"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.
Imagine someone who would pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force. Imagine him declaring, "The only permissible passages are those initiated by me and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!" "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry." "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"
The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.
Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?
Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"
The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.
Trust or verify? The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.
I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things. Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe. All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal. Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.
But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object. That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.
The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct. So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.
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