90. Ecstasy
90. ECSTASY
What is “ecstasy”? How can you “stand outside yourself” (which is what the word means)?
Dionysius says that the Divine love produces ecstasy, and that God Himself suffered ecstasy through love. . . .
To suffer ecstasy means to be placed outside oneself. This happens as to the apprehensive power and as to the appetitive power. As to the apprehensive power, a man is said to be placed outside himself when he is placed outside the knowledge proper to him. This may be due to his being raised to a higher knowledge. . . . As to the appetitive power, a man is said to suffer ecstasy when that power is borne towards something else, so that it goes forth out from itself, as it were. . . . he wills the good of his friend. . . (I-II,28,3).
Christ is the Father’s eternal ecstasy. The Incarnation practiced this to us. We practice it to each other by unselfconscious love and by self-sacrifice.
The mystics are given the gift of total unselfconsciousness, so they see nothing left of themselves. That is why they say such apparently pantheistic things, like “I looked for myself and I was not there” or “I looked for myself and all I saw was God.” Of course they’re still there: if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be having a mystical experience! It takes a real self to forget itself. (Duh!) It takes a real self even to make the mistake that many mystics make (especially Buddhists) when they say that they see that there is no real self, that the self is an illusion.
But we non-mystics can approach this state. There is a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, between the total ecstasy of mystical experience and the partial ecstasy of human love, whether of God or of another human person or of some great beauty that blissfully blots out all the inkblots of self-consciousness. When we are engrossed in a work of fiction, we are having a mystical experience, an out-of-body experience. We are not just sitting in a comfortable chair in Boston, we are helping Frodo carry the Ring into Mordor. During the moments when the narrative works its magic on us, we “identify with”, or find our identity in, the character in the novel rather than the reader of it. We are given a gift of grace, by the author of the novel (and, ultimately, by the Author of the author of the novel), so that we are “raised to a higher knowledge”.
And this always goes together with love. We can separate intellect and will, knowledge and love, only in abstract thought, not in lived reality here. For if we do not love and seek and affirm the God, the human being, or the beauty that elicits our state of cognitive self-forgetfulness, we cannot and do not mentally and spiritually have it. It takes love to change the mind.
(That is the simplest answer, by the way, to the question that troubles many philosophers and scientists, the question whether computers think, whether there is such a thing as “artificial intelligence”. The answer is no, because thinking never happens without willing—never, in God, in angels, or in men—and a computer has no will. It never says “No” to its programmer or user, only “Yes.” And not freely. It is like a very mobile and flexible book. It knows nothing at all, because it has no will.)
Love and will are the keys to understanding. Thus Jesus says to the Pharisees, “If any man’s will is to do his will, he shall know whether the teaching is from God” (Jn 7:17). To be carried out of yourself and “raised to a higher knowledge” by God, you must love God, want God. For He will not come unless He is called. He is a lover, not a tyrant.