How To Be An Agnostic
authenticated by some kind of peak experience, from speaking
in tongues, to being healed, to seeing a statue move. Typically,
the experience is noisy, demonstrative and, qua the high, often
barely distinguishable from a bungee jump or druggy trip. But
this is Christianity as psychological buzz; its passion is no more
than emotion. Its aims may be valid – happiness, satisfaction,
belonging – but they eclipse the goal of spirituality, at least
according to Eckhart, which is that of sacred ignorance.
For the pursuers of pure experience, the unknown is regarded
suspiciously. They substitute the language of personal fulfi lment
for the language of vertiginous doubt. It is not going too far to
say that Christianity as peak experience is the diametric oppo-
site of what the great spiritual writers of the past meant when
discussing the mystical life of the Christian (or indeed of other
faiths). If anything they are notable for being against it: the
whole point is to search for the God that is beyond experience,
even esoteric experience. This is why they talk of ‘divine dark-
ness’, ‘emptiness’ and ‘mistrust of the senses’. In one sermon
Meister Eckhart preached:
If thou lovest God as God, as spirit, as Person or as image,
that must all go. ‘Then how shall I love him?’ Love him as
he is: a not-God, a non-spirit, a not-Person, a not-image;
as sheer, pure, limpid unity, alien from all duality. And in
this one let us sink down eternally from nothingness to
nothingness.He heaps up the impossibilities – a not-God, a non-spirit, a not-
Person, a not-image – in order that God, spirit, Person, image
might be left behind.
Here, then, is a tradition in which a strong, cultivated sense
of mystery is the goal of its theology. It is characteristic of those
who pursue it to premise everything they say on knowing that
they do not know God. The aim is to hone the inability to speak
of God so that things which are clearly wrong are discarded –
which is to say, eventually, everything. The spirituality minded