THE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY OF GOD AND POETRY IN THE WRITINGS OF KARL RAHNER

Karl Rahner, S.J., was one of the leading contemporary theologians and thinkers within the Roman tradition of Christianity until his death a few years ago. Martin Marty says of Rahner:


Although limited in their direct influence, his works span a wide range of topics, from Ecclesiology to the theology of the Sacraments, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and issues of morality. In his wide range of writings can be found also a fascination with two topics: the hiddenness of God and poetry. As a modern theologian, Karl Rahner has incorporated the post-Vatican II theology into some pivotal statements on 'deus absconditus.' He also has something to say about the art of writing poetry as a form of prayer. Rahner stated that there would be tw

This [wintry] type '. . .would be made up of those who, although they are committed Christians who pray and receive the sacraments, nevertheless find themselves at home in a wintry sort of spirituality, in which they stand alongside the atheist, but obvi

It is for people such as these that Rahner confronts in his article, "The Hiddenness of God", several issues that attempt to understand the elusiveness of God. He begins with an important premise: though many theologians say that "God is dead," Rahner himself says if this is true "How should we speak about God?" His suggestion is formulated as follows:

'God is hidden', 'He is mystery. indeed he is the absolute mystery'. So speaks a long theological tradition, and it is on this tradition that a dogmatic theologian would like to offer a few reflections. The paucity of the data...allows no more than an abstract treatment of the subject. ...Still this investigation will be undertaken in the hope of presenting a somewhat more radical analysis of the problem which lies behind the phrase, 'the hiddenness of God.'

His first clarification is that in Catholic theological circles one does not use "hiddenness" to describe God, but the word "incomprehensibility" is used. Why? Rahner explains:

God emerges, as it were, from his hiddenness in revelation and makes himself known to man as the author of salvation. And yet the revealed word of God is seen from the point of view of the 'incomprehensibility of God' as something hidden and can only be illuminated through the word of revelation, in so far as this is intrinsically possible. Here the metaphysical or essential aspect is dominant. The basic assertion of classical theology refers to the incomprehensibility, the 'incomprehensibilitas' of God. This incomprehensibility follows from the essential infinity of God which makes it impossible for a finite created intellect to exhaust the possibilities of knowledge and truth contained in this absolute fullness of being.


St. Thomas Aquinas is the source of this theological concept for he teaches:

...that God always lies beyond the understanding of any finite created mind, even that of angels and of men in a state of ultimate fulfillment, and of the created soul of the God-man. Thus the fact that the state of blessedness can vary, with the individual beholder is made intelligible.



God is incomprehensible, yet God is also knowable. Or as Rahner says, "... . one and the same God is known and is at the same time incom-prehensible". . .. What then does this hiddenness or "incomprehensibility"mean? Rahner defines it as follows:

The incomprehensibility of God is defined more precisely by the observation that the being of God and the mystery of the Trinity are not 'transparent' to man. This applies at least in the case of the possibilities of knowledge open to man during his life of pilgrimage when his natural intellectual capacities do not permit him to obtain a speculative and philosophical grasp of the Trinity. ...The Trinity escapes conceptual mastery and remains a mystery.


God remains a mystery, yet free. Thus God can and does remain a free agent even after creation and is not compelled to reveal a presence to the world. He can reveal himself or not. Rahner even goes so far as to say ". . .God remains incomprehensible even in the beatific vision." This statement could be a study in itself, yet it shows how incomprehensible Rahner, and St. Thomas Aquinas on whom he bases his ideas, considers God. Although Rahner raises many questions and problems concerning the incomprehensibility, hiddenness and mystery of God, many of these questions do not pertain to this dissertation. One, however, does: the problem of knowledge. How we come to know an object is essential to this article and if we are to say that God is incomprehensible or hidden, how, then, do we know God? As Rahner says:

What is called knowledge according to the common usage originating in the western tradition of philosophy, i.e., comprehension and mastery, consists in the ordering of data in a horizon of understanding and system of coordinates which is evident to us as the object which we possess identically with ourselves. But it is this which is a defective form of the real nature of knowledge, then it is of no importance whether ordinary knowledge is understood in the sense of the creation of functional connections between the primary data of an original experience, or treated as the vision in which what is seen is comprehended. For the essence of knowledge lies in the mystery which is the object of primary experience and is alone self-evident.


In other words, we cannot know God in the philosophical sense of the Greeks for reason cannot comprehend the mystery of God. Knowledge of God is, in the primary sense, the presence of the mystery itself. We can know that something or someone is unknowable; this is a form of knowledge. As Rahner explains:

In other words the 'deus absconditus' is the source of truth for man, which is freely bestowed upon him and determines his identity. Man always stands before the 'deus absconditus', even when he tries to look away and refuses to accept the truth, that clear knowledge of the reality of the world, which gives him mastery over the world, comes from this 'deus absconditus'. Knowledge is primarily the experience of the overwhelming mystery of this 'deus absconditus.'


Often Divine revelation does not unveil something previously hidden, rather the 'deus absconditus' becomes ". . .radically present as the abiding mystery." God remains God. The author of Ecclesiastes was always aware of this mystery. God is free to be God. We do not see clearly, nevertheless we must accept the hiddenness. We are confronted by mystery:

The incomprehensibility of God as the blessed fulfillment of man, if one wishes to develop the metaphysical line of thought any further, is the same reality as the incomprehensibility of God in his own being and in the free gift of the mystery to man in his own being and in the free gift of the mystery to man in his individual concrete history.


God remains incomprehensible because he must be mystery and for all practical purposes unknown. Rahner establishes that the mystery of God predicates the fact that the poet writes in total mystery. The poet's creative act itself is mystery, while what the poet often is searching for is mystery as well, namely the Mystery. As Rahner says:

If the classical Catholic theology of the incomprehensibility of God were seen in this radical perspective, it would also be plain that a genuine 'theologia gloriae', for which Catholicism is often criticized, is still, if rightly interpreted, a theology of 'deus absconditus.' The 'gloria' is nothing other than the loving surrender of man to the incomprehensibility of God which is now a directly present reality.


God may have revealed to us the 'deus revelatus', but this God only becomes transparent as the 'deus absconditus." As Rahner writes:

...It is not true that the 'deus absconditus' is the sort of God who desires that we should not recognize him at all. He does not share one part of himself with us and conceal the other; rather he bestows his whole being upon us. In communicating himself as a 'deus revelatus' he becomes radically open to man as the 'deus absconditus."from this mystery man is no longer able to escape:he accepts God as he is, as the mystery of incomprehensibility who, once recognized, is the very truth of man and, once loved, is his blessed fulfillment.


Each of us lives, according to Rahner, with the hiddenness of God, the mystery. We are searching throughout the world for signs of God's loving presence, yet we know we can never comprehend what we are looking for. Why? Because we are finite beings, and any statement about God is a statement more about ourselves than about God. Rahner writes as follows on the topic:

Any interpretation of the Thomist doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God should not overlook the fact that this doctrine is primarily a statement about man, about his finite nature and its positive quality. Only in a highly derivative and tenuous sense [negative sense] should one regard divine incomprehensibility as an 'attribute' of God himself. If one starts by making divine incomprehensibility a (negative) attribute of God, then it would simply become one of a number of attributes which we predicate as 'names' of God, despite his simplicity and infinity. The doctrine of divine incomprehensibility could not then be given its proper weight or value for a theological and metaphysical anthropology. The most radical and ultimate statement of this anthropology is that man is a being who is endowed through the free self-communication of God in grace with the infinite incomprehensibility and incomprehensible infinity of God, and so shares in his own being in divine incomprehensibility.


Thus we see from Rahner's own words that the doctrine of incomprehensibility says more about humankind than about God, and what it says is simply that God is mystery to us. So with this argument kept in mind let us now turn to Rahner's insights into the poetic process and the poet.

Rahner has written several articles on poetry. He himself was not a poet, but rather someone who was very interested in the creative process and the role of word in the formulation of poetry. Rahner starts with the incomprehensibility of God as the premise for what he says. He writes:

For in this word [the gospels] comes what is incomprehensible, the nameless, silent power that rules all but is itself unruled, the immense, the abyss in which we are rooted, the overbright darkness, by which all the brightness of each day is encompassed, in a word:the abiding mystery which we call God, the beginning who is still there when we end. No doubt, the word expresses, designates and distinguishes, demarcates, defines, compares, determines and arranges. But as it does this, he who has ears, he who can see (here all the sense of the spirit are at one) experiences something totally different: the silent, mystic presence of the nameless.


Rahner says that "poetry is a way of training oneself to hear the word of life...." Christians can begin by allowing the gospel to seep into the depths of their hearts. As he states in another article, "To the poet is entrusted the word." So it is not just the Christian poet that is entrusted with the word, but all poets who speak from their innermost depths for from that part of us issues forth the primordial words. Rahner comments:

And yet these ultimate words possess only that 'simplicity' which conceals within itself all mysteries. These are the primordial words which form the basis of man's spiritual existence. ...In every primordial word there is signified a piece of reality in which a door is mysteriously opened for us into the unfathomable depths of true reality in general. ...It means only that primordial words reflect man in his indissoluble unity of spirit and flesh, transcendence and perception, metaphysics and history. It means that there are primordial words, because all things are interwoven with all reality and therefore every genuine and living word has roots which penetrate endlessly into the depths.


The primordial words, the words that cannot be defined, penetrate into the Uncomprehensible, namely God. They cannot be defined. "All definitions have constant recourse to new words, and this process must come to a stop with the ultimate words...." This seems very vague and Rahner himself says it is. He finally says:

The primordial words always remain like the brightly lit house which one must leave behind, 'even when it is night'. They are always as though filled with the soft music of infinity. No matter what it is they speak of, they always whisper something about everything. If one tries to pace out their boundary, one always becomes lost in the infinite. They are the children of God, who possess something of the luminous darkness of their Father.


This still brings us no closer to understanding what he means by primordial words because definition of this concept is next to impossible. Instead Rahner gives us an example from Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy, but prefaces this poetic example with one sentence:"They are words of an endless crossing of borders, therefore words on which in some way our very salvation depends."

...Are we perhaps here, in order to say, house,
Bridge, fountain, gate, urn, fruits, window,
At the most:pillar, tower...but to say, please understand,
Oh to say, what the things themselves never
Intimately thought to be...


Rahner then acknowledges that "...only someone who understands these lines of the poet has grasped what we mean by primordial words and why they have every right to be, indeed must be obscure. So this example must suffice. The poet understands, while many who are not poets may not truly understand the concept of the primordial word for its comes from our innermost being. The person who utters these words alone can understand them. These are not necessarily formal poets, or even professional poets, but rather those in touch with their innermost self. Rahner explains:

It is to the poet (Dichter) that the word has been entrusted. He is a man capable of speaking the primordial words in powerful concentration (verdichter). Everyone pronounces primordial words, as long as he is not sunk completely into spiritual death. Everyone calls things by their names and so continues the action of his father Adam. But the poet has the calling and the gift of speaking such words in powerful concentration. He has the power to speak them in such a way that, by means of his word, things move as though set free into the light of others who hear the words of the poet.


Rahner makes it clear that he is not talking of second-rate poets who earn a living by writing pleasing verse. Rather ". . .whenever a primordial word is really pronounced, wherever a thing appears in word in its positive freshness there a poet is at work." It is the poet who is at work no matter what he calls himself, though he may consider himself to be a theologian or a philosopher. Rahner continues:

Poets are humans who speak primordial words in powerful concentration. If they utter these words, then they are beautiful. For real beauty is the pure appearance of reality as brought about principally in the word . . .It [the word] lives in transcendence. For this reason the primordial word, before all other expressions, is the primordial sacrament of all realities. And the poet is the minister of this sacrament. To him is entrusted this word, in which realities come out of their dark hiding place into the protective light of man to his own blessing and fulfillment.


For Rahner, the poet is the minister of the word that is the primordial sacrament of all realities.

In connection with this sacrament of the word, Rahner now turns to priesthood. It is to the priest, according to Rahner, that the efficacious word has been entrusted. To him "...has been given the word of God." Now, the ideal for Rahner is a person who incorporates in his/her being both priest and poet. Being a priest does not necessarily make a person a poet. As Rahner explains:

For one can be a poet only if the word of the mouth springs up from the centre of the heart. The poet says what he bears within him. He expresses himself in truth. This expression itself is a part of what he is. On the other hand, one can say the words of God without expressing oneself. . . .

For that reason not every priest is a poet by the mere fact of speaking God's own primordial words. He says what is true; he speaks God's own truth. But this can happen without God's truth having become his own truth, the revelation in word of the very constitution of his own being. With a word of that kind poetic existence is not achieved. One has said less, less of the human, because more has been said, more of the divine.


As priest one speaks the Word, yet the Word can still be hollow: not the words themselves, but how they are articulated. For the real judgment is when ". . .a priest empty of faith or love". . . . speaks the primordial word. "It is already a lie and a judgment upon a man, if he speaks what is not in him." As Rahner says:

To be true poet, according to Goethe, 'a God has given the power to say what he is experiencing', while others remain silent in their agony and in their bliss. That is the grace of the poet. ... The priest does not have it. Even if he speaks out of his innermost centre of his believing, loving heart filled with the Spirit, he is speaking the words of God.


The priest must call upon the poet both within himself and outside of himself. In this secular world, the Church must call upon all who speak the primordial word, the poets who live beyond the touch of the Church. Yet how can the Church call upon these poets? Only by opening up dialogue with the secular world, and this is difficult for the Church do. Since Vatican II the Catholic Church has addressed this issue of dialogue with the secular world at least on the surface. Today this dialogue is a must for Christians who need to find new ways to articulate or speak about God. It is these primordial words that the poet speaks that are words of longing for God in a godless world. The Church must dialogue with these poets. For the poet may be the priest of the present age. For as Rahner says:

The poet is driven forward by the transcendence of the spirit. He has already been overpowered secretly and quite unknown to himself by the longing which the grace of the Holy Spirit has implanted in the human heart. So he speaks words of longing even when he speaks of the flowers and of the love of two human hearts. His words of nostalgia are stretched out in longing for an unsurpassable fulfillment, for perfect love, for the definitive transfiguration of all reality.


Two key issues in this article - the Hiddenness of God and the role of poetry in the exploration of the Unknown - are found within the works of Karl Rahner. He has shown us that by nature finite humankind can never understand or comprehend the infinite. The Infinite must remain a mystery, in fact the ultimate mystery. We as humans can try to fathom the depths of God, but that only leads to frustration. 'God is God' has to remain the ultimate statement on God. Yet one person comes closest to speaking of those depths, namely, the poet. To the poet is entrusted the ultimate words, the primordial words. It is the poet who speaks from his being, from his heart. It is the true poet who speaks to us of God. For Rahner, the ultimate spokesperson would be a poet who was a priest, or a priest who is also a poet. As Rahner says:

At first sight it might be thought that the poet and priest can make contact by one of them uttering the (poetic) question, and the other the (divine) answer. Question and answer, poet and priest, would thus live from each other. But now, supposing that the priest proclaiming, the theologian in the full sense, himself becomes a poet, in order to communicate perfectly his message from above? Supposing that the poet, happily satisfied by the answer he has perceived to his question, himself tells what he hears? Supposing that this happens:then - and what a blessed though rare occurrence - the priest becomes the poet and the poet becomes a priest. Such fortune is rare. If it happened often, there would be too much radiant beauty for our hearts. Even Scripture, the very words of God, only seldom speak in poetry. But occasionally it may happen. Then it is grace. It proclaims that everything is redeemed. The primordial words of man, transmuted by the Spirit of God, are allowed to become words of God, because a poet has become a priest.

But not a priest in the Roman sacramental tradition sense or even in the popular religious sense of the word, but rather in the secular sense of priest. A person who speaks for the people. The poet/ priest's poetry is mystery and speaks of Mystery. It takes us beyond ourselves, often by taking us into ourselves, but ultimately to the Incomprehensible. The poet is the spokesperson for the Hidden God.