The knowledge of God through faith.
Faith is non-conceptual knowledge, agnosia. An agnostic was originally someone who had non-conceptual, apophatic knowledge of God (dark knowledge).
(I just wanted to put this Alan Watts transcription somewhere, so this is as good as any other.)
[i]The Christian Church therefore emphasized “mystis” or “faith” as against “gnosis” or “knowledge” because they said you can never know God; God could never become an object of knowledge, and in this funny roundabout way, the Christian theologians were saying exactly the same thing as the Hindus, only the Hindus who do call this knowledge of God through faith, they call it “jnana” which is the same as the Greek word “gnosis”, but just to give you a little sidelight on how words get mixed up in their meanings: we now have a class of person called an agnostic and an agnostic generally means a person who doesn’t commit himself to any beliefs about the ultimate nature of things; he just says he doesn’t know.
But the original word “agnosia” in greek meant a special kind of knowledge, it was called “the dark knowledge of God”; the knowledge of God in the “Cloud of Unknowing” to use the title of a mystical treatise written by an anonymous 14th century English monk. This monk derived his ideas from a very mysterious figure who wrote under the name of Dionysus the Areopagite. Dionysus was a fifth or sixth century Syrian monk who had learned his mysticism from Porphyry (sp?) who got it from Plutinos who was a neo-platonist and who probably got a great deal of stimulation from the intellectual world of Alexandria, and Alexandria in the early years of the Christian era was a tremendous exchange place between east and west.
Buddhist monks visited Alexandria because it was one of the great centers of trade between Rome and India and as you may know, all Rome’s gold eventually went to India for the purchase of pepper, and as a result of this the Roman economy collapsed; they bought too much luxury from India and India in exchange got Roman architecture; you’ll see a lot of Roman architecture in Indian temples. But Alexandria was the great center for the gnostics and for Christian theology and some of the greatest theologians: Clement, Origen, Athanasius, Saint Cyril, all worked out of Alexandria.
And now going back to this strange monk Dionysus, it was he who first put around the idea in Christian circles that there was such a thing of the knowledge as the knowledge of God by faith, by agnosia, really by unknowing, and he, in a book which he wrote called “The Theologian Mystica”, he wrote a treatise on the higher knowledge of God which might be quoted directly from the Upanishads, in certain parts of it, the last section of it reads like the Mandukya Upanishad because it’s a series of negations. It says what God is not and he goes very far because he says that God is not “one” because our idea of unity falls far short of what God is; so does our idea of Trinity; so does our idea of spirit; our idea of mind; of justice; of love; all these things are not really God and he says in another place “that if anybody, having seen God, understood what he had seen, what he would have seen would not have been God, but some creature of God less than God; some sort of angel or something like that.”
It’s perfectly amazing to consider the influence that this man had for writing under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite. He became identified you see with St Paul’s first convert in Athens and legend has it that he was the first bishop of Athens and was martyred in Gaul now where he’s known as St Denis, but St Thomas Aquinas looked upon the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite as having the highest authority, and you could, if all the text of Dionysus his work had been lost, you could restore most of it from quotations of St Thomas.
He wrote really two very important books: one was the one I said “The Theologian Mystica” the other was called “The Divine Names” and these two books presented the two phases of his theology. The book called “The Divine Names” was a discussion on the nature of God in terms of what God is like, by analogy, and this kind of knowledge of God he called “cataphatic” from the Greek “phanai”, “to speak” and “kata” meaning “to say according to that” which is to say “to speak by analogy” where he used, though entirely negative language about God, this sort of discourse was called “apopahtic” and the word “apo” meaning “away from” to “talk away from” just as a sculptor, when he makes an image, reveals the image by removing stone, and so Dionysus explained that one attains the knowledge of God by discarding concepts, which is exactly what the Hindus mean when they say of God: one can only say “neti neti”: not this, not this, not any conception. Thus in Hindu philosophy, the highest state of consciousness in Samadhi is called Nirvikalpa Samadhi which means literally “non-conceptual”. “Vikalpa” means “a concept”, “Nir” is a negation, so the “non-conceptual knowledge”.
Now, people have greatly misunderstood this; they have imagined that “unknowing”, the state of the highest contemplation, was the acquisition of a blank mind from which you first discarded thought, then you went on to discard perception, then he went on to discard any kind of sensory content in awareness until you were, so far as anyone could say, aware of nothing and they supposed that this kind of
catatonic state was mystical consciousness. This is often believed in India. If you go to the Vedanta Society and ask “what do you mean by Nirvikalpa Samadhi?” they will tell you that the one in that state has no consciousness whatsoever of the sensory world; that he is completely absorbed as you sometimes see Hindu holy men sitting in a state where they are blind and deaf to everything going on around them.
The founder of Chinese Zen known as Hui-neng, described people like that as no better than pieces of rock and lumps of wood and said is a very serious mistake indeed to confuse Sunyata, the sanskrit word for “the great void”, which is both the ultimate reality and the consciousness thereof, it is a great mistake to confuse it with nothingness. It is rather to be thought of as space, or like space, because space is not empty, it contains the whole universe and so in the same way the state of mind of a person who is truly enlightened is not empty; it contains everything, but like space it is not stained by what it contains and it’s often said in Zen imagery: you can’t hammer a nail into space; you can’t spit on the sky and soil it; if you try, the spit will just return and hit your own face.
So they go on to say the consciousness in all of us, your basic mind, is like space. It is completely pure, but of course by purity they don’t mean unsexual, which is of course what purity generally means in the Western world: blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. A person who’s pure in heart is generally understood as one who never has any naughty thoughts. You know what “naughty” means? It means “vain”, “negative”, “empty”. A naughty person therefore is one who doesn’t amount to anything; he’s just nothing; that’s the real meaning, but this misunderstanding of the nature of contemplation existed not only in India, from which it was transmitted to China, but also in the West.
You read many treatises on Western mysticism and there’s still the feeling that getting into a deep deep trance, sometimes called “rapture”, again the word “rapture” has undergone some transformations: we talk about rapture as people being beside themselves with pleasure, but to be rapt means “to be taken away from the body”. So also “ecstasy” we now interpret as meaning in a state of high pleasure, but it means “to be outside yourself, to stand outside yourself, your soul has left you it is with God.” As Arabs say of all crazy: people be kind to them, they’re not here; their soul is with God, but actually if it can be true, as Buddhists say, that Nirvana and Samsara are one, and if it can be true, as Christians say, that the spirit can be made flesh, the word can be made flesh, then obviously the highest form of man is not sitting in a trance like a lump on a log with a perfectly blank mind because, if that were the highest state of consciousness, it would be an exclusive state of mind; a state of mind that shuts out life and, in that sense, it could not qualify for being what the Hindus call non-dualistic.
They always speak of the highest reality as being not “one” because “one” excludes “many”; not “nothing” because “nothing” excludes “something”; not “being” because “being” excludes “non-being” and vice-versa, so they use this word “non-dual” to mean that which doesn’t exclude anything, which as it were has no outside: as we say space has no outside. You can only have outsides inside space; you can’t have any outsides outside space; there is no outside space even though space may be curved and finite.[/i]
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