Contemplative Prayer: A New Framework by David Foster

Author:David Foster [Foster, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781408187128
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-07T04:00:00+00:00

5

Knowing and Unknowing

Discussions of contemplative prayer have generally affirmed that contemplation is, however mysteriously, a way of growing in the knowledge and love of God. As a personal relationship between the human being and God, this relationship involves more than our minds; it is a thing that engages us, heart and soul – body and spirit too. This is all a way of saying that faith is more than just a rational act, in the sense of being only a matter of logic and propositions. One of the strengths of the so-called traditional framework was the place given to the intellect as an intuitive and non-discursive power, and even, influenced by Plato, of erotic love.

This understanding of the mind was lost in the story I have outlined, and the possibility of knowing God, and of faith, as an intelligent response of love to love, needs to be retrieved in a very different intellectual environment. The path I have been trying to pick out is, paradoxically, one that starts from the disorientating experience of loss of meaning, a blank, where thinking comes to a stop.1 But in thinking out what might be going on there, I find that the knowing, in some way, still carries on. A different approach to rationality is called for, that is, addressing a new starting point for knowing. Obviously, what distinguishes religious faith at this point is the particular way in which a person finds that understanding has dawned.

The approach I have taken owes much to people who have been critical of the presiding rationalism of Descartes or the Enlightenment. Pascal, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, on the other hand, put the emphasis on faith, and emphasize the paradox in faith, the place of commitment and trust, the sheer freedom of the will rather than reason. They have often been seen as irrationalist. Nietzsche, obviously, as an atheist, thought faith was irrational but, more than that, argued that the will (to power) was the foundation for a necessary revaluation of values in order to exorcize God from his position in thought. Heidegger is interesting because he connects a critique of rationalism with the search for a new way of thinking about being, a new starting point for awareness.

The implication of the path taken so far is that contemplation now has to be approached in terms of human finitude. It cannot, as simply as in the past, be assumed to be the basis for a transcendence of the material and human to the spiritual and divine. Absolute reality is no longer so readily accessible an idea. A term that serves the purpose well here is that of ‘unknowing’. It comes from the English text The Cloud of Unknowing, and its anonymous author finds it in the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. It is a cognitive relation, but in a unique way, which this chapter attempts to explore. It is to be contrasted to other positions that assert, for instance, that all language about God is necessarily a human construction and is ultimately about ourselves.

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