A Language of Stone and Sky: Maximus and Augustine (Part 1)
I love the calm and custom of quick
fingers weaving,
The shuttle’s buzz and hum, the
spindle’s bees
And look—arriving or leaving spun from
down,
Some barefoot Delia barely touching
ground…
What rot has reached the root of us
That we should have no language for our
praise?
--Osip
Mandelstam, from “Tristia”
A poem can leave its maker at once more
deeply seized by existence and, in a profound way, alienated from it, for as
the act of making ends—as the world that seemed to overbrim its boundaries
becomes, once more, merely the world—it can be very difficult to retain any
faith in that original moment of inspiration at all. The memory of that momentary blaze, in fact,
and the art that issued from it, can become a reproach to the fireless life in
which you find yourself most of the time.
Grace is no different…To
experience grace is one thing; to integrate it into your life is quite
another. What I crave now is that
integration of some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace,
yet adequate to the hard reality in which daily faith operates. I crave, I suppose, the poetry and the prose of
knowing.
--Christian Wiman, My
Bright Abyss[1]
We do not merely want to see beauty,
though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.
We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united
with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe
in it, become part of it.
--C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,”[2]
The things of
the senses cannot of themselves distract from God. All the things of earth, in being very good,
declare God, and it is only by the mediation of their boundless display that
the declaration of God may be heard and seen.
In themselves they have no essences apart from the divine delight that
crafts them: they are but an array of proportions, an ordering or felicitous
parataxis of semeia, and so have nothing in themselves by which they might
divert attention from the God who gives them, no specific gravity, no weight
apart from the weight of glory.
--David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite[3]
The mystery of the Word’s incarnation
contains the force of all the hidden meanings and types in scripture, and the
understanding of the visible and intelligible creatures. The one who knows the mystery of the cross
and tomb knows the true nature (touV logouV) of these
aforementioned things. And the one who
has been initiated into the ineffable power of the resurrection knows the
purpose for which God made all things.
--Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Theology and Economy[4]
The atheism of our times—which often
flickers shapeless and nameless in the background our daily rituals—is given a
sort of monstrous glory in the now obscure passage of the 19th
century writer Jean Paul’s “The Speech of the Dead Christ from the Celestial
Sphere that There is No God.” In this
passage the narrator falls asleep, and finds himself in a graveyard where all
the dead are shouting upward to Christ from their graves asking “Is there no
God?” And Christ—nightmarishly—calls
back not with a voice brimming of hallelujahs but a ringing lament: “There is
none!” he calls. And the hysteria builds
further: “I went through the worlds, I climbed to the suns and flew with the
Milky way through the deserts of heaven, but there is no God. I climbed down as far as being throws its
shadow and peered into the abyss and cried, ‘Father where are you’ but I heard
only the eternal storm, which no one rules…And when I peered up into the
immeasurable world in search of the divine eye, only an empty eyesocket stared
back at me; and eternity lay upon chaos and gnawed at it and it chewed upon
itself.” This horror ends not with the
dead lamenting what Christ has revealed, but with an even more sublime terror—a
sort of absolute recapitulation of Christ’s derelict voice shrieking over the
mounds of Golgotha, magnified now, one would imagine, by how it rings hollow
across the void: “O Father! Father!” he
booms, “Where is thine infinite breast upon which I may lay my head?”[5]
And so
it is in a sense that such prose can startle faith more than any syllogism or
puckish New Atheist pseudo-intellectualists ever could, because it reaches to
cut not branches but deep root: God
cannot be found. Nor is God merely a
lost object, not where He once was but possibly somewhere; to us it seems He is
lost precisely in the sense He now has nowhere to be. Time has passed since Jean Paul, we have
awoken from the dream, shaken off its terror, and found ourselves somewhat
nonplussed to be in an infinite and infinitely disinterested universe. Christ’s horror is no longer our own. It is
not our explicit atheism that is the cultural problem per se, writes Henri de
Lubac, rather “the most distressing diagnosis that can be made of the present
age, and the most alarming, is that to all appearances at least it has lost the
taste for God.”[6]
Ironically the alarm of Christ’s
atheism here would reside for us perhaps not in the atheism itself, but in the alarm; for the very grammar to parse what
should be the magnitude of difference between a life of belief and a life of
disbelief has become foreign, and we, to it, complacent (we are all just human,
so the common consensus seems to run, it is just that some of us are human plus a few purely personal and
superstructural atavisms we call “religion”); and that one’s life should become
tragic or disoriented from this loss is itself lost upon many. The Catholic philosopher and sociologist of
religion Louis Dupré, indebted to de Lubac, elaborates that the characteristic
feature of modern atheism cannot be equated with unbelief: “we may call the
prevailing environment a-theistic, not because faith has disappeared in our
time, but because the question whether we believe in God or not, retains little
or no practical bearing on our lives…
[Belief] has become hidden by its
total incongruity with a radically secular environment. [Emphasis
added] Even to the believer himself the
flame of his faith has become secret, since it no longer enlightens his whole
life.”[7] The frantic perorations of Jean Paul’s Christ
have metastasized into our spiritual torpor and coma; God’s long silence the
lull for our now deep sleep. Once upon a
time we may remember Gregory Nazianzen warned that theology is not for everyone
because it is a difficult, dangerous, and costly discipline.[8] Now however it seems theology is for no one
at all; touches down nowhere.
With
such an environment now saturating us, just as it would seem churlish to
suggest a theological analysis could
benefit us—despite ready admission that it is no panacea—it seems even more so insanity
to say that if the Incarnation is the key, the keyhole to open the door of that
analysis is the question (esoteric seeming often even to the specialist), “One
will, or two?” But—keeping in mind de
Lubac’s aphorism, “that Every time in the West that Christian renewal has
flourished, in the order of thought as that of life…it has flourished under the
sign of the Fathers” [9]—that
is what we will precisely suggest in this paper by analyzing what we might call
the “theological aesthetics of Incarnation” or, what the title of this paper
uses, the “semeio-aesthetics”[10]
of Incarnation of Maximus the Confessor, and St. Augustine.
For they too, as the epitaph from
Christian Wiman at the vanguard of our paper remarks, craved “that integration
of some speech that is true to the transcendent nature of grace, yet adequate
to the hard reality in which daily faith operates. [Maximus and Augustine] crave, I suppose, the
poetry and the prose of knowing.”[11] Which is to say they both, in their genius,
attempted to fight the hard battle to understand what we mean by “perceiving
God” in the world and how one would speak of it. And like many keyholes, though apparently
small, the question “One Will or Two?” can be peered through to see the vast world-orienting
vistas that lay beyond it, but cannot be accessed without it.[12] This is precisely because, as John Meyendorff
well put it, “the character and method of Byzantine theology are determined…by
the problem of the relationship between God and the whole world, between
creator and creation, and involve an
anthropology, which finds its ultimate key in Christology.”[13] Its importance will come to be seen as part
of its integral placement within a vaster theological vision, not just of
Maximus but surprisingly also, in its own way, of Augustine.
And what we will find is that one
cannot merely happen upon God—or not—as one does upon a stone or sea. "One does not," as the philosopher Martin
Heidegger put it once, “lose God as one loses a pocket knife.” “Is God present
or not?” to these two giants remains in a sense unanswerable on its current
plane; it is the wrong question.
Rather—do we even have the capacities of language and thought to
articulate what we would mean by an
experience of God in the world? And here
it is seen that in Christ—where the whole mystery of the relation of God and
world “appears concentrated,” and tantalizingly “flickers through the
relationship of Christ’s two natures,”[14]—there
has been given to us as yet another grace a language for stone and sea and sky
to speak of God, and for us to see and hear and read the logoi of their being as participating in
and pointing towards God’s very life.
[1] Christian Wiman, My
Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2013),
4.
[2] C.S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory and Other Essays, (SanFrancisco:
Harper SanFrancisco, 2001), 42.
[3] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth
(Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 2003), 255
[4] Maximus, Chapters
on Theology and Economy 2.57-8 (PG 90. 1108AB) hereafter Chapter on Theology and Economy abbreviated
as Ch.Th.
[5] Passage taken from Michael Allen Gillespie, Nihilism Before Nietzsche (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995), 64.
[6] Henri de Lubac, The
Discovery of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Pubishing, 1996), 82. We may note at the forefront that, by a
fortuitous linguistic overlap, Maximus describes the minds assimilation of the
world in the synthesis that leads towards ultimate knowledge of God as the
mind’s “eating” or consuming of the substance of the known object, as
assimilation of the object as food for the subject (to nooumenon trofh tou noerou). Questiones ad
Thalassium 27.
[7] Louis Dupré, The
Deeper Life: An Introduction to Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroads,
1981), 14.
[8] Gregory Nazianzus, On
God and Christ: The Five Theological Orations and Two Letters to Cledonius trans.
Fred Williams (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002), 26 (Oration 1.3)
[9] Henri De Lubac, At
the Service of the Church: Henri De Lubac Reflects on the Circumstances that
Occasioned His Writings, trans. Anne Englund Nash (SanFrancisco: Ignatius
Press, 2003), 317-318.
[10] Ironically itself an ugly term, but its used as
shorthand to emphasize, as we shall see, that the aesthetic and the
sense-making or semeiotic nature of the universe mutually interpenetrate one
another in both Maximus and Augustine in similar manners.
[12] C.f. the remarks of Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According
to Maximus the Confessor trans. by
Brian Daley (New York: Valdimir Seminary Press, 2003), 208: “Here [Maximus’]
vision parallels that of the greatest Christian minds—Augustine in his battle
against Donatus, Thomas in his dispute with Averroes—in understanding how to
transform an apparently immediate situation in the history of ideas into a
question of universal relevance, how to make a particular attack on
Christianity into an occasion for developing
a view of faith’s entire structure.” [emphasis added]
[13] John Meyendorff, Byzantine
Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1979), 14. Emphasis
added.
[14] Von Balthasar, Cosmic
Liturgy, 209.
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