Mapping Journeys of the Soul: Spiritual Landscapes and Apophatic Self in the Patristic Tradition

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Mapping Journeys of the Soul: Spiritual Landscapes and Apophatic Self in the Patristic Tradition

There are different ways of journeying. Some travel by land, others by air. Some brave the seas, others launch themselves in adventurous explorations from the comfort of their armchair, as they leaf through the pages of their favourite travel book, traverse an old worn-out map with their finger, or roll the pointer across their computer screen. Physical or imaginative, most of these journeys share a territorial referent. They occur (or are imagined to occur) here, on this earth. This essay explores a different type of journeys, journeys that look inwards, rather than outwards—spiritual journeys, or journeys of the soul.

Spirituality is inherently geographical, or at least this is how we usually characterize it in everyday speech.Common definitions describe spirituality as “an inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of his/her being,” and spiritual experience as including “that of  connectedness with a larger reality , yielding a more comprehensive self; with other individuals or the human community; with nature or the cosmos ; or with the divine realm.” [1] Spirituality and spiritual experience are thus defined by direction, location, and scale.

Likewise, spiritual practices, such as prayer, can be envisaged as akin to the spatial act of journeying, and in more than a metaphorical sense. Praying and journeying both imply a movement. This can be a linear movement (from a to b, from London to Athens, from the beginning to the end of a service); it can also be a circular movement (through the liturgical calendar, through a prayer cord, or, from London to Athens and back to London). Praying and journeying are both articulated through stations, through breaks along a continuum (for example, liturgical feasts, the “stations” of the hymn akathistos , the knots of a prayer cord, or, more mundanely, London Heathrow—Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci—Athens’ Eleftherios Venizelos). Praying and journeying both take place in space and time. In the most literal sense, they physically converge in the act of pilgrimage.

Here, however, I would like to consider a longer pilgrimage—the journey of life, and more specifically, mappings of this inner journey. By “mapping” I mean the physical process of map-making (and therefore cartographic representations), as well as a cognitive process, an ordering process, a way of making sense of the world—and of life itself. Yet, how are movements of time and human experience translated into movement through space? Conversely, how is movement through space used to recount life-long spiritual journeys? And finally, why do we spatialize spiritual experience? Taking some modern examples of western “maps of life” as both a starting point and a term of comparison, this essay seeks to address these questions through the lens of fourth-century patristic writing.

Maps of Life

In 2000 a team of Dutch designers, produced a sui generis publication titled the Atlas of Experience .[2] Encompassing the most well-trodden, as well as the most remote regions of human existence, the atlas became an almost instant best seller, with 10,000 copies sold within less than nine months.[3] The atlas features twenty-one regional maps charting the invisible landscapes and inner transformations each individual traverses while moving through the pathway of life. As with any atlas, the Atlas of Experience also includes a synoptic map (Figure 1). This portrays the whole inner world of human experience as a large island. The seasons of human life are mapped longitudinally on different regions, from West to East: Spring, with its sources of inspiration, streams of ideas, cities of laughter and innocence, castles in the air, and sea of possibilities; Summer and its plains of solitude and mountains of work; Autumn and the swamps of boredom, the river of decay, and its ocean of peace; and finally the peninsula of Winter facing an uncharted land of “elsewhere.”

Original as it might appear, the Dutch Atlas of Life is part of a longer cartographic tradition. About a century earlier, American Temperance activists, for example, turned life into a train journey and mapped it accordingly. The graphic result thus looks pretty much like a US railroad map of its days (Figure 2). It presents the traveller with three main lines diverging from Decisionville and crossing different states, such as the “State of Righteousness,” the “State of Sacrifice and Service,” as well as the “State of Vanity” and the “State of Depravity.” The upper line leads straight to Celestial City. The others, following more convoluted routes passing through Beer Lake, Gossip Centre, Rum Jar Lake, lead to the State of Darkness and to the City of Destruction.[4]

The map bears clear references to John Bunyan’s allegorical tale Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for many centuries the most common devotional book in the Anglophone world, after the Bible. More significantly, the map builds on over two and a half centuries of cartographic entertainment and moral charting of “every conceivable aspect of modern life.” Maps of life and human experience are mainly a product of the Enlightenment and social change in western Europe. While the first one of its kind appeared in 1654 to illustrate the French novel Clélie by Madeleine Scudery, the genre, and especially its subset of “wedding maps,” became particularly popular in eighteenth century France and then in Britain, as the Marriage Act of 1753, which restricted marriage to a single legally binding form, and then the Divorce Act of 1857 became subjects of much public debate.[5]

Victorian wedding maps usually have a maritime theme, whereby the male lover navigates perilous waters before reaching his destination (marriage). Widowhood, divorce, second marriage and polygamy are generally shown as marginal social forms—as small and uninviting peninsulas and islands. Marriage, by contrast, usually features as a large island (Wedding Island) in a fashion similar to the Dutch “world of experience.” As with its twenty-first-century counterpart, Wedding Island is divided in provinces. In an exemplar published in the 1870s (Figure 3), for example, these include the Land of Kindnesses and Region of Rejoicing, as well as the State of Agitation, and Feeland, inhabited by lawyers. The island is surrounded by the Oceans of Felicity and Admiration, but also by the Sea of Doubt and by the treacherous Jealousy Isles.[6]

As with any map, each of these maps is the product of its time and of its culture: the scientific “rhetoric of truth” and secular vocabulary of a contemporary Dutch map; the American excitement with rectilinear boundaries and new transportation technologies; the Victorian romance of sea narratives and geographical exploration (and obsession with weddings). What all these maps share is that they are not maps of actual places. They are maps of regions of the mind and of pathways of human life. Unlike traditional maps, these maps include places impossible to return to as well as those impossible to avoid. Designed to entertain or persuade, to impart moral teachings or prompt personal self-reflection, these maps constitute evocative links between interior and exterior worlds.

They allow us to visualize invisibilities; to navigate interior routes; to put life into perspective. We can read these maps and their plain persuasive styles as visual expressions of a modern impulse to pin down and rationalize different aspects of human experience, whether within the artificial rectilinear boundaries of “states” or the natural self-enclosure of islands. We can read these maps as echoes of one another. Perhaps more intriguingly, however, we can also think of them as part of a broader and an even longer—indeed, much longer—tradition. This tradition takes us as far back as to the fourth century, and this time not through graphic representations, but through “textual mappings” of journeys of life and of the soul.

Spiritual Maps

Early patristic writing is often imbued with vivid description and spatial vocabulary. For the Cappadocian fathers, trained as they were in Hellenistic rhetoric, mental images served as powerful tools for persuasion and as media for expressing abstract concepts. Their theology was marked by suggestive imagination, rather than analytic subtlety.Or perhaps more precisely, as Fredrick Norris points out, “employing analytic subtlety as the expected method in search for the nature of God, and thus discovering its inadequacy, led to the choice of compelling images as the way to approach the inapproachable.” [7] Vivid images thus served as the basics to speaking about both human and divine nature. As Gregory of Nazianzus (329–389 AD) observed, “our noblest theologian is not one who has discovered the whole—our earthly shackles do not permit us the whole—but one whose mental image is by comparison fuller, who has gathered in mind a richer picture, outline or whatever we call it, of the truth” ( Fourth Theological Oration ).[8]

Combining colour and shape, as well as movement and memorability, landscape descriptions and journeys are especially prominent not so much as objects of poetic contemplation per se , as a necessary means for bringing meaning vividly before the reader’s (or listener’s) mind’s eye. In his treatise On Virginity , Gregory of Nyssa (335–395 AD), for example, recounts the journey of life as a serial movement through contrasting topographies: Painting vivid topographies in words, Gregory takes the reader through meadows of joy and deserts of sorrow; through periods of bright bliss and gloomy melancholy. What is important for Gregory, however, is not the landscape “seen” by the eye, but rather, the ability not to lose sight of the ultimate destination of the true life-long pilgrimage—the heavenly Jerusalem.The “spiritual map” traced by the Nyssian is a map constructed on metaphors and dualisms: the locus amoenus and the locus horridus ; the beautiful cultivated land and the wilderness, which is a reflection of broader conceptions of nature of the time—for the Church fathers beautiful nature was first of all domesticated nature—, [9] but also, and more significantly, the spiritual journey in this world and its destination; earth and heaven; ephemeral beauty and eternal perfection.

In this journey, terrestrial landscapes (which is, terrestrial cares) feature as distractions, a motive we also encounter in a parable by Ephraim the Syrian (306–373 AD). This time we have two travellers heading towards a city. Soon after they have set off they encounter an area covered with thick shadowy trees, bushes, and torrents—a true locus amoenus . The one traveller simply passes by, as he is in a hurry to reach the city. The other one stops to admire the landscape and remains behind. As the distracted traveller indulges in the pleasures of the place, he is surprised by a wild beast. The story ends with the traveller finishing up into the den of the beast, and the other making it to the city, as he had not let the beautiful landscape seduce him. The two travellers, Ephraim explains, are those who follow the path of virtue. The first traveller is the one who, hurrying to the heavenly kingdom, is not seduced by temptations.The latter, by contrast, is the one who turns his attention “from the invisible things to those visible.” [10] The locus amoenus is an ephemeral (if not diabolic) distraction from the final destination; it is an illusion, a temptation which Ephraim compares to demonic desires such as vanity, pride, lust for power. It is akin to the diabolic glimpse of “all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory of them” (Matthew 4:8) which Jesus was presented on Mount of Temptation—yet, this time it is a view from ground level and at a local scale.

The spiritual journeys mapped by Gregory of Nyssa and Ephraim the Syrian are linear ones: from birth to death, from the beginning to the end of life—from αρχή to τέλος . The word τέλος , however, embeds a second connotation, that is, perfection ( τελειότητα ), which in Ephraim’s parable is expressed through the biblical imagery of the city. Hence, unlike in the Dutch Atlas of Experience and other modern maps of life, here we have a geography of displacement, whereby the world becomes the periphery and the heavenly city the centre.

A similar journey is presented in Gregory of Nyssa’s Contemplation on the Life of Moses , a treatise that, using the prophet’s life journey as an analogy, recounts the voyage of the human soul from slavery to freedom. Here the reader is once again taken through a sequence of different landscape imageries—this time the symbolic landscapes of the Old Testament. In the Life of Moses , however, the horizontal movement through the landscape assumes a third, vertical dimension. The spiritual journey of the soul to God is mapped out as a journey through a moonlit desert night (which Gregory associates to the purification from egoistical passions). This is followed by the ascent of a fog-covered mountain (what he calls phōtisis , the enlightenment of the soul by the Holy Spirit), and finally the entry into the impenetrable darkness of a cloud and a cleft in the rock (or théosis , the union with God).

“The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb—the majority of people scarcely reach its base,” Gregory warns. It is achieved beyond human language, beyond rational understanding, beyond clear vision, beyond landscape. “For leaving behind everything that is observed, not only what sense comprehends but also what the intelligence thinks it sees, it keeps on penetrating deeper until by the intelligence’s yearning for understanding it gains access to the invisible and incomprehensible, and there it sees God” ( Vita Moysis 1.163). While in the previous accounts terrestrial landscapes metaphorically operated as a veil potentially distracting from the vision of spiritual truth (the heavenly city), here the dark cloud and the speluncar void are a precondition to access this truth. Visual presence conceals spiritual absence; visual absence invites divine presence.

While using landscape imagery, the Life of Moses ultimately transcends landscape; it defies the language of cartography. In mapping a pathway, it opens up an infinite abyss. Unlike the modern “maps of life,” the Life of Moses does not portray a fixed route with a beginning and an end. It portrays an eternal progress, a continuous journey towards the infinite, as the individual continually transcends all which has been reached before. “Because the one limit of perfection is the fact that it has no limit,” Gregory asks, “how then would [one] arrive at the-sought-for boundary when he can find no boundary?” ( Vita Moysis 1.5–6). Hence we have a further tension—between the mappable and the unmappable.

The Earth as a Spiritual Map

Unlike the modern maps of life (and indeed unlike most modern maps), patristic spiritual mappings are not static but dynamic maps. They are not synoptic views from above, but sequential views from ground level. They are akin to Roman itinerary maps such as the Peutinger table or pilgrims’ itineraries, such as the anonymous Bordeaux pilgrim’s (333 AD).[11] Both presented places and landmarks in a linear sequence, as encountered along the route; they presented a horizon that kept moving.[12]

The words Gregory of Nyssa and later Byzantine writers use for landscape are τόπος and χωρίον (from the verb χωρίζω , to divide). In classical and late antiquity the earth was experienced and narrated less as geometrical space than as a sequence of places , of elements or scenes charged with enargheia , or vividness. Thus χωρίον and τόπος bear connotations different from the modern word ‘landscape’; they do not designate scenic synoptic vision, but sequential juxtapositions, local specificities, memorable qualities. These qualities would allow readers (or listeners) to effectively imprint spiritual topographies on what the ancients called “the tablets of the soul.”

Vivid landscape imagery helps “spell out things more clearly,” Gregory of Nazianzus argues ( Homilies XXVI.10). Landscape acts as a mnemonic support and as an instrument of persuasion. It can also act as an instrument for revelation. Landscape utters stories. For the Byzantines, nature was a vast reservoir of familiar symbols through which the Creator revealed Himself. God had spoken to the Hebrew through “landscape utterings”: “the burning bush, the rock that gushed with water, the jar of manna, the fire from God that came down from the altar” (John of Damascus On Holy Images ). He continued to speak to humans through His works, which Basil called “visible memorials of His wonders” (Basil Homilies VIII.8). In this sense, Creation itself can be (and was) conceptualized as a spiritual map; a map that revealed invisibilities through its own visibilities.

“I was walking alone, just as the sun was setting,” writes Gregory of Nazianzus, as he recounts one of his contemplative retreats in the wilds of Pontus. Here a marine scene reveals a spiritual map. Through the contemplation of the sea, Gregory surveys human life from a distance, or, in his words, he manages to “lift up his mind for a little, above changeable things.”

Marine metaphors reappear as the hierarch announces his resignation from the See of Constantinople and in the moving farewell address he pronounced in occasion of the Second Ecumenical Council of 381 AD in the presence of the Emperor and one hundred and fifty bishops. This time a sea journey is employed to describe his very own condition and troubled life paths. Strained by the intrigues and intricacies that followed his recent enthronement as the bishop of Constantinople and wishing to prevent further possible divisions, Gregory decided to step down and return to his native Cappadocia: His period of leadership is likened to a difficult sea journey: The “sea of life metaphor” recurs several times also in the writings of John Chrysostom. “We all sail the same sea, and it is impossible to escape waves and spray,” the hierarch writes. Without faith, humans are like “those who attempt to cross the open sea without a ship, who for a little way hold out by swimming, using both hands and feet, but when they have advanced farther, are quickly swamped by the waves: in like manner they who use their own reasonings, before they have learnt anything, suffer shipwreck.” Or again, For Chrysostom, however, the sea goes beyond pure allegory. “We wonder at the beauty of columns, mural art, the physical bloom of youth,” the hierarch writes. Standing before the sea, John Chrysostom is seized with astonishment, with fear, with vertigo. The contemplation of the boundless sea is no longer simply a rational, didactic experience. It is no longer a mapping experience. It is a religious experience akin to that of the prophet. The sublime beauty of the limitless ocean can lead one outside of himself to approach the mysterium tremendum : the infinite, unmappable abyss of divine perfection Moses encountered on Sinai.[13]

As God’s handiwork, nature is sacramental. The Earth and its variety of landscapes are symbolic in the ancient strong, ontological sense of the word: sym-volon , the coming together of two halves, the visible and the invisible. Landscape contains the invisible and makes it visible thanks to its own visibilities.

Journeying towards the Infinite: Some Concluding Remarks

Early patristic “spiritual mappings” are similar to modern maps of life in that they delight, they reveal truths, they whisper secrets. And yet, they are also different in various respects. Firstly, their primary goal is not so much charting human emotions, as helping defeat human passions. Secondly, as cultural products of late antiquity, they operate at ground level, just as itinerary maps of their time. Unlike modern maps, they do not operate through mathematical correlations between fixed geometrical points, but through sequences of vivid topoi and their qualitative peculiarities, through visual breaks along a continuum. Thirdly, and more importantly, unlike Victorian “Wedding Island,” the Dutch “Island of Experience,” or the American “States,” patristic maps do not set human life within reassuring boundaries. They rather challenge boundaries. They are articulated through a tension between kataphatic and apophatic experience; through speech beyond speech; through image beyond image—through infinite progress.

Kataphasis emphasizes the metaphorical character of all human thought and as such it can guide us to God—the ultimate purpose of the journey of human life. However, as the Cappadocians recognized, once we are faced with God’s imageless glory, we realize the limits of all imagination. The cleft in the rock on the top of Mount Sinai opening on an infinite abyss, the perpetual march of the traveller towards the heavenly Jerusalem, “the littleness of man amid the greatness of the universe” all point to the human necessity of thinking through images and yet at the same time to their inadequacy to speak of the divine. As Gregory of Nazianzus writes, the divine is difficult to contemplate: How to approach the infinite then?

Gregory of Nyssa paraphrases God’s words to Moses “here is a place beside me where you can stand on a rock” (Exodus 33:21) as transcending both space and time. In speaking of place, Gregory argues, God does not limit the place to something limited and quantifiable: “On the contrary, by the use of the analogy of a measurable surface he leads the hearer to the unlimited and infinite.” The passage, according to Gregory, should thus be read as:

Epiktasis , or the infinite journey towards God’s inexhaustible mystery, finds visual expression in Byzantine representations of Saint John’s Klimax , the ladder of virtues taking ascetics from earth to heaven (Figure 4). In his sixth-century treatise, the abbot of Saint Catherine Monastery on Sinai provided his readers with practical instructions on how to raise their soul and body to God through the acquisition of ascetic virtues. Ascetics are thus shown climbing up the thirty rungs of the ladder, which correspond to the thirty virtues discussed by John in an equal number of chapters. While the author reaches the top of the ladder, other less successful souls are drawn to the mouth of hell by the evils of passions. On the upper right corner Christ is displayed only partially. He is enclosed within concentric semicircles. The exterior circle symbolizes the uncreated light which can be perceived by pure souls in this world. The central dark blue circle represents the unapproachable divine darkness inside of which God dwells ( ‘φως oικών απρόσιτον’, 1 Timothy 6:16), thus suggesting that the progress of the soul towards God continues after death—for eternity.

On the icon humans are shown as journeying between earth and heaven; they are in-between figures, or as Gregory of Nazianzus writes, they are “two-fold beings: earthly yet heavenly, temporal yet immortal, visible yet intangible.” [14] As God’s image, the human being ultimately remains a mystery—and the human heart the most difficult terrain to chart of all. ‘Εκάστου δε τα εντός και η καρδία είναι βυθός’ (Psalms 64:6). “Incomparably vaster [than the universe] is the inner space of the human heart,” writes Metropolitan Kallistos Ware. “The human person is open, always pointing beyond our present situation to a future as yet unrealized”—always marching in an endless journey. “To be human is to be endlessly varied, innovative, unexpected, self-transcending”—apophatic.[15]

Hence, we are back to the initial question: Why do we spatialize spiritual experience? And why spatialize spiritual experience through landscape imagery?

Geography, it has been argued, is simply a visible form of theology.[16] Geography has a unique capacity to give expression to the deepest longings of the human soul. Thanks to their imaginative power, to their ability to localize truth, to pin down the ineffable, to materialize the ungraspable, landscapes and geographical features offer themselves as effective devices for making invisibilities visible and thus spiritual paths accessible. Landscape serves as a rhetorical device that allows readers to visualize, to remember, and, ultimately, to walk pa thways to théosis. It holds a symbolic function.

Most pre-modern cultures perceived the world and themselves within that world as “part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.” [17] The Cappadocian Fathers and their Byzantine successors made no exception. They imagined themselves as part of a “universal chronicle” starting from Adam and ending with the Second Coming of Christ; a history of continuous revelation through repetition.[18] It is through these repetitions, through landscape utterings and overlapping geographies that they looked at the world, through the world, and beyond the world—straight into the abyss of their heart.

Bibliography

Akerman, J. 2007. “Finding Our Way.” In Maps: Finding Our Way in the World, ed. J. Akerman and R. Karrow, 19–63. Chicago.

Dilke, O. A. W. 1987. “Roman Large-Scale Mapping in the Early Empire.” In History of Cartography. Vol. I. Ed. B. Harley and D. Woodward, 212–233 Chicago.

Εφραίμ του Σύρου. 1989. Έργα. Vol. 2. Θεσσαλονίκη.

Foltz, B. 2001. “Nature Godly and Beautiful: The Iconic Earth.” Phenomenology 31:113–155.

Guignard, L. M. 2001. Review of The Atlas of Experience by A. Waaij, J. Lare, and D. Winner. The Geographical Review 91:614–616.

Levenson, J. 1985. Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. Minneapolis.

Leyerle, B. 1996. “Landscape as Cartography in Early Christian Pilgrimage Narratives.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 64:119–138.

Norris, F. 2006. “Gregory Contemplating the Beautiful: Knowing Human Misery and Divine Mystery through and Being Persuaded by Images.” In Gregory of Nazianzus: Images and Reflections, ed. J. Boertnes and B. Hagg, 19–35. Copenhagen.

Rautman, M. 2006. Daily Life in the Byzantine Empire. Westport, CT.

Reitinger, F. 1999. “Mapping Relationships: Allegory, Gender and the Cartographical Image in Eighteenth-century France and England.” Imago Mundi 51:106-130.

Waaij, A., J. Lare, and D. Winner. 2000. The Atlas of Experience. London.

Wallace-Hadrill, D. S. 1968. The Greek Patristic View of Nature. New York.

Ware, K. 2012. Orthodox Theology in the Twenty-First Century. Geneva.

Footnotes

Note 1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_spirituality

Note 2
Waaij, Lare, and Winner 2000.

Note 3
Mellin Guignard 2001:614.

Note 4
Akerman 2007:37.

Note 5
Reitinger 1999:106-107.

Note 7
Norris 2006:21.

Note 8
Quoted in Norris 2006:21.

Note 10
Εφραίμ 1989:145-147. I would like to thank Fr. Theoktistos Docheiarites for bringing this text to my attention.

Note 11
The Peutinger table is a 675 by 34 cm medieval parchment copy of a fourth-century roll displaying the extensive network of routes leading from the edges of the Empire to Rome along with their different staging posts (Dilke 1987).

Note 12
Leyerle 1996.

Note 13
Wallace-Hadrill 1968:95.

Note 14
Ware 2012:44.

Note 15
Ware 2012:44.

Note 16
Levenson 1985:116.

Note 18
Rautman 2006:2.