'Barth, in Dogmatics in Outline, is not simply mounting a conventional attack of agape against eros, faith against culture: he is rather saying that the self before God is not serious, it is groundless. It is not something that exists in its own density and solidity: the self before God is poised on the divine word...
5 September 1966
What I see is this: that while I
imagined I was functioning fairly successfully, I was living a sort of
patched up, crazy existence, a series of rather hopeless
improvisations, a life of unreality in many ways. Always underlain by a
certain solid silence and presence, a faith, a clinging to the
invisible God – and this clinging (perhaps rather His holding on to me)
has been in the end the only thing that made sense. The rest has been
absurdity. There is 'I' – this patchwork, this bundle of questions and
doubts and obsessions, this gravitation to silence and to the woods and
to love. This incoherence! There is no longer anything to pride my
self in, least of all 'being a monk' or being anything – a writer or
anything...
The great joke is this: having a self that is to be taken seriously,
that is to be proved, free, right, logical, consistent, beautiful,
successful and in a word 'not absurd'.
---Rowan Williams on Thomas Merton/ Barth.
~~~
There is something absurd about those who want to "prove" or "disprove" religion by arguments, logic, science or anything else; something slightly preposterous about the desire, or is it need?, to think that you, and only you, have hit on the truth, been delivered, found a clear view, made sense of it all.
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