Going at least back to the use of the eagle as a symbol for St. John the Evangelist, there has been an impulse to describe theologians and philosophers as soaring or climbing to heights inaccessible to the ordinary mind. Such imagery occurred to me often while I read this book, and I have to admit that I was sometimes unable to follow the author above the tree line. I’m not well-read in either theology or philosophy, so that many of his frequent references to other thinkers either were lost entirely on me or carried only a vague significance. More problematically, I sometimes simply did not understand the words, especially when Caldecott is speaking of things inherently impossible to put into words:
…it is the Holy Spirit, the unity and bliss of the Trinity, who is the repose of the Son in the Father and of the Father in the Son. The Spirit brings the circumincession to an “end,” not by stopping it, but by allowing it to be the infinite fullness it is. He is not beyond the circumincession, but is the beyond of the circumincession; he is its completeness, its infinite superabundance.
That’s from a chapter called “Divine Knowledge,” which is in part a defense of Meister Eckhart against the charge of heterodoxy. I don’t find it unintelligible, but neither can I say that I fully understand it. Several weeks after finishing the book I found myself thinking about it as a piece of music. When I hear music of any complexity for the first time, I don’t expect to fully appreciate it, or even to decide whether I like it or not. Even with pop music, if I don’t immediately like a song or an album but have reason to think I might—a review or the recommendation of a friend, say–I have a long-standing policy of giving it at least three hearings before I decide it really isn’t to my taste.
This book is like that. One reading has given me only a general feel for it. I don’t know that I will read it again from cover to cover, but I will definitely revisit several of the chapters that most intrigued me. It’s organized as three sections: “Nature,” “Divine Nature,” and “Sophia,” with each section containing several chapters treating particular topics that in general are of concern and interest in our time, in a way that might be described as grounded mysticism. The “Nature” section, for instance, attempts a new way of looking at the questions posed by the doctrines of mechanistic evolution, and concludes with reflections on the ecological question. But neither of these topics is approached in the conventionally argumentative way—the ecological considerations, for instance, do not simply repeat the valid but very familiar stewardship arguments. Instead, the discussions begin with an attempt to look deeply into the nature of the realities involved, with an eye that is at once informed by theological tradition and able to see afresh, and then to consider the implications of what is found there.
I really am at a loss to come up with a summary or a coherent overview of the book’s argument. Not that it would be impossible, not that the book is not coherent, but I would need to spend far more time studying it and thinking about it than I have time for at the moment. And for that matter to describe it as having an argument is to reduce it, for it is more meditation than argument, and yet a powerfully reasoned meditation. I spoke of grounded mysticism a moment ago; I could also speak of reasoned lyricism. For, despite the abstruse ideas and language, the book’s heart is a profound and joyful attentiveness to being, as we know it from both experience and revelation.
It would be hard to convey, without quoting at length, the way Caldecott moves back and forth from the mystical to the mundane. He doesn’t write like Chesterton at all, but there is a similarity in the vision, and perhaps—I see this only as I write—much of the commonality resides in that desire to see familiar things as if they were new discoveries.
I keep finding myself wanting to say something to the effect that he takes us to the limits of Catholic theology, but that way of putting it implies that there is some desire for escape at work. I don’t mean so much the limits of what Catholic theology allows, but of what it discloses. You feel like an amateur astronomer used to looking through his own small telescope getting a glimpse through the Hale—you see much further than you did before, and you see in much more detail what you were already able to see. Although there is a recurring pattern here in which an attempt is made to reconcile some idea, not necessarily part of the faith, possibly even at odds with it on some level, with the teachings of the Church, it came across to me for the most part not as a straining against limits but as an attempt to solve a puzzle: here is an idea which seems true, but is not clearly found in Catholic doctrine; is it possible to find a place for it?
This is especially noticeable in the “Divine Nature” section, which has chapters on Islam and Buddhism. The “liberal,” if I may use the term, Catholic approach to this encounter since Vatican II has often been either to wave away the differences or to see the Church as in need of education and correction. But Caldecott attempts to find points of deep commonality from within Christian revelation, not as part of a critique from outside (even when the liberal critique is from a Catholic theologian, he has often stepped outside to a place imagined to be objective and neutral). Nor is this the sort of “deep ecumenism” that holds all religions to be equal (but Christianity less equal than others). Rather, it begins with the Trinitarian premise—if there is a single idea which informs the book as a whole, it is that reality is Trinitarian through and through—and looks for ways in which that premise can illuminate and be illuminated by other faiths.
I would like to comment on the last section, “Sophia,” and on the last chapter within it, “Visions of Sophia?” (note the question mark). But I simply don’t understand it. I want to, because it has something to do with an understanding of Sophia as divine wisdom and also as a feminine figure. But how does it or she relate to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? I want to know, because for whatever psychological reasons of my own I have difficulty in giving to the Father and the Son, using those terms, the affective personal love which we are told to feel for God. I think this comes easier to women than to men; at any rate it doesn’t come easily to me, and I connect more with Dante than with St. John of the Cross (eventually I will write a long-contemplated essay on this subject). And I would like to have some approach to the Godhead through the feminine. (In passing, I wish my mental image of Our Lady were not so conditioned by art that I don’t really like.) But I really don’t understand this chapter. It may be the first I re-read.
A couple of weeks after I finished The Radiance of Being, a friend posted on Facebook his own personal religious creed, which he described as "Jeffersonian Christian," i.e. Christianity without the Christ. From his point of view it was clearly something larger and more free than Christian dogma. But my reaction was quite the opposite: I thought it was very small, and the idea of being confined to it seemed stifling. And I realized I was experiencing again something that I had felt when I entered the Church in 1981: that Catholic faith sets you free. How dull and oppressive to be limited to my own speculations and the skepticism of modernity. How liberating to see, beyond that little door that is Christianity, the infinite opening and opening and opening of the life of God, and to think of passing through that door and into that life. And to see the world we know in light of that. I hope I'm not exceeding the limits of a reviewer's privilege if I quote the closing paragraphs of The Radiance of Being:
Now that Christ has come, we see the depth of creation. Now that Christ has come, we can see everywhere the exchange of love by which the world was made, and is, and becomes; each thing and each person taking what is given by every other thing and person; and, if it does not give back, descending into darkness. And in the end, we shall see all things in God, as he does.
The world is entirely relational, constituted (that is) by its relation to God, all substance being the gift of God, received and given back to God by ourselves, and by God to himself. I who receive and am given, am in God receiving and giving, God being within me as the gift of myself and yet not myself, loving that which is in me that is not himself, the Father loving the Son in the Spirit.
The world is born in darkness as light, in the womb of the Trinity that is entirely luminous because the act of loving is all act and entirely act, being that which is given and received. All peace and all beauty are found in that darkness. The darkness is the light that cannot be seen because it sees all things, and it is the freedom to be, just as it is the freedom to love, because to be is to love and to love is to be.
I learned a few weeks ago that Stratford Caldecott has cancer and is not expected to survive much longer. It is sobering to think that he will soon know how nearly right or wrong he has been in this book, and how near his thought came to the reality. It makes such a book seem a considerably more serious matter than it might otherwise have. Of course we’re all in the position all the time of being only some limited span of time from the threshold, but we generally ignore it, and while we do these theological questions may seem an intellectual game. But they aren’t.
(The Radiance of Being is published by Angelico Press; ordering information here.)
Light On Dark Water 
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