A Christmas Eve Substack meditation that draws upon a mystical and possibly heretical passage from Juan de la Cruz.
Category: Mysticism
Intimations of Elsewhere: Sensible Reminders of Hidden Beauty
Salzburg, Austria, December 1971. A young Austrian girl, radiant and beautiful, walked into the kitchen. I lost all desire for the food I had prepared. My soul sprouted wings. The visible beauty triggered a memory of a timeless Beauty. Anamnesis pierced for a moment the amnesia induced by the bodily senses.
Dayton, Ohio, 1978. Gripped by the audible beauty of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in D major, the solo passage near the beginning of the Larghetto (26:33), upon return from a long, hard run, I could not eat the huge salad I had prepared. I set it down, my appetite gone.
Simone Weil (FLN, 318): "When once the whole of one's desire is turned toward God, one has no desire to eat when one is hungry."
The metaphysical elsewhere: beyond space, before time. Space- and time-bound as we are 'at present,' we must use spatial and temporal language to point beyond the spatiotemporal.
The intimations are rare. Don't ignore them, record them, honor and remember them. To dismiss them as the worldly are wont to do strikes me as the height of spiritual foolishness.
Unusual Experiences and the Problems of Overbelief and Underbelief
Substack latest.
One day, well over 40 years ago, I was deeply tormented by a swarm of negative thoughts and feelings that had arisen because of a dispute with a certain person. Pacing around my apartment, I suddenly, without any forethought, raised my hands toward the ceiling and said, "Release me!" It was a wholly spontaneous cri de coeur, a prayer if you will, but not intended as such. I emphasize that it was wholly unpremeditated. As soon as I had said the words and made the gesture, a wonderful peace descended upon my mind, and the flood of negativity vanished. I became as calm as a Stoic sage.
A Contemplative Nun on Thomas Merton
This just over the transom from Karl White:
Hope you're well. May be of interest.
 |
July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God.
|
Your message arrives at an opportune moment. The day before yesterday I received Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Christian Perfection and Contemplation: According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross. Garrigou-Lagrange's work is the real deal from perhaps the hardest of the hard-core paleo-Thomists.
While reading the chapter on infused contemplation, I thought of Thomas Merton. Merton's sense of the reality of the Unseen Order was weak and underdeveloped because of the strong lure of the secular — to which, however, he never entirely succumbed, pace the thesis of David D. Cooper's excellent but mistaken Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist (University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008). Cooper attributed the evolution (devolution?) to Merton's failure to achieve infused contemplation. As I read him, however, Merton never lost his faith. He did, however, remain to the end deeply conflicted. All the Merton commentators that I have read agree that he came to question the contemptus mundi he expressed in The Seven Storey Mountain. As for whether or not Merton attained infused contemplation, if he had why are there no references to it in his journal? There is a paucity of spiritual disclosure in those private pages of a monk who one would think would reveal the most intimate secrets of his inner life. I have read all seven volumes of his journal several times over. He is one of those key figures without whom you cannot understand the 'Sixties.
Thanks for the link. I read the Ellsberg-Sr. Wendy correspondence with interest.
Regards,
Bill
Buber on Buddhism: Notes on a Trenchant Critique
Felicitas Theoretica et Visio Beata: Monasticism and Christianity
The bliss of the bios theoretikos as described by Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics is the model for the Beatific Vision as described by Thomas Aquinas. The ultimate salvific state is a contemplative state. Monasticism is an institutional expression of this root commitment. The monk's life is decidedly biased toward the intellectual and the theoretical. As opposed to what? As opposed to a life in which praxis is paramount.
Question: Is the life of the monk the highest life for the Christian? Is the monastic life the highest form of imitatio Christi? Christ was no anchorite. He did not flee from the agitation of the cities and from the people except for relatively short periods. He associated with the canaille, with publicans and prostitutes. His ministry was among them where he risked everything and in human terms lost everything.
Despite their drastic differences, Socrates too moved among the people and met a predictable fate. He lived in no ivory tower where he could think and write in peace and in leisurely retirement. He wrote nothing. His academy was the agora. His was the dialectic of the streets, not that of the learned essay. A battle-hardened soldier, he knew how to translate military valor into civil courage. Among his interlocutors were powerful and vicious men. He took risks, offended them, and was executed by the State. But back to Christ. Let us hear St. Neilos the Ascetic. This is from his Ascetic Discourse in the Philokalia, that marvellous compendium of Patristic teachings.
For philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both His life and His teaching. For by the purity of His life He was the first to establish the way of true philosophy. He always held His soul above the passions of the body, and in the end, when His death was required by His design for man's salvation. He laid down even His soul. In this He taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life's pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body: he must not overvalue even his soul, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.
The apostles received this way of life from Christ and made it their own, renouncing the world in response to His call, disregarding fatherland, relatives and possessions. At once they adopted a harsh and strenuous way of life, facing every kind of adversity, afflicted, tormented, harassed, naked, lacking even necessities; and finally they met death boldly, imitating their Teacher faithfully in all things. Thus through their actions they left behind a true image of the highest way of life.
Although all Christians should have modeled their own life on this image, most of them either lacked the will to do so or else made only feeble efforts. There were, however, a few who had the Strength to rise above the turmoil of the world and to flee from the agitation of cities. Having escaped from this turbulence, they embraced the monastic life and reproduced in themselves the pattern of apostolic virtue. They preferred voluntary poverty to possessions, because this freed them from distraction, and so as to control the passions, they satisfied their bodily needs with food that was readily available and simply prepared, rather than with richly dressed dishes. Soft and unnecessary clothing they rejected as an invention of human luxury, and they wore only such plain garments as are required for the body. It seemed to them a betrayal of philosophy to turn their attention from heavenly things to earthly concerns more appropriate to animals. They ignored the world, being above human passions.
I draw your attention to the third paragraph. Christ did not flee from the agitation of the cities. He did not ignore the world and its turmoil. He was not above human passions. The God-Man was fully human. He did not die like a Stoic sage. He experienced to the full the brutality of the brutal Romans, dying like a man in utter agony of body and in despair of spirit, abandoned.
So the question is: Is the monastic way a way to evade true imitation of Christ? I myself am of the monkish disposition and not at all inclined to go into the agora like Socrates or into the temple with its moneychangers like Christ. Luther I find repellent; the anti-rational but also anti-mystical Kierkegaard fascinating but wrongheaded; the Roman church wishy-washy despite its deep depths of mysticism; it is the East and the mystical depths of Orthodox Christianity that attract me. Athens is closer to Constantinople than to Rome.
And so I ask my question in the spirit of Socratic self-examination. I do not have an answer. The unexamined life is not worth living, and the highest examination is the examination of one's own life.
Related:
Kierkegaard: "To Hell with the Pope!" and Monkishness. The Highest Life
Three Theisms: Ontic, Alterity, and Onto-Theological and their Liabilities
There is a problem that has occupied me on and off for years. One way into the problem is via the following aporetic triad:
1. There are things other than God that exist, and they all depend on God for their existence.
2. For any x, y, if x depends for its existence on y, and x exists, then y exists. (This implies that nothing can depend on God for its existence unless God exists.)
3. God is not one of the many things that exist, and so God does not exist.
It is easy to see that the limbs of the triad cannot all be true. And yet each has some plausibility, at least 'in-house,' i.e., among theists.
(1) or something like it will be accepted by both ontic theists and alterity theists, assuming that they are not pantheists. Roughly, an ontic theist is a theist who maintains that God is a being among beings, an ens among entia, while an alterity theist is one who maintains that God is radically transcendent, radically other, to such an extent that he cannot be identified with any being.
(2) won't be accepted by the alterity theists, but it is to my mind exceedingly plausible! If everything other than God depends on God for its existence, then God must in some mode or manner exist; otherwise he would be nothing at all. And on nothing nothing can depend.
(3) won't be accepted by the ontic theist, but alterity theists find it plausible. If God is other than every being, then he is no being. If to be is to exist, then God does not exist.
Since the limbs cannot all be true, one of them must be rejected. I am assuming, of course, that there cannot be true contradictions. There are therefore three main ways of solving the problem.
A. The quickest solution, call it Blanket Atheism, is by rejecting (1). There is no God in any sense of the term. No being is God, and there is no God 'beyond being.' There is just the natural world (and perhaps abstracta) but nature is not God, and so God does not exist. Reality is exhausted by space-time, its occupants, and (perhaps) the Platonic menagerie. To put it another way, concrete reality is exhausted by space-time and its occupants.
B. The alterity theist rejects (2) while accepting (3).
C. The ontic theist accepts (2) while rejecting (3).
But there are two other C-options, two other options involving the acceptance of (2) and the rejection of (3).
One could take a monistic tack, roughly along the lines of Spinoza. Accordingly, (i) there is a sense in which God exists — God is not natura naturata, but natura naturans – ; (ii) God exists in the primary sense of 'exists'; (iii) God alone exists, hence is not one of many existents, and so does not exist in the sense in which Spinozistic modes exist.
This is what I used to think, back in the '80s. See my "Two Faces of Theism," Idealistic Studies, vol. xx, no. 3 (September 1990), pp. 238-257. But I moved away from this position in the '90s and took an onto-theological turn that found expression in my existence book.
That is the other C-option. Accordingly, God is not an existent among existents as the ontic theist maintains. Nor is God somehow real but nonexistent as the alterity theist maintains. Nor is God the one and only existent as the monist maintains. Rather, God is self-existent Existence, yet transcendent of the created realm, pace monism. This is roughly akin to the position of Aquinas. Deus est ipsum esse subsistens. God is not a being (ens), but self-subsisting Being (esse). So God is Being (esse) but God also is. God is both esse and ens. Gott ist beides: Sein und Seiendes. Thus there is no 'ontological difference' (Heidegger) in God. God is Being but also the prime 'case' — not instance! — of Being. (Being has no instances.) But God is in a mode of Being unlike the mode of Being of anything else. So God is not a being among beings, nor does he have properties in the way Socrates has properties. I have gone over this in painful detail in many other entries.
If we take the Thomistic tack, we can navigate between the Scylla of ontic theism and the Charybdis of alterity theism. We can avoid the untenable extremes. God is not a being among beings, but God is also not nothing as he would have to be if he were wholly other than every being.
But this too has its difficulties. I will mention one. How could anything both be and be identical to Being? How could anything be both ens and esse? How could Existence itself exist? This is unintelligible to intellects of our constitution, discursive intellects. So now I am contemplating the final step: Into the Mystic.
The above triad strikse me as an aporia, an insolubilium. The 'solutions' to it are mere stopgaps that generate problems of their own as bad as or worse than the original problem. For example, if you 'solve' the triad by embracing Blanket Atheism, then you face all the problems attending naturalism, problems we have rehearsed many times. The original problem looks to be absolutely insoluble. One has to blast through it, as through a koan, into the Transdiscursive. The philosopher, however, hovers at the boundary of the Sayable, marking it without overstepping it, incapable qua philosopher of effing the Ineffable, but able — and this is his office – to point to it while refuting both denials of it and bad theories about it.
Karl Barth, Divine Revelation, and Mystical Experience
"It [divine revelation] is the opening of a door that can only be unlocked from the inside." Quoted by Thomas Merton in Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Image Books, 1965, p. 10) from a Christmas sermon preached by Karl Barth in 1931. I am going to take this ball and run with it.
Imagine someone who would pass through only those doors that he could open himself whether by hand, by key, by picking the lock, or by brute force. Imagine him declaring, "The only permissible passages are those initiated by me and controlled by me at every step." Such a one would never knock or ring a bell. To knock or ring would be to rely on another for entry and thus to sacrifice one's ingressive self-reliance, to give it a name. It would be the heteronomy of help in violation of the autonomy of self-entry. "The only fully responsible entry is self-entry!" "It is wrong always and everywhere to rely on another for entry." "The only doors worth opening are those one can open by oneself!"
The person I am imagining would be like the modern (post-Cartesian) man who accepts as true only that for which he has sufficient evidence, only that which he can verify for himself by internal criteria and methods. Such a one, if he were standing before the portals of saving truth that can only be unlocked from the inside, would deny himself access to such truth out of a refusal to accept help. His fear of error would prevent his contact with truth.
Would that be a prideful, and thus a morally censurable, refusal? Would it be the rebellious refusal of a miserable creature who, though dependent on God for everything, absurdly privileges his own petty ego and sets it up as epistemic arbiter?
Or would the refusal to accept divine revelation be a laudable refusal that bespeaks a cautious and critical love of truth? "I so love the truth that I will accept no substitutes!"
The question is not easy to answer. It is not even easy to formulate. The question concerns the very possibility of divine revelation, and the possibility of its acceptance, not the content of any particular putative revelation.
Trust or verify? The child is trusting, but gullible; he learns to be critical. Having come of age, and having been repeatedly fooled, he trusts as little as possible. The adult is wary, as he must be to negotiate a world of snares and delusions and evil doers.
I had an unforgettable mystical experience at the age of 28. I was tormented by a torrent of deep doubts as to the ultimate sense of things. Around and around I went like a Zen man in the grip of his koan. Striding along, alone, in the early pre-dawn of a Spring day in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, I came to a point where I caught a glimpse of the rising sun just as it appeared over the horizon. Suddenly all my doubts vanished and I was flooded with a deep intuition of the ultimate sense and rightness of things. The solar glimpse triggered a mystical Glimpse into the intrinsic intelligibility of the universe. All my doubts vanished. The Last Word was sense, not absurdity! I bowed my head and was suffused with peace, and Metaphysical Trust, as I later described it in my journal. Not a trust in this thing or that, or in any human person, or in oneself and one's powers of understanding, but trust in the Unseen Order in which this transient bubble of space-time is suspended and rendered meaningful.
But of course that remarkable experience was only an experience, and no experience proves the veridicality, the reality, of its intentional object. That's Modern Philosophy 101 and only an unthinking dogmatist could think it easily dismissed.
The dialectic proceeds beyond this point, of course, but weblog entries are best kept succinct. So I leave you with the alternative: Trust or Verify? Finite reason is not equipped to solve this conundrum. You will have to de-cide. That involves a leap of faith. You can put your faith in the Unseen or in your own powers.
Two Worries about Meditation
One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha. He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice.
For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines. As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.
Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach as inner listening. In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait. Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.
This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"
Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening. But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.
My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.
Finally:
The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent. Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.
Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.
Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.
Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self. Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.
I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in. The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.
You say you want details?
Related
Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge
Dwight Green writes,
I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year.A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here. (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.)The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.
Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse. Thanks for reminding me of the passage:
So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing. Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)
Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity. Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.
The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:
. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.
Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides. You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser.
The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge. I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth. Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.
Addendum: At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.
The Old Soul
The old soul sees, while his body is yet young, that this world has nothing to offer us that is finally satisfactory.
Are You an Old Soul?
Don't be put off by the New Age-y vibe of this article. There are real insights here, and the internal links are worth following out.
The Sensus Divinitatis Waxes and Wanes
Our sense of the reality of the Unseen Order and the Unseen Other waxes in the measure that we detach our love from the objects of the senses and the pleasures they promise but never quite deliver. It wanes as we lose ourselves in the diaspora of the sensory manifold and its multiple temptations and dis-tractions. There is a sense in which we 'realize' the mundus sensibilis by our spiritual attachment to it and 'de-realize' it by our spiritual withdrawal from it.
Traditional strictures against gluttony and lust have part of their origin here. The glutton and the lecher seek happiness where it cannot be found. It seems somehow fitting that Anthony Bourdain and Jeffrey Epstein should end their days in awful ways.
Simone Weil, and her master, Plato, approve of this message.
There is a Platonic problem of the reality of the external world. It is a problem not so much about the existence of sensible things as it is about their importance. But this is a large separate topic.
Thought, Prayer, Meditation
"Prayer is when night descends on thought." (Alain, as quoted by Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus.) Knowing Alain, he must have intended his aphorism as a denigration of prayer. I see it the other way around. We cannot think our way out of our predicament; thinking merely allows us to map the terrain and discover the impasses. It is merely a means of "consolidating our perplexities." (E. Cioran). It is the failure of thinking that leads us to pray, and the limitations of prayer that lead us to meditate and wait, like Weil, in silence. (Curious it is that Simone Weil was a student of Alain.)
So I say: Prayer is when night descends on thought, and meditation is when night descends on (discursive) prayer. But all three are needed for a complete human life. Each of us should aspire to be a thinker, a believer, and a mystic with triple citizenship in Athens, Jerusalem, and Benares.
A Philosopher’s Sign of the Cross
In the name of the Principle, and of its principal Exemplar and Expression, and of the dialectical Unity of the Two.*
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."
In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum. Secundum Ioannem 1, Prologus.
In the Principle was the Exemplary Expression, and the Exemplary Expression was with the Principle, and the Exemplary Expression was the Principle.
…………………….
*That unity-in-difference, and difference-in-unity, is a dialectical difference. It is an affront to the discursive intellect with its abrupt and frozen diremptions, but approximates the fluidity of life.