The Case for God (28 page)

Elevated feelings were never supposed to be the end of the spiritual quest: Buddhists insist that after achieving enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This was also true of Christian monks and nuns, who had to serve their communities; even anchorites often acted as counselors for the local laity, who came to them with secular as well as spiritual problems. But Rolle vehemently refused to engage with his fellows, and his contemplation did not lead to kindly consideration and kenotic respect for others—the test of authentic religious experience in all the major faiths. But as the rift between spirituality and theology developed, a flood of pleasurable and consoling emotion would be seen by more and more people as a sign of God’s favor.

The Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327) was uneasy about this development.
⁸⁶
Whatever mystics like Rolle believed, the feeling self could not be the end of the religious quest, because when reason fulfills itself in
intellectus
, it has left self behind. For Eckhart, the intellect was still the “place” in the mind where the divine touches the human; in
intellectus
, the “I” ends and “God” begins. We pass over into a state that is “nothing,” because it is unlike anything else in our experience. Ultimately, therefore, the intellect was as unnameable as God:

The intellect was “nothing” because it had ceased to be itself and had “nothing in common with anything at all … it is a strange land and a desert.”
⁸⁸

Where mystics like Rolle got stuck in the image—the fire, the heat, the “heavenly” harmonies—and seemed obsessed with their personal stories, Eckhart preached a detachment not only from the self but also from the “God,” whom Rolle and his like wanted to possess and enjoy.
⁸⁹
Detachment was the disciplined
kenosis
that would bring us
to the “silence” and “desert” of the intellect. We had to eliminate the images, concepts, and experiences that we used to fill our inner emptiness and, as it were, dig out an interior vacuum that would draw God into the self. Eckhart had given a spiritual relevance to the empty space that so fascinated the late scholastics. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but our interior void would attract the Nothingness that was God, since “everything longs to achieve its natural place.”
⁹⁰

But Eckhart was convinced that all this could be achieved within the normal structures of the Christian life. There was no need for a special lifestyle. People who became attached to one of the privatized spiritual “ways” currently on offer were “finding ‘ways’ and losing God, who in ‘ways’ is hidden.”
⁹¹
The truly detached person did not want an “experience” of the divine presence; indeed, “he does not know or experience or grasp that God lives in him.”
⁹²
The discovery of the “intellect” should be a homecoming rather than a bizarre peak experience, since it is a Platonic recollection of a once known but since lost identity. A felt desire for God can be only an ego need, born of the images we use to fill our emptiness. Any “God” we find in this way is an idol that would actually alienate us from ourselves:

Eckhart’s exuberant language, which swings so enthusiastically from the affirmative to the apophatic, demonstrates that precisely because this transformation is
not
an emotional “experience,” it cannot be described in words.

Despite the new scholasticism, Denys’s dialectical method was still ingrained in European theology. We see it in two very different English writers of the fourteenth century. Julian of Norwich, who was not a trained theologian, has a perfect grasp of the apophatic, even at her most affirmative. When she speaks of Christ, for example, she alternates between male and female imagery to push the reader beyond these mundane categories. “In our Mother, Christ, we grow and develop; in his mercy he reforms and restores us; through his passion,
death and resurrection he has united us to our being. So does our Mother work in mercy for all his children who respond to him and obey him.”
⁹⁴
And even though the anonymous author of
The Cloud of Unknowing
, who translated Denys’
Mystical Theology
into English, is taking the apophatic tradition in a new, fourteenth-century direction, he still sees it as fundamental to the religious life.
⁹⁵
If we want to know God, all thoughts about the Trinity, the Virgin Mary, the life of Christ, and the stories of the saints—which are perfectly good in themselves—must be cast under a thick “cloud of forgetting.”
⁹⁶

At first, the author explains, a beginner would encounter only darkness “and, as it were, a cloud of unknowing.”
⁹⁷
If he asked: “How am I to think of God himself and what is he?” our author replied: “I cannot answer you, except to say ‘I do not know!’ For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the same cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!”
⁹⁸
We can think about all kinds of things, but “of God himself can no man think.”
⁹⁹
This state of “unknowing” was not a defeat but an achievement; we arrived at this point by ruthlessly paring down all our God talk, until prayer was reduced to a single syllable: “God!” or “Love!” It was not easy. The mind rushed to fill the vacuum we were trying to create within ourselves with “wonderful thoughts of [God’s] kindness” and reminded us “of God’s sweetness and love, his grace and mercy.” But unless we turned a deaf ear to this pious clamor, we would be back where we started.
¹⁰⁰
In the meantime, the apprentice must continue with his prayers, liturgy, and
lectio divina
like everybody else. This was not what Eckhart would have called a special spiritual “way” but was a practice that should inform all the routine devotions and spiritual exercises of the Christian life.

If we persevere, the intellect will eventually abdicate and allow love to take over. Here we see the new separation of knowledge from the affections: “Therefore I will leave on one side everything I can think, and choose for my love that which I cannot think!” the author exclaims. “Why? Because [God] may well be loved but not thought. By love he may be caught and held but by thinking never.”
¹⁰¹
But the apophatic habit is still so strong that the author immediately starts to deconstruct the notion of “love” and explain what it is
not
. There is no glow, no heavenly music, or interior sweetness in the
Cloud
. In fact the author seems to have Rolle in mind when he comes out strongly against the idea of an intense experience of God’s love. He warns
beginners to be on their guard against the absurd literalism of this new spirituality. Novices hear talk of all kinds of special feelings— “how a man shall lift up his heart to God and continually long to feel his love. And immediately in their silly minds they understand these words not in the intended spiritual sense but in a physical and material, and they strain their natural hearts outrageously within their breasts!” Some even feel an “unnatural glow.”
¹⁰²
It is impossible to feel for God the love we feel for creatures; the “God” with whom these so-called mystics are infatuated is simply the product of their unhinged imagination.

Clearly this “sham spirituality”
¹⁰³
was becoming a problem. When novices are told to stop all “exterior” mental activity, the author explains, they don’t know what “interior” work means, so “they do it wrong. For they turn their actual physical minds inwards to their bodies, which is an unnatural thing, and they strain as if to see spiritually with their physical eyes.”
¹⁰⁴
Their antics are painful to behold. They stare into space, looking quite deranged, squat “as if they were silly sheep,” and “hang their heads to one side as if they had a worm in their ear.”
¹⁰⁵
But “interiority” is achieved only by the discipline of “forgetting.” That is why the author is not going to tell his disciple to seek God within, and, he adds, “I don’t want you to be outside or above, behind, or beside yourself either!”
¹⁰⁶
When his disciple retorts in exasperation: “Where am I to be? Nowhere according to you!” our author replies that he is absolutely right: “Nowhere is where I want you! Why, when you are ‘nowhere’ physically, you are ‘everywhere’ spiritually.”
¹⁰⁷
There were no words to describe this kind of love. A person who has not put himself through the process of “forgetting” will see a dichotomy between “inner” and “outer,” “nowhere” and “everywhere.” But “nowhere” is not a “place” within the psyche; it is off the map of our secular experience.

This “nothing” might seem like darkness, but it is actually “overwhelming spiritual light that blinds the soul that is experiencing it.”
¹⁰⁹
So the apprentice must be prepared to “wait in the darkness as
long as is necessary,” aware only of “a simple, steadfast intention reaching out towards God.”
¹¹⁰

Kenosis
is at the heart of the
Cloud’s
spirituality. Instead of seeking special raptures, the author tells his disciple to seek God for himself and not “for what you can get out of him.”
¹¹¹
But the discipline of self-emptying was becoming a thing of the past. Theologians were becoming more self-important, and “mystics” more self-indulgent. The new polarity was resulting in thinking theologians and loving mystics. Denys the Carthusian, an extremely learned Flemish monk of the fifteenth century, was disturbed by this change. The old mystical theology, he recalled, had been accessible to all the faithful, no matter how uneducated they were; it had been grounded in the ordinary routines of liturgy, community life, and the practice of charity. But the theology of Scotus and Ockham was incomprehensible to all but a few experts. The theology of unknowing had encouraged humility; the new speculations of the schoolmen seemed to inflate their conceit and could be imparted to anybody who had the intelligence to follow it, regardless of his moral stature.
¹¹²
Theology was not only becoming aridly theoretical; without the discipline of the apophatic, it was in danger of becoming idolatrous. Europe was on the brink of major social, cultural, political, and intellectual change. As it entered the modern world, spirituality was at a low ebb, and Europeans might find it difficult to respond creatively to the challenge.

Science and Religion

I
t is often said that the modern period began in the year 1492, when Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic in the hope of finding a new sea route to India and discovered the Americas instead. This voyage would have been impossible without such scientific discoveries as the magnetic compass and the latest insights in astronomy. The people of Western Europe were on the brink of a new world that would give them unprecedented control over their environment, and Christian Spain was in the vanguard of this change. Columbus’s patrons were the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, whose marriage had united the Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile. Spain was in the process of becoming a modern, centralized state. This was an age of transition. Columbus himself was certainly conversant with the new scientific ideas that were eagerly discussed in the Spanish universities, but he was still rooted in the older religious universe. A devout Christian, he had been born into a family of converted Jews and retained an interest in the Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism. He also regarded himself as a latter-day Crusader: once he reached India, he intended to establish a military base for the recovery of Jerusalem.
¹
The people of Europe had started their journey to modernity, but the traditional myths of religion still gave meaning to their rational and scientific explorations.