Introductory Notes for the Discussion Group for St Clement's at Andrew Day's residence on 23rd February 2024 on the subject of AJ Ayer's statement that:
“If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when he describes it. “
Contemplative Experience.
I will use “contemplative” rather than “mystic” in honour of “Mystic Meg” a News of the World sub editor and later astrologer associated with predicting things about National Lottery winners (which I am told, were rarely accurate!)
I am going to start with describing some tiny portions of the experiences of contemplatives and will then go on to deal with AJ Ayer's objections. I shall leave a few seconds before I identify each quotation to allow people to think about each quotation and possibly its source.
“After this I looked, and behold, a door was opened in heaven...” Revelations 4:1
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d...
The World HENRY VAUGHAN 1621 - 1695
This seems to be a description of the experience of a timeless moment.
Such moments are experienced by people who may have no particular faith and may or may not seek such moments through prayer. In addition to the distortion of time, light or fires, such experiences are described as totally absorbing, wondrous, often including bouts of great happiness or joy, they including feelings of love towards others or at least the presence of another with whom they are united and sometimes a feeling of immortality.
“How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for man to utter.”. That is St Paul apparently referring to himself in the third person in II Corinthians 12-4 about an experience that occurred a decade or so before.
I always think that anything can happen within a stone's throw of St Clement's whether it is scientific, philosophical or religious. Here is a student of Peterhouse in 1913, in his shabby room with a red shaded light on the table and a fire in the grate: “...the room was filled by a presence, which in a strange way was both without me and within me, like light or warmth. I was overwhelmingly possessed by someone who was not myself, and yet I felt I was more myself than I had ever been. I was filled by an intense happiness, and almost unbearable joy, such as I had never known before and have never known since And overall was a deep feeling of peace and security and certainty.” The experienced lasted until the following afternoon.
Fredrick Crossfield Happold tells of three such experiences, one in his room at Peterhouse, another whilst waiting to lead troops forward from trenches in the first world war and a third during the birth of his first child. I use the example of Happold because he later wrote a book entitled Mysticism in which he relates his experience but in a very modest way, so that it took me time to realise that one particular chapter was the author relating his experiences of the eternal moment. Happold manifests the reality that people who have had experience of a timeless moment may be profoundly affected by it.
Such states may last from a few minutes to many hours and can change the trajectory of people's lives.
From my brief and totally inadequate review of contemplative writings there seem to be at least five essential descriptives. They are Wind, Water, Cloud, Love, and Quiet – that still small voice.
The Wind
As it is Lent let us start with the wind in the desert...being born again
“ The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” This is one of the great descriptions of the ineffable action of the Holy Spirit and it comes from John 3:8.
The epithet: “the desert where there is nothing but the presence of God.” That is how the desert is described in the profane Arabic tales as The Thousand Nights and One Night. The desert is a clean sheet for the human soul. It should be no surprise that Jesus spent time in the desert, sorting himself out before the start of his ministry. Everything was possible and the worldly temptation presented to him by the Devil, especially earthly power, power over others, were a manifestation of those possibilities. Instead Jesus decided to take another road.
Here is the start of one of the great contemplative revelations:
“...as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.” Ezekial 1:1.
“And I looked and, behold a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire unfolding itself, and a brightness was about it and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.” This is Ezekial 1:5
Then we have in the valley of the dry bones, “Prophesy to the breath; prophesy, son of man, and say to it, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: Come, breath, from the four winds and breathe into these slain, that they may live. 10 So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath entered them; they came to life and stood up on their feet—a vast army.” Ezekial 37
Water
At the end of the book of Ezekial the temple has been measured out by the man in the linen suit with a measuring rod and built. By the time we get to Chapter 47 Ezekial tell us that from under the threshold of the temple comes a steadily deepening stream of water running towards the east, full of fish with trees on either side...
Perhaps the greatest of all visions described by a contemplative is The Revelation of St John the Divine– all 22 chapters of it. Despite the series of rich and portentous vision there is continuity too. It is as if the river of water that Ezekial describes which flows from the threshold of the Temple has gone underground in 600 BC to emerge again in AD 86 or so, when John, the writer of the book of Revelation, sets out his final vision of Jerusalem in which the writer is carried away to a high mountain by an angel “21:10 And in the spirt he carried me away to a great, high mountain and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God... 22:1 Then the angel showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal proceeding out of the throne of the Lamb 2 In the midst of the street of it and on either side of the river was there the tree of life which bare twelve manner of fruits and yielded fruits every month.
Teresa of Avila uses the analogy of water too. She says that starting on the contemplative life is a slow business and hard work much like pulling water up from a well and carrying it by hand to water the garden. It slowly becomes easier like having a water wheel which produces a stream of water to water the garden and finally she likens the abundance of awareness of God (specifically of Christ) to abundant rain falling effortlessly upon the garden. Teresa had reached the enviable state where she was aware of the presence of Christ beside here at all times, whatever she was doing. Is her awareness a deviation from orthodox views of the Trinity?
Cloud.
Then there is cloud: Moses disappeared into the cloud on Mt Sinai to see God's back and to bring back the law. He only saw God's back because seeing God in all his glory would have destroyed him, burnt him up, as in the classical tradition, Semele was burnt up after having been bedded by Zeus she demanded to see him in all his glory. The Cloud of Unknowing, an instruction manual written by an unknown 14th century priest for an unknown pupil is one of the greatest pieces of contemplative writing and it uses the cloud as a metaphor for the difficulty we have in comprehending, describing and drawing nearer to God.
Love.
“Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners.” Song of Songs 6: 10
We humans are selfish creatures but sexual love allows, or perhaps compels us, to extend love and compassion to others in ordinary life and this ability has been an important element in the experience and teaching of contemplatives as we can extend compassion towards others. St John of the Cross and Dante have very different writings based on the idea of Love.
Dante's unrequited love for Beatrice is the focus of his Divine Comedy, a description of his journey through hell, the inferno then out to the mountain of purgatory all guided by the soul of classical writer Vergil, finally into the Earthly Paradise where he meets the soul of Beatrice who takes him up to the Empyrion itself and a vision of God.
Dante describes his escape through a tunnel from the Stygian gloom, “the dead air” and ice cold of the bottommost circle of hell where he has just seen Satan chained into the ice. He emerges into the sunlight of a lovely Earthly morning back into the light to describe the sky,“Dolce color d’oriental zaffiro” the colour of Oriental sapphire. He has escaped back to “the beautiful planet that induces us to love” Lo bel pianeto che d’amar conforta. This sudden freedom speaks of the quality of a profound spiritual, contemplative, experience.
As Beatrice leads him upwards the force of her love becomes more intense such that as they approach the Hyperion she no longer smiles at him so that he does not burn up as Semele did after she demanded to see Zeus in all his glory. Finally he meets the soul of St Bernard who tells him to look upwards to the centre where God is.
"From that point on what I saw was in excess
Of anything that words can say, while
Even the memory falters at such overplus.
Like someone who sees something in his dreams
And waking finds the passion that it roused
Is with him still, though nothing seen remains,
Just so am I: my vision is in flight,
While all the sweetness that was born of it
Remains with me distilled into my heart..."
Paradise Canto XXX 55-63 J.G. Nichols [Trans]
John of the Cross, writings are very complex. He was inspired by the Song of Songs. He wrote contemplative or mystical verses and then wrote very terse commentary upon his verses full of descriptions of purgation, pain and spiritual difficulties but he also works through negative or apophatic theology. As with Dante there is the description of liberation in contemplative experience, of being freed from the cold grip of the desolation that life can sometimes be. Here is one of his poems from Dark Night of the Soul:
John's commentary on his poem the Ascent of Mount Carmel expresses the play between todo, everything and nada, nothing made famous by allusions to them in TS Eliot's poem East Coker.
In order to arrive at pleasure in everything you must seek pleasure in nothing,
In order to arrive at possessing everything you must seek to possess nothing,
In order to arrive at being everything you must seek to be nothing,
In order to arrive at knowing everything you must seek to to know nothing,
In order to arrive at that in which you pleasure, you must go by a way in which there is no pleasure.
In order to arrive at that which you do not know, you must go by a way you do not know.
In order to arrive at that which you do not possess, you must go by way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not.
From Brenan, Gerald 1973, St John of the Cross; His Life and Poetry. CUP.
This contains a reference to 2 Corinthians 10 “having nothing yet possessing all things”.
Quiet.
“9.
He
makes wars to cease
to
the ends of the earth.
He
breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he
burns the shields with fire.
10.
He
says, “Be still, and know that I am God;
I will be
exalted among the nations,
I will be exalted in the earth.”
Psalm 46
And of course there is Elijah's experience, God was not in the wind, or the earthquake, or in the fire but in the still small voice so beautifully celebrated in Hayden's oratorio of the same name. (1 King's 19)
AJ Ayer and His Delusions.
Now to look at AJ Ayer (1910 to 1989). Famous for his book Language Truth and Logic 1936 produced when he was aged only 26 years. This book was a full frontal attack on metaphysics, the area of philosophy that includes consideration of religious meaning. In his introduction Ayer writes:
“We may begin by criticizing the metaphysical thesis that philosophy affords us knowledge of a reality transcending the world of science and common sense. Later on, when we come to define metaphysics and account for its existence, we shall find that it is possible to be a metaphysician without believing in a transcendent reality; for we shall see that many metaphysical utterances are due to the commission of logical errors, rather than to a conscious desire on the part of their authors to go beyond the limits of experience. “
In the same vein Ayer entitles chapter 1 .”The Elimination of Metaphysics. So we might ask how Ayer arrived at his philosophical position.
Thanks to a book by Nikhil Krishnan, a fellow of Robinson College entitled “A Terribly Serious Adventure; Philoophy at Oxford 1900 to 1960. Ayer's philosophical progress can be traced' The main drift of Krishnan's book is a philosophical progress away from metaphysics (which includes religious ideas) towards empiricism and the scientific method which took place between 1900 and 1960.
Ayer started off discovering Moore's Principia Ethica 1903 ,and accepted for a time its most famous thesis that “goodness is a real quality but undetectable by scientists.”' He then embraced the more demanding position described in Bertrand Russel's Sceptical Essays 1924 “ That 'it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true” That of course is a good reason for embracing empiricism and specifically the scientific method.
Unfortunately Ayer was subsequently embraced first by Wittgenstein's Tractatus
“What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” (from the Introduction)
Of course it raises the question “is one allowed to be noisy about how we decide if we can or cannot speak about it? Ayer subsequently decided to go to Vienna and join the Vienna circle of philosophers in 1936 and became a major promoter of the circles main interest – logical positivism. This is an extreme form of empiricism which asserts the verification principal “the denial of literal or cognitive meaning to any statement that is not verifiable.” (Simon Blackburn 1996 Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.) That of course renders most of our everyday thoughts, interactions and conclusions invalid and was weaponised by Ayer against God and specifically “God talk”. He also wrote a paper entitled “God-talk is evidently nonsense”. But it is in Language Truth and Logic that we find the attack on the mystic and the contemplative life:
“But if one allows that it is impossible to define God in intelligible terms, then one is allowing that it is impossible for a sentence both to be significant and to be about God. If a mystic admits that the object of his vision is something which cannot be described, then he must also admit that he is bound to talk nonsense when be describes it.” P76
Yet his statement about the mystic is tautological, he is basically saying that if something cannot be described then it cannot be described. But Ayer loved tautology and, following Kant, believed that tautological propositions, or “a priori propositions” as he called them, were the only true propositions.
Language Truth and Logic, also caused a great deal of controversy and debate in the years immediately after its publication, not only for its sweeping dismissal of metaphysics, but for the metaethical emotivism that Ayer championed. He claimed ethical concepts are pseudo-concepts and therefore unanalysable.” (Chapter 5, p. 81).
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy describes Emotivism as “a meta-ethical view … that claims that ethical sentences do not express propositions but instead express emotional attitudes. Hence, it is colloquially known as the “hurrah/boo theory”. “Influenced by the growth of analytical philosophy and logical positivism in the 20th century”
Ayer's insistence on the emotional nature of ethical statements makes one wonder if that is the result of his first wife's reaction to his philandering and perhaps his philosophy blinded him, or perhaps we should say it shielded him from, the ethical realities of deception and betrayal which are inherent in such behaviour. Surely the statement “adulterers betray their marriage vows” is a perfectly clear ethical proposition and is even the sort of tautology that would have appealed to Ayre?
His ideas come from a time and a place where the cafes of Vienna were being visited by groups of young men wearing Swastika arm bands.
So to return from our brief excursion into metaethical emotivism, I would like to assert that Ayer's real tragedy is that he failed to follow his own philosophy because he neglected to attempt to verify his statements. There is no evidence that he ever read any of the contemplatives. If he had done so he would have realised that most contemplatives do not attempt to describe the indescribable but instead acknowledge that it is beyond the capacity of the human intellect or at least the intellect of the contemplative describing his experience.
So despite Ayer embracing a very extreme philosophy of logical positivism which demands that that things are only true if one can show evidence for them, and furthermore, only have meaning if there was evidence for them, he failed in the elementary procedure of ascertaining that “mystics” attempted to describe something that they acknowledged cannot be described. In doing so he managed to mock both mystics and positivism not to mention ideas on the meaning of meaning too.
Problems understanding Contemplatives Texts.
Reading texts written by contemplatives is fraught with difficulty. Many were written in other languages and long ago. So the meaning of words such as: will, soul, spirit, intellect, recollection, mind, conscious mind, imagination are difficult to interpret. That is especially relevant in dealing with Teresa of Avila who wrote extensively about her life and especially about contemplative experience. Nevertheless some contemplative texts evade time and the evolution of of language and are very clear.
One such example is The Cloud of Unknowing written circa 1370. The evidence that this man is not describing something he cannot describe is in the title itself. As one approaches a knowledge of God one enters the cloud. In fact the unknown author deals with the matter directly in Chapter 4 of The Cloud:
“All rational beings, angels and men, possess two faculties, the power of knowing and the poser of loving. To the first, to the intellect, God who made them is forever unknowable , but to the second, to love, he is completely knowable and that by every separate individual.” (The Cloud of Unknowing, Clifton Wolters Trans, Penguin 1961.)
Meaning and Life?.
Statements of contemplatives may have meaning in the profoundest sense if they give human beings a framework of beliefs about the world that allow us to focus our energies and attention on fulfilling objectives which make life seem worthwhile and the human endeavour worthy of pursuit. This definition of meaning may be essentially subjective but is that not where meaning lies?
I would present as an example the concept of kenosis as set out in this passage
“Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: 6Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: 7But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: 8And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. 9Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name: 10That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; 11And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” Philippians 2:5-11
This statement is especially relevant to the present season of Lent.Is this not a statement that is full of meaning for Christian and non Christian alike?
What do you think?
Additional Note 1: A description of AJ Ayer's near death experience.
What I Saw When I was Dead. The Sunday Telegraph (28th August 1988),
“The only memory that I have of an experience, closely encompassing my death, is very vivid.
I was confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint. A further consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should. I felt that it was up to me to put things right. I also had the motive of finding a way to extinguish the painful light. I assumed that it was signaling that space was awry and that it would switch itself off when order was restored. Unfortunately, I had no idea where the guardians of space had gone and feared that even if I found them I should not be able to communicate with them. It then occurred to me that whereas, until the present century, physicists accepted the Newtonian severance of space and time, it had become customary, since the vindication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, to treat space-time as a single whole. Accordingly, I thought that I could cure space by operating upon time. I was vaguely aware that the ministers who had been given charge of time were in my neighbourhood and I proceeded to hail them. I was again frustrated. Either they did not hear me, or they chose to ignore me, or they did not understand me. I then hit upon the expedient of walking up and down, waving my watch, in the hope of drawing their attention not to my watch itself but to the time which it measured. This elicited no response. I became more and more desperate, until the experience suddenly came to an end.
This experience could well have been delusive. A slight indication that it might have been veridical [objectively real] has been supplied by my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent a heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it had been like, she replied that all that she remembered was that she must stay close to the red light.”*
Q. Do contemplatives and mystics get a green light?
Additional Note 2. Analytic vs Synthetic statements.
Ayer was obsessed with analytic and synthetic propositions, ideas which he inherited from Kant. “Analytic statements are ones where the concept of the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject. “All Brothers are Male” is an example. Synthetic statements are not so and which is therefore apt for providing substantial information.” (Blackburn, Simon 1969 Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy OUP 418pp).
PM Cambridge 04/03/2024
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