THEISTIC MYSTICISM
Dionysius the Areopagite
Virtually nothing is known of this man. There was a Dionysius the Areopagite that was converted by St. Paul in the first century, but he was not the writer of such books as “The Divine Names,” and “The Mystical Theology.” He was most likely from the fifth century, definitely a Christian, and heavily indebted to Plotinus for many of his ideas. As with Plotinus, he used negative philosophy to describe his concept of God. It is not this, and it is not that. We can only say what God is not, not what He is. To predicate anything of God is to delimit Him, which is contrary to His nature in that the Almighty Lord is beyond mere description. Once all statements have been made about what He is not, then we are able to talk ‘about’ Him without limiting His greatness by words alone. As it usually turns out, the mystics proceed to describe God anyway, including Dionysius.
Dionysius, being a good Christian, wanted to characterize God in a positive way exemplifying his power as creator of a perfect universe. Such noble thoughts as love, wisdom, justice, must have a basis in God even though He in Himself is unknowable. Since these concepts have an empirical existence, God is the cause of their existence. We can say that God exists because he is the cause of existence, or that God is the cause of Love, not that God is love, but rather the source of all love in the world. It is the same with wisdom, power, justice, etc. A small problem exists as this line of reasoning leads to an infinite regress in that God is the cause of the causality that exists in the world, hence, the cause of the cause of causality–ad infinitum.
Nevertheless, Dionysius recognizes the paradox of mystical consciousness as both positive and negative. The negative side of consciousness is void, emptiness, nothingness, darkness, the absence of all thought. The positive side is union with God, infinite peace, and pure bliss. The paradox is that both positive and negative are necessary for divine union. In the negative state, the mind must be emptied of all content, must encounter the void, experience darkness, all before finding the light.
From Mystical Theology: Chapter 1. What is the Divine Gloom? We read:
“Trinity, which exceedeth all Being, Deity, and Goodness! Thou that instructeth Christians in Thy heavenly wisdom! Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty! Such be my prayer; and thee, dear Timothy, I counsel that, in the earnest exercise of mystic contemplation, thou leave the senses and the activities of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive, and all things in this world of nothingness, or in that world of being, and that, thine understanding being laid to rest, thou strain (so far as thou mayest) towards an union with Him whom neither being nor understanding can contain. For, by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of thyself and all things, thou shalt in pureness cast all things aside, and be released from all, and so shalt be led upwards to the Ray of that divine Darkness which exceedeth all existence.
“These things thou must not disclose to any of the uninitiated, by whom I mean those who cling to the objects of human thought, and imagine there is no super-essential reality beyond, and fancy they know by human understanding Him that has made Darkness His secret place. And, if the Divine Initiation is beyond such men as these, what can be said of others yet more incapable thereof, who describe the Transcendent Cause of all things by qualities drawn from the lowest order of being, while they deny that it is in any way superior to the various ungodly delusions which they fondly invent in ignorance of this Truth? That while it possesses all the positive attributes of the universe (being the universal Cause), yet in a stricter sense It does not possess them, since It transcends them all, wherefore there is no contradiction between affirming and denying that It has them inasmuch as It precedes and surpasses all deprivation, being beyond all positive and negative distinctions.”
Mystical union is a “dazzling obscurity.” This paradox is implicit in all mysticism. In the negative sense, God is incomprehensible and unknowable, but in the positive outcome, He can be reached in the ultimate union.
Meister Eckhart
Eckhart was born in Germany about 1260. He joined the Dominican Order and quickly rose to prominence. Although powerful and independent, his writings came to the attention of the ecclesiastical authorities, and he was summoned to defend himself against “sowing thorns and thistles among the faithful and even the simple folk.” Eckhart wrote a lengthy defense stating that he had always stayed within the doctrines of the church, but died before his trial.
Eckhart uses a language that is both original and meaningful; some notable sayings are: “There is a principle in the soul altogether spiritual. I used to call it a spiritual light, or spark. But now I say that it is free of all names, void of all forms. It is one and simple as God is one and simple. . . . .” “The highest part of the soul stands above time and knows nothing of time. . . . .” “In eternity there is neither time nor space, neither before nor after; everything is present in one fresh-springing Now. . . . .” “God is nearer to me than I am to myself. . . . .” “God is always ready, but we are unready; he is at home, we are strangers. . . . .” “It is often harder to leave a small thing than a great, and to practice a small work than one which men think great.”
Even the vocabulary Eckhart uses is one that has to be learned to fully grasp what he is saying. He describes the mystical experience as the “birth of Christ in the soul”; This “noble birth” takes place in the “core of the soul”; the “apex of the soul.” He says: “In that core of the soul is the central silence, the pure peace, and abode of the heavenly birth.” In one of his sermons he writes: “If you are to experience this noble birth, you must depart from all crowds . . . The crowds are the agents of the soul and their activities: memory, understanding, and will, in all their diversifications. You must leave them all: sense perception, imagination, and all that you discover in self or intend to do.”
In Indian literature, specifically the Upanishads, this process is the “obliteration of all multiplicity in the unitary consciousness.” The individual pure soul thus reached is identical with Brahman, or the Universal Self. In much the same way, for Eckhart reaching back into the core of the soul means to attain Absolute Oneness with God.
The Christian mystics had to deal with one other aspect of mystical union that was not an issue with the Eastern mystics. The Christian idea of the Trinity is central to Catholic dogma, and is the hub of its doctrines. To avoid raising the eyebrows of church officials, the Trinity needed to fit into its proper perspective. If the state of mystical union is an undifferentiated unity, then where do the three persons of the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, fit in? For Eckhart the Godhead is the “nothingness that is beyond existence,” the “formless abyss and desert stillness” where there is “no willing, no need, no act, no generation, but only an eternal silent undifferentiated One-ness.” Surprisingly, this is not God, because God and the Godhead are “as different as Heaven and earth. It is above and beyond God.” It is the “motionless peace from which the Blessed Trinity and all else comes.” The Trinity is distinguished from the Godhead, and external to it. As reality descends from complete Unity to the lower world of multiplicity, the Trinity remains at the peak beyond which is the “barren wilderness,” the waste, the desert, the emptiness of the Godhead. The Godhead is the unity not yet differentiated into the three persons. In this way, says Eckhart, “the soul enters into the Unity of the Holy Trinity, but it may become even more blessed by going further, to the barren Godhead, of which the Trinity is a revelation.” This may have assuaged the church fathers somewhat, but it seems to complicate what ought to be the simple merging of soul with Godhead.
From Sermon 21:
“. . . we, too, should be baptized by the Holy Spirit and thus experience what it is to live beyond time in eternity. We do not get the Holy Spirit in temporal things. When a person turns from temporal things inwards, into himself, he becomes aware of a heavenly light. The human spirit can never be satisfied with what light it has but storms the firmament and scales the heavens to discover the spirit by which the heavens are driven in revolutions and by which everything on the earth grows and flourishes.
“Even then, the human spirit takes no rest. It presses on further into the vortex, the source in which the spirit originates. There, the spirit, in knowing, has no use for number, for numbers are of use only within time, in this defective world. No one can strike his roots into eternity without being rid [of the concept] of number. The human spirit must go beyond all number-ideas, must break past and away from ideas of quantity and then he will be broken into by God. As God penetrates me I penetrate God in return. God leads the human spirit into the desert, into his own unity, in which he is pure One and self-creating.”
From Sermon 22:
“. . . we are not wholly blessed, even though we are looking at divine truth; for while we are still looking at it, we are not in it. As long as a man has an object under consideration, he is not one with it. Where there is nothing but One, nothing but One is to be seen. Therefore, no man can see God except he be blind, nor know him except through ignorance, nor understand him except through folly.”
Meister Eckharts wide-ranging views of the soul and union with God cut across narrow doctrines that could not confine him to anyone set of beliefs, but set him apart from other Christian mystics that eventually brought him to be posthumously condemned by the Pope.
Saint Teresa of Avila
St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross lived during the sixteenth century in Spain, and were members of the Carmelite Order of the Catholic Church. Although they worked together, and experienced mystical union, their experiences, while not totally unlike, were written from very different perspectives. St. Teresa admits she did not understand the process, and could not make distinctions, such as between soul, mind, and spirit. Nonetheless, she wrote with complete abandon what she felt and believed was the Spiritual marriage with God.
This is a common motif among Christian mystics that union is marriage of the soul with God. Often we hear language describing the union as Betrothal, Love of the Spouse, the Bridegroom, and Divine Marriage. St. Teresa also made great use of pious expressions throughout her writings, which portrayed the element of sin and struggle that are part of the human condition. She wrote of herself as “this miserable woman” and gently reproached the Lord for bestowing the favor of union “upon a creature so wretched, so base, so weak, so miserable and so worthless” as herself, even calling herself “wicked.”
From the Interior Castle: Spiritual Marriage.
“. . . one makes these comparisons because there are no other appropriate ones, yet it must be realized that the Betrothal has no more to do with the body than if the soul were not in the body, and were nothing but spirit. Between the Spiritual Marriage and the body there is even less connection, for this secret union takes place in the deepest centre of the soul, which must be where God Himself dwells, and I do not think there is any need of a door because all that has so far been described seems to have come through the medium of the senses and faculties and this appearance of the Humanity of the Lord must do so too. But what passes in the union of the Spiritual Marriage is very different. The Lord appears in the centre of the soul, not through an imaginary, but through an intellectual vision (although this is a subtler one than that already mentioned), just as He appeared to the Apostles. . . . This instantaneous communication of God to the soul is so great a secret and so sublime a favour, and such delight is felt by the soul, that I do not know with what to compare it, beyond saying that the Lord is pleased to manifest to the soul at that moment the glory that is in Heaven, in a sublimer manner than is possible through any vision or spiritual consolation. It is impossible to say more than that, as far as one can understand, the soul (I mean the spirit of this soul) is made one with God, Who, being likewise a Spirit, has been pleased to reveal the love that He has for us by showing to certain persons the extent of that love, so that we may praise His greatness. For He has been pleased to unite Himself with His creature in such a way that they have become like two who cannot be separated from one another: even so He will not separate Himself from her.”
“The Spiritual Betrothal is different: here the two persons are frequently separated, as is the case with union, for, although by union is meant the joining of two things into one, each of the two, as is a matter of common observation, can be separated and remain a thing by itself. This favour of the Lord passes quickly and afterwards the soul is deprived of that companionship–I mean so far as it can understand. In this other favour of the Lord it is not so: the soul remains all the time in that centre with its God. . . . But here it is like rain falling from the heavens into a river or a spring; there is nothing but water there and it is impossible to divide or separate the water belonging to the river from that which fell from the heavens. Or it is as if a tiny streamlet enters the sea, from which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it all becomes one.”
St. Teresa’s mystical unions varied between different periods of her life. She distinguished between Spiritual Betrothal and Spiritual Marriage which is the difference between occasional union and permanent union. Permanent union appears to be the integration of the mystical consciousness and the sensory intellectual consciousness. St. Teresa apparently could enjoy a state of mystical consciousness while continuing her daily routine, although most Christian mystics wrote of the obliteration of all thought and sense data in the brief period of ultimate union. Since Teresa described both experiences, it must be assumed that she reached a point of sustaining the mystical state however diminished it might have been. St. Ignatius Loyola also shared the same inclination for staying in divine union over prolonged periods of time. It is well documented that Gautama, the notable Eastern mystic, reached an extended state of rapture under the Bodhi tree for an astounding 49 days.
Saint John of The Cross
St. John’s mystical experiences are recorded as three levels of intensely emotional and intellectual movements to the union with God: the Dark Night, the Betrothal, and Spiritual Marriage.
In the Dark Night, as with most introvertive mystics, St. John says: “The soul must be emptied of all these imagined forms, figures, and images, and it must remain in darkness in respect to these internal senses if it is to attain Divine union. The inward wisdom cannot enter into the understanding in any conceptual form or sensory image.” It is what he calls, “The inflowing of God into the Soul.” The Dark Night is referred to in two different forms. The soul “must remain in darkness in respect of sensations, images, and understanding,” but it also enters territory totally strange and even frightening. St. John continues with: “But what the sorrowing soul feels most painfully in this condition is the dreadful thought that God has abandoned it and has flung it into utter darkness. . . . it feels most vividly the shadows and laments of death and the torments of hell which consist in the conviction that God in His anger has chastised and forsaken it forever.” St. John assures us that this is a necessary step in preparation for union with God through purging, cleansing, and humbling of the soul.
In the Betrothal, God is experienced directly; although purification continues, now there is delight, and happiness. It is a state “wherein the Spouse grants the soul great favors and visits it most lovingly and frequently. . . .The yearnings of the caverns of the soul are wont to be extreme and delicate.” Who is the Spouse? The three divine persons, but the three Divine Persons as one “for they all work in one.”
The Spiritual Marriage is the Beatific Vision in Heaven. “God is there, habitually, as it were, asleep in this embrace with the bride, in the substance of the soul; and of this the soul is quite conscious, and habitually has fruition of Him, for, if He were forever awake within it, communicating knowledge and love to it, it would be already living in glory.” The Trinity dwells in the souls of all mankind, but only a few actually come to experience it. “God dwells secretly in all souls and is hidden in their substance; for, were this not so, they would be unable to exist. But there is a difference between these two manners of dwelling and a great one. . . .He dwells not secretly with respect to the soul which is in this state of perfection, for it feels this intimate embrace within it.”
St. John, thus describes the condition he calls the ‘union of love,’ which he says is reached by ‘dark contemplation.’ In this sense the Deity penetrates the soul, but in such a hidden way that the soul “finds no terms, no means, no comparison whereby to render the sublimity of the wisdom and the delicacy of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled . . . We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible representations, which our mind makes use of in other circumstances. Accordingly in this knowledge, since the senses and the imagination are not employed, we get neither form nor impression, nor can we give any account or furnish any likeness, although the mysterious and sweet-tasting wisdom comes home so clearly to the inmost parts of our soul. Fancy a man seeing a certain kind of thing for the first time in his life. He can understand it, use and enjoy it, but he cannot apply a name to it, nor communicate any idea of it, even though all the while it be a mere thing of sense. How much greater will be his powerlessness when it goes beyond the senses! This is the peculiarity of the divine language. The more infused, intimate, spiritual, and supersensible it is, the more does it exceed the senses, both inner and outer, and impose silence upon them. . . . The soul then feels as if placed in a vast and profound solitude, to which no created thing has access, in an immense and boundless desert, desert the more delicious the more solitary it is. There, in this abyss of wisdom, the soul grows by what it drinks in from the well-springs of the comprehension of love, . . . and recognizes, however sublime and learned may be the terms we employ, how utterly vile, insignificant, and improper they are, when we seek to discourse of divine things by their means.”
St. John, writing of the intuitions and ‘touches’ by which God reaches the substance of the soul, tells us that “They enrich it marvelously. A single one of them may be sufficient to abolish at a stroke certain imperfections of which the soul during its whole life had vainly tried to rid itself, and to leave it adorned with virtues and loaded with supernatural gifts. A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life–even were they numberless. Invested with an invincible courage, filled with an impassioned desire to suffer for its God, the soul then is seized with a strange torment–that of not being allowed to suffer enough.”
The writings of St. John, and other Christian mystics, leave little doubt that their mystic experiences were the genuine thing, at least to them, and should be enough evidence to affirm the truth that spiritual union is a reality.