I was raised by unconscious Calvinists. In my late teens, I decided to investigate Calvinism and to make explicit and conscious for myself what had been hitherto implicit and unconscious. Claustrophobia quickly set in. My discovery of Jonathan Edwards provided some relief--with his notion of "the sense of the heart"--after all he was, in the words of Morton White, "like St. Augustine...a mystic who could argue."
In the end, however, I chose Kierkegaardian faith-as-passion and Bonhoeffer's late humanism over Edwards since the latter still found it necessary to come to Calvinism's defense.
Over time (and after reading Ghazali in the mid-1990's), faith-as-passion transmuted into the religion of longing (tasawwuf) and Bonhoeffer's Menschlichkeit evolved into Camus's "profound and radical this-worldliness [combined] with an explicit rejection of traditional Christian theodicy" [James Woelfel, Bonhoeffer's Theology, 28].
Although I invoke Camus, it is Henry Miller's essay "The Wisdom of the Heart" that contains a precise formula of the position I had come to by my junior year in college:
The whole secret of salvation hinges on the conversion of word to deed, with and through the whole being. It is this turning in wholeness and faith, conversion, in the spiritual sense, which is the mystical dynamic of the fourth-dimensional view. I used the word salvation a moment ago, but salvation, like fear or death, when it is accepted and experienced, is no longer "salvation." There is no salvation, really, only infinite realms of experience providing more and more tests, demanding more and more faith.
Miller was the self-conscious disciple of Whitman and, as such, offered in his "fourth-dimensional view" or "wisdom of the heart" a worthy successor to American Transcendentalism.
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