Thomas Merton said that theology could only be done by first becoming “impregnated in our mystical traditions,” but then went further: “theology meant even more than to ‘become fully impregnated in our mystical tradition,’ it is also to…help us to do what we must really do: live our theology…fully, deeply, in its totality.”
Or as Panikkar says: “Then authentic philosophy will crystallize into a life-style.”
Perhaps most important, it must be understood that this methodology of dialogical sophiology is inherently an artistic act. It is an artistic act that includes the mind, the intellect, merging it with the archetypal world of the artist, feeling passionately the cry of the poor and oppressed, and wedding it to the praxis of one’s life and the practical details demanded by it. Since dialogical sophiology is an inherently artistic act, let us bring our archetypal exploration to a close by turning to Cecil Collins, as he describes the artist and the creation of a work of art.
The artist…like the priest and monk…is the representative of the affirmative integrity of life…. By dreaming the dreams of man—because the artist does not speak for himself—he speaks for all men, by dreaming the dreams of man he then begins to change man’s dreams from within. This is the most important point of all…. And for an artist the greatest happiness is to have failed at doing the perfect, and the greatest misery is never to have attempted it.
In the creation of a work of art, Collins makes a distinction between creation and self-expression:
self-expression is not creation…Creation is transformation, something quite different, and no transformation takes place unless the energy is qualified and denied by limitations. For self-expressionists there are no limitations. But the real creative artist immediately has a vision and a perfection…You imagine something is infinite but then it has suddenly got to be in concrete shape. The shape, the size, the whole thing resists you, and this qualification is pain, and the pain purifies the energy and transforms it…[It is] the problem of incarnating it in a denser way…. That is where the purification comes in. The energy becomes transformed through this mutual qualification and then it’s in a state of grace.
As for the creative act itself, “art is not a place but a condition where the life of the soul is reenacted. When I say the life of the soul I mean the real life of the soul, what is happening in the life of the soul.”
Real creation of a work of art has nothing to do with having ideas that you wish to put in action, or having a programme, no matter how grand—it is a revealing, an unveiling of the nature of reality through evocation and through climate, atmosphere, through musicality. And therefore it’s always active, always alive…the idea or the vision is already within me in a seed form and the working of the material excites the seed and it unfolds within me. And I participate in this unfoldment, knowing when to come in, I hope, and trying to come in when it is necessary to give it a little bit of form in this way or that way, and not trying to interfere with it too much—to let it reveal itself.
“The whole problem is one of becoming sensitive to its intention, its unfolding. It knows perfectly well what it wants to do, and I mustn’t interfere with it. On the other hand one has to control the energy, to give it form, to be participating all the time in it. It is a wonderful balance between revelation, as it were, and form.
Our framework emerges, then, in the creative, artistic act of dialogical sophiology. We do not need to understand our framework and then work on articulating and forming it. Rather, we are constantly working on it, expressing it, courageously exposing it and letting it come into being, allowing it to be what it wants to be, to guide us, and to emerge as understanding in the act itself. “It is not necessary to understand in order to create but it is necessary to create in order to understand.”
And creation is always incarnational.
Excerpt From: Bucko, Adam. “The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living.”