You know, my entire career was at New York University, but I only taught the history of Christianity once. That's when one of my colleagues was not available. So I went back to my graduate study of St. Thomas Aquinas. And I loved it so much. When we got to Thomas in the class, I began to notice that the students -- most of them were Catholics -- had stopped taking notes. They stopped moving. It looked like they stopped breathing. They'd never realized that there was so much beauty behind the Catholic teaching. They thought it was about doing something right or wrong, rather than this great cathedral of language within which they could understand their very individual experiences. It struck me that what was great about Thomas is not that he was right or wrong, but that he's a poet. It's just beautiful work. It's an artistic creation of the greatest achievement. And when you take that insight and look across the traditions, you find people of very great poetic insight. The great religious figures are not philosophers, they're not historians, they're not institutional leaders in any sense. They are people who inspire the imagination and therefore deserve the word "poet." Read entire interview in Salon.
The logic of faith is not propositional, but analogic and poetic. It invites us into greater depths and religioius language fails in the same way that bad poetry fails insofar as it validates our habitual patterns of perception and thought rather than to break us out of them.
Any great theologian has his muse--she is Sophia referred to in the Book of Wisdom. And as a poem reveals something not ordinarily understood, so do the scriptures, and the great commentators and midrashists are poets whose raids on the unspeakable seek to articulate what the scriptures in moments of inspiration have revealed to them. Great poets and theologians operate on the vertical and on the dimension of depth. And as the capacity to operate on that dimension diminishes in the broader culture, particularly among the educated, so does the possibility to do poetry and theology or to appreciate it. The real question is not whether the great poets and theologians speak the truth, but why the rest of us have become incapable of hearing what they say.
The wisest know that whatever they understand is dwarfed by everything they don't. If you encounter a clergyman or theologian who thinks he has control over the meanings of the Scriptures, he is a hack. He is deluded and propounds bad religion. There are only mysteries pointed to and which draw us in, and the depth of our understanding depends on to what depths we have been drawn in. Sophia beckons, and either we respond or we don't. But no judgment can be made by someone who stands outside, who has neither seen her beckoning nor hearkened to it.
If you are looking for certainty, join a cult or some politically doctrinaire ideology. If you are interested in faith, be prepared to have your world turned upside down.