The Case for God (21 page)

Evagrius of Pontus (c. 348–99), who became one of the leading
hesychasts of the Egyptian desert, taught his monks yogic techniques of concentration that stilled the mind, so that instead of seeking to limit the divine by confining it within rationalistic, human categories, they could cultivate an attentive, listening silence.
²⁴
Prayer was not conversation with God or a busy meditation on the divine nature; it meant a “shedding of thoughts.” Because God lay beyond all words and concepts, the mind must be “naked”: “When you are praying, do not shape within yourself any image of the Deity,” Evagrius advised, “and do not let your mind be stamped with the impress of any forms.”
²⁵
It was possible to gain an intuitive apprehension of God that was quite different from any knowledge derived from discursive reasoning. The contemplative must not expect exotic feelings, visions, or heavenly voices; these did not come from God but from his own fevered imagination and would merely distract him from his true objective: “Blessed is the intellect that has acquired complete freedom from sensations during prayer.”
²⁶
Some of the Greek fathers called prayer an activity of the heart
(kardia)
, but this did not imply that it was an emotional experience. The “heart” represented the spiritual center of the human being, what the Upanishads called the atman, his or her true self.
²⁷

Today religious experience is often understood as intensely emotional, so Evagrius’s prohibition of “sensations” may seem perverse. In all the great traditions, however, teachers have constantly proclaimed that far from being essential to the spiritual quest, visions, voices, and feelings of devotion could in fact be a distraction. The apprehension of God, Brahman, Nirvana, or Dao had nothing to do with the emotions. Christians had been aware of this from the very beginning; worship had often been noisy and unrestrained: under the inspiration of the Spirit, there had been speaking in strange languages, ecstatic trance, and spontaneous prophecy. But Saint Paul sternly and memorably told his Corinthian converts that these transports had to remain within due bounds and that by far the most important of the spiritual gifts was charity. In all the major traditions, the iron rule of religious experience is that it be integrated successfully with daily life. A disorderly spirituality that makes the practitioner dreamy, eccentric, or uncontrolled is a very bad sign indeed.

In warning his monks against “sensations,” Evagrius was reiterating this central insight. Many of the disciplines of contemplation,
such as yoga or
hesychia
, were designed precisely to wean the mind and heart away from these earthbound modes of perception and help people discover another mode of experience. To cultivate and luxuriate in ordinary feelings and sensations meant that the contemplative remained trapped in the mundane cast of mind that he or she was supposed to transcend. A contemplative must not think of undertaking this journey into the depths of the psyche without a spiritual director or guru. Plunging into the subconscious is risky, and a good director can lead disciples past dangerous swings of mood to the disciplined equanimity of
hesychia
, which was rooted in a level of the self that lies deeper than the emotions.

The life of the desert monks was extremely monotonous. It is no accident that in all the faith traditions, people who wanted to engage in this kind of meditative activity organized a monastic life to cater to their needs. Details and emphases differ from one culture to another, but the similarities are striking. The withdrawal from the world, the silence, the disciplines of community—everybody wearing the same clothes and doing the same thing day after day—have been found to support the contemplative during his frequently lonely journey, to earth him in reality and wean him away from an excitement and drama inimical to the authentic religious experience. These practices provided an element of stability to counterbalance the mental extremity to which the monk, yogin, or hesychast was continually exposed. Once religious experience is equated with fervid enthusiasm, this can indicate that people are losing touch with the psychological rhythms of the interior life.

Hesychia
was not what we call “mysticism” today. It was not a specialized form of prayer, characterized by impressive spiritual visions and available only to an elite group of practitioners. The monks were the professionals, certainly, because they could devote themselves to it full-time, but
hesychia
was also prescribed for the laity. All the regular Christian practices—theology, liturgy, exegesis, morality, and acts of kindness—were supposed to be informed by the silent, reticent attitude of
hesychia
. It was not just for solitaries but could also be experienced in public worship and human relationships.
²⁸
One of the most famous exponents of the new apophatic theology was a married man who had been a professional orator until he became bishop of the small Cappadocian town of Nyssa. Gregory of
Nyssa (c. 331–95) had become involved in the political turmoil of the Arian controversy with great reluctance. He was uneasy about these theological disputes, because it was impossible to adjudicate Christian teaching from a position of magisterial detachment. Theology depended on practice, and its truth could be assessed only by people who allowed its doctrines to change them. We could not speak about God rationally, as we speak about ordinary beings, but that did not mean that we should give up thinking about God at all.
²⁹
We had to press on, pushing our minds to the limits of what we could know, descending ever deeper into the darkness of unknowing and acknowledging that there could be no final clarity. After an initial frustration, the soul would realize that “the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on with her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfillment of her desire continually generates further desire for the Transcendent.”
³⁰
You had to leave behind “all that can be grasped by sense or reason” so that “the only thing left for contemplation is the invisible and the incomprehensible.”
³¹

Gregory could see this process at work in the life of Moses. His first encounter with God had been the revelation of the Burning Bush, where he had learned that the God that called itself “I Am” was being itself. Everything else in the universe “that the senses perceive or intelligence contemplates” could only participate in the being that sustained it at every second.
³²
After this initial revelation, Moses, like the great philosophers, had engaged in a disciplined contemplation of the natural world. But while nature could lead us to the Logos, through whom the world was made, it could not bring us to God itself. When Moses climbed Mount Sinai and entered the impenetrable darkness on its summit, however, he was in the place where God was—even though he could not see anything. He had at last left normal modes of perception behind and achieved an entirely different kind of seeing. Pushing his reason to the point where it could go no further, he had intuited the silent otherness that existed beyond the reach of words and concepts. Once the hesychast understood this, he realized that any attempt to define God clearly “becomes an idol of God and does not make him known.”
³³

Gregory knew that many Christians were confused by the Nicaean statement. How could the Son have the same nature as the Father without becoming a second God? No longer familiar with traditional
Jewish terminology, they were also puzzled about the identity of the Holy Spirit. Gregory’s older brother Basil, bishop of Caesarea (c. 330–79), took time out from his diocese to find a solution. Christians must stop thinking about God as
a
mere being, a larger and more powerful version of themselves. That was not what God was. The new doctrine of creation had made it clear that God was unknowable; our minds could think only about beings in the universe; we could not imagine the “nothingness” out of which our world was formed, because we could think only about things that had some kind of spatial extension or qualities. It was impossible for us to understand what had happened before our world was created, because we could think only in terms of time. This was what Saint John meant when he wrote “In the beginning was the Word.”

What lies behind or beyond the universe is inconceivable to us. When we try to think of its “Creator” our minds simply seize up. But we could see signs and traces of God in our world. Reviving Philo’s distinction between God’s essential nature
(ousia
) and his “activities”
(energeiai
) in the world, Basil insisted that we could never know God’s
ousia;
indeed, we should not even speak of it. Silence alone is appropriate for what lies beyond words. But we could form an idea about the divine “energies” that have, as it were, translated the ineffable God into a human idiom: the incarnate Word and the immanent divine presence within us that scripture calls the Holy Spirit.
³⁵

To show Christians that Father, Son, and Spirit were not three distinct “Gods,” Basil formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. At first Christians thought that Jesus, the incarnate Logos, and the Holy Spirit were two separate divine beings. But Paul had explained that they were one and the same: “This Lord is the Spirit.”
³⁶
Because they were divine forces, Logos and Spirit were not finite or discrete like the beings of our ordinary experience. Over time Christians realized that because the divine energies they experienced in the rituals and
practices of the church were indefinable and illimitable, “Logos” and “Spirit” must refer to the same divine power. God was not the sort of being that was defined by number or extension, so Father, Son, and Spirit were not three separate “gods.” Pagans thought of their “gods” as members of the cosmos, with separate personalities and functions, but the Christian God was not that sort of being. When we spoke of Father, Son, and Spirit being One God, we were not saying “One plus one plus one equals three” but “Unknown infinity plus unknown infinity plus unknown infinity equals unknown infinity.”
³⁷
We think of the beings we know as single items or collections of different items. But God is not like that. Again, the absolute ineffability of the divine was the key to understanding the Trinity. The reason the Trinity is not a logical or numerical absurdity is because God is not a being that can be restricted to such human categories as number.

The Trinity has been very puzzling to Western Christians, but it has been central to Eastern Orthodox spirituality.
³⁸
In the early modern period, when the West was developing a wholly rational way of thinking about God and the world, philosophers and scientists were appalled by the irrationality of the Trinity. But for the Cappadocian fathers—Basil, Gregory, and their friend Gregory of Nazianzus (329–90)—the whole point of the doctrine was to stop Christians from thinking about God in rational terms. If you did that, you could only think about God as
a
being, because that was all our minds were capable of. The Trinity was not a “mystery” that had to be believed but an image that Christians were supposed to contemplate in a particular way. It was a
mythos
, because it spoke of a truth that was not accessible to
logos
, and, like any myth, it made sense only when you translated it into practical action. When they meditated on the God that they had known as Three and One, Christians would become aware that God bore no relation at all to any being in their experience.
³⁹
The Trinity reminded Christians
not
to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call “God” was inaccessible to rational analysis.
⁴⁰
It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius, who had seen God as a mere being.

When they presented the Trinity to their new converts after the initiation of baptism, the three Cappadocians distinguished between the
ousia
of a thing, its inner nature, which made it what it was, and its
hypostases
, its external qualities. Each one of us has an
ousia
that we
find very difficult to pin down but that we know to be the irreducible essence of our personality. It is what makes us the person we are, but it is very difficult to define. We try to express this
ousia
to the outside world in various
hypostases
—our work, offspring, possessions, clothes, facial expressions, and mannerisms, which can give outsiders only a partial knowledge of our inner, essential nature. Language is a very common
hypostasis:
my words are distinctively my own, but they are not the whole of me; they nearly always leave something unsaid. So in God there was, as it were, a single, divine self-consciousness that remained unknowable, unnameable, and unspeakable. But Christians had experienced this ineffability in
hypostases
that had translated it into something more accessible to limited, sense-bound, time-bound human beings. The Cappadocians sometimes substituted the term
prosopon
(“face,” “mask”) for
hypostasis;
the word also meant a facial expression or a role that an actor had chosen to play. When
prosopon
was translated into Latin, it became
persona
, the “mask” used by an actor that enabled the audience to recognize his character and contained a sound-enhancing device that made him audible.

But nobody was required to “believe” this as a divine fact. The Trinity was a “mystery” not because it was an incomprehensible conundrum that had to be taken “on faith.” It was a
musterion
because it was an “initiation” that inducted Christians into a wholly different way of thinking about the divine. Basil always distinguished between the
kerygma
of the Church (its public message) and its
dogma
, the inner meaning of the
kerygma
, which could be grasped only after long immersion in liturgical prayer.
⁴¹
The Trinity was a prime example of
dogma
, a truth that brought us up against the limits of language but could be suggested by the symbolic gestures of the liturgy and the silent practice of
hesychia
. The initiation consisted of a spiritual exercise that was explained to new
mystai
after their baptism in a liturgical context. They were instructed to keep their minds in continuous motion, swinging back and forth between the One and the Three. This mental discipline would enable them gradually to experience within themselves the inner balance of the threefold mind.
⁴²
Gregory of Nazianzus explained the kind of
ekstasis
this produced: