Why dost thou prate of God? Whatever thou sayest of Him is untrue.
Eckhart
IN RELIGIOUS literature the word “truth” is used indiscriminately in at least three distinct and very different senses. Thus, it is sometimes treated as a synonym for “fact,” as when it is affirmed that God is Truth—meaning that He is the primordial Reality. But this is clearly not the meaning of the word in such a phrase as “worshipping God in spirit and in truth.” Here, it is obvious, “truth” signifies direct apprehension of spiritual Fact, as opposed to second-hand knowledge about Reality, formulated in sentences and accepted on authority or because an argument from previously granted postulates was logically convincing. And finally there is the more ordinary meaning of the word, as in such a sentence as, “This statement is the truth,” where we mean to assert that the verbal symbols of which the statement is composed correspond to the facts to which it refers. When Eckhart writes that “whatever thou sayest of God is untrue,” he is not affirming that all theological statements are false. Insofar as there can be any correspondence between human symbols and divine Fact, some theological statements are as true as it is possible for us to make them. Himself a theologian, Eckhart would certainly have admitted this. But besides being a theologian, Eckhart was a mystic. And being a mystic, he understood very vividly what the modern semanticist is so busily (and, also, so unsuccessfully) trying to drum into contemporary minds—namely, that words are not the same as things and that a knowledge of words about facts is in no sense equivalent to a direct and immediate apprehension of the facts themselves. What Eckhart actually asserts is this: whatever one may say about God can never in any circumstances be the “truth” in the first two meanings of that much abused and ambiguous word. By implication St. Thomas Aquinas was saying exactly the same thing when, after his experience of infused contemplation, he refused to go on with his theological work, declaring that everything he had written up to that time was as mere straw compared with the immediate knowledge, which had been vouchsafed to him. Two hundred years earlier, in Bagdad, the great Mohammedan theologian, Al Ghazzali, had similarly turned from the consideration of truths about God to the contemplation and direct apprehension of Truth-the-Fact, from the purely intellectual discipline of the philosophers to the moral and spiritual discipline of the Sufis.
The moral of all this is obvious. Whenever we hear or read about “truth,” we should always pause long enough to ask ourselves in which of the three senses listed above the word is, at the moment, being used. By taking this simple precaution (and to take it is a genuinely virtuous act of intellectual honesty), we shall save ourselves a great deal of disturbing and quite unnecessary mental confusion.
Wishing to entice the blind,
The Buddha playfully let words escape from his golden mouth;
Heaven and earth are filled, ever since, with entangling briars.
Dai-o Kokushi
There is nothing true anywhere,
The True is nowhere to be found.
If you say you see the True,
This seeing is not the true one.
When the True is left to itself,
There is nothing false in it, for it is Mind itself.
When Mind in itself is not liberated from the false,
There is nothing true; nowhere is the True to be found.
Hui Neng
The truth indeed has never been preached by the Buddha, seeing that one has to realize it within oneself.
Sutralamkara
The further one travels, the less one knows.
Lao Tzu
“Listen to this!” shouted Monkey. “After all the trouble we had getting here from China, and after you specially ordered that we were to be given the scriptures, Ananda and Kasyapa made a fraudulent delivery of goods. They gave us blank copies to take away; I ask you, what is the good of that to us?”
“You needn’t shout,” said the Buddha smiling. “… As a matter of fact, it is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures. But I quite see that the people of China are too foolish and ignorant to believe this, so there is nothing for it but to give them copies with some writing on.”
Wu Ch’êng-ên
The philosophers indeed are clever enough, but wanting in wisdom;
As to the others, they are either ignorant or puerile!
They take an empty fist as containing something real and the pointing finger as the object pointed at.
Because the finger is adhered to as though it were the Moon, all their efforts are lost.
Yoka Daishi
What is known as the teaching of the Buddha is not the teaching of the Buddha.
Diamond Sutra
“What is the ultimate teaching of Buddhism?”
“You won’t understand it until you have it.”
Shih-t’ou
The subject matter of the Perennial Philosophy is the nature of eternal, spiritual Reality; but the language in which it must be formulated was developed for the purpose of dealing with phenomena in time. That is why, in all these formulations, we find an element of paradox. The nature of Truth-the-Fact cannot be described by means of verbal symbols that do not adequately correspond to it. At best it can be hinted at in terms of non sequiturs and contradictions.
To these unavoidable paradoxes some spiritual writers have chosen to add deliberate and calculated enormities of language—hard sayings, exaggerations, ironic or humorous extravagances, designed to startle and shock the reader out of that self-satisfied complacency which is the original sin of the intellect. Of this second kind of paradox the masters of Taoism and Zen Buddhism were particularly fond. The latter, indeed, made use of paralogisms and even of nonsense as a device for “taking the kingdom of heaven by violence.” Aspirants to the life of perfection were encouraged to practice discursive meditation on some completely non-logical formula. The result was a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole self-centred and world-centred discursive process, a sudden breaking through from “reason” (in the language of scholastic philosophy) to intuitive “intellect,” capable of a genuine insight into the divine Ground of all being. This method strikes us as odd and eccentric; but the fact remains that it worked to the extent of producing in many persons the final metanoia, or transformation of consciousness and character.
Zen’s use of almost comic extravagance to emphasize the philosophic truths it regarded as most important is well illustrated in the first of the extracts cited above. We are not intended seriously to imagine that an Avatar preaches in order to play a practical joke on the human race. But meanwhile what the author has succeeded in doing is to startle us out of our habitual complacency about the home-made verbal universe in which we normally do most of our living. Words are not facts, and still less are they the primordial Fact. If we take them too seriously, we shall lose our way in a forest of entangling briars. But if, on the contrary, we don’t take them seriously enough, we shall remain unaware that there is a way to lose or a goal to be reached. If the Enlightened did not preach, there would be no deliverance for anyone. But because human minds and human languages are what they are, this necessary and indispensable preaching is beset with dangers. The history of all the religions is similar in one important respect; some of their adherents are enlightened and delivered, because they have chosen to react appropriately to the words which the founders have let fall; others achieve a partial salvation by reacting with partial appropriateness; yet others harm themselves and their fellows by reacting with a total inappropriateness—either ignoring the words altogether or, more often, taking them too seriously and treating them as though they were identical with the Fact to which they refer.
That words are at once indispensable and, in many cases, fatal has been recognized by all the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy. Thus, Jesus spoke of himself as bringing into the world something even worse than briars—a sword. St. Paul distinguished between the letter that kills and the spirit that gives life. And throughout the centuries that followed, the masters of Christian spirituality have found it necessary to harp again and again upon a theme which has never been outdated because homo loquax, the talking animal, is still as naïvely delighted by his chief accomplishment, still as helplessly the victim of his own words, as he was when the Tower of Babel was being built. Recent years have seen the publication of numerous works on semantics and of an ocean of nationalistic, racialistic and militaristic propaganda. Never have so many capable writers warned mankind against the dangers of wrong speech—and never have words been used more recklessly by politicians or taken more seriously by the public. The fact is surely proof enough that, under changing forms, the old problems remain what they always were—urgent, unsolved and, to all appearances, insoluble.
All that the imagination can imagine and the reason conceive and understand in this life is not, and cannot be, a proximate means of union with God.
St. John of the Cross
Jejune and barren speculations may unfold the plicatures of Truth’s garment, but they cannot discover her lovely face.
John Smith, the Platonist
In all faces is shown the Face of faces, veiled and in a riddle. Howbeit, unveiled it is not seen, until, above all faces, a man enter into a certain secret and mystic silence, where there is no knowing or concept of a face. This mist, cloud, darkness or ignorance, into which he that seeketh thy Face entereth, when he goeth beyond all knowledge or concept, is the state below which thy Face cannot be found, except veiled; but that very darkness revealeth thy Face to be there beyond all veils. Hence I observe how needful it is for me to enter into the darkness and to admit the coincidence of opposites, beyond all the grasp of reason, and there to seek the Truth, where impossibility meeteth us.
Nicholas of Cusa
As the Godhead is nameless, and all naming is alien to Him, so also the soul is nameless; for it is here the same as God.
Eckhart
God being, as He is, inaccessible, do not rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the senses and comprehended by the understanding. This is to be content with what is less than God; so doing, you will destroy the energy of the soul, which is necessary for walking with Him.
St. John of the Cross
To find or know God in reality by any outward proofs, or by anything but by God Himself made manifest and self-evident in you, will never be your case either here or hereafter. For neither God, nor heaven, nor hell, nor the devil, nor the flesh, can be any otherwise knowable in you or by you but by their own existence and manifestation in you. And all pretended knowledge of any of these things, beyond and without this self-evident sensibility of their birth within you, is only such knowledge of them as the blind man hath of the light that hath never entered into him.
William Law
What follows is a summary by an eminent scholar of the Indian doctrines concerning jnana, the liberating knowledge of Brahman or the divine Ground.
Jnana is eternal, is general, is necessary and is not a personal knowledge of this man or that man. It is there, as knowledge in the Atman itself, and lies there hidden under all avidya (ignorance)—irremovable, though it may be obscured, unprovable, because self-evident, needing no proof, because itself giving to all proof the ground of possibility. These sentences come near to Eckhart’s “knowledge” and to the teaching of Augustine on the Eternal Truth in the soul which, itself immediately certain, is the ground of all certainty and is a possession, not of A or B, but of “the soul.”
Rudolf Otto
The science of aesthetics is not the same as, nor even a proximate means to, the practice and appreciation of the arts. How can one learn to have an eye for pictures, or to become a good painter? Certainly not by reading Benedetto Croce. One learns to paint by painting, and one learns to appreciate pictures by going to picture galleries and looking at them.
But this is not to say that Croce and his fellows have wasted their time. We should be grateful to them for their labours in building up a system of thought, by means of which the immediately apprehended significance and value of art can be assessed in the light of general knowledge, related to other facts of experience and, in this way and to this extent, “explained.”
What is true of aesthetics is also true of theology. Theological speculation is valuable insofar as it enables those who have had immediate experience of various aspects of God to form intelligible ideas about the nature of the divine Ground, and of their own experience of the Ground in relation to other experiences. And when a coherent system of theology has been worked out, it is useful insofar as it convinces those who study it that there is nothing inherently self-contradictory about the postulate of the divine Ground and that, for those who are ready to fulfill certain conditions, the postulate may become a realized Fact. In no circumstances, however, can the study of theology or the mind’s assent to theological propositions take the place of what Law calls “the birth of God within.” For theory is not practice, and words are not the things for which they stand.
Theology as we know it has been formed by the great mystics, especially St Augustine and St Thomas. Plenty of other great theologians—especially St Gregory and St Bernard, even down to Suarez—would not have had such insight without mystic super-knowledge.
Abbot John Chapman
Against this we must set Dr. Tennant’s view—namely, that religious experience is something real and unique, but does not add anything to the experiencer’s knowledge of ultimate Reality and must always be interpreted in terms of an idea of God derived from other sources. A study of the facts would suggest that both these opinions are to some degree correct. The facts of mystical insight (together with the facts of what is taken to be historic revelation) are rationalized in terms of general knowledge and become the basis of a theology. And, reciprocally, an existing theology in terms of general knowledge exercises a profound influence upon those who have undertaken the spiritual life, causing them, if it is low, to be content with a low form of experience, if it is high, to reject as inadequate the experience of any form of reality having characteristics incompatible with those of the God described in the books. Thus mystics make theology, and theology makes mystics.
A person who gives assent to untrue dogma, or who pays all his attention and allegiance to one true dogma in a comprehensive system, while neglecting the others (as many Christians concentrate exclusively on the humanity of the Second Person of the Trinity and ignore the Father and the Holy Ghost), runs the risk of limiting in advance his direct apprehension of Reality. In religion as in natural science, experience is determined only by experience. It is fatal to prejudge it, to compel it to fit the mould imposed by a theory which either does not correspond to the facts at all, or corresponds to only some of the facts. “Do not strive to seek after the true,” writes a Zen master, “only cease to cherish opinions.” There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Fact—selflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity. Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But “to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content,” in the words of St. John of the Cross, “with what is less than God.” Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who “have ceased to cherish opinions”—even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the heart of God, into his hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.
Eckhart
With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization.
Lankavatara Sutra
The word “intellect” is used by Eckhart in the scholastic sense of immediate intuition. “Intellect and reason,” says Aquinas, “are not two powers, but distinct as the perfect from the imperfect…. The intellect means, an intimate penetration of truth; the reason, enquiry and discourse.” It is by following, and then abandoning, the rational and emotional path of “word and discrimination” that one is enabled to enter upon the intellectual or intuitive “path of realization.” And yet, in spite of the warnings pronounced by those who, through selflessness, have passed from letter to spirit and from theory to immediate knowledge, the organized Christian churches have persisted in the fatal habit of mistaking means for ends. The verbal statements of theology’s more or less adequate rationalizations of experience have been taken too seriously and treated with the reverence that is due only to the Fact they are intended to describe. It has been fancied that souls are saved if assent is given to what is locally regarded as the correct formula, lost if it is withheld. The two words, filioque, may not have been the sole cause of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches; but they were unquestionably the pretext and casus belli.
The overvaluation of words and formulae may be regarded as a special case of that overvaluation of the things of time, which is so fatally characteristic of historic Christianity. To know Truth-as-Fact and to know it unitively, “in spirit and in truth-as-immediate-apprehension”—this is deliverance, in this “standeth our eternal life.” To be familiar with the verbalized truths, which symbolically correspond to Truth-as-Fact insofar as it can be known in, or inferred from, truth-as-immediate-apprehension, or truth-as-historic-revelation—this is not salvation, but merely the study of a special branch of philosophy. Even the most ordinary experience of a thing or event in time can never be fully or adequately described in words. The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say “blue” or “pain,” in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning. God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order. To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa. Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect symbols. But to anyone who really wants to reach a given destination, a map is indispensably useful as indicating the direction in which the traveller should set out and the roads which he must take.
In later Buddhist philosophy words are regarded as one of the prime determining factors in the creative evolution of human beings. In this philosophy five categories of being are recognized—Name, Appearance, Discrimination, Right Knowledge. Suchness. The first three are related for evil, the last two for good. Appearances are discriminated by the sense organs, then reified by naming, so that words are taken for things and symbols are used as the measure of reality. According to this view, language is a main source of the sense of separateness and the blasphemous idea of individual self-sufficiency, with their inevitable corollaries of greed, envy, lust for power, anger and cruelty. And from these evil passions there springs the necessity of an indefinitely protracted and repeated separate existence under the same, self-perpetuated conditions of craving and infatuation. The only escape is through a creative act of the will, assisted by Buddha-grace, leading through selflessness to Right Knowledge, which consists, among other things, in a proper appraisal of Names, Appearances and Discrimination. In and through Right Knowledge, one emerges from the infatuating delusion of “I,” “me,” “mine,” and, resisting the temptation to deny the world in a state of premature and one-sided ecstasy, or to affirm it by living like the average sensual man, one comes at last to the transfiguring awareness that samsara and nirvana are one, to the unitive apprehension of pure Suchness—the ultimate Ground, which can only be indicated, never adequately described in verbal symbols.
In connection with the Mahayanist view that words play an important and even creative part in the evolution of unregenerate human nature, we may mention Hume’s arguments against the reality of causation. These arguments start from the postulate that all events are “loose and separate” from one another and proceed with faultless logic to a conclusion that makes complete nonsense of all organized thought or purposive action. The fallacy, as Professor Stout has pointed out, lies in the preliminary postulate. And when we ask ourselves what it was that induced Hume to make this odd and quite unrealistic assumption that events are “loose and separate,” we see that his only reason for flying in the face of immediate experience was the fact that things and happenings are symbolically represented in our thought by nouns, verbs and adjectives, and that these words are, in effect, “loose and separate” from one another in a way which the events and things they stand for quite obviously are not. Taking words as the measure of things, instead of using things as the measure of words, Hume imposed the discrete and, so to say, pointilliste pattern of language upon the continuum of actual experience—with the impossibly paradoxical results with which we are all familiar. Most human beings are not philosophers and care not at all for consistency in thought or action. Thus, in some circumstances they take it for granted that events are not “loose and separate,” but co-exist or follow one another within the organized and organizing field of a cosmic whole. But on other occasions, where the opposite view is more nearly in accord with their passions or interests, they adopt, all unconsciously, the Humian position and treat events as though they were as independent of one another and the rest of the world as the words by which they are symbolized. This is generally true of all occurrences involving “I,” “me,” “mine.” Reifying the “loose and separate” names, we regard the things as also loose and separate—not subject to law, not involved in the network of relationships, by which in fact they are so obviously bound up with their physical, social and spiritual environment. We regard as absurd the idea that there is no causal process in nature and no organic connection between events and things in the lives of other people; but at the same time we accept as axiomatic the notion that our own sacred ego is “loose and separate” from the universe, a law unto itself above the moral dharma and even, in many respects, above the natural law of causality. Both in Buddhism and Catholicism, monks and nuns were encouraged to avoid the personal pronoun and to speak of themselves in terms of circumlocutions that clearly indicated their real relationship with the cosmic reality and their fellow creatures. The precaution was a wise one. Our responses to familiar words are conditioned reflexes. By changing the stimulus, we can do something to change the response. No Pavlov bell, no salivation; no harping on words like “me” and “mine,” no purely automatic and unreflecting egotism. When a monk speaks of himself, not as “I,” but as “this sinner” or “this unprofitable servant,” he tends to stop taking his “loose and separate” selfhood for granted, and makes himself aware of his real, organic relationship with God and his neighbours.
In practice words are used for other purposes than for making statements about facts. Very often they are used rhetorically, in order to arouse the passions and direct the will towards some course of action regarded as desirable. And sometimes, too, they are used poetically—that is to say, they are used in such a way that, besides making a statement about real or imaginary things and events, and besides appealing rhetorically to the will and the passions, they cause the reader to be aware that they are beautiful. Beauty in art or nature is a matter of relationships between things not in themselves intrinsically beautiful. There is nothing beautiful, for example, about the vocables, “time,” or “syllable.” But when they are used in such a phrase as “to the last syllable of recorded time,” the relationship between the sound of the component words, between our ideas of the things for which they stand, and between the overtones of association with which each word and the phrase as a whole are charged, is apprehended, by a direct and immediate intuition, as being beautiful.
About the rhetorical use of words nothing much need be said. There is rhetoric for good causes and there is rhetoric for bad causes—rhetoric which is tolerably true to facts as well as emotionally moving, and rhetoric which is unconsciously or deliberately a lie. To learn to discriminate between the different kinds of rhetoric is an essential part of intellectual morality; and intellectual morality is as necessary a pre-condition of the spiritual life as is the control of the will and the guard of heart and tongue.
We have now to consider a more difficult problem. How should the poetical use of words be related to the life of the spirit? (And, of course, what applies to the poetical use of words applies equally to the pictorial use of pigments, the musical use of sounds, the sculptural use of clay or stone—in a word, to all the arts.)
“Beauty is truth, truth, beauty.” But unfortunately Keats failed to specify in which of its principal meanings he was using the word “truth.” Some critics have assumed that he was using it in the third of the senses listed at the opening of this section, and have therefore dismissed the aphorism as nonsensical. Zn + H2SO4 = ZnSO4 + H2. This is a truth in the third sense of the word—and, manifestly, this truth is not identical with beauty. But no less manifestly Keats was not talking about this kind of “truth.” He was using the word primarily in its first sense, as a synonym for “fact,” and secondarily with the significance attached to it in the Johannine phrase, “to worship God in truth.” His sentence, therefore, carries two meanings. “Beauty is the Primordial Fact, and the Primordial Fact is Beauty, the principle of all particular beauties”; and “Beauty is an immediate experience, and this immediate experience is identical with Beauty-as-Principle, Beauty-as-Primordial-Fact.” The first of these statements is fully in accord with the doctrines of the Perennial Philosophy. Among the trinities in which the ineffable One makes itself manifest is the trinity of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. We perceive beauty in the harmonious intervals between the parts of a whole. In this context the divine Ground might be paradoxically denned as Pure Interval, independent of what is separated and harmonized within the totality.
With Keats’s statement in its secondary meaning the exponents of the Perennial Philosophy would certainly disagree. The experience of beauty in art or in nature may be qualitatively akin to the immediate, unitive experience of the divine Ground or Godhead; but it is not the same as that experience, and the particular beauty-fact experienced, though partaking in some sort of the divine nature, is at several removes from the Godhead. The poet, the nature lover, the aesthete are granted apprehensions of Reality analogous to those vouchsafed to the selfless contemplative; but because they have not troubled to make themselves perfectly selfless, they are incapable of knowing the divine Beauty in its fulness, as it is in itself. The poet is born with the capacity of arranging words in such a way that something of the quality of the graces and inspirations he has received can make itself felt to other human beings in the white spaces, so to speak, between the lines of his verse. This is a great and precious gift; but if the poet remains content with his gift, if he persists in worshipping the beauty in art and nature without going on to make himself capable, through selflessness, of apprehending Beauty as it is in the divine Ground, then he is only an idolater. True, his idolatry is among the highest of which human beings are capable; but an idolatry, none the less, it remains.
The experience of beauty is pure, self-manifested, compounded equally of joy and consciousness, free from admixture of any other perception, the very twin brother of mystical experience, and the very life of it is super-sensuous wonder… It is enjoyed by those who are competent thereto, in identity, just as the form of God is itself the joy with which it is recognized.
Visvanatha
What follows is the last composition of a Zen nun, who had been in her youth a great beauty and an accomplished poetess.
Sixty-six times have these eyes beheld the changing scenes of Autumn.
I have said enough about moonlight,
Ask me no more.
Only listen to the voice of pines and cedars, when no wind stirs.
Ryo-Nen
The silence under windless trees is what Mallarmé would call a creux néant musicien. But whereas the music for which the poet listened was merely aesthetic and imaginative, it was to pure Suchness that the self-naughted contemplative was laying herself open. “Be still and know that I am God.”
This truth is to be lived, it is not to be merely pronounced with the mouth….
There is really nothing to argue about in this teaching;
Any arguing is sure to go against the intent of it.
Doctrines given up to controversy and argumentation lead of themselves to birth and death.
Hui Neng
Away, then, with the fictions and workings of discursive reason, either for or against Christianity! They are only the wanton spirit of the mind, whilst ignorant of God and insensible of its own nature and condition. Death and life are the only things in question; life is God living and working in the soul; death is the soul living and working according to the sense and reason of bestial flesh and blood. Both this life and this death are of their own growth, growing from their own seed within us, not as busy reason talks and directs, but as the heart turns either to the one or to the other.
William Law
Can I explain the Friend to one for whom He is no Friend?
Jalal-uddin Rumi
When a mother cries to her sucking babe, “Come, O son, I am thy mother!”
Does the child answer, “O mother, show a proof
That I shall find comfort in taking thy milk”?
Jalal-uddin Rumi
Great truths do not take hold of the hearts of the masses. And now, as all the world is in error, how shall I, though I know the true path, how shall I guide? If I know that I cannot succeed and yet try to force success, this would be but another source of error. Better then to desist and strive no more. But if I do not strive, who will?
Chuang Tzu
Between the horns of Chuang Tzu’s dilemma there is no way but that of love, peace and joy. Only those who manifest their possession, in however small a measure, of the fruits of the Spirit can persuade others that the life of the spirit is worth living. Argument and controversy are almost useless; in many cases, indeed, they are positively harmful. But this, of course, is a thing that clever men with a gift for syllogisms and sarcasm, find it peculiarly hard to admit. Milton, no doubt, genuinely believed that he was working for truth, righteousness and the glory of God by exploding in torrents of learned scurrility against the enemies of his favourite dictator and his favourite brand of nonconformity. In actual fact, of course, he and the other controversialists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did nothing but harm to the cause of true religion, for which, on one side or the other, they fought with an equal learning and ingenuity and with the same foulmouthed intemperance of language. The successive controversies went on, with occasional lucid intervals, for about two hundred years—Papists arguing with anti-Papists, Protestants with other Protestants, Jesuits with Quietists and Jansenists. When the noise finally died down, Christianity (which, like any other religion, can survive only if it manifests the fruits of the Spirit) was all but dead; the real religion of most educated Europeans was now nationalistic idolatry. During the eighteenth century this change to idolatry seemed (after the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity by Wallenstein and Tilly) to be a change for the better. This was because the ruling classes were determined that the horrors of the wars of religion should not be repeated and therefore deliberately tempered power politics with gentlemanliness. Symptoms of gentlemanliness can still be observed in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars. But the national Molochs were steadily devouring the eighteenth-century ideal. During the first and second World Wars we have witnessed the total elimination of the old checks and self-restraints. The consequences of political idolatry now display themselves without the smallest mitigation either of humanistic honour and etiquette or of transcendental religion. By its internecine quarrels over words, forms of organization, money and power, historic Christianity consummated the work of self-destruction, to which its excessive preoccupation with things in time had from the first so tragically committed it.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment;
Cleverness is mere opinion, bewilderment is intuition.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
Reason is like an officer when the King appears;
The officer then loses his power and hides himself.
Reason is the shadow cast by God; God is the sun.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
Non-rational creatures do not look before or after, but live in the animal eternity of a perpetual present; instinct is their animal grace and constant inspiration; and they are never tempted to live otherwise than in accord with their own animal dharma, or immanent law. Thanks to his reasoning powers and to the instrument of reason, language, man (in his merely human condition) lives nostalgically, apprehensively and hopefully in the past and future as well as in the present; has no instincts to tell him what to do; must rely on personal cleverness, rather than on inspiration from the divine Nature of Things; finds himself in a condition of chronic civil war between passion and prudence and, on a higher level of awareness and ethical sensibility, between egotism and dawning spirituality. But this “wearisome condition of humanity” is the indispensable prerequisite of enlightenment and deliverance. Man must live in time in order to be able to advance into eternity, no longer on the animal, but on the spiritual level; he must be conscious of himself as a separate ego in order to be able consciously to transcend separate selfhood; he must do battle with the lower self in order that he may become identified with that higher Self within him, which is akin to the divine Not-Self; and finally he must make use of his cleverness in order to pass beyond cleverness to the intellectual vision of Truth, the immediate, unitive knowledge of the divine Ground. Reason and its works “are not and cannot be a proximate means of union with God.” The proximate means is “intellect,” in the scholastic sense of the word, or spirit. In the last analysis the use and purpose of reason is to create the internal and external conditions favour able to its own transfiguration by and into spirit. It is the lamp by which it finds the way to go beyond itself. We see, then, that as a means to a proximate means to an End, discursive reasoning is of enormous value. But if, in our pride and madness, we treat it as a proximate means to the divine End (as so many religious people have done and still do), or if, denying the existence of an eternal End, we regard it as at once the means to Progress and its ever-receding goal in time, cleverness becomes the enemy, a source of spiritual blindness, moral evil and social disaster. At no period in history has cleverness been so highly valued or, in certain directions, so widely and efficiently trained as at the present time. And at no time have intellectual vision and spirituality been less esteemed, or the End to which they are proximate means less widely and less earnestly sought for. Because technology advances, we fancy that we are making corresponding progress all along the line; because we have considerable power over inanimate nature, we are convinced that we are the self-sufficient masters of our fate and captains of our souls; and because cleverness has given us technology and power, we believe, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, that we have only to go on being yet cleverer in a yet more systematic way to achieve social order, international peace and personal happiness.
In Wu Ch’êng-ên’s extraordinary masterpiece (so admirably translated by Mr. Arthur Waley) there is an episode, at once comical and profound, in which Monkey (who, in the allegory, is the incarnation of human cleverness) gets to heaven and there causes so much trouble that at last Buddha has to be called in to deal with him. It ends in the following passage.
“I’ll have a wager with you,” said Buddha. “If you are really so clever, jump off the palm of my right hand. If you succeed, I’ll tell the Jade Emperor to come and live with me in the Western Paradise, and you shall have his throne without more ado. But if you fail, you shall go back to earth and do penance there for many a kalpa before you come back to me with your talk.”
“This Buddha,” Monkey thought to himself, “is a perfect fool. I can jump a hundred and eight thousand leagues, while his palm cannot be as much as eight inches across. How could I fail to jump clear of it?”
“You’re sure you’re in a position to do this for me?” he asked.
“ Of course I am,” said Buddha.
He stretched out his right hand, which looked about the size of a lotus leaf. Monkey put his cudgel behind his ear, and leapt with all his might. “That’s all right,” he said to himself. “I’m right off it now.” He was whizzing so fast that he was almost invisible, and Buddha, watching him with the eye of wisdom, saw a mere whirligig shoot along.
Monkey came at last to five pink pillars, sticking up into the air. “This is the end of the World,” said Monkey to himself. “All I have got to do is to go back to Buddha and claim my forfeit. The Throne is mine.”
“Wait a minute,” he said presently, “I’d better just leave a record of some kind, in case I have trouble with Buddha.” He plucked a hair and blew on it with magic breath, crying, “Change!” It changed at once into a writing brush charged with heavy ink, and at the base of the central pillar he wrote, “The Great Sage Equal to Heaven reached this place.” Then, to mark his disrespect, he relieved nature at the bottom of the first pillar, and somersaulted back to where he had come from. Standing on Buddha’s palm, he said, “Well, I’ve gone and come back. You can go and tell the Jade Emperor to hand over the palaces of Heaven.”
“You stinking ape,” said Buddha, “you’ve been on the palm of my hand all the time.”
“You’re quite mistaken,” said Monkey. “I got to the end of the World, where I saw five flesh-coloured pillars sticking up into the sky. I wrote something on one of them. I’ll take you there and show you, if you like.”
“No need for that,” said Buddha. “Just look down.”
Monkey peered down with his fiery, steely eyes, and there at the base of the middle finger of Buddha’s hand he saw written the words, “The Great Sage Equal to Heaven reached this place,” and from the fork between the thumb and first finger came a smell of monkey’s urine.
From Monkey
And so, having triumphantly urinated on the proffered hand of Wisdom, the Monkey within us turns back and, full of a bumptious confidence in his own omnipotence, sets out to re-fashion the world of men and things into something nearer to his heart’s desire. Sometimes his intentions are good, sometimes consciously bad. But, whatever the intentions may be, the results of action undertaken by even the most brilliant cleverness, when it is unenlightened by the divine Nature of Things, unsubordinated to the Spirit, are generally evil. That this has always been clearly understood by humanity at large is proved by the usages of language. “Cunning” and “canny” are equivalent to “knowing,” and all three adjectives pass a more or less unfavourable moral judgment on those to whom they are aplied. “Conceit” is just “concept”; but what a man’s mind conceives most clearly is the supreme value of his own ego. “Shrewd,” which is the participial form of “shrew,” meaning malicious, and is connected with “beshrew,” to curse, is now applied, by way of rather dubious compliment, to astute business men and attorneys. Wizards are so called because they are wise—wise, of course, in the sense that, in American slang, a “wise guy” is wise. Conversely, an idiot was once popularly known as an innocent. “This use of innocent,” says Richard Trench, “assumes that to hurt and harm is the chief employment, towards which men turn their intellectual powers; that where they are wise, they are oftenest wise to do evil.” Meanwhile it goes without saying that cleverness and accumulated knowledge are indispensable, but always as means to proximate means, and never as proximate means or, what is even worse, as ends in themselves. Quid faceret eruditio sine dilectione? says St. Bernard. Inftaret. Quid, absque eruditione dilectio? Erraret. What would learning do without love? It would puff up. And love without learning? It would go astray.
Such as men themselves are, such will God Himself seem to them to be.
John Smith, the Platonist
Men’s minds perceive second causes,
But only prophets perceive the action of the First Cause.
Jalal-uddin Rumi
The amount and kind of knowledge we acquire depends first upon the will and, second, upon our psycho-physical constitution and the modifications imposed upon it by environment and our own choice. Thus, Professor Burkitt has pointed out that, where technological discovery is concerned “man’s desire has been the important factor. Once something is definitely wanted, again and again it has been produced in an extremely short time… Conversely, nothing will teach the Bushmen of South Africa to plant and herd. They have no desire to do so.” The same is true in regard to ethical and spiritual discoveries. “You are as holy as you wish to be,” was the motto given by Ruysbroeck to the students who came to visit him. And he might have added, “You can therefore know as much of Reality as you wish to know”—for knowledge is in the knower according to the mode of the knower, and the mode of the knower is, in certain all-important respects, within the knower’s control. Liberating knowledge of God comes to the pure in heart and poor in spirit; and though such purity and poverty are enormously difficult of achievement, they are nevertheless possible to all.
She said, moreover, that if one would attain to purity of mind it was necessary to abstain altogether from any judgment on one’s neighbour and from all empty talk about his conduct. In creatures one should always seek only for the will of God. With great force she said: “For no reason whatever should one judge the actions of creatures or their motives. Even when we see that it is an actual sin, we ought not to pass judgment on it, but have holy and sincere compassion and offer it up to God with humble and devout prayer.”
From the Testament of
St. Catherine of Siena, written down by Tommaso di Petra
This total abstention from judgment upon one’s fellows is only one of the conditions of inward purity. The others have already been described in the section on “Mortification.”
Learning consists in adding to one’s stock day by day. The practise of Tao consists in subtracting day by day: subtracting and yet again subtracting until one has reached inactivity.
Lao Tzu
It is the inactivity of self-will and ego-centered cleverness that makes possible the activity within the emptied and purified soul of the eternal Suchness. And when eternity is known in the heights within, it is also known in the fulness of experience, outside in the world.
Didst thou ever descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time? Didst thou ever see a bright infinite in the narrow point of an object? Then thou knowest what spirit means—the spire-top, whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life.
Peter Sterry