Chapter 3: The Place of the Quest: Earth Haunted by Heaven

*premise: “It is the sense that the world we see is haunted by something we don not see, an unseen presence.”

The universe’s face as seen by the “haunt detector” called romantic love. (p. 102)

Because romantic lovers usually miss these two points-that romantic love points beyond itself to God and beyond the beloved to all people-because romantic lovers seek joy in rather than through their loves, and only in their loves, they are always disappointed. Because romantic love is only a prophet, it breaks when turned into a god. The divine light cannot be trapped in the human mirror, only reflected. It lives only en passant, in passing. Try to bottle the light and you get only darkness, (p. 104). It promises a standing outside the self (this is what “ecstasy” literally means), a self-transcendence, a death and resurrection of the ego, a mystical transformation. But it delivers only a tiny intimation of this at best, which only whets the appetite for the real thing, (p. 104). “All pleasures are substitutes for joy, “ (CS Lewis)

All the hauntings seem to come from the same source and point back to it, however diverse the media through which they come. There is something bigger than the world out there hiding behind everything in the world, and our chief joy is with it. The world is its mask; we must unmask it. We are outsiders, aliens, exiles; if only we could get in! (p. 111) “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, god knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words-to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it…..At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so. Some day, god willing, we shall get in…. through nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.” CS Lewis (p. 111-112)

Kreeft goes on to say that the hauntings are just signs.