Contemplative Literature Requires an Anchor

Spiritual and contemplative literature has the capability to be a mirror reflecting the raw, unfiltered human experience. The widow who reads the Bible sees not just stories of others facing loss but a reflection of herself, the realization that she too belongs in the lineage of the human condition, that she is not alone even in her darkest moments. But contemplative literature that refuses to connect even the most ineffable ideas, even if futile, shatters the mirror. A complete divorce between the reader and the literature itself. Literature that hides behind pure negation and the refusal to link material reality with the inner human experience is a blatant disservice to both the power of literature and the humanity of the reader. Such writing is better off never published: it is a failure to humanity wearing the mask of mystical rigor through pure negation.

Apophatic theology is a line of thinking that believes the only true statements we can make about the divine, transcendence, or God are negative statements. We can say for certain that God is not human, not mortal, not fallible. The idea is simple: if we consistently describe what a single subject is not, we begin to outline the unspeakable by removing any misconceptions. This is seen especially in the ancient authors Meister Eckhart and Pseudo-Dionysius.

But even modern authors employ via negativa, describing what something is not. This is especially noticeable in Weil's Gravity and Grace:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception. Grace fills empty spaces, but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void. The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.

Here, she claims that all movements of the soul are governed to laws similar to gravity. She then immediately says grace is not controlled by those laws. She then takes this negation a step further, stating that there must be a void (in other words, nothing rather than something) for grace to fill the empty space. This is profoundly aligned with apophatic theology: the precondition of grace is negation.

Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying ‘I’.

The negation of the I, the absence of the self, becomes the requirement of approaching fullness.

There are people for whom everything is salutary which brings God nearer to them. For me it is everything which keeps him at a distance. Between me and him there is the thickness of the universe—and that of the cross is added to it.

To Weil, the absence (or the negation) of God is his presence.

God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.

Here Weil makes absence itself the very form of divine presence. God is not grasped, not seen, not encountered as a fullness, but only as negation. Yet in this stripping away, we feel a presence more real than affirmation could ever offer.

Across all of her uses of via negativa, she always connects this literary and spiritual device to the human condition; the metaphysics of the soul, the relation of the self and fullness, the distance between her and God. This is a profound and powerful mirror for the human condition. As we read, we feel movement towards the truth even though she uses negative definitions.

Not all modern authors use the via negativa productively, and I found myself incredibly frustrated reading Thomas Merton's chapter titled What Contemplation is Not in his New Seeds of Contemplation. In the chapter, he consistently employs negation:

For contemplation cannot be taught. It cannot even be clearly explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, symbolized.

This is apophasis applied to contemplation itself.

He then goes on to describe to great lengths what contemplation is not:

Contemplation is not and cannot be a function of this external self.

…

Contemplation is precisely the awareness that this "I" is really "not I" and the awakening of the unknown "I" that is beyond observation and reflection is incapable of commenting upon itself.

…

For the contemplative there is no cogito and no ergo but only "sum, I am" [Descartes' cogito ergo sum].

…

Contemplation is not prayerfulness…trance or ecstacy…the gift of prophecy…pain-killer.

What deeply pained me and drove me nearly mad was his refusal to connect his abstract ideas into concrete reality. Even his only few concrete examples are not grounded in specifics of the human condition but rather abstract symbols of power and identity:

There are many other escapes from the empirical, external self, which might seem to be, but are not, contemplation. For instance, the experience of being seized and taken out of oneself by collective enthusiasm, in a totalitarian parade: the self-righteous upsurge of party loyalty that blots out conscience and absolves every criminal tendency in the name of Class, Nation, Party, Race, or Sect…The false mysticism of the Mass Society captivates men who are so alienated from themselves and from God that they are no longer capable of genuine spiritual experience.

Being left with the most specific examples being abstract ideas, there is no reflection to find in his writing. Although Merton is brilliant and kind, the detachment from material reality risks his writing to be written off as pretentious, detached, and a result of isolated privilege. The parade is too distant, too abstracted to function as a mirror. In Merton’s hands, negation ceases to polish the mirror of the soul and instead fogs it over. This is not apophasis as mirror but apophasis as mask.

Negation in literature must always serve the reader. It must strip away illusions in order to reveal the outlines of the soul. Weil never abandons the human, so her apophatic gestures bring us closer to ourselves. The reader feels that movement towards truth in his or her body. Merton, despite his brilliance, often abandons this tether. The reader sees his demolition of misconceptions but is left wondering, "Okay, so what?"

The danger of contemplative writing is not futility but detachment: when negation ceases to be a mirror, it becomes only a mask. In our world that prioritizes fragmentation of attention to the self, to higher things like God or transcendence, literature that hides behind negation without the attempt to connect back to the human condition risks further fragmentation. What we need is contemplative writing that dares to use negation but risks clarity, that risks the mirror, even when it seems futile.

Readers and lost souls don't need another mask of rigor, but a companion in the struggle to see.

Only then does contemplative literature cease to be a mask and become what it must be: an anchor.