The Apophátic Heart
[Si comprehéndus, non est Deus (“The deity understood is not God”) is found in Sermon #117 of Augustine (354-430).]
O Lover,
Of late an emerging insight has been surfacing in my voyage into fuller awareness of You. I cut to the chase. In my bungling and self-distracting way I long to possess You, to be drawn into You both via and beyond my sensorium, intellect, imagination, and affections. I intuit the persistence of that desire, one of my least disputed sureties, as being response to Your timeless disposition toward all of us creatures subject to time and space.
But the stage thus set is not unproblematic. To paraphrase Augustine: the deity whom I possess is by definition not You. Not only are You unfathomable in my cosmic confines where absolutization of creatures is idolatrous, but, if Gregory of Nyssa is to be heeded, that is also the case whatever else there may be beyond time and space. So then, if, on the one hand, we responders to Your drawing as old as the cosmos think we have captured You, we have thereby demonstrably failed; if, on the other hand, even while longing for You we concede as “not allowed” the satiation of this yearning, we may actually be arriving exactly where we need to be. In short, what appears to be strong faith may indeed be falsity whereas what is disparaged as weak doubt may actually be truth. In words attributed to Your Anointed One: “the last shall be first, and the first last” (Mt 20:16), yet another surface on Your oxymoronically upside-down Kin-dom!
Alas, You whom I (still and curiously) address as Lover, the above “insight” deposits me in a whirling interrogative thicket, one both perplexing and promising: Might doubt be seen as a refusal to absolutize a “thing,” whether of Your or our creation, and thus be counterintuitively viewed as a nonnegotiable component of faith in You alone (Tu Sólus)? Does not my drift from demarcation (kataphática [“with image”]) into Your wild and and trackless openness (apophática [“without image”]) require that I make my peace with agnosticism (“unknowing” a la The Cloud) of a certain sort? Do I not need then to hold differently my failure to possess You (oft expressed as impatience, aridity, or flirtations with despair)? Has not part of the tension in my journey been a failure to come to a fuller peace with my own finitude, a dynamic which the Incarnátus addresses on every front? And if my responses to the above queries might be “yes,” could not I experience a measure of consolation precisely in the relative absence of the same, this as in the Psalter’s “My only friend is darkness” (88:18)? Might I even find it edifying, an occasion of joy, to experience that none of the sensorial, intellectual, imaginative or affective tools in my erstwhile kit seem to work anymore? Could the experiencing of Your absence thus be Your greatest favor of all? Might all of the above be part of the larger and more profound meaning of Juan’s “dark night of the soul” or Mother Teresa’s spiritual desolation of nearly a half-century? O Lover, rather than dualistic alternatives, am I being shown that a mystery-shrouded agnosticism and the vísio beatífica can be one and the same? When stripped of all certainties, am I not invited simply to trust You?
In recent weeks my response to the above questions has been shifting yet more from “perhaps” toward “yes,” and I have been dubbing its metaphorical locus as “the apophátic heart.” “Apophática” then is not only about either the naming/un-naming of the whirlwind (“god-talk”) or the vocabulary of contemplative forms of prayer, but also about my recurring temptation to seek verification, confirmation, and scaffolding reassurance vis-à-vis You, the Télos of the journey. In short, consolations. The apophátic heart is moving beyond that need, its only consolation, a paradoxical one, the absence of the same. The heart of such a trekker, stripped even of specific expectation, finds its rest, almost as a child, in You alone (Tu Sólus). You alone are enough.
Finally, that in the Christ, “the image of the the invisible [You]” (Col 1:15), the kataphátic and apophátic are provocatively inter-folded does not dissuade me from viewing the latter as primary. It is principally the apophátic heart which is graced to rest in You far outside the range of its natural tools. The apophátic heart is being weaned of verifying, characterizing, objectifying, categorizing, absolutizing, requiring, and thus is increasingly indistinguishable from You who are, in the words of Eckhart, “No-thing.” But rather than experiencing this weaning as deprivation and desolation, such a heart increasingly finds itself as home to the only Presence who really matters. And there in its nakedness it trusts.
O Lover, I am grateful to You that something important is opening up for me here.
