by Matt Cardin
The feeling of an anticlimax, of something momentous having occurred, and of my having been too obtuse to comprehend it, hounded me for the rest of the day. It lay so thickly upon my heart that I felt smothered by its weight. When at last I collapsed onto my rough pallet in my solitary cell, I stared up through the window at a waning gibbous moon and fancied I could hear the abbot’s blessing still murmuring in my ear. Presently, I felt as if his words had descended to my heart, where they continued to murmur their approval of my efforts. Soon afterwards I drifted into a sleep more profound than any I had ever known.
I awoke the next morning with a powerful sense of remoteness, and with an odd sensation of coolness in my breast. It was not an unpleasant feeling, but more like a balm having been applied to a burning wound. For several minutes I lay there trying to divine the nature of the change. When I closed my eyes, I gained the impression of a second heart having been born within me. It was a heart made entirely of light, but of a strange sort that appeared as a luminescent darkness rather than a warming glow. My sense of imminent insight had never been so powerful, and yet its fulfillment hovered just beyond my grasp.
Of course I was ecstatic at the thought that I might have experienced divine illumination while I slept. But I feared to say anything to my brothers, lest this phenomenon prove to be other than what I hoped. Something about it seemed awry; the dark radiance of the new heart within me was colder and more piercing than the light I was accustomed to encountering in my religious service to God. It was also more thrilling, in a way I could not pinpoint. By the time I finally arose a bit later than my accustomed time, my joy had become tempered with anxiety, and I was anticipating the ritual of the daily schedule with a comforting sense of security.
My disappointment was severe when I found I was denied this small comfort. Instead of providing reassurance, the discharge of the Divine Office had never seemed so appallingly restrictive. My thoughts kept turning all throughout the day to the errors I had committed in my copying. While we read the morning hours, bathed, and ate, I felt distant and distracted, and afflicted by a growing restlessness. When at last we dispersed to our specialized endeavors at midmorning, I rushed to the scriptorium under the sway of an impulse I could not understand, and flung open the covers of my book with a sense of exultation.
With the pages laid out before me, I could see there was no evident reason why I should be gripped by such an acute sense of excitement. The errors were simply errors, nothing more, the mere product of wandering attention. I knew that I should feel properly contrite, and yet the inappropriate sense of excitement still gripped me in total opposition to the facts of the situation. The new heart swelled within me at the sight of the strange markings, and before I knew what I was doing, I had seized the quill and was about to start writing without any conscious notion of what I would write.
Of course it was my training that called me back to myself. I froze right before the tip of the quill made contact with the page, and then sat for many long minutes collecting myself. There was something happening inside me, some transformation that filled me at once with joy and confusion. At the moment, its primary outward expression was a perverse and nagging desire to alter the sacred work with which I had been entrusted. Except for a few meditative thoughts at the start and end of a day’s work—perhaps a quick reflection on the passage being copied, perhaps a prayer to God for guidance of the hand in its task—no copyist was ever supposed to write freely, using nothing but his own thoughts as a guide. And yet I felt that if I but loosed my hand, I could fill a thousand books with original words and still not have begun to exhaust the ocean of ideas struggling to emerge from my pen.
At last, with an effort of will aided by many long years of inner discipline, I forced myself to focus upon the exemplar, and not the new thoughts boiling like a storm in my spirit. I was partway through the Gospel of St. John, and I hoped that I might regain a sense of calmness and equanimity by letting my thoughts be molded to the writings of the disciple whom Jesus had loved. Still, I felt a sharp pang of regret as I dipped the quill into the inkpot and began to copy the words of the Scripture.
Shortly before it was time for the abbot to enter, I set down the pen and scanned back over my work. Again there was that sensation of my breath being squeezed off inside my throat, as I slowly understood what had happened without my being aware of it.
The purity of my intentions had not mattered. The new thoughts struggling to emerge had had their say without regard for my attempts to suppress them. At some point during the day, I had left off copying and started writing original words. During the conversation between Christ and the Pharisee Nicodemus, wherein our Lord asserts the necessity of a person’s being born from above in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, my book had been transformed radically, through a shocking shift in vocabulary and theology, into something else.
I could not say precisely what this new thing was, but it was certainly not the Word of God. Nowhere in the Deposit of Faith, either oral or written, could one find teachings of such a horrific and subversive cast. I read through the pages with a sense of mounting wonder and terror as I began to gain a powerful impression of imminent doom from certain words that appeared repeatedly in a patterned regularity whose scheme I could not divine. They spoke of “darkness” and “disorder,” “dispersion” and “depletion,” and of “the great deep, the watery waste of oblivion” that “laps hungrily at the shore of creation.” The world as I knew it—the world of life, light, and order, where God, man, and nature stood in fixed and unalterable relation to each other—was framed by those words into a loathsome perspective of weariness, worthlessness, and wasted effort.
As this portrait gained clarity in my mind’s eye, the room around me appeared to darken. The desk before me grew hazy. The spread pages of my book became like two windows peering out upon a midnight sky. For a timeless moment, I gazed through those windows into an impenetrable gloom. My thoughts slowed to a halt, and my fleshly heart seemed to freeze while the new heart of seething darkness beat with a sound like approaching thunder.
When I returned to myself and looked back at my brothers, I saw they had undergone a transformation. Instead of solid flesh and bone, inhabited by the quickening spirit of the living God, they now appeared to me as no more than empty frames, animate dirt held together temporarily by some precarious whim. The outline of their familiar human forms trembled liquidly as they bent over their books, like the slop in the pigsty at the rear of the monastery. I feared that if I but blinked or looked away, I might turn back to see them collapse into piles of steaming refuse.
My horror was magnified all the more when I looked down at my own hand and saw the same subtle transformation existing implicitly, hidden away within my flesh like an embryo of corruption. It was as if an inbuilt potentiality for dissolution lurked in the crevices of my physical being, and merely awaited the arrival of a clandestine signal before springing to life and overrunning my entire body.
Even as I reeled from these revelations, I heard the door scrape open behind me, and the abbot entered the room. Like a man in a dream, I remained paralyzed on my bench, unable to breathe, unable to reach out and shut the pages of my book to hide them from his gaze. I waited in agony while he passed from brother to brother with quiet words of encouragement. But when he approached me, I was astonished for the second time in as many days when he emitted no shout of horror at the vileness vibrating on my pages. For an excruciating moment he paused, and it was as if all the air fled from the room in a rushing whisper. We remained briefly in a silent vacuum, I on my bench and he standing behind me, while I awaited my judgment.
Then he did a most extraordinary thing: He leaned forward, reached over my shoulder, and ran his hand down the pages in a loving caress. He was careful to avoid the fresh ink. His fingers merely brushed the margins and traced the contours of certain words. Despite the absurdity of the thought, I had the undeniable impression that he was savoring what he saw.
&n
bsp; The rasping of his papery skin on the parchment sent a chill scuttling down my spine. I blinked and tried to clear my head of the freezing fog that had settled over it, but my mind was like a block of ice as the abbot lowered his lips to my ear and gave me his usual blessing. Then he whispered—or, more precisely, hissed—“The mind of Christ,” and left me to my frozen thoughts.
Afterward, I was more numb than horrified. My mind and spirit felt unable to take in all that had transpired, and I passed the next few hours in a sickened bewilderment. It was not until later that night, during the reading of Vespers, that the shock of what had happened finally hit me. When it did, I felt the abbot’s words begin to stir within me like a living presence. His blessing felt as if it were alive, lodged in my brain, and in search of a deeper destination than my mere conscious thoughts. Almost as soon as I realized this, the words plunged downward toward the new heart within me, and when they found it, began to nourish it with their meaning. It leaped in recognition at their arrival, and on the instant my lungs let go, having remained in a state of semi-paralysis all afternoon. My first great gasping inhalation was succeeded by another involuntary groan, which, in the sanctified air of the chapel, my brothers might easily have mistaken for an expression of spiritual ardor.
3. The Deep and Secret Things
These events troubled me to the point of desperation, and I spent many days meditating on their possible meaning. At what point, I wondered, had I become susceptible to the attacks of demons? For that was surely what such occurrences must signify. Despite all my exalted spiritual passions, I had fallen prey to the influence of a demon that was working through me to defile the Word of God. Briefly, I tried to console myself with the thought that this attack must be an indication of my advanced spiritual status, since demonic affliction customarily came only to those souls who had attained such an advanced state of grace that the enemy of God took note and inflicted all sorts of horrible inner and outer torments in order to drag them down from their lofty height. If that were indeed the case with me, then I knew I should count it an honor to be singled out by Satan himself as worthy of special attention.
But these thoughts did not comfort me, for they did not seem to reach to the heart of the matter. The vision of the world as a kind of empty shell, congealed around a core of nothingness, continued to haunt me. The memory of the strangeness in the abbot’s manner filled me with fear and loathing, even when I saw that he had returned to normal and displayed no more signs of a sinister alteration. Somehow, I could sense that the scope of my affliction extended far beyond the possibility of Satan and his demons, and I was all the more terrified by this unshakable notion that the understanding of the cosmic order I had received from the Church was pitifully inadequate.
Most of all, I was troubled by the continued alteration in my work. On the first day after the abbot’s strange blessing, I arrived back at the scriptorium with the intention of ripping out the offending pages and burning them. But when I went to do it, my hand was stayed by a sudden impulse that shot out like a lightning bolt from my new heart. I trembled so violently as I fought against it that I was forced to grip my hand with the other in order to avoid alerting my brothers that something was amiss. For a time I sat collecting myself. Then I tried to begin working as if nothing had happened.
That was when it became piercingly evident that I would not so easily be able to reclaim my former life. For no sooner did I pick up the pen than I began writing without reference to the exemplar. I filled several lines before I noticed what had happened, and the new words were of the same tenor as the ones I had written on the previous day. I gasped and immediately tried to drop the pen, but it was locked in my hand as if by an invisible fist gripping my own. Shock and weariness had taken their toll, and all at once I was too tired to resist the impulse that kept gnawing at me from the inside. Hot tears scalded my cheeks as I understood the helplessness of my position, and with a silent prayer of protection I reluctantly allowed my hand to begin writing again of its own will.
The result was even more terrifying than before. The words that appeared mocked the Word of God not only with their meaning, but also with their very appearance on the page. My hand seemed to have gone mad, for it refused to follow the guidelines of the rubric, and instead seemed determined to forge a new path. I watched in horror as it created a kind of woven pattern of text, where sacred teachings of love, trust, purity, order, and holiness were coupled with, and sometimes even negated by, wildly coiling statements of madness and pandemonium.
After awhile, I began to feel as if I had stepped away from my desk, away from the room, away from the world itself, and was watching helplessly—and, I will admit, with a growing fascination—as my hand wrote things that were an absolute defilement of the truths it should have been transcribing. “Darkness” and “disease” shrieked up at me from the pages. Christ’s teachings about the necessity of rebirth, the urgency of salvation, and the primacy of love were transformed into admonitions to “suckle from the breast of the unborn, which has never seen the light” and to “drink deep the nectar of oblivion.”
At the end of the day, when the impulse finally let go, my hand dropped to the desk and rested there like an alien appendage. I was spiritually and physically drained, and afflicted by a sour sickness in my stomach and spirit. But when I looked again at the pages filled with their bizarre textual nightmares, I experienced an even greater shock at the flutter of exhilaration that tickled my breast, and that whispered to me that the book was now more truly mine than anything else had ever been. The blasphemous new teachings felt connected, in a way I could neither describe nor deny, to that well of spiritual ecstasy buried deep within my soul. A hot pulse of excitement, much akin to the rush of love that had overwhelmed me when I first beheld the abbot sixteen years ago, began to beat behind my eyes. For the second time that day, my eyes filled with tears, but now they were tears of gratitude, which dried quickly and left me all the more wretched and confused.
My actual conscious capitulation occurred a few days later, during the reading of Terce. In keeping with the obscure rhythms of the inner life, it was while I prayed aloud with my brothers that my decision was fully formed to embrace this new direction and see where it would take me. I glanced around at the brothers, observed them chanting the litany with supreme devotion, and knew with a thrill of deep longing that I was no longer one in spirit with them. Hints of a strange truth that had built up over a lifetime of spiritual yearning finally came together to form a clear picture, and for the first time I understood that my passion outstripped theirs not only in depth but in kind. Not only did I want something more, I wanted something different than what the monastic life had given them. My fear of being influenced by evil spirits dwindled as I opened myself fully to the possibility that there was more to the cosmic order than what I had allowed myself to believe, and certainly much more than the Church had ever suspected. I was embarked on a solitary journey, with nothing to guide me but a limitless yearning for absolute union with the original source of life and consciousness.
That day in the scriptorium, I made my customary ritual of positioning the exemplar, lifting the quill, and dipping it reverently into the inkpot. Then I paused as I knew that I was about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Sitting there with the pen hovering above the page, I felt as if I were staring at the smooth surface of a darkened ocean. With a sense of plunging forward, downward, inward, I averted my eyes from the exemplar and began to write, not to copy but to write, to say things original and unheard of, and to regard them deliberately not with horror, but with an open spirit.
Instantly, the second heart was loosed within me, and a flood of new revelation began to shape itself into written words. My hand wrote with what seemed a supernatural speed and accuracy. Instead of cramping and requiring frequent rest, my fingers were charged with an inexhaustible energy. The new words filled lines, then paragraphs, then pages, while I sat by like a mere spectator. A rushing and a roaring, li
ke the crashing of ocean surf on a rocky shore, filled my ears with increasing vividness throughout the day, and I felt the unseen presence of the abbot standing behind me.
Late in the afternoon, I cut off the flow of words, set down the pen, and with pounding heart scanned back over what I had written. Not a single word was copied. Everything was original. And all of it was high blasphemy, by my former way of reckoning.
The pages before me spoke of something not of God’s creation, and thus not subject to the redemptive work of Christ; something existing not in the world of God but outside it, seething in a void of utter confusion. Reading these words, I began to envision dimly, as through a pane of smoked glass, a vast and ancient realm of uncreated darkness, a great gulf of eternal night where chaos churned through infinite circles of futility. It was fantastic, breathtaking, overwhelming in its immensity and grotesquery. Through a strange kind of epistemological alchemy, the mere sight of this realm began to impress upon me a sense of ancient secrets being laid bare. I saw plainly the absolute immanence, the impossible nearness, of this other realm. I saw the way it pressed in upon the world of life and light at the edges, and not only there, but also in our very midst, at the interstices where the components of the created order cohere. I saw the true nature of the ordered cosmos upon which I had based my hopes: its mutability and insubstantiality, as if it were merely a castle in the sand waiting helplessly and absurdly upon a deserted shore for the ravenous tide to flow in and devour it.
