WORDS TO THE WHYS

The truth will make you odd. Flannery O’Connor

"The transcendent distance between God and man."

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An excerpt from an article by David Fagerberg, Ph.D.


(3) An apophatic emphasis. Do not begin any theological enterprise without confessing the transcendent distance between God and man. God is beyond knowing. Augustine’s Latin phrase would satisfy any Eastern theologian: si comprehendis, non est deus – if you comprehend it, it is not God. The creature cannot know the Creator, and yet the Creator has made himself knowable, describable, circumscribable. God has done so first through revelation in the cosmos (where tracks of the Logos are imprinted as the creature’s logoi), second through revelation in Scripture (which Ephrem the Syrian said is the “first incarnation” because God clothed himself in our metaphors), and third through revelation in person, whom the Holy Spirit continues to make present in the mystical body of the Church.

The golden chain connecting the apophatic Creator with his creation is the hierarchies. In the East, this word has none of the political baggage the modern world has come to associate with it. The inventor of the neologism, Dionysius, defines a hierarchy as “a sacred order, a state of understanding and an activity approximating as closely as possible to the divine … The goal of a hierarchy, then, is to enable beings to be as like as possible to God and to be at one with him.”* When people ask me if the Church is hierarchical, I reply, “I hope so! I hope it has the power to enable me to be as like as possible to God.” If the Church is just the Jesus Club getting together to kill a Sunday morning then – as Flannery O’Connor said about the Eucharist being nothing more than a symbol – to hell with it.

 * Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy, 3.2 (Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1987) 154.

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