The Cloud Of Unknowing

Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the early 20th-century Roman Catholic thinker, wrote of three elements of religion. In the institutional element, a child, for example, soaks up with delight and few questions all the customs and creeds of the religious institution. The second intellectual element most typically begins in adolescence, when individuals begin to pose questions to the inherited faith and attempt to make sense of it for themselves. If they fail in the quest of this second element, they may well abandon their childhood faith and its related institution. But if they succeed, they move on into the third or mystical element of religion, when - without in any way leaving behind the first and second elements - they are able to live with questions that no one can answer, exploring the connections of thought and feeling which help make belief not a groundless or fruitless activity, and living in an attitude of wonder and ultimate trust in the universe. 

Now it seems to me that highly gifted people are often able to move naturally and with deep fascination into Von Hügel's third element of religion. They do not in the process leave behind the institutional and intellectual aspects of faith, and this gives them a rich multi-dimensional grasp on reality and meaning - something very different from certain and final knowledge. Many in our time have continued to be able to leap across to maturity of faith. At the other end of the spectrum, however, the simple (and the faux-simple), like the poor, we always have with us in the churches.

Not so fast.

First, this sounds a bit Kierkegaardian to me: beginning in the aesthetic, moving into the ethical (this is the basic argument of Either/Or), and then advancing to the religious in the Knight of Faith (if one doesn’t get caught as the Knight of Infinite Resignation). (This is presented in Fear and Trembling.) But these are the philosophical works; not the religious works. For S.K., the two have no commerce with each other. They speak different languages about different views of the world. Even the “leap of faith” mentioned there comes from Fear and Trembling, but SK meant it was what the non-religious see and how they understand; and they are wrong. It’s the attempt of the world to explain what they cannot explain.

Take the Knight of Faith. In SK’s description we see a perfectly bourgeois man of Denmark in the mid-19th century. What SK meant was the ideal of the religious could be anybody. But he also meant the designation, the identification, the definition, were the concerns of the philosopher, not of the saint. Or the Knight of Faith, since a saint is known by semeia (miracles, specifically). By the way, without signs, how do you know the K of F? And if you need signs, how do you know the signs are…signs? Or what they signify?

SK wasn’t trying to make this simpler. 

Seminary was a very intellectual (and rigorous ) experience. It taught me to think, not to believe. It didn’t teach me to be a mystic, so much as it taught me any appeal to the metaphysical, even any consideration of it, was considered “mysticism.” Seminary doesn’t deal in mysticism. We need to define our terms here.

I’m not sure “everyone her own Aquinas” is all that sound an argument anyway, since Aquinas and Francis were both mystics (Francis reportedly was the first to display stigmata; Aquinas finished his Summa and said he had a vision that turned all his writings to straw), but both came to very different conclusions about coming to God. Aquinas used his powerful intellect, Francis his powerless humility. I’m not saying one way is better than another; I’m saying it’s dangerously reductive to think there is “one way.” Or even many ways, as long as they lead from emotional (pietism?), to intellectual (“pure theology”?), to…the Cloud of Unknowing?

Monks in the first twelve centuries of the church didn’t pursue their spiritual goals by pursuing theology. Some did, but some thought it actually got in the way of their goals. Who was right? My maternal grandfather was a Primitive Baptist and, from time to time, a lay preacher to his congregation. He had no religious education, no seminary degree. What he knew of Christianity he’d learned in that denomination. He even sang from a shaped note hymnal. His inability to formulate a systematic theology* did not make him less faithful than me, or any less of a Christian. In fact, I aspire to his trust (faith) and faithfulness. He got there without the intellectual endeavors I’ve struggled to achieve. Who’s right?

I'm not arguing with the Baron so much as I'm arguing with the Guardian.  Their take is one Kierkegaard would savage, probably with a pseudonym (because his pseudonymous works were all critiques of philosophical reasoning by showing up its limitations and blindspots).

Christianity’s mysticism, per the mystics themselves, is more connected with unknowing than knowing. The classic text here is The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous English text about the encounter with the ineffable (another philosophical term). Sticking with England, there’s Julian of Norwich’s near death experience which led her to a life of service and contemplation as an anchorite. St. John of the Cross wrote of the “dark night of the soul.”  St. Teresa compared the experience of God to an intimate (sexual) encounter. Not too many people aspire to a state of ratiocination that will culminate in sexual ecstasy. Doris Grumbach wrote a memoir about her unexpected spiritual experience, and how (not unlike Julian, but with far less success) she tried to understand it and, more importantly, repeat it. Mother Teresa, her contemporary, reported the same thing. Try as I might, I can’t find how the intellectual experience of seminary yields the mystical ecstasy of Teresa, or even the visions of Julian. In seminary our cloud of unknowing was the region between our understanding and what our professors were trying to teach us.

And faith, by the way, is not either blind acceptance or a willing acceptance that you’ll understand all there is to understand. That’s just experience and wisdom. Socrates taught as much. Faith is trust; but trust in what?

Exactly. 

 

I know I’m speaking strongly about something offered rather casually. But the mystical experience in Christianity is not a matter of discovery, but revelation. It doesn’t come from our efforts, but from God’s revealing. Doris Grumbach didn’t pursue God; nor did Julian, nor even Paul on the road to Damascus. Monks tried to live as much in the presence of God as they could; and if they succeeded it would be, as Julian called her visions, a “shewing.” It wouldn’t be wrapped in knowledge, but in unknowing.

*not that I hold systematics in high regard. My final paper in seminary on systematics was on why it was a mug’s game. I got in a war of words with one of my systematics professors that carried on after I graduated. I’m still bull-headed enough to insist I was right.

Replying to rustypickup: The schema also strikes me as very RC. I struggle to imagine a Protestant bulldozing Pietism so complacently (that said, I don’t struggle that hard). Mostly I just wanted to engage it, to see what I came up with. It never as much as I imagine it will be.

Thanks for the book tip; I’ve already contacted my favorite local bookstore. My nearly 70 year old body is warning me if my limitations, but my equally aged brain still thinks I don’t know enough. 

Seminary is a struggle. I hope it’s a good one for you.