The Fleeting Mediations of Modernity

I am currently taking a course on St. John of the Cross, and we are reading both his poetry and his commentaries in which he elucidates his various understandings of the dark night. He argues that spiritual seekers must go through a 'night of sense' in which they purge themselves of tangible or bodily consolations, and 'night of spirit' in which they forego any attachment to spiritual consolation. The point of all these nights and purgings is to emerge less reliant on the mediations through which we know God and more attuned to Godself alone.

I have been thinking a lot about what these arguments meant for people of John's time and what they mean for us today. On the one hand, from the most obvious perspective, the modern world is in more need of a sensory and spiritual 'stripping down' since our culture so easily makes idols of the material goods that are so prevalent and of the self-help benefits which we are supposed to receive from spirituality; clearly, John of the Cross can provide a corrective to these distractions in shaking us from our material and spiritual accretions and pointing us, through nothingness, to God alone. On the other hand, however, I wonder if our society's modes of busyness, distraction, and virtual reality have already taken us out of the grasp of human experience and enacted a kind of 'stripping down' that might or might not leave us bare before God.

After all, I sometimes suspect that modern humans are not as thoroughly in the world as earlier people used to be. The lives and imaginations of John's Spanish contemporaries were vitalized and filled deeply with the tangible world surrounding them: the striking beauty and gruesomeness of medieval Catholic art, the gritty realities of toil and work experienced on a visceral level, etc. The reality of the medieval world in its colorfulness, drabness, richness, dirtiness, luxury and depravity left no doubt as to the captivating force of human experience.

Today, however, we are somewhat less captivated by reality because we have fewer tangible experiences and spend less time in them. A Spanish Catholic of John's time might have spent a morning curing leather in the shadow of a gargoyle-decorated Cathedral, becoming deeply familiar with the feeling of the leather and the roughness of the cathedral's stone, steeped in the experience of the work and that particular setting. I, on the other hand, spend the morning skimming through pdf documents, which do not really exist apart from the pixels of a computer screen which I hardly ever recognize as a tangible object since it is useful only as a kind of window through which intangible ideas can be processed. Sometimes I am vaguely surprised when something makes me aware of the world again - perhaps a computer key gets stuck, or my stomach growls, and I am surprised to find that I am in the world and the world does have certain claims on me. I wonder if, instead of being too much enamored with the immediacy of the world, we moderns (or at least we graduate students) struggle with the opposite problem of forgetting that we do in fact belong to an immediate world.

John of the Cross warns spiritual seekers away from becoming too attached to experiences which are only mediations of God and not Godself, but I suggest that we now need guidance for the next step. Modern humans are increasingly already detached from experience, only touching it fleetingly due to the distancing effects of technology and busyness. But whereas John of the Cross assumed that once humans were stripped of experience (as he was in the prisons of Toledo) then true knowledge of God would come, I don't see the divine as automatically coming to fill that space in our realities. We are certainly detached, which John regards as a positive receptivity to God, but I don't know if this particular detachment has indeed cleared our eyes to see God.