All Shall Be Well

The wisdom of words that come from silence

Job and his accusers, whom William Blake likened to Socrates and his accusers, both men’s silence misunderstood by their fellows.

I recently completed a period as Philosopher in Residence at Broughton Sanctuary. The time was much enhanced by the presence of a Mystic in Residence, too: John Butler. Which led me to ponder the relationship between the two practices.

After all, “mystic” and “philosopher” will be off-putting to many people, implying the exceptional and the inscrutable respectively. But being at Broughton, it was clear that both John and I are drawn by, and towards, something tangible and felt, aided by words and silence.

I thought of Julian of Norwich, a person who devoted her life to both things. Her way wasn’t about odd experiences or strange states of consciousness, though on occasion such things happen. Rather, she sought to establish a sense of the presence of God in the midst of the everyday. Silence and words helped secure that.

In fact, many great mystics, like Meister Eckhart, never write about personal matters, let alone the psychological, but instead evoke an intuitive perception. Even someone like Mother Julian, who had an ecstatic encounter with Jesus during a nearly fatal illness, regarded these brief “showings” as initiating something else: a decades-long theological reflection, leading to her book Revelations of Divine Love – which is surprisingly philosophical when you read it.

Similarly, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing, which is the text that most directly informs my contemplation, repeatedly warns against confusing experiences of any kind with the light of God.

At Broughton, John often talked of “this”, as he raised a cupped hand and then paused. I thought of these spiritual forebears. (Two of our dialogues are online: Presence and Beyond.)

Mystical simply means “hidden”. When an initiate of the ancient mystery religions, perhaps at Elusis, went on the pilgrimage that led to the “mysteries”, they embarked on an encounter with insights that had been obscure, and were now unveiled. The individual had been remade by the grace of a god.

Further, this remaking was also a kind of unmaking. Another modern day mystic, Simone Weil, talks of “decreation” – a kind of unravelling or dissolving of all that is temporal or conditioned in us. These parts of ourselves are not bad but they, typically, block our perception of what another mystic, Annie Dillard, calls “the holy and firm”. With that, the eternal and unconditional becomes clear. “We are created to become uncreated,” Weil knew the Church Fathers taught.

A sense of divine ground transforms everything. The apophatic path, as the decreating process is also called, morphs into the cataphatic: a realisation that all creation is divine. The corresponding process in Indian philosophy is denoted by the words “vedantic” and “tantric”.

Mystics deploy many strategies to indicate this twofold way of negation and clear-sightedness.

John spotted that our time at Broughton drew on the stability that can be found in a historic place, coupled to the mission of living more consciously, not least with nature. The approach is a committed response to modern spiritual decline, in which mystic vision has a key part, too, “an example of aspiring less to teach than to realise – a restoration of first principles – available to all,” John writes.

Mother Julian felt the presence of fragility, famously when she saw in her hand something as tiny as a hazelnut. The object was so small that it could easily fall into non-existence. But before that vulnerability she also perceived that which is unchanging: the love of God.

This explains her best-known line, written in a period that has been called the worst century in which to have lived, given the disquiet that wrecked communities and the plagues that wrecked lives. “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” she affirmed with the clarity of God before her.

Contrast that with modern philosophy that has, for the most part, lost touch with this awareness. It has contracted from the love of wisdom to the fetishisation of reason: words coming from words, not divine silence. As noise tends to do, the approach drains philosophy of vitality and probably lies behind the widespread conviction that philosophy is of little use to most people.

But the philosophical in origin is really synonymous with the mystical: an attunement to the silence of love within which everything can be known. Simon Critchley is one professional philosopher calling for a return of that, as he told me.

“Be oned with and like God in all things”, Mother Julian stressed. From that – with that – everything flows.