Love is Stronger than Death

THE NOTION OF MYSTICAL LOVE pervades the whole Christian tradition, of course, from the exquisite imagery of the Song of Songs, to the metaphors of the mystical marriage, the Church as the bride of Christ, and our spiritual readiness as the “wedding garment.” There are also human models such as Saint Francis and Saint Clare, or for that matter, Jesus and Mary Magdalene: those whom our hearts instinctively recognize as couples despite all efforts to spiritualize or explain away their relationship. We are reminded of the completing and liberating power of souls working together in a holy love that is in essence erotic. The concept is scary, however, and like a hot coal it is usually touched and dropped.

But I am convinced that the building blocks exist within our tradition to support a working theology of the mystical completion of souls. The hot coal does not have to be dropped; not only can it be accommodated within an illumined Christian self-understanding, but it has important insights to offer that extend and round out our Christian vision of death and the afterlife. For erotic love is a holy gift of God. And sometimes this love is so intense and powerful, and the sense of union so strong, that it continues right on growing beyond the grave, knitting two souls into the one wholeness they were always intended to become. Mystical completion does occur from time to time in our human experience, and when it does, it bears witness to those two profound insights at the heart of Christian faith: that love is stronger than death, and that it is the fundamental creative force in the universe.

These building blocks come mostly from the Christian esoteric (inner) tradition—the Fourth Way of G. I. Gurdjieff, plus the lineage of Christian hermeticism, continuing down from Jacob Boehme in the seventeenth century through Valentin Tomberg in our own times. Since many of these names will be unfamiliar to readers in the mainstream Christian tradition, I have included some brief biographical notes on them at the end of this book (pages 194-203). Please bear in mind that esoteric does not mean “heretical.”1

Those readers whose interest lies more in the story than in the theory may find it easier to skip this chapter entirely and move directly to Part 2, which can be done without losing the gist of the narrative. But for those whose primary concern is with the mechanics of soulwork beyond the grave, the following pages will provide an overview of the terrain.

The four building blocks are:

1. The union of souls

2. The idea of second body

3. The vow, or promise

4. “The wonders”

THE UNION OF SOULS

In Christian esoteric literature, the two sources that articulate this concept most directly are J. G. Bennett’s Sex and Boris Mouravieff’s intricate and difficult three-volume work, Gnosis. Bennett writes—in that passage Rafe was so taken with—that “the fusion of natures [in the union of wills of a man and woman] is a new creation. It is the true soul of man through which he can fulfill his destiny and become free of the conditions of perishing in time and space.”2

“The normal formation of the soul in man,” Bennett adds, “is through the union of the sexes”—a union, he makes clear, that normally but by no means necessarily involves genital sexual expression. What is at stake is this union of natures, and without such a union, although we can obtain “immortality within certain limits” through spiritual practice, “we remain incomplete beings.”

Mouravieff’s Gnosis, particularly in the later volumes, becomes more and more a hymn to this kind of mystical completion, which Mouravieff himself reportedly experienced with his wife. Echoing an insight whose antiquity dates back at least to Plato, Mouravieff claims that the human soul is “bipolar”: there exists in the world a perfectly symmetrical “polar being,” who is the unique completion of the other. He explains: “A man alone is incomplete. But just where he is weak, his polar being is strong. Together they form an integral being: their union leads to a fusion of their personalities and a faster crystallization of their complete subtle bodies, united into a common second birth.”³

While these pieces—from what unknown tradition?—offer tantalizing insights, I have always been a bit gun-shy of them in that they seem to entail considerable risk of diverting the spiritual search toward a mythological hunt for the perfect partner rather than fostering the calm receiving that is at the heart of real spiritual insight. But in addition, these concepts rely on the image of a broken soul: a mysterious bifurcation of that which was primordially one. While archetypally compelling, this concept seems to me too speculative, and too vulnerable to romantic delusion, to offer a really secure starting point.

A more solid foundation for constructing a mechanics of the union of souls lies, I believe, in the inner tradition of the developmental soul. The core teaching here is that man does not start out as a preformed soul (whether whole or bipolar), but only gradually develops a soul through a consistent inner practice, based essentially in the development of inner attention and the fusion of opposites within oneself.⁴

This is, of course, the watershed assertion dividing the Fourth Way tradition from classic exoteric Christianity, which assumes a unique, imperishable (and presumably unalterable) individuality, given as part and parcel of life itself. If this latter assumption is true, then the notion of a mystical fusion of persons, through love, to form one soul, becomes an operational impossibility, and the idea of a union of souls is reduced to an exquisitely tender metaphor.

Maurice Nicoll, however, in his book The New Man, suggests a way out of this apparent deadlock in his remarkable essay “The Idea of Righteousness in the Gospels.” Commenting on the Gospel text “Whosoever would save his life shall lose it; and whosoever shall lose his life shall find it,” Nicoll explains:

“Life” here means “soul” in the original.… Translating the word “soul” by the word “life”…is correct if we understand by the word “life” not physical vital life—the life of the body—but the level of himself he is at. Understand that the life of a man is not the outer life of his physical body, but all he thinks and desires and loves. This is a man’s life and this is his soul.… What a man consents to in himself makes his life and this is his soul.⁵

“From all this we can begin to realize,” Nicoll concludes, “that the soul is not something beautiful or ready-made but something that forms itself in him according to his life and that it really is all his life, the image of all he has thought and felt and done.”⁶

Nicoll seems to offer here the basis for understanding the notion of a union of souls entirely within the framework of Gospel teaching. “A man must lay down his soul [for his neighbor]: and this is the supreme definition of conscious love.” That is to say, through a life of conscious love—the persistent practice of laying down one’s life for the other, of the merging or union of wills in the effort to put the other first—the conditions will gradually come about for the creation of one soul. As long as the life goes on, in a renewed union of wills, one may speak of one soul, “for the soul is the image of the life.”

This union of souls cannot be done out of sheer romanticism, that initial rush of erotic attraction that is all most of us ever know of love. It is not a product of attraction, but rather of purification: the commitment with which the partners adopt the spiritual practice of laying down their lives for each other—facing their shadows, relinquishing old patterns and agendas, allowing all self-justification to be seen, brought to the light, and released. In other words, without a mutual and conscious commitment to bring one’s human love into sympathetic vibration with the sacrificial and giving love that is the font of all creation, there is no union of wills or souls. The willingness to die, on whatever level, for the other’s becoming is the practice that gradually transmutes erotic attraction into a force of holy fusion.

SECOND BODY

But could this union of wills continue beyond the grave, allowing that one soul to keep right on growing? Admittedly, this idea pushes the limits of traditional Christian notions of the afterlife, but it is by no means unheard of or theologically indefensible.

By an overwhelming consensus theological tradition assumes that when the physical body drops away, the developmental mode is over for the soul, and the evaluative mode begins. Depending on where one finds oneself on the spectrum of Christian orthodoxy, this evaluation can take many forms. In the most rigidly literal interpretations, it means judgment day, with an outcome of eternal damnation or eternal reward.

In the mystical and esoteric traditions, however, judgment and sentencing give way to the more flexible paradigm of conforming to a template. The time during which we are blessed with the external covering of a body is an opportunity to develop the skill of holy discrimination and be molded in the ways of divine love. The seventeenth-century mystic Jacob Boehme is thinking along these lines when he writes:

God works and wills in...the resigned will, by which the soul is made holy and comes to divine rest. When the body breaks up, the soul is pressed through with divine love and is illuminated with God’s light, as fire glows through iron by which it loses its darkness....“7

If, on the other hand, during its life in the body the will espouses “evil, lies, pride, covetousness, envy, and wrath,” then these become the template, and “vanity is revealed and works in it and presses through the soul completely and totally, as fire does iron.”

To conform one’s will completely to the template of divine love is a spiritual practice that Boehme refers to as “putting on the body of Christ.”

For others, such as Nicoll and Mouravieff, this same notion is conveyed in the biblical metaphor of the wedding garment that constitutes the admission ticket to the nuptial feast.⁸ However one visualizes the goal, it constitutes the great aim, and hope, of the Christian inner tradition: that in the course of this life, with dedicated practice, we can develop a second body, “the body of Christ,” or wedding garment, which after death enables us to claim a home in heaven because it already bears our human likeness. While not made of earthly flesh and blood, this body still has definite substantiality. Boehme sees it as formed from “the holy element,” which he calls “mercy” (Barmherzigkeit)—radiant, life-giving love.

But can this second body, this wedding garment, continue to evolve after physical death? Could Boehme’s “holy element” be a two-way street, so that the soul beyond death could continue not only to give but to receive nurturance from created life, and to grow in heavenly magnitude?

One who certainly thought so was G. I. Gurdjieff. In his great mythological fantasy, Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, he speaks of a “Holy Planet Purgatory” where those individuals who have attained an advanced level of spiritual understanding are sent “for a further perfecting...which sooner or later must inevitably be accomplished by every highest being-body.”⁹ Once a critical momentum of inner development has been attained, in Gurdjieff’s view, continued growth beyond the physical body is not only a possibility but an imperative—because the full maturation of such enlightened souls is essential to the maintenance of conscious life on the planet. They belong to what is variously called “the conscious circle of humanity,” “the justified,” or “the communion of saints.”

If these fascinating insights of Boehme and Gurdjieff are true, then it may be possible to envision purgatory not so much as a place where a soul atones for past sins, but where it continues to perfect itself, to rise to its full stature in holy consciousness and love. In the Christian West purgatory has always existed as a rather shadowy doctrine. On the high side, it contains within it the conviction that the prayers of the living can in some way reach and affect the fortunes of those in the world beyond. This is one of the most powerful affirmations of our faith, that death is permeable by love from both sides! But the tradition has never sufficiently developed the implications of this belief, and purgatory has been flattened by the tendency of exoteric Christianity to compute its meaning at the level of sin and judgment. There does not seem to be enough boldness to take the next step: that prayer, offered in deep faith and love, can transform the very nature of the soul for which it is offered and enable it to grow.

But in fact, Gurdjieff’s notion of a “high” or holy purgatory seems to be the logical outcome of a Christian incarnational theology that envisions the highest goal for human development not as a melting back into an undifferentiated unity, but as the ability to sustain the fierce particularity of love. Instead of being dissolved in the godhead, this second body, formed within the matrix of one’s unique human creaturehood, grows deeper and deeper in its capacity to receive and magnify the divine light. This, I suppect, is the mystical heart of what the inner tradition means by “permanent individuality.”

THE VOW

But it was Jacob Boehme, in a single obscure passage in his The Three Principles of the Divine Essence, who finally handed me the key to why this mystery of growth beyond the physical body is so persistently linked in our tradition to erotic imagery (the wedding garment, the mystical marriage, the bridegroom) and to the soulwork of beloveds separated by death. Pondering what might “comprehend”—that is, contain—the soul once it has departed from the body, he reaffirms that under usual circumstances the soul will undergo the process described earlier in this chapter: it will find itself either in hell or heaven, depending on which of these templates (Boehme calls them “principles”) it has conformed itself to during bodily life. But, he then adds:

If during the time of bodily life the soul has earnestly pledged itself [to another] and has not forsworn that promise, then the pledge itself comprehends it; otherwise that soul stands in its own principle, whether it be the kingdom of hell or of heaven.10

The original German here for “earnestly pledged”—verloben—has the connotation of betrothal, leaving little doubt that Boehme is thinking specifically of a love vow and not just any promise. If I interpret it correctly, what he is implying is that under certain conditions (“which we ought to be silent in here,” he adds cryptically), a solemn vow sworn between true beloveds during the time of their bodily life can become a “principle” in its own right: a matrix in which their love can continue to grow even after one of them has died and which forestalls the inevitable encounter with heaven or hell. The usual “till death do us part” is replaced with “unto eternity.”

A more contemporary way to visualize what Boehme has in mind might be to picture it as a kind of covalent bond across the abyss of death, enabling the two atoms to continue to function as one molecule. The bond is formed through the energy of erotic love.

Whatever image works, the gist of it is that the two beloveds, rather than sealing up the “interinanimation” (in the words of John Donne) of their souls at death, may under certain circumstances be permitted to keep it open. They maintain, as it were, not two separate souls now separated by death, but a continuous joint account whose language of transaction is through the medium of the second body. The final balance will be rendered at the hour of death of the surviving partner. But this choice can only be enacted if at least one partner (and at least germinally in the second) has developed this second body, or wedding garment, which allows their love to be shared in this new form.

These were the lessons that Rafe was beginning to teach me in our work together shortly before his death. In essence, it was a crash course in building second body, which on the Christian inner path is done primarily through the intense practice of “true resignation” (as Boehme calls it)—the laying down of one’s personal will in order to be unconditionally present to the will of God.

In the time since Rafe’s death, this reshaping of my will that he set in motion continues in my slow and painful learning that it is only through the development of second body within myself that I can receive and return the enormous gifts of love still to be shared between us. Memory and affective emotion are simply too weak; they eventually break down under the oxidation of time into an aching loneliness.

“THE WONDERS”

“It takes a gambler’s heart to do the spiritual journey,” Rafe once told me, early on in our time together. And it is gambling I think of when I come to the last part of this question, namely, what is the point, particularly for Rafe, of continuing an open-ended partnership across the vale of death?

For me the gains are fairly obvious, though by no means easy in day-to-day practice. It becomes increasingly clear that the shift of inner orientation that could never quite be mustered by ego alone is slowly being accomplished by love: the shift away from the habitual preoccupation with the things of this life. For as Scripture says, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

For me, thus, the heart is in heaven. I do not mean by this a yearning for death, but more, a kind of detachment that cuts forcefully through the usual distractions and enchantments of bodily life. If I forget the big picture, if momentarily or even habitually I slip into ambition or despair, I must remember—even as a hypothetical, Pascalian sort of wager—that this is not just my life that I am affecting, but our life. Despair, cowardice, laziness, self-justification—all those things into which folly might lead me in my own terrestrial corner of life—cannot be the proper response when I remember the one who has laid down his soul for me. In all, it is a pretty good honing to a deeper and more intensive practice.

But what is there in all this for Rafe? Perhaps the best approach comes in an insight by the contemporary theologian Beatrice Bruteau. “Love always seeks the ultimately real,” she writes in her essay “Persons in Love.”11 And what is ultimately real in one, she goes on to say, is centered in “an outflowing action of loving other persons.”

In other words, love calls forth the reality of the beloved, and the act of loving calls forth our own most authentic and dynamic center. The result is a mutual thrust deeper and deeper into becoming, the unfolding of the wonder of each person.

Rafe and I always noticed that our moments of high striving were somehow less authentic than the messy but always surprising emergences of some unknown new person, who stepped forth, not in the subduing of his or my essential nature, but in the creative tension of a love that cut off all escape routes. What we gave each other was joy and confidence, the seeing and being seen that allowed us to face not only the dark parts of ourselves that needed healing, but those light parts that needed birthing. Our holy substantiality beyond the physical body does not branch off from the highest we have achieved here, but from the wholest.

“Man was not born for self-dominion, but as an instrument of God’s wonder,” writes Jacob Boehme.¹² At the heart of Boehme’s complex theology lies the simple conviction that the soul, in its very journey of becoming, is the creative instrument of “the wonders.” In its struggle to discover and bring forth what it truly is, it becomes a unique expression of the heart of God, a visible trajectory of that divine, outpouring love that can express itself in no other way. Moreover, Boehme implies in a remarkable passage, it is the strength, the courage, the intensity of the soul’s “pure becoming” in this world that creates “Majesty,” that essential attribute of the next.¹³

This is almost certainly the inner meaning of Christ’s parable of the talents, which castigates the one who plays it safe and buries his treasure in the ground.¹⁴ The treasure must come out of the ground; conscious form and shaping must arise out of unconscious fear and impulse; and with gambler’s heart and artist’s skill, one must play out the hand dealt one by essence. For “the wonders which thou hast wrought and found out here,” as Boehme puts it, become the candlepower of the soul whose light is Christ.

With this in mind, I would venture a guess as to what might be in it for Rafe to continue an interinanimated partnership beyond the boundaries of physical death. Strengthened and made one in the body of hope, he and I can continue to work in the wonders, with my corner of reality and his interpenetrating to form a continuous whole. Not by imitating Rafe, but by allowing his deepest wish for my becoming to be the epicenter of my own journey, I can remain faithful to the wonders in both of us that were coming to birth through human love, and they will continue to grow and ripen for both of us.

At any rate, this is the path I am walking, and the road map insofar as I am able to understand it. But I am reminded of Rafe’s words, in one of those times of the forgiveness after the storm, “I tried to give it a shape, but it has no shape. All I can do is open my heart more and more deeply.”