THE NOONDAY OF EAST AND WEST

by Bruno Barnhart, OSB Cam

Alright then, let us suppose that Jesus is the 'noonday of history,' between the morning light of the East and the afternoon or evening light of the West. The Christian fathers sometimes wrote of 'morning knowledge' and 'evening knowledge' —as, for instance, divine contemplation and the understanding of created things. This powerful metaphor fits well the contrasting modes of consciousness that characterize the venerable Asian religious traditions and the swiftly evolving modern West: wisdom and science, contemplation and rationality, unitive consciousness and empiricism.

The same duality, in fact, can be found between the Christian tradition in the West—say until 1200—and the later secular western tradition. The Russian sociologist Pitirim Sorokin contrasted the two types of consciousness as "ideational" (equivalent to 'spiritual') and "sensate." He found the two alternating in the course of history, with a third "idealistic" culture—like that of the early Renaissance—between them, combining the traits of both. Sorokin sees this shape repeating itself in one culture after another, in one area of human accomplishment after another.

The shape of this cycle of history is that of a parabola or a mountain - recalling figures that can be seen dimly through the shifting mists of biblical history - not only the mountains of Sinai and Tabor but dramatic rise and fall of narratives: the story of Saul and David and Solomon, the narrative of Jesus' own life in the gospels. On the crest of the mountain is a revelation of two-sided 'identity' —simultaneously of God and of the human person, anticipated by the revelation of the Name to Moses at the foot of "Horeb, the mountain of God." (Exodus 3)

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In Jesus, the 'morning light' which is the Divine Word (cf Jn 1:1-5,9) has "become flesh" (Jn 1:14), so that the Divine Wisdom is newly present within bodily human beings in history. Further, this descending dynamic of Incarnation becomes the form of a new history—and a new 'evening light': the light of human rationality that gradually brings into existence a human world. We can see this humanizing process in the evolution of the western sense of the person, of justice, of human rights and human potential in this world, as well as in the still more 'material' flourishing of science and technology in the West.

The same parabolic form appears in the life of Jesus himself, as he grows from childhood to the epiphany of his baptism by John in the Jordan river, to the noonday of the Galilean ministry, the multiplication of bread and fishes for the crowds, the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor; then begins the descent toward his passion and death. Jesus' first lesson to his disciples is the 'ascending' illumination of his divine identity; his second and more difficult teaching is the way of the cross—of descent—which is inseparable from this identity. The same way of ascent and descent—from baptismal birth to eucharistic death, is to be walked by the disciples.

This figure can be seen clearly in the central section of Mark's Gospel (the first of the gospels to be written, retaining in its brevity a 'paradigmatic' form), from Mk 8:27 to 10:45 - framed by the two healings of blind men. First Jesus asks the disciples, "Who do people say that I am? . . . Who do you say that I am?" Peter responds eagerly, "You are the Christ." This is the upward movement, the great revelation of the identity of Jesus—within which is implicit the new divine identity of the human person. Then immediately Jesus begins the second lesson, telling his disciples that he must suffer, be rejected by the Jewish leaders, be killed and rise again. Peter, perhaps still aglow with the unutterable inner glory out of which he had proclaimed Jesus to be the Christ, "began to rebuke him"—this can never happen to you! And Jesus, in turn, rebukes Peter, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are not on the side of God, but of men." (8:33). Then Jesus repeats the difficult lesson for the others: "If anyone would come after me, let that one deny himself, take up his cross and follow me , , ,"

And then quickly Jesus and his three disciples ascend "a high mountain by themselves" where they see him transfigured. The revelation of the crest is that of the divinity of Jesus—and of the human person in Jesus. Matthew tells us, "his face shone like the sun" (17:2). The Light itself, become a human person. is unveiled for a moment in its freedom. (See 2 Cor 3-4.) In this momentary epiphany, it is as if the whole ascending evolution of life and the whole history of human development rises to its towering sunlit crest and then, like every wave upon the shore of earthly reality, turns and descends to collapse. The three disciples, we can imagine, having known within their own bodies the uncreated Light, are certain - for the moment - that nothing in the endless train of negations that challenge human life will overcome this one great 'yes'—the light of resurrection within them.

As the four descend the mountain, returning to the murky plain of ordinary human life, Jesus tells the three disciples once again that he must suffer and die and then rise again. The lesson will be repeated once more, with particular forcefulness, at the end of this central section of Mark, when James and John, still completely uncomprehending Jesus' 'word of the cross,' ask "to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory." They and the other disciples are told that the way of Jesus—and of those who follow him—is precisely the opposite of their ambitious program. The way is that of descent. (Mk 10:35-45) This is the inner law of the new divine-human identity: from the illumination in which one awakens to this identity one is impelled to the descent which is embodiment, incarnation. The sequence had been foreshadowed by Jesus' baptism followed by his temptation in the desert (Mk 1:9-13). In the Gospels of Matthew (ch. 4) and Luke (ch. 4), we are told how Jesus himself was confronted by Satan (the two occurrences of this name in Mark are not accidental) with a choice between two ways: the 'divine' way of power and the 'human' way of obedience. The figure of Jesus' earthly life will be completed in his passion and death, when the seed will fall into the ground to bring forth an immeasurable harvest. (cf John 12: 20-26, where Jesus responds to the same challenge with this simile of the seed, the ground and the harvest.)

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The peoples and the church of the West have a strange and unique role to fulfill in the historical progression from the Christ-event to the advent of a 'world church' (which Karl Rahner saw appearing in the Second Vatican Council¹ ) and a global humanity. It is not surprising, therefore, that the same drama of morning, noon and evening be visible in our western history. In the late middle ages, for a century or two, Europe was unified within the matrix of Catholic faith, and at the same time there began a swift unfolding of the full potential of the human person C the fullness manifested in each of its various dimensionsm in a Francis of Assisi, a Thomas Aquinas, a Meister Eckhart, a Dante Alighieri—before the fragile equilibrium was broken and the process of differentiation and division prevailed, leading to the fragmentation of our modern western culture. That brief medieval 'noonday' was not the attainment of a perfect church or society, nor was it something that we can return to. Yet, reflecting the original moment of Incarnation, it was a revelation of human fullness that continues to shed its manifold light upon us. The 'English version'—decisively cut loose from its religious moorings and expanding freely into a new world—can be experienced in the plays of Shakespeare.

Looking back over the past two thousand years of western history in the most simplistic way, one can imagine that the first millennium - the 'Age of Unity' - was ruled by the morning light of monastic contemplation and the second millennium - the 'Age of Autonomy' - by the afternoon or evening light of human rationality. During the brief noonday between those two slopes, contemplation and conceptual reason were held together in a fertile interaction. It was the 'metaphysical moment' of the West in which the divine light shone forth at the center of the human person and, simultaneously, the person awakened to its freedom and to the autonomy and unlimited scope of its reasoning power. It was the moment when Aquinas captured the intuition of Being in his philosophical language and when Eckhart penetrated in his experience and his thought to the nuclear truth of nonduality. It was probably then that our western tradition attained its highest development of that 'perennial philosophy' that Bede Griffiths found at the heart of all the great religious traditions.

In the interior morning light that shone brightly before that time, the monastic theologians can be imagined climbing a spiritual ladder toward the contemplative realization of divine union. An expression of this mode of consciousness is Guigo II's "ladder of contemplatives," by which the spiritual person ascends from lectio to meditatio and then to oratio and finally to contemplatio—that is, from reading the Scriptures to reflection on the word of revelation, then to the ascent of the heart towards God and finally to the repose of divine union. Parallel to this is the scheme of the "four senses of Scripture," ascending from the literal or historical meaning of the word through an "allegorical" (theological or Christological) level of meaning and a personalizing "tropological" sense to arrive finally at the "anagogical" sense which is to be understood either as the final Kingdom of God or as the experience of unitive contemplation. The ascent and its sequel are played out in the historical evolution of western consciousness.

The divine union or contemplative experience, which culminates both of these ascending ladders, marks the metaphysical crest of our figure, which is the profound awakening of the human person—equivalent to the 'discovery of the Self (Atman)' which Bede Griffiths found at the heart of the Hindu spiritual traditions. From the perspective of the morning, this is the unitive experience of God or of the divine Self, beyond the phenomenal world. From the perspective of the New Testament, this is simply the bursting forth of baptismal illumination and the new divine identity which is given in Christ. From the perspective of the evening, this illumination and this transcendent identity have been eclipsed by the sovereign light of human rationality, and the contemplative realizations of an earlier age are rationally 'deconstructed' to become examples of primitive consciousness. We can see this happening in Auguste Comte's scheme of the evolution of consciousness from "theological" to "metaphysical" to "positive" (or scientific, rational-empirical: for Comte the most valid mode of knowledge).

After noonday, then, we watch western philosophy begin its swift descent into the earthly knowledge that is our modern empirical science. While secular scholars are inclined to 'write off' the earlier period as a time of sterility, monastic thinkers, shocked by the apparent 'eclipse of wisdom' in the modern West, have often been led to dismiss the modern developments as the sinister—or at best ambiguous and largely futile—fruits of an abandonment of Truth. The stakes in this controversy are very high, and either of these heavy-handed judgments is too costly.

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The challenge to a new Christian theology is to bring forth the continuity, the meaning and the direction of this history, and so to 'save' both the morning light and the evening light of our western tradition. When we have expressed the problem in these terms, perhaps we have come half-way toward a solution. At least we know where it is to be found— in Jesus Christ, who is the perennial Noonday between the morning 'Eastern' light and the late 'Western' light. He is the Word or Wisdom of God—itself divine and the source of the created world, according to the New Testament—who has become an embodied human being: The Word became flesh. . .

Joachim of Fiore (+1202) schematized history in three phases: an Age of the Father (or of the Law), an Age of the Son (or of the Gospel), and an Age of the Holy Spirit which was to begin, he calculated, in the year 1260 - the time of our 'crest' of western history. While history has not borne out Joachim's prediction of a dawning age of contemplatives (his third age, of the Spirit), the trinitarian scheme is not completely unconvincing. After all, it is not difficult to see it unfolding within the New Testament itself—just imagine John the Baptist marking the conclusion of the Age of the Father and John the Beloved Disciple initiating the Age of the Spirit.

Can, then, the three phases of our present scheme be interpreted in terms of these three Ages? I believe that it can. Think of the Age of the Father as an era in which the divine Absolute, Source of the Universe, dwells on a metaphysical level completely transcending world and humanity, but can be experienced at the apex of the human spirit—even to the extent that the human person realizes the Absolute as its own ultimate identity (Atman), human personality disappearing into the undetermined Source. Think of the Age of the Son as that in which the Divinity 'comes forth' into world and humanity in such a way that the human person attains the perfection of its 'form' in this world, in a single human person: that is, Jesus Christ. Now imagine the Age of the Spirit as the time in which this fullness of divine-human union (or Incarnation) is realized multiply, in an ever-increasing number of human persons, and in which human persons awaken to the divine freedom (or spirit) as their own autonomy. Through the first toward the second Age, humanity (in its advanced representatives) follows an ascending path toward Divinity. From the second through the third Age, the divine gift descends from its one perfect and archetypical realization into multiple realizations, to continue its widening incarnational descent into all of humanity.

The 'parabola' which is described by these three Ages is like the parabola of organic life, rising from birth to maturity and then declining to death. Following the event of Christ, this figure takes on a new magnitude: this augmentation is what we see particularly in the development of the West, with its worldwide repercussions during the past five hundred years. While Joachim would certainly not have recognized this history as corresponding to his "Age of the Spirit"— nor would Roman Catholic ecclesiastical authorities—the captivity and exile of Israel and the rejection, passion and death of Christ were similarly shocking to the theological minds of their times. Our human rationality does not understand descent and its transformations; slowly and with great difficulty do we learn the lesson of Incarnation. Perhaps the dawn of the Age of the Spirit is the sunset of our usual reasoning, as Jesus seems to imply in his words to Nicodemus, the "teacher in Israel": "The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit." (John 3:8) Perhaps, as we might infer from Bede's suggestions, the Holy Spirit as "Divine Feminine" presides over this incarnational descent and our understanding of it.

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We have already seen, however, that the history of our western world confronts us not only with darkness but with the ascent of a new light. In the noonday light of embodied Divinity, there is a 'chemistry,' an energy of transmutation. The light itself, taking on flesh, becomes something new; human reason takes on something of the reach and power of the Logos. Wonders surpassing the miracles of divine power that accompanied Israel in its beginnings come about through the human mind and human efforts—now that the divine Mind has entered into humanity and into the human mind. But the 'mental' level that is most accessible to us is only the upper surface of this incarnational process which is continually descending deeper than our consciousness and our thought.

Incarnation is a "transcendental" principle of Christian theology, which permeates it at every level and every point. The principle goes beyond visible Christianity, however, to generate the secular world of the modern West. The birth of this secular world out of its Christian matrix involves a second principle as well, that of Autonomy. This principle too bursts forth at the late medieval crest of our western intellectual history, in the insight of Thomas Aquinas. The metaphysical liberation of God from the 'great chain of being' —from the mesh of concepts and images—is simultaneously the liberation of the human person from its umbilical cord of slavish dependency on God, to awaken to its own inner potential and generativity. Such is the explosive noonday of our western story, reproducing the noonday of Easter and Pentecost.

Silent, in unchallenged majesty, the sun blazes in its sky, free and unsupported, life-giving gravitational center of our world. This lion-like lord of physical reality is the image of a metaphysical Sun—the nondual Absolute discovered by the ancient sages of the East: Brahman-Atman-Purusha. In the middle of this twofold kingdom, something new happens. Between the metaphysical sun and the physical sun arises a third: the embodied divine sun which is Jesus Christ—in whom the metaphysical and the physical have become one—not in a heavenly body but in an earthly, human body. This is the event which becomes the luminous center of history, giving place and meaning to human events.

Irenaeus saw that in the Christ-event, God had entered into the natural form of earthly reality, which he imagined as quaternary: to the four elements of ancient science, to the four winds and the four directions of the earth correspond the four gospels and the figure of the cross. Our christocentric interpretation makes a parallel assertion about historical process, borrowing Sorokin's empirical scheme of three phases. In the event of Christ, God enters into the natural shape of organic life: each plant, animal and human person evolves from birth through a process of growth to its flowering and fruit-bearing, then to decline and finally return to the earth from which it came. We find this parabolic trajectory in the history of Israel, in the life of Jesus and in our own lives. With the appearance of Jesus at the center of history, however, the descending path takes on a new significance as the embodiment of Divinity—and of a cascading descent of divine light and energies into the world to create a new, human world and a single humanity. This 'eucharistic' destiny is, I believe, the inner meaning of the disconcerting history of the modern West, where God is to be found everywhere, anonymous and disguised, bringing the human person to life from within itself and awakening us to our common humanity.

The great gift of Bede Griffiths has been to recover the morning light of the East and to communicate it to his fellow westerners. During his later years, turning again to the West, he encountered there a scientific rationality that was beginning to awaken to that morning light, as if within itself. The missing element in contemporary attempts to bridge the gap between nondual "Asian wisdom" and Western science, however, may well be an understanding of western history in the light of the event of Christ. It is likely that the 'marriage of East and West' is to be found, ultimately, in the event of Incarnation through which the human person gradually awakens to the nondual divine light as its ultimate 'identity,' and awakens to the divine power within itself as its own generative freedom, to create a human world. Bede's courageous embrace of all reality from his firm standpoint of Christian faith signaled, I believe, a fresh appearance, in our time, of the single noonday light that shines from East to West, from antiquity into our present and future.

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Notes:

1. See Karl Rahner, "Basic Theological Interpretation of the Second Vatican Council," Theological Investigations, vol 20, pp 77-89.

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