Vertical interiority
“Know yourself” says wisdom. And the mystical experiment could be only an in-depth repercussion of such a sentence. Undoubtedly there is some kind of truth, because without “you” the mystery of God does not know where to communicate itself. This mystery starts, for you, with “your” mystery.
Here the great Christian difference should be immediately marked. The divine mystery is identified with your mystery, certainly. However your mystery is already more than yours. Your mystery is embarked where you are not any more sole master on board of yourself. Because here you exist only in the crossing of your deeper difference, in the gaping of your `same' towards the ‘Other’.
The essence of your life is exploited and decided on another plan which is not any more that of your daily mundane obviousness. An `elsewhere' which is however closer and more present that all the mundane proximities, since it coincides with your interior. The interior is not the closed small world of your intimacies. The interior is an bottomless abyss. The interior is an infinite universe. This interior gives direction, order and value to the outside.
Man is an animal hurt in his animal reality, an animal open on another dimension, an animal crossed by the vertical dimension. Without such a gaping chasm, spiritual life can not exist. The verticality means the crucifixion of our `natural' horizontality. By it, according to the deep thought of Pascal, “man passes man infinitely”.
The vertical crossing extends between ultimate heights and ultimate depths. The accent can be put on one or the other. Johan Tauler speaks more often about the abyss than about the top. At moments, he speaks about both at the same time, as if the inconsistency of the image underlined their inaccessibility. Gaping altitude or culminating depth, the extreme ‘acuminal’ and the extreme ‘abyssal’ meet and coincide. In turn or at the same time they mean the great difference from the horizontality of the middle, the ultimate divine mystery in man.
In Christian regime, this verticality is not only orientation or projection. It is ontological dimension of the being. It structures a hierarchical constitution of the human being with dimension capable of God.
It is to be feared that our contemporary mundane obviousness cannot follow any more. It counts on the radical finitude, the strict immanence and the total enclosure of the human condition. When ‘I’ is nothing more than a virtual appearance of an obscure `Id' growing fool in a dead end. Radically different is the Christian vision where man is infinitely open in vertical gaping. Infinitely open. Open on a bottomless bottom.
This bottomless bottom, according to the extraordinary vision of Johan Tauler, belongs to God alone. Here God Trinity wants to live and act. Here the Father, in the unit of the Spirit, does not cease generating his Son. Here, with his Son and in his Son, he generates us daughters and sons. Here we become “light in the light”.
goto