Paying Attention To The Sky

Michael Novak has written: “Albert Camus was insistent that we begin within nihilism. Only by finding our way out from nihilism could any new civilization rest on solid ground. He meant finding our way out by intellect, the kind of intellect that can engage with the Absurd.” Camus also famously said that if humans found that the universe could love they would be reconciled.

It illustrates an unusual cause of sorts for his atheism, a proof that it’s not the traditional argument of the existence or non-existence of God that gives rise to atheism but the knowledge that God is love that truly matters. From atheism emanates the most frequent charge against God and his existence, the use of the suffering of children to discredit the fundamental attribute of the goodness of God. Once you have discredited His goodness, you are basically done with Him. Home free as it were, without the home. It is a superficial theodicy.

Atheists refer to Catholicism as “Theism.” This strategy is to set up a simplistic conception of God (the old white haired guy in the sky) or to lump all “Theisms” together and then to discredit some Old Testament caricature, an angry or vindictive God.

It’s easy enough to do, but it is dishonest. It is the God of the New Testament, The God of Thomas Aquinas, the Trinitarian God of Love who is a lot harder to get rid of.

While one can come to know that God is present, our minds are unable to form an adequate conception of Him, or to imagine Him with any of our five senses. His mode of drawing us into His presence is necessarily by way of absence, silence, nothingness. There is an image in the poetry of Saint John of the Cross: “The place where he…was awaiting me — A place where none appeared.”

It must necessarily be so. The true God is beyond any human concepts, senses, imagination, memory. On those frequencies, He is not reachable. Mother Teresa of Calcutta acknowledged her inability to reach God on human wavelengths in a 1979 letter to one of her spiritual directors, the Reverend Michael Van Der Peet:  ”Jesus has a very special love for you. [But] as for me — the silence and the emptiness is so great — that I look and do not see — listen and do not hear”

Michael Novak writes: “If a Christian has not yet known this darkness and aridity, it is a sign that the Lord is still treating him like a child at the breast, too unformed for the adult darkness in which alone the true God is found. Any who think they can make idols, or images, or pictures, or concepts of God remain underdeveloped in their faith. Darkness is not a sign of unbelief, or even of doubt, but a sign of the true relation between the Creator and the creature. God is not on our frequency; and when we get beyond our usual range, which in prayer we must, we reach only darkness. This is painful. In a way, it does make one doubt; in another way, experience shows us that when one is no longer a child, one leaves childish ways behind.

Our intellects, our will — these can reach out to God, like arrows of inquiry shot up into the infinite night. These are not shot in vain. They mark out a direction. Waiting in silence, in abandonment, even in the dry sands of the desert, one comes to know His presence. Not believe in it. Know it.”

In a 1959 interview with the BBC, C. G. Jung once made the same point. Asked whether he believed in God, Jung replied, “I don’t believe — I know.”

Novak: “This is a dark knowledge. One cannot expect anyone else to know it, unless they have also walked the rocky and darkling path — or somehow by God’s grace been brought to it by a different journey, along a different route.”

Novak continues: “This is not a “will” characterized by effort, unrelenting desire, unshakable determination. I mean something almost the opposite: the quiet of abandonment, and trust. This is another mode of will, quite different from the striving will. It is. the willingness to forgo any other reinforcement except the blind and dark love we direct toward that infinite Light, on which we cannot set our eyes.

Nor do I mean a turning away from intellect or rationality On the contrary, I mean taking these with utter seriousness “all the way down” to the very roots of the universe. I mean trusting our own rationality our own intellect. I mean serene confidence in infinite Light, even when our senses go quite dark. Trust the light, the evidence-demanding eros of inquiry, within us. I mean the suffering love in which that Light issues forth among us. Not to, remove us from suffering. But to transfigure us by means of it.”