Presentation to 2008 Alternative Expressions of the Numinous
Divine Poetics: Language of Mystical ==== ¦ ==== Faith is borne of mystery and is often ineffable, borne of words and sacrament and is sometimes indescribable; faith is borne of the beautiful and sublime but mere expressions of its essence fall pathetically short. Mysticism scholar Bernard McGinn writes that Western Christianity sees God manifested in all things, but that no one thing can embody or express God. This has been, and remains, a problem for preachers, poets and writers: How to express the inexpressible; how to address an unknowable God? It’s also problematic for presenters. To that end… I would like to evoke a series of concentric circles, three circles of one large orb encompassing two smaller inner circles, as an organizing pattern for this presentation. It will reoccur throughout my talk today and I will indicate when I begin a new set of imbedded circles. Rings or circles are appropriate here. It was the philosopher-mystic Plotinus (Puh-Lot-in-Us) who wrote “the soul is a circle.” It was So my introductory circle begins with the outer rim, the overriding context: The outer ring: Writing in The Idea of the Holy, Rudolph Otto says, there are three ways to have contact with the mystery, the numinous, with God. One, directly, by an experience that cannot be described because it is beyond words – it happens and only afterwards do you know it; two, indirectly by which imaginative representations are used to illustrate the experience once removed from the experience cognizant of the representation’s inferiority, and thirdly, through conceptual art, which can produce the sublime. So we have: Moving into the circle, we come to the first inner ring. Writers, especially the ones I am going to talk about today, are concerned with the expression of the mystical first – experience or union with God. Writers attempt do so while composing and sculpting the second – representation – the words, the symbols, and all the while striving for the third – art – transcendence, union with God. This endeavor, this composition of what cannot be expressed or described takes on the shape, the logos, of that which it desires. This is the shape of their words: a beautiful, transcendent circle – setting out, circling away, and rounding in returning. Their craft is a divine poetics first employed in the 5th century and is still very much in use today by writers engaging the ineffable. Now to the final ring of my introductory concentric circle: The bulk of Western Christianity believes while God can be affirmed in many things these affirmations cannot contain an unknowable God. Here’s an encapsulating illustration: God created everything, like this glowing ball of light. Now the ball of light affirms God; I can point to it and say, “God created that. Wow. He created it, me, you…everything. What a miracle!” But none of it is God. Nothing I see, feel, taste, hear or touch can embody God. God is inexpressible. Nothing my perceptions allow is capable of being an expression of God. The ball of light is not God. However not even when you stare at this light, and then close your eyes and later reopen them with the ball of light magically gone does this in any way represent God. There’s a ghost seared into the back of your vision, but it’s not holy; the ghost is not the ball of light, nor is the absence of what was once present capable of being an expression of God. Neither the presence of the ball of the light in the first place, nor secondly the space that is left in its absence can be an expression of God. One of the principal writers to engage the ineffable in a divine poetics – a way to express the inexpressible – was Saint Denis, also known as Dionysius the Areopagite (Air-e-op-agit). Saint Denis, writing in his seminal work Mystical Theology, is a divine cipher giving writers and preachers of the apophatic tradition the means to crack the conundrum of expressing the numinous – of the numen, above and beyond the good, the self – that cannot be put into mere words. According to Thomas Carlson, writing in Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry, here are Denis’ poetics for expressing and experiencing a mystical union: 1) Affirmation or Cataphatism – God is everywhere and we can see Him in miracles and creations; we can hear him, etc. 2) Negation or Apophatism – God is indescribable, beyond time, beyond words, beyond our comprehension – unknowable 3) Negate the Negation – God is neither this nor that; neither light nor dark; day nor night. In Mystical Theology, Saint Denis writes: “What has actually to be said about the cause of everything is this. Since it is the cause of all beings, we should posit and ascribe to it all the affirmations we make in regard to beings, and more appropriately, we should negate all these affirmations, since it surpasses all being. Now we should not conclude that the negations are simply the opposite of the affirmations, but rather that the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond both every denial and every assertion.” So this is how the divine poetics works; how to compose and speak of that which cannot be expressed in word – you have to built up to it this way: So, Affirm the ball of light. Negate its ability to be an expression of God. Negate the negation by denying the negation to also be an expression of God. That the three-step process might resemble concentric circles is not, to my mind, coincidental; that the poetics is triune is only fitting. Three writers employ this divine poetics to great effect. Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (Eck-Heart), the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing and philosopher Simone Weil (Vey as Hey) all come to illustrate the poetics’ transcendence of time, place and language. I would like to move beyond the introductory concentric circle where I discussed the problem and solution for writers wishing to express the inexpressible. The divine poetics writers they use includes: affirmation, negation and negate the negation. So we’re moving on from the introductory circle to a new one. My first concentric circle beyond the introductory one is for the two writers who best follow Saint Denis’ in adopting the divine poetics in order to express the ineffable. This circle has an introductory ring; then the first inner ring which discusses the writers and a final central ring which covers the writer’s use of the poetics – affirm, negation, and negate the negation. Cloud author & Simone Weil – The introductory ring we find Simone Weil, a modern-day philosopher and mystic; a 20th century thinker and writer who was French, wrote in French and had her work translated into English after her death in 1943 – her most famous work being Gravity and Grace. The Cloud of Unknowing is a text of similar kind and approach to those of Weil; it was written by an anonymous English preacher of the 14th Century. The work was originally published in his native Midlands Middle English and later translated into modern day vernacular. It is a book on how to pray. As we move into the first inner ring we see that both Weil and Cloud foresaw a union with God as a relationship, one borne of love. The ultimate expression of love came via the three part poetics I first outlined in Saint Denis – affirmation, negation and negate the negation. In Weil’s corpus – including Notebooks, Waiting for God and Gravity & Grace – she employs the poetics. First she affirms: Weil’s God is one who “creates” who “rewards;” (Waiting 4) the one who “created love,” and “created beings.” (Waiting 72). Her affirmations contend that God is omnipresent and atemporal, but is a being nevertheless, an entity that seeks the cooperation of His creations. “The presence of God. This should be understood in two ways. As Creator, God is present in everything which exists as soon as it exists.” Weil writes in Gravity and Grace (35). The second presence is as spirit in union, which I will get to shortly. As any good apophatic Christian, Weil follows her affirmations with denials: “The entire being of the creatures compared with the infinite being of God is nothing,” she writes in Gravity and Grace (xxxii). Everything created or outside of her soul was to be negated; it is not God. The task of moving beyond negation to an ultimate union with God is a process of internal detachment from things and from concepts and into what Weil calls that second way I mentioned earlier, this is called the “presence of decreation.” (Gravity 35) And by decreation Weil writes in Gravity & Grace is, “to make something created pass into the uncreated.” (28) -- Uncreated, unsaying, apophaticism. This decreation empties the self of all creaturely attributes, save one that of love. Everything is negated by this love. “We must give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace. … To detach our desire from all good things and to wait. Experience proves that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.” Weil writes (Gravity 13). “…for God fills the void.” “The intelligence has nothing to discover, it had only to clear the ground.” [Gravity 13] That ground clearing is an act of love and attention, rewarded by God, Weil writes in Waiting for God (4). The unsaying in the soul begins to deny absence and presence. Weil begins then to say the ball of light is not God nor is the absence of light God. Her word choices begin to the oscillation: For Weil there is a sound, but not a sound; a desire -- but not to desire – a sorrow; a being but not an “I”… neither soul nor creature, an entity between gravity and grace – waiting – “separate yet melting into one,” she writes in Waiting for God. (72) When union happens, “secret and silent,” (Waiting 8) -- “…neither my senses nor my imagination had any part; I only felt in the midst of my suffering the presence of a love, like that which one can read in the smile of a beloved face.” (Waiting 27) Metaphor: beloved face; concrete. Staying in this inner first circle alongside Weil we find love is the last negation of the 14th century anonymous Cloud author. The scholars, such as Denys Turner, tell us The Cloud is firmly rooted in the apophatic tradition, positively asserting that while God cannot be known by thought one can know God by love via a process of affirmation, negation and the negation of negation. The Cloud of Unknowing begins with Affirmation: For the Cloud author, God can be seen (Cloud 12) God created man, “ …it seemeth to me that the everlasting love of His Godhead, through the which He made thee and wrought thee when thou wert nought” (Cloud 49) The author calls God a, “jealous lover.” (Cloud 51) He affirms, “He is the maker and giver of time.” (Cloud 58) Then the Cloud author instructs his readers to forget all that, to enter the darkness of God, to enter the unknown. The desire for God consumes all other desires and eventually frees us from desire itself. We are not so much desiring God as loving God in the non-conceptual silence of meditation to the point of self-transference into darkness. Darkness: “I mean a lacking of knowing: as all that thing that thou knowest not, or else that thou hast forgotten, it is dark to thee; for thou seest it not with thy ghostly eye. And for this reason it is not called a cloud of air, but a cloud of unknowing, that is betwixt thee and thy God.” And from here, union is possible: “The soul is oned with God,” writes the author. Here, negate the negation is represented, clearly, as the two clouds – the forgetting beneath, which is all of created entities we might have affirmed, then there is the cloud of unknowing between God and man of that which we denied. The union is neither the cloud beneath nor the cloud above. Unknowing, unsaying, apophaticism. The final center ring of this circle finds Weil and Cloud author both employing metaphors (a figure of speech applied to something to which it is not literally applicable) to distill their final negation. Both place the soul between two things: Weil has gravity, which holds the soul down; Grace which lifts up. The Cloud author has the forgetting which is left behind and the unknowing which is ahead. This kind of negation – a negation of negation – puts them in line with the poetics of Saint Denis’ whose final linguistic move we will remember was to insist that union with God was to be achieved by neither this nor that distinctions. Let’s leave this circle now and come to our final one. This is the concentric circles of one of the chief proponents of this kind of writing: Johannes Eckhart. He is the noted Dominican preacher and philosopher who came to be known as Meister Eckhart. Eckhart’s writing for sermons and biblical commentaries is equal parts beautiful, confounding and profound. Moving now to the first inner circle here we discuss Eckhart’s writing. Undergirding Eckhart’s approach to illustrating mystical unions is a belief that we, his listeners and readers, not necessarily need to understand or comprehend, but do as he says: Be rather than find a way to do it. This is clearly exemplified through the myriad paradoxes and linguistic gymnastics Eckhart engages in. “God is a word that speaks itself. (Breakthrough 57) The more God is in things the more he is outside of things. (65) God is spoken and unspoken. (57) God is unlike God by any comparison.” (59) Eckhart’s writing is designed to humble us, designed to show how inferior our intellect, or affection for God, is to the actual. While humbling, in order to express the inexpressible then Eckhart engages the divine poetics as did Saint Denis, Cloud author and Simone Weil – by affirming, negation, and negating the negation. Eckhart affirms God’s existence and His creations: “All creatures are words of God.” (58) “God is in all things.” (65) “All good things flow from the overflow of God’s goodness.” (166) In German Sermon 10, he says: “God creates the world and all things in a present now, and the time which passed a thousand years is as present and near to God as the time which is now. As the soul that remains in a present now, the Father gives birth to his only-begotten Son into it, and this same birth the soul is born back into God. All this is one birth. As often as the soul is born again into God, the Father gives birth to his only-begotten Son into it. (Teacher 265) Eckhart then negates these affirmations: He does this by highlighting the inability of the human mind to comprehend God, to see God, since as creatures we tend to marvel in creations at the expense of God. The more we seek the less we see. “We should also learn that there is no name we can give to God such that we would seem to be implying that by means of it we had sufficiently praised and honored God, for God is elevated over all names and remains inexpressible.” (Breakthrough 58). “God is nameless, for no one can know or articulate anything about God.” (178). And yet Eckhart believed God reunites us into one, indistinct, by virtue of us shedding our creature habits and thoughts. He writes, “You must know that to be empty of all created things is to be full of God, and to be full of created things is to be empty of God.” (47) “Detachment is wholly free of all created things.” (Eckhart 286, counsel] “Perfect detachment has no looking up to, no abasement or beneath any created thing or above it; it wishes to be neither beneath nor above, it wants to exist by itself, no giving joy or sorrow to anyone, not wanting equality or inequality with any created thing, not wishing for this or for that. All that it wants is to be.” [287 counsels] From here, Eckhart enters that final stage of divine poetics, negate the negation: “and when this detachment ascends to the highest place, it knows nothing of knowing, it loves nothing of loving, and from light it becomes dark.” [49] And union is possible, if only we embrace unknowing… “Unity is a negation of negation and a denial of denial. What does unity mean? It means oneness, to which nothing is added as an attribute… God is one. He is the negation of negation.” (Breakthrough 160) In the final inner circle we find Eckhart’s metaphor – the likes of which we have heard of used in the Cloud author and Simone Weil. Each developing a metaphor to encapsulate Saint Denis’ neither this nor that. A metaphor is the same – neither the term nor the signifier. “His unshaven face was like peach fuzz” – his face is neither a peach nor is a peach his face. Resembles but is not. In Cloud we hear of the cloud of forgetting and unknowing and man in between; in Weil we heard of gravity and grace… In Eckhart, finally, the metaphor is far more internalized, at the very core of the soul. Free from the intellect and love of a creature, the soul would be an empty place save one – a uncreated ground – the word of God – which emanates, flows out as the processions of the Persons in the Trinity and returns as the production of all created beings as God. Eckhart calls this flowing out – bullitio (boiling out) and this flowing back as – ebullitio (boiling over) … an imaginative representation of the ineffable, a metaphor of constant flux, …a circle, if you will. For the soul is a circle. & God is a circle whose center is everywhere, yet whose circumference is nowhere. Works Cited Carlson, Thomas A. “Apophatic Analogy: On the Language of Mystical Unknowing and Being-Toward-Death,” Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry. Ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmstead. Dionysius. “Mystical Theology,” Esoterica, <http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MysticalTheology.html> Egan, Harvey D. An Anthology of Christian Mysticism. Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1991. 367-370. Forman, Robert K.C. “Mystical Knowledge: Knowledge by Identity” Journal of the Gellman, Jerome, "Mysticism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/mysticism/>. Franke, Kuno. “Mediaeval German Mysticism” Harvard Theological Review Vol. 5, No. 1 (Jan., 1912), pp. 110-120 McGinn, Bernard. “Love, Knowledge, and Mystical to Sixteenth Centuries” Church History Vol. 56, No 1 (Mar., 1987), 7-24. ---, ed. The Classics of Western Spirituality: Meister Eckhart: Teacher and Preacher. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986. ---, ed. The Classics of Western Spirituality: Meister Eckhart: The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense. Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1986. ---, ed. The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism. Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of The Holy. Peers, Edgar Allison. Behind That Wall. 89. Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God. Underhill, Evelyn, ed. Element Classics of World Spirituality: The Cloud of Unknowing. Rockport: Element, 1997. 1-197. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. ---. Waiting for God. Perennial Classics: Images: Meister Eckhart: The Blavatsky Lodge Cloud stand in monk: Nina's Learnerblogs Simone Weil: simonweil.net Peter the Iberian: Wikipedia
August 17, 2008
This is called the apophatic tradition – apophatic meaning negative, an unsaying.
