Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and author, explored First Person mysteries when he researched the Patristic writers call “Desert Fathers” and people such as Evagrius Ponticus (345-399 A.D.) Evagrius a Christian monk had developed the apophatic (without images) theme in his focus on the practice of prayer. He was familiar with Gregory of Nyssa’s writings, and having spent a lot of time in silence himself, provided his readers with a detailed map of spiritual perception and practice. Evagrius wrote for people who felt drawn to the gnophos (Greek: darkness) of God, and he felt that the only way to dwell inwardly with the transcendent, invisible Creator was to take up an ascetical practice he called praktike. Praktike requires a deep basic intention to love God and to open oneself to God’s ever-present eternal love. Passions, ambitions, greed, self-love and attachment to sensations, pleasures, thoughts and material things get in the way. One must prune away everything that is non-essential and release every attachment that is a barrier to God’s eternal Love.

Evagrius was a kind of early Christian shaman psychologist. In his shaman-self he perceived the world as populated by good and evil forces and presences. But like a Buddhist meditator or post-modern psychologist, he paid attention to how specific thoughts and feelings might combine to shut us out of fruitful solitude and rewarding relationships. For example, entertaining certain thoughts–even about religious matters–can actually be mere entertainment, a waste of our precious time. Also, allowing self-centered thoughts to linger in oneself is like giving free rein to a scorpion in our hearts. The antidote for these diversions is conscious and deliberate attention and intention, one moment at a time. These qualitative qualities of mind and heart are like a fire that melts the congealed wax of evil, wayward and troublesome thoughts. 1

Evagrius is one of the first Christian writers to explore the consciousness of the First Person. He called this the contemplative way of God’s “dark” presence theologia. He is one of the first mystical theologians, and his naming of the stages of ascetic spiritual development–purgative, illuminative and unitive–have been used by generations of Christian seekers. In the purgative stage we become aware of, and let go of, our attachments to self-centered images, ideas, emotions, thoughts, and memories that are anchored in the material, chronological world. As we do this unburdening, God partners with us to cleanse the amphitheater of our consciousness, restoring us to what some Zen teachers might call “your face before you were born.” In this aspect of spiritual experience we are empty of the social identity (our primordial “face”) that we’ve fashioned in our social relationships and jobs. We might say that when we glimpse our pre-born face we exist in an empty and placeless place that resonates with God’s “identity” before the Big Bang. This is a holy Nowhere that Meister Eckhart called the Godhead (German: Gottheit), and Thomas Merton called the virgin point (French: le point vierge). We are then illumined with love, in an enlightening way of living.

In the purgative stage of spiritual practice, one’s self-centered experience (packages of intertwined thoughts, opinions, emotions, and sensations), begins to dissolve. In the illuminative stage an inner light radiates throughout one’s experience—no matter if one is aware of pleasant or painful things. Now, one perceives a Divine Presence in every detail of one’s life: in relationships, in silence, in nature, in driving and in the washing of dishes. It is as if all objects of awareness become transparent to divinity. This way of perception sees external things mindfully and more accurately. The Divine Presence itself, however, can never be an object of our awareness. Rather, in this ongoing illuminative stage of life, we ourselves are fundamentally transformed. The Presence we perceive becomes something that we are. And finally, in the unitive stage we enter into the dark cloud of unknowing in a trinitarian way, where we see that we both are, and are not, the other. As in the Holy Trinity, where each “Person both is, and is not,” the other. One intuitively perceives the Infinite in every finite moment; as William Blake exclaimed in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” In our post-modern age we might say that our “cavern” is our ego-self. As we become more and more released from our intellectual theories and our opinions, we become free of this ego-self, but we do not escape altogether into the infinite beyond the atmosphere of our ego-self. We are always living in both chronological time and eternal time.

Now, in the unitive stage of our lives, God can move freely throughout our everyday reality, darkly illuminating our senses and reason, healing us and touching others. On the intellectual level, this practice and discipline is called “negative theology,” which indicates special attention to what God is not: God is not this and not that because God is the holy Source of all thises and thats. In Hinduism and in particular Jnana Yoga and Advaita Vedanta one finds a similar teaching called neti neti (Sanskrit: not this and not that).

What Evagrius and his mentor, Origen (185-254 C.E.), taught us is that when we follow this ascetic path of purgation, watchfulness and devotion, God becomes gradually more knowable, but not in a cognitive, objective way. This is a wholly different kind of knowing because what is being known is beyond our thoughts, concepts, images, memories and imagination. It is the deep background of all these things. For Evagrius, the knowledge of God is a wholly luminous “infinite ignorance,” an embracing amorphia (Greek: formlessness) within and beyond our ordinary lives. Evagrius–and his Orthodox followers–would call this gradual awakening to a new, transcendent knowing a process of divinization (theosis). He would say that at birth we are already manifesting the image of God. But as we grow into our maturity, we must make our own efforts as free beings who choose to surrender to God. In these efforts we are attaining to the likeness of God, manifesting God’s grace and love in everything that we are and do (Genesis 1:26-27).

The path of theosis is central to what we call in My Dear Far-Nearness, First Person awareness; and theosis is the invisible foundation of trinitarian consciousness . But again, this is a kind of knowing that moves beyond knowing about something. This kind of knowing is a subtle or tacit way of knowing. The Holy Trinity is not an object in our cognitive inner space, and not anything out there that we can see, hear or touch objectively. It is not a noun, and it is not three separate beings. The Holy Trinity is a Presence within our presence, a way of being and a consciousness that we are being invited into, in each moment. It is a knowing that can only be obtained by an intellectual unknowing, and a knowing of the heart. And because the emphasis is on purging ourselves of all attachments and becoming free of self centered perception, we can only “know” the Trinity by unknowing while we are loving ourselves, others, and God. We must become mystery in order to discover ultimate Mystery of the First Person.

We are not who we thought we were when we began this journey into God. We are becoming unknowable to ourselves, and it is only from this “un-place” within us that we can perceive the unknowability of the One who creates us. This is the practice of the First Person of the Trinity.

1 Jeremy Driscoll, trans., “Evagrius Ponticus: Ad Monachos,” (New York: The Newman Press, 2003), pp. 49 – 53.