There are many mysteries of Christianity that, even 2,000 years later, are still to be revealed. There is tension in Christianity, as a religion of “the book” - that is, a religion that is based on a revelation from God Himself - it is focused so much on words, concepts, doctrines and dogmas. This is necessary, for, without these words and concepts to hold it together, it cannot create a community, a Church - a living entity that can process through time and history. However, it is a living tradition that also comes packaged with the experience of the saints - and some of these experiences are very strange indeed. There are mystical excursions, visions, the bodily manifestation of the wounds of Christ, bilocation, prophecy, healing and so on.
Many of these experiences are “flashy” - they are surely given by God to attract attention and give hope and healing to His people. To point to something that is beyond the mundane monotony that life can sometimes be. However, there is another occurrence in the spiritual life of the Church, as instantiated in otherwise normal human beings, and that is the quiet mystical heart of apophatic Christianity. I love the definition for “apophatic” from a Google search:
(of knowledge of God) obtained through negating concepts that might be applied to him.
This is the tension in Christianity - it is a revealed religion and therefore focused on understanding this revelation as accurately and precisely as possible through concepts and reasoning. Yet, it is married to a mystical tradition that speaks of the highest knowledge of God, the summit of the Christian life, not through these very concepts of revelation but through unknowing.
God, who is beyond all concepts we have of Him, yes, even, therefore, beyond the concepts He Himself has given to us in revelation, can at the highest levels of the mystical life only be experienced. This is experiential knowledge - the kind of knowledge that a woman and her husband have of each other in sexual intimacy. It is beyond words, yet utterly real - even more real than the thought forms that the lovers may have of each other.
This is not some New Age or necessarily Eastern notion - consider the highly influential 6th century Church Father Psuedo-Dionysius, who influenced St Maximus the Confessor, St Thomas Aquinas, St Bonaventure, Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross and many more:
This then be my prayer; but thou, O dear Timothy, by thy persistent commerce with the mystic visions, leave behind both sensible perceptions and intellectual efforts, and all objects of sense and intelligence, and all things not being and being, and be raised aloft unknowingly to the union, as far as attainable, with Him Who is above every essence and knowledge.
Mystical Theology, Section 1
The theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in his work “Creator Spirit” has some interesting things to say about the relation between the Word and the Spirit. The world is created through the Logos, through the Divine Word - the Father’s personal, infinite understanding of Himself. The Son is the archetype of all things, and the created world is a “working out” of this “archetypal-unity” into the multiplicity of things. As we gaze out onto the world and form our own ideas and impressions, we are comprehending in some small way the Word. The Son also, fittingly, entered the world of which He is the archetype - and in His human life revealed the character of the Father.
But the Son has also returned to the Father so that the Spirit could be released into the world. There is the sense that the given revelation, in both scripture and the world, can ossify and no longer be an active, life-giving word - it can become the “letter that kills” (2 Cor 3:6). The revelation, the words, the forms can become idols when our notion of God becomes “trapped” within them.
The Spirit reminds us of what Christ spoke yes, but He also gives life to “the letter” - the “word” that is not only scripture but also Christ’s multiplicity in form. For all the words of Christ to remain the “words of eternal life” (John 6:68) they must be “enlightened” or breathed into by the indwelling Spirit of each Christian - the Spirit whose mission is to unite all things in a union of love. Christ returns to the Father, and therefore the multiplicity must return to unity - it must return to the Divine Darkness which is beyond any finite reckoning or form.
The multiplicity of the “outworked” logos in time must reunify in Christ, it must return to the Father. It must return to the infinite, silent, union between the Father and Son. This return is when the Spirit bursts into the world (after the Ascension follows Pentecost), and when we are captured by the Spirit, more and more do we enter this infinite silence. The Spirit’s mission then is to remind us of the Word and to give life to the letter by inviting us gradually into the silence of God.
Here is what Fr Wilfrid Stinissen O.C.D. says:
God is Word; therefore it is fitting to speak about God. But God is also Spirit; therefore it is fitting to be silent about him. […] What God has revealed of himself through his Son (the Word) allows us to perceive something of his mystery and leads us into it. It is the Holy Spirit who is God’s mystery par excellance.
The Holy Spirit, Fire of Divine Love - page 16
The Spirit’s role may be said to be the drawing of all people through the Word and into His own unfathomable mystery. Yes, starting with images and concepts revealed by the Son, He drips His own Divine Life onto our hard hearts, finally breaking them open. But then, like a jealous lover, He shrouds them in His own infinite, quiet darkness, for He understands that He cannot be contained in human concepts and imaginations - He saves His beloved from their idolatry by darkening their understanding and quickening their amazed delight. For in this darkness a secret light blossoms which draws onward all those who see it.
The summit of the interior life is when we are so lost in the Divine Darkness that we can’t tell where He begins and we end.
The presence of the eternal and infinite and holy Spirit in the interior of the temporal and finite and unholy spirit is so incomprehensible that it makes the divine Spirit definitively unknown to us precisely at the moment in which he enters the most intimate contact and fusion with us, so that it becomes impossible to distinguish him from ourselves.
Hans Urs Von Balthasur, Creator Spirit: Explorations in Theology III
St John of the Cross, in a beautiful and sublime passage, speaks of the Spirit breathing in and through us, with the same spiration of Love that passes between the Son and the Father. We become deiform and God by participation, as the Holy Spirit loves within us:
One should not think it impossible that the soul be capable of so sublime an activity as this breathing in God through participation as God breathes in her. For, granted that God favors her by union with the Most Blessed Trinity, in which she becomes deiform and God through participation, how could it be incredible that she also understand, know, and love - or better that this is done in her - in the Trinity, together with it, as does the Trinity itself!
St John of the Cross - The Spiritual Canticle, Stanza 39
So what is the summary of these reflections? It is not that our theology, dogmas, scripture and revelations are unimportant - on the contrary. They are God’s way of making Himself known to us, so that we can begin our relationship with Him, form a community of believers, and walk on the proper path. However, this is not the end. No matter how high and lofty our thoughts and concepts of God are, they can never contain Him. In fact, the danger is that our thoughts and concepts of God, if turned into idols, can keep us at a distance from God.
We can end up loving our thoughts of God and not God Himself.
Ultimately, God can only be experienced - in the Divine Darkness, in unknowing. Yet He is only darkness to us because His infinite light overwhelms our understanding. It is on this path that we can reenter paradise, even on this earth, amongst the thorns and the toil.
Perhaps the Western Church, which is so focused on developing words and systems of thought, even to the point of vilifying others who harbour the “wrong thoughts”, needs to remember this.
Thanks for such a beautiful article!