Mysticism

← Encyclopedia

Mysticism is the claim, and the practice built on it, that the ultimate reality behind ordinary life can be reached directly — known or united with in experience rather than reasoned toward or merely believed. The word gathers a great range of such claims under a single heading, and most of the difficulty in the subject lies in that gathering.

The English term is younger than the thing it names. “Mystical” descends from the Greek mystikos, “hidden” or “pertaining to the mysteries,” and in the early Church it described the concealed meaning of scripture or the inner significance of the rites; the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, around the year 500, spoke of a mystical theology reached by stripping away every name for God. The abstract noun “mysticism,” by contrast, was coined in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, often by critics, to label a type of religion they distrusted. The category, in other words, was assembled partly from the outside, and scholarship has spent the last century arguing over what, if anything, it picks out.

Within the traditions themselves the vocabulary is exact and various. The Christian contemplatives speak of union with God and of an unknowing that passes beyond images and concepts. Sufi writers map fanā, the passing away of the self, and baqā, the subsistence in God that follows; al-Ghazālī recounted abandoning a teaching career to seek it directly. Advaita Vedānta holds that the innermost self is not united with the absolute but already identical to it, the difference an illusion to be seen through. The Neoplatonists described the soul’s ascent to a wordless contact with the One. Each names something precise, and means it in its own frame.

Modern scholarship divides over whether these point to one experience or to many. The perennialist reading, influential in the early twentieth century, held that beneath the doctrines lies a single core experience that the traditions then dress in local clothing. The constructivist response argues the reverse — that there is no raw experience prior to a tradition’s concepts, that a Buddhist and a Christian do not undergo the same thing and describe it differently but undergo different things shaped by what they expect. The debate remains open, and much recent work has stepped back from the word “experience” altogether, attending instead to the texts, practices, and communities that produced these claims.

What the traditions share, on any reading, is a structure rather than a content: the conviction that the highest reality is approached by a route that discursive thought cannot complete, and that the approach changes the one who takes it. The resemblances across the traditions are real and worth tracing. Whether they are resemblances of one thing, or only of the human reach toward it, is the question the field has not closed.

→ In the library: The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · The Confessions of Al Ghazzali (Field, 1909) · The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Gnosis · Neoplatonism · Monasticism · Metaphysics