The living sky

"I must be Mary and give birth to God from me, so that he may grant me eternal bliss," says a couplet by Angelus Silesius, a German mystic of the 1600s. Mary, the first woman who says yes to God, opens the channel of communication between God and man, allows God to become man and man to become like God. "God is the poorest thing, which begs all naked and alone »says another couplet from Silesius. Here is the "mad love of God for man" by Nicola Cabasilas, a man of the 15th century Byzantine: "the Christian is a miserable man, but he knows that there is Someone even more miserable, this Beggar of love at the door of the heart".

God, being Love, has always been looking for someone who loves him and now finally, through Mary's yes, he has found him. And Pavel Evdokimov, a man of the twentieth century: faith is nothing but "the meeting of the descending love of God and the ascending love of man". Without love there is no faith: "If Love and Faith do not make them overcome Reason, theologians and clerics will not understand, despite having clear wits", says Margherita Porete, a mystic of the 14th century. In fact, they did not understand: and they burned her alive as a heretic in a square in Paris.

Like it or not the theologians, mysticism is philosophy, it is true theology that stammers something that smells of God: it is no coincidence that mystics of all ages, all latitudes and all religions, speak of God in the same way, with words that seem to reveal the hidden meaning of those of Jesus. It is the mystics who convey to us with their poetic words, always at the limit, the effort that Jesus made to make himself understood, until they are convinced that there is no it was another way to communicate the limitless love of God than to accept to die on the scaffold of evildoers.

There was no other way to defeat death that prevents men from entering the dimension of the Risen One, to make it clear that time and eternity are one dimension in God. And Silesius: "God cannot become an object of love for himself if not by coming out of himself, if not by manifesting his infinite being in finite form. In other words, becoming a man.

God and man are therefore essentially One ". Yes, words to the limit. Perhaps Angelus Silesius, born in Silesia in 1624 in the middle of the Thirty Years War, had seen too many to bother to veil the essence of his relationship with God. He had witnessed the atrocities of the most infamous war fought on German and European soil (except barbarian invasions and two world wars): 12 million deaths and the usual tragic outline of rape, robbery, fires, hunger, pestilence, crimes. When life is on the edge, words are on the edge. There is only one way for the world to change: for man to become like God: "You will not go to heaven before you yourself become a living heaven".

Flaminia Morandi
NP November 2020