Excarnation or Incarnation?
O Lover,
Of the myriad of issues punctuating the faith journey of this trekker, one repeatedly presents itself as primary; the relationship of You, Source and Fount, with the cosmic effluence of which I am a part. In his 2007 A Secular Age Charles Taylor contrasts two responses to this question: excarnátio, You and the creation separated; and incarnátio, You and the creation united. Across the first half of my life these two tendencies were often referred to as transcendence (“otherness”) and immanence (“infusedness”), respectively. All in the Jesus tradition finding ourselves somewhere on the transcendence/immanence spectrum, the crucial issue has had to do with what that balance is. Ever amid Your brooding Presence—and already I tip my hand—I offer this prayer as the latest, albeit not last, in a series of explorations of this tension.
The transcendent impulse in the tradition of Jesus presents itself as the spearpoint of orthodoxy. You, O Lover, are depicted as “wholly other,” characterizable by nothing created. With the Augustinian firewall between Creator and creation fiercely maintained, adherents of this separation tend to place You in one or the other role of the subject/object structure. Faith characterized by dominant transcendence leans theological, creedal and cognitive with the theme of Incarnátio pertaining to one person: Jesus. It often depicts You as judging, punitive, and cold. Critics find this approach vulnerable to dualism, dogmatism, deism, distantness bleeding into irrelevancy.
The immanent impulse in the tradition of Jesus is seen by many as concentrated in its mystical edge, the “minority report.” A major flowering of this thrust emerged in the13th and 14th century Beguines and Rhinelanders, particularly Meister Eckhart (c.1260-1328). The “firewall” here being permeable, there is for Eckhart but a singular Grunt (“Ground” or “Depth”) of both You and the human center with the latter referred to as “an uncreated something,” a position sometimes called “panentheistic.” The immanent also blossomed in the present interface with Vedantic Hinduism with its nondualism emphasis upon Advaíta (“neither two nor one”). Many of the immanent impulse view You as “Ground of Being” or “Being Itself” rather than a being, however supreme. The Incarnátio of the Christ is often embraced as Harbinger and Exemplar of all humans, indeed, of the entire cosmos. Faith here tends to be more experiential and affective than cognitive, spiritual than notional, intimate than distant, loving rather than juridical. Critics view the immanent impulse as being on a slippery slope vulnerable to pantheism, depersonalizing of You, and cosmolatry.
So then, again, what is Your relationship with all of us creatures, O Lover? Are You primarily distant and other (excarnátus), or effusively enveloping us (incarnátus)? Does the Christ’s oneness with You (a la Jn 10:30) imply our dissimilitude and remove from You, or is it a window into Your permeating of us humans and nonhumans alike, into You being our very Depth? In short, is the biggest possible picture primarily excarnational or incarnational as these terms are here used?
My becoming persuaded of the latter, Incarnátio as cosmic, is arguably the most important spiritual shift in my eight decades. Long have I desired You, O Lover: to be embraced, loved, and drawn into the Perichorésis (“amorous Self-outpouring of Your unenumerability”); to have my cobbled and bastioned self transformed into Your Self; to live within the throbbing reciprocity of Your communal life rather than thinking about You from afar. I yearn for a fuller awareness of Your ubiquitous enfleshment, for what 13th C Angela of Foligno termed a world “pregnant” with You. What I envy most of the mystics is the ubiquitous strand of fíat volúntas Túa (“do with me as You will”), of surrender of all else in favor of Your encompassing “all in All” (I Cor 15:28).
I conclude this prayer with my edit of another 13th C text, one set by numerous composers including John Rutter: “[You, O Lover, infuse] my head and my understanding, my eyes and my looking, my mouth and my speaking, my heart and my thinking, my end and my departing.”
