Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Italian Dominican friar and priest, 1225–1274) thought that we can only perceive something outside us when something within us resonates with it and awakens it. We can only see red because redness is already within us. I trust that they would have said–we can only glimpse eternity, because eternity is within us, and that we can only perceive the Holy Trinity, because the three “Persons” of the Trinity are within us as three aspects of our consciousness. As the medieval mystic, Meister, often wrote, “the eye with which I see God, is the eye with which God sees me.” We live within a profound, dynamic reciprocity of knowing between what is inside of us and what is outside. The mystery of the Holy Trinity within us perceives the Holy Trinity that transcends us, and the transcendent Trinity is always communicating with us. The German philosopher, Martin Heidegger likened this reciprocity as a kind of tuning. He used the German word, Stimmung, whereby the tuner (der Bestimmende) and the tuned (der Bestimmte) are made equal. Here in our First Person reflection, we might say that when we realize our sacred unknownness, we are attuned to the infinite Presence of Creator. The German theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar (1905-1988) wrote that when we act in the world from this deep and subtle place within us, we are expressing Gestimmtheit (our attunedness to the Sacred).
Christians say that the Holy Three are both distinct and One–One in Three and Three in One. Christian contemplatives have different ways of navigating this paradox. In the era of the Nicene Creed (4th-5th centuries), theologians understood the Holy Trinity to be a perichoresis (Greek: aperikhōrēsis), a kind of dance. Each mystic we explore on this website seems to to have a favorite entry point into the whole of the Trinitarian dance. One can enter into the dimension of Creator, Christ, or Holy Spirit. But since each Person of the Trinity is a microcosm of all three, it is possible to learn something of the whole by lingering on any one of the Persons. Gregory of Nyssa (372-394 A.D.) was a Christian scholar and mystic who felt drawn to the First Person of the Trinity, our Creator. Mystics like Gregory will say that our doorway to Creator is always Now. We can’t think our way into sacred, transcendent Mystery. Rather, we must be silent and open, and let ourselves be found by Mystery. Dwelling in the First Person consciousness of Presence and Mystery brings deep, insightful attunement (German Gestimmtheit) with all aspects of awareness that arise in Second and Third Person awareness.
Being available for any of the sacred Three dimensions of awareness rests on a person’s desire to have a direct experience of God, especially in silence and solitude. Once we’ve tasted sacred awareness in silence, we can be attuned to sacrality everywhere and at every moment of chronological time. In general, contemplatives are comfortable with God’s ultimate unknowability, describing it as the apophatic path, (Greek: “without images or concepts”) and as via negativa (Latin: emphasizing what God is not). Christian contemplatives assume that to understand the meaning of First Person in intellectual language, one must be in the consciousness of the First Person. To “know” the Unknowable, one must be unknowable, even to oneself. This cannot be a merely theological idea. It must be a real experience, but one that transcends human reason, logic and language. In 21st century psychological language we might say that dwelling in First Person awareness requires us to surrender our chronologically constituted ego self–the everyday self that we need to navigate our jobs, families, and communities. Our ego-ground in linear time is absolutely important but now the ultimate ground of our knowing, perceiving, and awareness is invisible, even to us.
Gregory of Nyssa was an early Christian lover of the First Person. He was one of the Cappadocian Fathers along with Basil of Caesarea (330-379 A.D.) and Gregory of Nazianzus (320-389 A.D.). Together, they are seen as exemplars of Eastern Christian mysticism and as the great mystical theologians of the Patristic Age, which runs from the time of Jesus to either the 5th or the 8th centuries–that time during which the basic beliefs, doctrines and creeds of the Christian tradition were being formed. Gregory of Nyssa influenced all the Patristic writers who succeeded him. He read both Hebrew and Christian scriptures as stories about the spiritual journey into the Source, which he called the Godhead. For him, as for most Christian mystics, the Godhead (First Person) can only be “known” by grounding oneself in silence and navigating one’s presence between and beneath all thoughts and images. See, for example, this classic text by an Anglican monk, William Johnston, ed. The Cloud of Unknowing (14th c.) New York: Doubleday, 1973, 1996.
One might say that for Gregory, Scripture is everyone’s root story, a universal story, writ large and all inclusive–and that the words and stories are pointing to a deep, transcendent reality that pervades our everyday reality. Gregory believed that everyone’s consciousness emerges into the cosmos from the First Person of the Trinity. He believed that this entry requires a spiritual discipline that brings one into that same dark cloud in which Moses encountered God. This word, cloud, appears scores of times in the initial five books of Hebrew scripture (the Pentateuch). Gregory did not think that the “thick darkness” of God (Greek: gnophos) is a magical, fairy tale sort of state that only special people in primitive times have. But it is possible to read Gregory in our 21st century worldview, discerning marks of a spiritual developmental path that anyone can travel. He read the pilgrimage of Moses as a movement from the revelation of light (Greek: phos) to the darkness of the cloud (nephele), and beyond that to the thick darkness (gnophos) “where God dwells”. Gregory felt that anyone who is serious and sincere about getting to the bottom of ultimate truth in this life, can follow the lead of Moses into the holy Cloud of Unknowing, a sacred Cloud that seems dark to one’s reason. This experience is the dark mystery of Creator. This “darkness” is the spaciousness of pure awareness, the amphitheater in which all our memories, thoughts, plans, sensations and worries travel. It is difficult for us in the 21st century, to experience this darkness directly because our culture moves along quickly and our minds are what Buddhists call “a tree full of monkeys”. First Person awareness requires us to detach from the tree of chattering monkeys, to witness thinking without being “owned” by our thinking. And the only way to do this is to sit still and notice the “emptiness” between, around, and beneath our thinking. We are always thinking and inwardly creating stories about our experience, but it is also possible to witness our thinking without being attached to it. The infinite Mystery of Creator dwells in this spaciousness that is unattached to all concepts and stories about our reality.
Among ancient theologians, some had described the Christian journey as a descent into holy darkness, and some as an ascent into holy light. Gregory embraced the paradox, that a descent into unknowing appears to our intellect as nothing at all, but still, one that is infused with the light of infinite Love. When we first read the Gospel stories about Jesus, we may experience an increasing clarity, hope and illumination, but then all rational clarity dissolves in later stages where our new way of knowing is fully lit by the invisible light of eternal Love. The journey begins when we notice that we long for an intimate relationship with God, one that provides support and accurate guidance into our everyday reality, a “place” where our everyday lives and eternity meet. Reason dissolves and one finds oneself walking as if on a path of shadows in a vast forest–all the while longing for a complete relationship with the light which is only glimpsed through the trees. For Gregory, every sincere, faithful and disciplined lover of God eventually descends into this boundless Mystery, and discovers there a Love that eludes control by one’s narratives about reality, or by one’s personal will. This Love can’t be controlled or figured out, and it transfigures one’s pain and the suffering of the world: Gregory writes,
For having left behind all that appears, not only what the senses perceive, but also what the intelligence believes it sees, it penetrates into the invisible and incomprehensible, and there sees God. . . ‘When the veil of despair has thus been taken away, and she sees the beauty of the beloved defying all hope and all description . . .she is seized with an even more vehement desire, because she has received the chosen arrow of God in herself, and her heart has been wounded by the barb of faith, she has been mortally wounded by the arrow of love.’ 1
In Gregory’s time, this contemplative journey was called in Greek, theoria, a journey where “The Lord does not say it is blessed to know something about God, but to have God present within oneself.” 2
Thus, for Gregory, there is an emotional dimension to this descent, and the darkness that one discovers in contemplative prayer is suffused with love, but always coming to us through the portal of suffering–which is why Gregory refers to “the arrow of God.” As we detach from our repetitive thoughts and stories about reality, we enter the infinite cathedral of Presence, one that can be scary at first, But with practice we discover that this Presence is suffused with Love that continually shines, even as we navigate through our suffering and losses. Being available for this descent one must set aside time each day for silent meditation. We cannot control what arises within us when we are silent. A complete surrender is required.
In silence, traumatic experiences from childhood, teen years, and early adulthood may arise and call us to pay attention, and perhaps seek help from a therapist or counselor. We must remember that Gregory lived in a pre-therapeutic and pre-scientific time, but we can adjust for such lacunae (Latin: pit or hole) in his worldview. When we come to terms with trauma and began to feel healed and whole, Experiences of silence gradually accumulate in the soul, drawing one’s awareness ever more deeply into ultimate mystery, the First Person. Because it is only when we separate ourselves from the cacophonous images, thoughts and painful memories of social life, and the market square of our busy minds, that we can actually perceive the underlying pregnant and holy darkness that is the backdrop of all our thinking, feeling, perceiving, remembering and planning. Very often, silence helps us to notice Walt Whitman’s realization in his Song of Myself, 51:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
As persons, we are dynamic, complicated beings, including aspects that are conscious and those that are unconscious. Here in the 21st century we learn from psychological explorations like Internal Family Systems, that we contain many “parts.” Quite often, we can only notice and explore these multitudes and parts if we stop and pay attention in silence. Contemplative prayer that seeks the First Person drops beneath thinking, verbal prayer and the reading of Scripture, all the while honoring all our parts and inner voices, and also honoring the Gospels and God without literally thinking about them. When our soul has gathered itself in the presence of the Christ story in silence, it plays in the background of awareness as the invisible, sacred background of everything we are and do. Here in the 21st century, we honor the scientific story of reality, and from this perspective we can say that the invisible First Person consciousness emerges from the same silence that existed before creation–before the Big Bang and before we were born–and will exist forever. The great Jewish-Christian philosopher, Max Picard, explores this endless silence in his “The World of Silence.” Many Christian mystics use the name “Godhead” for this blessed Infinite Silencee which has born us into our brief and precious mortal lives. It is the holy “Nothing” that is beneath and between our thoughts, memories and emotions, but it is also a “Something” or a “Someone” that is understood to be God’s Presence, and can be addressed as “You.”
1 Quoted in Michael Cox, Handbook of Christian Spirituality, p. 70.
2 Louth, Andrew. The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys. Clarendon Press: Oxford, England, 1981, pp. 87 and 91.