From our Religions of Feelings to True Religion
In our modern, Cartesian world, all religions coexist in terms of feelings. Christianity itself becomes a religion of feelings, serving even as modernizing paradigm for all other religions, even the most recalcitrant, such as Islam. Christ as the presence of God in man becomes our feeling of God. We are supposed to be filled with God’s presence when we feel most intensely, even as feelings must be kept in check by our modern (“brave and new,” as per Shakespeare) or technological sciences, lest our feelings grow into material for dangerous fundamentalism.
With classical Christianity, however, God is present to us in repentance, through a cross, which in philosophical terms is a radical doubt open to truth. God opens us to truth, to his presence, which we do not “feel” directly, but divine as we negate ourselves, our sense of certainty, our very feelings. We “see” God’s presence through faith; we trust it, as we do not know or possess it as our own. We turn to God “backwards,” by doubting what stands before us ready-at-hand, in response to an unseen presence that negates our own presence, even as negation is here a sign of redemption in God. As we are transported in God, God ceases to be in us;1 for our very content resurfaces in God, consummate horizon, original form or context of sense.
Redemption through faith is resurrection through doubt open to God’s presence, which makes itself known in and through its vicars, its prophets—God’s chosen poets. We know, then, at one remove from truth; we know as in an enigmatic mirror, in a reflected manner, in words that point us back to their intelligent source. Words, poetry’s metaphors, that are not mere “letters that kill,” but paths of awakening, vehicles carrying us to a place in which we shall know ourselves as we are known by God.
Our religions of feelings alienate us from the original thrust of religious bonds, where our feelings are exposed as but vulgar affections to be negated reflectively on their way back to God—as we ascend back to divine intelligence. We have feelings so that we may question them in the direction of their source; so that sense, including our sense of self, may be converted from the plane of pleasure alienated from its real context, to that of desire thriving in its proper context. We are then called to live in our context, proper form of our very existence. Herein pulses “the life of the mind”: no mere realm of empty verbiage, but a living discourse, the very Word that lives eternally in God.
________
1 Cf. Saint Bonaventure’s Itineratium mentis in Deum (“Journey of the mind into God”).
Comentarios