“Theological mysteries are truth and therefore light for the mind, but the truth is so vast, the light of such intensity, that the mind is dazzled and amazed. When a man meets a mystery of the faith, he finds not a deficiency but an excess of intelligibility: there is just too much to understand. Reverence for supernaturally revealed mystery is therefore not reason’s abdication, but reason’s recognition, through faith, of a grandeur transcending its powers. ‘If it searches diligently, piously, and soberly,’ say the Fathers of the First Vatican Council, ‘reason, enlightened by faith, attains, by God’s gift, a certain most fruitful understanding of the mysteries … but it never becomes adequate to investigating them in the way it does the truths that constitute its proper object.’ Like the ocean, the revealed mysteries of God have a visible surface, beneath which lie hidden and unfathomable depths…
Wonder, which is the beginning of philosophy, is also the prerequisite for theology. In the exercise of his science, as in the conduct of his life, the theologian must convert and become like a child, recovering and preserving a sense of astonishment at the grandeur of what God has revealed in His Son. Just as Peter and John ‘went out’ to see the Empty Tomb (cf Jn 20:3), so, according to the Angelic Doctor, ‘the man who wants to explore the mysteries of Christ must somehow go out of himself’. This movement outwards, this Christological ecstasy, is an intellectual as well as a moral conversion. The theologian must be ready to break away from the dull conventions of his conceptuality, as well as from the deadly habits of his carnality, and to conform himself to the fresh wisdom and wonder of the Church.”
–John Saward, Cradle of Redeeming Love pp. 48-50
