God, Zen is admittedly a philosophical book. The non-philosopher may prefer working backwards toward the beginning, lest the metaphysical language in the first chapters become a temptation to lay the book aside. However, once one has digested the major thesis of the author, the remaining chapters become a rich discovery of the possible mutual benefits and parallels between Zen meditation and Christian contemplation.

The dynamic focus for dialogue between these ways is the “intuition of being”—a distinctive insight of St. Thomas. To this end, the author uses the teachings of Nishitani and Sekida to represent Zen and Jacques Maritain to interpret Thomism. Arraj emphatically insists that the decline in Thomistic metaphysics is due precisely to the lack of development of this profound insight, the “intuition of being”—the “inner light from which metaphysics originates” (p. 13).

Maritain, already in 1938, was developing his own teaching on the Void which was surprisingly related to the Zen experience. The ultimate conclusion for Maritain’s exploration of self-awareness was the conviction that the soul must become empty in order to experience its own existence. “The emptiness that is the elimination of essences or concepts becomes itself the means of knowing, not of course by concepts but by connaturality. In this kind of connaturality, the void itself connatures the knower with the absolute which is the existence of the soul” (p. 57). Arraj sees this as the danger point where the experience of the absolute which is the existence of the soul may be identified with the Absolute which is God, He quotes a Zen teaching illustrating this confusion: “Seeing Mu is seeing God.”

An imagined discussion between Maritain and the Buddhist, Izutsu, gives further insight into this difficulty and the possibility of reconciling Thomistic essentialism with Zen existentialism—both of which pay a price to arrive at “essence-less-ness” in the process of meditation.

In a section about koans, the author describes the Soto school of gradual enlightenment and the Rinzai school of sudden enlightenment. These will later be compared with the Christian concepts of acquired and infused contemplation. It is about this “acquired” contemplation that some of the more troubling questions regarding the differences between Christian and Zen meditation are raised.

One of the more obvious differences is the Christian adherence to belief in a personal God. What is not so obvious is what is happening in the kind of contemplation that is acquired, a “practice” which Arraj traces back to Quietism, which he further traces to a misuse and misunderstanding of St. John of the Cross. (Though he does not articulate the point, a more modern misuse of some forms of Eastern meditation may be indicated.) The medieval formulators of meditation practices which emphasized the non-conceptual were, in the author’s opinion, using a way of force to bring about an experience which was not given through passive infused contemplation. He answers his own question—whether or not the meditators achieved some sort of Zen-state—with an emphatic negative. Following the more traditional teachings on Christian prayer, he criticizes the voluntary abandonment of discursive activity. “With an intuitive gaze of faith they lifted their minds and hearts to God, but failed to see how discursive and individual acts were necessary to nourish this intuition.” Abuses and psychological disturbances were the result. Apparently, in the author’s opinion, the support of community and the help of a spiritual guide would have alleviated some of these problems.

Only passing notice is given to some of the more illustrious proponents of non-conceptual prayer. We think of the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, Meister Eckhart and the Rhineland mystics. Their insistence that all progress in prayer is solely due to the intervention of the Spirit did not prevent them from recognizing the role that human effort plays in the spiritual journey. Further development of the subject of purification in Christian prayer would have been a welcome insertion into the text at this juncture. Where do the psychological problems of the shadow, etc. find their resolution and healing if not through their admittance as they arise in the darkness which is consequent on emptying the mind and heart of compensations and projections—yes, even an overdose of spiritual activity. How does Christian purification compare to anything in the Zen experience?

Nevertheless the author goes on to tell us that a proper understanding of Zen would indeed offer great benefit to Christian meditators. There is, he says, a valid way of practicing non-conceptual meditation which is conceived of as a “preparation for contemplation.” Provided we are aware of the dangers, provided we understand the need to await God’s action in the passivity of the higher states of prayer, there is a place for the Zen way of searching for the “intuition of being.”

God, Zen and the Intuition of Being raises many questions for the Christian meditator who is attracted to Zen and other forms of Eastern meditation. The groundwork which the author has painstakingly done in laying bare the roots of both Christian and Zen metaphysics contribute greatly to the understanding of the meditation process itself. It is certainly made abundantly clear that the Christian cannot ignore what is buried deep in the Christian consciousness: belief in a personal God. In this clarity he does lay to rest a non-question: that of forsaking one path for another. Ultimately, it is in embracing the personal struggles on the Way we have chosen that leads each of us to the answers, not articulated on written page but in the heart of the believer.