Monthly Osuna: Letter C
The Apophatic Way
This is a monthly series on Francisco de Osuna’s The Third Spiritual Alphabet.1 In each post, we reflect on one letter from his Alphabet. The Alphabet was written as an aid to recollection. Recollection (being recollected in God) is both a form of prayer and a way of being in the world. This month’s letter is C.
Letter C
How the Soul is to be with God: Blind and Deaf and Dumb and Always Meek (SA 97). Ciego y sordo y mudo deves ser, y manso siempre.
“The most alien and distant road of understanding for mortals is the negative way of which this third Alphabet speaks.” Francisco de Osuna (SA 101)
A common feature for many Christian contemplatives, in both the eastern and western traditions, is their insistence on the negative, or apophatic, way of understanding God. The negative way recognizes that the divine essence is beyond our ability to comprehend. For that reason, our usual ways of coming to know something are of little help when seeking union with the divine presence. Osuna says the soul that is united with God is “blind and deaf and dumb and always meek,” which is to say that our usual ways of understanding and seeking are negated in order to intimately know the unknown divine.
We might consider Jesus’ statement that no one “knows the Father except the Son” who is the revelation of God to us (Matt. 11:27). The fact that the divine needs to be revealed undergirds the notion that divinity, in essence, is ultimately unknowable.
The Kataphatic and Apophatic Ways
One common way of understanding God is the positive, or kataphatic, way. The positive way takes good properties (e.g., love, knowledge, generosity, etc.) and attributes those properties to God in the superlative degree. If it is good to have knowledge, then God is all-knowing. If it is good to have power, then God is all-powerful. The kataphatic way, then, affirms not only the great-making properties of God but also our ability to know those properties.
However, the moment we begin to define God with positive attributes we place limits on the divine essence, which is transcendent and inscrutable. And, unfortunately, affirming those limits can also generate false statements. To show why this is the case, consider the divine attribute of ubiquity. We say that God is ubiquitous, meaning that God is present everywhere since God is not limited by time and space. However, our conception of “everywhere” is derived from our experience within time and space. We have no conception of what it means to say that God transcends everywhere. Although it is true to say that God is ubiquitous since God is everywhere, it is also not-true in so far as ubiquity, as we can conceive of it, cannot define God who transcends time and space. Therefore, God is greater than divine ubiquity since God is both ubiquitous and not-ubiquitous.
The negative way seeks to understand God by negating whatever God is not. Whatever remains, after trimming everything else away, tells us something about what God is actually like. Of course, once everything is negated, there is nothing left to compare with God. Hence, Osuna says:
“If we wish to attain the heights of contemplation…we must become blind to everything that is not God” (SA 103)
The Apophatic Way and Recollection
O the depths of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! “For who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Rom. 11:33-34 NRSV)
The negative way assumes that, at best, our positive statements about God are analogously true, e.g., God’s love is analogously like human love, but those statements fall short of defining the inscrutable reality of the divine. Once the apophatic way has brought us to the place where we understand that God is ultimately unknowable, then we are rightly situated for contemplative prayer.
“We ought to learn how to keep a free mind in all we do…To be aware of God at all times and to be enlightened equally under all circumstances, there are two special requirements. First, be spiritually quite private, guarding the mind carefully against irrelevant ideas, so as to keep them out and not deal with them, giving them no place in your life. The second has to do with the minds own inventions, whether spontaneous in the mind or representing some object, or whatever their nature. Do not be dissipated in such ideas lest you become lost in a crowd of them.” Meister Eckhart2 (ME2 31)
Unsurprisingly, once we have negated all that is not God, we are left without a mental conception of God. How, then, are we supposed to be “aware of God at all times” as Eckhart suggests? The apophatic approach to recollection lets go of words and concepts in order to embrace God with the “arms and wings of the heart." The one who seeks recollection, Osuna says, must “develop a taste for feeling rather than analyzing” (SA100). We can be aware of God at all times with the constant desire of our heart. This idea that we can come to know God with our hearts instead of the mental traffic of our minds runs throughout the literature of Christian mysticism.
I think it can be difficult, and perhaps a little scary, to let go of our conceptions of God and everything else for the sake of coming to know God in a more intimate way. It can feel risky. And, sometimes, those who have never taken the risk will insist that it is risky and shouldn’t be done. But those kinds of cautionaries are too often based in assumption and prejudice instead of experience.
Think about it; why should we be afraid to give ourselves over to the Love that sustains us in every moment? What greater faith can we offer than to trust that God is always present, even when we aren’t holding onto specific thoughts about God? Faith can feel like a risk because it is an act of letting go and giving up illusory notions of control. Even our conceptions of God can give us a sense of control so they must go, at least long enough to allow the illusion of control and “knowing” to fade. We can always take our conceptions back when we need to fumble around this world of passing things. But if we experience the divine presence without our ideas about God, we will no longer hold on to them as if they are God.
Francisco de Osuna The Third Spiritual Alphabet (Trans. Mary E. Giles; Preface Kieran Kavanaugh; Paulist Press, 1981)
Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation, Meister Eckhart (Trans. Raymond Bernard Blakney; Harper & Brothers; 1941)