SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE:

THE EMERGENCE

OF A NEW

THEOLOGY

"The quest for understanding requires that we give up the search for certainty and go on a voyage of discovery."

JOHN DUNNE, INTERVIEWED

BY KENNETH WOODWARD:

John Dunne, a Roman Catholic priest and philosopher, may be the most original religious thinker of our time. After decades of rationalistic de­emphasis on the myth and symbols of Christianity, Dunne has inspired a new school of "narrative theologians" who are rediscovering the importance of myths, symbols, and images in man's search for meaning and self­understanding. Like the late Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, he is a lone scholar with a prodigious talent for synthesis. But `where Teilhard looked to evolution for evidence of God's power and man's spiritual development, Dunne examines the stories we tell­the scriptures, epics, myths, poetry, biographies.

His contribution to religious philosophy is contained in a series of books beginning in 1965 with The City of the Gods: A Study in Myth and Mortality. In it, he analyzed societies according to the way they resolved the problem of mortality. In A Search for God in Time and Memory (1969), Dunne compared autobiographies, from Augustine's Confessions to Sartre's Words, to show how the telling of a life story gives shape and meaning to a person's experience. In The Way of All the Earth (1972), he used the life stories of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed to demonstrate how, through sympathetic understanding of these figures, we can experience their illuminations as part of our spiritual odyssey.

With the publication of Time and Myth in 1973, Dunne began to focus more directly on his own spiritual journey, and the conflict between the man of spirit and the man of flesh. The journey continues in The Reasons of the Heart (to be published this spring by Macmillan, in which he explores the depths of solitude, and what it is like to walk, in darkness and light, with God

.

Dunne is a shy, 47­year­old Texan who has spent most of his professional life teaching and writing at Notre Dame University, in Indiana. He works in a spare attic study atop a Victorian house near the campus, which he shares with several other priests. Dunne writes with a poet's precision and at a poet's pace. On a very good day he produces four well­wrought paragraphs; more often, he manages only one or two, or none at all.

Because of his somewhat reclusive nature, and the limited popularity of his books, Dunne is not widely known among his academic colleagues. Last spring, when Notre Dame was host to an international conference on reforms in the Roman Catholic Church, he was not among the invited speakers. Few of the Church's more celebrated theologians recognized the tall, bearded, solitary figure who wandered in and out of the lectures. When Hans Kung, the Swiss theologian, announced that his next book would be a study of God, I asked him if he had read Dunne on the subject. "Who is he?" Kung asked.

Born in Waco, Texas, Dunne gave up an early ambition to compose music and turned to religious philosophy. After attending Notre Dame's Holy Cross Seminary, he spent most of the 1950s in Rome, acquiring his doctorate in theology. In the course of his doctoral studies, Dunne became so dissatisfied with the imprecision of conventional theology that he took up, on his own, the study of symbolic logic and the foundations of modern mathematics. From there he proceeded, still on his own, through the existentialists, and then on to the work of modern Protestant theologians. The questions they raised about the meaning of life and death drew him back to theology.

In 1957, Dunne returned to Notre Dame, where he has taught for the past 20 years. His reputation as a teacher is such that students camp out all night in order to get a seat in his classes. (He teaches such courses as "Death and Rebirth," "Religion and Biography," and "Religion and Mysticism.") In 1969, he won the Danforth Foundation's Harbison Award for Distinguished Teaching.

Recently' some of Dunne's former students who are now missionary priests in Chile have urged him to extend his method to Marxism and the struggle for liberation in the Third World. The idea intrigues him. "For Marxists," he says, "the key to liberation is praxis ­doing what history is doing. For a Christian, we could say that liberation is doing what God is doing, and so giving up our plans for making history."

"He is thinking out-and living out-perhaps the most important theological experiment of our generation," says philosopher Michael Novak. "Like Gandhi, he is experimenting with truth by remaining faithful to the spirit of inquiry, wherever it takes him." Religious historian Martin Marty says Dunne does not fit neatly into any theological category. "There is not another thinker, religious or secular, like him," Marty says. "He brings to a too literal age the seer's gift for uncovering the connections between our existing approaches to knowledge." -K.W.

Kenneth Woodward: It has been about 13 centuries since rise of the last great world religion-Islam. You have suggested that a new religion, or at least a new form of spiritual adventure, may be emerging in our time. What do you have in mind?

John Dunne: I am thinking about two aspects of today's spiritual climate. One is the convergence of the world's religions. In some ways, it's like the late Roman Empire, when different religions, including emergent Christianity, were encountering one another.

I am also thinking of a paradigmatic religious figure of our own time like Gandhi and his "experiments with truth." Gandhi was born into Hinduism, yet, in his search for truth, he

experimented with Christianity and Islam before returning with renewed understanding to his own religion.

It seems to me that we are now in an age when the representative holy man is not a Buddha, a Jesus, or a Mohammed, who founded world religions, but a figure like Gandhi who passes over to the perspective of other religions and then returns with new insights into his own.

Woodward: Is today's spiritual adventurer searching for a common pattern, or "Ur­form," beneath all religious experiences ?

Dunne: No. While there are certain characteristics common to all religions, what is important in each is its unique insight-the enlightenment or revelation It brings into the common experiences of mankind. By passing through what I call "sympathetic understanding" of other religions, one can appropriate those insights and return to one's own. In this way, all the basic spiritual experiences of humankind can somehow be reenacted in our own lives.

Woodward: If I may try to summarize your work briefly, you seem to have seized upon the stories man has told about himself down through the ages- from cosmic myths and epic poems to autobiographies and the life stories of Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed-as various chapters in a single, continuing quest for self­understanding. This approach to theology sets you apart from any other theologian I have ever known or read. You not only describe that quest but go on it yourself in your various books. Finally and this is what gives your theology a purchase upon us you seem to require the reader to make the same quest or journey as he reads your books.

Dunne: That's right. The basic structure and theme of my theology, you could say, is the spiritual journey.

It is essential to wait for the basic questions of life to arise

personally before you theologize; otherwise you have the

answers, but no pressing questions.

Woodward: But it also seems to me that what is distinctive about the present moment in religion, at least in the U.S., is a pronounced movement into Eastern religions, into "born­again" Christian fundamentalism' or into some absolutist blend of both, such as the Unification Church of Dr. Sun Myung Moon. In each instance, I see a process of conversion, not an experiment with truth; a one-way movement that doesn't include returning to one's original tradition, as you said before.

Dunne: I agree that there is a good deal of the one­way movement you describe. But that is not the whole picture by any means.

What you're alluding to is what I would call a quest for certainty, a substitution of one kind of certainty for another; whereas what I am talking about is a quest for understanding.

Woodward: What's the difference?

Dunne: The quest for certainty is self-defeating, and that is true whether the certainty we seek is an assurance about God or about some person we love very much or about the significance of our own selves. In each case, I think, the more we seek certainty or assurance, the more uncertain we become. The appeal of the Moon movement, of fundamentalism, and in some cases of Oriental religions for young people of the West is that they seem to promise a certainty and assurance on all three levels. But the quest for understanding, as I see it, requires that we give up the search for certainty and go on a voyage of discovery And there is a lot to discover about God, about other people and about ourselves.

Woodward: When did you yourself give up the quest for certainty?

Dunne: That happened when I was doing my graduate studies in Rome in the late 50s, long before I wrote any of my books. I was wrestling with the problem of trying to be intellectually certain of the existence of God. Gradually, I came to see that the fundamental question is not "Is there a God?" but rather "What is God?" The first question presupposes that one already understands what God would be if there were a God. The second, on the contrary, calls for a voyage of discovery about life and about God, a journey toward God and with God.

Woodward: The journey image is very appealing. It's kinetic, dramatic, primal. But doesn't it also hide a philosophical relativity? Doesn't it assume that there is no absolute truth?

Dunne: The only absolute standpoint would be God's. For us, God is always limited by our own horizons, and the same is true of our understanding of other people and of ourselves. We achieve different insights into who we are at various stages in our lives. We achieve insights into others as our relationships with them change, and the same is true with respect to God. To get at those insights, however, we cannot assume a fixed perspective. This is why I have called the spiritual journey of our time a quest for understanding. You might say the method of passing over is a way of acknowledging cultural relativity without at the same time concluding that nothing is true.

Woodward: Give me a concrete example of what you mean by "passing over."

Dunne: Let me tell you how I began using this method even before I gave it a name or formulated it very clearly for myself. At the outset of my writing career, I spent about a year working on a book of political theology. I wanted to show how, beginning with the Greek city­states, in every age the city of man has had its own gods. But I just couldn't breathe any life into the subject. Meanwhile, I happened to read the Babylonians Epic of Gilgamesh and found that my real gut problem was death, not political theology. I had just turned 30, and I suddenly saw my youth passing and my own life opening up toward death. So I let the problem of death become the question behind my book: If I must die someday, what can I do to satisfy my desire to live?

Woodward: How did reading Gilgamesh help you hit upon the method of passing over?

Dunne: Gilgamesh goes on a great journey searching for some way to achieve immortality. I saw that we all do that. I saw that in every age and every society man tries to achieve some form of immortality. I found that I could enter the door of every culture by asking in each case how the problem of death was posed and what was the characteristic solution. I found the problems and solutions by examining the characteristic myths of each period as they are contained in epics and other literature. Thus, in the culture of the Greek city-states, I discovered the answer to death was to do immortal deeds; in the Roman Empire, it was to run the gamut of human experience. And so on into the modern era, where, it seems to me, the task has been to find significance for the self.

Woodward: How does your approach to the past differ from that of an historian of culture? In other words, how does entering other cultures the way you do become a spiritual journey or an experiment with truth?

Dunne: The difference lies in passing over. Writing cultural history would be like seeing the past as a museum in which all these previous cultures exist like statues. Passing over, on the other hand, is like the story in Stravinsky's Firebird ballet, where the hero, by capturing the Firebird, is able to bring all the statues to life. Once we have a question like death, which we have to answer for ourselves, then the solutions of other cultures become realistic options.

I found in writing my first book, The City of the Gods, that as long as I thought what the Egyptians were doing with mummies and what they were writing in The Book of the Dead were merely odd or bizarre, I knew I hadn't truly passed over. It was only when I could see myself believing those things, living them, having them make complete sense to me, that I knew that I had passed over into their culture.

Woodward: I see. But didn't passing over require a kind of willing suspension of belief in the solution to death proclaimed by your own religious tradition, Christianity? After all, you had a doctorate in theology and had been ordained a Roman Catholic priest before you wrote your book on death. Weren't you only feigning your belief in alternate solutions to death when all the time at least unconsciously you saw the solution in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Dunne: Of course, my background and all the studying I had done had a huge influence in shaping what I would eventually see as an answer. And, yes, at the end I came to see that all the answers to death fail except one. In the story of Jesus, I discovered that we have a relationship to death as well as to life, and that that relationship, grounded in the power of God, outlasts death itself. I

was on such a high when I finished that book that my friends thought I would never write another.

Woodward: I realize that the recital of your conclusion doesn't do justice to the process that went into getting there. But it still seems as if you knew what the answer would be all along.

Dunne: My point is that there is a tremendous chasm between the answers you have already from a religious tradition and the real questions that come up in your life. The answers you get from the Bible, say, or from the Koran or the Bhagavad Gita are so powerful that they can easily stifle the questions.

Woodward: It strikes me that your method is very similar to the theology of Paul Tillich, who had such an enormous influence on Rollo May and, in fact, the entire school of existential psychoanalysis.

Dunne: Tillich developed a very systematic method of correlating answers from Christian symbolism with the basic questions we ask about life. For him, God was the answer to the question of being, Christ was the answer to existence, and the Resurrection was the answer to death. Like Tillich, I think it is essential to wait for the question to arise personally before you begin to theologize otherwise, you have answers but no pressing questions. But I found Tillich's method of correlation too balanced, too quick with the answers. He left out the journey.

Woodland: The journey from question to answer?

Dunne: Right. The method implicit in my work is similar to Rilke's advice in his Letters to a Young Poet, where he tells the poet to live the questions he has about life and to let himself live into the answers. The process of living into the answers is the journey.

Woodward: So living into the answers involves going on journeys into other cultures, as you did with the question of death, experimenting with the truth in light of other myths?

Dunne: Yes, but there is more to my method that that. We are living our own journeys, seeking insights as we go along our way, discovering who we are, what God may be like, and what sort of story we are living out. There is no sense in passing over to other cultures if we are not at the same time seeking answers to these personal questions.

Woodward: What other methods do you use in your theology?

Dunne: In terms of formal influences, I am indebted to Jesuit philosopher Bernard Lonergan's theory of understanding, in which knowledge of any kind is a process of gaining insight from images. I have also learned much from Jung, who explored the origins of images in feelings. My own method, which I've never set out in great detail, is a process of eliciting images from feelings, attaining insight into those images, and converting insights into a guide for life. I see this process as the way in which the human mind works all across the stages of life. So the quest for under standing becomes a journey from insight to insight in the search for "the way, the truth, and the light."

Woodward: That's pretty abstract. Can you give an example of how I, for instance, would go about applying your method?

Dunne: One way you might begin is by keeping a spiritual diary, like Dag Hammarskjold's Markings, in which you wouldn't record just the daily events of life but rather your deeper feelings and reflections about those events. Doing this, you become conscious of your feelings, put them into images, and gain insights into them. Another way would be to write an autobiography, or at least an outline of your autobiography.

Woodward: In other words, write the story of my journey through life to date.

Dunne: That's what I have my students do. Right away, they find there are a lot of different ways of telling their life story. So I suggest that they find a model to help give it shape. St. Augustine's Confessions is a good one, since it is the original model for the whole literary genre of autobiographies. Jung's is good, too, and so is William Butler Yeat's. And then there is Kafka's Letter to His Father and The Diary of Anais Nin. Ultimately, though, these models are just a help in getting students to examine the grain of their own lives.

Woodward: That sounds very much like Jungian psychoanalysis.

Dunne: There are similarities. I also have them write out a personal creed in which they ask themselves how they really feel about received doctrines and dogmas, images of God, and stories of Jesus. It helps them get through to their own state of inner doubt or assurance or whatever. Sometimes I assign them a book like Rilke's Stories of God, which has the effect of jarring them loose from received images and allows them to come at the question of what God means to them in a fresh way, by creating their own images of God.

Woodward: As I recall, you did these things yourself in preparing for your second book, A Search for God in Time and Memory, in which you passed over into individual lives, rather than cultures, via autobiographies and life stories. I found it the most stimulating but also the most demanding of your four books. I doubt if I could summarize it.

Dunne: Yes, people tell me that is my most difficult book. I started out to compare life stories in relation to the problem of death, but I became so interested in the loneliness I found in modern autobiographies that my chief concern became the problem of the self in modern Western culture.

Woodward: How would you summarize that problem?

Dunne: Well, I'd say that the self becomes a central preoccupation in Western culture with the coming of the Renaissance and the Reformation. That's when we get the first great outpouring of autobiographies, which is one clue. With the decline of the hierarchical society of the Middle Ages, there is an emphasis in politics and economics on the autonomous individual. In philosophy, we get a revolution with Descartes, who takes the self as the starting point of thought: "I think, therefore I am." In social thought, we . find Rousseau proposing the cultivation of the unique, individual personality. In religion, there is Luther's doctrine of salvation by faith alone, which is another way of finding assurance for the individual apart from any institution, or even from doing good deeds. All these are examples of certifying the importance of the self.

Woodward: As against what, society?

Dunne: More than that. Basically, it's an assertion of the self against death as the common lot of humanity. More and more, I see the Black Death, which swept across the face of Europe in the middle of the 14th century, taking the lives of a third or more of the population, as the great historical turning point between medieval and modern culture. It erupted with such menacing force that man was reduced to himself. And the great mediating institutions of the Middle Ages, the lords spiritual and the lords temporal, lost their lingering influence over the lives of individuals.

Woodward: That's an intriguing argument. Can you cite any cultural illustrations to bolster it:

Dunne: We can compare Dante with Luther. Dante wrote The Divine Comedy just before the Black Death broke out. In that poem, he journeys through hell, purgatory, and heaven. There, you could say, death is a part of life. But in the 16th century, we find Luther comparing hell, purgatory, and heaven to despair, uncertainty, and assurance. There, you could say, the journey has been reduced to states of the self on this side of death.

Woodward: What happens after the 16th century?

Dunne: As you move into the 18th 19th, and 20th centuries, looking at autobiographies, philosophy, and poetry, what you find is a loss of confidence in the self. Death, in particular, seems to overwhelm the self. We find Hegel talking about death as "sovereign master" and Kierkegaard of "sickness unto death." A loneliness creeps into autobiographical writing, the sense of having lost something larger than the isolated self. Then, gradually, in the work of poets like Yeats and Rilke and, of course, in the psychology of Jung, you get a yearning for a wholeness beyond the self, a concern for soul, the non-self and for a God who seems to be hidden in the darker recesses of the psyche.

Woodward: I think the most extraordinary passages in your book A Search for God in Time and Memory are those in which you pass over into the life of Jesus to achieve the kind of insight into his life that he himself experienced. "Neatest trick of the week," I wrote rather flippantly in the margins. I was thinking of how other theologians and Scripture scholars still argue among themselves about the reliability of the Gospel texts and the difficulty of discovering the historical Jesus behind the Gospels' Christ of faith.

Dunne: I suppose it does seem rather bold to think that we can reenact Jesus' own quest for understanding. What we have in the Gospels are four biographical accounts of Jesus, each written from a different viewpoint of the post-Resurrection faith. To pass over into the life of Jesus, however, we have to enter an autobiographical mode, to try to see Jesus' life as he saw it;

Woodward: But Jesus is not, in the orthodox Christian perspective, just another man. From that perspective, he is both human and divine, God incarnate. Assuming we can pass over to his viewpoint, wouldn't that be equivalent to passing over to God's viewpoint, at least for a Christian?

Dunne: I don't think even the most orthodox Christian can begin to appreciate the staggering mystery of the Incarnation, or the impact of the fundamental Christian statement "Jesus is Lord," without first grasping the reality of Jesus' humanity. To do that, it seems to me, a Christian has to pass over from the position in which Jesus is seen as a "culture hero," to use Jung's term, through an intermediary stage in which Jesus becomes fully and unequivocally human, as he appeared to himself and to his own disciples.

Woodward: How do you go about penetrating Jesus' humanity?

Dunne: To say that Jesus is fully human means that at various points in his life, he gained insight into himself and his relationship to God.

Woodward: Would you say that Jesus went to his death seeing himself as a failure, at least in his efforts to convert Israel to his God?

Dunne: If we look on the conversion of Israel as his life work, we could certainly say that Jesus failed. But we can also say that in laying down his life for God, he also laid down his life's project. In the end, he put his whole life in the hands of a God who, however intimate, was still mysterious in his ways. That is one of the insights from Jesus' life story that we can carry back into our own lives.

Woodward: So, from a human viewpoint, you would say that Jesus died broken in spirit as well as in body.

Dunne: No, quite the contrary. Jesus experienced God in a unique way, as "Abba"--an intimate term for father --who accepts and loves unconditionally. He taught his disciples that they, too,

could have this relationship to the Father. Even at the final turning point in his life, during his Passion, Jesus is still discovering what this intimate relationship with God is for him. In the garden of Gethsemane, he prays that his approaching death be taken from him, yet he puts his confidence in the Father. Then, on the Cross, he experiences his final test of despair: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But he does not despair. His final words are "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit"---a final act of filial confidence.

Woodward: But that is as far as we can travel with Jesus, is it not, since that is the end of his life from a human perspective?

Dunne: We cannot yet follow Jesus from the darkness of death into the light of his Resurrection, any more than we can yet journey beyond our own death. But we can go through the letting­go of everyone and everything that is called for in death. We can go through that now and thus pass through death to a new and deeper life. We can come in that way to understand the relationship of Jesus with God, an intimacy with God that is able to endure death and survive it. That's why, in my own quest for understanding, I've come to imagine the spiritual journey as a walking with God, a companionship with God on a journey from insight to insight.

Woodward: Why, then, would a Christian pass over into the lives of Buddha, Mohammed, and so forth, which you have described as the spiritual adventure of our time? Why did you yourself experiment with the truth in that way?

Dunne: For several reasons. For one, I feel that I am more a Christian after having experienced, in some way, the insights of a Buddha or a Mohammed; by not merely examining their doctrines or spiritual techniques. Passing over to their standpoints seems to allow aspects of my own spirit to surface, like the way one guitar resonates when the string of another is plucked.

Secondly, if we are living in a time of convergence among world religions, then it seems better to try to understand them as personal quests than merely to confront them with rival truth claims. Finally, I have always been especially fascinated by the story of Buddha, much as I was excited by the Gilgamesh epic.

Woodward: What insights did you gain from passing over into Buddha's life?

Dunne: Much more than I could say in a brief conversation. I dealt with them in The Way of All the Earth, in which I used the life stories of the founders of the world's religions as a way of passing over to those religions.

Woodward: Just describe some of the differences you found between the life stories of Jesus and Buddha.

Dunne: First, I think we have to notice the parallelism in their life patterns. Each lives in the world for about 30 years, and then goes into the desert or forest seeking solitude; there each wrestles with false alternatives; there each receives enlightenment or revelation and each returns to share what he has found with others. The main difference is that in Jesus' life, the time in the desert and afterward is telescoped into three years, whereas Buddha spends seven years in solitude and another 40 teaching.

Woodward: There seems to me to be a great difference in what they brought back, taught, and subsequently experienced. Jesus brought back the revelation of men's filial relationship to God, yet his journey with God was not complete until his Resurrection. In between, he suffers and dies a cruel death. Buddha, on the other hand, does not speak of God or even of the soul. He returns from the desert fulfilled, and lives to a ripe old age. The nontheistic way of the Buddha seems better.

Dunne: I see what you mean. The Buddha more or less brings things to a standstill and terminates the journey with a kind of wholeness. He walks alone, whereas Jesus walks with God. I must admit that the idea of achieving wholeness alone, like Buddha, continues to fascinate me.

Woodward: Can one achieve enlightenment like the Buddha by passing over into his life story?

Dunne: I didn't. But in the moment of passing over into another life, one does experience a kind of "no­self, " or anatta, as in Buddhism, or a "universal self," or atman, as in Hinduism. And in the moment of coming back there is a return to self, as in the Biblical religions-in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. That's part of what I mean by saying that the adventure of our times involves a re­enactment of all the spiritual experiences of mankind. Comparing these experiences, I would say that for myself, the Christian experience is much truer to life because it requires coming to grips with the dark side of life rather than turning one's back on it. Often I think that much of the appeal Oriental religions have for Westerners is that-- to us, at least-- the Orientals seem so peaceful and whole, whereas Christians are always struggling.

Woodward: Where are you going next on your own spiritual journey?

Dunne: In my Yale lectures, published as Time and Myth, I experimented with telling the story of the spiritual adventure myself. I saw more clearly how it is an adventure of the spirit, because the spirit--both self and soul-- is our relationship to the things of life which must pass. As I got into telling the story, I saw that it is not enough to be just a man of the spirit; to be whole one must be a man of the flesh as well. The story of God, I also saw, is the story of a God who relates to both spirit and flesh, who in fact becomes flesh as we are.

Woodward: You have mentioned frequently your image of walking with God. How does one know when one is walking with God?

Dunne: That's the problem I've tried to deal with over the last three years in writing my latest book, The Reasons of the Heart. I see it as the problem we all have, of choosing a road in life. If I go into this work, or share my life with this person, then I cannot go down another road doing other work or sharing my life with another person. So it seems that no matter what choice I make, there is the loss of the road not taken.

Woodward: Do you see this as a particularly modem problem?

Dunne: We do have more options than in more traditional cultures. But I see it as a perennially human problem. I used to think that Jean­Paul Sartre was right, that you just choose. But I've become more and more convinced that there is a way or road that is meant for one to find, the path of one's deepest desire. God, for me, begins to figure in here, the idea of God's will for me. It seems to me that the ideas that there is a path and that there is a God go together. Just as the ideas that there is no path--one simply chooses-- and that there is no God go together for Sartre.

Woodward: Will you ever write your personal creed?

Dunne: I don't have to. It's already been done for me in the Gospel of John. Reading that, I find John is always just a little bit ahead of me up the road.

Kenneth Woodward is a general editor at

Newsweek specializing in religion, culture,

and behavior.

Reprints available. See Classified Advertising.

"In my own quest for understanding, I've come to imagine the

spiritual journey as a companionship or a walk with God on a journey

from insight to insight."

On the Holy: "One encounters the holy-the dreadful and the fascinating-- in different guises in the course of one's life, earlier in the guise of sex and later in the guise of death." Time and Myth

On the Life Story: "In the earliest part of the A.D. period the life story appears to have been essentially a story of deeds....In a later period the life story seems to have become rather a story of experience. In the modern period the life story seems to have become a drama of the self, a story of appropriation."

"As long as the life story is lived and told as a story of appropriation [or self­realization], each age in life will have a definite task . . . whether the appropriation of reality is regarded as a process of making realty unique or a process of making the self universal. The task of childhood will be to set the pattern of the life experience; that of youth to determine the lifework, that of manhood to decide the relationship between the life experience and the lifework, and that of age to complete the appropriation by the final acceptance of life." -A Search for God in Time and Memory

On the Longing for God: "As long as my heart is not kindled, the thought of an intimacy with God, of being known by God, even of being loved by God, can be terrifying. There is a longing for intimacy in the loneliness that pervades the human condition, but there is also a fear. It is the fear, it seems, that renders the longing weak and ineffectual, that reduces it to a pining and a languishing....When the spiritual adventure begins, though, when longing becomes so powerful that it 'casts out fear,' when there is a relationship with God, then there is no more question about the existence of God." The Reasons of the Heart

On Knowledge: "The essence of both autonomy and power... is knowledge: it is knowledge that gives a man a rich interior life, so that he is less in need of friends outside of himself; it is knowledge that gives him the tactics and strategy to defeat any enemies....The only way we can make him [man] completely autonomous and get his power completely inside of him is to make his knowledge its own object. This is Aristotle's definition of God, a 'knowing of knowing,' and it became Hegel's definition of the autonomous human spirit.

"A knowing of knowing...would mean knowing how an artist thinks, putting a thing together; knowing how a scientist thinks, taking a thing apart; knowing how a practical man thinks, sizing up a situation; knowing how a man of understanding thinks, grasping the principle of a thing; knowing how a man of wisdom thinks, reflecting upon human experience. It could mean being able to think in all these ways.. all in one.'' -The Way of All the Earth

On Faith: "Faith Is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." The things hoped for... have changed from epoch to epoch: posterity, land,, kingdom, righteousness, participation, selfhood. The things not seen have been differently named: God as El, the Lord as Yahweh, God as Abba, Jesus as Lord, the man consubstantial with God, the absolute paradox of God become man. Yet the substance of the things hoped for and the evidence of the things not seen has been present in one epoch after another, and in this we can discern the outlines of a city of god." -The Metamorphoses of Faith

On "Passing Over": "Passing over is essentially a matter of sympathetic understanding; a man must have within him somehow what he finds in another. The Way of All The Earth