A Grace of Sense - theological aesthetics

  An idea pointing towards a liberating understanding of the Scripture is derived from Gregory the Great’s Homilies on Ezekiel: "If someone - looking for virtue - should understand some words of God in a sense contrary to that intended by the one who pronounced them, one speaks words of God, as long as one seeks to build up love (even with another interpretation). For throughout Holy Scripture God speaks to us with one purpose only, to draw us to love of himself and our neighbor."( Hom. in Ez. 1.10.14 ) Love as the hermeneutical principle sounds like a modern, almost liberal point of view. However, Gregory is not saying that it does not matter how one understands the Scripture, as long as one maintains good relationships with other people, or something like that. There is more than that in the love of God and neighbor. For Gregory, reading the Bible is a passionate endeavor. One needs to struggle with the Holy Writ, read it attentively, and pray for deeper understanding. Greg...

  In a world where everything is public and nothing is hidden, our life becomes void of mystery and eventually meaningless. We lose the sense of depth within our hearts (how pathetic these words sound - and how old-fashioned indeed!) What I tend to say is better expressed by Thomas Merton:  "Actually, our whole life is a mystery of which very little comes to our conscious understanding. But when we accept only what we can conceptually rationalize, our life is actually reduced to the most pitiful limitations, though we may think quite otherwise. We have been brought up with the absurd prejudice that only what we can reduce to a rational and conscious formula is really understood and experienced in our life. When we can say what a thing is, or what we are doing, we think we fully grasp and experience it. In point of fact this verbalization - very often it is nothing more than verbalization - tends to cut us off from genuine experience and to obscure our understanding instead of ...

In the general opinion, faith and imagination have nothing in common, unless viewed with suspicion, when faith is understood as something entirely imaginary. Instead, a devout Christian never considers the object of faith as a thing imagined. And how could one do that? The object of our faith is the very core of existence, the most true of all.  Perhaps the most celebrated definition of faith in the Bible is "the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Heb 11,1; RSV) Thus, faith inevitably contains the dimension of imagination. This verse is particularly illuminating for our purpose.  The Greek word hypostasis may be rendered "that which has actual existence." ( I am not discussing the Trinitarian facets of the word here). Therefore, faith is hardly mere fantasy, but an act of imagination that penetrates into the actual, ultimate reality. Religious institutions tend to be conservative, to say the least, or, rather, narrow-minded. It is a ...