Mysticism

University of Richmond

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Religious Studies

1992

Mysticism G. Sco Davis

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Mysticism While 'mysticism' typically involves some experience in which the mystic attains a particular insight or understanding (whether through contemplation, prayer or immediate illumination), there is no acceptable comprehensive characterization of mysticism as such. This article will deal broadly with generally recognized varieties of mysticism and the ethical issues which emerge in their elaboration and criticism. The relations between ethics and mysticism vary across time, place and tradition. While this entry deals primarily with the relations between western philosophy and various Christian mystical traditions, nothing in the use of 'mysticism' presupposes any particular theory about the nature of mystics, their experience, or the object of that experience.

An extremely influential amalgamation of mysticism, ethics and metaphysics emerges from the writings of the third-century neoplatonist Plotinus (205-270). Plotinus holds that all being emanates from the One, and the goal of the philosophically enlightened individual is to attain contemplative return to the One. Achieving such contemplation requires freeing the soul from the bonds and promptings of matter. Ethics, from this perspective, has the task of establishing order within the individual and the community, with a focus on living the virtuous life of the wise man. The virtues set boundary and measure to human life, checking desire and establishing an order which, albeit in a limited way, reflects the principled order of Being. While intrinsically good, the life of virtue is not the ultimate human goal. As the philosopher becomes more adept in contemplation, he will disengage himself from common life and "leaving this beneath him, will take up instead another life, that of the Gods. "(Enneads 1,2) Drawing on book X of Aristotle's (384-322 B.c.) Nicomachean Ethics, Plotinus envisions this divine life as free from passion, transcending all material constraints.

Plotinus's individual and intellectual understanding of contemplation takes on a Christian flavor in the early writings of St. Augustine 876

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Song of Songs. In the same tradition, Ailred of Rievaulx ( 11 09-1167) wrote Mi"or of Charity and Spiritual Friendship, the latter a Christian response to Cicero's (1 06-43 B.C.) De amicitia.

Peter of Celie (d. 1182), another Cistercian, elaborates the relation of the good life to the purified monastic conscience in his treatise On Conscience.

The twelfth century also marks the rise of another mystical tradition that emphasized the gospel life and identification with Christ. Here, the most influential figure is St. Francis of Assisi ( 1181 /2-1226). In rejecting worldly goods and adopting absolute poverty, Francis and his early followers viewed themselves as embodying the form of life enjoined by Jesus in Matthew 19:16-22. For the early Franciscan this life involved itinerant preaching, sustained solely through alms. For Francis there was also a marked identification with all beings, an identification so complete that he was said to have miraculously received the wounds of Christ, or stigmata, as the culmination of his mystical experience.

Various of these strains combined in the mysticism of the late Middle Ages, particularly in Germany, where a rich mystical tradition emerged in the Rhineland, stretching from the pseudodionysian mystical theology of Meister Eckhart, through the self mortification of Heinrich Suso (c. 1295-1366), into the early Reformation. A similar confluence of traditions contributed to the flowering of Spanish mysticism in the sixteenth century. The most famous figures here arc St. Teresa of Avila ( 1515-1582) and St. John of the Cross (1542-1591 ), both of whom emphasized the experience of rapture as the culmination of rigorous discipline. This ecstasy found felicitous expression in the sexual allegories of St. John's poetry, though the poems cannot properly be understood outside the context of their accompanying spiritual exegeses.

The Protestant Reformation and the final fragmentation of the Christian tradition gave rise, from the sixteenth century on, to the debate over 'enthusiasm.' Faced with competing interpretations of God's requirements for his community, what, it was asked, was the decisive criterion of authority? If it did not lie with the traditional religious order, or with the convoluted reasonings of the theologians, then it would

(354-430). However, the object of contemplation is no longer the impersonal One of Plotinus, but the loving God of Christianity. Nonetheless the life of retirement and contemplation which Augustine describes in the ninth book of his Confessions (397 A.D.) stands in continuity with Plotinus's neoplatonic detachment. The most important transmitter of the Plotinian tradition, however, was the fifth-century Syrian Christian now referred to as Pseudo-Dionysius. In the Mystical Theology, and elsewhere in the pseudodionysian corpus, God is hidden and transcendent. No language suffices to grasp his essence; to arrive in the presence of the transcendent is to be beyond sight and knowledge. This negative theology received elaboration from the twelfth century onward in a number of commentaries and applications, including those by Thomas Aquinas (1225? -127 4) and Meister Eckhart (1260-1327). Eckhart developed the practical aspects of his mysticism in an extensive collection of sermons.

A second tradition may be identified with the monastic orders of the early Middle Ages. St. Benedict (c. 480-547), in his Regula monachorum (515 A.D.), emphasized humility and obedience as the primary virtues of the monk. In the Cistercian reform of the twelfth century, this tradition gives rise to a rich body of works that relate mystical love to monastic discipline. Perfection in the monastic virtues allows the monk to ascend the ladder of charity in which the heart opens up to receive the full love of Christ. This tradition differs from the neoplatonic in several notable ways. The emphasis on community and love gives greater scope to public virtue than does Plotinus. Further, the internal conversion of the soul, rather than detachment from the material world, is the prerequisite for mystical success. Consequently there is a shift in emphasis such as appears in St. Bernard of Clairvaux's (1090 or 91-1153) treatise On the Steps of Humility and Pride. According to Bernard, pride is the preeminent form of moral evil, the cause, in fact, of Satan's fall; the individual should work to eradicate pride in the soul. The Trinity works in the soul, through grace, to prepare the reason and the will to receive the kiss of divine love which is the mystical goal, and of which Bernard speaks at length in his influential sermons on the 877

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forms of mysticism. The American Zen master Robert Aitken advocates an ethics of "deep ecology" based on the Boddhisatva ideal of Buddhism, while Arthur Dan to, writing from a broadly Kantian position, maintains that most forms of nonwcstem religious thought presuppose metaphysical views that entail the collapse of morality. The relations between ethics and mysticism remain in a state of flux. See also: Augustine; Christian Ethics; Conscience; Plotinus; Religion.

seem that authority could be found only in the inspired individual. The Society of Friends, founded about 1650 and derisively known as "quakers," is merely one example of a group which rejected traditional ecclesiastical order and reliance on theology in favor of an inner light, by which mem hers of the congregation felt themselves called upon to speak out on issues of importance to the community. Locke's (1632-1704) Reasonableness of Christianity ( 1695) is the best known response to the moral and intellectual issues posed by enthusiasm.

In the debate over enthusiasm there crystallizes a set of interrelated problems about knowledge, authority and experience which have an immediate impact on ethics. A mystical experience frequently directs the mystic down a particular path of life, or indicates one set of judgments to be made over and against another. But arc there any constraints upon the mystic as moral agent-are there criteria for distinguishing the genuine from the deceptive in mystical experience? The ethical import of these questions increases as the individual or group moves further away from the authority of an established community. Thus the authority of the mystical experience in practical life has come to be a crucial question in the relation between ethics and mysticisms of all sorts. In the twentieth century, Anglo-American philosophical approaches to this problem have taken their cue from William James's (184 2-191 0) The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Unfortunately, James's conclusion that the mystical experience is epistemically self-justifying, but only for the mystic, restates, rather than resolves the problem, for it does not indicate how the purportedly authoritative experience enters into the moral life of the mystic and his community.

Popular presentations which represent all mystical experience as one and ineffable, merely clothed in the language of a tradition, offer no help in resolving particular ethical issues. R.C. Zaehner, Catholic scholar of mysticism and comparative religion, argued the primacy of theistic mysticism, directed toward a loving God, as opposed to morally indifferent or potentially degenerate

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- - , ed. Mysticism and Religious Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

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Scott Davis

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