Over the last half-decade I’ve found myself physically and symbolically attracted to fierce landscapes in a way I haven’t entirely understood. I’ve been driven to the desert mountains of New Mexico on many occasions, as well as to Mount Sinai in Egypt and dry stretches of the Negev in Israel. Such places symbolize much of the pain, and also the healing, made possible by wilderness. Thoreau was right: “We need the tonic of wildness.”2
This love of unsafe terrain has led me also to the study of desert and mountain imagery in the history of the Christian apophatic tradition. The apophatic way, familiarly known as the via negativa, is a tradition in spirituality that rejects all analogies of God as ultimately inadequate.3 God is greater than any language we might ever use to speak of God. Ironically, however, in the history of this tradition a few lean and spare landscape images have frequently been employed to challenge the very use of images themselves. These include the desert, the mountain, and the cloud—porous, “aniconic images” used, on the one hand, to question the overconfidence in words that sometimes characterizes the theological enterprise, and, on the other hand, to suggest metaphorically the deepest, virtually indescribable, human experiences of pain and joy.4 These landscape images derive their energy from the archetypal experience of Moses in the desert at Sinai. They recur repeatedly in mystical writers of the apophatic tradition, from Gregory of Nyssa to Thomas Merton.
This book makes no claim to be a thoroughgoing historical-critical study of the apophatic tradition. Nor does it offer an ethnographic analysis of specific cultural understandings of desert and mountain environments. What it attempts, instead, is something of a performance (rather than a mere description) of apophatic spirituality, inviting the reader’s entry into those rare events of “apophatic fusion” that sometimes occur in human life—when we’re driven like Moses to wonderment, beyond the distinctions we ordinarily make between subject and object, ourselves as knowers and that which we seek most passionately to know.5 Mystics have continually resisted defining their subject of discourse, insisting that God is ever beyond language, even beyond their “experience” of God. “Rather than pointing to an object, apophatic language attempts to evoke in the reader an event that is—in its movement beyond structures of self and other, subject and object—structurally analogous to the event of mystical union.”6The book, therefore, invites the reader into several of the pivotal texts (and contexts) out of which such events of vulnerability and union have repeatedly been generated in the history of the tradition. Its purpose is to allow these texts (and this terrain) to engage the reader at a deep level of personal risk, through the intimate involvement of the interpreter’s own voice in the process of saying and unsaying what is otherwise wholly unavailable to discourse. Only at the periphery of our lives, where we and our understanding of God alike are undone, can we understand bewilderment as occasioning another way of knowing.
Mine is a highly textured, multidimensional reading of the apophatic tradition. Its narrative structure draws heavily, with a naked honesty at times, from my own experience. I simply don’t know any other way of doing it. Yet this unusually personal involvement of the author in his research raises important hermeneutical questions.7
The self-implicating character of research in religious-history-writing is increasingly a subject of current debate.8 Reluctantly or not, the academy continues to probe the permeable boundaries between critical scholarship and lived experience. Walter Brueggemann distinguishes between the “scribes” who stringently maintain the integrity of a text, permitting it to linger in the ongoing life of a tradition, and the “agents of the imagination” who periodically allow the text to explode into new meaning, recovering its ability to startle in a way that necessarily moves beyond critical insight.9 Brueggemann himself embodies both tasks in his own work as a scholar. I, too, am interested in the scribal labor of attending to texts and the settings in which they are read, but in this particular study I function more as an agent provocateur, daring to let the text “explode” in my own hands in the process of offering it to the reader.
I write as a self-identified Christian, though one burned out (like a lot of people) on shallow religion. I’ve found more life, risk, and daring in the church’s ancient traditions of prayer than in what’s available in most contemporary spiritualities.
*
Desert and mountain places are often associated with the “limit-experiences” of people on the edge, people who have run out of language in speaking of God, people whose recourse to fierce landscapes has fed some deep need within them for the abandonment of control and the acceptance of God’s love in absolute, unmitigated grace.
The reader is drawn up the slopes of Mount Sinai above Saint Catherine’s monastery, into the lonely cells of desert fathers and mothers in ancient Egypt, up remote canyons in the high desert country of New Mexico, into a small and solitary room in Jerusalem, along corridors in a Saint Louis nursing home where my best teachers have been “desert Christians” who perceive abandonment not only as loss, but also as grace.
*
This intimate connection between spirit and place is hard to grasp for those of us living in a post-Enlightenment technological society. Landscape and spirituality are not, for us, inevitably interwoven. We experience no inescapable linkage between our “place” and our way of conceiving the holy, between habitat and habitus, where one lives and how one practices a habit of being.4 Our concern is simply to move as quickly (and freely) as possible from one place to another. We are bereft of rituals of entry that allow us to participate fully in the places we inhabit.
We have lost the ability even to heed the natural environment, much less perceive it through the lens of a particular tradition. Modern Western culture is largely shorn of attentiveness to both habitat and habitus.5 Where we live—to what we are rooted—no longer defines who we are. We have learned to distrust all disciplines of formative spiritual traditions, with their communal ways of perceiving the world. We have realized, in the end, the “free individual” at the expense of a network of interrelated meanings.
*
The intention of this book is to explore a particular habitat that has exercised extraordinary influence in the history of Christian spirituality: the lean and austere terrain of the desert mountain.
Why has such a landscape so often gripped the Christian imagination? What habitus gives it meaning? The apophatic tradition’s spare way of thinking draws energy from the imaginal poverty of a dry and barren land. The via negativa finds symbolically written across a frugal desert topography all of the emptiness necessary for beginning a life of prayer. As Michael Ondaatje puts it in his novel The English Patient, “A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water.”7 This book does not argue that apophatic thinking is inevitably linked to a desert or mountain setting. Ideas are never rigidly rooted in geography. Yet the symbolic terrain preferred by teachers of the apophatic way is inevitably a land that is stingy, uncluttered, and empty.
Given my own particular attraction to desert terrain, I have to ask myself four questions in beginning this work: What sort of spiritual experience (what habitus or pattern of prayer) do I bring to the desert as a way of interpreting it? Do I fool myself in thinking the desert is able automatically to grant me spiritual insight? How do I participate in the construction of the desert as a work of the human imagination? Finally, what personal risk is required in exploring this nexus where desert geography and spiritual growth converge?
*
The Desert Habitus of Contemplative Prayer
My own approach to desert experience is formed, in large part, by a fledgling practice of contemplative prayer, rooted in early desert writers such as Evagrius and John Cassian. These desert Christians practiced a particular habitus, a way of ordering one’s life around silence which was shaped by the desert-mountain terrain in which they lived. Calling themselves to a poverty of language and self, as well as goods, they plowed ground for the later growth of the apophatic tradition.
Denys Turner summarizes the historical development of that later tradition as an interplay between metaphors of ascent and inwardness, mountain and desert realities, the story of Moses meeting God on Sinai and Plato’s allegory of the cave, intersecting biblical and Neoplatonic themes.8 But the desert experience of silence was the soil out of which everything else eventually grew. The habitus of the early desert Christians allowed them to read from the landscape itself a particular vision of God, a conception of the human self, and a discipline necessary for the joining of the two. Through subsequent development in the tradition, it came to be articulated as follows:
1. God is a desert whose fullness of glory is hidden from human sight, known only in an unknowing and risking of love.
2. The self is a desert that must be stripped and made empty before God can be found at its center.
3. The realization of God’s love at the heart of one’s being is inseparably related to ascetical and liturgical performances (which are themselves suggested by desert experience).9
This “habit of being” outlines a model for growth in the spiritual life drawn from the desert itself, suggesting a pattern of behavior passed on in the community’s history through its teachings on contemplative prayer.
*
In the practice of contemplation, one comes eventually to embrace an apophatic anthropology, letting go of everything one might have imagined as constituting the self—one’s thoughts, one’s desires, all one’s compulsive needs. Joined in the silence of prayer to a God beyond knowing, I no longer have to scramble to sustain a fragile ego, but discern instead the source and ground of my being in the fierce landscape of God alone. One’s self is ever a tenuous thing, discovered only in relinquishment.17 I recognize it finally as a vast, empty expanse opening out onto the incomparable desert of God.18
*
For that matter, much of the experience I try to share in this book is, at its deepest level, inaccessible. I am not able to distill from either my mother’s encounter with death or my own exposure to desert-mountain terrain any universal insights about the wonder-evoking power of fierce landscapes. I am left, ultimately, at an end of language, having nothing more than my own emptiness to report, though gradually coming to recognize emptiness itself as a profound and wonderful gift.
This is a book that attends at last to what Sherlock Holmes once described as the problem of the dog barking in the night, referring—of course—to the curious matter of the dog’s not barking in the night. Sometimes the absence of sound and meaning, where normally most expected, may be itself full of significance.26
*
A bedouin story from the Sinai peninsula underscores the idea that what one brings to the desert—one’s personal way of seeing it, even of walking through it—is crucial to the way one understands it. A Westerner entering the desert beyond Nuweiba once asked an English-speaking bedouin how far it was to the nearest oasis. The man did not respond. “How far is it to Ein El Furtaga?” the traveler asked more loudly, distinctly mouthing the words. But the bedouin still said nothing. Shouting his question a third time into the man’s face, and receiving only silence yet again, the traveler finally shook his head and started walking away. “About four hours!” the bedouin then called out, in answer to his question. “Why didn’t you tell me that the first time?” the Westerner asked. “I couldn’t say,” the man responded, “until I knew how fast you were accustomed to walking.”55
*
In his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, British adventurer T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) wrote of his years in the Hejaz along the Red Sea. In the naked desert’s night, he said, “we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars.” He found in the desert something that cut to the bone, reducing his soul to a thinness he would spend the rest of his life trying to recover. Despite a Eurocentric romanticism he never overcame, his description of desert life suggests the leanness sought by early desert Christians. “The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body.”58 The mystery celebrated by the apophatic tradition is precisely this sensuous “nakedness of the mind” before God. It is where I have to begin this book.
No comments:
Post a Comment