Paying Attention To The Sky

Archbishop Kallistos Ware

A reader of this blog took a quote from one of my favorite essays here and asked someone else on a forum “Can this be true?” What does our orthodox faith have to say about this?

The quote in question was: “Wittgenstein taught us that language belongs to groups, not to isolated minds. Language reflects communal practices. Much of the reality that terms mark out is specific to the communities that use the terms. As any learner of a foreign language knows, reading a newspaper in that language requires learning about social and political realities specific to another culture. The abstract question “Does God exist?” is the question of an isolated mind. It tears God out of the context of communities who pray, celebrate, and serve, and it reduces the term to a cipher.”

And the reader’s query  (who listed himself as Roman Catholic, oddly enough) was: “What would you make of this article in light of Orthodoxy? Is it totally off the mark?” I confess I was sort of holding my breath because, as many of you know, the things I read and pass on in the form of reading selections and such are nothing more than the vagaries of following my faith. I’m no expert on the topic of anything Catholic but simply follow my gut. The quote comes from Alan Mittleman’s essay Asking the Wrong Question. Mittleman is of course Jewish and the essay is based on a thought from the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

So you can imagine I had breath held, imagining some crushing response (“No, this is totally misguided. Take care when reading those well intentioned but clueless Internet bloggers. Catholic in their minds only…”).

What came back was an Orthodox source that said (beautifully) pretty much the same thing. I offer it here as part of that pebble-thrown-into-a-pond phenomena. His Excellency, the Most Reverend Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (b. 1934, also known by his lay name, Timothy Ware) is a titular bishop of the Church of Constantinople in Great Britain. From 1966-2001, he was Spalding Lecturer of Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford University, and has authored numerous books and articles pertaining to the Orthodox Christianity. It was he whom the responder quoted.

Quote from The Orthodox Way By Kallistos Ware
Because faith is not logical certainty but a personal relationship and because this personal relationship is as yet very incomplete in each of us and needs continually to develop further, it is by no means impossible for faith to coexist with doubt. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Perhaps there are some who by God’s grace retain throughout their life the faith of a little child, enabling them to accept without question all that they have been taught. For most of those living in the West today, however, such an attitude is simply not possible. We have to make our own the cry, “Lord, I believe: help my unbelief.”(Mark 9:24). For very many of us this will remain our constant prayer right up to the very gates of death.

It may mean the opposite – that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it. Here an Orthodox Christian may readily make his own the words of Bishop J.A.T. Robinson: “The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.” As Thomas Merton rightly says, “Faith is a principle of questioning, a struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace.”

Faith then signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real. It is to know God not as theory or an abstract principle, but as a person. To know a person is essentially to love him or her; there can be no true awareness of another person without mutual love. We do not have any genuine knowledge of those whom we hate.

Here then are the two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal and he is love. And these are basically two ways of saying the same thing. Our way of entry into the mystery of God is through personal love. As The Cloud Of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”