Some notes on sorrow and selfishness, part I

While considering Gurdjieff’s discussion of the sorrow of his Endlessness, let's try referring to the  opening words of Catherine of Siena’s dialogue:

True contrition satisfies for sin and its penalty not by virtue of any finite suffering you may bear, but by virtue of your innocent desire. For God, who is infinite, would have infinite love and infinite sorrow.

The infinite sorrow God wills is twofold: for the offense you yourself have committed against your creator, and for the offense you see on your neighbors part. Because those who have such sorrow have infinite desire and are one with me and loving affection… Every suffering they bear from any source at all, in spirit or in body, is of infinite worth, and so satisfies for the offense that deserved an infinite penalty. 

True these are finite deeds in finite time. But because their virtue is practiced in their suffering born with infinite desire and contrition and sorrow for sin, it has value. 

—Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, Classics of Western Spirituality, translated by Suzanne Noffke, 1980, page 28.

 Catherine has a considerable number of observations about charity and virtue, which, as I’ve observed earlier, are closely related to the idea of conscious labor and intentional suffering.  To go one step further, Gurdjieff’s concepts of the infinite nature of God, his  intense preoccupation with purgatory, and his citation of God’s sorrow as an essential  thematic element are remarkably consonant with the material presented and examined in Catherine’s dialogue. It seems difficult to believe that the conceptual structure of Beelzebub’s Tales doesn’t owe a considerable debt to this piece.

 Catherine was a notorious religious ecstatic. Speaking from my own personal experience of religious ecstasy, I can say with great certainty that specific things she says are derived from that state. For example:

… I have already told you that suffering and sorrow increase in proportion to love: when love grows, so does sorrow. (Ibid, p.33)

 Her thematic blend of the perfect balance of joy and suffering are descriptive of religious ecstasy —which cannot be described in any adequate way— but more importantly, they echo Gurdjieff’s own words on the subject of happiness and unhappiness, as quoted by his perennial sage, Mullah Nassr Eddin:

 Every real happiness for man can arise exclusively only from some unhappiness also real which he has already experienced.

—Beelzebub’s Tales, p. 377

 Once again, we encounter details that must convince the serious scholar that Gurdjieff’s teachings, although framed in a completely unconventional storyline, reflect absolutely traditional and well-established ideas drawn from the deepest parts of the Christian mystical tradition.

It’s fallen to me over the years to speak a great deal about the Gurdjieff practice and my own practice; yet I rarely, if ever, refer to or speak rapturously from the religious ecstasies that formed and grounded my own inner practice. The kernel of that lies within everything I write; yet although rapture can be fundamentally instructive, and extraordinarily informative ( it forms the inward core of the soul) it isn’t useful to anyone else except through personal experience. It can, moreover, become a vice if one does not understands its imperative; and it needs to be firmly balanced by the rational. 

I think Catherine does a better job of this than Hadewijch; yet both have significant value. Perhaps the fact that Gurdjieff’s core teachings are, at their well concealed heart, drawn from Christian mysticism explains some of the powerful negative reactions they have attracted from  traditional Christian institutions. Mystics have often been treated suspiciously; their teachings seem dangerous, because they reach towards those unspeakable desires the church cannot so easily answer to or explain. The institutions are, inevitably, formulaic; and mysticism admits no formulas, but instead insists on the abandonment of them.

 Yet perhaps it’s not fair to say that mysticism admits of no formula, because in its essence mysticism has only a single formula, and that is the formula of love. Gurdjieff’s work has been accused of not being loving enough — and yet in my own experience, it asks us to discard and abandon all our previous concepts of love for the time being, in the hopes of encountering a new and deeper love: one that springs from these deep roots of Christian mysticism, that touches on the edges of the inner ecstasy of God’s personal Being, and that calls for us to understand love as a material substance that creates everything and flows through everything as a powerful current, not just of our unspeakable (nonverbal) desires, but also as the fundament of all Being.

 This idea of love does not have room for our emotional attachments, which are casual and subjective. Perhaps we come closest to understanding it from an intellectual point of view when we encounter Hadewijch’s love as a force of annihilation, which consumes everything we are in our first encounter with it, and demands everything from us. This, again, is an exact, though functionally limited, description of religious ecstasy. Our conventional understandings of love leave us with the idea that it has to “feel wonderful;” and yet there is nothing wonderful about this love: it is a terror and a burden, an extremity of anguish that cannot be survived without the ecstasy that accompanies it.

From a metaphysical point of view, we might say that God is comprised of an exactly balanced proportion of the good and the bad, and that His suffering arises from the fact that there is no way to have one without the other. 

We are called as His charges to share that suffering. It calls to mind Walt Whitman’s quote,  I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.  

The way Catherine puts it is less personal:  “in loving me you come to know more of my truth, and the more you know, the more intolerable pain and sorrow you will know…” (ibid, p.33)


May your heart be close to God, 
and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.