26,52 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: WS
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
The Renewal of Mystical Theology is a memorial volume of important, original essays honoring the life and work of the late John N. Jones. Jones was a major figure in The Renewal of Mystical Theology in the contemporary world, partly through his own writings, but especially through his generous help and sagacious care in soliciting, editing, and producing a wide range of books on spirituality and mysticism. Jones was an academic, trained in the critical study of religion at Yale University, after which time he became one of the country's leading editors in the field of mysticism. Although he published important essays on Dionysius, Jones' real vocation as a nurturer of the revival of interest in mystical theology emerged during his years as editor. The volume will appeal to teachers and students involved in Christian mysticism, as well as clergy, intellectuals, and educated lay readers. College and university instructors, as well as seminarians, can use the essays as a valuable teaching tool.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Seitenzahl: 549
Ähnliche
A Herder & Herder Book
The Crossroad Publishing Company
www.CrossroadPublishing.com
© 2017 by Bernard McGinn
Crossroad, Herder & Herder, and the crossed C logo/colophon are registered trademarks of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be copied, scanned, reproduced in any way, or 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. For permission please write to [email protected]
In continuation of our 200-year tradition of independent publishing, The Crossroad Publishing Company proudly offers a variety of books with strong, original voices and diverse perspectives. The viewpoints expressed in our books are not necessarily those of The Crossroad Publishing Company, any of its imprints or of its employees, executives, or owners. Although the author and publisher have made every effort to ensure that the information in this book was correct at press time, the author and publisher do not assume and hereby disclaim any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause. No claims are made or responsibility assumed for any health or other benefits.
Book design by The HK Scriptorium
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-8245-2236-0
Books published by The Crossroad Publishing Company may be purchased at special quantity discount rates for classes and institutional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected].
Contents
Contributors
Foreword
Gwendolin Herder, Publisher of The Crossroad Publishing Company
Introduction
Bernard McGinn
“Poem. For John, with Gratitude”
Matthew Lickona
Part IHistorical Perspectives on Mystical Theology
1. The Eschatological Consciousness of the Christian Mystics
Harvey D. Egan, S.J.
2. Comprehending the Incomprehensible: John Scottus Eriugena as Mystic
Bernard McGinn
3. From the Radically Apophatic to the Radically Kataphatic: From Meister Eckhart to Jacob Boehme
Cyril O’Regan
4. Showings to Share: The Mystical Theology of Julian of Norwich
Marilyn McCord Adams
5. The Ignatian Mystic
Phyllis Zagano
6. Teresa of Avila on the Song of Songs
Lawrence S. Cunningham
7. Is Darkness a Psychological or a Theological Category in the Thought of John of the Cross?
Edward Howells
8. The Contemplative Turn in Ficino and Traherne
Mark A. McIntosh
Part IIContemporary Issues in Mystical Theology
9. When Mysticism Is Outlawed: The Case of Said Nursi
Margaret Benefiel
10. Being as Símbolo: A Latino Reading of Dionysian Aesthetics
Peter J. Casarella
11. In Christ: Theosis and the Preferential Option for the Poor
Roberto S. Goizueta
12. The Christocentric Mystagogy of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI
Robert P. Imbelli
13. Contemplative Ecology: A Mystical Horizon for the Twenty-First Century
Diarmuid O’Murchu, MSC
Contributors
MARILYN MCCORD ADAMS
Philosophy of Religion Center, Rutgers University
MARGARET BENEFIEL
Executive Director, Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation, Washington, DC
PETER J. CASARELLA
Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM
Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
HARVEY D. EGAN, S.J.
Department of Theology, Boston College
ROBERTO S. GOIZUETA
Department of Theology, Boston College
EDWARD HOWELLS
Department of Theology, Heythrop College
ROBERT P. IMBELLI
Department of Theology, Boston College
MATTHEW LICKONA
La Mesa, CA
BERNARD MCGINN
Divinity School, University of Chicago
MARK A. MCINTOSH
Department of Theology, Loyola University, Chicago
DIARMUID O’MURCHU, MSC
Dublin, Ireland
CYRIL O’REGAN
Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
PHYLLIS ZAGANO
Senior Research Associate-in-Residence, Hofstra University
Foreword
Gwendolin HerderPublisher of The Crossroad Publishing Company
The world of study and publishing has much for which to thank John N. Jones, as Bernard McGinn explains in the following introduction. At The Crossroad Publishing Company, with its imprints Crossroad and Herder & Herder, we were given the great blessing to be with John day-in, day-out for twelve precious years.
Born in Richfield, Utah, on May 22, 1964, John graduated summa cum laude with a degree in Religion from Claremont McKenna College in 1986. But he began his collegiate career at a community college so that he could be close to his recently widowed mother. That happy blend of intellectual excellence and personal generosity was to become a hallmark of John’s life.
Following his undergraduate studies, he traveled to Spain on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to pursue his interest in Spanish mysticism. John later earned a master’s degree in Theological Studies at Harvard, an M.A. at Yale, and—with the successful defense of his dissertation on the Trinitarian theology of Pseudo-Dionysius—a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1997.
Dr. John Norman Jones arrived at our office, manuscript in hand, hoping to talk to an editor. We took him out to lunch, and by the end of the meal in a noisy Manhattan restaurant, somewhat surprisingly, John had accepted the position of Marketing Manager for the Herder & Herder theological program. We were that impressed with his learning, his kindness, and his obvious dedication to craftsmanship, and we hoped he would be able to use those gifts to sustain and enhance the Herder family’s 200-year tradition of publishing. We were not disappointed. John brought excellence as he brought friendship.
As our Editorial Director, John quietly did much to help shape the direction of Crossroad and Herder & Herder. He built long-term relationships with both established authors and new voices. He worked on important books by writers such as Meister Eckhart, Bernard McGinn, Francis Cardinal George, Christoph Cardinal Schonborn, Timothy Gallagher, Ronald Rolheiser, George Weigel, Gregory Popcak, Rowan Greer, Paula D’Arcy, Richard Rohr, Brian Robinette, Phyllis Zagano, and many others. But he also conceived and ran the Herder & Herder Young Theologians program. He worked hard to develop the manuscripts of first-time authors, though he rarely accepted credit for the role he played in the finished book. Instead, his focus was on the author and the work—the way it might help the author to grow as a thinker and writer, energize the theological debates of the day, and bring the reader further along in the search for truth, as well as the pursuit of hope.
Like a true mystic, John held his own life lightly even as he took it seriously. He owned little, and he spent long hours in meditation. Though an accomplished poet and scholar in his own right, he chose instead to work as an editor, placing his considerable gifts in service to the thought and writing of others. In both his personal and his professional life, he sought the comfort and happiness of those around him, making sure their concerns were understood and addressed. But his worldly detachment and self-effacing manner were not an attempt to retreat from life. Rather, they enabled him to better engage it: to push forward without seizing the spotlight, to practice justice swathed in kindness.
A writer by nature, John worked hard on refining his impressive public speaking skills. John cared deeply about communicating authentically with others. With John, one felt truly understood and always supported. Only after his early death did we learn just how many people he accompanied in his kindness and wisdom. That illness impeded his ability to speak added immense pain to his time of passion.
On the night of October 8, 2012, John Jones passed away peacefully after a courageous battle with oral cancer. John met the illness—and the deep suffering it brought—with characteristic grace, a grace informed by the profound sense of hope he cultivated over decades spent studying mystical traditions and applying the wisdom he found there. All of us who surrounded him during his last weeks experienced it as a grace. As death approached, John’s goodness and graciousness shone ever more brightly. He used what ability he had left to concern himself with others’ well-being, and actively attached himself to a hope so strong it never left him while he labored to leave the earth—a powerful testament to his beautiful character and a lasting gift to those near him. John’s life was consummate in its simple coherence of thought and practice.
Even today, every time I leave the office I double check my keys—John used to be right there in case I would not have them with me. Then I remember him reviewing my letters or marketing texts, gently suggesting, “Can we put the word hopeful in.”
We would like to thank Professor Bernard McGinn, who conceived and initiated this volume, and also did much of the work for it. Thanks to every contributor for writing a special chapter for John. Thanks also for the poetry of Matthew Lickona, who understood John, and to David Ciampichini for giving us the beautiful portrait for the cover. — Then, there is all that hope that John will enjoy the book.
Introduction
Bernard McGinn
Some of those who have contributed to this volume of studies in memory of John N. Jones are old enough to remember the days when mystics and mystical theology were considered marginal to the church, inhabitants of the stranger shores of religion. For Catholics, mystics were those “rare birds” (rarae aves) whose unusual, often bizarre graces (visions, locutions, ecstasies, stigmata, elevations, etc.), demonstrated that God was really more on the side of those suspicious of mystics, although a few of the mystical birds had been approved by ecclesiastical authority after long examination. In any case, the birds were meant for admiration rather than imitation. For many Protestant Christians, the very word “mysticism” conjured up a nonevangelical, ersatz form of Christianity, more dependent on Greek philosophical religion than the gospel. All that has changed within living memory.
The emergence of the mystical element from the fringes of respectability to the central role it now enjoys in Christian faith is evident, even if the causes and ultimate significance of this movement of the Spirit still remain somewhat hidden. Nonetheless, the change has been real, as shown by the fact that fifty years ago only a handful of the major mystical texts of Western Christianity were readily available to those hungry to drink from the authentic sources of this tradition. Today, devoted seekers (and even curious readers) have access to more of the solid food of deep spirituality and mystical piety than perhaps at any time in the history of Christianity. This revival has nurtured a renewed attention to the theological study of mysticism, as a host of articles, books, and conferences of the past decades has amply demonstrated.
The renewal of mystical theology has involved the efforts of devoted people from many walks of life—not only mystics themselves but also scholars and students, teachers and preachers, retreat givers, seekers after spiritual wisdom, and (yes) editors and publishers convinced of the importance of making the riches of the mystical tradition available to a new generation of readers and willing to devote their efforts to this endeavor. This is where the late John N. Jones, Editorial Director of the Crossroad Publishing Company for many years, comes in for special remembrance. Taken from us all too soon, John was a major figure in the renewal of mystical theology in the contemporary world, partly through his own writings, but especially through his generous help and sagacious care in soliciting, editing, and producing a wide range of books on spirituality and mysticism during his time at Crossroad-Herder. John was an academic, trained in the critical study of religion at Yale University, where he defended a dissertation on the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius in 1998. John’s life, however, took a different turn after he began working for Crossroad-Herder in 2000. Although he published important essays on Dionysius, John’s real vocation as a nurturer of the revival of interest in mystical theology emerged during his years at the press. Gwendolin Herder, the Publisher of Crossroad-Herder, speaks to the impact he had on his friends and coworkers at the press in the Foreword she kindly wrote for this volume, and all the contributors to this book could testify to what John meant to them and their professional work. Some have done so in the essays that follow; all have shown their eagerness to honor John, as a friend, colleague, and consummate editor. This is a signal mark of the affection and respect we all had for John N. Jones.
A brief word about my own contact with John, which inspired me to put this volume together. In the late 1990s John sent me a copy of his dissertation. I thought that it was an original and provocative work, one that deserved publication as an important contribution to the renewed interest in Dionysius. John, however, soon began working for Crossroad-Herder as what I would call their “Editor for Mysticism,” though I realize he did much more for the press over the years he worked there. Ever on the look-out for good new scholarship on mystical topics, John and I consulted over the years about promising dissertations, submitted manuscripts, and the like, although he was very much his own best judge about these matters. I had the opportunity to work closely with him in the editing and production of the two most recent volumes of my ongoing history of Christian mysticism under the general title The Presence of God. John was a superb editor, one with a discriminating sense of when to offer help and when to leave the author to make his or her own mistakes (which might be later corrected). What most impressed me about him was the tact and the generosity he extended to new authors, meticulously working with them to refine their manuscripts for publication. In all his work as an editor he demonstrated rare dedication and superb intelligence.
I considered John a friend and colleague, although our contacts were not frequent. Over the months of his final illness in 2012, as I was finishing the page proofs for The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (Crossroad-Herder, 2013), we had a number of e-mail exchanges, but, fitting his self-effacing nature, John said nothing about his health problems and I was absorbed with many projects. Receiving an e-mail from the press about his death in October 2012 was a tremendous shock for me. In subsequent weeks and months, the more I thought about John’s tragic early death, the more I became convinced that some memorial to such an extraordinary human being, one who did so much for the renewal of mystical theology, was a fitting, if insufficient, tribute to a person who dealt with others with such gentleness, helpfulness, and generosity.
With the encouragement of Gwendolin Herder, I began to develop plans for this volume. My intention was to ask for contributions from authors who had worked with John at Crossroad-Herder, or who had had close contact with him over the years. The staff at the press provided me with a helpful list of such persons, many known to me, others not. All those I contacted were invariably enthusiastic about the idea of honoring John, but, given the obligations of the academic life today, some possible contributors were regretfully not able to commit to writing an essay for the volume. Nonetheless, the reader should be aware that, along with the thirteen essays contained in this volume, there is “a cloud of witnesses” hovering over this tribute.
The essays in this collection vary greatly. Some are detailed studies with abundant scholarly apparatus; others are more general surveys. This is as it should be, because the renewal of mystical theology is being pursued in many ways today. I have divided the contributions into two broad sections: (I) Historical Resources for the Renewal of Mystical Theology; and (II) Contemporary Issues in Mystical Theology. It is an artificial division: When was history not important for current discussion, especially in spirituality and mysticism? When were contemporary issues not imbued with historical implications? Nonetheless, the distinction is helpful for differentiating between the essays that are primarily directed to investigating major mystical texts of the Christian tradition and those that analyze what the tradition may bring to bear on current concerns. The eight essays of part I are organized in chronological fashion, beginning with a broad piece on a key issue in Christian mysticism ranging over many centuries and figures. The next seven essays feature original analyses of key mystics in the Christian tradition between the ninth and the seventeenth centuries—John Scottus Eriugena; Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme; Julian of Norwich; Ignatius of Loyola; Teresa of Avila; John of the Cross; and Marsilio Ficino and Thomas Traherne. The five essays of part II feature fresh perspectives on crucial contemporary issues in the study of mysticism, one dealing with a crisis in modern Islamic mysticism, three concerning issues in Catholic mysticism, and a final essay returning to a broad perspective, that is, the relation of mysticism to ecology.
Some introductions to volumes of collected essays feature detailed descriptions of the contents of the volume, summarizing the purpose and content of each piece. I would like to spare the reader this editorial intrusion, confident that anyone who picks up this book is well able to read the titles and will need no intermediary for the experience of plunging into the essays themselves. What I do want to say before closing this brief introduction, however, is a sincere word of thanks to each of the distinguished authors who agreed to contribute to this memorial volume—all of whom have expressed their personal debt to our friend, John N. Jones. I am also immensely grateful to Gwendolin Herder and the other members of the staff at Crossroad–Herder who encouraged this volume from the start and whose many efforts have brought it to fruition. John’s memory will live on, not only in the many authors whose works he nurtured into print but also among all who are concerned with the renewal of mystical theology that is so evident in the essays in this memorial volume. In the communion of saints we pray: Requiescat in pace.
Chicago, July 2015
For John, with Gratitude
Matthew Lickona
Of course the devil grabbed your tongue
You fool, you wagged it oft enough,
And let it drip with scorn for rough-
made words that chapped and stung
the chilly soul; to nudge it toward despair;
preferring gentle speech that played
like sunlight cross your cell, strayed
to laughter, and singed with devil’s hair.
Of course your flesh is wasting now
you monk, so rarely you indulged it.
(Or if you did, so rarely you divulged it.)
Eschewing fatted calf for sacred cow,
retreating from your matter into mind
til now your Brother Ass begins to buck
against its weightless load, no truck
’twixt soul and what gets left behind
for now. And now of course you walk the path
that all men walk, but I still fear to tread,
believing more than I the rising from the dead
and God whose love has vanquished all his wrath.
Your flickering tongue, your flashing eye
Your bearded wit and naked grin
Your boyish faith that love will win
These will endure, and only death will die.
(October 3, 2012)
Part I
HISTORICAL RESOURCES FOR THE RENEWAL OF MYSTICAL THEOLOGY
1
The Eschatological Consciousness of the Christian Mystics
Harvey D. Egan, S.J.
Karl Rahner maintained that biblical texts about the afterlife are not a preview or advanced coverage of coming events but statements about a person’s present existence before God. In his view, knowledge of the last things comes from an etiological anticipation of what we know here and now about ourselves as graced sinners in relation to God.1
The Christian mystics fascinated Rahner because he appreciated that from them one “hears the views of the person who himself experiences most clearly and with the least distortion the relationship which exists between the human subject and . . . God.”2 Moreover, because “the characteristic piety of a mystic is given a special depth and power by the specifically mystical element of his piety,”3 Rahner highlighted the mystic as someone for whom the often barely audible and frequently distorted experience of God found in everyone has been purified and amplified—and with no deformation. In short, the mystics are the true loudspeakers of the redeemed sinner’s standing before God.
On the basis of Rahner’s theology, I claim that what one finds in the lives of the Christian mystics can prove useful for a deeper theology of death, purgatory, hell, and heaven. These realities are not only merited in this life but also, to some extent, begin and are experienced here. Mystical death, for example, sheds some light on the mystery of actual death. I also contend that the intense sensitivity of the Christian mystics to the presence of the least resistance in their relation to God’s love causes purgatorial and even hellish states that can be viewed as a paradigm of postmortem purgatory and hell. In addition, when purged of their sins, even the remnants of sin (their least disorder), the mystics by God’s grace are capable of an extraordinary ability to love more selflessly; that is, they experience a foretaste of eternal life. Thus, the mystical journey foreshadows physical death, postmortem purification, damnation, and eternal life.
MYSTICAL DEATH CONSCIOUSNESS
When the apostle Paul wrote, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body, I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body, I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise” (2 Cor. 12:2–4), he was the first person in the Christian tradition to attest to the experience of mystical death. And because of his transformation into Christ, he confessed that it was no longer he who lived but Christ living in him (Gal. 2:20)—yet another aspect of his mystical death.
Instances of mystical death abound in the history of Christianity. For example, the Franciscan ecstatic mystic Giles of Assisi (ca. 1190–1262) asserted that during his many mystical raptures—some lasting for weeks—he felt as if the soul were being wrenched away from his body and his body dying. These God-given experiences empowered him to contemplate the beauty of his own soul, to learn divine secrets, and to labor more diligently in God’s service. Mystically married to God, Giles became a parent of transcendental life for others. When asked if he desired martyrdom, he claimed that mystical death—that is, contemplation—was the better death.4
Bonaventure (ca. 1217–1274) placed Christ at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of his famous work The Soul’s Journey into God, to underscore Jesus’ major role in the soul’s mystical ascent into God. This treatise focused, however, on Christ, the soul’s bridegroom, the God-Man who is the gateway and door to mystical contemplation, to “ecstatic anointings” that produce the “learned ignorance” so dear to many mystics. Thus, the mystical Christ, the very life of the soul’s life, the Christ who heals and transforms the soul’s spiritual senses and then plunges it into its deepest depths, dominates the Journey. Bonaventure urged, “Let us, then, die and enter into this darkness. Let us impose silence upon all our cares, our desires, and our imaginings.” With Christ crucified, who as a dark fire “that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections,” one “passes out of this world” in mystical death to the Father. Moreover, “whoever loves this death can see God.”5
At the age of twenty-three, Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) experienced her “mystical death,” a four-hour God-given ecstasy in which her body seemed to be dead.6 The classic statement on mystical death, however, is found in The Spiritual Canticle by John of the Cross (1542–1591). He wrote, “How do you endure, O Life, not living where you live, and being brought near death by the arrows you receive from that which you conceive of your Beloved.”7 John, therefore, is paradigmatic of those mystics who view contemplation as a type of mystical death, that is, not living on earth because, during contemplation, one lives in heaven.
In addition to the delightful raptures of contemplation—that is, mystical death in the usual sense—there is also a dark rapture with all the psycho-physical marks of ecstasy that is brought about by an intense and painful concentration on God’s absence, an abrupt invasion of a wild and unbearable desire for God, an acute sense of the loss of the self’s former fervor, and a seeming loss of all meaning, except hanging and dying on the cross with Christ. I would ascribe this type of mystical death to the mysticism of the suffering servant or victim soul.
The urban anchoress Margaret the Cripple (d. ca. 1265)8 exemplifies this form of dark mystical death. Margaret embodied the profound mystery of suffering and dying with Christ crucified. Mystics of her tenor are not those who experience the cross as the setbacks encountered in great apostolic undertakings but rather those who manifest God’s hand even in life’s apparent absurdities: natural failings, physical defects, sickness, suffering, old age, and death. More important, they have also grasped the redemptive value of suffering, that Christ redeemed the world through his undergoing loneliness and isolation, not only by his death on the cross; they have learned how even hidden, sacrificial love is apostolic. The victim-soul mystic is the prime example of the person who allows God alone to determine who and what one is. By focusing on suffering as the way to God, Margaret indirectly criticized the fascination of her age with rapturous consolations.
Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–1997) was once called “the most powerful woman in the world” by the former Secretary General of the United Nations, Javier Pérez de Cuéllar. This hyperbole notwithstanding, it can be said of this Albanian peasant “Saint of the Gutters,” the saint of God’s thirst to love and be loved by humanity, that she is history’s best-known nun. Appreciated primarily for her service to the “poorest of the poor”—and honored for it through a Nobel Prize—Mother Teresa’s extraordinary holiness and mystical depths came to light only a few years ago because of the publication of her private correspondence. Early in her life as a nun, Mother Teresa took an exceptional private vow to consider even the smallest voluntary refusal to submit to God’s will to be a “mortal sin.” Writing later to her spiritual director, she informed him that she often begged Jesus for the grace to do promptly whatever he asked her, however small, and that she would “rather die” than refuse him. This private vow was the motivation behind all that she did and one of “her greatest secrets.”
Mother Teresa’s writings contain only a brief statement about the 1946–1947 honeymoon period of her mystical life, during which she experienced so much “union—love—faith—trust—prayer—sacrifice.”9 Reflecting back on this stage of her life, she felt much nostalgia for the intimacy she had experienced with Christ: “The sweetness and consolation and union of those six months passed by too soon.”10 There were also “oasis moments” of “joy untold” that punctuated her long bouts of darkness, loneliness, and pain of loss. Her spiritual directors later stated that she was on the brink of transforming union.
Mother Teresa’s writings, however, are replete with references to desolation, spiritual darkness, interior suffering, spiritual dryness, deep loneliness, an “icy cold” interior, acute feelings of emptiness and of her own nothingness (“What are you doing, God, to one so small?”). Her feelings of love for God, for Christ, and for others—as well as any experience of faith, hope, and love—simply vanished. The bone-marrow sense of God’s absence, of God’s rejection, of fear that her soul, Jesus, and heaven were illusions, and of a radical longing for God became her “inner hell” for more than half a century. Mother Teresa’s account of her severe trials surpasses even the classical description of the dark night of the soul found in the writings of John of the Cross—whom she had read, but about whom she had remarked only about his deep sense of God. The exceptionally long fifty-five-year period of interior dereliction—exceeding even the prolonged years of suffering of Paul of the Cross—is unique in the Christian mystical tradition. Her state of mystical martyrdom, of the dark mystical death, serves as a counter-balance to the popular view of mysticism as consisting of ecstatic experiences and states of rapture.
It is remarkable that under these circumstances Mother Teresa never wavered in her resolve to live for “God alone, God everywhere, God in everybody and in everything, God always.”11 Experiencing that God was destroying everything in her to fill her with himself, she came to the realization that this darkness—which she called “her greatest secret” (even her closest collaborators knew nothing about it)—allowed her to identify more closely with the poor. “It often happens,” she wrote, “that those who spend their time giving light to others, remain in darkness themselves.”12 The true nature of Christ’s early and repeated call to her, “Come, Come, carry Me into the holes of the poor. Come be My light,”13 led to her peaceful acceptance and love of her extraordinary interior darkness as an instrument through which she brought Christ’s light to others. In one of the most powerful statements of suffering-servant mysticism ever written, Mother Teresa prophesied, “If I ever become a saint—I will surely be one of darkness. I will continually be absent from heaven—to light the light of those in darkness on earth.”14
One discovers another anomaly in Mother Teresa’s writings: an almost complete absence of references to sin and disorder. For this reason, I see much more in her mystical dereliction than what is classically called the dark night of the spirit. Her freedom from sinfulness, from disorder, and her total fidelity to God’s will indicate a person totally open and offering no resistance to God’s workings. Her mystical death consciousness is a reparative, redemptive, expiatory death consciousness—a suffering for the salvation of others. The suffering-servant mysticism of the “saint of darkness” is a lived commentary on three Pauline texts. In 2 Corinthians 5:21, the apostle speaks of the sinless Christ who became sin for our salvation; in Colossians 1:24, Paul rejoices that he is filling up what is lacking in Christ’s sufferings. Mother Teresa knew that she, her nuns, and all Christians, were called to be “the spirit, mind, heart, mouth, eyes, ears, hands, and feet of Christ,” that is, to be the God-forsaken man on the cross for the redemption and salvation of others. In this way, she took upon herself the darkness and sufferings of others—even the pain of resisting the temptations that plagued those she saved.
Mother Teresa lived what the apostle Paul said about himself in Galatians 2:20: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” “When outside,” she wrote, “in the work—or meeting people—there is a presence—of somebody living very close—in very me.”15 Although she understood that she and her sisters must “more and more be His Light—His Way—His life—His Love in the slums,”16 she found the hungry, thirsty, naked, sick, and unwanted Christ “in His distressing disguise”17 in the slums.
Mother Teresa’s spirituality and mysticism are utterly simple: mad, passionate, total love of Jesus Christ. “From childhood,” she wrote, “the Heart of Jesus has been my first love.”18 One might add that he was her only love: Christ in the poor and the poor in Christ. Mass and the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament dominated her life. She spoke of herself as leading a eucharistic life, a Calvary life. Despite years of crucifying darkness, she affirmed that an “unbroken union” with Christ existed because her entire being was centered on him. “I have loved him blindly, totally, only,” she wrote. “I use every power in me—in spite of my feelings—to make Him loved personally by the Sisters and people. I will let him have a free Hand with and in me.”19 She spoke of herself and of her nuns not as social workers—whose work she valued—but as contemplatives who are “twenty-four hours a day with Jesus.”20 And what a wonderful grace and blessing to be able to say at the end of one’s life: “Jesus, I have never refused you anything.”21
PURGATORIAL MYSTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
The anonymous fourteenth-century author of the classic The Cloud of Unknowing provides an unusually clear and concise paradigm for understanding postmortem purgation, or purgatory.22 Writing specifically for those “who feel the mysterious action of the Spirit in their inmost being stirring them to love” and have resolved to “follow Christ perfectly . . . into the inmost depths of contemplation,”23 the anonymous monk instructed the contemplative tyro to create a “cloud of forgetting” between oneself and all created things. Because only love, not thought, can reach God, the novice must forget everything and “firmly reject all clear ideas however pious and delightful for they are more hindrance than help” (Cloud,chap. 9).
This practice, aided by the repetition of a short, meaningful word, such as “God” or “Christ,” causes a “cloud of unknowing” to arise between the contemplative and God. Because thinking has stopped, the contemplative must learn to be at home in the darkness caused by the absence of knowledge and to direct what the monk calls a “dart of blind desire” toward God. Only blind and naked contemplation, that is, one shorn of all thought and images—but filled with love—can penetrate the cloud between God and the contemplative and allow the person to rest quietly in the loving awareness of God’s very being.
This blind, loving contemplation is initially easy, consoling, and joyful but quickly turns into a deeply purgative flame. By creating the clouds of forgetting and unknowing, distractions soon arise to become the person’s “purgatory” (Cloud, chap. 23). Deprived of their natural activity, imagination and reason rebel, which creates a purgative state filled with “great storms” and “temptations.” The purging period intensifies when the person loses the contemplative desire, suffers from its loss, cannot return to regular meditation, and is tempted either to strain spiritually or to give up and return to an ignoble or lukewarm Christian life.
Moreover, as the blind stirring of love roots itself more deeply in the soul, it causes all past sins to arise and torture the person (Cloud, chap. 69). The monk wrote, “No evil thought, word, or deed remains hidden. . . . At times the sight is as terrible as a glimpse of hell and he is tempted to despair of ever being healed and relieved of his sore burden” (ibid.).24 If he perseveres in the cloud of unknowing, however, he will be rewarded with the experience of his past sins being healed. “Slowly he begins to realize that the sufferings he endures are not really hell at all, but his purgatory” (ibid.). This is a clear statement of the hellish and purgatorial consciousness of many Christian mystics.
Once the naked dart of mystical love heals the remnants of personal sins, the contemplative suffers greatly from experiencing self as a “lump of sin.” The root unity of one’s sinfulness, that is, original sin, now shows itself for the evil it is. “This foul, wretched lump called sin,” the monk penned, “is none other than yourself” (Cloud, chaps. 43, 69). Instructive is his observation that the “cloud of unknowing” causes this profound, holistic tasting of one’s sinfulness, which is both hellish and purging.
According to the anonymous author, not only sinfulness but also human existence itself separates us from God. The contemplative comes to the excruciating realization that a great chasm exists between self and God. The painful inability to forget self during contemplation causes an even deeper purification. The monk taught that the “elemental sense of your own blind being will remain between you and your God” (Privy Counseling,chap. 13). The “simple awareness of my being,” the “cross of self,” “the painful burden of self . . . makes my heart break with weeping because I experience only self and not God” (ibid., chap. 14). This purgative experience, however, eventually sets the contemplative “on fire with the loving desire to experience God as he really is” (ibid.).
Employing the typology of his day, the author presents Mary Magdalene, sitting lovingly at Jesus’ feet, as the ideal contemplative (Cloud, chaps. 16–17). (It was actually Mary of Bethany.) She is the one who reveals the most intense kind of contemplative suffering. Never ceasing to feel an abiding sorrow for the sins that she carried like a great secret burden in her heart all her life, Mary’s greatest pain came from her inability to love as much as she was loved. “Sick from her failure to love,” the anonymous writer emphasized, “for this she languished with painful longing and sorrow almost to the point of death” (ibid., chap. 16). The more one experiences contemplative love, the greater will be the desire to return this love in full. At the zenith of what is often called the dark night of the spirit, love itself is the contemplative’s healing and transforming torture, earthly purgatory. This perceptive monk stressed that the God-given blind stirring of love causes this purgatory only because of the person’s resistance and inability to love as much as he or she is loved.
Another example of an earthly purgatory can be found in The Relation of 1654, the spiritual autobiography of Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), a French Ursuline mystic and the first woman missionary to the New World.25 The autobiography gives convincing evidence that only someone who has passed through all the stages of the mystical life and attained spiritual maturity could have written it. Marie’s explanation of the thirteen states of prayer do not fit the classical pattern of mystical ascent as purgation, illumination, and union. Moreover, when she was in her forties—long after mystical marriage, filled with “so gentle and sweet a fire”26—she suffered yet another eight years of mystical purgation, an anomaly because transformative union is usually recognized as the summit of the mystical life.27
The slumbering disorders of Marie’s lower nature reawakened and brutally assaulted her. Temptations to blasphemy, immodesty, and pride—coupled with a strong sense of being the vilest and most debased of God’s creatures—surprised and humiliated her. Debilitating lassitude, anger toward community members, and fear that past blessings were only diabolical delusions encouraged suicidal inclinations.28 All the faults and imperfections committed since mystical union, which before “seemed like nothing to me now seemed horrible in light of the infinite purity of God who demanded exact reparation for all I had experienced.”29 One evening she felt an evil spirit penetrating her “very marrow and nerves to destroy and annihilate [her],”30 which she vanquished by her graced humble submission to God’s will. Even confidence in her most trusted spiritual directors and confessors vanished—one of the classic signs of the dark night of the spirit.
The Holy Spirit revealed how cunning Marie’s corrupt human nature was in hiding her sins and imperfections. She came to realize that only God’s light could illuminate the skewed nooks and crannies of her soul to purify, heal, and transform her. Just as the author of the Cloud of Unknowing had experienced contemplative love as a two-edged sword, Marie now found that the Spirit’s presence—which previously had been one of embracing love—became “a sword that divides and cuts with subtle sharpness,”31 which Marie called a “honing purgatory.” “This is a purgatory,” she emphasized, “more penetrating than lightning—a sword that divides and cuts with subtle sharpness.”32 Yet the Spirit’s “subtle” and “penetrating” thrusts into her spirit never reached the soul’s center, where God is master. However, the experience of God leaving this center for a while hurled her into an “intolerable void,” in which “are born those despairs which would like to throw body and soul into hell.”33
Paradoxically, this spiritual dereliction was experienced only as a “punishment” to be endured, not as something that ensnared and led to immoral conduct. Except for brief periods of God’s seeming absence, Marie always experienced an intimate peace in the soul’s center. “What I was suffering,” she wrote, “was contrary to the state that his divine Majesty maintained at the center of my soul.”34 The trials ended, the “garment of darkness” vanished, and peace came flooding into her soul—at the great price of a veritable purgatory on earth.
Mystical purgatory is also a salient feature in the writings of the thirteenth-century Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg. When she asked the triune God what was expected of her, she was commanded “to lay herself in utter nakedness” so that when God “flows,” she “shall become wet. . . . But when you love, we two become one being.”35 Complying, Mechthild became a “naked soul” and experienced the quiescence of the mutual surrender of God and the soul. Employing poetic hyperbole to express her overpowering experience of love, she made light of even the Virgin Mary’s love of God, the blood of martyrs, the counsel of confessors, the wisdom of the apostles, the austerity of John the Baptist, the dandling of and giving suck to the divine infant.
Mechthild proclaimed herself a “full-grown bride” who belonged at her Lover’s side. But she realized that this intimacy could not “last long. When two lovers meet secretly, they must often part from one another inseparably.”36 The way of true love, however, consisted not only in ecstasies but also in hanging on “the cross of love in the pure air of the Holy Spirit, turned towards the Son of the living Godhead, oblivious of all earthly things.”37 She was taught to love “nothingness” and to flee “somethingness.” The paradox: if one truly desires to love, then one must leave it. “Sinking humility” led her to embrace not only “Lady Pain,” but also the “most blessed Estrangement from God,” which plunged her first into purgatory and then even “under Lucifer’s tail,” into hell itself. “Thy SELF must go.”38 She was instructed, if she wished, to drink the “unmingled wine.” As with others in the mystical tradition, Mechthild experienced that “the deeper I sink, the sweeter I drink.”39
God instructed Mechthild that her mystical life comprised three stages: “Your childhood was a playmate of my Holy Spirit. Your youth was a bride of my humanity. Your old age is now a housewife of my Godhead.”40 Tenderness first marked her mystical journey, then sublime intimacy, and finally intense affliction and dereliction. Strikingly enough, Mechthild much preferred the state of “blessed Estrangement from God” to the states of tenderness and intimacy.
HELLISH MYSTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS41
Pseudo-Macarius, a late-fourth-century Mesopotamian monk, emphasized a mysticism of fire and light based on Christ’s transformation on Mount Tabor, the disciples’ Pentecost experience, and the light of God’s glory that shines forth from the face of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). The heavenly fire and light that Christians receive into their hearts bursts forth upon the body’s dissolution but also brings about the resurrection. Because of sin, however, Satan has made some people a “hell, a sepulcher, and a tomb dead to God.”42 In descending into hell, Christ also descends into their hell-hearts and conquers Satan there.
The majestic but until recently neglected thirteenth-century mystical Beguine Hadewijch stands out as one of the most sublime exponents of love mysticism in the Western mystical tradition. To her, Love is everything and, therefore, the very meaning of existence. Love is the trinitarian life permeating all reality and one’s life. She wrote, “I will tell you without beating about the bush: Be satisfied with nothing less than Love.”43 Hadewijch also confessed that she had nothing else to live on except Love, and she urged her readers to live—not for self-satisfaction—but solely for holy Love, out of pure love, and only to “content Love.”
In Hadewijch’s Sixteenth Poem in Couplets, she writes of Love’s seven names. Love is a “chain” that binds, driving the one bound with madness to devour the Beloved and to be devoured and experience far beyond one’s dreams “the Godhead and the Manhood.”44 Love is a “light” that enlightens reason as to how to love the God-Man. “Live coal” is yet another name, because Love burns to death and consumes “man’s desire and God’s refusal.”45 “Fire” is a name for Love, because it burns to death everything it ever touches so that both blessings and damnation no longer matter. “Dew” is the name under which Love works to impart the kisses that pertain to love, that same kiss that unites the Three Persons in the one God. “Living Spring” is Love’s sixth name, because Love is nothing less than Life which gives life to our life, a spring that flows forth but also returns to itself. “Hell,” however, is Love’s highest name. No grace exists there because this Love engulfs and damns everything. Hadewijch claimed that she was burned to ashes by the fire of this impenetrable, “insurmountable darkness of Love.” Perhaps a more poignant statement of mystical dereliction cannot be found in the Christian tradition.
Hadewijch confessed that Love had been more cruel to her than the devil ever was because the evil one could never stop her from loving God, but Love had taken this away from her. Paradoxically, she valued the hellish cruelty of divine Love more than her youthful raptures and joys. As an “old and wise lover” (a salient feature of her mysticism), she understood that one must forsake love for Love. Love’s “highest voice,” in her view, was to deny Love with humility. In line with an older tradition, Hadewijch experienced and taught an epektasis view of Love, that “inseparable satiety and hunger are the apanage of lavish Love, as is ever well known by those whom Love has touched.”46
The Dominican preacher John Tauler (ca. 1300–1361) also testifies to hellish mystical consciousness. In one of his sermons he instructs his listeners in the three stages of the mystical life. The first stage focuses on a life of spirituality and virtue that brings one closer to God. The second stage consists of spiritual poverty, “when in a strange way God withdraws Himself from the soul, leaving it anguished and denuded.”47 In the third stage, God divinizes the soul by uniting the created spirit to God’s uncreated Spirit.
The second stage is Tauler’s depiction of the dark night of the spirit and a paradigm of earthly hell. Deprived of all previous God-given favors, the person is brought into such desolation and “strange affliction” that he wonders if God even exists. Unable to experience anything of God or to find satisfaction in created things, “he feels himself hemmed in between two walls with a sword behind him and a sharp spear in front. What is he to do? Both ways are blocked. . . . To love and to be denied the object of one’s love surely would seem worse than any hell, if there could be one on earth. . . . The stronger his experience of God was before, the stronger and more intolerable is now the bitterness and pain of loss.”48
Some of the most captivating passages in the Christian tradition on purgative and hellish consciousness flow from the mystical wisdom of Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510). “The things that I speak about,” she dictated to her spiritual guide, “work within me in secret and with great power.”49 During a Lenten confession, Catherine experienced God as pure love so suddenly and overwhelmingly that she rejoiced: “If, of that which this heart of mine is feeling, one drop were to fall into hell, hell itself would become all eternal life.”50 In her view, hell is precisely obduracy in the face of pure love, the unwillingness to submit to the purging action of God’s love, wanting, rather, to remain trapped in the tortures of self love.
Catherine judged her own self as the “very opposite of God”—thus, her worst enemy. The slightest deviation from pure love caused her intense suffering. Moreover, God had revealed to her that self-will was so subtle and deeply rooted that it obeyed only itself—no matter how hard she tried to outwit it. The penetrating awareness of her spiritual corruption became so intense at times that she would have despaired and died, had God not lessened the duration of this experience.51
Catherine came to understand that God’s fiery love could annihilate the immortal soul. As it is being drawn upward, the soul feels itself melting in the fire of that love of its sweet God.52 The “rays of lightning” from God’s fiery love annihilate all resistance to God, that is, the “impediments” from the “rust of sin.” Mixing images, Catherine taught that only these obstacles cause the sufferings of those in purgatory and the soul “feels within it a fire like that of hell.” Of course, for the unregenerate—which was not her case—this love is not transformative. Again, the heightened consciousness of the mystic experiences his or her sinful self as an earthly hell, a paradigm of sufferings of the damned.
One of the most fascinating mystical autobiographies ever written, The Spiritual Life, flowed from the pen of the Italian mystic nun Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524).53 The inner sufferings that had consumed her for three years compelled her to write her book, the final chapters of which (XVII–XIX) contain one of the most profound depictions of the hellish state of mystical dereliction ever written. While being submerged in what she described as God’s deep and profound sea, she became conscious of three paradoxes that left her in despair and drove her to the bottom of a hell filled with the “envenomed dragon of the abyss.” Her teaching was that God is hell to sinful human beings. As seen in Hadewijch, however, Love itself can be experienced as hell, even for those highly advanced in the mystical life.
Teresa of Avila (1515–1582) described her own form of hellish mystical consciousness, the apogee of which was the excruciating vision of her place in hell—a tiny hole at the end of a long, narrow passageway, filled with vermin and sewage. In this hell-hole, she experienced “the blackest darkness,” suffocation, and bodily pains more severe than anything on earth. Worst of all, however, was the spiritual suffering: the soul’s suffocation, its constriction, the feeling that it was being wrested from the body; the soul tearing itself to pieces, unhappiness, and despair. To be burned on earth was minor when compared to being burned in this hell-hole. “I felt myself burning and crumbling,” she averred, “and, I repeat, the worst was that interior fire and despair.” She maintained that what she described “can hardly be exaggerated.”54
John of the Cross (1542–1591) taught that infused contemplation is “nothing else than a secret and peaceful and loving inflow of God, which, if not hampered, fires the soul in the spirit of love” (Dark Night 1.10.6).55 The Holy Spirit’s love flooding the soul, in John’s view, is “the fire and thirst of love” (2.13.4),56 which seeks only to heal and transform persons so that they “may reach out divinely to the enjoyment of all earthly and heavenly things, with a general freedom of spirit in them all” (2.9.1).57 Yet, what should be experienced as a “gentle and delightful burning” of the soul in the Holy Spirit is transformed into mystical dereliction, a hell, because of the contemplative’s disorder, sinfulness, and miserly love (2.9.11).58 John wrote, “When this purgative contemplation oppresses a soul, it feels very vividly the shadow of death, the sighs of death, and the sorrows of hell, all of which reflect the feeling of God’s absence, of being chastised and rejected by him, and of being unworthy of him, as well as the object of his anger” (2.6.2).59
In his instructions concerning the divine light flooding the soul, John taught that “the darkness and evils the soul experiences when this light strikes are not the darkness and evils of the light but of the soul itself” (Dark Night 2.13.10).60 Through these sufferings the contemplative sometimes comes close to death, which “so disentangles and dissolves the spiritual substance—absorbing it in a profound darkness—that the soul at the sight of its miseries feels that it is melting away and being undone by a cruel spiritual death” (2.6.1).61 It is as if the contemplative were experiencing the very pains of hell, although this is, in fact, an extremely meritorious, earthly purgatory (2.6.6).62
BEATIFYING MYSTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Many in the Christian mystical tradition viewed Adam as the contemplative prototype because of his supposed direct and immediate consciousness of God that he enjoyed until he sinned. Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Samuel, and other patriarchs are also presented in the Hebrew Scriptures as having a special God-consciousness. Moses and Jacob, for example, claimed face-to-face meetings with God—with some qualifications as to how directly they gazed upon his face (Gen. 32:30; Exod. 33:11, 23; Num. 12:7; Deut. 34:10). Jacob wrestled with God, survived, and was left with an overwhelming sense of God’s holiness (Gen. 32:24–25). Because Job saw God (Job 42:5), his agonizing questions ceased, and he repented “in dust and ashes.” Because the prophets had “stood in the council of the Lord” (Jer. 23:18), they were authenticated as mystics in action to speak forth God’s word. Moreover, according to many in the Christian tradition, if these figures of the Hebrew Scriptures had foreshadowings of the beatific vision, Paul the apostle certainly must also have experienced this.
Perhaps the boldest and most intriguing Christian claim ever made for a beatifying mystical consciousness is attributed to the ecstatic Franciscan mystic Giles of Assisi (ca. 1190–1262), who professed that he saw God so clearly that “he lost all faith.”63 Second in line may come from the pen of the Third Order Franciscan mystic Angela of Foligno (ca. 1248–1309), who claimed to have experienced in this life some form of the beatific vision. She wrote of a divine working in her soul that was “so deep and ineffable an abyss that this presence of God alone . . . is the good that the saints enjoy in eternal life” (Memorial IX).64 In her view, however, the least saint in heaven has more of what can be given to any soul before death.
On three separate occasions Angela found herself in a most exalted and ineffable way “standing or lying in the Trinity” (Memorial IX),65 and she saw the “All Good” in darkness. She comprehended that the thicker the darkness, the more profound the experience. In this darkness, her soul saw “everything and nothing at once” (ibid.).66 When the Trinity plunged her into this “extremely deep abyss,” all fear was removed from the soul and God secured it firmly in faith and hope. Incapable of describing this experience, she cried out: “Whatever I say about it is blasphemy” (ibid.).67 Concomitant with this experience, Angela discovered in her soul “a chamber into which there enters no sort of grief or joy of any virtue whatsoever, nor anything else that can be named or expressed. But into it there enters that greatest Good, and in that manifestation of God (which I do blaspheme in thus naming it, seeing that I have no word wherewith to speak of it perfectly) is the whole truth.”68
Third in this line, I would place the Beguine mystic Hadewijch, who daringly wrote that she had looked upon the face of God. She maintained that, in a vision, a seraph had raised her to heaven and said, “Behold, this is Love, whom you see in the midst of the Countenance of God’s nature; she has never yet been shown here to a created being”69—a “Countenance” that Hadewijch was to see numerous times. Moreover, Christ himself had granted her personally a glimpse of his eternal glory: “And he took me out of the spirit in that highest fruition of wonder beyond reason; there I had fruition of him as I shall eternally.”70
Less audacious claims are found in the writings of one of the great guides of Western monasticism, John Cassian (ca. 365–ca. 435). He taught that the goal of the monastic life is the partial restoration of Adam’s prelapsarian contemplative oneness with God. Cassian wrote of “pure prayer” as the essence of perfection and a foretaste of heaven. “This prayer,” the monk stressed, “centers on no contemplation of some image or other. It is masked by no attendant sounds or words. It is a fiery outbreak, an indescribable exaltation, an insatiable thrust of the soul. Free of what is sensed and seen, ineffable in its groans and sighs, the soul pours itself out to God.”71
Cassian also advocated the Eastern monastic monologistos prayer, that is, prayer in one formula. Although the Jesus prayer is perhaps the most famous example, Cassian may well be the first to give full articulation to the continuous repetition of an evocative verse, in this case, Psalm 69:2, “O God, come to my assistance, Lord make haste to help me.” For him, this psalm verse “carries within it all the feelings of which human nature is capable.”72 Moreover, perseverance in this prayer “will lead you on to the contemplation of the unseen and heavenly, and to that fiery urgency of prayer which is indescribable and which is experienced by very few.”73 Guarded by angels, one is ecstatically lifted up to silent prayer and becomes absorbed in the loving union that binds the three trinitarian Persons, a powerful foreshadowing of eternal life.
In agreement with John Cassian is Isaac the Syrian (d. ca. 700), a mystic and thinker of unusual clarity and richness, who wrote to guide his monks in reaching the ecstatic contemplation of God, which foreshadows the glories of heaven. He described a “prayer of no prayer,”74 which is attained only by a single person in generations. Because what is genuinely spiritual, in his view, must be free of all movement, in the “prayer of no prayer,” every motion of the tongue, intellect, will, imagination, and heart ceases. Only through the “prayer of no prayer” does a person gain entrance into the heart’s secret chamber where stillness and silence reign. There is no prayer there, no weeping, no desire, no exterior or interior movement at all, and even no free will—only the “prayer of no prayer.”
Awe, wonder, ravishing, self-forgetfulness, divine vision, and, paradoxically, no vision follow in the wake of the “prayer of no prayer.” One is conscious only of the light of the Holy Spirit, which seizes the inner and outer person, producing a profound spiritual inebriation. Engulfed by the Holy Spirit, the prayer of no prayer forces the spirit above itself to gaze ecstatically into the incomprehensible silence and bestows an unknowing more sublime than knowledge, a learned ignorance. This paradise-like prayer may be transitory, but it is indeed an actual foretaste of the resurrected life. Isaac’s homilies underscore, however, that all prayer—even the highest state of “no prayer”—is inextricably connected with psalmody and liturgy, especially the Eucharist.
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) is also a prime example of those mystics who understood contemplation as a type of ecstatic dying to the world and a foretaste of heaven.75 Through contemplation, God consummates his marriage with the errant person, illuminating the intellect so that it becomes rational, prudent, and wise. Because God is a violent Lover who is loved violently by the bride, the human will becomes forceful, powerful, and even fierce. In a statement that was to have great resonance in the later mystical tradition, Bernard taught, “If the soul knows this—or because it knows this—is it any wonder that this soul, this bride, boasts that that great majesty cares for her alone as though he had no others to care for.”76
Finally, the theological mystic Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) taught that, although no one in this earthly life can return to the condition that Adam enjoyed before his sin,77
