The Spiritual Senses and the Problem of Transcendence

Abstract

The Spiritual Senses and the Problem of Transcendence Gunnar Gjermundsen (bio) The Christian spiritual tradition has from its ancient roots been animated by an impulse toward transcendence: to reach her ultimate fulfillment and salvation, the soul is called to purify herself from ensnarement in sensory phenomena and the vicissitudes of the body in order to move beyond this fallen world to a suprasensible divine reality. Theologically, the impulse was over the centuries scaffolded in metaphysical binaries like sensory and intelligible, matter and spirit—and later, the natural and the supernatural. In the late modern era, this pattern became problematized. From inside the Christian tradition, theologians like Anders Nygren construed the impulse as an expression of an un-Christian eros of Platonic and Neoplatonic origin, foreign to Christ's central message of selfless, universal love.1 From outside the church, Nietzsche criticized what he saw as a life-denying attitude of ressentiment and otherworldliness in its ethos, while Marx famously denounced Christian visions of a transcendent after-life as "opium" to distract from needed societal change in the here and now.2 Today, these critiques would seem to have been confirmed by history. Despite murmurs of a post-secular age, the intersubjective consensus worldview of postmodernity is still so encased in secular materialism that talk of a dimension of reality beyond the purely physical is usually not taken seriously in academic and scientific discourse. This results in what I shall here define as the "problem of transcendence": how to give a satisfying answer to the modern critiques of the traditional Christian view of transcendence—with its highly ambivalent attitude to the body, the senses, materiality and the here and now—while at the same time not capitulating to the current secular denial of transcendence. One of the most promising avenues to approaching this problem springs from the same source as the Christian contemplative tradition itself—namely, the ancient patristic teachings on the spiritual senses. Here we find a wealth of material describing direct contact with the divine in a perceptual or quasi-perceptual manner, divinely transcendent, yet sensorially embodied at the same time, overcoming the traditional theological binaries. Spiritual practice has in this tradition given rise to a kind of first-person empiricism that may be guided by dogma but is not reducible to it. Attention to the spiritual senses [End Page 295] has become renewed among scholars in recent years.3 Yet, in this scholarship not much attention has so far been paid to the ways that the senses mature and transform along the contemplative path, a maturation that includes both changes in the soul's worldview, as well as the spiritual pedagogy that goes along with it. The present essay argues that adopting such a maturational or developmental perspective provides a new key to answering the critiques of Christianity's view of transcendence, and can also provide a robust, contemporary response to secular materialist orthodoxy. In the following, I will be looking at the spiritual senses from the perspective of the threefold contemplative path first articulated by Evagrius Ponticus, and given further elucidation by Maximus the Confessor, because of its seminal influence on later Christian spiritual tradition, both East and West. After briefly introducing the tradition of the spiritual senses and how it connects to the problem of transcendence, I will analyze how the spiritual senses of the soul evolve along the contemplative path based on a reading of Evagrius and Maximus. Then, in the final section, I try to show how this analysis helps to deal with the problem of transcendence, supported by key insights from the field of modern psychology. INTRODUCING THE SPIRITUAL SENSES AND THE PROBLEM OF TRANSCENDENCE The Christian tradition of the spiritual senses begins with Origen of Alexandria.4 In many places in his writings he speaks of a divine sense that in fact divides itself up into five different senses, corresponding to the five bodily senses we already know. These five spiritual senses are like subtle versions of the five bodily senses—on one level seemingly metaphorical, yet on another level quite clearly experientially real: But he who examines such matters more profoundly will say, that there being, as the Scripture calls it...