Spaces of Unknowing

[I thought I'd post up a recent think piece that I wrote for one of the members of my Committee. Strangely, the concerns in this one, while dealing with the specifics of religious experience, are probably an aspect of my work that would resonate with at least some of the presumed, if occasional, readership of the blog.]

In the three works that relate and prescribe mystical experiences that I've read, the way that spatial descriptions are used as figures for spiritual experiences seems to be crucial in shaping the position of the spiritual subject. As these mystics explore and express their relationship to and experiences with God, they employ an idiosyncratically modified language of the senses to locate themselves in new spiritual spaces, while also demarcating the boundaries (or the boundlessness) of those spiritual spaces. Although Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing undoubtedly draw on a broader spiritual tradition in for the language and figures that they choose to crystallize their spiritual experiences, comparing the way each work figures space and how this interacts with the senses highlights the widely divergent ways of conceiving a spiritual self. Despite these variations, the spiritual subject is often posited as a first principle or constituted as an after-thought in the paradox of trying to figure a location for the self in the abstract phenomena of the spiritual.

Of the three, Kempe's visions are reported in the most affective and sensual terms and Kempe herself is always imagined as immediately present in the visions of Christ or God. The spiritual space that Kempe constructs involves at least two important dimensions. The first draws upon the historical events of Christ's life and interposes Kempe as an active participant in the history of Christianity. For instance, Kempe imagines herself at both the conception and birth of Christ, playing an active role in each by speaking to the Virgin as well as helping Mary make arrangements for a place to stay for the birth:

And than went the creatur forth wyth owyr Lady to Bedlam and purchasyd hir herborwe every nyght wyth gret reverns, and clothys and kerchys for to swathyn in her sone whan he wer born, and when Jhesu was born sche ordeyned beddyng for owyr Lady to lyg in wyth hir blyssed sone. And sythen sche beggyd mete for owyr Lady and hir blyssyd chyld. (427-32)

The historical space that she imagines herself to be in forms a continuum with the stable historical spaces that are depicted in Biblical and Christian tradition. She imagines a herself as a female companion at the birth of Christ, in contrast to the more traditional narratives where men (shepherds, the Wise Men, Joseph) play more active roles. By interposing herself in those sacred spaces, she also manages to exclude masculine presences. Kempe's attention to the domestic details of the birth, making sure that there are "clothys and kerchys for to swathyn" Jesus and sufficient "beddyng" inscribes female presence in a traditional narrative that is oddly bereft of women. Thus Kempe's interposition enables her to construct a more active disposition toward spiritual history: the subject does not just receive these events as historical fact but is involved in constructing, re-imagining and re-interpreting them as well.

The second important way that Kempe navigates the spiritual spatially is through apprehending spiritual phenomena through her own bodily senses. The reality of her senses, feeling "the fyer of love brenning in hyr brest" (2064), smelling sweet savors and hearing wonderful sounds from heaven, confirm her position as a subject who is able to straddle the material and spiritual worlds. Her experiences collapse the clear-cut distinctions between material and spiritual spaces. In a sense, her body becomes a hybrid site, not unlike the pilgrimage sites that Kempe herself journeys to, where the spiritual and material mingle. This suggestion is supported by the fact that Kempe reports her first experience of intense "krying and roryng" (1589) on her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, specifically when she goes to the "Mownt of Calvarye" (1572). First experienced in a holy space, this possession of the senses so transforms Kempe's body that she carries this reaction in her own body whenever she thinks about the Passion of Christ. Yet unlike the venerated sites (or bodies of saints) that have become canonized as official places where the spiritual and temporal meet, Kempe's body remains a controversial space. The very mark of this conjunction of spirit and body – her loud outbursts, cries and weeping – becomes the most prominent feature of this controversy.

The athenticity of her experience hinges on the full mingling of the spiritual with the earthly; thus, the invasiveness by God that creates the bouts of uncontrolled weeping has to be complete and total. Even if the bodily experience remains very much present, Kempe cannot be in possession of her senses, if indeed the spiritual meets with and transforms the physical. While there are moments when she "schulde wepyn ful softly and stilly ... wythowtyn any boystrowsnes" (3300-1), her loud excessive crying is the norm, especially on special spiritual occasions such as Good Friday, where it escalates and intensifies over such a long period of time such that it leaves her physically depleted:

And every Good Friday in alle the forseyd yerys sche was wepyng and sobbyng five er sixe owyrs togedyr and therwyth cryed ful lowde many tymes so that sche myth not restreyn hir therfro, whech madyn hir ful febyl and weyke in hir bodily mytys. (3319-22).

This element of the excessive and uncontrolled is central to Kempe's own conception of the weeping as a spiritual practice. The body is never absent in Kempe's experiences of the spirit. It remains as a crucial marker of the intensity of her spiritual experience. Even if it is left "ful febyl and weyke", it remains tangibly present as the indication of the intensity of the experience.

Yet because her encounters with the spiritual are so intense and dramatic, her bodily experiences draw criticism, when she shares more traditional spiritual-social spaces with other believers. On the return leg of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she stops in Rome and draws criticism from fellow worshippers:

Than sche wept bittyrly, sche sobbyd boistowsly and cryed ful lowde and horybly that the pepil was oftyntymes aferd and gretly astoyned, demyng sche had ben vexyd wyth sum evyl spiryt, not levyng it was the wek of God but rathyr sum evyl spiryt, er a sodeyn sekenes, er elles symulacyon and ypocrisy falsly feyned of hir owyn self. (1929-33)

The body as a sacred space where the divine meets with humanity is thus also open to social interpretation and criticism, especially when it disrupts the institutional spaces such Church services and pilgrimage groups. Unlike the spiritual sites or saints bodies that pilgrims go to in order to experience the miraculous, Kempe's body is a mobile reminder of the intrusive element of this meeting between God and man. Her encounters in the earthly – against other pilgrims who disapprove of her spiritual practices and men in positions of authority as she journeys around England – make her a spiritual subject that is always doubled, split between the intimacy with Christ in her visions and the down to earth drudgery of fending off social and sexual prejudice.

Kempe's meeting with Julian of Norwich early in her spiritual experiences gives us a way to make a distinction between the two women's conception of the spiritual. Kempe goes to Julian for advice and reports Julian's guidelines:

[Julian] cownsely[ed] this cretur to be obedyent to the wyl of owyr Lord God and fulfyllyn wyth al hir mygthys whatevyr he put in hir sowle if it wer no ageyn the worshep of God and profyte of hir evyn cristen, for, yif it wer, than it wer nowt the mevyng of a good spyryte but rathyr of an evyl spyrit. (962-5)

Central to Julian's advice on the proper stewardship of spiritual experiences is the injunction that whatever Kempe experiences, it should be to the profit her fellow believers. Yet as has been implied, the nature of this spiritual profiting is very difficult to judge, especially if the specific nature of what gets placed in Kempe's soul is by definition an invasive, spontaneous eruption of the spiritual. Here is a central difference between the way these two spiritual subjects operate. Kempe, being very much in the world, cannot help but confront its norms and practices with her very being, especially when she is visited by God. Julian, on the contrary, speaks about profiting fellow Christians but does not really have to worry too much about the effects of her spiritual practice because she lives as an anchoress, apart from densely populated shared social spaces.

Even in her limited capacity as one who lives apart from society, Julian's "shewings" always demonstrate an awareness of how her spiritual experiences can form the template for others to experience God in the same intense manner. Through the carefully constructed re-creation of her visions and interpretations, she constructs formulae and structures of exegesis that other believers might benefit from. Though never explicitly didactic in nature, Julian's work invites the reader to share in the mysteries that she has partaken of and to apply the lessons that Julian offers for their own spiritual edification.

However, this instructive strand never detracts from the centrality of the physical body in her visions of Christ, which constitute the spiritual space of her experiences in a way that is radically different from Kempe's experiences. Kempe shares these spaces with Christ, Mary and the Apostles, whereas Julian's visions are always reported from the perspective of an outsider looking in. However, the intensity and detail of Julian's visions means that the body looms large in her experience, with its contours and textures occupying and dominating the entirety of her spiritual horizon. For instance, in the fourth vision, she sees Christ's broken body:

And after this I saw, beholding the body plentiously bleding in seming of the scorgyng, as thus: The faire skynne was brokyn ful depe into the tender flesh with sharpe smyting al about the sweete body. So plenteously the hote blode ran oute that there was neither sene skynne ne wound, but as it were al blode. And whan it come wher it should a fallen downe, than it vanyshid. Notwitstondyng the bleding continued as while til it might be sene with avisement, and thus was so plenteous to my sigt that methowte if it had be so in kind and in substance for that tyme, it should have made the bed al on blode and a passid over aboute. (473-80)

If she cannot interpose herself into these spiritual moments like Kempe does, it is because the spaces are entirely dominated by the graphic detail of the vision. The word "plenteous", repeated on three occasions in this vision, gives a good indication of how saturated the vision is, such that there is too much even for the mind's eye to take in. Instead of the spiritual merging with the physical senses, Julian experiences a space where her senses are scrambled such that she is no longer sure about what she is seeing: "wher it [the blood] should a fallen downe, than it vanyshid". Julian's mind seems to want to linger on the sight, on the "faire skynne ... brokyn ful depe", the "tender flesh" and "swete body" but this brief (and erotically charged moment) is taken from her by the blood that covers all. The tension between unveiling and covering up again tantalizes the senses instead of satisfying or exhausting them. The unstable movement through sight, obscuration and vanishing leave Julian's mind stranded, without a clear sense of where she herself is located with regards to the vision, such that she expects – "methowte" – that her bed should be stained with the blood from the vision. Unlike the certainty of Kempe's bodily manifestations of the spirit, the intersection of the spiritual and the material creates a space that makes perception a contingent and cautious enterprise.

At the same time that this instability between spiritual and sensual emerges, Julian seems to try to limit this amorphous space from taking over completely, by subjecting the vision to a point-by-point exegesis. The heavy-handed interpretations of her visions imbue the passages that follow each vision with a very different tone from the visions themselves. A different discursive mode is deliberately entered into as Julian parses each vision, phrase by phrase, to draw out the spiritual significance of each moment of the vision. While her ostensible aim of doing this is to profit those who might read her work, another motivation might be at work. Perhaps this shift in discourse is an attempt to limit or clarify the amorphous and excessive sights that appear before her, the very ones that scramble her senses. For instance, in the explication that follows the fourth vision, the "plenteous" nature of the blood that vanishes in the vision is transformed into a rhetorical device that holds together the various works that the blood accomplishes:

The pretious plenty of his dereworthy blood descendith downe into Helle .... The pretious plenty of his dereworthy blood overflowith al erth and is redye to wash al creaturs of synne .... The pretious plenty of his dereworthy blood ascendid up into Hevyn to the blissd body of our Lord Jesus Christe .... (488-94)

Not only does the repetition structure the interpretation with the very terms that made the vision an unstable space for the senses, the "dereworthy blood" now no longer obscures or vanishes but conquers vast swathes of space in descending to Hell, covering the earth and ascending to heaven, where it now returns to body of Christ, a very different "blissid body", instead of the eroticized one first presented in the vision.

If Kempe's experiences the spiritual as embodied invasions of God's presence, the author of The Cloud of Unknowing points to a very different way to conceive of spiritual space. Unlike Kempe's work, The Cloud of Unknowing does not place a premium on recounting intimate experiences with God as evidence of sharing a space with the spiritual. In fact, the force of the text's disavowal of the physical is best summed up in a mocking catalogue of mystical experiences that are regarded as fraudulent:

Sekirly it is good thei be ware; for trewly the feende is not fer. Som sette theire ighen in theire hedes as thei were sturdy scheep betyn in the heed, and as thei schulde dighe anone. Som hangen here hedes on sude, as a worme were in thiere eres. Som pipyn when thei schuld speke, as ther were no spirit in theire bodies; and this is the propre condicion of an ypocrite. Som crien and whinen in theire throte, so ben thei gredy and hasty to sey that thei think, and this is the condicion of heretikes and of hem that with presumpcion and with curiouste of witte wil alwys meynteyn errour. (1832-8)

Along the lines of this suspicion of physical manifestations of the spirit, the concept of space as a trope for spiritual discussion comes under intense scrutiny, especially when the author cautions misunderstanding the spiritual ("goostly") meanings of words like "in" or "up". The author argues that novice practitioners take these words far too literally, and end up deceived by their own imaginations in a quest for spiritual experiences that mirror physical ones. For instance, in explaining the detriment of misunderstanding the word "in", the author writes that

thei know not whiche is inward worchyng, therfore thei worche wrong. For thei turne theire body wittes inwardes to theire body agens the cors of kynde; and streynyn hem, as thei wolde see inwardes with theire bodily ighen, and heren inwardes with theire eren , and so forth of alle theire wittes .... And thus thei reverse hem agens the cours of kynde ... that at the laste thei turne here brayne in here hedes. (1809-14)

While the folly of these novices is to expect that the inner senses will replicate the outer ones, the author uses the trope of a reversal, a turning away from what is natural to explain what 'really' happens. So one spatial trope replaces another. It isn't so much that the novices are not making some kind of spiritual movement but that they are progressing wrongly. Instead of succeeding in accomplishing a movement "inward", they end up turning against God's instituted order. What is interesting here is that the author does not say that these individuals are moving further away from God, for that would merely indicate the wrong direction that could possibly be remedied by a re-orientation. Instead, the "turne" that is fatal is a qualitatively different kind of movement, one that rebels rather than misapprehends. Thus the answer to overcoming the error of situating a spiritual geography for the self is not in disavowing physical concepts altogether (despite the author's profound distaste for physical manifestations of the spirit), but in recognizing the proper uses of the physical to figure the spirit. Of course, these 'proper' uses, more often than not, are framed by the author's own idiosyncratic understanding of how the physical and spiritual are related.

Take for instance an early formulation regarding where the one who seeks God should be located. Despite the criticism leveled against the misapplication of spatial tropes in locating the spiritual, the author himself does not hesitate to use them:

And yif ever thos schalt come to this cloude, and wone and worche therin as I bid thee, thee byhoveth, as this cloude of unknowyng is aboven thee, bitwix thee and thi God, right so put a cloude of forgetyng bineth thee, bitwitx thee and alle the cretures that ever ben maad. (421-4)

Even as the one meditating on God must reach the point where God is just beyond the "cloude of unknowyng" – the space where rational thought and language cease to operate as the means of apprehending God – a "cloude of forgetyng" must be placed at the opposite end, to block out worldly things. The use of "aboven" and "bineth" in a mirrored opposition, with the spiritual subject located within the bracket of a doubly formulated "bitwixt" creates the impression of a subject that is somehow very precisely located, if not confined, in a spiritual imagination. Indeed, this precision seems to condense into this space all the energies of spiritual concentration. This condensation of space is akin to the recommendations that the author makes regarding thought and language. Just as these must be pared down to single essences, spiritual space must be made weighty with longing and anticipation, not rich with experience and phenomena. Unlike the enumerative and proliferating logic of Julian's spiritual practice, the advice in The Cloud of Unknowing moves in the opposite direction.

Another crucial instance of the author's re-configuration of space involves the notion "noghwhere", a concept that the author holds up as a key needed to unlock the door that leads to the presence of God. The author suggests that the individual should not look to worship God within himself, "[a]nd schorrly withoutyn thiself wil I not that thou be, ne yit aboven, ne be hynde, ne on o side, ne on other" (2293-4). Instead, after the all possible figurations of spiritual space are excavated and repudiated, he provides "noghwhere" as the proper space:

"Wher than," seist thou, "schal I be? Noghwhere, by thi tale!" Now trely thou seist wel; for there wolde I have thee. For whi noghwhere bodely is everywhere goostly. Loke than besily that thi goostly werk be nogewhere bodely .... (2295-7)

Not only is the negative value of "noghwhere" reclaimed and given a positive valence in the paradoxical formulation "noghwhere bodely is everywhere goostly", the way that the author presents this notion is significant. This is one of the rare moments in the work where the author dramatizes the voice of his imagined audience. While there are some instances where the implied listener raises questions that the author then deftly handles earlier in the work (for example, at the beginning of sixth and eighth chapters), those other moments are not invested with the same amount emotion. The author imagines an outburst of frustration at his elusive dislocations of the self, and it is precisely the frustrated repudiation of physical space – "Noghwhere, by thi tale" – that becomes the paradoxical answer to the enigma of where the self can be located in spiritual practice.

Works Cited:

The Cloud of Unknowing. Ed. Patrick J. Gallacher. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997.
Julian of Norwich. The Shewings of Julian of Norwich. Ed. Georgia Ronan Crampton. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994.
Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Lynn Staley. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1994.