Knowledge Without Form

 Sister Ruth Burrows

There is an analogy for mystical knowledge...in the common experience of transcendence such as comes upon us when confronted with beauty in art or music, for instance. It is a knowledge without form, inexpressible even to ourselves. We cannot hold it, it holds us. It is shy. Try to examine it, try to clutch it and it flees like the deer. We may seek to communicate our vision -- this is what artists do -- finding images and words, but we can never fully succeed. Images, words, form, becomes ciphers and that is all. What the artist achieves is another experience of beauty which, in its turn, can serve as a medium for what transcends it.

There are innumerable occasions when this shy visitant knocks: contemplation of the vastness of the universe as well as its infinitesimal constituents -- mathematics, a flower, an insect, a human person, the encounters of love, death, disaster -- to name a few. Such visitations we may call high points. There is a more fundamental, constant experience that we do not perceive. It is the experience of our very existence and it is from this that all distinct thoughts flow; without this they could not be. All this is to show that we have by nature a capacity for non-conceptual knowledge. We realize such knowledge is not within our power. It is given and never becomes a possession, as does distinct knowledge. It is obscure. God is able to make himself known in a way analogous to what has just been described.

Ascent to Love: The Spiritual Teaching of St. John of the Cross