Posted by johnboy on September 21, 1999 at 11:23:18:
Kung Lite
solipsism out of a wet paper bag
never fighting its metaphysical way
because it is radically empirical
objective bicsuits of reality
never cook in subjectivism's oven
oven set always on hermeneutical
the immanent hungering for transcendence
the apophatic being a liturgical burger short
at the happy meal of celebrations theological
the transcendent starving for immanence
the kataphatic lacking a numinous sandwich
at the picnic of the mystically existential
elevators of skeptics don't go to the top
lights of credulous on with nobody home
watch the aesthetes and ascetics go bust
tao, dharma and logos forsaking either-or
for paradox, mystery, creative tension, both-and
proofs surrendering to fundamental trust
Exegesis of Kung Lite
The whole point of the poem is that Hans Kung is the paragon of Gaudium et Spes. He turns to the world of history, of science, of philosophy and to the realm of theology and ideology. He listens to what everyone is saying and employs a dialogic methodology par excellence.
Hans Kung has listened so very carefully, reflected so very intently, and probed so very deeply into so very many positions, that when he enters into dialogue, he understands these positions, cognitively and intuitively, quite often better, it seems, than their authors.
If I have heard Hans at all, he is saying to every position: "I wish I'd have thought of that. Good thinking! By the way, Mary, have you heard what Joe has to say?"
Hans pleads with all who would posit whatever: "Don't rush to closure!"
Fidelity to the world and to God, to one another, finally means that no one gets written off, or as Hans would say, scotched. Rather, we continue to come together dialogically to explore and discover one another's depth dimension(imago Dei numero uno?) and we continue to come together as we find ever new and ever more compelling reasons to be together (imago Dei numero dos?). That is the foundation of the sacrament of marriage. Fidelity dies whenever we claim we know the Other. And that is why God is dead and we are alienated from one another; the great traditions and the sciences have too often rushed to closure. Hans Kung will have none of it. When the Church of the 22nd
Century beatifies and canonizes this man, he will be known as the patron saint of rapprochement.
To the Spirit and the Bride, the Church and the World, he bids come!
And he wants a healthy marriage:
Do you, Joe Empiricist, take Mary Hermeneuticist, as your lawful and wedded wife? (And will you both, please, use a hyphenated surname?) And will you accept from this marriage children, both George Immanent and Susie Transcendent, as beautiful little Supernatural Existentials sent lovingly from the Divine Communication? And will you love, honor and obey both the apophatic and kataphatic, the impersonal and personal, the existential and theological, the immanent and transcendent, the epistemology of control and the hierarchy of teleology, all the days of your life?
Why the hyphenated surname? Because in an authentically conjugal relationship, the longing for fusion and the longing for beatitude, the eros and agape, the immanent and the transcendent don't dissolve into one another. The kataphatic groom continues to carry the apophatic bride across the liminal threshold of the nuptial chamber in a liturgical dance of preorgasmic numinous energy that is never post-climactically spent, in a chamber where Beauty, ever-revealing, not timid but ever coy, is never exposed from every vantage point; with an appetite ever-tasting morsels of Truth though never satiated; where the wine of Goodness is both the driest and the most delectable vintage.
Delightfully wounding, it is such that calls us forth and sends us where we would not otherwise go, into the apophatic garden of the obnubilating and numinous mist of the Cloud of Unknowing where this Bride dwells, toward the ever-clear Vision-Quest of the desert which has an
expanding horizon ever-receding, where the Groom roams, not aimlessly, with an ever-parched thirst unquenchable in the always-pouring kataphatic rain.
And I found your footprints in the sand by the sea
And like your maiden I ran along the way to a secret chamber
And there you gave to me, there you taught me oh so well
And I drank of your sweet spiced wine, the wine of God (1)
Where have you hidden beloved? Why have you wounded my soul?
I went out to the wilderness calling for you, but you were gone.
But I have searched for my beloved in the mountains
I have searched in the meadows and the fields
She has poured out a thousand graces in them
So my heart might be healed
But my heart is not healed (2)
If the Church and the Modern World must hold one another in creative tension, radically both-and and steadfastly spurning the either-or, then Hans Kung will be the presiding celebrant at this liturgy. He will not allow the exchange between the empirical and the hermeneutical to resolve its tension in a facile dialectic. He does not at all suggest that the theses of anthropocentric humanisms and scientific materialisms be synthesized with a syncretistic blending of the theologies of the great traditions.
He asks us to ask ourselves if our needs for external validation are not perhaps misplaced when we engage our metaphysics in the search for logically coercive proofs of meaning in life. Rather, he prompts us to ask: When we do listen, dialogically, to all the manifold and varied voices of certitude, however cacophonous, where might we find an intrinsic unity? Kung elicits from us the answer: we all share a fundamental trust in uncertain reality. It is from a most basic attitude of trust that we might begin to affirm a life infused with meaning.
I resonate deeply with the notion that the universe is screaming at us with meaning, is importunately begging us to find a way to trust it.
Perennially, in the voices of the nihilists and of the theologians, what I hear is that we all trust uncertain reality, even if we trust it crudely in a most paradoxical way and at a most rudimentary level. Hans Kung has hung out the most authentically transcendental carrot that I have found in the world today and he bids us to authentically and existentially taste, and to see, the Goodness of the Lord.
And through this adventure
I faltered in my flight
Yet love had already flown so high
That I took my prey (3)
from John Michael Talbot's "The Lover and the Beloved"
(1) Where Have You Hidden; (2) I Found My Beloved; and 3) Adventure in God; all by St. John of the Cross/JMT.
Hans Kung reflections based on my interpretation of his voluminous writings.