There is only one way to cure the results of belief in a false or incomplete theology and it is the same as the only known way of passing from belief in even the truest theology to knowledge or primordial Fact—selflessness, docility, openness to the datum of Eternity. Opinions are things which we make and can therefore understand, formulate and argue about. But ‘to rest in the consideration of objects perceptible to the sense or comprehended by the understanding is to be content,’ in the words of St. John of the Cross,’ with what is less than God.’ Unitive knowledge of God is possible only to those who ‘have ceased to cherish opinions’—even opinions that are as true as it is possible for verbalized abstractions to be.
Up then, noble soul! Put on thy jumping shoes which are intellect and love, and overleap the worship of thy mental powers, overleap thine understanding and spring into the heart of God, into his hiddenness where thou art hidden from all creatures.
Eckhart
With the lamp of word and discrimination one must go beyond word and discrimination and enter upon the path of realization.
Lankavatara Sutra
The word ‘intellect’ is used by Eckhart in the scholastic sense of immediate intuition. ‘Intellect and reason,’ says Aquinas, ‘are not two powers, but distinct as the perfect from the imperfect. . . . The intellect means, an intimate penetration of truth; the reason, enquiry and discourse.’ It is by following, and then abandoning, the rational and emotional path of’word and discrimination* that one is enabled to enter upon the
intellectual or intuitive ‘path of realization.’ And yet, in spite of the warnings pronounced by those who, through selflessness, have passed from letter to spirit and from theory to immediate knowledge, the organized Christian churches have persisted in the fatal habit of mistaking means for ends. The verbal statements of theology’s more or less adequate rationalizations of experience have been taken too seriously and treated with the reverence that is due only to the Fact they are intended to describe. It has been fancied that souls are saved if assent is given to what is locally regarded as the correct formula, lost if it is withheld. The two words, filioque, may not have been the sole cause of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches; but they were unquestionably the pretext and casus belli.
The over-valuation of words and formulae may be regarded as a special case of that over-valuation of the things of time, which is so fatally characteristic of historic Christianity. To know Truth-as-Fact and to know it unitively, ‘in spirit and in truth-as-immediate-apprehension’—this is deliverance, in this ‘standeth our eternal life.’ To be familiar with the verbalized truths, which symbolically correspond to Truth-as-Fact in so far as it can be known in, or inferred from, truth-as-immediate-apprehension, or truth-as-historic-revelation—this is not salvation, but merely the study of a special branch of philosophy. Even the most ordinary experience of a thing or event in time can never be fully or adequately described in words. The experience of seeing the sky or having neuralgia is incommunicable; the best we can do is to say ‘blue’ or ‘pain,’ in the hope that those who hear us may have had experiences similar to our own and so be able to supply their own version of the meaning.
God, however, is not a thing or event in time, and the time-bound words which cannot do justice even to temporal matters are even more inadequate to the intrinsic nature and our own unitive experience of that which belongs to an incommensurably different order. To suppose that people can be saved by studying and giving assent to formulae is like supposing that one can get to Timbuctoo by poring over a map of Africa. Maps are symbols, and even the best of them are inaccurate and imperfect symbols. But to anyone who really wants to reach a given destination, a map is indispensably useful as indicating the direction in which the traveller should set out and the roads which he must take.
In later Buddhist philosophy words are regarded as one of the prime determining factors in the creative evolution of human beings. In this philosophy five categories of being are recognized—Name, Appearance, Discrimination, Right Knowledge, Suchness. The first three are related for evil, the last two for good. Appearances are discriminated by the sense organs, then reified by naming, so that words are taken for things and symbols are used as the measure of reality. According to this view, language is a main source of the sense of separateness and the blasphemous idea of individual self-sufficiency, with their inevitable corollaries of greed, envy, lust for power, anger and cruelty. And from these evil passions there springs the necessity of an indefinitely protracted and repeated separate existence under the same, self-perpetuated conditions of craving and infatuation. The only escape is through a creative act of the will, assisted by Buddha-grace, leading through selflessness to Right Knowledge, which consists, among other things, in a proper appraisal of Names, Appearances and Discrimination. In and through Right Knowledge, one emerges from the infatuating delusion of ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine,’ and, resisting the temptation to deny the world in a state of premature and one-sided ecstasy, or to affirm it by living like the average sensual man, one comes at last to the transfiguring awareness that samsara and nirvana are one, to the unitive apprehension of pure Suchness—the ultimate Ground, which can only be indicated, never adequately described in verbal symbols.
In connection with the Mahayanist view that words play an important and even creative part in the evolution of unregener-ate human nature, we may mention Hume’s arguments against the reality of causation. These arguments start from the postulate that all events are ‘loose and separate’ from one another and proceed with faultless logic to a conclusion that makes com-
plete nonsense of all organized thought or purposive action. The fallacy, as Professor Stout has pointed out, lies in the preliminary postulate. And when we ask ourselves what it was that induced Hume to make this odd and quite unrealistic assumption that events are ‘loose and separate,’ we see that his only reason for flying in the face of immediate experience was the fact that things and happenings are symbolically represented in our thought by nouns, verbs and adjectives, and that these words are, in effect, ‘loose and separate* from one another in a way which the events and things they stand for quite obviously are not.
Taking words as the measure of things, instead of using things as the measure of words, Hume imposed the discrete and, so to sxy, pointilliste pattern of language upon the continuum of actual experience—with the impossibly paradoxical results with which we are all familiar. Most human beings are not philosophers and care not at all for consistency in thought or action. Thus, in some circumstances they take it for granted that events are not ‘loose and separate,’ but coexist or follow one another within the organized and organizing field of a cosmic whole. But on other occasions, where the opposite view is more nearly in accord with their passions or interests, they adopt, all unconsciously, the Humian position and treat events as though they were as independent of one another and the rest of the world as the words by which they are symbolized. This is generally true of all occurrences involving ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘mine.’ Reifying the ‘loose and separate’ names, we regard the things as also loose and separate—not subject to law, not involved in the network of relationships, by which in fact they are so obviously bound up with their physical, social and spiritual environment.
We regard as absurd the idea that there is no causal process in nature and no organic connection between events and things in the lives of other people; but at the same time we accept as axiomatic the notion that our own sacred ego is ‘loose and separate’ from the universe, a law unto itself above the moral dharma and even, in many respects, above the natural law of causality. Both in Buddhism and Catholicism, monks and nuns were encouraged to avoid the personal pronoun and to speak of themselves in terms of circumlocutions that clearly indicated their real relationship with the cosmic reality and their fellow-creatures. The precaution was a wise one. Our responses to familiar words are conditioned reflexes. By changing the stimulus, we can do something to change the response. No Pavlov bell, no salivation; no harping on words like ‘me’ and ‘mine,’ no purely automatic and unreflecting egotism. When a monk speaks of himself, not as ‘I,’ but as ‘this sinner’ or ‘this unprofitable servant,’ he tends to stop taking his ‘loose and separate’ selfhood for granted, and makes himself aware of his real, organic relationship with God and his neighbours.
In practice words are used for other purposes than for making statements about facts. Very often they are used rhetorically, in order to arouse the passions and
