Now that we’ve traced the history of the great dualist heresy from its birth to its death, it’s reasonable to ask how much of the Gnostic impulse survived within mainstream Christianity during the same period. The answer is, surprisingly, a great deal. The Catholic and Orthodox churches had no patience for some of the central ideas of the old Gnostics, especially that the God of the Old Testament was an inferior deity and that the world was his misshapen spawn. And yet some of the main Gnostic themes persisted—sometimes as direct survivals of the Gnostic schools, but also as elements of the universal esoteric doctrine without which no religion can long survive.
Prime among these was the idea of a hierarchy of unseen entities that stand between corporeal reality and the absoluteness of God himself. Many spiritual works characterize these figures as equivocal and possibly hostile toward humanity. An early text known as the First Book of Enoch expands upon the Genesis account that speaks of “the sons of God” who married “the daughters of men” (Gen. 6:2). In 1 Enoch, these sons of God, or “angels,” are highly ambiguous. They do teach the human race useful arts, but they are motivated by lust for the “beautiful and comely daughters” of men, and when they marry them, they beget “great giants,…who consumed all the acquisitions of men.”1 Inspired in part by such texts, the Gnostics saw these dark angels as the archons—the forces of spiritual bondage that bar the way to illumination. Catholic and Orthodox Christianity often retained very similar systems, but they transmuted the archons from evil cosmic overlords into angels and archangels who held their appointed places in the heavenly hierarchy.
The Celestial Order of Dionysius
Among the most influential portraits of the heavenly hierarchy was the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite. The original Dionysius was a convert of Paul’s (Acts 17:34), but Paul’s Dionysius did not write this treatise, which was probably the work of an anonymous sixth-century Greek theologian. Nonetheless, I shall call him by this name, since we know him by no other. Dionysius portrays nine orders of heavenly beings, arranged in three triads: the Thrones, Cherubim, and Seraphim at the top; the Powers, Virtues, and Dominions in the middle; and the Angels, Archangels, and Principalities at the bottom.
It’s not clear where Dionysius got this system, which he himself seems to understand only imperfectly at times. But he does in his way represent a continuation of the Gnostic legacy as it would be digested by orthodox Christianity. His use of this legacy did much to shape the medieval Christian worldview.
To take a reasonably simple example, Dionysius lists two orders of these divine beings as Principalities and Powers. This echoes a verse I’ve already quoted, Eph. 6:12: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (cf. Rom. 8:38; Eph. 3:10; Col. 1:16, 2:15). But there is a big difference between this verse and Dionysius’s system. In Ephesians, the “principalities and powers” are by no means friendly to the Christian. They are equated with “spiritual wickedness in high places.”
Dionysius sees them in a far more positive light. “The name of the celestial Principalities signifies their Godlike princeliness and authoritativeness in an Order which is holy and most fitting.” Similarly, the Powers are so called because they lead those below “to the Supreme Power which is the Source of Power.”2 For Dionysius, the orders of angels do not oppose spiritual ascent but facilitate it.
Ephesians describes “principalities and powers” in a way that helped inspire the Gnostic idea of the archons. But for Dionysius, these orders are holy and beneficent and lead the soul toward God. In this case, the heretics may have been closer to the meaning of scripture than the orthodox. This is not the only case in which orthodox Christianity would adopt a teaching that is more or less explicitly contradicted by its own sacred scripture.
Dionysius’s celestial schema would be copied down through the centuries in Christianity. The most famous use of it appears in Dante’s Paradiso, which describes heaven as a series of concentric spheres surrounding the earth. Each sphere is governed by a planet, and each is associated with a particular one of Dionysius’s orders (the Principalities are in the sphere of Venus, the Powers in the sphere of the sun). Dante pays tribute to Dionysius by putting these words into the mouth of Beatrice, his guide to heaven:
And Dionysius with such desire
Set himself to contemplating these orders
That he named and distinguished them as I do.3
Following Dionysius, Dante has transformed the forces of spiritual wickedness into guardians of the divine cosmos.
Gnosis and the Celts
If Dionysius was able to take the equivocal or malevolent spiritual powers of Paul and transform them into heavenly choirs, the Christianity of the Celts is often credited with doing the same for the natural realm. Anyone who has wandered through the British Isles has undoubtedly been struck by the terrain’s elusive magic. The restful yet startling greens of the verdure and the cold, dreamy grays of the skies and rocks all seem to hint at an eerie otherworld concealed behind the façade of substantiality. It’s easy to see how this land could inspire rich fancies of the imagination.
Among the most vibrant products of this imagination is the history of these isles. The Irish spoke of the Tuátha De’ Danann, a mysterious race of supernatural beings who inhabited their country before the Celts. The Irish, Welsh, and Gauls devised intricate genealogies for their kings and nobles, whose ancestry they traced to a strange mélange of biblical patriarchs and Greek and Roman heroes. The medieval era produced the great Arthurian romances, which painted an idealized yet tragic picture around a legendary Romano-British chieftain. More recently, this powerful force of imagination has conjured up a past for Celtic Christianity that has more to do with fantasy than with reality.
By this view, Celtic Christianity was originally independent of the Church of Rome. This native-born Celtic Christianity fostered a holistic worldview that combined Christian teachings of love and compassion with reverence and awe for nature. Rather than exterminating the old pagan religion, this Celtic Christianity made a home for it, and even absorbed much of the wisdom of the Druids, the pre-Christian sages of the Celtic world. Only with the Synod of Whitby in 664, an assembly of churchmen from Northumbria, was the Roman hierarchy able to put its foot on the neck of this indigenous Christianity.
How much of this portrait of Celtic Christianity is accurate? To find out in more detail, a brief historical sketch is in order. Britain was conquered by the Roman Empire in 43 A.D., and Christianity came to the island over the next few centuries along with the other accouterments of Roman civilization. A legend dating at least as far back as the thirteenth century says that Joseph of Arimathea, who in the Gospels gave his tomb over for the use of Christ’s body, came to Glastonbury in 63 A.D. and founded the first Christian church in Britain. But as the Western Roman Empire collapsed at the beginning of the fifth century, Rome had to withdraw its legions. Britain was overrun by the pagan Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who would not be converted to Christianity till the seventh century.
Ireland’s acceptance of Christianity is generally dated from 431 A.D., with the coming of one Palladius as the “first bishop of the Irish believing in Christ.” Patrick, a Romano-British missionary who would become the island’s patron saint, arrived soon thereafter. The process of conversion, which took place over the next two centuries, was long, slow, and mainly peaceful. The Christian faith was not imposed on Ireland by the Roman Empire, which never ruled the island. As a result, the Irish were able to create a much more serene and eclectic merger of their new faith with the old ways than we see in much of Europe. As John Carey, a scholar of Old Irish, points out:
Exactly how, and by what stages, the old beliefs gave way to the new is probably something we shall never know. But we can at least see the outcome in the literature of the eighth century and later: a culture whose Christian faith found room for a keen interest in the pagan past, and was able to tolerate survivals that would elsewhere have been viewed with suspicion if not rejected out of hand.4
The Irish culture of the Dark Ages—ages that were dark everywhere in Western Europe except for Ireland—displayed an unusual thirst for learning. In addition to collecting the lore of their own rich pre-Christian heritage, the Irish monks amassed manuscripts from all over Europe, including texts that were elsewhere neglected or destroyed as heretical. In the words of a recent bestseller, this is “how the Irish saved civilization.”
This omnivorous love of knowledge fertilized Irish Christianity in sometimes unusual ways. John Carey analyzes a ninth-century Irish treatise, In Tenga Bithnua (The Ever-New Tongue), in which the apostle Philip describes “twelve plains beneath the edges of the world” that the sun illumines every night in its journey under the earth. Remarkably, the closest parallels to this passage are found in Egyptian funerary texts from the New Kingdom (1570–1070 B.C.), which give similar descriptions of the twelve chambers the sun visits in its nightly journey. Carey suggests that this motif may have come to Ireland through the intermediary of a now-lost Apocalypse of Philip, written in Egypt and read in Gnostic circles. (Philip was, along with Thomas, the apostle most often associated with Gnosticism.) The text would have been brought to Ireland by way of Spain in the seventh century.5
None of this, of course, implies that Irish Christianity was ultimately Gnostic, or even particularly heterodox. In fact, as Ian Bradley points out in Celtic Christianity, the “romantic view of Celtic Christianity as a gentle, anarchic, deeply spiritual movement crushed by the authoritarian weight of Roman bureaucracy and imperialism” is undoubtedly exaggerated.6 Bradley goes on to note that the importance of the Synod of Whitby, at which this crushing supposedly took place, is also overblown. The synod was convened to regularize liturgical practice in the British church, especially the method for calculating the date of Easter, which the Celtic churches had been doing differently from Rome. Carey offers a similar opinion: at Whitby, “what was at stake was not a matter of doctrine so much as a conflict between local tradition on the one hand and a push for uniformity of practice on the other.” Some thirty years earlier, a convention of Irish bishops had already voted to use the Roman method of dating.7
There is something in the Celtic world that seems to evoke the wistful side of human nature. As early as the seventh and eighth centuries, Irish monks were pining for the Golden Age of the saints who had brought the faith to their shores. In later centuries, this half-hidden Celtic heritage would be invoked again and again by people who wished for a return to a simpler, purer, more mystical faith, for a greater sense of the wonder of God’s creation and a more vivid experience of the other dimensions that lie beyond our mundane realm. That the world that embodied these ideals existed partly in the past, partly in the imagination should not blind us to their sublimity.
The Orthodox Science of Consciousness
The leitmotif of Egypt continues to recur throughout this narrative, sometimes as the dominant note, sometimes as a faint echo. This is not because of any special pleading on my part. It is simply because so many mystical currents in Christianity can be traced back to this memorious country.
Of these, by far the greatest is the hesychast tradition in Eastern Orthodoxy. The word hesychast derives from the Greek hesychia, or “stillness,” referring to the state of inner silence that was the goal of this practice. Hesychasm, which is still practiced today, is one of the few forms of esoteric Christianity that can rival the great systems of Hinduism and Buddhism in subtlety and depth.
Hesychasm has its roots in the spiritual practice of the Desert Fathers, a collection of seekers and hermits who began to repair to the wilderness of Egypt in the third century. The founder of the movement is reputed to have been a holy man named Antony, who was born about the middle of the third century and withdrew from the world around 270. His devotion and asceticism soon became a matter of legend. He was also the founder of semieremetic monasticism, in which the monks dwelled separately in huts and were generally left to their own devices, meeting only for common worship. (Cenobitic monasticism, in which monks live and pray in communities, dates from slightly later.)
Antony’s ascetic practices attracted the attention of the Evil One. According to the Life of St. Antony by the Church Father Athanasius, the devil first sought to derail him from his spiritual practice by various blandishments. One night “the devil, unhappy wight, even took upon him the shape of a woman and imitated all her acts simply to beguile Antony.” Antony resisted, so the devil made another assault: “Coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. For he affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could ever have caused him such torment.”8 In the end, of course, Antony is victorious, and his legend proved to be extremely fertile ground for artistic inspiration. Countless paintings and prints have depicted his sufferings at the hands of infernal spirits, and it even furnished the theme for Gustave Flaubert’s novel The Temptation of St. Anthony.
Athanasius’s account, though written soon after Antony’s death around 356–57 (Antony apparently lived to age 105), partakes enough of hagiography to raise doubts about its truth. But whether or not Antony really had to suffer the demonic assaults so luridly described by Athanasius, his story came to symbolize a major theme of the hesychastic tradition—the liberation of human consciousness from its own desires and terrors.
This tradition began to coalesce in Egypt and Palestine in Antony’s time and thereafter, when monks such as Evagrius the Solitary began to set down teachings of practical mysticism. In the fifth century, John Cassian, a disciple of Evagrius, brought some of these teachings to the West. Here they would inspire the formation of the great monasteries that served as the bedrock of medieval civilization.
When Egypt and Palestine fell to the Arabs in the seventh century, the center of Orthodox spirituality shifted to the Byzantine Empire, then consisting chiefly of Greece and present-day Turkey. By the ninth century, monks were settling on Mount Athos, a rocky offshoot of the Chalcidice (Halhidiki) Peninsula in northern Greece. In 1060, the Byzantine emperor issued an edict prohibiting women from the Holy Mountain, as it came to be called. Even female animals were forbidden (except for cats, which were useful for controlling the rat population). To this day Athos, an all-male enclave of monks (now numbering around 1,400) remains the center of Orthodox monastic life.
In the eighteenth century, a monk named Nicodimos of the Holy Mountain, along with another monk named Makarios, compiled an extensive anthology of hesychast spirituality called the Philokalia (the name means “love of the good” or “love of the beautiful” in Greek). It includes texts dating from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. Its five volumes (in modern editions) provide a succinct but comprehensive summary of the hesychastic way.
The spirituality of the Philokalia focuses on the liberation of something called the nous from passions and distractions. The exact nature of this nous has often been obscured by the words chosen to translate the term. The standard—indeed only—English version of the Philokalia renders it as “intellect.” But the nous has very little to do with the intellect in the modern sense. The translators admit as much. Their glossary defines the term as “the highest faculty in man, through which—provided it is purified—he knows God…. The intellect…understands divine truth by means of immediate experience, intuition or ‘simple cognition.’”9 But this isn’t terribly helpful either. If the intellect “understands divine truth by means of immediate experience,” why does it need to be purified?
In fact the spirituality of the Philokalia is much easier to understand if we translate the Greek nous as “consciousness”—a use that is perfectly congruent with the meaning of this word in other Greek authors, including Plato and his school. This translation enables us to see the hesychastic path much more clearly. The nous is the consciousness that dwells “in the depths of the soul” it is the “eye of the heart.”10 (People in those times experienced consciousness as residing in the heart rather than in the head.) It can be identified with what I have called the Self or the “true I.” In its unpurified—that is, its ordinary—state, this consciousness is pulled and torn by any number of conflicting desires, thoughts, and emotions. The task of the spiritual aspirant is to liberate the nous from these “passions” so that it can rest in hesychia, or serenity. At that point it can experience the “Uncreated Light” that is of the essence of God himself. As Evagrius the Solitary writes, “He who loves God is always communing with Him as his Father, repulsing every impassioned thought.”11
The authors of the Philokalia emphasize that this path is not an easy one. The “enemy”—the devil—is constantly lying in wait to ensnare the monk. The latter must maintain a constant inner watchfulness against the wiles of the enemy and his demonic minions. This watchfulness cannot be allowed to slip for even a short time, for a respite from the assault simply means that the enemy has temporarily withdrawn in order to regroup his forces.
The Philokalia mitigates this dismal outlook by reminding aspirants of the delights of spiritual knowledge, but at first one cannot entirely trust even in joy. “Initiatory joy is one thing, the joy of perfection another. The first is not exempt from fantasy, while the second has the strength of humility. Between the two joys comes a ‘godly sorrow’ (1 Cor. 7:10) and active tears.”12
For all its austerity, the Philokalia displays a profound understanding of human psychology. In its ordinary state, the mind, constantly pulled in many directions by all sorts of desires and grievances, knows no peace. It can never come to peace merely by satisfying its urges, because this is never going to be entirely feasible; and even if one urge is satisfied, another will soon come to take its place. Peace of mind comes from detaching oneself from these passions and unifying the consciousness by centering it on God. This is the “unceasing prayer” of which the hesychasts speak.
One striking aspect of hesychast psychology is that it constantly portrays as external what we usually regard as internal. Thoughts, feelings, and desires are impulses sent by the devil. Even those that are self-created (the technical term for such creations is logismoi, “thoughts”) often have a quasi-autonomous life of their own. The story of the demonic attacks on Antony suggests that they can even have palpable physical effects.
In enumerating the sins of which the monk should beware, the authors of the Philokalia provide a compendious list of the weaknesses and vices of humankind. Above them all is the demon of sexual desire, which “begins to trouble man from the time of his youth,” as John Cassian writes. “This harsh struggle has to be fought in both body and soul, and not simply in the soul, as is the case with other faults.”13
It stands to reason that if one is holding out a life of perfect chastity—in thought as well as in deed—as an ideal for oneself, such a goal would be resisted by a large and powerful part of one’s own nature. But why should sexuality be so bad? As we have seen, this is a view that was as predominant in heterodox as in orthodox Christianity. Why does the tradition in all its forms so often regard even sexuality in marriage as a regrettable concession to human weakness?
This question is rarely addressed in any kind of serious way, even today. Critics of the Christian attitude customarily dismiss it merely as a case of compulsive guilt or hatred of the body. But this does not take us much closer to understanding.
The almost automatic hatred of sexuality present in Christianity and in certain other traditions (many forms of Hinduism and Buddhism, for example) may stem from a misunderstanding of the human sexual impulse. By this view, sex is meant for reproduction; any other use of it is aberrant and sinful. But this overlooks the fact that sexuality seems to have a broader role in human life than it does in many species.14 Humans do not rut, they do not have mating seasons, women do not go into heat. Such biological strategies would suffice if sex were merely necessary for reproduction. But humans seem to live naturally, or at any rate ordinarily, in a state of low-grade sexual arousal and find it necessary to channel this energy into any number of interests, both sexual and nonsexual. While even those who aren’t monks may often find this inconvenient, it seems to be deeply built into our natures. If one is unaware of this fact—or regards it as a consequence of fallenness and sin—one could easily regard sexuality as a snare laid in one’s path by the devil.
While it’s apparently possible to cut off one’s sexual urges, the testimony of monks from all sects and eras indicates that this is a long, difficult, and unpleasant process. Even if it does end in the unutterable experience of the Uncreated Light, it may not be feasible for most people. And this is a key fact to remember about hesychasm. Above all, it is a way for monks. The directions in these texts—which are specific, detailed, and insightful—are meant not for people living in the maelstrom of ordinary life but for recluses sequestered in the deserts of Egypt or on the Holy Mountain. Quite possibly many masters of hesychasm would have said these practices are not even to be attempted while one is immersed in this world.
The reader may wonder why such a long discussion of hesychasm should appear in a work about the Gnostic heritage. Certainly the authors of the Philokalia—who were all strictly Orthodox—would have repudiated the slightest suggestion that their work smacked of Gnosticism. Nevertheless, some of the most prominent aspects of this tradition bear a strong resemblance to Gnostic thought and practice. In the first place, there is the emphasis on gnosis—here described as a turning of the nous toward the Uncreated Light—as the central focus of the spiritual path. In the second place, the hesychast mystics sometimes seem to resemble the Gnostics in their disgust with the world. While the hesychasts follow Orthodox teaching in denying that the body and the physical world are the handiwork of a degenerate god, in practice their attitude often comes very close. The devil is, after all, the “god of this world.”
Did the Gnostics—who, as we have seen, were centered in Egypt—directly influence the Desert Fathers and their spiritual heirs? That would be extremely difficult to prove. Any evidence in favor of this view would have been destroyed long ago. Or is this curious similarity simply another instance of the maxim that we become what we oppose? Possibly. I myself lean toward a third option: that the Gnostics and the hesychasts both embodied a certain attitude toward reality. If one has a strong enough sense of a world beyond, a world that is finer and purer than our own, the world before our eyes will seem like a distraction or a trap. This insight may even point to the inner meaning of Christ’s utterance: “The kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field: the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field” (Matt. 13:44).
The Hesychast Controversy
Although they were never branded as heretics, at one point the hesychasts had to defend themselves in the court of ecclesiastical opinion. This occurred in the early fourteenth century, when Western theology made its way to Eastern Orthodoxy in the person of one Barlaam of Calabria. Although he was both Greek and Orthodox, Barlaam had studied in the West and had been influenced by Scholastic philosophy, which was beginning to dominate Catholic thought. In the 1330s, Barlaam was appointed to a post at the University of Constantinople. Apparently motivated by a mixture of careerism and an appetite for polemic, he decided to make a name for himself by pointing out the theological errors of the hesychasts. The chief of these, in Barlaam’s view, had to do with the substance known as the Uncreated Light.
The Uncreated Light, also called the “Light of Tabor,” holds a crucial place in Orthodox theology. It is considered to be an “energy” of God—that is to say, something that proceeds directly from his essence. It is an emanation of God rather than a creation; hence its name. By experiencing the Uncreated Light, the hesychasts seemed to be claiming to experience God himself.
This hit a sore spot, not only with the fastidious Barlaam, but with much of the Christian tradition. More, perhaps, than any other great world religion, Christianity has always insisted on the radical gulf that separates Creator from creature. A Hindu mystic, experiencing the ultimate ground of being, might be moved to exclaim, “I am that,” but no Christian—in any event, no orthodox Christian—could permit herself to do this. The hesychasts were not making any such claim. But even their insistence that they were experiencing the Uncreated Light was too much for Barlaam.
Barlaam’s training in the Scholasticism of the Western universities had taught him that God was not only radically different from the human creature but radically unknowable. Reason was the only means of knowledge, and reason could not give a mere human access to the divine dimensions. The only legitimate alternative was to learn about God indirectly, through rational investigation of his creation. For the hesychasts to claim experience of God through the Uncreated Light was, for Barlaam, a dangerous error.
To defend themselves against these charges, the Athonite monks chose the theologically ablest man among them: Gregory Palamas. Gregory wrote two works refuting Barlaam: the Hagiorite Tome, which was later incorporated into the Philokalia, 15 and The Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts. Both are honored as central texts of Orthodox mysticism.
The dispute quickly grew into a matter of general interest, as church and state in the Byzantine Empire were inextricably intertwined. Gregory and Barlaam met in public debate in 1341, from which Gregory emerged as the victor, chiefly by drawing a deft distinction between the essence of God and the energies of God: the mystic can experience the latter but not the former, maintaining the rigid divide between Creator and creature.
The defeated Barlaam eventually returned to Italy, where he converted to Catholicism; we catch a last glimpse of him serving as tutor in Greek to the poet Petrarch. This would not be the end of the struggle—Barlaam’s position would be taken up by a Bulgarian named Akindynus—and Gregory would be excommunicated and cast into prison in 1343. Eventually, however, the hesychast position won out. In 1347, Gregory was released and the charges of heresy dropped. Since 1351 his ideas have been accepted as part of the theology of the Orthodox Church.16
One more aspect of this controversy is worth mentioning, as it touches upon a central theme of the Gnostic heritage. Gregory’s Triads are a defense not only of hesychast theology but of hesychast practice. Hesychast monks rely upon a technique called the Prayer of the Heart, also known as the Jesus Prayer. This consists of repeating a single prayer over and over again in obedience to Paul’s injunction to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17). The earliest version of this prayer, cited by John Cassian, is taken from Ps. 70:1: “O God, make speed to save me; O Lord, make haste to help me.”17 A later version, which is the best known, is “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
In essence the practitioner repeats this prayer unceasingly as a form of meditation until it begins to root itself in the beating of the heart; hence its name. The hesychasts also used certain techniques of rhythmic breathing to aid them in their efforts. Their opponents argued that all this amounted to “introducing divine grace into themselves through their nostrils.”18 Moreover, rooting the prayer in the heart violated the essence of the spiritual path, which was to free the nous, the consciousness, from the body. As Gregory writes, “These people say, in effect, that we are wrong when we wish to enclose our nous within our body. Instead, they say, we must cast it out of our body. They strongly criticise some of our people, and write against them, under the pretext that our people encourage beginners to look into themselves and to introduce their nous into themselves by means of breathing practices.”19
As outlined in The Triads, hesychasm consists of freeing the nous from the passions and turning it toward God. Thus purified, it turns back toward to the body to become the master of the household that is the human being. As Gregory describes it:
This is how we turn against this “law of sin.” We expel it from the body, and instead we introduce supervision by the nous, and by this authority we bring each power of the psyche, and every member of the body which will respond to it, under the rule of the nous.
For the senses, we determine the object and the limits of their actions. This work of the law is called “self-control.”
For the passionate part of the psyche, we achieve the best state of being, which bears the name of “love.”
We also improve the rational part, by eliminating all that prevents the thoughts from turning towards God. That part of the law we name “watchfulness.”20
Gregory’s arguments reveal a crucial difference from the Gnostic impulse, which, as we have seen, emphasizes freeing the consciousness from the body. Hesychasm does not mean freeing the nous from the body as such, “since the body is not evil” rather, it aims at freeing the nous from the passions. Thus cleansed and redeemed, the nous is capable of governing the psyche and the body and sanctifying them in turn. As Gregory argues, this harmonizes with Orthodox teaching, which has always stressed that Christ himself proved the essential holiness of the flesh through the Incarnation. The Gnostics, by contrast, denied the holiness of the flesh. They also tended to deny the Incarnation through doctrines like Docetism.
And yet the emotional force of much Orthodox and Catholic mystical writing, which stresses the defilement of the flesh and the need to detach the mind from the world, often seems closer to the Gnostics than to Gregory. It’s paradoxical to consider that a quasi-Gnostic point of view—a radical refusal to associate the body with the spirit—was embraced by Barlaam, a defender of the Scholastic philosophy who eventually converted to Catholicism, while at the same time the Catholic Church was persecuting the Cathars in the West for holding remarkably similar opinions. But then the history of religion often reveals conflicting trends even in the same institution.
Meister Eckhart’s Defense
Hesychasm was saved for Orthodoxy not only by the theological genius of Gregory Palamas but by the subtlety and flexibility of Greek thought. By the fourteenth century, the Greek world had had a more or less unbroken philosophical tradition going back some nineteen hundred years. Much of this tradition, both pagan and Christian, was illumined by mystical insight. The Greek mind was thus well equipped to repel the assaults of the cumbrous Scholasticism of the West.
Mystics in the West were not so lucky, as we can see from the case of a man who was perhaps the greatest spiritual visionary of his time: Meister Eckhart.21 Eckhart was born around 1260 in Tambach, Germany; his father was the steward of a knight’s castle in the Thuringian forest. Around the age of fifteen, he entered a Dominican monastery and began the lengthy course of study required to join the order. He studied in Paris and Cologne, probably in the 1280s. We next hear of him in 1294, when he is described as “Brother Eckhart, Prior of Erfurt, Vicar of Thuringia.” His brief work The Talks of Instruction dates to this period.
Around the same time, the Dominicans sent him to Paris—then the center of Western learning—to debate with their archrivals, the Franciscans. He acquitted himself well enough that he was granted advanced degrees by the College of Paris, and he continued to rise in the Dominican Order. He occupied the Dominican chair for theology at Paris in 1302–03, and was asked back again in 1311–13 (a rare honor). By the time he was sixty, he had been appointed to the highly eminent post of professor at the college at Cologne. Most of his sermons, which contain the essence of his teaching, probably date from this period.
It was at this late point in his life that Eckhart was charged with heresy. His accusers were fellow Dominicans who went through his writings and drew up a list of the theological errors they contained. Eckhart was sincerely indignant at these charges—“I may err but I may not be a heretic—for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!” he replied. He insisted that he had made no errors but that if he had, he would recant them. He appealed his case to the pope, as was his right, and traveled to Avignon (then the seat of the papacy) to defend himself.
The Inquisition took several years to proceed with the inquiry. In February 1327, Eckhart was notified that his appeal to Avignon had been denied. This is the last we hear of him alive. In a bull of 1329 condemning Eckhart’s teaching, Pope John XXII speaks of him as dead. This was perhaps fortunate, because Eckhart would have been grieved to hear that he had been deceived “by the father of lies who often appears as an angel of light” into “sowing thorns and thistles among the faithful and even among the simple folk,” as the bull put it.
Why did the church condemn Eckhart? Returning from his Paris debate, he said, “When I preached at Paris, I said—and I regard it well said—that with all their science, those people at Paris are not able to discern what God is in the least of creatures—not even in a fly!”22 The statement is telling. In the first place, its tone reveals Eckhart’s character—blunt, plainspoken, but with an immeasurable amount of spiritual depth. In the second place, his remark that the learned doctors of Paris could not have said what God was even in a fly strikes at the heart of the controversy he provoked. In a way it was not that different from the dispute that divided Barlaam and Gregory.
One aspect of Eckhart’s theology that the churchmen found troubling was his tendency to speak of God as the being inherent in all living creatures (even, we may presume, a fly). At one point in his lengthy Defense, he has to explain the following statement: “My living is the being of God, or my life is the essence of God: whatever is God’s is whatever is mine.” Despite its profound mystical truth, such an utterance seemed to erase the line between creature and Creator that mainstream Christian theology has always taken such pains to maintain.
Similarly, Eckhart tended to blur the distinction between the Son of God in the sense of the unique Second Person of the Trinity and the Son of God that each of us, in our essence, truly is.
The Father…begets me as his Son and the same Son. All that God does is one; therefore he begets me as his Son without distinction…. For this reason, the heavenly Father is truly my Father, because I am his Son and from him I have all that I have, and because I am the same Son and not another, because the Father does only one thing, therefore he makes me his one Son without distinction. We are transformed and changed into him even as in the sacrament the bread is changed into the body of Christ; and however many loaves there may be, yet they become one body of Christ.23
Here Eckhart is stating some of the central themes of esoteric Christianity. The Father is the transcendent aspect of the divine; the Son is the immanent aspect. This divine core, the true “I,” exists in all of us equally. It is what unites us, for, as paradoxical as it may sound, this “I” is the same in all of us. To be “transformed and changed into the body of Christ” is to become aware—cognitively and experientially—of this profound unity with all the other Sons of God and with the Father.
Practically every esoteric Christian has said something like this in one way or another. And yet it was too much for the church in Eckhart’s time, as it is often too much for the churches in our time. To say, as Eckhart does, “The Father ceaselessly begets his Son and, what is more, he begets me as his Son—the self-same Son!”24 seems to erase the distinction between God and man. It threatens to make gods out of human beings—quite apart from the fact that Christ himself said, “Ye are gods” (John 10:34). The irony is that much more acute in that Christ made this statement (quoting Ps. 82:6) to refute his Jewish opponents, who chided him for claiming to be a Son of God. Over 1,300 years later, Eckhart crossed the Pharisees of the Middle Ages by expressing the same insight. As both Christ and Eckhart learned, it can be dangerous for a man to realize he is one with God; it makes the authorities jealous. Mystics have generally dealt with this problem by adhering to codes of strict silence.
Eckhart’s Defense is also revealing in its language. The terminology he uses—“essence,” “predication,” “equivocals,” “univocals”—comes from the Aristotelian philosophy that had recently been adapted for Catholicism by Thomas Aquinas. In fact Eckhart also produced a number of Scholastic writings in Latin, which are less well known than his German sermons and treatises. Often the combination of Aristotelian logic and mystical illumination produces brilliant insights. And yet the Aristotelian terms and categories in Eckhart strike a strangely dissonant note. It is not that he does not understand them—his Dominican training gave him a great facility for such thought; Aquinas, too, was a Dominican—but rather they do not always lend themselves well to expressing mystical insight. The categories of Aristotle, with their relentless segregation of all things into genus and species, rarely do justice to a realm where contradictions are either resolved or transcended.
That the Catholic Church would come to rely on Aristotle and Aquinas to define its worldview has sometimes been lamented as a tragedy. So it may be. It is hard for us to say so, because, even today, some eight hundred years later, we are the products of this worldview. Even though Scholasticism has been increasingly discarded by the Catholic Church itself and is now regarded as a quaint antiquity in philosophical history, it has shaped our minds to an extraordinary degree. The Western capacity for creating extremely precise categories and superfine distinctions is a legacy of Aristotle. So is our interest in empirical inquiry and solid facts. To ask whether we would be better off without these things is like asking whether we would be better off if our parents had never met. We would not be here without them.
And yet Eckhart’s fate suggests that Western civilization paid a high price for the brilliant mechanism of Aristotelian thought. Since that time, mainstream Western philosophy and theology have hardly known what to do with mystical insight—or indeed with any state of consciousness apart from the totally ordinary. Usually they have found it easier to act as if such things did not exist. And this has brought terrible suffering upon us who are the heirs of European civilization. Our mastery of the physical world has not cured us of the wish for another one; our deft handling of materiality has not taken away our longing for the spirit. But we have been told too often that it is unrealistic to seek such things, so, persuading ourselves that they are childish fantasies, we displace our longings onto material objects. Such things cannot satisfy us, and we know they cannot satisfy us. But at this point they are the only things that we as a civilization can manage to believe are real.