Excerpt from Ch 4 from the manuscript “Idioms of Spirit” by Timothy Lavenz, April-May 2022

Chapter 4
Receptivity:
Prayer as mood, method, and attunement of created spirit

My longing for truth was one single prayer. –Edith Stein

To bespeak God is to become the object of God’s address. We could not possibly stress enough the degree to which this inverts our spontaneous attitude to our speech, when we consider ourselves the speaker who has something to say and wishes to be heard. In bespeaking God it is the reverse: God has something to say, and we are the ones who are to listen, and this fact reaches down to my innermost speech to change me and certainly covers everything I dare say about God. Good intentions immediately capsize in falsity when and to whatever degree it is ‘I’ who wish to be heard and not God through my speech. And yet, at the other end, there is the even greater risk of ‘identifying’ with God or the voice of the divine. Both roads to falsity, hubris, and pride appear when the enthusiasm of inspiration gets away from itself and breaks the rule of spirit. Here we can demonstrate the great benefit of Christ’s trinitarian example of how to live rightly before God:

For though the fullness of deity dwelt wholly and bodily in Him (Col 2:9), He did not take equality with God as a thing to possess but humbled Himself unto death on a Cross, taking the form of a slave for our sake (Phil 2:6-11). As the Son of God He affirmed He incarnated the great I AM (Jn 8:58). The Father has given Him all things (Jn 16:15), and the Father and He “are one” (Jn 10:30). Yet right here, where the unity between God and Man is absolute, Jesus in his form as a servant points to the ever-greaterness of God, saying that He goes to the Father because “The Father is greater than I” (Jn 14:28). Repeatedly He tells us that His mission is the Father’s and only through the Father is it is His own. The Son has life in himself because the Father grants His life to live in Him. The Son does what the Father gives Him to do. He judges only as God tells him to judge. He does not speak on his own authority but in the authority of the Father. He has come to finish the Father’s work (see Jn 5). Likewise, Scripture tells us again and again about the power of the Holy Spirit working in and over Jesus’ life. Indeed, not a moment of the Son’s life on earth went by without the Spirit of God dwelling upon Him and acting through Him: at His conception (Lk 1:35), at His baptism (Lk 3:22), at His flight into the desert (Mk 4:1), at His proclamation of the Kingdom (Lk 4:14-18), at His miracles of healing (Mt 12:28), at His crucifixion (Heb 9:14), at His death (Lk 23:46), at His resurrection (Rom 8:11), in His orders after the resurrection (Acts 1:1), in His sending out of the apostles at Pentacost (Acts 2). In all things, Jesus Christ is anointed by God “with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38). The Son is always sent by and returning to the Father, in and through the power of the Spirit. We are thus shown what is perfect Sonship through Jesus Christ, who models and manifests for us the triune life–a life that lets God live in us, act in us, and be God in us.

In Jesus Christ, the unity between finite human words and the infinite Word of God is achieved. This Word is eternally the Word of the Father in the Spirit and the Son’s own: for He has received it from God in power and in truth as God’s own bespeaking Himself–God’s own Word. In speaking God’s Word through a human mouth, Jesus shows us forever the right posture to take before God: obedient receptivity, both in unceasing prayer with the Father (unbroken communication in the essence of God) and in permanently active willingness to follow the rule of the Holy Spirit (unbroken doing of the Father’s will).  Upon witnessing His perfect prayer and perfect obedience in action, we believe Jesus’ human will was perfectly united with the divine will. In Him the Son did among men in the world what the Son in the Trinity does eternally: reflect, utter, and show us the Father.

We turn to Jesus then to understand what it means to mirror God for the world, for He teaches us the existential posture of totally surrendered openness and receptivity to heaven’s coming on earth. An idiom will be more Christian according to this criterion: Does it reveal a love and knowledge of God that approaches Christ’s? For Christ has manifested love and knowledge perfectly, and we find perfection only by imitating Him in conformation to His image, the perfect image of Man. He shows us what it really means to be addressed by God and respond. With the full measure of God’s call, He calls us to “follow Him” (Mt 4:19), for Jesus’ human call and God’s divine call are one and the same calling to love. To live in the Father’s love is to take up our Cross and “follow Him” (Lk 9:23).

It is always God who addresses us in our lowliness and calls us out of ignorance, mediocrity, darkness, cravenness, and sin into prayerful active communion with Him. An idiom of Spirit is not a subject’s self-expression, not one’s own ideas about God, not one’s own brand of religious thought, but rather its discovery of itself in the Newness of the Spirit as a uniquely-loved symbol of God in God. This discovery leads the questing spirit to pinpoint whatever in itself and its world does not symbolize God and discard it as dead flesh and non-entity, as a squandering of its chance at perfection, life, joy and peace in futilities. It betrays its real potential, destroys the image it was made to be. We see that whatever does not bear fruit in the Kingdom must be pruned back or cut off and burned (Jn 15:2, Mt 7:19). The more we see live out this insight into the link between sin and faith, wasted time and fruit eternal, the more we will willingly, naturally and gladly entrust ourselves to God—the more we will be receptor, receiver, receptacle and receipt of Him.

*

When one comes to prayer, one comes first of all into silence. One is called to respond to the fact of non-response. To push on discovering answers, though none of them equal the desired discovery. To reach out to God knowing that this very impulse comes from Him. For God is not an answer to a question but the reality of the unanswerable question we are to ourselves. No degree of analysis or deconstruction will ever resolve this othernesswithin us, for it constitutes us in a transcendence of self that only accomplishes its movement when it comes into the proximity of God Himself. When we sit in the silence of prayer, we attempt to welcome this proximity, we try to accept the communication of Himself which God extends to us in our lowliness. There, alongside or behind the rush of discourse streaming through our heads, we have a chance to confront our own speechless dimension, and it is there that we, whether we know it or not, meet or merge or commune with God. His Spirit says Yes, in and with our spirit, to the reality of God as mystery. Whenever and to whatever extent this happens, we are drawn into the mystery of our own spirit as radically oriented to the holy mystery of God. Faith – which by the power of the Spirit says Yes even in the midst of non-response – deepens our entrustment to this Mystery with two aspects of absolute transcendence and self-in-transcendence. The discovery of God terminates our search for ourselves, for it is in Him alone that we discover who we are. In all things we seek to “know even as we are known” (2 Cor 3:18): only as God communicates a vision of Him to us in our depths do we encounter what depths there are about us to know.

Prayer and its movement into these depths is similar to confronting a blank page. At first it seems impossible to unseal its depths, which betray no hint of themselves but mock with a gigantic surface of absence they flaunt as resistance to our best plan. If we stuck to our own devices then, we would never begin. We would default upon the dearth of life in us or worse. We would fill up the uncomfortable void with all the familiar phrases. We would crowd out the sensation of silence and emptiness in preference for the vain cycles of empty speech. It is only in setting forth courageously under the banner of the Nevertheless, while refusing to be led by what we have preconceived, that we see the lines begin to form, the channels of insight and self-uprootment, which will nourish us for the duration of our quest. We cannot look back on what we’ve tread but that we reopen everything we meant to the new departure, the absolute beginning that is God in the encounter. For that beginning is the next glimpse of our eternity burgeoning in the bud. It is the revelation of a threshold never quite crossed and which thus warrants the name death.

Meanwhile, the lines and channels accrue as memories of a passage into eternity, at the threshold of the threshold, where the self discovers the symbol it is to be for God’s purpose. That symbol is all gift, entirely a matter of reception from on high, but it remains true that we must set out in openness courageously to receive it. We must let the Other encroach on our notions, so that we are not controlled by our conditioned responses and preprogramming but give all our knowledge over in service to the flow of the incomprehensible in our breast, to pour forth a treasure that is God’s alone. We nurture that treasure best when we resign ourselves to never owning it, when we adore every chance we have to offer it back into His purpose—and consent to every blindness, every misunderstanding in others, every clearance of ourselves if it serves Him. Then, the miracle of grace is most apparent—when we in the very acceptation of our nothingness act as a channel for His Light pouring in. Then, we do not even need to reflect on the reflections, it is enough to dwell in the reflectiveness of Him. Then, it is not we who wish to shine but the ardor of God alive in the universal salvific quest, past all memory of self. Then, the symbol we are rises into an unprecedented health, a health already beyond the threshold of death, which we can thus cherish and nourish even more while still here.

The more the gift is received in our being, the more our being can become gift: that is the simple intuition of prayer. It contains in itself a power of transformation, yet it also needs our extrapolation into idioms of Spirit to fully manifest that power in a symbol, so that others may know it and participate. It is God’s intention to draw us from the singular in prayer to the universality of the symbol. Prayer is to the singular what revelation is to the universal, but both work in an interplay such that one always restores us to the other in a ceaseless movement of love for the source of the idiom and the awe, the secret and the song. Then our life stands, in living action, for His symbol. In this course we learn to receive a magnitude of beauty it would seem no mortal could comprehend—and this is true, for it signifies our sanctification, the steady filling-up of our emptiness with a Life-beyond-the-living, the answering of the question we are with the glorious evidence of the presence of His Kingdom, the intuition of unstinting fruit in the Spirit, and it gives us an unshakeable hope in the salvation yet to come of the whole cosmos (Jn 3:17, Jn 12:32). For God never ceases to act in the lives of those who will to love Him humbly and openly, who share that love so broadly that it overflows every container of word, image, and thought, thus remaking all human means of expression in His symbol by lending them a new capacity for the doing of His good. Thus do we inhabit all things as remade in Him and proclaim, ‘Behold the old has passed away, the new creation has come’ (2 Cor 5:17). The aim of our work as souls is not to improve a discourse, gather rare experiences, explore and transgress limits, or concoct novelties for novelty’s sake. It is to live such that one lives in the Kingdom, in a continuous conversation with the triune God, and thus perceive with inexpressible gratitude the truth of God’s victory on earth. It is to participate in that victory with every exertion, with every breath, with the full measure of a total life testimony, wanting from it only that the other discover God, His love, and live.

*

In prayer we therefore relinquish our finite control of knowledge and commit ourselves to voyage into the infinite with the self-evidence of mystery alone to guide us. There is no chart, no finish line, no nice polish, no ripe conclusion, no fool-proof image, no adequate icon, no felicitous comparison, no faultless expression, no success—each of these marks an illusion overcome, an obstacle become virtue and spur to greater trust. An idiom of Spirit is a means for casting out from the shore of the known to the unknown.[1]  It kneels in adoration of the achievement of our reason to have abdicated its cloak of hubris and alleged comprehensiveness for the sake of its service and fulfillment in abiding mystery. It portrays the mind in movement to its end, tracking step by step its growth into that divine darkness which is brighter than all created light. Insight serves as fulcrum for a turnaround of judgment, not a climb: the very surprise of insight’s wake opens us, against intellectual accumulation, into a renewed reception of grace.

An idiom of Spirit thus stands at the antipodes of spiritual greediness—it does not issue directly in self-realization or any other such personal acquisition—, for it retains nothing but the act of being continually reconstituted by God as fruitful movement of witnessing to the self-evident mystery (1 Pet 1:23), over which the soul knows it has no right, no claim, no power, no authority. The same then becomes true of its own expressions: they lack any authorial view that would in any way stand on their own (1 Cor 10:12). The soul descends into the fathomless poverty of its wordlessness, for only there is it rended and empty enough to encounter the Word that saves. This descent signifies not an abdication of thought but its proper situation in the hierarchy, as no longer trying vainly to dictate the course but submissively subservient to the outliers of the Holy. These it traces, not to gain itself a weight, but to give weight in words to the encounter, maturity, and hope which lie secretly behind them as the revelation’s true dawn in the heart of the singular for its rebirth. And yet, the secret is all out, divulged word by word beyond the capacity of any speaker—a secret thus secret to its beholder, too, a secret of mystery to which its seeker is blind because ever already found sheltered within it for eternal life.

The enigma races the heart, it belts out all its reasons for belief, it praises the Meaning uncorruptible behind everything, it sees all things working for the Good—and so it tunes in ever closer to the magnified Word, to magnify it in turn with the fullest manifestation of symbol it can muster from its reflected hearing. The exuberance it kickstarts is an exuberance of obedience without partiality or preference. It is a disposability to God modeled on Jesus’ Sacred Heart and atoning sacrifice for sin. An idiom of Spirit thus proclaims and revisits the Word in the beginning, so that as much as it billows with glee at God’s perfect plan, it decreases so He can increase (Jn 3:30), it wanes all its influence into the expansion of His, and in all things looks to Him for the reason and the scope, the silence and the devotion, the passion and the final word to pray.

*

As the soul symbols its encounter with God into finite reality, relics emerge—artifacts and impressions, poems and sermons, philosophies and potteries, fragments of reflection, notations of prayer, icons, paintings, songs—all gifts of love including works of mercy, foods donated, shelter given, consolations shared. Wherever the soul approaches disposability to God, its body and all its natural and technical appendages becomes available to Him as temple grounds for the Spirit. The outreaching network of these spiritual outliers can come to encompass the spiritual reach of an entire life, so that the soul at the center is less itself than the node for the passage of God—“a pure passageway for pure transmission of the gift.”[2] The creations which flow from such a body participate in God’s free gift of Himself, at least at their inceptive inflection as arrows received from the unknown to pierce through the numb hide of our sin. The soul alive with God is an eternally active contribution to the transfiguration of creation itself, for it is there a dictation of the Light in all its resources. Its works draw creation from nothingness to God, from the corruptible to the incorruptible, from transience to glory and power. But the odd truth is that none of these relics convey God on their own basis, nor could the soul ever claim to be the medium or mouthpiece of God. Indeed the greater our awareness of our poverty of spirit, the less we would ever dream of conceiving ourselves as the privileged purveyors of God’s truth. Every relic is mere inanimate matter, every word is mere mechanistic verbiage, every letter is dead save God invigorate it with His Spirit by incorporating it into new encounters with His life in other bodies and souls.

A soul can therefore never ensure or be certain that what it has made will contribute to the transfiguration. It can only hope that God will make of its offering a worthy sacrifice, a fertile ground for the seed of the Word, a good harvest for the Kingdom. Yet even this hope is unlinked from the created things that emerge as by-products of the soul’s encounter with God in faith. Another feature of faith: it sows its works into the world without a moment spent looking back (Lk 9:62). Under the rule of the Spirit, the moment always has enough urgency and urgent work in itself (Mt 6:34); faith patiently removes any anxiety we might have about other moments and entrusts the whole of our time and its total symbol to God. The soul trusts God will see to the growth and bounty, for finally it is Him alone who is to be communicated through an idiom of Spirit and nothing secondary. There is no ulteriordemonstration to be made: the embodied soul yearns to bear witness in its very creatureliness to the gift of uncreated grace in its soul. It testifies in all its works to the freedom of God to use it for His renewal of all things. And so the soul is emptied of every intention save to magnify Him here and now in whatever way. Magnification creates a slide of His glory—a slice of heaven, a tune of His mercy, a snapshot of His magnanimous generosity, a gesture of His sympathy, a healing touch of His compassion, an embrace of suffering humanity by His love. At no place or point on earth does the soul gather all these moments into an artifact of itself; on the contrary, by all appearances the soul’s interventions at God’s hand, every in-channeling of His grace into the mediations of empirical reality, are dispersed and scattered to the wind. It is as if the absoluteness and singularity of the final destination translated into an extravagant proliferation of possible destinations into every last corner of the earth.[3]

*

For earth to mirror heaven’s glory, every corner of it must be littered with the shards that earnest souls leave behind. For the soul is invariably broken by the world, divided by space and time, heard awry by ten thousand foreign ears, its sacred contentedness spread out into countless hidden pockets of existence waiting to be recovered and reworded along another’s way to discovering God. Over this its own fate in the world, the soul has no control. Its central task is to remember God, not its own place. At a certain pitch of holiness the two are rendered incompatible: submit to the abiding mystery, or seek to situate yourself in history; disappear your entity into the consuming flame of His love, or make a name for yourself at the tribunal of human culture. The greater the force with which this ultimatum comes to the fore of consciousness, the less the decision before God can be put off, for the ultimatum pertains to the value either of lastingness in God’s eternity or of personal legacy of impressions in the eyes of men.

In all practicality, to choose for Truth is to let all subsidiary truths go their way without concern for their coherence or their fate. This approaches an absolute degree of faith: God alone will be allowed to dispose of me and my relics, because He alone indwells them for their illumination. Therefore in every present will I magnify Him, trusting that in my lowliness it is enough to respond in obedience to His mission for me—the present act of faith, the present work of mercy, the present contemplation of His infinity—since mission is nothing like executing an order but always about sinking further into the mystery of His transcendence in my own—and that as for its result, it is in His hands wholly, for He alone is my salvation and my peace, my light and my release—He alone will transfigure my life into a symbol of His grace and love—so that as for me, I just believe.

It is on this ground that idioms of Spirit can proliferate into infinity without contradicting the unity of the infinite Spirit from which they spring. The goal is one: to communicate the mystery of God’s free gift of grace in coming close to us to fulfill the longing of our transcendence as spirits, thus to save and sanctify us for His good. Commutability among idioms is possible because the poverty of our languages can be brought into this movement of God’s will if He so chooses. As for us, we are exposed at every turn to a growing sense of dependency upon Him, as we readily witness in the inadequacy of our words to symbolize what He symbolizes for us—or to even portray the symbol we obscurely understand He is making of us. However, our lack of guarantee is no offense to a potential fruitfulness—we cannot be prejudiced to despair or pride, we cannot let a sober piety be shaded by enthusiasm or nihilism. And so we must never hesitate to bring our faith to expression in equal turns as our mentions of self-skepticism. Only thus can we turn our whole selves into a symbol of His grace—by asking ever after Him to come, with only this certainty: that He will come.

Each idiom of Spirit is thus a wisp, a vanishing morsel, a mortal moment of hope that, whatever its origin in glory, will filter into the past as memory and anticipation of the redeemed age. At the same time, each is a lesson “out of season” (akairos), a seam in the fabric of regenerated humanity, ready to be worn again in some fresh moment in timeless time, when the eternal instant meets the eternal Eternity—when the revival of a relic, of some hint of holiness, coincides with humanity’s actual progress in consecration to the ultimate end of hope—when the winds of Spirit condescend to whip our imaginations into His shape. An idiom is just one partial shard that, in the soul’s lived passage from inexistence to eternity, and by the grace of God who wills it share in His glory, may stand in for the total mirror of the soul, which withdraws into invisibility for His sake. These shards magnify the Lord and His transfiguration as it is reflected in our mud, to gain for all a limpid water of poetry in His mercy, of intelligence in His peace. For God can pour His bounty into any vessel He pleases. What is the good pleasure of God? To communicate Himself to our spirit and so really accomplish its propensity to transcend into the Absolute, while simultaneously filling soul and body, earth and world with His presence. What then is an idiom of Spirit if not a sign of revelation of Himself, the invitation of His call, the very legibility of eternal life He extends to us, if only we open our hearts and minds to hear and see?

*

The most excellent claim a soul can make with its life is “I responded.” God called me out of myself, out of my idea of self and world, out of my desires and prejudices, into His unknown—and I responded, I went. To go where the Lord leads is never easy for the nature we have inherited. It asks for a vigilant effort of discernment between what is centered and what is sin, what is mission and what is falsehood, what has eternal validity and what is mere custom of the age. To tune all the factors of our life to this discernment contains the power to change who we are. It opens us to the power of response, to allow God to respond to God within us. Without this discernment, this opening to His power, we languish in irresponsibility and lose out entirely on who we are. That is the worst claim a soul will ever have to make in looking back at its life: “God called, and I did not respond.”

Sin is life outside God. It is life off-center: non-life, self-cancelling life, denial of life, a waste and loss of life. The wages of sin is death because it drives us to that edge where disordered desire creates destruction and thinking of oneself becomes a plague upon the whole inner and outer world. Sin places the self at the center and thus contradicts the “law of sacrifice” which upholds everything in the universe.[4] But for the secret Oneness which should guide all our endeavors to their eternal purpose, the ego substitutes its own faulty unity—a string of counterfeit prospects and projects pursued in a solipsistic and separatist manner to the detriment of self, other, and world. To recenter oneself on love of God and neighbor is to gradually accept to make the conscious sacrifice that overthrows this false primary egoism and surrenders one’s good and one’s will to the work of the Spirit of grace. Such is one’s conversion from the reign of falsehood to the truth of a mission empowered not by individualistic want and plan but by constant consent to the action of the Lord in oneself.

From the perspective of our prospective holiness, every moment without recollection of God leads to perdition, either circuitously or straight into it. Every word spoken in anger, or mechanically, or neglectful of consequences, or merely to draw attention to ourselves—all of this paves the way to self-loss, because it lacks the gift of self without which there is no self at all. In truth, what we intuit at the basis of our being as a self—that mysterious kernel of decision-making capacity and freedom, which expects full self-possession—is really a potentiality to give ourselves. Our freedom is a freedom for the infinite mystery of God, a freedom to be freely sent and shaped and conditioned by His freedom. Only so can our action evolve along the lines of infinity: when we will to include ourselves in the action of infinite consciousness. Likewise, we possess ourselves more the more we are dis-possessed of ourselves in God and at His mercy for our ownmost truth. Put simply, the individual exists not for it to stand on its own, for it to make a name for itself, for it to acquire this or that good, but rather so that the aspiration to God’s life will exist. The more conscious and enacted this aspiration, the more impactfully does the individual live for salvation, for then they are living into their mission and participating in what is eternally valid, namely: the all-transfiguring act of God.

To heed God’s call and sacrifice oneself for the unique mission He has in store for us—this mission is our opening to heaven on earth—means building on a foundation that will last by putting His Word into practice (Mt 7:24-27). Purification is the sincere uprooting, cancelling, and rejection of whatever stands in the way of letting that Word take root (Mt 13:18-23). It means eliminating, at every level of our being, every obstruction to our surrender to the work of grace within us. Mission is not only an active task, it is not even firstly that, but above all the unity of contemplation and action, converse with God and obeying the Word among men. Mission begins and ends, it finds its whole nourishment, with a deepening and expanding contact with God, patient through His silent absences, reverent before His unattained visits, above all an orientation to heed His law over every other claim upon our attention.

The soul of vast assent will cease to reckon the world according to its own worldly eyes (2 Cor 5:16), but rather as a place where, because of sin, ignorance of God reigns. That world needs not critique and explanation, not more argumentation and discourse, but repentance of the heart and consecration of the soul—it needs saints. Once that seed has taken root, the severity of error in all our habitual ways strikes with the force of an epiphany over and over again until our resolve to love God and neighbor matches in intensity our sorrow over the chance at holiness squandered so ubiquitously in the land of sin. The Father gives us that resolve to love, to persevere through the unholy darkness of this world, in the Holy Spirit—and if we ever doubt it, we have only to contemplate His Son upon the Cross to be reminded of the source of our hope, the perfect pledge of our redemption. This contemplation establishes the very essence of every mission. For the Son is He who responded most fully to the mission’s call (Jn 5:19), who obeyed the Father to such a degree of extremity that He brought all humanity into hypostatic union with Him. He showed us what it looks like to obey God’s eternal purpose all the way out of love. The picture He gave disturbs us: it is crucified love, which resurrects as eternal love for us all. Christ’s example gives our souls the courage to go down, to cast aside whatever hinders our assent, and to refuse the lie of sin as nothing Christ can’t conquer—Christ in us and with us, Christ the symbol in and for us of the purified heart and soul, body and mind (Lk 10:27) ready to respond in all humility to God’s call as in ourselves “the new man… created by God in the righteousness and holiness of the truth” (Eph 4:22-24).

---

[1] Jean-Luc Marion writes, “God remains God only on condition that this ignorance [of God’s essence, concept, and presence] be established and admitted definitively. Every thing in the world gains by being known—but God, who is not of the world, gains by not being known conceptually.” In Excess, p. 150. Adrienne von Speyr summarizes this in the maxim: “The more mysterious God is to you, the closer He is to you.” Lumina, p. 19.

[2] Hans Urs von Balthasar’s characterization of the center of Ignatian spirituality. The Theology of Henri de Lubac, p. XX

[3] We could even incorporate Derrida’s idea of clandestination here: we cannot know, prescribe, predict, or program the addressee of our missives or where they will land. We cannot be certain that our sending will hit the mark, that it will not defer its stated goal and reach a different one. Moreover, this very uncertainty has a recursive effect on our own speech, such that we try to let the other we’re addressing address us first. This is linked to what we have said about bespeaking God as becoming the object of God’s address ourselves. For this errance of the destination, in the cloud of witnesses to God, is simultaneously our chance at truth, in the sense of truth, beyond true and false, as a shared blessing, as a bene-diction among saints in the mystical Body of God. That Derrida might not consent to that particular idiom does not deter from the communion invoked, for each soul is tasked with the work of mourning the others—and so of carrying them with them, to preserve them, where perhaps they would never have expected to go. Cf. Jacques Derrida, On A Newly Risen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy, p. XX. On the “messianic sentence,” which formalizes the question of the sentence that “telegraphs” its end, which speaks from the future destination and the clandestined eschatological community it intends, see Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, p. XX. For an idiom of the philosopher’s love, see The Postcard, pp. XX.

[4] See Sri Aurobindo, “The Sacrifice, The Triune Path and the Lord of the Sacrifice,” The Synthesis of Yoga, p 106 ff.