‘Biography of Light’: A Mystical Reading of the Gospels
A review of ‘Biografía de la luz’, by Pablo d’Ors; Galaxia Gutenberg, 2021.
Pablo d’Ors became part of the public consciousness of Spain with Biography of Silence, a lyrical and far-reaching essay on his experience of Zen meditation that was an unexpected best-seller. Though Pablo is a Catholic priest, that slim volume was noteworthy for how little it had to say about God, Jesus Christ, and all the other things that people in the West commonly connect with Christianity. But Pablo was not trying to smuggle God in through the back door, if you like: for him, Christianity has lost its mystical core—the central, often unsayable, wholly practical essence that underlies all religious belief. The spirit of the Christian faith has been overwhelmed by its laws; and without a guiding spirit, laws become stiff and unbending, unable to adapt to the world as it changes. Faith becomes something abstract and procedural, rather than something concrete and experiential.
This idea—that law must spring from spirit and not the other way around—is one of the many teachings contained in Biografía de la luz (Biography of Light), a door-stopper of a book that belongs to the author’s Trilogy of Enthusiasm but is the spiritual successor of Biografía del silencio (Biography of Silence). It is a reading of the Gospels in a mystical key, that is to say a book of literary criticism or exegesis but one carried out without ego. Put yet more simply, the author returns to familiar stories such as the Wedding at Cana and The Nativity and seeks to understand their most basic meaning if read with ‘the gaze cleansed’, as Huxley put it: with a minimum of himself standing in the way, warping that tale with its own bias.
The author returns to familiar stories such as the Wedding at Cana and seeks to understand their most basic meaning if read with ‘the gaze cleansed’, as Huxley put it.
The Nativity story, for instance—if I return to the point about the spirit and the law—tells us that Joseph, upon learning of his wife’s pregnancy, finds himself in a bind: does he trust his wife, whose claim to have conceived a child without having sex is contrary to every law of nature? Or does he trust her account, and go against everything he has been taught since childhood? Does he spurn his beloved, as the religious law commands him to do, or put his faith in the one he loves? ‘Religion or love, the objective or the subjective, the reasonable and prudent or what the guts and heart dictate?’ Pablo writes. ‘Joseph is torn between what is he taught and what he feels.’ We are told that Joseph did not solve this problem with with his intellect. He went to sleep, and woke up with a strong intuition, one that had risen up from a deeper, wiser part of himself, which was that he should stay with Mary.
The author draws out a message like this one from every chapter of the Gospels and sets it in the context of ordinary lives. If we steal bread to feed our family, we are breaking the law, yes; but are we doing the wrong thing? What if we are diagnosed with a disease and told we have six months to live? What do we do then? Who can tell us? The stories of the Gospels, Pablo writes, do not tell us what to do: that is to miss the point. That is, as Iain McGilchrist would say, a very left-brained way to think about them. Rather, the Gospels illuminate questions we all face—all the big and little questions that do not have easy answers, and cannot be resolved by reference to something outside ourselves. For we are the context, we are the circumstances: and only we have the capacity within us to weigh up everything and make the right call.
His theme then, is that our interpretation of the word or letter or law of God—and it does not even have to be the law of God; it could be any rule—must be anchored in love. This will seem mushy to the hard-headed atheist materialist types out there, so let me put it another way, and say that we must always consider law in the light of common decency: with kindness, with good faith, and with a genuine wish on our part to avoid doing harm. And I would add that we can think about this backwards: that just as what is intellectual requires what is intuitive; what is intuitive requires what is intellectual. We must feel and think together. The heart needs the brain, just as the brain needs the heart. Hence why Buddhists talk of ‘wise compassion’. Compassion by itself can be destructive, as anyone who has looked at Venezuela and its experiment with socialism knows.
The heart needs the brain, just as the brain needs the heart. Hence why Buddhists talk of wise compassion.
Pablo’s problem, of course, is that many people simply ‘don’t do God’, as Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, the architects of New Labour, famously put it. The more closed-minded among them will be liable to dismiss a book such as this out of hand. I think that is a mistake. Many of Pablo’s observations are very practical and also commonplace: they will ring true for anyone. Jesus’ temptations in the desert, to take an easy example, cast light on the draw of power and possessions—things we all face—as well as the need, from time to time, to withdraw from others so that, outside of a culture that can stifle our independence, we may better understand ourselves. Just take a break from the media for a while now and then, and you will see how, freed from the influence of others, you come to know yourself a little better.
As far as I know, Biography of Light is unavailable in English, but I am hopeful that this will change. Pablo has a very lucid style, one that, as with Thich Naht Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk, seems to me to reflect his humility and authenticity. He also writes in a way that is quite informal, if not quite colloquial; and so we have the sense of being spoken to directly, which as I have said elsewhere is something we find in the best writing, and is also one of the pleasures of reading: to feel we have a bond with the author herself. So this is a very good book. It is one of those books, like The Matter with Things or a good collection of poetry, that you can pick up and put down whenever you have the urge to. And if you are unconvinced, then I would invite you to read Pablo’s Biography of Silence, which is a fraction of the length, and available in English, French, Italian, German and Portuguese, as well as Spanish, for a taste of what this remarkable writer-priest is offering.
