Having read Spengler, and Toynbee, and referenced some others regarding the patterns in history, it strikes me someone ought to look at the evolution of the species in terms of intellectual diet. Thomas Aquinas seemingly provided a sound mixture of Christianity, Aristotle, and enough Plato to make for a well-rounded ingestion and digestion of all things past. As soon as he passes, the whole of Europe goes into a gurgitation of ideas, eructating all manner of noises, whining with centuries of costive cognitions and collywobbles, and swooning under the weight of silly speculations—academia gone mad.
Confessedly, not all the noise was senseless. Aquinas did not provide an unchallengeable and unquestionable theory of everything. He simply epitomized his university and its pre-occupation with metaphysics. Across the channel another focus was in vogue, as always is the case. At Oxford the Platonic theories fostered by Augustine were de rigueur. In the German states illuminism nursed great minds with notions of intuition and analogy thereby enchanting them to glissade beyond reason into a mystical contact with the spiritual world, or to weave a metaphysics founded in the mystical. Such endless intellectual bravadoes of gelandesprung were not sustainable.
The mediaevals tried to bridge the caesura twixt the Greek non-personal first principle and the Father of Jesus Christ, and while arguments by analogy (positive and negative) may be compelling, can we justify the existence of something on the basis of saying it is logical that it be? Modern science hypothecates constantly, and often fortunes and lifetimes are spent trying to prove a “mathematical certainty” translates into “it really is”. At Oxford, Roger Bacon began to turn the tide. He observed we know according to three differing forms: experience, authority, and reason. Only experience gives us knowledge. Authority can rouse only to believing something, and reason can theorize, but is empty logic without the support of experience. Ockham, he of the famous razor, defenestrated faith from the realms of reason. His epistemology turns on the affirmation that reason cannot affirm the existence of any “absolutes”. Questions of god and faith are matters of faith. Such a coup de grace will take longer to materialize in the German states, but here we face the end of the mediaeval world, the twilight of god and soul as the centre of the universe, or at least, the university. Here gestate the new world foci: man and science.
Speculation and Spirituality in a Gothic Age, a brief consideration: The adage fondly held by liturgists states lex orandi lex credendi est [the rule of prayer is the rule of faith]. It theoretically provides the liturgist with considerable cachet, for the discipline of public prayer is taken as the font of theology which as intellectualization of the cultic informs the evaluative systems of the culture. I venture the reality is a tad more complex and convoluted, and as with anything in public domain prone to distraction and distortion.
There were times when private prayer coloured both cult and culture. The monastic movement inadvertently accommodated the notion of professional sanctification garnered in rigorous asceticism. Such was not the intention of Benedict when in the sixth century he laid down the archetypical rule of communal life. Contrasting self-will with the will of God, he enjoined a life of physical and spiritual discipline, a mastery of sensitive, emotive, and cognitive faculties through obedience, silence, humility, prayer and work. The goal of such discipline was the making of a whole person focused in body, mind and soul, in work, thought and prayer; it was not about escape from an evil world to become a disembodied soul alone with a transcendent God. The monastic spiritual life became, however, divorced from the life of ordinary lay folk, and a spurious divide twixt a spiritual upper class and a spiritual lower class became reality. We have here the materializing of a socially abided delusion. The monasteries, founded to foster a simple life for the spiritual and material well-being of the world, grew increasingly splendid, rich, and powerful, and the common folk proportionately dependent upon the benefices of their entrepreneurship, resentful, and critical. (Admittedly, this was not universally the case, but the artificial separation of the species into categories tends to engender itself as disproportionate, and binding, if not closed, classes.)
There were times when philosophical speculation impacted the direction of spirituality. The tools of analogy in hand, Pseudo-Dionysius postulated the divine is beyond “being”. He presented prayer as the opening of the self to assimilation into the likeness of the divine, in brief, into being beyond one’s “being”, ec-stasy. He instilled in occidental culture the canon of spirituality mirroring the Neo-Platonic cosmic structure. The metaphysical ladder of matter, spirit, God presage the three stages of the spiritual life: purgation of all that inhibits the approach to God, the illumination of the soul by the grace of God to the soul so disposed, and lastly, union with, or perfection in, the divine wherein the soul knows itself in the act of being known, in psychic wholeness. It is such vision Benedict incorporated into his rule.
There were times when private prayer transformed its visions into philosophical speculation. Before the twentieth century de Chardin spun out his Cristo-sphere and Omega point, the twelfth century Joachim of Fiore was infused with flashes of intuition so galvanizing the most revered items of his faith were tossed into doubt. In the counterbalance, however, these intuitions satiated him with a foretaste of the future: a spiritualization of the intellect that would be poured out upon all peoples. From this he wove a theory of history in three parts cleft: the time of law characterized by the Hebrew scriptures and God as Father, the time of grace, emblemized by the Christian scriptures and God as Son, and the final time, an age of love and freedom, an age of a spiritual transcendence of understanding, personified in God as Holy Spirit. Modern depth psychology will, of course, see its ideas of the evolution of the psyche to its wholeness prefigured here.
In the thirteenth century, Meister Eckhart, in the role of preacher and pastoral counsel, taught union with God is pure gift. The divine is the capacity for giving, and the soul, in its likeness to God, is the capacity for graciously receiving. The divine gifting is a ceaseless action wherein the surface of the divine reality continuously recedes and dissolves. The face of God endlessly cleaves away from the spiritually experienced presence, revealing God as the abyss, or the silence, the desert, the darkness. In such illusive mists resides the heart of God, the Godhead. In this hiding, this receding Holiness is the platform on which arise the two divine transcendents: the Triune God of love and communion, and creation. Just as the divine looks to its two transcendents, the soul properly looks to its two directions, its God and its body. God is not only beyond his triune manifestation, and the world, but therein beyond Christ in his humanity, the church, and the sacraments. Yet, it is this God’s gifting of the divine spark of joy which allows the soul to become detached and free, knowing and rightly treasuring all things as expressions of God.
Eckhart is counted a mystic. His rapturous vision proved dangerous for an ecclesiastic in an ecclesiastically dominated world. It was, however, his philosophical speculations as a professor that were the prime topic in his castigations. God had traditionally, in one form or another, been held as pure Being, the fullness of Being. The prologue of the Johannine gospel has it that “In the beginning was the Logos”, logos referencing the Greek λόγος denoting the mind (thought, idea) as well as its incarnation, the spoken word. Inspired by this text, Eckhart postulated knowledge is superior and prior to being, to existence, and that God is, therefore, pure knowing, having “being” applicable to him only in so far as he is the cause of beings. Neither being nor existence are proper to God. The divine essence is knowing, and upon this platform arise trinity and creation such that there is nothing outside of the Godhead.
It is not outside of orthodoxy to claim the unity of the divine Godhead is logically prior to the divine Persons, or that the mystery of creation rests within God. However, Eckhart, enthused with vision, like Erigena before him, did not make the niceties of logical distinctions, he deleted them. He and his disciples, Tauler and Suso, exert a considerable influence upon late mediaeval spirituality and the reformers. Luther rejects the finding of God by either the intellect or good works, for God is Deus Absconditus [the hidden God], to whom one can come only in surrender, in faith, loving him not for any benefit that may come, but simply for his own sake, by entering a state of essential detachment. Such blind submission alone reveals man’s weakness, his sinfulness, allows God to be God, and man to be right-fully in God’s world.
There are three aspects of Eckhart’s understanding of note. First, the capacity of the divine to perpetually recede from our grasp is the ab ovo datum of mysticism and spirituality. Indeed, the spiritual pathway provided everyman in our common prayer, the liturgy of the church, is rooted in the journey from catechetics to mystagogy, in an ever deepening understanding of the summons into relatedness with the Holy. The great sacraments are signs, tellurian symbols denoting spiritual realities of unbounded depth whose richest meanings are revealed to the understanding only in their being lived, individually and communally incarnated, in and for the world. The sacred liturgies of the year provide an archetypal spiritual journey, unfolding from the experience of the approach of the divine in Advent, to the joyful gift of God-with-us, the Emmanuel of Christmas and Epiphany, to the greater focus and command opened by the solitude and desolation of Lent and Passiontide, to the exultation of spirit given in the all-embracing Christ of the Paschal mysteries, to the immersion into mission, its trials and insights, that is the Pentecost. Reapplied year after year, the progression of the sacred rites draws the soul into ever deeper freedom, maturity, and transparent joy for the Holy. Second, there is a twinned helical aspect to Eckhart’s analysis which is, at base, Neo-Platonic. The first spiral moves inward as the truth dissipates in our attempt to cognize it, revealing a more arcane level, this giving credence to the prioritization of knowledge over being, for we recognize truth as belonging to knowledge before being assignable to being; the second spiral moves outward as in the act of being known, in the abreactive joy of being experienced and understood in the depths of self (be that according to religion by the divine, or according to psychology by the self), one comes to the true knowledge and appreciation of self and world. Third, Eckhart adroitly observes the soul needs to look to its two directions, to God and to body, the material cosmos. These cannot be fatuously divided into two opposing poles between which soul must choose, for they are the two great aspects of reality the soul is called to conjoin in its living dynamic, consecrating the world as the act whereby it worships its God. The revelation of the world as the object of God’s love in the subject of God’s love, his Christ in whom all things are made, is the basal profundity of our Christian inheritance, a truth dolorously too often lost to the temptation to anathema the difficulties and nuances of our mission, and to embrace some simplistic and facinorous form of either-or Gnosticism.