On True Belief, False Mysticism and Reading the Cosmos (2024)

Were being not analogical, it would suffer distinction by way of quantity only; contingent being would burst apart like old wineskins with the inflowing of the new wine of the divine. Within such a univocal model, for being to signify something else would necessarily entail a supersession, its own meaning substituted at the whim and will of some apex being. I don't know anyone who marvels at the carnelian glow of a traffic light; its color has been so thoroughly subsumed to its municipal purpose that its inherent value is well-nigh negated. No one sees a traffic light as red, but as “stop” (at least in principle; here in Connecticut, some seem to see it as “floor it” in a statistically non-negligible number of incidences). In contrast, a Valentine rose is unforgettably beautiful for the meaning superadded to it, for its having been given in love, and by this admirer and none other. Analogical being, loving being, is a Zeno's paradox; approach generates an expansion become the milieu in which all things live, move, and become thus trans-signified.

We live among the ineffable. Creation, therefore, calls forth a reading no less than iconographic. For me personally, artistic poiesis invariably takes its departure point with the spontaneous apprehension of reality-as-poetry, and as such it comes on its own terms. A particular bar of intense music in the minor key; the play of winter light on ilex; impossibly white egrets nesting in the treetops over a cove; the taste of wild blackberries: I understand something, I “get” something, ineluctably certain, fully non-discursive, realer than real – or, rather, invested thoroughly with the wonder of the real.

Pope St. John Paul II writes of “the hidden power of sounds and words, colors and shapes” in which are sensed “some echo of the mystery.” Processing such privileged knowledge through study, transliterating the sublime to the prosaic – or the melodic, or the faintly accessible (at least in its intention) – is laborious, solitary, introspective, and painful. Yet is there not something objective and universal in this language of mystery? Who does not discern in the aerodynamic excellence of a wood duck in flight, especially in the autumn, an intangible elegance? Who would see the darting of a chipmunk as anything other than pure delight? Moonflowers broadening in the cool nights which encroach after the solstice as unalloyed sophistication? A harkening to paradise in a sun-warmed peach on the branch in August? Is there not a sort of metaphysical synesthesia by which flickering candlelight, gardenia blossoms, an immaculately clean and silent room, field strawberries, snow leopards, the viceroy butterflies circling the buddleia panicles outside, meteorites, and a million other realities of our world become as photisms of a higher order? Why do we speak of musical scales as chromatic? None of these are mere subjective associations; the force and the astonishment with which they take hold, while not blandly “empirical,” is in no way peculiar to the isolated individual. As St. John Paul tells us: “The intuition itself springs from the depths of the human soul, where the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things.” Lest one be too precious about it, the atlas of being's privative anti-images stands likewise ever at the ready. Its entries need not be invoked.

For St. John of the Cross:

The pontiff is speaking specifically of the move from phenomenon to foundation; however, we may infer two things: namely, that perceptual phenomena genuinely mediate an actual reality underlying them, and – given the appearance of this quotation in this particular encyclical – that the keen intuitive gaze into being the pope describes is neither foreign nor antagonistic to reason, but itself is a species of reason, of intellection.

The consonance between reason and poetry is thematic for Thomist Jacques Maritain (whose mentor, Pope St. Paul VI, sought for him the honor, vanishingly rare, of lay cardinal, though the philosopher resisted) who holds vigorously – and brilliantly! – for a “spiritual unconscious or preconscious.” He laments its neglect, together with the concomitant exaltation of the Freudian unconscious, as a hallmark of a dreary intellectual climate. I would like to excerpt his excellent work at length, allowing it to speak for itself:

We can see that reading the cosmos requires the move from phenomenon to foundation, fueled by the heat and light of the spiritual preconscious, itself a kind of annihilative splendor with respect to the discursive, to which it nonetheless does no injury, but rather upholds and vivifies. False mysticism, in its attribution of the deadening one-to-one correspondence entailed by a mere placeholder status, smothers the spirit – the raucously energetic act of being-as-analogical underpinning creation, the intimate interpretive vitality of the finite personal subject, the infinite creative freedom of God as artist. I conjecture that the superstition which would flatten being into a literalistic morality play, always waiting for the other shoe to drop, comes of sin – more specifically, of viewing being solely through the lens of our own guilt, and of the sadness and fear engendered thereby. I remember, in my adolescence, understanding as a matter of perfect clarity the divine wrath in the thunderstorm which raged as I ascended the steps from the underground 14th Street-Canarsie Local to the Brooklyn sidewalk. Thérèse as a child, to her family's astonishment, thrilled with glee at lightning bolts hitting a field in which they found themselves. To be insensate to natural danger is to tempt God – yet these immediate, unfiltered responses remain illustrative.

And this brings us full circle, to where Paul started immediately prior to this series... with the eclipse and Annie Dillard. In her famous piece, “Total Eclipse,” Dillard expressed and evoked a raw and mounting terror; Paul suggested that she could easily have used the title “Eclipse Apocalypse.” Indeed, the vision of nature she cultivated in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek led an early reviewer to describe her (much to her delight) as “one of the foremost horror writers of the 20th Century.” Somewhat later in her writing career, in Living by Fiction, she mused on what she perceived as the blurred lines between sane versus insane ways of relating to the cosmos, citing psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn’s claim that, in the doodling of schizophrenics, “Even the smallest loop… can be understood… and interpreted.” (We have considered the questions raised by Dillard and her reflections on Prinzhorn, both in Paul’s piece and subsequently.) Dillard – a practicing Christian at the time – concluded that line of thought as follows:

As for literary criticism and creation-as-text, Dillard is once more on the cusp… yet again falls short. The Transcendentalists (not the Medievals) could see creation-as-text in the framework of… one might even say, through the ghost of sola scriptura.1 Yet reality does not play out in abstractions. It is not notional.It is bigger, fuller, richer – it is, in short, encounter. And this makes us realize that word, even the divine Word who is the Second Person of the Trinity, follows the laws of analogy, must needs be ever revised upward and outward in our estimation. Word itself is a matter of dynamic disproportionality, ever expanding at our approach, invested with the infinity of infinities: immense and gentle; powerful and meek; perfectly accommodated to each and constitutive of universal peace; filling all things unto plenitude and yet self-abasing; eternally spiritual and irreversibly become body.

Beauty is, in a sense, the visibility of the good, just as the body is the visibility of the soul. Between the realms of the visible and the invisible, Christ is the bridge.2 As such, he is the Sacrament of God. All of this may offer insight into what I mean in naming an appropriate reading of the cosmos “iconographic.” The icon, if I may so define it, is a work of beauty that yet demands a fasting from beauty. It is thoroughly non-literal inasmuch as it is but quasi-representational; in other words, it remains self-consciously cognizant that the subject it aims to represent infinitely surpasses the competence of its craft, and so intentional distortion becomes a vehicle of what one comes near to in abstractia, via unknowing.

There is yet more to be said about the sacramentality of creation, and that will follow soon. In the meantime, suffice it to say that, for the saint, all negative darkness which may be experienced within the mystery of being is exorcised. For the saint, it is not terror, but shattering wonder, that marks the response to the unknown, or indeed the unknowable.

To take every celestial phenomenon for a hot tip of the end times for those in the know is less the product of an overactive imagination, than of a pervasive poverty of imagination. Each breath we draw, every moment of life, holds within itself an epiphanic reminder of a God who is beauty. Love adopts its own causality – Ratzinger wrote that somewhere, but the formulation has become so interior to me that I no longer have any clue as to its source. A rose of a certain color or the alignment of planets would hardly be the best indicator as to the resolution of a difficult life decision – such would reduce creation to a collection of mere talismans. But for me personally, a great blue heron overhead always signals a general but profound sense of divine accompaniment, ever since one flew in parallel with the car for many miles, over the twists and turns of the small river alongside Route 8 in the Litchfield Hills. There is a connaturality implicit in a gaze of love by which the beloved is everywhere revealed.

In the encounter with Christ, the blessed know the unending plenitude of kalokagathía, or beauty-goodness. Such an intuition prompted the ravished John of the Cross, immediately after declaring all to be his, to admonish: