Matt Segall gave his readers the following in his latest blog post:
“The Cartesian ego’s paranoid search for absolute certainty and formulaic Truth neglects the ambiguity of our world-in-process. The problem for the metaphysician, it seems to me, is not that Truth is ‘merely’ a fiction–that the real world is forever beyond our grasp–but that the world’s meaning is immense, immeasurable. There is too much meaning! It is for this reason that metaphysics has so often failed the polyphonic psyche and short-circuited its soul-making.” [footnotes2plato.com]

I wish we Christians would recover the awareness of ‘too much meaning’ at the heart of our fides quaerens intellectum (‘faith seeking understanding’). True theological apophaticism is premised by the dialectic between excessive meaning in God and the poverty of our senses, as Origen said, and among the ‘senses’ he included the intellect, the faculty by which the created mind ‘tastes’ and ‘sees’ the truth. We never gain more than a hint of its flavor, a glimpse of its beauty, but if we never cease in the quest (and live faith as hope), the glimpses and hints will grow.

I feel that a sort of ‘Cartesian paranoia’ pervades too much our doctrinaire Christianity, with the result that we sink into the illusion of having all the meaning we need, while meaning slowly leaks out of our narrowed minds.