A few Brief Summaries of some Christian Classics

 

A few  Brief Summaries of some Christian Classics

 

The Desert Fathers – 4thC AD

Were hermits, ascetics who lived a few centuries after Christ, in the desert region of Egypt from the 3 Century onwards?

Rejecting worldly pleasures and instead seeks a closer relationship with God/

The basic idea of the Desert Fathers - “we can ascend to God through a mixture of self-emphasis on the ascetic life. Jesus said “deny yourself, take of the cross and follow me. This they took very seriously.

 

City of God – St Augustine - 5^th C

Many writers at that time were attempting to harmonize Christian ideas with Platonism – to merge Reason and Faith to produce a “Reasonable Faith” to provide a rational foundation for the mystical and theological aspects of Christian, Jewish or later Islamic beliefs. He viewed Evil as simply the absence of the Good. He rejected the idea of the dualism of Good and Evil. He contrasted the City Of Man with the City of God. “We are all seeking to build a City of God, out of the City of Man, where man’s innate weakness is overcome through faith in God.”

 

 

The Cloud of Unknowing – 14^th C – Unknown Author

The main idea is that we can only approach God through love, not through knowledge and rational thought. The book describes the human need to understand as a stumbling block en route to reaching God through simple Love. The book provides insight into medieval mysticism. It has a Zen-like view of Christianity. The book’s view was that despite any ‘image” of God we might conceive of, the true Nature of God lies beyond, that image or concept we can hold in our heads. Therefore we must have an imageless approach to the Divine Being. God is transcendent of rational thought therefore that leaves God “clouded in darkness to our rational minds”. There is an impossibility of the knowledge (intellectual) of God. God can only be approached by unconditional Love. The author suggests not conceptualizing God, advising us to reject extraneous thoughts, only to focus on the Love of God. Spinoza and others recognized the impossibility of the knowledge of God, as we can only work within the limits of our rationality. Kant eventually divided the world into noumena and phenomena. His argues that in trying to understand the nomena world (the world of things as they really are, rather them simply as we perceived them to be) we inevitably came up against the bounds of reason. Kierkegaard seizes on this idea and suggested that to approach God, we must take a “Leap of Faith”. (This book, as well as the City of God by St. Augustine, were two of the core books for a Philosophy of Religion course I took at UNBSJ in Saint John back in 1989. Without those courses I would not have been able to have converted to Faith in 2000.)

 

The Mirrors of Simple Souls – 14 Century – Marguerite Parere – Lived in Belgium

She was burned at the stake in 1310 after a trial in Paris for heresy. The book takes the form of a conversation between the personification of Love, Reason, and the Soul. The book talks about the 7 stages of spiritual growth one must go through on a journey to union with God.

 

It bears comparison with the later work of “Dark Night of the Soul” by St. John of the Cross and “The Interior Castle” by St. Teresa which also takes the reader through the metaphorical journey towards divinity. The path towards God is on where the soul, the ego, is eventually annihilated in the sense that the soul on longer wills in a selfish way but wants only what God wants. In this

 

 Union with the Devine, the self disappears leaving only God. She believes that one could have a personal relationship with God, the central authority of the Universe.  In fact that it was only through the church and not the individual, could one have a relationship with God. Even today Marguerite Parere was never been pardoned the RC Church for the ‘crime’ of writing her poetic, spiritual works on the oneness with God.

 

The Interior Castle – Written 1577 – Teresa of Avila.

In it she committed her inner life to prayer.  she writes passionately about the soul’s search for the soul’s mate. She would often talk of the journey that starts out in contemplation and prayer that leads to the subjugation of the personal will to the will of God. Describes the seven mansions in the interior castle of the soul.

 

Dark Night of the Soul – St. John of the Cross – 16^th C

One of Spain’s best-beloved poems is the Dark Night of The Soul by St. John of the Cross. It is a short poem that gains a mystical account of the soul leaving the body and reaching up towards its “beloved”, God. It describes finding an ‘a secret ladder’ that brings you to a place where you find both peace and God. It was this poem that introduced into common language - “the Dark Night of the Soul”. In essence, this refers to the condition of despair that is felt by a believer who feels that his prayer is empty and unrewarding. Even though this love may feel unrequited, persisting in a life of virtue and prayer can lead us to a deeper understanding of that Love. In doing so we can recognize that we are that love of and from God and not limited to usual and base instinct of self-interest.