this tension belongs to the mystic not God, and the end of all this—when God has done His work—is not tension but a repose; not ever expanding out to embrace a God always beyond one’s reach but what St. Maximus called the “mystically blessed Sabbath”6 and an “ever-moving rest […] of perpetual enjoyment unbroken by any interval”7. He says that in this sabbath without any analogical interval “through an ecstasy of love” the soul “has closed itself entirely in God alone, and that through mystical theology has brought it all together to rest in God”8.
Does this mean though, as some fear, that the God-talk of academic theology and its natural powers of the intellect and rationality is bound to a fideistic subservience to the God-talk of private experience and ecclesial tradition? Are we no longer permitted to think about God without sacrificing our rational faculties on the altar of some magisterial inquisition? These are our questions; but not ours only. They are the question marks which have dragged on through Christian history often vacillating between extremes, rationalism and mysticism, the transcendence of God in Christ and the immanent relatability of the humanity of Christ, authoritarian traditionalism and unbridled mystical pioneering and so on. In all of this flux the church has produced a chorus of figures, saints and mystics, theologians and monks, churchmen and seculars, able to hymn the wonder of the Whole Christ whose composition admits no division—and certainly no tension. We shall set out on these questions of tension beginning with talk of God’s infinite unknowability and apophatic theology with the Word of God, the scriptures, the saints and mystics as our guide; then, moving on to the insatiable longing of man for the “whole God” and for identity with Him; finally we shall conclude this first entry on theology with a call to a renewed christological mysticsism, or a mystical christology which we will learn again to call—with the Sacred Heart of our faith—True Theology. That we may learn what St. Evagrius meant when he said: “The Breast of the Lord [Jesus Christ], is the knowledge of God; one who reclines on it will be endowed with theology”9
Apophasis
The divine scriptures speak in no uncertain terms of the awesome transcendence of God. His unspeakability, His ineffable, unknowable, invisible and uncircumscribable depth. The holy apostle says He alone “has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1Tim6:16). Or, St. John the Theologian says “No one has ever seen God” (Jn1:18). God transcends the capacities of both the senses and the intellect to grasp Him, that is, He lies beyond their natural power always infinitely exceeding them. The prophets abound with these exclamations, standing agog over the abyssal depths of the Infinite One the prophets declare “There is no Holy One like the Lord, no one besides you; there is no Rock like our God” (1Sam2:3). Not only does He transcend these powers, He cannot even be likened to the finite things which our powers can apprehend. God speaks of this in Isaiah “To whom, then, will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?” (Is40:18), and “To whom, then, will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One” (Is40:25).
Scripture does not stand alone here, but the whole christian tradition exclaims of the ineffable, incomprehensible, unknowability of God. St. Gregory of Nyssa says that “knowledge of the divine essence is unattainable not only by men but also by every intelligent creature”10, adding to this saying “what is divine is beyond all knowledge and comprehension” therefore “every concept which comes from some comprehensible image by an approximate (we might say “analogical”) understanding and by guessing at the divine nature constitutes an idol of God and does not proclaim God”. St. Maximus the Confessor says “It is said that all beings are objects of knowledge because they bear the demonstrable principles of their knowledge. God, however, is called the unknown […] This is why no knowable object can compare in any way with him”11. St. Dionysius the Areopagite, in his work “On The Divine Names”, warns his young reader “we must not dare to apply words or conceptions to this hidden transcendent God.”12 St. John Chrysostom has an entire treatise titled “On The Incomprehensible Nature of God”. Because God is testified by reason and scripture to be incomprehensible, he says, “whenever a man is meddlesome and inquisitive about God's essence, he insults God"13. We could continue on and on citing source after source concerning the infinite transcendence of God, but it is unnecessary, the point is clear enough. God is infinitely beyond all thought, conception, speech, idea or image. This is not a peculiar revelation of the Jewish-Christian tradition, broadly speaking, the whole of classical philosophy agrees. That which is the source of all things must be no-thing itself, therefore always, and infinitely exceeding every thought or idea we may have of it14. Clearly, a foundation is laid for a possibility of “tension” in our speech of, and to God. St. Augustine avers just this point, to speak of the unspeakability of God is to speak of that very God which you claim cannot be spoken of:
“If what I said were ineffable, it would not be said. And for this reason God should not be said to be ineffable, for when this is said something is said. And a contradiction in terms is created (a tension), since if that is ineffable which cannot be spoken, then that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable. This contradiction is to be passed over in silence rather than resolved verbally. For God, although nothing worthy may be spoken of him, has accepted the tribute of human voice and wished us to take joy in praising Him with our words”15
We are arriving at this ancient mystery which has oft produced a “contradiction in terms” or as our modern scholars have called it “a gargantuan tension”. This aporia lies between reason and revelation’s insistence on the infinity of God, His utter beyond-ness to the point of exceeding every possible thought or word, and our concrete experience of Him; our divinely inspired psalms of praise, revelations of His nature and intimate union with Him in prayer. The same Dionysius who says above that we must not dare to apply words to God, then prays that “God should allow me to praise in a divine way the beneficent and divine names of the unutterable and unnameable Deity”16. There is something irresistible about God that demands we cry out to Him in prayer, breaking forth in songs and shouts of adoration, contemplate and whisper, meditate and write upon the Mystery of who God is. Reason demands a harmonious resolution of this tension, that the suspended chord should resolve into its denouement returning to its root from every interval. Revelation too demands that we “press on to know the Lord” (Hos6:3) breaking through the abstractions of a purely ideal philosophy into the personal encounter with God; but revelation in the scriptures also guides us to the locus of this Mystery:
“I want [your] hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that [you] may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God’s mystery, that is, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col2:2-3)
Reality Is (Ultimately) Christo-logical Not Ana-Logical
A small note must be added here before we move beyond the ana-logy to the Christo-logy: We do not, and cannot, reject the analogy of being wholesale. Our fathers do analogically relate to God. Not only that, but scriptures testify that God is a rock (1Cor10), a vine (Jn15), a shield (Gen15), a hen (Matt23), a fire (Heb12), a light (Jn8) and so on. What theology must reject is the finality, or ultimacy given to the analogy of being; creation is not ultimately analogical but christological. Meaning that each creature’s finite manifestation of God’s infinite glory takes place through the “mystery of Christ in you” (Col1:27). God is not by nature a vine, or a shield, or a light, or a fire but His Person is the principle of all things—“Christ is all things” (Col3)—and He becomes incarnate in each thing as that thing. The analogia entis is true, but it is only true because of the Mystery of the Incarnation is its deeper truth. Meister Eckhart, commenting on a verse from Sirach (“They that eat me, shall yet hunger”), says it this way: “Analogates (creatures analogically related to God) have nothing of the form according to which they are analogically ordered rooted in positive fashion in themselves. But every created being is analogically ordered to God in existence, truth, and goodness. Therefore every created being radically and positively possesses existence, life, and wisdom from and in God, not in itself as a created being. And thus it always “eats” as something produced and created, but it always hungers because it is always from another and not from itself.”17 The deepest truth, the Mystery of God, is the coincidence of God and the creature in Christ where even the creatures “life” and “existence” just ARE God’s—from Him, this “radical” and “positive” identity of both God and creature, the analogy of every creature flows and is grounded.
The tension lies in our perception of a real duality. On the one hand we can honor the fact that God’s infinite transcendence means He shares no middle ground with finite creatures—as St. Maximus says in his disputation with Pyrrhus, between the divine and the creaturely natures “there is no common thing”18—and on the other hand we experience God as “closer to me than I am to myself”19 , and a “very present help in time of need” (Ps46). Moses saw God face to face, and yet “no one has ever seen God” (Jn1:18), the scriptures go so far as to say that those who belong to the Lord are “one Spirit with Him” (1Cor6:17), and that Christ “is our life” (Col3:4). We have been perennially tempted to sway in the direction of one extreme or another (a fundamentalist reformed theologian often rejoices in the preaching “God is God and you are not”, but has no place in his theology for the Song of Songs of an intimate mingling of the creature with God in the kisses of the bed chambers of Love—or, a liberal “process” theologian often may speak of God loving and suffering with us in our weaknesses but struggles to account for how God may omnipotently promise to end all suffering). But, either way, at some point in our praying or preaching or theologizing we reach a moment of ineffable Mystery, what St. Nicholas of Cusa called “the coincidence of opposites”20, where God and creature needs be totally present—even identical—to one another. If one believes at this critical juncture that the reality one is contemplating/experiencing is an ana-logical reality, one must necessary experience it as a “tension” (even if piously “passed over in silence). But if one believes the scriptures that “the Mystery of God is Christ” and thus having received by grace “all the riches of assured understanding”—and therefore the reality being contemplated is Christo-logical—one finds at this critical juncture just what one would expect to find: the God-Man Jesus Christ, Himself both creature and creator, both finite and infinite, receiving both sides or parts of the duality into Himself without mixture or confusion, and without separation or division21. Given that God infinitely transcends all things there can be no comparison or competition between them. In Jordan Daniel Wood’s recent masterpiece “The Whole Mystery of Christ” he critiques Demetrius Bathrellos on just this point. Bathrellos claims that we are to be “very careful to keep these two aspects of the mystery of the [Person] of Christ in complementary tension”22. Wood exclaims “How could these two aspects of Christ’s one [Person] stand in any relation at all, let alone any tension?”23. Have we not just seen that there is “nothing like the Lord”, therefore there can be no natural relation between Him and creatures, and if no relation certainly no tension. Thus the ladder “reaching up to heaven” upon which “the angels ascend and descend” (Gen28) is revealed not to be a hierarchy of analogy, but the Person of Jesus Christ: “Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man” (Jn1:51). Does not the holy apostle say:
“There is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind,
Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all” (1Tim2:5-6)
Christ is of course not an analogy for God but is “the Image of the Invisible God” (Col1:15) and “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Heb1:3). In fact, without any interval, if you’ve seen Him—as Man—you’ve seen the Father—as God (Jn14:9). He is confessed, at Nicaea, to be “God from God” and “true God from true God” and “consubstantial with the Father”. Thus is it revealed what reason knew must be true, that God’s transcendence transcends transcendence (It would have, otherwise, been an utter disappointment if God had turned out to be limited by His illimitability). The only question for reason was what form will this total identity of God and creature take? What would it look like? The answer is: Jesus Christ “who existed in the form of God… but emptied Himself taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness” (Phil2:6-7). In this transcendence transcending transcendence God becomes a creature, a man, out of love for all His creatures to rescue them from the bondage of nature, from sin and death. Again, St. Maximus:
“For even though He Himself is always the same, and is beyond all change or alteration, becoming neither greater nor lesser, He nonetheless becomes all things to everyone out of His exceeding goodness: lowly for the lowly, lofty for the lofty, and, for those who are deified through His grace, He is God by nature, and Deity beyond all knowledge as God beyond God.”24
The infinite and unknowable deity beyond all wonder is revealed in that He gives Himself to us to be truly known, touched, tasted and savored in conscious experience, in the warmth of personal love. God reveals Himself to be not only God beyond all creation but, in becoming a creature (Jesus Christ) and all creatures—“He becomes all things to everyone”—He reveals Himself to be “God beyond God” in the Person of the human Jesus. There is no other mediator between God and man, not the cascading analogical interval, nor the essential hierarchy, but Jesus Christ, Himself a man. Herein the mystical theology of the church is born, around this sacred and tensionless Mystery the people of God are gathered, not to a nature or an essence or an analogy but a Person. A Person whose life is given to us, baptizing us into the Triune communion of the Three Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. He is entirely knowable, speakable, touchable, intelligible and sensible in His humanity AND He is entirely unknowable, unspeakable, untouchable, invisible, and beyond intelligibility in His divinity, both of which are simply Him, entirely One in experience.
“And out of love he has come down to be at our level of nature and has become a being. He, the transcendent God, has taken on the name of man. (Such things, beyond mind and beyond words, we must praise with all reverence.) In all this he remains what he is—supernatural, transcendent—and he has come to join us in what we are without himself undergoing change or confusion. His fullness was unaffected by that inexpressible emptying of self, and, most novel of all, amid the things of our nature he remained supernatural and amid the things of being he remained beyond being. From us he took what was of us and yet he surpassed us here too.”25
The Experience of the Un-Experiencable
A dreadful mystery now lays open before us in the Person of Jesus: incomprehensibility is no longer an abstraction—which was shorthand for “ignorance”—but a concrete experience. St. John, called “The Theologian”, declared this gospel calling it “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life.” (1Jn1:1). Before Christ that which is incomprehensible in God is merely that which I cannot know, cannot experience, and cannot fathom—“no one has ever seen God”— but now we can know the unknowable and experience the intangible. This experience when considered abstractly, apart from Christ, certainly places tension on the intellect. But precisely in the act abstracting is it not Real, for it is “in Him that all things are held together” (Col1:17) and it is “In Him the fulness of God dwells bodily” (Col2:9), therefore only in Him are God and Man real at all. When we speak the “name above every name” (Phil2), Jesus Christ, the Word of God, we speak what Dionysius called the Unspeakable Name of God. This speaking of the unspeakable is called Theology. Not in lofty and ideal abstractions but in what is known in the deposit of faith, in conscious mystical experience, and in concrete personal encounter, is True Theology. The meaning of St. Evagrius’ words begins to glimmer now in our understanding: “The Breast of the Lord [Jesus Christ], is the knowledge of God; one who reclines on it will be endowed with theology”
We are just now arriving at the “beginning” (ἀρχή, arche)—“In the beginning was the Word” (Jn1:1). My heart is just starting to overflow, my tongue is the pen of a ready writer, ready to hymn of this altogether lovely Son, fairer than the sons of men upon whose lips grace is poured forth. But, we shall pick up from here in the next entry with St. Ephrem’s theology of experiential wonder and investigation…
The Definition of the Council of Chalcedon
St. Evagrius of Pontus, Philokalia, “One Hundred and Fifty Three Texts On Prayer” 1.61
Olivier Clement, “The Roots of Christian Mysticism” pg183
St. Maximus the Confessor, (QThall.35.3)
St. Diadochus of Photike, “On Spiritual Knowledge and Discernment” 1.7
St. Maximus the Confessor, (Amb.65.2)
St Maximus the Confessor, (QThall59.8)
St. Maximus the Confessor, 200 Chapters On Theology 1.36
St. Evagrius of Pontus, “Mirror for Monks and Virgins” (1.120)
St. Gregory of Nyssa, “Life of Moses” pg81
St. Maximus the Confessor, 200 Chapters On Theology 1.8
Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite, On The Divine Names I.2
St. John Chrysostom, “On The Incomprehensible Nature of God” II.32
For classical treatments of apophasis I can think of no better source than Eric Perl. His books Thinking Being and Theophany are an invaluable resource on this front. A more concise, and specific, treatment can be found however in his article Into The Dark published by CUA Press in a volume titled Mystery And Intelligibility. He also has an enthralling interview with a Q&A on YouTube with the guys at Dionysius Circle titled Dr. Eric Perl on Philosophical Mysticism and "Why is there anything at all?"
St. Augustine of Hippo, On Christian Doctrine
Ps. Dionysius the Areopagite, On The Divine Names I.8
Meister Eckhart, Commentary On Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 53
St. Maximus the Confessor, Disputations with Pyrrhus 89
St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions book III
St. Nicholas of Cusa, On Learned Ignorance I.4
This is of course the exact phrasing of the council of Chalcedon
Demetrios Bathrellos, The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature, and Will in the Christology of Saint Maximus the Confessor (Oxford Early Christian Studies), pg106
Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ pg37
St. Maximus the Confessor, (Amb21.16)
Ps. Dionyisus the Areopagite, On The Divine Names II.10
thanks for your insightful reflections
Thanks for reading, my brother! May God bless you in His Son