On the One Hand, On the Other Hand
One of the literary tricks of the early biblical authors was the ability to use words deliberately with double entendre. One primary example of this process is the Tetragrammaton, viz., the four letter word, YHWH, the self naming of God, in response to Moses’ question in the Burning Bush episode in Ex 3.14. Depending on the vowels that you use and where you insert them, then the meaning of the four consonant word changes.
St Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican contemporary, Meister Eckhardt both fell for the ruse. Each focused on one translation and in the process missed the joke at first, at least.
We know that wherever the Sacred Name YHWH means it is etymologically a derivative of the Hebrew verb to be, to exist, to become, viz., HYH, “hayah”. Aquinas translated YHWH as I am who am. As Aquinas understood it, YHWH was Self-identifying as the ground of being, the source of that exists. As a result, Aquinas refers to God in his famous and still useful exercise, “Proofs that it is logical to believe in God” as the Necessary Being, the First Cause, the reason for order in the universe, the unmoved mover.
Aquinas spoke of the analogia entis, which meant that we could only talk of “existence or being, both in creatures, specifically the human person, and existence of God using language of analogy or metaphor. God is like.....God is like a..
Toward the end of his life, Aquinas had a profound mystical experience. (Don't be put off by the language.) A mystical experience is when you know that you have the Presence of God in your life. The Christian Celts called "thin time", the rare, but powerful moments when you know that you have experienced the Divine Presence. Years ago, sociologist-theologian-novelist Father Andrew Greeley of Chicago said, "Everyone (therefore, you personally) has at least five or six powerful religious experience in the course of one’s life and that experience is enough to fuel your entire life in God.” After the experience that Aquinas had, he told his scribe, Brother Reginald, to burn everything that he ever wrote, saying, “All is straw, after you experience the Divine Presence.”
Meister Eckhardt, a bit younger Dominican monk like Aquinas, took the Divine Self-identification in Exodus to mean something totally different. In Eckhardt’s understanding of the Sacred Name, the Meister would have translated YHWH using different vowels with the four consonants to mean, I am who I am (and mind your own business). We can never know God completely. To know someone is to have some control over the person. How can our limited and finite brains know the Infinite God? Rather, God is to be experienced in solitude and silence and follow up service to others. Eckhardt said that the way to experience God is in the silence, where no words or thoughts are spoken. He quotes a line from one of the psalms, Be still and know that I am God now. Your use of the G-word says more about you, then it does about God. Eckhardt’s great theme was that of emptying into God, making room for God by excavating the construct known as our ego or false self. He spoke of the traditional p-idols identified as such by Karl Rahner and others as power, prestige and possessions, not as the real cause of idolatry. Rather, the big idol is the false self, the person we want to be, as opposed to the True Self, the person that God wants us to be. The Meister bases his teaching on the Philippians hymn that we say every Saturday evening in Vespers and on Palm Sunday. “Though his nature was divine, he stripped himself of glory, emptying Himself out and accepting even death on a cross.”
Eckhardt said that God is to be experienced, not to be defined. He said that religion in the West had unfortunately developed into mercantile spirituality, “in which I give something or do something and that puts God under an obligation as a business partner to respond.” Such a view of God Who can be manipulated deteriorates into a myopic, solipsistic, monadic, self-centered worldview. He suggests that we see the silent, transcendent God manifested trans-personally in our dealings with others, with our planet and with our cosmos. He reminds his hearers that word cosmos is etymologically connected to the word “cosmetic”, which means something fashioned, either on one’s face or in one’s universe. Someone does the fashioning, get it?
Rather than seeing his translation as something esoteric, he actually pushes for a democratic, everyday, experience of the divine presence. As St. Paul said in the Acts of the Apostles, “In God, we live and move and have our being.” God is with us 24-7 and we need to slow down in solitude and silence to let God take over and once in a while, allow us to experience that Divine Presence. His commentators stress that while Meister Eckhardt might be difficult to follow, his final word is what we might call everyday mysticism (how you process the Divine Presence in your life each day). Failure to do so leads to an alienation, disorientation and amnesia on the part of both individuals and social groups. (Case in point, look around us!)
Aquinas and Eckhardt both fell for the trap set by the biblical writer. Is God the God of being and/or is God the incomprehensible, the ineffable One? The answer seems to be yes. As we hear the Sacred Name today in our first reading, recall that YHWH appears 6000x times in the Bible. Still, we don't know what the name means. Catholics see mystery as that which is both infinitely knowable and unknowable as the same time. We can study the Mystery or sit still and be present to Mystery or both if we want! Isn't it wonderful? 030313AD jfq
