Posted on: May 5th, 2018 Deep Anamnesis (in an age of Secularism)
Perhaps there are two kinds of people in the world: those who sense that reality is mystical and cannot seem to shake this intuitive feeling, and those who don’t.
Of the latter type, think of a secular thinker (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins) who stands up and simply says, “There is no evidence for God.”
The former type, however, is not simply someone who has a new-agey sensibility. Rather, mystics are those who, among other things, remind us that we have forgotten. That is, a mystic is someone who respects the role of memory, or anamnesis.
Saying Morning Prayer this morning (Book of Common Prayer, p. 75), I prayed “Canticle 16,” the Song of Zechariah (BCP, 92), and a couple of things hit me afresh. About halfway through the song appear the lines
free to worship Him without fear / holy and righteous in his sight / all the days of our life.
According to great religious traditions of the West, from Christianity, Islam, & Judaism all the way to the mystery religions of the ancient near eastern Levant, and including the Pythagorean-influenced Platonism that in many ways forms a backdrop to the thought of the Church Fathers (for example), mankind or the human race was primordially positioned in relationship with God, already “worshiping Him without fear.” Whether this is articulated in terms of the Garden of Eden or the prenatal vision of the Platonic Forms, the primordial origin of humanity is one of communion with God.
Well, then, why don’t we modern, western people have any sense of this today? After all, I can’t see God, and there appears to be no evidence for him, or so it seems.
And the answer to this question, coming from the quarters of the the mystical religious traditions mentioned above, is, quite simply, that we have forgotten.
In Collation XV of the Hexaëmeron, speaking of the creation of the world in six days, Bonaventure writes:
The first age, resembling infancy, runs from Adam to Noah…. The first day symbolizes the first time, when light and knowledge were given to man; and this is infancy, which is erased by oblivion. So it is with everything that was done until the time when the Flood wiped out every animal except those that were named by Noah.
Bonaventure is arguing that, when it comes to the reality of God and our experience of God, we have forgotten.
If this is true, then centrally at issue in the religious (and philosophical) life is the task of remembering, recollecting, anamnesis. Hence, the Song of Zechariah, again:
In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high shall break upon us.
What is this mystical experience? Among other things it is the realization that, “Oh, yeah, now I remember, now I get it…. we were created for communion with God … and by grace and faith and all of God’s gifts (reason, creation, Scripture), that is exactly where we find ourselves, right now.”
