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ST.
JOHN OF THE CROSS describes three
'nights', three kinds and degrees of obscurity,
which the growing spirit must experience
during its transition from that natural life within
which we all emerge, and to which we are adjusted,
to the other life which is
'transformed in God'. He
says that these nights are like the strong soap and
soda which cleanse us from all the stains of unreality,
and restore us to the purity in which we can receive
the divine light. This symbolism at first repels us
by its apparent harshness ; its purely negative
character. But when we examine it, we see that it
is a desperate attempt to describe the sequence of
psychological states through which our limited
consciousness does and must move, from its normal
whole-hearted acceptance of that unquestioned world
of
' common sense ' which is shown to us by the
senses, to correspondence with that other level of
reality, dimly yet most truly known in our ascents
to the soul's apex—a world which is ever 'dark to
the intellect, though radiant to the heart'.
For the three 'nights' of St. John are really the
successive phases of one undivided process; the dis-
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concerting and purifying discovery of the mystery,
the cloud of unknowing, which wraps us round.
They are like the increasing dark through which
the earth turns so gravely and quietly from one
day to the next. The soul moves in them from dusk
to full night; and thence to that luminous darkness
which precedes the dawn, and has in it a tenderness
and wonder, a quality of revelation, unknown to the
'good visibility'
of the average day. When prayer
first brings us into this twilight of the spirit, the
sharply defined landscape within which we have been
accustomed to arrange our religious experiences, and
all the certitudes and satisfactions, religious and
other, mediated by the senses, lose their familiar
colour, importance and shape. They become less
solid and certain; more mysterious. As the bright
field and the safe homely creatures, which in daylight
we took easily for granted, assume an alien and
primeval majesty, reveal something of their inward
being, at the first approach of night; so it is when
the dusk of the spirit falls on the familiar religious
scene. The crisp
'facts'
of an organized faith suffer
a strange transformation. They loom up at us, dim,
huge, half-realized, and yet more deeply living than
before; like forest trees before the rising of the
moon. And now we begin to be aware of their
infinite solemnity and significance, their treasures of
hidden truth and beauty; and of our ignorance in
respect of their real meaning, our shallowness of
comprehension over against their depth. The world of religion is no longer a concrete fact proposed for
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our acceptance and adoration. It is an unfathomable
universe which engulfs us, and which lives its own majestic uncomprehended life: and we discover that our careful maps and cherished definitions bear little relation to its unmeasured reality.
'O Lord my God' cries Nicholas of Cusa,
'I
behold thee in the entrance of Paradise and I know
not what I see, for I see naught visible. This alone
I know, that I know not what I see and never can
know. . . . Thou, God, who art Infinity, canst
only be approached by him whose intellect is in ignorance; to wit, by him who knows himself to
be ignorant of Thee.'
How purifying, how deeply humbling is this
discipline of ignorance; this sense of the great life
that enfolds us, the dim country surrounding and
underlying the small bright patch to which alone
our analytic minds are adequate.
'For of all other
creatures and their works', says The Cloud of
Unknowing,
'may a man through grace have fulness
of knowing, and well can he think of them. But of
God Himself can no man think. And therefore I
would leave all that thing that I can think, and
choose to my love that thing that I cannot
think.'
The soul that has received this intimation of the
true relation between its small perceptions and the
universe of Spirit, has experienced once for all the
essence of that purgation of the understanding which
prepares the way of faith. For what matters here
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is that the mind shall become so quietly limpid, so
clear of its own deceptive notions and discriminations,
that it receives simply and humbly the subtle
touch of God;
'understanding because it does not
seek to understand', as we understand the mystery
of the night. Then we realize that prayer only
achieves depth and substance when it passes beyond
and above our intelligence; and we know not what
we do, because our action is engulfed in the mighty
act of Spirit, and we are for the time being lost in
the night of God.
Entering this
'night of faith' which is to purge
the mind of all its intellectual pride and self-assurance,
the soul at first feels utterly lost. Sensitive
nature is deprived of the accustomed support which
it has received from visible religion; and reason
receives its first daunting revelation of that overplus
of Reality with which it can never deal. The
miracle-play is over, the foot-lights have gone out,
and we must go home under the stars. Their radiance
seems very dim after the theatre lights. But
only with our docile acceptance of this enfolding
darkness can we escape from the imaginary world
of sensitive nature and learn to centre our being on
God alone. This strips the understanding, the
memory and the will of all fantasy, all easy self-assurance,
and forces them to face the dark reality
of Spirit and the narrow limits of our possible
experience.
'The soul does not unite itself to God
in this world by understanding, by enjoying, by
imagining, nor by any faculty of sensitive nature',
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says St. John of the Cross ; but by the generous act
of trust which turns from all these props to a bare
adherence in faith
'free, naked, pure and simple
without mode or manner'.
'God is greater than our heart.' But all that this
means for the soul which tends to Him cannot be
learnt without a painful cleansing of the intellectual
life. For it requires us to refuse all trust in the
final worth of our separate and distinct experiences
in the workings of philosophic reason on one hand,
or of religious imagination on the other while
accepting the intimations of God conveyed by these
imperfect instruments. This is the 'divine ignorance' which cleanses the interior mirror and stills
the restless mind, in order that it may receive in
humble tranquillity the impress of Spirit. And
purification here means the steady refusal to pour
ourselves out towards the merely attractive and
consoling, or the dangerously clear; the discarding
of easy diagrams and clever explanations of the
Invisible, the feeding of our humble sense of mystery.
It means accepting our ignorance, acknowledging the
awful gap between the Creator and the creature, and
refusing to narrow-down Reality to our own small
apprehensions and desires. All concepts of God,
from the most crude to the most 'spiritual', fall to
silence before His face. And it is the confession
indeed the joyful acceptance of this ignorance,
whether realized by way of
'pure faith' or 'pure
love', which is the essence of the mind's active
purification; preparing it for that deeper and more
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searching action of Spirit which is called the passive
night of the soul.
Being what we are, and living as we do a disorderly
and restless life of ceaseless confusion between the
fugitive and enduring, rational and instinctive levels,
and vagrant correspondences with this and that, we
can hardly hope to come to any real apprehension of
Spirit without such a deep and painful purgation of
the mind. Here we are not concerned with disorders
of the moral life, or conflicts between 'higher'
and 'lower'
desires: but with a total reconditioning,
expansion and unselfing of the intelligence, so that
it may respond by a simple movement of faith and
love to an environment of which Spirit, with its
mysterious demands and attractions, is the ruling
fact.
Flecte quod est rigidum.
When our first crude interpretation of life
according to the witness of sense and suggestions of
personal desire is transcended, our further and more
dangerous claim to interpret Reality in its depth and
richness by means of those 'rational principles'
to
which we have attained, must be transcended too;
if the intellect is ever to become cleansed of pride,
docile to mystery, and accept the limitations within
which it can safely work. Since the reality of Spirit
cannot possibly be clear to our sense-conditioned
understanding, all vivid definition, all appearance of logic and clarity, all attempts to equate
'religion'
with 'science' and make the natural and super
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natural fit, are deceptive. For that which is adequate
to us can never be adequate to God; nor
could a Reality we were able to understand ever
quench our transcendental thirst. We have to
recognize our intellectual concepts as the useful
makeshifts which they really are; paper currency
which permits the circulation of spiritual wealth,
but must never be mistaken for gold.
For there is no correspondence, no parity, between
our most admirable notions and the Being of God;
and we only begin to approach a certain obscure
knowledge of His presence, when we consent to
abandon our arrogant attempts towards definition
and understanding, become the meek recipients of
His given lights, and the silent worshippers of His
unfathomable Reality. Only by a movement of
bare faith does the mind really draw near to Him.
This, in the last resort, is all
it can do here: pacifying
the soul's house, gathering in its scattered interests,
passions, desires and spiritual preferences, and subduing
them to the single fact of God. Yet this is not
to mean a mere wholesale ejection from our mental
life and our religious practice of all that is not
'purely spiritual'. Real life is richer and more
difficult than this. We are called to a just and disinterested
use of that many-levelled world which
surrounds us with its graded realities, and in which
we are to find and love beyond all other objects of
desire the one full Reality, all-penetrating Spirit;
the Origin and sustainer of all these lesser lives,
lights and loves.
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So the purification of intellect does not mean the
deliberate cultivation of a holy stupidity, nor yet a
wholesale retreat from the sensible and the homely:
for then we reject the rich ore in which the treasure
is hidden, and abandon the only machinery for
dealing with it that we possess. It is as human
beings, transformed but none the less completely
human, that our life toward Spirit must be lived;
and within the sensible order to which we are
adjusted that we must receive the touch of God.
Therefore we shall need the perpetual intervention
of the senses, conveying the messages of Spirit;
and in order to deal with those messages, the best
mental patterns and concepts that we can achieve.
But if these are not to delude us, we shall need also
a constant, humble remembrance of their proximate
and symbolic nature; an awe-struck recognition of
the over-plus, the solemn mystery which penetrates
and sustains our finite world; a one-sided relation
to the Reality of God. We must never confuse
with Him any gift or experience of the contingent
world; even though we are seldom able to approach
Him in isolation from all sensible signs, or distinguish
with certainty substance from accident.
And this is where the stress and difficulty of our
mental purgation is most deeply felt. It creates for
us a situation which is at once costly, humbling and
bracing. It asks a ceaseless tension, a childlike
acceptance of the Infinite given to us in and with
the finite; which both redeems us from the risk of
mere quietism, and protects us from intellectual pride,
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the arrogant claim to 'know' God. The purifying
action drives the soul's centre of action inwards
from the circumference to the real ground of its
life, where Spirit indwells us; but this withdrawal
is balanced by a rich and selfless expansion, a
generous outward movement which is the fruit of
that preliminary stripping and retreat. The mind is
cleansed, quietened and expanded, stops its restless
effort to make things fit; is opened to the ceaseless
gentle action of the Spirit, which keeps us ever aware
that the best of our apparent discoveries and experiences are crumbs with which God feeds us from the
infinite storehouse of Truth. Here then the soul's
attitude must be undemanding and all-accepting:
content to receive Spirit's revelation through earthly
forms and figures, to gaze on the Cross and know that
it offers us a truth we cannot fathom; without disturbing
reflections as to the aspect under which
that truth is given in
'Orion or the Bear'.
So our aim must be to escape from all confusion
of gift with Giver; from anything which deflects
the soul's upward and outward look to That beyond
itself which it desires. For the pure radiance of
God, says St. John, is never absent from the soul ;
but the images and concepts with which our understandings
are filled, and to which we attribute reality,
prevent its diffusion. And the first of these impediments
is that tendency to identify sensible signs and
spiritual things, which has always haunted the
history of religion. For here Man is called upon to
accept the humbling necessity of his mixed nature,
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and receive news of the Spirit through the channels
of sense ; yet ever to practise a careful discrimination
between the revealing medium and the Reality
revealed. To remember that in religion all demand
for the sharp and clear, all trust in the image, and
satisfaction with the image, is unsafe; whilst refusing
the attractive temptation to abandon the whole
world of image and thought, and sink into a mere
undifferentiated
'awareness'
of Spirit—this indeed
purifies the understanding and subordinates it to
mystery, but does not annihilate it. For then,
refusing to attach ourselves to anything we are able
to know and comprehend, we go out with intense
desire through and in these known and familiar
signs, to That which is inaccessible to the mind;
and through that which we taste and feel, touch
That which transcends all taste and all feeling.
Once the sensible world, both natural and religious,
has become truly sacramental, it has become safe. Then, holding together its essential holiness and its
pathetic failures, and reaching out through both in
naked faith to God, the mind is released from slavery
to its own conceptual system; and preserved from
mistaking signs for things, pictures for portraits,
and even the most impressive movements and satisfactions
of the religious imagination for revelations
of Reality. The spiritual life, so deep, free and
elastic, so humble in its simplicity and so august in
its span, is ruled by the undemanding adoration of
that Reality. Thus it tends to such a simplification
of our whole psychic nature, that faith, hope and
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charity—the supernatural vision trust and love—become the varying moods and colours of one single
state; a pure abandonment to the vast action of
God.
So the soul in whom this life has been set going
must subordinate all thoughts, concepts, insights, to
this Divine action; must cling to no religious image,
nor claim for it absolute worth. On the other hand,
entrance into this night of faith solves many of the
difficulties of visible religion for us. Humbly
acknowledging the entire
'otherness'
of Spirit and
yet its gentle and continuous action within the world
of sense, we can accept the most homely symbol
and most absurd devotion for that which they are:
modes of the self-giving of that Spirit which is
modeless, yet which uses these sensible channels as
a merciful condescension to our childish state, and
manifests the royalty of love by meeting us on our own ground.
It will be seen from all this that the cleansing of
the understanding must be achieved at least as much
through prayer as through thought. Indeed, from
beginning to end these work together in the soul.
Here, as in the purifying of the natural life, all is
contained in the humble tendency to God, and selfopening
to His dark radiance. For this, of itself,
plunges the spirit into that night of faith which can
alone clear the mind of those unreal rationalisms,
and those deceptive constructions, behind which
we try to shelter from the simple and all-penetrating
blaze of the Divine.
