There are two modes in which contemplative writing has reached its readers across the centuries. They are not always named, but the distinction is real and matters.
The first mode is kataphatic. It names. It maps. It instructs. It uses framework and sequence, lists and definitions, charts and stages. The teacher in this mode translates what they know into a language the student can hold and study and try to enact. This mode tends to provide answers to the unanswerable. Most contemporary contemplative publishing belongs to this mode. Eight worldly concerns. Four immeasurables. Stages on the path. Diagrams of the breath. Circles of Knowingness. The reader who comes to such a book gains a vocabulary and a structure for practice. This is useful. It is not wrong. It may well serve the reader who is at the beginning of a path and needs a map.
The second mode is apophatic. It refuses translation. It approaches what cannot be said by not saying it. It defines the ineffable by not defining it and allowing the readers to trust in the lack of definition. It trusts that the reader who is ready will arrive at the recognition without being instructed in it. It teaches by example, by silence, by the form of the writing itself rather than by the content of the writing’s instruction. The apophatic writer believes that the form is the teaching, and that to translate the teaching into instructional language is to falsify it simply by putting into words what words cannot hold.
The fourteenth-century anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing is the clearest example in the Christian tradition. The book is a teaching, but the teaching consists of telling the student to place a cloud of unknowing between themselves and the God they seek to know. The author refuses to define the cloud. He refuses to describe what is on the other side of it. He tells the student that the longing itself, held without resolution, is the practice. The book teaches a kind of attention that the book itself cannot describe. The reader who arrives at the end has not been instructed in a doctrine; they have been shown, through the form of the book, what the book could not say.
This is the older tradition. Meister Eckhart preaches against the very God he is preaching about. Dogen writes sentences that double back on themselves. The Tao Te Ching opens by saying that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, and then proceeds with eighty-one chapters that resolutely refuse to name it. These writers are choosing a different mode because they think the mode itself matters. They are not less realized than the kataphatic teachers. They are answering to a different fidelity. They believe instructional form falsifies what apophatic form leaves intact.
The lineage continues into our own time. Joseph Campbell, working in the register of comparative mythology rather than mystical theology, made the same apophatic move when he insisted that God is a metaphor for what transcends all categories of thought, and that religious symbols across every tradition are transparent to a transcendence the symbols themselves cannot contain. Take a symbol as literal fact, Campbell argued, and the religion has been falsified by its own success. Bishop John Shelby Spong, who died in 2021, spent his career dismantling the supernatural-theistic God from within the institutional Episcopal church, insisting that theism was dead as a way of defining the divine and pointing toward what he called, borrowing Tillich’s phrase, “the God beyond God.” Marcus Borg, who died in 2015, made the same move in a gentler academic register, advocating panentheism and the impersonal divine “right here and all around us.” All three worked an apophatic seam even when writing kataphatically.
The historical evidence for this older tradition has been recovered in our own time most decisively by Elaine Pagels, whose work on the Gospel of Thomas and the other Nag Hammadi texts shows that the apophatic, immanent, mystical reading of Christianity was original to the tradition before the kataphatic, doctrinal, hierarchical reading suppressed it. The figure who said I am the light that is above them all. The all has come from me. Lift the stone, and you will find me there was not a medieval mystic but a first-century voice the institutional church excluded from its canon. Among other living writers, Cynthia Bourgeault places The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart at the center of her teaching, articulating Christian contemplative practice in language that refuses to translate the mystery into doctrine. Norman Fischer, the Zen poet and former abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, enacts the apophatic mode through poetry rather than instruction. The tradition has not died with the medieval mystics. It has its current carriers, and it has its scholarly recoverer.
The trouble with the kataphatic mode, when it is honest, is the dissonance at its center. The realized person knows that the realization cannot be transmitted through instruction — and then writes books of instruction. They know the map is not the territory and produce maps. They know the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon and become professional finger-pointers. There are reasons they do this. The bodhisattva ideal asks the realized one to remain in the world for the benefit of beings. Skillful means allows the teacher to meet the student where the student is. The lineage system requires the teacher to transmit something explicit so that the form persists. These are sound and good arguments.
But these arguments lose something important in the translation. The student gains a vocabulary and may lose the silence the vocabulary was meant to indicate. The chart becomes the thing the student studies. The framework becomes the thing the student tries to enact. The realization recedes behind the apparatus that points to it. The structural pull of instruction, especially in commercial publishing, runs in a direction the contemplative tradition has always been wary of. The danger in the kataphatic mode is not that it teaches, but that it can mistake explanation for realization. At its farthest extreme, mystery becomes message, message becomes performance, and performance becomes commodity. The honest kataphatic teachers do not let this happen, but they are working in a register where the gravitational pull toward that form is real and constant.
The work I have done across these books belongs to the apophatic mode. It does not instruct. It places attention next to attention. It shows the ordinary things of a life — a shepherd carrying a lamb in his jacket, a man washing his dead wife’s body, a boy walking into a sea that takes him — and the extraordinary things of a life — a being from the sea who does not age, a wind that has been moving across an island for longer than memory, a love that crosses the boundary between mortal and immortal time — and it places these next to each other without explaining the distance between them. The reader who is paying attention notices. The reader who is not, does not. The book does not insist.
The voice of the wind in The Shepherd and the Sea never explains the eadwynn. The shepherd does not name what is happening to him. Love lives in the one who carries it is the book’s deepest theological statement, but it appears once, at the end, after sixty thousand words of attention have earned the right to it. A book that taught that lesson directly would diminish the recognition. The book that lived inside the recognition is what was written.
The same approach runs through my other books. The Ecology of Awareness tells the story of forty years of ecological work and fifty years of contemplative practice without ever instructing the reader in what to do with their attention. The work simply happens, and the reader who reads carefully feels the shape of what attention has been across that life. The Tree and the Crown renders the same understanding in mythic form, through a forest that knows itself and through characters who never quite say what they are doing. Od and Ēvelyn is approaching the same truth through an innocent child’s perception, where naming is still unknown to her and the world is still encountered before it has been categorized.
What these books share is not a doctrine they are teaching. It is a mode of attention they enact. The teaching, if there is one, is embedded in the stories themselves. The reader does not finish them with a vocabulary to deploy. They finish them changed slightly in the quality of their own attention, or they do not. Either way, the book has not tried to instruct them. It has shown them something, and the showing is the teaching.
This is the harder mode to publish into the contemporary contemplative market. Established Buddhist and contemplative presses are built around the kataphatic mode because that is what the market for contemplative books mostly wants. A memoir or novel that refuses to instruct does not have a clear position on their lists. They cannot tell their sales teams what to say about it. They cannot tell their readers what they will learn. The apophatic book has always reached its readers through other channels — small presses, hand-copied manuscripts, anonymous editions, word of mouth. The Cloud of Unknowing circulated for centuries in monastic copies before it had a publisher. Dogen’s writings reached the West through the patient work of scholars and practitioners who recognized them, not through any contemporary commercial channel.
To publish this work outside the contemplative-instruction market is therefore not a fallback. It is the right path for the mode the work is in. Quiet Fire Press, distributing through IngramSpark, lets the books reach the readers who can receive them as they are, without being translated into a mode that would falsify what they are doing.
The work teaches by not teaching. The teaching is embedded in the stories themselves — in the ordinary and extraordinary things of life — and expressed through example rather than instruction. This is the fidelity to which my writing answers. This is what these books are for me: the implicate universe within me unfolding into explicate form, speaking to our explicate selves as living expressions of a hidden order, so that through inner seeing we may perhaps experience something of the ineffable.
We are the eyes through which the universe sees its own wonder.
Robert F. Doren · Quiet Fire Press