Word: sittler
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Negation is a part of faith's inmost character, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Sittler said last night in his fourth Noble lecture. Drawing up a "catalogue of forms of negation," Sittler first listed the "negation of no concern." If a man is absorbed solely in the "sheer operational activities" of human existence, he lacks "ultimate concern," and his negation is the "sheer stupidity of an ossified heart...
...past disappointments, as a conditioned reflex. When Christianity is offered as "a huge and rosy simplicity, gallant promises either crumple up in the hard clutch of need, or become mockingly simple symbols of childhood as they retreat before the dawning ambiguity in the moral intelligence." The Christian story, said Sittler, has "a tough, penetrating, hard purpose whose theatre is the dark dreads, tormenting anxieties, and constructive demands of life...
Finally, negation may be the "protest of affirmative nature against what seems to be the sterilizing claims of grace." But all that man can know of God is the way in which he cannot know God," Sittler explained, and therefore negation "brings to decisive clarity precisely what is involved in the affirmation of Grace and Nature." Faith has its peculiar courage in virtue of the persistent negation that accompanies it; faith is the ultimate risk, not a freedom from risk...
Setting forth phases to suggest the "awkward discontinuity" in human drives, Sittler said that within Possession--"the fire of nature and the creator of culture"--there operates a dialectic called Immolation. As C. S. Lewis writes, "To attend to your own love or fear is to cease attending to the loved or dreaded object...
...phrase Actually and Surprise, said Sittler, suggests that God's Grace, meeting us in community with a neighbor, also meets us in the actuality of world as nature. As Augustine wrote, "Thou hadst not sought me hadst thou not already known me." And Pathos and Passion illustrates man's condition and Christ's sacrifice, as in Gerald Manley Hopkins' lines...