The masters of this genre—Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius, John the Scot Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa—one might say, were experts at saying nothing, and they did this in ways that do not fit the simple alternatives of atheism or theism. They would challenge every- one who claims to know God, as Eckhart puts it: “A master says: if anyone thinks that he has known God . . . he does not know God.”15 Or with Aquinas: “The ultimate point of the human knowledge of God is to know that we don’t know God.”16 To say the very least, mystical theology is a threat to all who are certain and confident in their understanding. To the dismay of atheists, it remains part of a tradition of religion and spirituality, and to the disappointment of theists, it radically contests and threatens all systems of theology. Nicholas of Cusa calls it “learned ignorance”: “According to negative theology, infinity is all we discover in God. . . . In the shadows of our ignorance shines incomprehensibly the truth. . . . That, then, is the learned ignorance for which we have been searching.”17
In modern times, I love Fernando Pessoa’s description of the peculiar position of mystical language in both affirming “God” and denying “God”—or rather, beyond both: “Every sound mind believes in God. No sound mind believes in a definite God. There is some being, both real and impossible, who reigns over all things and whose person (if he has one) cannot be defined, and whose purposes (if he has any) cannot be fathomed. By calling this being God we say everything, since the word God—having no precise meaning—affirms him without saying anything. The attributes of infinite, eternal, omnipotent, all-just or all-loving that we sometimes attach to him fall off by themselves, like all unnecessary adjectives when the noun suffices.”18 For Pessoa, God is this slippery and unfathomable name, on which all adjectives slide off and cannot hold. We embrace the name God the way a bird embraces and gathers the wind beneath its wings, helping it rise, keeping it aloft. And yet the wind falls through and away from the bird’s grasp, never settling and confining itself to this one creature. Mystical speech is something like this, a confession of faith in a name without precise meaning, indefinite and impossible, and yet with the power to bear the soul into ethereal heights. For the mystics, faith is this journey to the unfathomable other that we affirm without saying anything.
For its daring and eccentric discourse, mystical theology has proved alluring to a wide variety of contemporary intellectuals. Called one of the “greatest audacities of discourse in Western thought” by Jacques Derrida, apophatic theology is oddly familiar to deconstruction: “This apophatic boldness always consists in going further than is reasonably permitted. That is one of the essential traits of all negative theology: passing to the limit, then crossing a frontier, including that of a community, thus of a sociopolitical, institutional, ecclesial reason or raison d’être. . . . This thought seems strangely familiar to the experience of what is called deconstruction.”19 In this way, apophasis crosses all kinds of frontiers and behaves like an illegal immigrant in its audacious and transgressive ways, walking across borders with all kinds of wild hopes and dreams. Heedless of human laws, apophasis follows higher, transcendent laws, like justice or God, but whatever the case, we know for sure that it wants to go farther than anyone thought possible.
It is true that mystics must speak and interrupt their preferred condition of silence, but they do so with metaphors suggestive of silence or emptiness—hence, their affection for bare metaphors like the desert, nothingness, the One, and so forth. Whether their language is reticent or profuse, they are indicating the inexpressible the way a nightingale’s song indicates the night. Take the case of the desert: for Derrida, the image of the desert illustrates “negative theology,” with the absolute aridity of the desert serving as his metaphor for the aridity and barrenness of apophasis. As a perfect image of divine nothingness or emptiness, the desert is an apophatic image par excellence, one that describes the barrenness of all our intellectual and cognitive presuppositions about the unknown. In bare and unadorned beauty, the desert is an icon of anti-iconic art like Islamic calligraphy. Apophasis, in this sense, is a “desertification” of language, a kenosis of discourse. “‘God’ is the name,” Derrida writes, “of this bottomless collapse, of this endless desertification of language.”20 Mystical theology, he tells us, is literature for the desert and for exile: “This literature forever elliptical, taciturn, cryptic, obstinately withdrawing, however, from all literature, inaccessible there even where it seems to go, the exasperation of a jealousy, that passion carried beyond itself; this would seem to be a literature for the desert or for exile.”21
With a focus on the New World, I will defend this claim throughout this study and insist on the relevance of mystical theology—this cryptic passion carried beyond itself, as Derrida puts it—for the desert and exile. For centuries, Jewish and Christian mystics made the desert their home and went there to retrace the wandering steps of the Israelites. For many of them—Philo of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius, for instance—Moses was their spiritual guide through the vast and perilous lands of the desert; and if they had any hopes of achieving wisdom, they knew it would be nothing more than what Moses got, a glimpse of God hidden by a dark cloud or burning bush. The narratives of exile and divine hiddenness shaped their mystical theologies.
Take the remarkable case of Dante’s mysticism of exile, for instance. Though Dante is narrating a mystical journey of the soul to God in The Divine Comedy, the poem is also haunted by the personal exigencies and terrors of Dante’s own desert experience of exile from his beloved Florence. When Dante writes of the character Romeo, for instance—an infamous wanderer exiled in the thirteenth century from the courts of Provence—he surely has himself in mind:
Romeo, proudly, old and poor, departed.
And could the world know what was in his heart
as he went begging, door to door, his bread.22
And when Dante meets his ancestor Cacciaguida, he is told of the agonizing future that will come to him, the heavy weight of exile that he must carry with him until the end of his days:
While I was still in Virgil’s company,
climbing the mountain where the souls are healed,
descending through the kingdom of the dead,
ominous words about my future life
were said to me—the truth is that I feel
my soul foursquare against the blows of chance . . .
As Hippolytus was forced to flee from Athens
by his devious and merciless stepmother,
just so you too shall have to leave your Florence.23
In The Divine Comedy and other writings (the Convivio, De Eloquentia Vulgaria), Dante would not only use language to convey silence like a mystic, but also to convey exile like a prophet, as a voice crying out in the desert.24 It is not surprising, then, that Dante would turn to the biblical narrative of Exodus to make sense of his own refugee condition. Although Dante does not name God with desert language, Israel’s bitter exodus through the desert becomes one of the most important narratives that define the Divine Comedy.25
With this image of the desert before us, we can see why Bernard McGinn insists that the mystics are wrestling with the absence of God as much as presence: “If the modern consciousness of God is often of an absent God (absent though not forgotten for the religious person), many mystics seem almost to have been prophets of this in their intense realization that the ‘real God’ becomes a possibility only when the many false gods (even the God of religion) have vanished and the frightening abyss of total nothingness is confronted.”26 If mysticism entails a confrontation with the abyss of nothingness, as in this description, then it seems