atheism for lent, day 12: the mystics come in like a wrecking ball

No, no, not those mystics.

I mean, those guys would be cool to study too, but they wouldn’t get us anywhere closer to an understanding of God’s nature or existence. Hmmm…or would they…?  🤔

In today’s reflection, Peter Rollins introduces us to the mystics, a loosely affiliated or even not-at-all-affiliated-with-each-other group of thinkers who, in pondering the nature of God, embrace the negation of negation. In their view, it works something like this:

• the theist says: “God is.”
• the atheist says: “God is not.”
  
• and then the mystic comes along and says: “God is/not.”

In Christian mysticism, “yes to God” comes together with “no to God” to create something deeper, richer, and more interesting. Here, the three letters “g” and “o” and “d” are put together as a signifier of something that cannot in any human way be signified. This is the dimension in which we “pray” to the “hole,” committing ourselves to The Lack That Is More Real than anything else in the universe because it isn’t part of this universe.

Simon of the UK, one of this year’s AfL participants, names the mystic “a nay theist.”

Like Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, the mystics say, “Hey, that God you don’t believe in? That God who’s basically an intangible Superman sitting up in the sky, finding out who’s naughty or nice? Yes, we don’t believe in that God either.” What’s more, to the mystic, every definition of the word “God” is an attempt to define the indefinable; all of the names fail; the “I AM” of the Hebrews is perhaps the closest we can get.

Harking back to yesterday’s Gaskings reflections, Derek, another AfL participant, points out that maybe in the mystic’s perspective, God’s non-existence would be a feature, not a bug. Here, God is the “cauldron of nothingness” out of which everything else arises. (This also connect’s to Paul Tillich’s “ground of being.”) If God is the nothingness ocean in the cauldron, then we are an open-mouthed bottle immersed in that ocean. The bottle contains only the tiniest fraction of ocean, but the ocean contains the entirety of the bottle.

In the mystical mindset, atheism is not an enemy. To the mystic, atheism is not a “necessary evil” that helps us deconstruct and then reconstruct (as iron sharpens iron). Instead, there is no reconstruction. You can consider humanity’s collective knowledge about God, and it all just amounts to straw. “God” is “the Other,” something that is utterly beyond us, something that we cannot reduce to our language.

This inability to grasp God is a failure; it is a lack. But this failure succeeds in its failure, for in acknowledging the lack (“praying to the Nothing”) and embracing it, we come closer to fidelity to God than we would if we conceptualized God as anything specific. “God” is fully “Other.” There is something that isn’t unknown just because we currently don’t know it, but because there’s a dimension that is, by its nature, wholly and forever unknowable. However, we can’t help but be in awe and wonder of it.

This letter-sequence “g/G-o-d,” then, is the signifier of something that exists in reality but cannot be contained in thought or experience. This is how we relate to our fantasies as well: we live in these “worlds” that don’t exist, but they affect our experience of the world that does exist. In the same way, “God” is the signifier of something that is the most important thing that is not a thing, something that doesn’t exist, something that will never exist — yet still affects (determines?) our experience of our own existence.

Karl Barth said that God is the great “No,” the great wrecking ball that smashes things and gives us radical unknowing.

Who better to usher us into the dark night of the soul than Betty White?! Mystics like Simone Weil insist that high atheism is closer to God than theism. One of AfL’s decentering goals for this coming week is to show us that it’s impossible to see just where theism stops and atheism starts.

The space of faith is the space of “de-nomination,” the naming and then de-naming of God; here, faith is the place where we pray, “God, please rid me of God” (Meister Eckhart). The mystics go all the way, abandoning mere intellectual affirmation in favor of a kind of traumatic experience of Otherness. This Otherness calls to them. They want to practice fidelity to this Otherness in an expansive language that is a type of praise: theopoetics instead of theology.

“You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free” — it’s the truth about YOURSELF that sets you free. “Love God” moves to “love God, love your neighbor” moves to “love your neighbor” in a sensitivity to Otherness. This fidelity to and keeping open a space for radical Otherness demonstrates religion at its best.

What a week this will be!

XOXO