The second approach to the doing of God’s essential will is through Annihilation, which is the final, consummating stage of the long-drawn process of getting rid of self-will. Annihilation is classified by Father Benet as passive and active. Passive annihilation occurs when God actually makes himself present to us in contemplation. Active annihilation is the being dead to the world while working in the world, the dwelling inwardly in eternity while outwardly operating in time. Both types of annihilation are necessary; but active annihilation is the higher and more perfect condition. Concerning passive annihilation, Father Benet has little to add to what was said of contemplation in the preceding section of his book. Distractions are touched upon, and the contemplative is advised to avoid and circumvent, never to fight against the intruding irrelevances. ‘For the more a man operates, the more he is and exists.’ But the more the man exists, the less God exists within him.
It is for an analogous reason that the advanced contemplative should avoid in his meditations all particular aspects of the divine life, and content himself with a ‘simple regard’ directed to God in his totality. Active annihilation is obtained through a process of’ recording,’ a kind of continuous, effortless awareness of God, and through a pure faith, which conceives of God as really present even in those circumstances, in which there is no sensible inward evidence of that presence and no reason for inferring it.
In this third section of The Rule, the right relationship between action and contemplation, between man in time and God in eternity, is discussed at length and with great subtlety.
Here I can only summarize what Father Benet says about that shrinking from outward works, into which so many spirituals fall, out of a fear of being distracted from their contemplation of God. This shrinking, he insists, defeats its own object and is in fact the final and greatest obstacle to perfection.
For ‘the more the soul fears and retreats from outward works, the more the images of these things stamp themselves upon her. Furthermore, she tends to attribute to them the place and standing of God. God must be recognized as being everywhere and, for the contemplative, his presence should do away with outward things. Instead of that, the soul that is afraid of outward things gives so much place to them that their presence does away with God.’ The spiritual who knows only passive contemplation, tends to introvert his mind away from things, to retreat from them into an inward act of contemplation.
But this does not abolish the problem of outward works; it merely postpones it to another occasion. Moreover, introversion implies extraversion, the attitude of the average sensual man who regards outward things as fully real and worthy of being treated as ends in themselves. ‘I say, then, that introversion must be rejected, because extraversion must never be admitted; but one must live continuously in the abyss of the divine essence and in the absolute nothingness of things; and if at times a man finds himself separated from them (the essence and the nothingness), he must return to them, not by introversion, but by annihilation.’
The learning to live in constant active annihilation is probably the most difficult and exacting of all human tasks; but to those who fullfil it comes the reward that came to Brother Lawrence and St. Teresa, to Mme Acarie, to Father Benet himself and, indeed, to all the great mystics; the experience of living simultaneously in time and eternity, among men and in God; the peace and bliss, here in this earthly life, of the beatific vision. The state to which Father Benet gave the name of active annihilation has been described, not only by Christian mystics, but also by the contemplatives of other faiths -by Hindus, by Buddhists, by Taoists, by the Sufis. All are agreed in regarding it as the highest, the most perfect condition to which the human consciousness purified, one-pointed, radically transformed can attain.
Up to this point The Rule of Perfection contains nothing which might not be found in the writings of any of the great contemplatives of the Dionysian tradition. But from now on Father Benet leaves the path of pure, undogmatic mysticism followed by his predecessors, to take another, more specifically Catholic road.
Father Benet departs from traditional mysticism by insisting that even the most advanced contemplatives should persist in ‘the practice of the passion’ -in other words, that they should meditate upon the sufferings of Christ, even when they have reached the stage at which it is possible for them to unite their souls with the Godhead in an act of ‘ simple regard.’ The Dionysian mystics, whose religion was primarily experimental and who were consequently ready to adapt Catholic dogma to direct and immediate experience, had always maintained the contrary. In the higher stages of orison, they had insisted, all ideas and images, even ideas and images connected with the life of Christ, must be put aside, as distractions standing in the way of perfect union.
In his commentary on The Cloud of Unknowing, Father Augustine Baker specifically comments on Father Benet’s departure from the traditional teaching. ‘I ask you to observe,’ he says, ‘that he (the author of The Cloud) leaves no room for the exercise of the passion, so long as one is enabled in this exercise of love. This love is directed to the pure divinity, without the use of any image, either of our Saviour’s humanity, or of any other creature. So that, according to our author’s teaching throughout this book, if one be enabled for the said exercise of the love of the divinity, and that during his whole life, he must not leave it to go and exercise himself in the passion, much less in any inferior matter. And in this point our author agreeth fully both with the author of Secrets Sentiers and with what I myself have affirmed in my treatise on the exercise of the passion, wherein we differ from the opinion of Father Benet Fitch in the third book of his Will of God and from some others also, who would have some exercise of the passion in all states.’
Father Benet himself was no less clearly aware than Father Baker of the novelty of his doctrine in this respect. There is no attempt in The Rule of Perfection to conceal or gloss over the break with tradition. On the contrary, it is admitted, and a whole chapter is devoted to an elaborate attempt to justify it. Unhappily Father Benet’s essay in justification is one of those, to us, completely fantastic rigmaroles, so dear and apparently so convincing to the medieval and early-modern theologian, dozens of quotations from the Old and New Testament are strung together in support of the contention whose truth it is desired to demonstrate. A few of these quotations have some slight bearing on the point at issue; but most are perfectly irrelevant and must therefore be subjected to a process of arbitrary interpretation.
This makes it possible for any statement to have any meaning whatsoever. Thus, Father Benet is able to find the confirmation of his teaching even in the anecdote of Rahab. That line of scarlet thread, which the whore of Jericho attached to her window, as a sign to the invading Israelites, prophetically signified that ‘God wishes us to place the red and bloody passion of Christ in the window of our inward house, which is our understanding, to the end that we may always meditate upon it and contemplate it.’ That this sort of thing should ever have carried conviction to anybody seems now completely incomprehensible.
The fact that it actually did so is a salutary reminder that the frames of reference within which men do their reasoning and feeling do not remain the same, and that at any given moment of history certain thoughts are strictly unthinkable, certain sentiments impossible to experience. Father Benet’s real reasons for teaching that the practice of the passion should be continued at every stage of the contemplative life were doubtless the following: first, he himself was strongly attracted to acts of personal devotion; second, he was a Franciscan, and Franciscan devotion has always been especially concerned with the passion; and, thirdly, he felt (as many theologians before and after his day have felt) that the empirical mysticism of the Dionysians was, in its higher stages at least, too undogmatic to be truly Catholic.
From our particular perch in time we look back and wonder why on earth Father Benet couldn’t baldly have said so, without bringing in Rahab and all the other nonsense. Meanwhile the odd fact remains that, owing to the nature of the frames of reference within which he thought and felt, justification in terms of a Bronze Age harlot seemed to Father Benet intrinsically more convincing than justification in terms of psychology and religious history.
The thesis which Rahab serves to justify is that contemplation of the passion is more pleasing to God than contemplation of the divinity. ‘One should not leave the passion to contemplate the divinity, but one should continue both simultaneously.’ That ‘simple regard,’ with which the Dionysians had contemplated the Godhead, should be turned instead on Christ-but not on Christ in his humanity alone; rather as God and man in one person. ‘The whole difficulty of this simple regard comes from the contradiction which seems to prevent the human reason from being able to contemplate in one simple regard God and man,
