The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his own vanity; God-like, he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words; whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis, completely expressible in words. To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how Truth is mangled and torn.
Anne Morrow Lindbergh, The Wave of the Future, Harcourt brace and Co, 1940, p. 6
Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it know is can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about himself on his own terms...By faith one not only attains to truth in a way that intelligence and reason alone cannot do, but one assents to God Himself. One receives God. One says "yes" not merely to a statement about God, but to the Invisible, Infinite God Himself.
Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, Burns and Oates, 1962, p. 98
Perhaps something of what Lindbergh and Merton were saying is captured in Paul's apophatic exclamation - "Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift" - generosity beyond articulation, the Word made flesh because the Word overflows the expressive capacity of words. When all our words are spoken, and all our thoughts are thought, the residue of meaning is immeasurable, infinite, eternal - but has become personal, "all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell in Him....and the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us, full of grace and truth. And we have beheld his glory.... Gloria in Excelsis Deo!
Comments