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.