Messages from afar
I mentioned in the last post that I wanted to post some more from The Shattering of Loneliness - On Christian Remembrance, by Erik Varden. This portion comes from the last chapter, which elicited a lot of nodding and sighing from me. If you have read here for any length of time you will know I have written about the experience of longing often, calling it ‘die Sehnsucht’, a word I originally came across in CS Lewis, but also from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke; a poem which featured in an article I wrote in 2014 for the CASE magazine on our existential homesickness. So, you will soon understand why I loved this chapter; a chapter which was to me an expanded and scholarly and theological version of what I was attempting to say, way back in 2014 and earlier (and contains much more besides relating to the word of God and the incarnation). The first part of the quote below is not new to me, but the following references to Athanasius show how far some ideas predate CS Lewis. And then I especially gained from this teasing out of the distinction between desire and longing (and thus how it also differs from nostalgia). So, all that said, read on:
After quoting a different poem from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours, addressed to ‘The Young Brother’, Varden then writes this:
“Our most intimate desires, the poet tells us, carry messages from afar. They make us homesick for a land we have not yet discovered. And that homesickness, that ‘longing’, invites us to enter a new kind of awareness. For Rilke, the tension between ‘here’ and ‘there’ is not a matter of banal sublimation. He upholds the intuition of the senses, which generate his insight. To say, ‘I’m made of longing’ is no irresponsible cliché. It is a pointer to something essential and true. By postulating longing as the foundation of existence, Rilke indicates a metaphysical relation that can be accounted for on the basis of strict theological reasoning.
… No one expounds it better that Athanasius of Alexandria (c. 295-373), whose treatise On the Incarnation of the Word spells out an anthropology founded on longing. Human beings, says Athanasius, are conditioned to long because they are structured in such a way that nothing in this world can satisfy them. Made in the image of the Word of God, they find no peace outside of a sustaining relationship wth the Logos who, alone, can bring them satisfaction. (pp 134-135)
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That is why the Logos entered history. God was not prepared to let our desire (which originates in us) have the last word. Instead he wished to vindicate our longing (whose origin he is). (p 141)
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Athanasius does not maintain that all sensual impulses lead to God. There is a distinction to be drawn between our heavenly, ‘logical’ longing and our earthbound, ‘illogical’ desire. Yet the fundamental principle holds: any authentic longing, any longing that, even implicitly, points towards eternity, is a possible path towards God. (p 145)
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To Athanasius’s way of thinking, the attraction of the Logos is a vital impulse. That impulse is easily fragmented by other, contradictory stimulants. While speaking of this conflict, I have once or twice highlighted the contrast, in Athanasius’s vocabulary, between ‘longing’ and ‘desire’. To clarify these terms, we can once again proceed etymologically. Athanasius’s word for ‘desire’ … [hēdonē], is derived from the Greek verb … [hēdomai], which means ‘to enjoy’ or ‘to take pleasure’. We use it when we refer to someone as a ‘hedonist’, whose life is governed by pleasure-seeking. The Greek word for ‘longing’, … [pothos], refers to yearning for a lost of distant thing, a thing known and treasured but now out of reach. Whereas hēdonē issues from me, from my wish for satisfaction, I experience pothos by force of something outside myself. The same charge is carried by the English verb ‘to long’.
The noun ‘longing’ is derived from the adjective ‘long’, indicating distance, and the first evidenced verbal forms are reflexive with a Dative pronoun: ‘it longeth me’. Where longing is concerned, ‘I’ (in old English as in Greek) stands as indirect object, patient of impulses from elsewhere. Whereas I can rightly call desire mine, longing is a gift received. Athanasius’s point is borne out by grammar and semantics. Our true longing is ‘logical’ both in the sense that it is rational and also, more literally, because it issues from afar, from the Logos who made and remade us. When I long, I hear the Word of God calling out to its image in me. On these terms, Rilke’s insight, ‘I’m made of longing’, gains fresh authority.
If this is true, then such longing will surely find expression even when the Word is not consciously professed as Truth. The question is pertinent at a time when society largely rejects religion in favour of fragmented ‘secular’ views. If Christian claims are to impress, we must show that they are more than scaffolding rigged round the existential thirst of man; that in fact they correspond to this thirst and carry refreshment. (pp 145-147)"