Anca Tomoioagă

University of Oradea, Romania

astoian2003@yahoo.com

 

 

Reason and Miracle in Şt. Aug. Doinaş’s “Psalms”

 

 

Abstract: Throughout the centuries, the search for God has been performed in two different gnoseological registers: the former has included concepts and logics; the latter has resorted to miracle, faith and revelation. There were several attempts, both in theology and philosophy, to find a complementarity between the two. The present study investigates the way in which the Romanian poet Şt. Aug. Doinaş succeeds in finding this complementarity, in a volume of religious poetry, namely “Psalms,” published in 1997. In his poems, the poet seeks God in every element of the phenomenal world and in the epiphanies the sacred books directly reveal to him.

Keywords: Romanian Literature; Şt. Aug. Doinaş; Natural Theology; Reason; Revelation.

 

 

7th century Eastern mystic, Saint Isaac of Syria wrote that man has been endowed with two spiritual eyes, one able to perceive the natural mysteries and the other able to grasp the divine secrets. The primordial wisdom of this mode of understanding the human being reconciles two types of knowledge considered antagonistic for a long time in human history. The mistrust in the complementarity between reason and sacred revelation has led to harsh polemics among philosophers and among theologians. It is to these polemics that we owe such antinomies like the one between pietism and scholasticism. Certainly, the Enlightenment, rooted into Thomas Aquinas’s scholasticism, intensified the schism between the two gnoseological registers of knowledge. Yet excluding the temptation of atheism, rationalism became more and more seductive in the West. The philosophers of the Enlightenment did not deny God’s existence but the mysterious dogma about God. In 1654, the French physician and theologian Blaise Pascal discovers through a mystic experience not the philosophers’ God but one of his revelations, a God that could not be known by means of the intellect. He was contradicted by Descartes, Voltaire, Newton and others, this creating the proper cultural background for the appearance of atheism. Marx, Darwin, Nietzsche, Freud tried to replace God:” if God was not already dead, then it was the rational beings’ duty to kill Him.”[1] In the 20^th century, atheism was already a state of mind. Modern theology (Brunner, Rahner, Buber, Barth, Tillich, Teilhard de Chardin, Hans von Balthasar) looks for God in nature or in science, as well as in arts, in the relationship with the Other or even in His own transcendent absence. Nevertheless, the people of the 21st century continue to search for the compatibility between reason and faith.

Still, there has always been a privileged space where the human being could encounter a personal God: poetry. The sphere of poetry has always included the hesitations, the doubts, the revolt, the ecstasy, the tensions, the questions of the relation with the sacred, a relation established on and beyond reason. For the present paperwork, I have chosen Şt. Aug. Doinaş’s volume of poems, “Psalmi” (Psalms), published relatively late, in 1997, focusing on how reason and revelation mingle in the psalmist’s faith. These poems express not only a way of believing in God but also the equilibrium between reason and miracle in the perception of God.

 

Schleiermacher in „Dialogue with myself”

 

Through his romantic theology, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) restored the balance between reason and faith. K. Armstrong explains the German theologian’s way of thinking as follows: “When we reach the limit of reason, our sensitiveness will accomplish the voyage towards the Absolute. When he talked about sensitiveness, Schleiermacher did not refer to an unlimited sentimentalism which could have led men and women to the infinite. The sensitiveness was not opposed to human reason; it represented an imaginary leap which takes us beyond the particular, for the understanding of the whole.”[2] Almost everything could be explained, the philosopher asserts, by means of religious experience that anticipates the configuration of theological theory. Therefore, the positive theology of the philosopher is the common territory on which natural theology and supernatural theology conjoin. Not antinomy but complementarity should be the right word to be used with regard to the relation religious emotion – reason. The similarities between Schleiermacher’s and the Romanian essayist’s ideas are easily noticeable.

One year before publishing the volume “Psalms”, St. Aug. Doinaş also published a book of essays which includes the essay „Dialogue with myself”, an imaginary dialogue between the empirical ego and the poetic ego. The topics are diverse but they include religion, a theme approached by the empirical ego:

“By the way, what about religion?”

“You are known as a believer.”/.

“And I perceive you as a rationalist. In this matter, namely God, I always felt you were different from me: as if you were waiting for me from behind, always lying in wait,/lurking while I was praying in the church, at home. Why?”

“Because your faith begins where my reason ends. You are the compensation of my speculative limits. Each time I reach the edge of this precipice – of the ultimate meaning – I rush into your arms. We complete each other.”[3]

The fragment clearly defines the essayist’s position regarding the relation reason-belief. In the Romanian poet’s vision there is a clear dissociation between the poetic ego, the writer who seeks deep meanings by reading theology, philosophy, analysing, meditating, and the biographic ego who lives effectively the religious emotion. The poet is rational and Apollonian, the biographic ego kneels, prays, each compensating the other. When the rational ego can no more explain it, it is saved by the faith of the empiric ego.

The desire for access to God through mind is voracious and immediately turns into an irreversible decay in time:” My thinking, like a ravenous hawk, / fell from the high sky as a bullet / to grip everything – with claws, with beak / everything it has been said and everything that will be written on parchments, marble and graves / she stores and devours.”[4] (Psalm LXXXXIII) The same psalm becomes a prayer in which the poet renounces the burden of theological concepts and dogmas so that he could believe in God with the innocence of a child: “But help me! So that I could throw/ this burden, and be a child…” The search for God through theology and philosophy is mirrored by Doinaş’s essays that recall names such as: Simone Weil, Hans von Balthazar, Dumitru Staniloae, Ludwig Wittgenstein, suggesting a concern under the sign of reason: “Whatever has been said about You throughout the centuries/ Lord, for me, it’s not enough.” (Psalm XXVIII).[5]

In the sequel to the cited dialogue, the empirical ego defines itself as “the divine hearing” of the poetic ego, an assertion only partially consented by the poetic ego. Doinaş makes clear that as the rational ego can not totally grasp the divine essence in the world, it conceives Him as being absent in the world order. Yet, the believer can go further and is able to identify God in transcendence. The transcendent presence, implicitly God’s absence in the world, is not new for 20^th century theology. God cannot be in the world: “Oh, God! / You frighten me/ with Your great presence, that is absence/ like a sun in eclipse.”[6] (Psalm XXIII) A present/absent God is suggested – a deduction to which both types of knowledge corroborated: “because the true human being loves God with his reason as well.”[7] Therefore, faith necessarily involves concepts and reason too.

 

Doinaş’s Poetry

 

As long as in Doinaş’s essay, the biographic ego and the poet met in a dialogue, each of them assuming a specific territory of the ego, they could also meet in the special space of poetry, in the manifest osmosis materialised in the hypostasis of the psalmist. This image of the poet, the psalmist, brings together both the biographical believer and the rationalist poet, a synthesis that creates antinomies and harmonies. By virtue of this tense cohabitation, the psalmist permanently lives with the fear of being “lukewarm”. In an interview with Emil Şimăndan, the poet states the theme line of his psalms. As a matter of fact, somehow, this volume of poems has a different poetic status, because it implies a special level of sincerity. For Doinaş, religious poetry intends to authentically point out what the person Şt. Aug. Doinaş feels, therefore being transformed in a direct expression of the self: “This later volume of verses rediscovers the trust in words, the direct emotion, the direct confession of my first poems of youth, not of the ballads, but of the other ones.”[8] Hence, the psalm becomes the right pretext for the empirical ego and the poetic ego to be simultaneously expressed.

Poem and prayer at one and the same time, the psalm turns into an intermediary/interface between the ego and the sacred. By definition, poetry is considered such a way of access. Horia Bădescu in his book “Memoria Fiinţei: poezia şi sacrul” (La mémoire de l`être. La poésie et le sacré”) identifies two modes of getting closer to the sacred meaning of the world, mysticism and poetry, asserting that the sacred is immanent to poetry under the form of a “mystical gene preserved in the lyrical code”[9] Both poetry and mysticism establish a relation with the sacred, a direct one, in the case of mysticism, and respectively, one mediated by the reality of the world in which poetry finds the sacred as virtuality. The theorist intends to specify that the sacred emerging from poetry is unclassifiable; it is “out of time and space, unhistorical and anominal”[10] and beyond religion. Certainly, this is a very similar definition to what the German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Otto defines as the numinous. According to Rudolf Otto, the sacred includes both irrational and rational elements[11]. Without the latter ones, the sacred could not be considered Christian. This assertion makes clear the role of the poem as a psalm. While poetry identifies in the deep layers of the world the indefinable category of the numinous, the psalm as a form of poetry in most situations refers to the Christian sacred, which surely includes the numinous. In other words, if the poetry reveals the sacred as numinous, the psalm of the faithful opens to a Christian living God. Poetry grasps the sacred in the world, the psalm does more than that, reveals the sacred from the psalmist’s heart.

Some of Doinaş’s psalms translate the finality of the psalmist’s creative effort. Writing, implicitly creating, reiterates, even under the form of an “ape-like imitation”, as the poet names it, the Creator’s initial gesture. The poetic word is nothing but the imitation of the Logos, an imitation through which the poet hopes to rediscover God. This reminds of the early ages pagan actors who used to imitate the Christians, spontaneously converting on the scene, while playing this role. The psalmist waits for such an emotional revelation in his imitative letter: “Divine You, you won’t be close to me/ as long as, while reading my writing, I don’t discover you as my letter”[12] (Psalm XXX). Consequently, poetry becomes the proper territory for revelation. Aware of the limits of the word that could not but intuit and suggest the Holy, the poet won’t search for God only in words but also in each natural element, in the beauty of the world, in the relation with the other, in everything the human reason can perceive (the prerogative of natural theology) Nevertheless, there are some sacred dimensions, the essential mystery of God that cannot be found. In this aspect, the psalmist prays to be him, himself, found by God. The revelation of the sacred mystery does not take place indirectly, through the God’s creation, but directly. God reveals to the individual through the filter of his faith (the prerogative of supernatural theologies). The Greek theologian Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) drew a clear distinction between knowing God through His energies in His creation (energies being compared with the sun beams) and knowing God in His essence. The Church father’s thinking made two different ways of knowing God (oftenly seen later as mutually exclusive) to be complementary. The poet of the psalms gets to know God in both ways, in His creation, in the phenomenal world stylistically envisioned in his poetry (as a means of revealing the sacred in the world) and in the immediate revelation of God through the feeling of the faithful ego.

 

The Philosophers’ God and Abraham’s, Isaac’s and Jacob’s God

 

The expression above belongs to Blaise Pascal who observed the distinction made in the modern era between rationally understanding and revelatory understanding of God. Both somehow became unilateral. Karl Barth, a Swiss protestant theologian of 20^th century and the leader of the opponents to natural theology asserted that God is totally transcendent, impossible to be identified in any natural element, the total Other. Karl Barth’s radicalism is sometimes mirrored in Doinaş’s psalms, specifically in the psalms of the revolt where the psalmist reproaches God of being aloof: “No. Today, I am here. And You – faraway.”[13] (LXIX) Nevertheless, Deus otiosus is a rare poetic idea in these psalms. Still, the term wholly Other, an appellative specifically used also by Rudolf Otto for the numinous, should be kept in mind. What is important when talking about Doinaş’s psalms is not God’s inaccessibility but His incomprehensibility, an idea John Chrysostom talked about too. The Church Father anticipated through akatalepton what fifteen centuries later Rudolf Otto named numinous: “what is strange in God”[14] In other words, the numinous is the irrational, the indefinable, and a part of the Christian God. That’s why, God cannot define Himself but through his “forever void name”[15] (Psalm XXXII). Psalmist’s appellatives for God are multiple, proving the impossibility of defining totally the Infinite through something finite: “Jealous”, “Unmerciful”, “the Living among the living”, “the Unnamed”, “The Divine”, “The Other”, “Master”. Simone Weil sees in God’s name the only mediator between man and God; it is the easiest way though it is unpronounceable in essence.[16] Nevertheless, the psalmist’s appellatives for God transform in such tracks of communication with the sacred, despite their emptiness. By His transcendence, the sacred is absent in the world, but present right through His absence. This incomprehensibility determined humans to call God Nothingness.

This is the reason why, in Doinaş’s poetry, God paradoxically becomes both Nothing and Everything at one and the same time: “You, in this frost of mine, what are You? Nothing of what exists.”[17] (Psalm XXXII). The indefinable God can be characterised by negative categories, through everything He is not. The reason finds in these negations a subterfuge.

If the intellect and its concepts remain helpless in front of this divine mystery, then how can anyone who looks for God reach Him? Mystics discovered a way: the revelation or the epiphany. In this case, God should not be looked for, but one need only wait for Him to descend into the believing human soul and instill in it the fascination and amazement before an omnipotent sovereign: mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It is a state of mind that can oscillate from the “pious repent” to “shocks and convulsions” and finally, to the “mute and humble shuddering”: “It can lead to strange excitations, to frenzy, to fascination, to ecstasy.”[18] Rudolf Otto describes this frame of mind as being associated with the sense of creatural status or the sense of absolute dependence on God: “the sense of our own nothingness, of losing ourselves in front of the one, whose great and fearful character we feel through fear. “[19] This is the Old Testament God who spoke to Moses through fire, a God of the fury that the man faces powerless. This fascination and tremble that makes His servants to fill infinitesimal is experienced by the psalmist too: “I wonder what you see, when Your terrible iris/ opens towards me: the madness/ of defying You like an ant? The fright/ of You annihilating me in the dust, like a giant?”[20] (Psalm XXVI). This state of mysterium tremendum is sometimes invoked because the psalmist wishes his faith to be a devouring fire: “Your presence shall consume me/ with the blaze of a sum/ that burns in vertical rods/ the multiple one of Your nature.”[21] (Psalm LVIII). This is the grace the mystics have searched for, the advantage of perceiving God beyond the intellect, in the heart, by means of a vertical synergy. The images of the theophanies in “Psalms” receive sometimes a violent coloratura, reflecting the hypostases of the angry Iahve: “Oh, rummaged I feel now/ by the flame claw of a gloom/ that burns in me everything that’s alive. / And, Lord, I’m nothing but ashes! But sweep me with thousands of strikes/ towards heaven/ till is not too late…”[22] (Psalm LX).

It is obvious that the psalmist longs for a state close to asceticism. Ascetics, in the poetic vision of the psalms, represent the only authentic redemptive counter-weight against evil. The psalmist prays God to listen one more time to the ascetics and the hermits before judging the world. But, the fight that takes place in his heart is against his senses. The misunderstanding with God starts from here. The psalmist accuses God of giving him these senses because they favour the sins, because through them he has access to what is not permitted, because they are feelers that perceive the world beauty which should be relinquished. In this paradox of the impossible gift, God seems to be His own enemy, as the psalmist names Him in Psalm XXXI, because he risked offering man a world that he could put instead of Him: “But, God, is there any use for us to be obedient in the abandon/ of Your world when You urge us to betray?”[23] (Psalm XXXI) After the divine fire, there is nothing left but an “arid desert”, writes the psalmist emptied by everything that is worldly and humanly. The psalmist succeeds in abandoning his senses, not by mortifying them, but by transcending them towards the pre-senses that give him the pre-taste of God: “With my sight beyond sight, / with my hearing beyond hearing” (Psalm XXXVIII). During prayer and revelation, the escape from senses, i. e. the transgression of the finite takes place. The psalmist is aware of his need of discovering a new type of seeing, of seeing with his eyes closed: “I cover my eyes – to see You” (Psalm LXX). Hence, the psalmist intuits God and does not know him through concepts and logics. To look for God with scientific instruments seems to be a failure from the very beginning. A special sight is needed, the inner eye, predisposed to the deep meaning, to essential finalities and to the sacred from the world.

Natural theology asserts that the sacred is not totally transcendent, that it exists in the beauty of the world, and that it is its reason of being. The psalmist finds God in the world’s beauty. As a matter of fact, the beauty put in creation might act as binding the human soul and the sacred. Simone Weil describes the human thirst for beauty, God’s trap: ”The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from high.”[24] The same author compares the world beauty with the entrance of a labyrinth in the middle of which the man will always find God waiting for him. Through this kind of labyrinth the psalmist wanders too, tirelessly searching for the presence of God. The nature gives testimony of God’s miracles that represent a dialect of His language: “In river, in beast, in flower/ You are some kind of breathing”[25] (Psalm LVIII). The elements of the world are not sacred in themselves, but they emphasize the marks of a visit that has just finished as nothing perceivable can relate entirely the unperceivable: “I feel you sliding through my fingers/ like a lizard with small golden scales”[26] (Psalm II).

This kind of miracle that enlightens the presence of God is also the human being itself. The whole universe shares God’s energy, including man. God can reveal Himself in the relations with the others. In his essays, Doinaş shows interest in the philosophy of relation, especially because he translated in Romanian the philosopher Martin Buber’s “Ich und Du”. Doinaş writes: “Apriori, any human being detains, before any social experience, an inner partner who is the innate You, any human being is meant to enter into relation with the otherness.”[27] Furthermore, the essayist sustains the philosopher’s idea that God reveals himself through the other as well. God is the eternal innate You, because humans have been born with the yearn for God. The relation I-You, fundamental for the spiritual development, signifies mutuality and sympathy and suggests the aspiration to a relation with a personal God: “Lord, I would like to call you You”, a God that starts a travel together with his fellow, on foot, in sweat: “Lord, take off your sunlit skies/ take off your moon and your stars; come with me to wander on foot and in sweat/ this country of chant and grief”[28] (Psalm V). Therefore, the psalmist does not wish only a God as flame, as revealed irrational, but also a human God, coinciding with his neighbour, the great other accessible to human communication. When He is neither in the person of the Holy Ghost, of the revelation, nor in the person of Christ, the God on Earth, the Divine is perceived as being the great Pantocratoras, the reason of the universe, the one that created “the terrible ethereal algebra”, the great cosmic geometer who gives coherence to the world. The Psalm LII names God “the geometer of a Circle” and the poet prays not for a miracle, not for kenosis but for God to integrate him in the coherence of the world, in the sacred order established by Him.

The psalmist has a multiple gnoseological experience. It is not a partial experience. In this case it would definitely lead to a failure. God is not totally mystery, as He reveals in His own creation, but this is not enough. That is why the psalmist does not stop to a single way of knowing God. The rational and the irrational do not exclude each other. In the poet’s vision there is no antagonism, but certainly a complementarity. When the power of reason fails, a special disposition for miracle is needed so that a complete gnoseological process could be achieved. That is how a modern thinker resorts to miracle in order to reach comprehension.

 

 

Works cited:

Armstrong, Karen, O istorie a lui Dumnezeu, (translated by Fraga Cusin), Bucureşti, Cartea Românească, 2001

Bădescu, Horia, Memoria fiinţei, poezia si sacrul, Iaşi, Junimea, 2008

Doinaş, Şt. Aug., Mai mult ca prezentul, Craiova, Aius, 1996

Doinaş, Şt. Aug., Psalmi, Bucureşti-Craiova, Litera International, 2003

Otto, Rudolf, Despre numinos, Bucureşti, Humanitas, 2006

Otto, Rudolf, Cluj-Napoca, Sacrul, Dacia, 2002

Templul meu, Şt. Aug. Doinaş în dialog cu Emil Şimăndan, Arad, Fundaţia Ioan Slavici, 1998

Weil, Simone, Waiting on God, (translated from French by Emma Craufurd), London, Collins, 1950

 

 

Notes