Prayers of this sort are common among the mystics and they are synonymous with the experience of wonder, reverence, and awe. When John the Scot Eriugena calls God the “divine desert”—the first to explicitly name God in this way—he was praying in unexpected ways, no longer naming God, but de-nominating, to borrow the language of Marion again.27 He was developing a theology of absence that is awesome in its sparse and vacuous symbolism: “A more profound interpretation understands it (the desert in Exodus) as the desert of the divine nature, an inexpressible height removed from all things. It is ‘deserted’ by every creature, because it surpasses all intellect, although it does not ‘desert’ any intellect.”28 Eriugena’s “divine desert” is equivalent to nothingness or emptiness, but of a peculiar sort, an emptiness that is over-full, a nothingness that is everything, a super-saturated presence that appears as absence. It is neither this nor that. Eriugena takes aim at formlessness the way Jewish or Islamic artists would remain faithful to the prohibitions of image and visual representation (considered idolatry).29
Whether in Eriugena or others, wonder appears frequently as the footprint of their language of unsaying. Eriugena bequeathed this strategy to many others, including the French Beguine mystic Marguerite of Porete when she would consider the nothingness that is God and the nothingness that dwells in the darkest recesses of the human soul: “They are amazed by what is from the top of their mountain, and they are amazed by the same thing which is in the depth of their valley—by a thinking nothing which is shut away and sealed in the secret closure of the highest purity of such an excellent Soul.”30 To be amazed by thinking nothing: perfectly said and perfectly representative of the desertlike apophasis I am pursuing in this book. For many mystics, amazement is the summit of theology and it takes us to inconceivable heights where language falters and where metaphors like “nothingness,” “desert,” “emptiness,” and “nakedness” point us to the other side. When reaching these summits, wonder or related experiences—admiration, awe, reverence—gain in potency as reason begins to falter and the mystic loses her mind and ego in the arms of the other. No wonder madness has so often been attributed to the mystics: they are out of their mind, distraught and hysterical, and they go to the desert in search of their Beloved like Majnun once did for his darling Layla, with reckless desperation and despair, tearing his garments, smearing his face with dirt, hopeless in love. The result may be madness, but a madness that is a blessing of God.
If nothing else, our brief conversation with the mystics teaches us one fundamental fact about the place of wonder in apophatic discourse: as much as it takes away and deconstructs all concepts and images that have turned idolatrous, it maintains a reverent posture before the bare, denuded metaphors that it loves so much. These metaphors—”nothingness,” “emptiness,” and so forth—should not be construed as a form of nihilism, in other words. The origins of modern nihilism may lurk in these thoughts, but mystics are too exuberant to succumb to a total annihilation of faith. They are fond of negations and denials, for sure, but resounding affirmations, loves, and pleasures are their salvation, the yes of their “negative theologies.”
For this reason, wonder is not reducible to human ignorance in the mystics. Wonder is generated by something affirmative, call it a “presence of an absence” if you will, but it is an absence like no other, something infinitely alluring, something that reveals in and through its withdrawal, that loves in and through its renunciation. In this sense, the experience of wonder in mystical apophasis remains at odds with the cynicism of the modern age. While mystical unknowing is a prefiguration of modern skepticism, it is different insofar as there remains for the mystics a formless beauty like infinity summoning and seducing the soul. For the mystics, infinity can surely be terrifying, but it is also an overflowing goodness, a spring “that gives itself to all the rivers yet is never exhausted by what they take” (Plotinus), the vast sea at high tide spilling onto the shores, the super-saturated excess of love and justice, the wide and immeasurable desert.31 Wonder is the response of the soul to these kinds of surprising beauty, experiences of the plenitude and surplus of infinity. Or it is the response of the soul to the strangeness of itself, to the foreign mystery dwelling deep within.
Exile and Prophetic Language
While there are numerous moments when mystics and prophets come together like two hands joined in prayer, it is also true that they have their own signatures when writing of wonder or exile, God or the desert.32 Though wonder is the natural ally of the mystic’s purpose—called on to dramatize the unreachable heights of the divine—exile appears so frequently in the prophets’ proclamations that it is more emblematic of their identity than the olive branch is emblematic of peace. As a memory that is both wounding and revelatory, exile is a defining theme of these troubled individuals who were almost always the voice of migrants and strangers, the poor and needy, if they weren’t the migrants and strangers themselves, estranged members of an estranged people. Though prophets seek wisdom in the signs and symbols of exile, it is also nothing to celebrate, so devastating and ruinous it is, if it was not also the occasion for the prophets’ betrothal to God. The prophets carry this memory of love deep in their hearts without ever losing sight of the severe and forbidding nature of exile, every bit as cruel and inhospitable as the desert sun. Indeed, when the prophets turn to the symbolism of the desert, there is an unmistakable tone of suffering and dereliction in their appeals. While the mystics are fond of desert language for its apophatic significance, their theologies often remain confined within an intellectual paradigm about the possibilities and limits of human ideas. With the prophet, on the contrary, the desert is a perfect mirror of the desolation and destitution felt by hungry wanderers and oppressed slaves, by exiles and aliens. Different from mystical exegesis, the language of the prophet is much more tormented, frightening, existential. It captures the coarseness of human history.
Desert imagery in the prophets is, in short, a dark summary of human history. The desert signifies dispossession in history and location, the forced slavery of entire communities, the yoke and cruelty of war, the loss of house and homeland, the hunger and misery of exiles and refugees. The desert is the homeland of the homeless, the region of wanderers and pilgrims. And the desert is, as Juan Rulfo knew so well, our own century, an age that bears a striking resemblance to the town of Comala in Rulfo’s surrealistic masterpiece Pedro Páramo (indeed, in Spanish páramo means a wasteland or barren plain, which makes his novel speech from the void, speech that rises from the barren soil like a scorpion).33
To take one example of the desertlike spirituality of the prophets, consider Jeremiah. His speech is like an uncontrollable fire—his metaphor—because it bears witness to the ashes of history, to burned communities and cities, to the desolation left in the wake of war, captivity, and exile. Like so many prophets, Jeremiah is the anguished chronicler of the heavy hand of history, of the welts and bruises left on the souls of the poor and innocent. He lets loose his words to wreak havoc among the untroubled and complacent consciences of the people. His words are wild and agonizing, full of complaints and protests, sad moans and laments—and full of tears:
O that my head were a spring of water,
and my eyes a fountain of tears,
so that I might weep day and night
for the slain of my poor people.
(Jeremiah 9:1)
A voice is heard in Ramah,
lamentation and bitter weeping.
Rachel is weeping for her children;
she refuses to be comforted for her children,
because they are no more.
(Jeremiah 31:15)
Indeed, in Jeremiah and other biblical texts, tears are the most obvious sign of the devastating reach of exile.