“Are you writing about yourself again? Do you think people have the time or inclination to read about your life?” my associate Scarlett asked today in my study as she took a casual glance at the manuscript I had just handed to her for her critical comments. Scarlett has been at my side for forty years in good times and bad. She is the first person to read my texts, and a severe critic of everything I say, write and do. No one on earth is capable of upsetting me the way she does; no one on earth has been of benefit and assistance to me the way she has. When several of my friends were appointed to high office after 1989, I could see that they desperately needed someone to give them systematic feedback, instead of the yes-men and lickspittles who surrounded them. The mature and good-natured side of myself I owe chiefly to Scarlett. The Bible says that a woman of fortitude is worth more than rubies; it requires a lot of fortitude, patience, and an unflagging hurricane of energy to stand by me. What am I to say in response? I am writing about myself, but also about a half-century of history of a country in the heart of Europe, and particularly about the history of the sorely-tested Czech Catholic church. I’m not a historian, that’s for sure, and my testimony will be a “subjective” one. How else? Naturally I am also writing my story for the readers of my books, and for those who have attended my lectures. When I read a book or listen to someone’s talk I frequently ask myself: How did this person come to the views they expound? Have they derived them mainly from books, from their study of specialist literature, or are their opinions also backed by the gold of their own personal life experience? Has their vision of the world undergone trials and crises? Did they have to revise or radically reassess their former views sometimes? When I know an author’s life story and how their personality and opinions have evolved, their writings become more vivid, meaningful, credible and immediate. My readers and listeners also have the right to know the internal context of my writing, as well as the external one, not just the historical circumstances and the social and cultural context, but also my life story and the drama of spiritual seeking and the process of maturity; should they wish to, they will find here the key to a deeper understanding of what I try to convey to them in my books and lectures. Before describing what one sees, one should declare where one stands, what is one’s standpoint, and why one has adopted it.
“Are you writing about yourself?” I could also reply that I am writing about God. But is it possible to speak about God and not invest one’s life into that account? Were I to speak about God “objectively” without investing myself in it, I would be speaking about a pallid abstraction. Wouldn’t such an “external God” be merely an idol. Conversely, is it possible to speak about oneself and say nothing about God? Were I to speak about myself and said nothing about God, I could attribute to myself what is His and become stuck for eternity in a trap of self-centeredness or drown myself in narcissistic superficiality. When Narcissus leans over the surface of the lake he sees only himself, and his eye remains fixed to the surface and his own image on the surface. This superficiality turns out to be fatal for him. The gaze of the believer must penetrate deeper. Only then will the depth not become a malignant trap. Two realities, crucial for our life, are invisible: our self, and God. We see many manifestations that can be attributed to our self and others to God, but neither our self nor God present themselves to us things that we can point to and which we can localize with certainty. The mystics—and particularly my beloved Meister Eckhart—have asserted one very profound thing that is also extremely dangerous: God and I are one and the same. This position can indeed be dangerous. When, from our standpoint, God has coalesced with our self, in the sense that we have substituted God for our self, then we have lost our soul. When we rigorously separate the two and start to regard God as something entirely external and separate from our soul, we have lost the living God, and all we have left is an idol, something, just “a thing among things.” The abiding task of theology is to point to that dynamic intermingling of immanence and transcendence. Perhaps we could speak about the link between our self and God in the terms used by the Council of Chalcedon to describe the relationship between the human and the divine in Christ: they are inseparable and yet unmixed. If I take seriously the mystery of the Incarnation—the heart of the Christian faith—and comprehend it not as some chance occurrence in the past, but as the key to understanding the entire drama of the history of salvation, the history of the relationship between God and people, then I cannot think of humanity and divinity separately. When I say “I,” I am also saying “God” because the human being without God is not whole. It is only in relation to God that we can start to sense that our self is structured somewhat differently than it seems when viewed with the superficial, naïve gaze of everyday life. Beyond our “ego” we sometimes get a glimpse of something for which the mystics and modern depth psychology strive to find an adequate expression—“the inner man,” the “deep self,” das Selbst... Meister Eckhart used to speak about the “inner God,” the “God beyond God”; some modern and post-modern theologians (and a-theists) speak about “God beyond the God of theism.” Perhaps it is not until we come to see the naïve, objectified understanding of God and the similarly naïve understanding of the “self” as illusions, that we will be capable of grasping Eckhart’s statement: “God and I are one”; we will comprehend that it is neither blasphemous self-deification nor covert impiety. The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me, wrote Meister Eckhart. And we find something similar in the writings of St. Augustine: The love with which you love God and the seeking whereby you seek Him, are the love and seeking whereby God seeks and loves you. Augustine wrote countless tracts about God, but what is maybe most inspirational to those who still dare to talk about God is his boldness to present candidly his own life story and say to the reader: Seek, friend. The solution to the puzzle, the key to the meaning of this story is God. You will find God only by knowing yourself; you will only find yourself by seeking God. Augustine thereby invented a new literary genre, and a new way to reflect on faith: autobiography as a framework of philosophical theology. (excerpted from introduction)
