Christ the Koan: A Reflection on Jean Sulivan
by Christopher Nugent

Christopher Nugent, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at the University of Kentucky and a past contributor to this bulletin, has long been interested in the late French writer Jean Sulivan. The following article is a substantial revision of a paper he gave several years ago at a conference on Sulivan’s work. Because Sulivan was influenced by that great pioneer of Hindu-Christian dialogue, Abhishiktananda, whom he met during a trip to India in 1963, we believe Professor Nugent’s article will be of special interest to readers of this bulletin.

“Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:48)

This essay would be more than just another of what Jean Sulivan himself wrote of wryly as “prodigies of interpretation.” Nevertheless, let me concede at the outset that nowhere in the work of Sulivan do I find the phrase “Christ the Koan.” The reality, however—the res—I find everywhere. And about Koan, as with Sulivan, best no definitions. Christ the Koan, as seen darkly through the mirror of Sulivan, can be an experiment in Christology, inevitably an experience in existential Christianity, and assuredly an immersion in mystical theology.

Sulivan was himself born in Brittany, France, as Joseph Lemarchand (1913–1980). We shall shortly see a second “birthing” in India. Ordained in 1938, the radical and rather laical priest is best known to an English-speaking audience through the translations of some of his works by Patrick Gormelly and Joseph Cunneen, the latter being the founding editor of Cross Currents. A man of the margins, Sulivan was variously a chaplain to university students at Rennes, a worker-priest, and above all an insightful and even prophetic critic—whether in essay or in novel—of a conventional religion which he felt had lost its flavor. His essential written sources, beyond the Gospel, would include great mystics like Eckhart and John of the Cross, divine discontents like Pascal and Kierkegaard, and post-Christian but incurably “religious” figures like Nietzsche and Henry Miller.

Sulivan defies categorization. While he has been characterized as a spokesman for post-Christian religion, I submit that he was more the voice of a post-cultural Christianity. He points beyond packaged answers to ancient questions, beyond proper nouns to common nouns, to a more intense but catholic Christianity.

Lest there be misgivings, this Christ the Koan would not, as it were, unseat Christ the King. Christ the Koan in fact would follow Christ the King; follow, that is, if one takes as point of departure the ironic inscriptions over the Cross. Christ the Koan would return us to the personage of “the mystery of faith,” as against the all-but-comedic spectacle of “Christ the Commodity.” This Christ the Koan whom I find implicit in Sulivan is a transcendental truth, a truth beyond confines of East or West, a Christ the Question as much as Christ the Answer.

An internal, even “nominal” émigré, Lemarchand took his nom de plume from a film of Preston Sturges, Sullivan’s Travels. Let our travels with him begin with the via orientis, Sulivan’s passage to India of 1963, five years before the better known trip of Thomas Merton. And if Merton had a climactic experience in Sri Lanka, Sulivan had a foundational experience in India. As he put it, “I was born in the south of India, on the banks of a river.”1 He even volunteered that he was “impregnated” (“J’ai été impregné”) in India.2 And if Merton’s experience was fired by the colossi of the reclining Buddhas of Polonnaruwa, Sulivan’s experience had as midwife the living colossus of Abhishiktananda. Abhishiktananda, the “Abhis” of Sulivan’s Dieu au-delà de Dieu, was of course the remarkable French Benedictine Fr. Henri Le Saux (1910–1973), a spiritual astronaut in pursuit of a Christ under the exotic symbolic phenomenon known as Hinduism.

The soil itself may have had much to do with Sulivan’s “birthing.” Disposed to spirit, this was “good soil” indeed, that of the Parable of the Sower. Here in India was a culture stripped of superfluity, and therefore a culture in which one is more likely to have a direct experience of reality. In its simplicity, it enjoyed a certain synchronicity with the society of the New Testament. Here was silence for listening, soil for self-knowledge.

There on the banks of the Cavery, Abhishiktananda, as it were, held up the mirror to Sulivan. Sulivan left us with no portraits, such as Merton’s Asian Journal, but what comes through is a transparent “Abhis” gently chiding him with things like being, despite everything, another “Hellene, like European intellectuals.” “Are you capable,” he asked, of “seeing the real in all its poverty?”3 Such poverty can be among the disguises of God. For Abhis, as against rational structures, the real, including the beyond, was within. Sulivan’s friend, Henri Guillemin, may have summed up much of this in his statement that the one thing that Sulivan learned from India was that Christianity “will remain inert so long as it does not go more within than the within of Hinduism” (“plus au-dedans que le dedans de l’Hinduisme”).4 But as Abhis put it, “the music of Shankara,” the founder of Vedanta, “led me back to the Gospel.”5 Sulivan’s enlightenment, birthing, or perhaps best, rebirthing, was, as he put it, in beginning to see with “the eyes” of Abhis.

And, as I shall suggest, with the eyes of Christ. Signal though it was, one could make too much of the sojourn East. It is problematic whether Sulivan came to a new awareness there, during a stay of two or three months, more than to a re-experience and re-affirmation of an older one. Guillemin points out that while Sulivan made “interior discoveries” in India, he had also published such titles as Le Voyage Interieur before the pilgrimage East. We need also note that his peculiar idiom is already present in a title like Paradoxe et Scandale in 1962, before his arrival in what convention stereotyped as “the inscrutable East.” His references to Eastern masters are rare. I find a koanistic quote from the venerable Taoist Lao-Tzu and a remark of the Tibetan Buddhist Patriarch Milarepa, but little more. And the following ponderable if provocative statement is present in Sulivan’s Morning Light: “The Gospel gathers and condenses the wisdom of the Orient.”6 We have arrived, in sum, at the via occidentis and the indigenous roots of Christ the Koan. After all, “Before Abraham was, I AM” is not lifted from the Tao Te Ching.

Sulivan’s diffuse Christology is rendered “Christ the Koan” because his God is not the god of the philosophers or idols of the marketplace but the God of the mystics, and the mystics are masters, if not originators, of archetypal paradox. Sulivan bemoaned our modernist “flight from paradox.” As against Cartesian clarity, this existentialist harks back to Tertullian’s credo quia absurdum, an absurdity that is more or less a constant of the mystical tradition. I find it simply and richly embodied in a medieval Benedictine such as Gertrude the Great, who sought “not clarity, but deity.” Indeed, this can be viewed as monastic theology. The root paradox of the coincidence of opposites is something Esther De Waal found in the “minimalism” of monastic life.7 Sulivan wrote inimitably of paradox as “the humor of the absolute.” Superficially irreverent, he took it straight to the heart: “Real presence. We should also speak of real absence. To find the word that would simultaneously communicate presence and absence, wounding with joy.”8

The world has watched for that “word,” a word that takes us to the threshold of the via negativa. The Taoist masters found or anticipated it in the Tao, “the ever hidden” and “always manifest”; the great Buddhists in the “form” of emptiness, “the formless form”; the Solomonic authors in a playful wisdom invisibly vitalizing all things (e.g., Proverbs 8:22–31); and Christians find it uniquely present in the paradox of an incarnation inseparable from emptiness. And here, we are told, is “something greater than Solomon” (Luke 11:31). St. Francis found this “wounding with joy” in the wound-word of the stigmata, which the Seraphic Doctor, St. Bonaventure, wrote of as “a mixture of joy and sorrow.” This mysterious word resonates in our classic formulator of the coincidence of opposites, Nicholas of Cusa, Sulivan’s le grand Nicole. And it is present in what I think of as the “suchness” of the Mystical Doctor, St. John of the Cross, in his arias of aquello (that, what) and certainly in his open synthesis of todo and nada, all and nothingness.

The Mystical Doctor is most directly pertinent. I have just alluded to his stunning climax to book one of The Ascent of Mount Carmel. Therein one finds a series of paradoxes such as “in order to know everything, seek to know nothing.” Sulivan, in his own climax to his Dieu au-delà de Dieu, turns to this idiom in several passages. Let me cite one:

Consanguinity with John of the Cross, the “Universal Doctor of the Church,” is not just cosmetic. It underscores both the orthodoxy and catholicity of our construction. For instance, Thomas Merton, a mystical son of St. John of the Cross, volunteered: “I would say that Zen is nothing but John of the Cross without the Christian vocabulary.”10 By the same token, I would say that Christ the Koan is nothing but Christ with a Buddhist vocabulary. Our incomprehension of Zen may be a token of our incomprehensibility of Christianity, that is, of Christ.

This uncomprehended Christ takes us to the core of Sulivan. It is, of course, a Christ who taught not just with parables but with paradox. Indeed, for Sulivan Christ was the “Absolute Paradox.”11 He was “marked,” bore the mark, of paradox. This Prince of Peace bears “not peace, but the sword.” He has “come to divide.” He makes enigmatic statements like “Leave the dead to bury their dead.” Such a statement is also a question, a summons, a confrontation. He confounds his audiences with announcements like “I have come that the blind might see and the sighted might be blinded” (John 3:39). “While not yet fifty,” as the Pharisees complained, he claimed to be older than the Patriarch Abraham. And he enjoined us to be “born anew,” arousing the ingenuous inquiry of Nicodemus if we were supposed to return to our mother’s womb (John 3:4).

In one passage Sulivan provides a litany of koanistic texts. He starts with Lao-Tzu on the Tao: “Great squares have no corners.” Again, “He who knows how to bind has no need of cord.” These are, in effect, foundational for some of Christ’s celestial non sequiturs, non sequiturs, at least, to the reputed wisdom of the world: “Turn the other cheek.” “Give also your robe.” “Happy those who suffer persecution for justice’ sake.” And then “He who loses his life saves it.”12

We could go on and on. Christ the Koan is Son of God and Son of Man, divine yet human, first and last, the root and offspring of David, the primal embodiment of the Paschal mystery of life-through-death. And we have yet to get to the Trinity! Small wonder that Christ is “sign of contradiction” to the conditioned, categorical mind.

The thing is to access the unconditioned mind of God, releasing Paul’s “spiritual revolution” (Eph. 4:23). Nicholas of Cusa helps here, with God perhaps wryly put as the coincidence of opposites—“the least unsatisfactory” definition of God. In the inclusive and positively bipolar mind of God, the divine and human poles do not exclude but magnetize each other. And Christ the Koan is not so much the sound of two hands as it is of two natures clapping! Calling us to awaken. For “enlightenment” Sulivan turns to, as it happens, the timely metaphor of “the explosion of this star.”

Le grand Nicole deemed the coincidence of opposites worthy of being inscribed over the door of Paradise. Let us knock a little more at the door. If a most famous koan agonized over in the Zendo is “Who is the Buddha?”, our corollary might well be: “Who do people say that I am?” (Matt. 16:13). How about: “I AM.” The Sinaitic “I AM,” of course, is not our notional “I am,” but one marvelously designed to disarm our separate, illusory “I am.” Consider King Oedipus. The resolution of the riddle of the Sphinx, even with its issuance of kingship (not koanship!), did not go far enough in the transfiguration of fell Oedipus. And incidentally, if Christ the Koan should appear harsh—“Leave the dead to bury their dead”—he is all the same more human than the humanist Socrates: “The last will be first.” As Paul experienced in the Acropolis, such saving paradoxes did not play too well at Athens. And curiously, the sighted Oedipus would be blinded, need none add, without the blind seer Teiresias being sighted. An unspoken irony of Christ the Koan, it appears to me, is that where he is most human, as at Gethsemani, he is most divine.

Christ the Koan returns us to the “lost horizons” of an “inscrutable West.” Let me suggest that he (or it) is eminently compatible not just with an “inscrutable East” but also with traditional devotional language such as Christ the King or Sacred Heart, plus our more sophisticated philosophical and speculative theologies.

Christ the Koan I find more or less connatural with our image of an inscrutable East (while conceding, of course, that the image has been much overworked). This Christ, so to speak, can lend a face to the great ghost of the Tao. He responds admirably to the challenge of the new “light from the East” and the Christological projections of a Shusaku Endo, Dalai Lama, or Thich Nhat Hanh.13 In general, he is an apt symbol of the God of the mystics in an age in which Karl Rahner went so far as to speculate that the Christianity of the future would be mystical—or not at all.

A mystical Christ the Koan is not just apophatic and is offered to enrich, not replace, more traditional images like the endearing image of the Sacred Heart. While a counterweight, perhaps, to sentimentalism, Christ the Koan reaffirms the heart which “has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.” “In the night,” sings the Psalmist, “my heart instructs me” (16:7). Sulivan synthesizes the apophatic and imagistic superbly. He declares that “God is a word” (“Dieu est un mot”). That is, “God” is only a word. And yet, he adds a few pages later, God is a word. The Absolute Paradox is “an infant God, weak and poor, the hidden God, weak as words, simple as bread and wine.”14 What irony, this W/word. Moreover, Christ the Koan can be seen as complement of Christ the King—as the Taoists might say, a revelation of the “dark, yielding” (but yielding to conquer!) feminine. Both Koan and King are intended as antidotal to and subversive of hubris, hubris whether individual or imperial. Both should enable devotion, real devotion.

Christ the Koan is likewise able to enrich theological discourse. And if the appellation “Christ the Koan” is objectionable, a real Christologist, Edward Schillebeeckx, has observed that some of the early Fathers referred to Jesus of Nazareth as “the new Orpheus” and that only the Fourth Gospel speaks of Christ as the Logos. Christ the Koan only enhances the universalism implicit in Logos theology, bringing out, if you will, its more lunatic logic. Sulivan at one point turns to the phrase “crazy logic” (la logique folle).15 Elsewhere he speaks of le logique naïve. Not a bad name for it: Henry Adams, in his classic Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, advances that children and saints can believe contrary things at the same time. The admission of children, incidentally, can anticipate any objection of the “inaccessibility” of Christ the Koan. It could also be antidotal to their—and the culture’s—addiction to computers! Christ the Koan really instances what a kindly Jesuit expressed as “the logic of the Logos.” Christ is not reason but an excess of reason. The Mystical Doctor, as we know from a great work of Jacques Maritain, is compatible with the Angelic Doctor.16 A koanistic Thomas Merton reclaimed his Scholastic formation in one of his last essays, but he could also write, in Cables to the Ace: “Over the door of Hell is written, ‘Therefore.’ ”17

Christ the Koan is not just sophianic theology, it is serio-comic theology, and its ultimate non sequitur is resurrection. In this respect it is fascinating to recall that when he who called himself “the resurrection” was walking with the pilgrims of Emmaus, themselves dumbfounded that he did not seem aware of the recent happenings in Jerusalem, he replied, “What things?” (Luke 24:18). The “Koan” could not have done that without suppressing a smile—if, indeed, he did suppress it. Sulivan wrote ironically of Le théologie mystique de Jean-Paul Sartre!18 But Merton, editor of The Jester in his Columbia University days, remains my candidate for the court jester of Christendom. And lest we alarm about a levity run amok, let me add that his, and Sulivan’s, was—to recur to the aforesaid “presence and absence”—a “wounding with joy.” If we can believe Isaiah, by such “wounds” we are healed (53:5).

In sum, Christ the Koan is not to render Christ a hippie, but whole. The old Church was catholic in theory but denominational in fact. A friendly critic, the astute Simone Weil, lamented that “so many things are outside” official Catholicism and had to be, as it were, baptized mystically. Christ the Koan is not to render Jesus of Nazareth less accessible but more, by rendering him in still another tongue, another idiom. It allows Christ to be “all things to all,” applies the maximal paradox of the “all in all,” and looks to the reconciliation of “all things through him” (Col. 1:20).

1. Le Plus Petit Abîme (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 176.
2. L’Instant l’Eternité: Bernard Feillet Interroge Jean Sulivan (Paris: Le Centurion, 1978), 55.
3 . Le Plus Petit Abîme, 236 & 85.
4. Sulivan: Òu la Parole Liberatrice (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), 107.
5. Le Plus Petit Abîme, 256.
6. Morning Light, trans. Joseph Cunneen and Patrick Gormelly (New York: Paulist, 1988), 11.
7. See her charming essay Living with Contradiction: Reflections on the Rule of St. Benedict (1989).
8. Morning Light, 75.
9. Dieu au-delà de Dieu (Connivance: Desclée de Brouwer, 1962), 239.
10. Springs of Contemplation, ed. Jane Marie Richardson (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992), 177.
11. Paradoxe et Scandale (Paris: Plan, 1962), 91.
12. Dieu au-delà de Dieu, 39.
13. For Shusaku Endo, Silence, trans. William Johnston (New York: Taplinger, 1960) and his Life of Jesus (New York: Paulist); the Dalai Lama, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on Jesus (Boston: Wisdom, 1996); and Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ (New York: Riverhead, 1995).
14. Dieu au-delà de Dieu, 235, 241.
15. Le Plus Petit Abîme, 256.
16. Distinguer pour Unir: Òu, les Degrés du Savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1946).
17. The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1977), 411. On the Scholastic background, “Blake and the New Theology,” The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton, ed. Patrick Hart (New York: New Directions, 1981), 9.
18. Le Plus Petit Abîme, 169.

Bulletin 69 • Index