2 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 2 our life experiences, cultural milieu, or historical grounding? Is it even possible to abandon all the religious images that are so strongly embodied in our lives? Many such images are already a latent part of our speech. In the words of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, they have sedimented. And it is precisely Merleau-Ponty who in his notes from the lecture La philosophie aujourd’hui considered Heidegger’s “metaphysics” and the hidden Being as analogous to the Christian mystic’s idea of a hidden God (Lat. Deus absconditus). In this regard Merleau-Ponty notes: “Non-theological ‘mysticism’ is further from theology than the philosophy of nothingness” (Merleau-Ponty 1996, 119, author’s own translation). Merleau-Ponty’s intention was, that nihilism or the Nietzschean philosophy of the dead (or killed) God is still theology, but he tried to outline a new kind of desacralized mysticism. Unfortunately, he does not develop this idea further, however, but leaves it as an open question for our philosophical reflection. Merleau-Ponty’s words about non-theological mysticism may remind us of the notion of the mystical discussed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.522 (which, incidentally, takes us back to Spinoza, with whom we started our contribution): “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They ‘make themselves manifest.’ They are what is mystical” (Wittgenstein 2001, 89). Things, which are Unspeakable: if there really are such things, then it is impossible to describe them, to express them through images (not only through words); if there really are such things, then we just have to remain silent in the face of them. The need of spirituality is here exposed to the Silence: of Being, of God, of Transcendence, of Nature. If philosophical silence should be a kind of revised spiritual exercise, then such philosophers face a difficult task: to say a few words about it and keep quiet, to be silent. Hamlet’s final words “the rest is silence…” are given new meaning here. To be silent means to stop creating an imaginative backdrop in which is possible to shape some deep imagined spirituality, but at the same time it means to open a new imageless form of spirituality. This form of spiritual experience may seem stimulating and inspiring, but it also raises questions. Is not silence itself an image? Or if it is not, doesn’t it at least open possibilities for the imagination to create representations of various spaces and acts of silence? If this silence of wonder before the Unknown or Being should be absolute and final, does it not impose on he or she who has decided for it an obligation not to say a word about it? If this is so, then spirituality is uncommunicable, non-intersubjective and should remain pure subjectivism. But how is it possible that we can talk about it and that others understand this speech? Maybe all images of silence are born from some anthropological Ur-silence, deeply rooted in the culture and thus in the latency of intersubjectivity. Those who have become sensitive to this silence are spiritual people of the kind Maurice Merleau-Ponty spoke of. Their thought did not stop at nothingness, but at the silence before Being and Nothingness. Of course, they also need images, but these are no longer figurative or even abstract; they are more like an empty painting in a silent gallery. Notes [1] Karl Jaspers interprets this passage as an attempt to reach the intimate presence of the One, to attain “to that which is not an object” (Jaspers 1974, 40). And Jean-Louis Chrétien, developing his phenomenological notion of “unhoped for” transcending all our expectations, adds that Plotinian spirituality is based on the jump or leap into the Void: “To leap is to cross the void, to go where there is no path” (Chrétien 2002, 107). [2] Although Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos could be the main work referred to here, the topic is also addressed in his other texts. For him, the spiritual accent hovers on the edge of the religious and the non-religious. The notion of sanctity (in contrast to geniality) here goes beyond a purely orthodox use, and Scheler writes in the essay Exemplars of Person and Leaders that the spiritual personality of holy person is, in essence, supra-temporal, while acts of genius originate in a point of time “without requiring a span of time” (Scheler 1987, 175). [3] The Greek word γυναίκεος κόλπος has the Latin equivalent of sinus mulierbis with similar semantic ambiguity (Adams 2005, 583; see also Newbold 2000, 11). [4] The Carolingian Renaissance also knows the opposite example, when Dhuoda, author of the Liber manualis ad filium which she wrote for her son William, takes on the role of father and abbot (Claussen 1996, 804). [5] Cf. the slightly different, even if semantically identical translation of these lines in Bynum 1982, 114.
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