The Roots of Christian Mysticism Session 3
Summary of Margaret Lane's "Biblical Origins II" talk, The London Christian Meditation Centre, St Mark's, Clerkenwell, 27 September 2005

Introduction

We could have looked at mysticism in the New Testament in a variety of ways. We could have looked at concept of the kingdom of God/heaven, the experiences of Paul who not only encountered the risen Lord in dramatic fashion on the way to Damascus but was also taken up into the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12). We could have looked at John’s Gospel and the concept of the logos which developed out of the wisdom tradition. We could have looked at the book of Revelation as an example of Apocalyptic literature but instead we looked at three aspects of the journey. 1) The symbol of the “Journey”, 2) the journey as a “Way of Poverty” and 3) the journey from darkness to light or is it from darkness to light to darkness?

1) the symbol of the Journey

We asked in our introductory session the question “what is Mysticism?” One of the answers given was that it involves a journey into the unknown. We are like Abraham who, we are told in Hebrews 11:8 “by faith obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out not knowing where he was going.”

Sometime between Abraham and Noah the legendary king Gilgamesh sets out in the quest for knowledge. Odysseus is another later traveller. The “journey” has always been a universal symbol of the spiritual search.

The journeying imagery used differs from mystic to mystic. Some describe it as a ladder for example Walter Hilton’s well-known work is called the Scale or Ladder of Perfection, John Climacus (klimax meaning ladder in Greek) wrote The Ladder of Paradise. He has 30 steps on his ladder which correspond to the number of years of Jesus’ life prior to his baptism. Benedict talks about climbing the ladder of humility in chapter 7 of his rule, by far the longest chapter. The image of the ladder is taken from Jacob’s dream in Genesis where he sees angels descending and ascending on a ladder reaching up earth to heaven. (Genesis 28) Benedict says by humility we ascend and by exaltation we descend. He sets out 12 steps on the ladder of humility. In a way the ascent motif is a paradoxical one for the ascent involves a descent into perfect humility

Other images include:
1) the ascent of a mountain as with John of the Cross and his Ascent of Mount Carmel (the mountain where Elijah encountered the prophets of Baal.)
2) Journey to the centre as in Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle.
3) Journey to the heavenly city John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

Whichever image is used it does tend to suggest linear sequential progress and of course that is not our experience which is more of a one step forward and two steps back. A spiral is a more apt description of the journey and this is recognized in the labyrinth. A labyrinth was created in the cloister garden at Norwich cathedral for the millennium. The Chartres cathedral pavement labyrinth was built around 1220 A.D. Recommended book The Mystic spiral Journey of the soul by Jill Purce for some good pictures. John Donne recognized the journey as a spiral in satire 3 (quoted in a book about the spiritual journey by Mark Barrett called Crossing:)

..doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,

Truth may stand at the summit but we do not have to wait until we get to the top to see it. We catch glimpses as we go round and round. (Sometimes it is more like going round and round in circles than in an ever-decreasing spiral!) or to put it another way mountain tops are not places where people live. They are places to visit, vantage points but then we have to come back down and carry on living.

We may only get glimpses of God on the way but the truth which the Israelites found difficult to accept in the desert is that he is present during the whole journey. At night he led them in a pillar of fire and by day in a cloud.

It is the way or the journey which is the important thing. Edwin Muir wrote the following:

Friend I have lost the way
The way leads on
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track
It’s lost and gone
Back I must travel back
None goes there none.
Then I’ll make here my place
(the road leaps on)
Stay here forever stay
None stays here none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed
That journey’s done
And what will come at last?
The road leads on. (Edwin Muir “The Way” in Complete Poems)

Before the journey begins we are asleep, in a state of drunkenness, blind, living under the law, in captivity. All these are metaphors used in the NT for our state before being awoken to begin our journey.

Once we have begun we have to keep on journeying. The very image of “the journey” seems to suggest progress of some sort in some direction. Rowan Williams in the Wound of Knowledge says it is worth noting how much stress the New Testament writers lay on the risks of regression. Salvation is to be realized in growth. And not to grow is to fall away.

Christians adopted the symbol of the journey :

Jesus said to him “ I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”(John 14:6)

We know that the first Christians were called followers of the Way:

What does it mean to follow the Way?

2) The Way of Poverty

Jesus himself taught “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3). In the New English Bible Matthew 5:3 is translated “Blessed are those who know their need of God.”

Paul said “though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich.” (2 Cor. 8:9)

Jesus tells the rich young ruler “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me”( Matthew 19:21). Some have taken this literally for example St. Anthony and St. Francis and perhaps this is what some of us are called to do.

To be poor is to acknowledge one’s dependence on God. This is where the desert imagery comes in. and it comes in so often in the bible. God liberates his people from Egypt not straight into the Promised Land but through the desert and they spend a long time there. Jesus too is tempted in the desert before he begins his ministry. John the Baptist lives in the desert. Paul went into the desert of Arabia before beginning his ministry. The desert is the place where we come to acknowledge our dependence on God.

But how does God break through our self-dependence? We talk about “making a name for ourselves.” Is it not more correct to say that God gives us our names as he gave Abram the name Abraham, Jacob the name Israel and Saul the name Paul.

We talk about the self-made man. Karl Barth in his wonderful commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans talks about “unbroken man”. The journey involves a breaking down and a breaking through or an unmaking and remaking.

The journey to maturity that the New Testament writers envisage is not about the acquisition or possession of knowledge unless it be self knowledge. And this self-knowledge is not something which can be achieved. We are looking at a process of unlearning or dispossessing, or detaching from old habits, negative tendencies, compulsions, old attitudes.

T.S. Eliot sums it up superbly in “East Coker” the second of the Four Quartets:

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

Relating this to meditation we try to shed all thoughts, feelings, words and images. John Cassian related the beatitude to prayer and talked about becoming grandly poor; the poverty of a single verse.

This formula the mind should go on grasping until it can cast away the wealth and multiplicity of other thoughts, and cast away the wealth and multiplicity of other thoughts, and restrict itself to the poverty of this single verse. So you will attain with ease that Gospel beatitude which holds first place among the other beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” This noble poverty will fulfil the prophet’s saying: “The poor and needy shall praise the name of the Lord.” Truly, what higher or holier poverty can there be than this, that a man knowing he is defenceless of his own, asks help for daily life from another’s generosity, and realizes his life and being to depend every moment on God’s help. Such a one truly confesses himself “the beggar of the Lord,” like the psalmist (Ps. 40:17) who said: “I am a beggar and a poor man: and God helps me.”

3) Darkness and light

a) as the ultimate symbol for God

Is the journey a journey from darkness to light to darkness or darkness to light?

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Moses’ encounter with God at Mount Sinai. First of all in the burning bush which was at the foot of Sinai and then in a cloud atop the mountain. The relevant passage of scripture is Exodus 20:21:

Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.

The darkness of Mount Sinai is contrasted with the light of Mount Tabor, the mountain of transfiguration. Mount Sinai is the mountain of the apophatics. The word “Apophatic,” from apophasis meaning to speak negatively, is a form of theology which says what God is not. Their view is that if we can say what God is then it is not God. The word is also used of a kind of mysticism which is based on an emptiness or silence. The apophatics are those whose ultimate symbol for God is darkness. Examples of apophatics would be-mystics like Gregory of Nyssa and John of the Cross, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing,also Pseudo-Dionysius. Cataphatics are those whose ultimate symbol for God is light and their mountain is Mount Tabor. Cataphatics include Teresa of Avila and Walter Hilton. Cataphatics rely on such passages as 1 John 1:5:

This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.

For example Walter Hilton in the Scale of Perfection says:

But the everlasting love of Jesus is a true day and a blessed light. For God is both love and light and He is everlasting,and therefore he who loves Him is in everlasting light, as St. John says: Qui diligit Deum manet in lumine (1 John ii.10)He who loves God dwells in light. The man who perceives that the love of this world is false and does not last,, and for this reason wishes to forsake it and seek the love of God, cannot immediately experience His love, but must stay for a time in the night. For he cannot come suddenly from one light to the other, that is, from the love of the world to the perfect love of God. This night consists in nothing else than but a withdrawal of the soul from the things of the earth, by a great desire and longing to love and see and experience Jesus and spiritual things.” (Book II, chap. 24)

For Walter Hilton we must pass through darkness to the light. This can be compared with Pseudo-Dionysius who talks about God as “darkness so far above light” or as “darkness concealed from all the light among beings”.

Henry Vaughan (1621-1695) mixed up the metaphors and spoke of there being in God a deep but dazzling darkness:

There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness; as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
Oh for that Night! Where I in Him
Might live invisible and dim! (from The Night)

Is this the same I wonder as God dwelling in unapproachable light? 1 Timothy 6:16:

It is he alone who has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see; to him be honour and eternal dominion. Amen.

John’s gospel which from Clement of Alexandria in the third century has been known as the mystical Gospel begins with these well-known words:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.

This is the new creation described by St. Paul as Life in Christ. The similarity between the beginning of John’s Gospel and the beginning of Genesis is often noted where God brings light out of darkness. However in Genesis God is not identified with the light or the darkness. He has brought light out of darkness or order out of chaos. When he uses the words “Let there be” it is almost as if rather than imposing order upon the chaos he is drawing back that veil of darkness and allowing “to be”. When we embark on our search to put on the mind of Christ and begin to strip away the attachments to physical possessions, old ways of looking at the world, old emotions it is as if we are drawing back the dark veil that then allows us to be.

b) The Transfiguration
The transfiguration of Jesus was obviously regarded as an important event in Jesus’ life as it is to be found in all three synoptic gospels. (Matthew 17:1-8, Mark 9:2-8 and Luke 9:28-36) It is not in John’s gospel but then John’s gospel is all about the gradual revelation of God’s glory following on from the prologue “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” There is also an account of the transfiguration in 2 Peter 1:16-19. Although this letter is not regarded as having been written by Peter (it was written much too late, about 100-110A.D. and incidentally was a late addition to the canon) it is thought that it contains older Petrine material which makes this account together with the account in Mark the oldest account of the transfiguration and probably given by an eye witness. In each Gospel the account of the transfiguration follows the statements by Jesus “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” And “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see that the kingdom of God has come with power.”

Rob Marshall in his book The Transfiguration of Jesus notes that the feast of the Transfiguration which falls on 6th August is a feast largely ignored by the Church certainly in the West. In the East the Feast dates back to the fourth century when the first Church was dedicated on Mount Tabor. In the West there is evidence that the feast was celebrated in 9th century but it was not accepted officially by Rome until the 15th century. The Church of England’s first prayer book in 1549 ignored it. It wasn’t until 1928 that the prayer book included a collect, Epistle and Gospel for Transfiguration. It is not mentioned in the creeds.

Luke’s account of the transfiguration is the one we looked at and comments on the passage are as follows:
Luke adds reference to prayer. Incident took place in the course of prayer.
Luke adds reference to glory and Jesus’ exodus which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem evoking another exodus and linking glory and suffering.
Luke also adds passage about disciples being weighed down with sleep maybe therefore missing the conversation about the exodus but managing to keep awake enough not to miss the vision.
Luke does not actually use the word “transfigured” which Matthew and Mark do.
Passage is full of Old Testament imagery- glory, cloud, voice, (all denoting God’s presence), mountain, Moses and Elijah, Tabernacle.
Irenaeus commenting on the passage pointed out that neither Moses nor Elijah had seen God face to face in their lifetime but God is now revealed to them.
Note Moses and Elijah disappear into the cloud while the disciples look on.
Note and meditate on Peter’s words “it is good for us to be here”
Note and meditate on the words “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

We concluded with an Office for the Transfiguration adapted from the one found in Rob Marshall’s book Transfiguration. (attached)

Margaret Lane