ABSTRACT
To convey the qualities of an elusive, luminous halo: this may be the aim of theology, as much as it was the goal of Woolf’s fiction.2 It is, indeed, what has led me to the image of glory. Not the blinding lights of its triumphalist counterfeits, the reflection of gold, or the glamour of celebrity, but a quality inseparable from life in all its fragility and ambiguities. Displaying both light and darkness, this halo is perhaps like the almond-shaped auras of Byzantine iconography – also called “glories.”3 It is the spectral luminosity of ordinary things, neither irresistible nor self-sufficient, but incessantly alluring. It is often barely perceptible, yet sometimes disconcerting – even terrifying. The apparent aberrations of its depictions do not diminish a theologian’s zeal to convey its varying, hazy radiance. Drawn by passion to the glory that flickers in the midst of everyday life, theology speaks of its “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.” This is a spirit that cannot be confined to neatly defined theological concepts or categories. And yet theologians persist in our weak attentiveness, “resolute” (Keller) in our attempts to describe it, however inaccurately and distortedly. We seek, with feeble words and images to express the inexpressible, in a multiplicity of voices, languages, and genres. An uncircumscribed spirit perhaps lured the words of Irenaeus of Lyon: “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” A celebration of these words lies behind the work of liberation theologians such as Elizabeth Johnson and Leonardo Boff, whose works express a passion for divine glory perceived in fully alive human beings.4 Rubem Alves rewrites Irenaeus in his unapologetic theopoetics of the body: “The glory of God is found in happy people.”5 Perhaps we recognize the efforts to convey it also in Emmanuel Levinas’s allusions to the “gleam of transcendence in the face of the Other.”6 These witnesses to glory are not expressions of writers who are distant from adversity. Quite to the contrary, they are the poignant confessions of those who have been touched by dreadful realities of injustice and cruelty: sexism, abject
poverty, colonialism, genocide. Their statements are defiant; they implicitly challenge the assumed dichotomy between glory and vulnerability. Yet we may still ask, how can we celebrate wonder when even a cursory look at history reveals that systems of injustices expose the lives of some people to indescribable suffering, when claims to glory have so often been part of the very justification of unjust systems? Such allusions to human glory seem to have cast a long shadow of destruction and death. The enormity of human injustice weighs on this exploration of glory – “doxa” – as I attempt to address the polydox character of theological witness. Injustice challenges me to attend to the vulnerability of life and leads me to seek concrete, material, fleshy images of the divine, for which I rely on biblical images of glory as earthy and elemental. Woolf’s words remind us that too often we miss glory where it is the closest to us, when it is most familiar. Therefore, theologizing glory requires theorizing the earthy and elemental; it also means theorizing what makes encounters with glory possible and difficult, prone to failure or counterfeit. For that exploration, I cross the border into the realm of philosophy to ponder the related concept of wonder. I am assuming, tentatively, that glory is the event that lures us into the experience of wonder, which Socrates famously declared to be the first passion of philosophy.7 But the distinction between these terms is hardly stable; philosophical descriptions of wonder, as we will see, often include the “objective” reality to which we are exposed as well as our “subjective” response to it. This argument thus necessarily moves between glory and wonder, for glory can only be conceived in relation to its effects on those who recognize it, who behold a transfiguration of the ordinary, those who open themselves in wonder. This reflection is, thus, less about a theological position than about a theological attitude. Rudolf Otto’s words about the numinous aptly describe the experiences of glory: it “cannot, strictly speaking, be taught, it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind” – or in the body? – “as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened.”8 Glory can only be evoked indirectly, through images that can never fully capture what, coming of an uncircumscribed spirit, materializes in multiplicity.
