Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism

Opening to the Mystical

Louise Nelstrop, Simon D. Podmore, Louise Nelstrop, Simon D. Podmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317137344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Theology

'Mystical theology' has developed through a range of meanings, from the hidden dimensions of divine significance in the community's interpretation of its scriptures to the much later 'science' of the soul's ascent into communion with God. The thinkers and questions addressed in this book draws us into the heart of a complicated, beautiful, and often tantalisingly unfinished conversation, continuing over centuries and often brushing allusively into parallel concerns in other religions. Raising fundamental matters of epistemology, representation, metaphysics, and divine reality, contributors approach the mystical from postmodern, feminist, sociological and historical perspectives through thinkers such as Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Siena, Ignatius of Loyola, William James, Evelyn Underhill, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Otto, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Louis Chrétien. Medieval and early modern radical prophetic approaches are also explored. This book includes new essays by Sarah Apetrei, Tina Beattie, Raphel Cadenhead, Oliver Davies, Philip Endean, Brian FitzGerald, Ann Loades, George Pattison, Simon D. Podmore, Joel D.S. Rasmussen, and Johannes Zachhuber.

Chapter 1
The Return of Mysticism: The Eternal Return of ‘the Same’?

George Pattison

In addressing the theme of ‘opening to the mystical’ I shall consider how mysticism has re-entered the field of theology and religious studies through the stimulus provided by aspects of recent continental philosophy of religion, such as the debate about Derrida and negative theology associated with Derrida’s lecture ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’.¹ What I shall say in this chapter is probably also, in its way, marked by what Derrida ‘said’ in ‘avoiding speaking’, although I shall not say it in anything like a Derridian way. But had negative theology, apophaticism, and mysticism ever really gone away, that they might need to be revived, brought back to life, and made into living elements in contemporary theology and philosophy?

If we go back a generation from the age of deconstruction (the 1980s and early 1990s), to that of existentialism (from the 1940s through to the 1970s), there too we find significant cross-currents between contemporary philosophy and mystical, not least negatively mystical, thought. Religious existentialists, such as Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, and Nicholas Berdyaev were not afraid to speak of God and to do so in terms that underlined the abiding mystery of God even in the context of divine self-revelation and, indeed, they also spoke of the apophatic depths of all truly personal life. Even in relation to more secular versions of existentialism, commentators observed links between key existential terms (in particular the ubiquitous ‘nothingness’) and the language of Kabbalah, Zen, and the Christian mystics.² Often, these links were gestured towards rather than analysed, but the connections seem well-founded. Apart from the fact that two of the main points of reference for twentieth century existentialism were Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, each of whom drew on mystical elements of their own religious traditions,³ it?is clear that the study of medieval mysticism and of a range of religious texts including, Paul, Teresa of Avila, Eckhart and Schleiermacher were an important part of Heidegger’s intellectual development and contributed to his basic analyses of Dasein’s way of being-in-the-world.⁴ Eastern mystical sources may also have played a role here.⁵ And whether or not Heidegger should be counted as an ‘existentialist’, there is no doubt that his philosophy of Existenz provided the prequel to 1940s existentialism and, via this channel, fed ideas, tropes and themes derived from mysticism into existentialism’s basic conceptual structures.⁶ At the same time, Heidegger’s early interest in mysticism can be seen as reflecting a Europe-wide phenomenon apparent also in his English-speaking contemporaries, including William James, Dean Inge, Baron von Hügel, C.E. Rolt and many others.

Perhaps, then, what we are experiencing is not so much a revival of a theme that had perished or been forgotten as the eternal return of what each generation is fated to discover anew. But is it the eternal return of the same? At the beginning of the twentieth century many commentators might have argued that it was, surmising that underlying the apparently infinite variety of religious life there was one universal religious experience of an essentially mystical nature, usually seen in terms of a direct perception or intuition of what was variously called God or Ultimate or Transcendent[al] Reality.⁷ Furthermore, it was widely agreed that this experience transcended all the possible concepts and images that human beings of diverse cultures had developed and were continuing to develop to try to name or otherwise articulate it. Or, if it was impossible to reduce the varieties of religion to just one primal religious experience, it might nevertheless be possible to develop a severely restrained taxonomy, such as the religious experiences of James’s once-born and twice-born types, or the widely used distinction between prophetic and mystical forms of religion.⁸ Either way, mysticism was seen as integral to the nature of religion and, in its way, as a basic, universally human phenomenon.

In a sense it was just this kind of postulation of an ineffable experience beyond all particular experiences that Derrida was trying to deconstruct. From the Derridian perspective, negative theology did, in the end, rely upon an affirmation and a knowledge, albeit an affirmation stripped of general attributes and a knowledge of a hyper-essential reality that could never be objectified in the manner of some knowable essence. Yet, even as he avoided speaking in this negatively theological mode, Derrida not only distinguished between the different ways of naming God in prayer and in the hymn,⁹ he also signalled another possibility for a religious interpretation of deconstruction by alluding to his lecture as making good on a promise to address the subject and invoking the eschatological gesture of ‘next?year in Jerusalem’. Derrida was probably right to resist the identification of deconstruction with negative theology, and I also think that John D. Caputo was probably right to reinterpret the negatives of deconstruction in the horizon of a kind of messianicity, a hope for an impossible future that, if not exactly a Kingdom of Love, would be a community of true friendship à-venir, an eschatology that could never have become realised.¹⁰

One aspect of mysticism that the debate about deconstruction and mysticism brings to the fore is that of whether or how the mystical can be spoken. Derrida seems not to have followed Wittgenstein’s injunction that with regard to that of which we cannot speak we must remain silent, yet the question of deconstruction and negative theology is a question of silence, a question of what cannot or may not be said. In the remainder of this talk I shall therefore focus my remarks on the theme of ‘silence’. I shall return to the question of the temporality and futurity of mystical discourse, but I want first to follow a clue provided by a contemporary French philosopher, Jean-Louis Chrétien, a thinker associated with the ‘theological turn’ of some recent French phenomenology that shared significant if controverted horizons with the quasi-religious thought of the later Derrida.

The point at issue is set out in the chapter ‘The Hospitality of Silence’ in Chrétien’s book The Ark of Speech. Here he proposes that only ‘a creature of speech’ (such as the human being) can fall silent: ‘silence cannot manifest itself … except to someone who is able to speak’. And, he continues, speech itself ‘comes from the silence that always precedes it … it accompanies silence, for while it is being uttered, it needs the noises all around and the lips of the other whom it is addressing to be silent: it tends towards silence, which alone can ratify that it has in truth said something and which allows the other to speak …’.¹¹ Thus far, thus Heideggerian, we may say.¹² But Chrétien further distinguishes between the kind of mystical silence found in Neo-Platonism (in Plotinus, for example), in which the aim of the soul is to accommodate itself to an impersonal divine order and the kind of silence that really involves a listening to.¹³ This quality of silent attentiveness is a mark of all genuine speech, since ‘[t]o listen in silence, with all my silence, such indeed is the preface to every speech that is not mere chatter’.¹⁴ Yet this also means that the one to whom we attend in genuine silence must, by the same measure, be one who is capable of speaking. Prayer, even silent prayer, is not simply ‘contemplation’ but ‘a silence that is offered … to the one God who listens and sees, and not to a blind, anonymous Absolute … [it is] a naked appearance before the Word … whose grace alone is what has made such dispositions possible in us’.¹⁵ Again, this is contrasted with the silence of Plotinus that, Chrétien suspects, ‘is surreptitiously nothing more than the adoration of the negation that suppresses our speech and thereby also our silence.’¹⁶ If the silence of the Neoplatonic mystic is a silence above or beyond the realm of personal life, from which everything we mean by that admittedly elusive term ‘person’ is excluded, Christian silence is not simply a negation practised upon our cognitive capacities: it is the silence of love, that is, of attention to and waiting upon the speech of the other. It is precisely the kind of silence that arises within a relation of personal life, of call and response. But does silence mean just the interval between two words, as in: I have spoken and now I wait for your response? Is silence just preparation for or the aftermath of speech? Does it, can it have significance in and of itself? Is it perhaps – even – integral to the possibility of speech, such that without silence there could be no speaking? And, if Buber was right in arguing that personal life is constituted by the speaking of the basic word of relationship, would that mean that without silence there could be no personal life? If the answer to these last questions is affirmative, and if we allow that there is a natural fit between silence and mysticism, does it then follow that something like a ‘mystical’ moment must enter into any religious life that is premised on the possibility of a personal God-relationship? And if that is so, have we returned, once more, to the discourse of a hundred years ago, and to the postulate of a universal mystical element in religion?

I have no intention of answering these questions in this chapter, but I do want to sketch a possible response that, while doing justice to the claim that an element of silence is integral to any genuinely religious discourse, points away from an eternal return of the same universal mystical experience and towards … well, I’ll come back to the ‘towards’ …

Crucial to the dialectic – the dia-logos – of call and response is the possibility that the call can be heard. As both Bultmann and Rahner in their evangelical and Catholic ways understood, the human being must be constituted as a hearer of the Word if he or she is to be able to be called into a saving God-relationship. In this regard, both put themselves at a certain distance from the extreme claims of Karl Barth that theology has no business with the hearer of the Word, only with that Word itself. But both also reveal a no less tangible proximity to the thought of a philosopher who was the colleague of one and the teacher of the other, Martin?Heidegger.

From at least the mid 1920s, Heidegger’s thought is plausibly described as a philosophy of language. This is already clear in Being and Time, and becomes ever more salient in his later thought. A crucial term in what Heidegger says about language is the idea of Ereignis or ‘the event of appropriation’. This word can carry the everyday meaning of happening or event, but also has within it the root eigen, one’s own, familiar to readers of Being and Time from the key term Eigentlichkeit, generally translated ‘authenticity’.¹⁷ Ereignis is the occurrence of meaning in and as speech, spoken language, when what is said is understood by both speaker and listener in an original and authentic manner, such that, in the formulation of Being and Time, what is being said, die Sache selbst, the matter at issue, is made present to and grasped by those participating in the discourse. It is therefore also the pre-eminent way in which truth – understood in Heidegger’s own peculiar sense of alētheia or ‘unconcealment’ – is revealed as what is being talked about gets laid open to human vision.

All of this leads Heidegger to contest the classical principle of identity, A=A, of German idealist philosophy. Why? Because what Heidegger takes that principle to mean is that truth, a true proposition, says exactly the same as the thing that is being spoken of. Intellect and its object correspond in a perfect fit. Being and thought are identical such that thought really thinks what it is thinking about. Religiously? Theologically, we could say that this would mean the abolition of any epistemological distance between human minds and divine reality. What we would think in thinking theologically would be the reality of God Himself.

This might seem to be the kind of extreme claim that is merely set up in order to be knocked down. However, the claim that in thinking God we really do know God as He is in Himself is a claim we encounter in several currents of modern religious thought. Heidegger himself sets up his critique of the principle of identity as a critique of Hegel, and the kind of ‘speculative theology’ inspired by Hegel did make just this kind of claim. One of the most widely read of the speculative theologians was the Dane Hans Lassen Martensen, Kierkegaard’s rival and nemesis, who, in his Christian Dogmatics, gave a characteristically clear defence of this principle in its theological application:

When Dionysius the Areopagite and John Scotus Erigena teach that God is absolutely incomprehensible, not merely for us, but also in Himself, on the ground that if He were known, the comprehension of Him would subject Him to finitude, antagonism, limitation; when they assert God to be an absolute mystery, above all names, because every name drags Him down into the sphere of relations; when they refuse to conceive of God save as the simply one (to haplos hen), as pure light, which does not differ from pure darkness, in which neither way nor path is discernible; when they object to calling God anything but “pure nothing,” not because of His emptiness, but because of His inexpressible fulness, in virtue of which He transcends every “something,” on which ground also they define Him...