Mysticism in the French Tradition

Eruptions from France

Louise Nelstrop, Bradley B. Onishi, Louise Nelstrop, Bradley B. Onishi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317090908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Théisme

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries secular French scholars started re-engaging with religious ideas, particularly mystical ones. Mysticism in the French Tradition introduces key philosophical undercurrents and trajectories in French thought that underpin and arise from this engagement, as well as considering earlier French contributions to the development of mysticism. Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers critical reflections on French scholarship in terms of its engagement with its mystical and apophatic dimensions. A multiplicity of factors converge to shape these encounters with mystical theology: feminist, devotional and philosophical treatments as well as literary, historical, and artistic approaches. The essays draw these into conversation. Bringing together an international and interdisciplinary range of contributions from both new and established scholars, this book provides access to the melting pot out of which the mystical tradition in France erupted in the twenty-first century, and from which it continues to challenge theology today.

PART I
Forgotten and Remembered: Philosophical Voicings of the Mystical

Chapter 1
With Mind and Heart: Maurice Blondel and the Mystic Life

Michael A. Conway

Introduction

For the greater part of the nineteenth century in France, discussing mysticism, the mystic, or the mystical was treacherous or foolhardy; best avoided. On the side of religion, this position was secured through the condemnation of Fénelon at the dusk of the great century of saints, which, to use the felicitous expression of André Bord, would end by ‘beheading religion’.¹ On the university side, the rise of a reductive positivism heavily critiqued, and all but drowned out, any general interest in religion, and, specifically, in mysticism.² To give you some idea of this, here are two observations from the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (1874): ‘Mysticism engenders ecstasy and magic, the source of crimes and of madness’ (Géruzez); ‘All the powers of mysticism conspire to make people stupid’ (Proudhon).³ Not only that, but the rising discipline of psychology relegated, for the most part, all mystical experience to the domain of psychopathology; more specifically, to hysteria.⁴ There were, of course, exceptions, but these were marginal to mainstream university thinking. The dawn, however, of a new century would see this position change, so that right from the beginning we see an extraordinary interest in, and discussion of, mysticism and the mystical; and this, somewhat ironically, at the heart of the university that was by now radically secular.

At the Collège de France, the outstanding figure (who emerged rather late in the day in terms of the public discourse on mysticism) is Henri Bergson, who entered there in 1900. It was, however, a number of his colleagues – including Édouard Le Roy, Jean Baruzi, and the sociologist Louis Massignon – who would set the proverbial ball rolling in terms of this new critical interest in mysticism. Across the road, literally, at the Sorbonne, Henri Delacroix, who taught psychology, gave the major impetus to the reappraisal of mysticism from within the university sector. These are the early leading figures; there are, however, a whole cohort of scholars, mostly in Paris and working in various disciplines, who had an interest in, and published on, mysticism.⁵ Although marginal, at least in a geographical sense, to the Parisian scene, Maurice Blondel, teaching until his early retirement at Aix en Provence, would prove to be an important contributor to this emerging discussion and appreciation of mysticism.

Blondel, right from the publication of his doctoral thesis, L’Action (1893), had an exceptional interest in the philosophical engagement with religion at the university. He saw the neglect of religion by philosophy as an impoverishment both for religion and for philosophy, and he set his life’s task to rectify this. Thus, it is not surprising that he would react to various publications on mysticism that emerged both from within the university world and from various theological directions, most notably, neo-Thomist, as evidenced by scholars such as Jacques Maritain, Auguste Poulain, and Albert Farges. From his various reactions to others and his own discussions of mysticism, it is evident that Blondel is keen to underline the legitimate and even essential role that philosophy plays in determining what exactly is true mysticism, and in differentiating this from a spectrum of false variations that had gained currency in the early decades of the twentieth century. There is a specific role for human intelligence in mysticism that can and ought to be determined. He shows that the mystic life is essentially a union that involves the whole person, and so goes well beyond a reductive Neoplatonic henosis. It is a spiritual dynamic that requires an ascetic life, itself an expansion and purification of human being. This life is not imposed from the outside against human freedom, but requires this very freedom and its assent in order to realize concretely its own inner logic. In the end, the mystic life involves us in an infused gift that is our ultimate richness.

The Report from Henri Delacroix (1905)

The first major figure to study the mystics in twentieth-century France, and who draws Blondel into an explicit discussion, was Henri Delacroix (1873–1937). Delacroix was a student of Bergson’s at the Lycée Henri IV and, then, at the Sorbonne of Brochard and Boutroux. After an early interest in the German mystics of the fourteenth century, he extends his research to the French mystics of the seventeenth century, and then to the Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century, notably St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross. The originality of the great Christian mystics, for Delacroix, is that they go beyond the intermittent mysticism of ecstasy that one finds, say, in Plotinus, to a continuous and homogeneous mysticism.⁶ Consonant, however, with the laïque character of the university of the time, for Delacroix, any study of mysticism must be carried out without recourse to the supernatural; the most sublime states of the mystic do not exceed the power of nature.⁷

For our purposes, what is of interest is the meeting of the Société française de philosophie of 26 October 1905, where, if I may quote Émile Poulat, ‘everything begins’!⁸ At this meeting, presided over by Xavier Léon, Delacroix presented for discussion a report entitled ‘The development of mystical states in Saint Teresa’.⁹ He presents the initial results of a project that will culminate three years later in the publication of his celebrated Études d’histoire et de pyschologie du mysticism. Here we have, for the first time, a method being applied to mystic states in all their complexity: historical, psychological, critical, rigorously objective, and, indeed, respectful of the fact in its alleged completeness. Delacroix underlines the need for a critical historical assessment of the documents associated with the mystics; for a study of the history of ideas and the impact of tradition on individual mystic experiences; and for a psychological analysis of the development of mystic consciousness. In this report, he demonstrates such a study, taking as his example, on this occasion, St Teresa of Avila. Thus, he enumerates three phases in the evolution of St Teresa’s mysticism: first, where she searches out union with God through different degrees of prayer (culminating in ecstasy); secondly, a state of ecstatic pain, where God is experienced as absent; and, finally, a definitive state, which is a permanent transformation of the soul, whereby God is experienced as really present. The soul lives in God and God acts in it.

A Question of Methodology

Blondel, who was unable to attend the séance, partly explained, no doubt, by the long travelling distance to Paris and his failing eyesight, responds to Delacroix’s ‘report’ in a particularly long and carefully drafted letter.¹⁰ This letter will, in time, serve as a preliminary draft, so to speak, for a more substantial study of mysticism which he would present some years later (in 1925). The philosopher from Aix is keen, first, to affirm categorically the importance of a critical philosophical investigation of mysticism; but, also, secondly, to critique what he sees as deficiencies in regard to the prevailing methodology at the university.

Whereas he is in full agreement with Delacroix that mysticism ought to be the object of a critical positive science (science positive), he underlines, however, what he sees as an implicit a priori postulate that distorts the discussion, namely, that everything that appears ‘in’ consciousness comes also ‘from’ consciousness. Delacroix studies mystic phenomena as being in the subject that is affected by them (which, in itself, is the condition of positive research), but he limits this to being from the subject alone; and here we have the fundamental problem for all attempts to deal adequately with mysticism. Under the guise of a methodological reserve – be it philosophical, ideological, or scientific – we have a prejudice or a bias of a metaphysical order at play that has an enormous influence on the interpretation, and even the initial description, of the very facts that one studies in the first place.¹¹

The crucial issue vis-à-vis mysticism, for Blondel, is that given this particular bias, one cannot explain the difference between phenomena that have a pathological element to them and phenomena that show a genuine spiritual integrity. You cannot discern the madman from the mystic! To illustrate this Blondel underlines the difference between ordinary ‘perception’ and ‘hallucination’.¹² On the one hand, in perception something of what is called the universal determinism (or the concrete order) is placed at the services of our personal ends and our practical needs; sensation is, what he terms, dynamogenic.¹³ Now, on the other hand, hallucination cuts us off from the regularity and the nourishment of this matrix of the common order. In one, you have an enrichment of our person through its place in the world order; in the other, you have a serious impoverishment.

When studying religious phenomena (and, in particular, mystical states), we find oppositions that are analogous to that between perception and hallucination. These, however, are even more profound in that they may exhibit, as their distinctive characteristic, either serious mental scars or, on the contrary, spiritual forces of a surprising plenitude and of singular integrity. For Blondel, the manner in which Delacroix treats St Teresa’s mystic states, for example, presupposes as resolved the question even of their origin, with the result that he reduces them to being, like hallucinations, neurotic. In more precise language, Delacroix supposed them to be an efference without an afference.¹⁴

The question is, how does one avoid such an a priori bias and, yet, maintain the autonomy of a critical philosophy? Blondel carefully clarifies that he does not wish, in terms of methodology, that one would begin with an a priori acknowledgement of divine presence, or, for that matter, even the hypothesis of a divine action. His issue is that one ought not to exclude, explicitly or implicitly, this possibility in the manner in which one poses the problem and describes the mystic states at the outset.

Blondel adds emphatically that it is not a matter of supposing or recognising immediately a transcendent operation. One cannot naively assume the transcendent at the outset of a positive, philosophical investigation. As from the psychological point of view, everything depends, first, on noting precisely the conscious aspect and, then, establishing whether such mystic passivity is similar in its development and by its effects to perception or to hallucination – for even in the simpler phenomena that we can positively establish and class, there is what theologians have called the ‘discernment of spirits’ to decide between a false, hallucinatory mysticism and a true mysticism. For Blondel, true mysticism nourishes the living powers of the human soul and makes our action more fruitful and universal.

André Lalande’s Vocabulaire (1911): The ‘Science of Mysticism’

As was customary for the production of the Vocabulaire technique et critique, André Lalande presented in 1911 a series of entries for discussion among his colleagues, and these included the words ‘mystery’ and ‘mystic-mysticism’.¹⁵ This would provide Blondel with a further opportunity to reflect on mysticism (at least, in the public forum). On this occasion, he is keen to combat another fundamental problem in dealing with mysticism, namely, the very abrogation of reason when examining it. Here it is a matter of rejecting the latent fideism or agnosticism that is ...