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The House of Wisdom: A Pilgrimage
By John S. Dunne
New York, Harper & Row, 1985.172 pp. $15.95.

This book is in part a story of self-discovery in the tradition of Augustinian disclosure that, in probing the human heart and mind, reaches into the recesses of the God that is revealed within. It is also a contemporary contribution to a continuing Christian discourse in which voices from theology, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts converge and give articulation to the most anguished questions and the most freely imagined hopes of humankind. It is a harvest-work by John S.

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Dunne, gifted spiritual writer and teacher, in which the insights culled from his earlier writings provide seed for the new ground broken here.

The narrative unfolds as a pilgrimage, both as a movement from place to place as well as a more subtle movement of seeing and feeling, a search for the Symbol of Wisdom. Wisdom, as Dunne perceives her, is "God's eyes and heart." She is an unresolved figure that beckons to him at this moment in his life. This Wisdom is "in my center of stillness" where "the wonder of existing" is to be found. Yet she is not simply within the self but within all selves: she is the "person in all the persons I have met," the "understanding in all the discoveries I have made." To her uncovering, the author brings the formidable powers of his intellect and heart, attempting through the exercise of both faculties-the "conjoining" of the two as he puts it-to pierce through seeming reality to the realm of soul. This reader found herself caught up in the process of Dunne's many-layered disclosure.

Our temporal pilgrimage (for Dunne's story points to a more universal human story) begins at Ayasofya in Istanbul, ancient churchturned-mosque-turned-museum dedicated to Holy Wisdom. In the shadows of the evocative structure, Dunne imaginatively recreates the experience of a Christian catechumen present at the liturgies. He greets the sunrise with the scriptural words that point to the dawning of light in. darkness that seem to him to call up the presence of Wisdom. Next, by "passing over" into the God of unity in the name Allah evoked here at. Ayasofya, Dunne finds himself called to venture into "the movement of' convergence" within the self that will allow that presence of light perceived in Ayasofya to shine in the darkness of the soul. The choice we have is, it seems, to return to the circumference of the center, to the many paths that might be followed or to respond to the unifying call. Yet, paradoxically, the convergence at the center does not draw us into a God who turns a back upon the many but into a God "whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere." We are drawn with Dunne into the experience attested to by many in the Christian contemplative tradition of a "learned ignorance," a "knowing of knowing and unknowing," in which inner and outer are perceived in organic relationship.

Imaging Wisdom as a light to follow on the journey into this divine darkness, Dunne then takes us on a "wanderyear of soul," a period of reflection before choosing the way next to follow. The way must lead him into time, our own time, he knows, for he has seen that the Wisdom shining in his own darkness is not only within himself but within all selves and intrinsically bound to the particulars of our time. Soon time begins to reveal itself to him as transparent-"a medium rather like the water of a stream"-and so reveals its timeless quality. This time in which Dunne's story is told, in which all our stories are unfolded, he comes to perceive as a medium in which we draw forth God's eternal presence, which "surrounds" us into our own time. Wisdom thus becomes the realization of meaning in the unmeaning of time.

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At the end of his "wanderyear," Dunne plunges us with heightened vision into our own times, seeking light in the darkness of contemporary doubt. There are signs, he affirms. The locale in which the signs are sought is the Rotbko Chapel, where artist Mark Rothko created fourteen somber and almost featureless paintings evoking the way of the cross. Here Dunne peers into Rothko's paintings by proceeding prayerfully from station to station as one would in a Catholic church. As he enters into the abstract message, calling forth meaning in unmeaning, he begins to realize that "the paintings do not show Christ suffering so much as what is seen by the suffering Christ's eyes, what is felt by the suffering Christ's heart. They do not show men and women of our times as much as what is seen by human eyes and felt by the human heart of our times." This vision unfolds as Dunne perceives more deeply that the sign emerging here is that "Christianity presents salvation to human beings in a person rather than a doctrine." This person, into whose reality Dunne passes in the Rothko Chapel, "said yes to having been fashioned and born, to living and to dying." In embracing death and suffering, he became willing to live, willing to affirm with his whole being that there is "a greater life that lives through death, a joy that is deeper than sorrow." The signs of our own times are those persons whose lives affirm life in the midst of death, joy in sorrow. Here Dunne finds Wisdom once again, the person evoked in the somber Rothko panels. She is the presence both inner and outer-the "yes"-into whose light Dunne emerges by entering into the reality of Jesus crucified.

The penultimate visitation on our pilgrimage finds Dunne in the meditation room of the United Nations, fully conscious of living with the dark spectres of the nuclear age and meditating on "seeing conjoined with contemplation, sight pervaded with insight that promises to see beyond our situation, to see through the threat of death and destruction to the wonder of existence, to see clearly the choice that existence poses to us." Delving into the cloisters of his own person, Dunne breaks open the modern myth of the isolated individual and finds that the conjoining of knowing and loving, of "passing out of the self " and of allowing the self to be entered into is the Way of Wisdom. At the core of this way is the subtle and treacherous process of discerning the "I" that is known and loved by God, the "I" that allows self to be known, loved, to receive the wonder of existence and to offer self in unconditional loving relationship to God. Dunne offers us a vision of the person, of persons, as transparent, open to and opened onto the fullness of reality.

The last chapter is written at World's End, a peninsula near Hingham in Massachusetts. On the promontory, both geographical and perceptual, Dunne offers a reflective recapitulation of the pilgrimage now completed, the symbol now resolved. "The journey is with God and not simply toward God; ... solitude is being alone with the Alone and not simply being alone; ... an otherworld is a deeper life we live already now and not simply a life after life." We have seen into the meaning of the

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unmeaning of our times, into the darkness of the soul where Wisdom's light shines as a beacon.

House of Wisdom is a dense and sometimes difficult book, a rumination in the Christian apophatic tradition. It is the mature work of a man steeped in the Western intellectual and Christian traditions who speaks with stunning insight to the contemporary search for the dimensions of soul and for God in the faces of hunger, war, pestilence, and death.

Wendy M. Wright

Weston School of Theology
Cambridge, Massachusetts