Comparative Mysticism

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Comparative mysticism is the study of mystical experience across religious traditions, together with the contested thesis that runs through much of it: that the many vocabularies of union, illumination, and self-loss are angles on one underlying reality. The field grew out of a simple observation. The testimony of contemplatives separated by language, century, and creed sounds, at the level of description, strikingly alike — and explaining that likeness has divided the subject ever since. It is a meta-discipline rather than a tradition: it takes the practices and termini of others as its material, and its native question is methodological. What, exactly, is being compared when a Carmelite’s unitive life, a Sufi’s fanāʾ, and a Vedāntin’s mokṣa are laid side by side — one experience in three dialects, or three different things that the comparison itself has dressed in a borrowed common idiom?

The founding lineage

The modern study took shape in the early twentieth century, in a handful of books that still set its terms. William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), treated mystical states as a class of psychological fact and supplied four marks by which a state of mind earns the name. The first is ineffability: the subject says at once that the experience defies expression, that no adequate report of its content can be given in words. The second is the noetic quality: mystical states present themselves not merely as feeling but as knowledge, as states of insight into depths of truth closed to the discursive intellect, carrying a curious authority for afterward. The remaining two are transiency — the state cannot be sustained, fading after at most an hour or two into the light of common day — and passivity, the sense that the personal will is in abeyance and a higher power is at work. James’s four marks have proved durable out of all proportion to the modesty with which he offered them; psychology of religion still returns to them, and so does the recent psychedelic-mysticism research that measures mystical-type experience against essentially Jamesian criteria.

Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) did the adjacent work. Drawing largely on the Christian contemplatives — the Rhineland preachers, the Spanish Carmelites, the English anchoritic writers — she mapped a common itinerary of the contemplative life: awakening, purgation, illumination, the dark night, and the unitive life. Her five stages, like James’s four marks, became a heuristic grid that outlived the Romantic essentialism in which she cast it. Rudolf Otto, the Marburg phenomenologist of the holy, sharpened the comparison to a single decisive pairing. In West-östliche Mystik (1926; English, Mysticism East and West, 1932) he set the Rhineland Dominican Meister Eckhart beside the eighth-century Vedāntin Sankara, finding genuine structural parallels — a Godhead beyond God answering to nirguṇa beyond saguṇa Brahman, a way of knowledge, a shared vocabulary of ground, an apophatic register — and then insisting on the differences: Eckhart’s Trinitarian dynamism, his ethical and sacramental embeddedness, set against what Otto read as Sankara’s static identity-language. The shape of that move — assert the resemblance, then refuse to let it dissolve the two terms into one — would become the discipline’s recurring gesture.

From this lineage came the proposition Aldous Huxley named the perennial philosophy in 1945. His formula has three layers: a metaphysic affirming a divine Reality substantial to the world of things; a psychology finding in the soul something similar or identical to that Reality; and an ethic placing the human end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground. Huxley’s perennialism is experiential before it is metaphysical — closer to James than to the doctrinal Traditionalist school of René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, who read his anthology as deracinated, having detached mystical descriptions from the initiatic and ritual frames that gave them meaning. The term itself is older than Huxley allowed: he attributed philosophia perennis to Leibniz, but it was coined by the Vatican librarian Agostino Steuco in De perenni philosophia (1540), as Counter-Reformation apologetics — a different claim, traced in the entry on prisca theologia and its Renaissance pedigree.

The dispute: common core against constructivism

The strongest version of the perennial intuition is the common-core thesis, given its sharpest analytic form by W. T. Stace in Mysticism and Philosophy (1960). Stace rests his case on a distinction between experience and interpretation. Across cultures, he argued, mystical reports exhibit a universal phenomenology in two types: the extrovertive, a unitive perception of the One through and within the sensory world, and — deeper, the ripening of the first into its mature form — the introvertive, a non-sensory state, contentless and undifferentiated, a pure unitary consciousness empty of all particular content. This introvertive core he held to be one and the same wherever it appears; tradition is then read as later vocabulary laid over a prior, shared encounter. Strip the interpretation away, and the Christian, the Buddhist, and the Vedāntin are reporting an identical thing.

Against this stands the constructivist critique, reframed decisively by Steven Katz in his 1978 essay “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism.” Its governing principle is blunt: there are no pure, that is to say unmediated, experiences. A mystic’s prior beliefs, training, expectations, scriptures, and inherited concepts do not merely color the experience after the fact — they penetrate and help constitute it. The experience/interpretation distinction collapses, because there is no raw experiential layer to which one might subtract one’s way back. On this view the Buddhist who seeks nirvāṇa and the Christian who seeks union with a personal God are not reporting one thing in two dialects but undergoing genuinely different things, formed from the inside out by what each was trained to expect and to want. Convergence among mystical reports is at best apparent, and at worst an artifact of the comparison itself — of translating every idiom into a neutral language that belongs to none of the traditions, and then discovering the similarity that the translation introduced.

The dispute did not stay frozen at these two poles. Robert Forman and a group of collaborators answered Katz with the Pure Consciousness Event (The Problem of Pure Consciousness, 1990): a wakeful but contentless awareness, attested across Eckhart’s language of forgetting and the soul’s nakedness in the grunt, the asamprajñāta-samādhi of Patañjali’s yoga, Buddhist deep absorption, and the ayin literature of Kabbalah. By definition, Forman argued, a state with no content cannot be constituted by tradition-specific concepts, since there is nothing for the concepts to construct; to infer difference of experience from difference of report is a post hoc fallacy. The field’s working settlement is something like a draw with the burden on the perennialist. The soft thesis — that such contentless states occur, and recur across traditions — is widely granted. The hard thesis — that they are foundational, identical everywhere, and underwrite a single shared metaphysics — is not. Cross-tradition agreement on a bare attentional state is compatible with deep divergence over what the state means and what doctrinal architecture surrounds it.

Honoring the termini

The traditions themselves rarely posed the question as comparative. Each held that its own path led somewhere exact, and named the destination in its own terms, with a load-bearing internal distinction erected precisely to keep the closeness it promised from collapsing into bare merger. Christian theōsis stages the human becoming god by grace, not by nature: from Maximus the Confessor to Gregory Palamas, the tradition insists that the creature participates in God’s uncreated energies while the divine essence remains imparticipable. Sufi fanāʾ — the passing-away of the servant’s egoic attributes — is paired with baqāʾ, the subsistence that follows, and Junayd of Baghdad’s reading holds the asymmetry between Lord and servant doctrinally intact even where it is experientially overrun; the ecstatic utterance is parsed as performative speech from within the state, not as a propositional claim of identity. Vedāntic mokṣa is not one destination but three incompatible ones: Sankara’s Advaita reads it as the recognition of an identity that always obtained, Rāmānuja’s qualified non-dualism as the liberated soul’s permanent distinctness within Brahman, Madhva’s Dvaita as proximity across an eternal, irreducible difference. And nirvāṇa, in the early Buddhist analysis, discloses precisely the absence of the substantial Self that Advaita affirms — the cognate vocabularies of knowing running in opposite directions even where the words share a root.

To flatten these into one terminus is not to find a deeper unity but a thinner one. The most rigorous comparative work proceeds the other way: it establishes first what each tradition will not relinquish, and only then asks what cross-traditional structure survives. What survives is real and worth naming — apophatic registers, languages of participation, the asymmetry between the finite and the infinite, salvation through a knowing rather than a doing. What does not survive is the inference from those resemblances to an identical metaphysical core. The many paths hold; the single summit they are said to climb is the contested addition.

Scholarship, sources, and the apparatus of comparison

The field rests on a small canon of primary statements, most now in the public domain and several hosted for direct reading. James’s Varieties remains the load-bearing text for the experiential approach; the complete 1902 work is freely available through Project Gutenberg at gutenberg.org/ebooks/621, with the mysticism material in Lectures XVI and XVII. Underhill’s Mysticism (1911) and her edition of The Cloud of Unknowing anchor the Christian contemplative itinerary; the latter is held in the Library. The Neoplatonic spine that W. R. Inge’s Christian Mysticism (1899) traced through the tradition is readable in Stephen MacKenna’s translation of Plotinus’s Enneads, and the apparatus for Patañjali — central to every modern discussion of contentless absorption — is available in Charles Johnston’s 1912 rendering of the Yoga Sutras, both in the Library.

The twentieth-century debate is conducted in works that remain in copyright and must be approached through citation: Stace’s Mysticism and Philosophy (1960); Katz’s edited Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978), where the contextualist essay first appeared and which is cataloged at worldcat.org/oclc/3447762; Forman’s The Problem of Pure Consciousness (1990); and John Hick’s An Interpretation of Religion (1989), whose Kantian framework — a Real an sich experienced through culturally shaped schemata, yielding the personae and impersonae of the traditions — supplies the dominant Anglophone pluralist alternative to both poles. Otto’s West-östliche Mystik (1926) is in the public domain in the German original; the Bracey-Payne English translation of 1932 is not yet. The prehistory of the perennialist intuition — Steuco’s 1540 coinage, distinct from the genealogical prisca theologia of Ficino and Pico — is established in Charles B. Schmitt’s foundational study “Perennial Philosophy: From Agostino Steuco to Leibniz” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 1966), at jstor.org/stable/2708338, and its critical-historical reassessment in Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

One ancestor of the field is easily overlooked. Friedrich Heiler’s Das Gebet (1918; English abridgment Prayer, 1932) made prayer — not religion, not the holy, not mysticism — the irreducible unit of comparison, massing prayer-texts from two dozen traditions into a single typology that ran from primitive petition through ritual, philosophical, and mystical forms to what Heiler called prophetic prayer. His architecture was visibly bent toward a Lutheran culmination, and that confessional teleology is why the framework was eclipsed once comparative religion reorganized itself around other categories at mid-century. But the structural problem Heiler posed — whether a contemplative phenomenon admits a comparative typology distinct from a typology of religious systems as such — is the same problem the Stace-Katz dispute inherits, and no later work has matched his empirical sweep. The deeper lesson of his eclipse runs through the whole discipline: a comparison is only as honest as the neutrality of the language it compares in, and the prophetic apex of Heiler’s scheme, like the introvertive core of Stace’s, turns out on inspection to be one tradition’s vocabulary elevated to the office of the universal.

A discipline of distinction

The constructivist insight cuts deeper than a verdict against strong perennialism. It is a caution about the instrument. Every comparison must be conducted in some language, and there is no view from nowhere available to the comparativist any more than to the mystic: to set fanāʾ, theōsis, mokṣa, and nirvāṇa side by side is already to have chosen a frame, and the resemblances that frame brings into relief are partly produced by the choice. This is not a counsel of despair. It is what gives the field its proper work. The value of comparative mysticism may lie less in settling whether the four termini name one place than in disciplining the comparison itself — in learning to register exactly where the structural parallels are real and exactly where each tradition’s refusal to be assimilated marks a difference that no neutral idiom can dissolve. Read that way, a tradition’s insistence on its own terms is not an obstacle to comparison but its richest datum, and the most cross-cultural thing the contemplatives turn out to share is the precision with which each declines to be translated into the others.

→ In the library: Underhill — The Cloud of Unknowing (1912) · Johnston — The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1912) · MacKenna — Plotinus, The Enneads

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Theosophy · Rhineland Mysticism · Patanjali · Mysticism · William James · Evelyn Underhill · Aldous Huxley · Meister Eckhart · Apophatic Theology · Comparative Religion Eranos · Christian Mysticism · Sufism Comparative · Syncretism · Prisca Theologia · Rene Guenon · Ananda Coomaraswamy · Traditionalism Perennialism