Dark Light of Love 0268026181, 9780268026189

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Dark Light of Love

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DARK LIGHT OF LOVE Foreword by Paul Kollman, C.S.C.

John S . Dunne University of Notre Dame Press • Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2014 by University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu All Rights Reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunne, John S., 1929– Dark light of love / foreword by Paul Kollman, C.S.C. ; John S. Dunne. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02618-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-268-02618-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-268-07775-4 (e-book) 1. Spirituality—Christianity. 2. God (Christianity)— Knowableness. 3. Light—Religious aspects—Christianity. 4. Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) I. Title. BV4501.3.D865 2014 248.4—dc23 2014022365 ∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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C onten ts

Foreword

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Paul Kollman, C.S.C.

Preface

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A Cloud of Unknowing

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A Cloud of Unknowing between Us and God 2 A Cloud of Forgetting between Us and All Else

Emergence

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Emergence of the Human Race

16

Emergence of the Individual 21

Separation

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Emergence and Separation 28 “The path taken by the soul of the dancer” 33

Reunion

39

The Road of Reunion 40 The Road of the Union of Love

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A Soul Is Oned with God Into Darkness with Love

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The Circle of Knowing and Loving

Dark Light of Love Dark Light: A Song Cycle

Notes

79

Index

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Contents

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65 75

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Foreword

The final sentence of this book (before its songs) is “I choose to live toward eternal life.” Intriguingly, the last sentences in each of John Dunne’s previous two books also point toward an ultimate destiny. The Circle Dance of Time (2010) ends with “At journey’s end there is life and there is music,” and Eternal Consciousness (2012) strikes a similar note in its conclusion: “Eternal life, I believe, belongs to those who live in the presence, and eternal consciousness is an awareness of ‘real presences,’ our real presence to one another and to ourselves and to God, and God’s real presence to us.” With John Dunne having gone “the way of all the earth” on November 11, 2013, these sentiments have a prophetic poignancy. John’s thinking in these final years of his life was filled with the awareness that he had been through most of the circle of his earthly life. He knew that he was on his return back to God, after being born from God. This embracing paradigm of emanation from God and return to God, embedded in his heart and mind years ago through repeated readings of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, shapes deeply the book you have before you. As with all of John’s books since the 1970s, his own personal experiences of loneliness and loving, of longing for God and learning from God, and of facing death and embracing life vii

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stand behind what he writes. His desire to understand and share what he had learned led him to engage with a rich variety of sources and writings, all in the effort to elaborate how the “dark light of love” illuminates a soul in the process whereby it is “oned” with God through emergence, then separation, culminating in union. By interrogating his own knowing and his own loving in that process, John leads us to reconsider our own knowing and loving, thereby shining light on the puzzles that perplex each of us. I invite you to read Dark Light of Love slowly and to savor it. Some people have enjoyed reading John Dunne’s books exactly as he wrote them—one paragraph per day. My own pace is not so leisurely, yet I urge you to pursue the rich yield that comes from close, patient, careful reading. This book, like each of the many by John Dunne that I have read, reminds me of the gift to us that his life as a writer and a teacher has been. He helped so many of us to understand the need to take seriously our own experiences, and he showed us how to plumb those experiences for insights inspired by his own. In reading this book, I am reminded of what he still can teach us and of what his untimely death has taken from us. It is a bitter privilege to write the first foreword to one of John’s books. I am deeply aware of the passing of a friend, mentor, and source of wisdom. He beckons me, however, like he beckons us all, to “choose to live toward eternal life.” And in him we have a worthy and hospitable guide, a light to kindle our hearts and illuminate our minds, as we seek to follow the implications of that always unfolding choice. Paul Kollman, C.S.C.

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P reface

Light passing through the dark of outer space becomes visible when it encounters an object. So it is too with spiritual light. It becomes discernible when it kindles the heart and illumines the mind. I call it “dark light of love.” Love is joy at the thought of the loved one, and love of God is joy at the thought of God, as Spinoza says. I will say love is joy at the thought of “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), for that speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition and says we are not alone. I think of the African love song, I walk alone, and it suggests to me a mystical song, I walk alone with the Alone, for mysticism is union or communion with ultimate reality. Life and light and love are the basic metaphors of the Gospel of John, and they form a great circle, coming from God and going to God, and “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” as Rilke says in his Stories of God. So Dark Light of Love is the name

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I am giving to this book, and I am ending with a song cycle called “Dark Light” after a song I wrote for my book The Mystic Road of Love, Why is it dark at night? —a thousand stars are like a thousand suns! Why is it dark before me, If your light Shines on my path? I can know more Than I can tell Of light and darkness, For if your eyes open, There is light, If your eyes close, Then there is dark, But light inside my heart.

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A C loud of Unk nowing

“The Cloud of Unknowing, in the which a soul is oned with God” —from title of Middle English work

“You see life as a journey with God, but I see it as a conflict, a wrestling with God,” my friend Tjaard Hommes once said to me. He was right. I do see life as a journey with God in time. To see it as a conflict, a wrestling with God, like Jacob wrestling with the angel (Genesis 32:24– 30), is to see the relation as one of facing God. To see it as a journey with God in time is to see it as one of being with God. Human relations can be seen in both of these ways, as facing one another and as being with one another. The human relation with God then has this double possibility, but in relating with God we are relating with the unknown. There is a cloud of unknowing that comes between us and God, according to the anonymous author of the mystical Cloud of Unknowing. But the full title of his work in Middle English was “a book of contemplation, the which is called The Cloud of Unknowing, in the which a soul is oned with God.”1 Thus it is not an agnostic but a mystical essay, if we understand mysticism to be 1

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union or communion with ultimate reality. How, though, is a soul oned with God in a cloud of unknowing? Apparently by way of love, “into the darkness with love.”2 “Love shone through the cloud which came between the Lover and the Beloved,” Ramón Llull says, “and made it as bright and resplendent as is the moon by night, as the day star at dawn, the sun at midday, the understanding in the will; and through that bright cloud the Lover and the Beloved held converse.”3 Thus I am calling this book Dark Light of Love. If we think of knowing as taking things in and loving as going out to things, things past, things present, and things to come, there is a circle, loving leading to knowing and knowing to loving. Love is joy at the thought of the loved one, and love of God is joy at the thought of God, as Spinoza says,4 and I will give it a Christian turn and say love is joy at the thought of “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), for “God with us” speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition. If the “dark light of love,” as I am calling it, is the dark light of joy at the thought of “God with us,” we can have a personal relation with the unknown, we can be friends of God, even lovers of God. There are two clouds in The Cloud of Unknowing: there is a cloud of unknowing that comes between us and God, and there is a cloud of forgetting that comes between us and all else.

A Cloud of Unknowing between Us and God If my life is a journey with God in time, I am led by the dark light of love, as in Newman’s lines “Lead, Kindly Light”: Lead, kindly light Amid the encircling gloom Lead thou me on! The night is dark, 2

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And I am far from home— Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene— One step enough for me.5 Darkness is the metaphor here for unknowing and the unknown. Dark light is like physical light traveling through the darkness of outer space, invisible until it strikes an object, as Arthur Zajonc says in Catching the Light.6 The dark light of love then is the kindly light that leads by the heart, one step at a time. “God is spirit” (John 4:24), and so God acts spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds. “The heart has its reasons that reason does not know,” as Pascal says,7 but these reasons of the heart can become known to the mind. That is insight, I want to say, when reasons of the heart become known to the mind. Thus the kindling of the heart leads to the illumining of the mind. Joy as a guiding principle, as in the autobiography of C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy,8 arises out of the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. It is a guiding principle in our dealings with the unknown and our unknowing. This path of joy contrasts with a spirituality of fear, an alternative way of dealing with the unknown. If I follow the path of joy, I am on a quest of understanding rather than a quest of certainty. A path of joy rather than of fear, a quest of understanding rather than of certainty, that I believe is what leads to being oned with God in a cloud of unknowing. We must look closely, therefore, at the contrast between a path of joy and a spirituality of fear, between a quest of understanding and a quest of certainty. Letting go of fear means letting go of certainty also in faith seeking understanding. Love is letting go of fear; understanding is letting go of certainty. “Music A Cloud of Unknowing

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must be treated as all things that are eternal, such as love and understanding,” a Chinese grandmother said to one of my students, “because it is these things that will carry us through the darkness of our lives and the death of our bodies to the moon of everlasting peace.”9 Love and understanding, as she said, are things that are eternal in our lives. The connection between them and joy appears in Five Mystical Songs by George Herbert set to music by Vaughan Williams: Come my joy, my love, my heart, Such a joy as none can move, Such a love as none can part, Such a heart as joys in love.10 Love of God thus is joy at the thought of God, and the thought of God is an understanding of our relation with God. It means we are not alone. Seeing my life as a journey with God in time, therefore, I find joy in the thought of walking with God and hope, as in the words “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). So love and understanding are things that are eternal in our lives, an answer to the problem of death, “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” To say love and understanding are things that are eternal, and music too, according to the Chinese grandmother, is to say “it is these things that will carry us through the darkness of our lives and the death of our bodies to the moon of everlasting peace.” We can readily see how love and understanding and music too can carry us through the darkness of our lives. This is the “dark light,” as we are calling it, of love and understanding and music. But can it carry us through the death of our bodies to everlasting peace? “Dark light” of love and understanding can bring us to inner peace in this life inasmuch as love is letting go of fear, and under4

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standing is letting go of certainty. For faith seeking understanding the inner life becomes the afterlife, the inner peace becomes the everlasting peace. I wrote a poem called “Dark Light” and set it to music: Why is it dark at night? —a thousand stars are like a thousand suns! Why is it dark before me, If your light Shines on my path? I can know more Than I can tell Of light and darkness, For if your eyes open, There is light, If your eyes close, Then there is dark, But light inside my heart.11 The “light inside my heart” is the light of the inner life that becomes the afterlife. It is the inner peace that becomes the everlasting peace. “Faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.” I have not been able to find the source of that saying, but it sounds close to Pascal’s saying that faith is “God sensible to the heart.”12 God is sensible, that is perceptible, to the heart, in our experience of the heart being kindled and the mind illumined. Actual grace, I take it, is that experience of the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. “If something happens to you, it is merely an event,” Irving Howe says, “but if you ponder it, and absorb it into your consciousness, it becomes an experience.”13 The kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind becomes an experience if we A Cloud of Unknowing

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ponder it and absorb it into our consciousness. Thus “God sensible to the heart” becomes an experience. I think of the words of M. L. Haskins quoted by King George VI in his Christmas message of 1939: “And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year: Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown. And he replied: Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”14 “Dark light” comes therefore of going out into the darkness and putting your hand into the hand of God. It is better than bright light and safer than a known way. Seeing my life as a journey with God in time means just that, going out into the darkness and putting my hand into the hand of God. I think of The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin about the pathways of aboriginal peoples across the continent of Australia.15 A journey with God in time is like following these invisible pathways. There is love and understanding and music. The love is the joy of being with God on the journey; the understanding is of the direction this gives to one’s energy; and the music is in song as “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.”16 Faith seeking understanding is what underlies this love and joy, this understanding, and this leap of mind in song. I think of Karl Barth’s interpretation of Anselm’s argument for the existence of God.17 It is not an argument from pure reason, Barth says, but from faith seeking understanding. What it gives, then, is an understanding of faith. Faith seeking understanding, we could say, underlies the thought of a journey with God in time. It underlies the thought that we are not alone and thus the leap of mind in song. “We are alone, and we cannot make one another unalone,” a friend of mine used to say. If our life is a journey with God in 6 |

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time, however, we are not alone. It is true, nevertheless, that we cannot make one another unalone. “Only God enters into the soul,” Saint Thomas Aquinas says, quoting an ancient theological axiom.18 If our relation with God and with others is one of being with on our journey in time rather than one of facing, though, there can be a harmony between our human relations and our relation with God. As the composer John Adams says, “the secret of grace is harmony.”19 Harmony between our human relations and our relation with God in being with, and dissonance in the relation of facing, leads us into “the cloud of unknowing in the which a soul is oned with God.” Atonement, understood as at-onement, goes with the thought of being with in our relation with God, but understood as substitution, “the substitutionary atonement,” it goes with the thought of facing. If “the secret of grace is harmony,” grace is found in atonement as at-onement where “a soul is oned with God.” Our relation with God, and our relation with Christ, is different in atonement as at-onement and in atonement as substitution. Christ takes our place in substitutionary atonement, but we take his place in atonement as at-onement. Making his God our God, as in the words to Mary Magdalene, “my Father and your Father, my God and your God” (John 20:17), goes with us taking his place. So it is too with what Albert Schweitzer calls “the mysticism of Paul the Apostle,” where Christ lives in us and we live in him.20 Our relation with one another too is different in atonement as at-onement and in atonement as substitution. It is I and thou in atonement as at-onement, and it is I and it in atonement as substitution, as in the question “Are you saved?” Harmony between our human relations and our relation with God in our being with others and our being with God on a journey in time seems implied in the classical motto Et in Arcadia ego, “And I too in Arcadia,” a tomb inscription and also the motto of Goethe’s A Cloud of Unknowing

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Italian Journey.21 Making it the motto of my own Italian journey, my six years in Italy, I think of my whole life as a journey of this kind in time. Keeping a log, like a ship’s log, of my journey in time, I feel I am on a voyage like The Voyage of Life painted by Thomas Cole (1842), through childhood, youth, adulthood, and old age. An unknowing surrounds the transcendent element at each stage. If I see my life as a journey with God in time, there is indeed a transcendent element at each stage on life’s way. There is an element of mystery, as I cannot leap over my own shadow. This element of mystery points to the possibility of eternal life. A cloud of unknowing thus comes between me and God, the mystery I am to myself, unable to leap over my own shadow, the mystery God is therefore to me, as in the prayer of Augustine’s Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!”22 It is the mystery of I and thou with God. It points to the possibility of eternal life in that it is a relationship with the eternal thou. In Christian belief eternal life appears in the more comprehensive formula I in them, and thou in me (John 17:23), Christ in us who follow him, and God in Christ. If I make the God of Jesus my God, if I make his Abba my Abba, then he lives in me and I in him, an everlasting life. Is it everlasting? I make his Abba my Abba, but what I experience is my own prayer, calling on his Abba, “Our Father . . . .” I am turning the truth of my life into prayer, like Augustine or like Goethe turning the truth of his life into poetry. To go on from there is what George MacDonald calls “proving the unseen.”23 What “proving” means here is experiencing. It is “God sensible to the heart,” as Pascal says, God perceptible to the heart in the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind that takes place in prayer. It is the substance and the evidence of eternal life, as in the words “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). “Short prayer penetrates heaven” it is said in The Cloud of Unknowing.24 Prayer penetrates the cloud of unknowing that 8 |

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comes between us and God, particularly short prayer like “May I know me! May I know thee!” Sustained prayer also penetrates heaven, like the sustained prayer of Augustine’s Confessions echoing the Psalms. Still, the moments of short prayer where there is greater intensity penetrates heaven, it seems, even in the midst of sustained prayer, as when Augustine exclaims “Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new, late have I loved you!”25 It is the same in song, as in Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms (1930), for instance at the words Laudate! and Alleluia! Recovering from surgery for lung cancer, I woke up in Intensive Care, and I found my mind going in circles, but I found I could pray, short prayer like “Help!” Afterward I composed a song and set it to music: Short prayer Penetrates heaven, Like Help! Like Thanks! Like Yes! May I know me! May I know thee! Everything Is in your hands! Guard me And guide me! Your will is our peace.

A Cloud of Forgetting between Us and All Else If love is letting go of fear, it is also letting go of sadness, and this letting go is a kind of forgetting. When I was at Manaus on the Amazon, studying the little wedding chapel called The Church of the Poor Devil, I asked the Mother Superior of the Sisters I was A Cloud of Unknowing

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staying with, “Are these people really as happy as they seem?” And she replied, “They can be sad for a day. But they can’t hold on to sadness.” I thought to myself then, “Now I understand the Cloud of Forgetting—it is not literal forgetting but letting go of sadness.” Also I came across words of Ramón Llull about remembering and forgetting. “He who truly remembers my Beloved, in remembering Him forgets all things around,” Llull says; “and he who forgets all things in remembering my Beloved, is defended by Him from all harm, and receives a part in all His blessings.”26 Attention is what he is talking about in remembering and forgetting. If my attention is focused on Christ or on God, then it is not focused on all things around. So in that way I am remembering Christ or remembering God and forgetting all things around. Here again it is not literal forgetting. I think of Malebranche’s saying, “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.”27 Letting go of fear and sadness seems to go with attention that is prayer. Thus Dag Hammarskjöld at the turning point of his life writes, “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”28 The “Thanks!” is a letting go of sadness, and the “Yes!” is a letting go of fear. What he is doing is not simply living in the present but living in the Presence, and relating to the past and the future out of an awareness of the presence of God. Living in the Presence contrasts thus with living solely in the present, for instance with Faust saying “the present alone is our happiness.”29 If I live in the Presence in the present, I can have a positive relation with the past, “Thanks!” and a positive relation with the future, “Yes!” Let us see then what it would mean to let go of sadness and to let go of fear. “They can be sad for a day. But they can’t hold on to sadness.” Letting go of sadness is more deliberate than being unable to hold on to sadness. It has the same effect, however, of being happy. Letting go of sadness comes about in living simply in the 10 |

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present as well as in living in the Presence. The difference is in the relation to the past. “Thinking is thanking,” the mystical saying of the seventeenth century,30 goes with a positive relation with the past, as in “For all that has been—Thanks!” It is a mystical saying because it expresses communion with ultimate reality, remembering God and forgetting all things around in the attention that is prayer. “The spirit looks neither forward nor backward,” Faust says. “The present alone is our happiness.” It is possible to interpret the sayings in the Gospel “not to look back” and “to take no thought for the morrow” thus in terms of living in the present, but they are meant, I believe, rather in terms of living in the Presence, as Dag Hammarskjöld says in retrospect of his moment of “Thanks!” and “Yes!” “From that moment I have known what it means ‘not to look back’ and ‘to take no thought for the morrow.’ ”31 There is a forgetting in not looking back and in taking no thought for the morrow, but there is also a remembering in thinking that is thanking. Thus “Thinking is thanking,” if we understand it as living in the Presence in the present, means “For all that has been— Thanks!” It is “counting your blessings,” but more than that it is “thanking God always.” Kierkegaard tells the story of an actor who received a standing ovation and went home and fervently thanked God. That is not thanking God always, Kierkegaard said, but if the actor had been booed off the stage and then went home and fervently thanked God—that would be thanking God always!32 It is true, “counting your blessings” tends to lift up the heart beyond sadness. Letting go of sadness does so more thoroughly and enables one to “thank God always.” “Noble-mindedness would be the nature of thinking and thereby of thanking,” Heidegger says. “Of that thanking which does not have to thank for something, but only thanks for being allowed to thank.”33 I take it, though, that thanking for being allowed to thank is actually thanking for something, namely for one’s existence. A Cloud of Unknowing

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Letting go of fear, as in “To all that shall be—Yes!,” is harder, it seems to me, than letting go of sadness, as in “For all that has been—Thanks!” For the fear includes the fear of death. The remembering includes the remembering of mortality, Memento mori, and the forgetting includes the letting go of that fear in the hope of eternal life. Faith as “proving the unseen” is an answer to death, experiencing the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving as a deeper life that can live through death and survive it. The experience, nevertheless, is on this side of death. Symbolic immortality can become real immortality as we go over from symbol to story. If we take birth and death as images, we can see emanation and return as insight into the images, emanation as insight into birth and return as insight into death. So the story is that of emanation and return, emanation from the One and return to the One. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” Rilke says in his Stories of God.34 We seem to be at the far point on the circle in a secular age with the emanation behind and the return ahead. The great circle of all coming from God and all returning to God is a symbol, but when it becomes the story of a life it becomes a reality, a journey with God in time. All the same, it is an unfinished journey. It is insight into death as a return, going home to God, that is a realization of eternal life. It is faith “proving the unseen,” the substance, the evidence of eternal life. It is faith seeking understanding, like Anselm’s proof for the existence of God, not a proof for pure reason but an understanding of faith. If we see time as a horizontal dimension and eternity as a vertical dimension passing through time at every present moment, as in the title scene of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, eternal life is in the vertical, the infinite peaceful sky Prince Andre perceives, lying on his back in the midst of the Battle of Austerlitz.35 Letting go of fear, above all the fear of death, goes with consciousness of the eternal in us. “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,” Kierkegaard says, “what would life be but 12

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despair?”36 Eternal consciousness, I gather, is consciousness of the vertical dimension of eternity passing through the horizontal dimension of time at every present moment. Because it passes through time at every present moment it is easily confused with the present. Actually, though, it is presence in the present, especially the presence of God to the human being or the human being in the presence of God. If the eternal is presence in the present, it is there in real presences, the presence of others, presence to self, and the presence of God. It is there in the mystery of encounter with others, in the mystery I am to myself, unable to leap over my own shadow, and above all in the mystery God is to me, in the cloud of unknowing that comes between me and God. If I see my life as a journey with God in time, the eternal is there in being with God in time, and there is my hope and my joy: “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not, for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Being with God in time means turning over one’s hopes and fears to God and living in “the peace of God that passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). Presence in the present, then, is the eternal in us. What is this presence? Once in a dream I met Saint Thomas Aquinas, a wisdom figure for me, and I asked him, “Do we love with a love we know or with a love we do not know?” And he replied, “With a love we do not know.”37 That thought, that we love with a love we do not know, seems to call for a spiritual journey in which we come to know the love. I think again of the saying of the old Bedouin whom Lawrence met in the desert, “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God.”38 The spiritual journey is a coming to realize the love, and the presence is of the known in the knowing and of the loved in the loving. Coming to realize the love as letting go of fear and letting go of sadness is the forgetting in the remembering of God. Coming to realize the presence of the known in the knowing and of the loved in the loving is the remembering. Forgetting and A Cloud of Unknowing

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remembering then, we love with a love we do not know, but we come to know the love that is “from God, and of God, and toward God.” So the spiritual journey is like Dante’s journey from dark wood to white rose, from the dark wood of fear and sadness to the white rose of love that is from and of and toward God. Seeing life as a journey with God, and seeing life as a conflict with God, being with and facing, lead to different visions of good and evil: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .”39 A journey with God in time, if I see my life this way, leads to a letting go of fear and sadness and to a coming to know love as from and of and toward God. It leads, as we shall see now, to a vision of the emergence and the separation and the reunion of humanity in which “a soul is oned with God.”

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Em e rge nce

Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire; you will what you imagine; and at last you create what you will. —George Bernard Shaw

Imagination is the faculty of possibility, as Kierkegaard says, and enables us to find the way of possibility. “God is that all things are possible,” he says, “and that all things are possible is God.”1 A journey with God in time, it seems to me, is the way of possibility. What I mean by that is to say it is the way on which a human being becomes fully possible, able to love “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). To say “Imagination is the beginning of creation,” as George Bernard Shaw says in Back to Methuselah,2 is to speak of the creative process going from desiring to imagining to willing to creating. What is missing in that description is the moment of insight into image. If we include the moment of insight, it becomes a description of the process of emergence. It is an answer to an unanswered question about human evolution from matter to life to intelligence, namely how intelligence arises. We go thus from 15

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desiring to imagining to understanding to willing to creating. That moment of understanding is crucial and is one of insight into our imagining. It is a leap of the mind. I think of the definition of song that Saint Thomas Aquinas gives in his preface to the Psalms, “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.”3 “In the beginning is the song,” Michel Serres says in his Genesis, speaking from the standpoint of information theory.4 Noise and information are the two basic concepts of information theory, and “genesis” in these terms is the emergence of information from noise. I think of the experience of standing on the seashore and hearing the thunder of the surf. To go from there to meaning is insight into image. It is emergence. It is the song in the beginning, “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.” There is a double emergence in the human story, the emergence of the human race and the emergence of the individual. The emergence of the human race can be seen in terms of human evolution from matter to life to intelligence. The emergence of the individual, on the other hand, can be seen in terms of emanation from the One and return to the One. Emergence of the Human Race In the story of the emergence of the human race and its separation from other living beings there is a prehistoric period where human beings were going in circles, living in the cycles of life. Then there is a passage from the cycles of life to a changing world and a hungering spirit, and this is the beginning of the historic era. Birth and death and rebirth are there in the cycles of life, and though death occurs it is not a problem, for there is rebirth, and the cycles go ever on. When memory intervenes, though, and relations with the dead are no longer dissolved, then there is a past and there is a future. There is a changing world and a hungering spirit, and Gilgamesh goes in quest of eternal 16 |

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life, the pyramids are built, and death becomes a problem: “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?”5 When we place the human story in the larger story of evolution, we find, as Whitehead says, “The present type of order in the world has arisen from an unimaginable past, and it will find its grave in an unimaginable future.”6 If we try nevertheless to imagine the unimaginable, we find ourselves in the process that Shaw describes, desiring and imagining and willing and creating. And if we add the missing element, insight into image, we come to “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” we come to the story and song of creation. Imagining the unimaginable, Tolkien imagines God singing the world into being, and C. S. Lewis imagines Christ in the form of the lion Aslan singing it into being.7 The song of creation, if we try to imagine the unimaginable, would express a “tension of essences,” as Albert Lord calls it,8 a tension of themes, like the ancient creation epics where the monster of chaos is overcome and the cosmos is established, or like a modern counterpart such as Moby Dick where the monster is not overcome. “Technically, every work of art comes into being in the same way as the cosmos—by means of catastrophes,” Kandinsky says, “which ultimately create out of the cacophony of the various instruments that symphony we call the music of the spheres.”9 Let us contemplate this passage from a “tension of essences” to a harmony of the spheres in the emergence of the human race, having in mind the saying “The secret of grace is harmony.” If the world’s first languages were in song, as Vico says,10 there is a fundamental relation between words and music. A love song like the African love song, I walk alone, can become a mystical song like I walk alone with the Alone. Emergence

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The tension of essences in the love song goes over into the harmony of grace in the mystical song. The tension of essences in the love song is in being alone and longing to be unalone. The harmony of grace in the mystical song is in walking with God, walking “alone with the Alone.” Words and music, if the world’s first languages were in song, have a relation, I think, like the right hand and the left hand. A tension of essences arises between the road taken and the road not taken in life and can be resolved in the harmony of the roads rejoining. That has been my experience, setting out on the way of words and having the way of music rejoin the way of words in later life. “He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”11 To say “there was only one Road” and “The Road goes ever on,” as Tolkien does, is to resolve the tension of essences between the road taken and the road not taken in the harmony of song. If we go then with the definition of song Saint Thomas gives in his preface to the Psalms, “Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” the one Road will be the way of possibility on which you learn to love “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” I think of the verse “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). Song and dance, as an expression of human wholeness, is an expression of “all your heart” and “all your soul” and “all your might.” I think of the phrase that is added in the Gospels, “all your mind” (Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27). Learning to love with all your mind, as I understand it, means coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and everything returning to God, like that of Saint Thomas in his Summa. When I go from there to learning to love with all my heart and soul, I begin to see my life as a journey with God in time. And

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when I go on to learning to love with all my might, I go on to the way of music rejoining the way of words. “I walk alone with the Alone”: the mystical song is mystical because it implies union or communion with ultimate reality. The emergence of the human race becomes full emergence, I believe, when it becomes mystical. “The mystic road of love,” as I call it, is what Saint John of the Cross calls “The road of the union of love with God.”12 As I am conceiving it, we are all mystics, and mysticism is the life of contemplation, one of the three dimensions of life in the ancient city along with the life of action and the life of enjoyment. It is true, nevertheless, that this mystical or contemplative dimension is neglected in our current society, and there is a rise of violence in its absence.13 We are all mystics, but we are capable of neglecting the mystical or contemplative dimension of our lives. What then would it be to live in the contemplative dimension of our lives? “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” Malebranche says: attention to the real presences in our lives must be the way. Walter Benjamin, writing on Kafka, says, “Even if Kafka did not pray—and this we do not know—he still possessed in the highest degree what Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’: attentiveness. And in this attentiveness he included all living creatures, as saints include them in their prayers.”14 “Oceanic feeling,” as Freud calls it, goes with this mystical or contemplative dimension of our lives. “We listen to our inmost selves,” Martin Buber says, “and do not know which sea we hear murmuring.”15 This inner sea is the life of the spirit, I would say, the life of knowing and loving. The emergence of the human race is the emergence of this life of knowing and loving, the life of hope and peace and friends and intelligence. If there is a life after death, it must be this inner life of knowing and loving. Knowing is taking things in, things past, things present, and things to come, and loving is going out to things.

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“May I know me! May I know thee!” the prayer of the Soliloquies sets us on a quest of eternal life, an eternal life of knowing and loving. This eternal life is a life of I and thou with God, knowing me and knowing thee. It is the prayer of the Soliloquies and thus is like the love song “I walk alone,” but it is prayer and thus is like the mystical song “I walk alone with the Alone,” or “I walk one with the One.” The knowing is a knowing unknowing “in the which a soul is oned with God.” “In the old days, when wishing still helped . . . ,” one of Grimm’s fairy tales begins.16 Our heart’s desire for eternal life does help, I believe, for it sets us upon a way of possibility. In the Parable of the Grain of Wheat (John 12:24) the outer integument breaks up and the inner life emerges. The way of possibility for us then is the inner life. It is the inner life, according to this, that becomes the afterlife. Death is the breakup of the outer integument. Can the inner life survive the breakup? What can we know? What should we do? What may we hope? Clearly what we should do, if this is true, is cultivate the inner life. As my friend Henri Nouwen once said, “Most people don’t have a rich inner life.” So, then, the emergence of the human race is the emergence of the inner life, and we participate in this emergence to the extent that we do have a rich inner life, like that of Dag Hammarskjöld in his Markings. I mention Markings because that is the example Nouwen was referring to when he spoke of a rich inner life. Years ago a dear friend, Sister Mary Grace, O.P., gave me a copy of Markings for Thanksgiving. She was “a free-riding auditor,” as she said in my classes. The heart of Markings, as I read it, is the moment when Hammarskjöld says “Thanks!” and “Yes!” That is the moment of full emergence. Now the emergence is becoming that of the individual, relating to his past and his future. If we see this emergence in terms of human evolution from matter to life to intelligence, it is the climax of human evolution. If we see this emergence in terms of 20 |

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emanation from the One and return to the One, it is the beginning of a spiritual adventure. Let us go on now to consider this spiritual adventure, the emergence of the individual in emanation from the One and return to the One.

Emergence of the Individual Individual emergence comes about, like Dag Hammarskjöld’s “Thanks!” and “Yes!,” at a turning point in life. “For all that has been—Thanks!” he writes, “To all that shall be—Yes!”17 It is the climax of his life till then and the beginning of a spiritual adventure. In retrospect then his whole previous life is part of this spiritual adventure. His “Thanks!” and “Yes!” is an answer to the problem of death, “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” He writes in Markings, “Do not seek death. Death will find you. But seek the road which makes death a fulfilment.”18 The road is that of the spiritual adventure. It is “the mystic road of love,” as I have called it, the road on which you learn to love with all your mind and heart and soul. Individuation means becoming whole, as in the Latin word individuum, “undivided,” and you become a whole human being by learning to love. The poet Nicanor Parra, when Thomas Merton told him about his experience of falling in love, advised “Follow the ecstasy!”19 To go from falling in love to loving God is a journey in which you follow the ecstasy, are led by joy, led by what I call the heart’s desire. C. S. Lewis in his autobiography Surprised by Joy describes this guiding joy as an unfulfilled desire more desirable than any other fulfillment.20 So when I ask myself, “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” the answer clearly is to follow the heart’s desire. What then is the heart’s desire? I will say it is the desire for eternal life, the desire for God. It is the quest of Emergence

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Gilgamesh but transformed by all that came afterwards, the immortality of the soul in the Dialogues of Plato and the promise of eternal life in the Gospels. If we think of eternal life as beginning already on this side of death, it is the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving, the life of hope and peace and friends and intelligence. So to describe the emergence of the individual is a kind of “phenomenology of spirit,” as Hegel called it,21 a description of the life of the spirit and the phases in this life. Hegel’s phenomenology goes from the person before others to the person before self, but I would want to continue on to the person before God. Or really, going from facing to being with, I want to go from the presence of others to presence to self to the presence of God. Emanation and return are the principal incidents on the spiritual adventure. Emanation is an insight into the image of birth, and return is an insight into the image of death. “Real presences,” as George Steiner calls them,22 are the encounters that occur on the spiritual adventure running from emanation to return. If I see my life as a journey with God in time, I ponder my beginning in emanation and my end in return, like T. S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, and by being still and waiting, the darkness of my life becomes dancing light.23 The presences then in my life, the presence of others, my presence to myself, and the presence of God come to appear as the eternal in my life. First, the presence of others: if I go from facing to being with in my relation to others, I can be with another or with others on my journey in time. The masters and the slaves in Hegel’s phenomenology are in a relation of facing one another. To go from facing to being with is to become friends. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). There is an element of knowing in being friends, knowing what the other is doing. I remember my friend Helen Luke saying she believed 22

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friendship was the highest thing. That would be true, I think, if we include friendship with God. Second, there is my presence to myself, and there is such a thing as friendship with oneself, as in the prayer Kathleen Norris came upon in Dakota, “Keep me friendly to myself, keep me gentle in disappointment.”24 To go from facing oneself to being with oneself is to make friends with oneself and become gentle in disappointment. Hegel’s phenomenology culminates in self facing itself, and this he considers absolute knowledge. Yet if we make friends with ourselves we come to realize we are a mystery to ourselves, unable to leap over our own shadow. Lastly, then, there is the presence of God. Kierkegaard’s formula in his Sickness unto Death makes the connection with our presence to ourselves: “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.”25 By relating to myself and willing to be myself, that is, I rest transparently in God. We find rest then in the presence of God. We go from facing God and wrestling with God, like my friend Tjaard Hommes, to being with God and resting in the presence of God on a journey in time. To “rest transparently in the power that established it” contrasts with a will to power. There is a theme of “the renunciation of love” in Wagner’s Ring cycle,26 and it seems to go with a will to power. There is an equal and opposite theme of the renunciation of power in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though you can see there the influence of Wagner’s Ring and Plato’s Ring of Gyges. The renunciation of power is the reverse of the renunciation of love. The temptation of power, as Tolkien describes it, is a temptation to be someone other than oneself. The Lady Galadriel, for instance, when Frodo offers her the ring of power, refuses and says, “I pass the test. I will diminish, and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”27 It is like the biblical test of loneliness, “God left him to himself, in order to try him and to know all that was in his heart” Emergence

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(2 Chronicles 32:31). David Daube compares King Hezekiah in this passage and Jesus crying out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”28 The temptation of power is a similar test of the heart. It reveals all that is in one’s heart. A positive test of the heart is the divine offer “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5), and the response “an understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9). All this reveals the human heart and the heart’s desire. If we say the heart’s desire, according to this, is “an understanding heart,” and also is eternal life, as in the story of Gilgamesh, then eternal life must consist somehow of “an understanding heart.” It must be an answer to the prayer of the Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!” The knowing comes, it seems, of walking on the way of possibility, on a journey with God in time. Eternal life is an I and thou with God, according to this, and the heart’s desire is to understand and to be understood in an I and thou with God. I think again of Kafka’s words in his diary, “There is no one here who has an understanding for me in full. To have even one who had this understanding, for instance a woman, would be to have support from every side. It would be to have God.”29 The human I and thou, “for instance a woman,” is inseparable from the I and thou with God, “It would be to have God.” So this would be the full meaning of “an understanding heart.” An I and thou with God in time can take the form of a struggle, a wrestling with God, or it can take the form of a journey with God. I have been taking the struggle to be the relationship of facing and the journey to be the relationship of being with. The paradigm of facing God, like that of facing other persons, is essentially one of conflict; that of being with God, like that of being with others, is essentially one of peace; and that of going from facing to being with is one of making peace. We have three paradigms then of relationship. Wrestling with God: “And Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day” (Genesis 24

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32:24). There is an anthology entitled Wrestling with God about “Jewish theological responses during and after the Holocaust.”30 The insight in these responses is to see the Holocaust and the responses to it in terms of Jacob wrestling with God. The wrestling is “until the breaking of the day,” and that breaking of the day, it seems to me, is the going over from facing God to being with God on a journey in time. “And Jacob was left alone.” There is a deep loneliness in facing God that is surmounted in being with God on a journey in time. If the love of God is joy at the thought of God, it is possible not in facing God but only in being with God, and so the great commandment of love is fulfilled not in wrestling with God but in walking with God. So too the hope of eternal life comes of walking with God, as in the words “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). What then is the significance of wrestling with God? It is the test of loneliness, I believe, as in “God left him to himself, in order to try him and to know all that was in his heart” (2 Chronicles 32:31). I think too of the Lord’s Prayer in the Gospels, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Mat thew 6:13). It asks not to be led into the test of loneliness. There are two elements in loneliness, being alone and longing to be unalone. When the longing to be unalone is combined with hope, it becomes love, as in the words of the old Bedouin reported by Lawrence of Arabia, “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God.” To go then from wrestling with God to walking with God is to go from loneliness to love. This is all about our relation with God, but what about God? Elie Wiesel speaks of “God’s suffering,” and that is the last entry in that volume Wrestling with God.31 I think also of Jacques Maritain saying “God is vulnerable.”32 To go from loneliness to love is to go from our suffering to joy at the thought of “God with us.” Yet it is also to realize that God is vulnerable or really to know our unknowing in these matters. Emergence

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What we come upon here is “the cloud of unknowing in the which a soul is oned with God.” Emergence of the individual is also emergence of God, just as emergence of the human race was already an emergence of God. The original emergence of God in that of the human race is revealed in a saying of the Kikuyu people in Africa, Ngai ndagiagiagwo, “God is not to be pestered.”33 The emergence of God in the emergence of the individual goes with a more demanding human relation with God, as in the parables of Jesus, for instance the parable of the unjust judge (Luke 18:1– 8). If we think of faith as a combination of willingness and hope, it is the element of hope that is increasing in the emergence of the individual. At the same time, God’s demand is increasing, as in the Talmudic saying, “God requires the heart.”34 The human and the divine demand come together in “the concept of dread,” as Kierkegaard calls it, and the “V” experience: “He sank absolutely, but then in turn he floated up from the depth of the abyss, lighter now than all that is oppressive and dreadful in life.”35 It is like the imagery in Dante’s Divine Comedy: “He sank absolutely” in the Inferno, but then “he floated up from the depth of the abyss” in the Purgatorio, and became “lighter now than all that is oppressive and dreadful in life” in the Paradiso. There is, nevertheless, a separation that occurs in emergence. There is a separation from other living beings in the emergence of the human race, and there is a separation from other persons in the emergence of the individual. And this separation points on to the need for an ultimate reunion with others and with all living beings.

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S e parat ion

It throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. —Alexis de Tocqueville

Speaking of democracy in America, Tocqueville says it threatens in the end to confine the individual “entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”1 It is really the emergence of the individual that throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart. Something similar happens in the emergence of the human race: “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him” (Genesis 2:18). Human companionship was the answer to the loneliness of human emergence, the other living beings were not enough, but what is the answer to the loneliness of the individual? Heinrich von Kleist, meditating on this question, as it seems, finds an answer in “the path taken by the soul of the dancer,”2 a going from alone to all one. For me the answer is in “a soul is oned with God.” That would indeed be “the path taken by the soul of the 27

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dancer,” as in “David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). “This is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet,” Kleist says, and “Grace appears most purely in the human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness.”3 The emergence of the human race separates us from other living beings so that we have to find companionship in one another, but the emergence of the individual separates us from one another so that we have to find companionship in God. We go from alone to all one with one another but ultimately with God. Companionship with one another and companionship with God, those are our answers to the loneliness of the human condition, but do we succeed in going from alone to all one? Let us consider the relation between emergence and separation, and then let us consider “the path taken by the soul of the dancer.”

Emergence and Separation “It was the word beyond speech,” Hermann Broch ends his novel The Death of Virgil.4 The problem of death emerges with the emergence of the human race, and even more with the emergence of the individual. “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live ?” That is how I have formulated it.5 The solution to the problem can be formulated too, like doing memorable deeds or running the gamut of experience or simply accepting death and becoming free to live and to love. Perhaps the true solution, though, can be expressed only in “the word beyond speech.” That may be Hermann Broch’s thought. Separation occurs in human emergence, separation from other living beings, separation even from other human beings, and separation is like death. “It was the word beyond speech,” the word in the end the same as the word in the beginning (John 1:1). If we think of it this way, then it does speak to the problem 28 |

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of death. Jesus is called the Word in the Gospel of John, I think, because he has “the words of eternal life,” as in the response of Peter, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). It is these words of eternal life that speak to the problem of death. “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), therefore, and in the end is the Word. To say “It was the word beyond speech,” from this point of view, is to speak of “the Word of life” as in the prologue to the First Epistle of John, the Word that speaks to the problem of death. It is “beyond speech” in that it is embodied in a person. However, I think I have gone beyond Broch’s thinking in saying this. What Broch meant, Hannah Arendt says in Men in Dark Times, is not the incarnation in Jesus but the incarnation in Man.6 What speaks adequately then to the problem of death, I ask: “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” Only “the words of eternal life,” I believe. Human emergence and human separation leave us with Kant’s question, “What may I hope?” I think of the saying of Heraclitus, “If one does not hope, one will not find the unhopedfor.”7 Eternal life is the unhoped-for in the hope of doing memorable deeds or running the gamut of experience or accepting death and becoming free. How does hope lead here to the unhoped-for? “Symbolic immortality,” as Robert Jay Lifton calls it,8 is what we have in doing memorable deeds or running the gamut of experience or accepting death and becoming free. To go beyond that to eternal life is to go “from symbol to story.” That is a phrase Denise Schmandt-Besserat uses as a subtitle of her work on the origin of writing, When Writing Met Art.9 To go from symbol to story can indeed have intimations of immortality, as when the story is that of a journey in time as a changing image of eternity. A journey with God in time is more explicitly that, as in the words “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Separation \ 29

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There is a distinction that Jean Giono draws between hope as espoir set on an object and hope as espérance open to the unknown.10 It is this hope open to the unknown, I gather, that leads to the unhoped-for. To go from symbol to story in this matter of eternal life is to go from the great circle of life and light and love to the story of a journey with God in time. The great circle is the symbol, as in Rilke’s saying in his Stories of God, “There is nothing wiser than the circle.”11 A journey with God in time is the story, a walking with God. All of this, symbol and story, is a matter of hope as esperance open to the unknown. “Proving the unseen,” as George MacDonald calls it,12 is experiencing this process of going from symbol to story. The intimations of immortality in this are in experiencing the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving. This is proving as experiencing, proving for a quest of understanding, not proving for a quest of certainty. The experience is one of presence, the known in the knower, the loved in the lover. Emergence and separation are a matter of presence. To go from hope as espoir set on an object to hope as espérance open to the unknown is to allow presence to be felt, the presence of the known and the loved. All of this, symbol and story, leaves us still in “the cloud of unknowing in the which a soul is oned with God.” Evolution as an insight into the emergence and separation of the human race compares and contrasts with emanation as an insight into the emergence and separation of the individual. Together they give us something like “Everything that rises must converge.” Still we are left with our unknowing and our hope of “a soul is oned with God.” Going then from symbol to story, we come to what I call “the road of the heart’s desire.”13 It is the road on which “a soul is oned with God.” Which road is that? I gather it is the road on which you find inner peace, as in Dante’s saying “his will is our peace” (la sua voluntate e nostra pace).14 I had a discussion about this once with René Girard, who was maintaining at that time 30 |

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that all desire is mimetic, that we see what other people want and we want what they want. I said, “But what about heart’s desire?” And he said, “What do you mean by that?” And when I tried to describe it he said, “That sounds like inner peace, not desire.” I said, “Yes, but peace is desirable.” Now, I have heard, Girard speaks of “inmost desire” as well as “mimetic desire.” “Seek peace and ensue it” (1 Peter 3:11) is the imperative of the heart’s desire. To be sure, we usually start with mimetic desire and only come from there to heart’s desire. For myself, reading the lives of saints, especially Chesterton’s lives of Saint Francis and Saint Thomas, led me to the thought of the divine invitation, “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5), and the response, “an understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9). To say the heart’s desire is an understanding heart sounds circular, but perhaps that is just what it is. Shaw’s dilemma, “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it,”15 would hold true only if the heart’s desire is not circular. Let us say then that the heart’s desire is “an understanding heart.” I think again of Kafka’s words in his diary, “There is no one here who has an understanding for me in full. To have even one who had this understanding, for instance a woman, would be to have support from every side. It would be to have God.”16 Here the heart’s desire is to be understood. If we combine this with “an understanding heart,” then the heart’s desire would be to understand and to be understood. “It would be to have God,” Kafka said, and that goes with Tolstoy’s saying in his diary, “God is my desire.”17 So the heart’s desire is repose in God, as in Augustine’s words at the beginning of his Confessions, “our heart is restless until it rests in You,” and that repose is inner peace, and it comes of “an understanding heart.” We go from symbol to story, therefore, and we go on from story to song, “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.”18 The road of the heart’s desire in story becomes, for Separation \ 31

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instance, “The Road Goes Ever On” in song,19 contrasting thus with roads that dead-end. It goes ever on insofar as it is an expression of the eternal. This eternal aspect seems to come to light in the passage from story to song. It is already there in the story, but it becomes explicit in the song. Roads that dead-end are roads that fall short of the heart’s desire, that have finite attainable goals, and dead-end in the attainment of those goals. The road that goes ever on is the way of inscape as an inner landscape opening onto infinity. I think of words and music being related as the right hand and the left hand. So to go from story to song is, as it were, to put a right-hand glove on the left hand by turning it inside out. The way of inscape as inner landscape opening onto infinity would be the musical inside of words. “Inscape,” a term coined by G. M. Hopkins, is the thisness of things and connects in the language of Duns Scotus with the concept of God as infinite. Thus it is an inner landscape opening onto infinity. It is the human essence as our capacity for God. As a more general term it is the relation of all things to God. An inner landscape opening onto infinity, that is what we come to as we pass from story to song: O Lord, go with me And be my guide, In my most need Be by my side: If you are guiding me I shall not want, If you are guarding me I shall not fear, Though I am walking In the valley of the shadow Of my dying, You are walking with me, 32

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And when I am not You will have taken me.20 That is the song I put at the beginning of my memoir, A Journey with God in Time. It is a prayer I say every day. It echoes Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd,” and also “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). We go from story to song, therefore, and we go on from song to dance.

“The path taken by the soul of the dancer” Learning to love with all your heart and soul leads ultimately to loving with all your might, as in the words “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). We go from symbol to story, from story to song, and finally from song to dance. It is what Kleist called “the path taken by the soul of the dancer.”21 If we consider this as one path, from symbol to story, from story to song, and from song to dance, we go from the symbol of the great circle to the circle dance of time. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” Rilke’s saying in his Stories of God,22 suggests the entire path. In the Enneads of Plotinus we come from the One and we go to the One and the circle dance is around the One. My own version of this is to add the far point on the circle where we are now in a secular age and where the soul is in the dark night of faith. The symbol of the great circle suggests that the far point is a turning point. Going from the symbol of the great circle to the circle dance of time, we follow “the path taken by the soul of the dancer.” This circle, in the words of the old Bedouin overheard by Lawrence, is “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God.”23 It is a symbol, a story, a song, a dance. As a symbol it is a vision of love at the heart of the world. As a story it is a journey with God in Separation \ 33

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time. As a song it is a mystical song like “I walk alone with the Alone.” As a dance it is a circle dance like the folk dance where the women form an inner circle moving clockwise and the men an outer circle moving counterclockwise. Thus it is alone and unalone. “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”24 The Mock Turtle sings this “very slowly and sadly” while dancing with the Gryphon around Alice. It is a choice then, a decision, to join the circle dance of time. If I join the dance, I am taking the far point on the circle as a turning point. Say, then, I do join the dance. Taking the far point on the circle as a turning point, I am seeing my life as a return, an epistrophe, a going home to God. “Even love must pass through loneliness,” Wendell Berry begins his poem “Setting Out.”25 I pass through loneliness on the way of this return. I am following the great circle of love but I pass through loneliness. The far point on the circle is that of a secular age, and that is where the soul is in the dark night of faith. It is where Saint Thérèse was in her “trial of faith” when she exclaimed, “I want to believe!”26 It is the test of loneliness, as in the story of Hezekiah, when “God left him, to try him, that he might know all that was in his heart” (2 Chronicles 32:31). Love must pass through loneliness, love as joy at the thought of the loved one, as in the lines Come my joy, my love, my heart, Such a joy as none can move, Such a love as none can part, Such a heart as joys in love.27 It is a prayer in loneliness, calling for the joy of love, the joy of being unalone. The test of loneliness reveals the human heart. It reveals the restlessness of desire, how the imagination of the

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heart goes from one thing to another, from one person to another. The prayer calls for the wisdom of repose in God. Rest in restlessness, I have found, is the way from restlessness of desire to repose in God.28 Rest in restlessness is repose in movement, like that of a whirling gyroscope or that of a balance wheel. By accepting this restless movement of the imagination of the heart I come to rest in it, and I go on to repose in God by insight into image, insight into the imagination of the heart. So “our heart is restless until it rests in You,” and the repose in God comes of insight into the restless movement of imagination. It has been argued that the restless movement of desire and imagination is an antidote to fascination with scenes of violence.29 This is a deconstructionist approach to narrative and scenes of violence. Rest in restlessness, on the other hand, leads to insight into the imagination of the heart and an understanding of narrative and scenes of violence. “Wisdom is repose in light,” Joseph Joubert writes in his Notebooks.30 Rest in restlessness is repose in light, I would say, but in the inner light of faith, not in that of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. Even light must pass through darkness, we could say, as “Even love must pass through loneliness.” For “faith is seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.” I haven’t been able to locate that saying, but it does seem true. The inner light of faith passes through the darkness of our unknowing like physical light passing through the darkness of outer space. It shows when it strikes an object. It shows when it illuminates a situation. “Situations like the following: that I am always in situations, that I cannot live without struggling and suffering, that I cannot avoid guilt, that I must die—these are what I call boundary situations,” Karl Jaspers writes.31 The inner light of faith illuminates these boundary situations. What it reveals is the loneliness of all these situations. So here again, “Even love must pass through loneliness,” the

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light of love must pass through the darkness of loneliness, and loneliness becomes love when willingness is joined with hope, and hope leads to the unhoped-for. These boundary situations are the basic occasions of insight. When my life opens up before me all the way to death, I can become conscious of a life project. When I encounter suffering, I can come to the learning that comes of suffering. When I encounter conflict, I can go from facing to being with the other. When I encounter guilt, I can learn forgiveness as a releasing from the past. And when I encounter circumstance, I can become conscious of a personal destiny. All of this comes of a quest of understanding rather than a quest of certainty in face of the boundary situations. When I am seeking understanding rather than certainty, my attitude is that of “faith seeking understanding” rather than that of doubt seeking certainty. So I am in a stance of “seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.” I am seeing light in the darkness of the boundary situations, and my attitude is like that of Newman in “Lead, Kindly Light”: “I do not ask to see / The distant scene— / One step enough for me.” Even life must pass through death, we could say, as even light must pass through darkness, and “Even love must pass through loneliness.” To take the stance of faith seeking understanding rather than of doubt seeking certainty leads to a sense of Christ being alive and living in us. When I make his God my God, his Abba my Abba, then he lives in me and I in him, and that is how I know he is alive and risen from the dead. But this is faith, and the knowing is the understanding that comes of faith seeking understanding. Doubt seeking certainty meets faith seeking understanding in the story of doubting Thomas (John 20:24– 29). Doubt seeking certainty and faith seeking understanding are incommensurable. It is a choice between them. Thomas chooses for faith when he exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

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(John 20:28). Christ says, “Thomas, because you have seen me you have believed” (John 20– 29), not “you have known” but “you have believed.” If there is a knowing, it is only the understanding that comes of believing, and so also for “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). So it is not “seeing is believing,” but if you believe you will understand, and that is true also for us who have not seen. If I make his God my God, his Abba my Abba, as he says to Mary Magdalene (John 20:17), then he lives in me and I in him, and I know he is alive and lives in us. My believing is not from seeing Christ alive but from making his Abba my Abba. “You believe in God, believe also in me,” he says at the Last Supper (John 14:1). I believe in God, making the Abba of Jesus my Abba, and so I believe also in Jesus. Who is his God? It comes out in his argument with the Sadducees, that his God is God of the living to whom the dead are alive, “for all live unto him” (Luke 20:38). In the Gospel of John “God is spirit” in the discourse with the woman at the well (John 4:24). I gather from this: if God is spirit, then God acts spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds. And if the dead are alive to God, it is because God is spirit and the life of the spirit is everlasting. So “the path taken by the soul of the dancer” is the path of the spirit. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit the path of the spirit goes from the presence of others to presence to self, but I want to continue on to the presence of God, “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). Thus “the path taken by the soul of the dancer” goes from dancing with another to dancing alone to dancing before the Lord with all your might. And we come to Yeats’s question, O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?32

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In dancing with another I am who I am with the other. What I am apart from the other does not appear, unless we are dancing a story of being apart and then together or being together and then apart. “If you should lose each other as you go through the—the—I never can remember the name of that country,— do not be afraid, but go on and on,” the wise lady tells Mossy and Tangle in The Golden Key by George MacDonald.33 That is a story I have set to music with song and dance.34 They do lose each other in the story, but they find each other again. In dancing alone I am as I am in the solo parts of dancing with another, but when I am alone I have to make friends with myself and to make friends with God. That is what Anwar elSadat tells of himself in his months of solitary confinement.35 The prayer of Augustine in his Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!,” is the prayer of this time of solitude. Making friends with myself, making friends with God, is my own answer to my prayer in the meantime of solitude. “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14) is the culmination of a process of learning to love with all your heart and soul. I get this phrase “learning to love” from the title of one of Thomas Merton’s journals.36 For myself this process of learning to love begins with loving with all your mind, coming to a peaceful vision of all coming from God and all returning to God, and it goes from there to learning to love with all your heart and soul. Learning to love with all your might comes then for me with my road not taken in life, the way of music, rejoining my road taken, the way of words. The rejoining of the roads taken and not taken becomes the road of reunion, “the road of the union of love with God.”

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Re union

“He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.” —J. R. R. Tolkien

Learning to love is a process of becoming a whole human being. The great commandment to love with all your heart and soul and with all your might is an imperative of wholeness. If there is “only one Road,” as Tolkien says, “like a great river,” and “its springs at every doorstep” and “every path its tributary,”1 it must be this road of wholeness, learning to love with all your mind and heart and soul, and even with all your bodily strength, dancing with all your might. “Do not seek death. Death will find you,” Dag Hammarskjöld writes in his diary. “But seek the road which makes death a fulfillment.”2 That road, it seems to me, must be this road of wholeness, of learning to love. It is “the road of the union of love with God,” as Saint John of the Cross describes it in Dark Night of the Soul.3 Learning to love, according to this, takes us into the night of faith, but makes that “a happy night” (una noche 39

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dichosa) because love is joy at the thought of the loved one, joy at the thought of God with us, for it speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition, saying we are not alone. This road of union with God is a road of reunion with others and with all living beings. “Attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” Malebranche says,4 and so attention can be a relation with God and with others and with all living beings. It is by way of attention that we walk the road of union and reunion. Attention is how we find our way through the dark night of faith, attention to things happening, to signs, to the heart speaking, to the way opening up before us. “If something happens to you it is merely an event,” Irving Howe says, “but if you ponder it and absorb it into your consciousness it becomes an experience.”5 Let us consider first the road of reunion on which we connect with one another and with other living beings, and then the road of the union of love on which we become what we know and love.

The Road of Reunion We can say of the road of reunion that it is a road of knowledge, taking things in, and a road of love, going out to things, things past, things present, and things to come. Taking things in and going out to things with attention “the natural prayer of the soul,” we connect with things. “Only connect!” E. M. Forster says in Howard’s End.6 By connecting I am living not just in the present but in the presence, the presence of others, presence to myself, and the presence of God. My life becomes a “practice of the presence,” a relating to the past and the future as well as to the present, like Dag Hammarskjöld at the turning point of his life saying “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” 40 |

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“Thanks!” for all that has been and “Yes!” to all that shall be sets one upon the road of reunion. If we think in terms of the symbol of the great circle of life and light and love coming from God and returning to God, then the road of reunion is the road of return. The problem of the return is the far point on the circle where we are in a secular age and the soul is in the dark night of faith. “Thanks!” and “Yes!” then are the first movements of return and reunion. We can trace in Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld the steps in the process of this return, before and after the turning point of “Thanks!” and “Yes!” Before the turning point there is considerable darkness in the entries of Markings, for instance “I dare not believe, I do not see how I shall ever be able to believe: that I am not alone.”7 The most insistent word is “loneliness.” Then comes the turning point, “Thanks!” and “Yes!,” and the entries become brighter and brighter, and the last entries are poetry. What happens thus on the road of return and reunion is that the deep loneliness of the human condition becomes love, the love that is “from God, and of God, and toward God.” I think of a passage in the novel Islandia by A. T. Wright. “When I first came here I thought sometimes that I would die because of the silence and a loneliness that is in the very air itself,” the main character Johnlang says. “For me that loneliness proved to be an anteroom to a more vivid reality than I had ever known before. One has to be lonely first.”8 There are two elements in loneliness: being alone and longing to be unalone. This longing, I gather, is the heart’s longing, the heart’s desire. When the longing is combined with willingness and hope, the willingness to walk alone and the hope to walk unalone, it becomes the love that is “from God, and of God, and toward God.” Willingness and hope are what constitute faith, an existential faith. Short of this, “that loneliness proved to be an anteroom to a more vivid reality than I had ever known before,” loneliness as in the African love song “I walk alone.” Willingness Reunion \ 41

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and hope carry us on to the mystical song, “I walk alone with the Alone.” “A more vivid reality than I had ever known before” in Islandia is what A. T. Wright calls ania, relationship, as distinct from apia, falling in love. Learning to love takes one through phases that are variously named. The first phase, no doubt, is falling in love; then comes relationship where one is choosing to give oneself to the relation; and last comes the great love that is “from God, and of God, and toward God.” Learning to love with the great love has phases too, first learning to love with all your mind, I would say from my own experience, coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and returning to God, then learning to love with all your heart and soul, and finally learning to love with all your might. “One has to be lonely first.” We are alone and we cannot make one another unalone—that is the theme of the first half of Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld. It is the loneliness of the human condition, the loneliness we encounter in all the boundary situations, in circumstance and conflict and guilt and suffering and death. If these are the basic occasions of insight, loneliness itself is the occasion of insight, and the insight seems to be there in the etymology of alone as all one. The secret of our aloneness is our all oneness. It appears in the mystical song “I walk alone with the Alone,” or in my song I walk alone With you all one; Alone with you I walk all one.9 There is a blind spot in a secular view. “If one does not hope,” Heraclitus says, “one will not find the unhoped-for.”10 If one does not hope for eternal life, one will not find the unhopedfor eternal life. It is the inner life, as I understand it, that be42

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comes the afterlife. “Most people don’t have a rich inner life,” my friend Henri Nouwen once said, thinking especially of Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings as an example of a rich inner life. What then of someone who has a rich inner life, as in the first half of Markings, but does not believe in an afterlife? I suppose the opening to eternal life would come with “Thanks!” and “Yes!” as in the turning point of Markings. In “Thanks!” and “Yes!” there is willingness and hope. “Thinking is thanking,” the mystic saying, leads on from hope to the unhoped-for. At the turning point of his life, when he says “Thanks!” and “Yes!,” Hammarskjöld sets out upon a way of possibility or The Way of Possibility. That is the term he uses.11 “For him who has responded to the call of the Way of Possibility, loneliness may be obligatory,” he says. “Such loneliness, it is true, may lead to a communion closer and deeper than any achieved by the union of two bodies.” That happens, it seems, when the loneliness becomes the love that is “from God, and of God, and toward God.” Later on Hammarskjöld writes, “Didst thou give me this inescapable loneliness so that it would be easier for me to give thee all?”12 The journey from loneliness to love is like Dante’s journey from dark wood to white rose. A journey through the dark wood of loneliness to the white rose of love is a journey of willingness and hope, willingness to walk alone and hope to walk unalone, willingness to die and hope to live. Willingness to walk alone and willingness to die without hope to walk unalone and hope to live are what Kierkegaard calls “infinite resignation,” but willingness combined with hope is what he calls “faith.”13 It is this faith that carries one through the dark wood of loneliness to the white rose of love. Going from infinite resignation to faith is what is happening in “Thanks!” and “Yes!” “Proving the unseen,” George MacDonald’s phrase,14 is experiencing willingness and hope, our relation to the unseen. What we experience is not the unseen itself but our relation to Reunion \ 43

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the unseen. What MacDonald has in mind is the verse “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). We do experience willingness and hope. What is more, the willingness and the hope lead on to the love, the joy at the thought of the loved one, the joy at the thought of “God with us.” So our experience is the loneliness, the willingness, the hope, and the joy that is love. Thus faith as willingness and hope is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” To go from infinite resignation to faith is the essential move in all this. I think of the words in the last movement of Beethoven’s last string quartet: Muss es sein? Es muss sein! Es muss sein!

Must it be? It must be! It must be!

The music goes here from Grave to Allegro, Grave for “Must it be?” and Allegro for “It must be! It must be!”15 Grave is the feeling for infinite resignation; Allegro is the feeling for faith. Going from infinite resignation to faith is thus a leap from sadness to joy, from Grave to Allegro. That is what happens in Markings with “Thanks!” and “Yes!” Will it come, or will it not, The day when the joy becomes great, The day when the grief becomes small? Hammarskjöld quotes from Gunnar Ekelof, and he comments, “It did come—the day when the grief became small. For what had befallen me and seemed so hard to bear became insignificant in the light of the demands which God was now making. But how difficult it is to feel that this was also, and for that very reason, the day when the joy became great.”16 I think of the say44

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ing in the Talmud, “God requires the heart.”17 The grief becomes small, the joy becomes great, when God requires the heart, “the demands which God was now making.” It is in the context of prayer that all this is said. When I pray, letting my ongoing conversation with myself become a conversation with God, I bring my hopes and fears to God, letting go of them, and I encounter the demands God is making, as “God requires the heart.” I come to realize, as Dante says, “his will is our peace.” The process is described in Paul’s words to the Philippians, “Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6– 7). Turning the truth of my life into prayer, as Augustine does, as Goethe turns the truth of his life into poetry, I go from sadness to joy, from Grave to Allegro, from infinite resignation to faith. Joy becomes a guiding principle in my life, joy at the thought of “God with us,” speaking to the deep loneliness of the human condition. Turning the truth of life into poetry can come up against that blind spot of a secular view, if you do not hope you will not find the unhoped-for. Turning the truth of life into prayer, or into poetry that is prayer, comes of the willingness and the hope of faith. “If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for,” Heraclitus says, “since there is no trail leading to it and no path.” I left out that last clause when I quoted the saying before. If we include that clause, then we can say the path does not appear until one hopes. When you hope, the path does appear, I think, as the road of the union of love. The Road of the Union of Love If there is a road in life that “goes ever on,” as Tolkien says, a road that does not dead-end, it must be the road that is described in Reunion \ 45

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Dark Night of the Soul, “the road of the union of love with God.” “Roads go ever ever on,” Tolkien writes in The Hobbit,18 but later in The Lord of the Rings he says, “The Road goes ever on and on,”19 with the idea that “there was only one Road,” “like a great river,” “its springs at every doorstep,” and “every path its tributary.”20 He doesn’t say this is the road of the union of love, but I do believe it is, as the only road that does not dead-end. For the human inscape is an inner landscape opening onto infinity, opening onto eternity, opening onto life and light and love. Learning to love, if that is the way we walk upon the road that “goes ever on,” is becoming whole, mind and heart and soul. It is coming into relationship, union, with “God is spirit” (John 4:24). As God is spirit, I gather, so God acts spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds, and thus learning to love with all your heart and with all your mind is cooperating with God. It is learning also, as Tolkien says, to “rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill,”21 and thus to do what God is doing. A phenomenology of spirit, if we understand “God is spirit,” has to go not just from the presence of others to presence to self, as Hegel’s does, but must go on to the presence of God. It has to follow “the road of the union of love with God.” That road takes us through purgative, illuminative, and unitive phases, through “purity of heart is to will one thing,” as Kierkegaard says,22 to seeing the one thing like Solomon answering the divine invitation “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5) with a prayer for “an understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9), to the union of love in “the peace of God which passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). To follow the road of the union of love, therefore, we have to follow the purgative way “to will one thing,” the illuminative way of “an understanding heart,” and the unitive way of “his will is our peace.” The purgative way is the negative way; the illuminative way is the affirmative way; and the unitive way is the goal, the union of love with God.

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“Nothing, Lord, but you” was Saint Thomas Aquinas’s reply to the divine invitation “Ask what I shall give you.”23 This for me has been an ideal ever since I read of it in G. K. Chesterton’s life of Saint Thomas. Chesterton puts it in positive terms, “I will have Thyself.”24 Still, it is an expression of the negative way of letting go of everyone and everything other than God. The Buddhist expression of the negative way is in the Heart Sutra, ending with the mantra “Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone altogether beyond, O what an awakening, all hail!”25 Or, as the Dalai Lama translates, “Go, go, go beyond. . . . ”26 A Vietnamese man, brought up as a Buddhist and converted to Catholicism in his youth, said to me that in Buddhism there is an impersonal relation with the Absolute but in Christianity he found that “You can have a personal relation with the Absolute; you can be a friend of God, even a lover of God.” An impersonal relation is an I and it relation; a personal relation is an I and thou relation. The word mantra means “prayer,” but prayer in an I and it relation is essentially meditation. In an I and thou relation it means conversation with God, letting my ongoing conversation with myself become a conversation with God. Prayer can become song, as in the Psalms, “the leap of mind,” Saint Thomas says, “in the eternal breaking out into sound.”27 “Often in the Gospel of St. Luke,” Marcel Proust says in his essay On Reading, “coming to a colon that halts it before each of those passages almost in the form of canticles with which it is sown, I have heard the silence of the worshipper who has just stopped reading aloud in order to sing the succeeding verses like a psalm which reminded him of the most ancient psalms of the Bible.”28 There is a silence then, “the silence of the worshipper,” in which God can speak, kindling the heart and illumining the mind, and inspiring the song in which the worshipper sings, inspiring “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound.”

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Going then from “Nothing, Lord, but you” to song as “the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” the negative way has very positive results. Or it does if it arises from a personal relation with the Absolute. It leads then to friendship with God, to love of God. Saint Thomas in his Summa uses the Aristotelian theory of friendship to describe the human relation with God.29 Aristotle himself had seen the human relation with God as an impersonal one, but Thomas, coming out of the Christian belief in incarnation, sees the possibility of friendship with God, “I have called you friends” (John 15:15). It is this friendship with God that opens up into the affirmative way. “An understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9) as reply to the divine invitation “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5) sets one upon the affirmative way. If the heart’s desire is an understanding heart, it may be experienced first as a desire to be understood, as if to be understood would be “to have God” as Kafka says. Or it may be experienced as a desire to understand. “It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another,” George MacDonald says.30 What is it to come near to the soul of another? Evidently it is to know, by loving to know. “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what the master is doing, but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). Knowing what God is doing, knowing what Christ is doing, that is what makes for friendship with God, friendship with Christ. This is what it is to come near to the soul of another. But what is God doing? What is Christ doing? It is as though we are still in the Sixth Day of Creation, when God is creating human beings. It takes a whole lifetime to create a human being. On the affirmative way of “an understanding heart” we can be doing what God is doing in creating human beings, cooperating in our own creation. “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and so God acts spiritually in creating human beings, kindling hearts and il48 |

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lumining minds, and we can cooperate by following the kindled heart and the illumined mind, as in Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light.” We can even be doing what God is doing by a life of gaining and sharing insight, as in Tolkien’s words, “you may rekindle hearts in a world that grows chill.” I gain insight by following the “kindly light,” and I can share insight with others, rekindling hearts in a world that grows chill. A life of gaining and sharing insight is the life we see in paradigmatic individuals, Buddha and Socrates and Jesus. There is a common experience here of gaining and sharing insight, but there is in each instance a unique insight, the enlightenment of the Buddha, the knowing unknowing of Socrates, the revelation of the God of Jesus that he calls Abba. The road of gaining and sharing insight for one who is following Jesus is “The road of the union of love with God.” “Walk on!,” said to be the last words of Buddha to his disciples,31 is the imperative for all of these ways, that of enlightenment, that of knowing unknowing, and that of revelation. If I walk on the road of the union of love, I am learning to love. Likewise “Follow the ecstasy!” the advice of the poet Nicanor Parra to Thomas Merton,32 sets him in effect on the road of learning to love. The knowing that comes of loving is the enlightenment, the knowing unknowing, the revelation. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” as Rilke says in his Stories of God,33 is the key to the enlightenment, the knowing unknowing, and the revelation. The circle of knowing and loving, knowing leading to loving and loving to knowing, becomes the great circle of life and light and love. “Walk on!,” if we take this to mean walking in the circle of knowing and loving, knowing leading to loving and loving to knowing, leads us into the circle dance of time. It is a circle coming from the unknown and going into the unknown, and in the Christian relation to the unknown as Abba, coming from God and going to God, and thus is the great circle of life and light and Reunion \ 49

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love. If we say with Rilke “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” wisdom is insight into the circle of knowing and loving, running from an impersonal to a personal relation, coming from and returning to the Absolute, as knowing leads to loving and loving to knowing. “Walk on!” is like “Go over!” Speaking of that, Kafka says, “If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables.”34 So these are parables, “Walk on!” and “Go over!,” and to follow them is to become a parable yourself. It is like Meister Eckhart’s “wandering joy,”35 the joy of being on a journey with God in time. To walk on the way of enlightenment, to walk on the way of revelation, is to go over into a knowing unknowing which becomes enlightenment, which becomes revelation, the wandering joy of a journey with God in time, wandering because it is a journey, joy because it speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition. If the love of God is joy at the thought of God, as Spinoza says, joy at the thought of “God with us” (Matthew 1:23), giving the idea a Christian turn, this wandering joy is love of God. Spinoza’s concluding thought, “all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare,”36 would be true of the love of God as joy at the thought of God. Giving the idea a Christian turn, however, as joy at the thought of “God with us,” the love of God becomes more accessible as God becomes more accessible. “Wandering joy” is the experience of one who is heart free. “He who has let himself be, and who has let God be, lives in a wandering joy, or joy without a cause.”37 It is “without a cause” in that it arises from within without some external cause such as success. It is the joy of being on a journey with God in time, the joy of being unalone. Being heart free, letting oneself be, letting God be, all this arises from being on a journey with God in time. It does not depend then on success or any other external cause. It goes with the “Thanks!” and “Yes!” of the journey with God in time. 50 |

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“Wandering joy” can become the guiding principle of a life, as it was in the life of C. S. Lewis, who described joy as “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.”38 It is what I call the heart’s desire. The divine invitation “Ask what I shall give you” (1 Kings 3:5) evokes the heart’s desire. “Nothing, Lord, but you” answers from the negative way. “An understanding heart” (1 Kings 3:9) answers from the affirmative way. “The road of the union of love with God” combines the negative and affirmative way. It is what Dag Hammarskjöld calls “the road which makes death a fulfillment.”39 How does the road of the union of love make death a fulfillment? I think again of the words “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). Walking with God is the union of love with God, a journey with God in time, “and he was not; for God took him” is death as a fulfillment. “I do not die,” Saint Thérèse said on her deathbed, “I enter into life.”40 This is her faith, going through the trial of faith in the last years of her short life, dying at the age of twenty-four. She walked with God: and she was not; for God took her. Yet what does it mean to say “a soul is oned with God” in “the cloud of unknowing”? The key seems to be in that phrase “into darkness with love,” and the insight we are seeking seems to be in the circle of knowing and loving, knowing leading to loving and loving to knowing.

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A Soul Is Oned with God

Alone with the Alone —Plotinus, Enneads

“Alone with the Alone,” the climax of the Enneads,1 could also be translated “one with the One,” and “I walk alone with the Alone,” the mystical song we derived from the African love song “I walk alone,” could also be “I walk one with the One.” According to The Cloud of Unknowing, however, “a soul is oned with God” in the cloud of unknowing. In other words, “alone with the Alone” or “one with the One” is not simply a knowing but a knowing unknowing. I realize I am a mystery to myself, unable to leap over my own shadow, and God is a mystery to me, and my prayer is that of the Soliloquies, “May I know me! May I know thee!”2 The answer to my prayer is there in the prayer itself, I and thou, “me” and “thee.” The answer is in the circle of knowing and loving, knowing leading to loving and loving to knowing. If the knowing, though, is a knowing unknowing, the relationship has to be one of faith, that is, of willingness and hope, willingness to 53

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walk alone and hope to walk unalone, willingness to die and hope to live. “There is nothing wiser than the circle,” as Rilke says in his Stories of God,3 and the wisdom of the circle is in this relation, we could say, between knowing and loving, knowing taking things in and loving going out to things, things past, things present, and things to come. The circle goes round from “remembrance of things past” (Sonnet 30) to “dreaming on things to come” (Sonnet 107), the knowing leading to loving and the loving to knowing, going from “Thanks!” to “Yes!” as in Dag Hammarskjöld’s words at the turning point of his life, “For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!” Or this is what happens in a standpoint of faith, of willingness and hope. “A soul is oned with God,” therefore, in “the cloud of unknowing” by entering into this circle of knowing and loving, and the first step is to go “into darkness with love.”4

Into Darkness with Love If knowing God is a knowing unknowing, loving God is a going “into darkness with love.” I think again of the words of Ramón Llull, “Love shone through the cloud which came between the Lover and the Beloved, and made it as bright and resplendent as is the moon by night, as the day star at dawn, the sun at midday, the understanding in the will; and through that bright cloud the Lover and the Beloved held converse.”5 What is “the understanding in the will”? I think of it as the quest of understanding, faith seeking understanding, and see it as contrasting with doubt seeking certainty. As the quest goes on the presence of love grows, joy at the thought of the loved one. Ramón Llull calls himself “the fool of love” and speaks of “the secrets of love” and how they remain secret even when they are revealed, as they are understood only by one who loves. I looked 54

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up the word in the original Catalan and found to my surprise that it is secrets. Speaking of the secrets of love he says, “for secretly the Lover hides the secrets of the Beloved; secretly also he reveals them, and yet when they are revealed he keeps them secret still.”6 As in The Cloud of Unknowing there is also “a cloud of forgetting.” “He who truly remembers my Beloved, in remembering Him forgets all things around,” Ramón Llull says; “and he who forgets all things in remembering my Beloved, is defended by Him from all harm, and receives a part in all His blessings.”7 I think of the cloud of forgetting coming between us and all things other than God not as literal forgetting but as letting go of sadness. I thought of that when I was on the Amazon and asked, “Are these people really as happy as they seem?” and was told, “They can be sad for a day, but they can’t hold on to sadness.” I know Levi-Strauss’s book is called Tristes Tropiques (1955), but I was talking to sisters who work there, who bring a vision of faith to “the sad Tropics.” Letting go of sadness goes with a vision of faith, of willingness and hope, willingness to walk alone and hope to walk unalone, willingness to die and hope to live, for our sadness is above all the loneliness of the human condition and the mortality of the human condition. Letting go is perhaps more deliberate than being unable to hold on. Letting go and letting God go together in faith. I think again of the mystical song, Come my joy, my love, my heart, Such a joy as none can move, Such a love as none can part, Such a heart as joys in love.8 I recite those lines when I seem to be mired in the sadness of loneliness and mortality, and I think of faith as “seeing light with your heart when all your eyes see is darkness.” A Soul Is Oned with God

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“I walk alone with the Alone,” my mystical song, is then an answer to loneliness and mortality, like Newman’s solus cum Solo. “I walk alone,” the African love song, was my doorway to “the reasons of the heart,” along with “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God,” the words of the old Bedouin reported by Lawrence of Arabia.9 If we put the two together, the personal “I walk alone” and the universal “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God,” we come to understand “the reasons of the heart,” that loneliness becomes love when loneliness is transfigured by willingness and hope. Emergence, separation, and reunion, the human story as we have been telling it, points beyond “alone with the Alone” to “one with the One” and the circle dance of time around the One. Mortality in the light of “the reasons of the heart” finds its answer in “eternal consciousness,” as Kierkegaard calls it, consciousness of the eternal in us. “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man,” he says, “if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?”10 Seeing loneliness and mortality in the light of “the reasons of the heart” takes us into Pascal’s world where faith is “God sensible to the heart” (Dieu sensible au coeur).11 To say God is sensible to the heart, perceptible to the heart, that is, goes with the thought that “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and God acts spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds. It is the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind that is perceptible. In the kindling of the heart our loneliness becomes love, and in the illumining of the mind we come to consciousness of the eternal in us. Again, an illustration would be what William James calls “the will to believe.”12 In her “trial of faith” Saint Thérèse, writing at the same time as William James, exclaims “I want to be56 |

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lieve!” but in the end she says on her deathbed “I do not die, I enter into life.”13 Her loneliness becomes love in the kindling of her heart, “I want to believe!” and in the illumining of her mind she comes to consciousness of the eternal in us, “I do not die, I enter into life.” If we analyze “the will to believe” into willingness and hope, “I want to believe” is willingness and “I do not die, I enter into life” is hope. Going then “into darkness with love” is the opposite of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”14 I think again of the saying of Heraclitus, “If one does not hope, one will not find the unhoped-for.” Raging against the passing of the light goes with hopelessness. If I go gentle into that good night, I go with hope of eternal life. The combination of willingness and hope, nevertheless, is life giving, willingness to die and yet hope to live, willingness to walk alone and yet hope to walk unalone, even to walk unalone in death. Going “into darkness with love” is going into the unknown with joy at the thought of “God with us.” I imagine the human being walking with God, and in the distance the two figures merging into one. I return always to those words of Genesis, “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). If we think of life as a journey with God in time, this merging with God at the end is a union of love in which the known is in the knower and the loved in the lover. “It was the word beyond speech,” the ending of Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil,15 seems to correspond to “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1), as if to say the ending and the beginning are one and the same. This seems to imply the great circle of life and light and love, coming from God and returning to God. If I see myself as living in this great circle, I can say with T. S. Eliot, “In my beginning is my end,” and “In my end is my beginning.”16 Living in the great circle of life and light and love is learning to join the beginning with the ending. “Men perish,” the ancient A Soul Is Oned with God

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Greek philosopher Alcmaeon said, “because they cannot join the beginning to the end.”17 How do we join the beginning to the end? I gather it is by learning to love with all your mind and heart and soul. For this is how we become whole. It is also, according to the biblical formula, learning to love with all your might, as in the words “And David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). Learning to love then “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5) is going “into darkness with love,” going from symbol to story, from the symbol of the great circle dance of time to the story of a journey with God in time. The symbol, the circle dance of time, the circle dance around the One in the Enneads, the circle dance around the dove of peace in Picasso’s painting, involves learning to love with all your might like David dancing before the Lord with all his might. The story of a life as a journey with God in time involves learning to love with all your mind, and with all your heart, and with all your soul. Learning to love “with all your mind,” a phrase that occurs in the Gospels,18 is the one that comes first in my experience. I take it to mean coming to a peaceful vision of everything coming from God and everything returning to God and Christ as the way, the organizing vision of the Summa of Saint Thomas. I used to read the Summa end to end, reading the explanations and skipping the objections and answers, taking about a month to do so, just to get the feeling of peace of mind it gave me. The thinking of Saint Thomas, I thought, was essentially intuitive rather than argumentative. Learning to love “with all your heart” comes first for most people, I imagine, starting from the experience of falling in love. For me, though, it starts from the experience of life opening up before you all the way to death and the awakening of the heart’s desire, “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?”19 The heart’s desire for me is first of all the desire for 58 |

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eternal life. It leads you on a quest of life like that of Gilgamesh. It does lead you into love and friendship, into finding and losing, and the losing leads you on into learning to love “with all your soul.” Learning to love “with all your soul” then is learning detachment in love, learning to be heart free, and is thus the most difficult phase in learning to love. It is the phase where love is more explicitly the love of God, joy at the thought of God, as Spinoza says, joy at the thought of “God with us,” I will say, giving it a Christian turn. When it comes to that, however, it leads us consciously into the great circle, “The love is from God, and of God, and toward God.” The symbol of the great circle becomes the reality of the circle of knowing and loving.

The Circle of Knowing and Loving Knowing and loving form a circle, according to Saint Thomas,20 knowing leading to loving and loving to knowing. Is this circle of knowing and loving the same as the great circle of life and light and love? The great circle is an image, a symbol; the circle of knowing and loving is an insight into the image. If we take it this way as an insight into the symbol of the great circle, coming from God and returning to God, the circle of knowing and loving is an understanding of birth and death. It is an understanding of birth as emanation from the One, and an understanding of death as return to the One. If we view birth and death not simply as facts but as images, we can see emanation and return as insight into image, emanation as insight into birth and return as insight into death. But if we consider birth and death to be facts in the usual way, the date of birth can be given and later the date of death. “Time can become constitutive only when connection with the transcendental home has been lost,” Walter Benjamin quotes from A Soul Is Oned with God

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Georg Lukacs.21 If connection with the transcendental home were regained, then time would not be constitutive by itself but would be, as Plato thought, a changing image of eternity. To understand birth as emanation from the One and death as return to the One is first of all poetic wisdom, like Wordsworth speaking of “intimations of immortality.”22 Is it more than poetic wisdom? It is if time is a changing image of eternity. It is indeed poetic wisdom as time is a changing image, but it is more if time is a changing image of eternity. It is poetic wisdom in the symbol of the great circle of life and light and love, but it is insight into image in the circle of knowing and loving. Let us consider, then, emanation as an insight into the image of birth and return as an insight into the image of death. “One great blooming, buzzing confusion,” that is William James’s description of the experience of birth.23 “Being and essence are what first occur to the mind,” Saint Thomas says.24 Let us take “one great blooming, buzzing confusion” as the initial image, and “being and essence” as the initial insight into image. If time is a changing image of eternity, we can go from there to a vision like that of the Enneads, the One, the emanation of all from the One, and the return of all to the One, but if time is opaque to eternity, we are left with a vision like that of Heidegger in his Being and Time, where human existence is seen simply as “being toward death” and the only hope is “an impassioned freedom toward death.”25 Time can be seen as opaque to eternity or instead as translucent with eternity or even as transparent to eternity. It is opaque “when connection with the transcendental home has been lost.” It is translucent when, as Wittgenstein says, “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”26 It is transparent when it is thought that eternal life belongs to those who live in the presence, that is in the presence of God. Living in the presence in the present means practicing the presence of God, that is, living in the standpoint of prayer. 60 |

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I think of Augustine going from the presence of others when he was a teacher of rhetoric, to presence to self in his Soliloquies, to the presence of God in his Confessions. He carries out “a search for God in time and memory,” as I call it,27 and if we carry out our own search, we can come in memory, in “remembrance of things past,” upon emanation as an insight into birth, and we can come in time, in “dreaming on things to come,” upon return as an insight into death. A search for God in time and memory is thus a quest of insight into birth and death, and we can come to a vision of emanation and return. Now “remembrance of things past” and “dreaming on things to come” is first an imaging and only then an occasion of insight. “We can know more than we can tell,” as Polanyi says,28 insofar as insight is recognition in our remembrance of things past and our dreaming on things to come, recognition of emanation in things past and return in things to come. We can know more than we can tell in that we can tell of things past and things to come, but we can know our relation to things. Our relation involves the mystery we are to ourselves, unable to leap over our own shadow. Thus the poetic wisdom in Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”: Trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home.29 To go from intimations to insight is to go from perception to apperception or recognition. We come to recognize our origin and goal, “the transcendental home” that we have lost touch with in a secular age. Recognition, or apperception, is perception with memory. Thinking back in memory to scattered recollections of childhood and thinking forward in anticipation to conscious mortality and heart’s desire of eternal life, we come to recognition, or apperception, of our origin and goal, of our “transcendental home.” Our A Soul Is Oned with God

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search for God in time and memory is a search for our “transcendental home” or for “connection with the transcendental home.” “Only connect!” E. M. Forster’s imperative,30 leads to a different result here than the one he was envisioning. It leads to spirit as relatedness and to “God is spirit.” Spirit “returns to itself,” Hegel says, and is “pure self-identity within otherness.”31 I think of spirit as relatedness, not only to self but also to others and to God, and thus as “the connection with the transcendental home,” and in saying “God is spirit” I think of God acting spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds. Spirit, then, as relatedness with others, with self, and with God, is what we know of spirit, and what we know of God as spirit is the kindling of our hearts and the illumining of our minds. I think of the human being as an incarnate spirit. A friend who had a stroke and a leg amputated was very taken with this idea, that we are incarnate spirit. What embodiment does is situate us in space and time: the brain situates the mind, the body situates the soul, matter situates spirit, and in general matter situates events. If spirit is relatedness, however, and God is spirit, the space and time and matter are dimensions of a human reality that is essentially spirit.32 Emanation and return, accordingly, are the origin and goal of the human spirit. By relating to myself and willing to be myself, Kierkegaard says, I am grounded transparently in God.33 This grounding in God can be spelled out in emanation and return, emanation primarily but return consequently, we come from God and we go to God. Emanation, coming from God, is an insight into the image of birth, and return, going to God, is an insight into the image of death, not a description but an understanding of birth and death. A description of the experience of birth, like that of William James, “one great blooming buzzing confusion,” does not tell of coming from God. An understanding of birth and death arises from the wisdom of the circle, but the circle can be inter62

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preted in more than one way, the emanation and return of the Enneads but also Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same events. What Nietzsche wants is to reduce eternal life to our earthly life from birth to death, but that does not really speak to our heart’s desire like “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Heart’s desire, I believe, is the desire for eternal life that comes with an awakening to mortality like that of Gilgamesh and sets us on a quest of eternal life like his. The wisdom of the circle in prehistory was one of birth and rebirth, and death was not a problem, but in the historic era it becomes a problem with the relation of the living and the dead, and the circle is that of knowing and loving. Ultimately the question is whether the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving, can survive death. It is the presence of God as known in the knower and loved in the lover that is or could be eternal life. “Eternal life belongs to those who live in the present,” Wittgenstein says,34 but I want to say instead, “Eternal life belongs to those who live in the presence.” Living in the present is Faust’s view when he says, “The present alone is our happiness.”35 Living in the presence, on the other hand, is what Augustine comes to, going from meditation in his Soliloquies to prayer in his Confessions. To say “The present alone is our happiness” is perhaps Goethe’s own standpoint, turning the truth of his life into poetry. To say “The presence alone is our happiness” would be Augustine’s standpoint, turning the truth of his life into prayer. Poetry and prayer can be one and the same, as in “Five Mystical Songs” by George Herbert, set to music by Vaughan Williams. The circle of knowing and loving can find expression in poetry and in prayer, for instance in Dante’s words, “his will is our peace” (la sua voluntate e nostra pace).36 We can take those words as the criterion of the heart’s desire: the true path of the heart is that on which we find inner peace. As poetry it is an expression of the peace of the present. As prayer it is an expression of the peace of the presence. Living in the presence in the present A Soul Is Oned with God

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is living in “the peace of God that passes all understanding” (Philippians 4:7). If we let our ongoing conversation with ourselves become a conversation with God, we are living in the presence, turning the truth of our lives into prayer. It is “practicing the presence of God.” “Be careful for nothing: but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6). This is a method, turning over our hopes and fears to God, letting go and letting God, and it leads to inner peace, “the peace of God that passes all understanding.” “A soul is oned with God” in “the peace of God that passes all understanding.” It has been argued that union with God cannot be an experience.37 This view comes of taking experience to mean perception of an object rather than consciousness of a subject. If we take experience to mean consciousness, then union with God can be an experience, a consciousness of inner peace, a peace of the subject that passes all understanding of an object. It is “the peace of God that passes all understanding” and is the experience of “a soul is oned with God.” If inner peace, then, is the experience of union with God, it is the criterion of the true path of heart’s desire, of “the road of the union of love with God” where “his will is our peace.” The light of the heart’s desire is what I am calling the “dark light of love.”

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Dark Light of Love

Into the darkness with love —the way of the Cloud of Unknowing

Spiritual light is like physical light traveling through the darkness of outer space, becoming visible only when it strikes an object.1 Spiritual light is experienced in the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. I call it “dark light of love” in that it is spiritual rather than physical light and yet is like physical light passing through the darkness of outer space. It strikes an object in the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. A kindling of the heart often starts as a desire to follow another. “As he was speaking a great desire to follow Bilbo flamed up in his heart—to follow Bilbo and perhaps to find him again. It was so strong that it overcame his fear: he could almost have run out there and then down the road without his hat, as Bilbo had done on a similar morning long ago.”2 An illumining of the mind follows as one discovers one’s own path in life, one’s personal destiny. “What is to be my quest?” Frodo asks. “Bilbo went

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to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return, as far as I can see.”3 “But you cannot see very far,” Gandalf replies. The illumining of the mind thus is unfinished and has to be carried on in a quest of understanding. If I see my way as one of gaining and sharing insight as in Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light,” then “I do not ask to see / The distant scene— / One step enough for me.” All the same, I am living toward eternal life rather than living toward death. Putting the two together, one step at a time and eternal life, I am walking with God like Enoch, “And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24). So I see my life as a journey with God in time. Concepts without experience are empty, Kant says, and experience without concepts is blind.4 Eternal life and one step at a time go together as concept and experience. They come together in the conviction that that our becoming is heading toward being rather than nothingness. This conviction, however, is one of faith. Belief in eternal life arises from awareness of mortality and “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68) speaking to the heart’s desire. “Into the darkness with love,” the way of The Cloud of Unknowing,5 is the way of entry into the circle of knowing and loving, where loving leads to knowing and knowing to loving. So if love of God is joy at the thought of “God with us,” it leads to knowing how God is with us, how things are meant, how there are signs, how the heart speaks, how there is a way. Still, our knowing is a knowing unknowing in that we are a mystery to ourselves, unable to leap over our own shadow. Those four sentences, Things are meant, There are signs, The heart speaks, There is a way, 66 |

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are concept and experience. As concept they express the thought that all that belongs to a life shall enter into it. As experience they express the finding that all that enters a life belongs to it. The mystery is the mystical, not how but that things are, things past, things present, and things to come. My own mystery is that I am. The cloud of unknowing that comes between me and God is all about the wonder of existence, that the world exists, that I exist. “May I know me! May I know thee!,” the prayer of the Soliloquies, is an expression of that mystery. Kierkegaard’s formula, by relating to myself and willing to be myself I am grounded transparently in God, puts the two elements together, me and thee, but leaves the mystery, the wonder of existence, intact. It is the wonder you can experience when you look up into the night sky, as I used to do in childhood, looking up at the stars on a summer night. “Existence is God” (Esse est Deus), Meister Eckhart’s formula,6 is an expression of the mystery, connecting God with the wonder of existence. Saint Thomas, however, maintains that God is not the existence of everything (Deus non est esse formale omnium),7 and so the wonder of existence is the wonder of each and every one. Thus too there is “a cloud of forgetting” that comes between us and all else than God, according to The Cloud of Unknowing, but this forgetting, we have found, is not a literal forgetting so much as a letting go of sadness. “In the beginning is the song,” Michel Serres says, thinking of the emergence of information from noise.8 “Song is the leap of mind in the eternal breaking out into sound,” Saint Thomas says in his preface to the Psalms.9 If we put these two thoughts together, we come to an insight into human emergence that connects with the wonder of existence. It is that evolution from matter to life to intelligence is somehow the other side of emanation from intelligence to life to matter. Human emergence is evolution, but it is also emanation, as song is “leap of mind” but also “the eternal breaking out into sound.” Dark Light of Love

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“Everything that rises must converge,” as Flannery O’Connor quotes from Teilhard de Chardin.10 The rising is the leap of mind; the converging is the eternal breaking out into sound. The song then is that of creation, the evolution and the emanation, as if God sang the world into being, matter and life and intelligence, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). Christ is said to be the Word, I believe, because he has “the words of eternal life” (John 6:68). Human emergence, then, is first the emergence of the human race and then the emergence of the individual. We can see evolution from matter to life to intelligence in the emergence of the human race, but we can see emanation from the One and return to the One in the emergence of the individual. The story of Adam and Eve can be read as the story of the emergence of the human race, but it can also be read as the story of the emergence of the individual. As a story of the emergence of the human race it is a going from innocence to experience. As a story of the emergence of the individual it is a return from experience. In The Death of Eve William Vaughn Moody imagines Eve returning to Eden, going “into the gaze and silence of the Lord.”11 Heinrich von Kleist too imagines a return to Eden, saying “we must eat again of the tree of knowledge” in order to come to full consciousness, “but that’s the final chapter,” he says, “in the history of the world.”12 I imagine this return from experience as a coming to “eternal consciousness,” as Kierkegaard calls it, consciousness that is of the eternal in us. There is a separation in our emergence, a separation from other living beings, and in the emergence of the individual a separation from other persons. “It throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”13 Tocqueville says this of 68 |

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democracy in America, but it could be said of the emergence of the individual, and more generally of human emergence. Perhaps there is an answer in the solitude of the human heart, a way from alone to all one. The African love song “I walk alone” suggests a mystical song, we have been saying, “I walk alone with the Alone.” Coming to “eternal consciousness,” to consciousness of the eternal in us, may be the answer to our separation from other living beings and our separation from one another. For if we see our life in time as a changing image of eternity, then the other beings and the other persons who are in our life have eternal significance. So if all that belongs to our life shall enter into it, and if all that enters our life belongs to it, there is no more separation from one another and from other living beings. We come again upon the imperative “Only connect!” and the thought that the life of the spirit is the life of relatedness. We go from symbol to story, from story to song, and from song to dance in learning to love, as in “David danced before the Lord with all his might” (2 Samuel 6:14). This path, it seems, is what Kleist called “the path taken by the soul of the dancer.”14 If we start from the symbol of the great circle of life and light and love, coming from God and returning to God, this path unfolds before us, story and song and dance. It means learning to love with all your mind (the symbol), all your heart (the story), all your soul (the song), and all your might (the dance). Learning to love, then, is our way to wholeness, after our emergence and our separation from other living beings and from one another. Love is joy at the thought of the loved one, love of God is joy at the thought of God, as Spinoza says, and joy, I want to say, at the thought of “God with us,” for this speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition. Joy is “an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction,” C. S. Lewis says in his autobiography Surprised by Joy.15 It is, I would say, the experience of the heart’s desire. Dark Light of Love

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On the way of return to the One (epistrophe) there can be a fulfillment of the heart’s desire. “He used often to say there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary.”16 It is a road of reunion and a road of union of love with God. Tolkien’s formula The Road Goes Ever On17 contrasts it with roads that dead-end. “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?” Jung says in his autobiography. “Only if we know that what truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.”18 I think of the human inscape as an inner landscape opening onto infinity. A symbolic integration of life is what we have on the road of return to the One. It is a road on which we are essentially relating to the infinite, relating to God. Our road of return takes us from the presence of others to presence to self into the presence of God. A symbolic integration of life involves especially two elements, love and work, “Who do you love? What do you do?” but underlying these a basic orientation of life, a life project, a solution to the problem of death, “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” The road of reunion and of union of love with God is a solution. On the road of reunion with others there is an experience of lost and found. “I lost, and then I found, and then I lost again. Maybe I shall find the lost again,” Ursula says in The Well at the World’s End by William Morris. “And the lost which was verily thine shalt thou find again,” the Sage replies.19 The lost and found is an experience also on the road of reunion with other living beings. I think again of my grandfather, and how he would take me on walks when I was a child. My grandfather Would take me on a way

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That later I would walk alone, Remembering a last Time I had passed a loved Red cedar and a mossyback along The river running —I would stop and point To see what he would call them And whatever he called anything, That was its name.20 On the road of the union of love with God there is also a lost and found, as in the words “One who finds his life will lose it, and one who loses it for my sake will find it” (Matthew 10:39). Although this has been contested,21 it does seem true that setting one’s heart upon another human being does divide the heart, while giving one’s heart to the journey with God allows one’s heart to become whole and be whole in a human relationship. The lost in a purely erotic love, facing one another, is found in an integral love, being with one another on a journey with God in time. In going from facing to being with “a soul is oned with God,” going “into darkness with love.” Knowing is taking things in, we have been saying, and loving is going out to things, things past, things present, and things to come. I am “oned with God” in knowing and loving, going into the darkness of unknowing with love. “I have learned to look close at most things that come my way,” Merlin says in Mary Stewart’s story.22 I look closely with the thought that “Things are meant” and “There are signs.” Love is going out to things and is joy at the thought of the loved one, joy at the thought of “God with us” in the meaning of things and of signs. Going “into darkness with love,” I am entering into a personal relation with the Absolute, becoming a friend of God, even

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a lover of God. “As God is one,” Newman says, “so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one.”23 It is the impression of “God with us,” and that impression speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition. I go then from the African love song “I walk alone” to the mystical song “I walk alone with the Alone” or “I walk one with the One.” I am “oned with God” in “the cloud of unknowing.” Entering into a personal relation with the Absolute, I am entering into the circle of knowing and loving where loving leads to knowing and knowing to loving. If loving is joy at the thought of the loved one, and love of God is joy at the thought of “God with us,” it leads to knowing that “God is spirit” (John 4:24) and God acts spiritually, kindling hearts and illumining minds, and realizing faith, as Pascal says, is “God sensible to the heart,”24 sensible or perceptible in the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. What is more, it leads to “proving the unseen,” as George MacDonald says,25 in the experience of the kindling of the heart and the illumining of the mind. This circle of knowing and loving is actually the great circle of life and light and love, coming from God and going to God. For knowing and loving are the life of the spirit, and spirit “returns to itself,” as Hegel says,26 and in returning to itself it returns to God. It is true, Hegel sees spirit primarily as presence to self, but I am seeing it primarily as realized in the presence of God. For me the evolution of the spirit is from the presence of others, as in the life of Augustine, to presence to self, as in his Soliloquies, to the presence of God, as in his Confessions where he is echoing the Psalms. “A soul is oned with God” then in a knowing unknowing of presence. “Dark light of love” appears thus in a knowing unknowing of presence. It is joy at the thought of “God with us,” for this speaks to the deep loneliness of the human condition and says we are not alone. “As God is one,” according to Newman’s saying, “so the impression which He gives us of Himself is one,” the impression 72

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of “God with us,” and this is the “dark light of love.” This is what I am praying for when I recite those lines of the mystical song, Come my joy, my love, my heart, Such a joy as none can move, Such a love as none can part, Such a heart as joys in love. “Into darkness with love,” the way of The Cloud of Unknowing, is a way of relating to the unknown in our lives, relating to the element of mystery, that we are unable to leap over our own shadow. It is living as if everything that belongs to our life shall enter into it and everything that enters into it belongs to it. Going this way, I am walking with God, I am on a journey with God in time, and like Enoch who “walked with God: and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24), I am living toward eternal life instead of living toward death. “I’ve found it! I’ve found it!” a student of mine once exclaimed, and when I asked him what he had found he said, “You accept death, and then you’re free!” That is the secular solution to the problem of death, like Heidegger’s “impassioned freedom toward death.”27 Living toward eternal life is different: you accept eternal life, and then you’re free! “I do not die,” Saint Thérèse exclaims on her deathbed, “I enter into life!”28 Living toward is what we can do, living toward death, living toward eternal life. “If I must die someday, what can I do to fulfill my desire to live?” Living toward death and living toward eternal life are answers, the either/or of a life. The secret of a life, William Carlos Williams says in his autobiography, is the direction you give to your energy.29 Eternal life and “an impassioned freedom toward death” are directions you can give to your energy. I choose to live toward eternal life.

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Dark Light: A Song Cycle

Dark Light Why is it dark at night? —a thousand stars are like a thousand suns! Why is it dark before me, If your light Shines on my path? I can know more Than I can tell Of light and darkness, For if your eyes open, There is light, If your eyes close, Then there is dark, But light inside my heart. A Cloud of Unknowing Love shines through the cloud That comes between You and me, And makes it bright and resplendent As the moon by night, 75

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The day star at dawn, The sun at midday, The understanding in the will, And through that bright cloud, You and I hold converse, For one who remembers You In remembering forgets all else, And one who forgets in remembering Is guarded by You from all harm, And receives a part in all Your blessings. Emergence Evolution From matter to life To intelligence Is the story Of the human race, But emanation And return Is the story Of the individual, Emanation in birth, Return in death, Coming from God And going home to God, One with the One. Separation There is a separation In our emergence From other living beings And from other persons, The deep loneliness Of the human condition, 76 |

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For “it is not good That the man should be alone; I will make him An help meet for him,” As he must follow The path taken By the soul Of the dancer. Reunion There is one Road, Like a great river, Its springs at every doorstep And every path its tributary, A road of reunion With other human beings, A road of communion With other living beings, The mystic road of love Where love is joy At the thought Of God with us, And we walk alone With the Alone. A Soul Is Oned with God A knowing unknowing Is where a soul is oned And oned with God, Though God knows With a knowing of knowing, For we go into our darkness With love, only love, But we enter a circle Dark Light: A Song Cycle

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Of knowing and loving, And there is nothing wiser Than the circle of life And light and love In the stories Of God with us. Dark Light of Love Dark light of love Can only be seen When it kindles the heart And illumines the mind, For God is spirit And acts as spirit, Rekindling hearts In a world that grows chill, So God’s light is dark To the unkindled heart, As light passing through The outer dark And cold until It catches the light.

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N otes

A Cloud of Unknowing 1. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Clifton Wolters (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 46. 2. Ibid., p. 211 (from “Dionysius’ Mystical Teaching”). 3. Ramón Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, trans. E. Allison Peers (London: SPCK, 1923), p. 49 (#118). 4. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 175 (book 5, proposition 32). 5. John Henry Newman, Prose and Poetry, ed. George N. Shuster (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1925), p. 116. 6. Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light: The Entwined History of Light and Mind (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, edition Brunschvicg, #277. See my Reasons of the Heart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), p. xii. 8. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955). 9. See my book A Vision Quest (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 117. 10. From George Herbert’s poem “The Call” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his song cycle Five Mystical Songs (1911). 79

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11. See my Mystic Road of Love (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), pp. 104– 105 (the words) and 106 (the music). 12. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, #278 (my translation). See the chapter “God Sensible to the Heart” in my Circle Dance of Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 21– 40. 13. Irving Howe in his introduction to the anthology Literature as Experience (New York: Harcourt, 1979). 14. M. L. Haskins as quoted by King George VI in a Christmas broadcast in 1939, King George VI to His Peoples (London: John Murray, 1952), p. 21. 15. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Penguin, 1988). 16. This is Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of song in his preface to the Psalms. See my discussion in my Road of the Heart’s Desire (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), p. 87. 17. Karl Barth, Anselm: Fides Quaerens Intellectum (Faith in Search of Understanding), trans. Ian W. Robertson (Cleveland and New York: Meridian Books, 1962). 18. “Solus Deus illabitur animae.” Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part 3, question 64, article 1. See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 56– 63. 19. See my discussion of John Adams’s saying in my Vision Quest, p. 39. 20. See his book with that title and also the last chapter on the mysticism of Paul the Apostle in Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and My Thought, trans. A. B. Lemke (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), pp. 216– 222. 21. See my memoir, A Journey with God in Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p. 27 where it is the motto of my own Italian Journey, my six years in Italy. 22. The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine (bilingual edition), ed. Thomas F. Gilligan (New York: Cosmopolitan Science and Art Ser80 |

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vice Co., 1943), p. 70, my translation of Noverim me! Noverim te! (book 2, chapter 1). 23. George MacDonald, Proving the Unseen (New York: Ballantine Books, 1989). 24. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Wolters, p. 105. 25. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 201 (book 10, chapter 27). 26. Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved (trans. Peers), p. 52 (#132). 27. Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres, ed. Genevieve Rodis-Lewis and Germain Malbreil (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), vol. 1, p. 1132 (my translation). 28. Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings, trans. Leif Sjoberg and W. H. Auden (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 89. 29. See Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, trans. Marc Djaballah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), especially pp. 162ff. 30. See my discussion of this saying in my Circle Dance of Time, pp. 67– 68. 31. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 205. 32. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 399 note. 33. Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, a translation of Gelassenheit by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 85. 34. Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton, 1963), p. 89. 35. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, the Maude translation edited by George Gibian (New York: Norton, 1996), p. 244. 36. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 1985), p. 14. See my book Eternal Consciousness (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Notes to Pages 8–13 \ 81

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37. See my book Love’s Mind (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), pp. 1– 7 (“A Late Summer Night’s Dream”). 38. T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin and Jonathan Cape, 1971), p. 364. See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 1ff. 39. The opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Emergence 1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (with Fear and Trembling), trans. Walter Lowrie (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 173– 174. See my discussion in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 25– 31. 2. George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah, as quoted by Padraic Colum, Storytelling New and Old (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 23. 3. See my discussion of this definition of song by Saint Thomas in my Road of the Heart’s Desire, p. 87. 4. Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Genevieve James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 138. 5. This is the theme of my first book, The City of the Gods (New York: Macmillan, 1965; rpt. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978). 6. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), p. 160. 7. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), pp. 13ff. C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew (New York: Harper Trophy, 1955/1983), pp. 116ff. 8. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, 2nd ed. by Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 97– 98, and The Singer Resumes the Tale, ed. Mary Lord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 49 and 62. 9. Wassily Kandinsky, Reminiscences (1913), as quoted by Thomas Habinek, The World of Roman Song (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 1. 82

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10. See my discussion of this saying of Vico’s in my Road of the Heart’s Desire, pp. 1ff. 11. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, one-volume edition (London: Allen and Unwin, 1976), p. 87. See also his song cycle, The Road Goes Ever On, poems by J. R. R. Tolkien, music by Donald Swann (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967). 12. Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1959), p. 34. See my book The Mystic Road of Love. 13. See my preface to my Love’s Mind, p. vii. 14. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), p. 134. 15. Martin Buber, Ecstatic Confessions, ed. Paul Mendes Flohr and trans. Esther Cameron (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), p. 11. 16. The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm, trans. Lore Segal with pictures by Maurice Sendak (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), vol. 2, p. 169. 17. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 89. 18. Ibid., p. 159. 19. John Howard Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy: Thomas Merton, the Hermitage Years, 1965– 1968 (Fort Worth, TX: Latitudes, 1983), p. 90. See my discussion in my Peace of the Present (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 11 and 13. 20. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pp. 17– 18. 21. See Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, translation and running commentary by Yirmiyahu Yovel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 22. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 23. Here I am alluding to T. S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker” in his Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1988), pp. 23 and 32 (beginning and end) and p. 28 (waiting). 24. Kathleen Norris, Dakota (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1993), p. 102. Notes to Pages 17–23 \ 83

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25. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 14. 26. See Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (New York: Schocken, 1995), pp. 46– 49. 27. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 385. 28. See David Daube’s discussion in his lecture “He That Cometh” (held in the Crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, in October 1966), pp. 5– 6. 29. See my discussion of Kafka’s words on this in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 5ff. 30. Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses during and after the Holocaust, edited by Steven T. Katz, Shlomo Biderman, and Gershon Greenberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31. Ibid., pp. 682– 684. 32. See my discussion of Maritain’s saying in my Church of the Poor Devil (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), p. 111. 33. See my discussion of the Kikuyu saying in my Peace of the Present, p. 67. 34. Ibid., p. 18 (on the Talmudic saying). 35. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 142.

Separation 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Henry Reeve, rev. Francis Bowman, ed. Phillips Bradley (New York: Vintage, 1959), vol. 1, p. 106. See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil, p. 7. 2. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” in Essays on Dolls, trans. Idris Parry (New York: Penguin/Syrens, 1994), p. 3. 3. Ibid., pp. 7 and 12. 84

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4. Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil, trans. Jean Starr Untermeyer (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995), p. 482. 5. This is how I formulate the problem of death in my City of the Gods, in the preface and in the conclusion. 6. Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), p. 139. 7. Heraclitus, Fragment #18, in Kathleen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 26. 8. Robert Jay Lifton, Boundaries (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 21– 34. 9. Denise Schmandt-Besserat, When Writing Met Art: From Symbol to Story (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007). 10. See Norma L. Goodrich’s afterword to Jean Giono, The Man Who Planted Trees (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co., 1985), p. 50. 11. Rilke, Stories of God, p. 89. Cited above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 34. 12. See note 23 above in “A Cloud of Unknowing.” 13. See my Road of the Heart’s Desire. 14. Dante, Paradiso 3.35 (my translation). 15. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman (London: Constable, 1930), p. 171. See my discussion in my Circle Dance of Time, p. 92. 16. See my discussion of Kafka’s words in my Reasons of the Heart, pp. 5ff. 17. Max Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreev, trans. Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky, and Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth, 1948), p. 23. 18. Saint Thomas Aquinas’s definition of song in his preface to the Psalms, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 16. 19. Tolkien, The Road Goes Ever On, cited above in “Emergence,” note 11. 20. The epigraph of my memoir, A Journey with God in Time. Notes to Pages 28–33 \ 85

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21. Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” p. 3, quoted above at note 2. 22. Rilke, Stories of God, p. 89, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 34. 23. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, p. 364. See my Reasons of the Heart, p. 1. 24. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald Gray (New York: Norton, 1972), p. 79 (chapter 10). 25. Wendell Berry, The Wheel (San Francisco: North Point, 1982), p. 26. 26. Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul, trans. John Clarke (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), p. 214. 27. From George Herbert’s poem “The Call” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his song cycle Five Mystical Songs (1911), quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 10. 28. See my Time and Myth (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), p. 79, on rest in restlessness. 29. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture (New York: Schocken, 1985), pp. 110– 125, on “The Restlessness of Desire.” 30. The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, ed. and trans. Paul Auster (San Francisco: North Point, 1983), p. 180 (Joubert’s entries for October 22 and 24, 1821, quoted by Maurice Blanchot in a commentary at the end of the volume). 31. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), vol. 2, p. 178. 32. W. B. Yeats, “Among School Children” VIII in The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 214. 33. George MacDonald, The Golden Key (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), p. 34. 34. My version of The Golden Key, the words of the songs, is in the back of my book The Music of Time (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), pp. 178– 183.

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35. Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), pp. 68– 93 (“The Liberation of Self ”). 36. Thomas Merton, Learning to Love, ed. Christine M. Bochen (San Francisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1997) (vol. 6 of Merton’s journals). Reunion 1. Tolkien, quoted above in “Emergence,” note 11. 2. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 159. 3. Saint John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. Peers, p. 34. 4. Nicolas Malebranche, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 27. 5. Irving Howe, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 13. 6. E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1972), p. 183. 7. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 86. 8. A. T. Wright, Islandia (New York: New American Library, 1975), p. 876. 9. I put this song to music in my Road of the Heart’s Desire, pp. 96– 100. 10. Heraclitus, Fragment #18, in Freeman, Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, p. 26. 11. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 120. 12. Ibid., p. 166. 13. This is Kierkegaard’s terminology in Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 2006). 14. MacDonald, Proving the Unseen. 15. Beethoven, String Quartet in F Major (Opus 135), ed. Wilhelm Altmann (London, Zurich, Mainz, New York: Ernst Eulenburg, 1911), p. 20.

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16. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 90. 17. Sanhedrin 106b. See my discussion in my Peace of the Present, p. 18. 18. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), p. 313. 19. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, pp. 48 and 86. 20. Ibid., p. 87. 21. Ibid., p. 1122. 22. Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1956). 23. Nullum nisi teipsum Domine. See my discussion in my House of Wisdom (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), p. 16. 24. G. K. Chesterton, Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Doubleday Image, 1956), p. 136. 25. Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom Books (London: Allen and Unwin, 1966), pp. 101– 102. 26. The Dalai Lama, Essence of the Heart Sutra, trans. Geshe Thupten Jinpa (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2005), pp. 130– 131. 27. Saint Thomas Aquinas in his preface to the Psalms, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 16. 28. Marcel Proust, On Reading, trans. and ed. Jean Autret and William Burford (New York: Macmillan, 1971), p. 65. 29. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, question 23, article 1. 30. C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, An Anthology (London: Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press, 1946), p. 99 (#259), from MacDonald’s Phantastes, chapter 23. 31. Chatwin, The Songlines, p. 179. 32. John Howard Griffin, Follow the Ecstasy, quoted above in “Emergence,” note 19. 33. Rilke, Stories of God, p. 89, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 34.

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34. Kafka, The Great Wall of China, trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1974), p. 150. 35. Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy, translations and commentary by Reiner Schurmann (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2011). 36. Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley with an introduction by Stuart Hampshire (New York: Penguin, 1996), p. 181. 37. Wandering Joy (Schurmann), p. xx. 38. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pp. 17– 18. 39. Hammarskjöld, Markings, p. 159. 40. Roger Troisfontaines, I Do Not Die (New York: Desclee, 1963). The title is a quotation from Saint Thérèse, her Story of a Soul, p. 271 (“I am not dying. I am entering into life”). A Soul Is Oned with God 1. The words of Plotinus are “a flight of the alone to the Alone” (fuge monou pros monon). See my discussion in my Music of Time, p. 28 and note 44 on p. 191. See Newman’s solus cum Solo, his discussion of “alone with the Alone” in his Apologia (London: Longmans, 1908), p. 195. 2. Noverim me! Noverim te! See The Soliloquies of Saint Augustine, quoted above in “A Cloud of the Unknowing,” note 22. 3. Rilke, Stories of God (Norton), p. 89, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 34. 4. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works (Penguin), p. 211. 5. Ramón Llull, The Book of the Lover and the Beloved, p. 49 (#118), quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 3. 6. Ibid., pp. 38– 39 (#75). 7. Ibid., p. 52 (#132). 8. From George Herbert’s poem “The Call” set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams in his song cycle Five Mystical Songs (1911), quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 10.

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9. See my Reasons of the Heart, my Oxford lectures, pp. 1 and 2. 10. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (with Sickness unto Death), trans. Lowrie (1954), p. 32. See my Eternal Consciousness. 11. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, #278 (my translation). 12. William James, The Will to Believe and Human Immortality (New York: Dover, 1956). 13. Saint Thérèse, Story of a Soul, pp. 214 and 271. 14. Dylan Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1957), p. 128. 15. Broch, The Death of Virgil, p. 482. 16. Eliot, Four Quartets, pp. 23 and 32 (opening and closing lines of “East Coker”). 17. Alcmaeon, Fragment #2, in Freeman, Ancilla to the PreSocratic Philosophers, p. 40. 18. Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27. 19. This is how I formulated the heart’s desire and the problem of death in my first book, The City of the Gods. 20. Saint Thomas, De Veritate, question 1, article 2. See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil, p. 135, and in my Love’s Mind, p. 4. 21. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 99. 22. Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality,” in William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, ed. Stephen Gill (New York: Penguin, 2004). 23. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1896), vol. 1, p. 488. “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” 24. Saint Thomas Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia (Rome: Gregorian, 1946), p. 9 (my translation). 25. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), p. 311.

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26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1995), p. 72 (#6.4311). 27. See my Search for God in Time and Memory (New York: Doubleday, 1969; rpt. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). 28. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1967), p. 4. 29. William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality,” quoted above in note 22. 30. Forster, Howard’s End, quoted above in “Reunion,” note 6. 31. Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Yovel (quoted above in “Emergence,” note 21), p. 170. 32. See my book Eternal Consciousness, on “Is Matter a Dimension?” pp. 19– 35. 33. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death (with Fear and Trembling), p. 147. 34. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, quoted above in note 26. 35. Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, quoted above in “A Cloud of Unknowing,” note 29. 36. Dante, Paradiso 3.35 (my translation). Ira Progoff, The Cloud of Unknowing (New York: Dell, 1957), p. 37. Dark Light of Love 1. See Zajonc, Catching the Light. 2. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 76. 3. Ibid., p. 79. 4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Muller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1966), p. 45 (“Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind”). 5. The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works, trans. Wolters, p. 211.

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6. Meister Eckhart, Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans. Armand A. Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974), p. 85. 7. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, book 1, chapter 26 (“Quod Deus non est esse formale omnium”). 8. Serres, Genesis, p. 138. 9. This translation is from Thomas Gilby, Saint Thomas Aquinas: Philosophical Texts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 2– 3. See my discussion in my Eternal Consciousness, pp. 23– 24. 10. Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1965). 11. William Vaughn Moody, “The Death of Eve,” in The Poems and Plays of William Vaughn Moody (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), vol. 1, p. 445. See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil, pp. 21– 22. 12. Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” p. 12. 13. Tocqueville, quoted above in “Separation,” note 1. 14. Kleist, “On the Marionette Theatre,” p. 3. 15. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, pp. 17– 18. 16. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, p. 87, quoted above in “Emergence,” note 11. 17. Tolkien, The Road Goes Ever On, cited above in “Emergence,” note 11. 18. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Random House Vintage, 1963), p. 325. 19. William Morris, The Well at the World’s End (New York: Ballantine Books, 1977), p. 357. See my song cycle “The Well at the World’s End” in my Mystic Road of Love (1999), pp. 131– 136. 20. See my memoir, A Journey with God in Time, pp. 2– 3. 21. This idea occurs in my Reasons of the Heart (1978), p. 141, and has been contested by Cynthia Bourgeault in The Meaning of

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Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity (Boston: Shambhala, 2010), p. 92. 22. Mary Stewart, Merlin Trilogy (New York: William Morrow, 1980), p. 436. 23. See my discussion of Newman’s saying in my Love’s Mind, p. 9. 24. Pascal, Pensées, ed. Brunschvicg, #278 (my translation), quoted above in “A Soul Is Oned with God,” note 11. 25. MacDonald, Proving the Unseen. 26. Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Yovel, p. 170. 27. Heidegger, Being and Time, quoted above in “A Soul Is Oned with God,” note 25. 28. Troisfontaines, I Do Not Die, quoted above in “Reunion,” note 40. 29. William Carlos Williams, Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1951), p. xi. See my discussion in my Church of the Poor Devil, p. 90.

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Index

Adams, John, 7 Alcmaeon, 58 Arendt, Hannah, 29 Aristotle, 48 Augustine, Saint, 45 Confessions, 9, 31, 61, 63, 72 Soliloquies, 8, 20, 24, 38, 53, 61, 63, 67, 72

Catching the Light (Zajonc), 3 Chatwin, Bruce, 6 Chesterton, G. K., 31, 47 Circle Dance of Time, The (Dunne), vii Cloud of Unknowing, The, 1– 2, 8, 53, 55, 65– 67, 73 Cole, Thomas, 8 Confessions (Augustine), 9, 31, 61, 63, 72

Back to Methuselah (Shaw), 15 Barth, Karl, 6 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 44 Being and Time (Heidegger), 60 Benjamin, Walter, 19, 59– 60 Berry, Wendell, 34 Broch, Hermann, 28– 29, 57 Buber, Martin, 19 Buddha, 49 Buddhism, 47, 49

Dakota (Norris), 23 Dalai Lama, 47 Dante Alighieri, 14, 26, 30, 43, 45, 63 “Dark Light” (Dunne), 5 Dark Night of the Soul (John of the Cross), 39, 45– 46 Daube, David, 24 Death of Eve, The (Moody), 68

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Death of Virgil, The (Broch), 28, 57 Divine Comedy (Dante), 26 Dunne, John The Circle Dance of Time, vii “Dark Light,” 5 Eternal Consciousness, vii The Mystic Road of Love, x Duns Scotus, John, 32 Eckhart, Meister, 50, 67 Ekelof, Gunnar, 44 Eliot, T. S., 22, 57 Enneads (Plotinus), 53, 58, 60 Eternal Consciousness (Dunne), vii Faust, 10, 11, 63 Five Mystical Songs (Herbert), 4, 63 Forster, E. M., 40, 62 Freud, Sigmund, 19 Genesis, 1, 4, 13, 24– 25, 27, 29, 33, 51, 57, 66, 73 Genesis (Serres), 16 George VI, 6 Gilgamesh, 17, 21– 22, 24, 59, 63 Giono, Jean, 30 Girard, René, 30– 31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 7– 8, 45, 63 Golden Key, The (MacDonald), 38 Grimm’s fairy tales, 20 96 |

Hammarskjöld, Dag, 51, 54 Markings, 10, 11, 20– 21, 39, 41– 43, 44 Haskins, M. L., 6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 22– 23, 37, 62, 72 Heidegger, Martin, 11, 60, 73 Heraclitus, 42, 45, 57 Herbert, George, 4, 63 Hezekiah (king), 24, 34 Hobbit, The (Tolkien), 46 Hommes, Tjaard, 1, 23 Hopkins, G. M., 32 Howard’s End (Forster), 40 Howe, Irving, 5, 40 Islandia (Wright), 41– 42 Italian Journey (Goethe), 7– 8 James, William, 56, 60, 62 Jaspers, Karl, 35 Jesus, 8, 24, 26, 29, 37, 45, 49 John, Gospel of, ix, 7, 22, 57 on eternal life, 8, 29, 63, 66, 68 on God is spirit, 3, 37, 46, 48, 56, 62, 72 Parable of the Grain of Wheat, 20 on Thomas (apostle), 36– 37 on Word of life, 28– 29 John of the Cross, Saint, 39 Joubert, Joseph, 35 Jung, Carl, 70 Index

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Kafka, Franz, 19, 24, 31, 48, 50 Kandinsky, Wassily, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 29, 66 Kierkegaard, Søren, 11– 12, 26, 46, 67– 68 The Sickness unto Death, 15, 23, 43, 56, 62 Kikuyu, 68 1 Kings (3:5, 9), 24, 31, 46, 48, 51 Kleist, Heinrich von, 27– 28, 33, 68, 69 “Lead, Kindly Light” (Newman), 2– 3, 36, 49, 66 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 55 Lewis, C. S., 17 Surprised by Joy, 3, 21, 51, 69 Lifton, Robert Jay, 29 Llull, Ramón, 2, 10, 54, 55 Lord, Albert, 17 Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien), 23, 46 Lukacs, Georg, 59– 60 Luke, Gospel of, 18, 26, 37, 47 Luke, Helen, 22– 23 MacDonald, George, 8, 30, 38, 43– 44, 48, 72 Malebranche, Nicolas, 10, 19, 40 Maritain, Jacques, 25 Index

Markings (Hammarskjöld), 10, 11, 20– 21, 39, 41– 43, 44 Matthew, Gospel of, ix, 2, 18, 50, 71 Men in Dark Times (Arendt), 29 Merton, Thomas, 21, 38, 49 Moody, William Vaughn, 68 Morris, William, 70 Mystic Road of Love, The (Dunne), x Newman, John Henry, 56, 72 “Lead, Kindly Light,” 2– 3, 36, 49, 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 63 Norris, Kathleen, 23 Nouwen, Henri, 20, 43 O’Connor, Flannery, 68 Parable of the Grain of Wheat, 20 Parra, Nicanor, 21, 49 Pascal, Blaise, 3, 5, 8, 56, 72 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 37 Philippians, 13, 45, 46, 64 Picasso, Pablo, 58 Plato, 22, 23, 60 Plotinus, 53, 58, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 61 Proust, Marcel, 47 Psalms, 9, 33, 47, 67, 72 \ 97

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Rilke, Rainer Maria, ix, 12, 30, 33, 49– 50, 54 Ring (Wagner), 23 Road Goes Ever On, The (Tolkien), 70 Schmandt-Besserat, Denise, 29 Schweitzer, Albert, 7 Serres, Michel, 16, 67 “Setting Out” (Berry), 34 Shaw, George Bernard, 15, 17, 31 Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard), 15, 23, 43, 56, 62 Socrates, 49 Soliloquies (Augustine), 8, 20, 24, 38, 53, 61, 63, 67, 72 Songlines, The (Chatwin), 6 Spinoza, Baruch, ix, 2, 50, 59, 69 Steiner, George, 22 Stewart, Mary, 71 Stories of God (Rilke), ix, 12, 30, 33, 49– 50, 54 Stravinsky, Igor, 9 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), vii, 7, 18, 48, 58 Surprised by Joy (Lewis), 3, 21, 51, 69 Symphony of Psalms (Stravinsky), 9 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre, 68 Thérèse, Saint, 51, 56– 57, 73 Thomas (apostle), 36– 37 98 |

Thomas, Dylan, 57 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 13, 16, 47, 59, 60, 67 Summa Theologica, vii, 7, 18, 48, 58 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 27, 68 Tolkien, J. R. R., 17– 18, 39, 49 The Hobbit, 46 Lord of the Rings, 23, 46 The Road Goes Ever On, 70 Tolstoy, Leo, 12, 31 Tristes Tropiques (Levi-Strauss), 55 Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 4, 63 Vico, Giambattista, 17 Voyage of Life, The (Cole), 8 Wagner, Richard, 23 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 12 Well at the World’s End, The (Morris), 70 When Writing Met Art (Schmandt-Besserat), 29 Whitehead, Alfred North, 17 Wiesel, Elie, 25 Williams, William Carlos, 73 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 60, 63 Wordsworth, William, 60 Wright, A. T., 41– 42 Yeats, William Butler, 37– 38 Zajonc, Arthur, 3 Index

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John S . Dunne (1930 – 201 3) was the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and the author of over twenty books, including Eternal Consciousness, recipient of the 2013 First Place Catholic Press Association Book Award for Spirituality, The Circle Dance of Time, and his memoir, A Journey with God in Time, all published by the University of Notre Dame Press.