This is also Thou; Neither is this Thou

The Way of Affirmation and the Way of Negation

Light as we commonly know it is the pure illumination of everything around us. The infinite vases of light pour onto everything we see. It is the word by which we know the world.

 Light is also known particularly as itself. In its most powerful and forceful forms, we cannot see or know it face to face, staring into its fullness, but we can know it in its beautiful parts. As in the rainbow, the refraction of light opens our eyes to the beautiful colors of light. Light contains within itself all the colors we know out in this world it illuminates for us. In a rainbow, light's beauty is known not as the overwhelming fullness of itself but in its sides and facets revealed in separation.

We can come to know light by its reflection and glimpses when the fullness of light is not represented in the form of the sun. The moon gives us a silvery gleam of pure light and many a heart have fallen in love with light looking at its silvery reflection. It softens light for us and removes the pure fierceness of the sun's light, and perhaps it makes pure light earthier, more human so that we can taste and know that it is truly good. The glimpses of light from the stars draw us in longing. It is the romantic within us that answers to the deep stirring call of the light from afar. For the light connoisseurs, the way light falls in shadows and shades through clouds or trees creates an even fuller hunger for light. These slight and infinite variations are always able to enflame within us a new and longing love for pure and holy light.

Whether in its absence or in its fullness or in its crescentness, the knowledge of light is always there. We only know the world because of light; therefore, whatever presence it has, we always know it. We can come to love the day and the light of day, the shadows of trees and clouds, rainbows, and light falling on water. Or we may love the light by night, the moon, the stars, the fire against the moon and the stars. Or, as I have come to love light, we can know and love it because of its coming or going, its waxing and waning, by the morning and evening, the moments of its crescentness. The last closing light of the setting sun is where I often find myself drawn into loving light.

The images of light in its glimpses, reflections, shades, and colors are how we come to love the actuality of light.

This is the way of affirmation. God is the Light. He has named Himself so because He is well known when light is understood as imaging God. The way of affirmation is the discovery and knowledge of God through his created images. Within the image of light, we come to love light by affirming and adoring the images light casts of itself, just so, we come to love and know God. He is the infinite light we cannot look at full, yet we can come to know and love (or reject) him through the images which are refractions, shades, and shadows, of Himself.

God is also love and also the living water. He is in the grass, He speaks in the wind, He laughs in the thunder, and He whispers in the willows . This is also Thou.

And yet, God is not light. He is none of these things. Neither is this Thou.

Just as light itself is not known fully through images, shades, reflections, and distillations created by it, we do not know God fully as Himself by just knowing His created world.

When we are little, we dare to look at the sun. We dare it, but we quickly learn we cannot hold our eyes upon it. Instead, we turn our head away from light to hopefully later find our love for it satisfied in less blinding ways. Yet, we never know its wholeness in its pieces. So we turn off the lights and blind the room of all light and sit alone in the dark. We wait in the absence of light to remind us that light is not the pale shine we see all about us but something holy and pure, and then, we turn on the single uncovered lamp in the middle of the pitch black room.

The light burns from within us but is not us.

So, we turn our face away from this world, we march into the desert (if God is the living water, we go were no water runs to know what true water is), we reject all things knowing that nothing in this world IS God. Here we discover the ultimate, terrifying truth: God is holy.

All men who know God have come to this place, the place that is not a place:

"I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away—
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about."
(from T. S. Eliot's, 'The Four Quartets: East Coker' Full text p 11)

A terrible good, a phrase Charles Williams uses often, is what we face when we meet God outside of everything we know. This is what every ascetic has sought for the entire history of the Church. This is what Paul found wandering those years in the desert before his true ministry began. This is the way by which the dead must pass to live.

The great knowledge of the via negativa is God's utterance to Moses: "I am who I am."

Amen. He is no other.

As Christians, we affirm the world in the bodily Incarnation of Christ, the creation itself, the knowledge of God in His created world ("The earth is the LORD's and all its fullness. The world and all those who dwell therein" Psalm 24:1), and the manifold images that are a witness of the Eternal Godhead. These are all God making himself known to us. Yet, we also deny the world, the flesh, the ever present masquerade of non-faces before us, because God is none of these things. We seek the backside of light, the absence of image, and the absolute otherness of God. We live within this great paradox: This is also thou; neither is this thou.

 

Here is a great article about Charles Williams' creative theology of The Two Ways from which this whole post is derived: http://theoddestinkling.mymiddleearth.com/2013/07/31/drunkards-or-monks-the-two-ways-as-a-major-cw-theme/

I can't say enough about how much Williams' writing has helped me see the world in a truly Christian way.

Indian Blankets

I walk among the Indian Blankets blooming bright on a spring day.
The day’s light it bears in an image from which I do not have to look away.
Fringed in yellow it turns to its father, and the holy face
Full of honor and obedience watches the sun’s trace.

The flower passes away in a summer and I know I have lost a brother
Yet in the earths loamy ground it waits to be exhumed by its father.
For each spring it is called to recount to me the deep truth of our race:
We are the other’s image to our Eternal Light which we cannot face.
We turn and see in each other His unbearable, beautiful Face.

A poem about the loss and renewal of the image

She is never too gone to write this wrong.
Somewhere she is freed from me strong
Enough to be another's immutable image,
A shared sight, but I no longer see its stage.

I was there with her once and always,
But here I am salted and sanded in this ground
Grinding my way into a buried haze.
Shroud of night, crowd of placeless thoughts
And spoke-less wheels, I feel this emptiness round
And through my shades of blurry, blaring sound.

Thy emptying leaves us dangling in dreaded ache and angst.

Tread in this night of ours and see the grey.
Creased with this fight, hours in a meaningless fray,
Leased plights, cried nights, being undone
From blackness and light, we are now none. 　

Into this blank world, speak us to life.
Whirled cup, wine and blood, leak rife
With sand that forms for us glass eyes,
New eyes that see through the crass sighs:
All are images that brew us into you.

She is Love's face shaped with a shy restraint.
Untie me from jealous eyes and chaste-less lies,
Uncensor me to feel the fragile, perfect sight
Of flesh's light in the bosom of a saint.

Explanation:

The idea for this poem came from Charles Williams' book The Image of Beatrice. Williams analyzes Dante's life work, mainly Dante's exposition of his romantic love for the Florentine woman Beatrice. Dante never married Beatrice nor did he ever consumate his love, instead he was rejected, Dante married another woman, and Beatrice died when she was 23. Yet this image of Beatrice remained for Dante so real that it in many ways called him to God as he depicts in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is the theotokos (God bearer) to Dante. Beatrice and Dante's pure vision of romantic love for her are what bring Dante to God or God to Dante.

The poem is in two states, one the immediate, singular yet common feeling of refusal and departure of a love, the other a totally universal yet always singular feeling of abandonment. These two states in the poem are separated by the single line bewailing the emptying: The emptying of the image of the girl is paralleled with the emptying of the image of God in our sight. Often, when we see this world we see wrong in what was made as right and evil in that which was created as “good” by God. We cannot see with our coveting eyes the beauty of the world, instead we simply know it as things we do not miserly possess. We warp it with our lusts, and our lives are lived in the grey. We have nothing but our own barren struggles as we cannot see God in any of it because our eyes are shaded by our sinful hearts. In both the singular and universal experience, we dangle in the dreaded ache and angst of the departure of a love and the Love.

Then the poem moves to a call for renewal of the image, a prayer; more carefully said it calls for new eyes to see the images of God in the world. These images are everywhere, and while none of them are God, they all were made by God and bear Him forth in some way. Everything created and recreated in this world can be a means to call us to God and all have the possibility when seen with the right eyes to "brew us into you." The end is a retrieval of the singular experience of love and heart break in this new light. Even the romantic vision and the loss of it can call someone to God like it did Dante Alighieri so many years ago.