The Spiritual Trek as Iconoclastic and Deconstructive

(4/6/23)

[“We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time” (T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Collected Poems, 208).]

O Lover,

In these ripening years I have been given a greater awareness of the extent to which the “more” of faith in You is by any other measure “less.” Indeed, the journey to You now arcs through subtraction rather than addition, a kind of ignorance than cognitive knowledge, trust than certitude. In this prayer I am aided by terms like “iconoclasm” (from the 8th-9th century conflict over physical images in the Eastern Church) and “deconstruction” (from modern literary analysis) in conveying something of this quality of faith in You. I begin by citing mystics, a part of Christianity’s “minority report,” who have contributed to my growing awareness of this counterintuitive quality.

Foundational has been the apophática (“sans images”) tradition going back to the anonymous Pseudo-Dionysian corpus (c.500 CE). These Greek texts from the Levant, made available to the Latin West by Eriugena in the 9th century and subsequently shaping a wide spectrum including Thomas, the Beguines, and the Rhinelanders, arguably reach their fullest development in the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing (c.1385) written in the English Midlands. Here the pilgrim is sandwiched between an intrinsic opacity regarding You above and an agencied amnesia regarding all creatures (self included) below. While useful in earlier stages of faith, especially among the young and also in a tethered way later on, images and words, reason and imagination, both the cognitive and the affective, are variously transcended as the apophátic wedge breaks through to regions beyond. These mystics’ accounts of prayer in this hinterland are punctuated with terms such as awareness and consciousness (rather than cognition), unknowing (agnosticism), self-immolating images (e.g., fire, night, the cross), and, of course, silence and its kin (e.g., emptiness, darkness, nakedness, isolation, even dereliction). Throughout the journey the apophatic mystic is painfully torn between her respect for the profound inadequacy of language and other depictions of You, and the urgency of alerting other trekkers to the immediacy of Your Presence. Amid that tension their prose repeatedly gives way to poetry. Or silence. 

I have gradually been becoming aware of both the allure and the radicality of this apophatic vision. Only in retrospect have I seen how I had opted for education so as to extricate myself from the strictures of my rural and provincial origins. Amid my seeming blundering into theological studies, first in evangelical Mennonite Brethren environs and then in two secular universities, my capacities involving images, words, reason, and the rest of kataphática were developing. I was not the only one who viewed me as a wordsmith of sorts, something of which I was proud. The venue for this game was the mind, the head, and I was becoming increasingly proficient in it. 

Decades later I would become suspicious as to the commensurateness of that toolkit vis-à-vis You, the one I claimed to be seeking. And only yet later would I, formed in a Christian tradition bearing the standard of immutability amid the flux, come to marvel at the pattern of iconoclasm (shattering of images) and deconstruction referenced above: change in my view of You, O Lover; of myself; and of the Christian faith itself, formerly understood as “once and for all delivered” (Jude 3).

Thus the gravity-like draw of the apophática, this amid my growing suspicion that of all options it was least inadequately open to the ineffability of the You whom You are self-disclosing, has thrown down a weighty and painful gauntlet. It is clear that in this autumnal season I am experiencing both sloughing off and jettisoning (active), and being honed and pared down (receptive), regarding what dominated the first half of my life. The role of the cognitive is largely atrophying to that of recognition of its own delimitation. A friend and peer, denizen of sugar maple country, speaks of this stage as one of being “boiled down.” Presently I am self-describing more comfortably as “agnostic” (the “unknowing” of The Cloud) than as “orthodox,” to say nothing of “crusader”; I am less enamored by certitude, more by the Reality—simple, singular, core, and ineffable—who is You, O Lover. 

All of this has been for me both rapturous and concussing, a melding which I expect to characterize my remaining time. But if I profess that whom I see in Your Christ is You, and it is this which I have experienced, then I must stay the course of this unburdening of the vessel of my lifespan, the jettisoning of the primary toolkit with which I fabricated my earlier life. Via Your Anointed One’s words to Peter You are  calling: “Cast out into the [apophátic] deep” (Lk 5:4). That invitation is the distillate of my entire lifespan, and I pray Your aid in offering my “Yes!” in as full a manner as I am able.