Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Dorothy Day: Drawing on the Profane to Grasp the Sacred

Rather than spending her adult years in a convent, Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Workers Movement in the twentieth century, could distill religious experience through her activity in the world—the sacred essentially coming up through the profane. This is not to confound these two spheres, just as Christology has held since the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) that the two natures, human and divine, of Christ do not mix within his one essence. In fact, even within the religious sphere, Day could distinguish qualitative differences between God as personified and as impersonal in nature.

Day wrote of her pre-Catholic religious “idea of God as a tremendous Force, a frightening impersonal God, a Voice, a Hand stretched out to seize me, His child, and not in love. Christ was the Saviour, meek and humble of heart, Jesus, the Good shepherd. But I did not think of Jesus as God.”[1] That she was reading Imitation of Christ at the time says a lot about how she situated Jesus as an exemplar. Whether viewed as a holy man or as the Son of God beyond nominally so in the Gospel story, Jesus is distinguished from the idea of God as impersonal. This resonates with the relation between loving devotion to Jesus as evinced by spiritual nuns, and viewing God as impersonal resonates with both Shankara, the ninth-century Hindu theologian who claimed that deities are merely manifestations of the all-pervading, impersonal Brahman, and Pseudo-Dionysius, the sixth-century Christian theologian who emphasized that God goes beyond the limits of human thought, perception, and emotion (i.e., sensibility). The latter applies especially to Day’s statement, “I made up my mind to accept what I did not understand, trusting light to come, as it sometimes did, in a blinding flash of exultation and realization.”[2] This can be interpreted as meaning that divine revelation lies beyond human understanding, and yet it is sad just how many people claim to know God’s will.

It was said of Day that she was too religious to be a Communist. This is ironic because her need for God was in the midst of her activities, political and even biological. The risk here was in committing the category mistake of conflating the religious sphere with others even though her religious experiences came when she was in the midst of activity in other domains. We can keep the religious domain as distinct and unique in some ways by interpreting her as being able to perceive her activities as analogies to dynamics in the spiritual domain that are qualitatively different from activities within Creation.

Relating herself birthing a child to God as Creator, Day wrote, “God is the Creator, and the very fact that we [i.e., she and the baby’s father] were begetting a child made me have a sense that we were made in the image and likeness of God, co-creators with him.”[3] Although the episode evinces that she could see something in nature (i.e., giving birth) as in some way being similar, and thus analogical, to a theological point, referring to herself as a co-creator ignores the qualitative difference between propagation in the world and God creating existence and all that is within it.

She was on firmer ground in thinking about how vegetable seeds grow “into flowers and radishes and beans,” she wrote, “It is a miracle to me because I do not understand it.”[4] The word miracle is distinctly religious, so its application sans God to a biological process itself should be resisted. So too, by the way, the word evil is distinctly religious, and thus ethicists who define it as grave injustice miss the mark. Day’s use of the word, miracle, should thus be taken as analogical only, even if the meant something more by it. The distinctly religious meaning to be grasped is that the divine transcends the limits of human cognition and thus is at least in part inherently mysterious to us. Unlike not understanding how a seed eventually grows so, producing even flowers and vegetables that hardly resemble the original seeds and yet are their final causes (Aristotle), not understanding God is inherent to God being uniquely transcendent as it extends beyond Creation; vegetables do not. Religion is distinct from the biological (scientific) domain. This holds in relation to other domains too, including that of ethics.

Ironically because she founded the Catholic workers’ movement, Day, like Kierkegaard, situated religious experience above the sphere of morality.  Of morality, Day said, “I saw them wrestling with moral problems, with the principles by which they lived, and this made them noble in my eyes.”[5] Lest this be presumed to be the highest form of nobility to Day, while she watching a woman kneel at her bed to pray, Day was convinced “that worship, adoration, thanksgiving, supplication” are “the noblest acts of which [a person is] capable in this life.”[6] Nobility in a religious sense is more noble than is ethical nobility In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard situates the divine decree made only to Abraham that he sacrifice his only son, Isaac, above the universally-accessible ethical stance that the sacrifice would actually be murder, for which Abraham would be culpable.

Although Dorothy Day illustrates that it is possible to have religious experience in the midst of our daily activities in the world rather than spending years in a monastery being necessary—and in this way she would side with Mahayana over Theravada Buddhism—her way of viewing the profane in a religious way risks conflating the two, as if the sacred and profane were co-creators rather than the profane being created by God. In general, this category mistake ignores the qualitative difference between the religious domain and other domains, such as science and even morality. Ultimately, conflating the heavenly and earthly cities risks putting humanity, and thus oneself, rather than a transcendent reference point, at the center.



1. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of Dorothy Day (New York: Curtis Books, 1956), p. 20.
2.  Ibid., p. 163.
3. Ibid., p. 153.
4. Ibid., p. 152.
5. Ibid., p. 123.
6. Ibid., p. 123.

Wednesday, November 13, 2024

Transcending Seductive Masks of Eternity: Thérèse of Lisieux

Marie Martin (1873-1897), known to the world as the Carmelite nun, Thérèse of Lisieux as well as Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, was a mystic who centered her devotional love on Jesus. Pope Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times”[1] and Pope John Paul Il made her a doctor of the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it is worth investigating whether her devotional love sublimated (i.e., looking upward) with Jesus as the object of the love was in fact humble, and thus more like divine than human love. Although psychological analyses of Thérèse exist in the secondary literature on her, we can both acknowledge her psychological challenges and put psychological couch aside as it is exogenous to the domain of religion, which has its own criteria; I will focus on and critique from a religious standpoing the distinctly religious meaning that Thérèse continues to provide in the West during the twenty-first century even though the wider secular culture in the West saturates modernity under the supervision of the tall, steel, and bewindowed edifices to wealth and worldly power.

Although her mother’s death when Thérèse was four was deeply felt by the little girl, and she may have suffered from mental illness at least as a child, the religious meaning that can be grasped from her mystical devotion to Jesus is nonetheless valid in religious terms. This is not to say that the trauma of losing her mother did not leave an imprint on her religious faith. She wrote, for example, of a dream in which she sees the “glance and smile [which are] FILLED with LOVE” of Venerable Anne of Jesus, the Foundress of Carmel in France, whom Thérèse refers to as “Mother” both in the dream and in writing about it later.[2] Thérèse also refers to the Church as “my Mother.”[3] The other side of the mother-equation is of course the child. Writing to her Prioress at the convent, Thérèse states, “I am acting with you as a child because you do not act with me as a Prioress but a Mother.”[4] The instinctual need for a mother was doubtlessly very much in play. The mother-daughter leitmotif is also salient in the following: “You have told me, my dear Mother, of your desire that I . . . . I began this sweet song with your dear daughter, Agnes of Jesus, who was the mother entrusted by God with guiding me in the days of my childhood.”[5] Thérèse is not referring to her literal childhood, even though she entered the convent when she was a teenager; rather, she has sublimated from her unmet psychological need to describing and inhabiting a spiritual relation that is a microcosm of the relationship between a creature, such as Man, and the Creator, which is God. Thérèse refers to heaven in the dream being “peopled with souls who actually love me, who consider me their child.”[6] She obviously did not mean this in the sense of being a corporeal daughter. She also wrote, “O Blessed Inhabitants of heaven, I beg you to ADOPT ME AS YOUR CHILD.”[7] That she uses capital letters to highlight being adopted spiritually as a child in heaven leaves no doubt both as to the salience of the child motif in her mind, and of the distinctly spiritual meaning that she applied to the word.

Rather than psychoanalyze the young adult who lost her mother so early, I want to draw on her book to explore the unique connotations that the child motif has in Christianity, which is in opposition to the values in the  earthly city. “The heart of a child does not seek riches and glory (even the glory of heaven),” she wrote.[8] To be sure, her focus in applying the child motif was not on differentiating Augustine’s two cities. Rather, she was describing what a creature is like relative to God. Distinctively and valid religious meaning is possible even amid disturbing psychological issues; the former is not invalidated by the presence of the latter. “I am only a child, powerless and weak,” she wrote.[9] Elsewhere in her text, she highlights that she is a “poor little weak creature.”[10] This is of course relative to God. From creatures being little and weak, Christianity goes on to postulate certain qualities. On July 17, 1897, Thérèse wrote, “I feel that my mission is about to begin, my mission to make God loved as I love Him, to teach souls my little way.”[11] Of that way, she adds, “It is the way of spiritual childhood, the way of trust and absolute surrender.”[12] There is a certain innocence and willingness to trust in a childlike nature that is innately suited to entering the Kingdom of God. Writing of children whom she had known, Thérèse refers to “the souls of little children” as already having “the theological virtues” and being “innocent.”[13]

Speaking on Thérèse in 1921, Pope Benedict XV said, “In spiritual childhood is the secret of sanctity for all the faithful of the Catholic world” so as to “enter wholeheartedly into the Little Way which led Sister Thérèse to the summit of heroic virtue.”[14] The pope made reference to the Christian scriptures, such as in the Gospel of Matthew (18:3-4), where Jesus says, “Amen, I say to you, unless you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little child, will be greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” In the Gospel of Mark (10:14-5), Jesus says, “Allow the little ones to come to me and forbid them not, for such is the kingdom of heaven. Amen, I say to you, whoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child shall never enter into it.”[15] In teaching her “little way,” however, Thérèse had drawn instead on text from the Old Testament, including, “Whoever is a little one, let him come to me” (Proverbs 9:4), “For to him that is little, mercy will be shown” (Wisdom 6:7), and “As one whom a mother caresses, so will I comfort you; you shall be carried at the breasts, and upon the knees they shall fondle you” (Isaiah 66:12-3).[16]

Thérèse did not mean childhood in the sense of being selfish and not assuming responsibility. It is in this sordid sense that Thérèse wrote, “It was December 25, 1886, that I received the grace of leaving my childhood, in a word, the grace of my complete conversion” because “Jesus desired to show me that I was to give up the defects of my childhood and so He withdrew my innocent pleasures.”[17] Referring to one such defect, she wrote, “My excuse is that I am a child, and children do not reflect on the meaning of their words.”[18] Paradoxically, Jesus made her as like a child in another way: “I felt charity enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others,” she later wrote.[19] Rather than selfish childishness, losing oneself in pleasing others—in Thérèse’s case, converting grave sinners—rendered her anew as a child of God. From selfishness to losing oneself is not, however, something I would associate with children. Moreover, although pleasing others is better than selfishness, the distinctly theological love (i.e., agape) that Jesus exemplifies (and ultimately is) can hardly be characterized as people-pleasing.

Thérèse applied the positive qualities of a child to denote her inferiority in her love-relation with Jesus, and more to the point, that she was a mere creature whereas he is God. It is in coming from a subordinate position that, when “Jesus saw that the time had come for me to be loved, He entered into a covenant with me and I became His own.”[20] She even draws in the mother motif: “To be Your Spouse, to be a Carmelite, and by my union with You to be the Mother of souls, should not this suffice me?”[21] She even brings in the child motif, for she also viewed herself as “the Child of the Church and the Church is a Queen since she is Your Spouse, O divine King of Kings.”[22] Rather than intimating incest, she was using possession to denote the extent of difference between a creature and its Creator. “O Jesus, Your little bird is happy to be weak and little,” she wrote.[23]

Thérèse is also implying that Jesus’ love is superior to her own even in her capacity as a devotee of Jesus rather than of wealth or earthly power. She broadly sketches the distinctive nature of Christian divine love in writing, “Because I was little and weak He lowered Himself to me, and He instructed me secretly in the things of His love.[24] Him lowering, or humbling himself, rather than being all high and mighty to someone who is weaker, constitutes the things of his love, and thus can be construed, moreover, as the self-emptying, agape love that God evinces in the Incarnation—that is, in God lowering itself to become joined (but not mixed) with earthly flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. The nature of God, which is divine love, gets poured into a human vessel without mixing with it. The theme of God’s love as humble rather than self-exalting carries through to how it is revealed. In the Gospels, Jesus says, “I thank thee, Father, that thou hast hidden these things from the wise and the prudent and revealed them to babes.”[25] Thérèse saw herself as such a babe. But did she love as Jesus loves or as people typically love? Was she really a child spiritually?

I contend that her piety was belied to a considerable, but not complete, extent by the epistemological arrogance of a creature presuming to know God and see God as it really is. In this way, Thérèse did not evince the innocence of a spiritual child and did not love as Jesus loves, for spiritual arrogance and agape love are antipodal. I submit that a mystic’s devotional love (i.e, caritas) is susceptible to the sin of pride because of the infusion and thus inclusion of eros and the likeness of the beloved to our world even in anthropomorphic terms. Beloved masks of eternity can thus be the final obstacle to further transcendence. If enough people master this insight in thoughts and worship, humanity would see a leap in the development of humaniry with respect to religion in the world comparable to the leap from animal sacrifice to the realization that religion has an interior aspect that antiquates the prior belief that gods demand animal sacrifices as a means of atonement for the sins of humans.

It is a mistake to assume that having an interior spirituality renders the divine within our grasp as creatures. Thérèse made this mistake. She wrote, “As the Imitation says, God communicates Himself at times in the midst of great splendor or ‘gently veiled, under shadows and figures.’[26] It was in this way He deigned to manifest Himself to our souls, but how light and transparent the veil was that hid Jesus from our gaze!”[27] In describing a vision she had of Anne, the founder of the order, Thérèse wrote, “The Carmelite raised her veil or rather she raised it and covered me with it.[28] I submit that Paul and Augustine had been more accurate and less presumptuous, given the inherent limitations of finite, mortal creatures as qualitatively distinct from their Creator, which is wholly other, in characterizing the veil as more like a window darked by smoke, such as we can imagine from incense and candles in a Church. “Doubt was impossible, faith and hope were unnecessary,” Thérèse continues, “and Love made us find on earth the One whom we were seeking.”[29] Although Paul had written that without love, faith is for naught, to relinquish faith and doubt regarding that of God is to make a category mistake regarding belief and knowledge in regard to that which goes beyond the limits of human reason, perspective, and emotions. In writing, “Yes, Jesus did all this for me,” Thérèse demonstrates epistemological (i.e., about knowledge, and the reaches thereof) arrogance.[30]

Hyperextended epistemological certainty of divine matters runs throughout Thérèse’s book. One instance is especially revealing. After her Christmas conversion, when she prayed for Pranzini, a prisoner on death’s row, she was certain that God would show her a sign of Pranzini’s last-minute piety, because she “was absolutely confident in the mercy of Jesus.[31] Reading of Pranzini kissing a crucifix while he was on the scaffold to be hanged, Thérèse was certain that Jesus had answered her prayer. David Hume would retort that Thérèse had actually committed the naturalistic fallacy, wherein an instance of positive correlation, such as two things occurring in a temporal relation, is erroneously assumed to involve causation (i.e., that one thing caused the other).

Another implication is in line with William James’ criticism of a thirteenth-century nun, Gertrud of Helfta. James wrote of that mystic’s view of God as being “full of partiality for his individual favorites,” including Gertrud.[32] Although I have argued that criticism is not applicable to Gertrud, it is ripe by the time we get to Thérèse. Writing both of when she walked down the stairs like a queen on Christmas, having just been transformed by Jesus from fear to joy, and later, when Jesus mystically made her his own: “Then I became beautiful in His eyes and He made me a mighty queen,” Thérèse depicts herself as among Jesus’s favorites.[33] Humility belied by religious superiority over other people is evident in her statement regarding what Jesus did for her: “Because I was little and weak He lowered Himself to me, and He instructed me secretly in the things of his love. Ah! had the learned who spent their life in study come to me, undoubtedly they would have been astonished to see a child of fourteen understand perfection’s secrets . . .”[34] To understand perfection esoterically can be likened to having the divine attribute of omniscience, or perfect knowledge. Even the learned would indeed come to such a person, though in the Gospels the learned Jews generally are averse to Jesus and his message.

Even though Thérèse admits that she was little and weak (and thus unworthy), the scent of arrogance wafts over her assumptions of being a queen and of superiority over older, learned Christians. She even extends the value (i.e., superiority) to include her “spiritual sister,” Céline, destined by Jesus “as the privileged one of His love![35] In writing to another nun, Thérèse observes, “How fortunate we are, dear sister, to understand the intimate secrets of our Spouse,” which is Jesus.[36] She makes the esoteric knowledge of the Gnostics look like front-page material of a well-circulated newspaper. Also, the exclusiveness of being married to Jesus is evident, as if that extent of union with the divine would not apply to anyone who loves distinctively in line with benevolentia universalis extended even and especially to one’s detractors and those who one regards as low, or outside. In the Gospel of Mark, the strangers catch on to Jesus’ message while his disciples don’t, and, moreover, Jesus says in Matthew (19:30; 20:16), Mark (10:31), and Luke (13:30) that the first are last and the last are first, and it is the meek whom Jesus says in his Sermon on the Mount will inherit the earth.[37]

Thérèse may have been in denial regarding the current undercutting her own intent to be humble. Rather than attribute this psychologically to the “nervous” illness that Thérèse had as a child or even the fact that her father referred to her as his “little Queen,”[38] it is more efficacious when in the domain of religion (rather than science) to focus on the distinctly religious meaning of divine, self-emptying love (agape) as it runs up against the sin of pride in a spiritual dynamic that does not reduce to psychology. Unlike all other domains, that of religion includes the belief and experiential yearning for a reference point that transcends the limits of human cognition, perception, and, yes Augustine, even emotion, as Pseudo-Dionysius argued in the sixth century. Similarly, Thérèse wrote, “I feel it is quite impossible for the human tongue to express things that the human heart can hardly understand.”[39]

Even though the religious meaning in Thérèse’s statement, “I wanted to love, to love Jesus with a passion, giving Him a thousand proofs of my love while it was possible,”[40] is laudatory, Jesus as Thérèse’s favorite mask of eternity may have paradoxically been the most intractable obstacle facing her to a more transcendent mystical experience of the divine as wholly other—as including mysterium. As David Hume claims in The Natural History of Religion, the human brain has difficulty holding onto divine simplicity, not to mention that which is utterly mysterious, for long without lapsing back to the familiarity of anthropomorphic masks. Her ultimate mask was Jesus, whose underlying paradigm is, “the heaven of our soul, made to His image, the living temple of the adorable Trinity!”[41] Rendering the divine in such familiar terms as a deity to whom a devotee can apply marital connotations to the relationship runs the risk of rendering the divine in human, all too human terms. Doing so unintentionally elevates the human being (and our realm) in religious terms, and thus may be partly why Thérèse unintentionally succumbed to spiritual arrogance.

This is not to say that no viable role exists in a person’s religiosity for divine form or religious ideas about God; much comfort can be had in devotion to a deity that has an easily-relatable form similar to those that inhabit our daily lives. Feeling love and directing the feeling to a personified ideal, as if to a tableau writ large, not only counts as extant love, but also puts the focus on the love itself, whether directly in being conscious of loving or indirectly in focusing on Jesus as essentially love. Ideally, however, the focus could be on theological love itself, unembodied and thus without distractions that are too familiar to be resisted by the mind.

My claim is that reality, and especially the source of reality, transcends even such masks of eternity because those masks compromise on the divine’s wholly other quality, which is to say that God, in not being bound by Creation, is qualitatively different, even in how being an "entity" applies. In short, devotional love is itself laudable, even though it is not the limit of religious experience. The mystic who stops at one’s favorite mask under the illusion that it is solid rather than a semi-permeable membrane can be seen as stopping needlessly short in yearning for the divine, which in Christianity is agape love itself. That is the ultimate value, and the real presence felt internally and yet still sought after in Christianity. Perhaps—just maybe—Thérèse unconsciously sensed on some level that even devotionally loving Jesus can be surpassed in spiritual terms: “Ah! Jesus, pardon me if I am unreasonable in wishing to express my desires and longings which reach even unto infinity,” she wrote.[42] Longing is a good word for yearning, and applied infinitely, the yearning for must itself be beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. Interestingly, Thérèse wrote of her “measureless desires” (for God) in conjunction with raising the question of whether there is “PURE LOVE in my heart?”[43] Such love can be construed as self-emptying, wholly other divine agape rather than eros-related, anthropomorphic caritas love.

The instinctual-urge of the human brain to construe things in familiar terms, such as a deity being embodied in a familiar form, must contend with the distinctly spiritual instinct of the brain to transcend even its own limits in experiencing yearning for a distinctly religious object that is immanent yet transcendent and thus wholly other. The strength of the latter instinct doubtlessly varies, perhaps in part genetically. Even in those people in whom the gene is salient, it tends to be undercut by the former instinct of the brain to hang anthropomorphic ornaments on the tree of divine simplicity. Thérèse can be interpreted as illustrating that this undercurrent can be strong even under a strong riptide of water on the surface pulling her off-shore into the beyond. She is galvanized by her urge to love her Spouse, and yet her yearning is infinite and thus can go beyond even the face of God to its very nature, which, unlike the content of a mystical vision, is without limit. The questions I would ask Thérèse are: What of God lies beyond the contents of your visions and dreams and thus is not captured in them? How is theological love distinct from the various ways in which humans love?  For she asks, “How can I realize the desires of my poor little soul?”[44] She then unwittingly answers her own question. “To satisfy me I need all.” On the one hand, this sounds utterly human, all too human; on the other hand, it could intimate the urge in yearning as that of transcending ad infinitum, and thus beyond the alluring, familiar masks of eternity that may say more about us than God. Thérèse wanted a vicarious mother because her actual mother died of breast cancer so early. Deeper still, in spite of having a loving father, she desperately wanted to be loved, and Jesus fit that bill.

In approaching God with erotic-sourced love, or caritas, as Augustine did (drawing on the sublimated eros in Plato’s Symposium) and nuns such as Gertrud of Helfta and Thérèse of Lisieux also did as mystical devotees of Jesus, the distinctive, qualitatively different sort of love that is theological in type may go unrecognized. Like a garden’s native fauna long hidden by the overgrowth of exogenous weeds from other gardens, the distinctly theological love can easily be overlooked ironically in the garden of religion. Even devout mystics could stand to do some weeding.

To be sure, Thérèse was definitely onto something transcending her devotion to Jesus in understanding “that LOVE COMPRISED ALL VOCATIONS, THAT LOVE WAS EVERYTHING, THAT IT EMBRACED ALL TIMES AND PLACES. . . . IN A WORD, THAT IT WAS ETERNAL!”[45] Quoting from “Words of Our Lord to St. Margaret Mary,” which is in the book, Little Breviary of the Sacred Heart, Thérèse agreed that the “science of love,” which is in the book of life, is the key thing.[46] In so writing, she was going beyond, or, put in more distinctly religious terms, transcending her favorite mask to focus on the theological ether behind the mask that gives it its form and goes beyond even doing that. The mix of contending instincts, informed by her own psychological history without being reducible to that domain, is clear in what she wrote next: “Then, in the excess of my delirious joy, I cried out: O Jesus, my Love . . . MY VOCATION IS LOVE! Yes, I have found my place in the Church and it is You, O my God . . . ; in the heart of the Church, my Mother, I shall be Love.”[47] In this statement, she reverts back to her devotional love (i.e., caritas) directed to Jesus—a love that is somehow related to her emotional need for a vicarious mother—then she makes the move again transcending all that in yearning to be love itself (i.e., agape).

To be full, the distinctly theological sort of love in Christianity must, Thérèse wrote, “lower Itself, and that It lower Itself to nothingness and transform this nothingness into fire.”[48] Whereas devotional love is informed (or fueled) by garden-variety eros even when such love is sublimated in being directed toward a high object, according to Plato and Augustine, distinctly theological love whose source is the divine is directed to the powerless, weak, and imperfect creatures via universal benevolence. It is not clear to me that loving Jesus ever more intensely while in a convent satisfies this kind of love, for Jesus is not powerless, weak, or imperfect, and, as a god-man and God’s eternal Logos, Jesus is not a mere creature, even though, as a mask of eternity, Jesus has been interpreted by David Hume (albeit quietly, through analyzing Mary) as well as by Jews and Muslims as the epitome of anthropomorphized divinity.



1. Pierre Descouvemont, Therese and Lisieux (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing, 1996).
2. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Third edition, trans. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996), p. 191.
3. Ibid., p. 197.
4. Ibid., p. 206.
5. Ibid., p. 205, italics added.
6. Ibid., p. 191.
7. Ibid., p. 196.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 195.
10. Ibid., p. 198.
11. John Clarke, “Introduction to the First Edition,” in Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul: The Autobiography of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, Third edition, trans. John Clarke (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 1996), p. xi.
12. Ibid., p. xii.
13. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, pp. 112-13.
14. John Clarke, “Introduction to the First Edition,”, p. xii.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 98.
18. Ibid., p. 196.
19. Ibid., p. 99.
20. Ibid., p. 101.
21. Ibid., p. 192.
22. Ibid., p. 196.
23. Ibid., p. 199.
24. Ibid., p. 105.
25. Matthew 11:25, quoted in Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 105.
26. The Imitation of Christ, III, 43:4.
27. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 104.
28. Ibid., p. 190.
29. Ibid., p. 104.
30. Ibid., p. 102.
31. Ibid., p. 100.
32. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
33. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 102.
34. Ibid., p. 105.
35. Ibid., p. 107.
36. Ibid., p. 189.
37. Matthew 5:5.
38. Thérèse de Lisieux, Story of a Soul, p. 107.
39. Ibid., p. 187.
40. Ibid., p. 102.
41. Ibid., p. 104.
42. Ibid., p. 192, italics added.
43. Ibid., p. 197.
44. Ibid., p. 192.
45. Ibid., p. 194. The ALL-CAPS is in the original.
46. Ibid., p. 187.
47. Ibid., p. 194.
48. Ibid., p. 195. Elsewhere (p. 199), Thérèse refers to “the Eternal Fire of the Blessed Trinity,” which she then associates with “the Inaccessible Light.” So it can be concluded that it is in the nature of divine (agape) love ultimately to bring nothingness, or perhaps only apparent nothingness as it is in darkness and thus cannot be seen, into the light. To raise (or literally enlighten) the meek and the pure of heart, while humbling the proud; to bring in the outcasted to be placed even closer than self-declared inner circles; and to show compassion even (and especially) for one’s detractors and enemies when they need or could use some help: these are ways of operationalizing divine love by humans. Without this, faith is for naught, according to Paul.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

Relating the Christian Logos, Incarnation, and Kingdom of God

Among the classic biblically-based films out of Hollywood, and the first to show Jesus’ face, The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) is a highly idealized rather than realistic depiction of the Gospel story. Only when Jesus is on the cross does emotion show on Jesus’ visage; even the horrendous suffering from the torture leading up to the crucifixion is not shown. The Christology is thus idealized, with Jesus’ divine nature impacting his human nature even though the two natures are theologically distinct. Because the film was the first to show Jesus’ face, it could be that depicting Jesus’ human nature in its fullness, absent sin of course, would be too much for a film made before the social upheaval that began in 1968 in the West to depict. The main drawback in depicting Jesus in such highly idealized terms is that it may be difficult for Christians to relate to Jesus in emulating him by carrying their own proverbial crosses in this fallen world. The main upside of the almost Gnostic idealization is that the theological point that the Incarnation is of the divine Logos, which in turn is the aspect of God that created the world, is highlighted. Reflecting David Hume’s concern, I submit that transcending (rather than denying) the anthropomorphic “God made flesh” to embrace God as Logos—God’s word that creates—more fully captures the insight of Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth-century theologian, that God goes beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotions. 


The full essay is at "The Greatest Story Ever Told."

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Hindu Mysticism: Transcending Deities

In his religiosity, Ramakrishna (1836-1885), a Hindu mystic and priest at a temple of the goddess Kali, the goddess of death, drew on the Bhakti (devotee), (Advaita) Vedanta, and Tantra aspects of Hinduism, as well as on Islam and Christianity to a much lesser extent, toward his goal of realizing God, which can also be put in terms of achieving self-knowledge of one’s true nature (atman). In the Bhavagad-Gita, Arjuna demands to see the god Krishna as he really is, but Krishna has to hold himself back, showing himself in (human) bodily form, albeit with a myriad of heads. Even a distended form such as this is too much for Arjuna. Moreover, ignorance cannot take in reality or awareness itself without it being adorned in anthropomorphic (i.e., having human characteristics) ornaments that Hume discusses in his Natural History of Religion. Krishna’s promise in the Gita is relevant, in “that, through His Maya, He will assume a human body and manifest His powers whenever religion declines, and will help [people] to obtain peace.”[1] It is through illusion that a deity assumes the likeness of a human form because seeing a deity’s essence in Brahman is simply too much for mere mortals.

Being corporeal, the human body resonates with the selfish, greed-instigating materialism that Swami Vivekananda, Ramakrishna’s closest disciple, claims, albeit with more than a tinge of resentment, is associated with modern (i.e., twentieth-century) Western civilization. The secularity in the West, especially with the epistemological reduction to empiricism further narrowed to natural science, “could not lead [people] to the knowledge of Atman,” or, I might add, to Brahman (and that Atman is really of Brahman).[2] In other words, “knowledge obtained through the senses will not enable [people in the West] to discover the reality beyond time and space,” especially in a decadent culture “founded on self-love, desire for worldly possessions and absence of faith in religion.”[3] Instead, knowledge of a person's own soul "is through self-control [of the mind as by meditation or renunciation], selflessness, and introspection."[4] 

Seeing the “face” of the divine as embodied in personified forms only gets a person so far if the goal of realizing the divine lies inherently beyond the limits of human resemblance, or, as Dionysius wrote, beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). Because Ramakrishna went beyond empirical representations of Kali in worshipping the divine “Mother,” such transcendence was very much a part of his mature religious belief-structure and practice.

For example, Tantric ritual centers around the worship of shakti, which literally means “energy, ability, strength, effort, power, might, and capability.”[5] In Hinduism, shakti is the universal power that underlies and sustains everything that exists. Shakti connotes femininity, and is synonymous with Devi, the goddess consort of Shiva, who furnishes the power (or energy) of the male deity. In Tantric Shaktism, Shakti is the principal deity, hence being akin to Brahman.[6] The goal of tantric practice is to transcend the tall hedge that separates the holy and unholy and thus achieve moksha, or liberation by seeing everything in the world as manifestations of shakti.[7]

In Christian terms, Gertrud of Helfta’s visions of Jesus as her divine spouse included one vision of Jesus lifting over the divide between the sacred and the profane, where she sees the wounds on his resurrected body, but this empirical representation may belie Gertrud’s claim of being transported to the divine side. To be sure, Gertrud’s goal of being in God, whose essence is (agape) love, which Calvin, unlike Augustine, thought people could have in this world, transcends being married to Jesus, and thus marital union, but her worship and visions did not go so far. Her image of Christ, as a “mask of eternity,”[8] became her final obstruction to even deeper, immersive union with God qua divine rather than erotic love. From his Confessions, it can be concluded that Augustine may have been held back in from achieving further transcendence by the same obstacle.

In contrast, Ramakrishna’s worship in nineteenth-century India went beyond the bodily representation of Kali to the goddess being essentially Brahman, which transcends the very notion of a deity (i.e., an entity that encapsulates the divine as personified). When asked about Kali worship, Ramakrishna said, “I do not worship Kali made of clay and straw. My Mother is the conscious principle. My Mother is pure Satchidananda—Existence-Knowledge-Bliss-Absolute. That which is infinite and deep is always dark-coloured. The extensive sky is dark-coloured and so it the deep sea. My Kali is infinite, all-pervading, and consciousness itself.”[9] Darkness represents mystery, as in being ineffable (i.e., the unknown). In Hinduism, Brahman, and any god or goddess deemed to be supreme and thus sharing Brahman-qualities, is the darkness within the stone idol of Kali that, being inside the statue, knows no form.

Regarding his vision of Kali, Ramakrishna said, “in my heart of hearts, there was flowing a current of intense bliss, never experienced before, and I had the immediate knowledge of the Light that was Mother.”[10] On another occasion, Ramakrishna described the vision as follows: “(I)n whatever direction I looked, I found a continuous succession of effulgent waves coming forward, raging and storming from all sides with a great speed. Very soon they fell on me and made me sink to the unknown bottom.”[11] He “saw a conscious sea of light. But what about the divine Mother’s form consisting of pure consciousness only”?[12] Did Ramakrishna see that form? Saradananda assumes so because Ramakrishna “uttered repeatedly the word ‘Mother’ in a plaintive voice.”[13] I find it spurious reasoning to conclude that such an utterance means that Ramakrishna’s vision was limited Kali’s female form—such a form would detract from seeing pure consciousness as a sea of light. Saradananda’s notion that the divine Mother’s form consists “of consciousness only” suggests that form is not being used here to refer to that of the human body. Indeed, immediately after the vision, Ramakrishna was still begging the goddess to show herself to him.[14] But, then, as Ramakrishna would later report, after he lost consciousness under the weight of such “unbearable anguish,” he “saw that form of the Mother with hands that give boons and freedom from fear—the form that smiled, spoke and consoled and taught me in endless ways!”[15] I contend that the vision of a “conscious sea - light”—consisting of “pure consciousness”—can be distinguished as more transcendent, and more wholly other (than us), than the female form of the Goddess that he saw while he was unconscious. His vision went beyond the goddess as an embodied entity to grasp the goddess’s essence as Brahman.

The shift in transcendence can be seen in Ramakrishna’s realization when he was “having the divine vision of the child Rama constantly,” being “(a)bsorbed in the meditation of that divine form in the mood of maternal affection towards Him, that, as Ramakrishna put it, “’Rama, who is the son of Dasaratha, is in every being; the same Rama is immanent in the universe and yet transcends it.’”[16] The “divine form” of the child Rama cannot hold Rama “entering the universe and eternally manifesting Himself as it” and being “ever existent in His own attributeless nature devoid of Maya [illusion] and beyond everything in the universe.”[17] Once Ramakrishna had reached the point of his life when he was engaged in his religious exercises, he would stay in a mood until “it experienced its ultimate limit, getting at last a glimpse of the non-dual consciousness beyond.”[18] To put it plainly, “seeing” the face of God in such rawness blows away not just the form of a child, whether in Hinduism or Christianity, but form itself. As Dionysius points out in his text, even the notion of an entity is taken from our experience of the world in which we live, rather than being necessarily applicable to a deity’s essence as Brahman, or, in Christianity, divine love (agape).

Such transcendence would translate into Gertrud of Helfta, a Medieval Christian nun, transcending her experience and vision of loving marital union with Christ to go on to experience indwelling in divine love itself, being in God rather than merely in relation to God. Similarly, such transcendence goes beyond Ramakrishna’s own practice of the Madhura-bhava, the “sweet mood as of the spouse of God.”[19] With Ramakrishna being “ever desirous to have the love of Krishna,” as Gertrud was in regard to the love of Jesus, that Ramakrishna “was a male person disappeared altogether and every thought, word or movement of his became womanly”—even wearing women’s dresses for six months—“in the faith that he was the spiritual consort of God.”[20] Gertrud didn’t have to change genders mentally and spiritually because she was a woman and Jesus is incarnated as a man, but she too viewed herself as a spiritual consort of a deity. But unlike Gertrud’s spiritual transcendence to spiritual matrimonial love, Ramakrishna’s religious experience and vision of the goddess being a “wonderful state of complete absorption in” the goddess transcends marital union and even a vision of the goddess’s hands and smile.[21] Put another way, Ramakrishna’s practice wherein his will perfectly reflects that of Kali as though being in the goddess compares to Gertrud’s unrealized goal of being in God, which is a more perfect union than is her liturgical marital union with Jesus and Ramakrishna’s “unbounded yearning for the complete”—only it is not complete even as an ideal!—"union for all times without a break with one’s darling of the heart.”[22] Even though “cruelly obstructed by manifold barriers,” the marital union sought may seem to be complete without such barriers, but this is not so relative to the deeper union as is evinced in dwelling in the divine.[23]

In short, Ramakrishna went further—transcended deeper—than Gertrud had because he surpassed even Kali manifesting as a deity ironically through intense devotion to that goddess. Gertrud had achieved only so much in her marital visions and experience of Jesus as her spiritual spouse, just as Ramakrishna could not hope to achieve a complete union as Krishna’s consort even if there were not a hedge between us and the gods.

That Ramakrishna went deeper in experiencing Kali than he could as Krishna’s consort, even with the efficacy of the method-acting bringing forth genuine female spirituality, is not to say that Ramakrishna ceased to have visions of the goddess in anthropomorphic terms. Before his vision, while worshipping and meditating, he “used to see a hand of the divine Mother or a foot, bright and delicate, or Her sweet, affectionate and smiling face, supremely beautiful. Now he saw, even at times other than those of worship and meditation, the full figure of the effulgent Mother, smiling and speaking, guiding and accompanying him and saying, ‘Do this, don’t do that.’”[24] In the years when Ramakrishna was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana), he had visions of “the divine Mother Herself dwelling in the female form.”[25]

Although used by one of Ramakrishna’s disciples to argue that Ramakrishna’s love as a devotee for the divine Mother and as a woman-attired consort of Lord Krishna was qualitatively different than the love that we mere humans who are not incarnations of a god (i.e., avatars) have, differentiations of kinds of love having differing relations to body can be used to understand how seeing the face of divinity beyond the particular deity’s form is more transcendent, and thus richer in terms of religious experience and insight, than devotional love that is oriented to an embodied deity. Swami Saradananda distinguishes love as “the attraction of one body for another” from “the attraction towards the aggregate of the noble qualities manifested in a particular body”—the latter being “so-called transcendental love” rather than love whose reference point is “free from the consciousness of the gross body and subtle desires for enjoyment.”[26] Both of these degrees or kinds of love are less than the best from a religious standpoint because they can be had by people who identify with their body “and conscious of being that alone.”[27] Ramakrishna did not identify with his embodied form, and certainly not with that alone, so he was able to have “true transcendental love.”[28] Because such love is greater than love of abstract qualities of an embodied person, I contend that the truly transcendent love transcends that of devotion or matrimony to a deity that is viewed as having a body, and thus a form. Even subjecting the divine to a form lessens it, as, for instance in Christianity God voluntarily lowers itself in selfless, or self-emptying love (agape) by becoming incarnated in a human body (i.e., Jesus).

David Hume’s theory of the human mind that it cannot hold onto or envision divine simplicity for long without retreating back to imagery that is familiar can explain the human preference for embodied gods (i.e., subjecting divinity to form). To be sure, Hume overlooked how the experience of transcending the divine clothed in familiar garb can transform the ornaments. Ramakrishna, for example, could “see an extraordinary ray of light coming out beaming from Her eyes, touching all the offered articles, taking their essential parts and withdrawing itself into Her eyes.”[29] The light transforms Her eyes, such that they become less familiar and more “other.” Similarly, as if the stone image of Kali were but training wheels on a small child’s bicycle, Ramakrishna reached the point of no longer needing to see the idol to see “the living Mother Herself, all consciousness, and with hands that offered boons and freedom from fear.”[30] When he was practicing Tantric rituals (Sadhana) from 1861-1863, “there was no limit to the number of the [goddess’] forms, ranging from the two-armed to the ten-armed.”[31] Ramakrishna’s visions of the goddess’ presence came to no longer reflect the engraved stone renditions of Kali, and that enabled the arms to differ from the two that human bodies have.

Ramakrishna could even transcend even the dichotomy that I have used as paradigm of sorts of the divine in a familiar form versus love (the Christian God) or pure consciousness (Brahman). Ramakrishna had a vision, for instance, of “the divine mother’s form, consisting of consciousness only.” The transformation of form itself by having transcended it can be regarded as the epitome of how transcending deified form can transform how a devotee sees form.

The implications should not be ignored, for from reflecting on them our own perspective of liturgy and worship itself can be radically changed. Even the scripture as guidelines for Ramakrishna’s liturgy could be seen as training wheels, for Ramakrishna’s worship as the priest of a Kali temple “passed beyond the prescribed limit of the devotion enjoined by the scriptures and took a speedy course along the exalted path of pure devotional love.”[32] Imagine a Roman Catholic priest putting the written Eucharistic prayer aside to speak spontaneously in devotional love for Jesus even in consecrating the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and the superordinate bishop telling the laity to let the priest be led so by the love. Imagine Gertrud of Helfta taking off her wedding band and dress to walk naked into a sea of divine love that transcends even the Incarnation, and thus marital union with Christ. The established rituals in religious liturgies can be seen from this mature religiosity as but firm guardrails for spiritual that to spiritual adults no longer look solid. The examples of Ramakrishna and mystics of other religions are worth our study lest it be only garden-variety eros and ego rather than spiritual maturity that relegate the hedges that spiritual children need. Fortunately, Mathur at Janbazar had the spiritual insight to recognize that Ramakrishna’s intense devotional love for the goddess had filled the temple “with an intense manifestation of palpable divine presence,” which certainly justified him having taken off the liturgical training wheels to act by the faith of his devotional love.

It can be argued antithetically, however, that transcending the goddess as a deity-entity to be engulfed in pure consciousness, or Brahman (i.e., Kali is essentially Brahman), may be considered to be devoid of distinctly religious content. Losing even the anthropomorphic garb of the goddess could mean leaving the religious domain for the tautology of consciousness of the whole. If this is a valid argument, then Ramakrishna’s holding onto to some visually-human attributes, such as having a hand and a smile, after ironically seeing (i.e., transcending) Kali’s “face” as pure consciousness itself, is necessary. That is to say, transcending a familiar mask of eternity to dwell in an absolute union with the divine may not obviate human (or familiar) images of a beloved deity. In this case, that such images are transformed, as, for example, Christ’s resurrected body is transformed and not the same as his earthly body, is crucial.



1.  Swami Saradananda, Sri Ramakrishna: The Great Master, Jagadananda, trans. (Madras, IN: Sri Ramakrishna Math Mylapore, 1952), p. 16.
2. Ibid. p. 13.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Monier Williams, Monier-Williams Sanskrit-English Dictionary.
6. Vanamali, Shakti: Realm of the Divine Mother (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008).
7. Carl T. Jackson, Vedanta for the West (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).
8. This term was coined by Joseph Campbell, a mid-twentieth century scholar of religion who, like Ramakrishna, emphasized what religions have in common, as per his “gracious message: As many faiths, so many paths and You will realize the divine Lord through any spiritual practice performed with a sincere heart.” Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 16.
9. Swami Chetanananda, Ramakrishna as We Saw Him (St. Louis: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1990), p. 404.
10. Saradananda, The Great Master, p. 140.
11. Ibid., p. 141.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., p. 215.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., p. 231.
19. Ibid., p. 149, 143.
20. Ibid., p. 233.
21. Ibid., p. 149, 143.
22. Ibid., p. 235.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., p. 143.
25. Ibid. p. 201.
26. Ibid., p. 235.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 143.
30. Ibid., p. 144.
31. Ibid., p. 202.
32. Ibid., p. 147. See also p. 149: “The Master had then gone beyond the limits of devotion enjoined by the scriptures and became engaged in the worship and other services of the divine Mother with Ragatmika devotion.” The use of the word, “enjoined,” can, I submit, be taken as a euphemism for what in more practical terms is more akin to “prescribed” or even “mandated.” That love in devotion to an entity that is but stone or wood in form within the boundaries of our earthly domain can be sufficient for a devotee to walk through the wall of encrusted requirements backed up by religious authorities tells us something about the sheer intensity that such love can reach in the human mind/soul (animus).

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Faith Seeking Understanding: On Religious Experience

On October 24, 2024, Pope Francis released his encyclical, Dilexit Nos (“He Loved Us), on the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the letter, he recounts “Saint Gertrude of Helfta, a Cisterian nun, tells of a time in prayer when she reclined her head on the heart of Christ and heard it beating.”[1] She wondered why the Gospel of John does not describe a similar spiritual experience, and concluded that “the sweet sound of those heartbeats has been reserved for modern times, so that, hearing them, our aging and lukewarm world may be renewed in the love of Christ.”[2] The pope concludes in the letter that this might hold for our times too. I contend that Gertrud’s spirituality can speak to the current modern age, in which that of Gertrud—the thirteenth century—hardly seems modern, but not in terms of focusing on Jesus’ resurrected heart; instead, Gertrud can point us beyond the limits of marital-union imagery with Jesus to experience that transcends the use of imagery that may say more about us and our world than that which transcends even the limits of the human imagination. Turning to the criticisms of Gertrud’s spirituality (and intelligence) by Thomas Merton and William James, I intend to salvage Gertrud in order to uncover her spiritual maturity.

According to Thomas Merton, Jesus said to Gertrud of Helfta, a nun in thirteenth century Europe, “I wish your writings to be an irrefutable testimonial of my Divine Love in these latter days in which I plan to do good to many souls!”[3] Jesus even dictated to her the title for her book: Herald of Divine Love. His rationale was that, as he told the nun, “souls will find in [the book] a foretaste of the super-abundance of my divine love.”[4] The inclusion of latter days flags the nun’s claim that it was actually Jesus who was talking with her, rather than her hallucinating, for in no sense can we say in hindsight that the thirteenth century could be characterized as the latter days of Christianity. This objection is only relevant, however, to the metaphysician (i.e., is Jesus a real entity?), the psychologist (i.e., was Gertrud hallucinating?), and historian (i.e., was Gertrud speaking to the resurrected historical Jesus of the Gospels?). The cost in making these category mistakes—taking religion to reduce to another domain and thus its criteria—is the missed opportunity (hence opportunity cost) to study the nature or essence of divine love, for that is the distinctly religious content in Merton’s report. Although academic study is obviously not necessary for a person to be religious, I, unlike Merton, applaud Gertrud’s intellectual forays into “secular” knowledge because intelligence plus knowledge can facilitate a person’s religious development.

Merton wrote of Gertrud as having been “an intelligent child with a taste for secular literature. Unfortunately, however, this taste became too absorbing. Although in itself it was harmless, or even good, it grew to such proportions and came to occupy such an inordinate place in her life that it choked the development of grace in her soul. . . . She was completely devoured by this one passion for the pleasure she found in reading the literature of the world. Psychologically speaking, what had happened was a completely unhealthy exteriorization of her whole self. She had developed a habit of pouring herself out, wasting her energies in the pursuit of her own satisfaction.”[5] But after some visions of Jesus, she “passed from tepidity to the closest mystical intimacy with the Sacred Heart,” which, being Jesus’s “infinitely perfect love for us,” became “the one big reality of her life.”[6]

Merton’s jejune and petty characterization of the intellectual life is hardly fair. At Yale’s divinity school, where I studied theology (while studying philosophy, history, film and education in the liberal arts college), faith seeking understanding was the mantra for both the students and the “scholarly priests” on the faculty. Of course, no Yale student could ever be accused of being an over-achiever, but this does not necessarily mean that God is thereby slighted by taking studying seriously, for God can be reckoned as the ultimate source even of the sliver of potential knowledge that a human being can learn in a lifetime. In fact, academic study can lead to a more mature religiosity.

William James criticizes Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690), a European nun and mystic who emphasized the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as being “so feeble of intellectual outlook that it would be too much to ask of us, with our Protestant and modern education, to feel anything but indulgent pity for the kind of saintship which she embodies.”[7] So who is right on the religious verdict on intelligence—Merton or James? Surely it is not necessary to religiosity, and intelligence and accumulated knowledge can bolster arrogance if devoid of benevolentia universalis, or simple kindness, as is all too common at Yale and Harvard in New England—far indeed from the Midwest. Even so, to love ideas is not in itself to hate God or reckon oneself to be a deity among mere, stupid mortals. It may be said of intelligence applied to religion that Satan is cleaver and yet God is omniscient (i.e., all-knowing). For us mere mortals stuck in between, ideas about the world and especially about God and even religion as a distinct domain can facilitate our religious development toward maturation. As Paul wrote, “When I became a man, I put away childish things.”[8]

William James had no patience for stymied, or jejune spirituality. He contrasts Gertrud’s “proofs of Christ’s partiality for her undeserving person” through assurances “of his love, intimacy, and caresses and compliments of the most absurd and puerile sort” with the capability of the modern religious person to get past the idea of God as a dispenser of “personal favors.”[9] I don’t believe James was being fair to the pious nun, for she was very mature in terms of religious development.

Gertrud’s use of partiality in describing her relationship with Jesus does not mean that she felt superior or better off with respect to other people; rather, the favoring she perceived from Jesus allowing his “visible presence” to show to her has to do with her own unworthiness, given “such disorder and confusion” within her that “was no fitting dwelling for [Jesus].[10] Given her self-knowledge of her “stiff-necked obstinacy” and her “tower of vanity and worldiness,” favor had to do with the sheer grace that afforded her the privilege of having visions of Christ.[11] “I must confess in very truth that this was a grace given freely and in no way deserve,” she wrote before noting that “severe punishments” were what she deserved.[12] Her sense of being favored was that by grace alone such punishments were obviated and even replaced by visions of Jesus. This had nothing to do with being favored over other people, and as a self-declared wretch, she surely would not have presumed to be favored over anyone. James comes off as a cold and resentful or at least biased member of the faculty at Harvard, and thus hardly alone there, but very far indeed from Gertrud and other mature religious folk whose humility warrants partiality.

Secondly, James neglects Gertrud’s goal being to see God’s face and paradoxically to be in God and thus in God’s love, understood as agape, or self-emptying (divine) love, which goes beyond marital connotations associated with her yearning for Jesus. Circling back to Merton, we can say that Gertrud used her God-given intellect polished by years of study at the monastery, to transcend the bridal language she uses to describe the anthropomorphic marital love between her and Jesus by going on to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which is mystically higher than merely being married to a manifestation of God.

Although Gertrud antedates David Hume’s seventeenth-century warning of the human mind’s inherent susceptibility to remaking God in our own image by anthropomorphizing familiar ornaments onto the pure idea of divine simplicity, I suspect Gertrud was able to use her studies and her innate intelligence to figure out the limitations of human analogies such as marriage and even erotic language, which compromise God being wholly other, and thus not even a being in the sense that we think of beings.[13]

Describing the liturgically-oriented fifth spiritual exercise in Gertrud’s program, two scholars distinguish Gertrud’s marital (and erotic) analogy wherein a nun “in a wedding dress [and] with a spousal dowry”[14] has is spiritually (and liturgically) married to Jesus, “the immortal spouse,”[15] from the telos, or ultimate goal in the following passage: “Having concluded the nuptial contract with the Lord, the mystic is burning for the kiss of her immortal spouse, for the wedding embrace in the innermost bedchamber of the heart. With the Lord as husband, the offspring of this marital union will be perfect love; it will mean becoming one spirit with God.”[16] I contend that the offspring transcends the marriage union as well as the marital and sexual language.

Gertrud was able to conceptualize her telos as an indwelling union in the divine, which is a closer and less humanlike union than is implicit in her vision of Jesus “leaning towards her like a sweet lover, and giving to her soul the softest kiss.”[17] It is important not to take even such sensual language too literally. According to two scholars, “When Gertrud thus focuses on Christ’s glorified human nature, she does not emphasize the belief that human nature in general is restored through the incarnation of Christ. She often distinguished between the ‘rotten body’ and the spirit. The body-soul dichotomy remains unreconciled in the Spiritual Exercises.”[18] This is only a relative or temporary problem, however, as Gertrud believed that at death, a person can flow back into God,”[19] which obviates even any relationship basis of union by transcending into God as love. Being in God transcends having a relationship with God, and it is precisely by one’s intellect and learning that a person can figure this out. Circling back to James, it can be said that whereas wanting to be married to Jesus can involve a desire for preferential treatment, though there is no evidence that Gertrud thought she alone could be Jesus’s spouse, indwelling in divine, pure (i.e., selfless) love transcends wanting preferential treatment.

With regard to the domain of religion as sui generis (i.e., distinct and of its own type of domain), although God by definition in being omniscient and transcendent is not limited to human systems of logic, it doesn’t hurt to be able to prune off wayward, human, all too human branches of even theological ratiocination as incoherent or really of another domain; otherwise, the human mind’s susceptibility to superstition and emotional enthusiasm in matters of religion could take over. As a prime candidate for pruning, Merton insists that the suddenness of Gertrud’s profound change “only emphasizes the fact that it was utterly beyond her own powers and was a pure gift of God.”[20] His assumption that a sudden change in a person cannot happen or has never happened before in a person without grace, or that sudden, momentous change is somehow contrary to human nature, is specious reasoning. It is similar to concluding that because a sick person prayed to John Paul II after his death and then gotten well without a medical reason (as if medicine were complete), the former pope must be a saint even though he did not act sufficiently on reports of child-rapes by priests and coverups by their respective bishops. Positive correlation is not sufficient to attest to causation. This logical point is often lost to the fervor of religious ideology.

It is also by intellect that we can come to realize the need to uproot the exogenous plants from the religious garden so we can see, understand, and experience the innately religious fauna that has been quietly growing underneath. Ignorance, superstition, and enthusiastic fervor can otherwise lead a person to claim to know rather than believe something that is a matter of faith. This fallacy, which involves reducing religion to some other domain (e.g., empirical science), involves an epistemological category mistake regarding what can be known. Subjecting a faith-claim to the verdict of what can be known from a historical account, or inferred from the result of an “arm chair” psychological analysis, for example, can be thwarted by previous study in logic and philosophy in general. Ironically, such “secular” studies protect the domain of religion from the encroachments of other domains as well as from overstepping onto other domains with an overriding arrogance of superiority based on a religious-domain-only belief claim.

From another shore, Merton saw fit to psychoanalyze Gertrud’s voracious appetite for knowledge, and William James claimed that “the revelations of Christ’s sacred heart” were Margaret Mary’s “hallucinations of sight, touch, and hearing.”[21] The modern mind will doubtless give credence to the rendering of religious experience into psychological terms. In 2023, I attended some lectures of a class at Yale on the results of empirical studies in psychology on religious beliefs. Generally speaking, empirical social-science tests can contribute to philosophy and the subject-matter of religious studies, though it is important to remember that the faith claims themselves do not suffer a consequent loss of validity in terms of religious meaning.

In the 1980s, in reaction to the historical critical method that had emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, Han Frei, a Yale professor of theology, claimed in his text, Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, that historical questions of, and, one could add doing psychologically analysis on, characters and events in faith narratives such as the four Gospels comes at the cost of grasping the religious meaning in the stories. In other words, let the stories speak to you; don’t interrupt them to get behind the stories.

Just as Donald Trump was deemed an easy target by American psychologists when he was running for U.S. president in 2024 even though none of those “educated” psychologists had subjected him to psychological tests, let alone even met him in person, so too it must be easy as well as tempting to analyze the religious experiences of people whose religious sensitivity enables even elaborate descriptions of such experiences. Applying psychological analyses to nuns who lived many centuries back and claiming that the results trump their respective religious experiences is not only fraught with difficulties that could render the results invalid, but also superimposes another domain onto that of religion without justification. A good education in the liberal arts and a sharp intellect can critically examine such unsubstantiated assumptions in what has become known as critical thinking.

Religion, I submit, should be treated as a distinct domain, and thus with its own sort of meaning, experience, and criteria. This is not to say that the domain cannot intersect or has never intersected with other domains, such as history and psychology; James may be right about the specious ontological basis of visions; Jesus referring to the thirteen century as “latter days” belies Gertrud’s claim that an entity outside of Gertrud’s mind was speaking to her in her vision. Even so, for people interested in the religious domain, whether in regard to faith or a resulting experience or practice, religious meaning is the gold to be dug up, whether or not it is attached to a historical event has come out of a psychological state wherein the contents of a vision are not themselves empirical; the religious meaning is still real in its own sense, and thus such meaning can be related to religious creeds, doctrines, and systemic theologies by criteria innate to the religious domain rather than superimposed by another domain. Not only is it the case that secular knowledge and an analytical and logical intelligence need not be a threat to religion; a good liberal-arts and sciences education can actually facilitate a person’s religious maturation and prune off the dead wood in the religious domain as well as overhanging branches from trees growing in other domains. 



1. Pope Francis, Dilexit Nos, October 24, 2024, para. 98.
2. Ibid.
3.  Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 452. Merton cites  Héraut 2.10.5.
4. Ibid.  Merton cites Héraut, Prologue.
5. Ibid., p. 453.
6. Ibid., pp. 454, 457, 456.
7. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1902), p. 262.
8. 1 Cor. 13:11. Paul writing about spiritual growth.
9. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 262.
10. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love, Margaret Winkworth, ed. and trans. (New York: Paulist Press), p. 96.
11. Ibid., pp. 95-6.
12. Ibid., p. 97.
13. Pseudo-Dionysius makes this point in his sixth-century writings. Moreover, he wrote that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., emotions). God, in other words, goes beyond the erotic language that Augustine applies to his yearning for God in Confessions.
14. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 227.
15. Ibid.
16. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 15.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 263.
18. Gertrud Lewis and Jack Lewis, “Introduction,” in Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
19. Gertrud of Helfta, Gertrud the Great of Helfta: Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), verse 285.
20. Thomas Merton, “Saint Gertrude, Nun of Helfta, Germany,” Cistercian Studies Quarterly 38.4 (2003): 454.
21. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 261.