True Resurrection [antikvár]

PREFACE I _ -HIS book is an attempt to explore my own experience. In writing it I was interested to discover that in some ways my experience has been closer to the tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church than to that of Western Christianity. As I said in my essay in Soundings and in the introduction to The True Wilderness, I have long felt that theological inquiry is basically related to self-awareness and that therefore it involves a process of self-discovery so that, whatever else theology is, it must in some sense be a theology of the self. This view I have found corroborated in the Orthodox tradition. 'Orthodox religious thought lays the utmost emphasis on the image of God in man. Man is "a living theology", and because he is God's icon, he can find God by looking within his own heart, by "returning within himself".'^ I have found too among the Eastern fathers an emphasis on unknowing as the inevitable medium of our knowledge of God. Technically this is called the apophatic method, in which a positive statement about God has to be denied in the same breath in which it is affirmed. It has long seemed to me that Western Christianity, for all its talk of analogy or paradox, has felt too much at ease in its assumption that its dogmatic formulations are representationally adequate descriptions of mystery. E. M. For-ster's description of it as 'poor little talkative Christianity' is not very wide of the mark. Most of all, I have always found it impossible to see the world or anybody in it as without God, as though the created order were not in itself God-bearing but were a sort of spiritual vacuum until reclaimed by grace as an almost technical operation. And here it ^ Timothy Ware, The Eastern Orthodox Church, Penguin Boob, 1963, p. 225.