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| Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word |
[As a young man] he became lost in the timeless identity of "saint" until a voice within his own soul — or was it his soul? — asked him a question about time: "How will you be able to endure this life in the seventy years you have yet to live?"
Ignatius had set his will into the most all-inclusive identity he knew — only to find that the setting was not complete. He had been absorbed by the [sacred] texts he read and the phrases that he carried about in his copybook. The enchantment lasted six or eight months until a very momentary impulse ... questioned the permanence of his will. ... In deciding to be a knight of God Ignatius had tried to will deeply, yet suddenly it was clear: his will was not all-inclusive. Something still escaped — integrity had been lost with the sin of Adam. He could not lose himself in a perfect ethic, for a perfect ethic remains impersonal and atemporal, while Ignatius remained an individual in time.
Ignatius had to devise a new way to handle the difference between the ethical ideal and his own inner experience: that is, he devised a spirituality. (p. 54-55)
Here, in this brief passage, is the crucial distinction between an ethic, based on religion, and a spirituality. King then adds:
A spirituality, any spirituality, could be defined as a way of dealing with the moods, urges and impulses that act on their own apart from the intent of the will. It is different from an ethic, for an ethic is an objective code and ignores how one feels, while a spirituality takes account of the very feelings that an ethic ignores. An ethic is concerned with the deeds one intends and for which one is responsible. While, in contrast, a spirituality is concerned with the inner life, a life which seems to go its own way apart from one's intent and for which one is not directly responsible.
An ethic is a sort of ideal. When one hears it told of in words, it can exert an enchantment, making the hearer, in effect, a "knight-errant" who henceforth roams the world, going hither and yon doing noble deeds. That is the gist of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel, which King analyzes at length. King sets the Don Quixote story and that of Ignatius — along with those of other notable idealists such as Socrates — into the context of the enchantment that the words and teachings of Jesus exerted upon his apostles and disciples.
He says Jesus himself was a "person of the book," who, when tempted by Satan, doggedly "affirmed the word over his appetite." Jesus told Satan, among other things, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God" (see p. 118). It is the story of every knight-errant and idealist: words take precedence over material things.
Unlike all the other idealists, though, Jesus was further characterized by his humanity, his fundamental compassion. His feeling for others was based, not on words coming to him from above the world, but on his own experience in the world. Don Quixote was far too abstracted from the real world to offer much in the way of human compassion, even to Sancho Panza.
One who in modern times was enchanted, just as Jesus was, by the word of God was Thomas Merton. As a young Trappist monk, at the tender age of 31 in 1946, Merton wrote his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. Published two years later in 1948, it told of how Merton had left a life of atheism and dissipation with the intent and desire to witness the voice of God in contemplative prayer.
Like St. Ignatius, Merton subsequently found that his determination to simply listen in prayerful silence to the enchanting words uttered by God above was undermined by an unquenched force within his own soul. Much as he wanted his life of prayer to remove him bodily from the world of sense experience, as it were — to annul the contingent existence of this material world in favor of the Ground of all existence, God — his inner being balked. He wrote of this perplexing turn of events, "There is in my heart this great thirst to recognize totally the nothingness of all that is not God" (see p. 151). But this "nothingness" which he despised would not let Merton leave quietly.
Merton had orginally assumed that there was an either-or choice to be made: either the light of God was to be his chosen abode, or the "darkness" of the world would be. There was no "in between" possible, so he embraced the former and excluded the latter.
Yet the sense world would not meekly disappear.
At first, Merton's recognition of this brute fact "filled his veins with drops of terror" (see p. 153). He was, to borrow a phrase, dazed and confused by the stubbornness of the material world in declining to cooperate with his noble program.
His rescue from crisis and confusion came in the form of a Zen awakening (see p. 152 in King). Merton one day began, simply, to see the world again! It now seemed to possess, oddly enough, an intriguing "neutrality that cannot be written down" in words. No formulaic incantation, of the sort by means of which he wished to bring about his soul's absorption into a higher light, remained available to Merton. Once the awakening had begun, he knew "the reality of the present and of solitude divorced from past or future." And this reality happened right here on earth!
He was accustomed to defining his reality in accordance with a pat verbal teaching, a set of aptly chosen words into which he could be drawn, taking him away from the material world. Now he fell so in love with the irreducibly physical parts of the world that he took to snapping photographs of old wood and weather-beaten rocks, using what he called his "Zen camera." This camera of Merton's made no judgments whatever. The pictures it made had no meaning — and that, says King, "was their importance. For, Merton would explain, in order to be complete, every monk and every person must experience one's own 'meaninglessness'!" (p. 154).
Merton's approach to life changed utterly, from one of contemplation to one of meditation. In the former, the whole point was to become so immersed in a spoken word beyond the ordinary senses that "the sense world would disappear." Contemplation, his word for such an immersion, was basically a monologue.
Meditation, though, was a dialogue that "occurs only in the earthly and historical curcumstances of one's life." "To meditate we do not rise out of the nothing [of the contemplative self]; rather we make [in Merton's words now] a 'return to the center of our own nothingness' ... . Nothingness is necessary for dialogue" (pp. 154-155).
"Nothingness" for Merton meant the opposite of Being. Nothingness went from being a negative to a positive for him; it had actually become a thing, as it were, to take seriously. For nothingness turned out to have an undeniable reality apart from Being.
"Darkness," for its part, had also become something more: more, that is, than the absence of light. Again, Merton found there was a distinction to be drawn between Nonbeing — i.e., the absence of the immaterial Word of God, who was the very Ground of Being — and the sheer presence of a material reality.
Out of the revelation implied in this Zen awakening, Merton finally broke his contemplative silence. He began, instead of just listening in awed silence to the Word of God, to exchange words with the Most High. He would come to write of this experience that "the alternation of darkness and light can [itself] constitute a kind of dialogue between the Christian and God" (p. 156).
The life of Jesus was likewise an alternation of light and darkness, King points out. Jesus was the light which the darkness could not comprehend, as the gospel of John tells us. His words spelled enchantment to all with ears to hear.
Then, after his time as a teacher or rabbi was at an end, there came Jesus's passion and crucifixion. Satan, as promised, had found the "appropriate time" to turn what had been the Purest of All Light into darkness, falsehood, and confusion. This was no longer a matter of verbal enchantment; this was experience — precisely the reality which had been summarily rejected by one and all while the enchantment lasted. At that fateful moment, "Word and world had never seemed further apart" (p. 130).
Yet, at one and the same time, King writes, "By his passion [Jesus] would become a 'visible and powerful manifestation of God' to all the world" (pp. 143-144). This was what Jesus himself had foretold: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself." Not just his Jewish brethren — all men, Jews and gentiles alike, would be enlightened by the evil darkness cast over Good Friday.
Paradoxically, that is, "[Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated." It would be a Zen moment par excellence: the crucifixion of Jesus as a koan for the whole world to see. It told humanity that when all words and meanings fail, when darkness seems utter, an enlightenment or illumination — one that is, strictly speaking, without meaning — is still available to us. To find it, we only need to do as Merton advised: "Don't think. Look!" Look, that is, at the Son of Man, incomprehensibly nailed to a wooden cross.
King tells us that Merton progressed from self-proclaimed atheist to a practitioner of contemplative religion, en route to finding his true spiritual life. There were three stages in his transformation. His original, atheistic stage began to wear thin when he "saw he was living a selfish life and using others for his own pleasure" (p. 157). An avid reader, he by chance struck upon a book, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy by Etienne Gilson, in which he found a Latin word describing God as "Of Himselfness" (see p. 150). The particular word was Aseitas. It became Merton's enchanting incantation, his abracadabra, his touchstone in the unfolding process of "coming out of his solitary identity [to] enter Another."
Then Merton went through the difficult transition phase called by the mystics the "night of the senses." On the other side of that night he found the religion and God he sought. "The word Aseitas delivered him," King tells us, into Paradise. Merton had in effect traded his own false and selfish Aseitas — his puny individual "of himselfness" — for subjection to God's true Aseitas. "He found God through a word ... through the words of revelation [which] he would contemplate."
Later would come Merton's Zen awakening, after another experience of night: the mystics' "night of the soul." It was the flip side of the night of the senses, a perturbation that beset Merton with terror and confusion. And morning broke yet again for Merton, when his Zen awakening arrived.
Merton thenceforth traded in contemplation for meditation: prayerful dialogue between him and God. King generalizes upon Merton's spiritual rebirth thus:
But perhaps all people are like Merton — perhaps all of us strive to become independent lords of a world centered about ourselves and our pleasures, to become Aseitas. But just as one is about to get such a world in place, one can be enchanted (by God or anyone), drawn out of one's self into a "higher" world in which one forgets the world one tried to establish. And, most puzzling of all, one finds the experience a liberation (one has been freed from the demands of being God). Later one will return to one's self and wonder how another could call one out of one's self and into life, but that is what has happened. Only after one has gone apart from one's self, is one able to make a real choice. It is only after "Orpheus" (the enchanting other [figure in Greek mythology]) has spoken that one's choice can include more than one's own self interest. "Orpheus" has revealed Paradise, a Paradise apart from one's autonomy and plans for control, a Paradise in which one is radically dependent. We cannot understand why something so opposed to selfishness can bring us joy. We fear to lose the Paradise [just as we once feared] to lose the world we can control. But if we give priority to the enchantment, then the moment is religious — no matter who the "Orpheus" is. Religion is a surrender of the self to the One whose words bring us Paradise. (p. 157)
You start, in other words, with yourself (stage one). An enchanting Word at some point leads you through a dark night of the senses into the light of a higher world beyond this one, a Paradise of silent melting, hopefully, into Pure Being (stage two). You presently return to yourself, however, after a dark night of the soul erodes the permanency of your joyful submission to Immaterial Being (stage three). You arrive right back where you started, but with a twist. You've been changed inalterably. Your orientation is now spiritual — not selfish, not religious, but spiritual. You can speak to, and with, God. Moreover, you can make choices out of that dialogue.
In fact, you have to make such choices. "A spirit," writes King (p. 158), "is an unsteady alliance of both worlds, enchantment and earth; it is the unity formed of the enchanting other and the earthen self, the Word and the World." Only by making choices can you steady that "unsteady alliance."
"Then one asks oneself what one will allow the [former] enchantment to mean," King says. It certainly appeared to be blissful, eternal love, at first, but now that particular honeymoon is over and it's time for the marriage proper to begin. Marriage needs to be a dialogue, a matter of making all the hard and easy choices together.
As with earthly marriage, so with the life of the spirit. After the enchantment of the honeymoon, after the dark night of the soul, there comes a new spiritual life of intercourse: communion and dialogue with God.
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