Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Plus de Merton
Your intuition that Christ suffers in us in the Dark Night of the Soul seems to be to be especially apt and true. In the Night of Sense it is we who suffer in our own emptiness; in the Night of the Spirit he is emptiness in us, exinanivit semetipsum. The special awfulness of that seeming void can certainly be taken as a personal presence, but without duality, without too much of the subject-object relationship. But above that.
"Everybody is suffering emptiness. All that is familiar to us is being threatened and taken away ... there may be little or nothing left and we may all have evaporated. Surely one cannot feel comfortable or at ease in such a world. We are under sentence of death, an extinction without remembrance or memorial, and we cling to life and to the present. This causes bitterness and anguish. Christ will cure us of this clinging and then we will be free and joyful, even in the night."
"In the night it is intolerale to raise the question of right and wrong because we are in a sense simply wrong and in another sense out of the whiole area of argument altogether. That is precisely the atmosphere of Greek religious tragedy. It is much healthier than our obsession with the fear that if we are not somehow optimistic we are lost. In the night optimism and pessimism are both meaningless. Does this sound absurd?"
"As to epectasis: I do not consider it a "state" at all but so to speak a basic law of the spirit, a kind of expression of the very nature of the spiritual life. I think this is most important for you in this "night," much of which comes from unconsciously hanging on to something steady and dfinite. We have got to travel in the void and be perfectly happy about it....all that we know clearly is insufficient. We must pass on to the unknown. The hunger for God cannot be satisfied except in the sense that an entirely new dimension makes the void itself our satiation, and this is nonsense as expressed here. Who is there left to satisfy?"
"[Eckhart] towers over all his century."
More to come. I've stopped reading until I can catch up with the quotations here.
"Everybody is suffering emptiness. All that is familiar to us is being threatened and taken away ... there may be little or nothing left and we may all have evaporated. Surely one cannot feel comfortable or at ease in such a world. We are under sentence of death, an extinction without remembrance or memorial, and we cling to life and to the present. This causes bitterness and anguish. Christ will cure us of this clinging and then we will be free and joyful, even in the night."
"In the night it is intolerale to raise the question of right and wrong because we are in a sense simply wrong and in another sense out of the whiole area of argument altogether. That is precisely the atmosphere of Greek religious tragedy. It is much healthier than our obsession with the fear that if we are not somehow optimistic we are lost. In the night optimism and pessimism are both meaningless. Does this sound absurd?"
"As to epectasis: I do not consider it a "state" at all but so to speak a basic law of the spirit, a kind of expression of the very nature of the spiritual life. I think this is most important for you in this "night," much of which comes from unconsciously hanging on to something steady and dfinite. We have got to travel in the void and be perfectly happy about it....all that we know clearly is insufficient. We must pass on to the unknown. The hunger for God cannot be satisfied except in the sense that an entirely new dimension makes the void itself our satiation, and this is nonsense as expressed here. Who is there left to satisfy?"
"[Eckhart] towers over all his century."
More to come. I've stopped reading until I can catch up with the quotations here.
// posted by MSR @ 11:14 PM 
