Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism - 13

Sat yesterday in The Varsity, post-GALAS steering committee meeting, munching on a slaw dog and an orange freeze, pondering Immanence vs. Emanation in the theology of mysticism. Various big names in the theology of mysticism world--Dionysius, Dante(!), Leuba, Teresa of Avila, Boehme, Tauler, Philo, even Plotinus--come down on one side or the other, but even in mysticism, there are trolls who must have it that their conclusion is right and the other is wrong. Probably not original to me, but couldn't it be like the particle and wave theories of light, in that both are helpful, depending on which behaviors of light one is attempting to understand or describe? For me, immanence is preferable, keeping in mind the danger of slippage into pantheism. Immanence is preferable because it is how our ineffable Eternal One chose to reveal to us in the very immanence of Jesus. In this construct,

"earth is literally 'crammed with heaven.'" p. 72 [see also, Gerard Manley Hopkins: "THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;. It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil."]

"'God,' says Plotinus, 'is not external to anyone, but is present with all things, though they are ignorant that he is so.'" p. 72

"...if God be truly immanent in the material world it is either sin or folly to refuse that world in order that we may find Him..." p. 73

1 John 4.20:

Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters,^* are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister^* whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen

A Year With Thomas Merton - January 28

Seeing the Center from Somewhere Else

The year of the dragon has so far distinguished itself by strong, lusty winds--great windstorm the other night, some trees blew down in the woods near the hermitage (one across the path going up). Pine cones and bits of branches all over the lawn.

The need for constant self-revision, growth, leaving behind, a renunciation of yesterday, yet in continuity with all yesterdays (to cling to the past is to lose one's identity with it, for this means clinging to what was not there). My ideas are always changing, always moving around one center, always seeing the center from somewhere else. I will always be accused of inconsistencies--and will no longer be there to hear the accusation.

"What makes us afraid is our great freedom in face of the emptiness that has still to be filled" (Karl Jaspers). And again these concluding words from the arresting little pamphlet on The European Spirit: "The philosophically serious European is faced today with the choice between opposed philosophical possibilities. Will he enter the limited field of fixed truth which in the end has only to be obeyed; or will he go into the limitless open truth?...Will he win this perilous independence in perilous openness, as in existential philosophy, the philosophy of communication in which the individual becomes himself on condition that others become themselves, in which there is no solitary peace but constant dissatisfaction and in which a man exposes his soul to suffering?"

January 25 and 26, 1964, V.67-68