Not to Understand but to Adore

"...in the name of the Father,
and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit..." (Mt 28:19)

A few years ago I read a book by the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov.  I should say I tried to read it.  It defeated me in the end.  The first section went swimmingly – a summary of the theological and Christological controversies of the Patristic period.  This is familiar enough to me that I could follow along.  Then he turned to contemporary thought and his own synthesis, and I was completely and utterly lost.  Lost in confusion; lost also in wonder.  His point was that the theological controversies of the early Christian centuries succeeded in developing doctrinal statements that avoided schism between heresies to the right and the left, and yet they did not explain the mystery.  To define God using human language and concepts is not to understand God.  Think about those key words: one God, three persons, consubstantial, homoousios in Greek.  These words are the solution to centuries of theological conflict: a miracle of compromise.  And yet they don’t explain anything.  How is God one in essence and yet three persons?  What does it mean to be a person?

We may easily think we know what it means to be a person, because we are one.  We may look at the concept of personhood from an anthropological or sociological point of view and apply this to God.  Theologians have told us that what is said of God is said by analogy, that is in some sense true but more inadequate than adequate.  Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite spent many words naming God by analogy, and then proceeded to deny every name he had given God by affirming its opposite.  Such is the mystery of God.  But personhood is different, not being merely and attribute of God.  Sergei Bulgakov says that, while we think that we know something about what a Divine Person may be, because we are persons, actually, it is God’s personhood that is primary.  God’s personhood, or tri-personhood to be more exact, is the font and archetype of what it means to be a person.  Personhood in God, according to revelation, is a relation of self-donating love, says Bulgakov.  We, on the other hand, are persons by analogy.  Created in the image and likeness of the three-personed God.  Chips off the old block so to speak.  Only by coming to know God can I begin to know what it is for me to be a person in relationship to other persons.  In other words, who we are as persons is wrapped up in the mystery of God.

The Eastern Church, both in its liturgy and its theology, seems to be utterly preoccupied with the Trinitarian revelation of God.  But this is not just an intellectual quest since they seem to have stayed closer to the contemplative roots of the Christian tradition.  They know well, as we Westerners sometimes forget, that the Holy Trinity is not to be understood, so much as to be adored.  There are many things in heaven and on earth that we do not understand.  This frustrates us sometimes, doesn’t it?  We want to know, to understand, to grasp and to conquer.  But life and reality deny us this.  We are reading the book of Job at Vigils these days.  This is one long attempt to understand the mystery of suffering and death.  And at the end, what Job gets is not understanding, but adoration – adoration of the inscrutable mystery of God’s providence, in which he allows his servants to suffer.  With the revelation that we have received in Christ, we can add to this God’s willingness to allow suffering to touch his own person, and so to conquer and transform it.  We still do not understand suffering and death.  But in Christ, we can adore their vanquishment.

Today’s great feast invites us into the inscrutable mystery of God: not to understand it so much as to inhabit it, to adore it, to cast ourselves down before it in wonder and self-abandonment.  I leave you with a poem of Mother Agnes which helps to pave the way into adoration.

O voiceless song
incredible harmony
impossible silent crescendo
that builds beyond and beyond
beyond all reach of my wonder
ever newly unfolding
unimaginable melody - -
You are the Song
the Father sings to the Son.
You are the Song
the Son sings to the Father.
You are the Holy Spirit.
I listen to your tumultuous silence
within