CHAPTER IX
WORSHIPPING THE DIVINE
IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH
FRANÇOISE B. TODOROVITCH
All humans share an insight into the existence of an overwhelming Transcendance that Christians and other believers call God. The conviction that a Divine Being, whose essence remains unknown to us, can be incarnate and take up a human form can be found in Hinduism, Sufism, in Mahayana Buddhism, as well as in Christian faith.
When the Samaritan woman asks Jesus about the mountain where God should be worshipped, he announces that the time will come when God will be worshipped neither here nor there, but "in Spirit and in Truth."
This answer implies a striking challenge for all religions today. Does it mean that Christians alone are able to worship God in Spirit and Truth. What "inspired" humans of all times and places whose experience has always been translated more or less accurately into dogmatic creeds and ritual prescriptions that stemmed from their own cultural environment.
Is the Truth of which they had an insight and which nevertheless remained inaccessible to them, and which they attempted to communicate to their fellow humans, not what mystics of all times have recognized as something beyond the divergences of religious creeds? How can this "Beyond" be characterized? Is it the "Totally Other," the "Void," the "Abyss" as some Western and many Eastern mystics suggest strongly? Whatever the answer will be, we cannot avoid asking ourselves which one helps us best to choose life over against the powers of violence, destruction and death.
An article published in the New York Times some weeks ago gives an account of recent research in social psychology conducted by Richard Nisbert and Takaniko Masuda. It shattered totally the age-old opinion that humans all over the world share the same fundamental ways of thinking. This research—carried in the United States, Japan, China and Southern Korea—show that Eastern thinkers tend to think in a more "holistic" fashion than do Western thinkers, that they rely more strongly on knowledge linked to experience than on abstract logic. Moreover, they seem to accept much better contradictions and paradoxes more easily. Western thinkers, on the contrary, who share consciously or unconsciously the thought-patterns of Greek philosophy, seem to prefer a more "analytic" way of thinking that leads them to isolate objects from their context, and to rely upon "logical" reasoning focusing upon avoiding all contradictions.
This kind of rationality led Western thinkers to separate ever more strongly philosophical questioning and religious belief, whereas Eastern thinkers felt no such urge to distinguish both realms so sharply. The most typical expression of Greek rationality, says Umberto Eco, is the mode of reasoning to which logicians have given the technical name of modus ponen : " If p, then q." This way of reasoning fits well the classical idea of a " definition " ("to define," means to trace the borders of the validity of a concept) setting up limits which protect us against an Infinite which is synonymous with the Indeterminate as such (peras - apeiron).
1 We must not forget that for the Greeks, the idea of infinity expresses an imperfection (the "in-finite" is that which is not yet finished, or that which has no limits whatever); by contrast, the finite expresses the perfection of an achievement, for instance the beautiful "finishedness" of the cosmos, similar to a jewel). Only through the influence of the Christian religion did the Infinite received a thoroughly positive meaning.
THE INFINITE AND ITS MANIFOLD "INCARNATIONS "
All humans, since immemorial times and all over the world, seem to have had the intuition of the existence of a transcendant principle which some humans decided to call "God." One of my patients, despite the fact that she was an atheist, told me that her desire was to encounter "as in poetry" something essential which she would probably call God if she did believe in him. The idea that this God, whose essence remains unknown to us, can become "incarnate" taking a human shape, can be found in Hinduism and Sufism,in Mahayana Buddhism as well as in Christianity. This is also stated in the verses taken from the Bhagavad Gita :
When goodness grows weak,
When evil increases,
I make myself a body
In every age I come back
To deliver the holy
To destroy the sin of the sinner
To establish righteousness.
What "inspired" men and women of all places and all times have experienced, drawn by the spirit that they felt living within them, although they did not know where it came from, has been translated into dogmatic creeds and ritual observances stemming from the cultural milieus in which they lived their experiences. The astonishing fact is that these practices, which appear to be strikingly dissimilar, share nevertheless a strong family resemblance. This is, for instance, the case with clothes specifically reserved to cult, offerings to the Divinity, sacrifices, the recitation of endless litanies, etc.
If it is well understood, this diversity of creeds and rites is a good thing, as Cardinal Nicolaus de Cusa tried to show in his dialogue De pace fide.
2 This was published in 1453, the very year the Turkish army conquered Constantinople, thus putting an end to the Byzantine Empire. In this imaginery dialogue, a general Council has been organised by Christ himself and his apostles in Jerusalem in order to put an end to religious violence. All nations known at the time, representing many different cultural traditions are invited to speak, among which we find a French, an Italian, a Tatar, a Persian, a Chaldean and even an Indian. In Cusa’s opinion the plurality of religions that finds its practical expression in the variety of rites becomes dangerous only if it produces "division and unfriendliness" leading to hating the other (§ 54).Cusa’s fundamental insight regarding the plurality of religions is the following: if the Divine Unity is transcendant and unspeakable, it can only imply a plurality of manifestations: "magna multitudo non potest esse sine multa diversitate ". Plurality and Unity are not contradictory to each other as long as we acknowledge fully the unnameable transcendence of the Divine: "Therefore we see that Thou who gives us life and being, are sought in different ways through different rites and you are called by several names, for what you are remains unknown and unspeakable to us."
3In 1799, Friedrich Schleiermacher made a similar statement in his famous Discourses on Religion, where he developed the idea that the plurality of religions is as necessary and unsurmountable as that of languages. It is grounded in the very essence of religion; which requires a plurality of manifestations. In Schleiermacher’s opinion, wherever a religious instinct is alive it will be able "to move back from the empty rituals and the abstract and rigid doctrinal formulations toward the original source whence it stems."
44 Obviously, humans can be led by their temperaments—which are influenced by several factors (among others, heredity or education) to strict observances and exterior ways of behaving in order to sustain a belief which would lose all meaning without being supported by such manifestations. Nevertheless, every human can catch sight of something lying "beyond" dogmas and rites that we try to express more or less accurately.Was this not also what Jesus had in mind when he answered the question of the Samaritan woman, asking him in which place God should be worshipped? He told her that the time would come when God would not be worshipped here or there, but "in Spirit and in Truth"?
5Christians think—as a recent document published in Rome by the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith has stressed—that this means that there is only one incarnation of the Divine, namely, that of Jesus Christ. Let us not forget, however, that Jesus himself reminded those who accused him of blasphemy when he called himself the Son of God, that in the Old Testament the men whom God had spoken to where called gods.
6 This is also one of the reasons why in his Discourses on Religion, Schleiermacher stresses that the founder of the Christian religion did not intend to give birth to the only possible religion and that Christ did not claim to be the unique Mediator between the Divine and humans.7
THE QUEST FOR THE "POINT OMEGA"
In Schleiermacher’s understanding, religion has its source in the obscure feelings that the Universe stirs up in us. Opening oneself to the "Truth" of which "inspired" humans all over the world have wished to give testimony, requires fundamentally "the passivity of a child,"
8 that is, the ability to let oneself be affected by the Infinite itself. This is the reason why Schleiermacher refuses to reduce religion to a lower-grade metaphysics (a " Platonism for the populace," as Nietzsche calls the Christian religion) or to a specialised moral, which commits us to an infinite task of moral perfection, despite the finite character of our life.The same idea that religion must rely only upon its own insights can be found in the teachings of the great spiritual masters of all times and places. "All that I know of the sciences of the Divine and the Holy Scripture, I have learned in the forests and the fields. I had no other masters than beechtrees and oaks," writes Saint Bernard: "Trees and stones will teach you more than what you can learn while listening to the words of a magister."
9 Meister Eckhart’s distinction between the Lesemeister (the masters in commenting texts) and Lebensmeister (the masters who teach us the difficult art of leading a good life) stresses a similar point.Once we admit that the "originary passivity" is the source of all positive religions, what are the consequences for intercultural and interreligious dialogue between the different wisdoms developed by humankind? Must we, following Hans Küng’s program of a Weltethos, look for the moral values common to all great religions? Or should we look rather for a transcendant "Omega Point" which only mystics are able to glimpse, as the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur stressed in his critical discussion with Küng?
The expression "Omega Point" was invented by the geologist and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin. During his research regarding the evolution of species he had deep visionary insights which led him to the idea of an continuingly evolutionary universe that would ultimately converge toward a divine "Omega point."
10 In response to this idea, which he expressed in several writings a Roman Congregation condemned him to silence.In a soul that has not maintained some sparks of the receptivity of a child, the Universe will never awaken the intuition of the Divine essence. "If you are not similar to little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of God" says Jesus.
11No wonder that institutions which are mainly driven by their will to power, whether spiritual or political, have always been afraid of mysticism whose universal aim goes beyond established laws. As Bergson shows in his Deux sources de la morale et de la religion, mystics seek to unite directly with the transcendent Principle itself, beyond the bonds which link them to a particular religion.
Louis Massignon relates that a Muslim mystic told one of his friends who had insulted a Jew: "You must know that all religious creeds worship God the Highest and that Judaism, Christianity the Islam and all the other confessional denominations are but different names and contrasting appellations, but that what they aim at contain no differences nor contrasts." Then he quoted the words of the great mystic Al Hallâj: "I have pondered on how I could give an experimental definition of religious confessions. This is how I formulate it: an Unique Principle with multiple ramifications. Therefore you must not ask your interlocutor to adopt this or that confessionnal denomination. This would prevent him from being led to an authentic union. The Principle itself must come to this man, and illuminate within him the highest meanings and then this man will understand"
12
WHOLENESS, NOTHINGNESS AND MYSTICAL DESIRE
Mystical language goes beyond logical reasoning. At least in the Western world, this means a major challenge for a philosophy and a theology that is thoroughly permeated by Greek and Roman rationality.
" Meditate upon the form for much time. Then let the visualisation of the tutelary deity melt away, till nothing at all remaineth visible of it; and put thyself in the state of the Clearness and the Voidness—which thou canst not conceive," advices The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
13For the mystics, God, whom they take to be both immanent and transcendant, is also the Totally Other who can be understood only through his continuity with all beings, and nevertheless through the paradoxical experience of what they call "the annihilation of the I," "the Void" and "the Nothing." Obviously, something like the "Void" or the "Nothing" can nowhere be encountered in the empirical world accessible to rational explanation, nor can it be found in the mental world accessible to introspection. The "Void" and the "Nothing" are just metaphors by means of which philosophical and religious language tries to designate the Unconceivable which lies beyond all empirical and intellectual grasp. The "Void" and the "Nothing" appear thus to be the reverse of an inaccessible "Wholeness."
In his book: La pensée du rien, Stanislas Breton states that "affirmative and negative theology are but the two sides of the same theology which is doomed to alternate additions and substractions in order to give expression to a purely excessive Unspeakable, through the interplay of the Whole and the Nothing."
14 He concludes: " Therefore the most truthful and the highest theology is that which refuses to lay upon the Infinite the chains of our measures of being and knowledge." In accordance with Nicolaus de Cusa, he concludes that the highest wisdom is to be found in a docta ignorantia. "Socrates admitted that he knew only one thing: ‘knowing nothing’ and that was in his mind the highest wisdom." " Is not the most noble theology?" asks Breton, " the highest wisdom which fulfills the Socratic understanding of the human spirit?"15However, several meetings with Japanese thinkers in Tokyo helped him to understand that the "Void" and the "Nothing have not at all the same meaning in the East and in the West. For Buddhist thinkers, the "Void" and the "Nothing" are linked to "a technique of emptying, whose progress is actualized through a certain number of exercises which imply both the body and the soul." In this progress, Breton suggests very cautiously, as he puts it, that one might distinguish a first phase of "detachment," followed by a "renouncment" and a "dispossession" which, from sunyata to nirvana, leads to an illumination "which masters the flow of time and which consists in a liberating."
16In the last pages of his study on the "thought of the Nothing," he draws our attention to the "strange fact" that "both in Buddhism and in Christianism, the strife for distanciation stems from nothing else than the fascination of the Whole, or, in other words, the fascination of Being taken as a Whole."
17As for myself, it is not for philosophical nor theological reasons that I had to ponder upon the possible meanings of "Wholeness" or "Nothingness," but for reasons directly linked to my work as a psychoanalyst, during which many who belonged to religious orders asked me for therapeutic help.
"Suddenly I understood the truth of which I had a glimpse while I was a child: Everything is nothing," writes Teresa of Avila, relating the beginnings of her religious vocation.
18 Whenever during a psychoanalytical cure we come across this truth glimpsed in childhood, it is expressed through similar words: " Nothing, Nothingness, a void, an abyss" that God alone can fill with his presence.During the psychoanalytical cure, too, the "Nothing" turns out to be the reverse of a "Whole." In all the cases of the nuns who underwent psychotherapeutic treatment with me, the existential alternative: "Either the Whole or Nothing" appeared to have its roots in the very precocious and unspeakable experience of a "Nothing," which they felt in their early childhood to be the nothingness of their mother’s desire in relation to them. Later, they would project the modalities of this first experience upon their unconscious representations of the God who was expected to satisfy totally their desire.
While they were infants they had wished to be the "whole" of their mother. This confronted them with the impossible task of having to become the "whole" of a love which was a void, thus becoming themselves a "nothing." How, indeed, can one under these circumstances take into account the nondesire of the other regarding oneself if not through desiring to become nothing in him ?
The desire of not having to desire, which so many contemplatives who came to my consultations uttered right from the start, is nothing else than the negative face of the desire to be the Other’s whole. This is also the advice that Saint John of the Cross gave to his novices in order to guide them in the mystic way, when he wrote in Ascending Mount Carmel: "In order to become everything, you must endeavour to be nothing at all."
The "mystics" that I encountered while working as a psychoanalyst expected to become the whole of their God, as during their early childhood they had wished to be the whole of a mother the failures of whose love proved them to be nothing.
A PROMISE OF LIFE
Was darf ich hoffen?, " What am I allowed to hope?" asks Kant. This is the third major question of the four fundamental questions which human reason as such must deal with in Kant’s mind: "What can I know?," "What must I do?," "What am I allowed to hope?," and, finally: "What is man?" The third of these questions is in Kant’s opinion the only philosophical key to a philosophical understanding of religion.
This is also the crucial question with which philosophers, religious believers, and finally, all humans are sooner or later confronted.
It is because they had reached a deathlock in the dynamic trajectory of their desire, which was supposed to lead them to the very Source of life, that many religious sought my help. I asked one what death meant to her. Her answer was: "Death? Nothing. . . ." Then she remembered that when she was a little girl her mother had left her once alone, putting her life in danger, and she began to associate: "My mother: nothing . . . death: nothing . . . existing no longer."
When the quest for a "Beyond" that should give full meaning to our life is rooted in an originary void, the impetus stemming from a first experience of being loved and loving, an impetus that could have taken them towards the Being whom they called God, fell back to its starting point: the void.
In this context, one could quote what Nietzsche says about the eternal return of the same in a passage of his Fröhliche Wissenschaft under the title The heaviest burde:
19What would you answer to a demon who would tell you the following: The life which you are living for now and which you have been living, you will have to live it once more; and there will be nothing new in it, besides the fact that every moaning and all that which is unspeakably small or great in your life will return to you. How much kindness must you feel towards yourself and towards life in order to desire just this last and eternal confirmation, this last and eternal sanction?
In formulating this paradoxical challenge, Nietzsche claimed that he had discovered the only real alternative against Schopenhauer for whom the eternal return of the same was the supreme malediction of the everlasting and universal will to live. This explains why Schopenhauer thought that the only true issue was to be found in a philosophical interpretation of Buddhism, the first and probably the most influential produced by Western philosophy. For Nietzsche, on the contrary, the radical acceptance of life which he himself interpreted as the will to power, leads inevitably beyond the "moral God" of Judeo-Christianism, back to Dionysos, the Greek God of life, torn apart by the Bacchants.
Is this alternative, represented by the two antithetic geniuses of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, who are also the two enfants terribles of Western philosophy, the last word, or must we look out for another answer to the Kantian question: "What am I allowed to hope?
To be caught in the trap of the eternal return of the same would indeed be a terrible condemnation of the hope which, consciously or unconsciously, dwells in all human beings. But whence does this hope and desire stem? Saint Augustin asked himself this question in the tenth book of his Confession, and endeavoured to give an answer.
20Truly, whenever I seek thee, my God, it is a happy life that I am seeking for," he says. But what led him to this quest? "Is it reminiscing, as though I had forgotten and that I still retain that which I have forgotten, or is it because I desire to learn a life which I ignore and which I never knew?" If a happy life is indeed what everybody desires, "where have they come to know it, in order to desire it in this way."
In my opinion, this desire of a happy life, which serves our life instincts, is rooted in the memories of moments of happiness that each one of us has felt one day or another. The desire of putting an end to an intolerable suffering is not enough for, as Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier has shown in her reflections upon her experience as a psychoanalyst, it can also go together with death instincts. In other words, it can lead to "the attempt to annihilate all reasons for quest and expectation by returning to a primordial silence, a realm before all desire, where one could ignore that we are doomed to desire." And she comments: "Under this respect, one could say that death is the last illusion which the human being encounters on his path. Through desiring to die, he nourishes the foolish hope to accede to a realm before desire, forgetting that this implies the annihilation of all pleasure."
21It is exactly this desire of not having to desire the negative of the desire to be the other’s whole—which I have come across more then once at the beginning of the psychoanalytical cure of contemplatives who had encountered from the very start of their life the nothingness and the void of their mother’s love.
Reminiscing one’s having been loved helps, on the contrary, the life instincts to triumph over our death instincts, even at the moment of our death. Françoise Dolto, the well-known French psychoanalyst, gives an interesting example of this. One of her young colleagues, who knew that she had an incurable cancer, met her regularly in order to confide her revolt to her. One day, however, she was appeased, feeling an intense joy similar to that of mystics, says Dolto. In one of her dreams, she had heard someone speaking ununderstandable words, which she remembered nevertheless. Thinking that it was an oriental language, Dolto advised her to have the words translated. The words turned out to be a Hindu lullaby, saying something like:
Sleep my little beloved child
Whose eyes are similar to stars
This young woman had been raised in her early childhood by an Indian nurse, while her parents where dwelling in the East. She remembered that this nurse enjoyed lulling her and singing to her before putting her to sleep. . . . Thus these words of love, stemming from the depth of childhood, still held their promise on the threshold of death.
In the same way, the injunction "You will love" that we read in the biblical book of Deuteronomy expresses the law of life itself: "Look: Today I put before you life and happiness, death and unhappiness, I who enjoin you today to love and you will live."
22
CONCLUSION
To conclude, let me come back to the verse of the Gospel that guided all these reflections: "God is Spirit, and those who worship him, must do so in Spirit and in Truth." What about this "Spirit of Truth" who enables us to acknowledge and to glorify the Being which, beyond all religious particularisms, the Gospel of John calls God?
The Biblical tradition, to which this verse belongs, suggests an answer in the consideration of the "promise of life" or, following Saint Augustin, the desire for a happy life, which he identifies with the desire for God himself.
According to the same tradition, the Spirit of Truth which will lead us to the "plenitude of Truth" (Jn 16, 13), is the Spirit of Life which at the beginning of all creation reigned over the waters. Like the wind, he blows wherever he likes, nobody knowing where he comes from and where he will go (Jn 3, 8). But this is also true, as Jesus tells Nicodemus, of anybody who accepts to be borne from the Spirit (Jn 3, 4).
As the French philosopher Michel Henry stresses over and again, there is only one Life in which all living creatures take part.
23 But this fundamental unity of Life is not synonymous with uniformity. Of this also we find clear testimony in the fundamental texts of Christianity. At Pentecost, the Spirit descended upon the members of the first community gathered in Jerusalem under the form of tongues of fire, shattering the walls of fear behind which they were hiding. The marvel of this event is not, contrary to a common reading, that they become able to speak the same language and even less that they repeat the same things. The marvel is that on that day they became able to understand what was said in foreign languages.Leaving aside the theological implications of this text, I would say that it is this miracle of recognition that happens again in every successful intercultural and interreligious dialogue. In this sense, we could apply Schleiermacher’s prophetic insights in his discourse on the Leibnizian project of a universal language to the dialogue in which we are involved now in Taipei.
"Some people," writes Schleiermacher, "forgetting their own origin, think that they alone are able to represent true humanity through their existence." They do not accept that today we must "acknowledge the formative power of all nations and thus the equality of spiritual life in its diversity." This means hoping "that the slumbering receptivity awakens either suddenly or that it develops progressively through the contact of the breath of a foreign life" until the spiritual development extends to the whole earth.
Schleiermacher claims that no nation has the right to retreat into its own language, but at the same time he makes it clear that the plurality of languages will never disappear. "For someone who loves there is no greater success than translating into his own language what has impregnated in the most determinate fashion the other’s particularity."
24This mutual recognition of the other can exist only where there is love, the only source of life.
Professor, Institut Catholique de Paris
Paris, France
NOTES
1
Umberto Eco, Les limites de l’Interprétation (Paris: Grasset, 1992), p. 51.2
Nicolas de Cuse, De pace fidei, La paix de la foi, trad. Galebois (Sherbrooke, 1977).3
"Tu ergo . . . es ille qui in diversis ritibus differenter quaeri videris et in diversis nominibus nominaris, quoniam uti es manes omnibus incognitus et ineffablis" (Nicolas de Cuse, De pace fidei, § 5).4
Cf. Jean Greisch, " La religion et les religions " in: Archives de Philosophie, 63 (2000), pp. 238-240.5
Jn 4, 21-24.6
Jn, 10, 33.7
Cf. Jean Greisch, " La religion et les religions ", Art. cit., p. 2448
Ibid., p. 237.9
Cf. Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Triad Grafton Book, 1985), p. 96.10
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Oeuvres, 13 vol. (Paris: Seuil, 1955-1976).11
Cf. Mt 19, 13 ; Lc 18, 16 ; Mc 10, 14.12
Louis Massignon, La Passion de Hallâj (Paris: Gallimard), vol. I, pp. 238-239.13
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy, op. cit. p. 358.14
Stanislas Breton, La Pensée du Rien (Kok Pharos: Kampen, 1992), p. 29.15
Ibid., p. 30.16
Ibid., pp. 58-59.17
Ibid., pp. 109.18
Marcelle Auclair, La vie de Ste Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: Ed. du Seuil), p. 48.19
Friedrich Nietzsche, Le Gai Savoir, § 341, Œuvres Complètes) (Paris: Gallimard), t. V, p. 232.20
Saint Augustin, Les Confessions, Livre X, XX, 29.21
Piera Castoriadis-Aulagner, La violence de l’interprétation (Paris: P.U.F., 1975), pp. 65-66.22
Dt 30, 15-16, 19.23
Cf. Michel Henry, C’est moi la vérité. Une philosophie du christianisme (Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1986).24
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Des différentes méthodes du traduire : sur l’idée leibnizienne, encore inaccomplie, d’une langue philosophique universelle (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999), pp. 103, 105.