Beyond Mediation
[“You shall have no other gods before Me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth or in the water under the earth” (Ex 20:3-4).]
[“(They) exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. . . . they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen” (Rom 1:23, 25).]
O Lover,
In recent years an increasingly important issue has arisen in my journey within and towards You: the relation between depictions or representations of You, and You Yourself. The former, often called “mediations,” appears in many sensorial or ideational forms: e.g., metaphors, similes, gestures, devotions, nature (including the human body), human love, doctrines, aesthetic works. Mediations are by definition kataphátic (“with images”), vehicles via which our awareness of You is both channeled and heightened. The sole authentic télos of this vía mediatíva is You Yourself, O Lover.
Alongside the kataphátic, and complementary to it, is the apophátic (“without images”), an impulse within Christian mysticism which longs for You more directly and unmediatedly. This strand, which generally begins in the mediative, is increasingly drawn beyond such depictions. Not surprisingly, when the apophátic does resort to finite expression, it is often with self-immolating terms like silence, darkness, emptiness, fire, abyss, depth. While the kataphátic and apophátic are complementary and travel together, a lesson I required years to learn, the latter’s use of mediations is provisional at best, its invariable trajectory transcending all intermediaries.
The major vulnerability of the mediatory path is the equating of the finite depiction with You. Both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures see the supplanting of the Creator with some aspect of the creation as nothing less than idolatry. The finger pointing to the moon cannot be be confused with the moon itself; that finger is, finally, a mere indicator, a directing agent. “Christian nationalism,” an example of idolatry in our time, routinely hijacks religiosity and is thus judged by Jesus’ repeated critique of institutional piety.
In contrast, Eckhart in one of his sermons writes of “the soul beholding God nakedly,” elsewhere of You as “No-thing”; Juan de la Cruz has this in his The Spiritual Canticle (#6): ”Ah, who has the power to heal me? now wholly surrender Yourself! Do not send me any more messengers, they cannot tell me what I must hear.” In the apophátic impulse the mediation is never the destination. Indeed, this temptation to absolutize the vehicle besets all religious traditions including those of the “people of the book” and of the Indian subcontinent.
Our plot thickens when explored principally from the perspective of the Roman Catholic Church, for this ecclesial entity is infused with a bevy of mediatory Sacraments—the Eucharist as “source and summit”—buttressed by a myriad of sacramentals involving the sensorium, intellect, and imagination. Even more central is the understanding of the Christ as sacrament, as the enfleshment of You. However, this strongly kataphátic understanding of both the Christ and the Eucharist does not always take with sufficient seriousness Jesus’ repeated deference to You in the Synoptics (e.g., “No one is good but God alone” [Lk 18:19]), his fíat volúntas túa (“Do with me as You will” [Mt 26:39]), his refusal to “clutch” (a la Phil 2:6) this or that rather than You alone. Does, for example, the current fervor regarding the American bishops’ Eucharistic Revival “show us the Father” (Jn 14:8-9) and how we all should then live, or is it flirting with the absolutization of a 13th C mediation called “transubstantiation”? Is it fixation on the finger, a kind of “eucharistolatry,” or expressive of the longing for union with the moon?
O Lover, I am grateful to You far beyond words for the lavish Catholic kataphátic fare via which You have so richly nourished the second half of my journey. I have benefited profoundly from many of its pointers and arrows, depictions and mediations, aids and crutches all. But in the present crisis, when darkness is shamelessly posturing as an “angel of light” (II Cor 11:14), particularly in the precincts of religiosity so laced with counterfeits, I long above all else for You and Your M.O. in as direct, unconveyed, and unmediated a way as can be. I pine for You directly, O Lover; with Moshe I cry out “show me Your Glory [nakedly]” (Ex 3318). My being is a “yes” to whatever it is that You will.
