Forms of theological thinking and religious practice that have featured the unimaginability and incomprehensibility of God are key to prayer and the mystical life.
Inclusive approach
Daniel Walden urges authentic engagement of Christians with the stories of transgender people as a path to greater inclusion to Church life.
I do not posit here a duty to receive the life stories that people tell us, including about their gender, without any critical engagement. But the reflexive denial with which transgender people’s stories are met is only “critical engagement” with an intellectual culture that routinely mistakes contrarian punditry for discussion, paid advertisements for book reviews, and publicity-seeking pronouncements for moral theology. Authentic engagement—the sort of radical encounter with other persons that Pope Francis regularly lays out as an obligation for all baptized Christians—demands that we suspend such instincts for immediate reaction. To be properly critical, we must first understand what we criticize. We must understand what a person is saying: what their terms are, how they map onto experience, and how the arrangement of those terms draws sense and meaning out of the sequential events of experience. Such understanding comes not from a momentary reaction to a single statement, but from sustained engagement with a person’s full understanding of their own life.1
Father Herbert McCabe is frequently cited in the article by Daniel Walden in Commonweal Magazine. The Irish Times describes the approach of Father Herbert that respected Catholic Orthodoxy and presented God as weakness rather than power.
At the centre of his faith was the image of a failed, reviled, first-century political criminal whose execution was a grim sign of how far the powers of this world will go when their interests are threatened. For him, God was a matter of weakness rather than power. When we spoke of him (or "she", as he sometimes casually referred to the Almighty in his sermons), we literally could not know what we were talking about. His thought thus joined a long Irish tradition of negative theology whose source was the great medieval philosopher John Scottus Eriugena.2
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines the Christian Neoplatonism of John Scottus Eriugena, the medieval philosopher who influenced Father Herbert McCabe.
Eriugena’s thought is best understood as a sustained attempt to create a consistent, systematic, Christian Neoplatonism from diverse but primarily Christian sources. Eriugena had a unique gift for identifying the underlying intellectual framework, broadly Neoplatonic but also deeply Christian, assumed by the writers of the Christian East. Drawing especially on Basil, Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus Confessor, as well as on the more familiar authorities (auctores) of the Latin West (e.g., Cicero, Augustine, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Boethius), he developed a highly original cosmology, where the highest principle, “the immovable self-identical one” (unum et idipsum immobile, Periphyseon, Patrologia Latina 122: 476b), engenders all things and retrieves them back into itself. Contrary to what some earlier commentators supposed, it is most unlikely that Eriugena had direct knowledge of the original texts of Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, or other pagan Neoplatonists, but he did have some direct knowledge of Plato (a portion of Timaeus in the translation of Calcidius) as well as familiarity with the pseudo-Augustinian Categoriae decem.3
Philosophy and theology that dates to medieval times may provide a foundation for sincerely listening to the voices and spiritual journey of transgender children of God.
References
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