Confitebor tibi, Domine, Deus meus, in toto cordo meo, et glorificabo Nomen tuum in aeternum. Quoniam tu, Domine suavis et mitis es, et Misericordiae omnibus invocantibus te, alleluia!
Offertorium (Feast of the Most Holy Name)
Proclaim that Mercy is the greatest attribute of God;
All the works of my hands are crowned with Mercy.
Jesus to Sr. Faustina
In Eastertide the Church celebrates the Feast of Divine Mercy and all year her hymns do not tire to praise the Misericordia of the Most High; but we are often too quick to limit this misericordia to purely moral categories. Certainly, we are all sinners in need of the Divine Mercy for our trespasses, but the mysterium misericordiae is far wider reaching and serves as the foundation for a whole metaphysics.
In Sufism for example, the divine Name al-Raḥmân (the Merciful, the Compassionate) is one of the most revered and (for reasons we will come back to shortly) features prominently in the invocatory practice of dhikr.[1] It is this attribute of ‘Mercy’ (raḥma) on which Ibn Arabi builds his mystical theology of divine sympatheia (not only as ‘compassion’ but also in the older sense of ‘universal interconnectedness’ – “sympnoia pánta”).
“God”, says the Sheikh al-Akbar, “wanted to see the essences of His Most Beautiful Names” and “reveal His own mystery to Himself” (Fusûs, I), according to the hadîth: “I was a hidden treasure and I yearned to be known”. In this desire (pathos) to stand revealed, He lets out a compassionate ‘sigh’ by which He manifests His infinite riches in in a succession of ‘theophanies’ (tajalliyât). This sigh is the ‘Breath of the All-Merciful’ (Nafas Raḥmânî), according to the Surah: “We breathed life into him” (21:91), namely the spiraculum vitae that is breathed onto the countenance of Adam Kadmon (Gen. 2:7), i.e. ‘Universal Man’ (al-Insân al-Kâmil) as the “all-synthesizing form”.
This primal act of self-revelation is at the same time a revelation quoad nos, a release of the individual ‘epiphanic forms’ (mazâhir) by which the Names are manifested – “God describes Himself to us through ourselves”. As Corbin explains:
These latent individualities have from all eternity aspired to concrete being in actu and their aspiration is itself nothing other than the nostalgia of the divine Names yearning to be revealed. This nostalgia of the divine Names is the sadness of the unrevealed God, the anguish He experiences in His unknownness and occultation. And from the inscrutable depths of the Godhead this sadness calls for a ‘Sigh of Compassion’ (Nafas Raḥmânî). This Sigh marks the release of the divine Sadness sym-pathizing with the anguish and sadness of His divine Names that have remained unknown, and in this very act of release the Breath exhales, arouses to active being, the multitude of concrete individual existences by which and for which these divine Names are at last actively manifested. Thus in its hidden being every existent is a Breath of the existentiating divine Compassion, and the (supreme) divine Name Al-Lâh becomes purely and simply equivalent to al-Raḥmân, the Compassionate.
Mystical gnosis starts from the Theos agnostos of negative theology to open up a path to the ‘pathetic God’ … On the one hand, the Sigh of divine Compassion, expressing the divine pathos, delivers the divine Names, that is to say, emancipates beings from the virtuality in which, anguished over their latent existentiating energy, they were confined, and they in turn deliver the God whose Names they are from the solitude of His unknownness. There, in pre-eternity, is joined the pact of that sympathetism which will forever unite the Godhead and his fedele, the Worshiped and the worshiper, in ‘compassionate’ dialogue (L’Imagination créatrice, I.2).
We may summarize that, according to Arabi, al-Raḥmân is, in a sense, the ‘principal Name’, the Name which contains all Names and by which all passes from virtuality to actualization/manifestation. As such it functions like a ‘bridge’ between the inscrutable Divine Essence, the unnamable Deus absconditus, and His manifestation, between Beyond-being and Being, the One and the many, the Lord and His faithful servant etc. Calling to mind the saying of St. Augustine according to which “we exist, because He is good” (for bonum est diffusivum sui), we could thus likewise conclude that we owe our existence to the fact that He is merciful.[2]
This conception of Divine Mercy as ‘creative impetus’ and subsequently the relational (or ‘sympathetic’) bridge between God and creation is also found in a Hassidic tale, which we want to paraphrase here in an abridged translation (cf. Weinreb, GottMutter, V):
According to the story, when God desired to create the world in order to share His infinite Joy and Love, the angels came up to Him and advised Him against it: “Man will be too strongly attracted by the earth, by the ‘telluric’, downwards tendency”[3], they said, “his Fall is inevitable and through him, instead of joy and love, the law of ‘gravity’ will come to rule over all of creation”.
God hears these warnings like an echo to His creative will until suddenly another voice arises and says: “Even if man falls – Love is capable to overcome the law of necessity, to overcome gravity. When all falls to pieces, Love will overcome. I advise you, let it happen. Love has the power to bear it and to suffer it all; Love overcomes the law, the purely necessary”.
And God proclaims: “You are my feminine, my maternal side! I shall name you Channa (Hebrew for ‘Grace’): Anna. For you have said what none of my advisors – mere echoes of my lawfulness – could say. You have said that which is new, that which transcends mere lawful necessity; you are the maternal side that inspires my grace”.
God-Father now knows His feminine side, Grace, and knows, that she will descent into the world that He plans to create. It is the world that He creates and ‘builds’ out of His Being, out of His ‘Son’ (ben, from benah = ‘to build’), which He births out of His ‘womb’ – The Hebrew word for ‘womb’ or ‘matrix’ (rehem) being the same as ‘mercy’ (raham).
Through this ‘entering-in’, this ‘infusion’ of Grace/Mercy into creation, He has given the world something that can bear all the inevitable injustices and survive all catastrophes; for the law of gravity is strong in the world and, through it, man abandons God and listens to the many voices of the world, the many idols.
Thus the daughter of Channa (St. Anne) is Mary, for marjam, mirjam means ‘bearing the bitterness of time’. As Mater Dolorosa and ancilla domini she willingly takes on the bitterness (“fiat mihi …”) and bears it and, despite everything (“A sword shall pierce thy heart!”, Lk. 2:35), gives birth to Jesus, the Saviour.[4]
Even if all were to go wrong, if humanity would decline everything that God were to offer (like the angels predicted), Mary, the daughter of Anna, would bear it all, the bitterness of time, for Grace was given into the world. Despite everything what may come, Grace will overcome, Love bears all, is the foundation of all. Thus the name of femininity, Channa, already contains all that will happen further. Grace and Mercy are attributes of Love. In Grace is revealed what already in the beginning, ante principium, was prepared for everything and everyone. And Weinreb concludes by stating that “Mercy is the willingness of God to even let Himself be born into this world”.
Here again all of creation flows from God ‘naming’ Himself (in this case His ‘feminine aspect’) as ‘Mercy’, ‘Compassion’, or ‘Grace’ (all accurate renderings of the Latin misericordia or the German Barmherzigkeit). In naming Himself He stands revealed. But since ‘revelation’ always presupposes an ‘entering into relation’, a ‘condescension’ (synkatabasis, as the Fathers said), a descent towards the creature, and as such also necessitates ‘limitation’ (for even creation can be considered a ‘sacrificial’ act; the primordial sacrifice of Purusha, “the Lamb that was slain from the beginning”), and it is this descensus which is essentially the Divine Mercy itself. [5]
But, as we have already seen, the working of this Mercy is obviously not limited to creation only, but – “as above so below” (sicut in caelo et in terra) – finds correspondences on all levels of being, even on the highest level of the Divine Life, the mutual kenosis of the three Persons in the love-play of the divine Liturgy (cf. Essay #X?).
For is not the generation of the Son in the ‘matrix’ of ‘Divine Maternity’ (the Immaculata) in a way already an act of ‘Mercy’?, a ‘sym-pathetic’ going-forth in which the thearchical Essence enters into relation with Itself and is delivered from Its loneliness. And could we not see in the loving spiration of the Holy Ghost – at least analogically – a kind of Nafas Raḥmânî?, the ‘Breath of life’ which the All-Merciful sighs over the primordial waters, rippling the cosmic ocean into the manifold plurality of universal existence (“Spiritus est qui vivificat”, Joh. 6:64). We may also think of the Eucharistic descensus, supreme manifestation of Divine Humility here on earth, in which God is revealed by hiding His Divinity behind the ‘veil’ of the sacramental species.
Thus the mystery of Mercy is that of ‘relation’ and ‘revelation’; it is nothing else than the ‘mystery of the veil’ which both reveals and conceals, the “seventy thousand veils of light and darkness” with which the All-Merciful covers the radiant splendors of His Face that “no one can see and live” (Ex. 33:20). It is by Mercy that the world is created and sustained in being (“Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not; they are new every morning”, Lam. 3:23) and it is also by His Mercy that He calls us back to Him.
As such the Divine Mercy (raham, raḥma) is not only our principle, but also the ‘matrix’ (rehem, rahim) out of which we are re-born (through Baptism now and in the glorified flesh in illo tempore), just as it is the ‘womb’ through which God Himself enters into the world and, in the Incarnation, even lets Himself be born into it in the most radical way (ex marjam virgine).
For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Joh. 3:16; Phil. 2:6-8).
Here we find the supreme manifestation of Divine Mercy, the kenotic descensus which is the very nature of God (“Was ist Gotts Eigenschaft? sich ins Geschöpf ergießen” – Angelus Silesius).
For could there be more Mercy shown to us unhappy creatures than the Mercy that induced the Creator of heaven to descend from heaven and the creator of the earth to clothe Himself with a mortal body? In eternity He remains equal to the Father but He made Himself equal to us in our mortal nature. That same Mercy led the Lord of the world to clothe Himself in the nature of a servant (St. Augustine, Sermon CCVII).
Christianity is thus the religion of misericordia par excellence, for it proclaims the ultimate synkatabasis (Divine Humility) and as such it is fitting that the Novena to the Divine Mercy begins on Good Friday. For, as the Holy Fathers tell us, the Cross is the ‘bridge’ that connects Heaven and earth[6] (or, metaphysically speaking, the unspeakable Theos agnostos and the creature), and through our participation in the Christic mystery, we too are “lifted up” (Joh. 12:32) into the Divine Life of the Trinitarian circumincession (“The Cross is the divine fissure through which Mercy flows from the Infinite” – Schuon).
Misericordia (Mercy, Grace, Goodness etc.) thus designates the descensus of God into creation, His kenosis, the entering-in-to-relation with the creature, in nuce: all ‘downward movement’ on the axis mundi, which in turn makes possible our ascensus (“When You pour over us, we are not dashed down but You raise us up. You are not spilled out, but collect us together” – Plotinus).[7] As one liturgical text proclaims: “Incensum istud ascendat ad te et descendat super nos misericordia tua”; the ‘incense’ – “the prayer of the saints” (Rev. 8:4) – ascends and grace descends; or, in the words of St. Augustine (the Doctor gratiae): “Prayer rises to heaven and immediately God’s blessing descends upon the earth”.[8]
We have already seen that the ‘Mystery of Mercy’ is deeply connected with the ‘Mystery of the Name’, the revelation of God’s Name (His ‘Self-naming’) constituting the primordial act of Mercy as such.
The notion of the divine Name has of course many layers of meaning, one of them being His maternal Immanence, the Shekinah, the ‘entering-into creation’ which the Hassidic story talks about. This ‘Divine Presence’ (be it in the Temple, in the Ark, or in the souls of the faithful) has since the most ancient times been described as an “indwelling of His Name” (cf. for example 2. Kings 23:27); it is also the ‘Great Mother’, His Infinity which penetrates and sustains all, “like a hen gathering her chicks under her wings” (Matt. 23:37). As Julian of Norwhich tells us:
We received our Being from Him – and this is where His Maternity starts – And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us … Thus in our true Mother Jesus our life is grounded, in the foreseeing Wisdom of Himself from without-beginning ... And from that time, and now, he feedeth us and funhereth us, and ever shall until doomsday (Revelations of Divine Love).
The Name being essential in the revelation of God quoad nos (Divine Mercy), it is not only significant to the Parousia of God in the world, but also to the ‘spiritual advent’ St. Bernard talks about, the coming of God into the soul (“… and we will come to him and make our dwelling place with him”, Joh. 14:23). For the Logos, says St. Maximus, always and in all things desires His Incarnation (descensus) and as such “the second coming of Christ our Bridegroom takes place every day within good men; often and many times, with new graces and gifts, in all those who make themselves ready for it, each according to his power” (Ruysbroek, Adornment of Spiritual Marriage, I.2).
The Invocation of the Divine Name thus serves as a ‘representation’ of God in the fullest sense (a ‘rendering present’), a true anamnesis (‘Er-innerung’), and here too this ‘condescension’ of God has but one purpose, namely to ‘lift up’ the creature in return (amor descendendo elevat).
God, in naming Himself, firstly determined Himself as being and secondly starting from Being manifests Himself as Creation … Man for his part describes the inverse movement when he pronounces the same Name, for this Name is not only Being and Creation, but also Mercy and Redemption. In man, it does not create, but on the contrary `undoes', and that in a divine manner, since it brings man back to the Principle. If God ‘pours Himself out in His Name’[9] (St. Bernard), man in invoking this Name reaches the ‘fullness of plenitude’. As seen by God, the Divine Name is a determination, a limitation and a ‘sacrifice’. As seen by man, it is a liberation, limitlessness and plenitude. The Name, when invoked by man, is none the less always pronounced by God, for human invocation is only the ‘external’ effect of eternal and ‘internal’ invocation by the Divinity. What is sacrificial for the divine is liberating for man. All revelation, whatsoever may be its mode or form, is a ‘descent’ or ‘incarnation’ for the Creator, and an ‘ascent’ or ‘ex-carnation’ for the creature (R. Coomaraswamy, On the Name of Jesus).
‘Naming’ is thus not only the ‘going-forth’ (prôodos) into creation on the part of the All-Merciful, but also marks the epistrophé of the creature, for He is both Al-Râhman and Al-Rahim, the Principle and End of all things.
Invocation of the Divine Name is theourgia in the fullest sense, both as ‘work of God’ (for “no one can say Jesus except by the Spirit”, 1. Cor. 12:3) but also as an ‘entering-into-relation’ with Him, a ‘rendering present’ of the Divine Shekinah within us and a passage from our ‘virtuality’ to the ‘actualization’ of who we are.
The ‘remembrance of God’ (mnêmê Theou) becomes thus a veritable ‘re-memberment’ of our dispersed selves, an ‘assembly’ (ecclesia), the continuous “edification of the temple of God” (Eph. 2:21). This is ‘Universal Man’; Osiris, ‘dismembered’ and scattered along the “four corners of this world”, Christ crucified one the cross of horizontal extension, Dionysus torn apart by the Titanic dynameis of separation and dispersion, and then ‘reassembled’ by the spiritual work of the initiates. For in His creative ‘naming’ the One proceeds into multiplicity, and in invocation we are ‘concentrated’ and gathered back together into the One as ‘members’ of the Corpus Mysticum.
The most famous ejaculatory prayer of the Christian Tradition is certainly the Jesus Prayer and in it we find encapsulated all we have said so far.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God
Have Mercy on me,
a Sinner
It proceeds by invoking the divine Name (which is not merely an invocation of the second Person, but – through the addition of His ‘Sonhood’ – of the whole Trinity as such) and calls down His Mercy which (standing in the ‘middle’ of the prayer) again functions like a ‘bridge’ or metaxu between God in ‘heaven’ and the sinner on ‘earth’ (this ‘middle position’ being likewise that of the Mediator as pontifex maximus). In its unfoldment the prayer thus follows the descending movement of grace (from God to the sinner, mediated by the divine Mercy); a structure that is common to almost all liturgical prayers, as well as the Lord’s Prayer given by Christ Himself. As Metropolitan Ware says: “In one brief sentence it (the Jesus-Prayer) embodies the two chief mysteries of the Christian faith, the Incarnation and the Trinity”, the synkatabasis of God towards us and our ascension into the mystery of eternal Love.
But, as the Holy Hesychasts tell us, the prayer can also be abridged to just: ‘Jesus’, for the Name of Christ is not simply one Name among others but encompasses everything, “the fullness of the Godhead” itself, as the Apostle says (Col. 2:9); It is the highest Name, the Name of Mercy.
“Everything that God has done for the salvation of the world lies hidden in the Name of Jesus”, says St. Bernadino. Not only this, but in a sense it really is the ‘principal Name’, the ‘primordial sound’ itself (cf. Essay #X), for, as the Fathers say, the Word God spoke in principio is the same Word that became incarnate through the Blessed Virgin. It is the Logos, the Word in so far as it is ‘spoken’ to the creature, and as such it is essentially Misericordia: Grace, Mercy, Love: the Goodness of God.
He is given a ‘Name which is above all names.’ It is a Name ‘above all principality, and power and virtue, and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this world, but in that which is to come.’ Now this is not only to imply that Jesus is a more appropriate Name for God than any other – though such it is, but also to instruct us that this Name signifies the ‘entire economy of the Incarnation and the Redemption … the Wisdom, the Power, the Goodness, the Majesty and all the attributes of God’ (Augustine). As Father Thomas of Jesus says: ‘Isaias called Him by the names of Wonderful, Counsellor, God the Mighty, the Father of the world to come, the Prince of Peace, and many other things, all of which are encompassed in the Name of Jesus of which these others are only explanations’ (Sufferings of Jesus Christ). Saint Thomas of Aquinas tells us that ‘we cannot name an object except as we understand it, we cannot give names to God except in terms of perfections perceived in other things that have their origin in Him’ (Compendium). However, He is ‘named the Word of God’ (Apoc. 19:13) and Saint Thomas also tells us that ‘the unique Word of God expresses as it were in a single instant, all that is in God’ (de diff. divini Verbi et humani). Dionysius the Areopagite says that many names are attributed to God in a ‘symbolic revelation of His beneficient emanations’ and lists the perfusion of these including ‘Truth,’ ‘Wisdom,’ ‘Word,’ ‘Ancient of Days,’ ‘Sun,’ ‘Breeze,’ but above all he says, this secret Name is now made manifest in ‘that Name which is above all names.’ Thus it follows that the Name of Jesus is a revealed Name, a Name existant in the mind and bosom of the Father before all time, a Name of Power, a ‘Marvellous Name’ as David the psalmist says, and an ‘inexplicable Name’ as Saint Thomas says in his commentary on the Our Father. Saint Bernadine of Sienna says ‘the Name of Jesus is itself God through which God the Father and the Holy Spirit communicate in the Divine Unity’ (Sermon on the Name). Both Jeremias and Amos clearly state ‘Dominus nomen eius – the Lord is His Name’ (Jen 33:2; Amos, 9:6). Thus Cornelius Lapide in his commentary on Paul's letter to the Philippians says that ‘Nomen ergo Dei, est ipse Deus et divinitas – indeed the Name of God is itself God and divine.’ More recently Father Prat S.J. has said in his Life of Christ that ‘in Holy Scripture the ‘Name’ of God is God Himself, made manifest to man in the voice of creation, revealed to Christians through the instrumentality of Christ.’ And so, ‘The Word was made flesh.’ (R. Coomaraswamy, Op. cit.)
Verily the Name by which God creates and sustains the world is the same by which He entered into it “in the form of a slave” and by which He makes His dwelling place in our souls: ‘Jesus’ (“God is salvation” – God is Mercy).[10] So let us call unto His Name unceasingly:
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have Mercy.
Amen.
[1] Thus the Quran begins with the words: B’ismi Allah al-Rahmân, al-Rahim (“In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful”), which is likewise a popular dhikr. Rahmân is the ‘existentiating’ Mercy, the ‘exhaling’ of the All-Merciful (linked to creation, macrocosm, procession etc.), whereas Rahim is used to designate the ‘redemptive’ Mercy, the ‘inhaling’, connected to the return of all things to God and the salvation of each particular man. The fact that this invocations stands like an epitaph at the beginning of the whole Quranic revelation (and of every individual Surah) already indicates the ‘mediatory’, ‘descending’ quality of the Divine Mercy, which we want to lay out in the following.
[2] Interestingly, a lot of passages in which the Vulgata speaks of ‘misercordia’ are rendered by Luther as ‘Güte’ (i.e. ‘goodness’ or even ‘grace’), and in fact these two notions are still much closer related in the German language than for example in English.
[3] This ‘downwards tendency’ is also connected to the Hindu notion of tamas-guna as that quality of nature (prakriti) that tends towards darkness, heaviness, inertia etc. (cf. our Appendix).
[4] This emanative ‘tri-unity’ (Anne, Mary, Jesus) can also be seen in the Anna Selbdritt motive, especially popular in northern Renaissance art; here again ‘Grace’ is the foundation of all, the ultimate ‘Radical’ (root-cause) of God’s merciful ‘descent’; inversely Christ revealed to Sr. Faustina that: “All Grace flows from Mercy”.
[5] As Baader observes ‘Grace’ (Gnade) comes from ‘descending’ (Gnieden, Niedern): “Die Sonne geht zu Gnaden, sagten die Alten, d. h. sie geht nieder”. It might also be noted that both ‘misericordia’ and ‘Barmherzigkeit’ point to the ‘heart’ (cor, Herz), which is the “seat of the All-Merciful”, according to a saying of the Prophet (“Heaven and earth can’t contain me, but the heart of my servant comprehends me”). It is thus not for nothing that the Jesus-Prayer (see below) is also called the ‘Prayer of the Heart’.
[6] This can also be interpreted kabbalistically: The ‘bridge’ that connects heaven and earth (i.e. Tiferet and Malkut) is Yesod (also called the Gate, Jacob’s Ladder, the Covenant, etc.); it is the ‘phallus’ of Adam Kadmon, literally the ‘organ’ by the union of above and below is effected. As is known, in the Kabbalistic Tree there are 22 ‘paths’ that connect the 10 sefirot with one another, each associated with one of the 22 letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and the path that leads to Yesod (also called “the path of the tzaddik”) is marked with the letter Taw, i.e. the Cross (T): “If anyone would come to Me [Tiferet] let him take up his cross [Taw]”.
[7] We might also note that, in Kabbala, the sefira Tiferet (marking the vertical descent of Keter elyon) is not only referred to as the ‘Heart’ (Lew) of Adam Kadmon, but also called Rachamim: the ‘All-Merciful’. Many Christian Kabbalists have further linked Tiferet (also called: ‘the Son’) to the incarnate Word, which likewise corresponds to the symbolism of the crucifixion of Christ between the two ‘thieves’, i.e. the two pillars of the Tree of Life (Boaz and Jachin), thereby not only reconciling ‘above’ and ‘below’ (i.e. vertically linking Keter and Malkut), but also harmonizing ‘the left and the right’, thus tracing the Sign of the Cross over the whole edifice of meta-cosmic manifestation, so that the streams of heavenly water can once more flow freely through the sefirotic channels.
[8] This two-fold movement along the axis mundi is perfectly expressed by the Latin word ‘benedicere’, which, when applied ‘bottom-up’, can be rendered as ‘to praise’ (“laudamus te, benedicimus te!”), whereas ‘top-down’ it means: ‘to bless’ (“benedicat te”).
[9] Similarly Origin tells us in his Commentary on the Canticle of Canticles that “God emptied Himself, that His Name might be as ointment emptied out, that He might no longer dwell in light unapproachable and abide in the form of God, but that the Word might be made flesh”.
[10] The more accurate rendering of this name would of course be none other than ‘John’ (Johannan, Yâh-Channan = ‘God is merciful/gracious’) and thus it is not surprising that it is John (Baptista) who announces God’s merciful descent and ‘prepares His way’ (“Ecce Agnus Dei”), just like it is John (Evangelista) who stands under the Cross, supreme manifestation of the Divine Mercy per se. The symbolism of the two Johns as the ‘guardians’ of the janua coeli and inferni by which the All-Merciful descents and ascents (‘channan’, similar to ‘benedicere’, can mean both ‘to praise’ and ‘mercy’, the two Johns thus representing both ‘movements’ respectively) is also picked up in the astrological symbolism of the liturgical calendar, the feast of the Evangelist being the 27th of December (winter solstice) and that of the Baptist on the 24th of June (summer solstice) – “He must increase, I must decrease” (Joh. 3:30).
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