367 - Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil

Three Outsiders: Pascal, Kierkegaard, Simone Weil
By Diogenes Allen
Cambridge, Cowley, 1983. 145 pp. $6.50.

Diogenes Allen hardly needs introduction to this readership, nor does he rest on his status as Professor of Philosophy at Princeton Seminary. In fact, he composes equally as pastor, concerned that professed Christians receive so little assistance in living out their profession, while the philosopher in him wants the help they do receive to be clear and availing. I am tempted to say that he's done it again! But anyone who may not have been as illuminated by his earlier works would miss that recommendation, so let me simply say that there is no better guide to these three guides from the modern Christian tradition in the ways of discipleship. So, one is helped by Allen's capacity to order their strategic advice and to profit from those who have gone before us, articulate in their faithfulness.

But why concentrate on relative "outsiders"? What's the point of that? The point is one painfully familiar to us all-the tendency of us "insiders" to think we have some special access to God-not by faith but by knowledge. To presume, in other words, that we are Christians rather than always becoming-or to put it yet more absurdly, that we're doing quite well, thank you, in our following of Jesus! What saves Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Simone Weil from that presumption, Allen insists, is their operative conviction that the God we worship is a hidden God. Each must then develop a pathway to relate to one who, even in revelation, remains hidden; and these turn out to be pathways to faith. Faith, in the sense of Luther, as what alone can free us to the ways of God, yet even more in the sense of John of the Cross, as the only appropriate manner of relating to the Holy One, In classical terms, Allen is more preoccupied with sanctification than with justification, and in that respect with filling in a recognized lacuna in Protestant theological writing.

How, then, can we think of ourselves as relating to one whom we acknowledge to be our very life, yet whom we cannot properly know? How, in short, can we negotiate the byways of living by faith rather than a pretended knowledge of the ways of the Lord? Pascal distinguishes three orders of knowing, three ways of consciously relating to the world: desire, mind, and heart. Kierkegaard deftly describes three forms of life: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. Without confounding the two, who come from diverse backgrounds, different centuries, and reflect distinct concerns, Allen nonetheless draws fascinating parallels between them. Both wish to show how Christianity transcends the paths of achievement available to human beings, and yet does so quite neatly along ways in which those paths will inevitably turn out to be deficient for anyone following them. Even more dramatically, we will have discovered the paths to fail in delivering what they initially promise: human fulfillment. For Pascal, the insufficiency of natural recipes flows from their incapacity to explain or to meet the paradoxes with which conscious human existence is fraught. For Kierkegaard, the form paradox takes is despair-in attaining what one sets out to achieve: one's self.

Simon Weil emerges as more subtle yet even more directly attentive to the love of God. The two prefatory steps become, in her, three (or four) implicit ways of loving God: through love of neighbor, love of the order and beauty of the universe, (human friendship), and love of religious practices. Through each of these loves, the object loved, if we allow it to take us over, will prepare us for an explicit love of God by purifying us from the self-centeredness which inevitably infects our ordinary loving. Provided we are, in each case, attentive to the realities involved, we will also discover "that there is nothing in this world which can fully satisfy us" and so "develop a degree of detachment from the world [which] creates an opening in us for God to enter."

What comes clearly through each of the guides is their inescapable conviction, fueled by the transcendent hiddenness of God, that "faith is not a substitute for evidence but a response to God made possible by (God, as] each of the writers shows us how we may come to faith, since we must be open to God's action." And the credit for all this being shown so well lies with Allen's clear-headed powers of exposition, at the service of his own operative conviction in the saving yet hidden-indeed saving because hidden-God.

David Burrell, C.S.C.
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana.