Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

It will probably come as no real surprise to you that when it comes to mystical theology, I find myself drawn to what folks have called the Via Negativa, the Negative Way. Folks like Pseudo-Denys and Meister Eckhart and works like The Cloud of Unknowing have been really formative to/of me.

Now...the "negative" in the Negative Way doesn't mean pessimism or dourness or anything much that we generally associate with the word "negativity." What it refers to is a recognition that all of our thinking and our language about God ("positive" or affirmative speech) is useful, but fundamentally deficient—it can never grasp the Ungraspable even as it leads us to the limits of what we can, in fact, grasp. What’s needed, then, is to use all the descriptive language we can, but never be completely satisfied with any of it; to use all the powers of imagination we can muster to seek and yearn for God, all the while toppling or undermining every comfortable image or idol; to give our knowing completely to grace in order to undo knowledge and be opened out, through unknowing, to the Unknown who can only be grasped by love…and only then because it is Love that grasps us.

In our astonishing and beautiful reading from Job this morning (and picking up from Dr Appel's commentary on mystery from yesterday's Daily Bread), we find ourselves invited to walk the Negative Way in the form of a poetic meditation on where wisdom might be found. The first part of the poem (verses 1-11) reads like an ode to human ingenuity: to discover gems and precious metals, we explore the unknown, we enter into dark places, caverns, caves, facing fear, uncertainty, trepidation to shed light on secret seams of ore rippling darkly through silent stone, hidden for ages, now revealed by our searching curiosity and delivered to the light of day to dazzle and provoke awe, desire and wonder.

The second part of the poem (verses 12-22), however, presents a marked contrast. There’s something more important, incomparably more precious than all the wealth of the world: it’s wisdom…and we appear to have no idea where to really find it. The final part of our reading (verses 23-18) reveals that only God knows where wisdom is. The message seems to be this: for all of our willingness to delve the depths of the earth to discover wealth and jewels innumerable, for all of our wandering in the unlighted crevasses of the world in search of veins of glittering gold or silver, there’s a kind of "darkness" to which we so rarely choose to give ourselves: a space of unknowing, dark not for a lack of illumination, but because there is no “thing” there to be illuminated and grasped by our minds but the ungraspable Real that transcends all thingness and illuminates every mind. What’s there is a blinding superabundance of Living Light. It’s there, in what the old hymn calls “Light Inaccessible” that Wisdom dwells. The awesome dazzle of all the jewels of the world cannot compare to the Radiant Darkness that lights all minds and all things in and by a mysterious grace of love. It’s on the threshold of this darkness, this unknowing, that we must stop, mouths agape in true wonder, awe, and love-longing, and be given by grace to the grace of real wisdom and illumination: which is to say, the grace of real relationship with the One God whose very Being is a Mystery of Love.

It is this attitude of wonder, longing, and willingness to be grasped by the unpredictable wildness of grace that Job refers to as the “fear of the Lord” that gives access to wisdom. If we would be Wise, we would search for and long for that Unknown Presence which is, as Augustine affirmed, “more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest” (Confessions III.6.11), dwelling in Light Inaccessible, the source of all Knowing that can only be more fully (though never completely) known through unknowing; the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love that is Wisdom’s very heart!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+