Luminous with Purpose

Now and again I will present the work of others close to me on this Substack forum. The essay that follows appeared as the final chapter in my book The End of Christianity. It is entirely the work of my wife Jana Dembski, who wrote it about twenty years ago. This essay is a deep reflection on the connection between human and divine purpose. I present it here with her permission.

Poised between the Garden of Eden and the future Paradise, we can be like fugitives stranded in a no-man’s land without a sense of purpose. We know of a primordial state of bliss we lost and of a perfected state of bliss toward which we are moving. But in the meantime we are here, on this earth, with its perplexing mix of beauty and tragedy. Though banished from the Garden with its gate forever barred, the memory of that perfect union with God keeps alive the hope of Paradise. When we let that memory fade, this earth is a place of exile. But when we remember that the divine image is in each of us, this earth becomes an arena of purpose. Then our vision is liberated. The divine images in all of us shine and collectively illumine the way—a way of purpose.

What is the divine image that generates purpose? God, the Divine, is Love. Thus our divine image, our defining feature, is love. Tertullian says: “And this therefore is to be considered as the image of God in man, that the human spirit has the same motions and senses as God has.”[1] What are the “motions” of God? As a means of drawing all of us back to himself, God moved down into this earthly arena. Here, his crowning achievement was his “passion,” his death. “Passion” shares its etymological root with the word “passive,” which means “able to be moved.” The ultimate expression of our divine image is to allow ourselves to be moved to the point of sacrifice, with the motive of moving others toward a perfected state of bliss, toward Love. This sense of purpose makes life on this earth no longer hellish, but a wondrous place of duty.

Many faiths share the motif of voluntary self-sacrifice to enable a greater life. The biblical teaching is that “except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone: but if it dies, it brings forth much fruit” (John 12:24). It brings the fruit of love. In similar vein, the ancient Eleusinian mystery rites ritually reenacted the slaying, dismembering, and scattering of Osiris, and celebrated afterward his resurrection in the green wheat that sprang anew. The initiate was made to understand that the sacrifice of the individual opened up new and larger vistas of life.

Those of us who profess to have no faith still follow the impulse to move toward something greater than the self. Consider, for instance, the disillusioned youth. Perhaps he never learns that his defining feature is to give himself over to something that extends beyond himself. The youth, his instincts still ardent, must expend himself in some way. A life devoid of high calling repels him. Saint Augustine, at the age of seventeen, expressed this sentiment: “I wanted something to love but knew not what to love. I hated a life of security and with no snares for my feet.”[2] And a youth today may still feel this godly impulse. With no channels to guide his movements, he may give himself over to indiscriminate movements such as those found in the use of drugs. The vocabulary of drug abuse in particular is laden with imagery showing the need to move beyond one’s present state. One takes “uppers,” “downers,” drugs to “get high,” or to “take a trip.” Such movements cannot bring forth fruit; because such movements are erratic expressions of being lost, they miscarry.

Movements might become even more abortive. When we lose the image of God beyond ourselves and in ourselves, our sense of purpose is mutilated. This, in turn, can naturally lead us to mutilate others or ourselves. Man, the only creature capable of despair, is also the only creature who can out of this despair move to end his own life. In such a case, one sees no purpose in one’s life, and therefore no purpose in continuing his existence. This calls for a retraining of the imagination, a divine guidance that illumines the true nature of the images of God in this world. Such was the divine guidance of Beatrice, who in The Divine Comedy drew out the lost and disenchanted Dante. She took him through the inferno and the purgatorio, wherein he began to see and have compassion for the plight of the images of God. She purged his vision to see the world as it really was. At last she delivered him into paradiso, where he gazed upon the very movements of God in the great cosmic wheel:

Look up now, Reader, with me to the spheres;
Look straight to that point of the lofty wheels
Where the one motion and the other cross,
And there begin to revel in the work
Of that great Artist who so loves His art,
His gaze is fixed on it perpetually.[3]

We are irresistibly drawn through this world; time itself dictates that we change. But the image of God in us does not change. That image was by no means destroyed by the Fall but only distorted. Thus acts of hate are in fact acts of love gone awry. The image of God remains but is misdirected. Therefore our purpose is misdirected. Actions then “miss the mark,” which is the Biblical definition of sin. This is the only perspective from which to understand the missteps of others and the misguided movements of ourselves. The essence of humility is to realize that we’re all made of the same essence, the same dusty humus into which divinity is breathed. Knowing this, our purpose becomes the redirection and soothing of all who have lost our way. We embrace others and ourselves. While on earth, our way may seem precarious, but we all still bear the beautiful image of God. As W. H. Auden puts it in his 1937 poem “Lullaby”:

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.[4]

This understanding of humanity refines and burns away all sense of shame and accusation. We acknowledge that we are faithless and that we and others are guilty. Yet the image of God shines its aureole, and we see that our bond elevates the fleeting moment into something holy. No single moment of life is ever insignificant but is instead luminous with purpose.

Such an understanding focuses on the small, forgotten moments, but it also widens its focus to take in the large picture. It does not deny that time and fevers burn away beauty. Nor does it deny the fact of the grave. To deny the cruelties of life is cruel. Struggling to explain the place of evil, some have conceived of it as provisional for an ultimately good purpose. To the one suffering, this explanation can ring hollow. At such times, only trust in divine love—perhaps in the form of fellow sufferers bearing the divine image—can make the suffering bearable.

The stoic philosopher Epictetus possessed this understanding. Epictetus was brought up as a slave in the home of a freedman of Nero. As such, he never had “freedom” as most people conceive of it. Yet his spirit was free because it was informed by a lofty sense of purpose. Epictetus said: “For everything that happens in the world it is easy to give thanks to Providence, if a person has but these two qualities in himself: a habit of viewing broadly what happens to each individual, and a grateful temper.”[5] We can have a broad perspective and a grateful heart if we recognize that a divine Providence has a purpose.

In 1772, William Cowper was blessed with a sudden and unexpected view of the Providence of God. Despairing, he decided one day to jump into the Thames river and end his life. But because of the dense fog that day, coupled with his suicidal disorientation, he repeatedly lost his way to the river. Weary, he decided that he could go no further, and looking up, found that his footsteps had brought him back to the safety of his own front door. In that moment he recognized that God indeed had a purpose for his life. He dedicated the rest of his life to helping others understand the purpose of their own lives. One means of doing this was to write the hymn “God Moves in a Mysterious Way”:

Deep in unfathomable mines of neverfailing skill,
He treasures up His bright designs and works His sovereign will.
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take; the clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break in blessings on your head.
His purposes will ripen fast, unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste, but sweet will be the flower.[6]

In his 1959 prose poem “Archangel,” John Updike illustrates the way in which the seemingly small forgotten moments have yet been guided by a sacred purpose. In this poem, an archangel liberates a man’s perception to perceive the image of God in all created things, in one’s loved ones, and in oneself. Everything is luminous with purpose. The archangel conjures up a boyhood memory, allowing the man to see how every fleeting second dilates into eternity. The archangel whispers: “Certain moments, remembered or imagined, of childhood. Three-handed pinochle by the brown glow of the stained-glass lampshade, your parents, out of their godliness silently wishing you to win… Such glimmers I shall widen to rivers; nothing shall be lost, not the least grain of remembered dust, and the multiplication shall be a thousand thousand fold; love me.”[7] The man now sees that it was the image of divinity in his parents which enabled them to love and sacrifice for their child.

When this man received the visitation from the archangel, it is as when God allows us to see the sacramental nature of everything that has being. We then realize that to perceive a beautiful object merely as beautiful object is to miss the mark, or to sin. Augustine said that the very “queen of colours,” in and of itself, is transitory, and therefore could leave him “dispirited.”[8] But when he recognized God in all lovely things, he said “You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me, you put my blindness to flight.”[9]

Such is an instance of the promise in Zechariah 14:20–21: “On that day there shall be inscribed on the bells of the horses, ‘Holy to the Lord.’ And the cooking pots in the house of the Lord shall be as holy as the bowls in front of the altar; and every cooking pot in Jerusalem and Judah shall be sacred to the Lord of hosts.” On that day there is no arbitrary separation between the sacred and the profane. For while “profane” means “before or outside the temple,” on that day everything is part of the temple. And just as each detail of the temple had a specific, essential purpose, on that day we see that everything around us, every person around us, has a specific, essential purpose.

An old catechism poses its first question as “What is the chief end of man?” And the answer given is “To glorify God and to enjoy him forever.”[10] One definition of “glorify” is “to multiply the splendor.” Our purpose is to see the glory of God in its multiplicity, to see that even mundane things are splendid. Zechariah 14:20 confirms that this is to be our liberated vision. Our purpose is to see that nothing is without purpose. During such an “epiphany,” that is, with light shining all around, we see that each object is beautiful and luminous with the divine imprint.

Ancient philosophers have intuited this connection between beauty and the Divine. Plato taught that the love of beautiful things leads one to the love of Beauty, of Good, itself. Aristotle spoke of “great-souled” men such as Anaxagoras and Thales, who yearned for beautiful but useless things. These men gazed upon the “remarkable, admirable, difficult, and divine,” but they were judged by others to be “ignorant of what is to their own advantage.”[11] The purpose of these men was not focused upon taking care of themselves. Such a focus would have fulfilled only the acquisitive portion of their souls and would ultimately have fragmented their souls. These men were “great-souled” because their focus was upon the divine, thereby filling their whole soul.

Consider the example of Achilles in the Iliad, who was transformed from the greatest of all ancient heroes into something greater than a hero: a full-souled human being. Before his transformation, Achilles identified himself only with his goddess mother Thetis, scorning his human father Peleus. He refused to break bread with his human companions, instead eating ambrosia, which means “not human bread.” But after his wrathful hubris burns itself away, Achilles’ purposes change. His purpose now becomes to immerse himself in the common lot of humanity and serve others, for he now cherishes the divine image in humanity all around him. He washes and drapes the body of Hector, the arch-enemy he had killed and dragged triumphantly through the dirt. He roasts a sheep and serves it to Hector’s father and the enemy king, Priam. He shows compassion for his own father Peleus, saying he will stand by him in his old age. This story of service is an echo of another story: that of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, putting himself at the service of humanity. To do so was to align himself with the sacred purposes of the cosmos. He was the fully divine embodiment who reinstated the creative order. He presented an image of what our creative purposes are to be.

Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann depicts our creative role as beings in the divine image. The Creator God demands that man also participate in creation and thus fulfill his purpose. Neumann says:

This drive to realization, which is a living factor in everything creative, belongs to the essential nature of unitary reality, which manifests itself alike in the creativity of nature and in that of the psyche, and urges man on to unite them both. Creative man … must also obey the trend to realization of the unitary reality itself, which impinges upon him from within and without. This forces him to “transcend”—i.e., to break through the partial worlds—and by so doing to achieve the “Great Experience.”[12]

Neumann here uses verbs describing movement, such as “transcend,” and “break through the partial worlds.” The dynamic is a refraction of the Christian concept of movement toward a state of bliss, as discussed earlier. Neumann describes an expressly creative purpose of moving toward Love, which he terms “unitary reality.” It is our sacred purpose to place our own creative nature in consonance with the divine creative nature—to “unite them both.” It is our means of becoming a co-creator. It is a means of having dominion over all the earth, of being fruitful and multiplying. When we direct our purposes to be creative in this way, we reflect a feature of the divine Creator. To do so is to obey the drive toward “unitary reality.” Such a supreme unifying force has been recognized throughout times and cultures as Love. The Christian faith describes this Love as God Himself, from Whom all things proceed, to Whom all things are drawn, and Who charges all movements of humanity with purpose.

Wallace Stevens was one of the great twentieth century poets. He was fascinated with the sacred purposes of the cosmos. His work is preoccupied with ideas of order, with origins, with passageways that allow entrance into a never-defined realm of transcendental spirit. His poetry is lyric in the classical sense of the word, for his poetic ear listens for the lyre of the gods. That is, Stevens understands that man’s senses in this physical world are to be attuned in a suprasensual way to a divine realm. Although his poetry shows that he was always yearning to understand the divine order, Stevens did not become a Christian until his deathbed. He lay the last two weeks of his life in a hospital, asking questions while the nuns on the hospital floor prayed for him. He was at last baptized.

Wallace Stevens illustrates his longing to perceive the divine order, the divine purpose, in his 1935 poem “The Idea of Order at Key West.”[13] Here he depicts one seeing the beauty of the divine, and in turn rendering the world around him as infused with the divine. The poem describes this dynamic: the divine draws the poet to a state of contemplation, wherein his world is illumined. This allows the poet to see divine purpose reflected in human purpose. This draws the poet more deeply into the heart of the divine. It is a circle of love that never ends.

The poem climbs to a state of exaltation as the poet perceives that each mundane thing opens a window into infinity. Each created thing shines out, clear and full of purpose. The poem begins with “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” The “she” here is an archetypal anima, that which represents the feminine, chthonic part of the soul, that which is endowed with generative powers. “Genius” signifies exceptional generative powers, while “the sea” connotes energy of unbounded mystery and depth. Yet “she” sang even beyond this. Thus the poet understands that her song extends to the material world but is unconstrained by it. “She” is the idea, an image of creative divinity.

The anima expresses herself in the material world. The poet relates that she “Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry.” She yearned to reveal herself to the poet below. The poet goes on to describe the anima in terms of light: “the outer voice of sky”; “theatrical distances”; “bronze shadows heaped on high horizons”; “mountainous atmospheres of sky and sea.” He describes her as an austere geometrician who measures the light: “It was her voice that made the sky acutest at its vanishing.” This calls to mind the belief of the ancient Pythagoreans, who held that geometry explained the structure and purpose of the cosmos.

The poet relates that he and his friend “beheld her striding there alone,” and were transformed by her presence. They had been surrounded by the effusions of the divine, illuminating their vision to see the presence of the divine in everything around them, including mundane human endeavors. Their vision has been transmuted. They do what the medieval alchemists attempted to do: their vision turns base elements into gold. They engage in poesis, for, in a sense, they remake the natural order. The poet pleads with his friend to help him understand the divine mystery:

               …tell me, if you know,
               …tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order…
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred
And of ourselves and of our origins[14]

Thus the poet now turns his attention from the light of the transcendent anima to the “glassy lights” of the fishing village. The light of the divine has opened his eyes, and he now sees that all loving human endeavors reflect the light of the holy. Their purposes may be like the glassy lights—they may be fragile, prone to break if not gently held—but they still spread light. And not only do they spread light; they do so in a way which enhances the structure of the cosmos. Their lights master the night and portion out the sea. They arrange and deepen the enchantment of the night. Each glassy light is true in the sense of truth given by Thomas Aquinas: “the truth of a thing as the possession of the existence established for it.”[15] That is, each glassy light fulfills its purpose. The fishing village is vulnerable as it sways on the edge of the dark sea, yet it too shines with eternal purpose. And since the village contributes to the symmetry of the cosmos, its lights are beautiful, cosmetic—in the sense that “cosmos” and “cosmetic” are derived from the same ancient root word for order.

“Oh! Blessed rage for order… The blessed rage to order words of the sea…” For it is indeed a blessed thing to be consumed with fulfilling our part of the divine order, with fulfilling our purpose. Then we are drawn closer to the fragrant portals of eternity. Though the glass is dark, it is luminous, and we begin to see through it. And we see that we are being drawn more deeply into Divine Love.

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[1]Tertullian, Against Marcion (circa 208), II.16. The translation is by Andreas Andreopoulos in his article “The Icon of God and the Mirror of the Soul: Exploring the Origins of Iconography in Patristic Writing,” typescript, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1234&context=cmrs/comitatus (last accessed November 27, 2008).

[2]Augustine, Confessions, trans. F. J. Sheed (1943; reprinted Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 35.

[3]Dante Alighieri, The Portable Dante, ed. and trans. Mark Musa (New York: Penguin, 1995), 447.

[4]W. H. Auden, “Lullaby,” Another Time (New York: Random House, 1940), 41.

[5]Epictetus, Discourses, I.6, in Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion, trans. T. W. Higginson (New York: Walter J. Black, 1946), 17.

[6]William Cowper, “God Moves in a Mysterious Way,” The Lutheran Hymnal (St. Louis: Concordia, 1941), 514.

[7]John Updike, “Archangel,” Pigeon Feathers, (New York: Ballantine, 1959), 169–171.

[8]Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 240.

[9]Ibid., 232.

[10]The Westminster Shorter Catechism, q. 1. Available online at http://www.creeds.net/reformed/Westminster/shorter_catechism.html (last accessed November 28, 2008).

[11]Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, VI.7, 1141b 3–9, in Richard McKeon, ed., The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1941), 1028.

[12]Erich Neumann, Creative Man: Five Essays by Erich Neumann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 140.

[13]Wallace Stevens, “The Idea of Order at Key West,” in George Perkins et al., eds., The American Tradition in Literature (New York: Random House, 1956), 1316– 1317.

[14]Ibid.

[15]Thomas Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, in Timothy McDermott, ed. and trans., Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 54.