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June 26 None The academic enterprise that has developed in the modern West does not know what to make of the transcendent reality beyond perceptual or intellectual apprehension. Nescience, unknowing, negativity, apophaticism, using reason to defeat reason – choose what term you will – is unlikely to appear in a university catalogue. It may occur in the minds of some professors and some students, but none of them could correlate it with scholarship, their academic reason to be.
Unknowing, like the iconography that can seem to be its antithesis but in fact often is its cousin, is a more-than-academic matter. The standard academic program cannot handle it. Once experienced, known personally, ultimate reality dwarfs all of our studies, even our studies of ultimacy. It is whole and complete; we and our academic studies are all too partial. It never dies. We fill up cemeteries and the basements of libraries. The academic world is grass and flowers; grass withers and flowers fade.
From the perspective of the mystics whom we find most trustworthy, the academic approach is not to be despised, as long as it confesses its partiality. When it presents itself as a wholeness, which is rarely, the mystic has to smile. Often, however, it gets so preoccupied, so absorbed with its studies, that it implies that it is the best, perhaps the only real, game in town. Of course, if the only local opinions are making money, getting drunk, or fornicating, this suggestion will seem to have great merit. The best and brightest will be attracted, and for a while they will stay intrigued. However, this best-and-brightest appeal itself will eventually undo them, for it will never let them forget: They have been made for more. TrackbacksThe trackback URL for this entry is: http://klx.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!DFB47E67795F3614!558.trak Weblogs that reference this entry
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