Ladders ascending through Clouds

"But now you will ask me "How am I to think of God himself, and what is he?" and I cannot answer you except to say "I do not know!" For with this question you have brought me into the same darkness, the cloud of unknowing where I want you to be!"
The Cloud of Unknowing

I’m sorry, but I had to blog again. I had to write!

The Cloud:

I had a brief encounter with Christian mysticism that kept me from continuing my study of metaphor. But it could be relevant. I had been doing my usual rounds at Barnes & Noble and, by chance, my eye landed on the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing. I’ve read bits and pieces and every time I read I'm affected. But already being in the frame of mind to study metaphor, I thought of this metaphor of the Cloud that a mystic chose more than 6 centuries ago.

The author’s main point is that love is more important than knowledge, for not only does love take us straight through the Cloud of Unknowing and into divine love, love (agape) - by nature - humbles, whereas knowledge often leads to conceit. Not only that, but knowledge actually leads us to a chimera. The intellect takes us to the land of concepts; but God’s deeper essence is beyond concepts. This is the subject of Rudolph Otto’s main thesis in The Idea of the Holy, a study into the relationship between that part of God’s essence which concepts cannot capture and the arousing in us of Numinous awe, which spawns in the pagans a particularly religious consciousness: the kind that leads to fear and worship of the dead, a belief in spirits, animism, sacrifice, magic, ghosts, and so on.

The intellectual route seems to land us in images, for, after all, the main role for concepts is to stimulate the mind to understanding, and understanding is almost always escorted by the imagination. The images should always be viewed as a substitute, a footstool, a ladder, a means to an end. To get past the Cloud of Unknowing we almost have to put everything discoverable about God by the discursive intellect into what he calls the Cloud of Forgetting. This forgetting is the ‘dart’ that punctures through the Cloud of Unknowing and into God’s love.

I think that a cloud is a good metaphor to use. Perhaps the Cloud of Unknowing is what is called a ‘high cloud’, and the Cloud of Forgetting a ‘low cloud’. In love, we rise above a mesocyclone of doubt and tornados are the brief fits of passion that befall times of doubt and anxiety. Through perhaps a thick layer of Mammatus clouds we rise a little higher! Love carries us above the darkness and into the edges of what is called ‘cloud iridescence’, rainbow colored clouds of feathery silk. The sun is close.

The Ladder:

We are like purchased slaves, like servants under contract to the unholy passions. And because this is so, we know a little of their deceits, ways, impositions and wiles. We know of their evil despotism in our wretched souls. But there are others who fully understand the tricks of these spirits, and they do so because of the working of the Holy Spirit and because of the freedom they themselves have managed to achieve. - The Ladder of Divine Ascent

I’ve also bumped into the metaphor of a ladder. The Danish philosopher Kierkegaard wrote under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus, who was based on a real person, a monk from Greece, an abbot who authored a book called The Ladder of Paradise, or sometimes called The Ladder of Divine Ascent. I thought it was interesting that the greek word for ladder is ‘klimax’, which is similar to ‘climax’: the ladder could be where we get the concept of growing suspense until a climax. The interesting thing is that the book was the first to be published in the New World, published in Spanish in Mexico. The name Johannes Climicas can be translated into either John the Ladder or John the Climber: I prefer John the Climber. His ladder had thirty rungs and his main point was that the key to the monastic life (which was his immediate audience) was trouncing the passions. Their proposed reward?: the Heavenly vision, a state not unlike nirvana, a mystical union with God. This is why the treatise is popular in the East; in fact, as far as devotions go, it is in the East what The Imitation of Christ (Thomas a Kempis) is in the West.

Climicas claims that we can climb to God via the 30 rungs with the Holy Spirit’s aid. It should ring a bell where Climicas himself borrowed his metaphor: Jacob’s ladder. In Jacob’s vision, he saw a ladder leading to Heaven. Climicas’ ladder has 30 steps (steps vary in other cases), because Christ lived 30 years just prior to his earthly ministry. The first 23 steps deal with overcoming the vices, the last 7 steps deal with attainment of the virtues. Kierkegaard used this pseudonym because the author was supposed to be hunting for God, climbing for Him, perhaps through The Cloud of Unknowing, and has not yet found him: the main point is that - again - the discursive intellect is impotent to bring one union with the divine. Faith and love alone give us those wings. As far as the book itself goes, it is very readable with very practical advice, both clear and profound, with topics as diverse as the vices of Talkativeness and Silence, Slander, Despondency, and Exile (even Meekness), and the virtues of Stillness, Faith, and Humility. To give a sneak peak - on the vice of Unmanly Fears: “Cowardice is childish behavior within a soul advanced in years and vainglory. It is a lapse from faith that comes from anticipating the unexpected.”

I think the metaphors of the ladder and the cloud are good ones and they’ve helped a ton. I’ll keep these in mind as I study more on metaphor in general.