Zen Christianity

Oh, it's a thing. Or at least it was a thing back in the '60s, when the hippies discovered Meister Eckhart. 

Is it still a thing? Signs point to yes. Here's one on Zen Catholicism that is even officially nihil obstat, which doesn't necessarily imply an endorsement, only that it contains nothing objectionable from a doctrinal standpoint. Indeed, how can one object to nothing? 

Well, it depends on the meaning of nothing. At one end is nihilism, at the other its opposite. 

You'll have to excuse my apophatheadedness. It's because I'm making my way through this book of essays called The Renewal of Mystical Theology. Chapter three, called From the Radically Apophatic to the Radically Kataphatic: From Meister Eckhart to Jacob Boehme, effectively blew my mind yesterday. 

By which I mean in the manner of a Zen koan, which doesn't have any logical, left-brain answer, but rather, is intended to subvert one's ordinary way of thinking and perceiving reality. According to my pal Gemini, Koans are designed 

to be paradoxical and unsolvable using logic or reason. This creates a sense of confusion and frustration, which can be a catalyst for breaking through our usual mental patterns. They are not meant to be solved intellectually, but rather grasped intuitively. 

Koans can help us develop our innate wisdom and access deeper levels of understanding. The goal is not to find the "right answer," but to allow the koan to challenge our assumptions and open us to new ways of seeing.

The confusion and frustration is supposed to put our ego out of isness by vaulting us to a higher or deeper plane of being. 

One might say that for the ego, order is everything. It doesn't matter if the order or map is wrong, only that one has a map. A casual glance at history reveals an endless variety of dysfunctional maps, or rather, of maps that essentially function to keep our shit together and ward off the anxiety of not knowing. Order in the negative sense narrows down experience and denies the existence of things outside or beyond the map.

What if there really is no map? This is the challenge of apophaticism, which is a leap into no map's land. The ego is in the business of creating sharp boundaries, but if they're too sharp, then the result is rigidity, pedantry, and control freakery. You know the type.

In fact, in psychoanalysis there's a concept called decompensation, which "is the functional deterioration of a structure or system that had been previously working with the help of compensation." It doesn't matter that the structure or system might have been dodgy to begin with, only that it functioned to organize -- or even ward off -- reality.

For example, a bad acid trip is effectively synonymous with an abrupt decompensation. On the other hand, psychoanalytic therapy might be thought of as a more gradual one, as various psychological defense mechanisms are explored and dismantled. But too much truth too soon can be a terrible thing, analogous to what happens in catastrophe theory.

Come to think of it, Bion used the term catastrophe to... I don't feel like digging through my library. Help us out here, Gemini: it refers to  

a profound and disruptive psychological event that shatters an individual's sense of self and their understanding of the world. It's not simply a negative event, but a fundamental breakdown in the way a person organizes their experience. 

A catastrophe disrupts the individual's ability to make sense of their experiences, leading to a sense of disorientation, confusion, and a loss of meaning. It can lead to a sense of disconnection from oneself, from others, and from the world. 

Nevertheless,

While a catastrophe can be a devastating experience, it can also be a catalyst for growth and transformation. By confronting and working through the catastrophe, individuals may emerge with a deeper understanding of themselves and the world.

In fact, it was Tolkien who coined the term "eucatastrophe" for "a sudden turn of events in a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and plausible and probable doom."

Anyway, after reading the essay on Eckhart and Boehme, I had to go for a walk to reconstitute my head. Eckhart posits "a form of knowing that transcends sense and the discursive intellect," so, forget about your familiar map. It's of no use here. I suppose we could call this creative destruction a kind of "meta-metanoia."

His "language of paradox is more performative than descriptive," in that it is "a rhetorical means to induce or at least open up the prospect of a direct experience of God," involving "the destruction of the careless ways in which" we speak of God in an "all-too-human" way. But one can never be sure if he's being literal or playful, descriptive or provocative, sincere or ironic.

He famously refers to the radically transcendent Godhead as a "nothing" which is also radically immanent in us. It reminds me of what was said in yesterday's post to the effect that our own nothingness is the image and likeness of the divine nothing. Paradoxically, this "unfathomable ground or unground" is simultaneously "the plus ultra of generativity and creativity." 

Like a koan, Eckhart's use of paradox and hyperbole is designed to shock the system: "unthinkability and non-knowing signify precisely the form of knowing commensurate with the reality that represents the limit to thought."

Even more controversially, he seems to draw a distinction between the personal God and an impersonal Godhead. However, it is difficult to say if he meant this literally or whether the intent is just to blow our minds, and not pretend to know the unknowable. Again,

the use of paradox was one of the means used by Eckhart to put the acquisitive self out of action in its thinking and speaking about God....

The transcendent divine is available more through unknowing than knowing and is characterized as hidden, abyssal, incomprehensible, nameless, and more appropriately indicated in darkness...

Or, paradoxically, a "dazzling darkness." The sun shining at midnight, as someone once put it. 

For Eckhart, even a technically correct doctrine can become a barrier, for example, if "the conceptualization of the Trinity is so facilely dogmatic that it comes to serve the role of an idol."

Yesterday we spoke of a kind of dynamic vertical metabolism involving both apophatic and cataphatic approaches. Well, the author brings in Ruusbroec, for whom "mystical theology and doctrine are fundamentally complementary rather than competitive." I agree, and this is a good place to pause...