Saint Gregory of Nyssa says in his Life of Moses that any concept that attempts to define God “becomes an idol of God and does not make God known.” We have an insatiable and natural need to conceptualize. But in order to know God, the Christian contemplative tradition insists on
The “unknowing ” that is higher (or deeper) than conceptual knowledge that the practice of contemplation cultivates. Saint Thomas Aquinas claims that “the end of our knowing is to know God as something unknown.” To know God the mind must be still (Ps 46:10). Initially (and this can last quite some time) to be drawn into this unknowing makes previous trials seem like mere child’s play; for the compulsive need to conceptualize everything in sight does not relent. When we are drawn into the presence of God with our conceptual mind gunning its engines, we are in for a rather rude awakening.
In his Homilies on the Beatitudes, St. Gregory of Nyssa likens it to stepping onto a “slippery, steep rock that affords no basis for our thoughts.” With nothing to hold onto, the conceptual mind cannot stabilize itself. Saint Gregory likens this encounter with God to being on the edge of a mountain precipice. Finding no toehold or handhold, “the mind has nothing it can grasp, neither place nor time, neither space nor any other thing which offers our mind something to grasp hold of, but, slips from all sides from what it fails to grasp, in dizziness and confusion.”
We may have known this liberating purification previously, but it focused more on the surface faculties of the soul, such as greed, gluttony, or lust. Not that these struggles did not give us a run for our money, but in classical Christian theology they are considered less spiritually dangerous. While struggles with these may generate a greater media interest, they are, in the ancient view of things, nearer the surface of the soul and produce more garden-variety suffering than the much sharper pain of confronting more spiritual, and therefore more dangerous, intellectual sins such as pride, envy, judgmentalism, or vainglory. When the loving flame of God sets about healing these sins of the intellect it is more painful because they are more spiritual, and we become painfully aware of just how beset by them we are.
Indeed, we are progressing along the path of holiness, but as a result we become aware of just how filled we are with deeply rooted intellectual habits that blind us to the loving light. As St. John of the Cross sees it, this is perfectly consistent with how wood takes on the qualities of fire. Before the wood becomes wooden flame-completely one with fire-the wood spits and hisses and oozes in preparation for becoming all flame. As part of the process of healing we become acutely aware of just how filled we are with arrogance, envy, preoccupation with our reputation, judgmentalism.
Indeed, these characteristics were all there within us, but we were at most only vaguely aware of them; now the living flame of love is drawing them out and placing them in our sight. The problem is that this stage of growth in humbling self-knowledge is singularly painful, with the result that we feel we are falling to pieces when in fact we are becoming one with the living flame of love. As when our prayer was beset by boredom, there is no time limit on these “sharp trials in the intellect.” These trials are intertwined with the tangles of Providence and are tailor made for each person, but the following are common enough places to undergo them: our relationship with beauty, knowledge, spiritual advancement, idealism—each presents a different opportunity to observe the grasping, clinging mind (this list is by no means exhaustive).
We need as much beauty in our lives as possible, but this trial can show itself in our relationship with beauty when the grasping, craving mind fragments the perception of beauty in such a way that we try to cling to it. This may show itself as a powerful attempt to possess the beautiful object or simply fantasize that we do. Until our relationship with beauty is cleansed and set free simply to gaze into and reverence Beauty, we will not be in a right relationship with Beauty. This trial in the intellect has for its sole purpose the expansion of our capacity to realize the depths of our immersion in Beauty, even in the most seemingly mundane contexts.
~Martin Laird, A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation
