John 20:19 "On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them: Peace be with you."
Man never has the whole truth at his disposal; a portion of it always remains with God. In all communication of truth, there is a kind of reservatio mentalis. This reserving , however, is not done by us, but by God. When arranging matters as we think best, we must always say: assuming that God does not arrange things otherwise. For man to make use of reservatio mentalis is all right provided he reserves something not for his own advantage, but for God's advantage. In belief, the reservatio of truth occurs on the part of God, who perhaps holds it back for communication to us at a later time. In belief there is a foregoing of complete understanding of truth, an abdicatio of truth, which is based on the recognition that everything we know and love has, in God, the form of the ever-greater.
But this foregoing does not apply in the case of dogma. Here, nothing is relativized. Dogma is the door that is closed against everything non-Christian outside of it. As directed to the outside, the dogmas are rigid and uncompromising. We must regard the door that the Lord closes behind him as closed for as long a he does not instruct us to do otherwise. And he himself does not open the door anymore , but goers right through the closed door. For him, the rigid closedness does not exist, for him every truth is open. But for us the closing must be regarded as final, as absolute. If we were able to add something to the Lord's truth by our own thought, the everything would be repeated called into question, including within the confines of the Church. Then, however, the door would not longer be the Lord, but rather, man and his truth.The Lord alone has the freedom to enter, from the outside to the inside, through the closed doors. What is closed for us is open for him. In heaven there will no longer be any unclosed doors because there will no longer be any unbelief.
Dogmas are securings of belief against outside dangers, not closures for the sake of closure. Dogma has a basis of immovable truth , but it opens itself out from that basis into the unlimitedness of living, inexhaustible truth in God. Objectively, it has an absolute point of departure; but it is also relative in each person who subjectively assimilates it, because here absolute truth is grasped only partially and imperfectly, and exists within an open movement of belief toward the Lord. The framework of the dogmatic truth is unshakable, but within its confines, the infinite truth of the Lord moves in sovereign freedom. God's truth is infinite, and is therefore always just outlined and suggested in dogmatic precepts. The measure of dogmatic truth remains the Lord himself; and the Lord can see everything differently, and infinitely more fully than any particular believer can see it. Neither individual believers nor the Church as a whole have any authority to make changes in dogma; but they are also not allowed to do so, because it is the Lord alone who comprises the truth of dogma.
From the way that the absolute and relative are intertwined, we can see that whereas man may regard himself personally as the greatest sinner, he nevertheless has no right to regard someone else as more guilty than himself. Another person could, perhaps, by citing different reasons, prove to him that he is wrong; an he too, in a certain respect, could be right. But in the end, both would be wrong, because the Lord alone holds in his hand the measuring stick of sin. All human judgments must, in the end, yield before his exclusive judgments. Similarly, the Lord remains the master of dogma, whose entire depths, which men do not plumb, are his own depths, which he avails himself of in freedom.
Adrienne von Speyr John vol.4, pp. 200, 201
For the fun of it, I began rereading "Mystery and Manners", by Flannery O'Connor, a book mostly about writing which is made up of different conferences, lectures and essays she wrote for different occasions, and which were collected and published by her estate after her death. I had read it back in the 1970's and underlined some statements she made because they jumped off the page at me at the time. They still do. Here are some of her observations for your enjoyment.
.....I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to a writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually it frees the story-teller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing by guaranteeing his respect for mystery....
.....Redemption is meaningless unless there is cause for it in the actual life we live, and for the last few centuries there has been operating in our culture the secular belief that there is no such cause....
{To write}...is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self knowledge is humility, and this is not a virtue conspicuous in any national character....
Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.....
...To call yourself a Georgia writer is certainly to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to realty....
....Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning but for the fiction writer himself, the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction....
....There may never be anything new to say, but there is always anew way to say it...
....People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything because they lack the courage....
....I think it is usually some form of self-inflation that destroys the free use of a gift. This may be the pride of the reformer or of the theorist, or it may only be that simple-minded self-appreciation which uses its own sincerity as a standard of truth...
....St.Thomas called art 'reason in making'. This is a very cold and very beautiful definition, and if it is unpopular today, it is because reason has lost ground among us...
....nothing produces silence like experience...
...I have found, in short, from reading my own writing that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil, I have also found that what I write is read by an audience which puts little stock either in grace or the devil...
