Alas, that Wisdom is so large - And Truth - so manifold!

My current enthusiasm for bringing theology and poetry into conversation, means I'm reading and re-reading poems I mistakenly thought I already understood. Here's one by Emily Dickinson - a poem that is theologically charged, and which recognises the tensions between learning and ignorance, and exposes our childish attempts to expound with great certainty the things we hardly begin to understand.

It is one of the great gifts poetry bestows that it challenges the mindset that always, everywhere and everything must explain and expound - the needed reminder that our intellectual grasp can never be sufficient to the richly textured tapestry and mystery of our all too human existence. And indeed, the word grasp is encoded throughout with the idea of possession and control - but it may be that the most important things remain beyond our grasping grasp. That's true of both theology and poetry, forms of human speech which imply more than they say, reveal much less than their whole, just as what is visible of Atlantic icebergs is superficial, above the surface, implying unseen mass and weight. 

Emily Dickinson - Poem 531
 

We learned the Whole of Love -

The Alphabet - the Words -

A Chapter - then the mighty Book -

Then - Revelation closed -

 

But in each Other's eyes

An Ignorance beheld -

Diviner than the Childhood's

And each to each, a Child -

 

Attempted to expound

What neither - understood -

Alas, that Wisdom is so large -

And Truth - so manifold!

The same general point is made with remarkable force by Hans Urs Von Balthasar in his meditation on the 'simplicity of sight' that is essential in all true seeing.

Here, finally it becomes clear why it is crucial to stress "simplicity of sight" (Mt 6.22; Lk11.34) so much when we encounter the form of Jesus. The Greek word for the simple people, haplous, means here both "lacking convolutions" and "healthy". For only the healthy / simple eye can see together the apparent contrasts in the figure of Jesus in their unity, only the little ones, the poor, the uneducated, are not seduced by an ever-increasing accumulation of nuggets of knowledge to consider individual traits only for themselves, thereby missing the figure because they are lost in pure analysis.
(Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Epilogue, page 96)