“Wherever you look, God’s symbol is there; wherever you read, there you will find His types. For by Him all creatures were created, and He stamped all His possessions with His symbols when He created the world.” Eprhem the Syrian, Hymns of Virginity (20.12) \
In part one of this series, I reflected on the role that learning to “listen” to art played in my life and how it helped me grow in my understanding of the voice of the Lord. And I wrote about the special role teachers play in helping us grow in our perception, spiritual or otherwise. I had such a teacher. He would stand next to us, as we looked at art together, and say, “Here is what I see. Here is what I hear.” His perception and guidance was an invitation for us to first see what he saw and to hear what he heard. At first I could not see it or hear it. At first all I could do was want to see it. And that desire was enough, a place to begin.
Growing in such perception is related by analogy to our perception of God, a point I learned from another one of my master teachers—Hans Urs von Balthasar. Balthasar, the great 20th century, Swiss Catholic theologian began what became a theological trilogy centered on beauty, goodness, and truth, with the question of beauty, which he framed in terms of theological aesthetics. The aesthetic has to do with perception, with what is sensible, so the perception of God is not the worst gloss on theological aesthetics. But how is such perception possible? How does one grow in it? Before answering how one grows in perception of God (as in listening to the voice of God), Balthasar asks a more basic but related question—how does one grow in perception generally. He turns to the example of perceiving art, and says it is through “the mediation of a great teacher” that one can “glimpse the uniqueness of a work of art” (Convergences, 52). One can learn to see through the eyes of another. One can learn to hear through the ears of another.
Throughout the multiple volumes of his great work The Glory of the Lord,Balthasar draws an analogy between the beauty of the world and the glory of the Lord. One implication of this analogy is that like the beauty of the world, God’s glory must be perceived. But in order to perceive it, we must be initiated into the reception and perception of divine revelation. God does speak, does have a voice, in other words, but one must become the kind of person who is able to hear it. I said at the end of the last essay that I wanted to draw out three aspects of the voice of the Lord that have analogical parallels to art. The voice of the Lord is allusive, effusive, and elusive. Let’s start with allusion.
Allusion may be most familiar to us from a literary context, which for me became entirely the point. The OED glosses allusion as “a symbolical reference or likening: a metaphor, parable, or allegory.” The literary application of allusion in particular helped me unlock something key about the voice of the Lord. The unfurling web of allusion unfolds as an ongoing, ever renewing conversation. One might begin, say, with Dante, only then to trace the simplest line of allusion from him back to Virgil and from Virgil back to Homer. The visual language of painting is also allusive. Again to trace a relatively simple example, Caravaggio is in conversation with Michelangelo, so that his visual language is in allusive conversation with his predecessor, and Michelangelo is in visual conversation with Giotto, whose own immersion in the world of Scripture establishes a basic visual vocabulary for the Italian Renaissance. Again this simple line of allusion does not even begin to deal with the sources of their paintings, the scriptures, the teachings of the church, the myths, which are themselves in constant allusive conversation with each other.
And the scriptures themselves are their own web of allusion, which endlessly fascinates and sometimes entangles us. Even that web is nested within another web of allusion—the creation—which speaks to itself and back to its creator, declaring the glory of the Lord. And this is what I mean when I say that the VOICE is allusive. If indeed “the heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above declares his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1) then the voice of creation sings back to the VOICE that first spoke (sang) it into existence. This reciprocity, this dynamism of the gift giving praise back to the Giver, opens an entire environment of communication wherein the whole of creation becomes a medium for the praise of its Creator. Creation is an allusion to its Creator.
Creation is an allusion to its Creator.
But this singing back is paradoxical. What is the nature of the voice of creation? Here the same Psalm is ambiguous. Some translations have it that the voice of creation speaks without speaking; it is a voice that is voiceless. “There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth and their words to the end of the world.” (Psalm 193-4, NRSV). What is that message? The declaration of glory. How then do we understand this voiceless voice? They are voiceless in that they do not speak of themselves. They speak of the one who spoke them into existence. This is the deepest kind of voicelessness. It is not an oppressive silence, but the allusive abundance of creation speaking of and back to its creator.
There is another way to take this verse in Psalm 19, however. Alternatively, some manuscript traditions, and the LXX seems to follow this tradition, describes not the silence of the voice, but the superabundance of it—”There are no speeches or words, in which their voices are not heard.” Meaning, it seems, that all that is cannot help but declare the glory of its creator. Whether these are silent voices or superabundant ones, their sounding is a response, an allusion to their originator.
Whether the voice is voiceless or superabundant, if creation articulates the glory of God, then the voice of the glorious God proclaimed must bear some relationship to the voice that speaks of Him. It wasn’t until I could think of God’s voice as a voice analogically, that I really began to understand what people might mean when they said they heard God’s voice.
What is allusive is also effusive, abundant.
Learning to catch an allusion here, an allusion there is the way any of us are initiated into a new language, a new vocabulary for a whole interconnected web of conversation and meaning. When I first saw those great masterpieces and read those great works in high school, what did I as a seventeen year old kid glean from these monumental works? What did I really see in those paintings? Or really hear in those symphonies? Or really understand from those books? Hard to say, but I was left then and am really left now with a set of indelible images—Ahab nailing the golden doubloon to the mast of the Pequod; a turtle lumbering across the highway in Grapes of Wrath; the downward gaze of a pregnant and bereft Eve; Dante emerging from the depths of hell to see the stars once again; the torsion in David’s body, the biting of his lip as he was just about to unleash the felling stone from his sling.
I was left with these indelible images and many more. I wanted more such images, more such encounters. This longing was intuitive, an instinct that this world has more and more and more to give. What is allusive is also effusive, abundant. Job, more than most, maybe more than almost any, knew such abundance can come at a cost—“Behold, these are but the outskirts of his ways, and how small a whisper do we hear of him! But the thunder of his power who can understand?” (Job 26:14) There is, then, a bridge between the allusive voice and the effusive voice, which we will turn to in the next essay.