From Prabuddha Dasgupta, a portfolio in The Paris Assessment concern no. 200 (Spring 2012).
I believe I’m temperamentally a mystic. I really feel very drawn to this type of expertise and this mode of conceptualizing and, particularly, the deepening and layering of ideas with expertise and expertise with ideas that may be seen in mystical traditions. Skepticism shouldn’t be an instinctual or default response for me. If somebody tells me one thing, I’m inclined to imagine it, irrespective of how unusual it sounds. Possibly I’m simply gullible, notably on the subject of profound experiences that I’ve by no means actually had, or by no means had in the best way that I would like. Possibly I’m only a dangerous thinker. The thought has definitely crossed my thoughts.
For instance, I imagine that Julian of Norwich had Showings, or revelations of Christ; that George Fox, the founding father of the Quakers, was carried as much as heaven; that William Blake was visited by Angels in his darkish little dwelling off the Strand in London; that Wordsworth had a complete sensuous apprehension of the divine in nature throughout his ascent of Mount Snowden; and that Philip Ok. Dick had an mental instinct of the divine in February 1974. This record may very well be continued. In truth, it may very well be properly limitless.
I don’t doubt this stuff, at the very least not at first, and I generally ponder whether I (as somebody who teaches philosophy as a day job) ought to all the time be cultivating skepticism or praising the facility of crucial pondering. There’s a defensive myopia to the obsession with critique, a refusal to see what you may’t make sense of, blocking the view of any unusual new phenomenon with a misty drizzle of passive aggressive questions. At this level in historical past, it’s at the very least controversial that understanding is as essential as critique, and affected person, kind-hearted, sympathetic remark extra useful than limitless private opinions, as we reside in a world completely saturated by suspicion and fueled by vicious judgments of one another. I’m not arguing for dogmatism, however I generally ponder whether philosophy’s obsession with critique dangers turning into a type of obsessional self-protection in opposition to unusual and novel types of expertise. My want is to provide leeway for unusual new intensities of expertise with which we are able to push again in opposition to the stress of actuality. All the best way to ecstasy.
I’m powerfully drawn to the best way mystics expertise what they expertise, after which suppose, converse, and write about that have. However it may be fairly arduous to explain, notably to skeptical eyes who may see mystics as merely loopy, which in a means they’re. Mad with God (whichever God that may be). So, I’ve determined to border my strategy to mysticism round seven adverbs which may get us nearer to seeing the phenomenon. For—because the outdated Puritan saying goes—God loveth adverbs.
Mystics might be mentioned to suppose and to work within the following seven adverbial methods:
1. Obliquely
2. Autobiographically
3. Vernacularly
4. Performatively
5. Virtually
6. Erotically, and
7. Ascetically
Adverb one, obliquely: that’s to say, enigmatically, negatively, by means of unsaying, oxymorons, antitheses, paradoxes, exaggerations, and subtractions. The author of The Mystical Theology, who is thought to us as Dionysius, who was probably Syriac and never Greek, is the progenitor of apophatic or unfavorable theology. He writes excessively of “super-essential darkness” or “darkness past radiance” to explain God. The nameless, however Dionysius-inspired and Dionysius-translating, late-fourteenth century writer of The Cloud of Unknowing, writes, “Of God himself, can no man suppose.” The Cloud writer’s English translation of The Mystical Theology is solely and fantastically referred to as Hid Divinitie. If God is hidden, then God have to be approached obliquely, negatively. God transcends all affirmation.
It’s the indirection of a lot mystical writing that pursuits me. Possibly indirection is the very best path to absorb writing. What we are able to see in so many mystical texts, to borrow from my buddy Eugene Thacker, is a logic and a poetics. This can be a logic of claiming and never saying, a non-negative negation, or a sequence of what we would name ascending negations, which is a means of approaching or adumbrating what Saint John Chrysostom calls “the incomprehensibility of God,” or the cloud of unknowing that separates us from the divine.
Mystical logic with respect to God shouldn’t be a sequence of descending affirmations, from some postulation of God or substance down by means of some purported chain of being, from angels to people, animals, and stones. It’s relatively a sequence of ascending negations, transferring up from right here under obliquely and superlatively, placing a cloud of forgetting between us and all creatures and peering up by means of a cloud of unknowing.
This logic of negation can also be a poetics which locations emphasis on a sequence of figures, like darkness, the desert, cloud, mist, sea, shadow, abyss, radiance, and the entire palette of colours that may be seen in my favored mystic, Julian of Norwich. Right here, the mental perception into God is conceived on analogy with empirical sight. It’s a multiplying of imaginative and prescient, from the perceptual to the conceptual. There are, for instance, many climatological motifs within the poetics of mysticism, even a conceptual environmentalism. However this environmentalism shouldn’t be literal or empirical however figurative and conceptual, the place metaphors endlessly enrich and enliven expertise.
Adverb two, autobiographically: the delivery of autobiography, particularly feminine autobiography, happens with mystical writing. The “I” in Julian is the primary “I” of an Englishwoman. The second is Margery Kempe, a technology later than Julian (they met in 1413; Margery needed the counsel of Dame Julian, as she referred to as her). The earliest tales of girls’s lives we possess are in lots of circumstances the lives of the mystics: generally these had been written straight by the mystic, as with Julian, Marguerite Porete, or Teresa of Avila, generally they had been recorded by Brother Scribe, as with Angela of Foligno, Christina of Markyate, Christine the Astonishing, and lots of others.
Importantly, if there may be an emergence of the autobiographical “I” in mystical writing, then it has the construction of “I is an different,” as Rimbaud mentioned. The I finds its voice and itself by means of its relation to the otherness of God. Possibly this is the reason autobiographies with out God are sometimes so boring (one thinks of the modern tyranny of memoir) until they stage autobiography because the self ’s conflictual, dialectical relation to itself, the division throughout the self that also inhabits the kind of the spiritual narrative.
I’m pondering right here of Rousseau’s Confessions or, much more acutely, of his second of three autobiographies, Rousseau, Choose of Jean-Jacques, which takes the type of Rousseau interrogating himself. Or consider Nietzsche’s beautiful self-presentation in his 1886 Prefaces and Ecce Homo, the place Nietzsche is all the time doubled, at conflict with himself. Autobiographies with out an “I is an different” construction are doomed to dullness, until extraordinary issues have occurred to you.
Adverb three, Vernacularly: that’s, within the native spoken language. Julian describes herself as “unlettered,” which in all probability meant that she didn’t know Latin and wasn’t literatus. However different mystics, like Angela of Foligno from the thirteenth century, had been in all probability completely illiterate and relied on Brother Scribe, a loyal monk. Julian’s e book is the primary e book in English by an English girl, however the identical is true of Hadewijch of Antwerp in Center Dutch, Porete in Previous French, Mechthild of Magdeburg in Center Low German, and Eckhart’s sermons in Center Excessive German. Medieval mysticism, particularly in northern Europe, is the emergence of the vernacular as a non secular language.
After all, using the vernacular is an implicit problem to the authority of the Catholic Church and its use of Latin. One can see this in England with John Wycliffe and the Lollards and the rise of what’s referred to as Lollardy, and their insistence on using the translated Bible from the late fourteenth century onwards, which is linked to common insurgency in opposition to the powers of Church, King, and State—the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. (By the way, one of many prime causes of the Revolt was a pandemic, particularly the Black Loss of life.)
Mysticism is usually linked to what emerges within the Reformation within the early sixteenth Century with Luther, who additionally interprets the Bible into German. Luther is antimystical, dedicated to the “alien” nature of grace, and opposed the so-called lovers of the Reformation, like Thomas Muentzer and the Anabaptists, who harassed the immanence of God in each particular person. Though it is a way more complicated concern than I’m permitting right here, which requires appreciable historic nuance, the Reformation opens a special area for mysticism. The flip to the vernacular permits a democratization of spiritual establishments and a progressive laicization, an undermining of clerical energy which might be traced with a very wild depth in America (in teams just like the Quakers, the Shakers, the Baptists, and the Mormons, and even all the best way to Scientology).
Adverb 4, performatively: We are able to strategy this concern by following Michel de Certeau, who was an fascinating fellow, each a Jesuit priest and a psychoanalyst. For de Certeau, mysticism shouldn’t be a site of information or a sequence of texts whose reality is evidenced on the subject of some exterior actuality, just like the substantiality of God. Neither is mysticism merely approved by means of an enchantment to visionary expertise.
Quite the opposite, mysticism is a method, a set of practices, a means of talking and performing which might be self-authorizing. Mysticism is performative. It’s a sure type of writing and talking which doesn’t simply document expertise, however which produces expertise, new types of expertise which may not have been beforehand lived. Mystical writing is a heterology, the place the presence of the speaker as topic is an impact of utterance made attainable by means of the opposite talking by means of the topic, the place that different is normally God. “I is an different” is the fundamental mode of manufacturing for mystical texts. Mysticism is a heterology the place God and the I turn into one, enter right into a zone of indistinction. This lack of distinction between the I and God, which is premised on the annihilation of the Soul, is the unusually passive exercise of decreation.
Adverb 5, virtually: The purpose concerning the performative dimension of mysticism might be put in another way, and that is on the core of the work of the fascinating theologian, Amy Hollywood. She understands mysticism because it develops inside monasticism, notably from the Rule of Saint Benedict, from the sixth century. Mysticism develops in relation to rigorous spiritual practices, particularly the practices of studying (of scripture), preaching and participation in liturgy, particularly the recitation of the Psalms. Importantly, these practices of studying, meditation, prayer, composition, and contemplation are each non secular and bodily practices. As Hollywood writes, “the Benedictine’s life is one wherein the monk or nun strives to make each motion a ritual motion.” Mysticism needs to be understood in relation to the cultivation of such practices. Maybe such practices are the very best that we are able to hope to realize when the world has fallen to items. I’ll return to the query of formality and devotional apply.
One other, quite simple, means of placing this level is that mysticism shouldn’t be some noetic or mental exercise, or some state of perception or nonbelief, and even some theoretical apprehension of the divine. Relatively, mysticism is a sensible matter, a matter of organizing one’s life round a set of practices that are ritually organized. It’s about dwelling in accordance with a rule, nevertheless that may be understood.
That is the that means of asceticism. Askesis is typically translated into Latin as studium, which is each non secular and bodily. That is what it means to check, to be a scholar. Here’s a speculative thought: we are able to additionally hyperlink the theme of apply to the origins of monasticism in Saint Antony and the Desert Fathers. One of many broadly learn books within the historical past of Christendom, way more broadly learn than Plato or Aristotle, was Athanasius’s Lifetime of Antony. Regardless of 5 prolonged intervals of exile, Athanasius was Bishop of Alexandria for forty-five years and was answerable for establishing the canon and order of twenty-seven books that make up the New Testomony and which has been used ever since. The Lifetime of Antony was a deliberate rewriting of Plato’s Apology, the place Socrates turns into Antony, the thinker turns into the monk, the pagan turns into the Christian. It was an enormous hit.
Antony engages in a withdrawal or retreat from town. Right here, town is Alexandria, which was the Manhattan of the traditional world—a business island metropolis off the coast of an unlimited continent, arrange by overseas, colonial powers, with a voracious urge for food for all the things. Antony goes first into the necropolis or metropolis cemetery and from there into the desert, which is seen as a temple with out partitions. That is anachoreisis, a retreat into solitude, the place the monk is the monos, the solitary. The concept right here is that one can discover God within the desert by withdrawing right into a cave or right into a cell. A cave is a cell. The desert is a sort of mystical laboratory the place one can discover God, a determine which is retained in modified kind within the concept of the hermitage and the anchorhold. The purpose is that withdrawal is a apply.
Within the Desert Fathers, the fruit of withdrawal might be hesychia, quiet, stillness, silence. It’s the cultivation of apatheia, passionlessness or equanimity. The purpose right here is obtain a disinterestedness in existence, to turn into corpse-like, useless to the world. And on this retreat, the monk should always wrestle with acedia, the noonday demon, or listlessness and sloth. Such is what we name despair, which Julian fantastically calls in Center English hevynes, the heaviness with which the self is hooked up to itself, riveted to itself.
It’s only by spending time with the noonday demon, the heaviness of despair, that God might be felt, heard, and communicated with. The downward plunge into dereliction and despair is what permits the “straining ahead,” or ekeptasis into God. It’s only by means of listlessness that one may each take heed to and lust for God.
Adverb six, erotically. I’d wish to spend a bit of extra time and area on this adverb, as it’s so essential for understanding mysticism.
For mystics, all the things activates the love of God. The divine shouldn’t be some entity—some desiccated abstraction—that invitations perception or disbelief, assent or dissent. No, God is to be erotically loved. It’s fascinating how a lot mystics place an emphasis upon the enjoyment of God, a listening which is a lusting. This may be felt extra carefully within the French time period jouissance, which is an enjoyment which delights and pleases but in addition carries clear sexual connotations.
Marie of the Incarnation (1599–1672), a French missionary in Quebec, wrote, “God alone was my solely enjoyment.” God is a supply of non secular pleasure, but in addition bodily delight. That is why Christ is so essential and the doctrine of the Incarnation is so very important. Christ is a sensuous being with a sensuous mom and a super-sensuous father. Our lived communion with Christ happens by means of the Eucharist, the place his flesh is eaten, and his blood imbibed.
The factor of liturgical devotion that dominates all others for medieval mystics, notably feminine mystics, is the Eucharist. The relation to God, the communion with God, takes place by means of the mouth. God is orality and enters one’s mouth with a kiss. The well-known French mystic, Madame Guyon (1648–1717), writes, “We should keep in mind that God is all mouth.” These phrases are taken from a commentary Guyon wrote, allegedly in a day and a half, on the Tune of Songs. An important textual content for Jewish and Christian mysticism, which additionally turns up in Sufism, is the Tune of Songs.
This isn’t the place to do justice to the extraordinary eroticism of the Tune of Songs, this historical, near-Japanese, nuptial drama, initially composed in Aramaic. The love described within the Tune by a younger girl—the Shulamite—and a younger man is clearly sexual. However it’s not sexually specific. As an alternative, the Tune makes use of a strong language of agrarian simile. Her stomach is sort of a stack of wheat, her hair is sort of a flock of goats streaming down Mount Gilead, her breasts are like two fawns or clusters of grapes. His stomach is sort of a block of ivory, his lips are like roses, and so forth.
Inside Judaism, the Tune as interpreted allegorically, not because the love between a woman and a boy however as Israel’s love for God and God’s love for his chosen folks. Inside Christianity, the Tune of Songs is the magical e book par excellence, the place the Church—the common Catholic Church—takes the place of Israel and the 2 lovers are reworked into God within the particular person of Christ and the soul expressed by means of the neighborhood of the Church. The Tune turns into an ode of affection between Christ and the soul. Christian mysticism might be understood as a millennia-long meditation on the that means of such love.
Already within the third century, Origen interprets the Tune allegorically as an epithalamion between a bridegroom, understood because the logos or Christ because the Phrase of God, and the bride, understood because the soul. He insists on the excellence between eros and agape, or love and charity, the place eroticism turns into chaste, and fleshly lust turns into refined love. However, within the medieval Christian custom, all the things passes by means of Bernard of Clairvaux, who wrote eighty-six sermons on the Tune of Songs between 1135 and 1153, reaching solely verse 4 of chapter three of the Tune.
Bernard’s sermons are lovely, delicate, densely layered palimpsests of citation and allusion, the place he allegorizes every sensuous element within the Tune—references to perfume, ointment, myrrh, and aloes—as expressions of the soul’s itinerary towards a loving union with Christ. However issues turn into much more compelling when the affective pressure of Bernard’s sermons on the Tune authorizes and licenses a whole custom of medieval mystical interpretation which is extremely felt and deeply private.
In Hadewijch’s Ebook of Visions (ca. 1250), the union with Christ is described in bodily phrases: “Then he got here to me himself and took me utterly in his arms and pressed me to him … Then I used to be externally utterly happy to the utmost satiation. At the moment I additionally had, for a short time, the power to bear it. However all too quickly I overlooked that lovely man.” One can discover echoes of this intensely erotic relation to Christ in a big variety of fascinating feminine mystics, clearly Julian but in addition Angela of Foligno and Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), down by means of Madame Guyon and Marie of the Incarnation within the seventeenth century.
However it will be a mistake to think about the eroticism of this custom of affective piety as restricted to ladies. Constructing from the Tune of Songs, the fourteenth-century English mystic Richard Rolle (circa 1300–1349) describes the fireplace of affection, the incendium amoris, by way of warmth, sweetness, and tune. The impact of tune, sound, and music, particularly the Tune of Songs, induces a sweetness of affection that’s felt by means of bodily warmth and in comparison with jewels and gems like topaz. In “The Non secular Canticle” of John of the Cross (1542–1591), the non secular marriage of Christ and the soul is in contrast with the kiss that opens the Tune, “There I, being alone, ‘kiss you,’ who’re alone.” As soon as once more, God is all mouth and when his love flows into us, it’s sweeter than wine. On this connection, we may additionally consider Saint Francis, together with his open, porous, stigmatized physique receiving the love of God. Or, certainly, Henry Suso’s identification of each himself and Christ as feminine.
The plain eroticism of the Tune of Songs develops into a fancy custom of affective piety the place the trail of the spirit opens by means of the physique and the place Christ is a transfigured mystical physique: a cloth physique, a non secular physique, and a political physique by means of the neighborhood of the church. Many mystics have a fiercely erotic reference to God by means of the particular person of Christ. Suppose maybe of the numerous medieval photos of the lactating Christ who feeds us from his breast or with the blood of his aspect wound, what Amy Hollywood calls “that superb slit.”
To place it mildly, the gender of Christ is fluid, without delay masculine and female, neither and each, a most queer God. One among nice virtues of the magical custom is that it permits, and certainly encourages, a extra complicated topology of intercourse and gender, of latest behaviors and wealthy potentialities.
Adverb seven, the ultimate adverb, ascetically. To my thoughts, mysticism is ascetic not regardless of its eroticism, however due to it. And it is a line of pondering that’s maybe puzzling for us: there may be not a contradiction between eros and askesis, between love or lust and denial or self-discipline. Relatively, there’s a relation of complementarity the place non secular self-discipline permits the attainable transfiguration of affection. And it’s love’s transfiguration which is of final significance.
That is the rationale why I’m sympathetic to the allegorical studying of the Tune of Songs that begins with Origen and continues by means of into Saint Bernard and the medieval feminine mystics. What’s going on within the Tune shouldn’t be some banal literalism which sees it by way of intercourse, however a change of the carnal, one other pondering of the erotic, a distillation, what psychoanalysts would name sublimation. What’s glimpsed right here is another lineament of need, that will enable for different prospects of enjoyment, even and particularly the enjoyment of God.
I’m curious concerning the meaningfulness of asceticism in the present day. The types of ascetic apply wherein folks interact are legion: scorching yoga, ceaseless meditation, excessive fasting, varied types of detox, extreme train, and compulsive types of routine-following, which was notably acute through the COVID-19 pandemic. Or asceticism turns into pathologized, as with anorexia, bulimia, and different behavioral “problems.”
We’re nonetheless strongly drawn by the will for asceticism, it appears to me. We’re fascinated by the extremity of mystical apply—consider the wildly self-destructive antics of feminine medieval mystics like Christine the Astonishing described earlier, the self-mortification of monks, stylites, anchorites, and the bands of itinerant flagellants within the early Center Ages. However we discover such habits and its metaphysical calls for too rigorous and weighty for our softer secular souls. For us, the purgation of sin has turn into a juice detox, and flagellation has turn into our relation to a foul selfie posted on social media.
We’re additionally, I believe, deeply puzzled by the best way wherein mystical apply conceives of the relation between the spirit and the flesh, thoughts, and physique. We have now all apparently turn into holists or monists, the place we’re all physique and physique is all that there’s. We’re endlessly inspired to take heed to our physique, let the physique do the speaking and maintain the rating. This might be good if it had been true. But it surely isn’t. We’re not equivalent to our our bodies, however relatively our expertise of our selves is eccentric, divided from itself. Physique holism is a brand new ideological discourse, which is refuted each time we get sick or sit within the dentist’s chair, or—even higher (or, really, worse)—are stricken by hypochondriac signs, conversion problems of the sort which have turn into remarkably widespread: a pandemic of genuinely felt phantasm.
Mysticism is an try to explain one other relation to the physique, centered round some distinction between spirit and flesh, pneuma and sarkos. Mysticism is concerning the spiritualization of the flesh and the fleshly, incarnate nature of the spirit—to grasp this requires a sure asceticism. We don’t coincide with ourselves. Solely psychopaths coincide with themselves.
With these seven adverbs, we are able to start to strategy the unusual and compelling phenomenon that’s mysticism, though we’ve barely even scratched the floor. At its core is love. What mysticism provides is an elevation and transfiguration of affection. Its that means is love. On the very finish of her Showings, Julian of Norwich famously writes,
And from the time that it was revealed, I desired many instances to know in what was our Lord’s that means. And fifteen years after and extra, I used to be answered in non secular understanding, and it was mentioned: What, do you want to know your Lord’s that means on this factor? Understand it nicely, love was his that means. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he divulge to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. Stay on this, and you’ll know extra of the identical. However you’ll by no means know totally different, with out finish.
