Early Christian Mystics E-Book

Bernard McGinn

• Herausgeber: WS
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 325

Beschreibung

Bernard McGinn's The Presence of God series is one of the most respected histories of Christian mysticism in print today. In this new book, Bernard and Patricia McGinn draw from the series to take a closer, personal look at the mystical vision of 12 great spiritual masters living before the Reformation. What were the deep insights of these early mystics? How can we apply their wisdom to our lives today? Chapters include Hildegard of Bingen on cosmic vision, John Cassian on prayer and purity of heart, and Bernard of Clairvaux on spousal love.

Leseprobe

The Crossroad Publishing Company

www.crossroadpublishing.com

Copyright © 2003 by Bernard McGinn and Patricia Ferris McGinn

Several portions of this book include revised and expanded material from The Foundations of Mysticism and The Growth of Mysticism, both by Bernard McGinn.

Illustrations by Bro. Michael O’Neill McGrath, OSFS

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McGinn, Bernard, 1937–

Early Christian mystics : the divine vision of the spiritual masters / Bernard McGinn and Patricia Ferris McGinn.

                p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-8245-9913-3

1. Mysticism – History – Early church, ca. 30––600. 2. Mysticism – History – Middle Ages, 600-1500. I. McGinn, Patricia Ferris. II. Title.

BV5075.M365 2003

248.2′2′09 – dc21

2003003726

This printing: September 2016

In Memoriam

Katie and Jack Ferris

Contents

Introduction

Part One

PRACTICES FOR FINDING GOD

  1.  Uplifting Reading of Scripture

       ORIGEN

  2.  Ascetical Practice and Contemplative Life

       EVAGRIUS PONTICUS

  3.  Prayer and Purity of Heart

       JOHN CASSIAN

  4.  Compunction

       GREGORY THE GREAT

  5.  Vision and Authority

       HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

  6.  Modes of Contemplation

       RICHARD OF ST. VICTOR

Part Two

TRANSFORMATION IN GOD

  7.  Endless Pursuit

       GREGORY OF NYSSA

  8.  The Body of Christ

       AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO

  9.  Unknowing Knowing

       DIONYSIUS

10.  Cosmic Unification

       JOHN THE SCOT

11.  Spousal Love

       BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX

12.  Living the Trinity

       WILLIAM OF ST. THIERRY

Two Concluding Prayers

Introduction

Twelve, like three and seven, is one of the sacred numbers. Prominent in the Bible, it seems inscribed into the very cosmos, as its use in many religious traditions attests. Twelve often signifies sacred foundations in the human world. The twelve patriarchs stand at the origin of the Jewish people, just as the twelve apostles are the foundation upon which Christ built his church. Tradition and imagination have discerned numerous other twelves in sacred history, such as the twelve prophets of the Hebrew Bible and the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit mentioned by Paul. The Calabrian seer Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202) was particularly fertile in discerning historical patterns of twelves, often by combining sevens and fives, as one of the keys to unlock the action of divine providence.

In putting together this brief introduction to the Christian mystical tradition up to the year 1200, it was no accident, though not originally a conscious choice, that the number twelve emerged as the most fitting for a selection of figures to illustrate the foundations of Christian mysticism. The dozen sketches contained here are based on the treatments found in the first two volumes of the ongoing series The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.* While the portraits below are based on material from The Presence of God, they have been adapted for a more general audience in numerous ways. Not only has the apparatus of footnotes and technical discussion been left behind, but we have sought to focus each portrait on a distinctive contribution that the mystic made to the broader tradition. This has led to the introduction of new material in some places and the rearrangement and recasting of the older material in others. While most of the sketches are necessarily shorter than the extended treatments in The Presence of God, in a few cases, such as Gregory of Nyssa and Hildegard of Bingen, they are actually longer. Like The Presence of God, Early Christian Mystics concentrates on Western Christian mysticism, so only those patristic Greek mystics are treated who had some significant impact on the West (Origen, Evagrius, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius). This means that some of the later Byzantine figures, notably Maximus Confessor (d. 662) and Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022), will not be treated here, though they too are foundational for the wider story of Christian mysticism up to 1200.

The mystical element in Christianity, as we are using the term “mystical” here, is that part of belief and practice that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what the mystics understand as a direct, immediate, and transformative encounter with the presence of God. Though many mystics speak of such transformative direct contact as attaining union with God, others avoid this language, so we have preferred to speak of presence. But presence itself, like so much else in mysticism, is not a simple and straightforward notion. God cannot be present the way a thing is present, because God is literally no-thing. God may become present in a way somehow similar to how two persons are present to each other, especially in the presence of lovers; but God as infinite person so far exceeds the categories and consciousness characteristic of our own finite subjectivity that the divine presence is often realized in forms of absence and negation that mystics have explored with courage, tenacity, and great subtlety. One thing that all mystics insist upon is that what they come to know of God through their yearning for and meeting with the divine presence is incommunicable, at least insofar as we understand ordinary communication. As one of the pre-1200 mystics not treated here once said: “We say what we can when we want to speak about the Ineffable One about whom nothing can be said in the proper sense; we must either keep silence, or use words in a transformed way” (Isaac of Stella, Sermon 22). Conveying mystical consciousness is a necessary impossibility.

Despite the ambiguities of presence and absence, and notwithstanding the impossibility of really saying what they found, the transformation that the early Christian mystics underwent impelled them to speak and to write in order to invite others to undertake the path they walked. In trying to understand the different aspects of that search as it is presented by the twelve figures treated here, it is important to stress a few basic characteristics of mysticism that have not always been properly understood.

First, mysticism is an element in the Christian religion, not a religion within the religion. Each of the figures treated below was certainly a mystic but also an individual who lived in the midst of the Christian community, which each served in many other capacities, such as teacher, monastic, bishop, and even pope. To call them mystics does not exhaust their other activities and contributions to the history of Christianity.

Second, it is also important to see mysticism as a total process, not merely some particular moment or moments in or beyond time where special contact with God is made. Mysticism is a journey, a path that almost invariably demands long preparation and whose true attainment can be measured only by the effects that mystics have upon others, both their contemporaries and their readers over the centuries. All the mystics took finding deeper contact with God as the central goal of their lives. The purpose of this volume is to make some small contribution to the ongoing dissemination of their transformative message.

Since Christian mystics live and teach in the midst of the community with its many and changing beliefs and practices, these twelve mystics have much to say about the Christian life in general. Reading and praying the Bible, partaking of the sacraments, practicing asceticism and self-denial, training in virtue, devotion to higher forms of prayer and contemplation — these are all implied and often explicitly set forth in the writings of these early mystics. Various attempts to describe the deeper, more direct, and personally intimate encounter with God that characterizes mystical consciousness are also expressed in a wide variety of ways among the writings of the mystics.

In the sketches below we have tried to give a sense of the general teaching of each figure, but we have also sought to highlight one distinctive aspect of the thought that characterizes each mystic’s contribution to the broader tradition. Mystical writers over the centuries have used a variety of styles, voices, and teaching methods. Each of the chapters that follow tries to suggest this by centering on a special contribution that demonstrates how the figure treated can be considered a true founder of mysticism.

We have divided the twelve chapters into two sections, each chronologically arranged, to reflect these different forms of contribution. Part One concentrates on Practices for Finding God. It begins with the Alexandrian catechist and preacher Origen (d. 253), the greatest exegete of the early church. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar once said that no figure is more invisibly all-present in the history of Christianity than Origen. Given the immense influence of his spiritual and “anagogic,” or uplifting, reading of the Bible, chapter 1 highlights this theme in Origen’s thought. A fourth-century monastic follower of Origen, Evagrius Ponticus (d. 399), took Origen’s basic theology of the soul’s return to God and wedded it to the new form of religious life created by the monks and nuns of the Egyptian desert with their devotion to rigorous asceticism and a life of contemplation. His teaching on these subjects is taken up in chapter 2. Evagrius’s mystical teaching was conveyed to the Latin West by another monk, John Cassian (d. 435), who founded some of the earliest monastic communities in Gaul. Cassian, however, was not merely a conduit; he was an original practitioner and teacher of mysticism. Cassian’s doctrine on the modes of prayer, and especially on the necessity for attaining purity of heart in order to reach God, is the subject of chapter 3. The mystical teaching of Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) is treated in chapter 4. Gregory’s solidly biblical doctrine touches on many aspects of mysticism, but we have concentrated on the theme of compunction, “being pierced to the heart,” both through sorrow for sin and in mystical love of God, as his central contribution.

Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), a Benedictine nun, was arguably the most multitalented figure of her remarkable age. Hildegard was interested in science and medicine; she was a gifted poet and musician, a dramatist and artist, and an original theologian. Hildegard was also a mystic, and chapter 5 shows how her mysticism and teaching authority were rooted in some of the extraordinary visions she received. Chapter 6 treats Richard of St. Victor (d. 1173), a canon, that is, a priest and teacher living according to a monasticized form of life. Richard’s importance lies in the fact that with him we see the coming together of the wisdom of monastic mysticism with the new organizing and systematizing form of the theology found in early scholasticism. Building on the work of his teacher, Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), Richard organized progress in attaining virtues and the ascending modes of contemplation into an integrated mystical teaching that was to be influential for many centuries.

Part Two considers the ways in which early Christian mystics sought to characterize essential aspects of transformative contact with God. Gregory of Nyssa (d. 394) is one of the three great Cappadocian Fathers whose teachings formed early Orthodox Christianity. Gregory was also a profound and passionate mystical seeker. His sense of the absolute infinity and unsurpassability of God led him to formulate a teaching on the endless pursuit of God, both in this life and in the hereafter, as the essence of mystical transformation. This is treated in chapter 7. Christians have always believed that attaining God is possible only in and through Jesus Christ. Christ is the goal and Christ is the way, especially the whole Christ, that is, Christ as head and as body, the church. The ecclesiological character of mysticism is set out by virtually all early mystics, but by none in a deeper and more convincing way than by Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), who is the subject of chapter 8. Chapter 9 considers the mysterious Dionysius, an Eastern monk influenced both by the Cappadocians and by Greek pagan Neoplatonists, who wrote around 500 C.E. Adopting the guise of Dionysius the Areopagite mentioned in Acts 17:34, this anonymous writer was the first to use the term “mystical theology” to describe the aim of a liturgically centered Christian life dedicated to uniting with God as the mystery beyond all knowing. While earlier Christian mystics often spoke of how God lies beyond all that we can know and say, Dionysius was the first to put forth an integrated and systematic negative, or “apophatic,” mysticism of unknowing knowing.

In passing to the medieval section of Part Two, chapter 10 deals with the Irish writer Johannes Scottus Eriugena, or John the Scot (d. ca. 880), a teacher at the courts of the descendants of Charlemagne. Eriugena has justly been seen as the greatest philosopher and theologian of the early medieval West, and we argue that he is also a great mystic. Eriugena sought to forge a consensus between the authorities of the East (Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius, Maximus Confessor) and the West (Augustine, Ambrose, and others). To do so he set forth a systematic understanding of the dynamism of natura, that is, God both as hidden in himself (the apophatic aspect) and as manifest in the theophany of his creation (the positive, or “cataphatic,” aspect). Building upon Dionysius (whom he translated into Latin), Eriugena created a cosmic mysticism rooted in humanity and Christ, the Godman.

The final two chapters deal with twelfth-century mystics. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) is rightly considered the touchstone of Western mysticism. When Dante needed someone to introduce the trinitarian vision of God that concludes the Paradiso, he could think of no more appropriate figure than this Cistercian monk. Bernard’s Sermons on the Song of Songs, eighty-six masterly homilies on the first three chapters of the Song as the mystery of love between the human soul, the bride, and Christ, the Bridegroom, are among the most influential of all mystical texts. Bernard’s mysticism of spousal love is examined in chapter 11. Bernard’s close friend William of St. Thierry (d. 1147), a Benedictine abbot turned Cistercian monk, also wrote a commentary on the Song, as well as a number of mystical treatises. His noted work The Golden Letter, the most incisive brief portrayal of monastic mysticism, often circulated under Bernard’s name in later centuries. William was an original mystic, however, not a mere student of his friend. This is especially evident in his profound teaching about the role of the Trinity in the mystical life, the subject of chapter 12.

A brief note about the genesis of this book is in order. Over several years the staff at the Crossroad Publishing Company, beginning with Michael Leach (now of Orbis Books) and continuing with Gwendolin Herder and John Jones, had asked Bernard McGinn to consider preparing a short popular account of early Christian mystics based on The Presence of God volumes. The pressure of research and writing for the later volumes of the series, as well as other obligations, seemed to preclude producing such a book. It was only in early 2002 that we realized that if we were to undertake the volume as a joint project, it might, indeed, be possible. Patricia Ferris McGinn had contributed much to the already-published volumes of The Presence of God through her editing and suggestions. Knowing the volumes as well as she did, she took up the initial task of summarizing and adapting most of the chapters from the longer treatments in The Presence of God. Each of these sketches then was reworked as a joint effort. Finally, Bernard McGinn added the “Suggestions for Further Reading” found after each sketch. These are meant to serve as brief introductions to translations of the writings of the mystics. A few helpful monographs are listed as well. More complete bibliographies can be found in The Presence of God.

We want to thank our family, especially Daniel, John, and Gina, and all our friends, both at Crossroad and elsewhere, who have encouraged us as we pursued this collaboration with love and joy.

BERNARD MCGINN AND

PATRICIA FERRIS MCGINN

December 2002

*Three volumes have appeared thus far: The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (1991); The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the Twelfth Century (1994); and The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism — 1200–1350 (1998).

Part One

PRACTICES FOR FINDING GOD

One

Uplifting Reading of Scripture

ORIGEN

LIFE

It was 202 in Alexandria. The mother was frantic with grief and fear, and when her entreaties did not deter him, she hid her eldest son’s clothes so he could not leave the house. Her husband, Leonides, had been arrested and would be beheaded as a Christian martyr during the persecution of the emperor Septimius Severus, and her son Origen was burning with desire to follow his father into martyrdom. Her tactic worked, however, and Origen, seventeen years old, lived to support his mother and his six younger brothers by teaching “grammar” (that is, literature). His father had seen to it that he had both an excellent secular education and a deep indoctrination into the study of the scriptures.

Eusebius, the historian of the early church, says that all of the Christian catechists had left Alexandria during the persecution, so when pagans came to him for instruction, Origen took up the additional role of elementary teacher of the Christian faith. By age eighteen he was head of the school of catechesis for the church of Alexandria. Eusebius credits him with bringing thousands into the Christian faith, and he was known for his courage in accompanying martyrs to their public executions despite the fury of the pagan crowds. Later he relinquished secular teaching, sold his library to raise money to live on, and focused solely on the roles of catechist, preacher, student of scripture, and ascetic (or Christian philosopher), roles in which he became very famous.

Origen is famous also for his self-castration, as we are told by Eusebius. This action has remained mysterious and controversial: it seems to have been the result of an overly zealous young man taking Matthew 19:12 literally (“There are those who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven”), despite the fact that church tradition, even then, understood the passage allegorically. His condition, however, did make it easier for him to teach and preach to women without scandal.

Origen’s growing fame led to trips abroad. His ordination to presbyter in Palestine caused a break with Demetrius, the bishop of Alexandria, after which Origen relocated to Caesarea in 233 to continue his work of teaching, preaching, and writing. Though he was arrested and tortured in the persecution of emperor Decius in 250, martyrdom still eluded him, and he died in 253 or 254.

INTERPRETING THE SCRIPTURES AS A SPIRITUAL PATH

We have only a portion of Origen’s vast literary output, but these works show him to combine the roles of exegete, theologian, and mystic with great creativity and intellectual power. While these three modes of thought are intimately related in his work, Origen remains first and foremost an exegete, perhaps the greatest that Christianity has ever known. It is in his Commentary on John and Commentary and Homilies on the Song of Songs that we find the chief elements of his mystical thought. The most important work for grasping the main features of his “theology of ascent,” as Hans Urs von Balthasar described it, is On First Principles (De principiis), the earliest Christian systematic theology.

As a product of the philosophical education of his time and yet as a Christian, Origen understood the true “philosophy,” the love of wisdom and the truth about the self sought by Plato and the Greeks, to be found not in contemplation of the heavens and the study of human society, but in the revealed scriptures. For him scripture in its entirety is nothing else than the Logos, or Word of God, teaching each believer in and through the church. The Logos eternally begotten from the Father’s self-emptying, who in turn emptied himself by taking on flesh, now becomes present and active in us through the mediation of his presence in the inspired words of the scripture. The intimate relation between reading the scriptures and reading the self (and, by extension, knowing how to read the cosmos) is brought out in a well-known passage in the fourth book of On First Principles:

One must therefore portray the meaning of the sacred writings in a threefold way upon one’s own soul, so that the simple man may be edified by what we may call the flesh of scripture . . ., while the man who has made some progress may be edified by its soul, as it were; and the man who is perfect . . . may be edified by the spiritual law. . . . For just as a man consists of body, soul, and spirit, so in the same way does the scripture, which has been prepared by God to be given for man’s salvation. (4.2.4)

Following the formula of St. Paul, Origen thus identifies three levels in the human person — body, soul, and spirit — and sees the true relation of these three components realized through personal appropriation of the scriptural message at three levels. The encounter with the text provides the spiritual education by which we reach for the true goal of life.

The first level consists in determining the literal sense of the biblical text. Here Origen was conscious of a twofold task: first, grasping the grammatical sense of the words and, second, discovering the historical reality of the passage. At times a passage is not to be taken literally, meaning that it could not or did not happen historically (see On First Principles 4.2.5), but that does not diminish the fact that the grammatical meaning of the words carries a deeper message for believers.

Still Origen, following Paul, taught the necessity of moving beyond the “letter that kills” to the second level (corresponding to the soul) for the moral meaning and the third level (corresponding to the spirit) for the mystical meaning of the scriptures. These moral and spiritual teachings of the Logos are discerned through a variety of allegorical and typological tools applied to the text. In the New Testament the teaching of the Logos is direct, while in the Old Testament the teaching is mediated through others as the events and persons of the Old Testament come to be understood as “types” and “allegories” of present realities. Though allegorical and typological exegesis is part of Origen’s heritage from both the Jewish and the Hellenic past, he is the first Christian to describe the personal appropriation of the teaching of the Logos as an “anagogic” reading, one designed to lift the soul above. “The scribe of the gospel is one who knows how, after studying the narrative of events, to ascend to the spiritual realities without stumbling” (Commentary on Matthew 10.14). The goal of interpretation is to realize the Bible’s teaching through our own ascension to God, a process that Origen once expressed as wishing “to gallop through the vast spaces of mystic and spiritual understanding” (Commentary on Romans 7.11). Through the encounter with the scriptures, using the tools of spiritual interpretation, the soul ascends back to its source in God. For Origen, this journey of ascent is the essence of the Christian vocation and the main motif of his mysticism.

Christian Platonist that he was, Origen needed to posit a descent from God as a prior condition to explain the necessity of the ascent of the soul back to God. Creation, the extradivine manifestation of the goodness of the Father, first becomes manifest in the Logos. In the Logos the ideas or causes, which are the prototypes for everything that comes to be in the actual universe, exist from all eternity. The Logos is both the model of creation and the intelligent agent through which the Father produces it. On the basis of these causes, God creates the intelligible universe, a prior and perfect creation whose fall made necessary the second creation. This second creation is the world of division, hierarchy, and sin that we inhabit. In his first Homily on Genesis, Origen asserts “. . . that first heaven, which we said is spiritual, is our mind, which is also itself spirit, that is, our spiritual man which sees and perceives God” (Hom. on Gen. 1.2). The original spiritual creation was composed of “intellects” all created equal after the pattern of the only true Image, the Logos (Hom. on Gen. 1.12–13). This is the creation described in the first chapter of Genesis. These intellects, each guided by a pneuma, or participation in the Holy Spirit, were joined to spiritual bodies and lived a joyous life of contemplation of God, “a pure and perfect reception of God into itself” (On First Principles 4.4.9). Together they constituted the supreme unity of the preexistent church under the headship of the one intellect, perfectly united in love with the Logos, that is, the intellect of the preexistent Christ.

The fundamental characteristic of these intellects, however, was the freedom given to them by God — divine goodness and the freedom of spiritual creation are the lynchpins of Origen’s thought. It was this freedom that made possible the original fall from perfect contemplation:

For the Creator granted to the minds created by him the power of free and voluntary movement, in order that the good that was in them might become their own, since it was preserved by their own free will. But sloth and weariness of taking trouble to preserve the good, coupled with disregard and neglect of better things, began the process of withdrawal from the good. (On First Principles 2.9.2)

Diversity and evil in our present world measure the degree of the fall from perfect contemplation without denigrating the Creator’s goodness. Humans are intellects who fell further than the angels and were provided a second, material creation as the schoolroom in which to work out their destinies. Material creation is more an educational opportunity than a punishment, since matter, including the human body, is not evil but part of God’s good creation, a limited good whose real purpose is to teach intellects to ascend above it in their path back to unimpeded vision of God.

              “We believe that the goodness of God through Christ will restore his entire creation to one end, even his enemies being conquered and subdued.”

— Origen, On First Principles

The fallen intellects constitute the core of the human person, composed of the three levels with which we are familiar: (1) pneuma, or spirit, the created participation in the Holy Spirit, which has become inert in fallen humanity; (2) pysche, or soul, which is the “cooled” state of intellect in the fallen condition, able either to be redirected above to contemplation of God through the instruction of spirit, or else dragged below by the sensuality to the level of (3) soma, the body, humanity’s material component. Because each intellect was created as a participation in the Logos, it remains capable of regaining its original state of contemplative likeness to God through the pedagogic activity of the Logos, the Word who takes on flesh in Jesus Christ through the mediation of the one unfallen intellect, the soul of Christ. Through Jesus’ unfailing love and unbroken contemplation of God, his soul becomes the model and teacher for all other souls as they awaken the pneuma within themselves and begin to return to God. Origen said, “We believe that the goodness of God through Christ will restore his entire creation to one end, even his enemies being conquered and subdued” (On First Principles 1.6.1). This insight, which Origen found expressed in Paul’s words that in the end God will be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28), is fundamental to his mysticism, though the idea that the demons might be included creates serious problems for later Christian orthodoxy.

For Origen the whole message of scripture concerns the descent and ascent of the Incarnate Word to rescue the fallen intellects. All other metaphors he uses are subservient to this itinerary: the passage upward to God achieved by and in Christ. The difficult and wandering journey by which the soul returns to God begins from the clear “bread” of direct scriptural language but can advance only through ingestion of the “wine” of scripture, its obscure and poetic speech, which intoxicates and draws one upward. Thus, for the Alexandrian, the spiritual life is an exegetical process in which religious experience, especially mystical experience, is realized in the act of making the language of the Bible at its deepest and incommunicable level into the soul’s language. Origen’s most intense religious experiences took place within the work of exegesis itself; this is where the soul rises with the Incarnate Word.

Origen presents the soul’s exegetical-mystical ascent according to a basic triple pattern of pedagogy found in the three books ascribed to Solomon. The itinerary is as follows:

        1.   Proverbs teaches what the Greeks call moral science, the proper manner of virtuous living that corresponds to the life of the patriarch Abraham and to what later Christians would call the “purgative” way.

        2.   Ecclesiastes presents natural science, that is, enlightened knowledge of the natures of things and of how they are to be used as God intended (corresponding to Isaac and the “illuminative” way).

        3.   Finally, the Song of Songs is the textbook for what Origen calls epoptics, the contemplative science that “instills love and desire of celestial and divine things under the image of the Bride and the Groom, teaching how we come to fellowship with God through paths of love and charity” (Commentary on the Song, prol.). When the soul has completed the first two courses of study, “it is ready to come to dogmatic and mystical matters and to arise to the contemplation of divinity with pure spiritual love” (ibid). This is the science of Jacob, who became Israel (“he who sees God”). It forms the “unitive,” or properly mystical, level.

The essential message from the Alexandrian is that “the true food of a rational nature is the Word of God” (Homilies on Numbers 27.1). The goal of human life, according to Origen, is the light and abundance of the Promised Land. Both in teaching and in temperament Origen concentrates on the positive rather than the negative, or apophatic, aspects of the enjoyment of God’s presence. He is rightly characterized as a “mystic of light.”

As the Alexandrian teacher develops the theme of the soul’s return to God, he uses many symbols and images drawn from the Bible, but it is in the Song of Songs that scripture reveals the heart of its message about the love of the descending Christ for the fallen soul. In the interpretation of the erotic language of the Song the deepest inscription of the mystical message takes place. Origen stands at the head of those Christian mystics who have argued that of all the positive, or cataphatic, modes of speaking available to the mystic, erotic language is the most appropriate way of using speech to surpass itself. Contrary to some modern critiques, the mystics have always insisted that they were neither disguising nor idealizing eros, but rather that they were transforming desire by leading it back to its original form: eros is in reality a heavenly force. “The power of love is none other than that which leads the soul from earth to the lofty heights of heaven, and . . . the highest beatitude can be attained only under the stimulus of love’s desire” (Comm. on Song, prol.). Adapting Plato’s teaching that eros is a desire to attain what is perfect and to beget from this attainment, Origen makes a daring breakthrough — God himself must be Eros if the eros implanted in us is what returns us to him. He says, “I do not think one could be blamed if one called God Passionate Love (eros/amor), just as John calls him Charity (agapē/caritas)” (Comm. on Song, prol.). Therefore, “you must take whatever scripture says about charity (caritas) as if it had been said in reference to passionate love (amor), taking no notice of the difference in terms; for the same meaning is conveyed by both” (ibid.).

Origen took the notion of God as Eros with great seriousness. Few ancient thinkers have more clearly expressed the tension between the realization of God’s yearning for the world and the power of the notion of the absolute unchangeability of the Ultimate. “God so loved the world” (John 3:16) was not a mere metaphor for Origen. In a few texts he dares to assert a kind of “suffering” in God, and some Origen scholars have argued that the “passion of the Word” in emptying himself to take on flesh is one of Origen’s most profound theological insights.

If, as Origen believed, eros has its source above and has been implanted in us by God-Eros (we could call this EROS I), the motive force powering the soul’s ascent must be the transformation of the eros gone awry in us (EROS II) back to its transcendental starting place. Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs contains the first Christian theoretical exposition of this transformation.

Origen begins by insisting that EROS II can be transformed only by turning it away from the inferior material and human objects to which it has become directed in its fallen state. Hence, any form of erotic practice, especially sexual love (even that legitimately allowed by the church), is irrelevant (or more likely harmful) for the transformative process. Origen’s emphasis on the privileged role of virginity as the manifestation of the soul’s preexisting purity and God-directed freedom marks the earliest theoretical defense in Christianity of the strict division between sexual practice and mystical endeavor. It has also been one of the distinctive marks of much, though not all, Christian mysticism.

Origen bases this disjunction on the identification of Paul’s notion of the inner and the outer person (e.g., 2 Cor. 4:16), that is, the flesh and the spirit, with the two creations. The inner person is the one created “in the image and likeness of God” (Gen. 1:26); the outer is that “formed from the slime of the earth” (Gen. 2:7). All the objects of desire characteristic of EROS II, from money and sexual pleasure to human arts and learning, are transitory and unworthy of true eros. The only true goal of eros is the spiritual good of the first creation, the manifestation of EROS I: “By that which is good we understand not anything corporeal, but only that which is found first in God and in the powers of the soul — it follows that the only laudable love is that which is directed to God and to the powers of the soul” (Comm. on Song, prol.).

But how exactly does the spiritual person learn to read the inner text behind the erotic images and longing language of the lovers in the Song of Songs? Here Origen bridges the gap between the inner and the outer person, between heavenly and carnal love, by means of the teaching about the spiritual senses of the soul that he developed from Clement of Alexandria. This is one of his most important contributions to the history of Christian mysticism.

According to the Alexandrian, “The divine scriptures make use of homonyms, that is to say, they use identical terms for describing different things . . . so that you will find the names of the members of the body transferred to those of the soul; or rather the faculties and powers of the soul are to be called its members” (Comm. on Song, prol.). Therefore, any bodily description contained in the Bible (and what book of scripture has more potent descriptions of body parts and bodily activities than the Song?) is actually a message about the inner person’s relation to the Word because this person possesses “spiritual senses” analogous to the senses of taste, touch, hearing, smell, and sight by which the outer person relates to the material world. When one seeks the proper understanding of the erotic language of the Song, these higher and finer “senses” of the fallen, dormant intellect are awakened and resensitized by the spirit and made capable of receiving the transcendental experience of the presence of the Word. Origen calls this “a sensuality which has nothing sensual in it,” as the language of the Song becomes the best way to read the inner text of the soul, and the spiritual senses guide the soul’s mystical transformation.

As an example, we can take his interpretation of the famous opening verse of the Song, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth.” Origen takes this erotic image through five levels of interpretation, which are both ecclesial and personal: (1) from the grammatical citation of the text and (2) its dramatic or historical reconstruction to (3) the deeper meanings of what it has to say about Christ’s relation to the church, (4) its general message about the soul’s itinerary, and finally (5) how we appropriate the message as our own. In summary, the message is that the sensation of receiving kisses is to be read as the mind’s reception of the teaching of the Word, conveyed both to the church and to the individual soul. “When her mind is filled with divine perception and understanding without the agency of human or angelic ministration, then she may believe that she has received the kisses of the Word of God himself” (Comm. on Song, book 1).

Origen’s reading of the image of the wound of love is more complex. He put together two texts, Isaiah 49:2 (“He set me as a chosen arrow”) and Song of Songs 2:5 (“I am wounded with agape”), to create a rich and original teaching about the Word as the arrow or dart of the Father, whose love wounds the soul (the surviving texts all have an individual, not an ecclesial, application). In the Song commentary this appears with a personal and poignant tone in which the desire for the Word’s teaching is expressed as a transcendental erotic obsession:

If there is anyone anywhere who has at some time burned with this faithful love of the Word of God; if there is anyone who has at some time received the sweet wound of him who is the chosen dart, as the prophet says; if there is anyone who has been pierced with the loveworthy spear of his knowledge, so that he yearns and longs for him by day and night, can speak of naught but him, would hear of naught but him, can think of nothing else, and is disposed to no desire nor longing nor yet hope, except for him alone — if such there be, that soul then says in truth: “I have been wounded by charity.” (Comm. on Song, book 3)