The Resurrected Body of Jesus: A Viable Launching Pad for Mysticism

Gertrud of Helfta (1256-1301) was a Christian nun whose sensitivity to mystical experience can be characterized as a bridal mysticism within a Christ mysticism. Think of Christ; turn yourself over to Christ. She brings in the related theme of light, which is salient in the Gospel of John, with Christ saying, I am the light of the word. Yet her mystical sensitivity was such that she could transcend even Christ’s resurrected body, which can be said to have been her favorite mask of eternity through which love, which, as Paul and Augustine had claimed, is God. This does not mean that the mask is finally tossed aside as somehow erroneous; rather, it is to say more generally that people who have an enhanced sensitivity to the mystical in a religious, or transcendent, sense, are oriented to going beyond God in our likeness to experience God as wholly other—as radically transcendent—and thus leave oneself behind.

Gertrud's guide to monastic prayer includes the following in the imperative form, “pray to the Lord to lead you into the school of love where you may learn further to recognize and love Jesus.”[1] Sight is implicit, if recognizing Jesus includes seeing his body. The theme of Gertrud’s third spiritual exercise (spiritual dedication) is “spiritual matrimony, wherein the nun is the bride and Jesus Christ is the bridegroom.  Eros is not excluded, the love being of caritas rather than agape for the nun even though “Christ’s desire is as great as the bride’s” and “this marriage of love” is rendered an “inseparable union” of “chaste love” by a “kiss of love.”[2] Clearly, Descartes’ mind-body dichotomy does not apply, as Christ’s resurrected body is transformed from being an earthly body.

In short, Gertrud’s language, which can be likened to Augustine’s erotic pining for God’s scent in The Confessions, includes even if as an illusion, sexuality and thus bodies rather than just souls.  Although Gertrud likens the “bond of love between the two spouses”—the nun and Jesus—to “the glue that unites the Father to the Son,” the “true spouse and wife, made fertile, brings forth the fruits of life.”[3] The sexual imagery, in which bodies are salient, simply cannot be ignored.

The likeness to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Trinity, however, should be taken with a grain of salt, given Augustine’s claim that likening the relation between the Father and the Son to that of a human father and son (or daughter) is an instance of idolatry. Augustine acknowledges that human weakness “can only think of what it has been accustomed to do or hear.”[4] And yet he warns that “no carnal thought creep up” when we think of Jesus’ line, “As the Father has taught me,” such as in thinking of how a human father teaches his son.[5] Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human relationship is to “fashion idols.”[6] But then is not thinking of approaching Jesus by incorporating sexual language also idolatrous? Fortunately, Gertrud’s goal goes beyond such imagery, and, moreover, even Jesus’ resurrected body. Her attitude toward human bodies, no doubt informed from living in a monastery from the age of 5, would argue against her resting for eternity with even a transformed yet still corporeal (rather than gnostic) body (of Jesus).

Even though Gertrud “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.”[7] For example, distinguishing the “rotten body” from the spirit (e.g., Spiritual Exercises, VI, 612f) is consistent with mortification, “dying to oneself in order to live for God alone (III, 149), which is implied in the “process of inner liberation.”[8] This is also consistent with Gertrud’s leitmotif of death of the corporeal body in its earthly state constituting “a beginning rather than an end, a paradoxical reversal of death and life, which . . . goes back to the mystery of the Cross.”[9] Yet Gertrud holds that Christ’s “human nature” is retained “in his heavenly state.”[10] Moreover, her mysticism is “typically Christ-centered,” with “Christ in his humanity” forming “the basis and focus of all of Gertrud’s writing.”[11] Put another way, It is the “human nature of Christ as one with the Spirit and as part of the Trinity, while still, Gertrud writes, ‘in the substance of my flesh,’” that “represents the pivotal point of Gertrud’s mystical life.”[12] I submit that the likeness of “my flesh” involves, on the devotee’s part, a “rotten body,” and furthermore that it would be difficult for Gertrud to stay with the bridal language to characterize her goal of blissful union with God, which for her includes being in God.

Fortunately, Gertrud transcends the mind-body dichotomy altogether in writing of God as Goodness (bonitas), Love (caritas), Cherishing-love (dilectio), Compassion (misericordia), Peace (pax), and Loving-kindness (pietas).[13] These words for divinity obviate the pitfall from anthropomorphism in rendering the transcendent as human, all too human. This is avoided to an extent by “employing simultaneously both male and female attributes for God.”[14]

The same is done in Hinduism, in depicting the deity, Shiva, as both male and female—as conjoined bodily with his consort, Devi, as in (in Christian terms of marriage) made one flesh. Ganesha, the Hindu god that has an elephant head, goes even further in upsetting the convenient assumption that a deity resembles our human form externally.

Put in simpler theological terms, Christ’s transformed (rather than earthly) resurrected body is Gertrud’s centering pole that she grasps as though with one arm as she leans out yearning for mysterium divinum; “the mystical experience” being “per se ineffable.”[15] In Spiritual Exercises, the “desire to reach God sine impedimente (without any hindrance) is reiterated throughout as direct contact with the Divine remains her goal,” and of course her summum bonum, which Plato describes merely as eternal moral verities (truths).[16] “Ah! O love, may your cherishing-love consummated in me be my end and consummation.”[17] Although she adds her hope that she “may appear worthy in the presence of the immortal spouse, in a wedding dress and with a spousal dowry,” I contend that being in the divine that is love transcends even a bridal union with Christ’s resurrected body.[18] So here Gertrud can be interpreted as describing the means (i.e., being married with Jesus in his resurrected condition, including bodily) after having depicted the end, or consummation, with divine love itself. There is a danger, therefore, that devotees following Gertrud’s spiritual exercises in praxis may focus on the means too much, without even pondering what divine love is in itself as a distinct type of love. As distinct, illusions to sexuality and even bodies can only go so far on the way to divine love saturating the devotee from within in the end.

Gender, and even anthropomorphism are hindrances from the perspective of experiencing union with the source of the divine, which transcends the limits of human thought and perception, as Dionysius suggests. Relatedly, in Hinduism, the part of Purusa’s primordial body that extends beyond most of that body—that which becomes the world—is transcendent in that it lies beyond our realm. Only once even such basic obstacles as gender-identification and the tendency of the human brain to render radically “other” thoughts into familiar terms are transcended can a person like Gertrud of Helfta have “inner freedom” (Libertas cordis), which is Gertrud’s most “unique characteristic and her most important theme in general.”[19] According to Gertrud, a “mystical rebirth in God” entails “integrity of faith, triumph over the enemy, unyielding perseverance, and freedom of spirit.”[20] Such freedom is needed to see “God face to face for eternity.”[21] Ironically, the light showing God’s true face transcends the light of the world.

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1, Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989): V. verses 311-12, p. 84, italics added.
2, Ibid., p. 14.
3, Ibid., p. 14.
4, Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.
5, Ibid.
6, Ibid.
7, Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
8. Ibid., p.9.
9, Ibid., p. 10.
10. Ibid., p. 7.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid. The use of the Latin word, caritas, rather than the Greek word, agape, is, I submit, misplaced in being an appellation for God. For Augustine, caritas is not selfless love, but is infused with, and thus not cut off from, garden-variety eros, albeit sublimated to the summum bonum. For the basis of this idea, see Plato’s Symposium. Calvin was more idealistic concerning the potential of human love in applying agape, which is divine selfless love, as evinced in God the Father allowing his Logos to be incarnated as His Son and even to suffer an excruciating death. Therefore, I contend that the sort of love that is divine is more accurately rendered as selfless (agape) rather than including human instinct (caritas).
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. “Gertrud’s text unequivocally defines the summum bonum in terms of the biblical ‘seeing God face to face.’” Introduction of Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989), p. 8.
17. Gertrud of Helfta, Spiritual Exercises, Gertrud Jaron Lewis and Jack Lewis, trans. Cistercian Fathers Series, No. 49 (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publication, 1989): V. verses 216-17, p. 81.
18. Ibid., verses 226-28, p. 81.
19. Ibid., p. 10.
20. Ibid., p.12, italics added.
21. Ibid.

On God’s Holiness and Mystery in Judaism

In The Natural History of Religion, David Hume claims that the human mind has difficulty holding on to the pure (i.e., unencumbered) idea of divine simplicity, and thus tends to apply familiar (i.e., human) attributes or qualities onto that idea (i.e., anthropomorphism), as if hanging ornaments on a naked Christmas tree. Eclipsed or compromised, or even lost entirely, is the quality of God being wholly other, and thus being qualitatively different than us and anything in our world. The Christian theologian Dionysius grasped this idea in his claim that God goes beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and sensibility (i.e., human emotions). The Biblical claim in the Book of Job that God is angry with Job’s “friends” for making statements about God’s ways without knowing them can be analyzed with an eye towards both viewing anger as only going so far with respect to God and being critical of the “friends’” presumption in assuming that God’s ways are within the limits of human cognition (i.e., theories). Rather than go to a negative theology wherein God is thought to be ineffable, I want to stress the value of recognizing both distance and mystery as being indispensable with respect to our relation to God lest we reduce God to our various masks of eternity.

In the Book of Exodus, the anthropomorphism as a narrative device in myth is not problem-free, so it is important to emphasize the leitmotif of distance between God and humans. “Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them.”[1] God remembers, which is an interesting anthropomorphism considering that omniscience is a divine attribute. That God remembers the covenant seems to imply that God had not been paying attention when the “Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites and made their lives bitter with hard service.”[2] So as to avoid the obvious incompatibility of omniscience and needing to remember, one commentator claims that the word, “’remember,’ when used with God as subject, typically means that God has determined to initiate action.”[3] But perhaps the two things—recalling and deciding—merely occur together (i.e., positively correlated) rather than mean the same thing even when applied to God as the subject. God is depicted nevertheless as being distant, moreover, looking upon the Israelites rather than being among them, and coming “down to deliver” the Israelites, which is a fundamental change from Genesis, where God is so close that God makes clothes for Adam and Eve once they realize they are naked.[4]

“What was God doing, during those years the Israelites suffered under the Egyptians?”[5] It is as if the hands-on deity had gone up to attend to other business, and turned back to the Israelites because their groans had reached a sufficient volume or intensity. Then God would be with Moses as he returns to Pharaoh to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. Alternatively, being omniscient and omnipotent, God may have been allowing the increased subjugation of the chosen people so they would experience their dependence on God, but the Israelites could not fathom this divine plan and thought instead that their god had been away. Such a divine plan is distinct from the infliction or permitting of suffering by God as punishment for the Israelites having violated the covenant. As one commentator admits, the Israelites in Egypt “are not accused of having done anything wrong.”[6] So the prophets’ association of the absence of God with “judgment for Israel’s sins” cannot apply here.[7] As in the Book of (righteous) Job, no “rationalization of the absence of God is ever attempted, but the issue,” according to one commentator, “is resolved by the coming of the God who saves.”[8] I disagree that the issue of God’s absence in the midst of undeserved suffering in the case of the Israelites in Egypt is resolved by the return of God, even if only in terms of God’s attention, for unlike Job, no wager calling for the slaves’ undeserved suffering to test their faith is mentioned in the text. In my view, the absence of God when the Israelites’ servitude was especially harsh is simply necessary for there to be the harshness, which in turn serves as the reason why leaving Egypt makes sense. God is anthropomorphized by the author here as God needing to remember, as a human does, for this narrative purpose. Were it the case as in Wisdom of Solomon that “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them,”[9] then presumably there would be no need for the Israelites to leave Egypt, and thus for God to save them.

In Exodus 3, there is also distance, but here the reason is easily understood. God at the burning bush tells Moses, ”Come no closer! . . . for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”[10] Here it is not that God goes off as if on other business; rather, it is humanity that should maintain a distance from God out of respect for God’s inherent holiness. Indeed, as one commentator states, “’Holiness’ has been identified as the quality of divinity itself . . .”[11] The definitive quality in experiencing holiness as analyzed by Rudolf Otto in his book, The Idea of the Holy, can be understood to be the numinous quality in which a wholly other, or “supernatural,” presence is sensed or inferred in the immediate context of liminality, as if the person were momentarily suspended between two types of existence or fundamental modes of reality. This core of holiness goes beyond what we can grasp as rationality or moral goodness and even “defies language.”[12] To use the term, “supernatural,” for instance, does not do the phenomenon justice.

Furthermore, sensing of a numen in a liminal situation is more fundamental than are the qualities of being fascinated and terrified. The latter two can be considered to be reactions rather than as primary. Projected outwards, God can be said to be fascinating or angry, but more to the point is God’s transcendence tangent to our realm. Put another way, something holy has sufficient deep significance to be sensed as ontologically different, or “other,” in a fundamental way.  God is the very definition, referent, or epitome of holiness.

Mankind is already tainted by the original sin of Adam and Eve by Exodus. Therefore, in Exodus, “Moses said to the Lord, ‘The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you yourself warned us, saying, ‘Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.’”[13] So even though “Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God,” they “took their stand at the foot of the mountain.”[14] Even the priests were to stand at that distance from God, who had “descended upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain.”[15] After God spoke to the people, who then said to Moses, “do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”[16] “Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.”[17] Although “God’s appearance on the mountain is . . . described as both frightening and attractive, daunting and fascinating,”[18] the thick darkness, itself ontologically significant next to daylight, as the experience of a full solar eclipse may intimate to a degree, suggests the liminal presence of a numen—that something that is fundamentally other than ordinary is now present in our world.

Drawing on Otto’s terminology, the mysterium experienced from the sense of a transcendent, numinous presence can be understood to be more fundamental than the tremendum (terrifying, as daunting, as distinct from simply being afraid[19]) and fascinans (fascinating) qualities of a religious experience of the holy. Including the presence of mystery is perhaps just another way of saying that a religious experience, unlike experiences in other domains such as science, politics, and even ethics, go beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. In this way, Otto can be situated with the Christian theologian of the sixth century, (Pseudo) Dionysius.

One implication of the Otto-Dionysius “synthesis” or “nexus” is that even the wisdom tradition in the Hebrew Bible falls short, as evinced in the Book of Job. Job’s “friends,” who insist rather harshly that Job must have been impious to suffer so, invite Yahweh’s anger, for in the “repeated attempts to reinterpret Job’s situation against all appearances in accordance with [Wisdom] teaching, they demonstrate that the attempt to interpret human fate according to fixed rules can become deeply inhuman.”[20] Initially sympathetic, lying on the dirt with Job for seven days, the “friends” essentially kick the guy when he’s down because they think they know God by building “entirely on the [Wisdom] teaching and its infallibility.[21] Thus, “God’s wrath burns against [Job’s friends] because,” God says, they have “’not spoken of me what is right.’”[22] God says to Eliphaz the Temanite, “’My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’”[23] Job’s three “friends” must “seek atonement” by performing a sacrifice to God; paradoxically, the “friends” “have to rely on Job’s petition on their behalf.”[24]

In contrast, Job does not try to “force God’s actions into any kind of theory,” then he recognizes the inappropriateness of his attitude after a dressing-down by God.[25] Job tells God, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore I despise myself, and repent in  dust and ashes.”[26] Job’s realization and repentance tells us that God’s initial claim that Job is a righteous man is correct after all. Job is blameless, not perfect, for he calls “God to account, indeed even accusing him” at one point, but he does so without the assumption of infallibility because, unlike his friends, questions the traditional human teaching that a “recognizable link” exists between what a person does and how much one suffers.[27] God rightly applies blame instead to Job’s self-righteous “friends,” for they have spoken of God without understanding, as they presumed that they could not be wrong about that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought and thus of theories. Humans cannot “understand God’s actions in terms of comprehensible and manageable rules.”[28] Faith seeking understanding should not put the cart before the horse, lest Aristotle’s notion of misordered concupiscence—putting a lower good above a higher one—apply.

Admittedly, it is tempting to stop at the anthropomorphist language of myth, or even to take that language literally, but God as wholly other necessitates mystery that goes with the inherent distance between us and a transcendent referent. Throughout the natural history of religion, the human proclivity to fixate on divine attributes at the expense of the distant mysterium of the divine, which relativizes even viewing it as a being (beings as entities being familiar to us in our realm), can at some point in a person’s experience of the divine compromise the sense of mystery and distance itself in yearning for that which inherently goes beyond the limits of human thought, senses, and feelings. It is thus important to keep in mind God’s command to stay off the mountain and the quality of mysterium in Otto’s theory, which, as a mere theory, does not exhaust God’s ways.

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1. Ex 2:23-25
2. Ex 1:13-14
3. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):5.
4. The quoted text is from Exodus 3:8.
5. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):4.
6. Ibid., p. 7.
7. Ibid., p. 8.
8. Ibid., p. 10.
9. 3:1
10. Ex 3:5
11. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):26.
12. Ibid., p. 31.
13. Ex. 14:23
14. Ex. 14:17
15. Ex 14:20, italics added.
16. Ex 20:19
17. Ex 20:21
18. Donald E. Gowan, Theology in Exodus: Biblical Theology in the Form of a Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994):28.
19. Ibid., p. 32.
20. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
21. Ibid., italics added. Ignorance that presumes that it cannot be wrong evinces the arrogance of false entitlement, as if the creature were above its Creator.
22. Ibid., p. 354. God’s statement is in Job 42:7.
23. Job 42:7.
24. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
25. Ibid.
26. Job 42:5-6.
27. Rolf Rendtorff, The Canonical Hebrew Bible: A Theology of the Old Testament, David E. Orton, trans. (Leiden: Deo Publishers, 2005):356.
28. Ibid., p. 357.