The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 1
Summary of Margaret Lane's
"Biblical Origins I" talk, The London Christian Meditation
Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 13 September 2005
Introduction
Following a previous introductory session when we discussed the
merits of some definitions of the word “mysticism” (see
appendix) we returned first this evening to the definition of Bernard
McGinn in his magisterial work The Presence of God: A History of
Western Christian Mysticism 1992 SCM:London p.64):
The mystical element in Christianity is that part of its belief
and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness
of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or
direct presence of God.
This definition had not found favour as being too cerebral and
rational. Some of the advantages of this definition are that:
1) The mystical element is seen as a process rather than as a one-off
experience.
2) It is seen as a state of consciousness rather than an extraordinary
experience
3) It shows that work is required on our side. It is not just a
question of being grasped by God’s grace.
4) It shows that the fruits not the roots of a state of consciousness
are important.
The importance of scripture
Again a quote from Bernard McGinn to illustrate this:
Though the role of the written word in Christianity is always secondary
to Christ conceived of as the Word (Logos) of God, the importance
of scripture must be clearly grasped if we wish to understand the
nature of Christian mysticism, because mysticism, especially down
to the twelfth century was for the most part directly exegetical
in character. The cultivation of immediate consciousness of the
divine presence took place within the exercise of reading, meditating,
preaching, and teaching the biblical text, often within a liturgical
or quasi-liturgical context.” (Bernard McGinn supra p. 64)
Note that scripture was often encountered in a liturgical context.
The word “liturgy” is made up of two Greek words “laos”
meaning “people” and “ergon” meaning “work”.
That is a public not a private context. This is important to note
because as time goes on there is an increasing emphasis on how a
person might achieve the inner state of purity of heart with which
to see God and it is easy to lose sight of the communal nature of
Christian mysticism.
What do we mean by Scripture
The Old Testament (although we tend to talk now about the Hebrew
bible rather than the Old Testament for the sake of Jewish Christian
relations) and the New Testament. The books in the Apocrypha were
not part of the Hebrew bible and have a rather ambiguous status.
They were regarded as canonical by the Church down to the 4th century
and indeed continued to be so regarded by the West. There was more
ambivalence in the East. After the Reformation Catholics accepted
the Apocrypha though Protestants didn’t. However all would
now regard them as valuable if not strictly part of Scripture.
There are different literary genres contained within scripture
with which we can engage with different levels of our being for
example the psalms with our emotions, narrative with our imagination,
law with our will and apocalyptic with our intuition.
How do we find meaning in scripture
All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for
reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that
everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every
good work.(2 Timothy 3:16-17)
There are different ways of approaching the meaning of scripture.
We can look at what the original author may have intended for example
by looking at what was going on for the community for whom the text
was originally written. We can look at it linguistically, or at
how the text may have been edited. Its genre may also help us to
work out what the author was trying to say. All of these approaches
are only valid though insofar as they can lead us to determine what
God is saying to us today for:
The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged
sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow;
it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. (Hebrews
4:12)
Lectio Divina or Spiritual Reading
Here is an extract from Soul Feast by Marjorie Thompson:
“Imagine for a moment that you have just received a handwritten
letter from a dear friend who lives at a great distance and from
whom you have not heard in a long while. What would you anticipate
about this letter? Where would you like to be when you open it?
Perhaps you can imagine settling into your favorite easy chair or
finding a quiet and secluded spot outdoors-a place where you can
set aside the unfinished tasks of your busy life and enter into
the world of your friend’s letter. Eagerness for news could
tempt you to devour each page as quickly as possible, yet the sheer
delight of spending precious time in your friend’s company
might compel you to slow down, savouring the words, phrases, and
images written specifically for you. In them you discover how it
is with one who is dear to your heart, what she or he is thinking,
experiencing, and questioning. Here are words that bring a sense
of your friend’s presence vividly into your life.
Now imagine a different scenario. After several intensely busy
days, you spy a newspaper on the coffee table and realize that you’ve
not been keeping up with world events. You pick up the paper and
begin paging through, letting your eye rove over headlines, news
photos, and captions, scanning articles that catch your interest.
Perhaps you are even doing this standing up, hoping to grasp as
much information as quickly as possible in order to return to those
unfinished tasks.”
In the case of the friend’s letter, words are a means of
personal relationship. In the case of the newspaper words are a
vehicle of information. When the Old Testament talks of knowing
God it does not mean knowing about God but knowing in the sense
of being in a relationship with Him. To get to know God or what
he is saying to us we need time to pay attention; to listen (the
word “obey” is the Latin “obaudire” “to
listen intently”). William of St. Thierry said that there
is the same gulf between attentive study and mere reading as there
is between friendship and a passing guest. In other words to come
to a consciousness of the presence of God we need to read Scripture
(or any of the texts we will be looking at through the course) reflectively.
This is the practice of spiritual reading or lectio divina.
A cautionary tale
Goes something like this:
A troubled young man in search of an answer opened the bible at
random and read “and Judas went and hanged himself”.
The young man was puzzled by this and thought he would try again.
This time he read, “Go thou and do likewise”!
The stages of Lectio divina
The traditional practice of lectio divina contains four phases
which are not necessarily rigidly consecutive. They are lectio,
meditatio, oratio and contemplatio. A good way of remembering them
is as the 4Rs: read, reflect, response and rest.
Before beginning to read we need to prepare ourselves. The first
thing is to try to ensure half an hour to an hour’s uninterrupted
time. The saints always say give God the best time of your day.
Select a passage of scripture of between 5-10 verses. If you are
worried about which passage to choose follow a lectionary where
the daily passages are chosen for you. Remind yourself that the
purpose of reading is to allow yourself to be addressed by the living
God. Offer your gratitude and ask for the guidance and illumination
of the Holy Spirit in your reading.
Lectio
Read the passage slowly, reflectively. It might be a good idea to
read the passage aloud and then you can listen to the words. Pause
between sentences and phrases.
Meditatio
If a word or phrase resonates, stay with it and allow associations
to arise and images to surface. By meditating on a passage we move
the word from our mind to our heart by engaging with it with our
memory, experience, thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, intuitions
and intentions to discover how scripture is a living word for us
or what it is God wants to say to us now. We can then carry the
word with us throughout the day.
Oratio
This is our prayer or our initial response to the word we have heard.
It might be a prayer of gratitude, it might be a confession and
repentance.
Contemplatio
This is simply resting in God with no expectations. Here we have
moved beyond thoughts, words and images to a kind of emptiness or
purity of being. This is the object of course of the meditation
rediscovered by John Main.
Somebody else writing about lectio divina uses the image of a cow.
“First the cow goes out and eats some good grass (lectio),
then she sits down under a tree and chews her cud (meditatio) until
she extracts from her food both milk (oratio) and cream (contemplatio)”
The Uncommon Reader
This is the title of an essay by George Steiner containing his
reflections on a painting by Chardin called The Philosophe Lisant.
This can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/nopassio.htm.
Steiner notes that the reader is dressed up to meet the text. The
fact he is wearing a hat evokes all those religious traditions including
our own where it is felt to be important to cover the head when
approaching the numinous.
Steiner goes on to note the hourglass as symbolic of the curious
relationship between the brevity of the life of the reader and the
long life of the book which will continue to be read by others before
and after the life of the present reader. It is the reader’s
realization of this relationship which gives the written text authority.
The quill represents the reader’s response to the text and
is used to set down marginalia. It is the presence of the quill
that shows that reading is not a passive venture.
“marginalia pursue an impulsive, perhaps querulous discourse
or disputation with the text….the writer of marginalia is,
incipiently, the rival of his text: the annotator is its servant.”
With his quill the reader will transcribe from the book:
“transcription comports a full engagement with the text,
a dynamic reciprocity between reader and book.”
Finally:
“Chardin is a virtuoso of silence. He makes it present to
us, he gives it tactile weight, in the quality of light and fabric.
In his particular painting, silence is palpable: in the thick stuff
of the table-cloth and curtain, in the lapidary poise of the background
wall, in the muffling fur of the reader’s gown and bonnet.
Genuine reading demands silence.”
The rest of the essay is Steiner’s lament that we have lost
this approach to reading and books.
Finally a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:
“The Word of Scripture should never stop sounding in your
ears and working in you all day long, just like the words of someone
you love. And just as you do not analyze the words of someone you
love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of
Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all.
That is meditation…Do not ask “How shall I pass this
on?” but “What does it say to me?” Then ponder
this Word long in your heart until it has gone into you and taken
possession of you.”
Mysticism in the Old Testament
God appeared on several occasions to Abraham. Perhaps the most
well known occasion is the encounter of Abraham with three men at
the oaks of Mamre captured in Rublev’s famous icon of the
Trinity. (Genesis 18) There is Jacob’s wrestling with an angel
after which his name was changed to Israel meaning “he who
strives with God”(32:24-30). There is the passage well-known
to meditators, of Elijah’s encounter with God in “the
still small voice”. (1Kings 19) In some translations this
is rendered as the sound of sheer silence. There is Isaiah’s
vision of God in the temple. (Isaiah 6) There is Ezekiel’s
vision of the chariot. (Ezekiel 10 and 11) and Daniel’s visions
of the end time. However it is the visions of Moses that have really
captured the imagination of the mystics.
Moses
The story of Moses is to be found in the book of Exodus. The theme
of the book is really the self-disclosure of God. Apart from the
bible Moses is referred to in other ancient literary sources for
example Manetho (an Egyptian priest) 3rd B.C. and Lysimachus 2nd-1st
B.C. both preserved in Josephus, and Artapanus preserved in Eusebius’
Church History. All assign different dates for Moses. See also Philo,
a contemporary of Jesus. None of these accounts can be taken as
historical evidence for the existence of Moses though it is generally
agreed that he did exist. Moses probably lived somewhere between
the 16th and the 13th century B.C. and according to Exodus was born
of two Levites. He was thought at one stage to have written the
first five books of the Bible called the Pentateuch. It is clear
now that these were written at a much later stage varying between
9th and 6th century B.C. and by more than one person.
It is quite possible that Moses was an Egyptian because the name
“Moses” is the Egyptian equivalent of the Scottish “mac”
meaning “son of” as in Rameses son of Ra or Thutmose
son of Thoth. It’s possible that he originally had a fuller
name but when he answered the God of Israel’s call the part
of his name referring to an Egyptian deity was dropped. This would
certainly fit in with the tradition whereby Abram became Abraham
and Jacob became Israel. Exodus gives us another explanation of
Moses’ name. It is close to the Hebrew word “Masheh”
which means “draw out” and he was named by the Egyptian
princess because she drew him out of the water. Perhaps it’s
unlikely that an Egyptian princess would make use of the language
of her country’s slaves but then equally unlikely that the
author of Exodus would want to portray the greatest Hebrew prophet
as an Egyptian. Mosheh really comes from an Egyptian word “to
beget a child”. The baby in the bulrushes seems to be part
of folklore for a similar story is told of Sargon of Akkad who became
king of the city of Agade and the goddess Isis who concealed Horus
in a papyrus thicket to save him from Seth.
The first incident that Exodus tells us of in Moses’ adult
life is his killing of an Egyptian who is mistreating a Hebrew slave.
Moses is forced to flee the country and he goes to Midian where
he marries Zipporah one of the priest’s daughter’s and
has two sons, Gershom and Eliezer. Also he becomes a shepherd. Shepherding
was a responsible profession. Kings were referred to as shepherds
of their people. God also has this title (Isaiah 40:11; 44:28) as
does Jesus later. (John 12:14; Hebrews 13:20).
It is while he is tending the flock that Moses has his initial
experience recounted in Exodus 3:1-12, the story of the burning
bush.
Things to notice about the passage
Andrew Louth in the introduction to his book The Wilderness of
God notes that the mountains of biblical revelation are all in the
desert. Moses has taken his flock of sheep through the wilderness
to Mount Horeb which is generally identified as Mount Sinai. The
Hebrew word for bush is Seneh, a play on Sinai! There are at least
two possible sites of Mount Sinai. It is either identified as Jebel
Musa or further north at Kadesh Barnea. A burning bush in the desert
may have been an ordinary sight. And perhaps this is the point.
God is to be found in the ordinary, everyday occurrences if only
we step aside to see. Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote this:
Earth’s crammed with heaven
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. (from Aurora Leigh)
There’s no reason why we shouldn’t do both!
God identifies himself as a God of men and women who is concerned
with the human situation. He calls Moses to alleviate the sufferings
of the Hebrews by securing their release from Egypt and leading
them to the promised land. This is not a mysticism where a human’s
individuality is lost by being lifted up and absorbed into the divine
as in some Eastern traditions but Moses individuality is heightened
by his call to a particular historical task.
It is interesting to note that although God appears as light to
the people, Moses who has drawn nearer is in a cloud of darkness.
Gregory of Nyssa wrote a life of Moses in which he noted that Moses’
encounters with God became more and more mysterious moving from
the light of the burning bush to the darkness of the cloud (Exodus
24:15-18) and finally to just being allowed to see God’s back.
(Exodus 33:11-23) Gregory of Nyssa interpreted this as meaning that
the closer we come to God the more baffling and surprising God becomes.
Margaret Lane
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