Spirituality and Incarnation

Introduction
In the early 1990s, while writing articles for the Plenteous Harvest, I wrote two essays on spirituality. At that time I was wrestling with a course I took on St. John of the Cross while at the Graduate Theological Union in the early 1980s. That course was taught by a member of a Roman Catholic religious order. As the course unfolded, I began to wonder about the theology underlying John of the Cross. Aspects of his thought appealed to me, especially the notion of the dark nights. According to what we learned, the first dark night, the night of sense, has to do with stripping the soul of all sensual desires that detract from God. The second dark night, that of the spirit, cleanses the soul of all its social, economic, cultural, and religious inclinations and beliefs on the way to union with God. These dark nights made sense in light of Scripture and what God had done in my life. The nature of the union with God was the problematical aspect. As I read John of the Cross, it seemed to me that his highest spiritual experience was a moment of ecstatic union which transcended God the incarnate Word. Or, to put it another way, union with God is beyond the senses, beyond concepts, beyond self and God as distinct selves. That didn't make sense to me, especially in light of the biblical revelation. Finally, in spite of the fact that I took a course in John of the Cross, I wasn't convinced that I really understood him, nor that my professor understood him.

Prior to and subsequent to studying John of the Cross, I have read a number of other writers. Above all, the Bible describes many encounters with God, and these are of decisive significance. Among writers, the most significant were Karl Barth, Vladimir Lossky, and Jean Leclercq. Somewhere along the line I learned that the spirituality of the West was influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite who adapted the thought of Plotinus. According to Lossky, when Dionysius was introduced to the West, he was misinterpreted along lines that denied the incarnational aspect of his thought. Further, Barth once commented in the early sections of his Church Dogmatics that the mystical theology of Schleiermacher was a synthesis of medieval mysticism and scientific rationalism. According to Barth, Medieval mysticism had no real doctrine of the incarnation. That is clearly true of Schleiermacher. Similarly, in a very interesting book, The Incarnational Element in Hilton's Spirituality by David G. Kennedy, I learned that English spirituality possessed a strong incarnation element, but with the introduction of Dionysius the Areopagite, this element no longer was at the fore. Finally, in Leclercq, his The Love of Learning and the Desire for God, I learned something of the connection between the biblical Word and the encounter with God according to Benedictine spirituality.

These sources, and more, gradually began to convince me that a real encounter with God does not leave the physical behind, but retains the physical because God is ultimately known in Incarnation, through the flesh of Jesus Christ. Specifically, on the basis of Scripture, and what God has revealed to me, I have become convinced that worship, above all the eucharist, is the place where God is most fully revealed. For that reason I ended my novel with the vision of God in the eucharist, a vision that did not transcend the physical and social aspects of the eucharist, but sees God with his people at the messianic banquet of the Lamb. In the early 1990s, I was wrestling with these matters, and wrote the following two essays for the Plenteous Harvest.
 Essay One
There are two doctrines that lie at the heart of the Christian faith: the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology, the doctrine that Jesus Christ is fully God and fully human.

The doctrine of the Trinity tells us that God is utterly distinct from the world, but capable of taking form as worldly events and speaking and acting in these events to form community.

Scripture describes how God spoke and acted through the burning bush, the Exodus, the entrance into the promised land, the monarchy, and in the Exile. Above all, however, Christians believe that God acted and speaks through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

To believe that Jesus Christ is fully divine and fully human means that the words and deeds of Jesus were also the words and deeds of God.

Christian faith does not connect God's full divinity with any other created reality. For example, the Christian faith does not say that our dreams are fully human and divine; nor is this said of the Church, nor of the collective unconscious. This is only said of Jesus Christ, and for this reason, the Creed states that Jesus Christ is the only Son of God.

The events in which God speaks and acts are first and foremost public events involving the body of the faithful and experienced through the senses. The primary revelatory event in the Old Testament was the Exodus. The event of the Exodus was a corporate experience, and it was experienced through the senses. The same is true of the revelation of Jesus Christ. The first verse of I John describes the matter as follows: "We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life."

Furthermore, these primordial revelatory events involving the whole people of God lead God's people on a corporate pilgrimage toward liberation, where liberation is understood as the formation of just and even loving social/economic order, both in the Church and larger society.

For Anglicans, the corporately experienced revelation in Jesus Christ is re presented in corporate worship. Worship is the place where we meet God. Worship is where we form the community on pilgrimage. Worship is where we receive the strength to "for forth into the world rejoicing in the power of the Spirit." Corporate worship is the center of our spirituality.

Within the Church today, there are currents that understand spirituality in terms of the unconscious (Jung), or the kingdom within (Stanford), or as a depth of creation (Matthew Fox), or as the depth of ourselves uncovered in therapy.

This is not to deny that God cannot act or speak through therapy, our dreams, and in creation; but these revelations are peripheral, minor, fallible, and misleading, if they are not critiqued and ordered by the central revelation of Jesus Christ in worship.
 Essay Two
Theology is a fallible and uncertain science, and in this article, I wish to present a perplexity that has been on my mind for some years.

There is an ancient spiritual tradition, formulated by Plotinus, clothed in Christian garb by Dionysius the Areopagite, and running into the present era through such saints as Theresa, John of the Cross, and Eckhart.

Plotinus was a pagan philosopher and mystic who conceived of God as threefold. First, there was the vegetative aspect of God which is the soul of the physical world. Secondly, there is the conceptual aspect of God understood as structure, logos, the platonic realm of ideas. Finally, at the heart of the divine, an ineffable reality above and beyond God's vegetative and conceptual nature. This reality cannot be directly described since it lies beyond the realm of ideas. Rather, it is experienced as bliss, the dissolving of all distinctions, ineffable rest and peace, beyond all categories.

The goal of the mystical way is to experience the ineffable heart of God. Classically, it results in the three fold path of purgation, illumination, and union, corresponding to the vegetative, conceptual, and ineffable natures of God. It results in the view that the highest spiritual experience is a "still point" within us, or a "center," or a ecstatic experience of Being as the ground of all existence, a ground beyond physical and conceptual categories.

Theresa and John of the Cross are saints of the church. They cannot be dismissed, especially by those of us in the Anglican tradition. They did not adopt Plotinus straightway, but integrated the Plotinus experience with Christian insights. Can this really be done? That is my perplexity.

The christological controversies led to the formulation that Jesus Christ was fully human and fully divine, the human and divine natures are utterly distinct, and they are united into one person. Now what does this mean in terms of the experience of God?

When one experiences God, one experiences the divine nature. The divine nature and the human nature are distinct, and the experience of God is of a powerful, mysterious, holy, and purposeful reality distinct from created realities. Nevertheless, the human and divine together are one reality, described theologically as one person Jesus Christ. The divine is never separated from the human. Therefore, the experience of the divine never leaves the human behind, but is always revealed with and through the human historical reality. This in Incarnation. All the theophanies in Scripture that I know of involve the human, social, historical dimension, and always result in ethical commands that direct God's people. By definition, a spirituality that transcends the physical and conceptual world, that merges into pure Being above the subject\object split, leaves the human nature behind. That is why the descriptions of these realities use terms such as void, cloud of unknowing, blinding darkness, divine abyss, and so forth. These terms contrast starkly with the results of meeting God found in Scripture. There God is certainly seen as awesome and mysterious, but this God speaks as events and commands his people in words they understand. This God is Word in every depth of himself, and this Word can be understood and obeyed. If there were some depth or height in God beyond the Word as in Plotinus, then we would have the god of the Arian heresy. As it is, we know a God that encounters us in the physical and conceptual realities of worship, and directs, blesses, and saves us. That is the center of our spirituality as I understand it.

The Rev. Robert J. Sanders, Ph.D.
July, 2003

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