How is enstasy employed in the search for truth?

Today’s Post

Last week we intoduced the concept of ‘enstasy’ proposed by Cynthia Bourgeault to describe the articulate side of mysticism.

This week we will look at how the enstatic mode of human cognition can be seen in the stories of Jesus, the letters of Paul and the writings of Elaine Pagels.

 

Jesus, Paul, Pagels, and the Enstatic State

We can find examples of the enstatic mode in the gospels, the writings of Paul and in the insights of Elaine Pagels.

While the ‘stories of Jesus’ include many examples of the traditional ecstatic understanding of mysticism, as Jonathan Sacks puts it, Jesus followed the Jewish tradition of telling stories.

“When the Hebrew bible wants to explain something, it does not articulate a theory, it tells a story.”

   The stories that Jesus tells follow this tradition.  They don’t get right to ‘the point’, but rather ask the hearer to consider something that can’t be objectively and empirically addressed, such as love, relationship, and fullness.  The stories are a way of ushering the subject from the objective, or ‘left brain’ mode of thinking into the subjective, or ‘right brained’ mode of understanding.  Jesus’ ‘mode’ of communication was decidedly ‘enstatic’.

Paul goes a little further by introducing three new, enstatic, ways of addressing these subjects.

• First, he ‘taxonomizes’ the insights of Jesus, departing from Jesus’ ‘storytelling’ mode to one which organizes his insights into specific topics. In many cases, Paul’s letters can be seen as the ‘metadata’ of Jesus’s stories:  information that when structured into another format offer a deeper revelation of mystical truth.  Paul does this when he breaks down ‘virtues’ into the categories of faith, hope and love.  He organizes Jesus’ insights into those aspects of human behavior most relevant to personal growth into the eight aspects of the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’.  As we discussed earlier in addressing the lowly ‘spreadsheet’, such a reformatting of information allows it to be seen in a new way, one in which the ‘listing of the data’ can begin to become the basis for the ‘dawning of the insight’.
• Second, he reconciles the many seeming dualities of both Jewish traditions and Jesus’ stories. As Richard Rohr puts it

“Paul plays off seeming contradictions with ideas like flesh and spirit, law and freedom, male and female—holding them both and eliminating neither, until he gets to the reconciling third or the great spacious place called mercy or grace which then results in a “new creation” (Galatians 6:15). But most people try to understand Paul at the level of the initial binaries that he poses, interpreting one as totally good and the other as totally bad”.

• Third, he recognizes that there is more in this ‘liminal’ space than can be captured by our attempts to articulate it when he says

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known, we see.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

    It is in this third example that the idea of enstaty becomes most clear.

Elaine Pagels, in her book, “The Gnostic Paul”, finds the idea of ‘gnosticism’ to be one of the human modes of cognition that recognizes the insights to be found in liminal space.  As such, it peers around the wall of dogma that was erected by the early church to shore up its need for orthodoxy that was so valued by the Roman state.  As this mode of belief required no hierarchical structure, it was what provoked the institutional church to forbid its various manifestations of worship.

She sees this statement from Paul as one of many which recognized the importance of the enstatic state to both human growth and its consequences for a successful society.

She goes on to elaborate on ‘Gnosticism’ as she addresses the ‘Gospel of Truth’:

“The Gospel of Truth”, then, is all about relationships- how when we come to know ourselves, simultaneously we come to know God.  Implicit in this relationship is the paradox of gnosis– not intellectual knowledge, but knowledge of the heart.  What first we must come to know is that we cannot fully know God, since that Source far transcends our understanding.  But what we can know is that we’re intimately connected with that Divine Source, since “in him we live and move and have our being.”

      The term ‘gnostic’ was introduced as a pejorative by Irenaeus to warn Christians against heretical teachings, but as Pagels observes,

“The Greek term, often translated as ‘knowledge’, actually means ‘insight’, or understanding, since it refers to ‘knowledge of the heart’”.

Next Week

This week we carried Cynthia Bourgeault’s insights into enstasy to a look at how Jesus’ enstatic mode of expression is reinforced and deepened by Paul, and further refined by Elaine Pagels.   Next week we will see how Teilhard employs this mode of cognitive activity, and how it can be seen to play out in the events of today.