Practical Guide to Contemplation
The two treatises, then, are eminently practical. They guide the reader in the path of contemplation. While there is an abundance of books teaching meditation of the discursive kind, not so many teach the contemplative prayer that goes beyond thought and imagery into the supraconceptual cloud of unknowing. And it is precisely this that the English author is teaching. In his rejection of conceptualization he is as radical as any Zen Buddhist. All thoughts, all concepts, all images must be buried beneath a cloud of forgetting, while our naked love (naked because divested of thought) must rise upward toward God hidden in the cloud of unknowing. With the cloud of unknowing above, between me and my God, and the cloud of forgetting below, between me and all creatures, I find myself in the silentium mysticum about which the English author read in the work of Dionysius.
If The Cloud is radical in its rejection of conceptualization, even more so is Privy Counseling, the opening paragraph of which contains words that set the theme for the whole treatise: “Reject all thoughts, be they good or be they evil.” This is pretty stark. God can be loved but he cannot be thought. He can be grasped by love but never by concepts. So less thinking and more loving.
The meditation that goes beyond thought is popular in the modern world, and it is for this reason that I find these two books particularly relevant today. As for the way of getting beyond thought, the English author has a definite methodology. After speaking of good and pious meditations on the life and death of Christ, he introduces his disciple to a way that may well be attractive also to the modern reader, namely the mantra or sacred word:
If you want to gather all your desire into one simple word that the mind can retain, choose a short word rather than a long one. A one-syllable word such as “God” or “love” is best. But choose one that is meaningful to you. Then fix it in your mind so that it will remain there come what may. This word will be your defense in conflict and in peace. Use it to beat upon the cloud of darkness above you and subdue all distractions consigning them to the cloud of forgetting beneath you. Should some thought go on annoying you, demanding to know what you are doing, answer with this one word alone. If your mind begins to intellectualize over the meaning and connotations of this little word, remind yourself that its value lies in its simplicity. Do this and I assure you these thoughts will vanish. Why? Because you have refused to develop them with arguing. (this page)
As can be seen, the little word is used in order to sweep all images and thoughts from the mind, leaving it free to love with the blind stirring that stretches out toward God.
In Privy Counseling the author speaks of two clear-cut steps on the way to enlightenment. The first is the rejection of all thoughts about what I am and what God is in order to be conscious only that I am and that God is. This is what I would like to call existential prayer because of its abandonment of all essences or modes of being. But it is only the first step. The second step is the rejection of all thought and feeling of my own being to be conscious only of the being of God. In this way the author leads to a total self-forgetfulness, a seemingly total loss of self for a consciousness only of the being of him whom we love. This is interesting doctrine. How can we twentieth-century men who talk so much about personality accept it?
The Loss of Self
Let me first say that this problem of the loss of self is extremely relevant in the religious climate of today, a climate that is largely dominated by the meeting of the great religions in a common forum and a fascinating dialogue that historian, Arnold Toynbee, has not hesitated to call the most significant event of the century. In this East-West religious encounter and exchange, the central problem on which all discussion finally focuses is that of the existence and nature of the self. Can a highly personalized religion like Christianity find common ground with an apparently self-annihilating system like Buddhism? This is a problem that has constantly come to the fore in ecumenical meetings I myself have attended. Anyone confronted with it would do well to listen to the wisdom of this English author. Steeped in the Christian tradition, he speaks a language that Buddhists understand. He is indeed a great spokesman for the West.
Let us consider some of the passages in which he justifies his advice to forget one’s own being.
In The Cloud he claims that to feel one’s own existence is the greatest suffering possible to man:
Every man has plenty of cause for sorrow but he alone understands the deep universal reason for sorrow who experiences that he is. Every other motive pales beside this one. He alone feels authentic sorrow who realizes not only what he is, but that he is. Anyone who has not felt this should really weep, for he has never experienced real sorrow. (this page–this page)
This is a remarkable passage. It might seem like a rejection of life and of existence, were it not for the author’s explicit statement that this is not his meaning:
And yet in all this, never does he desire to not-be, for this is the devil’s madness and blasphemy against God. In fact, he rejoices that he is and from the fullness of a grateful heart he gives thanks to God for the gift and the goodness of his existence. At the same time, he desires unceasingly to be freed from the knowing and feeling of his being. (this page)
It is clear that the author is not advocating self-annihilation; nor is he denying the ontological existence of the self. Rather is he saying that there is an awareness of self that brings joy and gratitude; and there is awareness of self that brings agony. What awareness of self causes this great sorrow?
It seems to me that Christian mysticism can be understood only in the light of the resurrection, just as Buddhist mysticism can be understood only in the light of nirvana. Until the resurrection, man’s personality, his true self, is incomplete. This holds even for Christ, of whom Paul says that “he was constituted Son of God by a glorious act in that he rose from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). In other words it was through the resurrection that Christ was perfected, finding his true self and ultimate identity. Until this final stage, man is inevitably separated from his end. And not only man but the whole universe, which is groaning in expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.
This imperfect state of incompleteness, isolation and separation from the goal is the basic source of man’s existential anguish—anguish that arises not because of his existence but because of his separated existence. Sorrow for this separation, says the author, is much more fundamental and much more conducive to humility than sorrow for one’s sins or anything else. Hence the anguish running through the writings of the mystics and reflected in the agonized cry of a St. John of the Cross: “Whither hast thou hidden thyself, O my beloved, and left me to my sighing?” Here the mystic is separated from the beloved whom he has inchoately experienced; and he longs for completion, for union, for the goal. If this means death, joyfully will he die—“Break the web of this sweet encounter.” As if he were to say, take away the veil that separates me from my beloved and my all. Clearly the anguish is that of separation and incompleteness at the level of existence. One can experience one’s incompleteness emotionally or economically or culturally or sexually; and all this is painful. But how terrible to experience it at the deepest level of all, that of existence! For all these other sorrows are partial experiences of one root experience of existential contingency. And this, I believe, is the sorrow of the man who knows not only what he is but that he is.
All this is not far removed from the anguish of the existentialist philosophers about which we at one time heard so much. Their agony was not necessarily theistic. Rather did it come from a radical sense of man’s insufficiency, contingency, incompleteness, mortality, summed up in Heidegger’s terrible definition of man as “being-to-death.” Here again it is not precisely existence that causes the trouble, but limited existence. Man, faced with the prospect of extinction, is not in control of his own destiny.
So much for the existentialists. With the English author it is mainly in Privy Counseling that the notion of separation with all its s
uffering is stressed. But now his language is more precise. The suffering of man is not that he is but that he is as he is; and the author makes his existential prayer: “That which I am and the way that I am … I offer it all to you.” (this page) Now he has made it abundantly clear that the problem is not existence itself but limited existence, and so he has no need for further explanation.
At the beginning of his treatise he makes a statement that echoes through the whole work: “He is your being and in him you are what you are.” Lest this sound pantheistic, the author quickly adds, “He is your being, but you are not his,” as if to remind us that while God is our being we are not God. But having made this distinction he keeps stressing that the great suffering and illusion of man is his failure to experience that God is his being. Rather does he experience his being apart from God. The whole aim of his direction is to lead us to the experience that “he is your being and in him you are what you are.” It is not in isolation, not in separation from the totality that man finds his true self; but only in God. The knowledge and feeling of any self other than this must be destroyed.
This leads to the inexorable law that the incomplete self must die in order that the true self may rise. “Unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground dies, itself alone remains; but if it dies it brings forth much fruit.”
In this context we can perhaps understand the author’s relentless assertion that the thought and feeling of self must be annihilated. Yet this annihilation is less terrible because it is the work of love: “For this is the way of all real love. The lover will utterly and completely despoil himself of everything, even his very self, because of the one he loves. He cannot bear to be clothed in anything save the thought of his beloved. And this is not a passing fancy. No, he desires always and forever to remain unclothed in full and final self-forgetting.” (this page) If we love, death will inevitably follow and self will be forgotten with terrible finality. But it will be a joyous death. Let me say a word about the connection between love and death.
In the Thomistic philosophy to which the English author is so faithful, love is “ecstatic” in that it takes us out of ourselves to live in the thing we love. If we love money, we live in money; if we love our friends, we live in them; if we love them in God, we live in God. This means that in love there is a real death, as St. John of the Cross (again a thoroughgoing Thomist) expresses in his enigmatic words: “O life, how canst thou endure since thou livest not where thou livest?” Is this because his life, no longer in his body, is palpitating in the one he loves? And he wonders how this life can continue. For death is an inevitable consequence of ecstatic love.
The dilemma is terrible. If man refuses to love, his separated self remains in its agonized isolation without ultimate fulfillment, even though ontologically God is in his being. If he loves, he chooses death for the separated self and life for the resurrected self. And it is the resurrected self that is at work in contemplation, which will never cease. “For in eternity there will be no need for the works of mercy as there is now. People will not hunger or thirst or die of the cold or be sick, homeless and captive. No one will need Christian burial for no one will die. In heaven it will no longer be fitting to mourn for our sins or for Christ’s Passion. So, then, if grace is calling you to choose the third part, choose it with Mary.” (this page)
This brings us to the question of the relationship of the true self to the all. The author writes that there is a total union (“He is your being”) and yet it is not total because I am not God’s being (“You are not his”). A strict Thomist of the fourteenth century, he would probably have explained this according to the Platonic notion of ideas in the mind of God—that creation exists from eternity in his mind, so that there is a total unity side by side with variety. To experience this would be “chaste and perfect love” in which one is united with God “blindly”; that is to say, without thoughts or feelings or images of any kind, experiencing oneself in God and through God. St. John of the Cross seems to be getting at this when he says that at first we experience the Creator through his creatures, but at the summit we experience creatures through the Creator.
Yet I myself believe that this metaphysic is less meaningful to modern man than the dynamic approach of Teilhard de Chardin. This is more biblical, giving centrality to the risen Christ Omega as well as to the resurrection of all men. It sees the ultimate eschatological union as a total indwelling of God in man and man in God and all in Christ going to the Father in accordance with the words of Jesus in John 17. As for the paradox that all is one and not one, Teilhard answers with a principle that runs through all his work: in the realm of personality, union differentiates. When I am most united with God, I am most myself. Here union is clearly distinguished from annihilating absorption: it is in union with the other that I find my true self. Incredible paradox? Yet we explain the Trinity in some such way. And does not the principle that union differentiates apply also to human unions and interpersonal relationships? In the deepest and most loving union with another, far from losing ourselves we discover our deepest selves at the core of our being. If this is true of human relationships, it must also apply to the most intimate union of all: that of Yahweh with his people.
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I have attempted to explain the author’s position on the loss of self, which is an integral part of his direction and a relevant problem in the modern religious scene. But I must quickly confess that the author is reluctant to offer explanations and probably does so only as a concession to the learned divines who may read and criticize his book. How often he remarks that “only he who experiences it will really understand.” If there is a problem, it exists only at the verbal or metaphysical level, while at the level of experiential love it is simply a non-problem since then one knows existentially what it is to lose self and find self at the same time. The whole endeavor of the author is not to explain (for no explanation is possible) but to lead the disciple to a state of consciousness where he will see it for himself. “And so I urge you: go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.” (this page) This is like the Zen Buddhists, who without explanation, insist that you must simply sit in meditation.
The Place of Christ
Another point that is crucial in these two books as in the works of all the Christian mystics concerns the place of Christ. Briefly the problem is this: Christian theology, following the New Testament, situates Christ at the very heart of prayer—Christ the man, the Incarnate Word. But how does Christ the man fit into this imageless, supraconceptual void? Where is Christ when I am between the cloud of unknowing and the cloud of forgetting? This is quite a dilemma; yet I believe that the author of The Cloud can truly be called Christocentric.
Let me say first that we can consider Christ in his historical existence or in his risen existence. In either case it is, of course, the same Jesus; but the mode of existence is quite different. About the historical Christ we can have thoughts and ideas and images, just as we can picture the villages through which he walked; but of the risen Christ we can have no adequate picture. This is stated categorically by St. Paul who, when asked what the resurrected body looks like, retorts (if I may translate him into modern jargon), Don’t ask stupid questions! “But someone will ask, ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’ You foolish man!… For not all flesh is alike, but there is one kind for men, another for animals, another for birds, and another for fish.” (I Cor. 15:35-38) So there are many ways of existence and the resurrected way is different from that we now enjoy.
Now the Christian, following St. Paul, does not pray just to a historical figure but to the now existing risen Christ who contains in himself all the experience of his historical existence in a transformed way, as he indicated by showing his wounds to his disciples. As for the way of talking about the
Christ who lives in our midst today, Teilhard de Chardin, influenced by the later Pauline epistles, speaks of “the cosmic Christ” who is co-extensive with the universe. By death the body is universalized, entering into a new dimension and into a new relationship with matter. It is in this dimension that the risen Christ is present to us. This is a dimension that we too enter by death; but in life also we can somehow touch it by love in the cloud of unknowing.
The English author is, I believe, speaking about the cosmic Christ, though he does not have this terminology. In fact he makes a brilliantly orthodox union of the historical and the risen Jesus in the Mary Magdalene motif, which obviously appeals greatly to him:
The Cloud of Unknowing Page 2
