by Umberto Eco
The sacred does not always appear in anthropomorphic forms; in certain cultures it can assume a variety of vicarious forms. It can be a tree or a rock in which, in some way, people perceive something “other.”
Clearly, simpler people attempt to confer a recognizably human or animal likeness on the sacred, either in the form of a totemic image or in the way that has always scandalized mystics and theologians the most, by giving it an anthropomorphic form.
So the fundamental problem with the sacred is that, to allow it to appear and be something that gives meaning to our experience, it may be talked about and made evident in the guise of idola or amalgamata, images—but how is it possible to make images of the sacred if the sacred is by definition something that lies beyond our experience?
There is a rather disconcerting text in which William of Ockham says that an image can only be a sign that allows us to recall something we have already known as an entity in and of itself; otherwise, the image would not strike us as similar to whatever is represented. So seeing a statue of Hercules would not make me think of Hercules if I had not already seen Hercules.
This text assumes (and this was a matter on which there was general agreement) that we are not capable, starting from an icon, of imagining something that until then was unknown to us. This would seem to contradict our experience, since people constantly use paintings, photographs, or Identi-Kit facial composites to be able to envision people, animals, or things still unknown—and even in Ockham’s day, when monarchs wanted to marry off daughters to cousins living in another country they would send images of them in advance. There is, however, an epistemological explanation for such an embarrassing statement. For Augustine, a sign was something which, while presenting itself to the senses, conveyed aliquid ex se faciens in cogitationem venire—something else to the intellect. For the Aristotelian tradition, at least until Thomas Aquinas, the sign referred directly to the concept, which was in its turn an image of the thing. But for Ockham, the true signum of the thing was the concept, not the word that referred to it. Concepts are the natural signs that signify things, while words are imposed by direct relation to things, he explains in Summa logicae: voces sunt signa secundario significantia illa quae per passiones animae primario importantur. Words signify the same things signified by concepts, yet they do not signify concepts!
If the only sign of individual things is the concept, and the physical expression (be it a word or a picture) is only a symptom of the inner image, then without a preliminary notitia intuitiva of an object, the physical expressions cannot mean anything. Words and images neither create nor bring into being anything in the mind of the addressee (as could happen in Augustine’s semiotics) if that mind does not already contain the only possible sign of the experienced reality—in other words, the mental one.
We might object to Ockham that any representation (such as an Identi-Kit composite) stimulates our mind to produce a mental sign thanks to which we can recognize the corresponding thing, and this is why we can imagine Hercules or Hitler even though we have never met them. But Ockham’s text gives rise to an interesting problem: the police officer could not put together that image of the suspect if the witness providing the input had not really met or seen the corresponding individual, just as Pietro Annigoni could not have made the portrait of Queen Elizabeth if she had not been sitting in front of him. The indisputable consequence is that there cannot be an image of something no one has ever seen. Even when something new is created, as is the case with centaurs, it results from putting together parts of things that are already known. And this is why we can make images of Hitler and even Mickey Mouse, but we cannot make images of a circle whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere. The Ockhamist theory of the image can be challenged as regards images of things attainable through experience, but holds up perfectly well for images of things that transcend experience.
Perhaps the first to pose the problem of the impossibility of representing or naming the sacred was Dionysius the Areopagite, known since the nineteenth century as Pseudo-Dionysius. He conceived of the deity as unfathomable and contradictory, describing something that is “not a material body, and therefore does not possess outward shape or intelligible form, or quality, or quantity, or solid weight; nor has It any local existence which can be perceived by sight or touch.… It is not soul, or mind, or endowed with the faculty of imagination, conjecture, reason, or understanding … nor is It number or order, or greatness … nor is It personal essence, or eternity, or time … nor is it darkness, nor is It light, or error, or truth …” and so on, for pages and pages of dazzling mystic aphasia. Not knowing how to name it otherwise, Pseudo-Dionysius calls the divinity “the luminous dimness, a silence which teaches secretly” and “luminous darkness.” But even these are images that refer to data of experience. How can we base on data drawn from experience something that should instead be the foundation of such data?
Pseudo-Dionysius held that God is ineffable, and the only way to address this satisfactorily is with silence. When someone speaks, it can only conceal the divine mysteries from those who cannot accept them.
This mystical attitude is, however, constantly contradicted by the opposite one, the theophanic conviction that, as God is the cause of all things, all names befit him, in the sense that every effect refers to its Cause. God can therefore be given the form and figure of man, of fire, or of amber. People can praise the ears, eyes, hair, face, hands, shoulders, wings, and arms, the back and the feet, and fashion crowns, thrones, goblets, volcanoes, and other objects full of mystery.
Pseudo-Dionysius warns, however, that such naming drawn from various symbols will never be adequate. Hence the need for those making such representations to dispense with what can only be extremely understated hyperbole (the oxymoron being appropriate here). Instead, the deity should only be named using “dissimilar similarities” or “incongruous dissimilarities” such that, for the divine “sometimes the images are of the lowliest kind, such as sweet-smelling ointment, and corner stone. Sometimes the imagery is even derived from animals so that God is described as a lion or a panther, a leopard or a charging bear. Add to this what seems the lowliest and most incongruous of all, for the experts in things divine gave him the form of a worm.” Elsewhere Dionysius refers to another supreme case of dissimilitude, citing the part of Psalm 78 where a wrathful Lord is “awaked as one out of sleep, and like a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine.”
But here, too, the allusion to the inexpressible sacred is through representations of things attainable in experience—and they are no greater than attempts to anthropomorphize the deity (depicting God with a beard and triangular halo), or for that matter to animalize the Holy Spirit.
And therefore, since we cannot really formulate a negative theology that says only what God is not, in trying to find one that is positively affirmative, we end up accepting representations of God as if he were one of us. This emerges even at the beginning of the Book of Genesis: if God made us in his own image and likeness, this means that we can imagine God in our own image and likeness.
Christianity has overcome this impossibility to a certain extent by speaking of an incarnate deity. Incarnation would be the semiotic artifice through which God is rendered thinkable and representable, understandable even to the humble—not only through the image of Jesus but also through the likeness of those who have been in some way mediators of the sacred, such as the Virgin Mary and the saints.
But the Ockhamist predicament arises in these cases, too, because none of the artists who have painted or sculpted portraits of Jesus and the Virgin ever saw them—given that the portraiture of evangelical characters began centuries after the death of Christ—and the Mandylion, the Veil of Veronica, and the Shroud of Turin (to the extent we wish to lend them credence) also appeared in much later periods.
If anyone has had direct experience of God, it is the mystics and, precisely out of faithfulness to the idea of the non-perceivable nature of the sacred an
d the impossibility of translating it into images, they have always described the experience of divinity in the form of darkness, dark night, emptiness, and silence. Yet all the great mystics have affirmed that, even in the mystical vision, which is an ineffable gift, it is possible to provide an image of God. To the mystic, God appears as a Great Void.
Dionysius the Carthusian, a fifteenth-century Flemish theologian, said: “O most benign God, you are the light and the sphere of light, where your elect go sweetly to rest, where they fall asleep and sleep. You are like a vast desert, perfectly flat and incommensurable, in which the truly devout heart, purified of all particular love, illuminated from on high, and full of ardor, wanders without getting lost, blissfully succumbs and together heals.”
The thirteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of a silent and empty deity as an abyss devoid of mode and form, and describes how the soul “wants to go into the simple ground, into the quiet desert, into which distinction never gazed, not the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit … For this ground is a simple silence, in itself immovable, and by this immovability all things are moved.” Only in this way does the soul attain supreme bliss, by plunging into the deserted divinity where there is neither work nor image. Eckhart’s disciple Johannes Tauler in his own Sermons writes:
The purified and clarified spirit sinks into the divine darkness, in a mute silence and in an unfathomable and ineffable union, and in this sinking all equality and all inequality are lost, and in that abyss the spirit loses itself and knows nothing either of God or of itself, it knows not either the equal or the unequal, or any thing; since it has plunged into the unity of God and has forgotten all differences.
And Tauler says that one arrives at true simplicity through closed senses, the absence of images, and contempt for oneself. In every event and in every external act, we must be the master of our senses, because in truth the senses lead us out of ourselves and cause extraneous images to come to us. We read of a holy man who, having to leave his cell in the month of May, pulled the hood of his habit over his eyes. Asked why he did this, he said: “I am defending my eyes from the sight of the trees, so that the visions of my spirit might not be obstructed. O my dear children, if the sight of the wild wood created an impediment for that man, how harmful the variety of worldly and frivolous things must be!”
In The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Saint John of the Cross says:
For, in order that one may attain supernatural transformation, it is clear that he must be plunged into darkness and carried far away from all contained in his nature that is sensual and rational. For the word supernatural means that which soars above the natural self; the natural self, therefore, remains beneath it. For, although this transformation and union is something that cannot be comprehended by human ability and sense, the soul must completely and voluntarily void itself of all that can enter into it.…
With respect to all these there may come, and there are wont to come, to spiritual persons representations and objects of a supernatural kind. With respect to sight, they are apt to picture figures and forms of persons belonging to the life to come—the forms of certain saints, and representations of angels, good and evil, and certain lights and brightnesses of an extraordinary kind. And with the ears they hear certain extraordinary words, sometimes spoken by those figures that they see, sometimes without seeing the person who speaks them. As to the sense of smell, they sometimes perceive the sweetest perfumes with the senses, without knowing whence they proceed. Likewise, as to taste, it comes to pass that they are conscious of the sweetest savors, and, as to touch, they experience great delight—sometimes to such a degree that it is as though all the bones and the marrow rejoice and sing and are bathed in delight; this is like that which we call spiritual unction, which in pure souls proceeds from the spirit and flows into the very members. And this sensible sweetness is a very ordinary thing with spiritual persons, for it comes to them from their sensible affection and devotion to a greater or a lesser degree, to each one after his own manner.
And it must be known that, although all these things may happen to the bodily senses in the way of God, we must never rely upon them or accept them, but must always fly from them, without trying to ascertain whether they be good or evil; for, the more completely exterior and corporeal they are, the less certainly are they of God. For it is more proper and habitual to God to communicate Himself to the spirit, wherein there is more security and profit for the soul, than to sense, wherein there is ordinarily much danger and deception.…
So he that esteems such things errs greatly and exposes himself to great peril of being deceived; in any case he will have within himself a complete impediment to the attainment of spirituality.…
For over and above the difficulty that there is in being sure that one is not going astray in respect of locutions and visions which are of God, there are ordinarily many of these locutions and visions which are of the devil; for in his converse with the soul the devil habitually wears the same guise as God assumes.
In the early seventeenth century, Jakob Böhme had a fundamental mystical experience that brought him into contact with the very core of the universe, thanks to a sort of dazzling epiphany when one morning he saw a ray of sunlight reflected in a tin tub. What he saw is not known, nor did he tell us, and all the editions that have tried to illustrate his mystical perceptions are made up of circular, spindly structures that are difficult to decipher.
The bottomless abyss of the Divinity, Böhme writes in The Incarnation of Jesus Christ (1620), is none other than a quietude devoid of essence. It can give nothing. It is eternal peace with no peer, an abyss with neither beginning nor end. It is neither purpose nor place, it is not seeking or finding, nor anything where there is possibility. It resembles an eye, its own mirror. It has no essence, or light or darkness; it is above all a magic, and it has a will, which we must neither seek nor follow, for it perturbs us. By this will we mean the foundation of the Divinity, without origin. It comprises itself in itself, beyond nature; therefore we must keep silent
And yet (even though I am not an expert in the history of mysticism and I make this suggestion with great caution) while I have the impression that the experience of pure and ineffable nothingness is proper to male mysticism, it does not seem to me that many mystical women have referred to God as Pure Nothingness; on the contrary, the most important among them have spoken of Christ as an almost carnal presence. Female mysticism is dominated by hierophany, and the woman who sees the divine image expatiates on her subject in pages of undoubted erotic ecstasy, and on her amorous feelings for the Cross.
The following quotation from Saint Maddalena de’ Pazzi’s “The Forty Days” (I quaranta giorni, 1558) ought to suffice:
Love, love, Oh love, give me a great voice so that when I call you Love I may be heard from the East to the West, and in all parts of the world, even unto hell, so that you may be known and beloved of all; Love, love, You are strong, and powerful love. Love, love only you penetrate, and pierce; you break and vanquish all things. Love, love. You are heaven and earth, Fire and Air, Blood and Water. Oh Love you are God and man, love and hate, Joy of nobility, Divine, Old and new Truth. Oh Love neither loved nor known. But I see one person who has known this love.
Then there are the pages in which Saint Teresa of Ávila speaks of the wine of love that penetrates her veins and inebriates her, of the divine spouse that in an instant makes her enjoy all the beauty, all the glory of paradise in such an ineffable way:
on some occasions I am in such transports I do not realize, were it not for my uttering amorous moans with all my spirit.… Once an angel appeared before me in tangible, bodily form. He was most beautiful and I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and piercing my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God.… The pain was so sharp that it made me utt
er several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one’s soul be content with anything less than God. It is not bodily pain, but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share.
Among the poems of Teresa of Ávila, we also find this:
When the gentle hunter
Shot me and made me surrender
My soul fell into the arms of love …
What joy my beloved
To be close to you
Eager to see you
I wish to die. And when you deign
To enter my breast
Oh then my God, in that moment
I fear losing you.
At fifteen, the French Salesian nun Marguerite Marie Alacoque (1647–1690) began to believe she was “betrothed to Jesus” and even reported that one day Jesus lay himself upon her with all his weight. “Let me use you at my pleasure because there is a time for all things,” he told her when she protested. “Now I want you to be the object of my love, yielding to my will, without resistance on your part, so that I may enjoy you.” It is worth quoting much more from her autobiography:
One day, having a little more leisure—for the occupations confided to me left me scarcely any—I was praying before the Blessed Sacrament, when I felt myself wholly penetrated with that Divine Presence, but to such a degree that I lost all thought of myself and of the place where I was, and abandoned myself to this Divine Spirit, yielding up my heart to the power of His love. He made me repose for a long time upon His Sacred Breast, where He disclosed to me the marvels of His love and the inexplicable secrets of His Sacred Heart, which so far He had concealed from me. Then it was that, for the first time, He opened to me His Divine Heart in a manner so real and sensible as to be beyond all doubt, by reason of the effects which this favor produced in me, fearful, as I always am, of deceiving myself in anything that I say of what passes in me. It seems to me that this is what took place: “My Divine Heart,” He said, “is so inflamed with love for men, and for thee in particular that, being unable any longer to contain within Itself the flames of Its burning Charity, It must needs spread them abroad by thy means, and manifest Itself to them (mankind) in order to enrich them with the precious treasures which I discover to thee, and which contain graces of sanctification and salvation necessary to withdraw them from the abyss of perdition. I have chosen thee as an abyss of unworthiness and ignorance for the accomplishment of this great design, in order that every thing may be done by Me.” After this He asked me for my heart, which I begged Him to take. He did so and placed it in His own Adorable Heart where He showed it to me as a little atom which was being consumed in this great furnace, and withdrawing it thence as a burning flame in the form of a heart, He restored it to the place whence He had taken it saying to me: “See, My well-beloved, I give thee a precious token of My love, having enclosed within thy side a little spark of its glowing flames, that it may serve thee for a heart and consume thee to the last moment of thy life; its ardor will never be exhausted, and thou wilt be able to find some slight relief only by bleeding.…