I was asked to wrote about the Christian way of the three fold reduction, often compared to eastern Satori, and most explicated by St John of the Cross and St Gregory of Nyssa, that is comprised of
the reduction of understanding to faith, memory to hope, and will to love.
It is a way of unknowing, apopophatic, where one must rid oneself of understanding, let go of concepts. If your mind is with things, it isn't with the presence of God.
One might even say until you know nothing, you will not know God.
This indeed involves an emptying of self, kenosis, although it has differences with eastern techniques, as it does so by becoming consumed in love for the person of Christ.
In the West, it also is associated with the Dark Night of the Soul, a kind of purifying “depression,” yet its spiritual endpoint is not therapeutic, to rebuild a healthy ego.
In ST JOHN OF THE CROSS AND DEPRESSION, DENYS TURNER does a wonderful job of explicating both this and the difference in how St John thinks of it, he writes:
“Some make the mistake of thinking that if this self is an illusion, then there is, lurking somewhere behind it, some higher, possibly more 'spiritual', true self, which the passive purgations release.
But John's is no 'higher self’ mysticism. For what is retrieved from the passive nights is, on the contrary, the ability to live without the comforts of a meaningful world, a meaningful self or even, for that matter, an intelligible God. It 'is a serious imperfection', St John says drily, 'and opposed to God's way', to 'desire to feel God and taste of him as if he were comprehensible and accessible'.
And as with God, so with the self. Beyond the passive nights we no longer need to possess the terms in which we can construe the world as meaningful, the product of an active intellect. Nor do I need to possess an account of myself in terms of a continuing sense of selfhood, the product of active memory.
And we do not need to possess these things because we no longer need to possess anything at all, as an active will does.
Intellect, memory and will no longer need to seem to be ours as distinct from the divine power which can now dwell within them, as if their being ours could only be construed by way of contrast with their being of God.
If I remain the agent who activates these powers, it is not by way of contrast with God's directly activating
them that I do so.
It is also that it is only because of our embedded anxiety to be a self that depression is possible at all. To be able to live free of the need to be a self is to leave nothing for depression to grip on.”
Once egolessness replaces the former stronghold and stranglehold of the self, the individual is able to love in a divine manner, by reason of the inpouring of the Spirit.
The continuity of our human identity is no longer grounded in the memory of a life that is realized within the boundedness of the created self, but in the memory of God's eternal love ...
St John of the cross's mystic poetry reflects this:
In order to have pleasure in everything, desire to take pleasure in nothing.
In order to arrive at possessing everything, desire to possess nothing.
In order to arrive at being everything, desire to be nothing.
In order to arrive at that wherein you have no pleasure, You must go by a way wherein you have no pleasure.
In order to arrive at that which you know not, You must go by a way which you know not.
In order to arrive at that which you possess not, You must go by a way which you possess not.
In order to arrive that which you are not, You must go through that which you are not.
David Bentley Hart in his essay on St John and Theosis writes:
“The object of contemplative prayer for John is the cultivation of perfect love for God, not the attainment of some higher noetic grasp of the divine; God can never be comprised by thought, but through love one can know his action and presence.
It is the heart, ultimately, not simply the mind, that is truly capable of being laid open before the invasion of the divine, and so one must pass from the more cerebral stage of meditation to that of infused contemplation, which subsists in faith; genuine intimations of divine presence are elusive, coming as (in the words of the Pseudo-Dionysius) "rays of darkness," unmediated by "things," and hence understanding must abdicate all its privileges of rule the end of contemplation is union with the divine in the pure passion of the soul — the passionless passion of charity.
It is, supremely, an apophatic way. "Nothing created or imagined," writes John, "can serve the intellect as a proper means for union with God, and ... all that can be grasped by the intellect would serve as an ob; the knowledge of God is darkness, which John, drawing on venerable tradition, likens to the impenetrable obscurity of the cloud on Sinai where Moses approached the place of the almighty.”
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