John Ruysbroeck

The true God is often largely overshadowed by the false god and so requires deep and sustained reflection. Traces of the true God is found in all religions – in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. For Neville Symington it is the wise people who wrote the Upanishads in the East who showed:

‘the first and deepest understanding of …the true God. “God” is not a term that is ever used by these seers. They use the following terms: “the THAT”, “the Absolute”, or just “Reality” …. Through contemplative thought these seers came to understand the absolute character of reality. They also understood that reality is contingent.’

So immediately there is a problem how can something be both absolute and subject to chance and so change? The only solution is that our minds are not capable of grasping this conceptually. Instead of struggling with the need to clearly define and say ‘this is it’ and be rid of uncertainty – which makes us anxious – there can be a recognition and an acceptance of our limitations.

‘What we need to acknowledge is that the human mind meets here a limitation rather than trying to deny the Absoluteness or the contingency or changeability of Reality.’

So how is the Absoluteness of the true God grasped? Symington sees it as through rational reflection, through mental discipline and virtue and ultimately that it is a personal act of insight. This therefore seems as if it could also include a personal revelation such as is found in Judeo-Christian-Islamic faith. The breakthrough to the realization of the Absoluteness of God is an inner experience – not one of being called from ‘outside’. Symington writes: ‘it is my own being understood as Absolute’.

This is surely similar to John’s gospel where we are assured that we will know the Spirit of truth ‘because he abides with you, and he will be in you’ [chapter 14: 17] and Christ’s promise that he and the Father will come to make their home with us [v 23]. The leap required, and perhaps this is the difficulty for our Western dualistic thinking, is to both realize the Absoluteness of Being and that we are also part of it.

Thomas Merton describes this as the awakening of the true self when our own subjectivity is united to the subjectivity of God: this is the true God. Merton, like Symington, Christian mystics, and Eastern seers, sees how futile it is to try to grasp God as an object which we can understand and seize.

‘We must transcend ourselves as well as our analogies, and in seeking to know God we must forget the usual subject-object relationship which characterizes our ordinary acts of knowing. Instead we know him in so far as we become aware of ourselves as known through and through by him. We “possess” him in proportion as we realize ourselves to be possessed by him in the in most depths of our being…. the realization that our very being is penetrated with his knowledge and love for us.’

Merton quotes the medieval mystic John of Ruysbroek that in contemplation the unity of God shines a simple light which shows itself to be darkness into which we are enveloped and lost – plunged into nothingness and nakedness but: ‘..overwhelmed by the activity of God’s immense love …becomes one spirit with God.’