4. Sober Inebriation
INTRODUCTION
counter a storm or a torrent of illumination. Rather it is sufficient if Truth merely whets our knowledge with some meagre and obscure ideas; and these spiritual drops flow through the saints and God's representatives.104
4. SOBER INEBRIATION
In this union between God and the soul, the closeness of the divine nature (designated by the darkness) causes the soul, as it were, to go out of itself, by reason of the attraction which God exercises upon it. This state is primarily char acterized by a passivity; indeed, the influence exercised on the soul is from without, and the soul itself is completely overpowered. This is the reason why the terms used to de scribe this state are those which usually apply to the passions, as, for example, love, intoxication, and so forth. The soul enters into a sphere which transcends its own limitations: thus it experiences a true withdrawal from the laws of its own nature and intelligence. Lastly, the intensity of this state may manifest itself in such an absorption in God that the soul becomes unconscious of all else. This, however, is secondary. The essential element of any ecstasy, as I.
Hausherr has rightly said, is "a going out of oneself, not by an unconsciousness involving the suspension of sense activity, but by a kind of projection of the soul beyond the laws of reason under the impulse of love."105
This going out of oneself, which is characteristic of the mystical experience of Darkness, is designated by Gregory in different ways: he speaks of ecstasy, inebriation, the pas sion of love, dizziness, sleep, madness, wounding. Now al though each of these images suggests different nuances of
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meaning, it would be a mistake to think that they designate different states of soul. Actually the choice of expression de pends primarily on the Scriptural context which is being discussed. Thus the word darkness is always used in con nection with Moses. The word ecstasy appears when the Scriptural text refers to it, and, especially in Gregory's dis cussion of Abraham (Gen. 15.12), David (Ps. 115.2), Paul
(Ps. 67.28), and Peter (Acts 10.10). Similarly, the expression "inebriation" is found in connection with Wisdom's banquet
(Prov. 9.3), the Canticle (5.2), and the goodly chalice of the Psalms (Ps. 22.5). Finally, the idea of passionate love, or eros, is linked in general with the Canticle of Canticles.
The first of these expressions, ecstasy, designates, as we have said, the soul's going out of itself by reason of the intensity of the divine presence, and we find it so used from the time of Gregory's first published work, the Treatise on Virginity.
Gregory, in explaining how God transcends all created goods, says that these are as drops of water to the boundless depths of the sea, or as sparks to the brilliance of the sun.
Hence The soul that does see [God's beauty] by some divine gift and inspiration, retains his ecstasy un expressed in the secret of his consciousness.... The great David rightly shows us how impossible this is. Lifted out of himself by the Spirit, he glimpsed in that blessed ecstasy God's infinite and incompre hensible beauty. . . . And though yearning to say something which would do justice to his vision, he can only cry out. . . : Every man is a liar.106
Gregory speaks clearly here of the transcendence of the divine nature, which sweeps the soul out of itself into a state
INTRODUCTION 35
of awe and ecstasy. We may also note the reference to the "impossible," which we have met before; it clearly shows that the soul is completely overpowered.
In another passage, from the treatise Against Eunomius, we will see the same ideas occurring in connection with Abraham's ecstasy as we found in the discussion of Moses' experience of darkness:
By going out of his native land, that is, out of him self, out of the realm of base and earthly thoughts,
Abraham raised his mind as far as possible above the common limits of our human nature. . . .
Abraham passed through all the reasoning that is possible to human nature about the divine attrib utes, and after he had purified his mind of all such concepts, he took hold of a faith that was unmixed and pure of any concept, and he fashioned for him self this token of knowledge of God that is com pletely clear and free of error, namely the belief that God completely transcends any knowable sym bol. And so, after this ecstasy which came upon him as a result of these lofty visions, Abraham re turned once more to his human frailty: 1 am, he admits, dust and ashes, mute, inert, incapable of explaining rationally the Godhead that my mind has seen.... In his life we are taught that for those who are advancing in the divine paths there is no other way of drawing near to God than by the in termediary of faith; it is only through faith that the questing soul can unite itself with the incom prehensible Godhead.107
Our text, of course, occurs in a theological, not a mystical, work. And this explains why Gregory emphasizes the fact
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that the divine nature transcends all determination. This is not, however, a negative sort of transcendence, like that of the Neo-platonic One. The text speaks of an ecstasy which "comes upon" the soul, causing it to go out of itself, and enter into the realm of the Godhead, from which it returns again to its human frailty. Again, the ecstasy is linked with the proximity, that is, the presence, of God; hence the soul is united with the living God of the Bible and not with the abstract essence of the Neo-platonists. Finally, the most im portant point is that faith is seen to be the only way by which the soul can be united to the Transcendent. And as can be seen from the similarity of treatment, we are on the same level as we were in the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles in connection with the image of darkness. But what is most important here is the connection between Greg ory's mystical doctrine and his theology. The progress made by the theology of transcendence during the fourth century brought about a more scientific formulation of an experience which, we may be sure, had not been unknown to the mystics of previous centuries, even though they had been unable to give it such accurate expression.
The idea of ecstasy in Gregory is intimately connected with that of "sober inebriation." The expression, as we know, originates with Philo,108 and shows once again, as in the case of the notions of darkness and ecstasy, Gregory's dependence upon the great Jewish mystic. The expression, "sober inebri ation," is a paradox, very much like the "luminous darkness."
It emphasizes the passivity of true ecstasy as compared with the effects of actual intoxication. And it is called "sober" to suggest that the state is not infra-rational but rather suprarational. So too, the expression "luminous darkness" suggested
INTRODUCTION
that the obscurity of the mind was not a defect—as, for ex ample, if one would speak of the darkness of ignorance— but, on the contrary, the effect of an excess of light.
The theme of sober inebriation appears in Gregory's works a number of times;109 but the most important text is one from the ninth sermon of the Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles, which offers a commentary on Cant. 5.1: Eat, my friends, and drin\, and be inebriated, my brothers. Greg ory explains that All intoxication causes the mind, overwhelmed with wine, to go into an ecstasy, but here there is an ecstasy involving a transformation from a worse to a better condition.
He thus brings out clearly the difference between ecstasy and inebriation. He then continues:
In this way the mighty David became intoxicated and went out of himself: he saw, while in ecstasy, that divine beauty which no mortal can behold, and cried out in those famous words: Every man is a liar.110
Once again we find the theme of David's ecstasy together with the same expressions that occurred in the Treatise on Virginity. David, indeed, occupies Gregory in a number of other passages.111 Here, however, the concept of ecstasy is further clarified by that of inebriation. And the "beauty
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which no mortal can behold"—just as we have seen it in our discussion of the darkness—refers to the ultimate incompre hensibility of the divine nature, and not merely to the inabil ity of man to understand supernatural reality.
Gregory gives other examples of this ecstatic inebriation as it is found in the Scriptures:
So too Paul, the new Benjamin, while in ecstasy, said: Whether we be transported in mind, it is to God, for this ecstasy was a movement towards the Godhead; or whether we be sober, it is for you.112
The reference to Paul as a "new Benjamin in ecstasy" is based on the verse of the Psalm, There is Benjamin a youth, in ecstasy of mind.in And Gregory explains this as follows:
The Old Testament foreshadowed the character istic traits of the Apostles by the use of figures and symbols. Among these is, for example, the reference to Benjamin a youth, in ecstasy of mind, instructed in the mysteries. And this is none other than Paul, the divine Apostle, of the race of Abraham and the tribe of Benjamin.114
Here Gregory points out another characteristic of ecstasy: being inexpressible it cannot serve the purposes of instruction.
And we may recall in this connection St. Paul's distinction between the charism of prophecy and the charisms of revela tion and the gift of tongues.
Finally, after Paul, we have St. Peter, who thus completes Gregory's list of those who enjoyed ecstasy.
INTRODUCTION
I am aware also [he says] that the blessed Peter experienced this sort of intoxication, hungry and drunk as he was at the same time. For even before real food was brought to him, being hungry and desirous to taste, while his household were pre paring, he experienced that divine and sober inebri ation. And thus he went out of himself. . . ,115
Here Gregory is referring to the pasage in Acts 10.10, where the word ecstasy is indeed used. In Gregory's description of it as a "divine and sober inebriation" we see, once again, the traditional paradox. And Gregory further emphasizes the "sober" quality of the experience by remarking that Peter was still fasting. This is perhaps an allusion to Peter's dis course in Acts 2.15: These are not drun\ as you suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. Again the inebria tion is said to come upon Peter in the same way as the ecstasy of Abraham. In this way the passivity, the violence and sud denness of the experience is again clearly emphasized.
In the twelfth sermon from the Commentary on the Can ticle, the passage on inebriation is immediately followed by a discussion of "sleep," in accordance with the verse that follows in the Canticle / sleep and my heart watcheth (Cant.
5.2). The notion of sleep is admirably suited to express the experience of ecstasy. For sleep is, in the strict sense, a kind of pathos, a passive experience, in which the mind goes out of itself and is under the control of the imagination. From this point of view the spiritual life is seen as an awakening, a watching, that withdraws the soul from the illusory dreams of sensual pleasure.116 But in the sleep of ecstasy the soul is swept out of itself and the limitations of its understanding,
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not by illusory dreams but by the sovereign reality of the presence of God. This sort of sleep is far superior to being awake; and this gives rise to a new expression, the paradox of "watchful sleep."
Sleep usually follows drinking. . . . But this is in deed a strange sleep and foreign to nature's custom.
In natural sleep the sleeper is not wide awake, and he who is wide awake is not sleeping. Sleeping and waking are contraries, and they succeed and follow one another. But in this case there is a strange and contradictory fusion of opposites in the same state.117
In this notion of sleep Gregory stresses a new characteristic of ecstasy. The soul is so carried away by God's reality and so absorbed in her contemplation of Him that she loses con sciousness of everything else:
The contemplation of our true good makes us de spise all these things; and so the eye of the body sleeps. Anything that the eye reveals does not at tract the perfect soul, because by reason it looks only to those things which transcend the visible universe. . . . When all of [the senses] have been lulled into inactivity by a kind of sleep, the heart's functioning becomes pure, the reason looks up to heaven, unshaken and unperturbed by the motion of the senses.... Thus the soul, enjoying alone the contemplation of Being, will not awake for any thing that arouses sensual pleasure. After lulling to sleep every bodily motion, it receives the vision of God in a divine wakefulness with pure and
INTRODUCTION
naked intuition. May we make ourselves worthy of this vision, achieving by this sleep the awakening of the soul!118
Note that here, as always, Gregory does not stress the psycho logical phenomenon of the suspension of the senses—which can be, in itself, very ambiguous—but rather the mystical experience of the intensity of the divine presence which sweeps the soul and absorbs all its attention. Gregory does not, of course, exclude the psychological repercussions; in deed, they would seem to be suggested by the concrete, ex periential way in which he describes the phenomenon.
Now the darkening of the intelligence, which is suggested by the image of darkness, expresses the inability of the soul to endure the brilliance of the divine light. The image of inebration suggests the soul's inability to endure the divine happiness. The symbol of vertigo, dizziness, refers to the immensity of the divine nature. It expresses the soul's com plete confusion in the presence of a reality for which there is no common measure. For, as Gregory explains in his Com mentary on Ecclesiastes, the soul is imprisoned within its own limitations, in accordance with its condition in space and time; Thus how can our mind, which always operates on a dimensional image, comprehend a nature that has no dimension? ... And though the mind in its restlessness ranges through all that is knowable, it has never yet discovered a way of comprehending eternity in such wise that it might place itself out side of it, and go beyond the idea of eternity itself and that Being which is above all being.119
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Again we see the soul's incapacity; it lacks a "way of compre hending"; and this, as we have already seen in our discussion of darkness, is characteristic of the created intellect com pletely overpowered in the presence of transcendent Being.
But the image of vertigo is not merely for Gregory a specu lative consideration, but is rather the expression of a concrete experience. It occurs twice in his works. The first passage is, once again, from the Commentary on Ecclesiastes:
Imagine a sheer, steep crag, of reddish appearance below, extending into eternity; on top there is this ridge which looks down over a projecting rim into a bottomless chasm. Now imagine what a person would probably experience if he put his foot on the edge of this ridge which overlooks the chasm and and found no solid footing nor anything to hold on to. This is what I think the soul experiences when it goes beyond its footing in material things, in its quest for that which has no dimension and which exists for all eternity. For here there is nothing it can take hold of, neither place nor time, neither measure nor anything else; it does not allow our minds to approach. And thus the soul, slipping at every point from what cannot be grasped, becomes dizzy and perplexed and returns once again to what is connatural to it.120
A similar image occurs in the sixth sermon from the Com mentary on the Beatitudes. Here again is the cliff projecting over an abyss:
Along the sea-coast you may often see mountains facing the sea, sheer and steep from top to bottom,
INTRODUCTION
while a projection at the top forms a cliff over hanging the depths. Now if someone suddenly looked down from such a cliff to the depths below he would become dizzy. So too is my soul seized with dizziness now as it is raised on high by this great saying of the Lord, Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God. . . . But no man hath seen God at any time, says the great John. . . .
This then is the steep and sheer rock that Moses taught us was inaccessible, so that our minds can in no way approach it. For every possibility of apprehension is excluded by the words: No man can see the Lord and live}21 The reference to Exodus 33.20122 gives us a clue to the inter pretation of the passage. The image of vertigo is used to express man's anguish as he realizes his inability to endure the overpowering presence of the Godhead.
And just as the symbol of vertigo expressed the soul's an guish before the infinite majesty of God, the notion of Eros denotes the surge of love which sweeps the soul out of itself in proportion to its awareness of God's infinite loveliness. It should be noted here that Gregory's notion of Eros has noth ing in common with the Platonic concept of love—an un fortunate confusion of which Anders Nygren is guilty in his chapter on Gregory in his book, Eros and Agape.123 Rather must it be explained in terms of ecstasy and "inebriation," as we have explained them: as God's adorable presence becomes more and more intense, the soul is, as it were, forced to go out of itself by a kind of infatuation, and to withdraw from its usual mode of existence, to be swept along the ways of God.
Eros, then, is not a longing for possession in a self-centered
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way, but a truly ecstatic love. As Gregory explicitly tells us, Eros here is simply the Agape of the Gospels in its most in tense form.
The bride then puts the veil from her eyes and with pure vision sees the ineffable beauty of her Spouse.
And thus she is wounded by a spiritual and fiery dart of desire (Eros). For love (Agape) that is strained to intensity is called desire (Eros).12*
It is clear then that Gregory uses the word because he feels that the passionate aspect of Eros is a more suggestive symbol for the passivity of the soul as it is overpowered by the revelation of the infinite beauty of God. In this way, too, Gregory justi fies the use of nuptial imagery in the Canticle of Canticles to symbolize the love of God:
In order to have us understand its profoundest doctrine, the Scriptures use as a symbol that which is the most violent of all our pleasurable inclina tions, I mean the passion of love. Thus we are meant to understand that the soul that contem plates the inaccessible beauty of the divine nature falls in love with it in much the same way as the body is attracted towards things that are connatural with it. But here the entire disturbance of the soul has been transformed into impassibility, all carnal passion is extinguished in us and the soul burns with love by the sole flame of the Spirit.125
Thus that irrational Eros, which violently draws bodies to gether by a physical attraction, becomes here a symbol of that
INTRODUCTION
supra-rational attraction which draws the soul irresistibly towards God by a kind of "passionless passion."126 We have here again another paradox.
But what is most important here is that Eros expresses the experience of the soul as the infinite beauty of God becomes more and more present to it. The more the soul is aware of this beauty, the more it sees that it is inaccessible. And it then realizes that it attains this beauty more by desire than by actual possession, just as it comprehends it rather by darkness than in the light.
The soul, having gone out at the word of her Be loved, looks for Him but does not find Him. . . .
In this way she is, in a certain sense, wounded and beaten because of the frustration of what she de sires, now that she thinks that her yearning for the Other cannot be fulfilled or satisfied. But the veil of her grief is removed when she learns that the true satisfaction of her desire consists in constantly going on in her quest and never ceasing in her ascent, seeing that every fulfilment of her desire continually generates a further desire for the Tran scendent. Thus the veil of her despair is torn away and the bride realizes that she will always discover more and more of the incomprehensible and un hoped for beauty of her Spouse throughout all eternity. Then she is torn by an even more urgent longing, and . . . she communicates to her Be loved the dispositions of her heart. For she has re ceived within her God's special dart, she has been wounded in the heart by the point of faith, she has been mortally wounded by the arrow of love.127