ABSTRACT
The substantive ‘mysticism’ (in French, mystique) did not exist before the seventeenth century. The root verb muo (‘close [lips and/or eyes]’), from which the adjective mystikos was derived, refers to the ancient Greek mysteries, probably to the secrecy of their rituals and teachings. With Philo ( rst century ce) the word mystikos assumed a loosely scriptural meaning, which the Alexandrian church fathers Clement and Origen applied to the Christian, allegorical interpretation of the Bible. In a similar way it came to refer to the symbolic meaning of washing, eating, and drinking in the sacraments of baptism and Eucharist. Gradually the term acquired a spiritual connotation, which eventually led to its modern usage. None of the preceding meanings refers to a private experience. Not even those Christian writers whom we now regard as having initiated the so-called mystical theology mention such an experience. The late origin of the connotation of private, exceptional experience in Judaism and Islam as well as in Christianity indicates that for the longest time neither religious authorities nor ordinary faithful considered such an experience essential to the faith. Early Christians appear to have regarded an awareness of God’s presence as naturally following their religious conversion. But there was nothing private or exceptional about it. They did attribute a continuous awareness of such a presence to Jesus. Paul in his letters to the various Christian communities developed an idea of life in the Spirit, which included some insight in the ‘mystery of Christ.’ It enabled Christians to understand Scriptures in a deeper, ‘revealed’ sense, which led to the scriptural meaning of the term ‘mystical.’ The Greek Fathers from the third to the ninth century, to whom Christians commonly ascribe the development of a mystical spirituality, hardly mention any but a cognitive experience. The weight of their teaching was intellectual more than affective. Nor did the Neoplatonic philosophy, which they had started to accept in the fourth century, encourage a different outlook. Even Dionysius the Areopagite, a sixthcentury Syrian(?) monk, asserted in his Mystical Theology (which many now consider
the rst ‘Christian’ treatise on the subject), that it consisted in a direct, albeit purely negative knowledge of God. The author had in fact derived much of its content from the Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus. This trend of interpretation changed at the dawn of the modern age, partly as a result of a different reading some contemplatives (Cistercians and Carthusians) began to propose of Dionysius. Since the awareness of God surpassed all concepts and ideas, the question arose whether mystical theology could still be assumed to consist in a cognitive act. Was it not rather an affective experience? The idea that it was rapidly gained acceptance in the West, without, however, excluding a cognitive component altogether. Moreover, as a subjective experience it became quite naturally a private one. Thus Jean Gerson (1363-1429), the chancellor of the Sorbonne, de ned it as ‘experiential knowledge of God’ (experimentalis Dei cognitio), a knowledge that could be acquired only through an affective union with God. Around the same time, Christian spirituality also began to stress the extraordinary nature of the mystical experience. Privacy and extraordinariness of experience are, even today, less apparent in the two other monotheistic religions. To be sure, Jews had, long before Christians, developed private as well as public forms of devotion. Yet they continued to refer to them by terms of ordinary devotion, rather than by speci cally mystical ones. Thus, the Hebrew term mitzvoth (commandments) had neither the experiential nor the exceptional connotation of the term mysticism. The reasons for the commandments remain hidden in God, but their subject matter concerns all religious Jews and is by no means the privilege of some. Even the esoteric Kabbalah continues in some respects the common halakha tradition of the commandments. In fact, kaballistic writers use a term of common devotion, devekut (cleaving to God), that in the Talmud refers to good works. As that term gradually assumed a more explicitly spiritual denotation, the emphasis increasingly shifted to a hidden knowledge. This was particularly the case in the highly esoteric form of Kabbalah initiated by the Zohar (The Book of Splendor), written in thirteenth-century Spain, but not printed before the sixteenth century. But it was never the exclusive privilege of a closed group, not even in Isaac Luria’s theosophical school in Safed (Palestine). In Islam also, the experience of God’s presence long preceded the birth of particular, mystical sects. We may trace that experience to Muhammad himself, who expressed it in the Qur’a¯n. It consisted in an unconditional surrender to the all-compassionate, all-loving God. As a young man Muhammad (d. 632 ce) frequently withdrew to a cave near Mecca to be alone with God. There, during his fortieth year, an angel appeared to him and recited the rst verses of the Qur’a¯n. A sage acquainted with the Christian writings con rmed that the voice had indeed come from God. Ostracized from Mecca, he was comforted in his trials by a nocturnal vision. He found himself transferred to the temple rock in Jerusalem and from there ascending through the hierarchies of being, up to the presence of God. Ever since that rapture, he appears to have remained conscious of God’s presence. The Qur’a¯n has preserved his experience of revelations that continued until shortly before his death. In Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s (1987) beautiful expression, ‘The Muslim lives in a space de ned by the sound of the Qur’a¯n.’ The sacred book directs the
spiritual life of the faithful to the love of an all-loving God. It instructs all Muslims to ‘remember God’ and to become interiorly united with him. ‘Invoke in remembrance the name of thy Lord and devote thyself to Him with utter devotion’ (Q. 73: 8). Even the Sharia, ‘the way of the faithful,’ must be viewed as an attempt to remain constantly in God’s presence by submitting all aspects of life to divine law. Muhammad’s successors, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and the prophet’s younger cousin Ali, whom he himself had taught, were deeply spiritual men. But when the Umayad dynasty came to an end and the Abassids ruled in Baghdad, all emphasis came to be placed on strict observation of the law. Su sm, which had existed since the eighth century, became a separate movement and the imams began to eye the followers of the spiritual path (tariqa) with suspicion. In 922 the great Su mystic, al-Hallaj, was executed for blasphemy. Others, beginning with his early contemporary Junayd, were more careful. Su mysticism – even as medieval Christian spirituality, and the Jewish Kabbalah movement – was in uenced by Neoplatonic philosophy. Yet the Su brotherhood never separated itself from the common faith; it remained open to all Muslims. The possibility of a general discussion of mysticism in monotheist religion presupposes that monotheist mystics share at least some common experience. Does it imply that religious mysticism is identical regardless of the tradition in which it appears? As late as the middle of the twentieth century some well-known writers still assumed that a single, homogeneous model of interpretation applied to all cases. That position, advocated by Aldous Huxley (1954) and W. T. Stace (1960), has now almost generally been abandoned. R. C. Zaehner (1956), a respected scholar of comparative religion, quali ed it by distinguishing three essentially different kinds of mysticism. Yet he continued to maintain that, despite those differences, the experience of theist, monist, and natural mystics remains essentially identical within each of those three varieties. Ninian Smart (1975) claimed that not the experience but only the interpretations (including the mystics’ own) differ along doctrinal lines. Those who describe the mystical experience as a state of pure, empty consciousness unmediated by any idea, go even further. F. C. Forman, its principal advocate in America, described it as a gap in consciousness, of which the subject does not become aware until the ‘experience’ is past. But how does such a gap differ from a dreamless sleep – to which, indeed, one of the Upanishads (Mandukya) compared it? On the opposite side are those who insist that experience and interpretation cannot be separated. For them, the interpretation forms part of the experience. According to Steven T. Katz (1978), no state of mind can ever be wholly unconditioned. Doctrines feed into the experience so much that one cannot exist without the other. This causes him to deny the possibility of a so-called unio mystica, which abolishes all distinctness between a perceiving subject and a perceived object, as a Neoplatonic idea adventitiously introduced into the Christian concept of contemplation. In his view, Judaism did not undergo this Neoplatonic in uence, at least not to the point of justifying any concept of a unio mystica. Both these claims have been contested, as we shall see later. Today we appear to have moved closer to a consensus that the mystical experience, despite a strong similarity in different religions, remains an analogous notion. Each
form of mysticism intrinsically depends on the doctrinal context in which it appears. The question is, however, how far this distinctness can go without altogether destroying the idea of an experience that has a common name. A rst point to consider here is that the mystical awareness (taken in the modern sense of a somewhat exceptional state) remains integrated with less intense modes of religious experience, from which it differs in degree of intensity, but not in essence. Because we have unaccountably detached the mystical from ordinary religious experience, the question of the presence of mysticism in any particular religion has attained an unwarranted signi cance. To avoid further confusion, I shall follow modern western usage in distinguishing ordinary from mystical experience, but restrict the distinction to the degree of intensity, not to the nature of the experience. At every level, religious experience is marked by the awareness of a mysterious and fascinating transcendent presence. Even those religions or branches of religion which attach less importance to experience than to prophetic or moral factors are inspired by the felt presence of God. Now, all religious experiences differ from each other either in content or in context. Part of the context consists in the signi cance a particular religious tradition attaches to ecstatic or peak experiences. In Vedantic Hinduism, the mystical experience comes close to coinciding with the essence of the religion. In Buddhism also it occupies a primary place, though that place widely differs from one school to another. Because of that difference from the three monotheistic religions, I have not included them in the present essay. The essays on Hinduism and in Buddhism contain ample information on the mystical character of those religions. But within monotheistic faiths the difference between the mystically inclined and others can be considerable. For Su s, the religious experience is far more important than it is for more legalistically oriented Muslims. All religious Jews strive for some experiential awareness of God’s presence. But groups and individuals considerably differ on the signi cance of the experience and on the means of attaining it. Among the Christian churches, the Catholic ones (Orthodox, Roman, and Anglican) as well as some Lutherans used to attach greater importance to it than the more prophetically oriented Calvinists or Baptists. But in recent years those differences have become less pronounced.
