This post is an excerpt from a reflection paper I wrote for a 2014 inter-religious dialogue course offered through a Roman Catholic seminary (though I myself am not Roman Catholic). I decided to include this excerpt because it explains in a more formal way some of the points I've been trying to raise about the roots of our world religions. I welcome comments on these reflections. Thanks for reading!
Jen
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| The Christian world view, with its focus on mystery and love, redemption
and forgiveness, is so open to everything in Creation that there is
room within it for all God’s children, regardless of when or where they
have lived.This photo of spring crocuses, taken in the morning light of the spring equinox, speaks to the joyful images of life, beauty, and creation that were central to Jesus' cataphatic mystical teachings. Photo credit JAT 2016. |
It is in response to Sottocornola and De Giorgio’s closing remarks about apophasis and kenosis that I would like to offer some in-depth observations, especially as these relate to Brassard’s opening thesis about the three basic soteriological questions. First, I should acknowledge that some of my interpretations spring from my daily personal experiences as a Christian mystic. To refine this statement, I turn to Bernard McGinn’s three-fold definition of mysticism as “a part or element of religion; . . . as a process or way of life; and . . . as an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God” (McGinn xiii–xvi). McGinn’s research has revealed there are different mysticisms, just as there are different Christianities and different Buddhisms. Apophatic, anagogic, and cataphatic mysticisms do not share the same goals, experiences, or practices. They also do not share the same answers to the three basic questions about “the human problem” or human psychology. I myself am a cataphatic mystic in thought, word, action, faith, and experience of the Divine.
Apophatic mysticism, which in its very essence is an experience of losing one’s personal identity within a transcendent cloud of oneness and unknowing, is a phenomenon which crosses all boundaries of race, religion, and creed. Within Christianity, the tradition of apophatic mysticism can be traced from Plato through many centuries of later Christian figures up to and including Thomas Merton. In the words of Merton’s biographer Lawrence Cunningham, it is “an imageless mysticism” with an emphasis on “silence, lack of image, presence, and so on [that] is characteristic of the dark mysticism that goes back to Saint Gregory of Nyssa, mediated through the writings of the Pseudo Dionysius and down to John of the Cross, and mediated again through the monastic and scholastic doctors of the Middle Ages” (Cunningham 97). There’s no doubt that apophatic mysticism is part of Christianity’s tradition, just as apophatic mysticism is the starting point for the Buddha’s own suppositions about “the human problem.” The point I wish to make is that apophatic experiences necessarily lead to a particular way of understanding Creation that is in direct conflict with the cataphatic and life-affirming teachings of Jesus.
It is a curious thing that a transient experience of transcendent oneness in a person’s life should lead him or her further and further away from an understanding of love (specifically agape) and closer and closer to pure logic and reason as the only adequate tools for understanding the universe. Yet this is indeed what seems to happen. Plato, as mediated first through Paul’s own writings on sin, law, and death, has had an enormous influence on Christian thought with the “imageless mysticism” he highlights in Phaedrus. In Plato’s well-known tale of the Charioteer, which probably dates from Plato’s middle period, he presents a “myth” about the nature of the immortal soul (Phaedrus 245c-250c). In this myth, the soul is compared to a winged team of horses and their charioteer. Souls compete to try to ascend to the region above the heavens, the region that is “occupied by being which really is, which is without colour or shape, intangible, observable by the steersman of the soul alone, by intellect, and to which the class of true knowledge relates.” If a soul succeeds in its required task of gazing upon “what is true,” it will be happy and will return to its home in the heavens; but if a soul fails, it will be filled with the weight of forgetfulness and incompetence, and it will fall to earth, where it must incarnate according to specific dictates of divine law.
I see strong parallels between the intangible cloud above the heavens accessible only to Plato’s intellect and the cloud of codependent origination accessible only to the Buddha’s intellect. Is it possible that both Plato and the Buddha had personal, apophatic mystical experiences that led them to theorize about the underlying structure of the universe – and therefore the nature of the beings who live within it – and conclude Creation is a “closed system” of oneness governed by immutable law? It is interesting that both men, writing from an apophatic perspective about the cloud of oneness known only to the intellect and will, both claim that incarnation is governed by rigid laws that can be understood by select human beings and escaped from through rigorous discipline and mental focus. It is noteworthy, of course, that neither apophatic teacher speaks of the preeminence of love and forgiveness for anyone, least of all God. Unlike Jesus, they refuse to speak of heart and mind and strength and soul in the same breath (Mark 12:28–34), but instead focus entirely on the mind’s efforts to transcend such lowly human “needs” as love and forgiveness by subjugating and even denying them through ascetical practices. I have begun to wonder if Plato and the Buddha both make claims for a “closed system” because there is no other way to justify an impermanent apophatic experience of oneness with all that is.
As I – and all mystics throughout history – can attest, a mystical experience is so intense that it changes the way the mystic looks at everything. One cannot help but seek a framework in which to understand the experience. An apophatic mystic seeks a philosophical framework that starts with a transpersonal, impermanent oneness and works backward. A cataphatic mystic seeks a philosophical framework that starts with a highly personal, “image-filled,” permanent Divine Love and works backward. An anagogic mystic uses elements of both paths and tries with all his or her might to unify them (as the majority of Christian mystics seem to have done, perhaps following Paul’s lead in 2 Corinthians 12:1–9 and 1 Corinthians 15:50–57).
As a practising cataphatic mystic, who has daily experiences of the presence of God, I can attest to the feeling of “being filled up with love” that comes from being in humble relationship with God. I would not describe it as a feeling of kenosis or self-emptying. In fact, it feels exactly the way Jesus described it: using the fullness of one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength to sustain a relationship of love and healing with a God who is an infinitely loving and healing God. It takes every ounce of courage plus all the gifts given to us by God to participate in this kind of relationship with God. The corollary is that when we speak of shedding aspects of ourselves in order to be freed from suffering or sin, instead of using the alternative presented to us by Jesus – forgiveness! – we slowly but steadily chip away at the gifts God has given us so we can know what Divine Love and forgiveness really mean. Of course, apophatic mysticism is not interested in the question of a personal Divine Love, because such a love is a question for the heart, not the mind.
I therefore argue against the use of a doctrine of kenosis in inter-religious debate. There have been efforts to describe kenosis as self-giving (in contrast to the original meaning of the word, which is self-emptying) but if it is self-giving Christians wish to speak of, then I would suggest we speak of it as Jesus himself spoke of it. The Gospels tell us clearly that Jesus does not endorse a withdrawal into a cloistered or consecrated ascetic community but instead insists we be full participants in community life and healing, even when others shun us for our unflinching commitment to wisdom, compassion, dialogue, healing, and service.
The remarks I’ve made here apply equally to any closed apophatic system, including Christianity’s own dark mysticism, and is not an indictment of the Buddhist quest for wisdom and compassion, which is filled with true sincerity, dedication, and long experience; instead, my remarks are a realistic assessment of the ways in which an apophatic world view may block and actually interfere with our quest for wisdom and compassion because of a starting assumption that denies the Divine Heart. By contrast, the cataphatic world view is a universal theory but not a closed system. In fact, the Christian world view, with its focus on mystery and love, redemption and forgiveness, is so open to everything in Creation that there is room within it for all God’s children, regardless of when or where they have lived.
Despite my dissatisfaction with apophatic teachings, wherever they originate, I see many positive “seeds of the Divine” in Buddhism. Two “seeds” that seem to have sprouted more systematically in Buddhism than in Christian orthodoxy are “the deep knowledge of human psychology shared by Buddhists” (Brassard 439) and the intense focus on praxis, as expressed through the moral teachings of the Eightfold Path. These two seeds were also primary concerns for Jesus, as shown throughout the Gospels. It is interesting to ponder how Christianity might better fulfill its stated goal of helping people heal their relationship with God if the Church were to combine Jesus’ cataphatic teachings with a stronger focus on both praxis and human psychology. I argue this would in no way diminish the sense of mystery and awe that are so important in the Christian relationship with our loving God. In fact, when Jesus presented his own thesis (the Kingdom paradigm) on the three basic questions about the human problem, he may already have understood that the mysteries of Divine Love, healing, forgiveness, faith, and redemption are intertwined in our physical reality in positive ways that somehow transcend the cause and effect laws formalized within apophatic teachings.
As Jesus taught us, and as
Nostra Aetate affirmed, great things can be accomplished in this world when we open both our minds and our hearts to each other and to the mysteries of Divine Love. There is no need to choose between the mind and the heart. Both are reflections of God’s own image and God’s good Creation: “The wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace (James 3:17–18).”
Thanks be to God.
Works Cited:
Brassard, Francis, Maria A. De Giorgi, and Franco Sottocornola. “Buddhism and Christianity.”
Catholic Engagement with World Religions: A Comprehensive Study. Ed. Karl J. Becker and Ilaria Morali. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2010. 438–458. Print.
Cunningham, Lawrence S.
Thomas Merton and the Monastic Vision. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Print.
McGinn, Bernard.
The Foundations of Mysticism. Vol. 1 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. New York: Crossroad, 1991. Print.
Odin, Steve. “Kenosis as Foundation for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue.”
Eastern Buddhist 20.1 (1987): 34-61. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web. 23 Mar. 2014.
Plato.
Phaedrus. Trans. Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin–Penguin Classics, 2005. Print.
For Further Reflection:
As you proceed along your own Spiral Path of wonder, science, and faith, it's important that you always keep your eyes and ears open to the promises being made to you by various religious leaders and gurus. Are the promises you're hearing based on equality of outcomes? Or are the promises based on equality of relationships? Although these two religious "highways" may not sound different from each other at first, they lead your brain's biology in different directions, so the physical wiring of your brain will depend on which of these two "highways" you give priority to.
The former highway (equality of outcomes) leads to moral codes based on laws, uniformity of belief, denial of historical and scientific fact, eradication of uniqueness, and the pure logic of salvation. All major world religions include some doctrines that promise equality of outcomes (i.e. if you correctly obey Laws A,B, and C, you'll get guaranteed results of X,Y, and Z), but some religions have more such doctrines than others. Platonism, Buddhism, Philosophical Taoism, and Ancient Near East Wisdom rely almost exclusively on equality-of-outcome doctrines. So do New Age and New Thought teachings derived from these earlier sources.
The latter highway (equality of relationships) leads to moral codes based on respect for interpersonal boundaries, openness to experience and change, conscientiousness, remorse, and the quixotic logic of healing. The Abrahamic religions, as well as Sikhism, Baha'i, and a number of aboriginal traditions, contain strong equality-of-relationship doctrines (though this isn't a comprehensive list of religions that incorporate equality of relationship). Wherever such doctrines exist, you'll see religious customs that are more expansive, inclusive, and emotionally uplifting.
Your guardian angels (the ones who are trying to help you heal your relationship with God during your human lifetime) are very keen on spiritual and religious theories that lead to equality of relationships. This means your angels are especially enthusiastic about praxis (i.e. spiritual practice) that promotes strong, healthy, respectful interpersonal boundaries between you and others, as well as between you and God.
Sometimes this means learning to say no -- learning to say no to those who are trying to take advantage of you by blurring the healthy boundaries that should exist between you.
From my own perspective, this has been one of the hardest things to learn and remember and implement in my daily life. I often struggle to say no, but I've learned it's a necessary part of knowing God and knowing myself.
Opening up your heart to others means you instinctively feel their pain. (This is what empathy is, after all.) But it doesn't always mean you should take on other people's pain or fix everything for them. You have to trust that your brothers and sisters are fully capable of learning how to heal their own pain
without abusing and manipulating others.
Yes, it's not always easy to step back and let someone take charge of their own choices. And yes, people need many kinds of assistance and support as they learn how to cope in mature, effective, loving ways with their own pain. But if you really want to know what Divine Love feels like, you have to accept that individuals have the power within themselves -- within their own souls -- to become stronger, wiser, and more courageous as they wrestle with the fear that comes with pain.
Sometimes you have to step back so the sunlight of God's love can work its magic on the seeds of redemption that lie within everyone you know and love.
This is the one of the most overlooked aspects of Jesus' teachings -- trusting that God wants us to say no to religious beliefs that damage healthy boundaries and respectful relationships.
Religion and faith aren't the problem in our world. Doctrines that dictate equality of outcomes are the problem, both within and without religion. So try to recognize and push back against such salvific doctrines wherever you can.
It's one of the fastest ways I know of to build your relationship with God.
