New Baptist Kidd on the Blog

I want to explore in much more detail some of the implications for Christian spirituality of taking the ‘pre-conceptual’, even the ‘non-conceptual’ option – as I began to introduce it in my last blog. At a theoretical level this might look like a pretty heavy enterprise - but there is good news; this can be broken down into some very accessible exploratory excursions, which will lead us into a variety of fascinating theological adventures.

The basic question is this: what are we going to do when the words run out? Or, to put it another way: what are the options once we decide that the deepest levels of truth – the kind which will be needed if we are to talk about God – are simply not amenable to exhaustive explication in words as we typically know them?

Well, the blanket term for those who have travelled this way ahead of us, and have made this decision against ‘words alone’ is the ‘apophatic tradition’, and some Christians have been interested in this tradition from the earliest days.

The topic is so wide-ranging, however, that we could run with it in many different directions. We might, for example, simply go visual – in which case we shall need to explore something of the controversies around icons, and we shall want to look at the potential spiritual significance of other kinds of painting and general ‘objets d’art’, such as the work of recent artists like Mark Rothko and James Turrell. We might, however, go thoroughly philosophical - and begin to trace patterns of ideas which certainly go back into Neo-Platonism, at and around the time that Christianity was born; and we might drop in on any one of a number of Christian writers who have found their way into Christianity through more mystical styles of believing; or we might even listen to some of the early twentieth century existentialist philosophers who, in their own distinctive way, encouraged something of a revival in these modes of thinking. We might also, however, go poetic. There are a number of religious-minded poets who have forcibly recognised the power of the apophatic tradition, the ‘via negativa’, as it is also called. I particularly have in mind the poems of R S Thomas as also, indeed, Thomas Merton, a prolific poet as well as committed exponent of contemplative spiritual disciplines.

So the irony cannot have gone unnoticed! It is not at all difficult to pile up a vast quantity of words, all seemingly in the cause of this non-verbal tradition!

My own first reaction to this irony is to enjoy a quiet chuckle – but then, on further reflection, I want to put down a marker which recognises that the apophatic tradition is not at its best when delivered as a stand-alone feature. It really does need its opposite number, the ‘kataphatic tradition’, in order credibly to make its way. Between the two of them, however, they can energise a dialectical movement which is immensely potent for revelatory disclosures and otherwise hidden depths from the world of human experience.

Our difficulty in the west is that, having sold out so strongly to the kataphatic over so many years – what with our preaching, our teaching, our written liturgies and our hymnody – that the only way we are likely to head somewhere new is with a massive shot of the apophatic antidote to set, as it were, the theological pendulum swinging another way. And that is what I am about to do - though we can take it in small doses and begin each unit with a thoroughly grounded artefact, like a story or a picture.

In this particular blog, I start in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, who I myself found surprisingly lucid on these matters. In the early pages of his classic text ‘Being and Nothingness’ Sartre is exploring why, in his own experience, something which is not conceptually accessible, a kind of ‘nothing’, can actually have as much if not more significance on his life than something which is in-your-face all-present-and-correct. But being a novelist as well as a philosopher, fortunately he gets us there with a cracking good yarn!

I am returning here to a paper I wrote about a year ago – but I feel I can now re-tell it with greatly increased conviction. Sartre invites his readers to accompany him on a visit to his local café in Paris – where I can easily imagine him engaged in amazingly intellectual conversation with his friends. On arrival he finds that one particular friend, one whom he fully expects to be there, is nowhere to be seen. So Sartre then proceeds to explore just how deeply significant the ‘absence’ of his friend really is –indeed how his absence, in its own strange way, actually makes his friend thoroughly present, maybe even more strongly than had he actually been there! The absence of his friend influences his feelings, his activities; in fact, it influences his whole life very deeply indeed.

Analysing this experience can help us to understand why some spiritual experiences of absence, as with God’s absence for example, seeming an experience of nothing, might become the most significant way that we are aware of a presence.

Clearly there has to be something about the absence of Sartre’s particular friend which makes the experience more significant than the experience of many other absences which, in theory, could also be credited to this café at that moment (for example, the absence of all those people, unknown to him, who live in England and have never even thought of visiting Paris). Can we identify, then, some structural conditions which make this particular absence so special?

Sartre identifies four factors, some of which are more obvious than others. First, he shows how the dimension of expectation is clearly significant – he arrived at the café with an expectation of meeting his friend, something which he brought to the experience as prior knowledge and prior relationship. Second, he identifies the importance of wonder - wonder in the sense of questioning, that is, rather than the sense of awe. Third, he names the experience of fear - why is my friend not here; has something gone wrong between us? Fourthly and finally, he points to the role of imagination – Sartre can imagine the alternative possibility – namely that his friend is actually present.

All four of which immediately begin to help me with my analysis of why a perceived absence of God might be highly significant for my counter-experience of God’s presence. First, as above, an expectation of God’s presence, whether I am a believer or not, has already fed deeply into my culture, through the inheritance of a faith community and its stories. I come with real expectations, however limited these might be. Second, I certainly come with questions; these have actually been heightened in recent centuries in company with the ascendancy of critical reason. Third, I come with fears: at root my fear of my own finite limitations, in time and in space, both of which repeatedly threaten me with the overwhelming possibility of meaninglessness. And lastly, I also come with a certain capacity for imagination, an intuition of the possibility of holy presence, even if it is too often eclipsed by my counter-culture of doubt.

In practice, I might even be tempted to condense Sartre’s four into a more famous ‘Corinthian three’ – I come to my experience of God’s absence already shaped by ‘faith, hope and love’ – and these profoundly transform the possibilities for my apparent experience of emptiness. I could even argue that they open the possibility of an unprecedented fullness. Actually, elsewhere in the same text, Sartre has the line ‘Fullness is emptiness given direction’. I might be confronted with what looks at first sight to be a devastating absence but, if I am simultaneously fed by a rich tradition which offers direction, perhaps this can be the very place where fullness will make itself known in greatest measure. That is, I think, what many mystics and the exponents of contemplative prayer are trying to tell us.

Not bad, eh! It was philosophy alright, but we snuck in through a thoroughly recognisable story, and it soon began to open up a whole new platform on which to build our further reflections. Watch this space, at this moment deceptively empty, and find out where it will take us next.