“... men are in darkness and estranged from God, that He has hidden Himself from their knowledge, that this is in fact the name which He gives Himself in the Scriptures, Deus absconditus; and finally, if it endeavours equally to establish these two things: that God has set up in the Church visible signs to make Himself known to those who should seek Him sincerely, and that He has nevertheless so disguised them that He will only be perceived by those who seek Him with all their heart...”

- Blaise Pascal Of the Necessity of the Wager 3:194



After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

- G.K. Chesterton, The Convert (1922)

What offers to give me meaning and security also threatens to lay unacceptable claim upon me ... when I have grasped that my being as agent depends on my receiving first, my being there, spoken to, acted on, I can still not be assured of my liberty to act or give because of the risk that I will be conscripted into the project of another. The fundamental need remains, to a greater or lesser degree, open, unmet ... only two options remain: the constantly fearful and cautious negotiation of my identity... or an act of trust in my right or capacity to act and give.

The doctrine of creation in its classical form is the religious ground for such an act of trust ... My existence in the world, including my need to imagine this as personal, active and giving, is ‘of God’; my search for an identity is something rooted in God’s freedom, which grounds the sheer thereness of the shared world I stand in. And to see that is already to have the need answered: my needful searching is part of what God gratuitously brings to be ... With God alone, I am dealing with what does not need to construct or negotiate an identity, what is free to be itself without the process of struggle ... God does not and cannot lay claim upon me so as to ‘become’ God; what I am cannot be made functional for God’s being; I can never be defined by the job of meeting God’s needs ... We do what we ought to do as creatures not when we attempt to resign from nature by treating ‘God’ as a successful rival for our attention or devotion over against the things and persons of the world, but by our being-in-the-world ... we learn being-in-the-world precisely by learning that there is in the world no absolute and independent ‘giver’, no final source of naming, of identity, not I nor any other individual, nor any corporate identity. We become able to see all attempts in the world at providing definitions for other persons and groups as attempts to escape the world; only one ‘power’ is entirely gift, entirely directed away from its needs (for it has none), and all other powers need to be unmasked or demythologized. The creator’s power-as-resource cannot be invoked to legitimize earthly power ... [because] self-love and self-gift are one ... [that is,] self-love presupposes self-giving. I can’t love myself without being a loved object, which means being, in some measure, given into another’s hands, another’s life. To say that God is without need is to say that God’s identity does not wait upon being an object for what is not God ... [Since] God is already one whose being is a ‘being-for’ ... we are led to think of God’s own self as eternal identity in otherness ... [because] Love in God does not result but originates ...

[Following Jacques Pohier’s portrayal of] Aquinas’ startling denial that we ought to love things or persons as a means of loving God or as leading us to God: we should [instead] love them for their ‘autonomy and consistency’, for what the free love of God has made them. ‘God is the reason for loving, he is not the sole object of love’: it is God who makes it possible to love things and persons for what they are ... God establishes the worth, the legitimacy, the right to be there, of what is in the world, and in that sense gives meaning; but precisely what God does not do is to intrude into the integrity of this or that aspect of being in the world as a justification or explanation for specific events. If the explanation of every event, every determination of being, every phenomenon or decision were simply and directly God, then the life of creation would not be genuinely other than God ... If we need God simply in order to understand and accept our very reality, then our relation to God in particular circumstances will not be one of need in the ordinary sense, a desperate effort to make God supply this or that desired gratification, physical, intellectual, or spiritual. We should instead be capable of receiving God as pure gift, unexpected good news—as the absolutely uncontainable, the irreducibly different; as God ... Being creatures is learning humility, not as submission to an alien will, but as the acceptance of limit and death; for that acceptance, with all that it means in terms of our moral imagination and action, we are equipped by learning through the grace of Christ and the concrete fellowship of the Spirit, that God is the desire by which all live, the creator.

- Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Blackwell 2000) pp. 72-78.

You who would read this book that I have writ
If you will please your heed to it lend,
Consider it well what you may say of it,
For it is very hard to understand
But let Humility lead you by the hand,
She, keeper of the key to Learning’s treasure-chest,
She, the first virtue, mother to all the rest.

Men of theology and Scholars such as they
Will never understand this writing properly.
True comprehension of it only may
Those have who progress in humility;
You must let Love and Faith together be
Your guides to climb where Reason cannot come,
They who this house as mistresses do own ...

So you too must abase your learning now,
Built only upon Reason, and your true
And perfect trust completely you must show
In the rich gifts which Love will make to you,
And Faith will cause to shine in brightest hue.
So understanding of this book they’ll give
Which makes the Soul the life of Love to live.

Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (University of Notre Dame Press, 1999) 9.

For a brief article on the importance of Porete, see Tina Beattie’s article last year in the Guardian

Poetry here pushes against the ultimate ambiguities of our experience of time, revealing that what is truly desperate about life in time is not the constant erosion of the biological basis of our existence, the inevitability of our powers failing us and, in the end, our being annihilated, but that it destroys hope and faith in love. Yet, if we are to believe in love, do we need to deny, transcend, or otherwise roll back the surge of time? Do we not rather need to be in time and to live in time otherwise than in the manner of violence and betrayal? The challenge is not to escape time, to transcend time, or to find a kind of centre to time, but to live out a different kind of time, a time turned towards justice, forgiveness, and peace rather than to an endless vanishing into nothingness.

George Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry (OUP 2011), 138-9. [US:UK]

"But Mary kept all these things and pondered them in her heart" (Lk 2:19).

...

2. But Mary's faith did not end in a mere acquiescence in Divine providences and revelations: as the text informs us, she "pondered" them. When the shepherds came, and told of the vision of Angels which they had seen at the time of the Nativity, and how one of them announced that the Infant in her arms was "the Saviour, which is Christ the Lord", while others did but wonder, "Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart." Again, when her Son Saviour had come to the age of twelve years, and had left her for awhile for His Father's service, and had been found, to her surprise, in the Temple, amid the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions, and had, on her addressing Him, vouchsafed to justify His conduct, we are told, "His mother kept all these sayings in her heart." And accordingly, at the marriage-feast in Cana, her faith anticipated His first miracle, and she said to the servants, "Whatsoever He said unto you do it."

3. Thus St. Mary is our pattern of Faith, both in the reception and in the study of Divine Truth. She does not think it enough to accept, she dwells upon it; not enough to possess, she uses it; not enough to assent, she develops it; not enough to submit the Reason, she reasons upon it; not indeed reasoning first, and believing afterwards, with Zacharias, yet first believing without reasoning, next from love and reverence, reasoning after believing. And thus she symbolizes to us, not only the faith of the unlearned, but of the doctors of the Church also, who have to investigate, and weigh, and define, as well as to profess the Gospel; to draw the line between truth and heresy; to anticipate or remedy the various aberrations of wrong reason; to combat pride and recklessness with their own arms; and thus to triumph over the sophist and the innovator.

...

- John Henry Newman, Sermon XV The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine (1813)