Indeed, “only a few souls ever pass beyond the night of sensory purification” (84).
The chaste contemplatives of John’s Carmelite Order try and dissolve the ego, so longing falls and spirit rises. There’s a process. Initially, one shuts off the body’s senses, its “false self.” During John’s first night, “the soul is stripped of all perceptions of God.” In the second “night of spirit, all ideas of God fall away” (italics are not added). God, happy you’ve dumped your vanity, now unites your interior with his command to banish the self. “Apprehending the word of God” via John’s way means “the soul becomes acutely aware of her own insignificance” (75). The soul then possesses a designified “I”—the goal of Christian mysticism, medieval or modern. You are purified, voided. You achieve a kind of feelinglessness, or no-mind.8
In John’s descriptive flurry, it’s unclear how you purge your core desires. Taking this path, your soul must feel excruciating pain. Just as the body does. An existential question is piqued: How would we know the soul’s emotions except as those emotions braise our skin or fray our nerves? Starr advises: “By sitting quietly with the breath, the blessed ‘no-self’ begins to emerge” (13). Set aside how this is done, sixteenth-century-style. If one annihilates “I,” what’s left to feel the spirit with?
One of John’s goals, it seems, is to resurrect the soul, abandoned in our prelapsarian past. To get there, he warns, beware “the path of the mind.” “Discursive thought and imagination” derail the soul’s advancement. (So much for memoir.) The goal is “formless prayerfulness,” that is, “doing nothing.” Being over becoming. John’s purpose is to focus “loving attentiveness” on God. That’s all that matters.
Dark Night portrays what is personally inconceivable, not what is demonstrable. It is the spiritual equivalent of praying away cancer, which generations past labeled “faith healing” and current practitioners now call “spontaneous remission.” Today, we judge John of the Cross’s discourse as a metaphor for becoming as “empty” of ego as the divine (presumably) is. And yet to locate God in this way cannot be redescribed—the no-self has no self (pardon the hocus-pocus) with which to report the obliteration it took to locate God.
Even Catholic sticklers, heeding the doctrine of original sin, discount this putative union between God and the writer, or the artist for that matter. Under “Mysticism” in The New Catholic Encyclopedia,9 we learn that our means of “experiencing” God is incompatible with the “sense experience” that defines us and, certainly, defines human creation.
Since any created nature is finite and liable to imperfection, only by special divine help would human nature be able to abide permanently in the enjoyment of a situation calling for the complete integration and subordination of all its faculties to the purposes of the spiritual side of its being. Having lost that preternatural endowment, man, of himself, is no longer capable of that intellectual awareness of God which, if awareness is to be adequate, must obviously be free from the distorting effects of imagery. God is pure spirit and is therefore not to be described in language drawn from sense experience. (113)
In “The Rhetoric of Scripture and Preaching,” Carol Harrison notes that for some Christians literature is yet another polluted runoff proving the Fall of Man: “Adam and Eve enjoyed a direct and intuitive grasp of the truth in their minds and had no need for language to convey, or mediate it, for them.” Language, she continues, “to some extent, is a result of the Fall: it forms a veil which obscures, distances, hides the truth from fallen man, whose eyes are no longer able to gaze upon its brightness. It separates and distances one man from another; it is essentially arbitrary; it can dissemble, misrepresent, be misunderstood.”10
Writing, painting, sculpture, music, film, are “drawn from,” if not “drawn to or by,” our “sense experience.” But despite that magnetic pull, the arts, so the authors of “Mysticism” claim, distort the pure spirit of God. Though it’s arguable whether the spirit of God and the spirit of the arts are comparable, it still seems the paradox is joined: Christians tout the Bible’s Word of God as inerrant, but any Word distorts God’s pure spirit.
What do we do with this and other paradoxes? Abandon them? Reconcile them? Leave them irreconcilable? Why did Augustine, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux, Thomas Merton, and a few other literarily called authors unpack so eloquently and so lustily these distortions and contradictions if only to show us that language itself may also, like the soul, house the mystery of existence?
One bad result of all this: such conundrums embarrassed clerics and led them to sanitize or censor writers for millennia. Anyone who appealed to the purely sensual aspect of the reader the church editors targeted as gratuitous, immodest, vain. One argument has been that God doesn’t need the sentiments of anyone’s ego because none holds a candle to his. So, the critic asks: Why does God need so much praise, so much worship, even written confessions that testify over and again to his perfection?
Thus, we’ve been encumbered with a tradition of devotional autobiographers who, like John of the Cross, adhere more to the pontifical, less to the experiential. These books, as we’ll see, advocate collective or sanctioned schemes and tropes, rarely exhibit a tangy style or a sultry voice. They fall into habits of toady sentimentality, eschew the irreverent pungency of a Simone Weil or a Chet Raymo.11 And it’s been literature’s loss.
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BUT ALL is not lost. By showing John of the Cross’s unlikely path to spiritual perfection, we get a first variety, albeit medieval, of the lengths one God-infused enthusiast will go. Such audacity haunts nonfiction testaments: confession, autobiography, devotion, essay, memoir. These brachial forms let us see the winding, uneven expanse of the territory we’re heading into, terrain I and others measure much as Lewis and Clark mapped the Louisiana Purchase while they trekked. The continental size also mirrors the time of its long, slow coming into being. Across two millennia, writers have enlarged their connection to holy texts and aerie ideals with greater confidence in their own transcendentally puzzling experience. Mindful of the gradual change and its delta-like spread, I find that writers who are marked by liminal adventure fall into two neighboring topographies, basin and range.
One (the range) is the lyric. Poem, prayer, song, hymn, and such select Bible verses as the beatitudes and the psalms. These forms mimic the transcendent by marrying the metaphor and the metaphysical in language. In England, celestial queries are exquisitely rendered in John Dryden’s Christian humanist verse, in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience, in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sprung-rhythm poems on God’s grandeur. Down the bookish eras, poets pinnacle heaven as their keenest wish, endowing paradise with a euphoria our species can never (again) reach. Such versifiers compact the sublime into stanzaic space with pithy shots of spiritual adrenaline.
The other (the basin) is the discursive narrative—one that proceeds via an often-unwieldy mix of argument, testament, commentary, a tone pensive if not grave, and an anecdote-rife, partial or full life story. In this form, the roomier extensions of life-writing allow tellers to intermingle the epiphanic and the summational. The result may bear some relationship to the faith-forged confession but is, in the hands of today’s eclectic masters, a differently imagined voyage of experiential wonder. These books dominate the current practice, on which, in coming chapters, I will focus.
Among the principal testaments of faith in English is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). The book has been described as a spiritual autobiography, an epic travelogue, an epistolary confession, and the first novel in English. This hero’s journey captures the risk-taking exploit for which Englishmen of the eighteenth century longed. Call it the adventure of the colonial entrepreneur—who is also a slaver, an imperialist, a barbarous pilgrim, not to mention a cannibal tamer and killer—saddled with Christian righteousness. (Crusoe, who is
