Thus the mind, accustomed as it is to the opaqueness in beings and the phantoms of visible things, appears to be seeing nothing when it gazes on the light of Being. It cannot understand that this very darkness is the supreme illumination of our minds, just as when the eye sees pure light, it seems to be seeing nothing.50
To counter this, we have to say contradictory things about God in order to break through this conceptual barrier. For Being is “both the first and the last; it is eternal and yet most present; it is most simple and yet the greatest,” Bonaventure explained; “it is supremely one and yet omnifarious.”51 At first, each of these attributes appears to cancel out the last, yet on closer examination we see that the apparent contradictions are mutually dependent: God is present in everything because being is eternal; multifarious because One. In this way, ordinary categories of thought and language break down in a coincidentia oppositorum.
The same applied to the contemplation of the Trinity. Like the Cappadocians, Bonaventure instructed his readers to keep their minds in motion between the One and the Three and not attempt to iron out the inherent contradiction: “Take care that you do not believe that you can understand the incomprehensible,” he warns.52 People must use the shock of this irreconcilable complexity to break down their accustomed modes of thinking or they will miss the whole point of Trinitarian dogma, which is to “lift you to the heights of admiration.”53
We even see these apparently diametrically opposed contradictions in the human person of Christ, the supreme revelation of God, who unites “the first and last, the highest and lowest”54 in such a way that the mind cannot cope:
The eternal is joined with the time-bound man … the most actual is joined with him who suffered supremely and died; the most perfect and immense is joined with the insignificant; he who is both supremely one and supremely omnifarious is joined with an individual who is composite and distinct from others.55
Christ, the incarnate Word, does not make the divine any more comprehensible. Quite the reverse: the Word spoken by God segues inexorably into the utter darkness of unknowing, because Christ is not the Terminus of the religious quest, but only the “Way” that leads us to the unknowable Father.56 Instead of making everything clearer, this supreme revelation plunges us into an obscurity that is a kind of death. For Bonaventure, the suffering and death of Christ the Word incarnates the brokenness and failure of our language about God. There is no clarity, no certainty, and no privileged information. We have to leave these immature expectations behind, as Bonaventure explains in the concluding passage of the Journey. We too
must die and enter this darkness. Let us silence all our care and our imaginings. Let us “pass out of this world to be with the Father,”57 so that when the Father is shown to us, we may say with Philip: “It is enough for us.”58 For he who loves this death can see God, for it is absolutely true that “Men shall not see God and live.”59
Just one generation after Thomas and Bonaventure, however, we can see a shift in the conception of God. This centered on the controversial figure of John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), the Franciscan philosopher who lectured to packed audiences in Oxford.60 Scotus criticized Thomas’s theology, which in his view made it impossible to say anything meaningful about God. He was convinced that reason could demonstrate the existence of anything. It must be possible to arrive at an adequate understanding of God by our natural powers alone. This was the governing principle of Scotus’s philosophy, the criterion that determined the truth or falsity of any of his ideas. But this “natural theology” was feasible only if we knew what we meant when we said that “God exists.” Scotus, therefore, insisted that the word “existence” was univocal; that is, it “had the same basic meaning,” whether it applied to God or to men, women, mountains, animals, or trees.
Thomas, as we know, argued that we could only use words such as “wisdom,” “existence,” or “goodness” analogically of God.61 But that was not enough for Scotus. There were, he argued, some words, such as “fat” or “exhausted,” that could not apply to God, but if such terms as “being,” “goodness,” or “wisdom” were not univocal of God and creatures, “one could not naturally have any concept of God—which is false.”62 Pagan and Christian philosophers all agreed that God was a being of some sort; they simply differed about the kind of being God was. They both meant the same thing when they said that God “exists,” even though a pagan might believe that God was a fire, while a Christian would deny this.
Thomas had regarded this type of thinking as potentially idolatrous; if we assumed that God was—in some sense—a mere being, it was all too easy to project our own ideas onto him and create a deity in our own image. But Scotus argued that we did in fact derive our understanding of God from our knowledge of creatures. We know from experience what a “being” or “wisdom” is, and when we apply it to God, we simply purge it of all imperfection and limitation. Then we “ascribe it to the highest perfection and in that sense ascribe it to God.”63 True, God’s existence was infinite while the existence of creatures was finite, but this was merely a difference of degree: God simply had a more intensive mode of being, in rather the same way as bright red is more thoroughly red than pink, though both have redness in common. There was no ontological abyss separating God from his creatures. They all “existed,” even though God had the largest share of being. Scotus’s modern critics have accused him of whittling down God’s transcendence and seeing God as merely a bigger or better being than us.64 Scotus himself tried to counter the objection that he saw God’s infinity merely as an extension of the finite by arguing that perfect infinity was not composite and that nothing could be added to it.65 But in the last resort, he did relinquish the traditional apophatic caution, by insisting that we could know a good deal about God in “a descriptive kind of way.”66 It was the thin end of the wedge. Others would follow Scotus in his desire for a theological language that was clear and distinct, based on certain and demonstrable grounds.
Scotus’s preference for a natural, almost scientifically based theology reflected a fundamental change in the training of theologians. In 1277, just four years after Thomas’s death, the Catholic hierarchy of France condemned 217 theological propositions, and some of these condemnations were directed against Thomas himself.67 There was a backlash against the teaching of Aristotle and widespread fear that Aristotelian physics limited God’s sovereign power and freedom, because if God had to conform to Aristotle’s natural laws, he could not be all-powerful.68 Clearly people were already beginning to think of God as just another being, another member of the cosmos, for whom such a contradiction would indeed be impossible. The 1277 Condemnations suggest that some theologians were trying to oppose this disturbing idea by claiming that God could indeed do anything he wanted. Even though Aristotle said that nature abhorred a vacuum, God could move the whole cosmos in a straight line, if he chose, and leave a void in its wake; it was not necessary for the earth to be the center of the universe, and God had the power to create an infinite number of other worlds. He could even, argued the English Franciscan William of Ockham (1285–1349), have saved the human race by descending to earth as a donkey.69
The university curriculum now required students to study logic, mathematics, and Aristotelian science before they began their theological studies. The younger generation were, therefore, no longer at home with analogical thinking, because the natural sciences required language to be transparent and univocal. Ockham no longer saw doctrines as symbolic; they were literally true and should be subjected to exact analysis and inquiry. Like Scotus, he had no doubt that words like “existence,” “power,” or “presence” could be used in the same way of God and creatures.70 Aristotle had insisted that each field of study had its own rationale and that it was dangerous to apply the rules and methods of one science to another. But teachers were beginning to abandon this practice.71 By the time some students arrived in divinity school, they were so well versed in scientific thinking that they tried to solve theolo
gical problems mathematically.72 They measured free will, sin, and merit according to the laws of proportion and tried to calculate the exact degree of difference between God and creatures, the odds on the possibility of God’s creating successively better worlds ad infinitum, and how many angels could sit on the tip of a needle.
The Condemnations of 1277 tried to stop this trend, but they had the opposite effect. The new preoccupation with the idea of God’s “power” (conceived simply as a more effective form of the “power” we know) led to a new vogue in hypothetical thinking. Scholars started to dream up all kinds of absurd feats that God should be able to manage, and these were tolerated as long as it was clear that these theories were purely speculative (secundum imaginationem). Some became fascinated by the idea of vast, interstellar space,73 which the French philosopher Nicolas Oresme (1320–82) regarded as a physical manifestation of the immensity of God. Others imagined God creating a vacuum by annihilating material within the cosmos. Would the heavenly spheres surrounding the earth collapse as nature struggled to fill this vacuum? If a stone were thrown into this void, would it move in a straight line? Would people be able to hear and see one another? 74 These philosophers did not believe that they could solve these problems: indeed, their emphasis on God’s absolute power militated against it.75 But, unwittingly, they had prepared the ground for the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when pioneering geniuses would investigate the mathematical implications of many of the questions raised in the late scholastic period secundum imaginationem.76
The abstruse speculations of philosophers like Scotus and Ockham led to a rift between theology and spirituality that persists to the present day.77 During the thirteenth century, some people found the new scholastic theology so dry and off-putting that they began to think that they could reach God only by discarding the intellect altogether. Instead of seeing love and knowledge as complementary, or even fused, in the traditional way, people began to see them as mutually exclusive. Until the fourteenth century, most of the great mystics were also important theologians. The theology of the Cappadocians, Denys, Augustine, Thomas, and Bonaventure was inseparable from their spiritual contemplation (theoria) of the divine. But none of the great mystics of the late medieval and early modern periods— Johannes Tauler (1300–61), Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), Jan van Ruysbroek (1293–1381), Richard Rolle (c. 1290–1348), Julian of Norwich (1343—c. 1416), Margery Kempe (b. 1364), Jean de Gerson (1363— 1429), Catherine of Siena (1347–80), Teresa of Avila (1515–82) and John of the Cross (1542–91)—made any significant contribution to theology.78
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a complete reversal of former practice, we find people cultivating a privatized type of prayer that was devoted almost exclusively to the achievement of intense emotional states, which they imagined were an “experience” of God. The new spirituality was sometimes aggressively solitary instead of communal, and showed little or no concern for other people.79 For the English hermit and poet Richard Rolle prayer was sensation. “I cannot tell you how surprised I was, the first time I felt my heart begin to warm,” he declared disarmingly at the beginning of The Fire of Love:
It was real warmth too, not imaginary, and it felt as if it were actually on fire. I was astonished at the way the heat surged up, and how this new sensation brought great and unexpected comfort. I had to keep feeling my breast to make sure there was no physical reason for it. But once I realised that it came entirely from within, that this fire had no cause, material or sinful but was the gift of my Maker, I was absolutely delighted, and wanted my love to be even greater.80
This was a spirituality of “urgent longing,” “interior sweetness” that set the heart “aglow,” “infusion of comfort,” and “perfervid love.”81 Rolle heard heavenly music, inaudible to the outward ear, which released a flood of pleasurable feeling that he identified with the love of God. He had no time for theologians, who were “bogged down in their interminable questionings”;82 motivated solely by “vanity,” these people should be called “Fool” rather than “Doctor.”83 Rolle regularly insulted anybody who uttered the slightest criticism of his eccentric way of life with a stridency that jars with his lush descriptions of God’s love. This emphasis on sensation was strangely parallel to the tendency of the late scholastic theologians, who were increasingly skeptical about the mind’s ability to transcend sense data.84 This new “mysticism” translated the traditionally symbolic discourse of interiority into a literal exploration of observable, quantifiable psychological states, which had become an end in themselves.85
Rolle made a great impression on his contemporaries, but many of them were disturbed by this emotional piety, which contravened cardinal principles about the nature of religious experience. As we have seen, contemplatives were supposed to rise above their feelings in order to explore the deeper regions of the psyche. Rolle refused to have a spiritual director who could have instructed him in the special techniques and carefully cultivated attitudes that would enable him to transcend his normal modes of perception. The traditions all insist that a mystic must integrate his spirituality healthily with the demands of ordinary life. Zen practitioners insist that meditation makes them more alert and responsive to their surroundings. But in his writings Rolle alternates between excitable, almost manic exultation and crushing depression. He developed a stammer and found that a job that would once have taken him thirty minutes now took a whole morning. His younger contemporary Catherine of Siena once fell into the fire in an ecstatic swoon while cooking a meal. This unbalanced behavior would become increasingly admired in certain circles. Like Rolle, Catherine refused to submit to spiritual direction that could have helped her to negotiate this perilous psychic hinterland.
Elevated feelings were never supposed to be the end of the spiritual quest: Buddhists insist that after achieving enlightenment, a man or woman must return to the marketplace and there practice compassion for all living beings. This was also true of Christian monks and nuns, who had to serve their communities; even anchorites often acted as counselors for the local laity, who came to them with secular as well as spiritual problems. But Rolle vehemently refused to engage with his fellows, and his contemplation did not lead to kindly consideration and kenotic respect for others—the test of authentic religious experience in all the major faiths. But as the rift between spirituality and theology developed, a flood of pleasurable and consoling emotion would be seen by more and more people as a sign of God’s favor.
The Dominican preacher Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1327) was uneasy about this development.86 Whatever mystics like Rolle believed, the feeling self could not be the end of the religious quest, because when reason fulfills itself in intellectus, it has left self behind. For Eckhart, the intellect was still the “place” in the mind where the divine touches the human; in intellectus, the “I” ends and “God” begins. We pass over into a state that is “nothing,” because it is unlike anything else in our experience. Ultimately, therefore, the intellect was as unnameable as God:
It is neither this nor that, and yet it is something which is higher above this and that as Heaven above earth. And therefore I give it finer names than I have ever given it before, and yet … it is free of all names, it is bare of all forms, wholly empty and free, as God in himself is empty and free. It is so utterly one and simple, as God is one and simple, that man cannot in any way look into it.87
The intellect was “nothing” because it had ceased to be itself and had “nothing in common with anything at all … it is a strange land and a desert.”88
Where mystics like Rolle got stuck in the image—the fire, the heat, the “heavenly” harmonies—and seemed obsessed with their personal stories, Eckhart preached a detachment not only from the self but also from the “God,” whom Rolle and his like wanted to possess and enjoy.89 Detachment was the disciplined kenosis that would bring us to the “silence” and “desert” of the intellect. We had to eliminate the images, concepts, and exp
eriences that we used to fill our inner emptiness and, as it were, dig out an interior vacuum that would draw God into the self. Eckhart had given a spiritual relevance to the empty space that so fascinated the late scholastics. Nature might abhor a vacuum, but our interior void would attract the Nothingness that was God, since “everything longs to achieve its natural place.”90
But Eckhart was convinced that all this could be achieved within the normal structures of the Christian life. There was no need for a special lifestyle. People who became attached to one of the privatized spiritual “ways” currently on offer were “finding ‘ways’ and losing God, who in ‘ways’ is hidden.”91 The truly detached person did not want an “experience” of the divine presence; indeed, “he does not know or experience or grasp that God lives in him.”92 The discovery of the “intellect” should be a homecoming rather than a bizarre peak experience, since it is a Platonic recollection of a once known but since lost identity. A felt desire for God can be only an ego need, born of the images we use to fill our emptiness. Any “God” we find in this way is an idol that would actually alienate us from ourselves:
For if you love God as he is God, as he is spirit, as he is person, and as he is image—all this must go! Then how should I love him? You should love him as he is nonGod, a nonspirit, a nonperson, a nonimage, but as he is—pure, unmixed, bright “One” separated from all duality; and in that One we should sink eternally down, out of “something” into “nothing.”93
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