 Dear Chuck,

     I want to thank you for the generosity and kindness implicit
in your letter and for its genuine concern for what Kierkegaard
would have called my "evig Bevidsthed". If I fail to reciprocate
this concern, my failure derives not from callousness or
indifference but from my belief that we are all different and
that it is unavoidable that each one of us should find happiness
and salvation on paths of his own.

     We differ, as I have mentioned, in our experience of the
spoken and the written word. Once one becomes aware that the
realities of our existences are ineffable, it no longer makes
sense to try to state what _is_ and what _is not_. Nor am I able
to confess my faith, saying I believe _this_ and I don't believe
_that_. The works of language become works of art that have an
integrity and a being of their own, and we are affected by them
much as we are affected by objects in the natural world that
surrounds us.

     Although I am the beneficiary of a very solid "Training in
Christianity," over the years my theology has become
fundamentally more and more Jewish. I dare not, I will not, I
cannot utter his name, except as metaphor and therefore subject
to all the vagaries and ambiguities of metaphorical
interpretation. And this reluctance to utter his name extends for
me also to that of his anointed. Accordingly, as I have said
before, I interpret the dialectic with which Kierkegaard conceals
the identity of the Christ as the Judaization of of Christianity,
a transformation which I find very congenial.

     If I understand you correctly, you are offended by the
dialectic of my exposition, which you construe as cynicism and
despair, as absence of a moral framework, as downright unethical
and evil; while for me, paradoxically, that dialectic as the
concealment of the divine is an expression not of blasphemy but
of piety, a reflection of an unwillingness if not indeed an
inability to proclaim his name.

     It is easy for me to accept the fact that the two of us
entertain very different theologies, and it seems only natural
that we should each, in communications such as this, try to stake
our claims to the common conceptual world, stating what we
believe to be true in the hopeless hope that it might, in the
end, appear as objective truth.  The Stoics, I believe, would
have identified our letters, with which we drive at least some of
our readers to distraction, to frantic pleas to REMOVE them from
the list, as efforts at Oikeiosis, efforts that are obviously,
within the narrow confines of our electronic correspondence, not
entirely unsuccessful.

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