SNC

The Changing of the Light is Torture

I will write, for once, about how the image of God pertains to human beings. I believe I can be trusted when I say that this anthropocentrism of scope is not because I do not believe in discerning the image of God in other creatures: if this blog had a unifying thesis it would probably be exactly the opposite. I don't believe that, when Genesis refers to humans as created in the image of God, that is a limited image, as though God could ever be limited in such an ungenerous fashion. It would be absurd, for instance, to deny that the lamb is the image of the Lamb of God. But it if important to bear this declaration in mind for humans specifically, because it is in the face of other humans that human beings are generally most prolific in discerning defilements. We may treat animals with horrific cruelty, callousness, and proud disdain, but it is with humans that we develop these hatreds into their most elaborate forms. It is in the judgement of human beings that we make the greatest use of the knowledge of good and evil, and so it is with human beings that we most desperately need to learn how to set that knowledge aside.

I am forced to speak anthropocentrically about the knowledge of good and evil, as well as about the knowledge of the image of God, because these are terms indigenous only to a subset of the spirits of the manifold cosmos. It is in the Garden of Eden that the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life were and are found, and this Garden is of the world below the firmament, inhabited by the spirits (biotic and abiotic) who, when the lightened waters of the first day of Genesis (and it is worth noting that in the Hebrew, this day is called not the first day but merely “the day”) found themselves below the partition. It is from the spirits below the firmament that the vegetable souls of the third day were created and distributed throughout the stars of the galaxy on the fourth day, from which the animal souls of the fifth and sixth days were created, and ourselves among them. This is the population, on this Earth and throughout the sub-firmamental galaxies, which has inherited the questions of good and evil as we know them. This is not to say that the super-firmamental spirits do not have a version of the same question: the angelic fathers of the Nephilim in Genesis and the fallen third of angels in Revelation indicate that all is not well in Heaven, and I am inclined to believe that the human decision to eat of the Tree of Knowledge by the tempting of the snake was not without the cooperation of our siblings above. However, the dynamics that lead them to love and not to love, to hate and not to hate, to torment or to assist the creatures of Earth, are beyond my ken. All I can speak of is this decision, the either/or that we of the lower light and waters are posed by this fallen aeon.

The line of Scripture that I treat most as a motto is found in Psalm 139: “Knowledge is too wondrous for me: high above, I cannot attain it, for where can I go from your Spirit, and where from before you flee?” Often “knowledge” is specified by the translator as “such knowledge,” but this is not what is written in the Hebrew. If I were to pair this verse with another, it would be, “For now we see as in a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part, but then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. But now abide faith, hope, love, these three, but the greatest of these is love.” From these two verses, I determine that there must be such a thing as a knowledge of wonders, a knowledge we best approach by love and by the movement of the Spirit—and I determine that it is not what we mean by “knowledge” now. How is it that there is such a knowledge that we apprehend but do not possess? I believe we apprehend it because it is a knowledge which is natively open to us, and I believe we do not possess it because we have taken up another knowledge—this, of course, is the knowledge of the either/or of good and evil. This first knowledge, I believe, is the knowledge of God and therefore of the image of God; this second knowledge is one which, asymetrically, the knowledge of God permits but which does not permit the knowledge of God.

What is the knowledge of (the image of) God? Here I believe Mahayana Buddhist terms are indispensibly helpful as regards the “tolerance” of “tathata,” or suchness. I might, in other terms, refer to the tolerance of the sovereignty of God, though not in the sense of sovereignty often assumed. Tolerance of suchness, as I understand it, is the tolerance of the fact that suchness is void of any ultimate reality, and specifically of the ability to pronounce ultimately the final verdict on its reality. What one must tolerate is the tetralemma that what is such does not admit of fixing to and filling its reality with any of the following statements: “it is this way,” “it is not this way,” “it is both this way and not this way,” “it is neither this way nor not this way.” One must tolerate what is such by being content not to define it, and one learns this tolerance by preferring, instead, the use of skillful means, aimed toward love, compassion, and joy. Whereas the attitudes of hatred, craving, and delusion demand that one of those statements be fixed to what is such in an ultimate fashion, love, compassion, and joy (specifically sympathetic joy) are content merely to make those statements in a provisional fashion, not to erase what is such but to love what is such, asking no questions of what it has to be to deserve such love. It is this sort of loftiness that I recall when I say the West Syriac formulation of the Hosanna in Excelsis: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, by whose glory the Heavens and the Earth are filled: Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he that has come, and is to come, in the Name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest!” I read a translation of a Mahayana sutra recently which translated “shunyata,” which I normally think of as “emptiness” or “voidness,” as “infinite space”: it is this infinite and illimitable space that is the glory of God, freed from the bonds described in the tetralemma, and one who comes in the Name of the Lord is one who is likewise freed.

As my priest loves pointing out, God is described as walking through Eden, and his voice is described as ringing through it: from Adam and Eve’s reaction to these phenomena after eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, it seems that this has happened before. The inhabitants of the Garden have what is necessary to know God—as the Spirit that proceeds through creation, as the manifestation of that divinity in an action so creaturely as ‘walking.’ To know this God, I believe, is to know how to respond skillfully, with love and compassion and joy. And if one can know God, one can know the image of God in Trinitarian terms, through the Logos, revealed by the Spirit, and one can respond to this image skillfully as well when encountered in creatures. Yet it is important that there is nothing in skillful means to prevent unskillful means: the fact that ultimate reality cannot be fixed to any judgement means that it cannot be fixed against a judgement of fixity, against a knowledge consisting of delusion. One is free to then prefer a different kind of knowledge, one of goods to be craved and evils to be despised. One is free to take the loving God, whose sovereign rule consists in the giving of the glorious image without any hint of stinginess, to be hateful and loving, to assume (as Eve is convinced of) that God acts to deceive you, to hide from God with whom you are ignorant, to assume you will not be forgiven and so not to ask for forgiveness from one you know full well does not desire to fix an ultimate judgement. This is not the opposite of suchness: suchness does not have an opposite, and so it can admit of that which poses itself in opposition to suchness. Because it is not the opposite of suchness, I cannot say that the dynamic of good and evil that we have stumbled into here below the firmament is the same that the spirits above the firmament have entered into, or even that it is the same for different spirits in this realm. But here we are.

There is no denying that we have come to know good and evil, and that we see it in each other’s faces. I believe we see it most prominently in the faces of our species because we see it most prominently in our own faces. There is that which I see as good as regards myself, and that which I view as evil as regards myself, and likewise for others. It is the easiest thing in the world to look at one another in this fashion. Humans service one another in so many ways, and offend each other in so many ways—I know I am offended by many human actions, and heartened by many human actions. It is possible to skew this balance in many different ways: I can interpret people in the most charitable possible light, tending toward the good, or I can be searchingly judgemental, tending toward the evil, or simply “brutally honest.” But brutal honesty is in fact what is least possible here. I can be honest as regards my perceptions of good and evil, but I cannot be honest as regards reality. Neither the good, nor the evil, nor the balance between them accounts for that other knowledge which is too wondrous for me: the knowledge that in the face of this one who I am so apt to fix a judgement to is the face of the unsearchably holy one, the non-self and the non-being, the abyss of love. To be honest about the existence of this image is another question entirely.

While walking near a river recently in the afternoon, I picked up a stick, and desired to place it into the golden stream of lightened water proceeding from the sun. Yet as I moved toward the golden waters, they moved—because of course, the gold that I saw was merely based on what was reflected toward me. In the end I did place the stick into the gold, but by this time I had realized the endeavour was obviously misconceived: amalgamating all the perspectives I could have toward it, the whole river was shining, and none of it was. I could licitly make the statement, “It is all gold,” or, “It is not all gold,” or, “It is both all gold and not all gold,” or, “It is neither all gold nor not all gold,” because the terms of the question were conventional rather than ultimate in the first place. By what means am I to discriminate between such statements? By what is skillful. Of course, this is not a proof of the voidness of ultimate reality and the need to tolerate the tetralemma: one could argue that the river is ultimately gold from such-and-such positions and ultimately not gold from such-and-such other positions, and then I would have to argue that the question is whether the river and its goldness are ultimate realities of which we can speak in ultimate judgements in the first place. But the point is that, where the tolerance of suchness is acknowledged, one is left to take what appears to the senses by the terms of their discrimination as a kind of illusion or situation which must be dealt with skillfully.

I am someone, as you are, for whom good and evil are perceptible terms. When I look at a specific person, I cannot help but see such-and-such a quality in them as good and such-and-such another quality as evil. Yet there is another apprehension, one which you may or may not share—I did not always feel it, but once I began to feel it, I have had no choice to remain faithful to it and to soften my heart for it day by day. This is the apprehension that this person I look upon is the very image of God, the God of which it is said, “Holy art thou, O God / Holy art thou, Almighty / Holy art thou, Immortal / Crucified for us, have mercy upon us!” I see the image of the God who calls me to love again and again, the image of “the light that finds me,” the image which Israel saw in Edom in the words, “No, please; if I find favour with you, then accept my present from my hand, for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favour.” I am honoured to look upon you, and the prospect of loving you is so precious that it would turn the fires of Hell into Paradise, as it is written: “Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.” I remain in the asymmetry I described earlier, in which this asymmetry does not preclude the images of good and evil I receive, and yet the images of good and evil I receive routinely obscure the glory that I cannot bear but to take refuge in.

It is painful to live in the fallen world. As it is sung: “If we meet / And we drink from borrowed cups / You read the room to me / All the changing of the light is torture.” The fruits of the Tree of Knowledge are my borrowed cups, and the room of this world composes images that rend my heart. How is it that I look upon the image of God and see at times the most hideous evils, either in them or in myself, in finding that which is not evil to be evil? What do I make of these changing images? How can I ensure to keep my eyes on that dark mirror, remaining exposed to love?

It is with this in mind that I have turned to Scripture. It is on matters of Scripture that I believe I am most heterodox, because I find the acceptance of infallible authority difficult in general, whether regards church tradition or Scripture or even matters of reason. But Scripture does hold an important role for me. It has a sacramental function which is an idea I have been informed Augustine held, but I do not know where to verify this: it is an outward sign of an inward grace, matter offered up in order to reveal the Spirit of God. One is not permitted, in the reading of Scripture, to take it as a mundane text and judge it according to the appearances of good and evil; one is required to find in it the image of the Spirit working. Yet the matter of Scripture, like the matter of a human face, is often intensely difficult, heterogeneous to the extreme and problematic in various aspects. In the reading of Scripture one is required to make use of the outward signs that appear, appearing not through the forms of sight and taste like the Eucharist but through the mental forms, the mental forms in which the Knowledge of Good and Evil works.

You will excuse me, I hope, for a bizarre statement, but I do not know that anyone knows truly what is written in Scripture. At its core is a mystery, which flitters in front of the reader in the form of many illusions. The manner in which the same passage appears again and again in front of me in so many different guises more or less confirms this nature to me experientially, such that the same words present me at one time with the requirement of making one of the four statements of the tetralemma, and at another time another of the statements. They do not allow me me to fix any one of the four upon them as their ultimate reality when I know that their ultimate reality is the Spirit of holiness, that one whose sovereignty must be tolerated in order for love to be learned, that one who is such. I have read of how monks in dedicated study rejoice in finding a passage of Scripture which had previously felt like a barren desert of meaning to have become a flourishing garden. In my experience I find the opposite happens as well: here what was a garden becomes a desert, or at once a garden and a desert, or neither. Good and evil dance upon the surface, and I must interpret their signs, yet not with a spirit of judgement. I cannot avoid coming to a judgement at some time: to engage with the text honestly, I must come to some conclusion. But at others, I must instead reject a conclusion, or at once accept and reject it—and often, the only honest engagement possible for me is simply to say, “I neither accept nor reject what appears to me: I truly can say nothing about it: I am baffled and know nothing.”

In this engagement with Scripture, I am not at all times bound to the judgements of good and evil. In fact, wonders become open to me: I notice that there is a vastly greater range of determinations than those of good and evil. Good and evil pertain to intentions through craving and hatred. What I crave appears good to me, because I delude myself into thinking that this good thing is intended to sate my craving, and I intend to use it that way. What I hate appears evil to me, because I delude myself into thinking that this evil thing is intended to spite my craving, and I intend to destroy it in order to sate my hateful urge. Therefore when intentions appear in the apprehensions I make, they appear in the guises of good and evil. At times Scripture seems to suggest some good intention, and at other times some evil intention, or some intention that is so contradictory or incomprehensible in terms of good and evil that I do not know what to do with it. Yet as I accept Scripture as something with infinite space at its core, as something brimming with the holiness of God, I also begin to perceive other visions not in terms of intention, and so not in terms of good and evil. Some phrase confronts me, not because I find it to be well or ill intended—not even well or ill intended in some matter peripheral to morality, such as aesthetically good or impoverished—but merely because it is there, without needing to be interpreted. For example, the phrase, “And behold, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” may suggest a noble intention to me; the apprehensions of good and evil do not cease in this world. Yet it suggests something else as well, something much more like what Esau’s face suggests to Israel. I am honoured to come into its presence, and I offer myself as an offering to it, merely to dwell alongside it, to return to it throughout its various shifting appearances, and to cite it and say, “Have I not heard it said? Has it not been said to me?”

Such apprehensions are not limited to the pages of the canon, just as God and God’s means of grace are not limited to the sacraments, but are at work everywhere and in all people. Scripture provides a kind of school, however, by which I come to recognize them elsewhere. At times it is in words: I have been struck by Cate le Bon’s music in much the same way I have been struck by the language of the New Testament, such that the words, “The light, the light, the light, the light that finds me” bless me again and again. And I am also blessed by moments. While waiting for a bus a couple months ago, I found myself to the west of a gorgeous rainbow, in a small parking lot, looking at a rose bush on which were crawling a host of ants. Good and evil pertain to this image: its beauty certainly struck me as good, and the prick of a thorn felt to some very mild degree evil. Yet the bulk of the experience is something I cannot interpret whatsoever, which has nothing to do with intentions and meanings: the exact position of every ant, the exact colour of every flower, the exact shape of the rainbow. I felt in that moment as if God had opened the book of his Scriptures, in which all my experiences are a page, and that I was peering in, and I knew it would be futile to ask, “But what does this mean? What am I to make of this, regarding the mental forms, the vicissitudes of the judgements of good and evil?” Do you not know, child of God, that you are looking into the book of God, in which the image of God is given? Would you seek in the book of God a better and holier book, holier because it is explained in the terms of the Tree of Knowledge? Yet even here there is the Tree of Knowledge and something to interpret, and yet, so much else besides.

It is this experience that I believe applies to the changing of the light which appears in the faces of human beings, to which our judgement of good and evil is most readily applied. I see the heroism or the depravity of my fellow human being like I see heroism and depravity in the Bible, yet I do not presume therefore to make an ultimate judgement on the nature of the God at work there, but instead to hone my skillful means of love and compassion and joy, of love and faith and hope. To take the illusion, even the most hideous illusion, not as the ultimate reality but as the gift given, the sign by which Israel knows that he is received with favour by Esau, such that in that vision one notes that “Esau ran to meet him and embraced him and fell on his neck and kissed him.” I may not see the river shining gold, but I do not take that to mean that it does not; I do not take myself to have the power to fix a statement because I have been given a statement with which to work. Instead, whatever the images that may present themselves, I must respond to my knowledge of good and evil the way that Job does: “And it happened when the days of the feast came round, that Job would send and consecrate them and rise early in the morning and offer up burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job thought, Perhaps my sons have offended and cursed God in their hearts. Thus would Job do at all times.” Not to deny that my fellow humans may do evil, nor that they may do good, and to intercede for them based on this possibility, but to insist on knowing in them through their appearances not the knowledge of good and evil but the knowledge of the image of God. I attribute this insight, and the inspiration for much of this post, to NJada.

The Lotus Sutra describes a monk named Never-Disparage, whose practice in meeting any person is to say, “I dare not belittle you, because you will all become buddhas.” It is this attitude which I desire most of all to cultivate; it is perhaps not surprising that Mahayana Buddhism, as the most splendidly developed universalist soteriology, has given me absurd amount of inspiration as a Christian universalist. I am doing my best, and I am also motivated by a force beyond my effort. By my effort, I bring myself to recite, “Holy art thou, O God, / Holy art thou, Almighty, / Holy art thou, Immortal / Crucified for us, have mercy upon us!” when I think some disparaging thought about someone; by effortless compulsion, I keep finding myself, quite embarrasingly at times, bowing to people deeply when I greet or depart from them, as one might to a king. I keep finding myself grinning, because I keep company with God and the numberless images of God. I shall try my hardest to love you; I shall try my hardest, when I perceive good and evil, to say, “And I made the air move in arrows / But I don’t know how to love you.” Here I stand. I can do no other.

I am writing on the eve of All Hallows—or really, in the middle of the night thereof. It is a day for the donning of disguises, and a day for the memory of those in whom the light of Tabor has shone openly. For me, there are two great feasts that pertain to hope specifically: the Transfiguration, in the life of Christ, and All Hallows, in the life of the new creation. Today I will hope and intercede for all of you and be heartened by the thought of your place in the Heavenly hosts; today I will also appreciate your guises and what you teach me skillfully through them. Still I am wandering in confusion, scattered in the imaginations of my heart, but I fix my eyes on that numinous blank for which I have no adequate concept, which I apprehend better by love than any judgements, and which is in you. And I will read: “For here there is no place / that does not see you: you must change your life.”