The music of JS Bach is pervaded by the mature faith that is both a fruit and a blessing of the spiritual life. It supports the conversational elements of the music in their interplay; the longing-element leading the dialogue onward, and the confidence-element always bringing the music to its rightful home by the end. That end is not initially apparent, but yet is also known to be there all along. Bach’s music, which I love more than most things, shows in wordless essence the conversation of dharma-farers, as they draw up their understanding of nibbāna on the basis of faith. It’s remarkable how much the currents of his music reflect the flow and freedom of the intimate life of the ardent meditator. What is also apparent in Bach’s music is the absence of forcefulness, which came in with the loss of faith during the Romantic age (just think of noisy old symphonic Beethoven…) – a decay into individualistic striving that has proved so troublesome subsequently.
Faith is traditionally seen as being composed of reason, experience and intuition, and is not usually regarded in terms of its limitations, because its establishment is more the concern. But once it is quite stable and established, which implies a measure of Insight, one can perhaps speak usefully of these problematic aspects.
Short of nibbāna, faith is felt as an intuition that something is true, but this is not yet known definitively. That would be wisdom, which is what faith gives way to, in time; and when wisdom is established, faith is de trop, and falls away in that respect. This reveals faith’s (skilful but) limited nature, even if it is relatively far less conditional than ordinary confidence, no doubt because of that suffusion of Insight. The very nature of partial Insight is to be longing for the wrong thing, and yet to be far more inclined than before to believe that one’s current state of understanding is the absolute Truth. This is the Faith Gap. It can give rise to a thin and flattened perspective, and an unreachable arrogance, if it is untempered; it can easily arise within a context that is too democratic, when a great multiplicity of voices are given equal weight; or equally, when one is doing one’s best, but has no guidance from those who are distinctively more spiritually mature. It is the nature of any Insight to give one a sense that one’s experience is showing the Truth, to some extent at least. It is the nature of partial Insight that one really doesn’t know yet what is missing in the picture – it is quite beyond you, however many clever words and conceptions you have. The karmic imperative to arrive at stability and control fills in the gaps in one’s understanding, to make partial Insight merely seem complete.
I’m not proposing anything new here. The Brahmajala Sutta (DN 1), which is the first sutta of the first nikaya, is a developed expression of just this that I am saying – that we very much tend to base our view of Reality on our meditative or insightful experience, because it seems more real, true or stable than what has gone before. For example, various limited aspects of śunyatā can show forth for long periods, and we can be convinced they are here to stay, and are a liveable state of affairs. The dark complement of partial insight is that the difficult or thus far unresolved elements of our experience may seem intractable, as though nothing can be done to change them – they are elided as non-problematic, or not noticed as being relevant yet (as in ‘it’s only selfing’). Hindsight is a wonderful and chastening thing… If we are not aware of the Faith Gap, we can thus limit our outcomes without even knowing that we are doing it. I’m not sure that there is a more serious argument for the necessity of spiritual hierarchy than this.