Cynthia Bourgeault (CB), Thomas Keating: The Making of a Modern Christian Mystic, Shambhala, Boulder, 2024
As CB states on p.208 “My deepest hope in writing this book is that those who have long been Thomas’s admirers, devotees, or critics will be better able to see where he himself was so powerfully headed during the final thirty years of his life and be prepared if needs be to let go of even the precious spiritual legacy he so carefully entrusted to our safeguarding to follow the scent of his flowing oneness straight into the heart of the world – and the heart of God.”
The book’s being aimed at those familiar with Keating may explain why so little is said about the development and content of the Centring Prayer (CP), the foundation upon whatever renown Keating’s work enjoys is based. The CP is often referred to, and is briefly explained at p.191 and n.6, pp.243-244. An earlier and fuller treatment might have made this volume more accessible to more people, and filled out the portrait of its subject. Neither do we learn what Keating believed about Christ, whether the Gospel accounts were historical (in whole or in part), or even what he would say when he delivered sermons in chapel or church on Sunday (if he in fact did so).
Further, the desire to write an apologia for Keating’s later work explains why a substantial amount of space is devoted to the oeuvre of other writers (most notably the abstruse Bernadette Roberts), which might show that Keating’s later directions were not so eccentrically wilful as might appear, while offering a similar but contrasting perspective so that his achievement stands out in high relief. I am not sure this was a particularly happy mode of procedure.
By contrast, there is little reference to the Catholic liturgy. To reachthose who critique Keating from a more traditional Catholic standpoint, that would need to be addressed, although I am not sure it could be settled. This omission must leave those critics confident in their own position. Ditto for the almost non-existent reference to Keating’s attitude to Scripture. Did he not even cherish the Canticle of Canticles?
However, the liturgy was – for Catholics of Keating’s vintage – the thing. It had to be experienced as it was then – when it seemed foreordained from the Creation that the Mass should be celebrated thus. The differences in outlook and practice between the Traditional Latin and the new (Novus ordo) Masses is rarely understood outside of traditionalist circles: the TLM was a supernatural sacrifice, and all was ordered to this. The Novus ordo is not, in practice, the same, even though some of the words and even the theology associated with it are in continuity. Rather, the new Mass is in actual fact more a this-worldly community gathering with more or less acknowledgement of God, depending on the particular celebrant and his liturgical team.
The TLM which Keating saw as a boy is a lost world, an enchanted paradise guarded by a flaming sword which turns in all directions, which even the Summorum Pontificum Masses cannot recapture its magic and mystery, for it suffused and defined the entire Catholic culture. When I read on p.18 that Keating would leave home early to attend daily Mass, I intuited why, and that he would never get it out of his blood. For Keating, a child, probably attending an upper middle-class American church with Gothic resonances, the morning Mass with its Latin, universal and ancient, was distinguished by its silence – a silence so musical no Catholic who knows the Novus ordo alone can imagine it. I mean the word “distinguish” not only as “differentiation” but more as “ennoblement.” Children receive, or can receive the Tridentine Mass as the supernatural adventure of eternity-in-life. Sensing the presence and the action of God at the elevation of the Host and then the Chalice, it is little wonder that he returned to something of his earlier devotions, causing some of his modern admirers to assume a regression (pp. 172 & 203). He himself wrote that “Ritual and sacred symbols once treasured sources of relating to You are meaningless to me now” (p.73); but were they truly? Perhaps he was kidding himself. Perhaps he was seeking a new Eucharistic mystery in contemplation.
CB is aware of the cultural depredation wrought on the Catholic Church and the Trappists in particular by the loss of traditions such as Gregorian Chant (pp.189 & 234). I am fairly sure that the real wound was the loss of the Traditional Latin liturgy, not only the chant, together with the devaluing of the Latin which had given the Church’s scholars a direct entree to the hallowed culture, the sonorous Vulgate, the sublime medieval hymns and sequences, all the way back to the austere and dignified Roman Stoics. Through them, these influences reached the people, not least through the tremendously popular litanies where the congregation would chant their responses in simple ejaculations, like plain-tone, often enough in Latin – a sort of Catholic mantra of immemorial age and ravishing poetry, which did in fact sustain the faithful. In the Eastern Churches, where these were not unceremoniously deleted after 1965, I have seen the comatose return to consciousness when the waves of a litany break on their ears.
In other words, I suspect that the story of Thomas Keating had more to it, or more precisely, owed more to pre-VII Catholicism that he owned. Incidentally, pace CB, post-WWII Catholicism was not marked by a “growing theological rigidity” (p.234) but rather the opposite. Pius XII had introduced some very significant changes, not least in liturgy and the study of Scripture; the shoves which dislodged the statue from its base, but did not tip it over.
Now for some short notes: first, I suspect that Keating had sleep apnoea. People with this condition always do badly in thin atmospheres such as that of Snowmass. Its symptoms often mimic chronic fatigue. The requirement that he put on weight would have been catastrophic, as males put on fat in the throat, exacerbating the condition.
Then, not only is Keating’s idea of divinisation not really related to Eastern Christianity and theosis (p.176), it is quite other. Divinisation is a concept so important to Eastern Catholics that it regularly features, even today, in the Maronite Divine Liturgy. Keating said: “You can’t see God because when you are God there’s nothing to see” (p.179). It’s the opposite in the Eastern Church, it is more likely that there is everything to see. This points to a fundamental difference between Keating’s speculations and most Christian views – one of the central issues of the book.
Third, I may be entirely wrong, but as I see it, speculation about “non-dual” and “dualistic” thinking itself exemplifies dualism. I could launch a theoretical critique of non-dualism and the “thought” of Bernadette Roberts. But I shan’t. I think that as we are, to talk along these lines is to self-hypnotise. We have the faculties we have, we experience various states, and – depending upon our state – more faculties may be open to us, so that in a very real way, our state and our faculties are different facets of the one jewel. What seems important is our state and the use we make of those faculties. So to call something dualism or monism, is of no concern to me, or to most Christians, except that the very use of these terms invites intellectual fantasy. To be more precise, I would say that I see it as formatory thought mixed with sentimentality, “belief in words.” But that is my personal view: most Christians would just react somewhere on a spectrum between bemused and outraged (CB often notes such reactions, e.g. “gasping for breath,” p.90).
Two final matter: first, Keating’s quip about the Mother of God (p.5) is in bad taste; even if meant partially or entirely humorously. More than that, it tells me that at that point of his life there was something iconoclastic about him. When one sees him filmed, the privileged background shows in his confidence and aplomb. But there is also a certain conceit in his demeanour and his pronouncements – as in that “quip.” Yet, I do not doubt that CB loved him for good reason, “reason” here as in “reasons of the heart.”
Finally, the punch-line: we meet “lived experience” on p.107. What might non-lived experience be? I was surprised to see some reviews critique this volume as badly written. I think it is extraordinarily well-written, but the matter is dense, and the lack of early explanation of CP and what experiencing it was like, will possibly leave those who have no acquaintance with Keating and CP blaming CB’s prose when in fact the problem is that I am not sure Keating himself had the tools to articulate his own experience – leaving we the readers, with records of an intellectualised experience.