The Dark Light

More from Matthew Bagger's 'The Uses of Paradox' - Chapter 3 on 'Mystics and Ascetics'.

Nicholas of Kues(Cusa) was a 15th century German Roman Catholic cardinal, whose writings include mystical treatises and philosophical and mathematical contributions. He was the first to use concave lenses to fix short-sightedness. Personally, on this fact alone I should probably be blessing him as a saint.

Exploring the idea that the absolute maximum cannot be a maximum relative to something else in his ‘De docta ignorantia’, Cusa hits on the idea that there is nothing lesser than the absolute maximum – but this, indeed becomes the absolute minimum! God as the absolute maximum is the transcendent simplicity, prior to contradictories, the enfolding (complicatio) of all and the unfolding (explicatio) of all. God transcends reason (ratio), which imposes names and operates by means of names and their opposites. ‘Learned ignorance’ consists in exploiting and then transcending all words, ‘every act of reason’ to ‘ascend to simple intellectuality to see God incomprehensibly'. The effort of human intelligence should be to raise itself to that simplicity where contradictories coincide.

Pseudo-Dionysius and Nicholas of Cusa differ from Hegel in that they both think that the deeper knowledge attained through paradox remains ineffable, whereas Hegel, in pursing the speculative, tries to articulate it. The awe, mystery and piety are what the mystic takes to be revelatory – the resistance to language lends to the paradoxes the sense that they have extraordinary cognitive content to disclose.

The Christian concept of mystery includes both doctrines regarding truth as well as on the very intelligibility of which one must take on faith. Mystery connotes that some truths resist rational articulation – there is a second order cognition that assures against absurdity to reduce first-order dissonance.

In Buddhism, the Madhyamaka texts portray anupalabdhidharmaksanti (intuitive tolerance of the incomprehensibility of all things) as enabling the development of prajna (intense knowing) and aryajnana (holy intuition), that is, enabling a transcendent cognitive state that discloses the ultimate truth about reality. This is necessary to the bodhisattva path, where the individual encountering the Madhyamaka doctrine of the emptiness of all things must paradoxically realise that the doctrine itself therefore must also be empty. Cultivation of tolerance of incomprehensibility allows for the ease of dissonance that the doctrine of emptiness would otherwise arouse.

John of the Cross pursues cognitive asceticism using Pseudo-Dionysius’ darkness and illumination imagery. Following the path of purgation, illumination and union, a night to the senses is the first dark night that is proposed, where, in the ‘Ascent of Mount Carmel’, St John describes the purgation of desires for worldly goods and attachments. The second night of the journey by the soul to union with God is passed by way of faith – that is, as ‘dark as night to the understanding’. Will and memory too are subject to total annihilation, a ‘death to the natural self’ is undertaken. The third night is the destination, God – described as the dark of dawn before the onset of illumination by God’s incomparable light, in ‘The Dark Night’.

Nurturing cognitive dissonance appears to be a key to St John’s Dark Nights – rigorous self denial, coupled with the faith that if God is darkness, we too must be prepared to enter into this darkness, purging the understanding in pursuit of the incomprehensible. For John, the vertigo of self-contradiction induced by faith abets detachment.

Entering deeply into the experience of faith, in and of itself, is what St John proclaims as the path to true mystical experience of God –

‘For not only does it give no information and knowledge, but, as we have said, it deprives us of all other information and knowledge, and blinds us to them, so that they cannot judge it well. For other knowledge can be acquired by the light of the understanding, but the knowledge that is of faith is acquired without the illumination of the understanding, which is rejected for faith’.

Thus, the soul is left resigned, detached and annihilated, self reliance is eliminated, and now it is prepared for union with God. We are humbled.

Note that we are humbled in a different way to that proposed by Kirkegaard, of perpetual martyrdom – St John proposes that after purgation, there is the illumination, the dawning of God.