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A monk sits under a tree. A lady passing by asks him, "Venerable Master, did you see a woman pass by earlier?" "No," he replies, "I saw only a combination of bones and flesh."
The monk, in stressing only the observable qualities of the human body, reduced a living woman to a walking carcass. This reductionism applies to religion. If religion has no inner meaning, it is at best a social phenomenon and at worst the biggest illusion propagated in history.
A friend was teaching a Sunday School class. Some persons discontinued attending. The complaint? She was being too spiritual in her teachings. However, religion becomes a carcass if it seeks to find its Life outside the spiritual, the domain of Pure Spirit, the Holy Spirit.
"We scale that wall of invisible vision beyond which Infinity is to be found," writes Nicolas of Cusa (b. 1401). According to Nicolas of Cusa how do we attain that Inner Vision of Truth? How do we see beyond the veil of the apparent? Nicolas of Cusa describes knowledge as a unifying activity, and with three stages: phantasy, reason, intellect.
1. Phantasy is sense knowledge. Sense knowledge is unification of incoming data through the senses.
2. Reason is abstract and linear knowledge. This faculty abstracts universal concepts, but it never arrives at unity of Truth. This knowledge does not accurately reflect Truth, for it is founded only on individual beings. Therefore, concepts result from contradictions: unity and multiplicity, being and non-being, good and bad, …
3. Intellect is representative of Reality, God, as perfect unity. In the Infinite Life, which is to say in God, all opposites are reconciled (coincidence of contradictories, or coincidentia oppositorum), contradictions are no more; however, nothing of the energies or being of the apparent contradictions is lost in the union.
The coincidence of opposites is a certain kind of unity perceived as coincidence, a unity of contrarieties overcoming opposition by convergence without destroying or merely blending the constituent elements. Although in one sense not obliterated, in another the constituent elements shed their multiple, differentiated status. Examples would include the coincidence of rest and motion, past and future, diversity and identity, inequality and equality, and divisibility and simplicity.
... coincidence does not really describe God. Rather it sets forth the way God works, the order of things in relation to God and to each other, and the manner by which humans may approach and abide in God. God is beyond the realm of contradictories. God ... preceded opposites, is undifferentiated, not other, incomparable, and without opposite, precedes distinctions, opposition, contrariety, and contradiction.
H. Lawrence Bond, Nicolas of Cusa: Selected Spiritual Writings
Human reason and its investigation of phenomena are meant to lead us to mysticism. Knowledge applied to discover the mysteries of creation leads to the mystery of God. Our knowing mystically leads to awe-filled silence, for in the silence we are in confession that we are open to be in Being beyond sensory and scientific knowledge. Knowing has led to Unknowing, which is knowing beyond knowing. Without silence we have yet to allow our thoughts, filled with opposites and contradictions, to dissipate at the delightful dawning of Christic incomprehensibility.
A god comprehensible is a creation of human neediness. Such may be an opiate of the masses, but it is not the God needed by the massees. Therefore, Christian mysticism is one of the most ignored prognoses for the arrogance and prejudice, and stark inertia, of much Christianity.
Accept humbly the relative nature of religious expression, for the worth of the relative is it derives from the Absolute and is the means of returning you to mature Faith. Christianity then is no longer a social drug of emotional compensation.
The essence of Trinitarian Mysticism is not false, or misleading. Or, in reference to Nicolas of Cusa, spiritual Reason is a scaling of the "wall of invisible vision beyond which Infinity is to be found." Infinity is Trinity.
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By observing the world and its phenomenal opposites, we see the hints of the Creator in Whom unification occurs. If we follow the hints backward to the Source, we will be aware of how little we do know of the Mystery, for most of our knowing is sensory and logical.
Still, by following the hints back to the Source, we shall more intimately and increasingly know the Inner Meaning that gives meaning to the cosmos. This last knowledge is what Nicolas of Cusa means by “intellect,” and what I call “intuitive knowledge.”
This is one level, beyond the popular-cultural, of following Christ, for the essence of Christ is what I speak of in this writing. There exists, eternally, the unification of the apparent opposites of Son of God and Son of Man in this God-Man, wherein is the perfection of the sacred marriage of matter and spirit. The alienation of the opposites are resolved in this God-Man. That is, Jesus Christ is the image of what Nicolas of Cusa speaks of. Jesus Christ is the Incarnation, meaning the unification in spirit-flesh of coincidence of contradictories.
Respect for and growing into the Inner Meaning is essentially what separates contemplatives from other persons in religion. To be the Church means we deal with God and God with us, and that means we go into the depths that all surfaces intimate. We enter into and, through the Holy Spirit, grow into participation in the unification of opposites that inheres in Jesus Christ.
Religion is the insinuation of Spirit. Without mysticism, the churches cut themselves off from the depth of the Divine and live only amid the apparent contradictions of the phenomenal and mental spheres. No wonder many churches are torn by division, for the members have never been introduced in how to live from the Knowledge in which there is no division. In the Spirit, we enter the Inner Sanctum of Unity and, then, we can share such unifying Intuition with the world and, thereby, be peacemakers.
Let us not treat knowledge like the monk who saw the woman as only flesh and bones. To master the world of apparent phenomena serves us, but leaves us with a sense of Something missing. To live according to reason alone leaves us, again, with a sense of Something missing. To be baptized into the trans-rational, the mystical, sends us into a domain of valid experience wherein the joyful journey into That Something More never ends. To follow Christ Jesus is to enter into the goal of Christian Perfection, which is the summation of a unification in Christ and lived out in the Jesus movement.
*The present writer has lost the source for the quote from Nicolas of Cusa, "We scale ...,".
Reflections
What encouraged you in the writing today? Explain.
Did you disagree with something in the writing today? If so, explain.
What is the Third Knowledge?
Have you had a moment in time when you felt the unity of all things? Explain.
Spiritual Exercise
Meditate and pray daily.
Make sure you have a sacred space in your home for time alone in prayer and spiritual reading.
Make sure you are in a covenant group. For more information on covenant groups, write me at the address below.
Consider, if you are not already, sponsoring a child through Compassion International. You can find out more about Compassion International by going to www.compassion.net to read about sponsoring, in the name of Jesus, children living in poverty. Thanks! Brian K. Wilcox
Brian’s book An Ache For Union can be purchased at major book dealers.
To contact Brian, write briankwilcox@comcast.net .
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